Reading matters

'Body Surfing' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - hardcover; Little, Brown; 304  pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

When this advanced readers' copy of Anita Shreve's soon-to-be-published Body Surfing thudded through my mail box (courtesy of a blog friend and not the publisher) I was -- to be perfectly frank -- just a little excited. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a Shreve fan. Not only does this American author produce quality fiction, she's not afraid to experiment and go off in different directions without losing the very essence of what makes her a great writer: she knows how to spin an entertaining, often emotional, yarn without sacrificing plot or character.

Body Surfing is a welcome return to form after the disappointment of her previous novel, A Wedding in December, in which the pacing was thrown off kilter by two narratives that did not particularly compliment one another.

But in this latest addition to Shreve's ever-expanding body of work (this is her 13th novel) the author has ditched her preference for dual narratives and stuck to one simple, and very solid, storyline.

'Where or When' by Anita Shreve

 Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 242 pages; 1993 (this edition 2004).

Charles Callahan, a real estate agent and insurance salesman, is married with three children. One day he chances upon a newspaper advertisement for a new poetry book, which is accompanied by a photograph of the author. Charles is immediately transported back to another time and place, for he once had a summer romance with the author -- Siân Richards -- when the pair were on a Catholic camp as carefree, young 14-year-olds, but lost contact with her afterwards.

With a recession biting and the bank about to foreclose on his Rhode Island house, Charles decides to risk his marriage and stable family life too by getting in touch with Siân, whom he has not seen in 31 years.

He re-establishes contact through an exchange of letters, which soon veer from innocent communication into more dangerous territory. When the pair meet at the site of the original camp of their youth -- now converted into a remote but posh hotel -- they embark on an illicit affair, which has tragic consequences.

'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 368 pages; 2006.

Judging by the reviews I have seen online, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is definitely one of those books you either loathe or love. I fell into the latter camp, although I have to admit that the main narrator, nine-year-old Oskar Schell, irritated the hell out of me because he was just so damned precocious.

This business card, which Oskar hands out to acquaintances, might give you some indication of the boy's huge annoyance factor:

OSKAR SCHELL: INVENTOR, JEWELRY DESIGNER, JEWELRY FABRICATOR, AMATEUR ENTOMOLOGIST, FRANCOPHILE, VEGAN, ORIGAMIST, PACIFIST, PERCUSSIONIST, AMATEUR ASTRONOMER, COMPUTER CONSULTANT, AMATEUR ARCHAEOLOGIST, COLLECTOR OF: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things.

'Some Hope' by Edward St Aubyn

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 450  pages; 2006.

Some Hope, sometimes known as The Patrick Melrose Trilogy, is actually three novels in one.

The first, Never Mind, introduces us to Patrick Melrose, a lonely five-year-old, and his eccentric and wealthy English family, who live in Provence, France. His mother, Eleanor, is an alcoholic, who thinks nothing of driving an unwieldy Buick under the influence, and his father, David, a morose and cruel man who wanted to be a pianist but was forced into becoming a medical doctor, a vocation that was short-lived.

Into this claustrophobic world comes two sets of friends -- American journalist Anne Moore and her boyfriend, Sir Victor Eisen, an eminent philosopher; and thrice-married Nicolas Pratt and his 20-year-old vapid girlfriend Bridget Watson-Scott -- all of whom are invited over for a dinner party that turns into a vile comedy of manners.

'The Rainforest' by Alicia Steimberg

Fiction - paperback; University of Nebraska Press; 160  pages; 2006. (Translated from the Spanish  by Andrea G Labinger.) REVIEW COPY.

Cecilia, a 50-something widow from Buenos Aires, is an independent and highly educated woman, a writer with a strong network of friends to support her. Why, then, has she allowed herself to be physically and mentally abused by her teenage son?

The Rainforest, by award-winning Latin American writer Alicia Steimberg, explores this conundrum with grace and sensitivity in fluid, almost languid prose that is divided into short, crisp chapters.

In the opening chapter we find Cecilia in an expensive convalescent spa in the Brazilian rainforest. Her stay, funded by a handful of unnamed generous friends, is designed to help her find solace and to come to terms with her familial problems.

Leaves and flowers brush my arms and my tears mingle with the raindrops that have begun to fall. I cry and feel better. I can’t see the sky, just the tops of the tall trees and a monkey swinging from a branch. What I wouldn’t give right now to be alone on a sultry afternoon, with a storm threatening, at the Buenos Aires Zoo, breathing in the scent of the animals by an algae-covered lake. I lie down on a bed of leaves at the foot of a colossal tree and fall asleep. When I awaken, I see that it’s grown dark enough to start back. When a little light filters through the branches, I realize I’m close to the clearing. Before leaving my solitude behind, I let out a scream that is like a howl.

Despite her obvious distress, Cecilia unexpectedly falls in love with a North American man, who is also staying at the spa and grappling with emotional issues similar to her own.

'Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress' by Dai Sijie

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 172  pages; 2006. (Translated from the Chinese  by Ina Rilke.)

Set in China in the early 1970s, this delightful story is about two teenage boys sent to the country to be 're-educated' by poor peasants as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Both the narrator, the son of two doctors, and his friend Luo, the son of a famous dentist, are classified as 'young intellectuals' even though they have not graduated from high school. Both are banished to a mountain known as the Phoenix of the Sky, where they are assigned quarters in a barn-like house on stilts in a small village.

Despite the horrific conditions in which they live and work, they manage to find solace in their shared sense of humour and their love of the local tailor's attractive daughter, the Little Seamstress of the novel's title.

When they accidentally stumble upon a locked suitcase containing a selection of 19th century Western literature, banned by the authorities, they resort to all kinds of schemes and trickery to get their hands on these rare, highly desirable novels by Balzac, Dickens and Dumas (amongst others).

But sadly the boys' love of books and literature has dramatic repercussions, particularly for the Little Seamstress, that are beyond their wildest imagininings...

'A Wedding in December' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 336 pages; 2006

A group of college friends, many of whom have not seen each other for 27 years, gather for a wedding at an inn in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

This once tight circle of friends - Rob, an out-of-the-closet pianist; Harrison, a book publisher; Jerry, a burly businessman with a stuck-up wife; Agnes, an umarried history teacher tormented by a long-running love affair and writing a novel; Nora, the widowed owner of the inn; and the wedding couple, Bill and Bridget, who dated at school but then went on to marry other people - spend three days at the inn.

The ceremony, restricted to just this group of seven friends and one or two others, takes on a special significance because Bridget, the mother of a 15-year-old son, has breast cancer and isn't expected to live much beyond two years.

And if this doesn't sound melancholy enough there are other shadows hovering over this group of friends, including the death of Steven, a charamastic classmate, at a drunken highschool party all those years ago, and the tragic events of 9/11 just three months earlier.

Amid this somewhat downbeat atmosphere the party gets snowed in and, fueled by the ensuing claustrophobia, tension and too much alcohol, comes the spilling of sordid secrets from the past...

'The Weight of Water' by Anita Shreve

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 248 pages; 2005 [first published in 1997]

Jean, a photojournalist, takes her husband Thomas, a struggling poet, and young daughter Billie on assignment with her to the New Hampshire coast.

They sail on an old boat captained by Thomas's younger brother, Rich, and Rich's new girlfriend, Adaline, towards the unusually named island of Smuttynose. Here, in 1873, two Norwegian immigrants were murdered. A third woman, Maren Hontvedt, escaped.

Jean's assignment is to photograph the bleak, now abandoned island for a magazine feature on the murders, for which a local man was later tried and executed.

Intrigued by the case, Jean goes slightly off brief and decides to do some research of her own. In a local museum she chances upon a sheaf of papers written by Maren Hontvedt that reveal exactly what happened...

'Derailed' by James Siegel

Fiction - paperback; Time Warner Paperbacks; 416  pages; 2004

This book takes the best bits of The Firm and throws in a smattering of Fatal Attraction to deliver a lightning-paced read with enough twists, turns and downright unexpected seismic shifts to keep you turning the pages late into the night (or, in my case, morning).

Charles is a well-paid advertising executive who's living a treadmill-like existence until he meets a beautiful stranger on a train. Besotted by the green-eyed Lucinda, he embarks on an illicit affair, momentarily forgetting his wife of 18 years and their sick teenage daughter. But his moment of pleasure turns quite unexpectedly into a violent nightmare in which rape, blackmail and murder all play a part.

'Daalder's Chocolates' by Philibert Schogt

Fiction - paperback; Thunder Mouth's Press; 322  pages; 2005. (Translated from the Dutch by Sherry Marx.)

Joop Daalder, the youngest of three children, grows up in a large house in Holland under two emotionally distant parents who show him little love or affection. He is clumsy, has no friends and is constantly compared to his two sisters who share a talent for classical music.

Resolved to leading a lonely mediocre life, Joop is lifted out of his humdrum existence by a chance discovery: a passion for good food and, in particular, chocolate. Unfortunately no one understands this passion and he must rise above the ridicule cast upon him by family and friends.

While on a university excursion to France, Joop meets a chocolateer, Jerome Sorel, who offers him the chance of a lifetime. Against his parent's wishes, Joop drops out of his art history course to accept Sorel's offer of an apprenticeship. With just the clothes on his back and a small amount of cash for company, he hitchhikes across Holland to the little French town of Avallon and Monsieur Sorel's old-fashioned chocolate shop.

Good food, good company and a  good career ahead of him, for the first time in his life Joop feels happy and at one with himself.

Later, when he falls in love with Emma, a Dutch nanny who lives in the same village, life couldn't get any more sweeter... or could it?