pickThe unnamed narrator shares so much of his biography with the author that it's impossible not to read this as memoir, although it's published as fiction. Either way, it's a frank confessional about the internal life of the son of British immigrants, who leaves his UK family & relocates to Berlin, where he does find the change of life he was looking for, but not the connection with others or himself.
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So this is the loneliness & Berlin is the best place to face it, as well as evade it. Because Berlin is essentially the end of the world at least as far as loneliness goes. This is the final stop on the train of solitude, the one where the conductor asks you all to change please, bitte aussteigen. There's nowhere you can go after this, nowhere more gentle, more brutal, no greater chaos, nowhere to be more gratefully anonymous. Thank God for Berlin
so-soI chose this book for #TitlesAndTunes #DramaQueen because of its title but it doesn‘t fit the prompt at all 🤷🏻♀️ The drama is real in Segher‘s short story collection, which mostly is about nazism and the war.
In the title story, for example, a woman imagines herself with her old schoolmates on a class trip. She intersperses her descriptions of the children in the years before the war with the lives they grew up to endure. A tough read.
pickA complex + deep analysis of a relationship btwn a 19 yr old girl + a married man in his 50s which v quickly turns disturbing in the manipulative nature of the control Hans exerts over Katharina. The setting is late 1980s Berlin so the paranoia + brutality echoes the last days of the GDR regime. I felt uncomfortable watching the way K is damaged by an older male but relieved towards the end. A dark troubling read but interesting nevertheless. ⬇️
"What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?
Some of those gusts are proud that they filled those ancient sails.
You could hear them above Berlin on election night,
Hailing the arrival of the moonlight and far-right;
You could hear them whistling through the corridors
Of the Holocaust memorial, slapping its stone walls and floors,
Gasping applause."
The book opens with this powerful poem, "Righteous Migrants".
bailedBail, I could no longer read about Hans Castorp‘s perpetual thoughts of sanitarium life. I am on page 440, 61% through and I feel like this book is just a constant continuation of the same theme and idea, prolonged for the author's amusement but nobody else's....I did appreciate some of the authors descriptions on the scenery in the Swiss Alps and believe this could have been a positive read for me had it been condensed 500 pages or so.
And then I opened it...how could I NOT pick it up?! (Post 2 of 2)
The language is wonderful, and if sad and revealing, because of these qualities it's also human and humane, and that's where connection happens.My only complaint is that at 122 pages, this was too short. 14h