The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

‘This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing life together. In this way, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unobtainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired. And anyway, she scolded herself, the moon is hanging low and gigantic and golden over Amed, I am with my handsome husband who loves me and encourages me, who makes me feel safe. I am safe and that’s all the world wants, only the young and the deluded would want anything else, believe that there is anything more to love than that.’

There are too many words in this passage. This overblown guy could learn that less is more. And I am betting that he neither likes nor understands women.

I really don’t know about this book. It’s had such huge press and I had to wait half a year to get it from the library. But it’s like a Greek male macho version of a Danielle Steel novel, full of sex (his personal fantasies I am thinking!) and a soap-opera-intensity focus on the gritty details of people’s private lives. The premise is interesting enough – a bloke at a BBQ slaps a brat of a kid, the parents press charges and that polarises the family and friends who are at the event. The emotion surrounding their responses creates fallout for their relationships. Marriages come under pressure, friendships strengthen or fail, individuals tell lies and create mayhem in other people’s lives.

I didn’t like the characters or the characterisation, which I thought relied on shallow stereotypes. I could almost see the writer lining up a whole bunch of people he’d met in the working class Greek community and popping them into the story. I didn’t like the gratuitous language, which I still believe acts like speedhumps in the story, and I didn’t like the explicit detail of the sexual encounters – I really don’t need to know where anyone sticks their fingers, not even if it’s only in their ears. I just thought it was trashy.

But then I did think he had a handle on some of life’s experiences. The relationship between the old Greek parents rang true as did the way that some of the characters struggled with concepts like love and fidelity. Like the curate’s egg, this book was good in parts. 3 stars.

La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

There’s an undercurrent of sadness running through Kingsolver’s books. This is a really interesting story about a lonely child brought to Mexico by his dysfunctional divorcee mother and struggling to grow up. He winds up in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and becomes entangled with their lives, a relationship that becomes dangerous when Trotsky arrives fleeing Stalin’s assassins. After Trotsky’s murder, the young man finally returns to America where he becomes a famous writer but is subsequently caught up in the post WWII anti-Communist purges. Through it all he keeps the diaries that become the basis for this book, which is posthumously published by his dedicated secretary Violet Brown. It’s great fiction - intelligent historical fiction - and beautifully written. There are particular images that remain with me – the flashy colours of Mexico that are a reflection of Kahlo’s paintings, and the image of Trotsky’s wife’s shoes, parked like little black motor cars by the bed. A book for greedy reading! 5 stars perhaps.

Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh

This is actually a trilogy: Men At Arms, Officers and Gentleman and Unconditional Surrender. So it is long and detailed and there’s plenty of time for plot and character complexity. It’s the story of Guy Crouchback, an upper class Englishman whose wife has divorced him and who is seeking to do his bit to justify his rank and privilege. The book is a detailed description of his wartime exploits between 1939 and 1945 with a 1951 epilogue. Deemed too old for active service, Guy joins up through the intervention of a friend of the family. He gets into the Halberdiers, a traditional regiment who recruit from the gentry by and large, and he goes on to do training in various parts of the country. He gets involved with a rogue brigadier, ends up moving to the Commandos, who are a group of special forces, eventually is posted to Egypt and then Crete, which is a disaster but from which he escapes in a fishing boat. Over the course of the war he doesn’t actually fire a single shot but wanders through a series of leadership and administrative jobs in an environment that is nothing short of chaotic. The story corresponds closely with Waugh’s own wartime experience, which I found horrifying because, as I said to Theo, it’s like an upper class British version of Catch-22. The characters are either hopelessly stitched up upper class Brits who are bound by pointless traditions and are utterly incapable of making a logical decision, or opportunists who are making their way in the world at war in any way they can whether it’s through spying, cheating, deserting or betraying their comrades. The conduct of the war is farcical, at times humorously so and at others, shockingly so. All of this is told in Waugh’s understated arch, satirical tone and with the character of Guy as a gently observant, somewhat gormless but rather likeable human counterpoint. My bookseller, Ian Moir, says he goes back to this book every few years and I will too if my book pile ever reduces to a manageable level. 4 ½ stars

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

I must have read other Erdrich books in the past because their names are so familiar but for the life of me I can’t remember any of them. Perhaps it’s because her plotting is sooooooo complex. This story is told by a series of characters and you do have to work hard to remember who is who and what timeframe they are talking in. But it’s worth the effort because the tale is interesting and the ending extremely satisfying. The story is set in North Dakota and is about the tension between Indians and whites – except it is how I imagine the tensions really play out, not in some exaggerated form but subtly, in attitudes and silences and for the most part, lack of action. The main character is Evelina and she’s half Indian; her grandfather plays an important role and tells his tale through her voice. There are characters including the judge and the off-the-rails cousin Corwen and the incredible members of a Davidian type sect. Over the course of the book Evelina grows up and that’s one plot but there are also the plots about the grandfather’s family history and the judge’s love affair and all of them are tied in with the one about the family of white people who are massacred and for whose death a pack of white vigilantes lynch a group of Indians. But the overriding themes are about life in small town America, and that incestuous knowledge of everybody's life and affairs that passes down over generations. The connections between people are complex and at times I found myself wondering why a particular part of the story was being told and then suddenly making the connection - oh, he’s the son or whatever. There are moments that make your heart sink in horror, moments that make you cringe, moments that make you laugh out loud and moments of such poignant tenderness that although I found this book harder work than many to read, I’ve come away glad I kept with it and convinced that Erdrich is a really accomplished writer. 4 stars

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris by Leanne Shapton

In his book Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster outlined a series of about six plot styles and said that all books conform to them. While this one is the boy meets girl, boy loses girl and then boy (sometimes) gets girl back again version, the writer has taken a really interesting and entertaining approach. She tells the story of the lovers, Leonore and Harold, through an auction catalogue. The descriptions of the items, which include many notes and letters to help the story along of course, detail their meeting, their passion, their lapse into mundanity and their separation.
It’s quaint and quirky and a very quick read. It’s a bit like a treasure hunt as you build up a picture of what the two characters are like as people. It’s also a comment, I think, on how in this society we define ourselves by things. 3 ½ stars.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The critics have loved this book – and so do I. Its appeal for me was immediate: it’s about a period in history that I find most fascinating, between the two world wars. It’s set in Czechoslovakia and Vienna, with references to the artists working at that time. And it is about the history of a house designed by an architect who worked with van der Rohe and Loos, architects I learned to admire during our time in Europe. The wealthy Landauer family employ the architect to build them a house and he creates a humdinger of a place, hanging off the hillside, with a vast plate glass fronted room that becomes a centre for art and culture in the city. The novel follows the lives of the people associated with the house - Liesel, Ottilie, Martin, Kata, Marika and Viktor and their friends Hana and Oskar - as the war progresses through first the Nazis, then the Soviets, then socialism and Dubcek. It’s sparsely written and avoids excessive imagery and embellishment, so although there’s a lot of sex and emotion, it doesn’t get out of hand and collapse into the type of sensational nonsense that a lot of historical novels do. My only criticism is that I found a couple of the sub plots unnecessary and a bit irritating and the ending a bit sentimental, almost as if he had to tie everything up neatly, which isn’t actually what happens in reality. There’s a great device at the beginning of the last chapter that really cheered me up – it’s not often you see some sort of literary trick that really ought to be but the beginning of the last chapter is just so satisfying. 4 ½ stars for this one.

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

One of the wealthy elite in London decides to give a dinner party at the end of the week. This book follows the lives of some of the people invited to that party; from time to time their paths intersect, unknowingly. I find that intriguing because it must happen all the time in real life. Faulks does incredibly detailed research into the technology of things and this book has given him the opportunity to discover how hedge funds work and to explore the way big money movers operate just within the law. I found that part quite difficult to follow and skimmed over a lot of it. But there are also characters like an Islamic activist, a bitter and twisted literary reviewer, a rather bemused Polish football player and his porn star girlfriend Olya, and a lawyer who becomes involved with a woman who spends much of her time playing virtual reality games on her computer. The window into their thoughts and motivations is quite interesting. Having said all that, I’m not the biggest fan of Faulks – sometimes it all stalls a bit and I often come out of one of his novels feeling a not quite satisfied. This one, 3 stars.