- This superb book won the UK's Costa Book of the Year in 2019. It was so well deserved.
- It is an utterly brilliant story of Witold Pilecki, a man of courage and integrity, who infiltrated the newly established concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland in the summer of 1940. He volunteered for the mission in an attempt by the Polish Resistance to uncover precisely what was happening. Ugly rumours had started to emerge.
- He was imprisoned in the camp for two and a half years. I quote from the blurb on the back cover: '...Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so meant attempting the impossible - but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself...'
- The book is exceptionally well written and has a strong narrative drive. It's also full of photos and maps, including of the camp and its layout. The extensive research that Fairweather has brought to this project has uncovered 'perhaps the greatest unsung hero of World War II (Economist)'. I found this book impossible to put down, despite the fact that the evil it describes in excruciating detail is visceral and sickening.
- What is extraordinary as well as heartbreaking, is that the Allies were so slow to realise the immensity of what the Germans were doing to the Jews. For various and insubstantial reasons, including a measure of anti-semitism, they were reluctant to respond, even after reviewing the clear and detailed reports Pilecki had successfully leaked. The horrific reality of the Holocaust was unknown to the public virtually to the very end of the war.
- This is a must read.
- This is a delightful and delicate novel, beautifully written. But, unfortunately, it's not without faults.
- It's a story of grandparents and their grandkids. Two sisters, who happen to be twins, are separated during WW2. 'Babi' stays in Prague and looks after the young boy Ludek, and Mana and her husband Bill migrate to Melbourne and are looking after the girl Mala.
- The children's actual parents are a generation lost through the upheaval of WW2 and later Soviet control of Czechoslovakia. Parrett refuses to indulge in any political scrutiny or critique at all, only briefly referring to some incidental events that contrast the two societies.
- Two intelligent and sensitive grandkids are living with and loving their grandparents and enjoying their lives.
- But, frankly, it’s all a bit too nice. There's absolutely no tension, generational or otherwise, and the kids rarely inquire into their real parents' lives and whereabouts or whether they'll ever see them again. Parrett never discloses much detail about the kids either, for example, how old they are, who their friends are, or how they're faring at school.
- It's a novel about ordinary domestic habits which bond families. There's a lot of focus on cooking and favourite foods, cigarette and pipe smoking, and the enjoyment of music, classical and popular. But it's slight. In the end there is little substance to it, and I needed more.
- Parrett's prose is gorgeous, but she indulges a little too much in obfuscation. There’s not a lot of clarity at times and that’s frustrating.
- If there is a main character in this short novel it is the boy Ludek. But we are only left to wonder what happens to him in Prague at the end. He is forgotten.
- Adele, Jude and Wendy are friends of Sylvie who has recently passed away. They’ve come to her beach house north of Sydney over the Xmas weekend to clean it up. Adele, the fading actress, is arty and creative and still physically attractive. Jude, an ex-restaurant worker, is fastidious, bossy, organised and intelligent ('No wonder Jude had never been a mother. It would offend her sense of order'). Wendy, an old hippy and respected academic, has let herself go and is now overweight and poorly dressed. She also drives an old, broken down car, and has a dog, Finn, who is deaf, nearly blind, old, arthritic and half dead.
- There's a distinct smell of decay in this whole group, and vivid memories of former glories.
- As someone who absolutely loved Wood's previous, award-winning novel The Natural Way of Things, principally because of its depth and resonance, I was at first quite disappointed with this one. These characters seemed entirely batshit crazy and uninteresting. A pretty ordinary tale of fading seniors and their typical group dynamics. And the dog profoundly irritated me.
- But after the first day’s cleaning, they go to the beach, then take showers, then head to a flash restaurant. Adele meets an old actress ‘friend’. Suddenly the book becomes hugely more interesting. Wood's sharpness of insight comes to the fore. She's brutal in her critiques and observations about their lives, old bodies and old friends. It's supremely intelligent.
- They hold a Christmas Eve party and the wine flows and tensions emerge. We've all been to these, and Wood captures the drama superbly.
- One guest, youngish theatre director, Joe Gillespie says: ‘You old girls are fucking hilarious’. But they are not. They are real in ways he would never know.
- The ending is powerful. I was struck by the beautiful image of the exhausted and storm-drenched Wendy and her dog being welcomed by a small congregation for midnight mass - ‘...trusting in this ancient, nonsensical, holy thing, accepting bread from a stranger’.
- And the story of Daniel, Jude’s 40-year lover, who has a separate life as a husband and father, and who she only sees on weekends, is very affecting.
- So, in the end, I enjoyed this novel immensely. Being of the same age, perhaps too much of it struck me personally.
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All the reviewers of this novel refer to its 'gothic' flavour, which is misleading. There are some 'ghosts' or spirits but they're not important. It's quite a contemporary novel of male/female relationships and, principally, the ugliness of masculine power.
- Some reviewers have also commented on, and praised, the deliberate withholding of details as the novel progresses, and the slow, dribbling, revelation of family relationships. The reader is thrust into the murkiness of it all. I found this aspect annoying. The constant introduction of new characters is confusing, and it's multiplied by three because there are three narratives over three different time frames, connected by thin threads.
- Why the deliberate obscurity, this mystery? It adds virtually nothing. A dramatis personae would have been helpful (which I've provided below).
- It's a very English novel in many ways. Upper middle class, stiff upper lip, snooty, and a disdain for simple clarity.
- Reviewers have also praised the writing. To me it was ordinary and charmless, like many of the characters. (‘But the money lasted only a grain of salt’). Some paragraphs are virtually incoherent. Apart from Ruth, the principal character, the women are annoying. Maggie is as mad as a cut snake and Viviane loves getting ‘drunk’. Just one glass of wine seems to make her ‘drunk’. Too much contemporary fiction indulges in this trope, as if there is no distinction whatsoever between 'slightly inebriated', 'tipsy', and 'drunk'. Virtually all the characters of this novel, set mainly in Scotland, drink Scotch whiskey, morning and night, like it was water. And sherry, and gin, and wine.
- The focus is on tangled, unsatisfying, man/woman relationships. Female sex with men is aggressive and rough. Rape is common. The men are abusive, deceiving and manipulative, most of the time. The women are victims of masculine power. The men behave as if they own women’s bodies. It’s very ugly. Violence seems to be their primary mode of expressing emotion, like apes. Murder is also part of the fabric, where raw animal emotion overcomes reason and decency.
- Did I enjoy this novel? Not really. Will it stay with me? Yes.
- Here's what I wrote about Wyld's Miles Franklin Award winning novel All the Birds, Singing six years ago:
Wyld's book is a spare and beautifully written story of a young woman's flight from horror, pain and abuse. In a real sense it's a testimony to the ugliness of men. We are spared no lacerating detail of the harsh, brutal treatment handed out to the woman by the cruel and violent men she encounters in country Australia as she flees from the consequences of a tragedy she caused as a reckless 15 year old in Darwin. Eventually she finds her way to a peaceful Isle off the coast of England where she lives alone and tends sheep.
But the dark beast of horror still pursues her.
(This is the Dramatis Personae for the three time periods, which readers will find helpful:
1. Present day: Viviane, Katherine (sisters), Michael’s daughters; Bernadette is their mother; Maggie (acquaintance). Deborah, real estate agent.
2. Aftermath of WW2: Ruth ('Puss'); Betty (housemaid), her sister Mary and Mary’s 11 year old daughter Bernadette; Alice (Ruth's sister) and her husband Mark; Mother+Father; Ludwig (dog, now dead); Antony (brother, killed in the war); Peter Hamilton (husband); his two children (boys Michael and Christopher); his former wife and the boys’ mother Elspeth;
3. Late 18th century: The Widow Clements (Charlotte); Joseph the son, and narrator; Agnes his sister; Cook; Father (Callum); the girl Sarah.)
- I finally got around to reading some Sebald, the highly regarded and influential German novelist who died in 2001.
- The edition, pictured above, is the 10th anniversary edition of his classic Austerlitz with an excellent introduction by the noted literary critic James Wood.
- I was profoundly moved by this book. The experience of the Jews in Prague during the Nazi invasion is beautifully portrayed. Sebald's prose is easily read, and the narrative deceptively simple and unembellished. But while the story builds slowly and powerfully, the details accumulate and are ugly and sad. It is very affecting.
- The structure of the novel takes a while to get used to, as Sebald continually holds back and only gradually reveals the details and full richness of the tale. As Jacques Austerlitz tells his life story to his unnamed friend during their periodic meetings over many years, it becomes clear that his story only became clear to himself over that same time span.
- The novel becomes a reflection on European history in the 20th century. As so many critics have written, it is haunting, mesmerising, and heartbreakingly tragic.
- A must read.
