Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow

Behold, a book by Saul Bellow that I didn't fully and thoroughly adore! And my last acquisition from the £1 Halcyon Books store in Greenwich before its closure.

What I liked were Henderson's back-story, his sheer size, and a number of his inner thoughts and dialogues with himself. Then again, all of these things - except the size! - are the things I normally love in Bellow's books.

What I was far from being comfortable with was him going to Africa and playing (an arguably well-intentioned) god. When he does get things epically wrong and blows up the village's cistern, I wasn't happy that he was being put in his place. I could only think about the lives destroyed by his act and about the (very) rich white man who would then move to the next village (with all the guilt in the world, obviously, but also with his millions).

Had I read this book when it was first published I would have probably reacted differently. But it would have been quite hard, because, well, that was 28 years before I was born...

In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne

I'm kind of surprised I even remember the password to my account. Well, the positive is that, despite the months of hiatus, I don't have a pointlessly crazy amount of books to catch up on because I didn't read that much (not quite sure that's a positive actually, but hey!).

Life, in the shape of an upcoming second child, is getting in the way. And I'm also helping my father-in-law translate his book from Portuguese (a language I don't speak) into English (a language that is not my first).

Anyway, back to a book I remember relatively little about, except that I got it at the IKEA Booker Prize event, and that I thought it was a Northwest London story that was well-written and interesting, but little more than that (if both the plot and the location remind one of Zadie Smith, then your work is really quite likely to pale in comparison). Also, I got it because its author had actually worked at the IKEA in Neasden...

So the overall rating would be "good enough": I liked the kid hoping to turn his life around by running for Brunel (a long shot, but I have great memories of playing basketball there and of their sports centre), and the depiction of the riots in the estate was quite compelling (but even here, nothing too new when one thinks of some of the biggest British books of the last few decades).