Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

This late novel is harsher and more modern than its better-known predecessors. Prince Nekhlyudov is a moral hero - formerly dissolute, now abruptly brought face to face with the consequences of his past, and with the means, as a wealthy aristocrat, to feel the responsibility to make reparations. He encounters one of his former 'conquests', a maid reduced to prostitution and then convicted of a crime deserving of deportation to Siberia.  The story, in three distinct parts, takes us from wealthy metropolitan salons - the milieu that in Anna Karenina was mainly accepted as natural - to the crushing poverty of the peasant villages, and finally to the elaborate and arbitary cruelty of the Tsarist Gulag. Published less than 20 years before the Revolution, this is a world where telegrams and electric lights, trains and rubber coats, mix with penal processions of convicts, like modern accessories within a medieval scene. There are beautiful descriptions of weather and landscapes, and the accurate and keen observation of people that we expect from Tolstoy. The dialogue is natural and deeply-felt. There is some emotional interiority in Nekhlyudov but it is superbly balanced with action and with the long term suspense of the situation, as he awaits the decision as to whether his remorseful offer of 'rescue' will ever be accepted. It's a tremendous story of moral anxiety, degradation and regret, but it does finish on a note of spiritual hope. Even though this is late Tolstoy, it's actually easier to read than his earlier epics. And I particularly recommend it to anyone who likes Graham Greene.

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch is a riveting read and rich in psychological material for any writer or creative person.
I picked up this book knowing very little about the story. The early pages are a little too discursive, as her family background is set up. However once the kidnapper strikes then my attention was riveted. The writing is calm, measured, seldom fraught, despite the author having gone through experiences beyond anything most of us could imagine- an indeterminate spell in solitary confinement, her only human contact with an unstable psychopath. Somehow Natascha managed him (as well as managing her own pain and indignity in passages that reminded me of Viktor Frankl's Holocaust memoir, Man's Search for Meaning)and so against the odds, she survived. Of course her dependence on her kidnapper was complete and not just a physical dependence, but also emotional. But who wouldn't become emotionally dependent on the one person in their life from the age of ten? After her 18th birthday she decided this was going to end. So she took an opportunity to escape, by no means the first she had been offered. Previously she had never dared - and one of the main reasons for that is that breaking the spell of her captivity would inevitably mean the death of either her or her captor. It's suggested at one point that his ultimate suicide on the railway came about as a result of a conversation with her. As with Frankl, you finish this book full of admiration for the author's psychological self-awareness, her 'groundedness'. <br>I was left wondering how many Prikopils there are in Austria. Certainly establishment complacency and police inertia seem to hide a very dark underbelly. She recounts how, after her release, one of the many crank emails she received was from a man who wanted her to come and live as his domestic slave...
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