Christine at Bookishly Boisterous started this meme – get amongst it.
1. There’s a lot of ‘Best of 2013’ book lists out… Don’t these people read in December*?
2. Finished two books on the same day this week – Back to Back by Julia Franck and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. Unless you’ve read both you won’t understand how weird it was to have chosen those books to be read at the same time. And to finish them within hours of each other. Continue reading
I was grossly under-prepared for the intensity of Julia Franck’s Back to Back. Which is probably why I found it so disturbing.
The story begins in 1954, and centers around a single family living in Berlin in the socialist East. The mother, Käthe, is a sculptor, who has been leveraging her party connections in order to get more significant commissions. Devoted entirely to becoming a success, she is a cruel and completely unaffectionate mother, putting the socialist party above her children – Thomas, Ella and (unnamed and mostly absent) twin girls. She treats her children as if they were adults – there is no bourgeois mollycoddling in her household.
“Käthe was hardly ever happy, but she was proud.” Continue reading