The Bureau of Past Management
Praise for The Bureau of Past Management by Iris Hanika, translated by Abigail Wender, V&Q Books
The Bureau of Past Management, was selected by Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times, a Best Books of 2021: Fiction in translation.
“Hans Frambach works at the Berlin bureau that gives the novel its title, whose mission is to help the country come to terms with its history. Toiling “day-in and day-out in the vineyards of memory,” he discovers that reconciling with the past—national and personal—is more easily said than done.”
“Much of [WG] Sebald’s greatest work was an examination of the guilt of Germany’s Nazi era as experienced by subsequent generations, a theme echoed by Iris Hanika in her bold and absorbing novel The Bureau of Past Management, which won the European Prize for Literature and is now translated sensitively by Abigail Wender.”
— Catherine Taylor, Irish Times Book Review, September 19, 2021
“The Bureau of Past Management is profound but never pretentious: Hanika resolutely refuses to offer a sermon on the failures of Germany’s ‘past management,’ but does suggest a way forward that confronts the past instead of archiving or displaying it: ‘Contemplate, rather than commemorate.’”
—Birgit Weythe, Review in Translating Women
—Houman Barekat, December 7, 2021
“There comes a time when it all falls away—the anger of youth, the sorrow you felt at the world’s injustice, and also the confidence that things would get better, maybe even good if you just tried hard enough, put your whole heart into it. There comes a time when that heart abruptly empties and you eddy down into yourself, entirely alone. Not a great time.”
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/iris-hanika-the-essential/
The Bureau of Past Management (Das Eigentliche) won the European Union Prize for Literature and, in 2011, the Literatur Nord Prize, was a long-list bestseller, and has been translated into eleven languages. The Bureau is available for purchase at Blackwell's UK or any independent bookstore.