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Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Amsterdam Athenaeum-Polak en Van Gennep 2010
User reviews
LibraryThing member Samchan
When you open up Traveler of the Century, you are introduced to the city of Wandernburg through the eyes of the protagonist, Hans. It’s a strange city, and we are told that it seems to shift around each time Hans explores the city. Even though he only meant to stop briefly before moving on to his
Early on, Hans also meets Herr Gottlieb, the head of a “good” family that’s seen wealthier days, and his daughter Sophie, who charms Hans from the start. It is through his acquaintance with the Gottliebs that Hans begins to participate in weekly salons that Sophie hosts. These salon sessions, attended by a handful of other Wandernburgers, serve as a platform for the characters to discuss and debate on a whole host of topics: republicanism, nation building, aesthetics, art and who determines what ‘good’ art is, religion, a nation’s identity and sensibility, and women’s rights. In addition to these salon discussions, woven throughout the book are passages that capture the plight of workers, especially seen through the eyes of two secondary characters: a textile factory worker and a farm laborer. As you can tell, this is an ideas book, not an action-packed, plot-driven one, although there’s a slight mystery running through the book about a creepy man who attacks women at night. Oh, and it’s also a love story, but even here, it’s intertwined with ideas about translation. At one point, Hans wonders if in translating poetry, an certain essence is loss, and I found apt his comparison of this to love. The last pages of section two are another favorite of mine, so well did they capture the dizzying effects of love.
The book has been billed as harking back to the 19th century novel, but what’s striking is that Neuman adds another dimension to it, which I found interesting. Here, his characters seem like real people: they smell; they sweat; they have body hair and ugly feet; and they have messy sex. Neuman talks some about this in one of his interviews (in Granta, I think).
The best way to enjoy this book is to do so slowly. At least in my case, I couldn’t power through it and be monogamous in my reading. Every once in a while, I’d start to get a bit of philosophy-musings-fatigue. So I’d read until the point where I found myself groaning, “No, not another salon discussion on Kant!” That was my signal to take a break and read something else. Then I’d dip back into Traveler on another day and be absorbed in it once again.
This is not a perfect book, and it is not a book for everyone, but I liked coming across language that was poetic and imagery that was beautiful, which I don’t imagine is an easy feat to achieve in translated works. What was also engaging was how a lot of the issues that are teased out in the book—in the salons and beyond—are issues that we grapple with today, reminding us that while some things have changed, so much has not.
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destination, Hans feels a strange pull to put off his departure continuously. During this time, he gets acquainted with the denizens of Wandernburg. My favorite of these is the organ grinder, whom I adored. To most Wandernburgers, he’s just another indigent man playing music in the market square for a few coins each day. But Hans is fascinated and charmed by the organ grinder, who lives in a cave with his equally charming dog, Franz. The whimsical feel of the novel comes largely through Hans’ interactions with this man, who loves to hear about his friends’ dreams, listen to the wind, and lives for playing his organ. There’s obviously more to him than meets the eye; he seems simple, but is capable of getting to the heart of things in a way that would impress even the best poets and philosophers. One of my favorite quotes is from the organ grinder: "with each sound we make, we are giving back to the air everything that it gives us. Music is always there...music plays itself and instruments try to attract it, to coax it down to earth” (p.156 US, p.176 British). The two men also parry back and forth on ideas of rootedness versus being on the go—obviously a major theme—as the organ grinder sees the virtues of staying in one place, while Hans insists that traveling is the only way to get to know oneself.Early on, Hans also meets Herr Gottlieb, the head of a “good” family that’s seen wealthier days, and his daughter Sophie, who charms Hans from the start. It is through his acquaintance with the Gottliebs that Hans begins to participate in weekly salons that Sophie hosts. These salon sessions, attended by a handful of other Wandernburgers, serve as a platform for the characters to discuss and debate on a whole host of topics: republicanism, nation building, aesthetics, art and who determines what ‘good’ art is, religion, a nation’s identity and sensibility, and women’s rights. In addition to these salon discussions, woven throughout the book are passages that capture the plight of workers, especially seen through the eyes of two secondary characters: a textile factory worker and a farm laborer. As you can tell, this is an ideas book, not an action-packed, plot-driven one, although there’s a slight mystery running through the book about a creepy man who attacks women at night. Oh, and it’s also a love story, but even here, it’s intertwined with ideas about translation. At one point, Hans wonders if in translating poetry, an certain essence is loss, and I found apt his comparison of this to love. The last pages of section two are another favorite of mine, so well did they capture the dizzying effects of love.
The book has been billed as harking back to the 19th century novel, but what’s striking is that Neuman adds another dimension to it, which I found interesting. Here, his characters seem like real people: they smell; they sweat; they have body hair and ugly feet; and they have messy sex. Neuman talks some about this in one of his interviews (in Granta, I think).
The best way to enjoy this book is to do so slowly. At least in my case, I couldn’t power through it and be monogamous in my reading. Every once in a while, I’d start to get a bit of philosophy-musings-fatigue. So I’d read until the point where I found myself groaning, “No, not another salon discussion on Kant!” That was my signal to take a break and read something else. Then I’d dip back into Traveler on another day and be absorbed in it once again.
This is not a perfect book, and it is not a book for everyone, but I liked coming across language that was poetic and imagery that was beautiful, which I don’t imagine is an easy feat to achieve in translated works. What was also engaging was how a lot of the issues that are teased out in the book—in the salons and beyond—are issues that we grapple with today, reminding us that while some things have changed, so much has not.
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LibraryThing member thorold
Early in 1827, a traveller arrives in the small German town of Wandernburg, which is in some undefined (and undefinable) spot on the borders of Saxony and Prussia. He makes friends with an elderly organ-grinder, falls in love, unintentionally steals the heart of the innkeeper's daughter, has
There's also a significant nod to another famous German plot - the young woman the poetic traveller falls in love with turns out to be engaged to the fine, upstanding son of a local landowner, and out of loyalty to her widowed father she can't break that engagement.
And there's a lot more to this book than that. In a similar way to what Thomas Mann did in Lotte in Weimar, Neuman uses the generous framework of a nineteenth-century novel, where there is space for detailed literary, political and philosophical discussions and for plenty of sub-plots and minor characters, to give us a closely-detailed idea of what Europe was like at that particular moment in history, a moment which he clearly sees as being relevant to our own times. His main characters are young people who have grown up reading Voltaire, Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft and believe that everything is possible. But they find themselves living in a world where there are still kings and priests and policemen and censors, the European ideal has disappeared into petty nationalism, and the only rights that the state seeks to protect are those of landowners and employers. OK, maybe there are a few parallels there!
Neuman's method isn't quite as crude as that, of course - he musters his evidence carefully and takes us through all the poets and philosophers we need to make sense of all that. For the most part he sticks to his chosen chronology, although he does take some minor liberties with time, giving his characters access to books that probably would have taken a few more months to get to a place like Wandernburg, or allowing them to boast about having travelled on railways that were then still under construction.
Neuman also takes some pains to show us why so many people felt in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars that Europe needed order, authority and religion, but he rather undermines this side of the case by making all his conservative characters ultimately reveal themselves as either evil or foolish.
There are some odd little anachronistic titbits thrown in to provide a bit of postmodern Verfremdungseffekt - the two young rebels at the centre of the story are called Hans and Sophie (so we know they aren't going to beat the system, and we have our little doubts about which system it is); the two policemen who share a name seem to have been borrowed from Tintin; the Spanish character has the surname Urquijo and his late wife was called Ulrike - both names that could have been around in 1827, but are more likely to make modern readers think about 20th century news stories. And of course there is a lot more sheer physicality around than there could be in a nineteenth-century novel - sex, body-odour, urinating dogs, and all the rest of it.
The central part of the story has Hans and Sophie collaborating on a poetry translation project, with a lot of reflections on what literature is for, whether and how far translation is possible, and why we need to be aware of literature in other languages. Neuman has to use a certain amount of literary sleight-of-hand here, because he's writing in Spanish about people who are supposed to be working in German, inter alia translating Spanish poetry. And of course the oddity of that comes over all the more if Spanish isn't your first language, and you find yourself reading Keats, Nerval, Pushkin or Heine in a Spanish that you are supposed to take as German! But he seems to get away with it, somehow. It must have been a nightmare for anyone translating the novel, though...
A fascinating, mind-bending and very immersive reading experience. And another book I'm going to have to re-read some day.
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various strange encounters with crows, ice, post-horns, graveyards, barking dogs, and a wind that shakes the leaves and blows the hat from his head. And eventually he leaves town again. You get the picture: the symbolic language of this book leans very firmly on Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems about a winter traveller, which Schubert set to music as the song-cycle Winterreise in 1827.There's also a significant nod to another famous German plot - the young woman the poetic traveller falls in love with turns out to be engaged to the fine, upstanding son of a local landowner, and out of loyalty to her widowed father she can't break that engagement.
And there's a lot more to this book than that. In a similar way to what Thomas Mann did in Lotte in Weimar, Neuman uses the generous framework of a nineteenth-century novel, where there is space for detailed literary, political and philosophical discussions and for plenty of sub-plots and minor characters, to give us a closely-detailed idea of what Europe was like at that particular moment in history, a moment which he clearly sees as being relevant to our own times. His main characters are young people who have grown up reading Voltaire, Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft and believe that everything is possible. But they find themselves living in a world where there are still kings and priests and policemen and censors, the European ideal has disappeared into petty nationalism, and the only rights that the state seeks to protect are those of landowners and employers. OK, maybe there are a few parallels there!
Neuman's method isn't quite as crude as that, of course - he musters his evidence carefully and takes us through all the poets and philosophers we need to make sense of all that. For the most part he sticks to his chosen chronology, although he does take some minor liberties with time, giving his characters access to books that probably would have taken a few more months to get to a place like Wandernburg, or allowing them to boast about having travelled on railways that were then still under construction.
Neuman also takes some pains to show us why so many people felt in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars that Europe needed order, authority and religion, but he rather undermines this side of the case by making all his conservative characters ultimately reveal themselves as either evil or foolish.
There are some odd little anachronistic titbits thrown in to provide a bit of postmodern Verfremdungseffekt - the two young rebels at the centre of the story are called Hans and Sophie (so we know they aren't going to beat the system, and we have our little doubts about which system it is); the two policemen who share a name seem to have been borrowed from Tintin; the Spanish character has the surname Urquijo and his late wife was called Ulrike - both names that could have been around in 1827, but are more likely to make modern readers think about 20th century news stories. And of course there is a lot more sheer physicality around than there could be in a nineteenth-century novel - sex, body-odour, urinating dogs, and all the rest of it.
The central part of the story has Hans and Sophie collaborating on a poetry translation project, with a lot of reflections on what literature is for, whether and how far translation is possible, and why we need to be aware of literature in other languages. Neuman has to use a certain amount of literary sleight-of-hand here, because he's writing in Spanish about people who are supposed to be working in German, inter alia translating Spanish poetry. And of course the oddity of that comes over all the more if Spanish isn't your first language, and you find yourself reading Keats, Nerval, Pushkin or Heine in a Spanish that you are supposed to take as German! But he seems to get away with it, somehow. It must have been a nightmare for anyone translating the novel, though...
A fascinating, mind-bending and very immersive reading experience. And another book I'm going to have to re-read some day.
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LibraryThing member TTAISI-Editor
If it is hard to imagine a book that combines elements of Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy and literature with aspects if magic realism, multiple love stories, and a genuine whodunit type crimesolver...well, I am sympathetic. This is not an easy book, but it is definiely a rewarding one, and
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engages the brain, the heart, and the body (and includes some marvelous sex scenes, too). Highly recommended! Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
This new novel by Andres Neuman, Traveler of the Century, is the type of book I enjoy -- a novel of ideas. But in this case it is also a love story of sorts, and the author comments on history and politics in addition to his decided interest in philosophy. In other words it is what any good novel
The main character is an itinerant translator named Hans. Readers who are familiar with German literature will recognize him as an everyman and he almost immediately assumes a role that reminds one of the similar role taken by Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain.
Hans arrives in Wandernburg, an unremarkable hamlet on the border of Prussia and Saxony. He intends only to pass through, but fortune detains him: First he befriends an old street musician, and then he falls in love with Sophie, an intellectually voracious young woman sadly affianced to the pampered scion of Wandernburg's wealthiest family. The story unfolds as a one whose themes embody both mind and flesh; Hans and Sophie love each other for their imperfect yet sensual flesh and for the liberty and equality of their fraternal thoughts. Reading texts in various languages as they plan an anthology of European poetry, lying together in bed, they practice translation as an erotic art and lovemaking as an intellectual pursuit. This is what intrigued me - the story of these passionate readers. I was transported into Neuman's imaginary world.
The meat of the story for those who are interested in ideas is demonstrated in scenes like the discussion between Hans and Professor Mietter (reminiscent of Mann's Settembrini in discussions with young Castorp) about the views of Kant and Fichte on Nationhood.
"A country ought not to ask what it is, but when and why." said Hans. "Professor Mietter responded by comparing Kant and Fichte's ideas of nationhood in orde to show that, rather than betraying Kant, Fichte had taken his arguments a step further. Hans said that in contrast to his views on Fichte, he liked Kand better when he spoke of countries rather than individuals. Every society, said Hans, needs order, and Kant proposes a vey intelligent one. Yet every citizen needs a measure of chaos, which Kant refuses." (p 95)
While Hans and the Professor's discussion of the ideas of Kant and Fichte continued I was reminded of my own recent reading of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace in which he is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. Episodes like this are grist for the mill of those who enjoy philosophical literature. But also interesting are the characters in Neuman's novel. In the scene from which I quoted Sophie is in the background, full of her own ideas, and feeling "the urge to behave in and unladylike way" by entering the fray herself at the risk of taking sides between her lover and the respected professor.
Traveller of the Century doesn't merely challenge the reader's intelligence; it rewards it with literary depth and beauty. I was not familiar with the author but in this novel he demonstrated the talent is required to create an accomplished vision that embodies interesting ideas and a great story.
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of ideas should be, along book that is both challenging and imaginative. While the American edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux has a Picasso on the dust jacket, the story is set in the 19th century. The exact period is purposely left undefined - this is not an historical novel and the Picasso is one of his works inspired by Velasquez which does not help explain the choice.The main character is an itinerant translator named Hans. Readers who are familiar with German literature will recognize him as an everyman and he almost immediately assumes a role that reminds one of the similar role taken by Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain.
Hans arrives in Wandernburg, an unremarkable hamlet on the border of Prussia and Saxony. He intends only to pass through, but fortune detains him: First he befriends an old street musician, and then he falls in love with Sophie, an intellectually voracious young woman sadly affianced to the pampered scion of Wandernburg's wealthiest family. The story unfolds as a one whose themes embody both mind and flesh; Hans and Sophie love each other for their imperfect yet sensual flesh and for the liberty and equality of their fraternal thoughts. Reading texts in various languages as they plan an anthology of European poetry, lying together in bed, they practice translation as an erotic art and lovemaking as an intellectual pursuit. This is what intrigued me - the story of these passionate readers. I was transported into Neuman's imaginary world.
The meat of the story for those who are interested in ideas is demonstrated in scenes like the discussion between Hans and Professor Mietter (reminiscent of Mann's Settembrini in discussions with young Castorp) about the views of Kant and Fichte on Nationhood.
"A country ought not to ask what it is, but when and why." said Hans. "Professor Mietter responded by comparing Kant and Fichte's ideas of nationhood in orde to show that, rather than betraying Kant, Fichte had taken his arguments a step further. Hans said that in contrast to his views on Fichte, he liked Kand better when he spoke of countries rather than individuals. Every society, said Hans, needs order, and Kant proposes a vey intelligent one. Yet every citizen needs a measure of chaos, which Kant refuses." (p 95)
While Hans and the Professor's discussion of the ideas of Kant and Fichte continued I was reminded of my own recent reading of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace in which he is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. Episodes like this are grist for the mill of those who enjoy philosophical literature. But also interesting are the characters in Neuman's novel. In the scene from which I quoted Sophie is in the background, full of her own ideas, and feeling "the urge to behave in and unladylike way" by entering the fray herself at the risk of taking sides between her lover and the respected professor.
Traveller of the Century doesn't merely challenge the reader's intelligence; it rewards it with literary depth and beauty. I was not familiar with the author but in this novel he demonstrated the talent is required to create an accomplished vision that embodies interesting ideas and a great story.
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LibraryThing member eoinclifford
Extremely well written, thought provoking. Can be a bit slow going at times but generally entertaining
LibraryThing member mausergem
I did not finish this book as it never grabbed me from the start and after70 odd pages it was not picking up.
LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
A book that I fell in love with almost immediately. Recommended by Bolano before it was even written. Unreviewable in a way; suffice it to say that Neuman finds a means of including everything in his book without ever damaging the plot or urgency of his characters. This one will stay with me for a
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long, long time. Show Less
LibraryThing member le.vert.galant
I've forgotten where I heard about this book and the specifics regarding its recommendation. Even so, I found it to be disappointing: a romance novel with philosophic touches rather than a philosophical novel containing a romance.
Subjects
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Shortlist — 2014)
Best Translated Book Award (Longlist — 2013)
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Shortlist — 2013)
Alfaguara Prize (2009)
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
2009 (esp)
2009
ISBN
9789025367756