You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

I found this book in the apartment we were renting in Rome. It’s a typical holiday read, a thriller of a rather unusual kind but a book you would leave behind rather that take back home with you to weigh down your luggage. The story is about a New York Jewish therapist married to a paediatric oncologist. She’s written a book about women taking responsibility for the choices they make when they choose a man in their lives. And then of course, surprise surprise, her own marriage ends up in chaos. The chaos is pretty horrific. The husband is not all he’s cracked up to be and after the collapse of everything she goes on a sort of hunt to uncover all sorts of surprises. The ending is very schmaltzy. But pretty much what you’d expect from a holiday read. It’s compelling enough to keep you powering through it, but all the time you know this book is the literary equivalent of a Maccas.

Trespass by Rose Tremain

The plot of this book was the blackest most depressing story. It was about a particularly unlikeable older English antique dealer who had issues with both his mother and his sexuality, his sister who is living in a lesbian relationship in France and her partner, a French brother and sister who have a desperately ugly relationship and a very unhappy child who has been transplanted from Paris to the country. The English brother moves to France and decides to buy a property there from the French brother, who has to get rid of his sister from her portion of the land for the sale to go through. It goes on from there. There are no resolutions really to anybody’s issues, and nobody ends up happy or fulfilled, just more miserable than before. It’s a most depressing read and not what I expected from Rose Tremain.

The Complete Clayhanger Family novels: the first two, Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett

Bennett’s style of writing takes a while to settle into but his stories and above all his characters are wonderful representations of provincial English life. These stories are about the son of a self-made man, a printer, whose childhood in a workhouse has formed him into a hard businessman determined to succeed. And of course he has. The son is altogether different, educated and arty, but prepared to give up his dream of being an architect and toe the line as he joins the family business. I’ve only read the first two. The first details his childhood, education and entry into the printing world; the second, his success as a businessman, his first flights of love and his tentative standing up to the dominant father. I’ll be back for the others shortly.

The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

These were listed on some literary newspapers top 100 list but honestly I fail to see how this author got on that list. Talk about over-written – adjective after adjective in long convoluted sentences in unbelievably complicated stories. I hated the first two stories, which I have now forgotten in what is obviously a bid for self preservation and I’m not reading any more.

Excellent Women by Barbra Pym

I was surprised by Barbara Pym. She writes in the style of EF Benson or PG Wodehouse almost, or perhaps even Jane Austen, presenting carefully observed social satire with fine wit. But it’s different, and far more believable, and for goodness sake, it’s feminist in its sentiments! The protagonist Mildred is half in love with vicar and then falls half in love with an anthropologist called Everard, but this isn’t a love story. It’s a story about finding one’s place in the world and the value of common sense when surrounded by really pretty silly people. He writing is surprising, funny and charming and I’ll be reading a lot more of it!

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.