The English-speaking world was first introduced to German author Clemens Meyer in 2011 when his short story collection All the Lights was published by powerhouse indie And Other Stories in Katy Derbyshire’s translation.
A landmark collection reissued
Fourteen years later, following two longlist spots for the International Booker Prize (most recently in 2023 for Meyer’s debut novel While We Were Dreaming) And Other Stories have released a new edition with their now iconic cover design, preserving Stuart Evers’ thoughtful introduction – certainly worth reading, although I would recommend you wait until you have finished the book (he doesn’t shy away from spoilers).
Post-reunification East Germany
Meyer was born in East Germany in 1977, his adolescence coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His work circles this seminal moment – Bricks and Mortar (Fitzcarraldo, 2016) tracks the sex trade in the former GDR over a twenty-year period, beginning shortly before reunification; While We Were Dreaming (Fitzcarraldo, 2023) follows a group of teenage boys drifting through a debauched and empty world of drinking, drugs and Technopartys, their lives in 1989 Leipzig unaffected by the changes sweeping over Europe.
All the Lights exists in the same kind of haze: the characters are isolated in their various stories, they and Meyer both more concerned with the contents of their psyches and their pasts – and in some cases with their immediate survival – than with providing place names or years. We have the vague idea that these characters live in East Germany some time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it is only those who travel – on leave from prison in ‘A Trip to the River’; living a life of petty crime and taking one train after the next in ‘Riding the Rails’; touring Germany to compete in boxing matches in ‘I’m Still Here!’ – who care where they are.
The rest live in bleak, nameless urban surroundings in which the artificial lights of the title are the only bright points in their lives, and even these are suspect allies: the protagonist of ‘The Shotgun, the Street Lamp and Mary Monroe’, tormented by the titular street lamp outside his flat (‘one of those disturbing street lamps, one of those lamps that never stop annoying you. And don’t anyone try and tell me street lamps don’t annoy you’) habitually uses the titular shotgun to attempt to snuff it out. For the most part, streets of ‘bars and kebab shops’, railway embankments, cramped flats, dole offices and looming tower blocks are the points of reference for the characters’ personal nightmares. And nightmares there are.
‘Why so much violence?’
In a video posted by the Deutscher Buchpreis to introduce Clemens Meyer following the shortlisting of his Die Projektoren (as yet untranslated, which is perhaps not surprising given that it clocks in at 1050 pages), the interviewer asks the author: ‘Why so much violence?’ It’s a question that could apply just as easily to All the Lights, which contains more than its fair share of vicious beatings, racist hatred, murders, heart attacks and suicides.
Short story collections are often like boxes of chocolates. You might be tempted to devour the whole thing in one sitting, but you’re likely to make yourself ill. Best to savour them one or two at a time. All the Lights is more like a 95% dark bar. Depending on your tolerance, you might feel sick after a single square. And part of that is the violence, certainly. The other part is the dread that hangs over each story, a dread which grows with each unhappy ending.
Any reader of an anxious disposition will spend the entirety of ‘Of Dogs and Horses’, in which a man gambles the last of his savings on the chance of winning enough to pay for an operation for his dog, mentally begging Meyer to tell them whether he got the money together or not. This is, as we find out in the throat-punch of a final sentence, the wrong question. By the time you reach ‘In the Aisles’, a beautifully minimalistic story of a shelf-stacker on the night shift, you are certain that the author is threatening his characters just to make you squirm. “‘Imagine if they locked us in here, by accident I mean,’” says our main character to his love interest, handing her a chunk of venison in the walk-in deep freeze. This after we are tortured with the protagonist’s forklift training videos (‘Lopped-off limbs, flattened feet, people skewered on the fork, and the more I saw of this forklift inferno, the more often I wondered if I’d chosen the right job.’). At the end of this story, grim as it is, you feel you have got off lightly.
Poverty and Darkness
The recurring thread is money, or rather the lack of it. This is something with which our author has experience. Most recently, at the prize ceremony for the aforementioned Deutscher Buchpreis, Meyer caused an Eklat (another delicious German word) by storming off when his book did not win, calling the judges ‘verdammten Wichser’ (I leave the translation of this insult as an exercise for the reader). In an interview with Der Spiegel, he revealed that winning the prize would have allowed him to pay off some of his debt and finance a costly divorce. Earlier in his life, Meyer worked as a forklift driver and a construction worker, spent time on the dole and was incarcerated in a youth detention facility – all situations which turn up in All the Lights.
This is writing which encapsulates the anxiety and desperation of having no money and having to go on anyway while your mother’s electricity is cut off, while your priceless paintings are hanging on other people’s walls, while you run for your life from neo-Nazis, while your old friend writes to you from South America to tell you that all his dreams are coming true – or are they? Escape to another city, another country, is framed as the only way to get rich, but in ‘Waiting for South America’ it is brought into question and in ‘All the Lights’ it is ruthlessly undermined. There’s no way out, Meyer tells us. He tells us very elegantly, in Katy Derbyshire’s sleek translation, with a stripped-back style which Stuart Evers characterises as ‘part American minimalism, part post-modern European’. His settings, even when he describes places you’d be unlucky to end up in, are drawn with such skilful economy that they are beautiful – for example, these two sentences from ‘A Trip to the River’:
“He turned over above me. I saw his foot for a moment in the light of the prison moon; we hung our towels over the window, but the floodlights were in the yard and outside the walls, and we never managed to completely cover it.”
The image of the ‘prison moon’, the moon usurped by a merciless wall of artificial lights for the control of prisoners, is so striking and thrown in so casually that it leaves you breathless. It’s a testament to Meyer’s skill as a writer, and the collection is littered with such examples. He is very good at what he does. It seems that what he wants to do with All the Lights is to have his reader close the book feeling sticky with other people’s despair.
Reviewed by Clem Clement for BookBlast®
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