My Hungarian father was 7 years old when he almost got deported to Polen by the Nazis, but was miraculously saved by his mother. He came to Sweden, where I´m born, and never looked back, completely focused on the future. So I, his only child, focus on memory and oblivion. It´s like we stand back to back—or like I´m a seamstress, trying to stitch the past with the present. In my British mother´s family history is Salonica, the magical Jewish city in the Ottoman Empire. My Spanish-Jewish grandfather spoke the same Castillian dialect that Cervantes used to write Don Quijote. And I´m born in Sweden. These are my universes and where my writing is born.
1947: Where Now Begins is not only a gripping family history. The careful juxtaposition of disparate events highlights an underlying interconnectedness and suggests a new way of thinking about the postwar era. The book deals with a decisive year, follows Simone de Beauvoir, Raphael Lemkin, George Orwell among others, and traces the key person, Per Engdahl, who revives the fascist and Nazi movements after WW2. A single, momentous year that is resonating very, very clearly today.
As a child of a holocaust survivor, I keep coming back to this book. Here Christopher Browning investigates the historic circumstances and the personal stories behind one police battalion of cheerful, friendly, ordinary men, who ended up being responsible for over tens of thousands of Jews during WW2. A great historian at work, helping us to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Agota Kristof is the same age as my father and experienced the same country, Hungary, move from its pre-war existence to dictatorship and deportations during the war and then, after the war, turning into a communist state. Her absolutely brilliant storytelling is mystifying, present, and distant at the same time, maybe an allegory over the state of her homeland, maybe over being human. The Notebook is mindblowing.
Another book I keep returning to is If This Is a Man. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, has written a matter-of-fact masterpiece, poetic yet never sentimental, about his year as a slave in the Monowitz/Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It´s a low-key book but vibrant book about being a human surrounded by inhumanity.
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing…
I only recently started to read James Baldwin and am blown away by his intensity and poetic language. In this first novel he describes the world of his childhood in Harlem, NY. It is American identity, history, and passion, it´s a portrait of a young man as well of the wounds of slavery hurting in every individual born into the American system. And it’s a beautiful story.
'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.'
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson…
An exiled witch takes centre stage in this powerful retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey. This book may be damaged by its own hype, but I read it when it was quite newly released and loved every sentence of this love story, where anger, cruelty, and mythical betrayal are ingredients. A great way of getting in touch with the archaic works of Homer.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart.
He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood. Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old, possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart. He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
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