A moving, beautifully written and illustrated picture book about Walt Whitman's time serving as a nurse durin"In all people I see myself"-Walt Whitman
A moving, beautifully written and illustrated picture book about Walt Whitman's time serving as a nurse during the civil war, helping to heal both union and confederate soldiers. We learn that this service began with the news of an injury to his own brother, who he went to take care of, leaving Brooklyn to travel to the South, and the battlefields.
Whitman was a pacifist: "I could never think of myself as firing a gun or drawing a sword on another man."
Using Whitman's own words, we are inspired to help serve those hurt and traumatized by war, as in our current wars in Ukraine and the middle east. Like so many healers around the world, Whitman over several years worked with thousands of the wounded, and these experiences shaped his deeply humane poetry.
"The moon gives you light And the bugles and the drums give you music. And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, My heart gives you love"--from Leaves of Grass ...more
Metropolis (2019) is the last entry in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther detective series set largely in Nazi German in Berlin. You begin with the first thMetropolis (2019) is the last entry in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther detective series set largely in Nazi German in Berlin. You begin with the first three, the Berlin Noir trilogy, and if you like them, read on. The scope is breathless in moving from Berlin to France to Poland to South America to Cuba to Greece and back to Berlin, connecting the dots in the Nazi aim to conquer the world, leading from his ascent to power and landslide victory to the fifties after the war when indictments and trials continued against the Nazi regime. Hitler is of course seen finally as a self- and greed-driven dictator who robbed and murdered and through disinformation talked millions into following him. Never again? If you think that, you are naive. But Kerr wanted to make sure we don’t forget, so he couches his dark true crime/horror history series in the guise of a crime thriller series that sets the bar for any to follow him, brilliant writing, dark humor, noir, (always hopeless) romance, Nazi terror.
So this final book, completed as Kerr (RIP) was dying from cancer in 2018, is amazing, and just as slap-in-your-face, wake-the-hell up and see-what-man-is-capable-of, as any before it. And the choice to end the series not as many tec series do, with the old man gumshoe fading into oblivion, but to show the roots of Nazism in what was essentially Germany’s defeat of WWI--more German boys killed than from any other country--that’s brilliant, too.
Metropolis is the title of this book and Berlin actually is a metropolis, of course; it is also the title of a classic science fiction film by Fritz Lang that came out in 1927. That film looks grimly at a technology-”enhanced’ dystopian future, with an undercurrent of despair at what was then (and still now is) seen as “progress.” This film is relevant to the noir feel/motifs of Kerr’s book, but more to the point is Lang’s M (1931), which is a real life horror film about the killing of children in Berlin, the serial killer played by Peter Lorre. Kerr’s book is set in 1928, at the end of the Weimar Republic and the advance of Hitler’s “strongman” “leadership” into Hell.
Metropolis has Bernie as a recent veteran of WWI, and initially a member of the Berlin Vice Squad, giving him a first row view of the “decadence” of the club scene in Berlin--you may recall the play/film Cabaret--that led to the Nazi crackdown against prostitutes, gays, disabled, Jews, and the art world in general. Kerr admits some of what happened in the twenties club world made many people uncomfortable. It shows the early Bernie detective work, right from the first passionately committed to the rule of law that was upended in large part by the Nazis, of course. Kerr sets the stage for Bernie’s career in the context of the stage set for Making Germany Great Again after the humiliating losses of WWI and the beginnings of the worldwide economic collapse of the Great Depression that hit Germany especially hard. How can German leaders make Germans proud again? Return Germany to its nineteenth century roots in Morality and the Classical arts and conservative social and political mores. But Bernie is less worried about the ills of decadence than the cure as crackdown on anyone who is different than the Moral Majority.
Kerr has Bernie involved in two related cases: 1) the serial killing of young girl prostitutes--the proliferation of which came NOT just because of “moral decay” but because of the economic problems caused by so many (male) soldiers killed, few and low-paying jobs (as usual) open to women and 2) the killing of disabled vets begging on the streets (a brutal reminder of the loss of war in Germany; seeing them some people think sets a bad tone for the desired MGGA movement). These were actual events in Germany in 1928, so we are there seeing it all through Bernie’s eyes as he--as he always does in these books--insists on the rule of law, even against serial killers.
I thought this finish was great; I’ll miss ya, Bernie, and Philip. ...more
Chrysanthemum Under The Waves by Maggie Umber (October 22. 2024) is her first long form work, weighing in at 300 pages, though it is also a collectionChrysanthemum Under The Waves by Maggie Umber (October 22. 2024) is her first long form work, weighing in at 300 pages, though it is also a collection of nine pieces (some very short, some a little longer) she accomplished for over 6 years, mainly from 2016-2021, during which her marriage ended, the foundation for the anguish and melancholy beauty of this book. She calls it a book of mourning, which also speaks to the loss of her health and the end of her working with her ex at a comics press they helped develop together. And the physical/psychic conditions imposed by the pandemic figure in as well.
But the book began with an appreciation of horror, as she is a Shirley Jackson fan, among other artists, with a focus on the mythological tradition of tales about James Harris, also known as the Daemon lover. Then, as she writes in her afterword, she began to realize it was also about herself, her marriage, her work, her life. For someone as young as she appears to be (I met her as I had before at CAKE, the 2024 Chicago Alt Comix expo), I would hesitate to suggest it might be her “life’s work” but I’ll propose that it is that so far for two reasons; 1) this is a deeply personal project, dealing very much with her “life’s work,” at least the work of her life, until now, and 2) it is her most ambitious work, by far. I’ll call it art comics, too, to distinguish it from alt comix, as the painterly image is central here. And it’s most often wordless, or privileging the image. The fact that it involved linking so many separate pieces and many of them wordless, it could be challenging to many readers, for sure. It was for me, but it pays off for the work I invested. I can’t wait to see it in paper next month. It’s tremendous.
The cover sets the tone and speaks maybe to grief, with smudging here and there of words perhaps connoting grief and the disorientation that sometimes accompanies it with tears. And the wet rotting decay that is associated with gothic horror? Water, under water, under waves
Epigraph: “I sought my image in the scorching glass, for what fire could damage a witch’s face?”--Sylvia PLath
Sections: *Introduction: in which Umber names and identifies the central figure of the Daemon Lover, a popular ballad dating from the mid-seventeenth century, aka "James Harris," "A Warning for Married Women", “The Man in the Long Black Coat,” and others, where a woman [including Umber herself] succumbs to this tempter (not a femme fatale, but a homme fatale).
*Those Fucking Eyes is wordless, depicting mainly a woman with eyes closed, perhaps seduced by Harris’s eyes. Mysterious, passionate, then a disturbing photo where the image of a figure is obscured, severely smudged, maybe pointing seduction/trauma. Watercolors. Theme of forties gothic romance, forties films begins, wordless.
*Rine features drawing, a big house in the woods, trees, isolated images, the gothic contemplative, chrysanthemum theme, distorted face of Harris, haunting, wordless
*Intoxicated depicts more delirious dangerous passion, featuring usually a ghostly pale face without distinct features, a punchbowl, with alcohol one, presumes, the place (or a bar) where fateful meetings between future lovers takes place, often leading to a kiss, a stage in a relationship… again, vague perhaps daemon-ish features or lack thereof. With an overlay of sort of sepia-toned, old photo wash. . . creating a sense of ambiguity. And maybe these folks are from the Victorian age, as this daemon lover is timeless.
*The Devil is a Hell of a Dancer features a poem about a woman setting foot on a ship with no mariners on it. . . until we meet the devil:
“Oh yon is the mountain of hell/where you and I will go.”
The words as always are smeared (under waves, tears, rotting gothic. . .)
“Old saying: when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, the devil changes you."
To “dance with the devil” is to engage in risky, reckless, or potentially immoral behavior. And she does, with this Harris.
*Chrysanthemum (formerly The Daemon Lover): Again, forties noir film vibe, Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Vertigo’s Kim Novak? … forties and fifties Shirley Jackson and Hitchcock fashionable and well-dressed women, surrounded by Chrysanthemums, Psycho hotel tryst?
[Chrysanthemums are generally associated with happiness, friendship, and well-being. However, yellow chrysanthemums can also be used to express neglected love or sorrow.]
Again, in Chrysanthemums, it’s a feature-less-faced man, with one even creepier frame of a man with two black dots for eyes (yikes). He leaves, she goes out to get groceries and returns to an abandoned apartment, in ruins, he’s gone.
To prepare for my reading of this chapter, I reread Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover,” on which Umber’s story is in part based. A story of a woman abandoned on her wedding day, the Harris guy nowhere to be found, a true real life horror, standing at the altar (and I have been to a couple of these events that were not finally weddings, everyone in shock). Fundamentally about a man’s lack of commitment to her and the devastation that entails.
Daemon mythology: a supernatural being whose nature is intermediate between that of a god and that of a human being.
*There is Water: Short, elliptical, watercolor washes, under water, waves, drowning, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, or maybe its this physical sense of Vertigo as in Hitchcock's film
The text: Blood displaces slumber/if the desert dominates Somewhere else there is water
*The Witch: A castle in the clouds, where a witch lives, ominous dark scenes--a reversal or inversion, maybe, where a woman is a dark figure, but there’s a mysterious dark man here, too, and dogs… The Innocents based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, or any gothic mansion in Jackson… a horse drawn carriage… the man meets the woman in the woods . a kiss, passion taking her down, down. . . and later, rowing in a boat. . .two terrifying frames of an open, toothy mouth
*The Tooth: A wordless comic also collected in Rob Kirby’s The Shirley Jackson Project: Comics Inspired by her Life and Work, a rendering of her story. So yeah, rabbit hole, I actually reread “The Tooth” from Jackson, and Umber’s rendering is maybe her least ethereal drawing, more of a pretty straight interpretation or Jackson’s story, but capturing the unsettling vibe. The woman is controlled by her tooth, and with the pain killers she takes, disoriented, increasingly in body horror.
“Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified; she was only its unwilling vehicle”--Jackson
The tooth is about Umber’s own physical/psychic “demise” (that forties word) that she went through, that dissociating, isolating occurrence of ill health.
*The Rock: Layered, shadowy, in a boat again, a woman in a long gown, with a man; , he touches her lower back. The rock is an island of rock where she goes to meet him, and again, to meet her demise.
Afterword: In the afterword Umber says she had beenwriting about James Harris, the daemon lover figure, highlighted in Shirley Jackson and elsewhere historically, then was left by her husband, and then realized, “The more I plunged in the darkness, the more I saw myself.” I am reminded of Yale psych literary critic who said your favorite stories are always to a great extent autobiographical. True here! Hauntingly so!
The best way to read/experience this collection is to just experience it before you read anything in the intro or afterwords, where certain things may become clearer, and then you can do as I did, reread it with her words as a guide. You see mirrors, water, decay, duplications, repetitions.
Umber says at one point as she was working she played the soundtrack from Hitchcock’s Vertigo sound track on repeat. Yeah, Kim Novak haunts this text as much as Shirley Jackson and James Harris:
“As I layered the woodblocks, sorrow mixed with sweetness”--Umber, somewhat restored in the process of her work, healed by it to some extent.
Fabulous project, one of my faves of the year, without question. Get it when it comes out, and see a book rollout event if you can here in Chicago or across the country. Thanks, Maggie, and congrats, and sorry to all readers for this erratic pile of notes toward a review. ...more
I picked up Life After Whale (2024) by Lynn Brunelle from my library because I saw it was illustrated by a favorite artist, Jason Chin, who is particuI picked up Life After Whale (2024) by Lynn Brunelle from my library because I saw it was illustrated by a favorite artist, Jason Chin, who is particularly known for his passionate commitment to the natural world. Life After Whale is amazing, one of my favorite books of the year.
I just saw a whale on the cover, but I had not paid any attention to the title, which also refers to what naturalists call “whale fall,” which happens when a whale dies. The whale in question in this book is a blue whale that dies at 90. And tt the opening of the book the whale lunges to eat krill, which exist as part of many co-existing ecosystems that are in part created by whalefalls, so the book ends where it begins.
What did I learn? Among many things, I was reminded or learned that
*The blue whale is the largest creature to ever grace this planet, including even dinosaurs such as the T-Rex. It can be the length of three school buses! 110 feet long, 65 tons, the heart the size of a golf cart, they tell me. * You can tell a lot of what a whale is through layers of ear wax, where we can determine how many births she has had, illnesses, and other struggles. * As the dead body falls, it is surrounded by bioluminescence, glowing, twinkling jellyfish and shrimp *There are many phases of whale fall that--get this--can over all take as much as a couple centuries(!! where various creatures feed on this carcass. Centuries! Then back to krill, who have eaten whales, and feed whales!
Marjane Satrapi became internationally known through her graphic memoir (and film) Persepolis. She sort of retired from comics in 2004, but decided toMarjane Satrapi became internationally known through her graphic memoir (and film) Persepolis. She sort of retired from comics in 2004, but decided to help organize a comics project after the murder of Mahsa Amini in 2022, killed by Iran’s “morality police” for not wearing her head scarf correctly. Protests erupted around the world and in Iran--including, and this is rare, men--in a country where the legal age girls can be married has been lowered to 9.
This book is not in any sense a “balanced” and respectful view of the current theocratic (or whatever you may want to call it) regime. It is angry, feisty, feminist, social justice warrior comics featuring some Iranian activists, some in diaspora, and other comics artists in Europe working with journalists, featuring several short, densely information-packed comics, concluding with a spiritedconversation between the principal organizers of the book about the state of Iran today.
You get history--including a short history of Iranian women, and feminist/mythological activists/goddesses, all you need to know to get background and get involved. And in the light of Project 2025 in the US, which is in part about the frighteningly extremist right goal to control women’s bodies in various ways, this is a particularly moving and inspiring warning about theocracy’s “religious” goals. I’ll admit I had not been seeing much on the state of Iran lately, so am glad to be reinvigorated by this book to focus on these issues.
Two great Wonder Woman comics series read in one year for me? First, Wonderwoman Histopria: The Amazons (2023) by Kelly deConnick, Phil Jimenez and GeTwo great Wonder Woman comics series read in one year for me? First, Wonderwoman Histopria: The Amazons (2023) by Kelly deConnick, Phil Jimenez and Gene Ha, and now Wonder Woman: Outlaw (2024) written by Tom King, and illustrated by Daniel Sampere and Tomeu Morey. Both very different. The former is the first volume of a trilogy that situates Wonderwoman in the context of every great mythological woman in literature, history, all of that. Great art, serious treatment, less story than history, but still epic and great.
King’s series is lighter, more fun, the diction aimed at young people, like, teens, duh, opening in some future setting with Jonathon Kent and Damien Wayne, the sons of Superman and Batman (two comics icons, from the DC trilogy that King has hit home runs on already) waiting for Elizabeth Marston (Lizzie, or Trinity) Prince, the daughter of Diana. Marston is a nod to the original creator of Wonder Woman.
But in the present, a lot of guys get killed in some western bar, an Amazon is seen as the perp, and the Amazons are now banned from the US, and facing AXE, the Amazon Extradition Act, led by a guy named Sgt. Steel (of course). So women need to fight back against all the hypermasculinty and misogynist liars in the dismal political present that is all too familiar. But it’s a lot of fun story, actually, layered with researched comics history. There’s a lot of current politics seen through a teen feminist lens, with great energetic art and some fun energetic writing, if a little on the simplistic side for me. But I had fun. 4.5 stars, maybe more.
Hey, did King anticipate the energetic Kamala Harris for President thing here?! :) ...more
The Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trThe Safekeep (2024) by Yael Van Der Wouden, her first novel (?!) is shortlisted for the 2024 Man Booker prize. I was busy and into other books, had trouble concentrating on it at first, but my third time in beginning it was a charm. It grows on you, builds suspense, and a twist at the end makes it clear this is a different book than it appeared to be, where you see everything in a different light. It reminded me of Patricia Highsmith in its mystery, it’s insinuation of the darker side of human nature. It’s also beautifully erotic, which is to say it is sexually explicit, speaking of:
"[T]he secrets of the body unfolded in the night."
But if you are thinking (as I was) that this was just a very good psycho-sexual drama, a vein of political reality that emerges, as it is set in 1961 Holland and this moment in time reaches back to WWII. Maybe that’s the closest I will get today to spoilers as this is a book a lot of people are just now reading because of the Booker attention, obviously.
Bare bones: Orderly and repressed Isabel lives in a big (one is tempted to say gothic, as a nod to maybe Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Highsmith, as the house is a key “character” in the novel that breathes and speaks and has a relevant history) house. As in many? all? gothic stories from The Fall of the House of Usher (oh, throw in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Castle of Otranto) on, we can see an analogy between the troubled people living in a troubled house and the body as (always already) the decaying prison-house of the soul. I repeat that line from above:
"The secrets of the body unfolded in the night." Tortured bodies/minds, tortured house.
Isabel is visited by Eva, and by Isabel's brother Hendrik and his friend Sebastian. The relationships between all these folks interweave and hothouse sweat DH Lawrence and Ingmar Bergman notes of psycho-sexual intensity, dark secrets, eroticism, slow-burning, elusive, and then exploding in intensities of various kinds.
I guess I wanna say that I think it is difficult to write well or with any originality about sex, but this author does it very well, lyrically. . . and, uh, passionately. But all the writing is powerful throughout with more than physical or romantic implications. You have been successfully misdirected if you think (as I did) that this is just a hot book, as I keep saying. It's so much richer than just that.
I was somewhat disappointed in the ending initially which I would like to talk about, but won’t. The author had been criticized for it in some reviews, I heard, so I read her strong defense of it and ya know, I’ll buy her argument. Read this book, trust me! I listened to it and the readers were fantastic in creating just the right tone, but I'll buy it and read it again, now knowing the ending....more
I think this may be my sixth graphic novel by the great Paco Roca, Return to Eden (2024). He wrote a kind of tribute to his father, and now this one iI think this may be my sixth graphic novel by the great Paco Roca, Return to Eden (2024). He wrote a kind of tribute to his father, and now this one is in tribute to his mother, to his larger family, to post-Dranco Spain, to the poor who survived these times--the constant hunger, the victim-blaming, and the joys--the Edenic moments--as captured in photographs, in particular family moments. Many of us have these photographs that we cherish. One photograph in particular encapsulates best her past is one of her family at a Valencian beach in 1947. So Roca takes this photograph and looks at each person and all that is buried in that photo to look at his mother’s, his family’s, and Spain’s history.
I loved the model it provides for writers/artists. One photo embodies a world, so much complexity behind those smiles. And there are other photographs, too, in the book, that resonate for him. Like me, Roca is getting older, a time when you maybe reflect a bit more. I love his tribute to his mother and his complicated family, and a chronicle of post-Franco struggles. Roca also focused on Franco in Winter of the Cartoonist, powerfully as well. Here, it is onene photograph, a time of possibilities and hope where some of the faultines become clear. For me this was an event of the year. I think young people might not appreciate it as much, maybe, because of the focus on family member, but that is the very reason I loved it. It's complex, layered, and has much tenderness in it. ...more
Intermezzo (2024) is Sally Rooney’s fourth novel and is wonderful, her most developed work, though it is a piece with all the previous work: It featurIntermezzo (2024) is Sally Rooney’s fourth novel and is wonderful, her most developed work, though it is a piece with all the previous work: It features deeply flawed, often unlikable people making terrible life mistakes, in part because they are utterly unable to communicate with each other. I just flat out loved it. It’s formally her most ambitious work, a series of interlocking pieces, shifts, variations on a theme, but I definitely also found it profound, and profoundly emotional, leaving me in tears as Normal People did. But I already know, as with many readers, some will stop reading because they find all the main characters screwed up. But that is exactly the point, as always with Rooney, as you get angry at them, and they either learn from their mistakes or not. Ultimately, I think it is her most hopeful book, but you have to read it all the way through to see it! One of the best books of the year, definitely.
To be clear, this is a novel, and not a musical work. An intermezzo is a movement coming between the major sections of an extended musical work (such as an opera). The events of the book happen between the death of the father and the time in which they may be able to go on. Inter, in between. And also it has something to do with chess in which a sudden move that impacts the game happens, as occurs between the two brothers later in the book.
What’s it about? Grief, as some may works of literature tend to be. Facing death, surviving the deaths of others, sometimes falling apart in the process. And relationships, learning to talk and understand each other, as grief goes on. And people do crazy impulsive things sometimes in grief. Are they necessarily the wrong decisions? We’ll see.
And the novel is about what it is that fiction/stories can do that argument/logic cannot. I am a fan of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a sort of aphoristic or zen koan-like series of meditations on the nature of language and reality. The book begins with a quote from him about language and chess, and returns to him explicitly in the end. Wittgenstein initially worked within the umbrella of positivist philosophers--The Vienna Circle--in his time to create a structural framework for thinking about the nature of knowledge. And Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of mathematics. Logic. Reason. Order.
The point of all this was to find some basic explanatory principles for how the world works. And Wittgenstein in Logico Tractatus he laid out his highly influential views on this subject. But he shifted his views later, near suicidal, then worked teaching children in the mountains, and his later work, Philosophical Investigations, took another direction, to undermine certainty about what we think we know about these things.
“How often in life he [Ivan] has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand.”
“Language doesn’t fit into reality like a toy fitting a slot.”
Sally Rooney was an internationally successful debater in college and soon after, and now is a novelist. Debate is a fiercely competitive activity focused on argument, evidence, logic. Her two main characters in this book are males, for the first time in her novels, two competitive, abrasive/distant brothers, whose father has recently died--Peter, 33, a successful lawyer, solicitor, and Ivan, 22, a rising chess player. Both of these activities we may associate with logic, reason, order, rules to follow. They don’t like each other, and they don’t really “get women.”
Ivan, following his father’s death, develops a relationship with an older woman, Margaret, who is 36 (and he’s 22), his first real relationship, something neither family would approve of, since she is technically married to an alcoholic, whom she left. Peter’s first real relationship was/is with Sophia, who got in a terrible accident after which she ended the relationship, encouraging Peter to seek someone else. He then slept with many women, including at present 22 year old Naomi. These May-December relationships are highly frowned on by friends and families, indicators of instability. Can they possibly work?
These boys are at odds with each other. Margaret is estranged from her husband and finds it difficult initially to talk to Ivan, this chess nerd who seems self-absorbed, someone Peter refers to as probably autistic. Peter can himself be a callous asshole; he loves both Sylvia AND Naomi.
In all the scenarios depicted here, it seems like societally we generally have rules for how to think of these things. But what if people do not fit your categories? Sure, we all disappoint each other, but we also have the capacity to surprise each other. Men, as Naomi says to Ivan, are “dogs.” Or they can be. But love in all its marvelous variations is also possible. Fiction--and not debate, nor law, nor chess,with all their potential impressive rational marvels, she’ll say--may be the best way to undermine the reductive expectations we have for thinking about the potential for human relationships. To imagine a future--which is what fiction can do--is to live, really live.
“Doesn’t the feeling between people have a truth of its own? Not in the sense of formal propositional truth-value, no. But then why does that word, ‘truth,’ have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?”
*At one point Margaret’s art centre presents a pianist playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, 32 variations on a theme. Ivan loves Bach, and Rooney would seem to be toying around with a variety of perspectives on themes.
*The formal structure of this grief tale is actually comedy, with lots of variations on themes and switching characters. Two pairs of May-December. When Peter is in crisis, both Naomi and Sylvia come to his rescue. When Ivan is playing a big match, both Peter and Margaret show up to support him. Unlikely pairs. So much sadness, but seen from a distance, a crazy dance happens. Then, late in the book Rooney quotes James Joyce, who says of his intense erudite classic Ulysses, “There’s not one single serious line it.” So consider that. In comedy there's always misunderstanding between people;they can't communicate, messes are made. Is this actually meant on some level to be a comedy?! In the end, things usually work out in Shakespeare's comedies, and as at the sexy end of Ulysses--Yes, she she said yes yes yes. I already said this was her most hopeful book!
*There’s a lot of wild, manic stream-of-consciousness driving each of the principal characters, at least Ivan, Peter, Margaret and Naomi. Presents a fine set of psychological portraits. But the whirl in it of what to do, what do I think, the crazy turmoil of emotional thinking that may have you spin out of control during grief, that could be seen as comic, in a way, from a distance, as painful as it is at the time. I mean honestly: Peter has sex with both Naomi and Sylvia within twenty-four hours and seems to promise each of them he will marry them. Not funny. Or, from a certain perspective, comedy?
*This book is also very much about the mysteries of love, as many many novels--and romantic comedies!!--are:
“Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, even without speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely.”
I think it’s wonderful, and I spent a crazy lot of time with it, well-spent. But why does she time and again tell me stories of people who are difficult and struggle with relationships and yet bring me to tears, finally, and many times? Maybe this book--like Normal People--is actually written by Sally Rooney for me? Maybe this issue of the failure to communicate is at the heart of most of our struggles on the planet.
*One might reflect on all the wars and angry confrontations between (principally) males on this planet right now, from increasingly conservative perspectives. The depicted confrontations between the brothers--including physical violence--may be a reflection on men and their inability to talk with each other, leading to violence again and again.
*This book has more wonderful descriptions in it than any of her previous books, so is thus less minimalist than early characterizations of her work, basically mostly dialogue. So much beautiful writing, some of it lyrical descriptions of nature (which is a staple of romantic comedy!):
“Golden green fields stretching out into the faint blue distance. Limitless clear air and light everywhere around them, filled with the sweet liquid singing of the birds.”
“She had been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life.”
“Life (because of Ivan, for Margaret) has slipped free of its netting.”
“People aren’t themselves when they are grieving.” (think: Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck, magic)
“You know he really loves you”--Naomi, to Ivan, about his brother Peter, whom he has said he hates
“Sitting there beside him quietly she seemed to embody the inexpressible depth of his misunderstanding: Of her, his brother, interpersonal relations, life itself.” (Margaret, and Peter, the two Decembers, sitting outside the room at Ivan's chess match, supporting him, loving him) ...more
An amazing adaptation of what for me is one of the greatest novels of all time, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I am quick to say this adaptation by the aAn amazing adaptation of what for me is one of the greatest novels of all time, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I am quick to say this adaptation by the artist Manu Larcenet was approved by Cormac McCarthy before his death, and I am quite certain he would more than approve of it. The balance in the work is between the bleak, almost hopeless post-apocalyptic landscape and the remaining shreds of humanity--to keep living your life as one of "the good guys"--til the inevitable end. This is among other things a father and som story, about a father passing down humanistic traditions of principled living/survival to his young son.
They are starving, these two, as is everyone they meet, and and in this version more so than the film version, the starvation is obvious and chilling and necessary. All the art is chilling, actually, brilliantly realized in black and white, each image a horrifying vestige of the unnamed disaster that has come before, as well as images of Beckett's phrase, "I can't go on; I'll go on."
I recommend, of course, that you read McCarthy's original text, see the wonderful film, but also read this worthy contribution to the Road project. Highly recommended. A piece of art in its own right, without question.
Thanks to the author Cormac McCarthy (RIP), the adapter/artist Many Larcenet, the publisher AbramsComicsArt, and Net Galley for this early look at the text, to be published September 17, 2024....more
If The Dead Rise Not, Bernie Gunther #6, by Philip Kerr may just be the best of the bunch, so far, and I know, I keep saying that. And when you read KIf The Dead Rise Not, Bernie Gunther #6, by Philip Kerr may just be the best of the bunch, so far, and I know, I keep saying that. And when you read Kerr's work, you know no country gets to say let's Make X Great Again, because all countries are guilty, there's corruption and extortion and racism everywhere, just part of human dna. So in this one, after Bernie gets booted out of Argentina, he ends up in Havana, in 1954.
The first part of the book, however, takes us back to Berlin, 1934, where The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad but are facing foreign resistance because of its alleged mistreatment of the Jews. In actuality it is not alleged as we all now know. In particular, with respect to the Olympics, Hitler denied all Jewish athletes admission to German sports clubs, thus no Olympic participation. So how does the US and others agree to still participate? In part it is because Hitler bribes Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee to look the other way. And as we now know (see Rachel Maddow's Prequel, for one example exposing the historical record), Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford were only two of tens of thousands of Americans who were Nazi sympathizers. And we also know the mafia was involved in the production of the 1932 Olympic games, and we know the US had its own history of racism against blacks that was a model for Hitler's treatment of the Jews and anyone it didn't like. So how could the US point their fingers at Hitler? But, seriously, how could they not?! Oh, and we learn Bernie is .25 Jewish, which had to be hidden for him to do the anti-Nazi work he would do.
So in 1934, Bernie Gunther, house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel,, begins to work with an American Jewish journalist, Noreen Charalambides (though she is actually Eisner, as lots of people have shifting identities in these books), on an article exposing this farce, falls in love with her, and only gets out of prison when his lover agrees not to publish her article, at the hands of German Jewish gangster Max Reles. So the Berlin Olympics happen and Hitler gets to showcase himself on the international stage, as we all sweep his anti-semitism under the rug for the sake of the "purity" of the Olympic spirit. Noreen goes back to America, no contact between them.
[Note to self: What else was going on around then? Kristallnacht didn't happen until 1938, but in the Ukraine in 1932-33, Stalin was starving more than 4 million Ukrainians. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin waged a brutal war against the Soviet peasantry leading to the Holodomor, the terror-famine that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians during the fall and winter of 1932-33. In 1936, his Great Purge involved the killing of millions of Soviet citizens, including many Jews. In 1939 he purged all Jews from Soviet leadership and forged a murderous alliance with Hitler. Hitler, Stalin, Batista, FRanco, Mussolini, and fast forward to today.]
Fast forward to Havana, 1954, dictator Batista, probably a fan of Hitler, as all strongman authoritarian dictators would be, and Castro is in prison writing a manifesto about his communistic aims for Cuba. Cynical Bernie hates Batista, of course, but he also doesn't trust Castro not to become a dictator, either. Bernie also sees, for the first time, two key people: His long lost love, Noreen, now an accomplished writer, with a daughter (and dead husband, check) and that gangster Max Reles is also in town, offering to make peace, offering Bernie a job with his casino, while sleeping with Bernie's ex Noreen's daughter (!). In this section we see that Noreen had for a time driven an ambulance (like Hemingway) in the Spanish Civil War, and hangs out with Hem in Havana. And we see all the different mob families and moguls in town, including Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, who hires Bernie to investigate a murder involving the crime families there.
The marvelous resolution (and some very moving revelations) of this one owes something to the resolution of Casablanca (you'll see). That I should have become tearful at the end of this detective historical fiction, well, I give a nod to Kerr, who in 2009 was awarded the world's most lucrative crime fiction prize, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, worth €125,000. I know literary prizes sometimes, like Olympic contracts, emerge out of complicated ethical processes, but trust me on this one. ...more
The last volume of one of the great manga horror series of all time, completed with a sense of catharsis and healing. I see at a glance that there is The last volume of one of the great manga horror series of all time, completed with a sense of catharsis and healing. I see at a glance that there is a graet difference of opinion about this work, but I will say it has to be his most personal, to date, a point made clearly through two (electric, concerning) letters by the author appended to two of the last volumes. Oshimi makes it clear here that this work is about his relationship to his own smotheringly over-protective and (probably) mentally ill mother.
I'll agree with critics that the series is best when focused, as does the first half does, on images of psychological horror, a boy raised by a mentally ill mother who may have attempted to kill her nephew. These pages are amazingly drawn, with few words, and all the horror happening in us as we see what it might be like to be raised by such a person. It's breathtaking.
Then the second half gets more verbal, and we begin to get lots of answers to what has been going on. The first half is psychological HORROR and the second half is more PSYCHOLOGICAL horror, as things get spelled out much more and lots of action--including an actual murder and the deaths of both hsi father and mother. It's very dark, but in part because of the letters I admire the obvious courage in the work. And most horror ends in catharsis, in a kind of hopeful resolution.
This has not been released in English officially yet, but a friend sent a digital copy to me of the last volume, which I found powerful. Again, if I were just looking for horror manga, I might have preferred it ended much earlier, with little information--I prefer my horror spare--but knowing what I know no about its being autofiction, I am glad to read that Oshimi wrote this out of his troubled relationship woth his own mother, that he is all right, and that he brings it to some kind of resolution with his mother, who did so much damage to him as he grew up. ...more
Here is a quiet, small, brooding, intense masterpiece, The Blue Room (1964), one of my absolute favorite books of 2024. Read Glenn Russell's great revHere is a quiet, small, brooding, intense masterpiece, The Blue Room (1964), one of my absolute favorite books of 2024. Read Glenn Russell's great review of it, which I just did, after which I decided to just leave a few thoughts here and encourage you to read his analysis. In it, he quotes John Banville (a Man Booker winner, and also one of my fave writers) as to the beauty of its achievement.
I had once written to my Goodreads friend and Simeon enthusiast Glenn to ask him what his five favorite non-Maigret novels (which I am also reading, in order), and this book was in those five he listed, one he also lists as one of all-time favorite novels. Now mine, too! Like Graham Greene, Simeon made a distinction I find false in both of them between their detective fiction (Greene called them his "entertainments,") and literary, or straight, fiction, what Simenon called his roman durs (or, hard novels). This distinction breaks down in both authors as some of their detective fiction is as well-written as any of their "literary" fiction. But I'll say this book is better than any of the Maigrets I have thus far read from Simenon.
The story is a simple and unremarkable one, in many respects, the tale of an affair between two people married to others, Tony and Andree. Tony has in the time of his marriage slept with a number of women, but in the time of a year he meets Andree to have sex in "the blue room" at Tony's brother's small hotel. We learn of this story almost exclusively through his testimony at a trial, mostly backstory about the affair, in which we see things through Tony's perspective., but get this: Through almost all of the 139-page book, we are not told why Tony is on trial. Oh, we know affairs, we know courtroom dramas, so we make guesses, but we are not told what the crime actually is, or who is presumed to have committed it, and we will be surprised by the complexity of the ending in spite of our assumptions.
Such a simple and familiar tale, one that sets a small town on edge, as they are angry (and again, we don't know why, until nearly the final pages) at what has happened. Tony is not a deeply reflective thinker, so we don't get too far into his thought process. He simply answers questions as truthfully as he can. But he is emotional at times, especially when Andree appears to give testimony that appears to contradict his. We also learn that Tony is especially devoted to his daughter, and supports his wife and home, and maybe that's all I'll say here. Read this short book, highly recommended! Masterful. Banville calls it luminous! And tis! Kind of took my breath away how good it is!
Next I review another Simenon book I finished also on my short vaca, Monsieur Hire's Engagement, another of the books on Russell's list to me, which I also loved. Both of these books feature a focus on lust/desire/sex and the propensity of the public to particularly condemn what they see as lascivious or sinful behavior. I guess one might say there's a kind of "darkness" in desire, the secret passions, taking place in the shadows, or even in the privacy of your thoughts, fantasies, but darker still is the public condemnation of such behavior....more
Sunday is a book-in-progress by Belgian comics master Olivier Schrauwen I was lucky to find on Net Galley. Thanks to the author, Fantagraphics and NetSunday is a book-in-progress by Belgian comics master Olivier Schrauwen I was lucky to find on Net Galley. Thanks to the author, Fantagraphics and Net Galley for the early look of a book scheduled to be published 19/15/2024. I should say I am a big fan of Schrauwen's work, and one much of it, so I was excited to read it, inclined to like it. And I did, or do! The book is like many of Schrauwen's work formally experimental, an investigation of how story can happen in a comics medium. This story is a fictionalized version of one day in the life of his cousin, Thibault. It's not a remarkable day; rather, it is a typical day for this loner. Not much happens. The mundane happens, as Thibault thinks, listens to music, does a bit of work, checks his phone, drinks coffee, watches tv. He's vain, not particularly interesting, so this is finally hilarious, in a way.
Se we know books that try to "capture" human consciousness. Think Joyce, Woolf. Joyce's long Ulysses is an attempt to detail on wakign day in the life of a Dubliner. Proust's' autofictional story dealing, for instance, in something like 50 pages, a couple hours of a boy as he goes to bed. In comics we have daily diary comics; you catalogue whether anything remarkable happens or not. A commentary on life: it's mostly mundane and not epic for most of us every day. Joyce calls his novel of a mundane Dublin day Ulysses, which is to say a mock-epic title. The same title would work here, in a way. A quest!
Thibault listens to James Brown, drinks coffee, works a bit, thinks about sex quite a bit, masturbates, listens to music, obsesses about a relationship. Many small panels, highlighted by color. Otherwise, mostly random thoughts. One story is a little more surreal than another, but it is still feels "real" to human experience. I can't wait to read the whole thing. Would it appeal to folks who just like to read stories to be entertained? Thrillers? Probably not. But you get some insight into "the human condition" and comics here. I really like it....more
“Our world has two oceans--an ocean of water and an ocean of air.”
Rachel Carson is one of the most important scientists in the history of the world, “Our world has two oceans--an ocean of water and an ocean of air.”
Rachel Carson is one of the most important scientists in the history of the world, in that she saw early on that we were destroying the very habit and ecosystem we depend on. Her book Silent Spring, speaking against the poisoning of the environment, earned her the vilification of many industries, though she was ultimately successful in getting the country to acknowledge the harm of some pesticides. She was also a poet, writing lyrically about nature in books such as Sense of Wonder and The Sea Around Us. We can’t blame her for the current climate disaster. She warned us, as did others., and hers was an early eloquent and passionate scientific voice.
As Maria Popova writes, “If there was poetry in her writing, Carson believed, it was not because she ‘deliberately put it there’ but because no one could write truthfully about nature ‘and leave out the poetry.’” (see below for link to Popova’s essay on Carson and this book).
Northwest US artist Nikki McClure was asked to illustrate a “lost” essay by Carson, the script to a 1956 TV program on the importance of understanding clouds, entitled Something About Clouds, both science-rich and lyrical. It’s clear sailors and farmers know clouds. But we are cut off from an understanding of nature, many of us, to our peril. In some schools science teachers are not allowed to teach about climate change.
We are living in an unprecedented time that makes our misunderstanding about the environment--and clouds--particularly painful and frightening, as increasingly dangerous storms, signaled by cloud activity. Bill McKibben writes in a May issue of The New Yorker about the unprecedented flooding across the planet, not soon to go away.
“Sometimes the process is marked by the violence of storms. Sometimes Nature indulges in the wild fury of floods. . .”
The cut-paper and sumi ink watercolor illustrations in this book are wonderful and I like the last page where we can get a glimpse of the artist’s work table. Comics artists now often include artist sections in volumes; why not picture books? I also like her passionate afterword, with links to other useful books. I got this book from the library but ordered it to own.
I think this is a wonderful essay and beautiful book, but I do not think this is an ideal book for young children, though with adult readers guiding them, maybe it can work. The art is fascinating and lovely, but I wonder if kids will dig it as much as I do. Still, this is a 5 star book for me and those I know well.
Reviewed early in May 2024 thanks to Net Galley; official publication date 9/24.
Original review: Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Music Reviewed early in May 2024 thanks to Net Galley; official publication date 9/24.
Original review: Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language (2024) by Joonas Sildre, is a wonderful graphic biography of an quietly astonishing minimalist classical composer. In a world of increasing (maximalist) noise and terror, he calls us forth to get small, listen, be still. I am familiar with his story and music thanks to a friend, T, so I especially enjoyed it. I also am a proponent of less is more, except in my long reviews, of course.
Arvo Pärt is a (formerly Soviet) Estonian composer who, because of restrictions by the Soviet government, was discouraged from composing and performing what were perceived to be “modernist” (non-conformist) (classical) music, and religious music, so he also composed music for film and the stage. He was born in 1935 and is as of today 88 years old. This graphics biography highlights a turning point in the seventies when Pärt’s work turned more minimalist, his music focusing on the production of sound, or more pointedly, the moment a note is played, when there is that silence “between two sounds” which I take to be a constructivist principle, where the listener co-constructs the music. He was inspired by his secret exploration of early music from the Renaissance.
You never heard of him? From 2011 to 2018, and again in 2022, Pärt was the most performed living composer in the world, and the second most performed in 2019, after John Williams. The Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, was opened to the public in 2018.
The challenge in a musician's biography is of course that the illustrator must make an attempt to convey the sound on the page, and Sildre does this playfully, attempting to capture the passionate intensity of Part’s experience with sound and music. He leaves a lot of space on the page, in keeping with Pärt ‘s minimalism, for us to breathe and reflect with him.
“You must treat every sound as if it were a human soul.” “Sound exists. Man is a mediator, not a creator.” “Wisdom lies in reduction.” “You work on yourself and the composition follows.”
Renunciation, order, purity. Pärt heard Gregorian chants for the first time and it opened up avenues for him compositionally and spiritually. He was exiled for many years but was not really a dissident, and when Soviet rule finally ended, he and his wife returned to Estonia to live. I connect his minimalism with Thomas Merton’s Trappist vow of silence. And his creative impulse is a leap of faith as with Kierkegaard.
“Words are a relatively poor means of expression. I believe I have within me that which can conduct deeper matters.” “I know a great secret. But I only know it through music.”
One premise for Ken Krimstein’s Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe (expected, August 2024) is tOne premise for Ken Krimstein’s Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe (expected, August 2024) is that both Einstein and Kafka, two genius innovators, lived in Prague at the same time, 1911-12. Krimstein, who does his typical deep dive into the research (see his Th Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt--talk about rabbit holes, Krimstein!), finds that Kafka (and his buddy, agent Max Brod) was present at the first public talk Einstein gave. Historical fiction, it imagines Kafka (an insurance agent at the time and unknown as a writer) walking and talking to Einstein, who has not had much luck getting work as he struggles with theories of gravity, light, and the nature of the physical universe.
This was at the time Kafka was trying to figure out the nature of the universe from another angle. Krimstein plays around with what they might have had in common: “The same thing you are: The true truth.” Both were nobodies, weirdos, suffered (and made their families suffer) for their obsessions, who moved to the upper echelon of their fields of work. In the same year or so, they both made breakthroughs; Kafka in 1912 published “The Judgement,” that in a way revolutionized literature, and well, Einstein, you know, the General Theory of Relativity.
The loose colorful illustration style (similar to his work on his Hanna Arendt book) invites us into the quirky worlds/minds of Kafka and especially Einstein, and makes it all more accessible. At one point we learn that Alice in Wonderland by Mathematics don Lewis Carroll contains playful connections to a lot of Einstein’s ideas. We meet Einstein’s family, but we do not see him reading the book with his family (lost opportunity, or too much on the nose?). But we do thus get a justification for the subtitle (which is otherwise a contemporary cliche for research obsession) and the basis for a playful approach to the story that has Kafka at one point as the Cheshire Cat!
The book is like a focused biography of a year in the life of Einstein, told with much humor and energy, bringing some insight to non-scientists with contemporary language and easy to understand analogies. Entertaining! Do I understand The Theory of Relativity, really? Well, I’m an English teacher. Maybe neither Kafka and Einstein are completely accessible to the general public. They get reduced to memes. Bu this book takes us out of meme-level and helps us see why they were so great I was lost in a bit of the science, but liked the attempt to make connections between these two guys. It's less about Kafka, of course, so it deals more with scientific squabbles Einstein was having, and imagines a conversation with Euclid.
*Reading should be disruptive, Kafka said, and Einstein would agree that physics should be the same.
*I like it that Einstein’s wife Mileva is asked about her contributions to her hubby's work. She was herself a scientist, who did most of the kid care, not surprisingly, in 1911, putting off her work for his meteoric rise.
*I was reminded of playwright Tom Stoppard’s Travesties about Zurich in 1917 when three historic figures were present: James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara. Ken: send it to Stoppard, in appreciation; maybe he will adapt this!? Why not you?!
Thanks to Net Galley, Bloomsbury Publishing and the author for an early look! Published 8/20/24....more
Victory Parade (2024) by Leela Corman is, in my recently more limited reading of comics than usual, one of the top (three, so far; the first two are LVictory Parade (2024) by Leela Corman is, in my recently more limited reading of comics than usual, one of the top (three, so far; the first two are Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and Leuyen Pham, illustrator. [YA romance, celebrating cultural heritage], and I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, Maurice Vellekort. Coming-out memoir of a gay illustrator and comics artist raised in a Calvinist tradition) graphic novels of 2024. Corman’s most ambitious and best work so far. Set in 1943 and in Brooklyn, where women are holding up more than their end of the economy and still suffering from daily misogyny, and then also in Buchenwald.
Rose Arensberg’s husband is a US soldier fighting abroad, and she has an affair with a disabled veteran. Anguish, guilt. Ruth is a young German Jewish refugee, probably having come over to Brooklyn via Kindertransport. Rose has taken Ruth into their home, and then Ruth heads into the world of professional women wrestlers (!). But it’s a mainly women story, a group of welders (think: Rosie the Riveter). And yes, we get to Buchenwald.
As with Corman’s own Unterzakhn, we see that Corman loves to drawearly women in period (grandma) underwear (Unterzakhn!) (and other clothes, of course!). As with Emil Ferris, who likes to draw working-class Uptown Chicagoans with interesting faces and bodies, Corman likes to draw the same kind of faces and bodies of working-class Brooklynites of that period.
*I was reminded of Jaime Hernandez, who also writes comics about women wrestlers in Love and Rockets, focused on eighties punk LA (Corman admits to creating an homage to some extent to JH).
*I was reminded of The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft.
*I hereby promote Marinaomi’s Comics Journal interview with Corman that I read after writing my review:
I am rating this five stars and calling it one of the best comics/manga volumes I will have read in 2024. But I warn you, it is psychological/family hI am rating this five stars and calling it one of the best comics/manga volumes I will have read in 2024. But I warn you, it is psychological/family horror at the most intense, and will from the first volume shake you.
Now, I have to say I am not sure yet, just having read it, that the events of volume twelve, a hugely pivotal volume, is the way I would have gone with the series, but then I'm not a mangaka, am I? Still, seriously, each volume until volume 11 moved glacially slowly, tell us the story of Seichi and his ultra-controlling, mentally ill mother, mainly communicating all the emotions in stark black and white, with as few words as possible.
Oshimi decided to take a huge risk in volume twelve and create twists in the narrative (spoiler alert) after having for several volumes nudged us to assume the mother, Seiko, had attempted to murder his cousin, Shigeru. In the last volume she confessed (at last, we say!) so she is imprisoned, but Seichi is also imprisoned, as he has confessed to finally completing the murder of his cousin. So in this volume she retracts her confession, renounces the fact that she ever wanted to be or ever will ever again be his mother, and this leads to the further disintegration of the already deeply damaged boy.
The risk here for Oshimi is in disrupting the carefully modulated tone and pace and essential silence of his tale to turn it into more of a fast-paced, action/court thriller, with quick turns of plot and much more talk. The police are involved in interviewing him and the mother appears in court, its more overt than covert psychological drama. The father is more involved and suddenly talking a lot for the first time, too.
Still, I like it a lot, I accept the shifts, and I look forward to the last five volumes to the finish. It remains gripping, just now in a less subtle, more explosive way....more
A German Requiem (1991) is Bernie Gunther #3, or the last of what initially was known as The Berlin Trilogy, but Philp Kerr, though wouldn't you know A German Requiem (1991) is Bernie Gunther #3, or the last of what initially was known as The Berlin Trilogy, but Philp Kerr, though wouldn't you know it, fifteen years later he revives Bernie and we get several more novels. But let’s take this as an angry, sad ending--a requiem--of the once powerful German state and the cultural mecca, Berlin, a WWII detective story, though this one takes place in Vienna, seeing events there from afar, as Bernie leaves his unfaithful wife behind.
None of the three novels take place during the most intense part of the fall of Berlin. Two precede the war, March Violets and Pale Criminal, and this one takes place in 1947-48, in the brutal aftermath, with Russia, the US and Great Britain vying for pieces of the badly wounded predator, Germany, with Russia shown to maybe be the most brutal (especially on German women) but no one can be proud. The revenge tour, post the siege of Leningrad, never to be forgotten.
Bernie was a detective at the fall of Berlin, a German, so forever suspected to have been a Nazi sympathizer. I mean, he did a job we'd agree was complicated but important for none other than Joseph Goebbels to solve the murders of some German women. But still, Goebbels! Then Bernie became a conscript, sent to the front, survived a Russian POW camp. This book is an homage to Orson Welles/Graham Greene’s Third Man, and noir filmmaking in general, ending on the set of the film. No one is innocent, is the point of The Third Man, and that fits here, too.
The crime is a murder Gunther is hired to investigate, and it’s all noir, all the time, with steamy women and back doors to clubs. And violence. This is definitely the darkest and most complex of the three books. And (because Gunther is older?) less sexist, though you know, it’s noir, so the heat is still there. But there’s a great deal of sympathy for the German “chocoladies” trading sex for survival, while rape by Russian soldiers is everywhere. The strongest characters in this one are women.
The man accused is a former colleague of Bernie’s. Not lately a good man, this guy, but Bernie is convinced he is nevertheless innocent. The background of US/German moral compromise is seedy and sad. And you already knew, all of the countries had a bad track record with respect to anti-semitism, so the attempt to affect heroism as liberators is tarnished here.
And Bernie, who as a soldier refused to kill Latvian Jews on orders, a good guy in that respect, still thinks hard about the nature of his “ own guilt—and perhaps it was really not much different from that of many others: it was that I had not said anything, that I had not lifted my hand against the Nazis.”
A powerful requiem written out of grief and anger for this war I read as we are hopefully not on the brink of the next war to end all wars. ...more
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