Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone?
Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice.
Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
My Thoughts:
Love in Five Acts is a tricky book to review. It is one that I think needs to be read and then left to settle and sink in. It is the memorable and thought provoking story of five connected women and their quest for love in the many different guises.
The reader learns the story of Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde. Their stories read like five short stories but they all lead nicely into one another and familiarity builds as the pages of this relatively short book pass.
Love in Five Acts has been expertly translated from German by Jamie Bulloch and I think he has done a wonderful job of maintaining the integrity of these 'Acts'. So much so I would not have known it was translated at all.
The characters oftentimes seemed distant and cold, unapproachable maybe but that made me feel as a reader that I was a fly on the wall just observing a brief snatch of the lives of the women concerned.
I guess this could be described as an exploration of feminity and the challenges of living in the modern world and the expectations to conform to the perceived norms of society. I loved the fact that these women were challenging that.
I admire the boldness of this book and the unexpected way it has challenged me. I don't think I have read something like this before.
About the Author:
Daniela Krien was born in 1975 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, then in the G.D.R. Her first novel, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, was published in English in 2013 (MacLehose Press) and in fourteen other languages. For a subsequent volume of short stories, Muldental, she was awarded the Nicolaus Born Prize. Love in Five Acts has been sold for translation into twenty languages. She lives in Leipzig with her two daughters.
Jamie Bulloch is a German-English translator of authors such as Robert Menasse, Timur Vermes or Birgit Vanderbeke, and a winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation. He lives in London with his wife and three daughters.
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