Casper SilkReseñas

I found the beginning of this one to be a bit slow. I kept hanging in there, and in the end, it was an interesting and sad book. At first, it seems a love story, but the truth is not as happy. I wish it had told more of Margit's survival and her journey to find her son. I find the historical part to be more interesting than the fictionalized part. Overall, I enjoyed it. 3.5 stars.

I listened to this book on Audible.com which was provided to me for my honest review.

I loved listening to this story and the narration was very easy listening as the readers voice was perfect for the character. The story follows a ballerina through her hardships and love (infatuation which is not always returned) with the Italian composer. As Margit is forced to separate from her husband when the Nazis invade the story takes a turn and she is clinging for life and also suffers a separation from her son. This story was hard to listen to at times but none the less it is a historical novel which is fiction but still based around a time in the world when there was a lot of suffering. A great listen!

If you think you'd enjoy the intersection of WWII-era Italian history, dance and a love story based on real events, give You, Fascinating You by Germaine Shames at try. This particular story wasn't my thing, but I listened to the audiobook and the reader was suitably immersive.½

The most interesting thing to me about this story is the slow and creepy build up of the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler. It was slow and insidious and it makes me think of our own Presidents unbelievable win this last November, something I am not happy about. I understand that the author wanted to honor the ballerina Margit Wolf by telling her story but I don't know if she really accomplished this goal as when we come to the end of the story we find that her 'husband' if he really was her husband as he had been married before, has been dallying with the ladies and she was left to pine away faithfully for him for over twenty years. What a creep he turned out to be, I was surprised that he turned out to be such a jerk because in the beginning he worked hard to get her to fall for him. Did she have her head in the sand for not wanting to know? No matter, Margit is a survivor and she was a victim of these horrific times. She had very little control over her destiny. The writing is beautifully done and the narrator did a fantastic job with all the accents. Highly recommended.½

A historical novel based on the life of Margit Wolf, a Hungarian Jewish ballerina. It follows her from before, during and after World War II, including her marriage to (and then forced separation from) an Italian composer. The book focuses a lot of time on her "ordinary" life before the war, with a slow build up of tension as Hitler gains power. The real Margit Wolf spent significant time in concentration camps during the war and while this is discussed in the book, it isn't really spoken of directly. A lot of the horrors that the characters witness are referred to obliquely rather than graphically described, keeping this on the lighter side of World War II reading, while still being emotionally powerful.

I did enjoy this book but I'm not quite sure why its being billed as a love story. It's certainly the least romantic story I've ever heard as one character is faithfully awaiting the day she'll be reunited with her husband (and trying desperately to survive the Nazis) while her husband is sleeping around. I was more interested in it because of Margit Wolf's life story. I have a morbid fascination with ordinary lives that are torn apart by global events and her entire life was shaped by circumstances far beyond her control.

I listened to the audiobook version which had a bit of a slow pace but the voice actress was wonderful otherwise.

As World War II looms, a young ballerina and a struggling musician fall in love. They marry and have a child before they are forced to separate because the young ballerina, and therefore her son, are Jewish. The subsequent closing of borders results in their separation for over 20 years. Eventually, they are reunited in Italy where it is revealed that the musician has remarried.

This story is gross. It's about a lying and manipulating man who marries a ballerina with the express intention of preventing her from going on with her career. At the time, the man is already married and has a child, but pretends otherwise. He succeeds and manages to keep her from traveling or dancing professionally ever again. He puts a baby in her so her body is ruined for ballet. She continues to practice at home, but he constantly discourages her.

Despite the prevailing political climate, he continues to ignore her worries about her Jewish heritage. He keeps telling her everything will be fine. Eventually, she is forced to flee Italy with her son. He doesn't even try to go with her. Just sends her off. The moment she reaches Hungary her passport is confiscated. Later she ends up in a concentration camp and her son in an orphanage. The whole time she's suffering, he's living it up in Italy. Writing music, getting famous, sleeping with all the women. He dies fat and happy with a multiplicity of wives and the ballerina cries for him. He leaves her nothing. He leaves his son nothing.

Despite this frankly appalling story, the author tries to spin it as a love story? Sorry, what part of this is romantic? He wrote a song about missing her, I guess? Even his proposal was awful. Don't go traveling with your dancing troop! Stay home and clean my house instead! I mean, what girl doesn't want to hear those words?

The execution also wasn't great. The author didn't manage to bring the characters to life and the sense of place just falls flat. She kept skipping over important events and including boring twaddle. Lots of this book was just tedious.

I received the advanced reader's copy of this book in audio book form, which I really like. The reading pace of the female narrator was a bit slow, maybe to allow the different accents (mostly Italian) to come across. The pace of the novel itself was also slow. The love story didn't grab my attention. The historical background of the build-up to Hitler's power could have been stronger in the early chapters. We really get the flavor of a dancer who must dance because she loves to dance, yet one who because of the political situation has less and less chance to do so.
The readers sometimes glimpse that the ballerina is telling the story from the vantage point of long afterward. Thus we get a sense of the inevitability of the jarring separation to come.

Solid read. A book on semi-retired businessman living in France, the book needs a couple of dozen pages to really get going. The culture clash of a British Jew with French muslims was quite interesting to "watch". I wouldn't really recommend the book, nevertheless it kept my attention to the end.

I was interested in Echo Year because I am always interested in books set in France. Just tell me it’s set in France and you’ve got a reader. It seems like it was listed in mysteries but it is definitely not a mystery. It’s one of those books with no clear genre that I end up just listing as literary. It’s just the story of some people’s lives and I never know what to call that.

The book is the story of David Crown, an English Jew living in the south of France on an estate he is restoring. His mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, and his American girlfriend live with him. His family had owned a very successful company that was bought out by a rival, allowing him to leave the business with a substantial wealth. He’s able to make his dream of living in a maison in the south of France with a lover come true.

His Judaism doesn’t play much part in his life in general until one day when going into town to buy gargoyles for his house, he happens upon a synagogue and stops to look at it. Unfortunately for him, not all inhabitants of the town are friendly toward Jews and violence follows. His idyllic existence is changed forever.

There are a number of themes explored in this book. Racism and nationalism are two clear themes but all the characters are also dealing with the purpose of life, one of the biggest questions anyone asks. Can a person change and can a person be redeemed from their past are also played with.

My take-away from the book, and this is probably not what the author intended to be the main take-away, was that everyone needs work to do. Work that matters. When you have no reason to get up in the morning, things go downhill fast. David and his girlfriend Rowena don’t have to do anything if they don’t want to because they have money so they question their purpose. Rashid, an Arab immigrant involved in the violence, can’t get a job so he gets involved in criminal behavior for lack of something better to do. Work that matters is essential to humans and this story played that out , in my mind at least.

I felt and saw the characters very clearly. Their motivations were clear, their emotions were clear, their feelings were clear. The characterizations were excellent.

This is not a feel-good book. This is a lot of troubled people dealing with their troubled lives. That is not the kind of thing I normally read but this was definitely worth my time.

I received this book free for review.

Between Two Deserts is the first of four novels Germaine Shames has written since 2002. A former foreign correspondent, Germaine took a scissors to her press pass when she realized reporting about international news in an imposed limited format made it impossible to describe for readers the complicated interaction of people caught up in daily existence, politics, and war. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jerusalem during the Palestinian Intifada (1987 to 1993) where describing events as news misses the mark in showing the world the importance of religion, land, tradition, money, family, and information to Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. Ms. Shames’ first novel shows the reader that at individual and social levels, there are many strongly-held points of view that involve more questions than answers. As a writer of fiction, Ms. Shames also understands what E. M. Forster indicated in India during the British Raj, that writing novels about foreign locations is always given the most color when love relationships develop in unfamiliar and stressful circumstances.

The cast of characters in Between Two Deserts cluster around the lodestone, Eve Cavell, a young American Jew who travels to Jerusalem after the death of her grandfather. Two generations away from the holocaust, Eve is not a wide-eyed ingénue but rather a person with superficial attachments to Jewish tradition and feelings of the sanctity of the homeland. Showing an apparent weak identity with her heritage, Eve seems free of strong political views and social prejudice. She is vital in her open sexuality and general freedom of spirit, qualities that are suppressed in Jerusalem residents. Characters illustrating constricted views and behaviors on the unsettled stage of Jerusalem during the period of Palestinian uprising include: Mozes Koenig a professor of Middle East Studies from Budapest survivor of the Holocaust and author of a novel popular ten years ago in Jerusalem A Time for War, Salim Mahmoud a restless young Arab man whose family’s wealth was greatly decreased when the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem, engineer Jacob Halevi an orphan placed by the Jewish Agency on Kibbutz Sde Boker after surviving World War II, Jacob’s wife Leah a degreed psychologist in private practice, Sana Mahmoud director of an orphanage for Arab children whose goal was to raise the next generation of Palestinian nationalists.

The story involves Mozes’ controversial new novel, A Time for Peace, inspired by his wife Gizella who was shot dead in route to Dachau for singing a lullaby to a frightened child. Eve reminds him of his wife, his muse, giving him new insight into the Israeli/Palestinian problem making him think that peace is possible. Salim, Jacob, and Sana do not see eye to eye with Mozes or each other.

This is an excellent novel that I enjoyed reading as much as I did Ms. Shames’ other three novels: Hotel Noir and Echo Year (written as Casper Silk) and You, Fascinating You. I so admire her writing style. It captures the essence of the settings and the characters with poetic impact. In Between Two Deserts, Germaine reminds me of Lawrence Durrell and his novel, Justine. Jerusalem and Eve are the focus for Shames, and Alexandria and Justine are the focus for Durrell. As with Durrell, Germaine Shames writes with a great sense of time and timing. I highly recommend all four of Germaine Shames' novels.

The résumé I read when I chose this from the Early Reviewers batch led me to expect more of a ‘cosy’ mystery – I couldn’t really have been more wrong. I started reading but it did not grab me. I had several tries and reached about a third of the way through before I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to finish it. I made more of an effort than I usually would as it was an ER book.

These texts provoke me. I find them cryptic and cold. I find them superficial. On the other hand, they interest me. The different roles the men and women play in these stories engage me somehow.
Germaine Shames shows an intricate play between male and female sexuality. Maybe this is what this collection of short stories is about - an exploration of possible scenarios between man and woman…It is hard for me to tell whether the stories are successful or not. Maybe some of the stories might have turned out more satisfying if they had been fleshed out a bit more. I have sat with the texts for a while now, and I certainly don’t “like” them, they don’t satisfy my personal taste, but they evoke some kind of emotion in me. Is it because they show me people that are very different from myself, doing things differently than I would have? That is food for thought. And maybe that is the whole mission of writing - to wake up the reader to the existence of a different reality.

You, Fascinating You is another excellent book by journalist, novelist, and screenwriter Germaine Shames. I have read and greatly enjoyed two of her previous novels, Hotel Noir and Echo Year, and a volume of short stories, Wars of the Flesh. In this novel, Ms. Shames writes a story of love and war based on the life of Margit Wolf, a ballerina trained in her art during the pre-World War II years in Budapest, Hungary. Margit, a beautiful woman from a Jewish family, narrates her life of dance and adventure beginning in the 1920s when she and three ballet friends were recruited in Budapest by an "impresario" with doubtful credentials to travel and dance in local musical shows in Italy. Her life goal was to dance ballet at La Scala in Milan and considered the opportunity to travel to Italy the first step in a wonderful career. Margit soon realized that there was a long road to her dancing goal. Although strong in character, Margit's dreams slowly faded as love, war, and persecution affected her along the road.

As a young dancer in Italy, Margit formed a relationship with an orchestra leader, Neapolitan Maestro Pasquale Frustaci. The love between the two was destined to last a lifetime, though most of the time the Jew and Gentile were separated by the edicts of war. Margit became restricted in travel out of Hungary while Pasquale returned to his family and career as composer/conductor in Naples. Margit describes her personal restrictive circumstances and the general increasingly deadly persecution of Jews in Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s. The will to live remained strong within Jewish families but the living conditions deteriorated during the War to bare survival. As time went by, Margit began to wonder if she, her son, and Pasquale would ever live together again.

Ms. Shames is a great story teller with a talent for giving life to characters while maintaining her distance from them. They do not speak her thoughts "out of character" as is the case with many novelists. I think of her talent as a "dissociative" approach to writing and believe it allows characters to experience their own genuine motivations and emotions. Another wonderful talent is Germaine's ability to represent time in her novels in a foreshortened manner that heightens the dramatic intensity of her stories. The reader notices a jump from one point of the narrative to a later one in terms of hours, days, and even years. By leaving out much of the daily circumstances and details of development over the years, the reader feels with high impact the excitement, contentment, boredom, and pain of the characters' lives as they return to the page after time has elapsed. The reader intuitively knows the important unwritten background details of their lives. Time itself is a character created by Ms. Shames (as it was with Proust and Joyce) allowing the reader to soar ahead of both the limits of ordinary and extraordinary experience of the characters. The reader can envision a play taken directly from the novel.

Well, that is exactly what Germaine Shames is doing, developing a musical play based on her novel. The title, You, Fascinating You, is a love song written by Pasquale lamenting the forced separation from Margit and their long period of separation. The reader anticipates a reunion, but given the circumstances, is it possible? I highly recommend this novel, and I plan to see the play when it is ready for the theater.

It took me a while to read this book as it was supplied as a pdf – I was expecting an ebook – and it was awkward to read until I got a tablet. When I did I found it a well-written and very interesting book – I hesitate to say enjoyable, given its subject matter. Although I have read fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Second World War and the Holocaust before, this dealt with aspects and areas that I had not really considered before: I’m British and most of my reading has probably been from a British, or American, point of view.
My main criticism was that I was unsure of whether the book was a novel or a biography, and that could have been my fault for not reading the blurb carefully enough or not reading the introduction before I read the book.

A collection of five short love stories. Overall the stories were average - not a bad read if you have nothing to do but nothing to make you not able to put the book down.½

The best way to describe this book is a haiku expanded to sort of a short story. There are five short stories in this book, but none seem particularly coherent -- they feel like fragments of a story, although in most cases the whole story is told. If you are looking for romance stories, you should probably look elsewhere. The author stays outside of conventional bounds. The settings are often well done, but the romantic aspect is usually perverted in some way -- romance gone wrong, and not in a fun way. I enjoyed some of the settings, but others seemed devoid of purpose.

I wager the author could parlay these stories into longer, more complete form, and come off better for the effort. If more experimental prose floats your boat, however, this is a short collection of short stories, and won't take much time from your life to satisfy your curiosity.

I would have to place this book in a category of it's own. I was expecting, as stated love stories, what I ended up reading could only be described as something "Edgar Allen Poe" would have written if he were attempting love stories. These were way over the top full of symbolism. Not my cup of tea although very well written and if you like this type of book it's just what you're looking for.

I received this book through Library Thing's Early Reviewers.

I've started it. I'm probably one third of the way through.

It's not grabbing me, but it's not atrocious either. I've found the prose a little too purple in places. A couple of the characters aren't gelling for me.

I have intentions to finish it, just like some of the others on my side table, I'm just not quite sure when I'll slot it in next.

A small collection of short stories that didn't really amount to much. Very little characterisation although there are some lovely lines of prose here and there. As a result I didn't really feel engaged with any of the work, and it ended up being instantly forgettable. Some of the stories might be worth reading if the author finished them, but they're just fragments.

A small collection of short stories that didn't really amount to much. Very little characterisation although there are some lovely lines of prose here and there. As a result I didn't really feel engaged with any of the work, and it ended up being instantly forgettable. Some of the stories might be worth reading if the author finished them, but they're just fragments.

Lyrical writing makes this short anthology of odd love stories an interesting read. Each of the five stories chronicles a bizarre love story, all of which felt unfinished to me. While the language evoked a definate feeling or scene, I felt unsatified at the conclusion of each story. Frankly I didn't like any of the characters enought to care about what happened to them. I would recommend if you're lookin for a quick, odd read. If you're looking for romance, skip it.

Casper Silk's novel takes the reader to a hotel on an island paradise that is definitely not on cruise line itineraries. St. Germaine is named after a saint with a personally tragic but very spiritual life among the poor and downtrodden. The Hotel Noir was once the finest on St. Germaine maintaining a first class rating. Although the hotel owned by Geinevere Baldi Blanc and her husband has dropped in ranking in recent years, fifty-four year old American writer/intellectual Francis Stein has returned every year for extensive stays during the winter months. His productive days of writing about social/moral issues, with his greatest success publishing a book about anarchists, are over. In fact, after twenty-five consecutive annual visits to the island, Francis has the feeling that this is the season of his fall.

The Noir has a beautiful façade on a sunny boulevard, but it is always night inside for the residents. They tend to stay up most of the night either running their stateside games or brooding over haunting memories. Some native islanders with ulterior motives visit the hotel and interact with the international guests. Francis is one of the brooding visitors, although he was not always so consistently introspective. When he visited the Noir with his wife in the early years of his stays, life was good and hopeful and he was productive with his writing. All of that changed in a tragic incident that left Francis alone and repressed during his annual trips to the Noir.

The decision to continue visiting the Noir after the incident was a difficult one because Francis had to give up an opportunity to live a culturally interesting, but structured life in Europe. Instead, he was drawn to the St. Germaine because of his own memories and the island's chaotic social, political, and religious customs. Afraid but willing to take chances, Francis ventures into the chaos looking for personal peace, intellectual redemption, and immersion in a culture with an undercurrent of spontaneous emotional reactions. He is very disciplined in the hotel, taking only one drink in an atmosphere of excess enjoyed by other residents. He also attempts to reign in his responses to feelings generated by the actions of the islanders. The intelligent character is torn between form and creativity, discipline and desire, love and hate, and finally life and death. And he does it the hard way, a solitary man dangerously crossing the paths of people with apparently quixotic motivations.

This is the second excellent novel I have read by Casper Silk (aka Germaine Shames). It will be interesting to see if the author continues writing with this nom de plume.

David Crown, a semi-retired businessman, lives in a chateau in the south of France. He's working on restoring it and is living there with his girlfriend and his mother. He witnesses a hate crime against a Jewish temple and it rattles him deeply. He takes on the role of mentor to a teenage boy, one of the two young Muslim men that were convicted for the crime and tries to make a difference in the lad's life. Meanwhile he's dealing with his mother's dementia, a housekeeper that regards he and his family with suspicion, and a neighbour that is waging war against unseen assailants against his crop of truffles. He's friends with the mayor of the town as well and we get some of the story from his point of view. David seems to have hit a wall, a midlife identity crisis and this seems to be a turning point for him.

I liked the book, it wasn't wrapped up in nice happy endings but you do think things might work out for him once he finds his feet and a different way forward for his life.

While reading this book, I couldn't get away from comparisons in my mind to the first story in Marie NDaiye's collection [All My Friends], which also deals with Muslims in France. NDaiye's world, although only a short-story, feels immense compared to this entire novel, which has a feeling of slightness to it. Not that slight is necessarily a bad thing, but Echo Year is a floating, almost bubbly novel in contrast to the depth that could have been placed there. I had a hard time appreciating this novel for what it was, instead thinking of ways that it could have dealt with some of the issues it raised more in depth. A little frustrating, I suppose.

There are a few writing choices I felt were overplayed - mainly the omniscient narrator too obvious and with too much explanation, especially at the start of the sections. The last thirty pages I found unnecessary and one of the revelations therein, I didn't find useful within the context of the larger story between David and Rashid.

Intriguing. Disarming. An unforgettable story beautifully written.