Winter of the World by Ken Follett | The Great Story(teller)

I have been a proper slow-poke this last month. Reading Ken Follett's amazing new novel Winter of the World took me a long time, but truth be told, I'm glad it did. It deserved not to be raced through, but savoured rather.

I read Fall of Giants last year, and had high expectations to the second installment in the Century trilogy, but Follett didn't let me down. Follett is one of the greatest storytellers alive, and once more he perfectly weaves together factual history with fictional characters who come to life in a stunning way. Follett has managed to put together a daunting amount of material in a highly accessible way.

I was happy to see that we hadn't seen the last of my beloved characters from Fall of Giants. But 20 years have passed and the main characters are the children of the main characters of Fall of Giants. The characters are spread over England, France, Germany, Russia and USA, so we are presented with a very full picture of the war from all sides. Since all of the characters are very reflected, regardless of political view, we get insight into a variety of situations, ranging from the Nazi supporter to the Russian spy, from the British soldier to the American politician. All are fully fleshed characters who are forced to change in the course of the war.

In Ken Follett's stories, there is always a very strong dichotomy between good and evil. There are always evil characters involved who are making life difficult for our heroes. But you can trust that good always defeats evil in the end in his writing. Now that I have read a few of Follett's books, I question if Follett perhaps makes those distinctions a little too easy at times. As "classic" stories go, we do expect and want good to win in the end, and of course in the big picture of the war it did, but I still feel that Follett can be a little harder on his "babies" and not always conveniently killing off the bad-guys towards the end. Real life isn't like that (yes, I know, this isn't real life, and people do want a happy ending).

Winter of the World is a history lesson with soul. It brings to life the horrible years of war, the terror, the hunger, the desperation, the blood, but it does it with heart. Once again I genuinely came to care for the characters who was at the heart of it all. And once I finished the book I just wished my grandparents were still alive so that I could pick up the phone and get an answer to all the questions this book triggered in me. I am hungry for more.

I am so excited now about the third installment! Follett keeps blowing me away, and I want him to just keep writing, keep the good stuff coming..! Winter of the World fully satisfied my cravings for a good story and left me with a lot to chew on. Come Christmas, I will pick my parents' brains for what blanks they can fill in, but unfortunately my grandparents' stories were never written down. 

 

City of Dragons by Robin Hobb | Coming Home

Reading Robin Hobb is like coming home. It's familiar, warming and things are the same, but different. City of Dragons, the third installment of The Rain Wilds Chronicles ties together this series with the previous trilogies The Farseer and The Liveship Traders.

The dragons and their keepers have finally reached Kelsingra, the mythical city of the Elderlings. But because most of the dragons cannot fly, they are stuck on the other side of the river. Only Heeby can so far fly to Kelsingra at will, and she is happy to bring her keeper Rapskal, as well as the "expert" on Elderlings, Alise.

Through their explorations of the city, readers of The Farseer will rediscover Kelsingra, and some of the mysteries Fitz never got to the bottom of will be shed light on. Will the city drown the keepers in memories? And what will happen to the city once Leftrin reaches Cassarick and the rest of the world learns about the existence of the mythical city? 

Malta, Reyn and Selden are also prominent characters in this book. They didn't play a big part in the first two books of the series, but here we finally meet them properly again and learn their fates after the events of The Liveship Traders. Malta is pregnant with what she hopes will be her and Reyn's first living child. Malta's younger brother Selden is in a very different predicament. Taken captive in Chalced as "the dragon man" he has to endure cruelties untold.

On top of this, the Chalcedeans are upping their hunt for dragons and dragon parts. Tintaglia learns a painful lesson in an unexpected encounter with arrows. And on his return to Cassarick, Leftrin learns that more people than expected are involved in the Chalcedean plot. The Chalcedeans are desperate, and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Once the idea strikes them that Elderling parts might serve the same purpose, things get very dangerous for our Elderling heroes.

I love being back in Robin Hobb's world, and I cannot get enough of this universe. I get to relive the initial awe of Kelsingra from The Farseer, but now the pieces are coming together. The two first books of this series was possibly a bit slow, but City of Dragons really picks up the pace and widens the scope of the story. We are no longer solely focusing on the slow trek upriver, we have reached the destination and get to see what else is happening in the world. I'm just bummed I now have to wait 6 months to read the final book, Blood of Dragons. Is it too much to ask, dear sweet Robin Hobb, that Fitz or the Fool/Amber make an appearance in the final book? All the other knots are being tied up, but I have to admit, every now and then I stop and wonder what Fitz is doing now. The end of Fool's Quest left room for a last adventure, but perhaps that is another novel (or trilogy)... *fingers crossed*

It should be clear by now that I really loved this book. Robin Hobb delivers reading experiences like no other. It's when I read her novels that I remember why I love fantasy fiction. I have to say, it seems that she's become more brutal in this book, and I like that. She's not at George R R Martin-level, but it's still nice.

Robin Hobb, please keep writing. You practically took my fantasy-virginity, and I will always love you for that and return to you again and again. 

Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann

My boss recommended this book to me the other day, and since I found the cover so awesome, I decided to give it a shot. I literally devoured it. Liza Klaussmann's debut novel is an impressive piece of narrative technique and elegance. A closely knit plot with characters you can't decide if you love, loathe, or simply fear, this is a novel which will keep you guessing right until the end (and it's not even a crime fiction book, technically).

The book kicks off in 1945 when the cousins Nick and Helena's ways are parted with the end of the war. Nick is to be reunited with her husband Hughes who fought in the war, and Helena is off to Hollywood to marry her new husband Avery. But the honeymoon period is short-lived. Nick finds herself whiling away the days in the choking Florida heat, waiting for her husband who she now longer feels she knows. And Helena quickly wakes up to a reality where her new husband's attentions are focused on his "life project". In a year, both woman are pregnant. And as the years pass by, the cousins reunite in New England at Tiger House. But one summer the children Daisy and Ed witness something that will change all their lives forever.

I love the structure of the book. We start off with Nick as the focalizer, and we get her perspective from her life as a bored housewife who aches for her husband's attention and gets a kick out of flaunting her tiny bathing suit in front of her neighbours. One day an incident occurs, and Hughes finally decides they should move back to New England.

After Nick, we have skipped forwards in time to 1959 when Nick's daughter Daisy is 12. Daisy and Nick, Helena and Ed are all at Tiger House for the summer. Daisy is obsessing with her tennis, but she's also falling in love for the first time with Tyler Pierce. Though Daisy finds her cousin Ed strange, she's easily persuaded when he asks her to come spying with him, and through their eavesdropping, we get suggestions as to what is going on under the surface in the relationships between the adults. The tension is thick in the air, and we quickly realize that all is not how it should be. This turns out to be the summer that will change everything for the kids, and the consequences will be fatal.

We skip forwards in time to 1967 and another summer at Tiger House. The focalizer is Helena, and through her flashbacks we learn about her early days of marriage and how she discovered she was stuck with her Hollywood husband who devouted all his time and money to his "project". When she fell pregnant with Ed, Helena started hoping for a better life. But Ed turned out to be a lot like his father, always conducting "research" and not really getting along with other kids. The only one who seemed to like Ed was Daisy, who is now engaged to Tyler Pierce. But Helena is anything but happy for them, and we learn that she's nurtured a growing resentment towards her cousin Nick. The tension in the novel keeps growing and we know that a disaster is about to happen.

The next focalizer is Hughes. His story skips between the war and until the present time of the story. We meet a man who feels that he's made a mess of things but is unable to make it right. His own mistakes cripple him from confronting others', and despite having dark suspicions about certain people, he is unable to do anything concrete about it. But Hughes really tries. Through Hughes' perspective some light is shed on certain occurrences, and we're starting to form a fuller picture of everything that's going on under the surface in Tiger House.

Fittingly, the last focalizer is the ever silent and unnerving Ed. Ironically, in his segment Ed is unable to speak. But he is still able to reveal what is going on behind his blank facial expressions. The build-up is perfect, and until the very last pages we are holding our breaths for fear of what will happen. The tension is so high-strung you can feel it in the air of the house. And Ed's distanced way of seeing things keeps us on the edge until the very last.

Klaussmann has written an almost perfect novel. "Almost" because I want her to keep doing it. I love the retro nostalgia of the setting, the nod to The Great Gatsby, the skips in focalizer which keeps the tension, the perfectly timed revelations of past incidences, the fullness and complexities of the characters, which seem to add dimensions with each person's point of view... It is simply put one of those really good novels that I'll recommend to ANYONE.

Finally I want to make a comment about the title, which I did not know came from the Wallace Steven's poem "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". The title is taken directly from the poem, and Klaussmann was inspired by the poem to write the book. The poem juxtaposes the ordinary vs. the extraordinary, and lack of imagination vs. a vivid imagination. I find this resonates well within the novel in several ways, and one could easily write an article exploring this. I would just like to say that Nick constantly strives for the extraordinary within her life as a "housewife". She wants to break free of her "place", but that does not always turn out for the best. I also feel that the poem suggests that everything is not always how it seems on the surface, and this is very true for Tiger House.

Read it and see the tigers prowling around the house at night, preying on each other.

Philida by Andre Brink | Long Walk to Freedom

Andre Brink says that his latest Man Booker-nominated novel, Philida has been the hardest one to date. Perhaps because in writing it, Brink had to delve into the past, truthfully as well as fictionally. Philida is inspired by true events that happened on a 1800s farm in the Cape area. At this point in this, this farm belonged to relatives of Brink's ancestors.

Philida opens with the slave woman Philida walking all the way to Stellenboch to file a complaint against her master's son, a Francois Brink. Four kids have come from their union, but the main problem is that Francois promised Philida her freedom in exchange for her body. Now that Francois is being pushed into a favourable marriage by his parents, Philida's prospects are suddenly bleak. But come hell or high water, Philida refuses to see her dream of freedom shattered.

 Set around the same time as In the Heart of the Country by J M Coetzee, I can't help but make some connections between the two stories. Both novels focus on a female isolated character. But the racial, and in other words, social differences also makes their choices different. Ironically, whereas Magda in In the Heart of the Country wants to escape her isolation and desperation through words and fiction, Philida can settle for nothing less than freedom. She wants to have the freedom to say "this I will do, and this I will not do". She wants to exert herself to proclaim her own freedom. Magda sees herself trapped within a male hierarchy, but can only escape it through imagined patricide. Philida defies her "place" and confronts her suppressors head on.

There is a lot of walking in the book. I cannot help but draw lines to the metaphorical 'long walk to freedom. Philida walks to Stellenboch and back, to Cape Town, and finally, her last trek to the Gariep, which is a kind of promised land for slaves. In her journey of discovery, Philida comes to find herself, the muslim faith, and she realizes how she can be free. Philida is becoming a real pilgrim.

An added dimension in this story is that we do not only see Philida's viewpoint, but also Francois' and his father's. Even though our sympathies remain with Philida, we are reminded that each story has more than one side, and that slavery makes slaves of us all - including the 'baas'.

Philida is a beautifully written novel which I enjoyed immensely. Philida truly comes to life and is an intriguing and complex character. I haven't really read any books addressing slavery in SA before, so this was educational for me.  I'm not sure I think it deserves a Man Booker prize, but it definitely deserves a large readership.

Booke Spyne Poetrie

Tried my hand at some book spine poetry today! It was quite fun, so will probably do it again!

Read two lines at a time, and then the final one:)

Ancient Light by John Banville | The Invention of the Past

I would like to suggest that a lot of contemporary novel authors have a preoccupation with how our memories are part "truth" and part fiction. J M Coetzee said "we half perceive but we also half create" (Age of Iron). Increasingly this notion is being explored in fiction, and Ancient Light is a great example of a novel that deal with this specific issue. Aging actor Alexander Cleave finds himself reminiscing about his fling with his best friend's mother when he was 15. These memories are juxtaposed to the heart wrenching memory of his pregnant daughter's suicide ten years ago. Alex is desperate to find out the truth about his daughter's death, as well as the truth of what became of Mrs Gray after their fling abruptly came to an end. But he is forced to make up some of it: 'often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing" (p. 211).

What I find extremely inviting about this novel is not only Banville's excellent prose and his meticulous choice of words, but also the fact that he seems to draw inspiration from two of my favourite authors, Paul Auster and J M Coetzee. If Auster and Coetzee's imaginative powers had a baby, the baby might come out as this novel. Both Auster and Coetzee's novels are often very metafictional, and especially the story set in the present tense of Ancient Light have some interesting metafictional traits. Alex has been offered a role in a movie, to play the elusive Alex Vander, whose identity was stolen after his death. The man who pretended to be Alex Vander was then as much of an actor as Alex Cleave. And in his remembrance of the past, it seems that Alex Cleave is inventing the past as much as the fake Alex Vander did. In playing Vander, he is becoming Vander; "...his usurper stepping seamlessly into his place and walking on, into the future, and overtaking me, who will presently in turn become a sort of him, another insubstantial link in the chain of impersonation and deceit" (p. 82).

Everyone involved in the movie production have strangely fictional names. Marcy Meriwether, Toby Taggart, Dawn Devonport and Billie Stryker all have a melodious but artificial quality which made me question if Alex was making them all up, or if they were somehow a figment of his imagination. And when Alex discovers that Alex Vander was in Portovenere, the Italian town where his daughter died, at the same time she was, I really start to question how everything is connected. It is almost an Austerian detective plot.

As mentioned above, the story happens on three time levels. Alex at 15 involved in an almost incestuous relationship with his best friend's mother; the time when his daughter committed suicide and the autopsy revealed that she was pregnant, while her personal notes revealed that a certain Svidrigailov was somehow involved; and now, Alex making his movie debut playing a man who pretended to be someone else. The great star Dawn Devonport has the female lead, playing Vander's much younger love interest. There is always a sexualized mother/son or father/daughter relationship involved in all, and in Dawn Devonport's case, she and Alex symbolically become surrogates for one another.

The title is mentioned a few times in the book. At one point it is referred to as a woman's right to have a window through which some piece of sky will be visible at the far end of the room. This I can only read as symbolizing hope and freedom. Was Mrs Gray's choice to have an affair with a boy her claim to the right of 'ancient light'? Later a different notion of the concept is brought up: "Now he was speaking of the ancient light of galaxies that travels for a million - a billion - a trillion! - miles to reach us. ...and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past" (p.172). Cleave is looking into the past of his youth, to an unresolved event that seems to have kicked off his acting, as well as the death of his daughter, which might never be resolved.

Grief is a strong theme in the novel. Similar to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the protagonist of Ancient Light cannot be reconciled to the fate of his child, and he feels forced to hang on to his grief: "to lay down the burden for the merest moment, would be to lose her with a finality that would have seemed more final than death itself" (p.140).

Ancient Light is a novel that deserves to be read in depth, to be lectured over, have theses written about it, and be compared and contrasted with author x,y and z. Unfortunately I have time only to scratch the surface and catch a hint of what it is about. It is without a doubt an excellent piece of literature, and it is when reading books like this that I really miss studying literature. Greater than The Sea, Ancient Light is a novel with sparks of excellent scattered throughout.

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane | Confessions of an outlaw gone gangster

Shutter Island author Dennis Lehane's latest novel, Live by Night is a thrilling dive into the 1920s-1930s gangster underworld of Boston and Florida. The self-proclaimed outlaw Joe Coughlin gets involved with the girl of one of the big local bosses, Albert White, and before he knows it finds himself jailed for a crime he did not commit. In jail, however, he becomes the "adopted son" of a bigger boss, Maso. When Joe returns to freedom, he's put in charge of Maso's Florida operation, and Joe quickly goes to work bribing the cops and fighting off the KKK in the area.

Joe lives by night, and there is always the threat of being betrayed by one of your own men. As we follow Joe's own experiences, the pendulum always keeps changing. Despite the unbearable heat in Florida, Joe builds a life and a name for himself there. However, Joe meets unexpected resistance in a drug and prostitution victim he helps rescue. The girl's father instills the fear of God in her, and she starts preaching against the potential casinos which could become legal at the end of prohibition. Joe has a lot riding on the casinos, but the girl gets the popular vote. Joe's reluctance to "turn her lights off" become fatal for him, and soon Joe finds himself on a boat, knee deep in a block of cement.

Joe always emphasizes that he lives by night, because the rules are different. "You, you buy into this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn't pretend to be anything else..." (p. 144). However, as time goes by, Joe has to admit to himself that the boundaries between living by day and night, between good and bad, are becoming blurred: "Something was getting lost in them, something that was starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags were waved at the Main Street Parades, where you sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself" (p. 284). 

The story is action packed and always entertaining. Lehane uses proper hard-boiled language which I just savour reading: "Dion Bartolo hit him in the mouth with his pistol. hit him hard enough to knock him out of his chair and draw some blood. It got everyone else thinking how much better it was to be the one who wasn't getting pistol-whipped than the one who was" (p. 5). The plot keeps thickening, and we can't help but remember the proverb "live by the sword - die by the sword".

I couldn't have read Live by Night at a better time. I recently started watching Boardwalk Empire, a brilliant "gangster" show set in the early 1920s, so I've got the social setting and context just right to get the most out of this book. A great story with everything you expect, brutal action, thrilling suspence, passionate romance and the femme fatale, as well as characters you enjoy knowing. Recommended!!!

Oh, and best of all? Not only are they making a movie version, but the crown prince of gangsters, Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing Joe! Eeeeeeeeeeeek! Can't wait! I hope there are certain scenes (uhum) they don't cut out for the movie script..!