Books

01
Aug
2021

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes | BookDragon

I recently finished reading ‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes. It was the 2011 winner of the Man Booker Prize (now The Booker Prize) the most coveted literary award in the English speaking world. I enjoyed it; Barnes is a gifted writer who has written, I believe, some 18 novels, many of which have won awards. It’s a short and engrossing book, is one of those novels that takes a somewhat close look at the inner life of a man. It reminds me a bit of ‘The Remains of the Day’.

Tony Webster is a cautious man in his sixties who has tried to more or less slide through life without making any waves or drawing too much attention. He receives one day an unexpected bequest – a middling sum from the mother of his university girlfriend, Veronica.

The bequest upsets Tony and he wonders what’s behind it. He reaches out to Veronica – with whom he had broken up badly to try and understand it. Through a series of emails, he tries to answer a number of questions. Had he loved Veronica? At the time he lacked the courage to say one way or the other. What had happened to the young man he had been, so anxious to be released into an adult life where he would make his mark?

Gradually, Tony assembles his memories – some accurate, some not and we begin to understand Tony, a man so afraid of loss that he avoids connections rather than embracing them. He didn’t consummate his relationship with Veronica because he wanted to avoid the questions that might follow. he eventually married a non-complicated woman and sought a mature, quiet life. Decades later he sees, or thinks he sees, his mistake. ‘We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe.’

Tony had thought Veronica was unable to understand anyone else’s emotional life, but it was really him who could look outside his own thoughts. The unreliability of his narration actually makes the book as we decipher more about him and his relationship to others as we go on. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-­preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.” Each time he thinks he understand, Veronica points out that he seems to understand nothing.

It’s a short book and an easy read. I understand that they have made a movie based on it, but I can’t imagine how. Give it a read to see a master novelist at the height of his power.

Posted by Tom in Books, Literature
25
Jul
2021

Northern Spy

I recently finished reading Northern Spy, the thriller by Flynn Berry. It’s not my usual genre, but I really enjoyed the book.

Despite the title, the book is not really about apples. Tessa Daly is a divorced mother of a six month old child living in a village in the suburbs of Belfast who works for the BBC producing a news program. It’s been a few years since the Good Friday agreement was signed but tensions are as high as ever and there are still the occasional skirmishes. Tessa is surprised one day watching a news program at work to see her sister, Marion taking part in an IRA robbery.

Tessa assumes at first, and so tells the police, that Marion has been forced to participate by the IRA. Soon, however, she is shocked to discover that Marion has been working with the IRA for seven years. Recently, however, Marion says that she has begun secretly working with MI5 and feeding them information to help set the stage for a peace agreement.

In an attempt to reduce bloodshed, however, Marion has deliberately sabotaged a bomb that was targeted by the IRA at a market and now she is under surveillance by both the IRA and MI5. So she asks Tessa to join her acting as a double agent and funneling information to her MI5 contact. Tessa is accepted by the IRA and asked to do increasingly dangerous tasks as she feels more and more trapped and worried for her family and her son.

If you like your thrillers with lots of car chases and explosions and suave secret agents, this is not for you. It is a page-turner, though as the tension builds and both Tessa and Marion are in increasing danger of getting caught and killed both by the IRA and the police.

Berry is a good writer and the book is an enjoyable read. The story flows nicely as the tension and uncertainty build. I enjoyed it and you should give it a shot.

Posted by Tom in Books, Literature
13
Jul
2021

Beheld

Beheld - Kindle edition by Nesbit, TaraShea. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

I recently finished reading ‘Beheld’ by TaraShea Nesbit. I enjoyed it and gained, perhaps, a slightly different perspective of our colonial roots.

They say that history is written by the winners and, to be sure, it is generally their perspective of events that are told and passed down. Some of us are familiar with the narrative ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ that was written by William Bradford, governor of the colony. But, of course, the writer gets to choose which facts to include and which to bury. This book is about some of those that Bradford chose not to tell us.

In particular, we learn about Bradford’s first wife, Dorothy, who fell overboard from the Mayflower while it was docked in Cape Cod Bay and drowned. It does seem odd that Bradford doesn’t mention it at all and that her very existence seems to be ignored.

This book is not a mystery, however. Dorothy is the novel’s recurring point of interest, appearing in the thoughts and memories of one of the key narrators, Bradford’s second wife, Alice. Alice and Dorothy had been childhood friends and when Dorothy died, Bradford sent for Alice and married her.

This is a novel about power and how those who have it use power to subjugate those who do not. The story is told by women. While we hear, in alternating chapters, from several people, the only first-person narrations belong to women – Alice, Eleanor Billington and later, Dorothy herself. There is tension between the Puritan majority and the Anglicans, personified by Eleanor and her husband who were brought to the colony as indentured servants.

It’s also a novel about cruelty. The Puritans believe themselves to be superior and civilized but they deploy barbaric cruelty to maintain their superiority. There is cruelty and subjugation everywhere – the Puritans over the Anglicans, the colonists over the natives, the men over the women. It’s all told in a quiet and matter-of-fact way that makes it even more disquieting to read.

Nesbit is a good writer and the book is a fairly quick read. Give it a shot and think about what parts of history we are told and what parts are buried.

Posted by Tom in Books, Literature
06
Jul
2021

Queenie

Queenie: Carty-Williams, Candice: 9781409180050: Amazon.com: Books

I just finished reading Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. It’s marketed as a ‘Black Bridget Jones’ but it’s so far from that it gives marketing a bad name. It’s much darker. I initially had some trouble getting into the book and understanding the protagonist, Queenie Jenkins, but once I did, the book raced by and I really loved it.

Candice Carty-Williams, a young Londoner, has a flair for story-telling that appears effortlessly authentic. Her title character is a woman you both know and cannot forget. Queenie’s life is in meltdown, and as she goes through a miscarriage, a breakup and the loss of her home and her job, the depression and dysfunctionality that once lurked in her world rise to overtake it.

The book opens as Queenie and her white boyfriend, Tom, take a break from their relationship. Everyone but Queenie knows that Tom is never coming back but she keeps thinking that if she changes this or improves that he will. It obsesses her and she begins to fall apart, neglecting her work even while she fears losing her job.

It’s a haunting downward spiral. Carty-Williams manages to engage the head and the heart, plunging the reader into Queenie’s descent, while simultaneously helping us unpack it. The atmosphere is unsettling. Queenie’s South London neighborhood is shifting beneath her feet, gentrification pushing out the markers of her Caribbean-heritage community, a metaphor for the fragility of her life.

This is the fertile heart of Carty-Williams’ writing: complex dynamics of interracial friendship, of the gaps that exist between generations, layered with the specific intricacy of a Jamaican immigrant family and the blurring boundaries of workplace relationships, are spun into an entertaining seam. Queenie’s best friend Kyazike brings nonchalant humor, while her grandparents offer complicated affection.

But above all it’s Carty-Williams’ treatment of love and sex that darkly elevates her story. Queenie’s substitution of sex for intimacy, her broken body image, her vulnerability to the hurtful racial fantasies presented by white male partners and her battle with trust are all painfully real. Moments of awakening — which unfold at a sexual health clinic, in the back of a car, in an office toilet — are all the more touching for their grotty familiarity.

After losing her job and some of her friends, Queenie moves in with her grandparents and slowly begins to recover her sense of self worth and learns how to cope with some of the pressures she faces, so things are starting to look up at the end.

I’ve probably painted too bleak a picture of the book. Carty-Williams is a skilled writer and she injects humor and there are some wonderful text conversations between Queenie and her group of friends whom she calls the ‘Corgis’ because, after all, the Queen has her corgis.

Give it a shot. Queenie was one of Time’s ‘Best Books of the Year’ and NPR’s ‘Best Books of 2019’. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.

Posted by Tom in Books, Literature
05
Jul
2021

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

Storied Life of AJ Fikry: Zevin, Gabrielle: 9781616204518: Amazon.com: Books

I recently finished reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a pleasant read – low stress, low risk, low drama and a well-told story. Zevin is best known as a writer of ‘Young Adult’ books and this is, I believe, her first aimed at adults.

The book is about a middle-aged man who owns a bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of New England. Fikry’s wife had died two years earlier and he is depressed, lonely and so much of a literary snob that his bookstore is slowly failing. He only stocks titles that meet is demanding tastes:

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.

In the first few chapters, his prize possession, a first edition of Poe’s ‘Tamerlane’ is stolen and he is about to give things up when a surprise package appears in the children’s section of his store. A little bundle of joy named ‘Maya’ appears. At first he plans to give her up to foster care but he falls in love with her and adopts her. At about the same time, he becomes interested in a publisher’s representative, a young woman who visits his store twice a hear to sell books.

I imagine you can see where this is going and so can everyone else. There are some exciting events, a few problems that Zevin quickly solves up and, at the end, everything is tied up in a neat bow.

There area a couple of gimmicks – at the beginning of each chapter there is a brief note to Maya in the form of what appear to be shelf talkers and expressing a love for books and for reading.

Zevin has written an entertaining novel that doesn’t pretend to be much more. There is a lot of love for books and literature expressed in the novel and it’s an easy and pleasant read. I think you might like it.

Posted by Tom in Books