conuly

Again, managed four books this months. Throughout the month I've been working my way through "Lonesome Dove" (and I'm still not finished) and since this is such a chunk of a book it took up a lot of my time.

Twardoch, Szczepan: The King of Warsaw. Amazon Crossing. 2020.
On a technical and literary level this was excellent and very interesting. Twardoch does a lot with narration and POV here and I won't say more because it would be spoiler-y. But if you like this kind of stuff, think about picking up this book. Unfortunately, the plot wasn't my cuppa. It's set in Warsaw on the eve of WWII and follows Jakub, an enforcer to the city's mobster boss. And I'm sorry, but I don't like stories about the mafia. It just doesn't interest me thematically. I didn't mind so much that this novel is full of (gratuitious) violence and d***s being cut off. But the mafia angle was a hard no. (Also a lot about the friction between Poles and the Jewish population in Warsaw, as well as working class and socialist fights. This is taking place at a very interesting time in Poland. You can read this without knowing a lot about Poland, but you'll have an easier time if you have a basic idea of the time period. The German translation I read had a bit of historical context in the end - can't say anything about the English edition, though.)

Everett, Percival: Dr. No. Picador. 2023.
This wasn't an overly successful read either. This was my first book by Everett. His name was on my radar and I know everyone was in love with "James" and "The Trees", but "Dr. No" was the book that was available at my library. So that's the one I read. And well, I'm not sure that this is a story that needed to be published. It's a satire on every James Bond movie ever and in truth, "Austin Powers" is the safer bet if you want something like this. Because at least "Austin Powers" is funny. "Dr. No" had about one joke (Everett riffing on the titular "nothing") but he played that note for 300 pages. So while this was kind of funny and kind of interesting in the beginning, I couldn't wait for the last 100 pages to be over. And nothing I read here will stay in my mind (ha ha).

Forster, E. M.: Maurice. Penguin. 2005.
Amazing. This was breathtakingly beautiful from beginning to end. I read "A Room with a View" a few years ago and remember liking it fine. It was a good book but it was missing that one secret ingredient that elevates a novel to all-time favourite status. "Maurice", in contrast, has that ingredient and I already knew in chapter 1. And yes, this is the novel that was only published postumously because of its rather controversial nature. And I can understand this. I don't know how much of this is biographical in the strictest sense, but it's evident from the get-go that this is a very personal, even intimate novel. Forster really goes deep here without ever being navel-gazey - something autofiction nowadays never manages. He doesn't only look at his own (or, as the case may be, Maurice's) homosexuality but at British society as a whole. He makes some very scathing remarks towards society and England's class system. In short, I loved this book and have since then put everything else he's written on my TBR.

von Arnim, Elizabeth: The Enchanted April. Vintage Classics. 2015.
This started out so good. It's about extremely bored English wives who decide to get away from it all by renting an Italian villa. It read a bit like "Fried Green Tomatoes" in the beginning, like a story that wants to show how incredibly boring and useless and repetitive being a wife can feel when you don't have any agency.  I expected it to turn into a story about female empowerment in which these women free themselves from their lives and husbands and do something totally different and fun. But then, once they're in the villa, and when the reader expects them to come to some sort epiphany in regards to their lives, von Arnim turns this around and it develops into chick lit. Suddenly, men are everywhere and the women realise that life is really boring without men. And then the book ends. I must say this left me totally non-plussed and I felt kind of cheated out of a good book. The authors language is beautiful - a bit flowery, but I found her prose engaging. But she stabbed her own plot in the back, IMO.