You’ll have to pardon the poor pun of the blog title, but I am well aware it’s been a while since I last posted.  However I have recently read The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver recent winner of the Orange Prize.  I learned a few things from it and one was what a “Lacuna” is.  I had mistakenly thought it was some special accent for the Spanish language, but no, turns out it is a gap or missing part in a body of work, or a hollow space by origin and in secondary meaning of some anatomical bone.  I also learned a good deal about Trotsky’s exile from Russia and the events leading up to his demise.  This becomes highly relevant in the light of later developments in this novel, when the infamous period of McCarthyism is detailed.  Although this is fascinating I did not find this work as engaging as “ The Poisonwood Bible” which I remember as quite the page turner and more dramatic.  I wonder if anyopne could have guessed the recent revelations in the media about the fact that apparently McArthy was somehow RIGHT about the level of Russian espionage though?

I did not mean to say the Lacuna is undramatic, but perhaps characters are dwelt on a litle more and there is definitely something extremely introspective about the protagonist.  I cannot help feeling this is reflected in the character of the book as a whole, which is highly introverted and turns in upon itself as it progresses and the second narrator is revealed.  The whole American section of the work (broadly speaking the second half) made me pine for the earlier, “Mexican” chapters.  I was quite taken by the portrayal of a “quiet” homosexual who even seems to only gradually acknowledge his own sexuality, although it is made quite clear to us as it emerges.  I missed his mother following her early demise and his father was never very present either in his life nor in this novel.  Instead our hero turns to diaries and to writing for his salvation - yet I never found the portrayal of this convincing nor was I convined that his writing actually carried any literary merit.

I should dearly like to know if Ms Kingsolvers attitude and possesiveness and, dare I say it, neuriotic attitudes towards manuscripts is the model on which she drew for the fictional character.

This is not the only work I read during my abstinence from the blog though, and I do feel I enjoyed a much shorter work I read for the library reading group a good deal more.  Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark” was a very gripping account of some six hours from midnight until daybreak in Japan.  During this time a mysteriously narcoleptioc girls sleeps and there are fictional scenes involving a Television which can be quite distrubing (at least to me) if one engages with them fully.  But this is just a sub-plot and the main action revolves around a student jazz player and the “sleeping beauty’s” sister.  They are thrown together in the plot by seeming chance when he finds a late night diner full and joins her at a table.  Neither had any plans to sleep and their crossing of paths is the main plot sequence.  He offers her services to translate for a victim of a brutal attack in a “love hotel” and this draws her in to a strange sequence where we see a very disturbed man portrayed also and hints of gangland violence which actually provide a macarbre humour with a mobile phone at some point.

It is definitely Harukami  near his best, reminiscent of some of his short stories - though this definitely qualifies as a novel, albeit a short one.  Brevity is never a problem with this author though as he draws together plot lines and enigmas and then leaves a wonderfully enigmatic and open ending to the work.

I also learned belatedly that Harukami came quite late in life to writing and before that ran a jazz bar.  There is a scene that haunted me where they enter a jazz bar around one or two in the morning and the proprietor has a few lines , one about records (vinyl) and not rushing because the night time has a special quality of time and demands that you do things at a different pace.  I could not help wondering how much the author was drawing on his own experience running a bar and if the character was at all based upon himself.

Tghe third book I read entirely was “ White Tiger” and I feel this post is long enough so may blog about that in my next entry, hopefully without too much of a gap this time!

This book by Paul Torday was the choice of reading group for May.  As I mentioned in my last post it was also one of the three books I took with me on holiday last week and in fact the only of the three which I finished.  There was a definite reason for this, which is that I not only took my library paperback, but also a five CD audio book of the same volume (unabridged).

I would definitely now say that having the book read to me did not detract from the reading, in fact in places it added something. On occasion I switched between reading the book on paper and listening to it and this felt quite seamless.  I had wondered if it would bother me to hear the lines of dialogue spoken rather than imagining the voices of the characters, but I had no problem with this.  There is a point where a radio interview is held, and having the voice of Andrew Marr as a radio four presenter definitely felt like a bonus.  I know audio books are expensive, but I was lucky because a friend already had this so I did not have to buy a copy.  It made the drive pass a lot more pleasantly and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

As for the actual book, well I would recommend it as a decent holiday read, but it is not great literature.  That does not mean the story is without it’s merits though, I loved the observations on Arab culture although perhaps they were a little stereotypical.  More interesting was the exploration of politics and civil service.  This was very believable to me and quite entertaining.  The other entertainment was slightly unsavoury, in the form of an exemplary failing marriage which was exploited a little for comic effect I feel.

Lastly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a little for the keen fisherman here, although how authentic it is I cannot say.  It certainly made me imagine I could enjoy donning waders and fishing a stream in Scotland some day, but I think I shall save that for a future holiday!

I think there really should be a post on my blog that discusses Holiday reading and books.  In fact there ought to be one whenever I take a holiday.  The last was probably for going to Wales, but this was only a weekend and Dylan Thomas remained untouched!

This time it is a week and it is in Northumbria.  Reading seems a more likely proposition.  My Ereader is loaded with “White Tiger” which is this months choice for the Brixton urban bookgroup.  And I have “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”  on load from my library which is the choice of the reading group there this month.  I also have the unabridged audio book of the same work for the car journey, which I am almost certain we shall manage to fit in since the drive is over six hours long, from London to Northumbria.

That gives the context, and I shall be especially interested to compare my experience of the three media forms, audio, Ereader, and paper.  I shall either make additional posts or edit and expand this one to give an update, assuming I am online whilst on holiday.  Should I be offline the posts will appear on my return, in June!

Well - for once a post which is not directly a book review as such.  I’m a little miffed because my sidebar choice to say what I am reading at the moment has suddenly decided to throw strange MySQL database errors when I try to update it,… so although it is correct that I am currently reading Proust (and only the first volume at that, goodness knows when if ever this will be completed, a few years at least!) similarly the diaries of a justified sinner is somehow languishing on my E-reader mid-read.  In fact my “active” current reading is “Mother’s Milk” by Edward St Aubyn - more of which in the next post I make after next months reading group at the library.

Which brings me to the another sticky subject I am grappling with, that of accessibility and my blog.  Chyrp RC2 has been released as a proper Version 2 since I first set up this blog, and with it comes another “add in module” called Readernaut which (hopefully) will work and allow me to reinstate the current reading feature in my sidebar.  Also since the inception of the blog I have met and fallen in love with a wonderful partially sighted woman.  So it would please me to make the blog work better as a fully accessible site, which I realise is far from the case.  And to complicate matters the geeky friend who hosts my blog has moved servers.  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am planning a revamp of the site design and so forth, hopefully transferring all of the content in tact also.  This was a traumatic vent involving almost a week downtime and some shakiness last time.  Hopefully it will go more smoothly this time.  Memo to self - remember to implement the “readmore” link feature and ensure it is accessible with blog redesign.

One of my big hopes is that with the redesign here might be more comments. I know from my own blog reading that a blog does not really “come alive” without comments. Whilst I am aware the traffic is very low I also know I have made posting a comment as easy as I possibly can so I cannot help being a bit miffed at the lack of them. Ok end of pity party. One thing I really know is that bleating on about wanting comments seriously does not invite or encourage them!

Anyway, before that I am moving house and the desk on which the computer will sit to do this wondrous work is yet to be made even - plus I am slated to redesign the website for my local quaker meeting… so I reckon I’ll be lucky to achieve these changes this year however much I am itching to get ahead with them and indulge in a little geekout fest all of mine own.  Second memo to self - must prune my blogroll and check it references current sites and ones I can cope with keeping up on too!  OOOooh did I mention in my blog that Dovergrey Reader got a mention on “Front Row” on BBC Radio Four?  Well I have now… and apparently she is very widely read and respected by publishers, no less!  I felt a strange mix of respect, envy, and rubbing shoulders with celebrity to hear this.  More power to her blog I say!

And to conclude on a more literary note, last night I heard that Mark Haddon has apparently written a play on the subject of bipolar disorder which I may well be interested to see.  I shall actually be somewhat prejudiced when I do though, for two or three reasons.  The main one is that I loathed his follow up to “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” and despite trawling through my blog archive (embarrassing days when it was full of drivel with no focus on literature!) I cannot find reference to it.  I know we did it for the library reading group and I vaguely remember reasons I disliked the book, which I would warn the squeamish to steer well clear of because there is a gratuitously grating description of someone piercing themselves for reasons that escape me.  Anyway life’s too short to review it now and I am losing the point(s).  The second is that although I liked his most successful work I am not at all sure it was especially accurate in offering any insight into Aspergers (although it may have had some points I think it did not get across how Aspergers has such a very broad spectrum at all and made it seem more disabling than it truly is).  Which brings me to my greatest misgiving, which is that I myself live with “bipolar light” as Stephen Fry describes it.  So if I reckon he did a poor job of portraying Aspergers I’ll be the most critical person and arguably qualified to judge how he manages as a playwright.  Who knows, we may yet have another post here under the “drama” category!

Three books in one bog entry… for me there is one common theme to them too, which is race and the way it is approached in literature.  I should almost like to include Coetze’s “Friday” here, but I think that work deserves consideration alone and in any case four wouuld be, I think, a book too far!

“Home” is a sequel or follow up to “Gilead” which was highly successful for Marilyn Robinson and the January choice of my reading group.  Although I did not make it to the reading group in February it did get to feature on their new blog and I have made a comment there, one which I expect will stand alone since this book group are definitely a fan of the printed page a proper meeting.  There are plenty of other online reading communities and active blogs out there, some in the blogroll to the right.  But back to “Home” and as you will have seen if you clicked through to my comment there is one thing I was left puzzled by, which likely would not have happened to me had I started reading the works with the highly acclaimed “Gilead”.  I had formed the impression the family at the centre of the narrative were black, African Americans to be exact.  It is largely this which gives the common thread to this post so perhaps I stretched the connection.

Gilead is the name of the small, rural Idaho town where the Broughton family home is.  They are a large family and the narrative is told by the youngest daughter who returns home to care for the aging patriarch of the family.  There is a touching portrayal of the return of one of her brothers, perhaps the black sheep of the family.  What I liked best was the exploration of things they shared despite being obviously quite different siblings with different life paths.  The simple fact they had shared the same family allowed them to make connnections they would never have managed as people who were not related.  This was actually the only hopeful part in a rather bleak novel, but only bleak in a realistic sense.  There was plenty touching and encouraging and very beautifully portrayed within that.

Ms Robinson has left herself plenty of scope for another sequel exploring how life goes on for Rosalind, the youngest in my opinion.  Everything we learn about Jack is presented obliquely and in a shadey manner which is a cunning way to paint him since this is the sort of character he is.  A drifter and destined to leave the novel as he arrives, from the street with not a penny to his name and a drink problem that haunts him along with a past relationship.  It was this relationship that finally meant i Had to accept this fammily is white and not black, because Della is the daughter of another minister and definitely coloured.  I did get a little tired of the way Jack’s father tended to dominate the novel, but perhaps that was a reflection of Jack’s life too in that he always felt he had not done enough and was destined not to make his father proud of him.  One could make an interesting criticism of the novel exploring the question of predestination.

You could not say the same of “ Mudbound” the firstl novel by Hillary Jordan which is very directly concerned with the quesiton of race in the American past, but also has a strong element of family drama and patriarchy.  This time the patriarchy is rather less benevolent, althought the elder son of the family whom our “heroine” narrator marries does present a more positive image, perhaps.

Set between the wars in the deep South of America this has many historical scenes directly concerning race - I should love to know if the auther os black and if not I am impressed by her research an ability to portray things convincingly fromt he point of view of Ronson and his family.  She did seem to me to have a very convincing way of speaking from a male viewpoint and understanding his friendship with the younger brother.  I commonly admire it when a male author can convincingly write from a female viewpoint, so here is a counterpoint for a woman author.

Last but not least Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman is a ficitional work of a very real hisorical event.  The reading group by large had not heard of the eventpersonally I was also surprised that it has faded from modern consciousness.  So as a work that reminds one of the historical sweep of the case and the historical background perhaps this book has some merit.  But as a work novel in it’s own right I found it extremely lacklustre, the characters felt very thin, almost to the extent of being cardboard cutouts.  We are only really presented with two protagonists, both female.  Everyone else is a walk on character and it seemed to me there were few and far between strong male roles here, which somehow seemed a lack when the tragedy of Scottsboro is the prejudice and biggotry leading to the wrongful arrest of nine black men whose lives were effectively ended thereafter.  I found myself far more interested in how events may have affected those men and frustrated by the way the novel would not go there.

If you are interested in the journalistic process and dilemmas it throws up then perhaps this book my hold more for you, since the leading lady is presented almost solely in the light of what was no doubt quite a pioneering career for a woman in those times as she works for a left wing journal covering events.  The role of the communist party is mildly interesting too and no doubt informed somewhat by the figure of Ruby Bates who seems really rather a stereotype of underclass suffering an dmakes me feel the book is almost parodying the liberal feelings of our protagonist.

All in all I did not really enjoy it, although the story if made somewhat compelling.  Others might get more form it though and no doubt it suffered coming after other books all of which had involved race to some degree….

I think I have also learned not to break off a posting in the midst of writing it (these last four paragraphs were written some days after the main substance).  I shall try to avoid doing that in future and hope this posting has not suffered as a result.

I approached this book, the last months for my library book group, with eager anticipation.  Then I attended the group before getting through more than a couple dozen pages, and listened to the book be roundly criticised.  And then I read the rest of the book.  So it is interesting to me how I now react to the book.

One of the reasons I was eager to read the book was simply what I think is a great title.  I am fairly convinced the title alone is a large part of the reason for th ebooks apparent success.  The other reason is that one of the main subjects in this fictional account is the figure of Nicola Tesla.  Throughtout my youth my father and a friend were often fiddling with a Tesla coil in the basement and placing razor blades in the middle of pyramids to sharpen them, and other such weirdly trendy things in the zeitgeist of the times.  So I was eager to find out more.

The book is written with some engaging language, in places the descriptive prose is positively poetic.  The research seems to be fairly sound, and I have to admit I was quite well engaged with the New York of the times the novel is concerned with, primarily around the thirties and forties one imagines.  However the main “meat” at the centre of the novel promises much but fails to deliver anything one can truly get ones teeth into.  Someone at the reading group said I may as well ready the first thirty pages and the last thirty, I would not be missing much.  I could not take this advice, but looking back over the book I can see just what he meant!

The other problem is that one is unsure how accurate the impression one gains of Nicola Tesla is.  Granted, Ms Hunt is creating a fictional character, but there are so very many direct quotes and facts which she has drawn on and placed within the work that I think it is flawed if it does not try to faithfully recreate at least the author’s impression of the character.  And do so without adding a mish mash of fiction to muddy the waters.  Now the only test of this is to research oneself - and I have not yet done so, but if I have time intend to, look into the life of Mr Tesla.  In this case there is plentiful material to draw on.  Someone from the book group had looked into his own autobiographical volumes and I imagine they could be fascinating.  There was one aspect I seriously enjoyed and which the reading group surprisingly overlooked; this was the description of a newly opened and extensive public library in New York.  If I ever get to visit New York I should like to trackthis building down and visit it (assuming it is based in fact and still exists).  I enjoyed the use of this setting thorougly and thought it was quite cleverly deployed, far more so than the New Yorker Hotel which I became bored by.  Also after looking the hotel up in Wikipedia I do believe I actually stayed there when visiting New York in the ninetties and I am sorry to say it had none of the features on display that are so well portrayed in the novel. Perhaps it says something that I found the locations more engaging than most of the characters!

Having said all this there is something the book tries to do which I think is what it was intended to be about.  I am not sure I would get it from the first and last thirty pages.  I believe the intense relationship between a father and a daughter is sketched in a little after the opening of the novel.  Then in concluding the prose seems to shift up a gear as the daughter deals with the death of her father and her future after the loss.  I do believe this is what Samantha Hunt might have taken as the central theme, but then again it could have been a love triangle which seems to be sketched in (and how much truth in that?), it could have been a romance (one is always tantalisingly offered but not really portrayed in the novel), it had many possibilities but ultimately tried to approach all of them and therein lies the failure in my opinion.

Still, great title it must be said! I wonder if the title helped garner the Orange prize nomination and other awards?  Somehow I suspect contacts and networking are everything there and the title largely incidental…  By the way I like the openning page of her website linked above - worth a click, though I suspect completely opaque from an accessibility viewpoint.

One could be forgiven for thinking that this book might fall into the Dan Brown/Da Vinci code “genre” to go by the title, but you’d be wrong.  There is a narrative device of two journals which alternate and one of these is necessarily hidden away and secret.  Perhaps secret is the wrong word, but there is a big “secret” which is only revealed towards the end of the book.  It is hard for me to talk about plot specifics without revealing this secret without “spoiling” the plot.

I was really quite taken with the way this book covers the sweep of an entire century, yet does so in a very engaging way by literally covering the life story of a woman from the last century to this.  All this in the context of Ireland.  There always seem to be questions I am left asking myself after reading a book, and I think the more of them I have usually is a pretty reliable indicator as to how good the book is or at least how much it engaged me.

For this book one question was if Sebastian Barry were Irish and another was whether he started the book with the ending in mind and some sort of plot outline.  For the former a quick google has revealed that he was Dublin born and is indeed Irish, as I expected since the book is immersed in Irish culture and history which was one of the reasons I so enjoyed it.  This also enabled me to learn a lot of history and background both of the troubles and of the recent revelations of abuse cases endemic in Ireland and a few other island nations (such as the island of Jersey where a residential childrens’ facility apparently had many many historic abuse cases).

As to where he started his planning of the book - well Google is less revealing of course and we can likely only speculate.

But this does lead me to the last thing I am curious about, which is how many readers are surprised by the final “twist” to the plot.  As the interleaving narratives progress we are left wondering if they will overlap in any other way than their perspectives on Roseanne’s life (it is told in the first person from the beginning and in third person from the end).  The third person is not the narrator per se, but another character in the book.  I found this plot device immensely satisfying and it gave Mr Barry a lot of opportunity to show what a fine writer he is.

To conclude - thoroughly recommended!  And please please do leave a comment to let me know if you were totally surprised as you finished the book or if you, like me, had intimations as to what was to be revealed before it was!

Over my holidays I took quite a few books with me, the majority on my ereader and two in paperback format.  I finished one of the paperbacks and found, as usual, that I was not going to get much further with Proust on my ereader!  Since the other paperback was not so appealing it was really nice that my uncle lent me a copy of “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg.  I’m still reading this, but it is the main subject of the posting.

Before I start though let me just say a little about the book I finished reading.  There would have been an earlier post for this, but i was on holiday from being online as well as from London!  I had been under the impression that I was reading a first novel when i started “The Savage Garden” by Mark Mills but at book group I learned this was his second novel.  It did not really show as such to me.  I found it gauche and the inclusion of gratuitous and vaguely salacious sex scenes did not improve matters.  A contrived plot sees a young graduate in Tuscany, where he shows us how attractive and modest he is when the local women seem to flock around him and swoon.  Methinks the author is playing with his own identification with the main chracter.  The writing is equallty inept in the florid use of analogies and similies - as one member of the reading group pointed out, describing the touch of a woman’s thigh as “dough like” is not really a fabulous idea from the female point of view!  It did however work as a piece of holiday reading, one can flip through and get it read fast enough without troubling oneself that life is too short to read such things.  Think of it as reading pap to relax from more enjoyable and worthwhile reading.

When it comes to the subject of my posting though, I need to turn to the first book I mentioned above.  As you can clearly see from Wikipedia the author is a truly remarkable man!  I cannot quite believe that he started out in life as a shepherd and only in adult life became a more or less self educated author.  More than that, he managed to write a work that has come to feature as a classic work with a particular appeal as being of great historical interest.  It is entirely possible that this may attract a contemporary audience, if it is true that Ian Rankin is collaborating on a screenplay as my uncle tells me.

I cannot complete my opinions of the work yet, given that I am still reading it, but already I know that it appeals to me on two levels, both as a novel in it’s own right and as a work of great historical interest.  Perhaps it could be compared with something like “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins as an exciting read.  Of course the Wilkie Collins work has been adapted for stage and it appears Hoggs may make it to screen, one of the reasons the comparison sprang to mind.  If I have the time and given that I was on holiday in Edinburgh the work also appeals to me as a historical sourse informing me about Scottish History and the reformation.

There is yet one more level on which I enjoy the work though!  It deals with the idea that a person can act in the name of Religion and perpetrate acts which are anything but religious.  In this case Fratricide, marital rap, and more all feature!  But the character believes he is acting in accord with “God’s will” and this absolves him of personal moral responsibility.  Could this arguement not equally be applied in modern times as one we need to consider in facing the challenge of terrorism and so forth?

But to come back to the title subject - please consider this edition of the work, from Edinburgh University Press if you have any plans to buy it.  Although the original text is standard (and readily available online and in numerous paper editions) a good deal of the pleasure in this work is the considerable body of historical notes and research around the book and it’s author.  Incidentally there is a preview of the work at Google Books and the link above takes you there..

This is not the only reason to get a particular edition, there remain one or two more.  Perhaps the cover picture can be extremely annoying or misleading.  If you are bothered by such trivia then it can be a reason!  On the other hand I have another work (James Joyce’s Ullyses) where I expressly chose the edition I bought because it actually has a different text, one agreed as authentic after considerable study.

So these are the reasons I think the choice of an edition of a work really matters!  I wonder what YOU think?  Feel free to add comments!