Ein Dorf in der Uckermark, wenige Stunden vor dem Annenfest.
Der Autor portraitiert die Einheimischen, aus Gegenwart und Vergangenheit, Mensch und Tier.
Das fand ich ganz vernüglich, wird aber vermutlich keinen sehr tiefen Eindruck bei mir hinterlassen. ( )

Fckin awesome: Uckermark ftw! ( )

Stanišić has either strongly supported or revitalized the patchwork village portrait novel. The first striking technique is a first person plural narration, a more precise identity for which is hinted at but never revealed. As he drips from one place to another, he gives his non-human characters no less respect than the human ones, and provides an immense and honest grace for them all. Execution of the characters' interaction, building tension despite skipping from one thread to another, and characters in the background never fully revealed suggest that Stanišić is well-acquainted with small town novels or small towns, but most likely both. The prose is unexpected of itself, and the first plural provides authority that is consistent with the historical flashes that dot the narration. No continuity is lacking, though the length of the sections give a concise staccato air. ( )

Fürstenfelde, between two lakes in the Uckermark north of Berlin, has all the typical problems of rural life in the New Bundesländer — an ageing and shrinking population, unemployment, neo-nazis, declining services, Wessies turning the few desirable properties into craft centres and potteries, Dutch farmers buying up the arable land, and so on. And of course it has seen more than its fair share of horrors over the past four or five centuries of border wars and political turmoil. Plenty of scope for a panoramic realistic novel like Juli Zeh's Unterleuten, which came out two years later.

But Saša Stanišić doesn't quite do that: he is writing a multiple-PoV community novel celebrating the oddities of the villagers, and he touches on all the obvious problems of 21st century life in small communities in the Uckermark, but he compresses it all into an unusually tight timeframe, in the night before the annual village festival, when all kinds of crazy things happen to people in the village as tragedies and folktales from centuries ago start to get mixed up with their present-day lives.

It's partly a charmingly comic view of the oddity that can flourish in small communities, partly a hard look at how big events trample on people, but mostly a celebration of the way history is defined both by the endlessly diverse individuals whose acts it summarises and by the endlessly diverse ways we read it and react to its stories. Very interesting. ( )

Fürstenfelde in der Uckermark: Am nächsten Tag will das Dorf feiern, doch in der Nacht vor dem Fest geschehen merkwürdige und bedrohliche Dinge: Die Kirchenglocken sind verschwunden, der Fährmann ist tot, aus dem Haus der Heimat sind alte Geschichten und Erinnerungen ausgebrochen ... ( )