This month, I faced a difficult decision. There were two titles that I would have loved to feature on this blog.

The first was Argentinian writer Federico Falco’s exquisite short-story collection, A Perfect Cemetery, featuring a wonderful postscript by its translator Jennifer Croft. Quite apart from the stories themselves (mini-novellas, really, given their depth and complexity), this essay ‘On Conversation’ contains some of the most illuminating writing about the translation process that I have read.

‘Translation is an encounter between two human beings that takes place in words that belong to different systems,’ writes Croft. ‘I have intuitively recreated on the page in English what I have seen in the movie versions of these stories in my mind. Falco wrote the screenplay, but I was the director of these sweeping films, just as you have been – as every reader will be. I hear the characters as I must, informed by all the people I have known and loved in all the places I have lived.’

Phew. With writing as powerful as that, authors of fiction had better watch out: there’s a risk that some stories might be overshadowed by the translators’ notes that follow them (although in Falco’s case, the primary text more than holds its own, it has to be said, and is well worth seeking out).

In the end, however, I plumped for reviewing Higher Ground, the first novel by the award-winning German writer Anke Stelling to appear in English, translated by Lucy Jones. The novel follows middle-aged writer Resi as she grapples with the news that she, her artist husband and their four children are soon to be evicted from a Berlin flat controlled by a friend. Struggling to face up to the implications of this bombshell, she sets out to try to write a warts-and-all portrayal of life for her teenage daughter, Bea. In so doing, she reveals cracks stretching back across the decades that threaten to yawn wide enough to engulf the whole family.

Mothers in literature often fall into one of two camps: they are either saints or witches. Stelling neatly sidesteps this. By having Resi narrate in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style, which more than once made me think of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, she is able to portray both the horrors and beauties of the maternal condition. ‘Let me hold you close to my breast. And remember – you have to get away,’ Resi writes to Bea in the opening chapter, and the novel leaves us in no doubt as to the truth of this statement.

This is an extremely funny book. All credit to translator Lucy Jones here, for the humour is largely in the writing, with rhythms, bathos and the subversion of expectations all delivering laughs. Stelling is an expert on the ways human beings deceive themselves and how we often betray these lies unconsciously. Time and again, we witness Resi self-sabotaging and setting herself up to fail even as she pledges to do better – an endearing trait that serves to counteract some of her more obnoxious flights of arrogance.

Nowhere is this dishonesty more evident than when it comes to issues of class and privilege, which form central threads in the narrative. Beholden to her more affluent friends, Resi is forced time and again to confront the limits of fellow feeling where money and life chances are concerned. Cleverly, Stelling resists the temptation purely to punch upwards, choosing instead to reveal hypocrisy and blind spots on both sides. Resi, we learn, might not be so hard pressed if she were able to unbend a little; but then, of course, she would not be Resi.

There is also much joyous material connected to the business of being a writer and the strange, destabilising experience of watching your work go out into the world. Again, Resi’s struggle to comprehend her friends’ indignation at her published criticism of their lifestyle makes a nice foil for the book’s reflections on readers’ often wrongheaded engagement with texts.

‘I am sorry that everything is so disjointed. I’d like to be stricter, have a more straightforward narrative, and be a comfort for all those in need. But I am who I am, and I won’t pretend that I have the same conditions as, say, Martin Amis.[…] That’s why this is exactly the opposite of a well-formed, elegantly written novel,’ laments Resi.

Of course, the lady protests too much. Higher Ground is a deftly structured, ingenious piece of fiction that manages not to advertise its cleverness in the way that some books by writers with more favourable conditions than Resi might now and then have done. What starts as a seemingly random swirl of reflections, circles ever more closely around the same themes, drawing the threads tighter until the web appears.

The result is a hugely entertaining, satisfying and thought-provoking novel. A really wonderful read.

Higher Ground (Schäfchen im Trockenen) by Anke Stelling, translated from the German by Lucy Jones (Scribe, 2021)

Picture: ‘Berlin’ by Patrick Nouhailler on flickr.com