The Namesake

This is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, and it’s not bad. It’s the story of Gogol who was named after the Russian writer whose writings, his father believes, saved his life. Gogol is a second-generation Bengali immigrant to the US, and this story is as much about the different aspects of American culture as it is about Indian (Hindu) Bengali culture. Gogol hates his name, and gets it legally changed, and it takes half his life to accept both his name and his heritage.

This story is mostly narrative, with few chunks of dialogue, which gives it a very calm but also a cautious feel – there’s no strong emotions. It’s well-written, and entertaining, even though only a few of the characters – Gogol and his parents – are really fleshed out. His wife, Moushoumi, remained a bit of a mystery to me, partly because their break-up is revealed second-hand. The other women in his life also fade away without fanfare, although they’re described well, and their differing lifestyles are really interesting. All in all, it’s a good read, especially for a first novel.

Maisie Dobbs/Messenger of Truth

These old-fashioned mystery novels by Jacqueline Winspear are in the style of Sayers and Allingham, even though they're modern. It's set in the 20's, but reverts occasionally back to the Great War, with the theme that what happened then had consequences which went on and on. Maisie Dobbs is the female investigator who solves mysteries using her psychological training and a bit of ESP; she's more interested in the human element than the solving of the puzzle.

It’s rather commonplace – the cockney servant, the emancipated woman and the convoluted mystery which is resolved easily in the last chapter. The writing is pedestrian, and she has a habit of telling us twice, rather than showing us once, what is going on. While it’s reminiscent of the early mystery classics, it lacks the depth of thought and the eye to detail, too – for example, historical characters think and speak in ways which would have been quite foreign to them. It has interesting moments, but it’s definitely not my kind of book.

Dido and Pa

Joan Aiken is definitely the best writer for children, ever. This is another story in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, and it’s a good one. Dido has returned to England after her travels and meets up with Simon, who is now Duke of Battersea. Unfortunately she also meets up with her Pa, who lures her away and forces her to work for the enemy, training an impostor to speak like the new Scottish King. But with the help of a number of curious characters the King, Simon, his sister and even the impostor is saved, as well as a poor slattern called Is.

You can’t help but love a book that ends with a young lady sewing a penguin, with a girl crooning, “I love little Kitty, her coat is so warm/And if I’m not kind she will chew off my arm”, where the enemies are stoned to death by children and it’s all done with seriousness and good fun (unlike many modern books which seem to laugh at, not with, their child readers). The utter richness of the language is something unique and lovely, again reflecting the respect the writer has for her readers. And the story always comes together in a satisfactory way, with Dido not marrying the Duke, and feeling rather sad about her Pa getting eaten by wolves.

Somewhere More Simple

I’m often whinging about books being given too good a rap by publishers and critics, but this is the opposite case; Marion Molteno is an exceptionally good writer, and yet most of her books are out of print, and this, her latest, was stuck up on a back shelf and not even put with “new arrivals” in the store. She reminds me of Melina Marchetta, because her books are all about character, and there’s something so intimate about the writing – you feel as though it’s been written by someone you know.

Cari decides to take a maternity leave locum on a small island off Cornwall – an island where she spent an idyllic summer as a child. Her boring husband agrees, and they settle there, meeting the locals including Anna, a bereft mother, and Hugh, a local farmer whose wife has left with their son. Cari and Hugh fall in love, and she has to choose between him and her husband; Anna has to get over blaming others for her grief; and Hugh has to deal with his own control issues. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s filled with a kind of beauty which really is simple, and really is human. I have to say I didn’t truly buy the Hugh-Cari relationship, because it seemed more a vehicle for them both to deal with their issues rather than an issue itself, but apart from that I loved it, I really did.

Robins at the Abbey/Stowaways at the Abbey

I’ve got a few of these books by Elsie J Oxenham, collecting them randomly in the same way as I collect other British Girls’ Stories of the 1920-1950 period. They’re a little slice of history, where the pinnacle of life is to marry and have sets of twins (in Robins, one poor damsel has two sets in one year!) and where there’s an impassable gap between the working and the landed classes. These stories are set near an old Abbey, where discoveries are made such as buried bells, loot from highwaymen, collapsed tunnels and the like. The girls all attend an English Dancing club and have very mild adventures. These two volumes – where one female Robin meets a male Robin and fall in love, or where a boot-boy is a stowaway in the Abbey and is reconciled to his master by one of the girls – are fairly tame, especially as most of the action is “off-camera” and is just retold by one girl to another, interspersed with announcements of more twins. They are nothing to the Chalet School, where the girls have a constant brush with death every other chapter, but as a piece of history they’re fairly interesting.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine, had a stroke which left him completely paralysed apart from one eye. By blinking while the listener recited the alphabet, he was able to communicate and write this short memoir. He was a father of two young children, and he lived only a few days after the publication of this book. It’s full of longing, full of hope, both angry and humorous, and extremely human.

He writes about one perfect day he shared with his children; writes about the day that his stroke occurred; writes about the history of the hospital, about how he feels about his carers, about the things he imagines as well as the things he experiences. He was only forty-three, and he lived less than a year after his stroke, but this book isn’t a book of grief but a book of life.

Invisible Cities

The idea of this book by Italo Calvino is that Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan (and actually they were contemporaries during the 1200s) and describes to him the cities he has visited; cities where the people worship the buckets and pulleys of a well, where everything is underground or high in the air, cities which contain the faces of the dead, or where everything is reflected and so the reflection is more important than the reality. Which is the meaning of these sketches, that the cities are invisible because they’re actually Venice, or not-Venice, or not-the city of the reader.

Definitely reminiscent of Borges, definitely both eerie and beautiful, and the sort of book where occasionally there’ll be an “ah-ha” moment; like the city where the unborn have their memorials and their worshippers like the graveyards of the dead, like the city of signs where only the sign is visible and perhaps there’s nothing there at all.

The Good German

It’s evident that Joseph Kanon is a big The Third Man fan; this book is like an extended version of the film. It’s set in the same time, just after the war, but in Berlin. There’s the innocent newsman just wanting to find out the truth, and the ugliness of what is really going on in the world - the black market, the Russians, the Nazis bobbing up once again. It’s a thriller rather than literary fiction, with car chases and gun fights and desperate escapes. At the same time, he’s asking questions about who turns out to be the good guy and who is the bad, in a time and a place like this?

It’s pretty well written, and flows well, without too much confusion or scene chopping. The women aren’t too stereotypical – Lena, Jake’s lover, is fairly annoying rather than the perfect woman, and Jake himself is not without blemish either. There’s no one in the story who is innocent apart from the children, and that’s the point of it all, that the dark’s so deep no one wants to see anyone implicated, because they too must therefore be guilty. No one dares throw the first stone; leaving the old Nazis free to declare themselves just under orders.

The conclusion isn’t easy, although he does try to make the last few paragraphs count – fails, but tries – and you’re left with the mess and a bunch of strangers flying away from it, which is something different at least. It’s a good novel, although the underlying idea of war excusing death, not crime, isn’t one I can swallow easily.

The Mathematics of Love

This is Emma Darwin’s first book, and it’s a good read – I couldn’t put it down. On the other hand, once you analyse it, it really doesn’t work. The ending’s disappointing, and the supernatural element doesn’t quite fit; you’re not sure what all the different pieces – why 1970’s, why 1819? – are supposed to mean. But the characters are interesting and sympathetic, and the story moves on at a good pace. It works emotionally, even though intellectually it doesn’t quite make sense.

Stephen Fairhurst is recovering after the horrors of Waterloo, and trying to deal with the past, including his great love and a child. He meets a family and becomes close friends with one of the women, an artist. She helps his recover his child and some meaning in his life. This story is interspersed with that of Anna in 1976 who is sent to her uncle’s place – the Fairhurst house – and discovers love and photography and a sense of history. The link between the two is letters, but also a mysterious little boy who is part of both worlds.

It’s well-written and flows nicely. I do feel suspicious about these 1819 women who are so liberated in their opinions, and the men too, actually, about war and women’s freedom and sexuality. Anna’s shock at 1970’s morality seems far more realistic. So it doesn’t quite work, but it’s still a great read, anyway.

Prisoner of Tehran

This non-fiction by Marina Nemat falls into the category of books you should read but can hardly bear to; they’re filled with true agony. This is about her life, when at 16 she was thrown into a political prison for instigating a strike at her high school. She is marked for execution, but is remanded to life in prison at the last minute, at the intervention of her torturer who has fallen in love with her. This torturer ends up forcing her to marry him, and she ends up becoming pregnant to him; but he is assassinated by fellow torturers who despise him. She is eventually freed and goes on to marry the man she loved before prison, but is unable to tell him all that happened to her. Years later, after emigrating to Canada, the memories flood back and she writes this manuscript, showing her husband, who is devastated by it.

It’s an unbearable story that is sadly quite easy to believe – there are too many stories that are similar about girls being beaten, raped, imprisoned, tortured for wanting something different to what is presented to them. The most frightening part is the utter reasonableness of her torturer husband, who was actually imprisoned and tortured under the previous regime himself, but cannot see that what he is doing is intrinsically wrong, that he has become evil.

It was written partly because of the Canadian woman who was arrested and tortured to death after photographing the very gaol that Marina was imprisoned within. The horror of her death shocked the world, but as the author says, it was many women and it still continues.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

The best you can say about this book by Paul Torday is that it’s entertaining; the worst is that it’s silly, or if you chose to be harsh, nonsensical. It’s about a British professor who is pushed into investigating the possibility of putting salmon into the wadis in the Yemen. He gets interested in the idea which results in him falling for a young woman who is also involved, realising his marriage and his work are farcical and that maybe there’s more to life than what he has. It’s all written in email or letter form, which is fairly irritating – it’s a style rarely done well – and while it’s supposed to be satirical, it comes across as simply silly. Most annoying of all is that the author, while he’d protest it’s just supposed to be entertainment, has tried to put across some deep ideas in the most shallow way possible – ironic, because the deep ideas are about how shallow politicians are. They may be, but it’s pretty obvious a lot of novelists are no better.

The History of Love

This novel by Nicole Krauss is in some ways a typical Jewish-American novel, but has a few original elements which has led it to being lauded as a masterpiece; that’s overstating it, but it’s got a couple of interesting twists which keep you reading. It follows two characters; Leo Gursky, a holocaust survivor who lost his love and his son to chance, really, and who is trying to find some kind of meaning in each day, and Alma Singer, who is trying to do the same through a book of her mother’s, “the history of love”. And of course through various twists and turns the two characters’ journeys end up intersecting and becoming one and the same thing.

There’s the usual little quirks in the characters, some fairly clever language, some poetic and myth-like qualities to the story. It didn’t really draw me in, however, partly because the quirkiness leads to a lack of intimacy with the characters, a kind of coldness. It’s well written, but it’s not my kind of book.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Alas, I need to stop reading reviews; there were so many positive ones about this novel by Michael Chabon, and yet it’s terrible, terrible. It’s a black comedy which is partly a homage to the Raymond Chandler era, partly to the whole Jewish comedy genre (I can hear The Princess Bride’s voice loud and clear) and is mostly incomprehensible – as exhausting as reading Jabberwocky, for every phrase contains at least fifty percent Yiddish. I’m sure if you were familiar with Yiddish, the language and culture, this book would be hilarious, but otherwise it’s just not readable.

Landsman is a worn-out cop who is investigating a murder, and neither he (nor the readers) can really work out why, seeing the entire country – of Alaska, which has been the Jewish homeland since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war didn’t turn out so well – is probably going to fall, and all their cases are going to be filed away anyhow. His superior turns out to be his ex-wife, and yes, they get back together sort-of, and the murdered bloke turns out to have all sorts of twists and turns, and in the end, I did not care, and I hoped the entire alternate world turned out to be some bizarre Sliders bubble, and mercifully popped.