The Relaxed Snowman & The Lost Balcony

[More often than can be warranted by chance, I feel, when I am carrying out two or three real-time reviews simultaneously, as I am now, one story enlightens or synergises, across-books, with another story. Here, remarkably, the tone and plot of 'The Night of His Sister's Engagement' that I reviewed here this afternoon, just before reading 'Westenstrand', has now become even more highly wrought regarding a watery foolhardy challenge to oneself - and, dare I say, vice versa!] – ’Westenrand’ itself is a wonderful account of an island off Denmark – subject to Hitler’s contemporary shenanigans, I sense, that also have bearing on the protagonist’s romance with a woman who frowns on his connections, albeit indirect, with that Dictator - an island (a bit like Mersea Island near where I live in Essex, if the latter is in a much smaller way and with shorter  intervals) that is one minute an island, the next not an island, as subject to the sea’s effects on a causeway. A bit like history. And economics. In both of which disciplines, routes work themselves out, while human bail-outs often falter. (They often milled coins with ‘reeding’ to prevent shaving off their edges.) (4 Mar 12 – another 3 hours later)