Backslider (floremolla) tries ROOTS again in 2017 - Part 2

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Backslider (floremolla) tries ROOTS again in 2017 - Part 2

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1floremolla
Editado: Ago 29, 2017, 7:32 am

New thread, same goals.







Non-ROOTs completed 2017
1. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 17.04.17
2. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis 28.05.17
4. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink 01.06.17
5. The Sea by John Banville 12.06.17
6. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector 12.06.17
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (audio) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 16.06.17
8. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster 23.06.17
9. Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks 05.07.17
10. Underworld by Don DeLillo 11.07.17
11. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare 24.07.17
12. Rebellion by Joseph Roth 08.08.17
13. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 09.08.17
14. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 13.08.17
15. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan 14.08.17
16. The Hours by Michael Cunningham 17.08.17
17. The Collector by John Fowles 28.08.17
18. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan 29.08.17

2floremolla
Editado: Sep 1, 2017, 8:58 am

ROOTs
1. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
2. Regeneration by Pat Barker
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4. Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
5. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
6. Vernon God Little by DCB Pierre
7. Animal Farm by George Orwell
8. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
9. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
10. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
11. Arcadia by Jim Crace
12. Harvest by Jim Crace
13. The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
14. The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
15. Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
16. number9dream by David Mitchell
17. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michael
18. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
20. The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells
21. The Time Machine by HG Wells
22. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
23. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
24. Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
25. Wallace, Bruce and the Wars of Independence by Sydney Wood
26. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
27. Glencoe: the Story of the Massacre by John Prebble
28. Unless by Carol Shields
29. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
30. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
31. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
32. Empire of the Sun by J G Ballard
33. The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan
34. The Power-House by John Buchan
35. Saturday by Ian McEwan
36. A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
37. Spies by Michael Frayn
38. Her Privates We by Frederic Manning
39. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
40. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
41. The Lost Estate by Alain-Fournier
42. Jane Austen by Carol Shields
43. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
44. Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier
45. The Diary of A Nobody by George Grossmith
46. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
47. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
48. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
49. Barkskins by Annie Proulx
50. The Third Man by Graham Greene

3floremolla
mayo 8, 2017, 5:09 pm

Unless completed.

Carol Shields' novel is about forty-four year old Reta, mother of three, a literary translator and writer of 'light fiction' whose eldest daughter, Norah, suddenly opts out of everyday life to beg on a street corner, wearing a sign that says "GOODNESS".

The story is narrated by Reta, who is traumatised by the 'loss' of her daughter, and fears for her safety and mental health. The bulk of the novel is given over to Reta's thoughts. In no particular order she thinks about the past, her family, her physician husband (and his trilobite collecting hobby), the previous occupants of their house. She refers often, and with reverence, to the Holocaust survivor whose works she translates from French to English.

She bemoans the shallowness of her own fictional characters and thinks about developing the novel she's writing so that it has more depth. She describes lunch with her friends, a visit to the library, a delivery of bark mulch. She writes angry letters to people who have outraged her by ignoring or under-representing female achievement, but she never sends them. All of these are opportunities for Reta/Shields to tell stories within the story and make general observations about life, the main focuses being to understand 'goodness' and assert the place of women in the world.

She also describes the particular type of thinking that happens during grief or after trauma where one experiences everyday life as if detached from it, and wonders at how everything goes on as before while, for them, life has changed so drastically. Reta continues to function through her grief but often wants to act out of character and yell at someone to make them see what she is going through internally and feel her pain.

It took me some time to engage with this book. It felt like Shields had had an idea for an ending and then filled in the rest of the book with a flimsy plot, fleshed out with anecdotes and a lengthy fragmented essay about women writers being dismissed as unable to see beyond the domestic domain - being 'good' but not 'great' writers, the latter being a title reserved for male writers only.

Things came together quite well at the end but the lack of intervention in the daughter's situation didn't ring true. Although technically an adult, and free to live how she chose, it seems unlikely a parent would have - even on the advice of a psychologist - watched their beloved daughter's health decline over the nine months it took to get to the nub of Norah's behaviour. And getting to the nub was only precipitated by a crisis, otherwise they'd still be waiting.

I'm disappointed that I didn't like this book more. Shields was making an important point but it was so laboured and unconvincing it was difficult to get immersed in the story and enjoy reading it.

4Jackie_K
mayo 9, 2017, 7:06 am

Happy new thread! There's a lot of them sprouting like mushrooms at the moment! :)

5floremolla
mayo 9, 2017, 7:13 am

>4 Jackie_K: thanks! I think you might be next! :)

6Jackie_K
mayo 9, 2017, 7:54 am

>5 floremolla: Yes, possibly! I thought I'd hang on to 300 posts, but might just do it at 250!

7MissWatson
mayo 10, 2017, 4:57 am

Happy new thread! How time flies, eh?

8floremolla
mayo 10, 2017, 6:59 pm

>7 MissWatson: thanks! this month is indeed flying by - only one ROOT so far so I'll need to get a move on!

9MissWatson
mayo 11, 2017, 3:24 am

>8 floremolla: I feel the same this month, and things won't improve with summer coming up. There's always so much else going on.

10Tess_W
mayo 12, 2017, 3:09 pm

Can't catch up, but will start anew here! Happy reading!

11connie53
mayo 13, 2017, 3:03 am

Happy New Thread, Donna.

12floremolla
Editado: mayo 14, 2017, 8:06 am

On Beauty completed

Another gem among the elderly ROOTs on my shelves, this one from 2005. Zadie Smith's style is instantly recognisable in this novel, centred on the mixed-race Belsey family and set against the climate (meteorological and cultural) of a New England university. The main protagonist, Howard, is white, English, liberal, 57 and a university professor of Art History. He's also a prize plonker.

The novel's tension arises when Howard learns that his arch rival is about to take up a post in the university. While Howard is treading water professionally, pondering over a book he's been writing for years and smugly expecting to be offered tenure, Sir Monty Kipps is everything Howard is not - internationally renowned, a published author on Howard's own specialist subject, Rembrandt, and a right wing activist, determined to bring down the university campus' liberal elite.

On and off-campus, the Belsey and Kipps families come up against each other. The offspring play a large role in the narrative. Two of them are students, young women with their own very different agendas, while the others come and go as the academic year progresses through Thanksgiving and Christmas and other family events.

The Belsey and Kipps wives, against the odds, forge a friendship which also keeps the two families in sporadic contact. While Carlene Kipps seems aloof she can't help but connect with the formidable but lovable Kiki Belsey.

We learn early in the book how Kiki's support has propelled Howard from his poor working class roots to an enviable existence and yet, in classic mid-life crisis style, he betrays her. Contrarily he still desires her and wants to retain his family and his comfortable lifestyle.

Smith does a first class job of portraying the arc of Howard's hubris and humiliation. Alongside this, each member of the Belsey family is portrayed in all their flawed brilliance - she never misses an opportunity to mine their comic potential. At the same time she makes serious points about race and class perceptions and the rarified atmosphere of academe.

This was a very entertaining read, with several laugh out loud moments from casual observations about characters, and funny scenarios that would make great screen action.

13Tess_W
Editado: mayo 14, 2017, 10:06 am

>12 floremolla: another BB for me! Being in academia I can very well relate to what appears to be a publish or perish mentality.

14Jackie_K
mayo 14, 2017, 9:51 am

>12 floremolla: That one does sound good.

15floremolla
mayo 14, 2017, 7:07 pm

>13 Tess_W: >14 Jackie_K: I should have added it's quite long at 440 pages - and it's probably not for the easily offended, though the sex is as much hilarious as it is graphic.

16Tess_W
mayo 14, 2017, 7:29 pm

>15 floremolla: I'm still in!

17Jackie_K
mayo 15, 2017, 5:02 am

>15 floremolla: yes me too- I don't mind sex in books if it's well-written and not gratuitous! I try not to be in the offenderati just for the sake ofit, only if iit's justified!

18Jackie_K
mayo 15, 2017, 5:02 am

Gack, sorry for typos, it's the phone really, not me!

19floremolla
mayo 15, 2017, 5:44 am

>16 Tess_W: >17 Jackie_K: oh good, in my RL book group we had a couple of members of the offenderati and had to be careful about recommendations. Though to be fair everyone has their limits.

I once recommended Small Town by Lawrence Block - I'd read a favourable review and I'd liked his Matt Scudder PI series. I didn't realise that every second chapter was basically an episode of kinky sex. The worst thing was that one of the women had taken it on holiday and gave it to her 15 year old son to read. It made his summer by all accounts but it led to the rules of the group being changed to ensure it wouldn't happen again. Plus I was teased mercilessly ever after about my 'reading choices'...

20floremolla
Editado: mayo 20, 2017, 4:30 am

Pale Fire completed

Structurally, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire consists of a framework that is standard in scholarly reviews of works of literature - three main sections comprising Foreword; Poem (in this case, Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos); a Commentary - and at the end, an Index. What is different is that the whole is not a review but a self-contained novel, in which each section plays a part in telling a complex and multi-layered story.

The Foreword opens conventionally with a short background and introduction of the work being reviewed. We learn that the reviewer/first person narrator, Charlie Kinbote, has been responsible for editing the poem, Pale Fire, for publication, from a series of numbered index cards written by published poet and university faculty member, John Shade, who had met an untimely death on completing it.

Very soon though we begin to question the authenticity of the narrator's relationship with the poet - he portrays himself as a close friend of John Shade, but there are indications that the feeling might not have been mutual. Indeed Kinbote comes over as a stalker.

In the Foreword Kinbote recommends his Commentary should be read before tackling the poem because his is the only 'reality' with which to view the poem and "for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word." (This reader decided to ignore that and proceed in the conventional 'start to finish' mode but checking back to the lines of the poem referenced in the Commentary.)

The Four Cantos of the autobiographical poem, Pale Fire, can be roughly summarised as: the Poet's memories of childhood; his ponderings on death; his adult life; his creative life. We learn that Shade wrote the poem in only a few weeks during July 1959, drafting, editing and discarding his index cards daily - until he met his untimely end. In the poem Shade reveals he has 'got over' his narrow concept of what poetry is and Pale Fire consequently is brimming with lyrical passages and bits of dialogue, random thoughts (and way too many literary references to look all of them up).

The poem runs to 999 lines and, in Kinbote's first observations in the Commentary, he suggests Shade intended to complete the poem elliptically by ending with the first line. And it certainly seems to fit, but this early imposition of his own opinion is the first indication that Kinbote has his own agenda. Where he ought to be using lines of the poem to elucidate meaning in an objective way, he criticises and suggests substitutions. Kinbote had hoped the poem would have been a biography of his own life, details of which he has been 'feeding' to John Shade for months - in his disappointment he uses the Commentary to tell his own story.

What is notable about Kinbote's story is that it's wildly improbable. He claims to come from Zembla, a curious northern country with its own language, and bizarre customs. He tells the story of the beloved king of that country fleeing from rebels. When the king escapes overseas, a vindictive rebel, Gradus, decides that he will hunt King Charles down and kill him.

As Kinbote's Commentary progresses - all the while linking the timing of the poet's writing of the index cards with the gradual approach of Gradus - it seems to imply that Kinbote, and King Charles are one and the same. Unfortunately for John Shade, Kinbote tells us, Gradus accidentally shoots Shade when aiming for the exiled king - hence the poet's untimely death. The revelations don't stop there however and as the Commentary nears its end, and its writer is under pressure to finish, there are allusions to a possible third identity - a Russian university colleague, Vaslev Botkin. Nothing is as it seems however and the assassin's identity is also in question.


It was interesting to find out after reading Pale Fire that it was being written at a time when Nabokov himself was translating Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin using the same review structure and was straying over the boundaries of subjective comment and adding subtle autobiographical references. It seems this sparked the creative idea for Pale Fire which can be viewed as a multi-layered exercise for the reader - it can be read at face value, it can be read with an insight into dual or triple identity. Or indeed there are other possible interpretations about which of the fictional characters might have written the whole book.

There are also many allusions and motifs scattered throughout - romantic Poets, birds, butterflies, obscure chess moves and even several Scottish references (where did Nabokov encounter 'houghmagandy'?) Some of these were known to be personal interests of Nabokov which he used recurringly in his novels.

Scholars have made careers theorising on what Nabokov 'intended' with Pale Fire, and the author himself made certain claims after it was published - for example that he'd planted 'plums' in the text to help get to the 'truth' of the story.

It's very clever, especially if you like a puzzle, and I enjoyed reading Brian Boyd's paper 'Shade and Shape in Pale Fire' which revealed how much had gone over my head https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf1.htm

21connie53
mayo 20, 2017, 4:31 am

>12 floremolla: Translated and a BB. Now searching for the book in Dutch.

22Jackie_K
mayo 20, 2017, 1:01 pm

>19 floremolla: I love that book group story! That made me laugh!

23floremolla
mayo 21, 2017, 11:10 am

The Name of the Rose completed (paperback and audiobook)

Umberto Eco used his specialist knowledge of medieval theology to provide the context for this unusual whodunnit. The novel opens with an introduction by a supposed present day scholar, who has briefly had an ancient manuscript in his possession and translated it. It tells of events that took place inside an abbey, somewhere in Italy in the early part of the 14th century, written by a monk, Adso of Melk, in old age, shortly before his death.

The story is then 'handed over' to be told by Adso, as first person narrator, who as a young novice has accompanied the maverick monk, William of Baskerville, to the abbey to take part in a theological debate during a time of schism between the Pope and the state.

Their arrival coincides with a suicide and a series of brutal murders. Anxious to bring the abbey to order before the arrival of further deputations, including Bernard Gui, an infamous Inquisitor, the Abbot asks William to use his keen powers of deduction to investigate. With Adso assisting, William must unravel the clues that seem to relate to the library of the abbey and involve a particular book that has been passed between the deceased monks.

The library, or Aedificium, is contained within a tower, which itself has four towers and extends over several floors. Access is strictly limited to the librarian and his assistant, but William and Adso immediately begin to explore the labyrinth of the building, finding secret passageways and mechanisms along the way and eventually working out the complex layout of the many rooms and the collections of books contained therein.

The Inquisitor arrives before the mysteries are unravelled however and immediately engages in an Inquistion when it is revealed that one of the monks is a heretic - in this scene we see how the Inquisitor uses techniques to trap the accused so that he is damned no matter how he answers the question.

Eco doesn't miss an opportunity to display his specialist knowledge - Bernard Gui was a real Inquisitor who literally wrote the handbook of Inquisition. Throughout the novel, Eco has his characters expound at great length on medieval writing and illumination of manuscripts, the objects of necromancy, Jesus and poverty, heaven and hell and whether laughter is a sin. And indeed it is revealed to be on matters of theology that the murder mystery turns, with a book that is seen by some to threaten their very religion, should it get into the hands of 'the simple' or uneducated.

There are many characters in this novel, most of them monks, and it is to Eco's credit that he makes so many of them memorable. The main protagonists, William and Adso are very likeable and immediately recognisable as echoes of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (the physical description of William is almost word for word the same as Holmes). William is not only able to deduce facts in a similar way but also, for his time, has wide knowledge of new technologies including looking-glasses. Adso is a passionate young man whose impulsiveness can lead him into trouble and danger but he sees William as a kindly mentor and is keen to learn from him. He is a great foil to William's character and while amazed and admiring is quick to criticise him for the sin of pride in his abilities.

The mystery of the deaths is finally unravelled when the Inquisitor has departed and William realises all is not as it seems in the abbey. The appearance of piety and scholarship in the abbey is revealed as a thin veneer to the lies, lust and violence going on just below the surface. The oldest monk, the blind Jorges, has been the real power behind the abbey, manipulating the abbot and his fellow monks, and all to the purpose of concealing a rare (possibly the only) copy of a work by the philosopher Aristotle on the subject of comedy that he would rather destroy than allow to become available to the masses because it contains ideas contrary to his beliefs.

Confronted by William and Adso within the Aedificium, Jorges escapes with the book, destroying it as he flees. In the chaos of pursuit a lamp is overturned and the library goes up in flames incinerating all of its precious books.


William and Adso go their separate ways and never meet again. Much later, Adso feels compelled to document the events before he dies, as testimony to things he witnessed but never fully understood, in hope that future readers will decipher meaning from them, for he is a believer in God's design and that there are signs waiting to be read within.

I enjoyed this novel most when it was focused on the sleuthing of William and Adso, and William's thoughts on various subjects, and least when it featured theological argument or long descriptions of necromancy or suchlike. Eco is clearly a very erudite man and he wrote an interesting Postscript to the book, explaining the creative process and the meaning of the title. Even so, had I to look up every word that was new to me, or try to understand every theory, I'd never have finished the book - I've learned it's best sometimes to breenge* through and get the gist rather than get bogged down with semantics. It being a long book and dense novel, the audiobook was an excellent aid - I liked the reader's (Sean Barrett) voice and he was very adept with Latin and other languages used throughout the text.

*noun. Scottish. A violent or clumsy rush, a sudden violent movement.

24Tess_W
mayo 21, 2017, 3:33 pm

>23 floremolla: I've seen the movie, starring the man of my dreams, Sean Connery. The book is on my wishlist.

25Henrik_Madsen
mayo 23, 2017, 3:32 pm

>23 floremolla: Great review - it makes me want to reread this wonderful novel and/or get to some of Eco's other works.

26avanders
mayo 23, 2017, 3:50 pm

Happy new thread! :)

>12 floremolla: I really need to read a different novel by Zadie Smith... I did not like NW, but I hear her earlier novels are better...

>17 Jackie_K: I am the same :)

>19 floremolla: unfortunate that you had to cater your book picks ... In my RL book group, we still just vote as a group and if someone isn't interested in a book, they don't read that one (and often don't come to the meeting discussing that book as a result). We have one member who won't read anything with a lot of death. Well, that cuts out a lot. But it's her choice ... so the book group still picks what we pick. When I was pregnant, the graphic sexual assault stuff was way too much for me-- so I skipped the 2nd half of one book and waited until I got the "clear" from other members on a different book.. again, that was my issue, and the rest of the group didn't suffer for it... I suppose it's nice of y'all to be so accommodating though ;)

& lol! I love that that can happen w/ book group picks ;)

>20 floremolla: oh! That's (Pale Fire) been on my Amazon wishlist for a while... I suppose w/ your 5-star review, it'll stay there!

>23 floremolla: Another that's been on my TBR for forever! My husband loves Eco and has read almost everything he's written... I still need to read the 1st! (Name of the Rose will probably be the first of his I read)

27Limelite
mayo 26, 2017, 3:56 pm

>12 floremolla:

Delighted to find your approving review of On Beauty. It's on my Wish List because of mixed reviews. Also as an attempt to curtail my impulsive book buying. Heh, heh, you pushed me over the edge. I'm going to get it!

28floremolla
mayo 28, 2017, 1:24 pm

>27 Limelite: I gues I'm officially an 'enabler' then ;) Hope you like it!

29floremolla
mayo 28, 2017, 1:49 pm

Lucky Jim Non-ROOT completed

Kingsley Amis' critically acclaimed first novel, Lucky Jim, set him up for a lifelong successful career as writer and poet. Drawing partly on his own experiences this novel covers a few days in the life of Jim Dixon who's has a probationary teaching post at one of Britain's 'red brick' (provincial) universities while he waits impatiently to hear whether he will be kept on - at best for a second probationary year.

Dixon's origins are northern working class and he finds himself somewhat at odds with the university hierarchy which comprises mainly professors from the old traditional universities who've been given the top jobs in the new establishments but still cling to the old order and reek of 'good breeding', highbrow culture and exclusivity.

Dixon's professional fate lies in the hands of the Head of the History department, the upper class, semi-senile Professor Welch, so, when invited to the Welch family's country home for the weekend, Dixon sees an opportunity to impress.

A fly in the ointment is Margaret, a colleague he'd dated, who has made a suicide attempt and is recuperating at the Welch's home. Margaret had been dating someone else at the time but nonetheless Dixon feels a certain guilt and awkwardness about seeing her.

To make matters worse, the Professor's son, Bertrand turns up for the weekend and he and Dixon take an instant dislike to each other, not least in Dixon's case because Bertrand has brought an attractive blonde girlfriend with him, the enigmatic Christine, and this seems to highlight his own deficiencies.

Dixon turns out to be prone to drink-induced social gaffes and ill-considered comments to the horror of the assembled company and especially Margaret whom he alternately pities and despises. He compensates for lack of self esteem by mentally launching a vendetta against the arrogant and effete Bertrand. The scene is set for some toe-curling but very funny escapades when he determines to seduce the attractive girlfriend and bring Bertrand down.

Dixon is a walking disaster, an anti-hero who pulls grotesque faces behind people's back, he thinks thoughts of physical violence he'd like to perpetrate on annoying people, he's a liar and a misogynist.

It's the early 1950s so political correctness isn't an issue and the novel is probably all the funnier for that, with some laugh out loud comical moments - albeit you feel rather guilty for siding with the incorrigible lout and hoping that things work out in his favour.

An influential work of its time that inspired subsequent generations of British writers - I couldn't help but think of Dixon as a younger version of Reginald Perrin.

30Tess_W
mayo 28, 2017, 3:46 pm

>29 floremolla: Great review and a BB for me!

31floremolla
mayo 29, 2017, 3:12 pm

Empire of the Sun completed

J G Ballard uses his own background and personal experiences as a child prisoner of war as a basis for this tale of survival of a privileged but parentally neglected eleven year old living in Shanghai in 1941 when the city succumbs to the Japanese invasion.

Jim's father works for a chemical dye company and he and his mother attend an endless round of cocktail parties and country club activities. The boy is used to spending long hours by himself, often cycling around the city's backstreets without his parents knowledge, where he witnesses poverty, casual cruelty and death as the Chinese poor scrabble for their livelihoods.

In the chaos of the Japanese invasion Jim becomes separated first from his mother, then from his father, and finds himself in a detention centre where he waits for his parents to come for him. He contrives to escape during a disturbance and, using his street knowledge, returns home hoping his parents will be waiting for him there, only to find that the streets are deserted and the houses ransacked. So begins his journey to find them, but as he becomes tired of living on his own resources he tries to surrender to the Japanese in hope of being sent to a prison camp and being reunited with them.

The Japanese soldiers ignore the boy and it's not till he's picked up as part of a looting gang that he end up incarcerated in a prison camp - his parents' whereabouts are unknown and Jim must remain there for the rest of the war.

Along the way, he meets some memorable characters - the Fagin-like Basie who teaches him to hustle and work the black market, the kindly Dr Ransome who sees to Jim's more traditional education and Mrs Vincent with whose family he is billeted in the camp, causing such resentment she refuses to help him even when he is ill.

Jim's daily existence revolves around scavenging extra food to eke out the meagre rations and he becomes a life-force within the camp, always doing jobs, hustling, feeding his brain with information and avidly watching activity on an adjacent airfield where he can indulge his great love of war planes and his admiration of Japanese pilots with whom he feels a strange affinity. Jim's reasoning for his perpetual activity reveals his mindset - he must do all he can to keep the camp running smoothly so that it will endure. He's unable to recall his parents' faces and has come to depend on the war and the camp for 'security' because he can't face the fear of the unknown alternatives.

As the final days of the war play out, the prisoners are led away from the camp on a death march, most of them on their last legs from starvation and disease. Jim is left with other dying prisoners in an abandoned stadium where, in his dying delirium he sees an unusual flash of light fill the sky which seems to convince him of what he had come to believe - that his soul had already left his body and he was no longer afraid of death. Later he believes that what he saw as the flash of the atomic bomb dropped four hundred miles away in Nagasaki.

Jim makes a last bid for survival and encounters a food parcel air-dropped by the Allies which sustains him. As the war ends, chaos ensues with rival armies, bandits and mercenaries fighting for the food parcels. Jim finds himself being exploited by first one group, then another, and each time makes his way back to the prison camp and the safety of familiarity, convinced a third world war is imminent. On his third return he meets Dr Ransome who has news of his parents.

Jim's reunion with his parents is poignant as he realises they too have suffered their own traumas and they are mor distant from him than ever. Before he leaves Shanghai for England with his mother, he makes one more visit to the camp, trying to make sense of what he's been through.


Ballard portrays his young hero as a bright boy, imaginative, an avid reader with an innocent admiration for Japanese heroes, whose quick wits keep him alive against the odds, but who is too young to synthesise his experiences and is thus destined to be profoundly affected.

Throughout the novel the horrors of war are described in quite unemotional terms as seen through Jim's matter-of-fact eyes and the result is an unsentimental narrative in which, unusually for war fiction, the Japanese are not portrayed as uniquely cruel.

32Tess_W
mayo 29, 2017, 4:50 pm

>31 floremolla: Great Review. I have the eerie feeling that I've read this before, but I have no record of it.

33Jackie_K
mayo 29, 2017, 4:54 pm

>31 floremolla: I remember seeing the film, with a very young Christian Bale in the lead role, while I was at university (so, would have been late 1980s). It's a very good film, from what I recall.

34floremolla
mayo 29, 2017, 5:30 pm

>32 Tess_W: maybe you saw the movie?

>33 Jackie_K: yes Spielberg did his magic on this movie in the mid nineties. I saw it but couldn't remember the detail of what happened after Jim got separated from his parents. Mind you, I don't remember buying this book either... :-/

35Tess_W
mayo 29, 2017, 7:15 pm

>31 floremolla: it took me awhile to find it, but I read another similar book called Eyes of the Emperor which was a YA book about the main character being used as bait for "Jap" hunting dogs during WWII.

36floremolla
mayo 30, 2017, 3:38 am

>35 Tess_W: I just looked it up - it's also a fictionalised account of a real life operation that was going on during that same period. Empire of the Sun also mentions mixed race children and families who seemed to suffer at the hands of both sides.

37floremolla
Editado: mayo 31, 2017, 10:30 pm

The Thirty Nine Steps completed.

Set in Britain in 1914 amid rumblings of war in Europe, John Buchan's novel is an early example of the thriller genre. The hero, Richard Hannay, could give Jason Bourne a run for his money with his derring-do and quick thinking.

Hannay, a Scot by birth, is still finding his feet after moving back to Britain from Africa where his family emigrated when he was a child. Hannay's boredom is interrupted by a neighbour, Scudder, in a state of agitation, who asks to hide in his flat and explains that he's being pursued by dangerous forces, whom he is trying prevent from throwing Britain into war in Europe.

Hannay obliges, only to come home one day to Scudder's corpse - and the realisation he'll be next, because he knows too much. Plus he'll be wanted by the police over the suspicious death in his flat.

Taking up where Scudder left off, Hannay has to get word to the British Government of an impending assassination while racing against time and being unsure whom to trust.

A great chase ensues, as Hannay flees north by rail, to Dumfries and Galloway in south west Scotland, and he has to use all his wits to stay ahead of both the police and the baddies by deciphering codes, clever disguises, stolen cars and escaping out of impossible situations, all of which lead to a tense denouement.

This is a pacy thriller and a much easier read than I had anticipated. Very atmospheric in a tweedy, pipe-smoking, gentleman's club sort of way. One criticism is that it relies quite heavily on coincidences, one of which rankled with me because it stretched credulity too far. Another is anti-Semitism, racist references to anyone who isn't British and condescension to the lower classes - these rankled even more but weren't unexpected, being the norms of the time.

The Power-House completed

The hero in this John Buchan tale is a Londoner of high social standing, being a barrister and a Tory Member of Parliament. Edward Leithen learns from his friend Tommy Deloraine that a mutual friend, Charles Pitt-Heron, has gone missing and that Tommy is planning to track him down and bring him back - it seems that Pitt-Heron has been caught up in shady dealings with the rich and powerful but publicity-shy Andrew Lumley.

By coincidence Leithen comes across various links to Andrew Lumley in the course of his work and, intrigued, sets to find out more about the man and his secret nefarious activities. When his car crashes on a lonely country road while on a motoring holiday, and he has to seek shelter for the night, the kind gentleman who takes him in turns out to be (coincidentally) the very same Andrew Lumley. Over a post prandial drink Lumley reveals himself to be a deluded intellectual and obsessed by power which he plans to expand upon through an international anarchist organisation 'The Power-House' of which he is leader. Leithen realises he must expose Lumley and stop The Power-House before they carry out a plan to destroy Western civilisation.

Leithen enlists the help of McGillivray of Scotland Yard and Chapman, a Labour MP, (but a loyal and tough friend) in trying to find something to incriminate Lumley, risking his life as he does so. When he finally has the evidence he needs, it's a race against time to lodge his statement before Lumley has him killed, for he has a network of agents to do his bidding. But Leithen has one more task - to secure Pitt-Heron's release from the megalomaniac's grasp....

The twist of the novel is that while Tommy has gone chasing across Asia trying to expose Lumley, and save Pitt-Heron from folly and ruin, Leithen has accomplished it all by sleuthing around London.

Another pacy thriller, with some earnest dialogue about intellectual freedom but it could have benefitted from more detail about what the dastardly plan involved and some further development of the main character who came across as plucky but rather bland.

38Tess_W
mayo 31, 2017, 10:05 pm

>37 floremolla: Great review, I think Hitchcock made The Thirty Nine Steps into a movie back in the 40's or 50's. There was a TV remake also....I'm not much into espionage, so I may take a look and see if I can't watch it!

39floremolla
Editado: Jun 1, 2017, 7:10 am

>38 Tess_W: yes, there's a Hitchcock version, which is suitably moody and melodramatic! must admit I'd rather watch an espionage movie than read the book.

I'm using the 1001 BYMRBYD list to prioritise my ROOTs and The Thirty Nine Steps is on there which is why I read it. Possibly included because it was one of the earliest examples of the genre? In a little note before The Power-House, Buchan mentions that The Thirty Nine Steps had been popular "in the dug outs and billets of the British front" of WW1 because it was just the right mix of being short and exciting. Perhaps this contributed to its success - and Buchan's desire to churn out more!

40rabbitprincess
Jun 1, 2017, 6:43 pm

The remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps does have Rupert Penry-Jones, which may have been my favourite part about it ;)

I know I read the book, but it was a long time ago. What little I remember probably comes from the Hitchcock version.

41floremolla
Jun 3, 2017, 4:45 am

>40 rabbitprincess: oh yes, I knew it was someone 'interesting' in the lead role ;)

42floremolla
Jun 3, 2017, 5:31 am

The Reader non-ROOT completed

A chance meeting with an older woman changes 15 year old Michael Berg's life. Bernhard Schlink's slow-paced novel begins as a wistful romance but turns into something much darker.

Set in post war Berlin, the novel charts Michael's relationship with a woman he realises he never really knew. Hanna is strong and self-contained but she lets him into her life and they find a pattern in their time together where he reads to her, they wash each other and they make love.

Hanna is still somewhat secretive however and she gets angry with Michael occasionally over small issues. One day, out of the blue, she disappears, leaving no clues as to where she's gone.

I guessed quite early on that Hanna's problems stemmed from being illiterate since her outbursts always involved something that had been written. Also that she moves away suddenly for fear of being promoted at work from tram conductor to driver which would have needed a good degree of literacy.

Her leaving Michael so suddenly has a profound effect on him and, during the next eight years he struggles with intimate relationships as he realises that he still craves what he had with Hanna.

Years later, as a law student observing war trials, Michael finds Hanna on trial, jointly with other former death camp guards, for letting a group of women and children prisoners perish in a fire in a locked building. He searches his memory for clues as to Hanna's 'real' character and tries to reconcile the person he knew intimately with the person on trial for murder.

As Hanna is accused by the other guards of writing the order to allow the deaths of the prisoners, Michael struggles with wanting to reveal her illiteracy as proof she couldn't have written the order but realises it would devastate her to have her secret revealed.

When she is sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for her crimes he wants to help her in some way but without condoning her actions. Thus he starts reading and taping books to send to her throughout the years without ever visiting or writing to her.


This a contemplative, philosophical novel, that asks moral questions for which there are no easy answers and leaves a lingering sadness that people often do the wrong things for unknowable reasons and that our fragile 'sense of self' (pride) can work so powerfully against us.

43Tess_W
Editado: Jun 3, 2017, 8:39 am

>42 floremolla: Great review (I didn't read spoiler) and goes on my wishlist!

44rainpebble
Jun 4, 2017, 12:40 pm

Donna,
Oh my goodness............you will appreciate Cather's writing. Some of her works can feel dated but they are of a certain time & place & it always seems right. And I definitely enjoy anything by Daphne du Maurier. I began reading her in my teen years & so have been loving her for over 55 years now. I even thrill to her nonfiction.
I really enjoyed your thread; pulled out a couple of recks. Enjoy your reads. :-)

45floremolla
Jun 4, 2017, 8:06 pm

>44 rainpebble: thanks, Belva, I'm looking forward to those. I'm struggling through a rather dense ROOT at the moment - I'm sure it'll be worth it though! Enjoy your reads too!

46connie53
Jun 5, 2017, 5:10 am

Hi Donna. Wow, you right such elaborate reviews! I read them with interest. And try to dodge BB's ;-)

47floremolla
Jun 5, 2017, 7:23 am

>46 connie53: yes elaborate is the right word! It's partly as a reminder of what the book was about and partly because sometimes the book itself is elaborate - I'm trying to make sure I understood what it was about and didn't miss anything important. I'm a Scot, I like to get my money's worth from a book! ;)

48floremolla
Editado: Sep 2, 2017, 7:13 am

Saturday completed

Ian McEwan's novel is the story of one eventful day in the life of London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Henry is a fortunate man by any standard; he has a beautiful and loving wife, successful lawyer Rosalind, and two personable and creative young adult children, Daisy, a poet, and Theo, a musician.

They live in a large comfortable townhouse overlooking a public square, minutes from the hospital where Henry works. This is where Henry's day begins, when he wakes around 4am and, from his bedroom window, sees a burning plane in the sky and nervously anticipates a 9/11 scenario. The day in question, 15 February 2003, just happens to be a UK-wide protest day, against the impending war in Iraq, and is to be marked with marches and rallies in all the main cities. Terrorist attacks are therefore a possibility.

As Henry's day starts afresh later, after a few hours sleep, he's relieved to find the plane had landed safely after a mechanical fire - however the unsettling event sees him ponder the decisions that led America, and Britain, as willing ally, into the Iraq war. All in all, he's fairly sure that going to war and killing Saddam is the right thing to do.

When he decides to drive his brand new top-of-the-range Mercedes to meet a colleague to play squash, he quickly bumps up against a protest march and, in an effort to avoid a delay he takes an illegal turn into a side street - a move that leads to events that impact dramatically on his day and threaten his entire family.

It's hard not to think of Henry as somewhat arrogant as his thoughts unfold early in the novel - his extensive and specialised medical knowledge as a brain surgeon confers an elite and almost God-like status on him - but at the age of 48 he is railing against the peaking of his manhood and his inevitable descent into old age.

So as the day goes on and Henry is forced to confront his worst fears and vulnerabilities, the reader can't help but wonder: will he desire vengeance?

I enjoyed this novel more when there was dialogue and action rather than being 'inside' Henry's head with his thoughts, but McEwan has produced a very well paced story arc that starts with the mundane activities of daily life and progresses through high drama to a satisfying conclusion, with much to think about along the way.

49Tess_W
Editado: Jun 8, 2017, 5:02 pm

>48 floremolla: a great review! The plot seems very familiar, but the title does not ring a bell. I will have to research and decide if I've read this before. If not, definitely a BB!

50floremolla
Jun 8, 2017, 6:37 pm

>49 Tess_W: believe me, you would remember Henry's detailed synopses of operations performed and diagnoses made! With most books, when I don't recognise a word I look it up - with this one I settled for having a very vague idea of what medical wonders were being described or I would still be googling even now. 😐

51floremolla
Jun 12, 2017, 12:25 pm

A Lost Lady completed

Written in 1923 by Willa Cather, this is a multi-layered tale on a theme of the passage of time and the effects of change.

Captain and Mrs Forrester are viewed with respect by the local community - they have an idyllic home on the edge of town where they hold social soirees with select townsfolk. The gentlemen are in thrall to the beautiful and charismatic Mrs Forrester, including Niel Herbert who falls in love with her as a young boy, and becomes a close friend as he reaches adulthood.

When the bank Captain Forrester jointly owns crashes, he alone among his colleagues relinquishes his own investments so that customers will not suffer financial loss. This selfless act has a calamitous effect on the couple's own financial fortunes and on the Captain's health. Niel observes the fallout as Mrs Forrester struggles to cope and makes poor decisions that lead to the disintegration of relationships and the triumph of an unscrupulous opportunist.

Carefully structured to mirror the changes brought to the American West with the advent of the railroad, the Forresters' decline echoes the decline of the pioneering way of life while the unscrupulous 'Poison' Ivy Peters reflects the ugly face of a new greedy capitalism that replaces the benevolent elite.

I enjoyed Cather's style of writing - elegant but simple, moving the story along at a brisk pace while still painting a vivid picture and atmosphere.

52Tess_W
Jun 12, 2017, 1:19 pm

>51 floremolla: On your say-so I will give Cather another go. I read Oh Pioneers about 40 years ago and it was a thumbs down, at that time. Perhaps now that I'm older (perhaps wiser?) I may enjoy her.

53floremolla
Editado: Jun 12, 2017, 4:02 pm

The Sea Non-ROOT completed

Recent widower Max Morden decants to a seaside boarding house along with his grief and an urge to think over the details of a traumatic event from his childhood. Max narrates the story and it shifts time and again without a warning from one timeframe to another - his stay at the boarding house, the year leading up to his wife's death from cancer, and the summer of 1955 when he was 11 years old.

The childhood summer of the novel is vividly evoked - the bohemian and wildly attractive (to Max) Grace family arrive at the seaside holiday house (now the boarding house) near the field of wooden sheds where Max is spending the summer with his bickering parents. Max falls in love with Mrs Grace and quickly ingratiates himself into the family, becoming friends with twins his own age, Chloe and Myles, and their young nanny, Rose.

Max observes the Grace family dynamics with the eyes of a young boy who is part child and part adolescent, and the long hot summer provides adventure, sexual awakening and a tantalising glimpse of middle class life, before tragedy strikes.

Fifty years later, as an art historian who has 'married well' Max has had what he always wanted but rages against his dead wife for 'leaving' him, because in a sense he lived through her, and feels untethered by her loss.

John Banville won many awards for this novel and deservedly so. His prose is elaborate and poetic, with amazing vocabulary (losel, strangury, costive!).The complex interweaving of the three timelines is smoothly and expertly done, with tension building in each as they progress.

He introduces just the right amount of doubt about Max's veracity as a narrator, and whether he is a good or nice person (Max lies, is ashamed of his parents and he has some very unsavoury thoughts about some of his fellow human beings) - thus making him more believably human.

The pace of the book only flags once, imo, with some detailed descriptions of characters and events at the boarding house, which felt unnecessary. On the other hand Banville does a superb job of allowing some revelations to become clear slowly, while keeping others till the end. Overall it merits the five stars.

54Tess_W
Editado: Jun 12, 2017, 3:35 pm

>53 floremolla: You and Miss Watson give me more BB's than anybody! And I don't think your link is the correct one.

55floremolla
Jun 12, 2017, 4:03 pm

>54 Tess_W: That's the touchstone fixed - can't do anything about those BBs though!

56floremolla
Jun 13, 2017, 4:10 am

The Hour of the Star Non-ROOT completed

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer whose work has been re-translated in recent years to make it more reflective of her original writing. This very short novel is typical of her style, where she writes with scant regard to punctuation or grammar, in a sort of stream of consciousness, sometimes speaking to the reader through her narrator and sometimes seeming to address the reader directly.

Right from the beginning she has constructed The Hour of the Star as a dialogue with the reader. Firstly her male author narrator, Rodrigo S. M., is unable to decide what to call the story and provides a list of alternative titles - he can't decide which to use as they're all pertinent.

Then Rodrigo, who is struggling to write this story about a poor northeastern girl, constantly tells the reader how nervous he is about writing this piece and asking for some understanding as to the difficulties he's having in shaping it the way he wants.

So much of the writing in the early part of the novel is directed straight to the reader, and the disjointed writing sounds so needy for approval and understanding, it's difficult not to hear the narrator's voice as that of Lispector herself.

But gradually these authorial voices fall away and the story of the poor girl begins to break through, in small fragments at first but then taking over the narrative as the story begins to tell itself, despite the best efforts of the author narrator to control it.

Macabéa is an orphan, raised by an aunt who so restricts her that she has no real childhood. When the aunt dies, she goes to the city and becomes a typist, albeit not a very capable one, and she earns barely enough to keep herself in shared accommodation and meagre sustenance. She is physically ugly, shrivelled and rickety from want of nourishment, without friends and unloved.

Lispector describes Macabéa's physical poverty in detail but it's the effect of the girl's poverty on her sense of self that is devastating. At first she is so used to having nothing that she doesn't feel unhappy. As she gains more experience of life she struggles to make sense of people and events because she doesn't know how to think, except to feel that she is worthless and shouldn't even be taking up space. Only in her death can the girl receive recognition for having lived.

An introduction to the book, written by Colm Tóibín, suggests the story is an exploration of Lispector's self as the northeastern girl, as an author, and approaching death (she died as the book was published). If that is the case, it implies she didn't think herself good enough as a writer. She certainly had her own style.

The unusual punctuation, sentence structure and authorial questioning are a distraction initially but soon meld with the story. By the end I found as much poignancy in the author/Rodrigo's final words than in the fate of the poor girl and wondered if the worst poverty of all is having no-one to validate you as a human being.

57floremolla
Jun 15, 2017, 7:19 am

Spies completed

Set among the blackouts and rationing of WW2, this is a tale of two young boys whose childish game of make-believe turns into something more sinister when they start tracking someone they believe to be a German spy.

In Spies, Stephen is an elderly man with a sudden yen to see his childhood home and make sense of the events of one summer when he and his best friend Keith became entangled in events - and caused repercussions - that they didn't understand.

Michael Frayn is a well known playwright and his novels have a delightfully visual sense to them - you can picture the characters, settings and events clearly in your mind. He evokes the personalities of the boys very well - Keith a privileged only child with a strict father, Stephen an outsider, slightly ashamed of his less affluent family.

The action takes place in a typical English street during war-time paranoia where the boys speculate about their neighbours and what goes on in the homes behind the high hedges. Always aware they have to 'do their bit for the War Effort', the events of the story see the boys pushing themselves beyond the limits of their safe environment towards fierce dogs and combative kids, a dark slimy railway tunnel and a strange figure who's been spotted lurking around the gardens at nights...

This novel is an enjoyable and sometimes humorous evocation of childhood adventures and innocent misunderstandings - from simple confusion of the meanings of words to misinterpretation of the actions and words of adults. And it also highlights the instinctive way that even children know there are some things about their families that should never be spoken of outside the home.

The denouement was interesting but rather unwieldy as it turnd out to be a denouement on several levels, and I thought the book would have benefitted generally from being shorter and less repetitious.

58Jackie_K
Jun 15, 2017, 8:47 am

You're going great guns with your ROOTing, nearly at your goal! Fantastic progress!

59floremolla
Jun 15, 2017, 9:14 am

Thanks, Jackie - I decided to increase it from 40 to 60 otherwise I might lose momentum!

60avanders
Jun 15, 2017, 1:02 pm

>47 floremolla: lol I don't understand the reference, but it's interesting: "I'm a Scot, I like to get my money's worth from a book!"

>48 floremolla: interesting... I've not read anything by Ian McEwan, but that one sounds like one I might enjoy!

>59 floremolla: funny that the goal helps you keep momentum... I guess that's just what this group is for! ;)

61Jackie_K
Jun 15, 2017, 1:48 pm

>60 avanders: it's a reference to Scots being traditionally thought of as careful with their money! (or tight-fisted, depending on how you look at it). Not something I've particularly found myself since moving here, people are just as generous (or not) as everywhere else, it seems to me!

62avanders
Jun 15, 2017, 3:39 pm

>61 Jackie_K: huh I didn't know about that, funny how places develop reputations ☺️

63floremolla
Editado: Jun 23, 2017, 12:25 pm

One Hundred Years of Solitude Non-ROOT audiobook completed

I had enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera very much despite its magic realism, a genre of which I'm not a fan, so I was prepared to give One Hundred Years of Solitude a go.

It tells the story of seven generations of the Buendìa family who founded a town called Macondo in an isolated area of Colombia, encouraged by a dream of building a city of glass and mirrors. They are cut off from the world except that every year the gypsies arrive, bringing with them new inventions that seem magical and prompt the patriarch Jose Arcadio to become a scientific boffin, looking for ways to use the inventions for the good of the town. When he sees ice for the first time he is excited by the prospect of using it to build houses in Macondo, seemingly oblivious to the fact it's a desert town. Eventually he goes mad in his search for knowledge and spends the rest of his life tied to a chestnut tree for his own good.

His wife Ursula is very much the matriarch and the power behind the man. She worries about the (literally) incestuous nature of the small town and that relatives will marry and have children with pig's tails.

They have two sons, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, and the novel follows their fortunes as one stays in Macondo and the other, goes off to fight in a civil war caused by a rigged election. Over the years they meet and marry women and have sons and daughters of their own, mostly called variations on their parents' names (which was confusing at times). The fortunes of the extended family ebb and flow over the generations and sometimes the house is wallpapered with money and painted with gold, while at other times it is almost derelict. Ursula lives to be a hundred, always contriving to control her family.

Generations of the Buendìa men are drawn to the first Jose Arcadio's workshop and become obsessed with making things or, latterly, with one of the last surviving members of the family, Aureliano Segundo, the translating of parchments written in Sanskrit. The final chapter of the book sees him decipher its meaning and discover that it tells the story of the Buendìa family from the first to the last and shows how its history repeats itself.

Against the story of the family the history of Colombia plays out, from becoming an independent country, to civil war, to the promise of great wealth with American investors, to the growth of the banana republic and the military massacre of striking workers.

The magic realism comprised such elements as ghosts, a seven year flood, an ascension into heaven and a profusion of yellow butterflies that followed one of the characters. I didn't find it too distracting except that I often didn't see the symbolism.

My main criticism of the book was that I felt the pace flagged in the second half, by which time I was confused with the similarly-named characters. This wasn't helped by listening to the book on audio as I couldn't easily go back to check.

Unfortunately the audiobook had the worst narrator I've heard. His delivery was most peculiar and distracting (other Audible reviewers confirmed this!) but I'll ignore that in giving the novel the rating the story deserves as it was a mighty achievement and helped bring Latin American literature to the world's attention.

64Tess_W
Jun 17, 2017, 9:18 am

>63 floremolla: Great review. This book is already on my wish list!

65avanders
Jun 18, 2017, 11:05 pm

>63 floremolla: wow, 4 stars despite that criticism! Overall, it must have been quite impressive! It's also already on my shelves :) I do like magical realism, but I have a slower time getting to the epics ... ;)

66floremolla
Jun 19, 2017, 3:53 am

>65 avanders: I decided not to take the terrible narration into account when judging the book. I also rounded up from the three and a half stars I would have given for my personal enjoyment, to four for the 'worthiness' of the book. I struggle with rating when my own personal enjoyment and the obvious quality of the work don't entirely coincide!

67avanders
Jun 20, 2017, 9:16 am

>66 floremolla: that's fair and impressive that you can separate them!
I have definitely gone both ways with that... meaning, if the narrator is really good, it ups the rating; and vice versa! But I try to always note that in my review/rating. (e.g., I think Armada was as good as it was for me because of Wil Wheaton's excellent narration)

And I completely agree... I will give a book a higher rating when I think it was worthy, even if I didn't really enjoy reading it as much as I'd have liked... ;)

68floremolla
Jun 23, 2017, 12:19 pm

A Room with a View Non-ROOT completed

I was inspired to read EM Forster by a fellow ROOTer and thought A Room with a View would be a good reintroduction (since I failed to finish A Passage to India in the early eighties). Somehow I missed the movie version of A Room with a View so had no preconceived idea of the novel beyond it being a tale of Edwardian manners.

In the first part of the novel, Miss Lucy Honeychurch is taking a sojourn in a small pension in Italy, chaperoned by her much older spinster cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. When they are overheard complaining about the lack of view from their rooms, a kindly elderly gentleman and his son offer to swop. This leads to a great muddle of manners as to what is and isn't appropriate since the gentlemen in question are clearly of a lower order and additionally Miss Honeychurch cannot possibly take the Room of a young man, according to Miss Bartlett...

The pension is populated with English tourists, observing and judging. Lucy wants only to improve her education and develop her own thoughts but an unexpected stolen kiss causes reverberations that impel the Misses Bartlett and Honeychurch to flee to Rome.

The second part of the novel takes place some months later in rural England at Lucy's home, Windy Corner, where she is now engaged to the eminently suitable Cecil Vyse. As fate would have it though, some of the characters and events follow her from Italy - and so begins a period of flux for Lucy, where she seems not to know her own heart in matters of loyalty or love.

I enjoyed Forster's light handed approach to this novel, especially the playful touches, with amusing asides to the reader. And he paints such evocative pictures of places that the Tuscan and English landscapes are an integral part of each scene, whether it is a violet-strewn hillside or a country house tennis court - little wonder his major novels have made great movies.

The characters themselves are quintessentially English, mainly bumbling along, without guile, always observant of correct behaviour and wary of scandal. Lucy represents the winds of change to Edwardian society with her more liberal values and attitudes and her acquaintances, the Emersons, reinforce that, emerging as somewhat heroic 'self-made' men, ploughing their own furrow. Cecil on the other hand represents the repression of the Victorian era, trying as he does to 'improve' Lucy and mould her to his ideals of womanhood while only succeeding in repressing her.

The twists and turns of the story are rather contrived, helped along by an unlikely source, but they lead to a most satisfactory ending where truth and love triumph and the view is of the Tuscan sky and the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean....*sigh*

69Jackie_K
Jun 23, 2017, 1:38 pm

>68 floremolla: That is one of my very favourite books! And do do look out the film, it is brilliant, and very faithful to the book.

70floremolla
Jun 23, 2017, 2:17 pm

>69 Jackie_K: I will! Sounds like it could be a ray of sunshine on a miserable wet day :)

71Jackie_K
Jun 23, 2017, 2:26 pm

>70 floremolla: Oh definitely - it's an all-star cast, and they're all brilliant!

72MissWatson
Jun 24, 2017, 11:57 am

>68 floremolla: Actually, there are two filmed version of the book, the famous one with Helena Bonham Carter and Daniel Day-Lewis as a very smarmy Cecil Vyse, and then there's a TV version which takes some liberties with the plot, especially with the ending. The one redeeming feature is Laurence Fox who made me feel sorry for Cecil.

73floremolla
Jun 24, 2017, 1:29 pm

>71 Jackie_K: >72 MissWatson: spoiled for choice! I did feel a little sorry for Cecil because he saw the error of his ways almost immediately. He moved on quickly to another fiancée - but whether he took the lessons learned with him we'll never know. ;)

74floremolla
Jun 25, 2017, 10:54 am

Her Privates We completed

Some years after the end of WW1, Frederic Manning published a thinly disguised account of his time in the British Army, in France on the Western front, called The Middle Parts of Fortune. It was later published in an expurgated version as Her Privates We to get around post-war censorship, mainly related to Manning's portrayal of the dialogue 'in the vernacular' that was used in the trenches, but possibly also for its frank accounts of military blunders and class division.

Part novel, part memoir, the book follows the author's alter-ego, Bourne, a Private, for a five month period between the end of the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and the battle at Ancre in November that year.

Bourne is a small man with a slight frame but he's better educated than most in the trenches, including the officers, and he uses his wits to get by. Despite being of a higher class, he gets on well with the other Privates who are from humbler backgrounds. He reads their moods and is careful in what he says so as not to alienate himself. He's wily, always with an eye to the main chance, which mostly involves getting his hands on food and drink that is reserved for the officer classes.

He is equally at ease with the officers who want to recommend him for a commission - to train to become an officer. Bourne is not interested: he'd rather be invisible among the ranks and get through the war doing his own thing, than be an officer and the focus of scrutiny and control. His introspection provides much of the novel's moral and philosophical scope and the story, though not told in the first person, follows Bourne throughout.

The novel is insightful on many levels - over and above the unsurprising fact that soldiers swore in the trenches. The day to day humdrum routine of the soldiers. The logistics of moving battalions of men up the line, carrying arms and supplies. The billeting in villages with weekly baths and clean clothes if they were lucky. Endless drill practise that exhausted men getting by on meagre rations. Surprisingly, alcohol was dished out by the army, but there was always more to be found (as demonstrated by Bourne's cynical use of charm and a bit of French language to relieve the monsieurs et mesdames of their liquor supplies).

The novel also meditates on the philosophical issues of war - duty, heroism, despair, infallibility, death. A deserter who has been caught and paraded before the troops focuses thoughts on the moral dilemma of executing deserters for treason. And Bourne tries to understand the incomprehensible - why it is that these men will put up with cold, mud, lice and meagre rations to defend their country on foreign soil. What is the force that makes them continue to move forward despite the depth of their fear? He concludes that they have become a machine.

As the novel reaches its conclusion the soldiers are at the front line contending with the noise, mud, chaos and fog until eventually they are in the trenches, awaiting the signal to go over the top. Bourne notices how each man closes in to himself and his own thoughts - till the final exchanges of reassurance with each other as they go over and Fortune decides who lives and who dies.

While Her Privates We portrays the 'coarse' dialogue of the trenches, the prose is also quite beautiful in places and it's impossible not to be moved by the human tragedy of it all.

75MissWatson
Editado: Jun 25, 2017, 10:57 am

>73 floremolla: I watched the Bonham Carter version again this weekend, and it was rather sobering to see a very young Rupert Graves frolicking in the pond, as compared to his grey Lestrade on Sherlock nowadays...

76floremolla
Jun 25, 2017, 11:06 am

>75 MissWatson: I had to Google some images but yes, hasn't he transformed? It's like a different person.

77MissWatson
Jun 25, 2017, 11:09 am

>76 floremolla: He always looks good in period costume.

78floremolla
Jun 26, 2017, 4:21 am

Journey to the Centre of the Earth completed

A quick-read fun adventure story from Jules Verne. Madcap German scientist Professor Otto Lidenbrock takes his reluctant nephew Axel and local guide Hans into the mouth of a dormant volcano in Iceland searching for the entrance to the earth's core. They're following in the footsteps of sixteenth century explorer Arne Saknussemm who has hidden an encrypted note inside an ancient runic manuscript the Professor has acquired.

Along the way, the journey is fraught with challenges - as the group makes their way down into the bowels of the earth they encounter unforeseen dangers and threats to themselves and their vital supplies including prehistoric animals and water boiling beneath their makeshift raft.

The novel was published almost 150 years ago and holds up surprisingly well, except that the womenfolk stay at home so that the men won't be hampered by their frailties. On the scientific side, the phenomenal knowledge of the Professor and his nephew (also a scientist) is very impressive and covers everything from geology, palaeontology, biology, botany and zoology to mathematics and physics.

Any shortcomings on the physical side are made up for by their taciturn guide, Hans, who quietly gets on with anything that needs to be made or fixed, or retrieved from a great height, and more than once his physical strength literally holds the group together and saves their lives.

This book caught my eye on the shelf as it's on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. It's an imaginative tale, backed up by just the right amount of scientific explanation and it's not very demanding which is probably why it was included in a set of 'Children's Classics'.

79Jackie_K
Jun 26, 2017, 4:48 am

>78 floremolla: I read Around the World in Eighty Days last year and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, it was very silly with lots of derring-do. It sounds like Journey to the Centre of the Earth is very similar! I will get round to it at some point (who knows when? Roll on retirement!).

80rabbitprincess
Jun 26, 2017, 8:03 am

>78 floremolla: My copy of Journey to the Centre of the Earth is also a children's edition (Puffin Classics). And apparently it is complete and unabridged, whereas the Puffin Classics edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a specially abridged translation.

81floremolla
Jun 26, 2017, 8:54 am

>79 Jackie_K: 'reading more' was on my 'to-do in retirement' list but sometimes it still gets squeezed out - last week I did some consultancy work, helped a neighbour with a planting plan for her garden, hosted an extended family gathering and a dinner for friends 'passing through', attended a three hour community project meeting, did two dance classes, got my hair cut, visited my mother and nursed my husband through a sickness virus...this is why retired people wonder how they ever had time to go to work. ;)

>80 rabbitprincess: my book was also an unabridged Puffin Classic - it was my daughter's and came in a set with Black Beauty, Treasure Island and suchlike. I don't think she was enamoured of it as she was more into Harry Potter at the time!

82floremolla
Editado: Jun 29, 2017, 5:24 am

To The Lighthouse completed

The Ramsey family's holiday home on the Isle of Skye appears idyllic - the sun shines, their eight children frolic in the grounds and assorted friends are staying at the invitation of the beneficent and astonishingly beautiful Mrs Ramsey. Young James is pressing his parents for a boat trip to a nearby Lighthouse - his indulgent mother assures him they will go tomorrow and take gifts for the lighthouse keepers, while his father dismisses the idea because the weather won't be suitable.

The first part of Virginia Woolf's three part novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that shifts viewpoint from one character to another and reveals the underlying tensions between them - not least the antagonism felt by Mrs Ramsey towards her husband, triggered by his thoughtless disappointment of the child's expectations. We don't see inside Mr Ramsey's head so much but it's fair to say that most of the other characters find him arrogant and self-obsessed - he is, after all, a published writer and philosopher with a reputation to uphold.

And philosophical questions do crop up. 'What have I done with my life?' thinks Mrs Ramsey. Yet she is the great linchpin around which everyone else turns - loving and encouraging her children, gathering stray people to her home, a matchmaker and philanthropist. Between explosions of temper, Mr Ramsey asks himself 'what now?' He worries about his philosophical legacy - will it be good enough to stand the test of time? His constant need for reassurance is a further source of annoyance for his wife (and others) but she is ever supportive of his fragile confidence.

Between the Ramseys and their guests there is a great deal that is thought about each other but left unsaid. In particular, Lily Briscoe, with an artist's gift for observation, senses the tensions while enjoying the surface euphoria of the holiday environment and tries to capture it all, focusing on light and shade and the placement of her subjects on the canvas. She fails.

Part two marks the passage of ten years during which the holiday home is abandoned and several of their number have died. The house begins to succumb to damp and decay until there is a sudden notice to the housekeeper that the Ramsey family and guests will be visiting imminently.

Part three sees the Ramsey family heading to the Lighthouse by sailboat while, at the house, Lily Briscoe tries again to capture her memories of that distant summer on canvas. Again in this part there are many thoughts and feelings seething under the surface - two of the Ramsey children (by now young adults) agree they will not respond to their father's neediness. But the trip to the Lighthouse - bearing gifts for the lighthouse keepers as Mrs Ramsey had desired - proves to be a kind of catharsis for the family and some of their guests.

Apparently this novel loosely mirrors Woolf's own family's holiday home experiences in Cornwall and she wrote this novel to explore unresolved issues with her parents, represented by the Ramseys. The character of the artist Lily - who has been told 'women can't paint, can't write' - reflects Woolf's own artistic experience.

I admire Woolf for her achievements in a pre-feminist artistic world and her efforts to expand her literary creativity with experimental writing like this novel. For example, the stream-of-consciousness style is her own - characters' reveries are continually disrupted by real life mundane thoughts. Ultimately though, much as I liked the story, I felt the literary gymnastics were so much to the fore in this novel it was slightly distracting.

83Tess_W
Jun 29, 2017, 9:20 am

<82 As always, a great review! I'm scared to read a Virgina Woolf, only heard negative things about the stream of consciousness being too difficult to keep pace with. I find that style of writing to be meandering and it drives me crazy.

84floremolla
Jun 29, 2017, 12:00 pm

>83 Tess_W: I found the stream of consciousness worked if I read it aloud in my head - which seems a strange thing to say but I can't think how else to describe it. I haven't read enough Woolf to form a proper opinion of her writing but so far I find some of it self-consciously trying to be 'different' and losing meaning as a result. Which is probably a philistine thing to say :))

85Tess_W
Jun 29, 2017, 12:52 pm

>84 floremolla: Tried stream of consciousness with James Joyce; and quit twice. I am going to take it up again and plod through, no matter what! I did try stream of consciousness with Vonngut's Slaughterhouse Five, but did not finish and donated the book.

86floremolla
Editado: Jun 29, 2017, 12:59 pm

>85 Tess_W: I managed Slaughterhouse Five fine. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a challenge, not so much the stream of consciousness but the fact the prose got denser and more esoteric as it progressed! I have Ulysses lurking on my shelf...so, maybe next year. ;)

87Jackie_K
Jun 29, 2017, 1:03 pm

I must admit my patience for stream of consciousness is pretty thin! I hadn't realised Slaughterhouse Five was in that style - I've enjoyed the couple of other Vonnegut books I've read, and had thought I ought to tackle SF at some point. Maybe I'll get it out of the library, so I won't feel so bad if I can't finish it!

88floremolla
Jun 30, 2017, 4:21 am

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) completed

The French classic Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier, is an exploration of adolescence in the innocent times of the late 19th century. The Lost Estate is a translation by Robin Buss.

Fifteen year old François Seurel attends a small village school, where his parents are teachers. His sheltered life is shaken up by the arrival of seventeen year old Augustin Meaulnes, a large boy of modest background but huge charisma and adventurous spirit. He is quickly nicknamed 'The Great Meaulnes' by the schoolboys as he is a natural leader. During term time he boards with the Seurels and he and François become great allies.

One afternoon he secretly borrows a horse and trap to collect François' grandparents, who are to visit for Christmas, but he doesn't return for three days. When he does, he is is overtaken by a feverish passion, the cause of which he eventually relates to François. He has been at a wedding party at a great estate, where he was welcomed like a guest and feasted and danced as if in a dream. But most importantly he has met a beautiful girl there, Yvonne, and fallen in love - he must return but doesn't know where because he'd been asleep when the horse brought him there and it was foggy when he left.

Months pass and the episode fades until some wandering gypsies come to the village and Augustin recognises them from the estate, one of them being Frantz, the brother of the beautiful girl. When the gypsies leave abruptly Augustin follows in hope of finding his love, Yvonne.

The twists and turns of the story are narrated by François who loves Augustin like a brother and misses him terribly when he leaves. But fate intervenes and it is François who discovers the lost estate, now a ruin, and endeavours to reunite Augustin and Yvonne, but at great cost to himself and to others.

This is a poignant tale about experiencing a golden time in one's life that cannot last, and then struggling in vain to recreate it - in this case it is a glorious adolescence before the responsibilities of adulthood take hold. But it can never be the same because times change and people change...

But this is not a novel to be taken too literally. At heart it is a wistful romance, albeit shrouded in mysteries that are slowly revealed, and shot through with heartache. Despite being best known for its description of the wonderful celebrations at the lost estate, I liked best the depictions of French rural life, especially the village school with its kindly teacher, its warm stove on cold winter days and boys taking turns to sweep the floors after class. And as it turned out, that was also a golden era, a time of innocence, destroyed within a generation by The Great War.

Le Grand Meaulnes was the only novel completed by Alain-Fournier before he died at Meuse near the Belgian border in 1914, during WW1, aged just 27. It was inspired by a real life encounter he had as a boy when he glimpsed and fell in love with a beautiful girl in Paris and then spent time trying to track her down. She was Yvonne de Quiévrecourt and, sadly for him, she was already betrothed.

89Tess_W
Jun 30, 2017, 7:08 am

>88 floremolla: A great review and hence on my wishlist it goes!

90floremolla
Editado: Jul 1, 2017, 9:03 am

Jane Austen completed

Carol Shields gives her own interpretation of the life of Jane Austin in this short biography. Born in 1775 into what Shields describes as 'lesser gentry', one of eight children of a country clergyman, much of Jane's life is an enigma - impressions must be gleaned from her works, published and unpublished, from letters to her sister, Cassandra, and others, and reminiscences from family members many years after her death in 1817.

Shields ponders where Austen's creativity came from and surmises it had its origins in the family's interest in putting on theatrical plays to entertain each other and the fact that her mother and one of her brothers dabbled in verse. She suggests that, second youngest, Jane perhaps found her niche among her siblings as a writer of novels - a relatively new form - and she was encouraged by her father.

Shields examines Austen's life against the production of her earlier novels, from the first rather clumsy epistolary Lady Susan, through the three major novels First Impressions - later to become Pride and Prejudice; Marianne and Elinor - which became Sense and Sensibility; and then Susan, later called Northanger Abbey (the order in which the books were written as opposed to publication). Shields relates each novel back to Austen's own circumstances at the time.

As her parents grew older and siblings flew the nest, the family moved from the countryside to Bath and then with the death of her father there were further moves. Shields believes this halted Austen's creativity - and it is true that she did not produce much work during those years. As well as losing her father, she also lost a close cousin and a good friend in a short period. As the family moved, they proceeded to smaller and smaller houses as her father's pension had died with him and her mother and sister had tiny incomes. Jane herself had none and was reliant on her family's benevolence.

Shields speculates that these conditions were not conducive to writing - Austen needed a stable environment and to be left alone to get on with her work. A move to Chawton to a cottage owned by her brother was the trigger to resume her writing career.

In 1803 Jane had sent a manuscript of 'Susan' to a publisher several years before and despite a small payment and promise of publication it didn't materialise. Six years later she wrote a strong letter - angry but restrained - demanding the return of the manuscript. It was duly returned and amended to become Northanger Abbey. Then followed her other three major novels: Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Again Shields examines how the novel's reflect Jane's life and perhaps changing outlook as a now published author. Sadly she did not live to see the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, having succumbed at the age of 41 to an illness that Shields, contrary to other biographers, interprets as breast cancer.

Shields portrays Austen as you would expect - a witty but spiky individual, who didn't get on particularly well with her mother and who regretted throughout her life her own inability to break free from living with her parents, a freedom sought and gained by all of her heroines, although through marriage rather than independence. Jane herself was unfortunate not to find a husband for whom she could feel genuine affection although Shields suggests she was not entirely disappointed, as the thought of childbirth scared and repulsed her. Understandably so, since death in childbirth was common at the time.

In terms of other insights into Jane's life and personality, some of her letters to her sister are quoted as evidence of her sharp wit where she delights in making insulting remarks against neighbours and displays a sense of humour verging on the malicious. But Shields detects a tendency to be so entertaining that she sometimes hides her true feelings.

This is a slim volume and disappointingly contains no images or substantial extracts of Austen's letters, although they are often referred to. I often felt reading it that I wasn't convinced by Shields' speculation. And I just didn't feel she added much I didn't already know - oddly, because I've never read an Austen biography - it seemed like she just wanted an opportunity to add her tuppence worth. Interestingly, though, Shields herself died from breast cancer just two years after publication of this biography so might well have had some special insight into Austen's cause of death.

To be fair, I tend to be highly cynical concerning works of research, and dislike conjecture, so biographies of Jane Austen are doomed from the start for me.

91floremolla
Jul 1, 2017, 9:05 am

End of Q2 Round-up

ROOTS read - 27
Non-ROOTs - 8
Total ROOTs for 2017 to date - 42/60
Total Non-ROOTs for 2017 to date - 8/30

Total (a nice round) 50

Acquisitions - tbc (or, let's be honest, I've lost track 😔)

Challenges for Q3

Read three non-fiction
Read one book in French (Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola already acquired for the purpose - so it must be done...)

92Tess_W
Jul 1, 2017, 10:13 am

Great numbers and I admire your reading in French. I tried reading Don Quixote in Spanish and it's been way too long...didn't make it past page 3. I read Theresa Raquin last year; dark.

93floremolla
Jul 1, 2017, 10:56 am

>92 Tess_W: I'm very pleased with the number 50 - it was going to be 49 but I decided it had to be rounded up for the sake of 'completeness'...or something. Make of that what you will. ;)

I'm maybe being a bit over-ambitious with the French, should probably have started with a YA book. But one thing I've learned through ROOTing is you can read anything if you break it up into bite-size chunks.

Speaking of which, I see you have DQ on your list of chunksters for this year. I've also got it downloaded from Project Gutenberg and plan to read it this year, even though it's not a ROOT.

94Tess_W
Jul 1, 2017, 2:46 pm

>93 floremolla:, Yes, I read DQ in college in the 70's. I think it's time for a re-read. I remember not really liking it in college, but I think now that I'm older and my tastes have evolved, I will enjoy it, as I do most classics. A friend got my one of those fancy real leather gilted copies of DQ back in the 80's so I've got to read it! (or do I?)LOL

95MissWatson
Jul 4, 2017, 3:07 am

Happy birthday, Donna!

96floremolla
Jul 4, 2017, 4:08 am

Thanks, Birgit!

97Jackie_K
Jul 4, 2017, 7:04 am

Happy birthday! I hope you have a lovely day! (weather's not great if it's anything like here, so an excuse for a celebratory read!)

98Tess_W
Jul 4, 2017, 9:10 am

99floremolla
Jul 4, 2017, 10:19 am

>97 Jackie_K: thank you, Jackie, that's exactly what I'm doing - and celebrating with cake and fizz later (it's not even funny to say 'once the sun's gone over the yardarm') :))

100floremolla
Jul 4, 2017, 10:24 am

Thank you so much, Tess! I have been spoiled and yes, book tokens have been forthcoming! :))

Happy Independence Day to you! When I started school the teacher told me my birthday was on American Independence Day - I had no clue what that was about. But fast-forward 35 years and I celebrated my 40th in NYC. It was tremendous, especially the fireworks on the river which my husband claimed to have arranged specially for me!

101floremolla
Jul 5, 2017, 12:16 pm

Where My Heart Used To Beat Non-ROOT completed

Robert Hendricks is a psychiatrist, once pioneering in his field, and a published author of a book on his then controversial theories. We also learn right away that he is a heavy drinker with a shallow love life. It's the 80s and, being in his sixties, he's past the best of his professional life, and now slightly embarrassed about his book, which has been overtaken by new thinking. He's a lonely, unhappy man, a misanthrope, a therapist in need of therapy.

Out of the blue he receives a call from Dr Antonio Pereira, an older psychiatrist, living on a Mediterranean island, and now nearing the end of his life. He had admired Hendricks' book and wants him to carry his, Pereira's, work forward as his literary executor after his death - in return he will fill a gap in Hendricks' knowledge about how his father died on the Western Front during WW1, for he had been his commander in the trenches. This information was something his mother had never shared with him because it was too upsetting for her.

Hendricks himself has fought in WW2 and he recounts his experiences to Pereira, including that he had sustained a non-life threatening injury in Italy and, during recuperation there, met Luisa, the love of his life.

This novel by Sebastian Faulks is about memory and how it's memories rather than real life that make us who we are. As Hendricks and Pereira talk (over several visits and many post prandial libations) the story goes back and forth between 'present day' (in the 80s) and Hendricks' experience in WW2. Gradually his memories of some episodes of his life become clearer - the events leading up to his injury, for example - and he seeks out people from the past to fill some of the other gaps. He also contemplates his childhood, his professional life and his relationships with women.

The story builds towards revelations by Dr Pereira about Hendricks' father and I anticipated this in turn would also trigger a major revelation about Hendricks himself - there is a revelation of sorts but it's under-whelming in the scheme of things.

I enjoyed this book for the most part but didn't love it. Unfortunately, despite the amount of ground it covered I finished it feeling something important was missing which marred the poignancy of his father's story.

102Tess_W
Jul 5, 2017, 12:56 pm

>101 floremolla: Great review, as usual! I have read Faulk's Birdsong and thought it dreadful. No BB here for me!

103floremolla
Jul 5, 2017, 2:27 pm

>102 Tess_W: I did like Birdsong but feel Faulks hasn't lived up to it since. He seems to have a clutch of topics that he mines for material and uses again and again. Oh well, it was a charity shop cheapy and I'll probably hang onto it for now as I have nearly all of his other books, but I can foresee a time when three and a half stars won't cut it for a place on my shelves ;)

104Tess_W
Editado: Jul 5, 2017, 6:54 pm

>103 floremolla:---3 1/2 stars, I will seldom take a BB on that or leave it on my shelf!

105floremolla
Jul 5, 2017, 7:10 pm

>104 Tess_W: actually in retrospect 3 1/2 stars was possibly a bit generous - back to the charity shop with it!

106LauraBrook
Jul 9, 2017, 4:00 pm

Wow, you are clipping right along! And, a Happy Belated Birthday to you!

107floremolla
Jul 9, 2017, 5:27 pm

>106 LauraBrook: well, thank you! I got some very generous book tokens as gifts so any good work I'm doing will be undone by a growing Mount TBR! :)

108floremolla
Jul 10, 2017, 2:25 pm

Jude the Obscure completed

Thomas Hardy's final novel, published in 1895, starts off hopefully. An unwanted child of parents who should never have married (according to his cold hearted great-aunt), Jude Fawley is nevertheless bright and idealistic. Realising at an early age that education is his best hope to escape a life of poverty he resolves to teach himself Latin and Greek - hoping that with sufficient learning he might attain a 'fellowship' entry to university. With his resourcefulness in obtaining books and aptitude for study he is soon outgrowing his small community.

But before he can escape the 19 year old Jude is trapped into marriage by a local girl, Arabella, who feigns pregnancy. Discovering he's been duped, he separates from her and she in turn announces she is leaving for Australia and a new life.

With nothing now holding him in the village he sets off for the university city of Christminster determined to follow his long-held educational ambitions. He has learned stone masonry and is able to find work restoring ecclesiastical buildings while he seeks an entry to university, or at least to further tuition. But he finds his lowly status a barrier to progress and begins to consider ordination and working his way up the church hierarchy instead.

Jude's ambitions are not limited to his career however - another reason for coming to Christminster is that he has fallen desperately in love with his cousin Sue, who lives there, and he is filled with a desire to be with her, despite the problems of their close familial relationship and his own marital status. When they meet and their relationship develops it is clear that there is an attraction between them, despite Sue being a free-spirited religious sceptic and proto-feminist.

However, on finding out that Jude is still technically married, Sue impulsively marries schoolmaster Mr Phillotson, for whom she's been working as an assistant teacher. Jude is devastated and turns to drink only to meet up with Arabella again who has married bigamously in Australia. Meanwhile Sue has realised she cannot stay married to Mr Phillotson, whose touch repels her, and she deserts him for Jude.

So begins a lengthy 'will they/won't they' relationship between Jude and Sue that must not be consummated because, in Sue's eyes they are both still married to others. But eventually both obtain divorces and Arabella reveals belatedly that she and Jude had a son, whom she now foists upon them to rear. With nothing to hinder them marrying, Jude and Sue disappear for a few days and return calling themselves Mr and Mrs Fawley.

But in fact they have not married, though they go on to have children, and eventually gossip catches up with them and they find themselves outcasts, struggling to survive penury. When they are financially at rock bottom a family tragedy propels them towards physical and mental ruin, and back into their previous marriages.

Hardy makes the social and moral backdrop to this doomed love story part of the relationship - as a product of poverty, Jude can never overcome the obstacles to his educational ambitions, and Sue is so reactionary against the repression of women in marriage, and the control of the church, that it constantly impacts on her life decisions and relationship with Jude.

The tragedy they experience causes Jude's ambitions to fade and he becomes disillusioned with the church, whereas Sue, always quick to feel guilt, turns to the church and decides she must make reparation by remarrying Mr Phillotson and becoming a dutiful wife. By now, Jude is physically weakened and, left to the scheming clutches of an uncaring Arabella, succumbs to a sorrowful end.


Throughout the novel, Sue is the most irksome contrarian, continually playing Jude along, reeling him in, only to abandon him in great guilt trips. Jude meanwhile, being naive and generous to a fault is acquiescent to her ever-changing moods and plans. Arabella is a conniving opportunist, while Mr Phillotson is motivated by a desire to 'do the right thing', even if it is unconventional.

It seems that whereas the men are pliable and well-intentioned the women are the corrupting influence. Whether Hardy is making a point here against women, or their characters are just fulfilling the necessity of each couple being incompatible in marriage, the portrayal of both women struck me as descending into caricature and towards the end the novel began to feel like an extended parable.

Hardy was known to have become anti-religious in his later life and Jude and Sue's opinion of marriage as a man-made construct for the convenience of inheritance, rather than a holy sacrament, was probably his own. The book was heavily criticised for blasphemy and obscenity when it was published and, though he went on to publish poetry, he didn't write any more novels in the remaining three decades of his life.

I liked the fact this novel explored modern sensibilities and I enjoyed the little insights into the end-of-century quotidian (as Jude might have said). If you're looking for an uplifting read, however, look elsewhere - this is the literary equivalent of spending time with an acquaintance whose negativity leaves you feeling you've had the life sucked out of you.

109Jackie_K
Jul 10, 2017, 4:39 pm

>108 floremolla: I love the last paragraph of your review! To be honest, I think most Hardy novels (at least the ones I've read) make you (well, me) feel like that! I do have Jude the Obscure on my TBR list, you've certainly piqued my interest there!

110Tess_W
Jul 10, 2017, 8:25 pm

>108 floremolla: That is about the only Thomas Hardy novel that I have not read. I will certainly move it up on my TBR list....I like Hardy, don't know why I haven't read it before!

111floremolla
Jul 12, 2017, 4:44 am

I've got Far From the Madding Crowd on my shelf but saw the movie version quite recently so won't read it right away. My parents have a lovely leather-bound set of Hardy novels but I wouldn't trust myself with them so will probably see if they're on Project Gutenberg or cheap download for Kindle!

112floremolla
Editado: Ago 27, 2017, 7:10 pm

Underworld audiobook and paperback completed

This 800+ page novel is my idea of a tour de force - Don DeLillo captures the essence of America during the latter half of the twentieth century, beginning with a 1951 baseball game in New York - "the shot that was heard around the world!" - jumping forward to a desert in Arizona in the nineties in Part 2 and then working backwards to the starting point again. This dynamic works well because the reader anticipates that questions raised and events referred to early in the novel will be addressed by the end...which is really the beginning.

The ball with which the game was won was pitched into the crowd and was never seen again. DeLillo creates a history for the ball and this simple device is one of a number of threads connecting the chapters, many of which would stand alone as post modern short stories. In fact the first chapter set at the baseball match has been published as such and it held my attention with several stories going on at once: the game itself, the sports commentators' excited exchanges, the truanting kids who jump the turnstiles, the celebrities (Sinatra, J Edgar Hoover and Jacky Gleason) exchanging wisecracks, the tussle for possession of the ball and the atmosphere that prevails around the city when people listening on their radios come out of their houses to celebrate. In the euphoria the citizens don't hear the news that Russia has just tested its first atomic bomb.

The remaining chapters revolve around the main protagonist, and sometimes first person narrator, Nick Shay, wealthy owner of a huge waste management business but erstwhile juvenile delinquent. He's a complex character whose marriage is on a knife edge and who feels disconnected from his children. The novel charts episodes of his life - and episodes of the lives of people connected to him - from his inauspicious youth, elder son of an Irish-Italian family, through to his late fifties.

Nick's life is shaped by the disappearance of his father in his early years in classic 'just nipped out for a packet of cigarettes and was never seen again' fashion. Nick believes his father, who was a bookmaker "running numbers", had run foul of the mafia and been executed. His brother Matty believes their father simply walked out because he was a coward who couldn't cope with his responsibilities. Both boys, and their mother, suffer the consequences, materially and psychologically.

In the nineties, Nick is taking a road trip to see a former lover, and famous artist Klara Sax, whom he met as an 'older woman' when he was just seventeen. She is overseeing a large scale installation in the desert, comprising the painting of over four hundred redundant fighter planes, including B-52 bombers that, back in the day, dropped atom bombs. Klara's history features prominently throughout the novel, as do other characters such as Matty and Matty's chess teacher Albert Bronzini who happens to have been Klara's husband at the time of her affair with Nick.

The episodes of characters' lives are set against the history of the times - thus, for example, race riots, the death of JFK, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the space race, and the rise of AIDS feature at the appropriate points on the timeline. Themes such as the history of waste disposal, religion and the number thirteen thread their way through the decades as do references to the underworld of the title - in reality many 'underworlds' that exist below the radar: drugs, prostitution, organised crime, corruption, murder, the disposal of contaminated waste, the human cost of nuclear weapons testing.

DeLillo portrays his characters in all the banality of their everyday lives, their petty quarrels, their hopes and fears, but he deconstructs these ordinary lives and events into layers of information and meaning - a look, or a reaction, hints at what's going on beneath the surface. We also get a glimpse into the lives and minds of a myriad of less ordinary characters and events - Sister Edgar, a nun and strict teacher of the Shay boys; a drug addicted graffiti artist; a chilling serial killer who shoots drivers on a Texas highway.

Not being American, I can't say that this novel captures American culture and counter-culture authentically, but I can say it captures my perceptions of the country and aspects of its culture perfectly.

In an Epilogue, entitled "Das Kapital", which returns to the nineties, Nick is on a visit to Kazakhstan to discuss a possible contract for disposal of contaminated waste and is shown houses built by the Russians to emulate American homes so that they can test the effectiveness of their atomic bombs. They're so authentic he feels nostalgic for the commodities of his youth - Old Dutch Cleanser, Rinso White, Ipana and Oxydol - items that are quintessentially American, and of that particular time in history. Unfamiliar to me yet still recognisably American in a way the globalisation of commodities is gradually erasing. As DeLillo says "Capital burns off all the nuance in a culture" - and Underworld is at heart an elegy to cultural change in America.

I loved the different worlds and eras DeLillo depicts in this novel - his descriptive prose, the richness of the dialogue, patois and curious quirks of speech of Italian-American, black or Hispanic communities and the inner thoughts of characters, whether implied or explicit, brought a kind of realism to the story. I felt by the end that I knew Nick Shay, and even wished him well.

I intended to alternate between paperback and audio of this 800+ pages chunkster but the narrator, Richard Poe, was so good I mostly listened. He brought the book to life with his mixture of dead-pan delivery and subtle but effective shifts of accent that included a remarkable version of a Lenny Bruce routine that captured his famous "we're all gonna dieee!" response to nuclear paranoia. Amazing - one to listen to again.

113MissWatson
Jul 12, 2017, 6:56 am

Another great review, Donna.

114Tess_W
Jul 12, 2017, 7:11 am

>112 floremolla: Great review, Donna! On to my wishlist it goes! Had I not read your review I would not have given it a second thought as the title makes me think sci-fi.

115floremolla
Jul 12, 2017, 10:16 am

Thank you both. I wasn't sure what to expect with this novel - reviews seem to be split between loving it and hating it! I really thought the audio brought something to it that I wouldn't have got from reading it. Having said that, it was an epic achievement on DeLillo's part, not least the tying up of all the loose ends!

116rabbitprincess
Jul 12, 2017, 5:49 pm

>111 floremolla: My mum was watching Far from the Madding Crowd when I was home for a visit a couple of weeks ago, and she was shocked by the scene where the sheepdog drives all the sheep over the cliff. She was talking about it all weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if she still hasn't finished the movie. It was pretty upsetting :(

117floremolla
Jul 12, 2017, 7:36 pm

>116 rabbitprincess: oh, your poor mum! It's supposed to be Hardy's 'happiest' novel but he still couldn't refrain from including graphic tragedy. Don't ever let her watch a dramatisation of Jude the Obscure! :(

118rabbitprincess
Jul 12, 2017, 10:01 pm

>117 floremolla: Hm, yes, or I'll have to pre-screen it for her! I'd seen Madding Crowd before (on the strength of David Nicholls doing the adaptation and Carey Mulligan playing Bathsheba) and hadn't thought to warn her about that part.

119Jackie_K
Jul 13, 2017, 4:30 am

>111 floremolla: I got Jude the Obscure from a free site - I don't think it was Project Gutenberg (although it is on PG, along with pretty much all the other Hardy stories you could possibly want), but I can't remember which one. I thought it might be Feedbooks, but I can't see a free version there.

I haven't seen the most recent film of Far from the Madding Crowd, but did see the one from the 1960s?1970s? with Julie Christie. I read FftMC for O'level English, and really didn't enjoy it to start with, but then they happened to show the film on the telly, and after watching that I found it much easier to get into the book.

120floremolla
Jul 13, 2017, 6:33 am

>119 Jackie_K: thanks, Jackie, I'll have a look online and see if I can get Tess of the D'Urbervilles as a freebie.

I used to be extremely picky about reading the book before watching the dramatisation and got terribly worked up if the latter deviated from the original! I've learned belatedly to try to see them as two different things, but I still like a bit of space between the two.

121Tess_W
Jul 13, 2017, 9:15 am

All of Hardy's novels are free on Amazon.

122floremolla
Editado: Jul 13, 2017, 10:20 am

>121 Tess_W: excellent, thanks, Tess!

123avanders
Jul 16, 2017, 5:10 pm

Hello! Just dropping by to say hi & great job on your ROOTing! Also, looks like I missed a birthday, so Happy Birthday! :D

124floremolla
Jul 16, 2017, 5:34 pm

>123 avanders: thank you - I'm clearly a 'people pleaser' as encouragement from fellow ROOters really helps! Hope all's well with you - looking forward to your updates, including the blog :))

125avanders
Jul 16, 2017, 6:18 pm

>124 floremolla: that's awesome that it has worked out that way... your people pleasing has helped you read more ROOTs because of "peer pressure" ;P

126Jackie_K
Jul 17, 2017, 9:52 am

>120 floremolla: I don't know if I'm too bothered either way usually if I see a dramatisation first or read the book (other than Dickens, where I generally need to see it first to get everyone right in my head), but I do know that there are certain books that I have absolutely loved where I just can't even contemplate seeing a film/TV version because I just know it won't be the same as the version in my head. So I refused to see the films of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Nicolas Cage? What were they thinking?!) or The Time Traveller's Wife (I understand that with both those films I didn't miss much!). More controversially, even though I know the film is meant to be a classic, and as brilliant as the book, I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the film of To Kill a Mockingbird, in case they just don't look like the characters in my head.

127connie53
Jul 18, 2017, 1:50 pm

Hi Donna, O my, you celebrated your birthday! I'm so sorry I missed it.

128floremolla
Jul 18, 2017, 7:46 pm

>126 Jackie_K: oh yes, I know what you mean about having a picture in your mind of a well loved literary character and in the film adaptation it's all wrong! I thought the movie of TKAMB was equal to the book - it actually 'illuminated' the book for me in terms of the setting. I want to watch it again now!

>127 connie53: thanks, Connie!

129floremolla
Editado: Jul 18, 2017, 8:01 pm

Frenchman's Creek

An old-fashioned historical romance by Daphne du Maurier - somewhat dated now, and a bit predictable in places, but a deftly handled story.

Set in the Restoration period, Dona St Columb is the beautiful and high-spirited wife of wealthy but none-too-bright Harry. Bored and disgusted with the shallow London scene of parties, card games and high jinks, she retreats to Navron, her husband's family pile on the Cornish coast, together with her two toddler children and their nanny, leaving the hapless Harry partying with their friend, Lord Rockingham.

On arrival at Navron she is surprised to find William, a servant whom she doesn't recognise but quickly comes to like and trust. She soon begins to relax and take pleasure in the gardens and the landscape and while gazing out to sea espies an elegant ship that appears to slip up the coast towards the river at Navron.

A few days later she learns from a neighbour that there are pirates raiding the properties along the coast, ravishing women and stealing valuables. With a frisson of excitement she realises the significance of the ship slipping into the creek to hide and that William is keeping a secret about how Navron has been used in the family's absence.

It's not long before she meets the dashing chief pirate himself, Jean-Benoit Aubéry, a charming, handsome and cultured Frenchman with a talent for drawing birds and beautiful women. The attraction is mutual and Dona finds herself drawn into the dangerously exciting world of piracy. But as she loses her heart to the charismatic pirate she learns the local aristocracy are setting a trap, and Harry is being summoned to join them. As Dona's summer idyll comes to a sudden end, she must decide whether she will help Aubéry and his men escape - and will she give up her family to flee to France with him?

Du Maurier elevated this novel from the humdrum historical romance by painting vivid pictures of the Cornish landscape and relating the scenes aboard ship convincingly. Dona is a brave and spirited heroine whose heart is in the right place but is forced by circumstances to do the unthinkable.

Frenchman's Creek does not have the darkness and suspense of Rebecca, but it has the excitement of piracy, the thrill of romance and the trepidation of being hunted. There was some repetition in the descriptive parts of the story which was slightly distracting, but on the other hand there was a carefully crafted ending which this reader thought was satisfyingly apt and poignant.

130Tess_W
Jul 18, 2017, 8:23 pm

>129 floremolla:, Glad you liked it, Donna! I read it 2-3 years ago and I thought the story was elementary but the language was beautiful and also flowed beautifully.

131floremolla
Jul 19, 2017, 3:49 am

>130 Tess_W: yes, that's it in a nutshell!

132floremolla
Jul 24, 2017, 7:20 pm

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost Non-ROOT completed

Albanian author Ismael Kadare presents a slice of life in his country, post-communism, as his protagonist, artist Mark Gurabardhi, finds it difficult to adjust to the new regime, and suffers a deal of angst, among the goings on in his little mountain town of B.

A local bank heist almost unhinges Mike as such behaviour was unheard of under communism - the townspeople react with a bemused pride that they are becoming 'westernised' by such a crime in their own town. For Mark it's another 'difficult to assimilate' event that adds to his agitation.

He works for the City Art Centre but has his own studio - where he mainly has sex with his girlfriend, paints her in the nude and worries that she'll leave him. His insecurity causes him to worry also about the studio's security (despite there being nothing of great value) and he installs heavy doors and multiple locks at the suggestion of a local tradesman, keen to cash in on new demand.

There's an element of magical realism with an allegorical story-within-the-story of a young woman whose parents marry her off to a snake as punishment for an offence, the details of which no-one could remember. In the mountain town, this is reported as news rather than a fairytale.

The sly snake is a recurring motif, as are the theft of immortality by Tantalus in Greek mythology, death, water out of control, the thoughts of the iceberg that caused the sinking of the Titanic, an ancient book of the Kanun mountain people which records blood feuds going back millennia and a local legend about a secret government archive hidden in the mountains around B, which everyone is looking for - presumably because it holds answers or some kind of 'truth'.

The assassination of Mark's boss drives his paranoia further as he suspects the perpetrator to be someone close to home.

This is a relatively short novel and it's full of allusions that we probably interpret according to our own cultural sensibilities but which reveal the universality of human nature, in particular the fear of loss of control and the feeling of disconnect that comes with periods of great change and upheaval. Ironically one of Mark's fears was that millennia of Albanian culture could be lost with the country's entry into the European Union while at the same time rejoicing at the funding being invested in infrastructure by the European Council.

Translated into English from a French translation from the Albanian, the novel nevertheless had some effective descriptions of the way of life and the people ground down by decades of oppression, so that their very actions seemed to suggest movement under pressure. For all that it had its humorous moments too.

An interesting read but I found it a bit disjointed and probably missed a lot of references through ignorance of the Albanian way of life.

133Tess_W
Jul 24, 2017, 9:21 pm

>133 Tess_W: Your book review is just delicious! However, I'm not a fan of magic realism so I can safely say this one is not a BB for me!

134Henrik_Madsen
Jul 25, 2017, 3:04 am

>132 floremolla: I read The Three-Arched Bridge by him a couple of years ago. It is a historical novel set in the 14th century but the subjectmatter is in some ways related. Some magic elements but mostly a realistic story and a prevalent focus on change. In this case the growing power of the Turks and the strife between Albanian lords which enabled foreign rule.

I thought that book was good but not great but I would definitely like to see some of his his interpretations of modern Albanian life.

135floremolla
Editado: Ago 11, 2017, 3:56 pm

>133 Tess_W: thanks Tess, magic realism isn't my cup of tea either but it was a small element of this short book so was easy to digest!

>134 Henrik_Madsen: I think this book is supposed to be set about 2002, ten years after the end of communism in Albania. You would think that Mark would have adjusted in that timescale but I guess the lack of communications infrastructure in rural areas would cause a slow filtering of information and change. There's a negative perception of Albania in the west, here in the UK at least, of being poor and crime ridden, so it would be good to learn more of the culture and modern way of life. This one was on the 1001 BYMRBYD list which is why I chose it. I'm not sure I'd rush to try another because although I thought it was interesting I didn't think it was great.

Interestingly Albania has not yet achieved EU status: 'The Republic of Albania is an official candidate for accession to the European Union since June 2014. Officially recognised by the EU as a "potential candidate country" in 2000, Albania started negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) in 2003.'

136floremolla
Editado: Jul 30, 2017, 6:03 am

The Diary of A Nobody completed

A satire of suburban values first published in 1892, George Grossmith's novel in diary form is regarded as a classic of English literature and his protagonist, Mr Charles Pooter, a forerunner of characters from popular British culture such as Reginald Perrin and Victor Meldrew. I certainly recognised similarities and some comic devices that are still used today.

Mr Pooter is a clerk, quietly assured in his steady employment and his nondescript life, with his 'little wife', Carrie, his unadventurous social life with his friends, Gowing and Cummings and his fondness for puns. On one hand he is an insufferably smug and judgemental aspiring social climber - but on the other he attracts all kinds of bad luck. Any effort to obtain a bargain or advantage, ends in catastrophe; any opportunity for social advancement ends in humiliation; any child or small animal will pick him as the object of its worst behaviour. Even his own clothes sometimes seem to conspire against him. Add to this his propensity for misunderstandings, and his epic clumsiness, and he leaves a wake of chaos and new enemies wherever he goes.

He is a man clinging to familiar routine and old ideals and always believes himself to be right - but around him the world is changing rapidly and he struggles with new fashions and fads, and what he sees as breaches of etiquette and abominable behaviour. He often composes 'letters of complaint' or sounds off to his long-suffering wife about what he perceives as people's slights against him. But he fails to see that it's usually his own grumpiness and incompetence that cause their actions.

Carrie Pooter is well-loved but patronised by her husband. He generally knows when to keep his counsel but can't help recording in his diary his disdain for her opinions and ideas. Nonetheless she is his steadfast supporter. However, the Pooters' son, Willie, who prefers to be called Lupin, is the embodiment of all that Mr Pooter is not - he's brash and cavalier, ambitious and uncaring of what people think of him. Much to Pooter's annoyance, he often trumps his father.

I enjoyed this novel for its gentle humour - not 'hilarious' as per the blurb - and its glimpses into late Victorian life. For all Pooter's faults it was impossible not to feel some sympathy when his oneupmanship was routinely turned to humiliation, and (oh dear) to recognise a little of oneself in incomprehension of the younger generation and the perception that the modern world is going to hell in a handcart.

Weedon Grossmith, the author's brother, provided illustrations, which added to the period feel of the book.

137Henrik_Madsen
Jul 31, 2017, 7:41 am

>136 floremolla: That sounds pretty interesting - which is good since the book has been sitting om my shelves so long that I might think of it as an integrated part of the bookcase.

138Jackie_K
Jul 31, 2017, 1:10 pm

You're going great guns with your goal, Donna - I reckon at your current prolific rate 3 books a month for the rest of the year is eminently do-able!

139floremolla
Jul 31, 2017, 3:48 pm

>137 Henrik_Madsen: haha, this was also on our shelves for three decades - I gave it to a charity shop and then realised it was on the 1001 BYMRBYD list. I bought this copy from another charity shop to replace it and decided it was still a ROOT because of its longevity. I did laugh aloud a couple of times and it's short and undemanding, which always helps with the numbers!

>138 Jackie_K: thanks, but I've really slowed down this month - was doing a bit of work that became quite demanding, helping my daughter move flat, plus getting my husband ready for respite care this week - which is like a military operation as he has so many medications and accoutrements! It's his first time in a new place so I've been making sure to spend a lot time with him in an effort to assuage my guilt. I haven't had a break for 16 months so am kind of due some 'time off'. I'm heading to Paris with my sister and our respective daughters - it's her daughter's 21st birthday treat. They live in Canada so it'll be lovely to get some quality time with them and make some new memories. :))

140Jackie_K
Jul 31, 2017, 4:28 pm

>139 floremolla: Oh, that sounds like it is going to be a wonderful break for you!

141rabbitprincess
Jul 31, 2017, 10:38 pm

>139 floremolla: Have a great trip! A girls' trip to Paris sounds lovely. Be sure to stop by Shakespeare and Company ;)

142Tess_W
Ago 1, 2017, 6:40 am

>139 floremolla: Enjoy your break in the City of Lights!

143connie53
Ago 5, 2017, 2:38 am

>139 floremolla: Have a lovey time in Paris with the girls, Donna.

144floremolla
Editado: Ago 6, 2017, 4:19 pm

A postcard from Paris - thank you all, we had such a lovely time, all of us managed to do everything on our wishlists. I bought one book, a nice little edition of Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. The two daughters bought books for their boyfriends - King Lear and The Bell Jar respectively. And my daughter bought The Power for herself. Maybe it's as well we were restrained by luggage restrictions ;)

145Tess_W
Ago 6, 2017, 9:01 pm

>144 floremolla: So glad you had a wonderful time!

146connie53
Ago 7, 2017, 3:01 am

>144 floremolla: Nice to hear that you had such a good time! And bought books too!

147floremolla
Ago 8, 2017, 11:07 am

Rebellion Non-ROOT completed

In Vienna, Andreas Pum, a veteran of the Great War, awaits his discharge papers. He's pleased to note that despite having lost a leg (below the knee) he has at least been rewarded with a medal for his troubles - around him are men with far worse injuries and no medals. He is a little aloof from the hoi polloi whom, in a flash he himself considers brilliant, he dubs 'heathens' because, unlike him, they carp and complain and have no faith in the system to do right by them. Andreas knows that he'll get his top-of-the-range prosthetic leg, a respectable job and eventually a nice little pension, because he's done his duty and he deserves it.

In the event, Andreas finds himself discharged with a basic wooden peg leg and an organ-grinder's permit. His life is lonely and basic and he lives among felons and prostitutes, barely making enough money to survive. When he meets the widow Katherina his life is turned around. With a good home, a comforting wife and a ready made family (a little girl) his ambition to make money and look after them grows. With Katherina's support he buys a little donkey to pull the organ cart and he is so pleased with himself he fancies he can make the organ play in a more heartfelt way, even though it's pre-programmed and all he does is turn the handle.

An altercation on a tram car begins a chain of Kafka-esque events that lead Andreas to rebel, against the state - and ultimately against God.

Related in a solemn and simplistic manner, this short novel by Joseph Roth captures post-war disillusionment and a state obsessed with process that leaves people broken and disconnected. Andreas isn't particularly likeable - he's weak and almost comically pathetic - but when he ends up in the criminal justice system and is on the receiving end of one injustice after another, it's hard not to sympathise with him.

Lots of period detail adds to the atmosphere of this little novel and with its vivid descriptions I could imagine it as a slow moving, darkly shaded, animated film.

148connie53
Ago 8, 2017, 11:50 am

>147 floremolla: Sounds real good, Donna. There is Dutch translation so I will try to find it!

149MissWatson
Ago 8, 2017, 12:46 pm

>147 floremolla: Oh, that one is new to me. One for the wishlist.

150Tess_W
Ago 8, 2017, 12:55 pm

>147 floremolla: On my wishlist it goes!

151CurrerBell
Ago 9, 2017, 1:59 am

>1 floremolla: I really like your idea of listing your non-ROOTs. I just added my non-ROOTs to my own thread following your example.

152floremolla
Ago 9, 2017, 4:13 am

>151 CurrerBell: wish I could claim credit for an original LT idea but I think Connie and a few others suggested it. I've been noting how other people set up their threads so I can be better organised next year!

153Jackie_K
Ago 9, 2017, 5:06 am

Glad you had a good break in Paris! And well done on the book-buying (relative) restraint!

154floremolla
Editado: Sep 2, 2017, 7:08 am

Siddhartha Non-ROOT completed

As a young man Siddhartha finds himself searching for meaning in his life and, against his father's wishes, he and his best friend Govinda leave home to join the Samanas, a group of wandering beggars who eschew all material possessions and live a life of meditation.

Before long Siddhartha is feeling unfulfilled and begins to question the Samanas ability to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Hearing of a man called Gautama who has recently begun to preach and already has a large following, he and Govinda leave to seek The Enlightened One. When they see him they are amazed by his demeanour which is peaceful, knowledgable and gentle and they believe he has attained the highest level of spirituality. Govinda immediately decides to become a follower but Siddhartha, after questioning the Buddha (for it is he) concludes that this level of spirituality cannot be learned from lessons and teachings but must be discovered by individuals through their own experience.

After a period of wandering and meditating on his own, a hungry and destitute Siddhartha then crosses a river where the ferryman, Vasudeva, looks after him and predicts that he will return some day to repay him. Siddhartha decides to rejoin the secular world and experience all he can so that he can understand the world more completely. Being a handsome and clever young man, he is soon taken under the wing of a beautiful courtesan, Kamala, from whom he learns the art of love. He also obtains a job with a local merchant and quickly learns to trade, working his way up to having his own business interests. Siddhartha wins everyone over with his tranquility and patience but over the years he becomes flabby and lazy, drinks wine and plays cards, and sometimes he is less than honest.

Eventually, growing older, his yearning for spiritual fulfilment returns and sends him forth in despair. He returns to the river and intends to drown himself but is saved by hearing the holy word, Om, in his head. He finds the ferryman, Vasudeva, and joins him in his work and discovers a quiet and reflective way of life where he listens to the many voices of the river and concludes that all things are connected, all life is cyclical. Vasudeva observes that Siddhartha has achieved completeness and departs leaving him as ferryman.

As news of the enlightened ferryman spreads, he is sought out in turn by Kamala, now a Buddhist convert, and his old friend Govinda, both of whom bring news....

This is a very simply told tale by Hermann Hesse who wrote it as 'therapy' for himself having turned to Indian philosophy when he became disillusioned with life. The book was published in 1951 but it was in the 1960s that it became popular as high profile people began to follow a similar spiritual path.

The gist of the book reminds me of Socrates "the unexamined life is not worth living" - spiritual enlightenment does not come from one source but from consideration of the entirety of a life. A thought-provoking read that I really identified with.

155Tess_W
Ago 10, 2017, 9:17 am

>154 floremolla: great review!

156karenmarie
Ago 11, 2017, 8:40 am

Hi Donna!

I cannot believe that I didn't seek out your thread before now and am so sorry, because there is some great talk here and some wonderful book reviews.

Starred and now I'll be able to keep up.

157floremolla
Ago 11, 2017, 4:03 pm

Hi Karen, welcome to my reading world! Made all the more fun by the visitors whose threads I also frequent.

I tend to keep up with all of the threads so will be popping in and out of yours too. :)

158floremolla
Editado: Ago 14, 2017, 9:05 am

Bonjour Tristesse Non-ROOT completed

It's the 1950s and Cécile is only seventeen but she lives a bohemian life with her playboy father, Raymond, who indulges her like an adult. On holiday from Paris they take a secluded villa on the French Riviera for the summer, where Raymond is ensconced with his young femme-du-jour Elsa, while Cécile is exploring an innocent (for the time being) relationship with a young man, Cyril, also on vacation from Paris.

Life is a round of parties and casinos, cigarettes and alcohol, long lies in bed and fun at the beach or lazing by the pool.

The unexpected arrival of her late mother's friend, Anne, provokes some excitement in Cécile who admires the older woman's elegance and sangfroid, but before long it becomes clear that Raymond's attention has shifted - he ditches Elsa mercilessly, with indecent haste, and announces that he is going to marry Anne.

Cécile is initially surprised and delighted but when Anne starts interfering in her life and curtailing her freedom she realises the way of life she had with her father is threatened and she must stop the marriage. She enlists the help of Cyril and the spurned Elsa in a plan calculated to entice Raymond to be unfaithful to Anne, but with tragic consequences...

Told in the first person by Cécile, and focused on her roiling thoughts and scheming, this novella had the feeling of a short story that has been over-stretched, rather than a claustrophobic thriller. The translation from the French seemed clunky and distracted attention somewhat from the story at times with its clumsy way of expression.

On the plus side it conjured up a vivid picture (for this reader anyway) of the blue skies and sea of the Riviera, the famous resorts and the sort of effortlessly beautiful French people who would frequent them in the fifties.

ETC

159karenmarie
Ago 14, 2017, 8:12 am

Hi Donna!

Excellent review of Don Quixote. I'm not sure I've read the entire book, but do think I have read excerpts, possibly in Spanish class in high school my senior year.

Best wishes for a good week.

160floremolla
Ago 14, 2017, 8:25 am

Thanks, Karen. I didn't think I was going to enjoy DQ but he and his sidekick grew on me. Hope you have a good week too!

161floremolla
Ago 15, 2017, 2:33 pm

A Farewell to Arms completed

Non-autobiographical, but loosely based on the author, Earnest Hemingway's own experiences as an American in the Italian army during WW1, this novel follows the main protagonist/narrator, Frederic Henry, through the last months of an Italian campaign to hold back the Austrians and Germans at Caporetto and to his life beyond the army.

Henry signs up as an ambulance driver when war breaks out while he's in Italy and finds himself billeted to a town below the mountain border where the allies are losing ground, and losing many men in the process.

Down in the town Henry, known as Tenente (short for Lieutenant) to his Italian buddies, shares officer quarters in a requisitioned villa with other medical corps staff including the regimental major and a doctor friend, Rinaldi. Time off is spent at the officers' bawdy house with girls and copious amounts of alcohol, talking cynically of the war and baiting the army priest.

And then, through Rinaldi, he meets Miss Catherine Barkley, a beautiful young British nurse whose fiancé has been killed in action. In the beginning she is suspicious of his motives and seeks declarations of love but in truth he's more smitten with lust. An ill-timed lunch break near the front sees Henry badly injured in an explosion and transferred to a new hospital in Milan to rebuild a shattered leg. Nurse Barkley isn't far behind however, and the two somehow combine her night shift with nights of passion. Inevitably she finds herself pregnant but, when he is discharged back to the front - albeit with liver damage from the copious drinking - she sends him off with assurances she will be fine. By now he's truly in love.

Back in the fray, Henry tries to drink sensibly (with limited success) and focuses on self preservation as the war is descending into chaos and no-one is confident about who's actually winning.

Eventually the Austrians and Germans are close at hand and the Italians and allies are given orders to evacuate. Henry and his small team of drivers set off with three ambulance cars, picking up stray peasants along the way, with the sound of gunfire close behind. When they get stuck on a muddy road they have to abandon the vehicles and passengers and cross country, caught between advancing Germans and the rearguard of the retreating Italian army, in danger of being shot at by both.

Hiding by day and travelling by night they head for Udine in hope of meeting up with their army but instead run into a faction of renegades summarily executing Italian officers for their failures. Henry escapes by plunging into a freezing river and begins an epic journey to Milan and then Stresa to find Catherine, having now abandoned the Italian army at a time when a foreigner travelling alone as a civilian can only be viewed with suspicion and liable to arrest.

When Henry and Catherine are reunited they must flee Italy and take their chances on a dangerous boat crossing to Switzerland.

In Hemingway's famously minimalist style, Henry as narrator gives a quite unsentimental and undramatic account of his army experiences and his escape despite these being the stuff of adventure movies. Ultimately though, this is not a war story but a love story. Only latterly does Henry allow himself the luxury of enjoying his love and his life with Catherine, so that when the ending comes it is all the more poignant.

162Tess_W
Ago 15, 2017, 4:48 pm

Glad you enjoyed both DQ and Hemingway! I really don't like either of them! I gave Hemingway a second try with The Sun Also Rises....but no go!

163floremolla
Ago 16, 2017, 3:52 am

>168 floremolla: I thought with DQ and both Hemingway novels I've read that I wasn't going to like them, but DQ really grew on me and I enjoyed it. With Hemingway I find his subject matter interesting but am not sorry to get to the end. His writing is very 'dry' and even when his character was declaring his love I felt there was a sense of detachment, otherwise AFTA would have got five stars.

164floremolla
Editado: Sep 2, 2017, 7:06 am

The Hours Non-ROOT completed

Michael Cunningham's book explores the emotions and motivations of three women through a single day in their lives. The stories are interlinked by Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway.

In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is struggling with restlessness and mental health issues as she devises the plot of a novel around a day in the life of society wife, Clarissa Dalloway. In 1940s Los Angeles, pregnant Laura Brown, struggles with her role as wife to Dan and mother to three year old Ritchie. She reads for escapism and is reading Mrs Dalloway. And in 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan is arranging a party for her friend and one time lover, Richard, who has won a prestigious writing award, while dying of AIDS. Richard's nickname for Clarissa is 'Mrs Dalloway'

The novel opens with the suicide of Virginia Woolf who drowned herself at the age of 59. The subject of suicide is a recurring motif throughout the individuals' stories, along with mental illness, ageing, death, memorable and/or illicit kisses and regret over the path of love not taken.

The focus on thoughts and feelings of the characters as they go about their daily activities echoes Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. Revealing what they are thinking while their actions are suggesting otherwise gives them depth and authenticity. No-one is perfect, not even the redoubtable Clarissa Vaughan, with her comfortable life, and her personality so much lauded in Richard's autobiographical novel.

All have severe doubts about their own talents and abilities, despite being highly capable and creative people. Laura Brown is an especially affecting character as a woman stifled and terrified by the need to fulfil the traditional role of wife and mother - and for whom death seems like an attractive alternative. It's a sad irony that Laura breaks one of society's greatest taboos by deserting her family and yet in the end she outlives them all by being apart from them.

I've seen the movie of this novel several times so there were no real surprises in reading the book, although it clarified for me the thoughts and feelings of the characters and their relationships to each other. It also meant the novel didn't have the emotional punch I felt when I first saw the movie. But still, the book is cleverly conceived, shows tremendous insight into the complexities of human emotions and is beautifully written. A reminder that we don't always know what suffering is going on beneath the surface of people's lives.

165Tess_W
Ago 17, 2017, 2:05 pm

>170 floremolla: Would you suggest reading the Wolf book before reading this one?

166floremolla
Ago 17, 2017, 5:02 pm

>171 Limelite: yes, worth reading first as there are immediate cross-references to Mrs Dalloway. I noticed for example that the key characters in The Hours have the same names as the key characters in Mrs Dalloway, but I'd forgotten some important aspects of the Woolf novel so I will have to read it again. It's very short so no great hassle to reread it.

I thought it was quite amusing that Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours sees a famous actress who she thinks might be Meryl Streep and in RL Meryl Streep played Clarissa in the movie...

167avanders
Editado: Ago 24, 2017, 9:45 pm

I just want to stop by to say hi... I couldn't possibly catch up, though I wish I could (explanation in my thread...)! I hear that you feel like you have a little more time again at some point after having a kid... here's to hoping ;)

168floremolla
Editado: Sep 2, 2017, 7:05 am

The Luminaries completed

Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, is quoted as saying the novel is "a weird kind of sci-fi, fantasy thing" to which I would add "dressed up as a Victorian mystery/psychological thriller".

Set in the goldfields of New Zealand in 1866, Catton has woven astrology, luck (good and bad) and superstition together with an intricately plotted mystery and a novel (in both senses of the word) structure.

Walter Moody, a young Scots-born lawyer, has come to try his luck in the Hokitika goldfields and perhaps find out what has become of his missing father and brother. His ship having been wrecked on a sand bar approaching harbour, he is cold and desirous of a warming drink when he happens upon a gathering of 12 local men in the inn where he is staying.

He is gradually drawn in to conversation, first with one man, then another, and as the night unfolds, all relate their own pieces of a tale that encompasses a murder, a disappearance, an apparent attempted suicide and the discovery of an enormous fortune, all of these having happened on the same day, 14 January 1866, just a fortnight previously.

Each of the men has reason to feel uneasy as they have all, by luck or happenstance, played a part in some or all of these circumstances that could be interpreted as collusion in crime. Moody, with his lawyerly skills, is able to assimilate the facts related to him and create a timeline of events, but even so there are many mysterious questions that cannot be answered because some of the facts are only known to people outside the gathering.

And indeed throughout the novel there are mysteries and mix-ups relating to a bullet fired but never found, shipping crates wrongly delivered, fraudulent and mistaken identities and the origins of a fortune in gold, all of which slide in and out of the story several times, seen from different viewpoints.

Catton drew upon an astrological chart for the year 1885-1866 within which to place her characters. The twelve men at the inn, the 'Stellar' characters, each represent a different sign of the zodiac and exhibit characteristics associated with the relevant sign.

There are seven 'Planetary' characters, each represented by a planet and with a specific 'influence' on events. Walter Moody, for example, is Saturn, and his influence is 'Reason' - he is able to bring logic and cool-headedness to the somewhat panicked twelve.

Two of the Planets are additionally 'Luminaries' in astrological terms - the Sun and the Moon who shed light on their subjects. The two Luminary characters have a special relationship with each other - they are two parts of a whole and (this might be where the sci-fi/fantasy element kicks in) they are so close they sometimes reflect each other's physical experiences.

There are also twelve buildings or sites comprising 'Related Houses'. Each of these reflects the twelve astrological houses, for example, in astrology the Third House represents communications and in Hokitika this is the newspaper office.

There are twelve chapters to the novel, each of which contains a number of sections which reduces from twelve to one. Also, each chapter is half the length of the preceding chapter, representing the 12 phases of the waning moon.

Within this structure, the arc of the story is eliptical - just when we think the story has been resolved (albeit with some dubious legal jiggery-pokery) it doubles back on itself and we get extra glimpses into the chain(s) of events that led to the happenings of 14 January 1866. There are allusions to this phenomenon in the novel - the ouroboros (a serpent eating its own tail) and the Maori name Hokitika which means 'around to the beginning'.

The story itself still works satisfyingly as a historical mystery if the reader ignores the layers of astrological influence, but even as a mystery it's nevertheless complex and requires full attention to tie together the disparate elements of a large cast of characters with a myriad of links between them and narrative sections that get shorter and shorter.

I enjoyed trying to unravel the astrological layers and understand the motivations of characters based on their zodiac signs but didn't try too hard to pin down behavioural characteristics to each. I also liked deciphering the graphics at the beginning of each chapter to see which Planet was influencing which zodiac sign - or rather, which characters were interacting with which.

The Sun/The Moon with their interchanging innermost/outermost positions were a conundrum at first but it became clearer when I found out that the Sun is the centre around which all of the other Planets and Stars revolve - in some parts of the story, this was Anna Wetherall and in other parts it was Emery Staines - being two parts of a whole, as one came into the 'innermost' of the story, the other drifted to the 'outermost'.

All very clever! In the end though I felt the purpose of the astrological devices, apart from providing a structure for the novel, was as much about bridging the gap between the 'believable' strand of the story and the 'fantastical'.....because after all, what is astrology but a leap of faith?

169Tess_W
Ago 26, 2017, 3:05 pm

>174 connie53: Oh wow, Donna, I'm impressed on how hard you worked to really get all the nuances contained within that book. I applaud you! I don't know if I want to work that hard to read it! It goes on my "thinking about it" list.

170floremolla
Ago 26, 2017, 3:25 pm

>175 floremolla: hmm, there's a backlog of chores testifying to the time (mis)spent, but hey-ho I don't like to think I've missed something when I read a book. I don't know if that's a Cancerian trait or not... ;)

I didn't go far into the storyline with this review so as not to give spoilers, but I do admire Catton's ability to keep so many, many plates spinning in this story and let them land satisfactorily - to me anyway!

171Limelite
Ago 26, 2017, 4:16 pm

>174 connie53: Fabulous review! Thank you, I learned a lot about a novel I thought I had "read" but about which I realized nearly nothing. Now I feel an urgent pull to re-read it in a state of semi or demi-enlightenment. I don't think there were many sources for analysis, hints, and clues available when I read it shortly after publication. But your review is also one and it is also a guide to further research.

(BTW, I'm a Cancer, too.)

172floremolla
Editado: Ago 27, 2017, 7:27 pm

>177 floremolla: there wouldn't have been as much to look up online when the book was first published - I looked at several early reviews which didn't cover a fraction of the astrological allusions. I even noticed some mistakes in them because the story was fresh in my mind.

I started to look at Shmoop notes on the novel but it was so annoyingly written I abandoned it quickly. I gleaned enough from a couple of later reviews and Wikipedia to get the waning moon structure and the zodiac and planetary signs then put the rest together from there.

So my interpretation is based partly on others' interpretations, partly on what Catton herself reveals in the novel. And in the end it all made sense, though keeping the threads of the story in my head was like trying to pin jelly to a wall.

If you like a puzzle I'd also recommend Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. I ended up reading academic studies on that one!

173Tess_W
Editado: Ago 26, 2017, 7:12 pm

>176 karenmarie: Few things trump reading a book for me: children/grandchildren/mother....that's about it! P.S. Capricorn here!

174connie53
Ago 27, 2017, 3:26 am

>174 connie53: Wow and wow and wow! I think I understand now. Thanks Donna. Aries here!

175floremolla
Ago 27, 2017, 5:12 am

>177 floremolla: >179 floremolla: >180 karenmarie: I didn't identify at all with the Cancerian character Edgar Clinch (his name reminds me of crab claws and unwelcome advances) - he was passive, underhand and.....creepy. Aubert Gascoigne, the Capricorn, was at least active in his kindness and an influencer of events. Te Rau, the Aries, had dignity as a Maori who loved the land and was against gold and the capitalism it spawned. I felt a bit short changed with dull Edgar but I think it's typical of astrology that we look for the good qualities and the things we want to hear about ourselves and ignore the rest. ;)

176karenmarie
Ago 28, 2017, 7:57 am

Hi Donna!

I already had The Luminaries on my wishlist. Fabulous review. Cancer here, but I don't have crab claws and don't make unwelcome advances..... *smile*

177floremolla
Ago 28, 2017, 4:45 pm

>182 floremolla: thanks, Karen :)

178floremolla
Editado: Ago 31, 2017, 10:35 am

The Collector non-ROOT completed

In 1960s England, Frederick Clegg is a repressed and uneducated young man, living with his aunt and disabled cousin, working as a Town Hall clerk, collecting butterflies as a hobby and obsessing over a pretty girl he sees around town. When he wins money on the football pools he packs in his job - he never liked or understood his colleagues anyway - and devises a plan to kidnap the girl, Miranda, and keep her as his 'guest' in hope that over time she'll fall in love with him.

John Fowles does a marvellous job of getting inside the head of Clegg, his thought processes, his pettiness and dislike of 'nasty' things, like vulgarity or sexual innuendo, and his chilling ability to think logically about the kidnapping and all the planning it entails.

The first part of this four-part novel is told from Clegg's perspective and written informally, as if he's telling someone the story, in his quite naive but singularly creepy way. This part covers a two month period during which he has abducted Miranda and imprisoned her in the cellar of a remote country cottage. It gives an insight into the relationship between captor and captive from Clegg's point of view, highlighting his efforts to keep control of his prisoner physically and psychologically. It also exposes his lack of a longer term strategy.

In Miranda he has chosen the wrong girl to dominate. An art-school student, she is fiercely intelligent, feisty and strong-willed in contrast to her pretty pale features and slim frame, and it's not long before she has recovered from her initial shock and fear and is trying to take command of the situation. She quickly sees Clegg for what he is and in her contempt nicknames him 'Caliban', a half-human character from Shakespeare's The Tempest, who tries to rape Prospero's daughter Miranda.

At the same time as she despises Clegg for being pathetic, Miranda is afraid of what he could be or do, and so she must tread carefully with her efforts - coaxing, cajoling, doing whatever it takes, as she grows increasingly desperate to be free.

Seen from Clegg's point of view, Miranda is privileged and spoilt - he realises she despises him and he begins to see elements of her character that don't fit his puritanical image of her.

In part 2, through a secret diary she keeps hidden under her mattress, we learn what Miranda has been thinking. She spends her interminable days thinking, despite Frederick's efforts to divert her with books, music and art materials, and we learn more about her background and the forces that have been shaping her as a young women. Chief among these is the rejection of her suburban parents' ideals and way of life and the influence of an older man, maverick artist 'G.P.', to whom she is in thrall.

Parts 3 and 4 resolve the kidnapping situation and look to the future, respectively.

Part 1 of this novel is deceptively simple - it could almost have been written by anyone with a vague idea of what might be involved in an abduction of a girl by a repressed creep. But Part 2 elevates the story considerably as Fowles gets into the mind of a strong young woman, beginning to break out of the shackles of her middle class upbringing to embrace radical ideas on art, which is where her passion lies, and on wider issues of class, politics, money, violence and the rise of the ignorant 'New People' - those with money but no cultural aspirations.

Miranda's diary records her complex relationship with her mentor G.P. through her recollections of their discussions on these subjects and the importance of 'experiencing' and being true to yourself as an artist rather than a reflection of others. Her recollections of the sublime G.P. alternate with her thoughts on her pathetic captor and she reveals her regrets, her loneliness and, as time goes on, her fears and her gradual loss of hope.

The Collector is a deceptively simple tale that delves into philosophical musings on art, love, disconnection and what it means to be human. I read and admired The Magus many years ago and feel inspired to read more of Fowles' work that characteristically weaves arresting stories with complex philosophical layers.

179floremolla
Editado: Ago 29, 2017, 7:33 am

On Chesil Beach non-ROOT completed

Set mainly in 1962, this short novel by Ian McEwan describes the trepidation felt by a young couple, Edward and Florence, on their wedding night. Edward is fearful of "arriving too soon" while Florence is terrified and disgusted by the thought of sex and all that it involves. In fact, she has never really let Edward kiss her passionately, and though he has occasionally 'tried his luck' he has had to be resigned to waiting for the wedding night.

McEwan explores the thoughts and motivations of both characters, both in the moment, in the honeymoon hotel in 1962, and in the back story of their lives: their families and growing up, their education and interests, their first meeting and their evolving romance.

Through the back stories we catch glimpses of what has led to the situation on the wedding night and, as events play out, we hope that they will each overcome the individual personal histories that have left them crippled by their own emotions, and commit to each other, in keeping with the vows they have only taken a few hours before.

This novel was expertly crafted and reminded me somewhat of Julian Barnes' A Sense of An Ending, where the decades that have elapsed from an unhappy youthful experience allow the older person to look back at it, in its context of the social mores of the day, and see it from a new perspective of regret for what should(n't) have been said or done.

180karenmarie
Ago 30, 2017, 8:01 am

Hi Donna!

>184 avanders: Another excellent review! I read and loved The French Lieutenant's Woman many years ago. I probably read it at too young an age to really appreciate it, in hindsight. I need to keep an eye peeled for more of John Fowles' books.

181floremolla
Ago 31, 2017, 10:41 am

Treasure Island completed

A well-known tale of piracy and adventure, written by Robert Louis Stevenson and first serialised in a children's magazine before being published as a book in 1883 - possibly one of the earliest examples of cross-over fiction to appeal to adults as well as children.

Young Jim Hawkins helps his mother run the Admiral Benbow inn and, if it's not enough that his father is dying and money is short, they have to suffer the buccaneer Billy Bones who has overstayed his welcome at the inn and frightens the other customers with his oaths and cutlass waving. When Bones receives the Black Spot and pirates come creeping around in darkness to murder him, Jim and his mother take flight to the home of the kindly local squire.

Realising that he and his mother will be penniless and unable to return to the inn for a while, Jim has taken a few items from Bones' sea chest, including a map of an island with X marking the spot of hidden treasure. When the squire and his good friend Dr Livesy see the map they are quick to decide they must set sail at once to retrieve the treasure and Jim must come with them.

On board the schooner Hispaniola, and having climbed into a barrel to reach an apple, Jim overhears a discussion among the crew that leads him to deduce they plan to mutiny, kill the captain and the gentlemen squire and doctor, and find the treasure for themselves. It's not long before pistols are being drawn and bodies are hitting the deck.

This is a great adventure yarn with non-stop action including fights, escapes, gory deaths and double-crossings as well as treasure maps, parrots and peg-legs. The characters themselves are so vivid and memorable that they've permeated popular culture - the slippery snake Long John Silver (though I noted he never actually says 'aaar, Jim, lad'), the marooned and slightly mad Ben Gunn and plucky Jim himself, who puts everyone in jeopardy when he can't control his urges to be heroic.

There were twists and turns in the story I could guess at before they unfolded, probably because they've been rehashed so many times in derivative pirate adventure stories, but Treasure Island must have been a truly exciting and mesmerising tale in its day and apparently is one of the most often adapted books for film.

182floremolla
Editado: Ago 31, 2017, 2:32 pm

Barkskins completed

'Barkskins' was the name given to indentured forest labourers who flocked to the east coast of North America, hoping to serve a three year stint 'in service' and go on to make their fortunes. Annie Proulx's novel begins with two French barkskins, René Sel and Charles Duquet arriving in 1693 to work for a brutal master in the most inhospitable of environments, with scant sustenance and shelter and no medicines except those of the master's Native American concubine.

While Sel sets his mind to keep his head down and get on with it, Duquet runs off at the first opportunity. The novel follows their lives and fates of two very different men, one solid and dutiful, the other greedy and ruthless, and the lives and fates of their descendants, generations of whom remain in the forestry industry.

Sel marries into the Mi'kmaq tribe when he is forced by the Master to marry the concubine and after her death he brings up a family who struggle to know where they belong, being neither white man nor full Mi'kmaq. The boys grow up skilled in the use of axes and follow René's occupation, travelling to forest camps and townships set up around the forests, getting work as they can. The prospects for the girls are worse and they can only hope to marry if they're not to end up as drunks and prostitutes.

Ruthless Duquet turns out to have a sharp nose for business and aspires to build a lumber empire. When his wife initially fails to give him children he adopts three boys and trains them to manage different aspects of the business. His wife later gives birth to twins, thus ensuring a dynasty in the making.

The characters from both families whose stories are followed are masterfully drawn by Proulx - too many to name and describe though we spend more time with the earlier characters and less with the later ones as the novel progresses towards its end.

The harsh environment and the nature of the logging industry ensure that there are many tragedies and fatalities throughout the novel but there are also love stories and rivalries, successful business ventures and failures, loyalties and double crossings and among it all some humorous set pieces.

Although there is scant reference to major world events, the breadth of the novel encompasses many aspects of social history: the clearance of Native Americans from their homelands, and their subsequent exploitation as slave labour; the influx of settlers and the growth of townships into cities, which in turn become slums for those at the poorer end of the scale; the changing role of women from domestic or decorous spouse to being a force in the workplace. Throughout, though, the novel reveals the yawning chasm between the lifestyles of the rich and privileged and the desperate circumstances of the poor and dispossessed, especially the Mi'kmaq.

Environmental concerns feature heavily too. From early in the novel there are references to the dubious sustainability of the clear-felling beloved by forestry companies who slash through the trees and burn what they do not use. It does not occur to them that the vast swathes of pine are not infinite. They fell the massive white pine to supply timber for ships, buildings and railroads, destroying oak and other woodland species in the process because there's no immediate demand for them. When their landholdings run out of timber they merely cast their eyes further west or abroad to New Zealand and South America.

When a German company buys land and begins to manage their forests for the long term with shelter belts and replanting they are considered bad businessmen. Meanwhile American companies are squeezing every last cent from their investments by failing to observe safety or environmental concerns and ensuring that the only stores available to their workmen in the isolated regions are those owned by the company. Their greed sees them try to take control of more and more land and of every company that uses and transports timber - railroads, sawmills and house building are all absorbed into massive conglomerations that monopolise the industry and demand more and more timber.

The ecological consequences finally come to the fore in the twentieth century by which time there are various characters in the novel among the dozens of descendants from generations of Sels and Duquets, who are by now aware of endangered species and the need for environmental protection and feel passionately about being activists in their different fields. But just as we begin to feel some optimism for the future the subject of climate change brings the final chapter to a close.

This is truly an epic novel, covering over three hundred years, many generations and worldwide locations, with some beautiful prose and a wealth of information on forestry and ecology. A few criticisms: it's not the most elegantly crafted novel - the end feels squeezed in, there are some loose ends (which might be deliberate but leave questions) and the environmental messages are often unsubtly delivered through conversations between characters - but still it's an outstanding achievement for any author, never mind an octogenarian.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Robert Petkoff who was excellent but wish I'd had a copy of the book to check back on a few things as it was difficult to keep track of who was related to whom at times. A family tree (ha!) would have helped.

183Jackie_K
Ago 31, 2017, 3:04 pm

>188 floremolla: Great review! I really enjoyed the one book of hers I have read (The Shipping News). I keep thinking that when Mt TBR is a bit lower (hahahahaha) I ought to look up more by her.

184avanders
Ago 31, 2017, 4:53 pm

Wow those are some very involved, great reviews!
Looks like you're really enjoying your reading these days :)

and >174 connie53: you just described a totally-me book: Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, is quoted as saying the novel is "a weird kind of sci-fi, fantasy thing" to which I would add "dressed up as a Victorian mystery/psychological thriller". All those things sound wonderful together! Glad the book's already on my kindle... ;)

185floremolla
Editado: Sep 1, 2017, 10:12 am

The Third Man completed

Englishman Rollo Martins travels to Vienna at the invitation of his old school friend and long-time buddy Harry Lime, only to find out Harry has been killed in a road accident and he is just in time to attend the funeral. It's not long however till he's spotting discrepancies in the accounts of Harry's accident - by most accounts there were two people with him, but an elderly neighbour swears he saw three men. Having identified the first two, Rollo embarks on a search for the third man.

Rollo happens to be a writer (of lightweight 'Westerns') with the pen name Buck Dexter and somehow finds himself mistaken for another author named Dexter and required to attend a question and answer session. He also seeks out a girl who attended the funeral, Anna Schmidt, who was Harry's girlfriend and falls for her himself. Leaving her apartment one night he feels himself being watched and is shocked to see that his pursuer looks very like his old friend Harry...

The story is narrated in the first person by another character, Major Calloway. It's not clear why this structure was adopted except that it make the story feel like one of many incidents that happened during that time in Vienna - just after WW2 when the city was occupied by four forces, British, American, French and Russian. Each had their own geographic zone, marked by check-points, which the others were not allowed to enter without authority.

Graham Greene wrote the novel to help him visualise and give atmosphere to a movie he'd been asked to write following the success of a previous movie based on Greene's short story, The Fallen Idol. The novel wasn't originally intended to be published since it was just a draft and many changes were made in its adaptation to film, however, it was considered interesting enough in its own right and was published with a preface by Greene explaining the creative process.

As a novel I felt it successfully conveyed the post war atmosphere of suspicion in a devastated city, it had some wry humour and it had a satisfying storyline, all ideal ingredients for a movie that went on to be hailed as one of the greatest of all time, with some thanks due to Orson Wells who helped develop the screenplay as well as playing the shadowy Harry Lime.

186floremolla
Sep 1, 2017, 8:55 am

>189 connie53: I thought The Shipping News was very good and also Postcards which was a short story collection, but somehow I lost touch with Annie Proulx's work after that - I've now picked up That Old Ace in the Hole at a charity shop so I'm looking forward to catching up with her.

>190 avanders: after a sluggish summer with too many distractions I've got my reading momentum back! My involved reviews are partly aide memoire but they sometimes help me to understand what actually happened in the book, especially long books like The Luminaries. I've come across others LTers saying the same thing so I don't feel too weird about it now ;)

187floremolla
Sep 1, 2017, 9:21 am

August Round Up

ROOTs
Five ROOTs completed this month taking the total for 2017 to a nice round 50.

Non-ROOTs
Seven - there are more new books sneaking in but I'm reading them before they become part of 2018's ROOTs which is a good thing imo.

Acquired
Eighteen - all charity shop £1-£2 and a couple salvaged from a pile my son was donating. There's this charity shop right next to where I park in town you see...

I think it's time for Part 3 of this thread now...

188floremolla
Sep 3, 2017, 1:08 pm

Doh! I forgot to continue the topic when I started a new thread...

189connie53
Sep 9, 2017, 4:36 am

Hi Donna, Just catching up on threads (again). You have been reading a lot of books.

And a new thread somewhere. I have to star that one too.

190avanders
Dic 15, 2017, 9:48 am

Hello... sorry for such a long absence! I kept seeing that "unread" number get higher and higher and was completely intimidated... Finally, I figured it's better to just stop by and say HI. :)
I wish I had time to go through these threads and read all about what you've all been doing and reading! But, alas, I very much do not. But I think of you often!! And my "hello" is heartfelt and repeated often in my own head ;)

I'm not sure how I will remain involved next year, but I will be around in some fashion!
xo

PS you totally finished your goal.... Congratulations!!

191karenmarie
Dic 24, 2017, 7:37 am

Hi Donna!



Stopping by to wish you and yours all good things this holiday season.

192floremolla
Dic 27, 2017, 7:42 am

Thanks Karen! :)