Overwhelming reading: "Gomorra" by Roberto Saviano

For non-Italian readers, you need to know that Gomorra is one of those rare books which really changes public discourse across an entire country. This book caused a massive stir in Italy and made a household name - and marked man - out of its author, Roberto Saviano, who can now go nowhere without bodyguards and is probably wondering when, not if, the killers will get to him. 

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.