Zina Rohan's Blog, page 6

Life and Fate

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In a way it's silly putting stars on a book like this - a book that was arrested, whose author never saw it published, and which is now, once again, persona non grata in Russia because Stalin is being rehabilitated. Nobody who is a Goodreads member can have had to make the decisions facing Grossman's characters, deal with the moral compromises, the equivocations, the desperate need to survive, all the while second guessing who might prevail next, who might be an ally, who should be supported and who denied - not for ethical or moral reasons but purely in order to stay alive. Only one character, not the 'hero' Viktor Shtrum, but a prisoner in a German camp does the right thing. He kills himself once he realises that he will be required to help construct the gas chambers. To him too is given what one might take as Grossman's credo: only senseless acts of kindness towards individuals have value. The rest is ideology, whether religious or political; and all totalitarianisms are ultimately faces of the same coinage.

No character is utterly sympathetic, nor is any without a single redeeming feature. All are flawed, prevaricataing, implicated, scheming, terrified, hungry. It is extraordinary that Grossman managed to write this without anyone finding out; typically canny of Khrushchev to arrest the book rather than the writer.

Read it. But set aside time to read it in long stretches. If you pick it up and put it down you will get hoplessly lost - especially if Russian names are a barrier to you.



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Away for a while

I'm about to start readingLife and Fate - cheating, because I'm reading it in English. All the same, I may be away some time...

Short book, Big Topic, Skilled Author

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the second Erpenbeck I've read. She is the most disconcerting and spare of writers, who says a great deal in few words. All-encompassing - in this case twentieth century German history seen through the changing fortunes of a lakeside house and the people who happen to live there - poetic, but also strangely cool. She is not interested in individual psychology nor do her books require her to be. Highly recommend this.



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More than Dead Friends

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A friend (American) who was and is in the music business told me about this book. It deals with the music scene in the UK in the 90s, and although - yes - I accept that the author, who knows of what he writes, is maybe cynical, I found this book really shocking. Depressing too. My friend assures me this is what the people in the busoienss are like. Wow! How glad I am I don't know them. Yet, how come my friend is such a sweet guy?



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New Draft

Well, I've completed a first draft of my new book, Absolution, set it aside for a while and am now embarking on the first of now doubt many revisions. How many? No idea.

A Sharp-toothed Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


To begin with I thought I might be irritated by this book...the convention of the first person narrator using the device of writing letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as a device for explaining what the nature of a servant's life in India is. But never mind that. Aravind Adiga has created a truly plausible character in Balram Halwai, village boy turned chauffeur to a newly-returned from America, soft, initially naive but essentially corrupt young businessman. There is wit; there is cruelty; there is desperation; there is cynicism; there is realism.

Fine feelings are doubtless a good thing but you won't survive for long if they alone guide your daily actions. The lowest of the low have only one way of keeping their heads above water which is, unfortunately, to behave as appallingly (almost) to others, both equals, superiors and inferiors, as they have behaved to you. Or might behave to you. Keep one step ahead, think big, don't get involved in wishy-washy compassion.

I am in no position to question whether this extremely dark (and extremely funny) view of India is accurate, but it reads convincingly. And the voice of our narrator is consistently the striving, angry but humorous one of the 'half-baked' man, withdrawn from school as a young boy so that he can earn money for the family. His ideas are based on what he sees of how the world works. His interpretations are unmediated by education or reading. His beliefs are hand-me-down, street talk shared with other chauffeurs, whom he cannily keeps at distance.

The White Tiger won the Booker Prize in 2008. I'm not surprised. It deserved to.



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The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have ambivalent feelings about this book. I can see why it has had the effect it apparently has had in the US, because it is such an American story. Possibly only in South Africa might there have been anything similar - or, on second thoughts, in India during the Raj. So in terms of the subject matter I have no problem with it. Kathryn Stockett acknowledges the difficulties of writing through the mind of someone so unlike herself, and that's fine. If writers kept to their land, their gender, their class, their whatever - there would be little experimenting and little imagination. I cannot say if the language she employs for her black characters is true to life because American English is alien enough for British ears anyway, even with our familiarity with film, so we can be in no position to judge the rendition of the Black voices of the south. It's as a work of fiction that I take issue.

Perhaps this is down to her editors (maybe with an eye to a film in the making?) but this book is schematic. There are parallels screaming at every corner, loose ends nicely tidied up. And then, worst of all, for the book itself, the white characters are dreadful stereotypes. Yes, there are a few 'good' white employers mentioned, but only in passing. The main white characters are unremittingly ghastly, not only vile to their Helps but also to their children. They have not one single redeeming feature that would render them human. Their relationships with each other are unpleasant; their marriages are left untouched; all we get is their nastiness.

On the other side, the black women are only good. The fact that one of them, Minny, has a mouth on her is beside the point. She is a good sort, a good soul, brave and stalwart. There is not a mean thought among them. Meanwhile, lippy Minny is a battered wife - just to add a detail, the tough woman who lets herself be beaten up by her husband out of a sot of desperate dependency. All the boxes are being ticked here. He is even called Leroy, for god's sake!

Skeeter, the compiler of the book that is the core to the story is of course gawky, unlovely as a child, and a wannabe writer. I gather that this is based on Stockett's own history, but it is another stereotype. What doesn't ring true at all is how she can at any point have felt attracted to the senator's son, Stuart, whose views she knows to be so opposed to her own. I simply do not believe that anyone could contemplate a relationship, let alone a marriage, with a person whose outlook on the world is so fundamentally different. Incidentally, I felt the same way about the marriage in We Need To Talk About Kevin. There too I wondered, what is this woman doing married to that man?

In the end, my feeling about The Help was that the author was getting a lot off her chest, but that someone should have stepped in and rescued the book from being both mawkish and agitprop.



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River of Smoke

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the second part of Amitav Ghosh's trilogy on the Opium wars - arguably the worst episode (among many) of Britain's history. It deals with the nineteenth century opium trade that Britain used - opium grown in India and shipped to China to create addiction there that would change the trade deficit Britain had with China. Before this Britain's imports of tea from China were so high, but exports of anything TO China so low, that the country's coffers to silver were draining fast. So Britain became a narco-state to set things right. And when the Chinese authorities finally put their feet down and tried to ban this, the British government went to war in the name of Free Trade, and won. The main prize was Hong Kong as well as what became known as the New Territories, as well, of course, as the right to trade whatever it wished.

Amitav Ghosh's trilogy has a vast cast of characters from India, China, Britain and the USA. But it is seen through the third person eyes of largely Indian characters, many of them having appeared in the first part of the trilogy Sea of Poppies. In this second volume Ghosh has the problem that faces many writers of historical fiction when the core of the story is the politics of the times: how to present complex information and many facts without giving lectures. He does this by having one character, a gay mixed-race artist, who as a man has the right to live in the foreigners' quarter of Canton, which was the furthest foreigners could get, write letters to a young woman, friend since childhood, who as a foreign woman is not allowed in Canton. There is another occasion when two of our main characters, in a flash back, have had a meeting with Napoleon when he was imprisoned on the Atlantic island of St Helena, and discuss the opium trade with him...and so on. This all works very well, although one can see exactly what Ghosh is doing - a case of the scaffolding rather on view. On the other hand, I cannot think how else he could have done it, so I shouldn't cavil.

I was longing for this book to come out having read the first volume more or less as soon as it became available. And now I can't wait for the third, which he is presumably writing. His narrative style is uncluttered and direct, but at the same time he happily drops into a variety of Indian languages and phrases, and pidgin as well. And if you don't follow every word, no matter: you get the gist and the flavour is the thing.

If you didn't know the history in any detail before (I did but that's because of my student days) you will learn a lot, and be most entertained along the way. If you did know the history you can enjoy the writing for itself alone and for the sympathetic eye he casts on characters whose motives are legion and for the most part as humanly selfish as we are accustomed to seeing today. Highly recommended.



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How to Decide?

I'm on the home stretch of the first draft of my new novel. Once that's done I shall set the manuscript - silly word since it's gone straight onto my PC - aside for some weeks and read someone else's fiction. And grind my teeth because they are achieving what I cannot.

But what? I'm most tempted by Amitav Ghosh's second part of his Opium Wars trilogy, the first having been spectacular.
Anyone suggest anything else?

The Song Before It's Sung

I've just read The Song Before It Is Sung: A Novel - my first Justin Cartwright. It's a novel based on the friendship - and then severed relations - between Adam von Trott, who was one of the conspirators hoping to kill Hitler, and Isaiah Berlin.

It was interesting, but somehow it didn't work. I felt Cartwright was wrestling with the material and had invented a structure that in the end didn't work. But at the same time it has made me want to read other books he has written as I gather this was not his best. Nobody can always write at their best - or maybe never.