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Feb. 19th, 2017 11:24 pmOlivia Manning – The Balkan Triligy
Much has changed in Bucharest since 1938 when this book is set, but a lot hasn’t. Olivia Manning I think was a woman with remarkable powers of observation, her writing has an almost forensic quality about it with each character dissected with almost forensic detail. The first moments of the book tell us almost all we need to know about the main players, Guy and Harriet, with Guy giving almost all he has to a refugee who has lost his papers while Harriet, sympathising, is more circumspect. Later, Harriet tells her husband she loves him, to which he responds ‘I know’.
I can’t decide whether this book is more remarkable for the details of daily life and descriptions of Bucharest and Athens (although the latter is less vivid for me, perhaps because I do not know it). I know all the places she describes and can imagine the peasants, the beggars and the spirits of dead Bucharest. She captures the fact that Bucharest has always been a city of big and grand dreams which never quite come to fruition, its grandiose ambitions and aspirations which somehow seem absurd rather than natural when she describes the characters such as Bella, Sophie and Sasha. But she is not kind to the Romanians, while describing the dark sides of the national character (which again I recognise) does not describe the warmth and humour of the people I have chosen. The Greeks are more sympathetically written of (which reminds me how one of the players in the book remarks that no one admires the Romanians and Manning certainly doesn’t).
Of the individuals Guy and Harriet are vivid but the others, although well drawn (especially the tragic yet cruel figure of Clarence and the toadying Toby) the others less so, I got especially irritated with Yakimov who is 2 dimensional and while such narrow figures exist in real life reading about them is tiresome. However the delicate interplay of Guy and Harriet is superb as each grows to know each other they realise that love is more than daydreams and that as they realise what the other is they will be disappointed. However where she does not have real experience the author is weaker, I would not describe her as a great imaginative novelist,I have no doubt she is describing her own marriage.
The real triumph of the books lies in describing events and nowhere more so than in describing what it is like to live in a place which may ver soon become a war zone where you don’t quite know what is going on. Gossip and rumour abound and there is only a sense that something bad will happen but you are powerless to do anything in reaction. Reading it I felt as though she were describing the shit that we are living through now as my emotions and Harriet’s are as one.
It was a good read and I look forward to the Levant Trilogy which I hope to get read this year.
Shakespeare on Toast - Ben Crystal.
I enjoy the videos Ben Crystal does with his Father (the wonderful and Erudite David) about Shakespeare and this little book is a nice introduction to what makes Shakespeare's stuff great, some elementary poetic and linguistic analysis for the non specialist and context of the theatre and performances. Good as a simple and easy to read intro on the bard.
The interior of the barracks was actually quite warm because of course they had been built to house soldiers, though certainly the bunks were narrow and the canvas sacking bedding looking none too comfy. In all the rooms the usual pictures of the descrimination against the Jews, the rounding up of the Roma, and a quite horrifying map showing how far the ghastly cattle trucks travelled. 
In this room was an urn of ashes, all that was preserved of 1.1 million souls. A man with a yarmulke was rapt, he caressed it, touched with with his forehead, gazed longingly at it, he would have climbed in if he could.
A whole room of mugshots, the earliest prisoners. The mother of the American family saw a photograph of a woman who shared a surname with her mother. For a moment I wondered if her ghost walked by.
Upstairs were personal effects. Hundreds of suitcases, glasses, fashionable ladies' shoes. I found it almost unbearably poignant that someone had thought to pack a cheese grater. Most awful of all were the broken dolls and other toys, the sight of which caused me almost physical anguish and which make me shudder just thinking of it.
In another room, a whole wall full of women's hair, all braided in the manner I usually do my own. The hair was sold for 50 pfennigs a kilo. 50 pfennigs for however many murders make up a kilo of hair. 50 Pfennigs. The hair was used to make cloth. Analysis of said cloth shows traces of Zyklon B.
We moved on to block 11. This was where torture and executions were carried out. It felt chilly in there, the decor remains unchanged from the 40s. I was glad that the place was so full we couldn't linger.
Next door, block 10, was Mengele's lair. The windows are blocked off completely. It is closed to all, for which I am glad. Nothing would induce me to go in there. Nothing.
And so we made our way round, I began feeling more ghosts at my back. Perhaps it was my fancy, I am unconvinced at the existence of the supernatural but I am certain that suffering permeates the ground and bricks. I could hear lorries driving by and began to want to run back outside.
Our last stop was the one remaining gas chamber - converted to be a bomb shelter just before liberation. Hoess was hanged right by it. As we walked in I allowed myself to pause and think of the gloomy atmosphere, and then in the chamber itself I looked up and felt a wave of utter, utter terror, a kind of sympathetic revelation of what the souls must have realised when they became aware that it wasn't water coming from the shower heads. I literally couldn't stay in there and I ran outside sobbing. Later at Birkenau I found I couldn't stand too close to the demolished crematoria there.
mother meanwhile found it difficult to walk down the railway line
My parents both have difficulty walking. Throughout the whole tour I had a vision of us arriving. Mum, Dad, sister and my 2 nieces would have been taken immediately for the 'shower', if my brother and I had been 'lucky' we would have been put to work, but probably only to die more slowly.
Dad didn't join mum and me at Birkenau as he had found the walking too much and I wished with my heart I could have joined him. Birkenau is an evil place. The chimney stacks make it seem doubly frightening
And the interior of each barrack was oppressive
And so the tour ended. Dad was exchanging some pleasantries with the guide, who shed his serious face and became quite genial and we drove back to merciful normality.
The following day we went home. in the evening I went for a walk and realised something. In the fields close to home there were some wild flowers and lots of bees, Birkenau is covered with clover, vetch and other tempting bee food yet I did not see or hear a single insect. Mother noted there were no birds nesting in the long grass.
