Murder, mystery and mayhem become rather too real at a fundraising evening at the renovated Pera Palas hotel. Fortunately for Istanbul’s rich philanthropists, Inspectors İkmen and Süleyman are there as the guests of Çetin’s old friend Dr Arto Sarkassian. Outside the hotel, the forthcoming marriage between Sergeants Ayşe and İzzet comes under the spotlight too.
A speedy read, with great characters – but make sure you’ve read A Chemical Prison first (handily the most recent Barbara Nadel I’d been able to lay my hands on at the Barbican Library up until now).
Publisher page: Deadline – Barbara Nadel
Telegraph review by Terry Ramsey, 01 February 2013
A lovely meditation on what wilderness really is, and where you’ll find it.
Read during my fortnight in Burma, I enjoyed The Wild Places more than Mountains of the Mind, and heard echoes of Kathleen Jamie‘s writings. I’m also inspired to read Roger Deakin‘s books – starting with Waterlog borrowed from bruv.
Adam Nicolson’s review in The Independent tells you all you need to know: The wilderness within, 31 August 2007.
Publisher page: The Wild Places – Robert Macfarlane
Commissioned to write an article, and carrying memories of the “lovely Courlandaise”, A Journey to Nowhere is Kauffmann’s account of the research trip he and his wife made to the Latvian province of Courland, not long after the Baltic States gained independence from the USSR.
For the most part the book is a travelogue in which we meet a German professor holidaying there with his wife and daughter, a Latvian would-be rock star but not the elusive ‘Resurrector ‘ – a French man who searches out graves of the Malgré-nous, Frenchmen from occupied Alsace forced to fight in the German ranks in World War II.
Other than Mara the “lovely Courlandaise”, Kauffmann’s girlfriend from a youthful sojourn in Canada, we hear precious little from Courlanders themselves – although there is many an observation of their aloofness and varying cultural explanations of this hinging on the history of the Baltic States, most recently the 20th century diplomacy that sacrificed them the the USSR, and the newness of their exposure to the society and cultural norms of the west. References to the Teutonic Knights and the Dukes of Courland abound, as do (often tenuous) connections to Kauffmann’s homeland, France.
The book was written in French, and many of Kauffmann’s cultural reference points eluded me and I reached the end of the book still waiting for deeper insights into and engagement with the inhabitants and history of this water bound land, a not so remote sliver of a seemingly lost Germano-Baltic world on the shores of the Gulf of Riga.
Publisher page: A Journey to Nowhere: Among the Lands and History of Courland – Jean-Paul Kauffmann
A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his travels as an 18 year old from the Hook of Holland to Hungary over the winter and spring of 1933/1934 – is truly from another time. He walks through a Europe, destination Constantinople, of disappeared rural traditions, emerging Nazism and an aristocracy from another age.
The title comes from Louis MacNeice’s poem, Twelfth Night, and reflects the fact that Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote his account 40 years after his adventure began:
For now the time of gifts is gone –
O boys that grow, O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill –
Here is dull earth to build upon
Undecorated; we have reached
Twelfth Night or what you will . . . you will.
Publisher page: A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor
See also:
In The Magnetic North we follow in the (snowshoe-clad) footsteps Sara Wheeler as she contours anticlockwise around the globe, from Chukotka to Solovki, taking the Arctic Circle as her guide. En route, she shows us the impact that competition for natural resources has had, and continues to have, on the countries and communities that cluster around the North Pole.
In the chapter ‘Beautiful routes to knowledge’, I bookmarked page 154 which tells us that nuannaarpoq is the Inuit for “to take extravagant pleasure in being alive”. What a fine phrase for a personal motto.
Another fab Frinton find, this time in the British Heart Foundation shop (which always has a good stock of second hand books).
Publisher page: The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic – Sara Wheeler
