« It’s the story of a German family. My own, as it happens. » Jo Lendle
EINE ART FAMILIE
(A Kind of Family)
by Jo Lendle
Penguin Germany, August 2021
We don’t choose the times we live in nor the times that shape us. Neither did Lud and Alma. Lud, who was born in 1899, and his brother Wilhelm revere Bach and Hölderlin, and share the same unattainable ideals. Wilhelm, who joins the Nazi party early on, measures others according to its standards; Lud measures himself by them, which torments him for the rest of his life. Alma lost her parents when she was a child, and her godfather Lud – who is only a few years older than her – and his housekeeper become a kind of new family for her.
Lud is a pharmacology professor specialising in sleep and its induction, and while he spends his days at the university Alma is left home alone, unable to stop thinking about him. When he starts researching poison gas, he doesn’t tell her about it. His struggle with his lofty ideals grows ever more desperate – for he can’t get Gerhard, the man alongside whom he fought in the First World War, out of his head.
Taking us on a journey from the days of the German empire to National Socialism, the early days of the GDR and post-war West Germany, Jo Lendle’s scintillating novel is the story of a family falling apart, of guilt, of the meaning of science, and of the subtle difference between sleep, anaesthesia and death. It is the story of a German family – which just so happens to be his own.
Jo Lendle was born in 1968. After studying cultural education and animation culturelle, he joined the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, edited the literary magazine Edit and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at several universities. He was awarded the Leipzig Promotion Prize for Literature in 1997. Since January 2014 he is head of the Hanser publishing house.
Sander has been on the run ever since 1572, when he saw his father murdered at the hands of the Spanish invaders in Flanders. He meets a master who teaches him how to paint flowers, while his brother Hugo, who hasn’t spoken a word since their parents’ death, mixes the paints for him. But Hugo is as unreliable and quick to anger as he is gentle, and when he commits a violent crime, he and Sander have to flee. They find refuge in an artist’s studio in Rome, witness the Pope’s dissipation, are caught up in the intrigues proliferating in the Neapolitan cardinal’s palace, and – both in their own special way – experience the joy of forbidden love. In the course of their adventures, Sander repeatedly finds a way out of seemingly hopeless situations … 
Germany, 1947. Nora’s friend invites her to a German-American New Year’s Eve party, where she’s swept off her feet by the handsome US officer William. Nora tries long and hard to hide her passionate affair from her father, but when she becomes pregnant and William is ordered back to the US she has no choice but to confess. Her father is beside himself, but has a solution: a banker friend of his offers to marry Nora and cover the family’s debts. Nora has no intention of agreeing to the plan. She leaves town with her son under cover of night and takes the train to Munich, where she meets a feverish and confused young woman in the street. Nora walks Celia home – to the villa of the wealthy Wagners, who mistake Nora’’s baby for Celia’s son. It’s a fatal misunderstanding, but one that Nora does nothing to dispel…