Posted on by Radz Pandit

Queen – Birgitta Trotzig (tr. Saskia Vogel)

Faber Editions has reissued some quality books in recent years, some of my favourites being The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford, The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger, Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, and The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, to name a few. Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen is another worthwhile addition to this stellar list; more importantly, it introduced me to an author I had never heard of, but who is considered one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated authors of fiction.

Originally published in 1964, Queen feels like a novella unfurling underwater – it emits a palpable sense of claustrophobia, coupled with elements of the strange and the otherworldly.

Set in rural Sweden, in the village of Back in Ljungby near the east coast, “of the sort where the coastal farmhouses’ great barn doors face the coastal wetlands”, the book opens with a letter announcing the arrival of a mysterious woman from America. It is November 1930; we do not yet know who this woman is (that will be revealed later), but she arrives in the village in the dead of night, her arrival as unsettling as the bleak landscape she traverses.

It was dark and had been for hours. She’d seen nothing of the parts through which she’d traveled. Neither could she see any of this landscape, whether there were forests or plains: behind the lit-up station building was nothing but impenetrable darkness, in the darkness a distant rumble could be heard, it was the mumble and roar of the Baltic but this she did not know, she’d never gone to school and knew little of how the world was constituted.

We are told she has suffered some form of trauma in New York, leaving her broken, wracked by fear, and marked by a profound emptiness.

She was an empty box: playing across its plundered deep interior was an eternally flickering reflection, tall flame-shadows. Her interior had been emptied and now was full of fire-shadows, shadows solely.

The woman is on her way to a particular farm in Back – the one belonging to the “Queen,” as she is known in those parts (“In these parts, they called her Queen. And she was queen of rags, of sagging moldering roofs, of nothing”). Judit Lindgren, the Queen, and her younger, docile brother Albert are now in their fifties, and, after years of poverty and isolation, they are suspicious and wary of the sudden intrusion of this unknown woman into their lives.

A narrative that does not always move linearly, the novella soon rewinds a hundred years to the same farm, then quite prosperous in the nineteenth century, ably run by Judit’s grandfather; a well-off family that refused shelter to the “rag-and-bone creatures” who often came by. One night, a pregnant, destitute woman knocks on their door and is turned away, her forlorn image leaving a lasting impression on the young, sensitive Johan (Judit’s father). As these things go, Johan eventually inherits the farm, but he is not cut out for the hard work, the management it demands, or the challenges it brings; slowly and steadily, the farm slips into disarray and neglect, while debts mount, large enough to overwhelm him and plunge the family into years of poverty and misery.

Roofs fell into disrepair, stalls stood empty, and no other animals were put in them, it wasn’t worth it, whichever way he turned it only seemed to end in loss and greater debt. It sucked and whirled and ate away at the narrow strip of solid ground on which they stood. A hollow brittle patch. And the entirety of the sea lapped and ate away at it. They stood there in the middle of the sea and the ground beneath their feet was on its way out.

Young Judit, however, is made of sterner stuff, inwardly vowing to take the reins of the farm and run it herself (“There is a choice in this world. I know what I’m choosing. I take this upon myself. I know what I’m doing”).

But she mustered the strength. For she knew that her father and her mother relied on her, she felt as if everything depended on her. She never had much time to be a child, but neither did she value such things: her soul had been old and mature from the start. And something in her body responded to the burden she was handed, something in her was unbreakable – one day the girl straightened up (under the yoke and water buckets) and grew, she grew to be stately and strong and in her way beautiful.

Albert, younger than her by a year, is slow, dull, and largely left to his own devices, forced to fend for himself.

A full long life of absence from one’s self? And now here too walked Albert, a shifting shadow of himself, the shadow of everything in his life that was darkness and nothingness. Pale, heavy, confused. Even as an adult he would burst into tears over nothing.

An unspoken bond develops between Johan and Albert – father and son, after all, are alike in many respects, at least in their nature and temperament. Then Viktor is born some seven years later, dramatically altering the family dynamics. The mother sinks into a postpartum depression from which she never recovers, her sense of self steadily diminished.

But still she was not there, she never was-she no longer had the strength to make her way back to them, she was far away and didn’t have the strength to make her way back. Out in that fog something had torn her up, damaged her, this was for life.

Johan develops no real affinity or love for the boy, but for Judit, Viktor’s arrival feels like a miracle. In him, she places her hopes for a partnership strong enough to confront a hostile world and strive toward a better, brighter future. When her mother places the swaddled infant in her young arms, Judit feels an immediate, instinctive bond with her brother. She is entranced by Viktor, resolute in her sense of responsibility for raising him.

So she raised him, hard and strict, for she had a dream -she was raising him so that one day he would enter into the dream, he would become strong and hard. He would not be like their father, not be like Albert. No, he would be of help to her and a support, together they would restore the farm, together they would pull it up out of the endless viscous morass of debt. It was for this that she raised him. They were to work together and he would be her help in all things, her support. In this dream their parents were already gone.

But as the years pass, Viktor, once the apple of Judit’s eye, grows into a wayward man and a source of deep disappointment to her. Shaped by a dysfunctional home – unloved and often beaten by his father, neglected by his mother, and stifled by Judit’s suffocating love and possessiveness – Viktor ultimately rebels.

But no shout could penetrate the dull empty silence, it was as if they’d never exchanged a word, father and youngest son, nothing was ever received as intended. And life marched on, in the muteness, in the emptiness. Sometimes it appeared as though the boy’s shining bright gaze was unseeing, blind.

Streaks of cruelty towards his elder brother and repeated episodes of truancy begin to mark his personality. His waywardness manifests in his relationships as well: clandestine affairs, illegitimate children, even driving a woman to suicide – incidents that set the village tongues wagging, while Judit bears the brunt of these whispers with her characteristic stoic reserve.

Meanwhile, Judit is the epitome of control and fortitude, and the men in her life – her father and two brothers – bend, in one way or another, to her will.

She was foremost among her peers for it was her wish to be foremost, it was in school that she began to be called Queen – as well as for her stubborn arrogance, once she’d trained her will on something let it be as it may, she took nothing back.

Compared to the resigned Johan, the obtuse and sluggish Albert, and the weak yet mercurial Viktor, she possesses a far greater strength of character, along with the will and courage to shoulder the responsibility of the farm, even as the men consistently let her down. Her relationship with Viktor is particularly fraught, as she is ultimately spurned by the very brother to whom she has given everything.

Then there is Albert, the neglected brother, ridiculed and jeered at by the villagers for his slowness and simplicity, and tormented by Viktor as he retreats further into himself – yet he still holds out, however faintly, the possibility of love. In a final act of rebellion, Viktor escapes to America, to New York, but finds it in the grip of the Great Depression, and struggles to secure work or any semblance of stability.

But whatever the case the idea that America couldn’t be conquered had been stamped on him, it is immense, cold, strange, it would have been different if there’d been a way back, if that had been possible to consider. But back was death. Beyond the Atlantic lay death.

All of this circles back to the opening scene: the woman making her way to the farm, as Albert and Judit regard her with suspicion, fearing she has come to claim a share of what little they believe is rightfully theirs.

Dark as carbon and hard-edged as a diamond, Queen is steeped in darkness and despair, yet it glints with Trotzig’s lyrical prose and striking symbolism, the sentences often reading like blank verse. This heightens the strange, haunting quality of the bleak, remote world she portrays, even as it remains grounded in the earthy reality of abject poverty and complicated relationships. In her distinctive style, Trotzig lays bare the grimness of poverty, the harshness of peasant life in rural Sweden, the dynamics of dysfunctional families, and the intricacies of unhappy sibling bonds. Violence, rage, frustration, fear, loneliness, resignation, sadness, and even wonder and love – Queen pulsates with a gamut of emotions and feelings as the characters struggle to connect with one another and the world beyond their home.

And the loneliness was difficult. It was a knot, a cramp. So he went into the heather, there was a pit of gray sand, fine cold sand, there one could lie down unseen, the heather provided cover. This was the locus of impurity. And he lay there on his back moaning with shame, a quiet quaking yammer that surged and sank in stiff waves, steps of a sleepwalker, mechanical.

Streaks of feminism lace the novella, particularly when centred on Judit, who recognises early on that she must be independent and take charge when the rest of her family is too frail, too consumed by their misfortunes to keep their heads above water. Judit is very much her own woman; her tough demeanour earns her the moniker “Queen,” and she soldiers on through life with a combination of grit and an unyielding resolve, despite the many disappointments and humiliations that come her way.

Other than the poetic flourishes that leap off the page, Queen drips with mood and atmosphere. Dark winters where the driving winds sound “as if the whole Baltic Sea were spilling across the meadows,” the flat, hostile landscape “soughing and whispering,” winter mornings where “a burning streak could be seen above the tranquil sea,” the sky “a white vault of heavens over the low grounds where horses and sheep grazed,” the white-tailed eagle circling “high above the shoreline dark and alone,” as well as the pounding, endless grey waves – the novella shimmers with a slew of metaphors and vivid imagery of the seasons, the landscape, and the weather.

He walked onto the heath, he had an errand over in Torp at the edge of the forest on the other side and he had made it up to where the road curved over the crest, he turned around and saw the whole wide heath gray-white-shimmering with snow gently sloping all the way down to the sea, it was over five kilometers down to that black-green unmoving surface, the air was gray and colorless and easy to breathe, it carried a faint fresh whiff of snow. The road curved over the crest. To the left was a pile of rocks, to the right was a spring. Around the spring a thicket of low alders, hazel – leaves fallen on the frost-gray ground like a blanket of gold coins.

Told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, Queen is an intense, evocative, and dense novella; there is a sense of inevitability about the characters’ tragic fates and their inability to break free from the greyness that defines their lives, which makes for compelling reading. Definitely recommended!

The Queen was consumed by her own pain, from the walls of Jerusalem she stretched her pain out across the mountains, her heart cried out like a body about to be crushed under a boulder, if the weight of death is not lifted, if the bedrock does not shift, will she not crack?

No.

Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.

Posted on by Radz Pandit

The Deserters – Mathias Énard (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

The first Mathias Énard I read was Compass, which impressed me so much that I wanted to read all his books thereafter. Since then, I have loved and reviewed three more of his novels – Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, and Zone. I thought The Deserters, longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was also excellent, although, admittedly, of the two storylines central to the novel, I preferred one significantly more than the other.

In some sense, the two storylines that form the DNA of Mathias Enard’s The Deserters are akin to its double helix structure – two distinct narrative strands that wind around each other, yet remain linked by a common theme of war, violence, and disrupted lives.

The first storyline, easily my favourite, is classic Énard – an engrossing narrative that showcases his considerable erudition and vivid prose as he combines the personal with the political, weaving mathematics and history (including the Holocaust, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the Covid pandemic, and the Russia–Ukraine war) into the story of a complicated relationship between a man and a woman.

The man in question is Paul Heudeber, a committed Communist and anti-fascist, brilliant mathematician, and survivor of Buchenwald, but the story is told from the perspective of his daughter Irina, a historian of mathematics (“My father walked on two legs: algebra and communism”).

It should be said that I was the only historian in the conference. All the others were mathematicians, physicists, or, worse, logicians. All facing forward. Looking toward innovation, invention, discovery. I was the only one who was less interested in the glorious demonstrations and inventions of tomorrow than in the sweet meanderings of the past. Meanderings of the past that project their light to the furthest limits of the future, and I felt, during this “Paul Heudeber Days” colloquium on the Havel…

Paul has long been dead, and much of his story unfolds through Irina’s flashbacks as she reflects on the life and political ideals not only of her father but also of her mother, Maja, whom Paul regarded as the love of his life.

One particular event becomes the narrative’s focal point: a conference held in Paul’s memory, bringing together several brilliant minds in Berlin to discuss the impact and enduring value of his written work, The Buchenwald Conjectures. Maja, who, along with Jürgen Thiele, plans the event “The Paul Heudeber Days,” arranges for the lectures and presentations to take place aboard a cruise ship on the Havel.

After his tragic death in 1995, Paul still remained extremely close, his body transformed into language, his name uttered like an incantation a hundred times a day by the conference participants. The river was the very expression of this melancholy, its most beautiful metaphor: what we watch disappear, what flees to the great unknown producing a green, fluid, iridescent, endless beauty, always present and never the same. Starting Monday, on the Havel between Spandau and Potsdam, this melancholy glued me to my deck chair, with the sun.

Accommodation for participants is arranged ashore at the White Owl Hotel, while the talks take place on the ship. The date is September 10, 2001, a day before the 9/11 attacks wreak havoc in the United States, and the attendees are confronted with the horror of what is unfolding during the course of the presentations the next day. Interspersed with Irina’s reminiscences of the conference is the correspondence between Paul and Maja – more precisely, the letters Paul wrote to her expressing his longing, as well as his work in mathematics, particularly the “infinity of twin primes.” From Irina’s perspective, the reader also glimpses Paul’s turbulent life: his arrest and imprisonment in Buchenwald (which he survives), his intransigence and commitment to his communist ideals, his disillusionment with the corrupted form of communism in the Soviet, and his refusal to leave East Berlin.

We get a sense of Irina’s fraught relationship with Maja, a fiercely independent woman in her own right and a political activist. Although she is in love with Paul, a divergence in their ambitions compels them to lead separate lives – Maja moves to West Berlin – even as she remains foremost in Paul’s mind. It is during his time in Buchenwald that he writes his famous work, The Buchenwald Conjectures, in the 1940s, which becomes the subject of the conference taking place almost six decades later.

Paul emerges as a man deeply committed to communism, yet disheartened by its failure to unfold as he had envisaged.

“The Prague Affair” had tested his faith. He found no justification for the Soviet intervention – Walter Ulbricht’s visit to Prague on August 12, eight days before the tanks entered Prague, eroded Paul’s trust. For my father, all these events were so many blows against socialism. For Paul, the Soviets were more and more becoming enemies of actual socialism, as they had been during Stalin’s time. Stalin did indeed conquer Nazism, buthe had also imprisoned, deported, assassinated, purged Paul’s heroes, all the revolutionaries of ’17; Paul had also been outraged to learn, much later, that, after the liberation of Buchenwald, the Soviets had continued to use the camp to intern prisoners there, until as late as 1950.

Mathematics and the obscure world of numbers offer him an escape into an arcane realm when the real world becomes too much to absorb, resulting in a body of work that blends mathematics and poetry in a way that will enthrall readers in subsequent years and inspire the tribute to his genius on that fateful day in September 2001. As this storyline unfurls, the dynamics of the complicated relationship between Maja and Paul come to the fore, as does their immense love for one another; we also sense the currents of betrayal, guilt, and forgiveness that form the fabric of their bond – the interplay of light and shadow across two lives inextricably bound together.

You protected my days as you protect them today, you even soften them in absence and Irina projects something of you, a softness, a consolation for the passage of time, a ray of light that comes from your close and distant soul. You are a malady – my passion has the malady of infinity, my love can only be written with your name. There is no other way to designate love but to say your name. Come back to me soon.

The conference forms the core of the Paul Heudeber storyline, from which the narrative radiates to the past, to the horrors of the Holocaust and Paul’s internment in a concentration camp, then to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then forward to a future in which both Paul and Maja are gone and Irina, now an old woman, navigates the reality of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The September conference itself finds the participants confined on the boat in a state of limbo as images of the 9/11 attacks – the collapse of the World Trade towers and the vast clouds of smoke billowing through the streets of New York – flash relentlessly on the news, filling them with dread and helplessness and heightening the dissonance between the tranquil setting in Berlin and the devastation unfolding in New York. By encompassing these pivotal moments of history – marked by violence, terror, war, and the human capacity for evil – within the story of a fictional mathematician, Enard demonstrates his mastery in shaping a narrative that captures the endless cycle of war and terror while also dwelling on the themes of love, family, a sense of purpose in one’s work, and the struggle to build a better future from the debris of the past.

The Camp (Buchenwald) had become a key moment in the symbolic construction of East Germany, the construction of the regime’s antifascist display case; the moment when, in the most painful heart of Nazism, within the organization of communist resistance in Buchenwald-those who will become the spearheads of subsequent antifascism, the ideological force of the Democratic Republic of Germany-the country still to come was metaphorically born in a child, a child who must be protected, for he represents hope.

The second storyline is a completely different beast in terms of tone and style. More poetic and elusive, it centers on an unnamed man – a soldier who has deserted his band of troops in the midst of war – though Énard deliberately avoids fixing the narrative in any specific time or place, lending its larger theme of the debilitating impact of war, a universal quality. While Heudeber’s narrative traverses years and decades, moving between past and future, the soldier’s story remains rooted in the immediacy of the present – the escape from combat, savouring the solitude of the mountain, and the necessity of foraging for food, in essence, the act of pure survival.

It appears that the man is somewhere in the Mediterranean, judging by the evocative portrayal of his immediate surroundings, as he looks out for “the fresh wild basil that spring causes to proliferate in the mountains”, chews for a long time on “a sprig, bitter, acidic, and peppery” as well as “arbutus berries that still survive in winter like forgotten Christmas decorations, coarse and red” as he makes his way to a certain destination…

“…This  sudden emotion comes from nearby – one day walking-from the village below, halfway up the slope, where the orange trees are little by little invading the plains, where the olive trees make themselves scarce on the terraces with their stone walls, where a few towers appear among the houses with gentle arches, with their broken domes between the green medlar trees, lit up with orange fruit in June, among the noble fig trees bent with age whose figs hum with insects in autumn…”

The soldier seems at the end of his tether, battered both physically and mentally, and seeks refuge in a cabin in the mountains where he supposedly spent his childhood.

It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers,

you know the region,

you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow,

the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

the cabin will protect you with its childhood,

you’ll be caressed with its memories,

sometimes sleep comes by surprise like the bullet of a marksman lying in ambush.

Pangs of extreme hunger besiege him, as do fears of being captured by soldiers who would certainly torture him to death once they discover his desertion; he must therefore reach the cabin stealthily and remain unseen. He manages to do so, only to be confronted with an unexpected development: a woman, accompanied by her donkey, has also taken refuge there. The sight of him terrifies her – she is aware of his capacity for brutality and fears he might rape her. He does not, though he intermittently regrets not having shot her when he had the chance, fearing she might betray him. A palpable tension persists between them, marked by distrust and uncertain motives, until a lightning strike hits the woman and the animal, turning the narrative in a direction that unsettles the reader’s perception of the man. These sections are rendered in a stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting the thoughts of both the soldier and the woman, dotted with sensory-rich imagery of the natural world, at once idyllic and menacing.

The thunder crushes the earth with its exploding, endless rage, cramped in the mountains, which it seems to split apart; the thunder opens up the sunny side as it rolls, the infinite thunder runs under the lightning flashes, jerky, abrupt sparkle of giants splitting the rocks with its crackling-lightning hit close by, lighting always hits very close, she can smell its scent of ozone, its light has blinded the donkey’s one eye with an awful reflection, the drops of water have become trickles, straight streams, opaque curtains of continuous rain, an instant deluge whose force is starting to shift the pebbles under her feet, the slope becomes a torrent in the thunder that resumes and rumbles again, crushing any hope of a refuge, she is immediately soaked, she is dripping, she looks for a nonexistent shelter, the rain strikes the ground as strongly as the thunder itself, she walks a few feet to the right, then returns to the left at a run, stunned, the donkey bellows at each thunderclap, it brays like a mad thing, adding its cries to the tumult, the lightning flashes, the thunder doesn’t stop, it’s a repeating gun that makes the earth shake, interspersed with huge electric arcs slicing through the very mass of the rain.

War and its devastations, violence, survival, exile, desertion, love, memory, and homage are among the central themes that course through the novel. The soldier’s narrative lays bare the physical and psychological destruction wrought by war, while in Heudeber’s narrative, we see how this recurring presence of death and devastation deepens his intellectual and emotional disillusionment. The title – The Deserters – in a sense refers to both Paul and the unnamed soldier: the latter has literally deserted the army, weary of war and its mindless violence, while Paul, in death, has in his own way deserted a world that is no longer what he wanted it to be. Though the circumstances remain unclear, Paul’s death is deemed a suicide, his way of abandoning a world that had no place for his political beliefs and subjected him to inhumanity, fuelling his descent into sadness and melancholy. Yet Paul had found hope and refuge in mathematics (“She taught me that mathematics was another name for hope”), as well as in his love for Maja and their daughter Irina.

In my father’s last letters, the ones written just before his death in the fall of 1995, there’s a kind of sad detachment, a sudden political apathy, a melancholy-starting in the late 1960s and his voluntary “reclusion” in algebraic topology and utopian surfaces, an imprisonment from which he wouldn’t emerge until the early 1980s to take over the running of the Institute, one has the impression that melancholy is gaining ground, that he’s starting to be overwhelmed by it. Ten years of sadness-did this sadness have to do with Maja, with the sensation of distance, almost of separation?

Readers of Énard will find in The Deserters a range of elements that recall Compass, Zone, and even Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants. For instance, one of the major themes explored in Zone is the unrelenting cycle of war and violence unfurling throughout history, in which, through the central character’s chaotic reflections, Énard draws connections between ancient and contemporary conflicts, highlighting how the Mediterranean has always been a fertile ground for violence, conquest, and suffering. Something of this carries over into the soldier’s narrative in The Deserters, as he abandons the mindless brutality of war somewhere in the Mediterranean, hoping to cross northwards unseen.

Echoes of Compass reverberate in the Heudeber storyline, not only in the immersive, enlightening prose that is a hallmark of Énard’s writing, but also in the way it occasionally segues into the influence of the Orient on the West, here through mathematics. Irina, for instance, speaks of devoting her doctoral thesis to “the algebra of Omar Khayyam” and her accreditation thesis to “the question of irrational numbers in Nasir al-Din Tusi,” and ofchoosing to travel to Cairo for her studies.

I learned Arabic in Cairo. I took refuge in the heart of the Middle Ages the way you leave your native village to try your luck in a distant city. Cairo was at once the capital of archeology, of ancient knowledge, the city of the Fatimids and the Mamluks, and the Metropolis of Nasser and Sadat.

There are also faint traces here of the kind of alternative history seen in Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, where Énard plays with the idea of Michelangelo accepting the Sultan’s offer to build a bridge over the Golden Horn in Constantinople, despite there being no firm historical record of it. In a similar vein, The Deserters presents Paul Heudeber’s preoccupation with the twin prime conjecture, which, a cursory search suggests, remains unproven, though within the novel, he may have solved it. One might even venture to suggest slight similarities with The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, not in terms of themes or content, but in the way both books bring together a range of different writing styles.

Intellectually rich and inventive, and beautifully translated as ever by Charlotte Mandell, The Deserters is another excellent novel by Mathias Énard, and one that will particularly reward his fans (I am certainly one). For those new to his work, however, this is perhaps not the best place to begin – Compass or Zone would be better entry points; however, if you are looking for something shorter, go with Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants.

Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell.

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Every Man Dies Alone – Hans Fallada (tr. Michael Hofmann)

Lately, I have been drawn to books that dwell on the themes of authoritarianism and resistance, given the terrifying state of the world. Therefore, the time felt right to read Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a book that had been languishing on my bookshelves for some time. I can’t believe it took me so long to finally pick it up because it is absolutely terrific. My edition has been published by Melville House, but in the UK, this novel has been published with the title Alone in Berlin.

At the end of Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada’s extraordinary, gripping account of the resistance of ordinary Germans to Nazism, we learn that the novel draws upon the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a poorly educated working class couple living in Berlin, who had never previously engaged in any form of political activity, until they began writing and leaving postcards around the city urging the citizens to wake up to Nazi tyranny, a regime that would bring them no peace. Drawing on the Gestapo case files compiled on the couple, Fallada shapes this material into a masterful narrative centred on the fictional Otto and Anna Quangel  (modelled on the Hampels) who, shattered by the death of their only son, set their perilous act of resistance into motion.

Originally published in 1947 and set in Berlin in 1940, when the novel opens, Eva Kluge, the postwoman, is on her way to deliver a letter to the Quangels, who live in a building on Jablonski Strasse. The letter carries the news of their son’s death in the war, and when Otto, having read it, conveys its contents to Anna, she is overcome with grief, lashing out at him with words that wound him deeply – “And now he’s supposed to be an exemplary soldier, and died a hero’s death? Lies, all a pack of lies! But that’s what you get from your wretched war, you and that Fuhrer of yours!”

Otto Quangel, we learn, is a foreman in a carpentry factory – reticent by nature, yet good and diligent in his work, and respected by both colleagues and those who report to him. Even in his personal life, Otto prefers solitude to company; the Quangels are therefore not a sociable couple, choosing instead to go about their daily lives quietly, until the letter announcing their son’s death arrives, and the cracks in their marriage begin to show. Until this point, Otto has always been a man who followed rules, a reliable worker in the eyes of the company management, and yet he has firmly resisted becoming a Party member. Thus, Anna’s words particularly rankle him, for he deems them unfair, even as he knows they were spoken in the immediate throes of grief.

When Otto meets Trudel Baumann, his son’s fiancée, a subtle shift occurs in his perspective. Trudel is, of course, deeply affected by the news of Ottochen’s death, but Otto also learns that she is part of an underground resistance movement, comprising three other men besides herself. The impression left by this meeting, together with the weight of Anna’s words, gradually plants the seeds of an idea in Otto’s mind.

Hanging on the gallows is no worse than being ripped apart by a shell, or dying from a bullet in the guts. All that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is this: I must find out what it is with Hitler. Suddenly all I see is oppression and hate and suffering, so much suffering… A few hundred thousand, that’s what that cowardly snitch Borkhausen said. As if the number mattered! If so much as one person is suffering unjustly, and I can put an end to it, and the only reason I don’t is because I’m a coward and prefer peace and quiet, then…

He and Anna, then, begin their venture of resistance – writing anonymous postcards that attack Hitler and the Nazi Party, and leaving them on the stairwells of buildings to be discovered by other ordinary German citizens – ‘PASS THIS CARD ON, SO THAT MANY PEOPLE READ IT! –DON’T GIVE TO THE WINTER RELIEF FUND! – WORK AS SLOWLY AS YOU CAN! – PUT SAND IN THE MACHINES! – EVERY STROKE OF WORK NOT DONE WILL SHORTEN THE WAR!’

The Quangels are aware that, on their own, there is little they can do; but perhaps, like them, there are many others who are disillusioned with the Nazis yet dare not speak out. Courage, however, is contagious, and the Quangels are filled with hope that their postcards will inspire others to resist in their own way and to find courage in the knowledge that there are many others like them.

He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

At first, the Quangels struggle to put their plan into action – which building should they choose? How can they drop the postcards without being seen? Otto insists on bearing the burden himself, determined that the risk should be his alone. Soon, however, Anna begins to shoulder that responsibility as well, but in those initial days, the fear she experiences is palpable and entirely real.

So I am afraid, she thinks. My God, he must never find out, otherwise he’ll never take me with him again. But then, I’m not really afraid, she thinks. I’m not afraid for me, I’m afraid for him. What if he doesn’t come out?

Sadly, the impact these postcards have on people is quite the contrary, as the reader soon learns, though the Quangels themselves are unaware of this at the time. With an atmosphere of deep-rooted fear pervading all layers of German society, most of the discovered cards end up being reported to the Gestapo.

They conceded that some of their cards probably wound up in the hands of the police, but they reckoned no more than one out of every five or six. They had so often thought and spoken about the great effectiveness of their work that the circulation of their cards and the attention that greeted them was, as far as they were concerned, no longer theoretical but factual. And yet the Quangels didn’t have the least actual evidence for this. In other words, the Quangels were like most people: they believed what they hoped.

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game, as the Gestapo mounts an investigation to apprehend the writer of these postcards, for whom death is certain if caught.

The man in charge of this investigation, Inspector Escherich, believes in the virtue of patience and critical thinking when handling the case, much to the chagrin of his superiors, who demand immediate results. As the postcards make their way to the Gestapo, Escherich meticulously plots on a map pinned to his office wall the locations where they were found, in order to form a composite view of the likely profile and whereabouts of the writer. As the days pass and the postcards keep coming, the frustration of his superiors only increases; Escherich, by contrast, remains calm, knowing it is only a matter of time before the culprit is caught – through a combination of his investigative skill and the likelihood that the perpetrator will eventually make a mistake, as his luck is bound to change.

Around them, Fallada populates Berlin with a wide cast of characters – informers, opportunists, petty criminals, and ordinary citizens – each navigating the suffocating atmosphere of suspicion and fear in their own way. Among the most prominent are Enno Kluge and Emil Borkhausen, both seeking opportunities to make a quick buck, yet the two could not be more different.

Enno Kluge, married to Eva Kluge, the postwoman we encounter at the beginning of the book, is portrayed as a serial womanizer and a lazy man, a chronic gambler forever seeking excuses to shirk work. He is unintelligent and weak, a petty thief, yet capable of emotionally manipulating his string of lovers with empty promises of reform, promises the reader knows he will never keep. His wife Eva has thrown him out of the house for his constant lying and thieving, and Enno now wanders the streets, searching for a former lover in whose arms he hopes to find solace. A brief partnership with Emil Borkhausen to rob the home of Mrs Rosenthal, a Jewish woman living in the same apartment block as the Quangels, proves a damp squib, leaving both men battered and increasingly distrustful of one another. Borkhausen, meanwhile, is a sly, scheming opportunist, desperate for money and always on the lookout for a quick scheme, even if it means resorting to blackmail.

While Part One – The Quangels – focuses on the couple and the circumstances that propel them toward their act of resistance, the second section –The Gestapo – largely sidelines them. For much of this section, the Quangels virtually disappear, as the narrative is dominated instead by the story of Enno Kluge – something I would have preferred to be somewhat more concise. At the same time, the section offers a detailed look at the workings of the Gestapo, particularly through the perspective of the lead inspector on the case, Escherich.

In a crucial set piece, Kluge’s suspicious behaviour at a doctor’s office, combined with the discovery of one of the Quangels’ postcards in the office corridor, leads the Gestapo to conclude that Enno is the elusive writer. Escherich, however, soon becomes convinced that they have the wrong man. The section brims with a sense of absurdity, especially in the Gestapo’s dogged pursuit of Kluge. Pressured by his superiors, Escherich is nonetheless compelled to continue the investigation, even though he believes Kluge lacks both the intelligence and the guile to have written the postcards. At the same time, he begins to wonder whether Kluge’s oddly suspicious behaviour might justify his arrest after all. Ultimately, Escherich forces Kluge to sign a confession stating that he is the postcard writer, even though he is not, and Kluge agrees, paradoxically, in the hope of finally getting the Gestapo off his back.

Incredibly compelling and fast-paced, Every Man Dies Alone paints a frightening portrait of life under an authoritarian regime in Germany – the fear instilled in ordinary citizens and the veil of constant surveillance under which they go about their lives, where challenging the Nazi regime is unthinkable, the fear being too great, where neighbours betray one another for trivial gain, and minor officials enforce rules with unthinking zeal. In such an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the Quangels embark on a dangerous path, and yet the novel, above all, is about resistance – not grand, sweeping gestures that might topple a regime, but small, individual acts of courage. These acts reveal how, despite the pervasive terror, many quietly questioned Nazi tyranny, resisting in their own ways and within their limits. It’s about an individual’s personal refusal to be corrupted by Nazi ideologies.

Even if the only effect is to remind them that there is still resistance out there, that not everyone thinks like the Führer…’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not everyone. Not us.’

‘And there will be more of us, Anna. We will make more. We will inspire other people to write their own postcards.

In this, the Quangels serve as the central moral compass of the story, but they are not alone. A host of secondary characters defy the regime in their own manner. There is Eva Kluge, who, agonised upon learning of her son’s complicity in atrocities against the Jews, renounces her Party membership. One of Enno Kluge’s lovers, Hetty, shelters him briefly when she learns the Gestapo is on his trail; though disillusioned by his constant lying, she remains convinced that he must not fall into their hands. Trudel Baumann, who marries Karl Hergesell and settles into a quiet domestic life with the arrival of a child, nonetheless feels a persistent urge to contribute to the resistance – “But the main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do. Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.” And then there is Judge Fromm, who hides Mrs Rosenthal in his apartment after her husband is captured, fully aware of the grave risks involved in offering refuge to a Jewish woman.

Throughout the novel, Fallada displays a mastery of characterisation. Otto Quangel is a taciturn master carpenter working in a Berlin furniture factory, portrayed as a dutiful, apolitical German who has previously kept a low profile. Following the death of his son at the front, Otto undergoes a sort of moral transformation, which fuels him to initiate an active, calculated resistance against the Nazi regime. We also see how his marriage to Anna, strained at first by the news of their son’s death, grows stronger as the novel progresses, as the couple comes to share a sense of purpose in resisting the Nazis.

They did their work in the most harmonious togetherness, and this deep, inner togetherness that they had only discovered now, after long years of marriage, became a great source of happiness to them, spreading its glow across their weeks. They saw each other, so to speak, with a single glance, they smiled, each knowing that the other had just thought about their next card, or the effect of their cards, of the steadily increasing number of their followers, and of the public that was already impatiently waiting.

While initially more fearful and compliant, Anna becomes an unwavering and courageous partner in Otto’s rebellion, providing the emotional strength and silent support necessary for their shared endeavour. Her love for Otto guides her actions and gives her resilience in particularly trying and fearful moments, and although she is often overshadowed by Otto’s stubbornness, she reveals herself to be a woman of fierce resolve. The sadness lies in how the Quangels are somewhat deluded in assuming that their postcards will have a momentous impact, yet later, when questioned on why they chose such a dangerous course, Otto Quangel replies, “At least I stayed decent,’ he said. ‘I didn’t participate.” And yet their efforts are not entirely in vain; they do manage to convert at least one individual, someone they could never have possibly imagined. Even Inspector Escherich comes across as a complex character. He is undoubtedly a Nazi, yet as the case progresses, he grows increasingly frustrated by the stupidity and misplaced zeal of the system, unable to make his boss see his point of view.

Fallada excels in depicting the dynamics of a totalitarian regime, where loyalty, fealty, obedience, fear, and paranoia prevail – where nuance has no place, where the system is rife with incompetence and danger.

They had failed to understand that there was no such thing as private life in wartime Germany. No amount of reticence could change the fact that every individual German belonged to the generality of Germans and must share in the general destiny of Germany, even as more and more bombs were falling on the just and unjust alike.

Then, Inspector Escherich’s dilemma in pursuing the postcard writers highlights how his capacity for critical thinking is overlooked by officials in their relentless demand for quick results. Despite being a respected police officer, even he is bound to follow the rules of the system, however bizarre and incompetent, and cannot challenge his superiors, as he gradually comes to realise.

Loneliness and solitude are recurring themes in the novel, and different characters in the story respond to them in different ways. Eva Kluge, after the disappointments of her husband and son, is glad to be finally alone – “Now she’s alone. At this moment it strikes her as very likely that she will enjoy the condition. Perhaps when she’s all alone she will amount to more: she’ll have some time to herself, and won’t need to put herself last, after all the others.” For others, like Mrs Rosenthal, to whom Judge Fromm offers a secret room in his house, the isolation is almost unbearable. Then there are the Quangels – Otto fiercely defends their privacy and the need to remain independent, shunning company, especially now that they have embarked on this dangerous project together, while Anna does crave some company, particularly that of her brother, whom she hasn’t met for a long time.

The title of the novel particularly refers to how each individual must face the consequences of his/her actions and, in this regard, is entirely alone – even in matters relating to death and persecution.

“As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.”

Every Man Dies Alone is imbued with a thriller-like quality that makes it an immersive read – first in the opening half, when the Gestapo races to close in on the Quangels, and later in the poignant manner in which their fate unfolds. Fallada brilliantly captures not just the story of the Quangels but also that of German society at large, and how it grappled with the all-pervading atmosphere of fear, distrust, and paranoia that prevailed in a police state. This climate, in turn, influenced the motivations of his myriad cast of characters – some moved to resist, others simply to survive, and still others to exploit the situation through crime, betrayal, or informing on one another.

‘Show me one that isn’t afraid!’ said the brownshirt contemptuously. ‘And it’s so unnecessary. They just need to do what we tell them.’

‘It’s because people have got in the habit of thinking. They have the idea that thinking will help them.’

‘They need to do as they’re told. The Führer can do their thinking for them.’

We are compelled to ask ourselves: What is the meaning of resistance? How difficult is it to resist when most citizens are gripped by fear and would rather submit to the dictates of a totalitarian regime? Does it make sense to resist when the odds of effecting any significant change are negligible at best? What does it mean to possess moral clarity, and can it truly provide the courage to act – and to face the consequences, however difficult or grim?

The novel pulsates with a wide range of moods, tones and emotions – mounting tension as the Gestapo closes in on the Quangels, leading to heart-stopping moments when they are almost caught; flashes of absurd comedy, particularly in the inspector’s pursuit of the bewildered, deeply flawed yet essentially innocent Enno Kluge; and tragedy in the deaths and suicides of certain characters. Piercing moments of kindness, friendship, tenderness, and hope punctuate the narrative, heightening its poignancy against a backdrop of hostility and terror. Otto Quangel, for instance, encounters a character later in the novel, a doctor, whose wisdom and companionship he comes to cherish – profound conversations that help him see himself in a different light.

I always thought it was enough if I did my work properly and didn’t mess anything up. And now I learn that there are loads of other things I could have done: play chess, be kind to people, listen to music, go to the theatre.

The book also concludes on an unexpectedly hopeful note, at least in relation to one of the characters, lending the story a sense of possibility.

In a nutshell, with its cast of vivid characters, a compelling story rendered in fluid, fast-paced prose, and its central themes of resistance and moral clarity, Every Man Dies Alone is a remarkable novel – one that feels ominously relevant in the troubled times we live in today – “We live not for ourselves, but for others. What we make of ourselves we make not for ourselves, but for others.”

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.

Posted on by Radz Pandit · 15 Comments

On My Blog’s 9th Birthday: 9 Favourites from 9 Independent Publishers

RRR turned 9 today! How the time has flown and I’ve enjoyed every bit reading and writing about books. I intend to continue…certainly till I reach the milestone of 10 next year. Meanwhile, since it’s my blog’s ninth birthday, I thought I’ll share nine favourite books from nine favourite independent publishers. 

NEW DIRECTIONS

A TILER’S AFTERNOON by Lars Gustafsson (Translated from Swedish by Tom Geddes)

Lars Gustafsson’s marvellous novella – A Tiler’s Afternoon – is a strange, hypnotic, existential tale exploring loss, the power of memories, the meaning of work, and the mysteries of life, that as the title suggests captures one working day in the life of an ageing, lonely tiler. On a grey November morning in 1982, we meet Torsten Bergman, the tiler of the title and our protagonist, aged 65 and living alone in Uppsala, Sweden, a man pretty much at the end of this tether. Then one Thursday morning, the piercing shrill of the telephone sets the stage for the unravelling of a puzzling, disconcerting set of events. A man called Pentti, a plumber and a jack of all trades, who has worked with Torsten in the past, tells him of some tiling work to be done in a big, old-fashioned, suburban house. When Torsten lands at the house that is to be his workplace, he is impressed by its stylishness and ambitious planning. But there’s not a soul to be found. 

Torsten, nevertheless, gets to work, priding on his resourcefulness while also being lost in his daydreams, but as the clock ticks away, the mysterious quality of the house begins to spark a sense of unease. By turns quiet, understated, and unsettling, with its masterful interplay of melancholia and wry humour, A Tiler’s Afternoon is a powerful little gem. 

DAUNT BOOKS PUBLISHING

KICK THE LATCH by Kathryn Scanlan

Comprising a series of crystal clear, pristine vignettes with eye-catching titles and nuggets of distilled information, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is such a joy to read – a book that brilliantly captures the panorama of a woman’s life on the Midwest racetracks where her sheer grit, fierce determination and unconditional love for horses enables her to make a mark in a tough field largely dominated by men.

Scanlan’s narrative is dexterously crafted, preserving Sonia’s distinctive style of speech (“there’s a particular language you pick up on the track”), a brilliant feat of ventriloquism if you will where Sonia’s engrossing storytelling skills artfully blend with Scanlan’s own style giving the impression of Sonia speaking through Scanlan. Lean and lyrical, the prose in Kick the Latch is stripped down to its bare essentials but it speaks multitudes, a whole way of life conveyed in as little space as possible but with remarkable tenderness and acuity. 

FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS

THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS’ GUILD by Mathias Enard (Translated from French by Frank Wynne)

Enard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild is a dazzling feat of the senses, a brilliant novel of rural life, violence and death, love and revelry, agriculture and anthropology, reincarnation, and the afterlife. Set in the marshlands of Deux Sevres, a village called La Pierre-Sainte-Christophe in Western France, the novel comprises seven sections but is arranged in a circular structure that begins and ends with an anthropologist’s journal entries, and enveloping a third-person narrative that is the hallmark of Enard’s rich, dense, immersive prose style introducing its central conceit (the Wheel of Life). This in turn surrounds the novel’s chief feature, the icing on the cake, which is the banquet or the feast that gives the novel its name, a section that brims with ribaldry and bawdy humour. The Annual Banquet is a richly detailed, intricately crafted literary feast with its exhilarating range of styles, forms, and voices, garnished with Enard’s trademark historical and literary references that make his books such a pleasure to read.

MCNALLY EDITIONS

THE OPPERMANNS by Lion Feuchtwanger (Translated from German by James Cleugh, revisions by Joshua Cohen)

Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns is a haunting, powerful story charting the rise and fall of a rich, cultured, liberal German Jew family during the years leading up to and during Hitler’s rise to power. The author takes his time setting up his cast of characters while simultaneously juxtaposing their situation with the broader grim political developments sweeping throughout the country making it an incredibly immersive read right from the very beginning.

The Oppermanns comprise the three brothers – Martin, Edgar, Gustav, and their sister Klara, married to the East European Jew Jaques Lavendel who is an American citizen but chooses to live in Germany. Established in Berlin, the family’s furniture venture is largely run and managed by Martin. Edgar is an eminent and respected doctor with a thriving practice of his own, while Gustav, the eldest brother, is relatively naïve and sentimental; a man of letters, Gustav is absorbed with his world of books and writing a biography on Lessing, fine dining and women, while oblivious and uninterested in matters concerning politics or economics.

As the Nazis come into power, the Oppermanns are shocked by the scale of the country’s moral breakdown while also unable to fathom the precariousness of their existence in this dramatically altered landscape of their homeland. In this volatile situation, the three brothers are faced with a terrible dilemma – should they flee Germany, or should they stay back?

CHARCO PRESS

TWO SHERPAS by Sebastián Martínez Daniell (Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Croft)

In the beginning, two Sherpas peer over the edge of a precipice staring at the depths below where a British climber lies sprawled among the rocks. Almost near the top of Mount Everest, the silence around them is intense, punctuated by the noise of the gushing wind (“If the deafening noise of the wind raveling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence”). Wishing to emulate the feat of many others before him, the Englishman had aimed to ascend the summit but that ambition now is clearly in disarray. Assisting him in the climb are two Sherpas, one a young man, the other much older, but with this sudden accident, the Sherpas are in a quandary on how to best respond.

Thus, in a span of barely ten to fifteen minutes and using this particular moment as a central story arc, the novel brilliantly spins in different directions in a vortex of themes and ideas that encompass the mystery of the majestic Mount Everest, its significance in the history of imperialist Britain, the ambition of explorers to ascend its summit, attitudes of foreigners towards the Sherpa community to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Rome. This is a brilliant, vividly imagined, richly layered novel that gives the reader much to ponder and think about.

RECOVERED BOOKS, BOILER HOUSE PRESS

TIME: THE PRESENT SELECTED STORIES by Tess Slesinger

Another excellent Recovered Books title, Time: The Present is a superb collection of 19 stories exploring marriage, relationships, unemployment and class differences  where Tess Slesinger displays the kind of psychological acuity that make them so distinct and memorable. Most of these stories were published in the 1930s in various journals and publications and capture the great turmoil of the period; a country grappling with the Great Depression and its crippling, sobering consequences on everyday living as well as the grim prospect of the Second World War looming large.

Some examples – “The Friedmans’ Annie” is superb and poignant, a terrific portrayal of the internal drama of a woman and an incisive tale of class differences and manipulation, while Slesinger’s flair for sarcasm and sharp, biting observations are on full display in the piece “Jobs in the Sky.” “Ben Grader Makes a Call” explores the psychological consequences of unemployment on a relationship, while “Missis Flinders” is a scalpel-like, hard-hitting tale of an abortion, the emotional burden of which sets in motion the unraveling of a marriage.

What’s remarkable about Time: The Present is the sheer variety of themes on display marked by Slesinger’s grasp on a wide range of subjects. At once astute, razor-sharp, gut-wrenching, tragic, perceptive and wise, Time: The Present is a magnificent collection, one that definitely deserves to be better known.

ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS

A CHANGE OF TIME by Ida Jessen (Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

Set in a rural Danish village in the early 20th century, A Change of Time is a beautiful, quiet and reflective novel told through the diary entries of a schoolteacher called Frau Bagge. The novel begins when her husband, Vigand Bagge, a mocking and cruel man, and who is also a respected village doctor, passes away. Subsequently, the novel charts her response to his death and her attempts to build herself a new life, find herself a new place and identity and discover meaning in life again. An exquisitely written novel.

FABER EDITIONS

THE MOUNTAIN LION by Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is a wonderfully strange and unsettling novel about the trials of adolescence, tumultuous sibling relationships, isolation, alienation, and the alluring enigma of nature.

Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the novel’s pre-adolescent protagonists, reside in Covina, Los Angeles with their mother and their two elder sisters Leah and Rachel. That they are unlike the rest of the family is evident from the striking first chapter itself where we learn of Ralph and Molly’s tendency to get unexpected nosebleeds, the result of having suffered from scarlet fever. These nosebleeds often make them objects of ridicule, and they withdraw into their private interior world, but this shared affliction also forges a special bond between brother and sister. Once their beloved grandfather, Grandpa Kenyon, dies while on his annual visit to the Fawcetts, Ralph and Molly begin to spend the summers at his son Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado. For a few years, Ralph and Molly lead a double life flitting between Covina and Colorado, until a decision made by Mrs Fawcett to first travel the world with Leah and Rachel and then relocate with all her children to Connecticut, sets the stage for events to follow complete with the novel’s devastating conclusion.

Stafford’s writing pulsates with a dreamlike, cinematic quality evident in the way she depicts the interiority of her characters, particularly children when pitted against grown-ups, the intensity of emotions playing out against a mesmeric, unsettling, and sinister landscape; potent ingredients that make for an immersive reading experience.

NYRB CLASSICS

A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR by Elizabeth Taylor

A View of the Harbour is a beautifully written, nuanced story of love, aching loneliness, stifled desires, and the claustrophobia of a dead-end seaside town. The main plotline revolves around Beth Cazabon, a writer; her husband Robert, the town’s doctor; and Beth’s friend Tory Foyle who lives next door and is divorced. However, like the wonderful The Soul of Kindness, this is a book with an ensemble cast where the lives of the other members of the community are interwoven into that of the Cazabons. This is a drab, dreary seaside town where for desperate want of drama and excitement, the lives of its residents become fodder for speculation and gossip.

Taylor is great at depicting the small dramas playing out in the lives of these ordinary people with her characteristic flair for astute insights into human nature. This is a community struggling to feel important, where an annual innocuous, humdrum festival becomes an event to talk about given the lack of entertainment otherwise, and where the inhabitants’ lives never go unobserved. This is one of her finest books, simply top-tier Taylor.

That’s it from me. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading some excellent books lately so watch this space for upcoming reviews.

Cheers,
Radhika

Posted on by Radz Pandit

Two Months of Reading – January & February 2026

2026 began on a strong note; both January and February were brilliant months of reading in terms of quality, if not quantity. I read a 2026 International Booker Prize longlisted title, a couple of short story collections, a memoir, and books by 20th-century women writers. All wonderful, there was no dud in this stack.

So, without further ado, here’s a brief look at the six books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking the title links.

THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM by Sylvia Townsend Warner

In a novel set in a medieval English convent with its spirited nuns, perhaps the greatest irony is that it comes into existence through an act of infidelity. The opening pages, set in the twelfth century, find Alianor de Retteville in bed with her lover, Giles, when the scene erupts into violence as her husband, Brian, storms in with his cousins. Giles is killed, but Brian spares Alianor, much to the jeers of his cousins. Brian, we are told, is a cuckolded husband who threatens to banish his wife to a nunnery, though Alianor knows the threat is hollow – his attachment to her wealth is sure to outweigh his outrage. A decade passes. Alianor dies in childbirth, and her death, in some inexplicable way, alters Brian.

He resolves to found a Benedictine nunnery at Oby in her memory, financing it with half of her dowry and keeping the other half for himself. Then, Brian de Retteville dies in 1170, and, akin to fast forwarding a cinema reel, Warner propels the narrative through a succession of years – 1208, marked by the Interdict; 1223, when lightning ignites the granary; and onward – until it arrives at 1349, the year the Black Death unleashes its terror on the convent of Oby. From this point, time once again slows down, and the greater part of the novel unfolds, culminating in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Overall, this was a fab novel about a medieval convent and its singular, spirited nuns spanning decades. Plague, politics, ambition, money, sex, murder – nothing is off limits in this immersive world laced with STW’s delicious dry wit. Time passes, nuns come and go, but convent life goes on. I was bereft when this book was over.

A DEDICATED MAN by Elizabeth Taylor

First published in 1965, A Dedicated Man is a wonderful collection of twelve stories that showcase Elizabeth Taylor’s signature gift for illuminating human nature, particularly her piercing and perceptive gaze into the hearts and minds of the characters she portrays.

We begin with “Girl Reading,” a subtle, beautifully wrought tale of class difference and the paralysing force of social embarrassment. No writer renders loneliness with as much aching beauty and quiet devastation as Taylor, and “The Thames Spread Out” is a superb example – another of her stories focused on a middle-aged woman constrained by the boundaries of being a married man’s mistress.  “In A Different Light” captures the fleeting novelty of chance encounters on holiday, a spell that dissolves once those same faces are glimpsed again in the ordinariness of home. The titular story, “A Dedicated Man,” centres on Silcox and Edith, whose shared ambition leads them into an unconventional arrangement designed to advance their careers.

We see a wide assortment of people in this marvellous collection – unhappy couples, wearied mothers and embarrassed daughters, lonely women and exacting men, holidaymakers and travellers, and so on. Themes of loneliness, the uneven texture of marital relationships, class divides, fraught family dynamics, hidden grievances, and the charm of unexpected connections are astutely and sensitively explored.

CATASTROPHE AND OTHER STORIES by Dino Buzzati (Translated from Italian by Judith Landry)

Originally published between 1961 and 1978, Catastrophe and Other Stories by Dino Buzzati is a compelling collection of twenty tales uniquely infused with surreal, existential, and farcical elements, where the boundaries between ordinary reality and surreal strangeness are often blurred. It’s a collection that not only showcases the range of Buzzati’s imagination but also the depth of his themes.

Many of the stories in the collection depict the psychological impact of disasters, whether seen or unseen, natural or man-made. In the opening tale, “The Collapse of the Baliverna,” the narrator’s voice is immediately marked by dread: he is paralysed by the fear of being ensnared in a criminal investigation, even though he may bear no real culpability, and there could be other bigger forces at play. The titular story, “Catastrophe,” vividly evokes the fear and creeping paranoia that seize people in the face of an imminent disaster, terror that intensifies precisely because the nature of the threat remains undefined.  “And Yet They are Knocking at Your Door” centres on an aristocratic family so insulated within their cosy realm, so out of touch with the world beyond, that they fail to grasp the seriousness of a disaster knocking at their doors.   In “The Epidemic”, a wonderfully peculiar story exploring paranoia and state surveillance, Colonel Ennio Molinas, a civil servant in a government ministry, finds himself grappling with the effects of a mysterious flu that has led to the sudden absence of several members of his staff. At first, the situation appears merely inconvenient. But then another official – jokingly, or perhaps not – suggests that the virus strikes only dissidents: those who oppose the government not merely through their actions, but through their thoughts and even their careless remarks.

Catastrophe and Other Stories, then, is a brilliant collection that explores themes of impending doom, bureaucratic absurdity, psychological unease, and the intrusion of the uncanny into everyday life. Throughout, Buzzati depicts characters trapped by their own apathy or by their inability to adapt to rapidly evolving, sinister circumstances.

MAKESHIFT by Sarah Campion

Originally published in 1940, Makeshift by Sarah Campion is an absorbing and finely wrought novel about a German Jewish woman in exile, tracing her quest for anchor and identity in the ominous years preceding the Second World War, as antisemitism intensifies under Hitler’s ascent to power.

The story opens in New Zealand, where our protagonist, Charlotte Hertz, is in a hospital recovering from a prolonged illness. She has been there for eight weeks in total, and from the outset her voice is sharp, restless, and acutely observant (“All that time, the sheets pricked like hot sand, the visitors crept in and out, stabbing me with their eyes, voluptuously drinking in every detail of my helplessness”).Though the doctors prescribe spending time in the garden, it does little to revive Charlotte’s spirits; it is the prospect of remaining indoors and immersing herself in writing that she genuinely looks forward to (“Writing is the prime catharsis, the excellent emetic. For once you are delivered of the words, the pencil-and-paper form of your disorder, there is no reason why they should trouble you again”).

What follows, therefore, is an account of Charlotte’s life up to her hospitalisation, as she reminisces on her childhood, her sprawling Jewish family, and her restless sojourns abroad in England, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, each move fuelled by the desire for new beginnings and, more importantly, an urgent longing for security.War, displacement, exile, loneliness, and the search for identity and belonging are central themes in Makeshift. Through Charlotte’s wanderings, Sarah Campion highlights the instability of the refugee experience, the uncertainty endured, the compromises made, and the emotional toll of never fully belonging.

GREYHOUND by Joanna Pocock

A road trip is often a metaphor for freedom, distance, and living in the moment; a liminal space in which the individual is unmoored from the pressing obligations of daily life. It captures one’s sense of moving forward, while allowing the mind to roam unfettered, contemplating the past, or thinking about the future, as the blurred contours of landscapes hurtle by. 

Much of this dynamic animates Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound (“Travelling on a Greyhound bus, you can disappear”),  a wonderful work of hybrid literature that artfully combines memoir, travel writing, reportage, and social commentary seen through the prism of her Greyhound bus journeys across the US in 2006 and 2023 from the east to the west.

Woven into this absorbing narrative are reflections on the country’s environmental crises, literary critiques of the great American road trip books, especially the differing perspectives of male and female writers, and a perceptive portrayal of contemporary America marked by income inequality, poverty, fractured communities, growing isolation, and an intense preoccupation with a rapidly evolving digital world.

THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann (Translated from German by Ross Benjamin)

In The Director, we meet the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst in the 1930s, shortly after his arrival in America, having escaped Germany as the political climate deteriorated with Hitler’s imminent rise to power. Having enjoyed a string of celebrated films that brought him acclaim across Europe, Pabst arrives in the United States hoping to reinvent his career. Yet, almost immediately, he finds himself adrift. Language proves a formidable barrier: unable to speak English, Pabst struggles to communicate his thoughts on scripts and casting to the American producers he is introduced to. Pabst’s situation changes abruptly when he learns that his elderly mother is ill. Concerned for her, he decides to return to their countryside home in Austria with Trude and their son Jakob, even though Trude has grave forebodings about returning to a region fraught with danger. Pabst meets the Minister – most likely Goebbels himself – and the encounter only deepens Pabst’s sense of disorientation, as he is firmly and subtly coerced, through psychological pressure, into agreeing to work for the Reich.

All this gradually builds toward the dramatic center of the novel, the one that revolves around the film The Molander Case, a film shrouded in mysterious circumstances, but which forms the heart of the moral crisis in the book as it moves toward its conclusion.

The Director, then, explores the treacherous allure of ambition, the shadowy nature of complicity, and the high cost of moral failure. In restrained prose flecked with dread and irony, Kehlmann shows how Pabst, renowned for his creativity and filmmaking skills, becomes entangled in an uneasy compromise with the Nazi regime. Through its cumulative effect of episodic incidents, shifting perspectives, and a mixture of real and invented characters, the novel probes the fraught dynamics of art, power, and survival.

That’s it for January and February. In March, I am still reading Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, which is great so far, as well as The Deserters by Mathias Énard, which I’m very much enjoying; Énard is always so interesting.