|
The Welsh Girl | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Ho Davies
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $13.94 (100%)
New (80) Used (85) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 233907
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0618918523
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780618918522
ASIN: 0618918523
Publication Date: January 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Following two widely praised short-story collections, Equal Love and The Ugliest House in the World, Peter Ho Davies's first novel, The Welsh Girl, deserves to be equally well received. It carefully examines two great themes, dislocation and cowardice, through the stories of a WWII POW camp built by the British in the remote mountains of northern Wales and Esther, the 17-year-old Welsh girl at the heart of the story. The POW camp, filled with Germans, is yet another national insult, as far as the Welsh are concerned, only one of many instances of prejudice between and among the novel's characters: Welshman against Brit and vice versa, Brits and Welshmen against Germans, Germans against Jews. Some of these enmities are age-old antagonisms; others are newly-minted political killing machines. Davies introduces a Welsh concept--cynefin--for which there is no English equivalent. It means a certain knowledge and sense of place that is passed down the matrilineal line in a flock of sheep. They always know where they belong and never leave their own turf. It is a perfect metaphor for much of what takes place in this carefully plotted story, and for the displacement felt by many of the characters. Esther longs to escape her village, yet is devoted to the flock and to her father. She meets Colin, an English soldier, in the pub where she works. He is a rough sort and things end very badly between them. Another theme visited again and again is the concept of cowardice. Is it cowardly to save one's life and the lives of others by surrendering to the enemy? Is death the price that must be paid to be considered brave? The German POWs debate this endlessly, especially Karsten, an intelligent, sensitive soldier who did surrender himself and his men when it was clear that all was lost. When he and Esther find one another under impossible circumstances, Davies renders their relationship perfectly: it is star-crossed, but desperately important to both of them, setting them both "free" in the truest sense of the word. The Welsh Girl is a beautifully told story of love, war, and the accommodations we make in the midst of both. --Valerie Ryan
Product Description
Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, Peter Ho Davies's profoundly moving first novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a POW camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when the astonishing occurs: Karsten, a young German corporal, calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two foster a secret relationship that will ultimately put them both at risk. Meanwhile, another foreigner, the German-Jewish interrogator Rotherham, travels to Wales to investigate Britain's most notorious Nazi prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In this richly drawn and thought-provoking work, all will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 One of the most Evocative Novels I have Read in Years September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This story of a Welsh girl, a German POW, and the complicated social strictures of small-town life during World War II is one of the most moving stories I have read in years. In prose that is simple in the way that the best poetry often is, Peter Ho Davies delivers Wales in evocative detail, and the feelings of his Welsh and English and German characters, male and female, as if he were each of them. The passage in chapter 13, with Karsten and Jim and the plane, is just lovely. Just lovely.
 Distant time, distant story September 23, 2008
It took me over a month to read "The Welsh Girl" - and I'm not sure why. I know I am in the minority in my lukewarm reception of this book (please see "Long-listed for Man Booker Prize"). It's certainly not as if the characters were not well drawn, the time and place carefully crafted, the story less than compelling...and yet...and yet.
I suppose the best way to describe my hesitation with this book is that I always felt as arms length. Even when inside the thoughts and hearts of Esther, Karsten and Rotherham...I felt as if the essence of what they were thinking and feeling were closed off. I didn't FEEL their feelings, didn't SEE what they were seeing...
That being said, it is undeniable that this novel, set during World War II in North Wales, is beautifully crafted. The descriptions of time and place were excellent; the characters seem ones transported in time for the reader to meet.
There were parts that I couldn't help but read twice - parts that broke through the fourth wall for me.
"...his progress reminds Esther of how the dogs part a flock. Sheepish, she thinks. The villagers feel sheepish. The word appears before her in her own flowing copperplate. She's been having these spells lately when words, English words, seem newly coined, as if they're speaking to her alone, as if she's seeing the meanings behind them. She's conscious of her lips, her tongue, forming them."
And there are moments when I can see the village so clearly that I feel I am truly there. "Within the fence, the faces of the Germans and MPs turn up to the slope to where the villagers stand. Hands are angled to shield eyes against the sun; arms are lifted, pointing. Esther finds herself blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring, but even as she turns away, Mott, at her feet, lifts his head and offers a long howl of replay to the snapping dogs below."
I've gone over and over that paragraph and I can't put my finger on it...but something about those words take me there - I can feel the sun on my face, making me squint...I can see the prisoners pointing up, I can hear the dog and I can smell grass and animals nearby.
And there are some small moments when the thin wall cracks and I can feel the emotions of the characters.
"He was serious, Karsten saw, the answer deeply important to him. For just a moment, he wanted to cry yes! and have done with it. For just a moment, he could feel the cool relief of admitting it, even to this child. He was almost certain the boy would rather have his friend alive and a coward than brave and dead. All he had to do was say it. Yet something inside him recoiled. Some pride, some recollection of those dreadful steps down the passage out of the bunker."
There I am able to feel those tightly wound emotions straining to explode - I can feel the pulse of the story. And once more with Esther:
"Esther looks at her through her tears and nods slowly. She does have hope, she realizes. All this time she's thought Rhys dead, and now she hopes, prays, that he is."
Maybe because these characters, in the short period of time when their lives intersect, live in circumstances where they cannot give reign to their emotions, cannot let their guard down for even a moment - maybe that is the distance I feel from their story.
This tale of bravery and defeat, of cowardice and unacknowledged heroism, is one I wanted to appreciate more. But maybe, this is one of those books where when read again, at a different point in my life, will have a greater impact.
Displaced Persons June 30, 2008
I found myself liking this book chapter by chapter, but did not feel that it connected up to a successful whole. The time is 1944, in the months following D-Day. The setting is a village in Snowdonia, NW Wales, whose principally Welsh-speaking inhabitants live by quarrying and sheep farming. But the war has brought strangers into the community: young boys evacuated from bombed cities, British soldiers who build a POW camp for German prisoners, and the prisoners themelves. So most of the people in the book have been at least temporarily displaced, except for the Welsh themselves -- though even they bear a centuries-old resentment at having been thrust into this remote region by the conquering English, whom they still regard as strangers, if not actual enemies.
Peter Ho Davies is exceptionally good at portraying this quality of marginality in human terms. There have been many POW books and movies, for instance, but they have almost all focused on the escape attempts of Allied officers imprisoned in Germany, and colored by the reader's knowledge of ultimate victory. But I don't know anything quite like Davies' portrayal of the German corporal Karsten and his gradual understanding that surrender is not a once-only thing but a continuing process, robbing him of his roots and identity, and requiring him to justify himself to his captors, to his companions, to himself, and even to his own mother. Davies is equally sensitive in portraying the Welsh Girl of the title, seventeen-year-old Esther Evans, and her attempts to define herself as she comes to adulthood surrounded by so many strange influences. Davies also introduces two other displaced persons as though to make his point: Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Deputy Fuehrer, who was arrested after his solo flight to Scotland in 1941, and his interrogator Rotherham, a part-Jewish German refugee who is now a captain in British Intelligence.
The trouble is that these different strands do not connect up well. The scenes between Rotherham and Hess, for example, are fine, but they amount to only three short chapters of a long book. Karsten's story is also told separately in about one chapter in three until well beyond the half-way point, when his life intersects with Esther's in a rather touching way; but even here there is little forward movement to connect individual moments. So the success of the novel really depends on the reader's interest in Esther and her world. She is certainly an attractive and sympathetic character, but her situation is by no means unique, and she spends too much time as the observer or victim of events rather than as the prime mover in them. However, her main quality is her sense of place -- she belongs to these mountains as much as the sheep do -- and here the author writes with obvious love of his native Wales.
 Haunting World War II Novel March 26, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
The Welsh Girl is a sensitive and haunting story about enemies and friends during WWII. The exotic setting allows the encounter between German prisoners of war and the "English" to have an almost legend-like quality.
Dwelling on the humanity common to all, it shows an extraordinary Welsh girl's meeting with an English speaking German prisoner. Beautiful descriptions of the countryside, believable dialogue among the German prisoners makes this book shine. But the author, known for his short stories, could have a faster pace in the middle of the book. The book is very, very good, just short of excellent.
The Welsh Girl February 21, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Welsh Girl blends historical fact with historical fiction. A historical novel that brings in the mysterious and never-explained flight of Rudolf Hess from Nazi Germany to Scotland with the building and populating of a German prisoner-of-war camp in the rough hills of rural Wales, this is an imaginative World War II saga that does not disappoint.
The author, Peter Ho Davies conveys the spirit of the times in his understanding of the historic and cultural tensions between the local Welsh citizenry and the British laborers who construct and later, the British soldiers who garrison the prisoner-of-war camp.
But it is in the mind and thoughts of the protagonist, the seventeen year-old Welsh Girl that the reader will most often dwell. The narrative is largely told from her perspective as both insider and outsider to the events going on around her.
Two other narratives cross and juxtapose. One of these is the narrative of a young German prisoner-of-war, "captured," (but who has actually surrendered) to the British in the D-Day landings in France. Transported to Wales, haunted by his surrender, his seemingly unlikely intersection with the Welsh Girl becomes more predictable and then inevitable, as the narrative unfolds.
The third narrative is that of a German-Jewish translator/interrogator and plant/spy. He is a refugee from Nazi Germany who struggles with his identity which he sees as alternatingly German, Jewish, anti-German, anti-Jewish and ultimately, world citizen.
The author has done his homework. He writes about events in the last year of World War II in the European theatre with confidence and clarity. The author also knows Wales and the Welsh mind. He is able to make you, the reader, feel like you are in that village pub, standing at the bar or sitting at a table, listening to the chatter, nursing your glass of ale.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
