Rachbxl's 2009 reading

I've had a slow reading start to 2009 and I've been holding off on starting my own thread here until I'd actually finished a book. Last year I logged my reading on the 75 books challenge, and whilst I enjoyed the environment and had a great year of reading, I didn't like the numbers. This year I'd like to read less, partly because I have several lengthy novels in my sights, and partly because "real" life is calling...

READ THIS YEAR:

Le dernier frere by Nathacha Appanah (Mauritius, in French)
Je l'aimais by Anna Gavalda (in French)
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (UK)
Forgotten Voices of the Secret War by Roderick Bailey (non-fiction)
Death at Intervals by José Saramago (Portugal, translation)
Fateless by Imre Kertesz (Hungary, translation)
The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne (USA)
The Savage Altar by Åsa Larsson (Sweden, translation)
Solaris by Stanisław Lem (Poland, translation)
Frictions ed. Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson (short stories, Australia)
Separate Journeys ed. Geeta Dharmarajan (India, translation, short stories)
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li (China)
Kryształowy Anioł by Katarzyna Grochola (Poland, in Polish)
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia, translation)
Western by Christine Montalbetti (France, translation)
Halo, Wikta! by Katarzyna Pisarzewska (Poland, in Polish)
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (non-fiction)
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand)
Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward (USA)
Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu (Romania)
Personal Velocity by Rebecca Miller (USA, short stories)
The Thing around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, short stories)
Everything Good will Come by Sefi Atta (Nigeria)
I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulos (Greece, translation, short stories)
Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
Sur ma mère by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco, in French)
The Heavens May Fall by Unity Dow (Botswana)
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan (UK - Wales)
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
If this be Treason by Gregory Rabassa (non-fiction)
Life Class by Pat Barker (UK)
Cuatro dias de enero by Jordi Sierra i Fabra (Spain, in Spanish)
When you are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (USA, short stories)
Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort (Netherlands, translation)
The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia, translation)
The Believers by Zoe Heller
The Bone Woman by Clea Koff (non-fiction)
Queridos mallorquines by Guy de Forestier (in Spanish, non-fiction)
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (Japan, translation)
Best American Short Stories 2005 (USA, short stories)
What was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (UK)
Mar Me Quer by Mia Couto (Mozambique, in Portuguese)
Le rendez-vous by Justine Lévy (France, in French)
My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad (Iran, translation)
The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (Canada, short stories)
Self's Deception (Germany, translation)
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (Haiti)
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (USA)
Middle Age: a Romance by Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania)
Insensatez by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador, in Spanish)
The Clothes on their Backs by Linda Grant (UK)
Blue Aubergine by Miral al-Tahawi (Egypt, translation)
Sidetracked by Henning Mankell (Sweden, translation)
A Woman of my Age by Nina Bawden (UK)
The Riders by Tim Winton (Australia)
La aventura de un fotografo en La Plata by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, in Spanish)
I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops by Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon, translation, short stories)
Djamilia by Tchinghiz Aitmatov (Kyrgyzstan, translation, in French)
Blindness by José Saramago (Portugal, translation)
Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt, translation)
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer (Iran)
Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina, in Spanish)
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead ed. Jeffrey Eugenides (short stories)
A River Called Time by Mia Couto (Mozambique, translation)
The Murder Farm by Andrea Schenkel (Germany, translation)
When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen (Finland, translation)
Los Detectives Salvajes by Roberto Bolaño (Chile, in Spanish)

GIVEN UP ON!:
House of Orphans by Helen Dunmore

A slow start to the year it may have been, but it was a good one:

Los Detectives Salvajes by Roberto Bolaño
(available in English as The Savage Detectives)

I've spent days musing how to sum up what this novel is "about" in one or two sentences; I give up, in part because the plot, or what there is of it, isn't really the point. I shouldn't have enjoyed this novel, which has all the things I think I don't like - fragmented narrative, lots of different voices, too much sex, too much violence, too much violent sex- and yet it was fantastic. I bought it months ago but waited until the Christmas holidays because it's long; I was glad I did that, because I enjoyed it most when I was able to spend a couple of hours a day completely immersed in it. After that I got bogged down a little bit, but it picked up again.

The central of the novel's 3 sections is made up of first-person testimony (given to those who may or may not be the savage detectives) from dozens of people who, over a 20-year period, came into contact with the novel's main characters (who never appear directly), Arturo Belano (based on the author) and Ulises Lima, whom we first encounter as struggling young poets, small-time drug dealers, dreamers. I think there are many ways of reading this novel, but the strongest message I got from it was about lost illusions and lost youth, as the romantic young poets with everything ahead of them turn into hopeless drifters, the world having got the better of them.

I could go on and on (now I understand all those other LT-ers who rave about this book!) but I'll resist the temptation. I've already palmed my copy off on to a real-life Spanish friend so I'm waiting for some good discussion there...

When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen
translated from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson

I needed something short and light after the detectives; this was short but turned out not to be light. Very good, though, written in a sparing way that I found very effective.
A young woman sits in a cafe, putting off going to visit her brother in a mental hospital (I said it wasn't light). As she orders coffee after coffee, she starts to remember everything that she's made herself forget, and the novel is a fragmented telling of episodes of her own life, together with that of her parents and her American boyfriend. I was irritated by the appearance of 9/11 in conjunction with the boyfriend's story as it seemed like jumping on the bandwagon at first, but Hirvonen actually worked it in well.
This is Elina Hirvonen's debut novel; I'll be looking out for more.

And she's off the mark! Welcome, Rachel!

Thanks, Akeela!

Over in the Reading Globally group I'm slowly reading my way around the world, and this next read, like the Finnish one, was a nod to that:

The Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel
translated from the German by Anthea Bell

I wouldn't have been tempted by this had I not seen that it had been a bestseller and won prizes in Germany (neither of these things would make me buy an English novel, but sometimes I think it's interesting to see what's popular in other languages and in other countries).
No prizes for guessing that it's about a (multiple) murder on a farm, but what makes it interesting is the way it's told - not a detective in sight. Instead, commentary from an anonymous narrator is interspersed with first-person testimony (to the police or the newspaper?) and newspaper cuttings (the title of the novel turns out to come from a sensational headline; I have to say that the title really put me off so I'm interested to note from the touchstone that the original German title was Tannod, the name of the village). All of those interviewed are keen to speculate about what has happened and why, several of them harking back to events in the war, 10 years earlier, giving the story an additional twist.

rachbxl--For me Bolano was an amazing writer. Tone, control of pace, uniqueness of voice and yet the prose is never really difficult--the way he uses fragments is almost like watching someone putting a jigsaw puzzle together--in the end there is the enlightenment that seemed inevitable from the beginning. A real trip.

Amazing as well that despite the fact he knew he didn't have long to live that he churned out all these novels and novellas in his last few years and again there's nothing that seems rushed.

Rachel, I came across this posting of a Olga Tokarczuk story when I finally got around to looking that the Words Without Borders January newsletter:
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=TokarczukKnight

OK, I admit to mentioning your name on the Esenin Translation Project thread HERE. As a translator you might find the conversation amusing.

>6 avaland: Thanks for the link, Lois - I enjoyed reading the story. I'm looking forward to reading more Tokarczuk (I have a novel TBR) because I find that she has a way of putting her finger on things that really appeals to me; I suppose I'm saying that I recognise my own reactions in her characters, like the description of the woman getting ready for bed in the story - gets undressed in the bathroom before remembering that there's no bath-tub in this holiday cottage, almost starts to cry with frustration, gets furious with herself for letting something so trivial upset her, lets her rage be tipped over the edge by the fact that the bed's not made, focuses anger on husband whom she summons from downstairs to help, only to find that her fury has dissipated by the time he arrives. It makes my toes curl in recognition.

A River Called Time by Mia Couto
translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw

I bought this novel because Mia Couto was recommended to me in the Reading Globally group (he's from Mozambique), and I read it now in order to take part in February's Africa read in the same group.

University student Mariano returns from his westernised life in a city on the mainland to the island home of his family, on the occasion of his grandfather's death. To his surprise, he discovers on his arrival that his grandfather has appointed him to take over the running of the family affairs (no easy task given the various warring factions; there's a fight between traditionalists who want to protect their island heritage and "progressives" who want to sell off their family home for development as a luxury resort, there are 3 feisty female members of the family all laying claim to the dead man...) Yet more surprising, Mariano discovers that his grandfather isn't actually dead, but is in an in-between state between life and death, having died a "bad death".

This is a wonderful novel full of myths and magic, and the importance of story-telling. Time is a fluid concept, not chronological, and the characters are rooted more in the soil of their island home than in any given moment.

I've read a couple of reviews suggesting that Brookshaw's translation was a bit stilted in parts, btu I didn't find it so.

#9: Ooh, I'm glad to see this good review. I read Couto's Sleepwalking Land and really liked it, and I'd been wondering about whether to try another of Couto's books.

Thanks, Rachel. I've never heard of Mia Couto, but I'm adding A River Called Time to my wish list.

>10 Medellia:, 11 Medellia, it was actually Sleepwalking Land that I was looking for, as that's what was recommended to me; I couldn't find it so I bought this one instead. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did should you decide to read it - and you too, kidzdoc.

Hello, Rach - wondered where you'd got to! Nice to catch up...

>9 rachbxl: & ff: I finished Sleepwalking Land about a week ago. While I loved the language of the book, I couldn't help feeling that I was missing a lot of what the author was trying to say. I could tell that the book was loaded with symbolism...but symbolic of what escaped me quite often. When the events of the here-and-now portion of the story meshed with the "journal" sequences, it made sense. However, often I was just left with the question of, "Why did that (fill in blank here) just come out of nowhere?"

It's left me wondering whether: a) I just need to try something else by Couto, b) I need to re-read it a few times, perhaps with some boning up on Mozambique, c) I'm just hopeless at the author's symbolism.

>14 TadAD: I think Under the Frangipani is considered one of his best.

I took an independent study in African lit in the fall of '07 and the professor (who happened to be Tunisian) asked me to write papers on all the books I'd chosen (about a dozen) around the book's title. Sleepwalking Land was one of them:-)

>14 TadAD: Hi TadAD, good to see you over here. Interesting - yours is the first negative reaction to Sleepwalking Land that I've heard (I haven't read it). I've only read A River Called Time so can't comment on any of Couto's other books, but certainly for this one no knowledge of Mozambique is required. I suppose you might get more out of it if you did have more background knowledge, but my, ahem, almost total lack of it didn't seem to hamper my reading. However, I know more about Mozambique now because the book made me curious to go and look things up.

>15 avaland: Avaland, I've heard good things about Under the Frangipani too - have you read it?
What were the other books you chose? I'm curious!

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
subtitle Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

I was attracted to this by the wonderful title, which turns out to be a quote from Catullus, who, Eugenides tells us in his fascinating introduction, "was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way". (I know we read Catullus in Latin at school, but as a teenager I didn't appreciate the implications of his love for Lesbia and the role of her sparrow).
Lesbia's sparrow was a spanner in the works of Catullus's love for her; alive, the sparrow got more attention than Catullus did, and dead, it caused Lesbia so much grief that she lost interest in him completely. The 26 stories selected by Eugenides all have a "sparrow" of some kind - they're not straightforward love stories with happy endings; they're much more interesting than that. This is love as a basic human condition, warts and all.
There are stories here by famous writers like Chekhov, Nabokov, de Maupassant, Faulkner, Kundera, Raymond Carver, as well as by several writers I'd never heard of, particularly more contemporary ones. I'm hard pressed to pick a favourite as my favourite as I was reading was whichever story I was on at the time, but I have to give a particular mention to Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog" and Deborah Eisenberg's "Some other, better Otto". I'm going to be looking out for more work by several of the writers here, including Chinese writer Eileen Chang.

I note that this book came out this time last year, presumably for the Valentine's Day market (it even has a special little box for an inscription on the fly leaf). I have to say that I'd be a little concerned about the state of my relationship if I were given this by my partner...!

>16 rachbxl:: I don't know that I'd call it negative...I actually enjoyed reading the book. It's very rare that an author can recreate a feeling of something abstract as sleepwalking, yet Couto did it. I was just frustrated. Maybe I'm just too literal minded.

I've yet to find a discussion that talks about the book beyond review blurbs. I guess I'll try something else of Couto's at some point.

>16 rachbxl: Here's the list of what I read and wrote papers on. Most of the titles chosen were from the 100 Best African books of the 20th century. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html However, because I had read some of Gurnah, Achebe, Djebar, I chose other titles and the professor I was working with tweaked the list a bit further (mostly deleting from the list - I tend to be a little too ambitious sometimes).

Achebe, Chinua (Nigeria). Arrow of God.
Couto, Mia (Mozambique) Sleepwalking Land
Dangarembga, Tsitsi (Zimbabwe) Nervous Conditions
Djebar, Assia (Algeria), Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Emecheta, Buchi (Nigeria) The Joys of Motherhood
Gordimer, Nadine (South Africa) Burger’s Daughter
Gurnah, Abdulrazak (Zanibar), Desertion
Mahfouz, Naguib (Egypt) Midaq Alley
Memmi, Albert (Tunisia) Pillar of Salt
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) The River Between
Okri, Ben (Nigeria) The Famished Road
Saadawi, Nawal El (Egypt) Woman at Point Zero

>19 avaland: Lovely list, Lois! Thanks for posting it. Interesting - with the exception of The Famished Road (which I tried to read years ago and didn't like - maybe I was too young and should try again), these are all books that I've either read recently or seem to be circling in some way, as if I'm moving in on them. (Perhaps because like you I've read these authors' books off the Columbia list, and those on your list would be my second choices too).

Thanks also for the link to the 100 Best African books of the 20th century - I had it bookmarked but hadn't got round to moving my bookmarks to this new laptop, so you've saved me the trouble of finding that one!

Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez (no touchstones)
(not translated into English yet)

This is the Argentine writer Eloy Martinez's most recent novel (2008), and the first of his that I'd read; on the basis of this one, I'll be reading more.

In 1976 Simon Cardoso disappears at the hands of the military junta in Argentina. His wife, Emilia, devotes her life to searching for him, in vain, until she finds him sitting in the next booth in a New Jersey diner in 2008. The novel opens with the scene in the diner and then switches between present and various times in the past - Emilia and Simon as newly-weds, cartographers both, heading off on the mapping trip in the south of Argentina from which Emilia will return alone; Emilia's life back with her parents in Buenos Aires - her father, chief "spin doctor" to the junta, was presumably responsible for Simon's disappearance; the years spent by Emilia chasing down phantom sightings of her husband across Latin America; the surreal craziness of life under the generals; the loneliness of exile in the USA.

Simon, the "disappeared", is at the centre of the novel, yet the book is about Emilia and the hole left in her life rather than about what happened to Simon. How does a wife carry on without knowing whether her husband is alive or dead? And by extension, how does a country carry on without knowing whether thousands of its citizens are alive or dead?

Eloy Martinez himself appears in the novel as the narrator of some of the contemporary sections, those most concerned with life in exile.

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

It was probably a mistake to read this on the heels of the Eloy Martinez book; there is was the Argentine generals, here it's the Revolutionary Guards that are arresting people on a whim and detaining them without trial. Sofer's first novel isn't bad, but it suffers in comparison and left me feeling unsatisfied.
Interesting angle on the Islamic Revolution, though - the main character, Isaac Amin, a wealthy jeweller arrested by the Guards on page 1, is Jewish; he feels completely Iranian because that's what he is, but realises that his country is going in a direction in which he cannot follow.
Sofer's writing is beautiful at times, but struck me as trying too hard at others - does every sentence really have to contain a simile or a metaphor?
I've just had a look at the reviews on LT and see that almost everyone gives this 4 or 5 stars. Maybe I'm feeling churlish this weekend, or maybe it really is the comparison with the last book I read, but I can't rave about this novel. As I said, it ain't bad, but I don't think it's anything special.

Rachel,

that Purgatorio book sounds terrific. You are a translator, am I remembering that right? Is it simultaneous translation you do, for one of the EU agencies? (So you are not thinking of doing literary translation from the Spanish, is what I am really asking? :-) )
I loved In Bruges, incidentally, not only as a film, but for the scenery as well. I would love to live in Europe again. Even the scenes of totally dingy decrepit Berlin in 1960, as seen in The Reader, made me feel homesick. But that's another story.

Thanks for a terrific review.

>23 polutropos: Andrew, literary translation is my dream for some time in the future when I don't have a mortgage to pay! Fear not, I'm quite sure this wonderful book will have been translated by someone else before then.

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi
translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata

This little book has been working its way up to the top of my mental TBR pile for quite some time, and finally its moment came the other day. Based on the author's interviews with female prisoners in Egyptian jails in her capacity as a psychiatrist, it tells the story of Firdaus, who has been sentenced to death for murder. The story is simply told, but the simplicity is deceptive; this is a thought-provoking book about a society which has different rules and standards for men and women, and is sometimes disturbing to read. I liked the matter-of-factness of it; it would have been easy for Firdaus to see herself as a victim of the system, but there is no self-pity. Rather, there is pride, pride in her treasured school-leaving certificate, pride that she gets to the stage of having a room of her own, pride that if she returns to prostitution it is having reached the conclusion that she is more free as a well-paid whore than as a struggling clerical worker - and even pride in going to her death holding her head high, having refused the opportunity to repent and receive a presidential pardon.

btw, the name Firdaus, I'm told, means "nothing". I found the story compelling and Firdaus admirable (yeah, and it's weird to admire someone who is a murderer, but that's the power of her story).

>25 rachbxl:, 26 I'm going to have to bump this one up the TBR pile. Great review, Rach!

Firdaus means "Paradise" in Arabic, which is of course El-Saadawi's mother-tongue. It's a fairly common Arabic name, but there is probably a play on the word if I know Al-Saadawi at all.

* It is interesting to note that the book was translated by her husband, who is also a medical doctor and writer, like her.

>26 avaland:, 27
You're right, Lois, Firdaus IS admirable - which I found made her story even more uncomfortable reading. We're not supposed to admire murderers, but she challenges our perceptions.

Thanks for the note about the name, Akeela, and also for the detail about her husband/translator - interesting. I picked up somewhere recently that Saramago's Spanish translator is his wife, too. I feel a long dissertation coming on here but I'll save it for people at work on Monday...

Blindness by José Saramago
translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

Thanks to deebee for recommending this as a good introduction to Saramago; she wasn't wrong.

A plague of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city in an unnamed country, throwing society into chaos. The panicking authorities intern the first few hundred victims in a fomer mental hospital, and it is in this closed space that the first half of the novel takes place. Like Cortazar's The Winners, which I read last year, Blindness is strongly reminiscent of Camus's La Peste in its examination of how an isolated group of loosely-linked individuals comes to term with extreme conditions, and how our vices and virtues come to the fore under this kind of pressure. Blindness in a way takes this one step further - is there any point in virtue when there is nobody to see it?

Saramago uses a very particular style - paragraphs go on for pages and pages, punctuation is sparse, dialogue is part of the main body of the text, without speech marks or anything to indicate that it is speech - and yet I was won over by it right away. It could have been a disaster in other hands, but in Saramago's it is quite simply brilliantly effective, removing the distance between reader and characters.
Another feature of Saramago's style is the lack of names - not just the town and the country, but all the characters. They are referred to throughout the book as "the man with the black eye patch", "the girl with the dark glasses", "the boy with the squint"; Saramago has a wry sense of humour, which is perhaps what saves this book from being unremittingly grim, and it's surely no coincidence that many of the "names" refer to the characters' eyes (even "the doctor" is an opthalmologist, after all).

In a nutshell: uncomfortable, disturbing, nightmarish, some of it made me flinch and cringe - and also impossible to put down, brilliantly written (and translated), very highly recommended.

touchstones are a mess - I'll come back later to sort them out

>27 akeela:, 28 Akeela, I stand corrected on the name; however, I'm pretty sure that's what my professor told me (he was Tunisian). But, it might be worth my while to check the emails and see exactly what he said.

>29 rachbxl: Blindness came up on the "Case of the Missing Quotation Marks" thread we started here in this group.

>29 rachbxl:: If you enjoyed Blindness, then you must read Saramago's Seeing, which is a sequel to Blindness, and even more chilling and politically prescient than Blindness.

Urania, that's so many recommendations of Seeing now that I have no choice but to read it, and soon! Thanks.

Djamilia by Tchinghiz Aitmatov
translated into French from the Kyrgyz by A. Dimitrieva and Louis Aragon

This is definitely a first; I'm quite sure I've never read anything from Kyrgyzstan before. Nor was I planning to read anything right now, but I happened upon this the other day and it seemed too good to leave in the shop. (It proved to be 2 euros well spent).

The French writer Louis Aragon, one of the 2 people responsible for the French translation which I read, called this short novel "the most beautiful love story in the world". I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but there's certainly something very special about it. It's the story of the forbidden love of a headstrong young woman, Djamilia, and Daniiar, arrived recently in the village after a nomadic childhood on the steppes, as narrated by the young brother of Djamilia's husband, away fighting in the war.

I found the setting of the story as fascinating as the story itself. The villagers have only recently abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and it is still important to them collectively. At the time of the story, several years into World War II, they are adjusting to life under the Soviets, and the collective farms, for example, contrast starkly with their traditional life on the steppes. From what I can work out, Aitmatov was working in Moscow when he wrote Djamilia, and that shows in the poignancy with which he describes his homeland (I found myself longing for something I've never seen). I found the combination of the evocation of the steppes and the understated love story to be very powerful. It's easy to say "it's very romantic", but the scene where Daniiar sings as they drive their grain carts home in the moonlight really is one of the most romantic things I've ever read (perhaps because it's all suggestion, not fulfilment).

My one gripe is that I'd have appreciated a glossary of the many terms which were left in Kyrgyz or Russian in the French text. There were footnotes for some, but not all, of them - and sometimes the footnotes only gave a synonym, also in Kyrgyz!

I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops by Hanan al-Shaykh
translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

I've been reading a lot of short stories recently and these certainly weren't the best of what I've read, but it's an interesting collection nevertheless. Al-Shaykh was born and raised in Lebanon and now lives in London, which gives her a good eye for cultural differences between the West and the Arab world which are the at the centre of several of her stories. (One of these which I particularly enjoyed was "The Land of Dreams", about Ingrid, a young Danish missionary in a Yemeni village).

These stories are all about female characters (there's even one story without any men in it at all, as they have all gone to make money in Saudi Arabia and come back to their women once a year), and what's interesting is the way al-Shaykh challenges the traditional role of women in the societies she writes about (I don't know about this book, but I know that some of her work is banned in the Gulf States because of this).

Sounds interesting...I'm adding it to the wish list. Thanks!

Just noting titles of books read recently for now - back with comments later, I hope.

La aventura de un fotografo en La Plata by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

A Woman of my Age by Nina Bawden

The Riders by Tim Winton

Rachel:

thrilled to see you back.

Missed you.

(I am about eight reviews behind myself.)

Thanks, Andrew. I'm shocked to see how long it is since I last posted here - I don't know what I've been doing all March (I wasn't reading, unfortunately, that's for sure). I've just checked in with your thread - lots going on while my back was turned! You've been reading some interesting things; I'll be back for a closer look when I get the chance. I particularly like the look of the Czech short stories (I forget the name of the author).

Catching up on comments...

A Woman of my Age by Nina Bawden

I hadn't read any of Bawden's works for adults before, but The Peppermint Pig and Carrie's War were both big favourites of mine when I was a child, which is why I picked this up off a shelf in a hotel last week. I think I could safely have left it there. It's a well-written book, nicely put together and well told, but it reminded me of all those Margaret Drabbles and Anita Brookners and others that my mum has passed on to me over the years - maybe they're great if you're a middle-aged woman, but I'm not (yet), and I find them vaguely depressing. So that's life, then? That's it? Alternatively, maybe life for middle-aged women has changed so much in the 30 years or so since these books were written that it's hard for me to identify with the characters? I don't know. (Interestingly, the main character in the Bawden book is only slightly older than I am now, but sees herself as far older than I see myself (perhaps I just need to grow up?))

Still catching up.

The Riders by Tim Winton

I've enjoyed everything I've read by Winton and this didn't disappoint. Admittedly I prefer his evocative descriptions of Australia to his descriptions of Ireland and Greece, where this book is set - not that there's anything wrong at all with how he deals with Europe, it's just that I love his Australian settings.

Scully, an unfeasibly ugly Australian jack-of-all-trades, and his unfeasibly lovely wife have been travelling around Europe for a couple of years with their little girl. About to return home to Perth, they visit Ireland and the wife falls in love with a tumble-down barn which she insists they buy to live in. The novel opens with Scully working on the barn while he awaits the return of his wife and daughter, who have gone back to Australia to sell their house. When Scully goes to the airport to meet them, the little girl gets off the plane alone; Scully's world falls apart as he realises that his perfect marriage wasn't so perfect after all, and he sets off on a crazy dash across Europe in search of his wonderful wife.

If I have a quibble about this novel, it's this wonderful wife (who never actually appears in person). She can't be this perfect! (She's not - she does a runner, after all). Even in Scully's eyes, can she really be this flawless after 8 years of marriage? My favourite character was the daughter, Billie, whom I thought was exceptionally well done, the long-suffering child having to parent her parent.

Blue Aubergine by Miral al-Tahawy
translated from the Arabic by Anthony Calderbank

Miral al-Tahawy has been on the edge of my consciousness for a couple of years now; I was prompted to go ahead and order one of her novels by Avaland's musings on Akeela's thread about who the next generation of women writing in Arabic might be - those who follow on from Assia Djebar, Nawal el-Sadaawi, et al.

According to the cover blurb, 'Miral al-Tahawy was born in 1968 in Sharqiya in the Egyptian Delta into a Bedouin family of the al-Hanadi tribe. She earned her MA in Arabic literature from Cairo University in 1995. She has been described by the Washington Post as "the first novelist to present Egyptian Bedouin life beyond stereotypes and to illustrate the crises of Bedouin women and their urge to break free"'.

This novel is the story of Nada, or 'Blue Aubergine', as her family call her, because that is what she looked like when she was born prematurely in 1967, the year of Egypt's defeat by Israel. There are three distinct sections to the novel - Nada's childhood, her first degree in Cairo, and her doctorate - but al-Tahawi doesn't use time in a linear way; there are no clear demarcations between Nada the child and Nada the adult, and experiences from one part of her life pop up in the narrative about earlier or later parts. This was disconcerting at times as it wasn't always easy to follow, but I decided not to worry about it too much - a decision which paid off, because by the end it all made sense. Similarly, it was sometimes difficult to work out who was being talked about because of the lack of proper nouns and abundance of pronouns, but I took the advice given by the translator in his introduction: 'If you're not sure which of the previous two "she"s the third "she" refers to, I invite you to invoke your narrative feel and sense it.

The main theme of the novel is the influence our childhood, our parents and the society in which they reared us have on our lives; Nada is crippled by the restrictive values imposed on her by her elders, and which she is unable to shake off. A paragraph from the end of the books sums it up:

My mother used to tell me how her father kept the windows closed, and turned the radio off if a love song came on. She had me convinced that if I lived my life afraid to do anything, then I was "polite and well-mannered" , and that if I stopped seeing my friend who chewed gum, that she had "brought me up well". But when her stories no longer scared me, and I decided to dance with the gypsies in the street, my mother lowered her head and cursed the day she'd given birth to me.

The whole novel is an account of Nada's attempts to find love and affection (and in particular to relate to men) in a way which her society won't condemn; unfortunately, as soon as she deviates from the set path and 'dances with the gypsies' she is lost, because her upbringing has left her almost criminally naive.

I enjoyed reading this very much (I suggest reading it in one or two sittings, or else it would be even more confusing than it is), but I found it very bleak. It was clear from early on that there wasn't going to be a happy ending for Nada, that her search was going to be in vain. Woman at Point Zero, for example, doesn't end happily, but is nevertheless uplifting; I'm unable to find anything uplifting here. Maybe we will have to wait for the NEXT generation of Arabic women writers for that...

Wonderful review, Rach!!! I picked up several more works of African fiction today at the bookstore, three of four by women (and one a Djebar I didn't already have).

Enjoyed your review, Rachel! Thank you.

I was thinking along the same lines before I saw your closing thought ... it would really be interesting to see what the next or current generation of Egyptian (and other Middle Eastern) women experience.

Thanks for the great review, Rachel! I've added this to my wish list.

>41 rachbxl:-44 I had to be very disciplined to write that review! It's a short novel (about 150 pages I think, don't have it to hand) but there's so much to say about it. I'm on the look-out for more of her work now (The Tent, Gazelle Tracks). I also find myself increasingly curious about these younger Arabic writers (women in particular although perhaps not exclusively); I can feel a bit of a jag coming on, I believe. (Thanks, Lois...like I needed an excuse to buy more books!)

The Clothes on their Backs by Linda Grant

I'm relieved to have finished this at last. Having enjoyed fiction as well as non-fiction by Grant in the past, I was keen to read this, but I thought it was disappointing. I almost gave up on it several times, and it's taken me a couple of months to slog through to the end.

My main gripe is that the characters didn't come alive for me; they were flat and not terribly credible. I had a particular problem with the voices of the Hungarian characters - try as I might, I couldn't hear them speaking. I tried imagining their lines in the mouths of Hungarians I know, but it just didn't ring true. I also thought it was an odd decision to have the speech of Claude, the working-class English boy, riddled with grammatical and syntactical mistakes - a fairly true reflection of how someone like him would speak, perhaps, but it was at odds with the almost perfect (if a little stilted) English spoken by the Hungarians.

Since I really enjoyed The Clothes on Their Backs, I find your thoughts about the lack of credibility very interesting. The Hungarian refugees I've met in New York, who probably emigrated in the same era as the characters in the book, are largely middle- and upper-middle class, so I didn't think I could compare their way of speaking to the essentially lower-class Hungarian refugees in Grant's book. For me, the characters were psychologically realistic, so perhaps the way they spoke didn't grate on me as it did on you. I found that it, in a subtle way, it provided a lot of insight into families, histories, and secrets, although I thought the ending might have been a little melodramatic.

>47 rebeccanyc: Hmm, interesting. I know I'm a harsh critic when it comes to speech and language (déformation professionnelle, if you like - in fact there was a little incident at work just now which brought that home to me!), and it isn't the first time that it's stopped me getting more out of a book. There was clearly something about this book, as I did finish it - if it had been truly bad I'd have abandoned it - but my overall feeling on finishing it was of dissatisfaction, of never really having been able to connect with it. I don't like to leave entirely negative comments about something I've read, as I did here, so thanks for attempting to redress the balance, rebeccanyc!

>48 rachbxl: racbxl, I agree with your comments about Grant. I did finish the book (so it couldn't be completely bad), but I too found the characters flat and unengaging.

>46 rachbxl: & >49 urania1:: someone else has just finished The Clothes on Their Backs and I want to say the same thing I said on that thread - the editing was terrible. Not just typos, but one crucial passage where she'd obviously changed her mind about the way she was going to handle narrative point of view and it had been incompletely corrected ("she"s and "he"s all wrong). I know it's really sad for that to ruin a book for you, but it did for me.

And I agree about the characterisation. And I thought the clothing metaphors were all horribly overworked. And... I'm going to stop now. Sorry.

On the other hand, Blue Aubergine will be going on my list. I'd just got to the point of thinking, "hmm, surely this can't be Rach's thread? All of these books i.e. in the 'new-to-me' posts were written in English originally" ;-)

>50 FlossieT: Flossie, if ever I write a book myself (unlikely, but you never know), will you be my editor, please?

You're right, there was a bit of a run of English books there - I was away for the last 10 days of March and ended up having to borrow some reading material, so there wasn't much choice. Normal service has been resumed now, though!

Insensatez by Horacio Castellanos Moya
(available in English translation as Senselessness)

Wow, what can I say? This is one of the most brilliant books I've read in a long time, but also one of the most disturbing. The anonymous narrator, a journalist, has had to flee his own Central American country because of an article to which the president took offence. A friend of his who works for the catholic church offers him work in a neighbouring country, proof-reading a 1,100-page report being put together under the auspices of the church on the atrocities committed against the indigenous communities by the military during the civil war.

I think it has to be understood that the narrator hasn't suddenly been pitched from a sheltered life into shattering reports of atrocities; he's a jaded Central Amercian journalist who has seen it all before, or so he thinks, and at the outset this is just another job; he has to make ends meet, after all. This is why, to me, the extent to which the report takes over his life is all the more striking. From the start he is captivated by odd quotes from the report, verbatim accounts from indigenous people who witnessed or survived the atrocities:

The people we were frightened of, they were people, just like us.
We all know who the murderers are.

He copies these phrases into his notebook, and they go round and round in his head like a tune he can't get rid of; he blurts them out to other people at inappropriate times and without providing any context. The further into the report he gets, the more the rest of the world recedes; he identifies by turns with both the victims and the torturers in long passages punctuated by phrases from his notebook. At the same time he becomes increasingly paranoid about his own safety.

To combat the grimness, the narrator retreats into the arms of two Spanish NGO workers, one repressed, the other anything but, in what I interpreted as desperate attempts to have contact with life and the living.

So far so ugly - but what I haven't said yet is that this is a very funny novel. In fact, it's this wonderful macabre humour which makes it readable, as without it it would just be too grim. The humour also puts the atrocities into stark contrast, I think - on the one hand we have the narrator fumbling around in his relations with others (his unexpected discourse on the heroic struggle of the Basque people, for example, and even more unexpected segue into what it means to appear in the pages of Hola, when he becomes convinced that the waitress is a government informer spying on him and the Basque psychiatrist responsible for much of the report - I thought this passage was hilarious), and on the other we have the narrator trying to come to terms with what he has to read. The humour comes to an end, I think, once there is no longer any distinction between the narrator's own life and the report, when the report has taken over his life altogether.

>51 rachbxl:: I'd be glad to :) Though my editing has got a little rusty nowadays... I stopped being paid to do it back in 2003 and have spent too long around computers... Becoming a 'proper' editor is definitely on my list of Things I'd Like to Be When I Grow Up.

>53 FlossieT: Okay, then - When We Grow Up I'll write a book and you can edit it. (Don't worry, that should leave you plenty of time to get un-rusty).

#52--rachbxl--I read Senselessness a few months ago and thought it was brilliant as well--but it is grim--which is not out of keeping with a lot of other works based on Latin and Central American dictatorships.

By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Thanks to Akeela and Avaland for recommending this one.

What a beautiful book! It was the perfect, soothing antithesis to Insensatez, and I didn't want it to end. A refugee from Zanzibar arrives in the UK, unusually old for an asylum seeker, and looks back on what has brought him to this point. His stories cross generations and continents, and they are spell-binding. There's something magical about this book, and in particular about the descriptions of Zanzibar, one of the spice islands and an important stopping-point for Arab traders brought there on the trade winds. I could smell the spices, the incense, the wood of the beautiful furniture sold by the narrator before his fortunes turned. Equally tangible is the melancholy with which the novel is infused, the sense of loss and nostalgia - yet Gurnah is skilful enough to stop short of wallowing and to keep the stories moving. Highly recommended.

Middle Age: a Romance by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates has only very recently come on to my radar, probably through repeated recommendations of her work by several people here on LT (you know who you are!) This particular novel hadn't been recommended to me, and it was my JCO starting point only because it's what I found in a second-hand bookshop.

Salthill-on-Hudson is a small town in New York state, inhabited by a glorious collection of rich, bored, beautifully turned-out middle-aged (but younger looking, please!) wives straight out of Stepford and, at the weekend, their complacent banker/lawyer/businessman husbands, back from New York. The novel opens with the accidental death of Adam Berendt, possibly the one person accepted into this superficially perfect society without being expected to follow all its rules. Whereas difference, non-conformity, in others is suspicious, in Adam it was accepted, cherished, even -- Adam Berendt, the one-eyed sculptor with the enigmatic past.

Adam was many things to many people (the women were all in love with him, each consoling herself with the thought that even if he didn't return her love, at least she was his "closest woman friend"; for the men, he seems to have been the man they would dream of being, had they not had to conform), and his death sets off a transformation across the town as all the individuals connected to him (each persuaded that they had been the most important person in the dead man's life) re-assess their lives in some quite startling ways.

The first 200 pages or so deal with the town as a whole, Berendt's death and funeral and so on, and this I enjoyed. Then come sections devoted to the transformations of one individual character (or couple) before all the ends are tied up in the final 30 pages. When I started reading this a couple of months ago I got fed up in the first of the individual accounts; the character here, Marina Troy, turned out to be the only one that I really didn't care for (or about), and I found that the pace dragged so I gave up. The other day I picked up where I left off, and after the Marina Troy pages the rest of the book almost read itself.

It's a good story very well-told, but what I most appreciated was the way Oates treats her characters. She doesn't pull her punches -- she shows them in all their self-absorbed ridiculousness and she can be viciously funny in her descriptions of them, yet (with the exception, for me, of Marina Troy)they all come across as likeable (very) human-beings.

>56 rachbxl: You're welcome, Rach! Glad you finally got to savor Gurnah's accomplished storytelling ability.

>57 rachbxl: Great review. This is one (of many, many) of hers I haven't read.

>56 rachbxl: Since reading By the Sea in 2007 (?), I've read Admiring Silence and Desertion, both of which I enjoyed although they are not as good. I have Paradise also which I hope to read soon.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

I wasn't intending to read this collection of stories (Lahiri seems to be everywhere I look at the moment, which puts me off reading her) but it was the only thing I could face buying from the newspaper shop at work the other day, when I'd ended up at a loose end and book-less (sometimes they let a half-decent book slip in amongst the airport thrillers). I read The Namesake under similar circumstances a couple of years ago.

These beautifully-written stories all deal with the adult children of Bengali immigrants to the area around Boston, and their struggle to break free from their parents' culture and establish their own American identities. There is much looking back to childhood, a time at which the characters had no choice (and indeed no desire) to reject their imposed Bengali identity, but even then they are acutely aware of the differences between them and their American classmates; college tends to be the point at which the characters break free.

These stories aren't all the same by any means -- the characters deal with their situation in many different ways -- but the characters come from such similar backgrounds (often academic father, stay-at-home mother who longs for Bengal but wants to give her children the best of the US, characters go off to Ivy League universities, get great jobs, marry Americans) that I found them all merging into one in my mind. I remember the first story, Unaccustomed Earth, and one other very clearly, plus the three wonderful interlinked stories at the end, but other than that I couldn't say who did what with whom or which story they came from. Nevertheless, a very enjoyable read.

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
Non-fiction

I recently became aware that we have a "lesiure library" at work, and this was part of the first load of booty tht I dragged home from there. (It was the first book I saw when I went in, part of a display by the door, and next to it was something by Ogawa Yoko, so I knew I was on to a good thing and was happy to part with my 30 euro subscription...)

When Edwidge Danticat was a very small child, her father left Haiti in the hope of finding a better life in New York, followed later by her mother. Danticat and her brother Bob were left behind as they were not permitted to travel, and it was almost 10 years until there were able to join their parents in the USA, during which time they saw them only once. Years later, Danticat discovers on the same day that she is expecting a child, and that her father is dying, both of which prompt her to look back at her family's history. Brother, I'm Dying is the story of the Danticat family; in particular it is a tribute to the author's "two fathers", her real father, Mira, and her uncle Joseph, who brought her and Bob up as his own in Haiti. It is a very moving tale about family ties, family love, exile, absence and loss, and about life and death, inseparable from an account of the last 100 years of Haitian history.

This could have been a real tear-jerker on the one hand, and strident in its outrage at the way the outside world (including the UN forces present in the country) left Haiti to its fate during its recent civil war on the other, but nothing is overdone; Danticat stands back and lets her story speak for itself.

Edited to correct spelling.

Someone else on the 75 Book Challenge read some Danticat recently and it comes across from the comments as incredibly powerful stuff. Do you think you can appreciate the work without first knowing any of the political background (I'm woefully ignorant about Haiti, what little understanding I possess having been gleaned entirely from Doonesbury)? Or do you pick it up as you go along?

>62 FlossieT: Rachael, I didn't even realise how little I knew about Haiti when I read my first Danticat last year, the novel The Farming of Bones, which can't be separated from its historical and geographical context (the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, where they were mainly employed as servants and in the sugar cane fields, ie doing the jobs that nobody else wanted). Both in the novel and in Brother, I'm Dying (her family's story set against the backdrop of the history of Haiti since 1950 or so) Danticat explains enough for it to make sense to the uninformed reader (that being just about all her readers, sadly, I would guess), but both books made me go and find out more (out of curiosity, though, not because I couldn't have understood the books without it).

Self's Deception by Bernhard Schlink
translated from the German by Peter Considine

Whilst I don't remember being bowled over by The Reader (it's a few years since I read it), I enjoyed it enough to think I might like to read something else by Schlink. What a disappointment!

In a recently-reunified Germany, Gerhard Self, former Nazi, ex-public prosecutor turned private investigator, receives a mysterious request to trace the daughter of a man who introduces himself as a local government official. After the usual red herrings, he finds the girl masquerading as an American au pair elsewhere in Germany, but decides not to tell her father. He discovers that the girl is a terrorist (but not without first having been shot at by the "father", who turns out to be neither her father nor a local government official), and inexplicably decides to help her escape from Germany so befriends her and spends several days with her travelling through France, Italy and Switzerland - until she disappears, taking the money from his wallet. Girl and "father" are eventually arrested in Spain, Self is arrested in Germany but only held overnight, and he does a deal with the police to secure the girl's release but ends up having to deliver her to a psychiatric hospital which features prominently throughout the story.

The backdrop to these capers is recent German history - and it's all there: the shadow of the Nazis, the divison of Germany, the need for reparations and forgiveness, Baader-Meinhof...I do appreciate what Schlink was trying to do, but it just didn't quite work for me; I couldn't take it seriously because the plot was so implausible. There are other serious points, for example about deception - who is deceiving whom? aren't we all deceiving at least someone at least some of the time? - and about our moral choices - can we really know how we would behave in a given situation? - but again, for me they were overshadowed by the plot.

Hello! I enjoy your thread and I'm envious that you can read in Spanish and English. Also, your comment about B. Schlink's Self's Deception is very interesting. I enjoyed The Reader but I had trouble believing the possibility of the plot in it as well.

>65 nobooksnolife: Hmmm, maybe that was my problem with The Reader as well. I remember that there was something that prevented me from really enjoying it, but I've no recollection of it at all.

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
short stories

I wanted to like this, I really did, but I couldn't. Whilst I admire what Munro was doing (taking fragments of her family's real history and weaving stories around them), somehow the stories just didn't pull me in. I enjoyed the later ones more (though still not as much as I've enjoyed other Munro stories), but a couple of the earlier ones I couldn't finish. I can't put my finger on what the problem was, although one possibility is that I have an irrational dislike of fiction which incorporates diary excerpts and transcribed letters. I've no idea why this is, but it's always been the case... I know other LTers have loved this book, but it's just not for me. (I met someone last weekend who told me that, confirmed Munro fan as he is, he's given up on this collection after three attempts to make it beyond page 50).

My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
translated from the Persian by Dick Davis

Published in 1973, this is apparently one of the best-loved Persian novels of all time. In the early 1940s, in Teheran, the teenage narrator falls in love with his cousin Layli, daughter of the paranoid patriarch of the family, known to all (behind his back) as "Dear Uncle Napoleon" because of his unswerving admiration for Napoleon, with whom he compares himself as a military tactician against the common enemy, the dreaded English.
The narrator recounts the story of his touchingly innocent and ultimately frustrated love for Layli, whilst around them the life of their extended family descends into farce thanks to the endless attempts of the narrator's father and Uncle Napoleon to get one up on each other in increasingly far-fetched ways. Farce? In 1940's Iran? Translated into English? I really wasn't expecting much - but this book is really, really funny, and gave me a completely different picture of Iran and its people, everything else I have read from Iran having been written for a foreign audience about the Revolution and its legacy (in the afterword Pezeshkzad quotes a review which says, "My Uncle Napoleon may do more to improve US-Iranian relations than a generation of shuttle diplomats and national apologies"). The chapter in which Deputy Taymur Khan "interrogates" the family using his "international system of surprise attack" is one of the funniest things I've read for ages.
Almost all the action takes place in the walled compound in which the extended family lives in 3 different houses, with a complicated cast of distant relatives and local characters dropping in regularly. This gave me the feeling that I was a spectator in the garden compound, watching the farce unfold before my eyes. Hats off to the translator for managing to render so successfully the characters' verbal tics - even the minor characters came alive for me.
My attention was wandering by the last 100 pages or so (of 500), but that may have been because I put the book down and picked it up again so many times in the course of reading it (not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because life got in the way). Had I read it more smoothly I might not have felt it was a touch too long.

Le rendez-vous by Justine Lévy
available in English as The Rendezvous

Despite the title, there is no meeting in this novella; it's all about the wait for a meeting that's never going to happen. Louise, the 18-year old narrator, has been summoned to a Paris café by her mother Alice, Alice's first sign of life in a year. As Louise sits and waits, she looks back over her life with her mother, and it quickly becomes apparent to the reader (as it is presumably apparent to Louise from the outset, although she clings to her hope) that Alice will be letting her daughter down once again.
As with Lévy's second novel Rien de grave, there's a lot here that is based on her own life (although one hopes that Alice isn't based on her real mother) - for example, the adult child trying to find her place in the world away from the shadow of her famous parents (Lévy is the daughter of French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy; Louise's father is a successful conductor and composer, her mother a former model). Lévy wrote this novel when she was only 20, and in some ways it shows; could Alice really have been so negligent? The drugs, the shoplifting, the prison sentence, lesbian lovers, male lovers, leaving her pills around for Louise to overdose on - not to mention plain old neglect. Some of them, yes, but piling them one on top of the other made it all less credible.
What I did like, though, was the dialogue - witty, zesty, succint, a forerunner of the dialogue in Rien de grave (Nothing Serious).

Mar Me Quer by Mia Couto
(possibly not translated into English)

I was entranced by Mia Couto's style when I read A River Called Time earlier this year and I became curious about what he would be like in the original. A full-length novel would have been pushing it a bit, but when I found this novella in the library I couldn't resist. This is a magical little tale about 2 neighbours and the stories they tell each other - as in A River Called Time story-telling is used to bind people together and to give them roots.
A Portuguese friend told me the other day that Couto "invents and re-invents" the Portuguese language, and I was able to get some feel of that in the beautiful flow - it carried me along with it. (However, I'll still be reliant on translations for anything longer than these 60 pages!)

My Uncle Napoleon sounds like a great read. Thanks for letting us know about it. It's going on my TBR list.

Hope you enjoy it, aruba!

What was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

Great book!

In 1984, Kate Meaney is a lonely 10-year old struggling to come to terms with the death of her father, her mother having abandoned the two of them years before. Given an unusual amount of freedom by her grandmother, Kate strives to bring structure and meaning to her existence through the investigations agency she has set up, and she spends her days mounting surveillance operations in the local shopping centre, following the instructions in one of her father's last gifts to her, a book entitled "How to be a Detective". Kate has a real voice, both funny and touching; O'Flynn captures a child's way of seeing the world perfectly.

Cut to 2003, and Lisa and Kurt are drone workers in the latest incarnation of the same shopping centre, two lonely individuals trying to make sense of the consumer culture around them. They both have a connection to Kate, yet Kate is no longer there, although there is no getting away from her presence either for them or for the reader.

This is O'Flynn's first novel and it's not perfect - I would have liked to know more about Teresa, for example, rather than just have her drop in and tie up all the ends at the end - but I really did enjoy it, and I'll be looking forward to reading anything else she writes. This is a novel with a real sense of place (the ghastly shopping centre, suburban 1980's England); both the writer and I would have been about the age Kate is in 1984, and O'Flynn portrays the time and place brilliantly, from the viewpoint of the child that she, Kate and I were at the time.

Hello! I've been following your thread (both this year and last year), as I think you read really interesting books.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for this review. I'm off on holiday soon and was planning to take this book with me. I'd heard good things about this book, but am looking forward to reading it even more now!

well - forewarned and all that - i DID quite like the reader and so bought Self's Deception at the last book sale - seems like it's likely to sit on the self to go to the fall sale. Thanks.

I, too, loved What Was Lost, with it's odd combination of Harriet the Spy and the grinding hopelessness of the wrong job. Just a beautiful book and I'm waiting for O'Flynn's next one.

>73 Rebeki: Have a good holiday, Rebeki! Hope you like What was Lost -but it won't last you beyond the first day because you won't be able to put it down...

>74 bobmcconnaughey: Bob, there was so much in there, there was a real attempt to make it something special but it just didn't work for me. Maybe it would for you (and it's a quick read so not too much lost if it doesn't...) I'm curious to see what someone else makes of it!

>75 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for the comment, RidewayGirl. It's been several days now and I'm still thinking about What was Lost - "grinding hopelessness" is exactly right to describe Lisa and Kurt and their situation. And yet not a "grindingly hopeless" book, is it? It's touching and funny and somehow there is hope.

The Best American Short Stories 2005 ed. Michael Chabon

I picked this up second-hand several months ago and have been dipping into it ever since. I enjoy short stories more and more, and there are some excellent ones here - works by Alice Munro, David Bezmozgis, Joyce Carol Oates, Cory Doctorow and Tom Perrotta were among my favourites here.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
translated from the Japanese (it's gone back to the library now and I'm afraid I didn't make a note of the translator, cardinal sin in my book...)

I love books like this - gentle, quiet books that creep up on you without you noticing, until you realise that the characters are always with you and that you can't wait to get back to them.
In a nutshell, a housekeeper with a 10-year old son is sent to work for a maths professor whom an accident has left with an 80-minute memory, meaning that they have to build up their relationship from scratch every day. The professor uses numbers to cope with the world, and he and the little boy are big baseball fans. Like all good books, though, it's much more than the sum of its parts, and it's a beautiful story about people and how we entwine ourselves around each other. There's a lot of quite complicated maths in there, and a lot about baseball - two subjects I'd have said I'm not at all interested in, yet Yoko Ogawa makes them fascinating.
I've ordered a copy for my mathematician (and keen reader) mum - I think she'll love it. (This is the first time I've come anywhere near appreciating her obsession with numbers. Language is my thing, and this is the first inkling I've had that numbers are a kind of language of their own).

>78 rachbxl: A class I had back in '07 really showed me the beauty in numbers and their expressions in nature, and this book showed the same thing in another way. I could not help but wonder what might have been different if math/maths had been presented to me in this way when I was very young.

There were some lovely, simple metaphors in her prose also that I found delightful.

>79 avaland: Lois, that's exactly what I was thinking - why couldn't anyone ever tell me that THIS is what maths is about? I'd have been much more interested than I ever was. Your class sounds fascinating!

Queridos mallorquines: claves del trato personal en la isla de Mallorca by Guy de Forestier
(I haven't checked but I doubt it's been translated; a rough translation of the title would be Dear Mallorcans: Keys to Personal Contact on the Island of Mallorca).
Non-fiction.

Last week I had to go to Mallorca for work, and this book was given to me on my arrival by a very dear Mallorcan friend with whom I have had some rather spectacular breakdowns in communication - a somewhat tongue-in-cheek olive branch proffered as soon as I came out of the airport!
These incidents of miscommunication have fascinated us both - and now I understand them! My mistake was to treat my friend as I would any other Spaniard, for how was I to know that Mallorca is a whole little world of its own? His mistake was to assume that I would know that (a very Mallorcan trait this, it turns out - surely the whole world knows how important Mallorca is? (The author quotes an old Mallorcan man who asked him "what's bigger? Mallorca or outside-of-Mallorca?"))
This was lots of fun to read and the style is light-hearted, but there's a lot of substance to it - an attempt to explain the Mallorcan way of being by looking at the history of the island: isolation; occupation; co-existence of Christians, Muslims and Jews; expulsion of the latter two; Mallorca's rise as a destination for mass tourism, etc. Fascinating stuff, but perhaps only if you have an interest in it to begin with (though if you have Mallorcan family or friends I'd say it's essential reading).

The Bone Woman by Clea Koff
Non-fiction

In 1996, at the age of 23, Clea Koff, then a postgraduate forensic anthropology student, was invited to join a mission to Rwanda, helping an NGO called Physicians for Human Rights which had been charged by the UN with the exhumation of the bodies of those killed in the genocide. This is her account of that mission and others to Rwanda, Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia; in all cases evidence collected by the teams was used to indict criminals on trial at ICTR and ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda/former Yugoslavia).

I don't read much non-fiction and I don't have a particular interest in forensic anthropology, so I don't know what made me pick this book up at the library, but I'm glad I did. In short, it's a book about digging partially decomposed bodies out of mass graves - but Koff manages to make it not about the dead, but about the living. She is clearly a talented anthropologist, but on top of that she's a very gifted story-teller, and she tells her tale with humanity and grace (and humour!), somehow never making it sensational. Koff sees her job as that of an "interpreter", making the bones speak, and when she returned from these missions she felt that she had to make them speak still louder by writing this book.

Koff apparently took up the study of forensic anthropology because she wanted to use it to help defend human rights, and her commitment shines through the very grimmest moments in the book. It is grim and grisly at times - how could it not be? - but never gratuitously. It's also very upsetting, and yet I came away infused with a sense of Koff's own idealism, repulsed by what she describes, of course, but uplifted by her account of the selflessness and humanity shown by the teams she worked on.

The Believers by Zoe Heller

As successful left-wing lawyer Joel Litvinoff lies in a coma after a stroke, his family struggles to come to terms with a discovery which shakes their faith in him - without ever being able to talk to him about it. At the same time, Joel and Audrey's grown-up children are all trying to find their own identities, helped and hindered by Joel's situation. Despite her family's opposition, Rosa's curiosity about her Jewish heritage takes her further along the road to Orthodox Judaism; fat, unhappy Karla gradually realises that her loveless marriage is not a life sentence and that she perhaps doesn't have to be miserable all her life; adopted son Lenny falls back into drug addiction, but this time finds the will to make changes and recover.

I'm back to my old bugbear, though - with the possible exception of Karla, I couldn't find any of the characters credible because of their implausible way of speaking. I think I read a comment elsewhere on LT a while ago saying that the dialogue of the American characters didn't quite ring true (Heller is British although she has been in the US for years), but for me it isn't just the Americans (anyway, as a Brit I might not even notice if American speech weren't spot on). In fact, Audrey, the main British character, is the character I found least credible of the lot - would anyone so unremittingly nasty, selfish, cruel, petty really still have a husband, loving children, friends? Heller does explain Audrey's character at one point - her sharp tongue was a way of hiding her shyness and discomfort when she arrived in New York as a young bride, and it made people laugh so she never dropped it - but even so, I would have found her more realistic if there had been just something likeable about her.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the book as a whole, but I found it very disappointing after Notes on a Scandal.

Wow--The Bone Woman sounds really interesting. Thanks for pointing it out--I've never heard of it but will be on the look out for it now.

Good review of The Believers, Rach - thanks. I'd already decided it didn't sound like one for me but it's nice to get confirmation from someone whose taste I trust rather than just a.n. newspaper reviewer!

The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim

Not that I did it on purpose, but this was perfectly timed right after The Bone Woman. Koff uncovers the horror inflicted on those who remained in former Yugoslavia; Ugresic uses her novel to show how fleeing the war was no easy option either.
Tanja Ludic, an academic from Zagreb, ends up in Amsterdam by chance (and the residence permit lottery), teaching Serbo-Croat literature at the university to a handful of her fellow "ex-Yugos" who have also washed up there. Rather than studying literature, Tanja embarks with them upon a journey into "Yugonostalgia" as they try to make sense of their displacement and the fragmentation of their country. They cling to each other out of desperation, yet where one moment there is comradeship and support and they are all "our people", the next an invisible line has been crossed and they are suddenly divided into Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, only for a fragile unity to be re-established out of need.

Another happy coincidence is that Ugresic is speaking in London on Sunday at the World Literature Weekend organised by the London Review of Books; I'm looking forward to hearing her.

Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort
translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen

I should say at the outset that this isn't my kind of book; I knew that when I bought it but I'd never knowingly read anything from the Netherlands before so I was curious, and as I'm actively seeking out books by women from obscure (in terms of my reading) places, I was doubly curious. It says on the cover that it's a "literary thriller" but I'd suggest that there's more thriller than literature here.

Struggling singer Maria has just separated from her depressive boyfriend, father of the second of her two children, when she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. She decides to terminate the pregnancy - and immediately starts to receive threatening letters. Fearing for her safety and that of her children, she flees with them to her sister's house, their old family home on the coast - but the threats follow her...

If you like thrillers, it probably isn't bad, but it just ain't my cup of tea (although I did read quite a lot of Nicci French and the like a couple of years ago when my dad was seriously ill as I found that it distracted me without requiring any input from me). The cover blurb likens Saskia Noort to Patricia Highsmith, but although it's years since I read any of the latter I remember it being much more subtle and therefore more disturbing (or maybe I was just younger and more impressionable). Here there are attempts to create psychological tension (sudden reappearance of the father of Maria's first child after years abroad, reports from the neighbour of a stranger looking for her in the street - a panoply of possible culprits, so Maria starts to suspect everyone and cracks under the pressure) but they are clumsily done and I could see the author pulling the strings. As for the ending, it stretched the bounds of credibility so far that it was almost funny.

I also had a few quibbles with the translation; I couldn't ever forget that I wasn't reading the original as often the English wasn't quite natural. For example, the police "exacavate" a body - surely they exhume it?

On the good side, it was a quick, undemanding read which fitted perfectly into my Eurostar trip back to Brussels on Sunday night!

When you are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

I picked this up in one of the little bookshops at work a few weeks ago; I was fed up and in search of something light because it was a half-train-strike day (these turn out to be worse than full-train-strikes because instead of making other arrangements you cling to the unreasonable hope that your train won't be affected). I started it as I stood on the platform waiting for said train, and earned myself some disapproving looks by laughing out loud at the first story (don't you realise there's a train strike, you stupid woman?)

The book is a collection of loosely autobiographical stories?/essays?/accounts? (I don't really know what to call them), some about the writer's childhood in a harmlessly, even charmingly, dysfunctional family, some about his adult life with his long-term, long-suffering partner, Hugh. As I say, some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, although at other times I felt it tried a bit hard. What I really liked, though, was the way Sedaris is able to pinpoint tiny little quirks of human behaviour; he's a merciless observer of people, although it's often himself that he's laughing at.

It took me several weeks to read this as I found that I enjoyed it more in small doses. I'll certainly read more Sedaris, but perhaps not for a while.

>87 rachbxl: I have only read a few books from the Netherlands, none of which impressed me too much. I like to think I just haven't found the excellent ones yet.

>87 rachbxl: and 89 Ciske by Piet Bakker from the Netherlands remains one of my favorite books. I read the Afrikaans translation from the Dutch and it was superbly done - I'm not sure if the English will have the same impact, because I know I enjoyed the language aspect of the book tremendously. It would be interesting to know, though.

>89 avaland: Lois, I guess we'll just have to keep looking! I certainly intend to read more by Dutch authors but I'm just not sure what yet - there's got to be something out there though!

>90 akeela: I remember noticing Ciske on your thread, Akeela - I'll see if I can track down an English translation. Thanks for reminding me about it.

Cuatro dias de enero by Jordi Sierra i Fabra
(only published last year so no translation as yet)

I'm tempted to write my comments in the intensely irritating style of the novel, but I'll limit myself to a few sentences to give a flavour of it:

This is a novel. A novel about Barcelona.

Barcelona, the great Spanish city, the last bastion of Republican Spain in the Civil War. "Barcelona is the last bastion of the Republic", mused Mascarell, reflecting upon how Barcelona was the last bastion of the Republic, as he walked through the deserted city.

Deserted because the Fascists are now just over the other side of the river, and everyone who can has fled the city. Deserted because nobody is left. Deserted because it is deserted. "Look how deserted this fomerly lively city is," reflected Mascarell as he walked through the deserted streets...

I wanted to read this because of the historical setting; in January 1939 the Republican government fled Barcelona before it fell to the Fascists, and everyone who could fled with them. For 4 days (the "four days in January" of the book's title) before the arrival of the Fascists the city was empty of all but those who physically couldn't leave and Fascist sympathisers who could now come out of the woodwork. The main character, Mascarell, remains in the city because his wife is dying of cancer. Despite the fact that there are no longer any services of any kind in Barcelona, Mascarell is determined to carry out his duties as the one remaining policeman in the city; his attempts to solve one last case provide the storyline, with the desperate city as a backdrop.

>92 rachbxl: Ha ha!

Regarding Dutch authors, I read and liked by The Twin Boven is het stil by Gerbrand Bakker, which was published by Archipelago Books earlier this year.

>92 rachbxl: Nice. Raising the bar for the seriously underwhelmed reviewer, I think.

By the way, in response to 87, I have seen some Cees Noteboom that look interesting, but have yet to read any. Um...thats about it really.

>93 kidzdoc: Thanks for the reminder, kidzdoc - I noticed that when you read it but had forgotten all about it. Have just been back to re-read your review - it does sound good.

>94 GlebtheDancer: And thanks for that reminder too, Andy; I've read some non-fiction by Nooteboom (Roads to Santiago, years ago - excellent outsider's look at Spain) but wouldn't have thought of his fiction.

Life Class by Pat Barker

It's been a long time since I read anything by Pat Barker, and I'm pleased to see that this novel lives up to my memories of her work. I admire her tight, controlled writing and her subtly-drawn characters. Her economy with words ends up being far more eloquent than more flamboyant, flowery prose might be, and I enjoy slowing down to get the most out of it. She doesn't beat the reader about the head with things; rather, there are tiny, understated shifts in the way characters interact.

Like the Regeneration trilogy, Life Class is set during the First World War. There are two distinct parts to the novel: it opens with a group of young art students at the Slade in London, devoted to art and their social life. This carefree world contrasts sharply with the second part, set on the battlefields of Flanders, seen through the eyes of Päul, art student-turned-ambulance driver. The contrast is maintained through Paul's relationship with Elinor, still in London; whilst Paul has to deal with unimaginable horrors, Elinor reacts by throwing herself into the parties of the Bloomsbury set. The narrative is interspersed with their letters to each other, which show how the gulf between their respective worlds is widening. ""Don't let's talk about the war; it gets into everything," says Elinor towards the end of the novel, but how can Paul talk of anything else?

Re Dutch authors:

Several years ago I read A Heart of Stone by Renate Dorrestein and it made a strong impression on me--themes were feminism and post-partum depression. Very insightful characterization.

>89 avaland: and 91

Two books by Dutch authors that I really love are as follows:

The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout (5 stars)
Faded Portraits by E. Breton De Nijs (4 stars)
The Song and the Truth by Helga Ruesamen (3.5 stars)
The Virtuoso by Margriet de Moor ((2 stars) - but Paola loved it)

One more of Dermout's books has been translated into English (I don't recall the title right now), but you can find it on Abe's.

I've read The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom. I didn't much care for it although it was funny in parts. He is quite popular in The Netherlands.

>97 arubabookwoman:, 98 Aruba, urania, thanks for these recommendations - I'll see what I can find. I knew there had to be more out there!

If This be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, a Memoir by Gregory Rabassa
Non-fiction.

This has been in my sights for a while now, following the reviews from rebeccanyc and avaland. I feel compelled to say at the outset that I'm really pleased to have read it and that, whatever the savaging I'm about to embark upon might suggest, I did enjoy reading it and found it very interesting. I no longer slog dutifully through books that aren't doing anything for me, so it's worth noting that I did finish this, even if I was frequently on the verge of ripping it up (this from someone who's usually incapable of making so much as a pencil mark on a book...)

To be fair to Rabassa, I don't think I'm his target audience. He doesn't say so, but I suspect that this book is written for readers of his translations (he is one of the leading translators of Spanish and Portuguese, described by Garcia Marquez as "the best Latin American writer in the English language"), in other words, not for professional linguists like me who will come along and quibble with all sorts of things that the layman wouldn't notice. And yet, if his book is aimed at the people who read his translations, why is it stuffed with words in other languages for which he provides no translations? If he thinks his readers can understand all the foreign terms he uses here, why does he think his translations of books are necessary? (As I said, I'm a linguist, and I didn't understand them all (I understand the languages I work with and bits of others, not all languages on earth); it really bugs me when a writer is so smug as to use terms which are not common usage in English without providing a footnote (I'd even settle for a translation in brackets, I'm not fussy); it smacks of arrogance, but more of that in a moment).

The book is divided into 2 parts. The shorter opening section provides details of Rabassa's early life and how he got into studying languages and translating (by accident - didn't we all?), followed by a details of all the works he has translated, with accounts of the challenges he faced with each. This was potentially fascinating, but after lengthy sections on Hopscotch and One Hundred Years of Solitude it dwindled to "I translated book x, and I met the author on y occasions, and I was approached by abc from the publishers about it. I hope more of his work gets translated". I found this frustrating because I wanted to know more about the problems he encountered and how he got round them (yes, he gives details, but generally about how to deal with names; yes, names are a problem - next?) For example, early on when he is still giving more details he outlines a particular problem (I forget what now, but I know that I found it interesting), and after writing at length about it he simply says, "my solution was to come up with lots of portmanteau words". This was one of the times I wanted to rip the book up - give me some examples! I felt I'd been cheated into reading that section with the promise of an answer, only to be denied it at the last moment.

Possibly my biggest single bugbear with this book is the man's arrogance. He loudly proclaims his dissatisfaction with every translation he has ever done (as if inviting the reader to say, "no, really, it was fabulous, you're amazing"), but nor does he have a good word to say about any work done by any other translator, which I find surprising. I found his regular smug asides extremely irritating. For example, when discussing Oswaldo Franca Jr.'s The Man in the Monkey Suit, narrated by a car mechanic, he says, A word of warning must be made here to those used to translating from the Spanish. In Portuguese the word for shop or garage is oficina. It doesn't mean office; that's escritorio. Does he really think that he's the only foreigner to have the linguistic sophistication necessary to understand this really rather basic point of vocabulary? (Even I knew that, and I don't officially understand Portuguese!)

Another thing I found odd was Rabassa's claim early on that he sometimes had to fight the urge to improve on the original. As far as I'm concerned, that's just not up for discussion (I'm not a literary translator, but still). I wonder, though, if he's not just playing to the gallery here, saying what his audience wants him to say. I say this because the first thing I'm ever asked when someone discovers what I do for a living is, "Aren't you ever tempted to change what they say if you don't agree with it?" Of course I'm not, firstly because I'd never work again, and secondly because I'm in it for the linguistic challenge, not the content, but nobody ever wants to hear that. Perhaps early on in his career he did have to fight the urge to improve, but I suspect it's in there now as a crowd-pleaser (and to make Rabassa look like a hero for resisting, even though he could have done better himself). Rabassa also presents himself as something of a hero with his "solution" to how to deal with the characters' names in One Hundred Years of Solitude - first names and/or surnames? how to avoid confusing the reader? Once again, I find this surprising as for me it's not open to discussion - what's wrong with copying the author's use of names? In this particular novel it's no less confusing in Spanish than in English.

Finally, the writing style. I've always believed that a good literary translator should be firstly a good writer; let's just say that this book won't have me rushing out to source any of Rabassa's translations. I found his style to be pedantic in the extreme, and not particularly pleasant to read.

However, this is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a long time; it's really made me think in a new way about what I do (the London Review of Books World Literature Weekend last month first got me thinking about it, and this is an interesting continuation). I know I've just pulled it to pieces, but I don't think I'd have finished it if I'd have agreed with everything Rabassa said; there wouldn't have been enough to keep my interest. I'm just sorry that it was only the book I could shout at; if I had Rabassa himself in front of me I think we could have some fascinating discussions. (That's a polite word for arguments).

Thanks, Lois!

>99 rachbxl: I'm a bit shocked to see the length of this last review - and that was an edited version of what I wanted to say! I think I'm going to pass the book around at work, see what my colleagues think...

>ha! I knew you would have some very interesting things to say about the book. I admit that I have not read a single Rabassa translation (that I can think of), although I did recently pick up a copy of Hopscotch from a library sale. What you took for arrogance, I think, I thought of as a rather odd writing style. I will also admit that I did not read all of the 2nd part. I read the entries on the authors I recognized and all of the women authors, and skimmed the rest for those challenges he talks about.

And yes, you do come to the book from different perspective...

btw, I sometimes think that contentious reviews can make books all the more intriguing!

>99 rachbxl: hmmmm, I think I'll be approaching this with some trepidation now!

And I'm racking my brains trying to remember if I asked you if you change people's words when you don't agree with them. Apologies if I did!

Part of me wants to read it but after your review it might irritate me senseless. Do you have any other recommendations for books about translation? When I bought my War & Peace translation by Pevear and Volkhonsky I told my husband how jealous I was that they are a husband and wife who spend their lives translating Russian literature! (yep, I'm sure it's not that romantic and glamorous really...but still...)

>102 charbutton:, 103 I didn't want to put anybody off! I did actually enjoy reading it and I'd say it's worth a go (although like Lois I ended up just skimming over the last few sections); it's just that I don't entirely agree with all Rabassa says. As you have no doubt noticed. I'm looking forward to hearing what others think.

Cushla, I can't recommend any other books about translation, sorry. (Because I haven't read any, not because I don't agree with them, either!)

Char, if you did ask me I don't remember! I don't mind the question; it's just funny to see how people are so often disappointed by the answer.

Well Rabassa is now in his late 80's and after a lifetime of translating this and that he is probably pretty fussy about a lot of things at this point. I tend to think there are lots of approximations in just about any translated work by any translator--that it comes with the territory but that long time translators are going to become exponentially more particular and more perfectionist in their aims. Rabassa is maybe the most famous of the Spanish translators but I don't consider him necessarily better than others like Edith Grossman, Suzanne Jill Levine, Helen Lane or Alfred MacAdam etc. etc. To me the most important part is what a translator chooses he or she is going to work on--how intriguing that work will be when it does finally appear in translated form. Rabassa was known for his work on some of the most seminal books of his era but we are in a new era now in which other authors and their works are being translated by other people. Language is not static--it is always going somewhere new or different--and new works offer new ideas and visions. We can admire the things of the past but we also need to keep an eye on the road ahead.

>105 lriley: Absolutely - a translator (or interpreter) who's not a perfectionist wouldn't be much of a translator. And yet perfection is impossible in translation because, as Rabassa says (just to show that I do agree with some of what he says), it's an art, not a science. It can't be taught and it can't be perfected, but you can't stop striving for it.

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

Lalwani was born in India and grew up in Cardiff, Wales; the main character of her book, Rumi, is born in Cardiff to immigrants recently arrived from India. I don't know that Rumi's story is at all autobiographical, but Lalwani certainly draws on her own experience for her descriptions of life in a family torn between two cultures, and of growing up in 1980's Cardiff, and she's very convincing.
Rumi is an outsider at school and in the community because of her race and colour and because she is a maths prodigy, making her "weird", and a "nerd". However, her isolation comes less from outside the home than from within it - the harsh regime imposed on her by her father, aiming to get her into Oxford at an early age as possible; the mixed messages she receives from her mother, homesick for India and confused about how to bring her daughter up as a good Indian girl so far from home ("only white people have sex", Shreene tells Rumi, going on to tell her that "we Indians" have children by praying for them; when Rumi asks for her first bra Shreene tells her she is "shameless"). Rumi escapes from it all by dreaming of India, where life, it seems to her, is simpler, and where she fits in better.
Rumi is a fantastic character, funny and likeable, and touching in her struggle to make sense of the world around her. I particularly liked the way Lalwani attempts to present Rumi's misguided parents as fully-rounded characters as well, making their behaviour understandable, if not endorsable - a more human side of Mahesh seen through his relationship with his chess-playing British friend, and Shreene's resentment at having Rumi's studying dictate the life of the whole family.
Lalwani won the Costa First Novel award with this in 2007, and apparently her second novel, The Village, is due out this year; I'm looking forward to reading it.

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

One of the Canongate The Myths series, this is a retelling of the myth of Iphis from Ovid's Metamorphoses set in modern-day Inverness. The original myth is the story of a girl brought up as a boy, who is to be married to his/her (female) cousin; at the last moment the gods intervene and avoid catastrophe and thwarted love by changing the pretend boy into a real boy. In Smith's version gender boundaries are fluid, unimportant - the children's grandfather tells them stories which begin, "when I was a girl"; the most beautiful boy in the world turns out to be a girl; a girl is so boyish she's girlish, or so girlish she's boyish.
A quick, entertaining read full of the verbal flourishes I've come to expect from Ali Smith.

A bit late with comments on translation. I've read three books recently that included scads of phrases from half a dozen languages (and no footnotes). I am used to this in older texts. A knowledge of French is almost de rigeur for some 19th-century British novels. However, I must say, I have been surprised by the return of this practice in more recent works. Maybe, we are watching a new trend emerge. Get out your foreign language dictionaries everybody :-)

Finished the Rabassa. He is annoying!

Have you read any of the other myth books? I enjoyed The Penelopiad and Weight, although the latter did feel a bit light.

>109 urania1: I have no problem with foreign words and phrases which are normal usage; my gripe here is that they smack of "aren't I clever? I know all these foreign words!", and that jarred all the more given that it was coming from a translator. There can be all sorts of reasons for using foreign expressions in texts - and also for not translating them - but I don't think "showing off" should be one of them!

>110 charbutton: I really enjoyed The Penelopiad. I've got a Polish one waiting to be read, by Olga Tokarczuk, and I'm looking forward to reading Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg - that was what she talked about and read from at the London Review event.

The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan

No review for the moment, but I will say that it's one of the best books I've read for ages!

>112 rachbxl: isn't it just fantastic?

Okay, all The Earth Hums in B Flat fans, log on to Amazon and click the button that says you wish this button were available in Kindle format. I am on a mission to keep my books to bookshelf ratio reasonable. I still buy printed texs; I have to support me sainted independent bookstore. Otherwise, I have become a Kindle woman. For all doubters, Kindles are great for eight-hour sojourns in hospital waiting rooms. One has plenty of books at one's disposal.

>114 urania1: Mary, I voted...

It is available as an eBook from Waterstones.com, but for Sony Reader rather than Kindle (since we don't have the Kindle in the UK). I'm playing 20 questions with Google, though (professional interest), and it looks like .epub to Kindle conversion is a bumpy if not impossible process.

The Heavens May Fall by Unity Dow

Unity Dow is Botswana's first female High Court judge and author of several novels, although this is the first I've read. It's a cross between that elusive "African chick lit" that some of us have been so curious about and something that wants to be much more than that - consequently I'm not sure it succeeds on either front. The narrator is a feisty 30-something female lawyer who's not afraid to be feminine. She can talk about clothes and nail varnish one minute, court rulings the next - yet I found the juxtaposition of girly nonsense and some quite technical legal stuff (Dow has a legal background, after all) quite unnatural, as if it couldn't decide whether it was a serious book about case law in Botswana or something much frothier. Similiary, I felt it couldn't quite make up its mind who its audience was - was it written for Africans or outsiders? At times I felt I was being lectured about "Africa" - look! we have an independent judiciary in Botswana! look! beautiful African women can be hot-shot lawyers too! - yet the cultural refererences I was really interested in weren't explained.

Interesting review, Rach, as always. I haven't read anything by Dow. Seems a good editor might have focused her a bit better.

in re novels and numbers: you might find Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture enjoyable. About maths and mathematicians, but one doesn't need to be a maths person (at all!) to enjoy it. Deals with the position of a maths person both w/in his family and the mathematical world. Obsession, family, "why bother w/ "truth" are among the themes. (There are quite a few prizes out there for being the first to solve famous problems....Fermat's last theorem (i think mostly taken care of0 and Goldbach's conjecture (every integer > 2 can be decomposed into the sum of two prime numbers). The author is both a math person and a good writer - his most recent work looks fascinating:

"Logicomix, a graphic novel, is based on the epic story of the quest for the foundations of mathematics. This is a quintessentially modern intellectual adventure, most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and, in some cases, insanity."

>118 bobmcconnaughey: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture sounds fun. Maths make several appearances in Popco, which sent me on an investigation of maths, which I would not have done otherwise.

Sur ma mère by Tahar Ben Jelloun

This is the literary equivalent of something we used to do in art class at school - take a tiny cutting of a picture out of a magazine, stick it in the middle of a piece of paper and imagine how the picture grows. Ben Jelloun takes as his "cutting" the confused memories of his mother during her last years, combined with what he already knows - and he imagines the rest. The result is a magically evocative picture of his mother's early life in Fez, and a poignant account of his mother's final illness and death.

And the rest of last week's holiday reading:

Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
My first Somerset Maugham, set in a villa in Tuscany - and found on the bookshelves of the villa in Tuscany where I was staying. An enjoyable little (100 pages or so) period piece.

I'd Like by Amanda Michalopolou
short stories translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta

The Thing around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fantastic collection of short stories, some set in Nigeria, others featuring Nigerians in America. If I had to choose a favourite it would be "Jumping Monkey Hill".

Personal Velocity by Rebecca Miller
short stories

The seven stories in this very enjoyable collection all have a woman's name as their title. Some of the women appear only in their own story, whilst others appear or are at least referred to in other stories too. My favourite was "Greta", the first story, about a 30-something woman struggling to balance personal happiness, professional success, parental expectations, husband - nothing extraordinary there, but I liked Miller's take on it. I expected the subsequent stories to feature more middle-class professional women in similar circumstances, but that was to underestimate Miller; in fact she presents us with 7 very different women in very different situations, and they're all convincing (and all in some way made me think, "you're talking about me!").

Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu

Although I'm not sure this would ever have been a great novel, I suspect there's a half-decent 200-page novel lurking in the 400 pages of this one. On the positive side, it gives a vivid view of both the unpleasantness and difficulty of life in Ceausescu's Romania - and of how there was still pleasure to be found in small things.

>122 rachbxl: interesting review - Pippa Lee never really grabbed me so I've avoided this, but it sounds really good. Thanks!

Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

I bought this debut novel having read an intriguing interview with 23-year-old Catton in a newspaper; I wasn't disappointed in that the book's equally intriguing, but I'm not sure yet what I made of it exactly.
The basic premise is that we are all, always, playing a role, but Catton takes it to extraordinary lengths (I had thought that perhaps she goes too far, but in my Polish class this morning I had to read an article about how some psychologists think that we are all, always, playing a role...) I was fascinated by the implications of Catton's suggestion that there are roles upon roles upon roles, that we are simultaneously the actor and the audience, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.
In the interview I read Catton defended herself against accusations from critics that "people don't really speak like that"; she claims that they do, but I'm not convinced, and I think that's what stopped this from really hitting the spot for me. Regardless of that, though, this is an extraordinary first novel, and I look forward to seeing what a more mature Catton produces in the future...

...almost as much as I'm looking forward to reading FlossieT's interview with Catton!

>125 rachbxl: interested which interview that was, rach! I hadn't heard her try to claim that was how people "really spoke" before and would like to read that one.

I have to (and not just because of the interview - which I wouldn't have pitched for if I hadn't been so bowled over by the book!!) say that I LOVED The Rehearsal. For me, it was perfect unity of style and subject. She has been criticised a fair bit for being too intellectual about it, though.

She's written several short stories that are around and about the place on the net - the latest, Two Tides in Granta 106, is more "traditional" in style.

I had the same reaction to The Believers, Rachel. I thought it was quite unpleasant to read, although I did give it 3 stars. I reviewed it here

Interested to hear about Catton - where can I read your interview, Rachael?

>127 kiwidoc: I should have said - Rachael's review is in the soon-to-appear first issue of avaland's new venture Belletrista.

I just read your review of The Believers - yes, my feeling exactly. My faith in Zoe Heller was restored shortly afterwards though by her piece(touching but also very funny) about her mother in a collection about mothers and daugthers (I don't have the details to hand and I appear not to have added it to my library).

>126 FlossieT: Rachael, I've been racking my brains to think where that interview might have been. It was in the last 3 or 4 months and it was definitely a British publication, and it was a supplement (which is odd because we don't generally get those in Belgium so I don't know how I got hold of it). I suspect it may have been the Saturday Telegraph magazine, which my mum happened to send me for another reason. I'll let you know if I think of any other possibilities.

>127 kiwidoc:, 128 Coming soon...really! Lots of technical web-type stuff at the moment...

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
non-fiction

I wasn't planning to read this, reviews on LT and elsewhere having persuaded me that it wasn't really my kind of thing, but I'm stuck in Poland for 3 months with nothing but War and Peace and a load of Polish books, and last week I desperately needed to escape into something lighter. Unsurprisingly, my local bookshops here are not exactly bursting at the seams with English books so it was an easy choice between Dan Brown, Harry Potter and this.

In the wake of a difficult divorce Elizabeth Gilbert took a year out to spend 4 months in each of Italy (eating), India (on an ashram) and Indonesia (with an old medicine man). The India part lost me somewhat as I just couldn't identify with it and had to turn several pages at a time, but I really enjoyed Italy (perhaps because in times of stress I'd rather eat platefuls of pasta than scrub temple floors), and Bali wasn't bad although I was starting to have enough by then.

A pleasant surprise, though, was that there was far less navel-gazing than I feared, and far more commentary on the world around her than I'd hoped. What's more, I like the way Gilbert sees things enough to want to read more of her work; I'd particularly like to read her short stories.

Halo, Wikta! by Katarzyna Pisarzewska

Random choice in a Polish bookshop (chosen for its brevity, like most of the books I buy in Polish, as well as for the fact that it won an award for contemporary women's fiction). Anyway, a fun little novel which I believe to be about a 30-something woman in Warsaw who wakes up with amnesia and discovers to her horror that the reason she lives in such luxury is that her husband is a gangster...as was her father. It was all quite surreal but I'm not sure if that was the author or my not-quite-reliable grip on the language.

>130 rachbxl: have to say I'm still not really attracted to Gilbert's book despite your very thoughtful review... but did you see her TED talk about writing and inspiration? Really great.

>131 rachbxl: I didn't, but I will now! Thanks. I think you could safely give the book a miss, Flossie...

Trying to catch up...

Western by Christine Montalbetti
translated from the French by Betsy Wing

Very original take on the classic Western genre which could only have been written by a French person. My review will appear in issue 2 of Belletrista.

As will my review of:
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić
translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursác, Celia Hawkesworth and Mark Thompson

Part of the Canongate "The Myths" series, this is Ugrešić's take on Baba Yaga, a figure common to stories and fairy tales right across the Slavic world.

Kryształowy Anioł by Katarzyna Grochola

I decided it was time to stop choosing Polish books based on their brevity (in part because short doesn't always mean easy) and went the other way with this 540-page novel. Another reason for moving away from short things was that I wanted something I could get caught up in, something in which the story would carry me away regardless of whether I understood every single word - and that's exactly what I got here. Great literature it ain't (I'm saving that till I can understand it and getting by on the Polish equivalent of chick lit for now), but it was entertaining enough, although far too long (Grochola is a prolific writer of fiction for women, and every book seems to be longer than the last; this is her latest, and it could happily have lost a third of its length at least).

Well done, Rachel!

>135 rachbxl: well, what was it about?

I didn't expect anyone to be interested so I didn't say on purpose. Since you ask...

It's the story of goody two-shoes Sara, whom we meet on the eve of her wedding, just as she discovers her husband-to-be in bed with the bridesmaid (I'd better say at this point that I suspect we're supposed to feel sympathy throughout the book for sweet little Sara, but I just thought she was a drip). The wedding's off, and she goes on to marry someone else, apparently failing to notice the all-too-visible (to the reader) sign on his forehead announcing that he's Bad News in the Long Run; he, too, leaves her for someone else (Sara! It's because you're BORING!)

In the meanwhile Sara has landed a dead-end job as a dogsbody for a local radio station, and the job requires her to do several night shifts a week, alone. To while away the time she sits in the studio and pours her heart out to the microphone, not knowing that she's being recorded. Without her knowledge the station starts to broadcast her outpourings and she's a runaway success (but she seems to be the only person in Poland who doesn't know about her programme), and ends up winning an international radio award. The programme changes the nation - people start to think about other people, about life, about what really matters, about happiness, all because of drippy Sara.

In the end Sara gets her man (only not the one it looked like she was going to get) and in a way she gets the child she longs for too, and they all live happily ever after.

You did ask, Lois! I decided I was not going to be irritated by the 2-D nature of the characters (she's Good and he's Bad, he's Rich and she's Poor); rather I saw it as a kind of fairy tale with a nice little moral (the moral being, every little woman needs a man).

It's a moral we should all live by, otherwise we poor women would be lost in the big wide world.

>139 charbutton: You're so right Char - I'm glad we agree.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
Excellent debut novel set in a provincial city in China in 1979 - my review will appear in Issue 3 of Belletrista (Jan/Feb); I'll post a link when available.

Separate Journeys ed. Geeta Dharmarajan
Equally excellent collection of short stories by contemporary Indian women writers. Again, I read this for Issue 3 of Belletrista so a link will follow.

>138 rachbxl: well, that was fun. As you say, it must have had something in it or you wouldn't have finished it, right?

>140 rachbxl: I'm feeling the pressure to get issue 2 up, eh? :-) Soon.

rachbxl - I read The Vagrants a few weeks ago - an interesting read from a good writer. Great to read about the Cultural Revolution from the inside perspective. I was pleasantly surprised with the writing, albeit depressed with the storyline.

>142 kiwidoc: Sorry Karen - haven't been here for a while. Yes, I was impressed with the writing (especially given that she arrived in the States barely speaking English, from what I understand), but the story was extremely bleak. I'm looking forward to seeing what she produces in future.

Frictions ed. Anna Gibbs and Alison Tilson

Anthology of short fiction by Australian women; review coming up in Issue 3 of Belletrista.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
translated from the Polish (via the French!) by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox

No, not my usual fare at all, but I've had quite an adventure with Solaris over the last week - although it hasn't shaken my conviction that SF just isn't for me.

Here in Poland I've met Julia, a professional dancer who's currently working on a piece inspired by Solaris, to be premiered in Vienna early next year. We were put in touch by a mutual friend because Julia was looking for a female native speaker of English to record some quotes from the text to be used as part of the performance. Julia asked me to read the book before the recording session - but before I did so she told me what it was about, and to my surprise I found myself desperate to read it.
Unfortunately, the book itself didn't grab me half as much as Julia's telling of it did - she concentrated on the psychological elements because that's what's important for her piece, and whilst they are certainly present in the book I found that I was getting bogged down in the sci-fi side of things.

Still, it was fascinating to read it knowing that for the recording I was going to have to speak lines uttered by Kris's wife but on a completely different basis - what if it's her, not Kris, who is real? (And even more fascinating was the experience of making a professional recording with an acting coach!)

The Savage Altar by Åsa Larsson
translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
(published in the US as Sun Storm)

The first Rebecka Martinsson mystery, which I've had half an eye out for for a while (horribly appropriate given that the murder victim is found with his eyes gouged out in the cult Christian church in which he was active).

Rebecka, a successful young tax lawyer in Stockholm, returns to Kiruna, her desolate home town in the frozen north which she prefers not to think about, when the brother of her estranged friend Sanna is murdered. Rebecka's tenacious investigations into a crime after which the powerful cult has closed ranks inevitably lead her to confront parts of her own past she'd prefer to forget - including her own time with the cult.

Like avaland, I read mysteries when I need a break from other things; I find that a good one really clears my mind - and this one's really good. I'll be looking out for more.

>146 rachbxl: I started the Larsson's with book 2 and never read 1 because the resolution is mentioned in 2. Still, I don't think I missed anything. I've read 3, The Black Path, also. I managed to buy two more Ake Edwardson's this week though!

Thanks for the review of The Savage Altar - I'll look out for it. We spent a night in Kiruna on the way to the Ice Hotel a few years ago, so I was quite excited to see that it's set there! It was late December and dark about 22 hours a day, but the town felt pretty bleak even apart from the weather.

>148 cushlareads: Cushla, a big deal is made in the book of just how remote Kiruna is, and it certainly came across as bleak. (It's set in the middle of winter so you'd be able to picture it quite well!)

The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne

This was another "best of a bad lot" from the limited English-language section at my local bookshop here in Gdynia - but what a great surprise! I'd never even heard of Suzanne Berne though she won the Orange Prize in 1999 with an earlier novel, but I really enjoyed this.

Against her better judgement, 30-something Cynthia has been persuaded by her older sister Frances to join the family for Thanksgiving; the action in the book takes place mainly over a couple of days around Thanksgiving, with sections set in the sisters' childhood. The sisters have been forced back into contact with their estranged father by the ending of his second marriage, Frances's own marriage is under strain, her daughters barely speak to her, Cynthia has just ended a relationship with a married man...in other words, we've got all the elements which go to make up yet another story about yet another dysfunctional family. Yet this book is somehow more than the sum of its parts, possibly because all the characters are so alive. Berne also has a wonderfully understated way of pinpointing what goes on in families, the little tensions and petty resentments which we never quite let go, and the way everyone clings to their own version of a story.

>150 rachbxl: I liked this book also (and agree with what you have to say about it!)

>150 rachbxl:,

Hmmm . . . I am almost tempted to buy the book. Baron von Kindle does have a copy in his library.

Fateless by Imre Kertész
Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson

I think this is what they call a "necessary" book, an "important" book - which doesn't necessarily make it an easy-to-read or even an enjoyable book, although I think it's very good. It is narrated by 14-year-old Gyuri, a Hungarian Jew who is detained one day en route to the workplace to which he has been assigned; he is sent first to Auschwitz and then on to Buchenwald. Coming from a non-religious family, Gyuri has never been particularly aware of his Jewishness and struggles to understand how it is that something by which he has never defined himself has come to be seen as his only defining feature. He is unable to identify with his fellow Jewish prisoners and consequently describes concentration camp life with chilling, yet very moving, detachment. Perhaps most moving, though, are the final pages, in which the camps have been liberated; struggling to come to terms with life back "outside", Gyuri finds himself nostalgic for the simple life of the camp.

I had a little problem at times with the narrator's voice. Particularly at the start of the book the narrator assumes a knowingly humorous style which I think is quite typical of a teenage boy - but some of the things he said struck a bit of a false note with me. I suspect it may be the best the translator could do with the colloquial language used by Budapest teenagers in the 1940's. In any case it didn't last, as the narrator's dwindling sense of humour is an indication of how he is being crushed psychologically as well as physically.

Before the end of the year I'm trying to finish off at least of a couple of books I've discarded over the last few months, and here's the first:

Death at Intervals by José Saramago
translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Having been bowled over by Blindness early in the year I was keen to try more Saramago, but I really didn't enjoy this as much. I don't know if it was me or the book, or the wrong time for me and the book, but I found it hard to keep up my interest so in the end it's taken me over 6 months to read under 200 pages.

I like the premise - what happens if people stop dying? In the unnamed country where this happens, people celebrate at first...but wait - is it such a good thing? The undertakers start to go bankrupt and want state aid, the church has to re-think its whole doctrine, the terminally ill see no end to their suffering - and a new form of smuggling is born, transporting those desperate to die over the border into the neighbouring country. Sure enough, death does return eventually - but she now notifies her "victims" courteously, informing them via violet letters that they have a week left...until one of the letters is returned to sender.

Whereas in Blindness I felt that the lack of names of people and places contributed to the universal nature of the story, here I found that the same device meant that I couldn't connect with (or care much about) anyone; it was too much about the whole rather than the individuals - until the last 20 pages or so when it suddenly becomes all about an individual (he of the returned letter), which I found rather an odd contrast.

I'll chalk this one up to experience. It won't put me off reading more Saramago, and I'm still looking forward to reading Seeing in particular. (Saramago doesn't seem to be well served in the Touchstones department!)

hi rach, i wasn't too impressed with Death at Intervals either. the premise is interesting enough and while i enjoyed the first half of the book, i found the second half too syrupy for my taste and the ending weak. hope you enjoy Seeing much better, as i did.

Deebee, I remember reading your review of Death at Intervals, and I remembered in particular that you didn't like the ending - as I was plodding along I couldn't wait to get to the end to see what it was you objected to. When I finally got there I agreed with you!

Here's another end tied up before the end of the year:

Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: an Inside History of Special Operations during the Second World War by Roderick Bailey

This fascinating book isn't my usual fare at all. It was lent to me by my dad, another great reader (he reads the non-fiction and I handle the fiction), after a conversation we had about British spies who were sent into France during the war and expected to pass themselves off as Frenchmen. (Of course it wasn't just the Brits in France that this happened to, but my dad is a Brit in France and we (I) were scoffing at the possibility of his ever being mistaken for a native).
Forgotten Voices consists exclusively of personal testimony from the archives of the Imperial War Museum from men and women from the Special Operations Executive, a secret British organisation set up early in the war to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage behind enemy lines. What struck me most from the accounts from 1939-40 was the Boys' Own Manual nature of the whole thing - a load of over-grown boys (and girls) involved in jolly japes using cocoa tins and string in a bid to outwit Jerry. (My favourite passage from the whole book is from this time - during the phoney war the gentleman in question is sent to France and fails to realise that of the 2 hotels in town, one is reserved for the British army, one for the German; he inevitably ends up in the "wrong" hotel, and, finding himself surrounded by Germans in the lift next morning going down to breakfast, he shakes the hand of each and every one of them because "I had been brought up to believe that war should be no excuse for forgetting one's manners").
The tone becomes much more sombre as the war progresses, and SOE's techniques develop considerably. What never changes is the staggering bravery, the sense of duty and the dignity of these men and women, none of whom had been able to speak about their activities until several decades later.

I read an interesting, although not very well written, book about an American female spy who was behind the German lines in France during the war --The Wolves at the Door by Judith L. Pearson. Amazing bravery under terrifying conditions.

Right, I'm adding both those to my wishlist - thanks! The Imperial War Museum is my favourite London museum.

I'm trying to remember what I've read about SOE, but haven't had my coffee yet. I've read more books about Bletchley Park and the code breakers supporting the SOE agents than SOE itself. Rachel it might not be your cup of tea, but I read my first Alan Furst novel earlier this year - The World at Night, set in Paris during WW2 - and loved it.

I second the Alan Furst recommendation. His earlier books are a bit better than his later ones, but they all make for compelling reading.

Sebastian Faulks also has some interesting books set in Europe during WWII, such as The Girl at the Lion d'Or and Charlotte Gray.

>159 cushlareads:, Did you know anyone can use the Imperial War Museum reading room, which is in the cupola at the top of the building? I used it to listen to some interviews from their sound archive with people who'd attended the Joint Services School for Linguists (written about in Secret Classrooms). They have a lot of interesting stuff there.

Thanks for all these suggestions!

>158 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, this looks so interesting that I think I might be able to overlook the bad writing under the circumstances. I'll look out for it.
>159 cushlareads: Cushla, RidgewayGirl, I've been wondering about Furst for a while - I'll take the plunge as soon as one comes my way.
>160 RidgewayGirl: wandering_star, thanks for this - Secret Classrooms looks like it would be right up my street. And I had no idea that the sound archive at the Imperial War Museum was public - might be worth a little trip to London, I think (although I'll wait till the snow's gone and there's a hope of Eurostar actually making it the whole way!)

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

That's it, I'm a confirmed Pym fan! Thanks to everyone over at the Barbara Pym Fan Club for converting me, and for suggesting that this was a good place to start.
This charming novel, written in the early '50's, is set in post-war London, and is narrated by Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman in her early 30's, stalwart church helper and pillar of the local community (one of the "excellent women" of the book's title). And in terms of plot, that's about it...not a lot of note really happens, but that's not the point. The point is Pym's wonderfully accurate observation of daily life and her delicious way of summing up everyday situations with understated humour. I can't possibly pick a favourite quotation because the book is stuffed with them.
I've been reading this over the past couple of days in front of the fire while it's all snowy outside - perfect!

Je l'aimais by Anna Gavalda
(English translation available: Someone I Loved)

Yesterday afternoon delayed trains caused me to be stuck in Paris for several hours on the way to my dad's near Limoges; I'd finished Excellent Women, couldn't face War and Peace, and everything else was in the depths of my case...a good excuse then for a little trip to the station bookshop in search of something to make the rest of the journey more bearable, which this certainly did.
I really enjoyed Gavalda's short story collection Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part (I Wish Someone Were Waiting for me Somewhere), but wasn't as impressed with her lengthy novel Ensemble, c'est tout (Hunting and Gathering); I like her style in short shots rather than watered down, so this, her first novel, was perfect for what I like about her writing, at 150 pages.
A 65-year old man takes his daugher-in-law, recently abandoned by her husband, to the family's house in the country, where for the first time they begin to speak to each other properly - and he, for the first time ever, talks openly about his feelings and his life. Or rather, about what his life has not been, based on a decision he took to stay with his wife rather than leave for the only woman he ever loved.
It's very simple - a man's confession over a meal - but in its simplicity is its brilliance. I thought I knew where it was going but I'm glad I was wrong, for the real story is surprising, and avoids the trap of falling into mawkish sentimentality whist being at the same time extraordinarily touching.

I've just picked up a copy of I Wish Someone Were Waiting for me Somewhere (in English, I'm afraid) so I'm glad to hear it's good! It was a bit of an impulse purchase in the Borders closing-down sale (sob) after avaland mentioned Anna Gavalda recently - she looked interesting.

>165 FlossieT: Rachael, I think you'll like it - I hope so, anyway.

Le dernier frere by Nathacha Appanah
(English translation due out Feb. 2010: The Last Brother)

Another one I picked up during my train delay the other day - and what a find. Certainly the best book I've read this year; probably one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. I'd never even heard of Appanah and pulled the book off the shelf only because I was curious about her name (she's from Mauritius, now lives in Paris, writes in French).

In a nutshell it's about an old man looking back on a childhood friendship between himself, Raj, the only surviving child in a family almost destroyed by the death of his two brothers in a landslide, and the orphaned David, one of a shipload of Jews interned on Mauritius for several years during the second world war. Appanah's writing is so beautiful that I felt that I had a living thing in my hands, and the emotional force left me almost physically winded.

This happens so rarely - you pick up a book about which you know absolutely nothing, and it turns out to be a treasure. The best Christmas present imaginable.

That book sounds fabulous, Rachel. I've just ordered it from The Book Depository, as it wasn't listed on Amazon US. It only cost $11.24 (52% off of the list price), and will be published in the UK on February 4th.

I've preordered it too, but it was priced at $17 something -- weird that there's such a difference just a few hours apart!

Huh! I just looked at The Book Depository again, and it is still priced at $11.24:

http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9781847246417/

Thanks, Darryl. That's what I got just now too when I clicked on the link from my confirmation e-mail. I've e-mailed The Book Depository to ask them to reduce the price for me, as this must be some weird glitch.