Difference between revisions of "Newest Literary Fiction Reviews"
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| + | |author= Hanya Yanagihara | ||
| + | |title=A Little Life | ||
| + | |rating=3.5 | ||
| + | |genre=Literary Fiction | ||
| + | |summary=Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude don't have a lot in common apart from their friendship. They gravitated together at college and remain close as they become successful in careers as different as the theatre and architecture. However even hopes for successful future can't erase the blight of the past for one of them. Jude is physically disabled from a cause that isn't genetic or congenital. In fact the cause isn't even something he's shared with the other three. The events around it stem back to his childhood and haunt each thought and action he takes as well as his ability to take them. | ||
| + | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447294815</amazonuk> | ||
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|author=Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator) | |author=Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator) | ||
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|summary=Every Tuesday he goes into town. This particular Tuesday he sees an advert for a rescue dog that's been badly treated by its previous owner. Somewhere the ad strikes a resonance and he adopts the dog, calling it Oneeye (yes, one word, just like that). Gradually over shared meals a friendship grows and develops over the seasons as the spill of spring turns to summer's simmer, through the falter of autumn and on to withering winter. | |summary=Every Tuesday he goes into town. This particular Tuesday he sees an advert for a rescue dog that's been badly treated by its previous owner. Somewhere the ad strikes a resonance and he adopts the dog, calling it Oneeye (yes, one word, just like that). Gradually over shared meals a friendship grows and develops over the seasons as the spill of spring turns to summer's simmer, through the falter of autumn and on to withering winter. | ||
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0992817064</amazonuk> | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0992817064</amazonuk> | ||
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Revision as of 12:50, 12 October 2015
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude don't have a lot in common apart from their friendship. They gravitated together at college and remain close as they become successful in careers as different as the theatre and architecture. However even hopes for successful future can't erase the blight of the past for one of them. Jude is physically disabled from a cause that isn't genetic or congenital. In fact the cause isn't even something he's shared with the other three. The events around it stem back to his childhood and haunt each thought and action he takes as well as his ability to take them. Full review...
West by Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator)
Put yourself in the shoes of a young mother to two children, who declares her intention to leave the Communist East Germany for West Berlin, and thus loses her scientist job. What would you expect on the other side – shops full of attainable products, pleasant neighbourhoods, nice neighbours, an active and busy new life, where things might feel alien but at least you speak the same language? Well, for Nelly Senff, this is hardly the case. Once past the depressing Eastern exit procedures she is confronted with more desultory interrogations from those 'welcoming' her to the West, beyond which she and her children (their father, whom she never married, is long assumed dead by the authorities, if nobody else) are practically left in a shared accommodation in a transit camp. The shops are full of what is still unobtainable, the children hate their new school – and people still look down on them as being foreign, even if they have only moved across a city. Full review...
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
Tediously captivating may not sound like the most compelling recommendation for a book you've ever heard. Yet it's the nearest I can come to summing up the style of this novel, which features some of the most beautiful language and imagery I've ever read whilst telling a story which moves at a glacial pace. Full review...
The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley
So, three books in, I've now got to grips with the idea that Huxley doesn't so much want to tell a story as expound his ideas. Once you know that, it makes it easier to choose whether to read him or not. On balance, I have come down on the side of not – I won't be dashing out to work my way through the rest of his output the way I want to with, say, Nevil Shute, or George Orwell. Full review...
When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow by Dan Rhodes
Two people are on a train on their way to, of all things, a WI meeting where the ladies of All Bottoms will be lectured on the non-existence of God. One of the two people is Professor Richard Dawkins, rampant atheist, hectoring scientist chappie, and all-round devotee of Deal or No Deal. The other is Smee, his mono-named assistant, amanuensis or 'male secretary'. Smee will come to the fore when the weather sets in and the train journey has to be abandoned some way short of its ultimate destination, Upper Bottom. Instead the pair fetch up at the isolated yet friendly community of Market Horton, and the only option for accommodation is taken – yes, the died-in-the-wool non-believer has to be housed by a retired vicar and his wife. This clash of titanic opinions, peppered with social faux pas aplenty will provide for a particularly English kind of farcical comedy, but one with the legs to go as far as any other Good Books have reached in the past… Full review...
Time Must Have A Stop by Aldous Huxley
Sometimes we start reading "authors" as opposed to specific books, because we feel we should. So it was with me and Huxley. I seem to remember reading and actually enjoying the classic Brave New World and so felt compelled to explore more of the oeuvre. Full review...
Submission by Michel Houellebecq and Lorin Stein (translator)
What do you expect from Submission? It is after all from one of Europe's more blunt huge-sellers, one who is most forthright in his opinions, narratives and characters' sexual lives. It has become indelibly linked with a new Europe, after its reception and contents led to publicity on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, which resulted in something less savoury than literature, to say the least. Do you expect it to be about a France of the near future, where a Muslim political party provides the president? Well, don't go into this submissively following your expectations. Full review...
Whispers Through A Megaphone by Rachel Elliott
Miriam doesn’t speak. Well, that’s not strictly true. She does speak, but nothing above a whisper which makes it hard to have a conversation with her. Particularly as she hasn’t left her house in three years. But today is the day. She’s going to open that door and walk outside. She really is. Ralph has finally twigged (and with no small amount of surprise) that his wife Sadie doesn’t actually love him. And now he’s not sure if she ever really did. Having spent so much time regurgitating his every moment onto Social Media, Ralph hasn’t really had a chance to think about it. But now he has, it is so shockingly awful that he has decided to run away. And of all the places he could run away to, he has chosen the same woods that Miriam has picked to be the first place she will visit out-of-doors. And Sadie? Well, she’s had enough of reading Tweets and living vicariously through the posts of others. Sadie is going to have an adventure of her own. Full review...
The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock
You'd be forgiven for assuming that debut novelist Benjamin Johncock is American: The Last Pilot has the literary weight of a Great American Novel, with a limitless desert setting plus the prospect of soon dominating space, and the spare yet profound writing style of Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. Johncock is British, but you can tell he's taken inspiration from stories about the dawn of the astronaut age, including Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and films like Apollo 13. His protagonist, Jim Harrison, is a fictional Air Force test pilot who rubs shoulders with historical figures like Chuck Yeager and John Glenn in the quest to break the sound barrier and conquer space. Full review...
The Past by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley writes beautifully subtle stories of English family life. Her understated style has a touch of the 1950s or 1960s about it, calling to mind Elizabeth Taylor or early Margaret Drabble, and she seems to adapt classic genres like the novel of manners or the country house novel. Here she deliberately channels Elizabeth Bowen with a setup borrowed from The House in Paris: the novel is divided into three parts, titled 'The Present', 'The Past', and 'The Present'. That structure allows for a deeper look at what the house and a neighbouring cottage have meant to the central family, and paves the way for one final shocker of a secret. Full review...
The Crossing by Andrew Miller
Tim and Maud seem, to everyone around them, mismatched. She, quite literally, falls into his life, and they build a life – jobs, a house, a boat, then a child. Tim needs Maud, needs her to complete him, wants desperately to completer her, to help her. But what if Maud is already complete? What if she doesn’t need help? When tragedy strikes, Maud will find herself miles away from anyone, on a journey that will change everything, and test her to the utmost. Full review...
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
It's always a privilege when you're given an advance reading copy of something – and a real 'block' when you read the small print that says 'not for resale or quotation'. Fair comment on the resale bit, but when you get something as brilliant as The Loney being required not to quote is just plain unfair. Full review...
The Silent History by Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett
Well, they kept this quiet – for reasons that will become obvious. A couple of years ago people in America were giving birth to problematic kids. They (the children) were soon found to be unnaturally quiet – perhaps crying with hunger or pain, but never even trying to 'ooga-wooga' their way into their parents' hearts. They were later found to be completely unable to speak, they could not read and indeed they could not understand anything said to them, or shown them, as an instruction. They were physically unable to parse anything as language, and were in a silent world of their own. But right about now they and we are combining worlds – schools are being set up, and funds are being made available, and people are coming down on the endless divide as to whether they are just problematic, disabled – or even the blessed. In a couple of years, however, the problems the virus that is causing these people to be born with will be shown to be a major problem – and that is before the kids themselves change. For they will be able to switch their mental abilities much like a blind man can hear more than the average, and will be able to comprehend body and facial language much more coherently than anyone else. Throughout this timeline, however, people will be working hard to try and study the problem, and put it right – if indeed 'right' is the correct word… Full review...
Kauthar by Meike Ziervogel
Meet Lydia. She's a normal British girl, interested in following both her father, and Nadia Comaneci, into the world of gymnastics but not brave enough to pull off the larger set pieces, and with not much more to interrupt her days than wondering why boys always have to talk about their willies. Now meet Kauthar, a white British convert to Islam, devoted follower of the precepts of her religion, ardent wife and stalwartly self-fulfilling, no-nonsense and satisfied. But what is this – why is she talking of being alone in a desert, and why is she directly addressing her god regarding how she can't perform any movement. Because it is torn apart? Has something gone wrong? Full review...
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K Dick
Dick is known primarily as a science fiction writer, most famously for the novel that spawned the film Blade Runner.
I read that novel - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - when I was about ten or eleven, a good ten years or so before the film came out and – to be fair – a good five years or so before I was fully capable of understanding the philosophical and ethical issues embedded in it. Not before, however, I was capable of asking the kind of questions that would get me the kind of answers that form my standpoint on those issues. Full review...
The Other Side of the World by Stephanie Bishop
This is a beautifully written book, located both in England and Australia, about adulthood, changing responsibilities, and the universal desire for identity and belonging. This theme is also reflected in the search for union and fulfilment in the marriage of Henry and Charlotte, struggling with the changes imposed on them by parenthood and family life across two continents. Full review...
The Bear Whispers To Me: The Story of a Bear and a Boy by Chang Ying-Tai and Darryl Sterk (translator)
Award winning Taiwanese writer Chang Ying-Tai's emotive, elegiac fable is a meditation on the art of storytelling. Its immersive detail and enchanting musical cadences give it a magical, dream like quality. It is a special work as it is one of the few examples of Taiwanese fiction available in English. The blind Paiwan poet Monaneng said of aboriginal Taiwanese culture:
"With tender care let us set in motion our blood that is once again warm.
Let us recall our songs, our dances, our sacred rituals.
And the tradition of unselfish mutual coexistence between us and the earth.
This is exactly what "The Bear Whispers to Me" effortlessly does. Full review...
Reunion by Fred Uhlman
Hans Schwarz was a jew and attended the Karl Alexander Gymnasium, the most famous grammar school in Wurttemberg. At sixteen he didn't really have a friend and was slightly apart from the other cliques in his class, until the arrival of Konradin von Hohenfels, the elegantly-dressed son of the aristocracy. For some reason Hans and Konradin became the best of friends, spending a glorious summer walking in the Swabian hills, comparing their coin collections and talking about everything. Only slowly does it occur to Hans that whilst Konradin is made welcome in his home, Hans can only visit Konradin's home when his parents are absent. This was February 1932 and in the closing years of the Weimar Republic. Full review...
101 Detectives by Ivan Vladislavic
101 Detectives had me baffled. The book comprises of a collection of stories which explore multiple themes from the perspective of one person. The stories are as varied as the characters presenting the tale to you. This exquisitely written book leaves you asking many questions and pondering many ideas. Full review...
Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Paul Leibovitz was a journalist. That was before. Before he had a small child, who did not survive as long as he should have. Before the end of the marriage that did not survive the loss of a child. Now Leibovitz himself, merely survives. He lives in a kind of self-imposed exile on Lamma, third largest of the Hong Kong islands, a place of greenery and solitude. Full review...
The Just City by Jo Walton
Urged on by her brother Apollo, goddess Pallas Athene founds the Just City of Atlantis – a city based on Plato’s republic. Filling it with an assortments of adults collected from throughout time, as well as ten thousand ten year olds, (one of whom is a disguised Apollo). Whilst the city flourishes, the arrival of Socrates may prove to be a fly in the ointment… Full review...
The Man With The Overcoat by David Finkle
Why would anyone - he was soon to ask himself innumerable times - take a coat from a complete stranger only because it had been offered? Skip Gerber steps off the elevator after a long day at work; the foyer of his office building is busy and buzzy and he does not notice the man holding the overcoat until the man hands it to Skip telling him to take very good care of it. Skip unthinkingly grasps the coat and before he has the chance to realise what he is doing - and that he is now holding an overcoat of unknown providence - the man disappears out of the exit door to the building. Full review...
The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein
Frances comes from a 'desperately artistic family', her father a medical illustrator and her mother an interior designer. Along with her younger sister Sarah, she grew up in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan: bunk beds for the girls and a fold-out sofa bed for the parents. The claustrophobic atmosphere has gotten to everyone and now, with Frances graduating from college, it looks like the family might fall apart. Her parents argue constantly and disapprove of Sarah's fiancé (not just because he isn't Jewish). Frances has her own romantic crisis: after a pregnancy scare, Robert breaks up with her. A high-flyer with a future in politics, he tells her that her art has no purpose; it isn't helping anyone. 'What does it matter if you do what you love, if what you love doesn't matter?' she asks her father. Still, she has no other prospects, so agrees to take up a painting apprenticeship in the furthest reaches of Norway; 'All I had was a direction, north.' Full review...
Dancing to an Irish Reel by Claire Fullerton
Hailey was on a sabbatical from her job in the music business in Los Angeles and taking the holiday of a lifetime to Ireland, when she walked into the Galway Music Centre and found a job which she simply couldn't turn down. She also found a home in a local village, a liking for the rural life and a man whom she could love. Liam Hennessy was a talented accordion player: music was his life and whilst he was more attracted to Hailey than he had ever been to another woman it wasn't entirely clear whether 'love' could ever be on the cards for him. Full review...
An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass
The title story, which appears first, is exactly what it says on the tin: one hunter's story of travelling to remote islands to take part in massive culls of great auks, until they were simply gone. It's always hard to believe that species that once numbered in their millions, such as the passenger pigeon, could go extinct so quickly, but when you read about the brutal slaughter tactics here – swinging clubs and boiling birds alive – you can see how a flightless bird was a sitting target. The narrator makes no real attempt to defend himself: the birds were there for the taking; that was that. Still, he regrets their extinction, because 'in any loss you can see a shadow of the way that you will be lost yourself.' (Those interested in the great auk's extinction may also want to read the 2013 novel The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page.) Full review...
Re Jane by Patricia Park
Growing up in Flushing, New York –Jane Re has long been hoping to escape her whole life. A half-Korean, half-American Orphan, Jane struggles to find her place as a spirited and intelligent young woman growing up in a strict and mirthless family, observing the traditional Korean principle of “Nunchi” (a combination of good manners, obligation and hierarchy). Desperate to escape, Jane is thrilled when she becomes the au pair for a rich couple – two Brooklyn based professors of English, who have adopted a young Chinese girl into their family. Jane soon falls for the man of the family, but their blossoming affair is soon curtailed by a family death, prompting Jane’s return to Korea. As she learns more about herself, her history and her culture, Jane must make huge decisions about her life, her future, and her man… Full review...
Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance by Patricia Duncker
Sophie and the Sibyl, consciously modelled on John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, is a postmodern blending of history, fiction, and metafictional commentary. Brothers Max and Wolfgang Duncker really were George Eliot's German publishers, but the accident of their surname matching the author's makes them her clever stand-in. As the novel opens in 1872, the venerable English author is exploring Homburg and Berlin in the company of her 'husband' while ushering her latest novel, Middlemarch, into German translation. Max, a young cad fond of casinos and brothels, has two tasks: ensuring Eliot's loyalty to their publishing house, and securing Countess Sophie von Hahn's hand in marriage. Full review...
Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume
Every Tuesday he goes into town. This particular Tuesday he sees an advert for a rescue dog that's been badly treated by its previous owner. Somewhere the ad strikes a resonance and he adopts the dog, calling it Oneeye (yes, one word, just like that). Gradually over shared meals a friendship grows and develops over the seasons as the spill of spring turns to summer's simmer, through the falter of autumn and on to withering winter. Full review...
