Gillian SlovoRezensionen

I don't know what sort of tone the book set, but the abridged audio came across almost post-apocalyptic, although it's set in modern London. It just seemed so crazy, the riots, the gangs, no one safe except the politician in their ivory towers (all corrupt, of course), and the very structure of society seemingly breaking down. Perhaps it was a little over the top. I'm not sure I would be able to stay on board if I were reading the book. I couldn't quite tell what all the fuss was about. Then again, look what happened in Ferguson, and Baltimore. These days it doesn't seem to take much. Perhaps it was spot on.

Gritty Aussie drama. A good mystery and love story in which you can almost feel the red grit on your hands as you read. A really good insight into life in the outback of Australia.

A very disappointing read. The characters were unlikeable with no redeeming qualities so I failed to connect or have any sympathy for them.½

This one was an OK summer read but I kept feeling let down by it, as if it had promise but never quite lived up to it, neither with respect to well-developed interesting characters nor in terms of what was happening to them.½

Un bon "policier" sur les périodes de transitions, et principalement l'incroyable transition imparfaite mais réussie qu'a connu l'Afrique du Sud½

Gillian Slovo is one of three daughters of Joe Slovo and Ruth First- ANC revolutionaries/terrorists/guerrilla fighters/intellectuals/anti-apartheid campaigners/politicians/parents. And it is that complex! The girls necessarily take second place to activities that the parents engage in for the sake of justice and the greater good. The author of this family memoir struggles to come to terms with her place and needs in a situation where the needs of others are greater and of a life and death nature. As is so often the case, there is no absolute resolution, but as the story of their combined lives unfolds we get the feeling that Gillian has at least come to have peace about the actions of her heroic and largely absent parents.

This account gives a lot of information about the rise and actions of the ANC, who went from terrorists to the ruling political party after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. I would have liked more political stuff near the end when it was coming clear that the ANC being in charge was able to affect little change in economic situation for black South Africans. But I think that at that time, there was just so much jubilation that apartheid had ended and that formerly exiled ANC members were now in positions of power, that the possibility of change was enough. Highly recommended.

A tale of intertwining stories set in Leningrad of the 1930s and 1940s. While the siege of Leningrad is significant in the later part of the novel, much of the story concerns the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and their repercussions on the lives of the characters. Very good reading, recommended for anyone interested in Soviet Russia.

One of Slovo's early works in the Kate Baeier series. Not a bad yarn but dated. I think she is more well known for her memoir of growing up in South Africa.

One word to describe how I felt about this book: frustrated.

First, I knew nothing about the historical event on which this is based, and I didn't feel the author made any of it clear. There was some kind of conflict between Egypt and Sudan, so a British general went there to fix things but he made a holy mess of everything. The book begins in 1884 when Britain sends more military to rescue him and his troops. The back story and political complications were a confusing muddle to me.

Second, the characters were totally unlikable. John Clarke, a young doctor who decides to go with the troops to the Sudan, comes across as superior and condescending. The general is stark raving mad with a God complex. John’s wife Mary is weak and needy and insecure, and becomes an opiate addict to deal with her loneliness. And then there’s the manipulative power-hungry journalist who’s campaigning for the general.

Third, the book reads like a rough draft. I don’t think an editor even glanced at the manuscript. Sentences like, “He was talking as if Will was a fellow general Will knew that he was really talking to himself.” (Wha?) and “The train juddered and champagne frothed out, some of it making it into the glass.” (The construction of that sentence implies that the champagne frothed out of the train.) It’s just quite dreadful.

I’ll use that clichéd review sentence: I really wanted to like this book. The author was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004 for “Ice Road.” I haven’t read that book, but I assumed that the prize nomination was indicative of her writing talent. And the events on which this story is based are wonderful material for a novel. But all in all, I really did not like this book and I only made it to the last page by sheer determination.

Gillian Slovo has a record of producing work based on contemporary issues and here we have a novel based on the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. It's a decent piece of work illustrating how big politics affects individuals and their lives. But the characters are sketchy and uninvolving. The ending is a little too contrived in order to achieve parity between the individuals and communities confronting each other. It gives an outsider some idea of life in modern South Africa but I'm not sure how it would be viewed in that country. Possibly a bit too simplistic.

Although I liked a lot about this book (which I first heard about here on LT), I found it disappointing. Only in the last few pages about the ice road across Lake Ladoga that relieved the siege of Leningrad (despite the title and the blurb on the back on my copy), the novel covers a group of interconnected people in Leningrad from the early years of the Soviet Union until the second world war, and particularly focuses on the time of Stalin's murderous purges in the late 30s. Slovo is ambitious, and tries to portray the feelings of people who believed in the goals of the Russian revolution, if not always in its methods, and who tried to further those goals even while making compromises with their own values and feelings. I admire her for trying to do this, even though I didn't find it entirely convincing. She does a good job of interweaving the different stories and creates some potentially interesting characters.

There are several reasons why I was disappointed in this book. Perhaps, the biggest one is that I have read a fair number of novels and nonfiction about this same time period, and this felt light weight compared to them. I am thinking here of writers like Vassily Grossman, Victor Serge, and Andrey Platonov, as well as books like Doctor Zhivago and Helen Dunmore's The Siege. Additionally, I never warmed up to most of the characters because they never seemed completely fully formed as characters and at times seemed like they were there to fill a role. And I got tired of their endless thinking and worrying, especially since very different characters seemed to express themselves with the same type of language, although expressing different thoughts. (For example, one character, who started out illiterate, keeps talking about how uneducated she is but expresses herself just like more educated characters.) Also, although I admire Slovo's historical research, at times it was a little heavy-handed; as a reader, I felt she was trying to make sure she mentioned the real historical facts a little too often. Finally, I thought the book was too long; I think it would have been more powerful if Slovo had condensed it.

I didn't hate this book but I had higher expectations than it was able to fulfill.

Het eerste deel van zwarte orchideeën gaat over de relatie tussen Evelyn en Emil in de nadagen van de Britse overheersing over Ceylon. Beiden zijn op het eiland geboren en getogen, maar Evelyn komt uit een arm Brits gezin, Emil uit een rijke Singalese familie. Beiden zijn jong, een beetje wild en opstandig, onconventioneel. Tegen de wens van hun families in trouwen zij met elkaar. Zij krijgen een zoontje, Milton.

Om redenen die mij nooit helemaal duidelijk werden wil Evelyn ineens naar Engeland verhuizen, een land waar zij nooit is geweest. Hoewel Emil een succesvol bedrijf opzet en daardoor in de hoogste kringen verkeert krijgt het gezin al snel te maken met subtiele en minder subtiele vormen van racisme. En waar Emil er alleen maar strijdvaardiger van wordt, ontstaat in Evelyn een gevoel van schaamte en ongemak, zozeer dat zij het gezin - dat inmiddels is uitgebreid met een dochter - verlaat.

Het tweede deel van het boek focust op de relatie tussen Emil en zijn zoon Milton. Net als zijn moeder wil Milton het liefste niet opvallen, erbij horen, maar door zijn huidskleur is dit onmogelijk. De relatie tussen vader en zoon kenmerkt zich door een totaal gebrek aan werkelijke communicatie en een opeenstapeling van frustraties. Pas als Milton in Sri Lanka zijn moeder terugvindt ontdekt hij een plek waar hij zich echt thuis kan voelen.

Wat ik echt mooi vond in dit boek zijn de beeldende beschrijvingen van de natuur in Sri Lanka. De subtiele manieren waarop de Britse samenleving het gemengde gezin buitensluit zijn tenenkrommend goed beschreven. Maar wat voor mij echt afbreuk deed aan het verhaal is de manier waarop de relatie tussen Evelyn en Emil wordt uitgewerkt. In het begin had het wat van een bouquetreeks romannetje, later werden beide karakters voor mij steeds irritanter in hun absurde gebrek aan communicatie en hun extreme dramatiek. Over the top en ongeloofwaardig.½

This is a pretty bad book; it's hard to believe Pat Barker meant the lavish praise quoted on the back cover. It's basically a romance novel set against the backdrop of a diligently researched Stalinist Russia, with obligatory markings of the various assassinations, show trials, and other newsworthy events; the main action, however, is the endless self-questionings and absurd actions of the main characters, not one of whom I found the least believable. And the repetitions! Slovo says nothing once if she can say it six times, with a bunch of rewordings thrown in. Or, as she might put it:

"He read on in disbelief. She said it again. She said the same thing yet again. Now in slightly different words, but it was unmistakably the same thing. Or perhaps he was dreaming it? He seemed to be dreaming a lot these days. But no, this was reality, and she was repeating herself in reality. Was she being paid by the word? Useless to think such things. He could not tear himself away; he kept reading, hoping for something better. But there was never anything better. Just the repeating, the endless repeating..."

Also, as in most books about Russia by non-Russians, there are a lot of mistakes (e.g., the daughter of Demyan is called "Demyanovichna"). It won't bother most people, of course, but it bothers me.

Gillian Slovo opens her novel Ice Road (2004) with a chapter on the story of the Chelyuskin expedition in the early 1930s, an attempt by the Soviet Union to open up a one-season navigation from European north to the Far East via the Arctic. The expedition ends in disaster, but the international rescue effort was made into a huge propaganda success for the Soviet Union. Slovo mentions a little-known theory that the expedition was doomed from the beginning.
The episode introduces the main character in the novel, an uneducated cleaner-cook Irina Davydovna, who survives the Chelyuskin disaster, the purges and, finally, the siege of Leningrad, which is described towards the end of the book.

I think Ice Road has been unfairly overshadowed by Helen Dunmore's The Siege. While stylistically Helen Dunmore may be stronger than Slovo, psychologically characters in Ice Road are treated deeper than in The Siege. Slovo captured the ordinary life and the paranoia of the thirties in Russia in a more striking manner than it comes through in Dunmore's book.

Read the full review on Tetradki:

http://russianbooks.blogspot.com/2011/03/two-leningrad-novels-by-english-writers...

This was an intriguing book, the characters superbly portrayed. A very balanced picture of the author's parents who were both entirely absorbed with their political engagements and struggles, to the extent that they ignored their three daughters.½

This was a tremendously compelling book which I could not put down. The characters were very complex and well developed -- dark and good sides were convincing shown and really reflected the realities of life in apartheid South Africa. The weakest character was probably the main character, but this did not detract from the story or the general strength of the author's character development. An excellent book about an absorbing and complex social experiment that could only have played out this way in South Africa.½

I enjoyed this book and the characters and story were well developed. Writing style was very good. However, I'm completely mystified as to both the title and the reviews on the book which both indicate it is about the Siege of Leningrad. In fact, only a very small proportion of thebook covers the Siege and this section does not indicate that the author did much research into the Seige. The bulk of the book deals with family and social structures under Stalin. This part of the book has clearly been well researched and the complex social interactions and tensions within families and between friends are very well developed. All in all a good book, but it needed a different title.½

This is the first novel I have read by this author. It is set in both Ceylon (as it was then called) and England and covers a period of twenty five years from the 1940s in Ceylon, to England from the 1950s to the 1970s and then back to Ceylon. I was really drawn in from the beginning of the story. The main character Evelyn is an English girl born and raised in Ceylon. The country is on the verge of independence and Evelyn's family is set to return to England when she meets and falls in love with Emil Raymundo, a Sinhalese man from a wealthy family. As a result she refuses to marry the kind but dull Tommy and marries Raymundo in spite of the opposition of his family. They leave Ceylon in the 1950s with their son Milton and later have a daughter Vanessa. I enjoyed the first half of the book which described life in Britain in the 50s for a mixed race family. Raymundo's flamboyance is disliked both by his family and the British and there are some beautaifully described scenes such as sports day at their son's boarding school. but without revealing too much of the story, I felt that the book lost its way a little in the second half and was not so convincing. But I still in the end thought it was worth reading and would be interested to read another of this author's books as a point of comparison.½

I always find stories set in Colonial times fascinating when they cover the era of transition into independence. This novel is set in Ceylon as it moves towards becoming Sri Lanka. The main characters are both rebellious in their own families and end up together with the problems of mixed marriages, rejection from families and the problems that their children face, especially in somewhere like England in the post-war years.The extra fascination is to watch the change in relationships over time and in different countries with the new pressures that are placed on it.

A tale of a couple both born and brought up in Sri Lanka - meet while young - he is brown and she is white. Marry against parents wishes - move to UK, [more the wife's wishes than husbands], husband and children suffer racism and classism, especially hurtful at school. Woman becomes depressed - disappears - husband tells the children she died in a car accident, even takes them to her "grave." The son gets through a period at posh, boarding school and then at state school, visits Sri Lanka when older and finds he is comfortable at last. Finds his mother too.

Sarah receives a phonecall in New York from her mentor Ben, a call that will bring her back the dorpie in South Africa that she left. The Truth Commission has arrived in town and the school Headmaster would like to use it to find out what happened to his son, to finally have a body to bury.

The New South Africa still trying to come to terms with its past, the victims and the perpetrators are caught up by a connection that none can break.

Kate Beier is hired by the wealthy Mrs. Weatherby to look after her daughter Alicia, a brilliant musician and spoilt brat. Kate is detailed to shadow the enigmatic figure who haunts Alicia's concerts. One night a broken body is discovered at the foot of a staircase after the concert... Average mystery, not a favourite of mine. Gillian Slovo is a South African novelist and playwright.

Truth and lies, and the uncertainties that lie in between - a novel about the relationship between aggressor and victim, between torturer and tortured. This book is a powerful drama about life in post-apartheid South Africa, a modern morality tale.

Sri Lanka/Ceylon. Milton, Verena, Evelyn and Emil and racism

Truth commission in South Africa. Dirk, Pieter, Sarah, Alex