What I'm Reading

The Guest, Fatherland and All For Nothing

This is What I’m Reading on Letter from Berlin: Every other week I share thoughts on books that I’ve read and loved recently, along with other things I’m reading. The book links are affiliate links. I am grateful, as ever, if you choose to subscribe. Your support is essential.

We are back, baby! Our summer is over, even though many of you are still in the thick of things. Our boys are in school again (wheee!) and we have returned to our desks and life’s regular routine is in full swing and for that I am very, very grateful. The summer was wonderful, but I just love the orderly buzz of those first few back-to-school days and weeks, when everything falls into place, even though you still have a tan, the boys are still swimming in the lakes, and you are still eating your weight in daily tomato salads.

Thank you for your patience while I took a little break from What I’m Reading over the summer. I was trying to finish Classic German Cooking (nearly there!) and spend time with my family. But here we are again! And so, without further ado:

Didn’t throw this one across the room, but I’ll bet some of you did.

Ohoo, The Guest. By now, many of you have probably either seen it, read about it or read it. The coverage has been wall-to-wall! First thing to note: I read Cline’s first book, The Girls, earlier this year and found it so repellent that I ended up literally throwing it across my bedroom shortly before finishing it. So I wasn’t planning on reading The Guest, or at least not right away, but then I was sent a copy by the publisher and at the last minute, I decided to take it with me on vacation. It slumbered in my suitcase for a bit until I started reading it one afternoon at my aunt’s house in France, and once I started, I only came up for air once for dinner. I finished it later that night.

The Guest is gripping. Simmering, anxious, at times even horrifying. I had clammy hands during much of it. A Black Mirror beach read, if you know what I mean? It follows the course of a week in a young escort’s life as she tries to stay afloat in the Hamptons after having been ditched by her older boyfriend (client). She uses her considerable skill at blending in (aided by a stash of pills and her attractiveness) to find shelter, food and a modicum of safety, but the danger she is in, both from the people she hoodwinks and the man who is after her, lurks like a greasy dark shadow. It’s stomach-churning and masterfully plotted and written. But - and here is somewhat of a spoiler, so if you don’t want to know anything about it, please stop reading NOW - the end is a disappointment. Much has been written about it (I thought this was very good) and it doesn’t completely take away from the accomplishment of the rest of the book, but it felt like such a waste to me. A friend told me that The Guest was the Cline book that she ended up throwing across the room upon finishing.

Have you read it? Did you have similar feelings about the ending? I would love to know. Also! Which books have you had to throw?

For me, the best book of the summer.

If there was a theme to my reading this summer, it was Germany and its endlessly compelling history. I told you about The Shortest History of Germany in early July. Then while we were away, and Max and my mother were taking turns reading that, I read Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger, which was astonishing. For me, it is truly the book of the year so far. Bilger, a staff writer for the New Yorker, was born to German immigrants who came to the United States just after World War II. In Fatherland, he explores the history of his family during the 19th century and first half of the 20th. His maternal grandfather, trained as a teacher, not only became a Nazi, but was high enough up to have been sent to occupy an Alsatian town during the Second World War. Through Bilger’s research, though, and his incredibly sensitive exploration of Germany’s history before World War I and afterwards, a more complex picture of his grandfather, and of the country, emerges.

If The Shortest History was a macro view of Germany and its history, then Fatherland is a micro view, from the perspective of one man or one family. Fatherland attempts - and succeeds, in my opinion - to help us understand how Nazism took hold in Germany from the perspective of individual humans who were not monsters. It is a profound achievement. As anyone familiar with Bilger’s magazine writing knows, he could make paint drying interesting, so having him take on this difficult and complicated topic was so satisfying and so moving. I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I meet. You simply must read it.

Closing out my trio of German-themed books was Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing. I didn’t plan reading these three books a few weeks apart or in this order, but afterwards it felt cosmically ordained. If The Shortest History was the macro view, as I said, that tries to explain Germany rationally and completely, from ancient times to present, and Fatherland was the micro view, with a sympathetic approach that tried to show Germans as, if not victims, then people for whom, at the beginning at least, Nazism provided a kind of escape from suffering, then All For Nothing was the bleak and ferocious corrective, the blistering summation of where Nazism ultimately led the Germans. Namely to utter destruction, utter chaos and utter devastation. When I think about reading the books in this order, in this amount of time, I get goosebumps.

All for Nothing follows the fate of a group of people holed up at a grand estate in East Prussia starting in January of 1945. The Germans are losing the war, have already lost the war, for all intents and purposes, and the Russians are approaching from the East. The cast of characters includes aristocrats, a few children, the household help, a Jewish man in hiding, Ukrainian maids and a fervent local Nazi and over the course of the novel, we watch as their fates approach. This is not a book about redemption, there is no mitigation to be found. As I read, and as the Russians came closer and closer, I found myself feeling wrathful and unforgiving. Perhaps Kempowski (and so many others of his generation, who bore the guilt of their fathers) felt the same way. Certainly the rest of the world did. As the book comes to an end, and the Third Reich is snuffed out, one feels a desperate kind of satisfaction. There is no other way to end.

Halfway through: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
On my bedside: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
On my wishlist: Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski