2017 Reading Challenge discussion

Luck has been with me and I've visited many of the places I've wanted to see. After I stopped visiting Europe regularly I found that some great+ grandparents were natives of Baden, a territory in western Germany now part of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg. If I go back to the continent of Europe, that's where I would go.

I didn't find many books set in Baden. A Legacy is set there and in Berlin, with more of the later action taking place in Berlin. I didn't love this book, and in fact found the dialogue pretty stilted and tedious. The very element that really appeals to me in movies, when people talk "over" the endings of other people's words, turns out to be confusing in books, especially when we don't know who is speaking. (Speakers usually aren't identified, and need to be intuited from knowing which characters are present in the room).

The book is fiction, domestic fiction, but based heavily on the author's early and unusual life. Both the author and the narrator are daughters of an elderly Baden-born father and an English mother many years younger than he. I really think I would have preferred a straight memoir. Some of the characters are so sparsely sketched (the father's first wife and his first daughter, for example) that it was impossible for me to identify with them, or care about why they were behaving as they were. And, while I appreciated the fact that the father's younger brother's school and army "careers" were a satire on the disturbed power of the German upper classes and army, the uncle was a cardboard cutout who didn't fit into the character the author drew for him.

A Legacy was written in the mid 1950's, when dry and understated wit predominated in British fiction. Some of it has held up well; A Legacy rather less so.