Wayfarers, by Knut Hamsun

Not even Thomas Hardy could wring such tragedy from a handful of ordinary characters, closely observed in their rural surroundings. (Now!)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A good book. A bit Buddenbrooks, a bit of a drama, with a great amount of insight. The ‘wayfarers’ are threefold: Edevart and August, wandering around Norway; all those who head for America and the new world; and the whole advance towards progress. In the inevitability and then both the benefits and problems of progress, the book has a lot to say. But it isn’t Mysteries, which leaves you with an enigma still demanding to be solved. You’re left instead with a good, romantic story.

Group Portrait with Lady, by Heinrich Böll

A work of considerable distinction. (The Times Literary Supplement)

Leni (the central character) is seen through a series of interviews with witnesses who make up this huge ‘group portrait’. This works brilliantly as a parody of fashionable documentary; then by making the story resonant with overlapping echoes; and finally by counter-pointing these voices of the imagination with the terrible dead language of real documents of Nazi bureaucracy. (The Guardian)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

As the review says, a work of considerable distinction, one that demands re-reading, if only because what is not said, more than most novels, is what is important. The Au. is perhaps the greatest literary creation, in the sense that the book is about the author’s fleshing out a character through research, etc., only finally confronting her face-to-face at the end. The style is perhaps at once its strength and weakness, and its ‘politics’ may be distracting - ‘another book about the war.’ But it isn't really about the war…