Arnon Grünberg
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Arnon Grunberg (born February 22, 1971 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch writer. Some of his books are written using the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt.
[edit] Biography
Arnon Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971, and was kicked out of high school at age seventeen. He started his own publishing company, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen. When he was only twenty-three years old, his first novel Blue Mondays became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. It has been translated in thirteen languages.
His novel Silent Extras was published in 1997 and has sold more than 100,000 copies.
In 1998 he wrote the novel Saint Anthony for the Dutch “Week of the Books”. 701,000 copies were published. His collection of essays entitled The Comfort of Slapstick was published the same year.
Grunberg’s novel, Phantom Pain, was published in 2000 and went on to win the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. The English translation of this novel was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005.
His first screenplay, The Fourteenth Chicken, was released as a movie in the fall of 1998, coinciding with the premiere of You Are Also Very Attractive When You Are Dead, a play Grunberg wrote for German and Israeli actors and which has been performed in Düsseldorf and Tel Aviv.
Grunberg was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam and the publishing house Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep to write a contemporary version of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. This book, In Praise of Mankind, came out in 2001 and won the Golden Owl Award for the best book of last year. 2001 also saw the publication of Amuse-Bouche, a collection of his short stories.
Under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg wrote the novel The Story of My Baldness, for which he won for the second time the Anton Wachter Prize, a prize for the best debut novel of the last two years. He became the first novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. The Story of My Baldness won in Germany the Aspekte Prize.
Again under the name Marek van der Jagt, in 2002, Grunberg published the essay, Monogamous, the essay chosen this year for the “Week of the Books”. Another Marek van der Jagt work, the novel Gstaad 95-98, was published in 2002 and was introduced by Arnon Grunberg in May in Vienna.
In 2002 Grunberg won the German NRW Literature Prize for all his books translated into German, including those by Marek van der Jagt.
In 2003 his novel The Asylum Seeker was published in the Netherlands and hailed as his best novel to date.
In 2004 he published a collection of short stories, Grunberg Around the World, and a novella. September 2004 his novel The Jewish Messiah was published in the Netherlands.
In 2004 he won the prestigious Bordewijk Prize for The Asylum Seeker. Also he won for this novel for the second time the AKO Prize, the only author till now to win this price twice.
From September 2004 till November 2005 he was the anchorman for the weekly Dutch cultural TV show R.A.M.
In 2005 The Jewish Messiah was on the shortlist of both the Golden Owl and the AKO prize. In the spring of 2005 he gave a master class at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, on “the technique of suffering”. Fall 2005 The Technique of Suffering was published. The book contains his lectures and the machines that the students built under his supervision.
Also in 2005 The Grunberg-bible was published, the best from the Old and the New Testament according to Grunberg.
In the same year he edited a collection of stories from Eastern Europe, Fear Defeats Everything.
In September 2006 his latest novel, Tirza, was published.
His work has been translated into twenty different languages.
Grunberg was raised in Amsterdam and currently lives in New York City. He writes columns (1995-1996: Letter from America, 1996-1997: Everyday Swordfish and in 2006 Among the People started), book reviews and essays for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, and a weekly column for the Belgian magazine Humo (The Mailbox of Arnon Grunberg), the Dutch magazine VPRO-gids (Yasha), the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, and a monthly column for Wordt Vervolgd, the Dutch magazine of Amnesty International. Grunberg also writes a blog for the online literary magazine Words Without Borders. Regularly he publishes essays and stories in Vrij Nederland and the literary magazines Hollands Maandblad and De Gids. He contributed to The New York Times, Tages-Anzeiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bookforum.
[edit] Selected Bibliography
Novels:
- Blauwe maandagen / Blue Mondays (1994)
- Figuranten / Silent Extras (1997)
- De heilige Antonio ("Saint Antonio") (1998)
- Fantoompijn / Phantom Pain (2000)
- De geschiedenis van mijn kaalheid / Story of My Baldness (2000), as Marek van der Jagt
- De Mensheid zij geprezen, Lof der Zotheid 2001 ("Praised be Mankind"/"Praise of Folly 2001") (2001)
- Gstaad 95-98 (2002), as Marek van der Jagt
- De asielzoeker ("The Asylum Seeker") (2003)
- De joodse messias / Grote jiddische roman ("The Jewish Messiah") (2004)
- Tirza (2006)
Stories:
Essays:
- Troost van de slapstick ("The Comfort of Slapstick") (1998)
- Monogaam ("Monogamous") (2001), as Marek van der Jagt
- Otto Weininger Of bestaat de jood? ("Otto Weininger or Does the Jew Exist?") (2005), as Marek van der Jagt
Filmscript:
- Het 14e kippetje ("The Fourteenth Chicken") (1998)
Plays:
- You are also very attractive when you are dead (1998)
- De Asielzoeker (adapted by Koen Tachelet, 2005)
Sites:
[edit] Themes, Style, Stories
Grunberg likes to use the perspective of individuals that end up making total sense to the reader, but that are likely to be considered more or less severely disturbed people, emotionally or otherwise, by the outside world. In his first two novels, the main character is slightly remarkable but not really a freak. The protagonist's friends, or at least the people he is hanging out with, are usually characterised by having certain obsessions or unusual hobbies, like handing out business cards to complete strangers, occasionally buying newspapers in languages they can't read, or having a desire to make it in Hollywood. The result of our learning the characters' adventures, or lack thereof, is often amusement. Arnon Grunberg possesses the talent to describe absurd or potentially absurd situations and dialogues, without ever losing the author's distance, and without ever telling the reader to laugh. Unusual relationships, of a sexual kind or not, are another important theme to Grunberg. Some characters like spending a lot of (not necessarily available) money, living in hotels, taking taxis and dining in restaurants, a lifestyle that Grunberg himself is suspected of preferring too.
In his "Van der Jagt" novels, as the author said himself, he could, behind the cover of the pseudonym, go a little further in exploring themes that may be inappropriate to some. An example of such a theme is the anal fixation and, in fact, general careless cruelty of the main character described in Gstaad 95-98. This fascinating novel is not easy to read but neither easy to put away. Here, we can't even say that the main character evokes any sympathy in the reader. The novel, however, is humoristic, albeit of a sick kind.
The Asylum Seeker is Grunberg's most touching book so far. Main character Beck is a failure, he makes mistakes (one of them of a violent nature), but ends up being sympathetic in the reader's eyes. Grunberg manages to have the reader conclude that Beck, a frigid cynic without illusions, has been the only normal person in this book's world all along. The Asylum Seeker is not really about an asylum seeker at all. The asylum seeker is merely a guy whom Beck's partner, a woman called The Bird in the book, who is terminally ill, marries in order for him to arrange a passport. The fact that this marriage is actually consumed (something Beck doesn't have a problem with, considering his own sexual policies) indicates the unusual, but maybe superior, nature of Beck and The Bird's relationship.
The Jewish Messiah is not about Judaism, nor about the Messiah nor about any of the political or historical entities that may be hidden, or referred to, in the book. It is about a young individual, Basel-resident Xavier Radek, grandson of a late SS-member. He needs a mission and, wanting to know more about Jewish suffering, decides to "console the Jews." He converts to Zionism, and falls in love with the Jew Awromele. Xavier's almost fatal circumcision, performed by a half-blind dealer of kosher cheese, is described in some of Grunberg's most hilarious scenes. This book, together with the Van der Jagt works, confirms Grunbergs unique position within Dutch literature. An illustration of the sense of humour employed in the book is the name "King David" given to the testicle Radek lost (during his circumcision), which is worshipped when Radek is PM of Israel. Needless to say, actual political issues, something Grunberg is not interested in employing in his books in the first place, are merely referred to because they are simply fun to use.
Some of Grunberg's work, mainly the aforementioned, may be compared with, by way of illustration, Kenzaburo Oe's short novel Seventeen. We witness a possessed individual and his whereabouts, described in a similar, consistently employed irony, that seems to have stopped being irony due to the fact that it is never indicated to be irony in the first place. In Grunberg's case, this makes the breathless reader, although (s)he wants to finish the whole book due to its dark humour, suspense and desire to soon get out again of the world created in it, which is essentially uncomfortable, upsetting and uncosy.
