I've been writing a novel for the last couple of years, Untitled (is the new working title). I finished the second draft earlier in the year and I've just started working on a further, more in-depth rewrite, but you can read the current version if you want. It is a story of conflict and love; between art and politics, Germans and Brits, London and Berlin.
- “Ben had envisaged being able to ignore the world cup entirely, not granting it the dignity of his attention. This was not to be. ”
- “Last night’s jeans, his red pair, stank as though they’d been used to mop the floor of a bar. ”
- “A road which circumnavigated London was exactly the road he wanted to take. ”
- “Markus was out more, going to meet Heinz, Heinrich or Heiner; Antje, Anke or Anya; or one of several different Stefans. ”
- “A girl in the queue behind translated: ‘she lives in the house next door and she’s seen you and your friend with no clothes on!’ ”
- “‘Well it’s lovely to see you’ve got back on your feet after that nasty misunderstanding in London,’ Chloe said. He could have killed her. ”
- “What made it so beautiful was the exclusion of everything which didn’t fit, pure order, no messy edges and complicated misfitting awkwardness. ”
- “‘You’ve become a bit rebellious since living here,’ Ellie said. ‘Perhaps you should get yourself a Mohican.’ ”
- “From Ellie’s point of view there was no explanation for his own bag, one of those large squashy rectangular sporty ones, stuffed to bursting, as if he were visiting another city, not Ellie. ”
- “As Julia was explaining about how this rift within the German left had affected the atmosphere in the house she had just moved to, Ben’s phone died. ”
- “Scraps of dry grass dropped out of his hair and landed in his milchkaffee. ”
- “A visitor was not what he needed right now. But that wasn’t what he wrote. ”
- “Ben had been called a lot of things, but never tough. He was, however, handy with a hammer. ”
- “Just under the bed was a dark-red t-shirt. He didn’t recognise it. ”
- “They accused him of being a poor host. He accused them of sadism. They accused him of treachery to the British nation. Finally he capitulated. ”
- “‘We might shave your head, strip you and banish you to a cellar. ”
- “‘Do they have an equivalent of Norman Tebbit over here?’ Ollie asked. ”
- “Ellie’s ‘we’re here, we’re queer, no flags here!’ and Julia’s ‘Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht’, were rejected in favour of ‘No borders, no nations; no balls, no goalposts.’ ”
- “Markus could clearly have lived like this for weeks, but to Ben it was a symptom of crisis. He declared a state of emergency, razed the heaps of clutter and cleared swathes of space. ”
- “‘I think we can assume anything involving fun is verboten,’ Sophie said. ”
- “The point at which Ben began to feel physically sick was when... he realised that it had been designed according a concept. ”
- “Ben glared at the sculpture now, hoping it and everyone in the room would turn to stone. ”
- “'It’s slowly dawning on me why everyone wears black all winter in this city.' ”
Read more...