Tag Archive: Germany
Inventing Anna (Episodes 5 – 9) (Netflix 2022)
Subtle: Anna Chlumsky.
(See our review of Episodes 1-4 here). We have watched the rest of the series, so that you don’t have to. In particular, we exhort you to never ever expose yourself to episode 9, which is without doubt the worst courtroom episode of a tv series ever made and possibly the worst episode of any tv series ever made. Before we get to that rubbish bit of drama though, our favourite Russian conwoman Anna Sorokin/Delvey (Julia Garner) and her hapless hangers-on go to Morocco. Anna’s treat. They stay at the sort of resort that the Kardashians frequent. Morocco is beautiful…
Continue Reading →Sundog
(Jeff Janoda. 2019) We at TVC are not particularly interested in the experiences of German pilots stationed in Southern Russia in December 1942, and so we would not have picked up Sundog, had we not known that its author, Canadian Jeff Janoda was also the author of the terrific, Saga A Novel of Medieval Iceland. Janoda justified our faith. It would have been our loss, had we judged this book by its subject matter. The settings of the two novels could not be more different, but the concise, detailed and historically rich style are the same. Sundog is a truly…
Continue Reading →Auto de Fe (Elias Canetti)(1935 – trans. into English in 1946)
A surreal representation of pre-World War 2 Mitteleuropa (specifically Germany), Nobel Prize winner’s novel Auto de Fé is an intense and disturbing stew of poverty, insanity and brutality. Dr Peter Kien, who is (at least in his opinion), the world’s greatest Sinologist, leads a strictly structured, hermetic life of study and paper-writing. He subsists on an inheritance, treating offers of professorial chairs with contempt. Although his housekeeper Therese has shown no attention at all to Kien’s 4-room library during the eight years she has lived in his apartment – other than in assiduously dusting it, Kien is enchanted when she…
Continue Reading →The Clown (by Heinrich Böll) – GUEST REVIEW
WE AT TVC ARE MOST PLEASED TO PRESENT A REVIEW BY OUR SENSATIONAL GUEST REVIEWER LYNETTE. Heinrich Böll’s The Clown jumped off the library shelf with its clown face cover. It was in synch with the contemporary news reports of creepy clowns that had been doing the rounds of e media. Having never heard of the writer, I was surprised at how popular and prolific he was as a novelist and poet, being well known as a best seller largely on the back of this 1963 classic, set in post-war Germany. Who other than children think that clowns are funny?…
Continue Reading →The Blue Flower
(Penelope Fitzgerald) I thought that Penelope Fitzgerald’s novalised (geddit?) part-biography of the poet and philosopher Novalis would help me straighten out the Penelopes Lively and Fitzgerald and stop me from confusing Novalis and Nerval. Of course Lively and Fitzgerald are virtually indistinguishable, both being women who have won the Booker Prize. By an incredible coincidence, each is English and has one “e” in her surname. It is also easy to see how I have confused the two male writers – after all, Gerard de Nerval was the pseudonym of Gerard Labrunie who took his lobster Thibault for walks about bits of France while Novalis was the…
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