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Ella Morris: A Novel
Spanning the decades from WWII to the Yugoslav conflict, Ella Morris is the story of a continent, and of a woman torn between two men. Born in Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, Ella Andrzejewski escapes Soviet-occupied europe and finds a safe haven in England. Here, she marries George Morris but falls passionately in love with a French student ten years her junior. The ramifications of this love triangle and of Ella's traumatic past will reverberate through the generations, as her children try to find their own troubled peace in a continent still scarred by war.
956 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 22, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 15, 2024
Maybe this guy explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ8Eo...
This book opens with somebody's death, then circles back to that person's beginning and closes with the moment when that death became inevitable. This turns out to have been a pretty clever structure, because as soon as it ended, I wanted to go back to the beginning and start over. Goodness knows that, at about 900 pages, I probably missed a lot on the first read-through.
In this book, we meet and get to know the indomitable Ella Morris. She is much battered by events as she grows from childhood to old age, but her constitution and personality seem to have been determined from the outset. Around this central star wheel a whole constellation of secondary characters, for each of whom an entire book's worth of material was also included (did I mention this was 900 pages?), including her husband, her not-husband, her children and partners of same. Due to their varied interests, we learn all sorts of things about being a spy, being a professor, being a defender of the environment, being a shaman, being a mother, and various other pursuits.
And--let us not flinch from this during this review--we learn about the horrors of war, both WWII as well as the more modern meltdown in the former Yugoslavia, and in both wars about the special horrors that await women captured by enemy soldiers.
Oddly, this book seems to tie together a great deal of my recent reading. Tony Judt's Postwar quantifies the plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees left stateless after the collapse of the Third Reich. Sybille Bedford, author of the charming A Visit to Don Otavio, was also a reporter covering the Nuremburg Trials, which were reflected in this book by reportage on the Serbian War Crimes tribunal. Simon Winder's Danubia looks at the unholy mess that was Eastern Europe between the wars. But maybe it's not so odd after all, since this book covers so much ground -- there's things in here that would overlap with pretty much anybody's interests.
Morley has a winning writing style. Parts of this book lag, especially when Morley attempts to explain scientific topics -- either way too much information is provided or not enough, depending on one's interest, but I found these digressions poorly done and maddening. Those sections aside, it is quite readable on a page-by-page basis, and by the end I found myself racing along in genuine suspense at how it would all be wrapped up.
So....what is the book actually about? Meaning, why did the author spend 30 years writing it? Alas, for this I have no clear answer. Is it possibly an homage to his mother, or wife? What little I have been able to learn about him does not support this view. It can also be read as a sociological study of 1900's Europe, a multisplendored land with a fascinating history that is small enough to rest quite comfortably in the interior of Australia. The main story alone takes place in London, Paris, several Canary Islands, Poland, Germany, Bosnia and Vienna. Dozens of other possible motives come to mind....The durability of women. The importance of family and roots. The need to pursue one's own life plan. Stewardship of our lovely planet.
Ultimately, This is the note on which he closes the book, and at the end of all this struggle and strife, a lovely note to end on.
This book opens with somebody's death, then circles back to that person's beginning and closes with the moment when that death became inevitable. This turns out to have been a pretty clever structure, because as soon as it ended, I wanted to go back to the beginning and start over. Goodness knows that, at about 900 pages, I probably missed a lot on the first read-through.
In this book, we meet and get to know the indomitable Ella Morris. She is much battered by events as she grows from childhood to old age, but her constitution and personality seem to have been determined from the outset. Around this central star wheel a whole constellation of secondary characters, for each of whom an entire book's worth of material was also included (did I mention this was 900 pages?), including her husband, her not-husband, her children and partners of same. Due to their varied interests, we learn all sorts of things about being a spy, being a professor, being a defender of the environment, being a shaman, being a mother, and various other pursuits.
And--let us not flinch from this during this review--we learn about the horrors of war, both WWII as well as the more modern meltdown in the former Yugoslavia, and in both wars about the special horrors that await women captured by enemy soldiers.
Oddly, this book seems to tie together a great deal of my recent reading. Tony Judt's Postwar quantifies the plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees left stateless after the collapse of the Third Reich. Sybille Bedford, author of the charming A Visit to Don Otavio, was also a reporter covering the Nuremburg Trials, which were reflected in this book by reportage on the Serbian War Crimes tribunal. Simon Winder's Danubia looks at the unholy mess that was Eastern Europe between the wars. But maybe it's not so odd after all, since this book covers so much ground -- there's things in here that would overlap with pretty much anybody's interests.
Morley has a winning writing style. Parts of this book lag, especially when Morley attempts to explain scientific topics -- either way too much information is provided or not enough, depending on one's interest, but I found these digressions poorly done and maddening. Those sections aside, it is quite readable on a page-by-page basis, and by the end I found myself racing along in genuine suspense at how it would all be wrapped up.
So....what is the book actually about? Meaning, why did the author spend 30 years writing it? Alas, for this I have no clear answer. Is it possibly an homage to his mother, or wife? What little I have been able to learn about him does not support this view. It can also be read as a sociological study of 1900's Europe, a multisplendored land with a fascinating history that is small enough to rest quite comfortably in the interior of Australia. The main story alone takes place in London, Paris, several Canary Islands, Poland, Germany, Bosnia and Vienna. Dozens of other possible motives come to mind....The durability of women. The importance of family and roots. The need to pursue one's own life plan. Stewardship of our lovely planet.
Ultimately, This is the note on which he closes the book, and at the end of all this struggle and strife, a lovely note to end on.
November 2, 2014
This is a wonderful novel by a writer I haven't come across before, although it's his tenth book.
It's the story of a woman born in Germany in the late 1920s who experiences the horror of the war in Europe and then flees to London, a displaced person in a state of shock. There she marries a man she doesn't love, has three children and, on a trip to Paris, falls passionately for a much younger man by whom she has another child.
What follows is an intricate study of a love triangle, at its heart, Ella, a strikingly beautiful and intelligent woman, imperious, volatile and charismatic, who repeatedly urges those in orbit around her to 'live every day as if it were a Sunday'.
Her and her family's dislocated, multinational lives take us to Central Europe, the Balkans, Japan, the east and west coasts of the US, and Tenerife. The author's themes include the Cold War, the destruction of the environment and the terrible aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Just as arresting is his personal theme: a perfectly ordinary life, he observes, is remarkable in all its happenings except that for the most part what is remarkable about it goes unnoticed.
Not in 'Ella Morris'. Alternately harrowing and lyrical, this is a magnificent book, beautifully written by a master story-teller.
John Clare
It's the story of a woman born in Germany in the late 1920s who experiences the horror of the war in Europe and then flees to London, a displaced person in a state of shock. There she marries a man she doesn't love, has three children and, on a trip to Paris, falls passionately for a much younger man by whom she has another child.
What follows is an intricate study of a love triangle, at its heart, Ella, a strikingly beautiful and intelligent woman, imperious, volatile and charismatic, who repeatedly urges those in orbit around her to 'live every day as if it were a Sunday'.
Her and her family's dislocated, multinational lives take us to Central Europe, the Balkans, Japan, the east and west coasts of the US, and Tenerife. The author's themes include the Cold War, the destruction of the environment and the terrible aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Just as arresting is his personal theme: a perfectly ordinary life, he observes, is remarkable in all its happenings except that for the most part what is remarkable about it goes unnoticed.
Not in 'Ella Morris'. Alternately harrowing and lyrical, this is a magnificent book, beautifully written by a master story-teller.
John Clare
January 18, 2015
This is an excellent book which tells of Ella and her war time experiences in Yugoslavia and her escape to London, where she meets George, who she loves in her own way and has a family with him but she meets Claude and a strange but endearing ménage a trois unfolds, some of the book is long winded and there are some tedious parts to it but you become very involved with the characters because you've been reading about them for so long! but then it is written very well and you do find the characters engaging. I loved Ella and Nadine and some of their history is harrowing but well researched and emotively put across, I would thoroughly recommend it but don't drop it on your foot! It's a very big book!
December 9, 2014
'Ella Morris' is a skilfully structured book written in a literary but not challenging style, ranking comfortably as a classic. The action passes smoothly from past to present and back to the past in well-balanced, manageable chapters. The reader is kept engaged throughout. This novel is for those who enjoy 'a good read' in every sense, being drawn into the many-stranded stories of memorable characters, escaping not into an unfamiliar world but into their experiences in the world we know. It was with a sense of loss that I closed the book at the conclusion. I highly recommend this exceptional novel.
December 4, 2014
Far, far too long.
So much potential, but did that proustian thing that only Proust should have done, in my opinion.
I can't be bothered paying attention to every single detail of peoples lives. Give me a story that makes peoples lives interesting, I get to watch the boring minutia every day of my life.
So much potential, but did that proustian thing that only Proust should have done, in my opinion.
I can't be bothered paying attention to every single detail of peoples lives. Give me a story that makes peoples lives interesting, I get to watch the boring minutia every day of my life.
January 22, 2018
Yet another book that gives you the ending which presumably is captivating enough to continue reading the rest. I suppose it works for some, perhaps most, but not for me. What's wrong with chronological order?
I wasn't deterred by the near 1000 pages, in fact would have hugged it to me to wallow in if it had been better presented. But no, they're all dead and gone and I have to trudge back to the beginning in chapter two.
Fergettit.
I wasn't deterred by the near 1000 pages, in fact would have hugged it to me to wallow in if it had been better presented. But no, they're all dead and gone and I have to trudge back to the beginning in chapter two.
Fergettit.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews