What BOOK are you reading right now?

I've recently galloped away from amazon, prefer abe. On the other hand, maybe Amazon owns Abe: I think I remember reading that. I've no idea.

So far, I am liking abe.

I'm reading a book someone mentioned though I can't grab a link re that post.

To me, the writer, an anonymous woman (that matter explored later) wrote one of the major books of the century.

A Woman in Berlin.

I highly recommend.

I just had to turn down tickets to their live show. Very sad

very sad indeed

I did recommend it, but others might have too. Glad you like it. :-) Have you read many books as gripping as that?

(Beats Jane Austeen any day, if you ask me. Whom I tried to read and failed. Too boring, ultimately. Her style can't save the lameness of her stories for me - sorry Spendi)

On the same theme -- life in a besieged city, when the veneer of civilisation peels away), there's Ferenc Karinthy's Aranyido (Red Army besieging Budapest), or Malaparte's Pelle (The Skin) on Napoli and Rome (the US landing in Palermo in 43 and the opening of the Italian front), or the Paris in 41 of Irene Nimerovsky's Suite Française.


All this pretty dark; parental discretion is advised. It's not ALL dark but it's not Jane Austeen either... about what happens when the state disappears, when they are no laws and it's down to each individual's choice what to do to survive...

No.


I wasn't off that you liked the book.

I'm on page 182, assuming a lot more of interest to come. Major book.

I've a million things to say about the book. Sometimes I need a rest with it. Tough to read.

I've thought I've known a lot. Wrong.

The next books you recently mentioned, I'll look for them.

Primo Levi and Carlo Levi, books to read.
I've only read one of each.

I finished A Woman in Berlin.

Wow.

Such a good writer, words fail me for describing how she handled writing about those two months. I'll add to what Olivier said in that as I read along I needed to keep my attention up as some of the near throwaway lines between all the heavy stuff also made me sit back and think. I was learning some new ways of looking at people and what they do and think all through the book.

:-) It's a beautiful book on a pretty horrible subject. The facts that the story is real and that the author never signed it because it was too disturbing, those facts add to the power of the book in my view.

Karinthy's Aranyido has apparently not yet been translated in English (I read it in French, translated as l'Age d'Or) but it's NOT a true life story - just a novel based on historical facts. Malaparte's Skin is in the middle. It's an ambitious literary book telling real events, as is Kaput. Malaparte was embedded in the US army high command as an advisor and translator so a lot of what he describes is real, but sometimes it verges on exaggeration, caricature or embellishment.

Irene Nimerovsky lived through the French debacle and mass fleeing in 1941, so Suite Française rings very very true. I don't know if everything is factually true though. She's Russian, a sort of female Jewish Nabokov if you will (same gorgeous style, same fluency in French, same intellectual brilliance). She emigrated out of the USSR with her parents in the 20's but they stayed in Paris rather than sail further to the US or Latin America during the 30's. She died in Auschwitz as a result... :'-(

I will put the second two on my amazon wish list (I haven't noticed one on Abe.com, but I'll check if the books are there), Irene Nimerovsky first. I'll wait on it though and read some other books... I can't take too much real learning all at once.

Yeah... Take a break. Both are great but heart-wrenching.

I read up about the purported writer of A Woman in Berlin, as I was very curious re what happened next and through her life. There is conjecture with assertions one way or the other. Anyway, Wiki has a page on the person named in the conjectures, which only makes me more uselessly curious, and sad for her re the early reactions to the book, and even wanting to protect her identity, which is finally none of my business.

The reactions were petty and heartless. It's impossible (or inhuman) to read this book and not love this woman dearly, peripatetic behavior included.

So much of what we have been taught, what has been celebrated made up the only story and so much of it is wrong.

I'm relieved that reactions have changed a fair amount over the years but the reactions in the first few decades must have been decisive for her re publishing again until after her death.

I am reading In Sickness and in Power: Illness in heads of government during the last 100 years, by David Owen.
His idea that bad political decisions come, sometimes, from physical illness by the political leader gives new lights on the strange ways of history.
The Kennedy chapter is particularly interesting.

She did the right thing. That woman knew how to protect herself.

I obviously admire her much. In a way, this body of literature is about the fall of European fascism at the end of WW2 -- but also the end of Europe itself, of its pride and sense of cultural dominance; Malaparte speaks eloquently of the end of a dejected, disgusted and disgusting Europe in comparison with American benevolence and naivity which represents for him, at this point, the future of mankind, like a young man is evidently the future for his old father, who just fell and can't put himself back up...

But at least in the case of Malaparte, Nimerovsky and the author of AWoman in Berlin, this end of Europe is narrated by the finest souls ever produced by Europe, by the most refined and sensitive observers that Europe ever produced, at a time when the culture was at its peak and still trying to surpass itself.

The woman in Berlin strikes me as an exceptional person, including in her intelligence, taste and moral values, likely embelishments aside. The biography of Malaparte is that of an ubermench; "greater than life" does not even start to describe it. Nimerovsky was a literary genius. We don't make such towering figures anymore.

But the description of Europe in its most abject moral and physical ruin by some of the finest European minds ever makes for some great literature.

I was reading a New Yorker (11/2/15) last evening and they mention in that issue's Briefly Noted book column Underground in Berlin by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (Little, Brown). I'll just copy the column text :

'During the Second World War, the author, a young Jewish woman from Berlin who had lost both her parents, managed to go into hiding for several years, relying on a network of family friends to elude arrest by the Gestapo. She moved apartments frequently, at times living with Nazi sympathizers, and suffered from continuous hunger. Not long before her death, in 1998, her son persuaded her to record her story. Simon writes in matter-of-fact terms, crediting her survival to chance and saying that she simply did what she could to live.'

I assume since the text is in this column that this is newly published in English, but I haven't looked it up elsewhere. I plan to check it out too.

That sounds interesting too. Let us know your take..

I'm reading some horror books.