Solzhenitsyn, Alexander "His Great Stories"

Solschenizyn, Alexander (Александр Исаевич Солженицын/Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) "Große Erzählungen: Iwan Denissowitsch; Zum Nutzen der Sache; Matrjonas Hof; Zwischenfall auf dem Bahnhof Kretschetowka" (His Great Stories: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - 1962; For the Good of the Cause - 1963; Matryona's House - 1963; An Incident at Krechetovka Station - 1963) (Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha; Для пользы дела/ lja pol'zy dela; Матрёнин двор/Matrjonin dvor; Случай на станции Кречетовка/Sluchaj na stancii Krechetovka) - 1962/63

I am not a huge fan of short stories but I always wanted to read something by Solzhenitsyn. So, when I found this book that started with one of his greatest tales, "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", I thought I'd give it a go.

Since there isn't an English collection of the same stories available, I will just talk about every single part of the book individually, don't worry, there are only four stories.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha) - 1962

We always hear about the Gulag, the prisoners who sent to Siberia and have to work there etc. But we never really know what is going on there, what the work is like, how the prisoners are kept.

Unless we read about the one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, starting the instant he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them again in the evening.

And once we read it, we understand why this writer was awared the Nobel Prize for Literature. If he hadn't written anything else, he still would have been one of the greatest authors on earth. While reading this, you are standing next to Ivan, you suffer with him, you follow him. And he seems to be a born survivor, one who can deal with a lot of things, can get that extra ration of terrible soup they all yearn for.

This is a very moving novel by someone who experienced the Gulag. He spent eight years there and then was exiled for life to Kazakhstan.

Brilliant story, brilliant writing.

Description:
"First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy" - Harrison Salisbury"

"For the Good of the Cause" (Russian: Для пользы дела/Dlja pol'zy dela) - 1963

Another great story about the downsides of the Soviet Union. A story of bureaucrats who are overdoing it. Who don't look for the benefit of the people, just for their own benefit.

This is only a short novella with less than a hundred pages and I do n't want to give too much away but the language is just as brilliant as in "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and the people are described just as well.

Description:
"In For the Good of the Cause, Solzhenitsyn presents a remarkable cross-section of Soviet life. He runs the whole gamut, from ordinary students, workers, and teachers to the omnipotent officials in Moscow, terrifying in their faceless, Kafkaesque anonymity.
Like his world famous novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, For the Good of the Cause, set in a new provincial school, is a scathing indictment of the victimisation of ordinary, decent people by Soviet careerist bureaucrats. Solzhenitsyn presents the conflicts between right and wrong, between the freedom of the individual and the harshness of the system with absolute sincerity and conviction."

"Matryona's House" (Russian: Матрёнин двор/Matrjonin dvor) - 1963

Another great story where we get to know the "little man" or in this case the "little woman" who had to make do with what they were given or allowed to have. This story is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences while teaching after leaving the Gulag.

Description:
"In 1956, after leaving behind his ordeal in the gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wanted to get lost in a quiet corner of the USSR, and applied for employment as a mathematics teacher. While looking for accommodations in the town that was sent, saw the hut of Matrona, an elderly widow who lived with a lame cat and a goat for company and decided to stay there.
'Matryona's House' is the tale of an old peasant woman, whose tenacious struggle against cold, hunger, and greedy relatives is described by a young man who only understands her after her death."

"An Incident at Krechetovka Station" aka "We Never Make Mistakes" (Russian: Случай на станции Кречетовка/Sluchaj na stancii Krechetovka) - 1963

Apparently, this story is also based on real life events, an accident that happened during World War II. I can only repeat myself by saying that the author is a great storyteller.

Description:
"In 'An Incident at Krechetovka Station' a Red Army lieutenant is confronted by a disturbing straggler soldier and must decide what to do with him."

I will certainly read more by this fantastic author.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature".

Book Quotes of the Week

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." Cicero

"Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world: making the most of one’s best." Harry Emerson Fosdick

"There are bits and pieces of yourself scattered in every book you read." Janaya Jessalyn

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space." Jeanette Winterson

"Books can make your imagination go beyond limits." N.N. 
[If anyone can tell me the originator of this quote, I'd be very thankful and would happily include the name.]

Find more book quotes here.

Bivald, Katarina "The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend"

Bivald, Katarina "The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend" (Swedish: Läsarna i Broken Wheel rekommenderar) - 2013

I wouldn't call this one of my favourite books because the plotline is pretty "chick-litty". Sara is Swedish and works in a Bookshop. Amy is American and lives in a remote village. They swap books and ideas about books.

And that's what caught me. Many Scandinavian authors are mentioned. Therefore, I made a list of all the books and authors they talked about. There are a lot of interesting books here though some of them are tending towards chick literature to me and I'm not a huge fan of crime stories, so a few of them would not be on my reading list.

Alcott, L.M. "An Old Fashioned Girl"; "Little Women"
Austen, Jane "Pride & Prejudice" (second review); Sanditon
Auster, Paul
Bondeson, Euthanasia - crime stories
Brontë sisters 
Brontë, Charlotte "Jane Eyre"; "Villette"
Brown, Dan (The Da Vinci Code)
Bulgakov, Mikhail
Child, Lee - Jack Reacher series
Christie, Agatha - crime fiction
Connelly, Michael - crime fiction
Coupland, Douglas "All Families are Narcotic"
DeMille, Nelson "The General's Daughter"; "Word of Honor"
Dickens, Charles 
Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Crime and Punishment; The Adolescent; The Gambler)
Evans, Nicholas "The Horse Whisperer
Fielding, Helen - Bridget Jones Series; "Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination"
Fitzgerald, F. Scott "Tender Is the Night" 
Flagg, Fannie "Fried Green Tomatoes";"A Redbird Christmas"
García Márquez, Gabriel (One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the time of Colera; The General in his Labyrinth)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von "The Sorrows of Young Werther"
Grisham, John "A Time to Kill"; "The Rainmaker"
Guillou, Jan - Carl Hamilton series
Guareschi, Giovannino - Don Camillo Series
Hanff, Helene "84 Charing Cross Road"; "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street"
Heller, Joseph "Catch-22"
Hemingway, Ernest (The Old Man and the Sea; For Whom the Bell Tolls)
Highsmith, Patricia "The Price of Salt
Joyce, James "Ulysses"
Keyes, Marian (Rachel's Holiday)
Kinsella, Sophie - Shopaholic Series
Läckberg, Camilla
Larsson, Stieg - Millenium Trilogy
Lee, Harper "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Lindquist, Ulla Carin "Rowing Without Oars: A Memoir of Living and Dying" (Ro utan åror: En bok om livet och döden)
Marklund, Liza - crime stories
Malraux, Phil
Martinson, Moa
Montgomery, L. M. "Anne of Green Gables"
Morgan, Jude "The Taste of Sorrow" (about the Brontë sisters)
Morrison, Toni "Beloved"
Murdoch, Iris "The Sea, The Sea"
Oates, Joyce Carol (the characters and I guess in this case the author agrees with me that she should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature a long long time ago)
Paolini, Christopher - Eragon series
Pratchett, Terry
Proulx, Annie "The Shipping News"
Proust, Marcel "In Search of Lost Time" aka "Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu)
Roth, Philip (Zuckerman Unbound; The Ghost Writer)
Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter Series 
Shaffer, Mary Ann & Barrows, Annie "The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society"
Shakespeare, William (Hamlet; Macbeth; Romeo and Juliet)
Sparks, Nicholas "A Walk to Remember"
Steinbeck, John "Grapes of Wrath"; "Of Mice and Men"
Stein, Gertrude "Geography and Plays"
Stockett, Kathryn "The Help"
Stowe, Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"
Thomas, Dylan
Thoreau, Henry David "Walden"
Twain, Mark "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; "Pudd'nhead Wilson. Those extraordinary twins"
Waller, Robert James "The Bridges of Madison County"
Wilde, Oscar 
Witter, Bret; Myron, Vicki  "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World"
Young, Elizabeth "Asking for Trouble"
The Bible

They also mention a list that seems to be interesting:
Mr. Rothberg's Best American Authors List

From the back cover:
"Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen...

Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist - even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory.

All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel and to convince them that reading is one of the great joys of life. But she makes some unconventional choices that could force a lot of secrets into the open and change things for everyone in town. Reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, this is a warm, witty book about friendship, stories, and love."

Book Quotes of the Week

"Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money." John Lyly

"We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life." John Milton

"Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." Mary Ann Shaffer

"The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself." A.W. Tozer, Man The Dwelling Place Of God

"By eating we overcome hunger; and by study ignorance." Chinese Proverb

Find more book quotes here.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi "Americanah"

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi "Americanah" - 2013

I read "Half of a Yellow Sun" earlier this year and really liked it. This is another novel about Nigeria even though a very different one. It takes place about thirty years after the events in the first book (Biafra war). The author tells the story about a young woman from Nigeria who emigrates to the United States and comes back years later.

This was an interesting book for me not only because of all the information you can get about Nigeria but also because it resembles my life. I didn't flee from a war-torn region but I have lived abroad for almost half of my life and I always hear comments by others who haven't who have a completely different idea about that, both people from my home country as well as those from my host country. So, for me this is not just a book about Nigeria but about immigrants and their torn-apart worlds. It is not as much a love story but a story about what you do if you end up somewhere where you are not wanted. It might as well have been a story of my life, without the love story gone wrong. Same as Ifemelu, I will go back to my own country one day and I am sure it won't be the same as it was when I left.

Someone mentions in the book that "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe was a great book but didn't help them to understand Africa but "A Bend in the River" by V.S. Naipaul did. I have not read the first book (now I have) but it's on my wishlist whereas I really can recommend the second one.

In any case, I did enjoy reading this book even though it touched a completely different side of Nigeria than "Half of a Yellow Sun" . I am looking forward to reading the author's third book, "Purple Hibiscus".

From the back cover:

"As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. But after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face?"

Sitch, Rob: Cilauro, Santo: Tom Gleisner, Tom "Molvanîa. A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry"

Sitch, Rob: Cilauro, Santo: Tom Gleisner, Tom "Molvanîa. A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry" - 2003

Molvanîa is a small country somewhere in the Central Europe with funny people, strange customs, an even stranger language. One of my favourite quotes: "Molvanîan is a difficult language to speak, let alone master. There are four genders: male, female, neutral, and the collective noun for cheeses, which occupies a nominative sub-section of its very own."

Their capital city is called Lutenblag, the country is divided into four provinces: The Great Central Valley, the Molvanîan Alps, Eastern Steppes and the Western Plateau.  Apparently, it borders Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia. It is known for being "the world's number one producer of beetroot and the birthplace of whooping cough".

Don't worry if you've never heard of Molvanîa - it is totally invented.

Although, in this case, any similarity with fictitious events, characters or places are probably not purely coincidental.

I still can't decide whether this "mock" travel book is just mocking the people who live in the area of where Molvanîa is situated but since I've heard they find it funny, as well, I might have been a tad oversensitive at times. I think we all can imagine where the ideas for the people and the customs in this weird country come from. However, it is quite funny at times, the only travel guide I ever read back to front, and I do have quite a few of them and use them regularly.

So, if you'd like to visit Molvanîa, you want to consider Aeromolv, the only flight line that offers a 10% discount per engine not in service per flight.

From the back cover:
"When sophisticated travelers get together to discuss ever more exotic destinations, the name "Molvanîa" often comes up. Not even John McPhee or Jan Morris can claim to have visited this small, remote Eastern European nation, the birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. How would they even get there? Fortunately, this definitive Jetlag Travel Guide offers everything a curious tourist will need to prepare for encounters with the Molvanîans. With winning insincerity, the authors describe the fascinating complexities of the native language: "Molvanîan is a difficult language to speak, let alone master. There are four genders: male, female, neutral, and the collective noun for cheeses, which occupies a nominative subsection all its very own."

Book Quotes of the Week

"I can study my books at any time, for they are always disengaged." (Mihi omne tempus est ad meus libros vacuum, numquam enim sunt illi occupati.) Cicero "De re publica"

"There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them." Mason Cooley

"When a farmer dies who knows the land and the story of the people working it, when a wise man dies, who knows how to read the moon and the sun, the wind and the flight of the birds, ... not just one man dies. It's a whole library that dies." Dario Fo

"The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure." Sydney Harris

"You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book." John Waters

Find more book quotes here.

Wolf, Naomi "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used against Women"

Wolf, Naomi "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used against Women" - 1990

The next book introduced into the Emma Watson Book Club - Our Shared Shelf.

I didn't think I would like this book as much as I did. I didn't think it would be as contemporary as it was. After all, this book was written in 1990 about the way women "obey" the "God of Beauty". As I can tell when I look around, nothing has changed since then, even though almost three decades have passed.

What can be done? First of all, I think this book should be read by everyone, not only women. There aer so many ideas and thoughts that should make every woman be happy with the body they have and not try to run after a fantasy image.

We should all be aware that the image of a "beautiful woman" is imposed on us, that hardly anyone really judges us the way we think they do and that, if we all stick together, women shouldn't be regarded in the workforce the same way as men are.

I remember the many articles I read about Angela Merkel, our current chancellor, and her clothes. Articles that would never have been written about her male colleagues. And I always wondered what that has to do with her ability to run a country. Nothing. She dresses decently and that's enough for me. And that should be enough for any woman who works no matter where.

I never had big issues with the way I look. I wouldn't call myself pretty and I certainly don't have a good figure anymore after giving birth to two children but I've always told myself whoever doesn't like me this way can just stay away. But I know how many women do have issues, they go from one diet to the next and suffer even more afterwards. If only they would all read this book!

However, there are a few things I have learned from this book. For example, I now know why I don't like women's magazines.

If I had a daughter, I would give her this book right now. But I think my sons should read it, as well in order to help their partners in future.

From the back cover:
"In the struggle for women's equality, there is one hurdle that has yet to be fully cleared - the myth of female beauty. It challenges every woman, every day, by seeking to undermine psychology and covertly the material freedoms that feminism has achieved for women. And, fueled by new technology in media and medicine, its ravages are reaching epidemic proportions.
The Beautify Myth cuts to the root of the 'beauty backlash,' exposing the relentless cult of female beauty - antierotic, averse to love, and increasingly savage - as a political weapon against women's recent advances, placing women in more danger today than ever before.
Naomi Wolf tracks the tyranny of the beauty myth throughout its history and reveals its newly sophisticated function today - in the home and at work; in literature and the media; in relationships, between men and women and between women and women. With an arsenal of sometimes shocking examples, Wolf confronts the beauty industry and its influence and uncovers the ominous, hidden agenda that drives this destructive obsession.
In a searing, timely analyses, The Beauty Myth indicts the new forces coercing women into participating in their own torture - starving themselves and even submitting their bodies to the knife. A direct descendant of The Female Mystique and The Female Eunuch, this book is a cultural hand grenade for the 1990s."

Happy August!

Happy August to all my friends and readers

New Calendar picture with this
beautiful watercolour painting by Frank Koebsch

 "Boats in the Harbour of Gager" 
"Boote im Hafen von Gager"

August used to be Sextilis in Latin, the sixth month of the year, but the Romans added two months and named this one after Emperor Augustus. 

We don't have a holiday in Germany or the Netherlands in this month, but the Belgians celebrate Mary's Assumption on 15 August.

 Enjoy this month with the beautiful watercolour painting 

by Frank Koebsch. 

I think it is inviting us to spend a day at the seaside.

 

You can find many more wonderful pictures on their website here.