A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 5000 unique visitors each month. So far 213 book reviews have been published.
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 In The Perfect Nazi, Martin Davidson joins quite a long line of authors who have written about the Nazi past of their relatives. Perhaps the best book in the genre is The Himmler Brothers, by Katrin Himmler – a difficult book to surpass in view of the noteriety of the author’s grand-uncle and grandfather. But Wibke Bruhns (My Father’s Country) also scores in that her father was an SS officer who was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944. However, Davidson is the commissioning editor for history for the BBC and as the cover tells us, has two degrees from Oxford University so readers presumably may expect something worthwhile in his book.
We are on undramatic ground with The Perfect Nazi. Martin Davidson’s maternal grandfather, Bruno Langbehn was an SS officer but did not rise to great prominence, his only significance perhaps being that he was committed to the Nazi party from its inception. ”Bruno”, as the author refers to him throughout the book, was far from being a glamorous figure, being an artisan dentist by profession, and fairly clueless about his work for the SS. Indeed, the final chapters of the book quote an official document which, the author tells us, provides little more than “a damning portrait of Bruno’s incompetence, his manifest self-importance and his blindness to the futility of the work itself”. It is therefore obvious from the start that this book is not going to provide any great new insights into the operation of the SS or the inner workings of the Nazi Party.
Continue reading Review: The Perfect Nazi – Martin Davidson
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 British readers may remember Vitali Vitaliev from his time as Moscow correspondent on David Frost’s 1990s television programme, Saturday Night Clive, and many broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. Vitali was born in the Ukraine, eventually defecting to the West, living in Britain and Australia, and eventually returning to London where he is a successful journalist and writer.
Life as A Literary Device, is partly biographical, partly reportage, and partly miscellaneous musing on life. The book consists of ”seemingly disjointed snippets of real life, they connect by association alone – the random pieces of coloured glass that from themselves into a pattern if viewed through that wonderful children’s toy, the kaleidoscope”.
Early in the book he writes of being influenced by the Russian writer Valentin Kataev, the founder of a literary style which he called “mauvism” – “a literary device consisting of the complete negation of all literary devices”. The term mauvism comes from the French word “mauvais” meaning “bad”, and as Kataev himself wrote, “I am the founder of the latest literary school, the mauvistes, the essence of which is that since everyone nowadays writes very well, you must write badly, as badly as possible, then you will attract attention”.
I am pleased to say that Vitaliev does not write badly – far from it in fact, but he has certainly held to the principle of mauvism in writing a book for the Internet age where ”one website routinely carries links to many others. You open a link in a story that you are reading and it takes you away to another story loosely connected to the first one yet years and/or miles away from it; you then close the link and return to the story you were reading in the first place”.
Continue reading Review: Life as a Literary Device – Vitali Vitaliev
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Noted novelist and translator Tim Parks has departed from his usual themes to write this autobiographical account of his journey from a life dominated by acute pain to one where a reasonable equilibrium between body and soul enables him to live in relative comfort and healthy productivity.
Teach Us To Sit Still will be of great interest to anyone with a chronic medical condition which the doctors seem unable to cure, but also to anyone who is concerned about work/life balance and the long-term effects of ignoring the body’s needs. I can’t say I’m in any either of those categories but I still found it a fascinating read. But the book is not only about pain and a quest for healing, for Tim, being the writer and scholar that he is, digresses frequently into philosophical and literary themes which break up the stark accounts of medical processes.
Tim Parks developed a set of problems in the region of prostate, groin and pelvis which had a devastating effect on his life. The first part of the book describes the medical explorations which he had to undergo in order to seek a diagnosis. Any man reading the book is going to squirm with discomfort as Parks’ recounts the procedures carried out on him, some of which make root canal work sound like a head massage. There are touches of humour, such as his account of the time he had to pee into a small plastic urinal called a “parrot”, while lying on his back (impossible for him – I can sympathise I’m sure), but generally this section is pretty grim.
Continue reading Review: Teach Us To Sit Still – Tim Parks
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 Even since reading Stefan Zweig’s remarkable description of psychological co-dependency in his novel, Beware of Pity, I’ve tried to read every thing I can get my hands on by this fine writer. In recent years, a minor publishing industry has developed around Zweig, with Pushkin Press leading the way with quite a few volumes of short stories and even an uncompleted novel, The Post Office Girl which I reviewed here.
The World of Yesterday is the final book Zweig handed to his publisher before he and his wife committed suicide in 1942, despairing at the destruction of European culture resulting from by the rise of fascism. Having a bit of a completist tendency with my favourite authors, it was hard to resist another book by Zweig, particularly one which is both autobiography and memoir, describing literary Vienna’s golden age, and its sad decline through the first half of the 20th century.
Let me say at the start of this review, that despite the adulatory reception this volume had when published by Pushkin Press last year, I found it a very difficult book to read. This is not conventional autobiography in the sense of describing the relationships and events which formed the subject’s life. It is really a cultural history, in which philosophical development (and decline) is given greater prominence than the life described. I found it to be a heavy read, with page after page of solid text unrelieved by any touch of human drama or even humour to lighten it. When I look at the appreciative reviews elsewhere I feel rather embarrassed to report that I didn’t actually enjoy this book. I found it not at all difficult to see this book in the context of Zweigs imminent suicide, for it has an air of gloom and failure about it which, while not detracting from its value to those with an interest in the era, on the whole makes it an unhappy and depressing read.
Continue reading Review: The World of Yesterday – Stefan Zweig
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Like many people, I occasionally flirt with philosophy, but usually find it too abstract and inaccessible – unless of course it is set in the context of a life well-lived (or perhaps not so well!), when the personal story of the philosopher helps his teachings come alive. For this reasons, I enjoyed reading the books of Alain de Botton such as his Consolations of Philosophy, which manages to extract the main thrust of the great philosophers and apply it to modern problems and complexities.
Sarah Bakewell has provided me with another highly accessible book of wisdom in How to Live – A life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. The added value of her book is that she has extracted the core of Montaigne’s thought but set it in the context of a very readable biography, containing not just the story of his life, but also the historical context in which he lived.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) had a successful career as a Counselor in the Bordeaux Parliament and in recognition of his services was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility. However, he tired of public life and at the age of 38 retired to his Chateau to live a life of solitude among the 1500 books in his library, where he began work on his Essays.
Sarah Bakewell has somehow taken the 16th century material of the Essays and has distilled them into a very readable book for the 21st century. Understanding that few people have the time to wander through the 1000 page original, she had summarised Montaignes messages in 20 chapters, with titles such as:
- How to Live – Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow witted,
- How to Live – Survive love and loss
- How to Live – Wake from the sleep of habit
- How to Live – Reflect on everything, regret nothing.
Continue reading Review: How to Live, A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
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 Most readers in Britain are so well-supplied by books in their own language that they rarely venture into reading books in translation and therefore miss out on the best literature of other European nations. About a third of titles reviewed on A Common Reader are European books in translation and I am pleased to add The Silences of Hammerstein to this number.
Hans Magnus Enzensburger is considered to be Germany’s most important modern poet and is a highly regarded publisher and essayist. But he is little known in Britain, or presumably other English speaking nations.
His book, The Silences of Hammerstein is difficult to categorise, being in parts biographical, fictional and critical. One of its features is the way Enzensburger intersperses his narrative with imagined conversations with the main characters in his book in which he asks them pertinent questions and records the answers he thinks they would give. The book ranges far and wide, and reminds me a little of W G Sebald’s books in the way photographs are insterspersed among the pages, providing enigmatic insights into the narrative.
The Silences of Hammerstein, chronicles the life of a German General and his family as they lived their lives through the 1930s and 40s largely while being largely opposed to the rise of Nazism. Continue reading Review – The Silences of Hammerstein: Hans Magnus Enzensburger
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 I came to this book, Seeing Things by Oliver Postgate, with a mild sense of curiosity, expecting it to be a quick skim-through rather than an in-depth read. How wrong I was. Within a few pages I was hooked on this witty, beguiling life-story, a tribute to a man who reminds us how much we can use the gifts and opportunities presented to us to live a truly full life.Most people will remember Oliver Postgate as the creator of Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog,The Clangers and Bagpuss- wonderful children’s television series which he created with his business partner Peter Firmin. His eminence as a maker of childrens’ programmes was however a hard-won thing, and Oliver lived a precarious existence through the early years of television, turning his hand to a huge range of occupations while supporting his family.
Oliver was born in 1925 to North London parents of a socialist inclination. Brought up in Hendon, Oliver was exposed to a wide range of people who had a degree of influence in forming the early Labour movement, not least his maternal grandfather, George Lansbury, one-time leader of the Labour Party.
The family were well-connected in Labour circles, and often spent weekends at the house of Francis and Vera Meynell, affectionately known as Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh, where people came and went among scenes of music, debate and al fresco eating, with people such as H G Wells and Bertrand Russell in attendance. Continue reading Review: Seeing Things – Oliver Postgate
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 Sometimes you read a book which opens your mind to a world so different to your own that you wonder at the diversity of the human race as you say, “these people are so unlike me”. I am not a gambler and I don’t play poker, but I found For Richer For Poorer thoroughly entrancing from start to finish, not only because of the “alien” subject matter, but also because of Victoria Coren’s skill at communicating the mysteries of this hidden (to me) world.
Victoria Coren has been playing poker for 15 years and unlike most gamblers, has won quite a nice sum of money, not least in 2006 when she won $1m in the European Poker Championships. The subtitle of her book, “A Love Affair with Poker” hits it on the nail, but this is a love affair with no happy ending, just a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, complete ecstasy when things go well and misery when they don’t.
You have to admire her persistence. She joined the world of poker when it meant mixing with disreputable people in dingy clubs, the lure of the cards overcoming the distaste for her surroundings. The book, For Richer For Poorer, chronicles her journey from playing her big brother Giles and his friends for pennies, through to the time when she carries a fat roll of bank-notes around with her.
Continue reading Review: For Richer For Poorer – Victoria Coren
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 I find that some of the most interesting history books are those which focus on a neglected aspect of a person or event and Conspirator, Lenin in Exile, provides a fascinating and very readable portrait of Lenin and his long-suffering wife Nadya during a period of their lives which few bother to study. Helen Rappaport’s book gives its readers a very human view of the leader of the Russian revolution as he travelled through Europe while evading the attentions of the Russian secret police, the Okhrana. This is a new take on the “tour of Europe”, as the sometimes penniless but always poor couple traipse through London, Paris, Geneva, Brussels and Munich, gathering around them whoever would help them in their cause of purifying and perfecting the nascent Bolshevik movement.
While Helen Rappaport gives plenty of human interest in this book, I found an underlying tone of horror (in myself, not the book), as I read of Lenin’s unfailing fanaticism and utter ruthlessness in dealing with family, friends and revolutionary colleagues. Fanatical hardly covers it: this man was possessed of a unique energy which compelled him to work unceasingly to eliminate compromise or dissimulation in the Commuist movement. He was prepared to drive those who loved him into the ground in order to get what he wanted. At one point in the book when the author tells us that Lenin could have faced the death penalty when he was arrested in Poland, I found myself inwardly crying, “if only” when I thought ahead to the years of terror which followed the implementation of his strategies in his homeland (and how fearsome to read of Lenin’s “wonderful Georgian”, Josef Stalin who stayed with Lenin and his wife in Poland). Continue reading Review: Conspirator, Lenin in Exile – Helen Rappaport
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 I suppose one of the quickest way to get an idea about someone is to look at their bookcase, or even better, to talk to them about books which have inspired them and guided them through life. Quite a few writers have been tempted to write about their life in books – I’m thinking about Francis Spufford (The Child that Books Built), John Sutherland (The Boy Who Loved Books) and Alberto Manguel (A Reading Diary) to name a few among many. I greatly enjoyed reading these and in any case, I collect “books about books”, and when I saw Rick Gekoski’s new books, Outside of a Dog, it had to be mine.
Rick is not the first person to write his life story in the context of the books he’s read, but this one is as good as any and was a read both amusing and informative. I’ll quote from the publisher’s website to list some of the books covered:
Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg;
Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Anomalies and Perversions;
Allen Ginsberg, Howl;
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye;
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land;
Descartes, Meditations;
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding;
W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems;
F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit;
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy;
Tom Wolfe,The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test;
Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations;
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self;
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch;
D.H. Lawrence,Women in Love;
A.S. Neill, Summerhill;
Roald Dahl, Matilda;
Alice Miller, Pictures of a Childhood;
A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic;
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams;
Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy;
Peter Wright,Spycatcher; and
Rick Gekoski, Staying Up.
And there was a good enough mix of the familiar and the new to keep my interest throughout. Rick is basically an academic (ex-lecturer in English at Warwick University) turned rare book dealer, and has many contacts in the world of literature. And oh yes, he’s been a judge on the Man Booker Prize. So, as far as literature is concerned I guess he’s qualified to write about books, which he does eruditely, knowledgeably and perhaps above all, humorously. Continue reading Review: Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoire – Rick Gekoski
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