Chris’s Comments (group member since Feb 01, 2011)

Chris’s comments from the Around the World in Books group.

Mar wrote: "Sorry if I am the troublemaker but did we decide to skip a few countries to then return to them eventually? I'm thinking of Albania, Armenia, Andorra, American Samoa, Antigua and Barbuda and Angola..."

Good idea, Albania for November?

At last we have finished countries beginning with A!

We are now taking suggestions for the October read which will be set in the beautiful Bahamas.

I'm going to suggest the James Bond novel Thunderball by Ian Fleming as I have seen all of the films but never read a Bond book.

What a strange feeling it is to look at (and inside!) the bones of somebody who we've read about!

So I see we have a tie in the poll ... between Ali and Nino: A Love Story and The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

What do you think we should do now? I'm all for reading whichever book you voted for. Either that or go for a quick re-poll? What does everybody think?

If Austria is anything like Thomas Bernhard suggests, I don't ever fancy visiting...

This doesn't look too fascinating, but I'll throw it in the pot ... Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic

I was really looking forwards to reading this, largely because it was supposed to be written in nineteenth-century Australian vernacular. The only other books I've read who use this vernacular technique are Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Both brilliant, in my opinion, in a large part because of the language.

So was anybody else a bit disapoointed with the language in this book? Not that I have any way of telling, but I didn't feel that it was authentic. More like Peter Carey had heard a few common phrases used back then, and threw them into his book. The use of the word 'adjectival', particularly, really irked me because I couldn't imagine Ned Kelly using it at all. ('Effing' worked slightly better I think).

Not that I disliked the book, I just thought that I would be immersed in the language a bit more/better.

Elizabeth ... I saw Arthur & George in a bookshop the other day after you mentioned it. I almost bought it purely because of the coincidence!

My suggestions are...

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
The Loser by Thomas Bernhard
Auto Da Fe by Elias Canetti
February Shadows by Elisabeth Reichart
Night Work by Thomas Glavinic
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

I think I'm going to go for The Loser, unless something comes up later.

Haha, some of those hats are actually really smart!

Haven't had the chance to look for any Austrian books yet, but caught this on the news...

"An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear"."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europ...

I wonder if there will be any novels as interesting as this Austrian 'Pastafarian'??

As I've never read a fictional biography of a real person before (are they common??), I'm not sure whether to find out a bit about the real history of Ned Kelly first.

Do you think this will ruin the plot or add to the book? My existing knowledge of Ned Kelly is virtually nil...

Ah, I didn't notice Armenia. They seem to have a lot of poets!

Hi, don't mean to step on toes but has anybody started thinking about Australian books for the May read?

No work of fiction has grabbed my attention yet, but I am intruiged by Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.

The footnotes in my edition were fairly long essays on the psychology of homosexuality ... they didn't seem to explain the content. I'm not sure if it was the translator, publisher or author who added them.

Ah, I just checked Wikipedia. Apparently Puig wrote these footnotes with the intention of forcing people to think about homosexuality objectively.

This book is definately a grower. I think that if I read it again in a few years it would be even more poignant. I'll hold my thoughts on the actual story until we're on to the next book.

As an aside, did anybody read the footnotes? I started to read them but they just seemed like filler. Is it worth me going back to read them do you think?

I'm about half way through but, to be honest, it hasn't really captivated me yet.

I would liken it to listening to two people having a really interesting conversation while you are dropping off to sleep. My mind tends to wander when they raise an interesting point, then I'll snap back to what they are saying again.

I dont know if that makes sense, but that's how I feel about the book so far!

ps. New Mexico sounds fascinating!

Thanks Elizabeth, looks interesting ... and might come in useful for future suggestions for this group.

Great point, Mar - as good as the author was at creating characters, Sagesse herself is entirely forgettable. I didn't realise until you mentioned it.

It makes me think about the point you raised earlier about the gender of the narrator. I'm a 22 year old male and I'm supposed to be inside the mind of a 14(?) year old female; was her personality/gender left intentionally amorphous so that people could associate better with the novel?

Regarding the voice of the narrator, I thought that the clarity/eloquence of the narrator perfectly complemented Sagesse's actual speech. I thought it was a great way of showing that complicated ideas and emotions are rarely vocally expressed, or poorly expressed, especially for quiet people (like me!).

I have to say I partially disagree with Elizabeth about Messud's exploration of mental illness. I really enjoyed and respected how she dealt with her father's troubles, but what she wrote about Etienne simply annoyed me. Although her writing is fine, I found her philosophising tedious as it lacked real punch and even her prose lapsed into purple patches - especially when theorising about Etienne. For example, when Sagesse masturbated her own brother. Uncomfortable to read as it was, I think it added to Sagesse's character. In fact, I thought that it was almost touching (no pun intended) that she would do that for him. But the drivel that followed:

'alone in his paradise, or in his hell, but not knowing it to be either—and now, with this sigh, with this relief, his body had communicated desire and been heard, and however my brother registered knowledge, he must know that it had, and, most terribly, would know when it remained, henceforth, unattended. Having been, beneath his sheet, unalone for even a moment, he would know forever more what it meant to be alone…. The wrong I had done, I realized, was to make my brother aware of his prison'

really irritated me!

Can I add Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt to the options? Looks like another adolescent growing-up novel but from the perspective of the other end of the social scale to Sagesse in The Last Life.

Although I did enjoy the book, I didn't get a real sense of place. Like Elizabeth said earlier, this could have been set in an American resort. Even the forays into each family member's lives in Algeria didn't particularly give me an impression of the 'Pied Noir' culture.

For a book which largely dealt with the shock of transplanting a whole family from one distinct culture to another, I was suprised and a little disappointed that (aside from a rare snippet) I learnt little about Algeria or France aside from the political angst.

I feel that the author really does excel in creating believable, troubled, human characters and convincing relationships. I guess it was never her intention to write a travel guide! Does anybody know if she wrote this book with anybody in mind - i.e. French/Algerians?