Nicole Krauss: Man Walks Into A Room

I've honestly never heard of Nicole Krauss, and picked up the book just for that reason: who is this unknown chick-lit author? Not that I borrow chick-lit just for the sake of the genre, mind - I have a few favourites, I admit, but it's not, on the whole, my thing. I have, for example, NOT read Sophie Kinsella. However, this is not chick-lit, it just looks like it at first glance, with its blue and fluffy cover. Krauss has been shortlisted for a few book awards and is generally quite acclaimed I believe.


This novel is about Samson Greene, who disappears from his New York home and is found wandering the desert in Nevada, his mind a blank, literally. Turns out that Samson has a brain tumour, the pressure of which suddenly became critical and caused a form of total amnesia. And when the tumour is removed Samson can remember nothing that has happened to him after the age of twelve. He is not a boy trapped in a man's body though, he is still a man of thirty-six, but he can't remember his wife, his job, his education, his friends, that his mother has died - nothing. Shaving feels odd and he's not sure if he can drive. This odd loss of memory leads him to want to relinquish his old, unremembered, life, and when an LA neurospecialist and researcher rings him to ask for him to participate in some ground-breaking research on memory transference, he agrees. There, I've told you a fair bit of the plot now, more than the cover did I think. The cover ends with telling me that "what he gains is nothing short of the revelation of what it is to be a human being" - you don't get depth like that from me, now.

This is not at all a bad book. It's well written, by an author that cares. Yet it leaves me strangely cold, and I'm struggling to pinpoint why. I remember reading an article somewhere about the abundance of authors these days who learned their craft in creative writing classes, and the article bemoaned the similarity in all these writing styles that was the consequence. Now, I'm not educated enough to detect anything like that, but I was struck by a similar sense of déja vu-ishness when reading this. As though I'd read this kind of prose a million times before, and this kind of theme too. (As a matter of fact the amnesia idea is not dissimilar from Mil Millington's Instructions for Leading Someone Else's Life, really. No other comparisons should be drawn though. Krauss is more in the vein of Ian McEwan, I'd say.) Somehow I don't really grow to care about any of the characters. I will admit that I shed a tear at some point, I think when Samson learns of his mother's death, and it's as raw to him as if it had happened five minutes ago. I thought it was sad. But somehow not so much Samson's grief, as the general idea of grief, if you see what I mean. I don't understand why the characters act the way they do - I can see this being filmed, and myself, watching the film, shouting at the more and more estranged Samson and wife to BLOODY TALK TO EACH OTHER ALREADY. As if I were the virtous paragon of exemplary spousehood. In short, I'm just not sucked in. I'm just not that into it. Also, I was super-annoyed at Samson talking to his doctor about cloning, and mentioning an idea he's just had that in the future everyone will have a spare living on a farm somewhere, to be called into service for organs if something happens to the original. Fair enough that the idea is original to Samson, who has lost twenty-four years of memories, but that the doctor hasn't heard of this very popular science fiction theme is a bit silly.

There are some great scenes in this book, but on the whole it's not that memorable (ha ha) for me. Admittedly it's books like these that I'd like to discuss, because I think I'd get a lot out of hearing what someone else, who maybe loves it, thinks.

I got a lovely surprise today!

My cousin (I wrote about her here) sent me a package and a card for my birthday (which was on the 11th), out of the blue. It was really nice of her, and I am delighted! Four books - not one, not two, but four! (Incidentally, my husband commented that they smelled the same as the dvd she gave us in Ireland - must ask her if she buys at the same shop or if it's her house that smells so nice. I wouldn't have noticed myself but mr Bani has a good nose.)

She sent me two novels by Michel Faber, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps
and Under The Skin. I've read the former - I didn't remember when I texted her to say thanks! thanks! thanks! but after a while I did and I just checked the blog to make sure. See how useful a blog like this is? Doesn't matter that I did, because I liked it and can read it again. Looking forward to reading Under The Skin then, looks like one of the short and sweet Fabers that I enjoyed. Also, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - a book that mr Bani likes a lot but I haven't read. Seems right up my alley though. Possibly this is one of the best book titles ever, by the way. Then there's a complete newbie, The Horned Man by James Lasdun. Seems to be some sort of crime fiction - so to be honest I may read that first.

They'll have to bide their time until I've finished the pile from the library though. But it's great to have a stack like this in reserve. Love it!

Cyril Hare: Tragedy at Law

Now, this is a real little treasure. I found it by accident - I was just going to "get something to read", and ended up trawling the crime section, gazing intently at all the yellow-stickered volumes hoping to find something new. This caught my eye, being an "old one". I'd never heard of Cyril Hare, and these old books have no information at all on the covers, so I really was borrowing blindly so to speak. Oh how I love finding something so entertaining and clever, completely by chance! I'm definitely going to be on the look-out for more of his writings. As Martin Edwards writes, he is one of the forgotten ones - he deserves a revival! And the best thing - the novel centres to a large extent around a car accident that takes place on 12th October 1939. And I finished this book on 12th October 2009. By accident, mind! It's only on the last few pages that one of the characters remarks on the significance of dates, and I noticed then. Clearly it is meant to be, me and Cyril are going to have a torrid love affair. There is no escaping such numerological coincidence.

The novel was written in 1942, and takes place, as I said, in 1939 to 1940. The earliest days of the war are nicely described by someone who is currently in the thick of it. Lord Barber is a rather unlikeable circuit judge, who on one night of the Assizes has too much to drink and knocks a man over with his car. (Or motor, as we said in those days. Oh yes we did.) Of course his position demands that the thing is hushed down, and not only that, but he is virtually penniless despite said position, so he'll be ruined if forced to pay damages. We follow Barber, his brilliant wife Hilda and the people he works with on the circuit, while mysterious things keep happening - anonymous notes, attempts on his life... so who wants to harm Barber, we wonder, while Barber himself is more preoccupied with worrying about financial ruin.

Great things about the book: you learn a lot about the system of the Assize courts. Hare was a judge, and it shows. It shows the system from the inside, and is pleasantly cynical and knowledgable. The real crime takes place at the very end, and then the last chapter or so solves it, while we've been given a lot of clues to do so during the read - Ngaoi Marsh uses much the same style. Plenty of period detail, charm and info in general. Fab bit about Hilda Barber, who is a legal scholar in her own right, but was kept from practising because of male prejudice. The author seems to be torn between recognizing Hilda's superior intelligence and the injustice that she can't practise law openly (only through her husband), and at the same time he feels that it's decidedly unfeminine and a little freakish. I find it fascinating froma feminist point of view, like.

Oh do read this if you come across it, alright? I'm so pleased I'm starting two new labels.

Vikas Swarup: Slumdog Millionaire (a.k.a. Q&A); Lemony Snicket: Slutet (The End)

I saw the film Slumdog Millionaire this summer (I think it was), and although it wasn't perhaps the best film I've ever seen I did like it. The book by comparison is actually not as good - and most importantly, the book differs so much in storyline from the film that it was, in my opinion, a poor decision to change the original title Q&A into the film title of Slumdog Millionaire. It gives you false expectations. However, the fundamental idea is, obviously, the same, since that is the book's originality and most appealing feature, and the one I can imagine the film-makers warming to: a young man, an orphan, who has survived by his wits and a fair bit of luck, comes on a tv quiz show and wins the billion rupee top prize. He is accused of cheating and beaten by the police. In the film, he tells the policeman how come he knew the answers to all the questions on the show; in the book he tells a young woman lawyer, who turns up out of the blue at the police station and claims to be his defence. His story is given in a series of flashbacks of his life, relating episodes where he just happened to learn those facts that just happen to appear as the questions on the show. Street knowledge, not book knowledge, as the author puts it in an interview at the end.

There is a strong message of belief in a destiny in the book, something which feels very Bollywood (and is not as obvious in the film). It is Ram's destiny to meet the woman he falls in love with, and to win the one billion rupees. If it were not his destiny, then why would he only get questions he knew the answers to? He also has a lucky coin that he uses when making decisions, and in the final sentences he throws it away, saying that luck comes from within. Which does sound the opposite of fatalistic really, but his point is that is doesn't matter if the coin comes up heads or tails, all the paths in your life have led you to the decision-making moment, and you know what must be done. And as for "all the paths in your life" as a theme - I feel a certain kinship to Dickens in the way that the story is put together. The woman lawyer is revealed to be someone from Ram's past, who has searched for him all these years to repay her debt, a school teacher whose sick son is saved by Ram's money becomes his lifeboat choice on the quiz show, the quiz show host is also a figure from the past, albeit a villain - out of the population of a billion the same few people seem to be falling over one another's feet all the time, and then the threads are gathered up at the end. It is very fantastical at places, and so I first decided it's unrealistic. But then I started thinking about how life is exactly this unrealistic really, and how odd it is that we have a different demand on realism in fiction - the dialogue for example has to be quite unreal to be deemed real. If you see what I mean. So I don't know. I saw the film as more realistic, to be honest, but that might also be to a large part thanks to fantastic performances from the child actors in it. A decidedly unrealistic side of the film was the way the characters as adults all spoke English - with no reference to how they might have learned it. In the book this is explained, and not considered a minor detail.

I have noticed several times (since we're speaking of destiny and such matters), that two ostensibly very different books may strike you as being very similar, especially if you read them close together so the impressions are fresh in your mind. In this case, I read the last book in the Lemony Snicket saga of the Baudelaire children just before Slumdog Millionaire. I read the first seven or so in one sweep at around this time but then I got a bit bored with the style (plus that the library never had them in) so I stopped reading them. My youngest daughter and her friends however are going through a Lemony Snicket phase, so she has been bringing them home en masse, albeit in the Swedish translation. When I saw the final instalment lying on the shoe bench in the hall (such a logical spot for a library book, don't you agree?) I thought that I'd just have to skim through it, translation or no, because one would have to know the end, right? Okay, and my point then about odd similarities (at last! they cry): Lemony Snicket and Vikas Swarup are similar in their writing styles. It is boxy, stilted, a little formal, repetitive at times. While this works in the part fantasy part pastiche frame that Lemony Snicket uses, it is not as successfull for Swarup. He's just not that great a writer - particularly since there are so so many FANTASTIC Indian writers of fiction. He simply cannot measure up. I skimmed large parts of the book - and not just because I knew the story and it was late and I was tired. It's not very spell-binding. That said, there is room for Swarup too in the pantheon of authors - he can sometimes be better than he is worse, and he is clearly driven by wanting to tell us a story. Which is not a bad thing.

I don't have that much to say about the final Lemony Snicket book. I've missed several books before the last one, so there were some references and characters I was unfamiliar with, but I really don't think that impairs my judgement when I say that the conclusion is a bit of a disappointment. The author fails to follow through on all the terrible hints and promises of horrific history we are fed with during the series. There is a slightly darker note in the book, as if Snicket wouldn't have minded going Gaiman on us and killed everyone off, but then he remembers that this is a children's book and that they deserve a happier ending. This, accordingly, is what we get, and for an adult it isn't completely satisfying. There are too many loose ends left for me to be entirely pleased, and it feels as though he just wanted to finish the damn thing already. I'm sure my daughter liked it just fine though, but I'll have to ask her. Update will be posted here.

Per Olov Enquist: Nedstörtad ängel; Gunilla Molloy: Att läsa skönlitteratur med tonåringar

Jag har faktiskt aldrig läst något av Enquist - en sån där sak som aldrig blivit av. Så stor som han är i den svenska författarskaran hade man ju kunnat tänka sig att han skulle få finnas med på den obligatoriska litteraturlistan om man som jag läste humanistisk linje på gymnasiet, men inte då. Vi var för upptagna med Strindberg och Tjänstekvinnans son. Zzzzzz. Men vi har i alla fall en hel del böcker hemma, tack vare den vid det här laget ganska mytiske maken, och Nedstörtad ängel var a) med i DNs litteraturtävling i julas och b) lagom lång för en natts jobb - nja, snäppet kort egentligen, men jag tog risken.

Enquist ska ju enligt alla som är några vara ruskigt ruskigt bra. Och visst, karln kan ju skriva. Nedstörtad ängel är betraktelser över tre historier i en bok - om ett par som hatar och älskar varandra, förlorade i sorgen över sitt mördade barn och kärleken till mördaren, om Pasqual Pinon som har ett kvinnoansikte på sin panna, en stum kvinna som han kallar sin hustru, och om Ruth Berlaus hatkärlek till Berthold Brecht. Historierna om Pinon och Berlau är baserade på historiska personer och innehåller förmodar jag en hel del sanning, vilket osökt får mig att fundera över om den tredje historien också är sann. Det är ju lite kittlande, eftersom fadern påstås vara psykolog eller psykiatriker (minns inte) vid Ulleråker här i Uppsala. Att fundera över detta tar upp en hel del av min energi är jag rädd, jag tappar lite intresset för att förlora mig i boken. Denna historia, och Pinons, är de bästa. Varför Berlau är med vet jag inte riktigt, även om det fungerar tematiskt (att vara beroende av att älska någon). Och Pinons livsöde känns ju så gripande att man blir enormt nyfiken på det och vill veta mer.

Det krävs skicklighet för att kunna plocka bara snuttar ur ett så pass fascinerande liv som Pinons, bara små brottstycken för att illustrera någon man vill säga. Boken igenom får vi oss små händelser till livs, som tillsammans bildar en helhet. Det är bra gjort, och han skriver som sagt bra. Men som helhet är jag inte så berörd. I efterhand funderar jag inte vidare på boken, möjligen att jag googlar Pinon som sagt för att kolla att han funnits på riktigt. Det är ju det som är en av de intressantaste sakerna med litteratur, att det blir så nästan slumpmässigt vad som berör en och inte. Jag läste för en tid sedan Att läsa skönlitteratur med tonåringar av Gunilla Molloy, en bok som maken (japp) lånade hem för jobbets skull. Det var mycket intressant. Molloy följde flera högstadieklasser under tre år för att se hur litteraturundervisningen gick till, och i en del av intervjuerna med elever anmärker hon på det att barnen säger att de vill ha mer av x, y eller z men helt missar att x, y och z finns med i den bok de precis tvingats läsa - den berörde dem inte. Det finns mer att säga om den boken men jag orkar inte nu, utan lämnar den som ett hett boktips. Jag är inte så säker på att jag gör detsamma om Nedstörtad ängel - den rekommenderas men jag är inte eld och lågor. Får läsa något annat vid tillfälle.

Mary Balogh: First Comes Marriage

My sister has a thing for Regency romances. It's a guilty pleasure, and I think it was with some hesitation that she agreed to lend me a book from her collection - it's never fun to have somebody thrash something that you yourself know isn't terribly good but that you like anyway (I feel this way about Marian Keyes or Jean M. Auel to name but a few). However, she's a smart lass and knew what was coming. And I have to say that I can see the appeal of novels like this, but myself I don't think I can stomach more than one (I might check out one of the classic authors of regency novels though, Georgette Heyer). Perhaps more if I get swine flu. I think they're excellent to read when you're bedridden and suffering. You really don't have to think at all, and can skip many pages without missing much. This book in fact could easily have been half as long - the actual substance of each chapter takes no more room than say two pages, and the rest is taken up with describing, in staccato sentences, how the main character reflects on this substance. For example, one chapter is about a new dress. New dress is put on, new dress is admired by self, new dress is walked downstairs and admired by all and husband (the one that was wedded without love, as a sort of business arrangement, and despite this is great in bed and fantastically suitable). Woman wearing dress reflects on whether husband really likes her in dress for two pages, husband reflects over how astonishingly sexy wife is in dress and how unaware of this she is for another two. Exeunt omnes. It's a definition of the word formulaic. Very annoying is that the author uses words and phrases that are wrong for this age, such as gender instead of sex. Also annoying is the excessive use of the word ton. I am not exaggerating when I say that ton might appear up to four times on each page. I couldn't remember what it meant, even though I could understand from the context that it referred to a set of people that our heroine was anxious to fit in with, so I looked it up after reading it. Well, then here's my question: surely the members of a set of people like this do not refer to themselves ever as such? I mean, we may know that there is a jet set but the members of the jet set don't call themselves the jet set. It's an outsider's definition. Please discuss.

So, I can't say I recommend it per se, but that I do understand the guilty pleasure, and that in itself is not an un-recommendation I suppose. There are four or so more in this particular series, about this particular family. All about two people who must marry and have sex despite their first inclinations. Do not read if you are afraid of thrusting. There is no shortage of that. The author is ludicruosly productive, by the way. By the time I write one blog entry she must have three more novels headed to the publishers...

Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

My husband got this for his birthday, and has been suggesting that I read it for a week or so now, insistently. It's not very long so I did it in one working night. It is the story of an intelligent young Pakistani who, over tea and a meal in a local restaurant, tells an American stranger visiting Lahore about his love affair with America and an American woman, a love affair that has ended with disillusionment and tragedy, respectively. It's a nice story that rings of truth - I've met people like our narrator, and I can understand the complex and diverse sentiments that he feels towards the United States.

I'm not completely mad about it. My initial reaction is that I'll soon forget it, that it's not very memorable. Admittedly it's too soon to tell, but it feels like a trifle to be honest. Well written, not without poignancy, realism and feeling - but still not all that. I am very distracted by the frame of the novel too. It is written as one continuous monologue, and I've always abhorred that style, the way the narrator tells us what the other person is doing and saying indirectly:

I observe, sir, that there continues to be something about our waiter that puts you ill at ease. […] And if you should sense that he has taken a disliking to you, I would ask you to be so kind as to ignore it; his tribe merely spans both sides of our border with neighboring Afghanistan, and has suffered […} Is he praying, you ask? No, sir, not at all! His recitation - rhythmic, formulaic, from memory, ans so, I will concede, not unlike a prayer - is in actuality an attempt to transmit orally our menu, much as in your country one is told the specials.

Oh how it distracts me. It works on the stage, sometimes. But in a novel it just irritates me and prevents me from becoming immersed. The ending is very open and slightly unfinished, and first I decided that I thought this was good, but then I re-read it on the way home and decided that no, I didn't much care for it. Mostly because, again, the author can indulge - overindulge - in the annoying narrative style, particularly badly suited to an ending that is supposed to be very tense and filled with quiet action. Who is the American stranger? Did he actually come to seek out our narrator, who has made a name for himself as an anti-American? Violence hangs in the air, but one is left unsure as to who is going to perpetrate it. I can't say I don't recommend it, but mostly I suppose to people who have never thought about what motives someone might have for disliking America at all - n.b., not that this book is the best I've read for providing answers and/or cultural insights. I really don't understand the radiant praise this book has received (according to the cover quotes).

Turns out that my husband's quibbles were much the same as mine.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods and Neverwhere

On loan from my sister, natch.

I read American Gods first, since I wanted the background to Anansie Boys, and because I find the whole idea of the ancient gods walking the not-so-paved-with-gold streets of the United States, desperate for somebody to worship them at least a little, very imaginative and appealing. However, let me do the negatives first. In my post about Anansie Boys I wrote specifically I believe that Gaiman might have a problem with writing novels as though they were comics - that is, with too much focus on describing a scene, you can tell as a reader that the writer has imagined a comic frame and now wishes to put this frame into words - but that he always stays on the right side of the line. Well, frankly I think he toes it a bit here. Possibly he was a bit new to the novel racket and hadn't learnt that you don't always have to be supervisual? The upshot is that the book, in my opinion, is a trifle long and I actually found myself a tad bored towards the end. However, it's entertaining and clever. He's possibly the only writer who could ever have conceived of ancient fertility/sex goddesses working as prostitutes to find worshippers. And not make it seem cheap, mind. I also like that we never get a firm grip on exactly why Shadow, our hero, ended up in prison, except that it had something to do with assault, a robbery and his wife being "left out of it". The story is that just as Shadow is set to get out of prison and go home to said wife after doing his three years, the warden summons him to tell him that she's died in a car crash. Feeling adrift, Shadow agrees to work with Mr Wednesday, whom we find out is the god Odin in his North American form, left over from the Vikings early visits. Oh, and that is another of my positives - I really like the bits where there is a story about how the gods ended up in North America, the "historical" fiction as it where. There is the story of an early Viking settlement, before Leif Eriksson. The men joyfully sacrifice the first Native American they meet in Odin's honour, and obviously get killed in retaliation. Or the first people to cross onto the continent from Asia, who sacrifice the skull of a mammoth, and how this god is gradually abandoned by the people's descendants. Or the twins, boy and girl, who are shipped over on a slaving ship, bringing a whole religion with them, a religion that the girl to her frustration watches become reduced to merely magic and witchcraft. These parts must have been thoroughly researched and show wonderful imagination, and Gaiman deserves great praise for this. I'd recommend it, definitely, on the whole. Plenty of blood, gore, maggots and sex. I don't know if you think this is good or bad.

Neverwhere is a book written after a TV series that I've never seen, but that my sister watched an episode of and says is a bit rubbish. The book might therefore be better, since there are no rubbish special effects in a book unless your mind creates them, in which case the fault is your own. But the book seems too obviously chained to its predecessor. I get the feeling that a lot is put in just because the writer doesn't want any fans to miss a favourite scene, and this includes comedy oneliners. Also, the comic book as novel thing, again, although here the problem is the TV thing. I don't really need a description of the heroines gothy-something clothes, in layers of ragged lace and velvet and what have you. More than once. Not being a Londoner I don't find it quite as oooooohhh to have the normal London echoed in a darker, magical Underworld, in which Knightsbridge is Night's Bridge and you DIE crossing it, and an angel is called Islington (incidentally, I picture the angel Islington as looking like the archangel in Lennart Hellsing's classic ABC-book). I suspect there are many jokes in these comparisons that I didn't get. But it's entertaining enough all the same, and stays on the right side of too long.

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

I thought I'd mentioned Cormac McCarthy earlier, when my husband was reading his entire oevre, but a quick search reveals that I hadn't - another example of a blog entry only written in my mind... I have never doubted that the books were worth reading, but I didn't really feel in a rush to do so as I felt that they were probably quite demanding, mentally, and for a long time I haven't been up to more than Janet Evanovich. Blood Meridian is, according the the quote from the Irish Times review on the cover, a "violent lyrical masterpiece [ … ] It is a barbarously poetic odyssey through a hell without purpose" - not light reading then. You kind of have to be in the mood for the plunge, I reckoned. However, mr Bani really wanted to share his reading experience with me, so he forced me into a deal. I would read Blood Meridian, and he'd read anything I chose for him. I chose Annie Proulx, and so far he's read a few of the short stories I think but not an entire book so as deals go I lose - doubly so maybe, because I wasn't entirely in the mood for Blood Meridian, and have found it a bit hard to focus sometimes. It's not an easy book to read: more on that later. When I said as much to my husband he did say, to do him justice, that I didn't have to read it if I wasn't enjoying it, but by then it was too late, I was reading it. Hm. And my thoughts on it are a little confused, a little torn - I suspect it's the type of book that I'll have to come back to in a few years and re-read, just to get it. It's convoluted and heavy on the unsaid and implied, even though the language can be sparse and measured.

Blood Meridian is about a band of men who get contracted to kill Apaches in Mexico and the neighbouring American states. We especially follow "the kid", a sixteen-year-old from Tennessee who despite being the son of a schoolmaster can neither read nor write and has "a taste for mindless violence". He drifts towards the West and joins the company of Apache hunters as a means to get out of imprisonment in the city of Chihuahua. The company is led by Galton, but the most prominent figure in the book really is "the judge", a man named Holden, who is huge, completely hairless and very learned. He leads the band of slayers as much as Galton does. After leaving Chihuahua they embark on a tour of extreme violence, of utter descent into violence and cruelty. Wherever they go they bring this havoc with them, ruining everything they touch. The kid doesn't seem ever to show any remorse or to hesitate when the company massacre Indians, or, when no Indians can be found, any people whose scalps will pass for Apache. Yet towards the end the judge seems to imply that he alone was the one with a conscience, the one who felt any sort of sympathy for "the heathen". I'm not sure I followed this development… maybe because for a while the kid sort of fades into the background, while the narrative centers more on other members of the company.

About a third of the way through the book I started to wonder if I was being severely hampered by the fact that I had little or no previous knowledge of the historical setting and people and of the geography of the region, or if it was possible to understand the book without knowing this. When my husband read it he spent a lot of time looking things up, everything from the untranslated Spanish to information on the real, historical, Glanton. I understood the Spanish well enough to follow the book, but felt a little adrift in the whole context. For example, when the kid first sees the gang, riding through the streets of Chihuahua, Glanton and the judge are both described to us. Later the kid's companion, Toadvine, says that "his name is Glanton" and explains his plan to join the band - well, I read a good three of four pages more before copping on that Glanton wasn't the name of the judge; I'd simply gotten them confused. The sparse writing style mixed with longer paragraphs of a biblical, metaphorical style is quite demanding on the reader, and I hadn't been concentrating enough. Now, had I known my history of North and Central America in the 19th century (beyond what I remember from Lucky Luke) I might not have made that error, since the name Glanton would have meant something directly. I also didn't first understand that "the Delawares" meant Native Americans from the East, possibly Lenapes. And so on and so on - the names of famous Apache chiefs, the places they go to, references to renegade American officers... if most if this is unfamiliar to you you have to concentrate that little bit harder to understand what's going on. Basically, I'm going to have to re-read this some time in the future, because now I got better and better at understanding as the book went on, and I'd like to see what I think if I'm with it all the way.

However, I don't read this as a historical novel, in fact I was surprised to see that McCarthy has based a lot on real historical events, not to mention the writings of Samuel Chamberlain, who was a member of the real Glanton Gang. Although I understand that there is fact in this fiction, the point isn't whether or not things happened as they are described, just as the point isn't assigning roles of victim-villain or good-bad. Although Glanton and quite a few others we meet are more or less ideological, hardened racists of the genocidal sort, the kid and his companions are just killing. There is a black man in the gang, casually referred to as "the nigger" but otherwise not much different. So they kill, and the Apaches kill... a clue I think is one of the quotes from the beginning of the book, a news report from 1982. In this the members of an archeological expedition claim that they have found evidence of scalping on a 300,000-year-old human skull. We are humans, and we kill and always have killed. Although we don't have to - quite a lot of the people the gang or the kid encounter on their travels seem to be ordinary, non-murderous, peaceful; but they are almost all killed and overrun by the violence and by war. Is that what it all must come to? And between bashing the brains of infants against rocks the gang sit and discuss morals and ethics, bizarrely enough, and most of them seem to know that they are committing heinous acts, that they are doomed if there is any such thing as a God. All except the judge who holds forth on his idea that war is God, the greatest, or possibly that he is God, and war. (These were my husband's favourite bits, the philosophical discourse, while I tended to drift more than a little here - in my defense I was reading at work.) Incidentally, I have no idea how they're planning to film this. Leave it alone I say.

It's pretty much a must-read.. oh before I finish I have to state my one huge quibble: there's an awful lot of spitting. Spitting into the fire, spitting dryly on the desert sand etc etc etc. Every single page almost. Does my head in a bit. Maybe I'm the only one who gets distracted by that? Anyway, I do like this. And it falls into a cathegory of books I'm very fond of, a cathegory Annie Proulx also falls into, namely tales of America. There's something about reading these tales of people who have no context, who have uprooted themselves (by choice, force or chance) from their European or other roots, and are now drifting on an alien continent that they try to make theirs - drifting not only in person but also in mind or in morals. I think it helps us understand a lot about the modern US - but that's a topic for a whole other post.

E.L. Doctorow: World's Fair

Years ago I read The Waterworks by this author, whom I'd never heard of, and was surprised by how much I liked it. I think I only read it because it was the only English book for sale at the tourist resort in Bulgaria (apart from a collection of Star Trek short stories, which we also bought, yes ma'm), and in those circumstances I wasn't expecting a good book (because, n.b., the Star Trek stories). But Doctorow is really a great writer. So some time or other I saw this secondhand somewhere and remembered how well I liked The Waterworks, whereupon I brought it home to save for a rainy day. Reading up on Doctorow on Wikipedia reminded me that I'm sure I've seen his book Ragtime somewhere... did my parents own it? If so, how could it get missed when we cleared up after my father died? Ah well. I'm going to keep a keener lookout in the future.

This is a novel that seems like memoirs of Doctorow's own childhood, as a little boy named Edgar. It is only towards the end that we find out what the family's surname is (Altschuler), and that brings home to the reader that although a lot may be biographical, there may also be a lot of fiction mixed in. It is quite simply memories, in a fairly chronological order, from a very young age and up until the visit to the NY World's Fair at the age of nine or so. It brings to life a lost New York, a lost America, in the most wonderful way. How the children buy cheap toys, made in Japan, and roast sweet potatoes from street vendors, how a journey from Bronx to Brooklyn would take forever, with train changes and bus rides... The first half or so has inserts in other voices, chapters in which Edgar's mother, brother and aunt relate a few things of what they remember. The second part loses these voices, and is perhaps more fictional?

I hope this writer isn't too soon forgotten.

Haruki Murakami: After Dark

I picked this up on a whim, reasoning that I should probably read Murakami because after all he is well-known etc. But to be honest I wasn't terribly interested, so the book was the last one left in the big pile I'd brought home… And now that I read it I'm not sure I'll read more by him (unless I get a terrific tip in the comments). Frankly I found it more pretentious than anything else.

A young man called Takahashi meets a girl, Mari, in a restaurant late at night. They are previously accquainted through her sister. This sister has, which Takahashi doesn't know, been asleep these past two months. Mari has decided that tonight she doesn't want to be at home, she is going to spend the night awake, in the city. So half the book is following what Mari does on her night awake. This half is fine. I can't say I loved it or that it moveed me deeply, but it's a good little snippet of modern Japan in a way. The other half is the strange things that are happening to Eri. Her telly turns itself on despite being unplugged, and shows a strange large room, and suddenly she is in the room inside the telly, and bla bla bla. What this has to do with Mari's half of the story I don't really know. Was it necessary with all the mysterious stuff in order to weave a tale around these two sisters and their relationship? Mostly meh. I am also a bit distracted by the translation, which despite being good I suppose is much too American for me. The translator has opted for writing what I suppose to be Japanese everyday language as American ditto, so it's full of "what do ya think?" and "gonna". Hm.

Stieg Trenter: Aldrig Näcken

Jag minns inte vem det var som tyckte att jag borde läsa Stieg Trenter ... Eller borde och borde, jag tror vi pratade om deckare och Stieg Trenter nämndes som en klassiker… ja det kanske var att jag borde läsa honom då, eftersom han är en sådan klassiker. Så nu senast på det lokala biblioteket (förresten: ett bibliotek, men en bibbla. Eller hur?) plockade jag åt mig en som såg hyfsat gammal ut (enligt principen att de äldsta böckerna i en serie är de mest läsvärda), och som enligt kritikercitaten på omslaget var "det bästa han skrivit".

Nja.

Den här Trenterdeckaren är lite atypisk har jag förstått i det att det inte är hans hjälte Harry Friberg som är huvudperson, utan någon ung dambekant till den store mannen vid namn Eva nånting. Mattsson? Får väl hämta boken strax och kolla. Hon åker ut till en väninnas sommarställe för att hålla henne sällskap. Väninnan är gift med en mycket rik och svartsjuk man, en man som snart hittas död på en holme i närheten. Alla tycks ha alibin. Harry Friberg är som sagt mestadels frånvarande i boken, men närvarande i anden. Han kommunicerar med polisen (som har en sådan hög aktning för honom att det blir konstigt) och Eva via brev och telefon, och dyker upp på slutet för att röka cigarr tror jag det är och avslöja hela brottet.

Den har ett märkligt språk, som pendlar mellan slang - gammalmodig sådan - och ett ganska formellt språk. I synnerhet i dialogerna märks det, eftersom titulerandet lever och frodas. Samtidigt som han skriver dej och mej och som sagt lite slanguttryck som jag inte minns på rak arm nu, så frågas alltså om inte "Agda vill ha en smörgås" och dylikt. Så på sätt och vis illustrerar den väl väl en brytningstid i svensk kultur.Alla knaprar förresten tabletter hela tiden, vilket också är väldigt tidstypiskt. Leve de moderna lugnande medlen! Det är nästan så att jag undrar om författaren sponsrats av läkemedelsföretag ... Dialogerna kan för övrigt vara kvicka, vilket är skojigt. Trenter har lagt ner mycket möda på att beskriva naturen och miljön i den skärgård där boken utspelar sig. Det lär ju vara hans signum, fantastiska Stockholmsskildringar - här blir det naturskildringar då. Och jo, jag gillar ju sådant, det är ju det som är det roligaste med gamla deckare, att de ger en sådan god bild av ett svunnet samhälle, lite i förbigående sådär. Men men men… som ni märker är jag inte begeistrad. Den där Harry Friberg upplevs som en deus ex machina mer än något annat, och mordet sen! Suck. Ja ja, jag ska väl inte avslöja hur mördaren betedde sig med kroppen för att få den dit han ville, men jag tycker det är högst osannolikt att det inte skulle vara alldeles för lätt att avslöja.

Äsch, lite tråkigt mest. Jag blev inte så förtjust som jag hade hoppats. Jag kanske läser fler Trenters, men inte blir det för intrigernas skulle misstänker jag.

Kate Atkinson: When Will There Be Good News?

The third and so far last in Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series, as promised. Like I wrote before, I fell in love with the first one, was a little disappointed in the second - so I was fervently hoping that book three would bring us back to the form of book one. It does and it doesn't - it is more of a linear detective story than Case Histories, but it's not as knuckle-draggingly obvious crime fiction as One Good Turn... oh,knuckle-draggingly is perhaps a bit harsh, but I mean it just by the way of comparison, you understand. When Will There Be Good News has a lot more interesting characters and delves more into human sadness, yet it doesn't measure up to Case Histories. Maybe I just can't be surprised anymore, which means that Atkinson should abandon the crime fic project and find something else to wow me with... This is still a good novel though.

It takes place a few years after One Good Turn, when both Jackson and the DCI Louise Munroe have gotten married - not to each other, mind. Jackson accidentally (in both senses of the word) turns up in Edinburgh, and is roped in by the young girl who saves his life to help her find the woman she babysits for, who has disappeared with her son. This woman lost her family in a murder when she was a child, and has heroically created a new normal life for herself. The book compares her to another woman who is a victim of domestic violence, as Munroe wonders whether it's possible to let go of such a violent start and put it behind you, as Joanna Hunter seems to have done. And so it floats along, with no terribly surprising turns but some good character description - until the very end when we get two or three great little twists, one of them slipped in almost by the by. I did like it a lot. Recommended!

Dennis Lehane: A Drink Before the War

This is from the Kenzie-Gennaro series, about two private eyes in Boston. It's a lot about class, poverty, race - reminded me a bit about The Wire actually, but I think The Wire is better. This novel was a bit hero-worshipping, and I don't think it should have been. I mean it worshipped its heroes, even though the one is a philandering man and the other a woman who despite knowing better stays in an abusive relationship (which, btw, her partner does not report to the police). I can't say I didn't enjoy it, but it really wasn't Lehane at his best. Too hard-ball noir cool detective. Example:

I hung up and felt a slight swell of warmth in my chest, like hard liquor on a cold night before the bitter kicks in. With Bubba and devin around, I felt safer than a condom at a eunuchs convention.

One-liners galore. I'll probably read others from the series, but I was disappointed.

Story: Patrick Kenzie is approached by a politician to find his former office cleaning lady, who has disappeared with some "important documents". Turns out this is stretching the truth of course, and then there's a gang war with plenty of shooting. Ta-da!

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.