evka b's blog

When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

Excellent book. Ostensibly a memoir of a white Zimbabwean, more broadly about dislocation, race, belonging, death, and secrets.

It has one of the most intense descriptions of Treblinka I can recall reading.

There were many times where I found myself crying.

Very moving account as well of watching one's parents grow old with a sense of helplessness to care for them and help them die well.

A Woman in Jerusalem

A Woman in Jerusalem

I just finished this and still don't know how I feel about it. I suspect I will still be thinking about it in a day or two. Or perhaps I will have completely forgotten it.

It is one of those books you read that if someone asked me what it was about, I'd take a long time trying to answer and then the answer wouldn't do justice to the book, or the way it made me feel.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Styron

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

I've read this book before. It is a very small book. William Styron wrote it after he had lifted out of a serious and debilitating depression. I remember reading it a long time ago, I think my father had recommended it.

It is a 'nice' description of depression though it lacks the visceral horror and lack of self that the real thing entails. It is cold and removed, to me. I wonder though how easily it is to describe depression in a way that would bring the real horrors to crawl across the skin of someone who has not had to struggle with the questions he raises.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vendela Vida

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

I like this book. The prose is very simple and it gives a fast flow to it. I don't like everything that happens in it. I can't help but wonder if one episode when the narrator was 19 was not completely pointless.

What I do like is how the mother of the narrator and eventually the narrator as well do not require there to be a thread to tie their separate experiences of life together. It is as though there is no ache for the meta-story that most people want for their life, there is no path, no theme, the could have teleported from spot to stop and picked up living, and simply not cared what came before. The two characters are quite different in the way that they do this.  The narrator's mother wishes to erase the the witnesses to her life, so her life is not known. In doing this she seems uncaring about the people who were involved in earlier versions of her life. The narrator seems to maintain her love, affection, caring for those who have been in earlier lives even though she also does not feel a need to continue that life, those people are free, they carry on in their space.

Panzer in Nord-Afrika 1941-1943, Ralf Munnich

Subtitle: Der Panzerkrieg zwischen Tobruk El Alamein und Tunis.
ISBN 3-7909-0071-0
Published in 1977

I must admit that this book looks much older than 1977, but that is the date on the forward.

So, its amazing. First, the cover looks hand drawn, and is covered in something akin to wax paper. Then, the book is almost all photos or drawings. It has photos from all the offensives, as well as detailed specs on the tanks themselves. The color plated tank specs are in the center, similar to a centerfold in their lusciousness and detail and glory.  It also includes maps and memos, gun specs and overviews, history.

The photos with people in them are amazing. There is Rommel striding across to a tank looking all the powerful brilliant general and yet he is wearing shorts with his socks pulled up to his knees. I believe in one of the photos is Hitler as well in the similar outfit. All seriousness aside, who ever thought that a military in dress shorts and socks was the right look for the Afrika Korps? Only their aryan knees and faces show...imagine the sunburn patterns.

The Miracle of Language, Lederer

The Miracle of Language

This is not a good book. Well translated that means I disagree with many of his conclusions. He's a bit pedantic, seems to insist that his opinion is the correct one, and waxes on about the perfection, utility, and expressiveness of English, more so than all other languages.

Blech. Maybe he doesn't speak any other languages.

Carry Me Down, Hyland

Carry Me Down

I begin to think that reading a long stretch of booker nominees over a week long period is a very bad idea.  The similarities in the books are obvious and become tedious.  I can't say if I would have enjoyed this book if I had read it spaced out from the others. It is about a mundane tedium of an adult sized 8 year old at the mercy of his parents tepidly fluxing life, concerned about all the lies adults tell him and his desire to one day be in the guiness book of world records.

A Thread of Grace, Maria Doria Russell

A Thread of Grace

Mmmmmm book. It is so dense with characters and history and stories. Some books I read I think could have been written in the same time it takes to read them. This book seems so intricately worked and researched and the characters so carefully built that I cannot envision the writing of it.  [in the back of the book there is a bit of interview the the author and she says it took 7 years]

The book takes place in three years, '43-'45, mostly in Italy occupied by Germans and is the story of jews and those who hid jews, partisans, fascistii, republicani, and those shape shifters who created and shed identities as required to assist in the survival of italians.

Half of A Yellow Sun, Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun

The author's full name is: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Enthralling and absorbing story of two wealthy Igbo sisters in Nigeria in the 60s and 70s during the Biafran independence movement. It is a story of the end of colonialism and the descent into tribal loyalties and massacres.

The weight of the story is in the lives of the women, the men feel smaller and stereotyped, but the story is so well woven that it doesnt seem to matter during the reading.

The Elected Member, Bernice Rubens

The Elected Member

This was a booker prize winner in the 70s, exact year no longer in my head. Google can assist you if you would like to know.

It also features incest, as did the previous book I read, making me question how it is I have randomly chosen to read two books with oppressive cultures that result in incest between siblings. 

In this case the episode is quite minor in the dissolution of the 'normal' family structure, which is busy disintegrating for other reasons, most of which were due to the main character's attempts to influence the path of the family's life.

It reminds me very much of many booker prize winners. there seems to be a similarity of prose style and structure to a large number of them. (Not those written by asian authors, in general).