‘Cold Comfort Farm’ by Stella Gibbons

1932, 307 p.

This was the April selection for my face-to-face bookgroup, and for me it was a re-read, but ah! who can begrudge reading such a little gem of a book?!!  It’s laugh-out-loud funny (or at least, I found it so) and if you haven’t read it- DO!

The book is set, as the small note on an opening page says, in the ‘near future’.  As twenty-first century readers, this is immediately unsettling because a book written in 1932, as this one was, is very much set in the past for us.  Some of her predictions, like air-taxis for short-distance travel, the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of ’46  or video-phones jar you into thinking “hold on, when was this set?”  In many ways it feels like a novel set in the 19th century both in its setting and characterization with the ramshackle manor house and loping rural farmworkers, but it was set in the future at the time it was written.

It was intended, apparently, to be a satire on the rural-gothic novels of the Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy ilk, which are hardly bestseller material these days. Satire, unfortunately, generally requires at least a nodding acquaintance with the subject or genre being satirized.  So here we have the odd situation where we are reading a satire that feels oddly familiar, as if we have met all these characters before-   the mad great-aunt in the attic, the simple farmhands, the young girl unaware of her beauty- and yet it seems that they have seeped into our consciousness without  being able to identify where they have come from.

The orphaned young Flora Poste decides that instead of getting a job, she will sponge on her relatives for her upkeep.  When an answer to her request for board comes back on a grimy piece of paper, followed by a warning to stay away, she decides that of the lukewarm responses she has received from her surviving relatives, it is this one from Cold Comfort Farm that attracts her the most. So off she bustles to Cold Comfort, bringing her modern girl sensibilities and common sense to an aging, rambling manor house where all the closely-intertwined Starkadder family are in thrall to the matriarch of the family, Great-Aunt Ada Doom.  Great Aunt Ada, who has sequestered herself in the attic after seeing “something nasty in the woodshed”, has ensnared the extended family around her, afraid to leave the farm to pursue their own destinies, declaring that “there’s always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort”.  Into this comes young Flora who, with her aid of her trusty handbook “The Higher Common Sense,” schemes and plans to set up some with marriages and to nudge others into following their vocations.  It’s all thoroughly good fun.

As I reached the end of the book, I was struck by how completely and deftly within just over 300 pages the author has sketched out such memorable minor characters.  In a closing scene, she lists the guests at a Starkadder wedding, and as she numbered them off, one by one, I felt a little jolt of recognition and affection, as if I was attending a family wedding myself, where the guests were all known to me.  And as for “something nasty in the woodshed”…..well, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

‘One Good Turn’ by Kate Atkinson

2006, 527 p

I don’t even LIKE crime novels as a rule, but I’ll make an exception for those written by Kate Atkinson.  This book follows on from her earlier novel, Case Histories by bringing to us again  detective Jackson Brodie, but it’s not at all necessary to have read the first book.  In the earlier book, there are three crimes that seem unrelated but become increasingly interwoven. This book is similar to its predecessor in that Jackson is searching desperately for “a tangible connection, not just a coincidence”, but it is more straightforward in that there is just the one crime initially that involves, in different ways, the many characters.

The book is set during the Edinburgh Festival, and the author turns a wry eye on the literary events and art-house performances that are part and parcel of such productions.  The crime occurs in the opening pages- always a good start, and in Rashamon-fashion the book moves from character to character in the lead up and fall0ut from the crime.  Her characters are full-bodied, and there’s enough romance to pep things up (and enough to induce deep groans in Mr R.Judge, should he ever read it, because he doesn’t like all that “love-stuff” mixed in with his crime stories).  Atkinson doesn’t take any of this too seriously, and there’s a cheeky humour that runs through the book.

The plot itself, while convoluted as crime novels tend to be, is easy enough to discern in retrospect, which is just the way I like it. Many’s the time that I’ve watched the credits roll on yet another ABC Friday night crime show, and I’ve twisted myself up on the couch and said “But I don’t get it…who?  why?…” and I can barely piece the plot together coherently enough to even formulate a question.

But this is a thouroughly satisfying crime novel, with a laugh or two along the way, several twists in the plot, and I can even tell you what happened!

My rating: 9/10 (I seem to be particularly generous at the moment. Perhaps I need to read a dud or two to get myself back into balance)

Sourced from: The Council of Adult Education

Read because: It is our March book in my face-to-face bookgroup

‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by ZZ Packer

224 p, 2004.

I was aware of ZZ  Packer, and the acclaim that she has garnered, even before I opened this book.  I was still reading Aphrodite’s Hat, and enjoying its understated, mature stillness, and from the little that I knew of Packer, I didn’t want her youth and exuberance intruding onto my reading.  I’m glad that I waited because keeping the two books separate enhanced them both, I think.

Z Z Packer was born in Chicago in 1973, attended Yale University and the Writers Workshop at John Hopkins University, and has been the recipient of several writing fellowships.  The short stories in this collection have appeared in various journals, and this volume received glowing praise.  She sure can write.

The stories are about 30 odd pages in length- just right, as far as I am concerned- short enough to be read at one sitting and long enough to develop character and a span of time. They are taut, confident, and she really doesn’t put a foot wrong.  Many of the characters are African-American (as is Packer herself), mainly they are women, and several of the stories are set in, or refer to Baltimore.  The Pentecostal Church is a potent and often ambivalent influence in her characters’ lives, and her characters are just clinging to the margins- sometimes physically, sometimes socially.

There is real complexity in this book.  There is no clear delineation between goodies and baddies, and life is uncomfortable and painful on the edges. The stories took me to a place and an existence that is completely foreign to me as a white Australian, older woman and she depicted it sharply enough that I ached, fretted and cared about characters encountered in thirty short pages.  Her endings were ambiguous but not unsatisfying.

You can read the short story ‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ that gives its name to this collection in the New Yorker, where it was originally published here.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups

Read because: It was the February book for the Ladies Who Say Oooh (i.e. bookgroup)

‘Aphrodite’s Hat’ by Salley Vickers

2010, 262 p.

My face-to-face bookgroup has a bit of a Christmas tradition, whereby each of us lends a copy of a book that we have enjoyed from our own bookshelves to another bookgroup member.   It’s a Kris Kringle-y sort of arrangement because you don’t know who donated the book you receive, and you can’t tell where your book is going to end up.  At our February meeting, the first for the year, we talk about the book and try to guess who chose it for us.  It is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair: sometimes you receive a book you’ve already read; sometimes you loathe the book you’ve received and wonder how you’ve managed to sit all year talking about books with the woman who chose it; other times you give a much-loved book (as I did with Kristin Lavrensdatter), only to have it trashed!

February is coming on quickly, so I thought that I’d better get stuck into my ‘present’.  Aphrodite’s Hat,  I see, by Salley Vickers.  I’ve read two of her books, with wildly different responses.  First I read Miss Garnet’s Angel with an online bookgroup and just loved it.  My response to  it was complicated by one of the bookgroup members arguing strongly and fairly (but not completely convincingly) that there was a whole other reading of the book possible that turned the plot on its head.  To this day, I’m still not sure.  When Instances of the Number Three came out, I snapped it up but this time felt that it was twee, repetitive and just plain silly.

But ten years have gone by, and I’m now well and truly of the middle-aged demographic that she writes about.  And, despite my frequent declarations that I don’t like short stories, I was quite happy to see that the book was in fact a collection of her short fiction. I’m finding myself happy to read something light and put-downable just before I go to sleep.

The longest story in this collection is ‘The Buried Life’,  after the Matthew Arnold poem of the same name, which she very helpfully gives at the end of the story (just as the cover of the book helpfully shows ‘Aphrodite’s Hat’ which is the title and theme of another of the stories in this collection). It’s a beautiful poem: this is one part:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

In tracking out our true, original course;

A longing to enquire

Into the mystery of this heart which beats

So wild, so deep in us- to know

Whence our lives come and where they go.

This captures the themes of many of these stories: middle aged people -generally women- often in their second marriages, who are disappointed that this second chance at love has not worked either; unhappy people teetering on the edge of infidelity;  loss of a child through death or intransigence.  They are very still stories that seem calm on the surface but cover a deep well of sadness.  As with Miss Garnet’s Angel,  there is a hint of the supernatural but it is so closely interwoven with love and longing that it pushed my derision to the side.  Many of the stories are set in England, with visits over to Rome or Venice for honeymoons and naughty weekends away, in the twentieth century tawdry version of the Grand Tour- again, shades of Miss Garnet’s Angel.  Most of the stories are very short, with a similar narrative voice, and often even start the same way with a voiced comment in a conversation.  They are very similar to each other, but I enjoyed each one so much that I found myself wanting more and happily turned to the next.

As I said, February approaches, and not only do we talk about our Christmas gift book at our meeting, but we also have our February selection- in this case, a collection of – you guessed it- short stories by Z. Z. Packer.  Somehow, I couldn’t bear to mix up my reading of these two very different authors.  I wanted to let the quiet, middle-aged, introspectivity of Vickers’ stories  have their own space, without being swamped by a younger, more rambunctious writer.

It doesn’t surprise me that, according to Wikipedia,  Salley Vickers is a 64 year old woman, or that she is a psychotherapist, and that she has had two marriages, both finished.  I suspect that there is an autobiographical bent to these stories, and perhaps my criticisms of Instances of the Number Three  could well apply to these stories as well.  Except that I am older, except that there is a clarity about human nature, except that I was utterly charmed by them.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Who knows??

Read because: it was a reading gift over Christmas from my bookgroup.

‘Walking on Water: A Life in the Law’ by Chester Porter

2003, 309 p.

One of the high points of my CAE bookgroup meetings (a.k.a. The Ladies Who Say Ooooh)  is when the book for the upcoming month is fished up out of the plastic box and brandished with a flourish. I’ve found recently that one advantage of actually doing some work on my thesis is that I am no longer likely to look at the next month’s offering and think “Damn, I’ve already read it!”. When our book for our final meeting was revealed last month, I found myself thinking “Good grief, who on earth chose this?” because it was Chester Porter’s memoir Walking on Water: A Life in the Law.

At first I thought that I’d never heard of the man, but I soon realized that I had without realizing it.  Most famously, he worked as Counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the convictions of  Lindy and Michael Chamberlain case, and he successfully defended Det. Sergeant Roger Rogerson on a bribery charge. He was known as “the smiling funnel web” and the title of the book comes from a quip directed towards him that “Chester Porter Walks on Water”.

Even though I encountered this book as part of my “off-duty” reading, I was very happy to read it in relation to Judge Willis.  The little gremlin of self-doubt that lives in my head regularly derides my ability to write about a man of the law (albeit a 19th century colonial man of the law) when I have no experience of that milieu at all.  The 19th century judicial culture is something that I am deducing for myself, largely from negative evidence of Willis’ breaches of judicial etiquette, rather than from any deliberate exposition of it by an insider.   So what did this book, written by a late twentieth century Australian barrister show me?

First, that even though a man might be a highly educated, brilliant barrister, he is not necessarily a successful memoirist.  Although Porter clearly expresses a number of opinions about the law, they are hedged with qualifications and nimble logical footwork. The book reads like a series of mini-essays which, from a reader’s perspective, made it easy to abandon a chapter or two if one’s attention was wandering.  There was no discernible overarching structure or motif to tie the book together.  In several places it was quite repetitious and the prose was doggedly careful. His daughter is the late poet Dorothy Porter, but whatever else she gained from her father- and I am sure that there is much- there is little poetry here.

Second, the book shares with military memoirs that felt need on the writer’s part to doff one’s hat (wig?) to learned colleagues, by praising them, rather formulaically, in passing.  Hence, many of his associates are named with the bracketed annotation (now SC; now QC, now Supreme Court Judge).  Given this emphasis on naming his colleagues, it seemed strange that there was no index.

I found myself wondering about the audience for the book. The frequent greetings-in-print that he gives to his colleagues suggests that he sees them as one readership, but the careful explanations and observations about the law are aimed at a more general lay readership.  The author comes over as a somewhat stilted, and rather old-fashionably decent man, able to look back at his life and acknowledge mistakes, and reticent about his family and private life.

Nonetheless, a book can work on one level while being perhaps less successful on another.  Despite my qualms about the structuring and language of the book, I found myself listening carefully to the radio report of evidence given recently by Ian Macdonald  at the recent Independent Commission Against Corruption hearing. It was another cross-examiner at work because Chester Porter retired eleven years ago, but as I listened I found myself thinking about the construction of a chain of questions and responses as an intellectual and rhetorical exercise. And as I read about the successful appeal of Jeffrey Gilham a few days ago, Porter’s warnings about expert testimony, the demeanor of witnesses and the shortcomings of police evidence loomed large in my mind.

My rating: 6/10

Read because: it was a face-to-face bookgroup choice

Copy sourced from: Council of Adult Education Book Groups

‘Tartar City Woman’ by Trevor Hay

1990, 178 p

I must admit that my heart sank a little when we received our November book for The-Ladies-Who-Say-Oooh bookgroup this month. Yet another book about a Chinese woman growing up in Communist China, I thought.  I’m over all these three-part family saga with grandmother, mother and daughter full of co-mingled admiration and resentment, alternately solved and exacerbated by the magical escape to the Wonderful West.  Well, there were elements of this here, but because this is a memoir of a woman, related by a man (rather than an autobiography), it thankfully lacked some of the emotional tantrum of such books.

Wang Hsin-Ping  grew up among the old gentry class in pre-Communist Peking.  Her father had emigrated to Australia and rather unaccountably disappears from the story completely, and after her mother died, she was brought up by her grandmother.  Members of the family seemed to be able to leave for the West fairly easily, and it was these family connections overseas that compromised her reputation during the various twistings and turnings of  Communist Party ideology as she grew up.  She was a forthright, intelligent young woman, thwarted in her career aspirations by her ambivalent attitude and suspect family allegiances.  Although she lived in a community of suspicion and fear- and I am not under-estimating the effect of this- she was not denounced; not sent out into the country; not beaten or starved or any of the litany of outrages that we often read of in totalitarian societies.  In fact, she testifies to a low-key subversion of authority, albeit over minor details. The peasant village sent her exiled 70 year old grandmother  back to the city because she was useless with her bound feet, and students sent to work in villages simply  returned to the city, in spite of the fact that without their ration books they would be dependent on others for food.

The book opens Trevor Hay’s own reflections on his attitude to China, particularly in the 1970s as he travelled there with an enthusiastic wide-eyed, left-leaning tour group, completely oblivious to Hsin-Ping’s journey in the other direction as she emigrates, seemingly easily, to Australia.  He meets Hsin Ping working in a Melbourne restaurant, and I can only assume that the book is the product of her reminscences and their conversations.  It is not co-written as such, at least in the authorship.

Yet there is a real distance between the teller and the recorder of the narrative. It is a rather cold, bloodless tale, with emotional relationships dispensed with in mere sentences.  Perhaps this is Hsin-Ping’s choice, but Hay does not problematize this in any way.  There is much detail about pedagogy and curriculum, and this ‘teacher’s eye’ view of the world perhaps mirrors the shared professional bond between Hsin-Ping  as an erstwhile classroom teacher and Hay’s own profession as academic in the education faculty at the University of Melbourne.  The book was useful in explaining the U-turns and contradictions in Chinese government policy.

Overall, I found this rather disappointing. It was not the family saga I expected, and for that I suppose I should be grateful, but it felt a rather stilted and incomplete picture of growing up in Communist China.

My rating: 6/10

Read because: it was the November for my face-to-face bookgroup AKA ‘The Ladies who say Oooohh’

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups.

‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ by Lionel Shriver

2003, 400 p.

I was surprised to note that this book was written in 2003. I felt that it was much more recent than that, and I see that it is about to be released as a movie later this year.  It was my selection for my face-to-face bookgroup, and I was rather dismayed that we did it while I was overseas, thus missing our meeting.  It was the first book that I have purchased for my e-reader, as distinct from the freebies that either came with the reader or that I have downloaded from Internet Archive.  It was rather distressing then, to find that it disappeared from my reader when I had to recharge its batteries through the computer.  I’m not really sure how to get it back: I had downloaded the original on my computer at home, and there was a message about not being able to download it in Canada- obviously ‘they’ had detected that I was in Canada now.  Most curious.  I was about 300 pages, and really wanted to finish it, so I ended up buying a hard copy as well.  So I guess that you could say that this first foray into purchasing an e-book was not an unqualified success.

The fact that I wanted so much to finish it says much about the book.  For about the first 100 pages I was really annoyed by the volubility of this narrator- did she have to go on and on about everything?  Surely Franklin, her estranged husband, would never read these lengthy, detailed letters!

The letters are arranged chronologically, and speak to Franklin as “you”.  They are a form of confession and catharsis as she re-lives her relationship with her son Kevin.  From the outset, she was ambivalent about Kevin: she was undecided about a pregnancy because of her success with her travel-guide company ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’, and she resented her husband Franklin’s overwheleming solicitude for the baby.  Both these tendencies intensified as Kevin grew from baby, to boy, to adolescent: Franklin could see only good in his son, Eva could see only manipulation and malevolence.

I’m not sure at what point my frustration at Eva the narrator dissipated.  It was probably as Kevin became more and more chillingly evil. The small details of his malevolence  were, in many ways, the most disturbing.  We are told in the first pages that Kevin will end up perpetrating an atrocity at his school, and the book slowly, but inexorably, moves towards that point.

I’m sure that the ladies-who-say-ooh in my bookgroup would have discussed motherhood and our ambivalences about our children, and the contribution (if any) of the family’s dynamics to Kevin’s personality.  I’m sure they would have discussed the nature of evil, and whether it is ever inherent, and how the trajectory of Kevin’s crime unfolded.  I wish I’d been there for the discussion.

My rating: 9/10

Reason read: My face to face bookgroup.

‘Other people’s words’ by Hilary McPhee

2001, 312 p.

Most people writing an autobiography (or even more risibly, having it ghost-written) announce that it is ‘in their own words’.  The title of this book is a little disingenuous.  The book certainly is in the words of the author, Hilary McPhee, but it is the story of her time dealing with other people’s writing as editor and proprietor of McPhee/Gribble books- a small, relatively short-lived, but influential publishing house in Australia.

As you might expect from someone immersed in other people’s words, the book is very well written.  It is divided into two parts.  Part I is largely biographical, pulling on a few family history strings, and contextualizing McPhee’s life as an Australian, swept up in the political and social changes of the Whitlam era and afterwards.  It establishes her as an intelligent, middle-class, educated young woman who seemed to fall into the publishing industry almost inadvertently, although her love for reading was a constant throughout her life.

Part II commences many years later as she settles down in the Melbourne University archives, reopening the files of the defunct McPhee/Gribble company which had been donated to the university.  As she does so, the emotions evoked by memories sweep over her- elation, bitterness, cold disappointment.  The company was started by two Australian women, in a male-dominated industry still hidebound by the copyright and marketing constraints of the colonial publishing market.  And for a golden moment, it worked. They were young, they had children, it was exciting and new and different.  Somehow, in a less performance-driven time, they managed to combine what sounds like a creche with the sensitivities of working with authorly egos and wading into an international industry where Australia was only a minor player.  It ended in tears, of course and quite literally, as most people reading this book would probably know.

In this regard, I find myself wondering whether the first part of the book was even necessary.  Apparently McPhee herself found the arc and voice for Part I only after writing Part II, and while it helped to contextualize the story of the company and its main actors, I would have been quite happy just to have had Part II.

This is a real reader’s book.  McPhee/Gribble developed an enviable list of writers- Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Murray Bail spring immediately to mind- but there are other writers here too that, after reading this book several years ago, I rushed out to read (e.g. Glen Tomasetti’s Thoroughly Decent People). Or at least, I bought their books to add to the to-be-read pile (e.g. Rod Jones’ Julia Paradise, and Gerald Murnane).  She occasionally gives the opening paragraphs of the most famous of the books they published and the words hit you with a rush of familiarity and affection, as if they are old friends from way back that you  weren’t expecting to see.  I haven’t read all the books she mentioned by a long shot, but I’d heard of most of them, and while the book could descend into name-dropping in less skilled hands, I certainly didn’t feel that way.  I found myself scouring my bookshelf, and pouncing on the McPhee/Gribbles I found there – “aha! there’s one”- and perusing the little logos on the spine in a way that I hadn’t before.

The book ends wistfully and rather pessimistically as the book industry becomes more depersonalized and more market-driven. I hadn’t realized the consequences of industry policies before globalisation- I was aware of the difficulties of Australian authors getting published, but less aware that the British dominance of our industry meant that American titles were rarely released here.  And since globalisation, she describes a scenario (that one suspects in drawn from real life, unfortunately) of a young writer’s first book being rushed through into a marketing schedule before it was ready and sinking silently as the next product was pushed through.  I suspect that things have not improved, ten years later.

Look- she has a blog where you can read a chapter of the book, a transcript of a 2006 interview and there’s a 2010 interview on Radio National’s bookshow.

My rating: 8.5/10

Reason read: Face-to-face bookgroup (the ladies who say oooh, except that they don’t anymore.)

‘Stasiland’ by Anna Funder

2002, 288 p.

(4/5)

Every year for the last five or so years I have put Stasiland onto my list of selections for my face-to-face bookgroup (AKA ‘The Ladies who say Ooooh’). Every year for the past five years, the year elapsed and Stasiland wasn’t chosen.  Ah! But this year IT WAS!!!

I was a little tentative about subjecting The Ladies to yet another of my gloomy selections after subjecting them to The Land of Green Plums about Ceausescu’s Romania last year- what would they think of the Stasi in East Germany this year?  I need not have feared: the narrative was more straight-forward here, and having a young Australian journalist as the first person narrator introduced a familiar voice and viewpoint onto something that, fortunately, is not within the experience of most of us.

Funder, working as a journalist in Europe after reunification, was first attracted to investigating East Germany when a request for a program on the “puzzle women” was brushed aside by the television producers she worked with. There was, it seemed, an embarrassment about the East Germans, as if it would all just disappear if no-one spoke about it.  These “puzzle women”, she later discovered, were employed to reassemble the papers shredded by the Stasi as the wall was falling, a task that would take over 300 years at the current speed.  Methodical to the end, the papers had been shredded in order and shoved into a bag together, and so it was possible to piece them together and reveal the banality and the all-pervasive intrusion of the Stasi into the lives of East Germans.

In East Germany, it has been estimated, there was one informer for every six people.  Some of the surveillance was the stuff of farce, like the  ‘smell samples’ that purported to capture every individual’s smell for later reference.  Other surveillance was more insidious: the reports that were given to potential employers who later changed their mind about the offer of a job; the insistence that there was no unemployment when, as a result of such reports,  one could not get a job; the  warning that a rock group singing subversive lyrics would no longer exist, only to disappear completely from all public view and hearing.  Escapes that were thwarted, imprisonment, blackmail, and the withholding of contact for years with a sick baby on the other side of the wall- by such means the Stasi dabbled in one’s very soul.   There was physical torture as well, but she broaches this only at the very end of the book.  By this time the claustrophobia, vindictiveness and degradation of such minute surveillance seemed on a par with physical torture.

But of course, such intrusion and cruelty leaves no physical trace.  She comments on the memorialization- or more correctly, the distortion of memory regarding East Germany.  She notes the way that East Germans distanced themselves from the Nazis immediately after the war, as if Nazi ideology had flowed from the West and engulfed them, then withdrawn completely afterwards, leaving them innocent of it completely.  She comments on tourist industry that has arisen around the physical fact of the wall- the remnant sections, the tours- that co-exists with a nostalgia amongst some East Germans for the simplicity and security of a life without the bombardment of consumer ‘choice’ and capitalist pressure.  When she places an advertisement seeking ex-Stasi operatives for interview, she encounters men  holding onto the shreds of a Communist dream,  in denial of reunification, and hopeful of the re-emergence of the Stasi.  She finds men who have mounted their own museums to East German life; she speaks to others who have their own justifications for their actions which ring hollow and rather pathetic in a changed world.

The stories of the Stasi operatives and their victims are important, because the Stasi’s reach was not so much in physical things but in the more intangible  sense of safety, identity and autonomy.  There is no museum to hold such things.

I was particularly interested in this book because of the role of the narrator in it.  It is not an academic book as such, and I was surprised to find notes related to specific pages at the end as there had been no footnotes to alert me to their existence.   The narrator is front and centre in this book: we see through her eyes and filter through her consciousness.  At times you need to read against her prejudices- for example, with one man who, as perfect East German man, was moulded this way through his own father’s well-founded fears and insecurities as a dissident, and was to a large extent, a victim as well as perpetrator.  I’m aware of a trend in academic history,  to make oneself part of the story as well, and to use one’s own doubts, questions, misconceptions and false trails as part of the intellectual journey.  I can see its allure as narrative device, but I’m wary.

Funder is not, though, offering this as academic history.  She is upfront about her outsider status, and she documents rather than explains.  It is powerful, chilling reading nonetheless.  Timely, too, as we hear of the Egyptians gaining access this week to their files, many of which had been hastily shredded.  Just as the East Germans before them, they are becoming aware of the size and pervasiveness of the secret police and the complicity of family and neighbours in their midst.

Laugh?

At our bookgroup (i.e. the Ladies Who Say Oooh)  last month we were talking about comedy in books.  The book we were reading, “Two Caravans”,  was billed as humourous, but I really didn’t find it very funny at all.  I commented that there are very few books that I have actually laughed out loud at.  Two that do come to mind are Clive James’ “Unreliable Memoirs” and Denise Scott’s “All that Happened at Number 26“- both of which had me laughing out loud, almost to the point of tears. We dourly vowed that we’d monitor our laughing at books for the rest of the year- a resolution that’s almost certain to deaden any mirth at all for the remainder of 2011!

I don’t think of myself as a humourless person, but I just don’t seem to do it very often when I’m reading.  Perhaps I do- it will be interesting to see.  I laugh at television and in movies, although come to think of it,  I rarely choose to go to a ‘funny movie’.  I think that I often laugh during conversations, and I quite enjoy listening to radio comedy.  I’m really looking forward to seeing Tim Minchin in a fortnight or so, but I think he’s one of the few comedians that I’ve actually seen live.  Of course, there’s laughing and laughing- can I categorize it?  Surely this is a truly kill-joy endeavour…

1.The little sub-vocalized ‘hmmph’ with a raising of the shoulders

2. Breaking into a smile with a little chuckle

3. Laughing out loud- head thrown back, shoulders shaking

4. Extended laughing out loud, perhaps with tears! or perish the thought- a little snort!- subsiding into chuckles then bursting out again.

And I often laugh at watching other people laugh.