Ruben’s Comments (group member since Jun 15, 2024)

Ruben’s comments from the NYRB Classics group.

ahhh, this means I will finally get to a tome that has been on my bedside table for four years :)

I loved the Morante last year.

All three sound good, but The Effingers is VERY high on my TBR, really excited for another big family saga.

Thanks Sam, I agree that Katerina is looking for her own voice and style as she narrates the story to us. And she evolves and perhaps even improves as a writer and an analyst of feelings, as the novel progresses.

This is also an interesting way of looking at David and indeed of all the characters 'outside' of Katerina's household. An important theme, probably the main theme in fact, is how the three sisters are confined to the house whereas characters such as David, Ruth, the father, but especially the Polish grandmother, represent the outside world, the freedom and courage to choose a different life, which it's not clear the three sisters have. Maria chooses differently, and Katerina is struggling with the choice - a choice that I suspect women only recently acquired in 1940s Greece.

Finished! Wow, I really raced through the second half - being on holidays helped. It reminded me of a summer ages ago when my father gave me the Garden of the Finzi-Contini. And I was also reminder of our Elsa Morante read earlier this year.

I try not to spoil, but I think for me the novel is mostly about the things we feel but don't say to each other - it's modernist, the inner life is central and it feels a few decades older than it is.

I have some questions:
What do you make of David and his intentions? What do you make of all these women and their inner lives, are they realistic?

I just finished the First Summer, also enjoying it quite a bit - it's dreamy and sensual and everything is set up for a good amount of intrigue and drama in the remainder. Perfect summer read!

I will join too (although admittedly I opted for the - in my view prettier - Penguin European Writers edition).

I finished, a week ago or so. Very proud of myself :) I also wanted to prove wrong my wife who accuses me of only reading short books to meet my reading goals (absolutely not true ;)).

As to the novel, I enjoyed it very much. As I said above, the characters are bizarre, their extreme emotions and twisted psychology making you simultaneously hate and feel sorry for them - and that holds for all four.

I am past the halfway point now and the reading has become a lot more relaxed. It's a simple story in essence, but the language took some time to tune in to. Now that I am in, I already know I will miss it when it's over.

I wonder what you make of the characters and their psychology...even though I often find them childish in their emotions, they are somehow still intriguing and surprising.

Wendy, you are lucky you like the main character, because there is no shortage of damaged, twisted individuals in this novel...from the grandmother to the cousin to the aunt, they are all completely mad :)

I have been dutifully reading my 10-15 pages before bed every night, now around page 200. I am certainly enjoying it, it feels very 19th century with its long sentences and focus on the psychology of the characters. It reminds me of some epic reading experiences a long time ago when I first started reading... I am now in the middle of the love story between Anna and Edoardo, so probably this is the pageturning part :)

Sam said it was heavily abridged - did you notice that when switching?

I will join! I read the somewhat dark introduction and it took me a minute to get used to the long sentences, but now that the book has properly started it is flowing very nicely, and becoming a very intriguing family history (I am still with the grandparents Teodoro and Cesira).

It has been a long time since I read a good, big family saga, but I realise I am in the mood for one.

Sam, it surprises me this novel was never translated into English. I guess a debut of 800 pages will always struggle to immediately find a publisher abroad... It's the same for my native Dutch by the way: while La Storia (like Saadia I was planning to start with that one too) and Arturo's Island were translated soon after the original, this one only appeared in Dutch in 2022 in a beautiful edition. I suspect Elena Ferrante's success (and her endorsement) may be thanked for that?

Transit is also excellent but quite different, it feels more experimental and reminded me of Catch-22. I wonder why Seghers seems to have stopped writing at the end of the 1940s, even though she lived until the 80s.

I finished yesterday, excellent book! I found it a fascinating insight in Nazi Germany before the war (although I understand from the Afterword Seghers fled already in 1933). It was interesting to see how big a role the Great War still played in people's minds and lives. And also to see the impact of Germany's economic recovery on people's acceptance of the regime despite its cruelty most people seem to disagree with. I guess the year is 1938 or so, the Nazis are firmly in power, but there are still some struggling, silent pockets of resistance (I had the same feeling of Emily that Georg was very lucky, but perhaps the Mainz area was traditionally opposed?), the war not yet begun, the Spanish Civil War often being referred to.

The fact that at the time of writing the author did not yet know how much worse the situation would get adds an extra dimension to the reading experience.

I also liked the absence of lengthy flashbacks. I often find flashbacks a weakness in thrillers or mysteries; some personal back history, a trauma or whatever, used to build character and justify an improbable plot. Here, we stay firmly in the present, the escape plot is central all the way through, but as it touches so many people we get an insight in many different German households and how they choose to interact with the regime.

thanks Emily! Indeed, the camp commander complains about it later on :)

I made good progress today, now really into it!

Same for me...I am enjoying it but wasn't making much progress. I decided on Wednesday to use an Audible credit for the audio version and that helps although paying attention is still necessary given the frequently changing perspectives (for instance I must have missed why they found the wrong jacket...). I am now a little over a third in.

I joined this Group especially for this read. I think it was one of you, Emily or Sam, that mentioned in the Newest Literary Fiction group this was going to be group-read here.

I read Transit two or three years ago and loved it so much I immediately bought The Seventh Cross (in the new translation), but it sits on my shelf ever since, so if I don't read it now, maybe I never will.