Plague

This book was crap, so crap I don't want to waste time writing about it. It could have been so good but failed completely.  Awful. 

Books 3 and 4 in the Neapolitan series.

 

I finally finished books 3 and 4 of Elena Ferrante's series last week and I have been a bit slack about writing them up. To be honest I really enjoyed Book 1 and 2 the most. As the women got older their lives just began to rush by and Elena made more and more errors of judgement and it became clear what a selfish woman she was. Her lover and her book launches meant far more to her than her own children. But hey, I'm being a bit unfair, male authors would definitely get away with behaving like her. I just found reading about her behaviour quite difficult to take in.  Having invested quite a few weeks reading about her and her grafting to get out of her difficult life in the Napalese gutter it was hard to witness her mistakes as she got older.  

Things never really picked up to be honest and the last book was pretty depressing for me.  The real author of this book,  Ferrante, is amazing though; I really believe that she has captured what life is about, a great belief in yourself and your talents when you are young and then as you get older life just whizzes by and nothing really lives up to your expectations.  You just keep on making mistakes and your kids don't appreciate your efforts. All very true I think for the majority of people. but I have to admit, pretty depressing to read  about in a book. I want to read more uplifting stuff really or something with an under current of black humour, which this series definitely didn't have!  

Having invested over 2000 pages of reading effort into these 4 books I'm glad I didn't buy them and just got them out the library. I think Ferrante writes beautifully and some of her descriptions just seemed so honest.  especially when people were having personal breakdowns but for me there are too many little things that annoyed me.  The beginning ( as you never find out about the opening scene until near the end of book 4, which cleverly locks you into having to read them all.) and the ending.  The ending is clever but far too ambiguous and that just annoyed me. 

I think slogging through these has put me into a reading slump now and I am just gonna focus on watching The Olympics. 

The Story of a New Name

Woah, I have been on a mammoth reading marathon since I found out yesterday that this library book has been pre ordered and must be returned today. I read all evening and most of the night and finished this off.  To say this series is addictive is an understatement  but I m not sure it's everyone's cup of tea.  Part of this book was really slow but I loved it...like life in all its glory and all its dullness.  This is the second in the series and again the only thing I really disliked was the ridiculous cover.

  Lila and Lenu's story from the ages of 16 to 23 held up against their claustrophobic life on the rough streets of 1960s Naples. I loved the descriptions of their friendship and their loves and their hatreds and jealousies. Plus the slow disintegration of Lila's marriage was brilliantly told  This book could be seen as extremely depressing and in parts it is. No one is an angel.  But weirdly I also found it uplifting and comforting because Farrente writes so honestly and I really believed every single scene in this book.

 Neapolitans living in poverty, scraping a life out, building up businesses, worshipping money, men getting jealous and beating their 'women' into shape, getting involved with the money lenders and the Camorra, memory versus reality, idyllic holidays on Ischia, people trying to escape the grinding poverty through both legitimate and illegitimate actions, snobbery and inverse snobbery, love and lust, the power of control, the idea of what intelligence actually is, and the feeling of deep insecurities are just some of the human conditions covered in this book!  

Yes, I devoured this book and I have to start reading the next one straight away.  The strange thing is I know this book isn't perfect.  Not all characters are well developed and there are lots of characters! plus parts are really quite dull but weirdly for me this worked too. It's just like life, lots of dull stuff and then suddenly things spark and lots of exciting and mad stuff suddenly takes over. Great read. 

Wild

Wow, I loved this book.  What a great read.  I have put off reading this for a number of years because I thought for some reason I would find it intensely irritating ...what with all this lost to found nonsense and a complete novice walking literally a thousand miles. But how wrong I was!  This was a brilliant book and I loved the honesty of Strayed's writing.  For a start she wasn't a complete novice, she was fairly fit,  had lived like a hippy all of her childhood, she was outdoorsy, and knew how to camp, tie knots and live a simple life.  The only thing she hadn't done was walk for days  on end , alone with all her belongings on her back. Her description of her life falling apart before she started the walking and the trauma of her mum's death, her family break up and her divorce were really honest portrayals but her way to cope was a choice between becoming a heroin addict or getting back into the outdoor style life of her happier childhood.  She luckily decided on the latter, and what an adventure she had.

I loved reading about her initial planning with her packed boxes being posted onto stations ahead.  Her inability to make her pack smaller. The pain in her feet, hips and mind as she had to keep walking up and down the range of mountains on the Pacific Crest TrAil.  I loved her descriptions of when she met bears, rattle snakes, foxes and hideous frogs. The great  and generous people she met on the trail, both locals and fellow walkers and the infrequent unfriendly people she bumped into too. Her vulnerability is clearly expressed.  She makes some big mistakes, especially when she runs out of water and the tank ahead is also empty and her shoes cause her continuous pain.  This was a hard core adventure.  Not for the faint hearted, but I have to respect these hard core adventurers.  They sure have guts to go out walking in extreme snowy conditions with only an ice pick to help them stay safely attached to the snowy slopes. Infact Cheryl did have to bypass a section of the Sierra Navada range because it was so dangerous with all the snow...still there in May, June. 

I also loved learning about a trail I know nothing about. There was a map of the trail from the Mexico border, through CAlifornia, Oregan and Washington State. I learnt a lot about the geography of the region.  I now know about Crater Lake, the deepest in North America and how the Sierra Nevada range changes into the Cascade Range and how this trail was created in the early 1970s. I watched a few YouTube videos giving advice on how to walk the trail...you really need to plan ahead and be hard as nails..it's the equivalent of walking up and down about 6 Mount Everests. But I could really understand the beauty and power of what walking can do.  On a much simpler level it has really helped me  and my sister, just getting out and about into the Countryside.  I'd never be able to do this but it's great to know that the opportunity to dream is out there and big respect to Cheryl Strayed for writing such an honest and beautiful book about the power of getting out into nature and just walking! 

The Little Red Chairs

Woah...this book was full on.  NOT an easy read at all. I think one section of it contained some of the most brutal scenes of violence I have ever read. (All this written by a woman in her 80s!) This book was not a holiday read, so ending up with it on my holiday was bit of a mistake.  I really couldn't get into it until on the flight home.  I felt suitably in the mood then!

This book was amazing on many levels and the whole feel of it was ultimately uplifting and positive even though parts of it were really grim and hard to read.

This book is a book of two halves.  The first half is based around a tight knit Irish village community, when suddenly a foreign man appears out of nowhere who claims to be a healer.  He manages to fit into the community and locals are charmed by him and one of the local woman starts an affair with him, really in order to get pregnant because things are not happening with her husband.  ANyway, it suddenly becomes clear that all is not good with this healer  guy.  He is actually one of the main protagonists of the BOsnian war and is responsible for mass murder of Bosnian Muslims and the siege of Sarajevo.   He has been in deep hiding for years and when things finally come out serious revenge is taken out on the innocent, yet pregnant, victim Fidelma. To me Fidelma personifies what happens when unexplained evil things suddenly happen.  How Fidelma and other people react to these horrible and traumatic events is the basis of the second half of the book. 

    THe second half is about  Fidelma's new life as a runaway in London.  Here other low paid workers from all around the world, who have all come looking for work in London, help her out ( or hinder her progress accordingly. ). She meets lots of badly paid immigrants,all trying to make ends meet in London and there are lots of different stories of their lives, all told in the first person in different varieties of broken English. As a teacher of English to non- native speakers I really could hear the voices of these people as they tried so hard to keep their dignity and sense of purpose in the underworld of their London existence. 

This book was not perfect in many ways.  Parts of the story were clunky. Often it didn't flow because the voices would change so often. Also Fidelma's cathartic visit to The Hague to see her mass murderer, ex-lover on trial just didn't work for me. I also thought the author was sometimes trying to cover too many 'issues' in one book. 

 But I have to say that this is my first Edna O Brian book and she is one hell of a powerful writer.  What I liked was her ability to be so personal and intimate one minute and then she could suddenly shift her focus to a more global perspective. Her writing is beautiful and her sense of place was amazing, especially  the Irish countryside and the bleakness of lonely lives In London.  Parts of this book were incredibly beautiful, others incredibly violent and lots of passages were sad but ultimately this book ended with a sense of hope and love towards our fellow man.    It was a tough read in many places but all respect to O'Brian for making me think and taking me on a roller coaster of a read.  

From Heaven Lake

Wow, what an interesting book.  I picked this up from the 50p rack at the back of Sainsbury's and I'm glad I did because I have checked online and it is now out of print.  Vikram wrote this travel book in 1983 when he was finishing studying in Nanjing, China.  He'd just decided to try and get back to Delhi via a land route starting in Xinjiang/Sinkiang in the Far West of Northern China and going through the flooded deserts of Far Western China, (it was the short lived monsoon season.)  into Tibet and then a difficult crossing via foot into Nepal. Not many tourists are allowed to go out of China this way and it was quite hair raising. And then finally he caught a flight back from Kathmandu to Delhi. 

I love the way Vikram writes and here he really makes you feel you are travelling with him in a distant land in a time which has now vanished for ever.  Tourists had to use special tourist exchange vouchers.  I was intrigued by this strange parallel money system and had always wanted to know how it worked. And weirdly when I was in the British museum last week I randomly found one and took a photo! I'm such a geek.

Vikram could speak Mandarin and was able to get a seat in a massive truck crossing Western China to Tibet and the wonderfully uncomfortable journey with the chain smoking driver and the young lad who just loved reading comics, was really vivid. The driver was an interesting character who unlike many of the Han Chinese didn't hold any particular negative feelings towards the Tibetians.  He was a practical guy who seemed totally at home in his rattling truck.  His ancient truck made at least 15 different noises but as soon as a16th noise  joined the din he would instantly stop and mess about with the old engine.  Windows didn't close properly and there was no heating in these huge trucks.  Food was mostly crackers and raisins and people initially seemed quite off hand with Vikram as they couldn't place his nationality. In Urumqi he was taken as a local because in this area of China they are such a mixed community.  China was still a very closed country in the 80s just coming out of its dark period of the Mao Cult, the cultural revolution and the imprisonment of the Gang of Four. People were wary of foreigners as they never knew if they were being watched or not. But often Vikram was treated so well. A shop assistant restitched Vikram's 'Muslim' cap to make it stronger.  He wore this cap so that he fitted in more in far Western China. People went out of their way when he lost his bag off the back of a truck and officials could go from being complete beaurocratic nightmares to inviting him home for dinner with the family. Lots of extremes.

Finally Vikram made it into Tibet. His description of the scenery is amazing, Lhasa  was in the process of being completely eradicated and changed into a far flung generic  Chinese outpost. Many Han Chinese were unhappy being posted in Lhasa, they were all homesick and just wanted to go home. Infact no one seemed happy with the political situation at all.  Neither the locals or the Chinese. That's what I liked about Vikram's style he never judged anyone. Everyone was just a product of their environment and friendliness and kindness could be found everywhere...apart from one American tourist who was rude to him because she never realised he spoke English. 

 The right to pray in the Potala had just returned but many other Tibetan monasteries had been totally destroyed between the 60s and 70s.  Vikram could only talk to locals who spoke Mandarin and many Tibetains didn't, but the people who did were mostly honest and open. His experience within the monasteries is so well written. A riot of colour, smell and sound. Also he describes the  foul smells so vividly. There is one road with a big green puddle in it, in which a dead dog is rotting and everyday he passes the dog is in a further state of decomposition. Urghhh!! 

One chapter really affected me.  It's a short description of a Tibetian religious death riitual called a sky burial.  At sunrise the dead body is expertly chopped up and then personally fed to the waiting vultures.   All of this happens whilst the family respectfully watches.  This chapter was both fascinating and stomach churning. The ground is too hard for burial and there is a lack of wood for a more common Buddhist cremation so this is the best way of getting rid of dead bodies and it made total sense to me. This practice, like many other things in Tibet, had been forcefully stopped during the cultural revolution but during this time in the early 80s things were beginning to slowly change and local religious practices were suddenly resurfacing again. I wonder how rites like this are viewed now , 33 years later?

VIkram's final leg of the journey over into Nepal is also fascinating.  He has to hire a Sherpa guide who takes him up a mountain down a really steep valley, along river banks and then finally a border guard pops out from behind a tree and tells him to open his bag because he is now in Nepal. He tries to steal some of his stuff but his Sherpa guide helps him out.  All of this trekking happened because the friendship bridge, which connected the two towns on the two sides of the border, had collapsed. He had to get special permission to cross this border but luckily through patience and diligence he managed it. 

He noticed that there was a woman washing clothes on rocks in the river and it was obvious that she was totally unaware that some of her clothes were in Nepal and others in China. It's little observations like this that I loved so much! 

Yes, this book was really great, partly because I felt like I was travelling with him. I also loved his observations about people and also the bigger observations he made about his country, India, and China. The two massive countries really have nothing that binds them or unites them even though they are so close. Geography and politics  have isolated them from each other. They have no common history or culture, apart from Buddhism. The Chinese and Indians don't influence each other yet their civilisations and food have completely dominated the cultures of SE Asia and much of the world. 

PS I enjoyed this book so much I read it twice. Straight back to the beginning once I had finished! Haven't done that for years!! 

My Brilliant Friend

Wow.  I have read this rather long book in less than a week.  The story just sucked me in and I just had to keep reading. it's written by an Italian author and I have since found out is a real big seller and no one knows anything about the author.  (There are rumours that he is writing under a female pseudonym.)

Anyway, I really  enjoyed this book. It's all about  the friendship of two girls called Lenu and Lila and charts their relationship from when they are pre school all the way to sixteen. These girls are born into a poor and hard life in post war Naples and things are tough. ( It was interesting for me to read this as a parallel life to my Mum's, as these girls were born in the same year. )

Life is grim. There  are ghosts and problems in families,which the girls can only sense because they are too young to understand the issues which haunt the families.  These problems are based on political alliances and money made and lost during the Second World War. But these problems hang like spectres over the families.  

This is a hard life as seen through the eyes of two very intelligent young girls, but girls who come from very different families. Not that parents play a big role in this book.  They are weirdly absent from much of it. 

 One friend leaves school after the  primary years whereas the other continues right through school.  But what got me was the honesty with which Elena Ferrente writes.  The friendship of these two girls is vividly bought to life and their inner secrets laid bare.  These girls both love, admire and are jealous of each other,yet are both completely dependent on each other.

 The men in this book are mostly macho brutes who just lust after money and power and that also means getting the girls they desire.  Looking and playing the part is all that matters to these deprived young lads. These guys have been abused at school, home and work and violence is all they know, so violence is what they show.  Infact lots of the way girls are treated in this book is shocking. women are nothing more than a status symbol and are bargained off for marriage via family meetings.  ( can't believe this is a European city less than  70 years ago!!) 

  This book is ultimately about how these two young girls learn to see how the local men view them ,the corruption and hard lives  which lay ahead of them and how both react so differently to these realisations. 

Yes, this book is pretty bleak and not exactly a laugh a minute and I'm not going to rush out to get the next one in the series , But I am glad I read it because there was just such a strong honesty of how girls behave with their really close friends.  I loved it but also found the number of characters annoying. No other characters,apart from the girls, are really developed that well but there is a long cast of people and I was constantly flipping back to the front pages to find out who was who. But hey I still whizzed through it!   This book was like a drug for me! 

 PS. I hated the cover.  Horrid freaky bridesmaid dresses and not really suitable for advertising the content of the book either.