Category Archives: Prizes

Breath – Tim Winton – 3/10

Current Affairs, Miles Franklin Prize, Thoughts and other Miscellany March 28, 2012 Leave a comment

It’s easy for an old man to look back and see the obvious, how wasted youth and health and safety are on the young who spurn such things, to be dismayed by the risks you took, but as a youth you do sense that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others.

Tim Winton’s tale of growing up in the surf of Western Australia in the 1970s won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2008 along with a variety of newspaper awards, and I strongly disagree with their judgement. While it has the self-important and philosophical bent of the prize-winner (see also: A Visit From The Goon Squad and The Sense Of An Ending… and The God Of Small Things, while we’re listing prize-winning books I can’t stand), and the first phase of the book, telling how Bruce Pike’s disenchanted teenage years with his shy parents were rescued by his gung-ho pal Loonie and surfing, is readable enough, midway through it rapidly descends into sexually-charged, faux-suicidal garbage, then putters along to its vapid conclusion.

Pike is Everyboy, annoyed with his meek parents who are scared of the sea, quite a good student without being exceptional, sociable without being a leader. He meets Ivan Loon, town tearaway, and the two strike up a solid although occasionally fraught friendship, in which Loonie demands devotion and admiration, and cannot bear to be outdone. When the boys discover the allure of the surf and a mentor who used to be a champion surfer, their teenage rebellion is harnessed and they spend 100 pages enjoying life and being pretty normal. Winton struck the balance between carefree enjoyment and the thrall of danger, the discontent of youth and the battle between egos well here.

Unfortunately, as apparently with almost every book these days, that wasn’t enough. We had to have the infidelity, the unconventional and dangerous bedroom episodes, the betrayal and lying and drama. This passage ruined the book for me as it was an unnecessarily dark twist and felt like Winton was trying far too hard.

The book gets 3 out of 1o rather than zero because of the quality of the writing and the authenticity of the teenage voice, but on the whole that is all there is to recommend this prize-winner.

Additional info:
This was a personal copy from Bookmooch.
Publisher: Penguin, 264pages (paperback)
Order Breath from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting costs.

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes – 8/10

Man Booker Prize, Modern Masters, Prizes February 7, 2012 Comments: 6

“His action had been unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words, wrong.”

This review is completely impossible to write. Nevertheless, I shall try. It’s partly my own fault – I read the book in October or November and it’s been lying around waiting to be reviewed ever since.

I don’t want to rate this highly, but I sort of have to. It is so smooth, so readable, and yet so cleverly worded and framed and constructed, that despite the narrator’s almost repulsive self-justification, you HAVE to keep reading.

Tony Webster is an ordinary sort of man, reminiscing now about his time at school and university and the group of friends he had at that time. He drops tiny hints along the way that his account might not be an entirely objective truth, but the scale of his unreliability as a narrator comes as a shock.

Some of my favourite quotes:

“We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.”

“In the meantime, we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic.”

“Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?”

“But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, in certain parts of the country.”

“One of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute and had ever since smugly claimed rural status.”

Fortunately, I have a get out of jail free card on this review, namely – I convinced The Book Accumulator that he must buy and read it, which he duly did in short order, and this is what he had to say about it:

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, which I read slowly – it was almost meditative – but could not put down. It was justifiably short-listed for the Booker prize; it won, so I suspect the judges were all sixty-year-old men. The narrator recounts his school and student days, and then forty years later has cause to look back at it – as well as at what has happened in the intervening time. I enjoyed the introspective and retrospective view of this life and the narrator’s ruminations as he tries to make sense of one part of his life, until the surprise ending. His hero claims he is average, but it is interesting to judge him as not only above but also below the mean, a limited and not always attractive individual whose memory lapses can be both useful and hurtful. A pleasantly surprisingly short novel about memories and memory and how we view our own history, about changing with age while settling into an ever more ordered and ordinary life, and yet about how life can surprise us, because we just don’t see things as we should.

See? Clever thoughts, articulately arranged. Thanks Dad :-)

Additional info:
This  copy was borrowed from my magnificent local library.
Publisher: Vintage Books, 150 pages
Order The Sense of an Ending from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

Remembering Babylon – David Malouf – 2/10 (DNF)

Modern Masters, Prizes January 31, 2012 Comments: 4

“Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, as long as there are two of them”

In David Malouf’s IMPAC-winning novel (novelette? 182 pages), a group of children in 1840s Queensland happen across a young man, unkempt and racially white, but exhibiting behaviour they and their community expect of the local Aborigines. The community is changed forever by Gemmy’s arrival.

I don’t understand how this won the IMPAC and was shortlisted for the Booker. It’s So Incredibly Uninteresting. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the characters, the setting, the writing, just any of it. Maybe that’s a criterion for book prizes.

Each chapter is from a different character’s point of view – we get Gemmy, Lachlan (the boy who found him), Janet (Lachlan’s jealous cousin), Jock (Janet’s father), the teacher… and none of them is an interesting person by themselves. There are some vague hints of interesting colonial life (dialogue is written in a strange Scotch hybrid sometimes) but it’s not explored. The writing is… meh. It’s not even exhilerating writing.

Urgh. Take it away from me.

Additional info:
This  copy was bought from a charity shop.
Publisher: Vintage Books, 182 pages
Order Remembering Babylon from Amazon if you can bear the tedium*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl – Yiyun Li – 6/10

Current Affairs, Prizes, Short stories January 4, 2012 Leave a comment

“‘The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,’ she said. ‘When you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you. Do you understand, Moyan?’”

In this highly-acclaimed volume of short stories, Li examines what it is to be a girl in modern China; adoptive daughters, female soldiers, old spinsters and marriages of convenience all come under consideration in her spare prose, in her little vignettes which rarely touch on the plot and involve few men. Mostly, this is a collection of reflections on men’s and women’s different roles in life and how women deal with that difference.

This has been very favourably reviewed by a number of bloggers (full list of those I’ve come across at the bottom of the review) but somehow the magic didn’t reach me. I found the recurring theme of how hard women have it in life wearing (although I don’t deny its truth, certainly in certain countries) and tired of the almost stereotypical women presented – there were a number of spinsters, tired and world-weary, a group of busybody investigating old hens, a woman acting on a teenage crush… had this been written by a man I would have flung it out the window in disgust.

Li has a beautiful turn of phrase, I won’t dispute that:

“Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut”

“She had always liked to talk about her own death as if it was an event to look forward to, her secret superstition being that death, like a man, would make itself conveniently unavailable once it knew it was desired.”

“Hanfeng looked at Siyu’s face, detecting a familiar absentmindedness. His mother, too, asked him questions to which she seemed scarcely interested in knowing the answers. He wondered if this happened to women who lived by themselves.”

but her characters were often unsympathetic: in the first story, the narrator is quite heartless about a funeral

“It is a hassle to travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face strangers’ tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people.”

while her mentor bluntly reveals that the girl is adopted

“‘You do know that you are not your parents’ birth daughter, don’t you?’ She turned and faced me. ‘And you do know that no matter how nicely they treat you, they can’t do much for your education, don’t you?’”

I am very much the odd one out in perceiving this collection to be less than remarkable; I suspect it is my inexperience with the short story format. I would expect this collection to appeal to fans of an sparser writing style (Eva suggested Kazuo Ishiguro as a companion author and I wholeheartedly agree) and those interested in feminist literature.

Other reviews: The Indextrious Reader, Like Fire, A Striped Armchair, Reading the Short Story, Madeleine

Additional info:
This Kindle copy was kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Order Gold Boy, Emerald Girl from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan – 3/10

Current Affairs, Orange Prize for Fiction, Prizes August 27, 2011 Comments: 21

“Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

As I find myself completely unable to understand this book, the summary comes from the back cover:

A Visit from the Goon Squad vividly captures the moments where lives interact, and where fortunes ebb and flow. Egan depicts with elegant prose and often heart-wrenching simplicity, the sad consequences for those who couldn’t fake it during their wild youth – madness, suicide or prison – in this captivating, wryly humorous story of temptation and loss.

I’ve seen at least 20 great reviews of this book (linked at the bottom of this page), and I know it’s been short-listed for a gazillion prizes and won quite a few of them (NBCC 2010, Pulitzer 2011, longlisted for Orange 2011), and I just don’t get it.

The characters are certainly vivid – Sasha, the kleptomaniac; Bennie, the sad middle-aged producer who seems intent on giving himself and his son heavy metal poisoning; La Doll, the misfortunate publicist extraordinaire and Lulu her daughter… but they were all unlikeable and unsympathetic – so set on being different, being “those who couldn’t fake it”. I didn’t want any of them to get out of their predicaments, I didn’t feel sorry for any of them.

The way Egan weaves these interlinked short stories together, moving back and forth through time and characters and media (including the now infamous Powerpoint chapter, 75 Powerpoint slides of Sasha’s daughter’s thoughts – I thought it was actually rather good, certainly unusual and absorbing), is clever and I like the idea (much as I enjoyed the linked vignettes of One Day). I just wish she’d used more likeable characters. Plot is near to non-existent – just some miserably parochial occurrences in the lives of the indifferent.

What did I miss that was so spectacular? So polarising? So prize-winning?

I do try to make a habit of linking to other reviews (otherwise why am I saving all the links?), but for this one I have split out the lovers and the haters.

The fans:

Fleur Fisher; Ready When You Are, C.B.; Literary Musings; Buried in Print; The New Dork Review of Books; Teadevotee; London Review of Books; Just William’s Luck; The Reading Ape; Hungry Like the Woolf; Sandi at You’ve GOTTA Read This; NPR; TIME magazine (Top 10 fiction books of 2010); Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles; The Mookse and the Gripes; Keep Calm and Read a Book

The unconvinced:

JoV at Bibliojunkie; Simon at Savidge Reads; Verity; Kevin From Canada; John Self

(the ‘aye’s seem to have it.)

Other:

A profile at Beatrice.com; a spot of autocorrecting at Like Fire; interview of Egan after Goon Squad won the Pulitzer

Additional info:
Personal copy from Bookmooch.
Publisher: Corsair, paperback, 349 pages.
Order this from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Marina Lewycka – 5/10

Fluff, Orange Prize for Fiction, Prizes August 6, 2011 Comments: 7

“You she-cat-dog-vixen-flesh-eating witch”

Nadezhka discovers that her 84-year-old father, recently bereaved, has become enamoured of a younger local Ukrainian woman and decided to marry her to save her from deportation. Nadezhka and her sister Vera attempt to set their father right, and when they are unable to do so, must watch the ensuing domestic mismatch. They rail against their stepmother with ever more inventive plots.

For a book that has won comedy prizes (Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), this was bleakly un-humorous. I suspect that the comedy award was given on the strength of farcical descriptions – the image of Valentina tottering around the garden in her plastic high heels and heaving her enormous bosom about is quite funny, but the human tragedy of Nikolai’s situation, bereaved of a valued if not beloved wife, overwhelms the comedy.

The story of how the family came to England is actually a beautiful one and I wish it had been the centre piece of a very different novel. Similarly, the sisters’ petty heirloom battles and the attempts of the youngest generation to piece it together made for some interesting family drama.

Character development is cast aside in the pursuit of laughter – both sisters come across as embittered middle-aged women, Nikolai as a doddering old fool, a eminent (post-eminent?) engineer with incongruous fluctuations in his ability to make reasonable decisions, and Valentina as a witch with unclear motives. Perhaps my understanding of the Ukrainian emigrant psyche is insufficient to impose a pattern on Valentina’s behaviour – to me it appears cruel, haphazard and simply bizarre.

However, it can only be a condemnation of the relentless black comedy that I was willing the old man to die rather than endure any further nonsense from his daughters and partner.

Reviews by other bloggers: Jane of Reading, Writing, Working, Playing

Additional info:

 

This was one of two personal copies I had. I think I bought them both in Notting Hill.

 

Publisher: Penguin, paperback, 336 pages.

 

Order this from Amazon*

 

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

 

 

 

Bel Canto – Ann Patchett – 9/10

Current Affairs, Orange Prize for Fiction April 26, 2011 Comments: 5

“I was taught to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty”

(from the blurb) Kidnappers storm an international gathering hosted by a poor Latin American country to promote trade. Unfortunately, their intended target, the President, has stayed home to watch his favourite soap. The takeover settles into a siege, bringing together an unlikely assortment of hostages.

I picked this up at my favourite cheap second-hand book haunt, the title and author both unfamiliar to me, on the strength of an Orange Prize victory in 2002 and that the plot involves an opera singer. I was encouraged to read it by Dorothy Of Books and Bicycles, Emily Brewer and Lizzy Siddal and was able to do so over Easter weekend at the in-laws’ in Edinburgh, mostly in front of a gas fire and under a fleecy blanket!

It wasn’t a terribly challenging read, but the farcical plot (initially unappealing) turned out to simply be a construct in order to bring together an eclectic and fascinating cast of characters. Patchett primarily gives the focus of the narrative to the translator, which is particularly appropriate as he is required for almost every character interaction. The multilingual setting seems unnecessary but actually limiting the characters’ communication in this situation where they are all physically confined together is rather clever as no mass interaction is possible, so we are treated to a story which stretches over several months but is told in vignettes and relationships rather than events.

Patchett has been careful with her characters and it shows. The soprano is un-stereotypically generous and sweet, not the diva we expect. The translator is a quiet, unassuming and invaluable man: “Gen was an extension, an invisible self”. The Vice President of the sorry little country is a wonderful character – on the verge of farce, but tender in his reminiscences of his time with his wife, and a dutiful host, continuing to clean and cook throughout the hostage situation. Carmen, the beautiful terrorist, is another shy, beautiful person in an unfortunate situation. Simon Thibault, the French ambassador usurped for the post of ambassador to Spain, loves his wife so single-mindedly – Patchett wrote some beautifully romantic lines for him.

The author must be multilingual or else she had access to a translator who had the rare skill of conveying what it is like to operate in multiple languages:

“Conversations in more than two languages felt awkward and unreliable, like speaking with a mouthful of cotton and Novocaine”

“If his concentration lapsed even for a moment it all became a blur of consonants, hard Cyrillic letters bouncing like hail off a tin roof”

“Gen, in his genius for languages, was often at a loss for what to say when left with only his own words…He had the soul of a machine and was only capable of motion when someone else turned the key… Sitting alone in his apartment with books and tapes, he would pick up languages the way other men picked up women, with smooth talk and then later, passion… He read Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, Flaubert in French, Chekhov in Russian… then he switched them around: Milosz in French, Flaubert in Russian, Mann in English.”

She also picks up the beauty of music, the power of a talented singer to force anyone to appreciate the music:

“All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

The primary ending is a little surprising but I found it fitting, but I was disappointed by the prologue. It seemed an unnecessary piece of romantic indulgence, bringing together two people who did not belong together.

This novel touched on two of my great loves – opera and languages – and so my reaction to it is perhaps predictable, but this is a beautiful novel, not heavy or dark but emotionally refreshing.

Additional info:
I purchased this in paperback from the Notting Hill Book and Comic Exchange
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 318 pages (paperback)
Order this from Amazon* 
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use these links, which goes towards giveaways.

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy – 5/10

Man Booker Prize, Modern Masters, Prizes September 2, 2010 Leave a comment

On the one hand, this is magnificent. The writing
is astonishing – “as though his body had the power to snatch its senses inwards
(knotted, egg-shaped), away from the surface of his skin, into some deeper more
inaccessible recess” (which I actually remember from a mock GCSE exam I was set
at some point – I recognised the passage in the book!) and Roy has dreamed up
an appropriately startling set of circumstances and characters. I’ve never been
to India, but I hope that her description is true to the original, because she
manages to capture specific images so clearly and in a manner which foreigners
can understand.

But I felt disappointed by this 1997 Booker
prize winner – there was no semblance of a plot, just anecdotes and episodes
back and forth over a century span. I was annoyed by the characters – not one
was “normal”; not one really made sense. Something which also struck me as
unnecessarily amateurish was the description of one of the main characters –
from the author photo on the inside cover, it was transparently autobiographical,
which I found lazy. Some of the plot elements (an episode of child abuse, an
episode of incest, alcoholic husbands all over the place) seem clichéd, in that
they seem to turn up in every book I read!

I wish I’d enjoyed this more – from the reputation
of the book, I feel like I must have missed something – but really I was very
surprised by the success of the novel given my poor reaction to it.

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living – Carrie Tiffany – 5/10

Current Affairs, Miles Franklin Prize, Orange Prize for Fiction, Prizes August 21, 2010 Leave a comment

Set mostly in the Mallee (the dried-out
plains of north-western Victoria in Australia), this little book tells the
story of Jean’s time working as a dressmaking instructor on the Better Farming
Train in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the depression came to
Australia and farmers were starting to realise the potential of “modern”
farming methods, and of her life as a farmer’s wife in the Mallee during a
horrendous drought which eventually drove the farmers off their land.

We read along with Jean’s hopes on the
train, as she meets her husband (the title refers to his empirical approach to
life as well as farming) and as they settle down to domesticity together. I
found the book a little depressing on the whole, but I think that is a result
of the author’s intention to convey Jean’s depression, boredom and
disappointment in the country. I didn’t find her husband a likeable character
and couldn’t understand why she married him – there was very little expounding
upon her feelings at the crucial stage.

What I thought was very well done was the
sudden insight into her husband’s character – his background in his home
country and the reason for his obsession with farming.

Not really worth bothering with, I don’t
think.

Snow Falling On Cedars – David Guterson – 9/10

Modern Masters, PEN/Faulkner Prize, Prizes July 31, 2010 Leave a comment

I write this review confined to the sofa by
one of the worst toe-stubbings I have suffered… fortunately Mr. RFBT rescued
the bolognese that was bubbling away on the stove.

This PEN/Faulkner
winner from 1995 impressed me enormously. I wasn’t surprised to discover
that the author lives on an island in the location in which the book is set
(the island on which the book is set is not necessarily real, I don’t know, but
it is very clearly based on a real place) because he captures the essence of
island living, of isolated communities with their epic feuds and total lack of
anonymity. I was fascinated by the place itself – a hybrid of Nordic and
Japanese communities, shrouded in fog and snow. Given the author’s surname I
would guess that this social mix is also real.

Snow Falling on Cedars reminded me very
much of Atonement – a forbidden love, disturbed by disaster, a third party
wishing things had been different, some time spent graphically at war. The main
plot line is the court case (in 1954) in which Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of
killing Carl Heine over seven acres of land in a deal gone bad over a number of
generations. The undercurrent is the relationship (or rather, lack thereof)
between the local reporter and the accused’ s wife Hatsue, from childhood
through to the court case – and the bad feeling left in every relationship by
the outbreak of war and the ensuing internment of Japanese Americans.

I would have given this 10/10 but for two
factors: I thought the war section was badly written – unnecessarily graphic,
in fact just unnecessary; and that Ishmael (the reporter) is a surprisingly
apathetic narrator.

I’m going to make a quick plug for Bookmooch at this point – I mooched
this book from Japan and it arrived in excellent condition. I love being a
member of Bookmooch – I save money on buying books, I know that my outgoing
books are going to loving homes, and every now and again I receive a book with
a postcard, photograph or something else personal in it. I never used to buy or
read second hand books but I love the idea that others have sat enthralled by
the very same pages. Bookmooch is not-for-profit and run (entirely?) on
goodwill, so even though I’m pretty sure I’m typing into a void of nothingness
in terms of readership, I hope that people will join up!

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