On to the next post in my Farewell series! Today, it’s all about works of historical fiction. Here are the three I liked best this year. Günter Grass: The Tin Drum An incommensurable book, dealing with the same things...
On to the next post in my Farewell series! Today, it’s all about works of historical fiction. Here are the three I liked best this year.
©Penguin.
Günter Grass: The Tin Drum
An incommensurable book, dealing with the same things – chiefly, the rise, excess, fall, and survival of Nazism; and the particular role of the not-quite-German, not-quite-Polish Kashubians between those nations – from many different perspectives, like looking through an oddly shaped and fractured crystal, where a slightly different angle makes for an entirely different interpretation.
Combining a baroque lust for storytelling with dry laconic witticisms, The Tin Drum examines how to cope with an age of insanity. Sanely playing along is not only unattractive, but also immoral, as Grass’s panorama of the Nazi-involved petite bourgeoisie of Danzig shows. Yet the protagonist’s course of denying reality and fleeing into the childish life of an eternal three-year old, an impulse-driven drummer, a man so appalled by the world that retreating into his mother’s womb is not enough, it needs to be the many skirts of his grandmother another generation removed – that’s no practical alternative either, and while it suits the protagonist’s individual needs, it is the same moral failure.
©Simon & Schuster.
Colleen McCullough: The October Horse
Long-time readers of this blog know that I am smitten with Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series… almost as smitten as McCullough is with Caesar. As the great man at last triumphs over the remaining traditional aristocrats and welcomes the defeated back into his good graces, there are no enemies to his rule anymore… right? Spoiler: There are, they just know how to hide. As the Roman Republic comes crashing down, so does Caesar. And now his power is up for grabs – for his enemies (Cicero, Brutus, Cassius), his loyal heirs (Octavian and Caesar’s generals), and those who are maybe both (Mark Antony). Octavian is a particularly captivating character: Almost as brilliant as Caesar and twice as ruthless. I am eagerly awaiting my read of the seventh and last instalment in the series.
And my favorite work of historical fiction this year was…
©Random House.
Annie Ernaux: The Years
A difficult book to classify – it could be argued it’s not even fiction, but rather a thinly veiled autobiography. But which autobiography refers to the protagonist in the third person, when “she” is not done away with altogether and replaced with the even more impersonal “we” or “one”, rigorously asserting the protagonist’s conviction to have no personality anyway? The best classification might be that of a collective autobiography which mixes sociology with a bit of fictionalization. The result of this daring endeavor is a masterpiece capturing the contradictions of post-war France in terse, laconic prose. Beyond that, it encompasses the story of the generation of 1968: Their origins, their buoyant hopes in the 1960s, and their tragedy as the political and the personal became ever more distant from each other from the 1970s on, ambitions for freedom and equality replaced by the small joys of family life and consumer goods.
And which works of (historical) fiction did you enjoy this year? Let me know in the comments!