The latest addition to my website is Roger Manderscheid‘s Feier a Flam [Fire and Flame]. Manderscheid was a Luxembourg writer and he wrote this book in Luxembourgish and then translated it himself into German. It is a Bildungsroman, the third part of a trilogy, with the first two books telling of the childhood of Christian Knapp and this starting just as he leaves school. It essentially concerns the entire 1950s and is presumably, at least in part, autobiographical. We follow Christian as he struggles with life, both wondering what he will do as a career (he tries teaching, the army and the railways before becoming a mundane civil servant) and, of course, with the opposite sex. Like many young men, he is very naive and seems unable to settle down to a steady relationship, something he aspires to. It is not a great book but, if you read German (or Luxembourgish), a fascinating account of growing up.