Questions of Travel - Michelle De Kretser

 

"I don't want to be a tourist in my own country."

"O Comboio Nocturno para Lisboa" - Pascal Mercier

Not much going on as far as reading is concerned...

Read "O Comboio Nocturno para Lisboa"(Night Train to Lisbon) as the year ended and Pascal Mercier's prose seems to have spoiled more mundane readings for me.

A book that manages to compile much of modern Portuguese history, which I, for one, tend to sometimes forget was incredibly tragic and harrowing, and create a complete philosophy in the shape of one of the most enigmatic and simultaneously magnetic fictional characters ever put to page, Amadeu de Prado.

We meet Prado through our protagonist, Raimund Gregorius, a schoolteacher in Bern who has spent most of his life buried behind books written in Latin and Hebrew. A chance encounter is all it takes - the apparently comfortable life of this middle aged divorcé is thrown into disarray after a casual meeting with a crying, Portuguese girl whose few words somehow spark an interest in an unknown language.

A visit to a book store puts a mysterious vanity press book into the hands of Gregorius: long winded meditations on several topics by a Portuguese physician who lived through the years of Salazar's dictatorship. Add a couple of books on grammar and suddenly, and completely out of character, he is boarding a night train to Lisbon, a city he has never visited.

Because luck has to favour intrepid gambles such as this, our increasingly hesitant protagonist begins almost at once to meet key figures who will help him navigate a strange city and, even more importantly, to slowly begin to make sense out of the puzzle that is Amadeu de Prado: a spiritual man who rejects organized religion and a natural philosopher and writer thrown into the path of medicine by his crippled father, a judge who, to his son's embarrassment, never spoke out against the dictatorship. Because of a tragic episode where he saves the life of a known henchman of the regime, Prado too is looked down upon by his once adoring patients - yet secretly, he collaborates with the resistance.

Slowly though, a doting older sister, a resistance brother, a former teacher and others seem to help Gregorius make sense of Prado. Or do they? Each seems to have met a different man... And so Mercier sends Gregorius and all his readers on an enthralling meditation on life, personality, choices, paths not taken and other conundrums.

Slightly over-melancholic at times the narrative holds the reader's attention through its sense of impending discovery. Will we ever get a sense of who Prado really was? Or is the answer in the first page where a few lines from Pessoa make an appearance?

Ella Maillart "Ti-Puss" & Sandor Marai "Un Chien de Charactère"

Neither Ella Maillart’s “Ti-Puss” nor Sandor Marai’s “Un Chien de Charactère” are currently in print in English. This, I think, is more than a coincidence – the English-speaking world being as ravenous for pet tales as it is nowadays.

Ah, you ask: But are these uplifting tales, stories of overcoming adversity, disabilities, abandonment and bad behavior? Well, not really and that might have something to do with it.

For in her delightful tale of life in India with a cat, Maillart lets Ti-Puss Minou run free, hunt and breed as she will (drowning or wringing the necks of at least half the littermates), takes her for walks in which the cat following her is always an uncertainty, travels in packed trains with her and generally allows her to be a semi-feral animal.

World traveler Ella Maillart lived in India for five years (1940-45) in order to study Hindu philosophy – however, following the Indian guru’s teachings on detachment became doubly difficult for the author when she began sharing her life with an animal that absolutely fascinated her. She couldn’t help but want to possess her and yet it was Minou’s wild nature that enchanted her.

Now, taking in consideration some hateful comments I’ve seen on sites directed at cat-owners who so much as allow a whisker outside the house, I can’t imagine “Ti-Puss” going down too well with Americans, not to mention the kitten-killing (but remember, this was the forties and Maillart actually tried to get someone to spay Ti-Puss, which proved impossible).

I enjoyed this book that brought to mind Konrad Lorenz’s description of the happiness he felt with the two cats that allowed him to accompany their forest strolls in “Man Meets Dog”. Cats are closer to wild animals than dogs, of course, and therefore seem to elicit in their chosen humans a surprised thankfulness: “Me, really?! You’ll allow me to feed you, gaze upon you and only occasionally scratch me? Why, I can’t thank you enough!”

Dogs can be wild too, though, as the protagonists of “Un Chien de Charactère” discover. Sandor Marai tells of a young, childless couple living in Budapest in the years after World War I. The husband decides to surprise the wife with a puppy for Christmas. The puppy, supposedly a Puli (a woolly Hungarian sheep guarding breed), is actually a much larger, mix breed of extremely bad character. Spoiled rotten, he soon starts biting everyone in the household. In those darker times, before the Dog Whisperer’s wisdom was available, the couple ends up deciding to send the dog away.

There is actually a common theme in both “Ti-Puss” and “Un Chien…”: both Maillart and Marai’s protagonist experience life with a more docile, pliable pet (Maillart with a daughter of Ti-Puss she gives away and the hero of “Un Chien…” with a polite lap-dog the couple gets after Tchoutoura). Yet both pine for the wild, independent cat or dog which brought so much trouble. This would please Lorenz immensely, he who always preferred his dogs “wolf-like” instead of docile.

Harsh as the destinies of Ti-Puss the cat and Tchoutoura the dog might seem, these stories feel real and are illustrative of sharing life with animals: there is often deep frustration, sadness and anger involved in keeping pets and that fact usually tends to get overlooked in feel-good books that portray animals as fragile beings who beg for our protection and spend the rest of their lives repaying our good intentions with unconditional love and good behavior.

In a culture that discards pets so easily for being animals (chewing, scratching, biting, barking, marking, etc) yet hails them as polite, cute, fashion accessories, these books are highly refreshing.

Horsey Reads

It would appear good horse literature is harder to find than good dog (and cat) literature.

Case in point – “Riding Lessons” by media darling Sara Gruen (she of “Water for Elephants” fame).

Annemarie Zimmer is an Olympic bound equestrienne who suffers a near fatal riding accident. Fade to black. We next meet her on the day she is fired, her husband leaves her for the secretary, her mother announces father is dying from Lou Gehrig's disease and her daughter continues to be a very adolescent teen (or the other way around). So mum and daughter take off to the legendary horse farm where she grew – is this sounding like a bad movie, yet? – oh wait, can it be that Annemarie, who has never ridden again since her accident will reacquaint herself with the equine and boyfriend of yore (who is a horse vet, a real man, not like her effeminate lawyer or whatever, husband)? Yes, it can. But since she is also one of most egotistical, unsympathetic, irresponsible and hysterical characters ever, she also finds time to two-time the poor guy with the French horse trainer (this character is soo stereotypical it’s offensive), ignore the fact her father is dying and run the farm to the ground.
Scared? You should be.

Obviously Sara Gruen learnt A Lot (although seemingly intelligent readers disagree) from this first novel (and sequel “Flying Changes”) in order to write the bestseller “Water For Elephants”. However, I’ll just have to take everybody’s word for it – since her very name causes me feelings of literary indigestion.

“Chosen By a Horse” – is actually a very nice book – a memoir of Susan Richards’ life with horses put into motion by her a adoption of a very neglected mare. I actually felt I learned a little about horses with this one (not knowing anything, that is) even though the focus is on the emotional. I liked her childhood memories and the whole moving story of the year she lived with Lay Me Down. I didn’t so much like the part where she starts dating again and encountering the mother of all douche bags, keeps on dating the guy for no understandable reason.

Needless to say my equine-lit hunger was not satisfied. Suggestions welcome.

Jiang Rong - Wolf Totem

After I finished “Wolf Totem” I went online in search of reviews. To my surprise critics everywhere seemed (at the very least) hesitant about this great book: most were uncomfortable at the harsh criticism of Chinese mentality (because they're on “our” side now and we mustn’t bother them), many resented the fact that characters talk at length about their world-views (“didactic” is now a four letter word, apparently), and quite a lot were genuinely upset at how long the book is.

I almost let out an audible sigh of relief as I read Jonathan Mirsky’s words for the Literary Review – I might not be as clueless and ignorant a reader as I thought.


Ursula K. LeGuin for the Guardian: “…that is the sorrowful theme of the rest of this long book” (which I honestly cannot believe she actually read, since she doesn’t mention the main theme of young man/ wolf cub relation). And how offensive is this entry line?
“I don't know what it means to sell four million copies of a book in China - that's a lot of books, but there are a lot of Chinese.” – ah yes, the old “there are so many of them” schtick…

Pankaj Mishra for the NY times: “It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller”

German critic Wolfgang Kubin, got so hot and bothered over “Wolf Totem” he deemed it “fascist” …

Literary critics being so much more cultured (clutered?) and informed than the rest of us, have to read this book in light of their extensive knowledge of millennia of Chinese culture and a complete understanding of contemporary politics – however, the rest of us might enjoy it for what it is: a spellbinding tale, that is also cautionary.

Clifford Coonan wrote in the Independent that “Wolf Totem” can be seen as “a moving novel of nomads and settlers and their relation with wolves on the Mongolian steppes, a guide to doing business in New China, an ecological handbook, or a piece of military strategy.”

To me, the strongest motif was one of condemnation of human nature. As we witness Chen Zhen embark on a series of bad decisions, all of them motivated by his very real love of wolves it becomes impossible not to feel strongly that human love and interest often ring the death toll for the object of their attention. Zhen regrets stealing the wolf cubs, leaving the mother bereft and the siblings dead at human hands, he regrets forcing his own bitch to nurse a wolf against her instinct, he regrets keeping the cub chained under the scorching sun, unhappy he cannot run or play with the other puppies, he regrets breaking the wolf’s incisors rendering him useless for a life in the wild and breaking his will with violence. And yet, all the time, the protagonist rationalizes to himself and others that this is the only way to “understand”, to “learn” about wolves.

Is “Wolf Totem” a rant against Chinese culture? Or is the real reason it bothers western mentality so much, the fact that it indicts all of us? Hasn’t our society been built upon the continual destruction of resources without care for the cycles of Nature? Isn’t our relation with animals built in terms of function? – for food, for work, for lab research, for our pleasure and entertainment? Aren’t we all part sheep, part Han Chinese?

Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

I was going to write a great review for this book. It would start something like this:

“1985 was the year the Russian painter Marc Chagall died. It is also the year we meet Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, the year when his waking life as the successful editor of the Soviet publication Art of the World, married to the daughter of the most revered national painter and father of two, starts slowly to mesh with a series of increasingly vivid dream-memories, triggered by long-lost faces, newly discovered relatives, the colors and streets of Moscow.

In these waking dreams Sukhanov comes to remember a time when he first (despite himself) loved art –a time when Botticelli and Dalí were not examples of decadent capitalism but magicians that made him dream as a child and strive to open new doors as a young artist; when his own father was in real life striving to discover the science that would make some of the last paintings of Chagall come true in the shape of men with wings and when the iconic paintings of Andrei Rublev stood for proud spirituality instead of feeble-minded belief.

As the daydreams become more intense and prolonged Sukhanov’s waking life starts to crumble – with Perestroika round the corner, old party dinosaur’s such as himself were no longer wanted around - and the irony that he has become expendable precisely because he has forced himself to embody the Soviet official view on art does not escape him. Midlife crisis can be painful enough without the aid of a regime disintegrating around you.”

But never mind all that. What I really want to say is that “The Dream Life of Sukhanov” is my favorite book of the year. I confidently state it today, the 17th of December. Beautiful language, a good story, food for thought and further reading, it has it all. Wonderful.

Bach Bachanalia (yes, I know it's been done to death)

Gabriel Josipovici - "Golberg: Variations"

Rereading the “Tao of Pooh” by Benjamin Hoff, I found the Tao Te Ching quote “The wise are not erudite, The erudite are not wise” which this morning immediately came to mind when I started thinking of Gabriel Josipovici. Josipovici is a very erudite writer who may or may not also be wise – though it would hardly be fair that he were both.

“Goldberg: Variations” takes the famous episode of Bach’s composition – supposedly commissioned by the insomniac Count Kaiserling, to be played by the interpreter Goldberg - and replaces the episode in England on the 1800s. Here we have Goldberg who has been summoned to the presence of Mr Tobias Westfield in his large country estate. Westfield is a chronic insomniac for whom a musician has proven no comfort – he therefore engages a writer thinking that, as a voracious reader and indifferent music lover he will find words more soothing than notes.

However, the catch as far as Goldberg is concerned, is that he is to produce original work to be read at Westfield’s bedside – and prolific and famous though he is (one chapter sees him invited to the court of King George) – the task triggers a gigantic writer’s block.

This is the start of the variations – the chapters take the reader backwards and forwards in time; seem sometimes to repeat certain themes and suddenly to introduce completely new ones, while the end brings us back to the beginning. All of which, aims to mimic the very structure of the variations.

Not having formal musical training myself I really can’t take that analysis much further. The rest are themes: conversations that range from the issue of lies in the literature of Homer,

“But is it not perhaps we who are at a fault? Asks Golberg. Do we not have too anxious a relation to truth? Earlier ages, which trusted more in providence than we do, were not afraid of lies, saw them, in fact as being necessary as speech itself to man in his dealings with others. (…) It is perhaps only those who are less than confident of the truth who fear, as we do, the indubitable power of lies.”

the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Victor,

“I am well aware of the fragility of what we call civilization, Goldberg says. I am well aware of how little it would take to turn you or me into Victors and how little even the most well-meaning would be able to do for us then. It takes years for us to feel our way up into society, years in which, with luck, our parents will help and protect us, but it takes very little to throw us back into the darkness.”

and the archeological discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae in Orkney and the family history of both Westfield and Goldberg told by different characters, wifes, sons, mistresses. Suddenly, the reader is catapulted to the present time where an unnamed author (presumably, at first, the author of the book we are reading) is on a sort of pilgrimage to see Klee’s painting “Wander-Artist” (on the cover).

Well, according to the back-cover there are loads of references to “Holderlin, Kierkegaard and others” – but, not being much of an erudite myself I must confess I didn’t exactly identify them. All in all, “Goldberg Variations” gave me the same feeling I had when, about 16 years old, I read Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” – that a lot of it, veiled references, hints etc were going right over my head (not that I figured them out in the mean time, by the way)- and frankly, it’s not entirely bad. Sometimes it’s nice to feel like there is a whole trove of knowledge to aspire to.

Just remember, it won’t make you wise.

Krazy in Kiev

Andrey Kurkov


Death and the Penguin
Penguin Lost
The Case of the General's Thumb
A Matter of Life and Death

The Soviet Union might have collapsed in ’91, but apparently, a lot of people never got the notice. Most were hit men, secret service officers, politicians and other small time crooks.
To most of Kurkov’s protagonists it doesn’t matter either way: Viktor, the other Viktor, Nik and Tolya might, on paper, be citizens of a democratic state, but the reality is somewhat different. A journalist, a police officer and a former border patrol officer they get drafted into mysterious jobs or cases never really understanding whose interests they are serving.

A couple of strange events, coincidences or plain bad luck strap them onto a crazy carnival ride at the beginning of each book, and they just try to hang on as best they can. Fortunately, they are all endowed with a Greek tragedy sense of just how pointless it is to fight destiny, or to try the emergency button: just as with most lifts in the apartment blocks of Kiev they are not working.

Viktor of the Penguin books and Viktor and Nik of General’s Thumb are all manipulated by shady characters that mysteriously appear and disappear with strange requests. Some might be trying to help but don’t bet on it – in Kurkov’s books everyone has motivations tied to countless other characters that never step out of the shadows – not so much puppet strings as a whole ball of yarn.

Between Germany, where former KGB agents are still being reactivated, Chechnya where hidden crematoriums silently perform the war’s clean-up and the Balkans where war criminals are living it up in their yachts, Kurkov takes us on a wild ride where we meet a bunch of good guys who get screwed over as predictably as Russian mobsters’ kids graduate from Oxford: there is a hit man who is fluent in sign language and has a soft spot for all creatures great and small, a quad arm wrestling team, a stream of beautiful young prostitutes with the obligatory hearts of gold, and the undoubted star – Misha the penguin – looking on an increasingly warm ex-empire, where ideologues turned into mobsters in the time it takes to down a shot of vodka.

All the protagonists’ share Tolya’s feeling in “A Matter of Life and Death”: “the strange sensation that what happened had nothing to do with me”. But, hey, maybe it was the alcohol – after all, Kurkov’s characters are not afraid to engage in a little (or a lot) of Eastern European cliché binge drinking.

It’s cold (not enough for Misha though) and somewhat depressing; good people get manipulated, their lives are expendable and in the end the bad guys get the billions stashed in the Cyprus account; or they get re-elected. So what? Play your cards right and you might get a state appointed apartment, a Bosnian girlfriend or at least a couple liters of melon flavored vodka.
And sometimes that depressing Ukrainian crap is just plain sweet - as when Tolya’s prostitute girlfriend asks:

“Would you marry me? Lena asked out of the blue with a note of irony.”
“I think I’d rather adopt you.”

Ahhh.
Of course in the end they can’t spend New Year’s together – she’s “booked for a bankers’ “mini Decameron”.
“A what?
Orgy with group sex. I’m looking to the future, saving for a one-roomer.”

Slavs – sweet yet psycho.
You sort of want to love ‘em and still keep a safety distance of a few thousand kilometers.
Reading Kurkov is just the thing.

in the mean time...

Famous Last Words - Timothy Findley
The Devil's Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea
I Misteri D´Italia - Dino Buzzati
Beauty Tips from Moosejaw - Will Ferguson
Il Panettone non Bastò - Dino Buzzati
The Bird Man and The Lap DAncer - Eric Hansen
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
The Telling of Lies - Timothy Findley
The Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
Manticore - Robertson Davies
World of Wonders - Robertson Davies
Spadework - Timothy Findley
Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano
Duma Key - Stephen King
Snake Hips - Anne Thomas Soffee
Monkeys are made from Chocolate - Jack Ewing
Julius Winsome - Gerard Donovan
Ask the Parrot - Richard Stark
Ghosts of Spain - Giles Tremlett
Tell Me Where it Hurts - Dr Nick Trout
The Perfect Sister - Marcia Millman
Intern - Sandeep Jauhar
Friends and Relations - Elizabeth Bowen
The Edwardians - Vita Sackville-West
Dietro la Porta - Giorgio Bassani
Una Notte del '43 - Giorgio Bassani
The Yiddish Policemen´s Union - Michael Chabon

Findley "Famous Last Words" and Eng's "The Gift of Rain"

Although very different in narrative style both Findley’s “Famous Last Words” and Eng’s “The Gift of Rain” share a remarkable similarity. They both deal with characters that, through no clear ideological affinity, end up involved with “the wrong side” in the Second World War.

Both protagonists’ voices reach us from the past: Findley’s Mauberley through his last words written on the walls of four rooms in an Austrian hotel on the Alps, Philip Hutton’s through several flash-backs that lead the reader back to the british colonial outpost of Penang, Malaya, in the 1930’s.

If both books stress anything about their characters “wrong” choices it is how easily they slip into them. Mauberley and Hutton never make conscious ideological choices, in fact, the philosophy of war seems a remote concern in either man’s life. It is rather through personal affections, a sense of loyalty of above all else to friends and family that they find themselves unwillingly striking points for the forces of the Axis.

In a sense both men are traitors. Mauberley is an american whose first rumblings of war find in exile in Italy, living what can only be called a love-hate relationship with his mentor Ezra Pound (Selwyn Mauberley is a fictional character named after Pound’s poem), while Philip Hutton is a child of a marriage between a wealthy british businessman and a chinese woman. Yet Mauberley ends up collaborating closely with nazi officials and Hutton with the japanese occupying forces.

How could they? Both “Famous Last Words” and “The Gift of Rain” succeed in extracting from the reader the benefit of hindsight; both place us square in the middle of confusion, conflicting reports, misinformation, and the absolute necessity of maintaining sanity and dignity by keeping daily life as normal as possible. The big decisions are being made elsewhere, by others. Mauberley and Hutton seem to be carried most of the time, by a stream of destiny more hypnotic and powerful than rational thought. But can there be rational thought in the midst of war? The luxury of certainty, moral and ideological, is a privilege of heads of state and commanding officers, both works seem to suggest. The rest of us has to muddle through, unaware of secret plans (or in the case of Mauberley, further confused by repeated hints of international conspiracies) oblivious to the fact that the war will be over in a few years, and that future will be a harsh judge – maybe more cruel in the long run, to those who stray from their rightful birth alliances, than to those who merely followed their leaders.

The theme of destiny is stronger in Tan Twan Eng’s “The Gift of Rain”, the underlying leitmotif even. For the teenager Philip Hutton finding balance has always been hard (harmony being the other narrative force of the book): he is after all, of mixed parentage in a colonial setting – colonies being so often more british than Britain – with two older brothers and a sister born of his father’s first marriage with a british woman. His other half, his chinese mother, ostracized by her family, dies when he is only for years old.

When he meets a japanese man to whom his father has let a small island facing their house, whispers of shared destiny start to sound in his ears. In fact, Philip will soon understand that Hayato Endo, who quickly becomes his sensei in the art of aikido and japanese language, is not only an important companion in this life – they have been friends before, namely in the Japan of the samurai, and it has always ended badly. This time will prove no different even though Philip Hutton will, for the longest time deny the hold of destiny, a knowledge imparted by fortune tellers, and finally his own chinese grandfather.

His decision seems clear headed, in first days of the japanese occupation: to offer his services to the enemy forces in return for protection for his family who, unlike most of the british expatriates have decided to stay on in Penang. However, Hutton soon finds himself embroiled in the more cruel aspects of occupation by a political force eager to provide a well-known surname as an ally: he takes part in the round-up of, often innocent, anti-japanese “criminals”, watches, unable to help, executions, tortures and beheadings and soon his sister and aunt will join the numbers of political assassinations.

Yet his relationship with Endo never falters. Even when Philip comes to hate him, even when he realizes many of their friendly outings have actually been military fact-finding missions, and that he has unwillingly provided information that will make the japanese attack a resounding success, they never cease to be close. For Endo is after all, against the war. He has merely struck a bargain with the Emperor: work for the government in return for protection and medical care for his father, a vocal anti-militarist. Endo and Hutton are therefore as similar as enemies can be: two men trained to kill who avoid violence, who work for warmongers to keep their families safe.

Even though Philip Hutton eventually turns into double-agent feeding information to the anti-japanese resistance, both men’s actions seem to beg the question: how many lives would each of us be willing to sacrifice in order to save our loved ones? How easy to calculate a tally in times of peace.

Findley’s character, on the other hand, will participate in zero hands on brutality (safe his own cruel execution). He travels in what we might call the jet-set of war, between celebrity writers, italian aristocracy, british heirs, american gold-diggers and well-groomed nazis. Yet his actions will prove no less important: after all, how many elegant soirées were the planning grounds of war atrocities?

Mauberley, being an american, and an orphan at that (the first scene of the book consists of the young Mauberley witnessing his father’s suicide) has no close of kin to protect. However he does have a most juvenile characteristic: he becomes so powerfully inebriated by strong personalities that he forgets himself, and seems to long only to bask in their solar presence. First the young russian aristocrat he meets in Shangai in the 1930’s, followed by a young and already fiercely ambitious Wallis Simpson, Ezra Pound, the italian aristocrat Isabella Loverso and even a nazi hit-man.

Most definitely an aesthete, Mauberley is the sort of flighty platonic lover (though his homosexuality is hinted at he never consummates any relationship, and seems as likely to become fascinated by women as men) who doesn’t even realize his friend Isabella is actually a very active double-agent. As long as he can play his part in closest entourage of Edward VIII and his girlfriend Wallis all seems right.
In many ways then, Mauberley is a perfect agent for whichever side can most easily sweep him off his feet. Once suitably mesmerized he will, as a little boy, try to please the object of his affection to very best of his abilities. After Edward VIII’s abdication Mauberley feels Simpson’s hurt as deeply as if it were his own: she did, after all, marry the title as much as the man…

And it just so happens that a group of concerned industrialists along with nazi and fascist officials would much rather have a monarchy as symbol of their uber-totalitarian regime than the charmless Hitler. It would be business as usual of course, but with a certain flair only bestowed on Kings and Queens (even the ones born in Pennsylvania).

Mauberley is accosted by the so-called Cabal, never fully understanding who or what lies behind his contacts. However they do mean to offer his friend Wallis a throne (throne of what, however, is the important questions he never thinks to ask), how can he deny his assistance?

Caught in a writer’s interpretation of a conspiracy, Mauberley is never quite up to speed on the events: “What confused me most was that having been set up by Isabella Loverso to expect some mighty, earth-shaking scheme, nothing of the sort emerged.”
In the end, Findley’s character only seems to grow up when he is being hunted down for his diaries in the end of the war, which is actually when the reader first meets him. In attempting desperately to tell his story he seems a man that finally understands the bigger picture (or is he, certain of his impending death, merely grasping at posthumous celebrity?)

The irony, is that this man completely removed from ideological concerns or even with morality, ends up being scrutinized by two american officers (poster boys for righteousness if there ever were). Captain Freyberg is half-deranged after witnessing the horrors of Dachau, and probably thinks anyone who ever served a glass of water to a german is assessory to genocide, while the bleary eyed Lieutenant Quinn is of the school of thought that forgives everyone if only they make a final confession.

Mixing real and fictional characters and events “Famous Last Words” is a tightly wound, punch in the face of historical fiction, while “The Gift of Rain” is a sprawling, cinematographical, russian epic of war narrative.

When our time comes, will we excuse ourselves through the eastern concept of destiny or through the western one of art? Better start thinking about it, if not for this lifetime…

"The Two Sams - Ghost Stories" - Glen Hirshberg

Let me just start by saying that "Mr. Dark's Carnival", the third on this collection of short stories, is just about perfect. It's a fantastic little jewel on fear and folklore, dream-like, hypnotic and terrifying.

Without it, I probably would rate "The Two Sams" medium-well done - technically correct but lacking a certain "je ne sais quoi". There is no doubt Hirshberg has a first rate imagination. I was particularly impressed with the flashback in "Dancing Men": one minute we're in Prague accompanying a lonely middle-aged jewish high-school teacher whose yearly highlight consists of taking his class on european tours of Holocaust hotspots - when bang! courtesy of a local puppet merchant we're catapulted into his childhood in New Mexico, a vision-quest aided by a local native american, an Holocaust-surviving grandfather and then bang! again, further back into polish forests and gypsy magic. Very nimble.

"Struwwelpeter" is the name of an iconic, XIX century, children's story book, in which baddly behaved children get their comeuppance in a very graphic manner - in Hirshberg's tale we're left not knowing if evil Peter will get his, but with little doubt that he deserves it. "Shipwreck Beach" takes place in a very unusual set, as far as terror is concerned - Hawaii, and for that alone it deserves some points even though it felt a little laboured. By this second story a strange leitmotif in "The Two Sams" become apparent, one that I found quite original: humidity.

There is always slow steady rain, moistness, something dripping or oozing. Sure, when you think about it, getting into knee-deep water in the dark, or even hearing the strange, unidentifyable sounds of water is pretty scary and Hirshberg uses it in a very poetic and intriguing fashion.

The character's psyches is very compelling and feels truthfull: the boy in "Struwwelpeter" who is as attracted as repelled by the hidden cruelty he can sense in his best friend's eyes. The high-school senior in "Shipwreck Beach" feels the same about her cousin: her whole life she's known he's bad news and yet, though she doesn't even particularly like him anymore, she affirms her independence by travelling alone to meet him, heeding some "can't look away" call, young people so often feel towards familial disasters. The small boy in "Dancing Men" has less confused feelings towards the granfather he is forced to spend three days with. Trapped in a wheelchair, with an oxygen mask strapped on and unable to speak, his piercing eyes and his adobe house in the desert are every middle-class boy's very idea of horror.

The title story "The Two Sams" is more sad than scary. Hirshberg portrays the despair of a young couple whose wife is seemingly incapable of keeping a baby in her womb. After two miscarriages, the husband is convinced the foetuses are coming back to lure their new unborn child to their netherworld. The only way to stop them is to destroy the mournful fetishes his wife has lovingly wrapped and stored - the earthly remains of the first two children. This one would make a good film though, you can just imagine the ghost babies sneaking through the house at night and singing their chilling lullabies into the woman's stomach as she sleeps.

All very nice, but "Mr. Dark's Carnival" blows them all out of the water. I just love when a story grabs you in the first lines:

"So the first question, really," I said, leaning on my lectern and looking over the heads of my students at the twilight creeping off the plains into campus, "is, does anyone know anyone who has actually been there?"

The Eastern Montana History seminar, Halloween special, on a curious piece of local lore known as Mr Dark's Carnival, the ultimate scary house, is where the tale begins. Professor Roemer takes apart, piece by piece, the communal myth of Mr Dark, in front of the freshest batch of college students every year. Inside though, he is a true believer - or rather, if he unravels every phony account of the Carnival, it is only because he yearns to find the original, the only, the unimitable, the ultimate frightening experience. He is forced to cut his lecture short, after being told a brilliant yet volatile graduate student has commited suicide. Not long afterwards a hobo will press two invitations into his hand. And that's all I'm saying.

This is Hirshberg's own account of how the story was born.

Quite frankly I didn't understand the ending: was Prof. Roemer killed or brought back to the living? Yet I hardly cared.

"The Night Country" - Stewart O'Nan

Well, "The Night Country" has a Stephen King blurb on its cover, and I've often thought it would be a fun project to read every book that has one ("Three Dog Life" is another). I got it second hand without ever having heard of the author.

Between the master's (and Peter Straub's) recomendation, the title and the cover, I was expecting something quite different.

New England, Halloween. It's always tricky to encroach on another man's territory, and this is most definitly King's hunting ground.

But "The Night Country" starts off with a bang, the chapter "Something Wicked" which is something poetic, all right. An invitation for a ride on Halloween night with some unknown creatures who turn out to be three teenagers killed in a car crash exactly a year before. O'Nan gives them a voice more seductive than mermaids, as they convince, indeed seduce us, into witnessing their last moments:

"Come, do you hear it? The wind - murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans. The house seems to breathe, an invalid. Leave your scary movie marathon; this is better than TV. Leave the lights out."
(...)
"Do you ever wonder?
"Do you want to know?
Come then, come with us, out into the night."

It reminded me of the end of the first chapter of Kingg's "Danse Macabre", October 4, 1957, and an invitation to a dance, which goes:

"But it's not a hunt, it's a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom.
But we'll dance anyway you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.
May I have the pleasure?"

There is nothing more enticing than being lured into that which scares us, through a soft spoken voice - it's also so much scarier to be enchanted so that we walk willingly (if a little bit wary) into the night, instead of being dragged out.

But then the next chapters (aptly named I know what you did and Dawn of the Dead) gave me a funny feeling I couldn't quite name. Then the next couple of chapters came and went and I finally understood that it was anguish. By then I wanted to finish "The Night Country" quickly because it started giving me nightmares. Only after I finished it, and as I thought about it and described did it slowly dawn on me how good it was.

It has to be one of the most unsettling books I've ever read. And O'Nan pulls a dirty a little trick on the reader looking for cheap thrills - you see, "The Night Country" isn't a horror book, at all.

Sure it has teenagers, is set on the days preceding Halloween and there are ghosts - but those are just treats to lure you into the big dark house. Once inside there are no carved pumpkins, no escapism, no scary movies that make kids scream and give boys and girls a chance to snuggle up to each other. Inside are lives so completely destroyed that not even death can save them. O'Nan forces us to look despair in the eye, and for my money it was the scariest thing ever.

Toe, Danielle and Marco met their untimely fate in the shape of a tree, on Halloween last year. They wander among the living, seemingly, a bit unsure what their new duties as ghosts are - except for being present whenever someone remembers them.

As it is, they spend a lot of time with Brooks, the police officer who, it slowly becomes clear, might have contributed to the violence of the accident by giving chase to the speeding vehicle. Unable to stop himself he goes over the photos of the scene almost everyday; his girlfriend left sometime ago and he is completely alone - his only living relative is an Alzheimer riddled grandmother who he visits as little as possible - another something-something to escalate is self-loathing.

Whenever we meet him he is alone in his patrol car, working nights, watching reruns of the crash in his mind, the girl projected into a tree, the moans coming from inside. He also follows Tim.

Tim is the one who got away. He came out of the accident with barely a scratch. He's fine - he just lost his girlfriend and two friends. Make that three; because although Kyle, a heavy-metal loving, marijuana dealing, every parents' teenage nightmare didn't die, he is now more Gump than Hetfield. He sports a crew cut instead of mutton chops, carries a lunch bag, and his mother helps him with his buttons, while Tim drives him to the convenience store where they both re-stock the shelves and clean the floor.

Kyle's mother might be the saddest of all these sorry characters - estranged from her husband who takes refuge in his work, taking care of a severely impaired son, she is denied even the refuge of grief, for she is too busy taking care of a five-year-old in the body of a seventeen-year-old - of all the inhabitants of the night country she is the only one whom O'Nan will deny a final respite.

This much we understand: that Tim wants to kill himself in an exact copy of the accident he survived; that Brooks somehow senses it and is determined to stop him; that the three ghosts cannot stop what is already in motion or even comfort the living with a word, an apparition or a dream, themselves trapped in broken deaths just as their relatives are trapped in broken lives. Kyle too has a ghost, a badass ghost, capable of some telekinesis it seems, but unable to see the other three even though they see him - and are scared of him.

O'Nan offers no redemption. This tale is not told in order to give the reader, in the end, a sense of lives being picked up, however crooked, a whiff of a new beginning. We leave the characters at midnight, just as the final blow descends - after, there will be nothing left to pick up.

My only qualm was the inclusion, in Tim's last moments, of the lyrics of The Smashing Pumpkins song "Today" - frankly it was too corny for words...

But it's just a little thing, it hardly matters. What does matter, what I was left suffering about was - who drive Kyle to work from now on and take him to MacDonald's once in a while? Who will visit Brooks' grandmother? How many ghosts will now follow Kyle's mother as she volunteers at the local library?

In O'Nan's "The Night Country" what gets wrecked, stays wrecked maybe even gets worse. As if tragedy can only draw out more of its kind, as if once broken, people cross out into another country where only silent ghosts, bad memories and the dark keep them company, until they too heed to the seductive voices of the dearly departed to take one last ride into the night.

Leonora Carrington - "The Hearing Trumpet"

Leonora Carrington is probably best known as a surrealist painter, and that is undoubtedly a shame if "The Hearing Trumpet" is anything to go by. A more delightful book is difficult to imagine.

One way to describe it would be as a Roald Dahl take on a Miss Marple mystery. Still it would be a way off. For Dahl would have to be informed by a grown woman's point of view - and that point of view would have to take in account the truly surreal life of Carrinton.

Whether or not, the young Leonora snipped her guests hair while they were asleep in order to serve them omelets stuffed with their clippings for breakfast, is truly besides the point. If she didn't actually do it, she at least thought of the prank which is too surreal for words.

Geographical constraints aside, her nanny is also supposed to have rescued her from a Madrid asylum where the young british debutant had been institutionalized (after a short-lived marriage with Max Ernst), by way of submarine. Once again Si non è vero è ben trovato.

"The Hearing Trumpet" has that cosy feeling only the british seem to get across with the surrealist touch of magic and color that one can't help but believe is consequence of Carrington's adopted country, Mexico.

Our narrator is an extremely lucid and good-natured, ninety-two-year-old. Marian Leatherby is perfectly content in the back room and garden of her son and his wife's home where she keeps two cats and two chickens and looks at the moon. Often she vists her friend Carmella, a sophisticaded mature woman who wears day-glow wigs and writes letters to people she chooses out of a phone directory (and is truly amazed they never write back, a surrealist at heart).

Marian's only handicap is that she is stone-deaf which most of the time does not take any pleasure out of her days. Unfortunately her son, and most importantly his wife, seem to find her an embarrasment, and her grandson agrees.

Petit-bourgeois that they are they take offence at the sight of old-age, and the fact that Marian has a beard doens't much help; neither does the fact that she likes to tell their dinner guests stories which, more often than not, lack a clear narrative line.

When Carmella presents Marian with a huge hearing trumpet, her deafness is solved. However, the first thing she hears is her family conspiring to put her away in an asylum.

Carmella takes her cats, and the maid the chickens (less fortunate) and off Marian goes to a surrealist asylum if there ever was one. The director and his wife seem to be involved in some sort of new-age cult the exact dogma of which is never very clear. The only thing required, besides some truly strange gymnastics, is for the women (it is a female asylum) to conform, forget about humour, curiosity and of course, voicing an opinion ("Personality is a vampyre", Dr Gambit avows). If however, one can feign a spritual connection to the other world as one of the women does, one is in the clear.

The women live in bungalows shaped as boots, cuckoo clocks, mushrooms, birthday cakes, igloos, circus tents and lighthouses. However the asylum used to be a catholic convent, and a strange portrait of a winking nun faces Marian everyday at dinner.

The story of Doña Rosalinda Alvarez della Cueva takes up part of the book, by means of a journal passed on to Marian, just as events seem to turn the way of a murder mystery: two women conspire to kill a rival (by means of poisoned brownies, how else?) and end up taking the life of another, glutonous woman, who on careful observation is not quite what she seemed.

Amid a mutiny in the asylum, late-night reunions where tribal drums sound, and where the elderly women find themselves compelled to perform strange dances, a strange creature is unleashed from the misterious tower which looks upon the compound.

Marian is led into a basement for a ritual initiaton and an ice-age ensues. It is all good fun, for Carmella arrives in a limousine driven by a chinaman with fur coats for all and an army of cats in tow, while Marian's long estranged friend, Marlbourough, arrives in an ark, straight from Venice, accompanied by his sister, a wolf-faced woman.

It is enough to make one crave for old-age if its going to be half as wonderful.

"The Hearing Trumpet" is a feminine book in which the few male characters are never as interesting as their wifes, mothers or sisters. There is no room for children, Marian's adolescent grandson is an idiot, and the adults tediously conservative, deluded, egocentric and full of their own importance. Only old-age, especially female, grants a magical eye and a colourful disposition, humour and serenity to withstand the adult world's boorishness. Cats abound and a small glass of "portuguese wine" makes everything endurable, especially coupled with a french éclair.

Alchemy is as attainable and delicious as tinned sardines. Wonderful.

Adolfo Bioy Casares - "Asleep In The Sun"

In "Asleep in the Sun" as in "The Invention of Morel", what happens, happens only in the last pages of the book.

In this sense the synopses of both Bioy Casares are somewhat misleading: they suggest a fantastic universe that will engulf the reader from the first pages, when really it's the other way around. What amazes in both books is how "normal" everything seems even with it clearly is not.

What conspires to make it so, is the very ordered and rational way in which both the unnamed narrator of "The Invention of Morel" and Lucio Bordenave tell their stories: they are utterly confused by the events which begin to take place in their lives and the only shred of sanity they can cling to, the only thing keeping them from complete madness is the careful, factual writing of their ordeals.

In "Morel" the journal of events is written for future perusal of persons unknown, while Lucio describes his story to a childhood friend, in order to beg his help. In "Morel" people appear where previously there were none, people who are unable to see or hear the narrator; in "Asleep In The Sun" the protagonist's wife comes back to him after being in an asylum, completely changed. What magic or science have the doctors worked upon her character?

Lucio's story can be read in many different ways of course, one of the most powerful might be as a satyre of modern psychoanalisys. But the important question is the one facing our narrator: if a loved one is transformed into someone devoid of all her faults and endowed with qualities you have always wished for, are they still the same person? Do you still love them?

The question is especially hard for Lucio who has always, if somewhat shamefully, believed he loved above all, his wife's beauty. As she is a very difficult person, one would believe Lucio should feel nothing but gratitude towards the doctors who took her away, for she returns, still beautiful but also loving, obliging, tender and humble.

However, Lucio cannot reconcile himself with the new Diana: she wants to take strolls in places she never cared for previously, has forgotten her most prized ability, cooking; never wants to leave the house except in his company, when before she went out alone and came back late at night, which caused Lucio a great deal of anxiety.

After fending off his sister-in-law's lewd advances in Diana's absence (all the more distressing because she looked so much like her sister); and battling the guilt of having allowed her institutionalization, (in one instance by acquiring a gentle alsatian, also named Diana, for the wife had been wanting a dog)the return of the new Diana is too much for Lucio to bear.

He starts, slowly, to become more and more distressed, and as he looks into his wife's eyes he cannot avoid the question "who are you?". The search for the truth about Diana's character change is finally what will plunge Lucio and the story into the fantastic, behind the walls of the asylum.

It is worth noting that in "Asleep In The Sun" the characters seem to be either wicked or clueless with not much space in between (except for his father-in-law who is both). The message might be that Lucio, and all good-natured people along with him, put their sanity at risk by wanting to find out the truth about the world. And also, that by wanting to seem perfectly reasonable and sane when faced with figures of authority (such as the doctor Samaniego), the insane and the mean, one is always taken advantage of.

More than once, I felt that the only thing that could save kindhearted Lucio was to allow himself a fit of hysterics and rage. But alas, that is the one thing he (or Bioy Casares)will not allow. Even in a world gone slightly mad, Bioy's characthers always believe pondered words will save them. The reader is all the more unsettled because he knows they won't.

Bassani, Bioy, Bulgakov, Colgate and Dahl

I feel a change coming on.

For months I've been concentrating on books which are either brand new releases or fairly contemporary, and while I'm not about to plunge head first into the so called "classics" I do believe I will be reading more and more "older" books.

Here are the five I've just finished:

Roald Dahl - "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More"

Adolfo Bioy Casares - "The Invention of Morel"

Giorgio Bassani - "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"

Isabel Colgate - "The Shooting Party"

Mikhail Bulgakov - "The Heart of a Dog"

Of these, the one I enjoyed the most was Bassani's. Set in the italian city of Ferrara just before the beginning of the II World War, it follows the life of a young jewish man and his relationship with a brother and a sister who happen to be the progeny of the wealthiest and most renowned jewish family of the city. The wonderful thing is how the book, a memoir told in the first person manages so skillfully to convey the intricacy and nuances of the jewish community (those who are observant, those who are not; those who are wealthy and those who are not; and those who supported the fascist party and their counterparts)while never loosing sight of the most important thing: for "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is first and foremost the story of a first (and unrequited) love between the narrator and Micól Finzi-Contini.
There are, to be sure, disquietening events (such as the expulsion of the young jews from the local tennis club) which point to tragedy ahead, but Bassani cleverly withdraws any suspense from the table: from the very first pages we already know none of the Finzi-Continis will survive the II World War. This allows the reader to give undivided attention to the events unfolding: the unnamed narrator's difficult relationship with a father who adores him but who is frighteningly unaware of the gravity of the political situation (as is most of the jewish community); a father who is quick to criticize the Finzi-Continis, and just as quick to bask in pride when his son becomes a good friend with the children of the family; the tragedy of Alberto's (the elder Finzi-Contini) homossexuality (which is merely hinted at, this being an italian book published in 1962); Micól's cryptic personality, who seems at times to flirt with the narrator just to rebuff him immediately afterwards; in effect, a normal nineteen-year old trying to grasp the complicated path between childhood friendship, adolescent fling and adult love; and the gentile Giampero Malnate (the objet of Alberto's affection) a young communist of the most intense and simultaneously, naive convictions.
But even tracing all of these (and several others) webs of relationships is just part of what made "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" so engrossing - it is also incredibly visual, or maybe cinematographic is a better word. I finished it feeling as though I had walked the cobbled streets of Ferrara, cycled through the snow on a chilly night, walked the paths of the Finzi-Continis garden,climbed its stone walls, felt the warmth of their Palazzo and, of course played a whole lot of tennis.

Bioy Casares' "The Invention of Morel" was the hardest to read. I felt the author was determined in keeping me and my rational impulses at bay, which of course he was. The book is presented as the written log of an escaped prisioner alone in an island, for soon after his arrival strange events begin to take place. A party of revellers appears on the big house (called "museum") which exists on the island, but even though, our narrator falls helplessly in love with one of the women from the group, when he finally confronts her, the girl acts as though she does not see him. For the reader it is instantly obvious that she really does not see him, and we aim to find out why: is he dead? is she dead (along with the rest of the group)? is the narrator suffering from dellusions caused by the comsumption of indigenous berries? Is the "museum" a mental asylum where all the characters are institucionalized?
Why is Morel, apparently the leader of the group, forever engaging in mysterious conversations with the others where it is hinted that all will be solved in a matter of days? What are the strange contraptions kept in the basement of the building? Why are the tides impossible to understand and why, on certain days can two suns be seen in the sky?
Our narrator, obssessed with Faustine, and with the idea that the whole thing is a complicated ruse by the police, to capture him, is of little help to the reader. He states at the beginning that he means to keep his records as clear and scientific as possible, and this he does, the result being that we feel as though we are watching the events at a great distance. We forever want to yell at him "look out" or "over there, you fool"!
Faustine was inspired by Louise Brooks the silent film star and that got me thinking that there is a certain feel of a silent film to "The Invention of Morel". Just as our narrator cannot seem to communicate with his beloved (or any of the others on the island), so did I as a reader feel estranged from the action. But that wasn't necessarily bad, it was just incredibly confounding and strange.
The answer to the riddle of the island was completely unexpected and again, bewildering. It also poses all kinds of philosophical questions. Very unsettling, and yet I ran out to get another of Bioy Casares' books, which must mean something.

Dahl's book was a gift and what a gift! His short-stories might delve into the fantastic but I loved them because the writting is so old-fashioned. And what do I mean by that? I mean good ol' no-nonsese story telling, not made to impress anyone or in order to fill an assgnment for a creative writing course (on this subject read Stephen King on the NY Times).
When the world just seems incredibly grey and full of cinics this a great book to curl up with (meaning any given day).

Isabel Colgate's "The Shooting Party" is pure, unadultered escapism of the highest order. I almost felt guilty reading it, so quickly did I dive right in the story, set during a weekend of "sport" (the birds probably don't enjoy the aerobics much)in an english country mansion, in 1913. If I could have gone back in time for a day, this would be a top destination. Julian Fellowes's introduction to the Penguin edition explains why, in 1980, this was a daring, even revolutionary book (Fellowes was the scripwriter of "Gosford Park"), which is all very well and good, but today it is hardly shocking, only great, which is even better.
You can hardly mistake "The Shooting Party" for a period piece since the servants are not only seen, but also heard. What's more they also think! There is even an (admitedly naive at least politically)animal rights campaigner/socialist at hand. A wealth of characters between the host family, their guests, their servants and workers provides a rich canvas for Colegate who achieves with equal sucess the voice of Ellen, the maid or Sir Randolph Nettleby. There are exotics, (an hungarian count and a jewish businessman from South Africa) mean gentlemen, clueless young girls, salt of the earth men, generous women and a couple of prodigious young people from both the "upstairs" and the "downstairs", not to mention a pair of star-crossed lovers and a dead body at the end (without which no english country weekend is complete).

Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" is a small book, which feels tiny after the lenght and breath of "The Master and Margarita". It is a satire in which an imminent Moscow doctor transplants the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into a stray dog, who shortly after starts to metamorphosize into a human and to develop the character flaws the donor displayed while alive (alcoholism and thievery), while also displaying the particularly irritating trait (for Doctor Preobrazhensky, at least) of taking up with the building commitee which is composed of ignorant and agressive revolutionaries.

"Kartography" - Kamila Shamsie

The city of Karachi is the main protagonist of "Kartography", a city where the streets truly have "no name" and where directions are intimately tied with events.

It may be violent, chaotic and "brazilified", with the wealthy taking their cars between mansions and country clubs, but Shamsie had me believe it is also magical - somewhere beauty is hard to come by and all the more unexpected and precious because of it.

The story centers around a childhood friendship between Raheen and Karim. Just when they step into adolescence and could have naturally evolved into boyfriend and girlfriend, Karim's father decides to take his wife and son to London and away from the escalating sectarian violence in the city.

The distance creates some misunderstandings, but the greatest one is caused by family history, for Karim's mother was once engaged to Raheen's father, and the boy's mother to the girl's father. What happened is intimately connected to the political violence of 1971, when Pakistan fought East Pakistan (Bangladesh), and to the ethnic groups each of the grown-ups belong to.

How much (or how little) Raheen and Karim know about these events will drive a wedge into their friendship, even though they never discuss it openly.

After boy and girl separate at Karachi's airport, each 13 years old, we next meet Raheen at an Ivy League university in the States. Frankly I didn't much enjoy that part: I kept feeling I'd read it before in some other book.

It's complicated, because the reality is that so many Pakistani, Indians, Chinese etc do go to universities in the U.S., many to study writing (like the author)and yet on the page, those experiences usually read like a cliché.

The other thing is that Raheen, our narrator, grows up to be less than likeable. At 13 she is a spirited young thing, but at 20 she's a bit of a sulker, unable to withstand any real affection from men, and she really does believe everything is about her.

In all honesty many 20 year olds are like that, but it sure gets a little grating. But never mind, soon Raheem and Karim, along with best friends Zia and Sonia are back in Karachi and "Kartography" really takes off - scaling violence and political unrest seem to conspire in order to throw our protagonists into similar tragic situations as those faced by their parents 20 years earlier.

There are many interesting map lines in "Kartography": the different kind of emigrants Raheen and Karim become (she, oblivious to the political situation of her country; he, obsessed by it); the subplot of their parents tale explained in separate chapters dated 1971; and the shifting identification of country, social class and ethnic group.

Overall, "Kartography" is an enjoyable book, though it left me with some nagging questions. There seem to be a lot of young writers, born in third world countries and educated in anglo-saxonic universities who rely on their regions of birth for their subject matter. In itself, that should hardly constitute a problem, but good literature needs more than a first hand knowledge of an exotic location.

One gets the feeling that in american universities these writers are urged to "write about what you know", and so they do. But they seem to aim at a western audience and so, play the "exotic" card rather heavy-handedly, while the main characters, the narrators, are of an almost absolute western sensitivity.

I don't really know what driving at exactly, except that of course, I want my books set in Karachi or Beijing or Seoul, but maybe I don't need the "benefit" of a american/ british university educated narrator every time.

Would those books get published quite as easily? I don't know.

I guess I used to be more naive about book publishing and have only recently started to realize that, like everything else, it is also political. There are many new writers who come from different ethnic backgrounds being published in the U.S. yet, it seems to me that most of them, besides being mostly female, have in common a degree in "Creative Writing" of some sort in a well-known university. Sometimes I fear they are all being coaxed into writing in a certain way by american professors, or worse, that only those who do, get published.

"The Gum Thief" - Douglas Coupland

This one had me stumped for days. I finished it last sunday but I just couldn't make up my mind on "The Gum Thief".

The thing is, I couldn't believe Coupland actually wrote something so mediocre and derivative and was trying desperately to justify it. But I can't - if "The Gum Thief" had been written by an unknown author, I believe it would never have seen the light of day, and readers everywhere would have missed absolutely nothing.

I read "Generation X" when I was 12 or 13 years old and became a fully fledged fan at 16 with "Life After God". I grew up reading Coupland and he is probably the one author of which I read everything (fiction). I loved the "uppers" ("Shampoo Planet", "Microserfs", "Miss Wyoming", "All Families Are Psychotic") and grew to appreciate the "downers" ("Girlfriend In A Coma", "Hey, Nostradamus", "Eleanor Rigby"). Last year's "JPod" felt like his best work ever.

So I was looking forward to "The Gum Thief", set in Staples and featuring Roger, a divorced forty something and Bethany a twenty-something goth. After the first entry by Roger, though, the book just seems to go nowhere, slowly. I had to force myself to keep going - I actually fell asleep three times reading it (and not at night).

It's not just the fact that so many of the ideas are recycled from previous novels (life after a certain age is meaningless and empty; fear of the pending apocalipse; sadness at the absence of faith, or at least a religious education; loving the new, hating the old ergo, hating Europe; fear of not being able to love or connect with other human beings)because Coupland always played around with the same set of fixed notions. And it's not that the format of narration (circumscribed to written communications between Roger, Bethany and her mother) seems to keep the characters and story at a fuzzy distance.

It's just that it's no good. And while on the one hand, I got the feeling that Coupland was aiming at a younger audience of new readers (hence the summary of all his ideas), on the other, it was pretty clear that his heart wasn't in it.

"The Gum Thief" makes life seem completely bleak and hopeless, and then, in the very last pages, as Bethany tries to take her own life, Roger (who certainly contributed to her feeling that way)suddenly changes his tone dramatically and tells her, in a completely sappy epistle, that life is worth living: sure, there's not any real hope of attaining knowledge or happiness, but hey...it's great to be alive!

Honestly, it felt like the last, life-affirming and then "hey, the whole thing was a joke! Lighten up!" pages were ordered by the publisher, in an effort to curtail a wave of teen suicides in British Columbia.

Look, don't spend 250-plus pages persuading me that life in the new millennium is utterly hopeless and depressing and then try to tell me you don't really mean it. That's just wrong.

As for "Glove Pond" the novel within the novel, that Roger keeps feeding Bethany and that critics found "a camp reconstruction of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” directed by a young John Waters" and "campily funny", I thought it was beyond terrible. I still don't know what the point was, and if there was one, it still doesn't justify how completely uninteresting it was.

My husband had a dream where I said "Look not only Douglas Coupland doesn't want to grow up, he also doesn't want his readers to grow up". I don't know if that's it, but "The Gum Thief" left me feeling a little sad. I almost wish it had left me feeling old.
That, I could deal with.

"Free Food For Millionaires" - Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee's first book is quite the tour de force. For starters its length is staggering at 560 pages but it is also ambitious in the number of characters it follows during a period of more or less five years.

The protagonist is Casey Han, daughter of korean immigrants in the United States. Just out of Princeton where she studied economy, we first meet her during a stressful family dinner after she has just decided to defer her entry into Columbia Law School for a year.

Her parents are very conservative and her father in particular expects nothing short of complete devotion and obedience of the two sisters (Casey's sister Tina is going to Medical School). The dinner ends in a violent confrontation where Joseph Han strikes his daughter and tells her to leave her home permanently. Casey goes home to find her white boyfriend engaging in a threesome.

These are the events that set "Free Food For Millionaires" in motion. Casey is an extremely likable character: though she has gone to Princeton and engaged in most of the social activities the university threw her way (vacations in the Hamptons, eating clubs, golf) she doesn't consider herself an Ivy leaguer. The fact is, her parents work in a dry-cleaners (the family has never had a vacation) and live in Queens, and even though she is loan-free because of a scholarship she can hardly indulge in the sort of carefree spending that seems to go with the territory. Not for Casey the benefit of a masters degree in Italy (in which her best friend Virginia is about to embark), or the gift of a Manhattan apartment bestowed by her father (such as her childhood friend Ella receives). She doesn't even have the financial support of being admitted into a banking program like her boyfriend.

She has no job, ambivalent feelings toward a career in either finance or law, and her love of well tailored and expensive clothes and hats, quickly throws her into a bottomless pit of credit-card debt. Whenever she can, she slips off into a rooftop or terrace and smokes about five cigarettes in a row.

Following Casey in her after school years, as she grows estranged from her parents and searches for meaning, money and love, would have been more than enough. Yet Lee, influenced by an admiration of XIX century novels (as she states in this interview), gives voice to the stories of many other secondary characters. And this is where the book lost its stamina, and freshness as far as I was concerned.

It is arguable that Casey's goody-two shoes friend Ella, deserves her own story, as does her korean-gone-mogul boss, Sabine, her sister Tina, her mother Leah, Virginia or her co-workers - even Ella's husband Ted gets his two cents - but I constantly felt as if Casey's voice was being robbed of depth in order to accommodate this vast cast of supporting actors. And more often than not, their respective episodes felt forced and stilted.

At the beginning of part II I was surprised and upset when I was told two years had passed - what had Casey been doing and thinking those 24 months?

And there was little final resolution for many of the characters. Tina, the younger sister, I felt was especially badly treated by Lee's choice of narrative: just as she shows some sign of being more than the dutiful daughter we abandon her broke, taking an indefinite break from med school in order to take care of her first-born. Casey's mother is also left at an impasse after having a miscarriage, being made pregnant by her choir director.

Even Casey's finale is left vague: she probably won't go to business school, or will she? Is getting back with the boyfriend she so carelessly cheated on?

There were great moments in "Free Food For Millionaires" and I wouldn't necessarily say no to another book by Lee. But after more than 500 pages I was left with the feeling that the real story was about to begin just as the book ended.

"Franny And Zooey" - J. D. Salinger

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way."
Franny

"Phooey, I say, on all whiteshoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day."
Zooey

On college professors:
"They make everything they touch turn absolutely academic and useless - Or worse cultish."

Well, you get the gist of it. Franny and Zooey are sister and brother, 20 and 25 years old respectively. The year is 1955 and the kids are going wild - actually, they seem to be going mental. They are obsessed with acting in almost the same way they are obsessed with zen buddhism, hindu sacred texts, and christian sects - but mostly, they can't stop going on about how everyone else is so dense and frivolous, so absolutely incapable of glimpsing their deep personal moral dilemmas.

Well screw Franny, Zooey and Holden while you're at it. You know what it is, don't you? These kids are rich. Period. That's their number one problem. 1955, 2005 whatever. They're still around, looking pretty and distraught at the lack of meaning, Truth and beauty in life. But guess what? They never worry about the rent, carfare or lunch.

They all annoy the hell out of me. But. I'll never be that witty, dahling. Nor that insightful. Like it or not, Franny's evaluation of campus life, the self-aggrandizement of teachers and general emptiness of students is still true today. It still drives many away from college and turns many more slightly insane.

Franny and Zooey aren't lovable - they are much too self-conscious for that. But at least they don't seem to make up excuses for themselves. In a way, they know they are privileged and detest the way they can't just blend with the crowd of Ivy league nitwits. They are both exceptionally clear-eyed about human nature - which, no matter what anybody says, is not, necessarily, a good thing. They are fiercely critical and more than a little judgemental - also, of their own motivations.

You probably wouldn't want neither of them as friends but you end up wishing them well. For Franny and Zooey, despite their background and upbringing (or precisely because of it), are the kind of young people you could imagine being institutionalized a few years down the road.

It can be argued that right beside Holden Caufield they are J. D. Salinger's closest alter egos. They are a little bit mad and a little bit sad. Sometimes they talk like insufferable snobs and sometimes they're right on the money. Just to be on the safe side we best keep a couple of them around. Preppy kids keepin' it real, and all that.

"I don't think it would have all gotten me quite so down if just once in a while - there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"
Franny

"The Wars" - Timothy Findley

The War to end all Wars - more than 5.ooo.ooo dead, almost as many missing, 12.ooo.ooo injured.

Findley's 1977 "The Wars" is the story of a nineteen year old canadian, Robert Ross, who enlists in 1915 to fight in World War I, and is driven, partly through his own character and partly as a response to the bloodshed and cruelty he witnesses, to perform an act of both madness and beauty.

The story is told by an unnamed historian, who relies on photographs, letters documents and interviews in order to trace Robert's story from his childhood in Canada to his death.

Findley has been described as a great "teller of tales" but to my mind his strength lies elsewhere. It is not that his stories are imaginative, which they are - rather, they make up a whole world into which the reader dives, retaining not an ounce of disbelief. Just as in "Pilgrim" written 22 years later, "The Wars" is an entrancing book, which kept me mesmerized for the two days it took to read it.

Once in it, you can barely stand to look up from its pages, and while reading it you loose all sense of being a reader - you are someone who has fainted, or has fallen into a particularly heavy nap, and been transported, not into a dream world, but into a reality so far hidden from your personal knowledge, that is nevertheless, undeniably true.

Cleverly weaving his descriptions into the action, Findley never allows you to slip from his grasp. "The Wars" has no descriptive features that aren't part of the narrative - everything you see, hear and smell is rendered through your different narrators with the natural rhythm of life and death.

You go down the steps to the hold of the S.S. Massanabie with Ross and smell the stench of hundreds of horses kept frightened in their own filth, with not a single porthole opened for fresh air, you see the only light provided by an oil lamp and feel the heaving of the ship. Your own revulsion is indistinguishable from the boy's as he is required for the first time in his life to kill a living being, a horse that has fallen and broken his leg, and you see the white of the horse's eyes as he stares with confusion and pain at his murderer.



It is in the trenches, where Robert is kept from the front line through his officer status, that the madness of war quickly starts to pour through: some of the boys go mad, some turn into cruel beings, most simply die.

Then there is Rodwell, a man who does the unthinkable: in the middle of the carnage he collects small wounded animals, birds, rabbits, hedgehogs, toads and nurses them in a makeshift hospital under his bunk bed. His suicide, after he is forced to watch the torture of a cat by his comrades in arms, and the letter he leaves Robert to deliver his daughter, provide the emotional climax of "The Wars".


After a leave of absence in England, Robert goes back to the front and the events precipitate: he is raped by fellow officers whose identities he will never know and from there on we feel him slowly retreating into his own mind. He is constantly, inexplicably, spared while men all around him are killed during attacks.

It is in the aftermath of one such attack that Robert, accompanied solely by a black mare and a dog he has found among the debris, sets loose one hundred and fifty horses trapped into a burning train. He means to save them, and stables them nearby, but the army is, of course, in pursuit of the young traitor.

The horses end up burned alive and we are denied the relief of seeing Robert go down in martyrdom with them. He would survive, horribly disfigured, to be court marshaled and die at 26.

"Someone once said to Clive: do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we've done? They meant their generation and the war and what the war had done to civilization. Clive said something I've never forgotten. He said: I doubt we'll ever be forgiven. All I hope is - they'll remember we were human beings."




During his months on the front Robert Ross killed three people: inadvertently, a german soldier who was assisting his escape, a senior officer who prevented him from saving a herd as their stable was under attack, and a soldier who tried to stop him as he made his final ride surrounded by 150 free horses.