Kitty Wake's blog

Monsieur Batignole

Told you I’d eventually get around to commenting on a film. This one seems to be very slightly more in my comfort zone than the others I’ve watched recently: The Day The Earth Stood Still (popcorn fodder, though the special effects were kind of cool), Defiance (a film during which I felt uncomfortable eating popcorn at all) and Downfall (it’s about the last few days in Hitler’s bunker – enough said. Think messy and frequent suicides; feel your eyes open in horror).

And The Breakfast Club, which is a) zeitgeisty and b) before my time zeitgeisty. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on it too much for that reason, though I will say I enjoyed it. Besides, it’s a film that’s been parodied everywhere. Twice on Family Guy alone, to my knowledge. It’s too well-known for me to feel comfortable having an opinion on it beyond “I liked it”, and I doubt it’s going to enter into the realm of media that really strikes a chord with me. Still, let’s say… 4 ½ out of 5 stars.

Monsieur Batignole

So what is this film that I’ve watched and liked? It’s a French film, which I watched in German because my French isn’t all that great. (I’d need subtitles, and besides, watching it in German is good for me.) It’s called Monsieur Batignole, and the titular character is a small-time butcher who’s muddling along during the Occupation of France, doing rather well, considering, getting a lot of business out of the Germans. They even give him a van… which has been seized from a Jewish tradesman and painted over. He has connections to them through his ‘future son-in-law’, Pierre-Jean, a slimy, odious little man who looks like Hitler with glasses, reads Au pilori and writes for Je suis partout – he is, after all, an ardent anti-Semitic collaborationist.

One day, he kinda-sorta-indvertently gets the Jewish family – the Bernsteins – who live in the apartments above his arrested, as they attempt to ‘go on holiday’ i.e. escape to Switzerland. (Quick history lesson: the film takes place in the summer of 1942, and starts the very day before Parisian Jews started to be taken away to the Velodrome, from where they’d be dispatched to concentration camps.) He experiences a twinge of guilt, but his family quash that. They get to buy the Bernstein’s lovely flat – once all the nice furniture and sundries have been confiscated and catalogued – and hold a party for the SS… They’re moving up in the world, and Madame Batignole is very pleased indeed.

And during the party, Simon Bernstein – the younger son in the Jewish family – arrives at the door of the old family apartment, having escaped from the Velodrome. Luckily, the first person who meets him at the door is Monsieur Batignole, who’s stirred enough at first to give Simon a hiding place for one night – and then he’s got to go somewhere else, seriously. OK, he can have some food, a drink, and a bucket for ablutions, too… and the Cohen children, Simon’s cousins, can stay for a little bit… but then they really have to go, honest.

Monsieur Batignole grows rather fond of the children, though he’s not entirely comfortable with his new task – it’s extremely dangerous, and his family are beginning to get suspicious of all the subterfuges he resorts to to justify going down to the cold room every so often. The tension increases…

To go any further would spoil the film. So I’ll write in white. Hopefully I have the plot points right.

Batignole goes down to the cellar once too often; Pierre-Jean and Batignole’s daughter follow him down there, where they discover the three children. Pierre-Jean orders the children upstairs and threatens Batignole with a cleaver for daring to shelter Jewish children. Batignole ends up turning the cleaver on Jean-Pierre, killing him.

There’s only one way forward now – it’s the way to Switzerland. Batignole pawns a Renoir from the Bernstein’s collection (he steals one of their requisitioned possessions from the Nazis) to pay for the children’s passports, and bids his daughter farewell. He’s not sure if he’ll make it back.

One fine day, Batignole sets out; three children in tow, and a bag containing, oh, thousands of francs over his shoulder. The journey doesn’t go quite as smoothly as he’d probably like; once, when he leaves the train carriage, Simon identifies him as a doctor. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it comes back to bite him in the rear when an SS officer at the eastern border of France dislocates his leg and a fellow-passenger flags him down…

After they leave the train and approach the border, they’re tired and hungry, and eventually find their way to a farmhouse. Batignole finds himself rather happy there – and quite taken with the lady of the house, whose husband is off in the army. (They have a brief dalliance.) The children get on well with her son, but the relationship between Batignole and Simon is becoming simultaneously more familial and more strained. (After all, Batignole did kind of get his whole family arrested…) Particularly when they forget their false names…

Simon decides he’s going to get to Switzerland, even if no-one else is. The farmer’s son tells him that his brother is in the Resistance and owns a gun, so of course he’s perfectly placed to spirit some Jewish children out of the country. The next day they meet in a café, where Simon name-drops some obviously Jewish names and talks about Yom Kippur, at which point the nice gentleman at the next table slams down his paper and arrests the poor boy, confiscating the shoulder-bag full of dosh. And what does the Resistance member do? He runs away.

Batignole completes his metamorphosis; he enters the police station and tries to talk the policemen round – to the point where he states that he is Jewish and also quite harmless. Simon, who’s been hustled into an office, distracts the policeman for long enough for Batignole to place a well-aimed blow to the groin of the bad cop; the good cop throws them the bag of money and Batignole and Simon escape to the local church, where the priest hides them in his vestment wardrobe and quite happily lies to the police.

Batignole and the children leave the next day. They bid farewell t the farmer’s wife and son before the priest leads them to the border. Batignole kisses the children on the forehead, ushers them into Switzerland and prepares to return to the village with the priest, before deciding, at the very last minute, he can’t leave the children, and the film ends with Batignole and the children heading off into the verdant hills of der Schweiz. Two captions over the scene of the man and the children walking across the field state that Simon and his cousins never found their parents… but Batignole stayed with them in Switzerland until the end of the war. Small-scale shopkeeper to small-scale – but extraordinary – hero.

End spoilers!

I was iffy about the film at first. I bought it two years ago. Impulse buy at Mueller’s, or whatever the big orange Bavarian department store Boots-equivalent is called. I watched about halfway through the movie, and then I realised I had to leave to catch my train to Bayreuth because I desperately wanted to see what attracted Wagner to the place. (Answer: I have no idea – it was cold and wet and inexplicably had a fifteen-foot fibreglass dinosaur – I jest not – in the middle of an otherwise traditional Bavarian square. No tram service, either. I did buy the best Bratwurst I’d ever eaten from a melancholy-looking, bearded, obese man in a small plastic hut, though, so be assured it had redeeming features.)

After I came back from the trip, I didn’t watch it for ages and then fell into that discouraging mode where I realised that I didn’t quite remember enough of the movie to be able to pick up where I left off, and I remembered enough of the movie to not be willing to watch the first half again. Then my computer broke and I couldn’t watch DVDs at all. So it was only yesterday that I slid the DVD into my computer drive again and decided to give it another go.

I loved it! Because of the main character, for a start. He starts off as the Everyman of Paris – a guy who just wants the Germans to be ‘correct’ in their occupation of his country, they’ll be gone one day, you see. As I say, he’s also doing quite well out of the Germans, and he’s anti-Semitic to a point. The reason the Bernsteins get deported is because Batignole buttonholes Dr. Bernstein in his apartment, accusing him of stealing a ham. Why not blame the Jewish guy? Everyone else would – after all, there’s nothing stopping him from selling the meat on the black market if he’s not going to eat it. And that diversion is long enough for Pierre-Jean to call the Gestapo to have the family arrested and deported. It sounds unlikely that a man like this could, three-quarters of an hour later (in real time – in film time, it’s about a week long), risk his life for the same people he’s been so prejudiced against before. I guess it’s the first time he examined his life – and as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
   
I loved the characterisation of all the French people in the story, overall. Too many times, the French have either been cast as 100% brave resistance heroes (then why did they have their country invaded in the first place?) or as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, as Groundskeeper Willie would have it. (No prizes for guessing why I disagree with that comment.) Pierre-Jean is clearly The Bad Guy, worse than the German Nazis because he’s a Frenchman trying to crawl up their arses. But the rest of them? There’s a Resistance member who doesn’t seem to be all that brave when it comes to the crunch, and there’s plenty of people who find out they do have what it takes when it comes to said crunch. And in the middle there’s people who are just trying to keep their heads down and hope the Nazis get out of Paris ASAP while taking as much advantage of the situation as they can. As did many people. Neither outright collaborators or big brave underground Resistance fighters… well, what would YOU do if that happened to your country? Think about it. What would you do if you either had to hide someone in your attic and potentially get in a lot of trouble (we’re talking death penalty here, quick or slow, not your choice) or send that person to their certain death and remain perfectly safe yourself? Would you be brave enough to risk everything?
   
The film ended, I feel, in exactly the right spot. I wanted more when the credits came up, but I realised that adding more might ruin it. It’s a little on the short side for a film – about 100 minutes, including the credits (during which it is revealed that all the skinned rabbits portrayed in the film were eaten by the cast), but it’s well-paced. I wasn’t bored for a single moment. In fact, I got so caught up in the story that I ended up painfully whispering “Simon, you idiot!” to the poor boy every time he slipped up, before realising that the story was not only long-past, but fictional. If I find myself offering advice to the characters, I count it as an involving film.
   
There’s certain similarities to Life is Beautiful (another foreign film which I had to watch in German – I don’t know a word of Italian beyond what is needed to play music). Two clear acts, both take place during the Second World War and involve the persecution of the Jewish people, and both have what seems like incongruous humour. I think that last aspect was better-handled in Life is Beautiful, which starts off with a funny (if hackneyed) opening comedy scene. You know what tone the film is setting. It took me an embarrassingly long time, however, to get that Monsieur Batignole was also meant to be a comedy of sorts. Up until a spoilered scene, in fact, revealed up there in that sea of white, which seemed bizarrely incongruous before a little lightbulb appeared above my head and I remembered some more subtle jokes (as well as Pierre-Jean’s entirely unsubtle characterisation, which was also incongruous because he’s so morally unambiguous). It could have done a better job of mixing genres.
   
But on the whole, I think it’s a valuable addition to my DVD collection, and boy am I glad to have made that impulse buy now. I can’t believe it only took, oh, two years to get around to watching it. I urge you to purchase it now, preferably in your native language so you aren’t pausing the DVD every so often and typing words into the LEO dictionary. That spoils the flow of a movie, I find. But all the same I thought it a lovely and interesting film. Long live the little heroes.

Bad Book Habits

I have many. First, the bad book habits I don't have. I don't crack spines (something that will drive me beserk; it's also the reason I only lend out my more pre-loved books), I don't dog-ear pages. I don't use a highlighter pen on actual books. Or a real pen, for that matter, unless I'm writing a note in the front of books I give as presents that ensure that the receiver can never palm them off on someone else. One I read about someone who, instead of using a bookmark, ripped out the pages of books as he read them. I didn't just wince, I cringed. And then I went to hug my enormous illustrated copy of Heine's Buch der Lieder. No-one will ever hurt my books.

No, I have three less devastating physical Bad Book Habits.

1) Leaving them in my handbag while I merrily trip around town. This is the number one reason why my favourite books end up looking a mess. The plastic stuff they put on the cover wrinkles and gets grubby, a bit like an ageing plaster (and by ageing I mean more than, oh, three hours old). The corners near the spine get gently crushed. There's an impression of my purse logo in the front or back cover. And then there's an impression of my head in a bog wall somewhere in one of many, many Yorkshire city centres. One more book (in this case, my well-travelled copy of And There Was Light) has battle scars. It's all my fault. Alas.

2) Taking books into the toilet and/or bathroom. Face it, they're pretty boring places. Nothing whiles away the time like a good book when you're engaged in necessary bodily maintenance activities, particularly if you, like me, have feet dextrous enough to hold a sponge. Unfortunately, my hands have once or twice inexplicably failed in their duty during a particularly hot bath, and a book has fallen face-first in the water. It produces an interesting crinkly effect in the pages but also renders the book unclosable. Farewell to thee, Notes from a Big Country. (NB. I have not yet suffered any similar incident with a toilet bowl, but I did once place the book on the tank, only to have it fall off at a crucial moment. I deftly trapped the book between my head and the tank, and extracted it with a grace perfected by my yoga habit. However, no bowl contact. Thank goodness.)

3) Unusual bookmarks. I took a trip through War and Peace again, and frankly I was appalled. Pierre's conversion to Freemasonry was marked by an aqua blue Penguin wrapper with an expiry date sometime last millennium. A piece of string heralded Boris' visit to Tilsit. The Rostov's flight from Moscow had an Andalusian postcard (dated 1996 or so) to commemerate it. A book about Tchaikovsky's personal life was even worse. Viscount wrappers, lots of 'em. I don't know what it is about neurotic, homosexual Russian composers who wrote some really killer music and had an unhealthy interest in teenage boys that made me want to eat mint fondant biscuits, but there were thirteen of them in there in addition to a note recommending I read Resistance by Anita Shreve and an opera ticket to see The Barber of Seville. The book, needless to say, smelt like a biscuit tin.

To be fair, yes, there was a lovely cat-themed bookmark in The Water Babies and a jaunty plastic Siamese with bendy legs wrapped around a page in Three Men In A Boat, but I must say, in my youth, I must have owned about 700 bookmarks and yet I still used biscuit wrappers and airline napkins. The law governing this must be some variation of Sod's law. Whenever I need an actual bookmark because I've found a fascinating book passage, there's nothing to hand but a pipe cleaner or discarded clothes label. Whenever I've just bought a nice shiny bookmark, I put it randomly in a nice-looking book so I can admire it, and then when I need it it looks like it might already in use.

I have to mention at this point that the most kick-ass bookmark I've used is a peacock quill - for the flamboyant and/or eccentric reader.

And on to bad reading habits:

4) Forgetting about books. I have a ton of books. At least, I can confidently say I own enough books to balance out my weight on a scale, and I intend to increase the number of books I own (because God knows the alternative is unthinkable as long as chocolate exists) until I am flung off the scale entirely like the projectile of a trebuchet - where the counterweight is entirely books.

This also makes it very easy to forget about books. I have so many they all blend together, and I'd love to know why every single book set on the continent during WWII has the same colour scheme. They are all brown; they blend into one another. Now I know I've read Children of Freedom by Marc Levy, but did I read the aforementioned Resistance (I did... I think)? I've read the first half of Suite Francaise twice for this reason, because I took two very similar-looking, similarly-themed books to Vienna with me and the panic that ensued when I couldn't find my hotel made me forget which one I'd read.

The other pernicious influence is The Internet, which explains why I have been finishing fewer books recently. Why devote energy to reading one book when I could read, like, a million blogs? Or hopping round Youtube. (I love Youtube. I started out watching a video of Itzhak Perlman playing some Tchaikovsky piece, which linked to him on Sesame Street - what a wonderful program it was! - and I thought "Hmm... yes, I do vaguely remember some chap with crutches playing Beethoven on the violin. Beethoven! Heavenly! I loved Sesame Street, you know. I wonder if they've got that pinball animation, recently rehashed on Family Guy where Stewie was in the bubble, that they always used to play?". Upshot was, three hours later I was watching a video of a cat sitting serenely on an automated vacuum cleaner in action.) I mean, how can a book compete with a breakdancing toddler or the Christmas episode of Mr Bean? It can and it must. So it will. Because I don't ever remember feeling that heartbroken when Youtube told me that Gabelstaplerfahren was no longer available, whereas, like I said, seeing a mutilated book almost reduces me to tears.

5) Buying books and not reading them. I think this relates to something that Chris Baty, the inventor of Nanowrimo, said. I bought his book about completing Nano, and in the part about writing lists of what you do and don't like in novels, he mentioned the 'literature-as-self-improvement' concept. Basically, people buy literature they don't enjoy because they think that, like Bran Flakes, if they aren't enjoying it, it must be good for them. Rubbish, sez he. Books are there to be enjoyed. They're entertainment.

Sadly, that message hasn't even filtered down to me, yet. I still buy stuff based on the idea that everyone's read this, it's a Penguin Classic, I can't possibly be considered well-read if I don't read this - and remain ill-read and £2 poorer for having shelled out on a book I have not yet read. Lessee... I bought The Go-Between by L P Hartley, and still haven't read it. At least not past "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Which is, if you didn't know, the first sentence. At least I don't do this with books I buy new - that would be a phenomenal waste of dosh - but it is so frustrating to realise I've read all my 'literary kink' fiction first - i.e. the fun stuff that features a theme I enjoy reading about, and now I've got to read something with an orange cover.

I'm not saying I hate all the classics, or that I think I won't enjoy reading the Hartley book. But... many of them are just not my thing, and I wish I could admit that. Same with more modern books that everyone else has read and I feel I have to read to keep up with the Joneses. Lord of the sodding Rings, for a start. I tried and failed to read it. I think I have an allergy to fantasy names. Fred = good, Frodo = bad. And Chocolat, by Joanne Harris. A friend of mine's mother said I might like it. I might still like it, but unfortunately it's on the bottom of a very tall pile of books I am disinclined to dismantle. And one of these days I swear I will read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (I liked the TV special), but as yet...

6) Style over substance. Skim reading. To me, these issues amount to the same thing. If I find an author whose writing style I love, I'll read almost anything I can find written in that style. (Same with artists, for that matter - I'd rather have a mediocre Friedrich than a really good Rembrandt or Picasso. Caspar David F rocks my socks, and that's an end to it. Should it be?) I used to be a lot worse about this. Style was all that mattered when I was six. I loved Watership Down because I was reading a really long book, really really long, and it had all these pretty descriptions of nature and the rabbits had OMG their own language!!... so obviously I didn't get anything like the blazing obvious World War II parallels. And when I read the book again when I was a teenager, I got it. And I think I got a lot more out of it when I was eighteen, and supposedly 'too old' for the book (there's more rant fuel), than when I was a perhaps-precocious kid. I technically knew how to read - that is, translate those funny page-squiggles into words with some sort of meaning - but I didn't know how to read a book. I could read how to not incinerate myself instantly with an oven, but the finer (or cruder) nuances of the human soul? Totally lost on me.

7) Kink reading. Not what you might think. Basically, what I mean by 'kink' reading is choosing books based on just one element, regardless of quality. As I sense that this entry is approaching truly gargangtuan proportions, this concept is pretty much covered in the Wittgenstein entry with my ill-considered purchase of The Crown Prince - the 'kink' is obviously the presence of Paul Wittgenstein.

All right, NEXT time I'll talk about a book I've actually finished, or a film I've watched, or a piece of music I've particularly enjoyed.

Books I Have Never Finished

There! There, I've made a new year's resolution. Finish books. I have to finish every single book I buy before I can buy any new ones. OK, if it's in a second-hand book that might not be there next time, I can buy it. Or, come to think of it, if it's a really cool book in Borders or Waterstones, I can also buy it. Or if it's a book that's in print but only findable on Amazon, then...

That was a non-starter of a resolution. Or was it? To hell with the rule of not-being-able-to-buy-new-books without finishing-all-those-I-already-own. I could leave that rule to the video games (pernicious; can you ever truly finish Pokemon? But then, Pokemon is pretty fun). I'd just finish my books. So to that end I invested in some WH Smiths sticky notes. Four colours.

Yellow: Untouched - books I've not really opened.
Orange: Partial - books I've read anything up to 80% of and then discarded for no particular reason.
Green: Can't Remember - any books which I really don't remember reading. I also put one on Lady Chatterley's Lover because I wanted an excuse to read it again.
Pink: Never - this tag went on only one book. Twilight. It would have been a partial if I'd wanted to pick it up again, but frankly I'd rather do a bowel resection on myself with a chainsaw.

So I spent an hour writing out little labels and sticking them merrily on books, including the ones on the shelf above my bed. I went to bed a couple of hours after this endeavour.

And when I woke up, I woke up covered in little sticky notes. The one on my forehead read "can't remember"; formerly appended to Peter Duck (I love Arthur Ransome!), it now neatly covered my forehead scar and served as a badge of my bad memory. (If I had a good memory, why do you think I'd need the stickers?)

Let's take a look at some of my labelled books, shall we? A trip down memory lane - or what's left of it - to see what I didn't finish and why. No pictures. I only add books I liked to my library (OK, I added one book I hated, to make a point. My blog, I can break the rules), and I either can't get pictures or I want to reserve judgement on these books until I've read them. I didn't hate any of them, nor did any disgust me (if any did, it wasn't the writer's fault) so I'm loath to opine before I've actually read them in their entirity.

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman - bought during a caffieneated carouse through the Waterstones in Leeds. People keep on saying it's good - internet people with their memes. My experience with the excreable The Perks of Being a Wallflower should have taught me better about trusting memetically recommended books.

It's not that I don't like the first 40 pages of the book, though; I just felt that it didn't live up to the hype. It's not grabbing my attention. I can shelve it easily. I've got more interesting books to read. I'll get round to it one day, I suppose. Until then I'll let it catch a little dust, mature a bit.

An autobiography of Prokofiev - this was an impulse buy in York. I had no idea that the composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote his memoirs; I bought it for the novelty value, not intending to read it quite yet. This was before I discovered that the train schedule in York was set by a sadist bent on making me spend £3 on a mediocre hot chocolate which had to last me an hour. It tasted like dregs. To try and forget that I looked like a bag lady - I had many bags with me and I was wearing a bobble hat with ear flaps, which was warm but made me look dorky - I started to read Prokofiev's book.

I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was I getting a first-hand look into an interesting composer's head (I do love Prokofiev), but he was an engaging writer. Not bad for someone who grew up to look just like a geography teacher. I really think Russian composers lost something in the appearance when they decided not to have beards any more. But Prkofiev comes across as a charming young man. He had a lovely childhood in the Ukraine, then he went to the Conservatory in St. Petersburg (IIRC), and... well, that's where I dropped it. Why?

Because the train pulled into Leeds and it was time to get off, go home and have some decent hot chocolate while beating up a lot of video game characters in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

I have 40 pages left of this book and I'll have to read them before I forget what happened in the previous ones.

What One Sees without Eyes - another Jacques Lusseyran book which I've had since I was seventeen. To put it succintly, I just... didn't... understand it. Too deep for me, who's used to proteins and cell biology and such like. It does say in the intro that the essays in the book were originally speeches, and I think hearing them would work out better. Also, people laugh at the title of the book, or I get into a conversation about the French Resistance, and yes, there was a teenager in charge of part of it, and yes, he was also blind, and yes, he survived Buchenwald -

"But HOW?!" they ask.

"Russians," I say, for that is the answer in the book.

And then I've got to get off a bus, or back to work, or go somewhere else, and I end up not reading the book. Between that and my own moronicity, that's why I never finished. I have read parts of it, which is unfortunate. I hate reading parts because I never forget them - I have a Solomon Shereshevsky-like memory for book parts - so when I try to read the whole, later, I get disrupted. But this time, and I swear it, my resolve will win through.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris - I ordered this while I was still living in Germany and was desperate for English-language books to read (reading German is, for me, not a task to be done while tired). It's in quite a different genre to my usual reading; IIRC, it's a crime-thriller type thing set in an alternate universe where the Nazis won and are obsessed with measuring head circumferences and nose lengths to determine whether someone is Slavic, Jewish or Aryan. (I never quite understood how this might work, ever. Would it not be possible to be both Slavic AND Jewish? And I can tell you that there are quite a lot of blonde-haired blue-eyed Eastern Europeans out there... never mind that the whole exercise does precisely sweet FA to tell you anything about a person.) I recall that the main character is a lowly police detective - I think - and there's some murders and he travels on a train at some point and he's not very happy with the whole Nazi thing. I think - it's been about 18 months since I last made an attempt on the book, and I know just why. I was more interested in the alt-history than the actual crime plot. I really should broaden my horizons, though. I'll get to it at some point.

The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore - Fascinating pop science read, one teensy problem - I dropped the book and the cover permanently creased, and the book now looks tatty. I'm shallow. I've read most of it, I know. I really need to get over my prejudice against tatty books, because goodness knows my first copy of And There Was Light looks like it's been in The Great Bag Occupation Rivalry wars (there's an imprint of my glasses in the back cover; the glasses won in a pyrrhic victory), but at least And There Was Light doesn't have a massive crease in the front cover!! (It might soon, I lent it to a friend. A male friend. Hope he's careful, or else...) And again, I own a lot of tatty previously enjoyed books - why is it that people seem to previously enjoy books by messing up the spine and cracking the poor book open? - so I shouldn't have anything wrong with tattifying books myself, but it does feel like a self-betrayal. I was always taught to respect possessions, both mine and other people's, so I feel guilty when I hurt a book, break its wings.

This book was never finished out of pure guilt.

To sum up, there are many reasons I never finished. Boredom, the fact that designated reading time came to an end, my blockheadedness (and the fact that the book title of this book invites derision, poor Jacques), genre... uh... boredom, I guess, and finally guilt. But these books are my books, so I will finish them one day. Promise.

The House of Wittgenstein

Hello! Sorry I haven't updated in, well, months. Life. But it's amazing how much better you feel when you have a good clearout. I've done my room, I've removed all the unsuitable bookmarks from my copy of War and Peace (nothing like a decade-old penguin wrapper to make you feel just a little queasy - I replaced it with a slip of paper informing me that yes, Pierre does become a freemason), I looked under my bed. That was a treasure trove of rubbish. Now there's a box of theatre programmes, a box full of German postcards telling me how to make Sachertorte and that Franz Schubert liked playing charades on holiday, some sketchbooks and my craft box. I reorganised my shelves so all my CDs are on view and I don't have a desk covered in book piles, I threw out all nonfunctional pens, I labelled books with sticky labels so I know if I've read them or not. Then I moved on to the playroom and filled boxes full of books and toys to be given away, though I will never give up my Lego (partly because I still like building big mansions, partly because I used to taste lego bricks and use them as nasal probes - my nose was three bumps deep at five) or the Beano annuals. Now I'm clearing out a barely-used bedroom. I discovered a photograph of my father and mother on a date, when they were younger than I am now. My mother was devastatingly pretty; my father looked like a dork with a tie wider than his body and a side parting. Their parents are there. My mother's parents look displeased; my maternal grandfather looks especially disappointed. I also found some of their seventies clothes - laugh riot.

So now I have my books on my shelves in a nice tidy bedroom, I can sit down and read again.

A quick factoid for my fellow trivia collectors. In Iowa, it is illegal for a one-armed pianist to charge for his or her performances.

“Are there really so many one-armed pianists that this needs to be a law?” you ask. Well… I don’t know. Either there are a whole lot of one-armed pianists with opportunistic agents, looking to make a quick buck round Des Moines et al., or Paul Wittgenstein turned up once and cleaned them all out.

You ask again. (Unless you’ve read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks – it’s a big seller this Christmas) “Who is this?” A notoriously arsey (Benjamin Britten described him as a sourpuss; Benjamin Britten is more polite than I would have been) one-armed pianist with a famous philosopher for a younger brother, that’s who he was. And I just read a whole book about them, so given my usual style of discussing books I’ll make sure you know as much as possible about their dysfunctional family. The Wittgensteins may have looked, on the surface, like a bunch of prosperous Viennese industrialists, but underneath there were catastrophic sibling fall-outs, guilt over poorly disguised homosexuality, suicide… Think the Berry family in Hotel New Hampshire, plus the Simpsons, multiply by a factor of The Troubled Political Situation in Early 20th Century Germany/Austria/round there… and that’s the Wittgensteins.

Or such is the impression I got from reading this book. I’ve got the feeling I was supposed to get some deeper meaning from the book. Then I realised that the reason I didn’t get whatever urged the author to write it was the same reason I favoured the sciences from when I was sixteen. (That, and a younger acquaintance revealed to me that he had to read Ulysses over Christmas recently. Ulysses! No-one reads that! Do they?) My relationship with the written word has never been deep. I came to terms with that some time ago and decided to ignore those silly “100 books you must read before you can consider yourself a member of the middle class” lists, more commonly known as “100 books you must read before you die” lists, and read whatever sounded interesting to me.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Alexander Waugh

It was interesting, too. Mainly because the author decided to cast Paul Wittgenstein as the hero of the family. It was either a hard choice (His brother was Ludwig Wittgenstein! Ludwig Wittgenstein!!) or a very easy one (He’s clearly the least crazy member, though when the ‘least crazy’ member of the family is the one who went swimming in the sea during thunderstorms to prove that he wasn’t that disabled, then the bar’s lowered quite a bit). Whatever his reasons, it was pleasing. I’ve always liked music. Let the pianist be the hero. I can understand pianists; they like music too. Now philosophers… Put it like this, I gave up on Sophie’s World when Gaarder got to Hume. So when given a choice between the pianist and the philosopher, I’m going for the pianist every time. Especially is said pianist is a guy who loses an arm and then decides that he’s still going to be a pianist, because that? That takes balls. So I can forgive Paul Wittgenstein for rejecting a Prokofiev piano concerto written for him in half a sentence. He was an interesting man.

So he was born into a very rich family – big house in the middle of Vienna, Brahms popped round every Tuesday for a tinkle on the piano or somesuch, massive art collection, and lots of piano lessons, especially for Paul. The patriarch, Karl Wittgenstein, was a demanding father – drove three of his sons to eventual suicide, leaving the last two, Paul and ‘Lucki’ Ludwig, to carry on the family name. (Not in Ludwig’s case. He was gay.) Ludwig went to study in Cambridge, and Paul stayed in Vienna and made his debut as a pianist in 1913.

June next year, Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. War broke out. The Wittgenstein boys were called up to fight for Germany/Austria, and off they went. And in one of those stunningly cruel twists of fate – I mean, if God has a sense of humour, he’s Frankie Boyle crossed with that weird kid you knew at primary who pulled legs off spiders for fun – two months later, Paul was leading a patrol somewhere in Poland when he had his right elbow shattered by a rifle bullet. Medical science being not so good, the only solution was amputation. War being also not so good, about three seconds post-amputation the Russians invaded the field hospital and took everyone prisoner. And you thought you were having a bad week.

In that situation, it’s sink or swim, or more accurately for Paul Wittgenstein, ‘suicide like your older brothers or learn how to play the piano with the left hand’. Paul chose option 2. During a year of being shuttled round POW camps in Russia (including one with particularly horrific conditions, including random horsewhippings and solitary confinement for making jokes), he refined his technique by playing on a keyboard marked out in chalk on a crate top, and occasionally a real piano when he could get at one. And eventually, Pope Benedict XV (I wondered when the previous Pope Ben was around, and if he looked like he ate babies too – he doesn’t, by the way) manage to pull some strings to get officers repatriated, and back came Paul. Near the end of 1915. It took that long.

Now there was a composer who hung round the Wittgenstein place like he’d been adopted. There’s a bust of him near the old Konvikt school in Vienna, and his name was Josef Labor; he was old and blind and lively-haired and wrote exactly the sort of music that appealed to Paul, enabling him to make a comeback. And when Labor eventually pegged out, Paul simply used his giant bank balance (one of the things that made him immensely attractive to women, along from his handsome face, his mad piano skills and his empty sleeve) to pay lots and lots of other composers to write music for him. Ravel. Prokofiev. Britten. Korngold. Strauss. And he was very successful in his profession.

It didn’t seem to matter at first when one of Ludwig’s old classmates – a chap called Adolf – was made the German chancellor. He was doing a lot better than Ludwig, who made a hobby out of self-flagellation, often accompanied by his boyfriends, in between writing his philosophical works. Paul was giving piano lessons at the time, and fell in love with one of his pupils, Hilde, (whose father was incidentally younger than Paul himself), whom he impregnated almost immediately judging by the date of birth of their first child. They got on very well.

But then there was the Anschluss. Ludwig meandered off to England – again. (After all, the philosophers were talkative and the boys were ever so pretty.) Paul and the rest of the Wittgensteins were still in Vienna. The NSDAP ordered them to fly a Hakenkreuz flag above Casa Wittgenstein, so Paul apologised to all his pupils profusely when they came over for lessons. And only then did the Nazis check out the Wittgenstein family tree...

Paul, Ludwig et al had been brought up Catholic, with a bit of the old Viennese anti-Semitism going on in the backs of their brains. Their parents had been Christians too. The grandparents – well, three of them had started out Jewish, so by the twisted Nazi logic that suddenly meant that Paul and his siblings were also Jewish. And therefore they were all-of-a-sudden persona non grata (or whatever the plural of that is). Some of Paul’s more… ardent students just stopped coming now they knew their teacher was Jewish, and he got fired from his official music-teaching job and rendered unable to perform in public. But worse was to come for Paul. He was now guilty of Rassenschande – race defilement – as his pretty young girlfriend had now borne him a second little girl, and in a stunning illustration of the complete stupidity of the “Who’s Jewish now?” laws, the older girl wasn’t counted as Jewish, but the younger one was, simply by virtue of their dates of birth. Oh, and by this time, they’d forbidden him to fly the Nazi flag as he was now “Jewish”, which must have been the only thing about the whole mess that was OK by him.

His siblings weren’t making matters any easier. Paul was frantic – they were apathetic, and just wanted to stay put and pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening by bribing the Nazis to stay away. So Paul upped and left, packing his own suitcase for the very first time in his life and heading off to America. Alone. Not because he wanted to abandon his girlfriend and children (as Germans, they’d be safer there than he would be), but because he had to get out of the country. The country that he’d once fought for – losing his arm in the process – now rejected him because of some distant ancestors’ religion. I mean, to me, this is fucking nuts. But it made sense to a frightening amount of people way back in the late thirties, so off went Paul, sans family, girlfriend and kids, to America.

Eventually Hilde and the kids joined him, he wrote a lot of letters to the German government so that his siblings would be regarded as “Mischlinge” – half-Jews – and would only have to pay a lot of money to the Nazis to not be shipped off to a concentration camp, and eventually he settled down in New York, started performing again and giving lessons and made a few recordings. But he never talked to his siblings again – that was how bad it got between them. Not even Ludwig. Alas. And finally he went and died of prostate cancer, in the days before there were public awareness campaigns to go to the doctor if you’re a man over fifty and have difficulty urinating. Just like Ludwig.

So I guess if you were a Wittgenstein, it’s cancer or suicide. (In my family it’s heart disease… but it’s important to note that for 200 years before I was born there were no other females, so with the decreased female incidence of heart disease I will hopefully live more-or-less forever.) Thank goodness this one was cancer!

I mentioned Paul Wittgenstein made recordings. I downloaded one after a lot of Googling – cost me £5 but I figured it was worth it, just so that I could listen to a pianist who definitely wasn’t cheating when playing Ravel’s concerto. That’s the best piano piece written for Wittgenstein. It’s angry. It’s beautiful. It’s everything I want out of a good piano concerto. And I’ve definitely heard better recordings than Wittgenstein’s. To be fair, the recording was made when he practically had one foot in the grave – or at any rate when he wasn’t in the full flush of his one-handed piano playing career. Apparently he was magnificent in his prime, but bootlegging concerts in the early 30s wasn’t really possible. So I ended up listening to a recording made in the 1950s. My goodness, he pounds on the keys in a way that would make Ravel rotate in his grave so rapidly that the resulting kinetic energy, if transformed into electrical energy, could power the street lamps of Paris for a year.

OK, I’m drawing the long bow. I listened to it again after a couple of days of not reading about Mr. Wittgenstein, and you know what? I liked it better. It’s hard to believe that the piano is being played by a guy with just a left hand, but then again I suspect that was what both Ravel and Wittgenstein were going for. Wittgenstein was a proud man and a serious musician – judging by the book – and would have rather died than become a sideshow attraction. And Ravel delivered the goods – a piano concerto that couldn’t have been any more difficult or more virtuosic if it had been written for two hands. It’s just a shame that Wittgenstein didn’t have the technique to match his courage. Because, let’s face it, you have to have balls (I mean that in the purely metaphorical sense) to decide that you’re going to be a concert pianist in the first place, let alone one with just the one arm. And apparently some people went to Wittgenstein’s concerts and came out blissfully unaware that the pianist had an empty right sleeve – exactly his aim.

As I went on through the CD – there were some pieces by Max Reger, a forgettable composer; an arrangement of a Schubert Lied that would have made old Franz do acrobatics with his eyebrows, and Brahms’ arrangement of the Bach chaconne written for Clara Schumann after she hurt her right hand but wanted to keep practising – I decided he wasn’t so bad after all. Definitely listenable. Interesting is about as far as I’m willing to go, to be brutally honest. Thing is, I was forewarned, and although Wittgenstein was very good for a one-armed pianist, had he been slightly, shall we say, luckier in the Great War, he’d be a complete nonentity as a two-armed pianist, at least in my opinion. And had he been an impoverished one-armed pianist, he’d be naught but a piteous curiousity. Thank goodness we can leave history the way it is, and make Paul Wittgenstein fortunate!

There’s also a romance novel written about Paul Wittgenstein, about being the operative word. I located the book – The Crown Prince by John Barchilon - in a second-hand bookshop and secreted it in the middle of some other books in order not to embarrass myself – not that I have anything against romance novels, but it looked like one of the family sagas my mother is addicted to. She can’t read a book unless it’s written in a pedestrian style and written by someone who had a remarkably shitty life.

It’s… ah, well. See, I think I might have quite enjoyed it either if the author had attempted to stick to the facts of Paul’s life (below I will list what is correct and what drove me nuts), or if the author had not used Paul’s name. Smashing a rather melodramatic made-up story into a real person’s name just doesn’t sit well with me at all. After all, the book’s story wasn’t exactly boring; it’s no Twilight. There was a war on and everything, and a plot of sorts, and the author, far from chickening out on climaxes, seemed to enjoy them rather too much. And there’s sex in it, some of it rather fetishist-like (I recall thinking “Wait, wouldn’t that hurt? What about his phantom limb?”). If the writing style hadn’t been so stilted in some places (and not used Paul Wittgenstein’s name) it would have been an OK read. After all, I grasped from Smart Bitches Trashy Books that it’s not often you get a disabled hero in your average romance, and women are throwing themselves at this guy.

But Paul Wittgenstein led an interesting enough life anyway. He was alive, once, and I believe at least some of his children still are (and able to boast “Ludwig Wittgenstein was my uncle”.) He had musical tastes and a well-documented career and he was part of the Wittgenstein family, and it would, I think, have behoved the author to take notice of that. I am speaking mildly at this point. I read most of the book with a WTF expression on my face – Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows, the works.

Advice: If you’ve read this far, don’t make the Crown Prince purchase. Unless you really want Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows. But buy the House of Wittgenstein book, if you would like to reassure yourself that your family is indeed quite normal compared to some.

The House of Wittgenstein

Hello! Sorry I haven't updated in, well, months. Life. But it's amazing how much better you feel when you have a good clearout. I've done my room, I've removed all the unsuitable bookmarks from my copy of War and Peace (nothing like a decade-old penguin wrapper to make you feel just a little queasy - I replaced it with a slip of paper informing me that yes, Pierre does become a freemason), I looked under my bed. That was a treasure trove of rubbish. Now there's a box of theatre programmes, a box full of German postcards telling me how to make Sachertorte and that Franz Schubert liked playing charades on holiday, some sketchbooks and my craft box. I reorganised my shelves so all my CDs are on view and I don't have a desk covered in book piles, I threw out all nonfunctional pens, I labelled books with sticky labels so I know if I've read them or not. Then I moved on to the playroom and filled boxes full of books and toys to be given away, though I will never give up my Lego (partly because I still like building big mansions, partly because I used to taste lego bricks and use them as nasal probes - my nose was three bumps deep at five) or the Beano annuals. Now I'm clearing out a barely-used bedroom. I discovered a photograph of my father and mother on a date, when they were younger than I am now. My mother was devastatingly pretty; my father looked like a dork with a tie wider than his body and a side parting. Their parents are there. My mother's parents look displeased; my maternal grandfather looks especially disappointed. I also found some of their seventies clothes - laugh riot.

So now I have my books on my shelves in a nice tidy bedroom, I can sit down and read again.

A quick factoid for my fellow trivia collectors. In Iowa, it is illegal for a one-armed pianist to charge for his or her performances.

“Are there really so many one-armed pianists that this needs to be a law?” you ask. Well… I don’t know. Either there are a whole lot of one-armed pianists with opportunistic agents, looking to make a quick buck round Des Moines et al., or Paul Wittgenstein turned up once and cleaned them all out.

You ask again. (Unless you’ve read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks – it’s a big seller this Christmas) “Who is this?” A notoriously arsey (Benjamin Britten described him as a sourpuss; Benjamin Britten is more polite than I would have been) one-armed pianist with a famous philosopher for a younger brother, that’s who he was. And I just read a whole book about them, so given my usual style of discussing books I’ll make sure you know as much as possible about their dysfunctional family. The Wittgensteins may have looked, on the surface, like a bunch of prosperous Viennese industrialists, but underneath there were catastrophic sibling fall-outs, guilt over poorly disguised homosexuality, suicide… Think the Berry family in Hotel New Hampshire, plus the Simpsons, multiply by a factor of The Troubled Political Situation in Early 20th Century Germany/Austria/round there… and that’s the Wittgensteins.

Or such is the impression I got from reading this book. I’ve got the feeling I was supposed to get some deeper meaning from the book. Then I realised that the reason I didn’t get whatever urged the author to write it was the same reason I favoured the sciences from when I was sixteen. (That, and a younger acquaintance revealed to me that he had to read Ulysses over Christmas recently. Ulysses! No-one reads that! Do they?) My relationship with the written word has never been deep. I came to terms with that some time ago and decided to ignore those silly “100 books you must read before you can consider yourself a member of the middle class” lists, more commonly known as “100 books you must read before you die” lists, and read whatever sounded interesting to me.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Alexander Waugh

It was interesting, too. Mainly because the author decided to cast Paul Wittgenstein as the hero of the family. It was either a hard choice (His brother was Ludwig Wittgenstein! Ludwig Wittgenstein!!) or a very easy one (He’s clearly the least crazy member, though when the ‘least crazy’ member of the family is the one who went swimming in the sea during thunderstorms to prove that he wasn’t that disabled, then the bar’s lowered quite a bit). Whatever his reasons, it was pleasing. I’ve always liked music. Let the pianist be the hero. I can understand pianists; they like music too. Now philosophers… Put it like this, I gave up on Sophie’s World when Gaarder got to Hume. So when given a choice between the pianist and the philosopher, I’m going for the pianist every time. Especially is said pianist is a guy who loses an arm and then decides that he’s still going to be a pianist, because that? That takes balls. So I can forgive Paul Wittgenstein for rejecting a Prokofiev piano concerto written for him in half a sentence. He was an interesting man.

So he was born into a very rich family – big house in the middle of Vienna, Brahms popped round every Tuesday for a tinkle on the piano or somesuch, massive art collection, and lots of piano lessons, especially for Paul. The patriarch, Karl Wittgenstein, was a demanding father – drove three of his sons to eventual suicide, leaving the last two, Paul and ‘Lucki’ Ludwig, to carry on the family name. (Not in Ludwig’s case. He was gay.) Ludwig went to study in Cambridge, and Paul stayed in Vienna and made his debut as a pianist in 1913.

June next year, Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. War broke out. The Wittgenstein boys were called up to fight for Germany/Austria, and off they went. And in one of those stunningly cruel twists of fate – I mean, if God has a sense of humour, he’s Frankie Boyle crossed with that weird kid you knew at primary who pulled legs off spiders for fun – two months later, Paul was leading a patrol somewhere in Poland when he had his right elbow shattered by a rifle bullet. Medical science being not so good, the only solution was amputation. War being also not so good, about three seconds post-amputation the Russians invaded the field hospital and took everyone prisoner. And you thought you were having a bad week.

In that situation, it’s sink or swim, or more accurately for Paul Wittgenstein, ‘suicide like your older brothers or learn how to play the piano with the left hand’. Paul chose option 2. During a year of being shuttled round POW camps in Russia (including one with particularly horrific conditions, including random horsewhippings and solitary confinement for making jokes), he refined his technique by playing on a keyboard marked out in chalk on a crate top, and occasionally a real piano when he could get at one. And eventually, Pope Benedict XV (I wondered when the previous Pope Ben was around, and if he looked like he ate babies too – he doesn’t, by the way) manage to pull some strings to get officers repatriated, and back came Paul. Near the end of 1915. It took that long.

Now there was a composer who hung round the Wittgenstein place like he’d been adopted. There’s a bust of him near the old Konvikt school in Vienna, and his name was Josef Labor; he was old and blind and lively-haired and wrote exactly the sort of music that appealed to Paul, enabling him to make a comeback. And when Labor eventually pegged out, Paul simply used his giant bank balance (one of the things that made him immensely attractive to women, along from his handsome face, his mad piano skills and his empty sleeve) to pay lots and lots of other composers to write music for him. Ravel. Prokofiev. Britten. Korngold. Strauss. And he was very successful in his profession.

It didn’t seem to matter at first when one of Ludwig’s old classmates – a chap called Adolf – was made the German chancellor. He was doing a lot better than Ludwig, who made a hobby out of self-flagellation, often accompanied by his boyfriends, in between writing his philosophical works. Paul was giving piano lessons at the time, and fell in love with one of his pupils, Hilde, (whose father was incidentally younger than Paul himself), whom he impregnated almost immediately judging by the date of birth of their first child. They got on very well.

But then there was the Anschluss. Ludwig meandered off to England – again. (After all, the philosophers were talkative and the boys were ever so pretty.) Paul and the rest of the Wittgensteins were still in Vienna. The NSDAP ordered them to fly a Hakenkreuz flag above Casa Wittgenstein, so Paul apologised to all his pupils profusely when they came over for lessons. And only then did the Nazis check out the Wittgenstein family tree...

Paul, Ludwig et al had been brought up Catholic, with a bit of the old Viennese anti-Semitism going on in the backs of their brains. Their parents had been Christians too. The grandparents – well, three of them had started out Jewish, so by the twisted Nazi logic that suddenly meant that Paul and his siblings were also Jewish. And therefore they were all-of-a-sudden persona non grata (or whatever the plural of that is). Some of Paul’s more… ardent students just stopped coming now they knew their teacher was Jewish, and he got fired from his official music-teaching job and rendered unable to perform in public. But worse was to come for Paul. He was now guilty of Rassenschande – race defilement – as his pretty young girlfriend had now borne him a second little girl, and in a stunning illustration of the complete stupidity of the “Who’s Jewish now?” laws, the older girl wasn’t counted as Jewish, but the younger one was, simply by virtue of their dates of birth. Oh, and by this time, they’d forbidden him to fly the Nazi flag as he was now “Jewish”, which must have been the only thing about the whole mess that was OK by him.

His siblings weren’t making matters any easier. Paul was frantic – they were apathetic, and just wanted to stay put and pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening by bribing the Nazis to stay away. So Paul upped and left, packing his own suitcase for the very first time in his life and heading off to America. Alone. Not because he wanted to abandon his girlfriend and children (as Germans, they’d be safer there than he would be), but because he had to get out of the country. The country that he’d once fought for – losing his arm in the process – now rejected him because of some distant ancestors’ religion. I mean, to me, this is fucking nuts. But it made sense to a frightening amount of people way back in the late thirties, so off went Paul, sans family, girlfriend and kids, to America.

Eventually Hilde and the kids joined him, he wrote a lot of letters to the German government so that his siblings would be regarded as “Mischlinge” – half-Jews – and would only have to pay a lot of money to the Nazis to not be shipped off to a concentration camp, and eventually he settled down in New York, started performing again and giving lessons and made a few recordings. But he never talked to his siblings again – that was how bad it got between them. Not even Ludwig. Alas. And finally he went and died of prostate cancer, in the days before there were public awareness campaigns to go to the doctor if you’re a man over fifty and have difficulty urinating. Just like Ludwig.

So I guess if you were a Wittgenstein, it’s cancer or suicide. (In my family it’s heart disease… but it’s important to note that for 200 years before I was born there were no other females, so with the decreased female incidence of heart disease I will hopefully live more-or-less forever.) Thank goodness this one was cancer!

I mentioned Paul Wittgenstein made recordings. I downloaded one after a lot of Googling – cost me £5 but I figured it was worth it, just so that I could listen to a pianist who definitely wasn’t cheating when playing Ravel’s concerto. That’s the best piano piece written for Wittgenstein. It’s angry. It’s beautiful. It’s everything I want out of a good piano concerto. And I’ve definitely heard better recordings than Wittgenstein’s. To be fair, the recording was made when he practically had one foot in the grave – or at any rate when he wasn’t in the full flush of his one-handed piano playing career. Apparently he was magnificent in his prime, but bootlegging concerts in the early 30s wasn’t really possible. So I ended up listening to a recording made in the 1950s. My goodness, he pounds on the keys in a way that would make Ravel rotate in his grave so rapidly that the resulting kinetic energy, if transformed into electrical energy, could power the street lamps of Paris for a year.

OK, I’m drawing the long bow. I listened to it again after a couple of days of not reading about Mr. Wittgenstein, and you know what? I liked it better. It’s hard to believe that the piano is being played by a guy with just a left hand, but then again I suspect that was what both Ravel and Wittgenstein were going for. Wittgenstein was a proud man and a serious musician – judging by the book – and would have rather died than become a sideshow attraction. And Ravel delivered the goods – a piano concerto that couldn’t have been any more difficult or more virtuosic if it had been written for two hands. It’s just a shame that Wittgenstein didn’t have the technique to match his courage. Because, let’s face it, you have to have balls (I mean that in the purely metaphorical sense) to decide that you’re going to be a concert pianist in the first place, let alone one with just the one arm. And apparently some people went to Wittgenstein’s concerts and came out blissfully unaware that the pianist had an empty right sleeve – exactly his aim.

As I went on through the CD – there were some pieces by Max Reger, a forgettable composer; an arrangement of a Schubert Lied that would have made old Franz do acrobatics with his eyebrows, and Brahms’ arrangement of the Bach chaconne written for Clara Schumann after she hurt her right hand but wanted to keep practising – I decided he wasn’t so bad after all. Definitely listenable. Interesting is about as far as I’m willing to go, to be brutally honest. Thing is, I was forewarned, and although Wittgenstein was very good for a one-armed pianist, had he been slightly, shall we say, luckier in the Great War, he’d be a complete nonentity as a two-armed pianist, at least in my opinion. And had he been an impoverished one-armed pianist, he’d be naught but a piteous curiousity. Thank goodness we can leave history the way it is, and make Paul Wittgenstein fortunate!

There’s also a romance novel written about Paul Wittgenstein, about being the operative word. I located the book – The Crown Prince by John Barchilon - in a second-hand bookshop and secreted it in the middle of some other books in order not to embarrass myself – not that I have anything against romance novels, but it looked like one of the family sagas my mother is addicted to. She can’t read a book unless it’s written in a pedestrian style and written by someone who had a remarkably shitty life.

It’s… ah, well. See, I think I might have quite enjoyed it either if the author had attempted to stick to the facts of Paul’s life (below I will list what is correct and what drove me nuts), or if the author had not used Paul’s name. Smashing a rather melodramatic made-up story into a real person’s name just doesn’t sit well with me at all. After all, the book’s story wasn’t exactly boring; it’s no Twilight. There was a war on and everything, and a plot of sorts, and the author, far from chickening out on climaxes, seemed to enjoy them rather too much. And there’s sex in it, some of it rather fetishist-like (I recall thinking “Wait, wouldn’t that hurt? What about his phantom limb?”). If the writing style hadn’t been so stilted in some places (and not used Paul Wittgenstein’s name) it would have been an OK read. After all, I grasped from Smart Bitches Trashy Books that it’s not often you get a disabled hero in your average romance, and women are throwing themselves at this guy.

But Paul Wittgenstein led an interesting enough life anyway. He was alive, once, and I believe at least some of his children still are (and able to boast “Ludwig Wittgenstein was my uncle”.) He had musical tastes and a well-documented career and he was part of the Wittgenstein family, and it would, I think, have behoved the author to take notice of that. I am speaking mildly at this point. I read most of the book with a WTF expression on my face – Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows, the works.

Advice: If you’ve read this far, don’t make the Crown Prince purchase. Unless you really want Andy Hamilton-style eyebrows. But buy the House of Wittgenstein book, if you would like to reassure yourself that your family is indeed quite normal compared to some.