Book Review: The Greater Hope by Ilse Aichinger

There are heaps of fiction works dealing with World War Two and the holocaust, but most of them have been written long after the unspeakable horrors and by authors who could look at the period from a safe distance, be it geographically or historically. It’s little wonder that only few eye witnesses, notably survivors felt up to letting their own dreadful experience flow into their fiction. It would have been too painful and in addition it was unlikely to make a living of such books. The Greater Hope by Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger is one of a small number of postwar novels evoking the sufferings of the war years. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old Viennese girl whose Jewish mother emigrates to the USA to escape from the Nazi regime. Her Aryan father, an army officer, rejects her and so she has to face all the incomprehensible prohibitions and dangers of the time in the care of her persecuted grandmother.

Poetry Revisited: The Lotus by Toru Dutt

The Lotus

(from Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan: 1882)

Love came to Flora asking for a flower
          That would of flowers be undisputed queen,
          The lily and the rose, long, long had been
Rivals for that high honor. Bards of power
Had sung their claims. “The rose can never tower
          Like the pale lily with her Juno mien“—
          “But is the lily lovelier?“ Thus between
Flower-factions rang the strife in Psyche's bower.
“Give me a flower delicious as the rose
          And stately as the lily in her pride“—
“But of what color?“—„Rose-red,“ Love first chose,
          Then prayed—“No, lily-white—or, both provide;“
          And Flora gave the lotus, “rose-red“ dyed,
And “lily-white“—the queenliest flower that blows.

Toru Dutt (1856-1877)
Indian poet in English and French

Book Review: The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergović

Every end comprises everything that was before. This is especially true for us human beings because not just own experiences make us the people who we are but through socialisation we also carry on our shoulders the material and psychological burden of our ancestors, i.e. of entire history. Time heals the wounds or makes them fester beneath the surface. In The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergović the turbulent history of the Balkan countries that once formed Yugoslavia materialises in 97-year-old Regina Delavale who has seen it all and who finds her accidental end knocked out by tranquilisers in a hospital in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2002 after senile dementia has irrevocably turned her into a violent, abusive and wicked monster. Going backwards in time her daughter Dijana evokes the forming, if not traumatising events of her own and her mother’s life until her birth in 1905 and even a little beyond.

Poetry Revisited: A May Night On The Mountains by Henry Lawson

A May Night On The Mountains

(from Australian Town and Country Journal: 29 June 1889)

’Tis a wonderful time when these hours begin,
These long ‘small hours’ of night,
When grass is crisp, and the air is thin,
And the stars come close and bright.
The moon hangs caught in a silvery veil,
From clouds of a steely grey,
And the hard, cold blue of the sky grows pale
In the wonderful Milky Way.

There is something wrong with this star of ours,
A mortal plank unsound,
That cannot be charged to the mighty powers
Who guide the stars around.
Though man is higher than bird or beast,
Though wisdom is still his boast,
He surely resembles Nature least,
And the things that vex her most.

Oh, say, some muse of a larger star,
Some muse of the Universe,
If they who people those planets far
Are better than we, or worse?
Are they exempted from deaths and births,
And have they greater powers,
And greater heavens, and greater earths,
And greater Gods than ours?

Are our lies theirs, and our truth their truth,
Are they cursed for pleasure’s sake,
Do they make their hells in their reckless youth
Ere they know what hells they make?
And do they toil through each weary hour
Till the tedious day is o’er,
For food that gives but the fleeting power
To toil and strive for more?

Henry Lawson (1867-1922)
Australian writer and bush poet

Book Review: No Silver Spoon by Katie Flynn

Much in life comes as a surprise, be it an agreeable or an unpleasant one. Biographies without more or less significant swerves, detours or even sharp turns are rare although we tend to believe that the rich and successful have to overcome less obstacles and can head straight towards their goals. And yet, the way we cope with the vicissitudes of life is just as important as the right focus. As children neither the Irish girl Dympna nor the Liverpudlian boy Jimmy in No Silver Spoon by Katie Flynn could expect to go into the direction that events made them choose, but they both accept the challenge and are determined to make the best of whatever may come. Their paths have crossed and separated already twice before love finally joins them and fate tears them apart again in Liverpool of the 1930s. But what is meant to be, will be.

Poetry Revisited: The Music of the Stream by Janet Hamilton

The Music of the Stream

(from Poems and Ballads: 1868)

Is it a spirit voice—an angel’s song—
That pours its liquid melody among
The mossy stones that break the rippling sheen,
Lone Calder! gliding thy fair banks between?

No! ’tis the voice—the music of the stream,
That chimes harmonious with the poet’s dream:
A dream of beauty, radiant and divine,
A halo floating round the muses’ shrine.

Oft in sweet summer prime I singing strayed
Down yon deep dell and through the woodland glade,
To woo fair Nature in soft Doric rhymes
And hear the tinkling of thy silver chimes.

And, ah, what glorious wealth of wilding flowers!
What wealth of fragrant blossoms on thy bowers!
What odorous breathings of the summer breeze!
What chorus of sweet singers in the trees!

O Nature! fairer, dearer to my heart
Than pictured scenes of highest, rarest art!
What sweeter chord can charm the spirit dream
Than the weird music of the singing stream?

Fond Memory treasures in her deepest cell
The woodland glade, the deep romantic dell,
Where oft the summer day too brief would seem,
When wandering, musing, by lone Calder’s stream.

"A change came o’er the spirit of my dream
I heard no more the music of the stream
The flowers and blooms were withered, trampled, soiled,
Nature’s fair face of every charm despoiled.

For, lo! obscuring the fair light of day,
The genii of the mines, in grim array,
With baleful wings the landscape shadowed o’er,
And beauty, bloom, and song exist no more.

Janet Hamilton (1795-1873)
Scottish poet

Book Review: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

The years of the Weimar Republic in Germany between 1919 and 1933 were a crucial period in European and world history. The political atmosphere after World War One and after the abdication of Emperor William II. was such that it prevented people both from coming to terms with the lost war and from developing trust in democracy and the parliamentary republic. Moreover, they were economically hard times that reduced many to poverty and left them in despair because life was only slowly getting better. Set in 1927/28 the German interwar classic Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin shows eighteen months in the life of Franz Biberkopf. He has just been released from prison and is determined to start a new, i.e. an honest life, but he’s a trusting kind of man and can’t understand why life puts obstacles into his way and everybody tries to drag him back into the world of petty crime.