For a while I found this difficult to follow – mostly my fault as I’m not good with names that are unfamiliar to me – but once I had a grasp of who alFor a while I found this difficult to follow – mostly my fault as I’m not good with names that are unfamiliar to me – but once I had a grasp of who all the characters were and got a feel for the shifting chronology of the narrative I was completely engrossed.
This is a novel that manages to be both brutal and beautifully tender. Its very first sentence sets this tone - “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” And Varra has created a memorable cast of characters. Most novels feature characters who are familiar to us in some ways. Varra’s characters on the other hand are far more eccentric than anyone I know. And that’s their charm, they are creations of a brilliant imagination. On the surface this is about the Chechan war but really it’s about relationships within families and between friends. Especially moving is the depiction of the difficult relationship between two sisters and the equally fraught relationship of a father with his informer son. The eight year old Havaa and the reader’s concern for her continuing safety is the emotional heart of the novel.
In short, a brilliant achievement, difficult to begin with but ultimately immensely rewarding and inspired story telling. ...more
Usually you can take with a pinch of salt what’s quoted on the back cover of books but in this case when the New York Times says “Impossible to put do Usually you can take with a pinch of salt what’s quoted on the back cover of books but in this case when the New York Times says “Impossible to put down” they hit the nail on the head. Quite simply a masterpiece of conscientious research and organisational artistry. Dee Brown provides an immensely sympathetic account of the plight of many Indian tribes as the wheels of progress arrived to wipe out their lifestyle, if not their culture. You could say Brown is too sympathetic but then for a people so cruelly trampled over by the wheels of progress you could also say this is the least they deserve.
I have to confess my sympathies were stronger for the tribes that fought back – especially the Lakota whose culture is perhaps the most compelling of all though every tribe in its way represents an ideal of freedom that tugs at the heartstrings. This is also a book about spiritual leaders – Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Chief Joseph. Eloquent wise men like Martin Luther-King with a vision, not just war-paint and rifles.
Though Brown names and shames many of the villains of the massacres he also gives credit where credit is due and exonerates certain individuals for posterity – “Not all of Anthony’s officers, however, were eager or even willing to join Chivington’s well-planned massacre. Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians by both Wynkoop and Anthony, “that it would be murder in every sense of the word,” and any officer participating would dishonor the uniform of the Army.” In short, this is a book you feel ought to be taught in schools because it makes such a strong and moving case for the paramount importance of respecting foreign cultures. Though it’s true these cultures could never have survived industrialisation in their traditional form this book highlights the cruelty that ensues when personal and corporate gain prevails over the spirit of community. As such it can almost be read as a grotesque metaphor for much that has happened in the world since.
“The whites are as numerous as the leaves on the trees. We know that. But what do we want to live for? The white man has taken our country, killed all our game. Was not satisfied with that but has killed our wives and children. Now, no peace. We want to go and meet our families in the spirit land. We have raised the battle axe until death. Call back your young men from our hills. They have run all over our country. They have destroyed the growing wood and the green grass. They have set fire to our lands. They have killed the elk, the buffalo, the deer. They do not kill them to eat them. They leave them to rot where they fall. If I went into your country and killed your animals and your wives and children what would you say? Should I not be wrong? And would you not make war on me? I speak straight and do not wish to deceive or be deceived. I will keep my word until the stones melt. The coyotes stalk to rob and kill. I cannot see them. I am not the Great Spirit. We were born like the animals, in the dry grass. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight straight to our hearts. Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked through this land why has she never entered the lodges of the Lakota? Why have we never seen or heard her? I do not want to go to the land where she walks. The flies in those parts eat out the eyes of horses. The bad spirits live there. I have drunk of those waters and they are bad. I do not want to leave here. Here my ancestors are buried. Life is sweet, love is strong. Our days are not many. The white man too shall pass. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild ponies all tamed, the secret corners of the forest contaminated with the odours of the white man. The end of living and the beginning of survival. We might understand if we knew what it is the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children, what visions he burns into their minds so they will wish for tomorrow. The white man’s dreams are hidden from us. You say you want to put us on a reservation, to build us tepees of wood and glass. I do not want them. I was born at the foot of the Black Hills.”
A stunning achievement, the most compelling novel I’ve read all year. The relationship between the two old Texas Rangers, Call and McCrae has to be onA stunning achievement, the most compelling novel I’ve read all year. The relationship between the two old Texas Rangers, Call and McCrae has to be one of my favourites in all literature. Both are brilliant character studies of archetypal men – Cal, infuriatingly silent, emotionally shy, almost retarded in his refusal to allow feeling, McCrae, prone to excess drinking, lazy and vain about his scant erudition. The bond they share becomes more and more moving as the novel progresses. It’s one of the great (entirely platonic) love stories about two men. Essentially about a cattle drive Lonesome Dove has all the profundity of an ancient myth like The Odyssey or even the Divine Comedy because at heart it’s a story about venturing into the unknown with only your wits to offer protection against the perils. It’s not just the two main characters who are so brilliantly developed, so compelling and ultimately so loveable despite their flawed complexities; there is a whole cast of such characters in this novel. The set-pieces, perfectly timed to sustain the excitement of the plot, are fantastically alive and vivid and moving. An early example of this is the young boy who rides into a nest of poisonous river snakes. The range of emotion McMurtry forces you to feel in this scene is dazzling. I’m not American and have never been there but I felt this novel explained the young heart of America to me better than perhaps any other novel I’ve read. It read like the depiction of the beginning of a civilisation. But never is McMurtry guilty of romanticising the past. You feel this is exactly how it must have been. Another brilliant touch is the young man who is more terrified of talking to women then any danger the prairies hold. Lonesome Dove is epic in the most exalted sense of the term....more
The best novel I’ve read so far this year. It’s about the redemptive powers of storytelling and is intelligent, compelling and deeply moving. It featuThe best novel I’ve read so far this year. It’s about the redemptive powers of storytelling and is intelligent, compelling and deeply moving. It features a cast of brilliantly drawn characters and does a fantastic job of demonising racism.
The street sweeper is Lamont Williams, an American black man in his 30s and an ex-convict who has lost touch with his young daughter. He is living with his grandmother in the Bronx, and after doing a good deed is offered a job as a janitor at a New York cancer hospital. Lamont is immensely likeable. Perlman does an excellent job of making us feel very protective towards him. One of the patients he meets is Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. Williams begins visiting the elderly man, purely for the love of talking with him and Mandelbrot begins sharing his wartime memories.
A second narrative features Adam Zignelik, a young historian whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer. Adam, like Lamont, is at a dead end and losing the love of his girlfriend Diana. He is persuaded by a friend of his father’s to explore a cache of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Adam, like Lamont, becomes a listener.
Perlman does a masterful job of unfurling the plot which extends ever further back in time, bringing the past back to life. Soon it becomes as gripping as the best murder mysteries. Highly recommended. ...more
Of course if you loved Wolf Hall you’re going to love this too. It’s slightly different in tone and texture to Wolf Hall though. Less richly dense andOf course if you loved Wolf Hall you’re going to love this too. It’s slightly different in tone and texture to Wolf Hall though. Less richly dense and intimate; quicker paced, covering as it does a much smaller time frame than Wolf Hall. I read somewhere Mantel heeded criticism of her excessive and confusing use of the pronoun he in Wolf Hall. And it’s true she is much clearer here, always referring to Cromwell by name whenever there might be confusion. What this does is remove some of the sympathetic intimacy we feel for Cromwell. In fact, you realise what a stroke of genius it was in Wolf Hall. For the first time there are moments when we see him as something of a calculating despot, we begin to have an inkling of why he was hated so much. We see the Michael Corleone in him. It’s fascinating that all the men eventually accused of sleeping with Ann are men against whom he has a long standing personal grudge. Men who were involved in Wolsey’s fall from grace. Cromwell becomes like Wolsey’s avenging angel, as if it’s been Wolsey all along he’s been working for and not the King. Reading between the lines you feel Mantel thinks these men were guilty but not guilty as charged. In other words, they all probably mocked the king while flirting with Ann but probably didn’t sleep with her. I’ve watched a few programmes asking the question whether or not Ann was guilty as charged. Those who are convinced she was innocent usually refer to her last will and testament in which she denied all charges. They say she would not lie, knowing she was about to die and about to meet her maker, that she would not risk an eternity in Hell by making a false statement. However Mantel states in the afterword that Ann’s testament didn’t survive and what we have is a fiction composed years later. Posing the likelihood that biographers, no less than novelists, take huge liberties with the truth.
I can’t wait for the third and final instalment of Cromwell’s story. ...more
The scope of this novel is hugely impressive. We are taken on bombing raids to Berlin, into the world of art theft in Florence, to partisan battles inThe scope of this novel is hugely impressive. We are taken on bombing raids to Berlin, into the world of art theft in Florence, to partisan battles in the hills of Tuscany, to the offices of the secret police in Florence, to Italian internment camps and to the Nazi death camps. And yet for all the pervasive horror of war this is essentially an uplifting novel written with sustained imaginative vitality about how people touch each other and how humanity prevails.
We see WW2 through three perspectives – these are three friends who met at art college in Florence before the war. Freddie becomes the pilot of a Lancaster bomber, Isabella, his Italian wife, is a painter in Florence and Oskar, a German Jew, is trying to avoid the Gestapo in Italy. All three narratives are utterly compelling in their different ways. Isabella is dragged into the world of art forgery and the fascist/partisan conflict; Oskar and his young daughter are hunted by the Nazis and have to depend on the kindness of strangers and are constantly in fear of their treachery (huge rewards were offered for information leading to the arrest of Jews). And Freddie is just trying to stay alive - the account of life in Bomber Command is a brilliant feat of imagination – a succession of thrilling set pieces in which you feel you’re up there in the plane. The control of the suspense throughout is done with great skill. You genuinely worry for the safety of the characters. Oskar’s efforts to keep his daughter safe is a very moving account of the love of a father for his daughter, just as Freddie and Isabella’s story is a moving depiction of the love between a separated husband and wife. It’s also a brilliant portrait of Italy and in particular Florence itself. I didn’t want it to end. Fully recommended. Along with All the Light We Cannot See my favourite read of 2015....more
It took Fitzgerald so long to write this novel that it’s inevitably flawed. It seems to me he began with a view to distancing himself from himself andIt took Fitzgerald so long to write this novel that it’s inevitably flawed. It seems to me he began with a view to distancing himself from himself and Dick Diver was conceived as a fictional character modelled on someone Fitzgerald knew. However as the novel progresses Diver becomes more and more Fitzgerald himself and the novel becomes ever more autobiographical. This is what ultimately gives it its beautiful heartbreaking quality – it’s the fictionalised story of Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda. Though Gatsby is undoubtedly a much better novel in terms of construction and economy Tender has an emotional power Gatsby lacks. It’s a novel that captures poignantly the diminishing returns of youthful optimism and vitality, of young love, and as such one of the most beautifully sad novels I have ever read. One’s heart goes out to poor Dick Diver. ...more
“My theme is memory, that winged host.” There’s a haunting elegiac beauty to this novel which maybe makes it seem a little better than it really is. T“My theme is memory, that winged host.” There’s a haunting elegiac beauty to this novel which maybe makes it seem a little better than it really is. The writing is gorgeous, especially when Waugh is dealing with the passing of time. He’s rather like the English Fitzgerald in this book – the nostalgia for youth and high emotion, the mourning an era which he beautifully romanticises and painting what follows as grey and turgid. The characters are all brilliantly conceived and drawn, uniquely memorable and contributing vital current to the book’s plot. It’s also a fascinating study of Catholicism and the nature of faith. Socially it’s an extremely conservative novel. Waugh does not like change but it’s this stubborn conservatism that allows him to create such a powerful atmosphere of heartbreaking nostalgia. ...more
I think the most admirable thing about this novel is how breezily it carries its research and lyrical prose. The short chapters and present tense narrI think the most admirable thing about this novel is how breezily it carries its research and lyrical prose. The short chapters and present tense narrative work so well in giving it an absorbing and urgent momentum. It also brilliantly doubles up as a work of historical fiction and a fable – a conjuring trick Doerr makes seem effortless. The characters might all be fairy story characters and yet they work just as well as believable real life individuals. We’ve got a princess, a prince, a guardian, a wizard and an ogre. And, of course, the magical stone.
Doerr especially writes brilliantly about the natural world. His descriptive writing extracts the wonder and sometimes the horror of what he describes with startling clarity. I didn’t however find him so gifted with writing dialogue, which I thought was the one weak spot in the novel. I think this was most evident when Jutta goes to see Marie after the war and their conversation, which should be a moment of high emotion, falls flat because neither of them asks the questions you want them to ask. Instead the dialogue is fragmented and overwrought. But this is a small reservation.
There’s a couple of questions I would like to ask Anthony Doerr. One would be, how did he decide which characters to kill off and which to save? Seeing as the stone purportedly causes harm to everyone close to its custodian there might have been an argument to kill them all off. I wonder how he decided. Did he know from the beginning? And another question would be why did he replace Etienne with his brother in the narrative? Why not simply give Etienne’s fate to Henri, so that the original radio voice of the novel is still there towards the end?
In another novelist’s hands this book could have been a high octane WW2 thriller. You’ve got an archaeological explorer, a spy and a sapper defusing bIn another novelist’s hands this book could have been a high octane WW2 thriller. You’ve got an archaeological explorer, a spy and a sapper defusing bombs. But Ondaatje does something altogether much cleverer and haunting with his characters and material. He investigates the borders of identity against the shifting borders of war. What goes into the forming of identity and what can undo it – “She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.” The prose is mostly exquisite though does occasionally get carried away with itself - "At night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more another constellation, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves of it between them in their embraces and in their turns of sleep. She holds an Indian goddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons." My favourite part was probably the Indian Sikh’s moving relationship with the English peer who is his bomb-disposal instructor. Despite the closeness of this bond Kip never feels accepted by the British – another example of official cartography not corresponding to personal cartography which is again explored by the English patient himself who, of course, is not English at all. ...more
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