Reading Matters

'The Girl With Glass Feet' by Ali Shaw

 

Fiction - paperback; Atlantic Books; 295 pages; 2009.

Ali Shaw's debut novel The Girl With Glass Feet is set on a fictional wind-swept island, St Hauda, where strange and unusual events take place. And there is no more strange and unusual event than having your feet turn into glass, which is what happens to the book's central character, Ida MacLaird, who returns to the island in search of a cure.

Here she meets Midas Crook, a painfully shy young man, who distances himself from the rest of the world by observing it through the lens of a camera. Midas is emotionally damaged through no fault of his own: his parent's had a troubled marriage, which ended in his father's suicide, while his eccentric mother turned into a recluse.

The two develop a close friendship, which slowly morphs into love. Midas is anxious to help Ida find a solution to her fragile feet, but with the glass slowly taking over her body, it becomes a race against time. Will a cure be found? Or will Ida succumb to this unexplainable phenomenon?

There's no doubt that The Girl With Glass Feet is a highly imaginative work of fiction and that Shaw is an ambitious writer. But I'm not sure the book succeeds other than depicting a beautifully described world in which enchanting, occasionally odd, things occur. For a start, the text is so oblique, it's hard to get a handle on events: for much of this novel I felt I was standing on the sidelines watching as events unfolded rather than becoming immersed in the action. And there's such a wide cast of characters, most of them cold, aloof and weak-willed, that it's hard to keep track of them all and their relationship to the central pair of Midas and Ida.

I know that some people have struggled with the magic realism at the core of this novel -- there are moth-winged cattle that flutter about, for instance -- but I thought that added to the fairytale element of the story, and demonstrated very clearly that anything was possible on the island and that a cure for Ida's glass feet, no matter how outlandish, may be possible.

As much as I did not fall in love with the story, I did appreciate many of the issues raised by it, not least the ways in which we deal with terminal illness and whether it is better to live your remaining life well or to chase a cure that may not exist. I think it's fair to say that The Girl With Glass Feet may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm glad I read this book and will be very interested to see what Shaw comes up with next.

-------------------------

The Girl With Glass Feet was the second novel up for discussion in the Not The TV Book Group. Hosted by Simon at Savidge Reads, the discussion remains open, so do pop by to read the comments and add your thoughts if you've read the book.

A day with Harvill Secker and an international contingent of writers

 

I never win anything, so when I found out I scored two free tickets to attend an event celebrating international literature I was quite excited. The tickets came courtesy of @Vintagebooks (on Twitter) and the event, part of Harvill Secker's 100th birthday celebrations, was staged at Foyles flagship store yesterday.

Getting me out of bed early on a rainy miserable Saturday is no mean feat, and still nursing a sore shoulder and stiff neck, makes it even more of a miracle. But I was keen to see Irish writers Joseph O'Connor and Gene Kerrigan, among many other interesting names on the bill.

There were five sessions, but the most interesting, in my opinion, was the first, entitled "Books that Changed the World" (in which Joseph O'Connor, Clare Clark and Nicholas Shakespeare discussed how literature has the power to change how we view the world), and the fourth, entitled "Crime Pays" (in which Stuart Neville and Gene Kerrigan looked at the popularity of crime fiction).

I'm not going to bore you with the details of either, mainly because I didn't take notes, but in the first session each of the authors named a book that had changed their world -- here's what they chose: Joseph O'Connor went for Catcher in the Rye, Clare Clark chose Black Beauty and Nicholas Shakespeare singled out Love in a Time of Cholera, which he's read six or seven times.

In the "Crime Pays" session I was brave enough to put up my hand and ask did either author see the day when a crime novel might win the Booker Prize. Neville, whose debut novel The Twelve is set in Northern Ireland, said he couldn't see why not. He referred to the controversy surrounding Tim Rob Smith's Child 44, which was longlisted in 2008, but thought the prize had recently been opened up to include all sorts of books, so why shouldn't a thriller win it. Kerrigan, a softly spoken Irishman with a Dublin accent, was as pragmatic as ever: "No, it's a literary prize for literary fiction."

My Other Half, who I had shamelessly dragged along with me, also asked a question: did Kerrigan's career as a journalist help him to write fiction? Again, the answer was pragmatic. He said that even though he had reported on all manner of horrendous crimes (for the Irish press), when he writes fiction he has to get inside the heads of these people -- and that's not always easy.

What I liked most about this session, aside from Kerrigan's practical, if somewhat world-weary, attitude, was that both authors believe it is crime writers who tell us most about the society we live in today. Which backed up the theory that I wrote about in this post, where I suggested Irish crime novelists were "dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half" in a way that had been ignored by literary novelists.

Ironically enough, this session was the least well attended out of all five on the bill, which, to me at least, suggests a slight snobbishness about crime fiction. Indeed, the woman sitting next to me spent the entire hour that Kerrigan and Neville were on stage reading a book and eating her lunch, completely oblivious to the whole discussion.

Finally, the best part of the day was receiving our Harvill Secker goodie bags as we walked out the door. This household now owns two copies of each of the following: Gunther Grass's Peeling the Onion, Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, Jose Saramago's Blindness, Louis De Bernieres's The Partisan's Daughter and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I smell a giveaway or two coming soon...

A short story by Kevin Barry

I've got a busy weekend planned, so I thought I'd post this photograph, which I took back in 2005 on a trip to the west coast of Ireland to get you in the mood for a terrific short story I'm going to point you towards.

I chose this picture because it was taken on the Belmullet Peninsula, in County Mayo, which is name-checked in Kevin Barry's Fjord of Killary, a rather delicious, occasionally dark, often humourous, story published in the New Yorker earlier this month. You can read the story here -- enjoy! (More of my County Mayo pics are here.)

[Thanks to Whispering Gums for the tip-off, and wonderful review, of this one.]

'Three Dog Night' by Peter Goldsworthy

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Australia; 360 pages; 2004.

Martin Blackman is a psychiatrist who returns to Adelaide, Australia, after a decade living and working in London. He brings his new wife, Lucy, also a psychiatrist, with him. The couple have several weeks to kill before their new posts start, and so it is that Martin and Lucy hook-up with Felix, one of Martin's childhood friends, who lives on a farm in the hills outside of the city.

Felix is a brilliant surgeon and has spent a large amount of time living and working in the Australian outback, specifically helping aboriginal communities. But the experience has changed him:

An athlete at school, full-bodied and muscular, he has shrunk to skin and bone. But his manner shocks me most of all -- this air of cool mockery, so unlike the Felix of old.

Within minutes of meeting Lucy for the first time Felix has been incredibly rude and scathing towards her, a pattern that is to follow every time the trio meet up. But later it becomes obvious that his obnoxious attitude is a shield for his true feelings: he has fallen in love with her. And so, without wishing to include any plot spoilers in this review, the story focuses on a very tricky, morally ambiguous ménage à trois that has drastic and long-lasting repercussions for all of the characters.

Admittedly I found Three Dog Night to be quite an unsettling and disturbing book. As much as I enjoyed Goldsworthy's lovely writing style, heavily influenced by the landscape and wildlife of Australia (I felt homesick reading his descriptions of the weather -- "a luminous morning saturated with sunlight and parrots" and the landscape -- "a geometric patchwork of orchard groves and vine rows and plush carpet-squares of lucerne and clover"), I found it difficult to like any of the characters. Martin, the narrator, comes across as particularly weak-willed and so in love with his wife that it becomes almost sickening to read.

If love is an obsessive-compulsive disorder [...] then I have been ill for years. But never as sick with bliss, as diseased, as now.

And Lucy, subject to so much adulation from her husband and just about everyone else she meets, comes across as nothing more than a sexual object, albeit with a limp that all the men in this novel seem creepily obsessed by. Meanwhile Felix is so utterly detestable you really wish he'd either disappear out of the storyline or someone would throw the punch I so wanted to send his way!

As ever, I know that you shouldn't judge a book merely on the basis of whether you like the characters or not. That Goldsworthy can craft such a highly entertaining and readable novel out of these occasionally snooty, high-browed and weak-willed people speaks volumes for his writing ability. I found all the characters to behave in inexplicable ways; they puzzled me, irritated me and sometimes made me angry. But I still wanted to find out what happened to them...

As much as I did not love the book, I did admire it and am glad I read it. It's very much a story about love, friendship, betrayal, divided loyalties and alienation. But it also provides a fascinating glimpse into aboriginal culture and traditions, made all the more striking when the book largely revolves around characters whom generally inhabit the world of western medicine, with its white coats, doctors and reliance on science and technology.

For those who don't know, Goldsworthy is an Australian GP who also happens to be an award-winning writer of novels, poetry and short stories. According to wikipedia, he also writes opera libretti and has been credited as a writer on three films. Last month he was made a Member of the Order of Australia "for service to literature as an author and poet, through arts administration, and to the community".

Three Dog Night, first published in 2003, is his sixth novel. It won the the 2004 Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award and seems to have been shortlisted for every other award going including: the 2003 Colin Roderick Award; the 2004 Miles Franklin Award; the 2004 The Courier-Mail Book of the Year; the 2004 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards; and the 2004 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. Oh, and if that wasn't enough, it made the longlist for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, too.

'The Lady in the Van' by Alan Bennett

 

Non-fiction - paperback; Profile Books; 96 pages; 1999.

This short essay, labelled as Bennett's "most  famous piece of non-fiction", first appeared in the London Review of Books in 1989. It has since been made into a play, for both stage and radio. I decided I had to read it after hearing Bennett mention it in passing in a BBC4 documentary that I watched last year. I couldn't quite get it out of my head that this famous writer and playwright had let a female tramp park her decrepit van, in which she resided, in his driveway for some 15 years! I mean, who does that sort of thing?

The piece, which is published in a delightfully small pocket-book format (14.8cm x 9.2cm, if you're interested), is easily devoured in half-an-hour or so. But it's one of those reads that packs such a powerful punch and reveals so much about the human condition that it lingers in the mind long afterwards and invites a second or third reading. 

Essentially, the lady in the van was an elderly woman by the name of Miss Shepherd. She had been parked in the London street where Bennett resides and had become somewhat of a local attraction -- and nuisance -- since the late 1960s. By June 1971 "scarcely a day passes without some sort of incident involving the old lady" including a young man giving the van a "terrific shaking", another banging on the side of the van to "flush out for his grinning girlfriend the old witch who lives there" and passing drunks smashing all the windows.

[...] to find such sadism and intolerance so close at hand began actively to depress me, and having to be on alert for every senseless attack made it impossible to work. There came a day when, after a long succession of such incidents, I suggested that she spend at least the nights in a lean-to at the side of my house. Initially reluctant, as with any change, over the next two years she gradually abandoned the van for the hut.

Eventually, when parking restrictions come into play, Bennett invites her to park her van in his driveway, and there it stays, sandwiched between Bennett's front door step and his garden gate, for 15 years. If it wasn't enough that visitors to Bennett's house now had to squeeze past the van and be scrutinised by the mad woman living inside, they often got a glimpse of the interior, "a midden of old clothes, plastic bags and half-eaten food". It sounds delightful, doesn't it?

Sadly, the longer she stays put, the worse her living conditions become. Her hygienic practises, or lack of them, become questionable, and, at one point, when Bennett gets a load of manure delivered to fertilise the garden she complains that people passing might think the smell is coming from her van.

She wants me to put a notice on the gate to the effect that the smell is the manure, not her. I say no, without adding, as I could, that the manure actually smells much nicer.

The book charts, diary-style, the ups and downs of having Miss Shepherd living in such close proximity. It's a mixture of frustrating observations, outlandish humour, hopelessness, despair and melancholy. Bennett does a superb job of describing Miss Shepherd's eccentric nature without mocking or denigrating her. While she quite clearly tries his patience -- for instance, when she buys a Reliant Robin in 1984 Bennett has to constantly recharge it for her because she drains the battery by simply sitting in it and revving the motor every Sunday morning, driving all the neighbours mad -- he never gives up on her.

The question that came to mind as I read this was not so much what made Miss Shepherd so kooky and "different", but what made Bennett tolerate her for so long? There are hints of an answer in the postscript which accompanies this edition in which Bennett admits he has done almost anything to live a quiet life.

I mull it over too [a phone call he has with Miss Shepherd's long lost brother], wondering at the bold life she has had and how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on -- living, as Camus said, slightly the opposite of expressing. And I see how the location of Miss Shepherd and the van in front but to the side of where I write is the location of most of the stuff I write about; that too is to the side and never what faces me.

If you ever get the chance to read this essay then I urge you to do so. It's a beautiful portrait of English eccentricity -- and tolerance.

An Australian reading list

I do love a good book list, so I was intrigued to recently find out about the Australian Book Review poll (via Matilda) in which readers were asked to nominate their Favourite Australian Novel from any era and any genre.

From the 290 individual titles nominated a Top 10 was compiled, which looks something like this (via Whispering Gums):

1. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
2. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson
3. Voss by Patrick White
4. Breath by Tim Winton
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
6. My Brother Jack by George Johnston
7. The Secret River by Kate Grenville
8. Eucalyptus by Murray Bail
9. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
10. The Tree of Man by Patrick White

The complete list of 290 titles, which comprises both adult and children's fiction, is below. Hyperlinks take you to reviews on this blog. I've bolded up the books I have read but not reviewed.

And the winner of 'Brodeck's Report' is...

Remember my competition to win a copy of Philippe Claudel's Brodeck's Report, the first book that was featured in the Not The TV Book Group schedule?

With a little help from Random.org I'm pleased to reveal the winner...

Congratulations to Lizzy Siddal! You'll be enjoying this rather magical and thought-provoking book as soon as I can find time to get to the post office!

Many thanks to everyone who entered, and consolations to those who missed out. I've got a few more competitions planned over the next couple of weeks, so your number might come up then!

Not the TV Book Group - Session Two: 'The Girl With Glass Feet' by Ali Shaw

I can't believe it's time for our second discussion in the Not The TV Book Group schedule. Where does the time go?

It's Simon's turn to host the discussion, so if you have read Ali Shaw's The Girl With The Glass Feet do drop by Savidge Reads and add your thoughts to the comments.

I finished the book yesterday and hope to post my review this time next week. In the meantime, I'll be over at Simon's partaking in tea and cream cakes (sounds so civilised, doesn't it?) and adding my thoughts to the discussion...

Saturday reading

My Saturday plans have been scuppered by a frozen left shoulder that has me rushing to the microwave every half-hour to reheat my gel-filled hot pack. Arrrrgh. I get these shoulder problems on a semi-regular basis, but why do they always happen on the weekend?

Anyway, it at least means I can spend the day reading. I've just finished Ali Shaw's The Girl With Glass Feet for tomorrow's Not The TV Book Group discussion, which the lovely Simon will be hosting on his blog, Savidge Reads. I won't share my thoughts about the book just yet... but am looking forward to hearing everyone else's when the discussion opens tomorrow morning.

I have also just finished reading a non-fiction book, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, which was excellent and thought-provoking in so many different ways. It will be difficult to review, because it embraces so many ideas and covers so much ground, that condensing it into a few paragraphs may be a bit beyond me. But I'll see what I can come up with and post my thoughts some time next week...

Meanwhile I'm about half-way through another non-fiction book, A Woman in Berlin, which is a diary written by an anonymous woman during the end of the Second World War. It's deeply moving and very disturbing, particularly as most of the women in Berlin were raped by Russian soldiers, including the author, during the handful of months that the book covers.

I'm now eying up my next read, another book set in war-torn Germany, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. I've been waiting for this one to come out in paperback for what seems like forever, because I know many of you read the hardcover last year and raved about it. 

What are you reading this weekend?

Book giveaway: Philippe Claudel's 'Brodeck's Report'

Back when we decided our schedule for the Not The TV Book Group I ordered a copy of Philppe Claudel's Brodeck's Report from Amazon. Sadly, it went AWOL in the post, so I had to order another copy in time for our discussion, which was hosted by dovegreyreader a fortnight ago.

Amazon kindly replaced my missing copy, albeit a week too late. This means I now have an extra pristine shop-fresh copy in my possession. Instead of going through all the rigmarole of returning it and getting my money back, I thought I'd offer it up to my blog readers.

So if you fancy winning a copy of Philippe Claudel's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Brodeck's Report simply leave a comment by 12-noon GMT on Sunday February 21, telling me the name of a book that would make a good book group read. I'll then choose the winner using an online random number generator (or some such).

The competition is open to anyone, regardless of where you live, but you can only enter once. Good luck.

Please make sure you include a valid email address when you log in to comment. This won't be displayed with your comment, but allows me to contact you if you end up being the lucky winner. Those comments without valid email addresses will be disqualified.

'The Unnamed' by Joshua Ferris

 

Fiction - paperback; Viking; 320 pages; 2010. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Imagine if you were afflicted with a disease that defies medical explanation, a disease that compels you to drop everything and just walk... and walk... and walk until you become so mentally and physically exhausted you just fall asleep wherever you find yourself -- in a snowy field, a parking lot, behind a fast food outlet or on a stranger's front porch. That's what happens to Tim Farnsworth, the protagonist, in this deliciously different novel, the second by New York-based writer Joshua Ferris.

When the book opens, Tim is in his late 40s and "ageing with the grace of a matinee idol". He's a rich, successful partner in one of New York's leading law firms and is happily married to Jane, with whom he has a teenage daughter, Becka.

But Tim has a secret. He has an unnamed disease which no amount of traditional or alternative medical help has been able to understand much less cure. In fact, no one seems to know whether it's a legitimate medical disorder or a mental illness. Even Tim wonders whether he is losing the plot when the compulsion to go on a walk hits him, but there is nothing he can do to stop it. (These walks can last from a few hours, to days, to weeks and even months.)

The only saving grace is that the disease occurs in episodes, often years apart, and when it reappears they put time-tested procedures into place to ensure he doesn't walk off, never to be found again: he carries a backpack containing vital necessities, including warm clothing and a GPS, with him at all times; Jane and Becka take turns to babysit him; and when things get especially bad he is handcuffed to the bed.

Despite this, Tim insists on holding down a demanding full-time job (as a litigator in a murder trial), although it's not long before his employers lose patience with his unscheduled disappearances. Similarly, Jane finds the situation stressful and upsetting, often having to get up in the middle of the night to collect Tim from his latest compulsive walk miles and miles from home.

I won't say much more about the plot other than it charts Tim's life over the space of some 20 years and details the impact of his condition of colleagues, clients and family.

What I will say is just how much I enjoyed reading this book (I read it in one sitting having taken a day off work to get over a rather horrible chesty cold). The narrative is fast-moving and interweaves Tim's medical problems with a murder trial that has an element of danger to it. The characterisation is superb, especially as each of the Farnsworths changes and develops over time (Tim loses his cocksure lawyerly arrogance, Jane loses her ability to cope, Beckah emerges out of her Goth-like teenage phase).

And to cap it all off, there's plenty of "issues" to chew over, including office politics, how work can rule our lives but also give meaning to it, our perception of mental illness, the conflict between body and soul, and how families deal with complicated, life-threatening medical problems.

At times the book is emotional, without being overly sentimental, but it's also thrilling (where will Tim's walks lead to next? what dangers will he confront?) and incredibly witty (especially the bit about the bicycle helmet -- and the dead toe).

But ultimately The Unnamed is a romance between two people, thrust into an extraordinary situation that tests their love to the limits. It's also a lovely story about the relationship between fathers and daughters (the scenes in which Tim and 17-year-old, overweight Becka bond as they watch DVD boxed sets of Buffy are especially touching -- and witty).

And, finally, I can't write an entire review without mentioning the similarities with Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife, although I'm sure I won't be the first person to do so: a husband, afflicted by an unexplainable medical condition, disappears without warning for long periods of time while his dutiful wife waits patiently for his unannounced return.

The Unnamed will be published in the UK on February 25.

'The Driver's Seat' by Muriel Spark

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 128 pages; 2006.

Oooh, my goodness, the late Muriel Spark did a fine line in totally batty, off-the-wall characters, didn't she? In this novella, first published in 1970 (and recently long-listed for the the Lost Man Booker Prize), she introduces us to the 30-something Lise, who escapes her boring office job for a holiday to "the South". Except this is no ordinary holiday -- and Lise is no ordinary office worker.

From the outset she behaves in inexplicable ways. When she throws a complete strop in a clothes shop for what seems like a very odd reason indeed -- she didn't like knowing that the dress she wanted to buy was made from stain-resistant material -- the reader immediately wonders whether Lise is highly strung or simply a bit weird. When she returns to the office and begins to laugh hysterically and then starts "crying all in a flood" you think maybe she's just hormonal.

But later, when she eventually buys the outfit she wants to take away with her, a garishly designed dress comprising "a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright V's of orange, mauve and blue" and a clashing summer coat featuring narrow stripes of red and white, with a white collar, you realise she's just completely barmy. This opinion is cemented when Lise tells the disbelieving sales assistant that:

The colours go together perfectly. People here in the North are ignorant of colours. Conservative; old-fashioned. If only you knew! These colours are a natural blend for me. Absolutely natural.

Oh yes, Lise is a nutter. And you just know her trip to the Continent is going to be filled with one narrow escapade after another.

And this is where I break one of my reviewing rules and reveal a plot spoiler, so if you don't wish to know what happens next, can I suggest you skip ahead to the very last paragraph.

Just when you are looking forward to finding out how the supposedly well-travelled Lise is going to negotiate a foreign culture wearing such a hideous combination of clothes, Spark introduces a curve-ball. You are only on page 25 and Lise hasn't even got on the plane, when you find out that she will be murdered:

She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.

Right-o. So, immediately, the tension gets ratcheted up a few notches because you want to know how Lise meets her sorry demise. And so you follow her shenanigans with a weird mix of fear and fascination, because even though she's a screwball character you don't want her to die.

And that, I suppose, is the magic of this wonderful book. It's only 107 pages long and easily read in one sitting, but it is such a masterpiece of plotting and suspense that you wonder how Spark achieved it in so few a words. Everything is pared down to the bare minimum without losing that sense of excitement and sheer horror as Lise bumbles her way through the streets of an unnamed European city.

The Driver's Seat is terribly dark fodder, but I loved every moment. I don't think it will win the Lost Booker, if only because it's so short and is over before you've even begun it, but it's definitely a book that demands a second or third reading to see if you can discover exactly how Lise plotted her journey of self-destruction.

Charlie Brooker goes over to the dark side. Yes, he's fallen for the ebook!

I love Charlie Brooker. Newswipe, his scathing take on TV news and current affairs, is the best thing on TV these days, and I always love reading his columns in the Guardian because they are so, well, hilarious, sarcastic, often rude... and usually spot on.

Today's piece, entitled "Why I'm an ebook convert" , is particularly perceptive -- and witty. He reckons the "single biggest advantage" to the ebook is not its portability nor the fact you can carry 1,500 titles on one device, but this: "no one can see what you're reading".

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read ­ Wolf Hall, that kind of thing ­ but quickly found myself downloading titles I'd be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

You can read the whole article here.

Dick Francis (1920-2010)

Farewell to National Hunt jockey-turned-author Dick Francis, who died today aged 89.

The above clip is courtesy of Channel 4 News.

'Brodeck's Report' by Philippe Claudel

 

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 278 pages; 2009. Translated from the French by John Cullen.

Philippe Claudel is a French writer, film director and academic. I read his first novel, Grey Souls, in November 2006 and described it as "a deeply mysterious, brooding novel". The same could be said of his second novel, Brodeck's Report, which evokes the same eerie atmosphere.

The book is set in a village somewhere in northern France near the German border sometime after the Second World War. Or, that is what we are lead to believe, because Claudel might be heavy on the symbolism and the atmosphere, but he is very light on specifics. We can only assume, from the clues that are dotted throughout the narrative, that this is the case.

The story is narrated by Brodeck, a survivor of a (presumably Nazi) concentration camp, who has returned to his village to be with his adopted mother, wife and young daughter. He makes his living by venturing into the nearby mountains to collect data and compile reports on the natural environment for the Government.

But one day he is asked to compile a report of a very different kind. A stranger to the village, dubbed the Anderer (which means "the other"), has been murdered by the locals. The locals now want Brodeck, who was not present when the crime was committed, to "explain what went on from the time he arrived in the village and why they had no choice but to kill him".

What results is a rather beautiful, occasionally murky but always symbolic, multi-layered narrative which puts the Anderer's arrival into context and shows how Brodeck, who is kind-hearted, emotionally damaged and psychologically scarred, begins to identify with him. It meanders back and forth, "leaping over time like a hurdle, getting lost on digressions and maybe even, without wishing to, concealing what is essential".

The story mines a rich seam of fairy tale lore, albeit with a very dark edge, casting the Anderer as "some sort of genie" who arrives in the village wearing "fancy old-style clothes" with a pair of "beasts" as mounts:

The Anderer was a mystery. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew where he came from or why he was here. And nobody knew whether he understood them when they spoke in dialect.

Brodeck, also an outsider (and most likely a Jew, with "a tiny piece of flesh missing from between my thighs"), is the only one who welcomes his arrival because it was a "sign of rebirth, a return to life".

For me, it was as though an iron door that for years had sealed the entrance to a cave had now been opened wide, and the air of the cave had suddenly taken in the wind and the beams of a bright sun. But I could not imagine that sometimes the sun grows bothersome, that its beams, which light up the world, inadvertently illuminate what people are trying to hide.

I could quote hundreds of passages from this novel which show Claudel's uncanny ability to hint at things without nailing them down. Motifs and symbols abound. And the ambiguity in the storyline only adds to the mystery and profoundness of it.

This is not an easy book to read, because it is so jam-packed with ideas and abstractions, tangents and digressions, but it is profoundly affecting. It's a novel about love, alienation, memory, forgiveness, betrayal, how the past informs the future, and the terrible, terrible things of which every single human being is capable.

-------------------------

Brodeck's Report was the first novel up for discussion in the Not The TV Book Group -- and what a discussion it proved to be, with more than 120 comments being made by participants last Sunday alone. Hosted by Lynne at dovegreyreader, the discussion remains open, so do pop by to read the comments and add your thoughts if you've read the book.

Stuff and things

Last year I bought an awful lot of secondhand books via Abebooks and, as a consequence, I signed up to their email newsletter, which arrives in my in-box once or twice a week. Today's newsletter featured a short item about Colm Tóibín, one of my favourite authors, pointing me to all his collectable work. I'm so glad my credit card is in the other room, because it would just be too easy to have a little splurge, acquiring all his lovely books that I haven't read yet!

Last night I went to a book signing... that wasn't really a book signing... in North London. Film critic Mark Kermode was promoting his new autobiography, It's Only a Movie, at the Phoenix Cinema, the oldest continuously-running cinema in the UK. Basically he stood in front of a packed audience and waxed lyrical about his love of film and some of the funny things that have happened to him as a film critic, and all the while he barely stopped for breath. It was an hour of complete ad-lib entertainment, followed by 30 minutes of questions from the audience. Good stuff.

Today a little parcel arrived from The Book Depository and out tumbled Natasha Walters' Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. I began reading it immediately and then found I couldn't put it down... She writes well and raises some very interesting issues about the hypersexualisation of British culture. Stay tuned for a review coming soon...

Irish writer has pop at... other Irish writers

Did anyone else read Julian Gough's rant about his fellow Irish writers in The Guardian today?

Gough, a novelist and short story writer who is based in Berlin, bemoans the current state of literature in his home country and is incredibly scathing of Ireland's "pompous" authors, describing them "as cut off from the electric current of the culture".

"If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity ... The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it's a direct connection, writer-to-reader."

I read the entire article, slightly alarmed, slightly bemused. Anyone who has followed my blog for a while will know I have a soft spot for Irish fiction and read more than my fair share of it. Gough's comments made me wonder whether he might actually have a point. Is Irish literature stuck in the past?

But then I realised that Gough's missed a trick. Sure, literary fiction might not be "dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half" but has he read any Irish crime novels recently? There's a relatively new and booming genre out there which IS addressing these issues.

The first name that pops to mind is Gene Kerrigan, a journalist turned crime novelist, who really has his finger on the pulse in terms of gangland crime in modern day Ireland. I read Little Criminals a year or so ago (but never got around to reviewing it) and thought it was bang-on in terms of showing the collision between modern Ireland's new class system -- the nouveau rich and the underworld.

Similarly, Alan Glynn's Winterland, which I read last year, shows the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" in 2009), planning policy and politics.

Even Tana French's In the Woods captures the new Ireland, albeit during the Celtic Tiger years, and makes much comment on political corruption and rampant development.

I'm sure there must be loads more...

I feel sorry for the postman

 

More than two weeks ago I went on a bit of a book slurge and ordered four books for the Not The TV Book Group schedule. The books, to be delivered in two separate parcels, never arrived. Thankfully, Amazon resent the books (at no cost), and they arrived today, along with a couple of other titles I'd purchased from secondhand sellers online. I also received two unsolicited books for review.

It never rains, but it pours.

Free eBook (for a limited time)

Some of you may remember that I reviewed Stephen Davidson's Kill & Cure last year. I described it as "an entertaining read that has a touch of the John Grishams about it".

Stephen has recently been in touch to tell me that his publisher, A&F Books, has suggested an online promotion in which the book is given away for free online (for a limited period).

Sounds like good news to me!

If you're interested, you can download the book from the author's official website.

'Rupture' by Simon Lelic

 

Fiction - hardcover; Picador; 256 pages; 2010. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

What drives a person to murder? That's the central question underpinning Simon Lelic's debut novel, Rupture, which looks at the aftermath of a horrendous crime in which a teacher shoots three students and a colleague at a north London school before turning the gun on himself.

Was mild-mannered Samuel Szajkowski (pronounced shy-kov-skee) a psychopath hellbent on killing the teenagers in his charge? Or did something "snap" and his temper get the better of him? Could his deadly actions have been prevented?

It's down to Detective Inspector Lucia May to find out, although the school headmaster would very much like the case to be wrapped up quickly. Even Lucia's bosses think it would just be easier to label Szajkowski a "monster" and be done with it:

'Five people died. All right then. Where did they die?' He [the chief inspector] looked at Lucia but did not wait for her to answer. 'In the same room. And how? By the same gun, at the hands of the same gunman. You have a murder weapon, a motive, a room full of witnesses.' DCI Cole looked at his watch. 'I've got an hour before I'm due to go home. I could write your report and still knock off twenty minutes early.'

But Lucia doesn't see it like that, particularly as her investigation begins to find evidence of systematic bullying in the school. The question is this: was Szajkowski bullied and if so, by whom? And if the headmaster knew this was going on, why didn't he do something about it? Doesn't that make him negligent in his duties?

This line of enquiry has an eerie resonance for Lucia herself, as it becomes apparent that she, too, is being bullied by her male colleagues.

Rupture is strikingly original fiction, and to pigeon-hole it as a crime novel would not be fair (although I suspect many will give it that label). At times it reminded me very much of Anita Shreve's Testimony, which charts similar ground, albeit a sex scandal at a private school, in a similar way.

It's also tempting to compare Rupture with other novels centred on "school shootings" but I think that does Lelic a disservice. That's because this book tackles the subject from a fresh, new angle. For a start, it's British (as opposed to American) and the perpetrator is not a student but a "misunderstood" teacher.

The structure, too, is unusual because Lucia's criminal investigation is interleaved with the varied testimonies of those she interviews. Each of these testimonies is told in distinctive first person narratives, ranging from angry parents, obnoxious teachers and arrogant students. While this is a rather clever device allowing the reader to piece together what happened based on the information as it is revealed, some may find this structure too difficult to follow. I have to say I very much enjoyed it, because it places you directly in Lucia's shoes and adds to the adrenalin rush as you get closer to finding out what really happened. 

Despite the many and varied voices in this book, the characterisation is very strong, particularly Lucia, who is a likable, eager and tenacious investigator, dealing with a host of problems, both in and out of the office, but is slightly out of her depth. You really feel for her situation.

And some of Szajkowski's colleagues, particularly the arrogant and super-confident physical education teacher, TJ, are wonderfully drawn. It's only Szajkowski, dead and unable to speak for himself, who feels appropriately aloof and unknowable...

If you're looking for a thrilling, provocative read, one that will linger in the mind and slightly alter your perspective on the world, then I can recommend Rupture. It's an impressive debut, and one that marks Lelic as a new British author worth watching.