Well, Girls, I Did It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                         On January 28, at 4PM, after 23 days of reading, (meaning an average of 80-plus pages a day) I completed Uwe Johnson's 1,668 page masterwork, "Anniversaries."  Now, as  I emerge from it to the real world, I feel I shall never be the same.  Though I have moved on to one book, and started another, I feel I still not have recovered from this work.  My head is reeling.

                                          In one sentence, it is a year in the life of Gesine Crespahl , and her daughter, Marie, from August, 1967, to August 1968.  But it is also about the post-Hitler era, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and is crammed with so many historical and cultural references--Franz Schubert to Franz Werfel, for example--not to mention Soviet Russia, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Viet Nam War, the riots in New York.....it is like unspooling a mammoth mural, and then drinking in all the images.  It is an indescribable experience.

                                            And it is not for everyone.  The book is extremely Germanic, in that there is not one ounce of humor in it.  Poor Lizbeth, Gesine's mother, whose life drove her to suicide, her daughter into the midst of the Holocaust, and Marie into the Sixties revolution in New York City.  The book goes back and forth in time, in a Proustian way, and it comes full circle, ending with Geisine and Marie by the water, on a beach.  And wait till you read about all of Gesine's Baltic relatives, who haunt this novel like the ghosts of her memory that they are.

                                               I have never read anything like "Anniversaries," and I expect I never will again.  Whom would I recommend this book to?

                                                Those who are already omnivorous readers, who desire a challenge, and who feel they have something to prove to themselves.

                                                   I am telling you, it would tax Virgil!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!