A sweltering combination of domestic turmoil, existential ennui, and an increasingly threatening final disaster, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer presents the portrait of fractures both geographic and internal, translated with a natural erudition by Imogen Taylor. Set in a German spa town on the verge of being consumed by wildfire, the novel tells of a young woman who receives a pair of surprising visitors, and in this disruption of her melancholy routine, a spark of desire is awakened—something that could prove to be illuminating, or all-consuming.
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Rachel Stanyon: Franziska, you’ve had a lot of success with this debut novel in Germany; translations and film rights have been sold, and it’s received some glowing reviews in the English-language press. And Imogen, you’ve got twenty translations under your belt. How did you each get where you are now?
Franziska Gänsler (FG): I always wrote. It was my main interest even as a child, but I never felt that it could be a profession—it’s so uncertain. I’m not from an artistic family, so I didn’t know how to get there. I ended up studying to become a teacher of art and English, and had stopped writing for a few years; I was painting and doing other things creatively, then somehow I took it up again. Then writing just took over all of my time. I was lucky because I was supposed to be painting, but my professor at university allowed me to write instead. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and couldn’t even read what I wrote, but she always signed off on everything. I started entering competitions, and from there my agent saw my work.
I actually wrote one book prior to this one, but nobody wanted to publish it. And then with Eternal Summer we came to Kein & Aber, which is my publishing house in German, and I’m still with them.
Imogen Taylor (IT): I think for me, it was a coincidence. I studied French and German, and then moved to Berlin after my BA in England. People started asking me to translate because they knew I could speak German and English, so I took odd jobs on for neighbours and friends. I was paid in bottles of wine for one of my first jobs. It wasn’t really very serious, and I carried on studying, with a master’s and a PhD. I was still doing some translation on the side, but not very much or seriously. And then I gradually realized that was what I really wanted to do, more than academic work.
RS: Franziska, it’s so interesting to hear that you also paint because it sometimes felt like you were painting with words; the language in Eternal Summer is very evocative, almost cinematic, with a lot of time spent describing what things look like. Is this crossover with your visual work something that you do consciously?
FG: I always thought that everybody’s brain worked like that, and only now through talking to other writers do I realize that not everybody imagines everything as an image. When I write, I visualize everything as if it were a film and then I just describe it. I can’t do it differently—it’s just how my thought process works.
RS: Imogen, did that pose any challenges for you? Do you tend to think in images?
IT: I’m definitely a more visual person than auditory. I do read everything aloud that I translate, as that’s important for the rhythm, but atmosphere is what I like best about Eternal Summer. Franziska’s second novel, despite being very different, is also very atmospheric and evocative of its setting on the Atlantic in France.
RS: Staying with your approach to the translation for a minute, Imogen, is there anything that you found particularly challenging about translating Franziska’s writing?
IT: I sometimes have trouble trying to work out what German authors are saying, but that wasn’t at all the case with Franziska. She writes beautifully, clearly, so actually it was a dream job. It was very straightforward: I just had to translate her beautiful sentences into beautiful English sentences.
RS: The translation struck me as very natively English in how it was expressed. Sometimes when I read translations from German, I can hear the original sentence structure underneath. I couldn’t do that at all here, and I wondered whether you took a deliberately domesticating approach to the translation.
IT: I think that’s how I work in general; I like a translation to read so well that you don’t think it this feels strange or foreign, for people just to be able to read and forget the fact that it’s a translation. There are some people who say a translation should sound a bit odd, but I don’t belong to that group of people.
RS: There generally weren’t a lot of cultural markers of German-ness in this novel either. A few German place names are of course mentioned, but otherwise it felt to me like this novel could have been anywhere. Were there further domestication strategies at play here?
IT: I think it comes from the original text. The character’s names, for example, are quite neutral, and I didn’t change them, so in a way they could be anywhere. There are subtle hints that it’s set in Bavaria, and there’s a point where the temperature and date are displayed outside a pharmacy, which the editor wanted in German so that we know where it’s set.
FG: I never really use places that actually exist. I use things that I know, but I always create my own city or village because I need it to work with the way I imagine it, and I find it hard to write from places that I really know. Maybe that’s also what makes it kind of a nowhere place, because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a mixture of places that I know in Bavaria or elsewhere in southern Germany. But I do think that it’s recognizable as Germany.
RS: To stick with the topic of language—when Iris is listening to two young climate activists, she describes the way they use language as being very “woke.” Given the way the connotations of this term have already shifted over time and might mean different things to different groups and generations, I was wondering, firstly, whether this was an Anglicism used in the German, but also, if it was meant to position Iris as being between these young activists and the older generation of her mother and grandfather. . . What does it mean to you?
IT: The term isn’t used in the German. In the original, it’s about a German way of gendering nouns that doesn’t exist in English. Everything in English is neutral, so we don’t have the need to say –in at the end of every word to show that women are included as well, or trans and non-binary people, or whoever else. There could have been a way to position it more clearly in German, but I would have had to explain it, because no one would know what gendering was. So, I rewrote that bit slightly and sent it to Franziska to ask if it was right. So those few sentences are my invention rather than Franziska’s, and that was how the word “woke” came in.
RS: That’s such a creative solution to the problem of how to express a grammatic form that doesn’t exist in English. One last thing about language, if you’d indulge me: the name of the town they live in, Bad Heim, has resonances in German that may be lost to an English reader. The German word “Heim” means “home,” which to me emphasizes that where they are is quite literally a refuge, a (last) resort, a place of safety. Did you consider adapting the name to include those meanings?
IT: I did think about it. I also worried about the fact that having the word “bad” in it might be slightly problematic, but I decided not to change anything when I first sent my translation to the editors in the US, and they seemed happy with it. Without this, it really would have been very much detached from Germany, which would have been a shame.
FG: In German, “Bad” is a marker for a spa town, for the quality of air and water, and I chose the name to indicate that the place used to be where people went for the good air, but now it’s all collapsed. As for “Heim,” I liked the sound of it, but there’s also this feeling of home, of course. I did also think about whether this would change in other languages, but it’s been kept in the French and the English versions, which I think is nice. I think people may connect with the name because of the well-known spa town Baden Baden, for example, and I like that the location is not completely removed from Germany.
RS: Speaking of the poor quality of the air, I wanted to ask about your use of fire as a symbol of climate change and of threat. Christian Petzold’s 2023 film Rote Himmel (Afire) also uses fire as a looming danger; obviously there are fires in Germany and it’s a really pressing global concern, but considering other possible impacts of climate change— rising seas, flood, drought, crop failure—it doesn’t strike me as the first thing that one might worry about in Germany. Is there something particular about the imagery of fire that figures in the German imagination and that you wanted to capture?
FG: This book comes from a short story that I worked on for quite a long time before I turned it into a novel. It was set shortly after the Second World War, and was based on my grandmother and mother’s experience of having to stay at a hotel for six weeks because they couldn’t leave the area. I wrote this short story about two women and a little child in a hotel where they were still feeling the aftermath of the war: the trains were still not running, and everything kind of smelled burnt.
When I started working on the novel, it was right before COVID, and the wildfires in Australia were really bad. There were images of animal herds, how people found them and took care of them, and of course the huge areas that had burnt down. And then the pandemic started to emerge, so I connected these two things and asked myself what it would be like if this happened where I live. How would people react? The climate crisis still feels pretty far away most of the time—although about a year ago, the area around my apartment flooded and I couldn’t enter it; we do deal more with water here.
But overall, I felt that climate change is mostly so far removed from our day to day, and I wanted to connect my area with a more urgent threat of climate crisis.
I also had a scene that I later cut where Iris is watching the news on TV, shot with night vision cameras, and she thinks that she sees Dori in the woods in her pale white dress. That’s why she wears this white dress—so that she would’ve been visible in these images from the woods—and Iris is never sure whether she dreamt that, or whether Dori was actually captured by these cameras. But I cut it because it led nowhere; it felt like it was just there to create excitement. There is a dreamlike quality to it though, because it’s such a secluded place. The air quality is always bad, and it’s so hot, and people don’t sleep. It all blurs. I even had one reader at an event who thought that the whole thing is just imagined—that Dori and Ilya are not real, and that Iris just goes crazy and imagines them, which is not what I intended.
RS: Hearing how the novel developed from a short story,it’s interesting that Baby did not originally feature. She’s such a vivid figure, this gruff old woman who smokes, drinks, swears, and belches. In mainstream media, what is “good” is more often portrayed as young, slim, beautiful, professional, and well-behaved. How much was it a deliberate choice to pit Baby—who for me is the moral center—against these ideals?
FG: Actually, Baby came to the piece quite late. I was writing about Dori, Iris, and Ilya, and at some point, I just grew so frustrated with them. It was missing a certain energy. My child was still very small at the time, and we were walking one day when suddenly this older woman jumped into our way. She had a bottle of wine and she started dancing and talking to us. For a few days we kept hoping to see her again. She brought us so much joy, and I felt like this was the energy that I was missing in the text. I was considering how I could bring in more liveliness and a more a radical way of making decisions. Iris and Dori are both so cautious and stuck, and I wanted someone who bursts into these scenes and pushes them—who is in a way excited about the fire and everything that’s happening. I also know women like this from my grandmother’s generation.
So, she entered the novel, and then she kind of just took over. It felt natural that she takes care of the cats, and she has no reservations about talking to the activists and helping them,because she’s very pragmatic. I think she’s actually the most loved character. Many people have told me that they have a Baby in their lives, and people send me messages about how much they like her, and how much they detest the activists.
RS: The line that mentions the activists getting picked up by their parents did give me pause. Baby, Dori, and Iris have so much riding on this situation, and the activists can just go home with their parents when things get too hot.
FG: Yes, but they also came there deliberately. They’re veryyoung, and it felt like a realistic way to paint different generations—how people react at different stages of life. I thought a lot about why there are more young activists than older ones, and of course it’s because they don’t have as many responsibilities. They have no children to take care of, and maybe no job or need to earn money yet. I was surprised at how many people didn’t like them. They are woke, maybe that’s the problem, but I tried to make them kind, and they don’t judge Dori. They’re really interested in bridging the generations, as I think all of them are. I’m writing about young activists in my third book, so I hope that people won’t hate them!
RS: Sticking with Baby’s generation: the novel suggests that Iris’s grandfather abused Iris’s mother. And yet Iris also shows us moments when he seems to be loving towards his daughter and granddaughter: for example, by building a Japanese garden because he knew that his daughter liked them; or taking his granddaughter to swim in the river. I really admired how you wrote these nuances into the relationships without ever apologizing for the violence. Did writing about this pose challenges in terms of the text’s composition?
FG: It was challenging to find the right balance. For example, how much does someone like Baby know by seeing it from the outside, even though she was always there to protect the girls. Iris was a child at the time, so her memory is different from how a grown-up would have seen the situation. We don’t ever truly know how the mother behaved, because we only have Iris’s memory. I think that violence can work like that;often when people find out about a violent situation, they never would have expected it because the perpetrator would always be so calm and so kind. It’s often in special relationships that the violence comes up: in a partnership, for example, or at home within the family. From the outside you can’t tell, because these villains aren’t always violent, and the novel always plays with this question of judgment.
For example, Iris is always between Dori and Alexander, and she has to judge for herself whom she believes, and whether what’s happening is violence or not. To me it’s very clear that the grandfather was at least emotionally violent towards Iris’s mom, and that Alexander is clearly abusing Dori as well. But many people don’t read it that way. It depends on how familiar you are with the topic.
RS: The fact that Alexander abuses Dori to me seems really clear-cut, despite the layers of complexity around Dori’s actions. This topic was handled with so much nuance and brought in so many different perspectives and possibilities. I was really pulling for Dori to be able to escape from Alexander once and for all. Was it hard to deny that happy ending?
FG: I did find it hard. There was also a German writer whowe asked to write a blurb for the book, and she said that she didn’t want to because she didn’t like the ending. This wasmostly from a queer perspective, because of the trope of the sad lesbian that stays behind alone. It really made me question whether it was the wrong ending, as I’m also a queer writer. But I didn’t want to change it.
If you read about emotional or physical violence and violent relationships, people always ask: “If it was that bad, why didn’t you go?” But when you read about it and talk to people, it’s just very, very hard, because it always swings from goodto bad, and the attachment is often extremely strong, so people stick with these dynamics. I didn’t want to make it feel unrealistic by making it that easy—as if you just step onto another train, meet some kind stranger who helps you for a few weeks, and then you’re out of there. That’s just not how it goes, especially when a child is involved. I hope people will read the text and be compassionate towards Dori. And angry. Maybe when they read it they will understand why she stays.
RS: The child, Ilya, is obviously so important to the novel. There are parallels between Iris, whose childhood memories are shared with the reader, and Ilya, who is not yet able to express herself. Ilya complicates Dori’s decision-making, but I think Dori’s behaviour towards her also complicates Iris’—and the reader’s—trust and judgement of Dori. I had so much empathy for Dori, and yet at the same time I feel like she does kind of neglect Ilya, and that’s such a hard thing to read.
FG: I found that people read it differently depending on their situation in life. There’s a moment at the beginning of the novel when Ilya is playing alone in the garden, near a pond, with the fires nearby, and Dori lies down without keeping an eye on her. I have friends with small children who said they couldn’t continue reading, and others who are not in contact with small children felt like she’s a good mom because she paints with her, and she’s patient and kind. When I wrote it, my child was still quite small; there’s always a balance between being exhausted and having your own needs, and then always having to be on call.
I felt like Ilya made the stakes higher for Iris, too, who cannot see the danger for herself anymore. But with a child around, she starts thinking about the air quality again, and whether it is safe. She also sees the limits that are there for herself: it’s not an area where you would want to raise a child.
RS: I think there are always more sides to a story than any one person can see, and the novel portrayed that really compellingly.
IT: I really appreciated the way that the novel keeps everything very subtle and doesn’t judge. I don’t think a happy ending would have worked, because there are terrible things going on. Even if it had worked out between Dory and Iris, we know that everything’s going very wrong indeed. It would have been fake.
RS: At the end of the novel, Iris reads the final line from a poem: “he eats me up until.” She seems to read the unfinished enjambment as holding the door open for ahappy ending, but I can’t help worrying that the final clause could equally be awful. Do you think that there might be something good in store, or do the conditionssimply not allow for good choices?
IT: I very much like when Iris says to herself that all she’slost are fantasies; she had these ideas of opening a bed and breakfast and having an idyllic life with Ilya and Dori, but they were all dreams in the end. What she’s lost was never areality.
FG: To me, it suggests a hopeful ending. This fantasy is probably quite powerful for Iris. She has taken a small step; her life was so monotone in a way, and now she has felt desire and hunger for something more. This feeling will not go away. But I also didn’t want to leave Baby alone. I felt like as long as they are there together, eating their goulash, they havesolidarity and a home.
As for Dori, I really don’t know. I always have this idea that at some point I will write something short about what happens to Dori, maybe from Ilya’s perspective, because I just can’t let her go. Dori is like a friend to me, and I hope that she’s okay.
Franziska Gänsler was born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1987. She studied art and English in Berlin, Vienna, and Augsburg. In 2020 she was short-listed for the Blogbuster Prize and was a finalist at Berlin’s 28th Open Mike competition. Gänsler lives in Augsburg and Berlin. Eternal Summer is her debut novel.
Imogen Taylor studied French and German at New College, Oxford, and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the translator of Sascha Arango, Dirk Kurbjuweit, and Melanie Raabe, among others. In March 2016 she received the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translations.
Rachel Stanyon is a translator from German into English and a senior copyeditor with Asymptote. She holds a master’s in translation and in 2016 won a place in the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. Her first full-length non-fiction translation has recently been published with Scribe.