Book Group: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets - Eva Rice

As my book group is approaching its 5th year and its 50th book, a review of past reads shows that the overwhelming majority have had unhappy, nay downright miserable endings.  One group member has been pleading for a happy book.  So it was that Stuck-In-A-Book’s mention of unremitting cheeriness led to the swift inclusion of this 2005 Richard and Judy Book Club choice onto our list.

Now I try not to indulge in inveterate literary snobbery and so I do enjoy a smattering of chicklit here and there.  The cover in itself was no turnoff.  However, the addition of candy floss pink edged pages was one saccharine-tablet too many and I began to read with a firm determination not to enjoy this book. 

Neither did I for about 120 pages.  The candy floss allusion proving more than apt.  Very sweet, dissolving to substancelessness after the initial taste.  But just as suddenly I found myself charmed.  It is quite an enjoyable read taken on its own terms.  A cheerful (Stuck-In-A-Book was right!) book about newly-formed friendships, the girlishness of the late teens, the innocence of the 50’s, pop idolatry in the days before Elvis, mismatched couples.  As a romantic comedy, it would make quite a good film.  The more serious social history element, the declining wealth of the upper middle classes as war and death duties take their toll on both people and property, is wrapped in an absurd humour, effectively removing much of the pain if not the sharpened point.

The group finally categorised the read as a happy fairy-tale for grownups and the book averaged a respectable rating.

I hope the group enjoyed the respite from mislit  because we have The Lizard Cage coming up ….. and I can’t wait!

Sunday Salon: Katrina’s Sunday Salon Meme

OK,  so now I’m avoiding the ironing.  A good way to do it is by partaking in Katrina’s special Sunday Salon meme

I always meant to…
The author I always meant to read: Like Katrina, Angela Carter is someone I must read.  I’ve got her fairy tales twinned up with The Grimm Brothers’ originals.  I think that should make for some interesting times.  Also Anthony Trollope.  But there’s so much of his, that I don’t know where to start.  Advice please.
The author I always meant to read more of: You can see the authors I intend reading more of on this list prepared for my own reference.  Once an author is on this list, I do find myself picking up their work fairly regularly.  One title to add:  Charles Dickens - Our Mutual Friend.
The genre I always meant to try/read has to be graphic novels. I bought one once! The Maus trilogy has languished in the TBR for over a year.
The book on my tbr pile I always mean to read next is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Given the accolades it receives, I can’t fathom why I haven’t got round to it yet.
The book I always meant to try again is Disgrace by J M Coetzee - because I’m the only person in the world who hates it.  What did I miss?

You know what, I’m setting myself a reading goal.  Sometime in 2008, I am going to remove all most of the above from my procrastination index!

Sunday Salon: The Greeting Committee

The pile of post that lies in wait after a vacation is a mixture of the good, the bad and the downright ugly.  Brown envelopes, credit card bills, junk mail - who needs it?  This time, however, there wasn’t much of that ilk.  There were, however, some new treasures for the TBR.

Back row:  From left to right: 

1) Under Control - Mark McNay, review copy sent by Canongate; 2) The Story of a Marriage - Andrew Sean Greer, review copy from Faber & Faber, courtesy of Librarything Early Reviewers; 3) Pharos - Alice Thompson, bought on the back of my enjoyment of The Falconer; 4) Secret - Phillip Grimbert and 5) Helpless - Barbara Gowdy, both purchased for buttons from NewBooksMag

The front row are the stowaways that returned from Germany with me, because I didn’t spend 8 days in the beer halls after all!  A few days in the glorious Bavarian alps in and around Berchtesgaden - this is the view from the hotel balcony:

Thereafter, a few more days in Munich, which is celebrating its 850th birthday this year and so is full of special exhibitions and events.  I visited the city archive at the Monacensia and its exhibition detailing how artists and writers have reacted to Munich throughout the centuries and bought the accompanying book “… und dazwischen ein schoener Rausch”, which is full of sepia images of Munich from times gone by and lots of lovely (and some not so lovely) sentiments about my favourite city. (Bottom row, third from the right.)  I’m finding a number of like minds and, therefore, adding to the TBR at an exponential rate.  First in the queue is Imre Kertész, whose sentiments on arriving in Munich are an absolute reflection of my own experience almost 30 years ago.  I won’t quote the whole piece because the book (and the exhibition) are wholly in German , which I found quite strange.  The final sentence of his quote shall suffice, because everyone reading this blog will understand. 

Muenchen ist wunderbar.

Too true.  Fortunately I have the TBR to help me bear the separation until I visit once more.

The Fifth Woman - Henning Mankell

In the week which contained the announcement of the 2008 CWA Dagger shortlists, with its inclusion of prerequisite Scandanavian title , Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it seems fitting that I’m writing up my thoughts on my latest Henning Mankell read.  Mankell, the first Scandanavian to win the Gold Dagger in 2001 with Sidetracked, and possibly the source of the appetite for  Scandanavian crime.

I have been working my way through his Inspector Wallander series, slowly but not always chronologically.  I have now completed the first 6:  Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, The Man Who Smiled, Sidetracked and now The Fifth Woman.  I have enjoyed them all - though numbers 3 and 4 not quite so much as the others.  I must say though that the opening chapter of The Man Who Smiled is one of the spookiest and most suspenseful pieces I have encountered.  Never (and I’m including Bleak House in this comparison) has fog been used to better effect.

It has been said that the great novels in the Wallander series start with The Man Who Smiled.  Move that one novel further on and I’m in complete agreement.  Sidetracked, the Gold Dagger Winner, is astounding.  It must be four years since I read it.  I still remember whodunnit and, more vividly, howdunnit and it’s not for the fainthearted.  Neither it must be said are the crimes within the 583 pages of The Fifth Woman. 

The murder of 4 nuns and a visiting Swedish tourist in South Africa unleash a series of highly inventive but particularly brutal killings in Sweden.  The killer has ice running through the veins. Mankell paces the revelations about the diverse modus operandi in such a way that the reader’s blood freezes over also.  There are seemingly no connections between the victims.  It is the nature of the case that a number of deaths must occur before a theory turns into a trail and Wallander and his team are on the way to cracking the case.   That is the particular strength of this novel.  The whodunnit, howdunnit, whydunnit elements are all incorporated but the emphasis is firmly on the how solved it.  Without the long hours, false trails, sacrifice, exhaustion and stubborn dedication of the team, the killer could not be found.

The motivations of the killer and the choice of victims add additional complexity.  Because these victims are not entirely innocent either; the skeltons in their cupboards as fascinating as the case that Wallander is asked to solve.  583 pages fairly zipped along, The Fifth Woman  firmly establishing itself as one of the great novels in the series.

 

 

Sunday Salon: Holiday Reading and Auf Wiederlesen!

Just in case you haven’t been counting since my Planet Germany post of 14 days ago, it’s only 2 days before the plane whisks me off to my favourite city in the world.  So, I’m afraid there won’t be much reading done here today.  It’s case packing otherwise known as d(ilemma)-day.  How many books do I need to take?  Better too many than too few … baggage allowance permitting, of course.  3 books should suffice for 8-days, don’t you think?  Ok,  I’ll pack 4 to be on the safe side.

What about subject matter? Thrillers and crime novels are my genre of choice for holidays.  Plenty of dark broodiness but nothing with heavy lashings of gore or existential angst.   I’ve been mulling this over all week as I have far too much choice but here is my final selection.

An amazingly perfect fit for my suitcase.

1) Henning Mankell - The Fifth Woman - Next in the Wallander series for me.

2) Engleby - Sebastian Faulks - This is a bit of a gamble but glowing reviews at www.bookgrouponline.com have tipped the scales in its favour.

3) The Colour of Blood - Brian Moore - An attempt to restart my mooreathon.  I was supposed to read The Emperor of Ice Cream last month but then I decided to avoid the war during my mini-Germanathon.

4) Cleave - a selection of Scottish women’s writing.  This is a) to address the gender imbalance of my holiday selections and b) something with which to read my way back home.

So, now I’m ready, it remains only to wish you all,  Auf Wiederlesen - see you in two weeks.  In the meantime, should you wish to enjoy the sights, sounds, food and drink of Munich with me, just click here. 

 

A-Z Shorter Fiction: K is for Heinrich von Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella, Michael Kohlhaas, is one of the most important in German literature, building a bridge between the classic and modern traditions. Quite by chance it shares an uncanny thematic link with Boell’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, which I reviewed earlier this week.

The plot is based on the true story of the C16th merchant, Hans Kohlhase, who lived in Cölln on the Spree (now incorporated in Berlin) in the March of Brandenburg. In October 1532 he set out on a trip to the Leipzig trade fair in the neighboring Electorate of Saxony. On the way two of his horses were seized, at the command of the Junker von Zaschwitz, as a supposed fee for passage through Saxony. Kohlhase sought justice in the courts of Saxony but failed to obtain it. Outraged, he issued a public challenge in 1534 and burned down houses in Wittenberg. Even a letter of admonition from Martin Luther could not dissuade him, and Kohlhase and the band he collected committed further acts of terror. In 1540 he was finally captured and tried, and was publicly broken on the wheel in Berlin on 22 March 1540.

Fundamentally the outline remains the same, details changing slightly as Kleist uses the story to express the unexpressable. Prussia in his day was a place of political discontent with the Elector of Saxony despised for his allegiance to Napoleon. The story of Michael Kohlhaas, his search for personal redress, his fight against the corrupt Saxon legal system, all allowed Kleist to villify the enemy and champion the issues of his own times without attracting accusations of political agitation. Putting aside the inevitable anachronisms that arise from this (such as the notion of individual rights), the novella makes for absorbing action-packed reading as Kohlhaas turns from fine law-abiding citizen to fire-wielding brigand. Nevertheless he retains common support and wins himself some influential champions. On the verge of a breakthrough, he is betrayed by the actions of a former supporter and from this point, it becomes somewhat confusing following the machinations of his enemies and the countermachinations of his supporters. The final scene depicts the ultimate paradox, demonstrating how Kohlhaas secures both defeat and victory at the same moment.

 

Important in terms of the development of Germanic literature, this novella continues to exert its influence on modern literature, most notably E L Doctorow’s modern classic Ragtime, with its direct homage to Kleist in the form of Coalhouse Walker.

The Falconer - Alice Thompson

When her younger sister, Daphne,  commits suicide, Iris Tennant successfully applies, under a pseudonym,  for the job of personal assistant to Lord Melfort, the Under-Secretary of War.  This takes her to his estate in the Scottish Highlands and to the place of her sister’s death, where she encounters a intricate net of sibling rivalry, sexual jealousy and political treachery.

Alice Thompson’s 132 page novella is bursting with ideas, biblical and classical allusion, the foreboding strangeness of a beautiful yet sinister Scottish glen.  Elements of magical realism and glorious C21st gothic.   

Lord Melfort’s family is a conglomeration of dysfunction: The sibling rivalry of his sons, Louis, a psychologically disturbed WWI veteran, and Edward, Daphne’s former lover,  who kept her in decadent splendour.  Lady Melfort, a strong, rational woman, with eyes of granite and an undocumented bitterness.  Her sister, Agnes, chooses to remain in her room, ostensibly due to agoraphobia. 

The employees are as colourful, including Iris and her mysterious motivations, who

refused to feel pain.  Refused to feel anything.  She had never felt love for her sister.  Her eyes felt dry.  Full of the opposite of tears.  Grief had not occurred to her.   It was not what she would allow herself.  Grieving was the letting of everything else fall away.  Grief was the shedding of hope.

And the falconer of the title, who fell for the charms of the delightful, though promiscuous, Daphne.  Through him, Thompson introduces a layer of subtext regarding the differences and similarities between man and the natural world.  Unlike the birds of prey he trains,  the falconer is scrawnily built and his shirt was unbuttoned at the top to reveal a hairless body, pale brown skin like the hide of a young animal.  In contrast the falcon,  a perfect airborne killing machine.  The pages are packed with avian metaphor and simile.  Agnes is waiting for her bird of paradise, her erotic pleasure, to find her; Iris, is planted like the cuckoo in the Melfort nest; Edward is the eagle, upright, strong and impenetrable.

But what of the Beast of Glen Almain?  A creature, unseen yet heard stalking the woods of the estate, demanding periodic sacrifice and appeasement if the residents of the glen are to find peace.  Is it folklore?  Or the beast in all of us.  The part of nature in us we like to hide.  Why was Daphne so afraid and why did she plead not to be allowed into the woods the night she died?

Or could the beast be something else entirely?  It’s 1936 and Lord Melfort, Under-Secretary of War, in appeasing the eagle of National Socialism is bordering on the edge of treason ……. 

 

Further information and an interview with the author at Two Raven’s Press. 

 

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll

I had such problems connecting with my chosen titles last week that it was time to revisit a favourite from times past. It’s well on 30 years since I studied Heinrich Böll in detail. I remember only that I enjoyed everything he wrote, even if I was studying him to death for my C20th German Literature final.  What to read?  Something short - I didn’t want to get embroiled in something long and complicated in the week before my holiday.

Thus did the 140 pages of Böll’s 1974 novelle The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum find its way to the summit of Mount TBR. 

In 1972 Böll criticised the tendency of the German gutter press to publish as fact many assumptions that could not be proven.  The particular examples he gave related to the alleged actions of the Red Army Faction.  Furore ensued.  Boell was branded a terrorist sympathiser and subjected to many an invasion of privacy, including a house search. 

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is his answer to the treatment he received, treatment which did no service to his health. The novella is, in effect, a personal diatribe;  a rant, if you will.  Except it is anything but.  The front cover blurb, courtesy of the Sunday Times, proclaims it “a marvel of compression and irony”.  Just so.  Boell’s anger controlled but his pen dripping with venom as he subjects his heroine Katharina Blum to the worst excesses of the gutter press.

Katharina, a young 27-year-old lonely divorcee, lets her hair down at a party and goes home with a man she has only just met.  The next morning, her home is stormed by the police, for her new lover is a suspected murderer.  Only they don’t find him.  Katharina must be in cahoots with him because the police have had the block of flats under surveillance all night.  The press get a whiff of the scandal and just 4 days later Katharina turns herself in for shooting the unscrupulous journalist who has destroyed her life.

No spoiler that - we are told as much in the first 5 pages.  For this is no thriller - the narrative voice is very detached - a reportage, an example of truly impartial reporting.  Yet there is no doubt where the author’s sympathies lie.  The centre of interest, however, not in what Katharina does but how she is driven to extreme action in such a short period of time.  Fascinating, too, how her acquaintances and her employers are tarred with the same unjust brush.  One example:  her red-haired employer was nicknamed “Trude The Red” during her university days.  Well, what a gift for the right-wing press and it’s a gift they unwrap with relish!

Böll once said: „Die Gewalt von Worten kann manchmal schlimmer sein als die von Ohrfeigen und Pistolen.“  Freely translated - Words can be more destructive than punches and pistols.  Katharina Blum’s experience is a case in point.

Sunday Salon: Exasperating …..

I’m having a bad run even if I did finish two novels this week.  Firstly,  Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl, which was disappointing to say the least, and I said a lot more here.  This morning I finished Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels.  My one word reaction forming this post’s title.

It’s a sequel Fforde should not have written, despite the pressure from the Thursday Next fandom.  It feels, dare I say this considering the overall premise of Fforde’s ultimate fantasy series, contrived.  Set 14 years after its predecessor, Something Rotten, this book has too many narrative strands, each requiring major amounts of exposition to sustain the internal rationale.  It’s mad and amusing in the usual Ffordian sense, but it descends rapidly into a wearying mania.   And it’s clumsy with Fforde committing two cardinal sins:

1) In novels 1 - 4, the plots of the classic novels being protected by Jurisfiction provided a central cohesion to the narrative.  In this, with one literary allusion after the other serving only to demonstrate Fforde’s inventiveness and cleverness, the joke soon wears thin.

2) That no-resolution-you’ll-have-to-buy-the-forthcoming-second-among-sequels cliffhanger of an ending is simply a cop-out.  Fforde perhaps as confused as this reader and needing a couple of years to work out what the hell he is going to do to sort out the shambles …..

As I said, this is exasperating from the man who wrote what is possibly my favourite chapter of all time - an episode guaranteed to lift me from the doldrums. Required reading particularly if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the cast of Wuthering Heights began to attend anger management classes. Chapter 12 of The Well of Lost Plots is the work of genius.

Please, Jasper, switch off the autopilot next time round.

 

 

The Artificial Silk Girl - Irmgard Keun

let me tell you, Herr Brenner, a woman should never wear artificial silk when she’s with a man.  It wrinkles too quickly, and what are you going to look like after seven real kisses?  Only pure silk, I say - and music - “

Mini-Germanathon Book 3 is Irmgard Keun’s one-time bestseller of 1932 - the tale of Doris in the dying days of the Weimar Republic in general, Berlin in particular.    Having stolen a fur-coat that makes her feel like a film-star,  she flees to Berlin, the same decadent cabaret of a place as portrayed by Christopher Isherwood.  Unable to achieve the transition from bit-part actress to international superstar, she ricochets from man to man living from handouts and charity, one step away from walking the streets for a living and unable to see the crassness and superficiality of her life.  Her(r) Berlin is anything but golden and glorious.

Her life ebbs and flows.  There are good moments. There are bad.  The text, Doris’s notebook, reflects this.  The literary highlight being the night she takes a blind WWI veteran out on the town.   Her words describing the city she inhabits.  Her blind companion wanting only to know if there are stars.  The truth being:  occasionally there’s half a star coming out but it can’t compete with the neon lights and all that buzz around us.  As the evening progresses, Doris forced to recognise the truth  All the people are in a hurry - and sometimes they look pale under those lights, then the girls’ dresses look like they’re not paid off yet and the men can’t really afford the wine - is nobody really happy?  Now it’s all getting dark.  Where is my shiny Berlin?

And this is where things go awry.  Because Doris, displaying a lack of intelligence that leaves me with little patience, chooses to live in the same superficial vein for the second half of the novel.  Life has further cruel lessons to teach her (including unreciprocated love) but she seems insistent on not listening and not learning.  Her existence merely repeating the same mistakes, the same montonous loop. 

Putting aside my antipathy to Doris and to the style of the narrative - the present continuous presenting a continuous bore - the novel works better as a commentary of life as it was led at the time.  Written in 1931 with no prescient knowledge of the cataclysm to follow,  Doris’s unknowing befuddlement at gratuitous thuggery erupting from nowhere reflecting the majority of the German population caught up in events they understood only too late.

There are round oranges and cheese and meat on the buffet. 

And then Else’s shoulder slides away from under me and there’s noise - shoes, lots of shoes were comng - the girls were screaming and throwing the windows open.  Schanewsky’s eyes were looking softly at me from the corner - the room burst with ten blond windbreakers - they are their enemies and again it’s got something to do with politics.  And they threw themselves at the buffet and under that kitchen lighting they looked pale and starved and they threw the oranges on the floor and ate all the sausages.  And made a tired ruckus.  And stuffed down all the sausages.  And then they left.  What was that all about?

Although effective as a piece of social commentary, I found the whole thing yawnsworthy and quite frequently sleep-inducing, becoming alert only on reading the translator’s note and Maria Tatar’s introduction (the latter read only on completing the work …) Kathie von Akum, who translated Keun’s original in 2002, maintains that Doris is the antecedent of modern-day Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaws and Rebecca Bloomswood.  (Well yes, but the modern counterparts are, at times, belly-laugh funny ….).  Maria Tatar’s introduction quite illuminating with regard to the Germanic literary antecedents, many of which languish in my TBR including  Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.  Fortunately not Schnitzler’s brilliant Fräulein Else, which, while written by a man, is far more succinct and involving than Irmgard Keun’s effort.