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Book tips from Elke Heidenreich: What do you read at Christmas?

2020-12-20T11:40:37.386Z


In her last "top title" of the year, Elke Heidenreich digs deep into the box with her favorite books and recommends literature pearls for great reading fun.


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Elke Heidenreich

This is an amazing book.

If you still need a great present for Christmas, it is the »World of the Renaissance«.

I think it weighs two pounds, by the feeling.

It costs 90 euros, which is 30 euros per kilo - it's worth it.

The book contains texts from the Renaissance, edited, newly translated, compiled and commented on by Tobias Roth.

He has to be a Renaissance person himself, in my opinion.

He also founded the publishing house "The Cultural Memory".

The Renaissance, that was a great time, around 1350 to 1500. The great time of innovations in art, in science, in thought.

From Italy the golden age spread across the world.

This book is also ... I have to show you how beautiful the color is: we have to open it once.

It contains text, but it also contains ... Look, color tables like that.

It's just wonderfully designed.

And in there are: texts by artists, by poets, by politicians, by scientists from the time.

Everything well commented and freshly translated.

What happened there, back in the Renaissance.

You can't even imagine that today.

It was a new look at people, a new look at the world.

It was dissected for the first time.

The focus was suddenly on people.

The sculptors and the doctors were important.

The horizon has widened.

Discoveries, the world circumnavigated.

Other countries have been discovered.

Beauty has been discovered.

In architecture, for example, in painting the central perspective.

All of this is shown in this wonderful book.

And in a great foreword, Tobias Roth explains what it's about.

And then there are the original texts by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffael, and Savonarola.

It is unrivaled reading luck and a book that really makes you smart, what is beautiful and what makes a wonderful gift.

So, and now I have something else for you: This year was suddenly another renaissance for Susan Sontag.

Susan Sontag, the great woman, the brilliant thinker, the essayist, died in 2004 and this year she was rediscovered.

First it started with Hanser, with the little stories about her "How we live now".

There is also the story of how she visited Thomas Mann when she was 14 or 15 years old in Pacific Palisades.

And then you can tell how self-confident on the one hand and also a little haughty on the other.

She looked at this whole stuffy atmosphere with the men and on the other hand was so impressed by this man who wrote the magic mountain that she could not say anything.

And later she wrote in her diary: "Thomas Mann and I were both not in top form that day," which is wonderful.

Then there is a book by Sigrid Nunez, "Semper Susan", from Aufbau Verlag.

Sigrid Nunez worked a bit as a secretary for her, then fell in love with her son Philipp Rieff, whom Susan Sontag got from her professor at the age of 19.

David Rieff, the professor's name was Philipp.

The son's name was David.

And Sigrid Nunez and David were together for a while, and she lived with them in this household and describes Susan to us as very capricious, also as often gruff and unpleasant.

But she does it without any malice.

It was just a brilliant thinker, essayist who didn't have time to take care of a household.

They never cooked there.

Food was bought or people went out to eat or friends just cooked.

And then there is now »Sontag«, the biography of Benjamin Moser, which was published by Penguin and it's just terrific.

He also received the Pulitzer Prize for it.

Look how beautiful this woman is, right?

I've always been in love with Susan Sontag.

And he does it so well.

He doesn't just write about childhood, school days and so on.

But in everything that Susan does, he already sees the future Susan, the past Susan.

He quotes a lot from her works and derives her life and character from them.

And we all know her famous sentence: "I write to know what I think." And he walks along it and has written a really great book that brings this woman closer to us with her limitless curiosity, her thirst for knowledge and also with their fears and, for example, their shyness and shame not to speak publicly about their bisexuality throughout their lives.

All in this wonderful book "Susan Sontag".

So, for those for whom all this is too fat, too complicated, I have a thriller: Everyone knows the "Maltese Falcon", that is, everyone knows the film. John Houston shot it in 1941. The book was written by Dashíell Hammett in 1930. Sam Spade in the film was Humphrey Bogart and Mr. Cairo, Peter Lorre with the high voice and that is now new and freshly translated by a woman who calls herself "pociao". I always stumble upon this name. It's called "pociao", translated really well, reads fresh and like new. And for women who don't want to read such harsh detective stories, I have Patricia Highsmith "Ladies". These are very early stories by Patricia Highsmith. Some of them have never been published before, and it's wonderful to be able to eat marzipan potatoes while reading how other women ruin their lives. So, and I always have it with poetry: I've already presented this great book by Ror Wolf to you elsewhere. "Everything else: uncertain". It's just so weird. Let me tell you again, don't forget that this book exists. I'll read you a quatrain goodbye. A poem about the weather, you can always use that. The poem goes like this: “It's snowing. Then the rain falls. Then it snows, it rains and it snows. Then it rains all the time. It rains and then it snows again. «In this sense: Happy Christmas.

Source: spiegel

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