Tag Archives: romance

The Lawgiver – Herman Wouk – 9/10

Modern Masters January 31, 2013 1 Comment

“God was right about Adam: for a man to live alone is not good. I can’t spare a rib.”

lawgiver

Herman Wouk (yes, that Herman Wouk) has been trying to write a novel about Moses for fifty years. As he finally sits down to start, Hollywood comes hurtling into his life; an eccentric billionaire will bankroll a film about Moses if Wouk will approve the script by unknown ex-Jew Margolit Solovei. Margo’s desperation to land the job puts her back in contact with a high school sweetheart and through him, commences a sweet and much-needed confidance with a literary professor. Throw in a naive Australian sheep farmer and a mad English agent; yet somehow romance and creativity prevail over absurdity.

This is really a character study in the somewhat polarised and distorted film world. Margo is a fantastic creation – passionate about her work yet insecure, craving the approval of her father, mentor and idols, yet perfectly happy to throw multiple spanners into works. The novel is tightly cast; no one is extraneous and all contribute to both plot and humour. Possibly my favourite character is gentle-natured Perry Pines, accidentally thrown into the whirlwind of Hollywood, yet clinging stubbornly to the farmland of his youth (“Crooked Creek Farm”).

The epistolatory/”collection of evidence” style of writing is one which I’ve only come across a few times before – it worked very well in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and spectacularly in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, while I wasn’t a huge fan of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Suffice to say, the book’s got to be quirky before you can think about using this method. Anyhow, it works here – various voices are developed without that inconvenience of having all your characters in one place, or justifying lengthy monologues/stream-of-consciousness.

Similarly, the technique of the author writing himself into the text as a character is both bizarre and gives him an auto-biographical mouthpiece; his anxiety at running out of time is palpable, as is his deep devotion to his wife of 65 years. In a sense, this has aspects of an open love letter to BSW in the same way that The End of Your Life Book Club is an open eulogy. The humour is strong without being forced – I was safe to read this while having my hair cut (no laugh out loud moments) but plenty of little chortles.

I found the deep-running Jewishness at once bizarre and intriguing, isolating, yet with the footnotes, captivating. This is really a novel about being Jewish, as well as being in the film industry (or a reclusive author, or sheep farmer…). I suspect that Jewish readers might find it overly simplistic or even a little insultingly stereotypical, but I’m not Jewish so I can’t judge.

Now I have to read Marjorie Morningstar.

Additional information:

Me Before You – Jojo Moyes – 8/10

Fluff August 21, 2012 Comments: 2

“He was younger than I had thought, and had dropped his faint air of haughtiness. Perhaps Parisian waiters were trained to be kind to weeping women in their cafés.”

Lou Clark, breadwinner for her family before her time, lover of bumblebee-striped tights and expert tea maker, loses her job in the tea shop and has to take on a job caring for Will Traynor, who very definitely lives on the other side of the tracks. Will is the victim of a motorcycle accident and has lost the will to continue (assisted) living. Can Lou give him a reason to keep trying?

I wasn’t completely convinced by Moyes’ previous effort, The Last Letter from Your Lover, but this has received absolutely rave reviews (including from one of my managers, who claims she was bawling for most of the book…) so home from the library it came, and off to France. I have to admit it didn’t move me to tears, but it was certainly a moving look at life as a carer and one cared for, and at its heart a simple love story in a complex setting.

Lou and Will are both not overly complicated but sympathetic characters, and most of the supporting characters are also not richly developed (there are lots of them so probably for the best) – I didn’t have all that much time for either of the families or the dreadful boyfriend; all the innate goodness seemed to be in our three key characters, which is a bit wrong. Nathan, the physical therapist, is a spectacular supporting character and without doubt based on a real-life deadpan New Zealander.

The ending is a little drawn out but I think that the characters all make decisions consistent with their personalities; Moyes milks the heart-string-tugging for all it’s worth right up to the last page (the source of the quote at the top of this review).

Additional information:
Copy from Tooting Library.
Publisher: Penguin, 480 pages (paperback)
Order Me Before You 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 War of the Wives – Tamar Cohen – 7/10

Fluff August 8, 2012 Comments: 3

“Simon now lives with his face to the wall. Every photo of him in the house is turned around so his nose is pressed against the cold plaster. Unable to see what’s going on. Out of the picture. Ignored.

How he’d hate that.”

Two wives. One husband. You can see how that might be awkward. Imagine being happily married for 28 years. You have three children, a lovely house and a husband who travels a lot – but even after all this time, you still love each other. Then one day you get a call that turns your world upside down: your husband is dead. You are devastated. You go to the funeral… and come face to face with his other widow. Another wife, another family. They never knew you existed, you never knew they existed. It can’t be true. It must be a mistake. It has to be her fault – all of it. Or: is it? But then again, not technically wives any longer. Widows. Two widows.

At first I was not convinced by this at all; both women seemed so insubstantial, spoilt, self-indulgent, but Lynsey Dalladay at Transworld has been so generous with review copies that I thought I would carry on (I couldn’t face writing the email to Lynsey to say I was abandoning it) and around page 150 it really picked up and suddenly I was hooked. Both women became more “normal” although both were still well outside the range of normal humans I interact with every day, and once both women were set on finding out what had happened and how they had been concealed from one another for so many years, it became a lot more gripping.

Some of the best writing is actually nothing to do with the bizarre conflict situation; it’s about the fear both women have of being left behind, of ageing, of not being perfect any more. Writing about the inherent distress of parenting teenagers, particularly in this age of technological openness and simultaneous concealment. When I was searching for a quote to top this review, I came across lots about ageing and teenagers, but actually not so many about the insidious betrayal at the heart of the book.

While I didn’t expect the various twists and certainly got quite into the threatening darkness the novel takes on, I was unconvinced by the ending; the revelation was too brutal and sudden. There was a large cast of extraneous characters and a few too many diversions from the plot (e.g. a stalker in a cupboard committing vandalism). On the whole though, a gripping read worth making it through the lengthy set-up.

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Transworld, 410 pages (hardback)
Order The War of the Wives 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 Sandalwood Tree – Elle Newmark – 9/10

Fluff, Historical Fiction August 20, 2011 Comments: 10

“Death steals everything but our stories.”

As I said on Sunday and again yesterday, I’m reading The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark as part of my Transworld Book Group Challenge:

I’m part of the Transworld Book Group!

It’s the story of Evie Mitchell, who is in India with her husband in 1947. Martin is documenting history in action during the Partition on a Fulbright scholarship; Evie keeps herself making their little bungalow spotless and teaching English to a few local children. One day, she finds a concealed bundle of letters hidden away in the wall of the bungalow. While she can’t interpret very much of them, the reader is given access to a second storyline – the tale of two girls raised as sisters. Felicity leaves Adela in England and makes her way back to India where she was born (and where we know she will leave the letters).

I adored this. It seemed to be just the right mix of exotic lands, adventure, mystery and family life/romance/interpersonal conflict to tick all my boxes. (Other recent successes in this vein – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bel Canto) And the language! A brief selection of quotes for you:

On the discovery and investigation of some ancient letters: “The letters were personal, and trying to fill in the blanks felt like peering into these people’s lives uninvited. I struggled with a brief pang of guilt before reminding myself that the letters were dated 1854 and the people concerned were long past caring.”

On marriage: “I remembered when we had shared joy as easily as breathing” “That was the beginning of us being smashed and remade with something of the other in each of us” “I’d lost my best friend and I missed him like fire.”

On Catholicism: “It occurred to them that my Catholicism might seem as arcane to them as their Judaism did to me. For me, the pageant of Byzantine robes and chanting in a dead language, the drama of tortured martyrs, virgin birth and crucifixion had been worn thin and made bland by repetition.”

And one of my favourite little comic moments (for reference – Evie has only just discovered that Habib speaks English):

“‘Oh, Mr Mitchell doesn’t care for eggplant.’
‘Of course not, Madam. Eggplant is a useless vegetable. A mistake I am making with this vegetable. I will take back. The merchant should not even be selling such useless vegetables, isn’t it?’
‘But last night you said eggplant was the king of vegetables.’
Habib regarded me with pity for not understanding something so simple. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘for you I am working, not for the eggplant. What good would it be doing me to be disagreeing with you and agreeing with the eggplant?’”
 

The dual storyline worked very well here (of course the strands are united at the end, but not as I thought they would be), much as in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine. I loved the Victorian characters, although my loyalties flickered back and forth between the two Victorian girls. Newmark has clearly done her research carefully and it shows. In the 1947 thread, I wasn’t much of a fan of the husband, but Evie was wonderful – impulsively adventurous, a sweet and loving mother, a young wife struggling in a marriage that is no longer the one she entered, determined to see India and experience it properly, unlike the colonial wives at the Club, with their trifle and cricket matches and G&Ts.

Evie could be slow sometimes too (annoying, in one who was supposed to be so smart). The conflict is well built and perpetrated, and the scenes with Evie and her son are sweet, but I was a bit disappointed in the resolution to the conflict – it seemed so flat suddenly.

But occasional ditzy moments from Evie and Martin’s sullenness were the only things tempering my very positive feelings about this charming cross-temporal and continental adventure.

Reviews from other bloggers:

Amused By Books, Beth Fish Reads, Leeswammes, S. Krishna, Erin Reads

Additional info:

This was supplied by Transworld Publishers, as part of their Transworld Book Group.
Publisher: Black Swan (Transworld), paperback, 482 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.

Rules of Civility – Amor Towles – 9/10

Fluff, Kindle, Review copies August 12, 2011 Comments: 17

“One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”

This is one novel I wish I’d listened to in audiobook – and I may try to get it in audio just so that I can. Towles has chosen to set his social study in carefree late 1930s Manhattan, choosing as his heroine a witty, smart, ahead of her time daughter of a Russian immigrant, Katya (now Katey) Kontent. Katey lives in Mrs Martingale’s boarding house with Evey Ross, and the two of them go out for New Year’s Eve on 1937 and befriend Tinker Grey, a young socialite banker. An awkward double romance develops but when Evey is disabled in a winter accident, Tinker throws his lot in with her. Katey moves on through New York society but every road seems to lead her back to Tinker eventually.

Towles has chosen to frame his story through the perspective of Katey as an older woman, reminded of the escapades of her youth by a photographic exhibition she attends with her husband. The first person narrative is slightly limiting, but by having Katey as the sensible one and Evey as the one whom trouble follows, we do of course get an interesting story. And this is an era with which I am entirely unacquainted! Most of my reading is set in pre-1900 or 1960+. The glamour and optimism of the late 30s in the USA, Manhattan before cell phones and yellow taxis and fear of terrorism, even the immigrant experience of the USA (it’s only really in Daughter of Fortune and Snow Falling on Cedars that I have run across it before) – all are new to me in literature and they were wonderful.

One of the things I love about reading on the Kindle is how easy it is to highlight passages and then come back to them when I am writing the review. Towles has a beautiful writing style, using words and phrases like “fabdabulous”, “the wine was older than me” and “a burgeoning taste for flawlessness”. Some of the ones I marked as I went through Rules of Civility:

On starting on page 104 of a Hemingway novel:

“Bit characters stood on equal footing with the central subjects and positively bludgeoned them with disinterested common sense. The protagonists didn’t fight back. They seemed relieved to be freed from the tyranny of their tale. It made me want to read all of Hemingway’s books this way”

Other quotes:

“He felt elaborately around the bag until he brought out a cinnamon donut perched upright on his fingertips. Which, as it turns out, is all it takes to secure a place in my affections.”

“It’s terrific, I admitted. But I can’t help thinking how much better it would look on you, given the color of your hair. If I may be so bold, Miss Kontent, the color of my hair is available to you on the second floor.”

“At peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon” possibly my favourite book quote ever.

Well worth the read. Get your hands on a copy if you can, and even better if it’s in audio!

Other reviews: NPR, Just William’s Luck, Jennifer at Literate Housewife, Nicole at Linus’ Blanket; USA Today

Additional info:
This was supplied by the publisher through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, read on Kindle. The hardback has 352 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.

The Distance Between Us – Maggie O’Farrell – 9/10

Current Affairs October 15, 2010 1 Comment

Summary: Stella runs away from her life in London to work at a Scottish hotel. Jake survives a crowd crush in Hong Kong, finds himself in the wrong life in England, and goes in search of his father in Scotland. Stella’s sister Nina has never coped well without Stella, and Stella’s Italian-Scottish family isn’t thrilled about her new life choices either…

I loved this. The bond between the sisters was so strong and real, and O’Farrell seems to have the knack of coming up with seemingly insignificant anecdotes which touch on the core of what she’s trying to convey – in this case, the protectiveness of a bigger (though younger) sister, teenage rebellion, different attitudes to life and love and yet that unswerving loyalty to one another.

Like in The Hand That First Held Mine, we have Europeans living in Britain, learning to be bicultural, touches of another language thrown in haphazardly – which appeals to me so much because it’s exactly what I have lived. According to Wikipedia, a stint working in Hong Kong (which she draws on in this novel) is O’Farrell’s only “foreign” experience, so I wonder where she got this bilingual slant from. Anyway, I think it’s fabulous.

Also as in THTFHM, there was a sort of mystery to be solved, or an undisclosed event which was revealed towards the end and had a transformative effect on the characters’ lives, but finding it out wasn’t really the aim of the book, which was quite pleasant. The deed in question was pretty clearly signposted but I didn’t think that detracted from it.

The reason this doesn’t get 10/10 is because the ending was a bit disappointing and twee – too neatly wrapped up. But I guess that’s a matter of personal taste.

 

The Last Letter From Your Lover – Jojo Moyes – 4/10

Fluff October 7, 2010 Leave a comment

This was the pick for the Open University Student
Book Club and as there was an opportunity to win books, of course I went to
get this from the library… I have to say I was disappointed by the OU choice –
I would have expected a university book club to come up with something a bit
stronger. I should state at this point that I have no time at all for
infidelity – there is no excuse, and I’m tired of reading books about it.

This chronicles two affairs carried out in London – one in
1960s London where the wife of a mining magnate is unfaithful with a
journalist, and one in the early 2000s where a journalist has an affair with a
married author.

The 1960s wife has just awoken from a coma after a car crash
with no memory of anything before the crash, and attempts to piece her life
back together through her distant husband, vivacious girlfriends and aloof
mother. When she encounters letters addressed to her from an anonymous lover,
she realises that the distance she feels from her husband is not imagined, and
sets about trying to find the journalist. We see (in alternating chapters) her
life before the car crash, so we know all about the affair when she doesn’t –
which I found irritating. Better either to present the affair, the crash and
the resolution, or for us to learn about the affair with and alongside her.

Even more confusingly, we have interleaved with this a
terrible Bridget-Jones style story of a fairly useless journalist who can’t
stand her manager and is grumpy because her boyfriend, an author with a wife
and a small child, isn’t at her beck and call. I found Ellie irritating and
alienating, not least because she seemed to gain nothing at all from the
affair, which (of course) turns out to be rather expensive for everyone
involved.

Only the couple in love in the 1960s are reasonable
characters – everyone else (including the modern protagonists) are dull and
flat. Mostly it feels like this novel was written intentionally direct for
screen. I did find the scenes in the Riviera and the ideas of 1960s London and
the African conflict around the same time engrossing; and I loved where one of
the characters turned out to have ended up, but not enough to make up for the apathy
of the rest of the characters and plot.

Fortune’s Rocks – Anita Shreve – 3/10 and 7/10

Fluff October 7, 2010 Leave a comment

I had to give thistwo ratings – one for each half! I had no patience whatsoever with the first half, which is the tale of how an affair develops between a fifteen-year-old girl and a married forty-one-year-old doctor/political author, at the exclusive summer resort of wealthy families around the turn of the twentieth century. The second half, in which Olivia deals with the aftermath of the affair, is much more interesting and also has a high quality of writing.

Everything I read at the moment seems to have philandering husbands and difficult pregnancies, which is annoying, and this was no different. I found John to be boring, opportunistic and certainly not worth throwing one’s future away on. Olivia is a neatly-developed character, but there is apparently only so much to be done with a 15-year-old, precocious, cosseted only child.

I am enjoying Anita Shreve’s settings on the wild eastern coast of North America – not an area that I know at all – so I will be continuing to hunt down her books around BookMooch and second-hand bookshops.

Reviews from other bloggers: Book Snob

A Wedding in December – Anita Shreve – 9/10

Fluff September 2, 2010 Leave a comment

This is the second “reunion” book I’ve read
this year (the other written by a dear family friend and thus specifically not
reviewed here, although she is enjoying commercial success in her native Australia)
and I love the concept. This time it is a wedding between two high school sweethearts
who should have married at 21, and married other people instead. A
25-year-reunion brings them together again and destiny is set straight – and so
the high school friends return for the wedding.

There is the classic cast for such a novel –
the widow, the happily married man with his boys and a hankering for the past,
the spinster with a secret, the now enormously successful and happy gay man,
the cancer victim and the brash bully with a trophy wife – but Shreve appears
to have specifically only spent time inside three or four of the characters’ heads,
not everyone’s, which is a wise choice; any more background and I would have
felt torn around between them.

There are of course scandals to be revealed
and preconceptions to be unravelled – and a shadow from the past following all
the characters around all weekend.

Highly recommended.

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.

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