Janine di Giovanni on Love, War and Longing

Your first book is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.

This is a book about the end of the Habsburg Empire and about a father and a son, and it was the favourite book of most journalists who worked in the Balkans. It has these themes of melancholy and the Balkans is a very melancholy place, especially in autumn. This book is very evocative of that. Roth came of age at the end of the Habsburg Empire and he killed himself on the Rue des Tournelles, just two streets away from where I live. He was an alcoholic. He was one of the great European novelists of the time but is very cultish – not as widely known as he should be. He writes very evocatively and hauntingly of a vanished world, about losing your youth, your friends, your family. It’s not cheerful, but the Balkans is not a cheerful place. The father and son relationship in the book is a very damaged one. The son is a failed soldier who lets his father down in every imaginable way. There is a scene where he’s talking to his father, a typically strong figure, and he can’t shake thoughts of death. He’s haunted by death and keeps saying something like; ‘The dead, the dead.’ So, it’s also about him longing for the love of his father. It’s about longing.

Next you’ve chosen Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway’s such a jerk in many ways. He’s so macho and he treated his wives terribly – until the last one! She kind of turned the tables. He was cruel to Fitzgerald who was a more fragile figure and probably a better writer, but I love this book. This book is written from a point of weakness, late in his life when his wife was caring for him but bullying him, and he’s looking back on his life as a young man – his first love! His first wife. He treated her terribly, of course, and left her for her friend, but here he’s talking about Paris and being poor with a baby and his wife, and there is something so moving about this macho man looking back at his life with regret. I live on the Rue Notre Dame des Champs which is where they lived in this period he’s writing about, and I walk past the apartment every day and think about them. It’s not just a portrait of a lost generation, but it’s about longing for youth and about regret. I mean, he was such an arsehole, but this is his best work, I think. Just writing about Paris and being young.

Tell me about the Elliot Paul book, The Last Time I Saw Paris

Ah, this is about longing for a life that no longer exists. Elliot Paul was unknown to me until somebody recommended this book, but apparently he was quite a famous American journalist living in Paris in the 1920s, and he did this amazing thing which was to write a biography of a street, Rue de la Huchette. It’s a complete dump now this street, it’s right in a tourist area and full of Greek gyros stands, but then it was a quintessential Parisien street and Paul profiles everyone on it, from the local tramp and the prostitutes to the shop owners, doctor, dentist, and he creates this unbelievably vivid picture of life in the 20s in Paris. It’s the only biography of a street I’ve ever heard of – apart from one in Sarajevo that someone was trying to do – and I’ve never read anything like this before. He starts in 1923 and ends in the late 1930s just before the start of WWII when he goes back to New York. Then he comes back after the war and…everything’s gone.

It’s tragic. He goes back to find all the wonderful characters and some have been killed, the Jews have been deported, there are kids who have been horribly scarred by it all and he says the Nazis have made a ‘fair haul’ of this street. He writes; ‘In future years the day of the black rain will always be remembered…’

It’s so beautiful and it’s totally unknown. In a way it’s sad that such a brilliant chronicler, who far surpasses Hemingway, has been forgotten.

And now you’re cheating by having two books by Martha Gellhorn – Travels with Myself and Another and The View From the Ground.

Well, she’s a hero of mine, even though she was not very nice to other women. She was one of those people. I once interviewed her for The Times and I was so excited. She lived in Wales and I got buses and traipsed across fields and I finally got there and she opened the door and said; ‘I hope you’re not expecting lunch because you’re not getting any.’ Her book, The View from the Ground, a collection of her journalism over six decades, was the only book I took with me to Sarajevo and I used to read it every night in my sleeping bag.