COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY, Austrian woman's storyteller reaches Anglophones at last

COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY
TERESA PRÄAUER (tr. Eleanor Updergraff)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An irresistibly witty satire about a dinner party where the foodie guests have a grand amount of taste but no social clue at all.

For the hostess, food has always been about growing up. From the pancakes your grandmother made, dolloped with jam, to the salty glug of your very first oyster. Now, poised at the brink of midlife, the hostess prepares for a dinner party in her new apartment, desperate for the envy of her cultured friends. With a hunger for the finer things in life, she folds linen napkins into neat triangles, arranges wildflowers for the table and puts on a playlist that projects effortless cool.

But her composure begins to falter when her guests arrive drunk and late, downing bottles of her perfectly cooled wine and trailing water over the floor. Here comes the chain-smoking professor who never says the right thing, the husband glued to his smartphone, the wife who makes a secret pass at your boyfriend.

As small talk and social preening give way to sexual tension and lost inhibitions, the hostess struggles to maintain control over an evening far beyond her wildest imaginings. Outrageously funny and keenly observed, this is the first novel by Austrian powerhouse Teresa Präauer to be translated into English, and a delectable feast of social satire for readers of Perfection and The Anthropologists.

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My Review: Maybe it's just me relating to "the hostess" so deeply and personally...maybe I'm feeling a little wistful for the times when asking people to your home for a home-cooked meal was not weird or unexpected.

That, however, is not remotely what's on Author Präauer's mind. This is a super-sarcastic snarkfest of skewered bourgeois pretensions. She gets after every conceibable subset of our brittlest chit-chat, puts a big ol' flensing knife under the scrotal skin of her (formerly) male characters, spraying narrative mace in their eyes since they weren't using them to see what's in front of their faces anyway.

The women! ZOMG What a collection of prunes, determined to out-smug each other in their certainty of opinions...most especially about food. In its deeply felt rage, it was Babette's Feast for the dining discourse of Ibnstagram meets The Women for the self-conscious class skewering.

It's not clear to me there is not only one dinner party, though it seems the characters aren't the same people...? But believe you me, they're indistinguishable...examining more closely than is comfortable people from the same background so I was left with one idea of what we-the-reader are supposed to think and feel about them. Our narrator occasionally addresses us through the broken fourth wall on the subject of how we perceive food; how food as a cultural touchstone came to exist in our minds.

So you know I was right there. I was fully engaged in every bit of this admittedly slight narrative. I don't think the story being told quite merits the 176-page count...It feels more like a 150pp novella would've done better justice to the exploration of the hostess's purpose in feeding her friends (only her friends) and her new Swiss...fella, let's say. Maybe I didn't really need the oddly angled ending, but rather a simpler one of a door just closing...?

Whatever my cavils, this introduction to Author Präauer, well-known and established in Austria, and her interests and writing style, was a genuine pleasure. I was entertained, amused, and drawn in to this social commentary on Instagrammable foodies, women with axes to grind but no courage to let loose and do it already, and the men who completely misunderstand them.

Very much a "give this one a try" shove to your bookstore from me.

THE DIRECTOR, living life through extraordinary times demands a lot from an artist

THE DIRECTOR
DANIEL KEHLMANN (tr. Ross Benjamin)
Summit Books/S&S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2026 International Booker Prize shortlistee!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

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My Review: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) lived an unlucky life. He was trapped in his native Europe for each of the World Wars fought there. His work...impressive stuff...is almost totally forgotten outside the small world of cinéastes. (Do you know anyone, apart from me, who's seen The Threepenny Opera and/or L'Atlantide?) We're treated here to a deep fictional dive into his inner workings. Given that he already knew Nazism was wrong, bad, and evil, and was trying to escape its miasma, his decision to collaborate with Goebbels in the propaganda machine seems inexcusable. In fact it was never forgiven. Not even his German-language film The Last Act (The Last Ten Days in English) bought him back his prior-to-collaboration esteem in spite of its honest treatment of Hitler's insanity at the end of the war.

What price security. It cost this security-seeker very dear. His only son was swallowed by the Hitler Youth because his father returned to see if he could care for his ailing mother. He is examined in this novel as only fiction is capable of examining an inner life. It's not the justifications and self-delusion that a memoir could bring to the table. It's the decisions he made writ plain and unadorned with the inevitable dishonesty of making excuses.

Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director.

I don't think a man who could meet with and work for Nazis could've brought himself to conjure those honest, self-deprecating words.

I'm new to Kehlmann's work. This kind of spotlight is not flattering to its object. It can easily become a hatchet-job or hagiography; each is distorted and ultimately dishonest. In Author Kehlmann's choice of fictionalizing events and people very close to precisely aligned with the historical record, he puts the dishonesty and ambiguity on whom it belongs: Pabst. It's just...disturbing, and in a way a biography, a memoir would not be because Author Kehlmann clearly knows the facts and has an opinion yet makes us, the audience, take in our responses without the comfort of distancing our responses.

Would any one of the readers of this book behaved differently than Pabst? The fictional framing strips away the fig-leaf of "objectivity" so we must sit in the decisive moments with Pabst. Are you sure your illusion of yourself as a resister is accurate? Are you sure your judgment of what you'll need to give up is accurate? Are you sure you can be in, but not of, the system you scorn and abhor?

Translator Ross Benjamin did a good enough job rendering the read into English that I was a bit surprised to realize it was a translation. That is, to me, a very high compliment, or intended as one at least. It is a feat of writing to fictionalize someone who's famous (if you know who he is) in the light that emphasizes who he was; an equal feat to take that unusual choice to a very high level of craft in a different language. Kudos to both artists for a job well done.

Why, if I'm praising this work so highly and with such fervor, am I not offering all five stars? Because at no time was I transported into a different awareness, a space of timeless immanence such as I was by Evil Genius or The Remembered Soldier. It's all too rare, that removal from mundanity, so this is not a knock on the quality of the read. I'm impressed and I'm edified and I'm involved by this novel. It's at the top of the literary heap. It deserves its International Booker nomination. I'm not going to put in my pantheon but I'm going to urge it on you as a fascinating, timely, well-crafted story.

LETTERS TO KAFKA, introduction to a life unjustly ignored in Anglophone literature

LETTERS TO KAFKA
CHRISTINE ESTIMA
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Bookends with Mattea Roach interview with Author Estima.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

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My Review: Modeling to a world unwilling to see what principled resistance to authoritarianism looks like, Milena Jesenská could be no more perfect a subject to study in 2025. Christine Estima has done it for us, and presented her findings in an involving, intense novel of Milena's life. The incident igniting her rise to resistance is a simple and practical one: she needs income. Her then-husband can't, in 1919 Vienna, provide for them. Having very recently read Kafka's stories and being moved deeply by them, Milena writes to request permission to translate them into Czech. Her aim is to get income...the result is to become utterly, passionately entwined with Kafka. It was not primarily a physical affair, only two known meetings, but a deep and consuming love.

The story here, however, is Jesenská...the woman, the intellectual, the object of desire for many members of the Vienna Secession. Reading this book of her own words, stitched into the author's gap-filling prose, I was unable to conceive of a good reason this vibrant and impassioned liver of life and lover of justice was so unfamiliar to me. I know the reason...she's a woman, misogyny's polarizing lenses filter those people out...but talk about stupid! Writing Milena Jesenská out of History is a wrong I hope we will see righted more and more. A resister of Nazism, not a Jew but friend to Jews and accomplice to their escape from certain death, person whose life trajectory includes Ravensbrück, is someone to be celebrated loudly and often. Never more than now.

The mind that created cultural touchstones Gregor Samsa and K., that saw Reality in place of consensus reality, said to Milena: "Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead. - FK". A spirit that can elicit this deep and passionate love from one whose life is known by him to be quite short is one worth knowing and celebrating.