“‘So you see,' she said, ‘you have to be like Switzerland. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life.”

The first book I finished in 2018 and my first Rose Remain though not my last.

Forgive me if I have this wrong (as I don’t actually know anything about classical music) but I imagine that this book is written in three parts to reflect the three movements of a Sonata. Each part/movement has its own themes.

Part one is post WWII and is about Gustav’s childhood friendship with Anton. It’s fundamentally about growing up in a neutral world where there appears to be no hate but no love either. “He fell over frequently, but he never cried, though the ice was hard, the hardest surface his bones had ever met. He taught himself to laugh instead. Laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind. The trick was to move the crying out of that bit and let the laughter in. And so he'd pick himself up and carry on, laughing.”


Part two happen just prior to a during WWII. It tells of Gustav’s parents and is about sex, passion, fear, doing the right thing and holding onto to love where you can find it.

Part three is about the 1990s and is about all of the surviving generations growing old. These are mostly broken people who in turn live broken lives but do the best they can and occasionally find love. “Gustav waited. He wondered whether he wanted to know the thing she was about to tell him, or whether it wasn't better for certain knowledge to remain hidden, so that the mind could conjure its own stories from out of the past, stories it could bear to live with, stories which, in time, took on their own reality and seemed to become true.”

Overall the story is Gustav’s journey in search of love and happiness.

This one is recommended to those who can follow a quiet introverted character who holds himself together like Switzerland. So like Switzerland Gustav cannot embrace his friends or face his enemies and as a consequence really doesn’t do much with his life except to feel and live it deeply.

I listened to this on audio and would really like to recommend the narrator Mark Meadows.