Victor Klemperer was a young professor of French literature in 1933 when he started penning down his impressions of life and living. The diary-writing passion gradually became a habit. This was to be no ordinary diary at the end of the day. Klemperer was a German Jew who lived in Hitler's land till the end of the Third Reich. The diary was not a quotidian journal of visceral likes and dislikes, personal dreams and fantasies -- it was, in Klemperer's own words, " a record of the everyday life of tyranny". The diary was smuggled out in instalments by his wife Eva to a secure hiding place at a friend's. It was first published fifty years after the Second World War ended, 35 years after Klemperer himself died. The first volume of the Martin Chalmers English translation of the diary appeared in 1998.

Klemperer survived the first anti-Semitic blitzkrieg of Hitler since he had served in the Bavarian artillery during the First World War. Better still for his own comfort, he was married to a Protestant. Things got bad in 1935 when he had to perforce opt for retirement. Gone was their source of income. Matters took a nosedive for the worse three years down the line when the Nazi regime denied Jews the use of all university and public libraries. He could no more maintain his scholarly pursuits. All he did now was concentrate on three things. The first an autobiographical account of his pre-WWI life. The second was a philological analysis of the effects of National Socialism (Nazism) on the German language, which was published two years after the war as 'LTI: Lingua tertii Imperii'. The third was his diary.

The meticulously chronicled diary was written under perilous circumstances. The risk of the diary falling into wrong hands was something they (Klemperer and his wife) took in their stride. But life was tough, and living tougher. Pecuniary problems and Nazi high-handedness took their toll. They was forced to leave their painstakingly-built house on the outskirts of the town of Dresden and settle for a place called a Jews' House. Here lived Jews who had Christian spouses. The privacy needed for his academic indulgences became a thing of the past. Socio-political realities began wearing heavily on their worn-out shoulders with the issuing of decrees that came with the breaking out of the Second World War.

Even the slightly privileged Jews who lived the Jew Houses had to lead a life of "fantastic hideousness". "Fear of every ring at the door, of ill-treatment, insults, fear of one's life, of hunger (real hunger), ever new bans, ever more cruel enslavement, deadly danger coming closer every day, every day new victims all around us, absolute helplessness." Klemperer read a lot, but his mind remained preoccupied with apprehensions about Jews elsewhere. The Gestapo was known to make desultory arrests. Those who were taken away never came back. Prisoners never escaped from the camps, but macabre narratives of torture and humiliation did. Klemperer's diaries survived the war -- they remained safely hidden with a sympathetic German friend.


What The Los Angeles Times said:
Reading Klemperer's diaries is a harrowing, but addictive, experience. The diaries' authenticity is so obvious, their calm and often reflective tone so persuasive, that even their boring stretches--and these are inevitable in an account of a life as dull as it was dangerous--cannot cause the serious reader's interest to flag. There is nothing quite like it in the historic literature on the Nazi period. © The Los Angeles Times


What The Chicago Tribune said:
Through the 3 1/2 dark years he chronicles in this volume, Klemperer's obsession with his writing sustains him. He seems to worry at times as much about his manuscripts' survival as his own. He despairs over the relative importance or insignificance of his work and his ability to continue it. "My diaries and notes!" he exclaims in 1944. "I tell myself again and again: They will not only cost me my life, if they are discovered, but also Eva's and that of several others, whom I have mentioned by name, had to mention if I wanted them to have documentary worth. Am I entitled, perhaps even obliged, to do so, or is it criminal vanity? . . . I have published nothing for twelve years . . . have done nothing but record and record. Is there any point to it, will any of it be completed?" © The Chicago Tribune

For one not acquainted with the Kiwi way of life, its gardens, kitchen, sensibilities and lore, 'Rapunzel Rapunzel', a collection of poems by Janet Charman makes reading a tad difficult --specially as it carries no information about the author or her milieu. However, pouring through the lines one realises that the predicaments of human life are basically the same all over --boundaries are but a blur as man deals with the various situations he is thrown in.

Existence has its share of rancour, laughter, moment of sunshine, derisive ties, dreams and the angst of living. Charman's lines encapsulate all. Her unconventional punctuation or rather lack of it --lines simply run into one another, follow each other as thought packed on thought merge, diverge and even scatter into a diffusion, limited capitalisation --convey a modern sensibility, strung taut by the demands of the times. Her dense, complex expressions are but pointers to this.

Women, aspects of womanhood, the various relationships they share among themselves and their men, the many questions that tease a woman during her charted existence --all find an echo through her pen:

"my child is sick /shall i give up my job/ my child is sick /i shall give up my job…./my job is sick shall i/ Give up My child…"

However, not all lines are as simple or universal as this:

"frank/ Frank Sargeson. Sarge/ and that's not her real name either/ well OK/ maybe it is now …"

But in spite of all the complexities there is also a playful wit: "we have to pull our poems on one leg at a time".
Her unadorned poems are almost conversational, so much so one feels she is talking to you.

"when I found her/ she told me all he wanted/ was an armful of bitter greens/ washed shaken torn up drenched/…. but she saw I was brought up/by a woman who kept a plainer table/a crisp host to be swallowed whole/with a fingernail of wine…"

Yet there's music in her subtle twists of perception: "elbow heel bow / line angle jaw bone / slim scar red car loading / the baskets getting the provisos …'

Figure this:

we all have to

run up the rungs
hands full
to hammer home
the last thing

capital A sprang
away from
the wall
slump under

i was backing
out for beer
when the bones
burst in your chest

verandah whiteware
mandevilla fridge
kuaka ribbon east
light pricked hedge

get up and
I'll go you
drink for drink
into oblivion

thrust wet biscuit
in your gob
without those
filthy hands

need leave off
the concrete
cutting
job

DIY now
opens one
arm props
up the spuds.

Janet Charman lives in Auckland and was last year's Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland. She is a poet who has no match in contemporary New Zealand poetry in her compassionate and unsentimental vision of life in the suburbs and in the family.

According to The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, she 'focuses on women's concerns: caring for others, victimisation, literary heroines, female sexuality including lesbianism, heterosexuality, childbirth and motherhood, vocations such as midwifery and nursing. . . . her writing displays considerable emotional range extending from sexual innuendo, to the erotic, to tenderness, or a playful wit . . . her poems are unadorned, conversational, political, yet there's music in her subtle twists of perception.'

The opera season was almost half over when two famous rivals came to London: the Banti woman, at that time one of the most celebrated singers in Europe in serious parts, and la Morichelli, equally celebrated in comedy. They were neither of them any longer young, and never had they been enumerable among the great beauties: but the one was much sought after and exorbitantly paid for the splendors of a glorious voice, the single gift she had received from Nature: the other, for her acting-she gave a performance that was true, noble, carefully worked, and full of expression and grace. They had therefore both become idols of the public but the terrors of composers, poets, singers, and impresarios. One of them alone was enough to make any theater where she was engaged tremble at her name. I leave my good reader to imagine, therefore, what the situation at the Italian Opera in London must have been at a time when both these stage heroines were engaged contemporaneously.

Which of them was the more dangerous and the more to be feared, is a question not easy to decide. Equal in their vices, their passions, their iniquities, their wickedness of heart, they were women of totally different, even contrary, dispositions, proceeding along different routes to the fulfillment of their designs. The Morichelli woman had plenty of talent and a notable cultivation of mind. An old fox, she covered her purposes deep under a veil of mystery and finest cunning. She took her measures always at long range, trusted no one, never lost her temper, and though fiercely practicing voluptuous indulgences, nevertheless always managed to play the part of a modest and retiring virgin of fifteen. The bitterer the gall she harbored in her soul, the suaver and the more honeyed shone the smile on her face. Of the temper of her dominant passion it is hardly necessary to speak. She was an actress. Her principal divinities were those of all her kind, but in an excessive degree: Pride, Envy, Money.

Banti, on the contrary, was an ignorant, stupid, insolent woman. Accustomed from early girlhood to singing in cafés and about the streets, she brought to the Opera, whither her voice only had elevated her, all the habits, manners, and customs of a brazen-faced Corisca. Free of speech, still freer of action, addicted to carousals, dissolute amusements, and to the bottle, she showed herself in the face of everybody for what she was, knowing no measure, no restraints; and when anyone of her passions was stirred by difficulties or opposition, she became an asp, a fury, a demon of Hell, capable of upsetting an empire, let alone a theater.

The moment they arrived in London, they joined battle for the possession of the manager's heart. On him I do not think it possible for anyone in the world to pass a just and accurate judgment. Much less than for any one else is that possible for me. Dragged by chance into his orbit from the dangerous pass in which I found myself in Holland, I had, and have always preserved, toward him all those feelings which gratitude, pity, and friendship are wont to inspire in gentle and well-bred spirits. To what extent I carried such sentiments, how finally I destroyed myself and my family in trying to help or save him, and how, in the end, he, like everybody else, paid me with ingratitude, we shall shortly see. Those same sentiments inclined me never to examine too severely nor study too closely his defects and his weaknesses, which I sought to defend or excuse, as a father would do with a child; and when they chanced to harm me, either I was silent, or exacted no other revenge than plaints. Without pretending, therefore, to draw an adequate picture of the man, I will tell simply what I think I know on the authority of others, or what I think I saw with my own eyes, of the character of William Taylor.

He was, or at least arrived in London, very poor, about the time the Italian Opera House was destroyed by fire. Inspired to become proprietor of a new theater, he made his plan, presented it to the leading gentlemen of that metropolis, and selling them a certain number of boxes for a certain number of years, he found himself in a position to have a theater built with the products of those sales. Then in a few years, after paying a balance still due to his predecessor, selling other boxes and a hundred seats ("silver tickets," they were called) for terms of years or for single seasons, he became absolute owner of that ample edifice, and, as was commonly said, without debts or encumbrances. How, and because of whom, William Taylor came to end his aged days in a prison, we shall see in the course of my story in London. © New York Review of Books

Anti-globalisation protests are increasingly becoming commonplace. Most of these are being directed at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Advocates of the necessity of the world becoming one small global village cannot cry wolf and heap all blame on Communists. For, these demonstrations are taking place not in the backwaters of erstwhile Communist countries. These are taking place much in their own frontyards -- Seattle and Washington. Anti-globalisation anger is as much a reality today, as was the globalisation pipedream that had set the process snowballing.

Those of the anti-globalisation brigade have real, hard truths to buttress their contention. Forming a substantial chunk of these crusaders are environmentalists who cite harsh facts to make their point. Forests are shrinking as the value of global trade in forest products climbs from $29 billion in 1961 to $139 billion in 1998. Fisheries are collapsing as fish exports rise, growing nearly fivefold in value since 1970 to reach $52 billion in 1997. Human health has been endangered as well with pesticide exports increasing nearly ninefold since 1961 to $11.4 billion in 1998. While economists tout record-breaking increases in global commerce in recent decades, more sobering statistics are being reported by the world's leading biologists: the loss of living species in recent decades represents the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

The increased exploitation of natural resources through forestry, mining and petroleum development is threatening the health of the planet. The newer industries of computers and electronics are not as clean as they purport themselves to be -- semiconductor manufacturing employs hundreds of chemicals, including arsenic, benzene and chromium, all known carcinogens. More than half of all computer manufacturing and assembly operations -- processes intensive in their use of acids, solvents and toxic gases -- are located in developing countries. That's globalisation for you.

Yet, in their haste to join the globalisation bandwagon, Hilary French says, many countries are doing so by protecting their own natural resources. Costa Rica has become a major eco-tourists destination, since it has realised the importance of its sandy beaches and dry deciduous forests. Others, like Mexico, are tapping the international market for their organic produce. French believes, "The surge in movement of goods, money, spices, and pollution across international borders is placing unprecedented strains on the planet. Ironically, the best way to tackle these problems is by putting globalisation to work for us, instead of against us."

How can this be done. French suggests that the WTO can incorporate a greater respect for the precautionary principle, which holds that lack of scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing action where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage. Better integration of environmental issues into the lending programmes of the WB and the IMF too can yield additional ecological dividends. She also calls for the upgrading of the United Nationals Environment Programme (UNEP) into a World Environmental Organization.

French concludes, "Over the course of the twentieth century, the global economy stretched the planet to its limits. The time is now ripe to forge the international policies and institutions needed to ensure that the world economy of the 21st century meets peoples' aspirations for a better future without destroying the natural fabric that underpins life itself."