History-ish books
Apr. 22nd, 2023 04:46 pmI am SO behind on book posts; these are from... a month or two ago?
Tales from Hollywood (Hampton) - From![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak. This is the script of a play, deeply researched, about European emigres to California in the wake of WWII. It's an AU, in the sense that the main POV character is Ödön von Horváth, who actually died in a freak accident in 1938 in Paris; in the play, the freak accident happens to another bystander, and Horvath survives to come to the US and work at Hollywood and hang out with other displaced writers, like Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger (who gets to be in scenes but I think does not actually get any lines), and Bertolt Brecht. (I must admit that before hanging out with selenak, I did not know who Heinrich Mann was, though I had heard of his brother Thomas Mann. Which is... a thing.) The parts about Heinrich Mann, especially the suicide of his wife Nelly, are just heartbreaking -- and side by side with hilarious parts where I was laughing really hard; it's a very funny play as well. It never loses sight of life's absurdity, and it also never loses sight of life's tragedy, and that double lens is really interesting.
selenak convinced me to read this by linking me to scenes available on YouTube of this play made into a TV movie version, with Jeremy Irons as Horváth and Alec Guinness as Heinrich Mann: clip 1 and clip 2 and now I am low-key involved in trying to find a copy of this because I want to see the whole thing :P
(Content note: one character is (historically) anti-Semitic; the first clip does include Heinrich finding Nelly and trying to get her to a hospital; nothing super explicit, but it's all rather horrible and wrenching.)
The Eagle's Daughter (Tarr) - This must have come out around the time that I stopped reading every single Tarr that came out, because, well, I never read it until now. It's set in the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the first century, and is about Theophano, a Byzantium woman who is given to Emperor Otto II as a Byzantium wife. (In the book and in older scholarship, Theophanu is a Byzantium princess "born in the purple"; I am given to understand that modern scholarship does not think she was "born in the purple" and is not a princess that grew up in a palace, etc.) The book goes on to relate the regency of Theophano and Otto II's young child Otto III when Otto II dies young and unexpectedly: his mother Theophanu, and Otto II's mother Adelheid join forces, and it's great and I can see why Tarr wanted to write about it :D I can also see why this book wasn't as popular as, say, her Cleopatra book. Of course far fewer people know about Theophano than do about Cleopatra, but also in addition to that I felt like there was a lot of telling-not-showing about the relationships between the characters: I never was fully convinced of Theophano's relationship with the POV character Aspasia, for instance; we're told that Aspasia basically raised Theophano, but we don't really see much of that relationship going on. The non-romantic part of the ending is great especially if you know the historical fate of Otto III (which I was dubious about how that was going to work), though Aspasia's romance ends in a way I did not foresee (and which, though not wholly unhappy, isn't very happy either).
Notes on what things are and aren't backed up by modern scholarship here, though this thread contains spoilers for the whole thing.
The Oppermanns (Feuchtwanger) - Also fromselenak! This is a book that was written in 1933 about a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany (and various people around their family), and how things change for them, almost overnight, as a not-explicitly-named-until-very-late-in-the-book "Leader" and his party comes to power. Yeah. It took me forever to read it, not because it's not a compelling and interesting book (which it is), but because -- well -- one rather knows what's going to happen, and it's not... good. But anyway once I got through that block it really was compelling and I finished it quite quickly, actually. It's... kind of horrifyingly impressive, how accurate it is, when you remember that he wrote it in 1933! (And even though he didn't see how bad it would get -- he saw enough to be horrifying.)
Of note given my recent fandom, Voltaire and Frederick the Great get a cameo as busts in a head of school's office, where (and I wouldn't have realized this before) they are symbolic of the Enlightenment, as well as a more overt talisman of how Frederick the Great got co-opted by whatselenak and mildred_of_midgard like to refer to as the Worst Fanboys Ever.
The characters keep saying things like, had not someone recently calculated that Goethe's works alone circulated in German-speaking territories to the extent of more than a hundred million copies? Such a people did not listen long to the shouting of barbarians. (And the US doesn't even read Goethe. :( )
One thing that is sort of weird is that due to Reasons, I have both a print copy and a kindle e-book; the print copy is an older translation, and the e-book is a new translation that came out this year. I don't know why they didn't bother to hard-copy print the new translation! Or, maybe amazon has a backlog of the old copies and is getting rid of them?? Who knows. Anyway, mostly the two translations are pretty similar, though the e-book also has an alternate ending (which ending is more prevalent in Germany? The translator said that Marta Feuchtwanger and others thought the original ending was too sentimental. I liked the original ending better, though!), and also there are some little things where maybe usage has changed over time. (For example, I have never heard Mein Kampf referred to as My Battle as it is in the older translation, and only very rarely even seen the title in translation at all; the new translation refers to it simply as Mein Kampf, which is how I usually have seen it.)
Anyway, I highly recommend it, although you might want to try to get the e-book rather than the print book. Also, content note for -- okay, look, it's a Feuchtwanger, and it has a personable young person in it, and this book makes it now 3 of 4 of his that I've read where the personable young person does not make it all the way through the book, and the fourth book Josephus (as far as I remember) didn't have a personable young person. (I was spoiled for this, and I'm rather glad of it.)
[Edited 4-23-23 to point out that Tales is also really funny!]
Tales from Hollywood (Hampton) - From
selenak. This is the script of a play, deeply researched, about European emigres to California in the wake of WWII. It's an AU, in the sense that the main POV character is Ödön von Horváth, who actually died in a freak accident in 1938 in Paris; in the play, the freak accident happens to another bystander, and Horvath survives to come to the US and work at Hollywood and hang out with other displaced writers, like Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger (who gets to be in scenes but I think does not actually get any lines), and Bertolt Brecht. (I must admit that before hanging out with selenak, I did not know who Heinrich Mann was, though I had heard of his brother Thomas Mann. Which is... a thing.) The parts about Heinrich Mann, especially the suicide of his wife Nelly, are just heartbreaking -- and side by side with hilarious parts where I was laughing really hard; it's a very funny play as well. It never loses sight of life's absurdity, and it also never loses sight of life's tragedy, and that double lens is really interesting.selenak convinced me to read this by linking me to scenes available on YouTube of this play made into a TV movie version, with Jeremy Irons as Horváth and Alec Guinness as Heinrich Mann: clip 1 and clip 2 and now I am low-key involved in trying to find a copy of this because I want to see the whole thing :P
(Content note: one character is (historically) anti-Semitic; the first clip does include Heinrich finding Nelly and trying to get her to a hospital; nothing super explicit, but it's all rather horrible and wrenching.)
The Eagle's Daughter (Tarr) - This must have come out around the time that I stopped reading every single Tarr that came out, because, well, I never read it until now. It's set in the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the first century, and is about Theophano, a Byzantium woman who is given to Emperor Otto II as a Byzantium wife. (In the book and in older scholarship, Theophanu is a Byzantium princess "born in the purple"; I am given to understand that modern scholarship does not think she was "born in the purple" and is not a princess that grew up in a palace, etc.) The book goes on to relate the regency of Theophano and Otto II's young child Otto III when Otto II dies young and unexpectedly: his mother Theophanu, and Otto II's mother Adelheid join forces, and it's great and I can see why Tarr wanted to write about it :D I can also see why this book wasn't as popular as, say, her Cleopatra book. Of course far fewer people know about Theophano than do about Cleopatra, but also in addition to that I felt like there was a lot of telling-not-showing about the relationships between the characters: I never was fully convinced of Theophano's relationship with the POV character Aspasia, for instance; we're told that Aspasia basically raised Theophano, but we don't really see much of that relationship going on. The non-romantic part of the ending is great especially if you know the historical fate of Otto III (which I was dubious about how that was going to work), though Aspasia's romance ends in a way I did not foresee (and which, though not wholly unhappy, isn't very happy either).
Notes on what things are and aren't backed up by modern scholarship here, though this thread contains spoilers for the whole thing.
The Oppermanns (Feuchtwanger) - Also from
selenak! This is a book that was written in 1933 about a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany (and various people around their family), and how things change for them, almost overnight, as a not-explicitly-named-until-very-late-in-the-book "Leader" and his party comes to power. Yeah. It took me forever to read it, not because it's not a compelling and interesting book (which it is), but because -- well -- one rather knows what's going to happen, and it's not... good. But anyway once I got through that block it really was compelling and I finished it quite quickly, actually. It's... kind of horrifyingly impressive, how accurate it is, when you remember that he wrote it in 1933! (And even though he didn't see how bad it would get -- he saw enough to be horrifying.)Of note given my recent fandom, Voltaire and Frederick the Great get a cameo as busts in a head of school's office, where (and I wouldn't have realized this before) they are symbolic of the Enlightenment, as well as a more overt talisman of how Frederick the Great got co-opted by what
selenak and mildred_of_midgard like to refer to as the Worst Fanboys Ever. The characters keep saying things like, had not someone recently calculated that Goethe's works alone circulated in German-speaking territories to the extent of more than a hundred million copies? Such a people did not listen long to the shouting of barbarians. (And the US doesn't even read Goethe. :( )
One thing that is sort of weird is that due to Reasons, I have both a print copy and a kindle e-book; the print copy is an older translation, and the e-book is a new translation that came out this year. I don't know why they didn't bother to hard-copy print the new translation! Or, maybe amazon has a backlog of the old copies and is getting rid of them?? Who knows. Anyway, mostly the two translations are pretty similar, though the e-book also has an alternate ending (which ending is more prevalent in Germany? The translator said that Marta Feuchtwanger and others thought the original ending was too sentimental. I liked the original ending better, though!), and also there are some little things where maybe usage has changed over time. (For example, I have never heard Mein Kampf referred to as My Battle as it is in the older translation, and only very rarely even seen the title in translation at all; the new translation refers to it simply as Mein Kampf, which is how I usually have seen it.)
Anyway, I highly recommend it, although you might want to try to get the e-book rather than the print book. Also, content note for -- okay, look, it's a Feuchtwanger, and it has a personable young person in it, and this book makes it now 3 of 4 of his that I've read where the personable young person does not make it all the way through the book, and the fourth book Josephus (as far as I remember) didn't have a personable young person. (I was spoiled for this, and I'm rather glad of it.)
[Edited 4-23-23 to point out that Tales is also really funny!]
