This week I started Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. When Otto Quangel's son is killed in battle, he starts dropping subversive anti-Nazi postcards all over Berlin. It's based on a true story (the scratchy writing on the great Penguin cover is based on the handwriting on the postcards) and was first published in 1947. The writing is really direct and informal, and it communicates the everdayness of life under Nazi rule ... the creepy, nosy neighbour might be about to report you for 'subversive talk' but he remains the sort of creepy, nosy neighbour character we can all recognise.
I could tell it was going to be excellent, but I wasn't quite in the mood for it this week - I wanted something a little less harrowing and more contemporary, but still brain-engaging ... so I've been devouring the wonderful Prep by Curtis Sittenfield. It's the story of a girl from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to an New England boarding school some time in the 1990s. Not a whole lot happens plot-wise, but Sittenfield is a wonderful writer and captures what it's like to be a painfully awkward adolescent whose inner reality is so at odds with the oustside world, and who's constructed innumerable rules to keep herself miserable: 'I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous ineraction.'
Here's Lee, the heroine, squirming in front of a well-meaning but misguided teacher who's kept her behind class and warned her not to be a 'cipher' but to feel strongly and engage with the world:
'She was wrong about everything, and her wrongness was, if absurd, also flattering. I was not disengaged, I was not disinterested, Aspeth certainly did not want to be my friend, and I was one of the least cool people I knew - all I ever did was watch other students and feel curious about them and feel dazzled by their breeziness and wracked by the impossible gaping space between us, my horrible lack of ease, my inability to be casual ... The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the US and China did not mean I didn't feel things. As for whether I was a cipher, that was more difficult to say because I didn't know what the word meant. But I would definitely look it up in the dictionary when I got back to the dorm.'
American Wife, also by Sittenfield, was one of my favourite books so far this year - it's a novel based on the life of Laura Bush, and when I say you finish it loving Laura Bush that will give you some idea of what an unexpected story it is. Prep is also excellent so far (100 pages to go) though I prefer AW. What a pity though that Prep is littered with typos, all punctuation - I found 3 on one page alone. I know the people working on it were probably overworked and underpaid, and it probably ran late and the author made changes at the last minute, but this is the PAPERBACK. You should be able to sort these things out by paperback stage. Still, loving the book.
