The final instalment in the Regeneration Trilogy struck me as a bit unfocused and heavy-handed in its use of symbolism and parallel storylines. HoweveThe final instalment in the Regeneration Trilogy struck me as a bit unfocused and heavy-handed in its use of symbolism and parallel storylines. However, certain scenes were very powerful, and the ending packed a punch.
I'm not sure why The Ghost Road rather than Regeneration or The Eye in the Door won the Booker Prize. I can only assume the Booker judges wanted to honour the trilogy somehow and so picked the last book to show their appreciation, much like the Academy showered The Return of the King with Oscars even though The Fellowship of the Ring was a vastly superior film. Personally, I thought The Ghost Road was the weakest of the three books (rated a mere 3.5 stars, as opposed to the 4 and 4.5 stars I gave the other two books), but it didn't mar my overall impression of the trilogy, which is good.
The second book of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is every bit as good as the first one, and probably better. While I'm not sure how I feel about tThe second book of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is every bit as good as the first one, and probably better. While I'm not sure how I feel about the split personality thing, I loved the psychological drama and the period detail. Some fascinating stuff there. I'll post a proper review once I've finished the trilogy....more
Regeneration, the first part of Pat Barker's acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy, centres on Dr W.H.R. Rivers, a real-life army psychiatrist at CraiglockhaRegeneration, the first part of Pat Barker's acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy, centres on Dr W.H.R. Rivers, a real-life army psychiatrist at Craiglockhart War Hospital who treated the likes of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen for shell-shock. Well-researched, well-imagined and well-written, it's an interesting mix of fact and fiction that provides a good insight into Great War-era Britain and early-twentieth-century psychiatry. A proper review will follow once I've read the whole trilogy....more
All Quiet on the Western Front (or, to give it its German title, Nothing New in the West) has been hailed as the best war novel ever, and it's easy toAll Quiet on the Western Front (or, to give it its German title, Nothing New in the West) has been hailed as the best war novel ever, and it's easy to see why. World War I is described in such vivid non-glory in its pages that you are sucked into the story straight away and stay there for the next two hundred pages. It is obvious that the author, Erich Maria Remarque, had first-hand experience of the things he writes about; the details are so right and authentic-sounding that they couldn't possibly have been wholly made up. Needless to say, the ring of authenticity adds quite a punch to the reading experience, elevating a good war story into an absolute classic of the genre.
All Quiet is a short book, but remarkably complete. All the aspects of trench warfare are there -- the excitement, the tedium, the horror, the pain, the fear, the hunger, the dirt, the loss, the sense of alienation, the awareness that you may die any minute, and last but not least, the realisation of the futility of it all. All Quiet has a pervasive sense of futility, an initially unvoiced but later fully expressed question of 'Just what is this war all about, and why am I putting my life on the line for it? What could be worth such a sacrifice?' The answer is, obviously, nothing, because if this book has one message, it is that war is awful and young men ought not to be forced to fight them. This is not a book which glorifies the war effort, or portrays soldiers as heroes. It is not a book which tries to justify Germany's involvement in World War I. In Remarque's own words, it is 'an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war -- even those of it who survived the shelling'. As such, it is brutal and confronting, but in the best possible way. Anti-war fiction has seldom been this effective, or this memorable for that matter.
All Quiet tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a young man who gets talked by an idealistic teacher into joining the German army fighting World War I in Belgium. In short, business-like sentences, Paul tells the reader about his experiences in and around the trenches, plus those of his similarly duped classmates, all of whom end up dead. All Quiet does a brilliant job of evoking the strain of being at the front, providing vivid descriptions of the horrors of night-time shelling, being caught in no man's land, the smell of gangrene in the hospital, etc. Reading the book, you get a good feel for what it must have been like to be a soldier in World War I. Remarque does not spare his reader. He not only tells you what it's like to hide from the shells that are coming your way, but also what it feels like to crawl through a recently dug cemetery where shells have just exposed some body parts, and what it's like to crawl deeper and deeper beneath a coffin so that it will protect you, 'even if Death himself is already in it'. He tells you what it's like to hear friendly voices after having been stuck in no man's land for what seems like an eternity, and what it's like to have an unscratchable itch because there are lice underneath your plaster cast. He tells you what it's like to stare longingly at the picture of a squeaky clean pretty girl when you're absolutely filthy yourself and crawling with lice. He tells you why you need coarse and black humour to deal with the horrors of war, and why you need girls, or at least fantasies about girls. He also tells you what it's like to talk to the parents of a soldier who has died a horrible death. And last but not least, he shows you the aftermath. All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates quite unequivocally how scarred the soldiers emerged from the trenches, because, as one of Paul's classmates says halfway through the book, 'Two years of rifle fire and hand-grenades -- you can't just take it all off like a pair of socks afterwards.' It shows how alienated the veterans of trench warfare felt from those at home, who could not for the life of them understand what it was like to experience the things they were going through. I guess this was the most powerful part of the book for me -- the part where Paul goes home and finds that he cannot communicate with his family, that he cannot possibly share the horrors of his recent experiences with his loved ones, because (1) they wouldn't understand, and (2) he does not want to upset them any more than their concerns for his well-being have already done. With chilling accuracy, Paul describes how empty his war experiences have made him feel. War, he says, brutalises soldiers, turning them into human animals, to the point where they have nothing to live for, as their former interests, dreams, tenderness and the future have all 'collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels'. His sense of desolation and isolation is so exquisitely rendered that by the time his leave is over and he has to return to the front, you find yourself agreeing with his classmate Albert: 'The war has ruined us for everything.'
As you can probably tell from the above, I had a strong reaction to All Quiet on the Western Front. From the sparse but effective prose to the expert way in which Remarque builds up the final two deaths, I just loved the book, responding to it unreservedly, jotting down astute observations and sharing passages from it with my boyfriend, who is a World War I buff. I felt like I was experiencing the boys' emotions with them, the good ones as well as the bad ones. I was shocked, horrified and repulsed when Remarque wanted me to be, but also got a few chuckles out of the book, because all the bad stuff really makes the good moments the boys experience stand out. I loved the male camaraderie which occasionally drips off the pages. I loved the descriptions of the little acts of vengeance the boys enact on those who have wronged them, as well as the few moments of genuine happiness they experience at the front, such as when they eat a stolen goose, raid an officers' supply depot or make their way to some girls they are not supposed to visit. These events are drawn so vividly and have such a genuine feel of relief and excitement about them that it's hard not to get drawn in. Mostly, though, I just sympathised with the boys, asking with them why war is necessary, and whether those who wage wars on others have any idea what they're doing to the men who fight the wars for them. I think All Quiet on the Western Front should be compulsory reading for every leader who has ever considered going to war. The fact that the book is eighty years old and deals with events which took place nearly a century ago does not make its message any less valid today.
A note on the Vintage English translation: Brian Murdoch's translation is good but a bit sloppy at times, especially in the second half of the book, where he occasionally uses German-sounding grammar and makes a few typos. It also sounds a bit too British for my taste, to the point where I occasionally had to remind myself that I was reading about German soldiers, as they all sounded so terribly English! I would have preferred a slightly less 'placeable' translation, but really, that's a minor complaint. By and large, Murdoch did a good job. Next time round, though, I think I'll read the book in the original German....more
I wanted to like this book. I really did. After all, how can one fail to be drawn in by a story about a German boy, the son of a high-ranking Nazi offI wanted to like this book. I really did. After all, how can one fail to be drawn in by a story about a German boy, the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer, who makes friends with a Jewish boy at Auschwitz, only to fail to understand his new friend's situation and meet a gruesome end with him? It's a great premise with plenty of scope for drama. A writer looking to fictionalise ignorance of the Holocaust would be hard-pressed to come up with a better idea.
Sadly, I found myself rather underwhelmed by The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for several reasons. Firstly, I didn't care for the main character, who is meant to pass for young and naive but really is rather selfish and obnoxious. Secondly, I found the faux-child-like tone of the book cloying and unconvincing, and thirdly, I was annoyed by the plot holes which kept popping up with alarming regularity. So while I admit the book is a page-turner and that I was keen to finish it to find out how it ended, I can't in good conscience give it more than two stars. To give it more than two stars would be an insult to better written books.
I'll start with the plot holes. There are so many of those in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas that I hardly know where to begin. For starters, it beggars belief that a nine-year-old German boy from a prominent Nazi family should never have heard the word 'Jews', nor be aware of what the Nazis think of Jews. Even if his parents tried to shield him from the nastier aspects of war, which Bruno's parents certainly seem to do, he would have been indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda from a young age onwards and would have been quite familiar with the main tenets of National Socialism and its leader, Adolf Hitler. Thus Bruno's complete ignorance of the Führer and the fact that Germany is at war is hard to buy. Similarly, it beggars belief that our young 'hero' could have near-daily conversations with a Jewish friend at Auschwitz for a year without having the faintest idea of what is going on in the camp. After over three hundred conversations with an obviously hungry and filthy friend, you'd think that even a self-centred boy like Bruno would realise that the camp is an unpleasant place where people starve, disappear and die, right? After all that time, it would also have to be blatantly obvious to him that the camp guards aren't very nice people. I know children aren't the most astute observers, but I refuse to believe that a nine-year-old boy who sees prisoners cower before guards, obviously scared, and then hears gunshots, would be surprised at the people on the ground not getting up, having to be carried away instead. Even in the 1940s, when children weren't exposed to action flicks to the extent they are now, boys surrounded by soldiers on a daily basis would have known what a gun was and what it did to the person it was pointed at. So the part of the book where Bruno watches Jewish prisoners being killed and thinks they are 'rehearsing a play' rang completely untrue to me. Quite frankly, I found it a little insulting to be expected to buy that kind of abject ignorance.
Other plot holes? Well, I refuse to believe that a Jewish boy at Auschwitz could meet up with his friend outside the fence nearly every day for a year without ever being detected, or that there could be a hole in the fence big enough for a boy to slip through without any or indeed many of the other Jewish prisoners trying to escape through it. There is simply no way that could have happened in real life, and I scratch my head at Boyne's asking us to believe it. I also scratch my head at some of the less prominent historical plot holes in the book, such as the fact that Hitler and Eva Braun apparently visited people's homes without bodyguards (really?), or that the Germans apparently didn't check their officers' family backgrounds before putting them in charge of their largest concentration camps. Yeah, right. Like that would have happened.
The book doesn't just contain historical inaccuracies, though. Another thing that put me off was the linguistic inaccuracies. For example, Bruno keeps calling Auschwitz 'Out-With' and the Führer 'the Fury', ad nauseam, despite being corrected several times. These are mistakes no German child in his right mind (least of all the child of a high-ranking Nazi officer) would make, and they seriously got in the way of my appreciation of the story, as linguistic inaccuracies tend to do. To make matters worse, Boyne seems to expect us to believe that Shmuel, a nine-year-old boy from the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, Poland, is fluent in German, which is unlikely, even if his mother is a language teacher. In my opinion, such mistakes are inexcusable, even in works of fiction. I can't believe Boyne's editors didn't pick up on these things and make the necessary corrections.
I didn't overly care for Boyne's style of writing, either. While I will (again) admit that I couldn't put The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas down (the premise is good and the tension is ramped up quite adequately), I disliked the pseudo-childish tone of the writing, which felt contrived and unnecessarily cutesy to me, and occasionally made me groan. Furthermore, I found the occasional excursions into Gretel and Shmuel's minds jarring; a more unified point of view (to wit, Bruno's) would have been preferable, in my opinion. Finally, I thought the final chapter felt rather tacked on, and several plot lines weren't tied up well enough for my liking. What was the point of Maria, for instance? What was her background, and what was her role in the story? I'm not sure I understand. I also think much more could have been made of several of the male characters -- Pavel and Bruno's father come to mind, or the eponymous boy in the striped pyjamas. As they are, they are cardboard cut-outs with no personality of their own. To be sure, this is partly because they are described from the point of view of a sensationally unimaginative nine-year-old, but still, I think Boyne could have done a better job infusing his characters with some personality. It would have made a flawed reading experience a bit more memorable.
Finally, like other reviewers I'm having a hard time figuring out the point of the book. What are we supposed to take away from this story? That people can be staggeringly blind to evil, even when it is perpetrated right in front of them? Er, OK. Point taken. It could have been made in a less cloying and mistake-riddled manner, though.
Way to ruin a promising premise, Mr Boyne. ...more
The title of this book is a bit facetious. Far from always being in the wrong places, James Fenton (a South East Asia correspondent for several major The title of this book is a bit facetious. Far from always being in the wrong places, James Fenton (a South East Asia correspondent for several major British and American publications) seems always to be in the right places for some good reportage literature. He was in Saigon when it fell (one of the last journalists to remain in the city when the North Vietnamese army pulled closer) and in the Philippines when an angry mob forced the Marcoses out of power. In between, he got a taste of the Khmer Rouge (only just avoiding a potentially lethal run-in), make trips into enemy-occupied territory in Vietnam, see Imelda Marcos play-act faith in her soon-to-be-deposed husband, and hang out with monks and die-hard Marxist guerrillas in the middle of a revolution. In other words, Fenton saw history being made, and he describes it in a way that makes you feel like you are witnessing it for yourself. His reports of rebellion and looting are powerful and evocative; so are his descriptions of 'quieter' episodes, such as the time he spends at a Cambodian monastery, or the eerie peace that ensues after the apparently ferociously well-behaved North Vietnamese soldiers take Saigon. He has quite a gift for setting a scene and adding humorous touches, capturing the atmosphere of the events he witnessed like a well-shot film. So as a first-hand account of some major episodes in twentieth-century South East Asian history, All the Wrong Places is very successful.
Sadly, the book has its flaws. The one that bothered me most was the near-total failure to place the major events in a historic context or background. In the Vietnam part of the book, Fenton drops a lot of names without any attempt at explaining who these people were or what role they played in the conflict. Written nearly two decades after the end of the Vietnam War, this part of the book really could have done with some background information for the benefit of those of us who were too young to follow the war when it was being fought -- or even those who did pay attention at the time. I doubt many people now recall the minor players in the conflict.
It could also be pointed out here that Fenton is a little too self-indulgent for his own good. Thankfully, his self-indulgence is of the wry British variety which I don't mind too much. There's a fair bit of humour in his writing, but slightly greater objectivity would not have gone amiss.
Finally, I felt the various parts of the book ended too abruptly. I would have liked to hear more about what happened after the events described, both to Fenton himself and to the people he meets on his travels. A greater attempt at proper introductions and endings and smoother transitions would have been much appreciated.
All in all, I give the book three and a half stars, rounded down to three.
(And for those of you who are wondering why I'm not referring to the South Korean part of the book: I can't comment on it because it wasn't included in the (very bad) Dutch translation I read. Note to any prospective Dutch readers of this book: steer clear of the translation, which is so literal it will make your eyes bleed. Stick to the original instead and I daresay you'll find it an enjoyable read.)...more
This book has garnered so many five-star reviews and deals with such important subject matter that it almost feels like an act of heresy to give it a This book has garnered so many five-star reviews and deals with such important subject matter that it almost feels like an act of heresy to give it a mere four stars. Yet that is exactly what I'm going to do, for while Night is a chilling account of the Holocaust and the dehumanisation and brutalisation of the human spirit under extreme circumstances, the fact remains that I've read better ones. Better written ones, and more insightful ones, too.
Night is Elie Wiesel's somewhat fictionalised account of the year he spent at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It's a chilling story about his experiences in and between concentration camps, his gradual loss of faith (he was a very observant Jew who obviously wondered where God was while his people were being exterminated), and his feelings of guilt when he realised that his struggle for survival was making him insensitive towards his dying father. It's gruesome, chilling material, and I felt very quiet after having read it. Yet I also felt vaguely unsatisfied with the book. I wanted more detail. I wanted fleshed-out writing rather than a succession of meaningful one-line paragraphs. I wanted less heavy-handed symbolism (the book very much centres on troubled father-and-son relationships, to echo the one central Father-and-Son one) and more actual feeling. I wanted a writer (and a translator) who knew better than to call an SS officer 'an SS'. And most of all, I wanted a less abrupt ending. I wanted to ask Wiesel what happened in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald. I wanted to ask him what happened to his leg, on which he marched for several gruesome days just days after having undergone an operation, and how he picked up the pieces afterwards, and why on earth his two eldest sisters, who died in Auschwitz as well as his mother and younger sister, never warranted more than a single mention. The latter was an example of seriously shoddy writing, I thought.
Perhaps my questions were answered in the original version of Night, which never got published. In his introduction to the new English translation of Night, Wiesel mentions that the book as it is today is a severely abridged version of a much longer Yiddish original called And the World Remained Silent. I think I can see why the original wasn't published (quite apart from the fact that the world wasn't ready yet for concentration camp literature, the few quotes provided in the introduction make for heavy reading). The abridged version definitely seems more readable than the full-length one, and does an admirable job getting the facts across. Even so, I think the publishers might have gone a step too far in abridging the book to the extent that they did. No doubt the very brevity of Night is one of the reasons why it's so popular today, but personally, I would have liked to see a middle road between the original (detailed) manuscript and the incredibly spare barebones version sold now. Don't get me wrong, the abridged version is effective, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the Holocaust for people with short attention spans. I prefer Primo Levi and Ella Lingens-Reiner's more complete accounts of life in the camps myself, not to mention several Dutch books which sadly never got translated into other languages.
But still. Night is an important book, and one that deserves to be widely read. In fact, one that should be widely read, by people of all ages and nationalities, to prevent nightmare like this ever happening again. ...more
I tend not to care overly much for short stories and novellas, but this 100-page Austrian novella from 1942 is a classic, and deservedly so. A taut psI tend not to care overly much for short stories and novellas, but this 100-page Austrian novella from 1942 is a classic, and deservedly so. A taut psychological drama, it tells the story of a short series of chess matches taking place on board a cruiseship. One of the passengers on board the ship is Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. Another is a millionaire who offers Czentovic good money for a match. Needless to say, the millionaire is about to get defeated handsomely when a mysterious passenger steps up and tells him how to save the game. The rest of the story then focuses on that passenger, a completely unknown chess player who turns out to be a former Nazi prisoner who learned to play chess by learning by heart the only book he could find in his solitary confinement, a chess book detailing one hundred famous chess games which he began to play in his head to kill time. In the end, the mental chess games against himself nearly drove him insane and he had to swear never to play chess again. And now the people on board are pressuring him to take on the world champion...
Chess Story (also known as The Royal Game) is a dark story about the struggle for survival and about the power and the feebleness of the human mind. Nothing much actually happens in it except for a few chess games, but the back story of the protagonist's madding isolation, his efforts to occupy and train his mind, and his eventual mental breakdown are rendered vividly and with great psychological detail. The result is a compelling novella which packs a greater emotional punch than many a full-length novel, and which is fascinating even for those who don't know the first thing about chess. ...more
The Quiet American is a short novel (180 pages), but it packs a punch, both emotionally and politically. A masterful study of male rivalry and politicThe Quiet American is a short novel (180 pages), but it packs a punch, both emotionally and politically. A masterful study of male rivalry and political engagement set in 1950s Vietnam, it pits against each other two very different men: Thomas Fowler, a jaded, world-weary, ageing British war correspondent, and Alden Pyle, an earnest and idealistic American who has just arrived in Vietnam to work at the Economic Aid Mission and hardly knows anything about the country except what he's read in a book. Early on in the story, in a scene whose absurdity belies the increasingly dark tone of the rest of the book, Pyle informs Fowler that he's in love with Fowler's mistress Phuong and intends to have her for his bride, since, let's face it, he has more to offer her than does Fowler. Amazingly, Pyle then goes on to insist on being Fowler's friend, seemingly unaware that the other man sees him as a rival and doesn't really want anything to do with him. So their stories keep weaving in and out of each other, until Pyle is found dead. The question is, who killed him, and why?
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