In the second episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist Megan Nolan to discuss Illusions by Ruth Rehmann, in a new translation by Rob Madole, the latest title in the Faber Editions imprint.
First published in Germany in 1959 and lost to English-language readers for decades, the novel follows four employees of a vast West German corporation across a single weekend. Cinematic, fragmented, and seductively modernist, it is at once an intimate and hypnotic portrait of four inner lives and an incisive state-of-the-nation novel about West Germany's postwar \"economic miracle\" - and the illusions that sustain it.
Our conversation covers Rehmann's place in the influential German postwar literary movement Gruppe 47, the novel's debts to and divergences from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, the way that the war haunts a generation trying to forget it, the mischievous omniscient window cleaner who watches over the story, and what it means for a woman writer to be faulted, as contemporary reviewers said of Rehmann, for \"an excess of contemporaneity.\"
Buy Illusions
UK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571396580-illusions-faber-editions/
Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/illusions-faber-editions
Megan Nolan's novels Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings are also available from Shakespeare and Company, and your local independent bookstore.
Sign up to Faber's Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author. https://tr.ee/DsDYp5
Books & Authors Discussed
The Tin Drum — Günter Grass
Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
Ulysses — James Joyce
The Forged Coupon — Leo Tolstoy
Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico
American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
Acts of Desperation — Megan Nolan
Ordinary Human Failings — Megan Nolan
Films/TV Shows Discussed
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — dir. Chantal Akerman
Playtime — dir. Jacques Tati
The White Ribbon — dir. Michael Haneke
Frozen Land — dir. Aku Louhimies
Bios
Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in New York. Her most recent novel is Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Guardian, The Times, and Sunday Times. It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, The Gordon Burn Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women's Prize. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) was an international bestseller, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Time. Nolan was also among The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists of 2021.
Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & Heritage
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company
Listen to Alex Freiman Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cg Insta: @alex.guitarfreiman