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Marion Gerlind
From: Germanga Departmental <germ...@berkeley.edu>Date: October 7, 2013 3:13:05 PM PDTSubject: Fwd: Eugen Ruge in SFGoethe-Institut San Francisco at Litquake,San Francisco's Literary Festival
Reading with Eugen Ruge
Reading
Saturday, October 12, 2013, 7:00 pm
Goethe-Institut
ART-Lounge
530 Bush Street
San Francisco
German and English
Free admission
+1 (415) 263-8760in...@sanfrancisco.goethe.org
Eugen Ruge, born 1954 in Soswa (Ural/USSR), studied Mathematics at the Humboldt-University Berlin. Since his relocation from the GDR to West-Germany in 1988, Ruge works full-time as an author and translator for theatre and radio. He received the Schiller-Advancement Award of Baden-Württemberg for his works. In 2009, his first prose manuscript In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (In Times of Fading Light) received the Alfred-Döblin-Award. The resulting published novel was awarded already twice: the Aspekte-Literature-Award and the Deutsche Buchpreis - the award of the German publishing industry for best novel at the Frankfurter Buchmesse – both in 2011. Eugen Ruge lives in Berlin.In Times of Fading Light begins in September 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer, who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico, where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s. The novel then takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family’s history: from Alexander’s grandparents’ return to the GDR to build the socialist state, to his father’s decade spent in a gulag for criticizing the Soviet regime, to his son’s desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past. With wisdom, humor, and great empathy, Eugen Ruge draws on his own family history as he masterfully brings to life the tragic intertwining of politics, love, and family under the East German regime.
The American press on The Times of Fading Light:
Mr. Ruge's novel is a pulsing, vibrant, thrillingly alive work, full of formal inventiveness, remarkable empathy and, above all, mordant and insightful wit. . . . You can see that from the ruins of the former Eastern bloc something has emerged with the power to survive and outlast the world from which it came: the art represented by Mr. Ruge's book, which has torn down the wall between Russian epic and the Great American Novel."—The New York Times"Not many writers publish their first novel in their late 50s, and even fewer still publish one as impressive and internationally well received as this one. . . . Powerful . . . Ruge has managed to weave the personal into the political in a book that functions as an ethnography of a lost time as much as it does a novel."—San Francisco Chronicle
