Amanda Brookfield's Blog, page 8

A Big Read

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Hanya Yanagihara's book may be called 'A Little Life', but it is not a 'little' story in any sense of the word. It is a HUGE book - 720 pages in hardback - heavy to hold, let alone read! - and the range of emotions it covers is similarly immense. At times I found it almost too unbearable to continue with - the pain described, physical as well as mental, being so vivid that every so often I had to screw up my eyes to get through a page. But ultimately, and wonderfully, and much more importantly, 'A Little Life' is a book about that thing that we choose to call Love. An ironically 'little' word, if you think about it, for a term referring to the vast, most defining aspect of being human.

The narrative of 'A Little Life' encompasses a span of fifty-plus years, covering the friendships between four male American college graduates, Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude, one of whom is heterosexual while the other three waver or have gay relationships. At the core of this group, and key to its shifting dynamics, is the character of Jude. And the thing that we gather early on about Jude is that he has endured - and survived - the most hideous sexual abuse that those of us fortunate enough to be unacquainted with such horror are capable of imagining. Cleverly and crucially, Yanagihara never actually describes this abuse in so many words; instead she gives us just enough information to form the necessary images ourselves - a far more potent way of evoking the indescribable.

So Jude is damaged goods, a survivor who never talks of what he has survived, because not-talking is how he has coped. He wants to leave that part of his life behind for good and the reader wants him to as well. Very badly! Seldom can I remember rooting for a character so much. But though Jude has wonderful friends and a fantastic career and all the support (including medical) that one could possibly want for him, the agony and effects of his past maintain their grisly stranglehold. He self-harms, to life-threatening levels. While, in terms of emotional well-being, he has good patches but also terrible ones. His friends look out for him as best they can, but their powers have their limits. And on it goes through the years. The roller-coaster of Jude's life: Fabulous ups. Horrendous downs. Until at last he finds 'true love' and you think, hooray! it's all going to be okay!

And in a way it is okay. The love story that unfolds is as moving as any I have read. It makes absolutely no difference whether you are gay or straight (for the record, I am the latter), since Yanagihara manages to convey the quality and depth and beauty of true human connection with a power that transcends sexuality. For that alone, I think this book deserves every one of the five stars I have given it.

But in a way what then happens is also NOT okay, both because we can never escape who we are and because life has a habit of never being a straight road. The zigzags are a given; part of the magic and the tragedy of being alive. None of us can ever know what is just around the corner. Yanagihara stares this truth in the face just as she stares all others. I found the ending of the novel as shocking as it was believable, just as I did all that had happened in the run-up to that ending. And when I closed the book after 720 pages, I wished there were 720 more.

So. In conclusion: Wow. Wow. Wow. But definitely not for the lily-livered or the faint of heart. In fact probably best to put on a hard hat and a seat-belt before you begin.





View all my reviews

A Literary Seamstress

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading Anne Tyler is always such a .....relief. You just know that you are in the hands of a writer utterly in command of her material, a craftswoman, taking you on a journey that will be as interesting as it is moving. 'A Spool of Blue Thread' is her twentieth novel and as powerful as anything she has done. It weaves a beguilingly simple story about the Whitshanks, a Baltimore family and the house they occupy, zigzagging back and forth through the years to show how the two came into being. The book begins with Abby and Red Whitshank in their old age, leading a life enriched by their children and grandchildren. They are ordinary folk in many ways, except of course they are anything but, because no human life is ever 'ordinary' and Anne Tyler knows that more than any one and is a genius at communicating it.

Though Abby and Red Whitshank are the starting point and focus of the novel, Anne Tyler gradually builds up our understanding not just of their relationship with each other but of the families from which they came and the next generation they themselves have created. Their children, gathering to help look after them as they grow more infirm, are loving and solicitous, but there are tensions among them too, surfacing out of childhood patterns. They all compete in various subtle ways over how best to help; Stem, the adopted one, finds himself learning more about his origins than he had bargained for, while Denny, the affectionate but elusive 'real' son, comes and goes, never quite committing or communicating. The two daughters meanwhile, with their own offspring to mother, have differing approaches and concerns.

This contemporary situation, of the faltering robustness of Red and Abby's health, needs resolution, but so too does the understanding of the past. This is where Anne Tyler excels, taking us back through the stories of how Red's parents met, and how Abby and Red fell in love, all of the threads united by the building and continued existence of the house. What struck me most as these tales unspooled was how good Anne Tyler is at showing the quiet strength of strong women; how within even the most conventional and old-fashioned model of a marriage female power can have the force of gravity. Like Red's mother, Linnie Mae, going after his father, Junior, from the age of thirteen, lovingly attaching herself to him - in spite of his reluctance - and simply never letting go. On the one hand, you are sort of appalled at the crudeness of her determination - as is Junior! - but the pair end up carving out a decent enough life together. She loves him, and ultimately, after the most silent and fearsome marital war I have ever read - over whether a wooden porch should be BLUE (Linnie Mae wins) - you realise that he loves her too.

The title of this novel intrigued me. When I got to the argument about the blue porch it began to make more sense. That was when I realised that the colour blue had been weaving in and out of the story all along, so subtly that it had only been on the fringes of my awareness. But that is Anne Tyler for you, a seamstress at a tapestry, laying down the patterns for us to find.




View all my reviews

Giving and Taking Away

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


'Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay' is the third in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, a series that tracks the lives of two girls, Elena and Lila, as they grow up in the poorest, most violent area of mid-twentieth century Naples, leaving it and returning to it, and going through periods of loving and hating each other in the process.

I have to say that for me this is the weakest of the series so far. I almost gave up on it several times. Once or twice I was even close to hurling it across the room. The reason being that the story-telling is so non-stop, so dense, so packed with its vast cast of characters doing this and that, not to mention the central narrative of Elena and Lina's relationship, criss-crossing and oscillating as they fall out, or fall in, or understand each other, or don't understand each other, that the cumulative effect is at times not unlike being hit over the head. Apologies to Elena Ferrante, who is without doubt the most remarkable writer, with a hell of a tale to tell, but for me she occasionally treads a fine line between being entertaining and downright annoying.

At times, I also found myself really struggling with the central relationship between the two women. Their pendulum swings of affection are so extreme - from intense closeness to years passing without communicating - that it stretched my credulity. Then there is the character of Lila herself, Elena's arch rival but also her kindred spirit, who is generally more off the rails than Elena and living dangerously and slaving herself to death and losing her looks, but somehow hordes of men - even the ones whom we are originally led to believe do not like her - are - as it turns out - in love with her. And not just in a regular way, but in a content-to-be-your-slave-and-breathe-the-same-air sort of way. If the rumours that Elena Ferrante is writing about her own life are true, and that such a friendship is exactly one she has known, then I apologise again and can only say that her way of communicating its dynamics do not always ring true.

If I sound like a sourpuss, let me add that the final third of the novel, covering Elena's marriage and motherhood, really took off, gripping me like a thriller. It ended with a sort of cliff-hanger situation (no spoilers in my reviews!) which, cleverly, was both exactly what one had longed to happen but which one knows cannot lead anywhere good. It was as if the plot was giving the reader something with one hand, while threatening to take it away with the other. The net result was, I closed this third book longing to start the fourth. Oh yes, Elena Ferrante is a clever writer indeed.



View all my reviews

A Moving Journey

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I know I have come to this book long after the plaudits for its excellence first started circulating. Sometimes I do that with 'best-sellers' simply out of a desire to resist following the stampeding herd (I get to them in the end, but in my own good time). With Edmund de Waal's 'Hare With Amber Eyes' however, I can remember clearly that the reason for my not rushing off to purchase a copy was because whenever I asked someone to explain to me why it was so good they failed miserably, managing only to convey that it was a story of facts rather than fiction. Why would I want to read a factual history of some Japanese ornaments, I asked myself, buying it as gifts for several friends over the years, but not acquiring a copy for myself.

But now I have read 'Hare With Amber Eyes', and loved 'Hare With Amber Eyes' and face exactly the task so many people failed at with me - namely, explaining its power. One of the difficulties is that it is a book that simply defies categorisation, criss-crossing the boundaries between memoirs and history, and yet delivered with all the poignancy and deftness of the greatest literary skill. In other words, it reads a like a novel;a novel so subtly woven together that the pieces of it merge effortlessly as one is swept along. Every detail is meticulously researched and described, and yet the big, often unbearably poignant picture that forms is just as compelling.

For those who may not already know, the hare with amber eyes is part of a collection of tiny hand-crafted Japanese ornaments known as netsuke which belonged to one of Edmund de Waal's mind-blowingly wealthy banker ancestors who, being Jewish, were persecuted and driven from their homes as part of the Nazi horror-show of the Second World War. De Waal tracks the fate of these netsuke from their beginnings to their current residence in his own London home, in the process conveying the moving story not just of his family, but of the genocide they lived through.

To describe more of the actual journey of these tiny figurines, what they 'witnessed' and survived, what they have come to mean for the author, would give too much away. Suffice it to say that reading the book was for me both highly educational and deeply emotional. I do not cry easily as a reader, but its very last word reduced me to tears. You have to read the whole story to understand why.



View all my reviews

Family Love

The Green Road by Anne Enright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I settled down to Anne Enright's 'The Green Road' thinking I knew what I would be getting: lilting Irish prose, a tale of atmospheres and landscapes, anecdotal snippets of hard lives and big hearts. Yes, I thought, I am familiar with these lyrical, mood-inducing writers, they are always enriching - a bit slow-moving perhaps, but as filling and satisfying as a good, big meal.

In fact, 'The Green Road' is all of the above, but also so much more......SO much more! No sooner have we been introduced to the Irish family, wrestling with the usual tensions - religion, money, loyalty - than we are fast-forwarded to one son, trying to survive the gay scene in New York at the height of the Aids Virus, a brutal world of love, lust and death. From there we go to Mali where another son tries to do good in the impossible conditions of the poverty-stricken third world - juggling the needs of his own heart with those of the people whom he is trying to help; people blighted by disease, ignorance, hunger and lack of hope.

In the meantime Anne Enright covers the lives of those who stay in Ireland too, the daughters and Rosaleen, the mother, in many ways the quietest character in the book, but, as we come to realise, by far the most powerful. The family go through so much - from illness, to heartbreak, to misunderstanding - but there is a wealth of joy too, threaded through with memories of the shared experiences, good and bad, of growing up.

If all of this sounds 'heavy', the truly remarkable thing is that it is not! There is nothing heavy about Anne Enright's writing'; it seems to float, carrying the reader along as it goes; and yet with every sentence she pierces truths about places and people with a precision that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Somehow - how? - it isn't a long book. A mere 300 pages, and I loved every word. The story ends up, in one sense, where it started - back in Dublin with the gathering of the clan for Christmas. Everything is as it was, and yet (as in life) nothing is the same. Wonderful.





View all my reviews

No Easy Answers

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Back in March I read and reviewed the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, 'My Brilliant Friend', giving it somewhat muted praise (3 stars), because, while the story-telling was good, I found the plot somewhat overcrowded, and the style of delivery slightly heavy and monotonous. I therefore approached this, the second in the series, with some wariness.

Perhaps it was the wary approach that worked - low expectations can produce the best surprises! Whatever the reason I - literally - could not put 'The Story of a New Name' down, as the bags under my eyes will testify. The plot-lines raced along, covering the early adult lives of the two main protagonists, Elena and Lila, as one of them struggles in her marriage and the other tries against all odds to pursue her academic studies, while loving a man who does not love her back. Ferrante deploys exactly the same narrative style as she did in 'My Brilliant Friend' - fast and furious - but the scope of the two women's emotional lives deepens so beautifully and compellingly that it was like reading a thriller.

Exactly which of the two main characters is the 'brilliant friend' remains a mystery. The girls are as competitive with each other as they are supportive. When one is up, the other is down. When one turns nasty the other turns needy. They go for long periods of not seeing each other and then fall back into each other's lives with an understanding and a relief that neither finds anywhere else. It is as if they want to lead separate existences but cannot - they have too much in common: the same roots, the same friends, the same enemies, the same strangling family poverty from which they are both trying to escape. Their fates are both completely different and yet inextricably entwined, and it is this that forms both the genius and the heart of the novels.

As I mentioned in my previous review, Ferrante's own'real'identity remains something of a mystery too. She does not give interviews and no one is quite sure who she is. As well as being an intriguing marketing ploy, this means that we have only her books to speak for her. Such anonymity, and yet she chooses her own name - Elena - for one of the protagonists! Does this mean we are reading fiction or autobiography? Or are we just being led a merry dance?

Whatever the truth, I am in awe and - officially - hooked. I shall move onto the third in the trilogy without any wariness whatsoever, hoping for some answers...though I have a feeling Ferrante is not going to make them easy.



View all my reviews

Not Right For Me

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I bought 'In the Country of Men' because I heard Hisham Matar talking on the radio and was captivated. He talked not just about this novel (without giving too much away - always a challenge!) and also about the writing process itself, eloquently expressing all the joys and difficulties that go with the territory of trying to create a story that combines drama with truth. The book won numerous awards, including being shortlisted for the Man Booker, and is based on harrowing real-life events which Hisham and his family experienced themselves during the implosion of Libya in 1979.

I was therefore surprised - and feel guilty to admit! - that I was disappointed. The story is written in the highest quality prose, of that there is no doubt, sometimes poetic, sometimes brutally factual, but there was something about the overall tone of the narrative that I found grating. I kept telling myself this was unreasonable of me, since the narrator of the story is the 9 year old boy, Suleiman, trying to understand why the world he knows is collapsing around him - so of course there was going to be a distinctive slant to the text. Yet I have read other such narratives through the eyes of youngsters - To Kill A Mockingbird springs to mind - and been gripped as opposed to irritated. There were moments when I was genuinely swept along - as little Suleiman himself is - by events and actions he does not understand, but I am afraid I could not separate myself from the annoyance sufficiently to award it more than three stars.

Perhaps it was a book that just came at me at the wrong time. Books can do that, it's part of their fascination. Just as stories can land in our laps just when we need them most. Hisham Matar is an excellent writer, he just wasn't right for me.



View all my reviews

Spellbinding

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I had never heard of Robert Byron (distantly related to Lord Byron, but that's by-the-by), nor am I a natural fan of 'travel' writing, preferring my reading matter to be fictional. Nor had I a clue where or what Oxiana is. (It is an area around the River Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya, which snakes down from southern Russia into northern eastern Afghanistan). So I think it is fair to say that I approached this book with some caution, finding the very last copy of it in a bookshop fortuitously soon after someone - whose opinion I value greatly - had mentioned it as being one of those Must-Read Unmissable gems of the twentieth century.

Byron was a journalist, delightfully eccentric and with a passion and knowledge of ancient architecture. The book is written as a journal, describing a trip he made in 1933 through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, on a quest to see the legendary eleventh century tower of Qabus, (or Kabus). The quest is achieved. The tower, depicted in my copy in a photo as a menacing but plain cone-topped construct of pillared bricks, is brought to life by Byron's extraordinary knowledge and powers of description, as is everything else that crosses his path, from local people, to breathtaking landscapes, as well as the countless other ancient and often abandoned monuments that he seeks out.

Byron is also very funny, particularly about the endless set-backs he encounters on his travels - no vehicle lasts more than a few days, the weather is regularly catastrophic, disguises are required, food is often scarce, and never does any single day go according to its original plan. Within that humour however, is a marked humility and respect for all that he encounters. And this to me, quite apart from the power of his prose to transport the reader into every place he visits, is key to the mastery of the book. For Robert Byron is a traveller in the truest, greatest sense: that is, he does not, ever, attempt to impose himself on the terrain and cultures he is exploring; he simply observes every detail with awe and gratitude and intelligence, managing in this great book to allow the reader to share that privilege with him.

Reading 'The Road to Oxiana' made me sad too. For even though Robert Byron wasn't always greeted with open arms, so much of the area he explored has now become synonymous with suffering and conflict on a vast scale, its innumerable wondrous antiquities destroyed or rendered utterly beyond access. What the book depicts therefore is literally, a lost world; a fact which made me all the more grateful to the genius and courage of the man for deciding to explore and document it. Sadder still, Robert Byron died just 8 years later, in 1941, thanks to a torpedo sinking the ship on which he was travelling as a journalist in the Second World War. He was thirty six. It is impossible not to lament the unwritten journeys and spellbinding prose that sank with him.

I know 'spellbinding' is a powerful adjective. So here is an example of why I have deployed it:

"Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estuary, we came out onto the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw the colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself."

See what I mean? 'Spellbinding' is the only word.




View all my reviews

Beating The Drum

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dorothy Whipple was born in 1893. She wrote nine highly acclaimed novels between 1932 and 1953, two of which were made into successful films. Even so, when a widely-read friend recommended I try her out, I was sceptical. Stories of domestic ups and downs in the 1930s, however accomplished the writing might be, sounded inevitably quaint and dated to me. If I am completely honest, I think her name may have prejudiced me a bit as well: DOROTHY WHIPPLE. It doesn't exactly have the ring of 'Dostoevsky' or 'Shakespeare', does it?! Instead I found myself picturing some dear sweet lady with a writing hobby, taking curtain-tweaking peeps at the world, incapable of unpleasantness or boat-rocking or shock-treatments of any kind.

I could not have been more wrong. On the surface Dorothy Whipple's characters do indeed move in 'ordinary' domestic worlds set during an era dominated by preoccupations of times long distant from ours. And yet beneath this surface, as with all great fiction, the subjects she addresses are universal. The main characters of 'They Were Sisters' are - as one might expect - three sisters, who have experienced a close upbringing but taken very different roads as adults. Their personalities, each so different, are acutely and tenderly drawn. One is head-turningly beautiful, one is shy and in a hurry to grow up, one seems duller and more sensible. They all marry 'well', but only two of them manage to have children. The novel opens when a reunion visit is being planned at the house of the sister who is childless. Any reader who thinks they could guess what will unfold from that visit would be mistaken.

Dorothy Whipple writes with such a lightness of touch, but has a razor-eye for human flaws. Everyone in this novel, from the sisters, to their various husbands and children, is utterly believable. As the years pass the contact between the three women ebbs and flows, but their deep bond of shared childhood remains. Problems arise, some of them terrible, but while wanting to help each other, they also recognise the need to live with the consequences of their own decisions. This creates a tension that builds and builds as the novel progresses until, behind the veneer of their civilised and genteel world, the most unforseeable and hideous tragedy takes place. The character at the core of this tragedy is as chilling and realistic a monster as I have come across on the written page. It sends shivers down my spine just to think of him. We have such monsters among us still, millions of them. We read of them every day in the newspapers, crushing those unfortunate enough to cross their path.

Dorothy Whipple is both so accomplished and so respected in the literary world that it is hard to believe she is not more widely known. I have thanked my friend for the recommendation and already read a second ('Someone At A Distance')that was just as good. Now I am now beating the drum myself. Taste and enjoy!






View all my reviews

Magic-Painter

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Would-be novelists often ask me about plot. Not being a thriller-writer, where the mechanics of What Happens Next are most obviously vital, I try to explain that for my kind of writing, if it is managed well, the plot emerges out of the characters. They tend to shake their heads, looking doubtful. But now, thanks to Colm Toibin, all I need to do is tell them to read 'Nora Webster'.

The novel is a joy: page-turning, mesmerising, every small detail observed with a precision that is moving simply for the fact of being so accurate. Nothing HAPPENS in the sense of who-shot-who-and-why, or will-she-won't-she. Instead Tobin takes us into the life of a woman resurfacing after bereavement. Nora has two older daughters and two young sons and a husband who has died. We learn the facts of her situation gradually, like colours spreading across a canvas. It kept making me think of those magic-painting books my mother used to give me when I was too sick for school and bored in bed: dab water on each blank page with a small paintbrush and pictures blossomed before my eyes. I would make each one last as long as I could, enraptured.

Nora Webster lives in a small, close Irish community where people look out for each other and know each other's business. While trying to offer help and solace, they burden her too, with their demands and their scrutiny. Toibin gets this desperate paradox of grief to a tee - the relentless push-pull of wanting privacy and space in which to mourn and make sense of one's loss, and yet the utter desolation every moment one is alone. His depiction of the two young boys coping without their father is particularly poignant - again, there is no great 'event', Toibin simply describes what they do, the sense of them lurching between moods, bickering or play-fighting, torn between wanting and not-wanting their mother as they struggle to find their feet as adolescents in their new father-less world.

Nora's husband had been a teacher, not only the bread-winner of the family, but also its chief thinker, from family matters to the choppy politics of the country. With him gone therefore, Nora has lost a ballast that extends to every aspect of her life. For the first time she has to make big decisions, about money, about houses, about jobs, about schools, about holidays. But she also has to decide what she thinks about the world, and how strongly she is prepared to stand up for her views. Most important of all, she has to guide but not smother her mourning children, being there for them in their struggles, but giving them exactly the space she yearns for herself. It is no easy path. There are pitfalls and surprises at every turn, including the discovery of a love of music and her own singing voice, which can silence a room.

Toibin is not in the business of writing fairy tales. As his picture of Nora Webster emerges we see a woman in her own right, flawed but true. With each step Nora moves further from the husband she had loved and from her grief, but never from the love itself. Around her meanwhile, her family reconfigure, a kaleidoscope slowly turning. To me this is high drama, the reason plot-led thrillers leave me cold. Toibin's characters live and breathe through every word. We believe in them and care about them. He takes the ordinary and illuminates its inner power. A magic-painter extraordinaire.





View all my reviews