- If you're a fan of Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti mysteries you'll enjoy this one for sure. It's exceptionally well plotted, unlike some of her many previous ones in the series.
- It’s the genuine Italian atmosphere that so attracts me to Leon's novels - the streets, cafes, food, apartments, and the weary, politically cynical, hospitality staff. She conveys the intricacies of the police and Venetian administration processes with confidence and undoubted expertise. And the Venetians stick together. They are a particular tribe of Italian, and they loathe the tourists that dominate every facet of their city experience. Even non-Venetian Italians are 'foreigners', especially Southerners.
- Commissario Guido Brunetti is a senior police officer and he has many interactions with his colleagues. It’s gratifying to read about the professional and personal dynamics of their workplace. That’s so rare in fiction. The same familiar characters feature in each novel, which is just such a pleasure. His loving wife and two children are also front and centre, as is the wonderful food they cook and share. Brunetti is a reader of the Greek classics from which he gets constant inspiration.
- Leon lives in Venice and adores the city and its immeasurable charms. Her affection shows on virtually every page.
- If you haven't read any of Donna Leon's books, this latest will undoubtedly suck you in. It's her best.
- This is a beautifully written historical novel that is both a tragic love story and a savage critique of the madness of the Third Reich and the Nazi theories of race and Aryan superiority.
- Young SS officer, Ernst, is attracted to the authoritarian order of the Reich, despite having barely survived a brutal family upbringing. Perhaps predictably he becomes violent towards his young wife, Herta. He’s unable to control his frequent bouts of anger.
- The SS is the priesthood of the Reich. The officers, in their totally black uniforms, are deemed superior to women in every respect. After marriage the wives are expected to be completely subservient to their husbands and all their domestic, professional and sexual needs. The perversion is truly ugly. Before they can be married the wives are ordered to undergo a 'training course'.
- Herta, on the other hand, resists. She is beautiful, loving and intelligent - a very sympathetic character. Music is her passion and she is completely unimpressed by her husband's growing absorption into the Nazi regime's pathology. She represents real life and nature.
- Her husband becomes a favourite of Himmler and Goring because of his passion for science, birds and animals, and his earlier trailblazing exploration of the wilderness of Tibet. The Nazi fantasy is that the Aryan race was created there, and is thus to be held sacred. Ernst is authorised to gather a team of scientists and embark on another mission to Tibet. He will bring back to the West numerous examples of the rich wildlife, mainly birds, that barely any Westerner has seen. The museums are clamouring for them.
- The problem is they have to be killed and stuffed. This is what thrills Ernst. He is obsessed with shooting animals - hundreds and hundreds of them.
- Herta's beautiful words end this powerful novel:
'Their enforced immortality could never take away the beauty of their fragile, fleeting lives.
I fly away from you now, no need for final words. The most powerful language belongs to them. It's the animals who make us human'.
- This is a light read. It's a charming story but with little meaning or depth. It indulges in standard homeless and junkie tropes, but thankfully rises above cliche because of the highly likeable and sympathetic young woman who narrates it.
- I was expecting a lot more given Brandi's first novel, Wimmera, was just so powerful and intense.
- The narrator occasionally hints as to why she's ended up on the street. Her mother died very young and she's been subjected to a series of ‘fosters’ for most of her childhood.
- She’s sensitive, aware and reflective, but also very innocent and naive, much to her detriment. She is abused in every way - sexual, physical, emotional. Food is rarely affordable, and then it’s McDonalds or cold pizza or dump bin leftovers.
- The people who help her along the way are portrayed very sympathetically - the police, the health professionals, the Salvos, even her neighbours in her low rent apartment block. She also has a good friend in Anton and adores her dog Sonny.
- Unfortunately she and Anton end up sharing an apartment with a real low-life, a nasty piece of work, and it doesn't end well for either of them.
- Brandi has a masterful control over the pace of the buildup, and the voice of the narrator. The girl is virtually confiding in you, the reader, and she sucks you in, your compassion building.
- As a story the tension builds, however the resolution is a real letdown. It's as if Brandi has deserted the scene of the crime. Perhaps he was just being too nice.
- Britain's prestigious Costa Book of the Year was awarded in 2018 to this delightful mix of historical narrative and fiction, a story of the horror of the rounding up of Dutch Jews under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during WW2. It's brought terrifyingly to life through the experiences of a young Jewish girl, Lien, who as a four year old is placed by her parents into the care of a secret resistance organisation and subsequently hidden in the attics and small rooms of various families until the end of the war. Just months after she was given away her parents were murdered in Auschwitz.
- An older man, the author, uncovers the secret history of Lien and the town of Bennekom, the small town of his childhood. It was the centre of a resistance network, a haven for Jews under persecution, because of the courage of so many of its residents whose stories are inspiring.
- But generally the Dutch were very cruel to their Jews, particularly after the war ended. The survivors of the concentration camps were not welcomed back. This reflects ‘...the curious split personality of the Dutch state’: equal rights under the Constitution v a ‘ruthless colonial power’, for example the massacres of innocent people on the island of Celebes in Indonesia after WW2. Over 4000 locals were slaughtered in cold blood.
- Van Es displays a tentativeness and anxiety about writing this book, which gives his story quite an affecting character. He interviews Lien numerous times but he worries that 'her memories are not as clear as I have made them’. His portraits of all the characters and of the Netherlands itself are sensitive and warm. He is a master of writing with a light touch, despite some of the horrific facts and details he uncovers.
- Lien spends months with two families in particular - one she loves, the van Esses (the grandparents of the author) - and one she loathes, the Van Laars, where the uncle continually rapes her.
- Lien's travails as she carries the weight of her childhood years through her adult life are sympathetically told. She has great difficulty in coming to terms with her experiences and fundamental identity. Two unhappy marriages and divorces and an attempted suicide define her, but finally, in her 80's, she finds peace. It's a wonderful, inspiring story.
- I’ve just been so fucking absorbed in this book for the last week! It is simply amazing. It's a personal story by a French investigative journalist as he discovers and uncovers the secret gay culture in the Vatican and the Catholic Church generally.
- Through countless recorded interviews he reports, word for word, what the insiders are saying. This is a political yarn as much as anything. And the enmities amongst the Cardinals, Bishops and priests of the hierarchy are vicious. ‘Now begins an episode of slander, gossip and revenge of a kind unknown since the time of Julius Caesar...’
- He paints wonderful portraits of some extraordinary and fascinating characters, like the conservative, reactionary, but still very powerful 'queen', American Cardinal Raymond Burke.
- He’s put an enormous amount of leg work into this in-depth investigation, interviewing the main characters numerous times. ‘...Rodiles explained when I interviewed him four times at his home in Havana’.
- I wouldn't call this book an easy read, yet like a well-paced crime thriller or police procedural, it's unputdownable. It's 550 pages long and full of names and places and packed with policy, theological and historical detail.
- There are four parts, one for each recent pope: Francis, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. Each pope is subject to a blistering critique, particularly the reactionary John Paul and the manifestly incompetent Benedict (who didn't retire because of illness, by the way, but because he finally realised he just wasn't up to it. He'd lost all control). Francis is far and away the most admirable.
- Martel offers an acute dissection of the styles and obsessions of the popes since Paul VI, and their henchmen. There is so much insider information, and it's delicious! Material is gleaned from constant dinners at excellent Roman restaurants (very gay, ironically). The high camp style of these robed prelates is relentless, but also charming in its own way. Their offices and apartments, or more accurately palaces, within the Vatican and its surrounds are described in arch detail. The Vatican is Gaytown, with the odd sprinkling of celibate heterosexuals!
- Martel does not spare Francis when he fails. He contrasts his frequently inspiring rhetoric with his disappointing actions, and examines what insiders call his ‘Jesuit way’ - one step forward then one step back. Francis is frequently ambiguous, contradictory and lame. But he is undoubtably a progressive and a liberal, confronting constant resistance and antagonism from powerful conservatives in the hierarchy. Thankfully he's a sharp contrast to his recent predecessors. And he's not been afraid to hire and fire. He is assiduously working behind the scenes to clean out the stables. Anti-gay, anti-reform homophobics and misogynists are being shafted left, right and centre. He is also supportive of ‘liberation theology' and its new iteration ‘gay theology’ and ‘queer theology’.
- Benedict is not spared at all. Before he became pope Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation of the Faith, was the grand inquisitor. He blacklisted theological reformers repeatedly, and suspended priests or nuns who dared to distribute condoms in Africa to fight AIDS. He was a dreadful fanatic. Pope Francis had no difficulty in altering or reversing most of his diktats. After eight years as pope, Benedict's resignation was in response to his final realisation that he had comprehensively failed in his papal mission. The Church was ‘full of filth’, he confessed in his memoir. Everywhere, 'it was corrupt'. Clerical pedophilia was emerging as a huge issue and Benedict refused to do anything substantial about it.
- The chapter on contemporary seminarians is enlightening. The majority are gay and use apps such as Grindr to seek sexual liaisons.
- ‘The Church has always been a place where homosexuals felt safe. That’s the key. For a gay, the Church is safe.’ (Martel quotes David Berger, former theologian and Vatican insider, who in a book accused Benedict XVI of being gay himself, though there remains no real evidence of this). ‘A hatred of homosexuals on the outside; homophilia and the double life on the inside. The circus went on’. Benedict's papacy was ‘the gayest pontificate in history’.
- After four years of intensive research into the power structures and influential players in the vast hierarchy of the Church, recording the opinions and confessions of hundreds of Vatican operatives, Martel also shows, quite surprisingly in my view, real theological sophistication in his critiques, insights and conclusions. He confirms the widely held view throughout the liberal Church and within society generally that celibacy is a medieval disgrace, the denial of priesthood to women an essentially immoral, anti-human act, and the opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage a destructive, life-denying aberration.
- The Epilogue about the author's first contact with an inspiring young priest when he was a teenager is quite beautiful. In tracking the priest down decades later he was saddened to learn that he died, alone and rejected, of AIDS.
