Birgit Vanderbeke at the German School on 14.3.2014

Every year the German School in Richmond, southwest London, presents an annual ‘Dichterlesung’ (author reading) evening, on which a notable German author is invited to talk about their work and read a novel extract in front of an invited audience. This tradition dates back to the 1980s and since then the school has hosted some very high-profile writers including Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. On March 14th it was Birgit Vanderbeke whose name was added to this distinguished list of visiting literary figures. The author was interviewed by the BBC broadcaster and journalist, Rosie Goldsmith.

Vanderbeke, who was born in 1956 in the GDR, moved to West Germany at the age of six, but has lived in the south of France since the early 90s. Her publications mostly take the form of short novellas and her writing style is playful, often reflecting a quirky sense of humour, yet confronting serious themes such as consumerism and capitalism, family and gender.

Although Birgit Vanderbeke’s first novella ‘Das Muschelessen’ (‘The Mussel Feast’) was published back in 1990, this is still the title for which the author is best known, and the only one of her novellas to have been translated into English so far. Vanderbeke told the audience how she realised that she was experiencing a ‘special moment’ in history during the time of the build-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. She knew that something major was about to happen, and was inspired by the question of how a point is reached when suddenly a society’s collective submission to a dictatorial regime ceases to function. The 112-page novella ‘Das Muschelessen’ was written over four weeks during those turbulent times, and was published in Germany in 1990. Vanderbeke recalled that although the book was a big hit with the public, it received mainly negative criticism in the German press. Nevertheless it won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and ended up as required reading on the German school curriculum. Furthermore, the English translation received favourable reviews in the UK when it was finally published by Peirene Press in 2013, and this year it’s been longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

The plot of ‘Das Muschelessen’ is narrated by a teenage girl who describes the tension building up amongst her family members one evening as they await the return of her tyrannical father. The latter, described by Vanderbeke as a parody of a patriarchal ‘trauma-monster of the 1960s’, has been away from home on a business trip and the family are preparing to celebrate his triumphant homecoming. As mussels are his favourite meal, his wife has slavishly prepared a big pot of them to celebrate his return, although the rest of the family don’t enjoy them and regard the simmering sea creatures with a high degree of disgust. As the storyline unfolds we realise that the father is a bully who abuses his wife and two children, and that a potential moment of family revolt against the father has been reached. A further interesting feature of the story is that while it’s ostensibly an allegory which critiques totalitarian regimes, it’s equally scathing about the superficial values of capitalism.

Following on from the success of ‘The Mussel Feast’, Vanderbeke disclosed that there are plans to translate more of her novellas into English. Currently ‘Alberta empfängt einen Liebhaber’ – a love story between two incompatible personalities - seems a likely candidate for the next translation.

Intriguingly, Vanderbeke admitted that a fascination with food reveals itself in many of her books. She has even published an unconventional cookery book called ‘Schmeckt’s? Kochen ohne Tabu’ – the taboo aspect referring to foods which are considered by many to be unethical or just plain disgusting, such as snails, lambs’ brains, veal, sheeps’ testicles, and – you guessed it – mussels!