A Patchwork Planet

I bought this book because it was by Anne Tyler and she wrote The Accidental Tourist which was much recommended and which I abandoned after starting it before I left Lewis for New Zealand last October. I keep wondering, now that I've read The Patchwork Planet, whether I would have started it had I known what I now know. Answer 'No'. Question 'Why?'

I think that I look for something in a novel which gives me an emotional interest; perhaps even a challenge providing it's not too much of one. If there is not an emotional interest then a 'good story' is a must. This book provides neither for me.

It explores the ordinaryness of the very ordinary lives of its characters. It is about trust: the way we react to those who may not trust us and the way those who may not trust us react to us. It is about change: the way we may try and change as a reaction to the way those around us view us. Having said that I'm not sure that I found any of it particularly convincing nor interesting.

Would I recommend it? No.

The Sorrows of an American

I was wandering through a bookshop (how unusual) and saw this novel by Siri Hustvedt.  The blurb intrigued me. Until recently I have never borrowed novels from the library.  I decided not to risk buying this but borrowed it.  Correct choice: it's not a book for my collection.  Apart from anything else I should have been warned by the endorsement on the front cover from Salman Rushdie. I'm not one of his admirers.  But I digress.

The dominant plot - there are many plots and sub plots - revolves around a mystery unearthed by the narrator, Erik Davidsen (a New York psychiatrist of Norwegian parentage) who is grieving for his father, and his sister Inga (an academic).  They are going through their father's papers when they discover a cryptic note about which their mother knows nothing. 'Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing (sic) about what happened,' it reads. 'We swore it on the Bible. It can't matter now she's in heaven or to the ones here on earth.'  The author of this note is a mysterious 'Lisa' no one can trace.  

This is not, however, really a story about finding the meaning of the note but a look at the human mind and its reactions to, and contained in, the many plots and sub-plots.  The book is very much an analysis of the characters contained within it.  It obviously does that well and is acclaimed for that.  There is an element of autobiography in the book in that the memoirs quoted are those of Siri's deceased father quoted almost verbatim.  It is true, too, that one can learn a smidgen of psychiatry and psychoanalysis from the book.

It did have an element of compulsion and once started I had to finish.  It was not time well spent. If you desire a satisfying outcome to a mystery then this is not for you.  It may be strong on personal analysis but it's weak on storyline.  Despite discovering that the book is almost universally acclaimed by the critics it did not make me want to read any more of her, also highly acclaimed, novels.

Quotes:

It's odd that we're all compelled to repeat pain, but  I've come to regard this as a truth.  What used to be doesn't leave us.

"We don't experience the world.  We experience our expectations of the world." (Inga)

Our memories are forever being altered by the present - memory isn't stable, but mutable.

"Injustice eats your soul" (Inga)

"...the [psychiatric] patients are now referred to as customers." " That's revolting."  "That's America."

[Telling a story] Burton made another dash towards his point.

And so we held vigil in the eerie space of the ongoing present, an interval drained of all significance, except that it was suspended between a child's fall and some future moment when we would know.

Hunting and Gathering: Revisited

On 11 December (gosh, is it really that ling ago?) I posted a blog about Anna Gavalda's book, Hunting and Gathering.  I have since watched the film with Audrey Tautou as Camille.  This caused me to re-visit the book.  As an aside the film, though enjoyable enough, is startlingly superficial when compared to the book.  I suppose that's an inevitability given the complexities and detail of the characters within the simplicity of the story.

In my original comments I had wondered whether the book was simply a holiday read or a more serious work.  If I were writing that posting now I would have absolutely no hesitation in saying that it is a work of considerable depth in its exploration of the characters who inhabit its covers. Nor would I have any hesitation in suggesting that it should be read.   

The Lovely Bones

I bought a copy of this book some time ago in, I think, a charity shop in the UK.  I kept meaning to read it.  It disappeared. I was standing in a bookshop in Napier just after Christmas contemplating the purchase of another copy when a young lady (customer) started explaining very enthusiastically why I should read it.  She had just finished it and was consuming The Time Travellers Wife.  I recalled that my Brother was very enthusiastic about that book so decided that her taste must be good.  So I bought the book.  I'm so glad that I did.

A fourteen year old girl (Susie) is murdered.  From heaven she gives a commentary on how her family, the murderer and those affected by the murder cope or, more to the point, don't always cope.  

So you now have a synopsis of the story;  a synopsis that tells you nothing. 

The book explores relationships and feelings (particularly grief) which are compelling aspects of life when dealt with this sympathetically and perceptively.  It mixes the subjective emotions with very day to day aspects of life and how people might react and interreact in both areas.  One very mundane and practical moment which I found particularly moving was when Lindsay (Suzie's sister) first shaved her legs.  Her Dad was the one who, despite his misgivings that she was too young, guided her through the process and showed her how to change the razor blade.

The book appears to portray Lindsay, who is one year younger, as the person who suffers the most from the tragedy because she is "the victim's sister" and loses her own identity as a result.  No one can look at her without thinking of Susie.  I think, however, that she deals with the situation better than her parents and brother. 

Suzie's portrayal of a heaven is non-religious.  Whether Alice Sebold is religious I neither know nor wish to know but she gives an account of heaven which, in my view, equates to it being a state of mind portrayed in physical terms rather than a physical heaven.

The description of a novel as 'Number one best seller' is one of my dislikes and tends to put me off books.  This is, however, a compelling read.  Would I recommend it?  Without hesitation.

Quotes:

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white striped scarf.  When I was little my father would pull me onto his lap and reach for the snow globe.  He would turn it over letting all the snow collect at the top, then quickly invert it.  The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin.  The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him.  When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."

"When the dead are done with the living, " Franny said to me [Susie], "the living can go on and do other things."

With the camera my parents gave me, I took dozens of candids of my family.    ..    ..    ..  I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way found a way to stop time and hold it.  No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life. 

Life is full of coincidences.  Production of the film of The Lovely Bones (which is, I understand, being filmed at the moment) has moved from Pennsylvania to New Zealand.  

I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere

With the exception of those by Somerset Maugham I am not a lover of short stories. However I can now add Anna Gavalda to Maugham. This book comprises a dozen short stories and a novelette (if there is such a thing) entitled Someone I Loved. When, a few weeks ago, I commented on her novel Hunting and Gathering I said that it was, apparently, a departure from her previous two books in that it was not a dark story of love denied nor lost nor roads not taken. As I had not read this book I relied on a reviewer for that information. Yes, this is a book of 'what if' and love denied and lost (and found and rejected for that matter) but I'm not sure that I would describe it as dark.

 

I have the feeling that many, many people if they were to read this book would feel distinctly uncomfortable. I spent a lot of time during the reading of Someone I Loved denying that I had ever acted like that. I had always been honest. Or had I? Whatever else this book achieved it made me feel uncomfortable.

 

Anna's style (I'm living in New Zealand at the moment and we don't do surnames here - OK I did for Maugham but that's different!) is controversial. It's staccato and leaves the reader to fill in a lot of the foliage. This would be totally alien to anyone who likes Anthony Trollope or admires descriptive writing for its own sake but for people like me who, generally speaking, cannot be arsed with the fluff and description and just want the story (because I'm a very slow reader who reads a novel as if it were a law book) her style of writing is ideal. I actually find it very pleasing as well.

 

Anyway I thought this book was quite thought provoking in a fairly light way and I enjoyed it very much. Would I recommend it? You know, I'm having great difficulty with that question. CJ recommends without hesitation books which I would never dream of reading. Not because they are not good books (I'm not sufficiently well-read to pass an opinion on that) but because they are subjects which don't interest me. Anna writes of people, situations and emotions. You will learn from her books nothing of history, nor science, nor, perhaps, very much for that matter. But they will stir you. And if they don't then you and I are very different people. There is only one way to find out.

 

Ah, yes, we are are we not?

 

Quotes:

A bottle of Côte de Nuits, Gevrey-Chambertain 1986. Baby Jesus in velvet britches. [Possibly the most extraordinary descriptive phrase I've read, but I think I understood what was meant.]

 

One of the few things I remember from school is a theory by one of those ancient philosophers , who said the important thing isn't where you are it's the state of mind you're in. He wrote that to one of his friends who had the hump and wanted to travel. He basically told him that it wasn't worth the trouble since he was bound to lug his load of problems around wherever he went. The day the teacher told us that, my life changed.

 

I guess that your face is a place that touched my life.

 

The trap lies in thinking that we have the right to be happy.

 

"You like squash and I like swingball, and that explains everything..." . . . . ". . People who are rigid inside are always bumping into life and hurting themselves in the process, but people who are soft - no, not soft, supple is the word - yes, that's it, supple on the inside, well, when they take a hit they suffer less...I think you should take up swingball, it's much more fun. You hit the ball and you don't know where it's going to come back, but you know that it will come back because of the string, and it makes for a wonderful moment of suspense. . . . . "

 

"You, you're like my father, you have nostalgia for the mountains."

"Which mountains, Mouschka?" I would ask.

"Why, the ones you've never seen, of course!"

A Moment In Time

I showed Hunting and Gathering to Wendy when I started reading it and she did not think, from the few glimpses she had, that it would be her sort of book.  As a love story she recommended H E Bates' A Moment in Time.  It would be arrogant of me to try and 'review' a book which must have been the subject of so many comments over the years by people far better qualified than I to pass judgement.  

However there is one very striking comparison between it and Hunting and Gathering: the endings.  I commented on the latter's ending that "What one can say is that the ending is wrapped up without a single thread left unsewn".  Bates's ending is one which leaves you to believe in the ending without telling you what it is.  Many years ago I wrote a piece called Life Is Good Brother which did just that.  I thought (and still think) that it was quite a good piece. However I was slated by the teacher because it did just what Bates has done.  I liked it in my essay.  I don't like it when others do it.  Inconsistent or what?

A Moment in Time is a pleasantly written story which one could not leave half read but it is not a book which I would pick up again nor put on my list of suggested reading for anyone else. Which just goes to show you.

Quotes:

It's always as well to remember that there are occasions when the greatest danger comes not from your enemies but from your friends. [Quote, Unquote]

It sounds like the most ordinary and simple of conversations but because of it I felt my latent affection for Tom Hudson stir very deeply inside myself, turn over and then go completely to sleep again, exactly like a warm kitten.  [Hmmmm.]

Hunting and Gathering

Translated from the French, Hunting and Gathering, Anna Gavalda's latest book is, apparently, a departure from her previous two books in that it is not a dark story of love denied nor lost nor roads not taken.  It is a story driven by its characters rather than a plot.

The characters are Camille, who works as a 'cleaning operative' and lives alone in a tiny, unheated, delapidated garret with a Turkish toilet on the landing and doesn't eat; Philibert, an aristocrat 'minding' an enormous flat which is the subject of a family inheritance feud and which is in the building in which Camille lives; Franck who lives in Philibert's flat and is a talented chef with severe boorish tendencies and Franck's Grandmother, Paulette, who is too old to look after herself but who is terrified of being placed in a nursing home.

All these characters are damaged in some way but come together as a group of individuals who, through each other, manage to mend that damage.  It is a story of many emotions: despair, kindness, sadness and happiness.  To my mind they were crafted with considerable skill and feeling.  One suspects the whole time of reading that this is a book which will have a happy ending.  Surely it will...............  What one can say is that the ending is wrapped up with not a single thread left unsewn.

I seem to wonder about the intentions of the authors of books that I have been reading recently.  I can't decide, for example, whether this book is simply a 'holiday read' or a more serious work.  Whichever, it is very pleasing prose.  I would suggest, too, that it is one of the most beautiful books that I have read recently.

It was recommended to me by a friend who knows me well and was a welcome recommendation. Would I recommend it to others? Absolutely but, and it's a big but, only to selected people.  'Cos if you're not one of those people you may well just not take to it.

Quotes:

It's a hypothesis.  History won't take us far enough to confirm it.  And our certainties never really hold water.  One day you feel like dying and the next you realise all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

In mid-November, when the cold weather began its dirty work of undermining everyone's morale...  [So appropriate on Lewis this year!]

The thing that prevents people from living together is their stupidity, not their difference.  [Ouch, that hurt.]

Why does there always have to be a notion of profitability? [in knowledge] I don't give a fuck if its useful or not, what I like is knowing that it exists.

...everything you regret comes back to haunt you, torment you.  Day, and night...all the time.  [My Godfather, Uncle JPD, drilled into me that one must never regret anything in life because, you've guessed it, it would come back constantly to haunt one.  The one thing I've regretted haunts me constantly.  Oh dear.]

Mathilde had the kindness, arrogance and offhand manner of those who are born in finely woven sheets.