Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Set on Edge by Bernice Rubens

This is the second Bernice Rubens novel I’ve read and although my friends highly recommend her, she’s not doing it for me. She writes as an observer, never really engaged with or absorbed by her characters. It’s like being a voyeur into their very odd, distinctly uncomfortable lives. As the raconteur, Rubens takes us through the day to day uncomfortable moments of their small existences as they resolve who they really are – in this case a middle aged lady called Gladys who has martyred herself to look after her siblings and aging mother, and is indeed, pretty much a replica of her mother. Turns out she is who she is. Some have suggested there is a black humour about her books. Black, definitely, but as for humour, well it’s not really apparent to me. I don’t believe in this writer’s characters and I don’t find their stories interesting, just small, gloomy and depressing.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

N-W by Zadie Smith

I read White Teeth a very long time ago and loved it, then was disappointed in The Telegraph Man. However a bookshop person persuaded me to buy this book and I’m glad I did. This is no easy read. It’s a gritty book, a downer rather than an upper, but it has an almost anthropological ring to it, or perhaps a sociological ring might be a better word. It’s the story of four young people who have grown up and known one another on a council housing estate in northwest London. There are flashbacks to their childhood but essentially it’s about where they are now, in their thirties, and where if anywhere they are heading. It’s oddly constructed, first in chapters then in almost sound bites, and much of it written in the local street jargon. Smith makes the reader work hard to comprehend what’s going on; by that I mean she doesn’t spell things out and explain them, rather you have to be on your toes and really think about what a particular passage might be referring to. I came away from this novel feeling saddened but as if I had really experienced their lives in some small way. The blurb on the jacket described it as funny, sad and urgent – I think I’d change the order of those – but agree that it is an excellent portrait of modern city life for a particular slice of society. I found the book uncomfortable but compelling.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

It took me about a month to read this utterly fascinating and absorbing book. Jared Diamond writes in a very accessible style about what people term ‘popular science’. He’s a geographer and arguably an ethnographer and this book compares traditional societies, with a heavy emphasis on New Guinea where he spends part of every year, and modern developed societies. He compares approaches to warfare, religion, child rearing, the treatment of the aged linguistics, approaches to danger, and health. It’s the sort of material that you want to remember and of course can’t, because of its detail. He presents masses of supporting evidence and you get the feeling that this is all thoroughly researched and thought out, the work of a lifetime of careful observation and follow up reading. This is a book I’ll keep on my shelf. Much of the information in it is actually a little bit life changing, especially approaches to child rearing, eating and, more broadly, in the way you view other human beings and their cultural background.