The Girl on the Landing

Michael Gascoigne is wealthy, decent and boring. He is locked into a routine of working as Secretary to his gentleman’s club, Grouchers, in Mayfair, or else stalking deer on his estate in Perthshire: someone whose idea of an adrenaline rush is playing bridge after dinner.

Elizabeth, his wife has married him – not exactly for his money, not exactly for love either. Their marriage is passionless and monotonous. On their honeymoon night, Michael’s first though is to hand his trouser in a trousers press. Dreary weeks are spent in the dank and gloomy house in a Scottish glen, Beinn Caorrun, that Michael inherited from his parents.

Then, on a visit to friends in Ireland, something appears to trigger a change in Michael’s behaviour. On the way back, Elizabeth tells herself: ‘there was something different about Michael.’ And there is. Life with Michael suddenly becomes so much more fun, more passionate, they spent hours talking, a surprise getaway in Rome… and Elizabeth sees glimpses of a man she could finally fall in love with.

But strange things began to happen. During one of those gentlemen club casual meetings, Michael snarled and passionately refutes the origins of Britons. Peter Robinson, Michael’s closest friend had lobby for supports of Mr. Patel nomination to Grouchers, which creates an uproar amongst club members who cited:

A great many members here don’t want to be shaken up. They don’t want to be modernised. That’s why they are members here in the first place. We all just want to preserve a little piece of England, here in Mayfair, where English people can speak and behave as their fathers did, without being apologetic, or politically correct or embarrassed by each other.

Michael concludes that the Mitochondrial DNA, maternal genetic inheritance, resembles that of the ancient Britons who originally populated this land at the end of the last Ice Age, somewhere in the Pyrenees, from the Mesolithic era, long before Celts, before the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings came. It’s the way Michael had defended his theory. His aggressiveness displayed was one that Elizabeth had never came across in her 10 years of marriage. Michael seems to talk to an imaginary friend all the time. Sometimes Elizabeth saw a dark-haired woman who appears on the windows or in the garden. Why does Michael shot a hostile glare to Alex Grant during the wedding and why the name of Stephen Gunnerton upsets him? Why is he reading about Serendipozan medication and symptoms of schizophrenia? What happen to Michael’s parents? Is it true his mother met an accident on a boat trip and his father disappears in the blizzard while out to save a boy? How long will the new changed Michael last? And who is Lamia, the name that Michael mutters in his sleep? But who – or what is changing Michael? Who is the girl on the landing? And what does she want?

My Verdict: 3.5/5

The book is separated by chapters which are narrated by both Michael and Elizabeth alternatively until the last quarter of the book we were left guessing about the whereabouts of Michael, and Elizabeth express her new found love for her husband. The book deals with the issue of mental illness, schizophrenia and medication that may alters patient’s personality. I find Elizabeth’s late awareness of her husband’s mental health history after a decade of marriage preposterous. However, the pace of the book is set nicely, first with the appearance of a dark haired lady who dress in dated costume, to the shocking discovery of Michael’s family and childhood history, to the possibility of Elizabeth walking into her demise with a psychopathic killer on the loose. A sensitive rendition of a dark subject,about being ‘normal’ and insane, about lost love and making a marriage works, about race and origins, albeit an unconclusive ending and we never knew if the Girl on the Landing that appears in the landscape picture on the wall is a ghost or a figments of Michael’s (and Elizabeth’s too) imagination. Pale in comparison to Salmon Fishing in Yemen, nevertheless a heart palpitating and enticing read.

Her Fearful Symmetry

After her success of The Time Traveller’s Wife, the much awaited Niffenegger’s novel is here. The novel opens with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat and its contents to the twin daughters of her estranged twin sister, Edwina, back in Chicago, on conditions that the girls be 21-yaer-old and that Edwina and husband, Jack are not to visit them on their London flats. These 20-year-old dilettantes, Julia and Valentina, move to London, eager to try on a new experience. 

Besides dressing in one of their obsessively matching outfits, Valentina is a perfect symmetry to Julia. Valentina has a condition called Situs inversus, all her internal organs, including her hearts are on the opposite side of Julia. Her Fearful Symmetry refers to Valentina, obviously. Symmetry, Cemetery, good wordplay. Valentina is asthmatic and is always sickly, she can’t find her directions and she depends on Julia to take care of her. The twins are inseparable.

She was used to the profound intimacy of her life with Julia, and she did not know what a cloud of hope and wild illusion is required to begin a relationship. Valentina was alike the veteran of a long marriage who has forgotten how to flirt. So the twins had remained virgins. As she lingers in the world of uninitiated. ‘What was it like?’ they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there.

The historic Highgate Cemetery, which borders Elspeth’s home, serves as an inspired setting as the twins become entwined in the lives of their neighbors: Elspeth’s former lover, Robert Fanshaw lives downstairs and is writing a thesis on the Highgate Cemetery; Martin Wells, lives upstairs, an agoraphobic crossword-puzzle creator, stricken with OCD (Obssessive Compulsive Disorder) spent his days stranded in bed or scrubs the floor with bleach till his hands bleeds and misses his wife, Marijke who left him for Amsterdam to be liberated from his sickness; and the ethereal Elspeth herself, struggling to adjust to the afterlife as a ghost, whose idea of entertainment is haunting the living with Ouija Board and writing on dust. 

Robert mourned for the loss of Elspeth but soon found comfort in the younger version of Elspeth, Valentina. Only Valentina can see and communicate with Elspeth’s ghost. When Robert found out about Elspeth’s ghost, he is torn between his faithful love to Elspeth and new found infatuation with Valentina. Will Robert choose to go back to the memory for Elspeth or will Robert choose to move on with Valentina?

There is a perverse pleasure in reading this book. You know the whole idea is crappy but you wanted to know what happens to the characters at the end. I find the inhabitants of the flat self-centred and weird. Robert Fanshaw stalked the twins for 8 weeks (through underground, parks etc.) before formally introduced to the twins (why??!!). Elspeth agreed to help Valentina separate from her twins (more why?!! considering the shocking truth between Elspeth and the twins). Robert agreed to become a grave robber to resurrect Valentina and why does Valentina feels suicidal when her life is going her way? Although she is finding a way to stay away from her dominant twin Julia, surely there is a way less drastic than faking her own death and thinking she will be resurrected successfully, especially when she had seen how her pet cat resurrection experiment failed?!! (Sorry for the spoiler).

I have to give it to Niffenegger in portraying the heartbreaking tale of two people who love each other but can’t be together – The unattainable is always attractive, as she said. The way Martin yearns for Marijke, Robert mourned for Elspeth. Niffenegger weaves a haunting tale about the complications of love, identity, and sibling rivalry and brought these quirky, troubled characters to life, but readers may need to suspend their own logic and supernatural disbelief as the story winds to its twisty and disappointing end. 

The ingenuous structure of The Time Traveler’s Wife is absent in this haphazard rendition of 6 or more characters in Her Fearful Symmetry. At several occasions I questioned myself if the success of The Time Traveler’s Wife is a fluke. 

My verdict: 3/5

An entertaining read with surprise unfolding of secrets and I finished it in one sitting and in one day, but I wouldn’t pester anyone to read it. To each his / her taste, die hard Niffenegger fans may forgive her shortcomings and love this.

Juliet, Naked

Annie and Duncan fit together naturally, like jigsaw pieces, though Duncan’s passionate obsession with Tucker Crowe, the reclusive, tortured-genius song writer, has never left much time for anything more meaningful – marriage, kids, conversations about something other than Tucker Crowe and his disappearance after a mysterious incident in a nightclub toilet twenty years previously. Duncan is a dedicated Crowologist. Duncan spent his waking hours talking to people on-line about Tucker Crowe. A Crowe night on an internet radio station, a new article, a new album from former band-member, are subjects of long discussions. The bulk of content produced are of essays analysing lyrics, discussing influences, or conjecturing, apparently in exhaustibly about Crowe’s silence. 

 In fact, Annie’s starting to wonder whether she’s wasted 15 years on a bad relationship, stuck in a dull job in a dull town on England’s Bleak east coast called Gooleness. 

She (Annie) wanted to feel unconditional love, rather than the faint conditional affection she could scrape together for Duncan every now and again; she wanted to be held by someone who would never question the embrace, the why or the who or the how long. There was another reason, too: she needed to know that she could have one (baby), that there was life in her. Duncan had put her to sleep, and in her sleep she’d been desexed.

The straw that breaks the camel back moment came when Tucker’s record company suddenly issue a stripped-down version of his most famous album, Juliet, Naked, Tucker’s first release for decades after his last hit album Juliet, and Annie just can’t see what’s good about it, or at least what’s better about it than the original, Duncan finds solace in bed with co-worker Gina – and Annie is at least liberated to throw him out. 

But worse is to follow for Duncan: Annie is not alone in her opinion. After she posts a review on a fan website, she gets a response from a completely unlikely source, Tucker himself. The correspondence which follows is doubly satisfying: it turns out that not only is Tucker an expert like her on years of waster life, but she begins to realise what lies behind his long silence. And it certainly isn’t an incident in a nightclub toilet. 

In fact, Tucker has been living as a recluse since leaving the pop scene. He has been dating and breeding. Tucker has been a useless father to four of his five children, and a useless husband to every single one of his wives, and a rubbish partner to every single one of his girl friends. Now in his fifties, Tucker is laden with troubles from his children from two continents whom he never spent time with, except Jackson; the fearful prospect of seeing his daughter, Grace; financial problems and health problems that has to do with his weak heart. 

Sometimes Tucker was mystified by society’s obsession with the natural father. All his kids had been raised by competent mothers and loving step-fathers, so why did they need him? They (or their mothers) always talked about wanting to know where they came from and who they were, but the more he heard that, the less he understood it. His impression was that they always knew who they were. 

This is my first Hornby book. But I can see Hornby’s talent for carving a total failure that you can laugh along with. Hornby writes brilliantly about the nature of creativity and obsession, and how two lonely people can gradually find each other. The novel is very contemporary, the online blogging and emails, the description of album, the wikipedia entry of Hornby, the paparazzi obsession of stalking a famous personality and silly things die-hard fans would do for their idols, the overrated appraisal of a crappy albums; it is all very believable and very funny. 

Towards the middle it becomes weary. There are too much whinging and whining. So if Annie wants to get hinge with loser Tucker, go ahead, I can’t see there is any good that would come out of it! And sure enough, there wasn’t any good that came out of it. 

My Verdict: 3/5

What I like about the book are the humour, the obsession, about wasted years and the emails that wrote with a heart. Unfortunately, a book that starts off in a high and ends with a low. Annie love life hasn’t improved, in fact she gotten herself into more mess, and she still kept her shrink appointments and spent £5 an hour on therapy. What a failure!

About the writer:

Nick Hornby (born 17 April 1957) is an English novelist and essayist. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sports, and the both aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.

Several of Hornby’s books have made the jump from page to screen. Hornby wrote the screenplay for the first, a 1997 British adaptation of Fever Pitch, starring Colin Firth. It was followed in 2000 by High Fidelity, starring John Cusack; this adaptation was notable in that the action was shifted from London to Chicago. After this success, About a Boy was quickly picked up, and released in 2002, starring Hugh Grant. An Americanized Fever Pitch, in which Jimmy Fallon plays a hopelessly addicted Boston Red Sox fan who tries to reconcile his love of the game with that of his girlfriend (Drew Barrymore), was released in 2005. It appears likely that A Long Way Down will also be adapted; Johnny Depp purchased film rights to the book before it was published.

Between the Assassinations

In Between the Assassinations, Aravind Adiga has imagined the small Indian city of Kittur, an everytown nestling on the coast south of Goa and north of Calicut. Through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, an entire Indian world comes vividly to life. Kittur presents a microcosm of Indian life in the 80’s, the years between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. Muslim, Christian and Hindu, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor: all of life – the ‘sorrowful parade of humanity’ – is here.

Journeying through Kittur’s streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and outer limits, the book begins every new story with an image of the fictional landscape, the Bunder with its prawn curry and rice, the lighthouse hill, the Nehru Maidan, Angel Talkies Cinema, the history, the language, the demographics of Kittur, the Salt Market Village etc. 

• Ziauddin, a village boy who found work in a tea shop and then employed by a Muslim man, Pathan, as a porter at the train station who instructed Ziauddin to count how many trains that carries truck load of Indian army every day.
• Abbasi, an owner of textile factory who constantly receive extortion to pay corruption to the State Electricity Board and the Income Tax Authority. Until one day he decided to stood up to them.
• The authority defying ‘Xerox’ Ramakrishna who sells bootleg textbooks and The Satanic Verses despite repeated taut from the authority, to earn a living.
• Shankara, a student of the St Alfonso’s Boy’s High School, half Brahmin, half low caste Hoyka, planted a home made bomb in Lasrado chemistry class, to mock his chemistry professor (who is mocked in his entire life because of his impaired speech). 

One day he met an old Brahmin who said ‘You must find your own caste,’…. ‘You must find your people.’ Shankara felt sorry for this old Brahmin who has to catch the bus. Shankara is always chauffer driven. Shankara thought: he is of a higher caste than me, but he is poor. What does this thing mean then, caste? Is it just a fable for old men like him? If you just said to yourself, caste is a fiction, would it vanish like smoke if you said, ‘I am free’, would you realise you had always been free? 

• Mr. D’Mello, an assistant headmaster at St Alfonso’s who invited pet student Girish to his home has high expectation of Girish to be virtuous, intelligent and to succeed. D’Mello was not pleased that Girish is not winning in quiz competitions and was disappointed Girish took a peak of pornographic images at the back alley.
• Keshava, a destitute old man, who came from rural village and mixed with the wrong crowd. He is promoted to a bus conductor only to meet with a tragic accident.
• Gururaj, a disenchanted journalist who believe he is reporting lies on the newspapers upon grapevine validation from a Gurkha night watchman, until he became mental and forsaken his rise to the editorial chair.
• Chenayya a cycle-cart pullers, working for Ganesh Pai of Umbrella street, pulling carts which consume higher calories than his daily food intake and it doesn’t make sense to him that ‘When an elephant get to lounge downhill without doing any work at all, and a human being has to pull such a heavy cart?’
• Soumya’s scrapping a living on begging to feed her father’s drug habits.
• Jayamma, the Brahmin cook, was condescending to the lower caste, but she was not treated any better by her employer.
• George D’Souza, a manual labour at construction site who became a gardener to the rich thinks he can controls his employer, Mrs Gomes, but stepped over his line and lost everything.
• Ratnakara, a sexologist who helped his rejected potential son-in-law to seek remedy to cure his STD.
• In the affluent neighbourhood of Bajpe, the childless couple of Giridhar Rao and Kamini, lives a life free from societal restriction. – except I don’t understand the link between Giridhar escape to his private beach and the deforestation to make way for the sport stadium.
• Murali of Salt Market Village, a bachelor at 55, gave his life for the work of the communist party only to see the ideology losing its appeal and things have not work out for the better in India. 

It moved a few inches at a time, and then Chenayya (the cycle-cart pullers) had to stop mid-hill and clamp his foot down on the road to hold his cart in its place. When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedalled; behind him, a long line of cars and busses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain……. 

Through the eyes of all of these characters, Adiga demonstrates acid observations and textured with wicked humours and humanity. Through them I understand the lives of the poor and deprived Indians, and the bigger forces at work that kept people in poverty. Short stories are essentially harder to write than a long one, the ending should be curt enough to stop it from dragging into a long fiction, but meaningful enough to prompt the reader to ponder about the implications and the meaning of it. In my opinion, Adiga fared better in his Man booker prize winning The White Tiger than this book.

My Verdict: 3/5 

The settings, landscape depictions are brilliant. Although stories like Chenayya and Shankara’s stories are inspiring and the meanings are deep seeded, but the book and its characters left a bad taste in my mouth. I lost interest mid-way. The reason is despite being in an impoverished and destitute life situations, the main characters manage to exude an air of contempt to fellow human beings, and the outlook in life is one of finding a way to be one-up against peers by indulging in more misdemeanour and lies. Whether this is intentional or not, the writer has not created and developed endearing characters that I could empathise with, and that dilutes the horrendousness of the atrocities committed by the characters in the book towards one another. 

For my reviews on The White Tiger click here.

Ravenous Youth and UFOs

In one of my foul mood weekend (must be the weather), I found reading through “Between the Assassinations” dreary and the prospect of starting a thick novel repulsive. So I picked up Xialu Guo’s 20 Fragments of Ravenous Youth, finished it within hours. Encouraged, I continued to read UFO in Her Eyes and finished both books in one day (200 pages each, less if you don’t count the photographs and dialogue-based narration). I am going to review both books at one go.

Life as a film extra in Beijing might seem hard, but Fenfang – the spirited heroine of won’t be defeated. She has travelled 1,800 miles to seek her fortune in the city, and has no desire to return to the never-ending sweet potato planting back home. Determined to live a modern life, Fenfang works as a cleaner in the Young Pioneer’s movie theatre, picking up lost items while sweeping the floor, falls in love with unsuitable men, keeps drawer full of course certificates in her Chairman Mao drawer (so-called because of Mao’s political ideology for personal and society advancement and improvement), work as film extras with silent roles, dabble on scriptwriting, and keeps her kitchen cupboard stocked with UFO instant noodles (might be the inspiration for her latest novel – UFO in Her Eyes) and live in places which are infested with cockroaches:

I’ve been blessed with cockroaches in every place I’ve lived in Beijing, but it was in the Chinese Rose Garden that I was truly anointed. My apartment was their Mecca. They spent the entire time multiplying. A female cockroach can produce 300 eggs in her lifetime, and it only takes a few weeks for an egg to become an adult. Every crevice gave forth a vast and mighty army of invaders, from the gas-pipe hole in the kitchen wall to each crack in the tiles. They linger on the rims of my cups, or in my rice cooker pondering the meaning of life. Once I swallowed one while absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatised, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.

(Ha! It reminds me when I kill one of them for my science project. I kept the cockroaches in an enclosed plastic bag for 3 days and they were still alive. When I cut off its head, its body was still squirming. It was freaky. I pour boiling water over the body and then spent time pulling apart its many parts of mouth and glued them onto my workbook, man, was I fascinated with them!)

FenFang struggle epitomised the emptiness and confusion of a country pumpkin out in the vast megalopolis, hounded by ex-boyfriend, Xiao Lin, moved homes several times, frequent calls from Boston boyfriend Ben, immerse in a social circle of scriptwriters Patton and Huizi, as Fenfang might say, “Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn’t it about time I got my lucky break?”

Fenfang holds some sentiments in what she had lost in the city and found comfort in the unconditional love of her family in the rural village, the books ends with an ambivalent feeling of leaving Beijing after 10 years and received a “number” (social number in China) to travel freely nationwide and overseas.

20 Fragments of Ravenous Youth captures the confusion of youth brilliantly. Each chapter starts with one of Xiaolu’s black and white pictures of Beijing in the midst of development – art photography cliche. They are pretty good pictures and they set the scene and create a visual imagery for the reader to follow. Although set in Chinese cultural context (for e.g. you have to hear Sandy Lam’s song ‘I love someone who isn’t coming home’ to know what she is talking about), a young woman’s search for beauty, fame and belonging (and whatever else that one is searching) is recognisable and universal.

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Totalitarian Society in its more exrteme version, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. – Milan Kundera, Something behind

The story of UFO in Her Eyes is set on Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is upturned when she sights a UFThing – a spinning plate in the sky – and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. It’s not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. And when the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar $2000 cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance.

The entire book is structured as interrogation file. First by the Intelligence agent, next the economic development finance officer assessing the mayor’s local village development plan to decide extra funding, a murder investigation, and then follow-up of the UFO’s report by the intelligence agent after 3 years. Xiaolu Guo tells Kwok Yun’s moving story via the interrogation files compiled by the visiting agents. We meet the bad-tempered inhabitants of Silver Hill including: Kwok Yun’s grandfather Kwok Zidong, Headmaster Yee (whom Kwok Yun’s later married), and the silent bicycle mender from Ji Lin Province who is suspected of murder and an illicit relationship with Kwok Yun. We also met the Butcher, Ling Zhu, reliving his days as a Parasite Eradication Hero during the Cultural revolution and had his license revoked by the authority for not adhering to the hygiene standards of eradication of flies; and the foul-mouthed tea farmer ‘Rich and strong’ who laments lost of revenue with the memorial statue of Kwok Yun and UFO sightings built without his permission on his land , Carp Li who rears his carps; all watching in horror as his land is overrun by the mayor’s 5 year modernisation plan and building initiative that includes sport centre, massive car park, shopping complex and major highways etc. The catalsyt for change is the ambitious mayor of Silver Hill, Chief Chang Lee, whose two sons died in a mine’s accidents. Determined to ‘Demolish the weak, demolish the rotten!’, Chief Chang embraces the DengXiaoPing’s ideology, where it is said:

Poverty is not socialism. “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” and to develop the productive forces to a level where there is an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. And the superiority of the socialist system to the capitalist system will be demonstrated by its ability to develop those forces faster and better. As they develop, the people’s material and cultural life will consistently improve. Socialism means eliminating poverty.

And that ideology encapsulates the underlying motivation of the leap of development the world sees in China.

As UFO Hotels spring up, and the local villagers go out of business, Xiaolu Guo’s startling parable of change imagines an uneasy future for rural China and its relations not only with Beijing but the wider world beyond. In the preface, Milan Kundera quotes that a totalitarian society requires absolute transparency, hence the elaborate process of interrogation, investigation and documentation prevalent in the Chinese society. Despite so, every character in the story has a hidden agenda. We are left with the questions whether the intention of pursuing economic development is one of collective good or personal greed. Overall it is an entertaining read. The story is shallow, but the implications are deep.

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My Verdict 5/5:

I thought after the readable Dictionary for Lovers, her subsequent books might fall short of expectations, like most writers do. XiaoLu Guo is a wonderful writer, she writes with a good sense of humour and provide ample food for thought. I am glad to be proven wrong.

About the writer:

Since the success of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (the book was  shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction 2006), Xiaolu Guo has scored further adoration from the literary world. The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 20 Fragments of Ravenous Youth was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Xiaolu’s film career continues to flourish: How is Your Fish Today? (2006) was selected for the Sundance Festival and awarded the prize for best fiction feature at the Creteil International Women’s Film Festival. Her latest feature, She, A Chinese, will be released in 2009. She is currently Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation resident, based in Paris. From South China fishing village to Paris, She has come a long way.

A note for the unsung heroes. The translation from Chinese by Rebecca Morris, with revisions by Pamela Casey have done the writer and the books justice, and none of the meanings were distorted, in fact I was at awe of the fluidity of it.

Intercultural Marriage, not for the faint hearted

Imagine a starry eyed bride being whisked away to a foreign land, she is married to a handsome foreigner, anticipating a life of adventures and of different cultures, while teary-eyed friends and family members bade farewell and wish her the very best of her future.

This is what fairy tales want you to believe. In reality, it’s far from fairy tale. 

What are the sorts of people who go into an intercultural marriage (exogamy)? It said these people display some of these attributes:

• Non-traditionals – while being a part of and accepted by their own society, they don’t place importance on belonging to the “in-group.” They do their own thing in life. A loner by choice.
• Romantics – foreign land, international adventure, you get the idea.
• Compensators – one who believe they can only find their better half in a foreigner. E.g. a Latino is more romantic, an Asian wife is deferential and obedient etc. (I can assure you it is just a myth).
• Rebels – these free-minded people are people who consciously or unconsciously marry cross-culturally almost as a form of protest against something in their own cultures they don’t like and / or want to get away from, often things that they are not able to put into words.
• Internationals – offspring of internationally mobile parents, e.g. corporate executive, diplomats.
• Others – and for many other idiosyncratic reasons, perhaps people who feel physically unattractive, unpopular with opposite sex in their own society and suddenly get swooned by another society who finds him or her exotic! 

The book does not claim to have all the answers, but it brings those who have their heads buried in the quagmire of making a multicultural marriage work to a higher level of awareness of the root cause of the unresolved differences. The differences in marriage are widely discussed, but the differences in an intercultural marriage present a unique set of challenge. The book outlined the following factors to watch out for: Values, Food and Drink, Sex, Male-Female roles, Concept of Time, deciding the Place of Residence, Politics, friends, finances, In-laws, Social class, Religion, Raising Children, Language and Communication, Responding to stress and conflict, illness and suffering, Ethnocentrism, the unique position of a Expatriate Spouse, coping with death or divorce.  

Values are taught at home and reinforced by society, so values are generally culturally determined. And Culture is the logic by which [we] give order to the world. We live our lives taking these social programming for granted. Not until we are put in a foreign culture, in religion as in culture, we often don’t know where our feet end until someone steps on our toes and the differences surfaced, and most likely none of the partners are able to articulate what is really wrong in their relationships.  

You have to understand the Male-Female roles, to understand where the scale is tipping where the power lies (in terms of gender role) in the society. Differences or cultural impasse usually happens with a man from male dominant society pairing off with a woman who came from an egalitarian society, the impasse is harder to resolve. One woman said it was easier to “keep on fighting” than to face the fatigue of trying to live up to ideals. I think I can relate to that. It’s like saying sometimes it is easier to keep saying “No” then to live up to your in-laws unrelentless demands and expectations, especially in a culture where family members are expected to do a lot more for each other. 

Fraught with so much misunderstanding, one must understand that communication in such marriage requires lots of translation, explanation, clarification and patience. (Phew!) 

Ethnocentrism is the explanation for the attitude that one’s own group is superior, i.e. the world view of one’s own culture is central to all reality. How able the partners are to walk in the other’s shoes depends on just how ethnocentric (unalterably convinced of the rightness of their own ways) they are. “You don’t have logic. This is a reality, you are unreasonable!” hmmm… This chapter really stunned me though. As in a lot of sentences in this book, I just kept going back re-reading some of the statements and utter under my breath, “Wow, how true!” It went on to say that Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right – Laurens Van De Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari. Well I don’t need to be reminded that most of our world’s biggest problems are caused by people which are ethnocentric! 

We are also introduced to encapsulated marginality versus constructive marginality (Oh I just love these psychological mumbo-jumbo!). According to cultural researcher Janet M. Bennett, Encapsulated marginality happens to a person who is buffeted by conflicting cultural loyalties and unable to construct a unified identity. Constructive marginality is a person who is able to construct context intentionally and consciously for the purpose of creating his or her own identity. Most children of intercultural marriages will tell you that, while during adolescence they fit more into the encapsulated category and were confused and perhaps even distressed and as children they tend to develop a private and public persona; as adults they have found and rather like themselves in their biculturality. Even out of the context of raising bicultural children, as a spouse you are most likely develop something called Intercultural Schizophrenic. One has to be emotionally very strong  to be able to make up your own identity out of your own life and decide if you want to be “Half something” (half of two cultures) or “double something” (best of two cultures). Take the path of self-negation to the extreme and you will lose yourself. It is no surprise that you find a spouse or immigrants who are acclimatise or acculturate socially in their adopted land, only to feel like strangers or foreign when they are back in their homeland.  

The book finishes off with introducing several types of intercultural marriage models, and the promises and good of an intercultural marriage. At the extreme, the models can be one of submission or total obliteration. Models that involves more open communication are the Compromising and consensus-based models. 

There is only one chapter that is dedicated to the promises of intercultural marriage. You become a broader minded and a model of the future. You increase self-awareness by examine own values, prejudices, become a better problem solver seeking alternative solution to mediate cultural conflicts, you raise children who are bicultural and who have a wider world view and feel at home anywhere in the world or just the sense of being pioneers in a new world order (not sure about this though :) ). 

Intercultural couples have chosen a complicated route in life. Some couples or bicultural offspring who finds it hard to fit into their home countries, validates the need to go to Europe and America, where they can vanish into the greater society and have a chance at normal life. 

He had explained once that to be born into a strong tradition was to know the steps to an intricate dance which started at birth and ended with death. “When you know all the steps by heart, you don’t have to think anymore – you are the dancer and the dance,” he said, and she had loved the mystery and poetry of it. It hasn’t occurred to her to ask him what happened when a dancer found himself alone on the floor of a different tradition. Could the steps of one dance fit the music of another? – Manjula Padmanabhan, “Stains” 

This book teaches you to lookout for the tempo, the rhythm, the musicians, the expectations, your audience, the factors that makes you dance the dance of intercultural marriage well. It is full of gems of wisdom, full of real life examples, experiences of cross-cultural couples and also because it is written from one (Dugan Romano) who has been there. Dugan writes with conviction and arguments and supporting evidence raised are so spot-on, that it prompts me to re-evaluate my life. There are certainly more stresses and challenges in an intercultural marriage and one that should not be undertake lightly. Even if you are not involve in an intercultural marriage, this is one eloquent and comprehensive take on intercultural studies, you might come out of it learning a thing or two about intercultural interaction, or avoid the trouble of an intercultural marriage if you think you are not up to it.  

My Verdict: 5/5

For its relevance and value-add guidance that can be applied, I give it a rating of 5 /5.

p/s: It is indeed my lucky year, I have read many books which sits on the higher end of ratings than any other year.

The Piano Tuner

It is my deliberate choice to start another book with a piano theme. A pure coincidence both The Piano Teacher and The Piano Tuner sit on my TBR pile, but a deliberate decision to read them back to back. 

On a misty London afternoon in 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the War Office: he must leave his wife, Katherine, and his quiet life in London, and travel to the jungles of Burma to tune a rare Erard grand piano. A grand piano made by Sebastien Erard in 1844. 

The piano belongs to Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, an enigmatic British officer, whose success at making peace in the war-torn Shan States in North East of Burma is legendary, but whose unorthodox methods have begun to attract suspicion. Myths surround Dr. Carroll. He first found fame when he succeeded in mobilising the local chief’s army by reciting Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ to him; he survived an ambush by taking a tin whistle from his hat and charming his attackers with a colloquial love song. He has been granted the piano in the heart of the Burmese jungle on the understanding that Bach and Schubert might be key weapons in Britain’s attempts to win the hearts and minds of the native population. 

Edgar, seduced by the idea of tuning an Erard in the far east, set sail across the continents. Across Europe, the Red Sea where he met a middle eastern man who knows of one story and tells of how he became deaf after listening to a strange sound in the desert; across India and Burma, and into the remote highlands of the Shan states to the British fort in Mae Lwin, where Surgeon-Major Carroll is expecting his arrival. 

En route he is entranced by the Doctor’s letters, the daily lives of Burmese and the botanical excursions. He is also faced with the brutality of life, the death of unintended victim of a hunting expedition, an attack by the dacoits, the sight of diseases and death, and his near death experience when he is infected with Malaria. 

As his captivation grows, however, so do his questions: about the Doctor’s true motives, about why he came, about an enchanting and elusive woman, Khin Myo, who stirs a strange emotion within Edgar that he never felt before. His steps became a little flighty, his laugh a little louder, his cheeks flush a lot more in the strange land… 

This book stirs a strange emotion in me as well, the mere mention of a piano takes me back to my childhood and adolescence. I have an old upright Robinson piano, which is grossly neglected by the previous owner. It is so old that no matter how the piano is tuned, a few weeks later it falls back in its old quirky ways. The sounds of my piano keys are never perfect. I learnt a lot more about the techniques of piano tuning in this novel. A piano must be tuned several times usually, he said, as the act of tuning one string changes the dimensions of the soundboard so as to affect all the other strings. Tune roughly the first time, regulate, and then tune again (my piano tuner only shows up once). The hammer felt needs to be checked and repaired (mine is all worn out, no one suggested a repair). A piano is most affected by humidity (you don’t say!) and an off-tuned key play in this case increased in pitch and plays like a sharp key. The dry season, however, will have resulted in the soundboard shrinking, loosening the strings and dropping a pitch. 

Edgar always worked slowly, loses himself in his work. But here in Mae Lwin, he was surprised by his own deliberation. In a matter of hours he would be done with tuning and no longer needed in Mae Lwin. Surely he wants to go home? Go home to his lovely wife. He had been away from home for too long. But he reminded himself there was no need to rush things either. Besides, he just arrived. 

For Edgar had learned early that being needed was not  the same as being accepted. Although he was a frequent visitor to upper-class homes, where the owners of expensive pianos often engaged him in talk about music, he never felt welcome. And this distinct sense of estrangement extended in the other direction as well, as he often felt awkwardly refined in the presence of the carpenters or metal smiths or porters whom he frequently contacted for his work. Perhaps, he feels differently in Mae Lwin….

Once Edgar finished tuning the piano, he was asked to play (despite his vehement protest that a piano tuner is not necessary a pianist!) for the sawbwa of Mongnai, one of the leaders of the Limbin Confederacy, with whom the British forces under Colonel Stedman have been at war for the last two months. He played a Bach’s prelude and fugues collections of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a piano tuner piece in his opinion, a piece bound by strict rules of counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is piece destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines, to present the beauty that is found in order, in rules – a piece that many in England would have dismiss it as too mathematical (I tend to agree!). 

As days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, we are, like Edgar, drawn into a Burmese lullaby of scenic highlands, lush verdant greeneries, cheerful laughter of women and children bathing and washing by the shimmering beauty of Salween river under the sun. The writer, Mason expends long paragraphs describing the scenes, the people, and Edgar’s long correspondence to his wife, and how the Erard Piano is transported through the jungles and out of the jungles etc…… 

Who is Captain Anthony Carroll? Is he a British patriot who mediates war between the Shan tribes for the good of the British Empire or is he a traitor? Is Khin Myo seduction real or a mean to persuade Edgar to stay longer? Is it true what is happening with Edgar, as in The Odyssey, once you feed on the lotus, you forget the way home and prefer to stay with the lotus eater? Is Edgar’s idea of paradise a figment of his imagination as external force threatens to annihilate the inhabitants of the paradise? 

A beautiful novel and a great way to lose yourself in the Burmese jungle, set in another time. 

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My verdict: 4/5

What I like most about the novel: historical well researched, a feel for the brutal politics of colonialism, to create a complex and subtly imagined adventure.Read like a classic. Write like a pro. An accomplished and sensitive novel for a debut writer.

What I like least about the novel: The unravelling of doubts and mystery was treated with haste. This book has no definite answer with a tragic and abrupt end. Enjoy the journey, don’t mind the destination. 

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About the Writer:

Daniel Mason, a 26-year-old American, began writing this, his first novel, while studying malaria as a biology undergraduate at Harvard in 1998, on the Thai-Myanmar border. One afternoon, he notes in a postscript, he journeyed south into old Burma aboard a long-tailed boat on the Salween River, which runs into the Irrawaddy. At the remotest little village trading post on the banks of the river, cut off by jungle, ‘a strange sound,’ he recalls, ‘rose up from the thick brush. It was a melody, and before the motor kicked in and we moved away from the shore, I recognised it as the sound of a piano’ At the publication of this novel in 2004, Daniel Mason is a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco.

To read more about Lotus Eater and Odyssey IX, click here.

The Piano Teacher by Janice YK Lee

“That’s us, the British colonials, battling against our circum­stances, always,” the formidable Edwina Storch says to Claire Pendleton over tea one sweltering afternoon. 

It’s 1952 and 28-year-old newly wed Claire Pendleton has just arrived in Hong Kong with her civil-servant husband Martin. Thrust into a new and international world, the once provincial Claire from Croydon finds herself transformed by her surroundings. She takes a position as a piano teacher to Locket Chen, the daughter of wealthy socialist Chinese parents. Teaching piano to Locket is not Claire’s only preoccupation, as she pocketed the family’s little collective items and quickly becomes intrigued by the family’s much elderly English driver, Will Truesdale. 

Claire’s love affair with Will is interwoven with flashbacks to the early 1940’s, during the onset of Japanese hostilities and Hong Kong’s swift fall, to his ex-lover Trudy Liang, a Eurasian beauty with secrets of her own. Trudy Liang is charming, insulting, scheming and above all captivating. In one of the novel’s retrospective scenes, at a party on the beach, conversation ceases as “they all watch her, rapt, as she plunges into the sea and comes up sleek and dripping — her slim body a vertical rebuke to the flatness of the horizon between the sky and sea.” 

In December 1941, six months after Will met Trudy, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, and Will was sent to the POW camp with many other foreign nationals. Conditions were bad in the camp and Will became head of the group to organise the POWs in their day-to-day barely humane existence. Will came across a secret about a Crown collection which is hidden away before the start of the war to avoid the collection from falling into wrong hands. General Otsobu, whom Trudy taught English and became his kept mistress, is looking out for herself and her cousins Dominic during war time to earn favours from the occupier and keep them alive in the lawless society at war. 

‘People have always expected me to be bad and thoughtless and shallow, and I do my best to accommodate their expectations. I sink to their expectations, one might say. I think it’s the ultimate suggestibility of most of us. We are social beings. We live in a social world with other people and so we wish to be as they see us, even if it is detrimental to ourselves,’ She laughs, lifting her face towards his. Her eyes, her skin, they glow, distracting him. ‘What do you think?’ 

While Trudy compromised her dignity and integrity, Will stay true with his integrity and refused the pass (permission) given by General Otsobu to be released from POW prison, and remain in prison with his comrades. Yet the past cannot remain hidden for long as Claire’s involvement with Will grows, Claire soon finds herself at the centre of a web of secrets, lies and murder, in which both her lover and the Chens are irretrievably entangled. 

Wasn’t love some form of narcissism after all?

My verdict: 3/5

Overall it’s a riveting story. The characters are irritating. Will with his ambivalent attitude towards Claire; Trudy, a social butterfly who has no inner anchor and life principles. Claire, the pilfering thief, unfaithful wife of a respectable expatriate. The characters are shaped in such a frivolous way that makes it difficult to invest in them. The facile way Claire got away with her infidelity is ludicrous. The dialogues are at times choppy. The endless partying and coquettish banters at first intriguing, most times irritating. Probably the commendable parts of the story are the subtle emotions and love depicted in the far eastern cultural context, the brutality of war, and the haunting first love are all captured beautifully. 

About the writer:

Janice YK Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong and attended Harvard College. She worked as a features editor at ‘Elle’ and ‘Mirabella’ magazines in New York before becoming a full-time writer. A Korean-American, she currently lives in Hong Kong with her husband and children. The Piano Teacher is her first book and voted as Waterstone’s New Voice of 2009.

We Are Made of Glue

Sometimes when I try to understand what’s going on in the world, I find myself thinking about glue. Every adhesive interacts with surfaces and with the environment in its own particular ways; some are cured by light, some by hear, some by the exchange of subatomic particles, some simply by the passage of time. The skill in achieving a good bond is to match the appropriate adhesive to the adherends to be bonded. – Georgie Sinclair 

Georgie Sinclair’s fail in the human bonding department, as her  husband, Rip, walked out; her 16-year old son is busy surfing born-again websites and believing that the end of time is near; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World magazine and an attempt to write an unpromising “Splattered Heart” novel, despite rejection from the publishers, are getting her down. 

So when Georgie spots Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric old Jewish neighbour with an eye for a bargain and a fondness for matchmaking, rummaging through her skip in het middle of the night, it’s just that distraction she needs. And although they mistrust each other at first – Georgie doesn’t like the look of that past-its-sell-by-date fish, while Mrs Shapiro thinks Georgie needs to smarten herself up and grab a new husband – a firm friendship is formed over the reduced-price shelf at the supermarket. 

Then Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital and to Georgie’s surprise, she is named as her next of kin. But sorting out Mrs Shapiro’s semi-derelict mansion, Canaan House, in Highbury, home to 7 stinky cats with agendas of their own, is no easy job. Georgie has to solve the mysterious breaking of the kitchen door and turning off of water tap.  When the handyman called in to change the locks, Ali the Palestinian, turns out to be not what he seems and his two assistants, are doing more breaking than fixing. 

And what about the two slimy estate agents, Mark Diabello and Nick Wolfe of Wolfe & Diabello (one with a charming taste for bondage) who are competing to trick Mrs Shapiro into selling her rickety old house? They said the mansion was worth £2 million or more for development site and the real estate agents are persuading Mrs Shapiro to sell it. What about the social worker, Mrs Goodney, who is determined to commit her to a nursing home? One day, Mrs Shapiro was hauled away to a nursing home and her house will be up on the market. Georgie has to step in to help her new friend. In the midst of nursing her own wound, and helping her own friend, Georgie she finds herself unravelling mystery about Naomi Shapiro’s past life. Who is the beautiful woman who is married to Artem? Where is the missing son? Who is Naomi Shapiro? Who is Ella Weschler? Are they the same person? What happen in Lydda? Where is Artem when Naomi gave birth to her son, Chaim? 

Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian was a treat. Subsequent novel Two Caravans was a letdown. This recent one is more sensible and sensitive. Lewycka handles world affairs topics which affects our world today, without losing her brand of humour which made her earlier novels a bestseller. Lewycka narrates parallel human tragedies of the expulsion of Jews in Europe and the expulsion of Palestinian from their land. A  land where the original inhabitants are from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, a land of migrants. We are also reminded that Jews are not synonym to the Israel state, and that there exists self-hating Jews who are not neo-zionism and oppose the setup of the Israel state. 

If you could get the human bonding right, maybe the other details – laws, boundaries, constitution – would all fall into place. It was just a case of finding the right adhesive for the adherends. Mercy. Forgiveness. If only it came in tubes.

Lewycka has a knack of weaving an intriguing tale from the lives of everyday normal people and bring out the humorous irony of old age. A peace theme permeates in this book (similar to The Lost Symbol, I always detect a common thread of the same topic or theme when I read one book after the other, wonder if you experience the same?). The ending is a happy one. The irony is sometimes we don’t have to like one another to co-exists in the same house (same group, same workplace, same nation… etc.), all it is required is to be civilised enough to prevent the friction from culminating into a full-blown war. Sometimes we have to sandblast or roughen the surface of two objects (adherends, in this case), in order to bond well. 

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My Verdict: 4/5

What I like most about the book: Quirky with a heart. Quick 5 minute introduction about the Middle-east conflict and Armageddon.  I like the use of glue as a metaphor for human relationships and peace.

What I like least about the book: Can be a little cheesy.

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About the Writer:

Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the Second World War and grew up in England. She now lives in Sheffield and teaches Media Studies part-time at Sheffield Hallam University.

Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in March 2005, was short-listed for the Orange Prize, long-listed for the Booker prize, and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, and the Saga Award for Wit. It has been translated into a number of other languages. Her latest novel, Two Caravans, published in March 2007, has been described as ‘heartfelt and funny’ (Daily Mail) and ‘hilarious and horrifying’ (Guardian).

Air mail: Letters from the world’s most troublesome passenger

T Ravencroft (Mr) would like to thank all the airlines and airline staff who replied to his letters, at times with patience above and beyond the call of duty, and without whom this book would not have been possible. 

Meet the world’s most troublesome passenger, T Ravencroft. Mr. Ravencroft spent his time constructing funny, profane, insulting letters to airline companies putting forth all his unusual queries and requests, and insults people and other cultures along the way. 

Ok what is so funny about insults? Surely there must be a line drawn between humour and insults? I have a strict definition of what is considered humour, but this book left me gasping for air as a result of convulsive giggling that this must be one of the funniest books I have read for years! 

Mr. Ravencroft:

• Wants to know how he can order one of those air stewardess’ uniforms so that he could order one for his wife to spice up his sex life.
• Wants to know how he can fit into the seat when he weighs 42 stones.
• Wants to know how he can be compensated for his stiff neck because he has to strain his neck to look at the TV screen.
• Wants to know if his wife will be suck out of the window if the window is accidentally struck by a masonry hammer.
• Wants to know what the word Lingus in Aer Lingus means? And suggested that if the airline want to highlight the ‘Irishness’ of the airline, while at the same time making the name understandable to anyone who speaks English, the perfect appellation for it would be Aer O’Plane! (Ha! Ha!)
• Wants to go to Australia for holiday and wants to know what age would it be safe for a baby from being swallowed by a dingo? (Qantas referred him to the Tourism Commission and The Zoo instead)
• Wants to know from Air India how he can transport a 13 tonne by air from India
• Wants to know from Malaysian Airline how he can transport one pound of cornflour without being misconceived as narcotics?
• Wants to know in case his mother-in-law slip and fall in Bulgaria mountain and died, how would she be classified on a plane? Would she come under passenger or luggage?
• Wants to know why Air Italia replaced those good looking air stewardesses for a TV screen on demonstrating in-flight safety instruction?
• Sometimes offers spelling lesson, to Airlanka Mr. Hasan Scarr, whose first language is not English, that Wether is spelt Weather, querie is spelt query, oportunity is spelt with double p, and Hasan is spelt Hassan! (I blurt out laughing at this one on the morning train!)
• wrote many other stupid requests and the audacity of writing them all the way up to Chairman of British Airways (BA) and Lord Richard Branson. 

As airline officials patiently replied his letters, one even offered history lessons on the conflict in Cyprus, Mr. Ravencroft insisted on further request. Some like Korean Air, Egypt Air, Turkish Air, Belgian Air are not bothered to reply his eccentric queries. 

I wouldn’t say all his requests are all nonsense though, there are some that make perfect sense, sample these:

A BA passenger will be overcharged for overweight luggage, as a result the passenger ate his stock of chocolate to lighten his luggage weight, so the point Mr. Ravencroft wants to make is: 

(a) BA check-in girl causing the passenger to eat the chocolate was futile, since the total weight of the passenger and his baggage was precisely the same both before and after he had eaten the chocolate.

(b) The passenger only weighed about 9 stone. He weighs close to 18 stone and he is quite sure that his weight added to his baggage was greater than the passenger’s weight added to his baggage, so the system is clearly unfair.

If either (a) or (b) had been taken into consideration, and any degree of common sense had been applied, the passenger would have been allowed onto the aeroplane without being coerced into eating the chocolate and he would not have thrown up on Mr. Ravencroft’s Hush Puppies shoes. Also,

I always wonder why they asked to reduce the weight of the luggage and allowed me to carry the extra weight as hang luggage. The justification was an extra piece of luggage incurred extra handling fees. Still don’t make sense to me. And also, 

Airline should ban announcements by flight crews about geographical features which can be seen from the right-hand / left hand side of the plane, and he don’t get to see any of those landmarks because he is always sitting on the wrong side of the plane and there is this women who clamber on his side of the plane to look out of the window, lurched forward and fell on top of him! 

I bet you don’t know that:

• Airlines operates a separate Exchange rate when they are up in the air. Don’t expect you will be given the correct foreign exchange when you buy food with one currency and get change for another.
• Virgin Atlantic pays $3000 for 2 months on a Box-office film that is shown on flight and definitely won’t be filming Ravencroft’s own film production.
• It is acceptable to consume your own wine on boards. In practice this is not something the airlines would encourage or advertise, that while the crew serves alcohol on board, they are more able to control the amount consumed. 

These are very outdated letters. Some airlines companies have ceased to exist, and letter that is dated before the Euro is introduced in Spain. I supposed Mr. Ravencroft has chosen to publish the letters and response many years later as a book, is perhaps to avoid legal implications. 

For past months I have spent countless working hours designing complaint policy, procedure and system, even attended a course on letter writing. This book is so relevant. This letter version of Ali G and Borat send me on hysterical fit of laughter and for that reason I am going to score it a full mark. 

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My Verdict: 5/5

What I like about the book: hilarious, audacious. It took me 2 hours to finish it. I loan the book from the library but I am running across the road to the charity shop to purchase it for 50p!!!

What I hate about the book: None, but some insults can be a little overboard. Depending who is reading it. It doesn’t bother me though.

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