The European Novel - The Capital by Robert Menasse

Why until The Capital - Die Haupstadt, read in the original German version - there is no other  novel dedicated to the EU life, work and fantasies? Despite the generous source of inspiration that the European Union and its various institutions can offer, there was no writer keen to write European novel in the institutional sense of the inspiration until Menasse. 

And what a generous inspiration EU it is, in all possible senses...

Written with irony, sarcasm and concern, The Capital is a chronicle of the everyday life of the Babbel of languages, people, departments and institutions of the Union. Out of a daily routine and bureaucratic assignments, Menasse - that moved to Brussels for long periods of time in order to properly research the enormous European octopus - created a multi-layered story. A story populated with a multitude of characters, from the bureaucrats working in different departments and institutions,  to Vatican secret agents, academics and Holocaust survivors.

This mishmash of people and ideas is Brussels. The European capital that, in Menasse´s book and in reality, is looking for a symbolic reboost. While EU is trying to figure out the details of the ceremony dedicated to the Big Jubilee Project, the local media are concerned about a pig on the loose, appearing in the most unexpected moments and city locations. At the same time, a crime is committed in a hotel, perpetrated by a Polish Vatican secret agent - this thriller part of the book is in my opinion the weakest chain of the story, as it does not have enough space to evolve as a proper crime investigation and it is easily obliterated about the other evolutions of the other stories. 

For the entire duration of the book, the characters are moving from a story to another, their personal and professional stories intertwinned more than accidentally. Out of a relatively complicated real-life structure, the art of the writer created a story that you want to follow, especially if you had to deal more than once with the EU. The characters are authentic, molded after the thousands of the bureaucrats filling the many rooms of the Brussels institutions. 

In addition, the novel launches a big - troublesome - question, especially following the latest Brexit shake-up: what is the basis of Europe? What is the vision of Europe nowadays? Does it correspond to its original aim, or to the expectations of its citizens? And after all, what does it mean to be an European citizen? And more than a suggestion: give more place to regions and local identities, instead of the national ones, often the result of circumstatial geographical and political decisions but without a proper realistic identity touch.  

The idea of the book, expressed by Menasse on other occasions as well is that the focus on the institutional - economic, technical - layer of the EU kidnapped the original sense of the united Europe, as it was founded on the ruins of the WWII: a cultural realm, a space of intellectual and spiritual unity. The suggestions of changing the capital of Europe to Auschwitz expressed by the participants sounds - although extreme and grotesque at a certain extent, but it is part of the dark comedy featured in the novel - as a last desperate reminder of what Europe faced in the aftermath of the war.  

Awarded the German book Prize, the equivalent of the Man Booker for the German-speaking realm, Die Hauptstadt is a captivating black comedy of self reflection about a continent in a world in crisis. A welcomed creative addition to the political and bureaucratic discourse in general. Looking forward for more courageous creative takes on the current ongoing European affairs and crisis. 

Rating: 4 stars

Porochista Khakpour´s Brown Identity

´When Iranians write you and say you are not Iranian enough for them, thank them, and when others say you are too Iranian for them, thank them too´.

The Essays on Exile and Identity included in the Brown Album recently published by Porochista Khakpour are an interesting genuine journey of coming at terms with a constantly changing perception and acceptance of identity. Being other in America - and elsewhere - requires a long travail that involves some risks: your assigned group may not accept the final results, you may not be happy with the roles assigned, the majority would have different expectations - culturally, gender-based, economically - from you as inherently associated with your group - ethnic, cultural, other. 

´I was brown, bisexual, from a Muslim background, of the dreaded Middle East, of the even more reviled Iran, always poor from parents who were originally not poor and then had become very poor´, a daily life within so many margins.

Like her memoir of living with chronical illness, Sick, I could not easily put down the The Brown Album. First, there is the constant exploration of a specific identity in the making, against all odds and branding associated, especially in the post 9/11 America. On the other hand, this unique story has to do with an everyday experience many of those dislocated for various reasons from their country of birth may resent at a certain point. Of course, some ethnic groups are more demanding than the others, and some countries are more or less oblivious to the identity appropriation - religious, linguistic and/or cultural. 

Khakpour was born in Tehran, in a family belonging to ´academic aristocracy´ - her father was involved in the development of the atomic program and her great uncle is Akbar Etemad, considered as the father of Iran´s nuclear program. Forced by the post-revolutionary Iran political circumstances to leave the country, her family considered for a long while the American journey as temporarily. The life in America is a reverse of fate and social status, as they do not belong to the so-called Therangels based in the rich part of LA. On one side, the glamorous Iranians: ´Here all the base materialism purged by the Islamists could upchuck ebulliently like a Disney-lit confetti-bomb blitz. Thbey were safe´. On the other side, her family: ´Old Iranian aristocrats stuffed into a tiny crummy suburban apartment with nothing to show of their pedigree but the insanity of those who once had everything and were forced to abandon it all, almost overnight´. Stories that are often replicated in different languages and cultures, at least for the first generation of immigrants. 

Khakpour´s first escape and the beginning of a new cycle of identity redesign is once she is leaving for NYC to study creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, an experice she describes as: ´To me, I thought it could be a place where I could pile on identities as if they were pizza toppings, cheap and fast and easily pickled off, but hopefully so amply loaded that who I actually was could be, for once, truly obscured´. In the end, she will be fully at home in the NYC nightclubs: ´Electronic music and its physical incarnation, the rave, was a tempting and great equalizer´.  

Porochista Khapour journey of defining herself is a courageous attempt to deny general lines and look for those specific descriptions that fit individual stories. We may move within defined limits and cultural expectations, but what about taking the courage of defining ourselves first as individuals described through genuine features than based on general categories? Such an approach is a matter of psychological comfort that is not easy but it´s almost an intellectual obligation.

After the two memoirs, I am looking forward to read the novels Khakpour wrote, including her incoming one dedicated to Tehrangels. I love her courage and her intellectual vibe very much.

Rating: 5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Review: Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo

´Befriend the First Lady. Buy her purple things. Purple bags, purple Benzees, purple houses in France. Depends how much you want it´.

Set in Africa´s largest city, Welcome to Lagos is a tragi-comical take on the ambiguity of a corrupt system made of and supported by people with loose loyalties. Among them, the Sancho Panzas of kindness, like the protagonists of the book: the two Army desertors, Fineboy, Oma and Isoken. When they caught the fugitive minister of Education Remi Sandayo, who took with him 4 million dollars from the fund dedicated to schools, they decide instead to use the money for the school that were deprived from being funded. 

The journalist Ahmed Bakare the founder of the Nigerian Journal, the son of a proeminent representative of the oil Minisrty, who left behind a business career in London to pursue his media dreams in his home country, is also a dreamer, as he expects to save both his newspaper and his journalistic honour by interviewing Sandayo. 

But the laws of corruption operate similarly everywhere and there is no place for innocents and dreamers. Ironically, the naive outsiders rarelly make the right distinction between the real vilains and the real god-doers. Ambiguity, cruelty and irony are often part of the everyday perception of people leaving under corrupt systems: the scale of values is reversed, morality is contextual and choices are dictated by social pressure and accidental circumstances. It can happen in Nigeria, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, but it affects/corrupts at the same extent the humanity of the people living under such conditions.

Largely inspired by real persons and facts - the 234NEXT who shot down after two years of publication in 2011, for instance, served as an inspiration for the Nigerian journal - Welcome to Lagos has an big cast of characters, utterly human and entertaining, yet tragical sometimes in their loneliness. They have a dream or two, or they just saw so much injustice and aim at something different, but did they know that the best way to get away with your dreams is in a big city? ´Lagos was a jungle, an orderly ecosystem with a ranked food chain, winners and losers decided before they were born´.

Welcome to Lagos is a window to a world where the sense of humour and weird irony help to survive when nothing is left for countering the unbearable heaviness of the bribes. Nigerian-born, England-based Chibundu Onuzo found the right voice to express this unique story.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review  

Book Review: The German House by Annette Hess

´I knew nothing! Saw nothing! Did nothing! That is beyond my knowledge!´

I am approaching with extreme caution historical novels by German authors based in Germany, dealing with post-WWII coming-at-terms with history. In general, I avoid to read too much literature on the topic, as I consider that the historical facts I am familiar with are already enough for a lifetime of nightmares. But as I am living here, I am becoming more and more curious to see the symbolical and mentality interpretations and reading of those events. 

The German House by Annette Hess - a book originally written in German, that I´ve read in the English translation by Elisabeth Lauffer - deals with the Frankfurt Trials, that took place in the German town between December 1963 and August 1965. 20 years after the end of the war, 22 people were brought to justice and eventually condemned for their role in the mass murders commited in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The German House is Hess´, who authored the screenplays of popular TV series like Weissensee and Ku´damm 56 - first novel. 

One may ask how come that during the previous two decades nothing noticeable happened for bringing to justice the culprits for million of deaths. Many of those involved in various levels in implementing the ´Final Solution´ resumed their ´honorable lives´, like the protagonists of the trials - both in the book and in real life. Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war German chancellor insisted to abandon denazification for the economic reconstruction of the country. The country advanced economically, indeed, while the moral wounds and trauma remained. The Frankfurt Trials were prompted following the solid documentation sent to the Hesse court by a journalist. The 700-page report reopened a discussion about the terrible guilt that apparently the German society preferred to elegantly obliterate for decades. However, it gives me existential fears to hear more than dozen of times the opinion that the past should stay in the past as there is nothing as simple as forgetting a generational trauma - which affects the perpetrators as well, although in a different manner.

The German House is the name of a popular restaurant serving German food in a neighbourhood with bad reputation in Frankfurt/Main. Ludwig Bruhn is the owner and the chef and together with his wife, Edith, dealing with the inexorable advancing of age, they have two daughers of marrigeable age and a young son: Eva is a German-Polish translator and Annegret, a nurse in a pediatric ward. Eva, whose Polish knowledge is not clearly explained in the book, is requested to be part of the team of translators working for the trials, an experience that will upside down her middle-class quiet world as she is facing a past her family does not want to remember. Her curiosity and stubborn desire to know the truth is facing the overall lack of interest among the rest of the German society. In the words of Eva´s mother: ´It´s terrible what happened in the war. But no one want to hear it anymore. And why in our city, of all places?´

Personally, I still cannot fathom how you can still go to sleep quietly in your bed after you´ve witnessed or perpetrated crimes against innocent children, to say the least. I cannot. 

Eva is a very complex character, whose dramatic discovery about her past and her family involvement in the WWII crimes, leads to making choices. The encounter with evil cannot leave anyone unscathered. But evil, at a petty level, is relatively a reality of the everyday life in The German  House: from the secretary who is writing lies in an anonymous letters to the landlord about a tenant she does not like, to the Annegret who is infecting new-borns with e.coli or the youngster putting on fire baby strollers. A matter of personal choice as in the case of the person who decides to end supporting or doing evil or of the network of lies we may build ourselves to justify or hide deep into our consciousness the genuine evil. 

Annette Hess, who intensively researched in the archives for documeting the book, creates a complex net of problems and moral responsibilities involving everyday choices between good and evil. The intellectual and moral part of the book is straightforward and intense and I largely enjoyed it.

My big problem in reading the book was sometimes the insidous switch from a scenery to the other which may work very well in screenwriting and visual settings but in novels can create confusion.

In addition to historical and other non-fiction sources about and representations of the post-WWII Germany and the issue of war culpability, The German House is a good source of documentation for the history of recent mentalities. 

Rating: 4 stars

An Intensive Short Story: An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

My first literary encounter with Zambia-born, Zimbabwe-raised Petina Gappah was a pleasure for my writing soul therefore I easily delved into the short story published by faber, part of their collection featuring individual authors on the occasion of the edition house 90th anniversary. Gappah has a training in law and currently works for international organisations in Geneva.

The action from An Elegy for Easterly is taking place in Zimbabwe during the so-called operation Move the Rubbish - or Murambatsvina in the local language - during which clums started to be cleared on the occasion of the Queen´s visit. The residents of Easterly were among the 700,000 people that lost their homes and livelihood during those intensive state-led operations.

The events that took place then are only the context of the short story, which follows short segments of life of some of the residents. The writing is clear yet able to bring to life the hustle and bustle of the African markets and everyday buzz. The humans and their short-lived stories and ambitions are adding more buzz and reality to the story. Martha Mupengo personifies the street madness perfectly, a lost soul keen to lift her dress for 0.20 cents. Lost in her own madness, without any help and human support, she is like a symbol of Easterly itself. Used, abused, stoled, abandoned dead in the housing where a crime took place. A no man´s land of sadness and displacement, of desperation, still, of a life following its own course. Like in her previous collection of short stories, Gappah gives a voice to all the residents, and by not taking sides and following the flow of the story, her accounts do have that literary attraction of authenticity. Curious and uninhibited, the author is bravely advancing her story on all fronts, no matter what the story development reveals. The end might be cruel, but this is part of acknowledging how life is.

I am not sure I will continue to explore other stories published by faber but definitely I am after more short stories, including for exploring the writing techniques.

Rating: 4 stars

Feelgood Book Review: My Very Italian Holiday by Sue Roberts

With high chances of being confined within the borders of my country of residence, Germany, for this summer, reading about holiday destinations like Italy or France makes me feel good. Add to this a bit of romance, and I am all delved into reading for the next couple of hours. The exact amount of time I need to fly from Berlin to a lovely sun-blessed destination.

My Very Italian Holiday by Sue Roberts is a story with at least three couple happy endings. Which is good both in real and literary lives. Who´s keen to experience or read about drama and heartbreak and missed loved and opportunities? 

Gina is managing together with her sister a B&B in the Lake District, in England. Two years after the accidental death of her husband, she is still mourning him and another relationship was out of plan. Until she crossed paths with the handsome Fabio who is visiting from Italy. The story between the two of them is developing one trip at a time. Personally, I would have expected more communication between the two before they really fell in love, especially regarding his past relationships but maybe things in real life are easier and simpler. However, the presence of a certain ex- in Fabio´s life, he did not mention, almost broke the new relationship but all is well when finish well. And the happy ending was not only for Gina, but also for her sister that found the love of her life. Their parents decided to give a new chance to their relationship, so count at least another happy couple until the end of the story.

Overall, My Very Italian Holiday is a really feel good book, an enjoyable and positive kind of read. Like all those simple things that we need in life to enjoy and nurture the hope for good things that maybe are about to happen.

Rating: 3 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Blog Tour: The Guest by Cathryn Grant

´Sometimes people are forced into things that might seem wrong to most. But until you live it, you don´t know´.

It takes a lot of reading practice to get used with a domestic thriller. I must reckon that I still need a lot of patience to follow the characters and the slow paced installments of the story until the very end. An end that most likely is worth waiting for, as helps to see the entire story into a completely new light. This, if you are patient enough to wait until then. 

The Guest by Cathryn Grant is one of those books when every couple of paragraphs I was questioning every single detail of the plot. In full honesty, I was not necessarily happy with the story, for most part of the reading but this changed for the good shortly before the final dot.

I had put down a long list of questions related to the evolution of the story:

Why, for instance, Ellie, the storyteller, has such a slow reaction after being revealed that her husband, Seth, was lying on her for good couple of weeks ? Why Ellie, again, was so easy in accepting a guest into the house that was supposed to live there undefinitely? What about the awkward - for me - family dynamics and the lack of communication between the husband and wife, especially when it comes to Brandon, the teenage son, a victim of school bullying? What kind of mother is this Ellie that after her son is taken for interrogations at the police station in a murder case is not making any single effort to find out the whole circumstances of the apparent involvement of the son? At a certain extent, the teenage drama unfolding has a good story potential, with the children/teenage characters being one of the best and clear protagonists of the plot. Although I tried, I did not fancy too much the first-person account as on one hand it is too monotonous, and on the other hand, it takes away a significant potential from developing the story on different levels and plans. A multiplicity of voices telling the story creates, in my opinion, a complex development of the intrigue. 

All being said, I may confess that until the end of the story I had rather dislikes about the entire story. The characters had a potential of being real enough, but somehow their features were lost in the subjective first-person account. But I was proven partially wrong and waiting until the last chapters was worth it.
The final pages are the most important part of the book, adding those much expected clarifications to the story and the real psychological twists I was waiting for. Once you finish the story, you feel like you need to reconsider completely the whole story and even to come back to some details for a better understanding. After a couple of hours of relative frustrations, it made me appreciate the power of patience, including when it comes to my reading projects.
I may not be ready yet for another domestic thriller but The Guest by Cathryn Grant proved to be a good introduction into this niche genre of the wide category of psychological thriller.

Rating: 3 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review