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1wandering_star
Jul. 16, 2012, 8:50 am

70. Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz

I doubly have LT to thank for this book - it went on my wishlist because of LT recommendations, and then I received it as part of my Secret Santa package.

The book is made up of short stories, barely interlinked but all set in the same village. They are really vignettes - things happen, but no resolution is reached. Somehow, too, Oz manages to write in a style which is both absolutely naturalistic - simple and clear - and at the same time has an air of the fantastic about it. All this makes the stories unsettling, in a way that is very difficult to put your finger on. I really enjoyed this - I understand it's a very different style from most of his books, but I am nevertheless keen to read more Oz.

Sample, from the very end of one story:

Nothing stirs the row of cypresses separating her yard from the cemetery. There is no hint of a breeze. Even the crickets and the dogs have momentarily fallen silent. The darkness is dense and oppressive, and the heat hangs heavily over everything. Rachel Franco stands there trembling, alone in the dark under the blurred stars.

2wandering_star
Jul. 16, 2012, 10:19 am

71. The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty

The "optimist" is what elderly Judge McKelva declares himself to be, shortly before undergoing the same operation that killed his first wife. Watching over him at the hospital are his daughter, Laurel, and his young second wife, Fay.

The first two sections of the book are about the interactions between the two, and the people around them; first in the hospital, and then at the judge's wake. The last two sections are much more interior. With Fay away, Laurel is going through the house she grew up in, looking for traces of her parents and thinking about her memories.

I enjoyed the first two sections a lot more, although I am ambivalent about the character of Fay. She is incredibly self-centred, prickly and insensitive, and on one level this was very well-drawn: she doesn't say much, but what she does say gives you a very clear idea of her character. On the other hand, she's clearly the victim of tremendous snobbery from the Judge's old friends, and it's possible to see why she is so insistent on her rights. Welty has one character explain this to us; but at the same time, makes her very hate-able, and it felt a bit too much that she was trying to have it both ways.

As for the last two sections, there may well have been significances that I missed. But I found them a bit slow. I quite enjoyed this book, but don't think I would read it again.

Laurel looked over their heads, to where the Chinese prints brought home by an earlier generation of missionary McKelvas hung in their changeless grouping around the mantel clock. And she saw that the clock had stopped; it had not been wound, she supposed, since the last time her father had done duty by it, and its hands pointed to some remote three o'clock, as motionless as the time in the Chinese prints.

3wandering_star
Jul. 16, 2012, 10:24 am

The Saturday Morning Murder takes place in a psychoanalytic institute in Jerusalem, where a well-respected, popular analyst is discovered murdered. There are some very nice touches in this book, in particular the way that the work of the lead detective is compared to that of the analysts, as he seeks to understand motivations, undercurrents of feeling, what is not being said. But I gave up reading it when I realised, at page 190 of a 290-page thriller, that I didn't care what was going to happen next or who the murderer might be...

4wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Jul. 16, 2012, 8:52 pm

I highly recommend the short story written by Jennifer Egan in a series of tweets. It sounds like an unpromising gimmick. But it is rather wonderful.

A sample series of tweets:

Your abrupt awakening may feel like a reaction to a sound.

In moments of extreme solitude, you may believe you’ve heard your name.

We reassure ourselves by summoning, in our dreams, those we love and miss.


Full story available here.

5rebeccanyc
Jul. 16, 2012, 12:53 pm

I enjoyed the Egan story too, which I read in the New Yorker, but I'm a big Egan fan to begin with.

In your previous thread, you asked about Mortimer. I think I learned about The Pumpkin Eater being semi-autobiographical in the introduction to the NYRB edition I read, but I'm not at home so I can't check. I haven't read about her anywhere else, so it would have to have been there.

6baswood
Jul. 16, 2012, 4:58 pm

John Gardner had good things to say about Eudora Welty in On Moral Fiction., he would have hated the tweets by Jennifer Egan.

7wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Jul. 16, 2012, 8:59 pm

I'm afraid I don't know anything about John Gardner, why would he have hated the Egan?

It seems to me it's no different from any artist choosing a highly rigid format (say, a sonnet) and using those limitations to produce creativity.

It's true that the choice of format is very much of these times, but I liked the story enough as a stand-alone piece and not just as an example of what could be done in the format. (Something I didn't think about, say, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, although I read it many years ago and might like it better now.)

8kidzdoc
Bearbeitet: Jul. 16, 2012, 9:55 pm

I loved Scenes from Village Life, and I plan to read at least one novel by Amos Oz this quarter. I finished My Michael last week, which was very good, and I'll read The Same Sea and Black Box soon.

9dchaikin
Jul. 17, 2012, 10:50 am

Welty and Amos OZ - two others of billions of authors I need to read some time...oh, and Egan too, but that's more recently to me. Love the excerpt you posted from The Optimist's Daughter.

10rebeccanyc
Jul. 17, 2012, 11:28 am

#7 I had misgivings about The Golden Gate, but I took it to SF on a trip five years ago and thought it worked fine, and I really enjoyed it.

11detailmuse
Jul. 17, 2012, 1:31 pm

>It seems to me it's no different from any artist choosing a highly rigid format (say, a sonnet) and using those limitations to produce creativity.
Good point

I located my New Yorker and Egan's story and look forward to it. Over what period of time did she tweet it and did you read it in tweet-time? Very interesting to consider that reading experience.

12baswood
Jul. 17, 2012, 6:25 pm

#7 John Gardner wanted to see literature move back to more traditional values. I think he would have found the Egan tweets "too clever"

13Nickelini
Jul. 17, 2012, 7:31 pm

I'm afraid I don't know anything about John Gardner, why would he have hated the Egan?

Because he's a pompous ass, that's why. And an insufferable snob. (I loathe John Gardner).

14wandering_star
Jul. 18, 2012, 8:09 am

Interesting discussion! I have located your review of On Moral Fiction, Barry, and while I haven't read enough of the authors referenced to engage with the argument itself, I do have certain fundamental beliefs that lead me to think I wouldn't agree with it.

Namely: it's human nature to believe that the world is going to hell. I do it myself. But for that very reason, it's important to guard against this way of thinking. There are ample examples to be found, if you go back to the supposed golden age, that they were saying exactly the same thing about their degraded times. Didn't Plato say that the invention of writing would lead people to become more stupid? (Replace with: texting, the internet, rock 'n' roll...)

In fact, of course, all change does lead to some loss; but just as you can't have change without loss, you also can't have change without some gain. It's just that whatever is gained is less visible to us than what is lost, and (particularly for those of us over a certain age) we miss what we don't have any more.

Before anyone asks, I am equally disinclined to believe any argument that change is wholly for the good.

I don't much like cynicism but I also find a bit suspect any suggestion that art has a moral duty to be positive. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your review. But it seems to me that if art, or artists, have any moral duty at all (which I am not sure they do), it's to present an alternative view to the orthodoxy of the day.

15wandering_star
Jul. 18, 2012, 8:12 am

Detailmuse - no, I waited until the whole thing was out before reading it. I think it might have been quite difficult to keep the story in one's head just reading it a line/tweet at a time... particularly since the invention of writing has destroyed our memories...

16dchaikin
Jul. 18, 2012, 8:48 am

"it's human nature to believe that the world is going to hell. I do it myself. But for that very reason, it's important to guard against this way of thinking. "

elegantly put, w_s.

17wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Aug. 2, 2012, 3:49 am

72. Pictures Of Perfection and 73. The Wood Beyond, both by Reginald Hill

It's been a very poor month of reading: I have started, then put down, any number of books, and even when I've been in the middle of one I keep getting distracted. As the days went by I kept picking up authors of whom I thought, this will finally clear out the rut - but none of them worked until I went for Reginald Hill. These two are the fourteenth and fifteenth in the series of detective stories featuring Dalziel & Pascoe, and I did almost nothing yesterday but read them.

Pictures Of Perfection takes its title from Jane Austen ("And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked"), and includes a number of nods to her work - most charmingly, a Pride and Prejudice-esque beginning to the romance between Wieldy and Edwin Digweed. It also features wealthy families and their poor relations, shocking across-the-lines marriages, village gossips, and so forth. Great fun.

The Wood Beyond also brings echoes of the past into the present, but in a very different way. A relative's funeral causes Pascoe to dig a little bit into his family history, and he discovers that his great-grandfather was court-martialled and shot after Passchendaele. This historical injustice takes hold of him, and the modern-day mystery involving animal rights activists and a pharmaceutical research facility is blended with his ancestor's diary and other documents of the time. As is the way of these things, the two strands of story soon start to resonate and each begins to shed light on the other.

The woman had slipped out, leaving Pascoe with no impression other than that she was small and slight. This, he guessed, was Franny Harding, the poor relation, a guess confirmed when the Squire, balancing his length precariously on the deficient rocker, said, "Don't know what we'd do without Fran. Always there when you need her. And she eats next to nothing, you know."

Ignoring this tantalising glimpse into the domestic economy of the upper classes, Pascoe, deciding that in this case ambiguity was the worse part of discretion, said bluntly, "Constable Bendish may have gone missing, sir".

18wandering_star
Aug. 21, 2012, 6:59 am

74. Fools Of Fortune by William Trevor

Fools Of Fortune tells the story of two cousins, one Irish and the other from Dorset, whose families have been intermingled for several generations. Their lives echo those of their ancestors, but are also affected by two acts - one an act of great hate, one an act of love - which in turn send their echoes down into future generations.

I thought that the book was very well-written - especially the long first section, told from the point of view of the young Irish cousin Willie. It was an excellent child's-eye view of adult events, with plenty left unspoken - it takes skill I think to leave just enough unsaid for the reader to work out eventually. But I found the act of love and its consequences much more implausible than the act of hate, so while I could appreciate what the book was trying to say, it felt quite unbalanced.

I wish that somehow you might have shared my childhood, for I would love to remember you in the scarlet drawing-room, so fragrant in summer with the scent of roses, warmed in winter by the wood Tim Paddy gathered. Arithmetic and grammar books were laid out every morning on an oval table, red ink in one glass inkwell, black in the other. In that distant past I didn't even know that you existed.

19wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Aug. 21, 2012, 7:22 am

75. The Opium War by Julia Lovell

This is a brilliant history of the Opium War, which teases out both the actual chaotic history of events and how those events have been interpreted through time. It's not easy to try and understand the progress of the war as it unfolded, to clear away the misinformation that was produced both at the time and since, but Lovell does a very good job. Neither side comes out of it with any credit - the British increasingly prejudiced against the Chinese, and in hypocritical denial about their true aims, the Chinese so afraid to report accurately to the Emperor that for most of the conflict they had no idea what the British demands were (and were unable, at crucial points, to lay hands on the documents setting out the British position). The book makes it clear how contingent and coincidental the course of events was: for example, the increasing exports of silver which led the Chinese to crack down on opium imports were not, in fact, caused by a major shift in the balance of payments but rather by the independence movements in South America which reduced the world's supply of silver and led the British to pay in opium wherever possible (instead of silver as they had done previously). There are also many insights, especially about the way that Communist China has mythologised the Opium War as 'the start of China's modern history'. I was also struck by an aside that the Chinese migrant labour that attracted so much hostility in the early nineteenth century was a result of the 1860 Treaty of Beijing, pushed on the Qing after the burning of the Summer Palace, which legalised the emigration of Chinese subjects.

The book squeezes in a lot of information, so at times I felt a bit rushed through the story, and Lovell has a slightly flippant style which might have annoyed me if it hadn't been clear that she really knew what she was talking about. But it also kept this an easy read, which has important insights into the way that the West and China perceive each other right up to the present day. Highly recommended.

Both sides' accreditations were examined, with particular attention paid by the British to the emperor's edict investing Qiying and Yilibu as plenipotentiaries. The mystical object was ceremoniously produced, remembered Loch, from 'a little shabby yellow box badly made and worse painted.' An official 'carried the roll of yellow silk in both his hands and proceeded - his eyes reverentially fixed upon it - with slow and solemn steps towards the table... I was greatly amused watching the anxious and horrified faces of the various Chinese when Mr Morrison touched the commission.' Loch assumed this was down to the intense respect that all Chinese had for the Imperial Word, and to disgust at the idea of such a sacred object being polluted by alien hands. His diagnosis was probably some way off the mark. For the edict was almost certainly a forgery, cobbled together in panic the previous evening.

20wandering_star
Aug. 21, 2012, 7:33 am

76. Relics Of The Dead by Ariana Franklin

This is the third in the series of mysteries featuring Adelia Aguilar, twelfth-century version of a forensic pathologist and unwilling assistant to Henry II. This time, Adelia is asked to investigate two skeletons buried in Glastonbury Abbey, which Henry is hoping will turn out to be the bones of King Arthur and Guinevere (and will therefore allow him to show the rebellious Welsh that Arthur is dead, not sleeping, and will never come back to support their revolt). I would say that this wasn't quite as good as the second in the series (my favourite); on the other hand, it kept me up till 2.30am when I finished it...

Suddenly she didn't want anything. 'Mansur, we're grave-robbing'. Her foster-father, she knew, had bought dubiously acquired skeletons from dubious men in order to teach his students anatomy, but what was she advancing by desecrating these dead? Not science, not medical knowledge, merely a chance for an abbey to acquire riches and a king to get his dead Arthur.

21wandering_star
Aug. 21, 2012, 7:41 am

77. Collaborators by John Hodge

This is the script of the play about Bulgakov and Stalin which I saw a couple of months ago. It riffs on a true story - that Bulgakov was asked to write a play about Stalin's early years for the dictator's birthday, and went on to do so. In the play, this turns into a nightmarish situation where the secret police threaten Bulgakov's wife, while at night Stalin meets him and writes the play while Bulgakov goes through Stalin's paperwork and accidentally sets off purges. After reading the script, my view remains the same - wittily written, and highlighting an interesting story about Bulgakov's life; but I can't buy the central metaphor that by this collaboration, Bulgakov became fully implicated in every aspect of Stalin's terror.

Stalin When I was young, you know, I wrote poetry.
Bulgakov Really?
Stalin Yes. We Georgians, we're all poets.
Bulgakov I'd love to read it some day.
Stalin If I thought for one moment that you really meant that - I'd make you read it! But my guess is that you'd sooner be tortured in the Lubyanka. I know I would!
Bulgakov forces a smile.
Isn't it wonderful to be creative?

22rebeccanyc
Aug. 21, 2012, 10:02 am

The book about the opium war sounds fascinating, and I'm a little dubious about the historical truth of Collaborators given the treatment of much of Bulgakov's work in Soviet Russia. It is true that Stalinloved a play based on an early version of The White Guard, called "The Day of the Turbins," but it must have been quite an adaption because Stalin would never have approved of The White Guard itself.

23kidzdoc
Aug. 21, 2012, 6:55 pm

I especially enjoyed your review of The Opium War, and I'm also interested in learning more about the two wars, after reading Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. I'll plan to buy it when I go to London next month.

24wandering_star
Aug. 21, 2012, 7:42 pm

Darryl - very good point, I have both of those on my shelf waiting to be read. Now would be a good time while I still remember the history!

Rebecca - it's useful to know that. The play (and intro to the script) mention that Stalin loved the play of The White Guard, but not that it was an early version. Apparently, though, the Stalin play was really written, and submitted to Stalin who commented that it was 'a very good play... but not to be staged'. I found it difficult to find out more, though - when I googled the incident the first few sites which came up were either linked to, or violently attacking, the author of Collaborators (an irony there).

25SassyLassy
Aug. 22, 2012, 11:37 am

Fascinating review of The Opium War. This book turned up in my recent recommendations list back in the spring and I put it on my list then. Your review makes it a "need to have".

26DieFledermaus
Aug. 23, 2012, 1:57 am

>21 wandering_star: - Good review of Collaborators - sounds like it would be interesting to see it performed live. I recently read a book about Stalin and the level of artistic micromanaging that he engaged in was rather disturbing. I imagine that Stalin poetry would be something like Vogon poetry.

27wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Aug. 23, 2012, 5:43 am

LOL, yes. Or like Mao's "A revolution is not a dinner party" which starts "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery"... and you think, I get this analogy, until the poem suddenly ends, "a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another".

In the play, Stalin comes across as rather engaging and charismatic, albeit monstrous.

28wandering_star
Aug. 28, 2012, 6:04 pm

78. Dart by Alice Oswald

After reading Memorial at the start of this year, I was very keen to read other poetry by Alice Oswald, so I was delighted as well as surprised to find nice editions of two of her books in my local charity shop. Dart is about the river of that name, in Devon, and Oswald apparently interviewed a large number of people who work or play on the river. Their voices appear in the poem, interleaved with imaginary voices, such as here where a waternymph and a woodsman share the page:

when the lithe water turns
and its tongue flatters the ferns
do you speak this kind of sound:
whirlpool whisking round?

Listen, I can clap and slide
my hollow hands along my side.
imagine the bare feel of water,
woodman, to the wrinkled timber

When nesting starts I move out. Leaving the thickety places for the birds. Redstart, Pied Flycatchers. Or if I'm thinning, say every twelve trees I'll orange-tape what I want to keep. I'll find a fine one, a maiden oak, well-formed with a good crop of acorns and knock down the trees around it. And that tree'll stand getting slowly thicker and taller, taking care of its surroundings, full of birds and moss and cavities where bats'll roost and fly out when you work into dusk


My favourite parts were those where Oswald took the words of the real people and inflected them with poetry. There is such a range of people, from boatbuilders and fishers to the less glamorous (sewage worker), and yet you can always hear the real voices in the lines that she has picked out. I felt I got a real sense of the living river, the potential beauty of everyday language, and the way that everyone has great insights if you can get them on the right subject.

So here are a few more:

Stonewaller -
You get upriver stones and downriver stones. Beyond Totnes bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they're slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it's to do with the river's changes. Every beach has its own species, I can read them, volcanic, sedimentary, red sandstone, they all nest in the Dart, but it's the rock that settles in layers and then flakes and cracks that gives me my flat walling stone.

Boatbuilder -
now if this was a wooden boat you'd have to steam the planks, they used to peg them on the tide line to get salt into the timber, you can still see grown oak boats, where you cut the bilge beams straight out of the trees, keeping the line sweet, fairing it by eye, its a different mindset - when I was a boy all boats leaked like a basket, if you were sailing you were bailing

Poacher - the most Dylan Thomasy of all -
Back in the days when I was handsome and the river was just river -

not all these buoys everywhere that trip your net so that you've got to cut the headrope and the mesh goes fshoo like a zip. Terrifying.
And there was so many salmon you could sit up to your knees in dead fish keeping your legs warm.
I used to hear the tramp tramp tramp under my window of men going down to the boats at three in the morning.

29baswood
Aug. 28, 2012, 7:40 pm

#28 and all with a West Country accent? nice review.

30janeajones
Aug. 28, 2012, 8:41 pm

Really interesting review of The Opium War. I loved the Ariana Franklin series -- so sad she died.

31wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Aug. 30, 2012, 10:02 am

I didn't actually know that she'd died - just looked it up and was surprised to see it was over a year ago.

This is out of order as I still have several books to review, but I was listening to podcasts on my way home and heard James Fenton reading this wonderful poem, which he wrote when he was a journalist in Cambodia:

Dead Soldiers

When His Excellency Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey
Invited me to lunch on the battlefield
I was glad of my white suit for the first time that day.
They lived well, the mad Norodoms, they had style.
The brandy and the soda arrived in crates.
Bricks of ice, tied around with raffia,
Dripped from the orderlies' handlebars.

And I remember the dazzling tablecloth
As the APCs fanned out along the road,
The dishes piled high with frogs' legs,
Pregnant turtles, their eggs boiled in the carapace,
Marsh irises in fish sauce
And inflorescence of a banana salad.

On every bottle, Napoleon Bonaparte
Pleaded for the authenticity of the spirit.
They called the empties Dead Soldiers
And rejoiced to see them pile up at our feet.

Each diner was attended by one of the other ranks
Whirling a table-napkin to keep off the flies.
It was like eating between rows of morris dancers –
Only they didn't kick.

On my left sat the prince;
On my right, his drunken aide.
The frogs' thighs leapt into the sad purple face
Like fish to the sound of a Chinese flute.
I wanted to talk to the prince. I wish now
I had collared his aide, who was Saloth Sar's brother.
We treated him as the club bore. He was always
Boasting of his connections, boasting with a head-shake
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase.
And well might he boast. Saloth Sar, for instance,
Was Pol Pot's real name. The APCs
Fired into the sugar palms but met no resistance.

In a diary, I refer to Pol Pot's brother as the Jockey Cap.
A few weeks later, I find him ‘in good form
And very skeptical about Chantaraingsey.'
‘But one eats well there,' I remark.
‘So one should,' says the Jockey Cap:
‘The tiger always eats well,
It eats the raw flesh of the deer,
And Chantaraingsey was born in the year of the tiger.
So, did they show you the things they do
With the young refugee girls?'

And he tells me how he will one day give me the gen.
He will tell me how the prince financed the casino
And how the casino brought Lon Nol to power.
He will tell me this.
He will tell me all these things.
All I must do is drink and listen.

In those days, I thought that when the game was up
The prince would be far, far away –
In a limestone faubourg, on the promenade at Nice,
Reduced in circumstances but well enough provided for.
In Paris, he would hardly require his private army.
The Jockey Cap might suffice for café warfare,
And matchboxes for APCs.

But we were always wrong in these predictions.
It was a family war. Whatever happened,
The principals were obliged to attend its issue.
A few were cajoled into leaving, a few were expelled,
And there were villains enough, but none of them
Slipped away with the swag.

For the prince was fighting Sihanouk, his nephew,
And the Jockey Cap was ranged against his brother
Of whom I remember nothing more
Than an obscure reputation for virtue.
I have been told that the prince is still fighting
Somewhere in the Cardamoms or the Elephant Mountains.
But I doubt that the Jockey Cap would have survived his good connections.
I think the lunches would have done for him –
Either the lunches or the dead soldiers.


(NB: this is already available on the internet, so I've posted it in full).

32rebeccanyc
Aug. 30, 2012, 10:23 am

A chilling poem.

33SassyLassy
Aug. 30, 2012, 12:51 pm

Incredible. I have always admired James Fenton as a journalist and had no idea he was a poet as well. More to look for.

34baswood
Aug. 30, 2012, 4:43 pm

Good posting of the James Fenton poem.

35wandering_star
Aug. 31, 2012, 9:30 am

I'm glad you all liked it! There are a lot of links to his essays and journalism on his website, but fewer to his poetry. He seems like a really interesting guy. Apparently his collection The Memory Of War contains many of his poems about his experience in Cambodia and Vietnam.

36wandering_star
Aug. 31, 2012, 10:48 am

Right, since it's the end of the month (how did that happen??) I should get on with catching up on my reviews...

79. Mary Shelley by Helen Edmundson

Helen Edmundson has written several plays for Shared Experience, one of my favourite theatre companies. They have a very physical style of theatre and do a lot of literary adaptations, often with a feminist and/or psychological reading to the fore. I've also seen their Bronte, which mingled the life and work of the sisters to very good effect. I didn't get to see Mary Shelley as I wasn't in London at the right time, but my sister did, and lent me the playscript.

When researching Mary Shelley's life, Edmundson discovered that both Shelley and Mary were very much influenced by the political philosophy of her father, William Godwin - in fact, that's how they met, as Shelley was a frequent visitor to her father, discussing the philosophy late into the night. Despite this, though, her father was firmly opposed to their relationship and at the time that she was writing Frankenstein, he had refused to have any contact with her for two years. The play is a very interesting depiction of their relationship and the wider family - both of Mary's half-sisters an intriguing personality in their own right - as well as looking at the trade-offs between idealism and compassion, as Godwin's theories lead to personal pain for individuals.

I enjoyed reading the script but it whetted my appetite for a revival!

Shelley: How right you are. How wise. Why don't you stay with me, and talk to me all night? Really, I don't feel at all sleepy. Do you?
Fanny*: No, but... I would like to, but...
Shelley: But what? Have you ever stayed up and talked all night?
Fanny: No...
Shelley: Then you must. It is one of the great pleasures of life.
Fanny: I don't think... I don't think Mama would allow it.
Shelley: Why not? Would you stay if I were a woman?
Fanny: Yes.
Shelley: Then stay. Surely your father, of all people, would not insist upon the proprieties. Are we such animals that we cannot control our desires?
Fanny cannot answer. Godwin enters.
Fanny: I'll say goodnight.
Godwin: Yes.


*Fanny was Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter, therefore Mary's half-sister.

37wandering_star
Aug. 31, 2012, 11:05 am

80. Black Juice by Margo Lanagan

I've been reading this book of short stories on and off for the last two years - I'd left it at my mother's house and would read one or two stories each time I visited. So it's a little bit difficult for me to review it as a whole. I've just scanned the other reviews on LT in hopes of jogging my memories of the earlier stories, and entirely endorse the one by GingerbreadMan which says:

Here's the thing. Most of these short stories aren’t really stories. They are more descriptions of glimpses of people and their worlds. Most of them lets us meet a young main character in a very concentrated event that sort of moves them in a new direction. We get a world – often a post-apocalyptic one, but sometimes fairy-tale, fantasy or a plain strange – drawn up with a few penstrokes, we get a vague idea of the character and what he or she is about. And that’s about it. This is a book of samples, of hands kept extremely close.


This time, I read the last three stories, and felt that the collection finished very strongly. In 'Yowlinin', a young outcast girl saves the life of a boy she likes, but it's not enough for her to overcome her status. In 'Rite of Spring', a young man is burdened with the task of singing in the spring when his mother and brother - who have the talent to do it - are ill. And in the last story, 'The Point Of Roses', a boy with psychic powers channels the essence of some everyday items, and in the process an older couple remember what it is that they see in each other. I really liked all these; but I have very little memory of the earlier stories, with the exception of the first, 'Singing My Sister Down', in which a family pay respects to one of their members as she undergoes a slow ritual execution.

I'm not sure if this is because the stories in the middle are less good than those that book-end the collection, or just because I was in the right mood for the last few. In any case, I would like to read more Margo Lanagan, perhaps one of the full-length books to see how she maintains the alternate world that she creates so effectively in the short stories.

I'm not a words person by any imagining - I like places where it's unwise to speak, in a hide beside the grazing field with the deer coming in from all around, among ferns watching a boudoir-bird darting and doubting at my snare. I like to walk in of an evening with a brace of cedar doves, lay them by the pot and go to wash. That way Mum keeps quiet; that's her thanks, her silence. Now there's a wordswoman. Talk you into a hole, my mum would.

38wandering_star
Aug. 31, 2012, 11:18 am

81. The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings (audiobook, unabridged, read by Jonathan Davis)

I don't usually buy books that I've seen the film of, but I really loved The Descendants (HOW was it beaten to the Best Film Oscar by The Artist?!?), and I read a couple of good reviews of the book which made me think that it might fill in some of the unspoken elements of the film. Well, it did, and occasionally in an interesting way, but overall I felt that the parts which had been left out of the film added absolutely nothing to my enjoyment or appreciation of the story. Definitely an example of the adaptation improving the book!

39wandering_star
Aug. 31, 2012, 8:29 pm

82. Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare

Am I really about to recommend, wholeheartedly, a 420-page book about whales? Well... yes - even for readers who (unlike me) aren't already interested in mighty creatures of the deep.

I could say at this point that the book isn't solely about whales - there is also quite a lot about the life of Herman Melville, and of course Moby Dick (did you spot the reference in the title of this book?).

But honestly, it's mostly about whales - and the human relationship with them, from the incredible scale of the whaling industry to today's conservation tourism.

So why is it so good? Well, the subject matter is interesting - both the whales, and the mind-boggling history of the whaling industry, from levels of danger to the enormous scale. It also turns out that there is a lot that we still don't know about whales:

It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like. Even now there are beaked whales, or ziphiids, known only from bones washed up on remote beaches - esoteric, deep-sea animals with strange markings which biologists have never seen alive or dead, so little studied that their status is 'data deficient'. New cetaceans are still being identified in the twenty-first century, and we would do well to remember that the world harbours animals bigger than ourselves, which we have yet to see; that not everything is catalogued and claimed and digitalized. That in the oceans great whales swim unnamed by man.

But most importantly, as I hope that extract shows, Hoare is a great writer, with a wide range of knowledge, the ability to put it into context for the reader, and a real sense of the poetry and mystery of the subject. There is a loose structure to the book, with different chapters introducing different species (blue, sperm, nar-, and many others I would not have been able to name before) - but mainly it feels like one of those great conversations that move seamlessly from one subject to another, so looking back you wonder how you managed to range so widely.

40deebee1
Sept. 1, 2012, 6:08 am

Reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky years ago got me interested in similar writing, and Hoare's book seems to fit the bill. It's now on my wish list!

41dmsteyn
Sept. 1, 2012, 7:43 am

I read Leviathan or, The Whale a few years ago, and also enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for the review!

42baswood
Sept. 2, 2012, 7:28 pm

Enjoyed your review of Leviathan or, The Whale. Having read Moby Dick last year I have had enough of whales for the time being. I will keep Philip Hoare's book in mind when I am ready to get back into the swim.

43wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 4, 2012, 7:41 am

I'm sure you'll enjoy it when you are ready to get back into the swim - boom boom!

83. The Anatomy Of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor (audiobook, unabridged, read by John Telfer)

Set in the eighteenth century, the title of The Anatomy Of Ghosts refers to a pamphlet written by the hero, John Holdsworth, which aims to disprove the existence of ghosts, by a detailed investigation of stories or supposed evidence involving ghosts. He wrote it after his son died - angry and upset that his wife, distraught at their loss, was being taken advantage of by spiritualists. After he published the pamphlet, his wife too died - in a probable suicide, for she drowned in the same place as his son. For all his rationalism, Holdsworth can't shake the feeling that her ghost is visiting him. At this point, Holdsworth is asked to go to Cambridge to investigate an apparent haunting - a young undergraduate has gone mad, supposedly after encountering a ghost, and his wealthy aunt wants Holdsworth to disprove the encounter in order to heal the young man.

This, more or less, is where our story starts. I thought it was a great setup - and was primed for some Turn Of The Screw-style psychological tension, with Holdsworth's livelihood, and beliefs, challenged by what (he thinks) he experiences. It was a little disappointing, therefore, that the rest of the story is a fairly straightforward mystery narrative.

But there's nothing wrong with a straightforward mystery, if done well - was this one? The answer is mixed. Plus points: an engagingly gothic setting and plenty of twists. Negatives: it felt really loooong (this may have been made worse by the fact it's an audiobook and so you can't go by 'the telltale thickness of the pages' - but a couple of times I thought, we must be close to the end now, but when I checked there were still several hours to go); and there was a romantic sub-plot which was unsubtle and, frankly, added nothing to the storyline, so that I started to roll my eyes in irritation everytime it cropped up.

I had similar reactions to another book by Andrew Taylor, The American Boy, which I listened to a few months ago - nice atmosphere and writing but a bit too long. I won't seek out any more of his books; on the other hand, if I find one by chance on a rainy holiday, I can see myself curling up with it...

44dchaikin
Sept. 4, 2012, 8:51 am

Have added Philip Hoare's book to my wishlist, mostly to remember for next time I approach Moby Dick, as it sounds like a nice fit. I'm not in a rush to read Andrew Taylor.

45wandering_star
Sept. 4, 2012, 10:26 am

84. The Flood by Maggie Gee

The time: more-or-less now. The place: a city which is more-or-less London - there is a President, not a Prime Minister, but he is prosecuting a war against a Muslim country in alliance with the President of more-or-less America (rather pointlessly disguised as 'Hesperica'). It's been raining for weeks and weeks, and almost without the residents realising it, floodwaters are creeping over more and more of the city.

There is a huge cast of characters, from wealthy Lottie luxuriating in her comfortable life, to elderly May looking after her grandchildren and missing her dead husband, from ex-convict and apocalyptic cult member Dirk to self-centered novelist Angela and her neglected daughter Gerda. They are all affected, in different ways, by the flood, by rumours of strange planetary line-ups, and by the city's preparation for a grand Gala, more-or-less a great celebration of capitalism. But we soon realise that they are also deeply interconnected in a multitude of ways, and to me the rising waters seemed to symbolize social atomisation, which has crept up on us without our really noticing, as well as everything that goes with atomisation, such as lack of connection and community, prejudice, and inequality.

I don't normally much like 'state of Britain'-type novels, and indeed after fifty pages I was ready to put this book aside. But for some reason I decided to give it another go, and I started to enjoy it very much. I think, in particular, it's because we see enough of the inner lives of our characters that they are not simply stereotypes or representatives of a particular social category, and they come together in unexpected ways. This makes it more subtle than other novels with a similar range, and yet it can still make its points effectively.

One of the awful things about children was that they expected you to be consistent. Lottie considered the options, briefly. Would she win if she physically pushed her out of the door? Everything subtly changed once kids grew taller than you, though Lottie had an extra stone of muscle. Still if she failed, all was lost. Instead, Lottie tried an adoring smile. It came quite naturally; she did adore Lola. 'If you leave right now I'll get Daddy to drive you and I'll put some chocolate cake in your lunchbox.'

'Oh cool', said Lola, forgetting her politics. 'And will you give me money for being good?'

Faith watched the bribe being given in silence. The sum was more than her morning's wages.

46kidzdoc
Sept. 5, 2012, 6:02 pm

Two very nice reviews; I'll add The Flood to my wish list.

47wandering_star
Sept. 6, 2012, 10:52 am

Yes, do, it's an interesting read! Incidentally, seeing you here reminds me that I was going to report back a couple of things from my trip to London last month.

Firstly, there is an excellent exhibition at the British Museum about Shakespeare's world, including what his London was like, and how the politics of the time affected the plays. The last item in the exhibition, there to show the extent to which Shakespeare's work resonates across times and cultures, is a copy of the Complete Plays which was smuggled into Robben Island prison. All the prisoners signed their names by the lines which they liked most; Nelson Mandela picked

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

48wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2012, 10:58 am

Secondly, I think I already posted a link to aMAZE me, an installation which piles up books in the shape of the fingerprint of Jorge Luis Borges. When I first walked into the room I had a real 'is that it?' feeling - it seemed like it would be one of those pieces of conceptual art which are more interesting to hear about than to see. But then I actually went down and started walking around in it...


49wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2012, 11:01 am


50wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2012, 10:59 am

51wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2012, 10:59 am

52wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2012, 10:59 am

53wandering_star
Sept. 6, 2012, 11:00 am

What I loved about it was the idea that all the books we have read are, in a way, a fingerprint of us. I also seriously considered seeing how long a wall I could build with my TBR...

54rebeccanyc
Sept. 6, 2012, 3:29 pm

Very intriguing!

55kidzdoc
Sept. 6, 2012, 7:45 pm

Thanks for reminding me about the Shakespeare exhibit at the British Museum, wandering_star. I'll probably see it next week. Unfortunately I understand that the aMAZEme exhibit has already ended, so I won't get to see it this weekend (I'll arrive there on Saturday afternoon).

What other interesting things did you do or see in London?

56avidmom
Sept. 6, 2012, 8:25 pm

>53 wandering_star: What I loved about it was the idea that all the books we have read are, in a way, a fingerprint of us.
That's very true. Nicely put! Thanks for the great pics.

57dchaikin
Sept. 7, 2012, 9:54 am

I also seriously considered seeing how long a wall I could build with my TBR...

think mine would blot out the sun...

Enjoyed your review of Flood and the lesson on bribery.

58wandering_star
Sept. 7, 2012, 8:51 pm

Sorry about that Darryl, I thought it was on for a bit longer!

I'm afraid the rest of my trip to London mostly involved eating & drinking, although I also went to the exhibition about Thomas Heatherwick (an architect and designer) at the V&A (really good - I really think he's a creative genius), an exhibition about tube maps at the Transport Museum (small but surprisingly interesting, for a Londoner at least, although you might not be quite so interested in the way the tube map has changed over time...), and the Serpentine Gallery pavilion. Since 2000 the Serpentine Gallery has ask a different architect each summer to design a temporary pavilion; this year the design digs down and traces the foundations of all the previous pavilions, in a sort of palimpsest. This one was pretty good, not my favourite which was probably 2008's Frank Gehry one, but far from the worst (last year's was really boring).

Frank Gehry's pavilion:

59wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 7, 2012, 8:54 pm

If you podcast, the BM and BBC have put out a range of podcasts on Shakespeare's Restless World which talk through some of the items in the exhibition; and My Own Shakespeare, very short clips of famous people talking about their favourite lines/speeches from Shakespeare and why these are meaningful to them.

60wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 7, 2012, 8:59 pm

Just to note that in August I also gave up on two books, Quicksands by Sybille Bedford and Notes Of A Desolate Man by Chu T'ien-wen, meaning that my TBR tally to here is -14 books for the year. Could be worse, but I'm not making much of a dent in the pile...

61wandering_star
Sept. 7, 2012, 8:59 pm

85. A Shower Of Summer Days by May Sarton

A Shower Of Summer Days is set in an Irish country estate, to which the lady of the house (Violet) and her husband are returning after many years away. It's possible to work out from internal clues that the year is 1963 - but you'd never know it at the house or the village - the one filled with fusty Victorian furniture, the other with attitudes of deference towards the gentry. Into this environment comes the American daughter of Violet's estranged sister, packed off to Ireland to encourage her to forget the entirely unsuitable young actor to whom she says she's engaged. You might expect that Sally's arrival would turn things upside-down, shake some new life into the house and new insights into the relationship. But in fact, it's she herself who changes more, seduced by the house itself and by the old-fashioned worldly wisdom of her aunt and uncle.

There is nothing wrong with this book - but I can't help feeling that I have read it, or books like it, many times before. I don't think that there will be a lot in this one which makes it stand out in my memory above the others - except possibly the nature of Violet and Charles' marriage, still very much a loving one but where both of them need to seek certain elements outside it.

Every now and then Sally straightened up, lit a cigarette, stretched and gave herself the secret pleasure of looking at her aunt. The large straw hat, floppy, tied under her chin with a pale blue scarf, gave her a charmingly old-fashioned look. She was, Sally decided, far away somewhere in the past, in a time, she thought with a pang, when I wasn't even born. She was wholly absorbed like a child, not to be touched. And this impression of Sally's was quite true, for picking wild strawberries was such a summer tradition of the house that Aunt Violet was dreamily half-consciously re-enacting innumerable summers, listening to the change of note as the little berries first slowly covered the bottom of the empty basket and then plopped down on each other silently as the second layer began.

62kidzdoc
Sept. 7, 2012, 9:56 pm

Thanks for your comments about London, wandering_star. Fliss (flissp) from the 75 Books club posted photos from aMAZEme on her Facebook page, and mentioned that the exhibit would end before I arrived in London.

I'll make a couple of visits to the Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the British Museum while I'm there. I still haven't been to the V&A, so I'll plan to go to the Heatherwick exhibition there.

Nice review of A Shower of Summer Days.

63wandering_star
Sept. 7, 2012, 11:03 pm

Oh, the V&A is wonderful - make sure you have plenty of time there as there is lots to see other than the Heatherwick. I also spent a lot of time in the ceramic galleries, where there is one room curated by Edmund de Waal, potter and author of The Hare With Amber Eyes (if you look up just after you come in the main entrance of the museum, you will see a very discreet exhibition of some of de Waal's ceramics...)

64wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 8, 2012, 10:24 pm

86. The Land Of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll (audiobook, unabridged, read by Edoardo Ballerini, part of the Neil Gaiman Presents series)

I was going to start this review by saying that this book began brilliantly, but when I went back to the start to remind myself, I realised that it was actually the second half of chapter two which was brilliant.

Up to that point, we'd seen enough of the narrator Thomas to know that he was a prep school English teacher, a collector of masks, grumpy and dissatisfied with his life, and the son of a famous Hollywood actor. He has a dream of writing the biography of Marshall France, a children's book author, whose work had made a deep impression on him as a child. Halfway through chapter two, he drops into a secondhand bookshop and sees a very rare edition of one of France's books. Unfortunately, it's already been sold - but he manages to persuade the purchaser to sell it on to him. He tells her about his biography project and she becomes his researcher - and later his girlfriend. They eventually head up to Missouri, to the small town where France spent much of his life. But when they get there, people seem to have been expecting them, and soon strange things start to happen.

The scene in the second-hand bookshop is extremely effectively written. There are a couple of tiny snippets from France's supposed work, which really made it understandable that Thomas should have become obsessed by him:

"The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glass. They sang cruel songs at each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day." - Marshall France, Peach Shadows

And there are a number of strange happenings and coincidences in his first encounters with the woman who will become his girlfriend, which set the reader up for her to be more than she appears on the surface.

But as we carry on with the book, there are any number of intriguing leads which go nowhere, and the eventual twists are not as interesting as any of the things which I had anticipated. Furthermore, Thomas is not a very likeable character - he's a shit to his girlfriend - and too much of the story is given to his personal life; and, without spoiling anything, I found the ending as much of a cop-out, in my opinion, as the 'I woke up and it was all a dream' endings that he despairs of his students writing.

So when I finished the book, I had very mixed feelings: a lot of excellent ideas and images, but overall it was a bit frustrating that they hadn't been developed very well. I wondered whether I would like to read more Jonathan Carroll, and thought that perhaps his ideas would come across better in a short story.

I found several were available on his website, so I had a go at them. Again, there were some interesting ideas: What if... you saw someone on the street and realised she was the woman of your dreams, but when you approached her she knew lots about you and claimed that you'd just broken up from a three year relationship? What if... every time your personality changed or developed a new one of you was created, and the old you had to go and live with all your previous selves? But the stories tended just to report the things happening without further investigation - they felt like a notebook of ideas rather than fully realised stories.

Reading these stories I couldn't help compare them to Sum by David Eagleman of the stories I've just read by Margo Lanagan. Eagleman successfully wrote a series of stories that were essentially a single "what if..", but really developed them. Lanagan's stories are similarly uncanny, but are set in a much more well imagined fantasy world.

65wandering_star
Sept. 8, 2012, 11:00 pm

87. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Hard to think of two books which are more drastically different!

The 'quartet' of the title refers to four people, close to retirement, who work together in the same office. It's the mid-1970s, and they feel increasingly disconnected from the world around them - they belong to that unfortunate generation who were always the wrong age to be respected (as when they were young respect was due to the old, and when they grew old the world belonged to the young). None of them has anyone particularly significant in their lives: Letty and Edwin each have one friend, Edwin has a grown-up daughter and Norman a brother-in-law; Marcia is aggressively solitary despite the attempts of neighbours to do something for her. But this shared disconnection from the world does not bring them any closer together - indeed, if they see each other in the street they are more likely to avert their eyes and hurry on.

This is the second Barbara Pym I have read, after Jane and Prudence. This one is a bit harder-edged, in the quiet desperation of the characters and some of their reactions to the modern world; but it shares the same insight and apparently gentle wit. With both, though, I have felt that there is something missing - or perhaps I am missing something, as I know Pym has many ardent fans. But I do feel that there are many authors that do this kind of social comedy, and others are sharper-eyed, or have characters that develop, or manage to mesh the humour with real tragedy better. I think I won't read any more Pym for a few years, and see if somehow I grow into it.

How had it come about that she, an English woman born in Malvern in 1914 of middle-class English parents, should find herself in this room in London surrounded by enthusiastic shouting, hymn-singing Nigerians? It must surely be because she had not married. No man had taken her away and immured her in some comfortable suburb where hymn-singing was confined to Sundays and nobody was fired with enthusiasm. Why had this not happened? Because she had thought that love was a necessary ingredient for marriage? Now, having looked around her for forty years, she was not so sure. All those years wasted, looking for love!

The thought of it was enough to bring about silence in the house and during the lull she plucked up the courage to go downstairs and tap — too timidly, she felt —at Mr Olatunde’s door. ‘I wonder if you could make a little less noise? she asked. ‘Some of us find it rather disturbing.’

‘Christianity is disturbing,’ said Mr Olatunde.

66bragan
Sept. 9, 2012, 9:57 am

>64 wandering_star:: I haven't read The Land of Laughs, but from what I have read, I find Carroll to be both a fascinating and a frustrating writer. His stuff tends to be really dreamlike in both good ways -- creative and intriguingly bizarre and full of fluid imagery -- and bad ways, like being random and full of loose ends and ultimately making very little sense.

67dmsteyn
Sept. 9, 2012, 2:13 pm

I agree with bragan, and I have read The Land of Laughs. Can't remember much about it, besides being very disappointed, as you were, with the ending.

68dchaikin
Sept. 9, 2012, 3:38 pm

Interesting about Pym, love the excerpt.

69wandering_star
Sept. 9, 2012, 8:09 pm

Bragan - that's a really good way of putting it, dreamlike in both good and bad ways. Perhaps that's why it's not memorable enough, Dewald?!

70DieFledermaus
Sept. 10, 2012, 12:04 am

I've only read one book by Carroll, White Apples, and it seemed like that one fit bragan's description. I was entertained, it had a great opening, there were a lot of evocative and creative images, but it was pretty random, there were a lot of explanations to explain increasingly weird stuff and it seemed like the author was trying too hard to make the two main characters quirky.

71japaul22
Sept. 10, 2012, 8:27 am

I'm planning to read Quartet in Autumn next month after reading Excellent Women as my first Barabara Pym book earlier this year. I loved Excellent Women, I think because I just tend to like quiet, observant, character-driven books. Obviously, after only reading one book by her, I shouldn't generalize, but I thnk her work will be comfort reads for me.

72LolaWalser
Sept. 11, 2012, 8:35 am

Pym... I have felt that there is something missing - or perhaps I am missing something

Just to let you know you're not utterly alone: I was very underwhelmed by Excellent women. As it is often brought up as her best, or best loved, or best exponent of her style, I know I have no desire to try another of her books.

It's been years, so I'm struggling to remember what exactly I disliked. The quietness and emotional reserve, the drabness of the tone, are something I can generally deal with, especially as it is usually presented as the "English" stereotype. But in this case it irritated me. Partly I felt bamboozled into reading a romance, another story of a dowdy mouse getting herself a man ahead of a beauty or another more interesting character. Because men really like security and modesty, you see. Party with the blondes, but do make sure to marry a brunette.

But even that victory didn't elicit much joy in the heroine (granted, she was depicted as having the vivacity of a soggy biscuit). And I know this kind of thing may have been the "literary" point--no use dreaming, you may get what you wish for, love is hollow, expect nothing, no hope for us--but I can't help feeling someone somewhere mistook lifelessness for lifelike-ness.

73wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 14, 2012, 9:36 pm

Interesting to see your different views! Certainly Lola there is minimal romance in Quartet in Autumn...

I personally quite often like books that are quietly observant, about the inner lives of reserved people - however, not these two.

Not much time to update today so here are v quick reviews of my last two reads:

88. Passing by Nella Larsen, a novella (100p) set in the late 1920s, about a young African-American woman who 'passes' as white - so successfully in fact that she has married a bigot. By chance, she meets an old school friend - the narrator of the book - and starts to flirt with danger by visiting her regularly in Harlem (and perhaps in other ways too). Larsen does a great job depicting both the narrator Irene and her friend Clare - Irene is often angry and humiliated by what Clare does, but is drawn to Clare in spite of herself - and the reader can understand why, I certainly found Clare fascinating despite her flaws.

'And he's coming up here to your dance?'
Irene asked why not.
'It seems rather curious, a man like that, going to a Negro dance.'
This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth's type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time.
...
Clare clapped her hand. ''Rene, suppose I come too! It sounds terribly interesting and amusing. And I don't see why I shouldn't.'
Irene, who was regarding her through narrowed eyelids, had the same thought that she had had two years ago on the roof of the Drayton, that Clare Kendry was just a shade too good-looking. Her tone was on the edge of irony as she said: 'You mean because so many other white people go?'


74wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Sept. 14, 2012, 9:39 pm

89. The Financial Lives Of The Poets by Jess Walter, a sort-of satire about the sub-prime financial crisis, is the story of a man on the slide: rashly quitting his job at the very end of the boom to start a website which would specialise in good writing (and poetry) about finance, he is on the point of losing his house and quite possibly his wife. Feeling increasingly desperate, one night he gets into conversation with the youths hanging out by his local convenience store, and gets one of those crazy-but-it-just-might-work ideas for how he is going to rescue the situation.

I must say that I enjoyed reading this - it really did keep me turning the pages. It could also be very funny, often with its invective (his old boss is described as a "budget-hacking delusional jargon-monkey"), and also because everyone talks very cleverly ("You're selling pot to pay for Catholic school? That's so Iran-Contra").

But it didn't quite work for me as a whole. I felt there was an awkward join between the two aspects of the book - one a sympathetic and believable story about a man who thinks he's always done the right thing, but has nothing to show for it; and the other a blistering satire in which everyone from drug dealers to policemen talk in financial jargon and will show you a spreadsheet at the drop of a hat. I would have preferred the book to be one or the other - realistic or over-the-top satirical.

75DieFledermaus
Sept. 15, 2012, 3:33 pm

Just going to say I loved the line "You're selling pot to pay for Catholic school? That's so Iran-Contra" though it sounds like the book as a whole disappointed.

Going back to Stalin poetry in #21 - I'm currently reading Young Stalin and the opening describes a bank robbery that Stalin organized. He convinced one of the bank employees to give them inside information. Here's a quote - "This key 'inside-man' afterwards revealed that he had helped set up this colossal heist only because he was such an admirer of Stalin's romantic poetry. Only in Georgia could Stalin the poet enable Stalin the gangster." Some of Stalins poetry is quoted in the book as well.

76wandering_star
Sept. 16, 2012, 9:12 pm

How fascinating! And just imagine a modern-day bank robber coming up with that reason... Young Stalin was quoted as one of the reference works Hodge used when he was writing Collaborators, so it may have been at the back of his mind. What did you think of the poetry?

As for The Financial Lives Of The Poets, I don't want to do it down too much. It was often very funny, and an enjoyable read. Just didn't live up to some of the rave reviews it's had.

77wandering_star
Sept. 16, 2012, 9:22 pm

90. The Scales Of Justice by John Mortimer

Hardly worth logging this as a book read, really, as it's a 'Pocket Penguin' (a series of short extracts Penguin brought out to commemorate their 70th year) and only 50 pages long. It consists of an extract from Clinging To The Wreckage, Mortimer's autobiography, and a Rumpole short story (The Scales Of Justice).

The Rumpole short story was very enjoyable but the extract of autobiography was excellent - enough to make me consider wishlisting it even though I'm really not that interested in John Mortimer himself, just because of the way it was written, with almost throwaway lines hiding a lot of compressed information.

Here's Mortimer writing about a university friend: He read Classics, and read them in the way I read Isherwood or Julien Green. He would sit in a squeaking basket chair, smoking a pipe and giving me his version of chunks of Homer and Euripides which, up to then, I had been trained to regard as almost insoluble crossword puzzles or grammarians' equations with no recognizable human content.

The extract also includes his first encounter with Penelope Mortimer, and an account of a conversation his father had with her (trying to dissuade her from marrying his son) which featured, lightly fictionalised, in The Pumpkin Eater.

78wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Okt. 1, 2012, 10:47 am

Um. End of September and I only have one more book to review... although I am part-way through several others.

91. Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell is the story of an English archer at the start of the Hundred Years' War. He enjoys being an archer, but as well as the 'day job', he has a personal quest: to track down the mysterious man who raided his home village, killed his father, and stole the sacred lance of St George.

This sort of historical military fiction is in no way my usual reading, but I really enjoyed this (and hardly even skimmed the battle scenes). I would quite like to read the next in the series to find out what happens to the characters - and would definitely like to know much more about the Hundred Years War. So a pretty good outcome all round.

Tally to end Sept: -6.

79DieFledermaus
Okt. 5, 2012, 2:13 am

>76 wandering_star: - Recently finished Young Stalin. The author includes a poem of Stalin's at the beginning of every section and I have to say I didn't think they were very good. Of course, can't get rid of my bias but the images seemed cliched and the poems too earnest. However, the author noted in the book that one of the reasons his poetry was noticed was the language and rhythm which might be impossible to translate.

>77 wandering_star: - Interesting, I recently picked up The Pumpkin Eater though mostly because it was an NYRB and had read some good reviews here.

80rebeccanyc
Okt. 5, 2012, 7:24 am

Loved The Pumpkin Eater, so interesting to hear about that encounter.

81wandering_star
Nov. 1, 2012, 9:36 am

The main reason that I am once again so far behind on my reviews is that I keep putting off writing the following one - as I feel like I would be struggling to say anything very intelligent or useful. But if I delay much longer I'll never be able to catch up, so I am just going to try and make this straight down the line.

92. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung

This book is set in China some time not too far away. China is flourishing, economically and socially, and people are very happy with their lot - except for a small group of misfits who seem to be able to remember a short period of time that no-one else can, a single month between the collapse of the world economy and the start of China's 'golden age of ascendancy'. The story is narrated from the point of view of Old Chen, a Taiwanese writer living in Beijing, who gradually accumulates information about the lost month (as well as friends who remember it) and eventually tracks down the truth.

I saw a lot of rave reviews of this book in the media. But I now realise that they all had one thing in common, that is, they were written by people with a deep and current knowledge of modern China. For anyone without this, I think The Fat Years would be a flawed and frustrating read. There are three reasons why this is so (and the last one is a spoiler):

- It's hard to know what parts are intended as satire and what is simply a description of reality in China today. I know that satire is about pushing existing trends to extremes, so I don't know why I found this a problem - I think because I was never quite sure how to react to a piece of information

- After about the first fifth of the book, there is no character development and minimal discernible plot (hard to achieve when the story is about someone sleuthing out the truth). The characters start to look like symbols of different 'types' in modern China, and it is very hard to care about anything that happened.

- The truth behind the mystery made me want to fling the book across the room. It turns out that people can't remember that month, just a few years previously, because the state has wiped it from the historical record. Now I don't know about you, but as soon as I heard about the premise for this book, I thought, aha, a metaphor for China's lack of historical memory. So for that in itself to be the big reveal was just a huge let-down - particularly as it had been such a hard slog to get there.

So, I'm sure this is an important book - in the introduction Julia Lovell talks about how it engages directly with subjects that other writers skirt around. But for the lay reader, it's not an enjoyable one. This is even half-acknowledged by the translator, who says in his afterword that many Western readers have found a particular part of the book boring and pointless, but in fact they are wrong!

82wandering_star
Nov. 1, 2012, 11:09 am

93. The Damned Utd by David Peace

This is about the 44 days that legendary football (soccer) manager Brian Clough spent heading up Leeds United, a club from the north of England. Now you might think that sounds like a book with pretty limited appeal... but you would be very wrong. In fact, I suspect that the less you know about Brian Clough the more you'll enjoy the book. Many of the LT reviews seem to object to the fact that it's not an accurate portrayal. To my mind this couldn't be further from the point. The Brian Clough that features in this book is a compelling tragic hero, the tragic flaw in question being his hubristic self-belief.

He has come to Leeds with a reputation as a genius football manager - but also with a reputation for being a bigmouth, a self-publicist, and most significantly for the Leeds players, a bitter and outspoken critic of their tendency to play dirty. ”You lot may have won all of the domestic honours there are and some of the European ones but, to me…you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.” A less confident man might have tried to build bridges before starting to change the club's approach - but Clough continues his full-frontal attack, which leads to the results you might expect both on and off the football pitch.

The book alternates first-person narration of Clough's time at Leeds with second-person narration of his career up to that point, both in chronological order. The first-person narrative is extremely stream-of-consciousness, and works well at giving us both the bombastic exterior and more troubled inner voice. Taken with the story of his career, it gradually unveils insights into his complex personality, and it gradually dawns on the reader that he is both sympathetic and a monster.

I read this more or less straight through - I genuinely couldn't put it down. In fact as soon as I could I went and bought another book by Peace, Tokyo Year Zero, although that didn't work so well for me (the obsessive stream-of-consciousness was the whole book - and without the leavening of the second-person narrative I found it excessive).

I don't think you would need to have much idea about football to enjoy The Damned Utd - there are quite a lot of descriptions of matches, but you wouldn't need to appreciate all the details to understand the overall arc of the story. And it would be a real shame to miss this.

83wandering_star
Nov. 1, 2012, 11:28 am

Need to speed up with these reviews!

94. The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje - a deceptively simple story which seems to be about a youngish boy travelling by boat from Sri Lanka to London, and the adventures he has on the way... but turns out to be just as much about growing up and starting to understand the complexities and ambiguities of adulthood. Beautiful.

After this I tried to read Hodd by Adam Thorpe, whose first book Ulverton I loved. Nothing else he's written had ever come close, but the subject matter of this one seemed promising. Ulverton was about the history of an English village, told in a series of episodes spanning the centuries, so that you see how customs morphed and how a simple incident could be distorted into a local legend. Hodd was billed as revealing the truth behind the Robin Hood legend, and I thought that it might be a return to the same ground. Unfortunately we are given the story as a period manuscript, complete with dull circumlocutions and pointless faux academic footnotes... I couldn't get on with it.

84wandering_star
Nov. 1, 2012, 11:34 am

95. School Blues by Daniel Pennac, which I picked up in a discount bookstore because I like Pennac's fiction, and admire the translator, Sarah Ardizzone - I think the first time I've ever bought a book because of the translator, but Ardizzone did a great job of translating the teenage slang in Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow and I thought this might be similarly interesting.

I loved this book. It's about the kids who don't do so well at school - Pennac describes himself as a dunce (cancre) during his own school days, but under the encouragement of great teachers he did well and ended up as a teacher himself, so he's seen both (all three?) sides of the story.

The book mixes memoir (of his schooling and teaching days) with a sort of manifesto for what teaching ought to provide, and the sympathy and support which should be given to those who don't find studying too easy, who don't "enjoy the blessed facility of being able to slip into a different skin whenever necessary, to shift from restless teenager to attentive student, from spurned sweetheart to focused scientist, from sporting hero to swot, from elsewhere to here, from past to present, from maths to literature".

While making a compelling case, Pennac knows that it's not easy - he recounts occasions when he too failed to reach out or to be patient or generous. He mocks his own pretensions and becomes, for me, an even more sympathetic character. All this, incidentally, is beautifully written and translated. I'll be giving School Blues to all of my friends who work in education.

85wandering_star
Nov. 1, 2012, 11:53 am

96. Vagabond by Bernard Cornwell, the sequel to #91 above - picked it up in a charity shop, but found it had neither the characterisation nor historical interest of the first in the trilogy. Had already bought the final book though so will doubtless read it soon.

97. A Distant Neighborhood (two volumes) by Jiro Taniguchi, a touching manga comic about a middle-aged man who suddenly finds himself in the body of his 14-year-old self, the summer before his father abandoned the family.

98. The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest by Peter Dickinson, a baroque mystery similar to those written by Michael Innes or Edmund Crispin. It's a style I like, but I found this one difficult - it's set among a community of Pacific Islanders who have ended up in London but are trying to hold on to their traditional practices, and while it is trying hard not to be racist in the way that the people and their motivations are portrayed, some of the language describing their physical appearance is very unpalatable to the modern reader.

99. Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker, republished popular fiction from the 1940s, in which the narrator makes up a story for a joke, only to find his invented character Miss Hargreaves turning up in his home town. Quite amusing, not very substantial.

86baswood
Nov. 2, 2012, 7:11 am

Excellent reviews, which I enjoyed reading. Interesting comments on The Fat Years, but what really grabbed my interest was the David Peace book on Brian Clough. I remember that episode and have an interest in Leeds United, because when I was in exile from London and away from my beloved team I used to go and watch Leeds United when they were in the premiership.

I often wondered what happened in those 44 days, I might be tempted to get the book and find out.

87rebeccanyc
Nov. 2, 2012, 7:48 am

Interesting about the David Peace. I've read and admired his GB84 and his Red Riding Quartet, both of which mix narrators/chronology and use stream of consciousness narratives in places. In fact, I found both of them remarkable so I'm tempted to try The Damned Utd even though I have no knowledge of and no interest in soccer!

88wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Nov. 3, 2012, 9:12 am

Rebecca - thanks, Tokyo Year Zero had put me off trying any more Peace but if there's more of a mix of styles in GB84 and Red Riding then I might give those a go. I think that you would enjoy The Damned Utd without any knowledge of soccer, so do try it (and even more so Barry!) - I'd be interested to hear how you get along.

89rebeccanyc
Nov. 3, 2012, 1:07 pm

I have to warn you that they're both extremely violent and obscenity-filled, in case that bothers you. It was arubabookwoman's reviews that led me first to the Red Riding Quartet and then to GB84.

90avatiakh
Nov. 3, 2012, 3:35 pm

A couple of years ago I read The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu because the translator was Sarah Ardizzone, she's won numerous awards for her translations. I also really enjoyed Pennac's School Blues and found the insight into the French school system fascinating. I read one of his Benjamin Malaussène books earlier this year and am now attempting to collect the rest of the series.

I've seen the movie of The Damned Utd and the tv miniseries of Red Riding Quartet and next year intend on finally pulling the books off the shelves and reading them. My husband is a lifelong supporter of Derby County, where Clough was manager before going to Leeds, he loves this movie.

91wandering_star
Nov. 4, 2012, 3:58 am

Rebecca - thanks. I'll try one and see how it goes.

Avatiakh - I love the Malaussène books although I haven't read them for ages - a re-read is definitely due. I heard a very interesting interview with Sarah Ardizzone about the way that she had prepared to translate Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, including going over some of the translations of the banlieue slang with kids of the same age and background on a London estate.

100. The Lost Books Of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason

The Lost Books Of The Odyssey consists of 44 short pieces, ranging in length from half a page to a dozen pages. They are all variants in some way of the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey - some of them change only one thing (Odysseus returns home to find Penelope married, or dead), others have no relation to the original other than the name of a character or two. One draws from the Persephone myth - Helen has been kidnapped by Death and the Greeks must fight an army that grows each time they lose one of their number. In another, Odysseus realises that Helen's secret is that each man sees in her their ideal of beauty - except for Menelaus, who wants her because others desire her, and who in his turn is desired by Penelope - and manages a crafty switch so that he himself ends up with Helen.

Quite a lot of them play with the origin of the Odyssey - in one, Odysseus is a coward who takes advantage of the war to escape his princely role, becomes a travelling bard and tells stories to glorify his role; in another, the blinded cyclops takes a sort of revenge on Odysseus by inventing all the difficulties of his homeward voyage, although he can't quite bring himself to kill off his creation. One even suggests that the Iliad is a manual for a complicated form of chess, with all the battle stories essentially tactical tips.

There are also several stories about forgetfulness, whether due to witchcraft or old age. I think my favourite story was the very last one, in which an elderly Odysseus retraces his steps back to Troy, finding that all the nymphs and monsters have gone, and that Troy itself is a tourist destination where actors replay key battles and the stalls sell imitation armour.

I love things like this, and there are many clever ideas in this book. Overall though I found it a little underwhelming. Last year I really enjoyed a book called Sum, which featured similarly short variations on a theme, which in Sum's case was the afterlife. But I quite often find myself thinking about some of the stories in Sum, because some of them illustrate quite profound points. While I enjoyed The Lost Books Of The Odyssey, I don't think the stories will stay with me so long.

When he was drunk Achilles would take his knife and try to pierce his hand or, if he was very drunk, his heart, and thereby were the delicate blades of many daggers broken. Odysseus, who had seen more than one such demonstration, rained praise on him for his extraordinary mettle, which made Achilles bridle like a puppy, but privately worried that a man immune to death must soon despise the mortals around him.

92detailmuse
Nov. 4, 2012, 7:30 pm

I too enjoyed Sum, and wonder if you've read Robert Olen Butler's Severance? The conceit is a bit gruesome -- the last thoughts of famous people, beheaded -- but as a collection of micro-fiction it's similar in success to Sum.

93wandering_star
Nov. 6, 2012, 10:00 am

Sounds very intriguing! - I will look out for it.

101. A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg

Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall.

Molly Wizenberg writes the food blog Orangette, which I really like. She writes very well about the delights of food and cooking, and a couple of her recipes have become my staples - this unusual and delicious pasta, which is a perfect example of the alchemy of cooking with its onions cooked in different ways, and this comforting and simple soup.

In this book, she's tweaked the blog format slightly so that it becomes a memoir-with-recipes starting from her early childhood. This is a fairly common format; I've enjoyed similar books by Colette Rossant (Apricots On The Nile) and Ruth Reichl (Tender At The Bone). The thing is, these books were published when the authors were, respectively, 65 and 50. Wizenberg was 31, and by her own admission in the book, is someone who likes life to be pretty steady and stable. I don't doubt that her family members and friends, around whom the book is written, are lovely people. But this sort of book has to be about memorable episodes from a life rather than detailed character studies, and Wizenberg's life just isn't interesting enough to support the book.

It feels rather mean to say this, as she comes across as a very nice person. But I did think that I could probably come up with more interesting stories about my own life! - and link each one to a recipe too - in fact it's been quite fun picking out what my memory-freighted recipes would be, starting with the cheese dip and cherries jubilee that my mother used to serve to guests (not together), progressing through recipes that I got from friends (a fantastic and reliable fish stew recipe from Brazil via my best friend's sister-in-law, a memorable meal of cold seafood with salsa verde in Sri Lanka) to Mr wandering_star's chilli.

Anyway, I digress. I will keep enjoying, and cooking from, the Orangette blog, and I'll probably keep a couple of recipes from this book (by the way, the recipes are heavily weighted towards desserts). But I won't be keeping the book itself.

94wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Nov. 8, 2012, 7:27 pm

102. Daughters Of The North by Sarah Hall (also published as The Carhullan Army)

Sarah Hall's The Electric Michelangelo was one of my favourite books of 2010, so I was excited to read this. It is set in a not-too-distant future, when catastrophic climate change has led to an economic and resource crisis for the UK, and a repressive government (known as The Authority) has imposed all kinds of restrictions on its people - most significantly for this story, limiting permissions for women to have children. We are told at the start that the narrative is the "Statement of female prisoner detained under Section 4(b) of the Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act". As it starts, our narrator, known only as Sister, flees her grim life to go into the Cumbrian uplands in search of the women of Carhullan - they have refused to register with the Authority and within the town are treated to the same uneasy mockery that the women of Greenham Common received in the 1980s, but she has always been inspired by their ability to hold out. She finds an almost idealised community. Life is hard, but Sister delights in their self-sufficiency and the "realness" of life around her, and the community (after an initial few days when Sister is kept in a tiny, stinking cell) is sympathetic and supportive. Sympathetic and supportive, that is, apart from the outspoken ex-miilitary leader of the community, Jackie Nixon, and her personal army of hard-training women. One day, however, Nixon tells the community that the Authority is planning to shut them down, and they need to be prepared to fight back.

Generally, when "literary" authors write "genre" (recognising the problems with both those categorisations), the challenge is for them to marry their traditional strength of credible characterisation with the strengths of the genre, in this case ideas of an alternative world which throw light on our own. Unfortunately, Sarah Hall appears to have resolved this challenge by focusing on neither: both the characterisation, and the book's world, are tremendously one-dimensional. In particular, Jackie Nixon should be a very ambiguous character - visionary heroine or manipulative cult leader? Are her sometimes brutal methods really a necessary means to a justifiable end? But Sister (who incidentally is the only member of the community not to be allowed to use her own name) is an unqualified fan, and we never see the mask crack. Similarly, I was expecting more on the internal dynamics of the community - even when they were all there to the same end, decades of life in a small community with little leisure or luxury would almost certainly have created tensions - which perhaps would have come to the surface when Nixon tells the women it's time to fight back. This, too, is missing: Sister describes the community as "running to a high level of courtesy and enlightenment, a society that celebrated female strength and tolerance"; and once the challenge has come, well, there's a 'bad' woman who's kept her husband on a nearby farm and who tries to argue back, but everyone else meekly decides to join the fighting force or be quietly returned to life in the town.

There are hints that we are meant to take Sister's as an unreliable narrative. She's giving it after capture, and during her fighting training all the women are trained to resist torture and not give too much away; and the 'bad' woman tells Sister that she's been brainwashed by Nixon. But the point of unreliable narrators is that you can see through their statements to the underlying reality, and that's just not the case here. A disappointing read.

The vegetable plots were extensive.They were tended every day by a group of women who were more worried about insect netting than anything else they ever had been in their lives, Jackie said. And they were happier for it.

95arubabookwoman
Nov. 10, 2012, 1:40 am

I think I've read all of Peace's books except The Damned Utd, which I have avoided because it was about soccer. The one I liked least was Tokyo Year Zero, and I probably wouldn't have read anything else by him if that was the book of his I read first. I think you'll find GB84 or The Red Riding Hood Quartet more to your liking.

96wandering_star
Nov. 12, 2012, 9:11 am

Thanks. I have downloaded the first chapter of Red Riding 1974, since it was free, and will give it a go.

I am halfway through a good collection of Chinese short stories, An Empty Room by Mu Xin, but won't finish them before I am picked up at 5am tomorrow to head off for a holiday in Burma! I'll be there for almost three weeks. Very excited about this, although it's a long long time since I have been on such a backpacky/low-budget holiday. Worth it though to be able to stay for a decent length of time.

See you in December...

97baswood
Nov. 12, 2012, 5:29 pm

Happy backpacking.

98Nickelini
Nov. 12, 2012, 10:35 pm

Have fun in Burma, and tell us all about it when you get back.

99DieFledermaus
Nov. 13, 2012, 2:59 am

The premise of The Lost Books of the Odyssey sounds really intriguing; I like things of that sort also. Too bad it was somewhat lacking.

Have a safe and fun trip!

100edwinbcn
Nov. 13, 2012, 8:33 am

... And let us know about any books on Burma. You haven't done any preparatory reading?

101rebeccanyc
Nov. 13, 2012, 8:58 am

On the subject of Burma, I read Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia earlier this year and found it fascinating, although not quite living up to the title.

102dchaikin
Nov. 14, 2012, 12:42 am

Wow, Burma. Enjoy!

103kidzdoc
Nov. 14, 2012, 3:19 pm

Have a great time in Burma!

104wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Dez. 5, 2012, 7:33 am

Hello! Thanks for all the good wishes. I am back from what turned out to be a wonderful trip. I think everything exceeded my expectations. The big tourist sights really were as spectacular as the photos that I'd seen - for example, in Bagan, you really could climb to the roof of a temple and see ruins dotted about the plain every direction you looked. The cities felt safe and welcoming and were a lot of fun to potter around and people-watch. And the food... well, the restaurant food we had was pretty bland, but Burma turns out to have some of the best street snacks of anywhere I've been - up there with India and Malaysia. And since food is very important to both me and the friend I went with, we had a very good time.

I don't want to clog up the thread with photos but I have put my favourite ten images into my LT profile gallery in case anyone would like to see what it was like!

Reading: good question. I hadn't found anything I particularly wanted to read about Burma before I went, since I'm not a huge fan of travel writing and it didn't seem possible to get any Burmese fiction. While there, though, I discovered that Norman Lewis had written a book about Burma in the 1950s - I really enjoyed his Naples '44 when I read it this summer, so Golden Earth is now on my wishlist. Rebecca, I'll look for Where China Meets India too if you recommend it.

I was in Mandalay on the day that Obama visited Burma. That morning, every teashop we passed that had a TV set was completely full of people watching the coverage. We managed to find a couple of seats in one to watch his speech at Rangoon University. It was simultaneously interpreted for the first part, but that stopped after the preamble - although there was scrolling Burmese text across the bottom of the screen, so possibly that was a translation? In any case, everyone seemed riveted even after the simultaneous translation stopped.

105SassyLassy
Dez. 5, 2012, 8:40 am

Beautiful pictures and glad the trip went well.

I have some books on Burma, by non Burmese, but would recommend George Orwell's Burmese Days and George MacDonald Fraser's (yes, the Flashman author) Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma.

I'll have to look for Golden Earth and A Dragon Apparent based on your comments.

106detailmuse
Dez. 5, 2012, 9:36 am

Terrific photos! Glad your trip was so good.

>best street snacks of anywhere I've been - up there with India
I'm happy to hear you've been to India, I may have a trip there early next year or more probably early 2014 and would love to ask you some questions.

107Nickelini
Dez. 5, 2012, 10:24 am

Thanks for reporting back on your trip! It sounds and looks fabulous. Colour me jealous.

108rebeccanyc
Dez. 5, 2012, 7:05 pm

#104 Glad you had such a good trip! I found Where China Meets India fascinating although, as I said in my review, it wasn't quite what I expected based on the title. It more a tour (historical and economic, as well as geographic) of neighboring reasons in China and India than a book about Burma.

109deebee1
Bearbeitet: Dez. 6, 2012, 7:06 am

Lovely photos, and glad you enjoyed your trip. Will drop by your page one of these days to ask for some travel tips for Bagan, as I'm planning a trip in May or so. Hope you don't mind!

I haven't read Golden Earth though its high on my TBR list. A Dragon Apparent mentioned by Sassy, about Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam on the eve of the war, is excellent. Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyii by Justin White is a very good background on the country's politics, and unravels some of the unknowns about the military dictatorship, if this is of interest to you.

110kidzdoc
Dez. 6, 2012, 8:23 am

Great photos, indeed! Thanks for sharing them with us.

111dchaikin
Dez. 7, 2012, 9:11 am

Welcome back and love those photos! Thant Myint-U (author of Where China Meets India) has written a few books on Burma. I can highly recommend River of Lost Footsteps which is about Burma and includes a history. There are six reviews on the work page, including mine from 2 years ago.

112rebeccanyc
Dez. 7, 2012, 9:15 am

I have River of Lost Footsteps too, but haven't read it although it's been on the TBR for years. By the way, I believe Thant Myint U is the grandson of U Thant, the former UN secretary general.

113avatiakh
Dez. 7, 2012, 10:24 pm

Love your photos. I looked through a beautiful cookbook just the other day, Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid. The food looked fantastic.

114wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 2:12 am

Thanks for the recommendations, which I'll look out for. On the subject of cookbooks, I saw a nice looking one in the airport called hsa*ba - not yet on LT but the website has a few sample recipes. And I'm very happy to provide travel tips!

Onto the reading.

The first ten years of my life I was not black. I was in many ways different from those around me, but not darker. That much I know. Then came the day when I became aware that my colour had deepened. Later, once I was black, I paled again.

Totally coincidentally, the first two books I read while I was away had very similar themes.

103. The Two Hearts Of Kwasi Boachi by Arthur Japin, which starts with the lines above, is based on the true story of two Ashanti princes, Kwasi and his cousin Kwame, aged ten in 1837 when they were sent to Holland to be educated. As princes - and curiosities - they are regular visitors to the royal court, but at best they are treated as noble savages. Unlike his cousin, Kwasi tries hard to fit in, giving us the rather painful spectacle of humiliating events being narrated by someone who is determined to laugh them off. It's a sad story, compounded by the betrayals of his adult life, when the Dutch state ships him off to a distant part of the empire. But I found it a bit of a slog to read. It's just not easy to write this sort of emotion-suppressing narrator without the story becoming overly stiff, and the themes felt a bit obviously flagged - not integrated enough into the narrative.

104. Honky by Dalton Conley, the story of a boy growing up in a poor area of New York, where his is almost the only white family in the area. He doesn't quite realise this until he starts attending a school in the city where most of the students are from better-off backgrounds. He ends up hiding each side of his life from the other - for example, when his mother takes him off to Pennsylvania for the summer, he says nothing to the neighbourhood kids (although he's very jealous that they can stay in the city and play in the water from the fire hydrants) but plays it up at school. I found the book moderately interesting, but it reads too much like a sociology primer.

I'll never know whether it was my mother's protectiveness, my expectations and aspirations, or simply my race that spared me from a worse fate. I will never know the true cause and effect in the trajectory of my life. And maybe it is better that way. I can believe what I want to believe. This is the privilege of the middle and upper classes in America - the right to make up the reasons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us.

115wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Dez. 8, 2012, 2:28 am

105. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (audiobook) - a picaresque Western, narrated by a reluctant contract killer. Original, and pretty enjoyable (and well read by William Hope), but some elements were definitely on the borderline of my tolerance for whimsy. A good rule of thumb is probably how you react to the information that the title refers to two brothers whose surname is Sisters. If you think 'oh for heaven's sake', you probably shouldn't crack the cover. (If the book can be said to have a bigger theme, it's about humanity and human relationships, and many of the more whimsical aspects are playing with this theme - but I still don't think it justifies such a terrible pun).

106. Tongue by Kyung-Ran Jo

A Korean novel about a chef who has recently been left by her boyfriend. I really enjoyed this to start with, but got quite annoyed with the narrator when two-thirds of the way through she was still trying to get the boyfriend back. Also, the highly sensual descriptions of eating and food became increasingly over-the-top and felt like they were just there to shock.

You work with fire and knives in the the kitchen, where small and large dangers lurk. The ideal place to hide a destructive instinct. I'm engulfed by this unstable urge as I watch red blood dripping onto the cutting board, feeling joy as if a frustration has disappeared.

116wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 10:08 am

My first meeting with the man who would send me on my quest for the Haitian zombi poison occurred on a damp miserable winter's day in late February 1974.

And with that, we are into 107. The Serpent And The Rainbow by Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist once asked to research whether there is any medical truth behind the legends of zombies. In Haiti, Davis eventually manages to track down the elements - poisons which can paralyse and simulate death. But he becomes much more interested in the social meanings behind the practice, which he concludes is used by secret societies as a way to punish individuals who transgress certain boundaries and taboos. This was a quick and interesting read, although the prose was often a bit purple.

117wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 10:09 am

108. Fludd by Hilary Mantel

Fludd is set in a grim northern English town in the 1950s, certainly the grimmest time and possibly the grimmest place that can be imagined. Lives are small, circumscribed by the fear of being different. The wild and beautiful moors surround the town, but no-one lifts their eyes up to them.

It's a largely Catholic town, with a convent school, and the story focuses on Father Angwin, the parish priest. Father Angwin has long since stopped believing in God, and has attempted to cover up the fact by being a stickler for doctrine. But he does still have a soft spot for the plaster saints in the church, and attempts to resist when the bishop tells him to modernise by getting rid of them. A few days later, a mysterious stranger arrives - the new curate sent by the bishop to keep an eye on Angwin? or something rather different... One way or another, he turns the priest's mind, and some of the townsfolk, away from their focus on the rules and reminds them that the basis of religion is love.

I read Fludd once before, many years ago (1990 or 1991), and my main memory is of being baffled. I was hoping that it would make more sense this time around, and it did, but only a little bit.

"Supposing a person entertains certain thoughts ... but he does not know at the time that they are bad? Suppose they start off as quite ordinary, permissible thoughts, but then he feels where they are tending?"
"He should stop thinking at once."
"But you cannot stop thinking. Can you? Can you?"
"A good Catholic can."
"How?"
"Prayer."
"Prayer drives thought out?"
"With practice."
"I don't know," she said. "It has been my experience that you can pray but the thoughts run under the prayers, like wires under the ground."
"Then you are not doing it properly."
"I have tried."

118wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 10:38 am

109. Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill

This is the last published book in the Dalziel and Pascoe series of detective novels. When Reginald Hill died (about this time last year?) I read that he had completed one more, but it doesn't seem to have been published yet.

The title appears at first to refer to the structure of the novel, in which several different narrative threads are woven together in a repeating pattern. There is Superintendent Dalziel, just getting back to work after the events in The Death Of Dalziel but not quite back to top form; several people on the hunt for a man who disappeared many years before; an up-and-coming young politician; and DI Pascoe, who's having a day off to attend a wedding (all the events take place between 8am and midnight). But as those threads begin to come together, the title takes on additional meanings - it might give too much away to say more.

I think Reginald Hill is now my very favourite crime writer. This is another stellar example of his skill - the crime story itself is very twisty and satisfying, the pace is fast, and there's also the poignancy of Dalziel wondering if he'll get back to the top of his game.

Normally Andy Dalziel was to diplomacy what Alexander the Great was to knots, but this time he hesitated the cutting edge and essayed a bit of gentle plucking.

119rebeccanyc
Dez. 8, 2012, 10:59 am

Interesting and varied reading! I liked Fludd, although I'm sure I didnt' get all of it.

120wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 10:41 pm

110. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

As this novel starts, Peter and his wife Rebecca are in a New York taxicab on their way to a party, talking about the upcoming visit of her much younger brother, back from rehab and a long finding-himself visit to the East.

A lot of books use this pattern of a young visitor bringing upheaval to the lives of a long-established couple. Here, the themes that it illustrates are about the search for something bigger, some meaning to our lives. Also, the rarity and arbitraryness of the extraordinary - the book is full of people whose youthful promise has turned into (or is turning into) an unexceptional middle age.

I liked By Nightfall less than other Cunninghams I've read. While told in the second and third person, it clearly follows Peter's consciousness, and his inner voice is rather fussy and fretful. Also, I can't help feeling that your forties is a bit old to be musing on the fact that you never became exceptional - I went through that in my twenties! Despite this, though, there are some beautiful pieces of writing in By Nightfall, so I probably would recommend it to people who have enjoyed his other books.

History favors the tragic lovers, the Gatsbys and the Anna K.s, it forgives them, even as it grinds them down. But Peter, a small figure on an undistinguished corner of Manhattan, will have to forgive himself, he'll have to grind himself down because it seems no one is going to do it for him. There are no gold-leaf stars painted on lapis over his head, just the gray of an unseasonably cool April afternoon. No one would do him in bronze. He, like all the multitudes who are not remembered, is waiting politely for a train that in all likelihood is never going to come.

121wandering_star
Dez. 8, 2012, 11:10 pm

111. An Empty Room by Mu Xin

An Empty Room is a collection of short stories, which Mu Xin selected from several of his works to be translated into English for this collection. If there is a common thread to them, it seems to be about traces - the traces that we leave behind us, and the traces of people's inner selves that come through in everyday interaction and make us feel we understand the people that we know.

Most of the stories are what I think of as the 'traditional' kind of short story, ie they are about a moment or an epiphany rather than a full narrative arc. Personally I prefer stories where things actually happen, but there are many images that will stay in my mind - the loss of a treasured possession in The Moment Childhood Vanished, a room full of discarded love letters in An Empty Room (my favourite story), and above all, the powerful and vivid image at the end of Halo.

This is hardly even a story but starts off as a long discussion of the different depictions of halos in Eastern and Western art. I was wondering what on earth the point was, when one of the speakers starts to tell the story of a time when he had a halo. During the Cultural Revolution he spent time in a crowded prison cell. The prisoners who have been in the cell the longest have the privilege of sitting against the walls, so that they have something to lean on. Each has their own spot - and the sweat and oil from their heads has created a patch on the wall behind them. The circles were exactly like the dignified light of Buddha portrayed in ancient art. Not only that, each new prisoner had to have his head shaved. Our arms were bared as it was the peak of summer, and we sat with legs folded. Our posture, the hazy circles, the shaved heads formed eighteen arhat profiles, no more, no less.

Unlike books written for non-Chinese audiences, there are traces here of the censorship which means that certain events cannot be referred to directly. In Halo, the prison service is explained like this: "In the second half of the twentieth century, certain events akin to religious persecution of heretics occurred in a certain country. I wasn't exactly a heretic, but certain details of a sculpture of mine were used against me." Fong Fong No. 4, a story about a woman who the narrator knows at four different stages of her life, contains the lines: After I returned home, our correspondence gradually became less frequent. Her letters then began to arrive from Anhui Province where she had been sent to do farm work. - a reference to the mass sending of urban youth to the countryside towards the end of the Cultural Revolution.

122Nickelini
Dez. 8, 2012, 11:14 pm

Also, I can't help feeling that your forties is a bit old to be musing on the fact that you never became exceptional - I went through that in my twenties!

Really? I'm in my late 40s and am still going through waves of it. In my 20s I guess I thought I actually was doing something exceptional, but then after accomplishing it I realized I could do better . . . so every decade I've had several bouts of disappointment in my unrealized potential. What a fresh thought to not worry about it anymore! ;-)

But otherwise, it's interesting to hear your thoughts on By Nightfall. After loving The Hours, for some reason I hesitate to pick up his other novels. Even though you didn't praise this one, it still sounds like a decent read.

123DieFledermaus
Dez. 9, 2012, 5:08 am

Wonderful pictures! I like stupid puns so maybe The Sisters Brothers is a book for me. Your review of Fludd is pretty tempting - I have Wolf Hall on the pile as I imagine everyone does, but I wanted to try some of Mantel's contemporary novels. Was thinking Beyond Black but Fludd sounds interesting as well, if odd.

124wandering_star
Dez. 9, 2012, 6:52 pm

Joyce - LOL, I will withdraw that part of my criticism! And to be fair, he's an art dealer, which I imagine is a field where success can come later in life.

Fledermaus, interesting but odd is a good summary. I haven't read Beyond Black so can't recommend one over the other. Fludd is shorter, but less contemporary (1950s).

112. Breath by Tim Winton

Breath is the story of Bruce Pike, and particularly of his early teenage years. Despite his father's fear of the sea, Pikelet and his best friend Loonie discover the thrill of surfing, and eventually befriend Sando, a grizzled older surfer - they admire his skill on the waves, and he sees in them some of his own youthful boldness. Sando begins to take them to his favourite secret surfing sites, and Pikelet begins to understand that his own appetite for excitement is far exceeded by the recklessness of those around him - but he can't realise the full extent of their self-destructive tendencies and how these will draw him in.

This book plays with ideas of danger and risk, excitement and fear. I really felt that I was riding that wave along with Pikelet, balanced between thrill and fear, almost tipping over at points into one or the other. Winton also does a remarkable job of describing the feeling of surfing - I've never done it myself but each time he writes about it, it feels vivid and exhilarating.

All the way down the big board chattered against the surface chop; I could hear the giggle and natter of it over the thunder behind me. When the wave drew itself up to its full height, walling a hundred yards ahead as I swept down, it seemed to create its own weather. There was suddenly no wind at all and the lower I got, the smoother the water became. The whole rolling edifice glistened. For a moment - just a brief second of enchantment - I felt weightless, a moth riding light. Then I leant into a turn and accelerated and the force of it slammed through my knees, thighs, bladder, and I came lofting back to the crest to feel the land breeze in my face and catch a smudge of cliffs before sailing down the line again. With each turn, each stalling fade, I grew in confidence. By the wave's last section I was styling. I scudded out into the channel, so addled by joy I had to sit a while to clear my head.

125Nickelini
Dez. 9, 2012, 8:11 pm

Oh good - Breath sounds good. I have it on my TBR pile but haven't been sure I actually want to read it or not. Sounds different.

126wandering_star
Dez. 10, 2012, 4:44 am

Have you read any of his other books? I have only read Dirt Music, which I really liked.

127wandering_star
Dez. 10, 2012, 4:58 am

113. 'Socialism Is Great!': a worker's memoir of the new China by Lijia Zhang

This is another tale of growing up, but in a very different context - China in the 1970s and 1980s. Lijia is a tomboyish child but also a good student, when at the age of fifteen she has to take up her mother's job in a rocket factory. We follow her life through the next ten years or so, as she studies, makes friends, starts to encounter young men, and continues to strive for a more interesting life.

Zhang is a fun and engaging personality, but the thing that makes this book interesting is that it's a real 'ant's eye view' of a time when China was starting to unfreeze and kicking off the process of tremendous change. We see the first private entrepreneurs tentatively setting up businesses, from kebab stalls to hair salons, and the impact that this has on daily life. A trickle of foreign films and novels becomes available. More and more Chinese start to study English and become familiar with ideas from outside China.

This is not high politics or literature, but it's a quick read and an interesting perspective. Frustratingly, it ends just after Zhang has been interrogated by the police for her involvement in a protest supporting the students in Tiananmen Square. The acknowledgements and book cover reveal that she spent some time in the UK, was married to a man with a Scottish name, and now lives with two children in Beijing - it would have been nice to have had at least a quick summary of how that all came about.

Suddenly, he started to stammer. 'Do you think there's a chance, chance, we could develop our friendship further?' My first proposal!? But it failed to thrill. Liu was a nice guy and good to me, yet I found him priggish and wet. I had high ideals for my would-be boyfriend, doubtless due to the foreign films I devoured. He had to be handsome, and highly intelligent, with a great vision for life, and a romantic with little regard for the number of wontons in his bowl.

128Nickelini
Dez. 10, 2012, 11:17 am

Have you read any of his other books? I have only read Dirt Music, which I really liked.

I own that one too, but haven't had time to read it either. Must get to him in the new year . . .

129SassyLassy
Dez. 10, 2012, 4:29 pm

>126 wandering_star: I've read Breath and enjoyed your review. I've also read Dirt Music and The Riders, both of which I really liked. I sort of stumbled upon him by accident when I confused his name with Tim Binding, another author I really like. Unfortunately, neither seems to be distributed very widely.

130wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Dez. 19, 2012, 10:36 am

114. Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami and 115. Haruki Murakami And The Music Of Words by Jay Rubin

I read most of the Jay Rubin book first, then paused before the final chapter (which deals with Kafka On The Shore) to read KOTS, so I'll review them in order of starting rather than in order of finishing.

Rubin is a professor of Japanese literature and one of Murakami's main translators (Alfred Birnbaum translated A Wild Sheep Chase and Philip Gabriel translated Kafka On The Shore, but I think Rubin translated most of what appeared in English in between). Because of these two facts, I had high hopes for his book, but found it disappointingly lacking in insight.

The best thing about the book for me is that it picked out common threads and imagery from Murakami's work. I have read hardly any Murakami in the last five years, so this was a useful refresher for me and did help me to appreciate KOTS better. Rubin also quoted some interesting comments that Murakami had made in various interviews. And the book was a quick, fluid read.

But many of Rubin's comments seemed like the personal views of a fan, rather than part of an academic work of criticism. Rubin is defensive of Murakami in the face of criticism from the Japanese literary establishment, and doesn't touch other areas where Murakami's work has been challenged (eg I have seen criticisms of his characterisation of women - I don't agree with those criticisms but I think it would have been valuable to discuss them). At the same time, he doesn't back up his judgements of which books are good and which are more minor works, apparently assuming the reader will automatically agree with him.

And there are far too many bits of the book like this: "In May 1989 they {Murakami and his wife} travelled to Rhodes where the beaches, the charming old city, and relaxing with a good book or two helped them to forget about the outside world." I just don't see the point of this sentence - it provides no information of value and begs the question how the author knows this! Other facts I didn't need to know include Murakami's fastest ever marathon time and the brand of beer he drank while living in the US...

Fortunately, I really enjoyed Kafka On The Shore. It's a return to the surrealistic Murakami of books like Hardboiled Wonderland or The Elephant Vanishes, rather than the sappy love story stuff. Like Hardboiled Wonderland, we have two interwoven stories. In one, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, and ends up befriending the staff of a private library who shelter him. In the other, old Mr Nakata, a bit soft in the head since an incident in his childhood, accidentally commits a terrible crime (or does he?) and and is forced to go on a journey to redeem himself.

The Kafka story starts off more naturalistically, the Nakata one more mystical (Nakata can talk to cats and stop a street fight by making it rain leeches). But they gradually start to intertwine in style as well as in story. I wouldn't say that the story makes complete sense, and there are some slightly disturbing elements, but overall it has that dreamlike logic which is one of the things I like most about reading Murakami.

The most insightful comment I found in Rubin's book is the following: In the final analysis, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a compilation of self-contained short stories, its great power deriving more from cumulative effect and variety than structural wholeness. I could say something similar about Kafka On The Shore - it's better to try and absorb the spirit of it than to analyse it too closely. One of the characters in KOTS puts this well, when discussing a song written by another character (and which provides KOTS with its title): Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she {the songwriter} found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around.

I had some very strange, Murakami-esque dreams while reading KOTS, such as one about a staircase that led to the end of the world.

131edwinbcn
Dez. 19, 2012, 11:28 am

Excellent review! I hope I'll come round to read this next year.

132wandering_star
Dez. 19, 2012, 7:37 pm

Thanks. I had had it on my shelves for a loooong time, but had been putting it off because I'd either struggled with (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman) or been bored by (After Dark) the more recent Murakamis that I'd read. I'm glad I finally picked it up!

116. Perfect End: a Yellowthread Street mystery by William Marshall

At the start, Perfect End fit squarely into what I think of as "cosy-surreal" mysteries, which combine a weird crime with gently witty narration (see Edmund Crispin and Michael Innes for the main practitioners of this genre). Perfect End, though, is closer to the surreal end of the scale. A typhoon is descending on 1970s Hong Kong, and a passer-by finds a police station deserted - like the Marie Celeste, it seems that the inhabitants just vanished, leaving half-smoked cigarettes and undrunk cups of coffee behind them. The only living thing he sees - as it sprints out past him - looks like a gigantic cat with a three-winged butterfly in its mouth. As the detection goes on, though, it becomes clear that there are some truly terrible events behind this set-up.

The most memorable thing about this book is the way that the climax takes place as the typhoon hits with full force, probably the most dramatic setting ever for the unmasking of a criminal. Auden, getting under cover below the window frame, yelled, 'How the hell are we going to get across there?' A shower of glass from panes left in the broken open door imploded and banged into the rear wall of the shop like bullets, 'You said the window wouldn't go!' He saw the car across the road still sliding begin to rip apart, the doors going first, and yelled again, 'How? How the hell are we going to get there?'

133wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Dez. 19, 2012, 7:56 pm

117. The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter

Trouble

'Jill'
I challenge the mirror
'how much guts have you got?'

I like my courage
   physical
I like my courage
    with a dash of danger.

In between insurance jobs
I've been watching
    rock climbers
       like game little spiders
          on my local cliff

I've got no head for heights
    but plenty of stomach
       for trouble

trouble
       deep other-folks trouble
          to spark my engine
             and pay my mortgage

and private trouble
    oh, pretty trouble

to tidal-wave my bed

I'm waiting

I want you, trouble,
    on the rocks.


And so we are introduced to the narrator of The Monkey's Mask, hardbitten private detective Jill Fitzpatrick. The next case she is offered is to find a missing student, and the only lead that she can discover is that the student had been seeing a (married) published poet. She'd also written him impassioned, explicit, Plath-esque poetry, and so Jill goes to see her tutor to see if she can narrow down the field. But romantic entanglements ensue, and perhaps Jill is not as focused on the case as she should be...

I enjoyed reading this, although not all the poetry is as effective as the first one, which I quoted above. The part that worked least well for me was the descriptions of Australia's poetry scene, as seen through Jill's eyes - I imagine that Dorothy Porter had good fun writing these but they didn't interest me too much and distracted from the storyline. I also guessed the ending.

134baswood
Dez. 19, 2012, 8:16 pm

Enjoyed reading your post on Haruki Murakami and your very useful comments on the Jay Rubin book.

135lilisin
Bearbeitet: Dez. 19, 2012, 9:34 pm

Other facts I didn't need to know include Murakami's fastest ever marathon time and the brand of beer he drank while living in the US...

The other quote was unnecessary (true, how is Rubin supposed to know that tidbit?) but this one I understood. It shows two of Murakami's loves: running and beer. Murakami even wrote a book about how he feels when he's running. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir

And two, in most every book (that I've noticed and others have noticed), Murakami is very particular about choosing out beers in his books. I read a blog of one Murakami fan who would drink the beer pointed out in the book as he read just get a feel for the character.

So I think that line is supposed to be a wink to the fans of Murakami's writing.

I haven't been able to decide which translator I've liked best for Murakami, whether Bierbaum or Rubin. Gabriel is the weakest in my opinion.

Edited to add: Did they discuss Underground at all? I'm not sure who translated that one but I feel that it doesn't get as much press as his fiction although I thought that nonfiction work was fantastic.

136StevenTX
Dez. 20, 2012, 12:23 am

Murakami is also very specific about brands of Scotch. In Kafka on the Shore there is a character who resembles the Johnnie Walker mascot. He tortures cats. If it had been people or dogs I wouldn't have minded, but not cats. I could never drink Johnnie Walker after that. Then I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in which the protagonist drinks Cutty Sark. (It's mentioned in 1Q84 as well.) So I tried it. I don't buy Scotch very often, maybe one bottle a year, but when I do it is Cutty Sark thanks to Murakami.

I just put Underground on the wishlist.

137wandering_star
Dez. 20, 2012, 7:19 am

Ha! Lilisin, thanks for pointing that out. That makes a lot of sense. For anyone who wants to emulate the great man, "he drank Bud Dry without feeling the need to consume something more fashionable". As for the running, I suppose it's interesting that HM runs marathons, but I'm still not convinced I need to know the times. Perhaps if I knew more about running...

Yes, Underground is covered. The gas attacks took place when Murakami was on a short break in Japan from his base in the US. Rubin suggests that in Underground, Murakami did what he often has his fictional narrators do - listen to other people's stories.

138wandering_star
Bearbeitet: Dez. 20, 2012, 8:25 am

118. Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker

A terrible crime has taken place in the quiet, complacent village of Burley Cross. Some vandal has broken into the village postbox, taken out the contents and dumped them in a back alley. The village bobby is handed the bundle of letters - the only available evidence of who might have committed this nefarious deed. As he, and we, read through them, we get a vivid and funny picture of village life - the busybodies, the nosy neighbours, the sweet old ladies and the downshifting city dwellers.

Some condemn themselves out of their own unreliable-narrator mouths; for others, you have to wait a few letters for the pieces of the story to fit together. The hinge of the narrative is a long letter which details the village 'auction of promises' - where some villagers donate services to be auctioned for charity, from sprucing up a garden to making a quilt or writing a song. Somehow, in the process, everyone is shown at their best or worst (depending on character).

It would be fairly easy to pick holes in this book. The butts of the jokes are often fish in a barrel. There's a surprising number of letters sent considering these days of email. And every single correspondent writes more or less in the style of Nicola Barker - digressive, emotional and emphatic. But you know what? It's a style that I enjoy reading.

This book isn't Darkmans. (Alas, what is?) But it's a very lively read. I whipped through it with a grin on my face, and at the end I realised that the village's inhabitants had worked their way into my heart - I really wanted to know what happened to them next! Given the way that hints scattered through the letters were stitched together at the end, though, I do have a certain confidence that the good ones will end happily...

Hi Prue, darling -

Seb here. You asked me to keep you up to speed on this year's BC Auction of Promises, and I must confess - to my eternal shame - that in spite of all my good intentions, I've been actively
avoiding getting in touch because I'm so deeply, deeply mortified by the horrible way things have been panning out... (In fact this is how bad it's got, Prue: on Tuesday I spent the entire afternoon sponging down my kitchen blinds - each, individual wooden slat, front and back - with a warm water and vinegar solution, having convinced myself that they were ever so slightly 'claggy' to the touch. On Wednesday I lime-washed a perfectly nice chest of drawers. On Thursday I spent hours removing the lime-wash).

139SassyLassy
Dez. 20, 2012, 10:01 am

Love your excerpt from the Barker book. How could you not forgive someone who could write such a delightful letter?

>136 StevenTX: Steven, combining Japanese and Scotch, I will now have visions of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation in my head all day...not a pleasant thought. Perhaps you could switch authors for a while and move to some of the single malts from Islay or somewhere similar:)

140baswood
Dez. 21, 2012, 8:29 pm

Bill Murray in Lost in Translation - a great performance, fortunately the image I have in my head is of Scarlett Johansson.

141detailmuse
Dez. 25, 2012, 12:55 pm

Off topic, but I know a man, a business acquaintance, who over several years went from looking like Jimmy Smits to Bill Murray. ((sigh))

142wandering_star
Dez. 30, 2012, 2:33 am

119. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

In 2019, scientists monitoring possible signs of extraterrestrial life pick up broadcasts of beautiful music coming from somewhere in the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri. While the UN discusses how to respond, the Jesuits pull together a secret, scratch mission.

We join the story forty years later, when the sole surviving member of the mission, Fr Emilio Sandoz, has been brought back, in disgrace and in a terrible physical condition. Alternating chapters take us through the time running up to the mission, and the aftermath where the Church is trying to discover, from Sandoz, what exactly happened.

This structure builds tension well, and the first half of the book was page-turning enough for me to overlook any implausibilities or other problems. But once they get to the alien planet, there's an idyllic lull which gave me space to figure out the flaws. One problem I had was that all the mission members are wise, rational, good people. They aren't perfect, but all their flaws are endearing, and what's more they all continue to find each other's flaws endearing even after several years of the mission - there is no complexity in the relationships.

A bigger problem was that the book seems to aim to explore the nature of faith - not something that I, uncomplicatedly atheist, have any particular interest in. Maybe this would work for a reader more interested in these questions; for me, it meant that there was very little point to the book - its only message seemed to be that bad things happen to good people (and non-earth species).

And when the mind-numbing scream of the engines diminished and then fell off to a silence almost as deafening, it seemed only natural that he should move into the airlock and open the hatch and step out alone, into the sunlight of stars he'd never noticed while on Earth, and fill his lungs with the exhalation of unknown plants and fall to his knees weeping with the joy of it when, after a long courtship, he felt the void fill and believed with all his heart that his love affair with God had been consummated.

143edwinbcn
Dez. 30, 2012, 4:27 am

>119 rebeccanyc:

Your review makes me all the more curious about the book.

144dchaikin
Dez. 30, 2012, 10:46 am

ditto, but warnings noted.

145wandering_star
Dez. 31, 2012, 7:01 am

It'll be interesting to see what you think, if you do get to it.

And finally.... 120. I Could Read The Sky by Timothy O'Grady with photos by Steve Pyke. I picked this up yesterday as a fairly quick read which would get me to a nice round number for the year. It turns out to be an intensely poetic evocation of the life of an Irish labourer working in the UK. Sitting in an alcoholic fuzz in his Kentish Town flat, he thinks back over his childhood in Ireland and adult life of labouring. O'Grady is American but apparently spent some time in Ireland researching the book, and he's done a good job of conveying the accidental poetry of ordinary people's voices. The book also contains a few dozen black & white photos of rural Ireland by Steve Pyke, an integral part of the story - some of these really added to the resonance, especially the faces, although others were just murky.

What I could do.

I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Da put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field. Work the swarth turner, the float and the thresher. I could read the sea. Shoot strait. Make a shoe. Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes.

146wandering_star
Dez. 31, 2012, 9:24 pm

My 2013 thread is here.