The You You Are– Ricken Hale
This is a free ebook from Apple to tie in with the new series of Severance. It pretends to be an extract from the laughable self-help book in the show, but also features foreshadowing of possible events in the new series.
I’m Staying Here– Marco Balzano
I saw the German edition of this book set in Graun/Curon for sale everywhere in Val Venosta, and then found the English edition on Overdrive from my local library. It was originally written in Italian, so you don’t lose much reading it in translation, as it doesn’t use any of the very distinctive German dialect from the area. It follows an ordinary family in the village from the 20s to the late 50s, using the real history of the area as a basis. It’s unrelentingly grim. The family are never allowed to have a minute’s happiness before the next historical event comes and smacks them in the face. Even the dog gets put down.
Trina graduates from teacher training in the 20s just as Mussolini comes to power, and bans German speakers from teaching. She gets married and runs a farm with her husband Erich instead. When the 30s hit, their daughter Marica runs away to Berlin with her Nazi-supporting aunt and uncle and is never seen again, and their son Michael naively thinks Hitler will save them from Mussolini. Erich gets sent for a stint on the disastrous Italian campaign in Greece, and comes back with fervent disgust for the Nazis. Once Mussolini gets jailed, and Südtirol is directly annexed by the Reich, they have to go on the run from the SS in a remote farm in the high mountains. As soon as they come back to the village after the war, the hydro-electric dam project that has been looming over them for decades is finally finished, and their house and farmland are submerged under the new resevoir.
There’s lots of hard farm work and horrible deaths of both humans and farm animals in this book. Val Venosta is still a remote place these days, but is now modern and very wealthy. Pre WWII, it was completely pre-modern. Nobody in the village has a radio or electricity, German newspapers are illegal, and most of the villagers can’t read anyway, so the characters spend most of the Second World War without the slightest idea of what is going on in the world. When I was walking around Glurns, I imagined not that long ago there would have been farm animals wandering the streets, and peasants living in the village who had never gone more than a few miles from home, and this is exactly the life everyone in the book leads.
The blurbs are full of praise for the author’s writing style, but the English edition was extremely flat. I don’t know if it was a translation issue, but the Italian reviews online also complain about the same thing. It’s like he had to cram so many historical events from his research in there wasn’t much time for any other development.
Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers– Emma Smith
A selection of essays on the history of books, but about their material form rather than the contents. Full of all kinds of interesting facts, such as that The Great Gatsby acquired its status as a modern classic because it was one of the books the US Army decided to print as pocket sized stapled booklets zine-style for soldiers in the Second World War, and so acquired millions of new readers.
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