Customer Reviews

The German Woman

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Intense content, vivid imagery and meticulous research. The book is rich in historical detail and immerses the reader in two wartime periods: post-WWI in occupied Germany, and end of WW2 during the bombings of London.

The first part of the book forcefully describes the chaotic and surreal nature of events as home forces retreat and foreign forces occupy; the post-war period of starvation and the desolation it brings; the demoralizing arrogance of occupying forces; and the daily bartering of goods and soul needed to survive.

The second part of the book, at the end of WWII, brings to life the shifting emotional response of a population enduring frequent, unpredictable terror -- the impossibility of living in a constant state of fear, the consequent deadening and reawakening of intense emotions, the awareness of imminent danger breaking constantly through to the surface of daily living.

The author is extremely skillful in conveying the passage of time -- the world as described in Part 2 is completely different in feel from that described in Part 1; this is accomplished through countless, detailed descriptions of daily life that enable the reader to feel differences across the two eras -- the milk-carrier's nag; the iron cookstove; a woman sponging off the black line on the back of her leg, drawn to imitate the seam of a stocking; the memory of raspberries in normal times; a child with rickets; a watch ticking on a severed arm. The reader is drenched in the atmosphere of the book's places and times.

Throughout, the day-to-day lives of Kate Zweig and her lover Claus illustrate the difficult practical and moral choices that people must navigate in times of war, or of terror -- some images in the book, and some of the responses to perceived "treason" are reminiscent of reactions in the US post 9/11. Questions of identity -- citizenship vs. humanity, self alone and self in relationship with others, the layers of meaning in how we act and what we choose to reveal of ourselves -- are explored in the context of extreme circumstances.

The book is best read slowly and with attention to detail. It is not a comfortable book -- war is horrible, and the author doesn't spare us. However, the language is beautiful, and the construction of the book is intricate -- a close reading pays off. The comparison to Graham Greene, both stylistically and in terms of the examination of morality and identity, is apt. I was also reminded of themes and preoccupations of C.P. Snow, Anthony Powell, Pat Barker, and early 20th-century British poetry. Though these themes are set in a historical context, I found myself thinking often of what it must have been like in recent years, and today, to live in Baghdad, Mosul, Kabul, and other areas where civilians are affected by war and daily life becomes a surreal combination of normalcy and random terror.

Highly recommended.

Paul Griner skillfully writes a mysterious story filled with haunting realism about two individuals who become lovers each of whom had lived what seemed a lifetime before they met. Their lives are complicated by their past histories which proves they are survivors but it also creates conflicts which may become their undoing in the end. The author's sparse prose is strikingly sharp and direct, creating a jarring tension and exciting anticipation in the reader who expects some malevolent force to enter like a cold wind on a dark winter's day. The reader anticipates the unexpected at every turn of the page. Civil wars had broken out in various countries even before the end of World War One and now President Woodrow Wilson had a Fourteen Point Peace Plan. Soldiers who spoke Polish or Lithuanian or German came through Wilno where the small field hospital where Kate Zweig worked as a nurse continued its mission despite limited equipment and barely enough coal to properly sterilize the surgical instruments ...

In part One, Kate Zweig lives in Wilno, East Prussia in 1919 with her mother-in-law and husband who was a surgeon but is now blind from wounds sustained in World War One. The author's descriptions of life after the war are filled with the realities of privation but a sort of lingering optimism exists which only humans who survived the unspeakable horrors of war can manage to sustain. They hold onto the hope of building a better future. The family moved to Hamburg where life was a bit easier but nonetheless still difficult. The description of Kate receiving a nearly new pair of leather shoes from her mother-in-law and Kate's stopping at a soup kitchen which would make her husband feel ashamed were particularly realistic and effective.

In Part Two, it is 1944 and Kate lives in London with a new set of friends one of whom is an American named Claus (Charles) who has German roots. There is a vagueness as to how and why she left Hamburg, then spent time living in France where her husband's family had been from and escaped to London to free herself from the Nazis. Claus had been imprisoned in the past on what appeared to be trumped up charges. Both Kate and Claus had mysterious and complicated past histories each of whom could plausibly explain it away. However, under the current political climate it placed them in jeopardy, given the feelings about anyone with German ancestry or connections. The author manages to create an eery suspense and drama as the lives of these two strangers who become lovers entangle. The reader is taken to a precipice, to a ledge where the author provides a totally surprising and explosive ending which leaves the reader stunned and breathless but completely satisfied. This book is a gem which has many hidden depths and layers that the reader more fully appreciates only at the end. There is a lingering feeling of sadness which remains long after finishing the book. Erika Borsos [pepper flower]

Griner's novel is an amazing read, one of the best contemporary novels I've read in years. As someone who isn't terribly familiar with the history of either World War I or II, I found the historical elements to be easily woven into the plot and in no way distracting or didactic.

The prose is beautiful, the characters are well-developed, and the plot is gripping. I strongly disagree with earlier reviewers who found the two halves of the novel to be disconnected from one another. As far as the claim that the novel is explicit in its descriptions of the horrors of war ---- well, it is, but I found it to be an integral part of the novel's setting and not overkill.

The love stories that tie together the two halves of the novel are poignant and real. I highly recommend this novel as a summer read. It will also make an excellent gift to anyone interested in good writing, WWI/II, or love stories. I plan on gifting it multiple times this coming holiday season.

This novel is historical fiction with a bit of espionage spy mystery thrown in to make it as good a book as you will read this year.

The novel is told through two characters: Kate, the "German Woman" and nurse and Claus aka Charles Murphy, an American film-maker.

The book starts as Kate and her husband doctor are fleeing the Russians at the end of WWI. They worked together in German field hospitals during the war. He was a German doctor trained in England and she an English nurse who followed him at the outbreak of the war.

The second part of the book follows Claus, an American, making films for the English and being an industrious warden. The two characters meet at the end of WWII as the VI's are ravaging London.

Those are the details. The big picture is far more intriguing. Nothing is sure throughout the novel except the gruesome dervastation and destruction wrought by war. Be it WWI or WWII, war devastates the common people at home and in occupioed areas even more than the soldiers - whether home is Germany or England and whether the occupiers are German or English or any other nation in those positions.

Depradation and tragedy occurs on both sides and Mr. Giner takes black and white and throws them out the window. This novel only considers variations in gray.

"Nothing is as it seems" applies to the two main characters. As every page turns, the reader learns something else about both - or seems to. The mystery/espionage part of the book is deciphering what is real, what is not and what is wartime paranoia.

What is excellent historical fiction also has considerable elements of an excellent spy mystery. This book is unique. As it explores the horrors of war's homefronts and aftermath, refugees and dispossessed, it is telling a compelling story that includes a very good mystery. Or does it?

This book is very very highly recommended.

I'm giving this book three stars because it is a well-written, if not totally original, example of its genre - the historical thriller. Kate Zweig and Claus (Charles) Murphy meet up in 1944 London, where Kate is a nurse (and possible spy) and Claus (Charles) is a film maker and air raid warden (and possible spy). The two meet and fall in love (and possibly spy). There's a back story of Kate, who was English born and raised and met a German doctor pre-WW1 in London. They were both forced to emigrate to Germany when Horst (the doctor husband) was kicked out of England in 1914. She returned to England after Horst's death, to live in her birthplace (and possibly spy). Claus (Charles) also has a back story of the son of a German mother and Irish father, who grew up in the US and experienced bigotry in 1917. So, both (possible spies) end up living and meeting in London.

To live in London in 1944 is to live with the ever-present danger of being hit by "doodle-bugs", those innocent-sounding but deeply dangerous bombs launched by the Germans in a new blitz-bomb mode. Claus (Charles) may be giving the Germans coordinates of populated areas to aim the bombs at so as to produce the most damage.

The book is a fairly good look at life in 1944 England. The story is complicated, but, in the end, I was not sufficiently interested in the characters to care much what happened to them. It's not a bad read, it's just not a great read.

The other thing I did not like about the book as marketing line in the book that describes Kate Zweig as "beautiful Kate Zweig, the English widow..." It's really irritating to see the main female character described as "beautiful", as if she'd be not worth writing about (and reading about) if she was not "beautiful"? Are we "average-looking" women worth less than a "beautiful" one? Do readers only want to read about a "beautiful" woman? Just a pet irritant with me.

The German Woman is a moving story about love, war and intrigue. The first part of the book centers around Nurse Kate Zweig and her doctor husband Horst in the midst of World War I. Griner artfully uses the plot to construct realistic images of the brutalities of war. When we move to Part II, we jump 25 years to 1944 and war torn London. Although Kate is still with us, Horst is gone and we are swept up in the story of Claus Morgan, an American expatriate, film maker and undercover agent for The Ministry of Information. The two fall in love, despite each sharing concerns of the other's involvement with the enemy. The characters are well developed and the scenes really come alive. If you have read Griner's short stories, you will see similarities to the plot twists in "The Thief" and "Boxes." The novel is reminiscent of Pat Barker's war series with the same intensity and psychological depth. Highly recommended.

Beautiful Kate Zweig is a woman cursed with beauty, passion, intelligence, and very bad luck.

English woman Kate falls in love with and marries a young Doctor in her home country who happens to be german, only to find themselves "persona non grata" when WWI breaks out. She is his nurse in Poland in a mobile army hospital, which they survive through good luck and the unexpected gift from an old patient, only to lose her husbands sight in an explosion in the post war chaos. Her husband becomes despondent and then...

Next we meet Kate in WWII England, where she meets an American film maker who is forced to work as a double agent in the war, but on who's side? Where do Kate's loyalties lie?

The German Woman is a sweeping Historical and tragic Romance Novel set in the stage of both World Wars, and while there isn't anything really startling in the story, it does challenge the reader to rethink the morality of the European Conflicts with the advantage of hindsight, spreading the blame a little more evenly.

So here's the deal, the German Woman wasn't really my cup of tea, but is a very readable novel, and one that I feel that people who enjoy the genre' should really enjoy.

3 ½ *

Simplest summary: In the exhausted days of 1944, an English nurse (the widow of a German doctor) becomes lovers with an American exile. Both have secrets.

But that doesn't tell you much, does it?

This book takes place in two uncomfortable eras which are relegated to a couple of paragraphs in most of our high school history books: the sorry wrapping-up of World War I, when Germany endured vengeful blockades and half a million died of starvation, and (primarily) in the summer of 1944, when the Germans were clearly losing World War II but matters were far from done. The entire premise is wrapped up in the musing of Claus, one of the two main characters, when he thinks, "If the war was in many ways noble, at its margins it could yet be wrong."

It would have been easy for this novel to get heavy handed. And certainly it isn't lighthearted summer-reading fun, as the author does not shy away from the gritty realities of those times. They are utterly foreign to most of us: a child with rickets, taking a bath with water rationing, the despair of a man searching through the rubble of a bombed-out house. Yet the writing is very good; Paul Griner certainly knows how to bring all our senses into the story, from Kate's perfume to the singing voices of a church congregation (suddenly silenced by the explosion of a bomb). He's equally good at expressing the uncertainties in personal relationships ("What does he think of me? Can I trust her?").

I found myself reading this book well after my bedtime, then waking up early to read "just a little more." Yet I'm reluctant to give it five stars, because I don't have that irresistible urge to press it on a friend. Without doubt, though, The German Woman is a good book for those who like historical novels or it-makes-you-think literature.

As an American I always find what the British went through in World War II a bit fantastical. This book reminded me of that. In fact the best part of the book was making those years in Britain come alive. There was constant terror, anticipation of loss...both loss of your own life or your loved ones, the importance of food, of a warm bath. And worst of all, perhaps, not knowing who to trust. Who was loyal to the UK and who wasn't? Even doubting your own motives at times. Trying to do the best thing, act on your higher impulses as things seemed or WERE falling down around you. There were the odd kindnesses, great and small, from strangers, scenes of beauty and hope intermixed with the dismal and hopeless. The swings of emotion alone would be debilitating. Yet in order to survive you had to act. Griner brings together characters that are, perhaps even more than the majority of World War II Brits, isolated and alone, countryless. Just when I had the sensation I was getting a clear sense of who Kate Zweig and Claus Murphy were and what their motivations were the ground would shift again. In the end they seemed only to be staving off hopelessness, barely staying ahead of it. When beauty made an appearance it only served to make the day to day hardships more stark; blood, death, privations, hunger, isolation and the seduction of letting go of hope.

I must admit that at first I did not like this book. I hate not to finish a book that I've invested any time in so I persisted, determined to get through in order to review it more fairly.

I struggled with the first chapters, lost in the long, often dense sentence structures or confused by some of the dialogue, not following between characters. The plot too was complicated. I enjoy historical fiction very much and appreciate accuracy, and this was obviously meticulously researched, but I was overwhelmed and confounded with the barrage of horrific details. I kept going over and over some sentences and rereading paragraphs in order to straighten out their complexities in my mind. I was getting quite exasperated, mostly with my own brain fog, when I realized that afterall, complexity and horror are in fact the very nature of war. What the author was actually creating for me was the atmosphere of war.

With that said, it was at that point when I decided that this was a novel that I would not be able to read through as quickly as I usually read. I decided then to work my way through more slowly and more deliberately. How glad I am that I did because what was revealed was a very satisfying, superbly crafted piece of literature!

Once I overcame my initial struggle with this novel, I was completely absorbed, even riveted. The plot was intense and intriguing, producing for me an impact of horror, outrage, fear and grief brought about by war. Likewise it cleverly used espionage to evoke issues of love, loyalty, patriotism, betrayal. The characters were extremely well developed, interesting and unforgettable. We are given two beautifully nuanced perspectives on these issues as seen through the lenses of its two main characters, an English nurse and an American filmmaker, who fall in love in London during the devastation of World War II. Their love story is engaging and never maudlin, a tale that haunts and provokes.

I hope my review will encourage you to read this masterful and thrilling novel. I don't want to cover the plot because there seems to be enough of that already in the other reviews. I just want to say that I am sure Paul Griner's THE GERMAN WOMAN will not only impact but stay with you for a very long time afterward.