Issue #70: Friday 26 July, 2024
After a couple of slow months, I am slowly starting to regain my former rate of reading, almost back to my usual pace.
Steven Conte is an Australian author who won the inaugral Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction in 2008 with his debut novel The Zookeeper’s War. This, his second novel, is also set during the Second World War.
The main character of The Tolstoy Estate is Captain Paul Bauer, a forty-year-old surgeon who is part of the medical batallion of the 3rd Panzer division, itself only a tiny part of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. As the novel opens, Bauer is trying to sleep in the back of a truck, part of a convoy struggling through mud on its way to their next base of operation. As is typical in military operations, none of the men in Bauer’s truck have any idea where they are going.
Where they end up is somewhere remarkable, however. It’s a stately home, and the ancestral estate of Leo Tolstoy, where the famous Russian novelist wrote most of his fiction including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Ignoring this history, however, the Nazi medical battallion proceed to occupy it and use its various buildings to set up their hospital and other facilities. This, by the way, all really happened.
Shortly after they arrive, however, they are confronted by a furious middle-aged Russian woman. Before the Germans arrived, the Tolstoy estate had been something of a secular shrine, a museum, to the genius of Russia’s greatest author. It had a small staff to preserve the site and educate visitors. The furious woman, Katerina Dmitrievna Trubetzkaya, is the head custodian there, and she is bitterly complaining about the damage caused by the German invaders. Paul Bauer speaks a little Russian and so is ordered to act as translator.
In the course of the novel, an unlikely and obviously doomed relationship develops between Paul and Katerina. Paul is a kindly man, devoted to his profession of surgery, not much interested in politics, infuriated by what he sees as the foolhardy, ill-considered invasion of Russia (ill-considered because Hitler, like Napoleon before him, drastically underestimated the effect of the Russian winter).
Paul does what he can to act as an advocate for Katerina to try to lessen the impacts on the staff of the estate and the people of a nearby village, but that is very little. Katerina is a dedicated communist and devotee of Russian culture, particularly, of course, the writing of Tolstoy. It’s a shared passion for War and Peace which first brings them together. Both of them can see the strong parallels of Tolstoy’s story, and the true history it depicts, with their current situation.
That’s the core of the book: an unusual, but ultimately convincing and very touching love story, along with true and fascinating history. And the links with Tolstoy’s masterpiece which run throughout make it a fascinating read.
Definitely recommended.
Note: if you are at all squeamish, you might want to skip past the frequent graphic depictions of field surgery as Bauer carries out his work when the casualties flood in.
Yet another production I completed for Standard Ebooks, following on from my production of the same author’s Aurora Floyd a couple of months back.
Set in the 1850s, The Cloven Foot follows the fortunes of John Treverton, who is at a very low point in his life. He has squandered his small inheritance and has had to sell his commission as a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment. Though he has been making a small amount of money from drawing comic sketches, he is feeling desperate and miserable when a telegram unexpectedly summons him to the death-bed of his wealthy uncle Jasper. The dying man tells him that he will bequeath his estate to the younger man on one condition—that he marry Jasper’s adopted daughter Laura within twelve months.
Acquiring the estate would solve all of Treverton’s worries. But there’s more than one problem. For a start, what if Laura refuses his proposal? She may be inclined to follow her adopted father’s wishes, but nevertheless she is a free agent. What’s more, Treverton has a secret which threatens any such marriage, and soon the complications multiply.
Sensational elements such as murder, mistaken identity, and bigamy feature prominently in The Cloven Foot, as they do in many of Braddon’s novels; but an important new theme is that of fraud—a theme which has been identified as part of an increasing trend towards featuring more white-collar crimes in the era’s popular “sensation fiction”.
Though not very deep, this is an enjoyable read if you like this kind of mid-Victorian “sensation” fiction (obviously I do: I’m also a big fan of the work of Wilkie Collins).
You can download a free, beautifully formatted ebook of the novel from here.
This was an audiobook, an Audible exclusive. It’s only of novella length, less than three hours to listen to. As I’ve said, the time I have available at the moment to listen is a lot less than it was, so very long audiobooks are taking too long to get through for my comfort. I only listen to such while I’m out walking, or driving some distance, or travelling on public transport. I’ve never felt comfortable just sitting in a chair at home listening to an audiobook, it doesn’t feel right somehow.
This story is set in Dublin, and it features the first appearance of McTiernan’s detective Cormac Reilly, here just as a secondary character. The story is told from the third-person point of view of a young woman, Niamh (pronounced “Neeve”) who wakes up one morning after a night out when there’s a peremptory knock on her apartment door. Cormac Reilly is the Garda officer who tells Niamh that there’s been a murder in the apartment foyer downstairs, and asks if she heard anything. No, she says, and he goes off. A little later we discover that the victim was Mia, Niamh’s own roommate, whom Niamh had thought was just asleep in her room.
Niamh finds that simply her association with a murder victim is enough to get her frowned on by the headmistress of the conservative Catholic school at which Niamh teaches, made worse when the police visit asking questions, and people at the school start to wonder about her involvement with the crime.
There’s a clever twist (although it wasn’t too hard to see it coming) and a fair bit of tension towards the end. So, an entertaining-enough short read.
Still going through the third season of The Bear. For my wife and I, “binge watching” means one or two episodes of a show each week. Like the others, this season of The Bear is great, though it feels a bit less structured this time, and I could really do without the ludicrous antics of the Fak family (in there possibly so the show qualifies as a “comedy” for Emmy purposes?). But by crikey Jamie Lee Curtis is extraordinarily good in it whenever she appears. “Ice Chips” was the episode we’ve just watched, very intense!
Comment on Issue 69
17 July 2024
Mark Nelson
---
You're right, it was a cracking month, with two books I gave five stars to on Goodreads.
—David
Comment on Issue 69
18 July 2024
Finegan Kruckemeyer
I ... just wanted to write you and say thanks so much for the beautiful review [of The End and Everything Before It] posted on Through the Biblioscope.
As it's a first novel for me, its journey out into the world feels particularly exciting and strange, and to read your words on my words was a real pleasure.
Thanks for having taken the time, and hi from rainy Adelaide.
---
Thanks, Finegan, you are very welcome.
As you can tell, I really enjoyed your novel and the clever concept behind it. It's tricky writing reviews which convey what a book is about without giving too much of the story away or introducing spoilers.
I'm looking forward to any future novels you might write.
—David
If you’d like to make a modest contribution to my efforts in this newsletter, I’d love it if you would buy me a coffee.
Want to comment? Please send an email to:
© Copyright 2024 by David R. Grigg
and licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-ND 4.0.
That was a cracking review that you gave of The End and Everything Before It. I've added it to the list of books that I'll probably never buy (but sometimes I do).
As a result of you mentioning, a few issues back, that you were reading Cloudstreet, I looked at the list of Tim Winton's books that I've not read and decided I should slowly whittle that list down. The first book to be whittled away was Blueback, which I really enjoyed. (And to link it to what you mentioned a few issues ago, it's a "novel" for younger readers.) Unfortunately, that was only the title from my four book order that Booktopia delivered before going belly-up. One of the three outstanding titles was Leigh Edmonds’ Proud and Lonely. At some point in time I'll need to gird my loins and order these three from somewhere else.
Blueback was dispatched to me fairly quickly. They were quoting a turnaround time of 30-35 days for Leigh's work. As it was described as being print-on-demand, I didn't understand the delay. Now the shipping delay has effectively blown up to infinity.
Good to read your description of Cloudstreet, I've long forgotten even the bare outlines of the story. Not sure it's on my list of books that I want to reread, particularly in view of its size.
The Seashell on the Mountaintop also sounds like a fascinating read. All-in-all it looks you had a cracking month.