Blurbs

“This book is truly a masterpiece.” —Hannah Arendt

“A gripping, complex, highly significant work in which the author displays not only his mastery as a storyteller but also his humor, irony, and descriptive power.”
—The New York Times

“The book seeks to be a comprehensive account of the ’60s... it is oceanic, and it is a masterpiece.... Searls’s superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times (Top Books of 2019)

Related

Excerpts, Oct. 9-12 chapters on the anniversaries
Another excerpt, May 3, 1968
Paris Review essays on Johnson, the book, and the translation: I, II, III
August 20, 1967 essay by me
Publishers Weekly: NYRB Classics Brings a Behemoth into English
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize acceptance speech: video / essay version

Goethe Institut, NY, special exhibit, including interactive map; event with Renata Adler + Liesl Schillinger; film festival:
  Anniversaries miniseries, 2000, dir. Margarethe von Trotta
  Summer in the City, 1967, voiceover text by Uwe Johnson
  Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, 1968, dir. William Greaves
  Trace of Stones, 1966, dir. Frank Beyer

Reviews

“I am absolutely stunned and slightly mortified that I’ve never heard of this book before... I think it’s extraordinary, I think it is a great late-modern masterpiece... It contains the whole world.... I was completely gripped.”
—Kathryn Hughes, Saturday Review, BBC 4

“Johnson’s seductive prose style—lyrically inventive, humane, and often very funny—is equally at home in grandly orchestrated set pieces and charming, offhand miniatures, a flexibility the author’s subjects demand... A master ironist, [he] relays the horror of Nazi rule with devastating understatement [while the daily] narrative drip allows New York to gather, unhurried, in rich, vivid accretions: ferry rides, conversations, coffee shops, digressions on architecture and subway etiquette, holidays, afternoons at the Mediterranean Swimming Club, and trips to the pediatrician... ‘That’s what I have left: I can learn how things work,’ Gesine says. ‘At least live with my eyes open.’... In a nearly 1,800-page novel of vaulting formal ambition, one does not expect its most radical feature to be this simple acknowledgment of reality: ‘We do not live by bread alone,’ Gesine advises her daughter, ‘we need hard facts too, child.’ ” —The Atlantic

“Johnson has Balzac’s passion for the telling detail, the revealing exactitude, here a passion that is impelled by the imagination of love. So intensely are the figures imagined—Gesine and her daughter, Gesine’s desolated mother, and all the tribe of Baltic relatives who variously endure and resist the Nazi scourge—that the ballast of Manhattan fact is needed to keep the book on the page, the life in focus.” —Richard Howard

“The growing political consciousness of Gesine’s daughter, Marie, provides a wonderful counterpoint to the novel's themes of crises personal, national, and global. This is a haunting and unforgettable portrait of the momentous and the historical.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated. Its streets are long, and its landmarks are varied. Sometimes the weather’s sultry, and sometimes the pipes clang in the cold. But Johnson's rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly meticulous... His writing is inhuman, godlike in its immensity.”
—Becca Rothfeld, Bookforum

“An overstuffed masterwork of late European modernism... Likened to Joyce’s Ulysses, it's really a kind of Joseph Cornell box in words, a vast montage stretching from August 1967 to August 1968. [It] touches on Vietnam, World War II, postwar Eastern Europe, the inhumane conditions of that New York subway system and the humanity of its riders (‘Marie was always given a greater amount of breathing room than she needed’), the triumph of despair, and countless other topics. A rich book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, from a writer too little known today.” —Kirkus

“Juxtaposing the tumult of ’60s America with everyday life in Nazi Germany, Anniversaries chronicles 20th-century turmoil through the eyes of Gesine Cresspahl... Against the big-picture backdrop, we get a fine-grained treatment of motherhood and migration... It feels thrillingly spontaneous, almost out of control. You can certainly see why it wasn’t all translated before now. But here it is: a novel of a year, perhaps the novel of the year.” —Anthony Cummins, The Observer