I've read two of the four books Peirene Press have published to date (their fifth is due out soon) and I must congratulate Meike and her team on the unusual and thought-provoking European literature they are bringing to the English-speaking market. First was Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea
"This novella deals with the weighty subjects of marriage and death in an impressively light manner. Shifting realities evolve with a beautiful sense of irony and wit. It is a tone that allows us to reflect, without judgment, on misunderstandings, contradictory perceptions and the transience of life."
That introductory note puts it very well because this is a book of contrasts, and one which is all about differing interpretations. If that sounds obscure, then here's the gist: Chinese scholar Hinrich Schepp begins another day by finding his wife Doro already at her desk in their apartment, editing his papers as usual. Bending down to kiss her good morning, Hinrich discovers that she is, in fact, dead. Shocked into disbelief and near-immobility, he focuses on the only thing that for him, in that moment, is real and true, namely the papers Doro has been working on, but expecting to see her notes on one of his articles, he finds instead that it's a draft of a novel he once wrote she has been looking at, and her annotations on the text are in fact a stinging, unsparing commentary on their own marriage.
"That morning, Schepp reluctantly turned back into what he had been all his life, a patient interpreter of primary sources." As he remembers his many years with Doro - the marriage he thought had been a happy one - and reads of the surprising plans she was about to put into action, he tries to make sense of all he's known and assumed was the truth, but his version is very different from the one Doro has revealed on paper.
This is a clever book, short and intense, shifting in mood and tone, showing us two halves of a whole - and in more ways than one, as you'll see if you read it. It's a shared life sharply bisected, and a hard look at how we both see and delude ourselves to suit the reality we want to believe in.
