Blonde Roots - Bernardine Evaristo

 

In all honesty, I wouldn't have read this book had it not been for the fact that the Southwark libraries app grants access to many of Evaristo's books since she won the Booker Prize. 

On the plus side, it made me realize that the "good" but not "one in a generation" kind of authors very rarely invent something from scratch and that, in this case, Colson Whitehead must have borrowed quite a bit from Blonde Roots for his The Underground Railroad (or maybe it's an incredible coincidence that both main characters take an actual underground railroad to try to escape slavery?). 

On the down side, I never really found myself gripped by this book. 

One interesting thing though: despite the frequent reminders that the slaves are white and the slave-owners black, I struggled to picture them as such and my mental image of Doris often switched between that of a white and a black woman. Talk about the power of ingrained perceptions and experience...

Snow - John Banville

 

Running out of readable ebooks on the Southwark libraries app (add some new decent titles, please!) I decided to give Banville's attempt to write a detective story a go. 

And I spent most of my time thinking (and sometimes saying aloud) "John Banville, come on, since when have you become a banal author reverting to all the most obvious plot twists used in airport paperbacks?!?". 

Seriously, rarely a writer has disappointed me as much as Banville did with this book. It had them all: the detective with the troubled love life, the manipulated and mentally unstable black sheep of the family, the abusive Catholic priests (I'm really, really far from being even just remotely a fan of the Catholic Church, but this is one of the three easiest and most annoying tropes around), etc. 

And not a single actual surprising moment through the book. Never. 

Le Perfezioni - Vincenzo Latronico

 

This was one of my frequent attempts to engage with Italian literature by going through the shortlists of the country's biggest literary prizes. 

As usual, I despair for the present and future of (just?) Italian literature. I can  picture authors stopping to re-read a sentence and spending 10 self-congratulatory minutes to remind themselves of how wonderful their prose is, and how imaginative their plot twists are, when in reality they are "meh" at the very, very best. 

But this is a book that I absolutely loved to detest. The main characters are obnoxious, the kind of Italians abroad that I hate with passion, those who leave the country but can't think of learning a new language besides basic rudiments, who are completely unable to break the umbilical chord that links them to the motherland, who anyway will always be able to count upon family wealth as and when needed and who only really have meaningful interactions - no matter where they are - with people born within 500 km of their native village. 

If Latronico's book is an ironic critique of this kind of people, I might read something else by him, but I actually doubt he had any intention of criticizing his characters or their way to see the world. 

Agent Running in the Field - John le Carré

 

A book that I read in part in digital form, and in part as a hard copy at our local library while my younger daughter was busy reading (well, actually just leafing through, she's three!) dozens of Bluey, Spot and - much to my chagrin - Peppa Pig books. 

Le Carré is one of those authors who make me wonder whether one can be both a great writer and have near universal reach. Very few can, and I believe le Carré belongs in that list. 

Sure, the ending of the book feels rushed and underexplored, but we're talking about an author who, at the tender age of 88, was probably feeling the pressure of time more than others (and he might have a point, as he died soon after the publication of this book). 

Apparently Agent Running in the Field has been described by many as le Carré's Brexit novel, which is obviously reductive, but I did love his decision to air out his anger and frustration with that whole bonkers project: while the likes of Ali Smith and Ian McEwan are preaching to the choir when they criticize Brexit, I suspect le Carré's readership covers a much broader socio-political spectrum and so his move was a lot bolder and riskier (though again, at 88 he probably didn't have too much to lose).