Category: Book Reviews

Sunday Salon – An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Yesterday I finished reading An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah. My copy, via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s Programme, is an uncorrected proof and is not for quotation, so no quotes in this post.

Elegy for Easterly001

This book has one of the most attractive covers I’ve seen for a while – the colours as well as the trees receding into infinity.

I sometimes don’t get on very well with collections of short stories but these are long enough for the characters to be more developed and the stories to be more satisfying than others I’ve read. But several I though would be even better developed as full length novels. They are about the lives of people in Zimbabwe, struggling to live with escalating inflation, where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars, of corruption, scams, disappointed lives, unfulfilled dreams and broken promises. They paint a bleak picture of the resilence and resistance of people in extreme circumstances, coping with despair.

Something Nice From London is one of the most poignant tales. Relatives living in England often sent something special to their families back home but one family are waiting at Harare airport for something different  – the arrival of Peter who died in London.  His cousin, also living in England keeps promising his body will be on the flight. Peter was the golden boy and much was expected of him. This is the story of unfulfilled ambition and expection. Because you’re not allowed to speak ill of the dead, the family have to forget how he bled them dry with constant demands for more money to pay his fees and provide accommodation and food as they mourn his death. Eventually the body does arrive, but not how they expected.

I also enjoyed Our Man in Geneva Wins a Million Euros, the story of a diplomat conned by an internet scam. In At the Sound of the Last Post, a politician’s widow at her husband’s funeral ponders the corrupt society they’re living in as his collegues bury an empty coffin – her husband was not the national hero he was made out to be. Death and sickness figure quite prominently in most of the stories and the book as a whole, although laced through with ironic humour,  is a lament – a lament for  Zimbabwe and its suffering people.

Book Review: Tangled Roots by Sue Guiney

Published on by Margaret

tangled-roots001I should have received Tangled Roots from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers programme but as it never arrived the author, Sue Guiney kindly sent me a copy. It’s written from two perspectives – John, a professor of Theoretical Physics and his mother, Grace, moving backwards and forwards in time and set in Boston, London and Moscow and as the title indicates is about how their lives intertwine and interact.

It took me several chapters before I really became interested in Tangled Roots. I was a bit lost in the description of the characters’ thoughts and inner soul searching. However, as I read on the characters began to come to life, particularly Grace.  Grace is looking back over her life, how her marriage and pregnancy brought her career to a halt, how she coped with her husband’s infidelity and the death of her second child, her sister’s cancer and how she struggled with depression. Overall, Grace is the more convincing character.

John is unhappy, seemingly going through a mid-life crisis. He hasn’t got over his mother’s death, has a failed marriage, succombs to an affair with a student, and it looks as though his and his Russian colleague’s research will be pipped at the post by the “South American team”. I’m hazy about the actual details of the research. It all seemed a bit vague and something to do with holography, but that maybe because I don’t know much about science and certainly nothing about theoretical physics. I wasn’t really convinced about this part of the book. I wanted to get back to find out more about Grace.

Tangled Roots is about family relationships and relationships between friends and colleagues. It’s about communication, understanding or lack of it, and about dealing with life’s catastrophes. It’s also about illness and depression. There is quite a lot of scientific information interspersed, some of which I found enlightening and there is a glossary of terms at the end of the book to help the scientifiically challenged like me. Entropy, which is the “measurement of the amount of disorder in a physical system”, serves as a simile with the characters’ lives as events spiral rapidly into disorder and chaos.

Ferney by James Long: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Whether you believe in reincarnation or not Ferney by James Long is a most enjoyable read. It’s difficult to write about it without giving away too much. I liked the balance between historical fact and imagination as the story of Ferney and Gally unfolds.

When Gally and her husband Mike buy a derelict cottage in Penselwood in Somerset they meet Ferney, an old man of 80 who knows the history of the cottage.  When they first see the cottage

It was not much more than a shell, and a green wet-looking shell at that, though the roof was still on. Long and low, the jumbled lines of its random stonework told of many changes and additions over all the busy years. The roof-line took a little step downwards towards the far end. Stone lintels topped window holes filled only by ivy and from the middle of the house a buckled, wooden lattice-work porch jutted out, tilting down on to its knees from the weight of the creeper that had massed on it, sensing an easy opponent.

Gally thinks it is perfect. Despite his misgivings Mike agrees to buy and renovate the cottage because after Gally’s miscarriage he wants to keep her on an even keel and this promised to bring her “more peace and happiness than he had seen since they first met.”  At this point in the book Gally is very fragile, tormented by nightmares and mentally unbalanced (or so I thought).

But right from their first meeting with Ferney he startles them both. Gally sees him as “a  philospher king with a sword in one hand and a book of verse in the other.” And as the bond grows between Gally and Ferney, Mike is upset immediately feeling on the defensive, irritated, and pushed out. And he is quite right to feel like that. Mike is a historian but he finds it hard to believe Ferney’s stories of the past and insists on having proof. The contrast between the two men is a focal point with Gally torn between the two of them.

I loved the way the narrative slips effortlessly from the past to the present as time slips for Gally and she finds herself reliving scenes from long ago. Just what effect does the cottage and the Bag Stone that stands outside have on their lives? And how will the relationship between Gally and Ferney be resolved? I just had to read on and on to find out.

This is the 12th library book I’ve read this year.

Book Review: The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

Published on by Margaret

Non-fiction books often take me a while to read and Sue Roe’s The Private Lives of the Impressionists is no exception; not however, because it’s difficult to read or boring, but simply because I decided to read it slowly. The Impressionists were a mixed bunch, including Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Caillebotte. I feel I got to know some of them more than others and have only just skimmed the surface of their lives, which is understandable in a book covering so many people.

The Private Lives of the Impressionists tells how the early leaders of the group met when students in the studios of Paris. There was Monet, from an affluent family background originally from Normandy, Pissarro a Portuguese Jew from a very different background, born in the Dutch West Indies, Cezanne, a strange and intense student from Aix-en-Provence. The group widened with the addition of Renoir, from a working family (his father was a tailor from Limoges), Sisley the son of an English merchant and a Frenchwoman, and Bazille the son of a wealthy Montpellier wine-grower. They rebelled against the Salon and were pilloried and criticised for their work. They struggled to make a living, although now their paintings sell for millions.

Manet, whose father was a judge and mother the god-daughter of  the King of Sweden, was not really a part of their group , although over the years he supported them but never exhibited at the Impressionists exhibitions. To say that Manet was a complex character is an understatement and I’m going to read a biography devoted to him alone at some point. I’d also like to know more about Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Renoir in particular.

This book follows their lives and loves and how their art developed over 26 years between 1860 when they first met and the introduction of their work to America in 1886. The Epilogue summarised what happened to each artist as the end of the century approached and the Paris art scene changed completely.

I now feel rather sad to have come to the end but there is a bibliography, essential for non-fiction books in my view, listing other books on the artists. If I’m being picky I’d criticise the bibliography because it’s arranged a-z by author – I’d prefer it to be arranged the individual artists. I’d also have liked more illustrations, but there are plenty of books on Impressionism.  I’d also love to travel the world to see their paintings – in London, Paris, and the US – well maybe I’ll manage the London galleries.

These are some of my favourite paintings, some of which are in this book.

Bar at the Folies Bergere by Manet
Red Roofs, 1877
La Loge by Renoir

This is the  eleventh library book I’ve read this year – still on target to complete the Support Your Local Library Challenge.

Book Review: The Cipher Garden by Martin Edwards

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

cipher-garden001The Cipher Garden by Martin Edwards has to be one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Set in the Lake District this murder mystery has everything – a beautiful setting captured so well by Martin Edwards, believable characters, and an unsolved murder with a good mixture of mystery and suspense. It’s a well paced, intricate and tense drama that kept me gripped right to the end.

Daniel Kind (see also The Coffin Trail and The Arsenic Labyrinth, my reviews are here and here) joins forces again with DCI Hannah Scarlett (in charge of the Cold Case Review Team) in investigating the murder of Warren Howe, brutally killed in the peaceful village of Old Sawrey, close to Near Sawrey the home of Beatrix Potter. There are plenty of suspects as Warren was a “serial philanderer “ who made scores of enemies and never worried if he trod on people’s toes. An anonymous tip-off to the police and a series of poison pen letters trigger the investigation and long-buried sins are brought to light before the killer is revealed.

Daniel is also tracking down the history of Tarn Cottage, which he and Miranda are renovating. The cottage garden poses a mystery – it is an ” old and melancholic private garden, mysterious and overgrown”, known locally as the Cipher Garden. The original owners and builders of Tarn Cottage, Jacob and Alice Quillers, died of broken hearts on the same day, one year exactly after the death of their son at the end of the Boer War in 1902. Not only is the layout puzzling with its tangled mess of paths meandering aimlessly leading nowhere, false turns and dead ends but the plant choice is also odd- mandrake, hellebore, foxgloves, belladonna and monkey puzzle trees.  

Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

The gathering dusk had become a favourite time for Daniel. He wandered outside the cottage and savoured the scent of old roses, and the colours mingling on the fell, tints of blue and indigo deepening as the sky grew dark. The slopes looked so rich and sensuous that if he could only brush them with his fingertips, it would be like touching velvet. (page 45)

Marc Amos’s bookshop flirted with the senses. If the whiff of old books and background Debussey were insufficiently seductive, the casual visitor would be lured from the craft shops in the courtyard by the rich aromas wafting from the cafeteria. It shared the ground floor of the old mill building with a maze of ceiling-to-floor shelves. Leigh Moffat’s succulent home-based desserts had found fame beyond this corner of the South Lakes and as many people gorged on her lemon cake and Death by Chocolate as on the tens of thousands of books in the store. (page 69)

Your husband has vanished and you come home from work one day to find that the bloke you hired to sort out your garden has been scythed to death and deposited in a trench he excavated himself. But that’s not all. He wasn’t some boring stranger, he was an ex. Someone you got over in your teens, someone you still pass the time of day with. There’s always the tug of nostalgia, if hardly romance. How do you think it made me feel, Chief Inspector? (page 144)

Martin is working on the fourth book in his Lake District Mystery series – The Serpent Pool, which he is aiming to publish in 2010.  I’ll be looking out for that one! He also writes a Crime Writing Blog – Do You Write Under Your Own Name? and has a website Martin Edward’s Books.

For another review see Dorte’s blog.

Reading Notes

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I finished reading two of Ian Rankin’s books recently, neither of which feature Rebus. The first one was A Cool Head, which he wrote for the World Book Day Quick Reads Promotion.  As you would expect it is a very quick read at 107 pages in a large font size. But I found it surprisingly complex and had to keep reminding myself who was who and who did what.

It’s about Gravy (called Gravy because he works in the graveyard) and what happens to him when his friend Benjy turns up at the graveyard in a car Gravy doesn’t recognise. Benjy who has a bullet hole in his chest asks Gravy to hide him and look after his gun.  Then he dies and Gravy finds a bag full of money in the car. Gravy then finds himself caught up in a most unpleasant sequence of events. What happens next is told from the different characters perspective in short sharp chapters. A fast paced book that kept me entertained, but not a great read.

Then a much longer and more satisfying book – Doors Open; the first Rankin book post-Rebus and I was immediately swept along with the action.  It’s about an art heist – planned by Mike Mackenzie, a self-made man, rich and bored with life, Robert Gissing, the head of Edinburgh’s College of Art and Allan Crickshank a banker with a passion for art that he cannot afford to buy on his salary. Between them they devise a plan to steal some of the most valuable paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland on the day that buildings normally closed to the public throw open their doors and invite them in – one such building being the warehouse at Granton where the National Gallery stored their overflow. It was going to be the perfect crime – so perfect that nobody would know the paintings had been stolen. That is until Chib Calloway, a gangster who was at school with Mike, gets involved.

This is full of action, as violence and mayhem erupt and I just had to read chapter after chapter as quickly as I could to find out how or if they were going to get away with it and then as their options seemed to disappear how the book would end. I liked so much about this book – the story, the characters, the view of the art world and how as one door closed another door opened …