Category: Book Reviews

The Sunday Salon – The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

Last Sunday I wrote that I’d started The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates. I’m still reading it. I really shouldn’t write much about it as I haven’t finished it and I’m wondering how it is going to end. I thought I could predict the ending but then something happened which made me think, maybe I was wrong, but maybe not. It’s a dark book, quite violent in parts which I don’t really like, but then I don’t have to visualise all the violence – not like watching something on TV or film such as Wire In the Blood, which is just gross. I’ve decided not to watch any more in the series, having turned it off during the first programme.

The Gravedigger’s Daughter is very much a book of two halves, split between Rebecca’s life as a child, living with her father, Jacob Schwart, a troll-like figure of a man and Anna,  her mother and her two brothers. They are a Jewish family who emigrated to America before the Second World War, fleeing from the Nazis. Her father, originally a maths teacher can only get work as a gravedigger and as the story unfolds we see the effect this has on him and inevitably on his wife and children. Denying they are Jewish, Rebecca grows up to be fearful of the others and after a terrifying and vividly described episode full of blood and gore in which her parents both die she eventually meets Niles Tignor. Life with Niles is full of danger and sickening violence towards her and her son Niley. It was with some relief that I found the second half of the book is a lot lighter in tone as Rebecca, now Hazel Jones makes a life for herself and her son, now known as Zack.  She at last meets a man, Chet Gallagher, a jazz-playing journalist from a wealthy family, who wants to look after her and Zack, encouraging his musical talent, and she uses all her cunning to make the most of her life with him.

So this is a book about prejudice, poverty, humiliation, suffering, and hiding your identity/creating a new personality for yourself, denying the past yet seemingly unable to escape from its consequences. The male characters are all unattractive, even repulsive and I found it hard to feel much sympathy for Rebecca/Hazel as she suffered and struggled to escape the tragedy that seems to follow her. Only Chet and Zack aroused my sympathy. Just occasionally I could see in Zack the inheritance of his father’s violence simmering just below the surface. The parent/child relationships are never easy in this book! I always find Oates’s books compelling reading despite the pessimism. Is there hope for Rebecca/Hazel – so far I can’t see it?

The questions I had on reading the opening chapters have mainly been answered – I only have about 50 pages left to read. I do have one little niggle about the way Oates writes sometimes in short, abrupt incomplete sentences, which break up the flow of reading too much.

Mainly, I suppose, The Gravedigger’s Daughter is about life and how we live it. Just a couple of quotes to end on. The first is Hazel’s thoughts about life and movies (for a while she worked as an usherette):

Stories looped back on themselves. No one got anywhere. She knew beforehand what actors would say, even as the camera opened a “new” scene. She knew when an audience would laugh, though each audience was new and their laughter was spontaneous. She knew what music cues signalled even when she wasn’t watching the screen. It gave you a confused sense of what to expect in life. For in life there is no music, you have no cues. Most things happen in silence. You live your life forward and remember only backward. Nothing is relived, only just remembered and that incompletely. And life isn’t simple like a movie story, there is too much to remember. 

“And all that you forget, it’s gone as if it had never been. Instead of crying you might as well laugh.”

And finally I think this quote sums up the novel succinctly:

Throwing off the shackles of the past.

James Herriot’s Cat Stories

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

In August I read a beautiful little book- it was a birthday present – James Herriot’s Cat Stories. It was a great relief to read this book after some of the books (about war and disasters) I’d been reading lately and this book with its lovely illustrations by Lesley Holmes cheered me up immensely. That’s not to say it has no drama or desperate situations of the feline type that tugged at my heart strings. (An aside the heart does have strings – I saw them on Alice Roberts’ programme Don’t Die Young.)

I must have watched all of the programmes in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small about “James Herriot’s” vet practice in Yorkshire.  There are many James Herriot books and I’ve read a few of them in the past. This book contains ten short stories, all about cats. In the Introduction James writes that cats were one of the main reasons he chose a career as a vet. They have always played a large part in his life and and now he has retired they are still there “lightening” his days. When he studied to become a vet he was astounded that he couldn’t find anything about cats in his text book Sisson’s Anatomy of Domestic Animals. Yet when he began his practice there were cats everywhere and every farm had its cats. Things have moved on since then and now “Large, prestigious books are written about them by eminent veterinarians, and indeed, some vets specialise in the species to the exclusion of all others.”

Cats have always played a large part in my life too (see here and here). 

James Herriot’s Cat Stories is not large; in fact it’s very small (158 pages) but the ten stories clearly demonstrate his love of cats. Inevitably there are some spoilers in my summaries:

  • There is Alfred the Sweet-shop Cat, “a massive, benevolent tabby”, belonging to Geoff the sweet-shop owner. When he starts to lose weight and becomes gaunt and listless, Geoff too begins to wilt and become bowed and shrunken.
  • Oscar the Socialite Cat who loves people often goes missing as he visits his human friends. Everyone loves him.
  • Boris by way of contrast lives in household full of cats taken in mainly as strays by Mrs Bond. Boris is a “malevolent bully” who regularly beats up his colleagues, so that James was always having to stitch up ears and dress gnawed limbs.
  • Three stories are about Olly and Ginger were two little strays who came to live, not with the Herriots but who sat on the wall outside the kitchen window, too wild to actually venture into the house. When they become desperately ill will they let James treat them?
  • Emily, a dainty little cat, has adopted Mr Ireson, “a gentleman of the road”. When Emily becomes pregnant, seemingly full of kittens she needs a caesarean operation.
  • Moses – Found Among the Rushes. He was rescued by James, looked after by a farmer’s wife and adopted by a large sow. 
  • Frisk the Cat with Many Lives (don’t they all). Why does Frisk, old Dick Fawcett’s faithful companion keep falling unconscious?
  • Buster the Christmas Day Kitten – the little orphan born on Christmas Day who grows up playing with dogs and behaves like a feline retriever.

Down To a Sunless Sea by Mathias B Freese

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Mathias Freese kindly sent me Down To a Sunless Sea to review a while ago. It has taken me some time to read it, mainly because it’s a collection of fifteen short stories, covering a number of difficult topics and I have found it quite painful to read. I don’t know if I can really do justice to these stories. Mathias Freese has worked as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist for 25 years and these stories are full of dark and dangerous situations.

First of all I like the title – taken from Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, inspired by an opium induced dream. But a sunless sea is a dreary, lifeless place in contrast to the pleasure dome in Xanadu and the sacred river Alph and as soon as I started reading the title story I realised why Freese chose that title as I was plunged into the fearful world of Adam, scared of most things and living “an intensely solitary childhood”, feeling detached and

“as though he is photographing himself behind a schizoid lens, for he is never in himself observing himself – holding the cap gun, for one. Rather he is Adam staring at Adam from afar, the nether camera-work of a dream.”

As I was reading the stories I began to wonder just what it is I expect from my reading. Sometimes I just want to be entertained and I didn’t find these stories entertaining at all. Sometimes I want to be taken out of myself and on this level they definitely work – there is one story that I could relate to a little bit and that is Little Errands in which the narrator agonises over whether or not he/she (I’ll say he from now on) has posted some letters, relating this to times when he’s not been sure if he turned off the car radio and will return to find a dead car battery. I’ve done something similar (well not the car radio) only to find that I haven’t posted a letter or I didn’t set the cooker timer and the chicken is still uncooked.

Some of the other stories are so sad and haunting, such as Alabaster – a little boy meets an old woman, a survivor of the Holocaust, and her daughter sitting on a wooden bench on a sidewalk. Clearly, they are sad – he thinks of them in later life seeing them as:

“… Egyptian statuary, totemic, to be viewed and admired, but not to be engaged, as if what they were or had been exposed to precluded any real human contact. This small family endured a strange exile.”

 The old woman frightens him a little with her strangeness and he sees the number tattoed on her arm – her arms had been beautiful as a child, like alabaster. Inside she is still that beautiful girl with alabaster arms, although now she feels as though she’s living someone else’s life.

I have to say that I found these stories quite disturbing and unsettling, which is not a bad thing, but don’t expect any cosy, comforting stories.  See here for an interview with the author.

The Sunday Salon – in Egypt with Nefertiti

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I started to read Nefertiti by Michelle Moran a bit ago and just in the last few days have picked it up again. Nefertiti is most irritating – insufferably self-confident, arrogant, demanding, lusting after power, manipulative, superior, full of her own self-importance and well, beautiful; just as you would expect her to be, a jealous selfish queen. I’m about half way through the book now and am enjoying it despite my dislike for Nefertiti, maybe she’ll become more likeable but I doubt it. As I read, ancient Egypt comes to life as Moran describes the building of the new city of Amarna, which Nefertiti boasted:

… would be a city unlike anything that had ever come before it, a jewel on the east bank of the Nile, that would write our family’s name in eternity. ‘When future generations speak of Amarna’, she vowed,’they will speak of Nefertiti and Ahkenaten the Builder.’

She was right, all these centuries later we are still fascinated with Nefertiti and this period of the 18th Dynasty. But I am more fascinated by her sister as described in this novel. I hadn’t heard of Mutnodjmet (Mutny) before, but she is presented as a much more likeable character. Younger than Nefertiti, and with a different mother, she is at first swept along as Nefertiti is chosen to marry Amunhotep, the young Prince of Egypt. However, she longs for a life of her own, with the man of her choice, Nakhtmin, a general in the army and worst of all a “commoner”. When Mutny becomes pregnant Nefertiti and Akhenaten (as he re-named himself when he renounced the god Amun in favour of Aten), by then rulers of the whole of Egypt, will not accept this, banishing Nakhtmin to fight the Hittites, and bringing about Mutny’s miscarriage. This is as far as I have read – it looks as though an immense struggle between the sisters is about to explode.

private livesReading Nefertiti reminded me of another book on Egypt: The Private Lives of the Pharoahs by Dr Joyce Tyldesley, which I bought a few years ago, only for it to sit unread on the bookshelves, until now. This book looks at the pyramids, how and why they were built; why the 18th Dynasty died out; and who was the boy-pharoah Tutankhamun. I’ve only dipped into this book so far, but it promises much and has a Further Reading section with yet more books to look out for. I see on Amazon that Tyldesley has also written, amongst many other books, Nefertiti:Egypt’s Sun-Queen . I really must read this as well.

I think I may stay in ancient Egypt for a while.

Pompeii by Robert Harris

Published on by Margaret6 Comments
Pompeii

Recently I’ve been going from book to book and not finishing any of them, apart from Pompeii by Richard Harris. If you’ve read my recent posts you’ll maybe understand why I’ve been unable to concentrate on reading, but even if the words have not been making much sense as I read them I find the actual process of picking up a book, turning the pages and reading the words to be therapeutic.

Somehow Pompeii made more sense than any of the other books I looked at these last few weeks. For one thing it’s so easy to read and you know the broad outcome right from the start. Vesuvius erupts destroying the town of Pompeii and killing its inhabitants as they tried to flee the pumice, ash and searing heat and flames.

Part of the book’s appeal to me was because I visited Pompeii and had a trip up to the summit of Vesuvius some years ago and so I could picture the location. It was not only Pompeii that was affected – the whole area stretching from the town of Herculaneum in the north of the Bay down to Stabiae in the south suffered from the eruption.

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Vesuvius Crater

The summit of Vesuvius, today looks flat from below and climbing to the top reveals the enormous crater as a result of the eruption.

 

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Frescoes at Pompeii

The remains of luxurious villas with their frescoes can still be seen and most poignantly some of the inhabitants preserved by the ash that killed them.

The story begins just two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and builds up to a climax. Whilst most people are blissfully unaware of what is about to be unleashed upon them one man – the engineer Marius Attilius Primus realises the danger when the aqueduct Aqua Augusta fails to supply water to the people in the nine towns around the Bay of Naples. Attilius realise that the problem lies somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Vesuvius. The tension mounts as he tries to repair the aqueduct and persuade people of the danger, hindered by the disappearance of Exomnius, his predecessor and the disbelief of the town magistrates. The power behind the town officials is the former slave Ampliatus who made his fortune after the last earthquake had devasted Pompeii. Harris gives vivid descriptions of the luxury of the town – its villas and baths – the corruption of its leaders, the poor living conditions of the general population and savage cruelty shown to the slaves. Ampliatus helps Attilius but only under his own terms – to continue the financial arrangement he had with Exomnius.

Interspersed with the story are details of the ingenuity and skill of the Romans in engineering, and of the nature volcanoes. I’m not technically minded but I found this more than interesting and added to my enjoyment of the book. I particularly liked mixture of fictional and historical characters and the inclusion of Pliny, then the Admiral of the Fleet, as he watched and recorded the progress of the eruption and the account of his death. But my favourite character is the hero of the book, Attilius – incorruptible, resourceful, stubborn, determined and an expert at his job. All in all I found the book brought history to life and I could feel the danger and fear as Vesuvius inevitably destroyed Pompeii.

This is Harris’s description of the horror of the impact of the eruption:

Pompeii became a town of perfectly shaped hollow citizens – huddled together or lonely, their clothes blown off or lifted over their heads, hopelessly grasping for their favourite possession or clutching nothing – vacuums supspended in mid-air at the level of their roofs.

This is the only book I’ve read by Robert Harris, but I would like to read more of his, particularly Imperium, again set in Ancient Rome and following the career of Marcus Cicero. I’d also like to read The Last Days of Pompeii, although I suspect I may not like the melodramatic style of this book by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton written in 1834, but it would be an interesting comparison.

The Sunday Salon – Book of the Day

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

It’s been a really hot day here today, stifling in fact, and far too humid for me to be comfortable. This is the sort of weather that makes me feel limp and exhausted even if I didn’t have toothache. So I’ve taken things easy today, dosed myself with painkillers and read Paul Auster’s new book Man In The Dark. My copy is an uncorrected proof that LibraryThing sent to me in the Early Reviewers Programme, so I can’t quote from it, which is a pity as it’s full of sentences/paragraphs I’d love to include in this post. It’s due out in hardback on 21 August and the back cover of my copy reveals that Paul Auster will be making a rare visit to the UK around that time.

It’s not long – 180 pages, just right for reading in a day and it’s sufficiently complex to take my mind off things. The “man in the dark” is seventy-two year old August Brill, recovering from a car accident, who can’t sleep. He is living with his daughter Miriam and granddaughter, Katya. To take his mind off the things he doesn’t want to think about – his wife’s death and the shocking murder of Titus, his granddaughter’s boyfriend – he makes up stories in his head. At this point I had to concentrate because there are so many stories and stories within stories. He imagines a parallel America, in which there is no war with Iraq. Instead there is civil war, several states having declared their independence and formed the Independent States of America. The main character in his story is Owen Brick, who reminiscent of the man in Travels in the Scriptorium, has to discover what is happening to him as the story progresses. His confusion deepens as he thinks someone is inside his head, stealing his life, not knowing what is real and what is imagined.

Katya is a film student, training to become a film editor and she and August spend their days watching films. A point of interest here for me as August considers that the difference between films and books is that watching films is a passive activity, whereas reading books makes you use your imagination and intelligence. He thinks Katya is using the films as a sort of self-medication to anesthetise herself against the realities of her life. As in The Book of Illusions there are descriptions of the films – more stories within the story.

As August struggles with insomnia he is joined by Katya in the dark hours and questioned by her he gradually reveals the story of his marriage and his despair at the death of his wife, Sonia. She in turn tells of her relationhship with Titus. This may sound a depressing, dark book – there is much in it about loss, despair, divorce, death and disaster  – but I didn’t find it so. There is also much about the everyday, ordinary stuff of life and love, even in a dark, brutal world. I enjoyed it.