Bernard Jan's Blog, page 23

The Hidden Faces of Holidays

This is about you: oppressed, invisible, silent. Nameless, undesired, unworthy. Unwanted. FACELESS. You – banished from your homes and you – caged into your existence.

You are turned into a burden of our society. (Not by your own will.) Because you are poor; once you had a meaningful life and now you are fading shadows crawling up and down our streets, unwashed and dirty packages stacked and locked behind razor wires with just a vision of freedom you once possessed in your vanished and broken homes, with destiny that doesn't force its smile upon you any more. The future for you is uncertain like the drops of sudden rain burned and turned into vapor on the hot desert sand.

The faces of the other you are even harder to count, harder to see. You multiply us by tens and hundreds of times. We love you from a distance. But we don't actually care about you, acknowledge you. We love the taste of you much better than the lives you were given and granted as something of yours and something that belongs to you only; we love your blood and fear on our tongue rather than the gentle pulse of your beating hearts on the soft palms of our hands.

Your babies are cute and our babies love to play with them. They relate and understand each other with the uncorrupted knowledge of innocent souls who know that they belong to and create one and the same universe. Though, that universe doesn't bring the same fate to all of them when, even at holidays and the time of universal joy, they go silently into the darkness of their lives, guided by the hands of our humanity. Their tears, their cries, pain and agony are hushed with our celebration of life and good wishes.

Something is very wrong. I look for compassion, kindness, gentleness and goodness, but they are masked behind our smiling faces. Sparkled into nothingness by the lights of fireworks and myriads of wishes. As the world sinks its teeth deeper into the soft and ripe flesh of celebration, I feel the ever thicker presence of death spilling like a fog everywhere, all over the world. Hiding both sad and smiling faces, hiding everyone and everything, like there is no single life left on this planet. Like the light is completely turned off.

Before the plates are cleaned, even before the tables are set and candles lit, I humbly beg you to consider celebrating kindness, compassion and life. Because there is so much more to it, so much more than a sparkle of champagne, clinging of glasses, smeared rouge and loosened ties after the long-hour night and tipsy heads.

Once we are back to our old selves, we realize that there is kindness in us and that there is the need for good deeds towards others. Homeless, poor, refugees, animals. Those abandoned, forgotten and faceless ones. Those we refuse to acknowledge, those whose existence we deny because they are far from our hearts.

Except, they don't have to be. Not now. Not ever. Particularly not in the days of celebration. They can be celebrated and celebrating with us, by our decisions and resolutions that will last for a long lifetime. Ours and theirs.

Thank you for choosing compassion, kindness, goodwill and empathy. Thank you for opening your hearts to human and animal suffering. And thank you for doing something about it.

Happy holidays!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com
Bernard Jan

A Christmas Outing Review

A Christmas Outing by Jonathan Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I happened to be on a tram on my morning ride to work when David's mother rip-opens the parcel her daughter has sent as a gift from Australia and pulls out of it a vibrating pink penis with a gift-tag around it. David stares open-mouthed at the sight of it, his boyfriend Jamie drops the remains of the biscuit he is eating in his lap, David's dad is laughing. David's mother looks from her husband to penis and from penis to her husband and asks, confused, “What . . . What is it?!” This propels David's dad into an even louder laughter, which is followed by a sudden blare of rap music ringtone from his phone he still doesn't know how to turn off.

At this point David is really annoyed at his futile attempts and all distraction. It is all too much for him so he yells: “I’m gay and I’m going out with Jamie and I love hiiiiiiiiim!” This scene is an ultimate climax of a hilariously funny novella A Christmas Outing by Jonathan Hill.

It is Christmas market time and 19-year-old David is going to visit it with his parents. This time, though, his boyfriend Jamie is coming along. David has something very important to announce to his parents tonight and Jamie is there to support him. Coming out to his parents is too complicated and not easy at all and Jamie is going to be there to be by his side and help him in any way he can.

A Christmas Outing is teeming with funny scenes and brilliant and comic dialogues of one dysfunctional family which is trying to survive Christmas time. A dominating mother and a submissive father who keep arguing about every little thing (sounds familiar, anybody?!), David's Psycho Sister who fled as far away as possible from her family and who sends sex stuff as gifts to her parents – her mom especially, and David who is the whole evening laboriously plotting a plan to admit to his parents that he is different, that he has a boyfriend, so he can be accepted and be himself more than he ever was.

Jonathan Hill is a master of building a suspense and expectation around David's coming out. He makes us smile, giggle, snort and laugh from one situation to another throughout this whole heartwarming and honest comedy short story that will make everybody feel good despite the serious issue of coming out which it covers in order for everyone who is and feel different to become recognized and labeled within the set and acknowledged categories of our society. His characters are very functional, realistic and alive, and we have certainly met their real-life versions at some point in our lives.

After Not Just a Boy, A Christmas Outing is another smashing success by Jonathan Hill I had luck and pleasure of reading. My pleasure would be even greater if I didn't have to suppress funny sounds that were threatening to burst out of me in a hysterical laughter in a tram full of people when David from the screen of my smartphone mused: My sister is on the other side of the world, in a different time zone and season and still she manages to piss on the bonfire I haven’t yet lit.

Wonderful, simply wonderful!! Five grins as big and shiny as five stars!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

p.s. Jonathan, maybe I should come out and admit that I fell in love with your writing?! (Here comes another big grin which you can see only with your mind's eye!)



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) Review

The Scattered and the Dead by Tim McBain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


That surprises come in small packages we can say with certainty for The Scattered and the Dead by Tim McBain and L.T. Vargus. But don't be too much surprised to see that this review, despite my best intentions, contains some spoilers.

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) has only 162 pages, but each page is carefully and meticulously thought over. It starts with the young man John Decker, who is writing a letter to an unknown girl (his neighbor), in a very unusual manner. He tells her that he sees her, sometimes feels like he knows her but he doesn't know how to say hi to her. Immediately after the opening sentences he starts describing to her the painful and realistically graphic death of his mother.

Decker is an introvert and he cannot fit into society. Even though he is good with saving money, he lives in his fortress of an apartment, where he is anonymous and no one knows about him. He is writing a letter to the girl three doors down across the hall, with whom he is trying to make a contact while watching the world go to shit on TV. The world is facing apocalypse, people are bleeding to death, zombies are eating people's faces, and he doesn't know how to connect with anyone.

He has endless supplies ordered from Amazon and he feels rather safe in his apartment when the face of the world, and consequently his life, rapidly changes. New deliveries stop to arrive, an old man sprays blood all over the sidewalk in front of his building, journalists wearing surgical masks report about riots and human misery everywhere. No one puts out the fire which devours the apartment building across the street, the power keeps cutting out until it goes out in the middle of the night and the big silence creeps in.

With such detailed descriptions of an apocalypse at the time of the plague, McBain and Vargus build suspense around their one main character who, as the world slides into its final days of civilization, becomes lonelier and lonelier. It makes me wonder what all goes on in the night, in the dark, in all of the places where my eyes can’t go. (. . .) Please help me find someone. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to be alone forever.

The horrific beauty of this book, unlike other zombie books, does not focus on the gory imagery of human degradation and destruction of our world. Those images coexist and function as a backdrop, while the true horror is that of a psychological nature of an unsocialized and abandoned 25 years old Derek who cannot stand the burden of loneliness in the world which completely belongs to him. Behold the loneliness. The only thing that’s left. The only thing that was ever real if you stripped away the novelties and distractions, maybe.

As the world around him crumbles further to pieces, Derek finds in himself strength to survive: But I’ve seen how things can change, how they must change, how all things must come to ash, how the old ways can die out and become something new. And I know I can change. I can transform. And so I will. And so he does transform, sometimes unaware of his actions which function on the most primal level. But he realizes and acknowledges the change that is happening not only in the world around him but within his lonely state as well. I started this letter in a lonely state, surrounded by people, literally in a building crawling with them, a city full of them, but unsure how to connect with them, how to really know any of them. And I end this letter in a lonely state, a different kind of lonely with no one around for miles. Apart from the dead bodies, I guess.

He is becoming someone else, an unknown person who not only manages to conquer his fears from both living people and the piles of dead bodies mass murdered in a government camp, but he also doesn't flinch in using a weapon to defend his survival, even finding rush and fun in killing other human beings.

McBain and Vargus have created a spectacularly creepy psychological and apocalyptic novella full of anxiety. Though from a different perspective, it brings to our mind a memory on the literary classic The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The biggest question we ask ourselves at the end of The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) is who are the true winners in this story – the ones who mercifully (or not) fell victims or its survivor(s). For, living in a big wide world full of dead bodies of the disease-plagued mankind is not a prospect we should look forward to. Unless we are able to mentally transform into something we aren't, bared to our basic instinct.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

The Art of Fielding Review

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Can't say I love baseball. A few times I tried to watch it (and comprehend all the excitement and fuss about it) but I failed and gave it up. It did not catch my attention, and instead of getting my blood up and igniting passion in me, it lulled me to boredom.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, a 605 pages long novel (Fourth Estate, London, 2012) about baseball star Henry Skrimshander at Westish College and fates of people connected to him, is anything but that. It is a thoroughbred, full-blooded, deeply moving, beautifully written tale about dreams, hopes, ambition, forbidden love, friendship, and many more.

Chad Harbach, an American writer and an editor at n+1 New York-based literary magazine, worked on his baseball debut novel for nine years. But as if that time had no effect on it, for each year of its creating only added to its flavor and quality. The Art of Fielding is a brilliant first novel you will not want to put down. Its characters are memorable, alive, realistic, the writing is flawless and tender, the novel itself passionate, gripping and all-consuming. It is a vivid reminder of more innocent times and ages we all sometimes crave for; melancholic and sentimental it touches our hearts and minds and squeezes the juices of humanity out of us.

If you had doubts whether I liked it or not, have no doubts any more. The Art of Fielding I loved from the beginning to the end, with every hope arisen and dream broken, with every single success achieved and love fulfilled, all the way to its sad and re-conciliatory end.

The Art of Fielding is the art of writing. We should all take it in our hands, read it with open minds and big hearts and pay respect to it. If this was the only novel Chad Harbach ever wrote (I hope not), it is the novel enough to find a place for him in the annals of American literary fiction.

Advice for the filmmakers: kindly pay attention to it!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Lady Justice and the Candidate Review

Lady Justice and the Candidate by Robert Thornhill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Robert Thornhill is the author you cannot ignore, if nothing else than from the reason that he started writing at the age of sixty-six and that he has never learned to type other than with one finger and a thumb! When we add to that the number of 28 (!!) books he has written and published at his late but very prolific age, we are getting a small literary miracle!

Lady Justice and the Candidate is the first of Thornhill's books I had the pleasure of reading. It is a well-balanced mixture of humor, adventure and mystery, which tells us a story about the independent Presidential candidate Benjamin Franklin Foster who appears on the American political scene practicality out of nowhere and wins over the sympathies and hearts of American voters with his simple message of change and honesty with which he is supposed to clean America and restore it to its days of glory.

Mission impossible or not? Not so important, as long as you enjoy reading this book. And if you don't believe me that Lady Justice and the Candidate guarantees you a relaxed and fun time – even when you have to hear about politics over and over again – see for yourself. Then be honest and admit to yourself that indeed you had had a laugh, while secretly cheering for that unusual and extraordinary candidate who at the age of 70 had more vigor and passion than some much younger politicians we all too well knew about.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

The Grid: Fall of Justice Review

The Grid 1: Fall of Justice by Paul Teague

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Grid by Paul Teague is a good example why dystopian literature is at the moment my favorite genre! The Grid 1: Fall of Justice is the first book in The Grid Trilogy and it instantly captured my attention as it was the case with its predecessors: the unforgettable Silo (Wool-Shift-Dust) series, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games trilogy, The Maze Runner series or the Divergent trilogy.

They say it is impossible to survive The Grid. It is the one, only and ultimate way to get justice once you end up among thousands of lawbreakers and detainees confined in the cages of The Soak, a vast and nightmarish underground prison located under a river.

A massive concrete wall separates hundreds of thousands of the privileged ones on Silk Road from almost four million poor residents of The Climbs, who live there in miserable and inhumane conditions with no elevators and with crumbling stairs, after the plague devastated their world many years ago, leaving billions of people dead in its wake.

Their city is the only refuge. But the refuge is where minority flourishes at the expense of many many others, where justice systems is corrupted and full of deceptions and lies, and where the will of the authorities is more important than practically non-existent human rights.

In this world Joe Parsons is trying to find the truth about the death of his suddenly disappeared father. He breaks into the Fortrillium network but before he gets the chance to avenge him, he and a few of his friends find themselves thrown into the The Grid. They are all facing a series of terrified justice challenges in the Gridder Games and only one person has ever survived so far.

The Grid 1: Fall of Justice is a post plague dystopian story. It excellently stages the faith of our society already plagued by the symptoms of greed, inhumanity and fabricated truth, which might lead to life of a few (un)lucky surviving hundreds of thousands, or even millions, in The City of our future while the rest of us will be gone.

Can't wait to read Quest For Vengeance and Catharsis, Part 2 and Part 3 of this very promising trilogy!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
The Grid 1: Fall of Justice
Paul Teague
Bernard Jan

Pet Peeve

When I was kindly invited by my friend and colleague Dario Cannizzaro, author of Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies – a great collection of short stories I was privileged to read and review – and a debut novel Dead Men Naked – to be released by the end of this year – to write a post about my writing pet peeve, my first thought was, oh no, I am going to publicly whine!

Whining or not, fact is that my biggest pet peeve is time, or better to say lack of it, accompanied by distraction. What on earth does that mean?

Well, time is all but relative and certainly I do not have it. As much as I try to organize my working day and the noise of my thoughts inside my head and the world outside it, I simply do not know, at this moment in time (again this precious word time!), when to sit down and start writing. (Maybe I should do that standing?! Or walking?! Or in my dreams, when I remember I had dreamed??)

I am not complaining, though it would be easier to do so! But after coming home from work, doing my regular networking hours, sending queries to literary agents (I am not doing that on a daily basis but nonetheless have to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for that sacred mission and highly important quest), writing posts for my blogs, updating my web page and social platforms, going through 50-100 emails depending on a daily e-traffic, I barely have energy to grab and read some book from my 90-something-high-pile of unread books (recently I regularly fall asleep and doze off more than once while reading because I am too tired to push my body and mind a little bit further), let alone write something. It's not that I don't have ideas and that my muse ran away to sell itself to someone else. I do! What I don't have is energy.

And TIME.

When I write I need to have my peace in order to escape this world and lose myself in my fictional world. This is when I switch realities, the real one with imaginary one. Yes, the imaginary reality is where I inhabit when I write, where I live with my characters, when I am a part of them and they become a part of me, where I make them miserable, kill them and mourn over them, where they break my heart.

Where we love each others.

In that world I don't want distraction with little or big things from this world I am trying to evade and forget, in that new world I have my new life which serves its purpose to create and build for the pleasure and entertainment of others. I am creating with love and dedication, revealing and showing what I love, with hope to share it one day with those who will appreciate it.

I don't want to be superficial and do it just for the sake of writing something and commercializing it. I want to do it out of love, to make something valuable and everlasting. My contribution to the world I will leave behind one day, soon enough.

So when I create, I need my peace and my time to write. Those are the diamonds I need to find and dig out from the muddy waters of my everyday life. When I find enough time, I will eventually find peace too. I will shut myself out from this world and move to another place and time. And if I cannot find time in this real time, I will dive into the well of my imagination, grab the remote and press pause.

As time continues its flux and events happen one after another without stopping, as seconds tick away one after another on their way to eternity and oblivion, my time will keep standing. My minutes will stretch into hours, days if necessary, and I will finish what I need to do. I will complete my task, my mission, my new creation I love and will gladly share with others who will appreciate it once I press play on my imaginary remote again and our times and worlds merge again into one on its continuous way into the unknowns of the future.

I thank Larysia, the poet from Canada who started this blog hop I am part of now and once again I thank Dario for introducing me to her.

With full confidence and great expectations I pass the question about writing pet peeves to my friends and fellow authors Angel Ramon Medina, author of the Thousand Years War Series and leader of the Hybrid Nation, and Jonathan Hill, author of Not Just a Boy, A Christmas Outing, FAG and the Maureen books . Don't forget to check out their web pages in the coming days to learn about their pet peeves! Thank you!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com
Bernard Jan

The Alphabet House Review

Kuća abecede by Jussi Adler-Olsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Experiments on humans are not a novelty in our humanity-deprived society, but in a psychological thriller The Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen set in a WW2 Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Europe, to be more precise England and Germany, are as shocking as the war itself and destruction it had left in lives and minds of those who survived it.

The world of two RAF pilots and good friends James and Bryan crashes down with the crash of their plane during a special photo-reconnaissance mission near Dresden. In hope of survival and running from the pursuit of enemy soldiers, they jump aboard a train which was supposed to be their way out to freedom. What they didn't know was that the train had been full of senior SS soldiers wounded on the eastern front and that instead to freedom it would take them deeper into Germany, behind the enemy lines, into the mental hospital the Alphabet House.

In a novel about war and an attempt of life during and after it, which according to its author is not a war novel, human relationships are put on the most challenging trial. Will friendship endure insanity, daily shock treatments, experimental drugs and the madness of one time, will it past the test of the basic instinct for survival which has lead to escape of one of the friends from the torments and captivity in a hellhole and ultimately to betrayal of another?

The Alphabet House is full of razor-sharp twists and turns, situations which border with surreal and almost impossible, acts of brutality and violence that will freeze blood in the veins of the reader. It is a collision and a symbiosis of the world of sanity and madness, where the unthinkable from our present perspective becomes natural in the blurred sight of a tortured mind.

Besides fascinatingly dissecting the behavior of the human mind, Jussi Adler-Olsen in The Alphabet House raises some serious questions about human relationships, how far we can go before we irrevocably damage them and whether a sincere repentance and goodwill are enough to forgive and maybe even forget.

In the particular case of James and Bryan, the real question is can friendship survive the act of Bryan's betrayal and thirty years of James' drugged and lost life? Can Bryan's wealth and money restore their relationship to the days and voices that were resonating from the past, when they were still kids? Or is the gap simply too big, the mind too damaged and the will too broken, just like the white crests of waves crashed by untamable and unforgiving forces of nature under the cliffs of Dover.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
The Alphabet House
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Bernard Jan

Not Just a Boy Review

Not Just a Boy by Jonathan Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Not Just a Boy is a warm coming-of-age human story about growing up and first love(s). A 78-pages-long novella – we can only wish it lasts longer! – of the talented author Jonathan Hill from Manchester, UK, takes us gently back to our childhood and school days where everything seemed to have been easier, carefree and more innocent. Unless . . . you were different.

For one of the two best friends moving to another school was everything but easy or innocent. Not being able to fit into the new environment, in difference to his friend, he is immediately labeled an outcast, unfit, different. His adolescent days unexpectedly turn into a nightmare of name-calling, ridiculing, bullying and physical assault; it seems like everybody knows about his schoolboy crush much sooner than him, even before he is fully able to comprehend the truth about himself. “There was precious little evidence, and certainly nothing concrete, to confirm that I liked boys. I just knew that I’d fallen for him. And if he’d been a girl or a . . . or a frog . . . maybe I would have felt just the same love towards her or it.”

Evidence or not, society doesn't forgive, and certainly not his school mates. Being different, being a boy with a crush on another boy, has a high price. And the price of being different he has to pay with broken friendships, isolation and loneliness, shame, confusion and torment.

After a grand opening, “I have been running for only a minute, maybe two, and yet their frenzied shouts are oddly distant, as if they originate not only from another part of the wood but from another time entirely. Every inch of me is riddled with pain and if I stop to think how bad the pain actually is, it is enough to make me want to tear off my limbs with my own teeth.”, and the tragedy that preceded this running but has been revealed only later in the book, at the end of the story, Jonathan Hill leads us to a pleasantly calming sunset of this remarkable novella, which warms our hearts with a promise of restored friendship and hope for a normal life despite being different.

Special kudos to the book cover art which just about perfectly captures the story that is about to grip and glue us from the first page already.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Not Just a Boy
Jonathan Hill
Bernard Jan

Ashley Bell Review

Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was love at the first read. It started with Watchers twenty-three years ago and lasted more than seventy books up to this date.

Dean Koontz, like very few authors, managed to keep me expectant, eager, thrilled and enthusiastic about his books. His latest novel Ashley Bell is no exception either. What's more and to be honest, despite being an author myself, I am now lacking words to describe how I really feel about Ashley Bell.

Ashley Bell is a complex novel of more than 700 pages about a remarkable young woman Bibi Blair who is determined to do the impossible and: 1) fight, beat, outsmart and escape death, and 2) find and save someone named Ashley Bell. Both seems rather impossible and destined to failure. But not for Dean Koontz and not for Bibi Blair.

Ashley Bell is a poetic, dark, psychological thriller in which the master of suspense and mystery creates a parallel world with the ease of The Maker. Koontz daringly plays the literary God and takes us into parallel worlds created by his incredible imagination, convincing us to believe and live the impossible. Dean Koontz has already taught as that nothing in his books is impossible, that “impossible” universes, creatures and situations are possible, we only have to imagine them.

His prose is a kaleidoscope of the most vivid colors and darkest shadows. It is a playground sanded with rarely seen scenes of violence and murders, chilled-to-the-bones moments and sentences poetically beautiful as sunsets. Our task is to imagine and bring them into life.

“If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline.” – Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews