Reading matters

'The Sirens of Baghdad' by Yasmina Khadra

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 307 pages; 2008. (Translated from the French by John Cullen.)

This novel, first published in 2005 under the title Les Sirenes de Baghdad in France, is yet another earnest and thought-provoking story by Yasmina Khadra, the non deplume of the Algerian Army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul. While The Attack was set in war-torn Israel and examined what it is that drives people to become suicide bombers, The Sirens of Baghdad is set in war-torn Iraq and looks at what spurs young men into becoming insurgents.

The story is told through the eyes of an anonymous young man, a Bedouin, who lives in Kafr Karam, a village in the Iraqi desert, a "place so discreet that it often dissolves in mirages, only to emerge at sunset". 

Determined to become more educated than his illiterate well-digger of a father, he attends the university in Baghdad a few months before the American invasion. But when the war begins, the university is vandalised and closed down, and he returns to Kafr Karam, "wild-eyed and distraught".

'Tenderwire' by Claire Kilroy

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2007.

Back in January a reader of this blog emailed me to recommend Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire. "I have recommended this book to so many different types of people, young and old, male and female, and I haven't heard one negative review of it," she wrote. "In fact, friends of friends of friends and distant relatives of friends have gone out of their way to tell me how much they liked it."

I'm always partial to a good recommendation, so I looked this one up on Amazon: it ticked several boxes for me, including great reviews and a mention on the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award long list. The fact that it was written by an Irish author and set in New York sealed the deal: I "mooched" a copy from BookMooch as soon as I could hunt one out.

Last week, looking for something that would entertain me during my lunch hour, I extracted the book from my reading queue and took it to work with me. I rarely take full lunch hours these days, often scoffing a sandwich at my desk, but last Wednesday the sun was shining and so I sat outside and cracked open this book. Hooked from the start, the hour whizzed by and for the rest of the day I couldn't wait to get back to the story of Eva Tyne, an Irish violinist living and working in New York, who goes on a rather dangerous mission to buy a rare violin of dubious provenance.

'The Attack' by Yasmina Khadra

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 257 pages; 2007. (Translated from the French by John Cullen.)

It's not very often that I get about 10 pages into a novel and decide I absolutely must buy everything else written by this same author. But that is what happened when I started reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack. I was so stunned and impressed by the novel's opening I just knew that I had to explore her back catalogue as quickly as possible.

But Yasmina Khadra is not really a female author. She is, in fact, a man and former officer in the Algerian Army who used a pen name to avoid military censorship -- or that's the explanation given on the "about the author" page in this book. (You can find out more on the Wikipedia entry and on the author's official [French language] website.)

Khadra has some 20 books to "her" name, but only four have been translated into English. The bestselling 2002 novel The Swallows of Kabul, shortlisted for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was the first. The Attack, also shortlisted for the 2008 IMPAC Award, was (as far as I can gather) the second. This book was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot, and won the Prix de Libraires. So, my initial impression, that The Attack was by an author of some standing was pretty much on the money.

The Attack is set in Israel and -- surprise, surprise -- it's about a suicide bomber. It opens with Dr Amin Jaafie, a surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, dealing with the bombed and bloodied victims of a terrorist attack in a downtown pizza restaurant that has killed 19 people. As a naturalised Israeli Arab, Amin has worked hard to be respected, admired and accepted by the Jewish culture in which he could so easily be cast as an outsider. A dedicated, highly professional doctor, married to the woman of his dreams, he socialises in the most fashionable of circles, making him a shining example of integration.

But when police inform him that the suicide bomber is his much-adored wife, Amin's carefully constructed world begins to fall apart. His house is vandalised, he is shunned by his colleagues and suddenly his adopted homeland wants nothing more to do with him regardless of his previous social and professional standing.

'Tarry Flynn' by Patrick Kavanagh

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 192 pages; 2000.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) is best known as an Irish poet, but he also dabbled in fiction. Tarry Flynn, first published in 1948, is perhaps his most popular and most famous novel. It is set in rural Ireland in the 1930s and tells the story of a young farmer's day-to-day desires: women, nature and poetry, not necessarily in that order.

On the face of it, this book does not have much of a plot. It's essentially a series of vignettes, held together by the passing seasons, but it is written in such beautiful, evocative prose, it's difficult to find fault with the narrative. There's a quiet, understated grace to every sentence that makes it a powerful and affecting read. I never thought I would say this, but I loved this book so much I'm afraid the late John McGahern, my favourite Irish writer and possibly my favourite writer per se,  has a rival for my affections.

There are lots of similarities in style and content -- I rather suspect that McGahern (1934-2006) drew inspiration from Kavanagh's work -- but it is their shared ability to find beauty in the simplest of things, in the mundane tasks of people's lives, that I love so much.

'Comfort Woman' by Nora Okja Keller

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240  pages; 1998.

During the Second World War the Japanese military introduced a programme to provide sexual services for its troops. Young, often ethnic, women were kept prisoner in special camps where they were employed as "comfort women", a euphemism for being systematically raped and beaten.

American-Korean writer Nora Okja Keller explores this abhorrent practise in her astonishing debut novel Comfort Woman, which, upon its release in 1997, attracted critical acclaim from far and wide.

Through twin narratives, which jump backward and forward in time, we learn the secrets and private struggles of two women: Akiko, a Korean refugee living in Hawaii, who has the unnerving ability to channel spirits; and Beccah, Akiko's daughter by an American missionary, who loves her mother deeply but is unable to fully accept her cultural and ethnic heritage.

What Beccah does not know is that her mother was once a comfort woman. This deeply hidden secret manifests itself in Akiko's often insane -- and embarrassing -- behaviour that plagues Beccah for much of her childhood. When most teenage girls are having fun, Beccah is haunted by her mother's absurd kowtowing to the spirits of the dead.

It is only when the secret is revealed that Beccah comes to some kind of understanding of her mother's strange ways...

'English Passengers' by Matthew Kneale

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 463  pages; 2000.

This is a brilliant seafaring romp set in the 19th century that is intelligent, witty and thought-provoking.

Told through the eyes of more than 20 diverse characters, it is never dull or confusing. Instead, it plunges the reader into a wonderful boys' own adventure tale turned comical farce in which a Manx smuggling vessel inadvertently flees British Customs by sailing half way around the world to Australia. To make the  journey legitimate the crew, headed by Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, carry on board a small expedition team, comprising a spiritually crazed reverend, a sinister racial-theorist doctor and a wayward botanist, intent on finding the lost Garden of Eden in Tasmania.

'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova

Fiction - hardcover; Little Brown; 657 pages; 2005

The Historian is a lush, richly evocative novel that explores the Dracula legend from an historical perspective.

In this gripping tale the narrator, a 16-year-old girl, discovers an intriguing batch of letters in her father's library. Unable to resist reading them she unwittingly opens a dark chapter in her family's past, which takes her on an ominous and dangerous journey, both physically and psychologically, across three decades and several countries. Along the way she learns the truth about her dead mother and how her father's seemingly benign academic research has put them all at risk.

'Cover the Butter' by Carrie Kabak

Fiction - hardcover; Dutton Books; 355 pages; 2005. REVIEW COPY.

Cover the Butter is a warm, funny and poignant novel which charts the life of Kate Cadogan, a "lost" housewife trying to make sense of her past and present.

Kate's story spans the 1960s to the 1990s, covering the turmoil, both good and bad, of her transition from inexperienced teenage girl to worldly wise forty-something mother.

Central to the story's emotional impact is the relationship between Kate and her Irish mother, Biddy, whose moods swing in unpredictable and hurtful ways - one minute tender and loving, the next heartbreakingly cruel. Coupled with a weak-willed father, who succumbs to his wife's domineering ways, the Cadogan family is a complex mesh of pain and devotion, humour and heartbreak, unfulfilled expectations and adoration.