The Rosie Project

At the end of the academic year in the school where I work, it has become the custom to exchange Summer reads with colleagues. I was lucky enough to be given The Rosie Project which Bill Gates enthused about on Twitter recently:

"The Rosie Project: A Novel, by Graeme Simsion. Melinda picked up this novel earlier this year, and she loved it so much that she kept stopping to read passages to me. I started it myself at 11 p.m. one Saturday and stayed up with it until 3 the next morning. Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right.) It’s a funny and profound book about being comfortable with who you are and what you’re good at. I’m sending copies to several friends and hope to re-read it later this year. It is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a long time."

With such a glowing testimonial, I think I need to lay aside all my other books, find a shady hammock and read it! 

Of course this just means that I'm in the same position as those Commonwealth Games cyclists who dropped a lap in the Scratch race, in that I will never be able to get back on track with clearing my backlog of unread novels!  

Baileys Women's Fiction Shortlist

After writing about Caitlin Moran's thoughts on being a judge for the Baileys Women's Fiction Prize 2014, I thought I should include the short-listed novels.

The winner, announced on June 4th was Eimear McBride for "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing." She had previously spent a decade trying to get her debut novel published. Bet those who rejected her are kicking themselves now!

So far, I've only read one of these: Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent, which was a brilliant debut novel.

SHORTLIST 2014

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah

Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland

Audrey Magee - The Undertaking

Eimear McBride - A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing

Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

2014 Shortlist

    

    

59 books in 5 months!

I just had to share the very fine musings of the excellent Caitlin Moran, writing in the Times Magazine the other week about the process of reading.

She was rather exercised by having agreed to become a judge on the Baileys Prize, realising that this would entail reading 59 books in 5 months, whilst still holding onto the day job (Columnist of the Year at The Times), AND being a wife and mother. After three months, she felt physically sick with literature, having gorged herself on this smorgasbord of novels. She was reminded of what she always knew as a young reader, and I shall quote it in full, because its just such a brilliant description of what reading is:

"Because what judging a literary prize did was remind me of what I knew when I was 11, and was wiser, and forgot as I got older and stupider: that reading is not a passive act. That it's amusing that "bookworms" are thought of as weak, bespectacled and pale - withdrawn from the world, easy to beat in a fight.

For a reader is not a simple consumer - as you are listening to a record or watching a movie.  A reader is something far more noble, dangerous and exhilarating - a co-artist.

Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive.  A writer is essentially typing blank pages - shouting out spells in the dark - until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else's.

Consider me, now. If I type "dragon" - casually, just six letters, no effort for me - suddenly, a dragon appears in your mind. You have to make it. Your brain fires up - perhaps your heartbeat will speed a little, depending on if you have had previous unhappy experiences with dragons.  Perhaps you will have given her golden claws - or maybe you have a fondness for tight, black shiny scales instead. But however closely I have described her, she will still be your dragon - in your head, a result of your million tiny acts of birth.  And no one else will ever see her.

And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. That old lady on the bus with her Orwell; the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell; the teenager roaring through Capote - they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire.  Their hearts are flooding.  With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss - you are the mathematical calculations that plot the trajectory of the blazing, crashing Zeppelin. You - pale, punchable reader - are terraforming whole worlds in your head. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia or Jamaica Inn or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them - hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until transfused with your time and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as " just being a bit of a bookworm."

So this is what I remembered, as I judged a literary prize, this Summer. Being a reader.  The unseen, life-changing duet you sing with anyone who's ever written a book."

See, I told you it was good!

Trespass

I have just spent a deliciously indulgent afternoon finishing off Rose Tremain's fantastic novel: "Trespass". So engrossed was I by her skilfully woven narrative, that an afternoon set aside for housework, was seriously eaten into! I vacuumed the lounge, read a chapter; pegged out the washing, read another, and so on, until by the time I should have been prepping the dinner, I had read feverishly to the last page, not caring whether the family went hungry. That's the sign of a good book!

Initially, my heart sank when I thought I was going to have to read through the characters' personal histories of sordid sexual encounters, which is something I prefer not to have thrust in my face, either when reading a novel, or watching a film on T.V. However, these do not dominate the narrative, and they do allow us to understand what drives the protagonists to behave how they do.

Tremain writes with authority about antiques, garden design and the landscape, architecture and industrial heritage of the Cevennes in France, where the majority of the plot unfolds.The story is essentially about the disintegration of two families over two generations, with their associated psychological baggage. The first is an English family: Anthony Verey, a well-known antiques dealer from Pimlico, and his older sister, Veronica, who lives in the Cevennes with her lover, Kitty. The second is French: brother and sister, Aramon and Audrun Lunel; the former an alcoholic, living in the ancestral home, whilst the latter lives in a modest bungalow down the road. It is when Aramon decides he wants to sell up, and Anthony that he needs to retire to France, that the two families' paths meet.

It is a deftly crafted novel of longing for lost innocence, and yearning for happiness. About wanting to be secure and loved, and to have a special place of one's own, which the world cannot threaten or remove. V's lover, Kitty, exasperated by the intrusion of Anthony into their love-nest bemoans: "Doesn't every love need to create for itself its own protected space? And if so, why don't lovers understand better the damage trespass can do?"

Sadly, even if we realise our grand designs for building a home, our past can often catch up with us, and the reader feels the weight of the Lunels' blighted history closing in on them. Audrun and her friend Marianne, try to explain this to Marianne's daughter: " When lives are blighted young, Jeannette, sometimes you just don't quite recover, and that's a true tragedy."

The joy of this book is discovering just how far someone will go to get and hold onto that "protected space". I will not say who that someone is, but even when you guess their identity, it is a delicious pleasure watching them execute their plans. Everyone knows it's the quiet ones that need to be watched.

About a Boy

This week I've ripped through Nick Hornby's fantastic novel: About a Boy. I've already seen the film several times, so coming across certain situations and dialogue, it's impossible not to see Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult in the main roles.

There is a wonderful symmetry about this book. The adult, Will, lives his life like an overgrown teenager, whilst the boy, Marcus, is old beyond his years, and does not relate at all to youth culture.  As their lives collide on what eventually becomes known as "The Dead Duck Day", they both learn a lot about life, and learn to appreciate each other.

Will cannot quite comprehend how his comfortable, insular and rather blank life, could have changed so radically with the mere intervention of a socially inept young boy, and his depressive, hippy mother.  At one stage he laments: "He'd had his whole life set up so that nobody's problem was his problem, and now everybody's problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them."

There's a wonderful supporting cast of wacky characters, especially in Marcus' own family, and Nick Hornby seems to have a knack for sounding completely authentic, whether he's spouting maternal wisdom, or voicing a teenage girl's alienation at school. Likewise, the period detail, especially the music references, are spot on.

It is a superbly entertaining read, very funny and sharply observant. I couldn't describe it better than Arminta Wallace in The Irish Times, who writes:"About a Boy is really about the awful, hilarious, embarrassing place where children and adults meet, and Hornby has captured it with delightful precision."

Do watch the film if you have never seen it. It differs very slightly from the book, but is a faithful representation, and in my opinion, it's Hugh Grant's finest hour!

Nicholas Hoult - no longer a boy

The terrifying art of writing.

Hannah Kent, first-time author of "Burial Rites" describes the process of writing as an often terrifying ordeal, and says: "Perhaps the only fiction worth reading - the writing that ensnares you wholly, that lays siege to your heart - is that which is born of love and terror, slick with the blood of its creator."

Burial Rites

Burial Rites is Hannah Kent's first novel, and I am astounded that a young, Australian woman could write with such command of Icelandic culture, folklore and history, as to make the reader feel totally immersed in the nineteenth century setting. Not only that, but with an economy of phrase she shows mastery over her characterisation of the condemned woman in her story: Agnes Magnusdottir, and the family who are forced to give her board and lodging on a remote farmstead, while she awaits her execution.

Kent had become intrigued by the real-life story of Agnes, whilst living in Iceland as a seventeen year old exchange student.  It was an obsession that stuck with her, so that later, when undertaking a PhD at Flinders University, she decided to make Agnes the subject of her research.  She had never undertaken any biographical research, or attempted to write a novel. No wonder she credits so many Icelandic librarians and archivists in her acknowledgements.

Agnes is one of three condemned to die for the murder of two men, Natan Ketilsson and Petur Jonsson at another farmstead in the North. Her fellow accused are being held with different families, and being ministered to by different priests. Agnes has requested a particular priest as her confessor, the young assistant,Toti, who visits her regularly at the farm. Her spiritual wellbeing is his foremost concern, as he seeks to prepare her to face death. In the close confines of the "badstofa", (the communal Icelandic living/sleeping room, see picture below), we learn about Agnes' life, intertwined with the lives of the local farming families and their servants. The isolation and loneliness of living in a remote location, the claustrophobia of a long, dark Winter in a small community, and the close scrutiny afforded to an outsider, which the author experienced as an exchange student, all resonate here. 

As the novel builds inexorably to its climax, she describes the bleak, unforgiving landscape in lyrical prose of stunning intensity, whilst Agnes' tortured internal monologue is laid bare. It is insightful, beautiful and heart-rending. In Hannah Kent's own words, the novel is a "dark love letter to Iceland." I recommend that Eyjafjallajokull permitting, you should read this astonishing debut novel, and book your flight!