Rasputin, Valentin "Farewell to Matyora"

Rasputin, Valentin (Распутин, Валентин Григорьевич) "Farewell to Matyora" (Russian: Прощание с Матёрой/Proschanie s Materoj) - 1976

A wonderful account of what development and progression can do to people. Matyora is a village in Siberia, a village like there are millions in this world. The people have lived there all their lives and everybody knows anyone, life goes on like it has hundreds of years ago, here and there we find new additions that make life easier, machines are introduced but for the ordinary people, life goes on as it always has. People get married, have children and die.

This is what most people in Matyora are looking at, this is there life. Or, in this case, it has been. The government decides to build a dam and float the whole area. The inhabitants of the village are to be relocated to other places nearby. While the younger generation welcomes the opportunity to get out of their destiny, the older members struggle, their whole world falls to pieces. Both parties portray what we all know, we have to make sacrifices for progress but how much is too much?

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life."

I have also read "To Live and Remember" by this great author.

Spyri, Johanna "Heidi"

Spyri, Johanna "Heidi" (German: "Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre" and "Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat") - 1880-1881

I think everyone remembers their first books. In my case, it was "Heidi". We didn't have that many books at the time, I had to spend a week in hospital when I turned seven, I got my appendix out. I don't remember any of the other presents I received but I clearly remember "Heidi". The very first book I owned. I still have the copy today and it looks pretty well read.

Heidi was everything I wasn't. She lived in the mountains, I lived in Northern Germany where the highest elevation was probably just a little over 100 meters. She loved the outdoors, I loved sitting inside reading my books. She was an orphan, I had my parents and three brothers and hundreds of cousins (well, "only" fifty, but who's counting).

Still, I loved Heidi, maybe because she was so different from me. We all have to have our fictional heroes, Heidi was mine. If I had had a daughter, I might have been able to transfer my love for this book to her but my two boys were not too keen. (I suppose that weird Japanese cartoon series didn't help, either.)

I recently asked my friends what their favourite childhood book was and "Heidi" was the most popular answer.

In any case, give this to your children, it's like time travelling for them, to a country that existed a long long time ago.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"A classic tale of childhood joys and friendships, it has delighted and inspired generations of children."

Orphaned Heidi lives with her gruff but caring grandfather on the side of Swiss mountain, where she befriends young Peter the goat-herd. She leads an idyllic life, until she is forced to leave the mountain she has always known to go and live with a sickly girl in the city. Will Heidi ever see her grandfather again?"

Sedaris, David "Me Talk Pretty One Day"

Sedaris, David "Me Talk Pretty One Day" - 2000

A story about the author's childhood. He is trying to tell it in a funny way and somehow he manages. But only somehow.

I was expecting this to be ironic which I would have liked. But it wasn't. This book was just the complete opposite of what I expected it to be. It was childish, that's probably the best description I can come up with if I don't want to get too insulting. The author didn't come across as a very likeable person, either. I just did not care for him or his life or anything he wrote down. At all.

I have no idea who awarded him the prizes for humour or what kind of humour they are talking about.

Will I read another book by David Sedaris? I doubt it!

From the back cover:

"A delightful comedy of atypical life stories that only David Sedaris can describe in such humorous detail.

David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day spent with you is like having a caesarean section. His family is another inspiration. You Can't Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother, who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food and cashiers with six-inch fingernails."

The Top 10 Most Difficult Books

Publisher's Weekly, a magazine especially for the book world, recently published this list of "the hardest and most frustrating books ever written":

Barnes, Djuna "Nightwood" - 1936
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" (Phänomenologie des Geistes) - 1807
Heidegger, Martin "Being & Time" (Sein und Zeit) - 1927
Joyce, James "Finnegans Wake" - 1939
McElroy, Joseph "Women & Men" - 1987
Richardson, Samuel "Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady" - 1748
Spenser, Edmund "The Faerie Queene" - 1590
Stein, Gertrude "The Making of Americans" - 1902-11
Swift, Jonathan "A Tale of A Tub" - 1633
Woolf, Virginia "To The Lighthouse" - 1927

 So, far I have only read one of those books, "To the Lighthouse" which was considered very difficult by everyone in our book club. I love reading challenging literature, be it fiction or non-fiction. Would I like to read all of those listed? Probably. Will I managed to read them all in the near future? Probably not, especially when I am looking at my every increasing TBR pile. Still, I will copy the list to my calendar and look out for those books whenever I hit the next bookshop and/or library.

Tsypkin, Leonid "Summer in Baden-Baden"

Tsypkin, Leonid Borissowitsch (Леонид Борисович Цыпкин) "Summer in Baden-Baden" (Russian: Ljubit Dostojewskowo - лджубит достоджэвсково) - 1981

Have you ever read a book that consists of just one sentence? Well, neither have I but if you want that feeling, you better start reading this one. A biographical novel about Dostoevsky's travels in Germany with this wife. An interesting perspective, especially if you  have read Dostoevsky's works. This novel reminded me a lot of "The Gambler" since this seems to be the part where Dostoevsky found his story.

The book is not very large but not that easy to read. Sentences sometimes spread over several pages. A thought that starts on one page might be broken up and lead to several other points until taken up again a couple of pages later.

It still is a very interesting book to read, it's amazing when you consider that the author never left his home country, never walked the walks in Baden-Baden like his hero, and still is able to describe them as if he had lived there all his life.

It's a different sort of reading but very well worth it.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of 'now.' A narrator - Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything 'right.' Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel."

Juster, Norton "The Phantom Tollbooth"

Juster, Norton "The Phantom Tollbooth" - 1961

This children's novel was recommended by a good friend who has a similar taste in books.

I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had read it as I child, or with my children. Now, I feel it came at least 20 years too late.

Partly quite funny, and even though I'm usually more into words and enjoyed the games they play with the language, I liked the world of numbers best.

But on the whole, it is just too much, too overdone, too fantasy-like. Not my cup of tea.

From the back cover:

"When Milo finds an enormous package in his bedroom, he’s delighted to have something to relieve his boredom with school. And when he opens it to find – as the label states – One Genuine Turnpike Tollbooth, he gets right into his pedal car and sets off through the Tollbooth and away on a magical journey!

Milo’s extraordinary voyage takes him into such places as the Land of Expectation, the Doldrums, the Mountains of Ignorance and the Castle in the Air. He meets the weirdest and most unexpected characters (such as Tock, the watchdog, the Gelatinous Giant, and the Threadbare Excuse, who mumbles the same thing over and over again), and, once home, can hardly wait to try out the Tollbooth again. But will it be still there when he gets back from school?"

Reading - Travel Through Time and Space

Anne Tyler said "I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place". Exactly. I have neither the time nor the money - or the health - to travel through space and a time machine has not been invented (and will never be, if you ask me, but that's another subject).

But - I just open a book, and there I am. I can be in China in a minute, or in Australia, South America, any place in Europe, Africa, ... anywhere I want; I can be in the Victorian era by just turning a page. I can meet people I always wanted to meet, even if they have been dead for decades.

Oh, what a wonderful thing a book is. I can explore history, genealogy, geography, anything I want. I can dream of being Elizabeth Bennett despising Mr. Darcy, or Richard Burton travelling up the Nile, and if I read a book again, I can even try to convince the characters to make different choices, guide Lara and Dr. Zhivago to a different decision so they can all have a happy ending. Not that they would ever listen.