I appreciated the cleverness of the structure of this novel, managing to capture 4 such different stories into four generations of a family (and all still living) was clever.
But "vibrant, richly drawn and captivating"? No.
The central character, Erra, really didn't convince me. Yes, it was a fascinating insight to yet another Nazi atrocity (and of course it is an atrocity, I find the book unconvincing, I am not disputing the historical accuracy), but it was not enough to build a whole novel around.
The ruthless academic grandmother was more convincing but so dislikeable, the great grandson Sol was irritating beyond belief (though what a mother!). Only Randall rang true for me, a whole novel from Randall's point of view I would have found quite enjoyable.
Leaving aside the weaknesses in structure and character, I did find the novel very easy to read and I admired the style that stayed somehow consistent while still reading very definitely as four separate voices.
I would try another Nancy Huston but I am surprised to see this on the shortlist.
Showing posts with label SarahA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SarahA. Show all posts
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Review - Sorry by Gail Jones
In 1930s Britain, a socially inadequate young woman marries an equally awkward young man. His ambitions take them to the Australian Outback, the middle of nowhere, to be greeted by a mixture of amazement, disdain and disbelief by both whites and aboriginals.
To further compound their difficulties they have a daughter, who enters their odd little life and makes it odder still. The mother is a Shakespeare-quoting nervous wreck, the father an over-ambitious, self-deceiver and their parenting style is eclectic, to say the least. The young girl finds companionship with the aboriginal servants and the autistic son of the ranchers from whom they rent their shack of a home.
The combined effects of the climate, post natal depression and sheer misery drive the mother to a nervous breakdown and she is taken to hospital to recover. The father compensates by raping the aboriginals and assiduously following the war in Europe. The daughter flounders along, saved in part by the sisterhood she builds with the new aboriginal servant and partly by the books that she devours.
This untenable situation ends abruptly when the father is stabbed. Mother, daughter and servant are all in the room but it is the servant who is taken away by the police. The daughter is left unable to speak without a stutter while the mother seems more relaxed, almost relieved. But the relationship between mother and daughter does not improve.
The war and the intervention of the Japanese drives them south to Perth where the mother tries to create a more normal life but is again hospitalised. This is the saving of the daughter, her new foster parents not only provide security and stability and a level of love and care she has never experienced, but also seek help for her stutter.
In dealing with her stutter, she is also able to unlock in her mind what happened the day her father died. She realises that she has thought but not admitted to herself that her mother killed her father and that the servant was unfairly arrested. The truth is that she herself murdered her father and that her mother's awkward attempts at making a better life for her have been her efforts to let her daughter know that she should not feel guilty.
After tracking down the servant in her reform school, the daughter tries to set things straight but is disappointed by the servant's unemotional response. The closure she has been seeking is not forthcoming and when the servant dies of pneumonia she is left feeling dissatisfied and drifting.
The striking feature of the novel is liberal use of Shakespeare throughout, not just the plays but the poetry too, Shakespeare is how the mother expresses her anger; she is quoting Shakespeare as her husband bleeds to death. Shakespeare is how the daughter regains her language. Clearly the author is well read in this area and this is a great device for a novel, illustrating how one author can be used to reflect and illuminate such a diverse range of experiences and emotions.
The story is not so strong. Fairly predictable, an acceptable range of characters (though I found the autistic son a somewhat odd addition), a reasonably unique view on both the outback and on the war but no twists or elements that really stand out.
The strength of the novel is the language, not just the Shakespeare but Jones' own language. The descriptions of the outback are original enough to catch the ear. For instance the descriptions of the aboriginal meeting places at river beds, the unlaboured descriptions of their language, their walkabouts and their extended family structures. Somehow she managed to take a bleak tale (you never for a minute think there will be a happy ending, not for mother or for daughter) and give it enough warmth and depth and colour to keep you engaged.
And the title? At the very end of the novel, as the daughter reflects on the dissatisfaction she feels with her reconciliation (or lack of it) with the servant, it finally dawns on her that the one thing she never said to her was "Sorry".
To further compound their difficulties they have a daughter, who enters their odd little life and makes it odder still. The mother is a Shakespeare-quoting nervous wreck, the father an over-ambitious, self-deceiver and their parenting style is eclectic, to say the least. The young girl finds companionship with the aboriginal servants and the autistic son of the ranchers from whom they rent their shack of a home.
The combined effects of the climate, post natal depression and sheer misery drive the mother to a nervous breakdown and she is taken to hospital to recover. The father compensates by raping the aboriginals and assiduously following the war in Europe. The daughter flounders along, saved in part by the sisterhood she builds with the new aboriginal servant and partly by the books that she devours.
This untenable situation ends abruptly when the father is stabbed. Mother, daughter and servant are all in the room but it is the servant who is taken away by the police. The daughter is left unable to speak without a stutter while the mother seems more relaxed, almost relieved. But the relationship between mother and daughter does not improve.
The war and the intervention of the Japanese drives them south to Perth where the mother tries to create a more normal life but is again hospitalised. This is the saving of the daughter, her new foster parents not only provide security and stability and a level of love and care she has never experienced, but also seek help for her stutter.
In dealing with her stutter, she is also able to unlock in her mind what happened the day her father died. She realises that she has thought but not admitted to herself that her mother killed her father and that the servant was unfairly arrested. The truth is that she herself murdered her father and that her mother's awkward attempts at making a better life for her have been her efforts to let her daughter know that she should not feel guilty.
After tracking down the servant in her reform school, the daughter tries to set things straight but is disappointed by the servant's unemotional response. The closure she has been seeking is not forthcoming and when the servant dies of pneumonia she is left feeling dissatisfied and drifting.
The striking feature of the novel is liberal use of Shakespeare throughout, not just the plays but the poetry too, Shakespeare is how the mother expresses her anger; she is quoting Shakespeare as her husband bleeds to death. Shakespeare is how the daughter regains her language. Clearly the author is well read in this area and this is a great device for a novel, illustrating how one author can be used to reflect and illuminate such a diverse range of experiences and emotions.
The story is not so strong. Fairly predictable, an acceptable range of characters (though I found the autistic son a somewhat odd addition), a reasonably unique view on both the outback and on the war but no twists or elements that really stand out.
The strength of the novel is the language, not just the Shakespeare but Jones' own language. The descriptions of the outback are original enough to catch the ear. For instance the descriptions of the aboriginal meeting places at river beds, the unlaboured descriptions of their language, their walkabouts and their extended family structures. Somehow she managed to take a bleak tale (you never for a minute think there will be a happy ending, not for mother or for daughter) and give it enough warmth and depth and colour to keep you engaged.
And the title? At the very end of the novel, as the daughter reflects on the dissatisfaction she feels with her reconciliation (or lack of it) with the servant, it finally dawns on her that the one thing she never said to her was "Sorry".
Australia, Africa and Mindspace
Hi folks, I am loving this project. The judges have come up with a great long list, I haven't had a duff read yet and it's not often I can read 5 books in a row and say that.
I have just read Sorry, set in Australia; The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, set in Africa; and the The End of Mr Y, set in, well Mindspace, and you have to read it to find out what that is.
I will be posting reviews shortly but so far I think The End of Mr Y is my favourite (though not necessarily the best).
Look forward to hearing how others are getting on.
I have just read Sorry, set in Australia; The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, set in Africa; and the The End of Mr Y, set in, well Mindspace, and you have to read it to find out what that is.
I will be posting reviews shortly but so far I think The End of Mr Y is my favourite (though not necessarily the best).
Look forward to hearing how others are getting on.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
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.
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.
Review - The Blood of Flowers
What a wonderful world this book has introduced us to! Seventeenth century Iran would initially make me think of dust and deserts, shahs and swords, mullahs and mosques, and all those feature somewhere in The Blood of Flowers, but so much more is revealed.
The unnamed craftswoman who narrates the novel (I shall call her The Girl, for ease) is, she believes, cursed by a comet which puts paid to her chances of marriage and happiness. Her father dies, leaving her and her mother dependent on the goodwill of her half-uncle, whom they have never met. The novel takes place in a timespan of barely a year, and in that year The Girl loses her father and her virginity, moves from a tiny village to a bustling city, and develops her talents for carpet weaving into a business idea for carpet designs.
I loved this book because it was such a different world and the detail (which I am happy to take as authentic) was so rich. The Iran that Anita Amirrezvani paints is not dry and dusty but vivid and blooming, and incredibly textured. The bath houses and the women's community within them were especially fascinating as were the descriptions of the houses and the kitchens.
I also loved it because of The Girl. What a Dick Whittington-kind of story. In a culture and society that saw women as possessions to be bought and sold (by the trade called "marriage") The Girl manages to achieve an amazing level of independence.
How does she do that? It would be too twentieth century American to say "because of her skill at carpet weaving and design". Clearly that helped, it gave her a sense of her own worth, it gave her something to add to society and something to trade, but it wouldn't have been enough on its own. Having an uncle who worked in the Shah's weaving workshop was helpful too (and I'll think about the role of the men in the story in a minute), because she needed something to make her understand the value of what she could do.
Her parents set her on the path to independence, they cherished her and helped her develop. Perhaps their devotion made them fall short in showing her her "true" position in society, which led her to make some fairly disastrous decisions later, but they can hardly be blamed for that.
Her sexuality gave her independence. Being offered "temporary marriage" by Fereydoon was a key point in her life, more key than even she and her mother and uncle realised in fact. She gave up the chance ever to have a "proper" marriage (though her prospects for that with no dowry were pretty slim anyway). But she used that to her advantage. Forced to confront her sexuality she realises that she can use it to try to get what she wants. She also realises that she enjoys sex, which must help her not to feel totally objectified by the whole situation.
She didn't achieve independence without any assistance from men, she didn't achieve it despite the men (that again would be too cliched and Amirrezvani is far too subtle for that). Her uncle's contacts and advice are crucial, Fereydoon's interest in her and attitude towards her is important. What she sees of her friend Naheed and her relationship with her polo player informs The Girl about how some see love and marriage. Yet by remaining unhampered by a husband (or without the blessing of a husband as her aunt and mother see it) she has opportunities denied to "properly" married women. And she uses them intelligently.
The combination of events that The Girl experiences takes her from naivety to knowingness, to adulthood in fact. It could so easily have taken her to disaster and to despair. What saved her? Surely the love of her parents, especially her mother, must have helped? Her instinct to create, by knotting and desiging carpets, probably gave her another reason to look beyond the immediate problems of her life. But some inner resilience is there too, what we would call "character" now I suppose, drives her to keep going. I think that is why I liked the book so much. The Girl was someone worth knowing, someone worth reading about and I cared what happened to her. I think so often in historical novels the authors are so busy trying to cram all their research onto the page that they pay too little attention to their characters.
My only complaint is that while I found the voice completely authentic and compelling, I found the language stilted. At best it was flowery and unnecessarily peppered with Arabic terms, at worst it read like a poor translation. I believe the author was trying to convey the difference in time and culture but for me it didn't work.
The unnamed craftswoman who narrates the novel (I shall call her The Girl, for ease) is, she believes, cursed by a comet which puts paid to her chances of marriage and happiness. Her father dies, leaving her and her mother dependent on the goodwill of her half-uncle, whom they have never met. The novel takes place in a timespan of barely a year, and in that year The Girl loses her father and her virginity, moves from a tiny village to a bustling city, and develops her talents for carpet weaving into a business idea for carpet designs.
I loved this book because it was such a different world and the detail (which I am happy to take as authentic) was so rich. The Iran that Anita Amirrezvani paints is not dry and dusty but vivid and blooming, and incredibly textured. The bath houses and the women's community within them were especially fascinating as were the descriptions of the houses and the kitchens.
I also loved it because of The Girl. What a Dick Whittington-kind of story. In a culture and society that saw women as possessions to be bought and sold (by the trade called "marriage") The Girl manages to achieve an amazing level of independence.
How does she do that? It would be too twentieth century American to say "because of her skill at carpet weaving and design". Clearly that helped, it gave her a sense of her own worth, it gave her something to add to society and something to trade, but it wouldn't have been enough on its own. Having an uncle who worked in the Shah's weaving workshop was helpful too (and I'll think about the role of the men in the story in a minute), because she needed something to make her understand the value of what she could do.
Her parents set her on the path to independence, they cherished her and helped her develop. Perhaps their devotion made them fall short in showing her her "true" position in society, which led her to make some fairly disastrous decisions later, but they can hardly be blamed for that.
Her sexuality gave her independence. Being offered "temporary marriage" by Fereydoon was a key point in her life, more key than even she and her mother and uncle realised in fact. She gave up the chance ever to have a "proper" marriage (though her prospects for that with no dowry were pretty slim anyway). But she used that to her advantage. Forced to confront her sexuality she realises that she can use it to try to get what she wants. She also realises that she enjoys sex, which must help her not to feel totally objectified by the whole situation.
She didn't achieve independence without any assistance from men, she didn't achieve it despite the men (that again would be too cliched and Amirrezvani is far too subtle for that). Her uncle's contacts and advice are crucial, Fereydoon's interest in her and attitude towards her is important. What she sees of her friend Naheed and her relationship with her polo player informs The Girl about how some see love and marriage. Yet by remaining unhampered by a husband (or without the blessing of a husband as her aunt and mother see it) she has opportunities denied to "properly" married women. And she uses them intelligently.
The combination of events that The Girl experiences takes her from naivety to knowingness, to adulthood in fact. It could so easily have taken her to disaster and to despair. What saved her? Surely the love of her parents, especially her mother, must have helped? Her instinct to create, by knotting and desiging carpets, probably gave her another reason to look beyond the immediate problems of her life. But some inner resilience is there too, what we would call "character" now I suppose, drives her to keep going. I think that is why I liked the book so much. The Girl was someone worth knowing, someone worth reading about and I cared what happened to her. I think so often in historical novels the authors are so busy trying to cram all their research onto the page that they pay too little attention to their characters.
My only complaint is that while I found the voice completely authentic and compelling, I found the language stilted. At best it was flowery and unnecessarily peppered with Arabic terms, at worst it read like a poor translation. I believe the author was trying to convey the difference in time and culture but for me it didn't work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)