. . .  Great Britain Europe Earth Outer Space The Universe

In his book,  The Address Book, Tim Radford has taken that concept and written a set of [...]]]> Like many school children of my era, when writing my name and address in a book I would extend the address to include cosmic information such as,

. . .  Great Britain
Europe
Earth
Outer Space
The Universe

In his book,  The Address Book, Tim Radford has taken that concept and written a set of extended essays on the concept of place, resulting in a fascinating meditation on our place in the world around us.  Starting with a chapter headed The Number and The Street, he meanders through The Town, The Country, The Nation and so on right through to The Solar System, The Galaxy and The Universe.

This could seem an artificial concept which would soon run out of steam, but Tim Radford begins well and takes his readers with him as they explore their own place in the Universe and make his meditation their own.  I can’t say I agree with his views throughout but at least he provoked a dialogue in me which made me think about my own sense of place and reflect on my own feelings for town, county, nation and panet.

Most of us feel a sense of affection to the place we live, and Tim takes an obvious delight in the town he lived in for 23 years, the Sussex town of Hastings.  I was reminded of Louise Dean’s book, The Old Romantic which is set in this rather run-down coastal town.  In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Louise Dean said,

Hastings has been on its uppers for many, many years – there are rumours, very much exagerrated, about Hastings having a revival . . . but its still humble and humbling, and fascinating and unkempt and wayward, and in some ways its very much a character itself.

Tim Radford says something similar.

The appeal of old Hastings had a great deal to do with its long-term impoverishment, its place at the bottom of the pecking order.

Hastings Old Town

If ever there was somewhere to inspire a writer, Hastings must be that place, with its run-downs estates, its genteel “old town”, the coach-loads of day-trippers on the sea-front and the strangely cosmopolitan population (Hastings has always attracted drifters of all nationalities).

In an odd addendum to this chapter on “The Town”, Tim suddenly tells us that it took him a year to write the chapter but that he has now moved with his family to Eastbourne, about 20 miles up the coast from Hastings.  He writes, “the reasons for the move are not important; what matters is that we felt no great wrench, no dislocation and no sense of loss as we made it”.  I can’t be the only reader who finds this a funny end to a chapter – it throws away the previous 20 pages in which Tim has been writing about the long-term influences of places we live in.  In casting off poor old Hastings in a few dismissive phrases Tim seems to undo his previous enthusiasm which made us want to go and take a look at the place.

We then move on to “The County” and find ourselves still in Sussex.  No doubt all counties have a unique flavour to them but Sussex certainly has its share of writers willing to claim it as their favoured home, not least Rudyard Kipling.  Tim notes that the landscape of Rudyard Kipling’s stories from his time at his home in Burwash “seems to be palpably, inescapably Sussex”, for without being particularly specific his “obvious fascination with a spirit of place, that sharp but intangible sense that here felt very different from there“.  In England the “county” can mean as much as the town, with some counties such as Yorkshire evoking a sense of allegiance and loyalty from its residents as strong as that felt for nations.

Moving up a level, Tim writes in his next chapter of  “The Country”.   He writes as someone who emigrated to England in 1961 having spent his childhood and youth in Auckland, New Zealand.  He describes the English of that time as a people “who lived in grimy, draughty, damp and usually freezing houses, often without bathrooms, who wore the same shirts for a week (changing the collar from time to time) and who inhaled a mixture of soot, sulpher, pollen, cigarette tobacco and the aroma of stale frying fat”.

He writes in this vein for a further page or so, “cold, grubby, war-damaged and depressed”, “endured crowded public transport, perpetuated prepostrous class attitudes and deferred to a dismissive bureaucracy”, “enjoyed the illusion but not the reality of great maritime resources”, “its cafés unwelcoming with bitter coffee and nauseating provender”, etc, etc.  Sometimes a writer gets into a groove and can’t seem to get out of it.  I lived through that era and remember it as an era of optimism and new prosperity.  I went, in clean clothes, to a bright, modern primary school building with picture windows and I lived in a pretty suburban home with cherry tress in the garden.  Perhaps Tim watched too many 1940s black and white films before he wrote this chapter.

Millet, The Angelus

We then move on to “The Nation” and “The Continent”.  Tim’s earliest impressions of Europe (from his New Zealand home) were gained from paintings like Millet’s The Angelus, in which an elderly couple, “heads bowed as if in prayer, standing in a potato field . . . the landscape is flat, and there is the spire of a church in the distance”.  Paintings like this, set on the great European plain, helped Tim to understand, “the intricate set of connections that stretch across national and regional borders. . . “  and also a confirmation of the global nature of his childhood Catholic education.  He goes on to discuss other European connections – Millet with Zola, Marx with the Bible, plenty with hunger.  He goes on to mention the great heritage of European literature and writes “books were the making of modern Europe”, with the printed book reintroducing Europeans to the ancient past  while enabling them to communicate renaissance learning across the continent.

In Tim’s following chapters, The Hemisphere, The Planet, The Solar System, The Galaxy we move on to more scientific ground covering the history of geographic and cosmic discoveries, from Galileo and Coperinicus to Edwin Hubble and his great telescope.  In his final chapter, The Universe we deal with the unanswerable topics, but the words to describe them are strangely unsatisfying:  “magnetic monopole”, “cosmic inflation”, “supersymmetry” are unenlightening to those without a scientific bias in their interests.  Are we any the wiser having read contemporary theory about the origin and final destination of the universe?  I think I echo Tim’s final words, “We are all displaced persons: even the luckiest of us are in some sense asylum seekers, refugees on a journey from somewhere to nowhere, creatures with a sense of a lost Eden, convinced that there must be a heaven, a place where we belong“.

The Address Book has been an interesting read, a reminder that a set of essays can be as readable as any novel.  It provoked my own thought processes while I read it and while I don’t agree with everything Tim Radford has written I would definitely recommend his book to anyone who has an interest in our place in the universe.

I have recently been engrossed in a first person account of the Polish resistance movement in World War II Story of a Secret [...]]]> Note – since publishing this review, I have been sent some interesting personal reminiscences of Jan Karski which I have published in two parts here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

I have recently been engrossed in a first person account of the Polish resistance movement in World War II Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World.
After the invasion of Poland by the Germans in 1939, Jan Karski became a liaison officer with the Polish underground, travelling across closed borders to Paris and eventually infiltrating the Warsaw Ghetto and taking eye-witness accounts to a sceptical Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt.

You are probably going to hear quite a lot about this book in coming months – a recent article in The Observer reported that film-maker Ian Canning, the producer of The King’s Speech has acquired the rights to the memoir from Penguin with Ralph Fiennes being a likely contender for Karski.

It is difficult to understand why this book was never published in Britain when in America 400,000 copies were sold during the war.  This new edition contains additional information added by Karski before his death in 2000, material which he could not reveal during the war.

The bravery of Jan Karski was exceptional.  Reporting directly to General Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister in London, Karski risked his life throughout the war, being captured by both the Russians and the Germans and suffering brutal torture at the hands of the SS.  Few people would volunteer to be smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto by the Jewish Resistance, and later to infiltrate the Belzec death camp in the uniform of an Estonian guard.

The history of Poland is sorrowful in the extreme and it is doubtful whether any European nation suffered so much in the 20th century.  When the Russian army crossed the Polish frontier to help defend the nation against the Russians they came as invaders in their own right and Karski found himself shipped back to Russia as a slave labourer, an agonising journey in freight cars taking four days and nights.  He was eventually able to participate in a prisoner exchange that saw him shipped back to the German sector and during the long journey back, he was able to jump from the train at night-time eventually finding his way to a Polish village where he found temporary refuge.

Making his way back to Warsaw, he made contact with the resistance who were initially highly suspicious of him, but as he completed tasks successfully he was trusted with more responsibility and made his way to Paris as a courier to the government in exile. His trip down through Eastern Europe and then into Italy and across the French border was full of the type of border incidents y ou would expect, but when he eventually made his way up to Paris, Karski was rewarded with a meeting with General Sikorski himself leading to lunch in a restaurant where vital information was exchanged.

Back in Warsaw, Karski again found himself being despatched to Paris but by this time, Holland and Belgium had fallen to the Germans and the army was marching on Paris.  If the journey was difficult before it would be doubly so this time.  Alas, while crossing the Carpathian mountains on foot in the company of a young guide, Karski was captured by German guards and handed over to the Gestapo for interrogation involving torture and beatings.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Incredibly, Karski was able to escape from captivity and the Resistance movement hid him in a remote farmhouse for three weeks while he recovered – before being sent back to Warsaw and further missions.

I could write at length about Karski’s two visits to the Warsaw Ghetto and his infiltration of a Jewish death camp.  These are as horrible as you might expect, but enough has been said about these things in other places for me to wish to add further details from Story of a Secret State.  However, these accounts do not occupy a large part of the book, and the tone overall is of an overwhelming passion to get the news out of what was going on in these hellish places.

I think the thing I would say about this book is that its immensely readable - Karski has a vivid writing style which draws the reader along with him.  The book has the urgency of a newspaper report written on the day of the events described.  This is no dull history, but an eye-witness account as readable as any novel and you feel Karski’s passion to communicate with the outside world.

For me, the book acted as a useful counterpoint to Richard Zimler’s recent fictional account of the Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Anagramswhich I reviewed here.

A follow-up article containing a substantial amount of additional information from Dawn Barclift has been published here.

Edmund de Waal is a renowned ceramic artist who’s work has been exhibited in Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  He can trace his ancestry back to a wealthy Ukrainian family who made their fortune from grain exporting and later banking, and who had spacious and luxurious homes [...]]]>

The new illustrated edition

Edmund de Waal is a renowned ceramic artist who’s work has been exhibited in Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  He can trace his ancestry back to a wealthy Ukrainian family who made their fortune from grain exporting and later banking, and who had spacious and luxurious homes in Vienna, Tokyo and Paris.  When Edmund inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese netsuke carvings from his Uncle Ignace, he felt prompted to investigate their place in the family history.  The Hare With Amber Eyes is the result.

The book opens with De Waal studying in Tokyo in 1991 while on a two year scholarship, visiting his Uncle Iggie (Ignace) in his home in Tokyo, which he shares with Jiro, his partner of 41 years.  Ignace has a wonderful collection of netsuke which has been in the family since the late 19th century.  Three years later, Uncle Iggie dies, and Jiro writes and signs a document bequeathing the netsuke to Edmund once Jiro himself has gone.

When Edmund eventually owns the netsuke he finds himself greatly intrigued by the history of this remarkable collection, and realises that all he really knows are a few anecdotes, which become thinner in the telling.  The only answer is to carry out a proper investigation into their story -

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me.  Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it.  Because it will complicate your life.  Because it will make someone else envious.  There is no easy story in legacy.  What is remembered and what is forgotten?  There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.  What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?

The collection originates with Charles Ephrussi, who lived in Paris.  The family were the greatest grain exporters in the world and had their own coat of arms and had taken many steps away from “those wagons of wheat creaking in from the Urkaine” until they were bankers and financiers.  Many family biographies rely on speculation and anecdote but as Edmund traces the ghosts of this time during his visits to Paris, it is evident that this family history has been preserved in letters and documents and is far more reliable than many similar attempts to capture the past.

Charles was an incredibly wealthy young man and had the freedom to do what he liked with his money. He travels Europe collecting works of art and furnishing his grand house in Paris.  Charles was a member of the exclusive artistic salons of the time, and knew literary and artistic figures, including Marcel Proust who based his character Charles Swann on him.  The preface to Proust’s early study of Ruskin dedicates the book to “M Charles Ephrussi, always to good to me”.  Charles bought paintings by Manet, Degas, Monet, Sisley, Renoir and many other impressionists.  There was a great interest in all things Japanese and before long he acquired the collection of netsuke which is the subject of this book.

As we go into the 20th century, the collection of netsuke is passed to Edmund’s grandparents in Vienna, and we read of the opulent lifestyle so abruptly brought to a close with the unification of Germany and Austria under Hitler.  These events are immediately followed by persecution of the Ephrussis along with many other Jewish families.  The bank is sequestered by the Nazi regime and their opulent house is ransacked and looted, with the family being allocated just two small rooms at the back of the house.

Their Aryan servant Anna is employed by the Nazis to pack up the household’s belongings into crates, but Anna takes it upon herself to hide the netsuke, three or four at a time,  in hear apron pocket.  When Edmund’s grandmother returns to Vienna after the war (they had managed to escape to Britain just as doors were closing), she meets up with Anna again, who returns the netsuke to her.  These little Japanese figures have had a chequered history indeed and they now seem firmly destined to eventually end up in London with Edmund, despite a long period when they were passed to his Uncle Iggie in Tokyo.

Edmund de Waal has turned out to be a more than satisfactory caretaker for the next stage of the journey of these little Japanese carvings.  They already have a long and tumultuous history but are currently at rest in Edmund’s North London home.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is a lovely book.  I have read similar accounts of family history where too much is assumed, where scenes are guessed at, conversations created where none could possible be recalled, and personalities are elaborated until they are far too larger than life.  Edmund de Waal seems to be a very careful writer.  He has only written about what he knows and what he can prove from primary sources.  This gives the book a far greater sense of authenticity than many others.  In addition, as an artist himself and a creator of fine porcelain objects, he is well suited to trace the course through of these netsuke over the last 150 years – he is wholly equipped to understand the meaning of such things and is adept at communicating his love for them with his readers.

All this matters because my job is to make things.  How objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question.  I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots.  I can remember the weight and balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume.  I can read how and edge creates tension or loses it . . . I can see how it works with the objects that sit nearby.  How it displaces a small part of the world around it.

The book is nicely produced and is illustrated with in-text photographs of Edmunds family and the places they lived in.  The only omission is pictures of the netsuke themselves.  Fortunately a few images of his collection are online here and here.

See a video of Edmund de Waal talking about the ceramic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum here

You can send this post to your Kindle by filling in the form below.  Neither of the email addresses you supply will be stored by the system.

[kindlethis]

In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland.  His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to [...]]]>

In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland.  His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to think about the nature of the Allied bombing campaign over Germany.

Then, being conscious of the poetic legacy of the First World War (Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke etc), he began to wonder why the Second World War did not produce a similar crop of memorable poetry.  The result is a book part history, part memoir, part poetic history, but all beautifully written, with a style that befits a teacher of English Literature and a writer for the New York Times Book Review.

The work of Bomber Command in the latter years of Word War II  is of course mired in controversy.  It seems impossible to speak of what they did with unconditional admiration, despite the fact that the Allies would probably not have won the war without the massive contribution of so many brave young men who flew in Wellingtons and Lancaster to wreak destruction on German industrial centres – and ancient cities.  As Winston Churchill said, “the fighters are our salvation, but the bombers are our means of victory”.

So great has been our embarrassment at the scale of the bombing campaign that it is only now that Bomber Command are going to get a memorial in Central London.   It takes a book like Bomber County to remind us of the sacrifice made by the airmen who flew dangerous missions over and over again, usually until they eventually failed to return from that fatal run when anti-aircraft fire finally brought them down.

No 619 Squadon Avro Lancaster III

Despite the fact that 55,000 Allied airmen were killed during the five years of the bombing campaign, film of the destruction of German cities shows such devestation and suffering that the achievments of Bomber Command seem to be forever tainted.  We should of course remember that the German blitz on London, Coventry, Liverpool, Plymouth and Glasgow  preceded the assembly of the lethal force of aeroplanes which hit back at Germany in an attempt to force Hitler to surrender.

Daniel Swift begins his book by describing a visit with his father to the site at which his grandfather’s body was washed up after his Lancaster came down after a raid on Munster.

The beach where the body was washed up is wide and white, with cafés raised on stilts and couples drinking beer in the sand.  There are windsurfers, children smacking the waves.  He came to land in the middle of a summer holiday, and the mismatch is startling . . . what we are doing is looking for the memory of a corpse.  But there is no sense of him here . . .

They find the the bright red lighthouse where the dunes fall into the sea where his grandfather was first buried in a “shambolic, rambling” cemetry, and find a café nearby with faded sepia photos on the walls and tables of children eating plates of chips and drinking Coke.   The events they have come to commemorate all seem so very long ago.

The next few chapters are as much reflection as history, although the terrible circumstances of the campaign keep breaking in – the hosing out of bodily remains from gun turrets, the deaths by incineration, and down below, the fire-storms, the melting tarmac which clogged the shoes of people trying to run away, the sheer atrocity of fire falling from the sky.  Daniel Swift turns to poets and writers of the time to try to get a feeling of humanity among the machinery of death.  We read firstly of Virginia Woolf walking through London on a January afternoon in 1941 (perhaps reminding us that we were bombed first) -

. . . by the Tube to the Temple; and there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares; gashed, dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builders yard.  Grey dirt and broken windows; sightseers; all that completeness ravished and demolished.

She writes in her diary of “going to London to be bombed”, and speaks of the searchlights converging on a spot exactly above her roof – “at any moment a bomb may fall on this very room.  Even down in peaceful Sussex, at Monks House, she thinks she hears the guns on the channel ports and remained haunted by the air raids, some friends later blaming the bombers for her eventual suicide.

Daniel Swift moves on to the poetry of Cecil Day Lewis, not quite a “war poet” but with some cogent contributions to the literature of the period -

Speak for the air, your element, you hunters
Who range across the ribbed and shifting sky;
Speak for whatever gives you mastery -
Wings that bear out your purpose, quick responsive
Finger, a fighting heart, a kestrel’s eye.

Daniel reads on through Mervyn Peake, T S Eliot, and American poets Randall Jarrett and John Ciaridi, each making their attempts to make human sense out of the mindless suffering which results from flinging high-explosives through the air to land on unwitting citizens below.

While writing the book, Daniel visited cities which his grandfather bombed and met elderly people who remembered the war years.  In Cologne, he meets Herr Boll who tells him that as a schoolboy the early raids provided excitement and spectacle, with competitions among the boys to find the biggest piece of shrapnel.  By the time of the Grossangriff, the big raid, thousands were being killed and injured and the city was devastated – “the city administration stopped repairing damaged buildings in December 1943″ and a report stated that “money as a medium of exchange is limited to a smaller sector of the economy”.  By October 1944 even the firefighters had given up and “Cologne was the perfect ruin, and what survived like the front of the cathedral, stood only to mark its loss”.

Dresden after the bombing

Daniel’s grandfather dropped seven 500lb bombs over Munster.  Daniel visits the city archives and discovered reports of the pitiful state of the population as the war continued.  He goes on to meet an elderly clergyman who became a flak assistant at the age of 15, and he tells Daniel  of how he read Dante’s Inferno while waiting for the bombers to arrive.  Later he meets two elderly sisters who treat him as a friend and express regret that his grandfather died “too young”.

The sixth chapter of Bomber County, The Sadness of Soldiers, goes into the incredibly painful matter of the morality of the campaign.  ”Those who want to memorialise the bombers founder here in the last week of May 1943″.  The case for justifying the campaign seems to stumble over the classic just-war principles such as “indiscriminate attacks must be avoided” and “loss of civilian life must be proportional to the military advantage anticipated”.  But George Orwell, while accepting the terrible nature of the campaign wrote “there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsiblity for its more obviously barbarous features.  War is by its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that”.

To say I enjoyed reading this book would probably sound callous, as though one could read of such things and not be moved, even dismayed.  I am glad I read it however, and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the history of the era or in the morality of war in general.  Its strong point is the personal history of Daniel and his family and the valiant way he has tried to find out everything about his grandfather’s part in the war.   The book successfully combines biography, history, travelogue, and a more philosophical reflection on the nature of the war and the poetry and prose it inspired.  It deserves a significant place in the literature about the period.

The book is beautifully designed and produced.  It has a simple white binding with lettering suggestive of a war grave, and then a three-quarter length slip cover containing a sepia reproduction of a Paul Nash painting of bombers over Berlin.  It is printed on creamy paper with elegant type-setting.

The image of Dresden comes from the German Federal Archive

This is the 200th full-length review I’ve published on A Common Reader.  A sort of milestone. . .

I have been subscribing to Granta magazine for quite a few years now and enjoy its quality writing on a vast range of subjects.  Its a well-produced journal, not the sort of thing you want to [...]]]>

This is the 200th full-length review I’ve published on A Common Reader.  A sort of milestone. . .

I have been subscribing to Granta magazine for quite a few years now and enjoy its quality writing on a vast range of subjects.  Its a well-produced journal, not the sort of thing you want to throw away, and I find with most editions that there are one or two articles which still in my mind and make me want to come back to them, often years later.  Articles (both fiction and factual) are written by a wide range of writers, including such notables Jonathan Raban, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster, Elaine Showalter and countless others.

Every so often a book comes your way which is satisfying in many different ways.  In Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family the writing is excellent and the variety of pieces is sufficiently wide that every one comes as a surprise when you read it.  The physicality of the book is pleasing – it feels big and substantial, the typeface and layout work well.  Its a book you can dip in and out of and as you read it, you know its going to remain on your shelf to be dipped in and out of for years to come.

Liz Jobey (Associated Editor of Granta) has selected 27 pieces about the family, taken from Granta magazines from 1995 to the present day, all of which, whether fiction of non-fiction, explore the complexity of family relationships and the stresses and strains they generate (and occasional joys).

The range is vast, covering as many aspects of family life as I can think of.  We have John Lanchester describing his father’s early retirement,  Diana Athill describing an early end to a pregnancy, and A L Kennedy describing her boxing grandfather.  There are so many pieces which stick in the mind its hard to know which one’s to mention.  Linda Grant’s description of shopping with her dementia-afflicted mother is both funny and wise and leads inevitably to the day she has to go into a nursing home.  The second piece in the book, Bicycle Thieves by Blake Morrison, tells how following the theft of his son’s bicycle, Blake tries to retrieve it from a poor London estate, but only causes huge embarrassment for himself in a way which I’d love to describe, but can’t for fear of ruining the piece for anyone else.

Granta magazines

There are some  lovely pieces here – Orhan Pamuk writing about his youth, scheming to avoid childhood vaccinations and gambling with his brother for cigarette cards as stakes.  Or Hilary Mantel using a story about pet dogs as a way-in to writing about real childhood griefs and fears.  I particularly liked Tim Park’s (see my earlier review) piece, “Paulo” about a mother’s relationship over 25 years with her schizophrenic son.

And yet although these pieces might appear to be too diverse for the book to have any sense of unity, it is Granta’s editor’s particular skill to select those which somehow complement each other.  Although the book consists of many different styles and subjects, there is a unity about it all, and the overall message is that family life though difficult is maintained by the complexity and variety of  human relationships at its heart.

I am pleased I have this book and would recommend it to anyone who appreciates good writing and enjoys shorter pieces as a change from longer, more time-consuming novels.

Newspaper Reviews

Marianne Brace in The Independent
Cassandra Jardine in The Daily Telegraph
Ian Thomson in The Guardian

A page about the book on the Granta website