Anniversaries [is] Uwe Johnson’s oceanic, nearly 1,700-page masterpiece ... It is a novel that swallows reality — as noisy and demanding as the world itself ... Anniversaries is not difficult reading, but it is painstaking. The story is tangled, the characters traumatized and suspicious of language. It requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject ... The excess of this book can feel occasionally oppressive, the detail mismanaged even — must every tertiary character come equipped with such a lavishly imagined back story? But two days without the novel now, and I’m lonesome for its patient, laboring gaze, a kind of holy attention that Gesine recalls in her youth...

Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated ... But Johnson’s rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly meticulous ... Anniversaries...is something between a diary, an autobiography, and an exercise in free association. Many of Gesine’s entries amount to love letters to her adoptive city ... Her meditations are dense with diatribes—so dense with diatribes that they begin to try a reader’s patience—against the Vietnam War, which she likens with great sanctimony and little subtlety to the Holocaust. But Johnson’s heroine is alive to the dangers of hollow outrage and dry documentation ... Unlike her borrowed reportage about the atrocities in Vietnam, her direct accounts of Nazi and Soviet brutality are relentless and rending ... Johnson is at his best when he personalizes an aching, anonymous history. Anniversaries’ engagements with the past can be palpable and piercing ... Anniversaries is less a work of plot than a map of human relationships ... Anniversaries is often difficult to follow: It demands an involved knowledge of German, Soviet, and American politics and a careful attention to what seem like marginal characters, who are apt to disappear for several hundred pages only to crop up again. Its content, in contrast, can be ethically easy. All of its protagonists are implausibly brave ... But ... How does Johnson know...about everything? How does he absorb so much so hungrily? His writing is inhuman, godlike in its immensity.

Many consider Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries to be the most important German novel of the postwar period. Conceived in New York in the mid-1960s and set there around the year 1968, the multi-volume work reflects on the global political antagonisms of that time and relates them to the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1930s ... The book’s German title is Jahrestage, or literally 'days of the year.' Each of its central chapters marks a single day in the life of the protagonist, Gesine Cresspahl, from August 20, 1967, to August 20, 1968. The calendar imposes a rigorous, almost mathematical structure on the novel ... Anniversaries has generated a dynamic body of criticism. Some have warned against a canonization of the work, which Johnson might have bid for in his precarious invocation of 'Death Fugue' as a foundational intertext. But, at the same time, the novel is a labor of memory. As he looks to the past, Johnson describes the absences that follow genocide—the voids of language and culture.

Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, a sprawling novel about an East German émigré and her 10-year-old daughter as they navigate life on New York’s Upper West Side, is a natural heir to this tradition, if an unruly one. Johnson pairs the book’s late-modern élan—its complexity of structure, its synchronicities and leaps in time—with an uncommon commitment to the simplicity and moral necessity of facts, 'the mirror of daily events.' Its unlikely hero, and sometime stand-in narrator, is The New York Times, which Gesine, an admiring if astringent reader, calls 'our tried and true supplier of reality.' ... In a nearly 1,800-page novel of vaulting formal ambition, one does not expect its most radical feature to be this simple acknowledgment of reality: 'We do not live by bread alone,' Gesine advises her daughter, 'we need hard facts too, child.'

Hailed by Günter Grass as the most significant East German writer, Johnson left his homeland in 1959, dying at the age of 49 in England. From 1966 to 1968, though, he lived in New York, where he wrote the tetralogy called Jahrestage ... The narrator, Gesine Cresspahl, lives in self-exile on the Upper West Side, working as a translator, trying to raise a daughter, Marie, by herself. Gesine is too young to have been complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich, but she saw them unfold, enabled by those who stood by, some of whose uniforms have merely changed colors in the years since the war ended even as other things have remained the same. A rich book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, from a writer too little known today.

In this sprawling multivolume novel, the events of one woman’s life over the course of a year in New York hearken back to several decades’ worth of German history and political upheaval ... Johnson’s novel opens in the late summer of 1967, and proceeds through the following year day by day, with all of the political turmoil that that entails—both in the United States and behind the Iron Curtain. Interspersed with this are occasional meditations on the New York Times and, more prominently, the story of Gesine’s family over the course of her early life ... This is a haunting and unforgettable portrait of the momentous and the historical.