Editions - Episode 2 - Illusions with Megan Nolan

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