bookrblog

The Careful Use of Compliments

Friday, August 24th, 2007 | British Literature | No Comments

Not Alexander McCall Smith’s best title - it’s a bit too cutesy – but I picked it up because it’s the next in the Isabel Dalhousie series, which I love. Interestingly enough the bit he gets right this time is the mystery, which is well put together and well resolved. The character bit, which is usually so enticing, was a bit uneven this time. Isabel has had her baby and is still with Jamie although she won’t marry him yet; Cat, her niece, won’t speak to her or acknowledge the child; and she has been fired – properly – from her editorship. It’s full of the little ponderings which make Isabel so fascinating a character, but the bit that falls flat is the child, who is a cardboard baby and just sleeps and eats – little crying, no dirty nappies, no sleepless nights etc. The odd relationship between Jamie and Isabel continues being odd, which I suppose is all right, but slightly frustrating. However it is all tied up very nicely at the end, even if Isabel does make a decision worthy of an entire article in her own journal of ethics.

First Among Sequels

Monday, August 20th, 2007 | British Literature | No Comments

I picked up Jasper Fforde’s latest with fear and trepidation, because his Nursery Crime books have been so terrible – but I needn’t have feared, this was very good. It’s sixteen years on and Thursday is still dabbling with both in SpecOps and BookWorld duties, while trying to be a good wife and mother at the same time. There’s all the fun of weird time, Spike and his demons, bookjumping and carpet laying, with lots of not-so-subtle asides about the reality tv era and corporate madness. Best of all he’s shoved in some cool twists that I really didn’t see coming. While this isn’t on par with the first two of the series, which are, I think, the best, it’s still very good, thought-provoking and – finally – a good comedy.

Salvation Creek

Saturday, August 18th, 2007 | Australian Literature | No Comments

This rambling biography by Susan Duncan is a kind of sea-change book. She suffers the death of her brother and husband in the same week, soldiers on, breaks down, moves house, loses her cat and her dog, has a devastating affair with a married man, gets cancer – and then finds a house in Pittwater, or, more accurately, a community of people there. She makes friends, learns to live in the moment, and eventually falls in love and gets married. It’s well told, although it could be more cohesive, and her habit of giving away what’s going to happen in two years’ time, then not referring to it for chapters, is a bit irritating. Again, it’s about wealthy people and their lives – I suppose wealthy people are the ones who are free to make the changes and write the books. And there’s an enormous amount of alcohol – I never realised how much people drank. Too much about dogs, too. But very readable, even though it makes you realise that there must be a lot of people who wait too long to realise life is short, if there are so many books like this being published.

Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

Friday, August 17th, 2007 | American Literature | No Comments

This is a quite interesting YA book by Adam Rapp, who is also a playwright and movie director. Steve Nugent is in an institution for teens who have mental health problems – either addicts or attempted suicides. He’s writing a journal as part of his healing process, covering where he started – in a school for the gifted – to where he ends up, in the institution. While it’s not really new stuff, there’s something about the writing that really draws you in; probably the casual nature of it. He loses his mum to cancer, his brother to suicide, takes some drugs (and you almost feel as stoned as he is during those parts) and ends up walking the streets and then poking his own eye out. While this seems sad material – and there’s no resolution to it all, except he falls in love with another girl in the centre – it is more thought-provoking than really depressing. It’s a portrait rather than a journey (although perhaps it’s supposed to be a journey – I’m not sure) and it’s a good one.

Romanitas

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The concept of this book by Sophia MacDougall is interesting; the Roman empire never fell and still rules to this day. It’s just that the execution isn’t particularly well thought through. It’s the Roman empire just with technology. And the story – the heir is in danger of getting killed cause he wants to end slavery, so he runs away – doesn’t really hinge on it being now rather than two thousand years ago, so, seeing that the planes and cars and so forth only appear sporadically, you don’t usually remember it is supposed to be now. Which is a waste, and as you read you can’t help but nitpick – that Latin would have remained the same over two thousand years, and all the customs, and the clothing etc – the only change is that there’s electricity. The idea of then but now has been done before and done better, so it’s a real pity the author didn’t revel in the challenge. Anyway, the characters are well-drawn and interesting, the story races along and is written fairly well (except for the chopping and changing from place to person and back again) and it’s resolved at the end despite being a trilogy. A good concept, but a wasted one.

Fat, Forty and Fired

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 | Australian Literature | No Comments

This is the comedy I sought out, by Nigel Marsh, and although it is funny in parts, it was also very irritating. For one thing, the title is a lie; he wasn’t fired, he was given the choice of a new job or a very generous retrenchment package, so generous he was able to live on it for a year – so long as the nanny and the second car went. Yes, he is and was a very, very wealthy man, and the worst part was that he scarcely seems to realise it. In his year off, he travels through Europe – and not backpacking, let me add – has a few other trips in Australia, and spends every day swimming at the beach, as well as doing the school run. His wife doesn’t work either (they have four children between four and six) and must be very long-suffering, as he admits to being an alcoholic with anger management issues – which return in less than a year, when he accepts another generous job offer and goes back to being a CEO. Yes, there’s definitely some funny segments in this book, and yes, it’s nice that he takes some time off to reconnect with his family. But this rambling memoir can’t be taken seriously, simply because most people would never find themselves in that situation. Fat, forty, and fired, yes; able to take a year off and sustain a family of six in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney based on a retrenchment package, with the knowledge that a job would appear whenever one feels up to it again? Unlikely. This guy hasn’t got a clue, and that’s what I really didn’t find very funny at all.

The Ballad of Les Darcy

Saturday, August 11th, 2007 | Australian Literature | No Comments

Peter Fitzsimmons was fortunate enough to have this book commissioned by the Books Alive people, to be given out free, which is how I got it. It’s the story of a boxing legend during WW1 who refused to join up and was vilified for it. He became champion in Australia at only twenty, and died at 21 of an infection brought on from a boxing injury. While the historical aspect was interesting, in the large segment of society that was not so keen on joining up and becoming bullet fodder, the idea that Darcy was an utter hero and legend just because he was a boxer doesn’t really cut it with me. The author, clearly aware of his audience, uses an overly-conversational style, including phrases like “see,” to start every other paragraph, almost as though he’s aware we’re not really going to get why Darcy was so great. I wouldn’t have read this if it hadn’t been a free book, but as a snapshot of Australian history, it was quite interesting.

Resilience

Friday, August 10th, 2007 | Australian Literature | No Comments

Here’s the last in my depressive reading list; a book about resilience by Anne Deveson, which of course is about bouncing back after adversity, but can’t help really be about adversity, all the different kinds. There’s Rwanda and Ethiopa, the Holocaust, human rights abuses in Turkey and South America, the Stolen Generation, child abuse, homelessness, mental illness, disability . .. and then how people managed to rise above them. Throughout the whole story is another, her own – not only the story of her son with schizophrenia from her earlier book, Tell Me I’m Here (which I must have read fifteen years ago) – but also the story of a man she met through writing this current book, fell in love with, and who died six months later in her presence from cancer. It was inspiring to hear of sixty-somethings falling in love, but weird to have it turned into an example for her book – such intimacy, but I suppose that’s what journalists do. While this was a very interesting book, full of quotes, it did lack depth and it did lack real critical discussion, perhaps because it wasn’t written by a philosopher, just by a journalist who has taken a lot of different examples. It’s about the level of a long article in the Good Weekend, but still a great read, unless you’ve just read the long litany of woes beneath. I really need to find a comedy next.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte

Thursday, August 9th, 2007 | British Literature | No Comments

This is an excellent biography by Elizabeth Gaskell, not just because it’s about the most unrelentingly tragic family ever, but because she’s an exceptional writer. There’s long descriptions of Yorkshire – historical and geographical – and interesting details about incidents that inspired various parts of Jane Eyre and Shirley. I never realised, either, what a complete nutcase the Bronte father was, nor what a complete loser Branwell was. And then of course the heaping up of horrors which was Charlotte Bronte’s life – poverty, mental instability (I don’t think any of them were free of it) and death after death. It’s almost an essay arguing against the whole “suffering is good for one’s character” case; Gaskell even mentions how ridiculous the philosophies of Day (who tortured some poor girl in hopes she’d turn out to be a good wife for him) were, in connection with some of Patrick Bronte’s actions. Of course, perhaps we would never have got Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights had their lifestyle been slightly more comfortable; but who knows – perhaps we would have got even better, if they hadn’t all died young and horribly at that. It’s interesting how even back then the Bronte’s story was seen as ridiculously tragic, although it does serve to remind you that only a hundred and fifty years ago, England was as diseased and poverty-stricken as the most underdeveloped country today. Charlotte Bronte does come across as slightly more prim and pious than in her books, but that may be because Gaskell was extremely religious herself. There are inaccuracies – deliberate changes and omissions, for example the Hegel situation – but it’s a brilliant piece of writing, even if terribly tragic to read.

The Poisonwood Bible

Monday, August 6th, 2007 | American Literature | No Comments

This novel by Barbara Kingsolver is quite good and very readable; it’s the story of a missionary family – a couple and four daughters - who end up in the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, later Congo) during the sixties. The father is predictably slightly mad, and goes madder; the girls are equally predictably the ones who get on with things and discover that maybe things aren’t as simple as they’d assumed. In the end each person has a different reaction to what has happened.

Each chapter is narrated by a different female, one of the daughters or the mother, and they have easily distinguishable voices. It flows well, and there’s a good build-up to the climax or the disaster which forms the centre of the novel. On the other hand, a lot of it is commonplace; surely by the 21st century we’ve read enough Heart of Darkness clones, and realise that the westerner entering Africa isn’t going to change it for the better, or even want to. There was definitely still the theme of “missionary evil/aid worker good” (and after Rwanda, you’d assume people would have begun questioning this – and interestingly enough, although the Rwanda horror set off the Zaire coup, there’s no mention of it). The whole “backwards” thing with the child with hemiplegia was grating, and I wonder what people with cerebral palsy would think of the easy cure the writer decides upon! In short, the writer does want you to question, but only so far, and I do wonder how far she has gone herself in thinking outside the boundaries.