A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

A book that my boss lent to me to re-establish my faith in the Men Booker Prize after I was forced to read an absolutely pathetic novel – Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, which had been shortlisted for the prize last year – for my office’s book club.

I read the first 100 pages of this book with the same ease with which I had read the opening chapter of The Sound and the Fury (i.e. not a lot, being constantly lost in a prose that was simply too challenging for me), but after that rough start Jamaican Patois started to make sense, at least relatively.

Two characters stood out for me: the girl who runs away from Kingston (whose internal monologues felt like they had been written by Zadie Smith, despite the fact that the very end of her story is rather predictable) and the deceased politician who concludes most sections of the book (his description of the Singer’s illness and death is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature that I’ve read in a while). I didn’t find the book’s violence to be as Tarantino-esque as many reviewers presented it to be. Actually, I found the book violent, but not that violent.

Being nearly 700 pages, at times I felt that James could have got to the point more quickly, but then again he was probably doing it on purpose to offer a more vivid picture of the modus operandi (or vivendi?!?) of Jamaican gangs.

Most of all, the book is a wonderful display of how much impact one musician (the Singer is – surprise! – actually Bob Marley) has had on the life of his own country. It’s also kind of funny to see Marley always mentioned as “the Singer” while Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff are called by their names.

Also, because of this book I’ve spent the last 24 hours listening non-stop to the soundtrack of The Harder they Come. 

A Perfect Peace – Amos Oz

A random book I picked up without knowing a thing about it (although knowing fully well how much I like Oz’s writing). A really enjoyable read, despite the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to finish it over the holidays (I’ll blame family and friends’ visits – and the consequent lack of quality “me time” – for that).

I always tell my students to read something by Oz or Yehoshua (in the case of the latter I normally refer to his novels, not his borderline senile newspaper columns) to prepare for classes on the Arab-Israeli conflict – they never listen, but at least I try – and A Perfect Peace, with its comments on the Six Day War and more generally on Israeli politics, will clearly be no exception.

The novel is insightful and ironic, in particular in its first half (which the author wrote much earlier than the second part), the comments on life in the kibbutz are deep and informative, and a number of the characters are particularly interesting (the relatively minor ones often more so than the central triangle of Yonatan, Rimona and Azariah). The second half of the novel, however, has an underlying sentimentally that I struggled with…

Mrs Dalloway – Virgina Woolf

Yet another one of the books that I got from Books for Free in Stratford before its untimely closure last year. Having only read To the Lighthouse, I was determined to find something by Virginia Woolf that could be, erm, readable for me. I picked Mrs Dalloway not so much because I knew what it was about, but rather because I loved Cunningham’s The Hours so much (maybe not the most valid of premises, but hey, it did the trick).

Turns out that Mrs Dalloway was in fact readable (so much so that I even managed to read most of it during a train ride between London and Cambridge without feeling the need to shoot myself in the foot) and, rather surprisingly, it was also quite enjoyable. Clearly, I found the troubled life of Septimus Warren Smith to be much more interesting than Clarrisa’s own (despite the fact that her relation, or lack thereof, with Sally is so very beautifully sad).

Most of all, having been at the London School of Economics for almost ten years now, surrounded by the myth of Virginia Woolf, the Fabian Society, and the Bloomsbury Group, reading Mrs Dalloway has allowed me to have an eye-opening epiphany: most of them were probably horrible people who ultimately either hated (or at the very least disliked profoundly) each other and only pretended to be friends because it could come in handy. Yes, rather sad…