Estonian reading: "Purge" by Sofi Oksanen

The first thing to do here is to acknowledge and thank Kristiina Randmaa for this book, which she brought as a gift to the works party we had at the end of last year. This is the second book I received from a colleague this way (the other being the Kappillan of Malta, from Marie-Claire, reviewed in the very first of these reviews) which has enlightened me considerably about a country which which I was almost wholly unfamiliar. Incidentally, Kristiina and Marie-Claire shared an office for years, so, who knows, perhaps the idea was in the air somewhere.

Seriously bleak reading: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel may indeed be the bleakest thing I'll ever read... Certainly there is no doubting the extraordinary evocative power of this book. It draws you wholly and unrelentingly into its nightmarish post-apocalyptic world, which, though never made explicit as such, appears to be the nuclear winter following an atomic war.  This is a world without a sun, without colour, without life beyond the few human remnants of a civilisation which has destroyed itself. The world has been ravaged by fire, the air constantly bears grey ash which mixes with frequent snow and covers everything. No animals, no plants (except at one point for some miraculous morel mushrooms), so no food beyond that which can still be scavenged from the old world, in the form of canned produce, a constantly depleting resource. 

On form reading: "Sunset Park" by Paul Auster

Devotees (!?) of this  blog will know that Paul Auster novels are automatic queue-jumpers in my waiting list of books-to-read,and may have been a little surprised that Sunset Park did not appear earlier. The truth is, unaccountably, that I managed to miss the appearance of this one, to the extent it was out in paperback before I cottoned on. (Just as well, because the beach/pool reading venue left this little book rather crinkled with damp and crunchy with grains of black Strombolian sand.)

Berlin reading, part 3: "The Berlin Wall" by Frederick Taylor

So to the last of the three Berlin books in my little spate, this a history of the famous Wall. (For the record, the previous ones were "Berlin at War" by Roger Moorhouse and Hans Fallada's bleak 1947 novel "Alone in Berlin.) 

Taylor writes a straight, well-paced, indeed gripping, history of the wall. It is not so much a beginning, a middle and an end but an origins, beginning and end book. He takes a fairly long run-up, starting with a potted history of the Prussian state (to which he subsequently refers to make some perhaps rather rhetorical comparisons with the GDR), and then a much more detailed account of the stresses and strains in four-power Berlin which, combined with the Stalinist obsessions of German communist leader Walter Ulbricht, led to the erection of the Wall. The planning and execution of the initial installation, which reveal the formidable organisational talents of Erich Honnecker, bizarrely shows the GDR system at its "best" - an extraordinary nocturnal exploit, wildly successful in its own terms, stopping the haemmoraging of population from the GDR in its tracks. 

Out of Print reading: "Dead Man's Bluff" by Bernard Dunne

The point of writing even one of these short reviews might be questioned, because this is of a book it is extremely unlikely any reader will come across. But there's a story behind it.

This work of crime fiction, published as a slim hardback in 1980 by Robert Hale of London, was the first book to be published by someone I actually knew, and indeed was related to. Bernard Dunne, aka Uncle Bernard, was not actually an uncle in the strict sense, but I suppose a great uncle, the husband of one of my grandmother's sisters, alternatively, my father's cousin's father. Now that may sound a little distant, but these were relatives we saw often when I was a child, and I have a very vivid recollection of this ramrod straight, moustachioed and, to a child, slightly intimidating former military man. By the time 1980 came round, and I was sixteen, I could see there was rather more to this rather taciturn individual than immediately met the eye, and I was by then equally picking up on family talk to the effect that he had a rather exotic past.

The publication of a crime novel, beginning in Istanbul, traversing the continent to end in southern England, seemed to confirm the impression. I have a distinct recollection of the book arriving, with the modest and typically laconic handwritten dedication in front of me now: "I enjoyed writing this, I hope you enjoy reading it". I remember my Dad reading it and his slightly non-committal answer to my question about what he thought of it, which induced me at that stage not to get around to reading it. I now suspect my father may have considered it unsuitable reading for me (they were different times...), with what may now appear to be a modest collection of prostitutes and other unseemly types populating its pages. Of course, this did all rather confirm the air of mystery which surrounded my uncle in straight-laced Lincolnshire...

Why I picked the book up now is really related to more recent family matters, with my Mum being in a clearing out frame of mind and threatening to give away, sell or otherwise discard what she sees as the clutter in the house. So, having randomly spotted Dead Man's Bluff on a shelf, and still in possession of the idea that I would one day read it, I grabbed it.

The book itself is an admittedly slight stout-British-policeman-meets-nasty-drug-dealers crime novel, but it is well-paced and contains some nice plot twists and turns. As a story, it would do perfectly good service as a post 9.00 pm TV cop show, which is a reasonable achievement in itself. Of course, much of my pleasure in reading it came from its interest as a period piece, and for the association with my uncle, whose pre-sixties, stalwart British attitudes, flavoured with that experience of places exotic, foreign and possibly rather louche, hinted at in knowing looks in the family, are clearly on display. Words like "swarthy" referring to dodgy Turkish gangsters are bandied about - though both menacing Middle-Eastern hitman and doughty Turkish policeman are given serious respect - while British hippies, pimps and lowlife probably attract the greatest disdain from the author. Yes, the attitudes are old-fashioned, but not tainted with the, say, casual racism one so often encounters in products of that period. I was pleased about that.

The language too seemed rather quaint, many Americanisms we now take for granted being completely absent and the punctilious use of the apostrophe in the words 'phone and'bus actually being quite distracting, as well as a reminder of how much the language has changed in only a few years.

This was a personal read and a recommendation would be pointless (though I did find a second hand book dealer through Amazon offering the book at over twenty pounds - original cover price £5.25). I enjoyed it though, and am pleased that, albeit rather late in the day, I read my Uncle Bernard's one literary emanation.

Pre-holiday - but ideal holiday - reading: "Imperium" by Robert Harris

I am reading Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy out of order. First, about a year ago, I read "Lustrum", the story of Cicero's consulship in the Roman Republic and its aftermath; now, I have recently finished "Imperium", which tells the tale of how he got there. Although, I suppose, in an ideal world these books should be read in the correct order, in reality I found it didn't matter too much.