Enjoy a Martin Rubin (BK) book review in the Aug. 10 Wall Street Journal–see below, and here’s a link to the full review: Martin Rubin Review WSJ 8/10/07
The Past, Another Country
By MARTIN RUBIN
“In an age when it is fashionable inside and outside the academy to deny the very existence of truth, it is refreshing to encounter a novelist intent on using fiction to reach historical reality.
“Justin Cartwright’s ‘The Song Before It Is Sung’ takes us from contemporary London and Germany back to the cloistered world of Oxford University in the 1930s and to the blood-soaked horrors of Nazism. In the novel, the bequeathed papers of an Oxford scholar, Elya Mendel, prompt one of his former students — a man named Conrad Senior — to begin an enigmatic quest. Conrad finds himself gathering letters and collecting testimony to sort out Mendel’s long, ambivalent friendship with Axel von Gottberg, a German aristocrat tortured and hideously executed following the unsuccessful 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
“Real-Life Models
“When we meet him, Conrad is barely managing a parlous existence as a journalist and would-be author…. [His] investigations into Mendel’s papers — and life — are the heart of the story.
“They reveal a great deal about Mendel himself and raise disturbing questions about Mendel’s German friend. In short, Conrad serves as a useful lens for readers as they try to understand the novel’s two main characters — both of whom, Mr. Cartwright writes in an afterword, are based on real people”–Mendel, on Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and von Gottberg, on one of the members of the 1944 plot.
Again, a link to the full review is at the top of this posting.
–Katherine Hyde (BK), web editor