I’ll be staying at the foot of the highest peak in Europe, Chamonix-Mont Blanc then crossed over to Geneva, Swtizerland to rub shoulders with the officials of the United Nations agency and organisation, then off to Berlin to see the finest of Germany.

Chamonix Mont Blanc

Geneva

Berlin

It will be a hiatus of 2 weeks before I will start blogging again. I am coming back and straight into an intensive 3-day training. Let me know how you get on!

If you are an Far Eastern Asian in your mid 40’s you are likely to have a mother which is less literate, who may have gone through many years of sacrifice bringing up her children, very superstitious and may practice ancestral rites to wade off evil so as not to incur God’s wrath on the family. Her children refer her as simply “Mother”. This Far Eastern Asian mother loves her children but will always favour her eldest son more than her daughters. Despite life is better in the contemporary times, this mother, will scrimp and save still to conserve energy and sustenance so that her resources can be stretched. The children may not understand why their mothers refused to sit back and enjoy herself but Far Eastern Asian mothers are not known to enjoy or pamper herself neither does she understand what “me-time” means, because her raison d’etre for most of her life was her family. She lives mostly in the kitchen cooking one meal after another, she doesn’t necessarily like it but she does it anyway. She is camera-shy. She is humble but not without pride. She hides her illnesses for not worrying her family. Sometimes she may be quick to criticise and harsh in her demands, her children will obey, some not, because it is a filial duty to respect your parents.

Definition: Far Eastern mother refers to mothers of Japan, Korea and Chinese.

This is what the book is all about. It is about a mother named So-nyo, who followed her husband from behind but couldn’t make it pass the door of the underground train and vanishes in the metropolitan “maze” of Seoul. It follows a scene where the siblings erupt into a fight and blame one another for the mother’s disappearance. Each chapter then follows contains a voice of each sibling and most notably the husband, and then the missing mother’s followed by an epilogue.

Paradoxically invisible until absence makes others imagine the life of their mothers, we saw the formation of the mother and wife So-nyo from those who grew up and took her for granted.

The eldest son is, Hyong-Chol, suffused with guilt at having achieved her Mother’s wishes to become a lawyer, instead he became a real estate agent. The daughter, Chi-Hon, increasingly sophisticated with age, is a writer and is irritated by her mother’s superstition and stubborness, and then regrets the distance between mother and daughter. Father, too, has the biggest reason for despair – he didn’t help Mother as she spiralled into illness, both physical and mental, and he became increasingly more self-indulgent, intolerant of his wife. Serve that husband / Father right for a guilt trip of a lifetime for walking too far in front and not caring about what’s behind his back!

You walked in front of your wife your entire life. Sometimes you would turn a corner without even looking back. When your wife called you from far behind, you would grumble at her, asking her why she was walking so slowly. And so 50 years passed. When you waited fro her, she stopped next to you, her cheeks reddened, saying with a smile, “I still wish you’d go a little slower.” You assumed that was how you would live out the rest of your days. But since that day in Seoul Station when you left on the train, that day when she was only a few steps behind you, your wife hasn’t come to you. – page 152

For the first time, the husband and children wonder who is mother, what is her childhood like? Did any of them really know her? Did they realise that she had been illiterate? Could they even remember the colour of the sandals she wore around her septic toe? The family strains and became guilt-ridden under these revelations, both introspective and narrative. There are sightings of a disoriented figure in blue plastic sandals eating out of restaurant dustbins, yet she slips out of the narrative as obliquely as she absents herself from family portraits. Yet, the children haven’t come close to locating their missing mother.

How little they cherished Mother when she was the rock of the family and how much they took her for granted when she is there and miss her when she is not there. The little tragedies of life come to roost, and – may I warn you that, unlike in most redemptive fiction – there are no easy answer in this tender and tragic tale, which is one it gave the most impact to readers who read it and felt the same loss the characters have felt.

The quibble I have is the use of the second- and third-person viewpoints. I lost the plot when too many “You’s” are being used, not exactly sure whose voice it is.

If she wanted to read it that badly, she should have asked me to read it to her.  You rub your dry, rough face with your hands. If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen towards your wife. Sometimes you even swore at her. You acted as if it has been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did. – page 131

Some blame the novel for its clumsy and unnatural sentence structure. I don’t think it is the translator’s fault as the translator should stay true to the original text, adding any flowery and powdery touch-up may dilute the authenticity of the author’s text. However, as the pages run with the word you and you and you, it can get wearisome and I was hoping when it will end so that the story could be told in a more natural first or third narrative. Also it can become too melodrama, I know some people falls for melodrama and I can vouch that a lot of the Far Eastern movies and books tend to lean towards tragic melodramatic theatrical plot. A good movie is a sad movie, that kind of assumption. So it doesn’t work for me in this aspect, so in that sense I would agree that the novel borderlined as cliché. I’m beyond melodrama and want my novels to be more factual, calm, cerebral and thought provoking.

Well, that’s me but what other people think about the novel?

Kyung-Sook Shin’s tale surely hit a nerve and went on to win the Man Asian literary prize 2012 (not sure if Chang Rae-Lee being a judge this year contributes to the win) and selling more than 2 million copies inSouth Korea. So she must have done something right. It is good news because many who loves it has great affection or memories of their mothers and their mothers probably fits the mould of the description in the novel. It certainly taps the universal tendency to take one’s mother for granted, it illuminates a mother’s sacrifice, a wife who never receives love from her husband, a woman who gave up her own dream to fulfil the dreams of her children. As the relationship of my mother and I are far from being friends, I didn’t find this novel as tear jerking as many would but I endorse the book’s plea to treat our mother a little better and give her the credits and love that she deserves. If readers of the novel then decide to take their mothers out for a good meal and have her around more often, then I would say this book has made some wins into fortifying good social and family values.

It is my first Korean novel and I sort of like it.

Rating: 

Mother would cook and bring out the food and wash the dishes and clean and hang damps rags to dry. Mother took care of repairing the gate and the roof and the porch. Instead of helping her do the work that she did non-stop, even you thought of it as natural, and took it for granted that this was her job. Sometimes, as your brother pointed out, you thought of her life as disappointing – even though Mother, despite never having been well off, tried so hard to give you the best of everything….. – page 253

Hardback. Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2011; Length: 261 pages; Setting: South Korea. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 22nd May 2012. Translated from the Korean language by Kim Chi-young .

Other views:

Tony’s Reading list : hate it.

Stu@winston’s dad : like it.

About the writer:

Shin Kyung-sook (born 12 January 1963) (Hangul: 신경숙) is a South Korean writer. She is the first Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for Please Look After Mother.

Shin Kyung-sook was born in 1963 in a village near Jeongeup in Jeolla Province in southern Korea. She was the fourth child and oldest daughter of six. Her parents were farmers who could not afford to send her to high school, so at sixteen she moved to Seoul, where her older brother lived. She worked in an electronics plant while attending night school. She made her literary debut in 1985 with the novella Winter’s Fable after graduating from the Seoul Institute of the Arts as a creative writing major. Shin is, along with Kim In-suk and Gong Ji-young, one of the group of female writers from the so-called 386 Generation.

She won the Munye Joongang New Author Prize for her novella, Winter Fables. Shin has won a wide variety of literary prizes including the Today’s Young Artist Award from the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize, Hyundae Literary Award, Manhae Literature Prize, Dong-in Literary Award, Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Oh Yeongsu Literature Prize. In 2009, the French translation of her work, A Lone Room (La Chambre Solitaire) was one of the winners of the Prix de l’Inapercu, which recognizes excellent literary works which have not yet reached a wide audience. The international rights to the million-copy bestseller Please Look After Mother were sold in 23 countries including the United States and various countries in Europe and Asia, beginning with China and has been translated into English by Kim Chi-young and released on March 31, 2011.

I did not expect the book to be an epistolary novel, so easy to read, entertaining and full of wisdom. The novel takes on a distinct voice of the protagonist who has a very narrow view of the world, particularly since her letters are written in dialect, slangs and from the perspective of a naïve, uneducated adolescent. Warning: If you plan to read this book, my review may contain spoilers.

The Color Purple is the story of Celie, a poor, barely literate Southern black woman who struggles to escape the brutality and degradation of her treatment by men. The tale is told primarily through her own letters, which, out of isolation and despair, she initially addresses to God and then to her sister Nettie. As a young girl she is repeatedly raped and beaten by her father (she didn’t know it was her stepfather then and this book is full of surprises and interesting twists), who then forced Celie into a loveless marriage to Albert (refer as Mr. ___ in the book), a widower with four children, one of them is Harpo who grew an attachment to Celie. Albert however is in love with vivacious and determinedly independent blues singer named Shug (Lillie) Avery. Celie is constantly being slapped and beaten by Albert for not being Shug, despite it all Celie took what fate thrust upon her. When his oldest son, Harpo, asks his father Albert why he beats Celie, he says simply, “Cause she my wife.” For a time Celie accepts the abuse stoically: “He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don’t never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, get the belt… It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear men.”

This novel is set in the early 1900′s and ends in the mid-1940′s, Celie soon found out her sister, Nettie, who she believes is dead is out in Africa with the missionary group to live with the Olinka tribe. For me Nettie’s letters are the most interesting as it describes the life of African, written in a better English (because Nettie was suppose to be the smart one) Nettie’s letter exudes calm and grace, faithfully serving the God’s duty and coincidentally took care of Celie’s children, which were abandoned when Celie was made pregnant.

Soon Celie and Shug struck up a close relationship and with Shug’s encouragement, Celie frees herself from her husband’s repressive control. Bolstered by her contacts with other women more confident than her, i.e. her sister Nettie, Shug Avery, the strong Sofia, Celie found her confidence and starts a business designing and making clothes, specialising in trousers (pants in American language).

The novel began with a harrowing start. The letters were brutally descriptive and honest that it made my heart wrenched. It is a delightful reading experience to see Celie’s personal evolution and acceptance of herself that eventually lead to Albert to re-evaluation of his own life. As the novel progresses, however, and as Celie grows in experience, her observations become sharper and more informed; the letters take on authority and the dialect, once accepted, assumes a lyrical cadence of its own.

There were many charming characters in the book but the letters and honest simple prose belies the fact that behind the characters there were intense emotional impact of love, hurt, disappointment and also forgiveness.Walkershowcases the ugliness of a community who is ostracised and sometimes turn against one another to add to the injury.Walkeralso provides a contrast to native African who lives in their land and being colonised as counter reflection of an African who lives in American.Walkerwrites which such lucid prose that I get so many entertainment and wisdom through the pages and if there is one take away from the book is from the words of Albert is that we are in world to love each other.

If you know your heart sorry, I say, that mean it not quite as spoilt as you think.

Anyhow, he (Albert) says, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here. Period.

So what you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he says, the more I love.

And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.

They do, he say, surprise. – page 256

Walker is extremely prolific and her voice is loud and clear. A poignant tale of women’s struggle for equality and independence without the emotional excess. The Color Purple provides for many reading group discussion about the role of male domination in the frustration of black women’s struggle for independence, but at the core of it is a very brilliant novel with a lot of heart in it, with a very distinct voice. Now, I understand why it is a modern classic. Highly recommended.

Rating: 

“If it is true that it is what we run from that chases us, then The Color Purple (this color that is always a surprise but is everywhere in nature) is the book that ran me down while I sat with my back to it in a field” -  Alice Walker, introduction.

Paperback. Publisher: Phoenix 2004, originally published in 1983; Length: 261 pages; Setting: South USA. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 26^th May 2012.

About the writer:

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, poet, and activist.

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, “wonderful at math but a terrible farmer,” earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children’s programs in Mississippi.

The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and National Book Award 1983 and was made into a movie in 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

Having said all that, Liquidation is a philosophical and cerebral novel. Perhaps not an ideal read for my current state of mind which is constantly thinking about the next project and impatient to get on to the next task. But I love Budapest and especially interested to read a book which is written by a Hungarian author and a Nobel Prize Laureate.

Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B, a writer of great repute – whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability – has taken his own life. His friend Kingbitter discovers among his papers a play entitled Liquidation, in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B’s other friends now face.

Kingbitter’s find precipitates a frantic search for the novel that Bee may or may not have left behind. That B was having an affair with Sarah, behind his wife Judit’s back and we soon found out Judit is having an affair behind B’s back with now husband Adam. While Kingbitter himself was having an affair with B’s ex-wife Judit.

The love affairs seems to give this novel a facetious air but there is nothing facetious about Liquidation; it aims to induce in us the same state of despair that obviously afflicted Kertész when he wrote it, but through the characters, depicts how surviving a tragedy such as the Holocaust could scar a person for life. This is particularly brilliantly described by Judit’s life with B. As B spent his time reading and writing, and writing and reading away, B is incapable of love and incapable of building close relationship with other human being and it’s not a pleasant thing to be his wife either.

I had no desire, no goal, I didn’t wish to die but I didn’t care to live either. It was a peculiar condition but, in its singular way, not unpleasant. – Kingbitter page 111

The novel has a little mystery in it. A renowned author and Auschwitzsurvivor, has just committed suicide, and his old friend and literary editor Kingbitter embarks on a search for a missing manuscript, the great man’s crowning achievement, the novel which will finally make sense of the Holocaust. Who has possession of this literary Grail? Sarah, B’s ex-lover? Judit, B’s ex-wife? And what are we to make of the fact that one of B’s extant works, a play likewise called Liquidation, uncannily predicts the action of the book we’re reading? Not much, to be honest.

We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of disaster, so there is a need for a particular art of living for us to survive. Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no characters. …For him there can be no return to some center of Self, a solid and irrefutable self-certainty; in other words, he is lost, in the most authentic sense of word. – page 55

Except for a few inspiring quotation or two, I thought the book was pretty bland. The book is written in a form of extended meditations from Kingbitter and Judit, which I thought Judit’s meditation was a better read, despite Kingbitter takes up most of the book.

The power of the book, as a Guardian review keenly observed is that: “Kertész keeps talking, keeps returning to the impassioned late-night dialogues that permit perennially suicidal intellectuals to live through to another morning. B’s suicide letter is tremendously poignant because we sense that it is the letter Kertész himself might have written, had he not been brave enough to go on. Judit’s account of her clash of wills with B over the nihilism that Auschwitz supposedly demands, and the dignity with which she declares “I wish to see the world as a place where it is possible to live”, are highlights of a book that should perhaps be read as a work of philosophy rather than fiction.”  (emphasis are mine).

And that’s the way to look at it and work out if you would want to pick this book up or not.

Rating: 

Hardback. Publisher: Harvill Secker 2003, 2006 translated edition; Length: 130 pages; Setting: Budapest, Hungary. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 26^th May 2012. Translated from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson.

About the writer:

Imre Kertész (born 9 November 1929) is a Hungarian Jewish author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he resides in Berlin with his wife.

During World War II, Kertész was deported at the age of 14 with other Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later sent to Buchenwald. His best-known work, Fatelessness (Sorstalanság), describes the experience of 15-year-old György (George) Köves in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwaldand Zeitz. Some have interpreted the book as quasi-autobiographical, but the author disavows a strong biographical connection. In 2005, a film based on the novel, for which he wrote the script, was made in Hungary. Although sharing the same title, the film is more autobiographical than the book: it was released internationally at various dates in 2005 and 2006.

Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002.

At least 10 years ago, I always wanted to read this book.

In April 1992, after he graduated a first in his college, Chris McCandless set off alone into the Alaskan wild. he had given his savings ($24,000) to Oxfam, abandoned his car and his possessions, and burnt the money in his wallet, determined to live a life of independence and living off the earth.

Four months later he was found (here I’m not introducing any spoiler as it is a well known fact, explained right at the beginning of the book), starved to death near Lake Wentitika in Denali National Park and Preserve. In piercing together the final days of travels of Chris, who nick named himself Alexandra the Supertramp, Jon Krakauer writes about the heart of wilderness, being a lover of wilderness himself, its terrible beauty and its unforgiving harshness.

Chris appears to be a polite, well-liked, intelligent young man. His favourite and adored writers are Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jack London. Why would a young man with a promising future walks into the wild without telling his parents where he is going?

Chris did not head straight to Alaska at the first instance. He actually spent a year or so, travelling around America, hitchhiking and working his way as he go along, ultimately wanting to head North to Fairbanks, Alaska. The book kept detail accounts of people that he had met. Most people said the same thing about him, likeable, polite and well read. Sometimes he sends postcards to friends he made on his journey, ironically not to his family, which is very sad.

Chris holds a fascination to the Wild and to the snow-covered North:

He read and re-reads The Call of the Wild, White Fang. He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. – page 45

For many moments while reading this book, I criticised Chris for being irresponsible, for not making contact with his parents and siblings, for being totally self-absorbed with his own mission and ideology. Then Krakauer gave me an insight into the childhood and upbringing of Chris, and I soon understand why Chris feels estranged from his family. Chris lives on his ideals that no one could understand. Chris is a high achiever, a person who has natural talent as an entrepreneur, plays the French horn, talented in sport and was a serious long distance runner. His father Walt said “Chris has so much natural talent, but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up.” Chris is an idealist and people around him are unable to meet to his lofty standards and in many ways I can relate to that.

It would be easy to stereotype Christopher McCandless as another boy who felt too much, a loopy young man who read too many books and lacked even a modicum of common sense. But that stereotype isn’t a good fit. McCandless wasn’t some feckless slacker, adrift and confused, racked by existential despair. To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily. He demanded much of himself – more, in the end, than he could deliver. – page 183

Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency, and this was especially true in Chris’s case. More even than most teens, he tended to see things in black and white. He measured himself and those around him by an impossibly rigorous moral code. – page 22

A haunting picture of Chris next to an abandoned bus where he died of starvation

This book falls under the travel literature genre but I felt it undermines the weight of the book. It is a book about humanity, about family, ideology and a test of human boundaries that has gone awry. It also carries nuances of mystery as the book peel the layers of truth through witnesses’ account and investigations to arrive at the most sound conclusion for the cause of his death. The book also records 3 or 4 figures from the past who had wander into the wilderness, Alaska and the desert, and met their end; in a discussion to find out why these people did what they did. If there is any gripe about the book, it’s about Krakauer including a chapter which draws parallels between his own experiences and motivations and those of McCandless; which I thought is fair and well but the book is really about Chris McCandless, is it not?

“I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless you all!” is the entry in the diary, dated 12 August 1992. Chris felt that his body was weakening, that he was losing weight fast, that his end was near. On or shortly after this day, he died. Three weeks later, his body was discovered by a group of hunters. Had Chris still been alive, this encounter would have saved his life. If Chris hasn’t throw away his map, he would have crossed the river using the aluminium tram at further downstream of the Denali river.

Krakauer takes you into the journey of the wilderness and also a young man’s soul, in such a beautiful way that  the man and the wilderness became one and I lifted my judgement and lament the death of an extraordinary young man. One of the most thought provoking travel literature I have ever read.

Rating: 

Into The Wild was adapted into a film, which was released on September 21, 2007.

Paperback. Publisher: Pan Books 2011; Length: 203 pages; Setting: United States of America. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 13^th May 2012.

Other thoughts: Andreas Moser

About the writer:

Jon Krakauer (born April 12, 1954) is an American writer and mountaineer, primarily known for his writing about the outdoors and mountain-climbing. He is the author of best-selling non-fiction books—Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles.

Krakauer was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, as the third of five children of Carol Ann (Jones) and Lewis Joseph Krakauer. His father was Jewish and his mother was a Unitarian of Scandinavian descent. He was raised in Corvallis, Oregon, from the age of two. His father introduced the young Krakauer to mountaineering at the age of eight. He competed in tennis at Corvallis High School and graduated in 1972. He went on to study at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where in 1976 he received his degree in Environmental Studies. In 1977, he fell in love with former climber Linda Mariam Moore and they married in 1980. They lived in Seattle, Washington, but moved to Boulder, Colorado, after the release of Into Thin Air.

Into the Wild was published in 1996 and shortly thereafter spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list.

These are my review for the following 5 books I have read so far.

1. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright 
2. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller  
3. Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick 
4. Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan 
5. Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding 

Experience shows none of us could accurately predict who will win but if any of these three win, number 1, 2 and 4 on my list, it would make me a happy woman. I think they are entertaining and deeply affecting read and the Orange Prize is the best thing in the world of literature since slice bread.

Having said that I read a sad and disappointing news about Orange Prize yesterday. The Orange Prize for women’s fiction has suffered a major setback after the mobile phone giant announced yesterday it would end its 17-year sponsorship.

But author Kate Mosse, the prize’s honorary director, said she was confident a new backer would be found and the prize would seize the moment to “go global”.

“The home of the prize is in the UK. But we would like to be able to grow the prize and take it into different international markets. Technology has made the world smaller. The idea of starting to talk to writers and readers all over the world feels quite exciting.” Ms Mosse said. Hmm.. I don’t quite get this, I thought Orange prize is international?

There are hopes of a new name and sponsor by September.

What will the prize be called in the future? Mango? Apple? Or Pear prize? We will just have to wait and see!

I don’t read Young Adult fiction, my introduction said. Yet in a rare occasion I do, when there is too much hype generated on the book. Interestingly publishers and movie producers alike are finding ways to tap into the market of Young Adult, to create a cult-like fan club out of young people to stories that are unmistakenly dark and sinister, with an angry protagonist at the heart of the story.

I’m referring to the only three Young Adult series that I have read: The Harry Potters series, Twilight saga and now The Hunger Games series. Lets start with a quick synopsis, as I think by now everyone has read enough reviews or movie snippets to know what this book is all about.

In the place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by 12 outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games. An annual affair that takes reality show to the extreme, by watching adolescents release into the arena and fight to death, until the last boy or girl standing.

When young Prim’s name was called out from the draw of the hat for District 12, her sister, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to fight in her sister’s place. Knowing full well that her sister wouldn’t stand a chance against all the bigger contestants. Katniss has been closer to death than Prim, her hunting and survival skills that she harnesses daily may help her stay alive in the arena.

I can’t win. Prim must know that in her heart. The competition will be far beyond my abilities. Kids from wealthier districts, where winning is a huge honour, who’ve been trained their whole lives for this. Boys who are two to three times my size. Girls who know twenty different ways to kill you with a knife. Oh, there’ll be people like me, too. People to weed out before the real fun begins. – page 44

The other boy called out from District 12 is Peeta Mellark. Peeta is the baker’s son, a person that spared Katniss some bread in the moment of her extreme starvation and saved her life. Would Katniss kill a boy who has done her a favour?

There is a very sick system at work, mostly against the contestants. The contestants, which are called tributes, are let loose in the arena which is similar to a forest setting, with lakes, streams, fields, tall trees and Cornucopia with food supplies. First, the tributes risk their lives to make a mad dash for the food, weapons and backpacks. If they have sponsors, bearing in mind, this is also a popular contest as the audience is watching, the tribute gets food, medicine and anything that they would wish for in a form of a silver parachute descending from the sky. If tributes decided to hide out and will their days away, the Gamemakers will concoct disasters or bait, be it rain, flood, fire, mutants and everything else to lure the tributes out from their lair to meet for a confrontation. When a tribute dies, the other tributes have to clear the ground and a hovercraft will be sent oversky to retrieve the body out of the arena and the cannon will be fired with the dead tribute’s face on display.

This is a game of strategy, of making alliances for now knowing full well you will kill them later. A game of using your strengths and forest survival skills to outwit the other tributes. It’s not the biggest size who will, but the smartest.

It was Preeta’s own ignorance that brought her down. I’ve spent so much time making sure I don’t underestimate my opponents that I’ve forgotten it’s just as dangerous to overestimate the them as well. – page 394

I told my friends I hate reading about children killing each other. I dislike Lord of the Flies and I’m not sure if I’ll read Battle Royale; but The Hunger Games is something else. I love reading about a strong heroine character, especially one that display great archery skills (I owe my infatuation to bow and arrows from watching Robin Hood the TV series in my adolescence and me spending the whole afternoon shooting arrows in Club Med in 1996!). There are talks about fashion, about spread of food, about personalities that prepares her for big time on TV, Cinna the fashion designer, Haymitch the District 12 past drunken winner of the Hunger Games. I especially like reading about the harsh reality of Katniss harsh life and hunting days in District 12, especially frightening is to read about Katniss being released to the arena as you would imagine a gladiator being released to the arena to fight the lion.

After that, the pages just flew by as one war strategy after another is unveiled as Katniss fought her way for survival. One especially has to watch out for the Careers, the boys and girls from wealthier districts who have spent their lives training and practising for the Hunger Games all their lives. To add to the complication of the game, Katniss and Peeta have to be “on-screen” lovers who may have to kill each other at the end. What will Katniss do? Will she win the game?

I didn’t expect to like this better than the other YA fiction I have read but this is truly very clever book. I wasn’t spare on the blood and gore of wounds and festered flesh, the brutal fighting and killing continues from the half of the book onwards but the book is really clever. I guess Collins growing up as a daughter of military officer paid off in the big way. We now have a story of fighting strategy and execution that would put spy thrillers and war reports to shame, and enough heart and emotions to make it on top of the chart as romance lit. The book is also about making choices that weigh survival against humanity; and life against love, which made me think that we are a fortunate lot to be thinking about other things other than our next meal!

Highly recommended for those who are curious about what is all the fuss about the book and the movie!

Rating: 

Paperback. Publisher: Scholastic 2012; Length: 454 pages; Setting: Dystopia North America. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 7^th May 2012.

About the writer:

Suzanne Collins is an American television writer and novelist, best known for writing The Hunger Games series (which comprises The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay).

Collins was born on August 10, 1962 in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the daughter of an U.S. Air Force officer who served in the Vietnam War. As the daughter of a military officer, she and her family were constantly moving. She spent her childhood in the eastern U.S. She attended high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where she was a Theater Arts major. She graduated from Indiana University with a double major in Drama and Telecommunications.

It is the early 1950s in Iași, a small city in communist Romania. A man is found on the steps of a hospital frail as a fallen bird. He carried no identification and utters no words and it took awhile before anyone discovers that he is deaf and mute. However, a young nurse called, Safta Valeanu, may know who the man is. Safta brings paper and pencils with which he can draw. Slowly, painstakingly, memories appear on the page: a hillside, a stable, a car, a country house, dogs and mirrored rooms and samovars in what is now a lost world.

Those memories are Safta’s also. For the man at the hospital doorstep is Augustin (also called Tinu), son of the cook, Paraschiva, at the manor at Poiana that was her family home. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin’s world remained the same size, Safta’s expanded to embrace languages, society – and love, as Augustin watched one long hot summer, in the form of a fleeting young man in a green Lagonda, Andrei.

The story criss-crossing between the past and the present, seems to be what most writers are doing these days including another two of the shortlists: Half Blood Blues and The Forgotten Waltz. As Augustin make his slow recovery, he conveys his past bit by bit through his drawings and crafting figurines out of papers. Adriana, the kindly ward sister, names him Ioan, for her lost son and took him to lodge at her home for awhile.

Safta and Augustin grew up together, one of privileged upbringing the other a son of the cook. Augustin was treated like a family of a household and tutored together with Safta by a governess. It is especially heartbreaking to learn that the governess decided that because Augustin is deaf he is not going to learn anything, not even the monastery would accept him. It is by grace that Safta’s mother, Marina, nurture Augustin’s talent for art and the only avenue Augustin could express himself. Augustin is also very good with horses and all those he tends to the horses of the Valeanu household.

Marina Valeanu prayed away her shame and her disappointment. She crossed herself and kissed the cool metal. her mind went over other things that the Abbot had said. how God might be found in the performance of simple tasks. How he might be found in silence itself. – page 63

When he was angry or sad, it was often only Safta who could understand what it was that troubled him. It was as if the mute boy was “the silent side of herself”.

Romania in WWII

Romania began the second world war neutral, joined the Axis powers after Stalin annexed Bessarabia, and sent armies to be slaughtered on the eastern front. It had a period of fascist rule and played its part in the Holocaust; this took the form of chaotic atrocities, typical of past pogroms, rather than systematic extermination. (Most horrifying is the story of the train that set off from the city of Iasi in June 1941 crammed with some 5,000 Jews. For a week it was shunted and redirected to and fro and held waiting in the middle of nowhere in the summer heat, until most of those on board were dead of exhaustion and dehydration. The barbarity of the event shocked German troops who observed it.)

Then, in 1944, the king led a coup against the ruling dictatorship. Romania joined the allies but this was not enough to save it. The Russians entered the country and Romania’s first communist leader,Gheorghiu-Dej, followed the high Stalinist model, from heavy industrialisation to mass arrests and labour camps, even to a Gulag-style canal project, to link the Danube to the Black Sea, reminiscent of the Soviet White Sea canal. To go back to those Russian references, it was Turgenev to Solzhenitsyn in little more than a decade. 

Rumour has it that the war is about to come, Safta left Poiana before the war while Augustin stayed. Augustin watched without comprehension as armies passed through the place. Then the Communists came, and he found himself their unlikely victim and encounter the horrors of his life.

Though he cannot hear her, Safta finds herself talking to him about the old days and, as she does so, she discovers that “speaking to someone who cannot hear is more than thinking aloud. The words make a trail of their own.” Augustin begins to remember the time after Safta had gone, the long hard years of the war. There are things he must tell her. Little by little he tries to summon the rest of the story for her, with his pencil.

What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We’re all so many people, aren’t we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don’t know how anyone keeps track. There are people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are. You for example. You’re at least three people that I know of: Augustin from Poiana, Ioan we gave a name to in the hospital, Ioan Adriana’s son come back dumb from the war.’ – Safta, page 154

It is a quiet novel with a very understated writing style. Harding writes in a very simple prose and very descriptive. For the very first moment I felt sorry for Augustin for being mute and the frustrations of not being able to hear nor comprehend all the life changing events and war that are happening to him. A lot of sadness and love of Augustin is left unsaid. Harding doesn’t tell you how Augustin feels but she tells you how he feels by drawing. He tends to his horse, he draws; the army came to the house, he drew; the army left and he left the house, he drew and carved out figurines with papers; he stayed with Adriana for awhile he drew; he is with Safta he drew.

He drew, and drew and drew which is uniquely refreshing but can be weary after awhile.

As I said the story criss-crossing between the past and the present, seems to be what the other two writers on the Orange shortlist are doing:  Half Blood Blues and The Forgotten Waltz and this is perhaps the 3^rd novels in the shortlists that refers to the WWII as a setting after Half Blood Blues and Foreign Bodies.

Nothing dramatic happens and really held my interest, not until the last 100 pages when secrets of both Augustin and Safta are revealed, layer by layer. It is an important book, one that I admire the author for finding the inspiration and her motivation to write about Romania at war (see article : Georgina Harding : Journey through Romanian history)

Read it in another occasion I may have raved about it, but for now I just want the book to finish.

Rating: 

Hardback. Publisher: Bloomsbury 2012; Length: 312 pages; Setting: Iași and Poiana, Romania. Source: Reading Library copy. Finished reading at: 6^th May 2012.

Other views:

Litlove: Much of what happens to him arrives without a meaning, and so the passages where he must undergo the atrocities of war are immensely moving as they add extra poignancy to those incomprehensible cruelties. And yet, the absence of language also insulates Tinu in some way, makes him stronger, more resilient, even in his frailty. This is a subtle book and an immensely patient one; patient in the way the characters treat Tinu, patient in the attention Tinu brings to his life, patient in its philosophy of enduring grief, loss and misery in the awareness that everything passes. And the more I think about it, quite possibly a strong contender for the Orange prize.

Nomad Reader: The verdict: This novel has an insistence to it, as Harding’s beautiful writing takes the reader on a journey through Romania before, during and after the war and into the mind of a man who has only art with which to communicate. The non-linear narrative flows beautifully and allows the reader to understand both these characters and their world more deeply. It would be a worthy Orange Prize winner.

Lizzysiddal : Turbulent, violent events are narrated painstakingly, with patience and an underlying stillness.  While this is at odds with the nature and impact of those events, it is as close a reflection as words can get to the silence that defines the painter-protagonist.

About the writer:

Georgina Harding is the author of three novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave and The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime and shortlisted for the Encore Award.  Her first book was a work of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime.  It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village in the Coromandel coast.  Her most recent novel Painter of Silenceis on the 2012 Orange Prize shortlist.  Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex.

Read about Georgina Harding’s motivation behind writing Painter of Silence: Georgina Harding : journey through Romanian history

I look back and feel that I wrote more raw and honest posts in the early years when no one was actually reading them. Over time I have written more reviews than putting any thoughts about what I feel about reading and life in general. Perhaps I was unhappy then and in recent years I am happier but still it is not an excuse not to think of ways to lighten up this blog.

I like Booking through Thursday meme and thought that is a way to generate some thought provoking discussion. If I can do a few posts like that in the future, instead of run of the mill book review, that will be great.

Thanks for being here.

It ain’t fair. Gifts is divided so damn unevenly. Like God just left his damn sack of talents in a ditch somewhere and said, “Go help yourselves, ladies and gents.Them’s that get there first can help themselves to the biggest ones. In every other walk of life, a jack can work to get what he want. but ain’t no amount of toil going get you a lick more talent than you born with. Geniuses ain’t made, brother, they just is. and I just was not. – page 272

The talent we are raving here is Hieronymus Falk, Hiero for short, nickname kid. Hiero was a trumpeteer, making jazz music with Paul at the piano, Fritz, Charles C. Jones, nickname Chip at the drum and Sid (Sidney Roscoe Griffiths), the narrator of the story, at the Cello.

In 1940, in the aftermath of the fall of Paris, Hiero was a rising star on the cabaret scene. He is arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He is 20-year-old. A German citizen. And he is black.

50 years later, Sid, the only witness that day Hiero was abducted. Sid is going back to Berlin, where they first met. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface a dark, ugly secret which sealed Hiero’s fate.

The day I learnt of the Orange prize for fiction announces the 2012 shortlist, I was fortunate to collect Foreign Bodies, Painter of Silence and this book at one go from the Westminster Library. Browsing through which one to start first, I read a few paragraph of Half Blood Blues and felt like giving up.

We talked like mongrels, see – half German, half Baltimore bar slang. Just a few scraps of French between us. Only real language I spoke aside from English was Hoch-deutsch. But once I started messing up the words I couldn’t straighten nothing out again. – page 5

The language and period slang (noticed the grammatical errors, they are not mine!) used in the story stay true to the depiction of half mongrel as mentioned above, initially I find it difficult to follow but after awhile I got the hang of it. All because this book won the Canadian Scotiabank Giller Prize including being shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2011, and now shortlisted for Orange Prize 2012, this book got to be good right?

So to make sure new readers do not fall into the same trap as I did, let me start off with a few basic glossary of this book:

• The Kraut - the Germans, The Boot is a Nazi soldier
• The Frog – the French (don’t ask me why)
• Jack is a man and Jane is a woman

So I persevere, and I was rewarded with a truly unique, authentic story. A story with a heart and come with much pain and betrayal. It has an almost all male cast with Delilah Brown as the elusive seductress, there is enough male banter to make me smile, very evocative of the period with the whole jazz music and lingo (I love listening to jazz and jazz singers, but I don’t claim to know the older generations except Louis Armstrong), there was enough fear to make me cringe at the knock of the door and a kick of the boot, and enough heart that made me want to take out a hanky and dab those nearly fallen tears.

The tall Boots done soften his voice, too. It was odder than odd; these Boots was so courteous, so upstage in their behaviour, they might’ve been talking bout the weather. Nothing like how they’d behaved in Berlin. There was even a weak apology in their gestures, like they was gentlemen at heart, and only rough times forced them to act this way. And this politeness, this quiet civility, it scared me more than outright violence. It seemed a newer kind of brutality. – page 17

The chapters goes back and forth between 1940 and 1992. I can’t help but marvel at the construct of the plot woven with a distinct and vernacular voices. The thing that most break my heart was the jealousy and led to a betrayal and there is one subject that I can’t bear to read is to read about a wasted life. A life which begins full of promise but to fall into pieces at the end, with nothing to show.

The book began with lots of banter and laughter, the middle part of the book a bit of a drag (but that’s because they were trapped in a situation waiting for things to happen) but it was the end, the last 20 pages that did it for me. A memorable scene I will never forget. Confession, redemption, forgiveness, how magnanimous and glorious! Edugyan made Jazz and her characters timeless, which is what Jazz is to me, timeless. She made these characters a legend. A lot of writers flop at their second novel, but not Edugyan, she got better and gave us this. I like this book more than I expected. I love female writers who can do male voices. It’s not my favourite orange shortlist but it’s definitely up there with the maestro.

Rating: 

‘I tell you what I know. The world’s damn beautiful. But it’s an accidental beauty. What we do, it’s deliberate. It’s the one damn consolation you can offer not just you own life, but other lives you ain’t even met.’ – Chip, page 334

Listen, jazz, it ain’t just music. It life. You got to have experience to make jazz. – page 202

Paperback. Publisher: Serpent’s Tail, 2012; Length: 343 pages; Setting: Paris, Berlin 1940 and Poland 1992. Source: Westminster Library copy. Finished reading at: 3rd May 2012.

Other views:

Stu@Winstonsdad:: I enjoyed the interaction of the three main characters ,the book slowly build the tension of  the german army arriving ,and the later story shows how when time has passed we are willing to open up.

Sam@tiny library: I was also impressed with how well Edugyan wrote from the male perspective of Sid.  She used the vernacular of 1930s Baltimore and made Sid believable as a kid from the wrong side of the tracks.  I liked the language quirks and deliberate misuse of grammar.  From a structural point of view, it also worked that the story wasn’t told chronologically, rather jumping back and forth from the war to the 1990s – it kept the tension going.

Jackie@farmlane books: Initially I found the writing very engaging, but it did lose some momentum in the central section. This slight lull in plot was quickly forgotten as I reached the final pages – I loved the emotional ending.

About the writer:

Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta to Ghanaian immigrant parents, she studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins University before publishing her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in 2004.

Despite favourable reviews for her first novel, Edugyan had difficulty securing a publisher for her second fiction manuscript. She spent some time as a writer-in-residence in Stuttgart, Germany, which inspired her to write another novel, Half-Blood Blues, about a mixed-race jazz musician in World War II-era Europe who is abducted by the Nazis as a “Rhineland Bastard”. Published in 2011, Half-Blood Blues was announced as a shortlisted nominee for that year’s Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. She was one of two Canadian writers, alongside Patrick deWitt, to make all four award lists in 2011. On November 8, 2011 she won the Giller Prize for Half-Blood Blues. Again alongside deWitt, Half-Blood Blues was also shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In April 2012, it was announced that Edugyan had won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Half-Blood Blues. Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poet Steven Price.