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September 05
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Katie
is currently reading:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Paperback)
by Gertrude Stein
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Katie
is currently reading:
Developing Ecological Consciousness: Paths to a Sustainable World (Paperback)
by Christopher Uhl
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Katie
gave
to:
Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought)
by David W. Orr
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read in September, 2008
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Katie
gave
to:
Newspaper Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1899-1906 (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf)
by H.L. Mencken
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August 21
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Katie
gave
to:
The Shadow of the Wind (Paperback)
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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my rating:
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read in July, 2008
Katie said:
"This book tells the story of Daniel Sempere, the son of a rare book dealer who one day stumbles upon a mysterious book by a mysterious author called Julián Carax. Daniel tries to find out more of Carax’s work and discovers that almost all Carax’...more
This book tells the story of Daniel Sempere, the son of a rare book dealer who one day stumbles upon a mysterious book by a mysterious author called Julián Carax. Daniel tries to find out more of Carax’s work and discovers that almost all Carax’s novels are being systematically destroyed by a shadowy figure who refers to himself by the name of one of Carax’s characters. Thus is a mystery launched, as Daniel attempts to unravel Carax’s secrets and figure out why his novels are being burned.
I liked The Shadow of the Wind, but it wasn’t exactly the suspenseful read that the first few chapters led me to expect. The mystery moves forward in fits and starts; the book is like some overstuffed Gothic horror of a house—the literary equivalent of the Bates mansion, perhaps—and Zafón sometimes seems to get distracted within his own creation, dropping the story of Julián Carax to spend time with another one of his creations, or just to look around and describe what he sees. There is a lot of back and forth between the past and the present as well, and the loose organization of this can sometimes make it seem like Zafón is just making it up as he goes along, without any real plan for getting to the end.
Interestingly, underneath all the mystery and secrets and Gothic detail, The Shadow of the Wind seems mainly to be a book about the mistakes people make in their own lives and the lives of others, particularly about the mistakes that well-intentioned people make: misreading each other, remaining still when they should act, acting when they should remain still, failing to communicate, keeping secrets too long or revealing them to the wrong people. The narrative is littered with these mistakes; we see them compounding each other and rippling through time as events in Carax’s life slowly spiral downward. There’s a nice sense of inevitability to the book’s dramatic conclusion. Although it’s not terribly realistic, I felt that everything had to end as it did.
Perhaps the best thing about The Shadow of the Wind is its use of setting. Zafón has picked a rich setting for himself—Barcelona in the ’40s and ’50s, just after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War—and he does a great job of evoking the city, the mood of the time, the architecture, etc.
I read the book in a translation by Lucia Graves. I don’t know whether I should blame Graves or Zafón, but the quality of prose in this book wasn’t that hot. I suspect that the occasional lapses into the purple are Zafón’s responsibility, and those actually work with the subject matter, but there are also some seriously cheesy/clunky sentences that I suspect are the result of clumsily translated idioms. I don’t think there’s another English translation out there, but if you’re thinking about reading this book and you happen to be fluent in Spanish, it might be worth trying it in the original....less
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Katie
gave
to:
Life Class (Hardcover)
by Pat Barker
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read in July, 2008
Katie said:
"Life Class returns to territory similar to that which Barker explored in the Regeneration trilogy, and I wonder if this book is meant to be the beginning of another trilogy or larger work. The book ends without any sense of resolution, and certainly ...more
Life Class returns to territory similar to that which Barker explored in the Regeneration trilogy, and I wonder if this book is meant to be the beginning of another trilogy or larger work. The book ends without any sense of resolution, and certainly Barker could delve even deeper into the themes that appear in the second half of the book: war, trauma, art, and the relationships between the three. In fact, I hope she develops this farther, as I think it would help this story to have some more meat on its bones.
The book is divided into two parts, and the division seemed somewhat strange to me. The first half concerns a group of art students in London: Paul, Teresa, Elinor, and Kit Neville. The dust jacket suggests that there is a love triangle in the group, but the geometry is more complicated than that. Elinor was the most interesting character in this part of the book, outwardly assertive but inwardly uncertain, determinedly independent, boyish, perhaps sexless... Unfortunately, the early focus was not on her but on Paul's affair with Teresa. The first half of the book felt somewhat center-less. It was interesting enough to read about the shifting affections among this group of students, and Barker included some worthwhile thought about class and gender in art, but I couldn't quite figure out why she was telling this story.
And then the war breaks out and everything changes. Paul volunteers with the Red Cross in Ypres, and instead of tracking his romantic affairs, we're suddenly following him through grisly shifts first as a dresser in a field hospital and later as an ambulance driver. Love is not gone from the book--much of the second half concerns Paul and Elinor's attempt to build a relationship--but it is forced to coexist with war and the horror of war. Barker includes a lot of correspondence between Paul and Elinor, and it's in their letters that the questions about art and war are raised.
Paul became a much more interesting character after he went to Belgium, but to my dismay Elinor became rather less interesting as the book went on. By the end she was espousing the view that art must be beautiful, must represent things that are loved and chosen (and therefore must not represent war), and she started to seem rather naive and stubborn. The best moment of the book for me came at the shift between the first and second parts. Near the end of the first part, Barker depicts the pressure to get involved felt at the start of the war by everyone at all levels of British society, and the rush to enlist among young men at the time. Reading it, I couldn't help being aware of what was going to happen to those men. And then I turned the page to the start of Part II and found myself in the midst of it: blood, dirt, bleach, and gangrene. Barker writes about atrocities of war with characteristic frankness; reading Paul and Elinor's debates about the meaning of art and war, I found myself thinking that Barker's frankness is the only real way to respect what happened.
There is one tantalizing scene near the end of the book when Paul finally starts making art based on his experiences at the field hospital and takes some of his work to his former teacher, Henry Tonks. Tonks is a real figure, both a doctor and an artist, who was involved in the pioneering use of plastic surgery on wounded soldiers, and who made a series of portraits of facially mutilated men that were never exhibited in his own lifetime. Thinking about that scene, I can only hope that Barker intends to continue this story. There is so much more to be mined from this vein.
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Katie
read and liked
Radhika's
review of The Mistress of Spices:
"This book belongs on a Harlequin/ Mills & Boon bookshelf. I picked it up expecting something quite different from the lukewarm and soggy story telling it contained. Perhaps the author was aiming for magic realism but ended up with a mishmash of...more
This book belongs on a Harlequin/ Mills & Boon bookshelf. I picked it up expecting something quite different from the lukewarm and soggy story telling it contained. Perhaps the author was aiming for magic realism but ended up with a mishmash of genres and not one that was well-developed.
The story revolves around a woman who had a weird past that has no real connection to her present. She "inhabits" an old body for no good reason other than she might actually be that old (the book meanders about the "years and years" spent here and there). She is supposed to adhere to some rules in order to keep her powers (which are knowing the spice remedies for curing emotional maladies) but when she breaks them, her powers are not taken away, in fact, she might even be promoted for her intransigence. It makes no sense, not even symbolically. In addition, the reader loses all interest after the umpteenth convolution surrounding an old hag in a hole-in-the-wall grocery store.
She falls for some dark-haired American and the only reason the author seems to provide is that his clothes look expensive. Despite being good-looking himself, he loves (for no apparent reason and not in a platonic way) this old hag in rags. And then he kisses her and has sex. And then she turns curt with him in the typical self-sacrificial mode common to romance novels. But it all ends happily-ever-after though not for me as I was brain-dead at that point. The language is completely inane and the patois affected by the author leaves one cold. ...less
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Katie
gave
to:
The Mistress of Spices: A Novel (Paperback)
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Katie said:
"I wanted to like this book, but alas, I could not. The trouble with it was two-fold: first, Divakaruni never thwarted my expectations or surprised me. The women I expected to be beautiful were all very lovely, the grandfather that I expected to be st...more
I wanted to like this book, but alas, I could not. The trouble with it was two-fold: first, Divakaruni never thwarted my expectations or surprised me. The women I expected to be beautiful were all very lovely, the grandfather that I expected to be stern yet loving turned out to be just that, etc. When I guessed that a character would live in a fabulous apartment and drive a fancy car, he did. The second problem was that I couldn't connect to the story emotionally. Reading this book was like watching a play in which the actors all wear masks portraying their feelings and perform stylized motions in place of real actions; I knew what was happening and what people were feeling, but I couldn't feel it myself. There are other problems too (a cheap sort of exoticism, magical realism that is too heavy on the magic and too light on the realism, prose that tries so hard to be sensual that it becomes almost funny) but those two were the ones that bothered me most. ...less
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August 25
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Katie
gave
to:
The Liars' Club: A Memoir (Paperback)
by Mary Karr
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
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August 14
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Katie
gave
to:
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (Paperback)
by Mary McCarthy
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
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