The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay

Edited and moved to Random Reading Thoughts

The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton

Hamilton is a journalist, and a writer of short stories and novels. His first three novels were set in Central Europe. Then came Headbanger (1996), a darkly comic crime novel set in Dublin and featuring detective Pat Coyne. A sequel, Sad Bastard, followed in 1998. The Speckled People came out in 2003 to critical acclaim It is an intensely personal memoir about very a political and public issue; what does language mean for national identity in democracies. His was a childhood of "lederhosen and Aran sweaters, smelling of rough wool and new leather, Irish on top and German below” so uniquely lived through two separate struggles represented by his parents. It is also about homesickness; for a dream Ireland, a lost Germany and a homeland of one’s own.

Hugo’s father wanted an Irish speaking self-sufficient Catholic Ireland. English if spoken by the children resulted in punishments including beating with sticks. He adapted an Irish name that no one could spell and pronounce and refused to answer even his work letters if they failed to write using his English name. Yet he also made toys, read stories and took his family on holiday to West Ireland (much to the amusement of the locals who were tired of the Dublin Intellectuals telling them they were the future when all they wanted was a decent inside toilets and jobs. His nationalism was driven by the shame of a father who had served and died in the British Navy leaving a service pension that funded his university education. He was always on the look out for the next big business deal to make Ireland economically free. But from crosses, toy wagons and tragic Honey they are failures, his only success is the size of his family as it grows year by year. They are the secret weapon to challenge the legacy of Empire.

His mother was a German Catholic, whose father was a conservative opponent of Hitler and whose family were passive resisters throughout the war although one sister was more active in being part of a network of safe houses hiding Jews. She herself as being “people of the head rather then the fist” so eventually rebels against her husband and destroys the canes but otherwise goes along with her husbands dreams and teaches her children German so they becomes fluent in three languages. She also has secrets that unravel as the biography unfolds.

The memoir is not a sentimental Irish story of hope crushed by poverty driven by the drink. The children have a comfortable and warm upbringing drawing on the richness of three culture’s music and literature. But being German meant that the children were bullied and taunted as Nazis and they were at a lost to say where they belonged. What drives the story is the voice of the narrator that uses simple sentences and childlike observations, gradually turning to what he knows and understands, as he grows older and so creating a quiet humorous yet honest account of two flawed humans struggling to make a better life for their children in the very different 50s and 60’s. An sequel called The Sailor in the Wardrobe was published in 2006. Highly recommended.
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Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

One of the unexpected consequences of the Soviet Union collapse is the exposure of a reality hidden away in dusty files and failing memories. Simon Sebag Montefiore with “The Court of the Red Tsar” and now “Young Stalin”, the Winner of the 2007 Costa Biography Award, reveals the messy realities behind the manipulated legends. Read books in the past, and the “truth” was the betrayal of great Trotsky and Lenin vision of Socialist Russia by the grey mediocrity of a bureaucratic opportunist. As ever was life so simple. In reality, his shadowy Party work was, only known to a few and suppressed after the Revolution to ensure his national role in the Party. Not known by him, Trotsky who wrote well, created in defeat the picture of Stalin we know. Stalin was in fact a dangerous but effective mixture of classically trained intellectual, poet, singer, effective organiser, street gangster and conspirator per excellence, who was cruel, ruthless, brave, cold, paranoid, witty, calculating. You could enjoy his company but be swimming with the fishes as he wept with your relatives in the morning.

Simon Senag Montefiore uses unpublished, censored 20’s and 30’s memoires and interviews with surviving eyewitnesses to make clear where the man and the cut of the age clash to create Stalin and the USSR. Soso, short for Joseph, suffered an appalling childhood of a drunkard father and a domineering, suffocating mother. Yet his mother’s various lovers protected him so he gained a middle class intellectual education. He was born and reared in a long vanished Georgian culture where Russians, Persians, semi pagan Mountain tribes, Jews fought, loved and traded. A popular annual festival was the town brawl when any active man from three fought each other to a standstill. It was also a world in which in Georgia, that had held the Ottoman Empire at bay for centuries, fall in to deeply resentful annexation by the Russian Empire a generation earlier. To grasp his early days think of Italians crossed with Spanish gypsies living to a code of honour and revenge that would make the Mafia a bunch of boy scouts.

He rose up the Party by being the man who could rob and steal to bankroll Lenin’s political ambitions as well as organise mass strikes. More importantly, he unlike Trotsky and Lenin was active in Russia with the regular members of the party. As we say now, he could talk the talk and walk the walk. Trotsky was clearly important in the 1917 revolution and in the later civil war but was vain and a snob, a great orator but mistrusted by many activists because of that. Stalin was not a showy speaker but knew how to play the simple plain worker to these crowds. This created adoring followers (many of which he killed in the 30’s) who enabled him to take control of the party when being in the Government had more status.

The book tackles the view that Stalin was a double agent traitor. He was clearly a double agent working on Party orders but examples given of his double-dealing fall flat. In reality, riddled with spies and traitor, the Party was monitored daily by the Tsar’s Secret Police. So Stalin betrayed by a double agent Party cadre spent 4 years in bitter Siberian exile. The traitor when exposed in 1918 shook the party to the core as it was akin to discovering that J.F.K (for our American cousins) or Atlee had been a communist double agent. And, if he could be a traitor so could anyone so paving the way to the show trials of the 30’s.

I must confess I am a sucker for anything about the rise and fall of the Communist Party as a long term Marxist. My interest came from my involvement in the revolutionary Left in the 70s and 80’s where the Trotsky-Stalin battles were still alive and kicking. Fear not American reader, I would clearly have been shot in the first days as one of those Quaker-Papist socialists who babble about the sanctity of human life. One of the few things that Trotsky and Stalin agreed on!. Hence, I have read in and around the ideas and history of this period for many years from the actions of the mule-headed Court, the oppressed peasantry and workers and the struggle of the intellectuals over the 19^thcentury to make the political ideas of the West live in Russia. But the book is well researched and clearly written. It would appeal to anyone trying to understand the period or wanting an insight into a complex man you would be foolish to slight in any way. Yet you can see it was his iron will that made the USSR and caused it eventual failure.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

One day you will lose some one you love, you may have already. Each of us will deal with it differently yet the same. The same because we can mark our progress and failures according to the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, the details of which are set out below.

Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news
Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable
Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up
Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out
Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable
Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward

Differently because each grief is the history of the life lost and left. Joan Didion is a famous American journalist, essayist, and novelist. Her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published October 4, 2005. The book-length essay chronicles the year following her husband's death, during which Didion's daughter, Quintana, was also gravely ill. The book is both a vivid personal account of losing a partner after 40 years of professional collaboration and marriage, and a broader attempt to describe the mechanism that governs grief and mourning.

It is clear that she moves in top social circles from her life style, which naturally goes by unremarked. The prose is clear and simple, and is best described as personal reportage, and hints rather then shouts the underlying pain of trying to make sense of how/why her husband died. It is intellectually brilliant yet emotionally cold. For a very different account of a writer dealing with grief read Blake Morrison, And when Did You Last See Your Father? Its revealing to me that she had loathed Dylan’s Thomas widow, Caitlin, highly emotional book, Leftover Life to Kill .

What I am about to say is not a spoiler as her daughter health is not used to build up to a point of hope in the account. But if true then it illustrates that Joan may still be stuck in grief or in writing this book moved on. Quintana seemed to be getting better during the period the book covers, she died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39 after an extended period of illness. The New York Times reported that Didion would not change the book to reflect her daughter's death. "It's finished," she said.

Would I recommend it? I hesitate because the account reveals a brilliant, strong woman who is able to do what she does best and write about circumstances that would floor many of us. You finish the last page respecting but not loving her. Don’t read it if you want a cosy cry, but if you look at Death with pride and stand tall she is your woman.

“You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.”

Friedrich Nietzsche