During Uli’s online remembrance, one of her colleagues from the EU expressed an interest in knowing more about Uli’s books, which were so important in Uli’s life.

            This moved me to make the list below of novels and a few other works (narrative poems, memoirs) that Uli said she’d enjoyed or been impressed by in her life, during the years I knew her, in 2014-2024. Not all were necessarily in her library, but they all meant something to her.

            These were just the ones she mentioned to me, others can probably add to the list.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, 1924 (This seemed to be a key book for Uli. She loved Mann’s writing and read nearly all of his novels.)

Mephisto, Klaus Mann, 1936

The Tin Drum, Günter Grass, 1959

Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck, 2008

The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth, 1932

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante, 2011

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino, 1979 (Calvino was another important author for Uli, who loved his playfulness with language and narrative.)

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1957

The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati, 1945

The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, completed 1350s (This was another key work for Uli.)

The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, completed 1320s (This was another key work for Uli.)

 

Metamorphoses, Ovid, completed around 8 AD (Narrative poem on many myths of transformation, another key work.)

 

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, 1913-1927 (Another key novel. She read at least several volumes of this work, if not all of them.)

Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782

Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky, completed in 1942

The Story of O, Anne Desclos (a.k.a. Pauline Réage), 1954

The Impossible Return, Amélie Nothomb, 2024 (This was the last book — or one of the last — that Uli read, she was reading it in the hospital in late August. It was about the author’s return to Japan. Uli seems to have liked this author at least partly because of Nothomb’s link to Japan.)

 

Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo, 1955 (For Uli, this was a masterpiece of Latin American/world literature.)

Rayuela (a.k.a. Hopscotch), Julio Cortázar, 1963 (I think Uli liked the unusual structure of this novel more than the content; she also enjoyed the author’s short stories.)

 

Fortress Besieged, Qian Zhongshu, 1947

Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, 1761 (Not sure if Uli ever finished this one, but she was reading it over several years.)

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima, 1956

The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, completed ca. 1012

 

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie, 1981

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham, 1944 (She didn’t consider Maugham a great writer, but enjoyed reading his work for relaxation.)

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1811 (Uli liked many of Austen’s novels.)

 

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders, 2017

The Human Stain, Philip Roth, 2000 (Uli enjoyed reading novels by this writer, despite his chronic misogyny and inability to create believable female characters.)

Lincoln, Gore Vidal, 1984 (Uli read Vidal’s entire series of historical novels on the U.S., as a way to learn U.S. history. She enjoyed all of the novels, especially this one.)

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, 1955

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930

 

My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk, 1998 (Uli enjoyed many of Pamuk’s novels.)

A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz, 2002 (This memoir was mostly about the author’s unstable mother, with lots of family history — a subject in which Uli was uninterested. But for some reason she enjoyed this dark book and really liked the author, maybe because of his difficulty.)

 

Random Memories

She read many other writers too, especially recent ones — she liked to keep up to date. But to me at least, she didn’t praise that many contemporary authors.

She said she kept notebooks with lists of the books she’d read: titles and years finished, I believe.

Once she opened a novel, she had to read it to the end, whether she liked it or not. She finished one of Tom Wolfe’s later novels even though it was 800+ pages, she hated it throughout, and she had to dry out the book after dropping it in the bathtub.

For years, she said, she’d been unable to throw away, sell or donate any books that she bought; somehow it didn’t feel right to do so. By the time she moved into her last apartment, though, she’d finally succeeded in slimming down her library.

She didn’t like authors such as Dostoevsky (or many Russian-language authors, as far as I can recall) or Kafka, or Borges, or authors such as Céline who wallowed in anger, violence and despair. She seemed to enjoy complexity in what she read, especially works with multiple narrators that moved back and forth in time. She loved literature that was “pure” and not politically committed; she hated, for instance, the novels of Ignazio Silone and disliked George Orwell’s political novels.

Mainly she enjoyed reading what were considered to be the major novels in the major languages, and prominent authors; she was generally uninterested in finding lesser-known, cult writers and reading them.

She’d read one or more of Primo Levi’s memoirs on his experience of the Holocaust — If This Is a Man (1947), The Periodic Table (1975) or The Drowned and the Saved (1986) — but otherwise tended to avoid books on this tragic period, which had taken some of her own family.

In exploring literatures outside Europe, she often asked people for advice on good novels to read. In each city where she lived — Brussels, Tokyo, Santiago — she belonged to book clubs for fiction and read widely.

Ulysses by Joyce had been recommended to her, but she felt — wrongly — that her English wasn’t up to the task of reading it, and she wouldn’t read it in German translation.

In her teen years, she’d been very interested in Black African writers and had read a number of them, but I can’t recall now which books or authors, except for Ngugi wa Thiong’o and maybe Weep Not, Child (1964).

Another writer in her early reading life was the popular German author Karl May, who penned adventure novels set in the American West and other exotic lands that he never visited, featuring Native American characters with names like Winnetou and Old Shatterhand.

She admired the major German-language literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki — famous, among other things, for his lists of great books to read — and she read his newspaper columns and his memoir. She also liked the biting German-language essays of the journalist Maxim Biller.

A memoir that she really enjoyed was What Language Do I Dream in? (2016) by Elena Lappin, the sister of Maxim Biller. Probably because the book was written by someone like herself, a woman who lived among many countries and languages.

She loved many German-language poets — two that she mentioned were Goethe and Paul Celan (“Death Fugue”) — but she resisted reading poetry in translation from languages she didn’t know. In the translation of poetry, she believed, too much was lost.

She had a fascination with trains and enjoyed reading works set on trains, but I can’t recall specific titles.

She wrote some short stories of her own, in Spanish when she was in Santiago, also in English, perhaps in other languages too.

The last song she chose to have played at her cremation ceremony, “Gracias a la Vida” by Violeta Parra of Chile, was the most moving farewell possible, a beautiful summation by Uli of her own life in books, travel, languages and love.