Cricket. The mysterious game, as English as fish and chips and the Queen and bad weather. All us foreigners ever learn about the game is that it takes a long time and nobody really understands the rules, which doesn't seem to stop the English upper class from having a go at it. But nobody understands the upper class either, so it makes perfect sense.
Still it took me, a most unlikely candidate, about half a day to get hopelessly addicted to cricket. Not even stints at football and tennis madness in my teens had prepared me for the overwhelming love I would feel for the game. Even my Aussie mentors shook their heads in disbelief when I spent entire days holed up in a draughty basement glued to the telly, after which I would grab any available person to watch me bowl until my arms went numb in the park opposite.
So when Michael Simkins describes his love affair in Fatty Batter: How cricket saved my life (then ruined it), it makes me laugh because I know it's all true. Michael gets the cricket bug when he's eleven and overweight, and nothing stops him from watching, playing and imagining cricket every single minute of his life. I've read a few humorous cricket biographies, but this one I loved because it shows the debilitating gap between love of the game and actual ability to play. Because when you love cricket, you want to play cricket. And if you're like me and Michael here, you'll realise sooner rather than later that it's quite hard. My career has been dormant since the infamous fast-ball-in-kidney incident in 2006, but then I'm not the one with the cricket memoir. Michael Simkins persevered and formed his own team, the adventures of which he describes in the second part of his book. It's hysterical in places, and a jolly good read. I suppose if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find the annoying bit of the game, which is the fact that even today's gentlemen players will always prefer to play with their lawyer, actor and generally middle-class friends in a middle-class setting while frowning upon Saturday leagues full of unappreciative oiks. Yes, cricket still seems pretty much a class thing, but then the novel never claims to analyse the game's social status. It's merely immensely entertaining and a comfort read for the similarly afflicted: However madly in love with the game you are, however annoyed your family and few friends outside the cricket world are, you're not alone, my friend. I'm with you.
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Ruth Rendell: Portobello
It's good to see that Ruth Rendell is still writing a book a year, and with this one, it's good to see her back in top form. I have read pretty much every novel she's ever written, and went from dismissing them as guilty crime reads to liking them a lot for the sake of their settings, rather than the actual crime. I freely admit that The Keys to the Street is one of my all-time favourite books.
Her latest offering, Portobello is set in and around - guess what - Portobello Road in London, famous for its market stalls and shops, and close to Notting Hill, famous for, you know, and posh houses. Here, in true Rendell fashion, the lives of a handful of people from all walks of life meet and change. There's Eugene Wren, a wealthy art dealer with an unlikely addiction, who finds a bundle of money and decides to return it to its rightful owner. This owner, Joel, is quickly found, but a small-time criminal called Lance is trying to get his hands on it as well. While Eugene is trying to come to grips with his addiction (you'll laugh), Joel's life unfolds before the eyes of Eugene's fiancee Ella, while Lance is still trying to find ways to come into money. And people die, of course, but it's no detective story at all. Rendell doesn't need that anymore; her readers have learned to be completely satisfied with her storytelling, which at its best plays with her characters' fates so artfully that you turn the pages with a small gasp of frustration. They're putty in her hands, and if she doesn't want to save them, no-one will. In a way, the fact that there's nobody to solve those crimes is disappointing and could be a let down for first-time readers. But for years it has worked so well that I don't even notice it anymore. What counts is Rendell's evocation of London life in all its facets. I'm not a big fan of London anymore, but by god, a few years ago this novel would have single-bookedly made me go to Portobello Road and take it all in. (For the uninitiated, I'd recommend The Keys to the Street though.)
While not a novel that will stay with you for days, Portobello is a good read that will make you appreciate London and Rendell's writing. Having read a lot of her books over the last years, I have come to grow a bit weary of a few of Rendell's narrative ruses though. There's a line of contemporary markers (the mention of the smoking ban for instance) that serve to firmly place the novel in time but get a bit obvious towards the end. Also, the big twist is missing, the last chapters don't really lead anywhere exciting. Still, better than most.
Her latest offering, Portobello is set in and around - guess what - Portobello Road in London, famous for its market stalls and shops, and close to Notting Hill, famous for, you know, and posh houses. Here, in true Rendell fashion, the lives of a handful of people from all walks of life meet and change. There's Eugene Wren, a wealthy art dealer with an unlikely addiction, who finds a bundle of money and decides to return it to its rightful owner. This owner, Joel, is quickly found, but a small-time criminal called Lance is trying to get his hands on it as well. While Eugene is trying to come to grips with his addiction (you'll laugh), Joel's life unfolds before the eyes of Eugene's fiancee Ella, while Lance is still trying to find ways to come into money. And people die, of course, but it's no detective story at all. Rendell doesn't need that anymore; her readers have learned to be completely satisfied with her storytelling, which at its best plays with her characters' fates so artfully that you turn the pages with a small gasp of frustration. They're putty in her hands, and if she doesn't want to save them, no-one will. In a way, the fact that there's nobody to solve those crimes is disappointing and could be a let down for first-time readers. But for years it has worked so well that I don't even notice it anymore. What counts is Rendell's evocation of London life in all its facets. I'm not a big fan of London anymore, but by god, a few years ago this novel would have single-bookedly made me go to Portobello Road and take it all in. (For the uninitiated, I'd recommend The Keys to the Street though.)
While not a novel that will stay with you for days, Portobello is a good read that will make you appreciate London and Rendell's writing. Having read a lot of her books over the last years, I have come to grow a bit weary of a few of Rendell's narrative ruses though. There's a line of contemporary markers (the mention of the smoking ban for instance) that serve to firmly place the novel in time but get a bit obvious towards the end. Also, the big twist is missing, the last chapters don't really lead anywhere exciting. Still, better than most.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Scaaaary... not.
My husband listens to Radio 4 all day, and although he never reads their books of the week, he often buys them for me if he thinks I might be interested. It's the reason I married him, actually. Well, that and a few minor things.
Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry isn't a book I would have picked for myself. I never read or watched The Time Traveler's Wife, purely because the title sounds ridiculous, but faced with another token of love (I'll stop now, promise), I started reading. He said it was going to be eerie.
Well, it wasn't. It is a ghost story, but a weird one. I didn't dislike it as such, but there were several things that bugged me, and I'm a terribly biased person when it comes to literature - I find it hard to get over an initial phase of unease. First of all, the story is set in and around Highgate Cemetary in London. That's fine, I like cemetaries and am a sucker for anything Victorian. Robert, one of the main characters, works as a guide in Highgate and is writing his thesis about it. He lives next to the cemetary. There are also ghosts. I get it. But still, the connection that the novel's protagonists have with the cemetary never transferred itself to me. It could have been melancholy and all-pervading, but it wasn't. The same applies to London. It never featured as the towering background that might have been intended, the novel was simply not long enough for that.
As it happens, the story is quite easy to tell: Elspeth, herself a twin, dies and leaves her flat to her sister's twins. Bored and without a purpose in life, they come to London from the United States and move into a house they share with Robert, Elspeth's lover, and Martin, his OCD friend. Soon the twins get close to one neighbour each, and it turns out that Elspeth is in fact a ghost hovering around her own appartment. When one of the twins decides she has had enough of her sister, she asks Elspeth's ghost to make her one. Yes, really. It all goes terribly wrong, of course.
Now, I have a problem with ghost stories written in a light novel tone. If you're not meant to actually believe in what is going on, you wonder what the point is. Because, thinking about it for a few minutes, what is the point in inventing a world that is pretty much normal apart from the fact that ghosts can randomly make you drop dead? It's not part of a big fantasy world where we can expect follow-ups every year, so what is it? I didn't invest a lot of thought in it, though, and the whole thing really only bugged in the way that Niffenegger's little oh-so-clever contemporary culture namechecks did. She mentions David Tennant. Ha. And Amazon sales rankings. It's the little things that annoyed me a little, and made the novel a forgettable one.
P.S.: Oh, I almost forgot my favourite bug, which is the blurb praising the author as "an exceptionally creative writer". It made me hate her before I even started the book. And now I'll be quiet and objective again.
Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry isn't a book I would have picked for myself. I never read or watched The Time Traveler's Wife, purely because the title sounds ridiculous, but faced with another token of love (I'll stop now, promise), I started reading. He said it was going to be eerie.
Well, it wasn't. It is a ghost story, but a weird one. I didn't dislike it as such, but there were several things that bugged me, and I'm a terribly biased person when it comes to literature - I find it hard to get over an initial phase of unease. First of all, the story is set in and around Highgate Cemetary in London. That's fine, I like cemetaries and am a sucker for anything Victorian. Robert, one of the main characters, works as a guide in Highgate and is writing his thesis about it. He lives next to the cemetary. There are also ghosts. I get it. But still, the connection that the novel's protagonists have with the cemetary never transferred itself to me. It could have been melancholy and all-pervading, but it wasn't. The same applies to London. It never featured as the towering background that might have been intended, the novel was simply not long enough for that.
As it happens, the story is quite easy to tell: Elspeth, herself a twin, dies and leaves her flat to her sister's twins. Bored and without a purpose in life, they come to London from the United States and move into a house they share with Robert, Elspeth's lover, and Martin, his OCD friend. Soon the twins get close to one neighbour each, and it turns out that Elspeth is in fact a ghost hovering around her own appartment. When one of the twins decides she has had enough of her sister, she asks Elspeth's ghost to make her one. Yes, really. It all goes terribly wrong, of course.
Now, I have a problem with ghost stories written in a light novel tone. If you're not meant to actually believe in what is going on, you wonder what the point is. Because, thinking about it for a few minutes, what is the point in inventing a world that is pretty much normal apart from the fact that ghosts can randomly make you drop dead? It's not part of a big fantasy world where we can expect follow-ups every year, so what is it? I didn't invest a lot of thought in it, though, and the whole thing really only bugged in the way that Niffenegger's little oh-so-clever contemporary culture namechecks did. She mentions David Tennant. Ha. And Amazon sales rankings. It's the little things that annoyed me a little, and made the novel a forgettable one.
P.S.: Oh, I almost forgot my favourite bug, which is the blurb praising the author as "an exceptionally creative writer". It made me hate her before I even started the book. And now I'll be quiet and objective again.
Thursday, 31 December 2009
Wrapping up 2009
Not only did I win NaNoWriMo, I also reached my personal goal of reading 50 books this year! And it does make me feel good about myself in the face of not having a proper, non-child-rearing job. But most importantly, I read some really good books. I loved the ones I should have read ages ago, developed an interest in war literature and discovered new loves. Nawww.
Seriously though, Birdsong is a fantastic book, and I'm not just saying that because I finished it earlier today. Also, read The Woman in White, everyone, for sheer entertainment value. And get yourselves a Wodehouse collection. Happy New Year!
Seriously though, Birdsong is a fantastic book, and I'm not just saying that because I finished it earlier today. Also, read The Woman in White, everyone, for sheer entertainment value. And get yourselves a Wodehouse collection. Happy New Year!
Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong
In keeping with what seems to have been this year's theme, I picked yet another book about the Great War, and this time I'll do my best to stay away from the empty phrases and musings about the use of another war novel. Not because Birdsong purports to have any answers, but because it asks the right questions.
Set in France between 1910 and 1918, it tells the story of Stephen Wraysford, an orphaned young man without ties to his British home country. Sent by his employer to find out about the textile trade in France, he gets entangled with the lives of his hosts and leaves them in disgrace, running away with Isabelle, the mistress of the house. What could have been a period romance ends abruptly when Isabelle leaves Stephen. The reader is then transported to the trenches of Flanders, catching up with a changed, disillusioned Stephen in 1916.
What follows is one of the most harrowing reads I have ever come across. The tone of the novel is set somewhere between distanced description and individual experience of the unimaginable horror of the war. Stephen sees almost his entire platoon die in the course of the first day of the battle of the Somme, and the reader struggles with him to comprehend the scale and reason of it. Neither Stephen nor any narrator's voice ever attempt to understand how the war changed the human experience, simply because it's not possible. If not even the actors themselves are able to come to terms with what they have seen and done, how could anybody make such a claim? The (in my opinion not very successful) introduction of a second level of the story, set in 1978, deals with the attempts of Stephen's granddaughter to trace his life. Her inablity to comprehend mirrors the reader's.
But reading Birdsong, I had the impression of doing something important simply by being told and not forgetting. And it really doesn't matter that my great-grandfather fought on the other side. What matters is that he came home alive but changed beyond recognition, suffering from shell shock, never for the rest of his life forgetting the war, and losing his firstborn in another war only twenty-five years later. By remembering this, people like me are doing the only thing they can in the face of the unimaginable. The reality of it never made it beyond the trenches.
No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.
When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.
We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.
We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.
Set in France between 1910 and 1918, it tells the story of Stephen Wraysford, an orphaned young man without ties to his British home country. Sent by his employer to find out about the textile trade in France, he gets entangled with the lives of his hosts and leaves them in disgrace, running away with Isabelle, the mistress of the house. What could have been a period romance ends abruptly when Isabelle leaves Stephen. The reader is then transported to the trenches of Flanders, catching up with a changed, disillusioned Stephen in 1916.
What follows is one of the most harrowing reads I have ever come across. The tone of the novel is set somewhere between distanced description and individual experience of the unimaginable horror of the war. Stephen sees almost his entire platoon die in the course of the first day of the battle of the Somme, and the reader struggles with him to comprehend the scale and reason of it. Neither Stephen nor any narrator's voice ever attempt to understand how the war changed the human experience, simply because it's not possible. If not even the actors themselves are able to come to terms with what they have seen and done, how could anybody make such a claim? The (in my opinion not very successful) introduction of a second level of the story, set in 1978, deals with the attempts of Stephen's granddaughter to trace his life. Her inablity to comprehend mirrors the reader's.
But reading Birdsong, I had the impression of doing something important simply by being told and not forgetting. And it really doesn't matter that my great-grandfather fought on the other side. What matters is that he came home alive but changed beyond recognition, suffering from shell shock, never for the rest of his life forgetting the war, and losing his firstborn in another war only twenty-five years later. By remembering this, people like me are doing the only thing they can in the face of the unimaginable. The reality of it never made it beyond the trenches.
No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.
When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them.
We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings.
We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.
Saturday, 26 December 2009
Merry Christmas, everyone!
And moving swiftly on, there's one book waiting to be reviewed.
It's good to go somewhere else from time to time and immerse yourself in the crime novels that you somehow never manage to read at home with all those important books threatening to topple the book heap. My mum is not afraid to check out the guilty reads in the library, and also has a network of people to exchange them with, so there's no need to even involve a librarian. There it was, 500 pages long and just waiting to be gulped down: Joy Fielding's Heartstopper.
Now, I did not expect much, but it should be a bit scary at least. Or gory. That kind of thing. Having grown up in a big house, I developed a habit of never reading crime novels in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep. Because then I'd be the only one still awake when the crazed axe murderer made his way up the stairs, and I really did not want to hear that. I still stick to that rule at the ripe age of 27, but I really shouldn't have bothered with this one. It was disappointingly uncreepy.
The story is pretty ordinary for the genre: Teenage girl goes missing, turns up dead, small community freaks out, sheriff is out of his depths, and everyone has lots of troubles of their own anyway. And, yes, the crazed axe murderer narrates a bit, too. But somehow the story never took of. The murderer is crazy, yes, but even I figured out who it was before long. I really don't care about teenagers dealing with high school dramas. And it just wasn't surprising or gory at all.
One other nerdy thing: The novel was translated by Kristian Lutze, who is as brilliant, funny and loveable as a translator can get. He spoke at university once, and it's fun to have actually met the guy who's translated what you're just about to read. Only when it turns out to be a bit disappointing, you can't help but wonder whose fault it was. But then there's not much a translator can do if the author doesn't write a catchy story. So I'll just stick to being disappointed with Joy Fielding, who surely won't mind. She'll still have a merry Christmas.
It's good to go somewhere else from time to time and immerse yourself in the crime novels that you somehow never manage to read at home with all those important books threatening to topple the book heap. My mum is not afraid to check out the guilty reads in the library, and also has a network of people to exchange them with, so there's no need to even involve a librarian. There it was, 500 pages long and just waiting to be gulped down: Joy Fielding's Heartstopper.
Now, I did not expect much, but it should be a bit scary at least. Or gory. That kind of thing. Having grown up in a big house, I developed a habit of never reading crime novels in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep. Because then I'd be the only one still awake when the crazed axe murderer made his way up the stairs, and I really did not want to hear that. I still stick to that rule at the ripe age of 27, but I really shouldn't have bothered with this one. It was disappointingly uncreepy.
The story is pretty ordinary for the genre: Teenage girl goes missing, turns up dead, small community freaks out, sheriff is out of his depths, and everyone has lots of troubles of their own anyway. And, yes, the crazed axe murderer narrates a bit, too. But somehow the story never took of. The murderer is crazy, yes, but even I figured out who it was before long. I really don't care about teenagers dealing with high school dramas. And it just wasn't surprising or gory at all.
One other nerdy thing: The novel was translated by Kristian Lutze, who is as brilliant, funny and loveable as a translator can get. He spoke at university once, and it's fun to have actually met the guy who's translated what you're just about to read. Only when it turns out to be a bit disappointing, you can't help but wonder whose fault it was. But then there's not much a translator can do if the author doesn't write a catchy story. So I'll just stick to being disappointed with Joy Fielding, who surely won't mind. She'll still have a merry Christmas.
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Sonst noch Fragen?
My next two reviews are going to be a bit strange, because I spent my holidays in Germany, reading German books. This one here is not even a translation, and not something I would normally read, but when you're facing a two hour drive with a peacefully snoring child next to you, you read anything people hand to you.
Ranga Yogeshwar is an Indian-born, German-speaking, Luxemburgian physicist who has been working for German television for years. He's one of those loveable, quiet types that you don't really mind explaining things to you, because they're never patronizing. Sure, you should be able to remember why the sky turns red when the sun goes down, because they explained that back in school, but there's nothing wrong with going over it again... Yogeshwar has had stints in pretty much every respectable science show on television, and now he's written a book.
Sonst noch Fragen? Warum Frauen kalte Füße haben und andere Rätsel des Alltags. (Yes. German. Veeeeeery long.) answers more than 100 of those questions that suddenly pop up and leave you wondering for a while, like the one about the red sky, the fact that most women suffer from cold feet while most men don't (less muscle work, more surface), or whether elevators can actually crash (they can't, hooray!). There are some obvious things, and some animal-related ones that I have to confess didn't bother me too much, but most of them are really clever, and surprisingly easy to explain.
Among my favourites are the fact that it's only pregnant female mosquitoes that suck your blood, that flies actually know which way the rolled-up newspaper is coming towards them, and that all handkerchiefs are square because Marie Antoinette preferred them that way. And the buttered slice of bread always lands butter first because the distance from hand to floor allows it to spin once. If you eat standing up, you might just be lucky. And in case you ever wondered: Germans prefer orange egg yolks. That's why they're coloured that way, not the other way around.
Sonst noch Fragen is an entertaining read, and you might actually learn something. With that, it ticks most boxes, and you still have enough time to read a novel afterwards. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to start a facebook group to introduce blue egg yolks to Britain. Join me.
Ranga Yogeshwar is an Indian-born, German-speaking, Luxemburgian physicist who has been working for German television for years. He's one of those loveable, quiet types that you don't really mind explaining things to you, because they're never patronizing. Sure, you should be able to remember why the sky turns red when the sun goes down, because they explained that back in school, but there's nothing wrong with going over it again... Yogeshwar has had stints in pretty much every respectable science show on television, and now he's written a book.
Sonst noch Fragen? Warum Frauen kalte Füße haben und andere Rätsel des Alltags. (Yes. German. Veeeeeery long.) answers more than 100 of those questions that suddenly pop up and leave you wondering for a while, like the one about the red sky, the fact that most women suffer from cold feet while most men don't (less muscle work, more surface), or whether elevators can actually crash (they can't, hooray!). There are some obvious things, and some animal-related ones that I have to confess didn't bother me too much, but most of them are really clever, and surprisingly easy to explain.
Among my favourites are the fact that it's only pregnant female mosquitoes that suck your blood, that flies actually know which way the rolled-up newspaper is coming towards them, and that all handkerchiefs are square because Marie Antoinette preferred them that way. And the buttered slice of bread always lands butter first because the distance from hand to floor allows it to spin once. If you eat standing up, you might just be lucky. And in case you ever wondered: Germans prefer orange egg yolks. That's why they're coloured that way, not the other way around.
Sonst noch Fragen is an entertaining read, and you might actually learn something. With that, it ticks most boxes, and you still have enough time to read a novel afterwards. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to start a facebook group to introduce blue egg yolks to Britain. Join me.
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Winifred Watson: Miss Pettigrew lives for a day
For years and years I have been careful to put the proper literary books on top of my heap when checking them out in the library, taking home a Dostoevsky for every Elizabeth George, and never, ever has the librarian commented on my intellectual greatness in the face of the global dumb-down. This is annoying. More annoying, however, is the fact that the one time the friendly librarian actually starts a conversation about one of my books, I have no idea what she means. Miss Pettigrew has apparently been made into "a major film!", and I didn't know. I didn't even know the book existed before I saw it there.
Published in 1938, the novel seemed to fit perfectly into my reading pattern. I love pre-war literture. While all the world was gliding into chaos, mainstream literature in Britain seemed to have been a merry affair. The previously mentioned Wodehouse was not the only one to write funny stuff, I noticed.
The story of Miss Pettigrew is as simple as it is fantastic: A tired, middle-aged governess is sent to the wrong address for her new job and ends up helping a bunch of young, carefree, rich people to organise their love lives. In the course of one day, Miss Pettigrew realises just how much she has been missing all those years; how the other half live (quite decadent, just in case you wondered. There is a lot of champagne and dancing involved.), and how powerful real emotions can be. Her apparent employer, the beautiful young nightclub singer Miss LaFosse, has man trouble and can't decide between the beautiful bastard and the good guy. Although Miss Pettigrew has never been in love, her instincts tell her what needs to be done, and a grateful group of beautiful yound people receive her no-nonsense advice on how to deal with men. In the end, because it is, after all, a romance, Miss Pettigrew herself finds the perfect man, and quite by accident.
It's not great, difficult literature, and the narrator's voice didn't need to be quite so explanatory, but the novel reads well, it's funny, and without aiming to be a fierce social commentary shows a lot about the fate of unmarried, poor women before the days of social security. Miss Pettigrew got lucky, but for many women, the drudgery and hunger went on and on.
P.S.: Has anybody actually seen the "major film!"? Might be worth a look...
Published in 1938, the novel seemed to fit perfectly into my reading pattern. I love pre-war literture. While all the world was gliding into chaos, mainstream literature in Britain seemed to have been a merry affair. The previously mentioned Wodehouse was not the only one to write funny stuff, I noticed.
The story of Miss Pettigrew is as simple as it is fantastic: A tired, middle-aged governess is sent to the wrong address for her new job and ends up helping a bunch of young, carefree, rich people to organise their love lives. In the course of one day, Miss Pettigrew realises just how much she has been missing all those years; how the other half live (quite decadent, just in case you wondered. There is a lot of champagne and dancing involved.), and how powerful real emotions can be. Her apparent employer, the beautiful young nightclub singer Miss LaFosse, has man trouble and can't decide between the beautiful bastard and the good guy. Although Miss Pettigrew has never been in love, her instincts tell her what needs to be done, and a grateful group of beautiful yound people receive her no-nonsense advice on how to deal with men. In the end, because it is, after all, a romance, Miss Pettigrew herself finds the perfect man, and quite by accident.
It's not great, difficult literature, and the narrator's voice didn't need to be quite so explanatory, but the novel reads well, it's funny, and without aiming to be a fierce social commentary shows a lot about the fate of unmarried, poor women before the days of social security. Miss Pettigrew got lucky, but for many women, the drudgery and hunger went on and on.
P.S.: Has anybody actually seen the "major film!"? Might be worth a look...
Thursday, 26 November 2009
Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
I remember this book from university. It was never actually on any reading list, but one of my professors referred to it all the time, and we all eventually learned to hate it after dealing with sentences like "But Happiness is not a potato." in a translation exam. I'm pretty sure that after that exam nobody but me would have come back to actually read the whole book, but then I'm weird like that.
First published in 1985 to great acclaim, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit tells the story of Jeanette, who grows up with an over-zealous, ultra-Christian adoptive mother in Lancashire. Home-schooled until the authorities step in, Jeanette spends her early childhood getting to know the Bible inside out, and later has problems fitting in with her peers at school. Her future has been laid out from the moment she was adopted: She is to become a missionary. At first, the descriptions of the religious madness that surrounds Jeanette are more comical than scary, and we get the impression that although she may not understand most of the people around her, she does believe in God and the rightness of her upbringing.
All this changes when Jeanette falls in love with a girl from church and experiences being on the receiving end of her religion's wrath. Slowly, the tone of the narration becomes darker as Jeanette struggles to come to terms with her feelings. It takes almost the entire length of the narrative for her to finally cut ties with her mother and move away.
Why this novel appeals to university lecturers is obvious: it is loaded with imagery, religious and otherwise. The plot is interrupted by stories, thoughts and analogies that add several layers of meaning. If so inclined, the reader can spend hours analysing them, only I have to admit that my brain doesn't work as smoothly as it used to back in the day. But even without fully appreciating those intricate passages, I enjoyed Oranges. The only thing I have to warn you about is the introduction. Don't read it before you read the novel itself. You might not want to read it at all, if you don't enjoy authors explaining their own work to the reader. But then again, that might just be me, because I'm weird like that.
First published in 1985 to great acclaim, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit tells the story of Jeanette, who grows up with an over-zealous, ultra-Christian adoptive mother in Lancashire. Home-schooled until the authorities step in, Jeanette spends her early childhood getting to know the Bible inside out, and later has problems fitting in with her peers at school. Her future has been laid out from the moment she was adopted: She is to become a missionary. At first, the descriptions of the religious madness that surrounds Jeanette are more comical than scary, and we get the impression that although she may not understand most of the people around her, she does believe in God and the rightness of her upbringing.
All this changes when Jeanette falls in love with a girl from church and experiences being on the receiving end of her religion's wrath. Slowly, the tone of the narration becomes darker as Jeanette struggles to come to terms with her feelings. It takes almost the entire length of the narrative for her to finally cut ties with her mother and move away.
Why this novel appeals to university lecturers is obvious: it is loaded with imagery, religious and otherwise. The plot is interrupted by stories, thoughts and analogies that add several layers of meaning. If so inclined, the reader can spend hours analysing them, only I have to admit that my brain doesn't work as smoothly as it used to back in the day. But even without fully appreciating those intricate passages, I enjoyed Oranges. The only thing I have to warn you about is the introduction. Don't read it before you read the novel itself. You might not want to read it at all, if you don't enjoy authors explaining their own work to the reader. But then again, that might just be me, because I'm weird like that.
Friday, 20 November 2009
Iris Murdoch: The Italian Girl
Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is one of my favourite novels. I've read a few more of her books, and the characters are all equally strange, but ultimately compelling. The Sea has the bonus of telling a gripping story, as well as dealing with the unavoidable human struggles that make good literature. After trying my best to get into one of her more philosophical novels, I've made a point of staying clear of them in order to keep that last bit of sanity. Suffice to say, they make for very (and I can't stress this enough) tough reading.
The Italian Girl seemed straightforward enough: Edmund, the narrator, returns to his family home after his mother's death. He had been estranged from the rest of the family for years, although we never find out why. From the few glimpses into his life the reader can't form a coherent picture of him, other than that he is quite boring. His brother Otto, his wife Isabel and their daughter Flora seem pleased to see him, although he struggles to adjust to the life they lead. Then, alongside a perplexed Edmund, we discover that everything is not as it seems: both Otto and Isabel are having affairs, with a mysterious Russian brother-and-sister act respectively, and Flora turns out to be pregnant. And this is where I lost interest, because what follows is too much of a stage play. The world of the novel is closely circumscribed, there are no minor characters or settings, and the sheer amount of theory, philosophy, religious imagery and drama that Murdoch forces on the characters is enough to make the whole thing seem ridiculously over the top. The novel's straightforwardness is its flaw - nothing is pondered over much. I could not, however superficially, connect to any of the characters. For me, they never came to life, and the whole novel seemed pointless. It didn't even make me think much, because of the speed with which it hurried along towards an unlikely finale. In the end, everything is resolved, the important characters are still alive and all the better for it.
And for anyone who is wondering: The Italian girl, who turns out to be the last in a row of Italian housekeepers, makes an appearance only about three times in the novel and lets Edmund sniff her shoe in the end. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could explain her significance for the novel, but I don't feel like spending any more time thinking about this book. Pity.
The Italian Girl seemed straightforward enough: Edmund, the narrator, returns to his family home after his mother's death. He had been estranged from the rest of the family for years, although we never find out why. From the few glimpses into his life the reader can't form a coherent picture of him, other than that he is quite boring. His brother Otto, his wife Isabel and their daughter Flora seem pleased to see him, although he struggles to adjust to the life they lead. Then, alongside a perplexed Edmund, we discover that everything is not as it seems: both Otto and Isabel are having affairs, with a mysterious Russian brother-and-sister act respectively, and Flora turns out to be pregnant. And this is where I lost interest, because what follows is too much of a stage play. The world of the novel is closely circumscribed, there are no minor characters or settings, and the sheer amount of theory, philosophy, religious imagery and drama that Murdoch forces on the characters is enough to make the whole thing seem ridiculously over the top. The novel's straightforwardness is its flaw - nothing is pondered over much. I could not, however superficially, connect to any of the characters. For me, they never came to life, and the whole novel seemed pointless. It didn't even make me think much, because of the speed with which it hurried along towards an unlikely finale. In the end, everything is resolved, the important characters are still alive and all the better for it.
And for anyone who is wondering: The Italian girl, who turns out to be the last in a row of Italian housekeepers, makes an appearance only about three times in the novel and lets Edmund sniff her shoe in the end. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could explain her significance for the novel, but I don't feel like spending any more time thinking about this book. Pity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
