The Weather in Berlin

Rating:
Summary: An Author at the Peak of His Powers
Review: I was not familiar with Ward Just's work until I happened upon "A Dangerous Friend," a very interesting novel about America's early involvement in Vietnam. Like that book, The Weather in Berlin has both a compelling plot and an immersive atmosphere. I strongly advise against reading the book jacket, or any review that tells you too much about the plot. Suffice it to say that the protagonist is a movie director who is famous for a 70's film about Germany in the 1920's, which became a cult favorite.

Having "lost his audience" since then, he returns to Berlin for a period of time at an Institute, and from that point on there are many interesting developments and observations on topics as diverse as directors and actors, Germany today and between the two great wars, European views of America and Russia, love and death, etc. But such a summary does not do justice to the atmosphere Just establishes, and to the way he somewhow manages to engage you totally in the plot while avoiding simplistic expressions of political ideologies and why people think and behave the way they do.

I haven't read a more compelling novel in years, and A Dangerous Friend is an excellent companion piece -- totally different frame of reference, same insights into character and history. I once read that the author Brian Moore (another favorite) "never wrote the same book twice." I haven't read all of Ward Just (I will), but I place him in Brian Moore's category -- just a wonderful writer and observer of human nature, whose minor characters are more "real" than many of the major characters in lesser fiction. This is literature at its best.

Rating:
Summary: An Author at the Peak of His Powers
Review: I was not familiar with Ward Just's work until I happened upon "A Dangerous Friend," a very interesting novel about America's early involvement in Vietnam. Like that book, The Weather in Berlin has both a compelling plot and an immersive atmosphere. I strongly advise against reading the book jacket, or any review that tells you too much about the plot. Suffice it to say that the protagonist is a movie director who is famous for a 70's film about Germany in the 1920's, which became a cult favorite.

Having "lost his audience" since then, he returns to Berlin for a period of time at an Institute, and from that point on there are many interesting developments and observations on topics as diverse as directors and actors, Germany today and between the two great wars, European views of America and Russia, love and death, etc. But such a summary does not do justice to the atmosphere Just establishes, and to the way he somewhow manages to engage you totally in the plot while avoiding simplistic expressions of political ideologies and why people think and behave the way they do.

I haven't read a more compelling novel in years, and A Dangerous Friend is an excellent companion piece -- totally different frame of reference, same insights into character and history. I once read that the author Brian Moore (another favorite) "never wrote the same book twice." I haven't read all of Ward Just (I will), but I place him in Brian Moore's category -- just a wonderful writer and observer of human nature, whose minor characters are more "real" than many of the major characters in lesser fiction. This is literature at its best.

Rating:
Summary: A Fancy Pot Boiler
Review: In this 305 page book the author gives an insightful look at the culture of the old East Germany as it has been changed after the reunification of Germany. Characters are presented representing the ones who enjoyed their old isolated lives under communist rule and are contrasted with persons who follow the capitalist ideologies. The time period of the book is the winter of 1999 and the scenes reflect that troubled time in the reunification process. This is a pleasure to read for those who have traveled in Germany in Berlin and the surrounding countryside. A familiarity with the locations and cultural atmosphere certainly enhances the pleasure. However, a map of Berlin and the surrounding area certainly would be a help to persons not very familiar with the locale. Another source of pleasure for me was the view into the mind of an American movie director, specifically how he has to be able to imagine all he ideally wants and then to try to reproduce that ideal with the fallible humans at hand. The narrative of the book wanders in and out of reveries by the principal character Dixon Greenwood as his imagination works with a story that he has to direct as part of a German television series.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Trip
Review: In this 305 page book the author gives an insightful look at the culture of the old East Germany as it has been changed after the reunification of Germany. Characters are presented representing the ones who enjoyed their old isolated lives under communist rule and are contrasted with persons who follow the capitalist ideologies. The time period of the book is the winter of 1999 and the scenes reflect that troubled time in the reunification process. This is a pleasure to read for those who have traveled in Germany in Berlin and the surrounding countryside. A familiarity with the locations and cultural atmosphere certainly enhances the pleasure. However, a map of Berlin and the surrounding area certainly would be a help to persons not very familiar with the locale. Another source of pleasure for me was the view into the mind of an American movie director, specifically how he has to be able to imagine all he ideally wants and then to try to reproduce that ideal with the fallible humans at hand. The narrative of the book wanders in and out of reveries by the principal character Dixon Greenwood as his imagination works with a story that he has to direct as part of a German television series.

Rating:
Summary: Berlin and LA?
Review: The Weather in Berlin offers a tight portrait of post-war(s) Germany and strangley, current day Hollywood. How are dreams realized and at what expense? How different is the psyche of a director or a dictator within their self-generated worlds of audiences/volk, leader and led?

Explore the subtle words and beauty of this fine novel. The Prussian past is really not that far from Hollywood and Vine.
Well worth the read and well worth the work.

Rating:
Summary: Berlin and LA?
Review: The Weather in Berlin offers a tight portrait of post-war(s) Germany and strangley, current day Hollywood. How are dreams realized and at what expense? How different is the psyche of a director or a dictator within their self-generated worlds of audiences/volk, leader and led?

Explore the subtle words and beauty of this fine novel. The Prussian past is really not that far from Hollywood and Vine.
Well worth the read and well worth the work.

Rating:
Summary: A Fancy Pot Boiler
Review: There's a big hole in the center of this book where the personality of the protagonist ought to be. It seems that the author, after having spent time in a German think-tank and needing to mine some gold out of it, hobbled together a novel from his impressions of Berlin, to which he added an incredibly thin plot revolving around the crisis of his 60ish film-making hero. The writing is very, very pretty, but not always clear. Sentences don't just run on but run amok. Everone talks alike. The action, what there is of it, is poorly motivated. There are numerous digressions, while seeming essentials are absent. The saving grace is what one learns about political and cultural thinking in today's re-unified East Germany.