Books: Think or Swim: Dancing the Conga with Molotov and Other Reminiscences.Werner Pincus Jaspert

Published: 15 September 2011
by DAN CARRIER

WERNER Pincus Jaspert has born witness to many of the events that shaped the 20th century, and the Swiss Cottage-based printing expert, now in his 80s, has squeezed his rampaging, far-reaching and scatter-gun views into a memoir.

Both an autobiography and a philosophical tract, his book Think or Swim takes us from his childhood in pre-war Germany on an odyssey across Europe and beyond.

Pincus, as he is called (pictured), includes what it is like to have a stroke, and how he recovered.

He lays bare a jumbled love life that included three wives and three mistresses, admitting that he sent his manuscript to one of them, who returned it unread with a note saying “I have heard it all before”.

In his field – that of printing and publishing – he is well respected, and while not a movie star, he writes as if he were one: his own fascination with the life he has led means the reader can’t help but be fascinated too.

As well as telling such stories as what it was like to be a German in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, we are treated to musings that can best be described as the world according to... He finds the internet “not that comfortable to read”, wonders if “science will find ways of lending man eternal life by replication of emotions and speech...” and that privatising postal services is appalling, all within a couple of pages.

He speaks of the murder of John Kennedy, wonders whether the sight of a young woman’s bare midriff is sexy, and says thanks to a policeman who once helped him break into his home when he was locked out.

He says in the preface that “many of my recollections may seem like the tales of Baron Münchhausen or those of Walter Mitty. They may sound like tall stories, but they are fact.”  

Yet he writes frankly about the things that make up a  life, and therefore are not far fetched at all, and proves the old newspaper maxim that everyone has a story to tell.

• Think or Swim: Dancing the Conga with Molotov and Other Reminiscences. By Werner Pincus Jaspert.
Privately printed by juntincappers@aol.com  ISBN: 978-0-9568736-0-6