the thoughtful dresser

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, is a thoughtful and readable discourse on the cultural importance of clothes and dress.  While it covers a lot of topics, from the old testament to shoes and Suzi Quattro, ultimately it is about how fashion and clothing can be used to create and express a self.

Grant draws on her own experiences, and on those of her parents, East European Jews who emigrated to Britain just prior to WWII, to explore how important clothing can be as a social marker, and as remnants of culture for immigrants (she also explores this in more depth in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs*).  Each chapter can almost stand on its own as a mini essay.  Three chapters, spaced at the beginning, middle and end of the book, document the life of Catherine Hill, a Holocaust survivor who tells the story of modifying her striped Auschwitz uniform as a defiance against a concentration camp system that defined her only by the number tattooed on her arm. Catherine Hill went on to be one of Canada’s most successful fashion buyers.

The writing is a bit uneven in this book, and some sections seem to have been less thoroughly worked and researched than others.  I felt I’d read some parts before, possibly because they were ideas that she explored in her column for The Guardian or on her blog.  But it was enjoyable and somewhat thought-provoking.  If you’re interested in clothing and fashion from more intellectual standpoint, but enjoy the frivolous side of it to, this is the perfect book for you.

*I should disclose that I won an autographed copy of  this book prior to publication through a competition on Linda Grant’s blog. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised that it was nominated for the Booker.

The Thoughtful Dresser
Linda Grant
Virago, 2009

goodbye columbus

Goodbye,Columbus (1959), is a novella with five short stories attached, and was Philip Roth‘s first book.

The novella is set in 1950′s New Jersey, and describes a romance between an idealistic and disaffected young librarian, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimpkin, the spoilt daughter of a wealthy family.  Theirs is essentially a summer romance which is ultimately not strong enough to withstand the reality of their different outlooks and backgrounds. In parallel the story also explores assimilation and class issues in the emigrant Jewish community to which they both belong; and the dynamics of families.

In some ways Goodbye Columbus is a little dated – it’s easy to forget what a big deal sex outside of marriage was in the ’50s before the advent of contraception. But it’s still a really well written story, especially for a first-time author.  It describes beautifully the fragile and tentative beginnings of falling in love with someone, and the way this love is a creation of the lovers, talked into being and made more concrete than perhaps it is.  It also describes really well how people in a relationship can talk past one another and completely fail to communicate.  Neil Klugman is more likeable than many of Roth’s later male protagonists, and the thread of misogyny that runs through his other books is mostly absent from Goodbye Columbus.

The five short stories are also concerned with Jewish-American themes, but don’t sit well with the novella, I think because it isn’t possible to develop characters to the same extent in the space of a short story.

It’s worth reading just for Goodbye Columbus, which is thoughtful and satisfying, and shows Philip Roth’s talent as a writer.

Goodbye Columbus
Philip Roth
Penguin,1960

crabwalk

Gunter Grass is a major player in Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), a thorn in the side of the establishment, part of the establishment, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and a former Waffen SS member.  Like most of his books, Crabwalk explores the impacts of the past on the present.  The book is narrated by Paul Pokriefke, a journalist who is struggling to understand his relationships with his mother, his ex-wife, and his son who has committed a terrible crime.  As with all of Grass’s book the root of all these problems lie in past events that have been repressed or ignored.

In 1936, a Nazi party functionary, Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed by a Jewish student in Switzerland. He becomes a ‘martyr’ for the Nazi party, and a ship in the Strength Through Joy fleet is named after him. Paul Pokriefke’s mother, Tulla, has happy memories of cruising the Baltic on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but her obsession with the ship has deeper and darker origins.  In January 1945, when Danzig was surrounded by the Red Army, a heavily pregnant Tulla was one of over 10,000 refugees and soldiers who crammed aboard the ship to escape. The ship was torpedoed shortly after leaving shore, and over 9000 people died.  Paul was born, or so his mother tells him, at the moment the ship sank, his first cries mingling with those of thousands of children drowning in the freezing sea.

As Paul grows up in East Germany, his mother tells this story over and over.  The teenage Paul  thinks he has escaped his origins when he moves to West Berlin not long before the borders are closed.  But after German reunification in 1989, his mother is back, and so is the story.  By this time he’s married, has a son Konrad, and has divorced.  Konrad becomes Tulla’s audience for the telling and retelling of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and he becomes obsessed with it, setting up a website chronicling the full story and calling for  recognition of the tragedy as a war crime.

On the site, Konrad debates with another young man, Wolfgang, who assumes the persona of the Jewish student who shot Wilhelm Gustloff. They agree to meet, in Schwerin, where Wilhelm Gustloff is buried.  Wolfgang spits on the memorial.  Konrad shoots and kills him.

During the trial, Paul Pokriefke struggles to understand how this happened.  His ex-wife blames him for being an absent father.  He blames his ex-wife for being too liberal.  Tulla defends Konrad’s actions and blames West Germany for ignoring the suffering of its citizens during the war, especially those like her who were permanently displaced from what is now Poland.  Paul, his ex-wife, and the dead boys parents meet in a bar after the verdict, collectively and awkwardly wondering how, when they thought they were doing everything right as parents, it seems they were doing everything wrong.

At the very end of the book, Paul visits his son in a juvenile detention centre several times.  Konrad has been building a model of the Wilhelm Gustloff, supplied by his grandmother.  On the last visit, he deliberately smashes it until his hand bleed, asking “are you happy now, dad?”.  On returning home and switching on his computer, Paul comes across a neo-nazi website that exalts the ‘martyrdom’ of Konrad Pokriefke. It doesn’t end, he thinks, it never will.

The title Crabwalk is a reference to the process of moving forwards while appearing to move backwards or sideways.  It echoes the way the characters need to scuttle back and forth across the wreckage of the past in order to understand the present disaster they find themselves in.  The German title is Krebsgang, and Krebs is also the German word for cancer.  I don’t know if that was a deliberate play on words by Grass, but it may well be a reference to the way that Germany’s continuing uneasy relationship with WWII and the divided years that followed, is eating away at the society from the inside.

Crabwalk is an enjoyable book.  The characters all have their flaws – Konrad is self-righteous, Paul is a bit of a loser, Tulla is slightly nuts – but they are well drawn.  Unlike Grass’s earlier books, which are very allegorical to the point of being slightly irritating, the metaphors and symbolism in this book are more subtle which allows the characters to shine through and be more like real people than are many in his earlier work.  The only slight wrong note was Grass inserting himself into the narrative as an unnamed older figure that Paul occasionally seeks guidance from in his writing.  I didn’t think this was needed.

Crabwalk
Gunter Grass
Faber, 2002