On The Other Side by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg

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Yesterday I wrote about Monica Dickens’ The Winds of Heaven, and told you that it was towards the fluffier end of the Persephone Books canon – and promised to take you to the other side of their spectrum today.  Well, here it is – one of Persephone’s non-fiction titles, On The Other Side: Letters to My Children From Germany 1940-1946 by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, translated by her daughter Ruth Evans, and first published in 1979. 

On The Other Side is effectively Mathilde’s diary, framed through letters to her children in Britain (although she never sent them), and documents what life was like in Germany during the Second World War.  Despite having read a lot about the British Home Front, the German equivalent is a perspective I have never read firsthand.  It helps that Mathilde is a delightful person, easy to empathise with – what other response would we have to someone who would say this?

Life would have no purpose at all if there weren’t books and human beings on loves, whose fate one worries about day and night.
This is going to be one of those ‘reviews’ which are, in fact, mostly quotations from the book – because the excerpts I’ve selected give such a comprehensive overview of the diary that it would be a waste of time for me to try and paraphrase them. 

Rather naively, I hadn’t really realised that people like Mathilde existed in wartime Germany.  I thought the German public would have been divided into those who supported Nazism, those who were apathetic, and those who lied to so much by Nazi propaganda that, though not sympathetic to those views, had no way of knowing what was going on.  But Mathilde shows that there were many exceptions:

Practically everyone knows that all that bluff and rubbish printed in
the newspapers and blazoned out on the wireless is hollow nonsense, and
when big speeches are made nobody listens any more.
Indeed, the account she gives of the appalling public life of Jewish Germans could scarcely be bettered by a textbook in its fullness, nor its empathy

Perhaps you cannot imagine what life is like for Jews.  Their ration cards are printed on the outside with a large red J, so that everybody knows at one that they are non-Aryan.  All women have to add the name Sarah to their first names, the men Israel.  They never get special rations, such as coffee, tea or chocolate, nor do they received clothing coupons.  After 7.30 at night they are not allowed out into the street; their radios and telephones have been removed.  Practically every shop and restaurant has a notice saying ‘Jews are not wanted here.’  It is so vile and mean that I can only blush with embarrassment while I write this.  But you and your children must know of this, that things like this are possible in Germany under our present regime.  You will hardly credit all this, or the fact that we others have stood by and said nothing.  And there are much, much worse things.  Many people have committed suicide because they could not bear this indignity.  Then, like vultures and hyenas, they [the Nazis] rush in and grab the belongings of the dead; honest names are smeared with filth, and decent Germans have been driven to emigrate by the thousand.
When reading about the war from the perspective of a British person (or, I daresay, the French, Belgian etc. – I haven’t read their accounts) there is much pain and anguish, but little internal conflict.  Love of country and hatred of the enemy can be expressed in a single breath, without contradiction.  While individuals may question the point of war as a concept, or the political manoeuvres of those in power, this couldn’t compare to the conflict Mathilde experienced with love of country and hatred of Hitler.

But however much we strain with every nerve of our beings towards the downfall of our government, we still mourn most deeply the fate of our poor Germany.  It is as if the final bomb hit our very soul, killing the last vestige of joy and, hope.  Our beautiful and proud Germany has been crushed, ground into the earth and smashed into ruins, while millions sacrificed their lives and all our lovely towns and art treasures were destroyed.  And all this because of one man who had a lunatic vision of being ‘chosen by God’.  May he and his followers be caught in just retribution.
However engaging and thought-provoking On The Other Side was for Mathilde’s accounts of the war, the actual events were very similar to those in Britain – shortages, bombings, fear for loved ones.  It is certainly all moving, but it has become familiar ground in fiction and non-fiction.  The part I found most fascinating concerned Mathilde’s experiences after the war was over; it was, again, something I had never read about from a German’s perspective.

6 May 1945: It is Sunday and I almost hesitate to put pen to paper.  Too much has happened in the few days since last I wrote.  The whole world has changed and part of the crushing nightmare that oppressed us for so long has been lifted during these five days.  I have listened quite openly to an American and to a British radio station, no longer threatened with the death sentence for this.  I can go along the road and proclaim loudly, “Adolf Hitler, the most evil criminal in the world,” and nobody will tell me to shut up.  Can you imagine that?  And can you picture our Andreasstrasse full of English trucks and private cars; on the pavements and in the front gardens a milling crowd of English soldiers – and it is a Welsh regiment, Ruth dear.  They serenely patrol the district: one is sitting in the middle of the road playing with a dog, another one is playing a recorder on a balcony; a couple tumble in and out of the house, for downstairs a captain has moved into the bottom flat.  What a lot of coming and going!
Although Mathilde and her husband welcomed the end of the war, and were very grateful for being in the British-controlled part of Germany (apparently other areas, particularly that under the rule of Russia, suffered greatly), the British army were, probably understandably, reluctant at first to sympathise with the German public. This was perhaps the most moving passage in the book:

He [her husband] was so passionately devoted to Great Britain and all it stood for.  Now he is disillusioned by the limitless arrogance and the dishonesty with which they treat us, proclaiming to the whole world that only Germany could have sunk so low in such abysmal cruelty and bestiality, that they themselves are pure and beyond reproach.  And who destroyed our beautiful cities, regardless of human life, of women, children or old people?  Who poured down poisonous phosphorous during the terror raids on unfortunate fugitives, driving them like living torches into the rivers?  Who dive-bombed harmless peasants, women and children, in low-level attacks, and machine-gunned the defenceless population?  Who was it, I ask you?  We are all the same, all equally guilty, and if my entire being was not straining towards a re-union with you, life would be nothing but torture and abhorrence.
As I promised at the start, I have mostly quoted from the book, rather than giving my own views.  It’s one of those books which I believe is too important to have me weigh in on it.  I couldn’t say that I loved Mathilde’s voice as much as I love Nella Last’s, but they are books which ought to be read alongside each other.  On The Other Side couldn’t be much further from The Winds of Heaven, but both exemplify what makes Persephone Books wonderful – books which enrich the reading life, whether through delightful fiction or thought-provoking non-fiction.

The Winds of Heaven – Monica Dickens

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Firstly, just thought I’d let you know that I’m back in the blogosphere (after two or three days of not reading much) and have replied to all recent comments, including all the wonderful and interesting comments on the On Commenting post.

Having recently got all excited about Persephone publishing their 100th title, I decided to check my unread Persephones against my A Century of Books list, and see how many blank spaces could be filled.  I have loved doing A Century of Books, but there’s no denying that some of those blank spaces are frustratingly elusive.  However, this cross-referencing did fill up two gaps – which happened to cover the whole cross-section of Persephone’s ethos.  Today’s book is at the light, frothy end of the scale – the book I’ll review tomorrow is serious and important.  I’m very glad to have read both.

My parents gave me The Winds of Heaven (1955) for my birthday a year or two ago, and it’s been on my large pile of books I’m looking forward to reading – especially since I am already a huge fan of Monica Dickens’ semi-autobiographical, very hilarious One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet.  But haven’t yet, somehow, read Mariana.  Anyway, The Winds of Heaven is very different from those – gone is the humour, gone is the absurdity, and present instead is one widower’s lonely, awkward life, bustled from pillar to post (those pillars and posts being represented by three rather selfish daughters.)

Lest we be in any doubt that those heavenly winds of the title be metaphorical, the opening paragraph is this:

When the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes, and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.
Louise Bickford is certainly of the creep-about variety.  She is recently a widow, left with enormous debts by an unscrupulous and selfish husband, and must spend her days living with one or other of her three daughters, on rotation.  In this novel, Monica Dickens draws her characters with broad strokes.  Having recently read V.S. Pritchett’s complex and brilliant delineation of his father, it was even clearer that Louise’s husband Dudley is essentially a cartoon villain.  Louise is downtrodden by him, and throughout the novel he looms in her memories like a bogeyman, apparently unkind and cruel from their honeymoon onwards.  Indeed, nobody would read The Winds of Heaven for its range of subtle character portraits – every marriage in the novel has at least one ‘bad’un’, and sometimes two.  On the flipside, some characters are just hopelessly nice.  Here are the various daughters and families:

1.) Miriam – sharp, pre-occupied, but not cruel.  Husband Arthur – cross, irascibile.  Daughter Ellen – sensitive, withdrawn, kind.  Other children Simon and Judy – young, excitable.

2.) Eva – bohemian.  Lover David – unreliable.

3.) Anne – lazy.  Husband Frank – adorable.

I’m being a little unkind to Monica Dickens, and I should point out that none of this prevented me enjoying The Winds of Heaven to the utmost.  It just isn’t a finely-drawn, perceptive novel – it’s light and broad and completely, wonderfully entertaining.  It reminded me a great deal of Richmal Crompton’s novels, which I love but which (I now recognise) are far from great art.  Indeed, the relative staying with various families is a plot Crompton uses more than once, and to great effect in Matty and the Dearingroydes.

Having called this novel entertaining, I should add that its themes are often sombre.  Chief amongst these is Louise’s situation – being loved but unwanted by her family, an awkward imposition wherever she goes.  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor this would be a subtly crafted, very moving story – in the hands of Monica Dickens, it is moving but never heartbreaking.  Serious themes do not a serious novel make.  Indeed, the novel is still more entertaining than it is cautioning or saddening.  In fact, I’m trying to work out why it was so fun to read, when there is almost no comedy in it, and the events are all rather melancholy – from miserable affairs to accidents with farm machinery.  I think it’s the same experience one has when watching a soap opera – the events are so over the top, and the characters embodying individual traits (Anne might as well just be a sign saying Selfish and Lazy) rather than complex personalities, that it’s impossible to feel distraught for them, and instead you can settle down to guiltless enjoyment of the spectacle.

All of which sounds like I’m damning Monica Dickens with faint praise – but I have admiration for authors who can create an action-packed, page-turning novel, with underlying seriousness, and still produce a credible narrative.  Dickens’ writing is never poor, and Louise herself is rather a well-drawn character – just one surrounded by characters who aren’t particularly.  And which of us lives on Elizabeth Taylor alone?  It is no mean feat to produce a loveable, engaging novel.  It’s the light end of the Persephone scale, but it’s perfect for a winter evening when you want something relaxing and enjoyable, with just the right amount of thought-provoking paragraphs laced into the mix.  Thinking about it, The Winds of Heaven is the literary equivalent of The Archers… and that, my parents would assure me, can be no bad thing.

A Quick Note

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There’s me, making a stand on being active in the blogosphere – and I go and disappear for a while.  I’m afraid I’ll be ducking under the radar until Monday, and then I’ll be back with pizzazz – replying to all your wonderful comments etc.  Family time at the moment – including our village sketch show, where I played newsreader Donald McTrevor (with a sort of Yorkshire accent, for some reason.)  More anon.

Thank you!

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(Firstly, apologies if my review of Love at Second Sight, see below, appears twice in Google Reader etc. – I published it early by mistake, then deleted and republished!)

I’ve found the discussion on yesterday’s post so, so interesting and helpful – thank you so much for joining in, if you did.  I hope it was clear that my post was talking to myself, as much as anyone, and that I was trying to address a more general point about the blogosphere, rather than just my blog.  I’m glad so many of us are going to make the same commenting resolution for 2013!  (Although this particular little post can probably be ignored, commentingwise ;) )

Just an update – I recently reinstated the word verification (having had it off for ages) because I was sick of getting dozens of spam comments everyday.  Blogger works out that they’re spam, and they don’t appear here, but they fill up my inbox.  However, after feedback yesterday, I’ve removed the word verification – as that does seem to make quite a difference to people’s experience of commenting.

Happy Thursday!  I’ll be spending much of my day on a train – but it’ll be worth it, cos I’m going hoooome for Chriiiiistmas!  I’ll reply to all of your comments (another thing which seems to make a difference, and which is a heck of a lot more fun for me than deleting spam emails!) as soon as I can.

Love at Second Sight by Ada Leverson

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Whilst rooting around for a 1916 title for A Century of Books (you should have seen me, scrabbling through my books, opening covers, reading publication details, reshelving huffily) I stumbled upon Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson.  It’s the third book in The Little Ottleys, of which I have previously read the first – Love’s Shadow – which was rather brilliant.  This is the only time A Century of Books has really rather compromised my reading plans – in that I skipped past the second title in the trilogy (Tenterhooks) straight to the third.  But someone had spoken on The Little Ottleys at a recent conference, and given away the plot, so it wasn’t as calamitous as it could have been.

Look away if you don’t want to know what happened in the first two novels… but they’ve (to be very brief) set up the fairly loveless marriage of Edith and Bruce; Edith falls in love with Aylmer Ross, but will not leave her husband, even when he asks for a divorce himself (having run off with another woman); he comes back to her, and everything settles down into what it had been before – which is to say, an amusing, charming, patient woman, and an exasperating man.  Bruce is best summed up by this wonderful quotation from Love’s Shadow: “He often wrote letters beginning “Sir, I feel it my duty,” to people on subjects that were no earthly concern of his.”  As for the lovely Edith, I’ll hand over to Leverson to describe her.  An author should show and not tell, as a rule, but all these qualities in Edith have been exemplified in previous books, so it is forgiveable that Leverson wants to let us know what a wonder she is, so that we can get on with the show.

She was a slim, fair, pretty woman, with more vividness and character than usually goes with her type.  Like the boy, she had long-lashed grey eyes, and blonde-cendre hair: her mouth and chin were of the Burne-Jones order, and her charm, which was great but unintentional, and generally unconscious, appealed partly to the senses and partly to the intellect.  She was essentially not one of those women who irritate all their own sex by their power (and still more by their fixed determination) to attract men; she was really and unusually indifferent to general admiration.  Still, that she was not a cold woman, not incapable of passionate feeling, was obvious to any physiognomist; the fully curved lips showed her generous and pleasure-loving temperament, while the softly glancing, intelligent, smiling eyes spoke fastidiousness and discrimination.  Her voice was low and soft, with a vibrating sound in it, and she laughed often and easily, being very ready to see and enjoy the amusing side of life.  But observation and emotion alike were instinctively veiled by a quiet, reposeful manner, so that she made herself further popular by appearing retiring.  Edith Ottley might so easily have been the centre of any group, and yet – she was not!  Women were grateful to her, and in return admitted that she was pretty, unaffected and charming.

Love At Second Sight opens with a scream.  The Ottleys’ son Archie has, it seemed, used Madame Frabelle’s mandolin as a cricket bat, and she is not best pleased.  And who might Madame Frabelle be, you ask?  The Ottleys want to ask much the same thing.  Their delightfully forgetful and absent-minded friend Lady Conroy introduced them (although later denied ever having heard of her, and in fact asks for an introduction herself) – and Madame Frabelle arrives for a visit.  Which has lengthened itself into many, many weeks.  She is charming, a great listener, given to understanding people – noticing their subtlest of thoughts, predicting their actions, and invariably being wrong about everything.

Indeed Edith did sincerely regard her opinion as very valuable.  She found her so invariably wrong that she was quite a useful guide. She was never quite sure of her own judgement until Madame Frabelle had contradicted it.
Madame Frabelle is determined that Edith is in love with Mr. Mitchell, another of the Ottleys acquaintances.  What neither Madame Frabelle nor Bruce notice is that Edith is in love – with Aylmer, who has returned from fighting in France with a broken leg.  Edith has to face a quandary – whether or not to leave her husband…

As I say, I haven’t read Tenterhooks, where a similar story takes place, so I can only contrast this with the first book in the trilogy.  In that (again, c.f. my review here), we see a marriage which is irksome and unequal, but in a comic fashion.  All the will-they-won’t-they plot concerns a multitude of other characters, none of whom have stayed in my mind, and the central Ottley marriage is stable, if awful.  Bruce’s absurd lack of self-awareness is hilarious, and his terribleness as a husband is darkly humorous – in Love At Second Sight, more is at stake, and more than a punchline is likely to come out of this incompatible couple.

Which is not to say that the novel isn’t funny.  It is very amusing, especially when Lady Conroy wanders onto the scene.  Ada Leverson was friends with Oscar Wilde, and his influence is apparent – if anything, rather more so than in Love’s Shadow, because she turns to the epigram rather more frequently in Love At Second Sight – par example, ‘she was a woman who was never surprised at anything except the obvious and the inevitable’.  Sometimes this clash of serious storyline and comic prose was a little disconcerting – I thought the balance worked better in Love’s Shadow – but  this is still a wonderful little book.

Of course, what you should do is get the trilogy and read them in order!  I’ll read Tenterhooks one day, and then everything will fall into place properly…

On Commenting

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This might seem like a navel-gazing post, but I’m going to try hard to make it more general.  It’s responding to something I’ve noticed in the literary blogosphere at large – I think it is a wider phenomenon – which is the decline in comments on blog posts.

Speaking specifically about Stuck-in-a-Book, the number of comments I anticipate getting, particularly on a book review, has actually decreased slightly from four or five years ago, despite the fact that my stats counter tells me I’m getting ten times as many readers now.  I’m lucky if 0.5% of the people who visit each day leave a comment, which seems an extraordinarily low percentage – and I’ve seen this trend around my favourite blogs, whether they have large or smaller audiences.  Perhaps nobody else thinks this is the case, in which case this post may end up discussing something unique to my blog, but do let me know (ha!) in the comments if you do or don’t agree with my observation.

Personally, I always find it hard to realise that people have read a post if they don’t comment.  Although I see that my blog is getting however many thousand hits a week, in my head it’s only the tens of commenters who register.  That’s not intended to be a gripe, it’s just an illumination of the curious way my mind works – but perhaps yours does too?

I want to write in praise of comments.  Like many bloggers, I am passionate about the community in blogging – I beat the drum for community, and try to get involved as much as possible.  That’s why I join in with readalongs, or start my own; that’s why I have run three series of My Life in Books so enthusiastically, and why I celebrate people like Kim, who is currently running a series of Bloggers’ Best Books of 2012.  Obviously a lot of blogging is necessarily done alone, and presents an individual’s take on their personal reading life – but the reason we’re all writing and reading on the internet, instead of jotting our thoughts in a notebook, is because we want to share the experience with others.

When I’m reading other people’s blogs, all too often I forget how important the comment box is.  Today’s post is directed at myself, as much as anyone else.  I read the post with interest, and appreciate the bloggers’ perception or humour.  I might well jot down the title of the book somewhere, or even head straight off and buy it.  But, although I comment a fair amount (as do many of you), too often I move off somewhere else without having written anything.  It’s a bit like leaving a party without thanking the hostess.

The comment box is a portal.  It stops the blogger being isolated, and brings the reader to their side.  It makes what might seem the loneliest of pursuits into a two-way conversation and a bustling world of long-distance friends.  Sometimes it adds information to the exchange, and that is wonderful; mostly it just adds appreciation or recognition – or even contradiction, which is, in fact, another form of recognition.  Sometimes I think, “But I don’t have anything to say.”  And what I probably mean is, “I don’t have any personal knowledge on this topic”, which isn’t the same thing at all.  A comment needn’t be the product of research.  A comment, any comment, demonstrates the time, energy, and thought put into writing is worthwhile – but is also rewards the reading time; it puts the reader in dialogue with the writer, and it elevates them both.  Even a humble “this sounds interesting” feels like a warm smile, and a “great review” like a bearhug.

Perhaps it is because there are so many blogs now, and people don’t want to scatter their responses too prolifically.  Perhaps (more prosaically) it is because signing up and word verification have got so much more complicated.  But, on behalf of myself and every other blogger out there, I want to champion the commenter and laud the comment box.  It is the lifeblood of the blogosphere, and I apologise for forgetting that myself.  I’ll be making a New Year’s Blog Resolution to comment more often as I read around the blogosphere, and maybe some of you will too.  Perhaps some of you have never commented on a blog before – perhaps 2013 can be the year you step across the great divide!  I’d love to know the thoughts of any blogger or blog-reader, on the topic of comments?  I’d hate for that side of blogging to slope away – let’s continue to support one another, and make blogging the wonderful, intelligent, friendly, joyous, constructive conversation it can be.

A Cab at the Door – V.S. Pritchett

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More Slightly Foxed!  Yay!  Well, this one was actually a little bonus – earlier in the year, when they sent me the fabulous Look Back With Love by Dodie Smith, they inadvertently sent me A Cab at the Door by V.S. Pritchett first.  And then very kindly said I could have both.  Having recently adored Blue Remembered Hills, I realised I couldn’t go long without another fix of Slightly Foxed, and so grabbed A Cab at the Door (1968).

I have to confess, I’ve spent much of my adult life confusing V.S. Pritchett and V.S. Naipaul (he of the I’m-better-than-all-women rant).  As crimes go, it’s not the worst, and I hadn’t actually read anything by either of them – but now I’m sure that Pritchett is going to be my favourite V.S.  Sorry, Italian astronomer V.S. Casulli.  Tough break.

Like all the Slightly Foxed Editions (of which this is no.3), A Cab at the Door is a memoir – stretching further than some, in that it takes us beyond childhood, up until the time Pritchett breaks away from his parents and leaves home for France.  Like most memoirists, Pritchett seems to have been blessed with more amusing, regional relatives than the average person (c’mon, my relatives, be more comical) but although we have entertaining visits to these, the dominant character in this memoir is Pritchett’s father.  And I choose the word dominant deliberately.  Whatever other merits the book has, I think its greatest achievement is a rich and complex portrait of the sort of man who would simply appear as an ogre in fiction.

Father (if his name is mentioned, I have forgotten it – as I invariably forget names) is selfish, arrogant, and angry.  His cruelty is that peculiar brand which stems from monumental self-delusion – he drives his family deeply into debt, but appears to believe it is none of his doing.  He has constant ambition to better himself and his standing in society (and even achieves it to a degree, eventually, becoming a Managing Director) but doesn’t care how his failures along the way ruin and sadden his wife and children.  His wife – a lively and somewhat crude woman – is all but forbidden from entertaining, and is constantly carted from pillar to post, as they move to escape his debts.  The eponymous cab at the door is Pritchett’s familiar childhood sight, waiting to take them to their next home.

But because this is non-fiction, Father is not the caricatured evil man, nor his wife the stereotypical woman whose character is squashed out of her.  Instead, despite his unkindness to his younger son, and his unpredictable behaviour towards Victor himself, there is still love in him.  His wife still has moments of shrieking with laughter; Victor can still bond with his father over literature, occasionally, even if his own early attempts at writing are loudly derided.  And what novelist would have the masterstroke of making Father become a fierce proponent of Christian Science?  It is a truly exceptional portrait of a complicated man – and a portrait which is never finished to the artist’s satisfaction, simply because he could not be comprehended.  Pritchett writes this brilliant paragraph towards the end:

Right up to the day of his death in his eighties, none of us children could settle our view of him.  It was simple to call him the late Victorian dominant male without whose orders no one could think or move.  It was only partly true that he was a romantic procrastinator, egotist and dreamer, for he was a very calculating man.  Sometimes we saw him as the unchanged country boy, given to local shrewdness and gossip.  (He loved the malicious gossip of his church and his trade.)  Sometimes we saw him as a pocket Napoleon, but he never even tried to obtain the wealth or power he often talked about.  His mind was more critical than creative and he was appalled by criticism of himself.  He would go pale, hold up his hand and say, “You must not criticise me.”  He sincerely meant he was beyond criticism and felt in himself a sort of sacredness.
A Cab at the Door doesn’t have the warmth and delight of other Slightly Foxed books – it doesn’t intend to – and so, while Pritchett cannot compete with Dodie Smith and Rosemary Sutcliff for my affections, his task is different and executed incredibly well.

There are, of course, other angles and facets to this memoir, but I thought it worth identifying and discussing the one which set it apart from others that I have read.  Perhaps not one to curl up with in front of the festive log fire (for that, get Look Back With Love or Blue Remembered Hills, I cannot encourage you enough) but certainly an impressive portrait of a frustrating man, exactly the right ratio of objective and personal, an exemplary achievement.

The Joke – Milan Kundera

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Last month I (coincidentally) read a spate of successful authors’ first books – Agatha Christie’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, A.A. Milne’s – which is always an interesting exercise, and the fourth ‘first book’ I read was The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera, given to me by my friend Lucy.  It could have worked for Reading Presently next year, but it also covered a tricky 1960s gap in A Century of Books.  Usually, with translated books, I am keen to mention the translator – but a fascinating Author’s Note at the end of The Joke explains that this fifth translation of the novel (from Czech) is really a combination of translations by David Hamblyn, Oliver Stallybrass, Michael Heim, and Kundera himself.  In case you still think Kundera might be a bit of a slacker, he is also responsible for the cover art.

The Joke is broadly about the way in which someone can (or cannot) be an individual within the Communist regime of 1950s Czechoslovakia, and the impact one decision can make on the rest of a person’s life.  Although possibly not the only ‘joke’ in the novel (the Wikipedia entry manfully identifies three), the pivotal moment of the novel comes early on.  Ludvik is a university professor and member of the Communist party – his somewhat humourless female friend is away on a training course, and they are corresponding…

From the training course (it took place at one of the castles of central Bohemia) she sent me a letter that was pure Marketa: full of earnest enthusiasm for everything around her; she liked everything: the early-morning calisthenics, the talks, the discussions, even the songs they sang; she praised the “healthy atmosphere” that reigned there; and diligently she added a few words to the effect that the revolution in the West would not be long in coming.
 
As far as that goes, I quite agreed with what she said; I too believed in the imminence of a revolution in Western Europe; there was only one thing I could not accept: that she should be so happy when I was missing her so much. So I bought a postcard and (to hurt, shock, and confuse her) wrote: Optimism is the opium of the people!  A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!  Long live Trotsky!  Ludvik.
It turns out the Communist party don’t appreciate a giggle, and Ludvik is ousted from his job, exiled from the party, and sent off to do two years at a military camp.  Whilst there he meets, and falls in love with, a mysterious woman named Lucie.  At the end of the novel, various different strands (including a few that I haven’t addressed – like Kostka whose Christian faith is taking him away from Communism) coalesce and overlap at an old-fashioned parade, and the multiple viewpoints Kundera has used for different sections all come together and collide, taking short chapters each without indicating whose voice is speaking.

Although Kundera rather overloads The Joke with different perspectives and competing storylines, it is only really Ludvik’s story which stands out; the rest feels like it is stuck on to the sides of his engaging point of view and intriguing experiences.  His reflections upon political doctrine, personal affections, and the curious unpredictability of cause-and-effect are all compelling – let’s face it, any novel which can get me even mildly interested in politics has achieved more than the public press has in the past 27 years.

But, although you can see the seeds of his later experimentalism, The Joke is a much more straightforward novel than the one which made me a fan, Immortality.  That is hardly surprising for a first novel, and this has that curious combination of putting-too-much-in with a lack of novelistic ambition.  If I hadn’t read a couple of his later novels, I wouldn’t have noticed the deficit – this is still a very good novel, and probably more to the taste of a lot of people than his postmodern work – but I have, so I do.  I was intrigued by one or two hints of his future work, including this (from a man trying to spot his disguised son in the parade):

My son.  The person nearest to me.  I stand in front of him, and I don’t even know whether it is he or not.  What, then, do I know if I don’t know even that?  Of what am I sure in this world if I don’t have even that certainty?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the catalyst for Identity. I think if I’d read The Joke first, I’d have been impressed but probably not actively sought out more Kundera.  As it is, I really appreciated being able to see where he started as a novelist – and how he progressed from there.

Are there any authors whose first novels, read after later ones, have really surprised you?

Song for a Sunday

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Most of you probably know Natalie Imbruglia’s song ‘Torn’, and thought her something of a one-hit wonder.  Well, I’ve always rather liked her second album, White Lilies Island, and especially the track ‘Do You Love?’  I don’t know if this is an official video or made by the Youtube uploader, but… well, have a great Sunday!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s all rather damp and miserable chez Stuck-in-a-Book at the moment.  Damp house, damp streets, even a book gone mouldy because I foolishly left it on the window sill (sorry, The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay, mea culpa.)  But by next weekend I’ll be back home – with family, cat, log fire, and such.  So, my final damp weekend miscellany of 2012, and possibly my final weekend miscellany of 2012, damp or otherwise.

1.) The book – stuck for something to give a bibliophile under the Christmas tree?  I was recently sent 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Octopus Publishing.  I’m sure a lot of us love these sorts of lists, and this book is far more than just lists, of course.  Lots of info by well-informed people (including my supervisor, I noticed!) as well as lovely pictures etc.  Since I’ve only read 80 or 90 of ’em, I’ve got plenty to go before I die.  More info here.  It’s a really nicely produced book, and I think it would make for great discussion on Boxing Day.

2.) The link – will go over (or perhaps under) the heads of most, but I think some of you in your 20s will appreciate this… I was obsessed with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books when I was about 10.  I’m sure OV and OVW can attest to my need to read them ALL, and they generously identified (and encouraged) the love of reading rather than my deplorable lack of taste.  For those not in the know, Goosebumps are ‘horror’ books for young children, with cliffhangers every few pages, utterly unconvincing characters, and always a huge, often nonsensical, twist at the end.  I loved ’em.  Well, some brave soul has re-read them all as an adult, and written hilarious reviews at Blogger Beware.  I’ve spent hours there.  Enjoy!

3.) The blog post – while quite a few bloggers do the TBR Challenge in the early months of the year, where they only read unread books from their shelves, Ali is spearheading A Month of Re-reading in January.  More info here, but the gist is pretty obvious – a month of re-reading books!  Lots of us who have 1001 books we want to read before we die (or before book group next Wednesday, as it may be) may feel like we never have time to re-read, so it’s nice to set aside time to do it.  It wouldn’t really work with my Reading Presently project, so I shan’t be joining in this year, but it’s something I’ll definitely keep in mind for the future.

By the way, out of interest, are there many of you using the subscribe-by-email option?