Bani's Books

Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island

2009-07-10T14:42:00.003+02:00

It may surprise you to know that it was actually my husband who borrowed this from the library - I can't remember why, maybe because he saw the film trailers? or maybe it was just recommended to him by an accquaintance? No matter. He read it and quite liked it, but he complained of there being a twist that he saw coming a mile off. So I read it too, and I did not see the twist coming. More fool me, perhaps, it's not a strikingly unusual nor original sort of twist, but I was quite prepared to take the story at face value. The twist therefore came as a bit of a surprise to me, and I found myself reluctant actually to accept it. More so since something is said in the prologue that makes it possibly that the twist is not true. (I'm being purposefully oblique here because I really wouldn't want to spoil the read for anyone…) So I liked this quite a bit. Lehane is a good writer, and he made a refreshing break from The Unconsoled (ha!) which I was "reading" at the time. I tend to pass by the Lehanes at the library, for no good reason at all finding myself going "nah" and choosing something else. Perhaps I should make it my objective to read them this summer. I have read Mystic River too, and liked it. His books are generally placed in a crime or thriller genre, but he is skilled enough to give them something more, really literary qualities. In fact I was thinking of this after finishing the book and looking again at the cover, which is black and disturbing with the title in a jagged script and Lehane's name overshadowing it all - had the cover been a plain beige with a plain title, and had the print of the whole novel been smaller, thus making the volume slimmer - well then it would be considered a different type of book altogether.

Story: on the isolated Shutter Island stands an asylum for the criminally insane. Two federal marshals arrive to conduct an investigation into the disappearance of one of the prisoners, a woman convicted of murdering her children. Gradually they start to see that all is not what it seems, and that something else is going on on the island. There, that could be a blurb that, but it really doesn't do the book justice. Nor can it if I don't want to risk spoiling it.

Anyway, I've already borrowed Coronado by same author, so I'll be back with opinions.

Edited 11th July:

Right, here's an opinion I forgot, that reading Coronado reminded me of: one of the things I liked best about Shutter Island is how wonderful Lehane is at describing men's emotions. He really goes all out and allows men to love, totally and overwhelmingly, and then despair utterly and bitterly when they've lost their love. It's not that often that I see that in a book (possibly I read the wrong kind of books, you say). His descriptions of emotions don't feel trite, pretentious or made up, ever. He also allows his characters to admit to their feelings. Hm, what I want to say seldom comes out when I sit down at the keyboard, but I'm trying to convey an idea that writing like that helps liberate men from a stereotype where you either don't connect with your emotions at all or distance yourself from them with a certain debonair cynicism. Do you see what I mean?

Just a note to remind myself...

2009-07-08T00:02:00.001+02:00

... that this is a book I'll want to read.

The Gentleman's Daughter by Amanda Vickery

Kiran Desai: The Inheritance of Loss

2009-07-02T23:02:00.002+02:00

I read about half of this, so I think a blog entry isn't uncalled for. I didn't finish it though, and since it was overdue at the library I had my husband return it the other day. There is no good reason why I didn't read it all. It's a very good book, really, and it should have pushed all my buttons - yet it just never grabbed me hard enough. Who knows why these things happen or don't; the silliest books can end up being the most meaningful you've ever read, and books that you can objectively see are great do nothing for you. I'll probably return to this some day, I find myself thinking more about it now that it's not in the house…

There were two parallell story lines. One is about a young woman, living in her grandfather's crumbling mansion somewhere near the border to Nepal since the death of her parents. The other is about their cook's son, who is trying to make a living in America.

I recommend it even though I got restless with it. According to this blog (in Swedish) it picks up pace towards the end, and also the blog author loves Desai's first one more. So I might get that one instead first.

Michael Innes: Carson's Conspiracy and The Gay Phoenix

2009-06-29T10:18:00.003+02:00

Okay, neither of these are very good. They both followed the stolen-identity-sinister butler/manservant formula I saw in The New Sonia Wayward. What's up with that? Why the repetition of the same theme... I was bored. Too bad.

Well, Carson's Conspiracy was not really stolen identity, but about a man who has the brilliant idea of faking his death to escape pecuniary problems. But sort of stolen identity, since he has an employee travelling under his son's name to do it. Enough of that. The Gay Phoenix is about two brothers on a boat, one dies and the other assumes his identity for the money.

That's all you need to know about them. No need to read them, really.

An Ishiguro sum-up

2009-06-28T21:48:00.003+02:00

Oh noez, another author who has disappointed me. It started out so well, with me loving Never Let Me Go, and liking The Remains of the Day a lot. The next three however, failed to tickle me quite as much, and I'm going to be honest with you - no. 4, The Unconsoled, it's just never going to be read. I've reached page 54 or something like that, and the narrator seems to be caught in a reality that's a bit like a dream, with events randomly following one another, and people suddenly saying and doing odd things that nevertheless seem sensible and that you accept, and dialogue that is just making no common sense and leads nowhere. I was reminded of the really surreal stuff, like Flann O'Brien. As I've written before, this is a type of genre that I can't take. I get really annoyed. I'll just come right out and say it - I like my reading to be linear, and if not linear in time necessarily then linear in sense thank you very much. Call me unimaginative if you want, but no dwarfs in red velvet rooms for me (yes, I also get unreasonably angry if forced to watch David Lynch films). So The Unconsoled is out. It'll be there when I'm ninety if I get the urge.

Going back to the ones I have read though, I think part of the problem is that I overdosed. Ishiguro is rather formulaic. You have a narrator, and the narrator is remembering the past while going about his or her business in the present. You therefore get two narratives one might say, that merge into one as the past unfolds to explain the present. Ishiguro also has a special way of writing these memories, which is part of what makes his novels so appealing - he understands that no-one remembers an exact chain of events, or precisely what led to the memory being retold. A memory will often just be a snippet of the larger event, for some reason stuck in the brain. So the narrators will often discuss this, sort of wonder aloud what the circumstances surrounding a particular memory might have been, or even backtrack and realise that the dialogue they remember must have not been spoken like that, that they are confusing two memories. It sounds tedious, but in my opinion it works very well most of the time, because it adds to the realism. When you read five or so novels pretty much back-to-back however… Like I said, I think I overdosed. Ironically, the one I am not going to finish, The Unconsoled, does not follow this formula (some tendencies to it do exist, but by no means as strongly). And the one I thought was oddest (apart from Unconsoled), When We Were Orphans, also had less of it.

So let me write about that book first. The story, as it is told in a mixture of present happenings and memories, is as follows: an English boy, growing up in Shanghai, loses both parents in what is believed to be some sort of kidnapping. First the father disappears, then after some weeks his mother. He is taken back to England to live with his aunt. We get to know him as an adult, when he is making a name for himself as a (private) detective. He becomes very well known and respected, and subsequently has the opportunity to return to Shanghai. The idea is that he will manage to crack what is behind the surging instability of the region (this is just before WW2). Okay. Problem 1: he is a detective. Now, if you change that into "vampire hunter" you get a job title that more accurately fits the tone of the novel. Something just seems off about it. I get a kind of Van Helsing (the film) meets Sherlock Holmes meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vibe. Problem 2: he comes to Shanghai with some sort of assumption (which seems to be shared by the majority of the English colony there) that solving the current problems will solve his parents' abduction. Not only that, he will any day now find them alive and well. To blithely assume that his parents will be found in such a state after being missing for twenty-odd years is just too queer. It makes no sense. The last chapters of the book has him leaping to conclusions in the war-ravaged sections of Shanghai, scrambling through rubble to get to a house where he believes that his parents are being held (still! after all this time!), finding a Japanese soldier whom he thinks is his childhood friend, and just generally not making much sense. I do admit that I've been racking my brains over this book for a while after finishing it, which I suppose is some credit to it. I'm leaning towards some sort of theory that the narrator never really grew up. His whole detective career is a sort of fantasy, born from his childhood games and desire to find his parents. Because the way he behaves and reasons once he is in Shanghai is just too far out to be based in reality, in my opinion. Sadly, that theory flies out the window somewhat since there's an epilogue that disproves it. Ah well.

I've also read two novels set in Japan. There is something that feels a little bit wrong about the tone of these too. I pondered for a while if I was picking up that Ishiguro, having lived in the UK since he was five, is actually writing about a society that he only knows second-best - a bit as if I were to write a book set in Ireland. This idea is supported by the fact that the same names keep popping up in both books, as though Ishiguro doesn't really know that many Japanese names (just like my hypothetical Irish novel would be populated by Dermots and Aoifes). This could of course be entirely wrong. The oddness in tone that I feel could be just a faithful rendering of the tone of a society and culture rather alien to me, the identical names could be anything - those names are very common, perhaps, or else it's a tribute to the author's family members.

I liked An Artist of the Floating World best, I think. Set in the 50s, it's about a retired artist whose work, we are led to understand, helped kindle the war-mongering in pre-war Japan. He has understood that if he does not in some way recant it will affect the well-being of his family. His younger daughter will perhaps never find a husband unless he can show that he is no longer a member of the "losing side". As he remembers we see that his praise of the traditional values that were so heavily emphasised before the war is to some extent a defensive measure, as he does not always like to be reminded of the sadder things that happened because of his political choices. There is a nice twist at the end, when his daughter comes with a different interpretation of events that make the artist less important. What she says implies that he has, to us, aggrandised his importance, perhaps so he'll have a reason to publicly repent of actions that he feels guilty about.

A Pale View of Hills was stranger. I'm still thinking about what it meant, what the underlying tension was about. Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, is visited by her younger half-English daughter following the suicide of her elder daughter by a previous, Japanese husband. (God that was an unwieldy sentence but I can't be bothered changing it. It's half twelve at night and I'm writing from work, after all… ) During the visit she remembers the summer in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko, and she was friends with a woman called Sachiko, who lived with her daughter Mariko in a tumbledown house near the new apartment blocks of the suburb. There is something more being said between the lines of this book, and I'm missing it. It has something to do with the mentioned fact that children were being murdered in Nagasaki that summer, and the parallell between Sachiko planning to go to America with her American lover, and Etsuko later taking her daughter Keiko to England when she herself marries a foreigner. Why are the murdered children mentioned unless I'm to suspect that I know the killer? Is it Etsuko's bullying husband? Is it Sachiko, who tries to drown the kittens? I don't get it. I must scour the internet for other thoughts. Starting with Wikipedia, maybe. Enigmatic indeed.

Despite my OD:ing, I still like Ishiguro and would recommend him. I'm going to take a break from him now though, and return to him some other time with a fresh mind.

In between books sort of

2009-06-24T09:36:00.002+02:00

Today I was rudely awakened to bring my son to daycare, despite trying to plug the idea that my husband could do it. I now have to go back to bed, because I'm working tonight and need to be fresh-ish, but since I got up and dressed I'm a bit too perky. So what to do? Sandwich and a cup of warm nutmeggy honeyed milk in front of the PC for a bit, of course, in the hope that it will help. I'm not quite awake enough for a proper blog entry, but I've been reading a bit so I really should. Perhaps tonight at work I can find the peace to tap them down. What I wanted to do today was go to the library to borrow something, but I don't think I'll have the time. Which leaves me with the book I'm reading, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Which I'm not sure I like. But given that I was actually getting to be quite a bit annoyed with how formulaic his novels is I should stop complaining and get on with it, since at least this one is not about someone remembering. Hm. You have until say six p.m. to convince me that it's not worth it/worth it a lot. I have also got Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss at home, which should be right up my alley but which I found extraordinarily hard to get into. Ditto for that one, regarding the convincing me that is. Chop-chop.

Seth Grahame-Smith (and Jane Austen): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2009-06-18T17:35:00.002+02:00

Jane Austen is one of the absolutely best writers ever. Really. I know this must be true, because even Harold Bloom has said so (lolz). Of all the reading experiences I've had, this has therefore got to be one of the most dire. It is with pain that I realise that this entry is actually my first Jane Austen entry. And I say this while directing a mental apology to my dear sister who lent me the book. She has actually payed money for it, thinking it to be quite a fun idea to add the scourge of the undead to the comedy of manners that is an Austen novel. I remember her saying that it wasn't completely consistent and that there are illogical bits in it that annoy her a little (such as the English housekeeper in Mr Darcy's Japanese-influenced household hobbling to meet the guests on bound feet), but that she found it quite humorous. My sister, clearly, is a more forgiving and generous soul than myself. I want to drag Grahame-Smith naked through thistles and then make him listen to a Glaswegian slowly read a combination of Little Nell and American Psycho. While I rub his scratches with salt. No, on second thoughts, I'll make him rub the salt into his wounds all by himself. That'll larn him.

The idea would have worked in a comedy sketch show on TV. It would have been quite funny. Every week a new scene from the zombie version of Pride and Prejudice - I can see that working. But as a novel it's awful. You end up skimming it to get to the bits that have been changed just to see how they've been changed. Possibly it might be feasible that someone who has only seen the film or TV series could stand to read it and appreciate the humour. Personally I think that the author would be better off spending time and energy on saving the whales or some similar laudable effort.

It is possible to use well-known characters that have passed out of the realm of copy-right with good results. Jasper Fforde is an example of a writer who does this. What he doesn't do is copy somebody elses novel and stick his own bits in it. He creates something new. There is only one instance in P&P&Z where there is a hint of "more", and that is when Lizzie Bennet refrains from killing a zombie mother and infant-in-arms, out of some sort of feeling of mercy, perhaps. It is entirely out of place with the rest of the book really, which in no way ever delves deeper into how it must really be to live in a zombie-invested Georgian England. Of course, the moment ends there. The only deeper emotions and feelings and true dilemmas in the novel, not to mention storyline, is Austen's. So read Austen, people. Please. Let this one die.

The book cover is fabulous though. Props for that. I'm not churlish.

I DN om deckare

2009-06-17T10:06:00.001+02:00

http://www.dn.se/dnbok/deckare-seriemordare-1.893065

Jag måste bokmärka detta för de författare som nämns längst ner ska jag läsa tror jag.

P.G. Wodehouse: Very Good, Jeeves

2009-06-17T09:56:00.001+02:00

Mr Bani mumbled something about wanting to read Wodehouse, so when I was in the library I picked up a book that seemed to be an early one albeit not the first, reasoning that surely one wants to start as close to the beginning as possible. Turned out that Mr Bani really wanted to start at the very very beginning (but he might have changed his mind now), so I read it instead. I've never read any Wodehouses, only watched a few episodes of the series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. I do know that there are people who praise Wodehouse as among the finest of comedy, on a superior level altogether. I dunno myself - sure it's funny, but is it the best ever? I didn't laugh out loud - oh tell a lie, I did, once. I was wryly smiling a lot though.

Being fond of detective fiction from this era it's hard for me not to like this sort of stuff though. There's country house parties, dressing for dinner… familiar terrain all. It's all fresher than you'd think too. My favourite really is Bertie Wooster's inane slang. Such as being server breakfast by Jeeves, and "tucking into the eggs and b.", only to two sentences later be helping himself to "another portion of e. and bacon". That's really very funny.

This is the one with the story of when his friend is in love with a dog-crazy girl and joins in a violent football game to try to win her. (Obviously that's just one story of several, but should be enough for me to recall the book…)

Ngaio Marsh: A Man Lay Dead

2009-06-10T23:43:00.001+02:00

This is the infamous paperback I paid 20 kr for in Stockholm. Apparently her first novel, which I didn't realise at the time - I just noticed that I didn't recognise the title so I bought it.

In the early days Alleyn has a journalist sidekick named Nigel Bathgate, who makes his appearance here. Bathgate gets an invitation to a week-end house party through an older cousin. The weekend is going to be spent playing a variation on a murder game - and you guessed it, there's a real murder.

While this has that lovely Marsh touch as far as language goes, and even some of the wry humour, it's still a bit rough. Alleyn is much too quick to feel certain that Bathgate's alibi is solid (based on three cigarette butts in an ashtray - I mean really), and even odder still he takes him completely into his confidence and allows him to join in a spy hunt. That's a bit absurd. But I still enjoyed it well enough.

Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body

2009-06-09T14:12:00.003+02:00

I'm taking a break from cleaning the bathroom to write an entry. Let's see if Minimus wakes up before I'm done, shall we?

Oh yes he did. So short version then.

Basic story: person who has always gone from relationship to relationship finds love, and mistakenly gives it up.

Good bits: gender of narrator never mentioned. Yay for Germanic languages where this kind of game can be played! Very clever, very subtle.

Bad bits: well, like I've mentioned earlier Winterson's poetry and depth can be a bit much for me. Possibly I was annoyed that narrator was an eejit. Read it and see.

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

2009-06-08T23:18:00.000+02:00

It is, I suppose, really a rather moving little story (more novella than novel) of how desire, inexperience and fear of sex drive a wedge between two young people on their wedding night. In his customary manner McEwan tells the short tale in minute detail, handling and turning over every detail of what is being felt and thought and sensed and said, and afterwards finishes off with a sort of epilogue where we find out how it all ended for the two. Did they sort things out or was this it?

Of the McEwans I've read I actually think it's the best one. There is no discrepancy in it really, no bit that seems shoved in there leaving me wondering whether it belongs. I'm still debating inside whether he's overrated or not - right now leaning towards not. I'm kind of struck by a feeling that he has done historical research even for this little thing set in 1962 - there's a description at the start of how mediocre English cuisine of the time is, and how their wedding dinner's starter is a slice of melon with a glacé cherry on top. Somehow seems rather detailed, as though he'd read an old hotel menu.

I didn't hate it, nor was I that enamoured. I suppose he's not really my kind of writer. Something is lacking. Mostly I'm annoyed that I finished the book before 2 am and I didn't finish work until 8. What was I supposed to do - play Bubbleshooter all that time? Like, omgz.

Zoë Heller: Notes on a Scandal

2009-06-08T08:33:00.001+02:00

This book is in many ways better than The Believers, the first Heller I read. It's tighter, tenser, more succinct. Very much a thriller, actually, not that anything particularly violent happens. It becomes a thriller thanks to the narrator, Barbara. Barbara is the friend and confidante of Sheba, the forty-something pottery teacher who has had an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil. When we enter the story Barbara is living with and caring for a devastated Sheba. She talks about the hounding by journalists, how they write lies and how they exaggerate. She knows the truth, because Sheba has told her everything. So she tells the story of how Sheba started working at the school, how Barbara immediately sensed that here was a kindred spirit, and how Barbara gradually makes herself Sheba's closest friend. Subtly we become aware that Barbara isn't just a normal friend. To remember everything that has happened, she writes, she has made a timeline and marked important events with little gold star stickers. That's our first clue to Barbara's oddness. As the story continues there are more, but since it's Barbara's story the incidents aren't dwelt on, just matter-of-factedly reported. It's very well done. Slowly we learn just how sinister Barbara's desire to be a BFF, to be needed and wanted and loved, can be.

Ironically (or something), one of the reviews quoted on the first couple of pages states that this novel "shares many qualities with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day." I seem to be swimming in a regular duck pond lately.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

2009-06-07T17:12:00.005+02:00

I saw the film of course - I've probably seen it a few times actually. Based on the film I was expecting something a little more passionate and tense, but my impression of the novel is softer, more humorous, although obviously melancholic. There are parallells to Never Let Me Go; as in that book we find out gradually, as our narrator in analytical detail remembers the past, that there was a dark shade to it, something that wasn't as safe and reassuring as you might think. Here the German sympathies of Lord Darlington provide the unpleasant backdrop, as he, easily led, becomes more or less a Nazi puppet while his butler shakes off any personal responsability, certain that Lord Darlington knows what is best and that serving such a great man is a reward in itself.

You read almost the entire book without fully realising why Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, reacts so passionately towards some of the things Mr Stevens does, why she takes things so personally. After all you're reading Stevens point of view, his reminiscing and justification over and of the past. Then at the very very end, there is the bit where Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs Benn, says to Stevens that the reason for her feeling unhappy at times is because she can't help thinking about what a life she might have led.

"And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens. And I suppose that's when I get angry over some trivial little thing and leave."

And Stevens admits to himself and us that at that moment, his heart breaks. But he rallies and hides it, and says his cordial goodbyes. This is beautiful. It's wrenching in its simplicity and in its understated emotionality. The great thing about Ishiguro's novels is how you don't understand everything that's been going on until the end, and that unmasking of what it seems is quite important.

It's quite as lovely as Never Let Me Go. Now I wish I had another Ishiguro to read. I feel this wish to stay in that mood or spell that Ishiguro's writing conjures up. Unfortunately I didn't make it upstairs to the English section when I was at the library last, because I brought Minimus and the pram, so I settled for the paperback swivel shelf (with selected novels) they have at the foot of the stairs. I picked up quite a few books then, and the other one in my bag is a Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal. It's probably going to be good too, but it's a whole different mood. Hm.

Incidentally, flipping through the last pages of The Remains of the Day I was reading the blurbs about the other books that Faber & Faber Ltd have to offer - I was thinking about how those days must surely be over now, when people read a paperback and proceeded to order another one based on these summaries and reviews, using the order form on the very last page, and I wonder if anybody ever did that at all? Surely people have always gone to book shops? Maybe this was a service used by lonely readers on isolated islands or something? and I noticed how this book was printed in 1999 and the order page has an e-mail address and a web URL for reference, so this must be the dying gasp of an old paperback tradition - anyway, I was reading the suggestions and got quite interested in a much-endorsed novel by Peter Carey called Oscar and Lucinda, "also a major film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett", and I was a bit amused by the fact that Cate Blanchett's face adorns Notes on a Scandal, since she was in that film too. Such little coincidences form the fabric of life, eh?

Michael Innes: Appleby at Allington and The New Sonia Wayward

2009-06-04T14:57:00.003+02:00

I was very surprised at our local library branch to come across these two books, I thought I'd read everything the library had to offer during my last Innes phase. But not so. Goodie.

(After writing those sentences there was an eight-hour pause, during which Minimus and I watched trains on YouTube and splashed in puddles (PLASS IN DE PUDDEL!) and made dinner etc. FYI.)

Appleby at Allington is a bit of a classic whodunnit, featuring the retired Inspector Appleby solving crimes in his neighbourhood. He is invited to Allington Hall to dine with the owner, a former scientist. Towards the end of the evening they go out to admire the son et lumière show that has been set up in the ruins of the original hall, and come across a dead body. Then there is a village fête, and another dead body is found, fished out of the lake. I liked this one, it was funny and well-planned. I enjoy this kind of dry humorous old-school British bantering. The New Sonia Wayward is a stand-alone, more psychological thriller, about a man who finds his successful writer wife dead, and tries to pass her off as being alive but out of the country so he won't lose her money. The tangled web of lies grows ever more dense and complicated for him, and his staff start to blackmail him. It's not at all bad, but unfortunately we see where it's going the minute he spots his wife's doppelgänger on the train.

I'd love to have a Michael Innes collection though, perfect feeling-a-bit-down reading.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies and Ellis Peters: Death to the Landlords!

2009-06-03T09:16:00.006+02:00

Ha, forgot about this! Which sadly summarises my view on the author - absolutely lovely writer, empathic, moving and so on, but somehow not quite as memorable as I expected. Now that my memory was jogged I started thinking about the people in this short story collection again, an I do remember a lot about the characters, I can separate the different stories in my head and so on... yet it just wasn't the kind of book I thought about an awful lot when I'd finished it. That said, it's still quality writing. I'm absolutely going to read more of her. Just something not completely absorbing about it. It is her debut of course, I should read her more recent work.

It is refreshing to read about a "normal" India. By which I don't necessarily mean normal from a Western point of view "oh look they have indoor toilets and electricity in India too the darlings", but an India and Indians that are described matter-of-factly. Lahiri writes mostly about the middle-class, in other words the Indians we meet, the ones that travel and emigrate. I recognise myself and yet it's different. It's very good writing, I was just hoping for a little bit more. Maybe in the next one.

Incidentally (and what jogged my memory) I'm reading an Ellis Peters' novel set in India at the moment. She describes India in much the same way as she describes 12th century England - there is an air of aloofness and romanticism that removes the reader from the reality of what she is describing somewhat. This is part of her charm, oddly enough. In Death to the Landlords! the son of her hero Inspector George Felse, Dominic Felse, is travelling in India. The group of people he travels with cross paths with a terrorist bomber group, whose aim, simplified, is to kill land owners. Haven't finished it yet, so don't know if it will be one of his travelling companions who are guilty.

I think I've previously read Mourning Raga from the same series, also set in India. But now I can't find it in the library catalogue... maybe that just means they had to get rid of it. Pity.

Jane Hamilton: A Map of the World and Ariana Franklin: Mistress of the Art of Death

2009-05-28T22:58:00.004+02:00

I borrowed the Hamilton novel on a whim, as I said. There was nothing on the cover indicating what it was about, just a lot of positive reviews, so I went for it. Started reading, very happy, good writing - then realised this was about children dying and suddenly was not so keen any more. Hamilton is a very good writer, so I was getting all worked up about it since it all seemed so realistic. I had to put it down. I can't take real horror right now. Which is why I declined to watch the film Grave of the Fireflies that Maxima got from a friend for her 14th birthday. I had a hunch that was going to be about babies dying too, and my suspicions were indeed confirmed when my red-eyed sobbing daughter met me in the hall after watching it the other afternoon. It was the saddest film ever she proclaimed and snivelled off to share her anguish with her friends on msn.

Anyway, I returned poor Jane Hamilton to the library (and of course immediately started to regret it, but done is done, I'm not reading it now so there). I wanted to write about it now though so I can remember to re-loan it sometime when I'm more relaxed (ha).

Which brings me to the second book of this post, an historical crime novel about a serial killer who, ironically, murders children, in a very gruesome way. Why can I take this and not Hamilton's? I think because Mistress of the Art of Death is, in the end, not real. It may be rooted in real history, it may be not flippant about human suffering and pain... yet there is something fundamentally escapist and distant about crime fiction that enables you to read the most horrible things without feeling too touched by them.

I wasn't expecting to like Franklin's novel as much as I did. I suspected that the female doctor Adelia, who comes to Cambridge to help find the murderer by reading the bodies of his victims, would be one of those larger-than-life characters that modern authors like to stick into the past to somehow avenge themselves on all that historical misery. However, Adelia is surprisingly likeable and imperfect, and the society is a rather nice blend of bad mediaeval and good mediaeval. People aren't just super-bigots and dirty xenophobes, but also just... well, people. I'll definitely be reading more of Franklin, it was fun.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

2009-05-28T13:37:00.003+02:00

How can I not have read this author before? I'm partly ashamed, partly happy that I have a number of probably most likely wonderful new reading experiences ahead of me. Never Let Me Go will always hold a special place in my heart I predict, because this my friends is science fiction at its best. The Wikipedia entry doesn't call it science fiction, but I've seen some other sites that recognize it as such. Like all good sci-fi it's not about the technology, it's about what it does to us.

The novel is set in a different Britain, in which sterile clones are grown from childhood to adulthood only to become "donors", to have their organs harvested. The story is told by Kathy, in her 30s, who is on her way to settling down to becoming a donor and subsequently "completing". She tells the story of how she grew up in a boarding school for clones, how she and her friends gradually learnt what they were, and she tells about her relationships with the people she loved best. It's very very good. It's slightly marred towards the end, when Kathy and her lover Tommy confront a former teacher from the school, and she "explains all". It feels a bit too summarizing and lecturing, but it's okay.

Recommended heartily. I'm off to borrow all his other works.

Sara Paretsky: Ghost Country

2009-05-27T23:33:00.004+02:00

I have some issues with this novel. This is sort of the basic storyline: at a wall in Chicago, a homeless woman thinks that the rusty water leaking through a crack is the blood of the Mother of God. When the management of the hotel, who own the wall (but not the sidewalk) try to drive her away, she is joined by two more homeless women, an idealistic young doctor, an alcoholic former opera diva and a young woman who has run away from an oppressive grandfather. When suddenly a non-speaking, hugely buxom and higly erotic woman called Starr appears, everything really kicks off. Miracles happen around Starr. A local church and some of it's more strident members get more and more annoyed. Ok, so it paints a picture of Chicago that is different, more... fantastical?... than in the Warshawski novels. Fair enough. But the distinct impression I'm left with is that it's an experiment in the genre "what if Jesus came back as...". Starr in this case being Jesus - a non-speaking, extremely sexual creature who can tongue-kiss a woman back to life on an altar. And there is a little bit too much written about her huge bosom and how much she has sex singly and grouply for me to think it altogether flies - simply because I find it unnecessarily "provocative". Possibly I'm just being churlish and over-thinking things.

I really don't like the breast bits though. It's some sort of odd mix between Swedish "sommarbuskis" and US titty bar. I don't get it. I'm missing the love I felt in Bleeding Kansas.

Ursula K LeGuin: The Eye of the Heron

2009-05-27T23:26:00.003+02:00

No no no.

I was not happy. Not that the idea is bad - in the future, two different kinds of cultures with their origins on Earth attempt to co-exist on an alien planet. One, the older, is descended from Portuguese-speaking criminals, who were deported when the planet was a prison colony. The younger, "The People of Peace", were also deported, but they are descended from members of a huge peace movement in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a movement so large that it threatened the rulers on Earth. Now the older culture, the Bosses, try to dominate and rule the younger, the Shantih, who want to try the theories of peaceful resistance in a revolt.

While I love the imagination present in the description of the alien world, the book gets overly political and preachy. Not subtle enough.

Annie Proulx: Postcards

2009-05-27T23:12:00.003+02:00

I'm seven books behind now, so I'm going to have to hurry to make the blog match my reading (I'm on book eight, the Ngaio Marsh I mentioned).

As expected, I loved this book. In the 1940s a young man commits a murder in a corner of his father's (one day to be his) farm. To conceal this he runs away, and spends the next 40 years moving about the West, taking odd and any jobs - mining, trapping, bone hunting for paleonthologists... for a while he has a farm, but loses it. He sends postcards home but never has a return address, so he never finds out what has happened to his family and their farm. Instead he keeps an image in his memory of how it was. We read what happens to him, and to his family, and to the US during these 40 years. It's tremendously moving and I devoured it. One of those books you can't put down.

My one quibble is that the postcards sent, that are reproduced at the start of every chapter, are illegible in the small print of the paperback. It ruins the story a little, to be honest.

The Wikipedia entry on Annie Proulx teaches me that she has written some science fiction stories early in her career. I'd love to read them.

Library visit today

2009-05-08T11:56:00.002+02:00

I've been dipping into my small stash of (second-hand...) books I've bought so it was time for a library trip. Oh, I never wrote about my visit to a second-hand book shop in Stockholm not long ago - they wanted more than 100 :- for old Ellery Queens. The audacity. No wonder they had so many. I found a rather worn Ngaio Marsh novel the title of which I forget at the moment and they charged me 20:- for that.

But today I got:

Paretsky: Ghost Country - I was so pleased with Bleeding Kansas that I wanted to give another stand-alone a try

Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go - because why not, never read him

Proulx: Postcards - want more of her, more more

Hamilton, Jane: A Map of the World - on a whim, fell for the blurb

Le Guin: The Eye of the Heron - because I remain faithful and this might be good.

So I'll be alright for a while.

Sara Paretsky: Bleeding Kansas

2009-05-07T22:37:00.004+02:00

I have been having a really bad day, for no other reason than a) I'm just feeling very down at the moment, and b) I'm trying to drill three holes in the living-room wall, with less than stellar results. Let's not go there. At one in the afternoon I broke down in tears and decided to take a break and write this blog entry instead to take my mind off wall craters. The instant I sat down my middle daughter rang and wanted me to pick her up from school because she wasn't feeling well. Now it's half-past ten at night, I sit down again, and at the first click of the keys my husband leans over to say that he took a facebook test to determine which ordinary thing he is (apparently he is sliced cheese, which is actually rather funny).

But I haven't lost my train of thought yet. I may if he speaks to me again.

Paretsky writes in the foreword that she grew up in Kansas, something I didn't know. It shows however that she's writing about ... how should I put it ... about people she understands and respects and loves, about a part of the world that she has deep feelings for. Unlike in a Warshawski novel, the main characters here aren't very savvy or politically aware, but "simple" farmers who take a "simple" pride in growing food that feeds people. They are patriotic and trust that the news is reported correctly and that the government knows its business. They are religious and church-going, and incorporate this into their daily lives. This doesn't make them idiots or despicable. There is no sarcasm here, no cynicism. I found this very endearing, very moving, and it gripped me all the way to the end.

The novel centres on three Kansas families that long ago settled together, worked together and fought slave-owners together, but now are estranged. The main families are the Grelliers, the "normal" family, and the Schapens, members of a deeply conservative church and run by a xenophobic and hate-filled matriarch. The main subplot is the birth of a red heifer at the Schapen farm, something with deep significance to a group of Orthodox Jews and to the conservative Christians (seriously, this is, what, the third novel I read featuring a red heifer. I should have kept track and added labels. Mental note.). There are a lot of other little plots and ideas - like how ludicrous it is to imagine that you can live in solitude in the country, where everyone talks about your affairs, how the Iraq conflict tears families apart, how grief can destroy a person, how religion can be twisted.... It's quite boxily written, yetI really liked it. There is something so true and respectful at the base of it. The boxiness is part of the whole aura. Oh, I can't explain myself, I can see that. Forget the literary criticism (attempts at). I actually cried reading this. I was touched at the pain the parents felt when their son died in Iraq. The simplicity of it, the way the world is changed for everyone and they don't know how to handle it - it's well described without in any way being too political and righteous. I would have expected Paretsky to be more cynical towards these Bush-following Republicans, but no. She understands, she respects, she grieves with them. When they sin, she doesn't judge. She tells the story. I had a great reading experience with this. Objectively, I can see that this is not the most astounding novel the world has seen - emotionally, it struck a deep chord. Funny how that happens. I'd recommend it now to anyone.

Annie Proulx: The Shipping News and Close Range

2009-05-02T15:23:00.001+02:00

I’ve been reading all this Proulx at that time of year just before the new greenery has started growing, when it’s as though only the skeleton of nature is there. The bare bones of it all, ready for sculpting as it were. Even though the forest is full of trees you can see so far. No leaves obscure your line of vision. The ground is flat, covered in dead grass, and it feels as though I could walk anywhere, just fix my gaze on a spot far away and start hiking. I can’t see any obstacles – or rather, they are all in plain view; they haven’t been hidden yet. Even though I can tell that it’s all ready for new growth, bursting with life, it also seems so vulnerable. It’s such a contrast to the almost perversely opulent wealth of foliage brought by July. Walking into the forest then you are surrounded by different shades of green, it all closes in on you and I for one get these ideas of building a secret house deep in among the trees (an idea that has stuck with me for many years, ever since I read The Prince of Central Park by Evan Rhodes as a child). In these months of spring such an idea seems ludicrous, there is no secrecy no matter how much you’d want it. You can’t even thrown an apple core under a bush and expect it to be hidden – all rubbish comes out in the open.

This may sound like a post about Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, but no, I do have a Proulx-y point: I wonder if part of how much I’ve enjoyed her books is the fact that I’m experiencing a similarly bare landscape as the ones she writes about. Or, at least it feels like bareness is a huge part of it – a wide open sky, endless plains or endless sea … sparsity and rough weather (the last bit perhaps doesn’t apply to my situation. It’s been a bit cold and windy, sure, but that’s it.). I suppose in a way I’ve only had to look out the window to relate, to get my own illustrated version of what I’m reading. Nature suiting the tone of the novel.

I’ve seen the film made of The Shipping News, some years ago. I can’t remember that it made a great impression on me. I think I was kind of interested in how it had an edge of grit and pain, even though it was mostly lost in Julianne Moore’s lovely face. This edge was an echo of the book, I see now, of all that Annie Proulx writes. Like I said before, she writes about people. And bad things happen to people, and yet they go on living, and perhaps they even turn out wonderfully well, considering. Possibly Lasse Hallström was a good choice of director, since when he’s at his best he does a fine job of showing real people. But the novel is much more complex, shows a lot more nuances and delves more into the many more or less quirky characters that populate the pages. A scene in the book that’s a little bit funny would in the film become slightly cheesy I think, “local odd-balls dropping one-liners in pub” typ of thing. But it all works on paper. It’s very very good.

Close Range is the collection of short stories that includes Brokeback Mountain, of cinematic fame. I still haven’t seen the film, but the short story is great. All of them are, but some I like more than others. There are more marvellous names, by the way and of course: Scrope, Freeze, Muddyman, Wrench. Some of the stories are realistic, others, like A Pair A Spurs have a fantastic edge.

I've been thinking about all the things I would like to say about Proulx for more than a week now, but they slip my mind. I'd like my words to be a punch in the face, a command to read this author, but I fall short of that. So just take my word for it. I seldom read authors that really touch me, that make me remember so much of what they've written, but this is one of them. One of those that make you genuinely glad that you haven't read all the author has written yet. You still have some to look forward to.

Gibberish

2009-04-27T15:32:00.002+02:00

Half an hour ago I woke from a dream in which I was wandering in Israel/Palestine and found skeletons of gibbon apes along the road. It was very real. I just caught myself thinking "what I pity I didn't take a photo".

I am seriously wondering if my recent reading of Annie Proulx inspired this fanciful flight of my subconscious. It's almost as though I can hear the dreamy background music.

I'll be back with Proulx posts, count on it.