Catching up

I'm copying down a few notes I made while staying in Tuscany for a week - a quiet cottage, with a few books and no internet connection, except in the office. I have not made any very meaningful comments, here.

Some of the books were there already -

Alexander McCall Smith: The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
No 1 Ladies’ detective agency, with its determinist view of characters – people should be happy as they are and not attempt things that are beyond them.
Problems as her husband Mr J L B Matekoni decides he will investigate a case of an errant husband, and mistakes a photograph for that of his own wife. Then one of his mechanics decides to start a taxi service. Mma Ramotswe’s assistant wants to change her job because she is about to get married.
They investigate thefts from a local office supplier, and only solve it by giving the culprit the keys to the cupboard – he takes the lot. The deaths at the local hospital – the cleaner is turning off the ventilator to plug in her vacuum cleaner.
A general feel-good series, set in Botswana, where McCall Smith spent some time.


Karen Essex – Leonardo’s Swans

Isabelle d’Este, her sister Beatrice, daughters of Ercole d’Este
Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. M. Isabella
Ludovico Sforza of Milan marries Beatrice
There are intrigues involving the French kings etc, and all through this Leonardo is at Milan. Il magistro, who doesn’t eat meat because he doesn’t want his body to be the tomb of another animal, but invents machines of war, never finishes his commissions.
Isabella’s great ambition is to have her portrait painted by Leonardo, though this never happened – there was a drawing, which is now in the Louvre. She also appears as a pregnant muse in the centre of a Mantegna painting – Venus and Apollo on Mount Parnassus, in the Louvre. Soap and sex and history mixed together.

Carol Drinkwater – The Olive Season
An actress and a film producer buy an olive farm in Provence, then get married. She has a miscarriage, and they put all their energy into olive growing. It is full of local characters, such as the Arab gardener, Quashia, the local olive farmer and builder, Rene, the local celebs and minor aristocrats, and the incoming Russian Mafia and a dose of superstition as she employs water-diviners and takes photographs where the subject disappears from the picture, and soon dies. The life-style of jetting off to London, NY, Australia is a little out of my range. Nevertheless, written in a down-to-earth manner, apart from the odd spiritual bits. All in spite of the two MCs not being conventionally ‘religious’.


I bought this one in Radda-n Chianti, when I realised I was running out of reading material.
Anne Tyler –Digging to America
Two families in Baltimore adopt Korean babies and keep in touch as they grow up. The main character (though the viewpoint shifts) is Maryam Yazdan, an Iranian immigrant in her late fifties/early sixties, the ‘grandmother’ of Susan (Sooki), and her relationship with her son, his wife and the child, then later with the other family and in particular Dave, the ‘grandfather’ of Jo-Hin ( the other Korean adopted child). Her difficulties in fitting in either in America, or in Iran even if she were to return. Exile, pride, self-sufficiency – being an outsider. There are also a couple in Vermont, Farah (Maryam’s cousin) and her husband, William – who are more Iranian than the Iranians.

This is a book Harry bought in the airport.
Carolly Erickson – Brief Lives of the English Monarchs
From William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II – well written and researched, easy to read, though I am sure I shall forget all the facts.

Atonement - book and film

Watched the film on 15th April. Very much enjoyed, though the layers (of time and reality) take a bit of getting used to. I am re-reading the book. Watch this space.

Yes, I finished it while on holiday - excellent book with a good strong story, well told, with convincing atmosphere when McEwan depicts inter-war wealthy family life, complete with class differences, and their effect on attitudes. Later the harrowing wartime experiences, of soldiers and nurses are vivid.

All wrapped up in an exploration of the role of a writer of fiction alongside guilt and innocence and self-justification. What is truth?

Jodi Picoult - Plain Truth

A dead premature baby is found hidden in the barn of the Fishers, an Amish family. Eighteen-year-old Katie claims to remember nothing of the birth or her pregnancy, though medical evidence establishes that she is the mother, and circumstantial evidence indicates that she is the likely killer.

Ellie Hathaway, a successful lawyer, is questioning her role as a defense attorney. She believes she has used her skill to allow criminals to evade justice, in the interests of furthering her own career. Ellie has recently become desperate to have a child of her own but has split up with her long-term boyfriend. She is persuaded to defend Katie, and because of the bail conditions imposed finds herself sharing the life of the Fisher family.

As the story unrolls, Picoult examines different value systems, ideas of justice and family relationships. One thing I like about her books is that the choices the characters make are difficult, and the line between good and evil is not entirely clear.

Joanne Harris - The Lollipop Shoes

The darker sequel to Chocolat, The Lollipop Shoes is beautifully written. The ending is happy, but could easily have gone the other way until the very last page.

Three viewpoint characters, Yanne (Vianne from Chocolat), her daughter Annie (formerly Anouk) and the entrancing, amoral, identity-stealing Zozie de l'Alba, who has taken on the alluring magical mantle which Yanne has tried to cast off since leaving her old life. The other characters are varied and alive, from the property tycoon who wants to bring stability to Yanne, at the expense of adventure, to Annie's camera obsessed school friend who helps pinpoint Zozie's strangeness.
My 'grumpy rationalist' side refused to be entirely convinced by the magical signs, symbols and cantrips, but the writing is a sensual delight.

Khaled Hosseini - 1000 Splendid Suns

This is the second book by the author of The Kite Runner. I have not yet seen that film, though I have read the book.

Hosseini's novel covers the miserable lives of two women in Afghanistan, covering the period before the arrival of communism, its overthrow, the jihad, the coming to power of the Taliban. It ends as the Taliban have been removed, and Laila and her childhood love, Tariq, reunited after many years, return to Kabul.
I found the book interesting for its social history, the information about the position of women, and the exploration of the relationship between the two central characters. Mariam the illegitimate child of a rich man from Herat,is married off to Rasheed, a bitter older man and the relationship becomes increasingly oppressive and violent as she fails to give him a child. Twenty years later Laila, the daughter of an educated couple in Kabul, who die in an explosion, becomes Rasheed's wife, in order to cover up her pregnancy by Tariq. The relationship between husband and wife turns sour after the birth of Laila's second child, a boy. Meanwhile the two women change from enemies to close friends.

I would have enjoyed the book much more if Rasheed had not been such an obnoxious individual. The personal violence becomes more horrifying than all the repression going on in the country.

Another aspect that I found unsatisfying is the shift in point of view from Mariam to Laila part of the way through the book. I would have liked to follow Mariam more closely during the intervening years before she and Laila are thrown together.

Catherine Edmunds - wormwood, earth and honey

This is a new collection of poems by Catherine Edmunds, who is a long-standing member of Writers' Dock.

Starting from the everyday, these poems turn playfully surreal or dangerous and dark. From formal sonnet and sestina to free verse, her use of language is subtle and skilful. I find more in them with each reading.

This one should appeal to the evil child in each of us.

Here's another one. I remember this clearly from Writers' Dock. Catherine wrote this in 2006, in response to a news item:

over the sea to annan

by

Catherine Edmunds

sixty cows grazing on skinburness marsh

tired of cumbrian grasses

looked over the water, wondering

at the land across the sea

scotland the brave

scotland the bonny

scotland the only five miles away

what do you reckon, girls?

give it a go?

and then as one

they took to the waters

they swam and they swam and they swam and they swam

across the solway firth to the land of annan

ah, the bravery

the sense of adventure

the foolhardiness of cows

five died during the crossing

and several embarrassed themselves

by becoming stranded on sinking mudflats

where kindly firefighters and coastguards

came to their rescue

farmer bowe

has farmed at silloth

for more than forty years

and is

surprised

cattle have grazed on skinburness marsh

for hundreds of years

but this has never happened before

to the best of his knowledge

he will make the trip over the border

and bring his girls back home

he thinks they were spooked by military aircraft

but I wonder

I wonder

maybe they tired of the marshes of silloth

maybe they thought

the grass looks greener and we will away

(singing) speed bonny cow

like a pig on the wing

over the sea to annan

will their milk now have a richness, a wildness

a knowledge of all that might be?

a memory of endeavour, of courage, of strength

of bovine possibility?

Summer People - Marge Piercy

Published in the eighties, and very much of its time - when many people were experimenting with sexual relationships outside marriage or couples. The key relationship in the book is a triangle, between Willie, a sculptor who does construction work to earn money, his wife Susan, a fabric designer, and Dinah, a composer. They have lived on Cape Cod for eleven years, all year round, and their relationship is accepted by the locals.

The book is told from several different points of view, and the chapter headings are simply the name of the PoV person. This annoys me on occasions, especially when it shifts to Susan, the least sympathetic character of the three, and the one who exposes the fault lines in the three-way relationship. She longs for the glitz of New York, as represented by Tyrone the tycoon, one of the 'summer people' of the title.

The them of Jewish identity is explored in the relationship between Dinah and her flute-player lover Iztak.

I may have been aware of more problems in the book than when I first read it about 15 years ago, but I still enjoyed it.