This lovely Philip Kerr novel has a sympathetic German protagonist who was a cop in Berlin during the Nazi era. He has survived the war, and this one is set in post war Peronist Argentina, with Eva herself appearing, It reveals startling “facts” about how Argentina constructed its own death camps for poor Jewish immigrants. The country (and story) is filled with real life escaped German Nazis, such as Mengele and Boorman and ex-Policeman Bernie Gunther is hired to pursue an escaped serial killer amongst the Nazi émigrés, a Berlin crime previously encountered in an earlier novel. A fascinating and unusual tale and my favourite of his so far. He is really good and I have enjoyed passing along recommendations to happy people.

Defender of the Realm  1940-1965 I am also still working through this classic monster book on World War Two. It is intriguing to read what is going on in that tiny brave beleaguered island as they face the appalling sacrifices of six years of total war, held together by the wilful bravery of one of the finest drinkers the planet has ever known. I appear first as a tiny molecule around the North African campaign and then am born just at the time that the tide of war has finally turned.  There will still be almost another three years of world carnage, culminating in the birth of nuclear warfare, the rise of America, and the exhausted decline of Great Britain as a world power, having pawned her all (to America) to barely survive. Major stuff.

Continuing my summer bi-lingual reading I am still slowly working through this in French. I have the translation to hand. Emma is with Rostand. It’s as good as I can get in French reading and improves both my language skills and my appreciation of Flaubert’s cinema-like rendition of scenes and emotion.

A nice copy, an unabridged re-publication of the original Shakespeare and Company edition published in Paris by Sylvia beach in 1922 tempted me once again to give this a go. About a quarter way through I was tempted by something else and set it aside for a while. It’s not in my top 100… It’s amongst the world’s top unread books.

It starts out so energetically, with such force, so well written like a meteor, with the tale of Sabbath’s passion for his Croat mistress and the consequences of their sexuality, and then suddenly and unexpectedly collapses into a long almost incessant moan of complaint by the sixty year old puppeteer, who causes his wife Roseanne to collapse into alcoholism, his other actress wife Nikki to disappear, and a young student to expose him (accidentally) as a serial molester of students. Meanwhile he blusters on and on, justifying his geriatric sex antics that one grows quite tired of his endless justifying of his own desires, and his harking back over his happy days with the whores of South America. He is such a brilliant writer and this book is filled with his effortless bringing to life of scenes, but in the end I tired of it and decided to put it to one side.