Book Reviews – Commemorating 100 Years of World War I

This year commemorates the 100th anniversary of the First World War that killed millions and devastated Europe. There are many books on the origins and the consequences, including a second more destructive war a few decades latter.

 Among the most recent books is The War that ended Peace by Margaret McMillan*, an historian of the University of Oxford. The title seems to dwell on the fact that “Europe had seen no major war for decades before 1914”, only limited conflicts in Asia, Africa and distant regions.

The first chapter has a vivid description of the Paris Exposition of 1900 that was visited by more than 50 million visitors. The French declared the Exhibition as “a symbol of harmony and peace”.

 The Introduction, as a stark contrast describe the destruction of Louvain in Belgium, once a “prosperous and peaceful“ gothic town with a famous university founded in1425 with a library that hosted 200,000 unique books. In 1914 the town was destroyed and burned. The author mentions that “like much Belgium, Louvain has the misfortune to be on the route of the German invasion to France..”

The book brilliantly narrates the events that led to the war, the small conflicts and tension between that superpowers and their different allies through the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the spark that brought Europe to a war which ended the European empires and caused the worst chaos, death and misery to millions of people, including civilians, children and woman.

 Among the fiction books that depict the human side of the beginning of a peaceful 20th Century and the horrible war, Joseph Roth offers two masterpieces, “The Radetzky March (1932) and its sequel The Emperor’s Tomb (1934). In the introduction of the first one, Nadine Gordimer mentions how Roth let us “see the deterioration of a society, an empire, in which disparate nationalities have been forced into political unity by an overriding authority and its symbol: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Joseph.”

 “The Radetzky March is the story of a prominent family that was granted the highest ranks of the nobility for an heroic act of a soldier that saved the life of the young Emperor Franz Joseph in a battle. It described the life of the youngest member of the Trotta family and how the Empire was collapsing under the oldest emperor in the world. “All around him, Death was circling, circling and mowing”. The huge power of the Hapsburgs was dying, “shattered on the ultimate bottom of the universe, splintering into several tiny solar balls that had to shine as independent stars on independent nations.”**

 Some analysts see a parallel to the conflicts between China and Japan for some minor unimportant islands comparing these with what happened in the pre-war Europe 100 years ago.

 I think it is a good timing to remember the First World War and its horrors reading Margaret McMillan’s history book as well as Joseph Roth’s brilliant novels.

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* Margaret McMillan. The War that ended Peace. Random House, 2014. iBooks https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-war-that-ended-peace/id653545020?mt=11

* Roth, Joseph. “The Radetzky March.” Overlook Press, 2002. iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-radetzky-march/id471195709?mt=11

Craig Brown. Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings.

A book on encounters and conversations, that can be useful to inspire stories and plots. Craig Brown is a columnist for the British magazine Private Eye, with a well-researched collection of conversations between famous characters. Craig Brown gathered these sometime bizarre meetings, expected or unexpected, from different sources. This book even includes an incident of Adolf Hitler being hit by a US student testing his new car in Germany before World War II. There is also an account of a 2-hour visit that Rudyard Kipling made to Mark Twain when the former was still a young follower of the latter whereas years later Twain became an admirer of Kipling. The book is filled with gossips, funny stories and interesting conversations between iconic names including artists, composers, filmmakers and architects, etc. Craig Brown tells us that “Everything in this book is documented…Nothing is invented. When accounts of the same meeting differ, as they almost always do, I have sided with the most likely.

Craig Brown. Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings. Simon & Schuster. 2012

Also reviewed by Michiko Kakutani. New York Times, August 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/books/hello-goodbye-hello-by-craig-brown.html?pagewanted=1&tntemail1=y&_r=1&emc=tntGreat

Orham Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 2008.

The author is the 2006 Literature Nobel Prize winner. In his 8th novel The Museum Innocence Pamuk explores life in Istanbul during the 70s and 80s with particular details from the perspective of the son of a wealthy industrialist. The book vividly portraits the social and moral conflicts of a society, even being ruled by a secular system that broke with Islamic law, which was torn between rigid traditions and the desire to emulate the West. Pamuk emphasizes these tensions through love and pre-marital sex. The book focuses on an obsessive relationship full of pains and difficulties, which for the western readers today might not be easy to understand. His descriptions of spaces including homes, streets and restaurants, as well as feelings of love, shame, greed, hope and despair in  situations such as parties and outings full of credible conversations with the most diverse topics ranging from filmmaking to business with lots of social gossips. All these made this book a psychological trip to the mind of an addict lover, as well as a guide to Turkey’s capital.

Related article: Memory Lane by Maya Jaggi, published in The Financial Times, is more of a review of the physical museum with the same name of the novel which was founded by Pamuk in a townhouse in Istanbul’s antiques district to host the objects described in the novel which are associated with its main characters.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d373494a-7cde-11e1-a676-00144feab49a.html#axzz24B8hpC9i