Annie Proulx: Accordion Crimes

Oh, this book is the best yet. Where Postcards was a little disorganized, what with the postcard bits being both hard to read and a little random, and The Shipping News a little bit too happy, this one is just about perfect. And imagine, when I started reading it, I didn't really want to, I struggled a bit. I wanted to read something less challenging I think, something that wouldn't dig into my soul. But very soon this had me hooked, and I couldn't put it down.

In the late 19th century a poor Sicilian makes an accordion (from bits he's stolen from his previous job), and when he emigrates to the USA with his son the accordion goes with him. The instrument is going to make his fortune, that's the plan, but his life comes to a violent and sad end, and the accordion passes on. And so we get a story of America, of immigrants who cling to their culture and language and music, of minorities whose families have been on the continent a long time now but who are still not yankees, and of the African-American tragedy, the ones who were first (well, second) but who never counted. It's just beautiful. The woman can write about polka music and make it sound like the most heart-wrenching dramatic thing ever.

I wrote on the scrap of paper I was using as a bookmark that there was one passage I wanted to quote, because it sums up so well why Annie Proulx is such a wonderful writer:

That poor man a machine for working, the bruised hands crooked for seizing and pulling, for lifting boxes and baskets, for grasping. The arms hung uncomfortably when work stopped. He was made for work, eyes squinted shut, the face empty of the luxury of reflection, mouth a hole, stubbled cheeks, a filthy baseball cap, wearing a cast-off shirt until it rotted away. If there was beauty in his life, no-one knew it.

That really moved me. I think she's Nobel Prize material.

Warming the cockles of a mother's heart

My eldest daughter who is 14 is reading Pride and Prejudice, and asking which other ones we have that are sort of like it. I have to give a big hand to the makers of the recentish film starring Keira Knightley and what'shisname, because it was after watching that one evening last week that she took the plunge. "Well, I don't understand that much and they use lot's of words I don't know, but it's good. I like when there's, like, intrigue." What greater praise is there - Harold Bloom, eat your heart out. I am working on my Jane Austen post, and this encourages me even more.

I'm running about three books behind on the blog, especially now since the littlest Bani slipped on a wet bathroom floor this Saturday and got a spiral fracture to his right leg. He occupies the computer during his waking hours, demanding Moomin films from YouTube. Poor little thing - and poor the rest of us I suppose!

Neil Gaiman: Anansi Boys

As you may have noticed, I do read Neil Gaiman, but I seldom seek him out. I don't know why actually (and it may change now), but I suspect I was scarred from the Sandman comi... sorry, graphic novels, a genre I do not understand at all. However, Gaiman is a bit of a genius actually. I should really have borrowed American Gods first, since this was his first foray into novels (not comics) on the theme of modern mythology and what-would-the-gods-be-doing-now type of thing. But the cover of Anansi Boys said it was funny, so I went for the comedy.

Fat Charlie Nancy learns that his father is dead, which doesn't upset him at all, since the old man was always making a spectacle of himself and playing practical jokes on people, including him. But at the funeral he learns that not only was Daddy a god, the spider god Anansi, but Fat Charlie has a brother, who leans more to the magical side of the family. Getting to know brother Spider unleashes the supernatural into Charlie's life, and gets them both chased by an ancient enemy of the Anansi bloodline.

I'm quite thrilled with this book, thrilled to the point where I'm pondering whether it shouldn't be required reading in schools, to introduce kids to the wealth of African storytelling and mythology. Gaiman manages something which many (white) authors fail at: he writes about African mythology and black people without falling into the trap of making either of them extra-sweet and super-heroic out of some sort of sense of guilt. The book is suffused with the joy of storytelling and a genuine admiration and respect for the oral traditions of black culture. But people are people, with weaknesses and all. He also is clever enough to never specify someone as black Black's the default. I love that he thought of that - perhaps it even came naturally to him? I have to admit that I would have had to make a conscious decision to not specify race unless white, so more credit to him if he didn't have to. Also, although there is a hint of someone who either enjoys the cinema and writes with that in mind or someone who is an author of graphic novels, he NEVER goes too far. He never puts in a load of one-liners as though desperate for Paramount to make a call. I LOVE THAT. (According to Wikipedia someone wanted to film it but make it "white", and Gaiman turned it down. If so, well done. I'd like to see this filmed, but not by just anyone. A subtle touch is needed.)

P.G. Wodehouse: Summer Moonshine

Ha, am I Mrs Update or WHAT? I borrowed this not-in-a-series Wodehouse because my li'l sis said that they're the best ones. And yes, it's quite rather very satisfying as a novel, I have to say. It's funny, it's amusing, it's witty, its dialogue sometimes sparkles. Good summer reading! Story: a penniless baronet owns a hideous house that he hopes to sell to an American widow. She has two stepsons, one who is not disowned, who while staying at the house falls in love with the Baronet's secretary, and one who has been cast off, who has just become a successfull playwright and has by chance fallen in love with the Baronet's daughter, who is in love with the widow's toyboy. Phew.

What I especially find sweet is the US-Anglo angle in Wodehouse. In such a natural way the twain mix and mingle.

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Kate Atkinson: Case Histories and One Good Turn

It was completely by chance that I first saw One Good Turn at the library. I was convinced there was nothing and oh well, maybe I could get a few Agatha Christies anyway. Instead I brought home a pile of ten books, no Christies among them at all. Ha. I saw One Good Turn on the paperback shelf and thought hm, I do like Atkinson, why not? and when I read the back I saw that she'd turned to crime writing, and that this was the second one, so I got the first too and read them in order. And oh, was I impressed with Case Histories. I couldn't put it down and I cried and I cried. This is not crime fiction, this is a novel about crimes, with the red thread of the private investigator Jackson Brodie as a means to tell us the stories of several people who've met with tragedy and pain and loss, all gradually revealed as the book progresses - so that when all is told at the end we find out that some of our presumptions were wrong, altogether. If you like crime fiction at all you must read this book!

While I was reading I was thinking of what to write to convey that feeling of melancholy, the pervading sadness in the novel, but now I've read the second book and another in between so I've lost the words - just trust me, it's worth it. In contrast, the second one is more like a classic crime novel. I think Atkinson might have been playing around with the genre a bit, but I don't think it's a complete success, I'm left feeling a bit "meh" all the same. I didn't love it as much, it felt too much like Part Two, it was more obviously funny in parts, and we weren't confronted with people's personal loss as forcefully as in Case Histories - here, the murders were of people we didn't get to know, and if we did, we didn't like them. I hope the third book swings back, and I hope she doesn't get stuck in a crime series genre. I'll be reading no. 3 as soon as I can, and in the meantime I've got my fingers crossed.

Ursula K. Leguin: Rocannon's World

This is one of LeGuin's earliest novels, and she places it at the beginning of the Ekumen books, if only for that reason. The Ekumen doesn't exist yet, instead we have a League of Worlds, that isn't as respectful and non-interfering as the Ekumen at all. They have interplanetary wars and everyfink. This is the book I picked up for 20 kr in a second-hand book dealer's in Stockholm, and the fecking thing was falling apart as I was reading. What a waste of money! But speaking of spending money, apparently there's an edition with this book, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions all in one, and that would be quite nice to have. Although, to be honest, I'd have to read the latter two first for free, because maybe (backtracking!) they're not that good and I don't want to own them. Hm, tricky and pondersome.

So first I read the blurb on the back of the book, and my, was it funny. It's so funny I have to quote the whole thing. Ready?

"On the far planet of Fomalhaut II, where three races lived in uneasy peace, the Starlords had landed generations back in their great ships to levy tribute on behalf of the League if All Worlds. Now disaster had struck, and Rocannon, the expedition leader, was marooned on that distant world, eight years away from the nearest planet.

His friends murdered and his spaceship destroyed, Rocannon led the battle to save Fomalhaut II, in strange alliance with the three native races - the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, the elvish Fiia and the warrior-clan Liuar. And in that desperate battle against an alien foe the myths were born and the legends grew. They were not his people, but the place became Rocannon's World."

Isn't it hilarious? You can almost hear the deep voice intoning it for the sci-fi special on Friday night. This is an interesting mix between science-fiction and fantasy, since the warrior clan are, well, just that, and speak like something from the more high-falutin' pages of Tolkien, all while they hack at people with swords. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's not fantastic. Bits of it are though. Bits are GREAT.

Alexander McCall Smith: The Careful Use of Compliments

This is "an Isabel Dalhousie novel", as the cover helpfully states. Isabel has her baby, doesn't live with nor want to marry the baby's father, Jamie, because even though she loves him it doesn't feel fair to him since he's so much younger. She wants to buy a painting, but is it a forgery? And if so, who painted it?

That's about it for the storyline, really. Like I've said I'm not as fond of the Edinburgh books as I am of the Botswana books. Probably McCall Smith's writing is too naivistic to appeal to me in a Western setting that I can relate to. Possibly I'm such a colonialist. I find it interesting though how the Dalhousie novels feel so much more melancholic, even though nothing like it really is expressed in words...

Ian McEwan: Black Dogs

My favourite McEwan so far I think, because there was nothing in it that seemed left hanging, or superfluous, or whatever it's been that's slightly bothered me about his books. This is just all the best of him. He has this wonderful way of writing a book about one event while adding on all these other bits that might not be that relevant, but that combine to make a lovely literary experience. Here, the narrator is a man who was orphaned early and spent a lot of time cozying up to other people's parents, so when he finally marries he is very keen that his wife's parents should get along again, despite them having been more or less estranged for years. The black dogs of the title attacked his mother-in-law on the honeymoon, and were responsible for a spiritual experience that set her off in a different direction than her husband. So that's really the story, more than half of it is the narrator describing his life, and how he talks to his parents-in-law, ponders their estrangement, tells us how he meets his wife, relates how he tries to write a biography of his mother-in-law, and thus how he gets the full story, and with that story he ends the book. It's very likeable and somehow, despite the scattered events in it, very succinct. I liked it a lot.

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games

I read about this book in the paper ages ago - oh I know, it was before Christmas, because I remember saying to my sister-in-law that I thought my eldest would like it. She didn't get it, however, and I forgot about it, until a few weeks ago in the library when I happened to see it. Immediately I remembered the favourable review and how it had seemed like My Thing, so I borrowed it and got stuck in a few days later.... and couldn't put it down. This is a real page-turner, I was delighted. It is a book written for "young people", so it runs a risk of being too simple, too explicit and explanatory, but Suzanne Collins walks on the right side of the line and I love her for it. For me as an adult reader the book would have been just that little bit better if things weren't spelled out quite as much, but in all fairness it really isn't overdone and I totally accept it.

Sometime in an undetermined future the United States is no more (neither, I take it, is most of its current coastline). Instead we have a tyrannical state called Panem, consisting of a centre, the Capitol, and twelve tributary districts, who were subdued after an uprising a century or so ago. Almost everything the districts produce goes to the Capitol. And every year the cruellest sacrifice is claimed - a boy and a girl from each district has to go to the Capitol and fight each other to the death in a kind of reality show, set in a climate-controlled wilderness with added dangers. One of the poorest districts is the twelfth one, in what is now Appalachia. Its children hardly ever win the Hunger Games. Katniss, our heroine, volunteers to fight, and is joined by Peeta, whose feelings she is unsure of. During the Games, Katniss rebellious spirit is kindled, and she starts to wonder if there is anything she can do to change the outcome.

I read somewhere that one of the great things about the book is how it caters for both sexes, as it has descriptions of stylists and outfits aswell as fights and deaths. It may be so, and if so it's even more to Collins's credit that she can write about a girl and still find her male readers. I loved this, and am already looking forward to the second book. Oh, and another great thing? The way the book ended, it wasn't completely obvious that there would be a second one. Subtlety. I like it.

P.G. Wodehouse: Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves; Jeeves in the Offing; Jeeves Takes Charge; Carry On, Jeeves

When I picked up this lot (in June I think, ahem) I immediately started to feel suspicious. I had only read one of these short story collections, remember, yet the illustrations on the covers of this new lot of books seemed to be about stories in that first one. And hey ho, suspicions confirmed: some idiot at Vintage press sometime or other thought it a great idea to print Wodehouse collections with the same story featured more than once, i.e. in more than one of the books. So you carry home books that are worth say 30 stories but you get 20, the same 20 mixed up in different constellations.

Eejits. It's a nice pleasant read alright but I won't be (unless I really really have to) borrowing books from this particular edition series any more.

Dennis Lehane: Coronado

This is a collection of short stories, and one play, the title's Coronado. The play is based on the second-to-last story, About Gwen, a story Lehane reworked and rewrote into a play for his brother's theatre company. I will confess that I won't read the play, I find reading plays an awful chore because I lack imagination. I enjoyed all the stories though, and will only repeat that Lehane is wasted when being labelled a crime writer solely. As a matter of fact I was repeatedly reminded of Annie Proulx. It's something about the way they both tell us something about America, about Americans.

Marcello Fois: Den försvunne fåraherden och Blod från himlen

Jag upptäckte att jag skrivit upp den här författarens namn i min kalender, vilket måste innebära att jag läst något fördelaktigt om honom i en tidning någonstans och ville komma ihåg honom. Alltså lånade jag hans tre deckare om advokat Bustianu från biblioteket innan jag skulle på en veckas semester, med tanken att dessa tre vore alldeles lagom att läsa ut på en vecka med familjen (de är inte särskilt omfångsrika). Men så när jag höll på att packa ångrade jag mig - tänk om jag inte skulle gilla dem alls? Då skulle jag inte ha någonting! På tåget! Så jag packade Jane Austen istället och del två i Ariana Franklins medeltidsdeckarserie. Mer om detta följer. Det visar sig nu att jag gjorde rätt, för visserligen går det alldeles utmärkt att läsa dessa romaner (Fois alltså - varning förresten, länken går till författarens usla hemsida med musik och allt), men de griper inte tag i mig ett skvatt.

Den första börjar i tredje person, som någon som berättar om advokat Bustianu efter vad hans far berättat för honom, men växlar plötsligt till första person, dvs advokaten själv beskriver och berättar. Dessa delar är bättre, får mer känsla. Så i bok två verkar han ha övergått till första person helt och hållet, men jag tror inte jag kommer att läsa ut den för jag blir helt enkelt inte intresserad. Problemet är egentligen inte historien, utan diverse manér i skrivsättet - en tendens att avsluta repliker med tre punkter vaddetnuheter ( ... ) till exempel. Det stör mig, det stör min läsupplevelse. Sedan tror jag inte översättningen fångar texten riktigt. Det är bara en misstanke, vad kan jag för italienska utöver tutti frutti... Men med all respekt för Helena Monti känns det fel att människor i slutet på 1800-talet säger att "fåraherden råkade i trubbel", samtidigt som texten peppras med "förvisso" och "sannerligen". Återigen - detta stör min läsupplevelse. Jag upplever boken som lite styltig, och tror helt enkelt att den bör läsas i original. Om jag får tid och lust kanske jag läser en engelsk översättning någon gång för att jämföra, vi får se.

För den som är intresserad handlar bokserien om en advokat på Sardinien, under slutet av förrförra seklet, som skriver poesi och hyser ett passionerat rättvisepatos. Karaktären har tydligen en förebild i verkligheten. Det är ganska korta berättelser med lite nostalgisk karaktär. Inte oläsvärt, men jag slutar nu.

Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island

It may surprise you to know that it was actually my husband who borrowed this from the library - I can't remember why, maybe because he saw the film trailers? or maybe it was just recommended to him by an accquaintance? No matter. He read it and quite liked it, but he complained of there being a twist that he saw coming a mile off. So I read it too, and I did not see the twist coming. More fool me, perhaps, it's not a strikingly unusual nor original sort of twist, but I was quite prepared to take the story at face value. The twist therefore came as a bit of a surprise to me, and I found myself reluctant actually to accept it. More so since something is said in the prologue that makes it possibly that the twist is not true. (I'm being purposefully oblique here because I really wouldn't want to spoil the read for anyone…) So I liked this quite a bit. Lehane is a good writer, and he made a refreshing break from The Unconsoled (ha!) which I was "reading" at the time. I tend to pass by the Lehanes at the library, for no good reason at all finding myself going "nah" and choosing something else. Perhaps I should make it my objective to read them this summer. I have read Mystic River too, and liked it. His books are generally placed in a crime or thriller genre, but he is skilled enough to give them something more, really literary qualities. In fact I was thinking of this after finishing the book and looking again at the cover, which is black and disturbing with the title in a jagged script and Lehane's name overshadowing it all - had the cover been a plain beige with a plain title, and had the print of the whole novel been smaller, thus making the volume slimmer - well then it would be considered a different type of book altogether.

Story: on the isolated Shutter Island stands an asylum for the criminally insane. Two federal marshals arrive to conduct an investigation into the disappearance of one of the prisoners, a woman convicted of murdering her children. Gradually they start to see that all is not what it seems, and that something else is going on on the island. There, that could be a blurb that, but it really doesn't do the book justice. Nor can it if I don't want to risk spoiling it.

Anyway, I've already borrowed Coronado by same author, so I'll be back with opinions.

Edited 11th July:

Right, here's an opinion I forgot, that reading Coronado reminded me of: one of the things I liked best about Shutter Island is how wonderful Lehane is at describing men's emotions. He really goes all out and allows men to love, totally and overwhelmingly, and then despair utterly and bitterly when they've lost their love. It's not that often that I see that in a book (possibly I read the wrong kind of books, you say). His descriptions of emotions don't feel trite, pretentious or made up, ever. He also allows his characters to admit to their feelings. Hm, what I want to say seldom comes out when I sit down at the keyboard, but I'm trying to convey an idea that writing like that helps liberate men from a stereotype where you either don't connect with your emotions at all or distance yourself from them with a certain debonair cynicism. Do you see what I mean?

Just a note to remind myself...

... that this is a book I'll want to read.

The Gentleman's Daughter by Amanda Vickery

Kiran Desai: The Inheritance of Loss

I read about half of this, so I think a blog entry isn't uncalled for. I didn't finish it though, and since it was overdue at the library I had my husband return it the other day. There is no good reason why I didn't read it all. It's a very good book, really, and it should have pushed all my buttons - yet it just never grabbed me hard enough. Who knows why these things happen or don't; the silliest books can end up being the most meaningful you've ever read, and books that you can objectively see are great do nothing for you. I'll probably return to this some day, I find myself thinking more about it now that it's not in the house…
There were two parallell story lines. One is about a young woman, living in her grandfather's crumbling mansion somewhere near the border to Nepal since the death of her parents. The other is about their cook's son, who is trying to make a living in America.
I recommend it even though I got restless with it. According to this blog (in Swedish) it picks up pace towards the end, and also the blog author loves Desai's first one more. So I might get that one instead first.

Michael Innes: Carson's Conspiracy and The Gay Phoenix

Okay, neither of these are very good. They both followed the stolen-identity-sinister butler/manservant formula I saw in The New Sonia Wayward. What's up with that? Why the repetition of the same theme... I was bored. Too bad.

Well, Carson's Conspiracy was not really stolen identity, but about a man who has the brilliant idea of faking his death to escape pecuniary problems. But sort of stolen identity, since he has an employee travelling under his son's name to do it. Enough of that. The Gay Phoenix is about two brothers on a boat, one dies and the other assumes his identity for the money.

That's all you need to know about them. No need to read them, really.

An Ishiguro sum-up

Oh noez, another author who has disappointed me. It started out so well, with me loving Never Let Me Go, and liking The Remains of the Day a lot. The next three however, failed to tickle me quite as much, and I'm going to be honest with you - no. 4, The Unconsoled, it's just never going to be read. I've reached page 54 or something like that, and the narrator seems to be caught in a reality that's a bit like a dream, with events randomly following one another, and people suddenly saying and doing odd things that nevertheless seem sensible and that you accept, and dialogue that is just making no common sense and leads nowhere. I was reminded of the really surreal stuff, like Flann O'Brien. As I've written before, this is a type of genre that I can't take. I get really annoyed. I'll just come right out and say it - I like my reading to be linear, and if not linear in time necessarily then linear in sense thank you very much. Call me unimaginative if you want, but no dwarfs in red velvet rooms for me (yes, I also get unreasonably angry if forced to watch David Lynch films). So The Unconsoled is out. It'll be there when I'm ninety if I get the urge.
Going back to the ones I have read though, I think part of the problem is that I overdosed. Ishiguro is rather formulaic. You have a narrator, and the narrator is remembering the past while going about his or her business in the present. You therefore get two narratives one might say, that merge into one as the past unfolds to explain the present. Ishiguro also has a special way of writing these memories, which is part of what makes his novels so appealing - he understands that no-one remembers an exact chain of events, or precisely what led to the memory being retold. A memory will often just be a snippet of the larger event, for some reason stuck in the brain. So the narrators will often discuss this, sort of wonder aloud what the circumstances surrounding a particular memory might have been, or even backtrack and realise that the dialogue they remember must have not been spoken like that, that they are confusing two memories. It sounds tedious, but in my opinion it works very well most of the time, because it adds to the realism. When you read five or so novels pretty much back-to-back however… Like I said, I think I overdosed. Ironically, the one I am not going to finish, The Unconsoled, does not follow this formula (some tendencies to it do exist, but by no means as strongly). And the one I thought was oddest (apart from Unconsoled), When We Were Orphans, also had less of it.
So let me write about that book first. The story, as it is told in a mixture of present happenings and memories, is as follows: an English boy, growing up in Shanghai, loses both parents in what is believed to be some sort of kidnapping. First the father disappears, then after some weeks his mother. He is taken back to England to live with his aunt. We get to know him as an adult, when he is making a name for himself as a (private) detective. He becomes very well known and respected, and subsequently has the opportunity to return to Shanghai. The idea is that he will manage to crack what is behind the surging instability of the region (this is just before WW2). Okay. Problem 1: he is a detective. Now, if you change that into "vampire hunter" you get a job title that more accurately fits the tone of the novel. Something just seems off about it. I get a kind of Van Helsing (the film) meets Sherlock Holmes meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vibe. Problem 2: he comes to Shanghai with some sort of assumption (which seems to be shared by the majority of the English colony there) that solving the current problems will solve his parents' abduction. Not only that, he will any day now find them alive and well. To blithely assume that his parents will be found in such a state after being missing for twenty-odd years is just too queer. It makes no sense. The last chapters of the book has him leaping to conclusions in the war-ravaged sections of Shanghai, scrambling through rubble to get to a house where he believes that his parents are being held (still! after all this time!), finding a Japanese soldier whom he thinks is his childhood friend, and just generally not making much sense. I do admit that I've been racking my brains over this book for a while after finishing it, which I suppose is some credit to it. I'm leaning towards some sort of theory that the narrator never really grew up. His whole detective career is a sort of fantasy, born from his childhood games and desire to find his parents. Because the way he behaves and reasons once he is in Shanghai is just too far out to be based in reality, in my opinion. Sadly, that theory flies out the window somewhat since there's an epilogue that disproves it. Ah well.
I've also read two novels set in Japan. There is something that feels a little bit wrong about the tone of these too. I pondered for a while if I was picking up that Ishiguro, having lived in the UK since he was five, is actually writing about a society that he only knows second-best - a bit as if I were to write a book set in Ireland. This idea is supported by the fact that the same names keep popping up in both books, as though Ishiguro doesn't really know that many Japanese names (just like my hypothetical Irish novel would be populated by Dermots and Aoifes). This could of course be entirely wrong. The oddness in tone that I feel could be just a faithful rendering of the tone of a society and culture rather alien to me, the identical names could be anything - those names are very common, perhaps, or else it's a tribute to the author's family members.
I liked An Artist of the Floating World best, I think. Set in the 50s, it's about a retired artist whose work, we are led to understand, helped kindle the war-mongering in pre-war Japan. He has understood that if he does not in some way recant it will affect the well-being of his family. His younger daughter will perhaps never find a husband unless he can show that he is no longer a member of the "losing side". As he remembers we see that his praise of the traditional values that were so heavily emphasised before the war is to some extent a defensive measure, as he does not always like to be reminded of the sadder things that happened because of his political choices. There is a nice twist at the end, when his daughter comes with a different interpretation of events that make the artist less important. What she says implies that he has, to us, aggrandised his importance, perhaps so he'll have a reason to publicly repent of actions that he feels guilty about.
A Pale View of Hills was stranger. I'm still thinking about what it meant, what the underlying tension was about. Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, is visited by her younger half-English daughter following the suicide of her elder daughter by a previous, Japanese husband. (God that was an unwieldy sentence but I can't be bothered changing it. It's half twelve at night and I'm writing from work, after all… ) During the visit she remembers the summer in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko, and she was friends with a woman called Sachiko, who lived with her daughter Mariko in a tumbledown house near the new apartment blocks of the suburb. There is something more being said between the lines of this book, and I'm missing it. It has something to do with the mentioned fact that children were being murdered in Nagasaki that summer, and the parallell between Sachiko planning to go to America with her American lover, and Etsuko later taking her daughter Keiko to England when she herself marries a foreigner. Why are the murdered children mentioned unless I'm to suspect that I know the killer? Is it Etsuko's bullying husband? Is it Sachiko, who tries to drown the kittens? I don't get it. I must scour the internet for other thoughts. Starting with Wikipedia, maybe. Enigmatic indeed.
Despite my OD:ing, I still like Ishiguro and would recommend him. I'm going to take a break from him now though, and return to him some other time with a fresh mind.

In between books sort of

Today I was rudely awakened to bring my son to daycare, despite trying to plug the idea that my husband could do it. I now have to go back to bed, because I'm working tonight and need to be fresh-ish, but since I got up and dressed I'm a bit too perky. So what to do? Sandwich and a cup of warm nutmeggy honeyed milk in front of the PC for a bit, of course, in the hope that it will help. I'm not quite awake enough for a proper blog entry, but I've been reading a bit so I really should. Perhaps tonight at work I can find the peace to tap them down. What I wanted to do today was go to the library to borrow something, but I don't think I'll have the time. Which leaves me with the book I'm reading, Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Which I'm not sure I like. But given that I was actually getting to be quite a bit annoyed with how formulaic his novels is I should stop complaining and get on with it, since at least this one is not about someone remembering. Hm. You have until say six p.m. to convince me that it's not worth it/worth it a lot. I have also got Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss at home, which should be right up my alley but which I found extraordinarily hard to get into. Ditto for that one, regarding the convincing me that is. Chop-chop.

Seth Grahame-Smith (and Jane Austen): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Jane Austen is one of the absolutely best writers ever. Really. I know this must be true, because even Harold Bloom has said so (lolz). Of all the reading experiences I've had, this has therefore got to be one of the most dire. It is with pain that I realise that this entry is actually my first Jane Austen entry. And I say this while directing a mental apology to my dear sister who lent me the book. She has actually payed money for it, thinking it to be quite a fun idea to add the scourge of the undead to the comedy of manners that is an Austen novel. I remember her saying that it wasn't completely consistent and that there are illogical bits in it that annoy her a little (such as the English housekeeper in Mr Darcy's Japanese-influenced household hobbling to meet the guests on bound feet), but that she found it quite humorous. My sister, clearly, is a more forgiving and generous soul than myself. I want to drag Grahame-Smith naked through thistles and then make him listen to a Glaswegian slowly read a combination of Little Nell and American Psycho. While I rub his scratches with salt. No, on second thoughts, I'll make him rub the salt into his wounds all by himself. That'll larn him.

The idea would have worked in a comedy sketch show on TV. It would have been quite funny. Every week a new scene from the zombie version of Pride and Prejudice - I can see that working. But as a novel it's awful. You end up skimming it to get to the bits that have been changed just to see how they've been changed. Possibly it might be feasible that someone who has only seen the film or TV series could stand to read it and appreciate the humour. Personally I think that the author would be better off spending time and energy on saving the whales or some similar laudable effort.

It is possible to use well-known characters that have passed out of the realm of copy-right with good results. Jasper Fforde is an example of a writer who does this. What he doesn't do is copy somebody elses novel and stick his own bits in it. He creates something new. There is only one instance in P&P&Z where there is a hint of "more", and that is when Lizzie Bennet refrains from killing a zombie mother and infant-in-arms, out of some sort of feeling of mercy, perhaps. It is entirely out of place with the rest of the book really, which in no way ever delves deeper into how it must really be to live in a zombie-invested Georgian England. Of course, the moment ends there. The only deeper emotions and feelings and true dilemmas in the novel, not to mention storyline, is Austen's. So read Austen, people. Please. Let this one die.

The book cover is fabulous though. Props for that. I'm not churlish.

I DN om deckare

http://www.dn.se/dnbok/deckare-seriemordare-1.893065

Jag måste bokmärka detta för de författare som nämns längst ner ska jag läsa tror jag.

P.G. Wodehouse: Very Good, Jeeves

Mr Bani mumbled something about wanting to read Wodehouse, so when I was in the library I picked up a book that seemed to be an early one albeit not the first, reasoning that surely one wants to start as close to the beginning as possible. Turned out that Mr Bani really wanted to start at the very very beginning (but he might have changed his mind now), so I read it instead. I've never read any Wodehouses, only watched a few episodes of the series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. I do know that there are people who praise Wodehouse as among the finest of comedy, on a superior level altogether. I dunno myself - sure it's funny, but is it the best ever? I didn't laugh out loud - oh tell a lie, I did, once. I was wryly smiling a lot though.

Being fond of detective fiction from this era it's hard for me not to like this sort of stuff though. There's country house parties, dressing for dinner… familiar terrain all. It's all fresher than you'd think too. My favourite really is Bertie Wooster's inane slang. Such as being server breakfast by Jeeves, and "tucking into the eggs and b.", only to two sentences later be helping himself to "another portion of e. and bacon". That's really very funny.

This is the one with the story of when his friend is in love with a dog-crazy girl and joins in a violent football game to try to win her. (Obviously that's just one story of several, but should be enough for me to recall the book…)

Ngaio Marsh: A Man Lay Dead

This is the infamous paperback I paid 20 kr for in Stockholm. Apparently her first novel, which I didn't realise at the time - I just noticed that I didn't recognise the title so I bought it.
In the early days Alleyn has a journalist sidekick named Nigel Bathgate, who makes his appearance here. Bathgate gets an invitation to a week-end house party through an older cousin. The weekend is going to be spent playing a variation on a murder game - and you guessed it, there's a real murder.
While this has that lovely Marsh touch as far as language goes, and even some of the wry humour, it's still a bit rough. Alleyn is much too quick to feel certain that Bathgate's alibi is solid (based on three cigarette butts in an ashtray - I mean really), and even odder still he takes him completely into his confidence and allows him to join in a spy hunt. That's a bit absurd. But I still enjoyed it well enough.

Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body

I'm taking a break from cleaning the bathroom to write an entry. Let's see if Minimus wakes up before I'm done, shall we?

Oh yes he did. So short version then.

Basic story: person who has always gone from relationship to relationship finds love, and mistakenly gives it up.

Good bits: gender of narrator never mentioned. Yay for Germanic languages where this kind of game can be played! Very clever, very subtle.

Bad bits: well, like I've mentioned earlier Winterson's poetry and depth can be a bit much for me. Possibly I was annoyed that narrator was an eejit. Read it and see.

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

It is, I suppose, really a rather moving little story (more novella than novel) of how desire, inexperience and fear of sex drive a wedge between two young people on their wedding night. In his customary manner McEwan tells the short tale in minute detail, handling and turning over every detail of what is being felt and thought and sensed and said, and afterwards finishes off with a sort of epilogue where we find out how it all ended for the two. Did they sort things out or was this it?

Of the McEwans I've read I actually think it's the best one. There is no discrepancy in it really, no bit that seems shoved in there leaving me wondering whether it belongs. I'm still debating inside whether he's overrated or not - right now leaning towards not. I'm kind of struck by a feeling that he has done historical research even for this little thing set in 1962 - there's a description at the start of how mediocre English cuisine of the time is, and how their wedding dinner's starter is a slice of melon with a glacé cherry on top. Somehow seems rather detailed, as though he'd read an old hotel menu.

I didn't hate it, nor was I that enamoured. I suppose he's not really my kind of writer. Something is lacking. Mostly I'm annoyed that I finished the book before 2 am and I didn't finish work until 8. What was I supposed to do - play Bubbleshooter all that time? Like, omgz.

Zoë Heller: Notes on a Scandal

This book is in many ways better than The Believers, the first Heller I read. It's tighter, tenser, more succinct. Very much a thriller, actually, not that anything particularly violent happens. It becomes a thriller thanks to the narrator, Barbara. Barbara is the friend and confidante of Sheba, the forty-something pottery teacher who has had an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil. When we enter the story Barbara is living with and caring for a devastated Sheba. She talks about the hounding by journalists, how they write lies and how they exaggerate. She knows the truth, because Sheba has told her everything. So she tells the story of how Sheba started working at the school, how Barbara immediately sensed that here was a kindred spirit, and how Barbara gradually makes herself Sheba's closest friend. Subtly we become aware that Barbara isn't just a normal friend. To remember everything that has happened, she writes, she has made a timeline and marked important events with little gold star stickers. That's our first clue to Barbara's oddness. As the story continues there are more, but since it's Barbara's story the incidents aren't dwelt on, just matter-of-factedly reported. It's very well done. Slowly we learn just how sinister Barbara's desire to be a BFF, to be needed and wanted and loved, can be.

Ironically (or something), one of the reviews quoted on the first couple of pages states that this novel "shares many qualities with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day." I seem to be swimming in a regular duck pond lately.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

I saw the film of course - I've probably seen it a few times actually. Based on the film I was expecting something a little more passionate and tense, but my impression of the novel is softer, more humorous, although obviously melancholic. There are parallells to Never Let Me Go; as in that book we find out gradually, as our narrator in analytical detail remembers the past, that there was a dark shade to it, something that wasn't as safe and reassuring as you might think. Here the German sympathies of Lord Darlington provide the unpleasant backdrop, as he, easily led, becomes more or less a Nazi puppet while his butler shakes off any personal responsability, certain that Lord Darlington knows what is best and that serving such a great man is a reward in itself.

You read almost the entire book without fully realising why Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, reacts so passionately towards some of the things Mr Stevens does, why she takes things so personally. After all you're reading Stevens point of view, his reminiscing and justification over and of the past. Then at the very very end, there is the bit where Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs Benn, says to Stevens that the reason for her feeling unhappy at times is because she can't help thinking about what a life she might have led.

"And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens. And I suppose that's when I get angry over some trivial little thing and leave."

And Stevens admits to himself and us that at that moment, his heart breaks. But he rallies and hides it, and says his cordial goodbyes. This is beautiful. It's wrenching in its simplicity and in its understated emotionality. The great thing about Ishiguro's novels is how you don't understand everything that's been going on until the end, and that unmasking of what it seems is quite important.

It's quite as lovely as Never Let Me Go. Now I wish I had another Ishiguro to read. I feel this wish to stay in that mood or spell that Ishiguro's writing conjures up. Unfortunately I didn't make it upstairs to the English section when I was at the library last, because I brought Minimus and the pram, so I settled for the paperback swivel shelf (with selected novels) they have at the foot of the stairs. I picked up quite a few books then, and the other one in my bag is a Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal. It's probably going to be good too, but it's a whole different mood. Hm.

Incidentally, flipping through the last pages of The Remains of the Day I was reading the blurbs about the other books that Faber & Faber Ltd have to offer - I was thinking about how those days must surely be over now, when people read a paperback and proceeded to order another one based on these summaries and reviews, using the order form on the very last page, and I wonder if anybody ever did that at all? Surely people have always gone to book shops? Maybe this was a service used by lonely readers on isolated islands or something? and I noticed how this book was printed in 1999 and the order page has an e-mail address and a web URL for reference, so this must be the dying gasp of an old paperback tradition - anyway, I was reading the suggestions and got quite interested in a much-endorsed novel by Peter Carey called Oscar and Lucinda, "also a major film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett", and I was a bit amused by the fact that Cate Blanchett's face adorns Notes on a Scandal, since she was in that film too. Such little coincidences form the fabric of life, eh?

Michael Innes: Appleby at Allington and The New Sonia Wayward

I was very surprised at our local library branch to come across these two books, I thought I'd read everything the library had to offer during my last Innes phase. But not so. Goodie.

(After writing those sentences there was an eight-hour pause, during which Minimus and I watched trains on YouTube and splashed in puddles (PLASS IN DE PUDDEL!) and made dinner etc. FYI.)

Appleby at Allington is a bit of a classic whodunnit, featuring the retired Inspector Appleby solving crimes in his neighbourhood. He is invited to Allington Hall to dine with the owner, a former scientist. Towards the end of the evening they go out to admire the son et lumière show that has been set up in the ruins of the original hall, and come across a dead body. Then there is a village fête, and another dead body is found, fished out of the lake. I liked this one, it was funny and well-planned. I enjoy this kind of dry humorous old-school British bantering. The New Sonia Wayward is a stand-alone, more psychological thriller, about a man who finds his successful writer wife dead, and tries to pass her off as being alive but out of the country so he won't lose her money. The tangled web of lies grows ever more dense and complicated for him, and his staff start to blackmail him. It's not at all bad, but unfortunately we see where it's going the minute he spots his wife's doppelgänger on the train.

I'd love to have a Michael Innes collection though, perfect feeling-a-bit-down reading.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies and Ellis Peters: Death to the Landlords!

Ha, forgot about this! Which sadly summarises my view on the author - absolutely lovely writer, empathic, moving and so on, but somehow not quite as memorable as I expected. Now that my memory was jogged I started thinking about the people in this short story collection again, an I do remember a lot about the characters, I can separate the different stories in my head and so on... yet it just wasn't the kind of book I thought about an awful lot when I'd finished it. That said, it's still quality writing. I'm absolutely going to read more of her. Just something not completely absorbing about it. It is her debut of course, I should read her more recent work.

It is refreshing to read about a "normal" India. By which I don't necessarily mean normal from a Western point of view "oh look they have indoor toilets and electricity in India too the darlings", but an India and Indians that are described matter-of-factly. Lahiri writes mostly about the middle-class, in other words the Indians we meet, the ones that travel and emigrate. I recognise myself and yet it's different. It's very good writing, I was just hoping for a little bit more. Maybe in the next one.

Incidentally (and what jogged my memory) I'm reading an Ellis Peters' novel set in India at the moment. She describes India in much the same way as she describes 12th century England - there is an air of aloofness and romanticism that removes the reader from the reality of what she is describing somewhat. This is part of her charm, oddly enough. In Death to the Landlords! the son of her hero Inspector George Felse, Dominic Felse, is travelling in India. The group of people he travels with cross paths with a terrorist bomber group, whose aim, simplified, is to kill land owners. Haven't finished it yet, so don't know if it will be one of his travelling companions who are guilty.

I think I've previously read Mourning Raga from the same series, also set in India. But now I can't find it in the library catalogue... maybe that just means they had to get rid of it. Pity.

Jane Hamilton: A Map of the World and Ariana Franklin: Mistress of the Art of Death

I borrowed the Hamilton novel on a whim, as I said. There was nothing on the cover indicating what it was about, just a lot of positive reviews, so I went for it. Started reading, very happy, good writing - then realised this was about children dying and suddenly was not so keen any more. Hamilton is a very good writer, so I was getting all worked up about it since it all seemed so realistic. I had to put it down. I can't take real horror right now. Which is why I declined to watch the film Grave of the Fireflies that Maxima got from a friend for her 14th birthday. I had a hunch that was going to be about babies dying too, and my suspicions were indeed confirmed when my red-eyed sobbing daughter met me in the hall after watching it the other afternoon. It was the saddest film ever she proclaimed and snivelled off to share her anguish with her friends on msn.

Anyway, I returned poor Jane Hamilton to the library (and of course immediately started to regret it, but done is done, I'm not reading it now so there). I wanted to write about it now though so I can remember to re-loan it sometime when I'm more relaxed (ha).

Which brings me to the second book of this post, an historical crime novel about a serial killer who, ironically, murders children, in a very gruesome way. Why can I take this and not Hamilton's? I think because Mistress of the Art of Death is, in the end, not real. It may be rooted in real history, it may be not flippant about human suffering and pain... yet there is something fundamentally escapist and distant about crime fiction that enables you to read the most horrible things without feeling too touched by them.

I wasn't expecting to like Franklin's novel as much as I did. I suspected that the female doctor Adelia, who comes to Cambridge to help find the murderer by reading the bodies of his victims, would be one of those larger-than-life characters that modern authors like to stick into the past to somehow avenge themselves on all that historical misery. However, Adelia is surprisingly likeable and imperfect, and the society is a rather nice blend of bad mediaeval and good mediaeval. People aren't just super-bigots and dirty xenophobes, but also just... well, people. I'll definitely be reading more of Franklin, it was fun.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

How can I not have read this author before? I'm partly ashamed, partly happy that I have a number of probably most likely wonderful new reading experiences ahead of me. Never Let Me Go will always hold a special place in my heart I predict, because this my friends is science fiction at its best. The Wikipedia entry doesn't call it science fiction, but I've seen some other sites that recognize it as such. Like all good sci-fi it's not about the technology, it's about what it does to us.

The novel is set in a different Britain, in which sterile clones are grown from childhood to adulthood only to become "donors", to have their organs harvested. The story is told by Kathy, in her 30s, who is on her way to settling down to becoming a donor and subsequently "completing". She tells the story of how she grew up in a boarding school for clones, how she and her friends gradually learnt what they were, and she tells about her relationships with the people she loved best. It's very very good. It's slightly marred towards the end, when Kathy and her lover Tommy confront a former teacher from the school, and she "explains all". It feels a bit too summarizing and lecturing, but it's okay.

Recommended heartily. I'm off to borrow all his other works.

Sara Paretsky: Ghost Country

I have some issues with this novel. This is sort of the basic storyline: at a wall in Chicago, a homeless woman thinks that the rusty water leaking through a crack is the blood of the Mother of God. When the management of the hotel, who own the wall (but not the sidewalk) try to drive her away, she is joined by two more homeless women, an idealistic young doctor, an alcoholic former opera diva and a young woman who has run away from an oppressive grandfather. When suddenly a non-speaking, hugely buxom and higly erotic woman called Starr appears, everything really kicks off. Miracles happen around Starr. A local church and some of it's more strident members get more and more annoyed. Ok, so it paints a picture of Chicago that is different, more... fantastical?... than in the Warshawski novels. Fair enough. But the distinct impression I'm left with is that it's an experiment in the genre "what if Jesus came back as...". Starr in this case being Jesus - a non-speaking, extremely sexual creature who can tongue-kiss a woman back to life on an altar. And there is a little bit too much written about her huge bosom and how much she has sex singly and grouply for me to think it altogether flies - simply because I find it unnecessarily "provocative". Possibly I'm just being churlish and over-thinking things.

I really don't like the breast bits though. It's some sort of odd mix between Swedish "sommarbuskis" and US titty bar. I don't get it. I'm missing the love I felt in Bleeding Kansas.

Ursula K LeGuin: The Eye of the Heron

No no no.

I was not happy. Not that the idea is bad - in the future, two different kinds of cultures with their origins on Earth attempt to co-exist on an alien planet. One, the older, is descended from Portuguese-speaking criminals, who were deported when the planet was a prison colony. The younger, "The People of Peace", were also deported, but they are descended from members of a huge peace movement in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a movement so large that it threatened the rulers on Earth. Now the older culture, the Bosses, try to dominate and rule the younger, the Shantih, who want to try the theories of peaceful resistance in a revolt.

While I love the imagination present in the description of the alien world, the book gets overly political and preachy. Not subtle enough.

Annie Proulx: Postcards

I'm seven books behind now, so I'm going to have to hurry to make the blog match my reading (I'm on book eight, the Ngaio Marsh I mentioned).

As expected, I loved this book. In the 1940s a young man commits a murder in a corner of his father's (one day to be his) farm. To conceal this he runs away, and spends the next 40 years moving about the West, taking odd and any jobs - mining, trapping, bone hunting for paleonthologists... for a while he has a farm, but loses it. He sends postcards home but never has a return address, so he never finds out what has happened to his family and their farm. Instead he keeps an image in his memory of how it was. We read what happens to him, and to his family, and to the US during these 40 years. It's tremendously moving and I devoured it. One of those books you can't put down.

My one quibble is that the postcards sent, that are reproduced at the start of every chapter, are illegible in the small print of the paperback. It ruins the story a little, to be honest.

The Wikipedia entry on Annie Proulx teaches me that she has written some science fiction stories early in her career. I'd love to read them.

Library visit today

I've been dipping into my small stash of (second-hand...) books I've bought so it was time for a library trip. Oh, I never wrote about my visit to a second-hand book shop in Stockholm not long ago - they wanted more than 100 :- for old Ellery Queens. The audacity. No wonder they had so many. I found a rather worn Ngaio Marsh novel the title of which I forget at the moment and they charged me 20:- for that.

But today I got:

Paretsky: Ghost Country - I was so pleased with Bleeding Kansas that I wanted to give another stand-alone a try

Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go - because why not, never read him

Proulx: Postcards - want more of her, more more

Hamilton, Jane: A Map of the World - on a whim, fell for the blurb

Le Guin: The Eye of the Heron - because I remain faithful and this might be good.

So I'll be alright for a while.

Sara Paretsky: Bleeding Kansas

I have been having a really bad day, for no other reason than a) I'm just feeling very down at the moment, and b) I'm trying to drill three holes in the living-room wall, with less than stellar results. Let's not go there. At one in the afternoon I broke down in tears and decided to take a break and write this blog entry instead to take my mind off wall craters. The instant I sat down my middle daughter rang and wanted me to pick her up from school because she wasn't feeling well. Now it's half-past ten at night, I sit down again, and at the first click of the keys my husband leans over to say that he took a facebook test to determine which ordinary thing he is (apparently he is sliced cheese, which is actually rather funny).

But I haven't lost my train of thought yet. I may if he speaks to me again.

Paretsky writes in the foreword that she grew up in Kansas, something I didn't know. It shows however that she's writing about ... how should I put it ... about people she understands and respects and loves, about a part of the world that she has deep feelings for. Unlike in a Warshawski novel, the main characters here aren't very savvy or politically aware, but "simple" farmers who take a "simple" pride in growing food that feeds people. They are patriotic and trust that the news is reported correctly and that the government knows its business. They are religious and church-going, and incorporate this into their daily lives. This doesn't make them idiots or despicable. There is no sarcasm here, no cynicism. I found this very endearing, very moving, and it gripped me all the way to the end.

The novel centres on three Kansas families that long ago settled together, worked together and fought slave-owners together, but now are estranged. The main families are the Grelliers, the "normal" family, and the Schapens, members of a deeply conservative church and run by a xenophobic and hate-filled matriarch. The main subplot is the birth of a red heifer at the Schapen farm, something with deep significance to a group of Orthodox Jews and to the conservative Christians (seriously, this is, what, the third novel I read featuring a red heifer. I should have kept track and added labels. Mental note.). There are a lot of other little plots and ideas - like how ludicrous it is to imagine that you can live in solitude in the country, where everyone talks about your affairs, how the Iraq conflict tears families apart, how grief can destroy a person, how religion can be twisted.... It's quite boxily written, yetI really liked it. There is something so true and respectful at the base of it. The boxiness is part of the whole aura. Oh, I can't explain myself, I can see that. Forget the literary criticism (attempts at). I actually cried reading this. I was touched at the pain the parents felt when their son died in Iraq. The simplicity of it, the way the world is changed for everyone and they don't know how to handle it - it's well described without in any way being too political and righteous. I would have expected Paretsky to be more cynical towards these Bush-following Republicans, but no. She understands, she respects, she grieves with them. When they sin, she doesn't judge. She tells the story. I had a great reading experience with this. Objectively, I can see that this is not the most astounding novel the world has seen - emotionally, it struck a deep chord. Funny how that happens. I'd recommend it now to anyone.

Annie Proulx: The Shipping News and Close Range

I’ve been reading all this Proulx at that time of year just before the new greenery has started growing, when it’s as though only the skeleton of nature is there. The bare bones of it all, ready for sculpting as it were. Even though the forest is full of trees you can see so far. No leaves obscure your line of vision. The ground is flat, covered in dead grass, and it feels as though I could walk anywhere, just fix my gaze on a spot far away and start hiking. I can’t see any obstacles – or rather, they are all in plain view; they haven’t been hidden yet. Even though I can tell that it’s all ready for new growth, bursting with life, it also seems so vulnerable. It’s such a contrast to the almost perversely opulent wealth of foliage brought by July. Walking into the forest then you are surrounded by different shades of green, it all closes in on you and I for one get these ideas of building a secret house deep in among the trees (an idea that has stuck with me for many years, ever since I read The Prince of Central Park by Evan Rhodes as a child). In these months of spring such an idea seems ludicrous, there is no secrecy no matter how much you’d want it. You can’t even thrown an apple core under a bush and expect it to be hidden – all rubbish comes out in the open.

This may sound like a post about Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, but no, I do have a Proulx-y point: I wonder if part of how much I’ve enjoyed her books is the fact that I’m experiencing a similarly bare landscape as the ones she writes about. Or, at least it feels like bareness is a huge part of it – a wide open sky, endless plains or endless sea … sparsity and rough weather (the last bit perhaps doesn’t apply to my situation. It’s been a bit cold and windy, sure, but that’s it.). I suppose in a way I’ve only had to look out the window to relate, to get my own illustrated version of what I’m reading. Nature suiting the tone of the novel.

I’ve seen the film made of The Shipping News, some years ago. I can’t remember that it made a great impression on me. I think I was kind of interested in how it had an edge of grit and pain, even though it was mostly lost in Julianne Moore’s lovely face. This edge was an echo of the book, I see now, of all that Annie Proulx writes. Like I said before, she writes about people. And bad things happen to people, and yet they go on living, and perhaps they even turn out wonderfully well, considering. Possibly Lasse Hallström was a good choice of director, since when he’s at his best he does a fine job of showing real people. But the novel is much more complex, shows a lot more nuances and delves more into the many more or less quirky characters that populate the pages. A scene in the book that’s a little bit funny would in the film become slightly cheesy I think, “local odd-balls dropping one-liners in pub” typ of thing. But it all works on paper. It’s very very good.

Close Range is the collection of short stories that includes Brokeback Mountain, of cinematic fame. I still haven’t seen the film, but the short story is great. All of them are, but some I like more than others. There are more marvellous names, by the way and of course: Scrope, Freeze, Muddyman, Wrench. Some of the stories are realistic, others, like A Pair A Spurs have a fantastic edge.

I've been thinking about all the things I would like to say about Proulx for more than a week now, but they slip my mind. I'd like my words to be a punch in the face, a command to read this author, but I fall short of that. So just take my word for it. I seldom read authors that really touch me, that make me remember so much of what they've written, but this is one of them. One of those that make you genuinely glad that you haven't read all the author has written yet. You still have some to look forward to.

Gibberish

Half an hour ago I woke from a dream in which I was wandering in Israel/Palestine and found skeletons of gibbon apes along the road. It was very real. I just caught myself thinking "what I pity I didn't take a photo".

I am seriously wondering if my recent reading of Annie Proulx inspired this fanciful flight of my subconscious. It's almost as though I can hear the dreamy background music.

I'll be back with Proulx posts, count on it.

Ursula K Le Guin: The Word for World is Forest

I wanted to re-read this because it had been a long time. I'm beginning to find the fore-words more interesting than the books themselves, actually. Here Le Guin calls the novel a little preachy - "overly moralising". She wrote it during frustration at the Vietnamn war. Now that she told me I noticed, but the story does stand up well anyway I think. It's just a classic in the genre. And that's all I have time for, but no matter (dunna mattuh) because you can google it for wiser words.

Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down

On a rooftoop on New Year's Eve four people meet and queue up to jump to their deaths. Obviously, queuing for suicide is socially awkward, so they end up not jumping, and then they end up becoming an unlikely group of not-friends-at-all-really.

It's not the best and most gripping tale of depression I've read, although Maureen's story comes closer than the others. It's just too funny and light-hearted. Then, Hornby would be the first to admit his failure in the Serious Literature department, so it doesn't matter (dunna mattuh as my son says). I liked it. I like Hornby. But his name is hell to type, it keeps coming out as Horby or Hienby.

Annie Proulx: Bad Dirt - Wyoming Stories 2

I haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain, folks.

Curiosity prompted me to get this, and also, short stories are good to read when interruptions are frequent (darn those nightly rounds when I'm working). I'm glad I did, because I found it quite marvellous. Not that every story was a masterpiece, but it was on the whole very good. In Proulx nobody is a hero I think, instead people are just people. This sounds simple, but most authors can't really write that simply, just about people. It's odd.

Some of the stories are about a little three-bar town called Elk Tooth. These are a little more humourous and feature the same sets of characters. A bit more crazy, like the one with the game warden who discovers an opening straight to hell in the forest, to which he commences to bring the poachers he catches.

I'm also enamoured with the names. Does everyone in Wyoming have fantastic names? Wolfscale, Conkle, Cokendall, DeBock.

And most of all she manages to make us fall a little bit in love with Wyoming. Without glorifying anything, least of all the people, remember, she tells us that it's worth loving. It inspires devotion and love. Maybe this love destroys it too. But I'd like to go there and see the clear sky...

Zoë Heller: The Believers

I picked this up on a whim because Heller's previous novel, Notes on a Scandal, is endorsed by Zadie Smith on the cover. This one was apparently filmed - I'd never heard of it. I'm so out of it. (Like that story of the sport's journalist who gets roped into reviewing Macbeth when the theatre critic is sick, and writes an unbiased enthusiastic review, having no preconceptions about Shakespeare - indeed no idea of who he was. This is me sometimes in questions of culture. Except I have Google to ruin me.)

Anyway, Zadie is right, and this is a great book. I thought it would be funnier (black humour, but nevertheless), but it mostly isn't. Quite moving and tragic. I might gripe about that the mother of the family, Audrey, becomes a little too much of a charicature, but I think this resolves itself a little towards the end. I'd recommend it!

Oh, and my motto for this Friday is, as you can see, "write something , no matter how short"...

Peter Dickinson: The Ropemaker

I had such a hankering to read something by Peter Dickinson, and thought myself very clever when I remembered that there was nothing stopping me from borrowing his children's books, since I'd read all the adult ones the library seems to have. After all, a long time ago I'd read The Blue Hawk (in translation, admittedly), and it was good. So when I saw this I picked it up. Unfortunately I was disappointed. It starts off well, throwing us into a setting and events that we don't completely understand the reasons for, without any explaining. This is classic Dickinson, to me, and I like it. Makes the reader feel a bit intelligent, right? But then the explanations start coming and to be honest I just felt like the whole book was a series of scenes piled upon one another, with long tedious dialogue and over-explained like anything. The first chapter I started thinking that this would make an excellent film perhaps, and had jsut started crowing to myself that Dickinson wasn't one of those writers that write as if they're expecting that to happen though, ha ha ha, and was I ever going to put that in the blog post!

I changed my mind. I am very unsure of this book.

It redeems itself a little in the epilogue, where we learn that despite our heroes and heroines tremendous efforts to save their home, there will come a future day in which they are a mere myth, and their country will have been overrun by violence and death. With that little glimmer of hope, when one descendant starts to believe the stories. Oh, and the world Dickinson has created is really capable of being a fantastic secondary universe. It's a tremendously cruel and violent Empire, riddled with magic and with a lot of internal logic and myth. Sadly, it doesn't reach all the way, I feel.

Caroline Graham: Written in Blood

The Midsomer Murder books are MILES better than the tv series, as I believe I've said. This one is about a writer's circle in Midsomer Worthy that invites a famous author to one of their gatherings. By the end of the evening one of their members is dead. Like I said I'm in a rush, so I'll just but down that I liked it. It's fairly predictable, but I still like it. The predictability is miles better in writing than on the telly.

Val McDermid: A Darker Domain

The only McDermid's the library stocks are the newer ones. I want my beloved Lindsay Gordon, pretty please...

This one is a free-standing story, about a cold case detective (who by the way, is a fabulous character) who is asked to investigate the disappearance of a miner whom everyone assumed had gone off scabbing during the strike in -84. His daughter wants to find him to help save her son's life. At the same time new evidence emerges in a kidnapping case from that same era, and our detective with her male sidekick solves them both.

I liked this, but I wasn't mad about it. I loved our radar couple though, more of them.

Am being a bit short, because I want to return the books today.

Ursula K Le Guin: Threshold

How fortunate that I happened to find Rocannon's World at the second-hand shop recently. Because this book just about did it for my relationship with Le Guin. First that enormous brick of questionmark that was Always Coming Home and now this. Premise is OK - a spot in the woods that's the threshold into another world, where it's always twilight. Discovered by accident by a young man with problems, and one day there he meets a girl who has been coming regularly since childhood. The inhabitants of the world are in trouble and gladly send these two off to meet their deaths. Okay, but what is the point of the story? It got awfully long and tedious for such a short book. It feels like an experiment.

Bit of a bargain

Went to the Red Cross shop yesterday and found Rocannon's World by Le Guin - a VERY battered copy, but for five crowns it'll do me nicely - and an Ellery Queen collection, containing mystery stories by Hemingway, Huxley and Steinbeck, among others. Should be good!

Ellery Queen's Double Dozen

This is a collection of short stories by various authors, edited by Ellery Queen and part of his (can you say "his" when there is no real Ellery Queen but instead it's a pseudonym for two people?) series of Mystery Annuals. I'd love to get hold of more of these, sadly I don't think the library has many. Most, if not nearly all, of these stories are forgotten now, but so many of them paint a lovely little picture of what was in at the time. I even kept little notes while reading this so I wouldn't forget my favourite bits, because I'm thinking I need another few labels on the blog to help me find the reading tips I leave for myself. However, I've lost the scrap of paper I was writing on. (Whereupon she takes a break to look for it.) (And doesn't find it.) I'll just ad lib then. Well, there's an L.E. Behney who has three stories set in rural or lower-middle-to-working-class America. They are quite moving and good. I especially liked the first one, about a woman in an abusive relationship who has had enough. There's an interesting one by George Summer Albee about a US agent in Algeria, trying to find a Communist spy. It sorts of precedes the whole current Iraq situation in a way. Disturbing in how it assumes the right for foreign powers to meddle in certain foreign affairs, I thought, but it wasn't my favourite in terms of pure enjoyability. A really clever one was A Paper for Mr. Wurley, by William Farrell, about a young boy who gets caught up in a murder on his way to school and writes about it for his school assignment. Keeps you kind of guessing to the end. There were, in short, many good ones, even though a few were only so-so.

Just my luck

I'm going shopping at Gottsunda Centrum today, with the two-year-old (apparently I don't value my sanity much). Minima needs supplies for her birthday party tomorrow. A good opportunity to pop into the library there and borrow some Peter Dickinsons I've already scouted out that they have.

But since it's Friday they don't open until 12, at which time I plan to be home and napping with Junior. It's so typical.

Sue Grafton: T is for Trespass

The blurbs on the cover have this as being one of her absolute best, a gripping thriller that’s so exciting you’ll wet yourself. Now, it certainly isn’t one of her worst, so I'm not complaining. Grafton steps away from the format of only writing from Kinsey’s point of view, and in my opinion that alone can make for a more interesting novel. Here we hear the story from Kinsey (first person narrative)and her antagonist Solana (third person narrative) – a calculating con artist who steals other people’s identities and insinuates herself into the homes of old or sick people, only to bleed them dry and (optional) kill them. One of Kinsey’s next-door neighbours falls prey to the woman when he ends up needing a nurse after an accident. So it is a good story, although I feel that the addition of Solana’s sub-intelligent, over-grown and abusive goon of a son was a bit unnecessary. To me the book is about the race against time – is the neighbour doomed? – and the pitting of wits. However, adding the son did make for a joyously violent and bizarre finale fight. I dare a director to film it, I bet you they’d feel compelled to tone down the dirty, desperate scrappiness of it out of fear of seeming ridiculous.

Absolutely one of her best. But I didn't wet myself.

Ngaio Marsh: A Surfeit of Lampreys

I was so pleased to spot this! Such a treat with an unread Marsh novel. This one is about a young New Zeeland orphan who comes to England to live with an aunt (who, by the way and most amusingly writes letters EXACTLY like Lord Peter Wimsey’s miss Climpson. For several pages I was unsure of who’s fiction I was inhabiting…), and first stays with her friends the Lampreys. The Lampreys are a large, eccentric and charming upper-class family who are permanently short of funds and hiding from creditors. Now they are once again in the red, and throw themselves at the mercy of Uncle Gabriel once again, hoping that he’ll help his heirs rather than see the family name shamed. But Uncle Gabriel is not so amenable, and is gruesomely killed. Who did it? The suspects are limited, and our orphan is torn between loyalty and horrible suspicion. I must say that I did not at all see who the killer was, I was fooled completely. Silly really, all the information was there. It’s quite good, and a nice period piece about Britain at the onset of war.

I am copying his draft and posting it anew to circumvent my last post problem. V. annoying.

Ellery Queen: Inspector Queen's Own Case

Ha, I should have read this one before House of Brass, since this is the novel in which our Inspector meets his Jessie. I don't think or suppose I'm spoiling things too much though through inadvertently revealing that they do indeed get married. I like this one a whole big bunch better. This isn't a clever whodunnit, but a more human crime story. It's a lot about emotion - wanting love, feeling inadequate, desperation, hate, guilt. The most interesting part isn't the crime, but Jessie's and Queen's budding relationship. It's a bit to it's lack that the crime, a terrible murder of a tiny baby, gets nudged aside, but it's never really forgotten so I'm not too upset.

I'm still interested by how different in tone it is to those Ellery-themed novels. Those are so clever and whimsical, whereas this is more say, The Bridges of Madison County. I can't think of a film to compare the former with right now, it might come to me. Forgive the halting analogy for now.

The only Queen left now is a collection of short stories. I'll be back.

Well this didn't work out at all.

Remember I had this plan to write a bunch of entries and post them when I had nothing new to post? I thought this would be possible by saving them as drafts and just posting, whereupon they would appear at the top of the page. Turns out they don't, they appear on the date when they were last edited, in that order. So I just posted a new Janet Evanovich post that popped into being on March 21st.

My point is, if you wish to read it you must scroll. But you're not missing much in this case. Stupid Blogger anyway.

Another two Queens

So I finished the -68 novel, called House of Brass. It’s not terribly good, and after reading it I was all set for a blog entry on how I was bored with the whole Queen concept and wasn’t sure if it was worth the trouble of reading the last ones I had. However, it’s hard to resist them, when they’ve got such cute tables of contents and lists of characters (not always the latter though). For example, in the House of Brass the table of contents is 14 chapters long, and the chapters are named:

1. What?
2. Where?
3. Why?
4. What!
5. Which?
6. Who?
7. And Where Again?
8. And Why Again?
9. What and Where?
10. Wherefore?
11. Who’s Who?
12. When, Where, Who Why
13. Who and Why?
14. Who, How and Why Finally



This is quite glorious of course – sadly, as I mentioned, the book didn’t live up to it. Inspector Queen is here retired, newly married and just back from his honeymoon when his bride, Jessie, receives a mysterious letter, inviting her to said House of Brass and undersigned Hendrik Brass. She’s led a humdrum life as a nurse and wouldn’t mind a stab at adventure, so convinces Richard that they should go. Once arrived they discover a most eccentric house, host, ditto servant and, predictably, a motley group of guests, all having received the same type of invitation. The host claims to be fabulously wealthy and for various reasons wishes to make said guests his heirs. After drawing up the will, he’s murdered – but where’s the moolah? Search commences, for money and murderer.

My objections to the book are for starters that it’s very much un petit trop, with an overly crazy group of characters, not to mention location. At the same time, there probably were in the -60s (perhaps still are?) many such pockets of weirder than weird places. The author himself refers to it as a “Sleepy Hollow” sort of place, and the House and Host fit right in. Maybe I shouldn’t necessarily fault it. More important is my second major objection: that our Inspector, who in previous novels has seemed quite razor-sharp, only needing his son for perhaps the final imaginative push, here seems to be bumbling about rather, worrying about his impending senility or something.

So after finishing this disappointment I was really ready to just pack it in, but instead read The Finishing Strokes, and was immediately quite cheered. This novel is ten years younger than HoB, and ticklingly enough set mostly in 1929 – right after Ellery Queen, a young man, has published his first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. Good thing I’d read that, because otherwise it wouldn’t be as funny. The book even quotes a review from Saturday Review of Literature as a prelude to Book Two:

“The Roman Hat Mystery, by Ellery Queen. This ‘Problem in Deduction’ introduces two new detectives, father and son. One is a genial snuff-addict, the other a philovancish bookworm. They are agreeable enough, if somewhat too coy and too chorus-like in their repartee . . . . In spite of minor defects . . . this is a competent piece of work for those who like their detective stories straight.”

Book Two then commences by telling us that although most reviews were favourable, this more acid one cut Ellery to the bone. I think this is a clever twist and it won me over – although I was already won over in Book One. This is surprisingly insightfully and at times movingly (such as it is) written, and describes how Claire Sebastian, in 1905, is injured in a car crash and gives birth prematurely. She dies, and her husband denounces the second twin, claiming the monster killed her. This is background for the rest. And to be honest I don’t know if I loved the rest, but it was fair. Ellery goes to a Christmas house party at young John Sebastian’s (the first twin!), a party that is spoiled by murder and mysterious gift boxes with ominous clues. I suppose, in retrospect, that I could have figured out the clues myself, especially since there were pictures, but I didn’t. I read it with the slight sense of huffiness that comes from feeling stupid. But on the whole I liked several aspects – the dialogue and descriptions of the interactions between the guests were at times very enjoyable for one thing. Apparently people were outrageously flirty in the -20s… Considering.

Janet Evanovich: Plum Lovin’

This is one of those between-series Plum novels that Evanovich occassionally turns out. It starts of dullish but picks up a little. Never rip-roaring funny I’d say. The slightly supernatural plotline is the most memorable thing about it. Some people apparently have “special” abilities, like our villain, who can give people an itch. Hives, that is. And the hero of sorts is called Diesel, who can sense where people are, or something. And so on. It’s the same theme as in the Christmas special novel I remember reading. So I’d not call it an out-of-series book so much as an another-series-book.


Ah I dunno, I suppose it’s cute.

Ellery Queen x 2

I got a whole big heap of them, and these are the first two to get randomly read. One of them is the first ever Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. It’s very different from the other Queen’s I’ve sampled, both in how the characters act and behave and in general tone. It does have a lovely period feel to it, being from 1929 – and by the way, I’m just so tickled by how long this series kept going. It’s like bloody James Bond. The other book, The Player on the Other Side, is from 1963, and I’m currently reading another Queen, this one from -68.

Anyway, The Roman Hat Mystery is a classic mystery crime puzzle. A man is murdered in the theatre, and oddly enough his hat is missing. The hat must be the crucial jigsaw piece – since it’s gone, it must be incriminating, and therefore only the murderer will have taken it. So who could have removed the hat from the theatre right under the noses of the police? All the clues are there, and it is relatively easy to work out whodunnit, although you must read more of the novel to get the motive. As for the Queens, they are somewhat more Europeanly foppish here, especially Ellery. Also, they have some sort of boyish man-servant named Djuna, who reminds me of nothing so much as the witch’s familiar the way he’s talked about. It’s quite absurd and I’m glad he went in later books.

The Player on the Other Side is a bit weirder. According to the terms of an eccentric will, four cousins must inhabit a house each, surrounding a common square, for a certain period of time in order to inherit a vast sum of money each. They are all very different and odd in their own little ways, bar one who is really mad. Then they start receiving mysterious notes, and then they’re killed. The twist of it is that as the reader you know who the killer is all along, but you don’t know who is ordering him to commit the murders. This is revealed at the end, and is a little disappointing. Smacks of sensationalist pseudo-psychology a bit, in my view, and too fanciful. Overtly and in-your-face clever.

What I noticed most in these two novels was that somewhere in one of them a room or office is described as tasteful, with a Constable oil painting. Now, I swear, Constable paintings seem to be The Thing in crime fiction. I’m convinced I run into them all the time, as the epithomy of taste. I must start keeping note of this.

Again, I went overboard

Am working three nights starting tomorrow night, so went to the library to stock up. I had seen in the online catalogue that there were several Queen's in the open archive section in the cellar. So I brought home six books by that author. Also a Nick Hornby I hadn't read, a ditto Val McDermid (though I hesitated, since it's neither about Lindsey Gordon nor Kate Brannigan, and those are my faves, also it's a bulky hard-back), a Caroline Graham (had almost forgotten that I like her), a cultural alibi in the form of a short story collection by Annie Proulx (how do you pronounce that name?), and finally, what I'm most excited about, a previously unread novel by Ngaoi Marsh. Oh joy. That makes eleven books, and a heavy bag. I still haven't read the Evanovich I have at home, but I figure that won't take long. And I'm working my way through T is for Trespass.

I spent some time now updating my link list with a few more author blogs. I think I need to badger mr Bani more about helping me tweak the blog, I'm not happy with the way it is but I doubt I can do much about it on Blogger...

Carol O'Connell: Shark Music

This instalment in the Kathy Mallory saga is also known as Find Me, according to Fantastic Fiction, a website as ugly as it is informative. I'm not sure right now which ones I've read, but I can see I've blogged about none. Definitely the first one, Mallory's Oracle, and I'm also sure of no. 3, Killing Critics, 4, Flight of the Stone Angel, 5, Shell Game and 6, Crime School. In this trip down memory lane I am aided greatly by this page at Dancing Badger. Said Badger is very positive towards the novels in question, something I myself am not. Or no, that's not right. I like these novels, I think they're well written on the whole, the characterization is generally good, the mysteries are clever, and the heroine herself, Mallory, is compelling, ok, granted. But she is a bit too much. And at least in Shark Music her character is not made clear to us so much as by what she does as by the author telling us over and over again what she is. She is compulsively tidy - this we know not so much from descriptions of Mallory's person and surroundings (except briefly when her flat is described at the start, and towards the end when she starts to come undone and forgets proper maintenance). And this niggles at me when I'm reading, and confirms my impression of Mallory as a too-much character. She is so exceptional that the author has to rely on other people saying that "oh boy, she is something else" or just third-person telling us. I've never really understood, for example, why Riker (her partner) calls her a sociopath. Okay, so I'm a sloppy reader, but none of Mallory's actions really stood out for me as truly sociopathic. More like she was logical to the point of being somewhat autistic sometimes.

The Dancing Badger link I posted gives a much better review and summary than I can, so I'll spare myself the trouble. My opinions though are pretty much what I wrote above about the entire series. I found it a bit hard to get into the flow and grip of the book. It felt a little like the book was a box of building blocks that a child emptied out on the floor. A lot of separate little bits that didn't make a whole, and in themselves didn't have enough information to show the entire house that could be built. I'm not sure the metaphor entirely pans out, but it does descripe how I felt... slowly the blocks sorted themselves into piles of colours and shapes and I was able to discern a fuller picture and get the story straight in my head. These are not complicated novels, not by any stretch of the imagination, so it's just something to do with how they're written that makes it a bit cumbersome getting into them.

The biggest impression the Mallory novels have made on me is an overall, dark and somewhat Gothic idea of a New York with crumbling gargoyles on old sky-scrapers, gargoyles that more often than you'd think fall down and hit someone on the head. Also I have a vivid memory of reading one of the Mallory novels just after or before reading a Jeffrey Deaver novel with a similar theme - magic, or rather illusionists. As the link shows, I didn't even remember which novel it was at the time. I've also read the none-Mallory novel Judas Child, which I remember much more clearly. A very disturbing, sad, original story. One of the themes of Shark Music is Mallory's search for her father, in other words a continuation of the book where she returns to her childhood Louisiana to settle the score on her dead mother's account. I thus can't help but think of the former book, and become profoundly annoyed by the fact that I can't remember the important details of it, like how Mallory's mother was killed. Very irritating! But it says something about the series - it's uneven, in my opinion.

Jaqueline Winspear: An Incomplete Revenge

Oh, I had to borrow it. It was new, I hadn't read it. And what does it matter then that I'm not keen on the Maisie Dobbs books really - it compulsive. In this one the mystical Maisie Dobbs heroine-worshipping super-woman image really goes into full swing, with Maisie sensing the aura of death all over the place, and in a retro play for explanation we find out that her grandmother was a gypsy, which apparently (not that it's spelled out) explains her psychic feelers.

She investigates a series of odd happenings in a village where her benefactor's son wishes to buy a brickworks. The incidents all take place during hop-picking season, which gives Maisie's assistant a good reason for going.

I can sort of see that Winspear wants to descripe a lost world and way of life, like the hopping. But I so feel like she's rubbing my nose in it. The book covers are lovely though.

By the way, my daughter is reading Lord of the Flies for school, and also watching the film (the new one). Only when she saw the film now did she become really disturped to be honest, the book did not grip her the same way. But anyway, she goes on and on about Roger and Simon and Maurice and Piggy - I simply have to re-read this, I remember nothing. Except Piggy. And a fire. And wild pigs and death.