It allows the reader to understand why and how, Hitler’s mad designs flourished. Not at the epicentre of war, more on the edge, but nonetheless devastated. This book is also about the “why” and the “how” of the tragedy of what happened in Germany. A book such as this one reveals so much more. It’s not enough to merely include the victors and victims of war, the tremendous upheaval of countries and shifting borders – that’s just the “what” of what happened. A tremendous tour de force which takes as it’s protagonist a Zwerg (dwarf) woman and encompasses the loneliness, the terror and pity of war.
Stones From The River is up there with the best of these. Books such as Adam Thorpe’s The Rules of Perspective or in another theatre of war, the fictional but accurate drug wars of Don Winslow’s Power of the Dog, for all it’s ‘romantic’ excesses.
So you can keep your Philippa Gregories and your Anya Setons, and give me the down and dirty truths of history. Kings and Queens, battles and skirmishes, are interesting, as examples, say, of how the other half lived, but to my mind it is what happened to the vast majority, not what happened to the privileged minority that is of primary importance and most worth knowing about. Whenever I read a novel about WWII I think of the ultimate war novel, to my mind, Berlin Alexanderplatz, another of those long, angry, violent and shocking novels, the trauma of which is unforgettable, similar to Q, the novel of the Reformation, told from below, as most of the important history should be told.
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