Book Review: S. by John Updike

Sooner or later for the less lucky among us comes the moment, when we realise that, for one reason or another, the life that we had so far doesn’t feel right any longer. Often such existential crises go hand in hand with a search for identity and meaning that can make us susceptible to outside influence. A longing for guidance in an unsettling phase of change like this can lead some of us (back) to religion and drive others into the hands of charismatic leaders as is the case in the epistolary novel S. by John Updike. Its protagonist is a well-to-do housewife from Boston who left her doctor husband to join a dubious Hindu ashram in Arizona and to reinvent herself in the spirit of Eastern philosophy, but she never loses from sight her personal advantage and tries to keep her old world under control sending letters and tapes.

Book Review: The Republic of Dreams by Nélida Piñon

Since times immemorial people have been dreaming and telling stories. Ancient myths and legends are part of the cultural heritage that shapes our view of the world and helps us to cope with life. But as we grow older the longing to live our own adventures and to weave our own legends grows. Determined “to make the Americas” thirteen-year-old Madruga, the central character of The Republic of Dreams by Nélida Piñon, left his native Galicia and arrived in Brazil in 1913. By the early 1980s, he is head of a numerous family and of a profitable group of companies, but almost lost his beloved grandfather’s ancient Galician legends. When his wife announces that death is coming for her, he and all the people who are integral part of their lives look back on the memorable events, joys and tragedies of seventy years thus start a new – Brazilian – legend. 

Book Review: The Door by Szabó Magda

It’s one of the greatest possible achievements of a writer – at least in my opinion – to be able to write fiction that leaves the reader wondering from beginning to end whether the story told is true or just invented and whether the protagonist is reasonably faithful portrait of a live model or most succeeded fruit of a vivid imagination. This was the effect that the novel The Door by Szabó Magda had on me. In it a narrator, who obviously bears striking resemblance with the Hungarian author herself, patches together bits and pieces of information that her much adored, but always-furtive domestic help granted her in over twenty years about the life before she worked for her. The result is a rough biography of an amiable stranger who went through all the crucial periods of twentieth-century Hungarian history and learnt to literally keep locked the door to her private life.

Bookish Déjà-Vu: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

On the occasion of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies held today in Stockholm (and Oslo for the Peace Prize), I'm reblogging my review of the picturesque novel An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. I originally posted it in July, i.e. less than three months before the British author born in Japan to Japanese parents was officially announced this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's the first time not that I read a book penned by a writer whom the Swedish Academy would later honour with this prestigious and remunerative prize, but that I reviewed such a one here on Edith's Miscellany.

»»» click here to read my review

Book Review: The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind

Sometimes small events that must seem utterly trivial to everyone unconcerned can fundamentally shatter our peace of mind, above all when they break our routine and evoke without warning unpleasant associations that unleash imagination. Who has never been haunted for no good reason at all by horror scenarios of the future emerging from the depths of our souls in most vivid colours and in most frightening detail? In retrospect, we often laugh at ourselves for having allowed them to put us into a state of alarm, occasionally even panic. The protagonist of The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind almost goes crazy when he finds a solitary bird cooing in the corridor in front of the door to his bedsit on an ordinary Friday morning. The bird seems to him the portent of evil and he can’t help seeing through his mind’s eye how the fundaments of his pleasantly eventless and solitary existence crumble and give way to chaos.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

In our modern western culture we – women and men alike – claim for ourselves the right to be the architects of our individual future… and happiness, but it’s a rather recent achievement even for us. During the greater part of history here too the lives of people were by and large determined by others, notably by fathers, feudal lords, priests, Kings or Queens, and by seldom questioned unwritten rules. Individual happiness mattered very little, romantic love was of no importance in marriage matters. In Mexico of the early twentieth century the protagonist of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is supposed to willingly uphold tradition that demands of her as the youngest daughter to put last her own longing for happiness in marriage and to take care of her mother until she dies. Love is stronger than tradition, though, and the girl’s passion for cooking accompanies her on her painful and long way to empowerment.

Book Review: Kinshu. Autumn Brocade by Miyamoto Teru

The separation of a couple can be a painful and traumatic experience for both partners, especially when it’s the result of sudden events or discoveries that make it impossible or unbearable to stay together. In such cases emotions often explode and burn out in a war of the roses, but not always. Sometimes they just simmer below the surface for a long time because the partners avoided facing each other as well as their problems and thus never really closed this chapter of their lives. Ten years have passed since Aki and Yasuaki, the protagonists exchanging letters in Kinshu. Autumn Brocade by Miyamoto Teru, divorced. A chance encounter on a gondola going up Mount Zaō on a day in November evokes memories and two months later Aki finally musters up the courage to ask her ex-husband how it came that back then he was found half-dead beside the body of a dead geisha. 

Book Review: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Very popular subjects of the famous Japanese colour woodblock prints from the seventeenth century on are scenes from ephemeral life in the pleasure districts which accounts for their being called ukiyo-e (浮世絵), i.e. “pictures of the floating world”. But life is in constant flow elsewhere too: πάντα ῥεῖ. In turbulent times, the flow even seems to accelerate and turn into a maelstrom that threatens to crush whatever or whoever gets caught in the strong current. In 1948, once famous painter Masuji Ono from An Artist of the Floating World by Japanese-English writer Kazuo Ishiguro finds himself stranded in a world where his art work has become an unwanted reminder of totalitarian ideals that led the Japanese Empire into disaster and where his daughter is no suitable match for any decent man because of his shameful part in the terror before and during the war. As he looks back, time passes, wounds heal and bitterness fades.

Book Review: Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

Some experiences and decisions can cast a lifelong shadow on our souls making us overly suspicious and critical of everything and everyone. Such general contempt is likely to make us unhappy and unpopular on the long run… although not necessarily. Some people who like to rant meet admiration from their surroundings, especially the cultured ones. In the Austrian novel Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard a bitter old man contemplates his bitter old friend who sits on a settee in the Viennese Kunsthistorisches Museum to contemplate a Tintoretto portrait of a white-bearded man. For over thirty years the man on the settee has been looking for a flaw in the Renaissance painting because unable to bear with the illusion of perfection he early made it his habit to find fault at everything and everyone. No great creative mind escapes his criticism and he gladly rants about them thus filling his friend with admiration.

Book Review: Black Box by Amos Oz

How often does it happen that the love that united a man and a woman turns into hatred as time advances and they drift apart. Some couples still manage to part in a civilised manner if not in peace, but often the end of a relationship is a violent and spiteful mess that leaves everybody concerned hurt, angry and bitter. Even worse if a child is involved who is too young to understand the reasons for the fighting as is the case in Black Box by Amos Oz, an epistolary novel about a couple whose marriage ended in a vicious divorce and left not only themselves but also their son filled with hatred and resentment for years on end. Only when the woman in her despair about the son who has grown into an uncontrollable teenager writes a letter to her ex-husband to ask for help, they finally get a chance to sort things out and make peace.

Book Review: So Long A Letter by Mariama Bâ

There can be no doubt that relations between men and women are a favourite topic of writers. Literature offers everything from the vicissitudes of romantic love over the turmoils of an unstable marriage to the wars ending an unfortunate relationship. Love triangles are a rather common ingredient in many novels, but since we all tend to prefer books from our own culture – which is clearly Judeo-Christian in Europe – we seldom read about polygamous marriages except maybe in a historical novel set somewhere in the Orient. So we know little about how a woman feels who is one wife among others. The epistolary novel So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ from Senegal surrounds a Muslim widow mourning her husband to whom she has been happily married for twenty-five years until desire had the better of him and he took a teenage second wife. In a letter to a friend abroad she tells her story.

Book Review: Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Most avid readers like me will know the experience. You get engrossed in a book and as you advance page by page you become ever more impressed by the power, the wisdom and the beauty of the words. And it’s only natural to long for more of it, isn’t it? Sometimes it can be sobering to read another work from the pen of the same author who caught our attention and touched us in such a way. If we’re lucky, though, further reads confirm the first impression and we become fans not just of the writings but of the woman or man who put them to paper. The narrator of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes greatly admires the work of the nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Flaubert. During another visit to Rouen on the traces of his literary idol he becomes obsessed with finding the stuffed parrot that Flaubert had on his desk for a while in 1876.

Book Review: Cassandra by Christa Wolf

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Women in a strictly patriarchal system always used to have a hard time making themselves heard, seen and taken seriously, but everywhere in the world and at all times in history there have been some who managed despite the obstacles that society, notably men put into their way. If they were lucky, they were much respected and adored for their achievements – whichever they were. More often, though, strong and defiant women were looked at with suspicion, even fear by men and women alike. They were branded as anything ranging from madwoman over shrew to witch and they were ridiculed, locked away or even killed. In the novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf the Trojan princess and seeress from Greek legend is depicted as an unusually intelligent woman with an innate yearning for independence, but neither her family nor the people of Troy accept her the way she is and so they don’t believe her prophecies when they should.

Book Review: If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Without doubt the holocaust is the darkest chapter of German history and it is inseparably linked to the horrors of World War II. Millions of Jews from all over Europe lost their lives not just in concentration camps, industrial plants and ghettos, but huge numbers of them were killed right away by members of the Waffen-SS and sometimes the Wehrmacht ploughing through the lands of the traditional Jewish shtetl on their way eastward. When Nazi troops crossed the Soviet borders on 22 June 1941, the fighting on the Eastern front began. Little noted at the time and hardly remembered today, both in the lines of Stalin’s Red Army and of the partisan bands that had formed on German-occupied territory fought Jews. The novel If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi tells the fictitious story of a dispersed Jewish artilleryman of the Red Army who joins the partisans because he has nothing left to lose except his life.

Book Review: The City and the House by Natalia Ginzburg

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I reckon that all of us occasionally go through times when we feel fed up with everything including ourselves and we would gladly seize any opportunity presenting itself to make a fresh start. Most of us, however, know too well that wherever we go we can’t run away from ourselves, can’t start with a clean slate like a newborn nor change overnight – probably not even in a lifetime – who we are deep down in our souls because some character traits are too fundamental and past experiences too influential. After many disillusions the middle-aged protagonist of the epistolary novel The City and the House by Natalia Ginzburg leaves Rome to join his older brother in the USA and to start a new life, but he becomes an even more solitary person who follows from the distance the troubles and joys that his friends and his estranged son have to deal with in Italy.

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

There will be very few who deny that the mother has a very special place in the heart of a person and that when she dies, it uses to be a particularly painful loss in most cases even if she has been suffering for a long time. It means the irrevocable end of an era – of “childhood” in a wide sense – since even the last remaining bond is cut and we can no longer submit like a child to her loving care if we feel like it. After the death of her mother, the renowned French author of autobiographical prose Annie Ernaux (born 1940) set out to trace the course of life of the woman who brought her into life and raised her. The result is A Woman’s Story first published in 1989, a touching literary portrait of a strong and powerful woman who was more than just the author’s mother.

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»»» Book Review: A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux

Book Review: A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

No matter when it comes, if out of the blue or dragging on painfully, the death of a dear parent almost always arrives too soon and is the source of great grief. Those who are left behind follow very different strategies to cope with the loss… and writing about the departed is one of them. Without doubt the greater part of such works of sorrow ends unread, maybe even forgotten somewhere on the bottom of a drawer, not so the award-winning French book titled A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, the author's literary homage to her late father written more than ten years after his death. In it she resurrects her relationship with the man who was her father and who never really managed to shake off his humble origins as the son of an illiterate farm labourer in Normandy although together with his wife he started a small café and grocery shop.

Book Review: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

2016 review of a book written
by an author whose family name starts with the letter
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Many of us tend to think of childhood as the happiest time in life because we associate anxieties and worries with the adult world. Unfortunately, reality doesn’t care about age and not all children enjoy a sheltered and carefree existence. It’s not necessarily adults who make a child’s life the perfect hell. Children can be really cruel among themselves. While boys may do bodily harm to others to show their supremacy, girls often prefer more subtle ways of terror that can undermine the victim’s self-esteem even more lastingly. As a child in primary school the protagonist of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood has been bullied by three girls whom she considered her best friends, but she was lucky. She was able to free herself just when her inexplicable dependence took a dangerous turn. Moreover, she became a painter who could get over the dreadful experience in her creative work.

Book Review: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

When after many years an old friend turns up from nowhere all of a sudden, be it in person or through an object or words reviving the memory of him or her, it can be a joyful, an unpleasant or even a disturbing experience. This is because such an unexpected reapparition usually evokes a past long done with, maybe almost forgotten or not voluntarily remembered. Sometimes it also gives rise to speculations about what the friend has been up to during all those years out of sight and about the reasons why s/he emerges just now. In A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami a letter from a friend of his youth known by the sobriquet “Rat” and the photo of a sheep herd on a mountain pasture send the nameless narrator off into a big adventure on a mysterious farm in Northern Hokkaidō.

Book Review: The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny

July has just begun and as always at this time of the year the readings for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, i.e. the 39th Days of German-Language Literature, are well under way in Klagenfurt, Austria, despite last year’s rumours that the province of Carinthia considered withdrawing from the event as sponsor of the main prize which would inevitably have meant its end. Strained public budgets aren’t a recent phenomenon, though, as shows – among many other works of literature – the much acclaimed novelised biography The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, the winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 1980. The story traces the life of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin whose dream it was to discover and chart the legendary Northwest Passage and who died during the third expedition to the Canadian Arctic under his command at the age of 61.