[835] My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry – Fredrik Backman

“They’re ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you’re bitten by one you don’t just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination . . . you wither away year by year until your body is just a shell.” (Ch.5, 46)

Elsa is an 8-year-old smartypant who gets bullied in school for her precociousness. Her only friend, and best friend, is her eclectic grandmother. Elsa’s precociousness along with her granny’s disregard for societal rules mark them as trouble to most people they encounter and make Elsa a pariah at school. To escape from reality, Elsa journeys to a fairy realm created by her granny, the Land-pf-Almost_Awake, with six kingdoms, each with its strength, purpose, and interlocking mythologies. When granny dies, she leaves Elsa a treasure hunt—she gets tapped to deliver a series of letters of various people in her building, and she is compelled to find out the secrets behind why there is a message of apology to all of them.

The fairy tales can often get the better of the main story. They can somewhat overwrought and tedious but Elsa’s adventures press on the pages. There is quite a system granny has invented for the relationships between her imaginary kingdoms. As Elsa learns about the troublesome day on which she was born, she is also enlightened to the philanthropic work her granny did as a surgeon and why her work had alienated her mother. It doesn’t surprise that the hunt reveals that each of the misfits in the building has a connection to her granny, and they are all hurt, damaged souls who have a story reflected in granny’s fairyland. It’s quite a complex tale and is intricately woven. Sometimes it gets really tedious, but it captures beautifully the honestly of children and obtuseness of adults.

(Note: I picked this up because of the universally acclaimed The Man Named Ove; but I am glad I have read this first and save Ove for later because the reviews are all in favor of Ove.)

372 pp. Simon & Schuster. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[831] The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive in him.” (Ch.31, 140)

The Days of Abandonment (Il Divorcio) is the raw, ferocious depiction of one woman, Olga, and her descent into disarray after her husband of fifteen years suddenly announces that he is leaving her because he is confused and unhappy. He manipulates Olga to call the shot of their separation. After he leaves, Olga has to care for the two children in addition to housework. She would sit in her increasingly disorderly home, writing letters to Mario and trying to identify the moment when her marriage ceased to be the mature partnership that she’d always thought it to be.

… and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. (Ch.26, 124)

What makes the book so powerful is the voice, first-person, caught in space between telling a story and explaining, justifying to herself what had happened to her marriage. Reader gets inside Olga’s head, witnesses her erratic thoughts, her dangerous motives, her hallucinations, her rage, her pain and her desperation. This is when the book sometimes get too difficult and muddy. She plunges into this vertigo where she cannot help lash at society and turn cynical and sarcastic, and withdraw her trust in people. She’s in a purgatory of rage and bereavement.

Without herself knowing, she has taken absence of her sense and lapsed into a momentary loss of sanity. But it’s almost as if this trip to hell and back is necessary and conducive to the healing. She’s making decisions that have sure consequences. She’s in self-scrutiny but also self-denial. Between reason, insanity and survival, she continues to live. It reads like a monologue of someone thrives to fight, who might have taken absence of sense but never an absence of morality.

187 pp. Europa Editions. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[830] The Red Notebook – Antoine Laurain

“How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?”

Set in modern-day Paris, The Red Notebook is the story of a bookseller who finds a handbag in the street one day, takes it home with him, empties out its plethora of contents and decides to look for the woman who owns it. Unbeknownst to him, the handbag belongs to this woman had been mugged the night before.

The book is a gem of a novella. It uses a found object as the pivot on which to turn a tale of happenstance. Laurent Letellier is a banker-turned-bookseller in his mid-forties. Given the handbag provides no information on owner’s contact and identity, he combs through the personal effects and reads through the journal for clues. Ensued is a whimsical experience of nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened or will happen–he gets to know her and her preferences and intimate details through her words but not knowing her in person.

Who is she? What does she do for a living? Why so many keepsakes in a small handbag? The aggregation between owner and finder is lightly spun, but eventually joined by the inventory of objects that bodes well for their kinship. This novella observes the totemic power of belongings. That Laure fought her mugger and grieved the loss of her bag speaks for the value of it—a piece of life that is irreplaceable. Laurain really captures the potent combination of sentiment and association attached to the most unlikely things.

A tale of serrendipity.

159 pp. Gallic Books. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[812] Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

Revisit of this classic in light of the recent events that implicate the assault on individual freedom and freedom of speech in Hong Kong

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” (Book Three, II, 249)

1984 is bleak and eerily prophetic. It is sadly more relevant today. Written in 1949, Orwell asked himself what Britain would look like if it fell prey to either one of the totalitarian creeds that dominated the mid-20th century. From this basic inquiry ensued a speculative dystopian novel, 1984. The novel creates a world so plausible, so frightening, so complete that to read it is to experience another world, in which

all the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. (Book Two, IX, 210)

Winston Smith lives in a country where individual thought is banned, where emotion is suppressed, where only the leader, Big Brother, is allowed to reason and to decide. Prodded by his natural need for reflection and critical analysis, he finds it difficult not to question the wisdom of the Party. In a dystopian society where all thoughts are under surveillance, no one would have suspected that Winston (and Julia, with whom he falls in love) is capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism), After all, Party-member Winston is one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers who rewrites, rectifies, and modifies records such that every statement and prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct. In other words, infallibility of the Party must be ensured even at the expense of truth and history. History could be altered and events of the past erased to ensure this controlled reality. By feeding false information and turning lies to truth, people are deprived of their human qualities.

Winston’s fellow intellectuals have sold their inalienable right to think freely for security and a semblance of physical well-being. More chilling than the Party’s goal to perpetuate its power is the large mass of common people who do not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught. When he comes across a newspaper about three men who had been wrongfully condemned for treachery and intrigues against the Party, he falls prey into traps and is doomed. He is “converted” and “made sane.”

When I read the book as a young teenager, what holds me is the fate of the lovers, who are arrested by Thought Police for having individual thoughts, and their doomed attempt to taste freedom. Over time 1984, its portrayal of a totalitarian tyranny roaming in the fray of my consciousness, becomes a political statement, an admonition to mankind, and a standard by which one is to gauge how far society has fallen in terms of individual freedom. Orwell proclaims that 1984 could happen if man did not become aware of the assaults on his personal freedom and did not defend his most precious right—the right to have his own thoughts. Man shall become so helpless, near-sighted, and deceived that they would surrender freedom for short-term happiness.

328 pp. Signet Classic. Pocket Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[806] The Sisters Mortland – Sally Beauman

Published under The Landscape of Love in the United Kingdom

“I can feel the force of my stare, over thirty years later . . . It had never occurred to me that these three girls, whom I’ve already pursued for months, alive with curiosity, peeping out at them from trees and hedges, spying on them in the church, even in the house, wondering if they will be my friends, . . . Are they assessing me, dismissing me, accepting me or judging me?” (Ch.26, 359)

With a slow beginning, this novel, revolving around three sisters in their derelict abbey-turned-home in 1967, grows in me as their complex relationships, between themselves and with their admirer friends, run the courses to an excruciating end.

Adolescent Maisie narrates the first quarter up to the end of the tragedy that befalls her. Despite a mild mental disorder that confines her to her home, she is bright and well-versed, endowed with an intractable will and peculiar thinking. She keenly observes the maturing of her older sisters: the bookish and emotional Finn and the alpha female-ish, vain Julia. They over the years become inextricably entwined with the friends and the tragedy that summer becomes the focal point by which they contemplate in later years what have gone wrong in their lives.

Along the visitors are Lucas Feld, a transient young painter executing a portrait of the sisters, Daniel Nunn, the gypsy grandson of the family housekeeper who is in love with both Finn and Julia, and Nicholas Marlow, a neighbor training to become a physician. Maisie watches their coming and going in silence. She withdraws to her world of reading and dusty keeping, and communes with the abbey’s dead spirits. She is an outsider, the family misfit. Despite the family’s effort to protect her, trauma befalls her and nobody knows why she jumps off the abbey tower.

Dan’s narrative, which makes up s heft portion of the book, is one of wrenching memories. He’s also prompted to search for the past of his family and the circumstances under which his mother died while giving birth to him. He’s a filmmaker burned out from drugs and travel, stricken by a sense of loss and misery. He has a moment of mental clarity—being on the verge of death but for the critical assistance that reaches him. He sees in a moment his whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before him simultaneously. These images are all retrospective of the days leading up to Maisie’s tragedy in the abbey back in 1967.

Beauman paces the book well, carefully weaving the different perspectives together. Maisie’s dreamy and vague narrative is justified as more details are revealed later by Dan. Suffice to say that what happens to Maisie and the cause of it have lasting impact on everyone in years to come. Beauman also depicts Britain as divided between the poor and the privileged through Dan’s self-pitying rant on dreams unfulfilled. The ultimate driving momentum is the plethora of secrets and betrayals, the infidelities, the lies piling up on lies over the years. It’s an exploration into how secrets come back to haunt us, how nothing is as it seems, and how relationships are bound as much by love and as by guilt.

432 pp. Time Warner Books. Hardback. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[805] The Sellout – Paul Beatty

“I understand now that the only time that black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.” (Prologue, 18)

This book is incendiary and funny. In a time when race in America is at an absolute boil, Paul Beatty comes along with a book so bold and straight-forward, tackling all the racial taboo and faultlines. To the conservative mind it is repugnant, but to the liberal it’s brilliant.

In the nutshell The Sellout is about a young black man born in the “agrarian ghetto” of fictional Dickens, a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of LA, who becomes a farmer and weed dealer. He ends up before the Supreme Court because he is reinstating slavery, at least in his own house, and segregating the local middle school, erecting around town signs that scream “COLORED ONLY.” Son of a psychologist, “Bonbon” has a weird childhood in which he was subjected to many social experiments studying blacks’ behavior.

When I was young I had a reputation for being extremely lucky. I never suffered from the typical ghetto maladies . . . Hoodlums would jump on my friends but leave me alone. The cops somehow never got around to putting my name on a scare card or my neck in a choke hold. (Ch.9, 124)

When Dickens is removed from the map of California, Bonbon aka “Me” goes on a campaign to have it reinstated with the help of Hominy Jenkin, an erstwhile chattel who is the last surviving Little Rascal, who used to perform racial skits. He volunteers to be the narrator’s slave. In addition to segregate the local middle school, he creates facade of a fake charter school populated by smiling white kids that he paints across the street from the real public school, inspiring a race to racially segregated achievement.

What really makes this book shine is Beatty’s constant barrage of asides that takes precedence over the whole plot. His wicked wit, bold racial discourse give the book it’s momentum. The rich asides, so full of racial slurs and innuendos, are very incendiary and provocative. They touch on the hilarious vignettes about nearly every black stereotype imaginable. Within the humor, Beatty encourages the reader to re-examine the preconceptions of race and look at race relations in America in a new light. The book by no means suggests that black Americans were better off in the eras of segregation and slavery; instead, Beatty argues that the idea that racial issues are a thing of the past is a misguided and very detrimental concept. He calls for accountability and open discussion, dealing with inequality, prejudice, and discrimination in a honest way.

304 pp. Picador. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[804] The Visitors – Sally Beauman

“The most powerful spells known to his priests were recorded on the tomb walls—and there was a reason for that. These tombs are not about death, Lucy: never make that mistake—they’re about conquering death. Everything in them is designed to ensure safe passage through the underworld and an afterlife that would never end.” (Ch.14, 123)

Set predominantly in 1922 but spans almost a decade, The Visitors is about the story of 20th century’s greatest archaeological find in Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The story is told by the fictional Lucy Payne, daughter of a Cambridge don, who has been sent to Egypt with her American governess to recover from typhoid, which killed her mother.

In the Valley, Lucy meets the real life Frances Winlock, daughter of Herbert Winlock, American archaeologist and field curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s excavation site near Luxor. Beauman creates a firm friendship between Lucy and Frances—together they shadow the band of real life archaeologists (Beauman thoughtfully provides a list of names in chronological order and divided by geography) in sharing the mounting excitement and anticipation for the new tomb’s discovery.

The Egypt part makes up a bulk of the novel. It is the complex web of relationships and acquaintances in Egypt that will partially contribute to Lucy’s subsequent life. One of the key issues is the proposition that Howard Carter (discoverer of King Tutankhamun’s tomb) and Lord Carnarvon entered the newly discovered tomb secretly before the official opening with the relevant government officials and removed certain artifacts. This allegedly illegal act tarnishes the reputation of both men, who had achieved celebrity status at the time of the discovery. Lucy reveals the extremes to which people are driven by desire and greed. She witnesses deception and questions by what rights does Carnarvon deny the Egyptians the right to enter the tomb.

Following Lucy’s departure from Egypt, the story moves on to events to her career in writing, her reacquaintance with his father, who married her ex-homeschooling teacher Nicola, her rackety marriage to a closet homosexual, her encounter with a TV producer who asks about her experience in Egypt some 60 years ago.

Beauman has written a book with superb detail, blending real life events, fictional and factual characters really well. Although at times the events that unravel after Lucy’s departure from Egypt can be tedious and not as palpable, Beauman has a wealth of material in which to explore personal relations. Lucy makes frequent references to that past that has entrapped her but also has sustained her to an old age as she has outlived almost everyone.

Beauman’s sophisticated writing style is endearing. The style is comparable to university discourse but the prose flows seamlessly. She makes sharp observations about the behaviors and morals of the British upper class and the American wealthy elites. She really nails that sense of entitlement at the time when imperialism and colonial were at their peak. This is evident as Egyptians are scarcely present in the story, though the new and pressing Egyptian nationalism features in the background.

529 pp. Harper Collins. Hardback. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

［797］ Silent House – Orhan Pamuk

“…and the wrought iron on the downstairs window was completely rusted. I had s strange feeling: it was as if there were terrible things in this house that I had never apprehended before owing to familiarity but that I was now recognizing with surprise and anxiety.” (Ch.4, 45)

A family reunion is taking place in a village near Istanbul, where Fatima, a 90-year-old widow of a doctor, embittered and trapped in the past, is awaiting the arrival of her grandchildren in a decaying mansion. The ill-tempered woman is attended by Recap, the 55-year-old dwarf who is her late husband’s illegitimate son. He patiently tries to safeguard his dignity from the demands of his tyrannical employer and the casual cruelty of his neighbors. Over time he proves to be the glue of this estranged family and that he helps assuage the inter-generational tension.

“Do you ever feel that way: sometimes I think I’m two people. But I’ve made up my mind, I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m going to be one person, one whole, completely healthy person. (Ch.24, 283）

It’s becoming obvious that the dilapidated house is metaphoric of Turkey, which is on the verge of a military coup in 1980. Fatima’s son quit as his job in the government in protest of its injustice. Like the occupants of the ancient house where memories entrap Fatima, the Turks also are no longer in control of their own destiny. The dwarf’s nephew, Hasan, a high-school dropout, realizes that no school work will enable him to escape his society’s rigid class hierarchy. He turns to a gang of right-wing nationalists to find his place on the world. This is how one knows that violence looms in the prospect. He becomes the story’s driving and destructive force, as he and his pack collide with two of Fatima’s grandchildren. Nilgun, who is object of Hasan’s fixation, is a pretty and good-hundred leftist. Metin is the young kid with an American dream. He, too, is a lovelorn, finding love unattainable and difficult to fit into the circle of rich kids in his school.

Laden with tension, Pamuk’s way of reverting consciousness shows a nuanced society across generations. The narrative contains chapters each told from the perspective of one of the characters. Each is constrained in the individual universes. Whatever constraint from the past—be it a divorce, a disastrous marriage, unfulfilled dream, social acceptance—entraps everyone who is also caught in a time of political instability. All desire to escape from their own awareness to wander freely in a world outside true mind.

Richly layered and character-driven, this book shows the political and social strains in Turkey in the run-up to the military coup in the 1980s, with rival philosophies uncompromisingly heading to national conflicts and personal tragedies. This is Pamuk’s second novel, written 30 years years, well before he received the Nobel Prize. It’s a novel that addresses and satirized national issues of Turkey.

402 pp. Faber & Faber. Pocket Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[796] All Our Worldly Goods – Irene Nemirovsky

“The ones who fought in it remember it only too well. Collective memory is a terrible thing. They say that people tend to forget; yes, they do, but the way animals forget: they remember having suffered, but not why . . . This kind of memory is instinctive, full of blind resentment, injustice, hatred, and stupidity.” (Ch.25, 213)

Set in France between 1910 and 1940, spanning two wars, All Our Worldly Goods is a story of war, family, enduring love and star-crossed lovers. In 1911, the well-heeled Hardelot family owns a paper mill in Saint Elme, a dull, respectable town near the Somme. The matriarchs plan marriages without reference to their children’s desires. Social and financial stability are the priorities, and they are indifferent to international politics. Since the bourgeoisie does not mingle with the lower classes, marriage between Agnes and Pierre Hardelot is unthinkable, let alone allowed.

But love refuses to be stifled by respectability. When Pierre breaks his engagement with the affluent but unattractive Simone, to marry below-the-salt Agnes, the community goes abuzz in shock. To the Hardelots the marriage is a disgrace, a scandal. Pierre ceases to exist for his very stubborn grandfather, who excludes him from family business and ostracizes Agnes.

The Hardelots had lived for their factory. They had married ugly women; they had skimped and counted every last penny; they had been rich and had enjoyed fewer pleasures than the poor. They had stifled their children’s interests, thwarted their lives. (Ch.20, 167)

Over time, Saint Elme has been swept by war. Germans have occupied the town and all the men went to war. Pierre’s father Charles is killed by a shell as he prays for his son’s life to be spared. The grandfather stands strong, though the bourgeois value begins to shake. The new generation rises up and finds such obduracy absurd. History of defiance is to repeat itself. Pierre’s son Guy wants to marry Rose, the daughter of Simone, who is ever more powerful as she owns the entire Hardelot paper mill. She is still bitter about the broken engagement thirty years ago.

The book is written in a very slight, succinct manner. The prose is spare but what is unsaid between the lines really accentuates human strength in times of adversity. Despite the gossips, the aged cynicism, the bitterness, the jiltedness, Nemirovsky observes how some vague instinct makes everyone want to endure these perilous times in the bosom of the family. The Hardelots’ enduring love for each other gives them strength to pluck the elderly and the young from danger, tend the wounded, and reunite children with their parents. But it is “what goes around comes around” story that reminds us of the best of human strength—love. It is love at the end that overcomes respectability. The ending is one that is most ironic, resonating with hope and reconciliation. The book is a very subtle study of lives.

264 pp. Vintage International. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]

[788] Island and Peninsula 島與半島 – Liu Yichang 劉以鬯

First serialized in newspaper in 1975, Island and Peninsula, yet to be translated into English, portrays the reality of Hong Kong during the turbulent years between 1973 and 1975. It’s fiction with a realistic backdrop reflecting on the adverse social and economic condition of the time and on how common people cope with their difficult life. Lau insists that the book is not historical fiction, as he has no desire to chronicle the crucial events, but it rather annotates these historical events by placing fictional characters in them. They are in constant interplay with the tough demand of life in a trying milieu following the stock market crash in 1973. Many have lost their assets in entirety and even mortgaged their properties in order to pay debts. The city is hit by depression; housing is meager; commodities are scarce and their prices skyrocketing; robberies and burglaries rife; power outage mandatory; and unemployment a constant threat.

At the center of this social struggle, and thus putting it all into perspective is the Sha family, a middle class family with two teenagers. In the face of tough financial outlook, husband and wife are often engaged in heated argument over petty household matters, especially money in times of inflation and depression. Even a small expense warrants careful deliberation. They argue over stocking up toilet papers, plastic buckets (for saving water during rationing), canned food. Their bickering is often followed by a timely reconciliation, which shows how social turmoil takes a toll on individual mind and relationship. Through people’s interaction with one another, their clipped but sharp-tongued conversation, Lau really nails the nuances of people’s psyche, one that is dictated by the desire to stay afloat.

The book is not plot-driven, but the constant interplay between society and people, in particular how they respond to hostile conditions and challenges imposed on them, keeps reader engrossed. What loosely constitutes a plot is a continuous flow of contingent events imposed on these helpless people caught in a times of depression. Lau portrays a city full of ironies, which even the most rational minds have lapsed in the face of a windfall.

222 pp. Holdery Publishing. Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]