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Wordly Obsessions

~ … the occasional ramblings of a book addict …

Wordly Obsessions

Tag Archives: historical fiction

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

29 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in 50 Books A Year, Book Review, Philosophy/ Religion, summer reading, Travels with Books

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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


moon tiger

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Teaser Tuesday 26/7 | War Time Reads…

25 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Excerpts, Meme

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

annie barrows, Cambridge, chicklit, historical fiction, kazuo ishiguro, Kensington, literature, mary ann shaffer, never let me go, Reading, Shropshire, teaser tuesday, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, war


Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Now I’ve taken some time out from novel-writing, I’m happy to be back doing Teaser Tuesdays again. This week I have noticed my reading to be a bit ‘themed’. On one hand I have the charming “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and on the other “When We Were Orphans” by the master of understatement, Kazuo Ishiguro. Both are set around WW2, but cover vastly different perspectives.  They both came highly recommended, and rightly so.

When We Were Orphans

“It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt’s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers.”  – Page 3

 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“I’m going to run through the wild-flower meadow outside my door and up to the cliff as fast as I can. Then I’m going to lie down and look at the sky, which is shimmering like a pearl this afternoon, and breathe in the warm scent of grass and pretend that Markham V. Reynolds doesn’t exist.” – Page 143

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

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

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


The Cellist of SarajevoThe 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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