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| 1609454251
| 9781609454258
| 1609454251
| 4.07
| 428
| Oct 01, 2016
| Sep 19, 2017
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liked it
| This Savage Parade [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade" wrote Arthur Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (here illustrated by Fernand Lége This Savage Parade [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade" wrote Arthur Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (here illustrated by Fernand Léger). It might almost have been the epigraph to this novel by Santiago Gamboa, who brings in the French poetic genius as either its presiding deity or devil. I might simply have translated sauvage as "wild" as opposed to "tame," but in this case the cognate is more appropriate; there is a savagery in Gamboa's storytelling be reckoned with; he does not deal with the deer and rabbits of the world, so much as its tigers and vultures. Ten thousand bodies lie fallen in the mud, while above them, another twenty or thirty thousand are still fighting, still alive. The bodies become deformed. Blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body and suddenly something bursts. A foul-smelling stream gushes out on top of the mud. The birds circle, pulling out eyes, the worms rise to the surface. That's what the soldier sees in battle: the bare bones of his friend, the amputations, the perforated skulls. What he has seen remains on his retina. Nobody who has contemplated such horror can ever be the same again.Why did I pick up this book? It had a strikingly atmospheric cover. It was published by Europa Editions, a firm I have come to trust. It was by a Latin American author from Colombia whom I did not know. And its flap promised an intriguing combination of characters, three living Colombians and a dead Frenchman. In a more or less regular sequence of chapters, we have an expatriate writer, known only as The Consul, summoned from Rome to Madrid by a woman from his past. We have the tormented childhood of another woman, Manuela, including time in a reformatory, but who somehow emerges from it all as a poet of striking originality. We have a frankly incredible character calling himself Tertullian, claiming to be the son of the Pope (yes, the then Cardinal Badoglio), and building a career as a motivational speaker. And we have episodes in the life story of Arthur Rimbaud, who set the literary world ablaze while still in his teens, but gave up poetry altogether when he was only 21, and spent the last 16 years of his life wandering as an exile in the tropics. Gamboa writes engagingly, and there is no doubt that each of these stories, expect perhaps that of Tertullian, captures the imagination. But we are in for some stormy waters. No sooner does the Consul get to Madrid than the Irish Embassy is occupied by Boko Haram, who start cutting the throats of the hostages. The Consul himself gets involved in violence and ends up in a prison hospital. Manuela's childhood includes abuse by her mother's lover, and a gamut of sexual experiences, many of which are described in detail, but she also finds support and joy from two older women who believe in her talent. Tertullian's methods, no matter the justification of his cause, seems very close to Fascism. And Rimbaud's history is what it is: utter brilliance, together with a flouting of all social norms, including a two-year affair with the poet Paul Verlaine, passionate love, drunken quarrels, drugs and gunfire. The passage I quoted above is safely in the realm of history, describing the Franco-Prussian War. But the modern story is no more palatable, seeming to take delight in denying moral norms. Each of the major characters engages in something ethically unexpected at the least, morally unconscionable at worst. And the minor ones too. To cite one small example, a Colombian priest tells his story to the Consul; he seems a sympathetic enough character. Yet we are shocked to see him denounce a parishioner to an anti-Communist hit-squad on the basis of what he has heard in confession only minutes before—and we are expected to excuse his betrayal because he leads to someone even worse. If Gamboa did not write well (or Howard Curtis translate with less brilliance), it would be easy to throw this book away in disgust. As it was, I kept reading, though the disgust remained. What ties all these threads together? The Consul, Manuela, and Tertullian eventually all meet up in Madrid, so there is a tenuous plot connection. In the last third of the book, they all return to Colombia, I suppose the "dark valley" of the title. For Colombian readers, I suspect that the whole book and the Colombian return adds up to a critique of the new prosperity that seemed to flow like magic from the peace accords of 2016, but it is hard to parse this if you don't know the country. For me, the real link was Rimbaud, the only character who has no literal part in the story. This kind of intertextuality, using the work of a dead writer as a moral (or here anti-moral) sounding-board for contemporary issues, seems to be a Latin-American speciality; Gamboa's compatriot Juan Gabriel Vásquez wrote The Secret History of Costaguana against the background of Conrad's Nostromo, and Roberto Bolaño made a career out of similar techniques. What really intrigued me here was not any of the fictional threads, but the one that was true: the life of Arthur Rimbaud. The rest of Gamboa's work, it seems to me, was merely a matter of breaking Rimbaud's life down into separate aspects, and inventing modern characters to act them out. The novel even ends with something that has no justification whatever in the modern story, but has a poetic appropriateness to the old one: a return to the city of Harar in Ethiopia where Rimbaud lived before his final illness. [image]"I alone hold the key to this savage parade." ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 28, 2018
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Sep 06, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0241144159
| 9780241144152
| 0241144159
| 3.56
| 74,471
| Nov 15, 2016
| Nov 15, 2016
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it was amazing
| Blackface Dance It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John's Wood. Blackface Dance It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John's Wood. The flat was on the eighth floor, the windows looked over the cricket ground.[image] Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936) [Watch video] This is the opening of the Prologue and excerpts from the four-page paragraph that follows, leading to the first of the many dance references that will articulate Zadie Smith's marvelous novel like landmarks. Why quote it? It does not seem like especially memorable writing. No, but it did its job, capturing my attention and not letting go for 450 more pages. It was partly the mystery, wanting to learn why this "humiliation" involves being put up in some of the most desirable real estate in London. Then the specifics of that walk southwards through London, the familiar streets, the surprise (but significant) linking of Lords Cricket Ground and the London Central Mosque, all of which gave me a strong sense of direction and purpose, even as it described a temporarily purposeless woman merely trying to fill time. And then that movie. Watch the video. Astaire dances with three of his own shadows. But this is not the smooth ballroom Astaire in white tie and top hat, but Fred in light blackface, tap-dancing. The number is a tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, as striking for its skill as what now seems its cultural insensitivity. But it is precisely this racial awkwardness that interests Smith. Much like her namesake Ali Smith does with the visual arts in Autumn, Zadie Smith peppers her novel with an eclectic playlist of video clips, all of which can be looked up and watched between chapters. They add up to a common theme: the representation and mis-representation of the African in popular culture. And there are some excruciating examples, such as Judy Garland in outrageous blackface in Everybody Sing (not Meet Me in St. Louis as indicated in the book), and Eddie Cantor blacked up in Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937). But that movie also contains an effervescent tap number by a little-known African-American dancer called Jeni LeGon (also in blackface, though naturally black). She becomes something of a role model to Zadie Smith's protagonist, not least because she bears a striking resemblance to her best friend growing up, Tracey. [image] Judy Garland in Everybody Sing (1938) [Watch video] [image] Jeni LeGon with Eddie Cantor in Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937) [Watch video] [image] Jeni LeGon with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson Not surprisingly, Smith also cites the most famous example of reverse blackface, describing the extraordinary performance of the young Michael Jackson at Motown 25, including his first public moon walk, followed by a clip of his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show towards the end of his life, as she questions him about the recent lightening of his skin. [In the novel, Smith has Jackson deflect Oprah's question, but he does answer her in the video, and in a very moving way.] [image] Michael Jackson in Motown 25 (1983) [Watch video] [image] Michael Jackson with Oprah Winfrey (1993) [Watch video] ====== All this is background to what turns out to be a very serious novel about race. Or, to put it another way, about the search for identity and purpose in the mind of Smith's protagonist. She is not named in the book, but it is hard not to think of her as "Zadie," for she shares many of the attributes of the real author: born in North London of a black Jamaican mother and white English father; her parents' later divorce; her own fascination first with tap dancing and then with jazz singing; her subsequent academic success. Like two other novels I have read recently, Michael Ondaatje's Warlight and Julian Barnes's The Only Story, Swing Time begins with an extended section somewhere between Bildungsroman and personal memoir, before developing into what is obviously fiction. All three seem to reflect the real lives of their authors, but Smith's novel feels closest to truth. It is also the most extensive. Even as Smith moves ahead to the adult story, she continues intercutting chapters about the two girls growing up on their respective estates, coming together in their weekly dance classes, then separated by them, as Tracey shows more obvious talent and transfers to a professional school. Against this, there is Smith's keen observation of social differences; she is, after all, an English author. Tracey is also the child of mixed parents, in her case a white mother and black father. But her largely-absentee father is a petty criminal and her mother fills her flat with trashy gewgaws. "Zadie's" mother, by contrast, lives frugally and commits herself to serious study of her African heritage and social activism; she will eventually stand for election, first for the borough council and then for Parliament. But she too is an emotionally absent parent, wishing the best for her daughter but spending little time with her. All the same, she is one of a number of characters against whom "Zadie" measures herself, in her attempt to discover who she really is. The most important of these is a white Australian singer called Aimee. By the time that "Zadie" meets her as a lowly intern in a television company, Aimee has become as much a brand as an individual artist, with an international fame similar to that of Madonna, the most obvious model for Smith's character. Going on little else but instinct, Aimee offers her a job as personal assistant, which she holds for the entire adult section of the novel. Very little of this is spent on the performing side of Aimee's life. What becomes important is that Aimee, like both Madonna and Angelina Jolie (another possible model), takes an interest in developmental projects in West Africa, deciding to build a school for girls, and using her connections to raise money and international awareness. "Zadie" makes many trips to the host village to lay groundwork and monitor progress. There she comes in touch with various other people against whom to measure herself: Lamin, the young head teacher; Hawa, a female teacher with whom she stays on her visits; and Aimee's logistics expert, a Brazilian named Fernando. As "Zadie" gets involved with each of these people in different ways emotionally, and grows to understand the African community, it becomes clear to her that Aimee's adoption of African causes, however worthy, is just another kind of blackface, and a split between them seems inevitable. Not that she is immune from racial gaffes herself: Too stoned in company once, I made the mistake of trying to explain what I found beautiful about the origins of tap dancing—the Irish crew and the African slaves, beating out time with their feet on the wooden decks of those ships, exchanging steps, creating a hybrid form—but Rakim, also stoned and in a cruel mood, stood up, rolled his eyes, stuck his lips out, shook his hands like a minstrel, and said: Oh massa, I's so happy on this here slave ship I be dancing for joy. Cut his eyes at me, sat back down. Our friends looked at the floor. The mortification was intense: for months afterward just the thought of it could bring the heat back to my cheeks.Brilliantly juggling the adolescent and adult stories, and interweaving them with cutting cultural references, Zadie Smith has written a novel that deals with interracial issues in a complex but satisfying way. She also maintains a gripping story on the human level: that of two relationships (with Tracey and with Aimee) that seem to promise much but end in failure. If there is one place where the author may fall short, it is in resolving her protagonist's quest for self-knowledge. She has learned a lot, certainly; we all have. But in the last chapters, just when you would expect the focus to be closing in on this still nameless central character, the pace of events picks up, driving towards an ending that I still don't fully understand. [image] Since first posting this review, I have looked at the question on this site about the protagonist's name. Two of the respondents remark that the leading character lacks a name because, as she realizes towards the end of the novel, she has always lived in somebody else's shadow—Tracey, Aimee, her mother—dark behind their radiant light. She might as well be one of the shadows dancing behind the blackfaced Fred Astaire. And in a late scene, sitting in a Paris café, she realizes that her idol Jeni LeGon, like many other women of color, have similarly been reduced to a shadow existence. But realizing it is the first step towards doing something about it. She is still in her early thirties, a lively and memorable character despite her lack of a name; there is no call for despair. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2018
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Jun 14, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1770414169
| 9781770414167
| 1770414169
| 4.18
| 1,039
| Apr 03, 2018
| Apr 03, 2018
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liked it
| Two Interesting Women 1. Lulu Parsons: I felt the truth of her words, the staggering physical weight of them, sink into my body. I followed Nadine d Two Interesting Women 1. Lulu Parsons: I felt the truth of her words, the staggering physical weight of them, sink into my body. I followed Nadine down the Bookmobile steps. Geordie was sitting cross-legged in the grass on the other side of the ditch, waiting. I shivered. In one brief moment, the cold hard stone I'd been carrying in my heart for nine months shifted, and with it, my invulnerability cracked away. Bleak, shattering pain took its place. Geordie took hold of my hand and kneaded it. I stood on the edge of the road in the dust kicked up by the departing Bookmobile, wanting my mother with a ferocity I never felt again for anything or anyone.Lulu Parsons is the youngest of five children in a family in Fraser Arm, a rural community in British Columbia, Canada. Geordie, the eldest of her four brothers, is mentally retarded; Lulu looks out for him, and he for her. Nine months before, when Lulu was eleven, their mother disappeared. She might just have walked out, but another woman in the neighborhood vanished at the same time, and the police suspect foul play. Later, their mother's sister arrives from England to keep house for the family, bringing with her a violin. Lulu falls in love with the instrument if not at first with its owner, and will eventually make a career performing her own songs on the US folk circuit, seldom returning home until circumstances force her to do so, four decades later. 2. Doris Tenpenny: She wants to be able to speak. Surely here, in the henhouse, she could. The hens bock-bock as Doris Tenpenny, wearing muddy rubber boots, hooks back the chicken coop door. They squawk and flutter. They hurry on yellow or black or red feet down the ramp and out the door. But even here. she cannot sound the words. In her twenty-four years, not one word has ever come out of Doris' mouth.Most of the novel is narrated alternately by Lulu Parsons, writing in the first person, and in the third person around Doris Tenpenny, the daughter of the local Baptist preacher, a religious bigot of the first order. Doris may not be able to speak, but her thoughts are perfectly articulate, and her views both insightful and progressive. I found both women interesting, but Doris more so, largely because of the contrasts between her muteness and her intelligence (she is a voracious reader), and between her social awkwardness and deep-seated kindness. This was a book I was prepared to enjoy, and indeed giving an update half-way through, I said as much. ====== But that was before the book entered what a Goodreads friend has called "the mushy morass in the middle of so many novels." There is an accomplished 240-page book hidden in the midst of this 480-page debut, but it needs better editing to release it. What Christine Higdon excels at is the description of country life, where very little happens that would make the newspapers, but everything is closely knit in a texture of relationships, family, and community. You cannot hurry this, I would agree. But in her best chapters, Higdon shows that she can celebrate these qualities quietly but radiantly, without spinning her wheels. Which is why one resents the longer sections where little seems to happen at all. The men are generally less important than the women in the story, but there is one minor character, a man named Aloysius McFee, who nonetheless impacts it in significant ways. He was the husband of the other woman who disappeared. He has come briefly but significantly into Doris' life, a secret that she nurses in long silence. And he has a much longer-lasting relationship with Lulu. Without saying more, for fear of spoilers, I suggest that your enjoyment of the novel depends very largely upon your ability to understand, let alone accept this relationship. In the age of #MeToo, it seems a paradox, an outlier to the usual patterns. Since it is her most daring stroke in the book, you would have expected Christine Higdon to have grasped it with both hands, treating McFee in more depth, and allowing us to share more of Lulu's experience and feelings, rather than just telling us of her belated reactions. I feel this was an opportunity lost, especially since Higdon's half-treatment of it will still not prevent many readers tossing the book aside in disgust. All the same, Higdon does guide the novel into a beautifully warm ending after about 400 pages. A few loose ends remained, but we could see where they were heading. There was a romance on the horizon that seemed too novelettish, a step removed from the rural simplicity of the rest. But that was balanced by other romances, other endings, that just seemed right, an affirmation of the basic values of family and kindness that have been there all along. So I was prepared to close the book with a sigh and bump my tentative three-and-a-half stars up to four. But no; turn the page, and you find Part Two! A 90-page Part Two after a 390-page Part One makes no sense at all. Yes, it clears up one of those loose ends that didn't really need elucidating anyway, and it fills in some small gaps. But it means starting again with virtually a new character in an entirely different part of the country. I read it, of course, but quickly. I had no interest in investing in a separate novella after reaching a more or less satisfactory conclusion to the main novel. So those three-and-a-half stars got rounded down after all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 29, 2018
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Jul 04, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0811226700
| 9780811226707
| 3.92
| 1,070
| 1946
| May 28, 2019
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really liked it
| Drowning in Sensation, or Lost in Translation? [image] The young Clarice Lispector (photo: Paulo Gurgel Valente) Sensation: So far as I know, the chande Drowning in Sensation, or Lost in Translation? [image] The young Clarice Lispector (photo: Paulo Gurgel Valente) Sensation: So far as I know, the chandelier of the title is mentioned once only, on page 10. It makes as good a place to start as any: Without knowing why, she’d nonetheless halt, fanning her bare thin arms; she lived on the verge of things. The parlor. The parlor filled with neutral spots. The smell of an empty house. But the chandelier! There was the chandelier. The great spider would glow. She’d look at it immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life. That icy existence. Once! once in a flash—the chandelier would scatter in chrysanthemums and joy. Another time—while she was running through the parlor—it was a chaste seed. The chandelier. She’d skip off without looking back.The "she" is Virgínia, a young girl living on an estate in the country, Quiet Farm. where she grows up worshipping, but also dominated by, her older brother Daniel. The long middle section (there are no chapters) will see her as a young woman in the city, getting to know other men. Towards the end, she will return home for a while, only to change her mind and go back to the city. Apart from the stunning final pages, that is basically the entire story. The few lines I quoted above contain it all: the chaste seed, the terror, the chrysanthemums and joy. This is something I realize only now; while actually reading, I was reeling from the delirium of words. For Virgínia may "live on the verge of things" as a girl, but the feelings that flood from her awareness of everything around her take total possession of her, inside and out; she is drowning in sensation. Here is another example, from near the beginning of her life in the city. Lispector is writing in longer sentences now, but there is still that extraordinary use of language: She opened the door of her little apartment, penetrated the cold and stuffy surroundings of the living room. Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness. She screamed low, sharp—but they’re lovely!—the room was breathing with half-closed eyes in the silence of mute pickaxes of the construction sites. The flowers were straightening up in delicate vigor, the petals thick and tired, damp with sweat—the stalk was tall, so calm and hard. The room was breathing, oppressed, asleep.Lispector apparently said that her writing was "trying to photograph perfume." Almost literally so here, the boundaries totally erased between the woman and the flowers, their scent, and the absence of sound from the street. Inanimate things take on feelings; the woman becomes one with the things. Translation: But such writing does make it an extraordinarily hard book to read. Take the second sentence in the passage above, "Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness." It reads almost like a parody, doesn’t it, as though spit out by Google Translate unaltered.* On the very first page, when Virgínia is described as looking down at a river "with her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge," and that word "branch" appeared again a few pages later, I got hold of the original Portuguese text online for comparison; could it mean "railing"? But no. I read Spanish, not Portuguese, but that was enough to suggest that, for the most part, the translators, Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards, have indeed stuck close to the original. But close or not, it left an uneasiness in my mind: if I could not totally trust the translation, what was the point of reading on? I continued, though, but in a more rapid fashion that did not leave time to agonize over details. Halfway through, I stopped to read the marvelous review in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal. Here’s what she says about Lispector’s language: No one sounds like Lispector—in English or Portuguese. No one thinks like her. Not only does she seem endowed with more senses than the allotted five, she bends syntax and punctuation to her will. She turns the dictionary upside down, shaking all the words loose from their definitions, sprinkling them back in as she desires (along with a few eyelashes, toast crumbs and dead flies)—and doesn’t the language look better for it?Sehgal also points out that the editor and co-translator here, Benjamin Moser, is also the author of the 2009 biography of the writer that did much to put Lispector back on the map of modernist originals, so it seems I am wrong to complain. All the same, I have a sneaky feeling that closeness to the original is not necessarily the best criterion for those who do not know the original. If an author makes her reputation by rearranging the syntax and dictionary in her own language, surely the best kind of translation would be one that takes similar scissors and tongs to English, without being constrained by the patterns of Portuguese? Submission: Parul Sehgal quotes Moser as saying "in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." She goes on in her own words: "The Chandelier is uniquely demanding—it’s baggy, claggy and contentedly glacial." It is that; the sensation of reading it was like struggling with a dream from which you cannot wake. But I could sense that this second novel of Clarice Lispector (1920–77), written when she still under 25, heralds a truly original artist. You might think of a Latin-American Virginia Woolf, except that I now know she had not read her at the time, so very much her own person. I surrendered as though submitting myself to sleep. One more example must suffice. It comes at the end of a scene between Virgínia and her lover. Everything he says and does (typical male!) is all in mental quotes, as he imagines how he will describe it to a friend later. But then Lispector switches back to her: She suddenly felt pain commingle with flesh, intolerable as if each cell were being stirred and shredded, divided in a mortal birth. Her mouth abruptly bitter and burning, she was horrified, rough and contrite as if in the face of spilled blood, a victory, a terror. So that was happiness.Such immediacy, such violence! From this point on, the novel seemed to accelerate—whether because Lispector had her foot on the pedal or I was just getting used to her driving. But the last few pages—again I thought of Virginia Woolf—were simultaneously a tour-de-force of modernist abstraction and totally, devastatingly clear. * Here is the sentence in Portuguese: Leve mancha ondulava num dos cantos, expandia como uma luz frescuras quase apagadas. And here is what Google Translate does in fact spit out: "A slight spot rippled in one of the corners, it expanded like a light, almost obliterated." A lot more normal, isn't it? I have noticed that the translators seem to go almost out of their way to use less usual words ("stain" is a particular favorite), and odd syntactic constructions, such as the omission of articles and strange plurals. Google simply ignores the word "frescuras" (coolness). Moser and Edwards get it in, but so awkwardly. Surely translation can do better than this? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 13, 2018
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May 15, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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ebook
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| 1787330729
| 9781787330726
| 1787330729
| 3.60
| 45,340
| May 08, 2018
| May 01, 2018
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it was amazing
| A Lost Inheritance We continued through the dark, quiet waters of the river, feeling we owned it, as far as the estuary. We passed industrial build A Lost Inheritance We continued through the dark, quiet waters of the river, feeling we owned it, as far as the estuary. We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews were in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river. I watched the welterweight boxer whom I had once perceived as harsh and antagonistic turn and look towards me, talking gently as he searched for the precise words about the ankles of Olive Lawrence, and about her knowledge of cyan charts and wind systems.[image] ====== The photo is no more than a convenient summary of the noir world that Michael Ondaatje conjures up in the first hundred pages or so of this masterpiece of emotional archaeology. Like another WG Sebald, only working with words, he shows snapshots of distant reaches of a damaged London, exhausted by the Second World War. And as with Sebald, Ondaatje's word images are half-open doorways giving onto a mysterious, half-remembered past. He is a grown man looking back at his early teens, groping in the dark to grasp the shape of a life that was itself a mystery, a limbo life that begins with his opening sentence: In 1945, our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.One of these men is a lodger in their London house whom they call "The Moth." He is benevolent but distant, disappearing for days at a time to leave the 14-year-old narrator (Nathaniel, more generally known as "Stitch") and his older sister Rachel to their own devices. The other is a former boxer known as The Pimlico Darter, who soon involves Stitch in activities of doubtful legality such as the smuggling of greyhounds upriver to race at the London tracks. Various other people come and go in the house, such as the "geographer and ethnographer" Olive Lawrence and the scholarly Arthur McCash, but it is The Darter who makes the biggest impression: The music-loving Moth appeared blind to the evident anarchy in The Darter. Everything the ex-boxer did was at a precarious tilt, about to come loose. Worst were the crowded car rides when the two of them sat in front, while Rachel and I and sometimes three greyhounds squabbled in the back on the way to Whitechapel. We were not even certain that the dogs belonged to him.I am also reminded of Patrick Modiano, for his fascination with the hidden details of a great city, his excavation of memory, and his sense of a semi-criminal half-life with its roots in the War. But there are even closer echoes of Ondaatje himself. His masterpiece The English Patient is also concerned with the immediate aftermath of war, and the way in which it can make criminals into heroes. But my most immediate connection was with his 2011 novel The Cat's Table. That was the story of a voyage from Ceylon to London of a schoolboy named Michael who might to all intents and purposes have been the author; though fiction, it used (in the author's words) "the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography." In Warlight, the action has been moved back by a decade or so, but in other respects it might almost be a sequel, with the same character a year or so older, compiling a scrapbook of extraordinary experiences that would be the raw materials for his later career as an author. This sense of memoir was confirmed when I suddenly realized that Nathaniel's school is the same one that Ondaatje himself attended in London—Dulwich College: ====== [image] ====== This color painting of Dulwich by Camille Pissarro also serves to mark the break between the noir feeling of Part One of the novel and the rural setting of Part Two. For a little before the halfway point something dramatic happens which brings the adolescent adventures to an end. The story resumes again, fifteen years on, in a beautiful group of villages in North Suffolk (photo below) known as "The Saints," where his mother grew up. This is more than the brief jumps into adulthood towards the end of The Cat's Table, more like the double-time frame he uses in Divisadero. Though "double" may be a misnomer. For although the narrator moves well forward in his own life, he makes it a vantage point from which to look even further back into his mother's story, to the interwar years and her activities during the War itself. Now the narrator is trying to make sense not so much his own life as that of his mother, from childhood on. Yet understanding his mother and understanding himself may be parts of the same process: When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually to you. "A memoir is the lost inheritance," you realize, so during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believe something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.He goes about his task elliptically; only gradually do you realize the web of connections that tie him to the village where his mother had grown up. But there are gaps in that web, and Stitch, true to his nickname, slowly attempts to stitch them up. And he does so, no longer as a memoirist or biographer, but a full-blown novelist, inventing an inner truth from the few fragments of fact that he can unearth. The book will eventually come round full circle, as most of the mysterious characters in Part One are brought into the real world. Yet the gift of Part Two is to introduce a new character with the marvelous name of Marsh Felon. The son of a family of roofing thatchers, he grows up with even more unexpected talents than The Darter, from being the genial host of a weekly nature show on BBC to a lethally effective operative in the War and its aftermath. It is a brilliant feat of alchemy on Ondaatje's part that the figure who returns the novel to the light of day should also be its loveliest source of romance. Facts, dates, my official and unofficial research fell away and were replaced by the gradual story, half dreamed, of my mother and Marsh Felon. How they eventually walked towards each other without their families, their brief moment as lovers and then their retreat, but still holding on to their unusual faithfulness to each other. I had barely a clue as to their cautious desire, of travels to and from dark airfields and harbours. All I had, in reality, was no more than a half-finished verse of an old ballad rather than evidence. But I was a son, parentless, with what was not known to a parentless son, and I could only step into fragments of the story. […] I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth.Indeed he does! ====== [image] ...more |
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May 11, 2018
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May 13, 2018
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May 11, 2018
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| 0679767207
| 9780679767206
| 0679767207
| 3.90
| 12,789
| 1980
| Jan 03, 1996
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really liked it
| A Hymn to the Midwest The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was th A Hymn to the Midwest The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.A passage from the first page of William Maxwell's 1979 novella and another from the fourth. A murder at the very beginning of a book, and described in so matter-of-fact a manner, that is something striking. And even more so the tease that begins the second chapter: who is this friend whose father is a murderer, and what happened to cause him such shame? Murder or not, this is no thriller, for all the external facts emerge very quickly. The rest of the novel expands slowly, in the unhurried manner of Midwest farm country in the twenties.The first half of the book is a Bildungsroman of great beauty, following the unnamed narrator from childhood through high school. He is a sensitive boy who loses his mother early, and it means much to him when he meets a special friend, Cletus Smith. Then the murder happens, and things change. The victim and the murderer were once also two such friends. Lloyd Wilson helps Clarence Smith and his family move in to the adjacent farm, and the day ends with a typical act of country kindness: He came upon the woman standing forlornly in the midst of a kitchen that had been stripped of everything, including the stove, and said, “My wife is expecting you folks for supper.” She wasn’t, but no matter. And anyways, they knew she couldn’t be expecting them because nobody knew they were coming. When the others sat down to eat, Fern nursed her baby in the rocking chair in the parlor. Afterward, he walked the new neighbors back to their house and waited till they had lit the lamps.The second half of the novella traces the stories of these two men, starting way back when each of them were children. I have to say that the tension dropped very slightly at this point, partly because the number of characters increased so that the story got harder to follow, partly because the narrator was no longer telling us his own story. What kept me interested, though, was the quiet assumption of old-fashioned Midwestern values, as though Maxwell were a link between Willa Cather before him and Kent Haruf after. These qualities continue to shine as an undisputed norm, even as individual characters betray them. And they are illuminated by passages of exquisite observation such as the following: Let us consider the kitchen the dog is not allowed into. Steam on the windows. Zinc surfaces that have lost their shine. Wooden surfaces that have been scrubbed to the texture of velvet. The range, with two buckets of water beside it ready to be poured into the reservoir when it is empty. The teakettle. The white enamel coffeepot. The tin matchbox on the wall. The woodbox, the sink, the comb hanging by a string, the roller towel. The kerosene lamp with a white glass shade. The embossed calendar. The kitchen chairs, some with a crack in the seat. The cracked oilcloth on the kitchen table. The smell of Octagon soap. To the indifferent eye it is like every farm kitchen for a hundred miles around, but none of those others would have been waiting in absolute stillness for Cletus to come home from school, or have seemed like all his heart desired when he walks in out of the cold.So five stars for the first half, maybe four for the second. I am inclined to round up. ====== On thinking further, however, I have decided to round down. Let me try to explain, albeit obliquely. A fellow reader, Fionnuala, included in her review a long quote from Maxwell in the Paris Review, in which he explains the genesis of the the novel. Here is part of it: With So Long, See You Tomorrow I felt that in this century the first-person narrator has to be a character and not just a narrative device. So I used myself as the “I” and the result was two stories, my own and Cletus Smith’s, and I knew they had to be structurally combined, but how? One day I was in our house in Westchester County, and I was sitting on the side of the bed putting my shoes on, half stupefied after a nap and thinking, If I sit on the edge of the bed I will ruin the mattress, when my attention was caught by a book. I opened it and read part of a long letter from Giacometti to Matisse describing how he came to do a certain piece of sculpture—Palace at 4 a.m.—it’s in the Museum of Modern Art—and I said, “There’s my novel!” It was as simple as that. But I didn’t know until that moment whether the book would work out or not.Here is the Giacometti sculpture he is referencing: [image]In that it represents an open space with a number of enigmatic objects in uncertain relationship to one another, I can certainly see it as a consoling image for the writer struggling with the problem of bringing a number of different ideas together into a coherent novel. And when he introduces it in the book, it also has a literal appropriateness: the narrator and Cletus are playing in the still-unroofed skeleton of his father's new house, walking across the void on six-inch planks. With this in mind, Maxwell also got his daughter to design a cover for the first edition, based on the Giacometti. [image]Yet, when he mentioned it in the novel, I felt a jar. The world he has been describing up to now is Illinois farm country, real, tactile, earthy. The Giacometti is a surreal work by a European avant-gardist, sophisticated, and housed in big-city temple to culture. Yes, Maxwell is clearly writing now as a much older man, well used to city life. But at the moment, he is still the small-town boy playing with the farm kid. Even the mention of the Giacometti opened a cultural gulf in the novel—and more significantly one of time. Maybe this is what he means when he talks about the guilt that still haunts him after fifty years. But if he opens the gulf, he has to explore it. Yet this moment in the book is almost exactly the place where the narrator, whether in his sixties or in his teens, begins to withdraw from the story. I regretted this at the time; now I have an inkling why. I can believe that the Giacometti helped him, but I think he might have been better to keep it in the background. Almost everything else in the novel speaks of a quite different kind of art from the interwar years: the Midwestern landscapes of Grant Wood or John Steuart Curry (below): [image] ...more |
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Aug 03, 2018
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Aug 04, 2018
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Apr 30, 2018
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| 0141441895
| 9780141441894
| 0141441895
| 3.72
| 13,876
| 1913
| Dec 18, 2007
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really liked it
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The End of Childhood Augustin Meaulnes, the larger-than-life hero of Alain-Fournier's charming French classic of 1913, is a curious mixture of tormente The End of Childhood Augustin Meaulnes, the larger-than-life hero of Alain-Fournier's charming French classic of 1913, is a curious mixture of tormented adolescent and knight errant. The soubriquet "grand" that is always associated with him refers perhaps to his size (large, tall) but also to the power of his dreams (grandiose, or even great). As told by the fifteen-year-old teacher's son François Seurel, the impact of this lad of seventeen who arrives as a boarder in his father's school has the transformative magic of Nick Carraway's first encounter with Jay Gatsby, only transferred to the world of schoolboys in provincial France. The comparison with The Great Gatsby is only one of many brilliant insights by Adam Gopnik, who wrote the introduction to this excellent Penguin Classics translation by Robin Buss (I have been checking the book in the original also). The text now seems slightly dated, with characters who are more ideas than real people, but Gopnik places those ideas within a clear literary, historical, and Freudian context; this edition is almost worth buying for his essay alone. Monsieur Seurel and his pupils seem to spend as much time in the countryside as they do in the classroom, and the life of that countryside is precisely situated in the Cher region of France, not far from Bourges. But in the midst of it there is a lost estate that is almost like a dream, never to be found again. Meaulnes arrives there by accident one night, after falling asleep in a horse-drawn wagon, and finds himself in the midst of preparations for a wedding. It is a passage of sheer magic: a Watteauesque fête champêtre populated by extravagantly-dressed children and figures from a harlequinade. He meets the daughter of the manor and falls instantly in love. But the wedding is called off and the guests disperse. Meaulnes spends the next years trying to find the way back again, eventually following his distant beloved Yvonne to Paris. The waking dream is not unlike the mysterious chivalric world of Maurice Maeterinck's Pelléas et Mélisande of 1892, seen here through the eyes of childhood as a lament for childhood's end. As Gopnik observes, Alain-Fournier places "what is essentially a medieval allegory of love in the terms of a late nineteenth-century realist novel." The realist element is always there even at the beginning—the routine of the school, the peasant life of the region. As the book moves on, however, the realism becomes stronger, not weaker. The lady setting out for the enchanted isle will become a housewife and mother; the absent bride at the wedding feast threatens to become a prostitute in Paris. Fantasy butts heads with life. Gopnik again: "The intensity of the romance of childhood—and the attempt to marry it (literally) to an erotic-romantic dream—glow bright for Fournier with the light of something not quite real, a flare not a fire." A flare, certainly, for within a year of publication, France would enter the Great War; and within a month of that, Alain-Fournier would be dead. ...more |
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Jan 2010
not set
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Jan 03, 2010
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Apr 24, 2018
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| 0747561419
| 9780747561415
| 0747561419
| 3.30
| 159
| 2002
| Jan 01, 2003
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it was amazing
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Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don’t think that is its mai Warmth in the Snow On the face of it, The Big Snow,the title story in this collection of five is a police procedural, but I don’t think that is its main point. At 137 pages it is a novella really, half the length of the whole book, and its mystery is insufficient to justify that proportion on its own. But put together with the other four stories, all of which are set in Northern Ireland during the severe blizzard of 1963, it completes a quietly marvelous collection of character studies, all featuring people who are socially awkward or wrong-footed by the extreme conditions, and treating them with love and understanding. Forget the title; this is a warm book. And an especially meaningful one for me, who grew up in that part of the world, and would have been about the same age as the two youngest protagonists. The opening story, The Light of the World, is the shortest, and hauntingly beautiful. I don’t want to say too much about it (or any of the stories) as Park is so skillful at controlling information. But it concerns a man leafing through a volume of Ansel Adams photographs while talking to his wife, who is also a photographer. She is lying in bed, and he is standing at the window, watching the falling snow, and everything is connected by beauty, pain, and that pure, pure light. [image] The Wedding Dress is almost as short, and equally mesmerizing. A woman scans the papers for a used bridal dress to buy for her own upcoming wedding, before she too goes out into the snow. White on white, its secret is a terrible one, and oh so sad. At 35 pages, Against the Cold is more substantial. Mr. Peel, the headmaster of a Belfast school, works with one of his teachers, Miss Lewis, to see the pupils safely home before snow closes them down. Conscious of his noblesse oblige, he escorts her to her door. She invites him in for a cup of tea before he starts his own long trek home, but the snow falls harder and harder. Peel is the only one of the five protagonists we do not like immediately. He is authoritarian and patronizing; he fantasizes about one of the other teachers, and looks down on Miss Lewis; he is a prude, who disapproves of her having a reproduction of a couple kissing on her living-room wall (he has probably never heard of Dante Gabriel Rossetti). But they have a long day ahead of them, and things can change.… [image] My favorite story was the second longest at 65 pages, Snow Trails. Peter, its principal character, is the son of the local undertaker, in his first year studying French at university, and longing to get away from the small country town. He is attracted to the young wife of a Belfast businessman, who has recently bought property on the outskirts. She is at least a decade older than him, but that doesn’t lessen the intensity of his crush. When they meet, he is reading Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier [ The Lost Estate ], and is thrilled that she has read it too. Indeed, the whole story might almost be a retelling of Alain-Fournier's impossible-to-recapture romantic dream, but it is no less effective in its own terms. And it is a similarly young protagonist, not the mystery, that is the focus of The Big Snow. Like the young Morse in Endeavour, probationary detective constable Swift is better educated and smarter than most of the people around him. But he is also green behind the ears and touchingly insecure. He is paired with an old-school sergeant named Gracey, who has no time for niceties but gets results by concentrating on the most likely culprit and squeezing a confession out of him. Only this time, Swift reckons he is wrong; most readers too will probably see the way the wind is blowing well before the halfway mark. But the real interest is in the relationship between the cub and the old grizzly, which takes some surprising turns, and in the character of Swift himself. He identifies strongly with the young murder victim, who is probably the first woman he has seen unclothed, and treats the case as a personal chivalric crusade. Once again, Park gets what it is to be young, sensitive, and bright. So it is a pity that, in developing a type he had captured so perfectly in the shorter story, he moves a little too close to melodrama in the longer one. Were this the whole book, my rating would be no more than four stars. But given the strength of the others, I can certainly go to five. ===== This is the fourth David Park book I have read. I begin to think he has a special affinity for short to medium length fiction. The very fine The Poet's Wives consists of three novellas, focusing on the wives of William Blake, Osip Mandelstam, and a fictional contemporary Irish poet. His The Light of Amsterdam and The Truth Commissioner are full novels, but each consists of several distinct strands that eventually interweave; I was a little lukewarm about the Amsterdam book, but the other is one of the most constructive responses to the Troubles in Northern Ireland that I have read. Long or short, I recommend anything he writes. ...more |
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Apr 24, 2018
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Apr 27, 2018
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Apr 24, 2018
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Paperback
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| 052542797X
| 9780525427971
| 052542797X
| 4.03
| 25,107
| 2013
| Mar 31, 2015
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really liked it
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Episodic. Informative, often fun, but still episodic My wife, who has been reading this in tandem with me for a book club, made the most generous and p Episodic. Informative, often fun, but still episodic My wife, who has been reading this in tandem with me for a book club, made the most generous and perceptive remark. “Shafak is obviously channeling an earlier tradition of oral storytelling,” she said, “and her book should be judged accordingly.” She is right. This sprawling story of Jahan, an Indian boy who arrives in Istanbul at the height of the Ottoman Empire as the mahout for a white elephant and stays to become a favored apprentice of the leading architect of the time has something of the fascination of the Arabian Nights. It is easy to read, and rich in the detail of sights, sounds, tastes, and smells. There are dangers and intrigues, calamities and lucky escapes. It should have been a breeze to get through its 400-plus pages. Only it wasn’t. Well before the quarter-way mark, it had become a slog. The reason is just what my wife says. As in the oral tradition it imitates, or like Scheherazade’s Thousand and One Nights, the book is made up of numerous separate episodes that each occupy a dozen pages or so, but barely connect into a larger whole. Scheherazade at least kept her Sultan waiting on a cliff’s edge before resuming the next night. Shafak does not even do that; each episode is wrapped up neatly at the end of its section. Go on to the next—why not? But then again: why? The book can give much pleasure while you are actually reading, but it offers little incentive to keep going. It simply lacks momentum—and in a novel, this is a fatal flaw. As a case in point, a third of the way into the story, the Royal Architect sends Jahar and another apprentice to Rome. While there, they make drawings of the construction of St. Peter’s and many other buildings, and after many failed attempts finally get in to see the great Michelangelo, who writes a letter to their master. But on the way home, they are robbed; their drawings, books, and the precious letter are stolen. And that’s all, except for a brief mention at the end of the book. This is one of the richer, better-developed episodes, but it is as though it had never been. Time passes, and we move on to other things—and others, and still others. Jahan falls in love with a princess, far beyond his reach; he finds favor with the Sultan, then loses it; he rides into battle on his elephant, Chota, and experiences defeat; he helps in the construction of magnificent buildings; he is thrown into prison; he has more lucky escapes than Aladdin. To describe a small portion of the book is to whet the literary taste buds. But that takes no account of indigestion. The novel is like a kebab with too many flavorsome tidbits threaded on too long and far too thin a skewer. Nonetheless, there were two things that kept me going. One was the colorful quality of Shafak’s writing and her sense of place; there is no mention of a translator, so I assume that the English is her own. Here is Jahan’s arrival in Istanbul, leading his elephant: In every street through which they passed, people moved aside in fright and delight. Women drew their babies close; mendicants hid their begging bowls; old men grabbed their canes as though in defence. Christians made the cross; Muslims recited surahs to chase Sheitan away; Jews prayed benedictions; Europeans looked half amused, half awed. A big brawny Kazakh went pale, as though he had just seen a spectre. There was something so infantile in the man’s fright that Jahan could not help but chuckle. Children, only they, stared up with sparkling eyes, pointing at the white beast. [image] Suleiman I, with his elephant and Sinan’s Süleymaniye mosque. Engravings by the Danish artist Melchior Lorck or Lorichs, who appears as a character in the novel. The other element to capture my interest was the way Shafak weaves true history into her imagined tale (although she admits in an afterword to switching a few things around). Her inspiration, she tells us, was a portrait engraving of Sultan Suleiman I (reigned 1520–66), with an elephant in the background (see above). Mimar Sinan, the Royal Architect, was also a real figure, living from 1488 to 1588 (yes), and designing over 300 major buildings. Two of them play an important part in the story, the Süleymaniye and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha mosques in Istanbul and the lovely Selimiye mosque In Edirne. The ability to look at photos of these while reading only enhances the color of Elif Shafak’s words. [image] Sinan’s Sokollu Mehmed Pasha mosque in Istanbul. [image] Dome and . . . [image] . . . interior of Sinan’s Selimiye mosque in Edirne. Though he is not a demonstrative figure, the reader’s growing awareness of Sinan’s kindness and paternal concern for his apprentices is one theme that does maintain a steady development throughout the book. Much more so than the thin threads of mystery such as various unexplained accidents and the theft of Michelangelo’s letter, which neither build much tension nor reach a satisfactory conclusion. It stretches belief a little that a young architect with increasing responsibilities should also be working as a trainer in the royal menagerie. But the multifaceted variety is essential to Shafak’s method. A reader who can’t accept things like that will not get much out of her book. Probably, I was not that reader; in terms of my own absorption, the book was barely three stars. But with an eye to the pleasures on offer to readers who care less about tight structure in a novel, I will happily round that up. ...more |
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Mar 10, 2018
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Apr 06, 2018
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Apr 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0062690965
| 9780062690968
| 0062690965
| 4.04
| 3,927
| Feb 06, 2018
| Feb 06, 2018
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it was amazing
| The Devil in the Mind Men fear that which is alien, that which they cannot control. Hence most are afraid of certain animals, predators, those they The Devil in the Mind Men fear that which is alien, that which they cannot control. Hence most are afraid of certain animals, predators, those they cannot tame. In this country that would be snakes, dingos to an extent, but mostly the wild native. It is remarkable really, to see how afraid you all are. They have become like the Devil in the minds of white men.Goodreads has you choose shelves for books you review. I am making a new one for this, Top Ten 2018 maybe; of course, it is provisional as yet, but I am pretty sure it will still be there in December. This brutal story of settlers, sharecroppers, and frontier justice on the edge of the Outback in 1880s Queensland also clearly goes on my Australia-NZ shelf—it has the sharp ring of authenticity—but in fact it was written by a Brit who only spent six years of his life Down Under. I am also putting it on my Bildungsroman shelf, although its main action takes less than a year, because its main character, Tommy McBride, learns the moral lessons of a lifetime during the few weeks surrounding his 15th birthday. And I was considering starting another one, Good Books I Hated, but that would only apply to the first half, so instead I shall explain. The jacket blurb has it right with phrases like "the brutal realities of life," "seductive cruelty of power," "a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor," and most certainly in the comparison to Cormac McCarthy. If I did indeed have a “Good Books I Hated" shelf, all McCarthy’s books would be on it. And this is recognizably the same world as, say, Blood Meridian, 19th-century frontier country where a thin veneer of legality provides cover for vigilante atavism. It took almost 100 pages, however, for the book to get moving; before that, it was more depressing than violent. Ned McBride farms a subsidiary holding leased from the big landowner of the region, John Sullivan. While Sullivan’s vast ranch seems to prosper in all conditions, McBride’s is hit badly by the drought, and those cattle that do not die outright can be sold only for glue. He has a wife and young daughter at home, and is assisted in the fields by two native men and his teenage sons, Billy and Tommy. At 16, Billy is eager to prove himself a man, but it is the observant, questioning Tommy who is the main focus; the heart of the book is his coming-of-age. This element does not really kick in until around page 90, when a sudden act of violence changes the entire course of the novel. Before this, I admit, I was about to write it off. Could the misery get any worse? But the tragedy opens a new dimension in which escalating violence is matched by increasing moral nuance. I was hooked. But to explain more, I have to at least hint at the nature of this pivotal event. It is not a big spoiler, but some readers may prefer not to know. (view spoiler)[The brothers return from a brief excursion to find that the farm has been brutally attacked. Evidence suggests that the culprit is a young native stockman who had been let go. Billy and Tommy call upon Sullivan for help, and now new qualities emerge. The landowner, whom we had thought of as a tyrant, now becomes quite sympathetic, and his wife is an angel of compassion. Sullivan prevails upon Inspector Edmund Noone of the Queensland Native Police to search for the presumed culprit among his tribe of nomadic aboriginals, the Kurrong. The boys had glimpsed Noone once before at the head of his band of black manhunters—"naught but killers and thieves," as he himself says. But once again, we are forced to reevaluate previous impressions. Noone turns out to have a philosophical bent and not a little education. The passage I quoted at the start continues: I think they are unnecessary. Mankind has moved on. I don't suppose any of you have read Darwin, but he makes the case very well. As a race the negro has fallen so far behind the rate of human evolution that for the most part they are unsuited to the civilized world. We have seen it everywhere, the Americas, Africa, the Indies, tribes who left to their own devices have advanced little further than apes. Your native Australian is no different. Darwin saw it for himself, visited these very shores. They are a doomed species, gentlemen. Those who won't adapt or be trained will be gone by the century's end.The moral re-evaluation will continue to the end of the book. People previously thought heartless will display surprising gentleness. In others, the veneer of apparent civility will crack, revealing the latent savagery beneath. It is here that the differences between the brothers will most clearly emerge. Billy, the elder, is prepared to take appearances as reality in his eagerness to join the adult club where shared prejudices are worn as a badge of membership. Tommy, though, continues to question, and cannot help seeing the natives as people too, especially when they take as prisoner a naked young girl of about his own age. But Howarth does not leave it there, as a simple antithesis between good and evil. The pragmatic Noone recognizes the strength behind Tommy's idealism, forming a strange bond between the moral opposites that for me was the growing fascination of the novel. Yet not quite opposites: though Noone is a killer, he is neither dissolute nor unprincipled; and Tommy's innocence cannot last for ever. I have one other shelf to put this on, Mysteries, kinda. We do not know who attacked the McBride farm; the evidence is far from conclusive. At the time, it hardly seems to matter; the outrage is merely the pretext for a travesty of justice that hardly requires evidence. But as the novel reaches its dramatic end (leaving aside the rather anticlimactic epilogue), the question of responsibility becomes very important indeed. (hide spoiler)] I obtained a free copy of the book through the Amazon Vine program. ...more |
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Feb 02, 2018
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Feb 06, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 4.51
| 174,521
| Feb 09, 2017
| Aug 22, 2017
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it was amazing
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[image] Hilarity and Horror “Listening in amazement, torn between horror and hilarity, he finally shook his head in disbelief….” Just over halfway throu [image] Hilarity and Horror “Listening in amazement, torn between horror and hilarity, he finally shook his head in disbelief….” Just over halfway through this almost 600-page novel, Cyril Avery, the protagonist, tells the story of his life so far to the man he is falling in love with. I share his friend’s contradictory reactions. For the first 200 pages at least, I would have called the novel a comedy—and still would, although I have to admit that it deals in horrors. It begins with a pregnant 15-year-old denounced during Mass by the priest and thrown out of her West Cork village. Before long, there will be the first of several murders; there will be lies and heartbreak; there will be deaths from AIDS; all tainted by a culture of homophobic bigotry that Cyril, a gay man, has to contend with for his entire life. And yet I still think of it as a comedy, not least because it is very easy to read. Look at the book’s dedication: “For John Irving.” This is the kind of long, sprawling, whole-life novel that few people other than Irving write any more. It begins in 1945, a few months before its hero’s birth, and ends 70 years later, in sight of his death. It is a roller-coaster ride, crammed with coincidences; the author has no qualms about bringing people together in climaxes that will go either wonderfully right or terribly wrong—or slip away in ironic incompletion. For example, Cyril, who tells his own story, identifies the pregnant girl as his mother in the very first sentence. Times being what they were, she gives him up at birth to a “hunchbacked Redemptorist nun” for adoption. But they will run into one another regularly every decade or so, and each time you wonder if this will be the big recognition scene. That is the way that comedies are constructed after all—or melodramas. Yet this is more. What keeps this from being trite or willful is, first, that Boyne tells a very good story. A minor character cites Jeffrey Archer as her ideal in this respect, which was funny because I had already been comparing Boyne to Archer in my mind. Favorably so, for he has greater moral depth, and the ability to create characters of strength and substance. Very early on, I realized that the girl, Catherine, was no pathetic victim, but a spunky fighter with the determination to do what it takes; it was a kind of assurance that things would not go very wrong for long. And the novel is full of people with similar strength—perhaps improbably so, which is why I thought of it as comedy. Then there is the character of Cyril himself. No matter how improbable some other things might be, he himself has the ring of truth. If I did not already know, I would assume that the author too was gay, given his ability to get inside the man’s mind and world. It is not always a pretty world; more than once I thought of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty for a similar frankness in describing pre-AIDS homosexual trolling, although he steers clear of the physical descriptions. But it is an honest picture—which is interesting since maintaining that life in sixties Ireland demanded the opposite: a constant tissue of deception. Even more interesting is how I found myself reacting to Cyril as a character. However different his life from mine, I always found myself rooting for him. And when he traps himself in a situation that offers no easy escape, the worst I could say was Too bad. Yet, much later in the book, he is brought face to face with the consequences of what he did back then, and the reader is too; I was forced to admit that, even though I went right along with him at the time, he really was a shit. So five stars for the novel’s readability, humor, characters, and moral complexity. But not an absolutely assured five. You could easily argue me down to four stars if you point out that the attempt to mix comedy and seriousness is a compromise that doesn’t always work, or that the use of a comedic plot mechanism may undermine the seriousness of its theme. I felt this especially towards the end, as the roller-coaster negotiated those last little hills almost too easily, as though the writer were just filling in time. But then I think how much the book interested me and kept me reading, even at a busy time, and know that I will keep it, lend it, and recommend it without qualm. Five stars it is. ====== [image] My Top Ten list this year is selected from a smaller than usual pool. I really only started reading again in May, and even then deliberately kept new books to under 50% of my total. In compiling the list, I also did not exactly follow my original star ratings, but rather the takeaway value after time has passed. In particular, there are two books, Lincoln in the Bardo and Go, Went, Gone) to which I gave only 4 stars, but which I recognize as important books, with more staying power than many that I enjoyed more at the time, but have since forgotten. For some reason, three of the ten books (Forest Dark, A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Three Floors Up) are by Jewish authors, set in Israel. To those, I would add a fourth: Judas by Amos Oz, read at the same time and of similar quality, but actually published at the end of 2016. The ten titles below are in descending order (i.e. with The Essex Serpent being my favorite). The links are to my reviews: 1. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 2. Autumn by Ali Smith 3. Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss 4. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne 5. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 6. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman 7. Exit West by Moshin Hamid 8. Three Floors Up by Eshkol Nevo 9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 10. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck And half that number again that didn't quite make it, in alphabetical order by authors: 11. Souvenirs dormants by Patrick Modiano 12. All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan 13. Improvement by Joan Silber 14. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout 15. Rose & Poe by Jack Todd ...more |
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| 0451497546
| 9780451497543
| 0451497546
| 3.86
| 3,341
| Aug 01, 2017
| Aug 15, 2017
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really liked it
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The Normal One Isidore Mazal (generally called Dory although he prefers Izzie) is the youngest child in a French family of six. His three eldest siblin The Normal One Isidore Mazal (generally called Dory although he prefers Izzie) is the youngest child in a French family of six. His three eldest siblings all complete PhD's in the course of the novel: Berenice is an historian, Aurore a classicist, Leonard a sociologist. Jeremie, still in college, is a musician. Simone, the only one close to his age (in his early teens), fanatically studies literature. And Izzie? Though clearly bright—his narrative voice is consistently engaging—he is no academic freak. He is the normal one. And he needs to be. Despite their reputation as super-achievers, this is a pretty dysfunctional family. All five elder siblings spend their time holed up in their rooms, and when they do have to interact with someone from the outside world, they behave with an arrogance that is funny for a moment—until you think how it would feel like to be on the receiving end. Isidore's life may be small potatoes, but at least he has one. We see his daily routine at school, his crush on a girl who has no interest in him, his friendship with another who is so depressed that she is given the ironic nickname "Sunshine," his contacts with his elderly German teacher Herr Coffin, and his kindness towards an inhabitant of their town who, at 111, is the oldest woman in France (not a very credible character, but essential to the texture). Isidore also "runs away from home" several times. I use quotes, because these are generally excursions so short that his parents barely realize that he has gone. Towards the middle of the book, I was thinking I would review it as a French Catcher in the Rye, but then I realized that Bordas was in fact doing the opposite. Holden Caulfield in Salinger's novel sees himself as exceptional and an outsider; Isidore Mazal knows he is ordinary, and is a conformist at heart. But this is a problem: how can the author maintain interest in a life that is pretty much routine? I am not sure that she can. This was a book that I enjoyed a lot while I was actually reading—Isidore has an attractive voice, as I say, and Bordas gets into his mindset quite convincingly—but I had very little interest in picking the book up again once I had put it down. There was very little narrative thrust or sense of where the book was going. Only at the very end did I realize the opposite: where the book had gone. And with that, raised my tentative three stars to four. ====== I gather that Camille Bordas has written two previous novels in French; this is her first in English. It is a language that she clearly knows well, yet I had a curious sense that she does not entirely own it. It took me a while, for instance, to realize that we were in France, not America; she refers to small coins, for example, as "a penny and a dime." Then once I had realized the setting, I kept being aware of the ghost French behind some of her phrases. For instance, the Mazals keep referring to their paterfamilias as "the father." There is a reason for this, as he is mostly absent then dead, but it is much more idiomatic in French (as le père) than in English. Admittedly, these are small points, and one soon gets past them, but they did contribute to the slight sense of disengagement that kept me from fully inhabiting the novel. ...more |
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| 1934137340
| 9781934137345
| 1934137340
| 3.83
| 3,029
| Apr 19, 2011
| Apr 19, 2011
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it was amazing
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The Sharpshooter …The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and heThe Sharpshooter …The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. Not the whole sweeping vale of tears that Rome and her priests want us to sacrifice ourselves to daily so that she lives in splendor, but one single moment in which we die so that someone else lives. That's it, and it is fearful because it cannot be seen, planned, or even known. It is simply lived. If there be a purpose, it happens of a moment within us, and lasts a lifetime without us, like water opening a closing in a wake.Very little of Andrew Krivák's debut novel is devoted to such abstract philosophy, words he gives to an old lifer in a Sardinian jail. Indeed the book is filled with action, including some of the best WW1 sequences I have ever read. But this is its point. Jozef Vinich, the first-person narrator, who has been taught to hunt by his father in the Carpathian Mountains, joins the Austro-Hungarian army as a sharpshooter, and goes through the rest of the war as an agent of death. When he is finally captured early in 1918, he needs to discover what is on the other side of the coin from death, what is the purpose of life, his life, any life. And remarkably, the final sixty pages of the book, in which he struggles to such an understanding, are more involving, more beautiful than even the magnificent seventy that had preceded them. It is not until the end that we get the meaning of the book's title. The novel opens in 1899 Colorado where Jozef is born and his mother dies. His father, a Slovak immigrant miner, moves briefly to Pennsylvania then takes his son back to his home country in 1901, where he takes up life as a shepherd. After the war, Jozef moves back to America, claiming his citizenship by birth. The twenty-some years and 160 pages in between have been his sojourn in the "old country," years whose lessons of mind, heart, and sinew will, we assume, last him an entire lifetime. It is not unusual for a writer to turn to the Bildungsroman genre for his first novel; what is unusual here is partly Krivák's precocious skill, and partly the fact that this is not thinly disguised autobiography but an immersion into the life of someone old enough to be his grandfather, half a world and a whole century removed. These 160 pages fall into three parts. In the first, Jozef grows to manhood, absorbing all the lessons his father can teach him, and bonding with an adopted older brother, Zlee. In the second and longest part, Jozef fakes the birth date on his ID to be able to join up with Zlee in the Austro-Hungarian army. As soon as their hunting skills are discovered, the boys are paired as marksmen and sent to pick off high-value targets in the mountains overlooking the River Soča. This, under its Italian name, the Isonzo, is the setting of two great novels that have always intrigued me. But Krivák is less romantic than Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and less cinematic in scope than Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. Eschewing the big picture for the small, he makes us see through the crosshairs of Jozef's sights as he makes his kills. Detailed, intimate, and often chilling, it is some of the best war writing I have ever read. [image] [image] The Soča/Isonzo today Brilliant as the wartime section was, it is what comes after it that makes the book. At first I didn't think so. Long treks in a weakened state and months of imprisonment might seem an anticlimax. Yet it is here that Jozef starts to think and, painfully, to feel; the conversation I quoted above comes from these pages. Finally released, he comes upon a pregnant gypsy girl and saves her from two murderous deserters. Together, they journey Eastward, towards his homeland and perhaps hers. It becomes a story of love, but karitas not eros, seemingly romantic but in fact almost religious. Almost without our knowing it, this final chapter has brought a hard-won redemption, which ends Jozef's European sojourn in moving beauty. Before becoming a writer, Krivák trained as a Jesuit priest, but his theology is deeply human rather than doctrinaire. I gather that an unusual priest will play a major part in the sequel to this novel, The Signal Flame. It makes me eager to read it. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever know—the only ground that up to then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk—receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe....more |
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Jul 24, 2017
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Jul 26, 2017
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Jul 23, 2017
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Paperback
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| 1501140213
| 9781501140211
| 1501140213
| 3.57
| 9,434
| May 09, 2017
| May 09, 2017
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really liked it
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House of Whispers, House of Murder [image] François Perrier: The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (detail) The basic story, of course, is that of Aeschylus' Oreste House of Whispers, House of Murder [image] François Perrier: The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (detail) The basic story, of course, is that of Aeschylus' Oresteia: a chain of killings, each in revenge for the other. King Agamemnon of Argos, the leader of the Greeks, prevented by contrary winds from setting sail for Troy. sacrifices his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods. Years pass before Agamemnon returns, only to be killed in revenge by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Years pass again, during which Agamemnon's son Orestes, who had been kidnapped on the day of his father's murder, grows to manhood. Finally, Orestes returns and, encouraged by his surviving sister Electra, kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. For the crime of matricide, he in turn is pursued by the Furies. [image] Pierre-Narcisse Guérin: Murder of Agamemnon Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles all tell parts of this story with some variations. I personally am most familiar with the opera by Richard Strauss based on the play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which focuses on Electra's vengeance and Orestes' return. Colm Tóibín, telling it in his own way, acknowledges the classical sources, but says that much of his plot and many of his characters are solely the products of his imagination. After a brilliant retelling of the first two killings (those of Iphigenia and Agamemnon), he then diverges from the originals to look closely at Orestes during his years of exile. We see him first as a captive in a kind of prison-school, then watch him escape with two other boys called Lysander and Mitros, then see the three living as fugitives in the house of an old woman on a deserted sea coast. A parallel chapter focuses on Electra, growing up in a household ruled by fear and tyranny. In the last hundred pages, Orestes returns, and though he does indeed kill Clytemnestra, most of the other events follow a different path that is Tóibín's own. [image] Greek relief: Orestes kills Clytemnestra So why did Tóibín undertake this? It doesn't seem to be a commission, like the Canongate Myth Series. One can only think that it speaks to several of the author's persistent themes, especially mothers and their sons in search of personal identity. These are found throughout his Wexford novels and stories. They also partially explain his interest in historical themes in his previous standalone novels, Henry James' emotional formation in The Master, and the epitome of all mother-and-son stories, Mary and Jesus in The Testament of Mary . And the first voice we hear is that of the mother, Clytemnestra. At first, it seems that she will be entirely sympathetic; her outrage at being tricked into bringing her daughter as the bride for Achilles only to see her slaughtered is a powerful spur, and Tóibín gives her the same hard-edged treatment he uses for the Virgin Mary, and a similar scorn for the platitudes of religion: I wish now to stand here and laugh. Hear me tittering and then howling with mirth at the idea that the gods allowed my husband to win his war, that they inspired every plan he worked out and every move he made, that they knew his cloudy moods in the morning and the strange and silly exhilaration he could exude at night, that they listened to his implorings and discussed them in their godly homes, that they watched the murder of my daughter with approval.This is powerful stuff, and I feel that the first 65 pages, where Tóibín stays closest to his sources, only retelling them from the viewpoint of this angry but realistic woman, are the best in the book—even as we become aware that Clytemnestra is acting for selfish motives also and is as much a tryant as her slain husband. When Tóibín leaves the mother to follow her son Orestes, the nature of the book changes entirely, losing its mythological resonance and becoming more like a boys' adventure story. There are still excellent descriptions and action scenes, but once the boys manage to escape and find refuge, most of the urgency disappears. Instead, Tóibín develops—with great delicacy, I must say—a growing homoerotic relationship between Orestes and Lysander. So far as I can see, this Lysander is an invented character; Euripides gives Orestes a different companion, Pylades. As there is a strong tradition that the two were lovers, this is not something that Tóibín is grafting on to the story. I found it moving, but not compelling. It also fits in with Tóibín's picture of Orestes returning to Argos as a much more sensitive and confused character than the avenging hero of myth. [image] Hellenistic: Orestes and Pylades In the end, it all comes down to Tóibín's treatment of the final act of this drama. I'm used to the rapid denouement of the Strauss opera where the killing of both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus follows almost immediately upon the great recognition scene between Orestes and Electra, so had trouble with the more leisurely pace here. Orestes is back in the palace for some time before he takes his revenge, and when it comes it is almost perfunctory. His relationship with Electra is far from clear-cut, and indeed she is the least fully realized of the major characters. A lot of the last fifty pages is spent tying the loose ends of Tóibín's invented plot concerning Lysander and his family. So far from being pursued by Furies, Orestes is oddly sidelined, so that the novel ends in a rather inconsequential dying fall. On the other hand, what could the author do? The Oresteia is a work of absolutes: Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter; Clytemnestra had to take revenge; his two surviving children had to avenge their father. But the moral swtichbacks are too much for a modern author; I imagine that a lot of the invented plot had to do with making the killings justifiable. One also senses a personal truth behind this: the young man's confused feelings about leaving his family and striking off on his own, together with the isolation of one who finds he cannot easily fit into the stereotypes of others. I only wish Tóibín has found a more compelling way of showing it. 3.5 stars, rounded up. ...more |
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Jul 03, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0312181108
| 9780312181109
| 0312181108
| 3.99
| 107,631
| 1948
| Mar 15, 1998
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it was amazing
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Cassandra Captures Happiness I don't really want to write any more, I just want to lie here and think. But there is something I want to capture. ItCassandra Captures Happiness I don't really want to write any more, I just want to lie here and think. But there is something I want to capture. It has to do with the feeling I had when I watched the Cottons coming down the lane, the queer separate feeling. I like seeing people when they can't see me. I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit like the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do. I can't get the feeling into words—it slipped away when I tried to capture it.Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain can't decide whether she wants to be Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen. But when two rich American brothers, Simon and Neil Cotton, move into the big house nearby and become the landlords of the semi-ruined castle where her family live, the choice seems to be made. She immediately thinks of Bingley and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and watches as her older sister Rose (almost 21) begins the old dance with the two young men. And what of Cassandra herself? J. K. Rowling describes her as "one of the most charismatic narrators I have ever met." And she is right. As Cassandra uses her journal to capture the castle and her family, we first laugh with her, then marvel at the acuteness of her observation, then feel for her as she struggles with things she cannot so easily capture: the confused emotional awareness of a girl entering womanhood over the span of a long English summer. Though published in 1948, the novel is set in the 1930s. Cassandra 's father, James Mortmain, has published one book, Jacob Wrestling, which critics have compared to Joyce; however, he has written nothing more for years, royalties have dried up, and his family live in genteel poverty. But in most romantic surroundings. While still affluent, Mortmain fixed up an old house built in the ruins of Godsend Castle. Then his wife died, leaving him with two girls and a boy: Rose, Cassandra, and Thomas—20, 17, and 15 when the novel opens. He has married a much younger woman, an artist's model named Topaz, strikingly beautiful and totally devoted. She presides over a largely empty house (since most of the furniture has been sold), while Mortmain holes up in the medieval gatehouse reading detective novels. The only useful male around is Stephen, the son of their former maid, whom the Mortmains took in after her death—thus adding a Heathcliff figure to the mix. All seems set for an English rural comedy, much in the manner of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. And indeed I found myself laughing continually over the first few chapters. But just as I was beginning to wonder (as I did also with the Gibbons) whether comedy alone was enough to keep the book going, the plot got moving and the novel deepened. But not necessarily in tandem. The romantic situations certainly built nicely, with Rose, Cassandra, and their father falling (not necessarily respectively) under the spell of Simon, Neil, and their mother; add to the mix Stephen and a predatory female photographer, and you get enough plot twists to surprise even me, let alone our innocent narrator Cassandra. But in many ways, the depth developed quite separately from the plot. For example, there is a scene later in the book when Cassandra consults the village Vicar that touches on real profundity. Though a minor character, the Vicar is a splendid portrait of a man of the cloth whose intellect and humanity are not constricted by his calling.* Cassandra is not a believer at all, and he respects that, but he nonetheless advises her to go into the church and simply listen: I could hear the rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed cut off from the restless day outside—just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: "I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness."You may note that I have put this book on my "Young Adult" shelf. I don't mean to reduce it by so doing; although about a young adult, it is written for adult readers, unlike Dodie Smith's famous children's book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. But it is also a book I would happily give to my granddaughter when she enters her teens. Although there are quite adult shadows on the horizon, this is about as far as we get in the actual text, where Cassandra is thinking what marriage means: And I still wouldn't like it. Oh, I'd love the clothes and the wedding. I am not so sure I would like the facts of life, but I have got over the bitter disappointment I felt when I first heard about them, and one obviously has to try them sooner or later. What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to.That is her voice, absolutely. Cassandra might shrink from the happy-ever-after prospect, but in fact she is rather good at capturing happiness when it comes. Here, to show how she herself develops as a person, are two of her descriptions of happiness. The first comes at the end of the first chapter, before the story has really started: I finish this entry sitting on the stairs. I think it worthy of note that I have never felt happier in my life—despite sorrow for father, pity for Rose, embarrassment about Stephen's poetry and no justification for hope as regards our family's general outlook. Perhaps it is because I have satisfied my creative urge; or it may be due to the thought of eggs for tea.The second is closer to the end of the book. I can only quote a few lines of Smith's magnificent extended passage, but they are enough to show that, though still only 17, Cassandra is growing up: The castle seemed to be mine in a way it never had been before; the day seemed specially to belong to me; I even had a feeling that I owned myself more than I usually do. I became very conscious of all my movements—if I raised my arm I looked at it wonderingly, thinking, "That is mine!" And I took pleasure in moving, both in the physical effort and in the touch of the air—it was most queer how the air did seem to touch me, even when it was absolutely still. All day long I had a sense of great ease and spaciousness. And my happiness had a strange, remembered quality as though I had lived it before. Oh, how can I recapture it—that utterly right, homecoming sense of recognition?+ + + + + + *Second only to the Rev. Will Ransome in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. It was Perry's list of formative books in the appendix to her wonderful novel that convinced me to give Dodie Smith a try. ...more |
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Jun 23, 2017
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Jun 26, 2017
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Jun 23, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0062225553
| 9780062225559
| 0062225553
| 3.80
| 33,878
| Nov 22, 2016
| Nov 22, 2016
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really liked it
| Brilliant . . . so what's my problem? In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to confirm with memory, narrative p Brilliant . . . so what's my problem? In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to confirm with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Whatever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.What a brilliant Author's Note! Moonglow may be a memoir of the author's grandfather, but Chabon has always been a wizard at telling stories. Now, right at the start of the book, he gives due notice that he will let nothing—not even fact—stand in the way of a good one. His grandfather leaps off these pages as tearaway, mischief-maker, jail-bird, space-nut, special operations officer in WW2, inventor, failed businessman, businessman again, and elderly Don Quixote battling a pet-eating python in a Florida retirement village. To impress a Dulcinea, naturally; from beginning to end, he shows a fine capacity for love and making love, even if his marriage to the author's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and fiery actress, was by no means plain sailing. Chabon brings scene after scene to life with his marvelous gift for description, such as this V2 attack in London during the war: The physics of the rocket's detonation had sucked the show windows from the front of Selfridges. The windows had been decorated for the season with ice floes and ice mountains of pasteboard and sequins. A frolic of pasteboard Eskimos and penguins. The aurora borealis or australis in arcs of colored foil. A mannequin Father Christmas in Scott Expedition drag. Now the sidewalk was buried in snowbanks of shattered glass. Christmas trees lay scattered like tenpins. Their needles drifted down onto my grandfather's hat and the epaulets of his greatcoat. When he hung up his trousers that night before bed, cellophane snowflakes snowed down from the upturned cuffs. Pasteboard Eskimos and penguins, headless, torn in half, continued their inaccurate cohabitation. Father Christmas was found the next morning in a dovecote on a nearby rooftop, intact and unharmed apart from a holiday frosting of pigeon shit.I got the book two years ago as a review copy from Amazon Vine. When I finally opened it, I kicked myself for not having done so sooner; it felt like digging into one of those cornucopia of stories I devoured as a boy. But then, roughly halfway through, I suddenly realized that I did not particularly want to read any more. Nothing had changed; I'd just had enough. So what was the problem? Perhaps my difficulty with classification is a clue. Is it fiction (which I enjoy) or a non-fiction memoir (which generally I don't)? Because of its many brilliant free-standing episodes, I have put it on my "stories" shelf, but does it also add up to be a novel? It works in the moment, but does it also work as a 400-page whole? As I see it, there are three ways in which an author might generate ongoing momentum. He can make the individual sections so wonderful that the reader cannot stop. Call this the box of chocolates approach; it works for a while, but you still must allow for indigestion. Or he can make us readers so interested in his grandfather as a person that we are anxious to see what happens to him. Chabon almost succeeds in this, I think, especially once his grandmother and mother come into the picture. But (personal failing) I am not a fan of memoir and biography generally, and it is difficult to truly invest in someone who is never given a proper name. Thirdly, the author can give succeeding chapters an increasing gravity or complexity, building up themes that can be developed into a true novel. Again, I think I saw Chabon beginning to do this roughly a third of the way through the book, but it was not quite enough to capture my loyalty. I stopped at about the halfway point, then read the last four chapters in detail. Nothing in them, I'm afraid, made me regret my decision to skip—though someone who is into non-fiction might not have had my problem. All the same, Michael Chabon is indeed brilliant, and I do not want to make this a negative review. So let me end with the first passage which made me think that this might be a novel after all. The grandfather, with the allied forces invading Germany in the last winter of the War, comes upon a priest in a rural village. He has a name, Father Nickel, and in the two or three chapters in which he features, becomes almost as well filled-out a character as the grandfather himself. Moreover Chabon, who has emphasized throughout the book that this is a Jewish story, creates a character from a very different belief system, and does so with a glowing generosity that I shall remember even after the rest has faded: "We've has a very cold winter," the old priest said. He was sitting up front, next to Gatto. Everyone agrees that this was unquestionably the case. "I gave out the pews and reredos and so forth. The beautiful oak pulpit, which a professor-doctor from Tübingen dated to the thirteenth century. I told them to take the crucifix too. It was quite large. Used prudently, it might have heated a dozen homes for a night or two. But there they drew the line. They were shocked, I think. I tried to explain that if He would give His life to save their souls, He would not mind parting with His image to warm their bones." He shook his head, looking at the ruin of his church. "Of course, in the end it went to waste."...more |
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Jun 02, 2018
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Jun 09, 2018
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Sep 11, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0307961222
| 9780307961228
| 0307961222
| 3.54
| 3,473
| Aug 2011
| Jul 09, 2013
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liked it
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A Madam of Consequence Henning Mankell divides his year in half between his native Sweden and Mozambique in SE Africa, and African characters have ofte A Madam of Consequence Henning Mankell divides his year in half between his native Sweden and Mozambique in SE Africa, and African characters have often cropped up even in his Swedish detective novels. So it is not surprising that his interest would be piqued on hearing that the principal brothel in the port city of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) was owned by a Swedish woman, back in the early 1900s when the country was under colonial rule as Portuguese East Africa. As little more is known of this woman, Mankell imagines her story for herself. For him, she is Hanna Renström, an illiterate girl from a famine-stricken area in Northern Sweden who, by a series of adventures, goes to sea as a ship's cook but leaves the Australia-bound ship at the African port, and checks into what she thinks is an hotel but turns out to be a bordello—a bordello that, by a further series of adventures, she ends up owning. On one level, this is a Bildungsroman. For, ignoring the much longer span of time in the original documents, Mankell shows Hanna's life only for two or three years in her late teens. And a lot happens to her: a two-week journey by sleigh to the Swedish port, life as a servant in someone else's household, the steamship voyage, love, marriage, and widowhood, her first encounter with Africa—and that's only the beginning. There is something of the quality of a young-adult novel to the story. While nothing is unbelievable in itself, the sheer number of plot twists (at least in the first half) and the rapidity with which everything happens do require a certain suspension of disbelief. The book has a very different feel from the painstaking progress towards a solution in Mankell's Kurt Wallander stories, or the slow emotional thaw of a novel like Italian Shoes. It is not helped by Mankell's typically dry style, often in very short sentences, as in the final three paragraphs of the second short chapter: But she can't run away. The ship has been transformed into an impregnable fortress.There is also a young-adult feel in the way Mankell delivers his message. When she lands in Africa, Hanna has never encountered black people before, but almost immediately makes some friends among the women working in the brothel. Until she meets a white nurse who begins to teach her that the natives are not to be trusted and must be kept in her place, and becomes infected with these attitudes herself. But as the book moves on, Hanna's views develop further, as she comes to understand the evil of colonialism and sense the underlying fear behind it. In the latter part of the book, she will stake virtually all she has (rather improbably, I think) on defending a black woman who has murdered her white common-law husband. I like Hanna and applaud almost all her more mature decisions, but I would like her even more if I didn't feel she was merely a model for the author's humanitarian sentiments, admirable though these are. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 10, 2013
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Oct 12, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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| 1101903481
| 9781101903483
| 1101903481
| 3.84
| 4,739
| Sep 01, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
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really liked it
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A Year of Drama Jesus. Jesus he never. Jesus he really did. No teacher Never, nor anyone else. Bang out blatant about going permissive. Noting, I noA Year of Drama Jesus. Jesus he never. Jesus he really did. No teacher Never, nor anyone else. Bang out blatant about going permissive. Noting, I note another face laughing just like me. Trying not. To be mature. To keep the rict from boiling over. Of an age she also seems so I Hello when I'd not usually. Then she, sloe-eyed with slowest smiles, says Cuppa? In the Canteen? And so wriggle in. Slip in. Remember people are blind to under your skin or. Under my skin now.Irish girl on her first day at drama school in London. The teacher tells them to remember to use condoms. She, a virgin still, is both shocked and validated in her desire for new life, new experiences and, starting here, new friends. The sex part will come soon enough (together with an enormous amount of drinking, smoking, and stoning). She meets in a bar an older man, 38, twice her age, an actor too, somewhat well-known, although she does not recognize him. The novel is about that first year of hers in London, not so much about drama school (which disappointed me a little), but a lot about that relationship. As I noted in my review of McBride's first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, the secret to her writing is hearing it aloud. Listening to a YouTube video of her reading a short excerpt unlocked the rest for me. Or more or less. It still sounded strange, though there were moments where the pain and violence of that book that could not have been written any other way. Here, the language is most appropriate for the sex. I have seldom seen so much bedroom writing in a novel outside of Henry Miller, but it did not offend me. In the earlier stages at least, she seemed very real in her discoveries of shame, pain, and soon enough eagerness. What did upset me was the amount of dissolution in between. I began to wonder how the protagonist ever had time to learn anything at that drama school, with so much of it spent on getting drunk, or stoned, or recovering from same. But alas I too recognize the craziness of that first year away from home as a fledgling adult, and McBride's fractured syntax, running the gamut from total chaos to sheer poetry,* is as good a way to capture it as any. Much as I would rather forget. Readers of A Girl will recall that it is not until quite late in that book that the story kicks into high gear. So it is here. Both the protagonist and her actor lover (both unnamed for now), bring baggage to their relationship; being older, he carries more than her. As the novel nears its end, however, much of this back-story gets revealed, first in hints, then more completely. The characters acquire names. The jagged sentences begin to smooth out, without ever completely losing Eimear McBride's characteristic lilt; apart from that, it might almost be a different author. Whereas A Girl used much the same language throughout, only later showing the reason for it, The Lesser Bohemians tells its story partly through the transformation of language. Is it too easy a device? Does it make for too sentimental an ending? Perhaps—if you see this as her story, which is how it starts. But having read a couple of reviews which see it more as his evolution, I am changing my tune on this one, raising my original three stars to four. There is some painful truth in here, but you do need the patience to winkle it out. ====== * I had a curious experience while reading. As it happens, I am currently writing a long poem, a parody pastoral in loose iambic pentameters, which has given me the habit of testing lines in my head for scansion. And there were times when, mentally reading McBride aloud, I heard her prose slipping into the familiar verse patterns, or variants of them. Which confirmed for me that much of what she is writing is poetry. But it also made me less able to grasp her poetry-prose, with its unpredictability of rhythm, its run-ons, sudden stops, and occasional surprise of concealed rhymes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 05, 2016
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Aug 07, 2016
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Aug 05, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1594486344
| 9781594486340
| 1594486344
| 3.94
| 35,210
| 2013
| Aug 20, 2013
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liked it
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John Brown's Mascot There are three reasons to read this entertaining historical novel. It won the 2013 National Book Award, and it is always good to f John Brown's Mascot There are three reasons to read this entertaining historical novel. It won the 2013 National Book Award, and it is always good to figure out what the judges were up to. It contains a lot of interesting information about lesser-known aspects of the abolitionist movement, especially the fighting between the Free Staters and the Pro-Slavers in Kansas Territory around 1856. And it is written in an infectiously cocky voice—that of Henry Shackleford, a mulatto boy who gets swept up by John Brown after his father has been accidentally killed in a fight. Although Henry is a mature man by the time he actually writes, he is only nine when his tale begins, and the irreverent attitude of youth colors everything. There has hardly been such an attractive narrator since Huck Finn. Oh yes—Henry goes through the entire book as a girl. Since he is wearing a corn sack when he first sees him, John Brown mistakes his gender; and when his father protests (just before getting killed) "Henry ain't a—," Brown thinks he is saying his name, Henrietta. Now I am not quite sure why this deception has to be continued for the entire four-year span of the novel, although it does provide some amusement in the middle section when Henry finds work as a servant in a whorehouse, and has to avoid graduating to more characteristic employment. By this time (roughly the second quarter of a 400-page book), the headlong excitement of the opening has slacked off, and John Brown himself is out of the picture. He is a splendid creation, a grizzled, hard-praying, Bible-quoting, bloodthirsty fanatic who has been called (though not by McBride) America's first terrorist. But with him out of the way, the tension drops, and never quite takes hold again even in the second half, when Brown heads East for the failed but historically pivotal raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, one of the triggers of the Civil War. More than once I was reminded of Devil's Dream, Madison Smartt Bell's portrait of a similarly charismatic maverick on the other side of the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Both authors favor high color and the surprise of the unconventional. But Bell is politically and morally more complex, and in the end it was this that I missed about McBride. He writes a great adventure, but it feels like one, more in the manner of Stevenson or Rider Haggard. It does not have much to say as the prelude to the most morally divisive schism in American history. ...more |
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Jan 07, 2014
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Jan 09, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1935744186
| 9781935744184
| 1935744186
| 4.09
| 45,768
| 2009
| Apr 24, 2012
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liked it
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Interested, but Bored How's this for a left-handed compliment? James Wood, writing in the New Yorker, says of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's si Interested, but Bored How's this for a left-handed compliment? James Wood, writing in the New Yorker, says of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's six volume autobiographical novel Min Kamp There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book: even when I was bored, I was interested.Put off by the similarity to a notorious German title (which appears to be deliberately ironic), I resisted this best-seller at first, but after hearing it highly recommended by so many writers whom I respect, I gave it a try. And my verdict is very much like Wood's. Knausgaard's obsessive recording of the minutest details of a mostly ordinary life, down to the routes of the commuter buses running in and out of Kristiansand, can indeed be boring. Yet there is an honesty there, a freedom from cant, and a skill in construction that make Knausgaard's writing undoubtedly interesting. Yet I would stay clear of Wood's word "compelling"; I have had a fair taste of it, but am not addicted; I am perfectly happy to leave the remaining five volumes to others. No doubt on account of its autobiographical nature and six-volume scale, My Struggle has been compared to Proust. But forget that. There is none of Proust's perfumed writing, transmuted sexuality, or endless summers peopled with aristocrats and artists. Knausgaard writes from pretty much a working class background, and anything he has to say—including his sexual exploits—he says straight. Volume 1 takes him from early puberty to mid-teens, but it is not told in strict chronological order like a memoir. It opens with a provocative essay on how we always hurry the dead out of sight (rather than leaving them around for a day or two) and ends with an extended account of the event that gives rise to the volume's subtitle: "A death in the family." In this, as elsewhere in the book, he stretches time and reshuffles it, going back to look at the same thing from different angles. He also keeps cross-cutting between his teenage years and his life today, married to his third wife, the harried father of three small children, and a resident of Malmö, Sweden. Ordinary though his life may be, he finds interesting ways to write about it. I also suspect that there is a lot I missed here that would be picked up by Scandinavian readers. At one point, for instance, there is a casual reference to Agnar Mykle, a left-wing Norwegian author who published a number of tell-all autobiographical novels in the fifties that were prosecuted for obscenity. One wonders if this is a Norwegian specialty; certainly you could say much the same about both this book and another Norwegian Bildungsroman that I read recently by Johan Harstad, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? A few pages later, Knausgaard briefly mentions the concept of "The Law of Jante," proposed by the Danish-Norwegian author Axel Sandemose. One might call this a principle of shared mediocrity, by which small Scandinavian communities mistrust individual excellence and quash any attempt to rise above the common denominator of one's neighbors. A fascinating idea. Karl Ove Knausgaard seems at one and the same time to write within the everyday ordinariness of local life and to rise beyond it. If the paradox intrigues you, this is the book for you. ...more |
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Mar 28, 2014
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Sep 06, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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it was amazing
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Jun 14, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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Jul 04, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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May 15, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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it was amazing
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May 13, 2018
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May 11, 2018
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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Aug 04, 2018
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Apr 30, 2018
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really liked it
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Jan 03, 2010
not set
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Apr 24, 2018
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| 3.30
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it was amazing
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Apr 27, 2018
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Apr 24, 2018
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really liked it
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Apr 06, 2018
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Apr 06, 2018
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it was amazing
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Feb 06, 2018
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Feb 02, 2018
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| 4.51
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it was amazing
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Nov 09, 2017
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Nov 01, 2017
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Sep 07, 2017
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Sep 04, 2017
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Jul 26, 2017
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Jul 23, 2017
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| 3.57
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really liked it
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Jul 18, 2017
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Jul 03, 2017
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| 3.99
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it was amazing
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Jun 26, 2017
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Jun 23, 2017
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Jun 09, 2018
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Sep 11, 2016
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| 3.54
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liked it
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Oct 12, 2013
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Aug 09, 2016
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| 3.84
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really liked it
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Aug 07, 2016
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Aug 05, 2016
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| 3.94
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liked it
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Jan 09, 2014
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Jul 18, 2016
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| 4.09
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liked it
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Mar 30, 2014
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Jul 14, 2016
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