Short Stories, Irish literature, Classics, Modern Fiction, Contemporary Literary Fiction, The Japanese Novel, Post Colonial Asian Fiction, The Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and quality Historical Novels are Among my Interests








Saturday, November 2, 2024

"A Man Becomes a Nazi" - 10 Pages-A Short Story by Anna Seghers - 1943 - translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo - 2021






 "A Man Becomes a Nazi" - A Short Story by Anna Seghers -  - - 1943 - 
translated from the German and edited by Margot Bettauer Dembo.- 2021

This will be my 12th year as a participant in Germans Literature Month, held every November.  Through the event I have discovered many new to me authors.

Born: November 19, 1900, Mainz, Germany

Died: June 1, 1983 (age 82 years), East Berlin

Born Netty Reiling in Mainz in 1900 of partly Jewish descent, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.


In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied history, the history of art and Chinese. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at the height of its struggle against the burgeoning National Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Fascism, which led to her being arrested by the gestapo.

 After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to Mexico, where she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal. During this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross, for which she received the Büchner-Prize in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War 

In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the freedom movement of the GDR. In 1951, she received the first Nationalpreis der DDR and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.

During prior German Literature Months I have posted upon two of her novels, Transit and The Seventh Cross.

“A Man Becomes a Nazi,” written in 1942 and 1943 in Mexico, explores the question: How does a person become a torturer and murderer? Within a tightly controlled narrative frame, the story ventures out into unstable terrain. Fritz Mueller’s life unrolls in front of a Red Army tribunal: “He was charged with shootings, hangings, and a series of acts of cruelty committed against women and children.

  This German, the fourth son of a soldier and unemployed metalworker, is born into a continuum of war and hardship. It is impossible to say what plays the greatest role in making him a Nazi—his circumstances, his education, his predispositions?. He becomes a cold blooded killer in a war against people he thought were enemies of Germany.

There are 15 other stories in the collection. I hope to post this month upon a few of them.

Mel u
The Reading Life


Friday, November 1, 2024

The Reading Life Review October 2024 -


 

The Reading Life Review October 2024 


Nonfiction Featured in October 


1. Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

2. The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

3.Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages 

4.The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 - 

5. Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages 

6. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages

7. Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages


October Novels


1.The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages

2. When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

3.The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain- 2015 - 244 Pages

4. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver- 2022- 720 Pages


October Short Stories - all by Carol Shields - included in the Stories of Carol Shields - 2004

1. "Good Manners"

2. "Collision" 

Birth County of October Authors 

1, USA- 7

2. Canada - 1

3, China - 1

4. England - 1

Four October authors are men, 7 were featured for the first time and only one is no longer living.

Blog Stats

As of today our posts have been viewed 8,164,356 times. In October there was 79,212 page views.

Per Google Stats the origin countries in October were 

1. Singapore

2. USA

3. India

4. Philippines 

5. Canada

6. United kingdom 

7. Hong Kong 

8. Brazil 

9. France

10. Russia

Of the ten post viewed posts 9 were on stories by South East Asian and Indian authors, one on an Irish story.









Thursday, October 31, 2024

"Good Manors" - A Short Story by Carol Shields -5 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004




This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.


The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection, it is my hope to read and post on them all.


"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelopy Lively from her introduction to Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 

"Good Manors" is the 32nd Short Story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.  I found it to be a disturbingly haunting work that in five pages tracks a ten year old child, almost molested by an older neighbour up to her sixties. She never marries and never forms an enduring relationship though she has brief encounters in which she is used for sex.


"THE STERN, PEREMPTORY SOCIAL ARBITER, Georgia Willow, has been overseeing Canadian manners for thirty-five years. She did it in Montreal during the tricky fifties and she did it in Toronto in the unsettled sixties. In the seventies she operated underground, so to speak, from a converted Rosedale garage, tutoring the shy wives of Japanese executives and diplomats. In the eighties she came into her own; manners were rediscovered, particularly in the West, where Mrs. Willow has relocated. Promptly at three-thirty each Tuesday and Thursday, neatly dressed in a well-pressed navy Evan-Picone slub silk suit, cream blouse and muted scarf, Georgia Willow meets her small class in the reception area of the MacDonald Hotel and ushers them into the long, airy tearoom—called, for some reason, Gophers—where a ceremonial spread has been ordered. Food and drink almost always accompany Mrs. Willow’s lectures. It is purely a matter of simulation since, wherever half a dozen people gather, there is sure to be a tray of sandwiches to trip them up. According to Mrs. Willow, food and food implements are responsible for fifty percent of social unease. The classic olive pit question. The persisting problem of forks, cocktail picks and coffee spoons."


To me the enduring questions are whatever are good manors really meant to do, what purpose do they serve and why did Gloria Willow make teaching good manors her life work.


Sunday, October 27, 2024

"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004


 
"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004


Buriedinprint.com 


This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.


The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection, it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelopy Lively from her introduction to Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 


"Collision" is the 31st story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted, it perfectly exemplifies Penelopy Lively's description.


"Collision" is an amazing story, not just two lives created in 15 pages but the history of how movements of continents create biographies.


I wish to quote enough from the story to give a sense of her wonderful prose.

""TODAY THE SKY IS SOLID BLUE. It smacks the eye. A powerful tempered ceiling stretched across mountain ranges and glittering river systems: the Saône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Drina. This unimpaired blueness sharpens the edges of the tile-roofed apartment block where Martä Gjatä lives and hardens the wing tips of the little Swiss plane that carries Malcolm Brownstone to her side. What a dense, dumb, depthless blue it is, this blue; but continually widening out and softening like a magically reversed lake without a top or bottom or a trace of habitation or a thought of what its blueness is made of or what it’s for. But take another look. The washed clarity is deceiving, the yawning transparency is fake. What we observe belies the real nature of the earth’s atmosphere, which is adrift, today as any day, with biographical debris. It’s everywhere, a thick swimmy blizzard of it, more ubiquitous by far than earthly salt or sand or humming electrons. Radio waves are routinely pelted by biography’s mad static, as Martä Gjatä, trying to tune in the Vienna Symphony, knows only too well. And small aircraft, such as the one carrying Malcolm Brownstone eastward across Europe, occasionally fall into its sudden atmospheric pockets. The continents and oceans are engulfed. We are, to speak figuratively...

Where else in this closed lonely system can our creaturely dust go but up there on top of the storied slag heap? The only law of biography is that everything, every particle, must be saved. The earth is alight with it, awash with it, scoured by it, made clumsy and burnished by its steady accretion. Biography is a thrifty housewife, it’s an old miser. Martä Gjatä’s first toddling steps are preserved, and her first word"


"

Saturday, October 26, 2024

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages



 When We Flew Away :A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages


Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:


The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - 2024

The story begins in May of 1940. About to be eleven-year-old Anne is living in Amsterdam with her parents Edith and Otto as well as her 14-year sister Margot, and her grandmother 

 Her father had been a wealthy banker in Germany, but after the rise of antisemitism and the Nazi Party he moved his family to what they all thought was the safety of the Netherlands, one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. 

Anne and her sister attend schools that have both Jewish and Christian students and their lives are comfortable and happy. Margot is considered the beautiful sister (Anne doesn't mind) while Anne is the dreamer. As the Nazi Army begins its march across Europe, Otto regrets not sending the girls to England and is desperately trying to get visas for the family to go to America. But after the Germans invade the Netherlands, all hope of visas seems lost and there is no escape for the family. All Jews must now register with local governments, people they considered friends and classmates become enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi Party, men are being arrested and sent to concentration camps, and their rights are increasingly being taken away. Then the impossible happens. Nathan Strauss, Jr., an old friend of Otto's from New York City, writes to say all the paperwork for their visas in now in order. But once again their hopes for visas are shattered. There is some unexpected happiness for Anne as she meets a boy named Helmut, who's known as "Hello" because that's how he greets everyone. But Anne's happiness is short lived as Margot receives a notice that she's being called up for a "labor camp." The family has no choice, they leave under cover of darkness and go into hiding.

I was completely drawn into Hoffman's brilliant imagining of the life of Anne Frank Before she began her diary,  She loves to read, tries to keep optimistic and dreams of moving to California.

In a time when immigrants around the world are being vilified for all of societies problems there is a profound lesson in this wonderful book.

Alice Hoffman is the acclaimed author of over thirty novels for readers of all ages, including The Dovekeepers, The World That We Knew—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize—The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, Incantation, The Foretelling, and most recently, The Invisible Hour. Her previous novels for Scholastic Press are Aquamarine, which was made into a major motion picture, Indigo, Green Witch, and Green Angel, which Publishers Weekly, in a boxed, starred review, called “achingly lovely.” She lives outside Boston. Visit her online at www.alicehoffman.com.








Thursday, October 24, 2024

Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings - 2020 -432 Pages


 Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

Previously I have pasted upon two biographies of authors from Selina Hastings, on Rosamond Lehmann and also one on W. Somerset Maugham.
Both of the biographies are marvellous so I was delighted to find her latest work Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings available via Libby,

She had the bitter sadness of losing her much loved father when she was fourteen, and the misfortune to have to manage living with her mother Lisa,needy, selfish, anti-maternal, irresponsible, and later to be her carer before the drug-addicted Lisa was sent back to Hitler’s Germany for enforced detox treatment under the care of her own elderly mother, where she soon died. These difficult life circumstances deserve commiseration and sympathy.

 But throughout the rest of the biography Sybille turned into an amiable freeloading sociable partygoer, a growing authority on wine and an excellent cook and gourmand, who talked about writing a novel for twenty years before actually getting down to writing it.

As Sybille was so very, very fortunate in the friends who supported her throughout her life we have to assume that she was charming, delightful, fun and nice to have around. I can’t think that merely being an orphaned deserving cause would have been enough to warrant the colossal generosity and freely given accommodation, cheques and trips to and from the USA that so many of her friends bestowed upon She went through lovers like other women might go through hats or a pair of shoes, mostly women but a few men thrown in the mix.  

Hastings details the reasons for Sybille's hatred of her native Germany and her love for France.  Sybille in an arranged marriage, the himosexual groom was paid, was able to get a visa to England just before the Germans occupied Paris.  The account of her trip to Mexico was very interesting.  


Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann, Sybille Bedford and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.






Monday, October 21, 2024

The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages



The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

Earlier this month a read a master work of narrative nonfiction  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 

Through the Chicago Public Library I was able to borrow another work by Patrick Radden Keefe, The  Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,focusing on the trafficking of Undocumented immigrants from China to the New York City..  The leaders in this enterprise are called "snakeheads"

"In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people.

“Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it’s all true.” —Time" From the publisher Penquin Random House
 
Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.


In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.

The Book goes back to Fuzhou China showing us why people would go into huge debt to try to get to America.  Keefe explains the complex international criminal conspiracies involved.  He follows the lives of the people who remained in America and those deported as well as Americans dedicated to helping them.


Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. 

Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the “20 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Empire of Pain was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. 

He is also the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an 8-part podcast, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.  

Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.  



Saturday, October 19, 2024

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages



  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages 

"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing." From 


After reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver set in Lee County Virginia during the opiod epidemic brought on by the actions of a pharmaceutical company owned by the fabulously rich Sackler family, I wanted to learn more about the causes and effects of the epidemic.

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe provides in an epic work of narrative nonfiction is the essential work.
 

 The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Eventually most of these institutions removed the Sackler name from their walls not wanting to be associated with them.

Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

The Sacklers spent upwards of a hundred million dollars in an attempt to discredit their accusers and avoid any personal impact.

We encounter people trying to help the victims of the Sacklers, ultimately about 600,000 deaths, employees of the Sacklers  (they did treat loyal employees well and top sales representatives making huge salaries). The Sacklers, through proxies, bought off Federal Drug Agency employees , offering government employees making $50,000 a year  ten times that to go to work for them if they would back away from legal pursuits of the family.

"PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing."  From Penquin Random House 









Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 -


 

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 - 


NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.


FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD AWARD • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL.


According to recent data about 10.5 million undocumented migrants lived in the United States in 2021, which constitutes roughly 3% of the total US population . Despite undocumented migrants’ impact on US society and its economy (especially in the agriculture, construction, and service work sectors and by paying billions of dollars in taxes each year), their voices rarely receive a platform due to a mix of the need for protective invisibility as well as xenophobia and racism.


 Villavícencío begin with a gripping vignette set during the night of the 2016 US presidential election. The author powerfully declares that she “understood that night would be her end, but she would not be ushered to an internment camp in sweatpants” . The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency propelled Villavícencío to profile migrants in ways that would reflect her family who are more than either “sufferers or dreamers” . Stressing her collaborators’ precarity, the author elucidates her methodology for collecting others’ stories: she changed all names in the book, did not make voice recordings of conversations, and destroyed all notes and transcriptions . The end result is a work that skillfully mixes the genres of political testimonio, biography, ethnography, and memoir. Having lived as an undocumented migrant herself and not identifying as a journalist set Villavícencío apart from other authors, as she cannot help but get deeply involved and “try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to solve shit for their parents because these people are all my parents” . She is open about her own mental health issues.



The Undocumented Americans was a very revelatory work for me.  I had no idea Undocumented people, subject to deportation, were on the front lines in the clean up efforts at the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attack. In the author's account of the life of Undocumented immigrants living on Staten Island, I learned how vulnerable they are to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and how many were highly educated.  I was fascinated to learn that oatmeal, a staple of my diet, is considered as a sacred food by Vodou healers,  Villavicencio explains why undocumented Hatians spractice Vodou beliefs as part of an anti-colonial heritage.


In a chapter devoted to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan the author details how years of neglect and outright lies caused the many undocumented immigrants to be forced to drink water made toxic by lead pipes,  


Villavicencio focuses a lot on the heavy use of alcohol  by undocumented immigrants as a means of escape.  As a highly educated person many immigrants were leary about talking to her.  It was very gratifying to see how she developed close personal relationship among undocumented immigrant women.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans. Her work, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, n+1, The New Inquiry, Interview, and on NPR.


Tuesday, October 15, 2024

The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages


 
The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages


The Book Lovers Library is the fourth novel  by Madeline Martin upon which I have posted.  

In December of 2021 I read The Last Bookstore in London by Madeline Martin, set in London during the Blitz years of World War Two. I loved this deeply moving vivid account of the impact of Germany's bombing of London on a small Bookstore.

Last year I read her The Libraian Spy set during World War Two in Paris as well as Lyon and Lisbon. Paris is occupied by the Germans. Portugal is neutral but in danger of being invaded. People come from all over Europe to Lisbon hoping to get a visa to go to America.

Last Month I read her The Keeper of Hidden Books, set, mostly in Warsaw during it occupation during World War Two by the Germans, centered on a library.

The Book Lovera! Library takes place in England during World War Two.  The library is a subscription based business.  I liked this book so much,  was drawn so deeply into the lives of the characters that I became afraid for them.



In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter, Olivia, have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she's left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots' Booklover's Library to take a chance on her with a job.

When the threat of war in England becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In the wake of being separated from her daughter, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbors and coworkers, and a renewed sense of purpose through the recommendations she provides to the library's quirky regulars. But the job doesn't come without its difficulties. Books are mysteriously misshelved and disappearing, and the work at the lending library forces her to confront the memories of her late father and the bookstore they once owned together before a terrible accident.

As the Blitz intensifies in Nottingham and Emma fights to reunite with her daughter, she must learn to depend on her community and the power of literature more than ever,


I really liked Emma's neighbours in the tenement house where she lived, her land lady Mrs Pickering with her adorable dog Tubby, the seemingly gruff older Mr  Sanderson, most of her colleagues at the ,library as well as some of the library  (I learned how a lending library worked, there is an explanation of them by the author)

You will love the ending.   One of the marvellous aspects of the work is all the novels mentioned, watching Olivia learn to love reading.  Ok and Tubby is a joy for dog lovers.


. Madeline Martin is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books translated into over twenty-five languages. She lives in sunny Florida with her husband (known as Mr. Awesome), two amazing daughters, and two very spoiled cats.




Monday, October 14, 2024

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain- 2015 - 244 Pages



 The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain- 2015 - 244 Pages

2015 Jewish Book of the Year.

"The Gustav Sonata is a work of extreme and painful beauty, the story of one profound love amid many failed relationships, and of the conflict between passion and self-control. Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists, and deserves, with this brilliant novel, to reach a wide new audience."
― Salman Rushdie

The Gustav Sonata” primarily takes place in pre and post-WWII Switzerland. It offers an interesting slant on the war and the meaning of neutrality by focusing on the lives of two different families affected by the greater conflict. It’s a deeply immersive story about loyalty during times of conflict, ambition, betrayal and family strife.

The novel centres around a Swiss boy named Gustav whose single mother Emilie struggles to make ends meet while working in an Emmental cheese factory. His father Erich died at an early age, but was once an assistant police chief during the tense period in the lead up to the war. In 1948, a six year old Gustav befriends a new Jewish boy named Anton at school. Emilie resents her son’s companion because she blames their diminished circumstances on the influx of Jewish refugees. Despite his mother’s objections, Gustav and Anton form a special bond which continues throughout their lives. Questions raised about how Emilie got to this difficult point are answered in the second part of the novel which moves back to 1937 to recount her tumultuous marriage with Erich. The third part of the book then skips far forward to the end of the 20th century to show how dilemmas about his family and his country’s past still resonate for Gustav in his later years.

The Gustav Sonata is a very powerful account, with turns I never saw coming but once they happened it was inevitable and perfect.

Rose Tremain's best-selling novels have won many awards, including the Baileys Women's Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Prix Femina Etranger. Restoration, the first of her novels to feature Robert Merivel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes.











Sunday, October 13, 2024

A Post in Observation of The 132nd Birthday of Katherine Mansfield




A post in observation of the 134 birthday of Katherine Mansfield 

Katherine Mansfield-A Getting Started Guide

As Irene Nemirovsky went to her death in a cattle car to Auschwitz, she had with her The Notebook of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield died January 9, 1923.   Like many another writer who died far too young (1888 to 1923-New Zealand) we wonder what she might have produced had she lived on another thirty years.    All of Mansfield's stories are now in the public domain so anyone can easily read them online.   I have read and posted on nearly all of her stories (the exceptions being a few very young age stories that I have not yet found online).     I have received number of E-mails asking me where one should start with Mansfield.    (I am a reader not a scholar.    I read a Mansfield story almost by accident ten  ago and fell in love with her work.   I also have read and posted on three great books about her as well.)

In observation of the anniversary of her death I have selected three Katherine Mansfield stories that will get a new reader into her work.   All of these stories are easy to read  and enjoyable.  

"Miss Brill"

Because I have a posting each one of Mansfield's stories, I found I can use my blogger stats to see which of her stories are being most widely read.  People from all over the world (including Bethlehem on Christmas Day!) have come  to my blog to read my post on "Miss Brill".   Most of the visitors were probably students so I can  for sure say "Miss Brill" is the most assigned in universities worldwide of her stories.     "Miss Brill" is my suggestion for your first (and if it comes to it your only) Katherine Mansfield story.   I have read it several times since my first  post and each time get more from my reading and continue to enjoy the experience.   The first time I read this wonderful story (about 5 pages) I was struck by how much Mansfield was able to put in a few pages and by the stunning undercutting of what I thought was my understanding of the plot as the story closes.     It is a very fun, sad, wise story.


from Katherine Mansfield journal



Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France
I mean something though. Its a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple. In Miss Brill I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence – I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her – and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After Id written it I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her.
Don't think I'm vain about the little sketch. Its the only method I wanted to explain. I often wonder whether other writers do the same. If a thing has really come off it seems to me there mustn't be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out. Thats how I AIM at writing. It will take some time to get anywhere near there.

"The Doll''s House"

"The Doll's House" is set in the New Zealand of the 1890s.     Mansfield has a great passion for her native New Zealand.      "The Doll's House"  is a very closely observed account of children at play.   It showed me how the play of children reflects what they learn from their lives.    In the smallest of details Mansfield builds a world for us.  

"The Garden Party"

As "The Garden Party" opens Laura Sheridan under the supervision of her mother is planning a garden party.   Readers in the 1920s in England and New Zealand would be aware that a garden party was meant to be a prestigious near formal occasion and an affair that was found only among the upper classes.   One of the most coveted English society invitations was to the annual Garden party at Buckingham Palace.   Laura is supposed to be in charge but we can quickly see her mother is a bit overbearing.  Rather near the home of the Sheridan's there is what the Sheridan family views as a wretched squalid community.   Right before the party is set to begin they learn one of the workers for  their party who lives in that area was killed in an accident.   Laura wants to stop the party but her mother will not hear it.   After the party the mother has a jolly good charitable idea.   Why not pack up all the left over party food and take it to the family of the man that was killed?  (Of course with no thought to the fact that the cottagers had never eaten food like that all their lives.)   Laura goes into the area where the cottages are located.    Mansfield is such an artist that you can feel Laura's fear as she goes into this area.   It all seems dark and evil and ever so wretched.    Laura goes into the cottage and views the body of the deceased.   It is Laura's reaction to the body of the  man and the multiple interpretations that can be made of this that seem to give this story its power and lasting appeal.


"There lay a young man, fast asleep--sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy...happy...All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content."


Mansfield does not tell us what to make of this.   Is Laura just a silly rich girl who did not know that the poor have lives too or does she experience some kind of revelation when she sees the body?   Is this a mockery of  accepted views of death or is it a celebration of  them?   There is a nuch more to the story but I hope some may want to read it so I will not tell more of the plot.



I have read this story several times now and it is a marvelous account of class structures in the 1920s, among many other things.   I quoted a bit from the text so new readers can see her beautiful prose at work.

All these stories can be read at the New Zealand Electronic Text center, a great reading web page.   If you go to Youtube.com you will also find a number of videos relating to Katherine Mansfield.  

Here is a link to all of my Mansfield posts-The Reading Life Katherine Mansfield Project

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/search/label/Katherine%20Mansfield

The best book on her life and work is Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/search/label/Katherine%20Mansfield

I highly recommend Katherine's Wish by Linda Lappin, a novel based on the last year of Mansfield's Life

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2016/02/katherine-wish-by-linda-lappin-2008.html


Morphologies Masterclass- Alison MacLeod on Katherine Mansfield 


I highly recommend this lecture - from the 2013 Manchester Literature Festival


https://youtu.be/a2DuHLQnFQM



The Katherine Mansfield Society website is a very valuable resource

https://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/

Mel u




Saturday, October 12, 2024

Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages


 

Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages 

Very  soon after  France surrendered to the Nazis, in May of 1940, the Germans made it their goal to appropriate France's  wine.  Wine was a  important part of daily French life and the vast vineyards supported much of the population.  Top Nazis officials fancied themselves experts on wine.

 As the war went on the Germans soon required all wine to sold to Germans, served in restaurants only open to Germans.  Vineyard workers were conscripted to work in Germany.  Vital horses were taken.

Vineyard owners began to seek ways to hide their products. 
They hid their most prized wines immediately, knowing that the Germans would take them and, more importantly, not appreciate them. They built walls in their cellars, closing in the wines behind them, and had their children collect spiders so they'd spin webs to make the wall look older. Dust from old carpets were collected to put on cheap bottles to make them appear rare.

These are the true stories of vignerons who sheltered Jewish refugees in their cellars and of winemakers who risked their lives to aid the resistance. They made chemicals in secret laboratories to fuel the resistance and fled from the Gestapo when arrests became imminent.
There were treacheries too, as some of the nation's winemakers supported the Vichy regime, or the Germans themselves, and collaborated.

Don and Petie Kladstrup are former journalists who have written extensively about wine and France for numerous publications. Don, a winner of three Emmys and numerous other awards, was a foreign correspondent for ABC and CBS television news. Petie, an Overseas Press Club winner, was a newspaper journalist and more recently protocol officer for the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. The Kladstrups divide their time between Paris and Normandy






Friday, October 11, 2024

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages


 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - 2022- 791 Pages 


Demon Copperhead is set in western Virginia in the Appalacians.  It is the story of an orphan growing up in the midst of the opiod epidemic.  Kingsolver modeled it meticulously on another novel about an orphan, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.  Dickens would be proud.


A New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2022 * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller *
 An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post Bestseller

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient." —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero's unforgettable journey to maturity

Told my Damon (he his given a nickname of Damon), his unwed teenage mother gives birth to him in her trailer.

Kingsolver shows us the impact of the coal mines, the stripping of the forests,  the exploration of Appalacia going back two hundred years.  The only jobs are as coal miners, the schools are terrible, the health care worse and the foster system is a cruel joke.  

Purdue Pharmaceutical company has decided this would be the perfect place to market a pain killer, oxytocin which ends up furthering the destruction of the community.  Doctors get free trips for prescribing it.  Once you start on it, you are made miserable once the impact wears down.

We follow Demon through his relationship with a very abusive stepfather, the death of his mother, his time in foster care, his friendships and romances.  Football is every thing in his town and he becomes a star player.  Death and addiction rule until they don't thanks to the resliance of Damon and some help.  

You will love the ending. Like a Dickens novel, every chapter wants you waiting to find out what happens next.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, Prodigal Summer, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. With her husband and daughters she authored the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2000 was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.





Friday, October 4, 2024

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages



 Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages


"The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.


Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.


In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress.


In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.


Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late." From the publisher 


Jason Stanley employs details from the rise of Nazism in Germany to explain how authoritarians systematically destroy the knowledge of history, seeking to convince people they are aiming at restoring a period in which times were much better. They accuse one segment of society as out to destroy the country. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews, in India now it is Muslims, in America immigrants. Authoritarians universally vilify the LGTBQ in their societies, insist women should be first of all wives and breeders. In Russia, a totally authoritarianism culture, one man is the great leader.


In America the history of slavery was for generations taught as not harmful to the slaves. Some school text books said slaves were better off in America. In India, the role of Muslims in Indian history is not taught in schools, in Russia historical truths involving the past independence of the Ukraine have been transformed into the notion that it was always part of Russia.

In America absurdities are used to hide the genocide inflicted on Native Americans by Europeans. The American founding fathers are treated like saints. These things require a take over of how schools teach history.

  In the United States Stanley details how the governor of Florida as done all he can to turn schools into parrots for the views of trump and his sycophants.  

There is so much of great value in this book.  Sadly those supporters of authoritarians world wide, especially in America will not read this or probably any other book.


"I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also an honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation.


Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.


My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. The proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018).


My last book, published in November, 2023, is The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press .  My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster." 








Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages


 Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages


I am very glad to begin October with Jonathan Blitzer's incredibly informative book.

"National Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • A Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist Finalist 

“What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is sure to take its place as one of the definitive accounts of the U.S. and Central American immigration puzzle. . . . Hopefully, those with the power to change things will listen.” —Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer"


Everything said by trump and his sycophants about immigration is false, much of it deliberate lies designed to terrify white Americans about millions of murders, gangsters and pet Eaters who are out to destroy America. As Blitzer explains elegantly Gangs in El Salvador,  Honduras and Guatemala originally developed when American authorities deported immigrants arrested for a crime of any kind.

Blitzer focues a lot  on El Salvador (I have been to Guatemala).  

 . . . "What could be a complex story is a stunning epic woven around the lives of four individuals seeking sanctuary from the death squads and murderous gangs that at different times dominated their homelands . . . While at times this is implicitly an indictment of the sometime short-termism and cynicism of Washington’s foreign, security and immigration policy, this is a novelistic account rather than a tract, and his tale is beautifully told. All four characters, whose lives he has followed over many years, linger in the reader’s mind.” —Financial Times  

Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer will become a classic.  I thank Jonathan Blitzer for this beautiful heartbreaking and heartwarming work.

Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.


Tuesday, October 1, 2024

The Reading Life Review - September 2024.




 The Reading Life Review - September 2024. 


In September I posted on two novels, a short story by Carol Shields as well as two novels.

Septemper Nonfiction 

1. The River of Doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.—2006 -  an amazing book, combining a vivid description of the Amazon, an arduous journey with details about American political history.

2. River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011  a fascinating exciting account of the first voyage by Europeans to transverse the Amazon

3.Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

4. Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003


September Novels

1.  Long Island by Colm Tóibín- 2024- A sequel to his Brooklyn 

2.  The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages 

September Short Stories

1. "Block Out" by Carol Shields - 2004

Home Countries of September Authors

1. USA- 5
2. Canada-1
3. Ireland- 1

Blog Stats 

As of today our posts have been viewed 8,012,930  times

In September we received  70,600 Pages views

Top Home Countries of September blog visitors 

1. Hong Kong

2. USA 

3. Singapore 

4. India

5. Philippines 

6. UK 

7. Netherlands 

8. Indonesia 

9. France

10. Germany 


The most viewed posts were on S. E. Asian short stories 




Friday, September 27, 2024

"Block Out" - A Shorf Story by Carol Shields - 17 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004


 Buriedinprint.com 



This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"Blocked Out " is the 31th short story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.

The story centers on a middle aged married couple from Ontario on a trip to Portugal. The man is a commercially successful writer of comic novels. For years prior to the death of his wife his current wife was his editor, loving him and his work.  

"THE WRITER MEERSHANK, vacationing in Portugal with his wife-cum-editor, Maybelle Spritz, became blocked. The two of them spent their first morning there exploring the coastal city of Porto, which is an airy gemlike city that, as Maybelle complained, had been severely underrated—given one lousy star in the Michelin Guide, that was all. This was plain crazy, a single star for a dozen broad sun-splashed terraces, for countless baroque churches, for the elegant iron bridges, and the lazy smoky river lined with pungent fishing boats and dark bars. Ridiculous! She was indignant. She slapped the green guidebook hard against her long thigh. Coming to Portugal had been her idea. She was the one who had thought of flight, of leaving the Ontario winter behind, who had persuaded and cajoled and weakened her husband, Meershank, and she was determined to unearth treasures for him hour by hour. Now this insult, this chintzy rating, a gorgeous city awarded one grudging star. “And just listen,” Maybelle said to Meershank, stopping in the middle of a steep, winding cobbled street to consult the despised guide. “We’re supposed to ‘note the gaily colored laundry flapping overhead.’ Laundry! I ask you. Never mind this incredible architecture all around us, we’re asked to gape at mended laundry"

Another marvelous story.



Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages



 Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages


OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Stunning.” —People * “Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” —The Boston Globe * “Momentous and hugely affecting.” —The Wall Street Journal *

From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.


Long Island is the 16th work by Colm Toibin upon which I have posted.

Long Island is a sequel to his novel Brooklyn.   Brooklyn is set in the 1950s.  It is about a young Irish woman, Eilis, who moves from rural Ireland to Brooklyn in hopes of  making a better life.

Eilis gets a job working in a big store and lives in a boarding house owned by an Irish woman and all of the other tenants are Irish women also. 

Eilis meets a man, a kind decent one but he Italian, not Irish. She goes to night school. Brooklyn is very much about the immigrant experience. It is about longing for home and the consequences of emigration on those who are left behind.  

Long Island jumps ahead twenty years.  Eilis Lacey is, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, 

A man arrives at her door one day with such shocking news that Ellis feels a need to go back to Ireland to get away from her husband. 

The occasion is the 80th birthday of her mother. She takes her two teenage children with her.  

Lacy reconnects with her best friend and an old flame who owns a popular pub.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of eleven novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal and the Würth Prize for European Literature. SimonandSchuster.com



Thursday, September 19, 2024

The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages



 The Keeper of Hidden Books  by Madeline Martin -2023 -413 pages

This is the third novel by Madeline Martin I have had the extreme pleasure of reading.



In December of 2021 I read The Last Bookstore in London by Madeline Martin, set in London during the Blitz years of World War Two. I loved this deeply moving vivid account of the impact of Germany's bombing of London on a small Bookstore.

Last year I read her The Libraian Spy set during World War Two in Paris as well as Lyon and Lisbon. Paris is occupied by the Germans. Portugal is neutral but in danger of being invaded. People come from all over Europe to Lisbon hoping to get a visa to go to America

The Keeper of Hiden Books is set primarily in Warsaw during World War Two.  Like her other books, much of the plot action centers around the
 work of the Central characters in a library. 

Poland was the first country taken over by Nazi Germany. The Germans did all they could to destroy the culture of Poland, banning and destroying many of the books in the libraries of Warsaw.   

"The Keeper of Hidden Books is yet another expertly researched and inspiring work of historical fiction from Madeline Martin. As Zofia Nowak and her young friends fight for their fellow Polish and Jewish citizens during the horrific German occupation, they witness again and again the power of friendship and literature in even the darkest times. With her direct, brave and thoughtful manner (so wonderfully reminiscent of Jo March), loyalty and love for her Jewish best friend, and touching first love with a fellow resistance fighter, Zofia is destined to capture readers' hearts everywhere--rarely have I loved or admired a character more. A heart-pounding, illuminating, and very important addition to the canon of WWII fiction."–Natalie Jenner, bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls

I found myself caring deeply about some of people in The Keeper of Hidden Books.  Others, including all the Germans I hated.  Martin vividly brings to cinematic immediacy the way life in Warsaw keeps getting worse for the Poles and especially anyone Jewish.  

I do not want to give away much of the plot other than to say at times I was scared for the Central characters and at times elated.  I admit to enjoying death scenes of Germans and especially one collaborator.  OK and I howled over the way two tyrannical German female librarians died.

I loved this book.  Martin includes an account of her research and Warsaw history.

"Madeline Martin is a New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books that have been translated into over twenty-five different languages.

She lives in sunny Florida with her two daughters (known collectively as the minions), two incredibly spoiled cats and a man so wonderful he’s been dubbed Mr. Awesome. She is a die-hard history lover who will happily lose herself in research any day. When she’s not writing, researching or ‘moming’, you can find her spending time with her family at Disney or sneaking a couple spoonfuls of Nutella while laughing over cat videos. She also loves to travel, attributing her fascination with history to having spent most of her childhood as an Army brat in Germany." From the author's website.