The Invention Of Curried Sausage

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the invention of curried sausage

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The Invention Of Curried Sausage

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An ingenious, revealing, and charming tale about the invention of a popular German sidewalk food by a woman who met, seduced, and held captive a deserter in April, 1945, just before the war's end. The Invention of Curried Sausage is an ingenious, revealing, and delightful novel about the invention of a popular German sidewalk food. Uwe Timm has heard claims that currywurst first appeared in Berlin in the 1950s, but he seems to recall having eaten it much earlier, as a boy in his native Hamburg, at a stand owned and operated by Lena Brucker. He decides to check it out. Although the discovery of curried sausage is eventually explained, it is its prehistory - about how Lena Brcker met, seduced and held captive a German deserter in Hamburg, in April, 1945, just before the war's end-that is the tastiest part. Timm draws gorgeous details from Lena's fine-grained recollections, and the pleasure these provide her and the reader supply the tale's real charm.

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Rating:
Date: 2006-06-08
A melancholy read of friendship and coincidence
This is a melancholy read of friendship and coincidence. The novel's object is the discoverer of veal sausage with curried ketchup - still one of the most popular burger van menu items in Germany. The circumstances of the discovery, and the narrator's recollections in connection with it, form the frame for a tale of wartime romance against a backdrop of defeat and regeneration at the end of World War II.

Rating:
Date: 2005-12-05
Sausage as one symbol for the end of WWII in Germany
Traveling back to his childhood neighborhood, the narrator meets with one of his mother's neighbors, who lived through WWII in Hamburg, one of the most devastated cities in Germany. Already as a child he bought curried sausage (Currywurst) from her - and by trying to unravel how this strange dish came to be, he discovers how one's woman life was changed... A small, poignant novella about love and loss, war and destruction, and the power of human connections...

Uwe Timm is a German novelist and well-known children's book author. With a seemingly simple, but convincing style, he opens a small (fictive?) chapter about German lives at the end of WWII.

Rating:
Date: 1997-05-04
An excellent work, slyly seasoned with metaphor.
I read this book in its English translation, and I must congratulate the translator, because the imagery and themes shine through the language differences with quite possibly all of the original intent of Mr. Timm. To suggest that somebody could "invent" curried sausage is nearly as ridiculous a premise as suggesting that somebody could "invent" sex, but I believe that's what the author wants us to see here. The magic of inventing the ridiculous, with a farcical sprinkling of the dangerous, is an elixir that in the end helps the protagonists forget that war is hell.