Cynthia Sally Haggard's Blog: Cynthia Sally's Blog, page 47

MBS by Ben Hubbard narrated by Robert Petkoff

[image error]Ben Hubbard knows how to tell a good story, and starting his book about MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, the current Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia) by conveying his tutor’s impressions of him when he was still a boy is a very good way of beginning to understand the charismatic, charming and cruel man we in the West refer to as MBS.

MBS always had natural leadership abilities. Yet he was the sixth son of King Salman (the eldest son of his third wife.) And King Salman himself was the 25th son (roughly) of King Abdulazziz.

Of course luck played its part in Salman becoming King. And luck was also behind the demise of two of Salman’s sons by his first wife. However, that still left MBS in 4th position, behind his four older brothers.

So, how did MBS pull off the remarkable feat of becoming Crown Prince? This well-researched, well-told book tells you exactly how.

I won’t say more so as not to spoil it for those of you who have not read it, but if you are interested in the current state of affairs in Saudi Arabia, you should read this book. Five stars.

The post MBS by Ben Hubbard narrated by Robert Petkoff appeared first on Spun Stories.

Lawrence Durrell’s THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET: JUSTINE, BALTHAZAR, MOUNTOLIVE and CLÉA

It is easy to see that Lawrence Durrell started life as a poet, for his prose is magnificent. But his strongest suit is his brilliant evocation of time and place, in recreating the alien landscape of Egyptian Alexandria in the late 1930s and 1940s, during World War Two. And his characters are marvelous: Nessim and Justine, Darley and Melissa, Mountolive and Leila, and Balthazar and Pombal, all quirky, all seeming to fit perfectly into a strange place which is an interesting blend of East and West.

This is NOT to say that THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET doesn’t have its flaws. Those of you who haven’t read these volumes and dive into [image error]JUSTINE (the first volume) should be warned that this is Durrell’s most experimental novel. After some wonderful brush-strokes that delineate Alexandria and environs, he plunges us in. The experience is rather like going through an elderly relative’s papers, all spread out over the desk in no particular order, and it is our job to make sense of it. JUSTINE places quite a burden on the reader by the formlessness of its structure. The novel is in four parts, but there are no chapters. Instead, when Durrell runs out of steam, we hit these abrupt breaks, and just as abruptly start up with something else. This can be irksome for the reader, with all these starts and stops, because just as we’re getting into something, we have to drop it and pay attention to something else. Accordingly, JUSTINE has a cloudy quality to it, like an undeveloped photograph, and the only clear thing that emerges is how obsessed the narrator is by Justine– the mysterious, elegant, beautiful, sensual wife of wealthy banker Nessim Hosnani.

The narrator of JUSTINE is un-named, and we don’t actually find out that his name is LG Darley until the end of BALTHAZAR. Of course LG Darley is a dead-ringer for Lawrence George Durrell, the author himself. When we first meet the narrator in JUSTINE, he is a Brit living in Alexandria who has a modest teaching job. One day, Justine accosts him after a lecture and takes him home to meet husband Nessim. And thus the machinery of the novel is set into motion (on page 29.)

Who is Balthazar? He is a close friend of Justine’s who holds weekly meetings, referred to by narrator L. G. Darley as the “Cabal.” Of course, he is a well-known member of the Jewish Community in Alexandria. If JUSTINE was incoherent, then [image error]BALTHAZAR is a more coherent version of the same story, told by the same narrator (L.G. Darley), with some extra background details that help us to make sense of the narrative, and chapters (!), which help with the flow of information.

By far my favorite of the four novels is [image error]MOUNTOLIVE, the story of a junior officer of exceptional promise at the Foreign Office, who scales the heights of the Diplomatic Services to become Ambassador. In Durrell’s hands it becomes much more than this, since these four novels are meditations and reflections on modern love. Of course MOUNTOLIVE provides all the juicy details about his personal life, as well as the office politics and intrigues of the British Embassy in Cairo and the British Consulate in Alexandria. The reason why this novel is my favorite is because it is the only one to have a coherent structure. All the anecdotes, digressions, free-associations and blind alleys are knitted together by having as a spine the story of Mountolive’s life and career. The other thing that is superb about this novel is the different perspective it gives on the story of the Hosnanis and their friends, which we have heard twice now, once in JUSTINE and once in BALTHAZAR.

[image error]CLÉA is the last novel, and not nearly as strong as MOUNTOLIVE. At least it actually has chapters, which give the narrative flow some shape. But like BALTHAZAR (and JUSTINE) there are too many rambles into the weeds for my taste. So much of these three novels (JUSTINE, BALTHAZAR and CLÉA) have a post-prandial air to them. They sound like someone who has just dined on French cuisine accompanied by exquisite wines. Slightly drunk, this raconteur is holding a brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, telling one bizarre anecdote after another. Very entertaining if you are Durrell’s guest. But for a novel? Not so much. Three Stars.

The post Lawrence Durrell’s THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET: JUSTINE, BALTHAZAR, MOUNTOLIVE and CLÉA appeared first on Spun Stories.

Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 4) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

He leaned across that huge desk as if to reach for my hand, but his arm lay on his side of the desk, his fingers hovering in the air, disconnected. He spoke to me about his family, how he’d grown up poor on a farm near Champaign-Urbana, how he had to beg his parents, both Polish immigrants, to let him go to school in the big city of Chicago.

“I even got a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago,[image error] and still they hesitated.”

My heart pulsed in the bottom of my throat as I nodded. “How were you able to go?”

“My mother,” he replied simply. “Somehow she persuaded my father to let me go. She’s a remarkable woman, I’d like you to meet her.”

A surge of some unnameable emotion lifted me up. For the first time in my life I felt I had won—something. And yet the weight of anticipation hung heavily upon me. How was I supposed to behave? Suppose his mother disapproved? Suppose I did something embarrassing? And, worst of all, suppose he stopped liking me?

I perched on that prim plastic seat, outwardly demure, my eyes lowered, while my hand lay lightly on my side of his desk, waiting. I studied the fake brown veneer of the desk as nothing happened.

The weight of his silence pressed in, so eventually I raised my head to check his expression.

He devoured me, almost as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“I’ve never met a woman like you before.”

I held my breath as I cast my eyes down, willing my heart to stop dancing its jagged rhythm. For the first twenty years of my life, I’d melted into the wallpaper, looking out as parties, and dances swirled in front of me, like a dangerous whirlpool. No one had discerned me before. No one had striven hard enough to surmount my natural shyness, see past my gangly figure, ignore my home-made clothes. [To be continued.]

The post Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 4) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard appeared first on Spun Stories.

PICTURE PERFECT by Jodi Picoult, narrated by Brian Hutchison & Amanda Cobb

[image error]As a professional writer myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the way that Jodi Picoult began this tale. What better way to introduce a character and her situation by having her lose her memory? And so the novel opens in a provocative way, with an unknown, unnamed woman waking up by a gravestone with no memory of who she is or what she is doing there. She is fortunate enough to meet a kind-hearted cop who takes her home and looks after her while he puts out a call for a missing woman.

Her life comes into sharper focus when her husband shows up, flying all the way from Scotland to retrieve her at a police station in Los Angeles. Turns out that the husband is Hollywood’s hottest actor – Alex Rivers – and the unnamed Jane Doe is Cassie Barrett, an up-and-coming-star in the field of Anthropology.

How such an unlikely couple met and married is narrated just after the point where Cassie discovers who she is and why she fled her husband’s Bel-Air mansion. As the narration continues, the dark underbelly of this marriage emerges, ratcheting up the tension as the reader wonders what is going to happen to Cassie now that she has “done” something her husband is violently against, and now that she has fled a second time.

How will she hide? What will he do when he discovers her gone?

This is the first novel by Jodi Picoult to explore a social issue, in this case domestic abuse. I found her take on it completely absorbing. Five stars.

The post PICTURE PERFECT by Jodi Picoult, narrated by Brian Hutchison & Amanda Cobb appeared first on Spun Stories.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

[image error]

May everyone find something to be thankful for during this very difficult year….

The post HAPPY THANKSGIVING! appeared first on Spun Stories.

HARVESTING THE HEART by Jodi Picoult narrated by Cassandra Campell

[image error]Author Jodi Picoult writes with such empathy and this novel was well supported by Cassandra Campbell’s superb narration. Here is the tale of a young woman who marries up into a family so wealthy it is beyond her wildest imaginings. But she marries fast after a whirlwind courtship at the age of 19, with no family to sustain her. She is semi-estranged from her father, and her mother disappeared when she was five. At age 19, she wants to go to college, to art school. But a tragedy and the ensuing guilt cause her to leave her home in Chicago for Cambridge Massachusetts. To make ends meet, she waitresses in a restaurant, where she meets Nicholas, the only child of wealth, and an incredibly driven young man who wants to be a heart surgeon.

Women who live this Cinderella story have to cope with the aftermath of trying to fit into a new culture they do not understand, and perhaps dislike. And people tend not to be kind, especially if one is young, beautiful and has snapped up a powerful handsome man that other women tend to swoon over.

Her account of Paige O’Toole’s efforts to fit in with her husband’s colleagues and their snobbish wives brought back memories of my own, when I had to spend my twenties (I married at 21) adjusting to a different country, different climate, different cuisine, different expectations and people who were twenty years older than myself.

Of course Jodi Picoult’s second novel has its flaws, and several readers have complained about Paige’s behavior and a couple of plot twists they found implausible. But her characters Paige, husband Nicholas, in-laws Astrid & Robert, parents Patrick & May (Lila) are so well-drawn, that I sat up into the wee hours last night so that I could finish it. Five stars.

The post HARVESTING THE HEART by Jodi Picoult narrated by Cassandra Campell appeared first on Spun Stories.

SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE by Jodi Picoult

[image error]Jodi Picoult’s debut novel is not a particularly easy read. It doesn’t help that we have FIVE point-of-view characters, and that one of those characters – teenager Rebecca Jones – is telling the story BACKWARDS!!

The worst part about this technique is that we learn about Rebecca’s boyfriend’s death very early in the novel, but the placing of this incident (which should be the top of the narrative arc as it is the most important thing to happen to ALL of the characters) is (a) way too early, thus destroying any tension associated with it, and (b) placed in a random fashion, just after we’ve settled down on the Quest/Journey part of the story.

Thirty-five-year-old Jane Jones has an absent famous husband (Oliver Jones.) After fifteen years of suffering (mostly) silently, she explodes, leaves and takes their 14-year-old daughter Rebecca from San Diego to Massachusetts to go stay with her brother Joley, with whom she is very close.

Joley leads her to him with a series of letters that begin as a meditation on their lives as abused children, and end with directions (“take Route 8 to Gila Bend.”) The point of view narratives are rotated amongst the five characters – Oliver Jones (absent husband) Jane Jones (frustrated mother) Rebecca Jones (their teenaged daughter) Joley Lipton (Jane’s brother) and (eventually) Sam Hanson (Joley’s boss.) Unfortunately, just as we arrive in Salt Lake City (the second stop on this journey) Rebecca suddenly chimes in with a description of her boyfriend’s death, which is so bizarre as to throw you off completely. (I was fortunate in having the audiobook at hand with five talented actors playing the five POV characters, which helped somewhat. Liz Morton played Rebecca, Carol Monda played Jane, Jonathan Davis was Oliver, James Colby was Sam and Chris Sorenson was Joley.)

The other thing that indicates this is a debut novel is that poor Jane never catches a break. After being abused by her father, she has a scream-inducing nightmare on the eve of her marriage to Oliver. A bad fight with her husband early on in their marriage, leads her to putting three-year-old Rebecca onto a plane back to her father, only to have that plane crash and the child nearly die. Finally, just as she is finding some happiness herself, she inadvertently causes daughter Rebecca unbearable pain.

Lastly, the title is NOT helpful. SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE doesn’t get at the theme of this story, which is about broken lives, broken marriages, broken families. A far better title would have been BROKEN HOMES, or even just BROKEN. (SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE makes you feel as if you’re JUST going out on a boat with a marine biologist, when the novel is about so much more.)

Jodi Picoult is such a talented writer, and I have never seen her make these mistakes before. What a pity that her editor at the time wasn’t more helpful. Having said that, this is an interesting read, as you can see the talent in this early novel behind the mistakes. My favorite scene is where Oliver is attempting to write a research paper, only to be interrupted constantly by the voice in his head. That scene shines with Jodi Picoult’s talent. Four stars.

The post SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE by Jodi Picoult appeared first on Spun Stories.

Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 3) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

And so our friendship began, with regular visits to the office hours he used to hold once a week for each class. It wasn’t hard for me to become his star student. When I wasn’t taking class, I was either perched on a chair in the library, or sitting at home with my parents in the deadening silence Father demanded, working. But now, in that final semester, the hours eased past, the deathly quality of Father’s silence dissolving as I lost myself in my studies. The other students were mostly absent from his office hours, and so we used to hold many private conferences about something I’d written, or questions that had come up in class, his huge desk brooding between us, a natural barricade. But its existence no longer troubled me.

One day, we were in his office as usual, and our conversation had long drawn to its natural close. Yet we lingered. I had just finished reading Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, [image error]an account of life in a medieval village in France between 1294 and 1324, one of the extra readings he suggested for the history course.

“I’ve never read a book like that before, it doesn’t come across as a history.” I paused, frowning, fumbling to clutch at an evanescent thread of thought. “It feels much more like science—like case studies—”

He sat up suddenly, his eyes capturing mine.

“You noticed that?”

“Of course,” I replied. “Isn’t it obvious?”

He sagged back into his seat. “Not to the other students.” He warmed me with his light-brown eyes. “But you are unusually mature for your age.”

I scrutinized his expression, surprised.

“I mean it,” he said, his eyes glowing as they lingered on my face. They were compelling eyes that seemed to call forth secrets, things I never spoke of. And perhaps that is why I slid into disloyal talk about my parents, how I’d had to beg them to let me go to university, how they insisted I live at home, and how I had few friends.

“You didn’t have a childhood either,” he remarked.

He leaned across that huge desk as if to reach for my hand, but his arm lay on his side of the desk, his fingers hovering in the air, disconnected. [To be continued.]

The post Reading Sundays: THE NON-AFFAIR (Part 3) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard appeared first on Spun Stories.

A fascinating account that explains today’s troubles: (AMERICAN NATIONS by Colin Woodard narrated by Walter Dixon

[image error]I don’t normally read non-fiction, but my husband raved about this book and so I picked it up. It was absolutely fascinating. Mr. Woodard’s thesis is that far from being a confederation of 50 states, the USA is actually a collection of 11 nations. In this book he traces the origins and history of each of these nations. In order of arrival they are:

El Norte, the Spanish speaking part of the USA originally belonged to the Habsburg empire, and comprised southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Texas, Colorado and Wyoming. Today, it is the fastest-growing nation in the Union. The El Norte nation also consists of the Northern states of Mexico.
New France came from Quebec and spread to New Orleans
New Amsterdam flourished in New York City and stayed there.
Yankeedom originated in Massachusetts & Connecticut spread its culture over the northern Mid-West into the coastal areas of Northern California, Oregon & Washington.
Tidewater sprung from the Chesapeake region of Washington DC, Northern Virginia, coastal Maryland & Delaware, and stayed there.
Appalachia originated in the mountains of Pennsylvania, spread down the Appalachian spine to West Virginia and North Carolina and then sprouted west to parts of Texas and beyond.
The Midlands started in Western Pennsylvania and spread west to the Midwest.
The Deep South originated on the sugar-plantation-growing island of Barbados, spread first to Charleston South Carolina, and then wound its way through Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri.
The Left Coast emerged in the 19th century and became a stalwart ally of Yankeedom, principally because the Yankees imported their culture successfully to that area (the coastal areas of Northern California, Oregon and Washington, including the cities of San Francisco, Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington. This Nation is also to be found in parts of Canada, in the cities of Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia.
The Far West erupted in the 19th century also. Originally a dependency of the Federal Government, due to its remote location (it comprises the interior areas of California, Oregon, Washington, as well as the states of Nevada and Utah) it came to life in the 20th century during the Second World War, when the Federal Government built highways, airports and factories.
The eleventh nation, the First Nation is newly emerging in the 21st century, in Canada, in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Nunavut and in the Northwest Territories, where the original inhabitants of Canada are buying back their land and applying ancient techniques to save it for future generations.

If you want to know why this land of ours is so divisive, why it seems that Republicans and Democrats can never ever agree on anything, read this book. You will find it illuminating. Five Stars.

The post A fascinating account that explains today’s troubles: (AMERICAN NATIONS by Colin Woodard narrated by Walter Dixon appeared first on Spun Stories.

HAMLET’S MILL by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend

[image error]As many have noted, HAMLET’S MILL is not an easy read. It is written by scholars who are fluent in many languages (French, German, Latin and Greek) and because this was published in 1969, they don’t always translate remarks made in these languages into English.

As such, this book is really for dipping, NOT for reading from cover to cover, unless you happen to be looking for something specific (as I was.)

Having said all that, I found this book fascinating. What particularly struck me was how Ancient people envisioned the earth. If you ask most people nowadays what they mean by “the earth,” they will tell you about our spinning orb, with its ocean and mountains, its flora & fauna, its orbit around sun and moon.

But that is NOT what the Ancients meant by that term. They meant celestial happenings in the sky, which impacted their lives on earth. Sometimes these phenomena were real, such as comets and the precession of the North Pole. Sometimes these phenomena were symbolic, where gods were associated with planets and Saturn was the First King of the Golden Age.

The take-home message for me is that when encountering Ancient myths, we have to ask ourselves whether the geography of the myth really takes place down here on earth, or up in the heavens.

If you are interested in the origins of myth, and you wish to read something that has strong academic credentials behind it, then this book is for you. Five stars.

The post HAMLET’S MILL by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend appeared first on Spun Stories.