"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The Castle (Franz Kafka) (written 1922, published 1926)

After running into so many glowing references to Kafka (including one just today in a Tony Judt book), I decided to go back to his books (at least two of the more famous ones, The Trial and this one).  

K, a land surveyor, is invited to "The Castle" to work.  He never gets there.  He spends time in a snow-laden village beneath the Castle.  It's hard to get around in the snow.  He learns that the authorities in the Castle - highly thought of in all respects - may have made an error in inviting a land surveyor.  He is not permitted to practice his trade.  He does end up for awhile as a janitor in the local school (this after forming a relationship with Frieda, the taproom girl).  He is somehow given two assistants - childlike, unhelpful, always present; one eventually takes off with Frieda.  He is supposed to receive messages from the Castle about his situation via Barnabas, but learns from Barnabas's sisters (especially via Olga) that this may not be very reliable.  (Their family had been disgraced when one of the sisters (Amalia) rejected an overture sent via message by a gentleman from the Castle.)

Klamm is an important Castle representative who spends time in the Gentlemen's Inn in the village.  K keeps trying to get in touch with Klamm.  His efforts do not succeed.


Pepi succeeded Frieda in the taproom.

The villagers have a strange life in general - generally in awe of the Castle and its inhabitants, inconsistent in their descriptions of the Castle officials, lacking understanding.  And K struggles to figure out how things work in this odd little world.

Chapter V is a masterpiece - K's conversation with the village chairman (low level official not even directly involved with the Castle) - about how K may have been summoned, and where he stands.  Kafka is rightly famous for observing and communicating the modern bureaucracy.

But there's more here - loneliness, inability to meet a goal; the setting in the village is unsettling.

Kafka didn't finish this book either; he was working on it when he died.

And no, I don't really know what to make of it.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The Long Road Home - The Aftermath of the Second World War (Ben Shephard, 2010)

I read lots of World War II stuff, and for good reason.  Most of it focuses on the political leadership, the generals and the armies, also for good reason.  This book is different - it focuses on the displaced persons (DPs, to use the then terminology) resulting from the military mayhem.

I liked it, though perhaps not as much as I was hoping.

On the Allied side, lots of planning and effort went into handling the DPs - it was recognized that this was critical to a lasting peace.  Nevertheless, the issue received a tiny fraction of resources in comparison to military needs (and for good reason).

I've read about a lot of these issues in books like this one, and even moreso in this one.  But this is one of the few to focus almost exclusively on the topic.

One obvious theme is the extreme degree of difficulty in eastern Europe - plenty of tough situations in western Europe, but nothing in comparison to areas where Hitler's armies swept through in 1939-1941; and then Stalin's armies swept back through later in the war.  Some areas saw multiple back-and-forth situations.

Life in DP camps - some of this went on for many years - no doubt substantial similarities to modern refugee camps - internal hierarchies and politics etc.

Nordic types were favored by British and US; Poles generally looked down upon; Jewish DPs as a particular challenge given their unique circumstances (even if the Holocaust per se hadn't yet entered public consciousness, certainly folks knew the Jews had been special targets).  This contributed directly to decisions about formalizing Israel as a state in 1948.

Ukrainians and others (including some Poles) absolutely desperate not to be returned to Russia - Americans and Brits became less strict about this as time went on.  These folks knew what their world would be like in Stalin-land.

The effort to trace lost children - sometimes resulting in returning long-adopted (if informally in many cases) children to parents who didn't know them and were in desperate straits of one kind or the other.

Getting places like Canada and the U.S. to take refugees.

Essentially this was a one-of-a-kind problem in terms of scope (not in terms of its nature) - no real way to anticipate or prepare for the post-war era.  The human suffering continued.