It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe.
I am not an obvious audience for military history, but Antony and I had met on the management committee of the Society of Authors, and it seemed only polite to read each others’ books.įrom Berlin, I moved on to Life and Fate. Grossman was referenced and footnoted in Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall, both bestsellers of the 1990s. Like a handful of other people a decade ago, I felt that I held a samizdat no one else I knew had ever heard of it. I read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2003. Every time I re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway I see how this brief but enormously influential novel, first read in my teens, created in me the sense of lightness and excitement when walking down a London street, or how the phrase “among the cabbages” would resonate as a fragment of a sentence about memory and longing.īut only one book had such a decisive impact that I can date to it a profound alteration in my worldview and even behaviour. After a lifetime of reading you become formed by books you are partly an accumulation of others’ ideas. T here are novels I have re-read after 30 or 40 years that have shocked me with ideas which evidently made such a strong impression they ceased to be someone else’s thoughts and became my own.
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