"All for Nothing," by Walter Kempowski

    This book was very well reviewed by James Wood in The New Yorker, and I got it from the public library here in Kensington shortly after we arrived. It was written in German, and the translation is clearly excellent--by Anthea Bell. I noticed recently, in an article about translation, that she is regarded as one of the best translators in England.
    The story is set near a small town in East Prussia towards the end of the war, as the Russian armies are advancing and a stream of refugees are retreating from the east. We are focussed on a family grouping in an old aristocratic residence of an ennobled family--the von Globigs. The father of the family is away in Italy with the army. The wife, Katarina, drifts around the house, very much in her own reveries of a brief time when she accompanied a male friend to a seaside resort. There is the son, Peter, about twelve years old, and 'Auntie,'  an elderly lady who runs the household, but whose relationship to the family is unclear. Subsidiary characters are two Ukrainian women servants and Vladimir, a Polish worker who wears a P on his jacket. Each play key roles as the narrative unfolds.
    And we have an omniscient narrator who is successively in the minds of these central characters, who react to each other, who have individual crises, who constantly are concerned whether they should leave, where they should go--this town or that. And some refugees, each with different stories, come into the house and are put up for brief periods. Katerina--for reasons she does not seem to understand--gets involved in sheltering a Jew.
    Eventually, the Russians are approaching the small town where they live...and the cart-horse is harnessed for departure.
There is something I cannot put my finger on about the way the story is told. It is a sort of detachment and objectivity in the way the characters' minds are working and a coolness with which what must have been horrific events are briefly and matter-of-factly described.
    Joan read it after me, and she was impressed.
    Thoroughly recommended.

"Forty lashes Less One," by Elmore Leonard

    I had never read anything by Elmore Leonard, a prolific American author, but the name seemed to me to be famous, and when I saw a novel of his available as an E-book in the library, I downloaded it out of interest: and then I gobbled it up...
    It is set in an Arizona prison, perhaps in the 'twenties or earlier,  and it focuses on the naive, temporary superintendent, who is a minister of religion: on two convicts--one a negro (the only one in the prison) and one a native American, who start by fighting each other in a punishment cell: and on a convict who seems to run the prison, with many of the guards in his pocket.
    The superintendent is convinced that the negro is a Zulu and the Indian an Apache, and their ancestry should mean that they can run long distances--so he has them trained to run behind a car each day, which leads them to develop a friendship and considerable running power. There is a major break-out as the prisoners are being moved to a new prison, and the convict boss and his outside friends go off into the desert to get to Mexico. The 'Zulu' and the 'Apache' follow them on foot and kill them all but the convict boss, whom they deliver back to the authorities, and then they set off to make their own escape.
    The whole story is very funny, and the portrait of how the prison is actually run, and especially the racial attitudes, was probably all too true of the period in which the story is set. I recommend it as a rather strange but fascinating read.