Month: August 2011

Today was almost indescribably boring. It had the drawback of also being almost indescribably loud, as construction, or demolition, or whatever it is continued outside our office windows all day. It was especially grating today, and I left around four o’clock. (I got in around eight, so it’s not like I was skipping out particularly early or anything.)

I did finish reading Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight on the train ride home, though. It’s part of the Neversink Library, a gift from Heather, and it’s the second of those books that I’ve read thus far. I liked it, although not quite as much as Georges Simeon’s The Train, which actually takes place only a few short years later, as World War II is getting underway. Keun’s book is set in Germany just as the Nazis are coming to power in the late 1930s, something she had first-hand experience with. It was published just a few years after she herself fled the country, and it’s a sometimes chilling and personal look at a nation descending into hysteria and violence. It does feel perhaps a little unfocused near the end, but overall I quite liked it.