Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

While the blurb on the jacket describes this as ‘a literary masterpiece’ I do beg to differ. It’s a huge read, at about 900 pages, and I did find myself skipping some of the gory murderous detail, especially in the bit where the gang members are fighting in Afghanistan. But I’m ahead of myself… The book is purportedly a memoir of an escaped Australian convict’s ten years or so hiding out in Bombay. It’s a terrific insight into the lives of slum dwellers and the gangsters in the city, though word now has it that the whole thing is wildly exaggerated and in many instances completely fabricated. We’ll never know. Roberts, known locally as Lin, moves into the slum and starts up a first aid practice. The story of this part of his life is entertaining and often endearing. However he later joins up with a gang of principalled gangsters, well semi-principalled anyway in that they don’t deal in drugs or pornography or women, and the story becomes quite bogged down in details of the gang members (whose names and characters I regularly confused, right through to the last pages of the book), the leader’s philosophical discussions, the various wars they fight and so forth. They even head off to Afghanistan to have a go at the Russians there with devastating results. The truth about who has been manipulating whom comes out at the end and is a gift for conspiracy theorists. In terms of literary merit, well, there are a lot of words and probably far too many of them. He waxes lyrical a little too much for my liking. The value of the book is in the story, which overall is a good yarn, though the ease with which he accepts the abominations that these gangs perpetrate on one another is truly shocking. If it all happened that way. In summary I think thriller readers would like this book for its story and pace. But I really didn’t like Lin and I won’t be buying the sequel.

Bream Gives me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

I got this book on recommendation from Gleebooks and I was disappointed. It’s a collection of short stories, if you can call them that, snippets and conversations all trying to be painfully witty and clever and postmodern. It’s a quick and relatively easy read if you can put up with it. I ploughed through, skipping great wads of it towards the end. This guy is an actor (played Zuckerberg in the film about Facebook) and script/screen writer and you can tell, as there is nothing literary about his style. His content is self indulgent teenaged conversations, between therapy sessions of which he seems inordinately proud. The first section, the bit about the bream, is vaguely entertaining as it charts the progress of a kid whose mother is in payback mode to the father who has abandoned her, and so takes him to restaurants because Dad has said he’ll pay for anything the kids does. But its smart-arsed and irritating overall.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

I’m not a huge fan of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels. This one is more of the same, a young couple eking out survival in their car who are lured into a model city where the organizers have people working month about in society and in prison to kick start the economy again. In typical Atwood fashion – remember The Handmaid’s Tale – all is not what it seems. Sadly this one is pretty ridiculous and not at all shocking because of that. Go back to something you do well, Margaret.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love was a self-indulgent bit of fluff. In this book, she’s more disciplined and makes a good attempt at building a terrific character, Alma, a botanist who rivals Charles Darwin in developing a theory of evolution. However I do wish the editor had been a bit harsher with the blue pencil – far too long, far too wordy and lots of extraneous waffle.

The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks

This is the surprising, shocking, incredible story of King David. Historical fiction at its best, really. Not having had a religious education, and not being Jewish more to the point I think, I knew nothing about David except for the Goliath story and an awareness of passing references to the City of David. I was also aware that the Old Testament stories are bloody and violent. So I wasn’t quite prepared for the scope and action of this story, which strikes me as rather like a biblical version of Game of Thrones with its murder and incest, homosexuality, rape, wars and mysticism. As always Geraldine Brooks has done her homework, even if the sources are limited secondaries. She tells the story of David’s life with welcome embroideries, from the time he is a shunned child sent to mind the goats through his rise on the battlefield to power to his failings and ultimate punishment. The word of ‘the Name’ runs right through the story, lending some terrific mysticism to the story. This isn’t March, though. It’s a great rollicking yarn, without the subtlety of March or the insight into its tortured protagonist. All the same, it’s a gripping read and not to be missed.

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

I’m now officially hooked on Elena Ferrante. This is the second of the four novels charting the lives of Lina (My Brilliant Friend) and Lenu, the girls from Naples whose lives take such different paths yet whose friendships remains intact. In this novel Lenu continues on to university in Pisa, struggling to accommodate the two very different cultures she finds herself living in. The emotion in these books, the suffering, the sense of loss and loss of hope, the glimmers of a possible future for Lenu, are gut wrenching but marvelous. Onto the next in the series.

The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernieres

Sadly, nothing ever lives up to the delight that was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. This is an interesting book though because it was inspired by the story of de Berniere’s grandfather, who disappeared from the family. It turned out that he left an unhappy marriage because his wife was still emotionally committed to her fiancé who had died in WWI. So this is a story about a family and their relationships during WWI. There are four daughters and three families, all connected as children through a kids ‘club’ called The Pals. It traces their progress through the war and the psychological difficulties they had to navigate as a result. Primarily it is the story of Rosie, Ash and Daniel but it isintricately connected with the families as well. But it is too long and much too wordy, especially with the pages and pages of detailed description about flying biplanes in the war and what it felt like etc etc etc. There are sub plots that don’t go anywhere, like the psychic medium who I think was in there to just to add a bit of colour. And the whole thing just flops about a bit.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Wow, what a fabulous novel. Elena Ferrante is someone who has kept her identity secret, though it is known that she grew up in Naples. This book is about childhood and adolescence in Naples and it must be informed by her own experience. And it is riveting. It tells the parallel stories of Elena, the narrator, and her best friend Lina, and their cohort of boys and girls and local families. They are poor girls in a poor neighbourhood with parents who are shoemakers and porters. Both have brilliant minds, but only one of them goes on to get an education. Perhaps because I visited Naples a couple of years ago, I found the insight into life, values and behaviours, rituals, relationships and norms utterly, utterly mesmerizing. Not only is the story compelling but Ferrante’s writing style is also addictive. I struggled a little at first, because she writes in Italian and this is a translation that has retained a lot of the convolution of Italian prose, but like reading George Eliot or Dickens, your brain soon settles into the rhythm of the language and its structure. It’s vivid, often violent, and original. I’ve come away desperate to read the next installment. I think this book is a masterpiece.

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

This is my second Patrick Gale book and I do like his writing. The other book, A Perfectly Good Man, hasn’t stayed with me unfortunately but I did note how much I liked his subtlety of style. This one is a foray into historical fiction using his own family history as source material. It is set in Edwardian times, when Oscar Wilde was being metaphorically strung up for his sexuality, and deals with Gale’s great grandfather Harry Cane who unaccountably left his a family to go to Canada to homestead on prairie land. Gale weaves a homosexual story around this, which is not implausible when you consider Harry never married in Canada. Although this is a major part of the story, there is also the Great North American Adventure story happening, with people battling it out to tame the land and eke out a living. Harry meets up with another gay man, Paul, and his sister Petra and they build their lives together. But nothing is straightforward and evil people, gossip, World War I and the Spanish flu all play their part in unraveling their happiness. This is a sensitively written book and a pretty good read really.

The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

This book is a version of Sliding Doors, three different scenarios that depend on whether the young man and the young woman get together or not. I don’t know whether it’s old age or not, but I found it hard to follow three sets of stories that were essentially soap opera plots about the worklife, successes, affairs etc of the same group of characters, without getting confused about who was doing what with whom. Because you’re telling similar stories three times, there’s never enough time and space to develop anything other than the Womens Weekly plot. So, entertaining enough but really only good for holidays on the beach when you have no intention of having to engage your brain too much.

The Green Road by Anne Enright

It says on the cover that this woman is the Laureate for Irish Fiction. She thoroughly deserves this recognition. Her work is incisive and truthful and beautifully written. She captures the rhythms of conversation with a perfectly attuned ear. This book is about a difficult mother, getting old, and living in her rambling and quite valuable house in Galway. She reminds me of many mothers, including my own, and frighteningly a bit of myself as well. She’s not nice, she’s not nasty, she’s just human with all the nasty bits and the disappointments and the feelings of love, disappointed or not. Three of her four children have left long ago to live in Dublin and Africa and Toronto. The fourth, whom I find the most interesting, is Constance. She has married well and lives close to her mother, the relationship between them is so like many mother-daughter relationships that it simply has to be drawn from life. Anyway, the four of them come home for Christmas and they bounce off one another like pinballs in an arcade game. I really liked this book because of its truth and its substance.

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

In the jacket blurb Colum McCann describes this as a poignant book and that’s a pretty good description. This is the story of and young woman and her family during the post WWII period. The characters are quirky in the extreme, people not quite down and out but almost. I didn’t really believe in them in the same way that I would believe in say Anne Enright’s characters – by that I mean I don’t know any people like these characters and their behaviours are a little larger than life - but because of this I was able to distance myself from them and enjoy them probably more than characters with whom I was more emotionally involved. The book is both funny and sad, and absolutely beautifully written. It’s another recommended read from me.

Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett

I was thrilled to find a Guardian newspaper summer reading list from all kinds of well known writers. This book was on it and I can imagine some cashed up writers prone on a sun lounge in Malaga reading this book from cover to cover. It is a page turner indeed. I am hypercritical of historical fiction and shy away from bodice rippers. However this one is really very compelling. I loved the historical period in which is was set: 1945 to 1989. It follows the lives of a loosely connected family whose various branches live in the Washington, East Berlin and Russia. It charts all those recently fascinating political events including the presidency of JFK, the lives and deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the civil rights movement in the US; in Russia we live through Kruschev and the succession of other leaders whose names I still can’t spell, right though to Gorbachev; in East Berlin of course we live with the Wall, the Stasi and the relentless dehumanization of the population. It is quite fascinating. What is not so fascinating is Follett’s really irritating prose style and interest in trivial detail. We could have cut at least twenty pages out of this 1004 page book if he’d reined in superfluous descriptions of what people ate for ‘snacks’ (for some reason every time I saw that word I wanted to throw the book at him!) and his tedious blow by blow descriptions of tawdry sexual encounters. I do not want to go with the hero as he slips his hand up under her skirt to find the soft triangular mound of her womanhood, for god’s sake. Follett is playing out his own sexual fantasies here and it doesn’t do service to what is otherwise a good story. And finally a bit of a whinge about the characters. There were too many good news stories here, too many easy paths to rock and film stardom, hell even potential Nobel prizes. We skimmed over whole lives, went in and out of marriages, babies grew up and left school, all in a superfluous and quite unsatisfying manner. I guess I found the premise so interesting that I thought someone could have written an entirely different type of book that explored some of these people’s situations in depth. But then, this is historical fiction, and that’s all part of the genre I guess. If you’re going to read it, warts and all, then this a good one.

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Never Mind I was shocked by this book. It is supposedly about a little boy, Patrick, but he hovers around the edge of the story like a little ghost, barely making an appearance and on the run from his vicious violent father (who demeans the mother and rapes the child) and from his completely uninterested mother. Two other couples make an appearance: Victor Eisen, a Jewish philosopher and his American journalist girlfriend Anne, and Nicholas Pratt, wealthy something or other and his very young and very self centred glittering girlfriend Bridget (who is as sure she will have to end up marrying him as he is that he will have to get rid of her!). These people bring insight into the situation. But it is a black and horrible story about the acceptance of the father’s sadism and brutality. Friends had told me this was a funny book and indeed its scathing satire of the upper classes is at times; however the violence of the father overshadows all. And then I discovered that the book is autobiographical. St Aubyn was either going to write it or kill himself. There are more books in the series and I will go on to read them but not expecting the witticisms and light heartedness of the Mitfords this time!

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracey Chevalier

Tracey Chevalier seems to like these stories about painters and their muses. This one was about the tapestries of the lady and the unicorn that I’ve seen in the Musee du Moyen Age in Paris, set apart in their own room for considered viewing. They are beautiful and unusual, showing a lady seducing a unicorn until it is prepared to lay its head in her lap. They also refer to the five senses and have the most beautiful background of tiny flowers. The story is really chick-lit dressed up as historical fiction but it is a great light read and perfect for holidays. The central character is Nicolas, the painter who conceives the idea. He’s a randy young fellow and his affairs help to define what goes on both in the tapestries and in the lives of the people involved: the noble women in the family who have commissioned the tapestries, the weavers and even the servants. The story is told in a series of episodes narrated by different characters such as the young noblewoman Claude, her mother Genevieve, the weaver’s wife Christine, his daughter Alienor, the painter himself and so forth. In fact you could say the story is weaving in itself – and I wonder whether Chevalier hasn’t intended that.

The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell

The third in the Corfu Trilogy, this is another collection of anecdotes from the four years the Durrell family spent in Corfu. It’s full of delightful yarns, including the time they had a party for their Indian friend Jeejee. These second books in the triology are like appendices though, having no narrative or structure to hold them together. They’re only for people that want more of My Family and Other Animals.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

I found this book quite difficult to sustain. It’s about a young and rather gutsy woman from Nevada who rides motorbikes and does downhill ski racing, who decides to go to New York to pursue her conceptual art practice. She is described as a ‘landscape’ artist, and her interest is in taking photos of speed – tracks in the snow that sort of thing. She meets an older Italian artist, on the run from his family who own a rubber and tyre making empire. He makes polished metal boxes for the art world and is very successful. A lot of the next part of the novel deals with the world of conceptual art and artists in New York in the 1970s and with the run down neighbourhoods of Little Italy, where Reno lives, and SoHo where the artists are just moving in. Conversation, in my view pretentious and lengthy, absorbs the writer through all this, and I found it hard to wade through the meaningless rants of the artists. The book comes to life when Reno and Sandro go back to Italy and she stays with his dreadful family in Bellagio. We’re thrown into the political turmoil, kidnappings and murders that were taking place then. The characters are intensely drawn, the conversation riveting and the action fascinating. I was not pleased with the end of this book, where I didn’t feel that Reno had moved on or learned much. It was almost as if she had been a quiet observer, when in fact she hadn’t been that at all. She’d been intimately involved in the art scene, in a love affair, and in extreme political action, and for a girl who had taken the risks of high speed racing and a solo move to New York to try her hand in the art world, her lack of response, the fact that she just goes on as if nothing has happened, just doesn’t ring true.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I really love Ishiguro’s other books, especially The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He seems unafraid of trying different genres, and this one is indeed a very different genre. It is a fantasy/fable. It is set in the time after the death of the Briton King Arthur when there is relative peace between the Britons and the Saxons, who had arrived in England more as settlers than invaders. But this peace is held in place by the mists of forgetfulness and change is coming. The characters are the old Britons Axl and Beatrice, the last of Arthur’s knights Sir Gawain, and the two Saxons, the warrior Wistan and the boy Edwin. They are created like characters from fables, performing a function, their conversation like poetry. They are all on their own quests: the old couple to find reclaim their memories and find their son, Gawain and Wistan to battle the dragon, Edwin to find his mother. Of course all these quests are symbolic and their true purposes are only gradually revealed. The entire story reads like a mix of Arthurian legend, Tolkein (who based his stories on the same) and even Beowulf. It is populated by ogres and dragons and pixies. There are weird women in black flowing robes and monster creatures in lairs. A spell lies over the kingdom. These are the characters of mythology and they move through the novel in an elegant sort of dance. But this is not a fast moving adventure. It is as slow-paced and thoughtful as the gradual recovery of memories that occurs throughout their journey, true literary fiction, and something to be savoured rather than read greedily.

Summer House with Swimming Pool by Herman Koch

My goodness this man is a chilling writer. I loved the last book of his I read, The Dinner, but this one is possibly even better. It is another psychological thriller, about a doctor, Marc, his family – wife Caroline and daughters Julia and Lisa – who go on holidays with an actor, Ralph, and his wife Judith. They meet up with a film director Stanley and his girlfriend Emanuelle. In case anyone other than me reads this, I’m not going to describe the pivotal event that occurs. But you feel it coming with a sense of horror, through the technique of a first person narrative with Marc is telling the story in retrospect. There’s a chilling sense of impending trouble that makes you read this book in great greedy gulps. The characters are marvellously drawn; the men in particular are truly awful people. Their characters are mean spirited and unpleasant and they have particularly dubious moral compasses. But they too are compelling, like watching a snake. There’s a lot to think about in this book – parallels between characters, morality, the relationships between males and females – so it would be a fantastic choice for a book club discussion.

Maggie and Me by Damian Barr

I bought this book because I heard Damian Barr reading at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. If I had realised it was going to be a misery memoir, I wouldn’t have bought it but I am so glad I did. It is not only a memoir of an unbelievably rotten child’s up bringing but also one of his coming to terms with his sexuality in a place where ‘jessies’ are likely not only to be ostracised but also to be physically harmed. Barr grew up in Motherwell, a mining town an hour out of Glasgow. It’s rough and the people in it are violent, uneducated, hard drinking and mean spirited. His mother is damaged in so many ways – by her own upbringing, by alcohol by a rain haemorrhage, by a series of violent husbands and boyfriends. Yet there is a strain of love that persists, something I found very comforting – she always gets the kids up for school, she opens tins of soup and packets of fish fingers for their tea, she loves him. He finds friends and teachers, who although they stand solidly in the background offering respite and opportunities where they can, still cannot rescue him from his situation. Only he can do that. And he does, lurching through life, grasping educational chances and making it out. The link with Maggie Thatcher, who is quoted throughout the book, I find tenuous. I think what Barr is saying is that the harshness and unfairness of her government, and her exhortations to tough it out and do better for yourself, were actually some kind of challenge to him, in a sense making him angry and determined enough to escape Motherwell and build a life for himself. There are some very endearing moments in this book, a lot of black humour, and some horrifying ones, especially as they are autobiographical. I came out of it liking and admiring this very brave man and glad that he fought his way out to a better life.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

On the all-time favourites list of a couple of people I know, this book is an absolute treat. It’s modern historical fiction, the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s long term affair with Mamah Cheney, a client, and of how both she and Wright left their families to ‘elope’ to Italy. They returned to the house he built for them in Wisconsin. Mamah is a complex character and of course the writer had to pull together what information she could to develop her character. But I believed wholeheartedly in her. As an intellectual, feminist and translator, who put her principles above the learned conventions of the traditional mother role, she reminded me of many of the firebrand revolutionary women of the time who were prepared to sacrifice anything for their belief in self. I also liked too Horan’s take on Frank Lloyd Wright. I found him utterly believable, indeed many aspects of him recognizable from the several truly creative people I have known closely. This is a wonderful read: well written, passionate and a fascinating story to boot. Just don’t look up the story or anything about it before you finish the book because if you don’t already know this story, the ending is a complete surprise.

Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Looking for something of an easy read on holidays I found this on my Kindle and thought I’d give it a re-run. I found myself looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to read it, so painless and lightly entertaining was it. It’s a series of anecdotes about Durrell’s life on Corfu, where he lived from the age of 10 to 14 with his family. The previous novel My Family and Other Animals charted the whole story but this book is just additional stories, like the encounter with a gypsy man and his dancing bear, a trip to go night fishing and so forth. They are not the best of his stories – he’d already used those – but they were gently entertaining and a good respite from the more serious literature I’ve been reading for the past month.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This is a compelling book, chronicling the lives of four generations of the Whitshank family in Baltimore. By and large the story centres around their family home, the building of it, the living in it and the departure. The people are fascinating because they are so flawed and so real. Tyler jumps back and forth as the stories of each of the characters are revealed and they are indeed touching, often sad but surprising in their revelation of the grit and resilience that people find within themselves. So we begin with Linnie and Junior, who come together from poverty and an almost backwoods existence to build their future together; their children Red and his sister; Red’s wife Abby and their kids Amanda, Jeannie, Denny and Stem and their families as well. It is satisfying to see how Tyler works family characteristics through the generations. Although her novels could easily become soap operas, they never do. She’s a master of low-level miserable relationships.

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

This is a weirdly collated set of five short story type chapters that I have trouble connecting. They are set in various periods of time and occasionally there is a reference to a place or event that happened in another of them, for instance in the last story Freddy the protagonist is thinking about buying an apartment in an old workhouse that appeared in an earlier story. But minimal references like this can’t be the point of this novel can they? Well yes, they possibly can: at one point there is a reference to after death when our atoms mingle with other atoms to reappear as flowers or trees or the hand of a baby somewhere. So these ‘memories’ or reappearances of things and times and places are part of that. I think a lot of it is about isolation. Each of the characters wanders through the story seeking connections and intimacy and once they find it, they lose it again. In the first story the British schoolteacher come secret service agent is betrayed by the French girl he is in love with; in the second the entrepreneurial Billy loses his wife; in the third Elena the researcher loves a man she can’t have; in the fourth Jeanne falls in love with a priest and in the final story Freddy is abandoned by the love of his life. I found this a pretty unsatisfying book despite Faulks trying to be clever. It took me quite a while to understand what he was trying to get at and I still think I’ve missed most of it; in the meantime, with the exception perhaps of the last one, the stories lacked animation and hope.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

A first novel, I think, this is a sort of cross between chick lit and historical fiction with a sort of unresolved supernatural twist. Set in the late 1600s, it tells the story of Petronella, an eighteen year old Dutch girl from the country, who is married off to a wealthy Amsterdam merchant. He gives her a cabinet house – the real one can be seen in the Rijksmuseum – and she finds a miniaturist to help her furnish it. But as the tiny contents of the house begin to arrive, she soon discovers that the miniaturist is foretelling the future. All very spooky. The book was interesting only in that it gave a historical fictionist’s view of the Netherlands during that period, where the burgomasters and the church were all powerful guardians of people’s morals and behaviour. It was a pretty thin effort I thought and worth reading only in the absence of something better.

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

At 700 pages, this book has kept me quiet for many weeks now, interspersed with a couple of lighter reading moments. It should be required reading. We’ve all heard people complaining about bias in history books; well this one tries to address that bias by telling the history of America from the point of view of everybody other than rich, white, powerful men. Zinn writes about class warfare in the USA, which began with the enslavement of blacks and the annihilation and displacement of the Indians, and continued with tenant uprisings, slave revolts, abolitionist agitation, the feminist upsurge, the Indian guerilla warfare. ‘After the Civil War,’ he writes, ‘a new coalition of southern and northern elites developed, with southern whites and blacks of the lower classes occupied in racial conflict, native workers and immigrant workers clashing in the North, and the farmers dispersed over a big country, while the system of capitalism consolidated itself in industry and government.’ The book is the story of land grabs and economic favouritism, unconscionable governments (both Democrat or Republican) favouring the wealthy elite who were and still are integral to their rule, their flagrant disregard of laws that were instituted to protect ‘the people’ and their rights and, at the centre of all this, war: imperialist war motivated by the desire for markets, the desire to keep a war economy ticking over, the desire to impress the world with America’s military might. Zinn includes a chapter on hope, where he details the small but determined groups who stand up to the government on behalf of the ‘little’ people, the women, the migrants, the blacks, the Indians, the poor and disabled. But this book was written in the 1990s and revised before the second invasion of Iraq and I seriously wonder how Zinn would view the changes to the American psyche as a result of that.

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

Well he’s done it again. I could not put this book down. It sustained me through an hour’s wait in the doctor’s waiting room where I was so enthralled that I didn’t even hear the fifteen screaming children climbing all over the chairs, and back home to an afternoon on the couch with a handful of Easter chocolates. So what’s so good about Ian McEwan? Well, for starters the moral issues he raises. And in this book they are doozies. The protagonist, Fiona, is a senior judge in the family court and during the course of the novel touches on a couple of cases including religious education choices for the children of separated parents, one of whom is a member of a fundamentalist Jewish sect. Fiona’s judgment on this case is detailed and fascinating. The main story though revolves around a boy, Adam Henry, a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who is underage and refusing a life saving blood transfusion. Fiona becomes involved with him, and her handling of the case changes both his life and hers. Every word counts in these McEwan novels. In this one, it was the introspection, Fiona’s detailed thoughts, captured in a voice so intimate that I felt as if I had a window into her mind. And of course rational and intelligent as she is, there are no easy answers to all the questions that beset Fiona in this novel. The other thing I noticed was the timeframe, small and gem-like, which reminded me of another favourite novel Saturday. There were hints of Enduring Love as well. Altogether this is one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in a while.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My reactions to this story oscillated between sadness and amusement. The story is about a psychologist father who raises a chimpanzee as his daughter, alongside his human daughter of the same age and his older son. When things fall apart, the family falls apart as well but it’s never really spoken about openly within the family. While the consequences sit with these people for the rest of their lives, it’s only when the human sister Rosemary becomes an adult that things become clear. It’s a sad tale because everybody suffers from the father’s earnest, but I believe misguided, quest for understanding. It rang all together too true following the publicity about the fate of Nim, a chimpanzee raised in similar circumstances and about whom there was a film made recently. Heart breaking stuff really. We are thrilled by the humanity of these animals and exploit them in our search for more knowledge and then junk them, despite their recognizably near-human emotions and intellect, when our research purposes are fulfilled. At the same time this story is whacky, filled with extreme and very odd characters undertaking all sorts of crazy adventures. I didn’t really find that part of it believable yet it was in the middle of another story line (the chimp one) that was very close to reality. An odd mix.

Ducks on the Pond by Anne Summers

I identified very heavily with Anne Summers as I read this book. She’s always been someone I admired, though my knowledge of her was pretty sketchy. This book is her autobiography, up until the mid 1970s. She grew up in Adelaide and it charts her difficult relationships with her family, in particular her father, her self doubt and her search for somewhere where she might fit in and do something with her life. It talks about her interest and involvement in politics and socialism, her brush with Marxism, and her very important role in the emergence of feminism. It’s hard to encapsulate such a moving and forthright story in a paragraph here and do it any kind of justice. Suffice to say her story must be familiar to many women my age. Reading it, I felt that we shared so many experiences that she might have been my sister – and I imagine she would say, that’s what the sisterhood is all about!

Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre

I really didn’t know what was going on in this book for much of the time. It is very slow in the unraveling, even though it is housed in the form of a novella and so can easily be read in a couple of hours. It is a horror story of sorts, throwing a computer sciences professor Ariel up against a creepy family in an equally creepy Victorian guest house on the British coast. But DBC Pierre didn’t really give himself over to the horror, and seemed more concerned with concocting weird conversations that didn’t hang together and equally weird events. I suppose they were clues but I didn’t get them. The main character Ariel is on his way to meet his lover and the whole thing revolves around the frustration of not being able to communicate because phone signals are not working. His attempts to communicate on a borrowed phone have the sense of one of those nightmares where everything moves slowly and you try to do something and can never execute the action. And I’m sure that’s deliberate. So I found this a disconcerting book, a bit annoying to read because I had no idea what to make of it and wasn’t entertained enough along the way to finding out what it was all about.

Stoner by John Williams

There seems to be some debate about the smallness versus largeness and the sadness versus happiness of this book. Stoner by John Williams was published fifty yeas ago or thereabouts and received minor recognition. It is the story of William Stoner, a farm boy whose quiet parents quietly decide to acquiesce to his wish to go to college to study agriculture. There he has an epiphany and discovers English and more specifically grammar and the effect it has on literature. He becomes a teacher and the rest of the story is about his life as a teacher in college. Some people think this is a sad book but Williams didn’t, and neither do I. It’s a book about Everyman, his daily life, small pleasures, larger disappointments. Some people do better than others. But this man Stoner goes through life doing the work he loves, making and breaking relationships, with the highs and lows and sadnesses that the ordinary person experiences. Apparently the book has not been picked up in the USA. It’s cheeky of me to comment but I wonder if that is not because of that culture’s interest in narrative. I know they test various film endings to see which one appeals and they’re not big on unhappy endings, whereas the Europeans revel in them! I know this isn’t a film, of course, but I wonder if there is a cultural perspective there. Anyhow, this is a wonderful book. A friend of mine recently told me that she sometimes finds herself with an overwhelming feeling of general sadness, for no particular reason, though she is definitely not depressed. I feel that from time to time as well, a sort of sadness that recognises the way the world is, our limitations, our powerlessness and how temporal it all is. And this book taps right into that. I read it slowly and often went back to reread paragraphs and phrases, afraid of missing a word or an observation while distracted by the quest for story. It is beautifully written and a book that everyone should read.

The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion

Good on you Graeme Simsion. Here’s another delightful book about the very odd Don, now married to the beautiful but challenging Rosie, and a Baby Under Development. It’s intelligent and original chicklit really but ideal for summer reading on the couch. My only gripe is that like the Harry Potter books and the Tolkein films, the first one is surprising and delightful in its originality, but the second one is more predictable. What made you laugh out aloud in the first, only makes you smile in the follow up.

Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones

Adam Mars-Jones’ hero John describes himself as a pilcrow, the sign for a paragraph, in his view an unusual piece of typography. And he is unusual. John has something called Stills Disease, which is a form of arthritis that utterly disables him. But it’s his character that makes him unusual. The novel explores the first fifteen years of his life in minute detail. At one point John talks about his progress being an inch and a half at a time and this book is a bit like that. But it is not for a moment tedious. In fact, the book is completely engaging. In every other way this boy is a normal child, though brighter than most, and spends his time manipulating a wonderful cast of characters that populate the special schools where he needs to live and gouge out an education. It’s clear from early on that he’s gay and his sexuality develops like any other normal healthy boy, full of fumblings and discoveries. This all sounds quite serious, a chronicle of how a disabled boy makes his way through life, morally good for you to read and applaud. But it’s not like that at all. It’s wicked and naughty and funny and sad in turn. John is a typical, wonderful, at times immoral boy. He’s a witty and sometimes scathing observer of the people and situations around him. He’s open and unapologetic for his often self serving and opportunistic behaviour yet has a streak of endearing kindness and empathy running through him. It’s a very funny book, often wicked, and with wonderful characterization. I found it refreshing to see how this disabled boy manages to navigate the early years of his life and come to terms with a very healthy sexuality – not something people normally think about when they consider those with a disability. That’s all there is to this book, a chronicle of fifteen years, but the elegance of the prose, the humour and wit and its originality make it one of the must read books on anyone’s list.