4 Short Muriel Spark novels

 The Driver's Seat:

The Girls of Slender Means

The Only Problem

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

To Die Beautiful by Buzzy Jackson

 Everyone is very thin, many have starved to death. 

The people are in rags, clothing that has been patched and patched again.

Hope, life, laughter is only a memory from BEFORE.

People who still have bicycles have affixed wooded tires to the rims. All the rubber has gone to them and their war.

Wood? Most of it has been burned.
The beautiful old elms that lined the streets are long gone, and still there is not enough fuel to do anything but freeze through the winter.


Many people from BEFORE who would be seen on the streets or in the businesses they owned have been rounded up and taken away. Some of them are still around, somewhere hidden, locked away for years in rooms, attics, and basements with widows blacked out. Prisoned, never seeing the sun, but safe from capture by the foreign soldiers in the street.

No this is not a dystopian sci-fi scene of an imagined future.
This is the 1940s during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as described in To Die Beautiful a new historical novel by Buzzy Jackson.

This very moving first person narrative is about Hannie Schaft who was a member of The Resistance all though the occupation. Hannie Schaft was a real person, a young law student, at least before the occupying Nazis demanded students sign a loyalty oath to Hitler’s Third Reich. By first volunteering for a cooperative support organization, until that was ravaged and shut down by the Nazi’s, she became connected and part of the underground resistance.

Buzzy Jackson has given voice to Hannie Schaft and though her character a gripping story of Hannie and her comrades in their fight against the Nazi’s and their fascist collaborators.
Jackson has succeeded in presenting a work that reads like a “page turner” adventure novel. This is historian Buzzy Jackson’s first novel. She has triumphed in fiction with it.

We go with Hannie and her comrades, Jan, until he is captured, and then Truus and Freddie two young sisters and resistance veterans as they travel by bicycle to their planed out missions to kill Nazis and their fascist collaborators. These collaborators help the occupying German soldiers by ratting out their Jewish and resistance countryman.

Buzzy Jackson constructs tense suspenseful scenes as Hannie, Jan, and Freddie approach the enemy. The Germans and collaborators have food, they aren’t starving like everyone else, but have a surprise comeuppance when a young woman sticks a pistol in their fat bellies and escape on the bicycles. 

We know through the prologue that Hannie is eventually captured and imprisoned. But that doesn’t prepare us for the details of what goes on in prison at the hands of her Nazi captors. Buzzy Jackson in the ending chapters does not shy away from showing us this horror. 
 
In an afterword at the end of the book she shares how the novel was constructed including the consulting the memoir Truus Menger-Oversteegen (1923-2016) who is a major character in the book, another very young woman and hero of the resistance.

Yet this adventure, this novel is about something that is all too real, something that actually happened and sadly still constantly happening in multiple countries all over the world.

A thoughtful reader in a powerful very military country might even ask, “Is my country doing this to innocent people somewhere NOW? How can I resist? How can I stop this?     
 

The Big Laugh by John O'Hara

 This was my first O'Hara novel. I just finished reading it today.

I’ll likely read another soon.

I really liked it. He strips away the glitter shell of Hollywood to reveal the hollow reality within.

The novel is dialogue heavy with a kind of lack of commentary about what the characters are thinking, but ultimately that is fine. It kinda reads like a text screenplay. The dialogue is very good,

I bought it for $3 at the cheaper book outside rack at The Strand NYC. Good investment.

The movie business is an odd cultural/business/entertainment mashup. Without stating it directly, even back 60 years ago O’Hara sets up the question: Why are these people, this business, so honored and their “entertainment” products given so much attention. Why are the “stars” so revered and the products, more or less all produced to make money, demanding of so much attention? Even now 120 years after the new technological wonder of moving pictures, it is somewhat troubling that this industry is so powerful and central in the minds and hearts of so many of us.
Is it part of the tragedy of centralization of big business, viral capitalism? Or just all in fun and don’t we love our “stars”. I kind of hate that moving image so easily became the dominant method of storytelling. I still love the novel over cinema/TV, hence I read this one and I’m on to the next one.