Book 256: Life After Life

"And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur–if a dish was to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances."

Dates read: August 19-25, 2018

Rating: 8/10

I have a small scar right about a half inch above my left eye. When I was a kid, I was jumping on the bed and my mom told me to stop. I jumped off entirely, and the scar is where the corner of the open dresser drawer I didn't keep track of went into my face. Just a tiny difference in my jump and I would have lost the eye. I wonder what would have changed in my life if I had. Or if I'd made any number of different choices before I went to college. Or while I was in college! If I'd gone to a different law school. If I'd taken a year off between undergrad and law school. If I'd gone to grad school for psychology instead. If, if, if. The fact is that there's no point in torturing myself with hypotheticals for things that have gone "wrong". Things are the way they are and all I can do is try to make the best choices I can from here.

What if, though, things could be changed? If you could go back, live again, make different choices? In Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, on a snowy night in England in 1910, Ursula Todd is born and immediately dies, choked by her umbilical cord, because neither the doctor or midwife made it on time. Then, on the same snowy night, she's born again, but this time the doctor makes it and the cord is cut and she lives. Until she's three, when she follows her older sister Pamela into the ocean and is swept away. Then she's born again with the doctor there, and manages to survive the family trip to the seaside but perishes at age five when her big brother Maurice throws her toy onto the roof and she tries to scramble after it but falls. And so on and so forth. She doesn't remember her previous lives, per se, but has strong feelings about crucial events that drive her to new actions in the face of them.

Where the book spends the bulk of its time is Ursula's various World War II experiences. In a few she dies when a bomb falls on her apartment building. In a few she's working on the rescue/cleanup squad. And in at least one, she's living in Germany. The fates of her family members, too, change in each go-round. What happens to Teddy, her sensitive, thoughtful younger brother who becomes a pilot, has a major impact on how things go for the family. Some things, though, never change: her deeply practical and stalwart sister Pamela always marries and has children and spends the war at the family home, and belligerent brother Maurice is never much liked by his parents or siblings and always rises to positions of authority.

Anyone who's ever wondered how things might have turned out if they had a chance to do it all over again (i.e. pretty much everyone) will find this an intriguing concept. And it allows Atkinson freedom to really explore the ways in which seemingly-small moments can resonate enormously in our lives, which she does with clear, assured prose that feels almost old-fashioned or "classic" in tone. Refreshingly, the most important choices are mostly unrelated to her romantic relationships with men! As a lady person, I'm used to books (and the world in general, honestly) treating marriage and childbearing as the central dramas of women's lives. Who she loves, though, is much less important to Ursula's story than her relationships with her siblings, particularly Pamela and Teddy, who are both wonderfully likable characters and the kind of siblings everyone wants to have.

What held back this novel from greatness for me was that with so many lives cataloged, I found myself sometimes more interested in how she would die this time than how that life actually played out, as well as a portion near the end that bugged a little bit because it made me question the underlying mechanics of it all. To be honest, though, these quibbles are a little on the nitpicky side and I wonder if they would have occurred to me if I'd read this book completely free from expectations. It's a very good book, well-written and enjoyable. But when I read it after hearing about how good it was for years, I was expecting something mind-blowing and it didn't get there, for me. Like I said, though, it's still something I liked quite a bit and I'd recommend it to all readers!

One year ago, I was reading: The Line of Beauty

Two years ago, I was reading: Detroit

Three years ago, I was reading: White Fur

Four years ago, I was reading: The Executioner's Song

Five years ago, I was reading: Through the Language Glass

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Book 256: Life After Life

Book 185: The Book Thief

"Although something inside her told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn't help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate."

Dates read: October 25-30, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Over the past several months (writing from the end of 2017), there's been no small amount of debate over what it means to be complicit. Ivanka Trump asserted that she's not complicit in her father's presidency, which she wouldn't necessarily be as a daughter, but she pretty clearly is as a senior advisor in his administration. There's a growing awareness that to be privileged in a system that's beneficial to you, whether or not you are an active architect or proponent of it, without taking action for marginalized people also flirts with the line of complicity. No one likes to feel complicit, so we try to find ways to weasel out of it, to find people more actively involved with whatever it is, point the finger at them.

One of the biggest open questions of complicity in the last century is that of the German population under the Third Reich. I suspect, like most things, it fell in some sort of bell curve...some citizens were opposed, some were supporters, and most fell somewhere in between, trying to survive by keeping their heads down. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief takes us to a small village in Germany during World War II and lets us see that spectrum play out. A young girl named Liesel and her brother are brought by their mother to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, because their mother can no longer afford to keep them with her. On the way, though, her brother dies, and this is what brings Liesel to the attention of Death.

Death is our narrator, and when the illiterate Liesel snatches a book off the ground as her brother is buried, he (it?) dubs her "the book thief". Liesel doesn't actually steal very many books during the course of the story, but it fits well enough. For a while, as Liesel grows to know and love her rough-edged, foul-mouthed foster mother and gentle, patient foster father who teaches her to read, and makes friends with her neighbor Rudy, their little town is isolated from larger events. But the real world can't be avoided forever, and World War II sweeps over the Hubermann household, bringing a Jewish man into their basement to hide and constant danger lurking everywhere.

The villagers' attitudes toward Nazism range from passionate true believers to the Hubermanns, who resist joining the Party and hide a Jew for months. Many of their neighbors go along as far as they need to to keep out of trouble. I don't think this is a perspective we see very often, looking at the ordinary people who exist in these regimes, and so I found it interesting to read. Zusak's characterizations of everyone who populates the village are a highlight...Liesel herself is probably the least well-developed character, but Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and several of Liesel's other classmates make vivid impressions and linger in the memory even after the book is closed.

But even though this book tends to get rapturous praise, there were some places where it fell flat, too. I think the Death-as-narrator trick worked less well than it could have...it just struck me as more gimmicky than meaningful and never really developed. I think the constant interjections into the text as "explainers" by Death were overused, and I think Zusak's writing is sometimes overly focused on going for "wow" instead of letting itself flow. As a whole, though, these are minor quibbles. The book is very good, with vivid and developed characters living in a well-drawn community, and the ending has a big (and earned!) emotional impact. It's well-worth reading and I'd recommend it widely, to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Two years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Three years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

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Book 185: The Book Thief

Book 159: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits could be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."

Dates read: July 6-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Awards/Lists: Pulitzer Prize, New York Times bestseller

I hate plenty of pieces of beloved literature. I had a whole post on it quite soon after I started my blog, but to save you the effort of going and finding it and myself the cringing I'd surely do if I went back and read it (I like to think that I'm getting better at writing this thing as I go along), I'll give you some of the highlights. I got nothing from Gone With The Wind. I LOATHED The Catcher In The Rye. I find Pride & Prejudice the least compelling of the Austen I've read so far. I did not at all care for The Great Gatsby when I first read it (thankfully, I re-read it after high school and now it's a favorite). Part of it is that everyone has different tastes, and part of it is the hype that comes from reading something that so many people have told you is amazing. It creates expectations that are really hard to live up to.

When you have a novel that tops many critical lists as one of the best of the 21st century, is considered a modern Great American Novel, and has won the Pulitzer, that's a lot of hype. So I have to admit I was a little nervous to start Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. What if all the hype was just, well, hype and I'd be slogging through like 600 pages of something I couldn't connect with? But starting on like page 50, I turned to my husband and announced "this is a really good book that I'm reading". I proceeded to announce this to just about everyone who might possibly care and probably several people who didn't. The hype is real, guys. This book is amazing.

It begins with the arrival of 19 year-old Josef Kavalier in Brooklyn, where his 17 year-old cousin Sammy Klayman is startled to find that he has a Czechoslovakian cousin, much less one with whom he's suddenly expected to share a room. Joe has just been smuggled out of Prague, where it's becoming more and more dangerous to be a Jewish person as Hitler's power begins to rise, and he's determined to make the most from the sacrifices his family undertook on his behalf and get them out, too. When he notices his cousin's talent for drawing, along with his own knack for a catchy story, Sammy has an idea: comic books. Superman has enraptured American youth, and soon the team that dubs itself Kavalier and Clay has a hero of their own: The Escapist, who cannot be contained by lock or key. The book then follows the players through time, as their comics become quite popular indeed: the bond that grows between them, Joe's struggle to get his family back, both men falling in love for the first time, and the fallout from major losses that rock them.

The quality of the writing is so, so good. I'd read Chabon's more recent Moonglow several months prior to this, so I was prepared for a well-told, wide-ranging tale, but this blows that one out of the water. I've added several other of his works to my TBR, but I'd be shocked if they could measure up to this one. Not that he's not extremely talented, but this has the feel of a masterpiece. It's detailed and rich and involving...I moved through it at a pace significantly slower than I usually read because there was so much there and I didn't want to miss a single turn of phrase. There are several situations in the book that are fantastical to the point of almost being preposterous, but Chabon lays so much groundwork and is so sensitive to the emotional truth of his deeply-realized characters that he's earned the trust of the readers to go there and they very much work. It's an incredible book and I would recommend it to any human that enjoys reading.

Tell me, blog friends, what super-hyped books let you down?

One year ago, I was reading: The Girl in the Tower

Two years ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Three years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 159: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Book 156: The Good German

"Clean. Hardworking. Just like us. Then they'd seen the camps, or at least the newsreels. How could they do it? The answer, the only one that made sense to them, was that they hadn't—somebody else had. But there wasn't anybody else. So they stopped asking."

Dates read: June 27- July 1, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Black and white thinking about the world is tempting. It would be easier that way, to separate it into good and bad without overlap or complication. But the world is a complication, and nearly everyone lives inside a shade of gray. Like most people, I like to think about myself as a good person, but of course (also like most people), I've been rude and thoughtless and even occasionally cruel. I mean girled a close friend in high school and made her cry. I stole a sweater that fell off of someone's laundry pile in college. I've said vicious things to my sister. Those aren't things a "good person" does, and the guilt I feel when I think about them inspires me to try to be better moving forward, to try to at least be on the lighter side of gray.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allies found themselves trying to figure out how to deal with a whole mess of dark-gray-but-not-quite-black. There were a few obvious evildoers that were put on trial and executed, but what to do with the vast majority of German people who were on some level complicit with Nazi rule but didn't really do anything? And what about people who might have been more directly involved with the machinery of the Nazi state but have something valuable to offer? Joseph Kanon's The Good German is deeply steeped in these hard, serious questions, which serve as background to a complicated romance and a twisty thriller, both centering on American journalist Jake Geismar.

Geismar arrives in Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, but he's not new to the city. He lived and worked there for years, including the early years of the Nazi regime, before the war. His assignment might be to cover Potsdam, but he's really there to find Lena, the beautiful married woman with whom he was having a passionate affair before he left. But before he can find her, he finds something else: a young American soldier, floating dead in a lake with a bullethole through him and thousands of dollars still on him. His investigation of the dead man leads him back to Lena, but along with Lena come questions about her husband, Emil. Emil, a literal rocket scientist, has vanished and both the Americans and the Russians are very, very interested in what might have happened to him.

I've always enjoyed books that go right for the kind of moral relativity that can be very uncomfortable to contemplate, and The Good German is rife with it. Who is the titular good German anyways? Is it Lena and the thousands of others like her who tried to live their lives as normally as possible, pretending they didn't know what was happening, not speaking out or acting out against the regime but not really having done anything affirmatively to participate in it either? Is it someone like Emil, who did have more active participation but has skills that can help the victors achieve great things? Is it Emil's father, an academic who dropped out of public life with the rise of the Nazis but didn't do anything to actively resist? What about the former detective, very much a part of the Nazi state, but who helped his Jewish wife survive until she was spotted by someone else, and providing testimony against the woman who betrayed his wife to her death?

That the betrayer was, in this case, herself Jewish led me down a disturbing Wikipedia deep dive. I knew there was some level of individual Jewish cooperation with the Nazi state in situations like ghetto leadership, but I never knew there were Jewish people who helped "out" Jews that were in hiding to the Nazis. The novel's character seems to be loosely based on Stella Kubler, who initially began her work in order to protect her parents and husband, as well as herself. But even after they were deported to death camps, she continued to catch other Jews for two years! After serving time in Russia, she converted to Christianity and eventually ended up committing suicide but not until the 1990s. So I learned something completely new, which is always interesting.

As for the book itself, I enjoyed it and would recommend it. It sounds like kind of a "dad book" (WWII-era, thriller, older male protagonist) but it's quite good. Kanon draws interesting characters and puts them into difficult situations, and with the thriller elements there's a nice balance of plot and character. I did get a little confused near the end trying to keep track of who was on what side and who was double crossing who, but on the whole the book was involving and prompted a lot of thought. I tend to be a little wary of World War II books because I feel like a lot of them go over the same territory again and again, but this one was a new take (for me, anyways), and is very much worth a read.

Tell me, blog friends...do you believe in moral relativity or is it more black and white for you?

One year ago, I was reading: In The Woods

Two years ago, I was reading: The Emigrants

Three years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 156: The Good German

Book 132: City of Thieves

"That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war."

Dates read: March 10-15, 2017

Rating: 9/10

Friendships that form under intense circumstances can be especially enduring. Most of us are or at least know someone that's still friends with someone they met at college orientation, just because you find yourselves thrown together at a vulnerable time. It quite often has little to do with what you actually have in common, but something about sharing new and interesting experiences with a person bonds you in a way that's hard to compare. I think of some of my law school classmates almost as war buddies. 

In David Benioff's City of Thieves, Lev Beniov is an introverted Jewish teenager living through the siege of Leningrad during WWII. One night, watching for air strikes on the roof of his apartment building with his friends, they spot a paratrooper and race through the streets (well after curfew, of course) and run after him. The man is dead, and the teenagers steal whatever they can off his body, with Lev in particular snagging a knife. The police spot them and the kids run...but Lev is caught. Thrown in the notorious local jail, he thinks he's dead. Then his cell opens in the night to admit Kolya, a bold 20something in a military uniform who claims that he was snagged after going AWOL to defend his thesis. Instead of being executed in the morning as Lev fears, he and Kolya are given a task: to collect two dozen eggs in a starving city for a wedding cake.

What emerges from there is a fairly predictable quest narrative. Lev and Kolya journey within the city and eventually outside of it to find the eggs they need to get their ration cards (i.e. their only link to the extremely limited supply of food) back, and as they encounter characters and obstacles and characters who are obstacles, they grow closer. We know that Lev survives into the present day because of the framing device Benioff uses, in which he presents Lev as his own grandfather relating the story to him, but exactly how he does, and what will become of the people around him are unknowns that propel the plot forward. Both Kolya and Lev are well-written characters, and although the structure of their journey is a familiar one, Benioff's prose is lively and entertaining and a pleasure to read.

I was happily surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I picked it up because Benioff is a producer of Game of Thrones, one of my favorite TV shows, and I'd heard it was pretty decent, but I usually have a hard time connecting with stories that feel decidedly "masculine". But this was a coming-of-age story that wasn't overly steeped in gendered notions of what that means. It's still more masculine than feminine, but not to the point where I felt alienated from it as I often do with stories that posit violence and/or emotional repression as what it means to become a man. It's as much as anything a story about a brief, intense friendship that forever changed a teenage boy, and who can't relate to that narrative? I definitely recommend this book, I'm already looking forward to re-reading it someday when I finally read through my TBR.

Tell me, blog friends...have you still got friends that you made when you went through hard times together?

One year ago, I was reading: In The Skin of a Lion

Two years ago, I was reading: The Name of the Rose

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Book 132: City of Thieves

Book 32: The Nazi Hunters

 

"A big part of the motivation for holding the war crimes trials was exactly that: to provide examples of justice at work for the whole world to see. By presenting the record of the Third Reich, aggression by aggression, mass murder by mass murder, atrocity by atrocity, the trials were critical to establishing exactly what had happened- and establishing the principle that the perpetrators bore direct responsibility for their crimes, whatever they understood their orders to be."

Dates read: March 16-19, 2016

Rating: 6/10

If you'd asked me, after high school, what history looked like from World War Two on, based on what I'd learned in class, I'd have probably said something like this: WW2 started in Europe, but the US stayed out until Pearl Harbor was attacked. There'd be a brief aside about Japanese interment on the home front, but once we got into the war overseas, America kicked ass and took names. We won the battles and liberated the concentration camps. Then there was the Cold War, which meant McCarthyism, the Space Race, and then the glasnost/perestroyka stuff and the Berlin Wall came down. That was usually as far as we got before the end of the year.

If you wanted me to tell you what happened to the Nazi leadership after the war, I wouldn't have had much to offer besides that Hitler and his mistress killed themselves. This isn't to tear down public school curriculum or teachers or insinuate that I was taught poorly or anything like that. World and even US history are such broad topics that you kind of have to focus on the highlights or you'd never get through it. But the fact remains that I (and I imagine many others) are largely clueless about what actually happened to the Nazis. Now that it's 2016 and many of the major players are very old or gone, there is perspective to look back at how it all played out: both with the Nazis and the people who sought to bring them to justice. Hence, Andrew Nagorski's The Nazi Hunters.

If you're like me and you have only a vague understanding of the topic but find it interesting, this book is a good choice. It's very comprehensive. Nagorski begins by discussing the immediate aftermath of liberation of the camps, including military personnel literally looking the other way on some occasions in which survivors assaulted and killed their former tormentors, then the Dachau trials and the Nuremberg trials. This was largely (but not totally) the end of judicial proceedings against former Nazis, and Nagorski covers why that was, with the rising tide of the Cold War cited as a particular distraction for the international community.

It might have been the effective end of the trials, but it was not the end of people seeking justice against senior members of the Nazi party. The most high-profile story is the abduction and Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, but there's also the stories of former Nazis Klaus Barbie, Latvian pilot Herbert Cukurs, and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, among many many others, and their hunters, like Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Isser Harel, and Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

I'm not sure quite what I was expecting going in, but I think it was more along the lines of a narrative/non-fiction novel style book. This is not that. It's very factual...not quite as dry as true academic writing, but more like newspaper reporting. It's very well-researched and thorough, but if you're looking for a thrilling true life pageburner, this will probably disappoint you.

Tell me, blog friends...what gaps did high school history leave in your knowledge?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 32: The Nazi Hunters

Book 6: The Nazi Officer's Wife

“You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.” 

Dates read: October 25-27, 2015

Rating: 10/10

An Austrian Jewish woman survives the Holocaust by marrying a member of the Nazi party. When she meets him, he is initially a high-ranking factory official, but by the end of the war, when everyone is pressed into active duty, he is an officer within the party. And the kicker? He knows she's Jewish. Totally made up, right? Wrong. That is the actual story of Edith Hahn Beer.

The Shoah has, understandably, sparked a lot of significant literature. The Diary of Anne Frank. Night. Sophie's Choice. Why this incredible memoir hasn't been included in the canon is beyond me, honestly. It was (like almost all of my Kindle books) a sale selection, the title promising a fascinating tale although memoirs aren't an especial favorite of mine. And it's been one of the few books I've read recently that I literally couldn't put down.

One of the upsides of the Kindle is its portability. And I have the Kindle app on my phone, although I hardly use it usually. Not here. I was reading on my eight-minute walk to work. I was reading in the bathroom. I was reading every spare second I could grab. Beer's writing voice feels like a story your aunt or grandma is telling you...it's immediate, it grabs you and doesn't let you go. From the moment that she's sent to her first work camp assignment, missing her mother's departure for the ghetto, to her friend's bravery in giving Edith her identification documents (which the friend then reported as "missing") so that Edith, unable to draw rations on her false ID, will at least be able to try to find work, to her first meeting with her future husband Werner, to her refusal to have any pain medication during the birth of their child so that she won't spill her desperate secret, all of it is incredibly compelling and although we know she survives her experience because she wrote a book about it, we can't help but eagerly turn pages to see how it plays out. Basically I was completely swept away and never wanted it to end and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-told story.

Tell me, blog friends...do you like memoirs or am I the weirdo that finds them very skippable?

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Book 6: The Nazi Officer's Wife