Entries from May 2009
Notes on a Scandal, May 2009, 7/10.
Written by Zoë Heller. Published by Penguin Books.
The novel’s title and basic plot – the love/sex affair between an attractive 40 years old teacher, Sheba, and her 15 years old student – might induce you to think the book will be all about Nabokovian pleasures and frenzies. However, the self-appointed chronicler is not Sheba, but an older colleague of her, a bleakly lonely spinster, whose friendship with Sheba blurs into obsession and of whose truthfulness we become more and more doubtful as we read along. It’s her deranged but lucid personality that keeps on surfacing throughout the book. This novel is really about the complex and disturbing relationship among the two women, and its transformation into mutual, and partly coerced, dependency. It’s a gripping read, very anguishing.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 7/10, British fiction, Zoe Heller
The Gathering
The Gathering, May 2009, 7/10.
Written by Anne Enright. Published by Grove Press.
This novel didn’t draw me in until it was almost over, but the story eventually came together and sparked my interest. The style of writing – a mix of long reminiscent passages and short staccato sentences focusing on vague memories and a feeling rather than an action – is not especially original, this is a very good example of the style, although the jumping back and forth was a little cliche. The narrator’s vagueness (as though you are already familiar with the narrator’s life and past, and reflecting her own inability to see clearly) and the author’s refusal to spell out details kept the book interesting. Although the main characters were deeply developed, most were more of an outline, no doubt an intentional tool to allow the reader to add his own colour.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 7/10, Anne Enright, British, Fiction, Irish
Rhyming Life And Death
Rhyming Life And Death (Translated by Nicholas de Lange), May 2009, 6/10.
Written by Amoz Oz. Published by Chatto and Windus.
This wildly imaginative novella pushed the boundaries of modern fiction a little too far for my taste. Although it was mostly an actual story there were substantial parts where the reader was spoken to directly and outside the narrative, and Oz took these opportunities to explicitly question (often without answering) why he was directing the story as he did and to make random changes to the plotline without reasons just because, as the author, he could. Although this is a novel way to narrate, it meant that despite there being a lot of character development there was no real plotline, few bridges between sections and little story development.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 6/10, Amoz Oz, Fiction, Israeli, Novella
The Moon and the Bonfires (La luna e i falò), May 2009, 9/10
Written by Cesare Pavese. Published by Einaudi in Italian. An English version is available from the New York Review of Books Classics Series.
This novel evolves on two parallel planes. The first is the story of a middle-aged italian emigrant, who, in search of a sense of belonging, returns to his village. There, he feels, there will be something of him in the land, in the plants, in the people: he will be truly home. The memories of his childhood and adolescence are seamlessly intertwined with the account of the rediscovery of the smells, the flavours and the faces of his hometown. Pavese flees all lyricism and conveys – with the intensity of a very spare prose style – the misery and the desolation of the peasants of northern Italy before and after WWII. Also powerful is the description of the havoc caused by the civil war that was necessary to rid Italy from the fascists, but that ravaged and transformed the people and the land he came back to.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 8.5/10, Italian fiction, Pavese, Premio Strega
My Uncle Oswald
My Uncle Oswald, May 2009, 6.5/10.
Written by Roald Dahl. Published by Penguin Books.
Despite this novella being beyond ridiculous and despite the gimmick of reading borderline erotica while denying that as a highbrow reader you would ever read such trash, there is no doubt that Roald Dahl has an incredible imagination and can tell a marvelously entertaining story. Written decades before viagra and when IVF was in its infancy, the book is surprisingly prescient for something so concerned with fornication and copulation. The diary-esque format helps keep things fresh, as does the metaphysical commentary when things could become tedious or repetitous, but in the end there isn’t too much substance to this book, whose themes of sex, lust, aphrodisiacs, greed, money, backstabbing and the high life would probably appeal more to the adolescent male and infrequent reader than to the booksnobs.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: 6.5/10, British, Fiction, Novella, Roald Dahl
