Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It is the story of a man who gets out of the concentration camp right at the end of the war and is sheltered within a village. He has a very successful post-war life, becomes mayor of the village and the village becomes a prosperous town under his rule.
Your next book is The Game of Opposites by Norman Lebrecht.
Again, this book is by someone who is appearing at Jewish Book Week, which, again, is why I have been reading it. It is set in post-war Germany, although the name ‘Germany’ is never mentioned. However, that is clearly the country. And it is the story of a man who is a prisoner in a concentration camp. Right at the end of the war he escapes from the camp and is sheltered in a nearby village. This suggests that people are being noble and brave in sheltering him but in fact it is just one family that takes him in and he stays there after the war and marries into the family.
The villagers are considered by other inmates of the prison camp to have been anything but decent towards them but the protagonist has a very successful post-war life, ultimately becoming mayor of the village and turning it into a prosperous town.
And so where is the theme of acceptance in this book?
Well, he does meet up with other inmates from the concentration camp who have very different post-war experiences. I suppose they are rather accusatory towards him for having done so well. Both these books show this considerable degree of acceptance of the circumstances which is something you don’t often hear about that much. Of course, there was a great deal of acceptance going on in the post-war period; people had to get on with their lives.
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Simon Mawer published his first novel 21 years ago and has since written seven others and two works of non-fiction. He is a trained biologist and has lived and worked in Italy for the last 30 years. Perhaps these two facts bring a different slant to his approach to writing, which The Economist has described as having ‘an inquisitive and quite un-English interest in history and science’.
