Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert (Jill)

Afterwards
By Rachel Seiffert

I first became acquainted with Rachel Seiffert when I read her first book, The Dark Room. I was moved by her gentle narrative style, and I was eager to read her second book, Afterwards. Thankfully, Orange January gave me the opportunity to be immersed - once again - in Seiffert's writing.

Afterwards is the story of Alice, her grandfather and her boyfriend, Joseph. At the heart of the story, though, is the effect of post-traumatic stress on veterans. Alice's grandfather flew a bomber in Kenya, dropping bombs on dense forests where faceless people and animals were killed. Joseph was a British soldier who served in North Ireland and carried a deep guilt about his service. While Alice's grandfather had his wife (now deceased) to talk to, Joseph couldn't utter a word - not to Alice or anyone in his family. His silence was deafening, and Alice had to decide on living with the silence or living without Joseph.

I admire Seiffert for keeping the story real, including the ending, and touching on this important subject. The trauma of war on soldiers can't be ignored, and Seiffert does an admirable job showing that, especially with Joseph. The guilt was eating him alive, turning him into a different man. It was sad to watch his transformation as the book progressed.

Afterwards won't be for everyone. You have to become comfortable with Seiffert's writing style and presentation. Similar to Helen Humphreys, Seiffert packs a zillion punches into each word. Sparse but powerful, Afterwards is a story I won't soon forget. ( )

Nickelini's Review - The Girls

 My comments from Orange July 2010


Comments: When this book was published I put it right on to my wish list--the premise of the story of conjoined twins sounded so interesting. I finally got around to reading it and I have to say it really wasn't for me after all. I don't know why I didn't like it--I think maybe it was the two narrator's voices. And there were some annoying elements--like the whole thing to do with the grandmother's ashes. And it was really sad in parts. Still, I managed to get through the whole 455 pages, so it wasn't awful.

Why I Read This Now: It was my last Orange July book.

Recommended for: well, I don't recommend it, but I know a lot of other readers liked it, so don't let me stop you from reading it.

Rating: 3/5

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Jill)

What Was Lost
By Catherine O'Flynn
Completed July 24, 2009

In What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn, characters experienced many versions of loss – from deaths to missing friends to lost ambitions and broken hearts. Central to this story is Kate Meaney – a precocious girl who fancied herself a junior detective. One day, she turned up missing. Neighbors and the press blamed Adrian, Kate’s friend, for her disappearance, and he could never shake the community’s suspicions. He ran away, leaving behind his parents and younger sister.

Fast forward 20 years to Kurt and Lisa. Lisa, Adrian’s sister, was the assistant manager of a local music store, and Kurt was a mall security guard who was haunted by the memory of Kate and his deceased wife, Nancy. Lisa and Kurt became friends and then romantically involved, not knowing that Kate’s disappearance would connect them in many ways.

The story of a missing child is never easy to read, and after O’Flynn masterfully showed Kate to her readers, her disappearance made it even harder. Kate was smart, likeable and unforgettable – the kind of girl you root for in a book. You wanted her disappearance to have some closure, despite the sadness.

I can’t say the same for the other characters in this book. O’Flynn was at her best creating Kate – I wished the whole book was Kate’s narrative. The other characters were regular, and their voyage of self-discovery was predictable. Inexplicably, O’Flynn included narratives from anonymous mall shoppers at the end of some chapters, which added nothing to the story.

What Was Lost was the first book by Catherine O’Flynn, and her writing holds a lot of promise. I was not as mesmerized by this novel as other readers, but there were parts of this book that were outstanding. I will definitely read another book by O’Flynn, hoping her future characters spring from that same creative place where she created Kate. It’s there where O’Flynn shines. ( )

Laura's Review - The Girls

The Girls
Lori Lansens
343 pages

Rose and Ruby, "the girls" in this novel, are conjoined twins. In fact, at 29, they are the oldest surviving craniopagus twins (joined at the head). Raised by Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, they now live independently and work at the town library. Rose, the more intellectual and bookish of the two, sets out to write their life story. She asks Ruby to contribute her own writings. The result is The Girls, a story that is both enlightening and touching.

Rose and Ruby have overcome a myriad of physical challenges just to live life day-to-day, and are faced with numerous medical issues. They can only view each other through mirrors. This means that although they have spent every moment of their lives together, their experiences and observations are sometimes vastly different. They have also kept secrets from each other. There is a scene where one twin observes a situation she knows will greatly disturb the other twin (who cannot see the situation herself). This is revealed in the novel but, because the twins do not share their chapters with each other, only the reader knows the full story.

Lori Lansens does a brilliant job of describing the significant challenges faced by conjoined twins, while also portraying the twins as everyday people possessed of typical emotions, ambition, and dreams. I also appreciated Lansens' technique of intertwining the twins' stories, revealing different aspects through each girl and allowing the reader to form the full picture of their lives. All in all, quite a thought-provoking read. ( )

My original review can be found here.

The Girls by Lori Lansens (Jill)

The Girls
By Lori Lansens
Completed January 5, 2009

The Girls by Lori Lansens was the story of Rose and Ruby – twins conjoined at the head, who were writing about their lives as connected but separate people. Set in Canada, Rose and Ruby became local celebrities whose lives were full and enriching, surrounded by people who loved them and accepted by those in their community.

Rose was the primary narrator of this story. Her sections of the book focused mostly on the history of her parents, Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey, and the events of the twins’ childhood and teenage years. Rose was a writer, so her pages read more like a book or a piece of fiction. Ruby would pipe in occasionally with her own chapters, which focused more on the twins’ present lives and their future. Ruby’s sections read more like a diary – much more casual but equally enthralling. The combination of both narrative styles made The Girls a fun but enlightening read.

I was fascinated with Lansens’s depiction of Rose and Ruby. At first, I wondered how hard it would be to share my entire life connected to my sister – with no sense of privacy, the inability to do something without my sister tagging along and the public stigma that they must have endured. However, by the middle of the book, I forgot that the girls were conjoined. They emerged as separate characters to me. In fact, it was only when Lansens mentioned something about their conjoining (such as using mirrors to see each other) that I remembered Ruby and Rose were connected. These characters evolved into their own women – with their own temperaments, dreams, loves and fears – and I loved reading every word of their lives.

The Girls was long-listed for the Orange Prize and an example of excellent contemporary fiction written by a woman. If you love great character-driven fiction, then The Girls is for you. ( )

The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jill)

The Gathering
By Anne Enright
Completed July 7, 2008

In The Gathering, Anne Enright took a disturbing look at family dysfunction. Told from the perspective of Veronica, a 39-year-old homemaker, the readers learned the ups and downs of being part of her large Irish family, made more complicated as the family dealt with the suicide of Veronica’s brother, Liam.

Veronica’s ghosts were a large part of this novel. Veronica was the keeper of Liam’s childhood secret, and as she grieved for her brother, she had to come to terms with the tragedies that plagued him. She also had to deal with her life decisions: hiding Liam’s secret, marrying her husband, mothering her daughters, and coping with her own mother, who Veronica loved and despised simultaneously.

Enright’s writing style was seductively descriptive. I envisioned the deeply depressed Veronica spiraling out of control, frantically typing her family’s life story as she drank and escaped from her obligations. She was not an easy character to like, but Enright’s writing evoked sympathy and sadness for this character.

In addition to the manic narrative, the reader must muddle through the many phallic references and sexual metaphors that sprung up (no pun intended) in each chapter. I can’t say these themes added to the novel, but they did not appall me either. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in Veronica’s train wreck to care.

All in all, The Gathering was a decent story about being a family member and how one woman dealt with her depression in the face of a family tragedy. If you like stories set in Ireland or are a fan of Booker winners, then I would recommend The Gathering to you. ( )

The Tenderness of Wolves (tanabata's review)

by Stef Penney

Fiction/Mystery, 2006
Quercus, trade pb, 445 p.
WINNER of the Costa Book of the Year 2006, Longlist - Orange Prize 2007
Interview with the author

1867, Canada.
As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a woman steels herself for the journey of a lifetime. A man has been brutally murdered and her seventeen-year-old son has disappeared. The violence has re-opened old wounds and inflamed deep-running tensions in the frontier township – some want to solve the crime; others seek only to exploit it.
To clear her son’s name, she has no choice but to follow the tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin and head north into the forest and the desolate landscape that lies beyond it…

The quote on the back of my copy that calls it ‘a fascinating, suspense-filled adventure’ pretty much describes my thoughts on it as well. The historical aspects of the fur trade and pioneer life in northern Canada were very interesting. It wasn’t necessarily fast-paced and full of action but the murder mystery and the search for the perpetrator added suspense. And the fact that the search led them through such harsh terrain was certainly an adventure. A nicely told story with a large, varied cast of characters, it was actually the bitterly cold, snowy landscape, so vividly portrayed, that became the strongest element of the story for me. At it’s core, a mystery, but more than that too. All in all, a very enjoyable read.

Stef Penney talks about the novel:


My Rating: 4/5

*originally posted on my blog here.

Review, The Gathering by Anne Enright

We have a word for a woman whose husband dies, and vice versa. But we have no word for those who lose a brother or sister. Yet the bereavement of each leaves the bereaved experiencing much the same depth of loss. A whole part of their life is now remembered only by them, not by the brother or sister who shared it. The traditions and rituals of a shared childhood can no longer be carried out, not even remembered and mocked with hindsight and laughter. And the body that both hugged and kicked, that squashed up on the settee with to watch TV, fidgeted fretfully in the back seat of the car, is gone, never to remind you of other times with a careless shrug, or gesture or grin.

Anne Enright describes a sister’s loss in The Gathering. Veronica, one of twelve siblings has lost her brother Liam. As in all big families, siblings form partnerships or cliques, according to age or circumstance. Veronica and Liam were close, close in age but also because they were sent off together to live at their grandmother’s for a period when their mother was ill.

Now Liam, missing for several years, has turned up dead – suicide. He walked into the sea at Brighton, England, his pockets weighed down with stones, his heart weighed down with ... what? And Veronica has to deal with this. She has to tell her mother and her siblings, identify the body and get it back to Ireland, arrange a wake. She has to deal with her feelings too, which is so much harder. The shock and the bereavement take her back to the memories of childhood and, with a mind ripped apart by grief, she remembers.

She remembers their childhood and the trauma of being sent away and not knowing why. She remembers their adolescence at college and their travels to England. She remembers leaving Liam and coming back to Ireland to make something of herself. And so the guilt creeps in. The guilt of laughing at him when he was younger and struggling to understand himself, and of letting him laugh at himself, treat himself as one big joke. The guilt that she saw that education was a path leading them out of poverty and but when Liam strayed off that path she chose not to go looking for him and drag him back. The guilt of having created her own family with Tom, just two daughters loved and cherished as the individuals she and Liam had never been able to be. Such a different family from the one she experienced hreself, and the only one Liam ever knew.

This is where Anne Enright’s storytelling gift is revealed. This is not a misery tale, but it is raw and angry, savage at times. Yet the prose is liquid and lyrical, concise and personal. And as Veronica stumbles through her grief she tries to piece together a “reason” for Liam’s death, from her own perspective of how their parents treated them and what happened at their grandmother’s. She looks for the reason in the only place she knows, their family. She turns to a history she never experienced and pieces it together (or fabricates it completely perhaps?) from tiny snippets of her grandmother’s life. We as readers experience a gradual, very gradual, blurring of fact and fiction, of memory and invention, of shifts in perspective and jumps in time until we feel as disconnected and lost as Veronica herself.

The end of the novel finds Veronica ready to return to her family life, to the husband and two daughters she has not been able to focus on. She isn’t happy, she hasn’t “got over” Liam’s death but she calm enough, sitting at Gatwick Airport, to acknowledge that her family is her home and to chose to go there.

The end of the novel leaves the reader confused, about the grandmother’s life, about the strange Mr Nugent, and the abuse of the children; still no nearer understanding why Liam killed himself. We are no longer sure that Veronica’s story is any kind of truth at all. Our initial belief in her descriptions of her siblings as psychotic or controlling is shaken; her statements that her husband is having an affair don’t ring quite so true. We do believe that she loved her brother, that whatever else her childhood gave her, it gave her Liam to grow up with. We see how, with that swept away so suddenly and so cruelly, Veronica’s response is not extreme but explicable.

And for that we must thank the author, for an insight into a grief that so many suffer and yet so few write about.

Marg's review: The Tenderness of Wolves

Originally posted on my blog in December 2006

As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Canada’s Dove River in 1867, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year-old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north toward the forest and the tundra beyond.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township—journalists, Hudson Bay Company men, trappers, traders—but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen, and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two missing sisters, a forgotten Native culture, and a fortune in stolen furs.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humour into a gripping historical tale, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery, and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the best books of the year.

This book is being sold in the bookstores here with a "Good Reading Guarantee", and that if you didn't enjoy it you could get your money back. If I had of bought it, for the first couple of hundred pages I would have been seriously considered taking advantage of that guarantee. It's not that it wasn't a good read, because it was...eventually. Maybe it was just the way that I was feeling, but every time I opened this book and read a few pages I just wanted to go to sleep. Once I got past a couple of hundred pages it was okay, and I no longer felt the need to sleep through the book but it did take me a very long time to get to that point.

Part of the issue for me was the sheer number of characters there were and how the action followed so many of them. We started out with the people who lived in the town of Dove River, particularly those who were directly affected by the murder of a French trapper. Then, the chief investigators enter the story - a couple of the upstanding gentlemen from the next town over, plus several men from the Hudson Bay Trading Company. Then a couple of other people vaguely connected to the case come into town as well. And then, everyone starts leaving again, in groups of ones and twos, ostensibly to try and track down the young boy who may or may not have killed the trapper. No one knows why he would do this, but still he has disappeared and that would make him appear guilty.

As many of the characters leave Dove River, they enter the wilderness in the middle of winter making travelling hazardous and drawing unlikely travelling companions closer together. Eventually the travellers arrive at a small religious settlement, where yet more characters and subplots are introduced to the book, and then again when they travel on to a small company outpost a little further on.

With the narrative following all the different characters as they arrive in Dove River and then leave in groups of two or three, the story switched too many times even within single chapters.

In the end this was an okay read. I think that there were probably a couple too many strands of the story than there really needed to be and therefore it was difficult to draw them all back into a cohesive finish, but there was certainly a good story to be told in there, and definitely signs of a good writer.

Carry Me Down - Ex Libris' Review

[Note: I read and reviewed this book when it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize]

The other outstanding book I read this week was Booker longlist title Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland.

Carry Me Down is a dark, disturbing psychological portrait of a boy caught in transition between childhood and manhood, between interests and obsessions, and all the subsequent emotions.

John Eagan is almost 12 years old with the body and voice of a grown man. He is an only child who lives with his parents at his grandmother's. John's father does not work (he's studying for an exam he never takes) and his mother works part-time. His grandmother, who seems to have plenty of money, spends her days at the racetrack. His father and grandmother do not get along. John is unusually close to his mother, physically as well as emotionally. John would like to be close to his father, but his father repeatedly disappoints him. More than anything, John wants to be understood.

As the story begins, John realizes he can detect when his father lies to him. He soon expands this theory to include his mother and grandmother, as well as his best friend. He convinces himself that he is a human lie detector and that this will be his ticket to be in his favorite book, The Guinness Book of World Records. He begins to tell lies and to steal as experiments in order to fine tune his theory. He starts his own book, the Gol of Seil (Log of Lies), where he records all his speculations and results of his experiments. John's home life begins to unravel at the same time his interest in lie detection turns to obsession.

M. J. Hyland takes readers on a spellbinding rollercoaster ride in this tale of disintegration and obsession. Told in first person by John, readers are brought to the brink time and again, right along with him, only to be yanked back. Her prose is crisp and clear, and nothing (the characters nor the plot) is gratuitous.

Carry Me Down was an up-all-nighter for me. It was very difficult for me to put down. I finished it last night, and I haven't been able to pick up a book today because it is still running around in my head.

This is only the second title off the Booker longlist that I've read. If the others are like this in quality, then the Booker judges certainly have their work cut out for them.

Rating: 5/5