Maus by Art Spiegelman

Prior to picking up Maus, the only graphic novel I have ever read was the excellent Persepolis. I've never been into superheroes or comics, so I just never tried anything from the graphic novel sections of the library or bookshop.  But I had heard enough about them to know that Maus, about Spiegelman's father's experiences of the Holocaust, is considered a classic of the genre.  It even won the Pulitzer Prize.  So when I found myself in a reading slump and in need of something new, Maus seemed like a good option.

Maus opens with Spiegelman visiting his elderly father and asking him to recount his experiences.  It soon becomes clear that the father-son relationship isn't perfect, and the wartime sections are interspersed with modern day encounters.  Spiegelman senior was a bit of a wheeler-dealer and he was able to survive the Holocaust by a combination of luck and always staying one step ahead of the game, looking out for new ways to make himself useful, to do whatever was necessary to survive.  These same skills (keeping everything because you never know when it might come in handy, wasting nothing, learning to deal with extreme situations) later form a wall between father and son and make functioning in the real world and dealing with real relationships almost impossible.  The version of Maus I read contains both book one and two.

I just loved this book, and devoured it in less than a day.  I was worried that I would find the experience of reading a graphic novel difficult, but I soon got used to the format and in fact, started to appreciate how the pictures allow a different kind of story-telling.  When Spiegelman Sr is talking about his time in Czechoslovakia before the war, the arm band that Jewish citizens had to wear enters the pictures without any mention a couple of pages in, a subtlety that wouldn't be possible in an ordinary novel.  The technique of drawing the Jews as rats and the Nazis as cats also adds impact that is only possible in a graphic novel.  Furthermore, it helps that the pictures were simple but beautifully drawn:

But above all, Maus is an excellent book because it's a powerful account of a horrible period of history and hearing about it from one person's experience humanises it for the reader.  That we get to see that survival doesn't guarantee a happy ending makes it all the more powerful. I'm so glad that I was in a restless reading mood, otherwise I might never have got to read this book.

Source: Library

First Published: 1986 (vol 1) & 1992 (vol 2)

My Edition: Penguin Books, 2003

Score: 5 out of 5

The Gods of Heavenly Punishment by Jennifer Cody Epstein

The firebombing of Tokyo during World War Two forms the centerpiece of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, a novel that follows the lives of several people before and after the war.  Cameron is an American pilot, newly married, who takes part in the firebombing mission only for things to go wrong afterwards.  Yoshi is the daughter of a Japanese father intent on capturing Manchuria and a Westernised mother.  She gets caught up in the bombing and must deal with the consequences.  Anton is an architect who lived in Japan but who is now involved in designing Japanese buildings in America, so the military can practise destroying them.  The lives of all the characters intertwine as they are changed by one dramatic event, the firebombing.

From the cover of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, I was expecting quite a gentle read, but it was anything but!  The actual firebombing itself is graphically described and the novel doesn't shy away from the grittier side of life.  There are no guaranteed happy endings for any of the characters and Epstein does a great job at showing how brutal war is, as the killing is indiscriminate.  In addition to this, the novel also deals with homophobia and how cities are permanently changed after war.  Yoshi was living comfortably before the attack but after the destruction, she is forced down paths she never expected she would have to go.

I was extremely impressed by the writing in The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.  Epstein has a lot of characters to deal with but she manages to keep them all distinct in the reader's mind and manages to give a sense of their personalities in a very short time.  This meant that the book quickly sucked me in and I rushed through it in only two days, as I couldn't put it down.  I'll definitely be getting hold of her other book, The Painter from Shanghai.

The only complaint I have with the book is that sometimes the links between characters felt contrived.  A bit like how everyone knows each other in Dickens' London, all of the characters in this story were linked in ways that just wouldn't happen in real life.  I don't mind a few coincidences, but there seemed to be a few too many of them.  Despite this, I really enjoyed reading The Gods of Heavenly Punishment and think it's a great example of a historical fiction book that can pack a punch.

Source: Review copy via Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours

Published: 2013

Score: 4.5 out of 5

Read Alongside:

1. Shanghai Girls by Lisa See - Another novel that examines the destruction of a city in Asia, as Japanese forces occupy Shanghai.  This one also doesn't shy away from portraying the gritty effects.
2. Next to Love by Ellen Feldman - This one links in with the Cameron storyline.  What was it like for the families of American soldiers during World War Two and afterwards, when they returned home?

The People of Forever are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

The People of Forever are Not Afraid was one of the books I was most intrigued by at the announcement of the Women's Prize for Fiction long-list.  It's about three girls, Yael, Avishag and Lea, who are conscripted into the Israeli army at the age of eighteen for their two years of compulsory military service.  Israel is the only country in the world to draft both men and women.  More of a collection of experiences than a coherent narrative, The People of Forever are Not Afraid is about coming of age in a military environment and what happens to life after discharge.  Between them, the girls experience a wide range of Israeli military life, from manning Palestinian checkpoints, to border control, to being in an infantry squad and training new recruits.  Set before and during the 2006 war with Lebanon, none of the girls leave the army psychologically unscathed.

 I had mixed feelings about this book, although the good outweighed the bad.  I just loved the blunt, forward tone of the narration and found it extremely refreshing.  The People of Forever are Not Afraid is not a 'nice' book, it's brutal in places but it's  abrupt and feels raw and honest.  There's no purple prose, just soldiers dying from Russian Roulette, girls shooting ice water into their veins and teenagers playing with guns.  Parts of the narrative were written in a stream of consciousness style, and Boianjiu is very good at portraying how the emotional crises of being a young adult can be amplified by the militaty setting;

"I tried and I tried to pretend that I was an olive tree.  I told myself that I lived, and I lived, and even when there were tumours exploding under my bones and predators eating out my eyes, I thought I'd die but I didn't.  I stood frozen, eyes open, my arms misshapen in the air; I tried forever to be an olive tree, I swear."

The first half of the book was the most compelling as it dealt with the girls being conscripted and their experiences during training and their first posting.  This was all completely fascinating and Boianjiu maintained ambiguity about the morality of what the three main characters were doing.  I read with interest about learning to withstand poison gas, learning how to shoot accurately, and how to check Palestinan border permits.  The book at this point was still a collection of stories, but they all hung together coherently around a common theme.

However, in the second half of the book, the narrative thread became too loose as Boianjiu wrote about what happened to the girls after the war, after the army.  The book meanders between the characters almost aimlessly and a number of new perspectives were introduced.  Yael, Avishag and Lea seemed to blend into each other, until I had trouble telling them apart.  I don't mind a book that's really a collection of stories, but I need more connection than this.

If I was just judging on the first half of the book, I would be giving an extremely high rating for the bluntness and emotional rawness of the narrative tone.  I loved that, and think Boianjiu is a very talented writer.  Unfortunately, the second half was too meandering for me.  I would still recommend this book though, I've read nothing like it before.

Source: From the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.
First Published: 2012
Score: 3.5 out of 5

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Code Name Verity opens with a young girl in a Nazi holding camp in Occupied France.  She's a captured British spy who has been tortured mercilessly for information and become a collaborator. She agrees to write down everything she knows about the British war effort in exchange for not being tortured any more.  And so begins the story of Verity/Julie and her friend Maddie, a pilot, narrated by both before the end of the book.  It's hard to write about the plot of Code Name Verity without spoiling it, but the narrator is unreliable and there are many twists and turns.  Is Julie really a collaborator?  Is she telling them everything she knows?

I liked Code Name Verity.  It's a solidly written book with many well-plotted twists.  I spent the first part of the book perplexed as there seemed to be a big difference between what Verity was saying (I'm petrified and will do anything to stop the torture) and her character, which was still lively and unbroken.  As the book went on, the reasons for this became clearer and I understood Verity/Julie a lot better.  Wein just about manages to pull off the deceit in the characters that makes the twists believable. 

There is a lot of suffering and torture in Code Name Verity, but it wasn't hard hitting.  Bad things happen to the characters and Wein tried to show the impact of that, but I never really felt it.  I wanted to feel Verity's fear and pain but the way she wrote about it prevented that.  Had I felt more connected to Verity, more "in her shoes", I would have enjoyed the book more than I did. I liked the plotting and trying to figure out who was telling the truth but there was always a distance in my reading experience.  Essentially, the characters didn't feel 'real' for their situation; at times Verity felt like a modern teenager, not a teenager of war forced to grow up too quickly.

I did enjoy the character of Maddie though.  She is more straightforward and written in a relatable way.  When Maddie writes of her love of flying, I wanted to be right there in the plane with her, soaring over the white cliffs of Dover.  As a whole, the book was a page turner and it was one I ripped through very quickly.  It was just lacking that 'oomph' and depth to turn it from a book I liked to a book I loved.

Source: Library
First Published: 2012
Score: 3.5 out of 5

Read Alongside:
1. Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson - Another story about a female spy during World War Two, this one about a singer in Egypt.  The spy plot is written alongside a romance.
2. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff - Excellent rendering of teenagers during an unnamed war.  This book contains the emotion I felt was lacking in Code Name Verity.

Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zukoff

Lost In Shangri-La is a true life adventure story.  In 1945, a group of American service men and women stationed in Dutch New Guinea got on a plane with the intention of seeing the mysterious 'hidden' valley of Shangri-La.  They never made it - their plane crashed into the jungle and only three survived.  Surrounded by hostile terrain, potentially unfriendly natives and with life-threatening injuries, they began battling to survive.  Lost in Shangri-La chronicles what happened afterwards from their meetings with tribespeople who had no previous interaction with the outside world to the daring rescue mission put into place to try to save them.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lost in Shangri-La.  It was a rare case of a non-fiction book where both the content and the writing exceeded expectations.  What happened to the three survivors was fascinating and I found it hard to put the book down, so keen was I to find out what would happen to them next.  This is one of those true stories you couldn't make up, full of adventure from the moment the plane crashed into the jungle.

I was also impressed with Zuckoff's writing style.  He relays the events clearly and at a good pace, adding background information but not overwhelming the reader with it.  I especially appreciated the sections where the survivors interact with the native tribespeople - Zuckoff included the impressions of the survivors and the natives, making it easy to see the frequent miscommunication.  Given the amount of research Zuckoff had conducted and the fact that he had travelled to New Guinea to interview the native population, these sections fascinated me.  The survivors were thought of as spirits descended from the sky heralding the end of their civilisation as it currently existed.

Whilst all of the book was written at a brisk pace, I much preferred the earlier sections straight after the crash as there was a greater sense of tension due to the danger the survivors found themselves in.  I did enjoy reading about the resuce mission but at this point the danger had passed so I was less invested in the text.  I would also liked to have read a bit more about what happened to the natives after the survivors left; Zuckoff does let us know what life is like for them now but I wanted the details - how did their way of life finally change forever?

Lost in Shangri-La is one of the most engaging non-fiction texts I've read for quite some time.  It will appeal to anyone who enjoys a good adventure story. 

Source: TLC book tours
First Published: 2011
Score: 4.5 out of 5

Want to read more?
The rest of the tour stops can be found here.

Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

I've failed miserably at reading all of the books shortlisted for the Orange Prize read before the awards ceremony on 30th May.  I blame both the difficulty in getting hold of certain books in a timely manner from the library due to long hold lists and the distraction of other, shiny new books.  I plan on finishing up the shortlist after the winner is announced.

Painter of Silence is the story of Augustin, a deaf and mute man who is found on the hospital steps of Iasi, Romania.  Through a connection with one of the nurses, Safta, the story of their shared childhood and war experiences slowly unfold, all told through art and silence.  The idyllic world of their childhood has been forever changed by war and a brutal new Communist regime.

Painter of Silence is the first shortlisted book to disappoint me.  I went into it expecting a treat as generally I enjoy these human stories set in war and Eastern Europe.  But from the first few pages I was disappointed with the story and Harding completely failed to engage me.  At certain points in the book, I was bored and just hoping for it to end.

I think there are a few reasons I felt this way about the book:
*The lack of a clear feel for the setting - Harding told me this book was set in Romania before and after the second world war, but I would never have known otherwise.  The country house with servants could have been practically anywhere and I didn't get a feel for Romania as distinct from any other country, there was nothing about Painter of Silence that transported me to another time or place.
*Augustin himself - Maybe it's brave picking a deaf-mute as a central character and Harding did show the power of silence, but at times this felt like a convenient way of not addressing issues to do with the war - Augustin wouldn't have picked up on it so Harding didn't have to write about it.
*The lack of terror associated with the new Communist state - The best books set in this time period have a sense of the all-pervading fear that often went along with Communist regimes (Sofi Oksanen's Purge is a great example).  This was absent in Painter of Silence; yes, people had to move home and Safta had to become a nurse, but there was too much emotional detachment for there to be any power in this.

So it's safe to say I had quite a few issues with this book.  At certain points I even became angry with it as it seemed like such a cliche of literary award winning writing (pick a war zone, choose a character with a unique perspective, offer some analysis of art and hey presto, you've won!).  But what saved the book to some degree was the writing itself.  I may have had issues with the story and characters, but the writing was simply stunning, quiet but powerful.  I have no doubt that Harding is a talented writer but Painter of Silence was definitely not a book for me.

Source: Library
First Published: 2012
Score: 2.5 out of 5

My pick for the Orange Prize: I've not read all of the shortlist, but out of the ones I have read, I'm rooting for Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, a simply beautiful book.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Stephen Galloway

The Cellist of Sarajevo is an extraordinary novel about ordinary people caught up in a war they did not want and have no control over.  The siege of Sarajevo is the longest running siege in modern history, lasting from April 1992 to February 1996 and killing around ten thousand people.  An average of 329 shells hit the city every day and snipers in the surrounding hills targeted civilians, making everyday tasks like a game of Russian Roulette.  When the difference between life and death becomes totally random and out of your control and the person walking next to you can be shot down whilst you survive, life becomes unimaginable.

The Cellist of Sarajevo follows three characters.  Dragan has managed to get his wife and son to safety but was unable to leave the city he loves himself.  Kenan must make several dangerous journeys to find fresh water for his family.  And Arrow has joined forces with the counter-snipers, trying to defend her city.  All of them are struggling to come to terms with what happens when civilisation as you know it melts away.

Despite all of this, it is not a novel of despair.  There are moments of humanity and hope amidst all of the destruction, such as people coming under sniper attacks themselves in order to save strangers.  All three of the main characters struggle with how much humanity and civilisation they are going to allow the snipers to take away from them, and for one of them the simple act of walking with your head held high and greeting passers-by becomes an act of defiance;

"He will behave now as he hopes everyone will someday behave.  Because civilisation isn't a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily.  It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible." p216

The most powerful part of the book for me was how random death had become for the inhabitants of Sarajevo.  At one point Dragan is waiting to cross an intersection and he witnesses some people cross without incident whilst others are gunned down and tries to figure out why some are targeted.  But there is no answer and I can't imagine having to come to terms with that.

I was very impressed with Galloway's writing.  Considering it is quite a slim book, he didn't need many words to create a powerful impact.  The ending was extremely powerful and it's a book that I've carried on thinking about long after I put it down.

Verdict: Profound portrayal of the impact of war on ordinary people. Highly recommended.

Source: Owned

First Published: 2008

Score: 5 out of 5

Next To Love by Ellen Feldman

Next to Love is the story of three American women caught up with World War Two.  Babe, Millie and Grace are left at home whilst their husbands go to war and must deal with both the waiting and not knowing and the reality of life after the war ends, a life that will never be the same again for any of them.  Broad and sweeping, Next to Love follows the lives of the three women and their children for many years and deals with a multitude of issues including bereavement, anti-semitism, grief, madness, adultery, snobbery, women in the workforce and the creation of a consumerist society.

Next to Love was one of those novels that was fun to read but that didn't make a big impression on me. The writing was smooth and flowing and I read through it quickly, but I think it suffered from trying to deal with so many issues at once.  For me, all of the power and impact of the story was in the opening sections dealing with the actual war and the immediacy of grief.  Some of these parts were heart-breaking to read and the subsequent chapters dealing with everything that happened years later just lacked in impact compared to that.  I wanted Feldman to concentrate on just the one thing.

The multiple perspective changes could also be confusing at times.  I don't know if this was just because I had a review copy on my kindle, but perspective changed a lot within chapters without any warning, which was confusing at first.  I like each chapter to be from the same perspective.  I also felt that the voices of the three women were distinct, but not distinct enough to warrant a lot of the perspective shifts.  The voice of Babe stood out more than the voices of Grace and Millie.  

Despite these issues I had with the book, reading it was an enjoyable experience.  Feldman created the atmosphere of WWII America well and there were lots of nice touches, like a section dealing with the creation of the credit card and everyone being confused by it first of all.  I also very much liked the ending of the story (which I didn't see coming), as it allowed me to look back on the book in a different way.

Verdict: Issue-packed story of three American women affected by WWII that loses steam towards the end.

Source: From the publisher via NetGalley

First Published: 2011

Score: 3 out of 5

Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

Work and wedding planning gobbled up all of my time last week, so I wasn't around much and there wasn't much time for reading.  What time I did have I devoted to Lords of the Horizon, a wonderful history of the Ottoman Empire.  I should say here that I'm fascinated by the Ottoman Empire and have been for a few years, but I hadn't managed to find a readable history about them.  I'm fascinated by the Ottomans after reading The Historian, because Islam has always interested me and because in an Orientalist kind of way I love the old tales of sultans and grand viziers (Edward Said would not be pleased with me!).

Synopsis: This history covers everything from the beginning of the empire to its fall.  There are chapters on especially famous events (like the siege of Vienna) and Sultans (like Suleyman the Magnificient).  The book is roughly in chronological order but battle chapters are interspersed with thematic chapters about the cities, Ottoman life and janissaries.

Score: 4 out of 5

What I really loved about this book is that Goodwin had really made an effort to make it beautiful to read.  It read more like a poetic fiction book than a history and in my experience of many stuffy history books, that is very rare.  Goodwin also had a gift for selecting the most interesting events and personalities, and then making them come to life with description.  My favourite chapter was the one about Sultan Bayezit (the Thunderbolt) who named his children after major religions, enjoyed being hated, was the son of a Byzantine princess, wrote to the Pope asking if the manger at St. Peters could be used to feed his horse and loved rum so much he asked the Caliph in Cairo to annoint him as the Sultan of Rum.  The whole book was stuffed with characters like these and the language made me feel as if I really was in Istanbul.

As I read it, I found myself wishing that I had learned about more of this kind of history at school.  Being British, we did a lot of British and Western European history, and then a little bit about the Russian Revolution but I knew nothing about Eastern Europe/Turkey.  And it's honestly fascinating and I want to read more about it.  It wasn't only the Ottomans themselves that were interesting in this book - I also enjoyed reading about the Wallachians, Hungarians and Asian people.

This book is a great argument for those that keep on arguing that Muslims are uncivilised, or trapped in the 'dark ages'.  The Ottoman Empire was the most advanced of its time, and the most tolerant.  When the Jews were expelled from Spain and most of Western Europe couldn't wait to get rid of them, the Sultans welcomed them with open arms.  People in territories captured by the Ottomans were free to continue to practise their religion in whatever way they wished.  There were even many Europeans along the Ottoman borders who defected and became Turk as life was perceived to be better there.  The Ottomans didn't care about nationality, birth, status or rank - anyone could become an Ottoman and rise to whatever they were capable of.

Overall, a fantastic book and one I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in history.  The only slight criticism I could make is that the pace slowed a bit towards the end, but then the fall of the Empire was long and drawn out.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Now that it's the holidays and I'm also stuck in bed with a horrible cold/virus, I have plenty of time to read.  I chose A Farewell to Arms because I've never read any Hemingway (or indeed much American literature at all) and because of all his books, the war-time setting of this one appealed to me.

Synopsis: An American in the ambulance service of the Italian army, Henry/Tenete starts to see the darker side of war and soon realises that he doesn't actually know what he is fighting for.  He falls in love with a British nurse, Catherine Barkley, and becomes an army deserter.

Score: 3.5 out of 5

I think my personal reading of this book suffered from the fact that All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my all-time favourite books, and A Farewell to Arms just didn't seem to have as much grit or reality.  It was still a good book, and the reality of war was still portrayed well, but it just lacked an emotional impact to me.

I wasn't familiar with Hemingway's bare and sparse style before reading this novel, and it took me a while to get used to it.  But once I had, I found it refreshing and I liked how some parts were left for the reader to fill in for his/herself.  Hemingway didn't write much about how the characters were feeling, but left that for the reader to work out through actions and dialogue.  Maybe that's why it lacked an emotional punch?

The structure of the book worked very well, with sections about the war broken up by the romance sections.  It was clear that Catherine and Henry were not very well suited, and that the constant threat of death had forced them into an early intimacy.  In fact, Catherine came over as very obsessive and a bit crazy.  She didn't want him to see anyone else (even his friends), she went to bed with him whenever he wanted 'to please him' and even spoke about cutting her hair off so they would look more alike!

Without giving away the ending, I'm sure lots of parallels could be made between what happened in their relationship and the war in general.  Overall the book was surprisingly easy to read (I always worry classics will be a struggle) and a good example of war literature.  But it wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be.