Heaven’s My Destination by Thornton Wilder
(Apollo, £10)
GEORGE Brush is a travelling textbook salesman who journeys across the American south during the great depression on a mission to convert the godless to his own peculiar mix of Ghandi-inspired pacifism and Christianity. Originally published in 1935, Thornton Wilder’s novel is a surreal and funny caper. Wilder doesn’t quite have the wit of PG Wodehouse, but the absurdist plot and frenetic tone has something of Jeeves and Wooster about it. Brush meets some bizarre and colourful characters on his trips, and imposes his own mad logic on every situation he becomes embroiled in. He also gets arrested a few times, once for aiding and abetting a robber he should, by rights, have been the victim of. It soon becomes clear that Brush’s attempt to cleanse the world of its sins is really a way to redeem his own immoral past. He eventually understands what we realise from the start: the quest for moral perfection can only end in farce.
A Portable Shelter by Kirsty Logan
(Vintage, £8.99)
This slight book of fantastical short stories has an original premise. A couple called Liska and Ruth move to the north-east coast of Scotland to await the birth of their daughter. They have promised each other they will only tell the truth to their unborn offspring. But in the dark hours they revert to creating strange worlds that would put no child’s fears to bed. Logan has clearly spent time immersed in Scottish folklore and fairy tales and a few stories here are aptly sinister and unnerving. Flinch is about a selkie fisherman who does well at hiding his identity until love forces his hand, or his flipper. Another, Stars, Witch, Bear, is about the fear of what might happen if your children go down to the woods today. Logan’s prose, however, is either unrefined or schmaltzy, and there are several boring experiments that shout out their overt and platitudinous messages, most of which are more feminist polemic than art.
The Bitter Taste Of Victory: Life, Love And Art In The Ruins Of The Reich by Lara Feigel
(Bloomsbury, £9.99)
This is a unique and fascinating perspective on Germany during and after the Allied occupation at the end of the Second World War. It documents the host of artists and writers, including Martha Gellhorn and her husband Ernest Hemingway, who were sent to this disturbed country to report on the devastation and the state of the German mind. Not long after victory, the Allies launched a project of "denazification". The theory was that – to paraphrase UNESCO – since wars begin in the minds of men, it was in the minds of men that peace should be reconstructed, and that artists should be the architects. The main ideological battle concerned whether the moral values of the German people could change. Interestingly, it was native writers like Erika and Klaus Mann who believed that their country’s psyche was irreparably debased. The Manns are the most prominent figures in this insightful study, especially Thomas Mann, whose Doctor Faustus became a hallmark of "rubble literature".
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