my tragic right hip

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.