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It's short and to the point, boiling down to a big bang finale that might be straight out of an action movie within just over 100 pages, covering some very heavy subjects (war, resistance, holocaust) in between... and yet it manages to lull you into a false sense of security with its burlesque charm. Like all of Hrabal's heroes, the young train station attendant Miloš Hrma comes across as a pretty simple guy - both in the sense of not having any huge aspirations and in the sense of not being the sharpest tool in the shed - and the people he works with are a collection of originals who add to the at times almost obscene slapstick humour. The dispatcher is a casanova, the telegraphist a slut, the stationmaster doesn't care about anything but his pigeons, and Miloš is just trying to work up the courage to lose his virginity to the cute conductor on one of the trains.

It just happens to be winter 1945 and the Germans are all but running in orderly panic from the Eastern front, and many of them have to pass through the little Czech town where Miloš and his colleagues are required to keep the trains running on time. And the Czech resistance is starting to see the light in the tunnel, but you know what they say...

...It's just a freight train coming your way.

A short fairy-tale-like story about a nobleman who comes back from the war with the Turks horribly disfigured; his entire left-hand side has been shot to pieces (or has it?) and the one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed, half-gutted, half-brained (but not half-witted) nobleman seems to have gone through a personality change; it soon turns out that he's, well, evil. He treats his subjects horribly, and he's also become obsessed with cutting things in half.

Of course, after a while it turns out his left-hand-side wasn't obliterated at all, but only took longer to get back from the war since it had to stop and help people every step of the way. Yes, his other side is so completely good it's sickening, and even though his subjects are happy at first to have a counter-agent to the right-hand viscount, it soon turns out that the left-hand viscount is barely any use at all, since he absolutely refuses to do anything about the world he lives in or even judge his evil half.

The Cloven Viscount is fun, a light read, playing around with the ideas of good and evil but ultimately not really saying much that hasn't been said in just about every fairytale ever written. I did find some details interesting - for instance, that the first sign that the first half-viscount is evil comes in his completely unforgiving view of justice and his need to separate everything into good and evil halves.

It's a likable enough story, it doesn't take itself too seriously and you'll breeze through it in two hours, but it's by far the most lightweight Calvino I've read.

Helmet off helmet off – we have lost!

Wolfgang Borchert was one of millions of Germans who fought in WWII. Not for Hitler, for national socialism, or for Germany; for Germany, he'd written plays against the nazis, which earned him a one-way trip to the front (it's easier to have your enemies take care of dissidents).

When he came back home, the war was over, Hitler was dead and Wolfgang himself wasn't far behind. Four years of bullet wounds (some allegedly self-inflected), field hospitals, sickness, jail and POW camps had finished him. So he sat down and started writing again. He wrote about fighting in a war he didn't believe in, where schoolboy fantasies about honour turned out to mean mass graves. He wrote about coming home to a country in both material and moral ruins, where everybody seemed to just want to pretend the last 10 years never happened. He wrote about a Europe that had marched straight into a meat grinder shouting happy slogans. He wrote as quickly as he could; everything old had been obliterated by the war, something new had to come, and he knew he wouldn't be around to see it.

We don’t need poets with good grammar. We lack patience for good grammar. We need those with the hot feeling that’s been sobbed hoarse. Who call a tree tree and a woman woman and say yes and say no: loud and distinctly and threefold and without a subjunctive.

There are several editions of Borchert's work. This one, The Man Outside, collects roughly a dozen of his short stories and the titular play, literature that runs gasping for breath along a knife's edge between furious polemics and horrified sentimentality and somehow manages to never fall off to either side. A direct, frenzied prose that occasionally simmers down into dreamlike, elegic pieces like "The Bread" and "The Rats Sleep At Night" and become completely heartrending.

In Borchert's stories, soldiers stumble down the street of once-again peaceful Germany with their heads full of machine-gun fire and the number of people they had killed. Boys sit in bombed-out buildings, keeping constant vigil so the rats don't eat their little brother buried under the rubble. Decades-old marriages threaten to crash over something as trivial as a piece of bread. Prisoners risk their lives for just a glimpse of a wildflower. And above all there's a narrator who at times seems to have endless sympathy and pity for his co-sufferers, and at other times drop all pretenses of telling a story and just yells at the reader: this is what we are. This is what we did, all of us. There are no attempts at setting it in some ideological or political perspective, all ideologies and politics got massacred in the war, there's just the now, the ground zero, where they need to start again.

Say NO! Say NO! Say NO!

Borchert isn't subtle. He doesn't have time for subtle. He has an incredible raw talent and had he lived, he might have looked back on these early stories today and thought of them as punkishly charming but a little too black and white, but that would never happen and he knew it, so he just needs to get it all down on paper.

Wolfgang Borchert died in 1947, 26 years old. The day after his death saw the first performance of "The Man Outside", the aforementioned play that makes up the centrepiece of the collection, with the subtitle "a play no theatre wants to perform and no audience wants to see." In this, a lone soldier returns to Germany after three years in a Siberian POW camp. His name is Beckmann - just Beckmann, everyone's forgotten his first name; he's never been anything but a soldier. He has no initiative of his own; he's never done anything but take orders. He still wears a uniform; he's never owned any civvies. And now they tell him that's all over, there's no need to feel bad about it, you only did your duty, here, have a schnapps and let's sing Alte Kameraden, why do you keep looking at us like that? But his parents, faithful nazis, are both dead. His wife found someone else. His general refuses to understand why he feels guilty about all the dead. With nowhere to go, nobody to listen, he tries to drown himself in the Elbe, but even Death won't have him. And so he stands there as the curtain falls, one of millions along dozens of riverbanks in a Europe that doesn't know where to go and finds no answers in 2000 years of civilization and millions of dead:

Go on, answer me!
Why won't you say anything? Why?
Won't anybody answer me?
Anybody?
Won't anybody, anybody answer me?

And the voice echoes.

So with the prospect of zombie mayhem looming, I figured I should finally pull my thumb out and actually read Pride And Prejudice.

And I'm really glad I did. Despite the book's reputation for being more than just a love story, I wasn't sure what to expect of a 200-year-old romantic comedy. But it pretty much won me over from the first page on; that famous opening line - "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" - turns out to be dripping with irony as Austen sets about sending up the social, sexual and class-related norms of her day. Which, occasionally, aren't all that different in nature, if not degree, to ours.

Of course, reading Austen with 200 years' worth of perspective on those issues (and no personal experience of 19th century upper class twits), it's probably easy to read it as more revolutionary than it was intended. [spoiler]Elizabeth does end up marrying wealth, after all - and doesn't protest when her father says she wants to "look up to [Darcy] as a superior".[/spoiler] The Second Sex it certainly ain't - not even A Doll's House. Still, it makes its points and makes them well - simply by sketching how the world worked and then inserting a female protagonist who asks, perhaps not the world, but at least a say in what part of the world she'll end up with - without ever getting preachy, and with characters so well-described (not in appearance, but in personality) that they still feel real all these years later. As an aside, I can't help thinking that it would be nice to slip this into the hands of people currently claiming to defend the ancient, sacred institution of marriage, too. Somehow I doubt that this is what most of them truly want to go back to.

"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced that it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly--which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. (...) To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the four per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married."

It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.

"You are too hasty, sir," she cried. "You forget that I have made no answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them."

"I am not now to learn," replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."

Romantic fellow, that Collins, isn't he? And bear in mind that this is considered a favourable marriage by just about everyone except Elizabeth herself (and her father, but he's what he is.)

Of course, it's all very obvious how it's going to turn out and apart from one twist that I should probably have seen coming ([spoiler]Wickham running off with Lydia[/spoiler]) it's not the kind of book you read for the plot. But still, even if the basic story is a bit by-the-numbers, it's beautifully written (though I was glad of the footnotes) and holy crap, the dialogue! Rapid-fire back-and-forths (especially Elizabeth and her father) loaded with barely-hidden sarcasm that just... zings as well as sings. Ah, dry British wit, how happy you make me. Even in a tale as dated as this undoubtedly is - though it's far from irrelevant - both the jokes and the subtly serious points still carry enough truth and venom to sting and tickle.

14 kilometres.

Or about 8 1/2 miles for you colonials. That's the distance between Morocco and Spain, Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, wealth and poverty. It's not that far, really. In Tanger, Azel and his friends sit around smoking kif, sick to death of a world where nothing happens except when the police decide to do a raid, and in Almería (Arabic name, like so many other names in southern Spain; al-mariyat means "The mirror") across the water is paradise. Or so they would like to think, at least. All they need to do is get across the Med without drowning and into Spain without getting arrested by the guardia. How hard can it be? And if a rich Spaniard offers you a chance, what are you willing to do to take it?

Obviously, it's hard for me to judge just how authentic Ben Jelloun's image of working-class Tanger, and the unemployed 20-somethings in it, is. And while Thomas isn't the first to comment that Ben Jelloun isn't a very vocal critic of the Moroccan government - Leaving Tanger very pointedly ends right as the current king ascends the throne, complete with crowds chanting "Long live the king" - I'm not sure that bothers me. When we're talking of political issues, I tend to prefer novels that deal with wider perspectives than just a specific government or a specific country, that try to get at the issues underneath the issues. And Leaving Tanger - a clumsy English title, that lacks both the deceptively simple Partir of the original and the rather poetic To the Other Side of the Ocean of the Swedish translation - seems to have the makings of a very fine novel; one that's about both geographical, cultural, political, religious and sexual outsiders in New Europe, of the difficulties of being human when everyone is expected to conform to the labels put upon you by others. Azel sleeps with women and men but refuses to be labeled bi or homosexual, he's a muslim who think the idea of women wearing veils is ridiculous and gladly gets both drunk and stoned, he doesn't belong in Morocco and he's not welcome in Europe... Through him, and the other people he meets who for various reasons exist on the fringe of society, Ben Jelloun wants to create a multi-faceted mirror of the ever-the-twain-shall-meet relationship of those 14 kilometres, with subtly hinted roots going all the way back to the days of the Califate. It should be a set-up for a Great Old World Novel, and every now and then it almost is one - funnily enough, the bits I find the most affecting are the ones where he spends an entire chapter on a secondary character. Maybe this should have been a collection of short stories instead.

Because unfortunately, he sabotages himself a little too often. His prose walks a wobbly line between concise poetry and dry reporting that's occasionally beautiful and occasionally (and far too often, at critical points in the narrative) reads more like a summary of the novel than the novel itself. Especially towards the end, it feels like Ben Jelloun has handed in a first draft that still needs fleshing out; characters come and go in a flash, plot lines are abandoned with no follow-up, and we never really get a completely clear picture - authentic or not - of the world the novel takes place in.

Ultimately, Leaving Tanger is a frustrating book. Frustrating because it describes people, and by extension a world, trapped in a situation that cannot continue indefinitely but where there are no clear answers to the question how to move forward. That's fine; a good novel should be more about asking questions than answering them. But it's also frustrating because it doesn't fulfill its promise, and because it seems to give up on itself towards the end (despite its short length) in a way that makes the somewhat hopeful ending sound like a lie. And that's a pity for both the novel and the real-world issues it tries to tackle.

Jasira is 13 when her Irish-American mother sends her to live with her Lebanese father in Houston. This is because her mother's new boyfriend has started to pay a little too much attention to Jasira. This is Jasira's own fault; after all, she's the one walking around with tits out to here and hormones all over the place, and the boyfriend is just a man after all, he can't be expected to control himself around her. She just needs a firm hand and a strict upbringing - if need be, have some modesty beaten into her.

Towelhead is told in the first person from Jasira's point of view, against the backdrop of the first Gulf War, which means that whatever her father may argue ("North Africans are white! When I got my green card, I checked white under 'race'!") Arabs aren't the most popular people in the American heartland. (The fact that he and Jasira are Christians barely comes up; it's not like anyone cares.) Hence the book's title, and much of the humour that comes up when Jasira's first boyfriend turns out to be black and her father vehemently protests that he's not a racist for forbidding her to see him; it's just that he knows first-hand how difficult interracial relationships can be for the woman. The fact that all the kids (and quite a few adults) are already calling her "towelhead", "camel jockey" and "sandnigger" on a regular basis is beside the point; the point is that he's not a racist. And while he's staring himself blind at his own hang-ups, he completely misses that the 40-year-old neighbour is starting to be interested in his daughter, who - hormones all over the place, and taught to respect her elders - finds it more than just a little flattering...

This is a comedy. Yes, it is. It deals frankly and matter-of-factly with teenage sex, parental abuse, cultural clashes, misogyny, racism and child molestation, and it's funny. As a narrator of her almost Lolita-in-reverse story, Jasira is a classic 90s US teenager; smart but not as smart as she thinks, cynical because her head is full of naive ideals, dismissive of everyone else - and not for no reason, as the adults (presented from her POV) are hardly the best role models. (If anything, the novel's biggest drawback is the rather clichéd adults.) But at the same time, what makes the humour uneasy is the way she still learns from them. Hormones or not, sexually active or not, she's still a kid and still believes what she's told - and if everyone, Lebanese dad or American boyfriend, tells her bad things that happen to her are her own fault for not living up to their standards, eventually she takes it on board. And there she finds herself caught between the eternally conflicting and mutually exlusive roles she's expected to play. Told to be obedient, especially towards men, then blamed for obeying the wrong men; told she's just a girl, then blamed for not being mature; told she's free to live her life, then blamed for not living it exactly as everyone - whether the racist paedophile next door or the liberal couple on the other side - thinks she should. And as said, obviously it's all her fault. They couldn't possibly be wrong. And so we build a world, teach our children their place in it, and make sure they pass on the guilt for being human to the next generation.

One fine day, just as the world is spinning on its sinning axis, a bunch of people disappear. Rather a lot, really. We're never given an exact number, but assuming it involves all the world's children, not just the blonde and blue-eyed True Christian children, that'd give you a figure of about 1.5-2 billion people. Now, our few remaining heroes must deal with the fallout of the most horrible disaster ever to strike humankind... that is, traffic jams, cliched newspaper editors, and the president of Romania giving endless boring speeches.

And no, it's not a comedy. At least its authors don't intend it to be one.

Now, there's a lot of things you can criticise Left Behind for without having to reach. You can call it preachy, long-winded and patronizing. You can say it has a vindictive "told ya!" streak as wide as the Red Sea. You can point out that it's about as biblically correct as Dan Brown, and twice as hung up on ridiculous conspiracy theories. You can say that it's blatantly reactionary, misogynist, xenophobic and anti-semitic. You can even, as some have done, claim that it's dangerous.

Or you can go the Oscar Wilde route and point out that Left Behind is simply a Very Badly Written book. A book so badly written that it actually works better as a parody of religious zealotry and close-minded nationalism, to the point where you might even find yourself cheering for the bad guys simply because the good guys are so utterly dim and unlikable, if not for the fact that LaHaye and Jenkins don't even manage to make the Antichrist an interesting villain - even though their entire plot hinges on his charisma.

See, Left Behind really wants to be a thriller. A rather horriffic thriller at that, a "scare 'em straight" kind of novel that hammers home the awful fate awaiting those who reject (the authors' brand of) Christianity when the end times hit. And it's not a bad idea, story-wise. God starting the apocalypse, 2 billion people disappearing, the big fight between good and evil... there should be a movie. But they forgot to bring horror and thrills to the party; instead, what they got was a boring, incoherent, poorly written mess, broken up by comedy when it falls apart into unintentional slapstick and parody, before sputtering out as if they ran out of paper in the middle of the story.

The trick to selling a supernatural (or otherwise non-realistic) premise is to make it plausible, make it relatable, and Left Behind has no idea how to do that since it feels absolutely nothing like the real world. The writers seem hilariously unaware of how anything works, unable to imagine how anyone who is not them would think about anything; it's like the "Kids say the darnedest things" of thrillers.

Daylight revealed the carnage and exposed Russia's secret alliance with Middle Eastern nations, primarily Ethiopia and Libya.

The main characters are obvious self-inserts, which makes it all the more disturbing that they are, for the most part, belligerent, self-serving, and incompetent. The secondary characters are all portrayed as either utter idiots or evil conspirators, since that's the only way they can ever hope to make the absurd plot work. The Antichrist being put in charge of the entire world because he's able to recite all the member nations of the UN (in alphabetical order in nine languages!) is just one of many examples where they seem to still be stuck in 3rd grade, where the definition of "smart" is "ability to parrot what others already know" - even though they get it wrong half the time. The writers don't understand their own concepts and so they just fib, which not only makes their characters look like morons, but makes me pretty sure the authors think I am one, too.

"Dr. Rosenzweig believes that some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, could have been ignited or triggered -- perhaps by a natural cause like lightning, or even by an intelligent life-form that discovered this possibility before we did -- and caused this instant action throughout the world. At this point they are postulating that certain people's levels of electricity made them more likely to be affected. That would account for all the children and babies and even fetal material that vanished. Their electromagnetism was not developed to the point where it could resist whatever happened."

Their... what?!? That's intended to be a believable explanation, btw. Yes, this is fiction and I'd be glad to give them a pass on factual errors if the characters and the plot held up. But it really really doesn't. It's incredibly clumsily written, breezing past what should be important events in a few sentences to get to the next overlong Bible summary, full of malplaced exposition that gets repeated so often you'd think they would notice how frequently they contradict themselves. Most of the novel focuses on characters trying to find out what happened, who's behind it, and what's going to happen next. But since the reader already knows exactly what's happened, we get a plot that's boring as hell and the only thing that keeps me turning the pages is to see what wacky concept the authors will try to sell me on next.

But above all, its failure is in completely missing its own point. The title is Left Behind; you'd think it would focus on the experience of being, well, left behind in the most horriffic disaster ever. The shock, the questions, the panic, the grief. Remember 9/11, or the Indian Ocean tsunami, or any major assassination or other huge disaster you may have been witness to in first or second hand? Remember the hushed shock afterwards? Remember the way every conversation would start with "Where were you when..."? Remember the outrage, the official mourning, the way it took weeks or even years to get back to something resembling normality?

Now imagine that multiplied by a few thousand times.

We never once get any sort of feeling for how the world at large – or even the US, which is really all the authors care about – is affected by this; at the most, billions of people disappearing and tens of thousands dying as a result is described as a logistical problem – it clogs up the roads, it makes landing aircraft difficult, you have to walk across Manhattan (which takes hours, apparently). You wanna do a horror novel about an apocalypse? The Last Man, War of the Worlds, The Stand, World War Z, On The Beach... I'm not saying they don't have their flaws, some more than others, but what they have in common is that they all give you some sort of angle on losing billions of people, bring you into the story, make you feel what it would be like, the pure shock it would be to humanity on both a personal and a societal level. What does Left Behind have? Clogged airport terminals. A couple of days later, the biggest news on the planet is that the president of Romania is speaking in the UN, which wouldn't be news ANYWHERE even in the middle of a severe news drought. All the world's children disappear, and nobody even raises an eyebrow except to weep a bit over their own kid before going on with their lives as if nothing happened.

In sports news, Major League Baseball teams in spring training face the daunting task of replacing the dozens of players lost in the cosmic disappearances.

Ultimately, LaHaye and Jenkins have neither the ability nor the interest to write about actual human beings living through trying times, what they are prepared to do to do the right thing under difficult circumstances, or what it means to be good or evil. They have a script that they cobbled together from a 2,000-year-old teacher's edition that everyone has already read, and rather than try to think up a plausible way of how it would play out in our times and what it would mean to people, they just do what many other bad fanfiction authors do and stick to the script no matter how badly it fits. Everything else be damned. Literally.

Just finished The Shadow of the Wind and on a whole, I'm pretty happy with it being my first Holiday Read (TM) of the year. It's definitely a thriller, a pageturner as they say, with healthy doses of sex, violence and... OK, no rock'n'roll, but used books are kind of like rock'n'roll and there's a lot of those in it too. But it's a thriller written the way I wish more thrillers were; by a writer who might not be a genius but knows his craft, who can bring a setting and a character to life, make you smell the dusty old pages or the fresh blood, and keeps you turning the pages not by having a cliffhanger on every fifth page and killing someone else every time he runs out of plot, but simply by setting up a complex plot and then letting it unfold bit by bit. Oh, and I like the fact that he sets it in a fascist dictatorship just a few years after a very divisive civil war but doesn't make a huge deal of it, just lets it seep through without constantly spelling it out for the reader; it's become normal to the characters, after all. And while it's not exactly Pereira Declares, it touches upon the literature-as-resistance plot but turns it into something more personal than political. Plus, lots of gothic horror novel influences too, can't complain about that.

That's the good news. The bad news? Well, like others have said, it goes on a little too long for an ending that's a little too predictable. That comes with the territory, I guess. And while some of the characters are nicely drawn, others - in particular the women - seem like pawns, prizes or plot devices in the boys' game a little too often. (It feels a bit a propos that one of the major clues is sold for the price of a prostitute.) But hey, it's a machismo culture and of course that's part of the plot too, so I'll overlook that. What's worse is Zafón's tendency to switch narrator when it fits the story; he stays in first person for most of the book, but at times he cannot figure out a way to develop the backstory and just goes into omniscient third for a few pages until we're up to scratch. It yanks me out of the story, reminds me that it's just a story after all, and I'm not too fond of that.

Maybe that's a little unfair to Zafón; after all, with all the weird coincidences and generally blurred lines between the story itself and the stories within it, we might just have a slightly unreliable narrator here (we'd almost have to, or there would be some things that just don't add up). Maybe the book is (or tries to be) smarter than it looks; maybe I should have kept a cooler head than the weather permits, and not let the Barcelona fog trick me. But for now, it's an enjoyable pageturner, no less, but probably no more.