![]() ![]() ![]() Although I’d done two years of German at school some twenty years before, it took me a long while to become really fluent. ![]() When I was actually writing The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, we were still living in Bad Münstereifel, the little German town where the book is set. Mostly the German is confined to single words rather than whole phrases these include a number of swear words or insults, such as Scheisse, Scheissköpfe and Verdammt!Īfter having written a further five novels, two of which were set in Germany and three in Dutch-speaking Flanders, I know that although there are some readers who love a bit of exotic foreign vocabulary, there are others who don’t like it at all. I certainly wouldn’t say the book is partly written in it, but there are enough snippets of German to merit a glossary in the back, containing translations of such interesting phrases as Ihr seid total blöd (You’re totally stupid). I still remember with a faint sense of outrage the reviewer who described my first novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden as “partly written in German.” ![]()
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