I recently finished Frederick Reuss's novel Mohr and was quite surprised to find myself in WW2 China again while reading. Mohr is based on the life of Reuss's real life great great uncle, Max Mohr, who was a playwrite, novelist and also doctor in Germany. The author had always known about him but was unable to learn more than basic information about his life until one of his novels wa republished in Germany in 1997 along with an afterword by Mohr's grandson - a relative Reuss was unaware of. The two men met, filled in family blanks and from a cache of photos and some letters (as well as published writings) Reuss crafted a novel about Mohr's life primarily after he left his wife and daughter in Germany in the mid-1930s. He ended up in Shanghai which probably seemed like a vast improvement for a German Jew, but ended up being just another nightmare against a different enemy.

I read The Fat Man's Daughter recently by Caroline Petit and it takes place in Hong Kong, Nanking and Manchuria just as the Japanese invasion heats up and there's also Iris Chang's classic, The Rape of Nanking, sitting on my nightstand this very moment. This is all practically brand new history to me and utterly fascinating. What is really interesting is how much these different writers have been able to capture the atmosphere and environment in remarkably similar ways - the books are all very very original, but the authors clearly did their homework and readers will certainly feel like they are there while reading them.

Mohr was a very good read - a very different read, I thought and almost hard to categorize or describe. It is a look at one man's life and his quest for something else, something he doesn't understand or can verbalize. I'm not sure that I truly understand his wife Kathe, although it is clear that she is puzzled by the actions of this man she thought she knew so well but chose to leave her and their daughter behind with vague promises of one day reuniting. Kathe was too busy living and keeping her daughter alive to believe fantasies, but Max wouldn't let them go. And what he found in Shanghai is a real mystery; whether or not it was what he went looking for even Reuss never knew. The book is easy to recommend because it certainly takes you to places that few others will and the fact that the principle characters are all real, just makes it that much more impressive. (Here's the NY Times review.)