Nancy Chapple

Nancy is an American citizen living in what has come to look like permanent European exile. With a fine college education and a Master's of Music in her bag, she set off to seek fame and fortune in the city of West Berlin, then still enclosed by the infamous Berlin Wall. She spent a few years in between in Düsseldorf and The Hague, but she's now back in Berlin, where she recently got married (a package that includes a 9-year old daughter half the week) and bought a rooftop apartment in the center of town - all the accoutrements of "settling down".

Her professional trajectory has been rather unusual. In Berlin she surprisingly quickly found a job teaching piano three afternoons a week, which brought in enough to lead a modest life: tiny shared apartment, literature classes for free at the university, five library cards, occasional trips around Europe. There came a time when that wasn't enough to keep her happy and fulfilled. She took an exam as translator and interpreter in German and English. After a few months translating a TV news show into English, she got a job translating at a management consultancy - without any business experience or similar previous position. By now she's been consulting editor at different international consultancies for well nigh seven years. Nothing can faze her anymore: no fancy slide presentation, poorly structured proposal, smart-ass young consultant; no wave of restructuring, internal re-organization, new job title. This is in fact a source of her seven-year itch.

To kick things off, Nancy will be writing about a) great books - her all-time soul food, b) classical music - her first love, c) Berlin - her adopted hometown, and d) life as an expat. If quite a few people enjoy reading what she writes, if they feel informed, titillated, amused, provoked - well she may just be able to write full-time. She's a bit of a missionary: well aware that we are all constantly bombarded with information and impressions, she clings to the old-fashioned idea that there is a difference between good and bad writing, good and inadequate music making, marketing hype and greatness. And that making distinctions and helping others do so is a worthy enterprise.

Do drop by her writing website www.apt-words.de. Some of you may also want to pay a visit to her husband's new web design business, where the emphasis is on functional, legible, well-maintained sites, not fancy bells and whistles: www.paso-webdesign.de.

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
--Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - by Vladimir Nabokov
--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
--Jarhead - by Anthony Swofford
--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews

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