Q. What do you get if you take Roger Hargreave's famous Mr Men series and meld it with the American TV series Mad Men?
A. Mad Men Mr Men
Characters in the series include Mr Draper (with obligatory cigarette), Little Miss Joan, Mr Campbell, Little Miss Betty, Little Miss Peggy and Mr Sterling.
You can read the first book in the title, Mr Sterling Gets Angry, which those clever people at The Poke have put together.
Perhaps this will fuel a mini publishing industry. My suggestions include Betty Draper's How to be a Good Wife self-help book for the newly married, Peggy Olsen's How to Get Ahead in a Man's World for the professional business woman, and Don Draper's How to be a Two-Timing Bastard and Get Away with it for the misogynist.
Fiction - paperback; Corsair; 109 pages; 2010. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.
Any book set in a Nazi death camp brings with it a certain kind of foreboding. But there's something quite uplifting about Maria Àngels Anglada's tale of survival set in Auschwitz.
Here, amid the death and brutality, a Jewish prisoner and former luthier is charged with a special task: he must make a violin for the camp's Commandant using a limited palette of materials and tools. What Daniel doe not know is that if he fails to make the instrument to a high enough standard he will be handed over to the camp's doctor, a man who conducts terrible experiments on his patients. But if he does build a suitable violin the doctor must hand over a case of wine to the Commandant.
This secret wager is no doubt a cruel one, but because the knowledge of it is kept from Daniel until well into the task (a fellow prisoner lets it slip), it does not affect the way he carries out the job. Indeed, Daniel is already living in fear -- mainly because the Commandant's behaviour is vindictive and unpredictable -- so making the violin comes as a welcome distraction.
The story is an incredibly poignant one, especially as it shows how Daniel's dedication to his craft gives him a reason to continue living when all around him lie starvation, disease and death. The very thought that his hand-crafted violin could be used to make beautiful music provides much-needed hope at a time of great despair.
While the book is far too slim to flesh out characters or provide important background detail, it tells the story in a simple, straightforward prose style reminiscent of short-story writing. And while it might be just over 100 pages long, it's power should not be under-estimated. The author's inclusion of real-life extracts from Nazi documents, which are detailed at the beginning of each chapter, only add to the weight of this novella.
The Auschwitz Violin will be published in the UK on November 4.
This time next week I will be officially jobless, so I've been steadily bringing home my little library of journalistic/editing texts. Some of these books have been with me since 1994, when I first trotted off to journalism school as a mature age student, but others were purchased later on in my career.
Here's what's in the pile from the top down:
The Elements of Style (Fourth Edition) by William Strunk Jr. and EB White This is a classic textbook which provides simple rules for writing plain English. It's for anyone who writes for a living, but it's also ideal for students, bloggers and letter-writers. Oh yes, and EB White is the same EB White who wrote Charlotte's Web!
Cassell's Guide to Written English by James Aitchison Very similar to The Elements of Style but goes into the specifics of English language rules and usage a bit more deeply. I found it helpful for settling arguments with sub-editors!
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler First published in 1926, this is the standard work on correct use of English, and the perfect tome to settle arguments about whether particular words should be hyphenated or not, how to use commas properly and how to avoid split infinitives!
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss This book was hugely popular in 2003, when it was first published, and my copy, a first-edition, got passed around a 10-strong team of sub-editors, each of whom tittered through it.
Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers by Harold Evans The bible. It covers everything from headline writing to structuring news and feature stories. Every intern or work-experience student I have had under my wing over the past 10 years has been encouraged to buy their own copy of this book. Honestly, it's brilliant.
Reporting in Australia by Sally A. White This is almost the Australian equivalent of Harold Evans' book (see above), but it has a much more detailed focus on the mechanics of reporting news: how to gather it and how to write it.
The Guardian Stylebook by David Marsh and Nikki Marshall I love a good style guide and have helped write, edit and update various in-house ones during my career. The Guardian one, published in 2004, is recommended reading for word nerds.
The Economist Style Guide Not quite as well laid out as The Guardian's one, but still hugely helpful for anyone seeking to write clearly in a way that is immediately understandable.
Subediting for Journalists by Wynford Hicks and Tim Holmes The kind of book that does exactly what it says on the cover. It covers everything from media law to writing headlines and standfirsts. Given most news organisations seem intent on getting rid of subs altogether, I imagine the market for this type of book has opened widely. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...
Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 84 pages; 2000.
There's something about J.L. Carr's Booker-nominated A Month in the Country which feels as if it was written long before its 1980 publication date. The story is a rather gentle and subtle one, ripe with religious symbolism, and it is so evocative of a long-lost English summer that whenever you lift your head from the page you expect to see blue skies, sunshine and fields of yellow-bright rape seed blowing in the breeze.
My edition comes with a rather good introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald, and a short forward by J.L. Carr himself, who says the idea of the book "was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. [...] I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart".
I've not read Hardy's novel, so I can't make a comparison, but I think Carr has definitely succeeded on the tug-at-the-heart element.
The story is a simple one about a young English soldier, Tom Birkin, who returns from the Great War and undertakes a special project: to uncover a medieval mural inside a church.
Tom, a Londoner, is not used to rural life. But in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby he finds the peace and quiet an antidote to his military experience, which has left him with a disturbing facial tick.
The marvellous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War [...] had done to me and begin where I'd left off. This is what I need, I thought -- a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won't be a casualty anymore.
He befriends another former solider -- and outsider -- at work in the village, Charles Moon, who is looking for a lost medieval grave near the church.
He also develops two key relationships with female residents -- 14-year-old precocious schoolgirl Kathy Ellerbeck, and the vicar's young, beautiful wife, Alice Keach -- both of them platonic, although the latter provides a frisson of sexual tension. I won't spoil it by telling you what happens!
As Tom slowly, methodically sets about gently removing the whitewash from the painting, he comes to know the inner-most workings of the village, its natives and their little secrets. There's not much more to the story than his gentle adaptation to rural living, the friendships he makes and the recuperative power of time to heal emotional wounds.
A Month in the Country is an understated but heartfelt story. Because it is told from Tom's point of view, looking back on his younger self, there's a bittersweet edge to it, tinged as it is with nostalgia and regret. Not bad for a slim book that's less than 100 pages long.
North Korea is one of those intensely secretive countries that most of us know very little about. Media coverage is virtually non-existent, unless it's something to do with nuclear weapons, George W. Bush's "Axis-of-evil", or leader Kim Jong-il, the latter usually covered in a humorous isn't-he-kooky? kind of way.
But in recent weeks, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has opened its doors to the Western media, albeit in a very controlled way, in order to show the world that Kim Jong-un, the leader's youngest son, is now the leader-in-waiting. This has provided a brief, but fascinating glimpse of a unique country, where conformity, not individuality, is the guiding principle.
The footage above is the North Korea that the North Korean Government want you to see. But Barbara Demick's book, Nothing to Envy, which won this year's BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, is filled with all the stuff they don't want you to know about.
This is a nation where citizens are encouraged to spy upon one another; where they are forbidden from listening or watching any media other than those run by the state; where every household must keep a portrait of the president on display; where they are so cut off from the rest of the world they truly believe the motto that they have "nothing to envy".
Demick, an American journalist, was a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, covering both North Korea and South Korea, in 2004. She was based in Soul, but made several trips to the North, and conducted extensive interviews with North Koreans who had defected. It is from these interviews that Demick shapes her book: a non-fiction account of six ordinary citizens living in the world's most secretive and repressive state.
The book has all the hallmarks of a great literary novel, because Demick uses narrative techniques to interweave the individual stories of six main characters living in Chongjin, the nation's third largest city.
The following description of the North Korean urban environment sets the scene:
There is almost no signage, few motor vehicles. Private ownership of cars is largely illegal, not that anyone can afford them. You seldom even see tractors, only scraggly oxen dragging plows. The houses are simple, utilitarian and monochromatic. There is little that predates the Korean War. Most of the housing stock was built in the 1960s and 1970s from cement block and limestone, doled out to people based on their job and rank. In the cities there are "pigeon coops", one-room units in low-rise apartment buildings, while in the countryside, people typically live in single-story buildings called "harmonicas", rows of one-room houses, stuck together like little boxes that make up the chambers of a harmonica. Occasionally, door frames and window sashes are painted a startling turquoise, but mostly everything is whitewashed or gray.
In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea.
The story initially focuses on two young lovers, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, who kept their relationship secret for six years but did not hold hands until three years later. In a society where sexual relationships outside of marriage are frowned upon and sex-education is non-existent, it took another six years before they shared their first kiss. Mi-Ran says when she eventually fled North Korea she was "twenty-six years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn't know how babies were conceived".
Further into the story we meet the indomitable Mrs Song, a factory worker, mother of four and model citizen. Two-thirds of the way into the book we are introduced to her oldest daughter, the wayward Oak-hee, who is trapped in a terrible marriage and believes that defection is her only hope of beginning a new life. By this time Mrs Song's mother-in-law, husband and son have died as a result of the famine that swept through the country in the 1990s.
There are two more characters: Dr Kim, a young medical doctor, and Kim Hyuck, a homeless teenager who grew up in an orphanage when his father abandoned him to marry his second wife. (Hyuck's mother died unexpectedly when he was just three years old.)
Demick paints each of these characters as incredibly resilient people with strong survival instincts. By tracing their lives over a 20- to 30-year period, she is able to demonstrate how their ingrained behaviour to obey the Communist regime slowly gets worn away, to the point where each comes to realise that the only way out is to flee. Their tales of escape are heart-hammering, and heart-warming, by turn.
Interestingly, Demick explains that defection was very low: only 923 citizens defected from the North to the South in the roughly 50-year period between the end of the Korean War and 1998. But that began to change in the late 1990s, brought about primarily by the famine that swept the country and the growing prosperity of neighbouring China, which became more and more of a temptation to those Koreans grappling to survive with no food, no money and often no employment.
The thing that amazed me most about this book, was less the glimpses of life lived in a Totalitarian society (it's no exaggeration to say this is George Orwell's 1984 writ large, the only thing missing seems to be the "two-minutes hate"), but the devastating impact of the nation's food shortages. According to Demick, this resulted in some 10 per cent of the North Korean population dying of starvation -- in 1998 the estimated casualties totalled 600,000 to 2 million.
Demick painstakingly reveals the desperate acts so many people had to carry out to find food. It makes for harrowing reading at times. I particularly felt for schoolteacher Mi-ran, who watches her young students wasting away in front of her eyes, knowing there is nothing she can do to save them from starvation.
The resulting collapse of the socialist food distribution system led to highly illegal business enterprises being set up, mainly in the form of food vendors such as butchers and bakers. Mrs Song, ever-resourceful, set up a flourishing trade in home-baked cookies. It says so much about her undying spirit, and her desire to keep forging ahead despite extremely adverse circumstances, that you begin to wonder if she's really true and not just figment of Demick's imagination.
The book is so jam-packed with intriguing facts that I couldn't even begin to list them all here, although several stick in my mind:
electricity is in such short supply that the lights are switched off every evening, plunging the whole of North Korea into darkness (this Google image illustrates it perfectly);
medical doctors are supposed to act selflessly by donating their own blood for transfusions and their own skin for grafts, as well as growing their own cotton to make bandages;
religion is forbidden because everyone must devote themselves to the cult of Kim Jong-il and the ruling Workers' Party of Korea; and
most North Korean clothes are made from a unique fabric called Vinalon, which is made from limestone and anthracite.
Nothing to Envy is a truly astonishing book, and this review cannot do it the justice it deserves. If you're intrigued by a nation that fell off the map of the developed world and want to know how ordinary citizens have endured extraordinary circumstances, then this book should not be missed. It's definitely been the highlight of my reading year so far.
I received so many wonderful recommendations I thought I'd list them here for anyone else looking to read either fiction or non-fiction titles with a Chinese theme.
Note that I've added a few more into the mix, which I've discovered while perusing internet book sites. Hyperlinks take you to my own reviews.
Fiction - paperback; Simon & Schuster Ltd - Washington Square Press; 368 pages; 2004.
The Good Earth is the first in an "oriental trilogy" written by American-born Pearl S. Buck. First published in 1931, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935. (Buck later received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 -- "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces" -- the first American woman to do so.)
The story, which spans some 50 years, is a relatively simple one about a poor peasant farmer, Wang Lung, who works hard to become a wealthy landowner.
Set in the period before the Revolution, it depicts China under the reign of its last emperor and presents a fascinating glimpse of rural life, where famine, flood and locust plagues are never far away.
The book opens on Wang Lung's wedding day. He has never meet his betrothed, O-lan, who is a slave at the House of Wwang (a family of rich landowners), but he is excited to have finally taken a wife.
She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in colour, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would. She bore Wang Lung's look, without embarrassment or response, simply waiting until he had seen her. He saw that it was true: there was not beauty of any kind in her face -- a brown, common, patient face. But there were no pockmarks on her dark skin, nor was her lip split. In her ears he saw his rings hanging, the gold-washed rings he had bought, and on her hands were the rings he had given her. He turned away with secret exultation. Well, he had his woman!
He takes her to his small house that he shares with his ageing father, and together the pair till the soil and tend to the crops. O-lan, stoic and hardworking, bears him three much-desired sons, as well as two daughters, one of whom is mentally handicapped.
Their life together is ruled very much by the seasons, and when starvation threatens in the early days of their marriage they retreat to the city in order to beg for food and try their fortune earning money by means other than farming.
But through sheer hard work, and a little bit of good fortune, Wang Lung is able to secure the future of his family by buying up little parcels of land whenever he has enough silver, and by the time he is in his 50s he is the wealthiest man in the village. This, in turn, presents him with new problems, including lazy relatives who suddenly want a piece of his new-found wealth. And how Wang Lung deals with these interesting moral dilemmas provides a good dose of narrative tension.
Stylistically, the book has the feel of a much-loved fable. The prose style is slightly old-fashioned, without being clunky, but there's never any doubt that you are in the hands of a master storyteller.
I enormously enjoyed following the course of Wang Lung's extraordinary life. And while Pearl S. Buck obviously has a message to push -- that hard graft reaps rewards -- this doesn't detract from an epic story that is filled with emotional highs and lows, joy and fear, lust and love, life and death.
The Good Earth is highly recommended if you are looking for an absorbing tale that highlights how ambition, honour and a smidge of good luck can overcome adversity but not necessarily solve all your problems...
I spent several hours on Monday sorting through books I've read and books I'm yet to read, and after I'd bagged up two giant bags of the titles I no longer want, I hit upon the hairbrained idea of displaying my books, not in alphabetical order, but by colour. I know it will make it near on impossible to locate particular titles, unless, of course, I know what colour the spine is, but I like the look of my shelves.
I get such a kick seeing this rainbow of reading that lies in wait.
The shelves, if anyone is interested, are part of Ikea's expedit series. My photograph depicts the top of a TV storage unit; I couldn't stand back far enough to get the whole thing in shot. Plus, you probably don't want to see my el-cheapo TV, nor all the non-bookish paraphernalia -- money box, telephone, wireless router, mini-speakers and so on -- on the other shelves.
The book ends are from Joy, but they don't seem to sell them online. Try Store instead.
As a teenager in the 1980s, I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War nuclear arms race. At the time there was a very real fear that Armageddon was just around the corner. It frightened me so much I still remember writing English essays about nuclear war and angst-filled poetry about world peace.
Australia may have seemed a long way away from the two main adversaries, the USA and Soviet Union, but anxiety about the nuclear threat was very real at that point in time.
I still remember the terrifying image, depicting Sydney Harbour after a nuclear strike, on the front cover of Red Sails in the Sunset, an album by Australian rock band Midnight Oil. I bought it upon release in 1984 and remember feeling incredibly impassioned by the lyrics, which were filled with political messages about the nuclear threat we all faced. (The band's singer, Peter Garrett, even went on to stand for the Nuclear Disarmament Party although he didn't get voted in.)
Not long afterwards, in 1985, the McClelland Royal Commission investigated secret British nuclear tests on Australian soil, including Maralinga, in the 1950s. I still remember the veterans who had been subject to the blasts being interviewed on TV news broadcasts. This short film (below) sheds further light on what happened.
It was about this time that I read Nevil Shute's nuclear holocaust novel On the Beach. I was 15 or 16 and remember being totally gripped by the story. It all seemed unbearably sad, totally realistic and did absolutely nothing to dispel my fear of Armageddon being just around the corner!
Twenty-five years later, would it live up to my memory of it?
Before I answer that, let me explain the story.
It is 1963. The entire population of the Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out by nuclear war and now the radioactive cloud is drifting slowly south, killing everyone in its wake. As the most southerly city on the Australian mainland, Melbourne is the last bastion for human habitation. And it is here that the American Navy has retreated. When a faint morse code signal is detected coming from the United States, a submarine is dispatched to make contact...
The novel is largely set in the naval dockyards of Williamstown (which, ironically, is the Melbourne suburb of my birth) and the fictional Falmouth (which, I suspect is a town on the Mornington Peninsula), although a great part of the action is set on a nuclear-powered submarine. However, I use the term "action" quite lightly, because not a great deal happens in the book.
Essentially, everyone knows that death is looming large but instead of going completely crazy about the situation, all the characters carry on their day-to-day lives as if everything is hunky dory. In Shute's world it's clear that civilisation is robust and there'll be no succumbing to riots or looting or anything immoral. Indeed, there might only be two weeks to live but if you want to go and buy a lawn mower, you can simply pop into the local hardware store and you'll receive the usual friendly customer service to which you've become accustomed. I suspect this business-as-usual approach is merely a reflection of the times in which it was written (On the Beach was first published in 1957), but it seems quite odd and dated today.
In fact, there's a lot about this novel that appears ludicrous when viewed with modern eyes, and I have to admit that there were times I thought the characters behaved so ridiculously or said unbelievably silly things that I wanted to throw the book across the room. After awhile I began to view the entire novel as a comedy, and while there's certainly a lot of gallows humour in it, I'm not sure that was Shute's intention.
Peter looked at the price tag, picked up the mower, and went to find the assistant. "I'll take this one," he said. "Okay," said the man. "Good little mower that." He grinned sardonically. "Last you a lifetime."
For the most part I found the characterisation poor -- the male characters in particular are almost indistinguishable from one another -- but there was one shining light in the form of Moira Davidson, a 20-something single woman, who has a penchant for drinking vast quantities of brandy and flirting with men. She strikes up a platonic friendship with Dwight Towers, the captain of the US Scorpion, around which most of the story hinges.
Mary, the wife of Peter Holmes (the central character), is also well-drawn, in the sense that her sheer naivety makes her stand-out from the rest of the cast.
But strangely for a book about the death of the human race, there's very little emotion aside from one touching scene in which Mary and Peter discuss how to deal with their young baby, Jennifer, when the radiation sickness strikes.
Shute also tends to write in a fairly stilted manner, using phrases that seem ridiculous -- "The breakfast came upon the table" -- and referring to characters by their nationality or occupation -- "The Australian", "The scientist", "The Commander" -- which grate with constant repetition.
While On the Beach is an entertaining, dare I say it, fascinating read, its purpose is not so much literary but cultural, revealing as it does a 1950s mindset coming to terms with the end of the world. I suspect this is one of those novels you love first time round, but a second reading only serves to reveal its weaknesses and Shute's writerly quirks.
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This book was chosen by Polly as part of our Riverside Readers book group. Here are some other posts written about the book by fellow members:
... you may be interested in seeing Steerforth's amazing haul of Victorian photographs, which he rescued from near oblivion and posted online. They are an absolutely fascinating glimpse of "the England of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins".
My reading, whether by accident or design, often follows themes.
For instance, in the summer I read a series of books set in Northern Ireland as part of a carefully planned Northern Ireland season; more recently I've read a trio of books that explore the notion of how violence is linked to boredom -- This is How by MJ Hyland, The Grass Arena by John Healy and The Canal by Lee Rourke -- which I picked up, one after the other, by pure chance.
Why do I want to read about China, I hear you ask. Well, next month I'm going on a 23-day trip, taking in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, and feel I need to get myself into the Oriental mood, as it were. The trip has come largely out of the blue; it was definitely not something I'd been planning for any length of time. But sometimes life throws you little surprises (in the form of workplace redundancy) and you need to roll with the punches and make the most of the opportunities that come your way.
I've deferred my university course for a year (classes began last week), so that I can go out and see the world for a few months, get myself some head space and figure out the next career move. China seemed like the perfect place to escape my usual 9-to-5 existence, particularly as I have always wanted to go sailing down the Yangtze River.
So, in preparation for a binge on Chinese fiction, I rifled through my TBR this morning and came up with four from the shelves: Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong, Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck and The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison.
Can anyone recommend some other novels set in China? Non-fiction suggestions are also welcome.
The winner of the Booker Prize is named next Tuesday. Here's a short round-up of Booker-related news and features.
The Review Show on BBC2 discussed all the shortlisted titles on last night's broadcast. If you missed it and live in the UK you can watch it on BBC iPlayer.
Fiction - paperback; New Island Books; 320 pages; 2007.
First published in 1966, Aidan Higgins' first novel, Langrishe, Go Down, is regarded as an Irish classic. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award, and was later made into a television movie based on a screenplay by the great Harold Pinter.
It is by no means an easy read -- it features literary flourishes characteristic of high modernism and a narrative that switches between third person and first person seemingly on a whim -- but it is a rich and rewarding one. I also found it profoundly moving.
The story is set in rural Ireland in the 1930s. Four middle-aged sisters live in a crumbling estate set on 72 acres in Celbridge, County Kildare. They are unusual in that they are landed Catholics, but their parents are dead and the money has long since run out. But their social standing remains, even if the only way they can pay their bills is to cut down a stately ash tree in the garden for two quid (a trend started by their late father, who felled trees and sold them for firewood when he was desperate for cash).
The book opens with the older sister, Helen, taking a crowded bus journey back home from an outing in Dublin. It is evening and the bus is awash with "circles of bilious light" and "warm gusts of sweetish nauseous air", all brought incredibly alive by Higgins' masterful writing. Without any mention of time or date, we get an immediate sense of period by the Evening Herald lying open on Helen's knee:
Well muffled up against the elements, the passengers read that the Italians were arming, that Herr von Ribbentrop had made a provocative speech at the Leipzig Fair, that the Pope had graciously given audience to Monsignor Pisani, Archbishop of Tomi. General Franco had spoken on the destined march of free Spain. At Melbourne, in cool summer weather, Australia had retained the Ashes.
By the time Helen gets home, we know the world is in a dire situation, that the Spanish Civil War is in full swing and the trouble is brewing in Germany. But the home front isn't much better. Helen's younger sister, Imogen, is prone to hypochondria and spends her days in bed, not wanting to rise, and her diet, comprising thin omelets sprinkled with parsley, has left her pale and weak. But what led to this situation?
The answer is revealed in part II, when the story jumps back in time, to 1932. In just over 150 pages, Higgins details the secret affair Imogen leads with her German lover, Otto Beck, a mature-age student who lives on the Langrishe farm. Otto is an intellectual, well read, well travelled and prone to talking endlessly about himself and his studies. (He is working on a thesis entitled The Ossianic Problem and the Actual Folk Sagas and Customs in 17th Century Ireland with special reference to the work of Goethe and the Brothers Grimm: a sociological-philological-critical study, a title that Imogen so deftly points out is "a bit of a mouthful".) Imogen, a 40-something virgin, sees him as her last chance to experience love.
They embark on a passionate affair -- which lasts "two springs, two summers, three autumns and two winters" -- and suddenly Imogen's rather routine domestic life takes on a new exciting element. But when she begins to realise that self-absorbed Otto is taking her for granted, that he is only interested in her body and not her mind, the relationship hits rocky ground. I don't think it is a spoiler to say it ends badly, but it is heart-rending to read.
The breakdown of their relationship is perhaps a metaphor for the tragic decline of the house in which Imogen was raised. As the property falls into ruin, so, too, does Imogen's simple, chaste life. Similarly, the ties that bind the sisters together begin to fray until very little love or friendship between them remains. And we could take it even further and suggest it mirrors the demise of Ireland's old order of power, too.
If this sounds like a terribly melancholy story, then you'd be right. It's heart-breaking in places, particularly when you realise that much of Imogen's behaviour is characterised by small acts of desperation in order to escape her dull, dreary life. But there's other emotion here, too, including love, passion and sexual desire, which balances the despair.
While this novel won't be to everyone's tastes -- too literary, too modernist, too experimental -- I thoroughly enjoyed it, not least because it took me right out of my comfort zone and introduced me to a novel regarded by so many as a masterpiece.
Fiction - paperback; Atlantic Books; 356 pages; 2010. Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers.
There's a Gothic, fairytale quality to Purge, the first novel by Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen to be translated into English. The novel has already been a bestseller in Europe and won three prestigous literary awards: the Finlandia, in 2008; the Runeberg, in 2009; and the Nordic Council Literature Prize, in 2010. I picked it up by chance while browsing in Foyles a couple of weeks ago, partly attracted by the stunning cover, but more enamoured of the writer's credentials and the book's unfamiliar setting.
And it is that setting -- Estonia -- which gives the story an unusual and decidedly different flavour to anything I've read before.
The story is a dark and disturbing one, hence the Gothic feel, and the two central characters -- an elderly widow living on the edge of a forest, and the dirty, dishevelled woman she finds in her garden -- have shades of Cinderella and her wicked step-mother about them.
But this is a story rooted in harsh reality, intertwining, as it does, the tale of the two women with Estonia's troubled past. The narrative, which jumps backwards and forwards in time, focusses on key points in Estonian history: its occupation by German forces during the Second World War; its post-war Soviet occupation; and its eventual independence and entry into the European Union.
And so while the story lurches between war and peace, occupation and liberation, Communism and Socialism, we follow the paths of two women, 40-years apart, who are victims of horrendous crimes: Aliide Truu, the elder of the two, was brutally raped by Communist militia in the 1940s as part of an interrogation; Zara is on the run from the sex traffickers who have tortured and raped her in Berlin.
How have these women being shaped by their pasts? And why is Aliide a virtual prisoner in her own home, beset by villagers who pound her roof with stones every night? And is it true that Zara sought her out deliberately, and for what reason?
The story is littered with shame, small acts of cruelty and large, unforgivable betrayals.
What makes it such an effective and powerful read -- aside from the themes of love, survival and treachery, and Oksanen's brilliant characterisation -- is the way in which the narrative is told in non-chronological bite-sized chunks, so that you have to hold fragments in your head in order to work out what is going on. This gives rise to moments of astonishment as pieces click into place and you begin to see how the events of the past are shaping the future.
I'm conscious of not giving too much away in this review, because it is one of those stories that needs to be read with as little background information as possible. All you really need to know is that these two women have tragic pasts, which collide in unexpected, unforeseeable ways. And while I don't think it is a perfect novel -- there are too many co-incidences to be believable, and Zara's tale of escape tends towards the implausible -- it is brimming with enough dark secrets to make it a real page turner.
And if you need further incentive to give this one a try, do read Savidge Reads' review -- by sheer coincidence we both seem to have read this book at the same time.
If ever a first line was to set the tone for the rest of the book, it is this one: "Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce."
The sisters are Sarah and Emily, separated by four years -- and a whole host of differing personality traits. Sarah, the eldest, is confident and pretty; Emily is intellectual. Both choose to lead very different lives -- Sarah marries young and starts a family, Emily pursues a career -- but neither of them find happiness.
There's not much more to the story than that, but in Richard Yates' carefully understated writing style there is a real emotional depth that resonates long after you've reached the final page. The more distance I put between the book and writing this review, the more I've come to appreciate the tragic beauty of these sisters' wasted lives.
First published in 1976, The Easter Parade was Richard Yates' fifth novel. It is set in New York and covers a 40-year period from the 1930s to the 1970s. It provides a fascinating glimpse of two opposing views of womanhood -- that of wife and mother, and that of single women who pursue fulfillment through work -- ideas that seem unusual for a male author to write about with such aplomb and insight. Indeed, male characters are few and far between in this novel, and when they do appear they are relatively weak and spineless.
For instance, the girls' father, a newspaper man who writes headlines in the New York Sun, a job of which his daughters are incredibly proud, seems to fall apart after the divorce, turning to drink and telling his daughters he is "only a copy desk man" and not especially talented. Sarah's husband, Tony, initially handsome and charming, turns out to be uncouth and abusive. And pretty much every man that Emily ends up with -- and there are a lot of them -- lacks any kind of self-esteem. But neither sister ever comes to the realisation that they deserve better.
That lack of self-awareness may be due to the girls' mother, the slightly eccentric and over-the-top Pookie, who seems to emasculate anyone, male or female, who comes within 15 feet of her orbit. In fact, Emily finds her so demanding that entire years go by in which Emily avoids her mother completely. Even when Pookie is in an old folks home, Emily feels no guilt in not making the effort to visit her.
The Easter Parade is a sad tale, but it's incredibly easy to read, and the pace is ferocious because Yates doesn't bother with unnecessary detail -- he'll often miss out entire years by using phrases such as "two years later" or "for a few years" -- but it doesn't come at the expense of characterisation or plot. I found this book the perfect antidote to "reader's block" and ate it up in a weekend.
My only quibble, and it's a very small one, is that The Easter Parade is largely told through the eyes of Emily, so you never really get to understand Sarah's motivations and why she makes the choices she makes. The best you can do is to simply guess.
Finally, many thanks to regular reader Jeniwren, from Oz, who sent me this book a couple of years ago; it only made its way to the top of my TBR a couple of weeks ago! I've now gone out and bought some of his other novels. I expect a Richard Yates' binge coming on very soon.
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Fiction - paperback; Corsair; 109 pages; 2010. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.
Non-fiction - paperback; Granta Books; 314 pages; 2010.
Fiction - paperback; Simon & Schuster Ltd - Washington Square Press; 368 pages; 2004.
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