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Pavel's Letters
Pavel's Letters
Oct 11, 2024 10:20 PM

Author:Monika Maron

Pavel's Letters

Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.

Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile.

Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.

Reviews

A raw...subtle and moving book

—— Independent

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

—— Times Literary Supplement

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

—— Independent on Sunday

This is the deeply piercing story, both personal and political, of a generation. It is hard to imagine it can be surpassed

—— Tilman Krause , Die Welt

Monika Maron makes other people's memories her own. She does so without moral outrage, telling the story straightforwardly, unsentimentally, not trying to show off her skill. The greatness of this book lies in this discretion: and Pavel's Letters is a great book

—— Rolf Schneider

This is the final volume in A.N. Wilson's trilogy tracing the course of Britain from the accession of Queen Victoria to the present day. The whole work, finished in just six years, is a monument to its author's industry, erudition and skill. It is hard to think of a professional scholar who could have accomplished this grand feat, let alone spiced the narrative with such pungent wit and piquant anecdotes

—— Piers Brendon , Sunday Times

Now that the trilogy is complete, it can be said with satisfaction that the verve, erudition and wit that distinguished the earlier books are undimmed in this latest work... He has written a fine work of popular history, and the fact that it is consistently entertaining in no way obscures the underlying seriousness

—— Literary Review

Wilson accurately skewers the follies of all and sundry

—— Will Self , Evening Standard

A brilliant panorama of the past 55 years... Where Wilson excels is in the mixture of fact, gossip and waspish thumbnail character sketches... Overall, Wilson's analysis of our age is inspired

—— Piers Paul Read , Standpoint

Wilson has produced a scintillating, coruscating indictment of British national collapse since the 19th century ... Under Wilson's pen, such a history is richly told

—— Tristram Hunt , Guardian

Gives a wonderful sense of Macmillan's complexity and stature

—— Blair Worden , Spectator, Christmas round up

A spellbinding insight into the fascinating character of one of the most remarkable politicians of the 20th century.

—— Archie Norman , Evening Standard, Christmas round up

A solidly buttressed biography that parallels his earlier works... Supermac is crammed full with interesting facts, germane and diverting by turns

—— Peter Clarke , TLS

Thorpe's superb biography leaves no primary source untapped, and bountiful anecdotes make this account of a truly three-dimensional character a joy to read.

—— Telegraph

Bringing together 35 years of research this biography of Harold Macmillan looks at both his personal and political achievements, conflicts, and events that defined his time. From Eton to prime minister, this is a compelling read.

—— Charlotte Vowden , Daily Express

He is an Aston Martin DB6 kind of writer, who is very English, very stately

—— Anthony Seldon , The Browser

Scholarly, and thoroughly researched, Supermac should nevertheless appeal to the general reader through the accessibility of its proce and the assistance offered by placing events in historical context... Humane, benevolent, and considerable; much like its subject

—— Dr Martin Farr , BBC History Magazine

The best biography of a post-war British Prime Minister yet written.

—— Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University

A unique and astonishing social history book which is revolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining

—— History magazine
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