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..!

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce | The Old Man and the Road

Longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a real gem. This novel is truly tender, and I came to grow fond of and care for Harold and Maureen, the main characters of the story. Retired, they live a quiet life in Kingsbridge in the south of England. One morning a letter arrives that will change their lives. A colleague Harold has not seen in twenty years, Queenie Hennessy, is terminally ill with cancer. After Harold has penned a reply and walks on his yacht shoes to the post box, something changes, and Harold gets this urge to keep walking. A chance encounter with a girl working in a petrol station spurs what will be Harold's pilgrimage, as he carries on walking, all the way towards Berwick-Upon-Tweed in the north of Scotland in the hopes of saving Queenie. 

Maureen is left clueless behind. While Harold phones her to let her know what's going on, Maureen lives in denial about the whole situation, and feels forced to fend off the neighbour's questions regarding Harold's whereabouts. Does Harold love Queenie Hennessy? 

As his pilgrimage progresses, Harold has to deal with more than merely nth degree blisters, hunger and unpredictable weather. All the people Harold meets on his way share part of their stories with him, and Harold feels it as a slight burden to get a peak into their lives. As he walks, Harold finally comes face to face with the problems in his marriage and in his life that he has been oppressing for twenty years. But when Harold's pilgrimage hits the news, Harold is blessed with co-pilgrims he didn't ask for who also claim to be walking to save Queenie. 

Meanwhile, Harold's absence is forcing Maureen to take a good hard look at herself and their marriage. I love the friendship that grows between Maureen and the neighbour Rex, and the way Harold's absence becomes the catalyst for Maureen to come out of her shell. 

This is overtly a story of a pilgrimage, but it is also the story of life as a pilgrimage. Harold's walk becomes a metaphor for his walk through life. On his walk he experiences moments of elation and great fate, he seemingly comes into his own: "He watched the squares of buttery light inside the houses, and people going about their business. He thought of how they would settle in their beds and try to sleep through their dreams. It struck him again how much he cared, and how relieved he was that they were somehow safe and warm, while he was free to keep walking" (p. 186). But he also suffers moments of extreme pain and doubt, and there are times when he can barely continue putting one foot in front of the other. And as the days go by, it becomes more and more questionable if the elderly man in yacht shoes can make it in time to save the dying Queenie.

The novel is also to a large degree a story about border crossing. Apart from the geographical border crossing of the walk itself, Harold also crosses all kinds of psychological borders; his walk is in a sense making him connect with nature and everyone in it."Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not" (p. 188).

I loved this book. When I think back on the reading experience, I feel warm inside. I want to give Maureen and Harold a great big hug, and I want to join Harold on his pilgrimage, but maybe with better shoes. I think there is a lot to learn about acceptance, forgiveness and redemption in this book, and that it is never to late. It's no harder than putting one foot in front of the other.

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne | The Angel Killer

The Guilty One is Lisa Ballantyne's debut novel. According to the publisher, the crime fiction book is bound to be a success, and based on the unusual and unsettling topic, I can definitely see it getting a lot of attention.

11-year old Sebastian Croll is accused of the murder of 8-year old Ben Stokes. Having been spotted fighting on the day of the crime, and with blood traces on his clothes, things are not looking good for the strange Sebastian who claims to have been with his fragile mother at the time the crime was committed. We follow Sebastian's attorney, Daniel Hunter, as the case forces Daniel to take a closer look on his own troubled childhood.

At 35, Daniel is a successful London attorney, but Sebastian reminds him that at his age, Daniel lived a very different life. With an absent father and a drug addict mother, the young Daniel is used to fighting, running, and always worrying about his mother. When he is placed with the foster mother Minnie on a country farm, Daniel manages to turn his life around. However, when Minnie does the unforgivable, Daniel walks out of her life and never looks back. Until now.

There is a strong link between "the Angel Killer" case and Daniel's own childhood problems. Daniel feels a tie to Sebastian, who seems to look up to him. If Sebastian is found guilty, he will be thrown into a prison system which will only worsen his problems. In the book we learn that in the UK, children are from the age of 10 considered legally responsible. In my home country of Norway, and the rest of Scandinavia, the age is 15. That said, there was a tragic case in Sweden in 2011 where a 10-year old child killed a 4-year old child on a playground. Because the perpetrator was a minor, child welfare took over. In the UK, however, that is not the case, and Sebastian risks actual prison sentence if he is found guilty.

The Guilty One is at times really creepy. There is obviously something up with Sebastian, guilty or not. The court case details were really interesting, and it is unusual get the perspective of the accused and the defender instead of the victim and prosecutor. The story of Daniel was also well developed. Minnie is just a great, complex character, and so is Daniel.

What I really enjoyed about this novel is the social commentary and the way nothing is clear cut. There are no innocents in this novel, everyone is guilty in some way. It is also nice that not everything is resolved or put out in the open. There are still aspects that are left to the imagination.

Well done on your first novel, Ballantyne. I wouldn't mind revisiting Daniel some time in the future.