Dark Satellites

by Clemens Meyer, Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

Overview

International Booker-longlisted author Clemens Meyer returns with Dark Satellites, a striking collection of stories about marginal characters in contemporary Germany. A train driver’s life is upended when he hits a laughing man on the tracks on his night shift; a lonely train cleaner makes friends with a hairdresser in the train station bar; and a young man, unable to return to his home after a break-in, wanders the city in a state of increasing unrest. From the home to places of work, Meyer transforms the territories of our everyday lives into sites of rupture and connection. Unsentimental and yet deeply moving, Dark Satellites is a collection of stories from our time, as dark as the world, as beautiful as the brightest of hopes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913097134
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Clemens Meyer was born 1977 in Halle and lives in Leipzig. After high school he jobbed as a watchman, building worker and removal man. He studied creative writing at the German Literary Institute, Leipzig and was granted a scholarship by the Saxon Ministry of Science and Arts in 2002. His first novel, Als wir träumten, was a huge success and for his second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter, a collection of short stories, he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2008. Bricks and Mortar, his latest novel, was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and was awarded the Bremer Literaturpreis 2014.

Katy Derbyshire, originally from London, has lived in Berlin for twenty years. She translates contemporary German writers including Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Simon Urban, Annett Gröschner and Christa Wolf.

Editorial Reviews

03/30/2020

These 12 quiet and powerful stories from Meyer (Bricks and Mortar) focus on intimacies between people on the margins, and on the social barriers that isolate people from one another. In “Late Arrival,” a railway employee and a hairdresser become close while spending long nights in the station bar after work. Over time, the women’s relationship becomes more serious, and they bend the rules of their jobs in order to send each other messages and spend more time together. In “The Crack,” a man’s apartment is broken into, but instead of reporting the crime, he wanders the streets and encounters an old woman who mistakes him for her grandson. In the deeply moving title story, a man who owns a burger bar grows close to an Arabic Muslim man in his apartment block and even closer to the man’s wife. In each tale, Meyer’s disorienting style highlights an uncanny element in the characters’ otherwise mundane moments, often to powerful effect. Scenes and conversations transition less than they cascade into one another—while geographies and time morph and dissolve from one line to the next. These strong, mysterious stories are worth revisiting. (May)

Publishers Weekly

‘Meyer's multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices... [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant – a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.’
— Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement

‘A journey to the end of the night for 20/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’
— Chris Petit, author of Robinson

‘The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing's “in stone”: Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’
— Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’
— A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet

‘Figures from society’s margins are at the centre of the stories... Dark Satellites throws a perceptive light on circumscribed lives on the edges of Europe.’
— David Mills, The Sunday Times

‘Clemens Meyer’s great art of describing people takes the form of the Russian doll principle: a story within a story within a story. From German jihad to a Prussian refugee drama, so much is so artfully interwoven that his work breaks the mould of the closed narrative. Images of history extending into the present are what make this collection a literary sensation.’
— Katharina Teutsch, Die Zeit

‘Dark Satellites proves once again that he is one of the strongest German writers. His short stories possess depth and truth, linking East German history with the present and painting dense and perceptive portraits of what we call ‘common people’ – without a trace of mawkishness or kitsch.’
— Heinrich Oemsen, Hamburger Abendblatt

‘Meyer’s writing is brittle, laconic, clear, intense – and once again on top form. Short stories are clearly his forte. He finds memorable images for his themes: a dance without music in an unused Russian canteen; a midnight haircut; a man who slides into another identity after a break-in to his home and leaves his briefcase, the last requisite of his old life, in an abandoned shop. Meyer’s stories are quiet, tragic and once again populated by ordinary people, for whom he has always harboured sympathies.’
—Steffen Roye, Am Erker

From the Publisher

Read More