This site will share with you hundreds of book and film reviews written since 2009. Also a chance to discuss these reviews together with some of my creative writing to be added.
A very clear and useful map for route planning, with the entire area on one side, which makes it easier to track a single route, although the whole map is quite large and has to be refolded continually. Larger scale maps at the bottom of the sheet for the main cities of Kaliningrad (not visited), Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn are also helpful e.g. for trip out of town from Vilnius to Trakai Castle. I also used the index in a form of a booklet including fifteen highlights, which are a good guide as to what to focus on during a visit of a week or two. The city street plans are useful for reaching central city hotels in e.g. Riga and Vilnius, including indication of one way systems. The languages of the Baltic states are so different from English that it is hard to match important landmark sites on the map up with the names used in English guide books The only other problem was that I had to remove the staples to separate out the booklet so I could use it more easily i.e. a small plastic pocket holder would have been more practical and worth a small extra cost.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Marco Polo Map (Baltic States) (Marco Polo Maps)
The harrowing blast of the opening sections on the Randall’s Georgia plantation rams home what it meant to be a slave in C19 America: a chattel to be bought, sold or abused on a whim, worked to death, favoured for a while before being discarded, publicly tortured and murdered as an example to others in the event of a failed escape attempt. The pecking order amongst the slaves is also revealed, with battles over the strips of land between huts, vital to grow extra food or keep a goat, the arrogance or bullying on the part of those emboldened by being in the boss’s favour, the general contempt for those too sick, crazed or weak to work.
The heroine Cora only survives abandonment as a child by her mother Martha because her reckless courage is taken by the other slaves as a form of insanity, meaning that she is best left alone. When conditions on the cotton plantation deteriorate even further, Cora is at last motivated to Martha, and escape with fellow-slave Caesar, who has made a vital contact enabling them to disappear on the “underground railway”.
The author’s decision to make this a real train on rails, rather than the network of support which it was in reality, has been described as a stroke of inventive genius. This device could serve to show the dramatic effect on Cora of being propelled rapidly into what is for her an unfamiliar and strikingly different world, although Colson Whitehead does not choose to make much of this aspect. It is a relief to have a break from the intense violence of the plantation. Yet the story of the real underground network is so interesting that it could have stood in its own right without the need for gimmicks or magic realism. I was irritated to be asked to suspend my disbelief: in the state of Georgia where so many were dedicated to capturing runaway slaves, how on earth could a real railway line have remained undetected over the years? Once located, the whole system would have been rendered redundant at a stroke. It would have been more challenging for the writer, also more engaging and fulfilling for the reader to witness Cora working her way across the States with the help of enlightened individuals, gradually learning about the world outside the plantation. Perhaps the worst effect of the invented railway line is that one can no longer judge what else may be purely a flight of Colson Whitehead’s imagination. I do not recall him providing a single date in the main text. The acknowledgements at the end are very scanty. I accept that creative writing can be applied to anything, but an important topic like the gradual process of abolition of slavery calls for a bit more grounding, if only in a solid appendix.
I was interested to see the differences between states without knowing how far they were based on truth: South Carolina seemed liberal, until it became clear that black women were being pressurised to accept sterilisation as a means of keeping the freed former slave population under control. North Carolina was more overtly brutal, with its chilling Friday sessions to hold public lynchings to provide exhibits for the sinister “Freedom Trail”. Even the apparent haven of a utopian community for ex-slaves in Indiana arouses the fear of white neighbours and resentment from those who have bought their freedom and feel threatened by others who have simply run away.
The narrative loses momentum after Cora’s first escape by rail, seeming to drift into the back stories of characters like Ridgeway, the driven slave-chaser who, having failed to track down Martha makes it his business to capture Cora. There is an odd digression into body-snatching which seems to have no connection with the rest of the novel. Characters are generally two-dimensional, the storyline sometimes disjointed and dialogues artificial, used as a means of informing the reader rather than communicating in convincing “voices”.
Perhaps this brutal tale will make most impact on readers who come to it with little or no prior knowledge of the appalling injustice of slavery. The novel appears to have been somewhat over-hyped, but at least it inspired me to research further online about, for instance, Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who risked her life leading others to freedom.
⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars
The Underground Railroad: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017
Written during the prolonged period of mourning for her husband Modou, as required by Islam, Ramatoulaye’s lengthy letter to her lifelong friend Aïssatou is perhaps never intended to be sent. Containing so many descriptions of events with which Aïssatou is already only too familiar, the letter seems to be in fact a device for a series of reflections on the role of women in Senegal in the 1970s, when the book was first published.
Both originally marrying for love contrary to normal custom, the two Senegalese women have suffered in common the humiliation of their middle-aged husbands’ decisions to take a nubile young second wife, taking advantage of the Muslim encouragement of polygamy. Yet the two friends’ responses have been very different: walking out with her four sons, Aïssatou forges a new career and independent life; despite her education and confidence when talking to a distinguished old flame on equal terms, Ramatoulaye swallows her pride and hangs on, for reasons she gradually explains. After more than two decades of motherhood, her body and looks have been ruined by the birth of twelve children many of whom still depend on her maternal care, she likes her home, perhaps she is partly to blame for her husband’s roving eye, and besides, she still loves him.
Although it is clear why Mariama Bâ Is so highly regarded as an African female writer whose work is widely studied, as a Western C21 woman I find it hard to know how to read it. To what extent is Ramatoulaye meant to be a passive foil to her friend, reflecting the typical attitudes of women born around 1930, socially conditioned to accept a subservient, domesticated back seat role? Despite divorcing her own husband, to what extent was Mariama Bâ with her nine children herself a model for Ramatoulaye? The latter is portrayed as conventional in her attitudes. In a society strongly conditioned by “caste”, natural jealousy of her young “co-wife” Binetou is mixed with contempt for the girl’s low birth, and of her mother’s vulgar eagerness to gain status and material goods through the marriage. Following the custom of having a “griot” or “storyteller” attached to the family, Ramatoulaye tolerates the frequent company of a gossip-peddling fortune teller who interferes in her personal life.
As Ramatoulaye dribbles out the details of her marriage in a somewhat disjointed fashion, often leaving tantalising gaps as to how exactly she makes ends meet or juggles child care with some shadowy career, I became somewhat bored with a situation which seems to have been explained in essence with no sign of developing further. Appearing to have “lost its way”, the novel lapses into a series of cues for didactic reflections on marriage, motherhood and family which might fit better in an essay, or a Sunday colour supplement slot. The appeal of her flowing, almost poetical prose, apparently based on the Senegalese tradition of storytelling, tends to mask the fact that her reflections often seem like platitudes to a Western reader. Perhaps they would have appeared more radical when the book was first published.
I was disappointed by the tendency to stereotype: man are egotistical and often easily manipulated; mothers-in-law are scheming or materialistic, yet the married wives, often wronged, have the monopoly of integrity and endurance
Admittedly, the final pages are given a fillip with some tongue-in-cheek accounts of Ramatoulaye’s attempts to deal with her teenage children. She tends to take the line of least resistance, realising that it is often best to be pragmatic and accept, say, a daughter’s unplanned pregnancy by harnessing the good will of the student who has caused it. Yet when she tries to redress her previous failings as a mother by telling three of her other daughters the facts of life, she senses from their bored reaction that they know them already – or think that they do.
Mariam Bâ is strong on dialogue, which makes it all the more of a pity that so many events are “reported” to the reader. There are also some inconsistent shifts in point of view, as when Ramatoulaye enters the mind of the mother-in-law obsessed by the shame of Aïssatou’s low birth as a mere jeweller’s daughter, which she resolves to counter by grooming a niece as a genteel second wife for her spineless son.
On balance, I liked the sudden digression into a vivid description, the odd sharp insight, the almost soap opera bubbles of family anecdote. If Ramatoulaye appears essentially hidebound, she is capable of occasional flashes of independence as when she rejects an eligible suitor, an old flame who ironically wants to take her as a second wife.
Little does Parisian Herman foresee the repercussions of his fateful decision to stay on an extra day past August 31st in the village where he is accustomed to spend the summer holidays with wife Rose and small son. A landscape he has only ever seen under sunny blue skies is obscured at once under freezing rain and mist which he realises will be the permanent state of the weather until the holiday season comes round again. Beneath the unfailing politeness and smiles of the locals, the women all conforming to the local tradition of tightly-laced bodices with coloured ribbons denoting the length of marriage, Herman observes for the first time the coldness of their stares. He has outstayed his welcome, which was strictly confined to the summer when tourists are valued only as a source of income. In his attempt to find his wife and son who have mysteriously disappeared, the once confident, dynamic urban professional is sapped of his energy and motiviation, unable to find the will to leave a place where he can never really fit in. The ultimate sad irony is that, far from being a refuge from materialistic, corrupt city life, the villagers are no better in this respect.
Related in a deadpan, convoluted, subjunctive-laden prose which sounds like poetry when read aloud, this modern fable becomes progressively more surreal. Precise in the choice of words, but farcical in content, this did not engage me strongly with the characters. It is quite hard to sympathise with Herman and his wife in their different forms of apathy, one wants to shake them, but perhaps this is not the point in what seems a larger scale attempt to question the norms and values of modern French life. The novella is original, and an interesting inversion of the idea of a Paris denuded of its population as people pile on to the autoroutes for a summer holiday in picturesque villages, never thinking about the effects of their invasion, or what these place are like the rest of the year. However, having made her point, Marie Ndiaye lets the story ramble and drag, struggling to a climax which proves a damp squib, the whimper of an ending feeling like a cop-out.
Apart from the practice gained by reading this in French, I found it overlong and rather dull.
Is genuine friendship possible between Indians and the British under colonial rule? Spelt out at both beginning and end, this is the question underlying a novel which, although quite dated, with some arguably stereotyped characters, remains relevant for a vivid portrayal of India, helping us to understand its present state, and also for the exploration of complex human relationships.
Naïve and idealistic, Adela Quested, who has come to India to decide whether or not to marry the young City Magistrate Ronnie Heaslop, is desperate to see the “real” India (not just be fobbed off with elephants). She also dislikes the character traits her fiancé is beginning to display. “His self-complacency, his censoriousness, his lack of subtlety, all grew vivid beneath a tropical sky”.
Keen to please, although quite critical of his colonial masters “who take and do nothing”, Doctor Aziz offers to take Adela with her future mother-in-law, Mrs Moore, on an excursion to the caves in the Malabar Hills. This leads to a bizarre incident with far-reaching repercussions, symbolising the lack of understanding and ultimate gulf between the two groups, British and Indian. Confusion as to what really occurred in the Malabar Caves is inevitable since Forster himself admitted that his mind was a “blur” on the subject, but this does not really matter since it is not fundamental to the book.
Having observed first-hand the insensitivity and arrogance of British administrators and their wives, E.M. Forster is scathing in his portrayal of them. Despite his obvious empathy, the Indians are not spared either. Aziz is ashamed of his filthy lodgings, but fails to insist that his servants remove the flies, their excuse being there is no point since they will only return. Obsequious and self-absorbed, Professor Godbole’s spiritualty seems bogus, when he shows no sympathy for the plight of Aziz, perhaps falsely accused of a crime, but appears more concerned over the choice of name for the schools he plans to establish in his new post.
Laugh-out loud comedy tinged with poignancy is used very effectively to show the continual misunderstandings caused by cultural differences. Aziz impulsively insists on lending his collar stud to his new friend Fielding, only to be disparaged behind his back by Ronnie for the way “the worthy doctor’s collar climbed up his neck” because of his “inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race”. On the train to Malabar, Adela and Mrs Moore are surprised to see the butler emerging from the carriage toilet with poached eggs. More of these are planned for their arrival, together with mutton chops, since Aziz is under the impression that English people eat all the time, so will need substantial refreshment every two hours.
Places are not romanticised either as Forster writes of the squalor and “abased, monotonous mud”. Although mysterious when viewed from the city by twilight, even the Malabar Hills lose their appeal close at hand: “Bland and bald rose the precipices; bland and glutinous the sky….a Brahmany kite flapped with a clumsiness which seemed intentional”. In another incident, “A grassy slope bright with butterflies.. purple hills in the distance” sound pleasant, but there is a sting in the final phrase: “The scene was as park-like as England, but did not cease being queer”. In other words, the Anglo-Indians could not help judging the landscape by what was familiar to them.
Rereading the book, I was impressed by the originality of E.M. Forster’s approach. In his attempts to capture the atmosphere of the Malabar caves which created such confusion in Adela’s mind or the ceremonies at the Hindu temple in Mau, the tone become almost surreal. What sometimes seems like a patronising parody of the latter made me uneasy, but it is offset by the sense of mysticism which only a few of the British, like Mrs Moore or her children Ralph and Stella can begin to comprehend. It is interesting that none of these three is fully developed as a character, perhaps to maintain the mystical element. On somewhat shaky grounds, Mrs Moore becomes a revered symbol of wisdom, a kind of modern goddess in Indian memory, perhaps reflecting how this has happened through the ages.
What was to prove Forster’s last novel took years to complete, as he struggled to achieve what he wished to be his final masterpiece. Although I found many passages brilliant, his experimentation at times falls short, as in the use of a stilted turn of phrase (allowing for the fact that language has changed over a century), or when an important point is introduced too abruptly in a staccato sentence, creating a disjointed effect. Forster appears on the “cusp” of the early 1900s, as he switches from lapses into flowery “Oh reader!” Victorian-style passages to astute, sharp prose which could have been written now. Reaching its court-room climax two-thirds of the way through, the narrative seems to drift after that but on reaching the end I felt the construction of the story is quite effective and certainly stays in the mind breeding fresh thoughts long afterwards.
Middle-aged, reclusive warden for an Appalachian Forest Service, Deanna is unable to resist the charms of the young hunter Eddie Bondo, although she suspects that his chief motive is to claim the bounty for shooting the coyotes thought to have migrated into the area, creatures it has become her obsession to keep concealed and protect. Sexual attraction has led city-bred Lusa to abandon her budding career as a research biologist to become the wife of Cole, a down-to-earth farmer in rural Zebulon County, where she feels oppressed by the suspicion and narrow-minded prejudices of his family and driven to bicker with him over their different attitudes to nature: like Deanna, she is interested in how coyotes have come to migrate two thousand miles from the Grand Canyon, whereas he is more concerned about the intrusion of meat-eating animals on the local dairy farms. Thirdly in the three interwoven story threads which we know will eventually converge, old Garnett Walker conducts a feud with Nannie Rawley “his nearest neighbour and the bane of his life” who sabotages his attempts to control the weeds on his lands with pesticides. Having lost the past family wealth from the American chestnut woods now lost to blight, he labours at the painstaking process of cross-pollinating replacement trees with stock from China, to re-establish a resistant strain. n.b. I’m interested by the Goodreads review from a male reader who felt that the men in the story are stereotyped and portrayed unfairly as less in touch with ecosystems than women, and more guilty of trying to control nature.
Trained as a biologist before becoming a writer, Barbara Kingsolver brims over with a knowledge of the natural world, much apparently based on personal observation, impressive for a city dweller, and thought-provoking – as for the idea that that pesticides may only cause bugs to multiply, by also killing indiscriminately the creatures which prey upon them. I soon found this novel an absorbing page turner, with vivid descriptions, a range of interesting, distinctive characters, by turns poignant and wrily humorous – the kind of story one tries to read more slowly in the vain attempt to take in all the bubbling brew of ideas and information, and which one feels sorry to end.
Yet at the same time, the author’s primary aim to show how the primal force to reproduce drives everything – insect, bird, beast and man – often leads to an almost farcical plethora of examples. It feels at times like reading a biology text book masquerading as a literary Mills & Boon, often too overblown, wordy, corny and contrived for my taste, as when Lusa tries to bond with her prickly ten-year-old niece, or when Deanna, unexpectedly tracked down by Eddie, launches into the analysis that he has been guided by her pheromones: “I’m fertile, that’s what got to you……I sleep outside a lot..I’m on the same schedule as the moon”. This prompts Eddie to say “So back in the old days, when they slept on the ground around the fire, wrapped up in skins….You’re saying all the women in the world came into heat at the same time?” This conversation takes place as the pair “stomp down” on puffballs “releasing a cloud of spores that rose and curled like golden brown smoke, glittering in the sunlit air between them. Sex cells, they were, a mushroom’s bliss, its attempt to fill the world with its mushroom progeny.”
The novel repays rereading, perhaps after an elapse of time. Sincere and “heart-warming”, carefully thought out to trigger reflection on man’s place in nature, it would have been a technically better novel if pruned down but perhaps it was the author’s intention to create a cornucopia of words and ideas.
What at first seems like memories of a childhood spent in a Congolese orphanage gradually becomes more surreal, proving by the end to be a kind of fable. A savage indictment of the brutal, corrupt, superstition-ridden and hypocritical regime of Congo-Brazzaville, it employs irony, farce and imaginative, no-holds-barred verve to make its point. The narrator Moses, nicknamed “Little Pepper” for his unorthodox method of dealing with a couple of bullies, befriends a fellow pupil called Bonaventure in the orphanage that mirrors the failings of the wider society of which they are both victims. Whereas Moses becomes more aggressive over time, pursuing a life of crime in order to survive, Bonaventure remains naïve and detached, yet both are eventually judged mad in a crazy world.
The novel has an authentic ring, perhaps because the author grew up in Pointe-Noire, the coastal town he describes so vividly. I like the flights of fancy as when Mabanckou reels off a list of particular food preferences by region, each deplored by all the rest: the Lari eat caterpillars, the Vili adore shark, the Tékés go for dog, and the northern tribes consume crocodile, despite regarding the reptile as sacred. Later on, the author’s imagination runs riot with various remedies supplied by a local healer to cure Petit Piment’s mental problems: cricket’s urine, green mamba’s blood, toad’s saliva, elephant hair mixed with kaolin and sparrow droppings.
I found the style hard-going at times: initially slow-paced, with too much repetition and explanation of events in somewhat unrealistic dialogues as when, sent to the school infirmary to give Moses his medication, assistant Sabine Niangui launches into a lengthy, intimate description of her early life. Events often seem disjointed, and new characters tend to be introduced too abruptly only to disappear as suddenly. Together with the casual violence and frank approach to bodily functions, this may reflect the reality of an orphan’s life, or the general state of affairs in the Congo, but the very prolific Mabanckou does not seem to have the time or inclination to fine-tune his work. Towards the end it is as if he has lost interest in the story, bringing it to a rapid, neatly contrived yet also open-ended conclusion.
Some may enjoy the picaresque inventiveness, but having made its point about the Kafka-meets-1984 state of the Congo, it did not hold my interest, as anything more than an opportunity to practise reading in the original French.
This is an unusual take on the shocking theme of America’s last public lynching in 1930, immortalised in Billie Holliday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit”. The author explores in turn the experiences of three women whose paths cross fleetingly on the evening of the atrocity. Forming a menacing background theme, the lynching is never explicitly portrayed, often seeming oddly secondary to the preoccupation with the personal lives of the two main characters Ottie and Calla. Both are feisty, damaged by dysfunctional childhoods yet on opposite sides of the racial divide.
Ottie is a sassy young secretary who indulges her lecherous boss to boost her pay cheque and has a troubled relationship with her husband, connected with events from her childhood which gradually become apparent. The trio’s whisky-sodden attempt to join the herd travelling to the misnamed town of “Marvel” for the lynching as a kind of casual spectator sport takes on the quality of a bizarre Odyssey. which seems at times like a nightmarish version of the Coen brothers’ “Oh brother where art thou”. Ottie suppresses her sense of unease over the lynching to the point of encouraging the hijack of a cornflowers’ cart to get there. This is the peculiar, incongruously sweet choice of a name for black Americans as opposed to “cornsilks” for whites, or “cornroots” for American Indians.
Orphaned as a child, taken in by a couple on sufferance, torn between her affection for two men, Calla channels some of her personal violent anger into defiant rage over the lynching to the point of taking action, however futile, to prevent people from attending it. One of the most convincing scenes is her perverse desire to “stamp into the ground”, even shoot, the one white person who shows her kindness. She is enraged by the inadequacy of his statement that the lynching is “just plain wrong”. For her, it is “a thousand miles from what needed saying….what a cornsilk needed to do was just keep his kindly mouth stapled shut”: the honest prejudice of his mother seems preferable. This section reaches the strongest conclusion in the novel.
By contrast, the viewpoint of Sallie, a brain-damaged local white woman with mystical powers provides a short, inconclusive postscript.
“The Evening Road” evokes the sense of 1930s inward-looking small town America where the superficial cosiness of catfish suppers at the church is warped by ordinary people’s unthinking acceptance of slavery’s racist legacy, of sexism and the drowning of guilty sorrows in whisky, a reaction against the unrealistically oppressive prohibition of hard liquor.
Despite its striking metaphors (hell-poker hot) and visual images , this novel comes across as an over-contrived exercise in creative writing. Deliberately surreal and evading the norms of structure, it appears too fragmented and rambling, with details only half-revealed at random, threads allowed to drift away, characters half-developed and unengaging, overall a kind of verbal “modern art”. I read on in the hopes of some resolution or revelation which never came and did not feel any insight gained in the process.
Set in Bristol against the backdrop of unsettling news about the French Revolution in which idealism turns so quickly to extreme violence, the central character Lizzie Tredevant steers a course between two different worlds. On one hand she has learned to be unconventional, unmaterialistic and free-thinking from Julia Hawkes, her radical blue-stocking mother and a talented pamphleteer on human rights. On the other, she is drawn largely by sexual attraction to John Diner Tredevant, a clever and competent self-made man who has battled his way out of poverty to become a successful property developer. The widower of a French woman, he is much quicker than Julia and her idealistic companions to see the ethical flaws in a revolution which brutally guillotines anyone who happens to be an aristocrat, priest, or sympathiser of the old system. He also appreciates how political and economic uncertainty jeopardise the Bristol housing boom and his debt-laden dream of constructing a grand terrace on the edge of the Clifton gorge, which forms a dramatic backdrop to the story.
Julia, step-father Augustus and family friend Hannah have all advised against her marrying Diner, who in turn does not hide his contempt for what he sees as their naïve theories and practical incompetence: “They tear down the Bastille, but can they build it again? Augustus would not be able to put a roof on a doll’s house…. Can he turn a lathe?…. Can he lay a flagstone floor? No, he depends upon those who can. He is as much a guest in the world as a three-year-old child”. Gradually, her loyalty to Diner is strained by his controlling behaviour, and her curiosity about the French wife she is afraid to ask him about develops into fear over a secret which he may be concealing.
Helen Dunmore knows how to structure a story with a double hook at the beginning: the mystery of a long-dead woman writer who really existed but left no trace of her work, and the reasons why a man is burying a woman’s body in a woodland clearing on the opposite side of the Avon Gorge from Clifton. She develops complex characters and relationships, although the poet Will Forrest is a little too good to be true, with a strong sense of time and place particularly evocative for those who know Bristol – it is intriguing to imagine Clifton as a raw building site surrounded by countryside. The narrative drive drags a little at times, but builds up to a gripping if slightly contrived, borderline melodramatic conclusion. This is a very readable work of popular literary historical fiction.
Antenna Reviews 