Sunday Book Coveting

Most of us know Dewey doing those book coveting posts. Today I thought I too will will do it, although I might not be as regular as she was. This week I will take up books I found interesting and added to my TBR list from The New York Times, where I read the reviews online on a regular basis.

EVERY MAN DIES ALONE by Hans Fallada

This novel takes place in wartime Berlin. Early in 1941, half a year after the French capitulation to Germany, a Gestapo inspector named Escherich stands in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, contemplating a map of the city into which he has stuck 44 red-flagged pins. Each marks a spot where a different inflammatory postcard has been found — “Hetzkarten” that denounce Hitler, hand-written in heavy, clumsy print. The first card reads: “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.”

THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN by Marlon James

At the center of “The Book of Night Women” is a black-skinned, green-eyed slave woman, barely out of childhood, who struggles to transcend the violence into which she is born, a violence that begins with her first breath as a “baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell.” Orphaned when her mother dies giving birth to her, Lilith more or less raises herself in the hell of the Montpelier Estate, a closed and brutal society all its own, where nothing is as it seems and nearly everyone has secrets to conceal.

HONEYMOON IN TEHRAN: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni

For Moaveni, born and raised in California, Iran is both an intimate and a stranger, a familiar motherland and an alienating theocracy that requires permits for musical instruments and prohibits coed wedding receptions. Yet it isn’t only the contradictions of a child of exiles sorting out her identity crisis that makes this book worthwhile. It’s the seductive contradictions of the motherland itself.

A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE by Elie Wiesel

The protagonist, Doriel Waldman, is a Jewish New Yorker in his early 60s who believes he has gone mad. Born in Poland just before World War II, Doriel hid with his father, sister and brother while his mother, blond and the holder of a counterfeit Aryan identity card, fought for the resistance. Unlike his siblings, who were captured and killed, Doriel survived the war, as did his parents, though they died in a car crash soon after the liberation of the concentration camps. An aunt and uncle raised Doriel in America, but he demands to be called an orphan and never allows himself to be loved. “As far as I can read people’s gazes,” Doriel explains, “they see me as mad. And I’ve always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love.”

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa

“The Housekeeper and the Professor” tells of the adventures, such as they are, of the remarkable virtual family formed by the professor’s new cook and cleaner, the single mother of a 10-year-old boy whom the professor calls Root because his flat head reminds him of the mathematical sign for a square root. Nobody except Root really has a name. Every morning the housekeeper, who narrates the story, has to introduce herself and her son to the professor all over again. He, in turn, as he does whenever he is stuck or flustered or has extended his 80-minute window, is likely to ask her shoe size or her telephone number. He always has something amazing to say about whatever number comes up.