When I started this challenge I thought Britain’s exit from the european union would be the biggest piece of history I would live through. Yet, as I limped towards the final books in my reading list in early 2020, the entire world shut down.
The Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the lives of millions of people around the world, including in Britain. Suddenly the divisions of Brexit which had been eating away at us for four years seemed to fade, like they happened decades ago. It’s not that the culture wars and the political opposition has ceased, but the reality of living our new lives has made them less important, perhaps just for a while. Suddenly it doesn’t matter what way your family voted on Brexit, it would just be nice to see each other again.
This time is not apolitical, the anti-racism protests have shown that. But I can’t help feeling it has focused the mind on what is really important, in a way the preceding four years of turmoil never did. The cessation in daily life asked us to reflect and examine, it needled our resilience. It’s hard to say if it’s brought the best or the worst of any country, but it’s raised each of us beyond the ordinary. If we’re going to go on the streets again, the people seemed to say, let’s make sure it’s worthwhile.
My reading in lockdown has been sporadic. What should have been a perfect chance to finish my reading list was hampered by libraries and bookshops closing and the last titles being beyond my grasp. But it may not have mattered, for somehow I haven’t had the focus to absorb new books and open my head to new places. Instead I’ve been drawn back to those tales which seem to speak most to the human condition; for this a European reading list is ideal. What continent has witnesses more more human tragedy, while examining itself so closely? In some ways it was as if my previous year’s reading had given me the vicarious experience to withstand the tumult that was coming.
As London locked down I was reminded of the “Woman in Berlin” whose horizons narrowed to as far as she could walk, just as I found on the hour’s daily exercise I was permitted. I could feel lucky that our amenities still worked, we were not being bombed or attacked by Russian soldiers like she was. But I shared her dark amusement at the goods we once so valued that suddenly lost their purpose: that train season ticket, or the office outfit. I felt I understood her adaptability, the practical way she attempted to withstand.
Enclosed by buildings, claustrophobic in this crowded, closed-up city, my mind reached towards the outside world. The hazy mediterranean evenings so wonderfully evoked by books like “The Cypriot” or the rugged hills and rivers of “The Eight Mountans”.
I grimaced as I read about the EU rejecting a bail-out for Italy and Spain. Two countries which were hurt so badly in the 2008 crash, now watching their citizens die as they were ravaged by virus outbreaks, and their European partners refused to help them. Having read “Adults in the Room” I felt like I could rehearse how the back-room negotiations went, the personalities that said no, the desperate frustrations of the Spanish and Italian ministers. Thank God the EU relented, or seemed to. We desperately need a union of Europe, but we need an EU that fights its worse instincts, I thought.
Varoufakis invokes a sense of countries and governments being swept up in this globalised economy, so much bigger than themselves and beyond their control; I feel that in this drive to reopen, in the fact that bars and theme parks in my country are reopening before the schools. That making money becomes more important than living human lives.
But humanity has been at the heart of this crisis and if we’re lucky will be the thing we prioritise if we recover. Stefan Zweig’s reflections on Europe in the aftermath of the First World War came back to me: how things changed, how he hunkered down and attempted to survive but also the optimism as the continent awoke, found its new normal and reconnected. People’s hostility had only ever been transitory, in truth they wanted to be together again.
Rapid change emerged in this locked-down time, when emergency powers were taken, pollution dropped and life became, in some ways, a little easier. The polemical environmentalism of Mrs Duszejko in “Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead” came back to me. Permanent change in our way of life seemed possible. If we’re lucky in our leaders and our instincts we will improve upon the world before. But if European history shows anything it’s that the world that comes immediately after a crisis can sink us lower than we could imagine. In my darker moments my head turns to the characters in “Books Burn Badly” whose hopes were crushed under years of fascism.
Let’s see what else there is in store for us. Meanwhile my head feels clearer and I feel ready to venture into the world again, open to whatever normal will turn out to be. In short, I’m ready to start reading.
The European Reader 