Excellent but not an easy read

There’s so much going on in this book that is painful, sad and horrific that it sounds like one to avoid but it’s also a story of relationships of every kind. The main characters are pretty unprepossessing at first sight but I was convinced to care and see the nobility in all of them. I’ve made it sound terribly hard work but it isn’t.

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Highly Descriptive of a devastated Berlin

I doubt I would have ever read or listened to this book if it were not for it being our bookclub choice. It describes very vividly life at the end of the second world war, in Berlin. The main character, Casper is a gay man, working the blackmarket, struggling trying to look after a father he loves, then becoming entangled in a web of decit and lies. Eva a rubble girl with a mission to kill, and her gang of fellow assassins, creeps into his life by trying to blackmail him. The story weaves its way around and around, I found it all a bit fanciful and over worked. I agree with a previous reviewer when he said he though it was written as a film script - I found it wordy and tedious to listen to at times. However, there was a good twist to the tale and it was read superbly. The characters all came alive in the voice of the narrator, I wish he read more novels. Would I recommend it - not sure, as a bit of history perhaps but as an enjoyable read no.

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Great descriptive writing but frustratingly long winded.

A story providing a historical insight into conditions in Berlin after WW2, however after such a contorted plot the end seemed rather tame.

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It isn't Fallada...but what comes afterwards.

It took me a while to get into Fergusson's work, because I kept on being pulled out by Fallada's Alone In Berlin, which is probably a superior read, but I can't quite say why. The themes in common are obvious, but even some motifs (the notes posted anonymously) were striking.

Maybe, Fergusson, although he writes very fluently and even poetically in parts, is too cinematographic in his style - if that can be a fault these days.... I kept on seeing him direct the movie of the novel.

It is not easy to be original about post-war Berlin, especially not for they, like myself, who also have just read Beevor on the subject. So there was nothing in this novel to surprise or engage me afresh.

I never quite knew whether to like or dislike Kaspar (so I picture a Max von Sydow playing his part), and to be honest had trouble in the first half grasping that he really was going to be the main character in the novel, and it was all and only really going to be a portrait of a gay guy in the late forties where fascist ideas still rule. The plot with the girl almost felt incidental, possibly because it was too cleverly buried in the realistic setting of the place and time. The flirtation with sexual ambiguity was uncalled for and felt, again, like another typical Hollywood teaser.

In short, it is a bit of a thriller but it means to read like a biographical account. I suppose this is to imitate life all the better but I can't say it got me involved any better.

It is perfectly narrated, once you get into the (again typical early-days Hollywood) choice to narrate the German characters with German accents. Why that was done, is a little odd, since it's all set in Germany, with Germans as main protagonists, with a few Brits dotted about and a Russian popping up, every now and then, but I get how alternatives could also have been less than successful.

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2 people found this helpful