Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The Birthday Party, by Laurent Mauvignier
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
the book group read, January 2024: The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
"The great butlers are by great virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity'."
from Pinterest |
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
"... the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report of on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore ..."
Throughout the novel, the author uses the present tense to not only communicate the ongoing changes that occur in the process, but also the very nowness of the situation, which is one factor in making this book so harrowing, and his examination of the lack of freedom of agency, as he notes here "when caught within such an enormity of forces" is another. And while I will not divulge the ending, which actually flips the story back on the reader, by the time I got there I was absolutely in tears, thinking not just of Eilish but of real-world mothers who have experienced some of the same terrors and who have somehow summoned the courage it must have taken to make the same kind of unbearable decisions, and quite frankly, who have come to a point at which they feel they must gamble everything to protect their families under some of the same conditions.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
A Study for Obedience, by Sarah Bernstein
"with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste..."
Thursday, August 24, 2023
This Other Eden, by Paul Harding
"there would not be a soul left on the island within five years. She'd heard it all before, threats and promises both, threats being far more common than promises, but either way no one had actually set foot on the island to see out their intentions, well-meaning or otherwise."
"no good ever came of being noticed by mainlanders, which always meant being noticed by white people -- plain white, her mother and aunts and cousins called them, to distinguish them from the lighter-skinned Apple islanders..."
children from the Malaga Island schoolhouse -- from Greenhut Galleries |
"As I do with all my novels, everything I'm reading, all the paintings I see, all the music I'm listening to, everything somehow or another gets thrown into the manuscript, in its earliest stages"
but in my own humble opinion, his time spent with Ethan's slowly-growing awareness of the beauty of the natural world and learning how to capture it in his art just went on too too long to the point where I actually lost interest, wanting to get back to the main throes of the story. I wasn't a huge fan of the biblical allusions/references either -- sometimes they felt a little strained as well as heavy handed. But those are my particular niggles, and to each his/her own.
I probably wouldn't have bought this book had it not appeared as part of the Booker dozen, but in the long run, and for many reasons, I'm glad I did.
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Hungry Ghosts, by Kevin Jared Hosein
"scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts."
"the dogma of a new world, howling and preaching steel and diesel and rayon and vinyl and gypsum and triple-glazed glass,"
"Moths see light and fly to it... Always searching for the border between deep darkness and the billows of the moon. The moonlight to them is hope. But to a moth, there are many things that resemble moonlight. It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed."
Eventually it becomes very clear that Hema is not the only ghost that haunts these people; there are many others with their own unfulfilled and unfulfillable appetites that ultimately lead them into despair. In the bigger scheme of things though, it's the ghosts of Trinidad's colonial past that are the most haunting of all. "Behold hell" indeed.
Once again, just a barebones look at a fine novel; if I wasn't so behind lifewise I could talk about this book forever. I absolutely loved Hungry Ghosts mainly because of the author's original approach in exploring the history of his homeland and his heritage. While the novel is often brutally violent and emotionally difficult to read, the author's prose is just beautiful, offering readers the sensation that they are there in that time as a witness to a slice of Trinidad's past. Definitely highly recommended -- I will read whatever this author has to offer in the future.
Just wow.
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Cursed Bread, by Sophie Mackintosh
"In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. There are many theories regarding the source of this catastrophe. None have ever been proved."