El log de lectura de Fisgón

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The Sopranos - Alan Warner

No, not Tony, Carmella, Meadow et al, these are actual sopranos, singers at the highest vocal range. The novel centres around the five sopranos in a school choir from a school on the west coast of Scotland, and one day in the girls' lives, as they travel to Edinburgh for a singing competition.

Alan Warner is a very underrated writer, I have always enjoyed his books. This one dissapointed me at first, I found the Scottish idiom that it is written in difficult to engage with, a little alienating. Also, the five girls around which the book revolves, weren't differentiated at all, I didn't know who was who, or what they looked like, they were all a mass of teenage speech and surprisingly Irish-sounding names, Orla, Finnoula, Aisling.

Yet, like the best books, you stick with it and it draws you in, and before you know it you can't stop reading. It does take a while though, but once they get to Edinburgh, start getting drunk, having adventures, meeting the seedy locals, I was hooked. They are all Catholic schoolgirls, but are mainly concerned with drinking, drugs, sex and shopping. Eventually I got to know the characters, and root for them, and fell in to the rhythm of their speech and the rhythm of the narration, which was also in this kind of very distinct Scottish English. Satisfying.

fisgon

Solace - Belinda McKeon

I read this a while ago, and was rooting for it from the beginning - I wanted to like it. She's a new, young Irish writer, it's good to see something new and exciting on the scene.

But god was this hard work. The writing was flat, obviously deliberately so, it seemed like she was trying hard to write like her mentor, Colm Toibin. But I just longed for some life in the language, some energy, and there was none. In fact I thought the book as a whole was lifeless, the characters didn't interest me really, I couldn't really describe the central character after reading, who he was, what he looked like. And the central event in the novel, an extremely tragic event, just left me cold. I had stopped caring at that stage. There is an air of misery about the book that alienated me, typical Irish misery mascarading as profundity.

This won an Irish Book Award recently. This baffles me. It was, to me, very mediocre and disappointing. And totally without solace of any kind.

fisgon

The End - Salvatore Scibona

I saw this recommended in a few places, and was hopeful about it, as I like a lot of American writers. I should have been warned off it when I read on the back that it was 'in the modernist tradition, reminiscent of Faulkner'. In other words, it has no real plot to speak of, sees itself as massively profound and is in fact cold and tedious.

It's one of these novels which I have no idea why it was published, or even written. It's a story of a community of Italian immigrants in Ohio in the 50s, which you would imagine would be full of potential. But almost nothing actually happens, the dialogue is stilted and artificial, there are moments of poetry and lyrical writing but they fade quickly and you're left wondering when it is going to end. I don't like starting a book and not finishing it, but I was severely tempted with this.

fisgon

El sueño del Celta - Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa es mi escritor favorito en español, imaginativo, sin miedo de experimentar, muy accesible. Escribió dos de mis libros preferidos en cualquier idioma, La Niña Mala, y La Tía Julia y el Escribidor. Pero esta no es su mejor novela.

De hecho, pienso que es por que no es exactamente una obra de ficción. Es la historia de Roger Casement, un intento de contar las peripecias de él desde su punto de vista. Vargas Llosa tiene que imaginar las emociones y reacciones de Casement, y eso es obvio, que el escritor está inventando lo que se sentía y que pensaba el protagonista. Es una mezcla de la historia, la biografía y la ficción que no me gusta.

Las partes que, para mí, funcionan bien, son las en que se habla de los tiempos de Casement en Africa y también en Perú. Casement era un tipo de verdadero héroe, hizo mucho para poner fin al sistema de esclavitud en El Congo Bélgico, y también a todos los abusos cometidos por las compañias del caucho contra la gente indígena en el Perú. Después de eso se transformó en un patriota irlandés, y traidor al Reino Británico.

Y son las partes irlandesas de esta novela que me decepcionaron. Como ya conozco la historia muy bien, no me interesaron mucho, y Vargas Llosa cuenta la historia como para niños. Muy simplificado.

fisgon

Anyone know why I can't edit my posts on this thread?

fisgon

Moorish Spain - Richard Fletcher

The story of the Arab presence in Spain is a fascinating one, and Richard Fletcher manages to do it justice in this book. The Arabs - or Moors, as they were called - came into Spain in the 8th century and stayed there for centuries after. The Arab influence is still there, in the architecture, the language, even in the people. It's not surprising as the Moors controlled Spain for about five hundred years, and were there in some form for three hundred more.

I suppose it's the fact that the writer gets to the complexities of the time that makes the book work. We see Christians and Jews being tolerated in Muslim Spain (much more than Muslims were tolerated later on, when the Christians reconquered), and then Muslims fighting in Christian armies, and vice versa, when the situation was more mixed. We see the variations within the Islam practiced in Spain itself, the initial rulers became lax and began indulging their taste for the pleasures of life, including alcohol, and this didn't sit well with the fundamentalists back in Arabia, who decided, on more than one occasion, to move in and take over, and impose a stricter form of the religion. Much like today. In fact, at times the Islam practiced in Spain was more progressive than much of what we see today in the Arab world.

The key to why this is important for Europe though, is that the Arabs revived the learning writings of the Greeks, which had been lost for centuries in Europe. They translated Aristotle and Plato, and many scientific works that were unknown in Europe. The Arabs were also way ahead of Christian Europe in medicine and mathematics, and brought all of this into Spain, which soon became a centre of learning in Europe. We owe a lot of the basis of European culture to the Arab conquest of Iberia.

fisgon

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

This book was nominated for the Booker, as its writer is Canadian, but it is purely American despite this. It's a Western, basically, tells the story of these two hired killers, Eli and Charlie Sisters (that's their surname, a pretty lame play on words I thought). They go on a trip from Oregon to San Francisco in the 1850s to off someone, and end up forming an uneasy alliance with the guy they were hired to kill.

I have no real idea why this was nominated for the Booker. It is a pleasant read, a relief after reading The End, which I finished a few weeks ago, but without anything really special at all to say about it. The period details have a certain interest, the narrator, Eli, is sympathetic, despite being a gun for hire, but I couldn't see any particular literary merit in the novel. It's a kind of morality tale, but I couldn't bring myself to care very much about anyone in the story, and the tale wound its way inoffensively to the end. I didn't dislike it, but was very underwhelmed.

fisgon

Foreskin's Lament - Shalom Auslander

This guy was just on RTE radio this week talking about his novel, but this book is his first one, a memoir of life growing up within Orthodox Judaism. And it's really good.

He is fairly honest about his own problems with depression and despair, but from his description it is clear that being brought up with all the insanity of fundamentalist Judaism didn't help his mental well being. It really does seem literally insane, especially around the dietary requirements - you can't eat meat and dairy within six hours of each other, for example - and the things that you can't do on the Sabbath. I suppose it was the first great monotheistic religion, and so managed to get a lot of the craziness before the other two came around. Anyway, the writer makes enough fun of the ridiculousness of the laws, while still feeling enormous guilt and fear when he breaks them, that it is entertaining and instructive both.

In fact Auslander doesn't claim to be a non-believer (though you would suspect that intellectually he is just that), it's that he does believe in the god he was brought up with, and hates him, calls him 'a prick'. He claims his problem is that he believes too much, and is just waiting for the next punishment or plague from Yaweh that will ruin his life. It's a very Jewish, very black type of humour, and funny, but also tender and honest and manages to get the reader (or at least this reader) on his side. You have to respect someone who pulls no punches, he really lets his fundamentalist family have it, a family who only half acknowledges Auslander's son because the child wasn't circumcised in the proper Jewish way. He doesn't spare himself either, and never tries to make himself out to be some kind of hero, is constantly self deprecating.

The constant pessimism and railing against this imaginary tyrannical god does get a bit old at times, but he always salvages it and brings it back to more human concerns. Read it.

fisgon

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson

From p.121
"I mean Jews. Don't you get sick of our, their, self-preoccupation?......don't you wish they'd shut up about themselves?"

I found this quote from one of the Jewish characters in the novel amusing, as it shows that the writer kind of knows that his novel, and in fact the one before it, has basically one theme, and one theme only - Jewishness. The word Jew - or 'Finkler', which is what the central character, Julian, calls Jews as a nickname - is on practically every page, it is a novel drowning in Jewishness, consumed by it. Following on from Kalooki Nights, which had a similar obsession, it does get a bit tiresome, if you are not as intrigued by the Jews as Jacobson plainly is.
Despite the obsession, it is a likeable, but flawed novel, written with energy and a light touch, though the jokes are often a bit clumsy. Still, I'd like to see him write about something else for once. After Shalom Auslander's book that I read last, I think I've overdosed on Jewish neurosis and self-obsession.

fisgon

Kind of indifferent to this. I've read a few books by him before, and loved London Kills Me, found it full of energy and creativity. After living in London for a year I could identify with the title.
But this novel seems a bit tired. I'm not sure if this was true of his previous books, but Kureishi is not a very good stylist. There's lots of leaden, static prose, very little poetry in the language, no real life in it. The story itself has its moments, and some predictably colorful characters, and he's good on the crossing of cultural boundaries and the mix of people from different backgrounds, but the whole just doesn't hang together. I suppose I didn't believe the narrator, or have much sympathy for him, or in any way accept the rather trite ending. It's an, at times, entertaining mess.

fisgon

Big fan of this writer. I loved The Virgin Suicides, and really loved Middlesex.

This book, by comparison, seems very conventional. It's simply the story of three young people in Brown university in the North eastern US in the early 80s. Madeleine Hannah is the central character, and I suppose that this is what made me think the novel unremarkable. She is smart, well-off, beautiful, un-troubled, not particularly complicated. Hard to make fiction from such a character. Not a lot of conflict there.
She has two main admirers. Mitchell is obsessed with her, and we read a lot of the accounts of his travels around Europe and Asia, partly as a means of forgetting about Madeleine and her rejection of him. We also hear about his search for religious meaning. Leonard is the guy she gets together with, and here, for me, is where the novel gets interesting.
Leonard has manic depression. The writer treats the illness with subtlety, sensitivity, goes into it in great detail, how the side effects from the drugs used to control it are sometimes worse than the illness, which is why so many manic depressives come off their meds. The highs and lows, how it is an illness of the brain, and how it feels like the brain is dying. And how it destroys most attempts to have healthy relationships.
For me this was where the strength of the novel lay. The ending to me was convincing, and the only thing that could have happened. It was meandering along pleasantly without great focus for a while, and was definitely salvaged towards the end, it picked up in emotional force and really worked, finally.

fisgon

Javier Cercas empezó este libro con la intención de escribir una novela, pero luego se dio cuenta de que los eventos no cabían en una ficción, que no conseguía escribir una historia ficticia sobre eventos ya tan extraordinarios.

En vez de una novela escribió esta investigación del golpe de estado en España que ocurrió el 23 de febrero, 1981. El 'instante' en el título es el momento en que Coronel Tejero, el líder del golpe, irrumpió en el congreso de los diputados en Madrid y gritó "¡Todos al suelo!", mientras sus hombres disparaban en el aire. Todos los diputados, menos tres, obedecieron el orden de Tejero y se agacharon debajo de sus escaños. Los tres que no siguieron los ordenes de Tejero fueron el Presidente de gobierno, Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo, el líder del partido comunista, y un general del ejército,

El héroe - o sea, la figura central - de la historia es Adolfo Suárez. Se ve que se transformó de un Franquista total, fiel miembro del Falange, a un defensor de la democracia. La historia en sí es fascinante, la vida de Suárez, su deseo absoluto para el poder, su falta de sofisticación, sus habilidades en el área de la política, la destreza con que dirigió la transición a la democracia. Y Cercas examina las razones para el gesto de Suárez, un hombre ya derrotado intentando salvar un poco de su dignidad política por no rendirse delante del golpe de Tejero.

No hay ningún elemento que Cercas no investigue. Los líderes reales del golpe, los generales Milans y Armada, las razones para sus ambiciones, el papel del Rey, los sucesos de ese día en febrero y las repercusiones del golpe. Es una investigación minuciosa de todos los asuntos que rodean un solo gesto de desafío de un hombre en la parte final de su vida pública.

fisgon

This is a novel by Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco. It is about a number of things, politics, writing, family, but mainly I think it is about the writer's country, the Philippines. It's a book written about an exile, by an exile, with that exile's obsession for their home place. And that, for me, takes something away from the book.

It is also all style and no substance. The main character is someone called Miguel Syjuco. Yeah, very clever. This has been done by Paul Auster, and others in the past, putting a version of themselves into the narrative, and there is nothing interesting about it anymore. It is full of literary tricks, a mixture of styles, extracts from the works of this other fictional Filipino writer, Crispin Salvador. It's all very clever, there are some nice passages, but it is fundamentally empty. I didn't care about anyone in the novel, or anything that happened. If felt like the novelist was showing off, for 300 pages, all to no effect whatsoever.

fisgon

I have read some reviews of this book which said that you don't need to know anything about baseball to appreciate this book. Strictly speaking this is true, but a knowledge of baseball helps. I follow the sport a little, and this made things easier. The book is not about baseball, as such, but is a little about sport, about the idea of team, of dedication, of talent versus hard work. It's about the process of striving after perfection, and the damage this can do.

It's a likeable book, well written, but it reminded me strongly of two other books I've read in the last twelve months, by Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. Eugenides's book, The Marriage Plot, is a campus novel, like The Art of Fielding, and to me has almost exactly the same tone, in the third person, controlled, detached, sympathetic, steadily building up momentum in the narrative towards a kind of climax. Franzen's Freedom is not generally set in a university, but has the same kind of mild humour, the same steady voice, the same pace. Maybe this is the voice of one particular generation of American writers, I don't know, but their writing has begun to sound the same to me at this stage.

The Art of Fielding is long, but worth reading. Don't believe the hype, though. Some of the blurbs - including one from Franzen, ironically - are over the top. Enjoyable, but I'm not sure that I'll remember it in six months time.

fisgon

I think anything that Zadie Smith writes is worth reading, even if, like this book, it is a bit rambling, and lacks a centre.

The blurb at the back of the book says that it is the story of a city. It is not quite that, but it does attempt to give something of a portrait of North West London, around Willesdon, Kilburn, Harlesdon, through a number of characters who the narrative follows.

And yet it is very unfocused, diffuse, hard to grasp. The focus moves from one character to another, characters that are vaguely connected but only vaguely, without every really following through, without ever really drawing the disparate strands of the story together. There is an attempt near the end to hint that the four people who are more or less central to the book are fundamentally linked, but it is half-hearted at best. This is the great let down, it is hard to engage with something so shifting, so unresolved.

The strongest part is when we learn about Keisha, who later changes her name to Natalie. This is all about identity, or the lack of it, of losing touch with roots, of this kind of modern deracination, of losing track of who you are. Natalie is the centre of the book, for me, if it even has a centre, and is the only character who grabbed me in any way, complex, conflicted, having it all yet deeply dissatisfied, having no idea who she really is.

Yet the impact of Natalie's story is diluted by the other, by Felix and Leah, who to me are far less interesting, less real. There are beautiful sentences, insights, jokes, word plays, all the bright cleverness that Zadie Smith achieves so effortlessly. But something is lacking in the novel that was there in On Beauty and White Teeth, a drive, a unity of purpose. A pity.

fisgon

Corazón tan blanco - Javier Marías

Es la segunda vez que leo esta novela. Casi nunca leo libros más de una vez, me parece una pérdida del tiempo, pero esta novela es única, en la complejidad de su argumento, en los temas que trata, en la estructura que tiene. Valía la pena re-leerlo, es algo genial, fascinante, profundo.

El narrador, Juan, cuenta una serie de historias y anécdotas, interesantes en sí pero aparentemente independientes, parece que no hay nada en común entre esta serie de sucesos. Habla del suicidio de su tía, de como había conocido a su mujer, de su luna de miel en Cuba, de conversaciones escuchadas por casualidad, de un guardián en un museo de arte que pierde su calma y quema un cuadro. Habla sobre su amiga, en Nueva York, que intenta ligar por una agencia de 'dating', y un hombre en particular que ella conoce.

Cuenta sobre su profesión - es intérprete y traductor - y habla de una ocasión en particular cuando él, aburrido con la conversación sosa entre dos políticos que debe traducir, decide cambiar el significado de lo que dicen el político español y su homóloga inglesa, creando un intercambio notable entre las dos personas.

Pero es sólo en la última parte de la novela en que todas las historias contadas empiezan a tener significado. Juan conecta cada ocurrencia con el gran argumento de la novela, por que se suicidó su tía, hace cuarenta años. Tiene que ver con su padre, que estaba casado con ella antes de casarse con la madre de Juan, hermana del suicidio. Y Marías conecta todo lo anterior, Berta, su amiga en Nueva York, la conversación entre los políticos, el guardián del museo, la luna de miel en Cuba y la conversación que escucha ahí. Y todo junto con McBeth, "el corazón tan blanco", la cita de la obra de Shakespeare tiene un significado adicional ahora.

No hay otro libro como este. Da una sensación de intriga y suspense, y también un temor durante casi toda la novela, que empieza con la descripción del suicidio de una mujer joven recién casada. Durante toda la historia estamos esperando una explicación, y también temiéndola. Cuando llega, vale la pena.

fisgon

What a waste of time. This book actually started to make me angry, about half way in, and things didn't get any better after that.

Hawthorn and Child are two London police detectives who, as the novel opens, are investigating an attack on a young man in the early morning. It starts off slow enough, but there is a crime involved, and so you expect some revelations, some investigation, something. But then the novel veers off, it looks at snapshots of other people's lives, almost all of them unnamed, though most of them with some tenuous connection to the eponymous policemen.

And that's it. There is no narrative, no progression with any of the stories, no sense of unity in the novel, just person after unnamed person, some internal monologue, a suicide, unexplained. In fact, nothing is explained, nothing has any meaning, it is nihilist and empty and pointless. A waste of time. There are plenty of good books out there I could have been reading, and I had to burn all these hours wading through this turgid non-event.

More than that, the writing is utterly opaque. There is no colour to descriptions, and in fact almost no descriptions at all. None of the characters is described at all physically, and generally it is hard to tell them apart, especially the two main characters. And most of the sections simply consist of a story about "he" or "she" or "I", and so you are four or five pages in to each section before you know who is who, and what their relationship is to the story. And by then you have stopped caring.

None of the narratives reach a conclusion, none of them fit into the overall story, such as it is, we learn nothing, there is no character development, no resolutions, no point. I kept expecting some kind of effort at unifying the various threads, but there is none. They exist as discrete entities, with no development or meaning. After The Parts, which I really enjoyed, this is a horrible, self-indulgent letdown.

fisgon

This is a bite-sized little novel, a novella really, and tells an apparently simple story that slowly develops into something far more complex and dense.

Tony Webster is the narrator, he tells us about his school days, his three best friends at the time and his first real girlfriend, Veronica, who he met in university. He spends one weekend in Veronica's parents' place in Surrey, where he thinks he is being patronised and ridiculed by everyone except Veronica's mother. Eventually Tony and Veronica split, Veronica starts going out with Tony's friend Adrian, who the group of friends has always seen as the most intellectual, and the most idealistic of them all. There is a suicide, and the group of friends drift apart, and get on with their own lives.

Fast forward forty years, Tony has been married and divorced, he has lost contact with the people from his past, until he receives an unexpected bequest in Veronica's mother's will. From there he feels compelled to dig into what happened in his twenties, and re-connect with his old flame Veronica.

As could be expected from a novel about someone looking back to their youth from the vantage point of their sixties, the book is about memory, and the passing of time. As the narrator says at the beginning, "Time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down." Time seems to have passed quickly for Tony, he tells of the intervening forty years between his time with Veronica and his present in about two pages, it has been a life half-lived, with few details. We get the impression that he regrets not having done more with his life, he regrets his caution, his lack of drive.

There is a lot unsaid in Tony's narration, or at least a lot half-said. He is not quite an unreliable narrator, as he is not totally deluded, but he is at the very least ignorant about a lot of things, and makes many assumptions that are not borne out by the facts. He is, though, aware of this. At one stage he says, "when we are young we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old we invent different pasts for others." And this is what Tony does. Even after retirement, when he tries to get back in touch with Veronica, he misinterprets everything about her responses to him, even holding out some vague hope of a rekindling of their relationship while all the time she has nothing but contempt for him. He is fundamentally clueless. Veronica herself tells him, more than once, "You just don't get it, do you?" And he doesn't.

The story builds towards a kind of climax, our uncertainty about what has happened in the past matches Tony's, until slowly the truth is revealed. It is a little like a kind of literary whodunnit whose final revelation is temporarily shocking, but which is not expanded on and not really developed. The ending, after so much mystery, is slightly anti-climatic, though this fits in with the theme of the book. What has happened has happened, there is no changing that, and the past is what it is and cannot be reformed or twisted or reshaped just by telling it in a different way.

The value of the novel lies in the journey towards the revelations at the end, and not in the twists themselves. It is a dense book, which would probably be worth re-reading, about someone whose life has disappointed him, though he is incapable of figuring out why, and who is prone to assuming things which are totally untrue. It won the Booker prize in 2011. I find it hard to say that the novel is prize-worthy, it seems too slight for that, but there is something interesting there in what at first seems like a very simple story. The complexity builds, layer after layer, until we have a very compact, tightly packed novel that draws you in and makes you want to know more.

Check out my blog with more reviews of films and books...

http://watchingandreadingandwriting.blogspot.ie/2013_03_01_archive.html

Queen-Mise

fisgon wrote: »

Anyone know why I can't edit my posts on this thread?

You can only edit a post for a certain time period after it is published. A couple of hours or a day maybe - I'm not sure. So if you see a typo a few weeks later, it is staying in the post unless you message a mod to change it

I really enjoyed your reviews. I might find that book on Moorish Spain and the one on the sopranos; they sounded interesting.

I could kinda read some of the Spanish reviews but not enough to really know what they were about:o

fisgon

Michael Shermer is a psychologist with an interest in why human beings believe the things that we do. This book is a synthesis of his decades of research into why we hold certain beliefs.

The strongest impression I got from this book was that we as human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for believing things that are not true. In fact, truth and facts and logic are very far down the list of things that persuade us to believe something. Shermer takes a number of the processes by which we form our beliefs and examines each one to get to how these work.

The first, and most prominent process we use to form our beliefs is what he calls "Patternicity". As Shermer says, "our brains are belief engines, evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature."

So we have evolved to connect the dots, to make connections between events that may not hold true, but which make us feel better as we don't like uncertainty. This is how superstitions evolve too, if we are watching our favourite sports team sitting in a certain chair, and the team wins, then our sitting in that chair has had a part in the win, and from then on it becomes "the lucky chair." The process is well understood and demonstrable, and it makes us form false conclusions from the evidence we get.

Another of his main points is that beliefs come first, then evidence. In other words we decide what we believe first, and then work backwards to find the evidence for this belief. And this leads to a very prominent phenomenon that reinforces our beliefs - Confirmation Bias. This is the process by which we interpret facts and evidence so that they confirm our beliefs.

The book is eye-opening, mainly in the way it points out how much we get wrong, how fixated we get on our beliefs, and how this fixation often leads us to hold on to things that are clearly untrue. It is a skeptic's charter, a reminder to go on questioning even in the face of things that seem obvious and self-evident.

more at....
http://watchingandreadingandwriting.blogspot.ie/

fisgon

I saw The Life of Pi recently, and here is a whole novel based around the relationship between tigers and humans, tigers on the loose, tigers as both threat and symbol of the natural world, in all its brutality and beauty.

Though you need patience with this book. The story progresses from two points in time. One with Natalia, a doctor in the former Yugoslavia, and the around the Second World War, in the village where Natalia's grandfather grew up.

So it takes a long time to build momentum. It is necessary to stick with the novel to begin to see some kind of connections between all the narratives.

And yet it is questionable whether it is worth the wait. The writing flows easily, it takes no effort to read the book and the stories are rich and deep and detailed, spanning decades, taking in city and country, real and supernatural. Yet there are in truth too many digressions, the narrative going back and forward in time, mentioning this character and that until it is hard to keep track of exactly who is who.

Finally there is a resolution of sorts at the end, an attempt to tie up loose ends. This linking the two chronologies of the story, however, is lacking, incomplete, providing more questions than answers.

So this book is a mixture. The story is too diffuse to be effective, and failed to hold my attention or engage me. And it is trying to have its cake and eat it, regarding the existence of magic and the supernatural. Yet it is well written, rich, with individual characters and narratives that are fascinating in themselves.

http://watchingandreadingandwriting.blogspot.ie/

fisgon

Reading Philip Roth is a pleasure. He has been doing this so long now, writing intricate, beautiful stories, he could probably do it in his sleep. He is an effortlessly poetic writer, gets directly to the core of characters' motivations and feelings, and draws you in and in to his narratives without you even realizing it.

Roth was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, and many of his novels, including this one, Nemesis, are set there.

The action revolves around the polio epidemic that swept through the north-eastern United States in the forties. We learn about the progression of the disease, from a few isolated cases, to tens, then hundreds of effected. At this time there was no clear idea why or how polio spread, and its progression seemed to be simply random, though it did mainly attack children.

In the midst of a boiling New Jersey summer, we meet the central character, Bucky Cantor, a teacher and playground coordinator, who knows many of the children who are afflicted by the dreaded polio. It is through his eyes that we experience the stifling summer and then the epidemic as it sweeps through the Jewish community of Newark, killing and paralysing kids as it goes, as devastating in its own way as the World War that is going on at the same time.

The novel then moves towards a kind of climax, and it is sickening in its horrible inevitability. The end is devastating, like a smack in the face. We see that there is no rhyme or reason to the progression of the disease, it takes fit and healthy people as much as the young or weak.

This is a wonderful, affecting, powerful book, Philip Roth at his best.

Full review here

fisgon

This is an intriguing book. The main source of fascination is the way that the story is told.

There are thirteen separate narratives, almost short stories, that feature a cast of about ten central figures who move into and out of each other's lives over the span of about four decades.

There is connection after connection between the stories, probably too many to count. The effect is to slowly and subtly create a view of a whole universe spanning decades, a universe with depth and breadth.

The second interesting aspect of the narrative is that the chronology slips and slides all over the place.

We go from the two thousands, to the eighties, to the nineties, back to the seventies, and then forward into the future, to 2022. The story is like a snake, weaving and twisting its way over and back, forward and sideways and backwards.

It should feel disorienting, all this chopping and changing, these new characters appearing all the time, but the individual stories are told so well that the reader doesn't have the chance to get bored or annoyed. The style and power of each story hold our attention.

We do manage to feel like we are reading about one whole universe, despite the thirteen disparate narratives. One character will be mentioned in passing in one section, and will then be the central figure in the next one. We slowly build up a picture of the insecure, fleeting, vibrant lives of the people who inhabit the novel, most of them involved in PR, the music business, academia, travel.

And in the end the fact that there are thirteen stories is a strength. It is obvious why it won the Pulitzer Prize. There is a variety of perspective and style and tone that makes the novel rich and deep and compelling.

Full review here

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The novel is set in a house in Wales - the red house of the title - where eight members of an extended family, aunts, parents, children, step-cousins, spend a week's holidays.

Inevitably, with eight people squashed into a remote house in the countryside for seven days, there are conflicts, revelations, epiphanies, growth, life changes, arguments, fallings out and makings up.

In fact it almost feels like a list of issues to be addressed - homosexuality - check, sibling rivalry - check, an extramarital affair - check, mental illness - check, bullying - check.

The setting is the catalyst for the drama. The four adults and four children are squashed together in one house away from everything they know. There is a spark of romance between some of the teenagers, suspicion among the men, incomprehension between the two women, a near death experience.

The style is very distinctive. The writing jumps from person to person, describing each scene almost simultaneously from differing viewpoints. We get a paragraph from Dominic's perspective, then from his son, Alex, then from his daughter Daisy, then we hear from his brother-in-law, Richard. Jump, jump, jump, jump.

The book is saved from being a kind of literary soap-opera by the strength of the writing and the pace of the narrative. And at least, in the end, while there has been change and development, there are no simplistic solutions.

They leave, having learned important things about themselves, but with no more answers than they had when they arrived.

Full review here... http://watchingandreadingandwriting.blogspot.ie/2013/05/mark-haddon-red-house-novel.html

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This is a very curious book. And also kind of addictive and wonderful.

It is the story of Richard Novak, who lives in LA and has made money in finance.

We know almost nothing about him at first, he is undescribed, faceless, seemingly anonymous.

Los Angeles, and its natural environment, are also key elements in the novel. Things are unstable, crumbling, there are forest fires, sink holes, tar soaking through buildings.

This is mirrored in the character of the protagonist, Richard. His world too is unstable. He has tried to gain a measure of control over everything by sticking to a routine, hardly leaving his house, shutting himself off from new experiences, keeping to a strict diet.

Yet one day he experiences a bout of intense, full-body pain that throws him into agony and forces him to go to the hospital. His health issue makes him reassess his life, and prods him back out into the world again, to meet people and take chances again.

The narrative just proceeds along relentlessly, from one strange and slightly surreal encounter to the next bizarre happening, all told as if we were listening to the news, totally deadpan. It is all so underplayed, and yet so intriguing and entertaining, that it takes a while to get used to the style.

Once you do, it is a story that draws you in, slowly but steadily. It also succeeds in making you want the best for all the characters, they are all flawed and ambivalent, but also completely likeable.

The novel is funny, horrifying, intriguing, perplexing, addictive. It may not save your life, but it will make it briefly better.

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Kevin Barry's characters are outsiders, criminals, addicts in one way or another, intellectually challenged, society's outcasts. He seems to have an affinity with these people on the margins, the ones who are, for one reason or another, not part of regular society.

In this new book of short stories, Dark lies the Island, he takes us on a tour of the seedy, the sinister, the run-down, the criminal, the alcoholic. The characters are nearly all doomed, they are failures, have had bad luck, made bad choices, some of them are simply bad and toxic to society.

As with any short story collection there is a mixture of tales here. There are some that are forgettable, or else that just strike a wrong note, and disappear as soon as you have read them.

And yet others work perfectly, are touching, creepy, funny, and self-contained enough to be a little universe just on their own. The last story - Berlin Arkanoplatz, My Lesbian Summer - is one of these, a perfect capturing of a particular slice of the Berlin art world, and the illusions of a young Cork man who intersects with it.

What is always true, though, is Kevin Barry's ear for dialogue, and for being able to transcribe what Irish people actually say, and the way we use words when we speak.

Full review here...
http://watchingandreadingandwriting.blogspot.ie/2013/06/kevin-barry-dark-lies-island-short.html

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The strength of The Tenderloin lies in the writing, which is zippy and funny and smart, full of pop culture references, wry observations and sharp dialogue. Girls are described as "Anistonian", in a slick reference to the Friends character. People talk in short, smart, pithy conversations, say things like "Boo ya," and "Feel me?", and the spirit of the times is constantly sketched out using markers like the OJ trial.

There are a number of weaknesses in the book though. It is frequently unclear, characters are introduced, not really described properly, and then briefly reappear again later when you have forgotten who they are. And even the title is never actually explained in the text of the book, a trip to Wikipedia is necessary to find out what relevance The Tenderloin has to the actual story. Unexplained, the title just hangs there as a needless mystery that is not very interesting when it is solved.

The biggest weakness though, is in the story and the central character. It is laid out like a coming of age story, though in fact Evan doesn't actually mature or grow at all. He doesn't seem to learn any important thing about himself in his time in San Francisco, and I found it difficult to even care about his development towards the end of the novel.

The Tenderloin is a vibrantly written, funny, smart book, that is let down a little by a weak protagonist and a narrative that doesn't really progress.

Full review here.

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This is a bizarre book.

It is hard to really know what to think or say about it, but it probably helps to just give an outline of the plot.

The narrator and protagonist is Harry Silver, an academic who lives in New York State. The book tells the story of twelve months in Harry's life, from one Thanksgiving to the next.

In the space of a short number of days Harry's life is turned upside down. His brother, George, kills his wife and is in turn incarcerated, so Harry is left as guardian of his niece and nephew. He moves into his brother's house when his own wife, Claire, divorces him.

From there, we get a succession of eccentric characters, a lot of old, senile people coming and going in the narrative, and apparently unconnected and random events happening every second page.

Some of these events are disturbing, like his niece's female teacher engaging in a semi-sexual relationship with the girl. Many are apparently purposely random, like when Harry's nephew Nate decides to have his bar mitzvah in a little village in South Africa. Others are seemingly pointlessly bizarre, like the frankly stupid experimental "wilderness" prison that Harry's brother is sent to instead of a normal jail.

That said, the narrative is relentless, it draws you in and, once you have accepted that there is nothing here that makes a lot of sense, it becomes compelling, in a weird sort of way.

Harry, again for reasons not explained very well, is a Nixon scholar, and has an unusual obsession with the ex-president. Part of his journey is in coming to terms with his life's work, and the book that he has been writing on Nixon for fifteen years.

Along the way, as well as his niece and nephew, Harry gathers in a strange coterie of strays and orphans. He somehow ends up taking care of the elderly parents of a girl he has a brief relationship with. He also adopts the son of a couple that his brother killed in a car crash.

There is redemption, of sorts towards the end. Harry finally discovers a purpose for his life in looking after the three children, two pets and two elderly people that he has picked up along the way. He is fulfilled by the connection that he forms with these people, and his life is given meaning by their need of him.

Yet it is difficult to take the story seriously in many places, it reads like the writer is simply making things up as she goes along, chancing her arm with one strange plot point after another.

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This is a long book, in which two dramatic things happen, and then almost nothing else does.

For a full review, check out the blog.

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Este es un libro que se escribió en 1873 pero que trata de un periodo de la historia de España sesenta años antes.

Está ambientada en la ciudad andaluza del título, en 1813, año en que empiezan las cortes en Cádiz, una forma inicial de la democracia, un tipo de parlamento básico.

Hay, también durante ese año, la guerra de independencia entre España y Francia. El protagonista, Gabriel de Araceli, es soldado en el ejército español, pero pasa unos meses en Cádiz.

Ahí, conoce a un aristócrata inglés, Lord Gray, un bohemio, un mujeriego y un idealista, que causa muchos problemas entre las hermanas de una familia local.

Es en esa familia, cuya figura materna es la severa Doña María, que tenemos una conexión con una España más moderna. Doña María organiza su familia como el dictador Franco dirigiría todo el país, ciento treinta años más tarde.

Las reglas en su casa son estrictas, sus hijas llevan vidas muy restringidas, salen muy poco, y el tiempo que pasan dentro de la casa es para rezar y para las devociones religiosas. Para Doña María, todo lo moderno es malo, toda innovación es la obra del diablo. A la beata Doña María le hubiera encantado el régimen de Francisco Franco en el siglo veinte.

Para mí, esa parte era la más interesante, los conflictos entre los liberales y los conservadores del año 1812 se repitieron un siglo y medio más tarde, y de verdad siguen hoy. Eso da a la novela una relevancia que ayuda a entender las riñas políticas del mundo de hace doscientos años.

También hay descripciones muy vivas de la vida de esa época, de las discusiones en las cortes, la multitud que va ahí para observar, y sobretodo de los personajes, que avivan la historia.

En resumen, Cádiz es una novela fascinante y rica, llena de humor y de descripciones que transforman la narrativa en algo especial.

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"Every shrink, every career counsellor, every Disney princess knows the answer: 'Be yourself'. 'Follow your heart.'
What if the heart, .....leads one....straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?" P.761

The central question of this book is, What if you cannot trust yourself? How do you live, if - because of damage, because of trauma - every instinct you have is self destructive?

Full review here....

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Meg Wolitzer's writing is new to me, but the style and subject matter, the overall narrative voice, are actually quite familiar.

The narrative voice of The Interestings sounds like her contemporaries, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zoe Heller, it is smart, funny, compassionate, a mixture of pop culture references and sharply drawn characters. The voice of a contemporary American writer writing about modern life.

It examines the lives of people who were teenagers in the seventies, and who are in their forties and fifties in the present. The novel, like all of the other writers above, explores the last few American decades, mixing the public with the private, how the lives of the characters intersect with historical events like Vietnam and 9/11.

Like a lot of American novels, it is partly about America, about privilege and fame, but it is also substantially about six characters that meet in a summer camp in 1974 and whose lives are linked from then on.

They are a sampling of the American middle class, gay and straight, talented and ordinary, beautiful and plain. The narrative is not in fact very complex, it simply tells the story of what happens to these people over the space of forty years, illness and marriage, kids and careers, the various attempts they make to forge lives for themselves.

And yet it sucks the reader in. Partly this is down to the style, which is seems light and accessible but is deceptively deep and lyrical. But it is the characters that hold the attention, they are real enough and convincing enough to make you care what happens to them. The slow, gradual drift through their lives gently reels you in, until before you know it you find yourself really wanting to know what happens next.

The tone is warm and sympathetic to its characters, and make it easy to identify with them. A book that gets better the farther you get into it.

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Extremely disappointing. In fact, this is juvenile, cringeworthy, pseudo-fantasy nonsense. Quite a shock to read such tripe from a great writer, don't know what he was thinking.

Full review here....

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Purity is the name of the book, of the main character and is also the aspiration of a number of the characters, who are searching for something pure and simple in their lives.

The book starts off iffily enough, but does really get going when the action moves from California to Berlin and introduces Andreas: son of East German communists, rebel, seducer of young women.

This is what the book does well; it gets inside the heads of its characters and gives us intimate knowledge of their motivations, desires, confusion.

The story soon takes on epic proportions, spanning decades, three continents, multiple characters. At first it seems like there is no connection between the protagonists, but slowly they come together and the inevitable links between their stories become apparent.

It is also a page turner. The novel is literary, but easy to read, and the story picks up pace and depth and colour as it progresses, until it is really difficult to close. It is a little long, and there is some repetition and some longeurs, but it is the work of a writer who knows exactly what he is doing and has confidence in his ability to tell a good story.

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Kevin Barry's strength is when he writes dialogue, and when he manages to get inside the head of a troubled, flailing individual. His descriptions are rich, earthy, and very Irish.

And this is when Beatlebone works. He has fictionalized a visit of John Lennon to the west of Ireland in the 1970s, when he is being pursued by the press, and just wants to escape to an island in Clew Bay that he bought, years previously. The wonderful parts of the book are the madcap, surreal discussions that John has with his minder/driver Cornelius, and the descriptions of John's inner life and the landscape that he sees around him.

The weakness lies in the plot, or lack of it, and the fact that the novel becomes aimless quite quickly.

The other problem with the book is that the writer has plonked a large section of non-fiction in the middle of the book, when he speaks in his own first person voice about the "making of" the novel. I know he thought that he was doing something innovative, but it is a terrible idea, breaks up the flow of the story and dispels the illusion created by the previous 100 pages.

In sum, a mix. Wonderful writing, poor structure, a bit aimless.

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To be clear, the title is "Mary Lavelle", the author Kate O'Brien.

This book was apparently banned in the thirties when it came out, and it is only in the second half that you discover why. It is quite daring for an Irish novel published in 1936, with adultery and open discussion about same-sex attraction.
- "I like you the way a man likes you."

I enjoyed the novel much more than I was expecting. Mary Lavelle, a middle class Irish woman in her early twenties goes to the Spanish Basque country to work as a governess for a year. She is engaged to be married back in Ireland to John, solid but dull and not very enlightened.

The strengths of the novel lie in two areas: The first is the description of Mary's rapid fascination with Spain, with the people, the bullfights (which repel and intrigue her), the language, the landscape.

The second is the portrait of the world of the "misses" - the community of Irish governesses that are charged with educating the youth of the Basque upper class. They all refer to each other by their surnames - O'Toole, Conlan, Lavelle, etc, and are practically all snobby, whinging, contemptuous of their adopted country, incapable for one reason or another of going home. It is an intriguing perspective on a little known community.

Mary discovers passion there in Spain, and in four short months the impression is that she has learned and developed more than in her whole life in Ireland. The book is a kind of love letter to Spain, a wistful, affectionate, at times intense portrait of a young woman who is opened up by living in another place, in another milieu.

The writing is intense and precise and full of detailed descriptions of characters, emotions and places, though it never gets top heavy. The best thing I can say is that I would certainly read Kate O'Brien again.

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This book is way too long for the subject matter.

It is a slight tale of a kind of Don Juan figure who falls for a woman who moves into his building. The poems of John Donne act as a kind of framing device, adding a commentary on the story. The main character is a calligrapher who has received a commission to produce thirty Donne poems, so this is the way the writer gets this slightly gimmicky element into the novel.

It is an enjoyable read; light, humorous at times, like a Channel 4 drama narrated by someone quite posh. But it is essentially insubstantial and has passages and scenes and conversations that seem pointless and could have easily been cut. There is absolutely no justification for the book to be nearly 500 pages.

The denouement of the story is very unconvincing, and the couple of semi twists near the end are very strained and hard to buy. Enjoyable, for what it is, but limited, and not as clever as it thinks it is.

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Irish writer, Elske Rahill, has written an uncompromising book. Based around three young students in Trinity College, Dublin, it is about sex and growing up, with a good sprinkling of mothers and daughters as a central theme.

There are a lot of descriptions of sex in the novel, but almost none of them are erotic: sex in this book is connected to domination, control and fantasy; it certainly doesn't seem to be a lot of fun or very pleasurable. The human body and its functions are also prominent: there is semen, menstrual blood, a miscarriage, childbirth, live sex shows, transvestism.

And yet, what the novel lacks is humour. It is powerful, but the characters are just too constantly intense, misguided, stumbling from one crisis to another. The tone is melancholy and dark; there is little joy in their lives.

This book is innovative and honest, but could do with some light, a breath of fresh air.

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If nothing else, this book is entertaining. Once you get past the first few sections, which are very heavy with economic theory, the story moves forward quickly, and the characters are never bland, if not always likable.

It is the story of the future economic disintegration of the US and the return of American society to a kind of pre-industrial state. Set between 2029 and 2047, t explores debt, aging, social justice and concepts of freedom.

What I would say is that it is all very bleak, and relentlessly so, for the first three-quarters of the book. Nothing good happens to anyone, and the fate of the characters constantly gets worse and worse; there is no respite.

However, Shriver is a talented writer, has a fertile imagination and can tell a good story. And this is what makes the novel readable and more than just another dystopian calamity story. It has endless ideas - not all of them work - but the invention and sheer creative energy give life to a dark, scary vision of the future.

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Started slow, and picked up speed, intensity and interest as the narrative progressed.

Probably close to a 7 out of 10, if I had to rank it. I enjoyed the developing relationships in the African village, Lamin and Hawa and Fern were some of the most rounded characters in the book, and it was when the story moved here that it started to draw me in.

The narrator is only interesting in that she is a non-person - I have just noticed that she has no name in the novel, no-one ever calls her anything. She is constantly subsumed by other personalities: her mother's, her odious friend Tracey's, her pop star boss's, Aimee. The narrator is not sympathetic, she is passive and aimless and has no real ideas of her own.

The novel is about music, about culture, race, the mixture of races, cultural appropriation, dance, the sucking dry of the developing world by its leaders and by the West. Perhaps it is about too many things, and has a couple of loose ends that are not tied up properly, but it is always intelligent, flexible in its perspectives and with characters that are vivid and full.

It would rank in the middle of Zadie Smith's books for me, below the magnificent White Teeth and On Beauty, definitely above the tedious N.W..

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Slick, easy to read, but kind of unremarkable, though not totally in a bad way.

The book is the story of Frances, a 21 year old student in Trinity in Dublin and her relationships/friendships with Bobbi, Melissa and Nick. They get together, split up, talk about stuff (online and in person) and wander in and out of each others' lives. In truth, they don't really do that much.

I don't mind that much that there wasn't a powerful plot driving forward the narrative, and I didn't mind really that some of the characters - Bobbi and Melissa, in particular - are hard to like. It was an enjoyable enough read, and impressive from someone so young (though that shouldn't really be a consideration if you are reviewing a book).

I have seen it described as "post-Irish", and I identify with this perspective, as there is literally nothing of the traditional Irish literary tropes and themes in the book - and that is a good thing. The story could be set in any modern western city by changing a few place and street names.

I do, though, find it a little difficult to get the minor hype that the book has inspired.

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One of my first thoughts about this book was – I pity anyone who had to edit it. The style is unique; it uses short sentences, non-standard grammar and spelling, a kind of stream of consciousness that attempts to express the fractured nature of the girl – and then young woman – at the centre of the narrative.

Also, there are no names in the book; we never learn what the protagonist is called though her experience is all we are given. These techniques give a kind of intensity to the narrative, but also alienate the reader a little, forcing us to look at the world we are given in a very different way to other novels – it becomes a little dreamlike and at times hallucinatory.

It is often impossible to know if the dialogue that we hear is only in the main character’s head or if it is really spoken, and there are parts where it is impossible to say exactly what is going on. It owes something to Joyce but probably more to Beckett’s novels; this kind of intense internality that attempts to let us into a disturbed, fractured human mind and to see what is going on from the inside.

The cast is minimal – a girl, growing up in rural Ireland, her brother who had a brain tumour as a baby and who is still affected by it, her judgmental, pious mother and an uncle who abuses her. There are some incidental characters that pop up, but no one of any real significance.

The plot is not exactly complex either. The girl grows up with her older brother who is teased and bullied in school. She is abused as a thirteen year old, and becomes promiscuous and wild. She finally escapes to the big city – Dublin? – to university, where things don’t really improve for her. She starts a relationship with the uncle who raped her as a thirteen year old, engages in some risky sexual behaviour, then her brother’s tumour returns and she has to deal with his slow decline and her mother’s growing resentment.

Not exactly a barrel of laughs. The more I read of this book, the more it reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel from 2015, A Little Life. In that book, the main character is abused by almost everyone he meets, and endures such extremes of horror and depravation that it is at times hard to read.
In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the central character – for practically the whole novel – is immersed in self-hatred, degradation, self-harm, guilt, depression, abuse, grief and loss. It is a litany of sadness and despair with no chink of light or touch of humour. The misery is relentless and only grows towards the end, building to the almost inevitable conclusion (similar to the conclusion in A Little Life).

The writing is, at times, powerful and moving, but the utter unforgiving relentlessness of the horror and gloom is hard to take, and hard to take seriously, in fact. If a male writer put his female protagonist through what Eimear McBride inflicts on her main character, he would be asked what drove him to want to punish her so badly and accusations of misogyny would abound. The writer seems almost to take a kind of glee in ramping up the abasement and degradation of her heroine and depriving her of any redeeming element in her life, any joy, consolation or safety.

The novel has won, or been nominated for, multiple prizes, so misery lit is obviously appreciated by literary judges. The truth though, is that it is an intermittently impressive but very flawed book, seemingly concerned only with transmitting to the reader the slow disintegration of a human being, a life without solace, hope or growth.

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A very standard tale, with little remarkable about it at all.

The book is reasonably well-written, though the prose is at times a little simplistic. The characters are clear but feel like people I have read about - and seen on TV and movies - many times; types rather than real figures.

The setting is compelling; Shaker Heights in Cleveland, a well organized city where people do the right thing and are considerate to their neighbours - like an American Japan. Into this setting comes Mia, a talented photographer, and Pearl, her teenage daughter. They are immediately out of place amid this trimmed, managed urban landscape.

The book feels like it was written with the film rights in mind - it is easy to imagine a script being written based on the story. The narrative moves forward steadily and always held my interest, but in a casual way; I was interested in hearing how it finished, but if I didn't, I also wouldn't have minded.

Underwhelming, conventional, though a story that keeps you reading.

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The writing in this book is so bad at times that I had to re-read certain parts just to make sure that I hadn't misread them.

I gave it two stars for the energy and at times the humour of the story, but in general there are so many things wrong with it that it is hard to take it seriously, and I did not succeed in finishing it - there are too many good books out there I could be reading.

For starters, the characterisation is pitiful. In fact, there are no characters, only caricatures. Characters in the book have one or two defining traits - Julian is a ladies' man, Miss Ambrosia is a floozy and talks about her periods a lot, the priests are predictably stern and sex-obsessed - and there is no real believable dialogue - each character has a catch-phrase that they use every time that they appear in the story - eg. Mary-Margaret is constantly talking about things not being "of her standard", Charles never stops talking about Cyril as his "adoptive son", that he is not really an Avery - every single time we meet him.

Added to that is the sheer ludicrousness of some of the conversations between people - early on in the novel two seven year olds in 1950s Ireland have quite a detailed discussion about sex, using ideas and terminology that they could not possibly have been familiar with. Cyril's workmate - Miss Ambrosia, openly discusses her periods and sex life with her work colleagues in the offices of the Department of Education in 1966 in Ireland - again, if you know anything about the mid-twentieth century in Ireland you would know how utterly unreal this is. Again, in 1960s Ireland, a woman talks about "dating" her boyfriend - an American word that was not used in Ireland until the 1990s at least.

People in Dublin have names like Woodbead, Terwilliger, Westlicott and Desmond Denby-Denby, as if these were normal Irish names and not the surnames of hobbits. The whole thing reads like a kind of hysterical farce written by someone who has no intention of being taken seriously. If this had been written by a non-Irish person, I would have questioned if the writer had ever been to Ireland, knew anything about Irish history or met any real Irish people.

Do not believe the reviews; if you are looking for something complex and interesting, avoid this book at all costs.

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Unremittingly bleak, this is a very one-note novel. This is its greatest flaw; it is absolutely uniform in tone, and that tone is one hundred per cent dark, drab, morbid.

This was the first Eoin McNamee book that I have read, and I believe that it will be the last. It is a story of secrets, the past coming back to haunt the characters in this small Irish town and the links to a past injustice.

The problem is that there is not one chink of light in the whole book. Every word, every phrase is there to communicate that this is a dark tale, told in a dark place about evil, damaged people. Every description of place is laden with adjectives and verbs to express its dilapidation and decay - a sentence taken completely at random - "She stood at the Victorian kiosk, the cupola broken and askew. The metal of the high board had begun to fail, the structure tilted to one side."

It is relentless, this misery, this sense of despair and doom - "A few others swam in the pool....They did not speak among themselves. They had time for their own hardship alone. They came up out of the changing rooms as though last chances were involved."

It becomes very tedious to read, this unceasing squalor and mess. It is often poetic, but is as subtle as a dark hammer to the head. Did not enjoy.

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First of all, this is not a novel. That may not matter, but it mattered to me - it is a collection of nine stories, all with a man at different stages of his life at the centre.

As I left each story, I was expecting to meet these characters again, and soon began to realize that that was not going to happen. I don't read short stories for this reason; they are bite-sized little chunks, a snack when you want something more substantial.

It is a pity, because I was intrigued by the characters and their narratives. They are all a little lost, uncertain of where they are or where they are going, looking back and forward at their lives with trepidation, regret, uncertainty. Most came off as real people, flawed, curious, at times fascinating, and I wanted to know more about each one. Each story ended too soon, just as I was getting into it.

I like the idea of writing specifically about European men; they are a sub-group worth writing about as much as anyone else - I don't really buy the criticism I have heard and read that there are no non-white men, no ethnic minorities (in fact, there may be - mostly their ethnicity is not mentioned at all) - writers are not required to be equal opportunity employers of characters.

This book had a lot of potential that it did not quite realize. If the stories could have been tied together in some way, or a more unified narrative created, this would have helped the book as a whole.

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The first novel I have read by Asimov, which is strange because I used to read a lot of sci-fi. To be honest, I wouldn't be rushing to read another.

It was written in the late eighties, so it is not that old, but some of the references to the future are a little dated. It is set two hundred years in the future, but there is still talk of people sorting through "computer printouts", which is a hilarious idea, even to us today.

Other parts were more fascinating, such as the idea that human beings have colonised the solar system and beyond and that real human civilisation is to be found on the settlements, which are artificial constructs in space.

The planet Earth is seen as a poor, devastated, crowded, unhealthy place that space settlers avoid like the plague. One of these settlements devises super-fast travel and ends up outside the solar system, near a star called Nemesis and a planet called Eurythra.

It is here where things fall away from science-fiction and come closer to magical-realism. There is a discovery of extra-terrestrial life that seems to be telepathic, and a gifted teenage girl who also seems to have some uncanny abilities to read people's thoughts. The whole story around this girl is very unconvincing.

All in all, the writing isn't great, the story sags in parts and the vision of the future could do with some more details. There are fascinating ideas here, but they are mixed up with some aimless writing and some misplaced magic or fantasy elements. Could be better.