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.