Difference between revisions of "Newest Literary Fiction Reviews"
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| + | |title=In The Dutch Mountains | ||
| + | |author=Cees Nooteboom | ||
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| + | |summary=Often, when asked if what I’m reading is a good book I hesitate before answering, trying to decide what the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full of interesting characters? Recently, someone asked me that and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”. In this instance, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also left me a little befuddled. | ||
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|summary=This is a collection of 17 Nikolai Leskov stories as mixed in subject matter as they are in length. From the very short ''Spirit of Madame de Genlis'', warning of the dire consequences of selecting literature for a mollycoddled princess, to the novella-length ''The Enchanted Wanderer'' telling the tale of the apparently immortal monk who prayed for suicide victims, Leskov (aided greatly by the talented translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) unlocks the mores, traditions, religion and superstitions of 19th century Russia for a modern readership. | |summary=This is a collection of 17 Nikolai Leskov stories as mixed in subject matter as they are in length. From the very short ''Spirit of Madame de Genlis'', warning of the dire consequences of selecting literature for a mollycoddled princess, to the novella-length ''The Enchanted Wanderer'' telling the tale of the apparently immortal monk who prayed for suicide victims, Leskov (aided greatly by the talented translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) unlocks the mores, traditions, religion and superstitions of 19th century Russia for a modern readership. | ||
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Revision as of 09:51, 29 June 2013
In The Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom
Often, when asked if what I’m reading is a good book I hesitate before answering, trying to decide what the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full of interesting characters? Recently, someone asked me that and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”. In this instance, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also left me a little befuddled. Full review...
Every Promise by Andrea Bajani
Italian writer, Andrea Bajani's Every Promise is narrated by Pietro. His partner, Sara, has left him due to their inability to have a baby, but soon she finds herself pregnant after a one night stand and reliant on Pietro's mother for advice. Meanwhile Pietro meets Olmo, an elderly man who lives in their old family apartment, who reminds Pietro of his own Grandfather, Mario, who, like Olmo, served in Mussolini's ill-fated Russian campaign. Olmo persuades Pietro to go to Russia to visit the scenes of some of the photographs he has to try to come to terms with the past. It's a story about the past, the present and the future and the struggle for one man to make sense of this. It's packed with surpassingly detailed imagery and Bajani is at times breathtakingly unflinching in exposing the vulnerability of his narrator. However, it is very much a slow burn of a book and it's not always an easy book to read. Full review...
In Between Days by Andrew Porter
After Chloe Harding is forced to leave her East Coast college, for reasons she refuses to explain to her recently divorced parents or older brother Richard, her family's lives start to unravel. Will the rest of them ever find out what caused her fall from grace, and can they solve their own problems? Full review...
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda
Red Hook, Brooklyn and it is blisteringly hot. Two fifteen year old girls decide the best and most exciting way to cool off is to take a small inflatable raft on to the river. The next morning one of the girls is found unconscious and washed ashore with no memory of what happened in the river and the other girl is nowhere to be found. This becomes a big local story and the survivor, saviour and community have to deal with the loss in their different ways. Full review...
Nowhere Ending Sky by Marlen Haushofer
Little Meta is growing up in a childhood paradise with two parents who love her and a younger brother to tease and train to do all the things that Meta wants him to. However the world outside Meta's paradise will soon change beyond all recognition as the Austria and Germany of the 1920s makes way for the Austria and Germany of the 1930s. Full review...
Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter
Sara raised Jason alone; even when she was with his father it felt as if she was a lone parent. Jason's father always seemed to be away doing something indefinable abroad; then he disappeared leaving her completely. Two years later Jason's father was dead. However Jason is a lad to be proud of, never giving Sara a moment's trouble and now a member of the elite US Navy SEALS. Now he's missing in action… Now she has to hang on and hope. Full review...
The Trader of Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks
In the Saigon of the 1980s the Vietnam War is over but the traces remain. Alexander has deserted from the US army and makes a comfortable living selling girls to local business men. Phuc used to be a business man, complete with mansion and the means to keep his wife and three children in affluence. Now his family live in a shanty hut, afraid of the ruling government that spies through the eyes of children. At last he finds a way out, his luck just needs to hold. Hanh also lives in poverty, desperately trying to help her sick mother with the pittance she earns from cleaning one of the city's many open latrines. Then one day she meets someone who offers so much more. His name is Alexander. Full review...
All Is Silence by Manuel Rivas
The small community of Noitía is a place where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, which considering most of the adults are involved in the one business, smuggling, is potentially dangerous knowledge. We follow a small group of three young friends growing up in the area as they play and learn and even experience a little of the black market dealings. They stumble across a stash of smuggled whisky and are caught by the charismatic king pin responsible for the trafficking, who teaches them that silence is the most important lesson to learn when growing up in Noitía. Full review...
From The Fatherland, With Love by Ryu Murakami
From The Fatherland, With Love is a 2005 Japanese novel set in the then-near future of 2011. Fatherland (as I will abbreviate it) explores the social and political ramifications of one speculative scenario: what if North Korea invaded Japan? Full review...
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
The Other Typist is set in 1920s New York City, with Prohibition at its height and Rose Baker, an orphaned young woman, working as a police typist. While she has no real friends, she's good at her job and seems to have the respect of the Sergeant, whom she admires and the Lieutenant Detective, whom she's less keen on. Then a perfect storm comes into their lives, in the shape of the enchanting Odalie, and nothing will be the same again. Full review...
What Lot's Wife Saw by Ioanna Bourazopoulou and Yannis Panas (Translator)
It's been over 20 years since The Overflow came, flooding half of Europe. Around the same time Violet Salt, a new multi-functional mineral, appeared, its production now governed globally by the mysterious, all-powerful Consortium. Meanwhile back in Europe The Colony, a haven for those escaping floods and indeed justice, is ruled by Governor Bera and six officials, the 'Purple Stars'. All seems to be well in a despotic, lawless way until the six wake up to the realisation that the Governor has died mysteriously in the night. The Consortium needs answers so choose the greatest crossword compiler of the age, Phileas Book, to investigate, whether he wants to or not. Full review...
Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston
- There are two women in an operating theatre and when one starts bleeding heavily - fatally - the other freezes, unable, despite all her training and undoubted skills, to do anything at all. Whatever the outcome it cannot pass unnoticed, unreported and surgeon Nancy Mullion is called to appear before a tribunal appointed by the General Medical Council. Over a period of weeks she's forced to confront the effect of being a doctor who has killed as well as cured. You're probably making assumptions now and nodding wisely. Don't - because you are almost certainly going to be wrong. This will not be the story which you are expecting and it was certainly not the story which Nancy's hospital wanted to hear.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Set mainly in New York's art district in the late 1970s, Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers tells the story of a young girl, known only to the reader as Reno, after the city she comes from. She's a girl who loves motorbikes and photography, but struggles to find her place in the New York art scene. When she falls for the estranged son, Sandro, of the Italian motorbike manufacturer Valero, himself an artist in New York, Reno finds herself in situations she cannot control. Full review...
Sketcher by Roland Watson-Grant
Nine-year-old Skid Beaumont lives with his three brothers, father Alrick and mother Valerie in the swamps beyond the New Orleans city limits. Life is hard and home is a rundown shack with no running water but they're only there temporarily; a 'temporarily' that is rather long-term. Alrick moved them from their nice home in New Orleans because the land was cheap and soon the city would build out to envelop them. Years later they're still waiting for that to happen. Life isn’t exactly mundane though; there are rumours that when Skid's brother Frico draws left-handed, strange things seem to happen. Full review...
The Story of My Purity by Francesco Pacifico
In Francesco Pacifico's translated Italian novel 'The Story of My Purity', Piero Rosini is a 30 year old, ultraconservative Catholic working for a radical Catholic publishing house. His marriage is devoid of physical contact, and he yearns for his virginal sister-in-law. Largely to escape these longings, he heads for Paris, never the first choice of one seeking to preserve their purity, where he is further tempted by a slightly unlikely group of girls, and one in particular, which is further complicated for him by the fact that she is Jewish. Almost living a separate life in his head, he cannot escape either the intellectual or physical constraints of his old life in Rome. Full review...
The Valley of Unknowing by Philip Sington
In the mid-to-late eighties the German Democratic Republic looked like enduring. Bolstered by a system of Mitarbeiter (fellow workers is a much more amenable term than informers) the Stasi kept their populace in check. Western media was easy to censor in those days. Border controls were brutal. People were shot on a regular basis trying to cross the no-man's-land into West Berlin and along the other inner German borders. Full review...
The Walk and other stories by Robert Walser
The publication of this collection of around forty short stories affords the English speaking public a unique opportunity; that of reading Walser, possibly the leading modernist writer of Swiss German in the last century. He has received high praise in 'A Place in the Country', W G Sebald's recently published posthumous collection and he is well-known as being a significant influence on Franz Kafka. His work here dates from 1907 to 1929 and along with his poetry won him recognition with Berlin's avant garde. He combines lyrical delicacy with detailed observation; reflective melancholy with criticism of brash commercialism. The fine writing in this volume strives to achieve a hard won integrity together with an experimental capacity for reflection. It challenges the reader and provokes him to new insights. Full review...
The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Nizam pushes a barrow up to a fortified US army base in Afghanistan. What is she doing there? How will the soldiers react? What do they believe: their experience, their training, their gut reaction or a young girl amputee in the middle of the desert who may be the last thing they ever see? Full review...
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright
What motivates someone to become a killer?
When the reader first meets Sean Bull, he is nine years old, living a seemingly carefree and happy existence surrounded by his family and friends in a close-knit community in Dudley, West Midlands. He loves Star Wars and playing football with his school friends and adores his teenage uncle Johnny, who tells him stories and creates the most wonderful pieces of art. Full review...
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
Imagine reading a book set in a Scottish children’s care home. It’s about a violent and a deeply disturbed fifteen year old drug addict who, when she was eleven, found her prostitute foster mother murdered in the bathtub. That’s the set-up of Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, and that’s what it’s about – but the funny thing is that whatever you’re picturing in your head right now, and what I was imagining before I sat down to read it, bears absolutely no resemblance to the book Fagan has actually written. Full review...
Cooking with Bones by Jess Richards
Sisters Amber and Maya run away from home, the city of Paradon, and arrive in a small village. Finding an old cottage, the girls settle in comfortably, hidden from the locals' sight while joining in with their customs as Amber backs honey cakes each night from the ingredients left daily outside the cottage and the instructions of the former occupant's cookery books. Now they've moved away from their old life Amber tries to encourage Maya to stand on her own two feet which isn't easy. For Maya is a formwanderer, engineered to reflect other's wants; a role in which it's difficult to exist normally, let alone while trying to adjust to change… and, indeed, unexpected death. Full review...
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Spanning the period from just before World War One to the end of World War Two, Kate Atkinson's Life After Life tells the story of Ursula Todd. Or more accurately, it tells the potential stories of Ursula Todd. If you've seen the movie Sliding Doors then you will have some idea of the concept Atkinson explores; that of small changes in life leading to different outcomes, many of which lead to tragic endings but strangely the book manages to be a celebration of the spirit of Ursula and is often quite uplifting. It's a book that sounds like it is going to be much more confusing than it is though and the result is a very special book indeed. It's that rare thing of a book that has a strong literary style but which is also very readable. Full review...
The Forrests by Emily Perkins
This is the chronicle of the Forrest family during the life of daughter Dorothy. They move ('they' being Dorothy, father Frank, mother Lee and siblings Michael, Evelyn and little Ruthie) from New York to New Zealand at the age of seven years old. Frank hopes the migration will signal a change in his luck as well as a new life for his family. He's right in that changes follow but there are as many to shake their stability as to still it and the past remains with each of them as well as the de facto adoptee Daniel. Indeed, Dorothy grows to realise that the past is a garment that's worn in some form throughout an entire lifetime. Full review...
Honour by Elif Shafak
Jamila and Pembe are twins who, growing up among the Kurdish in Turkey, are as wrapped in the customs of their Muslim faith and heritage as they are in the love of their family. Jamila develops a talent that will make her the hub of her community. Pembe's destiny lies over the sea as she migrates to England with her husband Adem in search of a better life. However, the destiny they travel towards is oh so different from the destiny of which they dream. Full review...
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
As Therese Anne Fowler points out in her acknowledgements, views on the relationship between F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife and muse, Zelda, tend to split into 'Team Scott' and 'Team Zelda'. The former believe that it was Zelda's instability and possessiveness that limited Scott's creative output while the latter argue that it was Scott's debauched behaviour that led to Zelda's mental problems. Z takes a more balanced view - the truth of the matter is that they needed each other but were tragically, mutually destructive. Getting the fact-based fiction tone right is always a challenge, and this is exacerbated when the author gives a writer the narrative voice, and Zelda was a talented writer in her own right as well as a dancer, artist and general social phenomenon. However Fowler pulls it off with aplomb in what is a sensitive and engrossing story of Zelda - 'the First Flapper'. Full review...
How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Much has been made in the media about the similarity in approach of Sheila Heti's fictionalised autobiographical How Should A Person Be? and Lena Dunham's HBO television series Girls. They certainly share a similarly bleak and introspective view of life, both are apparently based on the writer's own experience, both have a somewhat knowingly shock factor particularly when it comes to sex and both leave me somewhat depressed and sad. And both have been critical successes in the US. Indeed, How Should A Person Be? also features on the 2013 long list for the Women's Prize for Fiction, although it's not easy to assess where the fiction starts and the reality stops. In fact, the conceit is also somewhat similar to the scripted reality shows that dominate certain television channels. The effect is something that is interesting as a concept and exercise but less than enjoyable to read. Full review...
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
Set in rural Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow is a young mother, trapped in the result of a shotgun wedding in a largely loveless marriage on her husband's failing family farm dominated by the disapproval of her God-fearing mother in law. She dreams of escape with equally unsuitable younger men until one day on her way to acting on this impulse for the first time, she encounters an act of nature that will change her life for good. Barbara Kingsolver perfectly captures in the opening paragraphs the sense of entrapment and dissatisfaction of Dellarobia and doesn't let up for a moment. Full review...
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov, Richard Pevear (translator) and Larissa Volokhonsky (translator)
This is a collection of 17 Nikolai Leskov stories as mixed in subject matter as they are in length. From the very short Spirit of Madame de Genlis, warning of the dire consequences of selecting literature for a mollycoddled princess, to the novella-length The Enchanted Wanderer telling the tale of the apparently immortal monk who prayed for suicide victims, Leskov (aided greatly by the talented translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) unlocks the mores, traditions, religion and superstitions of 19th century Russia for a modern readership. Full review...
