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Wordly Obsessions

~ … the occasional ramblings of a book addict …

Wordly Obsessions

Tag Archives: 50 books a year

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

18 Monday Oct 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Meme

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

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


It's Monday! What are you reading this week?

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
The Passion of New Eve 
This gets 5/5 stars. An absolute joy to read. Review coming up!

2. ‘The Room’ by Hubert Selby Jr.
The Room
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

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

2. ‘The Woman in White’ by Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

… 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!

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50 Books A Year 2010 | Challenge Complete!!

05 Tuesday Oct 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Authors, Book Challenges

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

50 books a year, book challenge


Congratulations are in order, for I have finally finished my first book challenge ever. Yes, after many weeks of posting and obsessing about it I have reached the top of my own personal Everest: a pile of 50 books! In the past, the most I could manage was 20-25 books, but now I’m sure that if I really put my head to it, I can read much more. My aim for next year will be to read 100 books. So, fingers crossed for that!  

Below is the grand list of my conquered reads complete with ratings. To read the reviews, just visit ‘Zee’s Book Reviews’ on the right. All except ‘Lavinia’ of course, because that review was written for ‘The Blue Bookcase’. Note: I still have a backlog of about 7 books that I am still working on, and they will be up as soon as I finish them.

Excellence 5/5
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter

Almost Perfect 4/5
Motorcycle Diaries – Ernesto Che Guevara
Fantastic Mr. Fox – Roald Dahl
The Twits- Roald Dahl
Boy: Tales of Childhood- Roald Dahl
Memoirs of a Master Forger – William Heaney
PUSH – Sapphire
Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Story of Blanche and Marie – Per Olov Enquist 
South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Disgrace – JM Coetzee
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth – Xiaoluo Guo
Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

Good 3/5
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Crazy – Benjamin Lebert
A Partisan’s Daughter – Louis De Bernieres
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein – Peter Ackroyd
The Lost Estate – Alain Fournier
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Goethe
A Man’s Head – Georges Simenon
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
Disquiet – Julia Leigh
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories – F Scott Fitzgerald
Ether’s Inheritance – Sandor Marai
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
A Pale View of the Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
In The Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
The Rapture – Liz Jensen
Winter Trees – Sylvia Plath
The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson
Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lavinia – Ursula Le Guin
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Nocturnes – Kazuo Ishiguro

Avoid 2/5
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
The Calligrapher’s Night – Yasmine Ghata
The Electric Church – Jeff Somers

Waste of Time 1/5
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare

So far two books have been awarded the coveted 5/5 stars. Time will tell whether any other titles will join that celebrated rank. Only books of outstanding quality ever get this rating, so be assured that there is something very special about ‘Fear and Loathing’ and ‘The Passion of New Eve’. Both books managed to rise far and above my expectations. As a reader I found both books to be incredibly rich and terribly unique in their own way.

 

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‘The Rum Diary’ by Hunter S. Thompson

27 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Book Review

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

50 books a year, book review, Caribbean, hunter s thompson, rum diary, San Juan Puerto Rico


The Rum Diary: A NovelThe Rum Diary: A Novel by Hunter S. Thompson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.”

Paul Kemp; an arrogant, know-it-all journalist makes his way from New York to Puerto Rico to work at the only English-language paper on the island, ‘The Daily News’. The people there however, are like the weather; hot-tempered and volatile, often drifting from one assignment to another with little loyalty to their profession. As the paper sits perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, Kemp begins to question the reason he came to the island in the first place. His workmates (an unwilling, down-and-out, lazy bunch of vagrants) seem to be a mirror, showing him how he’ll end up one day if he lets his profession (and the island) burn him out.

Based loosely on Thompson’s brief stint as a journalist in Puerto Rico, the ‘Rum Diary’ is a mish-mash of office politics, masculine desperation and that all important question, ‘just what am I doing with my life?’ Kemp, a thirtysomething reporter has so far got by rather well on his youth and his looks; but upon arriving at this tropical paradise, falls short of his expectations. He suddenly feels like an unwanted immigrant. The hostility of the locals and the idle tension among his colleagues mounts to breaking point. He soon realises that he must make a decision; to stay and live in the languorous haze of uncertainty, or leave.

Before I begin to list the good, the bad and the ugly, I want to make it clear that this was one of Thompson’s first novels. The second, ‘Prince Jelly-Fish’ was written about the same time as ‘The Rum Diary’ but was never published. Thompson is also famous for his self-styled ‘Gonzo‘ journalism; a rather theatrical, egocentric form of reporting. For anyone hoping to find any of that here they can think twice, because this is not Gonzo. No where near, in fact. Here is a rare example of Hunter’s writing before the rock ‘n’ roll drugs took hold. People wishing to catch a glimpse of Thompson’s writing pre-Gonzo will find this a very valuable text indeed, because here is a young man with a clear vision and a bold pen who even at this age, believed in ‘buying the ticket and taking the ride’.

Although ‘The Rum Diary’ is a candid account on many levels, the problem I had with it was variety. Everything seemed disjointed, there seemed to be no definite direction which I admit, on one hand, enhances the inertia Thompson wished to create. The eye of Paul Kemp is a little too depressing. He finds nothing beautiful, most of the time I felt like I was looking through newspaper print; everything black and white, sleazy and never good enough. Puerto Rico came across as an island that falls short of its exotic equatorial glamour. The narrative is so firmly trained on the American characters and the failings of both them and their newspaper that the writing feels a little too ‘inbred’. There is only so much one can take about the jealous Yeamon and Chenault, his dumb, blonde girlfriend. Having said this, the characters are well-developed, yet they lacked greatly in other ways. There was no warmth to them.

The political situation of Puerto Rico might also have inspired Thompson to people his narrative with a lot of self-serving, arrogant ‘get rich quick’ types that often descend on such islands. These profit-seeking, hotel magnates crop up in ‘The Rum Diary’, where the attractive coastline are nothing but a profit margin to the capitalist mind.

“At that time the U.S. State Department was calling Puerto Rico ‘America’s advertisement in the Caribbean – living proof that capitalism can work in Latin America.’ The people who had come there to do the proving saw themselves as heroes and missionaries, bringing the holy message of Free Enterprise to the downtrodden jibaros. They hated commies like they hated sin, And the fact that an ex-Red was publishing a paper in their town didn’t make them happy.”

Having stressed that this is in no way ‘Gonzo’ material, I have to add that Thompson’s political opinions still show very strongly whch is a trait that he develops in his later work.

I was also quite surprised by the way Thompson wished to portray the islanders. He doesn’t paint a very kind portrait of them, and regards life on the island as an unbearable negative. The Puerto Ricans come across as people who like nothing better than to fight at the slightest provocation. They are stereotyped into drunk, lazy islanders who like their siestas and cannot be trusted. Like the island, the natives are a mere blur in the background and surface only as a negative superior to the other negatives in the novel.

Yet there were moments of atmospheric beauty, where Puerto Rico is allowed to come to life and shows its true colours.

“Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down he street. Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.”

This is the final paragraph of the book as Kemp is about to leave. This passage was most unfair, as it left me yearning to read more about these San Juan nights. The nostalgia is palpable, as Kemp realises how deeply the island has affected him. Throughout the novel his relationship with Puerto Rico was of a love/hate kind, with hate almost winning over. In fact, the last passage reads almost as if it was written by someone else, a different voice with a totally different set of feelings.

It made me think of two novels, the one Thompson wrote, riddled with office politics and inane characters and a different ‘Rum Diary’, stripped from its journalist perspective that’s perhaps a little fairer and truer to the time he spent in Puerto Rico. But then again, Thompson was not the kind for inspired travelogs. For that, I must go elsewhere.

View all my reviews

Related articles
  • The Rum Diary (politfilm.wordpress.com)

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Book Review | ‘Madame Bovary’ – Gustave Flaubert

16 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 1001 Book Challenge, 50 Books A Year, Book Review, Rory Gilmore Reading List

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

1001 book list, 50 books a year, book review, Catherine Earnshaw, gustave flaubert, Madame Bovary, rory gilmore reading list


Madame Bovary (Wordsworth Classics)Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book Challenges: 1001 books (no. 887), 50 Books A Year (no. 48), Rory Gilmore Challenge.

“Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains. [We must not touch our idols, the gilt sticks to our fingers.]”

The most famous line from the book sums up the very heart of the matter; as it illustrates in good old-fashioned terms how romantic legends should be admired from the pages of a book but never acted upon. Unfortunately our ill-fated Emma Bovary doesn’t heed this lesson, and reaches again and again to touch the moth-winged fabric of love, only to have it fall around her like dust.

A controversial novel in its time, ‘Madame Bovary’ still continues to draw a significant amount of praise for its handling of a subject like forbidden love. It took me AGES to finished this, but it was well worth it. First of all ‘Madame Bovary’, for all it’s old-fashioned language could teach modern storytellers a thing or two about proper ‘character development’. There are many elegant phrases that stand out, but what I admired most was the beautiful descriptions of the countryside:

“The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.”

Emma Bovary has to be without a doubt the most complex heroine I have ever read. Not even the enigmatic Rebecca de Winter, or the wild mistress-of-the-moors Catherine Earnshaw can come close to the depth and flexibility of this creation. Flaubert has rendered as complete an image of woman that can possibly be done in literary terms. She differs greatly from other heroines of her time, because Flaubert strived to depict a woman who was equally bad as she was good. You won’t find any of that ‘angel fallen from heaven’ malarkey here, oh no. Emma Bovary was greedy, needy and a thoroughly lustful lass to boot. She cuckolded her husband more than once, spent his money to the last centime and did not care an iota for her poor child Berthe.

Emma is a sensual creature despite her innocent looks; but it’s within the nuance of language and her character deconstruction that Flaubert saves his heroine from being taken as a total whore. Unlike his contemporaries he takes time to empathise with his characters. I was more fascinated by Flaubert’s sensitive wording of emotions than of the plot itself. Unhappy in her marriage, Emma seeks consolation in religion. But her convent days are over and she (despite having spent a great deal of time there) has never truly outgrown her romantic fantasies. Instead they fuel her bored mind until the unfortunate opportunity presents itself and the clandestine meetings with the suave Rodolphe begin. In fact I’ve clocked Flaubert accusing piety as the culprit for Bovary’s tragic end many times. It’s an interesting undertone that runs throughout the novel.

Emma’s unfaithfulness is just the beginning of a downward spiral designed to no doubt serve as a moral tale for young ladies. The ending results in the most tragic consequences, as Emma’s selfish actions have a knock-on effect to her husband and daughter. In short, the whole family is irreversibly ruined.

I say this is one of the more enjoyable reads out of the classics. Read it when you can.

View all my reviews

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  • Reading 125 Titles A Year? That’s ‘One For The Books’ (npr.org)
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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? 06/09

06 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Meme

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

50 books a year, gustave flaubert, Its monday what are you reading?, ursula le guin


It's Monday! What are you reading this week?

Here I am, back from my weird, indefinite hiatus doing the Monday meme again, (though how long for I’m not sure). For the past 2 weeks there wasn’t much to report in the way of reading anyway, as the frenzy of real life kind of took over. You know how it is, in the quiet moments you squeeze in a page here or a paragraph there, but that kind of shallow reading leaves you confused as to what’s actually going on. So I left off altogether. There’s no point in doing it if there’s no joy in understanding what’s happening.  

For this week I am determined to complete the 50 Books A Year Challenge. I’m on no.46 at the moment, so I’m hoping September will be the month where I polish it all off. It’s my first attempt at a challenge to read so many books in a year. Previous years I’ve managed about 25-30 max, but I’m really proud that I can get so many under my belt. After I pass the 50 mark I’m going to continue to see just how many I can get till the end of the year. Next year’s challenge might very well be ‘100 Books A Year’. Here’s hoping!

OK, so here’s how my reading list looks like:

1. ‘Lavinia’ by Ursula Le Guin
Lavinia 
I’m halfway through this amazing story about Lavinia, daughter and Princess of Latium and the Trojan warrior Aeneas. This fated tale of star-crossed lovers is told from a unique, sensitive perspective that questions the very fibre of ‘myth’, credibility of epic poetry and the concept of immortality through writing. Le Guin is a fluid, fluent writer whose ideas are easily absorbed by her readers. Lavinia’s tale is similar to that of Helen of Troy; and Le Guin wanted to explore what made Helen’s story survive throughout the ages, while Lavinia’s fate was passed over briefly in that Virgilian epic, ‘The Aeneid’, condemning her unjustly to a ‘long life, but a small one’.  

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 

Madame Bovary (Wordsworth Classics)
I can see how this work was a serious turn towards the contemporary. Flaubert tried hard to breathe life into Emma Bovary. She is full of complexities and what’s more, she is very much like us. It’s fascinating to see that after all these years a modern audience can still identify with her (even moreso now, I think), and that is the hallmark of a true classic. It never stops saying what it has to say. As I’m halfway through this one too, I’m not going to say much about it, except that Flaubert was a true master of description. His turn of phrase, his minimalist way of setting up a scene is a real breath of fresh air compared to his peers. There are no rambling paragraphs to be found here, just a story, a real story that he simply lets unfold.

 So, that’s it for this week. I hope I’ll have more to report back next Monday. Have a happy reading week everybody!

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Book Review | ‘Esther’s Inheritance’ – Sandor Marai

05 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Book Review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

50 books a year, book review, Embers, esther's inheritance, sandor marai


Twenty years after leaving her for her younger sister, Esther receives a letter from Laci, her estranged lover, announcing his grand return. Memories of her bitter loss, of the pain of love come back to worry Esther, as she prepares for one last meeting with the man who robbed her of almost everything. Nunu, her one faithful companion and housekeeper, warns her calmly of the calamity to come; but Esther does not heed her warnings. Or she simply doesn’t care anymore. Hers is a life wasted in nostalgia, of embalming each passing year with the rejection and betrayal of her loved ones. As the hour draws near, Esther readies to confront Laci, the charming trickster and masterful liar…

Esther's Inheritance

“Some people lie because it’s their nature…
But you lie the way rain rains: you can lie with tears, you can lie with your actions…
Your life has been one long lie. I don’t even believe in your death: that too will be a lie.
Oh yes, you’re a genius all right.”

This is my second time reading Marai, the first being his most popular work, ‘Embers‘, but unlike ‘Embers’ I found ‘Esther’s Inheritance‘ to be not only a shorter read, but a much more manageable challenge in terms of language. This novella is far more suited to Marai’s bare-worded style compared to ‘Embers’. I like to think that this book is an example of how a complex story can be told elegantly without too much detail. Marai knows that what matters is getting across the facet of the plot his readers want to read, which with a story like this would be character analysis (given the antagonist is an infamous womaniser).

Having said that, this is a very different kind of love story, a twist on Dicken’s ‘Great Expectations‘, where there is no embittered virgin bride that turns vitriolic with time, but a woman who has learned to suffuse her pain with nature. Esther is no Havisham, and she has no intention to wallow in her envy. Hers’ is a character full of wisdom and grace gained from experience. Her intensely human reactions to the man who betrayed her, still show affection where there really shouldn’t be any. Towards the end, Esther is confronted with a decision: to listen to her heart and allow Laci to once again intrude into her life, or to take advantage of her situation and finally get her revenge.

I give this novel 3/5 stars.

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Book Review | ‘Push’ – Sapphire

04 Saturday Sep 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Challenges, Book Review

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

50 books a year, AIDS, book review, Harlem, precious, sapphire, Substance dependence, Support Groups, United States


Claireece Precious Jones is sixteen years old. She cannot read or write and she is pregnant with her second child. Precious wants to learn. Her math teacher says she has ‘aptitude’ for numbers. That makes Precious happy. School is the only place Precious is happy, because home means hell. Home equals ritual abuse; physical, psychological and sexual. Home means a fat mother who lets her father rape her. Precious wants to go to school, because it’s her only way out. And one day, somebody helps her find a perfect school, a school where she can start fresh and have the courage to sit at the front of the class, not behind. At this school, Ms. Rain becomes the angel of words, where Precious learns to spell the pain right out of her life.

PUSH

“I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was 1983…
My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded…
My name is Claireece Precious Jones.”

Gritty, harsh, but tender and intensely human… this is written from the unique perspective of Precious; a young black woman living in Harlem with a terrible secret and a life scarred with crippling shame. Precious’ journal  (written in broken English) is endearing with its childish spellings, yet forceful in the clarity of the experiences it unfolds. And Precious is like a child, even though she is a mother of two babies, who are unfortunately also her siblings. She yearns for a clean life and rages at the hand dealt to her, but despite this, Precious has a goal and she can still dream. Precious’s wish to be a white girl, to be a virgin, to be young and clean and have people see the ‘good’ person inside her and not judge her by her looks or her past proliferates throughout the book. It’s heart-breaking and shocking to think this kind of thing still goes on in developed countries.
As a reader, we are put in her shoes. We live and breath the pain Precious must endure. At times, this kind of proximity can be too uncomfortable, but it attempts to answer the question everyone secretly asks themselves when they hear about situations like this, ‘how does one cope?’. The answer is to rise above yourself, which is exactly what Precious learns to do. This is an astonishing novel whose perspective never wavers for a minute. Sapphire always retains a steady focus on the psychology of the people who have to endure trauma’s like AIDS, drug addiction and incest.
So much pain, humiliation, confusion… but through it all Precious’s iron resolve to free herself from the sins she has been made to commit made me so proud of her and of the people like her who have endured this. At times, shocking to read, but the tenderness and scenes of female camaraderie kept me through it. Couldn’t put it down. Absolutely fabulous.I give it 4/5 stars.

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Quick Review | ’20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’ – Xiaolu Guo

22 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Review

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

20 fragments of a ravenous youth, 50 books a year, book review, chinese, Fenfang, Groundhog Day, Xiaolu Guo


20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no.45)

“Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn’t it about time I got my lucky break?”

’20 fragments of a Ravenous Youth’ is the disjointed chronicle of Fenfang Wang; a young woman who leaves the monotonous life of Ginger Hill Village to make it big in one of the most complex capitals of the world, Beijing.

Unlike the other villagers, Fenfang is painfully aware of the hum-drum life of her existence. Days seem to melt into one another, and life feels like a provincial Chinese ‘Groundhog Day’, with her as an anonymous extra. So at 17 she leaves with dreams of becoming a star, of reaching the ‘shiny things’ in life.

Armed with nothing but stubborn willpower, a half-empty suitcase and a headful of dreams; Fenfang lays her tentative roots in Beijing; a city still crippled by its’ communist past. But life has other plans for her. What ensues isn’t a story of success, but one of painful loneliness and desperate survival. Suddenly Fenfang realises that this is how you pay for living in a city with a  population of 15 million. As Fenfang drifts from one dead-end job to another, a bunch of aimless relationships and an ever-growing list of silent, forgettable roles, she wonders whether she will ever make it, or if those ‘shiny things’ were ever be meant for her.

Guo’s depiction of the ‘ravenous’ dreams of youth and the blind courage that issues from this ‘throw-caution-to-the-wind’ attitude was one of the things I enjoyed about Guo’s story. Originally published in Chinese, Guo states that the entire process was spent ‘chasing a language for the elusive Fenfang’ even when she didn’t agree with her protagonist anymore, and indeed with herself.

“Ten years on, I found I didn’t agree with the young woman who had written it. Her vision of the world had changed, along with Beijing and the whole of China.”

And indeed, one gets a feeling that they are reading a much younger, spunkier, arrogant version of themselves. As a woman I could identify with Fenfangs urgent pangs of occasional self-loathing, her worries about her past becoming a suffocating template to her future and moreover the mysterious, distant call to realise one’s destiny, whatever that may be.

But like Guo, I can sympathise and look back in wonder at the ‘crazy years’ of learning life the hard way. Maybe not learning it quite as hard as Fenfang, but the moments where everything seemed like an endless assault course and survival meant dodging the curveballs life threw at you.

For me at least then, the narrative felt like a mash-up between some very familiar feelings and completely alien ones. For one, I loved the candid descriptions of the different districts of Beijing. Fenfang’s indomitable personality was a breath of fresh air, and her first-person account of all the things she sees and experiences is touching. There were more than a few times when I wanted to feel angry at this irresponsible, arrogant youth; but her truthful, wide-eyed innocence prevented me.

“Although Fenfang, the heroine of the novel, should still be desperate about her life, I wanted to convince her to become an adult.”

I like to think of ’20 Fragments’ as a story about the internal struggles of growing up. Namely, curbing our impatience with our surroundings and finding positive, constructive ways to get ourselves out of situations. As the novel progressed, Fenfang began to look inside herself and for once stop obsessing about her peasant past. One of the many lessons she learns is to accept who she is, and that is probably one of the hardest Fenfang has to face considering her Communist upbringing.

Breaking the mold to become an ‘individualist’ in a culture taught to act as a collective whole is no mean feat. Unbeknownst to her, what begins as a journey to distance herself from this ‘collective cockroachism’, brings her even closer to it. How Fenfang deals with it, is part of a story that is familiar to all of us yet different for each of us.

View all my reviews

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Quick Review | ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

19 Thursday Aug 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 1001 Book Challenge, 50 Books A Year, Book Review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1001 book list, 50 books a year, arthur conan doyle, book review, Holmes, Jude Law, Robert Downey, Sherlock Holmes, Watson, Wizard of Oz


Hound of Baskervilles Sherlock HolmesHound of Baskervilles Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Book Challenges: 1001 BYMRBYD , 50 Books a Year (no.44)

“Everyone knows SHERLOCK HOLMES. Now is the time to rediscover him.”

These were the words on the back cover of my edition of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles‘, and I wholly agree. In fact I must say I had no idea Sherlock Holmes was so much fun! Again, here is a popular book (indeed, a cast of characters) that has been depicted extensively in cartoons and film, the latest being the blockbuster ‘Holmes’ starring the lovely Jude Law and notoriously unhinged Robert Downey Jr. Perfect casting as far as I’m concerned, but it always bugged me that I had never actually met with the real ‘Holmes’, the original, untampered version thought-up by Doyle. So I decided it was time I found out what made this literary figure so great in the crime-fiction genre.

As with ‘The Wizard of Oz’, I couldn’t help approaching the story with a certain mish-mash of varying images of the legendary Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson. On the whole, I was expecting a pedantic, slightly scary/ crazy guy (complete with quintessential English dry humour), whose brain is permanently hard-wired with an unusually uncanny level of intelligence. And to an extent I found the above to be a staple part of his character, so I was pleased that they kept pretty much to Doyle’s creation. However, what I discovered in this book was a much darker version of the detective. For one, he smoked a rare type of tobacco rumoured to be cannabis which can be seen in this novel. He is also reputed to be a cocaine user, who oddly abhorred the tought of visiting an opium den for his fix. The drugs were, of course, perfectly legal back in 19th century England and didn’t cause the slightest stir back then; but having them connected to a character of clear logic with today’s knowledge of the drugs puts Holmes in totally different light, suddenly giving him a depth that suggests a men battling with his inner demons. And his oddball attitude certainly supports this theory, especially since his way of looking at the world is so very different from the rest of us.

Of course, discovering the ‘real’ Holmes wasn’t the only positive. Dr. Watson turned out to be made of much sterner stuff than his TV/ film counterparts. He is an intelligent man, with a wit that only just falls short of Holmes’ brand of prodigious divining.

As far as the story goes, Doyle keeps to the usual time-honoured rules of crime-fiction by ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. The narrative is also handsomely varied between third-person story-telling, diary entries and the favourite ‘epistolary’ style of its’ day. The plot starts off at a rather good pace with no time wasted in establishing a gothic ambience with the legend of a hell-hound that dogs the ancient Baskerville family. The size of beast and its terrible penchant for human flesh puts a slightly ‘lycan’ spin on the whole mystery, but this is soon dissipated as Holmes starts unravelling what he terms as a yarn spun by a most singular and diabolical adversary.

There are plenty of action-packed moments, and the ending was especially satisfactory which is a must for a mystery novel. Having looked at the other titles in this series and I’m glad to see they are slightly more gory and have a wider scope in terms of location and plot.

3/5 stars to a good rollicking tale!

View all my reviews »

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Book Review | ‘The Story of Blanche and Marie’ – Per Olov Enquist

14 Saturday Aug 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

50 books a year, book review, Fiction, love story, Nobel Prize, Old-World, per olov enquist, Radium


This is the unusual story of Marie Curie and Blanche Wittman; two extraordinary women caught between the ordered mathematics of science and the symbolic alchemy of love. The novel deals with amputated emotions, the desire for detachment and its antithesis; a longing for reconnection. Set during the dawn of a new century; Enquist explores the questioning of the rational ‘Enlightenment’ period which nurtured cut and dry methods of modern science and the unfathomable, fledgling studies of psychology.

In the heart of this revolution, the arcane gods of alchemy clashed with the new generation of scientific thinkers who championed the sloughing off of Old-World superstitions to make way for solid fact. Amongst this tumult, Enquist recognises Wittman and Curie as major players and revolutionaries as well as victims of the struggle between the increasingly masculine world they inhabited and their feminine needs.

The Story of Blanche and Marie

“The word ‘medicine’, Charcot told her, ‘comes from Medea, the mother of Witchcraft.”
“Does that mean you are a magician?” she asked.
“No”, he said, “I am a prisoner of reason, with my feet buried deeply in the mub from which magic is composed.”

At the crux of this strange narrative lies the eternal battle between the rational senses and the repressed, animal psyche. Enquist builds a masterful framework based on these opposing principles on which to hang and analyse the passions, obsessions and martyred freedom of these women. The result is that he draws many fine connections between the frustrating incompatibility of what we are, and what the world expects us to be.

Inspired by Wittman’s diaries, Enquist finds ways to weave her erratic accounts with historical documents of that time. The story itself is divided into three colours; red, black and yellow which represent the colours of the three diaries Wittman used to record her thoughts.

To begin with, I found Wittman’s personal history infinitely more fascinating than Curie’s; purely because of the sheer bloody-mindedness of her devotion for a science that she was not only a guinea-pig of, but later to which she was a major scientific contributor. While Curie is meted as one of those rare female geniuses that made science her life; Wittman emerges as a little short of a saint, who surrendered her body piecemeal to that wondrous and deadly discovery known today as radium.

At the beginning of the story we are introduced to Wittman in the final stages of her life. She is quite literally only half the woman she once was, having lost three limbs to the radium research that eventually killed her. As an amputee riddled with tumours, she dedicates the rest of her life to recording her experiences as an inmate of the mental institution at Saltpetriere and later as research assistant to the Curie’s. Already a celebrity when she first met the Curie’s, Wittman was famous for her performance of hysterical séances conducted by Prof. Charcot, who later became her lover.

“If you share your darkness with the man you love, sometimes a light appears so strong that it kills.”

Wittman is presented as a woman riddled by obsessions so severe that they manifest in the form of her withering limbs, but Marie Curie is not immune to this form of hysteria. In the final chapters of his book Enquist shows us an alternative Curie; one stripped of that infallible, sterile image that we associate with the founder of radium. We meet a Marie restored to femininity, a Marie who has had been deserted in the wilderness of her deepest sexual desires without a compass to guide her. Enquist’s Curie is so far from the persona we are familiar with, that the tale of forbidden love that ensues serves as a deeply embarrassing and candid account of an average woman’s fall from grace.

The ways in which ‘love’ manifests throughout the novel resembles the chemical transmutations that the Curie’s concoct for their radium research. Science itself becomes a metaphoric element that Enquist shows as having transfused into the lives of these two historic women.

Radium, the cause of Blanche Wittman and later Marie Curie’s death is used as a clever device to represent the toxic, cancerous quality of love.

“He is reposing, secure and painless like a cancerous tumour of love, in her life.”

The luminescence and radiation of unbearable desire is seen as the true culprit in the demise of the women. Enquist takes ‘hysteria’ (a psychological condition synonymous with feminine weakness) and turns it into the guiding light. The phosphorus burn of love remains ever elusive, as neither woman has sufficient words to describe it in the various forms it takes. In conclusion, the formulaic sum of its parts are far too dispersed making them irreconcilable.

DEATH, LOVE and SCIENCE

Time and time again we see Wittman trying to rationalise ‘love’ through the use of scientific methods of questioning, however this falls apart at the seams as the story verges on a narrative hysteria of sorts. The overuse of exclamation marks indicates over excitement that is associated with Wittman’s previous occupation at the mental institute, where she would stimulate bouts of hysteria with the aid of hypnotism. The use of the three colours red, black and yellow are reminiscent of the ancient method of classifying different physical maladies (research). Enquist also uses her amputations to refer to many different folktales where this takes place.  I was surprised and moved at the reference to the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the girl with the red shoes, as it beautifully mirrors the moral tale of the price one pays for one’s vanities and obsessions.

I give this 4/5 stars.

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