I had osmosed enough good word of mouth about this one to try it. Although I have to say I am glad not to have heard the publisher's pitch - "Mulan meets Song of Achilles" - because that would have put me off, seeing as I couldn't stand Song of Achilles, and that would have been a shame, because I really did like this novel.

It is set during the waning days of the Yuan dynasty, the Mongol rule of China, and thus in the rise of the not yet called that Ming dynasty, and never tells us our heroine's orignal name, for different reasons than the lack of a name for the narrator of Rebecca. The central character in She Who Became The Sun, starting out as a girl in a famine stricken village, picks her (soon dead) brother's name and destiny in the opening chapter. (This is said at the back of the book so doesn't count as a spoiler.) Who she is and who she makes herself into is an ongoing challenge and theme of the book, along with destiny-by-choice. Not for nothing is her primary antagonist and foil a Eunuch, who unlike her did not choose his between the genders fate - but like her actively pursues the destiny he claims to be ruled by. Our heroine's name for the majority of the novel is Zhu, but after an exclusive focus on her for the first quarter or so the novel branches out to introduce other characters - the Eunuch, Ouyang, who fights for the Mongols who wiped out his birth family, the girl Ma, who starts out married to one of the leading rebels, and Esen, Ouyang's immediate superior chiefly among them, and all are interesting and vividly described. Ahead of reading the book, I was wondering how the author would handle the fact that the Yuan dynasty at this late stage was nothing to write home about - there would be fascinating Mongol leaders again, but only after they had lost China -, because obviously you need impressive antagonists if you want your hero(ine) to look even more impressive for defeating them. Cleverly, this is accomplished in a variety of ways - firstly, Zhu has famine and the patriarchy of her own society to overcome, then the strict hierarchy of the Buddhist monastery where she-as-her-brother seeks shelter in order not to starve, and even once she's with the army, she's in an outsider position (as a monk). Secondly, as mentioned, her main foil in the novel isn't one of the Yuan princes but Ouyang, who, like her, has his own secrets and agenda.

The novel provides plots within plots and also great character development all around. Zhu is initially driven by not just the basic desire to survive but also to matter, to not be nothing; it's not like she starts out with a Master Plan to accomplish what she has accomplished by the time. What she wants changes through the book. As does what she's willing to do for it. And the novel doesn't shy away from the fact it won't just be unsympathetic bad guys standing in our heroine's way. Nor does it pull the "evil advisor" card, i.e. puts the blame on another character. By the time the novel ends, Zhu has done something that solidly puts her into solidly into, hm, let's say Caprica Six territory and leave at that BSG allusion.

It's also a novel that fully embraces its genderqueer premise. The two main romantic relationships of the book, one explicit, the other unspoken but very there, are same sex in nature. And it doesn't forget not every powerful emotional relationship has to be sexual - there are also both compelling friendships and enmities.

Lastly: it's classified as historical fantasy by the publisher. The "fantasy" part essentially consists on the "Mandate of Heaven" which the Yuan are about to lose and several possible candidates for future Emperor are able to produce being a literal flame they can psychically ignite - that, and their ability to see ghosts. But that's it; the wars are fought by rl means, no dragons are flying around, and natural castrophes as well as famine can't be solved with fantastical elements, either. All in all, I would call it a historical novel going for a mythic aura myself.

Word to the wise: do by all means book a seat instead of just buying a ticket without reservation if you're travelling by train from Frankfurt to Munich. I did, and was very glad about it, as the train is currently crowded like hell with people standing in the aisles.

Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.

One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."

Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.

All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.

Saturday evening I met a friend of shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"

Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.

Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.

Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.

"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"

On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.

Yours truly is thoroughly exhausted, mostly in a good way. One of the reasons why I never miss a Frankfurt Book Fair in its entirety (i.e. the entire week, not just one or two days) is that you really don't get that many books on one spot anywhere in the world. This year: more than 400 000 books from more than 100 countries, of which 124 00 books are new publications. I like to have enough time to actually browse through some of them instead of running from hall to hall, hence one week.

This year, I also dropped by the antiquary part of the fair, where Dutch author Cees Noteboom gave the opening speech. I hadn't come for the speech (yesterday was quite enough until Sunday and the Friedenspreis), but for a Kästner volume and a chat with one of the bookstore owners, but I stuck around to listen. Noteboom was entertaining as always, if occasionally sexist. (Quoting a bookstore owner on how women hate it if their men collect books because women can't understand why one would want to - oh really?) His piece de resistance was the story how he had Umberto Eco as a visitor and went book shopping with him through the old book stores of Amsterdam. The owner of one shop was alarmed by Eco, who true to national cliché got louder and louder in his enthusiasm. Noteboom said something on the lines as not to worry, this was famous author Umberto Eco. "Bah," said the bookstore owner, "new books." Then he observed how Umberto Eco took book after book from the shelves and piled them in his arms, wandering to and thro without putting the volumes he had taken earlier back. The bookstore owner grew even more alarmed and asked Noteboom to tell his friend to put the books back before taking out new ones, please. Whereupon Umberto Eco added yet one more to the collection, then balanced all six or so of them, took them to the bookstore owner's desk, put them down and said in English: "You are an old Jew from Amsterdam. I am an Italian from Alessandria. How much?" And after some bargaining bought them all. "Ever since I always get told when new rarities arrive and get treated exceptionally well when I visit that store," added Noteboom.

Befitting this year's theme, there were notably more Chinese books in many a publisher's offering, though occasionally you also had a sign like the one from S. Fischer saying "we regret that our author Liao Yiwu was not allowed to leave the country in order to visit the fair". (Liao Yiwu wrote an article in today's Süddeutsche about this, if you can read German. He has written one of the most lauded publications (in our papers) of the fair, Fräulein Hallo und der Bauernkaiser (undoubtedly it's called something else in the English translation, but I have no idea what), a series of portraits based on interviews; he's also been to prison repeatedly for this volume. I visited the guest of honour hall in the Forum, i.e. the China exhibition, where of course only authors who were allowed to travel are mentioned. However, it's undeniably worth visiting and not just an exercise in state propaganda, as the majority is devoted to the history of Chinese printing, which is indeed awesome and fascinating. The entire room is designed to graphically present "the four elements holding Chinese culture together - paper, a drop of ink, a pictogramm and a book" - the bit of paper makes for the ceiling, the drop of ink is projected via video, and the letter consists of over a thousand different pictogramms growing up from the floor. The displays under glass show replicas of 3500 years old oracle bones with signs carved on them, then written scrolls, then scrolls printed - the diamond sutra - and a replica of the huge, huge printing blocks used to print them with, around 800 AD, several stages in between until early in the 11th century you get mobile letters. The examples of printing in China include also something created by an Italian, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who wrote several books in Mandarin and as we could see in the displays created the first map showing the entire globe printed in China. Aside from the beautiful aesthetics I was fascinated to see that he put the Americas on the right side and Asia on the left, i.e. the reverse of what is usual for (European) maps. (We put the Americas on the left side and Asia on the right, which makes Europe right-to-center; of course, when I visited the US for the first time at age 14 I could see they do it differently.) There were less displays devoted to the invention of paper, but there was one authentic relic fragments of millennia old hemp paper.

After leaving the guest of honour hall, I came about an hour too late to catch the pre-premiere, so to speak, of the new film based on my favourite novel by Heinrich Mann, Henri Quatre. (It's going to start in March 2010 in Germany.) Pity, but then I hadn't known they'd show it. On the other hand, it meant I wandered back to halls 3 and 4 where all the German new publications are (I'll check the English ones tomorrow or Friday) and that meant I came across an author talk which turned out to be fascinating, by Julia Voss, a young writer who has written a book about Michael Ende's Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer. One of our most beloved children's books, first published in 1960. (If you don't know it, you might now The Never-Ending Story or Momo by the same author, written later. And filmed none too well, but that's another story, as M.E. would have said.) I'm pretty familiar with it but what she found out had never occured to me, though listening to her make her case, it made complete sense. Especially for a book published in 1960, by an author who was a child during the Third Reich and really really hated school there. (Ende was lucky in that his parents weren't just artists but firmly anti-Nazi, which meant he had support at home. But school was as school was back then, ideological as hell.) She pointed out the entrance sign to Kummerland ("country of sadness", if you translate it literally) stating "only pure-raced dragons allowed, on punishment of death" - and the phrase "reinrassig" would have an obvious resonance in 1960 - the black smoke "like from ovens" rising over Kummerland, the school led by the dragon Frau Mahlzahn who terrorizes her students and makes them accept obvious falsehoods as true. The bullied half-dragon Hieronymus. ZOMG, thought I, she's right, and I never saw it. Michael Ende wrote an allegory of the then recent past into an incredibly popular kid's novel. (With, btw, a black boy as a hero.) "But," said the moderator interviewing Julia Voss, "Frau Mahlzahn is defeated yet not killed. Instead, she goes through a skinning and a metamorphosis and emerges as a reformed, peaceful dragon of wisdom. How does that fit?" "Reeducation, of course," she replied.

And on that note, I conclude my report of this day's highlights.

Update on the Book Fair Fail: the Frankfurt Book Fair proper doesn't start until next month - it's always an October event - but the advance symbosium (theme: "China and the world"), the debate to which two dissident authors (also originally planned as guests for the book fair itself) were first invited, then disinvited upon Chinese pressure, then invited again by PEN Germany took place this weekend, and PEN not only brought the two authors but gave them the time for two speeches as well. (Also, the mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, had the opening speech in which she blasted the Book Fair organization for its lack of spine.) This was when two thirds of the official Chinese delegation left the room, including the former Chinese ambassador. Then current Book Fair director Jürgen Boos (aka the guy who had given in to pressure and disinvited the dissident authors) went after the Chinese and apologized. Whereupon the Chinese returned and declared they did not come here to be insulted by "lectures about democracy", and that the two dissidents could stay but were in no way speaking for the Chinese. Bei Ling, one of the two dissident authors, said the attitude was dissapointing and that there was not just one Chinese voice but many. More, in German, here. Net result: everyone, Chinese, dissidents and public alike, is pissed off at Boos. I can't say I pity him; I'm still too angry.

Something to do if one is angry: listen to Brecht, Weill, any combinaton or solo thereof, preferably interpreted by Lotte Lenya. I've recently aquired the 1930/31 film version of the Three Penny Opera. It's a weird hybrid, very early sound movie by Pabst, with long sequences evidently filmed as if for a silent film (for example Mack the Knife meeting Polly, or the big crowd scene wherein the beggars disrupt the coronation parade and confront the queen), and he doesn't use the new medium of sound for more than dialogue and of course the songs, with no background noises. Very eerie, and a contrast to Fritz Lang's near simultanous movies which use the possiblities of sound as part of the storytelling already - just think of how crucial whistling is for M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder. However, this film features several of the original cast, among them Lotte Lenya as Jenny, plus Pabst was a good director, so it's still worth viewing. As for Lenya, she's one of those singers whose voice isn't beautiful - anything but - but it suits the material so well, and you can still sense her charisma, that later interpretations pale. So, here she is, the original Pirate Jenny (subtitled in English for non-German speakers):



More Brecht and Weill, because I'm still feeling cynical and angry. This is from the Brecht tribute staged in Rio de Janiero. Servio Tullio sings Das Lied von der menschlichen Unzulänglichkeit:



Back to Lenya, with the one song that should be familiar even if you haven't heard anything else from either Bert Brecht or Kurt Weill - Mack the Knife: