Look Who’s Back / Timur Vermes

Hitler’s back, that’s who. Strangely, inexplicably, Hitler reappears in modern-day Berlin, his formal uniform reeking of gasoline, seventy years after his supposed death. The circumstances of his reappearance are reminiscent of Rip van Winkle. He marvels at the new technology (untested avenues for his propaganda apparatus?), the multicultural face of Berlin (was there a military alliance with Turkey?), and many other aspects of modern society in a Berlin he last saw in ruins. He soon stumbles into a career on television. People treat him like Sacha Baron Cohen playing Borat.

Look Who's Back has become a publishing phenomenon in Germany, and has been translated for many international markets, and banned in Israel.

This book is meant as pure satire and there are some amusing passages, though there are other places where the attempt at humor seems to be pushing the boundaries of good taste. Even though the translator provides an appendix outlining key historical figures and touchstones in the German political and social landscape, there are many references that simply will be lost on the average reader outside of Germany. (For example, there was a pun with the name of the German magazine Der Spiegel / The Mirror, and a play on the word “Fuehrer” also meaning driver, and rather specific references to postwar German prime ministers such as Kohl and Schmidt and political leaders such as the Green Party's Joschka Fischer.) I suspect there was a lot that just went past me. At least it seemed like I was missing something. Maybe the text could have benefitted from the addition of some footnotes. Look Who's Back may represent another step for a new generation of Germans coming to terms with their uncomfortable history. It will be interesting to see how it plays overseas.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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