The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes

Being woefully ignorant of the history of every country but my own I thought I should read this history of Germany particularly as it claims to be the shortest.

The author takes the dividing line of the River Elbe as the fixed point of German history, from the Romans through to the present day. During the centuries this line represented in turn, the separation of the power of Rome in the West from the Slavic hordes in the East, the Catholic West & South from the Protestant East and the nationalism and militarism of Prussia in the East from the democracies to the West

UK children find understanding history tricky, or perhaps boring, but at least the sea is a fixed border and the reigns of Kings and Queens, and the lives of major figures help fix the chronology, so pity then German children faced with shifting borders, 3-way power struggles between The Emperor, The Electors (not electorate!) and the Pope. Add to the mix the changing alliances and aggression from all the neighbours and you could forgive any German child from throwing in the towel. Do not despair. This book picks its way at great speed through the mess and brings order to the chaos. Above all it makes one realise yet again how the ordinary lives of the hoi polloi (you and me) meant almost nothing to the rulers and the rich. The book is full of helpful, simple equations, such as:

Theory: radical belief in change through conflict + Practice: worship of state power = The perfect philosophy for extremists of both left and right.

At the end of WWII when Germany was partitioned along, yes, you've guessed it, the line of the Elbe, the map looked uncannily like the map of 814CE, at the death of Charlemagne.

I've no idea what a historian would make of this book, though the author studied German at Hertford College, Oxford and UCL, and held lectureships in German, but for this ignorant layman it helped fill in some of the yawning gaps in his knowledge, and it was a quick, easy read. It was also an important reminder that my UK-centric view of history creates a distorting lens which should be cast aside to let us see more clearly the mass of humanity beyond our shores as individuals engaged in the same ups and downs of life as me, rather than foreign nationals who want a slice of my cake.

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

This book has been on my must-read list for a while. It is a highly recommended novel and people comment, “I envy you reading this for the first time”. The heavyweight press seem to give it universal praise. Here’s one quote from the Financial Times review,

“Like a Dutch painting, every scene is described in glittering detail and framed with retrospective melancholy. A modern-day David Copperfield… The Goldfinch is impressive – lavish, gripping, exciting” (Emily Stokes).

The book is a door-stopper in length and spans a period of about 20 years in the life of the narrator, Theo Decker. As a 13-year-old boy he is taken to an art gallery by his mother. A bomb explodes, his mother dies, and Theo finds himself next to a dying man, Welty, who gives him a ring and an address. Nearby is a small painting which Theo takes with him as finds his way through the dust and rubble into the open air. The address turns out to be a shop selling antiques and the home of Hobie, an expert antique restorer and Welty’s partner. The painting is The Goldfinch by a Dutch artist, Fabritus and Theo’s unlawful possession of The Goldfinch is the main thread running through the story.

Theo is first fostered by a rich family, the Barbour’s, but his father, long estranged from his mother, comes to claim him and takes him to live in Las Vegas. Here he meets Boris, originally from the Ukraine, who introduces him to a decedent life of drugs, drink and stealing. After the death of his father, Theo moves back to New York where he lives with Hobie and becomes an expert in selling fake antiques. He hides The Goldfinch away in a storage facility but then is told that it’s been stolen. In the last section of the book Theo goes with Boris to Holland in pursuit of the painting.

Another thread in the story is Theo’s unrequited love for Pippa, a girl of his age who had also been in the explosion with Welty and who recuperated at Hobie’s. To rid himself of his feelings for Pippa Theo tries to concentrate on her flaws:

”yet all these aspects were – to me - so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested – ominously – a love more binding than physical affection, some tar pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years. …..She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I had lost with my mother.”

The wonderful, descriptive writing makes this a fine book. Donna Tartt is an expert in conveying images of people, places and the atmosphere in which they live and breathe. So, the quality of the writing is superb, but there are things I didn’t like. I found the whole scenario by which Theo comes to possess The Goldfinch and then to hang on to it, to be very implausible, which is a problem when the whole story hangs on this. Then, you have to buy into Theo himself, as he is the narrator, but once his life is invaded by his father and Boris, he loses the sensitivity of the relationship he had with his mother and I rapidly lost sympathy for him. We are all victims of circumstance but also victims of our own choices, and to me Theo’s life was a catalogue of bizarrely wrong choices.

Another issue is the peripheral nature of some of the “main” characters. Although Theo obsesses about Pippa throughout the 800-odd pages, she just flits in and out of the story and ultimately does not seem that important. Theo’s relationship with Boris is the strongest in the book and it is Boris who is instrumental in tracking down the painting after it has been stolen, but he drops out of the story for 200 pages, before coming back for the crucial denouement. Hobie too, the innocent, good guy and a true father-figure who provides Theo with a home and teaches him the mysteries of antique furniture, in the end is only a bit-part player.

Another problem with the novel is its length. Right at the beginning, after the explosion, it takes 20 pages for Theo to have contact with a dying man and get out into the open air. Pages are devoted to Theo's drug and drink habits which leave him miserable and suicidal. I found myself skimming pages at the end when Theo is in an Amsterdam hotel room being taken through yet another bout of depression by the author.

There is no doubting Donna Tartt's wonderful writing ability, and The Goldfinich shows this in spades, so great prose, with some memorable characters, but to my mind not a great story.

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Nights at The Circus by Angela Carter

There is a very insightful introduction to my copy of Nights at the Circus (Vintage edition) by Sarah Waters which helped set this strange, off-the-wall book in context. The novel is very well written but it takes you on a totally unbelievable journey. 

The central character is Fevvers, an orphan baby, abandonned outside a Victorian brothel who grows to develop wings. She is an object of curiosity and wonder so people pay to see her, but also an object of desire for a variety of rich men including, it is rumoured , the Prince of Wales. At the beginning of the novel an American reporter gains admitance to her dressing room at a theatre and she tells him the story of her early life. From here the story moves to a circus building in St Petersburg and finally into the frozen wilderness of Siberia. 

The book is peopled with many exotic characters, including chimps that can read, a pig that can spell and a concert pianist who perfoms in a cage full of tigers. Just as Fevvars can soar unaided up to a trapeze so the reader's feet are never on the ground for long. The world of this circus is definitley not of this world but is rich with Angela Carter's inventiveness. 

Sarah Waters writes, " it is a tribute to Carter's skill as a novelist that her characters can inhabit this gloriously artifical universe and yet remain so emotionally compelling and physically convincing."

If you like good writing, magical realism and the picaresque, then this is the book for you.

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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

This is wonderfully written book and deservedly sits in the classic pantheon. Set at the tail end of the 19th century, the heroine is a beautiful New York socialite, Lily Bart, who has to make her way in the world of the rich, with very little money. She lives in luxury with her rich aunt who willingly funds her niece in the vast expenditure of her wardrobe but refuses to pay her gambling debts. The only way out for Lily is to marry a wealthy husband. There are plenty of men in the offing, some already married, but she rebels at the prospect of a stiffling life as a rich man’s possession.

The first possiblity is Percy Gryce:

“ She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce - the mere thought seemed to awaken an echo of his droning voice - but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance the he might do her the honour of boring her for life.  It was a hateful fate - but how to escape from it? What choice had she?”

In immaculate prose Edith Wharton chronicles the hollow, dog eat dog, world of the rich with its greed and shallow friendships, and plots the increasingly desperate life of Lily, as she moves from the centre of this bright, glittering world  out into the shadows. True friends remain but the reader senses the ghost of Hardy’s Tess hovering over the novel and tragedy looming.

The House of Mirth is beautifully written and my Penguin edition had an excellent afterword by Hermione Lee, but I was frustrated by Lily as a character, she was a victim of circumstance but also an agent of her own destruction?

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The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Set in the Sicily of the 19th century, at the time of Garibaldi and the civil war, The Leopard tells the story of Prince Fabrizio Salina, who through the pages of the story, slowly declines from womaniser, sportsman and bastion of the aristocracy, towards gentil poverty, inconsequence and death. He lavishes his favour on his nephew Tancredi, rather than on his own children, even promoting the marrige of Tancredi to the beautiful Angelica, daughter of an upstart mayor, in preference to his own daughter. As the Leopard loses his lustre, and his palaces become dusty, threadbare and empty so the world in which he was pre-emminent passes away.

Though in translation the book is written in exquisite prose, full of irony and gentle wit. It is a commentary on custom and tradition, the exhuberance of youth, the regrets of age, and the slow inevitability of life seeping away grain by grain like sand through an hour glass.

This book deservedly finds it's place in lists of a 100 best novels. It's a classic to savour, to keep and read again.

Here's a little taste:

“...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.”

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Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Living in the narrow confines of the lecturing world of a minor college in 1950's Britain, Jim Dixon is just about holding onto his history post, just about having a relationship with the neurotic Margaret and just about earning enough to pay for his drink, fags, occasional dates, and rent in a run-down boarding house. Kingsley Amis, was one of the 50's "angry young men" and the novel is shot through with his ascerbic wit and hilarious situations as his luckless hero seeks escape from boredom and middle-class convention.

Good review here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-man-of-feeling/302486/?utm_source=eb 

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

200 years after publication was an appropriate anniversary to read Frankenstein for the first time. Leaving aside the elegance of early 19th century prose, what do I make of Mary Shelly's classic? It is a novel of unrelenting gloom, with a plot that lurches about like a well-lubricated drunk. All relationships are doomed to misery; all love is unrequited and all hopes dashed. On nearly every page you are assailed by gothic prose - precipices tower, rivers rage, winds shriek and icy cold pierces the flesh. Frankenstein, having created his monster is racked by torment, remorse, anguish, and dread, and that's on a good day! The main tale is narrated to a ship's captain but not before we've had a chapter or two of irrelevant back story of how the ship came to be in polar seas. The plot moves from scene to scene, with abrupt changes and poor connections. Mary Shelly was only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein and her immaturity shows in the unsatisfactory aspects of the book. Nevertheless she has conjured a startling tale that provokes questions about the responsibility of the creator towards his creation, and of man's thirst for knowledge and control over-riding the direction set by his moral compass.

Modern interpretation here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12737956 

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The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shulka

This book should be required reading for every child, every parent, in fact everyone, and most certainly for every UKIP voter or Daily Mail reader.

 Description  from the Goodreads website

How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport?

Or be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’?

Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you – however many generations you’ve been here – but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms.

Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants – job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees – until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

Salena Godden is a British poet, performer and author living in London. 

Here is how she finishes her essay “Shade” - it absolutely sums up my view of my humanity and the world I want future generations to live in.

“Human colour is the colour I’m truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. Welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of mixed identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboard. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of Rum, let’s toast to the minorities who are the majority. There is no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the 21st century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is the first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside.”

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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I can’t believe that “Days Without End” by Sebastian Barry has been already knocked off the top spot for this year’s best reads, and having enthused about that book I don’t know how to describe the overwhelming delight I had from reading “A Gentleman in Moscow. It was a feast of a book, like a meal with a succession of mouthwatering dishes, superb wines, wonderful company and briliant conversation. The gentleman in question is Count Alexander Ilych Rostov who is a resident in The Metropol, the most prestigious hotel in Moscow. As a member of the aristocracy in 1922, he no longer has a place in post-revolutionary Russia, but instead of being shot, or given a one way ticket to Siberia, he is made a non-person and sentenced to house arrest back at the Metropol, no longer in his palatial suite however, but up in a tiny attic room. If you know Charlie Mortdecai from the Bonfiglioli books, or have seen "The Grand Budapest Hotel”, you get an idea of the flavour of this book. 

Early on we have these lines:

”After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of the hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration–and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

The book progress from 1922 through to 1954 and we meet many engaging characters en route, including, the chef, the concierge and the seamstress, Russian officials, visiting Americans, a beautiful actress, and two precocious young girls who grow to adulthood, and play a key role in the story. One of them, at the age of 9 decides she needs to compile a list of the Prime Numbers and test Galileo’s ideas about falling objects. The other plays the Count at a game they call “Zut”, in which you have to name members of a category e.g the uses of wax or things that come in fours. 

There is poetry, philosophy and humour with the unexpected lurking at the turn of the page, all set down in masterful prose. You are taken on a journey where the journey is more important than the destination, although the final destination seals the perfection of the book.

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Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Lyrical writing, quotable on every page, a story of love and survival set in America in the years of the Indian wars and the Civil War. Thomas McNulty, a young Irish immigrant meets John Cole a fellow countryman. They work in theatre, join the army, rescue and adopt an IndianA girl, go through times of terrible hardship, and through everything hold together with courage and love. The story, often grim and brutal is told by Thomas in prose that sings off the page. One of the best books I've read. 

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