In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin, 2009)

This is different than my usual reading, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

The writer is from Pakistan; he puts together eight stories with quite a bit of overlap among the characters. It centers around a wealthy landowner named K.K. Harouni; he is now quite old and has gradually been selling off ancestral lands to cover failed ventures, high expenses, etc. The stories pick up various members of his family, but also focus on domestic servants, his key overseers, an electrician working on his properties, etc. Some of the family members are back and forth among London, America, Pakistan, etc.

So it speaks to the transition from feudal(?) Pakistan to very modern times, and it speaks across the social classes and geographies. All of which works very well. The last story is mostly about an old man who built a box-house that he could take with him when he moves (final move is to work on a Harouni property), nice and very sad.

Birthday gift from the Reghabis. Nice.

The Battle for Spain - The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Antony Beevor, 1982)

I have been very interested in learning something about the Spanish Civil War because it comes up so often in other things I'm reading.

There are a number of most interesting story lines that are part of the military action, such as:

1. The fascist powers of the day (Germany and Italy) expending great energy on behalf of Franco and the nationalists. The Nazis correctly perceived this war as a great opportunity to test military equipment and tactics; no doubt this was very helpful in the early days of WWII.

2. Stalin and the Russian communists expending great energy on behalf of the republican government. But not as effectively as the Germans. Stalin's interest was in seeing that the Spanish communist party was positioned to take over the leftist coalition after the civil war; he didn't wish to provoke Hitler. It seemed that the communists - one of the largest parts of the coalition - burned so much energy on internal politicking that might have been better turned toward the military. (And odd that Stalin entered into an alliance with Hitler, if short-lived, very quickly after the civil war ended.)

3. A "non-intervention" policy by those countries that might have been thought to be interested in supporting republican Spain - leaving it pretty much alone except for Russia and the folks mentioned in the next paragraph. Places like England and the US were scared off by the large communist streak in the republican coalition, not to mention the US Catholic lobby. Over time, the republican cause lacked resources.

4. Yet the republican cause was viewed by idealists around the world as noble, to the point where "international brigades" with thousands of participants showed up to fight fascism. Amazing. But at this point in the 1930s, the Stalinist purges and excesses were not all that widely known, and unions, communists and socialists were not in disfavor (worldwide depression, etc.)

5. And a big chunk of the celebrity artists and writers were in support of republican Spain. Ernest Hemingway probably most prominent among them. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great story, set entirely in the Spanish civil war.

6. The Guernica bombing.

7. Spanish vets show up on both sides in WWII, and it's easy to see why they would have been in demand. Republican types fought with the Russians; nationalist types helped the Nazis. There is a strong character in David Robbins' novel about Kursk - a Spanish civil war vet who was a tank expert. Etc.

8. I hadn't realized Franco was so tight with Hitler and Mussolini, or that he was running a first-class dictatorship right up into the 1960s. Retribution after the war apparently was just awful.

The book was quite good, though so detailed that I just blew through much of the military descriptions. I liked Beevor's Stalingrad (summarized here) better.

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