The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

I never intended taking a six week break from blogging, but somehow it just happened. I was very busy at work in May. Then in the end of May/beginning of June I spent 10 days on a combined dance competition and holiday trip in England and France. First I took part in the British Open Championships in Blackpool with Mr. Dance Partner and then I continued to Paris to watch some tennis. It was a great trip! We did well in the competition (got into the 25 couple quarter final out of 155 couples) and Paris, well, Paris was as fun as ever. :) But all that resulted in my not blogging at all for all these weeks. I have been reading, though! :)

Undoubtedly my best read during these past six weeks was a reread. I had been thinking of rereading all Sarah Waters novels in chronological order, but when the members of my reading group chose The Night Watch as our May read, I was more than happy to start the rereading not from Tipping the Velvet after all, but with this wonderful novel set during and after WWII. First time around Tipping the Velvet was my favorite and The Night Watch a close runner-up and I was excited to see what I would think of the book when reading it the second time.

I surely was not dissapointed! The first time I read The Night Watch back in 2006 I loved the character of Kay most -and I still did. :) But I think I was able to appreciate the structure of the book more this second time around. In five years I had forgotten a lot of the plot, but still remembered enough to realise how brilliantly Waters really had plotted the story. The first part set in 1947 sets a lovely, bittersweet tone, and I really could not get to the end fast enough to relearn where it all began in 1941. For those of you, who have not read The Night Watch, as you might have already guessed, the storyline moves backwards from 1947 to 1944 and finally to 1941.

What I loved the most, however, was the writing. Waters has a great eye for details. That's something she has in common with another one of my favorite authors Sofi Oksanen, allthough their books otherwise are very different. All in all, I could praise The Night Watch all night long, but I'll just add one more thing: of all the novels I've read dealing with war, the bombing scenes (or the scenes depicting the moments after a bombing) in The Night Watch are the most impressive.

Now I'm planning on taking Tipping the Velvet with me when I go for holidays. (Tipping the Velvet and the Robert Fagles' translation of The Odyssey :))

I'll leave you tonight with a quote from The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk. This is how The Night Watch effected me:

"Novels are second lives. Like the dreams that the French poet Gérald de Nerval speaks of, novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing." [p. 1]