|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
014002848X
| 9780140028485
| 014002848X
| 3.82
| 1,026
| 1966
| Jan 01, 1988
|
really liked it
|
Our main character is a man named Carel, just hired to be the rector of a church in London but he seems disinterested in the position. He doesn't meet
Our main character is a man named Carel, just hired to be the rector of a church in London but he seems disinterested in the position. He doesn't meet with parishioners or interact with anyone and keeps himself in isolation. The bombed-out church has just a tower still standing. He and his family live in the rectory. The archbishop sent him there where ‘he could do no harm.’ He has a young Black Jamaican woman live-in assistant and of course there are rumors about their relationship. [image] In reality we have several main characters. The minister lives with his daughter and a niece, both 20-ish. There’s a live-in caretaker, a Russian émigré, and his son. The niece and the daughter are antagonistic to Paddy, the rector’s assistant, due to incidents involving the rector's wife's death. The niece wears a medical corset and she is housebound. The two young women call each other darling and sweetheart (view spoiler)[ although we are told they are not intimate. (hide spoiler)] The daughter works outside the house as a stenographer. The disabled niece seems to enjoy her isolation. She leads the life of a sleepwalker. The daughter who dotes on her seems to be an enabler for her to remain dysfunctional. The overriding concern in the household seems to be: is she getting better or worse. Carel too seems to encourage the isolation that the girl lives in. Carel fends off visits from everyone including his younger brother who is the co-guardian of their niece. We get a deep dive into the psychological problems of all the characters. Their interactions are kind of wrapped in a fog and we have actual fog to assist the metaphor because the church is in a London backwater on the river surrounded by warehouses. Carel is not religious; he’s a priest who doesn’t believe in God. He says things like “If there is no God, there is all the more need for a priest.” The rector’s brother is writing a book about ‘morals without God.’ So this gives the author (who was a philosophy professor at Oxford) an opportunity to share her philosophical-psychological thoughts. She raises issues like (in effect) ‘can you fall in love with someone because the person strikes you?’ And ‘do we volunteer at a refugee camp because the misfortunes of others cheer us up?’ There’s good writing: “Like so many of those whose only troubles are the troubles of others, she had carried her girlish looks well on into middle age…” As in Murdoch’s comedy novel I read, Under the NetUnder the Net, we have an impossible love triangle. A loves B; B loves C, C loves A. One of the characters is a pathological liar who shakes down another character for money. He has a very good liars’ technique. He makes up a lie about needing money that makes him look bad. He’s caught in the lie, admits it, and explains his lie by inventing something that makes him look even worse. Works every time. Tension helps move the story along and there's a lot of it in this book. Everyone seems to say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, and fall in love with the wrong person. There's a store of sleeping pills in a cabinet that becomes a motif like the proverbial loaded gun said of stage plays: If someone waves a gun around in the first act, it better go off by the end of the play. (Various quotes attributed to Chekhov and others.) Everyone in this house of misery needs sleeping pills. [image] Top photo of St. Lucke’s church in Liverpool, bombed by Germany in WW II. Photo from slboc.com The author from independent.co.uk ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Nov 04, 2023
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0140041117
| 9780140041118
| 0140041117
| 3.91
| 1,562
| 1974
| Mar 06, 1984
|
it was amazing
|
It's been a couple of months since I've added a book to my favorites but I'm adding this one. Of the half dozen Iris Murdoch novels I've read, The Sea
It's been a couple of months since I've added a book to my favorites but I'm adding this one. Of the half dozen Iris Murdoch novels I've read, The Sea, The Sea has been my favorite but this one is equally good. I should say SPOILERS FOLLOW [image] This story is one of marital infidelity. The betrayer, no surprise, is the male, Blaise. But he has a naïve, gullible, loving wife who accepts his confession (delivered in a letter) and she continues to love him, even accepting the situation to the point where she says ‘you need to spend more time with your mistress and your eight-year-old son.’ He's ecstatic about how things worked out. He follows up on her suggestions and chaos ensues. (Hey guys – if you find yourself in this situation you might want to use his letter as a template. Who knows, it just might work out! LOL) While Blaise is the main protagonist in the story, there are really a half dozen other characters that we get a detailed psychoanalysis of their attitudes, their dilemmas, their feelings, their thinking. In fact, Blaise is a psychoanalyst. So we follow a half dozen quirky characters through the story. Among the husband’s many quirks, his most significant are his weird sexual proclivities. Murdoch spares us the details but his mistress is ok with it and that's really what binds them. He has never attempted such things with his wife and she remains clueless. Thus the sacred and profane of the book title. His wife, Harriet “…positively and half-consciously suffered from a sheer excess of undistributed love, like having too much milk in the breasts.” I’m being unfair to Harriet in characterizing her as a wimp above, someone just naively accepting the situation. The author gives us a fascinating take on her attitude of empowerment brought about by the situation. She is exhilarated, perhaps for the first time in her life, by her power. The power to forgive, the power to take charge, the power to set things straight, to help out the mistress and her husband’s other son. Harriet and Blaise have a 17-year-old son with all kinds of quirks. He’s surly, uncommunicative, bookish and oversensitive to the fleshy details of life. For example he's disgusted by his mother's pack of seven dogs she has accumulated due to her overflowing love for strays. There's a neighbor, Monty, a famous author. His wife died recently after an ugly bout with cancer and he’s not just mourning but obsessed by grief. Harriet forces consolation upon him. Emily, the mistress, is in the classic situation of the other woman. She lives in a dumpy apartment in a dumpy part of town, struggling financially, waiting for something to happen in their relationship. A hot mess? Her eight-year-old son by Blaise won’t speak to her and it's clear that the boy's bundle of problems border on mental illness. She shares her apartment with a female ‘friend’ who's not a friend. Add to the mix Edgar, an overweight former university professor and classics scholar. He's been devoted to Monty since college days, much to Monty’s annoyance. And this bromance may go deeper than Monty thinks. Now add two attractive young women who pretty much throw themselves at any available (or unavailable) man. To be crude, anything in pants. There are scatterings of homoeroticism in some of these relationships. (The author was bisexual.) There’s a metaphor with the ancient Greek culture going on involving Monty and Edgar who both read Greek and discuss Greek writings and philosophy. Both men apparently feel some attraction to David. And after all, he is named David. There are also hints about a possible relationship between the two young women mentioned above. So the machine is set in motion. I use the term ‘machine’ as the author has in her title and maybe 20 times in the book. I think the best way to describe her use of the word is in the sense that the inertia of a situation has taken over and there is no way to change it. One example is when Blaise is talking to Monty about how his son will never forgive him for his actions. “There isn’t – there isn’t – the machinery – for me to be forgiven – by David – it doesn’t exist.” There’s humor too, a kind of black humor, even puns. Monty’s fearsome mother lives at Hawkhurst. The hapless Edgar lives at Mockingham. After a chaotic scene at the home, we learn of the neighbor that “She had always expected irregularities from a psychiatrist’s residence.” It's amazing to me how a good author like Murdoch can give us perhaps 20 pages of what I will call psychoanalysis of all of the main characters, writing about their feelings and attitudes and how they turn things over in their minds and make those 20 pages fascinating and non-repetitive. Murdoch has been criticized for what some critics have called her ‘bizarre' plot twists and this story contains a couple. But she's one of my favorite authors so I will defend her. We all know that there are writing ‘rules’ such as the old thing about waving a gun in the first act of a play. (Actually that comes from Chekhov: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.”) And we often expect foreshadowing so that the dramatic events of the story don't fall on us unawares. But when you think about it that's not the way life is. Sometimes someone waves a gun around and nothing comes of it. And sometimes there's an auto accident, a plane crash or someone is shot in the street. Worlds get turned upside down and there was no foreshadowing. If you choose to read this book I’ll tell you there are two murders. But I won't say who were the victims and who were the killers even in a spoiler. It's a great book! [image] Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) wrote more than 25 novels as well as some academic philosophy texts when she was a professor at Oxford. Her novels focus on good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Murdoch can be considered an Irish author even though she grew up in and went to school in England. She was born in Ireland and both her parents were Irish. The Sea, The Sea, which won the 1978 Booker Prize, is her most widely-read book, and this one I reviewed won the 1974 Whitbread Award. Top photo of an English country estate from mansionglobal.com The author from theparisreview.org ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 14, 2023
|
Jan 19, 2023
|
Jan 19, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0679743707
| 9780679743705
| 0679743707
| 3.74
| 790
| 1981
| Oct 05, 1993
|
it was amazing
|
[Edited 4/7/23] This is a great fictionalized biography of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). I read it as a buddy-read with my good fr [Edited 4/7/23] This is a great fictionalized biography of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). I read it as a buddy-read with my good friend Ebba Simone and I appreciate her many insights that have informed this review. [image] Banville is truly able to get into the mind of a great scientist – the obsessive nature of the workings of their minds and the way breakthrough insights casually come after years of thinking about a problem - rising from bed or taking a shower - whatever - and it comes in a flash. (Did people take showers in those days? Lol) The author shows us what a lonely and thankless task Kepler was engaged in. How many astronomers could there have been working at that time? We read about perhaps a dozen or so scientists he meets with or corresponds with and a few knowledgeable local rulers who occasionally throw money his way as a sponsor. Kepler corresponded with Galileo, his contemporary in Italy, and made improvements to telescopes of the time. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brae was the primary astronomer Kepler worked directly with. Kepler and his family lived with Brae at his chaotic home for a time. We could say they were ‘frenemies.’ (I hate that word but it’s appropriate.) Brae treated Kepler for a long time as an 'apprentice.' Brae wouldn’t share his observation data of Mars’ orbit with Kepler – although he did so eventually. These data were crucial to Kepler’s theories. Brae was afraid Kepler would disprove his theories about planetary orbits (which Kepler eventually did). [image] The mindset of the onward and upward pursuit of scientific knowledge as we think of it today was not in place then. Banville shows us that many people at the time, even some scientists, and at one point his former teacher, didn't really care. While Kepler is spending years (decades actually) making calculations to end up proving that the planets have elliptical, not circular orbits, he often met with an attitude of "Who cares? Why does it matter? What difference does it make?" Kepler had a difficult personal life. At times his personal life was chaotic – a theme that the author stresses to contrast with Kepler’s intellectual pursuit of ‘order and harmony' in the universe. This was particularly true in the time that Kepler and his family lived with Tycho Brae whose household always seemed to be in chaos. Kepler had difficult relationships with his wives. Infants and favorite children died. At times he was persecuted or driven out of town by the Catholic hierarchy because of his Lutheran religion. He even had to help defend his mother from charges of witchcraft! In Kepler’s time, astronomy and astrology were intertwined. Kepler was fundamentally a skeptic about the latter but he was not above creating horoscopes for wealthy patrons when he needed cash to put food on the table. The book is not a comprehensive survey of Kepler’s life and times. It focuses on a few key periods of his life. He traveled around Europe, mainly to Prague and to Graz and Linz in what is now Austria. One section is comprised of fictional letters written by Kepler. Here is a passage I liked: “I do not speak like I write, I do not write like I think, I do not think like I ought to think, and so everything goes on in deepest darkness." Banville is known for his rich prose, almost lush writing at times. I picked a couple of passages to illustrate his writing style that may interest you in reading the book: “…Tycho gave a banquet, music and manic revels and the fatted calf hissing on a spit. The noise in the dining hall was a steady roar punctuated by the crimson crash of a dropped platter or the shriek of a tickled serving girl. The spring storm that had threatened all day blundered suddenly against the windows, shivering the reflected candlelight. Tycho was in capital form, shouting and swilling and banging his tankard, nose aglitter and the tips of his straw-colored mustaches dripping. To his left Tengnagel sat with a proprietary arm about the waste of the Dane’s daughter Elizabeth, a rabbity girl with close-cropped ashen hair and pink nostrils. Her mother, Mistress Christine, was a fat fussy woman whose twenty years of concubinage to the Dane no longer outraged anyone save her.” “Kepler suddenly recalled a sunny Easter Sunday long ago, when his grandfather was still alive, one of those days that had lodged itself in his memory not because of any particular event, but because all the aimless parts of it, the brilliant light, the scratchy feel of a new coat, the sound of bells, lofty and mad, had made together an almost palpable shape, a great air sign, like a cloud or a wind or a shower of rain, that was beyond interpreting and yet rich with significance and promise. Was that... happiness?” [image] I consider the book a great read – a work of ‘faction.’ The book is the middle work of Banville’s “The Revolutions Trilogy.” The other two are Doctor Copernicus (which I am reading with Ebba) and The Newton Letter. Top photo of Kepler on an Austrian stamp from stampio.org Kepler’s house in Prague, now a museum, from Wikipedia The author from irishtimes.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 13, 2022
|
Nov 14, 2022
|
Nov 14, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1335230009
| 9781335230003
| 1335230009
| 3.52
| 21,239
| Sep 29, 2020
| Oct 06, 2020
|
it was amazing
|
This is the second of the author’s Detective Inspector St. John Strafford novels. The first, The Secret Guests, was written under a pseudonym, Benjami
This is the second of the author’s Detective Inspector St. John Strafford novels. The first, The Secret Guests, was written under a pseudonym, Benjamin Black. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic and secretive Osborne family. Even though the Osborne family is Protestant, the Catholic priest is a frequent (often overnight) guest because he enjoys the conversation and the drink. He also keeps a stabled horse there. [image] It’s 1957 and the Catholic Church still rules Ireland behind the scenes. The archbishop wants the priest’s murder and mutilation covered up, so Detective Stafford faces obstacles at every turn. We surmise that the continuous snow is a metaphor for the cover-up. We have, as the author tells us, a bunch of stereotypical suspects as if they had been selected to be cast in these roles on the stage. There's the staid old estate owner, filled with war stories and riding to hounds. There's his frail, older, but still beautiful second wife. Two snotty-spoiled almost college-age kids, a boy and a girl, live there too. They were born to the deceased first wife. There's a domineering, grumpy live-in maid/cook. There's a crazy stable boy living in a filthy caravan in the woods. Did one of them do it, and, if so, why? The detective faces a lack of cooperation from the Catholic locals who immediately sniff out Strafford’s Protestantism. When he meets people they always tell him “ 'You don’t look like a policeman,' but what people meant was that he didn’t look like an Irish policeman.” We get tidbits of the Catholic/Protestant ‘coding’ that always goes on in this society: your speech; your name; how you take your tea; whether or not you eat kidney pie; whether you order Bushmills or Jameson at the bar. The Booker Prize-winning author (for The Sea, 2005) is famous for his beautiful writing. So I won’t give any more of the story and instead offer some samples of his writing: “The priest’s cassock hung on the back of the door, like the flayed black pelt of some large, smooth-skinned animal.” [image] Here’s how he sets a scene: “The library had the look of a place that no one had been in for a very long time, and today it wore a put-upon aspect, as though indignant that its solitude should be so suddenly and so rudely violated. The glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls stared before them coldly, and the books stood shoulder to shoulder in an attitude of mute resentment. The mullioned windows were set into deep granite embrasures, and snow-light glared through their numerous tiny leaded panes. Strafford had already cast a skeptical eye on the architecture of the place. Arts-and- Crafts fakery, he had thought straight off, with a mental sniff. He wasn't a snob, not exactly, only he likes things to be left as they were, and not got up as what they could never hope to be.” Here's a character description (the estate owner’s wife): “She stood in a low doorway leading off to another part of the house, with one hand folded tensely over the other at the level of her waist. She was tall - she had to stoop a little in the doorway - and markedly slender, and her skin was pinkly pale, the color of skimmed milk into which had been mixed a single drop of blood. Her face was like that of a Madonna by one of the lesser Old Masters, with dark eyes and a long sharp nose with a little bump at the tip. She wore a beige cardigan and a calf-length gray skirt that hung a little crookedly on her hips, which were no broader than a boy’s.” And there’s humor. Here’s the estate owner: “He was of middle height, and would have been taller if he hadn't been markedly bowlegged - the result, perhaps, Strafford thought sardonically, of all that riding to hounds - and he walked with a curious gait, at once rolling and rickety, like an orangutan that had something wrong with its knees.” Great writing and a good story, worth a ‘5.’ [image] This is the middle novel in the series of three Detective Straffords. The first was The Secret Guests, and the third, which I also reviewed, is April in Spain. Top photo of an Irish manor house, Cahernane House in Killarney, County Kerry from infiniteireland.com An Irish Village on youtube.com The author (b. 1945) from theguardian.com [Edited 10/28/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 22, 2022
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0140014454
| 9780140014457
| 0140014454
| 3.77
| 15,721
| 1954
| Oct 27, 1982
|
liked it
|
Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here
Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here it is. I'll explain below. It's still a good story. We have a hapless antihero, Jake, probably 30ish, bumming around London. He considers himself an intellectual but also recognizes that he’s basically a ‘literary hack.’ He gets some money by translating crappy books from French. But Jake is a guy who has never held down a full-time job. (view spoiler)[ Eventually he gets a job as a hospital orderly and enjoys it, but of course, loses it. (hide spoiler)] Jake survives by house-sitting and crashing in friends’ houses and attics of old girlfriends. He's a good guy and women generally like him. He has a sidekick named Finn, a Sancho Panza who is the stereotypical hard-drinking Irishman. Finn provides the muscle and gopher work for Jake’s various adventures. [image] Jake always makes the wrong decision. It must be a genetic thing with him. Even when he works through all the pros and cons in his mind, and the cons vastly outweigh the pros, he ends up talking himself into doing the wrong thing. “If one has good reasons for an action one should not be deterred from doing it because one may also have bad reasons.” That's a good part his escapades that make up most of the story -- that and a complicated love triangle – a love rectangle actually. I will make up names so I don't give anything away. Bob loves Lois who loves Tony who loves Diane who loves Bob. So the plot thickens. Jake interacts with some wealthy people. There are two sisters, one a famous actress, and three wealthy men who are entrepreneurs. (view spoiler)[ One is a bookie and one is in filmmaking. Despite going through life with hardly a pound in his pocket, Jake has a knack for turning down money and ends up relying on hot tips on horses from the bookie for much of his money. (hide spoiler)] Jake thinks a valuable manuscript he wrote has been stolen from him and he gets Finn to help him kidnap a valuable show dog as ransom to get the manuscript back. (view spoiler)[ True to his hapless lifestyle, the manuscript was not stolen - he could have simply asked for it back. The dog turns out to have been put out to pasture. No one wants him and he has no financial value. (hide spoiler)] The author’s day job was as a professor at Oxford so all her novels have concepts from philosophy or philosophy of life themes worked into them. Two are evident in this story. One is political, based around a socialist political activist appropriately named ‘Lefty.’ He corners Jake in a bar. They are both socialists but Jake doesn’t give a rap about politics, so Lefty engages him in a Socratic dialog to run him through the paces: Is it that you don’t care or is it that you feel it’s hopeless to try to do anything? Well, Jake tells him, it’s a bit of both and they’re interconnected aren’t they? A second, bigger theme, developed in several discussions with another character, is ‘do you need a general theory or philosophy of life to get by?’ Or can you be a pragmatist and make your decisions by the seat of your pants. Obviously Jake has opted for the latter, and we even get to read excerpts from a book Jake is writing about all this. And one more bit of heavy-duty philosophy. Remember the love rectangle? “Some situations can’t be unraveled.” lol [image] Some examples of the humor that I liked: “I have often asked Finn why he shakes his head when he has a hangover, and he tells me that it's to make the spots move away from in front of his eyes.” “He [Finn] loves trouble, his own or other people’s without discrimination…” “After all, she had no father, and I felt in loco parentis. It was about the only locus I had left.” “I needed to think, and I can never think in a taxi for looking at the cash meter.” “He was dressed in tweeds and had the look of an outdoor man who had lived too much by electric light.” “By now I had enough alcohol inside me to feel despair at the prospect of having to stop drinking.” Are there is other good writing: “Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away.” “What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all of the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.” Still it's a good story and I enjoyed the humor in the writing. So why rate it a ‘3’? It turns out, and I did not know this while I was reading the book, that this was the first novel that Murdoch published, 1954. Obviously her skills improved over time. I didn't enjoy the slapstick Three Stooges, overly-long escapade about kidnapping the dog and escaping with it through London. I also thought there were several other overly-long passages of 5 or more pages that didn't go anywhere. For example, Jake wandering through Paris in pursuit of a woman through streets and parks, or another slapstick episode where a movie stage set of Rome collapses, and a breaking and entering scene to get to see someone in a hospital. [image] But I’ll back-pedal a bit more. I note that Under the Net has a similar overall ranking on GR as her other novels. Of all her novels, Under the Net was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. (I think it should have been her Booker prize winner, The Sea, the Sea.) Top photo, London in the 1950s from alamy.com London from gettyimages.com The author from irismurdochsociety.org.uk [Edited for typos, pictures added 1/26/22, edited for spoilers 9/19/23/] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 26, 2021
|
Jan 2022
|
Jan 01, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1476785082
| 9781476785080
| 1476785082
| 4.02
| 17,916
| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
[Edited 3/17/23] This book is a fictionalized biography of the Nobel prize-winning German author, Thomas Mann, kind of a counterpart to Toibin’s book T [Edited 3/17/23] This book is a fictionalized biography of the Nobel prize-winning German author, Thomas Mann, kind of a counterpart to Toibin’s book The Master, a fictionalized biography of Henry James. Toibin is, and Mann was, gay or bi, and in his biography of James, Toibin assumed Henry James was gay but 'in the closet' – there is no hard evidence. Thomas Mann had a long and complicated life (1875-1955). I know I often summarize books rather than ‘review’ them, so for this book I thought I would just highlight a few important themes of Mann’s life that intrigued me, as Mann was portrayed by the author. [image] Above: Mann’s two oldest children with their gay lovers. Erika, second from left; Klaus, far right. From dw.com One aspect of Mann’s life, which occupies a lot of the story, was his wild and crazy children. Gay or bi-, Mann fathered six children and they all led complex lives that would be reality show material today. If then was now, and we were in Germany, we’d see one of their pictures on the front page of the National Enquirer every week at the supermarket. The best example of their chaotic adventures is the oldest brother and sister, both gay, who became famous in Germany as stage actors starring in plays that they wrote about their own love lives and their sexuality. This was Europe so they could do that when they could not have done so in the United States. They announced to the press that they would marry each other's lover, which the young woman did. Fortunately times change, but at one point, one of their daughters said of their mother “She will think she has been a failure as a mother. Three homosexuals, or two homosexuals and one bisexual. Two daughters who enjoy the company of older men.” (Two daughters married men their father’s age.) Independent of their sexual orientation, the relationship between the two oldest siblings is fascinating. Perhaps it has something to do with genetics because the situation was repeated from Mann’s wife's family to his own. Mann's wife had a twin brother. When they were young, they existed for each other in a self-contained world. Even at social gatherings, everything was a private joke between themselves and it was difficult for any outsider to enter that world. That was repeated in the relationship between Mann’s two oldest children. It continued all their lives until the brother became absent and dysfunctional in his 30s or so. (I also think of the brother-sister act in Donna Tart’s novel The Secret History.) (view spoiler)[ The brother died of a drug overdose. Mann and his wife did not attend the funeral. (hide spoiler)] [image] Above: Mann’s in his study in his California home from brightspotcdn.com All of Mann’s children relied on their father’s financial support well into and beyond adulthood. And yet they critiqued his lifestyle, saying that the house he eventually built California after he fled Germany during the War was ostentatious, and they had too many servants, etc. A continuous stream of money flowed out from him to his children for their rent, travel and other support, and they always had meals cooked by servants and a rent-free home to return to all their lives. Another theme that intrigued me was Mann’s reaction to the rise of Hitler. Of course he opposed Hitler. But why did it take him so long to speak out publicly against Hitler? Mann was the most influential intellectual in Germany. Hitler took power about the time that Mann was at the top of his fame: he had received the Nobel Prize in 1929. Mann’s main excuse was that he did not want to endanger his wife's parents who were in Germany and who, even though they became Protestants, were considered by everyone to be Jewish. But he also knew that most of his money was derived from his book sales to his German readers. He knew that opposing Hitler would result in the banning of his books. Mann already saw one effect of Hitler: Mann gave well-paid lectures around the country, but suddenly organized Nazi thugs appeared at his lectures to chant slogans and shout him down. In reaction, he wrote a weaselly political book that some critics called “unintelligible.” Mann simply assumed Hitler could not rise to power in Germany. It’s chilling, in the context of modern American politics, to be reminded how Hitler did it: among other things, the repetition of lies, the need for enemies, public reprisals to those who opposed him. After Hitler took power, Mann and his family fled first to Switzerland, then to France, then to the United States. In the US they lived first in Princeton, New Jersey, and later, California. Still Mann remained silent. Mann and his wife were invited to a private dinner with the Roosevelts and later he met several times with Eleanor Roosevelt to strategize about how he could help the war effort. Eventually Mann finally spoke out forcefully against Hitler but you wonder what was the point at that time, given that America had already entered the war. [image] Above: Mann’s home in California from watmh.org Mann liked real estate. He built a mansion in Germany in part to get his wife re-interested in family life after she became a patient in a tuberculosis sanitarium. After a year, she seemed to simply be adopting the life of “a patient.” His strategy worked. She came back home to her husband and children. Her telling of her experiences and Mann’s numerous visits to the sanitarium became the basis for one of his most famous books, The Magic Mountain. Much later he hired an architect to build a home in Pacific Palisades in California. It’s still there and it recently sold for $14 million. (Amazingly, it was listed as a ‘demo’ since the land was so much more valuable than the house, but it was bought and saved from demolition by the German government.) For most of his life Mann’s wife was his manager. She protected his secluded time for his writing. In later years his oldest daughter took over that role. For all of Mann’s life, his wife managed the often-times chaotic complexities that their six children got into. Mann left not only the running of his house to his wife but the raising and the management of the children. He appeared at dinner and cracked jokes and did magic tricks (the title) but otherwise he was an absent father. A dozen times in the story some dramatic, chaotic family situation arises and it's followed by the words ‘Thomas retired to his study and closed the door.’ Mann’s older brother was an important influence, and at times a nemesis, throughout his life. His brother became a well-respected author as well. He wrote mostly about politics, but his politics were radical. Mann hated to talk politics with his brother. And, as Hitler’s power grew, his brother became another person constantly urging Mann to speak out and oppose Hitler. The two Mann brothers in effect came to be opposing leaders of thought about different approaches to German government. And, of course, while the nation was having this reasoned intellectual discussion, Hitler arrived on the scene and burned the place down. His brother was another one who didn’t like Mann’s lifestyle, but Mann supported his brother financially for much of his brother’s life. It's interesting how the author structures the book. It's biography but it is far from a traditional biography. Dates are hardly ever mentioned. We do not hear what year he was born or when he was married or what year this or that book was published or how old he was when some dramatic event occurred. In fact at times I found myself wondering ‘How old was Mann now?’ Toibin does focus on Mann’s work in the sense that he gives us an overview of how particularly important works came about such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus and Death in Venice. Death in Venice is particularly intriguing. It’s the story of an old man in love with a young boy, and you wonder how a closeted gay man could have ‘gotten away with’ this story? The author explains how that was the case. And at the risk of giving too much away, I won’t go into details about Mann’s sex life, but some people, including family members, ‘knew,’ and many suspected his orientation. [image] Mann on a German postage stamp from Wikimedia When the McCarthy era hit the US, Mann and most of his children were investigated by the FBI. 'They had files.' You can imagine all the meticulous details those files were filled with about his children’s sex lives. Against US State Department urgings, Mann agreed to give a lecture in East Germany which the US authorities feared would help 'legitimize' East Germany’s communist government. After that, in effect, Mann and his children were hounded out of the country and Mann spent his last years in Switzerland. A great book. Very readable. Maybe a bit too much detail on the children’s lives, especially the details on getting all members of his extended family out of Europe as Germany took over country after country. The book has no pictures, so I added some in the review and put captions under them. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 22, 2021
|
Dec 29, 2021
|
Dec 29, 2021
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1335471405
| 9781335471406
| 1335471405
| 3.54
| 7,483
| Oct 05, 2021
| Oct 05, 2021
|
really liked it
|
[Edited 3/11/23] The author starts the story with the proverbial loaded gun: we follow a hired killer who grew up in an orphanage. (There are a lot of [Edited 3/11/23] The author starts the story with the proverbial loaded gun: we follow a hired killer who grew up in an orphanage. (There are a lot of orphans in the story.) This character enjoys killing and he refined his skills as a British soldier in Burma in World War II. [image] The next chapter shifts the scene from Dublin to San Sebastian in Basque country in Northern Spain. The story is set in the 1950s during the time of Franco’s dictatorship. We're not supposed to like our main character, Quirke, an Irish pathologist. I certainly didn't. He's a malcontent and a moaner. “…petulance was his pastime” and “He was feeling sorry for himself, and thoroughly enjoying it.” We’re told he gets pleasure from other people’s distress and he sometimes creates that distress, as we see during a key dinner later in the novel. Quirke’s wife is a psychiatrist. That probably helps her put up with him; that and the fact that she genuinely loves him. She must love him because she doesn't complain about all his moods, antics and heavy drinking. Quirke knows that he is way outclassed by her and he understands how lucky he is to have her. He frequently says a little prayer under his alcohol-laden breath: “Please don't leave me.” They both have had hard times in the past. He was raised with abuse in the orphanage and was at one time an in-the-gutter alcoholic. He still drinks heavily but his wife keeps him somewhat under control. She's the one who has a lot to complain about, but never does. She had relatives killed in concentration camps during the war and she had a previous marriage where she lost a child. But they both keep these traumas to themselves because they never talk about the past. I'll limit what I say about the plot to what we know from the blurbs. While vacationing with his wife in Spain, Quirke encounters a young woman doctor - the April of the title. He immediately knows this woman is a supposedly dead friend of his daughter back in Ireland. He calls his daughter to relate this and she sets the plot in motion by informing the woman’s uncle, who is a highly placed political official, and she tells the local Irish police chief. [image] Of course, these people back in Ireland know Quirke. They are dubious because they know his past history of severe alcoholism, so they aren’t eager to believe him. If this woman, who goes by a new name in Spain, really is the supposedly dead April from Ireland, she had a particularly harrowing childhood as a victim of child abuse and incest. I got a kick out of the hired killer character. He has never previously read a book in his life and somehow picks up Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. That's the story of Pinkie, a gang leader and killer in the British resort town of the title. We get Banville's killer’s opinions of what is realistic or not in Greene's novel. I liked the local color of the Spain setting as it had a realistic flavor in the characters’ remarks about language and cultural differences. “The carriage smelled strongly of garlic and sweat and something that she couldn't identify. It was simply, she supposed, the smell of Abroad.” Here are a few passages I liked to illustrate the author’s writing style: “Detective Inspector Stratford entered the room and closed the door gently behind him. His manner was abstracted, as if he had wandered in by accident and hadn’t quite realized yet where he was. Phoebe regarded him with candid interest. He was thin to the point of gauntness, with pale, bony wrists and peculiar, pale soft hair. His face was so narrow it seemed that if he turned sideways it would collapse into two dimensions and become a fine, straight line. He wore a three-piece tweed suit. The chain of a fob watch was looped across his concave midriff. He didn't look in the least like a policeman. He might have been a university don, or an unfrocked priest.” “Phoebe thought she had never known anyone so lacking in affect. That would be the Protestant in him, she said to herself, and immediately felt guilty.” “Christ almighty, but would that fellow never stop popping up in front of him, like one of those bottom-heavy toys that won't stay down no matter how hard they're knocked over?” I read this book as a buddy read with Ebba Simone. I enjoyed discussing it with her and I appreciate her insights and comments. [image] This book is No. 8 in the Quirke series of crime novels. The earliest ones were published under Banville’s pen name, 'Benjamin Black.' The author is best known for his novel The Sea which won the 2005 Booker prize. Top photo, an old postcard of San Sebastian from cardcow.com Modern San Sebastian from eater.com The author as a young man from godine.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 03, 2021
|
Dec 10, 2021
|
Dec 10, 2021
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0307272796
| 9780307272799
| 0307272796
| 3.29
| 2,874
| Aug 25, 2009
| Feb 23, 2010
|
really liked it
|
I hadn’t read any John Banville for a while so I tried this one. The author toys with us in several ways in this dark humor, ‘life goes on’ story. A f I hadn’t read any John Banville for a while so I tried this one. The author toys with us in several ways in this dark humor, ‘life goes on’ story. A family has gathered at the deathbed of the patriarch who lies in a coma. The man’s second wife is in attendance, along with their son and daughter, and their respective wife and boyfriend. [image] Various Greek gods form a backdrop to the story. They toy with us too while they battle with each other, working out their jealousies, rivalries and animosities. The story is narrated by the god Hermes. His father Zeus and mother Maia have roles too. Zeus likes to assume human form and have sex with the women in the story, but when the women wake, they can only imagine it was a dream. There’s not a lot of activity by the gods, and we’d still have a decent story if their shenanigans were omitted entirely. The author toys with us too in the names he gives people. The family name is Godley; both father and son are Adam; a daughter, Petra, is very un-rocklike, and another character, Benny Grace comes to the rescue. The timeline is askew, or perhaps it’s more proper to say we’re in an alternate reality. At the start of the book we have steam trains, pony carts clopping down the road, and people plucking chickens. Then we learn the daughter has shaved her head and that another woman is a ‘daughter of the 50s’ So we may be thinking: ‘1950s’? But then we read about salt-water powered cars and we learn that the comatose man was a physicist who overturned Einstein’s theories as well as that conceptual darling of present-day physicists, string theory. He did the math and discovered that time was made up of ‘particles.’ The family is loaded with quirks and tensions of all sorts. We learn a lot about them from the thoughts of the paralyzed man. Coma or not, his brain is still running full-steam ahead and his wife knows he’s aware. She torments herself by wondering if he spends his time thinking of his first wife. [image] Both children seem oddly matched with their significant others. The son is a clunky farm boy married to a cosmopolitan artist. The daughter is a social misfit to the point that everyone wonders what will become of her. Her ‘boyfriend,’ an aspiring author, seems to be hanging on only because he hopes that he can write the dying man’s official biography. And speaking of hangers-on, Benny Grace arrives to visit the dying man. We know from discussions among the gods that he is up to mischief. What will it be? Even though he is the only outside visitor to come, he’s the last person the dying scientist wants to see. Benny made his career as a professional hanger-on and sycophant to the great man. He procured women for Adam Sr. when they traveled to scientific conferences. He found a wealthy woman who helped fund his research. So what is he up to now? Some passages I liked: “He [the daughter’s male friend] smells like a priest.” “What do priests smell of?” “Ashes. Wax and ashes.” “He had not intended to be humorous. He does not care for jokes, does not understand them or what they are for.” The gods speak: “The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot…” [image] I enjoyed the read, a 3.5 rounded up to 4. I note however that it is one of Banville’s lowest-rated books on GR. It’s my sixth book by Banville and my two favorites remain first, The Sea, and second, The Untouchable. (GR readers rate those two in the opposite order.) Top photo of a house in rural Ireland from tripadvisor.com Greek gods from istockphoto.com The author (1945- ) from irishtimes.com [Edited for typos 2/7/24] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 19, 2021
|
Aug 25, 2021
|
Aug 25, 2021
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
3.84
| 165,564
| Jun 15, 1914
| Jan 04, 2001
|
it was amazing
|
Dubliners is a collection of short stories published in 1914. The concluding story is The Dead, which the blurb on GR cites as “the best short story e
Dubliners is a collection of short stories published in 1914. The concluding story is The Dead, which the blurb on GR cites as “the best short story ever written.” We are told in a brief introduction that Joyce was a pioneer in popularizing the structure of the modern short story as focused on “a fleeting but decisive episode.” Elsewhere I’ve read of the focus of the modern short story described as 'the moment.' [image] So, is The Dead the greatest short story ever written? I’ll add my two cents: I first read it 50 years ago in college. I’ve always remembered it as if I read it yesterday. How many of the hundreds of short stories I have read since then can I say that about? Many of the stories are very short - only four or five pages. Here are a few samples: In The Sisters, their brother, a priest, dies at home. Was it because he broke a chalice during mass shortly before his death? In An Encounter, two boys play hooky from school and encounter a strange man. His conversation is such that it seems he might be a molester. In Araby, a young boy lives in a house in which a priest died a short time ago. The young boy is frustrated in trying to buy a present at a bazaar for his puppy love. In Eveline, a young woman debates leaving her father and running off to Buenos Aires with her lover. [image] In Two Gallants, a young man waits to see the result of his best friend’s visit to a young woman they assume is a prostitute. In A Little Cloud, a man is jealous of his friend’s success in London. He determines that you have to 'go away' for success. He feels trapped in Ireland by his wife and baby. In A Painful Case, a man frequently visits a married woman and her daughter at home. The husband thinks he’s visiting because he’s interested in the daughter. He’s not. [image] Some of the stories are modern in outlook, bringing up issues of feminism and racism. The Dead touches on both issues during conversation around the Christmas table. An elderly aunt is furious about boys getting preference over girls in a choir. A man around the table raises the issue of no one appreciating a great tenor. “Is it because he’s only a black?” The story, A Mother, focuses on a dispute over a payment for her daughter singing in a choir. “They wouldn’t have dared to have treated her like that if she had been a man.” [image] Top photo: Grafton Street, Dublin, early 1900s from vintag.es A still from a movie made of The Dead, (Anjelica Huston and Donal McCann) from irishcentral.com Postcard of Dublin in the 1920s from monksbarn.wordpress.com The author from theculturetrip.com [Pictures added 11/15/2021; edited 8/11/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
Dec 14, 2020
|
Dec 14, 2020
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
0241260175
| 9780241260173
| 0241260175
| 3.55
| 2,613
| Oct 05, 2017
| Oct 05, 2017
|
really liked it
|
Mrs. Osmond by John Banville Banville has written a sequel in the life of Isabel Archer, the main character in Henry James’ novel, Portrait of a Lady. Mrs. Osmond by John Banville Banville has written a sequel in the life of Isabel Archer, the main character in Henry James’ novel, Portrait of a Lady. Like James, the story is full of psychological insight, and the writing style is like that of James but with shorter sentences and fewer sub-clauses. Kind of Henry James lite, as I have written of novels by Anita Brookner. [image] When we last saw Isabel, the 1880’s jet-setter in a time of steam trains and horse and buggies, she had married a wealthy American man and moved to Italy. (view spoiler)[ The man has a daughter from a previous marriage and his closest companion is a woman who basically talked Irene into marrying this guy. There’s a mystery about his daughter and who this woman is. Irene married him over objections from her parents and friends who wanted her to follow expectations and marry an older wealthy man – that’s the way it was done. Banville starts us off a few years into her marriage when she has come to realize that he married her for his money. He’s a so-called artist. (hide spoiler)] Irene is helped along by her hard-fisted maid who realizes that her mistress has her head in the clouds and is too soft-hearted and gullible. Still not yet 30, Irene is miserable and feels middle-aged. All the major characters are Americans living in Europe. They’re originally from Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. (Irene was from Albany, New York.) None have ever worked for a living – it’s all money inherited from Dad and probably Grandpa. Sometimes they marry European men or women, whose fortunes are fading, to get a title. So it’s a match made in heaven if you bring American money to the table and say you married “Princess” or “Count” so-and-so. I’ll let the author speak for himself with some key thoughts that also illustrate the style of writing: “Her home, the Palazzo Roccanera, was well-named, for it was there the she had run up against the immovable black rock of failure – the failure of her marriage, the failure of herself, her failure – like the engine of a steam train rounding a bend and colliding full-tilt with a boulder fallen on the track.” Of her husband “…to lose face would have been, for him, insupportable, for what else had he other than the appearance of being what he was not?” [her husband] “…bent upon his wife a gaze lacking in all expression save what might be a certain faint disappointment – disappointment not at finding her there, she thought, but at the notion of her in general, of her being anywhere, at any time…” [image] “ ‘I think,’ Isabel said, with a smile betokening misery, ‘that it is myself I wish to be free of.’ " When she thinks of a former suitor: “To have married him, she acknowledged, would have been to elect to live between seasons, neither in summer nor in winter, neither in spring nor in fall; together, they would have inhabited a weatherless world.” Her maid thinks: “…Paris was not unwelcome, for Paris she did like, despite the persistence there of French people.” “Philosophy, in the opinion of the correspondent of the New York Interviewer, was a harmless diversion from the true brisk business of being human, which was nothing more and nothing less than to live a harmonious, fulfilled and useful life.” [of her husband’s mysterious companion] “Madame Merle’s own smile, bland, slow, insinuative, that drew up her lips at the left side, like the corner of a curtain being lifted on something that had better not be seen…” I liked this exchange: “He lives as he always has, very content and quiet.” “Well he has much to be quiet about.” [image] This is my fifth book by Banville and I enjoyed it. Obviously I like his work and I would say that my two favorites remain The Sea (his Booker winner) and The Untouchable. Top photo of Paris in the late 1880's from mymodernmet.com Lucce, Italy, 'The Florence of the South' from alistairdewarphotography.com The author from theguardian.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 25, 2020
|
Nov 25, 2020
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0140106693
| 9780140106695
| 0140106693
| 3.83
| 303
| 1980
| Jan 25, 1991
|
really liked it
|
Wikipedia hits the nail on the head for this novel by Trevor: “The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalized members of society: children
Wikipedia hits the nail on the head for this novel by Trevor: “The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalized members of society: children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use Gothic elements to explore the nature of evil and its connection to madness.” The main character is a 47-year old widow in a small English town who is marrying a much younger man, a good-looking bit-part actor who appears across England in a TV ad. Her young-adult daughters are happy for her but her mother has reservations that she (unfortunately) keeps to herself. [image] The actor is the protagonist in the story. Let’s make a list. We’ll start off mildly and work our way up the scale: he’s a cad, a con-man, a gigolo, a sponge, a user, a bigamist, a sociopath and maybe a psychopath. He uses women for money. (view spoiler)[ Sometimes he marries them, as he did with an elderly widow; sometimes he gets them pregnant, as he does with the third main character in the story, a young woman who has his now-12-year-old daughter. (hide spoiler)] He flits in and out of their lives causing more damage. The actor seems to be multisexual. (Yes, that’s a word now.) (view spoiler)[ He’ll go with old ladies and young women and he has sex with men for money. At one point in the story he’s attracted to an underage girl. (hide spoiler)]He’s an equal-opportunity destroyer of lives. This is probably the most sexually-oriented novel of all of Trevor’s that I have read, but there is no joy in any of the sex. It all seems to be survival tactics on the actor’s part. The latest widow’s honeymoon in Italy (view spoiler)[ (for which she paid) ends disastrously and she never sees him again. (hide spoiler)]Yet she still loves him and through various twists and turns, gets involved in the other people in his life. (Back to the title.) She watches the tragic downward spiral of the mother of the actor’s child; she even gets involved with his parents in an old folks’ home. It’s been said that it’s easy for us to see the flaws in other people’s lives but not in our own. We want to take a few friends and family members and shake them by the shoulders and say: “Stop drinking!” “Leave that abusive loser!” “Get off your butt and get a decent job.” “Pay some attention to your kids!” “Lose some weight and two-thirds of your health problems will go away.” To the widow we want to say “Cut loose from these people! It’s over. Get on with your life.” But then we would have no story. There are other themes in the story. One is the widow’s overly-caring nature: “…her compassion made a victim of her.” As in many of Trevor’s works there’s a Catholic-Protestant theme. (view spoiler)[ The widow is Catholic, so the con-artist studies up on the religion to pretend he’s Catholic. Meanwhile the local priest is in love with her. (hide spoiler)] With all this trauma, the widow start losing her faith. She tells the priest her feelings now about God: “Is He my own particular illusion, a fog of comfort to be lost in? ….He’s just a wisp of nothing now.” [image] I really enjoy Trevor’s work; this one, Other People’s Worlds is my tenth novel by him and I’ve also read a couple of collections of his short stories. A very good story. Photo of Congleton, Cheshire from alamy.com The author from theaustralian.com.au [Revised, spoilers hidden 9/16/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 10, 2020
|
Jul 15, 2020
|
Jul 15, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0140107487
| 9780140107487
| 0140107487
| 3.61
| 280
| 1969
| Jan 23, 1989
|
it was amazing
|
Trevor has accomplished an amazing thing in this novel – he’s successfully mixed comedy and serious religion. I don’t often do it, but I chuckled at s
Trevor has accomplished an amazing thing in this novel – he’s successfully mixed comedy and serious religion. I don’t often do it, but I chuckled at several passages. The story is set in an old run-down boarding house in Dublin. It’s populated by characters that seem to have crawled out of pages of a Dickens novel. A 90-year-old woman owns the house. All her life, even when her deceased husband ran it as a hotel, she has taken in orphans and homeless people. The woman has no hearing or speaking abilities so she and fellow inhabitants communicate in silence by writing in a notebook. [image] Her divorced son lives in the house but he’s useless – an alcoholic who spends all his time smoking, drinking and playing the dogs and horses with the weekly allowance his mother gives him. The house is actually run by an aging butler, a Uriah Heep type, who cooks and does occasional cleaning. Believe me, you would not want to stay there. As an example of the kind of characters who live there, let’s take Morrissey. He’s short and skinny; ferret-faced and feckless, people say. He’s a pimp who scouts out men for four women. One of the women is an orphan who wanted to be a nun. Obviously that didn’t work out so she does her business in the boarding house. He shows men their pictures on cards and men frequently react by saying things like “She’s huge and ugly” or “She looks deformed.” Still, he does business – that and shoplifting from Woolworths keeps him going. The butler hates him and his activities, so Morrissey has to sleep on the floor of the lobby. Into this mix comes an older woman photographer, Mrs. Eckdorf, who has heard about the hotel. She’s a well-known photographer who publishes coffee-table photo books. In the opinion of the local priest, she specializes in exploiting low-class misery to sell books to rich people – which is basically what she does. In a round-about way she has heard of this hotel in Dublin from a bartender who had used Morrissey’s services at some point. [image] SPOILERS FOLLOW: She first wanders Dublin taking photos of down-and-out people who all ask her for money – she refuses. These are folks such as one lady on the street who gets permission to go into bars and drain dregs from glasses into a can she carries. To the amazement of the locals the photographer becomes the first person to actually stay in the hotel in years. To everyone’s annoyance she gets permission from the elderly owner to click away at the matron’s annual birthday party. The butler spreads the false rumor that she wants to buy the hotel. The butler tells the priest he has seen a halo glow around her. Here’s where the religion comes in. Without giving too much plot away, I’ll say the photographer simultaneously has a religious conversion and a complete mental breakdown. She comes to believe that the elderly, silent matron, welcoming to all these cast-offs, knowing everyone’s thoughts in her notebooks, loving them equally and non-judgmentally, whether her alcoholic son or a prostitute, is God-like. Mrs. Eckdorf argues religion with the local priest, a man who is more comfortable with dead saints than with living people. A passage I liked about a visitor to the cemetery seeing untended graves: “”The dead live on for a time, she thought, and then they die.” [image] I’ve read a half-dozen of Trevor’s novels. I’m not sure I would say this is my favorite but of those I’ve read I would call it Trevor’s “most accomplished” work. It’s a tough sell to marry serious religious stuff with comedy – not just humor - but he pulls it off. I’m giving it a ‘5’ and adding it to my favorites. Top photo of Dublin from luxurytraveladvisor.com Middle photo from irishtimes.com The author from businesspost ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 09, 2020
|
Jul 09, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0385354266
| 9780385354264
| 0385354266
| 3.36
| 1,730
| 2015
| Sep 15, 2015
|
really liked it
|
The main character is a relatively famous and well-off artist but he has stopped painting. Apparently so he can have another affair and become even mo
The main character is a relatively famous and well-off artist but he has stopped painting. Apparently so he can have another affair and become even more self-absorbed than he already is. He’s 50-ish, older than both his wife and current lady friend. His woman friend tells him: “You didn’t see the car in the street? But of course you didn’t. You never notice anything that’s not yourself.” He’s too self-absorbed to really fall in love with either his wife or his woman friend. [image] He’s putting on weight. I liked these lines: “But I could no longer be fitted into the world she knew: I was the wrong shape, all blunt corners and slippery sides, cumbersome and unmanageable as a piano stuck in a doorway.” The story revolves around the long-time friendship of two couples. We learn early on in the book of a big complication in the relationship: (view spoiler)[ The artist is having an affair with his best friend’s wife. (hide spoiler)] Things go downhill from there. The artist is also a kleptomaniac, mainly taking little keepsakes from other people’s houses. He sees the world as an artist. The colors of a sky or a landscape remind him of a certain painter; a woman’s pose reminds him of a certain painting. The main character tells us he has no control over his life; of course, because he does not exercise control over himself. He muddles through. There is very little dialog. Since we don’t read Banville for his plots, we read him for his excellent writing. So I’ll let him speak for himself: “It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I’m gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do.” On his father’s final illness: “People passing by [the house] put their heads down and would not look in. The thought occurred to me that in a way my father was dead already, and everyone, including myself, was impatient for him to realize it and take himself off, out of our troubled sight.” “Grief, like pain, is only real when one is experiencing it…..My mother had barely entered on her middle years when she fell ill and simply drifted away, her death seeming hardly more than an intensification, a final perfecting, of the general distractedness in which she had passed her lamentably brief life.” On dreams: “…it’s only when I wake that I wonder what these visitations mean, or if they mean anything – after all, why should my dream life have a meaning, when my waking one does not?” “I feel like an archaeologist of my own past, digging down through layer after layer of schist and glistening shale and never reaching bed rock.” “A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads… What were they talking about? Nothing. Isn’t that what people always talk about when there are others around to overhear them?” When the last descendant of the local earls asks him if he wants a lift: “How does he do it, how does he manage it, that grave, patrician sonority, so that the simplest things he says convey the weight of generations?” On his art agent/gallery owner: “It is Perry’s policy to be always on the way to somewhere else, a place much more important than here.” The author occasionally addresses the reader with lines like “You’re not paying attention…” and “…this is last year I’m speaking of, more than nine months ago, for it’s September now, do try to keep up.” I mentioned above that we don’t read Banville for his plots but suddenly in the last chapter we have a baby, a funeral and a wedding and none of them would be what we would have guessed. Life goes on. Nice twists at the end! [image] This is my fourth Banville. The best I thought was The Sea (2005 Booker winner) which I added to my favorites. I gave a ‘5’ to The Untouchable and a ‘4’ to The Shroud. Blue Guitar I won’t add to favorites, but I think it deserves a ‘4.’ I'll also note that I'm in the minority on this one; its overall rating on GR is 3.4 which is low. Watercolor, Irish Countryside by Don O'Neill from bigcommerce.com Photo of the author from irishtimes.com [Edited for typos, spoiler hidden 8/30/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 17, 2020
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0141186682
| 9780141186689
| 0141186682
| 3.85
| 1,679
| 1985
| Dec 01, 2001
|
it was amazing
|
We know this from the cover blurbs and from the first few pages: Edward, the main character is a young man, a college student, living in London. He gi
We know this from the cover blurbs and from the first few pages: Edward, the main character is a young man, a college student, living in London. He gives his best friend a sandwich laced with LSD as a joke. The friend falls to his death from a window. Edward’s guilt comes to shape his whole life, plunging him into a debilitating depression worsened by weekly letters from his friend’s mother cursing him as a murderer. Edward’s mother is dead, and he returns home where he lives with his father and a younger brother. Their lives are complicated too as his father is having an affair with a married woman (the wife of Edward’s psychiatrist) and his brother is socially and intellectually withdrawn from the world, shunning sex and alcohol. His brother is dedicated to somehow doing good and helping people, becoming like a priest or a monk, but without believing in God. That brother takes on Edward as a kind of “project.” [image] People tell Edward he has to learn to live with his responsibility for his friend’s death, but he thinks “…but I can’t live with this, I can only die with it, except that I don’t die.” The reader may think that both young men need a good woman to help straighten them out, but how will they attract anyone in their current situations? The blurbs tell us, in so many words, that Edward is seeking redemption and his brother is seeking salvation. With advice from a psychiatrist and a fortune teller (!) Edward goes off to find his biological father, at one time a somewhat famous artist. Edward finds his father’s wife and two half-sisters he never met living almost in isolation in a cult-like four-person commune. His father is “away and will arrive shortly.” So weeks later, where is he? There’s a heavy dose of philosophy in all this. (Murdoch was a philosophy professor at Cambridge.) In the course of one dinner conversation we can touch on everything from the ancient Greeks and geometry to nuclear war, terrorism, pornography and artificial intelligence! There are many good lines and humor. Just a couple: “As Edward found these words emerging from his mouth he felt a thrill of fright as if the words were actually little animals which had leapt out of his mouth and were now running about.” “The head waiter had noticed the incident….His contempt for his clients was impartial.” The social network portrayed in the story is so dense that touching it anywhere affects everyone else. So when the couple having the affair is found out and the wife says, “Let’s not get in a muddle –“ her lover can say “That’s your funniest remark yet.” The affair occupies almost as much of the book as Edward’s incident. Watch what you wish for. Can a woman fall head-over-heels in love with a man for just two weeks? And I’m reminded of a book by Anita Brookner, can you really fall in love with someone you almost despise? There’s a wonderful love letter from the man to the woman, trying to win her back, that is a classic. There are many surprising plot twists and several amazing coincidences. (Murdoch has been dinged by some critics for her “bizarre plot twists.” You get the impression that the author is toying with us because the coincidences aren’t all necessary to the plot – someone could have called and said “I’m coming to town and I’d like to see you” rather than running into someone by accident. But the coincidences are the author’s way of showing the real-life impact of chance. Just a few pages from the end of the book, Edward reflects: “In a way it’s all a muddle starting off with an accident: my breakdown, drugs, telepathy, my father’s illness, cloistered neurotic women, people arriving unexpectedly, all sorts of things which happened by pure chance. At so many points anything being otherwise could have made everything be otherwise.” I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Joseph Conrad: “It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.” There are also some shocking surprises. And, just as in real life, some things that people predict come true and some don’t. That’s another way the author toys with the reader: contrary to theater parlance, the loaded gun shown in the first act may never go off. There’s also a bit, almost, of the supernatural. Hallucinations (perhaps due to Edwards past drug use), the fortune teller, poltergeists. (In one of Murdoch’s books she has a flying saucer appear in the distance.) Somehow the author gets away with it and leaves us with a great read. It’s a dense, complicated plot and it’s fitting that the end of the book is a series of letters resolving everyone’s status and straightening out loose ends. (It’s also a fairly long book – the paperback edition I read had 520 pages of small font, without which, it would have been a 700-page book.) [image] The Good Apprentice was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1985. The critic Harold Bloom listed The Good Apprentice in his 1994 book, The Western Canon, as one of the books important and influential in Western culture. Murdoch can be considered an Irish author even though she grew up in and went to school in England. (And all of this story is set in England.) She was born in Ireland and both her parents were Irish. I’m adding it to my favorites. Photo of London streets from unsplash.com The author from curtisbrown.co.uk ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 20, 2020
|
Jan 20, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0571195261
| 9780571195268
| 0571195261
| 3.95
| 4,894
| 1990
| May 18, 1998
|
really liked it
|
[Edited, spoilers hidden 9/14/23] This tale of a curmudgeonly Irish father and his effect on his five children was short-listed for the Booker Prize in [Edited, spoilers hidden 9/14/23] This tale of a curmudgeonly Irish father and his effect on his five children was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1990. While reading it, at first I thought of A Man Called Ove, another curmudgeon. But Ove was not a father and Ove softened up over time. Michael, this father, did not. As the story went along I thought more of Stoner; even though no one would call Stoner a curmudgeon, but, I thought: this is his life, this is the way he is, this is the way things are, it is what it is, he’s not going to change, what did you expect? [image] The father, Michael, is a farmer. He has small pension from having been in the Irish Army, but money is tight. He spends his days in backbreaking work dawn to dusk on his family farm, bringing in hay, tending the animals, mostly cattle. We learn quickly that he is the master of his roost. His wife and three daughters wait on him. He is served food first at a separate table and the rest of the family eats together afterwards. He is stern and has ‘black moods;’ “…silence and deadness would fall on them” when he walks into a room. If a dish is dropped in the kitchen everyone freezes and looks to him for his reaction. His wife feels “inordinately grateful when he behaves normally” and “inordinately grateful for the slightest goodwill.” Yet his girls and youngest boy love him especially in those rare moments when he might dance around the room. Perhaps he is manic depressive? The father says grace before and after meals. He leads the family in Catholic prayer every evening – a full rosary on their knees. His blackest moods come about most often (view spoiler)[ when he thinks of his prodigal son, the oldest boy who ran off to London and never came back. The son keeps in contact with his brother and sister but never comes back home. He sees his father once at one of his sister’s weddings and they speak politely for a minute. They exchange one polite letter. That’s it. He does not attend his father’s funeral. (hide spoiler)] [image] The girls and his wives accept his dominance; the boys rebel. All his children will eventually leave home to get work. (view spoiler)[ The prodigal son owns a business renovating houses in London. The oldest daughter is a nurse in London; she visits home two or three times a year. The two younger girls get civil service jobs in Dublin and they come home every weekend until they both marry. The youngest boy, spoiled by his three older sisters and the second wife, rebels in a big way. When he is only fifteen, he takes up with an experienced 22-year old girl visiting back home for the summer from New York. The boy stops attending school and flees to London with help from his sister and brother living there. But unlike the oldest son, he makes up with his father and frequently returns home. (hide spoiler)] One daughter also rebels a bit as she gets older. She resents her father discouraging her from taking a scholarship to go to university. The story is a wrap-around. It begins with the family gathering for what may be their last get-together with their father. It ends with that gathering, his death and funeral. There’s good writing: “She was as far from ugliness as she was from beauty and she was young and strong and spirited.” There’s humor: When he lets his second wife set the wedding date, she notes that “…he was more like a man listening to a door close than one going toward his joy.” And “The man’s head was designed to keep his ears apart.” Most of the story is told by an omniscient narrator with focus alternating on the characters. For example we get his courting of his second wife from her point of view (or, I should say her courting of him) and the young son’s escapades are told from his from his perspective. [image] The author has an easy, understated style of writing, quite a bit like his countryman, William Trevor. The story is slow at times and a few scenes get repetitive – such as too many weekend visits by the daughters. But all in all I thought it a first-class read. The Guardian considered Amongst Women one of the all-time 100 best novels in a 2015 list. McGahern’s first novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland for its content related to family sexual abuse. [image] The geographical setting is in northwest Ireland near Sligo, near the coast and close to the border with Northern Ireland. This is near where the author (1934-2006) grew up, in Ballinamore, County Leitrim. Top photo, Sligo, from cloudfront.net Landscape painting by Charles J. McAuley from woolleyandwallis.co.uk The author from /i.guim.co.uk/ Main street in Ballinamore, the author's home town, from wikimedia commons ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 2020
|
Jan 05, 2020
|
Jan 05, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0140258345
| 9780140258349
| 0140258345
| 4.12
| 1,963
| 1996
| Oct 01, 1997
|
it was amazing
|
I’ve read many excellent novels by Trevor but it may be that he is an even better short story writer than novelist. In the blurbs, one from the New Yo
I’ve read many excellent novels by Trevor but it may be that he is an even better short story writer than novelist. In the blurbs, one from the New Yorker, in which Trevor published many stories over the years, one critic said “Trevor is probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language.” Well, Trevor is gone now (1928-2016), but he’s certainly excellent as a short story writer and as a novelist. I was very impressed with two other collections of shorts I read and reviewed, Hill Bachelors and A Bit on the Side. This collection, After Rain, was listed as one of the eight best books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. [image] As with his novels, many of the subjects are lonely people and almost all are leading somewhat drab, confined, constrained lives. One of the things I appreciate most about Trevor is his originality or inventiveness in the short plots. Imagine being a short story writer yourself trying to come up with a story line for a short story that no one has used before! Trevor’s a master. Here are five brief descriptions of the stories I liked best. In The Piano Tuner’s Wives, an elderly blind piano tuner takes a second wife after the death of his first wife. His first wife was a plain woman who was “his eyes.” All her life she gave him vivid descriptions of the hills, the trees, the houses they visited to tune pianos, the people they met. The second wife was and still is a beautiful woman who had hoped the man would have married her when they courted when they were younger. She resents the first wife and despairs that he cannot appreciate her past and present beauty. She sets about to change all his “visual” perceptions that he learned from his first wife. How’s that for a unique plot! In A Friendship, two women have been lifelong friends. One of them has an affair and the husband (rightfully it turns out), feels that his wife’s friend encouraged it. He will forgive his wife if she ends the friendship. What will she choose? Gilbert’s Mother focuses on a troubled mother-son relationship. The son, mid-twenties, may be mentally challenged or he may just be a jerk; the guy of kind that people avoid and at best, tolerate, but say “he has a screw loose.” Can this all be an act that he uses to control his mother? [image] The style and mood of After Rain, the title story, reminds me of books by Anita Brookner. A young woman is visiting Italy, staying at a pensione she visited with her parents as a child. She is alone, trying to get over a recent romantic breakup; the latest in a series of such events. She knows the trip is a mistake as soon as she arrives. While admiring a local painting of The Annunciation she has a striking moment of inspiration when she figures out what’s wrong in the relationship department. [image] Much of Trevor’s work, certainly all his novels that I’ve read, have characters who have had some connection to “The Troubles” – the history of violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Lost Ground, the longest story in the book, features a Protestant boy in Northern Ireland, a teenager, who experiences visitations by a Catholic saint while he’s in the apple orchard. He takes up preaching about his experiences in local towns and is killed. That’s shocking, but even more shocking is how he was killed and who killed him. Great reading! Seascape Cottage, oil painting by Norma Wilson from i.pinimg.com The Annunciation, painting by Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli from Wikimedia Commons The author from ichef.bbci.co.uk ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 2020
|
Jan 01, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0141002174
| 9780141002170
| 0141002174
| 4.03
| 607
| Oct 05, 2000
| Oct 01, 2001
|
really liked it
|
It’s easy to find cover blurbs that list an author as “one of the greatest…” But Trevor’s blurbs go beyond that. A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal
It’s easy to find cover blurbs that list an author as “one of the greatest…” But Trevor’s blurbs go beyond that. A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal said of Trevor “There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world.” A reviewer in The Weekly Standard called him "the greatest living writer in English.” Trevor’s gone now but his work lives on. [image] This collection of a dozen short stories shows his style: poignant and melancholy with deep psychological insight, especially about loneliness. Some stories are set in towns but most are in rural areas: dying farms and dying churches. Some examples of the stories I liked best: Two of the stories concern men wanting to be on the farm and women wanting to be in town. In “Low Sunday, 1950” a brother and sister in their 40s have been living on a farm and in a house inherited from an aunt. She wants to move into town but can’t bring herself to broach the subject with her brother. She knows that he will chose to stay on the farm alone. Maybe next year she can bring it up… In the title story, “The Hill Bachelors,” a young man has returned to live with his mother and run the farm after his father’s death. He’s knows of a half-dozen women who would marry him but none want to move out of the town and into rural isolation. Even his mother wants him to leave again. “She hadn’t thought she would be left. She hadn’t wanted it. She didn’t now.” [image] In some stories, humor is added to the seriousness. In “Death of a Professor,” a senior faculty member, fifteen years older than his wife, is the last to know that all four of the morning papers carried his obituary. It is said of his wife that “…in her heyday Vanessa’s beauty recalled Marilyn Monroe’s. Over the years, inevitably has come the riposte that she still possesses the film star’s brain.” Were the obituaries a student prank? Or a joked played on another professor who has pined for Vanessa for decades? In “Against the Odds” we see how a woman con-artist takes bachelor farmers for quite a sum. In “The Virgin’s Gift,” three times a monk has had visions of the Virgin Mary. When he was a youth she told him to join the abbey, which he did for more than fifteen years. Then she told him to go live a totally solitary existence on an island, which he did for twenty-five years. Now she reappears for the last time (she tells him) and says he must go back to civilization. Why? He loves his life of peaceful isolation. He doesn’t even know if his parents are alive of if the abbey still exists. In “A Friend in the Trade” A married couple runs a small publishing company. A decades-long friend comes to their house so frequently that he’s like a member of the family. The woman knows he’s secretly in love with her. Now they are moving out of London. Does the friend really think he’s going to move in with them in their new house? [image] In other stories mentioned in the cover blurb, three people are frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love’s consummation, and a nine-year old girl dreams that a movie part will heal her fragmented family life. Great stories from a master. Top photo of a notecard of a painting in County Mayo from i.etsystatic.com Middle photo from googleusercontent.com/stone-walls-ire... The author from irishexaminer.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0143039628
| 9780143039624
| 0143039628
| 3.98
| 1,304
| 1983
| Apr 25, 2006
|
really liked it
|
This novel reminds me quite a bit of another novel by Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault. Both involve a main character who disappears for 40 years and t
This novel reminds me quite a bit of another novel by Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault. Both involve a main character who disappears for 40 years and then returns. And like other Trevor novels, the main characters are Protestants in Catholic Ireland and a good part of the plot derives from “The Troubles,” the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. [image] But in this novel, the characters don’t all line up on traditional sides. The mother of the young boy who is the main character in the first half of the book is Protestant, but she sympathizes with the Catholic Irish cause as does her Protestant husband. In fact they go so far as to give money to one of the Irish leaders who visits their estate, essentially a grain mill. They give a home to a defrocked Catholic priest who acts as a tutor to their son. The first and second halves of the book basically have two different main characters. In the first half the focus is on a young man who sees most of his family killed and his home burned by the Black and Tan Protestant military. We never know why the Protestant military killed members of this Protestant family –perhaps they learned of their support given to the Irish cause or perhaps it was because they had a grain mill employee who was found hanging in a tree with his tongue cut out – the symbol for him being a ‘spy’ for the Irish. But they knew the man who was the military’s leader. After the burning of most of the house, the boy and his mother keep the mill going for income and some of their extended family and servants continue to live there. But the mother turns into a zombie. For the rest of her short life she never recovers from her shock and grief. Always dependent on alcohol, she is now a full-blown alcoholic. She is almost bed-ridden, uncommunicative and uninterested in life. She can only focus on the military leader who killed her husband. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts to the boy’s female cousin who arrives from England. She and the young man are in love but can’t connect. Essentially the boy is too damaged to communicate along normal social lines. She goes to a girl’s school in Switzerland and has a terrible time there. She returns to England, pregnant, and goes to live at the Irish estate in hopes that the young man will marry her. Forty years later… A quote: “The most important things of all happen by chance.” [image] A good story. Like other Trevor novels, understated with excellent writing. It’s set in County Cork in southern Ireland and Enniscorthy (Colm Toibin’s territory!) is mentioned several times. Photo of Cork from cdn2.wanderlust.co.uk Photo of the author from irishexaminer.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0735224633
| 9780735224636
| 0735224633
| 3.58
| 105,194
| Oct 09, 2018
| Oct 09, 2018
|
really liked it
|
Edited, spoilers hidden 2/23/22 The setting is an important part of this story: an old family house* outside of Dublin, nicknamed Ivy House, where two Edited, spoilers hidden 2/23/22 The setting is an important part of this story: an old family house* outside of Dublin, nicknamed Ivy House, where two generations ago a whole crowd of brothers and sisters grew up and then their children came for summers, weekends and holidays. It’s now occupied only by the oldest unmarried uncle, slowing dying of a brain tumor. [image] The real mystery begins halfway through the book when a skull is found in a tree cavity by one of the grandkids. But perhaps the mystery started much earlier in the book, when the main character, a PR guy for an art gallery, was severely beaten during a robbery -- so severely that he is taking more than a year to recover with physical disabilities and long- and short-term memory problems. During recovery he goes to live in the old house with the dying uncle so they can take care of each other. Two of his cousins visit and stay over almost every weekend. It turns out the skull belongs to (view spoiler)[ a male classmate of the children. The classmate disappeared twenty or so years ago and at that time everyone thought he had killed himself by jumping off a cliff . (hide spoiler)] Now the police are circling round and, based on their investigation, they feel that it must be one of the four who killed him: the main character; the female cousin, married with two kids; the male cousin, gay, and taking a break from his partner in Germany, or the uncle. [image] The police focus in on the main character. Of course, with his memory problems, he gets to the point where he thinks MAYBE IT WAS ME and I just don’t remember, and my family isn’t going to tell me just so I can give myself away to the police. Little by little as they talk night after night, police visit after police visit, we see that a case could be made for any of the four – or perhaps any two acting together. There’s a lot of very good writing. I recall thinking early in the book, in the passages about the main character’s group of buddies at a bar on the edge of drunkenness; an incident at his work, and the break-in at his apartment: 'all this is very well-written.' There’s occasional humor: While the main character recovers in the hospital, his mother brings him so many things that “…random stuff was popping up on every available surface through spontaneous generation and sooner or later the nurses would find me buried under a heap of cupcakes and an accordion.” So it’s a good read but in my opinion has a flaw. It gets a bit dragged out at the end. By the middle of the 500+ page book, almost every scene is discussion of the murder around the table with the cousins. Night after night they make a fire, have dinner and wine, wait to be sure the uncle doesn’t stumble up the stairs or drop his wine, and then they go over the possibilities again and again. It it one of them who's not telling? Was it the uncle? A bit much – otherwise I would have given it a 5, so a 4.5. The author (b. 1973) is Irish and American. As a child, her family lived all over the world and she was born in the US, but she went to university in Ireland, married there, and makes her home in Dublin. Because of her series of best-selling crime novels she has been called the “First Lady of Irish Crime.” She also is a well-known actress in Irish theater. [image] *As an aside, it would be fun to make a list of novels where the house is so important to the story that it is essentially a character. Off the top of my head I think of Sabato’s On Heroes and Tombs set in an old decrepit mansion in in Buenos Aires, and Hatoum’s A Tale of a Certain Orient set in Manaus, Brazil. Even Virginia Woolf’s house in To the Lighthouse might qualify or the beach house in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. A house in Dublin from artprintimages.com Grafton Street, Dublin from postmediavancouversun2.files.wordpress.com Photo of the author from irishamerica.com ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 2019
|
Apr 05, 2019
|
Apr 07, 2019
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
0571338763
| 9780571338764
| 0571338763
| 3.53
| 65,931
| May 15, 2018
| May 15, 2018
|
really liked it
|
This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Its fame comes from the distinctive 'Voice of Middle Sister.' So it’s a 'voice' book that makes me think o
This book won the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Its fame comes from the distinctive 'Voice of Middle Sister.' So it’s a 'voice' book that makes me think of others: the Scottish brogue of Swing Hammer Swing by Jeff Torrington or The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus. The book has thousands of reviews on GR so I’ll go easy on the summary. You’ll probably like it - or you won’t. There is a dichotomy in the reviews with mostly 4’s and 5’s but many 1’s and 2’s and a lot of DNFs. [image] The 'Voice': this isn’t a quote but a list of vocabulary to give an example: “Ach aye yeah, middle sister, wee sisters, my maybe-boyfriend, his maybe-girlfriend, renouncers, the opposite religion, over-the-water, over the border, this side of the road, that side of the road, it’s not wee buns, ach aye no…” Here’s an example of the voice from a passage where her mother talks to her about her deceased father. “She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whooping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.” There is very little back-and-forth dialog, but passages of conversation are included in the one paragraph per page structure. [image] The story is all centered on the euphemistically called 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland especially from the late 1960s through 1988. The author was born in 1962, so she lived in Belfast during most of this time and was ten at the time of peak violence, 1972. More than 3,500 people were killed in the violence from shootings and bombings, or shot by British soldiers or by paramilitary groups on each side – Catholic and Protestant – her 'opposite religions.' This is a huge number of deaths for a city the size of, say, Toledo, Ohio or Plymouth, UK. Every family in the story is touched by the violence in some way, and in those days, Catholics had large families. In the main character’s family, she has had a brother shot and a brother-in-law killed by a car bomb. Another brother is on the run because he is wanted for violence by the police. An older sister can never return because she married someone of the 'opposite religion' and went to live in England. Daily life is shaped by the conflict. Her maybe-boyfriend is in trouble for holding on to a British-made car part. There are ‘our shops’ and ‘their shops,’ the right kind of butter, the TV shows you can and can’t watch (James Bond movies are out) and the right and wrong kind of tea. There are forbidden first names for boys (no Clive, Wilfred, Norman, Keith, Edgar, Clifford or a dozen others). Paramilitary guys on each side hold kangaroo courts to keep their people in line. You don’t call the police or an ambulance – that gets you notice from ‘the authorities. It’s likely they won’t come anyway for fear of an ambush. There are constant camera clicks as authorities take pictures from behind trees and in parked cars. Middle Sister is odd and stands out. That's a mistake in that environment. She jogs and she reads while she walks. She attracts the attention of a paramilitary guy known as the Milkman, who stalks her. She’s 18 and her mother has been after her since she turned 16 to ‘do the proper thing’ and get married and start having kids. [image] There’s good writing: “No one has ever come across a cat apologizing and if a cat did, it would be patently obvious it was not being sincere.” “I opened my mouth, not sure, to say something – or maybe just to have it hang open.” I liked it but I gave it a 4, rather than a 5. It was quite good but it did seem to drag out a bit. Top photo:IRA men going to plant a bomb, 1987, from belfasttelegraph.co.uk A bomb as late as 1998 killed 29 people. From irishtimes.com Photo of the author from economist.com [Edited 3/31/22 and 9/8/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 24, 2019
|
Mar 28, 2019
|
Mar 30, 2019
|
Kindle Edition
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.82
|
really liked it
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
||||||
3.91
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 19, 2023
|
Jan 19, 2023
|
||||||
3.74
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 14, 2022
|
Nov 14, 2022
|
||||||
3.52
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
Apr 26, 2022
|
||||||
3.77
|
liked it
|
Jan 2022
|
Jan 01, 2022
|
||||||
4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 29, 2021
|
Dec 29, 2021
|
||||||
3.54
|
really liked it
|
Dec 10, 2021
|
Dec 10, 2021
|
||||||
3.29
|
really liked it
|
Aug 25, 2021
|
Aug 25, 2021
|
||||||
3.84
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 14, 2020
|
Dec 14, 2020
|
||||||
3.55
|
really liked it
|
Nov 25, 2020
|
Nov 25, 2020
|
||||||
3.83
|
really liked it
|
Jul 15, 2020
|
Jul 15, 2020
|
||||||
3.61
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 09, 2020
|
Jul 09, 2020
|
||||||
3.36
|
really liked it
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
Mar 21, 2020
|
||||||
3.85
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 20, 2020
|
Jan 20, 2020
|
||||||
3.95
|
really liked it
|
Jan 05, 2020
|
Jan 05, 2020
|
||||||
4.12
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 2020
|
Jan 01, 2020
|
||||||
4.03
|
really liked it
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
||||||
3.98
|
really liked it
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
||||||
3.58
|
really liked it
|
Apr 05, 2019
|
Apr 07, 2019
|
||||||
3.53
|
really liked it
|
Mar 28, 2019
|
Mar 30, 2019
|