“This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smile
“This was, I would later realise, a planet of things wrapped inside things. Food inside wrappers. Bodies inside clothes. Contempt inside smiles. Everything was hidden away.”
This book made me laugh out loud, and that doesn’t happen very often. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this good. The plot is a bit of a joke, the characters are all a bit ordinary and boring, but it is the irony and the dry wit that makes it all so brilliant.
Perspective can be an extraordinary humorous thing when the world is viewed through the eyes of an emotionless and uncaring alien. He arrives on earth and takes over the body of a maths professor, Andrew Martin. The alien is unaware of human social rules and basic etiquette and walks around campus completely naked at Cambridge University. He is quickly arrested, taken away, and finds himself having to explain his actions to the authorities. He doesn’t understand the world and is all a bit lost.
Ironically, the family of Andrew begins to prefer the alien to the original version. He is far more interesting and attentive to their needs in his efforts to conform to human social norms. He was sent to Earth to erase a big mathematical discovery that the original Andrew made, to halt the progress of humanity and to restore balance to their development. His mission is to also erase everyone who may also know about Andrew’s discovery, so it remains a permanent secret. However, the alien begins to like his newfound humanity and struggles with his task. He quite likes having a wife and a son and seeks an alternative life, a human life.
“Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”
And that’s important advice and the book is full of it. Matt Haig is a self-help author as well as a novelist, and that does shine through the narrative. I feel like his books are always written with the intention of helping people in some way shape or form. This is the first novel I’ve read in several months because my reading time has been taken up by academic books, so I’m glad I chose wisely and had so much fun reading this. I hope you do too.
On another important note about the author and the book, I recently realised he’s a vegan. I didn’t know going into this but came across this quote:
“A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multi-purpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.”
The alien is horrified by the ways in which we treat animals, and how we hide behind this façade of renaming them to make the notion more attractive to us. Things are hidden from the human eye behind wrappers, false names and distance. And this is certainly a great point to take away from this book and to close my book review with.
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The Living Mountain is a short piece of writing that is rich in allegory and meaning; it comes from a dream brought on by anxiety surrounding the AnthThe Living Mountain is a short piece of writing that is rich in allegory and meaning; it comes from a dream brought on by anxiety surrounding the Anthropocene and its connotations: it comes from nervousness about the future in the wake of our attitude towards the natural world.
This takes on the form of a fable, one that highlights exactly what can go wrong if we dominate nature and cultivate too much of her riches and resources; it is a story that is very ecologically aware and one that is cautionary and intelligent: it is a very timely and important piece of writing. I find myself drawn to more and more books like this, books that engage with issues of ecology and the environment.
“How dare you speak of the Mountain as though you were its masters, and it were your plaything, your child. Have you understood nothing of what it has been trying to teach you? Nothing at all?
Amitav Ghosh is becoming one of my favorite writers because of the way he tackles environmental crisis and the way he situates it in a postcolonial space. And this is strikingly important, I have only ever seen a small handful of writers do this. When he talks about the mountain he is talking about nature as an entity, as a living system that we cannot control or should never attempt to do so. When he talks about invaders attempting to take all its resources, he is using the fable as an allegory for colonialism and its impact on the natural world.
Overall, this is a strong short story and I would love to see more of these from him. This would fit perfectly in a collection of them addressing similar themes.
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Gun Island is a beautifully written and clever novel that deals with myths and legends, environmental crisis and how our place in the world is fueled Gun Island is a beautifully written and clever novel that deals with myths and legends, environmental crisis and how our place in the world is fueled by uncertainty and catastrophe.
Amitav Ghosh is a writer whose work I've come to admire greatly. This novel deals with several themes that consider the difficulties of living in the modern world; it engages with displacement and identity, refuge and relocation: it captures the ever changing and ever evolving nature of a multi-cultural metropolis in the wake of increasing urbanization. It also captures the issues asylum seekers face as they cross boarders into the unknown. In the wake of tornedos and a shifting natural landscape, people are forced to evolve and adapt into something new: it’s a book written under the ever reaching and ever increasing shadow of climate change as we begin to enter an unrecognisable space. It's remarkable and potent.
“We’re in a new world now. No one knows where they belong anymore neither humans nor animals.”
Such is the dilemma of the protagonist, Deen Datta. He is a rare book dealer with Bengali background feeling at odds with his comfortable New York life. He feels out of place and like he has lost a sense of his true heritage. He goes on a quest to discover the details of The Gun Merchant, a fictional character evident in Bengali oral tradition, and in doing so learns a lot about himself, the world and life itself. The story is a slow burn, and in taking it cautiously Ghosh reveals the interconnected nature of the themes and characters.
I’m impressed with the number of themes Ghosh has engaged with here, and he has engaged with them carefully and sensitively. I’ve read a lot of his non-fictional work and I can see a lot of his interests pouring through into the narrative here. For me, he occupies a completely unique place in the fictional world because of what he addresses (and how he address it.) He is certainly an author that explores his ideas creatively through the act of writing.
I’m going to end my review by sharing a quote that sums up a large part of the central motif behind this novel here:
“Only though stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.”
And we can use them to inform the present. We can use them to understand the changes we are facing. I liked this novel, a lot.
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This is the twelfth book I have read by Murakami and at this point you could probably say that I am quite invested in the author. I think he is fantasThis is the twelfth book I have read by Murakami and at this point you could probably say that I am quite invested in the author. I think he is fantastic, well, sometimes. And that’s the problem, I just don’t find him very consistent in his brilliance. My opinion of this collection only reinforces my point.
The title After the Quake immediately suggests that these are stories relating to an earthquake when in fact these are short stories that were written after an earthquake in Japan and are very loosely related at best to the actual quake. They vary in their themes, optimism, purpose and quality. I consider them quite a random bunch of stories that happened to be written after a natural disaster which briefly appears in the pages. Was I missing something? I just don’t quite feel like these all belonged together or even in the collection.
Anyway, that aside, I liked some of the stories in here a great deal. Others just lacked any weight and were a bit bland. One was suggestive of great and transformative personal change spurred on by the realisation of how fleeting life can be, but it didn’t go anywhere. Another just seemed to be about people burning things on a beach as a from of catharsis. They all remained a little open ended, as good short stories should be. Indeed, a good short story should hang over you and linger in your mind, but not all of them were that engaging in their content. Not all the characters were interesting enough to warrant much thought.
If I sound critical of Murakami, it’s because I know how great he can be. And for me, that greatness only manifested itself in one short story here. It was a story about a frog called “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” And what makes this story so great is how uncertain everything felt; it felt real and unreal at the same time: it felt like reality had been warped and that the narrator may or may not have lost his mind. An unreliable narrator is not quite the right label because he believes what he experiences is real, but we are left questioning his reality. It was a clever piece of writing.
For me, this was very much a mixed bag. This can often be the case with short story collections, but I've never felt quite so polar about stories in the same book before by the same author. To invoke a cliche, he has really become hit or miss for me. So I think I'm going to have a break from Murakami for a while. I will read more of his books in the future, but that future will be distant.
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The Blind Assassin is a bloated monster of a book.
To put it plainly: it was slow, dull and padded out. In my estimation this is a 400 page story wrapThe Blind Assassin is a bloated monster of a book.
To put it plainly: it was slow, dull and padded out. In my estimation this is a 400 page story wrapped-up in a 650 page package. There is so much material here that adds absolutely nothing to the story, themes or characters. It is full of pointless inane details that were excruciating to read through. It is loaded with unnecessary day to day things that did nothing but drag the book out. So much needed chopping away to make the novel more precise and readable.
Despite this though, there is still a good book here buried beneath the excessive prose.
"Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won’t stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual."
There’s something powerful and exacting about a retrospective narrator, one who looks back and analyses all the mistakes that have been made over the course of a lifetime. Whilst this isn’t a book focused on climate change, it is a book about regret and coming to terms with the greed of human behaviour and this idea is captured perfectly with this passage. As Iris watches the devastating effects of war and greed, she realises that the people in her own life embody some of the worst traits known to man.
Unusually, this is a book where we have the ending right from the start. We know how its all going to finish and slowly, ever so slowly, Atwood begins to reveal how everything happened. This kept the novel moving forward, but at a snail pace. There are quite a few surprises along the way and a big reversal during the final few pages, which, for me, completely saved the book.
What else did I like?
The novel is undeniably very clever. There are stories within stories within stories and it’s the reason Atwood won the man book prize in 2000. It’s creative and intelligent. There is no other novel, to my knowledge, that is put together quite like this. It is told through retrospective narration, newspaper clippings and a novel Laura Chase (the narrator’s sister) has written. There’s a book within the book! It’s a great idea but if experience has taught me anything, the judges of the booker prize always place literary originality over literary quality. And that can be a great thing, but not always. This story had no momentum and it dragged and dragged and dragged and dragged.
I was so close to giving up on a couple of occasions, but I was determined to finish this because I know how great Atwood can be. And there were glimpses of her skill here, in a watered-down form. Don’t get me wrong, I think The Blind Assassin is a good book but the sad thing is, it truly could have been a great book had it been shorter and more to the point. I felt bored when I was reading, the same way you might feel bored when an octogenarian tells you a forty-five minute story that could have been wrapped up in ten. And that's the problem: this is simply too big for the amount of story it actually contained.
I liked the critique on capitalism. I liked how the villain of the novel (yes there is one and no names mentioned) was the walking embodiment of it, along with destructive consumerism and expansion. I liked how subtle the manipulation tactics used by various characters were, to the point where the narrator has no clue she was being played by multiple people at the time. When she got older, she learnt her mistakes, and that’s important. Most of all I liked the ending. I liked what was kept hidden until the final few pages.
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”
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This is a compelling and highly symbolic feminist retelling of an Ancient Greek story that I recommend most highly.
I’m always impressed by the writingThis is a compelling and highly symbolic feminist retelling of an Ancient Greek story that I recommend most highly.
I’m always impressed by the writing of Madeline Miller. Her first book The Song of Achilles was a powerful and imaginative retelling of The Iliad. Her second novel Circe, however, was at a completely different level: it was simply fantastic in every way.
As such, I had extremely high expectations going into this and I’m very pleased to say they were met entirely. First off though, it’s important to note that this is a short story but it packs a very hefty punch. Galatea is a literary adaptation, a taking of an established story and retelling it and here it is done from a strong feminist perspective. Miller takes a piece of Ovid's Metamorphoses and gives it new life and agency.
Indeed, she takes an otherwise silent female character and gives her a voice and a story. Galatea was made from stone by a sculptor. He created her and prayed for her to come to life and his wish was granted by the gods. In Ovid’s version they get married and live happily ever after, but his narrative is problematic. What about Galatea wishes? Miller gives that consideration here. Galatea was physically made and sculped to be one man’s ideal: he made her to serve his every whim. It never occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, she might want something different from life.
What follows is a story of desperation and entrapment. Galatea, quite naturally, wants to escape from her overbearing creator and jailor. In this, he is the ultimate expression of the suffocating patriarchy which he represents. And without giving away the plot conclusion, it’s a forceful indictment of the terribleness of treating women like objects. I was impressed by the story’s closure. It was symbolic and it left a lasting image. Here Miller shows that her writing is on par with the likes of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter when it comes to adapting stories and ideas.
So, this is a very strong short story. I would love to see more like it from Miller, a collection of them would certainly be great. For now, I will continue to read everything she writes. ___________________________________
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This is a very mediocre collection of short stories from a writer who can do SO MUCH better.
When an author can achieve literary greatness in their wrThis is a very mediocre collection of short stories from a writer who can do SO MUCH better.
When an author can achieve literary greatness in their writing, there’s an expectation that they must do it all the time. Murakami has achieved such a thing several times over, though he did not quite do it here. Unfortunately, whilst these stories do have a brief echo of his brilliance, they simply do not deliver: they are not what they could be.
In some ways, I feel like Murakami dug these out of his bottom draw. These don’t feel like new stories, but instead they feel like the stories of an author who is still refining his craft. They seem like the words of an author who would one day develop these themes into fantastic plot points with powerful narrative delivery. Here, though, they just don’t quite cut it.
The writing is fuelled by the same randomness that defines his writing. There’s casual sexual encounters and strong music references. There’s a sense of the unusual, the uncanny and of something not quite right. His tone is here and what’s a little bit confusing is the uncertainty about who exactly is speaking. Is it a fictional character or is it actually Murakami himself? The lines become blurred in more than one instance especially when a character has the author’s name. This is a clever device but it’s all very brief and none of the stories seem to go anywhere real. There’s not enough time or words for them to count.
And that’s the problem: Murakami is a great novelist, but he is not a great short story writer. He is at his best when his unique motifs are combined with excellent plotting. He churns out huge novels that are tense, emotional and very clever. The short story form doesn’t really work for him: he just can’t do what he does best within its limitations.
Although his previous collection of short stories, Men Without Women, was a little better, it also failed to showcase his real talent. If you want to learn what Murakami is really about, then I recommend reading After Dark and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. For me, he is at his absolute best in those two novels.
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“Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away.”
How do we tell our children that the world is on the brink of environmental collapse?
Bew“Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away.”
How do we tell our children that the world is on the brink of environmental collapse?
Bewilderment explores this question by borrowing elements from Flowers for Algernon, creating a character whose regressive condition can be mitigated through contact with his deceased mother’s brain patterns.
The mother was a vegan activist. And as time goes on Robin (the son) begins to act and think like she did after experimental exposure to her cognitive processing. He organises protests and actions. He begins to actively attempt to improve the world from a very young age. And, quite naturally, he becomes enamoured by a vegan teen activist on the autism spectrum, Inga Alder (a character based heavily on Greta Thunberg.) Robin identifies with her words and her ideas about climate change, and he realises that he is just like her. To quote some of the rhetoric Robin regurgitates here:
“The creatures of this state do not belong to us. We hold them in our trust. The first people who lived here knew: all animals are our relatives. Our ancestors and descendants are watching our stewardship: let’s make them proud.”
“That’s why they’ll all go extinct. Because everyone wants to solve it latter.”
Robin becomes extremely focused on these ideas and works hard to mitigate the apathy of society. He wants change and understands change can only occur if one changes their own behaviour and works to change that of others. He dreams of a better world and gazes at the stars with his father, creating one in his mind.
And through this Bewilderment questions the restrictive nature of labels that hinder individualism. Accurate classification can be a problem when “disorders” such as autism exist on a spectrum. How do we precisely define what someone has? We can’t. No two cases are the same as no two people are the same. And I think this is an important idea to push. People should not be grouped up under such a label that diminishes their identity and personality. And for me this became one of the strongest elements of the book.
Bewilderment is a careful novel; it is introspective, slow and very conversational. And as with the narrative progress of Flowers for Algernon, it becomes clear the positive effects Robin has received (his ability to affect change and to manage his emotions) due to experimentation will soon begin to fade. Powers alludes to this heavily from the beginning, and without giving away spoilers, the interaction between the two novels is quite clever. And it did much to enhance the story here.
Whilst the novel explores many modern themes in a clever way, it lacks the energy and power of The Overstory. It is also simpler, less chaotic and far more precise. There’s much less to take away too in comparison, but I do hope Powers builds on these themes in latter books. He’s quite sensitive with them, but I feel like there is still much left to say. This is a very good novel, but it could have been a great one if it had a little more energy. __________________________________
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This started so well but then it got more and more boring with each chapter.
I was hooked on this as soon as I started reading. I found myself stormingThis started so well but then it got more and more boring with each chapter.
I was hooked on this as soon as I started reading. I found myself storming through it and totally invested in the story. Then somewhere, around half-way through, I found myself growing terribly bored. My reading rate slowed down. It started to feel like a chore, and it took me almost five months to finish it.
What happened?
The story seemed to stagnate, and the descriptions felt very similar and reused. Moreover, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere other than the obvious direction. Granted, it picked up towards the but by then I had lost interest and wanted the book to be over. It seems rather trite in a book review to complain about the length of a book, but I’m going to do it anyway: this felt too long. I have no problem with big books if they need to be big. This one felt padded out and like parts needed to be stripped back and the writing made tighter. It waffled on and I grew tired of it.
It was slow, so painfully slow
I’m disappointed because I feel like I should have loved this one and I thought I was going to. I wish I had something more positive to say, but I can’t find anything else I enjoyed about it. It had a good hook but that’s it. Consider me very unimpressed.
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The Overstory is very green, very vibrant and very important.
You could even say that it is a celebration of the natural world and the power she poss The Overstory is very green, very vibrant and very important.
You could even say that it is a celebration of the natural world and the power she possesses, but that would be a drastic oversimplification. The novel equally explores (but perhaps not celebrates) human nature and our failures to act and care in the face of ecological collapse. So few people are willing to do anything and extend empathy beyond their immediate lives. And here you have the crux of the novel: environmental frustration.
The natural world has called certain people to defend her; they feel compelled to change destructive behaviours: they have been awakened to nature’s desperate plight and they are ready to act positively for much needed change. And they are met with ridicule, greediness and people too ignorant to understand the importance of trees in our lives.
“The most wonderous products of four billion years of life need help.”
Trees are silent sentinels witnessing the passing of generations, as human families are characterised in tree years through parts of the story. In this the pervading power of the natural world is contrasted against the fragile nature of human existence. Our environment has evolved drastically, but we haven’t. We still have many innate animal behaviours that are completely unsuited to the modern world. We are ill adapted to our concrete environments. There’s a reason why we feel a sense of peace and tranquillity when we visit a forest or an open landscape. It’s where we belong.
The need for change is fuelled by a strong undercurrent of scientific progress and academic discovery, but that can only achieve so much. It is the act of storytelling itself that becomes the best tool for change:
“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
The book is a heavy hitter. Powers creates a huge cast of characters with overlapping stories in order to bring these themes home. It’s a book that is easy to become lost in but is pulled together by its central and unifying motif of ecological concern. It is a marvellous piece of writing though it is undeniably difficult in places. It is challenging and it will make you think, but most importantly it is best described as a book that drastically wants us to consider how important trees are.
We really need them. We can't survive without them.
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Zadie Smith is a fantastic writer, unfortunately though Swing Time is not a fantastic book.
I feel like it is lacking a certain sense of energy and styZadie Smith is a fantastic writer, unfortunately though Swing Time is not a fantastic book.
I feel like it is lacking a certain sense of energy and stylistic flair that is characteristic of her other novels. To put it into perspective, Zadie Smith can write with real power and authority: she can do remarkable things. Swing Time though is tepid, unimaginative and convoluted.
Zadie Smith normally likes to play with the idea of the novel, twisting its conventions to create stories that do not follow typical narrative conventions. They are different. They are new. And by doing such things she pushed the boundaries of what typical storytelling can be, but she does not quite do this alone. In NW she channelled the voices of Joyce and Woolf to create a modern metropolis that echoed with a multitude of multiracial voices that define modern Britain. In On Beauty she channelled the spirit of Forster to provide a critique of identity labels. She used modernist writers to create new modern fiction. And it was brilliant.
However, she is not really doing anything new here nor is she building on the past. Indeed, this does not quite feel like literary fiction of the same calibre because she is not engaging with any new themes or ideas. She has not built on her previous works but has continued to talk about the same things in a less interesting way and far less creative way. Swing Time is by no means a bad book. I consider it a mediocre book written by an incredibly talented writer.
So, I am shamelessly criticising this in direct comparison to her other works because I know she can write better. I have similar feelings towards Murakami’s newer works too. I suppose it would be too much to ask of a writer to be consistently brilliant.
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I enjoyed Autumn immensely because of its wit, intelligence and creative charm.
The novel is inventive, playful and clever. It is a book that weaves tI enjoyed Autumn immensely because of its wit, intelligence and creative charm.
The novel is inventive, playful and clever. It is a book that weaves together ideas and references from a huge number of places, channelling them into a relevant and potent story. The descriptions are masterful in tone and have flourishes of vivid colour, comparable only to the writing of Virginia Woolf. There is also a lot of history that hangs over the book, as a lot of history hangs over the autumn season. There are echoes of Keats and Dickens, of things that have already been said but need to be said again in perhaps a slightly different way.
Words and sentences wash over you in torrents of majestic and palpable prose. It is simple. It is direct. But it is loaded with meaning. And it feels strikingly modernist. It feels like Ali Smith is deliberately pushing the boundaries of storytelling; she attempts to capture the elusive and the vagueness of human experience because there is something that is not quite said or quite established through the work. It even has a dream like quality at times, as memory and the present are intertwined. Whilst she does not quite deconstruct the novel as powerfully as Zadie Smith does in her writing, Ali Smith writes with a same awareness and engagement with early twentieth century writes.
This has been dubbed as the first Brexit novel, though the novel barely touches or engages with it. To reduce it down to such a label is to do the writing here a huge disservice. I do not consider it such. There are far more important things at play here, though I have no doubt that the said label did help the book sell tremendously. For me, it is more of a novel that discusses regret, friendship and the inevitability of death. And it captures much of this through nature imagery, through the different colours of leaves, trees and pages of books. Although it has a melancholy nature, the book is still thoroughly charming because of this.
The most important element here is the creative energy that drives the narrative, and it has been infused with a love of books and ideas. It is passionate. And it is a work that understands and appreciates the importance of the act of reading and, by extension, the act of writing.
I savoured every word.
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Murakami is a master of conjuring up chance encounters; he is a master of making the mundane seem magical, mystical and alluring.
And that is his greatMurakami is a master of conjuring up chance encounters; he is a master of making the mundane seem magical, mystical and alluring.
And that is his greatest strength as a writer; he uses it to lure you in and to tell you an extraordinary story that makes life seem just that little bit more interesting. He creates possibility out of the most basic human connections and conversations. He shows us the randomness of life that give it colour, flavour and excitement. There’s possibility everywhere.
I am not going to talk about the plot because it is not what makes this story so special. The characters are not all that interesting either. For me, it is all about the magical realist lens in which Murakami writes. It makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. And he can do it exceptionally well. In fact, I would go as far as to say I do not know of any other writer who does it quite as well. There is just something about his books. They have a certain unique characteristic that make them distinctively his own, I cannot quite put my finger to it. And they are always totally profound.
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
This quote sums up so much of the main motif of this book and perhaps even life itself. We’re all struggling. We’re all trying to make our way. And this is captured beautifully here.
I must say, I've struggled greatly with Murakami as of late. His recent books Killing Commendatore and Men Without Women have been quite basic. Here, though, the author is the height of his powers. He is totally in control of his craft and it's amongst his finest of works. And it actually makes me want to go back and read the rest of his works because I now remember just how fantastic he can be.
So more Murkami for me in the future.
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“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of th“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
Fight Club is absolutely tragic in its reflection of the real world. I get angry when I read it and annoyed at a world that could cause such a situation. This may be fiction, but it’s full of truth.
The modern world is unfulfilling and depressing. People spend their lives working in call centres or sat behind desks slowly getting more miserable until they become depressed and want to kill themselves. The modern world drives people crazy with its insufferable and suffocating ways. It’s a concrete jungle and not all of us can find happiness amongst the endless grey days of mundanity.
And in a way, Fight Club is a reaction against that. Fighting bare knuckle in the streets is a way of feeling alive in a dead and detached world. It might be painful, but it is something. It’s a feeling, no matter how bad it may be. It’s better than the nothingness that faces these men as they wonder amongst the stones and lights of an insomnia driven emptiness because it is a feeling, a reminder that they are in fact alive. If you’ve ever worked a dead end nine to five job, then you may be able to relate. It can be soul destroying.
“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
This is not a happy book. It possesses no bright spark and like American Psycho it left me feeling thoroughly defeated after reading, and that’s because there is so much truth in these pages. Hard truths. Gut-wrenchingly agonising truths. Truths that might make you question your own existence because they are just so cynical in their viewpoint. It’s all a bit of a mind fuck. And if we’re to talk about the power of words, about how words can affect you and make you perceive something new, then these words certainly are powerful in their terribleness.
The Order of the Day is a concise novel that challenges perceptions of history and time; it's driven by black comedy through which Vuillard demonstratThe Order of the Day is a concise novel that challenges perceptions of history and time; it's driven by black comedy through which Vuillard demonstrates that history is written to fit an agenda, and that agenda is not always to tell the truth.
The Nazi takeover of Austria was not as clean as the media (the Nazi media) told the world at the time. Underneath the warm welcoming the Nazi’s received when they entered the country, was years of political scheming, assassinations and manipulations. Eric Vuillard engages with this; he engages with the idea that history is written by the victor. And at this moment in time, the Nazis were completely victorious, and they said nothing about their systematic conquest.
The British did nothing. Their policy of appeasement helped Hitler’s power growth go unchecked. And it’s easy to criticise this, the novel here is full of sarcasm. Britain’s policy was clearly the wrong choice, but we must remember that we are looking back with historical bias. Hitler was a monster, but the extent of his evil was yet to be revealed. Chamberlain sought peace above all else, and when he signed the Munich agreement (in effect sacrificing Czechoslovakia to the Nazi rule), he thought he was doing the right thing. He believed Hitler’s promises. He trusted in Hitler’s honour. He thought his politicking would stop Hitler’s ambition. We know today that he was a fool to do so, and not to mention heartless, but we know the outcome: hapless Chamberlain did not know what was to come.
I really liked aspects of the novel, and it did make me think about such historical leaders and their blunders. It made me think how different the world could have been if a few key political figures had taken a different action when confronted with Hitler. But, at the root of things, I don’t think this novel does anything new. It is basically a brief and slick re-telling of the start of the second world war with a sarcastic and politically engaged commentary. And the author has clearly done his research; he draws on journals within the narrative, a lot of work has gone into this book. The prose is artsy and very well written; it is engaging and the narrative pushes forward eloquently, but I can’t help but feel that there is something missing.
This is a very small amount of writing, and part of me wishes it continued to narrate the rest of Nazi Germany’s rise and fall. I feel like we have been given just a brief glimpse of one of the key moments in such a rise, but there are also many other significant glimpses that could have been narrated to give a detailed account. I would gladly have read a full novel told like this.
Certainly, it’s better to walk away from a book wishing for more than less, but I feel like this was a bit of a wasted opportunity. More content was needed for this to achieve its ambitions. It also engages with the idea that major business owners drive much of the political agenda, but, again, more of this was needed to illustrate exactly how far this goes.
Overall, it’s an engaging read but entirely forgettable because of its lack of substance – 3.25/5*
I've not got a great deal to say about this one other than it bored me to tears. I just couldn't get into it at all despite restarting it sevDNF - 35%
I've not got a great deal to say about this one other than it bored me to tears. I just couldn't get into it at all despite restarting it several times. It just didn't speak to me on any level. The characters didn't interest me and the plot was tiresome.
Life is far too short for books you don't enjoy....more
This is one of the most important and necessary novels written in the twenty-first century so far. It’s relevant, it’s powerful and it really is neThis is one of the most important and necessary novels written in the twenty-first century so far. It’s relevant, it’s powerful and it really is needed. Go read it!
Margaret Atwood ended the world in Oryx and Crake. She presented a vision of the future that wasn’t too far removed from where the planet is heading. And, in a way, this book is an answer to such environmental catastrophe.
Firstly though, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t really a sequel, it’s told alongside the events of the first book. Atwood presents another vision here: a vision of how we can (or how we would) work towards preventing environmental collapse. It’s the very best of speculative fiction because it plays with real world ideas and fears. There’s nothing in here that is implausible. It’s often marketed as a science fiction novel, but I would not quite call it science fiction because it adds nothing that couldn’t one day be real. And, unlike the harsh scientific solution to world’s problems she delivers in Oryx and Crake, the ideas she discusses here are more compassionate.
The Gardeners are humanity’s hope. They are a radical green group that advocate living in a way far removed from the customs of standard society. Recycling is their religion. Reusing is their faith. They work towards protecting mother earth in all her glory by minimising humanities impact on it. They are a reactionary group, reacting against environmental collapse and a lack of resources that dominated the narrative of Oryx and Crake. They are vegetarians and they live in their own private commune, boycotting consumerism and the pharmaceutical companies that control the population (without them ever being aware of it.)
“By covering such barren rooftops with greenery we are doing our small part in the redemption of God’s creation from the decay and sterility that lies all around us, and feeding ourselves with unpolluted food into the bargain, Some would term our efforts futile, but if all were to follow our example, what a change would be wrought on our beloved Planet!”
They believe “the flood” is coming, a symbolic collapse in which only the pure will survive in the new world after the old one has been destroyed by man’s selfish ways. They have extremely strong beliefs, but they are also practical and are willing to relinquish certain elements of their creed when faced with survivalist choices. They are not entirely bigoted, and their leaders are far cleverer than they initially appear. In such a group, Atwood presents a counterattack on man’s current ways. And when considering the state of the world today, the current environment protests by schools in Northern Europe, the surge in veganism and vegetarianism and an increased interest in maintaining what’s left of the environment, Atwood’s green cult feels very real and, in a way, a possible answer to the problems we are facing.
I feel like a group not unlike these could exist one day. And Atwood really sympathises with their plight and efforts here. It’s a fantastic piece of writing and I’m really intrigued to see exactly what the sequel does.
MaddAddam Trilogy 1. Oryx and Crake - 5 stars 2. The Year of the Flood - 5 stars 3. MaddAddam - 2 stars
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With as much creative energy as Joyce’s Ulysses, and with as much history and depth as Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Bolano’s magnum opus iWith as much creative energy as Joyce’s Ulysses, and with as much history and depth as Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Bolano’s magnum opus is a bold statement against literature itself. However, with such a book comes all the tedium you would expect from Moby Dick. As a result, this book will only be truly great for a small selection of very patient readers.
Now let me unpack that a little. 2666 is a book about masterpieces; it is a book about writing books that don’t quite fit literary conventions. As readers, we like to slot books into nice and neat little categories that help us to understand what the book is. This isn’t one of those books. This is wild and untamed; it’s erratic and random and full of passion and life and death and tedium. 2666 is a book that dares to be different; it’s a book that dares to challenge the literary cannon, and it puts up an incredibly strong fight against normality.
And within it there are moments of real beauty and there are also moments of absolute abject horror. There are also some moments that boarder on the pornographic as the characters are filled with desire because they are so completely detached from the world and everyone it it so they scream out to be loved and to be close to someone, even if it is just for a few hours. It’s a novel that is politically charged and angry. It’s absolutely loaded with themes and motifs and it’s asking to be pulled apart and analysed, but it’s also terribly dull. It’s boring to read. It’s repetitive and it’s detached and it’s cynical and it’s just a real slog.
And there’s the rub: I really don’t think may readers will be able to read this from cover to cover, and those that do will find very little joy within its pages.
It’s not a pleasant book to read. It’s a book that graphically details the rape of 112 women with scrutinising facts. This section of the novel is like a police report, cold and almost like a documentary, as it navigates case after case of brutal murders and rapes. We even learn what type of rape it was and in what fashion it was committed. We learn how many rapists were involved and the quantity of semen left in and on the victim. All in all, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve read and at several points I did question why I was actually bothering to read it. What’s the point in putting yourself through such a painful experience? What is this book giving me?
And this raises another question the novel discusses: why do we read? What are we trying to get out of it? One of the novel’s five sections is a demonstration that we will never truly find the author in the books we read. They are illusive, and any attempts of pursing them will be in vain. Distance is the key. Bolano attempts to alienate the reader, as he frustrates him time and time again with countless character disappearances and a complete lack of narrative closure. It’s certainly not a book that was meant to be comfortable to read or one that takes you on a journey. The characters are flat and never grow. The plot is a mess.
Some critics have called this a feminist texts because of the way it criticises a culture that allows for the rape of women in such a causal way. Some call it political because it criticises a world that allows such atrocities to happen. But I call it an oddity, a book that dares to be different and to say things in a very different way. And I am so torn on my opinion of it, I haven’t struggled to rate a book this much since I read Ulysses (which I left unrated). I want to praise this book, and I also want to forget it's existence.
I suppose three stars will do for this insightful, intelligent and acute novel that left me bored, angry and depressed.
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The last time I read a book with this much narrative confidence, power and authority was back in January when I tackled Midnight’s Children.
It's rareThe last time I read a book with this much narrative confidence, power and authority was back in January when I tackled Midnight’s Children.
It's rare that a book comes with a voice this strong. Like Rushdie’s novel, Smith creates a present that is pervaded by the past. Her characters are very aware of their ancestry, and they really struggle to reconcile with it in the modern world. Are they Indians? Are they British? Are they black or white? Or are they a little bit of everything? Because of their duality, they struggle to find themselves in the modern metropolis. They don’t quite know who they should be, so they cling to and project ideas they are far removed from. And it’s all a little tragic, to see such confusion.
“...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.”
Every character Smith has conjured up here could be someone you’d encounter in real life; they are all very real people and they are faced with some very real problems. However, the issue I had with the novel is that we simply do not stay with them for long enough for them to develop. We glimpse them, nothing more. I’d even hesitate to actually call this a novel; it’s more like four loosely related novellas slapped together with a very small amount of glue to bind them. It’s close on collapsing.
As such, this doesn’t have a plot per say. It’s more like four separate character studies. And it does work to an extent; it captures a large part of the contemporary space, but as a novel it feels fragmented with little to no cohesion. Some sections were better than others, with characters who were more flawed and interesting to read about. To make this a little clearer, I feel like I need to write four seperate reviews in order to talk about his book properly and rate each section differently.
I’m not going to do that, but I hope you get my point; it’s quite a difficult book to talk about because it doesn’t feel like a normal book. Smith followed a similar model in NW but that came together as it captured the city is what trying so hard to evoke whereas this feels very much apart. I can see why many other users on here have chosen not to rate it.
It's a very powerful debut, but I did not enjoy all of it. A mixed bag for me.
Sean Barrs
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