Category: 52 countries

I’m glad to be back from conference—it was a long week. Since I haven’t read anything new, I’m really happy that Michael Wallner’s April in Paris has finally been published. The German entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I finished this novel while we were on vacation in Cuba. It’s not saying much, considering how awful certain parts of that trip were (ahem, the hotels), that I preferred to be reading rather than watching yet another Dirty Jobs marathon on one of the two illegal American television stations in our room at night.

Anywaaay, behind-the-scenes reading aside, I really enjoyed this novel. It’s captivating and engaging without being overly wordy (it’s a relatively short 256 pages). Set in Paris during the Second World War, April in Paris tells the story of Michel Roth, a German soldier stationed in French capital who falls in love with Chantal, a resistance fighter.

Roth speaks impeccable French, and his post in the German army is that of an interpreter. Knowing that he could be charged with treason or worse, he sneaks out at night in a white suit, changing in bombed-out Parisian buildings, and walks the city, long to pass for anything other than the enemy. On one of his walks, he sees Chantal, and begins to follow her. She resists him at first, doesn’t trust his perfect French, his made-up story, and as the truth comes out, on both sides, they do fall in love.

When a tragic act of the French Resistance finds them out in many different ways, the inevitable reality of the war breaks apart any chance they might have had, in other circumstances, to be together. There’s an aspect of a good thriller in this novel, and Michel is a thoroughly sympathetic character, despite the fact that he was an officer in the German army. In a sense, the novel reminded me of that one scene in Band of Brothers where the Germans were singing across the line on Christmas Eve, about how despite the politics and the absolutely evil actions of the company of men in charge of Michel’s existence, he’s still human. He still has feelings; he still has a story worth telling, worth hearing.

The setting, occupied Paris, evokes such powerful images, and similar to Nemirovsky, but without the overtones of her giant Russian-like writing style, Wallner’s novel brings the time alive through his sharp prose and tight narrative. And not to be unbearably cliched, but the ultimate tragedy of the situation is Shakespearean and completely doomed from the beginning, which somehow makes the story utterly satisfying.

Peter Carey’s magnificent Theft: A Love Story is the Australian entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. Set in the early 80s, the novel tells the story from the perspective of two brothers, Michael and Hugh Boone, who each swap the narrative point of view back and forth like thunder and lightning.

Michael “Butcher Bones,” an infamous artist who is both in and out of favour, is on the edge of his own sanity throughout most of the novel. Defeated by an acrimonious divorce, he falls in love with Marlene, a mystery woman who turns out to be the daughter-in-law of a famous artist, Jacques Leibovitz. The master is long dead, and the central theft of the novel’s title revolves around one of Leibovitz’s paintings going missing from northern New South Wales where Butcher and Hugh are staying.

Hugh, or “Slow Bones” as he’s called, piledrives his way through the novel breaking baby fingers and using capital letters. Always in his older brother’s care, Hugh provides a dissenting voice in the book, at once within the narrative but decidedly outside most of the story. Not unlike Benjy from The Sound and the Fury, Hugh’s most poignant moments are when he’s storming around New York City noting the inherent differences between it and Bacchus Marsh in Australia where he was born.

Before I even picked up this novel, so much of what I had heard about Carey’s book revolved around the explosive portrayal of his ex-wife, Alison Summers. For a moment, that turned me off, a literary revenge, despite how enduring, grows tired after a while. Thankfully, the love story of the novel’s title doesn’t refer to the Plaintiff, as Butcher’s ex-wife is referred to, but to Marlene, the younger, Australian-bred, New York living lover he picks up part way through the novel.

Through her courtship to Leibovitz’s son, Olivier, and subsequent marriage, Marlene has developed quite an eye for art. She exploits her connections and broadens Butcher’s own horizons, as the novel moves from rural Australia to Japan, where he has a show. From Japan, they’re in New York, and when the penultimate moment of the novel arrives, Hugh and Michael make their way back to Australia.

Like a bucket of cold water dropped on your head on a hot day, Theft shocks you into submission with its bold, slashing strokes of brilliant prose that belt out the story. The novel burns on the way down just like the whiskey that seems to be Butcher’s constant companion. One part mystery, one part obsessive love story and two parts good, old-fashioned yarn, I can’t begin to tell you how hard I fell for this book. If I were indoctrinating new titles into the 1001 Books list, this one would be at the top of my list.

David Grossman’s Lion’s Honey, part of Canongate’s esteemed series The Myths, is the entry from Israel in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. More of a meditation than perhaps a true retelling, Grossman dissects the myth of Samson like a teacher approaching a poem. Taken apart piece by piece, the overlived* existence of the hero is explored both in an historical and in a modern context.

My feelings about the entire project are mixed: I’m not sure what the purpose of The Myths in these short, concise little books is, but I enjoyed reading Lion’s Honey, if only because it gave me a glimpse of how interesting it might be to study the stories of the Bible. In Samson, a man truly at odds with his destiny, Grossman is able to present a “character” with a keen eye to the subtle differences between the original text and the sense of the myth as it’s been studied by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of its lifetime.

This brings forward a real sense of how the myth itself is played out both in religious studies and how it has evolved over the years, finding its way into pop culture, poetry, modern novels and Talmudic study. In some ways, as Grossman relates the very real landscape of Samson’s story to the modern-day Israeli state, you get a true sense of how myth combines with history, which in turn combines with story.

Many of the books in my 52 countries challenge didn’t give me a sense of what life was like in the country of the author’s origin. The Ireland of Tóibín is found more in how he constructs a story than in the narrative itself in The Master (but felt a great deal in his marvellous Mothers and Sons). The Canadian Arctic of Consumption is one that’s utterly foreign to me, which was kind of the point. But in this book, I felt the landscape, the lush trees, the hills, the dust, the imprints of civilization on the caves, and it made quite an impression.

There’s a bit where the graves of Samson have sort of popped up, no one thinks they’re the actual resting spots of the man and his father, as Grossman says, they can’t be, but believers are there anyway, faith prevailing over common sense as it should. And that’s kind of an apt metaphor for this little book as well: Samson the hero, whose story has been told and retold over thousands of years, that despite his shortcomings, despite his inability to come to terms with his gift from God, finds a way to act, even if those very actions will bring about his own death. His own faith prevailing against reason, betrayal, even love.

Anyway, it’s a bit deep for a Tuesday morning when I’ve got a wicked cold and a big foggy head, so if the above makes no sense, go ahead and tease me for it. But I’ve managed to keep to the first day of my Book A Day challenge. I have a feeling I might not make it tomorrow, Lion’s Honey, after all, is a mere 145 pages.

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*overlived was today’s OED word of the day. Shockingly the first one, like, ever, I’ve actually used in a sentence the day it arrived in my inbox.

As much as I didn’t want to, I had to put down The Master and pick up Havana Best Friends this weekend. There was a slight chance that I might get to interview Jose Latour for work and I needed to be prepared just in case (which also included reading his latest book Outcast, which comes out in February, review tk).

For any of you more familiar readers of MTRH, you’ll know that I don’t read a lot of mysteries and/or thrillers. It’s not because I don’t enjoy them, it’s more because my tastes tend more toward the literary and less toward the commercial in fiction, which isn’t meant to imply anything at all in terms of the quality of the writing. However, I think that Latour manages to cross over the boundary from the commercial to the almost-literary exceptionally well, and this book is a mixture of all kinds of influences.

I think the recipe for Havana Best Friends starts with a few cups of good spy fiction like John le Carré, it’s flavoured slightly with a bit of the bombastic nature of Robert Ludlum, then all the ingredients are tossed around with Law and Order for a minute to see what sticks, and to taste, just add a hint of Mankell. Presto! You’ve got the novel. Yet, even though you can compare it to many titles, the style is Latour’s own: brazen, bold and sometimes funny (with a wickedly blush-worthy sex scene), the book takes you along for a ride and never really leaves you behind, and I think that’s his key skill as a novelist.

The implausible plot actually works and there wasn’t a moment where I said, “Oh come on!” In short, there’s a fortune hidden in the walls of an old Havana apartment. Put there by a wealthy follower of Batista before Castro’s revolution, the son of the man wants to reclaim his treasure. But it’s not as easy as it seems because there are people living in the apartment, and now the question becomes: does the fortune exist and, if so, how do they get it?

What follows is a tense, even chilling, thriller that winds around the central mystery until the book’s satisfying conclusion. As the Cuban entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I’m happy to say that Latour’s descriptions of the place, of the people, and of the country itself did give me a sense of what life is like there. And I did enjoy that some of the places Latour talks about, I’d seen, so it felt real to me in that way too. This book didn’t pass the heartbreak test, but I enjoyed it anyway. It was perfect reading for a cold January afternoon.

Now, I am gladly going to knock another one off the 1001 Books list with J.M. Coeztee’s Slow Man. Oh, and that takes care of South Africa in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge as well. But what do I really have to say about the book? Well, that’s a bit more difficult considering my toes have been cold all day, I’ve got a “spot” on my forehead, and I’m so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open.

All of my remarks about this particular book will be prefaced by the fact that J.M. Coetzee is a well-deserved Nobel Prize winner. In fact, he is probably one of the greatest writers living today. I count his books, especially Youth and Disgrace, among my personal favourites. But lately, especially after the fiasco of a book that Elizabeth Costello turned out to be, I’m starting to wonder if he’s spending a bit too much time, well, talking to himself.

As the critical consensus is split between whether or not the character Elizabeth Costello is in fact Coetzee himself, I have to wonder about why he chose to include her, yet again, in another one of his novels. The story of Slow Man takes place in Australia where an older gentleman, Paul Rayment, ends up in a terrible biking accident where he loses a leg. The amputation puts a stop to his life as he has know it, obviously, and, as the novel progresses, he is less inclined to get better and more inclined to stop living altogether.

Nurses are assigned from the hospital’s roster of home care to care for Paul once he gets home, and he goes through a number of them before settling on Marjiana, who becomes a catalyst in his life for many reasons. And when things start to unravel as a result of both his injury and his professional relationship with this woman, Elizabeth Costello shows up on his doorstep unannounced, and stays. She’s an omnipotent character of sorts, spouting all kinds of meta-fictional/philosophical speeches about the state of his existence. And that’s where the book sort of goes off the rails for me—I don’t mean to sound flippant because I loved the first half of the novel, but the rest, meh.

One the whole, the book, at the beginning, comes close to passing the heartbreak test, and it excels at what Coetzee does best, which is delve into the most frighteningly human aspects of his characters when they’re set upon in the most horrific of ways. But the second half of the book became so pedantic and almost existential (not that that is a bad thing) that I sort of felt like I was listening to a Beckett play rather than reading a novel. And had I known I was going to be reading a Beckett-like novel, I would have been okay with it, but as it sort of showed up out of the blue to become that way, I was put off, and kind of disappointed.

Will that stop me from reading more Coetzee, not on your life. Primarily because he writes such awesome sentences, strings the words together like this:

“No, Paul, I could care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.”
She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.

But did it mix up my thoughts on Slow Man, absolutely. It’s almost as if Coetzee wrote two different novels and then patched them together, or he fell so in love with Elizabeth Costello from her own novel, that he wanted to keep on writing her. My only unanswered question now is why?

Arundhati’s Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997, which I’m assuming is one of the reasons why it was included in the 1001 Books list (I’m at 122! whee!). Set in Kerala, India primarily in 1969 and moving through the odd flash-forward to present-day (1996), the novel tells the story of two different-egg twins Estha and Rahel before, during and after the tragic death of their British cousin, Sophie Mol.

Told in a narrative style that is frustrating to say the least, Roy’s brilliance comes in spurts, where she puts words together in such a fashion that yes, her prose comes close to my heartbreak test, but on the whole, I felt like I was walking through mud while reading this novel. Lovely thoughts about loneliness, the meaning of family and the implication of the caste system permeate the novel as Estha and Rahel discover that life can absolutely change irrevocably in a day, and that one event can stain your entire existence. After Sophie Mol dies, the twins, now separated, wander through life feeling half-whole, disjointed and totally ruined by the emotional damage inflicted upon them.

There’s no coherent story, but you get a sense of the events from Roy’s vignettes, each told in a very child-like tone: the twins are born into a bad marriage, their flighty, beautiful, but damaged mother takes them back to her mother’s house, where they live with their uncle and their great-aunt, their uncle’s ex-wife comes to visit from Britain bringing along their beautiful, sand-coloured cousin, said cousin dies tragically, their mother’s affair with a Paravan is revealed, his life forever changed, she’s shunned, one of the twins must go live with their father, the other becomes totally lost.

But you piece together the events like a puzzle as the novel moves backwards and forwards towards the penultimate event: Sophie Mol’s death. The final, deep, dark tragedy, of what happens when the romantic relationship between Ammu, their mother, and Velutha, the Paravan, becomes public knowledge, is an offering from Roy to her own gods of small things, the rights and wrongs of the world, of how love isn’t always magical and sometimes simply doesn’t change anything, and how some people just become lost in their lives at any age.

Part of my own goals with this Around the World in 52 Books project is to experience the literature of other countries, in this case, India, to feel the sights and the sounds, to breathe in the air a bit differently, and the novel truly accomplishes that—I got a real sense of the surroundings, of Kerala, and of the social and political differences between the characters in the book. Am I glad I read this novel, yes, but would I highly recommend it, probably not, but that doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t be totally enthralled by the magical, almost mystical, non-linear storytelling.

“Do you hang on to clothes you haven’t worn for ten years? Or bags of pasta, cans of beans?”
Danielle did not need to answer.
“What is it about books? Perfectly rationale people get crazy about their books. Who has time for that?”
“I measure my life out in books.”
“You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn’t be measuring your life. What’s the point?”

Claire Messud’s massively addictive, massively hefty novel ended up on more than one ‘best of’ list this year, not the least of which was its inclusion in the NY Times “The 10 Best Books of 2006.” The Times describes the novel as ‘superbly intelligent’ and a ‘keenly observed comedy of manners,’ and I would not disagree. But it’s long. And it’s wordy, which is in complete contrast to the 2nd book in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, A True Story Based on Lies.

At first glance, too, Messud’s novel seems to retread over well-worn territory, especially for me, in a year where I also read The Good Life and Elements of Style, tackling yet another book about New Yorkers and the tragedy (and its aftermath) of 9/11 might be a bit much for my already broken heart to take.

But that’s where I was wrong, Messud’s book, while earnest in its intention to examine the subject matter, is not earnest in its narrative style or tone. And the elements of satire that appear as a result of her ability to take these characters so deep into themselves without necessarily letting them in on the joke, ensures that the novel feels a little like a Restoration play written in our very modern age.

The plot of the novel follows the lives three college friends, Marina, Julian and Danielle, ten years or so after their graduation, who are now firmly ensconced in their adult lives, which means essentially nothing considering they are as much adrift as they ever were, from a few months before 9/11 until just after the attacks. There is a firm cast of supporting characters, Julian’s boyfriend, Danielle’s mother, Marina’s socially awkward and strangely surreal cousin with the odd nickname of Bootie, along with the ‘Emperor’ himself, Marina’s father Murray Thwaite, an accomplished, and older, infamous journalist in the style of Hemingway, who smokes, drinks and, ahem, well, you know.

Marina, beautiful, lost and finishing her own manuscript, deliciously self-absorbed and ridiculously Paris-Hilton-with-brains (entitled) in her approach to her life looks to her best friends, Julian, a freelance writer in a totally destructive relationship, and Danielle, the one with the stable job, stable life, stable outlook, to guide her as she lands back home while attempting to finish her book about children’s clothes. Life happens. Love happens. Lots happens. But as the planes crash into the two towers, no one in the novel comes out unscathed.

Messud’s talent for long, breathy sentences with many, many commas, dashes and other forms of punctuation, means that we know so much about each character, from their brand of Scotch to the workings of their inner minds, that there’s always the fear the book will careen off the page. Yet, her skill as novelist means that all of the many threads of their lives are woven into an immaculate quilt, with not a single stitch out of place.

It’s fitting, somehow, that my book from the United States, is about New York City, the one place that’s been so ingrained in our psyches from books, from film, from television, that it seems so much more than the sum of its magnificent parts. Oddly, it’s an apt description of The Emperor’s Children as well, it’s a magnum opus of a book, an epic of a tale that carries you in and around its over 400 pages without leaving you lost in Alphabet City in the middle of a scorching hot summer season.

If I have one, teeny, tiny criticism, it’s that my heart remains firmly in tact, and as much as I admire Messud’s skill as a wordsmith, I wanted more in terms of emotional involvement, and even in the book’s penultimate moment, when my favourite character, Danielle, finally falls apart, I didn’t ever get that catch in my throat I felt while reading Consumption. But it’s not like every book can (or should) make you cry.