The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

One woman, five possible lives. The End of Days is Jenny Erpenbeck's haunting novel about a red-haired girl born of a Jewish mother and Christian father in the Austrian empire in the early twentieth century. She dies as an infant in the first book, which begins:

"The Lord gave, and the Lord took away, her grandmother had said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn't right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up."

What happens to her parents and their marriage makes up the rest of that part of the story. The child was not in the world for long, but she has had an impact on the lives around her.

What if the baby's life had been saved? Book II portrays another trajectory for her, this time into her teens. In each of the five parts, she lives longer. Her life plays out against the larger theatre of events through the twentieth century in Austria, Russia and Germany. In the final part, she is in her nineties at her death. The closing sentence (not a spoiler!) sums up the philosophical and melancholy tone of this remarkable work:

"Many mornings he will get up at this early hour that belongs only to him and go into the kitchen, and there he will weep bitterly as he has never before, and still, as his nose runs and he swallows his own tears, he will ask himself whether these strange sounds and spasms are really all that humankind has been given to mourn with."

Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky and published by New Directions, the jacketless dark green cover design--featuring a gravestone surrounded by vegetation--is a good match for the sober and surprising contents. The more I think about this novel, the greater my admiration for it.

Readalikes: Great House (Nicole Krauss); Life After Life (Kate Atkinson); and Aquamarine (Carol Anshaw).

Baby's in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles by Arne Bellstorf

Baby's in Black is set in 1960-62, when The Beatles were honing their musical skills by playing long sets every night in a dive bar in the red light district of Hamburg, Germany. It's a slice of pop culture history, created in graphic novel format by German artist Arne Bellstorf.

At that time, The Beatles were comprised of John, Paul, George, Pete Best (on drums) and Stu Sucliffe (on bass). A couple of young German friends, Klaus Voortman and Astrid Kirchherr, started going almost nightly to hear them. They eventually got to know the band members very well. Astrid took photos of them (and would go on to be one of The Beatles premier photographers). Astrid and Stu fell in love; this is mostly a story about them.

I love the energy and immediacy of this biography. There's plenty of Beatles trivia too, like George being sent home to England by the German authorities because he was underage (17). And the reason why the band is called the Beat Brothers on their very first recording (backing Tony Sheridan on "My Bonnie").

Here's a bit of dialogue from when the band is first invited to sit with Astrid and Klaus during a break in the music:

John Lennon - "Where did you get them black turtlenecks?"
Klaus - "I bought this one at the flea market in Paris."
John - "And did you get your hair cut there?"
Klaus - "No. Astrid cut my hair."

Later, Astrid cuts Stu's hair too. Apparently, the rest of The Beatles copied the hairstyle afterwards, although that's not told in Baby's in Black. Black, by the way, is Astrid's favourite colour.

Bellstorf's art is in velvety blacks with scribbled graphite shadings. Sometimes the marks go outside the panel borders--an appropriate touch for this free-spirited group of young people who are metaphorically colouring outside the lines. Deep black clothes and accented eyes capture the mod vibe, and smudgy graphite is perfect for the pervasive cigarette smoke.

Listen to some early Beatles, let your hips shake, and your experience of stepping back in time will be complete.

Albert Einstein and Antoine de Saint-Exupery in Picture Book Biographies

Biographies in picture book format are a weakness of mine. I think it's the combination of art and true facts, plus they are short. Because these books are usually only about 30 pages long, I know that I can spend a leisurely time appreciating them, and still get through the whole thing in one sitting. For me, they signal a mood of relaxed enjoyment.

I recently read two delightful examples back to back: On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein by Jennifer Berne and Vladimir Radunsky and The Pilot and the little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery by Peter Sis.

Radinsky's exuberant illustrations in On a Beam of Light radiate joyful energy. His black ink lines are expressively untidy and the rich gouache colours do not stay neatly inside the lines. The paper is light brown, speckled with fibers, giving it a homespun look.

Important lines of text are highlighted in red. (On a Beam of Light. Berne & Radunsky)

Berne has selected details about Einstein's life that will make the most impression on children. For example, when Einstein grew up, he chose specific clothes for thinking. He refused to ever wear socks. Einstein never spoke before age two, and hardly said a word before age three. When he did finally speak, he was full of questions.

"So many questions that some of his teachers told him he was a disruption to his class. They said he would never amount to anything unless he learned to behave like all the other students.
But Albert didn't want to be like the other students.
He wanted to discover the hidden mysteries in the world."

Readers can go on to discover more about Einstein through Berne's notes and resource list at the end.

Even though Peter Sis has a very different style from Radunsky, I was struck by the way they both showed their subjects as babies, floating in space:

Baby Einstein (On a Beam of Light. Berne & Radunsky)

Baby Saint-Exupery (The Pilot and the Little Prince. Sis)

In The Pilot and the Little Prince, Peter Sis uses medium to light colours, mostly golds and heavenly blues. He avoids black. His shading is made up of lots of minute lines and dots. There are whimsical details like the winged horse above. Continents on a map and mountains seen from a plane are shown with facial features. Pictorial elements on a page are frequently grouped in medallions with tidbits of additional text. It's like a treasure hunt to find everything on each page.

Young Saint-Exupery attempted to fly with his bicycle. (detail from The Pilot and the Little Prince. Sis)

There is a great deal more information in this book about Antoine de Saint-Exupery than in the one about Einstein. Older children, teens and adults will all find much to appreciate. Sis packs a lot into his pages! What makes the biggest impression is Saint-Exupery's lifelong love of flight, in spite of numerous crash landings. There are details about the history of aviation as well as Saint-Exupery's writing career and his service in World War II. And I learned a surprising lot about the earliest airmail service.

Peter Sis has written and illustrated many more wonderful books, including The Tree of Life (about Charles Darwin); Starry Messenger (about Galileo); and The Wall, his autobiography about growing up in Czechoslovakia. I've previously reviewed his retelling of a thirteenth-century Persian poem, The Conference of Birds.

The Redstart by John Buxton

While waiting in the line-up for one of the events at the Vancouver Writers Fest, I chatted a bit with author Helen Humphreys. She told me about John Buxton, a British officer who studied birds while being held in a German prison camp during WWII. I was intrigued, so via interlibrary loan, I tracked down a copy of a book Buxton wrote about the common redstart, which was published in 1950.

The Redstart has supplied me with extensive information about a species I had never even heard of beforehand. There are some photos and drawings in the monograph, but it is Buxton's words that have given me the clearest picture of this bird:

"The first glimpse of a redstart usually leaves an impression of an active little bird with a red tail which it shivers in a strange way that at once catches the eye." 

"The displaying male, with his bright tail fanned and pressed down on to the branch, his rosy body flattened, his black face and white cap thrust towards the hen, with his wings held straight up to show their shimmering pink undersides as he waves in his plumes the various light; his wild, darting flight after the act, accompanied by a sweet warbling song as he flies -- all combine to make one of the most striking lovely scenes I have ever watched in the lives of birds. It is all the more surprising that no one else seems ever to have noticed it."

Buxton often quotes from classic literature, such as the line above from Andrew Marvell's poem 'Thoughts in a Garden.' Each chapter opens with a poetic epigraph, and there are no translations for those that are in their original language. Readers are clearly expected to have studied Greek, Latin and modern European languages; my education seems paltry in comparison.

I love books that contain rare or specialized words because encounters with vocabulary give me great pleasure. The Redstart contains seldom-used words like dilatoriness (tending to postpone), ferruginous (rust-coloured) and perforce (by force of circumstance). Of course it also has plenty of ornithological terms as well, like cock-feathering ("adult hen common redstarts have often been noted with plumage more or less resembling that of the cock, which is normally so strikingly different"); gape (used to describe the mouth line on a closed beak); and tail-coverts (feathers at the base of the tail).

What touched me most are the small clues that Buxton's careful bird-watching is taking place within the context of a prison. His observations are made from within a camp parade ground that was a daily place of exercise for 2000 men, and he could only do so when they were allowed to be outside. Via correspondence, German ornithologists gave him assistance, as did several of his fellow inmates.

Buxton kept meticulous journals while imprisoned and was grateful to regain possession of them after the war. He counted song repetitions, the minimal number of visits required for a redstart hen to build a nest (600), the number of minutes a hen would leave her eggs (an agitated 27, when a prisoner sheltering from rain too close to her nest prevented her from returning), and the rate of alarm calls per minute (84-59). "On 1 May 1941 at Laufen a sparrow-hawk flew low through the trees near one of the redstarts at 9:37 a.m. The cock flew up into a willow at the north end of his territory, and called the alarm twee twee continuously until 10:15, by which time I was exceedingly bored."

The final few pages (139-142) are the very best, where Buxton expresses his gratitude to "these strange creatures that, merrily busking about the trees which shaded us, or perching on the wire that kept us close, delighted us, [..] by the very incomprehensibility of their lives. They lightened (if only for a little while)  the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world simply by their unconcern in our affairs, and by the beauty and pathos and vivacity of their lives."

I'm now interested in learning more about Buxton so, at some time in the future, I'll probably read Birds in a Cage: The Remarkable Story of How Four Prisoners of War Survived Captivity by Derek Niemann.

Readalikes: Moonbird (Phillip Hoose); The Big Year (Mark Obmascik).

The Property by Rutu Modan

Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan's wonderful novel, The Property, was translated into English by Jessica Cohen and published this year by Drawn and Quarterly. Hooray! Modan's Exit Wounds is one of my very favourite graphic novels. Another of hers is the charming Maya Makes a Mess, published by Toon Books and intended for beginning readers -- but don't let that stop you from enjoying it at any age.

The Property is on the longlist for next year's prize at Angouleme, along with some others I've read: Are You My Mother? (Bechdel), Goliath (Gauld), Saga (Vaughn and Staples), and Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller (Lambert).

Regina Segal, an elderly Polish Jew, travels from Israel to modern Warsaw in order to reclaim family property that was lost in the second world war. The story opens at Ben Gurion airport. Regina is accompanied by her granddaughter Mica, who is mortified by her grandmother's behaviour at the security check. Regina insists on drinking an entire two-litre bottle of water rather than have it confiscated, meanwhile refusing to allow anyone else to go ahead of them in line.

Regina is stubborn and prickly, but I found her sympathetic. She has her own reasons for not having shared with her granddaughter the whole truth about her past. Old family secrets and complex modern relationships add layers to the plot. Modan has a great ear for dialogue and the humour inherent in the everyday. Her art is in the full-colour clear line style that is similar to Herge's Tintin. She is excellent at conveying facial and body expressions. The background indoor and exterior settings are highly detailed, so the city of Warsaw is vividly present. It is a heartwarming story with a hopeful conclusion. I loved it.

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

Alison Moore's The Lighthouse is all about undercurrents in the lives of some lonely people. Futh is a British man who goes on a walking holiday in Germany after his marriage disintegrates. Ester and her husband Bernard run a bed and breakfast called Hellhaus (the light house), which is Futh's first and final stop on his weeklong circular route.

The narrative moves back and forth in third person between Futh and Ester, revealing past events that have shaped their current existence. There are similarities that take on significance and a sense of menace builds as the story progresses. Connections between human beings are sometimes harmful, rather than supportive.

An ornamental silver container in the shape of a lighthouse, and that once held a vial of perfume, is at the center of the slowly simmering plot. There is evidence from the start that things are not as they appear on the surface. A reflection of this can be seen in Ester's technique for cleaning her guest rooms:

"In the bedroom, she strips the sheet from the bed, shakes it out and inspects it and then smooths it over the mattress again. She turns over the pillows, plumping them up." (Reminds me of Tomsky's Heads in Beds memoir.)

Later, Futh occupies that room. "He opened a book and tried to read but could not concentrate, kept reading the same lines over and over and reaching the bottom of the first page without having taken it in. He was distracted by the moth flying at his lamp. He got out of bed again and opened the curtains and the window to let it out, knowing that this disoriented moth was really after the moon, its navigational aid, although Futh could not see the moon from where he was standing. Getting back into bed, he turned over his pillow to get the cool side and noticed the stain of a stranger's mascara like a spider on his pillowcase."

Moore chose a quote from Muriel Spark as the epigraph: "she became a tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks." A perfect preface for this unsettling novel.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Voice and character are two outstanding aspects of Esi Edugyan's award-winning novel, Half-Blood Blues, about musicians in a jazz band in Europe during the second World War. The tale is narrated by Sid Griffiths, who is 82 years old in 1992. His story often flips backward in time as he relates the events surrounding the disappearance of his youngest bandmate after being picked up by Nazi soldiers in Paris.

Sid played bass in the Hot-Time Swingers in Berlin in the 1930s. Ninteen-year-old Hieronymus Falk, a German with a Black father, played trombone. Chip Jones, Sid's boyhood friend from Baltimore, was the drummer. Here Sid describes a session they played with Louis Armstrong, who had heard about Falk's talent:

"Chip's kit was crisp, clean, and I could feel the lazy old tug of the bass line walk down into its basement and hang up its hat, and I begun to smile. Then the kid come in. He was brash, sharp, bright. And then, real late, Armstrong come in. I was shocked. Ain't no bold brass at all. He just trilled in a breezy, casual way, like he giving some dame a second glance in the street without breaking stride. It was just so calm, so effortlessly itself. Give me a damn chill."

Fifty-two years later, on the way to the airport, Sid's cab driver asks, "Where you off to?"

'"London," I said. "I'm going back to London. I live there." Better not to tell folks your business, I figure. Nor to let them know you're leaving your pad empty. A man's got to be careful these days.
 "London?" the cabbie said. "No kidding. I used to live in London. England's alright but the food'll kill you. Whereabouts you live over there?"
I frowned. I ain't got no mind for this damn small talk. Best to shut him up quick. "Not London England," I said. "London Ontario. In Canada."
The cabbie's eyes sort of glazed over. Canada kills any conversation quick, I learned long ago. It's a little trick of mine.'

Ha! I never got tired of Sid's cranky voice. I could tell he was suffering from an old pain -- a mix of sorrow and guilt and shame -- and I stayed glued to his telling right up to the last satisfying word.

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant

"My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded." Pia Kolvenbach was 10 at the time of that freak incident in the small German town where she has lived all her life. Other children shun her afterwards - out of fear that Pia will be the next to burst into flames - and so Pia becomes more of a loner than ever.

Herr Schiller, an elderly friend of her grandmother, is kind to Pia and tells her stories. Pia loves the thrill of his scary tales about witches, ghosts and demons made of fire. But then young girls start disappearing from their town. The police ask children to report anything odd. To Pia, many things are odd. Pia believes Herr Schiller and his stories might hold a clue to these current events. If she can solve the mystery of the disappearances, she hopes that people will finally forget the circumstances of her grandmother's death.

A haunting story in which psychological suspense builds slowly but steadily. Grade 5 to adult.