Good news, everyone: my status as a Franzen completist is secure.

After finally achieving this status in late 2021, I unknowingly let it lapse for several months, after Franzen’s latest German translation was published in April of this year.

For reasons I cannot fathom, the Franzen tier ranking I published right at the end of 2021 has been my highest-performing blog post ever since. The stats page (like much else) on WordPress is pretty useless, no longer displaying many search terms or links or anything that would help me. Does anyone else know how to find out? Is a Franzen tier ranking really hitting some obscure SEO parameter?

Anyway, I updated the tier ranking, and as you might imagine, this one falls into the bottom tier along with Franzen’s other translation projects. Not to say they are bad, but they are not essential reading, in my view. I actually quite admire The Kraus Project. I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone but a completist.

As for The Short End of the Sonnenallee, I sum it up in the tier ranking:

What if Spring Awakening was set in 1980s East Berlin, and the tone was “silly” rather than “tragic”? What if Franzen translated what is basically a YA novel, to add to his very mixed bag of translations? Read this novella to find out!

It is a rather silly book, about horny teens, but as Franzen points out in his introduction, that’s something of an accomplishment, given the very serious setting. These teens are living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, harassed by guards and jeered at by gawkers from the West, with very limited possibilities for their futures. And I’m being a little silly myself when I call this YA. It is certainly concerned with youth, but we occasionally get glimpses into the post-reunification future. The parents and other adults, often played for laughs, have their moments too, as when Micha’s mother finds a Western passport of a much older woman, and attempts to make herself up to match the picture, but can’t follow through and actually leave. A running gag about asbestos is similarly played for laughs until it suddenly becomes serious.

The book didn’t really grab me. The tone was a bit too uneven, the focus a little too adolescent, but it is short and sweet, and great for Novellas in November. I’m also seriously thinking about a Purity reread, now knowing that Brussig inspired the section on 1980s East Germany. And that’s saying something, since Purity is only a B-tier book.