Summer Reading – Book #1: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Tags

book review, bookerprize, cyprus, historical fiction, literature, Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively, Reading, romance, Summer Reads

4am in Cyprus is the most precious and delicious time of day. Sitting on the verandah of the house I am staying at, I realise that I only have a few hours of this cool breeze before the sun begins its rapid ascent and bakes the island with the ferocity of an open oven. The island (situated as it is) has all the beauty and culture of a typical Mediterranean country, but is only 264 km away from Lebanon. As a result, we get our fair share of the searing middle-eastern heat. Many times have I been caught in Cyprus and witnessed the unbearable stranglehold of the siroc wind that eddies in from the Sahara desert covering the island in a blanket of dirty, red dust. So far however, here in Famagusta, we have been treated to a cool, Eastern Levantine wind. Long may it last…

It has been a week exactly since I arrived, and every year I have the same goal: immerse myself in as many books as possible, not just for reading’s sake but also for writing. Moon Tiger drew my attention partly for its intriguing title and partly because I felt an affinity to the lady on the front cover. Cyprus nights can be as stifling as its days – and it’s not uncommon for its inhabitants to lie dazed and confused on a bed till the early hours of the morning. However it was the green coil burning in the bottom left of the picture that sparked childhood memories of long, mosquito-ridden evenings spent at my grandmothers farmhouse; of nights steeped in the incense of jasmine flowers, the warm exhale of baked earth, the chirrup of cicadas and of the sweet, secret wilderness just outside (and often inside) the green flaking shutters. It was a time before air-conditioning, when fans whirred all night laboriously, teasing our hot skin with intermittent relief and every bedroom had a green coil that burned through the night, warding off the blood-thirsty mosquitoes that would come thirsting for our tender, pale skin.

And that is exactly what a ‘moon tiger’ is, a green circular coil that was a common mosquito repellent in the middle-east. But here, Penelope Lively makes it an unbearable metaphor for the fleeting nature of time, of love lost, of yearning, of desire and life itself.

Claudia Hampton, the protagonist of this slim novel lies in a hospital bed, dying from cancer. She is a historian who has had a prolific career, and is determined to end her life writing decides, “I am writing a history of the world… And in the process, my own”. Anthony Thwaite who wrote the introduction to my edition underlines the starkness and the arrogance of this statement. It is a ‘hodri-meydan’ as we call it in Turkish, which translates to throwing one’s hat into the ring and challenging one’s adversary. In this case, Claudia’s arrogance is aimed at death itself which threatens to erase her from the face of the earth without a trace, with nothing to account for. For a historian, it was her life’s work to painstakingly unearth and record the smallest aspect of human life. However, as Claudia’s life burns away, just like a moon tiger, she begins her triumphant chess-game against her adversary in the most marvellous of ways: by literally collapsing time itself.

Lively manages to embed Claudia’s personal history in the prehistoric era, in the catacombs of Egypt; from the primordial mud that we crawled out of, to the glittering cosmos.

A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well – no more knit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez… The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute – from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.

Let me tell you something: she manages it. Beautifully. The book has its moments where you stop, draw a breath of disbelief at the prose, the geometry of ideas, the brush-stroke of imagery and it’s not fair I tell you. It’s not fair. In a little over 200 pages Lively has created a masterpiece that delivers a bitch-slap to Michael Ondjaate’s The English Patient. Here is also a love story set in the middle-east, yet what I loved about it was that it was a distinctly female voice that truly plucked at my heart-strings. Claudia Hampton is a woman I yearn to be: a modern warrior, an Artemis, a Diana who crests the way forward rather than lurks in the shadows of her male counterparts.

She has the temerity to marry her own existence to that of the pharoahs, Prometheus and cosmic chaos itself – she was present, or rather they were present, in her time. She declares that they have lived side by side, breathed the same air, touched each other across time itself. Hell, she even does away with time itself, collapsing it like a toy concertina, proving that the concept of linear chronology is a mental trap, an error of perception. All eras, according to her decaying brain, can be lived in tandem, all at once. The neolithic exists in 2018. All we have to do is go to the beach, pick up a rock and there an ammonite winks at us from across the ages.

In short, this novel has taught me that yes, life is fleeting, yet death never really touches us. We just need to change our concept of what ‘existence’ means. And Claudia Hampton, probably my favourite female heroine of all time, does that exquisitely with lilting prose steeped with all the wisdom and knowledge of a time-keeper. As Ray Bradbury once wrote, women are ‘wonderful clocks’… which is probably why Penelope Lively was able to create a character like Claudia Hampton, who sees the world not in the masculine, linear (like old father time), but rather in the feminine plural.

The sun has come to rest on the nape of my neck now, forcing me to move. The dry creak of a lone cicada has struck up… soon a whole chorus of them will join in. I leave you with the words of Ray Bradbury, and the wonderful notion that we are eternal and time runs parallel with everything that has existed or has yet to exist in the world. In this, I whole-heartedly believe.

“Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.” – Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travels with a bookworm – Weird encounters at the airport…

Tags

Bookhaul, books, Donna Tartt, female authors, Gatwick, Humor, Italy, Laura Purcell, literature, Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively, Shopping, Summer Reads, The Secret History, The Silent Companions

The summer holidays have come around, and like most teachers I have aimed to get out of the country as soon as humanly possible. It’s been a grueling 10 months of secondary education – stressing over grades, dealing with poor behaviour, becoming a marking machine for the last two terms (firstly with an endless stream of year 11 PPEs followed by end of term Year 10 PPEs and assessments for other groups).

It’s fair to say 2017-18 academic year has been more hellish than normal – but that’s OK, as I’ve put 2’235 miles between me and London and am now happily sweltering in the dry, Mediterranean heat! As always, I aim to over-achieve my pledge of 52 books a year, but must admit that I’m only ahead because I’ve cheated with only reading comic books for the first half of the year! I’m a bit disappointed with myself really…

I can’t read as much as I could or would like to during term time, so the summer holidays for me is perfect for full-on literature immersion. Mind, body and soul I make a commitment to getting through as many titles as possible, making up for the rest of the year when my brain is so tired it can’t even deal with children’s fiction.

We arrived at Gatwick Airport respectably early, did our ‘liquids shop’ as it’s bloody impossible to take any shower gels or shampoos with you (unless you pay an exorbitant amount of money to Easyjet for hold luggage!) Once this was done, I called it ‘my time’. I dumped my stuff with whoever I was travelling with and half-ran, half-skipped to WHSmith’s (or even better) Waterstones.  Here, I allow myself one minute to just wonder-gaze at the spines of  books before I  tally up how many I’m getting – this is 5 weeks after all, a looooong time.

Then comes the choosing of the bloody things, and this time round I really struggled. I bloody hate fresh fiction – and I’m not good with snap decisions either. I usually wait for a siren call, a beckoning from the shelf, but Gate 111 awaits and my group have already started making their way over. I agonise over a plethora of things: ‘Is this intellectual? Will this stretch-and-challenge me? Do these books reflect the reading journey that I am on? Does the subject matter serve a purpose? Is this book too ‘simple’? Is it too ‘new’ and thus the praise for it from the New York Times too misleading? From me to you, never trust the New York Times!

I don’t know whether half of what I buy is spurred on by a sense of self-worth, genuine discernment of literature or pure vanity of ‘looky here at what I’m reading, aren’t I a clever cow!’ – however I walked away with three titles, all of which are female authors. To my horror, I discovered my reading diet had thus far consisted of white male authors, which I seek to rectify this year. I have a colleague to thank for that as he has also embarked on a similar journey.  But eventually I was able to make all three of my personalities happy, by opting for The Secret History by Donna Tartt, recommended to me by a dear colleague, The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell which is fairly new yet has a gothic twist (if the blurb is to be trusted), and the Booker Prize winning Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, which sates the intellectual in me that craves for ‘literature of meaning’.

 

Time was ticking, and I was stuck behind three Italian ladies and a child trying to pay for some silly quitter strips with red buses on them and a couple of metallic pens with gold and silver crowns (c’mon! c’mon!) It didn’t help that the Jamaican lady behind the counter was also serving them begrudgingly – one of her idiosyncrasies of serving being the question: ‘Where are you flying today?’

Now normally there would be a speedy answer, money would change hands and off the customer would go. But there I am behind the Italian ladies who don’t know 5 words of English between them and do not understand what is being demanded of them. The Jamaican lady’s question, which at first appears to be a social filler, actually turned out to be a legitimate question. She genuinely wanted to know where each passenger was going. Absolutely insisted. How bizarre! At first the Italians looked at one another baffled, she demanded a second time to know where they were going, then a third, tone of voice hardening to a point akin to a Home Office interrogation. At this point the child sensed the tension in the air and began squirming. It was jarring – the ladies managed to stammer a response of ‘Italia’, hoping that would save them. However this didn’t quell her thirst for knowledge. The woman went full on MI5. ‘Are you travelling with this child? Is this child your child?’

The women were flustered like chickens who have had their hen-house disturbed. This isn’t customs – why can’t they just pay and walk away with their books? Why was the poor little bambino being pulled into all of this? Did they look like kidnappers?

At this point, I began to get irate as I’m in danger of not making it to the gate if it carries on in this vein – but eventually again the women manage to say the right thing and walk away quickly, glad to be released from the interrogation.

Relief turned to anxiety as now I realised it would be my turn. I hand over the books, quickly whip out the card ready to pay and leave as quickly as possible. But no… she wants to know where I am going too. Shit. I read her face – there is a ‘the shutters are down’ look to it and I realise maybe this idiosyncrasy has deeper roots. She certainly couldn’t read the body language and emotions of the Italian ladies, yet she insisted that her questions be answered, as if they were part of a cycle that helped her to get through one customer after another. A mechanical routine that helped her negotiate unexpected requests. Asperger’s maybe? Play along with it came the voice inside me. Indulge her.

So I went the opposite way – answered all her questions, made light conversation, watched her from behind the counter, and then realised with sadness the look in her eyes as I walked away with my book load. All she probably wants is to go away somewhere too – maybe asking where people are going to is a way of coping with a summer stuck serving customers at Gatwick. At that moment I tried putting myself in her shoes – all those people, jetting off to fabulous places, while you are stuck in an inbetween space, watching the world go by. Working in airports must be hell…

After a fleeting twinge of regret I exited WHSmith with a stoopid grin on my face, again half-skipping, half-running to my other fellow travelers, only to find that the gate closes in 10 minutes.

Shit! I’ve never been this late before – and I vowed I’d never do it again. Getting to Gate 111, as further insult to injury, turned out to be the mother of all journeys. Up and down a flight of stairs, escalators, you name it. I hate you Gatwick! Why can’t you be like Stansted?

Long story short I almost missed my bloody flight for the love of books, a strange Jamaican lady and some flustered Italian tourists. And all I wanted was some reads to tide me over for a couple of weeks till my next book haul…

Looking Back at 2011 | A Year Through Books

Tags

American, book challenge, kurt vonnegut, literature, Michael Ondaatje, Slaughterhouse-Five

It’s that time of year again folks, a fresh new year. We’ll all be setting ourselves fresh new reading challenges, so it’s the perfect moment to look back at 2011 and see what we have accomplished and how we can further improve on our performances. I see that throughout the year I’ve discovered how some of heavyweights like ‘Beowulf’ are not all what they are cut out to be. Yet a penny dreadful like ‘Sweeney Todd’ can turn out to be a surprisingly solid five-star read!

A way to do this is to looks at goodreads.com’s ‘2011 Reading Challenge’. Being a slow reader, my personal record has never gone past more than 50 books, yet I was determined to do better. And I did, I managed to read 72 books. I’m thrilled! For 2012 I’n trying a tentative 70!

Here’s my selective reading journey for 2011:

5 Star Reads

White Oleander – Janet Fitch
The Snow Goose – Paul Gallico
Man in the Dark – Paul Auster
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
Beginners – Raymond Carver
The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
Marvels – Kurt Busiek
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Schaffer
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Legend of the Sleey Hollow – Washington Irving
The Tales of Bejamin Bunny – Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter
Labyrinths – JL Borges
A House of Pomegranates – Oscar Wilde
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
Sweeney Todd – Anonymous
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

4 Star Reads

Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope
The Angel’s Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
2BR02B – Kurt Vonnegut
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Doll Short Stories – Daphne du Maurier
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Aesop’s Fables – Aesop

3 Star Reads

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Octopussy and the Living Daylights – Ian Fleming
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – A. Solzhenitsyn
Kung Fu Trip – Benjamin Zephaniah
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Informers – Brett Easton Ellis
Point Omega – Don DeLillo
Wolverine: Origins – Paul Jenkins
The Spy Who Loved Me – Ian Fleming
The Summer Without Men – Siri Hustvedt
Dune – Frank Herbert
First Love, Last Rites – Ian McEwan
Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
Japanese Fairy Tales – Theodora Yei Ozaki
English Fairy Tales – Joseph Jacobs
Grimms Fairy Tales – Brothers Grimm
Beowulf – Anonymous
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

2 Star Reads

Tales of Freedom – Ben Okri
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Civil War – Mark Millar
Florence and Giles – John Harding

1 Star Reads

Lost World – Patricia Melo
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette LeDuc
Lost Souls – Poppy Z Brite

So, how was your reading year? I hope you had an interesting one, and good luck for all the 2012 challenges.

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Book Review | ‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan

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amsterdam, Atonement, book review, Fiction, first love last rites, ian mcewan, short story

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Oh my. Ian McEwan, you are a sick @&%*! But bloody hell can you write…”

This was my first response to these lean, mean sickening stories of ennui, sexual perversity and emotional absence. McEwan manages to abridge the two opposing poles of sexuality and mortality in these scary little urban tales. Besides this over-arching theme McEwan seems to write each story from the perspective of the perpetrator rather than the victim – something I never actually got comfortable with considering all his protagonists are murderers, incestuous rapists, pimpish theatre directors and paedophiles.

What I suppose I liked about these stories was how McEwan took a day out of an ordinary person’s life, and showed us how quickly it could be degraded, how by degrees an average person could manage to commit an ‘accidental’ crime, sometimes through idle suggestion alone. There is a very precise psychology around these stories and I’m pretty sure anyone who has followed the news over the past 10 years can name at least ONE incident that bears an incredible resemblance to one of the fictions within this slim book.

The taboo subjects in this novel are the things that we tend to shudder and condemn within our circle of family and friends. These are things that we would never dare identify with because it’s outside ‘normal’ accepted social behaviour. The acts themselves are the type that once committed, puts one on a ‘road of no return’. They are acts of self-condemnation and moral ruin, and I sense it is McEwan’s intent to make us feel how close we really are to becoming such monsters. After all, no one is born a rapist or a murderer, and something has to happen to make them that way. And sometimes that something can be a subtle domestic happening that grows to sinister proportions until it finds an awful outlet.

The narrative itself is written in a deceptively straight-forward and often jolly manner which means we instantly fall into the habit of identifying with the narrator. And as readers that is what is expected of us. However, the trap is laid, and when things start getting nasty I personally found I couldn’t ‘disassociate’ myself with the protagonist as I wanted to, and ended up being given a pay-off of disgust and distress.

I have often found McEwan’s writing to be like a ‘small quake’, the events he writes about have a quiet devastation to them. They live long within you like a seismic echo. One of his most loved novels ‘Atonement‘ is a classic example of this which makes ‘First Love, Love Rites’ little miniature versions of such calamities.

The stories that stood out the most were ‘Solid Geometry’ and ‘Conversations With a Cupboard Man’. The former is a borderline gothic tale of spousal enmity and the occult of mathematics. The latter deals with the turbulent past of a retarded man, and looks at the horrific psychological damage done to people who do not receive proper social care.

Despite my glowing review I gave this book 3/5 stars because I have read better by McEwan and hope to discover more novels of the caliber of ‘Atonement’.

If you like Ian McEwan then please visit my review of ‘Amsterdam’.

View all my reviews

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The Problem with Gargantuan Book Challenges, and How I Handle Them…

Tags

1001 book list, book challenge

As Hallowe’en approaches I tend to look back on my reading record to see how well I’ve done throughout the year. Although I am heading nicely towards my target of 60 books, I was not pleased to discover that I had grossly deviated from my other book challenges, especially the most important one: 1001 Book Challenge.

It’s not an easy list to conquer, as anyone who is currently undertaking it will know. The sheer number of books aside, it is probably the only list that well and truly makes you ‘feel’ your mortality. Especially if you have (like me) gauged their yearly reading speed. Mine stands at approximately 50 books a year, placing me in the ‘slow reader’ category compared to some readers who manage well over 100 books a year!

One good thing about gargantuan challenges like the 1001 Book List is that many people are attempting it. It’s tough but it’s highly popular and if you can find a good online reading group (I’m a member of the goodreads one) there is plenty of camaraderie to be had along the way. And you’ll soon discover that most people are there to discover truly good books that deserve their time and effort. There is no pressure to actually COMPLETE the list. In reality, it would take a lifetime of reading. So the challenge is viewed as one that allows you to read a lifetime of ‘quality’ titles that have been tried and tested by critics.

Joining a group also means you’ll meet many people who have varying reading habits, some quite surprising. Some people begin to read the books in list order, finding a sort of rhythm as they tick off the books one by one. Some like me, tend to pick and choose haphazardly whereas others read books in ‘author’ order, e.g. reading all titles that happen to be in the list by Dickens, then go onto another author and so on. If you can’t be bothered to choose a book from the list yourself (and there are plenty of lists floating around in all formats) or you rather can’t bear to look at that heart-stopping list for fear of fainting then there is always the monthly readalongs that let you know which books are being read by the whole group. This is best by those who like to enter into heated debates. I like a good discussion every once in a while, but it’s rare that I choose to do a readalong, mainly because as soon as I commit something is bound to come up and stop me from joining in!

Now this year has been very up and down for me reading wise and with all good intentions I have not had the chance to make the best use of my time. I also believe that because I have 3 different 1001 lists (2006, 2008 and 2010), I have put myself off a bit. Just a tad. So I sort of gave up on it. But I won’t let that happen for 2012. Oh no, I’ve decided to make a shortlist of 1001 books that I have been DYING to get my hands on. My list is a mish-mash of titles taken from all three versions which makes things a bit more manageable.

Here’s what my proposed 1001 Book Challenge for the coming year looks like:

Pre 1700’s
*Don Quixote (Own)
*Oroonoko (Own)
*Tale of Genji
*Aesop’s Fable
*Metamorphoses

1700’s
*Rasselas (Own)
*120 Days of Sodom
*Caleb Williams
*Camilla
*Wilhelm Maisters Apprenticeship

1800’s
*La Bete Humaine
*Germinal
*Bel-Ami
*Against Nature
*Nana
*Erewhon
*The Moonstone (Own)
*Crime and Punishment (Own)
*Woman in White (Own)
*The Red and the Black
*The Brothers Karamazov
*Tale of Two Cities (Own)

1900’s
*Locus Solus
*Rashomon
*The Great Gatsby (Own)
*The the Lighthouse (Own)
*Steppenwolf
*Lady Chatterley’s Lover
*Les Enfants Terribles
*Tender is the Night (Own)
*Nausea
*The Little Prince
*Zorba the Greek
*Love in a Cold Climate
*Go Tell it to the Mountain
*Casino Royale
*Bonjour Tristesse
*The Mandarins
*The Talented Mr. Ripley
*Pale Fire
*Ada
*Heartbreak Tango
*The House of Spirits (Own)
*If not now, When?
*Beloved
*The Black Dahlia
*Kitchen
*Buddha of Suburbia (Own)
*The Virgin Suicides
*A Suitable Boy
*The Poisonwood Bible

2000’s
*Kafka on the Shore
*Suite Francaise
*Elegance of the Hedgehog
*The Children’s Book
*On Beauty
*After the Quake

There are a total of 58 books, which means it is well within my means to conquer such a list. Obviously I hope to read more than that, as each year I try to stretch myself beyond the 50 mark. This year I’m trying for 60 books, of which I have read 47 so far. I know it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m really determined to take a big chunk out of that 1001 list. There are so many important books on there that I just have to make the knowledge of them ‘mine’! But considering that the list is updated every two years, I won’t be making much of a dent in it really.

So, enough of my list mania, what about yours? How do you handle your Book challenges? Is there a particular order, pattern to how you pick your next read? I don’t care how wacky it is, I would love to know.

Book Review | ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ by Stephen Galloway

Tags

assassin, book review, Bosnia-Herzegovina, historical fiction, stephen galloway, Steven Galloway, the cellist of sarajevo, war

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“He knows the sniper will fire again, but he isn’t afraid. At this moment fear doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as bravery. There are no heroes, no villains, no cowards. There’s what he can do, and what he can’t. There’s right and wrong and nothing else. The world is binary. Shading will come later.”

It is as if I have read this book before. The story, the people within it, their strife seems so very familiar, so very ‘close’, that all through the book I couldn’t shake off that feeling of deja vu. I see within it echoes from every war novel/ film I have ever come across. From the first lyrical chapter right through to its devastating end, ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ is a fictional masterpiece. Do not let the leanness of the prose fool you, nor the sparsity of its characters, for each sentence may at first feel like a random spray of shrapnel, but it is far from it. Every point Galloway makes, his observations about the ‘war machine’, the blood-crazed generals, the ‘men-on-the-hills’, their victims and the unsung heroes in the midst of this war-torn city all hit the bullseye. Like his character, the legendary sniper “Arrow”, Galloway never misses his literary mark.

“A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.”

Galloway’s aim is not to show war in its’ terrible mechanical glory, but rather to humanise it as much as he can. War is a difficult concept to understand; however the siege of Sarajevo is even harder, as the city quite literally caved in on itself and Galloway makes this painfully clear to us as he leads our eye down to street-level. And it is here that we are made to understand the confusion and fright of ordinary people, through the geographical decimation of their home town.

The narrative structure is simple. It alternates between three characters: Dragan (a baker), Kenan (husband and father of two) and Arrow (a young student-turned-sniper) and each tells a different side to the conflict. With Kenan we make the deadly journey to the only water supply in the city, dodging the random bullets from the ‘men on the hills’ while Dragan picks his own perilous way across shell-shocked streets and mortared bridges to his job at the bakery. Both men feel like ants who constantly fear the shadow of the boot above them. ‘Arrow’ on the other hand allows the reader to access the mind behind the cross-hairs that threaten the citizens of Sarajevo. While she is determined not to become like the ‘men on the hills’, she is however haunted by the question of just exactly who it is that she is becoming.

At the midst of this chaos is the Cellist, who at 2 o’clock every day sits out in the street and plays an adagio for every person that was killed by a mortar attack as they lined up for bread one morning. Twenty-two people were killed; for 22 days he chooses to risk his life to honour the memory of those who died, by placing himself in full glare of the snipers.

Needless to say, there are some shocking scenes of death and mutilation. But Galloway deftly picks through the rubble of a wrecked city, pushing aside torn limbs and broken bodies to find the wonderous speck of humanity amongst all the horror. What he does unearth and hold out for all to see are the incredible acts of bravery that can only be the product of a still-beating heart, a heart which will only reveal itself in the challenging glare of death.

View all my reviews

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Book Review | ‘Cat’s Cradle’ by Kurt Vonnegut

Tags

bokononism, cats cradle, dystopian, humour, kurt vonnegut, l ron hubbard, religion, science fiction, scientology

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

So you thought Scientology was wacky? Then you obviously haven’t read ‘Cat’s Cradle’. Forget Hubbards’ many layered, ‘brownie point’ rank system to reach the exalted state of ‘Xenu’; you need

‘Bokononism’. It’s not only completely rubbish and written by a mad man, but also insanely fun to implement. OK, I know it’s not ‘real’, but I really enjoyed the little sing-song calypso psalms that pepper the story every now and then.

‘Cat’s Cradle’ is, when all’s said and done, dystopian fiction. It looks at the delicate balance of the ecosystem, and how one crazy idea in the head of a crazy and very capable person can in effect, completely destroy life as we know it. Written in the first person, the story involves a writer obsessed with the scientist Hoenikker, the supposed ‘father’ of the atomic bomb and his attempts at writing a thesis around the day the bomb went off. During his research he gets to meet Hoenikkers weird and defective offspring, not to mention his work colleagues who give him insight into the frightening genius of the man.

What is evident is that a) Hoenikker’s scientific intelligence was off the scale, but b) had severe emotional lacks which means that c) he approached his work with all the curiosity of a child, but none of the responsibility of an adult. This revelation sends huge shock waves through our researcher, especially when he realises that the last project the good doctor was working on, was ‘Ice 9’; a sliver of which has the capacity to turn every water particle into ice. Some killing machine right? And where did the idea come from? A random crazy general from the American War Department who is constantly complaining how the Marines are fed up of working in all that mud all the time.

But the doctor died before it was ever realised, so we can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Right? No, we can’t. The nightmare scenario begins to unfold, as our poor researcher boards an airplane for the island of San Lorenzo which consequently will also be the very place where this strangest of Armageddon’s take place.

Dystopian fiction is usually quite depressing and grey, but Vonnegut changes all that. ‘Cat’s Cradle’ is in essence about a very upsetting scenario which despite all the light-hearted humour, still seems like it COULD happen in reality. But it is the humour that saves it from being just another ‘Brave New World’. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but makes very accurate observations about society and the ludicrous things we use science for. Vonnegut doesn’t beat you over the head with his message about weapons of mass destruction, but leaves a margin of seriousness within all the silliness for you to chew on.

This is an intellectual novel that is very easy to get into that also resonates deeply with current issues of climate change, war and destruction. Read this. You won’t regret it.

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Book Review | “Point Omega” by Don DeLillo

Tags

abstract, alfred hitchcock, art criticism, book review, don delillo, Fiction, metaphysics, point omega, surrealism

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.”

There is a touch of the abstract, a large dose of surrealism that goes towards constructing the plot of ‘Point Omega’ that made me gawk the first time I read it. The fact that it opens on an art installation showing a super slowed-down version of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and through this manages to a) offer some seriously sharp observations on human nature and art and b) almost solve the mystery of time and space itself, is quite a mean feat. Yes, the opening paragraphs read rather like a bit of high-brow art criticism. But don’t let that put you off, I have heard DeLillo’s work described as being cryptic and rather impenetrable but this one apparently is his most straight-forward attempt yet. While I cannot vouch for his other works, I can honestly say that DeLillo’s reasoning will have you pondering some very strange topics that seem both out-of-this-world yet incredibly close to home at the same time. Which is exactly what I like about this book.

Told in a style that I consider to be unique to DeLillo, the story basically recounts the strange relationship between a freelance film-maker intent on creating a seamless, one-take film and a secret war advisor, who decides to withdraw to the engulfing anonymity of the desert. Themes of obsession, isolation and metaphysics are explored between man to fellow-man, nature and the ever-present, all-encompassing flow of time. Things flow slowly, conversations are fragmented, feelings and thoughts break down in such a static environment. The desert seems to swallow all sense of reality, takes away the passing of the time (or rather the recognition of its passing) as these two men bond in a quasi-primitive way.

However the arrival of the war advisor’s daughter on the scene begins a cycle that slightly disrupts this Beckett-esque, ‘two old grumpy men’ thing which to be truthful, I didn’t really get. I wanted to see the filmmaker get his one-take movie. I wanted to see these two crazy men do their weird collaboration. There was magic to be had there, and I believed DeLillo was well within his capabilities to explore that weirdness, a further breaking down of reality. But the daughter comes along and ruins that. This is the point I feel slightly ‘robbed’; like I was promised something and it wasn’t delivered. Nevermind, I got some recompense at the end with a bit more art theory cum life theory and managed to forgive DeLillo a little.

This short novel has lots of space to move, being wonderfully under-crowded character-wise (only four real characters populate the scene), yet DeLillo finds ways of introducing claustrophobia and discomfort into the sweeping desert landscape where he bases his story.

With Delillo, we finally understand how through the abstract, the surreal or the ‘theatre of the absurd‘ that we understand life and modes of living that are perhaps, too big to comprehend as they are. It is essentially the ‘jarring’ of reality that offers us a broader glimpse at truths that were previously hidden. So it is that DeLillo begins and ends his story with the art installation and his nameless protagonist who ponders the meaning and moreover the inexplicable profundity of such a piece where time is (quite literally) slowed down to the point of stopping.

I gave this book 3/5 stars, yet had DeLillo followed through with the film-maker/ war advisor storyline instead of interrupting it, this could have been a much greater novel, as well as a longer one.

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Related articles

• Review: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (bloodonforgottenwalls.wordpress.com)
• A few words with David Cronenberg about “Cosmopolis” (somecamerunning.typepad.com)
• Reader reviews roundup (guardian.co.uk)
• new delillo in february 2010 (sippey.com)

Reviews, Resolutions and Remnants… 2010 at a Glance

Tags

2011 resolutions, book challenge, book review

“2010 – The year I thought I lost my colours, but found them again through books… and blogging.”

For me, 2010 was the year I accidentally discovered blogging. Like all good ideas, I happened upon it by chance when I was reading a particularly entertaining review of ‘Lolita’; and it suddenly dawned on me, ‘why don’t I give this a try?’ Truth be told, I was going through some particularly nasty emotional problems (remnants of the evil 2009!) and in a position I call ‘zero gravity’ where I felt like I was floating off into deep space with nothing to anchor me to reality. So without thinking, I opened my first blog account and started to write myself out of my mini-depression. Before this I felt like all the colour in my world had been sucked out, but reading and writing eventually brought those colours back to me again. If you think of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and the sequence where Dorothy is in Kansas; that’s how it was. For Dorothy, it took a hurricane and some munchkins to do the trick; for me it was a blog. It seems a little silly and a bit strong to say ‘my blog saved my life’, but in this instance it gave me those ‘little steps’ I needed to help find my true self again. And what better way to do it than through the very real and sincere love of books.   

With time I found the world of book blogging to be a particularly special community, because it was here that I realised people like me had a name (bibliophile) and what’s more, they almost always felt the obsessive urge to write down their thoughts on a book; which when you think about it isn’t what your average reader does now is it? Prior to blogging I had about 4 notebooks full of such scribblings and took a funny pride in them. For me, my reading journals are a year-by-year record of book-themed reflections on the world of literature and how this often manifests in real-life. I’m pretty sure most bloggers out there have experienced the phenomenon of the ‘book/ life collision’, when a read deals with the exact same problem that you are facing at that moment in time. It’s a pretty special moment, as it feels like the book has been ‘sent’ to you in some way.

In 2010 those books were ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe and ‘Disgrace’ by JM Coetzee. The former is the story of a proud and powerful tribal chief who is so strict in his adherence to the ‘old ways’, he is left absolutely powerless when the white man finally comes to town. In ‘Disgrace’, an equally nonchalant college professor learns the value and worth of mankind in ways he never dreamed he could. Both novels struck a deep chord, as we often lose perspective of what we actually are in the scheme of things. In ‘Disgrace’, people like animals are only pawns on a very, very large cosmic chessboard. In ‘Things Fall Apart’, the village chief loses to the white man because he is unyielding and impatient. Like the ancient chinese proverb says: ‘A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall.”

Despite it being a very gloomy year, 2o10 did go pretty fast, and it was a good thing it did! However, I am left with the one thing I was hoping I wouldn’t have: ‘review remnants’; which means there were quite a few books I didn’t get round to writing up about. Here’s my shameful list of laziness:

A Man’s Head – Georges Simenon
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles – Haruki Murakami 

It would have been nice to start with a clean slate (and an empty TBR list for that matter), but I suppose I will have to add my rogue review remnants to my ever-growing list of new years resolutions, which brings me onto:

Zee’s 2011 Reading Resolutions!

Yeah, I make one every year, and it usually ends up having things like ‘read x amount of books’, ‘read such and such writer’ etc. But this year I hope to be more realistic (so she says!). So here’s my modest 2011 list:

1. Gather and read ONCE AND FOR ALL all the really hard, thick books that I have lying around that I have ‘claimed’ to have read in the past: a.k.a the ‘Fat Fiction’ Challenge.

2.Renew the ’50 Books A Year’ Challenge for 2011, half of which will consist of the 1001 books challenge.

3. Attempt to be more ‘technologically open’ when it comes to literature. Which means trying out at least more than one audiobook/ ebook this year. It also means making more use of online resources such as Librivox. Even a technophobe like me must adjust a little to the changes around me; even if I have taken an oath to read the written word!

4. Finish reviewing the ‘remnants’ of the last year.

5. Start to review books for authors and publishers (haven’t done this before, but it would be fun!)

6. Continue to take books out of the library and SAVE MONEY! (This was last years resolution, which I did stick to – and broke only on very special occasions!)

7. Join more readalongs! I missed the Midnight’s Children one and would like to make it on time for another book.

8. Complete the rough draft of my novel. It’s been a very exciting time for me as I finally give shape to the story that I’ve been carrying around for the longest time.

and finally 9. Discover more book bloggers and post more often to the people I have subscribed to! I do follow a large number of blogs, but lately real-life has been getting in the way of my blogging and responses to some otherwise great, great topics I have been reading about.

So to wrap things up, I wish everyone in the blogosphere and beyond a very happy, peaceful and fun-filled 2011. I hope it will be a good year as I continue to meet more great people. Happy reading everybody!

Zee.

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? (18/10)

Tags

50 books a year, angela carter, hubert selby jr, Its monday what are you reading?, meme, Robert Rankin, wilkie collins

Another Monday, another meme. Things have slowed down since the last time I posted. The good news is, I’ve finally reached my 50 Books A Year target (yay!). And I’ve also began to focus more on my writing, which is why I haven’t been posting as frequently. More posts will follow on my thoughts and feelings on that.

But here is what’s going on from the book front:

Books Read
1. ‘The Passion of New Eve’ by Angela Carter
 
This gets 5/5 stars. An absolute joy to read. Review coming up!

2. ‘The Room’ by Hubert Selby Jr.

Scary stuff. This gets two ratings: 3/5 for story and 5/5 for execution of the writers’ craft. I’ll elaborate later in a full review.

Currently Reading
1. Retromancer by Robert Rankin

Still monkeying around with this one, but that’s only because (look below)…

2. ‘The Woman in White’ by Wilkie Collins

… this one has taken over! Who’d have thought Collins would turn out to be such a brilliant writer?

That’s it for now. Happy reading everyone!