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selenakSome of my favourites anyway, since I have so many. Bear in mind, too, that this isn’t a “best of” list, just one of personal love. This being said, in no particular order:
1.) Pauline Gedge: Child of Morning. Not the first novel that whisked me away to ancient Egypt – that was Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian - but the one which I ended up loving best. About Hatshepsut, the 18th dynasty female pharaoh, with Senmut the architect (and her lover) and her stepson and rival Thutmosis III as the most important supporting characters. I’ve read other novels at Hatshepsut later on, but still can’t imagine her any other way. And I still cry for the last twenty pages or so, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to read the novel all over again.
2.) Anne (and Serge) Golon: Angelique. Or however the first volume of the saga is called in your language of choice. (It’s currently published in Germany in two volumes, but the original German translation did La Marquise des Anges as one single volume from her childhood to her return to court post second marriage. I’ve written about the Angelique novels before at a meme: this was the first historical series I fell for. If you’re only familiar with the film versions: the books are infinitely more interesting. Set during the reign of Louis XIV, the first one has our heroine grow up the daughter of a provincial poor noble, married (for the cash) to a rich count who due to having a scarred face and a crippled leg, not to mention a skeptical, scientific mind and an independent attitude, has a frightful reputation but actually turns out to become the love of her life (this imprinted child!me on the “arranged marriage where the partners learn to love each other” trope), goes from riches to rags when said husband is accused of witchcraft as a frame job and apparently dies, spends some time as a thief in the Parisian underworld, then claws herself back to first middle class and then nobility with a mixture of initiative, blackmail and ruthless smarts. Only in retrospect when later novel series introduced me to other heroines did I figure out that Angelique was highly unusual in that her misfortunes were actually allowed to change her (as a series of highly traumatic events and the experience of poverty, and not poverty, nobility style as in her childhood, but poverty, Parisian street style, would), and that the way she got money and social standing back (in which both a patent to distribute chocolate in France and blackmailing her cousin into a second marriage played key roles) was not the way it would happen to, say, Catherine or Marianne (whom I also like, just not as much) of Juliette Benzoni novels fame. Also, the way the king (Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil) is depicted is unusual for the time it was written in: neither a wise benevolent monarch who just doesn’t know what the mean courtiers do, nor an evil tyrant to be deposed. He’s not very sympathetic (the main reason why Angelique’s first husband is prosecuted under a blatantly trumped up charge in the first place is because Louis not just lets it happen but encourages it, though he’s not the prime initiator, and he does mostly out of royal pettiness and a dislike of independent aristocrats), but along with the luxury and the mistresses, he’s actually a hard worker on the throne with an eye for talented people. And the supporting cast is full of great characters, some historical, some invented; one particular favourite of mine is Desgrays, who starts out as Angelique’s lawyer (or more accurately her husband’s lawyer), whose brief lawyery career ends with said trial and who then becomes a police man at the same time Angelique becomes a criminal. Desgrays is historical (mostly famous as the cop from the Affair des Poisons), but the personality the Golons give him is basically that of a noir detective who ended up in a costume saga, and like I said, his occasionally adversarial friendship-with-benefits with our heroine is a highlight through the novels for me.
3.) The Josephus Trilogy by Lion Feuchtwanger. I’m cheating here, because these are three novels, not one, but they belong together: “Der Jüdische Krieg”, “Die Söhne”, “Der Tag wird Kommen”, published in English as “Josephus”, “The Jew of Rome” and “Josephus and the Emperor”. Feuchtwanger wrote these during the last year of the Weimar Republic (the first one) and during the 1930s (the second and third one) while in exile, and they’re both historical novels in the sense of dealing with history, and for being a document of exile writing. The central character is of course Flavius Josephus, aka Josef ben Matthias, the Jewish writer who switched sides during the big Jewish uprising in the last year of Nero’s reign, became attached to the Flavian dynasty and has both been reviled as a traitor and treasured as the only non-biblical detailed source on Jewish history. Feuchtwanger always was drawn to morally ambiguous characters rather than straightforward heroic ones, especially in the novels where he (who was German-Jewish) thematized Jewish history, and there is some obvious identification going on with Josephus the historian who tries to interest a Roman and Greek readership in Jewish history, but Josef is anything but a Marty Stu. As with all his main characters, Feuchtwanger lampshades all the vanity and occasional cowardice, and the murky reasons for action (for example, when Josef in the first book rescues his arch rival who has all the moral courage and integrity Josef lacks, it’s as much because he wants that guy finally beholden to him and respect him as it is for any other reason), but he also makes you feel for him. And the focus on the Jewish communities (in Israel, Alexandria and Rome) during the eras of Nero, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian is still a rarity in historical fiction set during this time. This trilogy works both as fiction and as Feuchtwanger’s personal meta on what it means to be a Jewish writer torn between cosmopolitan ideals and nationalism in an era where everyone else around you goes more nationalistic , and couldn’t be more contemporary.
4.) Christa Wolf: Kein Ort, Nirgends. I don’t think that one is among Wolf’s translated novels. To be precise, it’s a novella, about a fictional meeting between two of German literature’s most famous suicides, Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderode. The language alone makes this a masterpiece, between trust me, writing about two poets famous for their command of language and making them sound in character (and not just by letting them speak in quotes) is fiendishly difficult to pull off, and Wolf accomplishes it in a way that makes it feel entirely natural. She also makes me like Kleist as a person, which is tricky because his letters are often v.v. off putting to me, and her Günderode is so compelling that it made me march straight to the library to find this woman’s work.
5.) Christine Brückner: Wenn du geredet hättest, Desdemona: Ungehaltene Reden ungehaltener Frauen. This one was translated into English, by actress Eleanor Bron, no less. (“Desdemona, if only you had spoken” – the other part of the title is sadly an untranslatable pun. “Ungehalten” can both mean “angry” and “not delivered”, so the subtitle means “never delivered speeches by angry women”. However, Bron came up with a subtitle that at least tries to capture the pun aspect – “Uncensored speeches by incensed women”.) It’s not a novel, so I'm cheating a bit, it’s a collection of fictional speeches by women, some historical, some fictional, and ever since it got published, several of those speeches have become set pieces for actresses, so I’m not surprised an actress was the one to translate it. (The English edition has Eleanor Bron’s name large and Christiane Brückner’s name small, of course. ) The writerly act of ventriloquism Brückner pulls off is considerable, because none of her speakers sound like the other (despite, obviously, all speeches being written in the first person), and all come across as rounded, psychologically plausible characters. Some of my favourites include Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther’s wife), Effi Briest (fictional heroine of Fontane’s novel) and Christiane Vulpius, longtime mistress and then wife of Goethe. By no means all speeches are addressed to men: Christiane, for example, is talking to Frau von Stein, her arch enemy. Perhaps the most daring given this was originally published in the late 80s was the speech by Gudrun Ensslin, one of the leaders of the RAF (that’s Baader Meinhof Group for English speakers), who at that point had been dead only a little more than a decade), but having read a lot about the subject, I find Brückner’s Ensslin plausible. There are some that don’t work for me as well as others: Mary the mother of Jesus, for example, or Laura the muse of Petrarca. Still: this collection, in any form, written or as audio spoken by actresses, is a firm favourite of mine in historical fiction.
The other days
1.) Pauline Gedge: Child of Morning. Not the first novel that whisked me away to ancient Egypt – that was Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian - but the one which I ended up loving best. About Hatshepsut, the 18th dynasty female pharaoh, with Senmut the architect (and her lover) and her stepson and rival Thutmosis III as the most important supporting characters. I’ve read other novels at Hatshepsut later on, but still can’t imagine her any other way. And I still cry for the last twenty pages or so, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to read the novel all over again.
2.) Anne (and Serge) Golon: Angelique. Or however the first volume of the saga is called in your language of choice. (It’s currently published in Germany in two volumes, but the original German translation did La Marquise des Anges as one single volume from her childhood to her return to court post second marriage. I’ve written about the Angelique novels before at a meme: this was the first historical series I fell for. If you’re only familiar with the film versions: the books are infinitely more interesting. Set during the reign of Louis XIV, the first one has our heroine grow up the daughter of a provincial poor noble, married (for the cash) to a rich count who due to having a scarred face and a crippled leg, not to mention a skeptical, scientific mind and an independent attitude, has a frightful reputation but actually turns out to become the love of her life (this imprinted child!me on the “arranged marriage where the partners learn to love each other” trope), goes from riches to rags when said husband is accused of witchcraft as a frame job and apparently dies, spends some time as a thief in the Parisian underworld, then claws herself back to first middle class and then nobility with a mixture of initiative, blackmail and ruthless smarts. Only in retrospect when later novel series introduced me to other heroines did I figure out that Angelique was highly unusual in that her misfortunes were actually allowed to change her (as a series of highly traumatic events and the experience of poverty, and not poverty, nobility style as in her childhood, but poverty, Parisian street style, would), and that the way she got money and social standing back (in which both a patent to distribute chocolate in France and blackmailing her cousin into a second marriage played key roles) was not the way it would happen to, say, Catherine or Marianne (whom I also like, just not as much) of Juliette Benzoni novels fame. Also, the way the king (Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil) is depicted is unusual for the time it was written in: neither a wise benevolent monarch who just doesn’t know what the mean courtiers do, nor an evil tyrant to be deposed. He’s not very sympathetic (the main reason why Angelique’s first husband is prosecuted under a blatantly trumped up charge in the first place is because Louis not just lets it happen but encourages it, though he’s not the prime initiator, and he does mostly out of royal pettiness and a dislike of independent aristocrats), but along with the luxury and the mistresses, he’s actually a hard worker on the throne with an eye for talented people. And the supporting cast is full of great characters, some historical, some invented; one particular favourite of mine is Desgrays, who starts out as Angelique’s lawyer (or more accurately her husband’s lawyer), whose brief lawyery career ends with said trial and who then becomes a police man at the same time Angelique becomes a criminal. Desgrays is historical (mostly famous as the cop from the Affair des Poisons), but the personality the Golons give him is basically that of a noir detective who ended up in a costume saga, and like I said, his occasionally adversarial friendship-with-benefits with our heroine is a highlight through the novels for me.
3.) The Josephus Trilogy by Lion Feuchtwanger. I’m cheating here, because these are three novels, not one, but they belong together: “Der Jüdische Krieg”, “Die Söhne”, “Der Tag wird Kommen”, published in English as “Josephus”, “The Jew of Rome” and “Josephus and the Emperor”. Feuchtwanger wrote these during the last year of the Weimar Republic (the first one) and during the 1930s (the second and third one) while in exile, and they’re both historical novels in the sense of dealing with history, and for being a document of exile writing. The central character is of course Flavius Josephus, aka Josef ben Matthias, the Jewish writer who switched sides during the big Jewish uprising in the last year of Nero’s reign, became attached to the Flavian dynasty and has both been reviled as a traitor and treasured as the only non-biblical detailed source on Jewish history. Feuchtwanger always was drawn to morally ambiguous characters rather than straightforward heroic ones, especially in the novels where he (who was German-Jewish) thematized Jewish history, and there is some obvious identification going on with Josephus the historian who tries to interest a Roman and Greek readership in Jewish history, but Josef is anything but a Marty Stu. As with all his main characters, Feuchtwanger lampshades all the vanity and occasional cowardice, and the murky reasons for action (for example, when Josef in the first book rescues his arch rival who has all the moral courage and integrity Josef lacks, it’s as much because he wants that guy finally beholden to him and respect him as it is for any other reason), but he also makes you feel for him. And the focus on the Jewish communities (in Israel, Alexandria and Rome) during the eras of Nero, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian is still a rarity in historical fiction set during this time. This trilogy works both as fiction and as Feuchtwanger’s personal meta on what it means to be a Jewish writer torn between cosmopolitan ideals and nationalism in an era where everyone else around you goes more nationalistic , and couldn’t be more contemporary.
4.) Christa Wolf: Kein Ort, Nirgends. I don’t think that one is among Wolf’s translated novels. To be precise, it’s a novella, about a fictional meeting between two of German literature’s most famous suicides, Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderode. The language alone makes this a masterpiece, between trust me, writing about two poets famous for their command of language and making them sound in character (and not just by letting them speak in quotes) is fiendishly difficult to pull off, and Wolf accomplishes it in a way that makes it feel entirely natural. She also makes me like Kleist as a person, which is tricky because his letters are often v.v. off putting to me, and her Günderode is so compelling that it made me march straight to the library to find this woman’s work.
5.) Christine Brückner: Wenn du geredet hättest, Desdemona: Ungehaltene Reden ungehaltener Frauen. This one was translated into English, by actress Eleanor Bron, no less. (“Desdemona, if only you had spoken” – the other part of the title is sadly an untranslatable pun. “Ungehalten” can both mean “angry” and “not delivered”, so the subtitle means “never delivered speeches by angry women”. However, Bron came up with a subtitle that at least tries to capture the pun aspect – “Uncensored speeches by incensed women”.) It’s not a novel, so I'm cheating a bit, it’s a collection of fictional speeches by women, some historical, some fictional, and ever since it got published, several of those speeches have become set pieces for actresses, so I’m not surprised an actress was the one to translate it. (The English edition has Eleanor Bron’s name large and Christiane Brückner’s name small, of course. ) The writerly act of ventriloquism Brückner pulls off is considerable, because none of her speakers sound like the other (despite, obviously, all speeches being written in the first person), and all come across as rounded, psychologically plausible characters. Some of my favourites include Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther’s wife), Effi Briest (fictional heroine of Fontane’s novel) and Christiane Vulpius, longtime mistress and then wife of Goethe. By no means all speeches are addressed to men: Christiane, for example, is talking to Frau von Stein, her arch enemy. Perhaps the most daring given this was originally published in the late 80s was the speech by Gudrun Ensslin, one of the leaders of the RAF (that’s Baader Meinhof Group for English speakers), who at that point had been dead only a little more than a decade), but having read a lot about the subject, I find Brückner’s Ensslin plausible. There are some that don’t work for me as well as others: Mary the mother of Jesus, for example, or Laura the muse of Petrarca. Still: this collection, in any form, written or as audio spoken by actresses, is a firm favourite of mine in historical fiction.
The other days
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