Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize 3.5 The Safekeep is the story of a house in the Dutch countryside and its current and former inhabitants. It is 19Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize 3.5 The Safekeep is the story of a house in the Dutch countryside and its current and former inhabitants. It is 1961, and 30-year-old Isabel resides in the home her family acquired during World War II. Isabel is isolated, sexually repressed, and lonely. Maintaining the house has become the focus of her existence, and she spends her days obsessively counting her household possessions, micro-managing her maid, and caring for the garden.
Despite her tenure, the house is not hers. It belongs to her older brother Louis, a womanizer who lives in the city. Consequently, she cannot refuse Louis when he asks if his current fling, Eva, can stay with her at the house while he is away on business. While ostensively, Isabel and Eva represent the pairing of opposites, their icy relationship evolves into a passionate love affair that leads Isobel to come to terms with her sexuality and the origins of her house.
The Safekeep is Yael Vander Wouden's debut novel. Her writing is lean and terse, with finely crafted characters. She creates a tense, propulsive atmosphere reminiscent of writers like Patricia Highsmith. While the story is well-plotted, it tends toward melodrama at times, and I anticipated the twist early on. However, Yael Van der Wouden's debut demonstrates that she is a writer with considerable promise.
I look forward to reading more of her work in the future. Highly recommend....more
Noble Laureate Annie Ernaux excels at writing autofiction. A Man's Place tells the story of her father3.5
Winner of the Noble Prize for Literature 2022
Noble Laureate Annie Ernaux excels at writing autofiction. A Man's Place tells the story of her father, while A Woman's Story focuses on her mother's tale. Both center on social class and the impact Ernaux's move to the intellectual middle class had on her relationship with her parents.
Ernaux's father worked his way from rural farmhand to the working class. With Aniie's Mother, he bought and ran a small grocery and cafe in a French village. They earned enough to send their daughter to a private Catholic school that provided her with the tools to enter the professional world. Annie's "upward mobility" becomes the source of her father's pride and alienation.
Ernaux has a keen eye for detail and describes the insecurities,indignities, and anxieties that pervade class status in France. She portrays her father sympathetically. However, his portrait lacked the depth of her depiction of her mother. In A Woman's Story, Ernaux places her mother's life in a historical context and shows how her mother is a product of her time, family of origin, and social class. That sense of context, both historical and familial, is far less developed in her portrait of her father. For me, it was a less satisfying read. ...more
During the Holocaust, did German and Austrian Jews go like “sheep to slaughter”? In Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in NaziDuring the Holocaust, did German and Austrian Jews go like “sheep to slaughter”? In Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Nazi Germany, Wolf Gruner, a professor of history and the founding director of the University of California Dorfside Center for Advanced Genocide Research, challenges the commonly held view that Jews were passive in the face of the Holocaust. Gruner spent twelve years systematically researching German and Austrian police reports, court proceedings, and prison records dating from 1933. He also examined 170 survivor testimonies from the Shoah Foundation. In this new book, Gruner expands the traditional definition of resistance — which describes armed group activities — to include individual acts of opposition. This broadened lens offers a more accurate and complex portrait of the responses of ordinary Jewish men and women living under horrific conditions.
Given the oppressiveness of the times and the severity of the penalties, any act of resistance took courage, no matter how small. Gruner identifies five types of individual resistance and devotes a chapter to each category. For every type, he provides an in-depth case study and additional stories to indicate patterns, demonstrating that these are not isolated instances.
The first category, “Contesting Nazi Propaganda,” refers to individuals who resisted by removing or destroying Nazi symbols, flags, posters, and/or anti-Jewish signs. The second, “Oral Protest,” signifies any verbal criticism made in public or private spaces, which, if reported, could result in prison time. The third, “Defying Anti-Jewish Laws and Restrictions,” might include activities like staying out after the 8:00 Jewish curfew, going out without a yellow star, and/or failing to turn in radio — or it might involve a more complex action, such as sabotaging forced labor, going into hiding, or escaping from a camp.
Jews also engaged in “Written Protest,” which included distributing anonymous leaflets and postcards, petitioning against specific Nazi acts, and critiquing the regime in letters, private communication, and even suicide notes. Perhaps most macabre is the example of seventy-one-year-old Benno Neuburger, who was sentenced to death by guillotine for mailing anonymous postcards that were critical of Hitler. The final category, “Physical Defense Against Verbal or Physical Assaults,” was less common, and primarily the province of the young.
Gruner’s archives reveal that, in addition to the hundreds of Jews who were arrested monthly for “political offenses,” ordinary German individuals protested against the regime and the persecution of Jews. His research model has far-reaching implications for marginalized groups and allies alike. It can help us better understand the actions of those who are facing violence, even genocide, under authoritarian regimes today.
Winner of the Nobel Prize 2022 2.5 Look at the Lights My Love is Annie Ernaux's year-long chronicle of her visits to Tres- Fontaines, a "superstore" siWinner of the Nobel Prize 2022 2.5 Look at the Lights My Love is Annie Ernaux's year-long chronicle of her visits to Tres- Fontaines, a "superstore" similar to Target's or Walmart in a shopping mall in the suburban town of Clergy. She examines the class, race, and ethnic interactions in a domain populated mainly by women. Ernaux also examines how management controls and manipulates consumers, from loyalty cards to seasonal "sales."
While the book is well-written and often insightful, this subject would have worked better as a magazine piece. There needed to be more substantial observation to hold my interest for an entire book....more
I listened to Annie Erneaux's bitter-sweet tale of her mother's life and death on a bleak rainy drive. ItWinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2022
I listened to Annie Erneaux's bitter-sweet tale of her mother's life and death on a bleak rainy drive. It was a fitting setting. A Woman's Tale is a short, moving work that is difficult to categorize. Written ten months after her mother's death from Alzheimer's disease, the book is Erneaux's attempt to find the woman who was her mother and, in the process, come to terms with their loving yet fraught relationship.
To accomplish this, she takes a step back and views her mother as a woman caught in the context of her time. Born in 1906 in a poor rural area of France, Erneaux's mother struggled for "respectability," which she viewed through the lens of class shame. While desperate to escape rural poverty, she had to leave school at twelve to help support her family. Although she obtained a factory job which she viewed as a "step up," she was still considered inferior to the world of her provincial village. She married young, and her first child died in 1938. Annie was born during the war, and her mother's postwar dream was to provide her with everything she had never had.
Small business was the only means of advancement open for Erneaux's parents. They opened a small grocery which her mother ran from dawn to dusk while her father labored elsewhere. They sent Annie to a private Catholic School. She attended university and married an educated professional man from an upper-middle-class family.
Annie's mother was proud, yet her daughter's achievement and social mobility became an area of contention between mother and daughter. Erneaux writes about the class-fueled mother-daughter battleground with compassion and regret. She then chronicles her father's death and her mother's struggles as a widow who comes to live with her daughter's family, husband, and two sons and her descent into Alzheimer's.
Erneaux has an eye for detail and an intimate knowledge of her subject. She paints a portrait of her mother that is both loving and heartbreaking. As I listened, I felt like I knew and grieved for her as I simultaneously grieved for my own mother.
What a sweet, uplifting read! 84 Charing Cross Road is a booklover's book. It contains the 20-year correspondence between New York City scriptwriter HWhat a sweet, uplifting read! 84 Charing Cross Road is a booklover's book. It contains the 20-year correspondence between New York City scriptwriter Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a London-based used and rare bookseller. Beginning in 1949, in response to an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature, Helene and Frank forge a bond around books that grows into a heartwarming friendship. It's a charming, whimsical read. I highly recommend it....more
"It is a historical injustice if the names of Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering remain more well-known than those of Raoul Wallenberg and Oscar Schi"It is a historical injustice if the names of Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering remain more well-known than those of Raoul Wallenberg and Oscar Schindler."
On May 30, 1941, shortly after the Nazis began their occupation of Greece, two Athenian partisans climbed atop the Acropolis and tore down the Swastika flying overhead. Resistance groups and other segments of Athenian society banded together to rescue Jews and other refugees. Most prominent was Damaskinos Papandreou, the Archbishop of Athens and the head of the entire Greek Orthodox Church. Damaskinos was the only head of a European church to formally condemn the final solution. In addition, he issued false baptismal papers and ordered priests and nuns to hide Jews in churches and convents. The church's efforts, resistance groups, and private citizens saved 2/3 of Athens's Jews.
Damaskinos is honored in the Garden of the Righteous at Israel's Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem. The garden pays tribute to individuals who risked their lives, liberty, or careers to save Jews during the Holocaust. The 27,000 individuals honored constitute half a hundredth of one percent of the European population or one out of 20,000.
In his book, named after the memorial garden, Richard Hurowitz presents in-depth case studies of individuals from various nations who took significant risks to do what they believed was right. These include diplomats such as Sousa Mendes of Portugal and Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat cum spy who defied government orders and issued Jews visas saving thousands of lives; Georg Duckwitz, a German diplomat in occupied Denmark, who alerted the Danes to the intended date of the Jewish deportation and helped arrange their safe transport to Sweden; Polish social worker and nurse, Irena Sender who worked with the Polish underground and rescued over 2,000 children from the Warsaw Ghetto and Gino Bartoli, champion Italian Tour de France, cyclist who transported false documents across northern Italy, during cycling practice, saving hundreds of lives.
The case studies are moving and engaging. Hurowitz combines fine writing with in-depth research. Each case incorporates the individual's backstory and the historical context specific to the region. Hurowitz's finely crafted narrative captures the tensions, heroism, and consequences faced by those who sought to thwart the Nazis.
Hurowitz concludes with research findings about rescuers. Despite the difficulties and dangers rescuers faced, most tended to minimize their deeds and describe them as nothing special or just doing the right thing. Significant studies found no correlation between gender, age, nationality, race, family size, or birth order in the rescuers' backgrounds. However, parenting style was a common thread. Most grew up in households where the discipline style was loving, consistent, and nonauthoritarian. In addition, rescuers tended to have a strong moral code based on religion, ethics, ideology, or compassion. They had parents who acted altruistically and were accepting of people from different backgrounds.
In the Garden of the Righteous is a timely book. Unfortunately, we live in a world where racism, antisemitism, and homophobia are again rising. The vivid portraits of rescuers provide inspirational reminders of the possibility of fighting against irrational forces.
This review was originally published by Jewish Book Council. JBC enriches and educates the community through public programming, a literary journal, weekly reviews and essays, discussion questions, and over twenty literary awards. Find out more here....more
What counts is not the things that happen to us but what we do with them.
A Girl's Story is my first ErnauWinner of the 2022 Noble Prize for Literature
What counts is not the things that happen to us but what we do with them.
A Girl's Story is my first Ernaux. In her unusual memoir, Ernaux attempts to bridge the 50-year time gap and recapture the painful sexual awakening of her 18-year-old self and its life consequences. Moving back and forth in time, Erneaux contrasts the 1950s with the present and the impact of the sexual norms on her self-esteem and growing self-awareness. Ernaux's writing is beautiful, honest, and raw. Highly recommend...more
Happening is, sadly, a timely book. Ernaux chronicles her attempt to obtain an abortion in France in 1963 when the procedure was illegal. She was an uHappening is, sadly, a timely book. Ernaux chronicles her attempt to obtain an abortion in France in 1963 when the procedure was illegal. She was an unmarried college student from a conservative working-class background with few resources or connections. Her evocative prose captures her solitary, harrowing journey through the backstreets of Paris to obtain a procedure administered in an unsafe and demeaning manner. Ernaux also vividly describes her fragile, crumbling interior world.
I listened to Happening on audio. It is a short book, and Tavia Gilbert's narrative interpretation was powerful. Highly recommend....more
“And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”
Fredrik Backman is an autho“And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”
Fredrik Backman is an author I turn to when I am looking for a boost. His books: A Man Called Ove, Anxious People, Your Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, and Brit-Marie are filled with quirky yet likable characters, humor, and humanism. His lively writing style and insight into the human condition help me to laugh at life. In Beartown, Backman shifts gears and focuses on the ugly side of human nature. At times it is a painful read.
Beartown is a small town in northern Sweden facing economic decline. It is a hockey town, and the powers that be determine that hockey is the key to its revival. If Beartown’s high school hockey team wins the finals, they believe that the town will become the site of a hockey school, which could spark new development in the area.
Backman is adept at creating the ambiance of a small town enthralled with hockey. With a sardonic eye, he introduces the townspeople, the team manager, the coaches, the players, the parents, and their history with hockey. The story builds to the first playoff where Beartown wins. There is just one game to go. Then at the playoff victory party, the star player commits a rape. Backman’s realistic depiction of the town’s response is a gut-wrenching read....more
I loved this book. I just saw the film adaptation and highly recommend it.
Spoiler Alert
"He found himself asking was there any point in being alive wit
I loved this book. I just saw the film adaptation and highly recommend it.
Spoiler Alert
"He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another."
Orders of Roman Catholic Nuns in Ireland ran the Magdelene Laundries from the 18th century until 1996 to house "fallen women," prostitutes, unwed mothers. The Nuns forced these women to engage in unpaid manual labor, washing, ironing, and packing laundry as "penance for their sins." From 1922-1996, 10,000 girls passed through the laundries where abuse was commonplace(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/wo...).
In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan provides the reader with entre into this world. Her writing, like the story itself, is subtle and low keyed. It centers on Bill Furlong, a local coal and timber merchant in New Ross, a small town in County Wexford. Furlong is married and has five daughters. His mother, an unmarried domestic worker, avoided the laundry when her employer took in mother and son when at 16, she gave birth to him.
The novella occurs at Christmas time, a busy delivery season for Furlong. When he delivers to the local convent, he finds a young girl, dirty and cold, locked in the shed. She has recently given birth, is lactating, and asks Furlong desperately about her baby. He brings her to the Mother Superior, who feigns ignorance and provides him with a hefty tip. After that, he leaves and must decide what to do.
Keegan juxtaposes scenes of an idyllic Irish village at Christmas time with the harsh realities of the residents of the laundries, a reality that most village residents are aware of but don't want to confront. It is against this backdrop that Furlong deals with his moral dilemma.
I highly recommend this short work. I want to thank GR friends Candi and JimZ for bringing this book to my attention!...more
Mythology is an area of great interest to me. I've attempted to study it in both courses and books, and I have to say Elizabeth Vandiver's lecture se Mythology is an area of great interest to me. I've attempted to study it in both courses and books, and I have to say Elizabeth Vandiver's lecture series on Classical Mythology is in a league of its own.
First and foremost, the series is both scholarly and accessible. Vandiver begins the series with a clear and concise survey of the leading theoretical approaches to understanding myths. She discusses the perspectives of leading functionalists (Malinowski), structuralists (Levi-Strauss), the psychological methods of Freud and Jung, and Joeseph Campbell's metaphysical analysis. Vandiver is leary of dogmatists who attempt to use one overarching theory to explain the significance of myths. Throughout the course, she pulls from various perspectives to demonstrate how a specific approach might help us understand a particular myth.
Secondly, I appreciated the series breadth and scope. Vandiver begins with Theogeny Hesiod's poem about the origins of the Gods and moves through the significant myths of the Gods and heroes. The last three lectures examine the integration of Greek mythology and religion into Roman culture and focus on Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Throughout the lectures, Vandiver examines women and gender roles, the nature of patriarchy, and views of life and death reflected in this mythological worldview. I found the lecture series insightful and stimulating. I highly recommend this course. ...more
Fredrik Backman has great compassion for people who live on the margins. His humanism comes to the forefront in his portrait of Brit-Marie, a 63-year Fredrik Backman has great compassion for people who live on the margins. His humanism comes to the forefront in his portrait of Brit-Marie, a 63-year-old highly functioning autistic woman with OCD, weak social skills, and a big heart. Backman draws the reader into her mindset, obsessive list-making (in pencil, not pen), compulsive cleaning, and adherence to propriety, all an attempt to order and make sense of a world she doesn't fully understand but cares about deeply.
At the book's start, Britt-Marie has left her husband of forty years after learning that he has had an affair. She takes a job at the recreation center in Borg, a town almost destroyed by the economic crisis of 2008, and ends up coaching the local soccer team, a sport of which she knows little.
A typical Backman cast of quirky yet likable characters populates Borg. The story balances pathos and loneliness with humor and hope. It is an uplifting read.
The Women of Troy examines the grim realities of Bronze Age slavery wherein the victors kill their opponent's men and enslave their women and childrenThe Women of Troy examines the grim realities of Bronze Age slavery wherein the victors kill their opponent's men and enslave their women and children. It is the second book in Booker winner Pat Barker's retelling of the Trojan War from a feminist perspective. The first novel, The Silence of the Girls, recounts Homer's Iliad from the point of view of Briseis, who Achilles selected to be his slave and concubine, his trophy prize for his achievements in battle. The second book draws from Euripede's play, Trojan Women.
Briseis's viewpoint remains dominant in The Women of Troy. She is no longer a slave because she was pregnant by Achilles and, to protect the child, was married to his chief lieutenant after his death. Consequently, she uses her "wife" status to roam the camps freely to help the other women adjust to their new roles as slaves and concubines to the men who had murdered their families. Throughout the novel, Barker's sparse tight prose causes the characters of Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromede, and Helen to come to life.
Barker also includes the voice of Pyrrhus, Achilles's 16-year-old son, to advance the narrative. Pyrrhus begins the tale from the belly of the Trojan horse. His father has died before his arrival, and he is desperate to prove himself worthy as a warrior. As a result, he actively participates in the brutal sacking of Troy, kills King Priam, and refuses to grant him a proper burial. These acts have angered to Gods who have stopped the winds so the Greeks could not return home.
Pyrrhus's hubris stands in stark contrast to the women's suffering. The novel revolves around daily life in the camps, the women's anguish, their attempts to maintain some sense of agency by thwarting Pyrrhus and gaining a proper burial for Priam.
The book had a sad, almost dystopian quality. The goal of Bronze age slavery is a kind of ethnocide, the physical destruction of the place and cultural destruction of the survivors. I kept wondering how women in this situation raise the children of their Greek masters. Do they secretly tell them the stories of Troy and their ancestors? And through them try to keep their cultures alive? How do they survive? It was a thought-provoking book. I recommend it, especially if you are interested in the ancient world.
4.5 My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
It's snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people that she likes have been real shits on earl4.5 My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
It's snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people that she likes have been real shits on earlier occasions, she has to carry on liking them. You'd quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who have at some point been real shits. Elsa, almost 8, p315.
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry is the story of the relationship between Elsa, almost 8, a precocious child with comic yet compassionate insight into the adult world, and her feisty, cantankerous grandmother, a retired surgeon who adores her. However, Elsa's perceptiveness and intelligence make her different, and she becomes the target of bullying in school. Her grandmother, her only friend, protects her by fuelling her imagination with fantastical tales of imaginary kingdoms.
When her grandmother dies of cancer, at Christmas time before her 8th birthday, Elsa responds with grief and anger. Her grandmother has left her with a "mission" of delivering letters of apology to people she feels she has wronged or offended in their apartment building. The " mission, " framed as a treasure hunt, is understood by Elsa through the lens of the fantasy world her grandmother created. She tackles it as an adventure. However, these letters allow Elsa to fully appreciate her grandmother's life and connect more deeply with her parents and the community's quirky yet loveable tenants.
This novel is my fourth by Backman. Although I found it hard to get into at first, it has become my favorite thus far. Perhaps this is because of its whimsical nature. It is almost like Roald Dahl for adults. I enjoyed the inventive interplay of the fantasy world with everyday life. In addition, Backman's humanity, his ability to portray characters who at times live on the margins with deep compassion and humor, provides an added dimension to the story....more
An Officer and a Spy is an outstanding historical fiction/ thriller. It provides a historically accurate account of the Dreyfus Affair, the espionage An Officer and a Spy is an outstanding historical fiction/ thriller. It provides a historically accurate account of the Dreyfus Affair, the espionage case that ripped apart fin de siecle France. Author Robert Harris selected Lieutenant Colonel George Piquart as his protagonist and chronicled the events which led to his altering his belief in Alfred Dreyfus' guilt.
On October 15, 1894, 35-year-old Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French army, was arrested for high treason, spying, and passing on classified information to the Germans. He was tried and convicted on very flimsy evidence and sentenced to life in solitary confinement on Devil's Island, a remote outpost off the coast of Venezuela.
Dreyfus was Jewish and the first "outsider" to rise in the ranks of the French military. According to New York Times reviewer Louis Begley, the military had just introduced merit-based appointments a few years earlier, and many of the anti-semitic general staff were less than pleased to have Dreyfus among them. So when evidence emerged that there was a traitor passing secrets to the Germans, they suspected Dreyfus.
The top generals saw Picquart as a good old boy who shared their prejudices. He initially believed in Dreyfus's guilt and received a promotion to the head of army counter-intelligence as a reward for his role in Dreyfus's court-martial. Ironically, this promotion placed him in the position to learn that the wrong man had been tried and convicted. Yet, despite his prejudices, Piquart was an honorable man who felt that it was his duty to free the innocent Dreyfus and put the real spy Officer Esterhazy in prison.
Robert Harris is a master storyteller. He gradually builds tension and subtly shows Piquart's growing disillusionment, adding evidence and depicting the harrowing events that led the military command to harass and prosecute Piquart and defend the honor of the real spy. Harris captures the polarization within French society and the rabid anti-Semitism of those who clung to their belief in Dreyfus's guilt, despite all evidence to the contrary.
An Officer and a Spy takes the reader on a suspenseful roller coaster ride that is all the more powerful because it is true. I highly recommend it....more
I have never read anything by Swedish writer, Fredrik Backman, but I decided to try him based upon all of the rave reviews I have read on Goodreads. MI have never read anything by Swedish writer, Fredrik Backman, but I decided to try him based upon all of the rave reviews I have read on Goodreads. My GR friend, Berengaria, described A Man called Ove as the "ultimate feel-good novel." I have to agree.
In short, Ove is a curmudgeon, the penultimate grumpy old man. He has lost his wife of forty years and, in his grief, can find no reason to live. His half-hearted suicide attempts are comically interrupted by his new neighbors, a pregnant Iranian woman, two daughters, and Swedish husband. He eventually finds meaning through his relationship with them and others.
Sound sad or somewhat sappy? It could be in the hands of a less skilled writer. However, Backman has a wry wit and an excellent eye for detail. He clearly likes Ove and the rest of the eccentric characters who inhabit the pages of this book, making A Man called Ove a light, enjoyable and entertaining read....more
Written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh's retelling of Antigone is intended as a tribute to the French Resistance. It is a powerWritten in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh's retelling of Antigone is intended as a tribute to the French Resistance. It is a powerful, beautifully written reinterpretation of the very moving original. It demonstrates the role of context in the interpretation of myth.
Thanks to GR friends Ilse and Theo Logos, for the recommendation...more
Deadline in Athens is a well-crafted, gritty work of noir detective fiction. In addition to an intriguing storyline, Markaris provides an interesting Deadline in Athens is a well-crafted, gritty work of noir detective fiction. In addition to an intriguing storyline, Markaris provides an interesting portrait of Athens in the 1990s. I want to thank GR friends Berengaria and Violeta for the recommendation!...more
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