Cornelia Fisher began to marshal her defences, like a kangaroo in a tight corner that turns about, ready for a boxing match. With the expression of a reproachful Sybil she said: “We were so awfully sorry to hear of your cousin’s death. Really! It struck all of us quite hard, even though we all” (she laid great stress on the ‘all’) “barely knew the poor thing.”
“I knew her quite well,” said Stanley, raising a storm in his teacup, but he was quickly interrupted.
“My dear Lady Cornelia, you can have no idea what I felt when I heard the news! All so sudden! I was quite flabbergasted.”
“We were all flabbergasted.”
“But it’s really quite impossible for you to conceive, Lady Cornelia, what this loss means to me. She was my best friend. I don’t know if your son has told you just how close we were to one another. Just imagine, was it not adorably touching of her to mention me – me, and nobody else – in her Will?”
Charlott a Bit Loopy – complete translation
The full English translation of Wilhelm Speyer’s thoroughly enjoyable 1927 novel – a romantic crime comedy set in the still optimistic mid-Weimar years where the New Woman was starting to set the social trends – is now available for download.
A best-seller between 1927 and 1933, Speyer’s novel was showered with critical praise for the freshness of its plotting and characterisation, all done with a deftness and sense of fun quite rare in German fiction.
Yet Speyer was largely ignored after he returned from exile, and he died in poverty in 1952. This novel was not rediscovered until 2008; my translation is the first into English.
I’m now translating Speyer’s follow-up from 1930, which he wrote in collaboration with his old school friend Walter Benjamin: I Must Go Out and Leave You Here – the story of a fashion model. I should be able to post it before the end of this year.
