Over-ambition

[fivemack]

I've decided to try reading a well-received thriller (Franz Schätzing's Der Schwarm) in German, to improve my German.

This may be a foolish exercise, since the list of words I've had to look up so far include

Verschwindet	disappears
Heerscharen	hosts (multitudes)
die Qualle	jellyfish
Unterdessen	meanwhile
gewaltig	immense (general adjective of amplification)
Zangenkiefern	not sure (fangs? Zangen are forceps, but Kiefern are pine-trees)
Hingezaubert	conjured forth
Ahnen	to suspect
der Vorfall	incident
die Bedrohung	threat
der Fortbestand	continuity
vermeintlich	alleged
die Werbeagentur	advertising agency
ausgebildeter	trained (selbstausgebildet = self-trained)
der Taucher	diver
erfüllen	to accomplish

and I have only just finished reading the blurb before page one. You probably get an idea of the theme of the book from this vocabulary alone, in much the same way as, trying to read the lead article in a German newspaper, I learned in succession 'Mut' (courage), 'Pflicht' (duty) and 'Mehrwertsteuer' (value-added tax).

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Here's something moderately alien-sounding that one of the Russians on one of the newsgroups I read recommended:

"It is one of my favorites: The Protopartorg's Red Aura by Yevgeny Lukin. It is set after Russia broke up into regions, and then the regions broke up, and so did their subdivisions. So we have two small towns ruled by Orthodox Communists (Orthodox as in religion) and Liberal Warlocks which predictably dislike each other. They both have quite... interesting politics, both internal and external. The external have to do with NATO and the fact that the US President is crawling over the map of Europe with a magnifying glass and trying to find some country as yet unbombed (can you guess when the book was written?)

So we have a domovoy (kind of a goblin), who is trying to emigrate from Lytsk to Bakluzhino, where he can escape holy water; we have the protopartorg from the title (a mix of the religious title "protopope" and the communist party title "partorg"), who has been exiled to Bakluzhino due to political intrigues; the leader of communist underground -- bandits -- a business -- secret agents of the government (all at the same time); an agent of secret services of the government; the leader of the government; and none of them qualify as Good Guys, though the domovoy comes closest.

If you can read Russian, here it is (http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/lukin_evgenii/lukin_evgenii_alaya_aura_protopartorga)"

НОЧНОІ ДОЗОР seems alien enough for many practical purposes, though that at least is available in translation; it may of course be comfortable and homely for those comfortably at home in contemporary Moscow.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ночной Дозор, I mean.

There Is No I In Cyrillic

[interlocuter: but sire, I can see two of them, look, either side of the Ls]

Why can I never remember и-краткий? и is only the second most famous Russian letter in the West, after я.