Cormac McCarthy – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: The Safekeep to Pachinko

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

Thank you so much for putting Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safekeep on my reading list Kate. It’s a book which delivered so much, and also invites any number of ways the Six Degrees contributor could go.

I settled for looking at those parts of WWII little known about here, as far as the German perspective goes. and begin with We Germans, by Alexander Storritt. ‘What did you do in the war?’ a young British man asks his German Grandad. And is told, in the form of a long letter found after his death. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They see Polish villagers hung by unidentified men from a single tree ‘in bunches, like swollen plums.’ They witness rape and crucifixion. They steal a tank and use it against the Russians. They squabble bitterly with each other. They kill enemy soldiers without compunction. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointess horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

A book in a similar vein is Hubert Mingarelli‘s A Meal in Winter (translated by Sam Taylor). An account of three German soldiers whose task on a bitterly cold winter day is to hunt down Jews in hiding and bring them back to the Polish concentration camp where they are based, for an inevitable end. This unenviable task is better than the alternative: staying in camp to shoot those who were found the previous day. They talk – about the teenage son of one of them – and they find just one Jew. Is he their enemy, deserving his fate, or is he just like them, a young man doing his best to survive? What if they return to camp with nobody to show for their day’s hunting? As the men retreat to an abandoned cottage to prepare a meagre meal, their hatred and fear jostle with their well-submerged more humane feelings to provide the rest of the drama for this short, thought provoking book.

This reminds me of a book about the seige of Leningrad, which I read many years ago, but which made a lasting impression on me: Helen Dunmore‘s The Siege. The novel revolves around five interwoven lives during the war when Leningrad was completely surrounded by the Germans. Winter came and there was no food or coal, it was a brutal winter and one half of the population of the city perished. What energy the citizens had was devoted to the constant struggle to stay alive. Some of the strategies they employed will stay with me forever. Soaking leather bookmarks to get some nourishment from the resulting ‘stock’, for instance.

Let’s leave war behind, but looks at another struggle for survival in Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road: another book I read a long time ago. The tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after has stayed with me.

Oh dear, back to war, but staying with relationships within a family. V.V. Ganeshananthan‘s Brotherless Night. This book plunged me right into a war that had previously been an ongoing news item from somewhere very far away. The ethnic conflict in 1980s Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese dominant state and several separatist Tamil separatist groups is brought to life by the Tamil narator, Sashi. She’s 16 when we meet her, and an aspiring doctor. She has 4 brothers, 3 older, one younger. We follow the family’s fortunes as an ethic-inspired war breaks out, and daily life becomes more difficult, disrupting her education and resulting in her older brothers and their friend K joining the fray at the expense of their own education. Loyalty to a movement rather than family is alien to their parents. Tensions arise. Tragedy strikes. Normally conforming Sashi is moved to become a medic at a field hospital for the Tigers, because what is more important than relieving suffering, saving lives, whoever needs that help? As the war becomes ever more destructive, her personal conflicts and the family’s day to day arrangements become ever more complex. Years go by as the story unfolds. This story is impeccably and compassionately researched. It is urgent, intimate, written with striking imagery and immediacy. A distant conflict, several decades old is brought right into our homes and becomes alive once more.

Another book I read ages ago is Min Jin Lee‘s Pachinko. This too is about not civil war, but about two nations – Korea and Japan -who historically have a less than happy relationship, and how this conflict plays out in the life of a single family, throughout the twentieth century. Some stayed in Korea (South Korea in due course), and others tried for a new life in Japan. None found it easy. This is a book about resilience and emotional conflict passing down through the generations. It’s about well-drawn characters making their way in the world, sometimes with great success, but rarely able to escape from the shadow of their past. It’s a real page turner, from which I learnt much about this period of Korea’s history. Highly recommended.

I seem to have wandered rather far from the intimately domestic scale of The Safekeep, and spent a lot of time dwelling on war. I wonder what my next chain will make of August’s book: Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu?

Six Degrees of Separation: from Western Lane to The Lock-Up

Kate: Six Degrees of Separation

This month’s starter book by Chetna Maroo, Western Lane has only just been acquired by our library, so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I understand though that it’s about eleven year old Gopi whose mother dies. Her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen in squash, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters.

This took me off at a slight tangent, something to do perhaps with ‘quietly brutal’. I remembered reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: the tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after will stay with me for a long time.

This linked for me with another book where a father is centre stage: The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. As someone of dual heritage myself (half English, half Polish), born in the same period as Hamilton I was interested to read this account from a man with a German mother and Irish father. His story is told in a series of vignettes, which gradually provide a coherent picture of the family’s day-to-day life over the years of Hamilton’s childhood. His mother brings with her memories of her family’s anti-Nazi stance – yet in Ireland she and her family are called Nazi. His father insists on the family’s Irishness – which meant denying everything English in their lives. Both these threads isolate them all from their peers. They’re rather poor, though Hamilton’s father has all kinds of unusual and ultimately unsuccessful business ideas. This is an account of a young boy’s growth into adolescence and adulthood, trying to find a path towards the adult he thought he wanted to be. A sensitive and restrained and thought-provoking narrative.

Let’s move to a book with no father figure at all: Sisters by Daisy Johnson. July is utterly dependent on her damaged, controlling older sister September, to whom she is very close in age (the clue is in their names). Following some bullying of July in their Oxfordshire school, they move with their mother to the house in North Yorkshire that had once been the father’s family home. Sheela, the mother is also unstable – withdrawn and neglectful. The girls are widely considered ‘isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty’. Their behaviour is unsettling, often shocking, and makes reading the story a tense and unsettling experience. It leads towards a denouement that is both shocking and yet satisfactory, leaving the reader with a hope for better things.

Another book with families and relationships at the heart: The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell. Here are two stories: that of Lexie, 1950s university drop-out, who meets Innes, and leaves rural Devon and her family, to live the full bohemian London experience. And that of Elina and Ted, new (present-day) parents who after a horrible, dangerous birth, are struggling to adjust to their new very-far-from normal. Their exhaustion, Ted’s curious moments of disorientation, their differing expectations seem likely to destabilise their relationship. How do these two worlds collide and make a story? They don’t, not in the first half. Then hints get dropped, about the house and neighbourhood where all these characters lived. And despite the drip-feed of clues, the end, when it comes, is shocking , unexpected and entirely believable. I was involved from the first to last page.

This is getting a bit heavy. I’ll do what I so often do after a dose of mood-lowering reading and rush over to Venice to read a Brunetti mystery by Donna Leon. The plot hardly matters. It’s a few hours in the company of Commissario Brunetti and his entirely satisfactory family life that I’m after. Give unto Others is Leon’s latest book. And this post-pandemic tale is as usual a good one. It involves a former neighbour who comes and talks – unofficially – about some concerns she has about the business in which her husband and son-in-law have been involved. As ever, layers unpeel to reveal dark secrets and shenanigans. Tricky moral questions arise for Brunetti to wrestle with. How involved should he be? If you’re a Leon fan, you won’t need any encouragement to find out.

For my last book, I’ll choose to link with Brunetti by choosing another crime novel where the personalities are of just as much interest as the crime, and where human relationships are what count the most, The Lock-up by John Banville. We’re in 1950s Dublin, some six months after Banville’s April in Spain took place. A young woman has apparently asphyxiated herself in her car in a lock-up garage. It becomes apparent it’s a murder. As ever, though the whole of the book is on the surface an account of the efforts to solve the crime and find the perpetrator, actually, that’s not the reason to read it. Instead, it’s about the more-than-prickly relationship between DI Strafford and police pathologist Dr. Quirke, about the complicated love affairs both men have in 1950s Dublin, still under the somewhat puritanical stranglehold of the Catholic church. And this extends to its influence over police investigations as well as moral arbitration. It’s about the weather, the greyness of Dublin. And it’s about simply enjoying Banville’s luscious writing. So many reasons to read and appreciate this book.

So: families and relationships form the link between all my choices this month. Next month, perhaps it will be food, as the starter book is the culinary classic, Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential.

Three of my images this month come courtesy of photographers catalogued in Pexels. Tirichard Kuntanon illustrated the Cormac McCarthy, Dids the Donna Leon, Mike Bird the John Banville. The image for the Hugo Hamilton was from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s time for Six Degrees of Separation … in September…

‘On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.‘

Six Degrees of Separation: Kate W

This month, the chain begins with Rachel Cusk’s Second Place. The narrator is M, living out in a remote country landscape with her second husband Tony, invites celebrated painter L to stay in the second cottage they own: she is powerfully attracted to his work. We’re witness to M’s inner monologues, as she worries about her relationship with her daughter, her husband and L’s antipathy towards her, manifesting itself in calculated rudeness. Cusk acknowledges the book as a re-write of Mieko Kawakami’s memoir of DH Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos, but I haven’t read this. M could be thought obsessive, over-analytical, though much of what she thinks is beautifully expressed. Insightful? Pretentious? Only you can decide.

Some weeks on from reading Second Place, my lasting impression is of a lonely setting, and of characters who are ultimately alone. So the first link in my chain is Jane Harper’s The Lost Man. This story is set in the Australian outback, and for me the central character in the novel. Understanding the vastness, the harshness, the loneliness and unforgiving nature of this landscape was what I took from this book. It’s the story of a family, of three brothers who live next door to one another (by which you need to understand that they each live at least three hours drive from each other), and what happens after Nathan finds Cameron dead one day, by the grave of a long-dead stockman, in upsetting circumstances. The wider family unravels, then ravels again in a satisfyingly realised story, in which the ending was possibly just a little too neat. But it’s a great story, well told and visualised.

Loneliness of a different kind is at the heart of Javier Marías’ Berta Isla. Berta and Tomás fall in love while still at school together. Anglo-Spanish, Tomás goes to university in Oxford, to further his extraordinary gift for languages, while Berta studies in Madrid. At Oxford, Tomás makes a mistake which obliges him to make his choice of career to work for the British secret service. It changes his and Berta’s relationship for ever. This is the story of a marriage in which the husband is largely absent to his wife, to his children and to the world at large. It takes in – at a distance – the Irish Troubles, the Falklands War, and Franco’s dictatorship.

At one point Berta herself quotes from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities: ‘…every human creature is destined to be a profound secret and mystery to every other creature’. That’s what this book is about. A thoughtful, discursive book which will remain with me for a long time.

A quiet bar in Madrid (Igor Olyarnik: Unsplash)

Let’s look at loneliness of a different kind: Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn. This is a book about what man has done to various places on earth, and what happens when man ceases to interfere: when the mining stops; the botanical garden is left to its own devices; the fatally damaged nuclear reactor is fenced off; the WWI chemical weapons site locked and the farmland abandoned. Nature begins to take over once more. Maybe not quite in the form that it had previously, but insidiously, by adapting and making do. The wilderness revives.

This beautiful, even lyrically written book celebrates Nature’s power to recover, even when to the average aesthete the results are not conventionally pretty. It may be almost too late. There is much to be concerned, horrified and terrified about as man continues to despoil the planet. But Flyn finds hope in nature’s power to take back control. A book I am pleased to have read: and one which gave me plenty to think about, and plenty to appreciate in the quality of Flyn’s writing.

Flyn didn’t write about the desolate but strangely beautiful industrial spoilheap that is Parys Mountain in Anglesey. But she very well could have.

Back to fiction, to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after will stay with me for a long time.

An apocalypse of a different kind is described in John Lewis-Stempel’s Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War. I thought I was pretty clued up about the social history of World War I, but this book was a revelation. It describes the war, and life in the trenches and beyond from the point of view of the young subalterns who, in leading their men at the Front, had a life expectancy once there of six weeks. These young men, some no older than 17, had been equipped by their education in public schools to be team players, leaders, and military men through their membership of the OTC. They rose to the occasion, leading men often old enough to be their fathers, commanding their respect and even love. Some of these men became officers in their turn, because the public school men, frankly, were mainly all killed. Marlborough School, for example, lost 400 men in the Great War. This is about their short lives, and the lives of the men they led. Brilliant.

From a son et lumière at Ripon Cathedral in 2018 to commemorate the end of WWI a hundred years before

Oh goodness, this has been quite a dark month of book choices. Let’s lighten the mood for my final choice, in a book about that moment in our lives when we’re all finally alone … death. Waiting for the Last Bus by Richard Holloway. This is an excellent, thought provoking book written with a light, amusing touch. I’ve reached the stage in life where reflections on life and death seem appropriate, and this is a book I’ll read again. Holloway considers our fears of death, both for ourselves, and for those whom we love. He looks at what comes next, both for the deceased and for those left behind. A former monk, agnostic, and bishop, Holloway has written a book which is accessible to us all, not just Christians. Highly recommended, and not at all depressing.