Carole Angier
Post-Wall Angst
From Germany to Germany: Journal of the Year 1990
By Günter Grass (Translated by Krishna Winston)
Harvill Secker 288pp £15.99) order from our bookshop
Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany
By Cees Nooteboom (Translated by Laura Watkinson)
MacLehose Press 400pp £20 order from our bookshop
Günter Grass and Cees Nooteboom are grand old men of European literature, and we should be grateful to Harvill Secker and MacLehose Press for bringing us their responses to a key event in European history: the reunification of Germany. However, I warn you that I crawled out of Roads to Berlin, in particular, exhausted and only occasionally enlightened.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate