Generalising

In the winter of 1939, Josef Kavalier stumbles into his cousin Sammy’s cramped bedroom in New York City, having escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague. They share a cigarette, and something begins: a friendship, and a partnership,that will last years. Between them they create the Escapist, a superhero who can escape from anyone and anything, who travels the world as an agent of the League of the Golden Key, helping others to escape from oppression and tyranny.

The theme could be predictable and hamfisted: in America, Josef becomes Joe, and Sammy Klayman has already become Sam Clay; they escape from their Jewish backgrounds into the mainstream American middle classes just as Joe has already escaped Prague. But escape in itself isn’t the only theme – it’s also the failures that surround it, the way Joe and Sammy, in a way very reminscent of Angels in America, fail to be anything but their Jewish, troubled selves. Sammy can’t escape from his own sexuality, Joe can’t escape from anything he’s left behind. And as a counterpoint to the escapes, there are the absences left behind: the absence of Sammy’s father, Joe living with the daily absence of his family, and later, the absence of Joe.

The language is lyrical and indulgently expansive, the moods perfectly evoked, but interestingly, there is nevertheless an appopriate comic-book aspect to the way the novel is written: events have a ka-pow! quality, especially in the earlier part of the novel. Joe bounces through a young lady’s window, to screaming, Sammy kisses his his first love on the roof of a building with thunderstorms exploding around them, and later, Joe’s adventures in the Antarctic cold, complete with grim madmen and sudden death have the overblown comic-book feel.

What to say, in the end? I wasn’t sure what to take away from this novel. It is too heavy and sad to read once, but there’s something beautiful and altering in it, and something compelling about the way history and religion are threaded masterfully throughout. It stays with you, with all its weight.

Seriously? This book is truly excellent. I mean it. Yes, it’s slight, yes it’s yet another of those blog-turned-book-deal things, but it’s razor-sharp and poignant, hilarious and sometimes sad, but always engaging and frequently educational. It’s a treat.

The premise: thirty-year-old Julie Powell, a secretary living in the outer boroughs of NYC in apartment that her mother is convinced she’s going to die in, decides apropos of not much that in the space of one year, she is going to cook her way through the five-hundred-plus recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Of course, she blogged it – but this was in 2001, when such things weren’t quite ubiquitous – and, something I think is enormously in her favour, the book is not simply a rehash of the greatest hits of the blog but tries to tell a complete narrative, with some blog entries merely reproduced where appropriate.

And, well, it’s fabulous and compulsively readable. While she writes reams about the recipes – all of which feature tonnes and tonnes of butter – she punctuates it with tales of her own life, her work for the government agency clearing up the debris after 9/11, her long-suffering husband, her romantic-hero brother, her mother, her friends, and she brings all of them to life. She’s cheerfully rude about her Republican colleagues, at one point feeds them a cake filled with ceramic shards and antifreeze, and is relentlessly cutting about the Bush administration, in and around her adventures cooking marrowbones, calves’ brains and apples in aspic and other such horrifying delicacies. She writes very well indeed, and with a kind of intimate familiarity; in any case, in her description of herself as a foul-mouthed hysteric with misanthropic tendencies, she rang very familiar for me.

The one flaw of the book, I think, is the attempts at vignettes in the real life of Julia Child – while these aren’t bad, per se, I really think they’re unnecessary and a sign of lack of confidence in her own story, which is entirely unjustified.

In short: please look beyond the provenance and the cover, and don’t be afraid for a minute that this is going to be one of those cook-yourself-thin horrors (not only is it all butter all the time, nowhere does anyone discuss diets in this book). It’s one of the best I’ve read this year.

NB. I see after publishing this review to LibraryThing that a lot of people think Powell is boorish and swears too much, and so you shouldn’t read her book. Coincidentally, most of those people are fucking cunts.

Today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and – to a first approximation – the end of the German Democratic Republic. I don’t really have anything intelligent to say on the matter; I was seven at the time, and failed to notice much about it. I do remember, a couple of years later, visiting a relative with a little fragment of the Wall in the glass china case in their living room, and being duly impressed, but I’m not sure I could have explained why. (This is odd – I know I was aware of world news stories a year earlier, in 1988, perhaps even late ’87. Maybe my memory is at fault here, not my childish attention-spans.)

But it does reminds me, on the other hand, that I wanted to mention that:

• there is a new discount bookshop open on St. Aldates;

• it is selling copies of Stasiland for £2;
• which is one of the best books I’ve read this year;
• and you should be able to deduce #4 for yourself.

(Why, look at the tangential relevance. Classy, me.)

Stasiland is great. Absolutely, unqualifiedly, great. Well-written, moving, direct, vivid and detached; it describes horrors and terror without either dwelling on them or glossing over them, which is a rare skill. It’s a series of linked stories of daily life in East Germany – mostly East Berlin – told by former citizens, interspersed with a narrative of life in contemporary Berlin as the author tracked them down. She deliberately included interviews with ex-Stasi members, some devoted and some compelled, which provides an interesting second layer to the reminiscences.

Following on from Stasiland, I read Timothy Garton Ash’s The File a few months later. It was an interesting corollary, an attempt by a privileged observer – a Western historian – to trace back his time in East Germany through studying his file, to trace back the contacts with bystanders and informers. The problem is that neither is the book you’d really want to read; Funder tells a lot of stories second-hand, and Ash tells his own story and those entwined with his, but we never quite get a first-hand memoir of someone who actually lived under the regime and couldn’t, as Ash could, walk away.

Suggestions for further reading on East Germany, either from a social or a historic perspective, appreciated.

On a lighter note, Ben Lewis’s Hammer and Tickle was enjoyable as a jokebook and a vaguely serious study of humour in adversity – I did like his idea that you could follow the trajectory of people’s faith in The Whole Grand Communist Project by looking at the tone of their jokes about it – but could have done with cutting out the 20% of padding about the author’s private life. Perhaps best just to read the original essay.

And finally, I have not yet bought a copy of K Blows Top, but I expect it to be all you’d expect from a book detailing Khruschev’s wacky road-trip across fifties America. (This must be one of the few sentences where “wacky” is the only appropriate adjective.)