Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
I have some precise rules about the amount of misery I'll put up with in a book. Endless misery is not personally improving. It does not make you more conscious or serious to be willing to put up with it. If your imagination is vivid and your empathy is engaged, to read about the torture of others is to in some measure imagine it happening to yourself; a smaller terror, but a real one. I do not need a fictionalized account to know that genocide is bad. My imagination gets me there just fine.
So, yes, I should have seen this coming. Feuchtwanger is in the thick of German pre-war literary life, one who barely makes it out of Europe. This novel is about the rise of the Nazi regime, with a mixed reception simply because it is so close to The Events themselves. It does not have the room to breathe of Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross, nor the conviction of that book that there is more and better on the other side, whenever we get there. All of this is fine--the rise of Nazism and the decline of a German family are venerable literary topics for a reason--but it seemed clear that things would be going especially badly for the young son of the family, and sure enough, Wikipedia confirms a suicide coming. I have a very hard line about not being interested in accounts of teenage suicide, so I'm done with the book.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
A book I have been constantly warned not to read front-to-back, so I am reading it front-to-back. It's very funny, in the section on fashion, to see how differently fashions play out on either side of the Atlantic. In France, crinolines and petticoats (and bicycles!) are all associated with modernity and exposed feminine sexuality; in the US they appear to be all associated with the exact opposite--in Gone With the Wind and Lost Cause-ism they're the sign of women who know how to be women when men were gallant and women were demure.
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