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475 pp. The original French publication appeared in 2021, entitled La card postale, at the Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. It was translated by Tina Kover. Though the book is called a “A Novel,” the four names on the postcard—Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie (it is her picture on the dust cover) and Jacques—are not fictional characters. Rather,…
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Maybe, it is not necessary to recommend this novel. After all, it appeared in 2017 already, and it was even turned into a TV mini-series. But I happen to have read it only now, some time after I finished and summarized the author’s subsequent book, Our Missing Hearts (2022). Perhaps there are some other readers…
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This is a political novel embedded in a story of love between a mother and her son, placed in the context of resistance to an authoritarian regime. This regime is a fictionalized United States of America whose people are under strict surveillance based on the “Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT).” The core enemy…
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262 pp. This novel is about three women of my age, the early seventies. Originally, it was a clique of friends comprising four women who had come to know each other when they were in their thirties: Sylvie, Jude, Wendy, and Adele. An important role is assigned to a dog, Finn, who was given to…
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Some time ago I read the author’s The Weekend (see my related note). Since I was less than impressed by that text, I did not expect to read another of her novels until the Booker Prize committee not only longlisted her Stone Yard Devotional, but also shortlisted it in 2024. In this novel, an unnamed…
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When Nazi Germany started its war by invading Poland in September 1939, the Holocaust of European Jews did not yet exist as a unified murderous policy approach. Rather, the content of this policy and its administrative and technical implementation were gradually devised in the two years after this invasion in reaction to the changed context…
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English version published as Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Literary collaboration by Helmut Freitag. Edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. The German original edition was published by Verlag Steinhausen, München, 1979. Filip Müller, a Jewish Slovak, was born on 3 January 1922. He died on 9…
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The author’s starting point is found right in the first two sentences of her foreword to the book: “America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” Of course, this danger has a name as well as a date: Donald…
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Ingeborg Rapoport was an internationally recognized Pediatrician practicing at the famous Charité Hospital in Berlin, German Democratic Republic. She was born in 1912 and died in 2017. Because she had a Jewish mother, her finished doctoral dissertation in medicine was rejected by the University of Hamburg. At age 102, she became the oldest recipient of…
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Müller’s book is kind of a primer for readers who would like to refresh their knowledge of the fundamentals of democratic political systems. For readers who are up to date about these fundamentals, Müller’s text can be boring at times. Patience might be needed most with chapter 4 “Reopening” (pp. 139-178), in which Müller recounts…
Books worth reading 