Reading Matters

'Fugitive Pieces' by Anne Michaels

 

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury Publishing; 304 pages; 1997.

Sometimes I find myself unexpectedly reading one novel after another that share similar themes. I think this is what you call serendipity. Or maybe it's sheer coincidence. But whatever the case, I couldn't help but compare Anne Michaels' 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces with the book I'd just finished, Hugo Hamilton's more recent Disguise.

Both books tell the stories of young Polish boys, orphaned during the Second World War, who start afresh but are haunted by events of the past. But where Hamilton's novel fails to really pack any emotional punch, perhaps because of the understated writing style and his emphasis on telling not showing, Michaels delivers a hugely poignant story that reverberates long after you reach the final page.

There's something exceptional about Michaels use of language, which conveys the precise mood of a particular moment using prose that reads like poetry, not surprising given she's an award-winning poet. Here's an example:

White aspens make black shadows, a photographic negative. The sky wavers between snow and rain. The light is a dull clang, old, an echo of light.

And so it goes. Admittedly, I found this lyrical use of language a little off-putting to begin with, but once I got used to the rhythms and the pacing and let it wash over me I was held in its sway. In fact, I had to do everything in my power not to underline every second passage because I'd end up spending more time vandalising my book than reading it.

But what about the story, I hear you say. Well, it's just as beautiful and haunting, really. It's divided into two parts.

The first is narrated by Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old Jewish boy, who witnesses the Nazis storming his house, killing his parents and older sister. He flees and hides himself in the boggy marshes of a nearby wood, where he is later discovered by a Greek geologist, Athos, who takes him back to the sun-filled Greek island of Zakynthos and brings him up as his own son. Here, Jakob is given unconditional love and is schooled in everything from the English language to archaeology. The horrors of the war are never far away though, particular as the island is under German occupation.

Later, the pair immigrate to Canada, and set up home in Toronto. Jakob goes to university, falls in love, gets married, becomes a poet and translator. But all the while he mourns the loss of his parents and, in particular, his sister, whose ghostly presence he feels long into his old age.

The second part is narrated by Ben, a 20-something married man, who has long admired Jakob's poetry, and goes on a mission to find Jakob's long lost personal journals. It is this second part that allows the reader to view Jakob from a different perspective, to see how a certain kind of sadness has permeated his life, and how he has long struggled to find his rightful place in the world.

In many ways this book is about Jakob's desire to put the past behind him in order to move into the future. It's a heartfelt tale about one man's search for happiness in the face of such enormous personal loss.

Fugitive Pieces won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1996, the Trillium Book Award in 1996, the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1997 and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1997.

From around the blogs

I have read loads of wonderful posts on other blogs this week. Here's a rundown of the ones that have caught my attention:

Petrona takes a look at the outfall of the Borders shakedown and suggests that we needn't worry that eBooks will overtake the world. "One good aspect of all of this is that we still read lots of books, in whatever format," she says. "I think that there is still plenty of lateral thinking that can be applied to the writing, production, selling and, indeed, reading of books."

The Fiction Desk reveals that a new online bookshop dedicated to independent publishers will be launched on Tuesday.  I'm really looking forward to visiting the site when it goes live and seeing exactly what's on offer.

Danielle from A Work in Progress reviews Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity and calls it a "distressing read." She adds:"Pity is the main theme running through the story, but as well Zweig writes about responsibility, compassion, cowardice and hypocrisy." It sounds just like my cup of tea!

Whispering Gums highlights the magic of William Trevor's short story The Woman of the House, which was published last year in the New Yorker. I printed off the story (via the link on WG's post) and read it on my tube journey home tonight and was captured from the word go. It's a real little gem of a story, with a slightly menacing undertone.

Litlove reviews a Persephone classic, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle, which has been languishing in my TBR pile for at least a year, and calls it "a time capsule from a very different era". She adds: "This is another book that I loved enormously for its admirable heroine and its equally admirable intent – weak, twisted men are trounced by lionhearted women, the sickly inbred power of the British aristocracy is trumped by the fresh moneyed energies of America, and the history and buildings of two nation’s ancestors are restored by the vigorous dollar."

Simon from Savidge Reads falls prey to the Stefanie Myer phenomenon. He's a brave man to admit it!

The Writer's Pet interviews David Vann (author of the very wonderful Legend of a Suicide) and elicits some frank admissions from him. "Fish are so specialized and odd," he claims, "there’s one out there to represent each of our human traits.  I think everything human can be mapped onto one fish or another and made clearer by the exaggeration of the fish’s adaptation."

Finally, at the risk of massaging my own ego, KevinfromCanada writes a very kind tribute to my blog. I'm just chuffed he's discovered the wonders of John McGahern's prose for himself.

The 'joy' of comments, part 2. Otherwise entitled 'I hate Twilight'

As I've mentioned in the past, I do get some strange comments on this blog at times. I thought I'd share the latest with you.

It was added to a post I wrote way back in 2006 called "Why do we read fiction?" in which I shared a few "answers" I'd found in novels I had been reading at the time. The initial post attracted a handful of comments, all quite intriguing, from readers sharing the reasons why they read.

Fast forward almost four years later and someone calling themselves "I HATE TWILIGHT" (yes, all in caps) leaves the following comment on Monday morning:

READING IS A WASTE OF TIME I TELL U

SPECIALLY FICTION

ALL THAT TIME U WASTE READING

TRUST ME ADD IT UP

It honestly made me laugh. This particular person has a couple of issues, right? Did they read Twilight and hate it? Are all their friends reading it and therefore ignoring them? I mean, the mind boggles...

Together, or separate?

 

So, progress on the book piles is going very slowly. I can already see the rest of this week's evenings stretching out into a giant sorting exercise, because as I sift through these books, working out what to keep and what to ditch, I'm also compiling a spreadsheet so that I can keep track of what I own. It's a slow process.

The photograph above shows my 'A' pile -- all these books were written by authors whose surnames begin with the first letter of the alphabet. (There's also a couple of 'Bs' there right at the end. You can click the image to see the full size.)

Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether I should shelve my non-fiction titles separate to my fiction titles. Mind you, only about one-percent of my books are non-fiction -- in fact, they're mainly memoirs.

So, what do you reckon? Keep together, or separate? What do you do?

The state of my TBR pile(s)

 

Does anyone else get crazy ideas like this? I thought I'd sort through all my unread books today, given the weather was pretty rubbish and I had no other plans.

As most of you know, I live in a poky little flat in London, so I have very limited space to keep books. About 150 titles were put into storage when we had the kitchen and living room refurbished at Easter, so I managed to bring them back into the house for the first time since then. I then gathered all the other unread books stockpiled on top of my wardrobe, my bedside table, my chest of drawers, my TV unit and my big cane basket, and dumped them on the living room floor. 

I'm not sure how many books are here, but I expect it's around 250. Very few of them are full-priced, brand-new books. Most are secondhand copies picked up at Oxfam or "mooched" from BookMooch. I reckon about ten of them are review copies sent to me by publishers.

I've now put them into alphabetical order (how sad) according to author's surname and in the process weeded out a few rogue books I'd already read and three bags of books I haven't read (and don't plan to), which will be donated to Oxfam next weekend.

Oh and the fun and joy of a bibliophile, eh?

'Disguise' by Hugo Hamilton

 

Fiction - paperback; Fourth Estate; 288 pages; 2009.

Disguise, the fifth novel by Irish writer Hugo Hamilton, is a story about lost identity.

It opens in war-torn Germany at the height of the Second World War. Mara Leidman's young son, Gregor, is killed during the bombing of Berlin -- "He was almost three years old and went straight from his dream into death" -- and so, bereft and shocked, she flees south, into the arms of her father, Emil, a war deserter who drives a delivery truck collecting defective weapons. When Emil presents her, shockingly, with a refugee orphan (given to him by an old woman he meets on the road) to replace her dead son, Mara looks at the boy with revulsion. 

He was frightened and cold, snivelling and coughing. His eyes were infected. He was holding his ear and sucking a button on the shoulder of his woollen jumper at the same time, staring into the dark outside the windscreen, worried what was keeping his mother and why she was not coming to collect him.

Mara does not really want anything to do with this new replacement who understands little German, but when she is unexpectedly interrogated by the Gestapo, circumstances force her to pretend that this is her real son, for to suggest otherwise would surely result in her own execution.

The book then fast forwards 60 years and Gregor, now an elderly man, with an estranged wife and adult son of his own, reflects on his life living in the "borderlands", never quite sure of his roots and never feeling like he belongs anywhere in particular. Over the course of a day, surrounded by family and friends, picking fruit on an orchard outside Berlin, he sifts through his memories. As the narrative flickers seamlessly between the past and the present, we learn about Gregor's lonely and complicated life.

As a 17-year-old he deliberately cuts himself off from his parents, when his Uncle Max accidentally lets slip that Gregor had been "found" as a toddler. But his mother, who hasn't even told her husband about the "swap" (he was fighting on the Russian front at the time) denies all knowledge.

Over the course of the next 40 or so years, Gregor becomes a musician, reinvents himself as a Jew (he even goes so far as to arrange a circumcision), and drifts from Berlin to Ireland to Toronto.

Gregor had turned his life into a search for belonging, though it always remained a distant thing, a vague, utopian memory.

His marriage slowly flounders because he cannot truly open up to his wife, Maria, about the things that trouble him. Then when Maria makes contact with his "adopted" mother behind his back, she begins to doubt his claim that he was a Jewish foundling. Surely his mother isn't lying? Could it be that Gregor's convinced himself he's Jewish in order to alleviate some kind of German guilt?

There's a lot of big themes and issues in this book about memory, loss, belonging and the ways in which Germans dealt with the aftermath of the war. And while Disguise had the potential to be absolutely heart-wrenching in places, I found the prose style so distant and removed -- there's a lot of telling and not much showing -- that it made very little emotional impact at all. This is a shame, because the opening chapter is one of the saddest and most exciting, and morally troubling, pieces of fiction I've ever read. But the rest of the book fails to live up to this promise and, as a result, Disguise, while an enjoyable read, doesn't deliver the truly emotional wallop that would have elevated it to something really special.

'Everyone's Got a Bono Story' by Anne-Marie O'Connor

 

Fiction - paperback; Tivoli; 352 pages; 2004.

If you ever needed proof that I have rather eclectic reading tastes, then this review coming directly after W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four should do it. Admittedly, I read Everyone's Got A Bono Story on my sick bed; my mind couldn't settle on anything and I was looking for something completely fluffy, something that wouldn't tax my brain and would be as easy to read as a knife slicing through soft butter. This book, the first by Anne-Marie O'Connor, fit the bill perfectly.

It's set in Dublin where everyone has a story to recount about Bono, the lead singer of U2. Perhaps they've seen him drinking in a bar, maybe a cousin went to school with him, or a friend of a friend once delivered him a pizza. But Aoife Collins, a 20-something office manager who has dreams of becoming a fashion designer, hasn't got a story to relate. When she loses her job and is evicted from her flat, all in the same week, her lack of a Bono tale seems the least of her worries. Then her best friend, Rory, throws down the gauntlet: if she can engineer her own encounter with Bono he will give her 5,000 euros.

You see where this is going, right? Okay, the story is as cheesy as the cover image, and the whole premise is just ridiculous, but it's a very witty read. Part of the joy of reading Everyone's Got a Bono Story is following Aoife's exploits as she tries lots of different ways to meet the man himself, including dressing up as a nun and knocking on his front door. There's certainly an element of farce to it, and I'm surprised no-one's actually made it into a film -- it'd be a riot.

O'Connor fleshes out the narrative by giving both Aoife and Rory complicated parental relationships: Rory's dad is super-rich but oblivious to Rory's homosexuality; and Aoife's mother just wants her daughter to return to rural Kerry, where she can settle down with a nice man, rather than running amok in the city.

Of course, there's the obligatory romantic liaison for Aoife, which doesn't go according to plan, and a similar amount of angst about her career, because she just lacks the confidence to do what she really wants to do.

There's no surprises in the rather predicable plot, which ends on a rather happy note for all involved (including Aoife's mother), but this is a light-hearted read, perfect for those times when you fancy a giggle.

The 100 Best Books of the Decade

Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road has been chosen as the best book of the decade by The Times.

The newspaper compiled a list of 100 books, an incredibly eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, with some intriguing choices, including the following books reviewed on Reading Matters:

• Unless by Carol Shields
  

• Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

• The Ghost by Robert Harris

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

• The Accidental by Ali Smith

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

The full list is available on The Times website.

We interrupt this service...

Excuse the cross-promotion, but I thought you might like to know that I've been trialling a new micro-blogging service after Typepad invited me to do so.

I set it up on November 8, and not quite knowing what to call it, I simply used the first name that popped into my head. Given I'd recently finished reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four perhaps it's no surprise that I selected a word from the Newspeak appendix: "duckspeak".

The blog is pretty much an experiment and lacks a specific focus (ie. you won't find much mention of books), but I'd be delighted if you took the time to drop on by and said hello. You can visit me at http://duckspeak.typepad.com

If you like what you can see, you can now try the service yourself, as Typepad officially launched it today. It's really easy (and fun) to use, and it's absolutely free. You can find out more via the official website.

Why you shouldn't feel guilty about buying books

We've all been there. Looked at the last bunch of books we've purchased and then felt guilty about it. So I was delighted to see Litlove of Tales from the Reading Room spell out nine lovely reasons for buying books.

1. Reading is extremely good for you. It focuses the mind, hones concentration and improves memory, all in scientifically proven ways. It is also a way to open your mind to other cultures, other perspectives, other ways of life. Reading on screen, listening or watching television and/or films does not bring the same mental benefits as the slow, in depth, contemplative exercise of reading on the page. It also teaches problem solving and lowers stress. If you think it is important to do a sport or take exercise for the body, it’s equally essential to work out the brain, or else we risk becoming insular, forgetful, restless and opinionated.

Visit Litlove's brilliant Reasons For Buying Books to discover the remaining eight reasons.

'The Emigrants' by W.G. Sebald

 

Paperback - fiction; Vintage; 256 pages; 2002. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse.

Winfried Georg ("Max") Sebald is one of those writers I've been meaning to read for years, but it wasn't until Robert McCrum, writing in The Guardian earlier this year, named him as one of three modern greats from the past 15 years, that I thought I really must get around to trying him. (Interestingly, The Guardian has an entire section devoted to Sebald on its website. His books The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz were also named on The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read list.)

The Emigrants, first published in 1992 and translated into English in 1996, heralded Sebald as a writer to watch. He apparently had a rather meteoric rise in the literary world, with all kinds of praise thrown his way, including a suggestion that he should win the Nobel Prize. But tragically all this came to nothing when Sebald was killed in a car accident in 2001, aged just 57.

Knowing of his tragic demise makes reading this book even more of a poignant experience, for The Emigrants is a melancholy book about grief and loss told from the perspective of four German Jews coming to terms with the events of the Second World War. It's a strangely beguiling book, a weird mix of fiction, memoir and history. To complicate matters further, it lacks a plot, all the characters are told through the prism of other character's memoirs, and the narrative meanders all over the place. The text is also littered with black and white photographs, none of which are captioned.

But despite these strange idiosyncrasies, the prose is eloquent and hypnotic, even if Sebald has a penchant for overly long sentences. And, somewhat surprisingly, it's also highly readable and addictive. I ate this one up hungrily in the course of a weekend.

The book is divided into four parts, each one telling the story of a different exile: Dr Henry Selwyn; Paul Bereyter; Ambros Adelwarth; and Max Ferber. Their individual tales are linked by the unnamed narrator (believed to be a thinly veiled version of Sebald himself), who explores their histories and eventually comes to realise the devastating and occasionally long-lasting consequences of the Third Reich on their lives. Suicide, depression and displacement are never far away.

This is a sober and moving book about what it is like to have your country stolen from you. It was my first introduction to Sebald; I'm confident it won't be my last.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 352 pages; 2004.

How do you review a book that is a true 20th Century classic like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four without simply regurgitating all that has been said before? Is there really anything more I can add to the mix? Probably not, but that won't stop me telling you just a little about this brilliant dystopian novel, first publishing in 1949, and why I love it so much.

For those of you who have never read Orwell's masterpiece (a term I don't use lightly), it's set in London in 1984. The city, which belongs to one of the world's three superstates, is under Totalitarian rule and at perpetual war. Everyone lives under the watchful eye of Big Brother, children are encouraged to spy against their parents, and to even think "bad" thoughts is considered a crime.

Winston Smith, the narrator, works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting Times articles so that the ruling Party's version of history, which changes on a daily basis, is always correct. But Winston is not like everyone else and considers that the continual surveillance and collective world view is oppressive and stifles individuality. He's also alarmed by the number of people who are "disappeared" and re-written out of history because they haven't toed the Party line.

When he meets the intriguing Julia and begins an illicit romance with her, he discovers that he is not the only secret "rebel". But this liaison does not escape the Thought Police and Winston is thrown into prison, where the "secrets" of the Party are finally revealed to him.

I first read this book circa 1994 when I was studying journalism and I remember, quite clearly, the oppression resonating off the page. It was a dark, incredibly thought-provoking story, and with every turn of the page I could feel my whole world view being challenged on very many different levels: was history a true record of the past? was the news media so corrupt? were wars just a means to stimulate the economy and keep people in jobs? were the enemies of the West just a conspiracy invented to keep us living in fear?

Fast forward 15 years and I re-read the book as part of my book group last month. This time 'round, my brain, having already grappled with these new and alarming concepts, now concentrated on whether Orwell's "predictions" had come true. And because I was less caught up in the overwhelming brilliance of the book's scope and vision, I enjoyed the narrative, which is quite fast-paced, and the eloquence of the prose, which is sparse without ever becoming boring.

The thing that struck me most, however, was how much of this futuristic novel was deeply rooted in the time in which Orwell wrote it. There are echoes of war-torn London throughout this book, not the least in the following passage:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff that feels incredibly prescient today: the so-called War on Terror and its resultant erosion of civil liberties; the increasing reliance on media spin, particularly by government agencies; and the ever-present CCTV surveillance, especially here in the UK (in 2006, there was one CCTV camera for every 14 people).

By contrast, Orwell's prediction that the future would be sexless didn't quite come off, and even the notion that you only had to alter The Times newspaper to rewrite history seems laughable given today's preponderance of media outlets and formats, including the internet and mobile phone technology.

But, on the whole, this is a remarkable book, a kind of warning shot from the past, that still resonates and which will continue to resonate long into the future. If you've never read this book, I urge you to do so, and even if you have, it's worth revisiting just to re-experience Orwell's amazing vision.

For a rather wonderful breakdown of the novel, including explanations of the terminology, visit the wikipedia entry.

----

This book was chosen by Gemma as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members:

• Claire's review

• Simon's review

A visit to Riverside Bookshop

 

Since early September I've been on a mission to spend my lunch hour taking a longish walk (instead of gulping down a sandwich at my desk while I continue doing paperwork), which has proved to be quite an illuminating experience. I've discovered some very interesting places within striking distance of the office, but probably my favourite discovery has been the Riverside Bookshop tucked away in Hay's Galleria, just around the corner from London Bridge.

It's actually a bit of a hike for me and definitely on the outer-limits of how far I can walk comfortably within 20 minutes given I still have to return to the office as well as squeeze in a bit of browsing time. But it's worth it. I've visited maybe three or four times in the past two months, and it's promptly become a very desirable destination.

For the fiction lovers among you, this independent store has one of the best ranges of modern and contemporary novels I've come across in London, particularly given it's small size. Note, you won't discover any bargains or 3-for-2 tables. What you'll get here is full-priced fiction but the range and quality of what's on offer more than makes up for it.

On recent trips I've acquired books from my wishlist, including W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and Douglas Coupland's Generation X, that I haven't found in much bigger branches of Waterstones.

If you want to visit, Riverside Bookshop is located in Counter Street, London SE1 2HD. The nearest tube is Monument on the District Line or London Bridge on the Northern and Jubilee Lines.

My life-long love of magazines

 

I don't think I've ever talked about magazines on this blog, and yet I've had a life-long love of them. I grew up on a diet of Mad Magazine and Reader's Digest along with second-hand copies of the Australian Women's Weekly, New Idea, Woman's Day and Family Circle passed down to my mum from her magazine junkie sister.

As a teenager I used to spend my pocket money on the Australian edition of Smash Hits and later, when my musical tastes "matured", I regularly bought Q magazine and Rolling Stone.

I then went through a "green" phase (I studied environmental planning as an undergrad) and took out subscriptions to Australian Geographic and Habitat, the journal of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

As a postgrad journalism student I discovered the delights of Vanity Fair and, despite the odd year or two when I made cuts to my magazine-spending budget, I've been a subscriber ever since. At about this time I started buying much more diverse magazines on an irregular basis, such as GQ, The Bulletin, Who Weekly, Marie Claire and Empire. 

Ironically, I ended up working in the magazine industry when I moved to the UK, first in business-to-business magazines and then in consumer magazines. It didn't change my passion for them, but it did make me look at them in a different way. Now I can't pick up a magazine without analysing the fonts, the paper quality, the picture usage, the ratio of editorial pages to advertising ones, the coverlines and so on.  

These days I tend to stick to foodie mags and the odd lifestyle title. I have subscriptions to Vanity Fair and Olive, and I tend to buy Ideal Home* every couple of months. A few months back I discovered Jamie Oliver's own magazine, Jamie, and while I wouldn't call myself a fan of the chef this magazine is absolutely sumptuous; it has the highest production values of almost anything else on the market, with gorgeous mat paper and stunning photography throughout. It's a real treat to sit down and read.

How about you? Do you read magazines? Which are your favourites?

* Disclaimer: In the interests of transparency, I work for the company that produces this one.

Amazon names Colum McCann's 'Let the Great World Spin' as its book of the year

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin has been selected as the book of the year by the editors at Amazon.com. They describe it as "a rich and moving novel of New York City in the '70s, told in ten distinctive voices from all corners of the city whose lives connect and divide against the backdrop of Philippe Petit's audaciously graceful tightrope walk between the Twin Towers."

I reviewed the book last month and described it as "ambitious" and "staggering in its scope" but I wasn't entirely convinced McCann pulled it off, and gave it just three stars.

The editors at Amazon name 99 other books, as part of their 100 Best Books of 2009, but I've only read one off the list: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, which comes in at No. 4.

Note that the British version of Amazon breaks their 100 best books list into 12 different catagories. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is named the best fiction book of 2009.

[Via Matilda]