Tag Archives: Wars of the 20th Century

August 18, 2023 · 7:04 pm

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: What a bad title for an excellent book

Rebecca Donner’s biography of her great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, is great (though the title is impossible for me to remember thus making it terrible when I try to recommend it). It has a thriller vibe as the resistance forms and fights in Berlin leading up to and during the Second World War. The cast of characters (I know, I know, they’re people) feel sharp and present – the best kind of biography for me is one where you can forget its non-fiction. And how wonderful to have recovered the story of Harnack, all but forgotten, from fragments and trace references, and to bring her heroism to the contemporary moment.

Harnack’s heroism is her bafflement that those around her are quiescent amid the rise of Hitler. Everyone, she thinks, seems to think someone else will solve the problem of Hitler, someone else will put a stop to the madness.

Most pressing to a reader in 2023 are the questions of what we do ourselves amid our parallel moment. Bravery is not my strong suit, and so I’ll simply suggest you read this one, and think about accrual of silence and shrugs. Sort of like how I approach choosing take-out on Friday nights, and then find myself annoyed that we’ve ended up with shawarma. Once again.

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January 22, 2023 · 7:28 pm

The White Hotel: In which ChatGPT writes my review and/or This Book Is Extremely Weird

What a strange, strange book. I must have started – and stopped – D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (first published in 1981, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it) fifteen times. Why did I persist you ask? Because m. named it as one of her favourite books, and loaned me a copy with Please Return underlined and so I thought, okay, okay. I’ll try again.

And why did I keep giving up? The intensely erotic (pornographic?) opening sections (say the first 100 pages) was A Lot to get through and I kept thinking is the whole book this… smut? (lol – it’s not smut. But also so much fisting and adults breastfeeding). Anyway, I kept reminding myself this is meant to be read by Freud (as Freud, our opening character has sent this account of his patient, Anna G, to a friend) and so keep it together, Erin.

Does it improve? I don’t know. The elaborate sex scenes diminish in the later sections that are narrated from the perspective of the patient – actually Lisa – a kinda mediocre singer and her prophetic visions. It ends – somehow – in the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar with Lisa/Anna in attendance. And then maybe Palestine. With some letters to Freud in-between. And a confirmation that Lisa/Anna is an extremely unreliable narrator being interpreted by… Freud.

It is A Lot. And unlike anything I’ve read before. I am very certain ChatGPT could not dream this one up, and so cause for some hope for the future of the novel. Though Freud interpreting The White Hotel would be neat.

And so I leave you with this:

Erin to ChatGPT: “write me a review of The White Hotel in the style of Freud”

ChatGPT : “As a psychoanalyst, I find “The White Hotel” by D.M. Thomas to be a fascinating exploration of the human psyche. The novel tells the story of Lisa, a patient of mine, as she recounts her past experiences and memories to me. Through her recollections, we are able to delve deep into the workings of her mind and uncover the complex and often disturbing elements of her psyche.

The novel also explores the relationship between Lisa and myself, and how this relationship is both therapeutic and destructive. The author masterfully portrays the transference process, and how it can be both beneficial and detrimental to the treatment.

The writing style of the novel is unique and poetic, which adds to the intensity and emotional impact of the story. The novel is not only intellectually stimulating, but it also evokes a wide range of emotions in the reader, from empathy to horror, as it delves into the dark and disturbing aspects of the human mind.

Overall, I highly recommend “The White Hotel” to anyone interested in the workings of the human mind and the complex relationship between patient and therapist. It is a novel that will stay with the reader long after it is finished, as it forces us to confront our own inner demons and the fragility of the human mind.”

Like I said. Extremely weird.

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January 3, 2023 · 8:17 pm

Chance: Good thing the 5 year old didn’t read it.

R. who is (somehow) now 5 picked out Uri Shulevitz’s memoir Chance: Escape from the Holocaust from the library which was (I suppose appropriately) shelved in the children’s section as it is pitched at an older young adult reader. Anyway, I’m pretty shrug shrug to whatever the kid brings home to read – we’ve read a lot of garbage Little Critter books and a lot of much to adult books about dragons as a consequence – but in this case I thought I’d give it a quick go over before reading it to him (something I have truly not done before – which results in a lot of adapted stories let me tell you).

And not that I won’t read it to him, but maybe not at 5. He is still, after all, afraid of giants and requires illustrations with ‘angry eyes’ to be covered up, so not sure he’s ready for the steady description of a family of Jewish refugees from Poland through Soviet Russia (and back again) during WWII. Like the descriptions are never super graphic, but the relentless hunger, terror, uncertainty and sudden death of loved ones… might be a lot.

It does make me wonder when the right time might be to read books to him (or the other kid) that are… difficult. Like we’ve been reading books that explore racism, or violence, or death or other manner of hard stuff forever – in (I like to think) age appropriate and supported ways. But eventually he will be ‘ready’ for a book like this one – where the fate of the author is genuine chance (or maybe God, but you know, chance) and he’ll have to sit with that. I guess I’ll just leave it to school to figure it out. Ha ha.

But seriously – how have you figured out when to read something with a younger person that might be Hard? Or when have you yourself approached a challenging topic and what did you need to read through it well?

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November 30, 2022 · 5:59 pm

Shrines of Gaiety: Extremely Fun(ny)

I’m here to report that Kate Atiknson’s Shrines of Gaiety is extremely fun and funny. Though, if you are at all like me, it will take you 75 pages to figure that out. I started out thinking ‘this is Serious literary fiction’ (and it is literary fiction!) and set in London after World War One and about gender politics and gangsters and so must be Dull But Important. Persist, dear reader, persist.

It is funny, smart, playful and entirely absorbing.

Perhaps another reason why it takes a bit of time to get your bearing in the book is that it flits chapter by chapter through third person limited narration among a motley cast of characters all interwoven with one another in the setting of London’s night clubs: a runaway teen ager arrived in London to find her fortune as an actress (spoiler: she does not find her fortune as an actress so much as nearly starve on the streets); a once-impoverished parochial librarian arrived in London with her fortune to take up a job as a spy (!); a newly arrived Detective Inspector tasked with solving a spate of murders; the head of a string of night clubs, Nellie Corker, who sees ghosts, reads fortunes and machinates to maintain her power; and the passel of Corker’s children half of whom are indistinguishable and the other half sharp and bright.

Threads of murder and mystery, romance, debauchery (a baby party! where adults dress as babies and fancy around with nannies and opium), theft, corruption and scheming. Delightful for the fun of it all, but woven through with substantial questions of how a society (or an individual) responds after a great trauma (say a giant war and then an influenza pandemic), of how that generation of women and men change as a consequence – both in expectations for their lives but of their roles in politics and the economy, of how little we can rely on the police.

I can’t promise you’ll love it, but I do think that if you make it through the first hundred pages without laughing you’re probably a bad reader and should just quit.

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