Isabel Cole's Trailblazing Green Frontier

I should be honest up front: I'm biased when it comes to Isabel Fargo Cole, who was one of the first real, live translators I got to know personally. Along with Katy Derbyshire, she was one of my earliest translation role models. I knew she had translated Meyrink's Golem and Wolfgang Hilbig, with whom I had an ambivalent relationship, but for years there'd been whispers that Isabel was writing a novel in German. Part of my admiration has to do with my occasional attempts to write in German. English-Language literature is filled with modern examples of authors for whom English was an adopted or non-native language, from Joseph Conrad and Nabokov to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yiyun Li. However, there is much less of such a tradition in German-language literature, with the exception of representative from Turkish and Eastern European immigrant groups, including Katja Petrowskja's prize-winning "Maybe Esther" (translated by the inimitable Shelley Frisch). But with the notable exception of 2016 Bachmann Prize winner Sharon Dodua Otoo, it's very rare to come across a native speaker of English who chooses to write in German.

And what a book it is! Die Grüne Grenze starts in the 1970s in the highly guarded German border region in the Harz Mountains. A young pair of artists with an unplanned pregnancy hastily gets married and decides to leave the divided metropolis of Berlin for the mountainous periphery. Editha is a sculptor who receives commissions from the state. Thomas is a writer and his plans to write the definitive novel about the border leads him to historical fiction. Thomas is still struggling with the material when Honecker’s period of liberalization ends, and their daughter Eli learns to speak in a time and place where lines between what can and cannot be said are very thin. After 250 pages in the green frontier idyll, there narrative jumps back to the 1950s, exploring Thomas’s past, which is shrouded in uncertainty. Many mysteries from the first 200 pages are elegantly solved and yet much is left open to interpretation.
One could make the mistake of focusing too much on the fact that Cole writes in German rather than appreciating how excellently she writes. Responding to an email yesterday, she contended that one reason she switched to writing in German was because her subject matter was heavily (East) German and writing about it in English “felt like translating.” If and when the book is translated into English, Cole hopes to be the one doing the translation “because I’m sure I would deal with the material differently in English and for an English-speaking audience.”
Regarding her chances of winning, the GDR setting, its 500 pages, the fact that the novel is very German in certain ways, yet the author American, and the small publishing house add up to make it a dark horse. Odds: 5-2.