Back Reviews Reel: March 2015

A tiny island in the Golf of Naples, the buzzing Chinese capital Beijing, London and a legendary mountain watching over six Anatolian villages and the Syrian coast were the scenes of the books that I reviewed here three years ago. My tour started with the Italian classic Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante containing the (fictitious) memoirs of a childhood and youth before World War II. Then I hurried after the young man from the contemporary Chinese novel Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen who set his hopes on life in the metropolis. My trip to the British capital in the 1980s brought me into touch with The Good Terrorist by en-NOBEL-ed Doris Lessing who dreamed of changing the world. And finally, the Austrian classic The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel made me share the lives of Eastern Anatolian villagers who refused to surrender to the Ottoman army sent out to drive them away from home in 1915.

Poetry Revisited: Beauty’s a Flower by Moira O’Neill

Beauty’s a Flower

(from Songs from the Glens of Antrim: 1900)

          Youth’s for an hour, 
          Beauty’s a flower,
          But love is the jewel that wins the world.

Youth’s for an hour, an’ the taste o’ life is sweet,
Ailes was a girl that stepped on two bare feet;
In all my days I never seen the one as fair as she,
I’d have lost my life for Ailes, an’ she never cared for me.

Beauty’s a flower, an’ the days o’ life are long,
There’s little knowin’ who may live to sing another song;
For Ailes was the fairest, but another is my wife,
An’ Mary—God be good to her!—is all I love in life.

          Youth’s for an hour, 
          Beauty’s a flower,
          But love is the jewel that wins the world.

Moira O’Neill (1864–1955), real name Agnes Shakespeare Higginson
Irish-Canadian poet

Bookish Déjà-Vu: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The air in the crammed and cornered rooms of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona, Spain, may be stale and dusty, but for any passionate reader like myself and the protagonist of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which I chose as a bookish déjà-vu, it inevitably carries the stimulating breath of freedom, wisdom and delight. When the boy takes one of the forgotten books back home with him, he wrenches it as well as its author from the unfathomable dungeons of oblivion and brings it back to the light… or rather to life. He accepts to be the book’s guardian for the rest of his life not imagining that several years later his duty to protect the book from all harm and the mystery shrouding the author will draw him into a series of dangerous adventures. And along the way he meets his love.  

Read my review »

Poetry Revisited: A Town Window by John Drinkwater

A Town Window

(from Poems, 1908-14: 1918)

Beyond my window in the night

Is but a drab inglorious street,

Yet there the frost and clean starlight

As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town

The crocus works among the mould

As eagerly as those that crown

The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill

Across the cobbles moans and rings,

There is about my window-sill

The tumult of a thousand wings

John Drinkwater (1882-1937)

English poet and dramatist

Book Review: Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler

In many families worldwide domestic violence is a painful reality. Where people are imbibed with respect for human rights from an early age like in major parts of Europe and Northern America, the physical or psychological abuse of any family member is considered as intolerable as harming a complete stranger. In other societies, especially less prosperous ones where children get basic education at best, people often think it normal, even necessary that a man gives his wife and children a beating. It’s a means to prove his absolute power, to keep the face in the community, and certainly to work off frustration too. To the Kurdish protagonist of Blue Jewellery by Katharina Winkler just as to all other women in her surroundings it seems perfectly natural that her husband Yunus beats her black and blue whenever he feels like it. Not even their emigration to Austria changes his habits.

Poetry Revisited: Kukkiva maa – Flowering Earth by Katri Vala

Kukkiva maa (kirjasta Kaukainen puutarha: 1924) Maa kuohuu syreenien sinipunaisia terttuja. pihlajain valkeata kukkahärmää. tervakkojen punaisia tähtisikermiä. Sinisiä, keltaisia, valkeita kukkia lainehtivat niityt mielettöminä merinä. Ja tuoksua! Ihanampaa kuin pyhä suitsutus! Kuumaa ja värisevää ja hulluksijuovuttavaa, pakanallista maan ihon tuoksua! Elää, elää, elää! Elää raivokkaasti elämän korkea hetki, terälehdet äärimmilleen auenneina, elää ihanasti kukkien. tuoksustansa, auringosta hourien – huumaavasti, täyteläästi elää! Mitä siitä, että kuolema tulee! Mitä siitä, että monivärinen ihanuus varisee kuihtuneena maahan. Onhan kukittu kerta! On paistanut aurinko, taivaan suuri ja polttava rakkaus, suoraan kukkasydämiin, olemusten värisevään pohjaan asti! Katri Vala (1901-1944) suomalainen runoilija, suomentaja ja opettaja

Flowering Earth (from the book A Distant Garden: 1924) The earth is foaming with purple-violet clusters. white rowan flowers, batches of red catchfly. Blue, yellow, white flowers turning the meadows into amazing seas. And the smell! More wonderful than sacred incense! Hot and shaky and crazy, the pagan earth fragrance of the skin! To live, to live, to live! To live frantically the high moment of life, petals wide open in the air, to live beautifully in the flowers. Its scent, the sun for hours – abominable, full of life! What thereof that death is coming! What thereof that a multicolored glamor hangs faded to the ground. After all, bloated time! It’s the sun shining, the great and burning love of heaven, directly into the flower heart, down to the dull ground of its being! Katri Vala (1901-1944) Finnish poet, translator and teacher Translation: automatic online translators corrected with the help of online dictionaries and the translation by Herbert Lomas published on Books from Finland

Book Review: My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper

In patriarchal societies women seldom play an important public role. Instead they are more or less confined to home and family, so little information about them “leaks out”. Diaries and letters sometimes shed light on their daily lives, but otherwise historical sources use to be scarce. Literature mirrors this situation. Where women live in the shadow of men, they aren’t likely to get leading parts in books, either. Set in China in the late 1880s and the early 1910s respectively, the forgotten classic My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard by Elizabeth Cooper evokes the life of a Chinese upper-class woman through two series of letters. The first she writes a few months after their wedding while her husband is abroad with a Chinese delegation, the other twenty-five years later after having moved to Shanghai where her husband was appointed governor and they have to lead a more Western life.