Published in the late 1950s, the book tells the story of a random group of people who all find themselves in the small German harbour town of Rerik in Autumn 1937. They each come from quite different walks of life, but are brought together by the one thing they have in common: a desire to leave Nazi Germany. From Rerik it is theoretically possible to escape to Scandanavia by boat, and thus the action focusses around one character, the unimaginative fisherman, Knudsen. Knudsen, who owns a boat, is the only member of the cast with the ability to attempt such an escape, but paradoxically the only person who has a good reason to stay where he is. His mentally disturbed wife would certainly be taken away to a concentration camp if he were to leave her unattended for too long.

Knudsen is a (somewhat unenthusiastic) member of the communist party, and one of the party faithful, a young man called Gregor, has been sent to Rerik to give him a bit of a talking to an inspire him to under some propaganda action in the area. Gregor does his best, but he himself has already become disillusioned with communism and before he even arrives in the town, he has decided that he is going to flee from his responsibilities. Whilst holding a secret meeting with Knudsen in a local church, they meet the local vicar Helander, a nice elderly gentleman who lost a leg during the Great War and appears not to have long left to live. Anyone as squeamish as me will feel an urge to be sick when there are detailed descriptions of his wound and his false leg! He himself is clearly too frail to flee anywhere, but inside his church there is a magical piece of sculpture which he calls “Der lesende Klosterschueler”. The powers-that-be have decided that this is so-called ‘entartete Kunst’ (sorry, I don’t know how to translate that… degenerate art perhaps?) and therefore they are sending officials to come and take it away in the morning. The sculpture, which portrays a boy utterly absorbed in a book, is presumably considered dangerous because those in control do not wish to encourage the population to read. As soon as Gregor sets eyes on the figure he becomes strangely haunted by it, and together he and Helander convince Knudsen to help them rescue it.

Things are complicated further by the arrival of Judith, a Jewish girl from a wealthy family who is on the run from the Nazis. Her mother committed suicide a few days previously, and her last wish was that Judith should attempt to escape to Sweden via Rerik. Arriving in Rerik, Judith quickly becomes disillusioned when she realises there are virtually no international boats in the harbour, and she immediately runs into difficulties when the owner of the hotel she is staying in asks to see her passport. She can’t show it to him because that would immediately betray her as a Jew, so she is fast losing all hope when suddenly Gregor takes pity on her and decides to rescue her.

Together the unlikely bunch set off on a perilous adventure which involves rowing a small boat across the harbour in the dead of night, trying to avoid the searchlights of the police boats which patrol the waters looking for those trying to escape. It’s a wonderfully tense book which brings to life the fear and hopelessness of the era in a highly readable way. Somewhat unexpectedly, it more or less ends happily with Judith and the statue making it to Sweden and Gregor cycling off into the distance. Poor old Helander ends up with a back full of bullets, but his days were numbered anyway and he manages to shoot down a Nazi first!

It’s impossible to do the atmosphere of the book justice in such a short review, but I thoroughly recommend it and I’ve categorised it in my list of books which I most definitely want to read a second time

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you love.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

So, erm I think I’ve got that right. The one’s I’ve read are bold and total around forty, which I feel is respectable The ones I love are bold and underlined; for the category “love” I used the criteria that I must have read them multiple times and be prepared to sit and read them again today were it not for the fact that I’ve arranged to meet Babel. There are about 15 I love, and this has been an interesting process because having always naively assumed the html for underline would be ul, I have now (after a painful 10 minutes) established that it is style=”text-decoration: underline;”. The ones I have always hoped to read but never got round to are italic, and the ones I never hope to read are crossed out. They’re mainly Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Wilson. I thought the latter was immature when I was ten, so feel I am unlikely to enjoy her more now. I read one Pratchett as a child and hated it, and as for Harry Potter… well, call me contrary, but I’m of the opinion that something everyone likes can’t be that good

Of course, it didn’t The novel tells the story of an elderly Australian lady, who on her 21st birthday discovers that the people she has thought of as her parents are not, in fact, her parents. At the age of 5, she was taken from her English home and placed on a ship to Australia by a mysterious lady who she knew only as “The Authoress”. The Authoress told her to hide in a dark part of the ship and indicated that she would be back later to fetch her, but she never reappeared and the little girl arrived in Australia several weeks later with nothing except a small suitcase containing a book of illustrated fairy tales. She was found by a kindly worker at the port whose wife was having problems conceiving, and he took her home with him and brought her up as his own daughter.

This happened at the turn of the century, and many years later the now elderly Nell decides to travel to Britain to try to uncover her past. She traces her ancestors to a particular stately home in Cornwall and is so taken with the area that she purchases a cottage on the estate with the intention of moving there permanently. When she returns to Australia on a brief visit to sort out her affairs, however, she is confronted by her wayward daughter who dumps her grandchild Cassandra in her care and runs off with her latest lover.

Nell decides to do her duty and be a parent to Cassandra, and the first the girl knows of her grandmother’s past is in 2005 when the old lady dies and Cassandra is left the cottage in her will. Having lived through some fairly troubled times of her own recently, Cassandra travels to England also and attempts to decipher her grandmother’s past. She knows that there is some sort of dreadful secret associated with the cottage, but no one seems prepared to tell her what. She is fairly confident that she has found out the identity of Nell’s parents, even if she cannot understand why the Authoress, a family friend, would have kidnapped her. But all is not as it seems, and when Cassandra finally uncovers the true identity of Nell’s mother, the whole mystery begins to unravel.

This was a pleasant book, which was fun to read It didn’t grab me quite as much as ‘The House at Riverton’ did, though I’m not sure I can explain why. I didn’t identify with the characters as much, I guess, and despite the fact that parts of this book are undoubtedly sad, it failed to reduce me to tears so I can’t categorise it as being quite in the same league. It was easy to read though, and I certainly finished it in record time; it took the entire week, but given that I read for at most an hour a day and that there were well over 400 pages, that seems pretty quick At times it was a little confusing, because the action kept switching between different periods and locations, but on the whole I managed to keep up and it all contributed to building the suspense. Unfortunately I think I saw the final twist a couple of chapters before I was supposed to have seen it, which probably ruined the effect slightly, but all in all I would say that it is an excellent book which I would thoroughly recommend

The novel tells the story of a German policeman called Xavier March who accidentally ends up investigating the death of a high-ranking Nazi official. As it appears that things are happening to thwart his investigation, he begins to realise all is not as it seems and the victim appears to be one of a long line of Party officials who are being liquidated by members of the establishment. Increasingly working against the rules and the orders of his own officials, March (and a female American journalist he picks up halfway through) attempt to solve the mystery. What links these men and why is it so important to the Gestapo that they cease to exist?

The answer is eventually found among the historical archives of the Reich. All those concerned were present at a conference where the Final Solution was initially discussed, and thus among the select few who knew the truth about what happened to the Jews. It is worth pointing out that in this imagined world, no one at all does know the truth; Hitler’s victory in the war means that the Allies have never uncovered concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

Once he is in possession of this knowledge, March is shocked and sickened. His only aim in life is now to get the documents out of the country so that they can be published in America. He gives them to the American girl and she sets off in an attempt to cross the Swiss border. March attempts to follow her, but he is now a hunted man. His own son betrays him to the Gestapo, and it soon transpires that traitors have been everywhere as he is carted off the Gestapo headquarters and subjected to horrific acts of torture.

Suddenly it seems as if he is thrown a lifeline to escape. Put in a car with a colleague he once thought of as a friend, he is led to believe there is a rescue attempt and he can be driven to meet up with the American. Luckily he realises just on time that this is a trick to make him reveal her location, so instead he leads the Gestapo a merry dance, all the way to the site of Auschwitz. As the police agents close in around him, he receives confirmation that Auschwitz was not just a figment of the imagination and, having a strong feeling that the girl and the documents are now safely across the border, my interpretation of the ending is that he shoots himself. It’s not spelled out in black and white, but he walks off into a forest with a gun.

Hmmm. I don’t really know what to say. The ambition of the book is impressive, the Europe it creates is fascinating, but somehow I just felt there was something missing. There was no “X factor”, nothing which stopped me wanting to put it down. In fact I put it down for weeks at a time, read a chapter, and put it down for the next seven days. I’ve read better thrillers, better historical thrillers set in Germany even, and I’m left just feeling vaguely disappointed that a book which could have been amazing turned out to be, well, just sort of okayish. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll go out of my way to read any more books by the same author. Babel, however, thinks it was really cool and has reviewed it here.

My favourite German language novel of all time is ‘Der Vorleser’ by Bernhard Schlink. Perhaps I am slightly biased in my choice, because it was also the first German language novel I have ever read, sent to me as a Christmas gift by a penfriend about 15 months after I had first started learning. At this stage, my language skills were probably about GCSE sort of level, and the idea of reading a book had never occurred to me. As a present, I felt obliged to read it, but I approached it with a fair amount of trepidation, as well as a dictionary. That was actually the first and last time in my life that I have ever used a dictionary to help read a non-English book. I could make a long an intelligent argument as to why I don’t think dictionaries aid beginners in reading foreign literature, or I could just state that after the novelty value had worn off, I became too lazy to look words up

Expecting to understand nothing, I was actually pleasantly surprised The book is divided into several sections, and the first was particularly easy to understand which gave me a nice confidence boost. Meanwhile the storyline was so captivating, that by the time I got to the second part which involved some more complicated legal jargon I was totally hooked.

‘Der Vorleser’ is Bernhard Schlink’s most famous book, and has been translated and widely read in English as ‘The Reader’. Having fallen in love with the German original, I later read the English translation and thought it was an Americanised abomination, but I’m probably prejudiced and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to other people Set in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young boy who, aged 15, begins a steamy affair with a woman in her 30s. She is rather mysterious, and all the time he sleeps with her he never discovers very much about her. He is totally infatuated with her. How she feels is less clear and she has one particularly strange peculiarity; after they have had sex, she always asks him to read aloud to her. Hence the name; vorlesen = to read aloud.

One day the woman abruptly disappears, and the boy next sees her years later. He is a student, studying law at a local university. She is on trial as a Nazi war criminal. His shock is overwhelming. Here is the woman who he loved, a woman who seemed neither evil or violent, standing trial in a court of law on the charge of causing the deaths of a group of Jewish women whilst serving as a female concentration camp guard during the war. He has been in love with a female member of the SS.

The woman spends life in jail for what she has done, during which time the boy remains in sporadic contact with her, and the reader is left to judge for themself as to her true culpability. It emerges that she is in fact illiterate. On the one hand this calls into question her guilt; she has accepted full responsibilty for the crime with which she was charged, but cannot possibly have read and the signed the papers on which the conviction hinges. On the other hand, we learn she used to invite Jewish women to her room to read aloud to her in the camp. All the women were later executed; was she trying to make their last days more bearable, or liquidating them before they told anyone else her shameful secret? No answer is ultimately given.

It’s a very sad book, and for me a fascinating one because it deals with a period of history we so often neglect. Our study of Germany so often ends with the declaration of peace in 1945, and picks up again in 1989 to look at the fall of the Berlin Wall. What happened in between? How did a nation of people who had been conditioned to think like Nazis rehabilite themselves to cope with normality? What was it like growing up in a world where you couldn’t tell how many people the man sitting next to you on the bus might have ordered to their deaths?!

‘Der Vorleser’ was, in any case, award-winning. Schlink has written other books, amongst them detective fiction which isn’t bad, but nevertheless doesn’t stand out as anything special. I therefore approached ‘Die Heimkehr’, another novel which deals with recent German history, with interest

The book tells the story of a guy called Peter Debauer, who grew up in post-war Germany. His single mother tells him that his Swiss father died in the war, and he spends idyllic summers in the Alps with his Swiss grandparents. From them he learns everything he knows about his father, his mother being strangely unwilling to talk about him. His grandparents earn extra money by editing a magazine, and one day a story published in it catches the eye of the young Peter. It tells of a young man who has escaped from a prisoner camp in Russia and is trying to get back home to his wife in Germany. His adventures captivate the young Peter.

Years pass, Peter is grown up and his grandparents dead. One day he comes across some old sheets of the grandparent’s magazine lining packing cases, and discovers the story afresh. He is particularly struck by the ending, which describes the soldier finally returning home, only to find that his wife has married another man and has a second child by him. Peter is peculiarly drawn to the story, and realises that the house described actually exists in his own town. He begins to suspect that the author may not have been writing fiction, and also that the story might in some way be connected with his own mysterious family history.

So begins a quest to track down the author of the story, which leads him all over Germany and eventually to New York. In the middle of the tangled web he is trying to unravel is his father; he is not dead, was never married to his mother, and is a most unsavoury character who had multiple aliases during the war and appears to have been close to some very big Nazis. Peter is determined to meet his father face to face. He finds him in New York, where he is lecturing on law with a dubious morality and involving students in sadistic experiments. It never comes to a father-son confrontation. Peter attempts to expose him and ruin his life, but nobody is terribly interested in listening.

This is a strange book, and I’m not sure I fully understood it. The theme of heimkehr (homecoming) is present on several levels, and there are frequent classical references to the Odessey which go over my head because I have never read it. Some of the legal and political theory was also a bit beyond me. Perhaps partly because it was in German, but predominantly because Schlink is a trained lawyer. It’s a compulsive book which I definitely wanted to get to the end of, and it does raise some interesting questions, but the end was somehow unsatisfying. I might read it again *once*, but that would probably be it.

Having finally found the book, I was more than a little apprehensive about starting it. I adore Boris so much that to find he had no literary talent whatsoever would be rather a blow, and ploughing through an embarrassingly poor novel out of pure loyalty was not a task which I relished. Also I was a bit apprehensive about the description on the back cover which labelled the novel as political comedy. The last book I read which described itself in that manner was some sort of dreadful effort by Sue Townsend, I can’t remember exactly but think it was called something along the lines of ‘Number Ten’, and I didn’t find it amusing in the slightest. Fortunately, in this instance I was pleasantly surprised

For a start, Boris writes in a far more intelligent way than the casual observer might give him credit for. Indeed, I am certain that the novel was filled with classical allusions which most of us mere mortals have not been sufficiently well educated to pick up on, much less properly understand. Secondly, the story line is genuinely funny and the characters capture the imagination. At some points I was genuinely laughing out loud, and at others I really didn’t want to put it down to go out, so well was the plot flowing

To adequately describe the plot would be an utter impossibility, so convoluted it becomes, but the backdrop to the action is a US Presidential visit to the UK in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Security is high as protestors line the streets, waiting for the presidential car to arrive on it’s way taking the man himself to make an important speech in Westminster Hall. Unbeknown to the combined forces of the UK and US secret services, four hapless suicide bombers have hatched a cunning plan to hijack the speech and blow up the assembled politicians. The ringleader is a blatantly Pakistani man who nevertheless possesses a passport in the name of Jones and got his ideas for bomb making whilst studying hairdressing at the university of Llangollen. He is aided by a couple of more hardened criminals who have spent time in Afghan training camps, and a kid with a wonderful Wolverhampton accent who isn’t entirely sure he wants to be a martyr but is hanging onto the thought of the seventy two virgins he is going to get in Paradise

Having stolen a Black Country ambulance, the terrorists embark on a fraught journey across Central London, passing through numerous security cordons and yet in a series of farcical errors, failing to be detected by the police. There are some wonderful characters who cross their path on route; the cheerful Nigerian traffic warden who nearly meets a sticky end when he attempts to have the ambulance clamped for parking on a double yellow, the nervous American sniper who ultimately ends up hanging from a plinth in Westminster Hall attempting to shoot Jones with rhinocerous tranquilizer, and of course the hero of the piece, a bumbling, Boris-like politician who after several hundred pages of not quite succeeding in his attempts to thwart the plot, ultimately ends up doing something rather brave and saving his political career

This is an “anything that can go wrong does go wrong” tale of epic proportions, and yet the characters and their motives are so well drawn that it remains highly believable. The story is so well paced that there isn’t so much as a boring moment, and I will most definitely be reading it again, most probably on a day when I need cheering up. Thoroughly recommend it, and still fancy Boris like hell

Hermann Hesse, if you have never heard of him, is quite an important literary figure who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, predominantly for his achievement with ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’. His other famous novels included ‘Steppenwolf’, but ‘Das Glasperlenspiel’ is the most renowned and was published in 1943 in Switzerland. Hesse was German, rather than Swiss, and in fact served an apprenticeship in a bookshop in Tuebingen, the town where my sister is currently completing her Erasmus year. However, he relocated to Zurich during the war years, the Nazis not being terribly big fans of his writings, and I have read somewhere that he also assisted Thomas Mann in starting a new life outside of Germany. It is important, incidentally, not to get confused and think that Hesse was a Nazi himself. He wasn’t at all, but my subconscious seems to get mixed up somewhere between Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler and convince himself that he used to serve in the SS

My brainstorms aside, this is a very good book but a rather bizarre one which I feel I may struggle to coherently explain. It is set in the twenty-fifth century, in a state called Kastalien that is located somewhere in German-speaking Western Europe. Having survived a period of world wars, Western Europe is now relatively peaceful and prosperous and Kastalien has been set up as a state entirely devoted to learning and academia. Seemingly populated exclusively by men, the inhabitants of this province do not have to work for a living but spend their days pursuing studies in whatever weird faculties their fancy lies. Of principal importance appear to be music and mathematics, but there is also considerably study of linguistics and philosophy. Only history and subjects relating to the real world appear to be neglected. Young boys who show intellectual promise are removed from their families at a young age and sent to attend boarding schools in Kastalien. There their intense academic education begins, and as they mature they are initiated into what is called the Order. Kastalien is not a religious state, (to say it was atheistic might be misleading for their is simply no consideration of God at all) but the Kastalien Order does not seem significantly different from a monastic one, the young men living lifes of chastity, poverty and obedience. They have no contact with or even any concept of the outside world in the form of women, family, commerce.

It is indisputable that a very high level of learning has been achieved in Kastalien. The role of the state appears to be to safeguard culture, morality and the arts and keep them free from outside influences and taints. And yet the curious thing about it is that there is very little original work which takes place at all; it is not a creative place, where people invent new music, new mathematics, new art – it is a place, where people concentrate only on acquiring pre-existing knowledge, and then synthesising it.

Despite not being religious, Kastalien is a very spiritual place, almost in a Eastern sort of way. There are mentions of people practising yoga, and a heavy emphasis on meditiation. The most spiritual and sacred thing in the entire province, however, is the strange invention known as the Glass Bead Game.

Precisely what the Glass Bead Game involves is left rather vague throughout the book, but it is purported to be a method through which links can be found between widely different fields of study. Through the synthesis of the Glass Bead Game, a Mozart sonata can be linked to an algebraic equation which can in turn be linked the growth pattern of a plant in the natural world. The game used to be played in the so called olden days by arranging glass beads on what I imagine to look like a sort of abacus, in different patterns which represented themes from mathematics and music. Over time it has developed its own language which can now be written with squiggles on paper, but the overall concept remains the same. The Glass Bead Game is supposed to be capable of representing all the learning which is known to mankind.

So much for the background. The story itself is a biography of a man called Josef Knecht. Taken to Kastalien at a young age he grows up there and is soon singled out as having remarkable talents. A combination of circumstances lead him to be awarded one of the most honourable positions in the Kastalien hierarchy by the time he is forty. Knecht becomes Magister Ludi, the Master of the Game, and so has overall responsibility for developing, safe guarding and teaching the Glass Bead Game in Kastalien.

The book documents his success in this role. He is widely regarded as one of the most popular and intelligent people in Kastalien. But it soon becomes clear that Knecht is far from happy and he begins to develop an urge to leave Kastalien and start a new life in the outside world. There, he believes he can do more good, and he also comes to recognise that the Kastalien ideal is not one which can last forever. The only problem is that for someone of his rank, or indeed anyone, to leave Kastalien is unheard of, and he soon faces a bitter battle with the authorities.

How the book ends I won’t say in case anyone wants to read it and I spoil it, but it is peculiarly abrupt. Having led the reader at a leisurely pace through the 600 preceding pages, Hesse suddenly cuts off sharply at the most potentially exciting part of the entire story, in a way which is both dramatic and unsatisfying. The narrative finishes at this point but the book continues with the inclusion of a couple of writings of Knecht’s which are unrelated to anything which has happened and form a peculiar anticlimax.

All in all I have to say that I enjoyed the novel a lot. Whilst it was long and sometimes the subject matter was hard-going, the prose nevertheless flowed so naturally that it wasn’t an effort to read. Unlike Thomas Mann’s ‘Der Zauberberg’ which I read earlier this year, I actually wanted to pick up the book to see how the story continued, and there were no points at which I felt I was losing the will to live. This is despite the fact that it is actually a book with far more reflection and conversation than action.

As to what the message of the novel actually is, I am finding it hard to conclude. I have seen it described in reviews as Utopian, but that doesn’t seem to me to be the case. If Kastalien were a true Utopia, Knecht would not expose the flaws in it which cause him to leave. To me, the whole atmosphere in the place seems rather sterile, the inhabitants potter about with already existant creations without ever finding the impetus to create anything of their own. While it would be a gross exaggeration to suggest it was dystopian, I feel sure there is a warning message somewhere about the danger of an intellectual so completely removed from the outside world…

A very thoughtprovoking book, well worth a read.

Having studied mathematics at university, I am always sadly excited when I get the chance to read anything about numbers, but more often than not I find that maths books are disappointing.  Either they are so obscurely complicated that no one of only average intelligence who is trying to conduct a normal life could possibly devote the time and energy required to understand them, or the author has decided that his work needs to be accessible to small children and spends a patronising chapter explaining what an integer is.  Without using the word integer, obviously, lest that upset people, and probably suggesting the reader imagine they are part of an African tribe and counting out beans.  This book, which falls into neither of the above categories, was a refreshing change; an example of that all too rare species, books which deal with complex mathematics yet are pleasurable to read

Written in a clear and readable style, it includes just enough detail to be accurate and comprehensive, without including so much as to be dull and incomprehensible.  Proofs, equations and graphs are included only where strictly necessary and in circumstances where they add to the understandability of the text as opposed to destroying it.  It is probably fair to say that if you don’t have a certain level of interest in and thus knowledge of mathematics that you aren’t going to find it a riveting read and may not see it through to the end, but there is just the right mix of mathematical concepts with historical and biographical facts to keep the reader’s attention.  Part of my enjoyment undoubtedly came from the fact that this was a subject I had studied at uni and therefore I was able to consult my own notes on Number Theory when I came across results which I knew I had learnt to prove during my degree but could no longer quite remember.  This gave me an additional insight into the book, and the book in turn gave me an additional insight into my degree, describing the real figures and events behind the sometimes dull series of lemmas and theorems with which our lectures were filled.

The book tells the story of some of the most amazing numbers in mathematics; the primes.  I still remember the first definition I ever learned at university, and my complete and total horror at the fact that something as simple as p not having any factors except itself and one needed such a convoluted array of symbols to express it.  What was wrong with words?!

In any case, ‘The Music of the Primes’ is a detailed account of human attempts to understand prime numbers.  Some of the most eminent names in mathematics have worked in this field of number theory, from Euclid and his beautiful proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers, to Gauss and Euler, Hardy and Ramanujan.  My hero Georg Cantor and his continuum hypothesis (that there are only two sizes of infinity represented by the real numbers) even got the odd mention, and I do in fact remember reading a translation of his work on transfinite primes once, but I don’t seem to have any notes on it.  The most significant figure in the entire saga, however, is Bernhard Riemann who proposed the fiendish Riemann hypothesis.

I have to say, anything I have ever come across by Riemann, I have failed to understand.  He seems to be one of those men who have a vast amount of mathematics named after him, and I can remember a curious course I took called Further Complex Variable Theory, where his name cropped up with significant frequency.  The course was curious because the name implied there should have been a prior course called Complex Variable Theory for this to be further to, only there hadn’t been.  It was taught by a very lovely man who unfortunately had no idea how to teach, mumbled terribly, and through an unfortunate accident in a first year tutorial happened to know my name, which meant he used to ask me questions whenever he got desperate.  We learnt about Riemann sums and Riemann integrals and once there was some mention of the Riemann sphere, which threw me completely.  By the second lecture I realised I wasn’t going to understand a word of it, and my marks in the homework questions were somewhat depressing.  Fortunately the lecturer provided printed notes, which I memorised when it came to revision, and via what must have been some pretty spectacular moderation, eventually passed with 88%

I felt a bit more sympathetic to Riemann after reading the book and have almost forgiven him for the mental contortions his spheres have caused me.  Generations of mathematicians have, however, wrestled with attempted proofs of his famous hypothesis and without exception failed.  The Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics, and has only increased in importance since Riemann proposed it in 1859.  The more attempts which have been made to either prove or disprove it, the more has seemed to ride on whether or not it is true.  Stated as simply as possible, it is the conjecture that for the Riemann zeta function, all non-trivial zeros will have a real part equal to ½.  What the Riemann zeta function is, I’m not sure I feel equal to explaining to you; it’s a function of sum variable x, defined as the sum of an infinite series, and in a real domain it is fairly well behaved, but from what I recall, extending it into the complex domain involves horrible things like cuts in planes and poles and other things which washed over my head in further complex variable theory.  The book itself describes it in terms of a landscape in four dimensions and tries to give helpful diagrams, though I confess to not completely understanding those either, because three dimensions are normally sufficient to flummox me.  I have always disliked the zeta function in principal anyway, because I have a complete incapability of drawing the Greek letter zeta :cry:

In any case, the extent to which you understand the zeta function will not have much impact on your understanding of the book.  In a way I think the story it tells is a profoundly sad one; so many people who have dedicated their lives to trying to prove this hypothesis, some who have even lost their lives, by physically dying or going mad, and yet the book comes to an end and the hypothesis is still unproven.  No one has even managed to prove that it can’t be proved, as Gödel and Cohen managed with the Continuum Hypothesis, and no computer has managed to find a counter example, a non-trivial zero which has a real part not equal to a half.  It seems somehow depressing

As the book indicates, a proof of the Riemann hypothesis is not just a random happening in abstract mathematics about which we do not need to care, but something which could affect all of our lives.  You probably already know that much encryption (for example credit card numbers) which is carried out during internet transactions, relies on the fact that it is incredibly difficult to break a large number down into two prime factors.  If the work which is being done to attempt to prove the Riemann hypothesis ever sheds any light on a simpler way to do this, e-commerce would suffer a significant setback.  The chapters on cryptography are pretty cool and not at all difficult to understand.  One of the later chapters went slightly over my head when it started talking about quantum physics, but that’s probably my fault for being too stupid to understand physics.  Physics upsets me

Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so that I am going to investigate getting a copy of Hardy’s ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’.  A friend of mine recommended it to me ages ago, but I’ve not had the motivation to consider it until now

This book is quite a recent one, published in 2006. It tells the story of a young woman called Sonia who has been in an abusive marriage, and to escape both her violent husband and the person she has become, she cuts all ties with her urban life and goes to work in a health spa in a remote village in the Lower Engadine. It seems like an idyllic setting, and my sister chose the book for me because we have had so many holidays in that part of the world, but soon sinister things start happening.

The hotel in which she is working as a physiotherapist (or more precisely, a person who does massages but I’m not sure what you call it in English) has recently been reopened after a long period of closure, and there appears to be a lot of ill-feeling among the locals, some of whom had other plans for the site, about these outsiders invading their village. The hotel is soon plagued by disasters, a series of insignificant events which are nevertheless strangely threatening. First of all the plants in reception randomly lose all their leaves over night, then clocks start striking at the wrong times and the beloved budgie of the protagonist is found floating in the fish tank… One day she enters the hotel library and finds a book of fairy tales lying open at a fable called “The Devil of Milan”. It tells the story of a young girl called Ursina who sells her soul to the devil. The devil promises her great beauty and happiness, until the day when certain conditions are fulfilled and then she will have to pay the price.

He quotes the conditions thus:

“When Autumn comes in Summer, when night comes during the day, when light burns in the water, when it dawns at the twelfth stroke, when the bird becomes a fish, when the animal becomes a man, when the cross turns to the south, then you will belong to me”

Sonia realises that the mishaps in the hotel fit this rhyme and the conditions are already half fulfilled. No one will believe her, but as things become even more disturbing she thinks she has worked out the human perpetrator of the crimes … and then he dies.

What is going on in the Engadine? Is there a supernatural explanation, or is the past she has run away from coming back to haunt her?

There are twists right up to the final page, which make it a very exciting read. It’s a bizarre book, because Sonia suffers from a condition which means she can smell colours and feel smells and all sorts of other weird sensory combinations, and it took me a while to get used to sounds being described as blue. I thoroughly enjoyed it though, and for me it seemed especially realistic because it described events which actually happened; at one point the village is cut off from the outside world because torrential rain has washed away the railway bridge. I was staying about ten miles away in 2005 when that happened, so it was kind of surreal reading the book
Unfortunately I don’t think Martin Suter exists in English translation, but if you want an easy German read, I’d definitely recommend it.