My Top Ten Literary Turning Points

Life is full of ‘crucible’ moments, isn’t it? Moments which, when you look back, you recognise as being particularly important for one reason or another, influential in your development as a person, and pivotal in your individual history. I have plenty of these moments; not all of them revolve around books, but – me being me – the most important ones do. I’ve already discussed, at some length, the importance of books like The Little Prince and Elidor to me so I won’t revisit those here (you can check out this post if you’re interested), but what follows is a roughly chronological list of books which, when I first encountered them, had a profound effect on the direction of my life.

1. The Diary of a Young Girl

I was introduced to Anne Frank’s diary at around the age of seven or eight, when our teacher set it as a class text. We were only supposed to read sections of it but – of course – I ended up reading the whole thing in my own time. All our teacher told us about Anne Frank was that she had written her book when she wasn’t much older than us, and that she had lived at the time of a terrible war. I don’t think I can over-emphasise, then, how it felt to read to the end of this incredible book and learn, out of the blue, that Anne did not survive this war. By the time I’d read the first few entries, I was already in love with Anne and her family – a love which has endured to this day – and it broke my heart when I read the postscript describing how the Franks had been betrayed, and how they’d died. I felt like I’d lost a friend, and it was the first time I’d been faced with the evil that can exist in the world, made all the more terrible by being juxtaposed with some of the greatest good I’d ever read about.

Reading The Diary of a Young Girl changed my life and left an indelible impression on me, and so it was a shoo-in for my list.

Image: annefrank.org

2. Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters

I know I’ve mentioned pTerry on the blog before (by the way, if you don’t know why he’s called pTerry by his fans, I exhort you to find out), but he’s important enough to be included on this list again. The first Pratchett book I read was Wyrd Sisters, which I remember begging my father to buy me one sunny Saturday afternoon when I was about eight or nine. He’d long accepted the fact that I was a bookaholic by then, and in lieu of pocket money (an alien concept to my brother and I as kids) he’d agreed to buy me a book every week or two. So, on this particular book-hunting trip, I spotted the thrilling cover of Wyrd Sisters, fell instantly in love, and it was that book or no book.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

My dad was a bit dubious about buying this book for his teeny-weeny child (which, if you look at the cover, is entirely understandable), but he trusted my judgement and it came home with us. I devoured it, didn’t understand the plot at all, but loved it anyway. I told myself ‘I’ll put this book away until I’m bigger and I’ll read it again then,’ and I did exactly that.

I loved it, and I love it still. It was the first ‘big person’s book’ I read, and for that reason it’s one of my pivotal reads.

3. Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t

I think I’ve read pretty much every Judy Blume book in existence – Deenie and Tiger Eyes very nearly made this list, too – but I’ve chosen Margaret and Then Again because I read them both in quick succession the year I turned twelve, itself a pivotal age. Margaret taught me a lot about what was facing me as I teetered on the brink of adolescence, terrifying and tantalising me in equal measure, and Then Again gave me a much-needed window into the mind of the average teenage boy. From Margaret, I learned all about menstruation and complicated friendships, and from Then Again I learned that, underneath all their inexplicable mystique, boys were just like me. That was a mind-blowing lesson.

4. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

I read loads of books during my time at secondary school, but for some reason this one sticks out the  most. I guess this is because I studied it during the last two years of my post-primary education and then took an exam on it, and during that time I probably read it six or seven times. I’d never really been in love with a fictional character before I met Heathcliff, and even though I now see him as an emotionally manipulative loon, some of my heightened hormonal adoration remains. I adored this book when I first read it, and it was my first classic.

5. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!

I studied English Literature at university, and – naturally enough – I read a ton of books. I could have picked any volume out of hundreds, but this one made the cut as a pivotal read because its protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, nestled in my heart and has never left. A big-boned, hard-working country girl, Alexandra is determined to make the farm she inherits from her father viable once again, and she pours every drop of her effort into her land. At one point in the novel she has a dream where she is picked up and carried effortlessly by a golden man, a man the colour of her cornfields, whom she senses loves her with the sensual passion that is missing from her real life. She is particularly moved by the fact that he is strong enough to carry her, as in reality she knows no man who would be capable of such a feat, and she wakes in tears. Alexandra is all about deep-seated passions – feelings buried so deep she can’t even admit them to herself – and, at the time in my life when I first met her I identified with her in a very profound way.

6. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

The Secret History is the book which almost got me fired from my first real job after college, because I was caught repeatedly reading it under my desk. It was, to the best of my recollection, the most unputdownable book I’d ever read up to that point in my life. It stuck straight to my brain because it described the kind of milieu I had just left – the world of the university – which was, at that time, the place in which I wanted to spend the rest of my career. I dreamed about a life in academia while answering phones and preparing mail-outs, and even though I’ve long since abandoned that dream, for very good reasons, this book gave me a taste of what I yearned for. It also made me feel glad that I was a literary nerd, which was a huge comfort.

7. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

So, this book isn’t my favourite of the Harry Potter series (that would be The Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, fact fans), but it’s on the pivotal reads list because it’s the one where… it’s the book in which… Oh, goodness. I just can’t say it.

Image: vadamagazine.com

I adored Dumbledore. I can’t even explain why. I prefer him even to Gandalf, which is saying something. When I read that scene, the one where he… anyway, I remember screaming ‘No!’ and weeping, uncontrollably, as though I’d just been punched in the solar plexus. I had to close the book, allow myself time for a good cry, and then attempt to finish it through a veil of tears despite the fact that all the sunshine had just been removed from my life.

Yes. This is how emotionally invested I can allow myself to become in fictional characters.

So. This is the book that taught me how to keep going with a book series even when the heart has been ripped out of it. Pivotal, I’m sure you’ll agree.

8. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman

I wish I knew more about graphic novels. It’s a genre into which I’ve always intended to immerse myself, but I’ve never quite managed to get around to it. The only graphic novel series I’ve ever read in its entirety is Sandman, but – to be fair – if you’re only going to read one, then Sandman is a good one to pick. Based around a family of siblings known as the Endless, consisting of Death, Delirium, Desire, Destiny, Destruction, Despair and Dream, the latter being the central character in the series, it follows their interactions with the fate of the universe and the lives of humans both individually and generally. The Endless are not gods – they are older even than that – but they are more like personifications of their names, and each of them has a vital role in the correct running of our universe and all universes. They are definitely a dysfunctional family unit, but their adventures make for compelling and awe-inspiring reading. Also, the art is incredible. Several artists illustrated the series, but I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite.

9. The SF Masterworks Series

All right, so these aren’t a book, singular, but they were definitely a pivotal literary event in my life. I discovered the SF Masterworks series while I worked as a bookseller, and it was almost more than I could do to avoid ordering them all in for myself. I have managed to collect several of them, however, and I’ve yet to be disappointed. Look out for their distinctive yellowish covers, and collect away. They are fantastic. They taught me how big a nerd I am, and how comfortable I am with that knowledge.

10. The Dream of the Rood

I couldn’t leave a list like this without mentioning a medieval text. The Dream of the Rood is an anonymous Old English poem about Christ’s crucifixion written from the point of view of the cross, which is exactly as nuts as it sounds. It’s a psychedelic piece of literature, and it transfixed me when I first read it. In my final year at university we were asked to write a paper on it, and even though there were plenty of widely available translations (or modernisations, really) of the text, I wrote my own, painstakingly working through the poem word for word. I’ve never been so absorbed by anything in my life, before or since.

I wrote the paper. I got a First. It was awesome.

Also, as a direct result of this text I did an MA and then a Ph.D. in medieval literature, which led – indirectly, but clearly – to the rest of my life’s happiness. So, pretty pivotal.

So, there you have it. My life’s defining moments, as expressed in books. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and if you have, please consider writing one of your own and linking back here. I’d love to read what your top ten (or five, or twenty) literary turning points are.

My Neil Gaiman collection, aka my pride and joy.

 

 

 

 

Book Review Saturday – ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’

I’ve been aware of the writer and illustrator Judith Kerr for many years, knowing her only as the creator of the wonderful classics ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ and the ‘Mog’ series. Recently I watched a TV documentary about her life and career and realised that there was far more to this author than met the eye.

Judith Kerr
Image: theguardian.com

In this – her 90th year – one of the ways in which Ms Kerr’s life’s achievement is being celebrated is by republishing some of her books for older readers in special commemorative editions. One of these books is ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,’ the first in a collection of stories about her youth which has become known as ‘Out of the Hitler Time.’ The other books in this series are ‘The Other Way Round’ and ‘A Small Person Far Away,’ which I hope to get to as soon as possible.

I had no idea until a few weeks ago that Judith Kerr was German by birth; she had always seemed quintessentially English, to me. I never realised that she is the daughter of a prominent German-Jewish intellectual who had feared for his safety, and that of his family, because of his avowed anti-Nazi stance, and I never realised that, in 1933 – on the eve of the election which would bring Hitler to power – she and her family fled Germany for the relative safety of Switzerland, leaving all they had ever known behind. Judith Kerr went on to emigrate to England, where she has had a lengthy and successful career, first at the BBC and then as an author and illustrator, but it is in this book that we learn of how things were for her before she found the security of a safe and settled life. ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ is the story of a girl named Anna and her brother Max, who – along with their writer father and loving mother – are forced to leave Germany in 1933 because they are Jewish.

It is Judith Kerr’s own story, to a large extent. How she manages to tell it in such a matter-of-fact, clear-eyed way, then, is beyond me.

The 2013 Commemorative Edition of the book.
Image: bookmavenmary.blogspot.com

Judith Kerr described in the documentary how her own son, as a child, watched the film ‘The Sound of Music’ and felt satisfied that he now knew exactly how things had been for his mother as a girl. The highly unrealistic, melodramatic escape from the Nazis as portrayed in the film pleased the young boy, but it did not please his mother. ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ is her attempt to show her son how it felt to be German and Jewish in the 1930s, and how it really was to see your father bent double with worry and stress, and your mother working hard to keep the family together, and you – as a girl of nine, turning ten – struggling to understand why all this was happening.

For a reader like me, who cut her teeth on ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ and ‘The Silver Sword,’ this book is not what I expected. ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ is primarily a book about a family, and its efforts to stay safe and united in the face of great evil. We are introduced to Anna as she walks home from school one snowy day with her friend Elsbeth, and we meet her family – her genial, intelligent and gentle father, her ladylike and refined mother, her boisterous and fun-loving brother – until, one day, Anna wakes to find that her father has disappeared. He has fled to Zürich, where he wishes to prepare a new life for his family, and within a few weeks the others must follow him. They must also make haste, because all over Germany Jews are beginning to feel the iron hand of oppression – people are having their passports confiscated, and encroachments into their personal freedom are just beginning. Their family friend, ‘Onkel’ Julius, tells Anna’s father that he is being ridiculous – ‘this will all blow over,’ he feels. Anna’s father is over-reacting, he is sure.

Nevertheless, the family leaves with as much speed as they can muster without drawing undue attention to themselves. Within a fortnight, Anna’s mother has arranged their departure, and the removal of all their belongings, and they are making ready to flee. Anna’s father is quite famous, as a writer and journalist, and her life in Berlin is comfortable. The disappearance of such a high-profile figure as her father is hard to conceal, but they manage it, explaining his absence by saying that he is ill with ‘flu; then, finally, they take a fraught, tense train journey toward the Swiss border. Anna and her brother are delighted with the cat belonging to the lady who shares their carriage, and are happy to amuse themselves by looking out the windows at the new world zooming by – but Anna’s mother’s white-knuckled grip on her handbag, and her pinched face, tell the reader all they need to know about how much fear she was in. The story follows the family as they move from hotel to boarding house, to cheap rented flat, as their money begins to dwindle. They lose their household staff, and Anna’s mother must learn how to do tasks she has never before needed to perform in order to keep the children clothed and fed. Anna’s father cannot find well-paying work – nobody is willing to employ a writer with his profile, or at least not for the money he could earn in Berlin. They leave Switzerland for Paris, and then finally they go to London.

This is not a book about the war, as such. There are no moments of violence here, and no descriptions of atrocity. This makes the poignant scenes – the loss of childhood innocence, the leaving behind of beloved toys, the separation from friends and family, the death of a beloved person – all the more powerful. This is a story being told by a ten-year-old girl, trying to explain to us how it felt to live in these troubled times, and how little sense it all made. A powerful scene early in the book shows Max and Anna happily playing with two German children – that is, until the mother of their new playmates comes outside and catches them. “‘Siegfried!’ she called shrilly. ‘Gudrun! I told you you were not to play with these children!'” (p. 70); the German mother then removes her children from Anna and Max’s company and refuses to let them play together any more. To the children, this seems ridiculous, unfair and stupid – and to the reader, seeing nothing more than the names given to the young Germans (both of them taken from Germanic mythology and folklore), it is clear what sort of people these Germans are. However, we share one thing with our childish narrator – the separation of these children, two of them Jewish and two Aryan, but all German – is ridiculous, unfair and stupid. It is a brilliant point, cleverly and gently made.

‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ is a slow, seemingly slight, and simply-written book. It is not a war diary, and it is not a book filled with explosions and battles. It is the tale of one family remaining steady in choppy waters, and a powerfully moving testament to the ways in which war rips apart the fabric of normal life, severing families and separating loved ones. It is a piece of lace covering a dark black hole.

It is deservedly a classic.