Life after Forty by Dora Heldt

This was pleasant. Not a must read - but a really good "read on the plane" sort of story. The translation ran smoothly; I didn't notice any particular oddities of phrase or word choice. Of course, I believe most European children start actually learning a second language (usually English) very early and continue the study through school.

I'm not quite sure how to classify the story - maybe that implies some depth that I have not perceived. It would be a "coming of age" story - but with a main character who celebrates her fortieth birthday during the course of the story - that sounds a little silly. It reads rather like a romance, but it isn't one. I guess it was just the story of a divorce - and, appropriately, treats it as a process rather than an event.

It opens on the day that Christine's husband drops the divorce bomb (by phone - what a jerk), and ends with a celebration, as her friends put it, not of her divorce but of the new life she has begun a year after she thought her life had ended.

There is no great revenge, no scene of vindication - although we do gather more and more about what a colossal jerk her (ex)husband is. We see a lot of women coping in various ways and Christine working her way through all of their individual approaches to similar situations to find her own way.

I still don't see why she couldn't take her cat to Hamburg, though.