bwl 46 - June 2008
Fiction
| G W Dahlquist - The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters
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| An intriguing title; a large sprawling adventure in the current vogue for 19th century pastiche, this will either absorb you - or irritate you. This is the world of Ruritania - royalty, dastardly dukes, evil scientists, a beautiful villainess - and heroine - and a convoluted plot. Just keeping track of the action requires an agility worthy of an Alan Quartermain or Hannay. I am enjoying it all - I just wish I could remember who everyone is! (Ferelith Hordon)
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| Peter Ho Davies - The Welsh Girl
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| This was disappointing and never got going. It centres on a Welsh girl in the Second World War who crosses paths with drunken British soldiers and a German POW. There was another (very peripheral) storyline about Rudolf Hess and a German refugee interviewing him for British intelligence, but it was hard to see the relevance. Predictable in places, unbelievable in others, it was all a bit of a drag - I struggled to keep going. (Annie Noble)
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| Siobhan Dowd - Bog Child
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| Siobhan Dowd was one of the most interesting new writers for young adults to emerge in the last few years. Sadly she died in 2007. Set in the Ireland of the 1980s at the time of the Maze hunger strikes, Fergus prepares to leave school and struggles to make sense of his world where tragedy could be just round the corner. Excellent writing, lively characterisation and dialogue, this is a teen novel worth reading. (Ferelith Hordon)
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| Sebastian Faulks - Engleby
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| I found Engleby a curiously uneven book. It is in turn interesting, intriguing, amusing but pretentious and sometimes downright boring. Look out for Stelling's dinner party which will remind you of invitations before we all had the confidence to refuse them. We have all met Laura and Clarissa. The drawn out ending left me with a feeling of ambivalence - I don't know whether I enjoyed this book or not! (Judith Peppitt)
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| Patrick Gale - Notes from an Exhibition
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| This is the story of a family blessed, or perhaps cursed, by a mother who is both gifted artist and manic-depressive but who she really is or where she came from is a mystery which begins to unravel after she is found dead in her Cornish studio. This is one of those books which I raced through to discover what happened but when it was finished needed to read and savour all over again. (Jenny Baker)
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| Sophie Kinsella - Shopaholic Abroad
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| Becky, our heroine, goes her own lighthearted way without ever quite losing sight of life's realities, however she may stray from the straight and narrow her new bank manager has frowningly advocated. Girl-talk for girls of all ages but intelligent, aware and above all frivolous, for that moment in the bath or at the end of one's tether . . . virtual and vicarious shopping, what more does a girl want, especially in New York? (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Sophie Kinsella - Shopaholic and Baby
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| Becky, now married, finds shopping for two even better, why didn't she think of this before? . . . and, whoa, a pram is ideal for carrying packages - at least one for country, another for town. Well-written, surprisingly intelligent - a tonic for difficult moments or an afternoon dip, with its warm, if a little spoiled, attitude to life's lighter side . . . There's nothing like Becky for a holiday read for anyone fairly or very frivolous. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Sophie Kinsella - Shopaholic and SIster
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| Becky returns from ten months honeymooning AND shopping to discover she has a long-lost half-sister. At last she can share wardrobes and cosy chats with a kindred spirit, something she missed out on as an only child. But oh dear, it transpires her sister is a frugal intellectual. Becky mystified but undaunted, ploughs on nevertheless. Clever, entertaining with a serious undertone for those who look. Another gem for Becky fans - other ladies: try harder! (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
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| Forget the story (though it's an interesting one) but get to know Mikael Blonquist (disgraced journalist and ladies' man) and Lisbeth Salander (psychic case but brilliant hacker) because there are two more books to be published soon. And then you'll understand that unhappily for us this author died prematurely. . . (Laurence Martin Euler)
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| Rose Macaulay - The Towers of Trebizond
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| Laurie, young artist, breathlessly describes an imaginary journey largely taken along the southern Black Sea towns of Turkey, with her Aunt Dot on a camel, a retired High Anglican vicar named Canon Chantry-Pigg and a local doctor interpreter. Purpose of the journey: to convert Moslem-Turkish women to Christianity and enable them to escape the domination of their menfolk. A remarkable, witty, entertaining story with many comic episodes. (Jeremy Swann)
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| James Robertson - Joseph Knight
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| Sir John Wedderburn, a Scottish sugar planter exiled to Jamaica after Culloden, returned home after many years bringing with him his token slave, Joseph Knight, to serve him in perpetuity. But Knight rebelled and the resulting case became a cause célebre bitterly fought in the Edinburgh courts. In this fictional account, Knight remains a shadowy figure but Wedderburn and his family, the lawyers and historical figures like Boswell and Johnson are brought vividly to life. (Jenny Baker)
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| Danny Scheinmann - Random Acts of Heroic Love
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| This is really two stories. One is the effect on a young man of his girlfriend's death in a bus crash in Ecuador (made all the more poignant by a recent similar event); the other is the heroic journey across Russia made by his Grandfather during World War I. Extraordinarily, both stories are based on real events in the author's family. Although it dragged in places, this was a moving exploration of grief. (Annie Noble)
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| Mark Slouka - The Visible World
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| This vividly recreates Czechoslovakia during the German occupation and examines its ramifications over the next 30 years as those who experienced its horrors try to rebuild their lives. The centrepiece is the plot to assassinate Heydrich by partisans and a related tragic love story. The plot jumps across the decades, from Czechoslovakia to New York, and tracks a son's quest to understand his parents. It's a tremendously moving and atmospheric book, and is highly recommended. (Annie Noble)
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| John Updike - Terrorist
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| With his striking powers of observation the author savagely portrays post 9/11 America and a run-down district of New Jersey in which his chief character, young Islamic fanatic Ahmad, lives and works. The story inolves Ahmad's relations with his imam, his black Christian girl friend Joryleen, his Jewish career adviser and his Lebanese employer who manipulates him. A depressing yet dramatic story and I much admired Updike's masterly skill in telling it. (Jeremy Swann)
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Non-Fiction
| Wibke Bruhns - My Father's Country - The Story of a German Family
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| You know the dreadful conclusion from the beginning. Only 6 when her father was executed for his part in the 20 July Hitler assassination plot, this is Bruhns' painful, deeply moving account of his life and death. Her journalistic style, so full of often unanswered questions, might seem detached. It has the opposite effect, drawing us into the lives of a provincial German family and thereby revealing more about this turbulent period than many conventional histories. (Jeremy Miller)
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| Nora Ephron - I Feel Bad About My Neck - And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
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| Nora Ephron is an American writer famous for the script of "When Harry Met Sally" and is also an American woman of more than sixty. And even with all the American tricks (beauticians, personal trainers, coaches and/or botox) she knows the grief of the sagging neck against which apparently there's nothing you can do. . . but she manages to be as hilarious as she is profound. (Laurence Martin Euler)
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| Robert Fisk - The Age of the Warrior - Selected Writings
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| This latest book by The Independent's Middle East Correspondent contains 108 of his last five years' articles, giving us the unique opportunity to relive the immediacy of his evocative prose while reassessing, with hindsight, political and human events in the region. Heartrending, instructive, enlivened by Fisk's rare brand of wry humour and his objective but positive, if saddened, outlook on the world. Very personal, at times humbling, always at the cutting edge of life's experience. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Gunter Grass - Peeling the Onion
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| Peeling away the onion skins of memory, Grass re-discovers his own truth with fascinating results, not only his original musings on memory, choice and happenstance but his master story-teller's account of his life - boy soldier, miner, black marketeer, artist, poet, even musician - before finding an outlet for his experiences in novel-writing. And his move from incredulity ('Germans don't do this') to 'gnawing shame' over the Holocaust rings true. Impressive and unexpectedly (for me) very enjoyable. (Annabel Bedini)
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| Henry Hitchings - Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World
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| How one man found himself taking on the task of defining a language is a story worth the telling and this book does it justice. However, arranging the small-ish chapters under alphabetical headings that are themselves dictionary entries does seem to be taking the conceit a bit far! The enormity of the task Johnson set himself became more apparent as work progressed but the eventual impact of the finished work must have made it worthwhile. (Clive Yelf)
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| Jerry M Linenger - Off The Planet - Surviving five perilous months aboard the space station MIR
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| Space travel is like war with much boredom followed by frantic activity. Major fires, air full of anti-freeze, supply ships crashing into the hull and an alarm system in constant action and all this in what was in effect a thin-skinned floating junk room. Jerry writes like the all-American patriot/hero he is but the passion seems to flow from the frustrated efforts of the Russian crew to deal with their own ground-control and failing equipment. (Clive Yelf)
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| Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland - The Tiger That Isn't - Seeing through a world of numbers
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| A tiger? Or just sunlight on leaves? Numbers and statistics are not always what they seem and the authors use a clever mix of facts and stories to keep us amused and prove their case - that numbers can be used to inform or misinform, that we must be on our guard. Under deceptively simple chapter headings such as ' Size' or 'Chance' they give us the tools to help us judge for ourselves. (Wendy Swann)
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| Judy Parkinson - i before e (except after c) - old school ways of remembering stuff
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| If you like mnemonics and acronyms, enjoy pithy rhymes, have trouble with spelling words like brocolli (whoops, sorry, broccoli), confuse practise or practice, there or their, can't convert from imperial to metric, don't know the star signs, stumble at maths, then you'll love this book crammed with old-fashioned memory aids; though you might find that memorising some of the aids is even harder than trying to remember whatever it is you are trying to remember. (Jenny Baker)
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| The Pythons - The Pythons' Autobiography
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| To sum this book up how about 'Python swallowed in small chunks'? Take a significant event ('How did you get to university?') and transcribe the answer from an interview from each of the Pythons in turn - or in Chapman's case from existing documentation, friends or relatives. It works very well too, with the same incidents being recalled or interpreted in a myriad of revealing ways and with a candid and forthright approach from all concerned. (Clive Yelf)
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| David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
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| Hilarious book of autobiographical essays about angst, social pain and growing up in North Carolina and later, working in New York. The second half of the book details Sedaris's move to France with his boyfriend, Hugh. He still lives in France and I'm not sure if he speaks French yet. (David Fine)
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| Louis Theroux - The Call of The Weird - Travels in American Subcultures
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| In a surprisingly philosophical look at the nature of 'weirdness', Theroux revisits many of the individuals that featured in earlier television specials. The fact he maintained contact with many of them, even if he found the views they held repugnant, seems to be evidence of an empathetic rather than voyeuristic attitude on his part, a feeling reinforced when considering his own actions and motives. Behind weirdness is a complex person and that's what interests Theroux. (Clive Yelf)
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| Barbara Tuchman - The March of Folly - From Troy to Vietnam
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| Tuchman defines folly as 'the pursuit of policy contrary to self interest' and analyses the Renaissance Popes, British loss of America and the Vietnam war within this perspective. Originally published in 1984, her reasoning is eternally relevant - viz. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq - when despite enlightened contemporary warnings and common sense the dominant political psyche stubbornly pursues the line 'If it's patently not working, do more of it'. Absolutely (if depressingly) compelling! (Annabel Bedini)
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| Auberon Waugh - A Turbulent Decade - 1976-1985 - The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
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| It was these scurrilous diary entries that first led to my (still un-cancelled!) Private Eye subscription and re-reading them is a real trip back to a different country of half-remembered scandal and gossip-mongering. Waugh's acerbic wit offended many at the time but his turn of phrase and sometimes startling imagery reminded me of an embittered, reactionary Eddie Izzard with an underlying but well concealed morality. I was grateful for the numerous explanatory footnotes though. (Clive Yelf)
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| Feedback |
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Annie Noble writes:
I completely endorse the advice in the review of The Book Thief: " . . . read it now" (bwl 38). This is an extraordinary and memorable book, which is simply impossible to put down. Gut-wrenchingly sad yet uplifting: read it and weep. |
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Jenny Baker writes:
I'm often put off reading certain books because of all the hype and hearsay surrounding them and one of these was We Need to Talk about Kevin* by Lionel Shriver (bwl 29). The subject matter - lone American teenager goes on shooting rampage - seemed reason enough to avoid it. Well, I'm reading it now and yes, it is disturbing and shocking but at moments really funny and never less than compelling. Despite the awfulness of the story, from the very first page it has become one of those proverbial unputdownables.
*winner of the 2005 Orange prize |
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Jeremy Swann writes:
Although visitors to France this summer may well not notice it, the French are this year celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Napoleon III, Emperor of France from 1852 to 1870. For many years his reputation was subjected to strong attacks from Victor Hugo amongst others for his failure to equal the achievements of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte. However recently his record has undergone a reappraisal and historians have pointed out that he played an important part in helping to bring France up to the same level of development as other major European countries such as Britain.
Following France's defeat in 1870 which ended the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon went into exile and spent the rest of his life in England, where he had lived happily in his much earlier years. It is perhaps comparatively little known to British people that he and his wife, the Empress Eugénie, are both buried in England, at Farnborough (Hants), in the Imperial Crypt of the Benedictine Abbey there which is open to visitors.
Probably the best recent biography of Napoleon III is by Pierre Milza but this thick paperback does not appear to have been translated into English. On the other hand Amazon quotes an impressive list of books in English about Napoleon III in which English-only readers can read much more about this engaging, longtime underrated but important figure in 19th century French history.
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Annabel Bedini writes:
May I disagree with the reviewer of Sebastian Faulks' Engleby, bwl 46? Far from patchy and boring, I found it a coherent, credible and absolutely chilling exploration of an emotionally dysfunctional mind. (Faulks seems to be increasingly interested in the functioning of the human mind - see his Human Traces, bwl 33 - and it will be interesting to see where he goes next.) As for the infamous dinner party, to my mind it was the only moment of comedy in an otherwise bleak book.
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