tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53697370083590207372024-02-06T17:57:53.793-08:00Slightly ReadAndrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-5334918832127862922012-04-03T12:58:00.001-07:002012-04-03T13:11:37.890-07:00'Beasts of No Nation' by Uzodinma Iweala<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A book about a child soldier in an unnamed west African state sounds a lot like like a book you <i>ought </i>to read rather than one you'd want to. But Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala avoids this problem by making his narrator's voice compelling from the very start:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><i>"It is starting like this. I am feeling itch like insect is crawling on my skin, and then my head is just starting to tingle right between my eye, and then I am wanting to sneeze because my nose is itching, and then air is just blowing into my ear and I am hearing so many thing: the clicking of insect, the sound of truck grumbling like one kind of animal, and then the sound of somebody shouting TAKE YOUR POSITION RIGHT NOW! QUICK! QUICK QUICK! MOVE WITH SPEED! MOVE FAST OH! in voice that is just touching my body like knife."</i></span> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18px;">(To sample a larger part of the text, click </span><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060798673" style="line-height: 18px;">here</a><span style="line-height: 18px;">).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">The entire book is written in this register - a pidgin English that apparently mimics the speech patterns of various west African dialects. Surprisingly, it failed to get on my nerves and I read it with the urgency that the present continuous tends to evoke. Agu, the nine year old narrator is recruited by a band of guerrillas at the start of the book and is quickly brought into the fold by being forced to commit a brutal killing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">(And here, readers, is where I lost my train of thought while I was writing this review a couple of months ago and went scouting the internet for pictures of cats dressed as pirates or something instead. It happens. But since then everyone has got very excited about this Joseph Kony fella and child soldiers have become, like, so hot right now. Would I sound like some prick of a hipster if I said that I was into child soldiers before you all even knew about them? I would. I dunno, read this book instead of watching some shoddy viral video if it's a topic you're concerned with. It's not fun, but it's good.)</span></div>
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</i></span></div>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-71787643426493181052011-12-08T14:07:00.000-08:002011-12-08T14:07:42.034-08:00'Exile' by Jakob Ejersbo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>"It has to be deeper, otherwise the dogs will get her," Dad says. Doesn't he realize they already have me?</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">'Exile' was a pure impulse buy for me. I think it attracted my attention simply by its author having a Scandinavian name (I suppose I assumed he might be some new crime fiction writer) and then by having the outline of Africa on its cover. When I saw the backpage blurb about it being part of a trilogy of books about growing up as an ex-pat in Tanzania I was sold, having lived there for three years when I was a kid.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The narrator of this book is Samantha, an endearingly fucked-up teenager who deals with neglectful, dysfunctional parents, a sister growing up and getting on with life faster than her, and life in the pressure-cooker of an international boarding school by smoking and getting shit-faced on booze like <i>konyagi</i> - a rough Tanzanian spirit, and whatever drugs she can lay her hands on. She also seeks out male attention to a pathological degree, and it is really her frequent and misguided dalliances with numerous boys and men that the book revolves around.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Indeed, there are so many men in Samantha's life that it can be hard working keeping tracking of who's who. It seemed a strange move on the author's part until I learned that 'Revolution' - the second part of the trilogy, not due to be published in English until next year - is a collection of short stories featuring characters who play bit-parts in Samantha's life. Having such a such an extensive and eclectic cast presumably allowed Ejersbo a broader canvas to paint with.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It is a book that reeks of urgency, in all kinds of ways.There is a rawness and a panic to nearly all of Samantha's actions, and there is a scathing honesty and simplicity to the words that describe them. Ejersbo - a Danish writer whose depiction of a Tanzania as rife with poverty and corruption as it was in my day, as it is today, was informed by his own time living there - died of cancer in 2008 and seems to have spent his final months ensuring his trilogy was completed before he succumbed to the disease. If the other parts of the trilogy are as compelling and affecting as this one then he'll have left a notable legacy.</div>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-4339537932490078562011-09-05T12:57:00.000-07:002011-09-05T12:57:50.605-07:00'The Redbreast' by Jo Nesbø<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiN9NbRZL3RgQz5wZ3Pc0iqoKF3lafPo59Tdk304ttrv5EPCBrLskhOBKEMuY7ItDjCTfrSi-zdElFwsck3Bg9UuP2BA71UoNL9WPO-CQwOJJEFrBs8xdhIyJhY2_h6X-Md6riOpjyRLHv/s1600/redbreast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiN9NbRZL3RgQz5wZ3Pc0iqoKF3lafPo59Tdk304ttrv5EPCBrLskhOBKEMuY7ItDjCTfrSi-zdElFwsck3Bg9UuP2BA71UoNL9WPO-CQwOJJEFrBs8xdhIyJhY2_h6X-Md6riOpjyRLHv/s400/redbreast.jpg" width="261" /></a></div><br />
A book about neo-Nazis and psychotic gunmen running around Oslo was a disconcerting thing to be reading on the 22nd of July, 2011, as Anders Breivik went on the rampage. Despite how this sounds, Nesbø has fashioned a surprisingly subtle and intelligent thriller, whose parallels with the Norway attacks are fuel for the fire of those who claim that crime novelists are often the writers with their fingers closest to the national pulse.<br />
Nesbø has been around a while, though he's only really come to prominence on the back of the Stieg Larsson-instigated wave of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction.<br />
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'The New _____________' labels of any kind tend to make my teeth all itchy, but it is particularly unhelpful in the case of comparisons between Nesbø and Larsson, as Nesbø is the superior writer by a fjordic mile. Where Larsson throws sordid sex scenes, product placement and half-baked cliffhangers at nearly every chapter, Nesbø brings an informed view of history and society and in his protagonist, Detective Harry Hole, we get a highly believable, nuanced character capable of evincing genuine pathos.<br />
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And a much finer bandwagon to be on.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-6653014996352619482011-07-24T15:16:00.000-07:002011-07-24T15:16:41.225-07:00'The Motel Life' by Willy Vlautin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvv4YKlkXDHLgBkENSX2J_6vONJDv6EGSRYSGcOWks3L7P7Wdgl3E0ClSz1DAXMNnc5utYpgIRH15aQ291pl_T7R6j_YUlnvI0Si6NFu2Uibkt6g5gcnxuMNis4haWv9t7S8SGB85T88J/s1600/The-Motel-Life.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvv4YKlkXDHLgBkENSX2J_6vONJDv6EGSRYSGcOWks3L7P7Wdgl3E0ClSz1DAXMNnc5utYpgIRH15aQ291pl_T7R6j_YUlnvI0Si6NFu2Uibkt6g5gcnxuMNis4haWv9t7S8SGB85T88J/s1600/The-Motel-Life.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Willy Vlautin was originally best-known as the lead songer of alt-country group Richmond Fontaine, but has recently won serious plaudits for his third novel, 'Lean on Pete'. Being a forager in the Hodges Figgis bargain basement, I picked up his previous two novels 'The Motel Life' and 'Northline' first, and set to work on them. 'Motel', his debut, is the more impressive of the two books to my mind.<br />
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It tells the story of Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, two brothers from Reno with a troubled background who go on the run after Jerry Lee kills a teenager while drink-driving. Comparisons have been drawn by some reviewers to 'Of Mice and Men', due to the relationship between the simple Jerry Lee and his sparkier brother Frank, who narrates the story. But this is probably unhelpful to Vlautin, as he never even attempts to sketch out his characters as fully as Steinbeck does. What he does do is to whisk the story along; each short chapter a striking vignette of unhappiness and uncertainty with a winsome illustration at the start. Where the book really succeeds is that, rather being edge-of-your-seat thrilling or meaningful in any particular way, it feels like an excellent evocation of what really <i>would</i> happen if two brothers ran away from a crime. The romantic sub-plot, too, is tender and convincing.<br />
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'The Motel Life' will likely attract a wider audience next year when it is released as a movie. Provided the film's dialogue is kept as sparse and simple as the novel's is then it shouldn't lose much in the book to screen transition. Either way, it's an agreeably diverting piece of downtrodden Americana, if somewhat lacking the depth to be much more than that.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-41776130588528504472011-05-06T10:37:00.000-07:002011-05-06T10:37:49.603-07:00'Swamplandia!' by Karen Russell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWr6eXWj0kpDcINp_9cYCfppt5qhgAJnDxJ1L_iaABxPSsMzGPj-eLcYyavKLgXVEVvqLeJ19E09U9RcnqlFCoDPyCrlskpOAZ1Bex3BP_0SFnsQmqvP007xwpMThwwVOtQkctO6XMe5-S/s1600/swamplandia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWr6eXWj0kpDcINp_9cYCfppt5qhgAJnDxJ1L_iaABxPSsMzGPj-eLcYyavKLgXVEVvqLeJ19E09U9RcnqlFCoDPyCrlskpOAZ1Bex3BP_0SFnsQmqvP007xwpMThwwVOtQkctO6XMe5-S/s320/swamplandia.jpg" width="216" /></a></div><br />
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Karen Russell first attracted attention a couple of years ago for her debut short story collection <i>St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves</i>. Needless to say, I haven't read it. But there was something beguiling about the cover and plot synopsis of her maiden novel, <i>Swamplandia! </i>, a tale of an odd family who live on an island in the Florida Everglades, where they run their own (eponymous) alligator park, replete with live alligator wrestling shows.<br />
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It's a singularly strange book, largely in a positive way. It opens with the death of Hilola Bigtree - alligator wrestler extraordinaire and beloved mother of Osceola, Kiwi and Ava. The book is largely built around the efforts of the three to deal with their mother's death, though only the perspectives of Kiwi (in the third person) and Ava (a more gripping, less amusing first person perspective) are seen. Kiwi's is really a coming of age story, as he travels to the mainland and works a shitty job for a rival theme park in a misguided attempt to raise enough money to keep Swamplandia! afloat without Hilola, its star attraction. Ava is a charming, unreliable narrator who struggles to keep her sanity whilst looking for her older (but still teenaged) sister, Osceola, who has become unhinged enough to run off with a ghost called Louis Thanksgiving, who she intends to marry.<br />
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Such a bizarre story, you would imagine, requires strong, vibrant writing to work. And Russell manages that in spades, with memorable descriptions and inventive adjectives in almost every paragraph, without sounding too loose and jazzy. A sampling of any page of the book would throw up vivid sentences, but one particularly striking metaphor is used to explain a character's reaction to a rape, where she feels drawn to her rapist:<br />
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"Once, at Argyle Murphy's fish camp, I watched a little scottie dog get a Gulch bottle broken across its back and then go loping, tongue lolling, towards its owner with the man's beer and its own blood stiffening on its fur - not to attack him, as I'd originally thought, but to lick and lick at the emerald bits lodged in his hand."</i><br />
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Interestingly, in an<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/03/karen-russell-on-%E2%80%98swamplandia%E2%80%99/"> interview</a> Karen Russell speaks of how her writing process involves a lot of time carefully composing sentences, and how the editing of the book required her to cut a lot of these sentences out. It is arguable that a few more sentences could have been chopped to facilitate a zippier, tidier narrative; though it would take a hard-hearted bastard of an editor to decide which ones. <i>Swamplandia!</i> falls a fair way short of perfection, but the loveliness of its prose means any reader will be glad to have encountered it.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-21922435038339546762011-02-28T16:16:00.000-08:002011-02-28T16:20:24.479-08:00'The Thing Around Your Neck' by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieA few years back Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came to a secondary school I was teaching in at the time to do a reading and Q&A session for the senior students there. I hadn't read anything of hers at that stage but was aware of the high acclaim there had been for her novels <i>Half of a Yellow Sun</i> and <i>Purple Hibsicus</i>, so I went along out of curiosity. After she'd finished reading some extracts questions were opened to the floor and a girl put up her hand and asked Adichie where she gets her ideas for characters. The author was a few words into her answer before she stopped and asked the girl if she had read any of her books, as she was going to use a particular character to illustrate her answer. When the girl rather shamefacedly admitted that she hadn't Adichie just laughed before continuing her answer, which was to the effect that her characters are nearly always based on people she's met. Then she said "Maybe one day I'll write a story about a girl who asks questions about books she hasn't read."<br />
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Ouch.<br />
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Adichie's fierce intelligence, along with her biting (and sometimes petulant) wit are what come through in <i>The Thing Around Your Neck</i> - her first collection of short stories. She is a traditionalist in the sense that there is absolutely no gimmickry to her prose, though she rips into certain conventional values mercilessly. 'Cell One', which I have seen singled out as one of the weaker stories in the collection in other reviews, is an excellent opener to my mind, with an elegance of style that matches the grace under pressure of the narrator, save for one outburst.<br />
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High standards are maintained throughout, as Adichie plays through her strengths by sticking to the subject matter she knows, that being conflicts of various sorts in her native Nigeria and the difficult experiences of Nigerian immigrants in the USA. You firmly feel that she is basing these stories on personal experiences, some of which are clearly still very raw. Perhaps a little too raw, in some instances, such as 'Monkey Hill' - a tale of frustrations and condescension at an African writers' conference, where Adichie's obvious desire to lampoon someone leads to a mildly cartoonish depiction of a villain, thus threatening the integrity of what is otherwise a very clever story. Although, as Adichie would be at pains to point out, I wasn't there.<br />
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The only other criticism I could make of this collection is that on the one occasion when Adichie chooses to narrate a story from a male perspective I felt my immersion in the book waning considerably, as the story didn't have a fraction of the heart of the others. But that is only really a minor glitch, and you can appreciate the fact that Adichie is trying to spread her wings a little. I read much of this book out loud (it helps my wife get to sleep) and the immaculately composed sentences tripped off the tongue, and brought out just the amount of emotion that they were looking too. I look forward to delving further into Adichie's work, along with reading this one again sometime. And I'm glad I'll never have to ask her an uninformed question.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-15505552766745706702011-01-16T13:01:00.000-08:002011-01-16T13:01:35.864-08:00'In a Strange Room' by Damon Galgut<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOT2B9BCvVydH09oP89-fCLVNVh1LLiVzmlM4tah17n_xMFU6SO3vX2kZt_WOIsuXaytg4BE-U2RhOJdyoD6-HWuQ_NQwTcYmlbKcqQX4Un6ivOHihN44AzzJ29CYL0neZsf_DWEHFWUJZ/s1600/strangeroom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOT2B9BCvVydH09oP89-fCLVNVh1LLiVzmlM4tah17n_xMFU6SO3vX2kZt_WOIsuXaytg4BE-U2RhOJdyoD6-HWuQ_NQwTcYmlbKcqQX4Un6ivOHihN44AzzJ29CYL0neZsf_DWEHFWUJZ/s320/strangeroom.jpg" width="203" /></a></div><br />
Damon Galgut achieved a new level of fame last year when <i>In a Strange Room</i> made it onto the Man Booker Prize shortlist. But he had been there before, a few years back, with a very fine book called <i>The Good Doctor</i>. Neither of these books won the prize, which seems a shame, as they are two of the most fascinating, readable literary novels I've encountered. Both possess that quality that only the most special novels have where the reader feels enriched and, in some intangible way, changed by what they have read.<br />
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<i>In a Strange Room</i> is, at face value, three pieces of travel writing with only a shared narrator as a common thread. Galgut himself appears to be that narrator, though he makes it clear that this is really a work of fictionalised autobiography fairly early on:<br />
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<i style="color: black;">"He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching."</i><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Throughout the book Galgut moves between referring to the protagonist in the third person (for the most part) and the first person. Surprisingly, this is never confusing to the reader. It simply reads as a way of distinguishing the polished narrative of his experience from the sketchier parts of the story. Thus, when the narrator is at his most confused and emotional vulnerable we are more likely to see 'I'. Whilst the three pieces are ostensibly unconnected, there is an increase in intensity throughout each, which then carries through to the next, culminating in some emotionally coruscating scenes in the final part, where the narrator cares for a manipulative, suicidal friend. Such devastating drama owes much to Galgut's precise, controlled prose. there are no pyrotechnics here, for he shares a talent with Cormac McCarthy and</span><i style="color: black;"> </i><span style="color: black;">countryman JM Coetzee for employing a deliberately limited vocabulary to powerful effect.</span><br />
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Galgut has said that this book is about power, love, and guardianship, and how our relationships are defined by one or more of these elements. It is, and more. But for me his true triumph is capturing the disconnectedness of the traveller and the frustrations of thwarted love. Highly recommended.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-84214298053376569952011-01-07T19:37:00.000-08:002011-01-07T19:49:33.041-08:00'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha7G09av_P0ve22m2MVcQbllmAYTIkJiOlOBIVR6roH2FcKB1BjPlPc8-8crxxbU5nqwNb0crYkHaKLAGsBDmmeH4fvGNRKwHpMe_dDYXr11LnMY93F1m7G-XNSDOavYLVs3vokPeLaloT/s320/secrethistory.JPG" width="208" /> </div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">It's all there in the opening line, really: Bunny is going to be killed, the killers (among them our narrator) may or may not get caught, the killers are still only concerned about themselves.</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">I read this book on the strength of some glowing recommendations and some ecstatic reviews on the back pag, so it was almost inevitably going to disappoint. It did, but only slightly. It starts promisingly, laying out over several hundred pages how it comes to pass that Richard Papen and his friends kill their college classmate, Bunny. This, for me, is where the true brilliance of the story lies, as Tartt paints Bunny as such an odious, parasitic creature that I found myself urging the other characters to kill him as soon as possible. Such feelings, growing as they do over several hours, are far more discomforting to an immersed reader than they are while watching a film, where "Kill that fucker!" is a much more transitory, forgettable reaction. Also notable was how familiar the pretensions and arrogance of the scholarly friends felt. I read the book using my old student card as a bookmark to remind me of how jumped up and obnoxious third-level education can make you.</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">It's after the death of Bunny that things start to lag a little. I believe Donna Tartt spent several years writing this book, and it shows - in both good and bad ways. The prose is of a lovely standard, and the characters mostly well-drawn, but the pacing of the drama is all over the place, zipping along at one moment and leaden and flabby the next. As such, some key events feel hurried, while some more peripheral moments feel hugely over-emphasised. </div>Still, it's hard to imagine that there's a novelist out there who didn't overthink their debut novel to some degree, and far be it from me to denigrate what is a well-loved work, one that a lot of people feel is destined to enter the modern canon. Tartt shows a stunning coldness at times, and I find myself hoping that her third book, rumoured to be due next year, won't suffer the same consequences of an equally-lengthy gestation period.<br />
<div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"></div>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-20899277559097648002010-12-16T17:40:00.000-08:002010-12-16T17:40:38.240-08:00'There Are Little Kingdoms' by Kevin BarryWere I a more prolific reader and book-blogger I would no doubt be inclined at this time of year to wax lyrical about my favourite book of the year. But I'm not, so I can't. Paul Murray's <a href="http://slightlyread.blogspot.com/2010/04/skippy-dies-by-paul-murray.html">Skippy Dies</a>, the very first book I reviewed here, would most likely take the crown if I thought about it. Though had Kevin Barry's debut short story collection <i>There Are Little Kingdoms</i> been released this year I would have had an awful lot to think about.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DOeYLVhhClFPNxFS23rRTLb6dhAj2p5Mx-h4o0Yy6TY_Wsvy7uyi7RcajDW3PXk1VYt4tdddnT16ZNycvaFF_BuhIb8Z420ViWSkLe7i8QeblGLic0-W1qwE4fdGGkvrqv-4f8FZVe0M/s1600/KevinBarrylittlekingdoms.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DOeYLVhhClFPNxFS23rRTLb6dhAj2p5Mx-h4o0Yy6TY_Wsvy7uyi7RcajDW3PXk1VYt4tdddnT16ZNycvaFF_BuhIb8Z420ViWSkLe7i8QeblGLic0-W1qwE4fdGGkvrqv-4f8FZVe0M/s400/KevinBarrylittlekingdoms.jpg" width="250" /></a></div> It was, in fact, released in 2007 - leaving me mystified as to how it took until early this year for me to get wind of it. It appears to have had slow-burning success, garnering rave reviews and high profile admirers such as Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright on the way. It's a kick in the bollocks of a book, giving a stunningly accurate depiction of an Ireland that is so rarely portrayed well in culture, be it high or low brow. The Ireland of midlands ennui and petty personal victories. As soon as Barry launches into his first story, <i>Atlantic City</i>, you feel a surge of familiarity with the protagonist, Jamesie, king of the pool table and the pinball machine, a proud, bored fish in a slightly-too-small pond.<br />
And so it continues from story to story. If you don't already know countless examples of these characters in real life then you certainly know they're out there, just a stroke of poor luck away from sitting beside you on a bus, or hitting on you painfully in a provincial nightclub. Donna and Dee, the restless and irritating twins of <i>Ideal Homes</i> provide a perfect example, somehow perfectly encapsulating the new mentality and morality that took hold just as the Celtic Tiger first stirred.<br />
But if it sounds as though Kevin Barry has taken a harsh view of the people of these nondescript towns that dot the country then you'd be mistaken. His pages lack a sense of judgement, simply letting the characters be who they are, letting them reside in their own little kingdoms.<br />
Read this to enjoy some side-splitting, heart-splitting prose, and to learn something you almost already knew about Ireland today.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-12218540210880631772010-11-08T12:00:00.000-08:002010-11-08T12:03:32.040-08:00'The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ' by Philip Pullman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGtwu_QZzbXfLsJrSTq3HHRn5qhEt5rLdoPi2S5zOurpUJNIVAIR5e1Czysfsa5LDUpjJFV_F7-BAHFU0ue8eyHbirqMbgQFyPGnbGmWRB6xw8tlkWdEFNlAQ0vVA46CGTslq__7VSEDhx/s1600/GoodJesusScoundrelChrist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGtwu_QZzbXfLsJrSTq3HHRn5qhEt5rLdoPi2S5zOurpUJNIVAIR5e1Czysfsa5LDUpjJFV_F7-BAHFU0ue8eyHbirqMbgQFyPGnbGmWRB6xw8tlkWdEFNlAQ0vVA46CGTslq__7VSEDhx/s1600/GoodJesusScoundrelChrist.jpg" /></a></div>Before getting down to the nitty-gritty, a small qualm I have with this book: the 245 pages of the paperback edition contain some of the widest margins I have ever encountered, with a full inch to either side of the text, and about an inch and a half at the top and the bottom. This, coupled with the fact that each short chapter tends to conclude halfway down a page and is followed by a blank page (included in the page numbering) mean that the book is presented as a full-blown novel, though a more environmentally-concerned publisher could probably print the content on 60 or less pages without reducing its legibility. I have read longer short stories than this entire book, which leads me to believe that Canongate were being more than a little cynical by finding a way of duping people into spending around twelve euros on what is really a very slender novella. Clever.<br />
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What's left of this book when you cut out the excess paper is intriguing. Pullman retells New Testament stories by imagining the figure of Jesus as twins: the wholesome, well-intentioned preacher 'Jesus', and the sickly, shady 'Christ' - who recognises the potential for power that his brother's charisma represents, and reports on his actions to a mysterious stranger. Events, unsurprisingly, lead towards the crucifixion of Jesus, and it is only here that the story deviates significantly from the gospel stories as we know them and the sinister undertones of Christ's meetings with the stranger are brought starkly into the light. Most powerful of all is Jesus' lengthy soliloquy in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which Pullman's own atheistic viewpoint is shown both in a manner both strident and measured:<br />
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<i><span id="fullpost">‘And slander’s what it is; you made this world, and it’s lovely, every inch if it. When I think of these things I’ve loved I find myself choking with happiness, or maybe sorrow, I don’t know; and every one of them has been something in this world that you made. If anyone can smell frying fish on an evening by the lake, or feel a cool breeze on a hot day, or see a little animal trying to run around and tumbling over and getting up again, or kiss a pair of soft and willing lips, if anyone can feel those things and still maintain they’re nothing but crude imperfect copies of something much better in another world, they are slandering you, Lord, as surely as words mean anything at all.’</span></i><br />
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<span id="fullpost">The last line of the above quote also shows Pullman's awareness of the historical context of the story, with a clear reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He shows himself to be generally well-informed when it comes to biblical scholarship and is largely respectful of it. He does, however, pick and choose when to</span><i><span id="fullpost"> </span></i><span id="fullpost">go with the facts as they are generally accepted, and when to twist things slightly to fit his own narrative purposes. This is probably fair enough, as this book is ultimately one about storytelling, but it makes for a confusing blend of myth and history at times (the book is sold as part of Canongate's Myth series). Much like the New Testament, many would claim. The compelling question for me is whether Pullman is aware of Albert Schweitzer's findings in his book 'The Quest of the Historical Jesus' that anyone who postulates too much on the precise character and ideology of the historical Jesus ends up projecting their own personality onto him. I would warrant that Pullman is aware of this, and has taken the opportunity to quite openly use the figure of Jesus as a mouthpiece for his own philosophy and thoughts about organised religion.</span><br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
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<span id="fullpost">Fortunately, it's a lucid and compelling one, well worth the money despite its brevity.</span>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-47063985142682410442010-09-29T07:46:00.000-07:002010-09-29T07:46:23.546-07:00'Disgrace' by J.M. Coetzee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDxsQqjxuOJ4IOSpmr2nnxoCet2Gsp6vcuU4IGdrsqZ6R7nadz6mf40Ff-IG474HNqhaEC8v6nUyfpQdot4HkAmnQi91brb-6w3Vj38XAyGCVpd1PPByH9NP-r2uhrX92WtkPiWM3hJau6/s1600/disgrace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDxsQqjxuOJ4IOSpmr2nnxoCet2Gsp6vcuU4IGdrsqZ6R7nadz6mf40Ff-IG474HNqhaEC8v6nUyfpQdot4HkAmnQi91brb-6w3Vj38XAyGCVpd1PPByH9NP-r2uhrX92WtkPiWM3hJau6/s320/disgrace.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Disgrace was the first novel I read by JM Coetzee and, at the age of nineteen, was probably one of the first really "grown-up" novels I bothered finishing. It's a fine piece of work, notable throughout for Coetzee's complete control of the story and his utter lack of bombast, even when describing dramatic and traumatic events.The novel deals with the fallout of the early post-apartheid years in South Africa and shows how attempts to even the score in terms of land-rights and crime may well have gone too far in the other direction. Coetzee is sometimes criticised for having a certain cold clinicalness to his writing, but it is precisely these qualities that make Disgrace such a memorable book, deserved winner of the Booker Prize in its year of publishing, and one that is likely to stand the test of time.</div>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-43325835644546778412010-09-02T12:23:00.000-07:002010-09-02T13:05:53.927-07:00'The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts' by Louis de Bernieres<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Every now and then you read a book that has little bits of magic in it, be they in the style or the story of it. <i>The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts</i> is a book coated in big, dirty swathes of magic. Whilst being grandiose and intimate at the same time, this tale of love, corruption and cruelty in an unnamed South American state contains both belly-laughs and enough viciousness to make you weep for the world on virtually every page.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCtnJfEojksn_TwRkjfmR4_aN-eAeQjzeRCiuChu268CnnlUMP4xI3mNRBiUBzOUOmLs3QvqsHyY-_7vXWphkbkrsq1NwWikiM4TvDINh_kd35hqYSCJ48z15bCxjLaTKDsn3aOcacM3FT/s1600/donemmanuel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCtnJfEojksn_TwRkjfmR4_aN-eAeQjzeRCiuChu268CnnlUMP4xI3mNRBiUBzOUOmLs3QvqsHyY-_7vXWphkbkrsq1NwWikiM4TvDINh_kd35hqYSCJ48z15bCxjLaTKDsn3aOcacM3FT/s320/donemmanuel.jpg" /></a></div><br />
When you stop to consider that this was de Bernieres' debut effort you will start to weep for all the writers who never manage to demonstrate an ounce of this man's vision or ambition within their entire careers. If I'd ever gotten around to reading more than one short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I have a feeling that I'd be drawing most favourable comparisons right now.<br />
Minor quibbles (if only because no-one enjoys relentless positivity) are that there are an awful lot of Spanish slang words to get your head around, and an awful lot of characters to follow. But really, these things matter not a whit, as this is one bad-ass muchacho of a book.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-81932228229417123332010-08-27T08:25:00.000-07:002010-08-27T08:25:03.036-07:00'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0pYKkUKIk5YlCdQiS6j68Ty_7oYcIn9MqLwOfD7bIL__CSf09al2ahegjNWEwAJs9VDmUT6icrkAg7-PDmiJxfJzcwy2Itrb9ImKP_401PPDZ3lTRcpou8LZd3w8tgrGjdXpX5EET9RTX/s1600/dragon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0pYKkUKIk5YlCdQiS6j68Ty_7oYcIn9MqLwOfD7bIL__CSf09al2ahegjNWEwAJs9VDmUT6icrkAg7-PDmiJxfJzcwy2Itrb9ImKP_401PPDZ3lTRcpou8LZd3w8tgrGjdXpX5EET9RTX/s400/dragon.jpg" width="257" /></a></div><br />
"The new Dan Brown!" claim excited fans, who love Stieg Larsson's brand of page-turning, investigative excitement, and who relish the sight of the same book being read by so many people.<br />
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"The new Dan Brown," sigh the less easily impressed, who recognise something horribly familiar in the sloppily-written, even-more-sloppily-edited prose with a manipulative cliff-hanger shoehorned into the end of every chapter, and who despair of the sight of every single fucker on the bus making this their quarterly read.<br />
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Larsson is, to my mind, a couple of notches above Dan Brown. Make of that what you will.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-35265342753152693462010-08-15T13:11:00.000-07:002010-08-15T13:11:28.351-07:00'Let The Great World Spin' by Colum McCann<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>"A poet with every living breath" proclaims Peter Carey of Colum McCann, with the kind of effusiveness that is now entirely typical from big authors providing a cover quote to help a lesser-known author flog their book. For once, however, this appears to be more than mere hyperbole.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRO5I7151Dcog2MMVoNmbtsiPTjjo7MQNTZXaC2EvrBmvJiBTY7HSHumelwycDLrKbva8_a6km0twwTiU1vE4kVsoxx7GVn95YpK058sJW3KntB0bxmo3hHrv-REOcKg5tTgzL5tZ-JuS6/s1600/let-the-great-world-spin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRO5I7151Dcog2MMVoNmbtsiPTjjo7MQNTZXaC2EvrBmvJiBTY7HSHumelwycDLrKbva8_a6km0twwTiU1vE4kVsoxx7GVn95YpK058sJW3KntB0bxmo3hHrv-REOcKg5tTgzL5tZ-JuS6/s400/let-the-great-world-spin.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
McCann's book, set around Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, is told from the multiple perspectives of people in New York at the time, and shimmers with pretty words and turns-of-phrase from start to finish. My reading of it suffered from lack of time due to work and wedding preparations, meaning some of the intensity of the book was lost through my spending over a month on it. Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel that it featured one or two fairly superfluous narrators - particularly the teenaged photographer Fernando, whose function within the centre of the novel I couldn't really understand.<br />
More impressive were the middle-aged Claire - grieving for her son killed in Vietnam, and the loud-mouthed prostitute Tillie - an intriguing blend of arrogance and contrition.<br />
Ultimately, I found the narration of the story a mixed bag: largely compelling but occasionally flagging. However, it is the constant beauty of McCann's prose that makes this book essential reading for those who are as concerned with style, perspective and profoundness as they are with out and out storytelling. Nowhere is this better seen than in the sections of the book that deal with Petit's (though he is unnamed in the book) daring walk:<br />
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"Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other. On the lookout for the moment when he wasn't even aware of his breath.<br />
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The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.<br />
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake."Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-41952325802426967962010-07-05T13:15:00.000-07:002010-07-05T13:15:43.327-07:00'The Slap' by Christos TsiolkasHere at Slightly Read we (meaning I, but 'we' sounds so much more authoritative) have noticed that copies of <i>The Slap</i> seem to have been flying off the shelves in bookshops. Reviews have generally been kind too, and the Irish cover features highly effusive quotes from respected authors like John Boyne and Colm Toibín; the two men nearly tripping over themselves with desire to tell us what a must-read this is.<br />
So why was I left feeling so underwhelmed? <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZgED9R00yVor5E5tju-1fyEA8IUJXynlAhIx87gConkyDYQDJZmhWvspGR91v66T7nSGbrfQ2bGHdizx6QZsC3O8iFH0YAh4q8RiwSYb7JtGK8mu2Z12Ib4VOlNoEEoBWBx9QvdHu4RT/s1600/slap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirZgED9R00yVor5E5tju-1fyEA8IUJXynlAhIx87gConkyDYQDJZmhWvspGR91v66T7nSGbrfQ2bGHdizx6QZsC3O8iFH0YAh4q8RiwSYb7JtGK8mu2Z12Ib4VOlNoEEoBWBx9QvdHu4RT/s320/slap.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><br />
Firstly, the narrative structure of this book is extremely frustrating. The 'slap' of the title forms the starting point of the book as a man - Harry - slaps the child of Rosie and Gary - a properly dysfunctional pair of gobshites. The story is told from the perspectives of eight people who are at the barbecue where this event occurs. There is no apparent reason for this tactic and it renders the book somewhat like a collection of short stories on a theme, rather than a novel. The story progresses as each new section starts, meaning that we never get to discover how one character, who might have been central to events in the previous section, feels about or even reacts to key developments as they occur. Further to this, there are three (arguably four) characters whose sections are more or less incidental to the central plot and do little to shed new light on any character but themselves. If Tsiolkas was intent on examining a broad cross-section of Australian society up close in this manner he would probably have been better served with a book of short stories. One presumes that was less commercially appealing.<br />
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Secondly, the characters Tsiolkas chooses to focus on seem somewhat arbitrarily chosen. Why do we need to hear from both handsome,Greek Australian, reluctantly middle-aged Hector and Harry when they are both philandering husbands, casual drug users and obnoxious boors with little to separate them? Unless, of course, Christos Tsiolkas finds something particularly interesting in rogueish Greek men? Why do we hear from ageing, weary Manolis but never his long-suffering, even longer-complaining wife Koula? Why hear so much from damaged, childish Rosie but nothing from her alcoholic, delusional husband Gary? Why no section devoted to aboriginal Bilal, whose conversion to Islam makes him, in my mind, the most interesting character in the book?<br />
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Thirdly, the sections where Tsiolkas describes sexual acts and masturbation come across as prurient rather than realistic, giving parts of the book a silly, soft-porn feel. Which is fine, if you're only aiming to write silly soft-porn.<br />
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And fourthly, doesn't listing this book's flaws in such a manner make me sound like your mother lecturing you while listing your misdemeanours on her fingers? <i>The Slap</i> is fine, and will continue to sell well for the next few months or so, but unless you happen to be particularly concerned with the faults of modern Australian society I don't see any great reason to go with the hype and buy this book, as it won't really give you anything that hasn't already been better done by numerous authors.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-43264023554792987272010-06-16T07:26:00.000-07:002010-06-16T07:26:44.059-07:00'Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth' by Naguib Mahfouz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>In a break with protocol thus far, I'm reviewing the last book I finished. Books about pharaohs would not usually be my bag, but I picked this up a couple of years ago while on holiday in Egypt, where my interest in such matters was always likely to be uncharacteristically heightened. Akhenaten, though, was a name that had first piqued my interest a couple of years earlier when I heard brief mention of him during a college lecture. He was the first person on record for propounding monotheism - the idea that there is only one god. As such, given the course of history and whatever your own religious convictions might be, he might very well be regarded as one of the most significant people to ever live.<br />
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What surprised me about this book was how emotive it managed to be. I've read little in the way of historical fiction and didn't expect to feel such an attachment to the main character. But Akhenaten's insistence on swimming against the tide is a moving struggle, even when recounted in some farly emotionally detached language.<br />
An oddity, this one, but highly recommended for anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt or the evolution of religion.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-77541791048635869142010-05-24T14:26:00.000-07:002010-05-24T14:26:57.573-07:00'The Heart of the Matter' by Graham GreeneWhen I first took notions that I might like to be a writer some day, around the age of eighteen when I still had less than no idea of where my life was heading, I reckoned that I'd like to write at least one book that was absolutely gut-wrenchingly, heartbreakingly, stamp-all-over-your-soul-and-then-piss-on-it tragic. A book that would leave the reader crushed. David Guterson's <i>Snow</i> <i>Falling on Cedars</i> may have been one of the reasons for this rather morbid desire, but an even greater one was <i>The Heart of the Matter</i>, the only Graham Greene I have read so far.<br />
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The precise details of the story of Scobie, a long-serving police-inspector in an unnamed British colonial town in West Africa (with Greene drawing heavily on his own experiences of living in Freetown, Sierra Leone) have long escaped me, as the details of most books I read tend to. What remains with me is the clarity with which Greene evokes the sadness and fear of a man torn asunder by pride, failure and good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. A man who fails everyone by working so very hard to fail no-one.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-66351034357968537272010-05-14T14:08:00.000-07:002010-05-14T14:08:04.619-07:00'Tenderwire' by Claire KilroyWhen the list of the <a href="http://www.irishbookawards.ie/PublicVote.aspx">50 books</a> nominated for best Irish book of the decade was published a few weeks ago I was mildly ashamed to realise that I'd only read three of them. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, the list is a fairly broad one taking in several categories and including things I would rather eat than have to read, like <i>PS I love You</i> and Bill Cullen's autobiography. Still, there are plenty of good authors on the list, and several of those books have been sitting on my shelves for months now, awaiting my perusal.<br />
One such book was Claire Kilroy's <i>Tenderwire</i>. I appear to be reading Kilroy's stuff backwards, having read her third and most most recent one, <i>All Names Have Been Changed</i> (a review of that will no doubt be along soon enough), before Tenderwire - her second.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQIXUxmdKqAL48T2f7d-SlkhpGh0fv-np_XHCq8zpReyNVACTmEe-s0uTx35_E_wPdn32ojlcgE4KjEFB2_tt9eBTS_svQf0T449-Nsz0vByu2sV0y9h3ELm0f2t9QDIQfPGLf_1vz5in/s1600/6a00d83451bcff69e201157215cccb970b-300wi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZQIXUxmdKqAL48T2f7d-SlkhpGh0fv-np_XHCq8zpReyNVACTmEe-s0uTx35_E_wPdn32ojlcgE4KjEFB2_tt9eBTS_svQf0T449-Nsz0vByu2sV0y9h3ELm0f2t9QDIQfPGLf_1vz5in/s320/6a00d83451bcff69e201157215cccb970b-300wi.jpg" /></a></div>Tenderwire tells the story of Eva Tyne, a young Irish violinist living in New York who is offered the chance to buy a supposedly rare and valuable violin by a gangster she meets in a bar whilst in the middle of a self-pitying, self-destructive bender. Her life subsequently takes a number of twists and turns as the violin brings triumph and danger to her life in equal measure.<br />
A thriller about a violin? You're probably not gripped yet. But such is Kilroy's skill at characterisation and dialogue that the reader quickly becomes engrossed in the story and comes to understand the redemptive symbolism that the violin holds for the passionate, mentally unstable Eva - a character whom the reader may not necessarily like, but whom they will find themselves caring about. Such are her travails and such is her emotionally fragile believability that there was more than one point during the story where I wanted to wrap Eva up in a blanket, make her a hot chocolate and tell her to cop on to herself.<br />
On this evidence Kilroy deserves her place among the best new Irish writers. I'll let you know for definite when I've read her first.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-12583875115853332212010-05-05T18:26:00.000-07:002010-05-11T16:03:51.766-07:00'Not Untrue and Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin<i>Not Untrue and Not Unkind </i>came to most people's attention when it managed to make the Man Booker prize longlist last year. Before reading it I saw the author speaking authoritatively and engagingly on foreign news correspondence during a debate in the literary tent at the Electric Picnic. O'Loughlin worked for various newspapers, Irish and otherwise, in reporting on various conflicts in Africa over the past couple of decades. It's therefore easy to suspect that this tale of jaded foreign correspondent Owen Simmons and the various professional and romantic relationships he becomes snarled up in is more than a little autobiographical.<br />
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Reading the book would appear to confirm this. Journalist in-jokes abound, some of which hit the spot very nicely and some of which do not (constant lampooning of real-life journalist and author Jon Simpson in the bloated and laughable figure of Timothy Drysdale is hilarious, whilst references to UNICEF as 'Think of the Children' seem a little silly - though that may well be the point). Such details add colour and plausibility to the book, though they can seem a little too anecdotal. More difficult for the reader to contend with is the assumption that O'Loughlin seems to make that his readers will be familiar with the conflicts, politics and geography of central Africa. In reality, even the more informed of his readers are likely to be a little unsure as to where certain cities are in relation to each other and even less sure as to which action the Zairean government took when, and why. Perhaps this is a deliberate tactic on O'Loughlin's part in order to illustrate the confused trekking from pillar to post that war reporters must do, as dictated by those back in western newsrooms who seem to know much more of what's going on. It's hard to tell.<br />
Where O'Loughlin really earns his advance, and presumably that Booker nod, is in some beautifully written passages - particularly those describing Dublin, and the breakdown of a relationship. The man has a way with words, both visceral and poetic, that save this novel from drowning in its muddy context and would seem to bode well for his future as a novelist.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-13876314614175781372010-05-04T18:41:00.000-07:002010-05-04T18:41:34.373-07:00'Animal Farm' by George OrwellI read <i>Animal Farm</i> a good few years back. It came in a boxset of Penguin classics that my folks gave me and was the slimmest book in there. I'll get around to reading <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i> and <i>On The Road</i> one of these days, probably.<br />
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It also happened to be one of the options for prescribed fiction for the English Leaving Cert course, which I was doing at the time, but our teacher preferred for us to read <i>Lord of the Flie</i>s. Turned out Orwell's little piece of satire was far more useful for the purposes of my history exam, as it helped me to grasp the intricacies of Stalin's Seven Year Plan and the full betrayal of the Marxist dream in a way that a bare history book never could. And that, I suppose, is chief among the reasons why we'll always need good fiction.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-48656060416755785762010-04-27T17:15:00.000-07:002010-04-27T17:15:53.920-07:00'Bad Day in Blackrock' by Kevin PowerIt would be easy for me to hate Kevin Power. The man is less than two months older than me and has already written a prize-winning novel. I had always thought that aspiring novelists, bar Cecelia Ahern, were meant to sit around vaguely mulling life over until they were 35 or so. The fact that this novel is rather good makes it even more difficult to bear.<br />
<i>Bad Day in Blackrock</i> is a fictionalised look at the <a href="http://www.tribune.ie/archive/article/2006/apr/30/so-what-did-happen-to-brian-murphy/">death of Brian Murphy</a> outside Anabel's nightclub in Dublin, involving three former Blackrock College students. It's a brave topic for any novelist, let alone a new one, and it inevitably left Power open to accusations of insensitivity. All names have been changed, of course, and some details are altered for the sake of narrative clarity, but it remains an immediately recognisable story to any Irish person.<br />
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Yet one only needs to read a few pages of the novel to realise that this is a far more respectful, measured way of examining a delicate issue than the oft-seen 'Tell-All Exposés' that unemployed tabloid journalists like to produce about contentious court cases. Power is examining the way of life of affluent South Dubliners at that moment in time, and the factors that can lead to such things happening. As such, he occasionally runs the risk of sounding like Ross O'Carroll-Kelly without the comedy. A morally barren, self-absorbed, hedonistic picture quickly emerges, whilst Power manages to stay sympathetic at the same time. These are young people behaving badly because their schools and their parents have told them that they can.<br />
As someone who has had daily contact with precisely this milieu through teaching in a private school I find it hard to argue against this. Read Bad Day in Blackrock if you have an interest in how much of Ireland is raising its children. Or just read it if you like well-written, perfectly structured fiction that refuses to err on the side of bombastic, even when it must have been ever so tempting.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-51833098132229900552010-04-22T17:01:00.000-07:002010-04-22T17:01:36.119-07:00'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan BrownI read <i>The Da Vinci Code</i> at that point of saturation it had a few years back when a visitor to earth might have come to the conclusion that humans had only ever published one book, and decided to leave it at that. The experience was much akin to that of making love to Mary Harney: momentarily exciting, as long as you didn't think about what you were doing too much, followed by a massively unsatisfying climax and months and months of self-loathing, recrimations and seeking explanation for that which you already know there is none.<br />
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Hey, we all make mistakes. But delving further in Dan Brown's ouevre is surely akin to finishing up with The Harnster, lighting a cigarette, and then wondering aloud what <a href="http://efrafandays.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/widdecombe.jpg">Ann Widdecombe</a> and <a href="http://208.106.181.133/_media/imgs/articles/a99_Shane.jpg">Shane MacGowan</a> were up to for the evening. No. Just no.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-61411135002045418132010-04-20T17:14:00.000-07:002010-04-20T17:14:25.114-07:00'The Beach' by Alex GarlandI was bought a copy of The beach when I was 18 by someone who insisted that I'd love it. I wasn't so sure: the cover was the film tie-in version, prominently featuring Leonardo diCaprio with no shirt on. Hardly my kind of thing to be reading stuff with the twat from Titanic on it. But I gave it a go, and now feel like I owe an awful lot to that book.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The narrative, telling the tale of English backpacker Richard and his slow descent into madness on an island paradise shared by a handful of idealistic travellers, is arresting from start to finish. It awoke a dormant wanderlust in me and carried me along on waves of euphoria, fear, and horniness. Reading it, I felt like I <i>was</i> Richard - with his Vietnam movie fantasies, thwarted sexual desires, and hypocritical longing for a place untrammelled by other tourists.<br />
More importantly, I was discovering for the first time as an adult the power that literature could have on me; a power that went far beyond anything a film or TV show could hope to achieve. Garland has only produced two more novels since (or three, if you count the novelisation of <i>Sunshine</i>, the film he wrote for director Danny Boyle) and while both could well claim to be more accomplished pieces of literature it's unlikely that Garland will ever manage to write anything as thrilling or as resonant as<i> The Beach</i> again. Few have.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-67373071541600137652010-04-19T08:00:00.000-07:002010-05-07T08:35:27.723-07:00'Skippy Dies' by Paul MurrayThere was a time when I baulked at the sight of the larger novel. It's easy to become fixated with how many pages there are in a book, and how many you still have to go, particularly when the novel feels more <i>worthy</i> than engaging. I schlepped slowly through Haruki Murakami's 600-odd page The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles last year, assuring myself that it would be worth finishing, and that if I could even cover as much as twenty pages in a day then I would have the thing finished within a month.<br />
Skippy Dies, the second novel by Irish author Paul Murray, did not feel that way. It's over 660 pages long, but during a few quiet days in Donegal I raced through it, devoting sittings of up to four hours at a time to it.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4kuS0B9G2TpER9YvXUfxgqIAwMBBkegMCSawn_BHk4JoStsXJmDN5B2jRwd621p1bO-0WVEXJKK4isCkkhfRmxYK5dVfqpolRpHQDXNgvyZsCAMsc1C8XsrZMhqfwNSeOzn4rIvcA_s0H/s1600/skippydies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4kuS0B9G2TpER9YvXUfxgqIAwMBBkegMCSawn_BHk4JoStsXJmDN5B2jRwd621p1bO-0WVEXJKK4isCkkhfRmxYK5dVfqpolRpHQDXNgvyZsCAMsc1C8XsrZMhqfwNSeOzn4rIvcA_s0H/s320/skippydies.jpg" /></a></div>It's a remarkable book, set in the fictional Seabrook College - a place that bears more than a passing resemblance to Dublin's Blackrock College. The protagonist,14 year-old Daniel 'Skippy' Juster dies in a doughnut shop on the first page. The book thereafter devotes two-thirds of itself to the build-up to Skippy's death and the factors that led to it. Myriad other characters swarm comfortably about the place, and topics like fidelity, bravery, divorce, drug use, child abuse, religion and ambition abound whilst, astonishingly, never weighing too heavily on the reader. Murray manages to keep a lightness and humour to matters by employing more than a touch of fantasy in his writing. The conversations between the teenage boy characters, for example, read almost like an X-rated version of <i>Saved By The Bell</i>. But in a good way.<br />
What this means is that, though Murray has all manner of important things to say about Irish society and about teenagers today, he manages to do so without ever becoming hectoring or shrill. <i>Skippy Dies</i> is an epic, in the very best sense of the word, and is well worth checking out.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5369737008359020737.post-28298182138008763532010-04-15T16:27:00.000-07:002010-04-15T16:27:13.276-07:00You Have to Start SomewhereDostoyevsky, Banville, Russell, McGahern, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Proust.<br />
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I haven't read any of them, at this point in time. This is a blog about books by someone who is far from an expert on them, he just likes them. There will be little in-depth analysis, no talk of motifs, little in the way of delving into influences. I'm not a professional book-reviewer, so I won't be able to offer sneak previews of the hot new thing hitting our bookshelves in a fortnight. You may not have read a single one of the books that I have. There'll be no ratings out of ten given, because I don't believe in them. There'll be no particularly good reason to visit.<br />
But there'll be honest reviews of books I've read and had something to say about, so I'll be delighted if a few people drop by. And if they don't, I'll still have read those books.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06170574944537866579noreply@blogger.com7