Book Reviews




The Samurai's Garden
Gail Tsukiyama























Wheels within wheels: the Making of a Traveller
Dervla Murphy

John Murray 1979
Republished by Eland, London 2010
3.5 stars


This book is very readable and captures Dervla’s child and young adult hood growing up in Ireland the only child of a pair of intellectual but difficult parents one of whom was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and then expected her daughter to stay at home and look after her.

Her father was a county librarian in County Waterford and her mother was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis when Dervla was a young child. Her mother remained in a wheel chair. Her father seems to have been rather other-worldly, he was passionate about theology, astronomy, the Renaissance and shared these enthusiasms with his wife. They could happily argue over a small point of historical theology. He also wrote books which were rejected time and again.

Dervla’s education was erratic, she started at the local state school but then grew out of that. She was then sent to an Irish speaking boarding school where she was bullied badly and then left. She had a spell of being home-schooled by her mother but this also failed. She was later sent to a boarding school run by nuns and left this in her early teens when her mother needed looking after at home.

Dervla loved reading and was encouraged in this by her parents and buying and reading books was a main escape for her from her closeted life. She also started writing at an early age and won prizes for short story writing in the local newspaper.

She also developed her physique, early on she trained herself to endure high levels of pain which would later be useful when she was biking to India and walking in Ethiopia. She was given a bike for her 10th birthday and this opened up a new world for her, she had long rides that were an escape from the confines of home. She later says casually that at her peak she could easily bike 125 miles per day. In her early twenties she had long rides that took her to Oxford and London. Here she enjoyed the colleges and the atmosphere and regretted that she had not had a university education. She also started to appreciate the narrowness of Irish nationalism. Her first trip overseas was to Spain and here she learnt to bike, explore and cope with a foreign culture and language. I think that this trip was crucial in giving her confidence to make her later trips. She also had a trip to Germany that was not so successful, mainly because she felt that the Germans lacked a sense of humour.

As a teen she also had a romance with Godfrey, a shy ex PoW who was divorced and so unable to marry but did have a guilty relationship with a teenager. She describes well the emotions of being in love and the awakening to physical pleasure. They both knew that they would not marry. He then disappeared and the next she heard was when his ashes appeared with a request that he should be buried at sea. Mark, the local priest was also a constant support to her and knew of this relationship and did not condemn it.

She carried a huge burden in her teens and twenties, that of looking after her invalid mother. Her mother was demanding and capricious. No maid stayed any length of time because her mother demanded such excessive and unnecessary cleaning. Dervla was then taken out of school to look after her parents’ house and was a resentful housekeeper for almost 15 years. She captures the tangled emotions of that home. She was angry and resentful and did not communicate well with her father. He was weak and her mother with her infirmity ruled from the bath chair. Dervla was casualty in this. They also had no money to pay for a carer. Because she had left school early she also had no qualifications. Classic double bind, and happening 50 years ago.

Her father died quite rapidly in 196x when he developed renal complications after influenza. Her mother then died 11 months later.

She then was freed from her house and nurse maid duties and at the age of 30 took off on her bike and fulfilled her life time dream of biking to India.

She then returned and put together her journals from the trip to create “Full Tilt To India” which was published by John Murray.

The book is well written and captures life in rural Ireland 50 years ago well. It has some interesting political asides, her father’s family were strong republicans and one cousin who stayed the night there when on the run was later executed for his crimes. She also notes how uninterested the family were in the Second World War, Irish people very much felt it was England’s war and were even reluctant to believe the reports of Nazi atrocities. She also captures the emotional chains that her parents put on her and how she tried to resist these. I also saw similarities between her life and my father’s, he also left school at 14 without qualifications and it was very difficult for him to catch up later. He like her father experienced the rejection letters for literary works that they had spent a long time labouring over. Both lacked training and critical guidance. I also think that her lack of higher education still shows in her writing which is observant and honest but not sophisticated. She also lacked a tough editor who would have helped her in the long run.

Irritation of her value judgments.
Quite good, not outstanding writer and absence of training partially explains this.
Education neglected by parents who should have encouraged her.




Goya
Robert Hughes
 

Jarvis Press 2003
3.5 stars

This is a serious book about Goya that I bought in Hay on Wye after seeing the Goya portraits at the NPG in Dec. I had seen the Goya etchings with their very bleak view of life at the Courtauld in May. I had also seen both the portraits and the Black paintings at The Prado in Madrid. So having seen all these Goya pieces and having appreciated his work it was time to read about his life. Robert Hughes’ book is a detailed and thorough analysis of Goya’s life and work. There are 10 chapters starting with his childhood outside Madrid and ending with his death in exile. The early chapters cover his work as a court artist when he designed 40 plus tapestries depicting Spanish life and mainly pastoral scenes but some had a darker edge with pictures of injured workmen. He started doing portraits then and he captured people’s characters well, one can see intelligent articulate people depicted. He also loved fashion and many of the sitters have beautiful hats or finery. In 1793 he went profoundly deaf from unknown etiology and had 30 years of isolation from the world. He continued to paint but his work became darker. He spent his recuperation with Sebastian Martinez who had a large collection of etchings that Goya may have seen during his recuperation. He then started making many etchings notably the large series “caprichios” which depicts the masquerade and shortcomings of Madrid life, adulterers, power being abused, older women selling younger women, whores, monks preaching abstinence but then being gluttonous in secret. He also depicted the plight of victims of The Inquisition. Witches often feature in his work.

During the Napoleonic wars and the fall of the Bourbons Goya painted the resistance movement out in the countryside making shot and needing help with tasks like water carrying, paintings that are now famous. His engravings the “Desasres” show violent aspects of war, death, rape, looting, from the revolution. These were never made into prints so were never a contemporary comment. He experienced the resistance moment in Madrid that became the masterpiece (The third of May 1808 or the executions on Principe Pio Hill ) the Mayo 3 painting in which a rebel is being executed by a Napoleonic firing squad. The rebel is a stocky martyr who represents all of us; he is also throwing his arms up into a crucifix like pose. The soldiers are in black, heads bent over to do their task. This masterpiece now represents the crackdown after revolutions everywhere. After the restoration Goya had a difficult time in Madrid, not least because he had been given a so-called “eggplant decoration” by Napoleon during his occupation. The work done towards the end of his life is very black, he lived outside Madrid and painted a series of black paintings as murals, these have very dark subjects, Saturn eating child and a huge witches Sabbath presided over by a black goat. These were later removed and are now in the Prado.

Goya moved to France when King Fernando granted an amnesty for people to leave. Here he made a final set of dark etchings Album G with pictures of the elderly infirm, witches and transport for disabled and insanity. These reflected his current preoccupations then. I saw the ones from Album D at the Courtauld exhibition In May.

This is a very detailed and thorough analysis of Goya’s work and covers his different styles well with good illustrations. But the book is difficult to read, there was far too much extraneous detail about Spanish history that should have been edited out. The book is also peppered with irritating value judgments.

At the end I was still wondering who Goya was and what was he like. His paintings are so dark that one wonders about the man behind them. There is a huge contrast between the portraits which are pleasant and vivid and the darkness of the etchings and drawings. I wonder what clashes were going on in his head. So I learnt a lot from this book but I am still looking for a book that explores Goya’s psychology.

London 2015
Goya: the Witches and Old Women Album, Courtaul Gallery London May 15
Goya: The Pictures, National Gallery London Dec
 


The Green Road
Anne Enright
 

2014
4 stars 



This contemporary Irish tale captures the lives of four siblings born in the West of Ireland but becoming adults in West Africa, New York, Waterford and Dublin. The book follows each child through their adult life. It also illustrates the power a parent can exert on their children.

We meet Dan as a teenager saying he wants to become a priest, which makes his mother take to her bed for 2 weeks. Then he goes to NYC and comes out as gay. He is there during the early years of the AIDS epidemic and sees friends die rapidly, his friends supported one gay man Billy who died very quickly and Dan never went to see him. Later on we see Dan living in Toronto with a rich lover Ludo who supports him.

Emmett we met first in West Africa where he is living with another aid worker, Alice. Alice adopts a dog which upsets the Muslim house staff and when she is away the dog is poisoned. Their relationship then falls apart and we can see that Emmett finds it difficult to express love and is haunted by the deaths he has seen elsewhere in the world.

Constance stayed at home, married a local builder, Dessie who is doing very well. Her children are now in their teens. Early in the book she has a cancer scare and we see her at the hospital and how she interacts with other people there and observes that there seemed to be no gap between breast feeding and breast cancer.

We meet Hanna when she is struggling with her first baby. She wanted to be an actress and her mother swooned over her face saying that she had a face for films. But she did not succeed in the theatre world and then married and we meet her struggling with a new baby and an alcohol problem. She has a complex relationship with her husband.

Half way through the book the mother Rosaleen, writes to the children says that she is planning to sell the house. This drama brings them all back for a family Xmas. They are all carrying different baggage, Dan has just been proposed to by his boyfriend Ludo in Toronto but does not really want to get married, Emmett is living in Dublin with a Dutch girlfriend Saar and also does not want to get married. Constance is living in her home town and getting obese. The family gather in a rather fractious way; Hannah with her alcohol problem, Dan with his feeling of being an outsider, Emmett with his poor relationship skills. Constance is the only practical one and she organises her mother's house. Enright captures Constance doing the pre Xmas shop and buying many unnecessary items just in case they are needed.

The Christmas meal is well described and then Rosaleen announces that she will sell the house and move in with Constance, having failed to discuss this with Constance. Later Rosaleen goes for a drive and then wanders out across the fields, at one point I wondered whether this was a suicide bid. She stumbles across the fields, thinking about her late husband and the loss of social status she had through her marriage. She then takes shelter in a hunger cottage. These are relics from the great hunger and whole families died in these houses. When the family realise that she is missing they mobilise a search, led by members of the AA because they were the only people who were sober. Enright captures the anxiety of the search. Hannah who has the intuition to find her mother and then lies curled up next to her. The search also tests their feelings about their mother.

The book captures the lives of different people in the 90s and naughties, the AIDS epidemics, gay marriage becoming acceptable. It is also a powerful exploration of the dynamics of families and the power that an elderly parent can exert. Rosaleen’s a needy neurotic woman who is present at the opening of the book and then is very manipulative in the way she brings her children home. The book is well structured with an opening section setting the scene; each section describing the individual lives of the children would stand as a short story especially the pieces in New York and Africa.



Rings of Saturn  
Sebald
Vintage Books, London 2004
3.5 stars





This novel is a beautiful and melancholy journey across Suffolk. The book is mainly about Sebald’s interior travels.   Sebald is a German academic based in East Anglia who walks around Suffolk mainly alone.  The book comprises 9 chapters each nominally about a walk but each chapter has at least two major essays on something that has been triggered by his walk.  Some are easy to connect with East Anglia such as the state of the herring industry in the N Sea. Each essay is supported by a vast array of facts, such as the 600 000 people employed in Holland in the herring industry in the 16 century.   He also reflects on people associated with East Anglia such as Thomas Browne. However just a small association such as noticing a Chinese dragon on a railway in Suffolk leads into an essay on the vicious dowager empress of China.

He connects with local literary figures such as Swinburne, Fitzgerald and Conrad.  He is also fascinated by the rise and fall of big houses and their associated communities. In one he notes that the house is now gone but the trees are now reaching maturity 200 years later.  

He was deeply affected by the bombing of Dresden and mentions this regularly.  He also reflects on the sugar industry and the cruelty this produced

It was hard work to read but somehow rewarding. This was a wonderful interior journey and he is an interesting  Joycean companion. However he is rather melancholy. Doug Soutar passed this book onto me as part of his own book thinning when he moved up to Edinburgh.



Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann

4 stars

This is a beautifully written family saga set in a Hanseatic port and spanning 70 years of the 19 century. The Buddenbrooks are the central characters and the saga opens with a family celebration in 1837. They have a thriving business, a comfortable life and social status in the city.

Johann Buddenbrooks is running the family business and clearly doing a very good job with the business prospering. He has four children, Tom, Tony, Clara, Clothilde and Christian. Tom is a bright man and learning the business from his father. Tony is a lively character, rebellious and emotional. Early in the plot she falls in love with a young medical student when she is also being courted by a wealthy business man from Hamburg. She is not keen on him but is put under huge pressure to marry him. Her father arguing that this is a good match for her. Tom is a steady character, not excitable and he is very conventional. He is very irritated by his brother Christian who is a playboy preferring the theatre and men’s club. He attempts business but the routine of work does not suit him and he needs bailing out. He also has a couple of marriages. Clothilde is very religious and never marries or has a social life. She joins and Order of sisters.

Tom and Tony are the main characters whom we follow over the century. Tom marries a very stiff formal Dutchwoman who plays the violin beautifully. But she is also a frigid character and not surprisingly they only have one child after many years. He is named Johan after his grandfather but he is a sickly child who has night terrors, sleepwalks. He is looked after by Frau Ingmaar who is faithful family retainer staying with them for 30 years. Johann is also a slow leaner but he does love music and plays with a music teacher. He also tries composing but he is consumed by shyness. It is clear from early on that he is not going to be able to take over the family firm.

The family form declines as the century progresses, Tom is very stiff and formal and delighted when he is elected a senator and initially people are enthused by him. As the years go by he fossilizes into someone who spends excessive time on making sure that his appearance is perfect. He also cannot adapt to modern business methods and one sees the family business slowly declining. He has a sever midlife crisis being consumed by anxiety. At this point he has a holiday with his brother on the Baltic beach where they like to spend their summer holidays. He and Tony had visited the beach 30 years ago when she was trying to avoid marriage to Grunlich.

Tony has a far more exciting life as suits her temperament. Her father has to rescue her from her first marriage to Herr Grunlich who has managed his business disastrously and falsified his accounts to win Tony’s hand and then when he is about to be made bankrupt appeals to Johann Buddenrooks for money. Johan replies by taking Tony back to the family home. Tony then has a holiday visiting a friend in Munich and here falls in love with a lively man called Alois Permanender. She then marries him and moves to Munich, being in Munich brings out the north German vs south German differences. She finds the Munich people very vulgar, laughing and eating and drinking beer. Her refined northern tastes do not go down well. She falls out with her husband and they have a massive row and she storms home saying that she has been called something so vulgar she cannot even say it, years later it emerges that he called her a “Baltic rollmop”. She then comes home and brings her daughter up in the family home. Her daughter of course is not eligible for a society bachelor because of her mother's two divorces, she then marries a business man who then turns out to have been falsifying his accounts and goes to prison.

Mann describes people’s clothes beautifully and one sees these changing through the century. He also captures people’s feelings. He gives many details about furniture. Funerals described more lovingly than the weddings

I would have enjoyed more detail about the locations; fortunately because I had been to The Baltic I could supply these myself. I also found that the last 100 pages went too slowly. I could see that Mann wanted to show Tom’s emotional decline but he could have stopped earlier. The section describing Johan’s school days was interesting but somehow felt added on. I guess Mann found it difficult to know where to stop and needed Johan to die so that his mother could then go back to Amsterdam.

The novel also captures the decline of the family because they were unable to respond to new opportunities and were very governed by what their father had done.

I enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to visitors to the Baltic. It was given to me by Pete after his visits to The Baltic




Life after life

Kate Atkinson

2013
3.5 stars 

The many lives and deaths of Ursula Todd

This book opens with a possible assassination in Munich in 1930. It then rapidly moves to the birth of a child in 1910, this is Ursula Todd, the third daughter in a well-to do family in Berkshire. The child is born with her cord round her neck and dies, the event is then retold but with medical help arriving and this time the baby lives and becomes Ursula Todd. The novel then explores the many lives and deaths of Ursula, every time she dies the story rewinds and starts at a different point. So one builds up multiple possible lives for Ursula. In one life she becomes pregnant after being raped by a friend of her brother’s in another version she just receives an over long kiss. In another life she marries a vicious mean man who murders her, in another she almost drowns in Cornwall on the beach. Atkinson then uses this style to explore many possible lives in the 1930s . In one version she is a fire warden during the Blitz and Atkinson evokes the experience of being in the Blitz wonderfully with perceptive details about the effect of bombs, dust and the comradeship of the fire warden teams.

Several possible lives that involve her living in Germany are told, in one she is married to a lawyer who is close to the Nazi High Command and they holiday with Hitler in Berchtesgarden. She then commits suicide in Berlin in the chaos after the defeat of the Nazis.

The book explores the themes of how can life go in different directions. It is an interesting topic to explore but results in much repetition. Somehow it does not quite work. Atkinson is excellent at evoking many aspects of English well-heeled life in the 1920s, the domesticity, the faltering class system changes in dress, music housekeeping.

The other family members are drawn to different degrees; one of the strongest is her mother Sylvia who married aged 18 with little idea about reproduction and none about contraception. She has a strong sense of class, also herself uneducated but she talks in literary allusions much of the time. Her father Hugh is gentle man whose stature grows through the book. Her sister Pamela is a blue-stocking and goes to Leeds to study chemistry but then just focuses on motherhood and has 6 children herself. Ursula is close to her brother Teddy who is a romantic, and wants to become a framer but joins the RAF as a bomber pilot and nearly dies when bombing Berlin. Another brother Jimmy goes to the US. She is close to her aunt Izzie who is very unconventional and early in the book has a child that is given up for adoption in Germany. She gives Ursula help when she needs an abortion and refuge during the Blitz. Sylvia of course hates Izzie.

This is a big family saga and Atkinson evokes the 20s and 30s well. I wonder why she choose to develop a theme around this family, they are very English and conventional. They are almost willful in their absence of political engagement and this shows in Ursula’s inability to see the Third Reich clearly. Whilst I enjoyed the narrative I’m not sure that I want to spend more time with this family.
 

The Baltic Revolution
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the path to independence
Anatol Lieven

Yale University Press
Second edition 1994
 

I read this book whilst travelling in the Baltic States in July 2015 and it was a great companion and introduction to what I was seeing and experiencing thorough the cities, landscape and museums. I learnt much about the history and culture of the Baltic States from Lieven. He also gives excellent context to the contemporary problems.  

The book has nine chapters that cover the geography and the history of the area from the ancient Baltic people through to the Soviet colonisation in the late 20th century. He also discusses the culture of these states. He creates narratives relevant to the different countries with threads for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. He brings out how rural Lithuania is, how cosmopolitan Riga is and how close to the Finns the Estonians are. Christianity came late to the region, there were conversion battles in the 14c which seems very late for a country like Lithuania which is now very religious. Lithuania was ruled by the Poles for a long time, and now the Catholic Church is dominant. However this also impeded the development of the Lithuanian language which happened very late. One of the consequences of development of the Baltics was Germanisation which one sees in the coastal areas and Thomas Mann having his summer house on the Curonian Spit, which was part of the Prussian empire then. Latvia and Estonia were part of the Russia Empire and the serfs were liberated early then left landless. 

He argues that the independence in 1918 was very weak. It was an economic success but a political failure because parliamentary democracy did not develop and foreign policy was missing. He also notes that now the independence of 1918 is being mythologised as is the history of the independence movements in 1990. 

He talks about the occupations of the 1940s, during the Soviet occupation people’s assemblies were set up as part of the communism import, collectivisation also happened then. During the German occupation many people fled, the population of Estonia dropped by 25% between 1939-45, Latvians went abroad or were sent to Soviet labour camps. In Lithuania and Latvia a resistance movement who lived in the forest was set up. I saw the set up of the Latvian resistance army in the museum in Vilnius; at one time they had extensive bunker systems to hide in. But there were also unfounded hopes that the West would come and rescue the Baltic states after the war and this was deeply disappointing for the resistance fighters. 

He brings out the disaster of the Russian occupation describing it as ‘Stalinisation, normalisation and the stagnation”. During Sovietisation, the Baltic states were marginalised because they were remote for Moscow; ministers had to repeatedly go to Moscow to beg for investment. Inappropriate industrialisation occurred with a huge influx of Russian workers causing a housing shortage. However the Baltics were known as the Soviet West because living standards were better there. 

He gives excellent descriptions of the culture of the Baltics and especially the choirs singing in Latvia and Estonia. We saw a rural folk festival in a national park in Estonia and everyone was taking part from tiny children to older men. In Riga there was a large folk festival for the whole region. These have been going since 1869 and were an important place for young people to meet and protest songs arose here in the 1980’s. There are also folk tales with heroes. Forest spirits are an important part of the culture. 

He gives good descriptions of the Baltic Germans who played an important part in developing the region in the 19 century. They seem to have all disappeared now. However the Baltic Russians are a more complex matter. Some Russians have been there a long time, they have taken on local customs and changed themselves but the Estonians resent them and use the word Russian to mean someone poor and dirty. But in NE Estonia the Russian speaking population has produced doctors, scientists and managers. The Estonian government was making speaking Estonian a condition of citizenship but I think this was dropped when they applied for EU membership because it meant that they were discriminating against 30% citizens. There has been a shift from being anti-Soviet to ant- Russian. In 1992 Lieven broke in to a Russian military base and found the soldiers depressed. There are now no Russian soldiers in The Baltic States. 

He also brings out how small these countries are, in Estonia there are 4 families who dominate state public services. He notes that there was some enthusiasm for a Nuremberg style trials of past collaborators. But people were worried that this was a right wing political campaign Even in 1994 he was hopeful about the Baltic States because they had achieved independence without ethnic conflict. There is less corruption than in other post soviet countries such as Azarbaijan. Also the Baltics are Scandinavian in many ways and care about public services. 

I was sorry that the book ended in 1990 because I would have appreciated his perceptive comments about the current situation now with all three countries having joined the EU, adopted the euro as their currency, experienced and recovered from the financial crash of 2008. When I travelled in these countries in July 2015 I felt that these countries have travelled a long way and have recovered from their sovietisation in many ways but are still behind other European countries, their democracies still looked weak. 

This is a good book to read about the region but would benefit hugely from a brief update covering the main events of the last 20 years.
London 2015



The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan

Knof Australia 2103

This wonderfully complex novel has a sad, bitter man at its centre. Dorrigo Evans a Tasmanian and his experiences of being a doctor on the Thai- Burma railway and how this affected the rest of his life. Dorrigo is born in Tasmania, qualifies as a doctor and is then caught up in the Second World War. As he is becoming an army soldier he has a passionate love affair with his cousin’s wife, he is consumed by his passion and in a mad moment as he is leaving for the front he asks her to marry him on the phone even though he is semi-engaged to an educated middle class woman, Ella. We then hear that Amy died in an explosion at her husband’s pub. We experience the horrors of the Thai Burma railway through the eyes of Dorrigo but also through the Japanese soldiers and the Korean guard. The section written in the camp feels very visceral with graphic descriptions of the starvation the men endured and how it affected their bodies and minds. We see the individual characters of the soldiers and how they coped or perished, Dorrigo shaves every day. The smallest acts of humanity could help one survive. The mud and rain were ever present; we also experience the beating to death of a soldier, Darky. We also experience the camp through the Japanese soldiers and see how they did not respect their prisoners.

He writes about the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima and the devastation that this caused. In the ensuing social chaos Nakamura, the Japanese colonel realises that the is war criminal so he re-invents himself and moves to Sapporo, North Japan where he marries and has a family. However he later befriends a doctor who was also a wanted criminal for having done live dissection.

Dorrigo takes three years to return to Australia and finds Amy waiting for him at the airport, they marry quickly and Dorrigo rises through his surgical profession. We see him cutting himself off from any emotions at all. Their marriage is a loveless desert, they were best in company when they could sparkle for others. Dorrigo is also a prominent supporter for war veterans and their causes.

We see the life of the soldiers who did survive, one pair go and free fish from a tank in Adelaide because one of their mates had talked endlessly in the camp about freeing fish if he survived. Jimmy Bigelow never speaks about his experiences but does keep his bugle as a prized possession because he had blown on that every day during the camp.

Dorrigo also visits some of the wives of his comrades who died. One widow is living deep in the bush and struggling to survive. He also discovers that he was related to Darky who was tortured to death and that Darky had aboriginal heritage.

The Korean guard is executed for war crimes and he does not really understand why he was executed. Nakamura re-invents himself as a good man. We see the price of survival, Dorrigo survived but he was then impossible to live with. The book also reflects on the effects of being a slave.

Dorrigo almost crosses paths with Amy who then succumbs to cancer alone.

Dorrigo dies after a car crash and his last thoughts are about the daily selection that he had to do choosing men for work, he choose the strongest so that the weaker would be protected.

I found this a compelling book and a reflection on the price of survival, Dorrigo is a good man in the camps but his emotional and private life was blighted. Nakamura was vicious in the camps and later found some good parts of his character.

It also made me think about the effects of the camp on my mother who was a civilian prisoner of the Japanese in Java, she was so young and had life changing effects and left her reluctant to discuss the camps. I discussed this book with Kennedy whose father was in Changi, Singapore. He felt that it was over derived from the diary of Weary Dunlop the medical officer in the camp. The parts in the camp have a very strong medical sense but I felt it was a much deeper book in its exploration of the effects of imprisonment and how people survive and how does a good man cope with the dreadful choices.



The Living Mountain
Nan Shepherd

Aberdeen Univ Press 1977
Canongate 2011
4 stars

The most lyrical book I have ever read about mountains.

This is a distillation of the experience of 30 years walking in the mountains. She lived in Aberdeen and wrote a couple of modernist novels, this short book was written at the end of the second world war but she was only persuaded to publish it in 1977, so there was a 30 year gestation. Each chapter considers a different aspect of The Cairngorms, water, snow, plateaus plants. She explores each theme with a depth of experience and wonderment. In each chapter she says something profound about the mountains and her deep relationship with them. When she talks about eagles you know that she has seen them close by and can compare them with ptarmigans. She also talks about how a journey that started as a sensuous experience has become a deep mystical experience for her. When she is in the mountain she has a Buddhist like sense of tranquility.

 

In Spite of the Gods. The strange rise of modern India.
Edward Luce

Little, Brown 2006
4 stars
 

This is a very thoughtful book about India written by someone who has lived and travelled there, has an Indian wife and is a financial journalist. The book reflects his deep knowledge about India, is written from a sympathetic perspective and his analysis is grounded in an understanding of Indian politics and economics,  

The book is structured around seven chapters which cover; the tension between the cities and the villages, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the rise of lower caste politics, the dominance of the Gandhi dynasty, Hindu nationalism, Indian Muslims and comparisons with China.  

He describes the people whom he meets well with memorable vignettes. In the chapter about the villages he talks about the enduring emotional ties that Indians’ have with their villages and he stays with Sonia a Gandhian social activist in Rajasthan who is working to improve the lot of people in her village. However he also shows how most villagers are living at subsistence levels and can only live in the village because they have a relative working in the city. Gandhi’s teaching also romanticized the villages and that still persists. In the chapter on Indian governance he describes how the young IAS officers are an educated elite governing the equivalent of small countries. I thought of the young IAS district governor we met in Udaipur, bright, young with a modern line drawing of Gandhi on his wall. Luce talks about a young IAS officer whom he met in Cochin who was famous for not taking bribes and so had built Cochin airport in record time and with great efficiency.  

He explores the effect of corruption on Indian society, because so much money is lost through bribes the money allocated by government never reaches the people and projects it is intended for. In Bihar the roads are dreadful because the money for maintenance is removed and without good roads food cannot be transported. Poor people suffer most from the corruption, a poor woman in Delhi described how she had to pay someone to fill in her ration card application and then another bribe to receive the food allocation., when she did receive it the flour was weevily because the good stock had been sold by the shopkeeper. He contrasts Tamil Nadu where there is better governance with Bihar where the money that is allocated never reaches people.  

He also explains Indian politics well and how the low caste politics of N India is likely to remain powerful for a long time. He visits Lalu in Patna and sees the patronage that Lalu commands. When Lalu was in the cabinet he was Railways minister which offed him many opportunities for patronage. Maywati is a similar low caste politician in UP, also now v powerful. They both rely on people voting for them without questioning their policies, the vote banks. Of course if the low caste politicians were to join forces they could govern India forever but they are actually continually fragmenting. He also experience the corruption that makes politicians rich and has a cameo of his visit to xx house in Lutyens New Delhi where he has remodelled the house and put in vast split screens and stuff made of marble.  

Luce explores the continuing poverty in India. This is exacerbated by the poor level of education at a lower level. China opted to have good primary education and has raised the levels of literacy and so people can work in factories. India prioritized university education and produces vast numbers of engineers that work across the world. But much Indian industry remain small scale and home based where illiteracy can be hidden.  

He is fascinated by Indian politics, he has a whole chapter on the Gandhi dynasty and at that time he did not know that Rahul Gandhi would be entering politics and that her would be a Congress government lead by Singh but controlled by Sonia G. He has also talked to and written about the main players Lalu, Singh, Modi. He commends India for being a democracy but notes the low level of function of the Lok sabh.  

He discusses the effect of India’s size thinking as an economist how important this is and how it could give India huge leverage. 400 million Indians do not know where their next meal is coming from.  

He discusses the expanding middle classes explaining that the colonial legacy of speaking English has given the Indian IT sector a huge advantage., but even so the numbers of people employed in the IT sector is v small an dwarfed by agriculture and the service industries. He explores the beneficial effects of technology, liberating people form their caste traditions but it has also resulted in an increase in female fetocide.  

In his conclusions he suggest that the “future is India’s to lose”. If the middle class could be engaged enough to work on alleviating poverty which would be through better governance then India could boom with it’s young population if they were educated.

Interesting and sympathetic book. 





Private Island
Why Britain now belongs to Someone else 
James Meek 
Verso, London 2014
****
This is a powerful description of the changes that have occurred in the public services he explores. Meek has developed insight into the management and structure of the postal service, railways, electricity, water, NHS and housing associations. He gives vivid and data supported accounts of how these have changed for the worse since privatisation.

The postal services chapter opens with a vignette of a Dutch postal worker who was supposed to sort and deliver her post at home, she got behind with the deliveries and eventually the undelivered post filled her flat. The postal service are now being delivered by private companies who want to deliver less and do not have the obligation that the Royal Mail had to deliver to every home in the UK 6 days a week. The Postal services in Germany and Holland have produced a worse service for customers and poorer conditions for workers.

The privatization of the railways lead to the loss of expertise, engineers were thought to be not needed and let go. The railways then started on a massive upgrade of the West Coast mainline without the expertise of the professionals needed to do it. The price of upgrading was also predicated on using an untested technology “Moving block” for line control that had not been tested outside of small metropolitan areas. The railways was unable to do the upgrade, passengers had years of poor service and Railtrack went bankrupt. There were also severe crashes because of the loss of expertise.

The privatisation of water also lead to a loss of expertise and then when there were severe floods in 2007 the pumping station at Tewkesbury flooded because it had not been upgraded. Our electivity supplies are now precarious because they are mainly owned by foreign companies. We therefore have lost control over the pricing and also the future energy policy, and the role of nuclear energy.

He describes the meaningless reorganization of the NHS and the crazy contracts that were given to private providers to do operations. He also describes the hip replacement saga in which Dupont refused to accept responsibility for the failure of hip replacements that were metal on metal and had a higher failure rate. We see creeping privatization in the NHS.

He discusses housing in depth and shows how local councils have given up control over local housing stock and this being taken over by housing associations. Costing all of us more because of the upward spiral in house prices.

This is a powerful and depressing book. It shows how important services that should be run for everyone in society are being privatized. As a result decision about these service are made in remote board rooms. We also have lost control over vital aspects of our lives, transport, communication, energy, housing health.
 




Girl meets Boy
Ali Smith

Canongate 2007
3.5

This is a Scottish gay retelling of the Iphis and Ianthe myth in which a girl child was brought up as a boy and is then changed by the gods so that she could marry her love. “Girl meets Boy” is set in modern Scotland, two sisters, Anthea and Imogen are left on their own when their grandparents sail off around the world leaving only a brief note. The sisters work in advertising for a corporate firm called Pure who market bottled water and one sister gets ahead with her suggestion of Eaudonia. She is then starting to move up the corporate ladder and goes to London for advanced corporate training. But there is a Banksy like Guerilla, Robin then appears in Inverness and paints eco-slogans around the factory and then all over the town. Robin is strong, ecological and a female catalyst. Anthea falls in love with Robin; the novel captures the excitement and uncertainty of falling in love,

The ending is brilliant with a Shakespearean imagined gay marriage that is the shown to be a dream




The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot

Pan, New York. 2010
4 ****

This book written by a young New Yorker is important because it captures the human story behind an important scientific discovery. She explores the science, medicine, ethics behind the cells that were taken a poor black woman with carcinoma and the social backgrounds of the family who donated the cells. Like many human stories it is messy and the doctors and scientists were not aware enough of the human consequences of their actions. Hela cells enabled a huge breakthrough in cell biology because they continue dividing and so provide a continuous cell line.

Skloot did a lot of investigative work, it took years to gain the trust of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah and then she became fascinated in her mother’s story. The science is well described and how Henrietta’s cells were taken and grown in 1950 by a lab assistant Mary Kubrick. The lab had tried to grow many cell lines and they were not expecting these to grow, they were also trying many different media including fresh chicken blood. When the cells did grow they were then unstoppable, Georg Gey the man leading the lab was not a great publisher and his team had to push him to get him to publish the work. They gave out the cells with very little oversight. Johns Hopkins did not make money themselves out of Hela cells but they had not patented them so they did not make any money from the cells themselves but they could not stop other people making money out of the cells. The cells were also used in some very unscientific experiments such as being injected into prisoners. The demand for Hela cells was so great that a special facility to make them was set up close to Tuskegee, close to Henrietta’s home. Skloot also shows how the family were unacknowledged until family DNA was needed to help assess the purity of HeLA cells. I also wonder whether the reason that they grew so prolifically was because they were contaminated with herpes viruses that Henrietta herself had acquired and had contributed to her carcinoma. Whilst she was being treated she also had acute gonorrhoea acquired form her husband.

Skloot describes Henrietta’s life vividly, her birth is a slave house in Virginia and how she grew up motherless and ended up sharing a bed with her cousin whom she had her first child at the age of 14, she had another 4, one of whom had severe learning difficulties and was put into care at the negro Asylum for the Insane in 1953. Henrietta’s husband David went up to Baltimore to work in the steel factory during the Second World War and Henrietta joined him there. They still kept links with Clover and the backbreaking tobacco growing that was done there. She was first seen at John’s Hopkins with cervical cancer in 1951, her tumour was removed, she received radiotherapy but died in great pain from renal failure 9 months later. Neither she nor her family seem to understand the seriousness of her condition.

Her children then had a very tough life, there were four children, Lawrence dropped out of school to look after his siblings. David her husband remarried to Ethel who tortured the two youngest children, Deborah and Joe. Deborah then got pregnant at 15 and her cousin looked after the child so that she could finish her education. Joe ended up in prison via The Army. Deborah is a very important voice in the narrative because she never knew her mother and being part of Skloot’s detective work was finding out about her mother. Deborah is also a difficult damaged person and lost a huge amount with her mother’s early death. One of the researchers at John’s Hopkins made a fluorescence dye picture of Hela cells and it was given to Deborah as a portrait of her mother.

This is an important book because it explores the tension between material given for scientific research and the people whose lives were affected. The scientists were delighted to have these amazing cells that helped them solve scientific problems but they have not thought much about the woman behind the cells. In contrast the family were deeply affected by Henrietta’s early death and the effects of this can be seen in the lives of her children especially Zakkariya and Deborah. There is another tension that is that even now the Lacks family cannot afford good health care in the US. Their mother gave a huge gift to the world but they remain poor.

One also sees the poor ethical practice then, Henrietta’s name was let slip on TV programme and then people became interested in the family. The cells were also used in some unscientific experiments such as injecting cells into prisoners. The poor quality of medical care then is also illustrated, Deborah seems to have been given little information about her condition and this then had a rebound effect on the family later. They also had nowhere to go to find out information.

I was struck by the enduring violence of American society in the South. Blacks are still affected by poverty and lack of education and this translates into violence later on. The book also illustrates the inequalities generated by the absence of universal health care in the US.

This book has spawned some impressive developments. Sloot lead in the setting up of a Henrietta Lack’s foundation http://henriettalacksfoundation.org/ which gives scholarships and help to black people. One can watch the early programmes about Hela Cells and the foundation supports an annual lecture. This is probably helping the redress the imbalance that the family have experienced.

This book should be read by anyone working with human tissue in a lab, it will help people see the human story behind laboratory cell lines




The Guest Cat
Takashi Hiraide

Macmillan 2014
4 stars

This is a lovely story about the role an independent animal can play in your life and home. Takashi and his wife were looking for somewhere to live and moved into the guest house of her old house. He was a writer and editor and decided to work from home. As they settled down into their new home they were then adopted by Chibi a light, bright independent cat who lived with the family next door. Chibi is playful and brings fresh air and new love into their lives. As they bond with the cat we hear about their other friendships with former work colleagues. Takashi is himself a writer and editor, his wife becomes close to the old lady. Her husband then dies and they start looking after the large house and gradually moving on. Then they suffer the blow of being told that Chibi is dead, but the woman who tells them gives them few details and they are not invited to visit her grave. They then move out of the house because it is sold by the children. They then take up a new flat and also adopt new kitten at the end.

The story is a beautiful capturing of how entwined one’s life can be with an animal. Sadness when animal dies. The story has Japanese touches, tatami mats, traditional houses. Japanese cat titbits. The twist in the tale is the author was not sure that the cat died- the excuses that the neighbor made were too simple




Elizabeth is Missing
Emma Healy

3.5 star
 

This novel is set inside the head of Maud an old Lady with progressing dementia. In her confusion she worries constantly and irritatingly about the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth. She tries to find out what has happened to her friend. She also discovers an old compact case in her friend’s garden and this sets off another mystery. The second mystery is about her sister Sukey who disappeared in the 1950s and the novel has parallel threads one set on the 1950s in post war Britain and her family’s home. She was barely a teenager, her sister had married Frank who was a sly chap and dealt in black market goods. 

We see the agony of the parents with Sukey’s disappearance and the initial assumption that she must have run off. But Frank is also awakens Maud’s sexuality. The thread set in the 21st century gives us the experience of living with dementia, continually going to the shop to buy tinned peaches, writing notes and the n forgetting them , muddling daughter and grad-daughter. We experience the infinite patience of the daughter who also finds her mother quite irritating and her mother moves in with her daughter. The novel captures developing dementia well, her forgetfulness progresses with the novel and the link back to the 1950s which ends with Sukey’s body being found in the garden make it very readable. It is well written and Healy captures feelings such as getting wet in the garden or cold at the bus stop and family dynamics well. The motive for Sukey’s murder did not really work and was a weaker point of the novel.
 

I appreciated the reflections on memory, identity and ageing .  

 


Brooklyn 
Colm Toibin
4 *
 

This is a beautifully written Irish book. It is set in Ireland in the 1950s and we meet Eilis who is living with her mother and sister. Her sister gets her a job in a shop but also sees the limitations of the town. Father Flood, a priest in Brooklyn then visits and with Rose helps Eilis get a visa and accommodation in Brooklyn. She moves into an Irish boarding house and starts work in a department store on the shop floor. She combats her homesickness by doing evening classes in accountancy and book-keeping. The Irish girls are all keeping an eye on each other at their dances. She meets Tony, of Italian descent and starts dating him. Their romance builds up; he is a nice steady man with kindness and a sense of humour. However she is shocked by the poverty of his family who live in only two rooms. Their relationship deepens, but she is alarmed when he talks of having children.

Disaster strikes when Rose, her sister dies suddenly at home. Eilis goes home and soon finds that her brothers have returned to their jobs and expect her to look after her mother. She slowly settles back into life in Enniscorhy and is soon being wooed by Jim, the local publican who everyone thinks has good prospects. But there is a problem, Eilis has not told anyone that before she left New York she wed Tony. She had told her sister that he was important to her in the regular letters she wrote. Pressure mounts on her to settle with Jim, but whilst she is agonizing over her choice she meets an older woman in the town who is friends with her Brooklyn landlady Mrs Kehoe. She makes it quite clear that she knows about Eilis partnership with Tony and also that she would use this information to blackmail her. Eilis then confesses her marriage to her mother who merely observes that Tony must be a nice man if Eilis has chosen him. I was in suspense, one only learns what Eilis is choice is right at the end.


It is a book about peoples’ thoughts and feelings. There is very little background scene setting even in Brooklyn. In fact Eilis hardly goes to Manhattan. When she accompanies Tony to a Dodgers match the match is described by the conversation between his brothers. Eilis’ mother says almost nothing, she has little to say about her daughter going to America. When she decides to return her mother retreats to her room the night before saying that she does not want to be disturbed. But Toibin captures the scenes well and I felt as though I was in the cathedral town, at the wedding, on the strand. In the shop she is one of the first to sell to coloured women.


Looking forward to reading other Toibin books.




Berlin - Imagine a City
Rory Maclean

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2014

I heard Rory Maclean talk about his book at The Hay festival 2014 and bought it there and had it signed. I have read it in anticipation of going to Berlin in 3 weeks time. It is an outstanding travel book. He captures the history of the city through the lives of its residents and had 24 different vignettes from the 14th to 21st centuries. The first vignette is of a medieval troubadour whose tongue was cut out for singing songs that criticized the king, the last recounts a Jewish family being welcomed back to the neighbourhood they were deported from 70 years ago.

The book captures the ongoing change in Berlin. Soldiers have frequently been present and the medieval soldier was a mercenary and away from home. Frederick the Great changed from being an Enlightenment figure to pursuing military campaigns. Napoleon captured Berlin and this left a deep shadow. Bismarck sent troops to France to avenge the previous defeats and salvage Prussian pride. Hitler militarised Berlin and MacLean has several chapters that touch on the Nazis. The next occupants were the Russians, Americans and British after the war. Maclean captures the spying activity that went on then describing Bill Harvey who created a secret tunnel underneath the Russian sector for spying. The tunnel was redundant because the Brits and Americans had been betrayed by double agents. Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in 1963, reaching out to an encircled city, is written as a play and captures the drama of that event. He also notes that the wall was dreadful but it was better than war and this was recognised by many people.

Berlin’s strong artistic associations are captured across the centuries, the medieval troubadour, Marlene Dietrich, Berthold Brecht. The last two had to leave Berlin because of Hitler’s opposition to artists. Kath Kollwitz captured life in 20 c Berlin through her drawings depicting the poverty of its inhabitants.

Margaret Boehm describes life in 19 c Berlin for women. Christopher Isherwood also captured Berlin in the 1930s. He describes Leni Reifenstahl’s work for the Nazis in detail and comments on how she never acknowledged her association with the Nazis.

People have gone to Berlin to have fun: singers, prostitutes and then the hedonism of the 1920s.
Berlin could also be a tough place for women, the exploitation of women in factories in the early 19 is vividly portrayed as is the exploitation of women. He describes the double standards for women especially in the 19 c when men would have mistresses who they were seen with publically but also had upright private lives.

Maclean also captures the life of East Germany, he interviews a man who joined the East German army with enthusiasm only to be sent to a prison camp.

His penultimate chapter is about a Vietnamese refugee who first went to East Berlin but ended up making money in the united Germany but was also involved in gang warfare.
This book is a distillation of Berlin.





Americanah

Chinamanda Ngozi Adiche

3* 

4th Estate London  2013



This is a long novel about the US, Nigeria, migration and love.  The central character is a woman in her 30s ,Ife who after university in Nigeria gets a scholarship to go to the US.  That means leaving her boyfriend Obinze and they hope that he will join her. She joins her cousin who had to flee Nigeria 6 years earlier when her General lover and the father of her son Dilek fell from power and they were both spirited out.   Adiche captures the difficulties of the new migrants’ life, the way that nothing is familiar and everything is a challenge, she is able to spend some time with her cousin in NW before taking up a scholarship in Penn Uni. She captures beautifully the squalor of a student lodging especially when there is a dog there. Ife then moves to Yale and becomes a successful academic. Her next lover is a rich white man called Curt who seems quite unaware of the racial slurs and stereotypes that are being played out every day with Ife. She starts to become interested in the aspect of race in the US and starts a blog. She then has an affair with another man in the apartment and Curt pushes her out. Her next lover is Blaine a black American academic at Yale who is the perfect man, sensitive, attentive, socially aware and environmentally conscious. Somehow Ife is constrained in this relationship and it fractures fatally when she fails to support Blains at a campus protest about low paid workers, preferring to have lunch with an African sociologist. By this time Ife is famous from her blog. She moves back to Nigeria, this section is really a reflection on the different aspects of race in the US and how they have their own language which is curious to a black African who has not experienced slavery.    

Earlier there is a long section about Obinze being in the UK and how he struggles as an illegal migrant, he works hard, lives poorly. The contrast of his current life as an illegal with that of one of his class mates who has married a successful lawyer is brought out by a dinner party in Islington in which the guest enthuse over things he has no access to, exquisite food, rural pottery and projects that baffle him, such a scheme to encourage doctors to return to Africa. This illegal life contrasts with Ife's legal life in the US.  Ife's move back to Nigeria allows Adiche to explore the challenges of retiring home. She captures the pleasures of Nigerian food, the smells of Lagos. These  are set against the struggle of getting a job there, she initially works for a female magazine but soon leaves and sets up her own blog about returnees to Lagos. She also finds Obinze and starts an affair with him.   This novel captures the reactions and struggles of migrants.  Both legal and illegal, she notes how people become Americanised, her nephew Dilke is American rather than Nigerian and even attempts suicide as a 17 yr old. She explores the paradox of being an African in the US where it is assumed that as a black person one is Afro - American with a slave heritage. She also explores returning of migrants well. The love stories are not so convincing, Ife does not treat her boyfriends well and opts out of relationships or destroys them and this did not endear her to me.   

The strengths of this book are the depiction of life as a migrant and a returnee. The weakness is in  Ife' s character who is not likeable and so I cared less about her. The blog posts were also written in a rather wooden style so I often skipped them. This novel does not compare with Chinamanda's previous excellent novels.  






Care of Wooden Floors
Will Wiles

3 *

 

This is an absurdist and enjoyable novel about Eastern Europe, house-sitting, friendship and the quest for perfection.  

The unnamed protagonist responds to a call from his successful minimalist composer friend to flat sit for him whilst he is in California sorting out his divorce. The flat is in the capital of an Eastern European country (unnamed) and is minimalist perfection with pale wooden floors, 2 cats and a dour cleaner. Our hero is a lazy graduate (W) whose writing career has not taken off and has not managed to settle into a long-term relationship with a woman.  

Oskar is a controller and has left a trail of notes across the flat about how to look after it, even one in the stash of porn mags beneath the bed. On the very first day W spills a glass of wine and marks the floor. This sets of a chain of consequences including more wine being spilt on the floor, the cats getting their teeth into the sofa, the cats getting drunk and one dying by falling into the piano. There is then a long corpse scene when W has to disposing of the cat in a canal There are more accidents involving wine and floors and W tries to correct the damage but everything worsens and the cleaner even dies accidentally in the flat.  

As W is trying to make repairs in the flat he discovers that the underside of the floorboards are also wine stained. He then has a call from Oskar and it transpires that Oskar’s wife found living in the flat impossible and the two of them had had a bet about the impossibility of living in the flat as part of trying to resolve their martial problems; if someone else also messes up the flat the Oskar would accept that it was an impossible flat to live in.

This is a very easy book to read, Wiles describes architecture and cities well. He also gets into the head of an underachieving 30 year old very well. Much of the book is a witty interior dialogue by W imagining what he would say to Oskar. This dialogue contrasts well with Oskar's notes; the notes are so formal and W’s head is so emotional.
 


The nature of friendship is one of the main themes; another theme is the quest for perfection and what a price it has. It can only be achieved in the absence of other people.  

The book is somewhat over-written; the details about the E European city are over done. There is also a long section on a drinking evening in a nightclub with a friend of Oskar’s, this does not really link into the rest of the book. But it is a book that is enjoyable to read. 
 

How to Read The Air
Dinaw Mengestu

Jonathan Cape 2010
3*

I picked this paperback up after hearing Mengestu speak at the Hay Festival of Literature (May 2014). And I started redaing it in Ethiopia in July 2014. The narrative is about two young Americans in New York, Jonas is of Ethiopian extraction but grew up in Illinois. He meets Angela, a black Afro-American lawyer, at a centre for helping asylum seeking process their applications. The novel explores their marriage, his parents' marriage, the spaces between people and unspoken narratives.

We hear the story through Jonas’s mind, and he interweaves an account of his marriage with Angela with a parallel exploration of his parents' marriage. They have very contrasting characters, he incredibly passive whilst she is an ambitious hard working trainee lawyer. After he loses his job she buries herself in work, then she has an affair with another partner, she moves to Los Angeles, whilst Jonas is passive and barely responds to the challenge of her leaving. Angela complains that she does not know what he is thinking and it is easy to understand. The other major event is his father’s death, to which he is initially emotionally flat but then he has to travel round the mid West where his parents had a near fatal crash. We see how his parents’ marriage had huge tensions and the parents barely communicated with each other. We can then see this replicated in the marriage of Angela and Jonas.

Jonas is also a fantasist, at the asylum centre he dreams up amazing stories for applicants relating with having their homes burnt down when in fact they flew business class from Dubai. But he does this without a blink. After he loses his job at the centre Angela’s senior partner finds him a part time job teaching English at a private school in Manhattan. Jonas is initially a quiet teacher but then starts to tell the students stories, initially boasts about his past. After his father dies he embarks on a long elaborate narrative about how his father fled for Addis and had to work in the docks in Port Sudan until he was able to get a passage on ship out of Sudan. The story is detailed and engrossing, I felt as though I experienced the tough work of loading ships and the anxiety about being betrayed and whether one will get onto a ship. Jonas tells his student this narrative over a month or so instead of teaching the students. Whilst they are engrossed one can see that this is heading towards disaster. At the end of the story Jonas just walks out of the school.

The tensions in the relationship between Angela and Jonas are very palpable and it is easy to see how she complains that he tells her nothing. In the narrative we experience the feelings he is unable to share.

This is an uneven novel, the narratives are good as is, Jonas’s story telling abilities, and details observed from New York, such as the way Angela’s senior partner greets him but the overlong exploration of his parents accident made the novel pall and more difficult to read. The other problem was it was difficult to care about Jonas’s parents.
  




Chowringhee by Sankar
3*

This is “the Kolkata hotel novel”; I bought it in Delhi in Mar 2014 to supplement to my visit to Kolkata in Nov 2013. We follow the fortunes of a young man, Shankar, who struggles with employment. He starts as a wastepaper bin salesman but then has a break and is employed in the hotel as a secretary. We then experience life in the hotel and his growing work and life experiences through his eyes. There is a large cast of characters, the most notable is the chief receptionist Bose who runs the hotel and gives Shankar lessons in work and life. Another strong character is Rosie, a secretary, who absconds with one of the guests but returns and picks up her job again. Our hero had been lodged in her room which he felt uncomfortable about. Rosie also reclaims her room by blackmailing Shankar with sexual threats even though he was too paralysed by fear to even think of touching her. One of the hotel staff was a great stylist, choosing perfect napkins and furnishings. One of the ladies in a permanent suite had her styles and colours changed daily. There is also a hotel orchestra lead by the band master Gomez who loved Beethoven.. Our hero also learns to compere an erotic show with an Englishwoman Connie in an act with a dwarf. The acts involved pricking thousands of balloons to raise the erotic temperature. Sex is a big theme of the book, other Kolkatans hire suites and install their mistresses. One of the hostesses Karabhi thought that she was lined up for marriage to a Kolkata industrialist and then commits suicide when his family arrange for him to marry another woman. Another couple take rooms at the hotel whenever they are having a row and then often reconcile loudly and publicly.

One of the more touching stories related to Dr Sutherland who wanted to stay a last night in the hotel. He had been in Kolkata as part of the smallpox eradication campaign and our hero then went to the English cemetery in Kolkata with him to visit a grave. Sutherland later wrote explaining that they had visited his father’ s grave who had died prematurely after being blinded by smallpox in Kolkata many years earlier.

The book captures other Indian aspects of hotel life- the frustrations of dry days, which are still practiced. For many the hotel was an escape from home The book is strong on what it feels like to be a junior employee in a big hotel. One feels what it is like to do night duty; the employees live in a terrace of rooms in the hotel. The inward-lookingness of Kolkata in the1960’s is also captured.

What I missed was descriptive detail. I had little idea what the hotel or the employees looked like and this weakened the descriptions. It has a well written ending because Bose does find his princess (an airline hostess) and leaves the hotel, all the employees then club together for a fine banquet at which he has napkins and knife and fork and Gomez the musician plays. Then the enigmatic owner, Marco Polo decides to sell the hotel and leaves. Shankar is then sacked with only a months pay because he was on a temporary contract. This looks like Rosies ‘final revenge'. The book also captures the few options that women had in the 1960s and also the hotel employees, how their fortunes depended on their looks as well as their skills. However this book was a slow read.






London Orbital
Iain Sinclair
3 stars

Iain Sinclair made this walk around London in the late 1990s following the M25 around London’s periphery. It is a fascinating idea and one that appeals because I am also doing the London Ring (albeit the inner, smaller greener Ring walk). Sinclair is attracted to the murky side of history and he brings a critical eye to the landscape. This walk is a social, political and historical walk around London’s circumference. He warms to buildings that have changed and writes well about the hospitals that ring London. Once people were sent there for respite, now they have become desirable properties. His social commentary is also acute and he describes people’s social aspects acutely. When he looks at a development he suspects the murky property deal that has accompanied it.

He walked with several companions, Renchi, a New Ager type, who is always looking for runic signs, Marc Atkins the photographer accompanied him in the early stages but he was then attracted to other larger projects and dropped out. For the last half of the walk he was accompanied by Kevin Jackson, a journalist but a poor walker with an overloaded rucksack who then developed blisters in his blisters on his feet. Sinclair is attracted by New Agers.

The walk goes through Waltham Abbey, Enfield, Mill Hill, Abbots, Langley, Staines, Epsom and Dartford. In each place Sinclair makes connections and links with the lives of previous Londoners. In Waltham Abbey he notes the long association with the military industrial complex, small arms were produced here over centuries, in the Royal Small Arms Factory. When walking over North London he writes about the Elizabethan Houses that were the country escapes for the Elizabethan court. Myddelton was the jeweler to James 1st and became very wealthy but was also a speculator. He built New River to provide water to London and this continues as a small stream in Islington. He has an accurate description of the National Institute Medical Research building as a forbidding cliff with a gleaming copper patina roof. Here they pause to hear a lecture by a German conceptualist as part of an arts /science event. I nearly went to work there for my Doctoral research. In Shenley he notices the former mental hospital and also finds Wren’s house (Porter’s Park). When he describes Harefield Hospital in NW London he sees cardiac surgery as having links to Aztec sacrifices. In South London he describes St Georges’s Hill where the 17th century Diggers met. At Box Hill he does not warm to the NT café and bike hire. At Epsom he muses about the 17 c writers who went out there, Pepys, Defoe, John Aubrey. He tracks down an Eric Gill sculpture in a church in Painshill but it is disappointing. At Joyce Green hospital he meets a pathologist who is saving the history of the hospital as a smallpox hospital.

He also has a very active brain and he is busy analyzing and reflecting on how things are. He enjoys his meals in greasy spoon cafes and connects with local people and places them in the landscape. However this book is far too long and the digressions, although interesting, become wearying. He also parades his heroes such as JG Ballard too often. He also talks about his pet dislikes too often- New Labour and the Millennium Dome, paradoxically he excels in the number of ways to describe the Dome disparagingly.. The end of the walk is extraordinary, taking place in the 1999 December darkness and he and Kevin get lost close to Waltham Abbey and he experiences the landscape as if in a dystopian future.

He obviously wanted to complete the walk by the Millenium and then returns to his Waltham Abbey starting point for the Millennium celebrations in which he has an indifferent Indian meal.

This book made me aware again of all the literary and architectural links that London has. It would be worth looking up some of these links as I do the London Ring walk.





Secrets and Second Chances
Anita Shirodkar

Rupa, 2014
3 stars
 

Indian romcom and thoroughly enjoyable.

The book opens with a successful architect, Nandita Dharkar, finding a new flat in Mumbai. She has previously worked in Delhi doing up market conversions for socialites. She has relocated to Sabarwal associates, a Mumbai architect practice and is looking forward to doing larger projects. Her first big project is designing a new luxury hotel. This brings her into contact with Arvan Rai who grew up in the US and is now working in India. She initially has a frosty relationship with him after an unfortunate first meeting at a party when he was very drunk, however they then have a love affair that is characterised by luxury contrasting with their hard working professional lives. Nandita is a very driven woman, organized and determined to succeed. The narrative captures well the architects office with different characters, one woman who is very supportive, another who is having an affair with a married man and the established senior worker who resents her presence.
 
Nandita ‘s mother Amrita lives in Delhi where she has a successful food business Epicurean, producing Indian gourmet food for social events. She is also very driven and a rather private woman. She and Nandita were very close and she brought Nandita up thinking that her father had died. This was not true and we see Amrita burdened by the secret. However Nandita has recently found a letter written by someone who was probably her father hidden in a jewelry box that her mother had forgotten about and used as a gift. Aditya Arora, an ex-boyfriend then turns up in Mumbai. He has previously led a playboy like life refusing to settle down to a job, but now he is trying to make a career as a photographer. He comes and lives in her flat, and rapidly has a relationship with Arushi, one of Nandita’s new friends. Nandita’s professional and past lives start to cross, she is working on the design for a new TB drugs facility funded by a pharmaceutical company and Abhimanyu, the head is clearly very fond of her and I wondered whether he thought that he might be her father. On her thirtieth birthday she receives a vast bouquet from him but also a letter from a lawyer. She then goes to the lawyer in Ballard estate. Here she discovers that her father is dead but has left her a letter and a fortune. She then discovers that she was the daughter of Himanshu, the younger brother of Ravi Sabarwal. Her mother had had a fling with Himanshu the younger brother of Sabarwhal when she felt abandoned by Abhimanyu who had gone to the US as a student. When she found she was pregnant she relocated to Delhi and gave up her early fashion photography career. She then reinvented herself as a food producer. She kept Himanshu away and was fiercely independent and rejected offers of money. He came to Delhi occasionally to observe unseen and saw Nandita growing up. In Mumbai Nandita the realizes that she loves Aditya and that they have a closeness that cannot be matched by other relationships and they decide to marry. At a final dinner in Delhi Nandita tells her mother how she has pieced together the story of her life. At the same time her mother and Abhimanyu are rekindling their relationship from 30 years ago. The book works best when describing Nandita’s work and the work- life balance she creates. She seems rather a tough character and does not have a lot of insight, maybe that came partly from her mother. I also could picture all the places in Mumbai and Delhi and enjoyed all the references to places I know.





Surviving the Sword. Prisoners of the Japanese 1942-45
Brian MacArthur

2005

This book documents the FEPOWS and their sufferings in the Japanese camps. MacArthur has interviewed many ex soldiers whilst they were still alive and captured their testimony. He has also consulted reports, letters and dairies. He creates a powerful story about the soldiers who were imprisoned by the Japs after the fall of Singapore and other places in the Far East. His story is mainly about soldiers (Brits and Aussies) with major sections about the building of the Thai Burma railway, the hell ships and the work camps in Japan. The cruelty of the Japanese dominates this story. They themselves would have committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner so held their prisoners in very low regard but the torture they inflicted was brutal.

The Brits were notoriously unprepared for the invasion of Singapore. Many soldiers were then taken to Changi jail and military order reasserted itself there with separation of officers and ranks and establishment of military discipline. He then has a long section about the horror of building the Thai- Burma railway. Here 62000 men were used as slaves and 270 000 locals as coolies. They were starved, assaulted, beaten, tortured in many ways. It is painful to read about. The Japanese were indifferent to the disease and death that resulted. The prisoners were starved with grossly inadequate food, disease especially infections and deficiency disease (Changi balls dermatitis) were rife and many men starved or died from diarrhoea or malaria. How did man survive this? The most important one was comradeship and men looked out for each other. The death rates were lower when they shared food equally and when extras were rotated around. Those living in the area where eggs could be bought survived better because buying local eggs gave an extra source of protein. There were also some outstanding medical officers (eg Weary Dunlop) who worked to ensure that latrines were built and that food was shared. They were also very ingenious and made use of small amounts of medicine, tried innovative treatment, men with bad ulcers had amputations which were often life saving. Some officers arranged for all men to have a small amount of money docked so that sick men got something extra. Not everyone was happy to sign up to this. They were also ingenious at making radios and having sector news reports, in the stable camps there were classes and lectures, men studied for professional topics. And there were lecture courses Stealing was rife, the Aussies specialised in it and especially as a way of outwitting the Japs, the Americans had a mafia in ten camps, cigarettes were another form of currency. Music and religion were also life enhancing.

In stable camps officers retained their perks. Changi seemed a well ordered place by comparison with the work camps. It was here that British military discipline with it’s petty rules also thrived, using swagger sticks as they walked around camp and a prison cell for minor infringements of military discipline. MacArthur has a long chapter called officers and Gentlemen in which he explores the many ways in which the army officers maintained rank and privilege, even dressing for dinner. It was clear that many of the officers did not earn these privileges. He points outs that British officers who had joined in King Edwards reign not good at coping with new situation., some lost the will to lead. The Aussies seemed to have shared more with their men and the men had lower death rates, 27% vs 37% for the Brits, also a lower death rate for aussies officres and 6% for Brit officers.

Kennedy Cruickshanks’s father was in Changi and Kennedy mentioned the papers he wrote after the war on the neurological effects of deficiency – burning feet. Andrew Rice has also commented on the reports of painful feet associated with these deficiencies and mentions Dunlop in his talks. I have also been thinking about my mother as a teenage Dutch civilian in her camp. The theme of starvation and cruelty is one that she mentions in the few times that she discusses that episode in her life. 





The 32 Stops
Danny Dorling

Penguin 2013
Part of the Penguin series to celebrate 150 years of the Tube.
4*

Dorling navigates the length of the Central line through a series of vignettes , he starts at West Ruislip at 6.00am and imagines a typical person living there, he the visits each station along the line at 30 min intervals. At each station he writes about a person who would typify the area, so in Ruislip we see the concerns of Council employees, At White City a woman is visiting her son on remand, at Queensway we see a wealth creator, at Notting Hill Gate a would be Tory candidate is canvassing, at Bond St a cardiac surgeon takes his registrar out for lunch before doing his private surgery, at Holborn a wealthy Greek Lady, at St Paul’s a homeless lady is begging, at Bethnal green a Jewish immigrant has a row with her daughter, at Leyton an old East End lady muses on Labour history, .in South Woodford and old lady barely manages in her home with carers visiting.

He uses these characters to explore the social demographics of London, In Ruislip he considers the effect of location of the GCSE results. In central London he looks ta people’s income. He is also very interested in gradients and how a few stops can affect people’s life expectancy. At Oxford St he notes that the Tube runs beneath the most expensive volume of real estate in the world. His vignette of a cardiac surgeon takes in the surgeon having lunch with his registrar who hates him but needs his patronage. In Holborn a Greek lady is there, she feels out of place, dislocated from Athens and there because of her money, her nephew is studying at LSE. The young are struggling to find somewhere to live; the old are worried about the young.

He plots the number of bankers at each station, highest in Bank, then Notting Hill Gate. His plot of GCSE scores shows the highest results in Notting Hill gate and lowest in Mile End.

He has looked at data on health, wealth, education for each stop and created a wonderful detailed picture. The data illuminates rather than drowns. He depicts the huge gaps, the non doms in the City and the old lady worried that her flat will be taken away from her because she has too many rooms.

This is a beautiful piece of social history.


 



The Alchemist
Paul Coelho

Harper Collins 1988
3 star

Story of an Andalusian shepherd boy who is learning the trade of shepherding who dreams twice that he will find treasure at the pyramids. He meets an old man who knows about his dream and tells him to follow his dream and gives him two stones (Urim & Thummim) to help him achieve his aim.

He then crosses the Straits of Gibraltar to the Arab town there. Here he rapidly has his money stolen and has a cold night outside, but he then sees that he could help a man with a crystal shop. Here he learns Arabic but also develops his skills and helps the man develop the shop with innovation. He then becomes keen to follow his dream again and so starts to cross the Desert. He is accompanied by a man who is now his guide. They travel with a huge convoy but only just reach an oasis before war between the desert tribes breaks out. Here he also falls in love with a Bedouin girl, Fatima. His mentor is guiding him to learn to listen to his heart because this is the way he will find the treasure. The boy then has challenges; he has to learn to handle a kite. His big test comes when he is challenged by a Bedouin chief to summon up the wind. He does this after great concentration. But he also grows in his own spirit because he then appreciates that he has to listen to his heart.

However he does not find the treasure at the pyramids. He then returns home first to the girl in the desert, then his heart tells him to go to Andalucia. Here he is back at the church where he had his first dream. By following his heart he is now able to find treasure in the place where he started. The lesson is that he nee the journey to learn about himself and to follow his heart.

It' s rather soft story. I suppose its popularity come from the simple message that we should listen to ourselves. The character of the boy is not really developed. We follow his journey and see him grow but he is still a sketchy character. The desert is evoked well as are his early travails when he has to learn on the road to protect himself, he also clearly has a capacity to learn from situations.  





The Winter House. Nicci Gerrard
Penguin 2009

A novel about death and how it enables one to revisit one’s childhood. The story has a strong structure, Ralph who is dying of cancer asks his two teen friends to be with him as he dies. He chooses a cottage in Scotland where they spent the last summer of their childhood. Marnie narrates most of the novel through flashbacks. She grew up in a cottage with her sad mother who had been widowed young. Marnie’s first boyfriend is the super athlete David but he dies in a car crash caused by him driving off in a rage when she ditches him. This then brings Ralph, the younger brother who wants to be a poet and thinker into Marnie’s life. However Marnie lusts after Oliver, the other member of the group. The fourth member, Lucy, is barely mentioned.

We see the children pass into adulthood over a summer which includes a holiday in Scotland by the lake. Later Oliver and Ralph go to university and Marnie to art college. Marnie finds a partner in Italy, a man with children so she acquires children without having her own.

The cottage and the cold winter are captured well, but the flashbacks to their younger selves do not work. The teenage angst that Nicci depicts is not very interesting or compelling. There were clearly major fractures, Marnie’s friend Lucy is given almost nothing to say and seems to have come off badly. But I did not really care about the characters enough.

I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to reading this. It has been on my bookshelf for years, but it did not reward my effort.




The Wild Places Robert Macfarlane
4 stars
Granta 2007

This exploration of the British Isles is beautiful, tough and filled with wisdom. Robert is convinced that there is no wilderness left in the UK and sets out to explore it. He then explores 15 different kinds of wilderness from island to cape, summit to grave. He starts in Wales at Enllis, and then travels to many remote parts of Scotland taking in Skye, Glen Coe, the Pentland Firth and Cape Wrath. In these places he sleeps out in his bivouac bag, does night walks. At each place he is aware of the past history and he brings a sense of social history to each place. Through his eyes I understood the effects of the Highland clearances better and how the dislocation broke families and communities, in Ireland he makes the horror of the famine palpable. Describing both the ineffective relief efforts and people dying quietly in their cabins. Through his walks he appreciates how the landscape of the British Isles is moulded by the effects of people who have lived there for millennia. When he is in Ireland with Roger Deakin he also looks at the plant life in a limestone area and starts to appreciate how exotic this is too. The birth of another child also limits his wanderings for a while and he then appreciate the beauty to be found around him at home. When he visits Holloway in Dorset he is amazed at how much can be detected of previous life there. Orford Ness can also be a remote dangerous place. The books also rich in reflections about landscapes and how they are formed, when he is writing about limestone he reflects that limestone weathers around previous imperfections, in Orford Ness he writes about the science of sand movement and dunes.

He appreciates the mystical. In Wales he thinks about the pilgrims who migrated there in their coracles. In the Lake District he reflects on Coleridge’s melancholia.

He also explores the concept of maps, he appreciates the standard grid based OS ones but also argues that we should replace these with other mental maps. A day on Chesil beach leaves him thinking about the importance of making maps of ones inner landscapes. He has a map at the front of his wanderings which connect the walks in a space that puts Scotland at the front and links together the various objects he picked up on his travels.

The book is a tribute to Roger Deakin who was clearly an inspirational friend and also a traveller, albeit through trees and water. Roger describes his visits to Rogers home, Roger then becomes ill but despite this they travel to Ireland and Dorset. It is on these travels that Roger shows Robert the life at hand. Roger then dies and I see Roger as a father figure t handing over knowledge to the younger man.

The lesson of the book is that wildness can be found close to home and that one should appreciate its many forms. 





The Paying Guests
Sarah Walters

2014
3.5 stars

This novel is set in 1920,s London, a genteel world of widows and unmarried daughters. Mrs. Wray and her daughter Frances take in paying guests to cover their finances because their father had made bad investments and not provided for them properly. Len and Lillian move in, Len is a clerk at a City insurance firm; his wife is a rather flighty creature who likes heavy decoration and baubles. A love affair develops between Lilian and the daughter of the house, started when they walk around the local park together and have a picnic; the affair deepens after a Saturday night party at her relatives in a lower class home on the Walworth Road. Frances had a previous lesbian affair and still visits her old lover. They had planned to live together but Frances was unable to cope with the massive family pressure put on her to renounce her lesbian love. She is now rather jealous of her ex girlfriend who had a new art critic partner.

The affair between Frances and Lilian becomes passionate and physical. One evening the three of them play a dares game with a very sexual content and Frances can see how Len is vicious towards Lillian. She and Len then go away on holiday. When they return Lillian is pregnant. Frances then helps her self abort at home, Len comes in whilst this is occurring and in the fracas that ensues Lillian kills him with a blow to the head with a poker tray. They take the body out into the garden and leave him. His body is discovered the next morning by an errand boy; and the street becomes a murder scene. Lillian is interviewed by the police as is Frances. The police investigation then grinds on and we see various people being considered as potential murders. Surprisingly Frances is never in the picture of suspects, the police build up a case against a weedy chap who is detained. At the trial Frances then discovers that Len had been having an affair himself as had his friend Charlie who then gave a false witness about the last time he saw Len. The accused boy had attacked Len earlier in the summer, an incident that he had tried to brush off. The tensions and drama of the trial are well described and the boy appears to be at risk of false imprisonment because he was represented by an inexperienced barrister, but the jury decided on a not guilty verdict. Len’s family was very angry. Frances has had v little time with Lillian and at the end of the book it appears that their love might be renewing.

This is a very powerful description of lesbian love, the early stages of an affair are captured, the irrational feelings. The physical aspects of lesbian love are also well described. The reasons for the love emerge during the novel. The drudgery of keeping a household in the 1920s is well described, Frances has to mop and clean and cook. The absence of men in 1920’s London is well captured. The first half of the book is good and I felt that I was in that gentle household, people’s feeling when someone moves in are described. The love affair between Frances and Lilian only just succeeds, Lilian is rather irritating and it is difficult to see what attracts Frances to her. The guilt that they experience after the murder is excellent, Frances is also very poor at keeping her distance from Lilian after the murder and I felt that she was going to betray their secret. Their guilt during the trial is also well explored and I wondered how they would live the rest of their lives and whether their crime would catch up with them. The first half of the novel captures 1920s south London well and contrasts with the second half, which is dominated by the trial and reads more like a crime novel.






Notes from the Hyena's Belly: an Ethiopian boyhood
Nega Mezlekia

2001
4 stars
 


This book describes growing up in Ethiopia in the 1960s, Nega grew up in a small town and captures rural Ethiopia then. Initially his family was in Jijinga. He describes his pranks at school and how he was then taken to have the sprits smoked out of him. When he was a teenager life in Ethiopia became far more dangerous and the Somalis started a revolutionary movement. He and a friend Wondwossen joined the movement and were soldiers for almost a year. His friend was killed and he then returned to school aged 16. By this time the revolution had started in Ethiopia and he and his family were forced out of Jijinga by Somali bombs. He describes the family fleeing with other refugees well. He and his family relocate to Tesfr. He is then offered a scholarship at Addis Ababa University. The year he takes this up is the year that the Derg unleash the Red Terror. Students are being murdered and he keeps a v low profile and gets a transfer to an agricultural university. Here he qualifies as an agricultural engineer. He stays here for another 4 years, supporting his brothers and sisters who are living with his younger sister and her husband. He is then offered a scholarship at Wagening university in Holland and attends there for two years. He watches the regime back in Addis destroy the country and decides that the only option is to move on to Canada. He flies there as a tourist and then seeks asylum. When he sought asylum he was expecting to be tortured but instead the officer gives him a slip for his health insurance and says that he can earn money, he then requalifies as an engineer and works in Canada. A year later (1989) he traces his family and discovers that his sister has thrown his brothers and sisters out and his younger brother ended up in an orphanage and missed most of his education. He then brings his brother over to Canada. The story is told well and captures what it was like growing up in small town Ethiopia in the 1960s. Nega is an outspoken boy and frequently gets into trouble and on several occasions his mother takes him to have the spirits conjured out of him. Nega has storytelling ability and each chapter feels like another story told by the fireside. The book also highlights the problem of being an adolescent in Ethiopia at the time of the fall of the emperor and then the dictatorship of the Derg. He captures the different political philosophies that were part of his discourse, being loyal to the crown as a young boy and obeying the flag, then following Marxist philosophy as a teenager. He now feels that the Marxists had used the wrong recipe for Ethiopia and should have allowed private enterprise to be stronger. He now lives in social democratic Canada. He captures the strong spirit life of Ethiopians. His descriptions of the battles between the army and the EDRC are vivid and come from first hand experience. He also captures the importance of family life for Ethiopians, how one hangs together as a family, especially when a refugee. He also describes his mother's sudden death very we'll and captures the pain that accompanied it. I enjoyed this book reading it on my visit to Ethiopia in 2015. It has given me insight into Ethiopian social customs and I understand the historical dynamics of the revolution and the horror of the Red Terror better. It complements my visit to the Red Terror Museum in Jan 2013






“Can't we talk about something more pleasant?”
Roz Chast A Memoir

Bloomsbury 2014
5 stars

A beautiful captured graphic novel about Roz' s parents, a Jewish couple in Brooklyn growing old and dying. The tale spreads out over 18 chapters starting with Roz attempting to talk to her parents about what they wanted for the end of their lives. The title of the book is her mother’s brisk response. We then follow her mother having a fall, going into hospital, the unmasking of her father’s senility. They manage at home for a little while both then move into a nursing home closer to Roz, her father dies after falling and breaking his hip. Her mother dies three years later having initially defied death and then had a long wind down.

This book describes so many aspects of parental aging that I now recognise: the level of grim rising in previously clean houses, the obsession with money. Roz got so tired of her parents talking about their bank books that she made a sign saying “ No bank book talk “ They also had paranoid fears about people coming into the home.

She captures her feelings, asking herself, “Why could they not have sorted out their house whilst they had the ability to do so?” Her reflections on clearing out her parents flat are touching; she finds letters from when her father was stationed in New Guinea during the Second World War. She photographs the house, the fridge with meals on wheels cartons, her mother’s work-station, and an arrangement of all her mother’s handbags.

She also records her parents’ personalities, her father meek and unassuming, her mother forceful and vigorous. The family and work colleagues recognised the “Blast from Chast” that her mother could deliver.

The graphic medium allows her to be very honest about her conflicted feelings with several speech bubbles showing her different responses to the situation when her mother went into hospital the first time. She is also able to use humour to talk about a very serious topic. The huge costs and their impact of having them in a care home are mentioned. These constantly escalated with more personal support and then hospice care.

In the care home her parents eat in the dining room, but they are “Out of practice socialising”, having been “each other's mirrors for too long”. Not everyone agreed with her father “that her mother was the world authority on everything”. Her mother remained in denial about her father dying until the end and declined herself three years later. Her mother also bonded with a black woman carer who was with her mother until the end.

She reflects the burden of being the only child responsible for a parent. She also reflects on her difficult relationship with her mother. She records how she tried to mend it but it was too late for that.

This book is relevant to everyone, we shall all face death of our parents, family and friends and this is a record of death in America in the 21st century.

I enjoyed this book for the truthful but witty reflection it gives on a serious topic. The graphic medium was perfect and allowed her to describe herself and her feelings. I shall be recommending this to all my friends.








The Testament of Mary
Colm Toibin

3 stars 


This slim book has Mary at its centre and how she might have experienced Christ’s life. This testament is therefore written from her perspective in contrast to the other testaments that were written by apostles. The narrative starts with the raising of Lazarus from the dead. This is described as an event that caused confusion; Lazarus was quiet and did not talk about what had happened to him when he was dead. Initially people had crowded around the house but rapidly people started to avoid him. She then goes to the wedding in Canaan and ends up leaving and travelling alone. Toibin imagines the loneliness that Mary might have experienced well, whilst Christ is performing miracles she is hiding in her house with people leaving food outside for her. She describes the crowds, noise and confusion in Jerusalem and how the priests urged the crowd to vote for Barabbas. The crucifixion is painful and she leaves before the end. She is taken away by one of the apostles to a safe house. She then lives out her life in Ephesus. Since she did not see the death she did not also experience the resurrection. She describes the resurrection as a dream that she and Mary had She has now been living in Ephesus , she complains regularly about the disciples and how she feels they are trying to rewrite history.

This is a book for Christians, since I don’t believe in the gospels it is not shocking for me to read a narrative undermining them. There are also too many details that are not explained for non-Christians.

I found Fiona Shaw’s play far more engaging because it depicted Mary’s grief and gave it a human context, that human context is missing here.

Disciples being an awkward bunch



The Last Man who Knew Everything
Andrew Robinson

Pi Press, New York, 2006
3 stars



 
This book is an excellent account of Thomas Young's life. Andrew Robinson is the polymath needed to comprehend the different aspects of Young's life (1773-1829). Because Young had such a wide range of interests a book about him has to also cover aspects of medicine, anatomy, the physics of light and wave transmission, translating hieroglyphs and scientific societies in the early 19c. Young was born the eldest of 10 children and he was clearly a gifted child, with a flair for languages and an ability to self teach maths and science. He was also supported by a rich uncle who was himself a doctor. Young attended medical lectures in London then went to Edinburgh for two years. He completed his medical training in Gottingen and seems to have enjoyed being in Germany. However he then had to come back and spend a further two years as a student at Cambridge because his medical degree was not recognised. A problem that still affects medical graduates from outside UK. He kept a low profile in Cambridge spending much of his time reading physics instead. He then moved to London with the aim of setting up in practice there. However he then spent significant amount of time first working on light perception and then wave theory. He was also a keen member of the newly founded Royal Institute and gave a series of lectures there. He then resigned from that to concentrate of his medical practice. He was appointed a physician at St George’s and had a significant practice in Worthing during the summer. However his next challenge was to work on the Rosetta stone and make a significant contribution to the understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He then became involved in the production of almanacs for navigations and then worked on calculating life expectancy for life insurance. He also had another Grand Tour in his late 40’s and died aged only 55.

Young was clearly fascinated by intellectual challenges and worked hard at a range of problems. He gave lectures but does not seem to have been a great communicator. He also seems to have taken the deciphering of a range of problems part way but then not done the work to complete the solution, this seems to have happened with understanding the lens, wave theory and hieroglyphics. He was also inhibited from spending too much time in science lest his medical practice suffer. It does seem to have suffered and he does not seem to be remembered as outstanding physician by his peers. I also would have liked to know more about Young's social life, whom did he talk to, which dinner parties did he go to, what was he like. I ended feeling that Young had probably not used his talents best as a physician and that it was shame that he did not become an academic because that would have suited him better. The book is also a little over-written with knowing asides in each chapter that I found a little irritating.


The Cellist of Sarajevo - Stephen Galloway
Atlantic Books 2008
3 stars 



I read this as part of my Balkan experience. The novel is easy to read, and captures many facets of life in a besieged city. The novel is narrated by the four main characters; a baker, cellist, retired man and a sniper. The cellist sees 22 people killed after a bomb hit a bread queue, he then comes out into the street every night and play Albinoni’s adagio on 22 nights as a memorial. But the city is surrounded by snipers and after the first performance he is in great danger, so a sniper, Arrow is assigned to protect him

We experience the psychological horror of living in a besieged city through the Kenan who has to collect water for his family and also for a difficult neighbour who does not appreciate the sacrifice he is making and does not get bottles with handles that he could carry easily. He is petrified by the war, unable to talk to people and terrified of death. Dragan works in bakery, and has a struggle to get to work, laments the old Sarajevo. Early in the war he sent his wife and son in Italy so now he wonders about their lives. Through these characters we experience the dehumanizing effect of war

The most unusual character is a female marksman, Arrow, after the war started she morphed into an outstanding sniper and helps protect the city. She also has worked out her own moral code, she shoots armed soldiers, they shoot unarmed civilians she is then assigned to protect the cellist. We experience her thoroughness as she works out how to protect the cellist from another marksman in the city. After the cellist has played 22 times Arrow is then taken up into the regular soldiers and imagines herself being shot by soldiers at the end.

This book captures the psychological, financial, emotional stress of being besieged. I was able to picture Sarajevo and I felt as though I had experienced the sieges. The characters also illuminate the inhumanity of war and the dreadful emotional and social cost of war, Kenan is unable to behave as he would like to. The contrast to this gloomy message is that humans can rise above war, and use art and music to bring humanity.

The novel has clumsy structure because the four characters never overlap, we also learn too little about what motivated the cellist to play.


1 comment:

  1. I gained new knowledge from well written content of this blog. It is showing some different kind of strategy to keep work better and improve with every new assignment. Gracefully written blogzwangerschapscursus amsterdam zuid

    ReplyDelete