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.
With many colourful illustrations, this serves as an attractive souvenir of the BBC series, although the DVD is obviously better. The chapters themed by chronological time periods provide much intriguing information if you have the time and patience to tease it out of the somewhat rambling text: the followers of the Jain religion who gather annually to pour "great vats of milk, paste, saffron and vermilion over the giant statue" of their guru Babuballi; the ruler Ashoka, advised that he had to be "cruel to be great", who converted to Buddhism in later life, leaving his kingdom scattered with carved pillars instructing his subjects on how to live as he removed the death penalty, calling for the conservation of forests and respect for the beliefs and practices of others and so on.
I was looking for a book that would combine history with culture and politics, but to be fair this does not claim to be more than a history. With friends and contacts to ease his path, Wood presents a somewhat rose-tinted view of India: the squalor, dirt and pollution are cunningly omitted from all his pictures, and the ancient monuments and paintings gleam with colour, with little sign of the ravages of time. If you are reading this for a standard sightseeing tour, you may be a little disappointed by the often harsh and worn reality.
After spending more than two hours trying to absorb the twelve rooms of the Royal Academy’s impressive Autumn 2013 exhibition on Australia, I realised that there is a strong case for obtaining the official guide which covers the totality of exhibits, giving you time to digest at leisure the portrayal of Australian landscape and culture through paintings and photographs.
The official symbol of this striking exhibition is Sidney Nolan’s dramatic portrayal of the outlaw Ned Kelly, dehumanised by his helmet, rectangular and silhouetted in black, with only the sky visible through the visor. Yet, for me, the major discovery was the power and skill of Aboriginal art, initially applying to eucalyptus bark natural pigments of black, red, ochre and white in surprisingly sophisticated cross-hatchings to imitate sandhills, rivers, wildlife, dreams of rain and ancient legends. More recently, native artists have progressed to acrylic on canvas, whilst retaining their traditional themes, which have also been taken up and reinterpreted by the European artists who have settled in Australia.
I was also interested to see how movements such as impressionism and romanticism were developed in the late C19 to early C20 in a distinctive Australian style, influenced by the quality of the unrelenting and brilliant sunlight and the nature of the vegetation, the fronds giving rise to “fernomania” and the varieties of gum tree, relatively sparse-leaved but with branches forming strong patterns. European painters fell in love with the country, like Glover who painted a carefully tended and irrigated flower garden against the background of the natural bush.
Fascinating social history is revealed through the work of early convicts with an artistic bent, or McCubbin’s giant, moving tryptych of “The Pioneer”, arriving in a wagon, working with his wife to establish a holding, until she dies, leaving him to tend her grave. We see the colourful crowd on Manly Beach in 1913 after public bathing had been permitted, the confident “squatter’s daughter” in the 1920s. surveying in the brilliant sunshine the open woodland probably created by generations of aborigines following the practice of using fire to reduce the vegetation, and to bring it up to date, Howard Arkley’s luminously bright rendition of a prosperous suburban house, “Superb and Solid”.
Although there may be some justice in the charge that it would have been better to show more work by fewer artists, this begs the question of which one would choose. As it is, we are given a useful overview of the whole gamut of Australian art, leaving us to pick out and pursue what appeals to us as individuals.
This impressive American "debut" novel must have flowered from the diverse influences of growing up with book-loving bohemian parents in a tough working-class suburb, dropping out of school to gain raw experiences but somehow getting to college, avidly reading Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf, and carrying first-hand research to the extent of riding freight trains and interviewing men on trial for murder.
Set against the backdrop of the crumbling American dream, as foreign competition knocks the heart out of once thriving steel-making towns, Meyer explores the drama of an unlikely friendship: on one hand, puny and eccentric but brilliant Isaac English, haunted by his mother's suicide and burdened by the task of caring for his cranky invalid father, on the other athletic but indolent Poe who has thrown away the chance to train as a football champion. Both share a confused desire to escape the depressed backwater of Buell, mixed with inertia and a love of the area's natural beauty. When one commits a serious crime, acting on impulse to save the life of the other, who will be blamed and with what outcomes?
After a dramatic opening, the story slips into a slow-paced cycle round the inner thoughts of six linked characters: Isaac, his favoured sister Lee who has managed to escape to Yale and a wealthy marriage, his crippled father Henry, Poe, his long-suffering mother Grace and Harris, the local police chief who fancies her, himself a survivor of the Vietnam war. Sometimes, Isaac's streams of consciousness become too obscure and tedious, the boozy sex between Grace and Harris a little repetitive, the minor scenes, as when Lee or Harris is socialising, too corny or banal. The strongest charge is that the denouement seems a little rushed and underdeveloped compared with the rest, although I liked the upbeat but open ending. Yet overall, this is gripping, with sufficient tension and unresolved drama to keep you reading in the belief that Meyer is ruthless enough to opt for tragedy, although it will never be unrelieved.
Less ambitious and "epic" than its successor "The Son", for me, "American Rust" is a technically better novel since the structure is tighter and the characters are more fully developed and therefore you care about their fate, with the possible exception of Lee who is the only one who might be regarded as successful, which perhaps is perhaps intentional on Meyer's part.
A good choice for a reading group as there is so much to discuss, it bridges the blurred gap between literary and popular fiction.
This quirky biography of Flaubert wrapped up in an eccentric almost plot-free novel from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Braithwaite, an uptight retired English doctor obsessed with the French author is unusual, often amusing and, as some reviewers have commented, at times too clever by half.
If I had not read in French "Madame Bovary" and "Un Coeur Simple", I would have found it much harder to appreciate this book, which further restricts an appeal already limited by its status as a "literary novel".
I have learned a good deal about Flaubert, which I wish I had known when studying him for A Level decades ago, only no doubt his penchant for whores, young foreign boys and smutty jokes would have been considered unsuitable by my teacher. I can see that he was an original and truly independent thinker, probably still don't quite grasp the contribution he made to the modern novel, but do not find him very likeable as a person. He comes across as immature and opinionated at times, perhaps because his epilepsy isolated him, although he seemed to think he needed to be set apart, an observer looking on, to be able to write.
With his quicksilver intellect, Julian Barnes lets slip in passing a host of fascinating details and anecdotes. Flaubert wished he could afford to burn every copy of the very successful but deemed scandalous Madame Bovary. Did he mean it? Flaubert was bothered by his tendency to use metaphors. Was the famous parrot one of these and, if so, was it meant to be a symbol of the writer's voice, his obsession with "the Word"? Sartre, in what I find a surprisingly intense desire to attack Flaubert, rebuked him for, as Barnes cleverly puts it, being the "parrot/writer" who "feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert".
Barnes's mouthpiece Braithwaite lambasts the critic who claimed that Flaubert was so careless about the outward appearance of his characters that he gave Emmma Bovary three different eye colours: deep black, brown and blue. Instead, he shows how Flaubert subtly described her eyes in different lights and situations. Barnes uses some entertaining devices, such as three different versions of the chronology of Flaubert's life, the first very positive, the second negative, the third a series of striking quotations from different years of his life – or I think it is, but it's hard to know when Barnes is quoting and when he is making things up, which the novel format permits him to do.
I particularly liked the chapter written from the viewpoint of Flaubert's longsuffering mistress Louise Colet, who seemed to want to be his wife rather than his Muse and confidante, although she must have had "better offers". In the excellent chapter, "Pure Story", the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite explores with great poignancy his relationship with his wife, managing in the process to draw comparisons with Madame Bovary.
Although I found some of the middle chapters tedious and rambling to little purpose, the book contains so many sharp insights it deserves to be kept and read more than once.
In a remote unnamed English hamlet at an unspecified location and time, somewhere around the 1600s, perhaps, the "accidental" burning of the master's dovecotes is blamed on a family of squatters. The ensuing chain of disastrous events plays out against the long-term tragedy of the inexorable forces of change, by which common land, felled woodland and cornfields are to be enclosed for sheep-farming, destroying in the process a stable community in which everyone has a place.
The sustained sense of tension makes this a page turner, even though I suspected the ending would be a will-o-the-wisp. Suspense combined with Crace's striking, original, often poetical language carries you along almost too quickly. You need to read more slowly, or more than once, to grasp the full force of his prose.
Narrator Walter Thirsk's insight and articulate flow of words is explained by a connection since childhood with kindly but weak Master Kent. In what proves a type of fable or morality tale, Thirsk symbolises the human flaw of good intentions rarely put into practice. He may also be an unreliable narrator, lying even to himself at times over the degree of his devious self-interest.
Crace captures the spirit of a lost way of life without glamorising it. Some wry snatches of humour and sharp character studies add spice to the tale. "Harvest" highlights the danger and skin-deep nature of civilisation in rural England, where "might was right", and a landowner could punish and mistreat tenants with impunity. Crace conveys a poignant sense of loss over the destruction of the harmony of people working together, as in the remarkable description of the harvest in the opening pages, and of their deep knowledge and appreciation of nature. At the same time, we are not spared the harsh reality of "Turd and Turf", the filth and hardship of daily life.
Although I would have liked a stronger dramatic conclusion to this tightly plotted tale, Crace is not concerned to impress us with a final twist. The terms "hallucinatory" and "hypnotic" used by professional reviewers are very apt. Claimed to be the last book in a highly regarded body of work, this deserves its place on the Man Booker shortlist.
Aged nineteen, Mazarine Pingeot was "outed" by Paris Match as the illegitimate daughter of French president François Mitterrand and his long-term mistress. Now a journalist and writer, Pingeot has milked this drama in "Bouche Cousue" or "Lips Sealed", a memoir of her childhood inspired by her first pregnancy, and, more recently, in "Bon Petit Soldat".
There are moving descriptions of the strain of living a lie, being unable to tell school-friends who her father really was, thereby crushing her own identity. Although loved by her parents, she describes her childhood repeatedly as living in a bubble, protected yet also cut off from the "real" world. When she saw her father making speeches on the television, he seemed like a double of the person she knew. She recalls the loneliness of the dark state apartment when her parents were out at work. There was companionship with the ever present body guards but, once a teenager, escaping them became one of the few acts of rebellion open to her without giving herself away thereby damaging her father's reputation.
Some of the most poignant passages cover his death which came soon after the exposure of the truth. She began to read biographies, finding it difficult to come to terms with the existence of a man very different in early life from how she knew him, by then old enough to be her grandfather. With great frankness she explores complex emotions: was she hidden from the world out of shame or a desire to conceal something precious; should she hate him for this concealment and the fact that she was thrown into the world of media attention, often critical, just when she was still too immature and unsure of herself to cope?
The omission of such important factors as how her parents formed their relationship when Mitterrand was still married to the formidable Danielle, the lack of speculation about his "other family", may be a deliberate attempt to present details from a child's perspective. In addition to the dating of chapters with days of the month but not years for context, what really annoys me is the style. Disjointed and artificial, it often feels like a series of exercises in writing, such as the continual addressing of her thoughts to her unborn child.
She seems blind to certain factors. For instance, she refers several times to her unmaterialistic and principled upbringing, but never comments on how Mitterrand housed and protected mistress and daughter at the public's expense and was judged after his death of being guilty of misusing anti-terrorist laws to tap the telephones of those who might expose his daughter's identity.
Mazarine seems perhaps understandably damaged by the secrecy of her upbringing. She comes across as obsessed with it, bitter, self-absorbed, neurotic. She claims to be unable to remember certain things, but one senses that she is, perhaps unconsciously, glossing over inconvenient details which destroy the image of an idyllic if constrained "bulle" in which she enjoyed a special bond with her father, her mother often portrayed as playing second fiddle.
Elif Shafak is a born storyteller, who knows how to hook the reader in a first chapter which ends, "He is my brother. He, a murderer". Although appearing to give so much away early on must detract from some of the dramatic power of later events – you could also argue this gives you the thrill of anticipation – a few red herrings and twists are left to the end.
I do not mind that the story of Turkish Adem Toprak, damaged sins-of-the-father style, and his beautiful Kurdish wife, Pemba Kader, or "Pink Destiny", flits between multiple viewpoints over five decades, but accept that this may confuse some readers. The author often seems to digress, caught up in her own fertile imagination, but most characters and incidents have some bearing on the complex plot which proves to have been carefully thought through. For instance, the forbidden lover Elias, a man of great tolerance, moderation and adaptability, symbolises the ability to survive in any culture since he does not belong to a particular one.
The scenes in Kurdish villages near the Euphrates are too unfamiliar for me to assess their authenticity, but I was convinced by the portrayal of a community held together by superstition and tradition which also have the power to destroy those who do not conform. The folktale aspect which Shafak likes to employ, a world of ghosts, spells, binding customs, unbending beliefs and unlikely coincidences is easier to accept in rural Turkey.
The culture shock of the Toprak family's move to London is well drawn, although too many of the sub-plots struck me as unrealistic with weakly developed or stereotyped characters: Roxana in the Chinese gambling den, Iskender's English girlfriend Katie, Yunus's escapades with the squatters – it seems implausible he is only seven, but I suppose at a more realistic ten plus he might be too old to share a room with his sister Esma.
With fewer characters and incidents to distract the reader, there might have been the space to develop the core of the book: the nature of honour in different societies and its implications, particularly for women in intensely male-dominated communities.
The author does not shrink from scenes of great cruelty, nor from the tragedy of misunderstandings and lack of communication, yet the story is saved from harrowing bleakness by her humour and warmth – which occasionally becomes a little too cloying for my taste. The soft centre irked me, as this potentially powerful book winds to a somewhat subdued anticlimax. Some passages are so insightful – for instance, the casual way British people say, "It's a shame" – that I wished the author had spent a little time editing weaker patches – continuity errors, cringe-making dialogue, etcetera – to make this a great piece of literature (like "Life and Fate" or "A Fine Balance") as well as a "good read".
In this complex, slow-burn psychological thriller, when gorgeous, provocative and probably mentally unstable Eliane sets her cap at decent young car mechanic and part-time fireman "Ping-Pong", you know it will not end well. As the viewpoint switches, mainly between these two characters, Eliane's motives are revealed, the desire for vengeance over a past wrong, but this is a tale of misunderstandings, twists and fateful coincidences which do not fall into place until the final pages.
I agree with reviewers who have found this excellent, although it may take a while for you to appreciate its cleverness – many of the apparently irrelevant fine details prove significant in the end. Apart from building up the tension to a point when you cannot put the book down, Japrisot contrives to create sympathy for all the characters, and to present a vivid picture of life in a small French town where people know each other's business, filling doorsteps and windows along the way to watch Eliane and Ping-Pong as they set off for their first date. The main characters are strongly drawn, with realistic, changing emotions and reactions, in, for instance, Eliane's relationships with Ping-Pong and his two very different brothers. The one weak link for me is Eliane's former school mistress whom I found unconvincing. There is also humour, as in Eliane's continual exaggerated references to time to show her youthful impatience – "I waited a thousand years for him to answer" etc.
It's true there may be a pattern in Japrisot's characters: working class men prone to violence, neurotic young women who play on their sexuality and so on, but he was a past master of the twisty thriller that lends itself to film-making.
If you are not French, this may prove hard going because of the idioms, but it is worth the effort for the sense of suspense, the plot twists and the atmosphere of small town life near Grasse and Digne, where forest fires rage in the distance during intolerably dry summers, and the main source of interest is the Tour de France.
This is oddly reminiscent of "Under Milkwood", perhaps because it uses the poetical yet often also earthy voices of a variety of characters to capture the spirit of a rural community. A short intense and condensed novel, with all the flesh of scene-setting and background information stripped away, it comprises twenty-one internal monologues which combine to show how the collapse of the building boom in Ireland wreaked havoc on the already sad and dysfunctional lives of many ordinary people.
Pain is piled on by the shovel-load, and it would all be unbearably bleak but for the author's ear for the poetry and droll wit of the Irish way with words. There is continuous entertainment in not only the language but the links between the various characters, their different readings of situations, and the poignant plot which gradually emerges around the ever-present figure of the charismatic but troubled Bobby Mahon. Donal Ryan is prepared to take risks: one "voice" is a ghost in limbo, and I was unsure for a while if another was not a "split personality".
If there are flaws in this original book, one is that some of the "losers" portrayed are a little too similar and so seem superfluous, another that many characters share the same streak of repressed violence plus a fundamentally introspective, articulate, self-aware voice that is probably too much that of the author. At times, I felt I was being told too explicitly what to think about a particular person, as in the case of Bobby's embittered father Frank, rather than left to deduce it for myself. The style is less convincing when Ryan abandons his Irish patter, as for patriarch Josie Burke's educated liberal lesbian daughter Mags.
Although my interest flagged a little in the middle of a book which seemed to have "made its point" about the state of Ireland quite quickly, what proves to be a carefully constructed tale twists to an effective ending.
Overall, it is an impressive first novel, which repays a second reading.
This omits "Un Coeur Simple", for me the first and best of Flaubert's "Trois Contes". Although very different from the former and each other, these two tales share a kind of overblown Gothic violence and romanticism which I believe was popular in the C19, but which now seems mawkish and dated. La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier is the tale of a spoilt young man who develops a craving for violence, and then suffers the effects of a curse; Hérodias is based on the story of the beheading of St.John the Baptist, approached in a rather oblique way. I understand that Flaubert wanted to create "reveries" on imagined religious characters,and was keen to write stories with very little subject matter, so that all the emphasis is on the words used. He succeeds in this for me with "Un Coeur Simple", the tale of a simple servant who becomes obsessed with a parrot, but the two fables included here left me cold. The sentences are so pared down in places for the style to seem disjointed, as if passages are missing. The language also seems far from plain and direct but rather convoluted, with a good deal of archaic language to do with say, different types of falcon, or items of Roman clothing.
As for the translation, if you can discipline your eye to read the French in bold text and only consult the English when necessary, this is quite a useful aid, particularly since some of the antiquated specialist vocabulary on, for instance, hunting dogs or medieval arms, may not be in your dictionary. However, it seems to me that translations of some phrases and sentences have been omitted, whereas on other occasions bits are added "by way of explanation". Also, the quality of translation is very uneven: some passages are crude literal translations, but others seem very loose and inaccurate, perhaps in an attempt to capture the meaning of Flaubert's often oddly condensed style.
Antenna Reviews 