Category: 52 countries

#51 – The Accidental

As much as I enjoyed Absolution, am I ever glad that I put Ali Smith on my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. The Accidental is one of the best books I’ve read this summer, with its echoes of Mark Haddon and David Mitchell (I still think his Black Swan Green has never gotten the attention it deserves; it’s a brilliant book), Smith’s novel quickly sucks you in with her switching voices, intuitive point of view and tumbling prose. And while she’s officially my Scottish writer, and this book is set in England, it’s hard to assess whether or not it’s an accurate reflection of the chosen country’s literature. I’ll probably have to delve into Smith’s backlist to find out if she’s written a book set in Scotland, but after reading The Accidental I’d be surprised if it wasn’t on the 1001 Book people’s radar and might be included in an updated version years in the future.

Annnnnywaaay.

The story of the Smart family (daughter, son, stepfather, mother) is told chapter by chapter in each character’s voice starting with Astrid (aforementioned daughter), as they spend the summer away from London in a “substandard” vacation house. When a stranger named Amber who has absolutely no connection to anyone in the family, regardless of what everyone in the house thinks, simply walks into their life and starts making changes, she becomes the catalyst that skyrockets the family into a whole other world in terms of their physical and emotional lives.

Each character has a specific, overriding emotional issue: Astrid’s being bullied at school; Magnus suffers through a tragedy somewhat of his own making; Michael, the step-father, needs to deal with his, ahem, indiscretions; and Eve, the mother, suffers from a writer’s block that bleeds into all aspects of her person. But when Amber bashes into their lives and mashes up their thoughts not only about each other but about the various issues that are pulling them apart and in all different directions. Amber is a hippie, a charlatan, a psychic, a seductress, and her presence finally makes everyone come to terms with the facades that structure even the purest of lives.

On the whole, it took me a long time to get through this book. I picked it up months ago and read 30-odd pages and then put it down. Picked it up again a few weeks later, started from the place I stopped, got confused and gave up. But this weekend at the cottage, after a particularly intense game of multi-language Scrabble, I relaxed before swimming and read the entire book from cover to cover. And I loved it. I really did.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I’m proudly displaying the book on my grandmother’s sideboard-thingy that has pictures of her tucked into that totally creepy print of my uncle’s. Oh, and I think I have the US version of the book because I ordered it through my old work…

#49 – A Golden Age

I thoroughly enjoyed Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age. Set in Bangladesh just as the war for their independence broke out in 1971, the novel centres around Rehana, a woman in her mid-thirties with two grown children (a son and daughter), and her struggle to keep her life together during the difficult times.

A Golden Age takes place in the town of Dhaka, which is technically East Pakistan to begin with before it Bangladesh. Tahmima Anam has a talent for bringing rich detail to the page that not only truly reflects the time and place, but also builds up an atmosphere around Rehana herself. She loves to garden, and therefore the landscape reflects that fact. She’s a widow, and despite having some hard times, manages to keep her family together throughout the struggle by building a house on her property that she rents out. But most of all, Rehana’s a mother, and the entire story with the novel bears witness to this fact.

One of the most interesting aspects of war fiction, if that’s even a genre, for me when it’s told from a female perspective, is how different the story remains. War on the home front may be worlds apart from where the front-line action might be (although the war touches Rehana and her friends directly), it still changes lives in ways that make it impossible to ignore. There is a subtle strength in Rehana’s character that reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay in a way, and the argument was made to me, many years ago during an undergraduate class in modernism, that To the Lighthouse should be considered a war novel. While I’m not sure if it’s an accepted reading of Woolf’s novel or not, the idea stuck with me, and that’s how I approached my thinking about A Golden Age, as if it too was a war novel in the purest of senses.

Like To the Lighthouse, there’s a building that Rehana rents out on her property called Shona that becomes a central character in the novel. As life in war is reflected by its inhabitants, and the house itself takes on a new personality. It’s a fascinating idea, I think, to imagine not only how characters feel the impact of war, from the blankets the women sew on top of Rehana’s roof for the refugees, to the pain and anguish she feels when her children become involved in various ways, but to also see what changes in the physical landscape beyond just craters made by bombs (Khaled Hosseini, I’m looking at you). Even a detail as simple as a bed that used to be used for a child has now been appropriated for other things makes you imagine war permeating every aspect of a life, and not just those lives on the front lines with the bullets.

Regardless, I wanted to read this novel because I didn’t have Bangladesh on my Around the World in 52 Countries list, and I’m so glad I got a chance to experience it. For a first novel, it’s really quite wonderful. It’s also exciting because HarperCollins Canada will publish the novel in Canada this January, and even though you could order it from Amazon, it’s actually worth the wait.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I left the book on the dock when we drove home and had to call my aunt to rescue it. The cover got a bit water marked (as it rained a bit, just a few drops) but I wanted to show the poor abandoned novel where it would have ended up had my family not shown it a little bit of kindness. And what a cold, cloudy day it was! Shockingly, it was first-thing in the morning when I took the picture. And the bits of wood everywhere are from Gordie, the dog, who loves sticks so much that it’s almost impossible to understand.

#46 – Love In The Time Of Cholera

I find it perfectly fitting to be writing about Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, while I have a fever. As there’s nothing new that I can possibly add to the world’s discussion of this text other then to say that I came to it for many reasons: the first of which would have to be its inclusion on the 1001 Books list; the second, because I’d read One Hundred Years of Solitude after finishing my undergrad at Queen’s and fell hard for it; and I read Ben McNally’s Valentine’s Day column over at Booklounge.ca where he said it was the ultimate book to read for that holiday. See, lots of good reasons to pick up this book.

Regardless, could there be a more expressive book about love ever written? Probably, but this book took my breath away more times then I could possibly count. Full of every single type of love story, from an unrequited affair that lasts the length of the book itself to the hills and valleys of a long, successful marriage, from the physical to the spiritual, from the epistolary to the serenade, it’s impossible not to appreciate love in all its forms after finishing this novel. The sentences are exquisite, complex and meandering, almost to the point of getting lost down the cobblestones of the author’s mind, until he brings you back to the apex, which lands in exactly the right place.

The Columbian port in of call for my Around the World in 52 Books, I can’t think of another novel I could savour like this, as if it’s a sweet cheese or a fine glass of wine. I was all rosy for love after finishing this book up north, and ended up watching Before Sunset for the fourth or fifth time. My own story ended up with a lot of long sentences as I thought about the main love affair that forms the center section. Of course, I ended up editing half of them down over the last few days I was there because they didn’t make much sense, as I was all drunk on Columbia, the Caribbean, the food, the smell of almonds, and the like. Ahem.

In the end, the craziest analogy I can come up with that describes the reading experience of Love in the Time of Cholera is this: a few years back when I was still working at the evil empire, I was having a discussion with my coworker Lynne, where we were imagining what life would be like if we were cats. Go with me here. It’s okay as it’s not as kooky as it sounds. Beyond the pale ass licking jokes we got from the cheap seats, we were thinking of how cats don’t really know time as we do, how their days are measured by their senses, by things that they smell, by places they visit. In a way, Márquez’s novel is set out by the senses as well, but it’s also defined by one emotion, in a way, it’s all measured out by love. Love sets the pace and brings the action. Love defines the characters and their motivation. Just like a cat smelling its way through the day, this novel imagines an entire book not set about by the plain, banal chronology of the weeks, days, months, years in a life, but by love itself, as real as the grass, the trees, and yes, the ass, that my cat uses to define her day. In a way, it’s the essence of everything. And aren’t we just dumb enough never to realize it.

And there. I’ve jumped the shark now by mentioning my cat in my blog. Sigh.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Of course I finished this novel while in bed. If you look closely enough you can see the tip of my grandfather’s paint-by-numbers on the wall.

#45 – Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon‘s Nowhere Man took me many weeks to finish, but like so many of the extra-ordinarily literary books on my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge that sit on the 1001 Books list, I’ve come to expect that I will work my way through these books like one would an art gallery in a foreign city: slowly, methodically, and with great patience.

The story of Josef Pronek as told from the point of view of many different narrators, Nowhere Man is a captivating novel that highlights the uncanny ability of the author to challenge conventional storytelling techniques while creating a character who ultimately glues the book together. Hemon, originally from Sarajevo, perhaps perfectly distills the idea of a splintered society, what war does to a person, to a people, in this novel. At times he merges the stereotypical (The Beatles as revolutionary charge and right of passage) with the nonsensical (Pronek’s time as a canvasser for Greenpeace), but always manages to show how each narrator maintains that little bit of love and affection for Josef without losing the reader.

All in all, it’s a powerful, moving book that I would recommend if only for it’s wonderful use of form. In a way, it’s a bit like learning a new language each time we switch narrators and see yet another sliver of Pronek’s life. The syntax might be different in each section, but the end goals, communication, compassion, understanding, englightenment, remain exactly the same.

It’s interesting too, how my reading life and my movie life have been tracing common themes of one another really without any conscious effort on my part. Recently, the RRHB and I watched The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays a young nurse also stunted by the war in Bosnia. The two characters intersect so nicely: Josef finally releases so much of the tension built up through the entire novel by falling in love with an American girl and, in a way, the very same thing happens to Hanna, Polley’s character (she falls in love with an injured oil rig worker). It was a good experience reading and watching the two works somewhat in tandem, to get a male and female perspective, in art form, of the conflict.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I finished the book one very foggy, very cool morning on the sun deck while my cousins slept in the cottage and I wasn’t quite ready to start writing.

#43 – A Thousand Splendid Suns


Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, takes its name from a poem by a 17th century Persian poet Saeb-e-Tabrizi, and focuses on the life stories of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila. The lives of both women, despite their very different beginnings, are fraught with tragedy, oppression, dignity and finally redemption throughout the almost 400 pages of this book.

Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man from Herat, lives in a poor kolba, a roughshod mud hut outside of town with her mother. The product of an affair between her mother, a housekeeper, and her father, who comes to visit once a week, Mariam grows up with the stigma of being a harami. Her father is ashamed of her and her mother, to an extent, resents her presence, despite the keening kind of love she feel for her daughter. After the death of her mother, Mariam is sent by her father’s many wives to Kabul, where she’s forced to marry the brutish, and much older, Rasheed. Their union is not a happy one. For one thing, Mariam is a teenager, and her new ‘husband’ is not only much older, but much more strict. He expects Mariam to be a proper wife, wear a birka, and be obedient.

Years pass, and the marriage between Rasheed and Mariam deteriorates, but by this time, Hosseini has introduced the novel’s other main character: Laila. A beautiful, blonde-haired, light-eyed girl, Laila’s family dotes on her, and she’s raised by a dutiful father who feels that everything in life stems from having an education. Laila, of course, excels at the top of her class. And then, as the Soviet regime ends, and the country collapses once again, bombs fall around Laila’s life, pulling away her dearest friend Tariq, and destroying as much of her world as she could touch by spreading her arms out beside her.

The lives of these two women, who live as neighbours in Kabul, are set against these types of incidents, as the war-torn history of Afghanistan plays out in an extremely personal way. Rasheed takes centre-stage again, now husband to Mariam and Laila, and the two women slowly learn to navigate their lives around his brutish, slavenly behaviour.

A Thousand Splendid Suns isn’t as strong a novel as The Kite Runner and a number of parts feel forced. But like in The Kite Runner, there are serious elements in this book that build nicely from beginning to end. As the Afghanistan stop in my Around the World in 52 Countries, it’s a worthy novel just for giving me an inside look at life in a war-torn country. But without the central essence say found in the main characters of a book like Camilla Gibb’s exquisite Sweetness in the Belly, the first two-thirds of A Thousand Splendid Suns lacks in emotional depth or understanding, especially in the context of the women’s lives.

In a sense, to sweep the broad swath of history from 1964 until the years just after 9/11, Hosseini gives up some of Laila and Mariam’s own stories, and fits them into the major events that changed the country’s landscape. I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing nor is this a bad book, not by any means, and the ending is particularly wonderful and has magical, even redemptive qualities, but it all feels kind of Hollywood. It feels like the book set out to prove to the rest of the world how awful life was for those women, and while it achieves that goal, I think it would have been even more effective had it not lacked a certain something when it came to their characterization. To an extent, I feel like Hosseini himself sacrificed these women in order to get his own point across, despite his obvious respect and admiration for both Mariam and Laila. But even despite my criticism, I really did enjoy reading this novel. And boy am I happy to at least be able to cross off one more country; it’s a just such a treat to keep my challenge alive.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the last 100 or so pages of the book this morning in bed while my RRHB slept after his show in Brantford last night. You can see the tail of the cat who kindly took up my position after I left. He’s keeping the home fires burning. And he’s a good excuse not to make the bed, just yet.

#32 Depths – Henning Mankell

I was halfway through this book before I declared the death of my reading challenges, so maybe all is not lost.

While Depths isn’t a Wallander mystery, it still retains many of the qualities that Mankell displays in his popular detective series, especially in tone and narrative style. Mankell has never been an author to shy away from the bleaker aspects of human nature, and Depths is no exception.

The novel, set during the First World War in Sweden, opens years in advance of the main story, as one its main characters, Kristina Tracker, the wife of naval Commander Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, escapes from the mental hospital that has been her home for many years and stands alone in the forest contemplating one memory: that she once had a husband.

From there, the narrative switches point of view, and the story becomes entirely Lars’s. He’s an exacting kind of man, with a mind that has a unique talent with measurements; a man who is drawn inexorably to the sea, who uses his unique skills to become a hydrographic survey engineer for the Swedish navy.

While on a mission, Lars discovers a young woman named Sara Fredrika living on a Halsskär, a skerry close to where they are measuring the depths of the sea. Soon he becomes obsessed with the woman, and the friction between the life he has in Stockholm with Kristina Tracker, and the one he desires on Halsskär turn Lars into a man even he would not recognize. His longing to escape from both of his two disparate worlds drives him to desperate acts, those of which bring the novel to its tragic conclusions.

Mankell shows with the novel that the ache of humanity that drives the overwhelmingly brooding yet wonderful Wallander series can carry into a more literary, artistic novel. His voice in this book is clear yet abrupt. Depths has short, succinct chapters, barely longer than two or three pages each, yet the story feels rich, flushed out and complete. Mankell’s sea, and how it relates to Tobiasson-Svartman’s consciousness, becomes almost a secondary character in the novel; it’s described beautifully and at length, and it’s easy to understand Lars’s connection to it, both psychologically and physically.

The Swedish entry in my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge, for once I felt a sincere and complex connection to the setting in the novel. Depths is a novel all about landscape, bleak, cold winters, rolling storms, the power of the sea, and the deep impact that war has on the men in its service. It makes me think that I’d love to read anything Mankell writes outside of the Wallander series, not that they aren’t great books, because they are, but Depths satisfies in an entirely different way.

#30 – The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Alexander McCall Smith’s latest novel in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Series, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, is the Zimbabwe entry on my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge. These days, I kind of feel like Phil Keoghan from The Amazing Race, “this is the latest stop in a race around the world!” Heh.

Annnywaay. With familiar characters, the lead detective Mma Ramotswe, her husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, the associate detective/assistant Mma Makutsi, and many others, the story follows the same basic structure as the seven books before it, where the ‘mysteries’ more like moral lessons. Each character comes to his or her solution in a way that highlights the good characteristics of their personalities, all the while life goes on as normal in the small Botswana agency. As always, the books are more about life in Botswana perhaps, than about the problems the people bring to Mma Ramotswe and her co-workers.

In this particular story, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni discovers that he might like to try being a detective and has a case to himself, and while it doesn’t get solved in the traditional sense, a happy ending is found regardless. Reading McCall Smith is like drinking a large glass of lemonade on a hot day, it’s sweet, satisfying and never too tart for my liking. Although just like anything sweet in life, it’s easy to OD, so I’d take it one book at a time (over the course of a few months, at least) when reading this series, should the magic wear off, because who would want that?

#26 – Out Of Africa

The romantic notions I had regarding this book stem, obviously, from seeing the film, where I assumed Out of Africa would echo the autobiographical elements of Sydney Pollack’s adaptation. For years, I’d wander past it on the shelf and think to myself, ‘man, I really do need to read that book,’ ashamed, that in six years of studying English, with a focus on post-colonial literature, I had never had the courage to actually conquer Isak Dinesen’s work. It was quite a shock, then, to discover how different the book actually is from how I built it up in my imagination.

After almost two months of reading it on and off, I’ve finally finished the real Out of Africa. Sometimes majestic, sometimes upsetting, sometimes painfully dated, and sometimes downright brilliant, the book is described in the 1001 Books as “perhaps the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism.” Telling the story of Dinesen’s time running a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills, it’s almost anthropological in much of its intent, and the parts of the book that are so distasteful now, racist even, are contained in her attempts to categorize life in Africa. But the parts of the book that soar are when she’s exploring her very real connection to the land, to her farm, to her life as she built it around her. For example, when the book captures her very human emotions, it’s some of the most wonderful writing; yet when she attempts to “explain” away Africa to her European counterparts, perhaps her imagined audience, it’s almost painful to read it’s so offensive.

Yet something makes you hang in there, and there are subjects you almost wish that she released herself, and/or her voice, enough to write freely about: her true feelings toward Denys Finch-Hatton; her absolute heartbreak with the failure of the farm; her obvious anger toward her husband (who gave her syphilis, as we all know from the film). All of these aspects of Dinesen’s life are explored in passing, as if she could only express herself when truly looking at the landscape, as if the descriptions of Africa and the farm could somehow intuit how she felt on an emotional level about the rest of her life.

There are so many wonderful passages in the book that it would be impossible to list them all here, and as the Denmark entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I find myself once again confronted with the fact that the author I’ve chosen has once again transplanted themselves elsewhere to tell the story of an adopted land rather than his/her homeland. Perhaps in the end, it doesn’t matter at all where you’re from, all that matters is that you find your heart in the place you choose to write about. There’s no denying Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) left her heart behind in Africa when she was forced to return to Europe.

My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is a whole side of your life which there they are alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries.

…I had consented to give away my possessions one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of.

#25 – Hallucinating Foucault

I’ve been wanting to write about this book all day. Last night I was about 20 pages from finishing but I was so tired after my new dance class (I’m taking a Thursday night class at the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre; it’s just a beginner class, but it’s perfect for me right now), that I finished it on the subway ride to Writer’s Group tonight. I hate that, leaving 10 or 20 pages to the next day instead of finishing a book, but sometimes your body just says that’s enough reading for now.

So, Patricia Duncker. She’s my born-in-Jamaica author, but according to the most basic Google search, Duncker now lives and teaches in the UK. Again, the theme of authors no longer living in their homelands comes up in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. I guess, in a way, I’m not really reading as many countries as I imagined I would, trying to balance the 1001 Books list (page 856) and my quest to broaden my reading base, but I have I’ve ended up reading a lot of good books by authors writing about Europe and/or the States. Mainly, I haven’t spent as much time trapped in the lovely and deliciously wonderful world of Can Lit, and that’s actually okay.

(Oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of novels, like this one, set in Paris and in France, which makes me think the world is trying to tell me something…like it might be time to book a ticket or something?).

Regardless, Hallucinating Foucault brought up a lot of memories of undergraduate and graduate school. The book tells the story of a young man working on a thesis of an imaginary French writer named Paul Michel, who has been institutionalized and utterly forgotten by the establishment. After a particularly intense affair with a young woman called The Germanist, he sets out to save his idol from utter decay in a psychiatric institution.

The title comes from Michel’s relationship with the French philosopher, who is described by the author himself as his perfect “reader.” Intertwining all kinds of post-modern themes with a very basic coming of age story, Duncker’s prose remains sharp throughout. In fact, I’d like to note that the epistolary aspects of the novel,the letters between the novelist and the philosopher that the student uncovers while in France are especially lovely.

The story is very much about the insular life of a student studying for an advanced degree. Not unlike Possession but without the Victorian overtones (Byatt even blurbs the book), Hallucinating Foucault has a central literary mystery to solve: why did Michel stop publishing books? And is he really, truly crazy? Part love story, part philosophical tribute to the work of Foucault, it’s a short, intense novel that I feel lucky to have discovered.

However, it’s told me nothing of life in Jamaica. I have to admit that I would have much preferred to read Michelle Cliff, oh how I loved No Telephone to Heaven, but my challenge isn’t about re-reading books I already know I like, but about finding gems I never would have noticed had it not been for a little guidance.

My favourite quote is from one of the letters that Michel has sent Foucault:

My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. …You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

#23 – Good Morning, Midnight

I’ve been listening to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, one of the girls in the car up to conference brought it along, and it’s lovely, aching, heartfelt, broken, all the things a good record should be (there are a couple of songs that are just okay but for the most part, the whole album is really crisp). And I just finished reading Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. For some reason, the two fit so well together, the lonely, rough voice of Amy’s music echoes exceptionally well the narrative voice of Sophia Jansen, the protagonist of this strange little novel.

Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of my favourite books, and I’ve also read Voyage in the Dark, but years ago, so it’s not as fresh as the latter, which I’ve read three or four times in my lifetime now. But this novel isn’t as coherent as the other two, Good Morning, Midnight‘s stream of consciousness narrative is hard to follow sometimes; it’s as confused, pained and as troubled as the narrator herself.

Faintly the story of a struggling single girl who has escaped a tragedy only to attempt and drink herself to death, there’s little in Paris for Sophia (or sometimes Sasha) beyond the cafes and the chicken scratches of an everyday existence to keep her alive. Abandoned by life itself, she wanders through the days in a wine-soaked state and drowns her dreams in Luminol in the evenings. Profoundly sorrowful, Rhys’s novel vacillates between the utter beauty of modernism and a very true feeling of drowing. French inter-mixed with English, past mingled with present, real life confused with the stuff of dreams, it’s hard not to ache when following Sophia stumbling down the street or listening to her rant hysterically to the men who become her companions.

As with all the books I read in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, a trend seems to be evolving, where displaced (or replaced, or happily emigrated?) authors tell stories not of their native land (in Rhys’s case, Dominica) but of their adopted homelands or even of places wild in their own imaginations. The setting for this novel is post-First World War Paris, just before the onslaught of the next devastating conflict. There’s evidence of many displaced persons within the book, refugees from life like Sophia herself, who find themselves all searching for money and acceptance. But all in all it’s the ache in Rhys’s writing that holds me tight in my place, her delicate way of describing situations, and her flighty use of metaphor, which makes me want to give up writing all together, find a bottle and romantically walk the streets of Paris wearing chunky heels and a new coat, and then fall into a shabby hotel only to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

Wholly deserving being found on page 402 of my 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Fully captured in the feeling of heartbreak and ideal reading on the plane ride to Paris.

There’s a bookshop next door, which advertises second-hand English novel. The assistant is Hindu. I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes – a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it. But he insists on selling me lurid stories of the white-slave traffic. ‘This is a very good book, very beautiful, most true.’