A Common Reader . . .

Review: Castorp - Pawel Huelle

In Castorp we revisit the life of Hans Castorp, of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. As many readers will know, in The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp visits his cousin, a patient in a Swiss sanatorium high up in the Alps. He is persuaded to have a medical examination, and drifts into a prolonged course of treatment during which real-life passes him by as he is drawn into the intense, over-heated relationships in the sanatorium, only brought to an end by the start of the First World War.

Pawel Huelle has written a highly effective prequel to The Magic Mountain, in which we see the young Hans Castorp leave his uncle's home in Hamburg and go to Danzig (Gdansk) to study ship-building. 

Castorp's new life commences on board the ship Mercury as he sails to Danzig, in the company of three other passengers with whom he is obliged to spend an uncomfortable few days, dealing with their eccentricities and awkward conversations.  On arrival at Danzig he is persuaded to delay his onward journey to his lodgings by a Dutch tradesman, Kiekiernix, who despatches his bags on to his new landlady and drags him into an elaborate and time-consuming lunch.  Castorp eventually arrives at his rooms to find no sign of his land-lady or his bags, and determines to avoid all further distractions during his stay in Danzig. 

He enrols at the Polytechnic and commences his studies, returning each night to his lodgings where the behaviour of his landlady and her maid cause him some consternation.  He finds comfort in his beloved Maria Mancini cigars and an ample supply of Burgundy wine, and life carries on, amusing and entertainingly for the reader, as the young Hans explores his new surroundings. 

I will not go into further detail of the plot for fear of spoiling the book, but needless to say, it involves Castorp's intense romantic feelings for a remote Polish woman, who he pursues at a distance, unable to carry the relationship further (at least intitally) because of his intense shyness.  There is a denouement, and it is satisfactory as far as this book is concerned, while also leaving themes to be picked up in The Magic Mountain for those who care to read it. 

I enjoyed this book greatly and have been asking myself whether it would be readable by someone who had not read the Mann novel.  I have come to the conclusion that it stands very well on its own, and in some ways, I think it would be good to read this prequel first.  It will change one's understanding of the Mann novel slightly and lead to a sense of recognition of traits in Castorp's character as he settles into the sanatorium.   Mann purists may disagree, but as both works are after-all fiction, in my view, to read this "introduction" first would ot be a bad thing. 

For those who come to this book after reading the Mann novel, I think that they would enjoy this harmless speculation on what went before, and it will be an amusing (and brief) read bringing much of The Magic Mountain back to mind, and reinforcing the view that in Castorp, Mann created a strong and memorable character. 

Pawel Huelle has captured Mann's style perfectly, while also adding more humour and direct interest to his story.  Frankly, more happens in these 230 small format pages that in the whole of The Magic Mountain's 854 and I don't think this book is impoverished by omitting the lengthy philosophical dialogues to which Mann was so given.  The story of Castorp's early years is quite consistent with what came next in the sanatorium and one can only congratulate Huelle for inventing an account of which suggest answers to some of the questions arising from Mann's epic work. 

The book is translated in a flowing and easy to read style by Antonia Lloyd Jones and is beautifully presented by the publishers Serpent's Tail. 

Cheapskate production values

I read lots of book reviews, but rarely find reference to a topic which is of interest to me - value for money.  I shop around for good prices on petrol, a new lawn-mower, a decent second-hand car, but it sometimes seems that book reviewers live on a different planet where the price and the publication values of a book are rarely mentioned (I suppose most reviewers get their books free of charge, so perhaps they think its a bit churlish to look a gift horse . . . etc, etc).  Well, as "a common reader", I think the publishing industry needs to realise that the price/quality axis is not ignored by their market, and can be quite a significant factor in purchasing decisions. 

I began to think about this post after reading a review of Tom Fort's Downstream: Across England in a Punt in The Oldie magazine in which the reviewer, Michael Leapman, criticises the production values of the book - "the publishers . . . too mean to add a section for pictures on proper paper, they have inserted them on the same pages as the text, all in black and off-white, many smudgy and several indecipherable". 

Ahh, W G Sebald, what did you start?  Of course, in Sebald's case the photographs were deliberately grainy and misleading.  His black and white images strewn amidst the text of his prose books, without captions or credits, have the purpose of arresting time; to quote Sebald himself, "they act like barriers or weirs, which stem the flow, slowing down the speed of reading" (The Emergence of Memory by Lynne Sharon Schwartz).  The photographs are an integral feature of Sebald's books and no doubt his publishers were quite bemused at having to print them among his discursive paragraphs (we bloggers can quite happily publish photographs of themselves aged 10 as here!).

Since then, a number of other publishers have cottoned on to the economic benefits of this type of book illustration and it has become quite common to publish photographs in this manner, rather than having a separate section of photographs printed on glossy paper. 

Review: Fair Play - Tove Jansson

At first glance Tove Jannson's Fair Play is simply a collection of stories about two female artists living together in their old age.  It is semi-autobiographical, with Tove being the fictional Marie, and her lifelong partner, graphic designer Tuulikka Pietelä, being Johanna.  Tove is of course the author and creator of the Moomin series of childrens' books, which spawned a large number of television programmes popular in the 1970s and 80s, and to this day. 

Marie and Johanna divide their time between a large apartment in Helsinki and a tiny island of the coast of southern Finland, across the channel from Estonia.  Both women have a strong commitment to their work, and while living as partners, they also create plenty of personal space for their artistic preparation and reflection. 

As in Tove's books, The Summer Book and A Winter Book, on the face of it, nothing much happens.   However it is in the minutiae of their daily life together that forms the real core of the book and if there is a message at all, it is about making the most of each moment of the day, and appreciating everything that is around you - this almost Buddhist message comes across strongly in these simple stories.

Review: Repatriated - Adriaan Van Dis

I have been reading some fairly serious books lately covering themes of war and politics and feeling the need for something rather less demanding I decided to read Repatriated by Adriaan Van Dis (tr. David Colmer very ably from the original Dutch).  I have now spent two or three days in 1950s North Holland, where sand-dunes fringe the endlessly flat polders, and tiny villages struggle to get back to normal life after the Second World War.

This is one of those quirky novels like Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which defies classification.  At first I thought it was going to be a member of that genre that W H Smiths call "Tragic Childhoods", but it is far from that, not least because it is essentially humorous (and also fictional). 

The story focuses on an adolescent boy (un-named) and his father, Mr Java, who live with the boy's mother and his three half-sisters.  Mr Java has come to live in Holland with his family from the Dutch East Indies, and he daily inflicts his eccentricities on his family, especially "the boy", until eventually reaching an absurd climax, which I won't describe for fear of spoiling the novel for other readers. 

Review: Slightly Foxed magazine

Slightly Foxed, "the real readers quarterly", is a magazine for people whose reading is not confined simply to what is new or popular.  As their website suggests, the magazine will suit "people who don't want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing".  Any enthusiastic reader, will be all too conscious of the way in which tastes are manipulated for commercial reasons, especially  to recoup the huge advances paid to authors, and it is refreshing to find in Slightly Foxed, a magazine which is free of glossy adverts for the latest literary fashion accessory. 

The Slightly Foxed website poses the questions:

• Do you carry elderly Penguins in your pockets?
• Do you panic if you find yourself on a journey with nothing to read?
• Do you linger in the book sections of charity shops?

Well, the second question is one to which I can answer a definite "yes".  I have even been known to take a book to the supermarket in case I am held up at the checkout, and the thought of being in the dentist waiting room with only the surgery's Daily Express to read is the stuff of nightmares.

The first and third questions, while relevant to Slightly Foxed are slightly misleading because the magazine is definitely not the sort of thing you'd find in a charity shop and the production values of the magazine bear little relation to "elderly penguins" (mine tend to be falling apart with thin, yellowing paper - "slightly foxed" in fact!).   

Review: The Angel of Grozny - Åsne Seierstad

In Angel of Grozny, Åsne Seierstad provides a deeply personal insight into the life and times of the Russian Republic of Chechnya.  Her book is full of personal anecdotes and descriptions of her visits to a vast range of people in Chechnya, and while this makes it very readable, it can at times be a little disjointed, and it is not always easy to find a common thread.  Her bravery and persistence in seeking out these stories is a wonder in itself however, and several times I found myself wondering how she would get out of the situations she found herself in. 

Seierstad first visited Checyna during the war in 1994, when the break-up of the Russian empire was in full swing. Boris Yeltsin, while encouraging other Soviet nations to "take as much sovereignty as you can", drew the line at allowing Chechnya to gain its independence because he felt that this would threaten the borders of Russia itself.  The result was a violent war, with Chechen fighters confronting young Russian soldiers with the traditional daggers and assassins' bullets, only provoking severe retaliation from the Russians against the civilian population. 

Review: My Father's Country - Wibke Bruhns

In My Father's Country, subtitled "The Story of a German Family", Wibke Bruhns takes us through German history from the start of the 20th century to the Second World War, as it affected her family.  She begins with her grandparents and ends just after the trial and execution of her father, "HG" Klamroth for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

The family were wealthy, owning several businesses and being heavily involved in international trade.  They were steeped in German nationalism, being conservative in the extreme and highly respectful of the military and its leaders.  Wibke Bruhns writes that her father HG, had to absorb "three cheers for Kaiser and Fatherland with his mother's milk".