Back Reviews Reel: February 2016

The second review month of 2016 I opened with two contemporary works set in Switzerland of the 1970s and the USA of the early 1950s respectively. The award-winning Swiss novel The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons by Monica Cantieni tells the story of a foster girl in line for adoption trying to fathom her new life in Zurich, while self-published Bells Above Greens by David Xavier is about a nineteen-year-old who just returned from the Korean War that cost his idealised brother’s life and finds it difficult to adjust to university routine in Indiana. Then I presented two classics, namely The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier from 1931 and The Tree of Man by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White from 1955. The first is the four-generation saga of a Cornish family devoted to the sea and the latter is the life story of a farmer in the greater Sydney area.

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In the 1970s, when the six-year-old protagonist of The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons by Monica Cantieni arrives at the home of her new parents in Zurich, she is a greenhorn both in life and in a family. The childless couple who took her from the orphanage is Swiss, but not particularly well-off which is why they live in a predominantly immigrant neighbourhood on the city’s outskirts where everybody struggles to stay afloat. For the little girl it’s a confusing world that she can neither see clearly nor put into words, but her adoptive parents-to-be buy her glasses and they teach her new words that she stores in all kinds of boxes. In the week-ends they visit her new – senile – grand-father Tat on his mountain farm and it’s with his help that she finds her way…

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The light young adult novel Bells Above Greens by David Xavier opens in the early 1950s with Sam coming home from the Korean War after nine months as a soldier in action. He is only nineteen years old and the experience marked him, not least because just a week before their return to the USA his adored elder brother was killed. It falls to him to give the bad news to the girl called Elle whom his brother wished to present to him as his fiancée. After the summer Sam resumes his studies at the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Indiana where also his late brother’s girlfriend is a student at St. Mary’s College, but before long he begins to drift through student life without direction. While he keeps seeing Elle, he gets involved with rebellious and shallow Liv…
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With clear echoes of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry, The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier portrays four generations of a family of boat builders in a small fictional town in Cornwall. The family saga starts in 1830 with the wedding of wild and fearless Janet who, for being a woman, can live her passion for the sea only through others. Taking completely after her, her third son Joseph becomes a sailor and together with the older sons her husband builds a ship for him with a figurehead carved after her. During the ship’s launch Janet drops dead happily. By then her youngest son, who always felt unloved, has long set out to make a fortune which will allow him to take his revenge on the others. But he can't destroy the strong seed that Janet planted…
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It’s a slow-paced story of a man and his family that unfolds in the classical novel The Tree of Man by Patrick White, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the early twentieth century Stan settles the piece of bushland at the back of beyond in New South Wales that he inherited from his father. As soon as the farm yields enough, he marries young Amy and after some years they have two children. While son Ray turns out malicious and unruly, daughter Thelma is kind and docile, but both yearn for leaving behind the misery of farm life and before long they go their own ways. Relations between husband and wife, however, remain marked by affection and habit. Meanwhile, things have changed and always growing Sidney reached the once remote place…
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