I was really looking forward to Reading Clemens Meyer. It was the content that didn't work for me rather than anything against Meyers style & writing. It is of course published by Fitzcarraldo which is a clear mark of quality literature. Unfortunately, a bunch of young teenage boys running round Berlin just wasn't something I connected to or wanted to read about. I thought I did hence why I requested the novel as I thought maybe it would have a similar feel to the protagonist's of The Catcher in the Rye or even the Secret History. But alas, no. I'll still be reading all the Fitzcarraldo books I can get my hands on because that fact that they were the publishers of this book was the reason I selected it in the first place on NetGalley.

Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize

"But it was the drugs, the bastard drugs that messed everything up, that smashed up our dream, the dream not even the Markkleebergers, the hools, Engel’s people and all the cops in Leipzig could put a stop to."

While We Were Dreaming is Katy Derbyshire's translation of Clemens Meyer's 2006 debut novel Als wir träumten. I've previously read her translations of two of his later (in the original, but earlier in English) works, the novel Bricks and Mortar and the story collection Dark Satellites.

My review of the former pointed to the fascinating and complex voice - "multiple perspectives and different voices, told in a non-linear fashion ... we’re not always clear who the narrator is and even within a given narrative points of view and times shift. Characters “reminisce” about the future" - but also my own frustrations as a reader, both in the subject matter, but also the excessive length which combined with the narrative style to make it hard to follow the real story. I concluded: 5 for the literary merit and the brilliance of the translation and 1 for my personal reading experience.

Reading While We Were Dreaming one can see how this, as the author's debut, developed in to the more complex later work. It shares the same (for my taste, excessive) length, the dark subject matter and very masculine point of view, and the non-linear narration. However, it's a more accessible work, the narration within each section actually relatively straightforward, and succeeded in holding my interest to the end, and making me unpiece and then engage with each character's journeys.

While We Were Dreaming is the story of a group of youths in Leipzig either side of German reunification, the main characters aged c13 at the time the Wall fell. Our narrator is Danny, and his gang of friends include: 'Porno' Paul, known for his extensive collection of magazines and videos although he found his one experience of the real act rather distasteful; Rico, once a promising amateur boxer but who has more success employing his skills are more useful for gang fights; Mark, who becomes addicted to drugs; Stefan who prefers to be known as Pitbull; and 'Little' Walter, who takes his pleasure and meets his fiery end in carjacking.

The story is told in vignettes in non-chronological order, so that we may find ourselves at a character’s funeral but only learn of his death later, or jumping from adulthood years after 1989 to school during the DDR era.

This is the story of a group from the 'wrong' side of the tracks as well as the 'wrong' side of the Wall, whose behaviour graduates from insubordination at school (Rico is the first to be send to youth custody for burning his pioneer scarf) to shoplifting, carjacking, fights with rival gangs and fans of other clubs, and alcohol and drug addicition. Detention - first in a youth centre that is almost like a summer camp but later in adult prisons - is an occupational hazard.

But Meyer also shows us their positive side: - the gangs and rival fans they most despise are those with neo-Nazi sympathies; and they are loyal to one another (although Danny's own honest narration documents some early incidents where he hid rather than helped his friends). A representative incident has them befriend an elderly lady and provide her with companionship and practical help, but the companionship is largely as she enjoys sharing alcohol with them and they help themselves, behind her back, to her cash as 'compensation' for their work.

Literature, particularly translated literature, should give on insight and empathy into different lives, and this succeeded, although I also can’t avoid acknowledging that the book most came to live in the scenes with which I could connect more, rather than those involve violence, sex and booze, such as an amusing incident when two first see and use a microwave and try to make toast:

‘I can’t see anything,’ I said. ‘We should be able to see something by now, it should be getting brown or something.’
‘Just wait another minute.’
‘Hey, the mags, weren’t you going to get the mags?’
‘Yeah, yeah. But look at this first!’
‘Come on, it’s crap, I thought we could have pizza or something.’
‘I can’t help it, Danny. My mum hasn’t been shopping yet, she was going to...’
Ding! The bell rang once, the plate stopped turning and the light went off. Mark opened the door. The bread looked exactly the same as before. He took one slice out and dropped it.
‘Damn, it’s boiling hot!’
The bread was on the floor; I picked it up carefully.
‘It’s all soft,’ I said, ‘and a bit clammy. Not exactly nice crispy toast.’
Mark used a tea towel to take the glass plate out of the microwave. He pressed his finger into the other slice.
‘I dunno, Danny, it really is a bit soft. I must have set it wrong. Look, you can set the power here, it must have been way too low...’

Or the travails of the local club, Chemie whose history rather neatly illuminates the upheaveals of reunification:

"We got to Chemie late, Rico and me, that Sunday in the year after the Wall came down, when we played BFC Dynamo. It was the last season of the GDR League, even though the GDR didn’t exist by then. BSG Chemie Leipzig didn’t exist any more either, we were called FC Sachsen Leipzig now, and a few months before that we’d been called FC Green-White Leipzig for a while, but we didn’t understand why, we believed in Chemie and we were Chemie, forever. BFC wasn’t called BFC either any more, they were FC Berlin, but we didn’t care, we hated them either way."

Derbyshire explains some of the translation choices she made here, including the titles of her previous translations (this one easier). It's interesting to note how her say "I want the characters’ language to change subtly as they get older, from childhood to youthful bravado to jaded machismo" as she definitely succeeds in this, and generally in the tone of the story, which is all the more striking with the non-chronological nature of the novel, this tone, as well as more explicit references, acting to signpost where we are at any point in time.

This is a less ambitious work than Bricks and Mortar but for me a personally more successful one - 4.5 stars for the literary merit and quality of the translation and 3.5 for my own reading experience. On a relatively weak International Booker list this is one of the stronger entries so I will round up to 4 stars.

Excited to have read this in advance of its long listing for the booker international. I enjoyed this immensely and it’s well-deserved.

The premise of this book was very interesting to me, but I found the style hard to read. The pace of the characters' actions is breathtaking. The scenes veer from one place to another and it is like being in a high speed chase. Clemens Meyer has created an interesting world of dysfunctional people, but his prose reminds me of James Joyce - brilliant but difficult to access.

While We Were Dreaming is an episodic novel about teenagers in Leipzig after the fall of the Berlin Wall, whose lives are filled with drink, violence, and carjacking, and a certain hopelessness amongst their dreams. Told from the perspective of Daniel, the book follows him and friends like Rico, Mark, Paul, Daniel, Walter, and Stefan as they, at various ages, get in trouble, scheme, rage, and explore the version of Germany they now live in post-reunification.

This is a long book split into shorter sections of varying lengths that follow particular episodes in Daniel's life, moving backwards and forwards in time between these parts, but you quickly pick up the key characters, settings, and happenings. The way these parts are woven together builds up a story in a non-linear way, of hope and violence, police and the constant threat of imprisonment, and the importance of their friendships, even when things are bad, and though it sounds like it could be confusing, it does feel like a complete book by the end, but it also takes a lot of time to get there.

The book feels similar to books like Young Mungo or Who They Was in that it presents a violent youthful world in a literary way, but in the case of While We Were Dreaming, which is translated from German, it has has a very specific sense of time and place, and the aftermath of a divided country and extreme politics. I found it could be too slow for me at times and the length was off-putting considering that it doesn't really have much of a narrative (or at least not a linear one you can discern whilst reading), but the setting was fascinating and it makes for a distinctive coming of age novel.