Jan Karski - Story of a Secret State

Coming soon...

Slawomir Mrożek - Słoń (The Elephant )

Rating 7.5


The Elephant is a book collecting forty-two short stories where Slawomir Mrożek pokes fun at politics, bureaucracy and social life of Poland in the 1950s. Although Poland is never named here what the author wrote had a very clear goal: hitting the daily comedy of a life ruled by what the Party and its hyerarchies said.

It's a fact that most Polish people at that time had to follow the line (or at least pretend to do it for their own sake). And that Party line was far from being straight and drawn after logic, but rather bent to the left with the final result of blazing a turning spiral into either sad or ridicolous endings for those who walked along it.

Mrożek understood this and decided to amplify and enhance the spiralling process to its extreme consequences. Therefore, the style he chose here is sober and precise miracolously suspended in midair between fairytale telling and a political statement with punchlines delivered just at the right time and with a flawless aplomb.

The comparison with Kafka chosen by the British editors of the English translation of this book is a bit simplistic. First of all the short stories written by Kafka have very little humour in them and secondly, Mrożek is way more direct and concise than the Czech master. Moreover, unlike Kafka, the Polish author employs a first person narrative with sparingness and doesn't investigate over the moral dilemmas, psychologic idiosyncrasies or overwhelming victimism of his characters.
Mrożek is what I may call a clever situationist or better an artist of witty situationism while Kafka joined a very different club and the complexity of his conclusions are by far harder to grasp in a single draught.

If Kafka is a strong drink, not a schnapps but a fruity liquor, to sip and taste thoughtfully, Mrożek is prosecco, dry white wine with sparkling on the top you can freely indulge yourself with.

It looks like this sparkling Mrożek believes that human beings, after all, are not complicated but predictable creatures and it's rather the situations they deal with which transcend into extraordinariness.
In fact, the short stories collected into The Elephant are populated by common people and mostly revolve around plausible situations with some unexpected twist or decision turning on the table into absurd realism. This technique makes the subtle but strong message delivered by Mrożek even more powerful leaving a pleasant taste in the readers' mouth.

My favourite toasts here? The Elephant, The Swan, The Co-operative, A Citizen's fate and In the Drawer with the last one reminding me the idea behind a little gem of a Polish movie of some 25 years ago, Kingsajz. Na zdrowie!

PS: A final special mention goes to the few but carefully chosen illustrations by Daniel Mroz here. These drawings perfectly fit and add up something magic to what Slawomir Mrożek wrote.

Penalty Fees

Washington 5 PM, 19th May 2012.

The G8 leaders celebrate the rescue of the Euroz...ehr no, actually they were watching the Champions League final.
They work for us. Cheer up.

Czesław Miłosz - Proud to Be a Mammal

Rating 6.9

This is a collection of essays and writings by Czesław Miłosz with a colorful cover and assembled with a clear commercial purpose by Penguin.  Well that's better than nothing, I guess.

Perhaps I should have picked up The Captive Mind by the same author rather than this one, but while facing the decision I confess how the pinkish cover of this book with its leaning belltower in Vilnuis (portrayed above) won me over.
I thought I needed some sort of lightweight Miłosz introduction.

Proud to Be a Mammal kicks off in a very promising way with a couple of unforgettable essays. Engrossing pages where the author recalls his early bohemian and literary life in then Polish Wilno (currently Lithuanian Vilnuis) and his runaway to Warsaw while his hometown was annexed to the USSR with a bogus referendum.

Milosz has a very engaging style and a soft spot for the vanished Wilno/Vilnuis cast of characters, stressing out the cultural and cosmopolitan mood of the town in the 1930s. The way of writing here reminded me a couple of other self-biographies: Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov and Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz.
Also the following pages are very interesting with Miłosz talking about the bureaucratic oddities and the terror of living in "the GG" a term which stands for "General Government" the part of Poland ruled by Germans after the Nazi invasion and the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact.

Overall, 155 pages of Proud to Be a Mammal are pure gold. At least for me.
Unfortunately, the remaining 120 pages of this collection of essays and written thoughts are not at the same level. Perhaps it's just me looking for something different and thus skipping over most of the letter to the author Jerzy Andrzejewsky and being not really elated from all that follows it included the essay naming the book itself Speaking of a Mammal.

I think the publisher made a little mess here mixing up disjointed writings in order to have a thicker book. I believe that less and more carefully chosen stuff would have made a better introduction to Miłosz.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Coming soon...

Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

Rating 7.1

It's hard to find a single drop of oil in Kapitoil, but this doesn't mean you shouldn't read this novel.

Yes, I'm talking to you bankers, speculators, brokers, financial advisers, oligarchs, sheiks, Russian PMs and Iranian presidents, spin doctors, politicians, entrepreneurs, capitalists and anti-capitalists, environmentalists, exploited and exploiters of this world.

I repeat: this book doesn't definitely smell of crude oil. No oil drums involved. No Brent Crude classification diagrams. No gas wells around. No black petroleum stains as bookmarks.
I'm sorry Vladimir and Mahmoud.

Al? Haven't you heard me? There's nothing for you here. 

And yet, let's s Teddy Wayne's first novel is a pretty good one.
Let's take the protagonist, Karim from Qatar (please pronounce it Cutter) also known as "The Dream".
Mr Wayne made him an amazing character with a distinctive personality and a wonderful vocabulary, a geek with a heart, a wizard with a soul.

Whereas contemporary authors like Mohsin Hamid or even Jonathan Safran Foer (yes!) had a similar extended use of monologue for their main characters, but ended up with a boring and unrealistic result, Wayne learned the lesson in a better way. Karim never annoys me. And I am able to understand his behavior, his peculiar logic, the way his moral probity and curiosity are both being challenged by New York City in A.D 1999.

Do you remember all that fear for something called the Millennium Bug?
That's it. Teddy Wayne did and does and he decided to backdate a novel which he could have easily tried to set up on 2010-2011 ten years earlier when NYC was unbroken: I found it an interesting choice.

The cast of American characters surrounding Karim - a Qatariman in New York as Sting would put it -  is chosen very well and highlights the story in a perfect and poignant way. Less appropriated are the two characters left behind in Doha, Karim's father and sister but Mr Wayne mostly keeps them hanging at the telephone.

Surprisingly enough, I would label Kapitoil as a "romantic novel" if any label may be needed.
Because at the end of the day it's Karim sentimental involvement for a workmate (how obvious! You would say. Well. perhaps. But it works) the main plot here.
Yes, of course, there is a sharp criticism to the lack of morality of a certain top financial world caught before 9/11 and well before the crack of Lehman bros and all that came after. And there is also some math every now and then, but not the dry jargon you would expect in the mouth of a banker and a self-taught software engineer.

Quoting Karim, he is very much "the cream of the cream" of a novel written with a clever and well-trained hand. Not a book to worship or one of the most brilliant novels of the last years, but quite certainly a smart, compelling and entertaining reading. And - ok, Al! I will tell them - this novel doesn't pollute the environment like all hydrocarbons do. Well done, Wayne! Don't walk away from this path.

Kurt Vonnegut - Galapagos

Rating 7.3

Galapagos is not your usual cup of tea of a book. Which is pretty much the same comment everyone could make for every novel by *Kurt Vonnegut (he omitted that "Jr" of him since he became rather famous).

And it's true how Vonnegut's lovers can find many of the main obsessions of good old Kurt here. From the likes of the sci-fi novelist *Kilgore Trout to the fascination for long days spent (and fortunes built) in hotel rooms passing through the sentence "and so on".
And yet, being Mr Vonnegut a bit older here than he was when he delivered most of his successful literary production, he had time for rationalize a lot of things in this novel, leaving behind his beloved Trafalmadorians and any interstellar interference on the business of our planet.

The *main narrator here is a ghost and, surprisingly enough, he was never kidnapped by aliens nor discovered to be one. He simply chose to dwell in the boat he helped to build in and he died for. An excellent boat which will last for a single trip sinking in the Pacific Ocean quite soon but, nonetheless will have its share of glory before the end.

What happens in Galapagos is that human beings accidentally start a little innocent nuclear war in 1986 leading to the progressive destruction of their race in a span of a million years time (quite an optimistic view, you have to reckon it!), except for an unexpected, isolated and unheard of colony of descendants left on the rocky shores and deep seas of an island in the Galapagos.
The novel tells how this odd bunch of characters made it to the islands and happens to be a joyful and macabre allegory of Darwinism. Those who happen to be particularly unfortunate specimen of the human race somewhere, could be the cream of evolutionism somewhere else.

Let's take furry women. Or illiterate cannibals.

Vonnegut here seem to unravel the mystery of his plot from its very beginning telling the reader who will die and when and putting stars like this * before the name of those who will succumb.
This stylistic device is such a clear violation of the most elementary rules on keeping the suspense alive that looks bloody ingenious. There is not a single character here the reader is asked to like or identify with because, ultimately, what Vonnegut aims to tell us is that the current human race is a failure.
Those big brains of ours, for example, are not very practical tools for surviving in an unfavourable environment and, moreover they drive us to make many mistakes and stupid actions.

What we will need in one million years is a good, thick natural fur for keeping our body temperature stable protecting our skins from the harsh sun-rays and, above all, a nice set of flippers paired with an efficient aerodynamic skull for fishing our way through survival. This is Galapagos logic. Back to the basics, then.

Peter Hessler - Oracle Bones

Rating 7.6

From the tiny photo on the back cover of "Oracle Bones", Peter Hassler looks like a friend of mine, A., when I was at the university.
One day, around 10 years ago, I met this fellow out of our "Media and communication" department and I told him that he should have tried doing some internship in order to get the 5 credits he missed before getting his degree.
I remember how he originally wanted to take part to some sort of seminar on semiotics or something and I insisted that it was a waste of time.
"Oh come on! - I told A. - Do something practical. Why don't you look for a radio, a magazine, a local tv having an internship programme through the department".

I was working for a radio in those days and started deserting most of the university lectures due to my reporting all over the town. I wanted my friends to enjoy something similar rather than got bored over useless theory.
A. listened carefully to me but didn't seem quite sure on taking my words for granted.

A few months later I met A. again at the headquarters of Romano Prodi, a former Italian PM who was campaigning again against Berlusconi. My friend was carrying a big camera and - just like me - had a press pass around his neck. "You see? I followed your tip - he told me - it's just that they needed cameramen rather than reporters but I took the opportunity nonetheless".

Six years later I do write some daily articles from the UK for an Italian newspaper, but get my living thanks to another job which is not related to journalism. My friend A. did so much better. He became the anchorman of prime time news on a regional channel, the host of a popular radio programme and delivered some features for a national television. And he happens to be quite good in what he does.
Things are rather unexpected sometimes.

Peter Hessler has a similar but far more successful story to tell.
He left the US and Missouri when he was still freshly-faced, freshly-graduated at Princeton and 20 something. At that time, young Hessler had only published an extended etnography work on a tiny place named Sikeston somewhere in the States and spent some time in Oxford, UK as an English literature student. As a journalist he was a nobody.

Then, comes the unexpected step. As the same Hessler in this book tells us, he joined the Peace Corps and went to China as a volunteer.
After some months spent teaching English and learning Mandarin in a small town along the shores of mighty river Yangtze in which he was one of the only two foreigners, (he wrote a book about that) Hessler came back to the US.
As in his homecountry, the still freshly-faced but far more experienced was not able to find the job he looked for, he returned to China.

And in all but friendly Bejing, Hessler had more luck than in the US. Working as a humble clipper "the last one they had" for the Wall Street Journal he got money enough for renting a room of his own, wandering around the Chinese capital and spending a lot of time chatting with people in cheap restaurants and cafes.
Sometimes he did some trekking in the countryside brought his own tent and slept outdoors. Sometimes he did some random translation job. Sometimes he looked for an interesting story to cover as a freelance: at first failing quite miserably in this last respect.

I am insisting so much on the author of "Oracle Bones" because this book has very much to do with Peter Hessler. He's all but shy in talking about himself, his successes and his failures, but never intrusive. He doesn't definitely show off.
Still it's from Hessler personal life in Bejing that I learned many interesting things on how China as a nation changed from 2000 onwards.

"Oracle Bones" is a fascinating reading on two levels: in telling how Hessler made it in becoming a famous freelance reporter and in showing many things that happened when PH was writing around, the people he met, the stories he jumped into, the troubles he had with the police and so on.
All tied up with the mail and paper correspondence Hessler kept with some of his former students who seem all very confident and at ease while writing to him about their adult lives. One starts to like and sympathize with these Chinese people who - unlucky choice - are all introduced with their English nicknames.

Albeit a few unfortunate stylistic choices, this is an author who has a great passion, respect and care for China in all of its aspects and is eager to talk Mandarin with common people rather than with politicians or entrepreneurs. Hessler poses many questions to himself and is considerate enough to investigate over Chinese history.
It's "artifacts" the recurrent term here (even too much). Hessler looks for artifacts wherever he goes from Manchuria to Taiwan passing through Sichuan and Nanking. It's artifacts that matter because they can always teach you something about the people who made them and about those who discovered or preserved them during difficult times such as the so called Cultural Revolution.

After reading "Oracle Bones" I can say I learned many things I didn't know about China and I do trust the author who told me about them here.
Unlike his wife Leslie T.Chang who was a bit clumsy in mixing up her point of view and family history with the personal stories of Chinese workers in "Factory Girls", Peter Hessler is very much at ease with the subject he chose and never loses the grip on its audience.

The fact that Hessler himself has now relocated (with formerly miss Chang) to Cairo and is currently becoming fluent in Arabic in order to report from the Middle East is just another unexpected step.
I wish I knew how to make it. Unfortunately, I'm hopeless with foreign languages. 
Oh well, I will let Peter come first!

Richard McGregor - The Party

Rating 5.8

I wish I liked it more, but the truth is that this book has been (I'm still finding my way through it) a major disappointment.

Mind you, I have read some books dedicating a superficial analysis to the mechanisms of either the Russian CPSU or the North Korean communist dynasty and I know something on how things went in the DDR or in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain.

I've never suffered of the complex that Germans like "Ostalgie" (nostalgia for life under communist East Germany), I've never voted for a party with the term "communist" or "socialist" in its name and I like calling myself a "right leftist" - whatever that means.
I'm definitely not a conservative supporter and don't believe in the cheap virtues of liberalism.

What I would probably be quite satisfied to vote for - if Italy or England had something like that - is an equivalent of the Norwegian Arbeiderparti, a decent "party of workers" with some greenish issues which doesn't suffer the identity crisis experienced by the British Labour and the unbearable nihilism ravaging the Italian Democratic Party.

But Norway is a fairytale.
And green socialism there wipes its oil-stained face.

The only time in which I somehow flirted with communism I was 16 years old and a bunch of nice girls claiming to be "Young Leninists" - whatever that meant - approached me out of school. I was invited to one of their weekly politburo.
I went there and it turned out that taking part to that meeting was important for two reasons:
1) it gave me enough inspiration to write a short story named "A Little Leap Backwards" years later (unpublished, I'm afraid).
2) it led me to lose all of my potential interest for any aspect of the Communist cosmology (Che Guevara posters, Marx quotes, CCCP branded football shirts etc.).

It's true the Young Leninist girls were attractive, wore pantyhose and knew who Trotsky was ("a renegade!"), but how I could cope with such convincing logic that "Karl Marx wrote 300 books, have you read all of them?" as the (male) leader of the YL addressed me with a grin painted on his face?

I simply didn't have the time (and the money) to make myself a Marx bibliography. And that's where the flamboyant Young Leninist groupies lost me. No regrets left.

Alright. My apologies for this useless preamble.
What I wanted to stress out is that I cannot help but finding quite interesting the stories narrating the way in which the communist apparatchiks overruled over the economic, cultural and social lives of whole countries. And I like reading about deranged politics and politicians' idiosyncrasies.

However, The Party by the Australian journalist Richard McGregor is a bore.
At least for me.
I never managed to get into the narrative structure of this author and found his way of writing so dry that I had to keep a bottle of water at hand.

Seriously, I did my best with this book but haven't like it a bit so far.

I see there is a lot of insight work, research and first account stories behind The Party, but maybe it's just me not caring that much about The secret World of China's Communist Rulers. Who, accidentally, are all but communist in their thirst for good business. And I am sure my beloved Young Leninist girls would have not approved this.

Chico Buarque - Budapest

Rating 7.3

Question:
What an Italian reading the English translation of a book written in Portuguese and by a Brazilian author pretending to be the ghost writer of a German guy and dedicated to the study of the Hungarian language is up to?

No, it's not a joke.



Answer:
Writing a few impressions on Budapest by Chico Buarque.
Sorry there is no punchline here.

Composition:
This novel caught me by surprise. Of course I knew that Mr Buarque has talent, being considered one of the finest interpreters of bossanova today. A man, this Chico, who gets a high consideration in a country - Brazil - where another successful musician like Gilberto Gil spent five years playing the minister of Culture (and did some good things).

And yet, I didn't know Buarque as a novelist. To tell you the truth, the only Brazilian writer name I remember by heart is the sepia pictured, pointy bearded Machado De Asis although I have never read anything by him.

Let's talk about Chico and his Budapest.



This is a very clever novel written in a very personal style and I'm glad I picked up this book pretty much by choice in one of my usual Saturday expeditions scouring the second hand bookshops.

An unusual novel, yes, but nonetheless related to other things I read in the past combining the traveler's introspection of Nooteboom with the magical literary realism of Borges in a plot that reminded me the Ringmaster's Daughter by Gaarder.

Whereas Gaarder wrote about a guy getting his living by selling to famous novelists beginnings and whole first chapters of stories to develop in successful books, Buarque's Josè Costa is a ghost writer or - as he puts it - "an anonymous writer".

Quiet. Be quiet. José Costa is not the kind of man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and thinking about blowing up the parliament in Brasilia at the frenzy chimes of Bat Macumba by the Os Mutantes. And José Costa is neither a hacker, or the supporter of some Brazilian Pirate Party asking for the freedom from copyright and crying against Sopa.

In fact, José he's quite the opposite. And yet the copyright and royalties play a key note and a key role in his daily life of anonymous ghost writer. He gets the money without showing his face. He's happy, he's content of standing in the shadow while his associate Alvaro works on enlarging the portfolio of politicians, bishops, professors interested in having Josè writing their public speeches and essays.

Then, José Costa spends one night in Budapest on his way back from an anonymous writers world congress in Istanbul.
From that moment on his own identity will be divided into the anonymous ghost writer José Costa in Rio de Janeiro and the wandering Zsoze (surname) Kòsta (name) in Budapest.

And now I will say no more.
For this is a novel open to more than a single interpretation and the almost impossible meeting of a Brazilian mind with the Hungarian mentality.
Those who spent many hours of their lives studying on their own unusual half-forgotten languages for the sake of it (I did it), will find in Budapest a book to enshrine.

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

Coming soon...

Åsne Seierstad - The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya

Rating 6.8

From the bestselling author of the - extremely overrated - The Bookseller of Kabul, comes this book about Chechnya.
The Angel of Grozny is much better than what Seierstad wrote (and thought to see) about life in Kabul, but is still affected by the same cons.

Here we have a young and undoubtedly talented journalist who is not content of being a reporter but would rather like to be a writer, a storyteller.
And Åsne Seierstad does have the gift of writing some touching and beautiful descriptions here and there. The author is certainly able to use some powerful, effective and evoking imagery, but perhaps Miss Seierstad should ask herself what kind of books she aims to deliver.

Does Åsne want to write a journalistic first handed account about the time she spent in turbulent Chechnya and how she felt while reporting from there? Very well: a good half of The Angel of Grozny is about this and it works.

Does Åsne want to put herself in the shoes of Chechen people and tell us their personal sad but defiant stories on a second handed account using a hint of imagination to fill the gaps? Less appropriated but fine: the weaker chapters of this book are about this.

Does Åsne want to tell us the reason why Chechnya became such a mess at the end of the 1990s and a puppet autonomous republic later on interviewing the likes of local despot Ramzan Kadyrov, taking us in the cleansed streets of Grozny and in a Russian Court Hall? That's wonderful: the best bits of her book here are about this.

But how can you mix these three books up in a single one? And, above all, is this a good and right choice? I believe it's not, but I may be wrong.

I really enjoyed the pages in which Miss Seierstad left her need of identify herself and sympathize with the unfortunate Chechen people she wrote about to focus on what really happened around her.
There are excellent pages of good honest journalism here and, in my humble opinion, they succeed in portraying the drama of Chechnya in a far better way than those chapters in which the author tried to see things with Chechen eyes.

I think that spending a few weeks in Grozny was very brave of Åsne Seierstad but was also not enough time for being able to grasp how local people feel, think, breath, live. A journalist is not an anthropologist and anthropologists themselves can get only a superficial view on the life of people they spent years with.

I'm pretty sure Åsne Seierstad is well aware of this.
The thing is that stressing out the emotional connections, stimulating the self-identification of the readers with the characters they read about sells good.

And titling this book "The Angel of Grozny" is all but a coincidence. Angels sell splendidly. War does not.

V.V. Ovchinnikov - Britain Observed

Rating 7.3

The Britain observed by V.V. Ovchinnikov dates back to the end of the 1970s. And the cover of this book with its Pacman-like graphic and the "O" of "observed" shaped as the Soviet sickle & hammer (sorry, no picture available) tells you something more on the odd anachronism of reading it on 2012.

However, I have to admit that Mr Ovchinnikov wrote a pretty good little book on Great Britain (plus Eire and Northern Ireland). The kind of observations the former correspondent of Pravda does here are somehow between a tourist guide of the 1950s and what an author like the Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini wrote about Britain and the Britons in the 1990s selling an awful lot of books.

Here you can find many clever but old-aged notes on the British way of life as it was 25 years ago but also plenty of observations which are still valid nowadays.
The only downwards of Ovchinnikov's work is that he had the weird tendency to compare the UK with Japan and China where he spent years as a correspondent before being sent to London. And sometimes he even states the Britons and Japanese are similar. Oh well, that's news!

That said, the good part of this book is that its author never indulges on the Soviet superiority over the UK, poking fun at Britons sometimes but always stressing out how their way of, say, washing dishes without using running water is a cultural difference rather than a barbarian act.
I think that, in this aspect, Britain Observed reflects the period in which it was written with the glasnost at the door and a Soviet Union no longer under the unbearable rhetoric and political influence of Lenin and then Stalin.

Vsevolod Ovchinnikov doesn't have the wit of Ilf & Petrov who themselves wrote a marvelous account of a visit to the US in the 1930s but - at the same time - was never asked to wrote an elegy on a canal dedicated to Lenin as happened to the comic duo.
I don't know what this guy was writing as a correspondent from London for the Pravda and how much freedom he enjoyed in his articles, but Britain Observed has a very relaxed and pleasantly ironic pace without doing any annoying proselytism.
This is what I call well-documented escapism and I'm not surprised that the book, with its Russian-Soviet title meaning The Roots of an Oak-Tree (?), sold well in the USSR. At least that's what the cover of my British edition says.

Check for the chapters on the British politics and you will be surprised on how good Ovchinnikov is in describing how the English parliament works. Given his training at home with the elephantine structure of Soviet government, I assume the author had no problems at all in grasping the mechanisms of the UK democracy.

All in all, this book stands out as an interesting historic document including many brilliant observations on the UK provided from an unusual half-communist point of view with such funny oddities like Ovchinnikov touring Ireland following the steps of Engels

Hans Fallada - Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Alone in Berlin)

Rating 8.2

Falada was a talking horse appearing in The Goose-Girl a fairytale written by the Grimm brothers.

When Herr Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen took the nom-de-plume of Hans Fallada, borrowing the first name from another Grimm's fairytale he was far from being the kind of person you would like your children to spend time with.
Claimed insane after having killed a friend in a duel when he was barely 18 years old and for that reason a notorious guest of several mental institutions, he was also addicted to morphine and an alcoholic.

The young troubled Mr Ditzen was an outcast. He spent his time working in the farm fields mostly for financing his drug and drinking habits and trying to compose some poetry while at the sanatorium but without really managing to make it.

And yet, somehow, Ditzen/Fallada was on his way to become one of the most successful German writers of his generation portraying scenes of all but idyllic German life in the difficult years of the Great Depression and the Mark super-inflation.

Despite being labeled as an undesirable author by the rising Nazis, Fallada managed to get by during World War II refusing to leave Germany although constantly intimidated by Goebbels & company who understood his talent and wanted to put it at the service of the Third Reich.

The disturbing beauty and way too underrated importance of Jeder stirbt für sich allein (appropriately translated into Every Man Dies Alone in the US but becoming a milder Alone in Berlin for the British edition of the book) is that Fallada wrote this book at the very end of his short life.
He died before the book got published perhaps not having the time for editing it as he would have liked to.
And yet, Alone in Berlin stands as one of the most powerful last wills in literature you can ever find.

Fallada took inspiration from the real story of a couple of Germans who decided to write hundreds of anti-Hitler postcards during the last years of the regime, leaving them in public places hoping to get a reaction against the Nazis.
Otto and Elise Hampel were not cultured people and eventually failed in their goal to stir the Berlinese people against the Third Reich being discovered and executed, but the strength of their rebellion is nonetheless a great one.

Fallada was given the Hampels file by a friend of his and decided to make a novel out of that forgotten little example of resistance to the Nazi atrocities. And what the author managed to accomplish is an extraordinary portrait of everyday's life in Berlin in the 1940s with an impressing cast of characters and a spy-story plot which reminded me of Graham Greene.

But, if possible, Fallada aimed higher here than what Greene ever did.
And you know what? He got there. Let's keep in mind and never forget that this book was written in 1947, when all the awful memories were fresh and actually the Berlin pictured here was still mostly raised to the ground. 1947 is the very same year in which pen-named Hans Fallada died.

Alone in Berlin is a novel where the triumph belongs to the apparent banality of good demonstrating how it is not only the most-educated people fighting against a regime, but also those who have personal motivations and strong ideals and a tenacious will to win over the evil.

Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Rating 7.0

This is an interesting book about a cultural, social and historical background I am not really familiar with.
Before meeting up with Oscar "Wao" (it stands for Wilde, mind you!), the only things I knew about Dominican Republic is that it's a little country in the Caribbeans sharing the same island with the unfortunate Haiti and where baseball is the national sport.
Well, there is not a single crack of the bat in this novel. Which is not necessarily a fault, I think.

I assumed there might have been a huge Dominican community abroad but to this day I would frankly be unable to distinguish a Dominican from a Puertorican or an Haitian if I could meet a Latino looking person in the streets of the UK. Don't take me wrong: it's just that I'm not familiar with the topic.

So far the only book I had read regarding the life of Latino immigrant families in the US dates back to several years ago and is named "An Island Like You" by Judith Ortiz Cofer a novel talking about Puertoricans in New Jersey which the most interesting feature is probably starring a character named Jennifer Lopez and being the hideous and ambitious beauty of the neighborhood. Well, as the book was written in 1995 when the famous J.Lo was still a nobody, that's what I call a coincidence!

Anyways, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is a different sort of paper beast dealing with Dominicans in New Jersey. But not a paper tiger at all.
Junot Diaz likes to show us how talented he is and how much he likes to flick among literary genres with a narration moving from third to first person, dealing with three generations of the same Dominican family and with a mind-blowing use and abuse of footnotes, quotations and pop culture references. And indeed, Mr Diaz is a talented author who seems to write with an extreme confidence and easiness, playing with his readers and tickling their sentimental as much as their morbid instincts.

I read reviews comparing Junot Diaz with Nabokov but I honestly cannot see how. Where Nabokov was cold and rational in impersonating and justifying either Humbert Humbert excesses or his own idiosyncrasies, the characters of this book are very much alive and kicking and falling apart.
Sure, Junot Diaz is indebted with other writers and he himself is well aware of it.

The way Oscar Wao builds up his sentences, for example, is hilarious because he borrows from JRR Tolkien (a recurring name here) every sort of old fashioned term and one cannot deny the huge influence of John Kennedy Toole in portraying the way the fatness of Oscar is perceived (the fact he ends up teaching English in a school just like Toole himself did is a clear homage to the father of Ignatius O.Reilly).

The greatest strength of this book is in the way Diaz gives a strong personality and a very precise identity to his characters, while its weakest point is probably the discontinuity of the narration, with key moments which seem to be forgotten with a main Latino narrator appearing out of the blue and Oscar Wao driving a car on his own all in a sudden.
I did prefer the Dominican Republic chapters to the one about life in New Jersey although the references to the dictatorship of the Trujillo family are a bit obscure every now and then.

One may wonder on how much of Mr Junot Diaz himself is into Oscar Wao's pop geekness and it's not a coincidence that I thought several times to a book like "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline while going ahead with the (not that) brief but surely wondrous life of Oscar Wao. In fact, I do think that Cline and Diaz could be excellent pals and would have a lot to talk about while playing arcade videogames and listening to The Smiths on tape cassettes.

All in all, this is a funny and touching book to read but before starting with it make sure that you have some basics of Spanish and Spanglish as Junot Diaz won't help you with any marginal notes on translation (despite delivering many others here).
Ah, and don't get too much impressed by the way Diaz seems to enjoy descriptions of sex from an often violent and mechanical male perspective: after all - as he points out here - no Dominican man has ever died a virgin!