Category: Chunkster

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2010 Chunkster

The Surrendered – Chang-Rae Lee

When I saw that The Surrendered was being marketed as a cross between A Fine Balance and The Poisonwood Bible I knew I had to read a copy. I think that the comparisons are justified, but The Surrendered is much easier to read and not quite as good.

The Surrendered begins in Korea in 1950, telling the story of how June Han escaped from the war-torn country. This initial section was easily a 5 star read for me. I was instantly drawn into the June’s world and my heart broke as I read about the things see had to endure. I had a little tear in my eye as these 30 amazing pages drew to a close.

She let go his still-warm hand, kissed his still-warm face. She stayed with him as long as she could. But when the last car of the train passed her she rose to her feet and steadied herself. And then she ran for her life.

Unfortunately the book went downhill slightly after that. The focus switched to June’s life in 1980s New York, which in comparison to her childhood in Korea was a bit dull. I was craving a return to the fascinating, roller-coaster of life I’d already been treated to. There was nothing really wrong with this modern section – it just didn’t have the atmosphere or historical insight of the first section; it was the type of story I had read many times before.

The book does flip back to Korea and we travel across to Europe with June as she searches for her son, but I never found the magic produced in the first chapter again.

I highly recommend that you read the first chapter of this book, but the remaining 400+ pages aren’t that special.

The Thoughts of Other Bloggers:

…while I recommend Lee’s writing, I feel this book is definitely for the stout of heart. Shelf Life

…a very deep and thought-provoking novel. Serendipitous Readings

 Have you read any books written by Chang-Rae Lee?

 

Categories
1990s Chunkster

I Know This Much is True – Wally Lamb

I Know This Much is True had been on my bookshelf (along with most of Wally Lamb’s other books!) for several years, but the fact that it is 900 pages long meant that kept getting pushed down the pile.  

I finally decided that it had sat there for too long and so made the effort to start it. I am really pleased that I did as it is a fantastic book.

I Know This Much is True follows Dominick, one half of a pair of twins growing up in a small town in Connecticut. Dominick’s twin brother, Thomas, develops paranoid schizophrenia and we see how this affects Dominick’s life.

It seems strange to sum up a 900 page book in so few words, but the plot is quite simple. Instead of a complex plot we get a complete insight into how Dominick’s thoughts and feelings change throughout his life. We see him struggle to juggle love for his brother with frustration and guilt and by the end of the book I felt as though I could predict his actions. I don’t think I’ve ever known a character in literature so well.

The book gripped me from the very start. Dominick’s complex relationships and inner thoughts touched my heart.

All my life, I had imagined the scenario in which my father would, at last, reveal himself to me. As a kid, I’d cooked up cowboy dads, pilot fathers who made emergency landings on Hollyhock Avenue, hopped from their planes, and rescued us from Ray. Later, I had cast gym teachers, the man who owned the hobby shop downtown, and even benign Mr. Anthony across the street as potential fathers: the real thing, as opposed to the intruder who had married my mother and installed himself at our house to make us miserable.

It took me over a month to finish the book, but it never dragged. My only complaint was that the story-within-a-story didn’t really work for me. I loved Dominick’s voice so much that any deviation had me itching to get back to his narrative.

Many people moan that the ending was too neat, but I loved the way everything was resolved.  It would seem strange to learn so much about one person and then not know what happened to them.

Overall I thought that this was a moving insight into the way mental illness affects the family of the sufferer. Highly recommended.

Thoughts of other bloggers:

It’s a complex, deep, and moving book that you won’t soon forget. Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’?

But most of all, just too many awful things happen to Dominick that it stops being believable…. Regular Rumination

…. requires patience to wade through, but is well worth the journey. Caribous Mom

Did you enjoy I Know This Much is True?

Which Wally Lamb book do you recommend I read next?

Categories
2009 Chunkster Historical Fiction Orange Prize

The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

 Short listed for the Orange Prize 2010

I enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible so was hoping that I’d like The Lacuna too. I even saved it to be my last read from the Orange short list as a special treat to myself. Unfortunately my expectations were dashed as I really struggled to enjoy The Lacuna.

The Lacuna begins in Mexico in 1929 and covers an interesting period of history in both America and Mexico. The fictional characters are mixed with real people such as Lev Trotsky, so this book is a departure for Kingsolver in that it is her first work of historical fiction.

The book began slowly and I found I had to concentrate really hard just to understand what was happening. I quickly ensured that I only read the book in large chunks when I had nothing to distract me. Unfortunately this hard work didn’t pay off as I wasn’t rewarded by an entertaining story. I found the writing to be very passive and although some of the descriptions were interesting I was never drawn into their life. I was just a bored observer.

The market in Coyoacan is not like the Zocalo downtown, where everything comes ready-made. The girls in blue shawls sit on blankets with stacks of maize they just broke from the field an hour before. While waiting for people to come, they shell off the kernels. If more time passes they soak the corn in lime water, then grind it into wet nixtamal and pat it out. By day’s end all the corn is tortillas.

The characters were flat and I found it impossible to connect with any of them. There was just no emotion in the book – even scenes of horrific acts were observed in a pleasant way. I became increasingly frustrated by the light, monotonous tone and so considered giving up at several points. The length (nearly 700 pages) was the main reason I eventually gave up. It would have taken me a week of reading to complete this book and I didn’t want to dedicate such a large chunk of my reading time to a book that I wasn’t enjoying. I gave up after around 200 pages, but in many ways I wish I had done so much earlier.

Overall, this book was a big disappointment.

 (DNF)

The thoughts of a few other bloggers:

Throughout the story, important things were happening, but since I didn’t feel any connection to the main character, it became very hard for me to care. Fyrefly’s Book Blog

….the ending is amazing! A Book Sanctuary

At times Kingsolver seems to believe that she has to write for the lowest common denominator, a reader who knows nothing of history and has no chance of divining meaning. Book Gazing

Categories
2009 Chunkster Orange Prize

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Monique Roffey

 Short listed for the Orange Prize 2010

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle is set on the island of Trinidad. George Harwood is given a three-year contract to work on the island and so moves from England, with his wife Sabine, to take up the post. George quickly falls in love with his new surroundings, but Sabine is home sick and longs to return to England. This causes friction within their marriage, but Sabine comforts herself with a fixation on Trinidad’s new leader, Eric Williams. She explains all her problems in detailed letters to him, but can never bring herself to post them. One day George discovers these letters and realises how many of his wife’s problems had been kept hidden from him. He decides that he needs to prove how much he loves her, but things go very wrong…

There was some fantastic imagery in the book. This section is taken from the very beginning, but it sets the scene perfectly:

Every afternoon, around four, the iguana fell out of the coconut tree. Bdup! While sunbathing, it had fallen asleep, relaxing its grip, dropping from a considerable height. It always landed like a cat, on all fours, ready to fight. The dogs always went berserk, gnashing and chasing after the creature as it fled, scuttling across the grass, a streak of lime green disappearing off into the undergrowth.

There was quite a lot of dialect and this was occasionally difficult to follow, but I didn’t mind as it added to the atmosphere.

My main problem was that the book had no forward momentum and so I often found myself with no desire to read on. With a book of this length (my copy has 437 pages) this isn’t an ideal situation. If I put the effort into reading it then I was often rewarded, but there were times when I considered giving up as reading was a chore.

With hindsight it was a fantastic story, but the pace was too slow for me. I would have preferred it to have been much shorter, but I can see why it was short listed for the Orange prize.

Recommended to those who enjoy slow, character driven novels.

Not many people have read this one, but opinions seem mixed:

I was bowled over by this book.  Other Stories

 …didn’t have the star quality in terms of either plot or writing that my favourites from the Orange longlist have had. The B Files

I think this one will be nestling into my list of favourite reads for 2010. Buried in Print

Categories
2010 Book Prizes Chunkster Science Fiction Thriller Uncategorized

Angelology – Danielle Trussoni

Angelology takes place in a world where angels walk among us. Their wings are tied flat beneath their clothing so you have no way of knowing who they are, but these angels have been breeding with humans to create dangerous hybrids called Nephilims. Unlike the immortal angels these nephilims are dying and so are trying to do everything within their power to get hold of the angelogogist’s research in the hope it will reveal a cure for their disease.

Angelology is a fast paced thriller, which I’d describe as a well written hybrid of The Da Vinci Code, The Historian and Twilight – so if you enjoyed these three books then you are bound to love this one.

I loved the atmospheric descriptions:

The angelologists examined the body. It was intact, without decay, the skin as smooth and as white as parchment. The lifeless aquamarine eyes gazed heavenward. Pale curls fell against a high forehead and sculptural shoulders, forming a halo of golden hair. Even the robes-the cloth woven of a white shimmering metallic material that none of them could identify exactly-remained pristine, as if the creature had died in a hospital room in Paris and not a cavern deep below the earth.

This initial scene setting was quite slow, but the pace soon sped up. I enjoyed the beginning, but about 100 pages in I began to lose interest. The plot was convoluted, meandering and never reached any real conclusion. There was a lot of history added to the book, but as most of it was made up this didn’t hold the same appeal as other pieces of historical fiction.

The central character in the book is a young nun called Evangeline, but she never really engaged me. I felt as though I was carried along by the fast flow of the words, rather than any real desire to know what happened.

The book is being made into a film by Sony and I am sure that this will be a  much better medium for the story – especially once the plot has been condensed into a two hour time slot!

The lack of a fully resolved ending means that I’m sure there will be a sequel, but I’m in no rush to read it – I am happy to wait until its inevitable DVD release!

Overall I found it to be a fast paced, inventive book, but I just didn’t care what those fictional angel-hybrids were doing.

This book is getting very mixed reviews, but I am sure it will be a massive hit – especially after its release in paperback.

…an incredible novel that I can’t recommend highly enough. S. Krishna’s Books

….in the end Angelology falls far short of its potential. Muse Books Review

…too many weak points to the overall story for me to end up really invested in the story. Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News and Reviews

I loved the world Trussoni has created with its mixture of the esoteric, history and myth and not least for Trussoni’s quality prose. Chasing Bawa

Do you think you’ll enjoy Angelology?

Categories
2009 Books in Translation Chunkster Historical Fiction Other Prizes Recommended books

The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell

 

Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell

Winner of 2006 Prix Goncourt and the grand prix du roman of Académie française, Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award 2009, 2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist, 2010 long list Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

The Kindly Ones is one of the most controversial books written in recent years. The book is a fictional biography of Max Aue, a senior SS officer, present during the Holocaust.  His job is to compile recommendations for future Nazi policy and so he travels to see the execution of the Jews, the German front line and finally the concentration camps. The fictional characters are weaved together with real people like Göring, Speer and Hitler; producing a well researched, compelling version of WWII.

The Kindly Ones is the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. I have read a few individual scenes in books like A Fine Balance or Fugitive Pieces that almost equal the horror of the milder sections in this book, but the descriptions of the Holocaust were so intense and prolonged that I found this book very hard to read. There were times when I could only read a page or two before having to put the book down and do something else. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough and so I started skim reading sections. I found this didn’t help much as I was still painfully aware of what was happening, so I reverted to the slow, painful pace I had started with.

The whole book is like driving past a car crash – you know you shouldn’t look, but you do anyway  –  unable to resist the temptation to see how bad things really are.  I was gripped throughout, an amazing feat for a book so long. The prose is easy to read, but I did get a bit confused by some of the German military terms (most of which are explained in the back, but as I don’t really understand the British equivalent that didn’t help much!).

I expected the plot to emphasize the fact that the people involved in these terrible events had no choice in the matter – that it was basically ‘do or die’.

The man posted to a concentration camp, like a man assigned to an Einsatzkommando or a police battalion, most of the time doesn’t reason any differently: he knows that his free will has nothing to do with it, and that chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man.

I was therefore surprised to see many opportunities for Max Aue to avoid ending up on the path he took. Initially I wondered why the book was written in this way, but then I realised how clever and realistic it was. The events leading up to the atrocities are obvious with hindsight, but to the people involved each step was so small that they were unaware of the final consequences. Many questioned the actions and were given what seemed to them to be reasonable justifications. For this book to change the way I view the Holocaust is an incredible achievement.

The Kindly Ones also contained many poignant scenes. I was particularly touched by this passage:

“I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people.”

Overall I’d describe this book as a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the Holocaust, but the length and graphic descriptions of human suffering mean that most people should approach this book with caution. I will remember this book for the rest of my life and although I sometimes wish I could erase some scenes from my memory, on the whole I think it is helpful to remember that these events happened.

Do you want to read The Kindly Ones?