Reading Matters

'Invisible' by Paul Auster

 

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 320 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I think I may have developed a wee bit of a literary crush on Paul Auster, although our relationship took a little while to develop. Indeed, I was ready to dump him before it even began, because our first meeting in which I read Oracle Night, back in 2005, was not a particularly pleasant one: I simply didn't get what he was all about. But then I gave him a second chance and read the New York Trilogy and suddenly it all began to make sense. Auster is a novelist who plays with the format, concentrates on recurring themes (for example, coincidence, writing and story-telling, truth and memory) and often makes himself part of the action.

This novel, his 16th, is one of his more accessible, and would make the perfect introduction to anyone who has yet to try Auster for themselves.

It's told in four interlocking parts. The first introduces us to Adam Walker, a 20-year-old poet and literature student at Columbia University, who meets Frenchman Rudolf Born, a visiting professor, and his seductive young girlfriend, Margot, at a party. The chance introduction is to have a long-lasting impact on Adam's life. Initially it all seems rather positive, because Born is a rich man and he's keen to employ Adam as the editor of a new literary magazine he wants to launch. But then it all goes terribly wrong, for reasons I won't divulge, and Adam finds himself wishing he'd never met Born, who comes across as quite a creepy, violent, narcissist capable of the most hideous crime.

The second part is told from James (Jim) Freeman's perspective. He once attended classes at Columbia with Adam, although they were never close, and went on to become a very successful writer. The pair fell out of touch, but then 38 years later, Jim receives a part-written manuscript from Adam and asks for his honest opinion of it. The manuscript, entitled Summer, is included, and forms the bulk of this part of Invisible. It tells the story of what happened to Adam after his falling out with Born in the spring of 1967, and includes an eye-opening, somewhat racy, account of Adam's incestuous relationship with his sister.

The third part is again told from Jim's perspective, with the second part of Adam's manuscript, entitled Fall, included. This details Adam's move to Paris and his half-cooked ploy to extract revenge on Rudolph Born on home turf. It also recounts his friendship with Born's step-daughter.

The fourth and final part has Jim meet Adam's sister, Gwyn, a 61-year-old beauty, to discuss whether the manuscript should ever be published given it has quite damaging revelations about her in the text. Born's step-daughter also has her chance to tell her side of the story.

As you can tell, there's quite a lot of jumping around of perspectives, although it's all told in the first person. It's only Adam's manuscript that switches around. But this is fairly typical Aster fare, because he has a penchant for including a book within a book, so what you end up reading is a multi-layered narrative. It's a bit like sitting in front of a mirror with a mirror behind you reflecting a never-ending set of images of a person looking in the mirror looking at a person looking in a mirror and so on.

There's no denying I loved this book. I raced through it in just a matter of days and found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. There's something about Auster's work that unsettles the unconscious mind, so that certain scenes and characters will pop into your head unannounced. I have only read a very small selection of his extensive back catalogue but Invisible is one of the better ones I've had the joy of reading. Definitely recommended, regardless of whether you're an Auster virgin or not.

'The Second Plane' by Martin Amis

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 224 pages; 2009.

Martin Amis is best known as an English novelist with some 10 titles to his name. But Amis is also a short story writer, literary critic and essayist, and this book comprises a collection of 14 pieces -- two short stories, eight essays and four reviews -- around the theme of September 11, 2001. These pieces were written between 2001 and 2007, and have been produced in the order in which they were written. Amis says he has added to them, but cut nothing, although he was briefly tempted "to cover my tracks".

Now, this is where I put up my hand and confess that I'm not well versed in Amis's work. I read Times Arrow many moons ago and it did not convince me to try any of his other stuff. My sister, who doesn't read as much as me, enjoyed London Fields, but I'm still not convinced.

Reading this collection I'm still no closer to understanding Amis or what makes him tick other than I now know he's an atheist turned "weak-agnostic" and he doesn't think much of Islamists, George Bush or Tony Blair. Join the club.

There's something about these pieces that seems too dry and too highbrow for one to truly engage with them. At times it felt like I was reading a novelist pretending to be a journalist -- and on that basis, he fails, because there's too much style and too many literary flourishes getting in the way of the facts.

A case in point. Or four cases in point, actually. He reviews three books and one movie -- United 93 directed by Paul Greengass; The Looming Tower: Al Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright; State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward; America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn; and The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left by Ed Husain -- in this collection and with the exception of the book by Steyn, whom he describes as an "oddity" who "writes like a maniac", I'm not really clear where he stands on them: did he like them or not? In many ways, he simply summarises the contents, adds his two-bits worth on the subject and refuses to tell us what he really thinks of the works in question.

So, putting aside the reviews, how do the other pieces fare? By far the best piece here is his opening essay entitled The Second Plane which was first published in The Guardian just seven days after the attacks on the World Trade Center. There is raw emotion here and a desperate attempt at comprehending the incomprehensible. (In his author's note at the start of the book Amis describes the piece as "hallucinatory" because it was "fevered by shock and by rumour".) But it's the opening sentences that really sets the scene, for this short chapter as well as the book as a whole:

It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.

In The Voice of the Lonely Crowd, first published in The Guardian in 2002, he makes a salient claim, later championed by many others, that the event had brought literature to its knees. He argues that "many novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11" because "they were playing for time". I think, in this instance, he may be right.

I think he's also right about a lot of the stuff in the rest of this essay, not the least his theory that religion is a sham.

... religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward -- and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Similarly, The Wrong War -- written in March 2003, before the invasion of Iraq -- is a strong piece about how America is "behaving like someone still in shock" and that the "axis of evil" is a theological construct invented by Bush because it "makes him feel easier about being intellectually null". 

As you can see, Amis doesn't pull his punches. But what he says makes sense.

I especially like his claim that the Coalition planned to go to war because there was a lack of weapons of mass destruction, not the other way around:

The surest way by far of finding out what Iraq has is to attack it. Then at last we will have Saddam's full cooperation in our weapons inspection, because everything we know about him suggests that he will use them all. The Pentagon must be more or less convinced that Saddam's WMDs are under a certain critical number. Otherwise it couldn't attack him.

On the whole this is an interesting collection, although it probably won't tell you anything you don't already know or haven't come to figure out on your own. But what it does do is provide an insight into a dreadful time in our recent history and shows how the public realm has been shaped and altered by terrorism and war.

'Shadow' by Karin Alvtegen

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 320  pages; 2009. Translated from Swedish by McKinley Burnett. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Karin Alvtegen is a Swedish crime writer whose body of work -- five novels at last count -- has earned her critical acclaim and several awards and award nominations, including the Glass Key award in 2001 (for Missing) and the Goldpocket 2004 (for Betrayal). Her latest novel, Shadow, has already earned her the Danish Academy of Crime Writers´Award (The Palle Rosenkrantz Prize 2008) for Best Crime Novel in Denmark. It has also been shortlisted for the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award 2007 for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year.

So, when a review copy thudded through my letterbox last month courtesy of Canongate, I was quite looking forward to getting stuck into it. I'm happy to report it didn't disappoint. In fact, psychological crime thrillers don't come much better than this.

Shadow takes two seemingly random events -- the abandonment of a four-year-old boy left on the steps of a theme park, and the death, more than 30 years later, of an old lady whose freezer is stocked with carefully wrapped and signed books by a famous Nobel Prize-winning author -- and traces their connection. It sounds like a bizarre premise for a book, but in Altvtegen's hands these divergent threads slowly but surely become entwined in a surprising and ultimately shocking way.

At first I found the story a little slow to get going, but the book works by ratcheting up the tension in a gradual but steady way, drawing out the suspense to the point where it almost becomes unbearable, you simply want to race to the end to find out what happens. The multi-layered plot, involving betrayal and murder between family members and colleagues, is so expertly put together that the ending is almost impossible to guess -- a fine indication, if nothing else, of Alvtegen's superb talent as a writer. This surprise denouement, however, makes it difficult to review Shadow without giving the plot away.

The characterisation is also very good, even if all the characters seem quite similar: weak-willed and sex-starved, lacking courage but desperate to find a way out of their current predicament. In fact, none of them are particularly likable but they are all empathetically drawn and seem all the more human and hence believable for this.

Essentially Shadow is a story about dark family secrets, but it also looks at the price of fame and how the search for public approval can drive some people to make unsound decisions that have long-lasting and occasionally tragic repercussions. It also examines the impact of our childhood on the rest of our adult lives, whether abandoned or ignored by our parents or left to grow up in a Nazi concentration camp, and how small moments in time can have monumental consequences.

'Man in the Dark' by Paul Auster

Fiction - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 160 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Paul Auster is one of those authors you either love or hate. He has a very dedicated cult following, but I have never been a member of that club.

The first Auster I read was Oracle Night, charmed in part by the coverline which claimed that "If you have never read Auster before . . . this is the place to start". I didn't really know what to expect, but I struggled with the cold detached prose style. And I simply didn't "get" the storyline. And yet, months later, I was still thinking about the story and the characters. There was something there that had wormed its way into my brain and would pop into my consciousness when I least expected it. I began to worry that I had written off Auster before giving him a proper chance.

And so that is how I came to read what is probably his most famous novel -- or series of novels -- New York Trilogy.  And this time, kind of knowing what to expect, I fell in love with Auster's style and his thematic exploration of stories within stories and of the loneliness of writing and the concept of parallel lives and the blurring of fiction and reality. I loved the book so much I couldn't bring myself to read anything else by him, although I often pick up his novels in book stores, walk around with them under my arm for a bit and then, chicken that I am, return them to the shelves and opt for something that little bit safer.

Fast forward a couple of years and when I discovered there was a new Auster about to hit the shelves I asked Faber and Faber if they'd be kind enough to send me a review copy, and they very kindly obliged.

Man in the Dark is typical Auster fare. It contains stories within stories within stories, and it plays with the concept that people can inhabit more than one world. It also explores memory, and the differences, if any, between the real and imagined.

It is told through the eyes of August Brill, a 72-year-old invalid, who dreams up stories in his head as a way of overcoming his insomnia. One of these stories is about a young man who awakens in a parallel universe in which September 11 did not happen. The America he finds himself in is not the calm, peaceful nation one would expect but a country at war with itself resulting from the secession of New York and a host of other states unhappy with the 2000 election result that put George W. Bush in power.

It's a horrifying glimpse of another world that might have been. It reads like something that Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King might have colluded on. It's dark, menacing and incredibly realistic.

But this is but one narrative thread of Man in the Dark. There is another in which the grieving August Brill recounts his marriage and long life with his now dead but much-loved Sonia to his granddaughter, Katya, who also suffers from insomnia. Katya, too, is grieving for the loss of her boyfriend, Titus, who was murdered in Iraq, and she stalls her grief by watching world movies with her grandfather all day long.

Later, the story of Titus's untimely death, is also spelled out. So what results is a novel composed of many different stories that share common themes including love, loss, loneliness, fear and war.

Man in the Dark is an immensely readable book that moves along at a fast pace, so fast that I was able to read it in one sitting. There's little clutter, but there's a lot of stuff going on, too much, probably, to absorb in one reading. Whether the diehard fans will like it as much as me remains to be seen, but I thought it was an enjoyable, affecting and thought-provoking read, one that I am sure will linger in my mind for a long time to come. Now, if only I was brave enough to explore more of his back catalogue.

'Garden Spells' by Sarah Addison Allen

Fiction - paperback; Hodder; 327 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I know you shouldn't judge books by their covers, but when this one came thudding through the door, courtesy of the publisher, I practically salivated over this soon-to-be published paperback, not so much because I was dying to read the story, but because the artwork was so delicious. The image shown here (see left) doesn't do the real hold-it-in-your-hands cover justice, because it doesn't quite convey the gorgeous embossing that glitters like fairy dust on the dress and curlicues. So you'll just have to take my word for it. It's a magical cover, and if they give prizes to book cover designers, this designer should not only get the top accolade, they should get a lifetime achievement award. Seriously.

But does the cover match the contents, I hear you say. Well, the story is certainly magical -- think English author Joanne Harris transported to North Carolina -- but Garden Spells isn't going to win any top literary awards. This is comfort reading: enjoyable, fluffy and fun. In fact, I read this book in two longish sittings while the rain pounded against the window one miserably wet Saturday and it was perfect fodder for an entertaining weekend read.

The story revolves around two sisters, the relatively strait-laced Claire Waverley and her younger wayward sister Sydney, from Bascom, North Carolina.

Claire lives alone in a beautiful Queen Ann style house that has been in the family for generations. The house has a garden with magical qualities, including an apple tree that bears fruit all year round. In fact, if you eat an apple from the tree the greatest event of your life will be revealed.

Claire uses ingredients from the garden in the delicacies she cooks as part of her profitable catering business. These ingredients affect the eater in curious ways -- want to be able to keep secrets, then eat Claire's biscuits made with lilac jelly; want to make sure you are understood, then eat turkey salad made with zucchini blossoms; want to recall good memories, then drink rose geranium wine.

Unfortunately, Claire's culinary talents have marked her out as a being a little strange, and unless she's doing business with someone, most of the locals keep their distance.

But Claire is not the only Waverley who has a reputation for being odd. Her Aunt Evanelle has the ability to predict people's needs and will present them with odd objects -- a brooch, a mango slicer, two dimes -- that will come in especially useful at a later date.

Sydney, very much aware of her family's reputation, fled Bascom ten years ago. But now, with an abusive boyfriend on her tail, she returns to the family home -- the only place she has ever felt truly safe -- with her six-year-old daughter Bay in tow.

But if Sydney's reappearance upsets Claire's equilibrium, the arrival of a handsome man moving in next door is set to turn her carefully tended life completely upside down...

Garden Spells, a kind of chick-lit meets culinary novel meets 21st century fairytale, is an enchanting read, if a little on the silly side. It's slightly predictable and the romantic elements are cliched, but this is balanced by a tightly written plot and such glorious descriptions of food you can't help but feel hungry as you turn each page. If you like magic realism, you'll love this; if you like your novels grounded in reality, you won't. But either way this is a fun read -- and the cover is a knock-out!

'The Kept Man' by Jami Attenberg

Fiction - hardcover; Riverhead; 304 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The Kept Man by first-time novelist Jami Attenberg is published tomorrow, but I was lucky enough to read it before its release date. I think it was the opening line -- "I have been waiting for my husband to die for six years" -- that intrigued me most, quickly followed by the setting (New York -- Williamsburg and Brooklyn, to be precise).

The story is about a woman, Jarvis Miller, married to a highly successful artist, who, one day, falls off a ladder in his studio, bumps his head and ends up in a coma. Jarvis spends the next six years in limbo, married to a man who is no longer the man she married but is still faithfully devoted to him.

But one day, when her washing machine breaks down, she is forced to use the local laundromat, where she meets -- and befriends -- three attractive men who turn out to be house husbands. For the first time since her husband's accident, Jarvis gets a taste for the real world, where the possibility for new relationships and new experiences makes her feel alive again. It is only when she discovers some of her husband's secrets -- in the form of three mysterious collections of photographs -- that Jarvis feels it is time for her to let go of the past and embrace the future...

For a first-time novelist, The Kept Man represents an accomplished piece of work. Jarvis Miller is an amazingly well-rounded and believable character; flawed but willing to admit her flaws; lonely but not clingy; frightened yet brave. I found her incredibly tough but likable, if a little edgy and slightly needy.

The same cannot really be said of the narrative. Yes, the prose style is strong and confident. Yes, the characters are believable. Yes, the dialogue rings true. Yes, the setting is vivid and feels very real. But the story arc -- the plot -- seems as if it's holding back the punches, as if there's a whole host of back story you have to wade through first before you can understand Jarvis's sudden epiphany.

My point is this: we know Jarvis has experienced something traumatic and that the love for her husband cannot be doubted, but her reason for moving on and letting him go takes far too long to arrive -- about one-third of the book, to be precise. I think the narrative drive -- or the reason for the reader to keep turning the pages -- could have been stronger, by posing a question in the reader's mind up front.  All it would have taken is a line or two  in the first chapter indicating that Jarvis has reason to doubt her marriage, that she has evidence to back it up, and the seed of suspense would have been planted. But instead, I found myself reading without understanding the point of the story. I kept thinking, so what?

But that's not to say that this book isn't a great one. It is saved by a wonderful cast of characters, Attenberg's prose style (her attention to detail is superb) and a satisfying conclusion. The Kept Man is an entertaining read that explores what it is to love and be loved, how to move on when the past has such a grip on who you are, and why it's important to experience the world rather than cut yourself off from it. I await Attenberg's next book with much anticipation...

'I'm Not Scared' by Niccolo Ammaniti

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 225 pages; 2003. Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt.

Books about childhood that truly get inside the mind of a child are difficult feats to accomplish. How do you recapture the innocence, that naive sense of wonder, that wide-eyed outlook on life untouched by greater human experience without talking down to your reader or coming across as if you're trying too hard?

Whatever the trick, Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti has achieved it. In spades.

The somewhat ludicrously titled I'm Not Scared is a delicious treat, one that transports the reader back to that time when the adult world was incomprehensible and the best thing about life was riding your bicycle throughout the long, hot school holidays that lay ahead every summer.

Set in a small Italian village enclosed by scorched wheat fields, the story is told through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, Michele Amitrano, who hangs out with a small group of local children, including his younger sister. One day, during a dare to race up a remote hilltop, Michele stumbles upon a sight that the others don't see: near a dilapidated farmhouse he finds a young boy chained in a hole hidden under a sheet of corrugated iron and a mattress.

Later -- and this isn't a plot spoiler -- we learn the boy has been kidnapped, and that some of the adults in Michele's village, including his parents, are involved. This floors Michele, whose sense of childhood justice is outraged. He vacillates between sharing his discovery, or keeping quiet. He chooses the latter... with devastating consequences.

The beautiful thing about this book -- aside from the well-paced plot and the gentle telling of the story -- is the writing. In stripped back prose Ammaniti reveals so much about humans and the sometimes emotionally strained relationships between children and adults -- and always, despite the heavy drama, humour is not that far away.

'Papa! Papa!' I pushed the door and rushed in. 'Papa! I've got something to ...' The rest died on my lips.
He was sitting in the armchair with the newspaper in his hands looking at me with toad's eyes. The worst toad eyes I had seen since the day I had drunk the Lourdes water thinking it was aqua minerale. He squashed his cigarette-end in his coffee cup.

Similarly, his descriptions of the rain-starved Italian countryside are so vivid you feel as if you are standing there with the sun beating down on your back.

The stream was always dry, except in winter, when it rained hard. It wound its way between the yellow fields like a long albino snake. A bed of white pointed stones, incandescent rocks and tufts of grass. After a steep part between two hills, the stream widened out to form a pond which in summer dried up into a black puddle.
The lake, we called it.
There were no fish in it, nor tadpoles, only mosquito larvae and water boatmen. If you put your feet in it, you took them out covered in dark, stinking mud.

I'm Not Scared bears striking similarities to the more recent The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: both novels are about young boys finding themselves face to face with counterparts in dire life-and-death predicaments, both feature innocent narrators being confronted with the worst of human nature. But where The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has a neatly drawn heart-wrenching ending, I'm Not Scared packs a powerhouse punch which leaves the reader to make up their own mind as to what really happened.

Finally, a word of warning: if you intend to read this book make sure you've got a few clear hours to do so, the storytelling is so rich and vivid you won't want to abandon it until the final, devastating climax is reached. I read it in one sitting, completely unaware of the ticking of the clock, a perfect Sunday afternoon treat.

'The Yacoubian Building' by Alaa As Aswany

 

Fiction - hardcover; Fourth Estate; 272 pages; 2007. Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies.

The Yacoubian Building has been a best seller in its native Egypt and throughout the Arabic world since publication in 2002. It was translated into English in 2004 but has come to more prominent attention because it was made into a film of the same name last year. This hardcover edition was published in 2007.

Set in downtown Cairo at the time of the 1990 Gulf War, this intriguing novel shows modern Egyptian life through the eyes of a diverse range of characters, all of whom live in an apartment block called the Yacoubian Building.

Similar in style to Nicholas Rinaldi's Between Two Rivers, which is set in a Manhattan residential building, it charts the struggles of a wide cross-section of society, from the underclass that live in cramped conditions in converted storage rooms on the roof of the building, to the wealthy residents who inhabit the building's individual apartments.

There are so many characters in the book that a list is printed at the front for reference. The main ones include: a wealthy and elderly playboy (Zaki Bey el Dessouki); a bright and ambitious young man who wants to enter the Police Acadamy but joins a militant Islamist organisation instead (Taha el Shazli); a beautiful girl who supports her family by taking a poorly paid job in a clothing shop which is run by a man who expects sexual favours (Busayna); a shirtmaker and petty schemer (Malak); the gay editor-in-chief of a French language newspaper (Hatim Rasheed); and a self-made millionaire who has a secret second marriage to satisfy his ever-present libido (Hagg Muhammad Azzam).

Each of these characters are incredibly interesting in their own right -- with secrets to keep and struggles to overcome -- but Aswany makes things more intriguing by having some of them bump into each other in often surprising and unpredictable ways. While this helps drive the narrative forward, it also allows the reader to appreciate the apparent contradictions in Egyptian society where people with different religious, political and moral viewpoints live side by side, not always in harmony.

In fact, Aswany's book is a highly political one, showing as it does a society rife with bribery and corruption and riddled with poverty and violence, the result of a political system dominated by a single party. Here, the disenchanted populace dream of escape to foreign lands to live better lives. Some also see Islamic extremism as a viable method of creating a better society.

Western readers may also be shocked at the role that women are forced to play in this culture. They are not only objectified but they are conditioned to believe that it is up to them to modify their behaviour in order to meet the sexual demands of the male population. If that means you need to put up with your boss's advances at work, then so be it, there's no such thing as sexual harrassment here.

There's no doubt that The Yacoubian Building is a powerful, thought-provoking and controversial read, but it's also an entertaining and enlightening one, and I was sad when it came to an end. I very much recommend it, particularly if you want to experience an eye-opening glimpse of a culture not widely written about in western literature.

'The Blood of Flowers' by Anita Amirrezvani

 

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 384 pages; 2007. Review copy courtesy of Waterstones.com

We all struggle to live a life of our choosing, but imagine what it must be like to be a female in a very male world, a world in which women cannot be seen much less heard, a world in which even the most talented must give themselves over to marriage and motherhood -- no questions asked. This is the premise behind this lush, luminous tale by first-time novelist Anita Amirrezvani that is due for publication next month.

Set in Iran in the 1620s, The Blood of Flowers is about one girl's painful journey from naive young peasant to hard-bitten business woman. When her father dies, the unnamed narrator is forced to flee to the city with her mother in tow. Here in the captivating capital of Isfahan, they are taken in as house servants by  an uncle and his demanding wife. Their new life is riddled with broken promises and much hard work, but the saving grace is the narrator's special talent for carpet making, which is strengthened under her uncle's tutelage.

But being able to design and knot carpets is not enough to secure her future: only marriage to a wealthy man can do that. And if marriage is not an option, the next best thing, a temporary contract known as a sigheh, will have to do -- provided it is kept secret...

The Blood of Flowers is a sweeping, extravagant and sexy tale about life lived against the odds in another era and another culture. Amirrezvani very much brings this Cinderella-like story to life with gorgeous descriptions of the scenery and architecture, the bazaars and market stalls, the hand-knotted carpets and the factories in which they are made. But it is when she is describing food and the interiors of wealthy people's homes that she really comes into her own: the detail is, at times, mouth-watering to the point of making one feel hungry and desperate for an inky-black coffee.

Amirrezvani is also very good at moving the plot along at a rapid pace, helped in part by putting her narrator though incredible ups and heartrending downs, testing her will at every opportunity. And the characterisation is strong if somewhat stereotyped -- the wicked aunt, the kindly uncle, the poor mother.

My only quibble is that the narrator's sexual awakening -- a quite critical component of the storyline and reminiscent in many ways of Debbie Taylor's The Fourth Queen and M.R.Lovric's Carnevale -- goes on for so long that I became bored with it.

Ultimately, The Blood of Flowers is a delicious, entertaining fairy tale that captivated me for the two days I took to read it. It will especially appeal to anyone who appreciates great storytelling (the main storyline is interspersed with traditional Iranian and Islamic tales) and wonderfully evocative writing. And I rather suspect it will be on the best-seller list before we know it!

'Candle Life' by Venero Armanno

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 351  pages; 2006. Review copy courtesy of the author.

This book begins where it ends: with a man lying on "dusty French cobblestones" in a Parisian street coming out of what he feels to be a coma of sorts.

The man is an Australian writer. He is living in an arts commune, where he spends his days mourning his Japanese-Australian girlfriend, Yukiko, who died suddenly before their planned trip to France.

One day he gets harassed by a strange-looking black man with a misshapen head. His name is Sonny, he's American, a beggar and he claims to have known many of the 20th century's greatest writers before his unspecified fall from grace.

Our unnamed narrator is not quite sure what to make of Sonny -- is he being duped, or is his story a legitimate one? -- but the chance meeting acts as a kind of catalyst for all kinds of accidental occurrences, including sexual congress with a mute Russian woman, the death of his dead lover's gay friend and a love affair with a French student. Throw in a rich, possibly corrupt, Russian art dealer and a second beggar with a dodgy past and you get an entire cast of weird characters that only serves to heighten the strangeness of the city's dark underbelly in which the narrator finds himself.

While it's difficult to describe Candle Life without giving all the best bits away, it can be summarised as a strangely beguiling book about one man's journey of self-discovery -- spiritually, sexually and creatively -- in a foreign city far from home. Through the narrator's recollections of his life in Australia juxtaposed with his life in Paris, his dislocation and alienation becomes very real to  the reader. And because he is grappling with grief, he has an air of vulnerability that makes him endearing even if you might not agree with all the decisions he makes. I know at times I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and say, what are you doing? are you crazy?

Armanno's writing is very assured, at times almost dreamlike, lulling the reader into a kind of trance. I've not read any magic realism before, but I imagine that parts of the story fall into this genre, although I think it would be unfair to label the entire book as such, because much of it is incredibly lucid and down-to-earth and very, very accessible.

As much as I enjoyed the story, there seemed to be too many divergent tangents which didn't always drive the narrative forward. I found the chapters towards the end to be the most interesting and intriguing -- especially Sonny's revelations about what happened to him in Turkey and then our narrator's claustrophobic, page-turning experiences in the catacombs under the streets of Paris.

All in all, Candle Life is a richly symbolic and -- as the blurb on the back describes it -- "startling original" book about finding your way out of darkness and into the light. Unfortunately, it is not available outside of Australia and New Zealand, which is a great shame because it deserves a wider audience. (Try Angus & Robertson online, Readings.com or Australian Online Bookshop for international orders.)

'Alias Grace' by Margaret Atwood

Fiction - paperback; Anchor Books; 480 pages; 1997.

Did she do it or didn't she do it? Is she a bloodthirsty murderess, or was she simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

These are the questions that form the driving force of this remarkable novel by Margaret Atwood, who takes this captivating true story and truly makes it her own.

Set in Canada in the nineteenth century and based on a real life crime, Alias Grace is about a teenage maid, Grace Marks, who is tried for the  brutal murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress, Nancy Montgomery. She is found guilty and sentenced to death but has this commuted to life imprisonment, while her 'accomplice' is hanged.

Grace, a poor immigrant from Northern Ireland who has cut all ties with her family, tells her story to Dr Simon Jordan in a long series of visits he makes to her prison cell. Dr Jordan, who works in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is 'hired' by a group of spiritualists who believe Grace is innocent and want to secure her a pardon.

But the good doctor has problems -- professional, emotional and moral -- of his own, and before long it is difficult to tell who is the supposed crazed criminal and who is not.

Initially I found Alias Grace a little difficult to get into. The chapters are narrated in alternate voices and formats -- Grace's 'interviews' with Dr Jordan involve her telling her story from the time she left Northern Ireland to the aftermath of the murders, while Dr Jordan's story is revealed through letters written to him and by him -- which take some time to propel the narrative forward. Once you understand the rhythm of the book, it gently sucks you in and I found it difficult to put down because I was itching to get to the point where Grace would reveal what really happened on that fateful day.

Atwood structures this novel in a very clever way, so that the reader is drip fed information on an almost need-to-know basis. She also manages to successfully get inside two very different heads and tells their individual stories in a convincing way (personally, I preferred Grace's narrative, although I largely expect she was prone to exaggeration). And her writing is often beautiful. Take this example, one of my favourites, in which Grace is revealing what happened when she flees the scene of the murders:

And I thought, I am riding through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as it says in the Psalm; and I attempted to fear no evil, but it was very hard, for there was evil in the wagon with me, like a sort of mist. So I tried to think about something else. And I looked up at the sky, which did not have a cloud in it, and was filled with stars; and it seemed so close I could touch it, and so delicate I could put my hand right through it, like a spiderweb spangled with dewdrops.
But then as I looked, a part of it began to wrinkle up, like the skin on scalding milk; but harder and more brittle, and pebbled, like a dark beach, or like black silk crepe; and then the sky was only a thin surface, like paper, and it was being singed away. And behind it was a cold blackness; and it was not Heaven or even Hell that I was looking at, but only emptiness. This was more frightening than anything I could think of, and I prayed silently to God to forgive my sins; but what if there was no God to forgive me? And then I reflected that perhaps it was the outer darkness, with the wailing and gnashing of teeth, where God was not. And as soon as I had this thought, the sky closed over again, like water after you have thrown a stone; and was again smooth and unbroken, and filled with stars.

Without wishing to spoil the ending, I have to say I am still largely undecided as to whether Grace Marks was guilty or not. Whether I missed a key element of the plot or whether this is what Atwood deliberately intended, I do not know. Suffice to say this is an intriguing and sometimes perplexing book, but it's an entertaining one too, and it's certainly made me more interested in reading more by this highly acclaimed author.

***

This book was chosen for discussion in Reading Matters Online Book Group (Session 8) in October 2006.

Click here for reading group questions and discussion.

'Missing' by Karin Alvtegen

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 352 pages; 2004. Translated from Swedish by Anna Paterson.

I took this book on a long haul flight and read it in one sitting, but I'm sure that if I wasn't stuck on a plane I would probably have done the same. The plot is gripping and the story moves along at a frenetic pace. I know it's an over-used cliche, but the best description I can come up with is this: Missing is a real page turner.

Set in Stockholm, Sweden, it tells the story of a 32-year-old homeless woman, Sybilla Forsenstrom, who is accused of murdering a businessman in a city hotel.

When a second victim shows the same mysterious signs of mutilation that characterised the first murder, Sybilla becomes the most wanted woman in Sweden.

With a little help from an old friend and a teenage boy, Sybilla is able to avoid arrest. But her rising sense of panic coupled with a strong desire to clear her name begins to affect her judgement and the reader is left wondering why the police are taking so long to track her down. Surely, at some point, she's going to make a major cock-up that will lead to her imminent arrest?

Intertwined with this woman-on-the-run narrative is a second storyline that examines Sybilla's childhood. Raised by two emotionally remote parents, devoid of warmth and any real love, we find out what makes this resourceful woman tick.

Without wishing to spoil the ending, I can only say that it satisfyingly draws together all the elements of both narratives into one neat conclusion.

My only real quibble is that the news stories (about Sybilla's alleged crimes) that Alvtegen intersperses throughout the novel do not ring true from a journalistic perspective - they're not structured properly and lack attribution. I could forgive this oversight once, but when the book is littered with dozens of examples it begins to irritate.

Still, don't let this put you off. Missing is ultimately a quick, entertaining read, much in the same vein as a Nicci French thriller, and you could do worse than read this little gem, which was awarded the premier Scandinavian crime writing award. It was also nominated for the Poloni Award and Best Crime Novel 2000 in Sweden.

Oh, and trivia buffs might like to know that Alvtegen is the great niece of Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, so writing obviously runs in the family!

'Oracle Night' by Paul Auster

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 207 pages; 2005.

Up until now I have been a Paul Auster virgin. I have seen him interviewed several times on television, and appreciate that he is an interesting and accomplished and much heralded author. Whenever I hear his name I automatically think of New York, because he seems synonymous with that city.

Recently, when browsing a local bookstore, I picked up Oracle Night and was charmed by the coverline on the front of the book: "If you have never read Auster before . . . this is the place to start". I weighed the pros and cons, and then thought, why not?

Essentially Oracle Night is about a novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness. He lives with his wife in New York, and while she's at work, he spends his days touring the city on foot. One day he buys a notebook from a stationary shop run by a little Chinese man. He brings it home and finds that as soon as he opens it the writer's block that has plagued him for months completely disappears. Suddenly his imagination comes alive and, in doing so, his own life takes on a surreal, larger than life edge that has him questioning the very essence of who he is, where he's come from and where he's going. He begins to scrutinise his relationship with his wife and his friend in ways he had never contemplated before.

Did I like this book? I am still in two minds. It throws normal novel writing conventions out the window. There are stories within stories within stories - and many of them don't come to any satisfactory conclusion. There's no real plot to speak of, although the strong characterisation and the hypnotic writing, holds it together. And, in many cases, it asks more questions than it answers. I am still wondering "what the hell was that all about?"

If anyone who has read this book can enlighten me, then please do. In the meantime, let me say it was a fascinating novel, but I wouldn't rave about it and I have no immediate plans to rush to the bookstore for a feast of more Auster. Although I would never say never.