Stones from the River

It's taken me a while to read this book it's  kept me company on my train journey to work every day for the last month and I'll miss it even though it irritated me in places.
Anyway, this is a story totally based on the life and inhabitants of a  fictional village  in Germany between 1921 and 1951.  It was a story about families, mental-illness, love,loss, heart-break, fear, guilt, betrayal, ignorance, knowledge and strength.  (Phew!!)   All told through the view point of Trudi.   Trudi loses her Mother to mental illness when she is four and is bought up by her fabulous Dad, Leo.  For me, Leo was a the star of the story along with the unnamed benefactor, who's always leaving needed gifts for people on their doorsteps...finding out who he was at the end of the novel was bitter sweet.
Trudi literally isn't your 'average' narrator, she's a dwarf who spends the majority of her young life hanging from door jambs trying to stretch herself. Obviously being so different isn't good in Nazi Germany but she manages to survive by taking a back seat...remaining in the shadows and watching the world around her disintegrate. People treat her like a child but she finds a lover, hides Jews, refuses to join the Nazi party and collects secrets about people.   That she actually survives these years is astounding. (Would she really have survived? )
I found her initial constant moaning about being a dwarf pretty irritating and boring to be honest but as she becomes older and sees the life around her it's interesting to see how her perceptions change. I really like her by the end of the book.  And my God, I feel like I've really spent over 30 years in her company.  This is a real village book, totally engrossed with village people's lives, relationships and personalities.  There are so many characters it's hard to keep up with who is who and sometimes it was just totally confusing.
It was the simple acts of kindness and bravery which affected me...the kid who gives a loaf of bread through the window of a train bound for the camps, who is then bundled onto the train herself and never seen again; the old woman who is constantly beating up young Nazis with her umbrella and  the people who dig unsafe tunnels between their houses in which they try to hide their Jewish neighbours.

Ursula Hegi is an amazing writer but for me the story was just too vast with too many characters. I found it hard to keep a track of every relationship. it was a long book and would have been better with fewer people in it, although maybe that was the purpose, a total immersion into village life during this period.

Jerusalem, the Biography.

My favourite quote is at the beginning of this book.

   

The city has been destroyed , rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt again. Jerusalem is an old nymphomanic who squeezes lover after lover to death, before shrugging him off her with a yawn.  A black widow who devours her mates while they are still penetrating her.

Amos Oz.  A Tale of Love and Darkness

Wow,right!! I'm as prepared as I'll ever be now for my trip to Jerusalem!  I read this book a year or two ago but I've reread it and enjoyed it even more this time.  This book is IMMENSE.Over 3000 years of history in one book is a challenge!  Respect to Simon Montefiore for even attempting such a task, being balanced and neutral  and also an amusing narrator.
 I didn't find it scholarly , just a good , yet violent read about a city populated by many mad men down the ages. The characters are what makes this book so interesting and their lusts for religious, political and earthly powers.

What I love about  Jerusalem is its ability to rebuild itself again and again out of the ashes under different leaderships. Jews, Babylonians, Greek, Persian, Romans, Christians, Pagans, Muslims, Crusaders,  Turks, French, Russians, Germans, British, Arabs, Zionists, Americans...they've all played their part and left their mark. The passions this city arouses are truly astounding!
It's crazy to think that just in 1918 Jerusalem was yet again  in squalor with only 50 ,000 inhabitants,many suffering from malaria and venereal disease. But this city is like a Phoenix and keeps on rising again and again.

What a city , what a history. I am both excited and apprehensive about what awaits  me in Jerusalem's  modern, deeply divided incarnation.





                                                                                   

National Poetry Day

OK, it was national poetry day today. Poems are not really my thing but it has had me thinking today and I have one favourite that I know,remember and love. here goes....

Love, seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despair

Love  seeketh only self to please
To bind another to its delight
Joys in another' s loss of ease
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.

W. Blake

Pure

Wow a book set in Paris in 1785  just before the French revolution. There is no real mention of the upcoming carnage and terror which will hit the country but you sure get a clear message about  the filthy  and awful conditions people lived in at this time.   In fact, like the book Perfume, this book was smelly!  One of the memorable parts of the first chapter was how the people's breath smelt of rotting corpses.  In fact the title is great because there is no purity here...no one washes and there are rotting bodies of various states of decay seeping into the walls and cellars of people's houses...ummm, delightful!

A young, intelligent and forward thinking engineer moves from Normandy to Paris  to coordinate the movement of bones out of the over flowing cemetery.This cemetery is literally stuffed full of bodies, mostly from plagues and the whole area just stinks of death and decomposition. The authorities want something to be done...slowly they are becoming aware that sharing personal space with thousands of rotting bodies is not healthy and the guy from Normandy is ready for the mammoth task!

Jean-Baptiste is amazing and totally dedicated to his project I really loved him and his lovely green coat he buys by mistake when drunk.    He tries to ignore all the superstitious locals, becomes good friends with the alcoholic organist and  falls madly in love with the local high-class prostitute.  Through all the traumas of almost being hacked to death in his bed and having to find men who are willing to dig and excavate the plots he finally manages to clear the land and the feeling of achievement at the end is pretty uplifting after all that grave digging! (The chapter when the guys are digging deep down in the pits is incredibly claustrophic and totally creepy.   I obviously loved it!)

I have to be honest that the first thing I enjoyed about this book was the  cover...it really is beautiful. (This was not a kindle experience book for me) and also the first few chapters of the book were absolutely amazing. Andrew Miller's descriptions were pure poetry and I was totally transported  to the time of Louis XVI.  I liked Jean-Baptiste, his ideas and enthusiasm were engaging but many of the other characters were a bit flat.   It's as if Miller was really only interested in descriptions of places and activities rather than development of character. But I think that was the main purpose of the book;  to show how amazing and life changing events  can  take place at the hands of quite ordinary people.
 By the end of the book I felt like I had been there too,  digging and emptying out the pits, and the sense of satisfaction when the air was clean and the land purified was pretty uplifting.

This book took me ages to read and was tough going in places but I feel like I have read it twice...many bits I had to read again.Sometimes  the words were so beautiful I had to read them again!

 It was a strange and weird book, unlike anything I have read before because it was totally dedicated to death and decay but in a poetic yet realistic way. Nothing like a dose of 18th century living to give you a reality check on how much we have to be thankful for in modern times!
  By the end it had painted a pretty optimistic view of the future. (Well, any future is good when you don't have to live next door to thousands of rotting corpses any more!) Yes, I enjoyed it!

The Year of the Flood

This is the sequel to Oryx and Crake and I really enjoyed it, in fact I preferred it . I think that is simply because Margaret Atwood is just a far better writer when she is narrating from a woman's perspective.  Plus this book just had a meatier story line. (Metaphorically speaking as there isn't any meat we would recognise left in this futuristic world, apart from human.)
 What I love most about Atwood's futuristic world is that she takes advances in science, which we all recognise as normal,  and takes the progress to the nth degree. Ultimately this ends in the most nightmarish conclusions where all control and ethics have vanished.
This book happens concurrently to the action retold in Oryx and Crake just before the 'Flood' which kills off all humanity. This book has more colour though as you see how life is in the  pleeblands which are the ghetto areas where most of the people live if you don't work for a multi-national company.
  Society has disintegrated to the lowest denominator and Margaret's outlook is extremely bleak as mob rule takes over the world in graphically violent imagery.
 Amongst all this carnage there are God's Gardeners, a cult created around the sanctity and beauty of the Earth who try to keep old traditions alive. The two female protagonists come from this cult and their knowledge and forethought enables them both to survive through the 'Flood'   This cult is totally believable but all of the sermons at the beginning of each chapter did bore me a bit, maybe because I'm not such a big ecological or environmental warrior as Atwood. For me Atwood has enough grit and realism in this book  just to stop short of it being a preachy tome being thrown at my head!
I loved how people survived through these hard years before the 'flood' and also how characters from Oryx and Crake appeared in this novel .  The endings of the two novels end up at exactly the same point with charaters and plots interweaving. Very Clever!
 Now I have to wait for her to release the third book, what the hell is going to happen?!
I love Margaret Atwood because she takes risks in her writing.  She is so passionate, writes beautifully and even though she is sometimes annoying her stories keep you hooked.

Fifty shades of Grey

OK,  I've done it.  I've read it and it's over.   Hats off to E L James (That's all I'm taking off.) She's orgasming all the way to the bank because of her published phoawwwwanomen.
Yes, I read it in 2 days and parts of it were funny/weird/kinky/addictive.   But to be honest I just found Mr Christian Gray deeply, deeply disturbing and Ana just damn annoying.  Parts of the plot reminded me of the flat lining development of the fourth Twilight book. But  I don't think this book is read for plot development.
Calling this Mommy Porn is an insult to Mom's and porn, but hey who am I to write anything because 1000s and 1000s of women have swallowed this book whole with no gag reflex at all.
Maybe I'm just a snob, but I think not...I did manage to read it and enjoyed some of its bonkers content but to be honest I found most of it dull. Oh dear! Oh my! Yawn, yawn...my inner Goddess was losing the will to live but occasionally I did have to read things twice...really? what the hell???!!!!
This book is all over the media and press and the best article I read was comparing this book to a Gregg's pasty.  When you eat a Gregg's pasty you know exactly what you are going to get and you secretly enjoy it. You wouldn't buy a Gregg's pasty otherwise.
 Brilliant, to me this book was a  ham and cheese pasty. Yum!

The Sense of an Ending

What a bargain! I bought this after work today in a charity book shop in Bicester for £1. It's a thin book and I have always thought that paying £7.99 for both the kindle and book version was a total rip off so I grabbed this brand-new unread copy off the shelf without a moment's hesitation. 

I then started reading it in the garden after work and  I have just finished it in one sitting. I  have always thought that Julian Barnes is a bit of a posho, intellectual, poncy kind of writer and in a way he is but this book gripped me from start to finish and I totally enjoyed it.

 He starts with a boring man reflecting on his dull life. The first half is about him looking back at his life at school and his Uni days. Because the only important person is himself you can slowly begin to see why life has been such a safe,grey, bubble for him. 

When he receives a solicitor's letter with money left in a will from his dead girlfriend's mother things begin to unravel for him. 

The second half makes us aware that this guy is an unreliable witness. His memories are shady...nothing is what it seems. Was his girlfriend such a bitch and if so why?  What went on with the Mother? Is he responsible for the actions of his friend or is he being too self-important? What things is he leaving out or repressing? How can memory distort the reality? 

 He desperately wants to find out what the hell is going on but his ex-girl friend from over 40 years ago is keeping important information from him. The guy remains dull and self-centred, (all the imagery of masturbation make it clear that he really is a wanker!) He never asks questions or enquires about other people's feelings. He just reaches conclusion from what he imagines and makes conjecture without any solid facts. ( I supposed everybody does this...this is what makes this book so real, the guy is just Mr/Mrs Normal.)

In the end, the main protagonist being pretty unlikeable and boring is not really a problem. It's all about how Julian Barnes has manipulated you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions.

   Yes, the ending is totally left dangling and you are left with just a Sense of an Ending.

Julian Barnes is having the last laugh...he's left a lot of readers totally confused, me included!  

But I think that's the point...it doesn't matter that no ending or final conclusion is drawn up.  That's the whole purpose of the book.

I think this book is an allegory for 'history', the only class in school which all the friends attend together. The teacher says 'without all the facts history cannot be recorded properly and that sure happens in this book!

This book ends up being  just the self interested opinion of one side and even when the guy thinks he  has become  'enlightened' he hasn't. 

 For me nothing has shown me how clearly and cleverly you can be deceived than this annoying, yet deceptively clever little book!  Julian Barnes is a total show-off and I thought there would be a high probability of me disliking this book but I didn't...I loved it. 

Oryx and Crake

The Handmaid's Tale is one of my favourite books so therefore I was looking forward to reading Margaret Atwood's later dystopian novel.  Mostly I enjoyed it a lot but at times it got a bit downright strangely weird.   Even now I am still unsure if Oryx was a real character or a computer implanted figment of the imagination.

Anyway,this book is set in the near future and is about what will happen if  the unimpeded progression of scientific advances of today continue  and therefore,the consequential  terrible results.

People who work for big corporations live in heavily protected compounds whilst the world around them collapses as people die due to uncontrollable airborne viruses, wars,floods, storms and famines.  Society has ceased to function at any level and corporations run the show/world.

the world has no fish or meat to eat due to extinction and there is a severe lack of natural food. The corporations have bred new spliced animals. For instance..  Pigs mixed with racoons (Pigoons) for human transplants and a new kind of chemical chicken for 'natural' protein, which has no brain (hence can feel no pain) and is just a load of chicken breasts growing around a central point. People mostly just live on bland fake soy and piles of pills and drugs.

Droughts mean nothing really successfullly grows any more and the people who are lucky enough to live within the corporation boundaries literally live in a bubble, protected from the horrors of the outside world.

Crake is a super intelligent, delusional scientist who also suffers from believing he is God. He decides to kill off all humanity with an uber-super drug after splicing the perfect human beings called the Crakers; who eat nothing but grass, have no need for language or sun cream and are peace loving and incredibly beautiful.   Love and jealousy don't exist either because women just go into heat like dogs and four guys are chosen to service the  woman for a 3 day shagathon. Children are bought up as part of an extended faimily.

One poor guy is left alive to look after the Crakers. (Crake chooses his best mate and secretly immunises him against the killer virus.)  His name is Snowman (due to always being wrapped in a bed sheet to keep the intense sun rays off his skin). 

  The book is really just a stream of consciousness based around Snowman and his memories.  Parts of it are really funny (Especially when he remembers the food he used to eat and the  computer games and shows he used to watch as a kid).  Other bits are just down right weird.  But hey, I respect Atwood for writing such a mad book.  Parts of it make no sense and I feel like she was off her head whilst writing it...but hey, she's passionate and her energy and ideas kept me hooked. 

The ending is really unclear too which would have annoyed me if I didn't have the second book to read... I've already started that.  Bring on the horrors!  Let's hope it all starts to make a bit more sense after book two.

Catching Fire and Mockingjay

What can I say about these two books. The first Hunger Games Book was OK, an interesting read really. But my God, these two are complete drivel. I finished the second really quickly hoping the final instalment would be better but I have just abandoned it. The characters, storyline, love triangle crap and whiny main character are just too much for me. 
Everything is rushed, explained badly and totally unconvincing. NO, this is not because I am too old to read these books. that's just insulting to teenagers and me. It's because the books have been quickly churned out to make a profit from innocent readers on the back of the first book. Characters are  made from cardboard/tissue paper and the different zones of tyranny are just farcical.
 Everything just takes a back seat to Katniss whining on. Katniss, the feisty main character, ends up being so pathetic. It's ended up mirroring what happened to Bella in the Twilight series. Why do these girls become so bloody useless?! 

Maybe I am being too serious and hard on these books but I really don't think so.  I read for pleasure and there was no pleasure to be found here! In fact the problem was this poor author was actually trying to get a serious point across about 'freedom, love and war and stuff '. But labouring it all in such a naff way it just turned to complete mush. 
I hope she is happier and richer now she has finally been released from the tyranny and torment of writing this dross.

The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers is like Sausage and Mash or Jacket Potatoes  to me, comfort food in book form.  I've been dipping in and out of it and I love it still. It was Dicken's first novel and was initially serialised in pamphlets over 18 months. Because it's like the first soap opera ever written it's easy to just pick up where you left off.  When you are feeling low  the mad characters, ridiculous story lines,slap stick humour and the miles of charging around the country by horse and carriage ending with copious amounts of drinking and story telling in taverns will soon sort you out.
It's definitely Dicken's most upbeat book (especially the first half.) There is hardly any plot but whenever Mr.Pickwick or his gang of traveller mates get into trouble you always know that Sam Weller will be there to sort things out...Sam Weller is my Hero, if only I could find a guy like him these days!

Alone In Berlin

I  finished this book in 5 days and to be honest I'm exhausted! What a dark, dark book. What a testimony.. I was totally gripped and have been reading late into the night to get this finished. It's taken me on a roller coaster ride and to be honest I'm glad it's over because it kind of took me over.  I just needed to know what was going to happen ( I had already  guessed  that there would be no happy ending!)I will never forget the power this book held over me whilst I was under its spell.

 I can't believe I'd never heard of this book before I found it in a charity shop. Hans Fallada wrote it in 1946 in just 24 days and it is probably the first real testimony of what it must have been like to live under the Nazis. Fallada was one of only a few authors/artists who didn't leave Germany during the war.   Unfortunately he died before this book was published and for some strange reason it was only translated into English a few years ago.(Maybe because some publishers thought Fallada was complicit with the Nazis, as are so many of the normal, everyday characters in this book.)
 I found out more about Fallada later; his life was totally bonkers too...

Anyway ,the style of the book was pretty easy to read, almost like a newspaper report with added parts of black humour (pitch black humour). the translation is obviously modern and it's like a book written in the last 10 years. It also has an amazingly beautiful end section...which is incredibly positive even in such dire circumstances.

 I think it's the the most heartbreaking book I've ever read about fighting against injustice. The main character drops hand written postcards around the city denouncing Hitler and the Nazis.He innocently believes that if people read them there will be a people's uprising but instead 95% of the cards are instantly handed into the Gestapo and a massive man-hunt begins.

I loved the way he perfectly crafted his characters, the strength of some people against the cowardly behaviour of others. All kinds of low-life people appear in this book...and their weaknesses and strengths are so well described..(To be honest most of the characters are foul.)
 It does ramble off in places and could have been shorter but ultimately I enjoyed (if that's the right word) reading this book but I am looking forward to a far less harrowing read now!

In Defense of Food.

I didn't think I would have much to blog about this book, but hey, I'll give it a shot..I've decided to write about everything I read. This book was  interesting but really aimed at the American market because lots of the 'food' he wrote about I didn't recognise.  His message was how to save the obese nations and get us back to eating normal food. He ranted about health food and said that if a product claimed to be good for your health it was definitely best not to buy it. (This was a good message for me because I have always wondered whether I should be spooning mouthfuls of benecol margarine into me as it claims to reduce cholesterol)
He said that if you were eating food that a Grandmother or Great Grandmother of the world wouldn't recognise you were probably on the super highway to type 2 diabetes and a mobility scooter.
His mantra was EAT FOOD, NOT A LOT, MOSTLY PLANT BASED. He then broke down each part and gave a rather scathing history of the 'nutrition' and marketing behind most of the health food in the West today. I liked the part on how all the cultures which moved to the States all had their own food culture at the beginning but the power of the American nation made them slowly over time forget their food histories and eat a more processed and blander diet to literally bind the people into an identity of being American.
I really enjoyed the history of food production; how sweet food has become much sweeter over the last 40 years due to using cheaper corn syrup,  which unfortunately doesn't interact well with the body making us unaware of when we are full.  And how trans fat has turned from the newly created super fat of the 70s to the biggest killer now.
He talks about how vitamins can't work well in isolation...we still have no idea how the micro nutrients within a banana are extracted so efficiently by the human body. He is scathing about Mr. Kellogg blaming his weird approach to eating as a basis for the strange Western cereals on the market today. Kellogg's deeply religious beliefs meant he turned eating from a pleasure into nothing more than a way of getting fuel into the body...in fact this way of seeing food as nothing more than fuel is one of the biggest problems behind the western diet.
Then he traipses off round the world talking about the diets of other countries and how superior they are and  how the big black cloud of the Western Diet has encrouched and how societies  are trying to turn away from the influence of Western food companies.
All this scientific terminology and food history could have become boring but somehow Mr. Pollen pulled it off and the book remained fun and interesting.  Lots of it to me were just common sense but it was still a good read.
Here is Mr. Pollen's helpful list on how to eat yourself thin, healthy and maybe more beautiful:

• Don't eat anything which has more than 5 ingredients on the tin and make sure you can pronounce them.
• No high fructose corn syrup
• Avoid food with health claims
• Stay out of the middle of supermarkets...that's where most of the shit lives. keep to the walls!
• Shop at markets when you can.
• You are what your meat has eaten.
• eat more like the French, Italians, Japanese, Indians, Greeks, Turks, Lebanese...blah, blah, blah.
• Don't buy food where you buy petrol
• Pay more and eat less
• eat at a table
• try not to eat alone
• Cook

Simple really...

Catch 22

OK, here goes...this book is a total mystery to me because I have been trying to read it for years.  I start each new attempt (four so far) full of good intentions, thinking that this time I will manage it. I hope each time  that I will finally see the light about why this book has been called  One of the greatest novels of the century. But I never manage it and by a third through I'm infuriated, bored, depressed and totally lacking any empathy for any of the characters.  They can all die in the war for all I care.
On Amazon this book gets 4.5 stars out of 5 and thousands rave about it.  I JUST DONT GET IT!! It's a conspiracy!
 It's badly written, confusing and lacking any narrative. It jumps around like crazy and new characters just appear every few lines. Yes, parts of it are funny but mostly it's just a deeply depressing rant. OK, Heller is good at playing with words and that's amusing and clever for a while but his 'humour' never seems to move on from this and it all becomes a bit embarrassing; like he's showing off in front of his Mum.
A friend of mine says I should stick with it and that I will be rewarded for my patience as it starts to make more sense half way through. But I can't be bothered now. I have lost the will to live with this book and even reading one page is a chore.  I just jump from the first line to the last on each page! I want a book to be good all the way through...is that too much to ask? I really don't want to be rewarded for having waded through crap for a week! (A week, yes, I have been stuck with this damn book for over a week!)
My response  does upset me because I really want to like it but I find it weak and dated. The reason this book is such a classic is just because it spawned a saying and was a catalyst  for  great series like M.A.S.H but apart from that it just infuriates me.
The last laugh is on Heller though...because with me he has created a perfect personal Catch 22. If so many people like it, I must be missing something so I have to read it again, but I think it's shit...what's going on?!!!  I'm sure I will have to return to  this irritating book one more time before I die!

The Hunger Games

I read this in about 3 days and enjoyed it a lot. It was like a drug and real life was put on hold whilst I tore through this novel.  It was exciting, entertaining, disturbing and frivolous all at the same time. It's written for teenagers and did bring out the latent teen gene within me!

 The idea behind the story is fantastic.  It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where America has been split into 12 districts. these districts then send two of their teenage kids off to fight to the death in a reality TV outward bound adventure world gone mental.

The premise of this is so brilliantly obscene but 'Lord of the Flies' it is not! Characterisation is minimal. It's action all the way...my problem was that I felt like a member of the despised rich district; a person who was addicted to watching/reading about what the hell was going on. So when a kid died I didn't feel particularly upset because I was just completely driven onwards by the action.

It was a totally addictive book and I loved the way it subtly mocked the American Army and the horrors of reality TV.  But I finished it over a week ago and to be honest I can't remember any of the characters anymore.

I loved it when I read it, but it was a bit like eating a massive meal, enjoyable but you feel a bit bloated afterwards.  I think that's because it's target audience was 14 and I'm 40!

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I finished this book last weekend and only now do I have the energy to write anything about it.  I didn't like it at all. The first third of the book was OK, but then it just went  rapidly downhill from there.   I just feel indifferent about it and the way it is marketed as a 'typically British, humourous book'  is just insulting. Parts of it were so cringeworthy I just don't know how it was ever allowed to be printed.

Finishing it was a chore, as I think it must have been for the writer Paul Torbay. Although it was supposed to be a satire I just found it grey, boring and slightly irritating. God only knows what they must have done to this book to make it worth turning into a movie. All I know is I sure am NOT going to watch it!  I can't even get too emotional and 'rantish' in true Jane fashion about why I didn't like it. It was just dull...dull...dull.  Yawn.
(Sorry Catherine Weller if you read this, hope you enjoy/are enjoying it FAR more than me!)

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Over the last month this book has always been within grabbing distance  It's become my friend and I've slowly savoured it all.  Now it's finished and I feel sad.  Last night I was re-reading parts again. It's such a beautiful book.  It all finally made perfect sense once I had completed it and as you can guess, I loved it.
I've been a fan of Kingsolver for years and I think she is my favourite living, American author. Her prose, descriptions, attention to detail, characterisation and knowledge is astounding and I'm in awe at how much research she must have done to write this book. It must have been so difficult to create fictional characters who so easily fit into real events. Infact it's hard for me to realise that most of the charaters in this book are not real. The Poisonwood Bible is one of my favourite books but this one surpasses it, I think, partly because it's less preachy.
Initially the style was a bit hard to get into because it is a collection of diary entries, newspaper clippings and magazine articles all lovingly put together by the formidable Violet Brown.  It's a collection of the writings of Harrison Shepherd. Harrison's first diary entries are about his childhood in the 20s with his flapper/floozy Mexican Mother who flits from one rich horrible boyfriend to another. Harrison is everything his Mother isn't; quiet, an observer and most of all a writer...he can't be without his little cheap notebooks in which he writes everything.The first half of the book is all set in the 20s and 30s mostly in Coyoacan in Mexico City.  This first section is a bit hard going and slow but as soon as Harrison ends up being a cement mixer boy and then a chef  for the food loving, mental, city wall muralist, Diego Riviera things start to move along at a better pace! Shepherd moves into his crazy house and becomes friends with Diego's wife, Frida Kahlo. I love how Frida and Diego come across in Harrison's diaries;  Idealistic communists mixed with  vibrant, colourful and deeply traditional Mexican personalities.  They are both demanding and selfish artists who also have a strong belief in a more bohemian yet equal lifestyle for all. Kahlo is absolutely brilliant.

I won't bore you with 20th century history but somehow Lev Trotsky, an exiled leader of the Communist revolution in the USSR ends up in hiding  in Mexico living with Frida and Diego in their big Blue House. Lev can't speak Spanish so Harrison ends up translating for them so he becomes a witness to their funny, passionate and interesting conversations.

OK, the history was all new to me and could have been boring but Kingsolver cleverly mixes fact with fiction and creates a fantastic personality  in Lev Trotsky. The massive historical details are just pared down to a human level. Trotsky is funny, intelligent and compassionate. He loves Mexican food, has an affair with Frida  and adores his chickens.     From Harrison's perspective life is full of adventures, colours and interesting people who he loves deeply. he admires Tolstoy immensly and he becomes a Father figure he never had. Then suddenly Tolstoy is assassinated by a pickaxe to the head  (obviously some undercover Russian agent pounded it into his head). The house is completely gutted by the police and Harrison runs away to the United States...
The second half of the book is mostly spent in the USA and the tone and colour is suddenly drained and subdued. Life in 30s depression American is in stark contrast to the vibrancy of mad Mexico. the poverty is clearly described.  War veterans from the First World War have created The Bonus Army and Shepherd (Well, really Kingsolver!) writes an incredibly emotive diary entry about these  families living in camps on Capitol Hill and getting caught up in the tear gas used to dispel them. This scene is clearly stamped on my memory now.
  Shepherd still loves cooking and through the depression years his housemates are in awe of how he can cook so well with such meagre funds.  When the Second World War starts Shepherd gets 'A Blue Slip'.  due to 'his indifference to the female of the species.' Harrison's homosexuality is referred  to a bit but isn't a defining part of the novel at all.  Infact during the trails later it's amazing that lots of lies are created about him but this one truth is ironically not used against him at all.
Shepherd starts writing books about Mexican History and after the War they become massive best-sellers. He becomes rich and successful but he just wants to be left in peace to write.  He moves in with the wonderful, discreet Violet Brown his typist.  She is one of my favourite characters and through her we see how crazy life in the USA has become. I love how direct, honest and practical she is and her dedication and love for her friend, Shepherd.
.During the post-war years it becomes a policy that American have to have a fear, the government cultivates an inward society that holds all other systems and ways of living as a threat to the American dream and their hard fought freedoms.  First it's the fascists and then it's the Reds. Slowly America turns against Shepherd. The words used by the characters in his novels are used against him personally. His relationship with Riviera , Kahlo and Trotsky turns him into a Red. He is slandered, abused, interrogated and accused of un-American behaviour. The media makes up all kinds of rubbish about him.... his books stop selling and he is worried about being sent to prison.  This is the time of the Communist witch hunts, the McCarthy trials and everyone becomes paranoid that there is a Red in their midsts and Shepherd's interrogation near the end of the book is heart breaking.
 Even people who were fighting for black rights, people who were pro-public health programmes  along with political foes, actors and modern artists were often accused of having pro- communist tendencies and either they left the country or were publicly vilified and dispatched to boring, paper shuffling jobs. Anything which was different or other was deemed un-American.
Through all this gloom the ending is surprisingly wonderful and uplifting and finally everything becomes clear about why Violet has written this book out of love for her great friend Harrison. As soon as I finished I had to start reading again because some of the imagery at the start of the book had become clearer too.

OK, this book sounds like a really worthy, intellectual read and in a way I suppose it is because I've learnt a lot. But it's more than that, the style is beautiful and the lives of the people are so well created you can almost smell the food in Mexico and the poverty in 30s America and I'm really going to miss Lev, Violet and Frida!

 This is Kingsolver's masterpiece and I think it's a labour of love for the unrecorded little events which happen in even the most important of historical times. Also she knows that as a writer, what happened to Harrison could happen to her or any author or artist.When you write or paint you open your soul and put your life and integrity in the hands of a politically fed media circus.
 I now understand a bit more about the fear Americans have for any kind of universal welfare state being implemented in the US,  because for them  it has  dubious, socialist under tones which are totally un-American.
The parallels with life today are scary for us all. History just keeps on repeating itself. Change the word communist to terrorist and the fear still successfully continues.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I've gone back to 1953 and travelled from a Syrian Nunnery in Kerala Southern India to Madras and then on a typhoid ridden boat to Aden in Yemen. The lovely Indian Nun/nurse now has to decide if she is going to travel on to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia with the rather emaciated English doctor.       (GO WITH HIM!!!!)  So much has happened in just 25 pages...I think I'm going to get totally absorbed by the remaining 500 pages of high adventure!

25th March .   

This morning I finally finished.  I couldn't get up until I knew how this book ended. It was all pretty emotional really and this is definitely my book of 2012 (so far!) This book took me longer to read that normal but to be honest I quite enjoyed taking my time because the characters, places and history could just stay with me for longer. I really felt as if i were in Addis Ababa living the tumultous times of the 50s,60s and 70s.  As I really want to visit Ethiopia  it was a great introduction to what life was like in this country under Haile Sallesie and then the Stalinist dictator, Melinik.

But really this book was about people.  The lives of the twin brothers born to the Indian Nun (She tragically dies when they are born) and the distraught Dr. Stone just runs away from his children in shame and grief.  So the twins are bought up by another Indian couple who are absolutely superb characters...Verghese sure knows how to create wonderful, well rounded people.  I really believed that the people at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa were real and that I was priviliged to witness the highs and lows of their lives.

Sometimes the details of surgical procedures were a bit too clinical and over long but apart from that this book was excellent and even more so because it was so different. The journey to Aden from Madras was thrilling, the live in Aden was tense, the family lifestyle created within the hospital was amazing , especially so with all the political strife and madness surrounding the country at this time.  The adoptive parents were inspirational and the life in a poor Harlem hospital was also incredibly well described.  You realised that life for a poor sick immigrant in New York was just as bad ( if not worse )  than Ethiopia.  Let alone being accepted within the expensive 'White' run hospitals of the rich if you were a foreign doctor.

This book was so beautiful to read but at  times you could not believe the horrors of people lives. Verghese is clever though, because he doesn't wallow and write  a lot about people's problems he leaves it up to the reader to imagine what things must have been like and I found this style of writing to be extremely powerful. Like in reality, lots of things are just left unsaid.

 A rift is drawn between the twin boys but you never feel that one character is bad and the other good.   We all do good and bad things and it's how we choose to deal with this fact which makes the difference.

Ultimately it was a book about living for the moment, forgiving the people who have harmed you, realising  what true love means (or doesn't mean) and accepting people for who they are.  I'm sad to have finished it and I won't write anything more about the plot because I want anyone who has read this review to get the book and read it too.

Thank you Helen and Rhiannon for posting this to me...you knew I'd love it!

Trespass

Rose Tremain sure knows how to write, her prose just takes you straight into the book   I enjoyed reading it because her style of writing is like an expensive and classy wine, but the writing couldn't quite disguise the after taste of a rather dull story.  All the characters in this novel were nasty and grim, and to be honest I wasn't really rooting for anyone to stay alive, apart from the young girl who appeared in Chapter One and then didn't materialise again until 200 pages later. 

I stayed with it because I just couldn't believe how awful the characters were and also, even though the modern day story was pretty dull, the history of each character was fascinating. Infact in places it was almost comic because everyone was so disturbed. I don't think that is what Rose Tremain intended.  In fact I think she was trying to write a 'deep' novel about all the ways you can trespass on land, people's emotions, their lives and their thoughts.  But I think what she intended to do and ultimately what she achieved were completely different.

This was a strange book for me because although I didn't like any of the characters I was able to understand exactly why they were behaving so badly because the psychological disection of each person was so clearly explained.  The whole book was dark and repressive with a constant presence of hatred and loathing.  Not a bundle of laughs at all but it was Rose Tremain's writing that held it all together. Some books you read are life affirming but this one sure wasn't.  It clearly showed people at their worst and the dark consequences of years of repression.

The Man in the Seventh Row

OK, I bought this book from an online publishing house called http://blastedheath.com/

I liked that that the company was bypassing the traditional publishing  system to get new writers out there.  I looked at a few of their books and decided on this one because it wasn't crime, wasn't set in the grim bad-lands of Glasgow and it didn't have heroin ravaged, beaten up faces on the ebook cover. (This being their kind of stock fiction).  I haven't checked the site in the last few weeks and would rather not...but maybe things have lightened up!

I'm glad it only cost 99p because this book had no plot, no direction and was dull.  Today I made the big decision to stop reading it and move on. just sitting doing nothing on my train journey to Oxford was more interesting than reading this.  It wasn't like a novel at all just a diatribe based on how much the 'author' knew about films.

There was the odd funny line in the book but ultimately I can't even begin to tell you what the hell this book was about.  It was like an abandoned buoy, just floating in the ocean.  The premise was good ( a guy who is transported into the movies whenever he sits in the 7 th row) but by 80 percent through the book I just couldn't take any more. I tried, I really tried to stick it out.   But  I just wish he had just got permenantly stuck in some 70s horror movie and never came out again. I sure felt like I was stuck in a shite movie though and this morning I had the great pleasure of deleting this from my kindle.

 Posted on 17.02.12 on posterous.com

The Sisters Brothers

Found out about this because it was on the Booker short list. I wanted something a bit different from 1850s Britain so jumped across to the 1850s in the USA.

Even though I read the kindle version I still like the cover, so here it is.  Books on the kindle are a really pared down experience because all the external factors are gone;  bending the spine, losing your bookmark,the smell of old pages and the worst sin of all, looking ahead and reading the last few pages. But I still love my kindle, I can actually read and concentrate for longer on it with fewer distractions and sharper print.

Right, about the book.  It's been a while since I finished it but I  really enjoyed it.  I felt like I was reading a film.  I don't know if this is a new genre which has arisen lately but it happened in a more simplisitic way when I read  'The Help'  . It's really like you are just reading a book which has been written for the movies.  I can see how the Coen Brothers are going to just take it and make it their own.

It was clever, hard hitting, sad and extremely darkly comic.   Charlie and Eli Sisters were two hit men brothers for hire travelling across the Wild West to California with the orders to kill a man -Herman Kermit Warm (what a name!) Everyday was full of mad adventures and  characters were just left and story-lines unfinished as the brothers moved across America to find the guy they needed to kill.

The book was totally lacking sentimentality.The characters were so well written it was like you could smell there gangranous wounds, bad breath and greasy hair.  I loved the section on Eli's festering tooth ache and how his jaw swelled up so much his brother could see it even when he was riding far behind him.

Eli is the narrator of the book and the less psychopathic of the two brothers. You get so engrossed in his world it's like you have been privileged, as a reader, to enter his inner thoughts and nothing he does can shock you.I loved Eli's compassion for his old horse and how he would do anything for him, but also he's prone to mad rages where nobody's life is spared.

The Don Quioxte travelling across the Sates was my favourite two thirds of the book.  I wish the whole book had been one long journey but no, they finally reach San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush.

 Once Hermit Kermit Warm arrived on the scene, even though he's an extremely colourful character, the tone of the book changed ( I think I missed the witty banter between the brothers as they race through the townships leaving trouble behind them.)

There are a couple of naff plot devices which lead them to  H K Warm and suddenly the book changes  It becomes really sad and not darkly comic anymore, just dark and sad. I wish the last third of the book hadn't happened and that my memories could be of the Sisters Brothers just charging across America on their steads with total abandonment.

Posted on 06.02.2012 on posterous.com

North and South

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

I got this book for my birthday from Catherine Weller. We had been talking about it; how she had watched it on TV and I hadn't . I had never read any Gaskell before and had no idea of the story.

First impressions were positive because I loved the cover.  Lots of 'classic' books have fusty old- fashioned, worthy, boring pictures on them. (Penguin Classics are the worst culprits.) Those do not encourage you to pick up a book which you instantly visualise as a worthy tome. This cover, in contrast, was beautiful. 

Luckily there was no picture of Elizabeth Gaskell inside. Unfortunately her portrait isn't good at selling books, she looks a bit severe and dull.  It seemed like Vintage had done it's 21st Century packaging homework.  It worked for me!

Now for the content,

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. I often find reading Victorian novels a bit of a chore but this was an easy read and I feIt I could empathise with Margaret, the main character. She was a strong minded 19 year old, who seemed very mature.This was because her parents were really pathetic characters. They just just left everything up to their dutiful daughter. Luckily Margaret had enough balls and character for the both of them.

 I enjoyed the section when her father tells her he has lost his religion ( a problem for a vicar I presume) and they have to move from the countryside of Hampshire up to Darkshire. A euphemism for Manchester. Marg's Dad is too much of a coward to inform his wife about such life changing and momentous events and poor Margaret gets lumbered with informing her. So off to Darkshire they trot (literally). Poor Mother is beside herself with grief. Life is obviously very different up North for Margaret but even though she comes from a middle class and educated family she is not a snob.

John Thornton is a business man who wants to educate himself further.  He becomes a student of the ex vicar. (Lots of learning Greek) John never went to school and educated himself in business...luckily for him he finds Greek really interesting.(Or is it all an excuse to see Miss Margaret?!) There are then lots of discussions and high sexual tension between Margaret and John. He becomes obsessed by her hands and arms  and Elizabeth Gaskell gets carried away with  highly erotic language  for a page or two. After the super heroine flings her arms around John to protect him from a brawling gang of striking workers in his cotton factory things unfortunately calm down between them. She thinks she can not be  with a Northern business man, he thinks she is 'in love with another man'  John is aware that he is not a 'gentleman'  and Mother of John thinks she is too poor and aloof for her beloved son. There sure are lots of class prejudices for them to overcome.

Margaret puts her old Southern lifestyle onto a pedestal but finally it dawns on her that the lot of the average Southern farmer/worker isn't any better..infact probably worse, than life in Darkshire. Farm hands down South are nothing more than ignorant serfs and die really young from daily grind in the fields.   At least up North people seemed to  have a more industrious spirit and more freedom of mind.   (There's a great section on Witchcraft in rural Hampshire at the end of the book)

Of course Margaret and John get together, but along the way there are many tribulations, misunderstandings, fainting fits, discussions and deaths.(Lots of deaths)

I enjoyed reading it partly because topics covered are timeless: workers rights, health, depression, responsibilities, class,  love, lies and humanism. Luckily Gaskell doesn't turn the book into a preachy, worthy epic either. It's just a well drawn picture of life in Britain at that time.

Originally posted on 02.02.12 on posterous.com