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| 1782276122
| 9781782276128
| 1782276122
| 4.13
| 43,213
| 2020
| Sep 03, 2020
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** A couple of things happened recently, which have changed my life. I accidentally bought a book that I’d never heard of in one of tho
**spoiler alert** A couple of things happened recently, which have changed my life. I accidentally bought a book that I’d never heard of in one of those 3 for 2 offers and I listened to Kazuo Ishiguro on a podcast called How to Fail in which people talk about the impact their failures have had on their lives and careers. Ishiguro was regretting his lack of interest in his father’s scientific career as an oceanographer, which had led to his almost total ignorance of science. It struck me with considerable force that I, too, had gone nowhere near anything scientific since passing a couple of O-levels at sixteen. I was completely ignorant of how the world really works let alone our galaxy and the universe. The title of the book was: ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ by Benjamin Labatut. Described by some as a non-fiction novel it mixes extraordinary fact with delirious fiction so that you’re not quite sure which is which. The title seems somewhat apocalyptic in these times of political polarization, clickbait media and misinformation in the metaverse and anybody could be forgiven for thinking…yes! And give this book a dazzling sidestep to resume your trajectory to the great beyond. You would be missing something. From the opening paragraph in which we’re told of Hermann Göring’s scarlet stained extremities due to the imbibing of 100 tabs of dihydrocodeine per day! To the last paragraph in which we learn of the exuberance in death of the lemon tree, Labatut batters the reader with fascinating stories of madness induced by the search for the ultimate truth, which seems to be unerringly located very close to the abyss. In the enduring pandemic we’ve been told by politicians all over the world that: ‘We are following the science,’ which is supposed to induce a sense of security in us. Here we have all these logical people, capable of developing vaccines and medication, in order to prevent and treat a global viral infection. Labatut, in his initial chapter, shows us just how unpredictable the business of science really is. That, for instance, the invention of the first synthetic blue pigment, Prussian Blue, used by Hokusai and Van Gogh in their paintings became, when processed by the Swedish scientist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1782, Blue Acid, or what we call Prussic acid. That is, the most powerful poison known to man: hydrogen cyanide. The original Spanish title of this book (Labatut is Chilean) is ‘Un Verdor Terrible’, which, he makes out, was a particular fear of the German/Jewish scientist Fritz Haber. He who developed the use of Chlorine Gas as a weapon in WW1, but was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen. This had the dual effect of solving the global fertilizer crisis saving millions from starvation whilst providing a supply of explosives so the Germans could extend their war effort thus killing more soldiers. It is this solving of the global fertilizer crisis, which gave rise (in Labatut’s amused mind) to the fiction that Haber’s ultimate fear was that the plant world would gain the upper hand and inflict ‘a terrible greening’. You’d laugh out loud if you hadn’t already learnt that the ‘B’ version of Haber’s other invention, a pesticidal fumigant so powerful it was called Zyklon (cyclone), would be implemented by the Nazis to wipe out millions of his fellow Jews in the gas chambers. If those warning shots weren’t enough to unnerve you then the next chapter called ‘Schwarzschild’s singularity’ surely will. On Christmas Eve 1915 Einstein received a letter from the trenches with the precise solution to all the equations of General Relativity, which he’d published only a month before. That the writer had suffered a horrible death in the trenches from a blistering necrosis called pemphigus was not yet known. Also unknown was Schwarzschild’s horror at his other discovery on the back of his calculations, which was that when a giant star exhausts its fuel and collapses the force of gravity becomes so powerful it tears a lightless hole in space into which everything around it falls including…time. Schwarzschild had discovered what we call a Black Hole. It tormented him. He thought it had powerful psychological implications. You never know when you have reached the tipping point, at which a Black Hole sucks you in, until it is too late. From his deathbed in WW1’s trenches, as he solved Einstein’s equations, he foresaw a terrible darkness looming over the horizon. It made me wonder whether this would be the ultimate end of the universe in trillions of years time. As more and more giant stars collapse and all matter is sucked into their unavoidable gravitational pull whole galaxies could become Black Holes until, presumably, the tipping point would be reached. At this point the universe would return to its ultimate Black Hole, one of such impossible shattering density that it could only explode, and with a Big Bang all would be set in motion once more. What Labatut does, in mixing up fiction with non-fiction, is not only to make the unlikely truth more accessible, but also to accustom our minds to accept that there could be an alternative reality: this is what we see, but this is what is actually going on. In doing so he paves the way to the real meat of the book. He gives us one last story about the brilliant mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck, who in attempting to unearth the structures underlying all mathematical objects reaches what he refers to as ‘the heart of the heart’ and, at that precise moment, falls into the abyss of his own mind, eschewing maths for evermore. Having witnessed this collapse we are now ready for the moment when we cease to understand the world: Quantum Mechanics. Einstein, having brilliantly envisioned Spacetime and developed his theories of Special and General Relativity, had hoped that there would be an ultimate unifying theory that would encompass everything from fields to particles right down to the tiniest of tinies in the subatomic world of electrons. He was in for a terrible shock. Once it was realized that light existed in two different ways, being both wave and particle inhabiting two distinct orders and possessed of opposed identities, the stage was set for the big showdown. How could this possibly work? At the heart of this duality was something that defied common sense and all traditional fundamental laws of physics. In the red corner were Einstein and Schrödinger and in the blue, Heisenberg and Bohr. The red corner was desperate for truth and beauty while the blue were intent on the ugly reality. Einstein found Schrödinger’s wave equation totally gorgeous, as did everybody else, but it also made them uneasy. ‘There was something strange in it that begged them not to take it too seriously.’ They all thought Heisenberg’s matrices hideous, complicated and counter-intuitive with, at their heart, an incomprehensible uncertainty that they couldn’t bear to accept. This, ultimately, in Labatut’s words, was what they had to swallow: ‘Reality does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured and it is only in that instant that it appears. It has no attributes prior to observation. A particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring it that makes it a real object.’ At a stroke it was the end of determinism. ‘Heisenberg proved that what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be apprehended.’ Is that weird enough? Einstein was outraged. He condensed his rage into the epigram: ‘God does not play dice with the Universe.’ And it is this very thing that I find so pleasing and spiritually uplifting. That after centuries of work by some of the greatest minds on the planet what they have discovered is that, at ‘the heart of the heart’, lies an incomprehensible mystery. And what these stories show is that you’d be very unwise to meddle with it. I mean, look what happened when they tampered with the nature of the atom. The Nazis had asked Heisenberg to manufacture a bomb. He delivered his opinion that nobody would be capable of developing an atom bomb before the end of the war. He was stunned by Hiroshima. As Oppenheimer said, on seeing the first nuclear explosion, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I think I’ll be sticking to growing lemons in my house in the Alentejo. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 03, 2021
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Dec 08, 2021
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Jan 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0802148042
| 9780802148049
| 0802148042
| 4.31
| 162,781
| Feb 11, 2020
| Feb 11, 2020
|
really liked it
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I was surprised, when I heard the Booker Prize shortlist, that not only had Hilary Mantel not made the cut, but that four debut novelists had. None we
I was surprised, when I heard the Booker Prize shortlist, that not only had Hilary Mantel not made the cut, but that four debut novelists had. None were fresh out of university, but were rather writers in their 30s and 40s with careers who’d finally got round to publishing a novel. The winner, Douglas Stuart with ‘Shuggie Bain’, was a fashion designer in New York who’d always wanted to write but had been told that with his profound Glaswegian background maybe English Literature was not for him. His novel was turned down by 44 publishers on both sides of the Atlantic not because they didn’t rate it but because they couldn’t think how to market it. You can imagine the chat around the boardroom table: ‘How do we do this? Now let me see…we can market shit, no problem, but brilliance…now that is a real challenge.’ Because ‘Shuggie Bain’ is a brilliant book. It’s tough and brutal about a kid, Shuggie (Hugh), and his two siblings being brought up in poverty by Agnes, their alcoholic mother. There are very few cracks of light that make it onto the page in a narrative based on Stuart’s own upbringing in Glasgow in the 1980s. But the writer has taken ten years to wrestle this 430 page story out of himself (first draft 900 pages single spaced) and there is nothing more powerful than somebody bringing their experience to you and making you feel it in every bone of your body. The writing is visceral. The setting is post-industrial bleak and gruesomely squalid. The characters, ground down by poverty, living cheek by jowl in each others business are operating at a primitive, tribal level. Are you Catholic or Protestant? Rangers or Celtic? Working or not? Drinking to get happy or to achieve oblivion? Imagine living in that and realizing you don’t quite fit because Shuggie, with his penchant for dolls and brightly coloured ponies, his ‘posh’ accent and fastidiousness, is rumbled very early on by his peers as a ‘poofy wee bastard’. We meet Shuggie as a fifteen year old, post trauma, in 1992 living alone in a bedsit in a tenement with porcelain figurines of ballerinas and kittens staring down at him as he puts himself through a stern memory test of football results in the hope of somehow being like a ‘real boy’. He’s working at a deli counter and promises himself he’ll go to hairdressing college while getting through the days: ‘his mind had abandoned him and left his body wandering down below.’ We cut to Sighthill eleven years earlier with Agnes, 39, leaning precariously out of the window of a high-rise flat hoping to fly away from the stifling failure of her husband and three children sharing her parents’ living space. She’s a raven-haired beauty in love with clothes, make-up and being smart. Vain and spoilt, hopeless and yet forthright she’s had her perfectly good teeth removed hoping to achieve the Elizabeth Taylor smile with her new dentures. It doesn’t quite work out like that: ‘Agnes clenched her jaw in anger so tightly that the porcelain dentures shrieked like two supper plates rubbing together.’ Agnes, after a failed marriage to a Catholic, is now with the aging but still magnetic cab driver Shug Bain who ‘had the talent to sell it to you like it was the thing you wanted the worst.’ As well as wee Shuggie she has two older children from her previous marriage. Catherine is the sensible one with a good job as a PA to the chairman who’s heading as far away from Agnes as she can get. Leek is reclusive. When he’s not sleeping or hiding in a room he’s made in a block of pallets he loses himself in his drawings. Drink, lager and vodka, has always been Agnes’s big problem and Shug never liked it. Once early on, she’d got smashed on a night out in Blackpool and he’d dragged her up the stairs by the hair, left her ‘behind the door like a ragged draft excluder’ before hitting her twice in the face, throwing her on the bed ‘like a burst bin bag’ and raping her as she wept. Finally, after a particularly shocking drunken incident Shug has had enough of her. He loads his family into the cab, drives them out to ‘a scheme’ beyond the mining slagheaps surrounded by peaty marshland and drops them in a house with a patch of garden that Agnes greets with the words: ‘What a shitehole.’ This is Pithead where the scene is set to go from worse to indescribable except in the Stuart’s hands it’s brought to vivid life. Shug abandons his family and the serious drinking starts with Agnes egged on by struggling ex-miners’ wives all cackling like witches as they blow their benefits money on booze and the catalogue’s never-never. Catherine marries leaving Leek and Shuggie shoring up their mother. There’s a brief respite when Agnes, having joined AA is sober for a year, takes a night shift in a petrol station and meets another cab driver. But he reintroduces her to the dreaded drink and from there the fall is precipitous. Leek is eventually ‘papped’ (banished) leaving Shuggie to collect the benefits money, buy the lager, keep himself from starving, monitoring her state, even rescuing her from parties and tenderly caring for this wreck of a person who was his mother and is the only one he truly loves. Yes, this is a savage read especially for women who come in for exceptionally brutal treatment. There’s some vintage Glaswegian humour on the way too, but what’s really mesmerizing is to see the thinness of a civilization built on coal, steel and shipbuilding which, having failed, returns its people to this primitive state with their religions ironed into them scratching around amidst the destruction for money to buy scraps of food and ‘nooses of Special Brew’ hoping to blank themselves out from psychotic episodes of violence and sexual encounters in thin-walled tenements swallowed by the smirr and yet… And yet even amongst the hideous uncivilized brutality there is kindness and above all there is still love. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2021
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Jan 12, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 3.85
| 243,274
| Mar 25, 2008
| Mar 25, 2008
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it was ok
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This is a warts and all kind of book, weighted towards the depressing, at times unashamedly sentimental, it veers between the insights of literary fic
This is a warts and all kind of book, weighted towards the depressing, at times unashamedly sentimental, it veers between the insights of literary fiction and the crowd-pleasing twists of genre fiction, while some of the time moving with the interconnectedness of a novel, but then abruptly deciding that, no, it’s really a collection of short stories. For a writer this is a fascinating piece of work because it is at times brilliant, occasionally messy, frequently frustrating and annoying and yet perplexingly readable. It is, in short, a bit like life: even if you don’t want to go on you find you have to. We meet Olive Kitteridge through her husband, Henry, the local pharmacist in a town in Maine. He is a calm ordered man who enjoys running his business with a meticulousness that never gets in the way of his good humour. Henry’s the sort who’s concerned that Olive doesn’t ‘bear down too hard on Christopher’ (their son) over his homework. When he hires ‘cute’ young Denise as his new assistant his wife describes her as ‘Mousy.’ and says: ‘No one’s cute who can’t stand up straight.’ And when Henry puts it to her that they should have Denise and her husband round for dinner: ‘Not keen on it.’ The invitation is extended anyway to his wife’s response: ‘Then that’s that Mr President. Give your order to the cook.’ and she turns in a spiky performance at the dinner. Olive is a big woman with big opinions and big feelings, which, because they are so big and they come from her, she believes them to be true and irrefutable not only to herself but to all. Her pet project is her son who she loves more than anybody else in the world, to the point that Henry’s fathering influence isn’t really allowed a look-in. You sense this enormous pressure bearing down on the boy and that there will be consequences. You quickly realize, too, that Olive is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea…if anybody’s…but she does have the love of a good man, which she recognizes. However, Strout also affords us glimpses of another person held deep within Olive’s bigness and this is revealed in the tragedy that befalls Denise whose husband is killed in a shooting accident. ‘Oh you poor child,’ she said, in a voice Henry would always remember – filled with such dismay that all her outer-Oliveness seemed stripped away. You poor, poor child.’ As well as being Henry’s wife and self-described skivvy Olive is also the math teacher at the local school, which means she’s come into contact with all the local kids who have their opinions about her ranging from fear to fascination. In this way Olive just about supplies the connective tissue between the stories/chapters that enables the publishers to call this book a novel. However, each chapter features different character(s) and in some of them Olive is mentioned only in passing and if you’re in novel-reading mode towards the end you’ll find yourself asking: do I really need to get to know more characters with no relevance to what has happened before at this late stage? If you maintain the distance of a short story collection reader it will make the latter part of the book less frustrating. That is not to say that the characters you meet are uninteresting. All sorts of things come out when, for instance, Olive spots Kevin, an ex-pupil whose mother committed suicide, sitting in his car in the bay. She goes to join him and, believing Kevin’s complicated psyche is deserving of some revelations, admits her own father’s suicide, acknowledges her son’s depression and some genetic blame while also revealing Henry’s mother was ‘a nut’. Kevin finds himself strung between ‘liking the sound of her voice’ and wanting her to leave. Christopher’s wedding gives another insight into Olive as she takes childish revenge on the know-it-all wife by bagging one of Suzanne’s favourite shoes, a bra and scrawling on one of her tops with a marker pen. Olive’s inclusion in other stories becomes a bit strained as with the anorexic girl, Nina, befriended by the widowed Daisy Foster who’s started an affair with Harmon of the hardware store because his wife has announced ‘I’m just done’ with sex. Strout levers Olive in primarily to show that she cares about distressed kids and to give her an opportunity to be mean about her daughter-in-law. I was particularly taken with Angela O’Meara, the alcoholic pianist at the local cocktail lounge. What starts out as a sad story about talent being frustrated by a dominant mother, who also indulges in prostitution, turns into an ugly insight into the way males prey on such vulnerability with a deep need to inflict hurt. Both stories are interesting, but where do they fit in the novel called Olive Kitteridge? My greatest difficulty came when Strout engineered Olive, suffering from diarrhea after a meal out, into the hospital (to go to the loo), which is then held up by a couple of druggies and under pressure from the gun-toting lads Olive and Henry say a few unforgiveable things to each other. This diversion into rather poorly executed crime fiction destroyed all suspension of disbelief and yet, amazingly, I still kept reading. By the end of the book Olive’s husband has been incapacitated and she finds herself surprisingly drawn to the recent widower, Jack Kennison, who she finds lying on the path of her favourite walk. ‘Are you dead?’ she asked loudly. She gets him to a doctor and finds that this has ‘put her back into life’ and so they become involved. Everything’s wrong about him including his politics (Republican) and yet when he needs her she goes over and the resulting connection is profoundly human. It’s just a pity that the reader feels somewhat distanced from this final connection with Olive by two previous chapters featuring extensive casts in stories that take us no closer to the eponymous heroine. I’m not sure where this leaves me thinking about the standing of the Pulitzer Prize, which I’d always thought of as quite a thing. But having been defeated by Anthony Doerr’s book All The Light I Cannot See, completely blown away by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, and then baffled by this one, I’ve been left somewhat confused. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 12, 2021
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Feb 21, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0802157068
| 9780802157065
| 0802157068
| 3.96
| 10,622
| Mar 02, 2021
| Mar 02, 2021
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it was ok
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For those who’d enjoyed ‘The Sympathizer’, Nguyen’s debut of 2015 in which he pulled off the perfect literary political thriller, there was a lot of p
For those who’d enjoyed ‘The Sympathizer’, Nguyen’s debut of 2015 in which he pulled off the perfect literary political thriller, there was a lot of pent up enthusiasm for his new novel. That his first book had been a brilliant take on that highly emotional subject, the Vietnam War, but written not from the perspective of a traumatized American soldier, but rather a Vietnamese/French communist mole in the entourage of an exiled South Vietnamese army general, ensured that it would receive particular attention. While nothing could quite compare to the opening of The Sympathizer where the nameless hero and his blood brother, Bon, escape from Saigon in the last moments of the Vietnam war during which Bon’s wife and child are killed by a random bullet, Nguyen makes a valiant effort. We join a band of refugees on a boat heading out into the ocean in the hope of rescue and future asylum, with our duo among them. They have successfully escaped from the brutality of the re-education camp to reach Indonesia and end up on a flight to Paris. Bon has sworn to kill all Communists (not realizing that his blood brother is a communist agent) and in particular Man, the faceless commissar of the camp. After being met at the airport by the hero’s ‘aunt’ we are rapidly introduced to the two strands that will propel the book. The first being the drug dealing and sex business run by the Boss, who they’d met in the camp, which aims to deliver thrilling scenes of lust and violence. The second being lengthy exchanges between characters about Colonialism, Marxism, Capitalism, Identity, Racism, Sexism and Religious Extremism with frequent reference to Césaire, Fanon, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Derrida, Adorno, Gramsci and others. No sooner have the two refugees reported to the Boss with their Kopi luwak (a luxury coffee that passes through the digestive system of the civet cat), which proves to be a disguise for a Class A drug, than our nameless hero’s intention is revealed: “Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but the average Frenchman and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.’ Nguyen: “These are novels of ideas and politics, and history, and theory, and so on, but there are also spy and crime novels. And I think that you can do all of these things simultaneously. I look for inspiration to the French who like to read philosophy…and detective novels. And these are totally compatible. And that’s part of the spirit of these two books.” The two strands brush up against each other but never quite connect as in the case of the character known as ‘the eschatological muscle’ who, as the black bouncer at the Boss’s brothel known as Heaven, is found watching a talk show about existentialism. “ ‘Sartre, he’s okay, the muscle said. I prefer Fanon and Césaire.’ ‘Me, too, I said.’ ‘The muscle continued watching the debate about Sartre, but his mention of Fanon and Césaire sent me back to the last time that I encountered them, at Occidental College, where I had spent six years studying for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in American studies. My mentor Professor Hammer…’” This brief exchange gives an idea of the territory of the book: the philosophizing is going to be demanding and it is not going to be integral to the story. Nguyen: “Americans are still hung up about the Vietnam War. And indeed much of the world only thinks of Vietnam through the Vietnam War. That’s fine. So I made my down payment with The Sympathizer, but the intention was always to situate my experiences and the experiences of Vietnamese refugees and the Vietnam War in a much larger context for me, which is the unfolding of American power, of French colonialism.” Coming on the back of his brilliantly synthesized earlier novel The Committed might feel to many like a family’s favourite dish deconstructed. It won’t be served as your Mum always made it, but rather in a way that demands quite some effort to enjoy. Unfortunately, in this case, the drug dealing, honey trap strand came across as a very sweet, over-iced cake, which fell apart on contact with the spoon, while the intellectual elements were the brussel sprouts, which could be palatable, but not interspersed with this particular cake. Nguyen: “My attitude towards contemporary American fiction is that a lot of it is geared towards easy reading.” Nguyen throws everything at this enterprise. There are some powerful and humorous aperçus ‘Colonizaton is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission.’ And he finds the streets of Paris ‘narrower than the average French mind’. There is an extraordinarily moving memory of a return to his village and the love of his mother and a half page outburst to his ex-colonizers of ‘Fuck you! Thank you!’ in ever-decreasing print. He also resorts to graphics, huge capitalizations, words patterned on the page and, for the great denouement between our hero, Bon and Man, he switches out of prose and into screenplay mode. Nyguyen: “And unfortunately, as an adult I’ve learned many, many rules. And in writing The Committed, one of the things I did was simply just to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to do it. And it was quite freeing.” Whereas The Sympathizer was the perfect synthesis between thriller and political novel achieved through an innate emotional connection with its subject, The Committed fails to bridge the gap between fiction and thesis. While, as Nguyen says, the experience was freeing for him, to this reader it delivered an inert intellectualization of his polemic packed with a weak mortar of dissociated sex and violence. There will be another novel to make up the trilogy. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 10, 2021
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Apr 05, 2021
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Apr 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 057122539X
| 9780571225392
| 057122539X
| 3.58
| 16,338
| 1995
| 1995
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really liked it
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‘The Unconsoled’ is my third Kazuo Ishiguro novel after ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’ and it has been the most difficult to like, but
‘The Unconsoled’ is my third Kazuo Ishiguro novel after ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’ and it has been the most difficult to like, but the most extraordinary to read. I knew I was in for an interesting ride when the protagonist of the novel, Ryder, an outstanding pianist, arrives at his hotel prior to a concert in an unnamed mittel European city and enters the elevator with the old porter, Gustav. There follows a four and a half page conversation about the art of great portering, which demands that the cases are never actually lowered to the ground, and is so brilliantly boring it teeters on the edge of the absurd without quite making it to laugh out loud. You begin to realize that you are in a different world when, during the ascent, Gustav starts referring to a ‘Miss Hilde’ and Ryder suddenly finds they are not alone and that the mistress of the very ‘tight schedule’ of appointments around his performance is in the lift with them. If her mysterious appearance hasn’t been enough to make you fully appreciate the strangeness of this world then you will by the time Ryder inexplicably intuits that Gustav, while showing him around the room, is actually preoccupied, as he has been all day, by his daughter and her little boy. ‘The Unconsoled’ follows that same odd, but perfectly comprehensible, logic of dreams. Why bother have someone obviously entering the lift with you when they can appear behind you in an instant. Why bother go through the business of creating intimacy when perfect intuitions can become mysteriously known. The difficulty comes when this perversely explicable logic is pursued for 535 pages and we find ourselves, as we do in dreams, enduring extraordinary frustrations and diversions but which, and this is the tricky bit, are not our own. It is said that other people’s dreams are boring because their significance is only pertinent to the dreamer. It is, after all, their subconscious throwing up characters known only to them and their behavior odd or otherwise, along with images they treasure and obstacles peculiar to them that they must somehow surmount, while the listener is left drumming their fingers at the impassioned recounting of something meaningful only to a psychoanalyst. So this is an extremely risky enterprise and I understand that this is a book much tossed into the corner by baffled readers. I never got that far but found I could not read it in large chunks but had to digest it 20 pages at a time. And this is why it is such an extraordinary book to read. I was much activated by it. I found it exhausting and exasperating in equal measure as Ryder endlessly sets out on missions only to be diverted to others while having extraordinary requests heaped upon him along the way with the knowledge that he has interviews to give, lunches to attend, the arrival of his parents, music to be prepared, practice to be undertaken and a great performance to be carried out. It is stressful. It transpires that Gustav’s daughter, Sophie, is either Ryder’s wife or girlfriend and her little boy, Boris, is probably his son. It’s oddly distressing to see Ryder set out with Boris on an outing only to be accosted by a journalist who persuades him to have his photo taken requiring a trip necessitating Boris being left in a café. As they head for the photo shoot on the tram we find that Ryder knows the ticket inspector from primary school in Worcestershire and she is upset with him for not making it to an arranged appearance so that she could show him off to her friends. He wants to put this right and they agree to another meeting. This takes 8 pages. The photo shoot is out of town and requires a climb up to a famous building whose significance is important but we do not understand why and numerous shots are taken (5 pages). Up there he meets another man, Cristoff, a recently banished conductor now persona non grata in the musical city, who is delighted that the great Ryder has agreed to attend ‘this lunch’. They head down the vertiginous slope to the man’s car and set off to a small restaurant where, after a hostile reception from an anti-Cristoffite, there follows a meeting with the supposed acolytes and a rowdy argument about arcane bits of musical theory such as ‘pigmented triads’ (20 pages), which would have been funny had the little boy not been left alone all this time in the bloody café! It’s intolerable. Of course the question has to be asked why this should be so unbearable and gradually, as these interminably frustrating episodes unfold, we see the plotlines develop. Ryder, a recognized face wherever he goes, is prone to a certain grandiosity, and all his attempts at connecting with Sophie and Boris seem to fall drastically short. We learn about Brodsky the recovered drunk and reinstated conductor, who carries ‘a wound’, both physical and psychological. He has a pressing need to repair a relationship he’s had with a Miss Collins from many years ago, which he hopes will be achieved by the acclaim from the concert. Hoffman, the hotel manager, had fallen in love with a highly cultured woman from an artistic family, who he believes has spent her long married life with him in a state of great disappointment that he wasn’t a classical music composer. He has co-opted her in imposing the same disappointment on their son, Stefan, who he is sure is a mediocre talent but, according to Ryder’s ear, happens to be a very gifted pianist. And so it goes on, Ishiguro revisiting his favourite theme of wasted lives, failures to engage and missed opportunities for real human intimacy. It takes quite some time for Ryder to reach the concert hall, which he leaves almost as soon as he’s arrived. We feel sure that the concert will never take place, but it does…after a fashion, and we are left inconsolable at the misplaced importance and shattered dreams of those, the unconsoled. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 02, 2020
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Nov 18, 2020
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Nov 20, 2020
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 030787804X
| 9780307878045
| 030787804X
| 4.25
| 23,389
| Sep 15, 2019
| Feb 25, 2020
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it was amazing
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‘Apeirogon’ by Colum McGann Is this brilliant book, written by an Irishman about the Middle East conflict, potentially one of the trickiest books ever ‘Apeirogon’ by Colum McGann Is this brilliant book, written by an Irishman about the Middle East conflict, potentially one of the trickiest books ever attempted by an author? The courage it must have taken, as an outsider, to step into what even his protagonists have experienced as the ‘mouth of a volcano’ must be equivalent to that of, say, a New York Jew having a go at writing about The Troubles. You wouldn’t take it on lightly. You wouldn’t take it on unless you really thought you were going to somehow make a difference. The two protagonists are grieving fathers, an Israeli, Rami Elhanan, whose thirteen year old daughter, Smadar, out shopping in 1997, was killed, along with seven others, by three suicide bombers exploding themselves on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, and a Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, whose ten year old daughter, Abir, was killed by a rubber bullet to the back of her head fired from an Israeli soldier’s rifle in a passing jeep after she’d bought sweets in a local shop in Anata in 2007. While Bassam had endured the upbringing of the occupied born in a cave in Hebron and ending up in prison at the age of 17 under terrorist charges where he sustained daily beatings for seven years and eventually became the prison inmates’ Commander, Rami had enjoyed the life of the occupier, a seventh generation Jerusalemite from a comfortable home, military service, work as a graphic artist and marriage to Nurit, the daughter of an Israeli general, Matti Peled, and who herself had attended the same school as Netanyahu. Rami and Bassam became the world’s two most unlikely friends. Bassam’s Damascene moment came in prison when he gained access to a documentary about the Holocaust. Expecting to satisfy his loathing of the Occupier by watching Jews being killed in their millions he was instead shocked to the core by the sight of men, women, children and babies mercilessly processed through the Nazi death machine. He learnt Hebrew and set up Combatants for Peace. It was at a meeting of his movement of former fighters searching for peace that, eight years after Smadar had been killed, Bassam met Rami under the impossible circumstances of a Jew, who’d lost his daughter to Palestinian suicide bombers, joining hands with a convicted terrorist. What do you say to a man who has lost his daughter? Perhaps you have to look to the 13th c Persian poet Rumi for help: ‘Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.’ This brings us to what is most remarkable about Colum McGann’s book. Bassam and Rami’s losses and friendship are at the heart of it, their unbearable stories are told right in the centre after the 500 sections that lead up to and then the 500 sections that lead away from 1001, alluding to One Thousand and One Nights ‘a ruse for life in the face of death’. These sections can be anything from a line to several pages long. They consist of an extraordinary range of thoughts, ideas, observations, lines of poetry, facts and descriptions. They are also infused with the stories of Rami and Bassam and many others who find themselves in the chaos of this long conflict. The idea comes from an apeirogon – a polygon with an infinite number of sides and vertices or as McGann puts it: ‘As a whole an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, one can arrive anywhere within an apeirogon and the entirety of the shape is complicit in the journey, even that which has not been imagined.’ So the apeirogon’s implicit connectivity enables us to learn in a series of sections that, in the 16th c, deposits of saltpeter (which are a blight in my own house) leaked through the ceiling of the Sistine chapel creeping across paintings, and an artist spent his whole life trying to prevent the disintegration of these murals by carefully wiping away these accretions with cloth and pieces of wet bread. This is followed by how a Syrian chemist in 13th c made gunpowder by boiling down saltpeter and in a subsequent section how the Chinese in the 9th c accidentally created gunpowder whilst looking for the elixir of life before finally returning you to the night Smadar was blown to pieces on Ben Yehuda Street. Elsewhere you relive the experience of Philippe Petit’s attempt to unite Israel and Palestine on his tightrope walk performed in a jester’s suit across the Hinnom Valley (Valley of Hell) where, unable to find a white dove of peace, he releases a nearly white pigeon, which instead of flying off re-lands on his head and then his balancing pole so that he has to shake it off. Rami and Smadar are watching below. You discover that the Hebrew word for pomegranate, ‘rimon’, is also the word for grenade and that it is said to consistently have 613 seeds corresponding to the number of commandments in the Torah. The French philosopher Pascal suggests to you that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit, alone, in one room.’ We are obliged to connect, to find a pattern in this apparent chaos of images and ideas. ‘We have to prepare ourselves,’ which is said on the night that Abir, having been shot, is taken to one hospital and transferred to another through the bizarre system of checkpoints that slows and delays and stops so that only hours later does Bassam arrive with her. There are details of the paths taken by migratory birds, the hideous nature of the anti-riot Skunk water and how stun grenades are used not only to stun people but to destroy the sleeves of wells, the playing of John Cage’s 4’33” of silence, how the impaling of insects on barbed wire by shrikes is part of their courtship behavior, the disappearance in the countryside of a woman collecting natural sounds for her music album, the nature of Bassam’s prison number 220-284 which he cuts out of his uniform and gives to his mathematical guard because, as amicable numbers, each of which is the sum of the factors of the other, they have special significance to him. And so it goes on for 500 sections up to the centre and 500 sections away. I am an outsider. I have lived through 63 years of this conflict and have experienced none of it. In the same way that Anna Burns’s novel Milkman introduced me to a unique perspective on The Troubles that I had never glimpsed so McGann has taken me inside world’s most insoluble problem, which has, at its heart, wherever you choose to look, loss. Be it loss of sons and daughters, loss of houses and land, loss of freedom and dignity. But in Rami and Bassam there is hope. They tour the world with their terrible stories but also as an example of people who’ve found the field beyond right and wrong. Because I’m an outsider I wondered what insiders thought about this book. By accident I came across an article in the Jewish Chronicle. I was looking for a photograph of the two men and there they were enjoying each other with the piece below explaining their story, and how neither of them had been able to finish the book because it was just too painful. What it also said was that Abir had been ‘killed’ by a rubber bullet, while Smadar had been ‘murdered’ by three suicide bombers. I looked for a Palestinian perspective and found an enraged one that, having been infuriated by Exodus, a Leon Uris novel/film depicting the true story of a ship of Jewish refugees arriving in Palestine perpetuating the myth of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ was now maddened by McGann’s novel (already optioned by Spielburg) because ‘it is the height of mendacity to suggest that the stories of individual relationships in circumstances of enormous power disparities are anything but normalisation sideshows’. Bassam understands the horror of the Holocaust. Rami understands the humiliation of the Occupation. Both know that peace will have to come however much the powers that be struggle against it. ‘It will happen at the moment when the price of not having peace exceeds the price of having peace.’ ...more |
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Aug 12, 2020
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Aug 21, 2020
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Audio CD
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| 0385353499
| 9780385353496
| 0385353499
| 3.70
| 8,724
| Sep 30, 2014
| Sep 30, 2014
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really liked it
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A lot of people, some of them might even be readers of his books, but not all, have a big problem with Martin Amis. I’m a great admirer of his work (S
A lot of people, some of them might even be readers of his books, but not all, have a big problem with Martin Amis. I’m a great admirer of his work (Success, Money, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information and his autobiography Experience) but I’ve had my difficulties over the years in particular with Yellow Dog. I’ve struggled to understand the antipathy to Amis’s work. To me he’s one of those rare writers who forges sentences that no other writer can. But then again that might be his problem. He sits in a category for which Brits reserve particular vitriol: Clever Clogs. Nobody likes them. You’re allowed to be clever with the caveat that you must never (use Latin words unless you’re Boris Johnson) show it and you must absolutely never, ever, shove it down people’s throats. Amis is so clever he can’t help it. The output is brilliant and mellifluous and is goes straight down people’s craws. But Amis is also a satirist and it’s his job to slip down people’s craws and maybe make them laugh, but above all to make them, in all their discomfort, think. Two big sins. Being clever and making people think. I realized that Amis and I share an interest, perhaps an obsession. There are crimes, crimes against humanity, which reached their apogees in genocides and the slave trade, and then there’s the Holocaust. Ever since coming across Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book, The Scourge of the Swastika, as a fourteen year old, I have tried to comprehend what the hell happened there. Amis in his novel The Zone of Interest makes his attempt in fiction but in the Acknowledgements, an Afterword, “That Which Happened”, he first lets Primo Levi give a chilling insight into the Auschwitz mentality. Levi, newly arrived, waits in a shed dressed in prison rags. He spies an icicle and, desperately thirsty, breaks it off. A guard grabs his wrist and snatches it away. ‘Why?’ asks Levi. The guard explains: ‘Here there is no why.’ Amis lets Levi explain: “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is to almost justify. Let me explain ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no normal human being will be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also unfortunately their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human…There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred, it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man…” If ever there was ever a competition for The Martin Amis Ultimate Uncomfortable Read I would suggest that The Zone of Interest is the winner. He puts you in a KZ, in this case Auschwitz, inside the heads of three narrators. Angelus ‘Golo’ Thomsen (Golo being his first childish attempt at saying his Christian name) is an SS officer built in the most powerful Aryan tradition: 6’3”, frosty white hair, Arctic cobalt blue eyes, jaw riveted together, thighs as solid as hewn masts. What’s more, he’s the nephew of Martin Bormann, the Reichsleiter who has unimpeded access to the unmentionable Chief’s ear. Golo’s sacred mission is the Buna-Werke, an IG Farben enterprise being built by Auschwitz inmates to produce synthetic materials and fuel for the war effort. His cynical, seemingly supportive gaze falls on the madness around him. He and his old childhood friend Boris, also an SS officer, are skirt chasers and in his opening monologue he reveals that his practiced eye has fallen on none other than Hannah Doll…the Kommandant’s wife. Paul Doll, our second narrator, is an unlikely figure of fun. Hated by his wife, he is the boozy, weak, ineffective and much despised Kommandant who, in our first sighting, sets the KZ scene. Falling foul of a practical joke played on him by a friend in Paris, who’s warned him of a particularly difficult ‘shipment’ (Sonderzug 105), he stands prepared on the ramp with armed Stormtroops, machine-gunners and flamethrowers. A mere 100 people disembark, mostly children, the disabled and the elderly one of whom even dares to complain of the lack of a restaurant car! He spouts the rehearsed lie to the assembled ‘pieces’ that they are to be taken to the farms for ‘honest work and honest board’ only to have a truck appear full of ragged cadavers being taken for burial in the aptly named, stinkingly eruptive, Spring Meadow. The Kommandant, brilliantly instinctive, orders the musicians rather than the Stormtroops to strike up and, although the first strains of the violins could do no more than duplicate and reinforce that helpless, quavering cry, he saves the day. The third narrator is the most pitiful of all and is the one character through which no attempt at humour passes. Szmul is a Jewish inmate, a Sonderkommando, who, as one of the saddest men in the history of the world, facilitate the destruction of their own people. They disseminate the great lie by intimating that they will be returning from their cleansing ‘shower’ and then work amongst the dead to remove gold teeth, cut hair and assemble valuables. They are rewarded with cigarettes, extra rations and schnapps, but also with the rare opportunity to save a life. It is Szmul who comes up with the solution to the ghastly Spring Meadow, forming a ziggurat pyre of the dead fueled by human fat that burns with such ferocity that the Kommandant attends in shorts and shirt mid winter swigging from a bottle. The accounting, there always has to be an accounting, is done by dividing the number of the victims’ femurs by two. This is why The Zone of Interest is a difficult book. The continuous, everyday, corner-of-the-eye horror and human degradation combined with the half-baked fiction smeared over this vision of hell, the inexplicability of the hatred, the mad perception of the Jewish threat, the economic fallibility of every aspect of the KZ project translated through the laddish humour of Golo and Boris, or the unconscious buffoonery of Paul Doll. It’s like being made to listen to a Beethoven symphony being played on a glockenspiel: novel to start with, but ultimately agonizing. This is not to say it’s a bad book, just an impossible book. Boris’s description of the truck of corpses accidentally driven past the newly-arrived on Sonderzug 105: He said that about a dozen of them flopped out over the tailboard; he said that it made him imagine a crew of ghosts being sick over the ship’s side. ‘With their arms swinging. Not just any old corpses either. Starveling corpses. Covered in shit, and filth, and rags, and gore, and wounds, and boils. Smashed-up, forty kilo corpses.’ ‘Mm. Untoward.’ Is Golo’s response. We are on page 37. The endless, banal unfolding of the surrounding but background horror; the beatings, the screams, the starvation, the death and the stink is remarked upon casually as if it’s as completely acceptable as the sexism. Women after the soup course at a dinner are expected to become shock-absorbers. After Doll’s story about Himmler’s delight at an angora rabbit taught to beg, Golo leans forward, thrusting his hand between the knees of the widowed Alisz and, excited by her terror, talks about the Wansee Conference covering the Final Solution. He only removes his hand to mention the one unused resource of the Reich…women. The banal horror and sexism is perfectly encapsulated in the terrifying Ilse Grese, Golo and Boris’s go-to squeeze, who reads mags on her bed with her oxhide, steel-tipped whip curled up on the floor and whose instruction for sex is Schnell! A strong stomach is required for comedy operating at these, the grimmest boundaries, of human experience. What could have accumulated into an even more unbearable satire than Swift’s baby-eating ‘A Modest Proposal’, just for sheer length, is rescued by the unexpected turn of events with Golo Thomsen. In pursuing Hannah Doll, his sexual desire for her magnificent frame (This would be a big fuck) is transformed into fascination, then admiration and finally, surprisingly to him, into love. It’s as if through her combative relationship with her husband she inspires Thomsen not only to human feeling I used to be numb; now I am raw, but also to pursue his aim of Kreative Vernichtung by sabotaging his sacred mission. This is no place for romance. Golo and Hannah have far bigger things on their plates amidst these scenes of profound hideousness. Hannah wants to know what has happened to her disappeared gardener and then later her ex-lover, the Communist, Dieter Kruger. She is also determined to break Paul Doll’s mind on the wheel and he retaliates by setting up Szmul to kill her. Golo has the necessary contacts and reports back to his muse while setting in train various schemes that will ensure the Buna-Werke never produces a milligram/litre of anything and deftly hobbles the rise of those that might make a difference to the German war effort. They are both ‘caught’ but get away with it and after the war Golo, now rehabilitated and working for the Americans, seeks Hannah out. Despite his decision to do the right thing he’s unable to escape the contamination of complicity and finds he cannot construct a plausible inner life. Hannah reluctantly agrees to a short meeting. While he had been her point of sanity in an insane world she has no wish to revisit it because when I see you I smell it. And I do not want to smell it. As she says: we don’t deserve to come back from it. And: Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place. But they do whisper ‘So long’ to each other as they part. It’s been especially disturbing to read this book in these unsettling times having always believed that there’s no way anything like this could ever happen again. Now we find ourselves teetering on abysmal brinks in a world overrun with uncertainty and anxiety from an unseen and unknown enemy as the airwaves around us clamour with confusion. While this may well be the winner of the world’s most uncomfortable read it is also perhaps one that we should all endure just so we don’t make the silly mistake of slipping on one of those brinks. ...more |
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Jun 08, 2020
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Jun 13, 2020
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Aug 21, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0142000655
| 9780142000656
| 0142000655
| 4.42
| 559,101
| 1952
| 2002
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it was amazing
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I’d read a lot of Steinbeck when I was younger but the one book that had always eluded me was East of Eden…until lockdown. It was a pleasure, after va
I’d read a lot of Steinbeck when I was younger but the one book that had always eluded me was East of Eden…until lockdown. It was a pleasure, after various struggles with concentration, to find a novel that so thoroughly engaged me that I confined myself to reading 100 pages a day in order to eke it out. After years of writing and reading crime novels I am used to coming across outstanding villains capable of great evil and Steinbeck does not disappoint with the complex Cathy Ames. She is the beautiful but frightening child arsonist, the teenage mistress of a prosperous pimp, the instantly unfaithful wife of Adam Trask, the uncaring mother of ‘his’ twins, who she immediately abandons having shot her husband. Finally she is the ruthless whore who poisons a brothel owner to take over the business and ends her days as the vindictive and cruel, but arthritic and desolate madame catering to her fellow corrupt humans’ specialist tastes. That’s a lot of very determined evil crammed into one little human being. You could say she really embraced the dark dimension of the human enterprise. But as she sits in the strange grey lean-to she’s attached to her home contemplating the childhood security of fantastical diminishment offered by Alice in Wonderland’s ‘Drink me’ potion, she realizes: You missed something. They had something and you missed it. However, Steinbeck also achieves something that is not so easy to do and that is to write memorable ‘good’ characters without provoking a weary approbation in the reader. In fact he doesn’t just write one ‘good’ character of depth, wisdom and humour but in Samuel Hamilton, the Irish farmer of the poorest land in the Salinas Valley, and Lee, the Chinese, philosophical manservant of the wealthy Adam Trask, manages to complete two of the most moving depictions of nuanced grace and goodness that I’ve come across in literature. Make that three because we’ve probably got to include the delightful young Abra, the focus of Adam’s twin boys, Cal and Aron. She refuses to live up to the virginally pure fantasy conjured in the angelic Aron’s muddled head and ultimately opts for the more knowing Cal, who’s taken on the monumental human struggle between good and evil. I was wondering whether the constraints of lockdown had made me even more sensitive to the human need for love and affection. Tears came to my eyes on two occasions during this book. The second was towards the end when Lee, the faithful, but ultimately lonely servant/mentor who, having given up on his dream of owning his own San Francisco bookstore, returns to the Trask family home. Much as he loves his master and the twins the connection to them is necessarily detached as, while Aron is lost both to his fantasy of purity and ultimately to the war, Lee is left to steer Adam and Cal to an acceptance of life’s uncomfortable reality. One where both good and evil exist, but in which humanity at least has the choice. It looks as if he will be condemned to the ultimate loneliness of the wise factotum until, in the dying pages, something magnificent is realised between him and Abra. “You know I haven’t wished for many things in my life,” he began. ‘I learned early not to wish for things. Wishing just brought earned disappointment.” Abra said gaily, “But you wish for something now. What is it?” He blurted out, “I wish you were my daughter –“ He was shocked at himself. He went to the stove and turned out the gas under the tea-kettle, then lighted it again. She said softly, ‘I wish you were my father.’ He glanced quickly at her and away. ‘You do?” “Yes, I do.” “Why?” “Because I love you.” I’m sure there were many critics who chastised Steinbeck for cheesiness but this resonated. Perhaps it was all those lonely souls stuck in their locked down houses, barred from all relationships, forbidden to touch or be touched, receiving food on their doorstep and a distant chat ending in a wave from a masked son or daughter. Or maybe it was something else. My first big emotional moment in East of Eden came about half way through the book. Samuel Hamilton is getting old. His nine sons and daughters can see it and they get together to discuss what they should do to relieve their parents of the hardship of their lives. They decide that they will invite them to their homes and, passing them from one to the other, they will be looked after so that they will never have to return to those brutal barren acres in the Salinas valley. Tom, the son who is currently working with Sam on the farm, will take over all the work. This he is happy to do, but he is very unhappy about the way his brothers and sisters insist on doing it, which is, in order not hurt their father’s feelings, by stealth. They won’t let him know their real intentions. While Tom and Sam are working in the barn one of the sisters calls and makes the first invitation. Afterwards Sam gets round to asking Tom if he’d mind if he and his mother ‘took a little trip’. Tom is a poor actor and, as he lies on behalf of his siblings, the truth glares out until Sam relieves him by revealing that, don’t worry, he’s cottoned on. “I wasn’t in favour of it,” said Tom. “It doesn’t sound like you,” his father said. “You’d be for scattering the truth out in the sun for me to see. Don’t tell the others I know.” He turned away and then came back and put his hand on Tom’s shoulders. “Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth, my son. It’s not clever but it’s more permanent.” Thank you for wanting to honor me with the truth. That was the line that broke me apart. I can’t think why. ...more |
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Jun 2020
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Jun 07, 2020
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Aug 21, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1910695114
| 9781910695111
| 1910695114
| 4.46
| 18,907
| Aug 15, 2013
| May 23, 2016
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really liked it
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My book of 2019 is ‘Second Hand Time’ by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, which, if you need a category is ‘True Crime’. It is a doorstop tome
My book of 2019 is ‘Second Hand Time’ by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, which, if you need a category is ‘True Crime’. It is a doorstop tome in which are arranged the stories of people, rarely heard, telling their experiences of the break up of the Soviet Union…and more. The tales come from every sphere of life and from mouths of all ages from a 59-year-old architect to a 22- year-old student. The ages are important because those who’d lived in the Soviet Union were on a different planet to those who’ve mainly known Putin’s Russia. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. The crimes are on an immense scale and the suffering is correspondingly enormous and ongoing. It is no less than what you’d expect after a belief system, in which God was not allowed, suppression was paramount, betrayal was constant, violence, slavery, torture and death was commonplace, suddenly collapsed. It was a world where fathers could be arrested and, after years in the camps, would come back to drink themselves to death leaving their children to discover that the informants were not only neighbours but dear Aunt Olga as well. One woman, as she was being taken away, begged her neighbour to look after her little girl. She returned to find the neighbor had been as good as her word and her daughter was happily grown up. All that remained was for her to read in her file that it was that same neighbour who’d informed on her in the first place. ‘Why didn’t we put Stalin on trial? I’ll tell you why… In order to condemn Stalin, you’d have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you.’ It is, therefore, quite staggering to find that when prestroika occurred many people couldn’t stomach the new freedom, had no comprehension of the market, and were totally unprepared for this new brutality: capitalism. So disorientating did they find it that all they wanted was for Stalin to come back. ‘You want to talk about the nineties… I wouldn’t call it a beautiful time. I’d say it was revolting. People’s minds flipped 180 degrees. Some couldn’t handle it, they went crazy, the psych wards were overflowing. I visited a friend of mine in one of them. One guy was screaming ‘I’m Stalin! I’m Stalin!’ while another one screamed ‘I’m Berezovsky! I’m Berezovsky!’’ They lived for the kitchen and the conversations they used to have about great Russian writers. ‘Books replaced life for us.’ But nobody cared about words anymore. They only cared about money. ‘The first thing to go was friendship.’ ‘There’s loads of salami in the shops, but no happy people. I don’t see anyone with fire in their eyes.’ ‘Russians need something to believe in… Something lofty and luminous. Empire and communism are ingrained in us. We seek out heroic ideals.’ It is a brilliantly conceived and organized book in which humanity does not come out very well. But all is not bleak. There is love as well. As one young woman tells of the brutality of imprisonment after being arrested in a non-violent protest in Minsk, Belarus: ‘The first few days we talked about politics, but after that we only ever talked about love.’ ...more |
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Dec 15, 2019
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Jan 28, 2020
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| 178022592X
| 9781780225920
| 178022592X
| 4.25
| 38,815
| Mar 13, 2014
| Oct 23, 2014
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really liked it
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Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. This book is a series of case histories written by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. In these stories we are given extraordinary Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. This book is a series of case histories written by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. In these stories we are given extraordinary insight not only into the world of brain surgery but also the modern NHS, the frighteningly backward facilities of the Ukraine (where Marsh performed operations), but above all into the humane mind of Henry Marsh himself. Neurosurgery is amongst the toughest of surgical disciplines because it is the one area where the smallest of slips can provoke the most drastic of outcomes such as severe disability, paralysis and death. Marsh is unflinchingly honest about the mistakes he’s made, the luck he has had and the tough process of learning from experience. Many of the surgeons I have come across have been arrogant, lacking in humanity and matter of fact about things that really matter to the patients they are dealing with. I suspect this comes from playing God on a daily basis with people’s lives. Having to distance yourself from what you are doing in order to be able to do it. Keeping any emotional involvement at bay because it would be too upsetting to face patients and families with catastrophic news. Henry Marsh has transformed my opinion. He talks to patients, in some cases he becomes their friend, he even talks to them while he’s operating on their brains to make sure that he isn’t ruining them. He talks to their families, he sympathizes and empathizes. He has abiding regrets for some of his decisions. On visiting a care home he sees the name of an ex-patient, who had been reduced to a mound on a bed, and relives the horror of that operation. He admits to hubris – in wanting to perform the perfect operation on a most difficult tumour he decides that he will go in one last time in order to cut out the very last bit. In doing so he puts his patient beyond repair. He has intense emotional experiences with patients and loved ones in languages he can’t even speak, he unleashes brilliant vituperative tirades against the stupidity of NHS managers, he has torrential arguments both in his head and out loud, he relates the death of his own mother with the most moving compassion, he diverts from going home to say goodbye to a patient he’d spent years trying to save. He is, in short, a brilliant surgeon, who is also utterly and totally human. ...more |
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not set
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Mar 16, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1594633665
| 9781594633669
| 1594633665
| 3.96
| 3,036,666
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 13, 2015
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liked it
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The Girl on the Train is the debut thriller by ex journalist and chick-lit writer Paula Hawkins. It’s a dark psychological novel set in London’s commu
The Girl on the Train is the debut thriller by ex journalist and chick-lit writer Paula Hawkins. It’s a dark psychological novel set in London’s commuter belt and features the first person narration of three young and not entirely reliable female characters: Rachel, Megan and Anna. Rachel is a divorced alcoholic, who travels on the same train morning and evening from a room she rents from a half friend, to a job she no longer has in a PR company in London. Her train passes the back of the house where she used to live with her ex-husband, Tom, who is now in a new relationship with Anna who has had their baby. They live a few houses away from Scott and Megan who Rachel daily observes from the train, but doesn’t know. They assume the status of perfection in her imagination until one day she sees something that throws that fantasy into question. This is followed by Megan’s disappearance with Rachel insinuating herself into the subsequent police investigation. What I found striking about this book, apart from the thrilling read, was the intensity of the claustrophobic loneliness of the three main characters. Rachel is a lost soul desperately trying to refill the emptiness she feels at her inability to conceive and the breakdown of her marriage with canned G&Ts and wine. She is in the ultimate catastrophe with no home of her own, no love and no job. Her mind buzzes with repetitive arguments and self-hatred. It’s one of the writer’s achievements that we are never totally repelled by her appalling behaviour. Anna is in a happy marriage with Tom, but is thrown into a state of anxiety by Rachel’s constant harassment. She is also falling into the trap of the home alone Mum. Megan, who starts her story a year before the others, is married to Scott but has lost the job she had in a local gallery, which occupied her agitated mind, and now indulges in various strategies in order to keep the past at bay. The setting of a commuter town on the outskirts of London tells an economic story and contributes to the claustrophobia. These are people in their early thirties who should be living in London but their respectable incomes only just allow them to get by in boring Ashbury. There is no sense of the global possibilities of the capital here. It’s just the railway station, the track, the underpass, the pub, the café, not even a park to wander in and no sense of teeming life apart from commuters staring dumbly out of their passing trains. The writing is good, the pacing constantly gains in momentum, the twists and turns of the plot rarely strain the bounds of credibility and the reading experience is relentless. There’s no doubt that Paula Hawkins is an exciting new talent. ...more |
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not set
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Jan 30, 2015
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Feb 03, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0670025488
| 9780670025480
| 0670025488
| 3.67
| 16,317
| Sep 01, 2012
| Sep 27, 2012
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really liked it
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A.M. Homes’ book May We Be Forgiven is the story of Nixonologist Harry Silver’s one year journey from a catalytic kiss from his sister-in-law through
A.M. Homes’ book May We Be Forgiven is the story of Nixonologist Harry Silver’s one year journey from a catalytic kiss from his sister-in-law through mayhem, murder and madness followed by physical, mental, social and familial breakdown, divorce and redundancy to stability, equilibrium and finally redemption. The first half is brutal. It is the mid-life crisis to end all mid life crises but the suffering is mitigated by a dark, rich, black humour that made me laugh every day I read it. Homes has a wonderful eye for human fragility but rather than dwell on the pathetic she points up the absurd. After Harry has had a TIA and ends up in hospital he worries about someone to look after the pets and the hospital sends a Furry Friends Companion Consultant (we are in US suburbia after all). ‘Do you have a cat or a dog?’ ‘Both.’ ‘If a stranger opens the door, would they attack? Where is the food, and how much do they get? Is the dog all right overnight – or do you need a nighttime companion? We have students who will occasionally do sleepovers.’ ‘How long am I going to be here?’ I ask. ‘That’s a question for your doctor. Adoption is also an option in some cases.’ ‘Someone would adopt me?’ ‘Someone would adopt the pets -…’ It’s pathetic but funny because you know exactly how Harry feels in his confused state. He really does need someone to take over, to care for him. Unfortunately that person has got to be Harry himself and once he steps up to the plate the centre begins to hold and a new life falls into place. The danger here is that, once the mayhem and madness are over and stability sets in, the book could become boring. However, the dullness of suburban life is lifted by a cast of characters determined to discover a new connectivity. They tried internet dating or rather random sex and found it lacking now they’re pursuing Forster’s nostrum: ‘Only connect.’ This is Homes’ theme: “There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with out families, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version – it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.” Homes’ believes the best way to set about connecting is through family and, if you don’t have one, make one for yourself, which is what Harry does. He doesn’t just adopt his brother’s children, but also the orphan left from the car crash his brother caused and the demented parents of the girl he met in the A&P Store. Suddenly Harry has a full life. It’s not perfect, it’s messy, but it’s his and it’s real and it makes him feel alive. He organizes a bar mitzvah for his nephew who has been supporting a village in South Africa. This change of venue and perspective could have been disastrous as we expect some hideous culture clash, but I found the episode curiously moving. Finally Harry lays Nixon to rest. Having spent his career raking over the life of one of America’s most contentious politicians he is handed some stories written by Nixon which he believes gives him a new, trembling insight in to the man. He spends time reshaping these stories using a Chinese transcriber to type up his changes while eating lunches in her parents’ deli. The Chinese ‘connection’ is not lost. Nixon brought about the first ‘talks’ with China and it’s stunning to look back in 2012 at the monster China has become – the greatest owner of US debt, the largest manufacturing base for US goods, the greatest cause of US redundancy. It was also interesting to note, in the light of the Snowden affair, that Homes herself came across the fact that 850,000 people now have Top Secret security clearance in the USA. We thought Nixon through Watergate had plunged us into an uncertain world, but it seems that it was through one of his more positive steps that he has brought about US decline. May We Be Forgiven is a fascinating book, one that puts its finger on the pulse of modern suburban American life and finds it tachycardic with occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation. It is not a book for the faint-hearted. Just the sheer amount of food consumed and either vomited or defecated by humans and dogs would be enough to weaken most European readers. I was fully expecting Homes to announce by the end that Harry was now 250 lbs and heading for a triple bypass. It’s funny, coruscating, disturbing, enlightening, moving and provocative – what more can you ask for from a book? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 23, 2013
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Jun 25, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 2246760011
| 9782246760016
| B00EAS0ZPS
| 4.07
| 26,186
| Jan 13, 2010
| Jan 2010
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really liked it
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Not just a fascinating account of the assassination of the Blond Beast, Reinhard Heydrich, and the heroism of the Czech and Slovak assassins, but also
Not just a fascinating account of the assassination of the Blond Beast, Reinhard Heydrich, and the heroism of the Czech and Slovak assassins, but also a sometimes charming, occasionally incisive and frequently brilliant report of the research and writing decisions taken in order to bring this small bit of history with its massive repercussions to the page. I'm sure there will be some readers who wished Laurent Binet had just got on with it and told his story but, as a writer, I can understand all the difficulties he faced and it was enjoyable to watch him agonize over ridiculous detail (the colour of Heydrich's Mercedes), while laughing at his brazen attempts to put 'believable' dialogue into the mouths of 'historical figures'. Whatever you might think of his authorial musings the one thing that can't be denied is that once Laurent Binet sets about telling the story of the assassination and it's extraordinary aftermath he totally delivers on all fronts.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 03, 2013
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Jan 10, 2013
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Paperback
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| 0140044469
| 9780140044461
| 0140044469
| 3.93
| 2,418
| 1967
| Feb 24, 1977
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it was amazing
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An outstanding account of a curious adolescence. Beautifully descriptive of first friendships, an obsession with yo-yo, an eccentric step father, runn
An outstanding account of a curious adolescence. Beautifully descriptive of first friendships, an obsession with yo-yo, an eccentric step father, running away from home and the joy at finally breaking free. One of those rare books that make you laugh out loud at the child's view of the idiosyncrasies of adults and marvel that someone could come out of this relatively unscathed.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2012
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Jul 29, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0143121006
| 9780143121008
| 0143121006
| 3.85
| 7,185
| Apr 24, 2012
| Apr 24, 2012
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really liked it
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Excellent research. Very well put together. Good narrative pace. Superb and accurate historical detail. Restrained, descriptive prose. A powerful emot
Excellent research. Very well put together. Good narrative pace. Superb and accurate historical detail. Restrained, descriptive prose. A powerful emotional build. A disturbing insight into the evil that can reside in an expat society without the normal societal controls combined with a shameful lack of interest from the authorities purely because they didn't much care for the broken-hearted father. I felt by the end that Paul French had put right something that had been wrong for more than seventy years and it made for a very satisfying read.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2012
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Sep 10, 2012
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Jul 29, 2012
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Hardcover
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