Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More
I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience FIVE books, FIVE films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
Translated by Carol Janet Brown Janeway This 1995 novel, which is book 9 of my 20 books of summer, feels like it should be much older, if only because it seems to been on my radar forever. The book follows some 30 years in the life of a man called Michael Berg, who recalls his sexual …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Reader (Der Vorleser) by Bernard Schlink (Germany)”
I’m interested in literary biography, and that extends to lives examined through film. I thought this 2016 Austrian movie, directed by Ruth Beckermann, could be interesting, focusing as it does on the correspondence between Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the German-language poet Paul Celan. The film is a low-budget affair, in which two actors (played …
Haunting story of a man’s efforts to uncover his past after discovering that he was sent to the UK on the Kindertransport as a five-year-old child
I hadn’t come across this classic of children’s literature until my son was assigned it as a year 8 (age 12-13) text. Published in 1968, The Endless Steppe is a memoir of Esther Hautzig’s childhood experiences during WWII, when she and her family were exiled to Siberia. Hautzig was born in what is now Vilnius, …
Continue reading “Book review: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (Lithuania, 1930-2009)”
Genre-defying exploration of a Jewish family in Soviet Russia
Jenny Erpenbeck’s story of an East German house over the course of the 20th century
Harrowing masterpiece, recording the wartime memories of those who grew up during the Second World War in Belarus
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 