Rebeccanyc Reads in 2013, Part 5

* means a favorite read

Books I'm Reading Now

   
Paused

Read in November
98. Maíra by Darcy Ribeiro
97. The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce edited by Michael Newton
96. Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina
95. The Hare by César Aira
94. Freud by Jonathan Lear
93. Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo*
92. A House in the Country by José Donoso*

Read in October
91. The African by J.-M. G. Le Clézio*
90. The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina
89. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa*
88. Resolution by Denise Mina
87. A Dead Man's Memoir by Mikhail Bulgakov
86. The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor
85. Oil on Water by Helon Habila
84. Exile by Denise Mina
83. La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas

Read in September
82. Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník
81. Garnethill by Denise Mina
80. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French
79. Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou
78. Still Midnight by Denise Mina
77. L'Amour by Marguerite Duras
76. Onitsha by J. M. G. le Clezio*
75. Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
74. Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century edited by Muireann Maguire
73. 419 by Will Ferguson
72. Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi
71. Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
from previous thread
70. The Laughing Man by Victor Hugo*

Read on Earlier Threads

Read in August
69. The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart*
68. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth*
67. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
66. The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi
65. Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou*
64. Archangel: Fiction by Andrea Barrett
63. Xala by Sembène Ousmane
62. Murther & Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies
61. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset*
60. Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev*
59. Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker
58. Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

Read in July
57. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
56. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
55. Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
54. The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth
53. Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
52. The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley*
51. The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola
50. The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez by Sony Lab'ou Tansi

Read in June
49. A Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
48. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore
47. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox*
46. Reticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
45. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
44. This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
43. Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey*

Read in May
42. Lucifer Unemployed by Aleksander Wat
41. A Priest in the House (The Conquest of Plassans) by Émile Zola
40. Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry*
39. The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh*
38. Transit by Anna Seghers*
37. Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue
36. The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri
35. Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant
34. To Say Nothing of the Dog: or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis*
33. Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin*

Read in April
32. The Sin of Father Mouret by Émile Zola
31. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vassily Grossman*
30. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol*
29. Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories we Tell about Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough
28. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
27. The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant*
26. Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi
25. The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz*
24. It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter

Read in March
23. The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
22. To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia*
21. Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia
20. War and War by László Krasznahorkai*
19. The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik*
18. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss*
17. Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
16. A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
15. News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh
14. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac*

Read in February
13. Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
Read on Previous Thread
12. The City Builder by George Konrád
11. Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore*
10. Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
9. The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
8. Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier*

Read in January
7. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
6. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel*
5. My Century by Alexander Wat*
4. Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi
3. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo*
2. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss*
1. Pot Luck by Emile Zola

Books Recommended by Others
(Idea for this stolen from Deebee's thread)

The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn Recommended by SassyLassy Bought 1/9
Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas Recommended by dmsteyn Bought 1/9
Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats Recommended by RidgewayGirl
The Recognitions by William Gaddis Recommended by EnriqueFreeque
The Embarrassment of Riches by Simon Schama Recommended by deebee Bought 4/2
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi Recommended by steven03tx
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey Recommended by detailmuse Bought 5/29/13
Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog Recommended bymkboylan
Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger Recommended by Linda92007
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz Recommended by Lisa/labfs39 Bought 2/15
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Recommended by MJ/detailmuse and SassyLassy
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto Recommended by Lois/avaland Gift from Lois
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History by Peter Heather Recommended by deebee Bought 8/22
The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People by Neil Shubin Recommended by detailmuse
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton Recommended by RidgewayGirl
Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky Recommended by Chris/cabegley
Color Me English by Caryl Phillips Recommended by Linda92007
Brodeck, Monsieur Linh and His Child, and Grey Souls by Phillipe Claudel Recommended by Lisa/labfs39
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King Recommended by Cyrel/torontoc Bought 5/10
Freud (The Routledge Philosophers) by Jonathan Lear Recommended by Dewald/dmsteyn Bought 6/6/13
The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth Recommended by SassyLassy Bought 5/10
The Czar's Madman by Jaan Kross Recommended by SassyLassy
Imperium (recommended by SassyLassy) and Shah of Shahs (recommended by Cyrel/torontoc) by Ryszard Kapuściński
The Country of the Blind and other stories by H.G. Wells Recommended by Barry/baswood Bought 6/6
Rough-Hewn Land: A Geologic Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains by Keith Heyer Mehldahl Recommended by stretch/Kevin
Resistance a Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnes Humbert Recommended by Merrikay/mkboylan
Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac Recommended by Merrikay/mkboylan
The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers and Found Treasures edited by Frieda Johles Forman Recommended by Cyrel/torontoc
Writers on Writing by The New York Times Recommended my MJ/detailmuse Bought 7/24
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Recommended by Edwin Bought 7/16
Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals Recommended by Edwin
The Women's War by Alexandre Dumas Recommended by SassyLassy Bought 7/24
Lost Classics edited by Michael Ondaatje Recommended by Wandering_StarAlready own this!
Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Joan Druett Recommended by Colleen/NanaCC Bought 8/7/13
419 by Will Ferguson Recommended by Steven Bought 9/10/13
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth Recommended by Barry/baswood Bought 8/12/13
The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Recommended by Colleen/NanaCC
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells Recommended by Steven Bought 10/12/13
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland Recommended by WanderingStar Bought 10/28/13
The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald Recommended by Deborah/arubabookwoman
Jewish Journeys by Jeremy Leigh Recommended by Paul/Polaris

List by country of books read in 2013 (i.e., country of author)

Africa

Congo
Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez by Sony Lab'ou Tansi

Nigeria
Oil on Water by Helon Habila

Senegal
Xala by Sembène Ousmane
Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane

Asia

Burma/Myanmar
Smile As They Bow by Nu Nu Yi

Indonesia
A Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Vietnam
The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh

Central America (and Mexico) and the Caribbean
The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe)
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba)

Europe

Belgium
Reticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic
Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník
The Opportune Moment, 1855 by Patrik Ouřednik
Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

England and the UK
Fiction
The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce edited by Michael Newton
6 books by Denise Mina
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue
To Say Nothing of the Dog: or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Nonfiction
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz
Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories we Tell about Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

France
The African by J.-M. G. Le Clézio
La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
L'Amour by Marguerite Duras
Onitsha by J.M.G. Le Clezio
The Laughing Man by Victor Hugo
The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola
A Priest in the House (The Conquest of Plassans) by Émile Zola
Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin
The Sin of Father Mouret by Émile Zola
The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
Pot Luck by Emile Zola

Germany
Transit by Anna Seghers*

Hungary
War and War by László Krasznahorkai
The City Builder by George Konrád
Kornél Esti by Dezsõ Kosztolányi

Italy
The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia
Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia

Norway
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset*

Poland
Lucifer Unemployed by Aleksander Wat
The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz
My Century by Aleksander Wat

Russia/Soviet Union
A Dead Man's Memoir by Mikhail Bulgakov
Red Spectres edited by Muireann Maguire
Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev
An Armenian Sketchbook by Vassily Grossman
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Middle East and North Africa

Morocco
Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi
The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi

South America

Argentina
The Hare by César Aira
Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

Brazil
Maíra by Darcy Ribeiro

Chile
A House in the Country by José Donoso

Peru
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

US and Canada

USA
Fiction
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Archangel: Fiction by Andrea Barrett
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh

Nonfiction
Freud by Jonathan Lear
Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker
Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox
Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey
Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry
It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

Canada
419 by Will Ferguson
Murther & Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies

I decided to start a new thread, even though I'm not quite ready to review the two books I finished today (Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou and Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi because I had time to set it it up with all those preliminary posts and I won't have time to do that later in the week. So, to be continued . . .

Congrats on two books finished. It must have been a good reading day.

Great review of The Laughing Man, Rebecca; I've added it to my wish list.

Thanks, Lisa. They were both short, and I was about two-thirds of the way through both of them, so it was easy to finish them. Now I'm somewhat at a loss about what book to take on the subway with me this morning, so maybe I shouldn't have finished both of them yesterday!

Thanks, Darryl.

I have a busy day today, so it will be at least tomorrow before I post reviews.

71. Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou



novelist Alain Mabanckou is a wonderful writer who captures the voice of his narrator, Broken Glass, and the people whose stories he tells, and whose language flows, and this is true even though he has an unusual way of writing, using only commas as punctuation, so there are in effect no sentences, just paragraphs, and even those "sentences" as paragraphs have no capital letter at the beginning and no period at the end, yet there is never any trouble following along with what Mabanckou is saying, although it may take a little getting used to, and it surely must have been difficult to write that way, as I am finding as I write this paragraph, and equally if not more difficult for the translator to convey the feeling of this writing style in English, so now, because this is not an easy way for me to write, even though I often write long run-on sentences myself, I'm going to stop and write the rest of this review in a more comfortable, for me, style

This is the second book by Mabanckou that I've read, although he wrote it first, and I didn't warm to it quite as much as I did to Memoirs of a Porcupine, although it did grow on me as I was reading it. It is narrated by Broken Glass, a 60-something alcoholic former teacher who now spends nights and days at Credit Gone West, a bar run by his friend, the Stubborn Snail, who has visions of fame and grandeur for what is in essence a dive. Stubborn Snail, because he worries about Broken Glass and because he is seeking publicity, gives Broken Glass a notebook to record the story of the bar. At first, Broken Glass tells the stories that some of the habitués of Credit Gone West feel compelled to tell him, and these stories are generally crude, and often scatological, but nevertheless humorous and understanding of the frailties of humanity and the harshness of life. In the second part, Broken Glass moves into his own story, writing more or less backwards in time, and the reader learns how he wound up losing his job and his wife and ending up more or less broken down hanging out in a seedy bar, despite his love of language and his familiarity with the great works of literature of the world.

For one of the fascinating things about this novel is the way Broken Glass weaves the titles of novels into his narration, as well as references to what happened in some of those novels. To give a feel for this, here is an example:

"they swore he'd be eating boiled potatoes, become a beggar, one of God's bits of wood, sleeping in a barrel, like a certain ancient philosopher, and still the Stubborn Snail stood firm, determined as a chess player, and the years went by in dubious battle, till his envious components got bored of nitpicking, he resisted the confederacy of dunces, and the other barkeepers all called him names . . ." p.19

One of the things I liked about this novel is that it seems that Broken Glass himself got more insight into his life as he wrote about his history -- the same experience the reader is having -- and begins to see that some people, such as the woman who sells him his bicycle chicken, actually care about him (not that this changes the decision he makes towards the end of the book). This is a much more clever and complicated book that it seems at the beginning.

72. Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi



This harrowing but moving memoir of Laâbi's return from prison, with flashbacks to his experiences as a prisoner, has had many titles. The original French title, "Le chemin des ordalies," means "the path of ordeals," the English title translates as "street of the return," and the title of Laâbi's translation of his own book from French into Arabic is "The Fool of Hope." All of these titles express aspects of the memoir.

Laâbi was imprisoned by the post-colonial Moroccan government for close to ten years for "crimes of opinion," as a leading poet and writer, founder of an influential literary journal, and contributor to a political journal. He was eventually freed because of protests from other countries. At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was tortured, and the descriptions of torture were almost impossible to read, although I felt obliged to because reading about them is not in anywhere the same league as experiencing them. This part, brief though it was, certainly makes one think of all the torture that has taken place throughout history, and that which is happening now, and that which our own government has engaged in.

The memoir intersperses Laâbi's feelings on re-entering the world with his memories of imprisonment, with feelings and thoughts he addresses to his beloved wife, who he refers to as Awdah, which means "return," and with myths and stories. All in all, this is an extremely poetic work, despite the horrors it describes and alludes to, and the complexity of return. Here is part of a letter he sends to his wife while he is imprisoned:

"I dream a lot lately, threatened dreams, wandering, beset by obstacles, but beautiful, restorative glimpses of your presence. So yesterday, I dreamed about Qods (their daughter). She was on my knee, I was teasing her, laughing with her like a madman. Did you realize that dreams end up creating certain atmospheres, turning familiar places into something new. It's like that for me, there are some places I always go back to, a kind of farm near some caves by the sea, a huge Moroccan house which reminds me both of the Alhambra and one of the houses I used to live in, a kind of apartment in a building but open to the sky with doorless rooms. For the most part these places are only different combinations of the same prison-space. Not always, for in some of the dreams I don't feel completely affected by this space. All the same, the capacity to dream is prodigious. And so important for a prisoner." p. 75

One of the peculiarities of this book is that it is written in the second person, that is Laâbi refers, presumably to himself, as "you" throughout, e.g., "You are free," "You open the sack with your name on it," "You reassure yourself," etc. It was not clear to me why Laâbi did this, perhaps as a distancing mechanism, perhaps to allude to the universality of the prison experience, although he is very particular about his own experiences, as a poet would be. Laâbi addresses this in his epilogue:

"More worrying still, this YOU that you consecrated as hero or chief character, who will fall into the trap of believing that it has anything to do with an individual? Will it not be understood as WE? What then have you put of yourself into the mouths of others and what of others into your own mouth? And with what justification?" p. 177

Certainly, despite the horrific cruelty that Laâbi experienced, he was able to go on and write as charming and almost light-hearted a novel based on his childhood as The Bottom of the Jar. That speaks to his ability to somehow separate these vastly different experiences, as well, of course, to his talents as a writer. Towards the end of the memoir, he muses on how he has recovered:

"Little by little you recovered from your astonishments, You rediscovered reflexes that you thought you had lost forever . . .Your astonishment bumped less every day against the rock of realities and good sense. Already there was memory and forgetting. Your new life already had an age.

Then there were the great questions. Not that they had been absent after the first steps you had taken during the starry night of your deliverance. From that instant you had said to yourself: Look at me, returned to the multiple body from which I had been snatched. How shall I find again the land and the people? How shall I create again with my hands their fertility? But now, you had seen. The earth had turned. The rivers had recovered their normal courses. The social puzzle had been fitted together."? p. 163

And finally:

"Free. Old salt of the prison seas. If you are now free, it's because you will carry this citadel for the rest of your life, engraved on your heart." p. 175

I enjoyed your review of the Laabi book, Rebecca.

Wonderful reviews, Rebecca. I have Bottom of the Jar and after I read it, I will definitely seek out the memoir. One thought about the use of "you": after reading the last quotes, I had the thought that perhaps he was addressing his earlier self? From the vantage point in his new life, could he be reflecting back on a self that now feels somewhat alien in his "memory and forgetting"?

That's an interesting idea, Lisa, and it would certainly fit. I think that's kind of what I meant by a distancing mechanism, but it's more understandable the way you suggest. By the way, the memoir is out of print; I had to get it from ABEBooks.

Great review of Broken Glass, but what is a bicycle chicken? Interesting to read about Mabanckou's writing style, but my first thought was that if there were no paragraphs or individual sentences then the text would appear as one solid block on the page. I find this a little off putting.

Rue du Retour was written originally in French, it is strange that the English translation should keep the French title. Writing in the second person has the effect of putting some distance between the subject and the author and I wonder if this was the intention.

Barry, as far as I could tell from the internet, bicycle chicken refers to local chickens that run around on their own and barely have any meat on them!

There are paragraphs -- they just don't have periods at the end (as with my imitation).

The English translation gave it a NEW French title: "Rue du Retour" instead of "Le chemin des ordalies" -- I have to assume Laâbi went along with the new title, just as he changed it himself for the Arabic translation.

Lovely review and discussion -- I'm not sure I can put myself into this space despite the poetic writing.

73. 419 by Will Ferguson



Will Ferguson really tried with this book. He tried to take an inventive but not really exciting thriller plot about the effects of a Nigerian e-mail scam on a Canadian family and make it Meaningful and Important by adding in stories of three people in Nigeria. The Nigerian sections were longer and more compelling, and the characters were better developed, which made the Canadian sections seem less interesting and to some extent tacked on.

There have been a lot of reviews of this book, including one that spurred me to buy it, so I won't go into a lot of details about the plot but will focus more on my reactions to it. Basically, Laura, the daughter of a man who killed himself after he succumbed to a "419" scam (named after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that forbids such scams), becomes obsessed with tracking down the scammer and seeking revenge. Simultaneously, the reader learns about the young scammer, Winston, who comes from an educated background; about Nnamdi, a boy from a Delta village who becomes a young man deeply affected by the oil industry; and Amina, a young woman who is fleeing the northern Sahel region. Needless to say, their paths will converge.

I found it fascinating to learn about the environment and social fabric of the Delta region and beyond, how the development of the oil industry in Nigeria has destroyed these and the economic opportunities for most young people, and how the various aspects of the criminal culture interact. I also enjoyed learning about the different groups that make up Nigeria. As one of the characters says,

" 'There is no Nigeria. . . . "There is Fulani and Hausa, Igbo and Tiv, Efik and Kanuri, Gwari and Yoruba. But Nigeria? That is only the pail we carry these in.' " p.82

Ferguson did a lot of research (detailed in his acknowledgements) and is a very readable writer, but some of the Nigerian material read like he was showing off his research. And I did wonder whether perhaps it was intruding on the story lines, and whether I might have enjoyed another book, perhaps a nonfiction one, that focused on Nigerian issues, more. Also, I found some of the plot development conveniently coincidental and unconvincing. I did find it interesting that Laura was a copy editor, and that she used her copy editing skills to track down the scammer, as I was a copy editor a long time ago; however, when Ferguson wrote that Laura "moved into the lucrative field of freelance copy editing," I had to roll my eyes!

This was a quick read, and mostly enjoyable, although not to my mind prize-worthy (it won the Scotiabank Giller prize for Canadian fiction). I don't feel its flaws outweighed its positive points, but they certainly detracted from the reading experience for me. However, one good thing about reading this book is that it made me more eager to read two other books that have been on my TBR for a while, both by J. G. le Clezio: Onitsha, a town referred to in this book, and Desert, about the Sahel region more generally. I would also be interested in books by Nigerians about some of the issues described in this book.

Interesting review of 419 I note that Steven recommended it and Darryl did not like it at all. Rebecca you seem to fall somewhere in the middle. It would appear from your review that the realistic setting does not sit well with the plot machinations.

Barry, it was like it was two books: one on the impact of the 419 scheme on the Canadian family and the daughter's attempt at revenge and one that tries to paint a picture of different aspects of Nigerian life today, from the bustling 419 and other criminal schemes in Lagos to the impact of oil drilling on the Delta to the differences between the Muslim north and the "Christian" south. Neither "book" worked really well, but Ferguson is a good writer and I enjoyed learning about Nigeria.

74. Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century, selected and translated by Muireann Maguire



I bought this book when I saw it in the bookstore because I read a lot of Russian, including Soviet era, fiction, and I was intrigued that this collection included stories by writers I knew (such as Bulgakov and Krzhizhanovsky) as well as authors I was unfamiliar with. These writers were taking a chance by not toeing the party line about realistic fiction, and in fact many of these stories were not published in the USSR during the authors' lifetimes and one author, was killed in the 1937 purges. However, although some of the stories were enjoyably creepy and thought-provoking, I guess it takes a lot for me to appreciate tales of the supernatural. I kept on reading because each story was different (although two involved people emerging from mirrors and pushing the "real" person into the mirror), and I kept hoping I would like them more. I believe this is a case of my personal taste, and that the stories would be much more compelling for someone who likes this kind of fiction more than I do.

75. Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe



"When Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by the Pope in St. Peter's in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Maya civilization was it its height: scattered throughout the jungle-covered lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula were more than a dozen brilliant city-states, with huge populations, towering temple-pyramids and sophisticated royal courts. The arts, scientific learning, and, above all, writing flourished under royal patronage. Maya mathematicians and astronomers scanned the heavens, and tracked the planets as they moved across the background of the stars in the tropical night. Royal scribes --devotees of the twin Monkey-Man Gods -- wrote all this down in their bark-paper books, and inscribed the deeds of their kings, queens, and princes on stone monuments and the walls of their temples and palaces.

Even the mightiest empires have their day and finally crumble, awaiting resurrection by the archaeologist's spade. It was not long after 800 that things began to fall apart for the ancient Maya, who had enjoyed six centuries of prosperity during Europe's Dark Age, and city after city was abandoned to the encroaching forest. Then there was a final brief renaissance of lowland culture in northern Yucatán, to be followed by the final cataclysm brought about at the hands of the white foreigners from across the sea." pp. 48-49

I start with this long excerpt because it sets the stage for Michael Coe's story of how Maya writing was deciphered and because it shows his readable but scholarly approach. I picked up this book, which has sat on my TBR since October 17, 1992, according to the sales slip still inside it, because I recently enjoyed Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth about deciphering Linear B.

The central questions posed by this book are why it took so long to "break" the Maya code and what understanding their writing tells us about the Maya and their lives and preoccupations. In large part, this is an intellectual history of the people who tried to decipher the writing, and one of the enjoyable aspects of the book is the way Coe gently but pointedly describes where they went wrong, as when he remarks, about an extremely influential researcher in the field, "It as though someone were pursing a career in evolutionary biology, and decided to ignore Darwin."

The story of decoding Maya writing is at once a comedy of errors, a tale of opportunities missed and what Coe calls "stumbling blocks," a story of chance serendipities, and a look at the hard work of anthropologists and linguists. Writing can be logographic (using symbols for words or the smallest parts of words, called morphemes), syllabic (with symbols for consonant-vowel combinations), or alphabetic (like ours). At first, Mayan writing was thought to be logographic, although a 16th century Spanish priest, Bishop Landa, wrote down syllabic and alphabetic sounds associated with different glyphs and images; his work was lost for centuries but proved helpful much later in confirming interpretations arrived at using other methods.



Pages from the Dresden codex, one of four Maya books that have survived.



Writing on an 8th century stone monument from Piedras Negras.

By the time Coe, a Yale anthropology professor, wrote this book in 1992, researchers had finally broken the code, learning that although there are glyphs that represent individual people and other words, most of them are syllabic and used in combinations. They were finally able to read the inscriptions on monuments, and thus learned that they were neither all dates (the Mayans had an amazing obsession with dates) or all astronomical observations (ditto), as had been previously hypothesized, but detailed the accession of rulers to power, their genealogical heritage, their capture of prisoners, their somewhat bloody rituals, and more. I have no doubt that in the 20+ years since, much more has been discovered, but this is a fascinating tale of real people and real research, as well as a portrait of very real people who lived more than a thousand years ago. One of the interesting findings to come out of this new understanding is the prestige associated with being a scribe, and their artistic leanings. As Coe writes:

"Now, the ancient Maya scribes could have written everything expressed in their language using only the syllabic signary -- but they did not, any more than did the Japanese with their kana signs, or the Sumerians and Hittites with their syllabaries, or the Egyptians with their stock of consonantal signs. The logograms just had too much prestige to abolish. And why should they have done so? 'One picture is worth a thousand words,' as the saying goes, and Maya logograms, like their Egyptian equivalents, are often remarkably pictorial and thus more immediately informative than a series of abstract phonetic signs: for example, the Maya could, and sometimes did, write out balam, "jaguar," syllabically as ba-la-m(a), but by using a jaguar's head for balam, the scribe could get his word across in a more dramatic fashion. p. 264

Coe lived through a dramatic breakthrough in understanding a fascinating culture and people. This book tells how it happened.

I think I'll skip Red Spectres, as I don't care for supernatural/Gothic stories either, but your review of Breaking the Maya Code sounds fascinating, and outside my normal reading channels.

Fascinating review of Breaking the Maya Code, Rebecca. Your review of 419 brought to mind Wole Soyinka's wonderful novel The Interpreters which I read many years ago. It's about a group of young Nigerian intellectuals from varied backgrounds during the 1960s. As I recall it had a rather hopeful feel, but that was before the oil companies moved in and destroyed the environment, economy and much of the culture of Nigeria.

Thanks, Lisa, and Jane. I've been meaning to read Wole Soyinka for years, and that might be a book to start with.

As for the Maya, I got really interested in them in college when I took a seminar on them, but haven't read much about them in recent years, although I have had several books on my TBR for probably 20 years, including the one I just read.

That is a long time to have a book on your shelf Rebecca and I suppose it has become a little outdated, as much could have happened in Maya studies in the meantime. Better late than never and I enjoyed your review and I will probably search wiki to find out what happened to the Mayas

I don't want to shock you, Barry, but there are definitely books on my shelves that have been there even longer than 1992! I do feel I would like to have a more recent perspective on the Maya, and I've just done a little research on both LT and Amazon to find the most recent and respected books. So I think I'm ordering a textbook-style book by Coe, The Maya, now in an 8th edition published in 2011, and a book that everyone seems to rave about called Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, now in a second edition published in 2008. I would like to read A Forest of Kings by Linda Schele, a very noted Mayan archaeologist which I've had on my shelf since 1990, because it was highly praised, but of course it will be out of date and I don't know how much I can read about the Maya. I just hope I don't keep these new books on my shelves for another 20+ years!

Rebecca, I greatly enjoyed your review of the Mayan code book.

Fascinating review of Breaking the Maya Code, Rebecca. I see on Amazon that there is a third edition, revised and updated, and published in 2012. It is available for Kindle and I think I may succumb to temptation. I took a course as an undergrad in psycholinguistics that was very interesting, as well as several fascinating anthropology courses, and I always wished I had pursued both subjects further.

Oh, that's interesting, Linda. I wish I'd seen that before I ordered the other Maya books. May have to add that one . . .

And thanks, Jonathan.

Even though I wasn't enthusiastic about 419, it got me interested in the Nigerian oil business, and so I was intrigued by an article in today's NY Times entitled "As Oil Thieves Bleed Nigeria, Report Says, Officials Profit".

76. Onitsha by J.M.G. Le Clézio



This cover is a detail from a painting entitled "August Visitor (Arrival of White Men in an Ibibio Village" by E. E. Ekefrey.

The more I thought about what I should say about this book in my review, the more I realized how complex the novel really is and how much is left unsaid. It starts as the partially autobiographical story of Fintan, a boy who seems to be about 11 or 12 years old, traveling with his Italian mother (whom he calls Maou) by ship from the Atlantic coast of France to Onitsha on the Niger River in Nigeria. It is 1948, the war is over, and Fintan's English father, Geoffroy, whom he has never met, has sent for Maou and Fintan to join him in Onitsha.

The first part of the novel depicts the voyage, which the reader sees through both Fintan's and Maou's eyes, as they enter a foreign world and feel the impact of both the climate and the racist/colonial structure of the society. None of this is didactic; it emerges from the perceptions and actions of the characters. The later parts of the novel take place in and around Onitsha, except for the very end when the family leaves Africa.

In Onitsha, once again, each member of the family reacts to the world in which they find themselves -- Maou and Fintan mostly among the Africans, Geoffroy largely among the colonial English, those engaged in commerce, as he is, and those representing the government. But Geoffroy has another interest, one which drew him to Africa in the first place. He is convinced that the last black queen of Meroë, part of ancient Egypt, led her people up the Nile and across the mountains to found another kingdom on the banks of the Niger, perhaps at a mystical site known as Aro Chuku. (I did a lot of Googling at this point.) His imaginings of this journey, shown in another typeface in my edition, are interspersed with the rest of the novel, and progress as the novel progresses. Geoffroy also comes to think of a mysterious young woman, Ayo, who is unable to speak or hear and whose past is uncertain, as a reincarnation of the long ago black queen.

Meanwhile, Maou irritates the colonial powers by showing her disgust with how they treat the Africans, including a group of prisoners hired to dig a swimming pool while still chained together who carry on their work in sight of a dinner party at the district officer's home. Fintan explores the natural world with a slight older friend, Bony, quickly shedding his shoes and socks to run barefoot over the savannah and rocks; he also is becoming aware of sexuality. A mysterious European, Sabine Rodes, who has an "adopted" African son as his servant, as well as some association with the equally mysterious Ayo, also figures in the story.

Le Clézio's writing is beautiful, and he vividly depicts the very different environment the mixed European family finds itself in, and how they react to it.

"It was the beginning of the rainy season. The big river was the color of lead beneath the clouds, the wind flattened the treetops with violence. Maou no longer left the house in the afternoon. She stayed on the veranda, listening to the rising storms, far off towards the source of the Omerun. Heat crackled the red earth before the rain. The air danced above the tin roofs. From where she sat she could see the river, the islands. She had lost all desire to write, or even to read. She needed only to look, to listen, as if time were of no more importance." pp. 119-120

Beyond the tale of a boy experiencing a new world, and the picture of colonialist racism in action, and the dream-like story of an historic or mythical migration, and the vivid depiction of a time and a place, this book also seems to be about voyages of various kinds, isolation of various kinds, and the urge to write. Geoffroy travels from England to Italy and then to Africa, Maou with her mother and aunt and Fintan from Italy to France and with only Fintan to Africa, the black queen of Meroë from the Nile to the Niger, and finally the family back to England and France. All are alone in a way, finding their place in Africa on their own, Maou and Geoffroy coming from different parts of Europe and leaving their own families behind. And each writes something at some point in the story: Maou letters to Geoffroy, Fintan a story of a girl who takes "a long voyage" to Africa, and Geoffroy his notes about the epic journey of the queen of Meroë. Left unsaid, but looming in the background, are the devastation World War II brought to the Europe they have left and the impending anti-colonial upheavals in the Africa they leave at the end. As the mysterious Sabine Rodes says to Maou:

"Have a good look about you! The days are numbered for all of us, all of us! For good people and bad, for honorable people and for those like me! The empire is finished, signorina, it's crumbling on every side, turning to dust: the great ship of empire is sinking, honorably! You speak of charity, don't you, and your husband lives in his dream world, and meanwhile everything is crumbling around you! But I shan't leave. I shall stay here to see it all, that's my mission, my vocation, to watch the ship go under.", p. 143

(Incidentally, Rodes has already seen a real ship go under in the river, a wreck that figures prominently in the novel.)

At the very end of the book, a now-adult Fintan reflects on how his year in Africa infused his whole life, leaving him with feelings that set him apart from others, and how his experiences there connect him with the then-ongoing war in Biafra.

This is a book that I will continue thinking about for a long time.

From my limited reading of J. M. G. Le Clézio, I would say he was a very justified Nobel Prize Winner, and I am especially interested in the international dimension of his work, such as the novels and stories set in Africa. Your review is very inspiring and useful, as I will be looking for a copy of Onitsha.

Fabulous review of Onitsha, Rebecca! I thoroughly enjoyed that novel, and I'd like to read it again in the near future.

Thanks, Edwin. This is only the second Le Clézio I've read, but I loved The Prospector too, and am looking forward to reading his other book I own, Desert. I also am going to try to find his essay about his own time as as a child in Africa online; it hasn't been translated, but I'm curious about how his own experiences translated into the character of Fintan, so I'll try to read it in French. I too think he deserved the Nobel, but I'm basing that on only two books. Incidentally, I first read Le Clézio because he was a featured author in the Author Theme Reads group a few years ago.

Thanks, Darryl. I remember that you liked it.

I haven't read anything by Le Clézio, but Onitsha sounds wonderful!

I just recently purchased Le Clézio's Wandering Star and am looking forward to reading it even more after reading your accolades of his writing.

That's one I don't have, Lisa. I'll be interested in what you think of it. And thanks, Steven; it was a fascinating book.

77. L'Amour by Marguerite Duras



This is the first book I've read by Duras, and what a strange book it is. More impressionistic than a traditional novel, it has a film-like character to it with very spare descriptions of the scene and the actions and little in the way of plot. According to the introduction and afterword, and also a helpful interview with the translators provided by Open Letter, the publisher, with my copy (I am a subscriber), the characters in this novel, referred to as "the woman" or "she," and "the traveler" and "the man who walks," both called, sometimes confusingly, "he," are characters in several other novels and movies in Duras' "India cycle," although it is said this book can be read on its own.

I found it beautiful but mystifying. The language is very simple, very repetitive, and yet poetic. The sentences are often very short, and paragraphs can be one line. Here is an example, almost picked at random.

"She is silent.
The light changes again.
He raise his head, looks in the direction of her gesture; he sees that from the far end of S. Thala, toward the south, the man who walks is returning, making his way through the seagulls, he is returning.
His pace is even.
Like the changing of the light.
Accident.
Again the light: the light. Changes, then suddenly does not change anymore. Brightens, freezes, even, shining. The traveler says:

    --The light

She looks. pp. 8-9

The story, such as it is, takes place in S. Thala, a resort town where the river meets the sea, that is apparently either out of season or has been abandoned. There are empty buildings, fires, sounds reminiscent of parties in times gone by.

Light and darkness, day and night; looking and seeing, looking and not seeing;walking, coming, going, returning, etc.; the beach and the sea; remembering and forgetting; pregnancy, illness, and death; cries and groans -- all of these seem to play a role in this book. It seems, to me anyway, that Duras wanted to strip down her language, allowing readers to visualize in their own minds what is happening, even though much of what is happening is surrealistic and incomprehensible. What comes across is that there was a livelier, happier life for the characters there in S. Thala sometime in the past -- and that something happened to change that so that the characters seem disturbed, or at least very sad.

This was a puzzling read, and I'm not sure if it makes me want to read more Duras or stay far away!

I own at least 15 books by Duras, yet L'Amour* is not one of them. She used the name "Thala" in something I have read, though, but at the moment I can't recall where. The language does sound very cinematic, very much like the set directions in the two screenplays by her I've read. You may not like it either, but you should at least give her most famous work, The Lover, a try.

* Gave up on finding the right touchstone. That Louis L'Amour guy sure wrote a lot of cowboy stories!

Two great reviews Rebecca, I think the Marguerite Duras book would appeal to me more than the Le Clezio, though they both sound good.

Thanks, Steven and Barry. Both the author of the introduction and the author of the afterword point out that this was the last book Duras wrote before she started writing screenplays exclusively (for some years), so it's not surprising that it seems cinematic. And yes, they also point out that in another novel in the India cycle she used the place name South Thala, and that the woman and the traveler correspond to the characters in The Ravishing of Lol Stein and The Vice-Consul. I do have The Lover, so I'll probably read that too.

As for the touchstone, I found all the Louis L'Amours too, but I learned a trick from Darryl/kidzdoc for when something doesn't touchstone. Within the usual square brackets, copy the work number from the work page (the last number in the web address for the work) followed by two colons and then the title, i.e., (number::title) but with square brackets, and that will force a touchstone to the work. That's what I had to do with this book.

Since I don't care for reading plays, much less screenplays, I think I'll skip this one. But I would like to try one of her other novels. It sounds like the Lover is the place to start.

The work number trick has come in handy many times. Sometimes the title I want doesn't show up in the choices at all, yet lots of books with different titles do. Go figure. Ah, the quirks of LT's search algorithm.

In Les lieux de Marguerite Duras, interviews with Michelle Porte, which I finished two weeks ago, but haven't had time to review, Duras says that S. Thala stands for Thalassa, but that the name was somehow distorted in her mind and she decided to not correct it.

While in Amsterdam in late July early August, I tried to buy L'Amour but the shop assistant said that they had just earlier that day sold their copy, and it would take more than two weeks to order an new one. I did not find a copy in the other major bookstores. Instead, I bought three books with interviews.

However, reading the interviews, I realized that I should first read Un barrage contre le Pacifique (Engl. The Sea Wall), which I am currently reading as in all her autobiography she keeps referring to that work. I may be able to get L'Amour later at L'Arbre du voyageur, the French bookstore in Beijing.

Lisa, I'll probably read The Lover next week.

That's interesting, Edwin. L'Amour was only translated into English this year, and I received it because I have a subscription with its publisher, Open Letters, which publishes works in translation. But it seems you are planning to read it in the original French. If I like The Lover, I may attempt other works by Duras (I'm VERY impressed that you have at least 15 of them, Steven!), and The Sea Wall might be an interesting one to try after that.

Nice review of L'Amour, Rebecca. I'll take a pass on it, and Marguerite Duras.

I read for the Author Theme Reads group, Darryl, and because serendipitously I had received it from my Open Letters subscription. I had previously bought The Lover for the theme read, so that's why I'll be reading that too. I feel I need to give her more of a chance than one book. (And they're short!)

I'm taking a pass on most of the Author Theme Reads this year. I will join in next month, as I want to read the two novels by Simone de Beauvoir I own, The Mandarins and She Came to Stay, and I'd love to re-read America Day by Day, her insightful, witty and often humorous account of her travels in the US in the late 1940s.

78. Still Midnight by Denise Mina



I wasn't familiar with Denise Mina until RidgewayGirl recommended her enthusiastically on her thread. Having now read this book, the first in a series featuring Glasgow Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, I am not as enthusiastic as she was but I am not completely negative either. In this novel, Alex is unhappy both at home and at work, where she lacks confidence in what her fellow detectives think of her, but is driven to solve the case in which Aamir, an elderly Indian from Uganda, is kidnapped during a home invasion in which the two balaklaved white invaders are looking for someone named Bob -- but there is apparently nobody named Bob in that Indian household. The novel is as much about the somewhat hapless kidnappers as it is about solving the crime, and as it proceeds the reader learns much about their lives and the lives of the family of the kidnapped man, as well as, obliquely, about the history of Aamir's escape from Uganda and the tragedies and complexities of his and Alex's lives. For a while, I felt there was too much in this book and that it detracted from the mystery aspect of it, but I realize Mina is trying to paint a fuller picture of aspects of life in Glasgow. I have mixed feelings about detective fiction that aspires to greater scope and meaning, but I am intrigued enough that I will try something else by Mina at some point.

79. Blue White Red by Alain Mabanckou



This is the third book by Mabanckou I've read, but the first he wrote. (It was only translated into English this year.) In it, he takes a look at the lives of Africans who go to live in Paris and the varieties of experiences they have there. It is both a satire of the "Parisians," as they are called, and the prestige which they and their families acquire when they return for visits to their home county (in this case, Congo), and a look at the harsh reality that most undocumented immigrants find when they arrive in the capital of their former colonizer.

The tale starts out with the narrator declaring "I'll manage to get myself out of this" on finding himself imprisoned in a dark cell outside Paris. The scene then shifts back to his village in Congo, where the villagers are all entranced by Moki, a local young man who has done very well for himself in Paris, showering his parents and extended family with expensive gifts including a newly built house complete with water and electricity and two cars that they can use for a taxi service. On his yearly visits home, Moki stresses that speaking French is different from speaking "in French," and he is quite the local dandy, wearing expensive designer clothes and stressing how stylish he is. The narrator, Massala-Massala, is eager to try his luck in Paris too, and Moki arranges for him to get a passport and a tourist visa. This section of the book is quite satirical and very funny in places.

In the second part of the book, Massala-Massala is in Paris, but it is nothing like what he has imagined. He is living with a dozen or more other immigrants in what is apparently a single room on the top floor (no elevator) of an eight-story building (which may have been condemned), lit only by a skylight. Gradually, he meets some of the movers and shakers of the immigrant community, who clearly are making their living illegally and, once he has been provided with new false documentation (since tourist visas expire), Moki introduces him to one of the most important movers and shakers who will in turn introduce Massala-Massala, now known as Marcel Bonaventure because that's the name on his papers, into the world of the black market. In this section, Mabanckou paints a picture of African immigrant life in Paris, and Massala-Massala meditates on how he has not lived up to his father's guidance.

I enjoyed this book, and I felt it presented a damning look at postcolonial attraction to the culture and life of the former colonizer but, having read later works by Mabanckou, I think he's become an even more interesting writer as he's written more.

As a side note, I was interested that Mabanckou's epigraph for one of the sections was a quote from a poem by Abdellatif Laâbi, some of whose work I've also recently read.

Excellent review of Blue white red, Alain mabanckou

Blue White Red sounds like an interesting book, although I don't know that I'll be able to read it anytime soon. I assume it was part of your Francophone theme read?

Great review of Blue White Red, Rebecca. I bought it earlier this year, and I may read it before the end of the month for the Reading Globally challenge.

Alain Mabanckou has become one of my favorite African authors, and I enjoyed his most recently translated novel Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty; I'll write a review of it soon.

Thanks, Barry, Lisa, and Darryl. Yes, Lisa, it was part of the theme read over in Reading Globally, but I actually read Memoirs of a Porcupine first and that remains my favorite of the three Mabanckou novels I've read (the second was Broken Glass He is definitely becoming one of my favorite African authors too, Darryl, and I'll be interested in your review of Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty. I liked this one less than the other two, but it was his first and it's always nice to see a writer getting better as he writes more.

Great reviews, Rebecca -- catching up here after a very busy week at work.

Catching up and am quite interested by your experiment in styles (Broken Glass, Rue Du Retour and L'Amour); I might browse the first two but the third goes onto the wishlist.

Thanks, Jane; I'm having a very busy week this week, so I sympathize! And thanks, MJ. I didn't plan it that way, but I certainly have experienced a wide variety of styles. I think I'm ready for some good old-fashioned story telling!

I've fallen a bit behind here. Fabulous review of Onitsha. Based on Desert and The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, Le Clezio jumped high up my list of favorite authors. I recently bought L'Africain (The African - can't get the English touchstone to come up), which is a short autobiographical book on his childhood in Africa. Maybe that's the essay you are looking for?

Thanks, Linda. I am looking forward to reading Desert and yes,L'african is what I was looking for, but I've been too busy to follow up. However, I just checked Amazon and an English translation was just published earlier this month. I'm going to look into it.

80. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French



I read this book because of a recommendation here on LT that assured me that a lot of it was about prewar, pre-revolution China and not just about the gruesome murder of a 19-year-old English schoolgirl. And so it was, and French is a good writer, and I was eager to find out what happened, or what the young woman's father figured out after the police failed at their investigation. And it was a mildly interesting read.

But I guess I felt French was saying, in so many ways, "look at the corruption, look at the vice, ooh, so exotic" and telling the story from the perspective of the English (and to a lesser extent, other Europeans, especially the White Russian refugees from the Soviet Union). You'd almost think the Chinese were only there to complement the Europeans.

There's a district where drinking and drug selling and prostitution go on. How shocking! The local police are corrupt. How terrible! Sometimes the Europeans and Chinese mix. How daring! Many people won't talk to the cops. How surprising! The English want to investigate but have their hands tied by their higher-ups. How unusual! Well, you get the idea. The book relies a lot on the unfamiliarity of most readers with this time and place, and on their being interested in the "exotic" nature of it. But I did read the whole thing.

And PS, the subtitle "How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China" -- I don't think so!

Good review of Midnight in Peking, Rebecca. It doesn't sound like one for my wish list.

Sounds like a story of the 1930s told with 1930s attitudes and clichés. Not one for me either.

Great review Rebecca.

Who says that irony is difficult to detect - I love a bad review.

Loved your good "bad" review of Midnight in Peking. :)

But I did read the whole thing.
LOL!

Thanks, all. I did think maybe I was being overly snarky, but I just couldn't resist.

I don't mind the snarky, I'm just sorry that it was such a bad reading experience for you. I definitely won't go looking for that one!

81. Garnethill by Denise Mina



I had mixed feelings about the first book by Denise Mina I read earlier this month, but I'm glad I didn't give up on her and read this book, her first, and the one that first got the person who recommended Mina to me, RidgewayGirl, enthusiastic about her. I found the damaged personality of the protagonist, Maureen -- who the morning after a night of heavy drinking finds her lover brutally murdered in her living room -- compelling. I enjoyed getting to know many of the other characters, including Maureen's family (mostly bad) and friends (mostly good), as well as a variety of police officers, and I appreciated the way Mina wove in the issues the characters are facing, including sexual abuse, psychiatric and other problems, crime, class, and poverty. There was humor too, and even thought the plot may have bordered on the melodramatic, I will now look for other books by Mina.

I've been reflecting on my third quarter reading, and since I have time today but will have another very busy week, I thought I would post my thoughts today, event though the new quarter doesn't start for two days and I might finish one more book.

First, the highlights (and lowlights) of the quarter. There were a few stretches of no great books, but overall it was a good reading quarter.

Favorite Fiction
The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwartz-Bart
Onitsha by J. M. G. Le Clezio
The Laughing Man by Victor Hugo
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou
The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset
The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Best Nonfiction
Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev

Most Disappointing
(This is a category for books I had higher hopes for, not books I went into with low expectations.)
Red Spectres edited by Muireann Maguire
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz

And now the statistics.

Total books read: 33
25 fiction, 8 nonfiction
11 by women, 21 by men
18 by authors new to me
8 due to LT recommendations/8 for LT group reads
4 on my TBR for more than a year

Country of writer

US, UK, Canada
US: 4 fiction, 4 nonfiction
UK: 4 fiction, 2 nonfiction
Canada: 2 fiction

Africa
Congo 4
Senegal 2

Caribbean
Guadeloupe 1

Europe
Czech Republic 1
France 3
Norway 1
Russia 2

Middle East/North Africa
Morocco 2

(My math is off somewhere, but I'm too lazy to figure out which titles I missed)

For the next quarter, I expect to read a lot of books from South America for the Reading Globally theme read, to continue reading books from France, and to continue my generally spontaneous method of selecting what I'll read next.

Nice wrap up for the quarter. I was able to zip through your favorites and see if I had missed any good ones. :-) I do something similar at the end of the year, but haven't done it quarterly. I think stats like this are always interesting.

Thanks, Lisa. It gets so overwhelming at the end of the year that I started taking a look at what I was reading at shorter intervals. Not that it really changes how I read, since I nearly always pick what I'm going to read based on my mood at the moment, but it's informative anyway to see the gaps in my reading. I also find it interesting to see at the end of the year whether books that were favorites in earlier quarters still seem so compelling after time has passed.

I nearly always pick what I'm going to read based on my mood at the moment

Me too.

but it's informative anyway to see the gaps in my reading

And to see trends. Some years a particular country's literature seems to dominate. At other times, I see how one book led me to another and another. The connections can be interesting.

interesting to see at the end of the year whether books that were favorites in earlier quarters still seem so compelling after time has passed

I know. Sometimes I love a book, but can't remember what I liked about it a year later. If a book stirs my emotions, but doesn't have a lot of substance, I find it tends to fade in my memory. It jazzed me at the moment, but doesn't last.

Some years a particular country's literature seems to dominate.

That's certainly true for me this year, with France (and French-speaking countries) dominating. That's for two reasons: my continuing Zolathon has gotten me interested in French literature more generally and my involvement in the Author Theme Reads group, which is focusing on French authors this year, and the Reading Globally group which had last quarter's theme read on Francophone authors from outside Europe. I expect to continue reading a lot of French literature because there were so many authors and many of them were extremely prolific.

At other times, I see how one book led me to another and another.

That's true for me too. This year, reading one book about how a language was decoded, The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox led me to take Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe off the TBR, where it's been for more than 20 years, and that may get me to read more about the Maya, an interest of mine since I was in college. Similarly, reading The Greenlanders got me to read Kristin Lavransdatter, and that made me more interested in Morality Play by Barry Unsworth, and all of those in turn will not only get me to read more Unsworth but also may make me take theree nonfiction books about medieval times off my shelves (where they've been for decades): A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, The Black Death by Phillip Ziegler, and The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johann Huizinga. And for just one more example, reading Transit by Anna Seghers led me to Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry, also a long-term resident on my TBR shelves. I could go on . . . but that's why my reading is so unplannable.

Wow, 55 posts on this thread alone since I went away. No wonder it's taking me so long to catch up!

I finished 419 just before I left (not yet reviewed) and was interested in your comments. I suspect I liked it more than you did. I'll have to follow up with Jane's recommendation of The Interpreters as I have really liked other Soyinka works I've read. As you say above, one book definitely leads to another.

Great review of Onitsha. This is one of those authors I always plan to read and never do. Now I have to correct that.

Enjoyed your review of Midnight in Peking, which is a book I still want to read, just for fun. I like reading those old books just for the contrast with then and now, a sort of "where are they now?"

Also enjoyed reading about Garnethill, which I read while I was away, also based on RidgewayGirl's recommendation.

Glad I'm not the only one who finds long time TBR occupants. It's always a jolt to find the receipt and discover where you were, in both senses, when you got the book.

After nine weeks, amazon.ca finally informed me they cannot supply Marguerite Duras, nor were they able to provide Dorothy Richardson. Frustrating, as both authors were ordered, so I didn't look elsewhere.

Great explanation of the progression of some of your reading for this year.

Nice to see you back, Sassy, and I hope you had a good vacation. I've had a crazy week (second in a row) and it will be at least tomorrow before I have the time to catch up with everyone's threads.

I am going to read a book called Oil on Water by Helon Habila which someone recommended on another thread to follow up on 419; it is winging its way to me from Amazon.

I first encountered Le Clezio when he was an Author Theme Reads author a few years ago and I read The Prospector. I bought Onitsha after that, along with Desert, which I also hope to read soon.

By the way, Midnight in Peking is not an old book, although of course it's about the 1930s, but the author focused on the British because that's the story he was telling. I guess I just would have been more interested in what was going on in Peking more generally with the Japanese at the doorstep and Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao roaming around the Chinese countryside. It is an interesting portrait of a world that no longer exist.

Good luck getting Duras and Richardson. Is it too expensive shipping-wise to order them from Amazon in the US?

82. Case Closed by Patrik Ouředník



About two thirds of the way through this fun but mystifying book, Ouředník writes:

"Reader! does our story seem rambling? Do you have the feeling that the plot is at a standstill? That, generally speaking, nothing much is going on in the book you now hold in your hands? Do not despair: Either the author's a fool or you are; the odds are even. Others have died and so shall we, we'll die, oy vey, alack, alas! Who on earth knows how on earth it will turn out? Sometimes a person gets tangled up in his own life without realizing it; and the same is true of characters in novels.

You ask: how will it all end? But that, dear readers, we cannot reveal. We began this story with no clear aim or preconceived idea. How it will turn out, we do not know; whether it will turn out, we haven't a clue. . . . ." p. 90

So what is this book about? On the surface, it is the story of an elderly man who once wrote a book and who lives in what appears to be an apartment building for retired people, a building in which there was a fire that might have been arson, his son who may be somewhat retarded, a cabin they might have owned in the mountains where a crime might have been committed decades ago, and a police detective who is apparently lackadaisically investigating. Chess is somehow involved too, and sex, and some pointed remarks about the Czech and Czech writers.

I read this book almost a week ago, but haven't had time to review it until now, and it's been puzzling me all this time. It seems to be, in some way, about life and death, and I think it tries to mirror the randomness and sometimes meaninglessness of life, and I also think it may be about memory, and how we remember what happened in earlier stages of our life. But really, as Ouředník says above, I haven't a clue.

I did enjoy it, although perhaps not as much as Ouředník's The Opportune Moment, 1855, which I really liked when I read it earlier this year and which inspired me to get this book too. Parts of it are very funny, and Ouředník (and his translator) really have a way with words, as the excerpt I quoted above shows. I really wonder how the translator went about translating all the wordplay; it read very well in English but I do wonder in cases like a line which reads "he couldn't have gotten laid if he'd been an egg," which is very funny in English, but could Czech possibly have the same expression or is this the translator taking a different joke in Czech and finding an English equivalent? I'm not complaining about this because all the wordplay was a lot of fun and so I was impressed by the translation, but I'm just interested in how translation works.

"which is very funny in English, but could Czech possibly have the same expression or is this the translator taking a different joke in Czech and finding an English equivalent?"

Thought provoking.... :)

I'd never heard of the author before, but this one goes on the wishlist (along with The Opportune Moment). I love that quote!

Wow! New author to explore. I, too, love the quote. Who translated your edition? I checked a couple of sites like this one, but didn't find the laid egg proverb.

Steven, I discovered The Opportune Moment, 1855 in a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts last fall, and I read it this year during the Reading Globally theme read on Eastern Europe. That's what made me get this book, and I'll probably get another, Europeana, which has also been translated into English.

Lisa, Alex Zucker translated this book, as well as the earlier one I read. Are you familiar with him? ETA i think you would like Ourednik.

Case Closed, Patrik Ourednik sounds like a fun read. Any hints of senile dementia in the rambling story telling?

Very funny, Barry, but no, not at all!

83. La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas



Plots and counterplots. Betrayal and friendship. Poisonings and swordplay. Romance and intrigue. Swashbuckling knights and beautiful women. Treachery and loyalty. What's not to like?

I certainly enjoyed this tale, set in Paris in 1572. The wedding of Henry, King of Navarre, a Huguenot (Protestant) and Margot, the sister of the Catholic French King Charles, is set to take place among much celebration -- and among a plan to massacre the Huguenots assembled for the wedding. Thus begins a roller coaster ride of plots and love affairs, religious and political intrigue, vicious hatred and stalwart honor, all loosely based on history. Suffice it to say Dumas keeps the plot rolling along, but he also creates many memorable characters especially Margot herself, her murderous and power-hungry mother, Catherine of Medici, and her mother's "perfumer" (i.e., poisoner). It is interesting that these two women are so strong and important in an early 19th century novel.

The notes in my Oxford World Classics edition were very helpful, as was the introduction, which pointed out that the early nineteenth century saw a popular hunger for action-oriented, melodramatic works, and for novels that dealt with France's history. The notes also indicates where Dumas strayed from the historical record.

While I found this book hard to put down, I think a little goes a long way, at least for me. I do plan to read more Dumas, including The Count of Monte Cristo, but probably not until next summer since it is such a tome and because I think I need a rest between Dumas novels.

84. Exile by Denise Mina



I was able to finish this novel, the second in Mina's Garnethill trilogy, rapidly because I was stuck at the car shop yesterday and couldn't concentrate on my other books because of the blaring TV. This book continues the story of Maureen O'Donnell from the first volume, and I was especially glad not just to see her again but also to read more about her family and friends, as Mina is so good at creating characters as well as setting the backdrop of economically troubled Glasgow and dealing with issues of mental illness, sexual abuse, and alcoholism in a matter-of-fact way. In this novel, Maureen becomes involved in trying to find out who murdered an alcoholic former resident of a women's shelter where her friend Leslie works, and in doing so encounters a variety of scary and dangerous people both in Glasgow and in London. I am looking forward to the third volume of the trilogy because I find the characters, flawed as they are, so appealing.

On Friday, I'm heading up to Boston for the weekend on the train. Of course, I'm already thinking about what I'm going to take with me for this wonderful reading opportunity. So far, I'm definitely bringing along The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which I'm in the midst of, and considering the following.

The Lover and Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras
The Hare by Cesar Aira
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
Oil on Water by Helon Habila
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

Maybe I'll think of some others by Friday morning, which is when I'll make my final decision.

Of course, I expect to do some serious book buying while I'm there, in both the Harvard Bookstore and the Harvard Coop. I got some real finds the last time I was there.

I haven't read any Dumas since I was in high school. I really should branch out into some of his lesser known books.

Have fun in Bean Town! I envy both your book laden journey and the shopping. New England will be so pretty this time of year.

Thanks, Lisa. I've had so many really busy weeks I'm looking forward to the reading, seeing relatives, and relaxing.

Your reviews are so enjoyable to read and have the unfortunate effect of having me add books to my wishlist at a ridiculous rate. I'm going to look for both Case Closed and La Reine Margot, although in the case of the latter, also because I liked the movie.

Glad you're enjoying the Garnethill trilogy. I liked how Mina made entirely likeable and sympathetic characters out of people society hates.

Have a great trip Rebecca. I am driving up to Massachusetts today, and then driving to Maine tomorrow for the long weekend. Kind of wish I was able to take a train, although my daughter is driving from her house to Maine, so I may be able to read then. My grandson will be with me for most of the ride today, so I will not be able to listen to my book. There will some good reading time once we get to the island.

Thanks, Kay and Colleen. One more busy day . . . Colleen, I envy you being able to read in a car; it makes me carsick! Buses too; that's one of the reason I love the train.

I read Queen Margot several years ago and enjoyed it a lot. I was really surprised at the forwardness of the women.

The Count of Monte Cristo is less rolicking, but much deeper. I think you'll enjoy it.

Have a great trip and a productive shopping experience!

Have a great weekend in Boston, Rebecca! I went to the Harvard Coop for the first time this spring, and I was far more impressed with its selection of books (and the friendliness of its staff) than Harvard Book Store (whose employees made the staff at the Strand seem cheerful in comparison).

I'll leave for London tomorrow night instead of tonight, and I'm also debating on what to bring with me, knowing that I'll buy 15-20+ books while I'm there. I think I've settled on Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink, Proper Doctoring: A Book for Patients and Their Doctors by David Mendel, which NYRB reissued last month, and The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa. I have several books on my Kindle that I'm planning to read this month as well, so that should be plenty.

I was thinking of Oil on Water after reading all these 419 reviews. I'm catching up and inspired by your review of Onitsha. It makes me want to read more by le Clezio, including that book.

Thanks, Darryl. The Coop has an incredibly broad selection of books, and the Harvard Book Store has deteriorated, in my opinion. I don't pay much attention to the friendliness of the staff at bookstores one way or the other, because I generally like to browse on my own. Where it matters is at the small bookstore I go to a lot; there the staff actually make suggestions to me! Have a great trip to London. I loved The Green House but it requires close attention (and even then it's hard to tell what's going on).

Dan, I'm definitely taking that with me, and thanks for the comment about Onitsha. I may end up bringing the other Le Clezio I own, Desert with me on the trip instead of one or more of the others.

Still debating what books to bring . . .

How long is that train trip Rebecca?

Nice to see you enjoying the Alexandre Dumas.

Not long enough to read all those books, I fervently hope, Barry! It varies between 4 and 4 1/2 hours depending on how many stops the train makes. I'm too cheap to take the "fast" train which is only about half an hour faster and costs three times as much, which they try to justify by saying the seats are nicer. I'd rather spend the money on books!

Besides, a faster train means less reading time!

I need to try another Le Clezio. I recently read Wandering Star and was underwhelmed, but I'm not sure it is his best work. I'm not ready to give up on him altogether.

Rebecca - Can you think of anything you'd rather spend money on than books? Anyone? Anyone?

This is such a great thread!

I'm back but will have to post my book haul and reading reports later today, hopefully this morning, as I have some other things to take care of first.

Lisa, I haven't read Wandering Star but I highly recommend both the Le Clezios I've read, The Prospector as well as Onitsha.

Merrikay: Very funny! Very true! And thanks.

So . . . first the haul, all from the Harvard Coop because I spent so much time browsing there I didn't have time to go anywhere else.

Forest of a Thousand Daemons by D. O. Fagunwa -- said to be the first novel written in Yoruban, translated by Wole Soyinka

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers -- said to be the forerunner of the British spy story

Europeana by Patrik Ouředník -- because I've been meaning to buy it and haven't seen it in my favorite NYC stores

Zero by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão -- because it looked very strange

Mouchette by Georges Bernanos -- an NYRB I haven't seen before

Deep History; The Architecture of Past and Present by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail -- a pretty academic book that I don't know when I'll read, but I have an interest in prehistory

I also made a mistake and bought Black Snow which looked to be a book by Mikhail Bulgakov I had never heard of. But then, by one of those coincidences that occasionally happened, I started Bulgakov's A Dead Man's Memoir on the train back to New York and the introduction referred to Black Snow and I looked it up on my iPhone and found that Black Snow and A Dead Man's Memoir are one and the same novel, just in different translations, and are also known as A Theatrical Novel! So BOOK OFFER: If anyone would like a copy of the Black Snow translation, send me a PM with your address and I'll mail it to you.

Also, when I got home, two books I'd ordered from Amazon had arrived: The African, a childhood memoir by J. M. G. le Clezio and Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells, which I bought because of Barry's recent enthusiastic review.

because it looked very strange

That sounds like my approach to book selection.

Nice haul, with lots of variety!

85. Oil on Water by Helon Habila



Part adventure story, part an exploration of environmental and political activism and violence, this is at heart a tale of the devastation -- environmental, cultural, and personal -- wrought by the Nigerian oil industry and its inherent colonialism even in a post-colonial era. I became interested in reading this novel by a Nigerian writer (who lives and teaches in the US) after reading 419 by a Canadian author.

The strength of this book is its portrait of the Niger River delta: the intricate and confusing network of waterways, fouled by oil, and the dead fish floating in the; the abandoned villages and those destroyed by the war between the military and the militants who challenge the oil companies' control of the area; the destruction of the river-based culture and economy' the histories of some of the people who live in the delta; and, always, the flares from the oil wells, flickering everywhere. I was also impressed by the way Habila interweaves the past and the present of the story line, so the reader learns the history of the characters and how they got to be where they are in way that loops back and forth, occasionally confusingly, in time.

That said, there were aspects of the book that grated on me. The narrator, Rufus, is a young journalist, sent originally as part of a small group of journalists who volunteered to meet the militants who had kidnapped the wife of a British oil company engineer to verify that she is indeed still alive and eager to be returned once the ransom is paid. As the novel progresses, Rufus and his idol Zaq, formerly the most famous journalist in Nigeria and now an alcoholic and ill has-been, venture deeper into the delta in search not only of the British woman and the "Professor," a leader of the militants, but also of the story and the deeper "meaning" of the story. Although complications ensue, this allows Habila, a former journalist himself, to let Rufus interview all sorts of people, thereby providing their life histories to the reader. This seemed a little forced and convenient to me, although I found their stories interesting. I also found some twists of the plot a little convenient and not entirely believable.

Much in this book turns out to be not as it first appear; as Rufus says in the very first words of the book:

"I am walking down a well-lit path, with incidents neatly labeled and dated, but when I reach halfway memory lets go of my hand, and a fog rises and covers the faces and places, and I am left clawing about in the dark, lost, and I have to make up the obscured moments as I go along, make up the faces and places, even the emotions. Sometimes, to keep on course, I have to return to more recognizable landmarks, and then, with the safety net under me, I can leap onto less certain terrain.

. . .

The fog lifts as suddenly as it descended, and the sun shines brightly again, and once more I am on sure ground, but I know the fog can return again, get into memory's eyes, blinding it momentarily."

86. The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor



For the many years since I was first entranced by Patrick Leigh Fermor's tale of his travels, on foot, starting at the age of 18, from Holland to Czechoslovakia in A Time of Gifts and then from Hungary to the Rumanian and Bulgarian border in Between the Woods and the Water, I , like his countless other admirers, have yearned for the third volume which would take him to his destination of Constantinople. And here, after his death, it is -- sort of. Leigh Fermor's literary executors, dear friends, took his early drafts of the material, enhanced by some of his own editing in his waning years, and turned into this still incomplete volume which ends in mid-sentence several days before he reached his goal. As his friends and editors note in their introduction:

". . . on his death in 2011 he left behind a manuscript of the final narrative whose shortcomings or elusiveness had tormented him for so many years. He never completed it as he would have wished. The reasons for this are uncertain. . . . The Broken Road may not precisely be the 'third volume" that so torment him, but it contains, at least, the shape and scent of the promised book, and here his journey must rest. pp. xii and xxi.

It is, of course, delightful to be on the road again with the youthful Patrick Leigh Fermor, with his fascination with and erudition about everything from natural history to the ancient movements of peoples, the individual people he meets (from aristocrats and diplomats to beekeepers, woodburners, fishermen, shepherds, and monks), art and architecture, wine and food, religion, charming girls and women, and drinking and conversation. His perceptions are not as finely tuned, as energetically shaped and edited, as in the earlier volumes, and the reader gains more insight into his memory and writing processes, personal commentary that perhaps was ruthlessly excised as those volumes were extensively written and rewriiten.

Nonetheless, there is much that is splendid in this book: the shock of the glittering nightlife of Bucharest after months in small villages, mountains, and plains; the dog that followed him and bayed at the moon; astounding dances in a cave filled with goats on the edge of the Black Sea; the wildness and solitude of much of the country he walks through. And over this, our knowledge that this was a world about to be torn apart forever by war, by nazism and then communism and then modernity, a world that is no more.

At the end, the editors have appended a section from Leigh Fermor's diary that covers three weeks he spent, just after reaching Constantinople, walking through the breathtakingly beautiful and astoundingly rugged peninsula of Mount Athos, where he stayed at the diverse monasteries that perch on the rocky outcrops. Written in great detail (although apparently edited multiple times), this section has an immediacy and a voice that contrasts with the longer journey that precedes it.

I am glad Patrick Leigh Fermor's literary executors produced this volume. It doesn't stand up to the two earlier ones but, as a devotee, I am grateful for their efforts.

Although I have read your reviews of the earlier volumes and been tempted, this review has pushed me over the top, and I am adding A Time of Gifts to my wishlist.

What a wonderful haul! I too had to laugh when I read that you chose a book because "it looked very strange".

Excellent review of The Broken Road; From iron gates to mount Athos. It sounds worth reading for us Patrick Leigh Fermor admirers.

I noticed that you had got The Riddle of the Sands in your book haul. You need to be careful because it is claimed to be a "Future War" novel and so qualifies as science fiction. Whatever it is, it has a good reputation and I will be reading it sooner rather than later.

Lisa, I may have spoken glowingly of PLF in various posts, but I read the first two volumes pre-LT, so I haven't reviewed them here. Do start with the first one, A Time of Gifts -- it's available in an NYRB edition. By the way, I had to order this third volume from England; it hasn't been published in the US yet.

And Steven and Lisa, I don't usually buy books just because they're strange, but I looked at a couple of titles by this author, who I had never heard of, and this seemed to be one of the two considered his best. By strange, I mean that it doesn't seem to rely entirely on narrative, but seems to include "newspaper" clippings, boxes and sidebars, etc. -- i.e., the pages look strange!

Barry, do you think there are two books called The Riddle of the Sands? This one seems to be mostly a spy story with some nautical stuff thrown in. I have to admit I bought it partly because Childers was himself a gunrunner for the IRA and was executed; however, his son became president of Ireland!

Oh, I misremembered, I must have been remembering your posts as reviews. I do remember you talking about them glowingly somewhere, sometime, but that is as close as memory serves! I'm hoping to get a gift card for my birthday. Maybe I'll pick up A Time of Gifts then. It's an appropriate title for a celebration.

I have an NYRB book that is entirely three line news snippets. Have you read it? Let's see, it's called... ah, Novel in Three Lines. I think that one qualifies as strange. And Hrabal's Dancing lessons for the advanced in age was one sentence!

I think I would love Patrick Leigh Fermor...

Enjoyed your review of Oil on Water and your way of trying to explain the flaws. It's an enjoyable and interesting book, but it's not really all that complex.

Sounds like you have fun bookshopping!

Oil on Water sounds good even with its flaws. I love the excerpt you chose.

#105 it is the same book.

Lisa, I don't have that three-line NYRB although I've seen it in stores. I do have the Hrabel on the TBR.

Dan, it is hard not to love PLF. And thanks, about Oil on Water -- yours was one of the reviews that prompted me to get it.

Merrkikay, the excerpt is not typical of the book, so perhaps I shouldn't have used it although I wanted to illustrate that things are not always as they seem. Most of the writing is much more straightforward.

Barry, how strange. There's no indication of the SF aspect on the back cover of the book . . .

>Patrick Leigh Fermor's tale of his travels, on foot
oh your review makes these volumes sound interesting. A Time of Gifts goes onto the wishlist.

Sounds like you had a great weekend getaway.

Very nice haul Rebecca - some really varied titles there. Europeana looks interesting, and the pre-history one as well. Thanks so much for the review of The Broken Road - I'm tempted... I did enjoy A Time of Gifts on the whole but I think I had bigged it up in my mind too much before I read it and felt slightly disappointed at certain aspects of it. I didn't read the second book yet. Mmm, food for thought here, for certain.

MJ, It's years since I read the first two PLF volumes, but I was just entranced by them. Sorry A Time of Gifts didn't quite work for you, Paul; I had never heard of it when I read it so I came to it with a completely open mind. As for Europeana, since I've read two other books by Ourednik this year, I've been interested in getting that one.

Sorry to have missed your trip to Beantown, would have liked to connect if it had been possible.

I agree with much of what you had to say about Oil on Water. I'd still like to read his Waiting for an Angel as I've read Oil and Measuring Time.

Have you read the latest Adichie yet? Your monthly listings suggest not. I'm only going to say that I was disappointed in the half I did read. Plenty of rave reviews for it here on LT though.

Finished the Jennifer Haigh collection, thank you! I will eventually have some comments on my thread, but I enjoyed it (am trying to write some comments on the books I've read in an effort to catch up--but, there's a backlog to do).

Nice to see you here, Lois. It was a whirlwind trip -- saw cousins, other relatives, went to bookstores. Mostly stayed in Cambridge. But if I come for longer, it would be great to see you.

I haven't read Americanah yet. As you know, I was a big (maybe tiresome?) booster of Half of a Yellow Sun, but I was disappointed in her short story collection, and so although I'll probably read Americanah, I'm waiting for the paperback.

Glad you liked the Jennifer Haigh.

87. A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel by Mikhail Bulgakov



In this short semi-autobiographical novel, Bulgakov satirizes the famous Moscow Art Theater and his experiences transforming his novel The White Guard (about an upper class family from Kiev during the civil war, from a very White perspective) into a play, The Days of the Turbins, that could be acceptable to the censors (indeed, even Stalin became a fan of the play). The conceit of the novel is that the novelist turned playwright Maksudov, before he threw himself off the Tesepnoi Bridge, sent these memoirs to the writer, hence "a dead man's memoir"; it has also been translated under the title Black Snow, which is the title of Maksudov's play in the novel.

The novel is clearly extremely witty, although I had to rely on the notes to see who all the characters are really based on, and I'm sure this would have been much more fun for readers familiar with the cast of characters of the 1930s Moscow theater scene. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and even laughed aloud at certain points. Even without having a grasp of who the "real" people were (although one of the co-directors of the Theater is Stanislavsky, famous for developing "method" acting), I appreciated the insight into the craziness of the theater: the dislike of the two founders for each other (and the absence of one of them, although he sends telegrams with advice), the difficulty of staging new works featuring younger characters with the aging actors instead of always performing classics, the peculiarities of individual actors, the censor's desire to completely change the characters and the plot of the play, the amazing abilities of the typist/office manager, the jealousy of other writers, although one gives him sage advice about dealing with the censor (who, by the way, is called the Head of Internal Order).

" 'What you ought to have done is not argue,' Bombardov said quietly, 'and reply like this: 'I am very grateful to you for your guidance, Ivan Vasilievich, I will definitely put it into effect.' You must not object, do you understand that or not? At Sivstev Vrazhek Lane nobody objects."

'How is that possible? Nobody ever objects?'

'Nobody, not ever,' Bombardov replied, tapping out each word. 'Nobody ever has, nobody does, and nobody ever will.'" p. 113

The book gathers speed as it goes on, and it is occasionally difficult to remember all the characters, so the total effect is of barely contained chaos and the insanity (and worse) of the theater world and the effects of the Soviet system on it. This book doesn't stand up to The Master and Margarita or The White Guard but it is full of entertaining yet horrifying scenes of the creative life, such as it was, of 1920s and 30s Moscow.

Enjoyed your review of A Dead Man's Memoir A slice of Soviet artistic life?

Just catching up, Rebecca. So much to like in your reviews.

Loved catching up on your thread, Rebecca. Always enjoy your diverse reading choices and the great reviews. The two Laabi’s appeal, and Case Closed had me laughing out loud. Thanks!

Thanks, Barry, Colleen, and akeela, and glad I could make you laugh!

A very nice review of A Dead Man's Memoir. The Master and Margarita is one of my all-time favorites, and I liked Heart of a Dog too, so I think I'll take your advice and look for The White Guard next.

Terrific review. Wondering if I should read White Guard, would need to get myself I the right state of mind.

#110 - flattered my review led you to Oil on Water. Avaland led me there - not just her review, she sent me the book!

The White Guard is terrific -- it is much more straightforward than The Master and Margarita but compelling nevertheless.

88. Resolution by Denise Mina



In the conclusion of Mina's Garnethill trilogy, Maureen is forced to confront several of her demons at the same time. The trial of the man who gruesomely killed her lover in her apartment is about to start and she has to testify at it, the father who abused her as a child is back in town, and her sister is about to have a baby, frightening her about what her father might do to the baby. Then, because of a good deed she does for a strange old woman who also works in the down-at-the-heels market where Maureen and her friend Leslie are selling illegal cigarettes, she uncovers what is really going on at a brothel. Fortunately for Maureen, because a lot of creepy things are happening, her friendship with Leslie has been repaired, she has her new friend Kilty, and her brother Liam still is her only connection to her family, although her newly sober mother keeps calling her.

As with the earlier novels in this trilogy, the strengths of this one are the characters, the portrayal of the underside of Glasgow, and the pacing. The plot was interesting enough to keep me reading although, especially at the end, some of it strained my credulity, including the impact of various plot developments on Maureen. But I will read more Mina.

The Garnethill trilogy sounds like something I will enjoy. I added to my wishlist a while ago.

Rebecca, the Bulgakov sounds fabulous! Have you read Stanislavski's memoires? They might appear to be a minority interest, but are actually quite wonderful, in the same way that Nabokov's are, for example: a glimpse of pre-revolutionary Russia. ...My Life in art, I think it is.

and thanks for writing about Paddy Leigh Fermor. He is always much missed.

Your Bulgakov review reminds me that I want to get some more works by him: I've read the two I have. The White Guard and Heart of a Dog are on my wishlist.

Thanks for stopping by, Murr. It would be interesting to read Stanislavsky's memoirs since he is savaged by Bulgakov in this novel! I'm sure he'd have a different perspective. And, Lisa, I have to get Heart of a Dog too.

Colleen, I think you might enjoy the Garnethill trilogy.

Glad your trip to Boston was such a success.
Bulgakov's A Dead Man's Memoir sounds delightful -- off to check Amazon to see if they have a copy available.

Great stuff here as usual, Rebecca!

Great haul from the Harvard Coop. After my first visit there this past spring I doubt that I'll ever go back to the Harvard Book Store without a good reason to do so. Forest of a Thousand Daemons sounds interesting, and I love your rationale for buying Zero ("because it looked very strange")! I own Anonymous Celebrity and Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, and I plan to read one of them for the South American literature theme in Reading Globally.

I'll post my London book haul to my neglected Club Read thread shortly.

Nice review of Oil on Water. It sounds as though you liked it considerably better than 419. I think I'll hold off on adding it to my wish list, though.

Great review of The Broken Road. I almost bought it when I went to Daunt Books, a fabulous travel bookstore in Marylebone, but I held off since I haven't read anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor yet. I do have A Time of Gifts on my Kindle, and I'll probably read it sometime next year.

Your review of A Dead Man's Memoir reminds me that I still haven't read The Master and Margarita or The White Guard yet.

Thanks, Jane and Darryl! Glad you had a good trip to London, Darryl, and you certainly got a great haul there too (saw it on your 75 thread).

I did likeOil on Water better, largely because it was by a Nigerian writer, but I felt there were some things that were better in 419, such as the atmospheric feel of the waterways in the delta. Also, you should definitely start PLF with the first book, A Time of Gifts, and I think you should read M&M or The White Guard before A Dead Man's Memoir. Didn't you read A Country Doctor's Notebook by Bulgakov a few years ago?

You're right, Rebecca. I did read A Country Doctor's Notebook, and I did like it.

89. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa



Although I'm a big fan of Vargas Llosa, and although this book has been on my shelves for 30 years (I still wrote my name and the date in books back in June 1983), I never read it until now. And what a delightful book it is! Vargas Llosa intersperses semi-autobiographical chapters about the 18-year-old narrator's life and his budding romance with his 32-year-old divorced aunt by marriage with chapters that the reader eventually realizes are episodes in the radio serials written by a Bolivian scriptwriter recently hired by the radio station at which the narrator works.

In the Aunt Julia chapters, the narrator, whose name is Mario but is generally called Marito or Varguesita, wants above all to be a writer; nonetheless, he is somewhat lackadaisically going to law school to please his family, while working as news editor and writer at the radio station and hanging out with his friends. He lives in Lima with his grandparents, as his parents are in the US, and spends a great deal of time with members of his large extended family. And that is how he meets Julia, who has come from Bolivia to Lima to visit her sister, the wife of one of the narrator's uncles, to recover from her divorce and find a new husband. One of the delights of these sections are the narrator's sense of fun, as well as romance and responsibility, and some parts are almost laugh-out-loud funny, especially as this part of the plot builds to its conclusion. I also enjoyed the descriptions of how the radio serials are recorded, and the efforts of the sound effects man in particular. The characters Vargas Llosa creates are wonderful.

The chapters representing the work by the master, and eccentric, Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, are more puzzling. They start off as fairly standard soap opera fare -- romance with a whiff of incest, rape, etc. -- and gradually become weirder and weirder and darker and darker. At one point I was confused because a name seemed to be changed, and gradually (from the narrator's chapters), I learned that the radio listeners were confused by this too, as characters seem to be moving from one serial to another, changing lives, professions, and more, and dying in one serial to be resurrected in another. Through this, the reader sees Pedro Camacho's breakdown before the listeners and the radio station owners start discussing it.

Although both the narrator chapters and the serial chapters move along at a brisk pace, with well drawn characters and well developed plots, there is another aspect to this book, and that is the nature of writing. The narrator frequently discusses stories he is trying to write, and of course is fascinated by how Camacho works, so part of the story is the portrait of the aspiring writer as a young man. And this is probably semi-autobiographical as well. The last chapter, which I felt a little tacked on, reveals what happens when the older author, who has been living in Europe, visits Peru and runs into some of his old friends, some who have risen higher in the world, and some who have fallen. It ties up some loose ends, but I felt the novel could have ended before this.

All in all, this book was a lot of fun.

In my case Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was the first MVL novel I read, and it led to way to several others. Look how different the cover on my edition is. You'd never guess they were the same novel.

Mine was the first US paperback edition, and it was practically still the 70s. It cost $3.95!

Have there been different translations of Aunt Julia?

30 years on your bookshelves; is that some kind of record. I probably have books older than that on my shelves, but if I have I will never read them. Loved your review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which sounds like a lot of fun.

Charmed by your name and date from 30 years ago. Terrific review.

Lisa, my translation is by Helen Lane and I don't see any other obvious English-language translator possibilities on the list of Other Authors on the main book page, so I think not.

Barry, I don't know if that is a record for books on my shelves that I haven't read. I have books going back to the 70s and even the 60s, but since I was in school/college until the mid-70s most of those are books I read (or didn't read) for classes. I'm sure I have some books I haven't read from the late 70s and early 80s, but I'd have to go through my shelves to find them. In some cases, I've had books for a long time because I kept trying to read them for years, and then had to buy new editions when I finally wanted to read them because the old one was falling apart; The Magic Mountain is a case in point, and I still visualize it with the yellow cover of the copy I had for decades, rather than the bland cover of the copy I read.

   

In that case, I bought the book in 1972 and probably succeeded in reading it (in the other edition) in the early 2000s, so that would also be 30 years.

And Dan, thanks.

Oh, I have books like that on my shelves too. At one point in the mid 70s, I determined to read all the unread novels alphabetically by author -- I think I got through the B's. Still better to know that one has something available to read than not ;-)

Someone asked me how many unread books I have at home the other day. When I replied about 2000 she said "Oh so you never have to go to the library!" What is wrong with her? And every time I see her she is reading so I thought she would know better.

LOL Merrikay

Alphabetically, Jane?!!! I'm impressed by your organization! And I love having more books than I could ever read -- at least most of the time!

Merrikay, I have no idea how many unread books I have since my "Hope to Read Soon" collection (which currently contains 572 books) mostly includes recent acquisitions (i.e., post-LT). It would be a monumental task to go through my entire library and determine which I've never read, albeit being at least possible now that I have everything cataloged in LT.

It's the librarian in my soul.....

Nice review of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Rebecca. Have you now read all of MVL's novels?

Thanks, Darryl. There are a few I haven't read yet, including The Way to Paradise and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I also have his autobiography, A Fish in the Water, and a book of essays, Letters to a Young Novelist, on the TBR.

90. The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina



The first book by Denise Mina I read was the first volume of this Detective Alex Morrow series and I was intrigued enough to start her Garnethill trilogy even though the Alex Morrow book, Still Midnight, didn't wow me. I'm glad I did, because I loved that trilogy, and I liked this second Alex Morrow a lot better than the first. Maybe it's because I now like Mina's writing so much, but I found the story a lot more interesting, dealing not as much with the brutal murder of a young woman as with the damaged lives of several of the characters and the impact of parental neglect. As always with Mina, it is the characters and the setting that stand out, not just Alex and her colleagues and family but also the young murderers and their families. (This is not a spoiler because it happens in the first few pages.)

>147 rebeccanyc: You have already put Denise Mina on my radar, but happy to see you enjoying another.

You've convinced me to read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter which for some reason I've avoided, probably due to a silly mental link with Travels with My Aunt. I've also added A Dead Man's Memoir to my list. Does it tie into The Stray Dog Cabaret at all?

91. The African by J.-M. G. Le Clézio



In this brief, haunting, perceptive, and needless to say beautifully written memoir, Le Clézio searches for a way to understand his father's life, and the sharp dividing line World War II created in it. Like the young boy in Onitsha, Le Clézio was born in France at the beginning of the war, while his father was in Africa, and didn't meet him until years later when he, with his mother and slightly older brother (not a character in the novel), rejoined his father in Africa. Unlike the father in the novel, Le Clézio's was French (although born in Mauritius, which at the time was a British colony but had originally been a French one; when he was a boy, the family was evicted from their house and had leave Mauritius) and a doctor.

In the first two chapters, Le Clézio describes his own introduction to Africa as an 8-year-old, and it was interesting to read about experiences that were then included, in a transmuted way, in Onitsha.

"So the days in Ogoja had become my treasure, the luminous past that I could not lose. I recalled the blaze of light on the red earth, the sun that cracked the roads, the barefoot race through the savannah all the way to the termite fortresses, the thunderstorms rising in the evening, the nights filled with sounds, with cries, our female cat making love with the tigrillos on the sheet metal roof, the torpor that set in after fever, the cold coming in under the mosquito nets at dawn. All that heat, that burning, that tingling." p. 16

But most of the book is about his father. Offended by the class-conscious rigidity of the British medical establishment, after receiving his medical degree in England he went first to what was then British Guiana and then in 1928 to Africa, to remote regions in Cameroon and Nigeria where he was the only white man and where he was far from colonial outposts and attitudes. Later, after he married Le Clézio's mother, she joined him there, and they would travel by foot and on horseback for days at time. The descriptions of the country and the people are beautiful and fascinating. It was a world as little touched by colonialism as life in a colonized country could be, so Le Clézio's parents experienced the people and their culture as they had more or less always lived. Hating colonialism, they were open to the world they found themselves in.

What Le Clézio explores is how the man who could be so engaged with this "treasure of humanity" could turn into the rigid disciplinarian that Le Clézio experienced when he came to Africa and met his father for the first time. He attributes this first of all to the war. Le Clézio's mother returned to France to give birth to her children and they were stranded there by the war; although his father made a superhuman effort to get to France and bring them back to safety in Africa, he was unable to reach them or communicate with hem and must have lived in an agony of worry. Le Clézio also looks at the position his father was assigned to after the war, closer to colonial centers, not in the remote, freer regions. "Then my father discovered -- after all those years of feeling close to the Africans, like a relative, a friend -- that the doctor was just another instrument of colonial power, no different from the policeman, the judge, or the soldier." And he looks at what it meant, both for him and his father, not to have had those eight years together.

"Things would undoubtedly have been different if there hadn't been the fracture caused by the war, if my father, instead of being faced with children who had become strangers to him, had learned to live in the same house with a baby, if he had been part of the slow process that leads from childhood to the age of reason. That African land in which he had known the happiness of sharing his adventurous life with a woman, in Banso, in Bamenda, was the very same land that had robbed him of a family life and the love of his children." p. 92

Finally, Le Clézio looks briefly at some postcolonial struggles, including the horrors of the Biafran war, which took place in areas he was familiar with, and then examines how his own experiences in Africa as a young boy formed his personality and interests.

"I am forever yearning to go back to Africa, to my childhood memory. To the source of my feelings, to that which molded my character. The world changes, it's true, and the boy who is standing over there on the plain amidst the tall grasses in the hot breath of wind bearing the odors of the savannah, the shrill sound of the forest, the boy feeling the dampness of the sky and the clouds upon his lips, that boy is so far from me that no story, no journey will ever make it possible for me to reach him again. p. 102

This book is enhanced by wonderful old photographs taken by Le Clézio's parents and is printed on much heavier paper than is common these days; it is a lovely example of thoughtful printing. And so I was shocked and disappointed at one error that leaped out at me, when the publisher failed to notice that at one point the text reads "Port Harbor" when it means "Port Harcourt."

Wow what an interesting story!

Also glad to hear Mina continues to please.

Thanks Colleen and Merrikay!

Sassy, you probably haven't been avoiding Aunt Julia as long as I had it on my TBR! No, A Dead Man's Memoir is strictly about the Moscow Art Theater, but your post reminds me that I have an NYRB book called The Stray Dog Cabaret, which is a collection of Soviet poetry from the Stray Dog Cafe.

Wonderful review of the L'Africain (I have thumbs up-ped it). It's a book I read 7 years ago and I'm still reminded of its beautiful words today. So happy to see it finally making the rounds on LT. (Because it has just been translated, right?)

Yes, lilisin, it really is a beautiful book, and it was only recently translated. I read about it when I looked up Le Clézio on Wikipedia after reading Onitsha, because I wondered how much of it was autobiographical, and didn't realize it had been translated into English and feared I would have to try to read it in French. But then someone on LT (alas I can't remember who) told me it had been translated, so I ordered a copy. Didn't you love the photographs too?

The African sounds very interesting.

Great review of The African, J M G Le Clezio

Great review of L'Africain, your review brings out all that I expect about that book. Great quotation (from p. 102).

I don't recall if the French copy has the photographs. I'll have to check next time I'm home.

Amazing review. If I didn't already adore le Clezio, I might after your review. That memoir will make its way on my wishlist.

ETA - it's already on my wishlist, care of Linda...now need to make the next step and buy a copy.

Thanks, Edwin and Dan. Dan, it must have been Linda who let me know it had been translated; I couldn't remember who it was.

Great review of L'Africain, Rebecca. I bought my copy shortly after it came out in translation and probably did mention it along the way, since I find Le Clezio to be an amazing author. I have been saving it for just the right moment and am glad that it lives up to expectations!

Got a copy of A Dead Man's Memoir on your recommendation. I haven't had time to dip into it yet, but my husband is enjoying hugely.

You've convinced me that I must try Le Clezio again soon. I was disappointed with Wandering Star, but I think it must have been an anomaly, because everything else he has written sounds lovely.

I think you would like any of the books I've read, Lisa: The Prospector, Onitsha, and The African. I haven't read Wandering Star, but I'm looking forward to reading Desert which I also own.

92. A House in the Country by José Donoso



This is a remarkable book, and I hardly know where to begin to talk about it. Starting as a seemingly straightforward tale of the hugely rich and aristocratic Ventura family, consisting of seven sisters and brothers, their spouses, and their 33 surviving children, it quickly becomes convoluted, bizarre, disturbing, comic, perverse, shocking, postmodern, and puzzling. At the same time, Donoso has said that this book was his response to the 1973 coup by Pinochet and that he has even included word-for-word excerpts from both Pinochet and Allende (in this article on the Dalkey Archive website).

The story begins at the Ventura's house in the country, Marulanda, where the parents are preparing to take their huge retinue of servants and go for a day-long excursion to a fabulous woodland glade and waterfall, leaving the cousins, ranging in age from 6 to 16, locked inside the "park" that surrounds the the house and separates it from the grassy plains and native populations outside with hundreds of metal lances tipped with gold and embedded in cement beneath the ground. The servants are not just servants but, led by the huge Majordomo, enforcers of the parents' rule over the children, doling out cruel punishments that leave no marks. And the native people have been conquered by the Venturas' ancestors and now work for them, mining and laminating the gold that is the source of the their wealth. The white people all believe the natives are cannibals, and threaten the children that they will be eaten if they misbehave.

So the stage is set for intrigue and trouble when all the adults leave: all the adults but one. For Uncle Adriano, who married the totally frivolous and somewhat slow-witted Balbina Ventura, and who is the father of 9-year-old Wenceslao, has been enclosed in a straitjacket, drugged, and locked in a tower ever since he "went crazy" because of a truly horrifying and shocking event. (A doctor, he was the only family member to have any relationship with the native people.) Wenceslao is determined to take advantage of the absence of the adults, which it develops has been engineered by a group of the children, to free his father. Other groups of children are engaged in plots of their own, and most of them believe the adults will not return at the end of the day as they have promised. Some of them try to leave.

That's about all I can tell to set the stage, both because I don't want to spoil all the surprises and because there is so much else going on in this novel, or "fable," as the author, who intervenes occasionally to explain what he is doing with the plot and the characters, persists in describing the work. Towards the end, he also notes that the characters are "emblems" and "a-psychological." I am sure I didn't understand everything Donoso was doing in this book, but here are some thoughts.

First of all, there is an artificial feel to a lot of the book. Not only are the characters "emblems" (although Donoso has accomplished quite a feat in making so many characters understandably different, it is extremely helpful that he includes a list of parents, children, and ages at the beginning), but several of them engage in a long-running improvised "play" called La Marquise Est Sortie à Cinq Heures. The "play" allow them to use flowery language, flirt and plot, and remove themselves from the reality of life in the summer house. Further, the house is filled with trompe l'oeil frescoes and wall decorations; the highly liveried servants melt into the walls, and the people on the walls spring to life. There are also revelations about the library and other aspects of the house that are not what they appear to be. Tying in with this, there are people who are blind, or practically blind, or dependent on very strong eyeglasses, and there is a whole network of tunnels beneath the house (for reasons revealed later) in which people have to find their way by feeling the edges.

Then, there is the whole idea of cannibalism. Whether the native people ever were cannibals is never quite clear, but the idea that they "still" are serves the function of keeping the children in place. At the same time, the mothers are always saying things to the little children like "oh, you're so delicious" and "oh, I could just eat you up with kisses." The idea of cannibalism threads its way through the novel.

There is also a theme of holding back nature. The lance "walls" of the park hold back the grasses of the plain, but every year in the fall there are winds that bring what are called "thistledown blizzards" that make it almost impossible to breathe. And many of the tunnels under the house are brimming with the unstoppable growth of wild mushrooms.

The second half of the novel relates to the return of the adults, after what seems to them only a day. Denying the reality that appears before they even reach the house, they dispatch the servants to return to the house and straighten everything out while they return to their homes in the capital until order is restored. This section gets really wild and crazy, with turmoil, fighting, cruelty, bravery, and revelation after revelation; at this point, "reality" becomes even more tenuous than it has already been, and the author returns more often to discuss his choices.

So what to make of this book? I was really impressed by Donoso's ideas and imagination. I was less able to detect the political ideas; although it was possible to see the servants, on their return, as the army, it was a lot less clear who other groups of people might represent. My conclusion is that this is, as Donoso, said, a "response" to the Pinochet coup and crackdown and that he is not trying to make complete analogies. I think I spent too much time trying to figure out who might stand for whom and not enough just experiencing the novel.

Although I've written at length, I've only scratched the surface of this complicated book. If I didn't have so many other books I want to read, I would start it all over again.

PS As a side note, this is another book I've had since the mid-80s. I see that my edition was published as part of something called The Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature, and the list of other titles at the front of my book is very intriguing, including authors and books I would like to look out for.

A House in the Country sounds like a good find. Great review!

Great review of A House in the Country, Rebecca! As I just mentioned in my thread I loved his novel The Obscene Bird of Night, so I'll definitely put this book at the top of my wish list. I'll probably read his novel The Lizard's Tale next month.

wow that does sound pretty interesting.

Thanks, Colleen, Darryl, and Merrikay. Darryl, I have The Obscene Bird of Night, which I think I bought after reading about it here on LT some years ago (maybe your review?), but I read A House in the Country first because I've owned it for nearly 30 years. I will read The Obscene Bird of Night, but probably I'll read some other South American authors first.

Rebecca your review makes me very interested in The African. It's of general appeal, yes? -- i.e. not needing a familiarity with Le Clézio or his fiction?

93. Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo



This fun novella is both a mystery story and a gentle parody of a mystery story, with poisons, atmospheric events, people who aren't who they seem to me, a dead bird, literary allusions, and lots of subtle humor. It begins as a somewhat pompous and self-satisfied doctor travels to a remote Argentine beach resort, owned by his cousin who, he points out, owes him money so he gets to stay without charge. He encounters a group of other visitors, one of whom is poisoned to death that very night. Soon, everyone is a suspect for one reason or another; a vicious storm that blows sand everywhere starts up; and more mysterious things begin to happen.

Although I enjoyed the mystery, I was more delighted by the writing style of Bioy Casares and Ocampo, and especially liked it when one of the amateur detectives/suspects revealed that his favorite novel was The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo, which I read earlier this year. This was a quick read, and a fun one.

Note: There is a problem with this book that LT staff are trying to solve, in that my copy doesn't link up with the other copies of the book and the Bioy Casares author page doesn't show that I own it. So, above, I have provided an HTML link to the page that shows my copy of the book; if you do a regular touchstone, it goes to a German edition of the book, which is the only one the Bioy Casares author page shows, not all the others. It also isn't letting me save my review on the book page.

#170, MJ, absolutely, and it may get you interested in reading more by Le Clezio.

A House in the Country really sounds appealing, so I just put it on the wishlist. Great review.

I do love your reviews!

I'm going to a book sale at Third Place Books this weekend, and I will check and see if they have A House in the Country. It sounds fascinating. Sadly I have read far too few South and Central American authors. I really need to branch out more.

In my more habitual mode, I finished three books in a row about WWII and am still chugging away in Bloodlands. Can't decide what to start next. I have a library book out about Chechnya and an ER book on, you guessed it, WWII. *sigh*

Oh, have fun at the book sale, Lisa! Over the years, I've read a lot of South American authors but there are a lot of gaps in my reading, and Donoso was one of them. The Reading Globally theme read this quarter is a perfect opportunity for me to make a dent in my TBR pile and discover new (to me) authors.

I'm a little afraid of checking out the theme read, as my TBR is already threatening to burst at the seams. It will be a good resource to refer back to as I begin to dabble. I don't know why I have such a block when it comes to reading literature from this region. I guess it's like anything, intimidating until you get your feet wet and you have enough knowledge to understand the references, history, culture, influences, parodies, and connections. As it is, I feel lost.

Great review of A House in the Country and how wonderful to discover a list of contemporary World Literature, (circa 1980's) I bet some of these have sunk without trace

Lisa, I do understand what it is like to read in an area you're unfamiliar with. I found it very hard to get into the Japanese writers I read last year in the Author Theme Reads group and also to get into the Southeast Asian read in Reading Globally this year because I've read so little Asian writing. Even in South America, I've read a lot of Mario Vargas Llosa and (a long time ago) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and very little else. But I seem to have acquired a lot of books from this region over the years and I'm taking advantage of the theme read to get to them.

Barry, here is the list from inside my book of the titles in the Vintage Library of Contemporary Literature (i.e., 1984). Some of them are now well known, some sound intriguing, and some, as you say have probably sunk, or at least are out of print (like A House in the Country). And some of the authors are now well known, while others are completely unfamiliar to me. I partly typed this in so I would have the touchstones handy to explore these books.

The Island of Crimea by Vassily Aksyonov
One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta
Correction by Thomas Bernhard
We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light by Julio Cortazar
The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout
Widows by Ariel Dorfman
Masks by Fumiko Enchi
The Samurai by Shusaku Endo
The Questionnaire by Jiri Grusa
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki
The Guardian of the Word by Camara Laye
The Wine of Astonishment by Earl Lovelace
Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
History: A Novel by Elsa Morante
Solitudes by Goffredo Parise
Blood of Requited Love by Manuel Puig
Maira by Darcy Ribeiro
Shame by Salman Rushdie
Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
The Four Wise Men by Michael Tournier

ETA I just went to ABE Books and ordered several of the out-of-print titles.

Interesting. Although several of the authors are known to me, the only one I've read is The Questionnaire.

P.S. I know how to mark a post as a favorite, but how do you find those favorites again? Is there a way to pull them all together into one list? Or do you have to remember the thread and scroll?

If you go to the list of ways to view Talk in the left column and click on More Options, there is a favorite message view. You have to remember which thread the favorited message you want was in, but when you click on it you will be taken straight to the favorited message.

ETA The Questionnaire was one of the books I ordered. Did you like it?

To be honest, I read it a long time ago and I don't have a strong impression either way.

Thanks for the Talk tip.

some great links there rebecca

As many of you know, I've been organizing the Reading Globally theme reads for the past few years. We're now at the stage of suggesting topics for next year, so if any of you are interested in Reading Globally, please come on over to this thread and post your ideas for next year. You can go to the Reading Globally group page to get an idea of what our themes have been this year and in years gone by.

94. Freud by Jonathan Lear



I bought this insightful and mostly fascinating book because of Dewald/dmsteyn's excellent review earlier this year and, rather than repeating a lot of what he said, I will mostly focus on my reactions to the book.

The author, Jonathan Lear, is both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst (nonpracticing, I believe), and he approaches Freud's key ideas primarily from a philosophical perspective. Neither an apologist for Freud nor a dismisser of him, he is not afraid to criticize Freud for ideas that haven't held up or weren't well thought out in the first place, but he also isn't afraid to applaud him for his innovative and creative theories. As he notes:

"It is worth reminding ourselves that the central concepts of psychoanalysis emerge as a response to human suffering. Freud listened to ordinary people who came to him in pain, and his ideas emerged from what he heard. Some of his ideas are speculative extravagances and deserve to be discarded, but the central concepts of psychoanalysis are closely tied to clinical reality. One aim of this book is to bring the reader back to clinical moments and show how theoretical ideas develop out of them. . . .

Just as a doctor probes for the hidden causes of physical diseases, so Freud took himself to be probing the unconscious for hidden meanings making the patient ill. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that a certain clinical brutality flows from this self-understanding. . . . It also blinds him to the profound philosophical and ethical significance of his discoveries. Another aim of this book is to bring this significance to light." pp. 9-10

In successive chapters, Lear explores Freud's ideas on interpreting the unconscious, sexuality, interpreting dreams, transference, mental functioning, the structure of the psyche, and morality and religion. I found the first chapters the most compelling, the ones in which Lear discusses the ideas at the heart of psychoanalysis, and the later ones, in which Lear discusses and mostly criticizes Freud's broader theories, less interesting. It was fascinating to learn about how anxiety can prevent us from examining our true motivations, how many of our strategies for avoiding troubling ideas extend back into childhood, how astoundingly complex many of the associations from our dreams can be, how we can repeat behaviors without realizing we're repeating them, and much more. I also liked the way Lear describes some of the people Freud treated (always acknowledging that he relied on Freud's notes, not on knowing the people himself), focusing on how they presented themselves in the clinical setting.

I was also interested in the way Lear brings in philosophical concepts, including those of ethics and freedom, and the way he illustrates how philosophers such as Socrates thought of the psyche. I know a little more about psychiatry than I do about philosophy (about which I know almost nothing) and I found Lear's philosophical discussions fascinating.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading this book for several weeks in the middle of it, and so some of the most interesting material isn't fresh in my mind. But for the most part I found it well-written, intriguing, compassionate, and perceptive.

As Lear notes in his conclusion:

"The aim of psychoanalysis is not to promote homogenization of the soul but to establish active communication between what hitherto had been disparate and warring parts. These lines of communication serve a bridging function -- uniting the psyche by bringing its different voices into an common conversation. Conflicts will still arise. It is a condition of life itself that the psyche will never be a conflict-free zone. But when they do arise, they will be experienced as conflicts -- rather than in some disguise. . . . .

Plato, who did so much to bring philosophy to life, was ever wary of the myriad ways it could go dead. . . . Philosophy, he said, was not so much a matter of acquiring beliefs as of turning the soul away from fantasy and towards reality. It seems to me that Freud -- whatever mistakes he made, whatever warts he showed -- made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of what soul-turning might be." pp. 222-223

Great list of international fiction there Rebecca - I've just added a few after enjoying a while perusing those.

95. The Hare by César Aira



Aira is known for his novellas -- I've read one and have others on my shelves -- so this book, at 266 pages, is a tome for him. Although I hesitate to generalize from the one other Aira I've read, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, I think the shorter length works better for him, as there were definitely sections that dragged a little. And this book was more dependent on plot which, again probably unfairly generalizing, is not necessarily his strong point. Also, I found his depiction of the Indians a little grating, although I realize that they were partly described through the lens of the late 19th century protagonist and partly symbolic in a philosophical way. Nonetheless, Aira shines in his sly humor, his absurdity, his stunning descriptions of nature, his imagination, his light-hearted philosophical digressions, and his love of language.

The story begins with a somewhat extraneous look at the activities of the Restorer of the Laws, i.e., the dictator, of Argentina. He then gives his blessing, and his best horse, to the English naturalist, Clarke, who is mounting an expedition to the pamaps to look for the extremely rare, and perhaps nonexistent, Legibrereian hare (which, it turns out, may not even be living creature). The rest of the novel covers Clarke's travels through the pampas with Carlos, a 15-year-old would-be artist, and Gauna, a taciturn guide who, it develops, is on a quest of his own. In the course of their travels, they encounter three very different groups of Mapuche Indians, get to know several individuals in each group, get caught up in various plots and "wars" (without generally understanding what they're about), reveal aspects of their pasts (including that both Clarke and Carlos were adopted), and ultimately experience several plot revelations, at least one of which was obvious to me about halfway through the book.

But this is only the plot, and the plot is the least important part of the book. As mentioned, Aira loves philosophical digressions, and some of the ideas he explores in this book are simultaneity, identity and twinhood, transformation, continuity and time, and myth and reality. In a way, the book is all about story-telling: the myths groups live by, how these myths differ from "scientific" and "rational" explanations, the imaginary world versus the real world, the stories we tell others about ourselves and the stories other tell us, and, of course, the story that is this novel. (I do think Aira is playing with the reader at times, especially in the way he somewhat ridiculously ties up a lot of loose ends in the final chapter.) Thinking about a story Gauna told him about why he wanted to come to the pamaps, Clarke muses:

"He had to admit it was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories that did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretive judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities." p.170

As in the previous novel I read by Aira, there is a lot that is absurd in this book, and it can't be read in a literal way. If it weren't so much fun to read him, and if he weren't such a good writer, I might find this irritating. I think this book was a little bloated, but I enjoyed it, and I will read more Aira.

Intriguing review of The Hare. It reminds me a bit of Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller in its themes and concerns.

I've occasionally wondered why Freud's works on psychoanalysis are considered important to the discipline of philosophy, and your review of Freud helps answer that question.

...the imaginary world versus the real world, the stories we tell others about ourselves and the stories other tell us...

This kind of characterizes the distinctive flavor of Latin American literature as a whole, doesn't it?

Thanks, Paul. I've ordered a few and I'm sure I'll be back for more.

Jane, as I recall The Storyteller, it was a lot more straightforward. But yes, some of the same themes, although Aira seems a little dismissive of the indigenous myths/stories while Vargas Llosa embraced them.

Steven, if we generalize enough, we could apply that to all literature!

You've just introduced me to a writer who sounds like just the thing. Given Aira's age, do you suppose any of the absurdity would be hidden messages about the Argentinian dictatorships, sort of like the Romanians used to do with their writing? Great review.

Thanks for you insightful review of The Hare by Cesar Aira a writer new to me, but he sounds interesting

but the central concepts of psychoanalysis are closely tied to clinical reality. One aim of this book is to bring the reader back to clinical moments and show how theoretical ideas develop out of them (Quote from your quote from the Jonathan Lear book on Freud) which I like but sometimes struggle with.

Sassy, certainly the "Restorer of the Laws" in the first chapter of The Hare could stand in for an Argentinian dictator, but the rest of the book is more an exploration of history and story-telling than a commentary on politics. For both you and Barry, I stress that I feel The Hare is weaker than the much shorter An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, which I read a few years ago. I also own but haven't read two other Aira novellas, How I Became A Nun and The Seamstress and the Wind.

Barry, what about that quote do you struggle with, and why?

Great review of The Hare, Rebecca. I haven't liked the three novellas I've read by him, though, so I'll pass on this book.

I am deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis and the linking of theoretical ideas to clinical reality. This is purely a personal view based on no medical knowledge. My wife is a psychoanalyst and while I believe that her work on the whole does more good than harm I just don't see the link to clinical reality.

Thanks, Darryl. I'm impressed that you've read three novellas by Aira since you didn't like them!

Interesting, Barry. I think hat there's a lot of nonsense in a lot of psychotherapy, but I also think there's some insight there too.

>It is worth reminding ourselves that the central concepts of psychoanalysis emerge as a response to human suffering.

This reminds me of reading in Asylum (a melancholy collection of photos of state hospitals in ruin) that mental facilities emerged as sanctuaries then devolved into places of confinement. You've interested me in Freud.

96. Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina



This is the third novel featuring Detective Alex Morrow, and in it she has both given birth to twins and informed her superiors about her half-brother Danny, one of the leaders of crime in Glasgow, so she is more relaxed in some ways than in the first two. Of course, she is still dedicated to solving the crime, in this case the murder of a grandfather during a postal robbery, a grandfather who both seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and to have some connection with the robber. As in any Denise Mina mystery, the novel is about a lot more than the crime. In this book, the focus is on how money corrupts: corrupts those who have it and those who want it and those who don't know they want it. It is an examination of a broad web of police and political corruption and of criminals who put police officers and politicians in compromising positions so they can then ask favors of them. The sense of place is less strong in this novel than in other Minas I've read, but her characterization shines as always and the plot is more compelling than in some of her other works, although still dependent on a little surprise here and there.

>198 rebeccanyc: I will definitely get to this series eventually. It is already on my wishlist thanks to your earlier reviews.

97. The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce edited by Michael Newton



Although I'm not a big ghost story fan, when this book was on display at my favorite bookstore shortly before Halloween I snapped it up, and have been dipping into it ever since. A little to my surprise, I liked a large number of the stories, but perhaps this shouldn't have been surprising since the anthologist, Michael Newton, in his introduction, noted:

"In choosing the texts for this anthology, I worked on the principle that a story should be good in itself: that is, well written, sophisticated, and (if possible) frightening. This means that I felt it best not to shy away from some obvious choices. In my view, some very good anthologies of ghost stories are weakened by a desire to pick surprising, neglected or substandard stories by the best writers in the genre, or second rank stories by largely forgotten writers. . . . (This book is) for those who want one volume that brings together the very best examples of the genre."

I also appreciated the rest of Newton's introduction, in which he discussed the background of the ghost stories and some common themes and ideas. The stories in this book are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and are by British and US writers.

While I didn't like (or finish) all of them, there were quite a few stories that I found compelling, in particular Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story," Edward Bulwer Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters:, or The House and the Brain," Amelia B. Edwards' "The North Mail," Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea," Margaret Oliphant's "The Open Door," W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," Mary Wilkins Freeman's "The Wind in the Rose-Bush," and M. R. James' "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.'" Although very different, and in some cases a tad predictable, each of these fulfilled the anthologist's desire for well written and at least a little scary stories. I felt they gave me an overview of the genre, and some fun reading evenings, which is also what the anthologist intended.

Some excellent authors in The penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce and I bet there wasn't a vampire slayer in sight. This might make a good Christmas read.

Not one, Barry! There were other well known authors, including Dickens, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, but I didn't warm to their tales as much. I wanted to like the Ambrose Bierce, but I just didn't.

I had to read "The Monkey's Paw" in high school English class - and so did my kids. Bet there weren't any zombies either!

I have to say that even though I could see where it was going (who couldn't, with a three wishes story?), I really loved "The Monkey's Paw" and found it decidedly creepy. I almost thought the rat was the son, not the "person" knocking at the door. (I did that partly to try out the new spoiler feature.)

Very cool! Great review of an interesting sounding anthology Rebecca. I cn think of at least a couple of people that would really like that.

Like you I'm not a big ghost story fan, but if I were to read some, this sounds like the perfect volume for me.

Thanks, Paul and Lisa. A year or two ago, I read a collection of ghost stories just by M.R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, after I read a story of his that had been posted on line. I enjoyed some but not all, and I did think he was one of the better writers in this anthology. I would recommend this one for the variety (up to a point) and the generally high quality of the writing.

I've started a new thread for the rest of the year. Please come visit me there.