Helene's profile

35 ratings | 17 reviews
avg rating: 4.80

Helene's bookshelves

read (32)
currently-reading (2)

to-read (3)
downthesemeanstreetsbypirithomas (1)

Helene is currently reading

	12/04 Helene gave to: Snow (Paperback) by Orhan Pamuk bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
	recommended for: Anyone read in January, 2007 Helene said: "Just started Love to read new authors. Although he has been around, He's new to me. His non-Kemalist, very open and vocal stance on the Armenian genocide and commentary on anti-Hellenic sentiment in Modern Turkey up through the 1990's, I find bold an...more " add a comment
	12/03 Helene gave to: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Hardcover) by Ishmael Beah bookshelves: currently-reading	my rating:
	recommended for: Teachers and students read in December, 2007 Helene said: "An important memoir about boy soldiers of Sierra Leone. Beah's journey resembles Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS and Joseph Campbell's THE HERO OF A THOUSAND FACES in terms of folklore and folk tradition on rites of passage through trials and tests...more " add a comment

Helene's recent updates (rss)

April 29

Helene read and liked Susan's review of The Year of Magical Thinking:

"Didion is a fearless and incisive writer. You can sense through her immediacy and precision that she is prepared to tackle any subject. Here the subject is her own mind in the wake of a family trage" ...read more »

April 28

New comment on Susan's review of The Sea, The Sea (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Helene wrote: "I really should NOT comment on your review, which I am sure is quite valid. However, I probably won'...more "

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April 29

New comment on Susan's review of The Year of Magical Thinking

Helene wrote: "Hi
I really should put everything by Joan Didion on my "to-read" list. She is a wonderf...more "

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January 25

Helene gave

to:
My Name Is Red (Vintage International)
by Orhan Pamuk

my rating:

recommended for: Anyone, especially those who are interested in historical fiction during the Ottoman Empire.
read in April, 2008

Helene said: "I though this book is brilliantly written. The translation work is equally so.

Now it has been a few months with this book [I read on the commute in both directions] and I understand effendi as a turk or possibly a kurd. Since both groups were mu...more I though this book is brilliantly written. The translation work is equally so.

Now it has been a few months with this book [I read on the commute in both directions] and I understand effendi as a turk or possibly a kurd. Since both groups were muslims who worked in secret.In the sultan courts, secular works of art: visual or musical were generally designated to primarily other populations, primarily, Greeks and Armenians.

This book is great for any instructor on the high school and community college level who needs a reader for a writing course and needs examples of different POVs, complex sub-plots and examples of other less accessible literary devices as: personification.

In Pamuk's interview with Charlie Rose, Pamuk explained that he actually began his formal artistic training as a painter. A true ineheritor of the Kemalist regime, he explored Turkey's identity crises of wishing to be traditional and simultaneously wishing to fulfill Attaturk's dream of conforming to western ideologies and authors from every nation including Dosteovsky. THE BLACK BOOK and MY NAME IS RED are beautiful examples of this exploration. This intersection and its conflicts for him is a constant study which he likes to push the boundries of. He prefers to write for his [global]readers and NOT for exclusively for Turks especially those residing in Istanbul. Most Turks, he added, don't care for his political views especially when it involves his very public [and sometimes vociferous] recognition of the Armenian Genocide. His Noble Laureat [2006] has given him new freedoms to blast the NAtionalist party and utra right wing conservatives with a new found strength. Erdogan does nothing but encourage PAmuk with silence and continued political immunity. Hurray for courageous souls like Pamuk and Erdogan.

If you have never read any of Pamuk's novels, I recommend MY NAME IS RED as an excellent novel to begin with. It reminds one of a cubist painting since you are given multiple perspectives and points of view at once. Almost a hybrid of Gris and Picasso. The Omniscent narrator's voice effortlessly gently fades into the mouth of each of the characters and is also able to reveal the thoughts of the characters without so much as a blink.

This novel is on the surface a murder mystery, however, for westerners this novels sub-text is very difficult to grasp because it doesn't rely so much on the readers understanding of Turkey's history, but on an awareness on the history of lesser known countries who have a history of being closed societies but desire foreign acceptance. so then they must undergo these types of identity crises. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Armenia,Russia, China and Japan, have exemplified very closed societies that have or are enduring the very same process of identification vs conformity and the compromise.

Greece has been confronting this since antiquity. Its an issue in some of the plays Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripidis have dealt with as did Herodatus and Homer's THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. Greece is still grappling with it though much less. Owing partly to their early awareness of this as an on-going process, but also acknowledging a type of proto Darwinian sense of "adapt and modify, but no need for absolute change" and that was the compromise of the Greeks.

THe communities of the diaspora have dealt with it more since they are outsiders holding on while trying to negotiate something that doesn't compromise who they are.

MY NAME IS RED reads then as an allegory of the present state of Turkey in the fin de siecle though set in the 16th c. wanting to hold on and knowing that it NEEDS to move and push forward. In the end, needing to negotiate a compromise without losing sense of self. The stylistic and aesthetic approach might be Wilkie Collins but should we be surprised when Pamuk openly praises and acknowledges having been directly influenced by western writers??? ...less "

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January 10

Helene marked as to-read:
A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel (Paperback)
by James Salter
bookshelves: to-read

my rating:

read in August, 2008

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New comment on Susan's review of A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel

Helene wrote: "Every now and then you will find a novelist who writes a narrative with a parallel oh so subtle sub-...more "

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January 07

Helene gave

to:
Tales of Ordinary Madness (Paperback)
by Charles Bukowski

my rating:

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Helene gave

to:
The Bookseller of Kabul (Paperback)
by Asne Seierstad

my rating:

read in July, 2004

Helene said: "A perfect companion to READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN by Azar Nafisi.

BOOKSELLER is on the surface about the struggles of a Kabuli bookseller with the Taliban. Since he sells primarily books of secular content, many translated from western languages the...more "

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Helene gave

to:
The Kite Runner (Paperback)
by Khaled Hosseini

my rating:

recommended to Helene by: my sister
recommended for: Anyone interested in Asian American literature
read in June, 2004

Helene said: "I LOVED THIS NOVEL!!!! A wonderful and sad story of 2 boys and their friendship and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Has many twists and turns. I thought: well written for someone who isn't a writer in this field. Khalid Hossaini is a ph...more "

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see all 32 of Helene's books »

Helene's favorite quotes

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

tags: sympathy

305 people liked it

"Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like"
— David Sedaris

tags: confinement, hell

9 people liked it

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	Susan 96 books 40 friends
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