GERMAN LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
by Michaela Anchan
THE METHOD BY JULI ZEH TRANSLATED BY SALLY ANN SPENCER
I ’ m reading my way through the Deutsche Welle list of the “ Top 100 German Books in Translation ” as a way to learn more about Germany ( and all the European history I didn ’ t learn at school in Wellington , New Zealand ).
After reading a lot of novels set towards the beginning of the 1900s , this time I decided to jump to the other end of the spectrum — these two novels are from the last decade and are both set in dystopian worlds that take parts of our current world and amplify themes to an extreme .
The Method by Juli Zeh was published as Corpus Delecti : Ein Prozess in Germany in 2009 , and in English in 2012 .
The Method is set in a world which has eradicated pain and suffering — the government has become a kind of “ health dictatorship ,” monitoring and regulating all exercise and nutrition , analyzing body fluids , and generally ensuring everyone is in peak physical condition at all times .
A life free from suffering and pain could be great in theory , but of course in practice it means an uneven balance of power . Zeh uses the story of siblings Mia and Moritz Holl , and the fall-out after Moritz commits suicide under strange circumstances , to investigate how this kind of system could wield its power .
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