Cynthia Sally Haggard's Blog: Cynthia Sally's Blog, page 55

Ian McEwan is not a bad name for a writer (PAN E POMODOR)

[image error]PAN E POMODOR is the delightful tale of how an English couple, Margaret and Ian McEwan, bought a house near Vico in the Gargano region of Puglia, southern Italy, and set about restoring it.

But it is more than that. It is really an homage to a region of Italy that the author and his wife came to love, including digressions about olive farming, local bureaucracy and the intricacies of vichese, the local dialect.

Given that this was self-published on Lulu, this is really an astonishing achievement, because the author and his wife would have been obliged to do everything to produce and market this softcover book. Nevetheless, I had two problems with the book. The first problem was with the occasional times when McEwan lapses into first person, which I found jarring as most of the story was told in third person, and there was nothing to motivate the switch. The second problem was with the way the book ended. It just stopped, leaving the reader up in the air, wondering if the couple ever caught the people who destroyed their fence and made off with some of their goods.

Ian McEwan is a good name to have in the writing world. In case you are wondering, this is NOT the famous British author, but a computer programmer turned olive farmer. Nevertheless, if you are eager to find out more about Puglia, this is not a bad book to read. Four stars.

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ON PERSEPHONE’S ISLAND: A Sicilian Journal by Mary Taylor Simeti

[image error]I was delighted to see that Mary Taylor Simeti had done a travelogue of Sicily, because I remembered her charming tale of Queen Constance and her various travels around Italy that I read some years ago. I was not disappointed in this book. Simeti plans her book around a year, starting with the old New Year that occurred November 1st, with the Feast of the Dead, and gradually working her way around the seasons so that the end of the book finished one year later.

Although she spends much time discussing her garden and her various meanderings around the Sicilian countryside with her family, this book is also a snapshot of life in Sicily during 1982-1983. I was a young woman then, freshly married, and her vivid prose enabled me to go back in time nearly thirty years ago, to re-remember events that I had completely gotten, such as the Italian government’s successful attempts to divert the lava flow of Mount Etna, so that it did not go into populated areas. (They did this using dynamite). But I loved this book because of Simeti’s relentless quest for the shadow of Persephone and the Greek civilization that existed on Sicily so many years ago. Highly recommended. Four stars.

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THE FALCON OF PALERMO by Maria Bordihn

[image error]Maria Bordihn’s THE FALCON OF PALERMO is an ambitious biography of an ambitious character. Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), was known to his contemporaries as Stupor Mundi (the wonder of the world), because he could speak six languages – including Arabic – and had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Bucking the mores of 1200s Europe, Frederick was not above making sarcastic comments about religion. His reputation was such that Dante consigned him to the sixth circle of hell, in the tombs of the heretics. The only reason why he wasn’t burned at stake is because he was the most powerful monarch of the time, ruling a territory that included Sicily, Southern Italy, and Germany. He was both Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily.

So it was with a sense of anticipation that I opened the pages of this novel, because a larger-than-life character would naturally inspire larger-than-life drama in the pages of this novel. No? Unfortunately, not exactly.

What is wonderful about this novel is the delineation of character, especially those of Frederick and his wives, especially his morganatic fourth wife Bianca.

What doesn’t work so well is the method of telling this story. The novel opens in 1194, when Frederick is born, and trundles on through 56 years until he dies in 1250. It is not possible for a novelist to cover this amount of time without resorting to narrative summary. However, the whole novel is cast in this way. What I mean by that is not that there are no scenes (there are plenty of them), but that the scenes are not dramatic enough. There is not enough raw emotion on the page. There is not enough conflict. So Frederick’s larger-than-life character is curiously muted. Which is a pity, because his story lends itself to some memorable screaming matches (which I would have enjoyed)! Four stars.

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Reading Sundays: THE MARRIED MAN (Part 1) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

[image error] The word ‘diary’ is etched in faded gold, the black leather cover is cracked at the edges, his name is written in flourishing copperplate:

Robert Prisley Caveley.

Friday, 20th June 1930

“Tomorrow, I become a married man.”

The tissue thin paper rustles as she reads.

“Not having been married before, I can’t say how I’m going to find my new station in life, although Miss Florence Emily Richards, and I, have been walking out for some time.”

The chair creaks as she leans back.

“Over the years, I’ve become good at keeping a low profile. I’m the bloke that goes to the pub regular-like, but keeps to himself in a corner over yesterday’s newspapers, and a cigarette or two. I’m the bloke that comes straight home from work every evening, to help my future in-laws with the mending, and the fixing. I can be seen during quiet summer evenings, tending to their roses in the small plot out back. I’m quiet, I’m polite, and if I have few friends, and a certain reticence about talking to strangers, nevertheless, I hope Emmy’s parents are happy their lovely daughter has found such an obliging bloke to be her husband.

“I work as a clerk in the local bank, and make a decent income, enough to keep a wife and family. At least, I’m a cut above the laborers, carpenters, butchers, longshoremen, and chalk-diggers that are typically available to a girl like Emmy, in a place like Thurrock, Essex,[image error] where the Thames widens its mouth before drifting towards the sea. [To be continued.]

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THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN by Carolina de Robertis

[image error]This haunting novel begins in 1900, when many people in Tacarembo explained things to themselves by means or folk-tales or legends. It is a novel with three protagonists. The first one, Pajarita disappears as a baby and mysteriously reappears in a tree. It is left up to the reader to decide whether the lost baby did in fact turn up in the tree, as the family tells it, or if, in fact, we are talking about two different baby girls, one disappeared and dead and the second who happened to be in a tree when the family was looking for the first one. No matter, the family takes Pajarita to its heart, and when she is about fifteen she attracts the attention of a young man from Venice, who asks for her hand in marriage. Pajarita moves with him to Montevideo, produces children, including a daughter Eva, who is the second protagonist of this novel.

Eva loves words even from an early age, but her family is poor. At the age of ten, her father asks her to sacrifice her education so that she can work in a shoe shop and earn the money they so desperately need. Eva complies, but she is not treated well by the owner of the shoe shop. Her father, who is friendly with the shoe shop owner, chooses to believe his friend rather than his daughter, creating a family rift. It is not surprising that one day, Eva decides to leave. Through a chain of events, she finds a rich husband and has two children, Robertito and Salome, the third protagonist. By this time, she is living with her family in Buenos Aires. But it is now in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the time of Evita Peron, and the political situation becomes unstable. Eva and her family are forced to move back to Montevideo.

Salome grows up surrounded by her relatives from her mother’s family in Montevideo, Uruguay, but again, political instability rears its ugly head, and Salome pays a very heavy price for choices that she made when she was a teenager. (You will have to read the novel to find out what they are).

This was such an interesting novel for someone like me who doesn’t know hardly anything about Latin America, and enjoyed learning about it from three fascinating women. These women, and all that they had to endure from their menfolk and from society kept me turning the pages of a book. Carolina de Robertis is also an excellent stylist. There was some truly beautiful writing in this novel, powerful use of metaphor and simile. My favorite moment occurs when Ignazio, the young man from Venice who eventually marries Pajarita is sent by his grandfather to make something of himself:

“Listen, I have a little money in the floorboards and I’ll send you to the New World if you swear you’ll build something else, something useful over there, something worth building. Anything. Swear.”

It broke, then, the canvas stretched over the world, and Ignazio was not numb, not in a painting at all: he stood in a raw, unfinished world, surrounded by the dead, exposing a fresh layer of living skin.

“I swear,” he said.

What a wonderful way of describing someone’s sudden understanding that actions have consequences. What a great way of evoking sudden maturity. Five stars.

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MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively

[image error]I can see why Penelope Lively’s novel MOON TIGER won the Booker Prize in 1987. It is a beautifully written novel, awe-inspiring over its control of multiple points of view and in its non-linear story telling.

We start in the present, with elderly Claudia Hampton ill in hospital, dying of cancer. As she lies in bed, memories of her past flicker through her consciousness, but not in chronological order. Reading this novel is like delving into someone’s past, like peeling layers off an onion, until we get to the core of the story, which is…But I don’t want to spoil this novel for you, so I’ll let you discover that for yourself.

We learn about Claudia, her quiet mother, her unusually close relationship with her brother Gordon, her disdain for Gordon’s wife Sylvia, her partner Jasper and her daughter-whom-she-doesn’t-understand Lisa. We also learn about another man in her life.

Without spoiling the plot, I will say that I found the characterization of the lover, Tom, wanting. Claudia is portrayed as such a sharp-tongued, opinionated, fiercely intelligent woman that for the life of me I couldn’t see why she was attracted to quiet, decent Tom. I couldn’t figure out why he made such a powerful impression on her. By contrast, her relationships with her argumentative brother Gordon and the sexually powerful Jasper were easy to understand and imagine. I know it seems awfully presumptuous NOT to give a Booker-prize-winning novel five stars, but I’m going to give this four stars, taking a star off for the problematic Tom.

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THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER by Nina Bawden

[image error]I loved this book as a girl, another favorite I read over and over again. But what intrigued me so much about it then was Perdita, the witch’s daughter, the shy, neglected girl, bullied by other children in the teeny-tiny Scottish isle where she lives.

Now, I find myself more focused on the other aspect of the story, (which passed me by completely before), the story of the jewel thief hiding his ill-gotten gains on a remote island in the far north of Scotland, and how he is inadvertently thwarted by Perdita and her new friends Janey (who is blind) and Tim, Janey’s brother.

Tim is the least interesting character of the three. He mainly exists as a mouthpiece for the working out of the jewelry heist plot. But Perdita and Janey are perfect foils for each other. Perdita, because she is unusually sensitive to when other people are about to be hurt. And Janey, because she is blind but extremely smart, so that she is well adept at hearing things others cannot. The scene where Janey leads Perdita and Tim out of danger is my favorite.

If you have a middle grader who wants to read something different, quirky & English, you should look no further. Five stars.

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Reading Sundays: HAUNTED BY DREAMS (Part 4) a short story by Cynthia Sally Haggard

Helena had met Dr. Vanderzanden in a Statistics class she’d had to take for her Business degree. She’d been number-phobic and miserable, but wanting to be a good role model for her daughters, she forced herself to attend Dr. Vanderzanden’s office hours. And somehow, she managed to learn enough to pass the course and graduate.

Helena left university one week and took a job in the doctor’s office the next, throwing herself into the busyness of a popular practice, working overtime to pay back her college debts. But that is when the dreams started. Sleepless nights are hide to hard from a spouse, and Helena’s restlessness irritated Jake, perhaps because they impinged on his night-owl habits. Helena would slump in a corner of the couch, knocking back cheap red wine in the hopes that it would get her to sleep, while Jake glowered not ten feet away from her, chain-smoking in front of his computer, as he ground out his thesis.

“What is it this time?”

Helena paused in mid-sip. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” he growled in a whisper.

What could she say? This time, the dream had been vague, dark. She’d been with Jake and two other couples, business colleagues. She didn’t know who these other people were, but she sensed that they were her colleagues rather than Jake’s. They must have been Mary Beth and Nancy Anne from the doctor’s office with their husbands or boyfriends. They were in his garden, the professor’s garden, that surrounded his palatial house on top of a hill. Gnarled trees surrounded them and the undergrowth hid a rushing stream that went down a slope into an artificial pool that everyone called “the tank”. The professor’s pool was murky, dark and sinister.[image error]

What could she say?

THE END

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Paullina Simon’s THE SUMMER GARDEN (BRONZE HORSEMAN #3)

[image error]After the epic struggles of THE BRONZE HORSEMAN and TATIANA & ALEXANDER, THE SUMMER GARDEN, the third volume in the series, is a comparatively quiet book about how the main characters manage to live a “normal” life amongst the folks in the wilds of Arizona.

Those flashbacks that are set off into their own sections (that are far too long IMHO,) were here again in this volume, again making me skim those pages as I really wanted to get on with the main story.

What I loved about this story is how realistic it was. Gone is the heady idealism of youthful love and in its place is the gritty reality of the day-to-day, of trying to get on with someone that you are still getting to know, and the difficulties of long-term relationships, especially when the protagonists are not very articulate and are not good at talking through their problems.

I’m not sure I would have enjoyed this volume if I hadn’t read the first two, as this rather quiet story derives its interest from the sturm und drang of what happened before, in volumes 1 and 2. But if you are one of those people who enjoyed THE BRONZE HORSEMAN and TATIANA AND ALEXANDER, you will enjoy this. Four stars.

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Paullina Simon’s TATIANA & ALEXANDER (BRONZE HORSEMAN #2)

[image error]TATIANA AND ALEXANDER is Volume 2 of Paullina Simon’s THE BRONZE HORSEMAN trilogy. Unlike most second novels, this one doesn’t disappoint, even though I had some problems with it that I didn’t have in Volume One.

What I loved about this story was how hard it was for Alexander to come back home, and how eventually Tatiana had to go and find him.

What didn’t work so well for me were all the flashbacks and I think that was because of the way they were handled. Generally speaking, a writer wants to make it easy for the reader to read the piece, and so flashbacks should be short, to the point and slipped into the narrative infrequently. The way Paullina Simons handles flashbacks is to set them off in a section of their own, which means that they become far too long. I have to say they did little for me, and in fact I found myself skimming over them so that I could get back to the main story.

It says something for the quality of Ms. Simon’s writing that I was willing to do that! Those of you who enjoyed THE BRONZE HORSEMAN will enjoy this volume. Four stars.

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