Love Virtually by Daniel Glattauer, translated by Jamie Bulloch and Katharina Bielenberg (published by Maclehose Press)

'One of the cleverest and most magical love-dialogues in modern literature' Der Spiegel

Our Book of the Month has been selected with Valentine’s Day in mind. A delightful portrait of a couple falling in love via email, it isn’t published by us, but is translated by one of our advisers on German literature, Jamie Bulloch, who has written our latest ‘Armchair Traveller’ piece (below) about why Love Virtually both is and isn’t ‘Austrian’.

We LOVE this book. Sophisticated, sexy, sparkling with verbal wit, it’s the perfect Valentine’s gift.

Check out the interview with Jamie and his co-translator (and wife) Katharina Bielenberg at www.quercusbooks.co.uk/blog/love-virtually-an-interview-with-the-translators/

ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: AUSTRIA

Translator Jamie Bulloch talks about translating Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, and why it is and isn't Austrian

My wife and I have just translated a novel together. A novel about an email love affair, and this has resulted in many raised eyebrows among friends. It’s been an intense yet hugely entertaining experience, and in the process we fell even more in love . . . with Austrian novelist Daniel Glattauer’s brilliant Love Virtually.

When I first read Daniel Glattauer’s Gut gegen Nordwind in German, I was immediately drawn in and could see why it had been such a success. Taking the form of a series of emails between a man called Leo and a woman called Emmi, the novel (whose title we have decided to render as Love Virtually) charts their romance, from a first message sent by Emmi to Leo in error, trying to cancel a magazine subscription, to the sharing of their innermost secrets and longings. As the correspondence progresses, the couple keep putting off the moment when they will meet in person. After all, Emmi is happily married, and they cannot be sure that their feelings for each other will survive the test of a real-life encounter.

There are precedents, of course, from Madame Bovary to Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail; the epistolary romance is nothing new. And the email format presents a very real danger of  banality. But this book is so compelling, so full of erotic tension, linguistic ingenuity and subtle observations of human nature that it becomes irresistible.

 Glattauer took the German book world by storm in 2006, topping the bestseller lists for weeks and eventually selling close to a million and a half copies in the German-speaking world. Sales of its sequel, Every Seventh Wave (Alle sieben Wellen), are fast catching up. Rights in both books have been sold in 35 countries, but it may be for the English edition alone that Leo and Emmi’s story is translated by two people.  My wife Katharina is principally an editor, but she has also translated in the past, and publisher Christopher MacLehose thought the novel presented the perfect opportunity for a new kind of collaboration, which might also result in the characters being given their own distinct voices.

In many ways Glattauer’s work is the universal novel par excellence. Although the protagonists are both based in Vienna, the primacy of their virtual correspondence strips the novel of its geographical and cultural specificities, partly explaining the book’s global appeal. Does this mean, then, that there is nothing specifically ‘Austrian’ about Love Virtually? It’s an interesting question.

Austria has undergone many political transformations over her history, several of these in the twentieth century alone. This has led to much soul-searching over what it is to be Austrian, and specifically how ‘Austrians’ should define themselves in relation to the greater German cultural sphere. It is a theme well explored by writers down the years from Grillparzer to Hofmannsthal, and Joseph Roth to Thomas Bernhard. In the decades following the Second World War, Austrians gradually became more confident and comfortable with a national identity that no longer took Germany as a reference point, but which embraced neutrality during the Cold War and Europeanism thereafter. This seemingly smooth development was given a kick-start by the Allied declaration of 1943, which stated that Austria had been the first victim of Nazi aggression. But post-war Austria’s foundation myth meant that a large chunk of her shadowy past remained undigested, only to come up again with the resurgence of the far right in the late 1980s and 1990s under Jörg Haider. The question of Austrian identity thus remains an open one.

The musical pedigree of Austria is well known. But she also boasts a fine literary tradition going back to the Nibelungenlied in the late twelfth century. To the writers mentioned above, one could add the names of Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, Franz Werfel, Hemito von Doderer, Hermann Broch, Ingeborg Bachmann and the list would not be exhaustive. For a small country (a population of less than 8.5 million), Austria’s literary output continues to be impressive. It is partly sustained by the country’s rich historical and cultural heritage, but also by her much larger neighbour of more than 80 million. To be successful commercially, and perhaps critically as well, Austrian writers need to conquer the German market in addition to their domestic one. This imperative is possibly an incentive to authors in Austria to be more outward looking, rather than parochial, and engage with larger, universal themes.

This perhaps explains why Love Virtually is such an internationally accessible novel. But scratch the surface and you will see that many of its charms have an ‘Austrian’ origin. Leo and Emmi’s correspondence is abundant in language play and wit, which have a strong tradition in Austrian writing – think of the satire and irony in Karl Kraus, or the exploration of the possibilities and limitations of language by Wittgenstein and Musil, amongst others. It is a good bet, moreover, that Sigmund Freud, another Austrian, would have delighted in the pseudo-analytical efforts of the correspondents to uncover each other and grapple with the significance of their burgeoning relationship.

If Daniel Glattauer is a reliable indicator, then contemporary fiction in Austria is in good hands. It will be interesting to see how the literary scene develops there and the extent to which, in the future, it will be informed by the issue of ‘Austrianness’.