The Fathers - John Niven

 

A book that I picked up by chance, and chiefly because I felt that it could provide some light entertainment and occasional insight. 

And that it did. With the obvious clash of cultures and classes that its cover promised, but done with a gracious touch that reminded me of John Lanchester. 

Nothing in the book is excessively surprising. Things seem to take a turn for the worse, then everything works out for pretty much everyone. Yet, there are enough moments - funny, dramatic (this book did nothing to placate my fear of children and grapes), insightful - to make it a compelling read. And Niven does a really good job of highlighting what I think is one of the most overlooked issues for "my" people: middle and upper-middle class people don't have children, or have them very late in life. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney

 

And the last of the Sally Rooney novels that I've read lately (and, actually, the last Sally Rooney novel I hadn't read). In my very own rankings, it sits as a comfortable second, but the gap between this and Intermezzo is significant. 

I greatly enjoyed the e-mail exchanges between Alice and Eileen that alternate with the narrative chapters, but I found it odd that, while the written communication between the two of them felt so real, the dialogues in the other chapters (and the overall dynamics of the four main characters) felt somewhat unnatural. Or maybe my experience of dysfunctional relationships is too limited for me to understand these people's interactions. 

Also, I somehow kept on picturing Felix as the bold "heavy" from Anora. 

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

I almost feel guilty to say that I didn't particularly like this book, considering the kind of reaction that it generated worldwide. Interestingly, the few negative opinions that I found online came from Nigerian readers. 

While I obviously agree with the main premises (Igbo people telling the stories of the impact of the Biafran War on their communities, and the fact that the world should remember the suffering it caused), I think the book ultimately lacks depth, chiefly because of how stereotypical so many characters looked. 

We have the armchair academic revolutionary (who oddly enough never talks about other revolutions - in the 1960s! - or about his academic interests), the well-meaning but out place white man, the houseboy who gets educated and reaches new heights (despite some very serious lows), a couple of cartoonish depiction of Western journalists, etc. 

The worst is the absolute perfection of Olanna, which I found rather tedious. I really wish we heard more from her twin, who to me was by far the most interesting character of the story. 

On top of that, while the context of the story was quite clearly the 1960s, I felt that the interpersonal dynamics between the main characters were much more current (in particular considering the fact that I suspect Nigeria didn't quite experience the sexual revolution of the 1960s in the same way as the Western world). 

Summer Crossing - Truman Capote

Apparently Capote was rather unhappy with this novel(la?) and that was one of the reasons why it wasn't published during his lifetime. Man, did he have high standards...

Summer Crossing is not exactly the best book of the 20th century, but that doesn't mean that one cannot spend a couple of enjoyable hours reading it. Again, this is a typical "New York book", inclusive of holidays in the Hamptons, inter-class romance, parties, garages etc.

It's not going to change your life, and it surely didn't change mine, but it can be good company on a lazy (early) summer afternoon.

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).

Howard’s End – E. M. Forster

How I suffered. It’s not like any of this was unexpected (quite the opposite as, thanks to the help of Merchant-Ivory productions, the plot had very few surprises for me), but it’s all so heart-breaking. I very much like to identify with poor Mr Bast (it’s not as if I came from a poor family, but I am still the first kid to go to university, and went to another country – and LSE and Cambridge at that – and scrubbed dishes six nights a week for three years in order to pay my own expenses and feel like a pseudo-proletarian). Seeing him ultimately mistreated by people who (in some cases) mean well but fundamentally only see him as their own little project and not as, erm, a person, is just too much.

Sure, Charles will go to jail following Bast’s death, and his own kid (whom he will never meet) is going to inherit Howards End and be all posh – but that doesn’t even begin to make up for a stupid death under piles of books or the awfulness of not being in control of one’s own life because some do-gooders who are completely out of touch with reality secretly (or not so much at times) think that they know what’s best for everyone.

Being Forster, it’s obviously superbly written, but this story just gets me so very worked up!

Una Vita Violenta – Pier Paolo Pasolini

My parents each had a copy of this book when they moved in together back in the 1980s and, thirty years later, realized they had no need for two copies in the same house so gave one of them to me (that said, they’re not even sure whether they read the novel or not!)

I did love Ragazzi di Vita, but I found Una Vita Violenta (which in many ways follows in its footsteps) to be of a whole other calibre. Whereas one grows to like the Riccetto in the former a bit less as the book goes on and he settles within “the system”, I actually fell in love with Tommaso more and more with each page (after feeling the intense desire to strangle him during his football match with kids half his size at the beginning of the book, I just felt the need to protect him from the evils of the world).

Sure, his political path is a bit too allegoric for me, but by the end of the book my nerves were completely shattered. I was glad he did not drown in the flood that hit his old neighbourhood, but the end is really no less devastating (and yet, it is the only way the book could/should have ended in order to be one of the great works of the Italian literature of the last century). 

The Gambler (and other stories) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

When it comes to buying me books I have fundamentally four categories of friends (from the largest to the smallest): those who don’t even try because they are too scared (I feel your pain, and I apologize for being a snob!), those who try to buy me books and fail miserably, those who ask me what books I want or directly give me book vouchers (always very much appreciated), and those who just buy me books and don’t fail miserably (I salute you). This collection of stories comes from a friend belonging to the last category.

Some of the short stories in the collection I found quite boring (White Nights above all, despite being one of the most well-known works in this book), but others I found absolutely brilliant: A Nasty Story and The Meek One in particular not only don’t show any sign of ageing, but they are also so incredibly touching (I feel no sympathy for the protagonist of the former, and not that much for that of the latter, but plenty of sympathy for the celebrating family and the wife and servant respectively).

The Gambler itself is a wonderful novel(la?) about human weakness – when Dostoevsky describes the main character’s “system” it appears quite clearly that his own system mustn’t have been too different. The one issue I found, however, is that after the bombshell of grandmother’s arrival and her subsequent departure the pace of the novel slowed down too much and I lost a fair bit of interest, regained only in the last few pages with the summary of everyone’s lives given by Astley. So yeah, they probably should have kept on gambling instead of leaving Roulettenburg!!

A Passage to India - E.M. Forster

Ah, the relaxing joy of an E.M. Forster novel when your pregnant wife is overdue!

Seriously though, this novel was exactly what I needed - I considered reading Howards End, but I don't think I could have survived it emotionally...

Forster's subtle (or at times not so subtle) criticism of Western colonial attitudes is still remarkably relevant in today's world. As is his portrayal of mental illness. As is his description of class issues. As is his discussion of race.

Sure, Forster himself was a Westerner talking about India and was affected by all our (mis)perceptions and (mis)conceptions, but to me he remains fundamentally a genius.

The Great Gatsby – Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I read this book at 17, an old paperback that my grandma had bought with a cheesy magazine (disclaimer: she bought the magazine to get the book as my grandma was, in her way, a good reader – and being on a budget she was the queen of discounted first issues and random promotional offers in the town’s newsagent).

And that’s where the poetry ends. Because, again, I wonder why I should care about Gatsby, Daisy, or even Nick. In all honesty, I wasn’t this critical when I first read the book, but just because I was still moving my first tentative steps in the world of the greats of the twentieth century and i thought that I should like – or pretend to like – everything that had been labelled a masterpiece. And call me naive, but I’d like to think that I would have stopped being star-struck by these rich New Yorkers way before Nick.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – David H. Lawrence

Back in the day, my granduncle hid my grandma’s copy of the book on top of their kitchen cupboard (and cheekily ended up reading it). At that time the book was hot stuff. Nowadays, its erotic tones no longer causing uproar, the book is just quite boring.

I don’t really care about Lady Chatterley’s love for her gamekeeper – not from a psychological, and even less from a physical and erotic point of view. And I’m tired of inter-class forbidden loves where the poor always ends up being the charmingly mysterious figure who ends up being manipulated (happily or unhappily) by his or more often her partner.

And I’ve got nothing left to say about this book, something which, incidentally, says a lot...

The God of Small Things – Arundathi Roy

To me this book is pretty much an Indian version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (or probably the other way around, considering the years of publication of the two works). Yet, for much that I loved McEwan’s book, this one left me rather unmoved.

In both books the poor suffer and the rich get on with their lives (there is very little atonement – if at all – in both cases, at least in my opinion). The difference is that here the children are the ones being manipulated and they are not manipulating adults. Maybe that’s what I didn’t like about the book. Or maybe it’s the excessively romanticized scenes of inter-cast love. Or maybe it’s the myth of Oxbridge across the world that just annoys the hell out of me. I wish the Indian communists were given more of an actual role, rather than being left just on the side (crucial, but still on the side). I had really high expectations from this book. They just weren’t met.

Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini – Giorgio Bassani

I am starting to feel sorry for whoever ends up reading this blog and its countless comments on books about... Italian Fascism! Apologies, but those bleak years did prove to be an incredible source of inspiration for a generation, or two, of Italian authors...

At least this book isn’t really about the Resistance, or anti-Fascism, but rather about the impact that the regime had on the everyday life of rich Jewish people who had no particular interest in fighting it. Being narrated by a character outside the family, it idolizes the lives of the Finzi-Contini. The book is completely coated in a melancholic patina, something that I really envy because I don’t think I will have the same bittersweet memories of my fruitless Italian juvenile love (my memories of her are just plain bitter).

For me, one noticeable quality of this book is Bassani’s ability to ultimately leave politics aside: he managed to write a book on the impact of Fascism without actually discussing Fascism, with a story that remains within the boundaries of the villa of the Finzi-Contini, only occasionally venturing to a couple of other locations in the town of Ferrara.

For anyone familiar with Italian cinema, I was quite surprised by the fact that Vittorio De Sica directed the (fairly unsatisfactory) movie inspired by the book, as the story would have been perfect, absolutely perfect, for a movie by the Taviani brothers.

Demons – Fyodor Dostoevsky

A wonderful gift by a friend who, having to always have a different opinion from the rest of the world, told me that this should have been my first Dostoevsky book rather than Crime and Punishment, or The Idiot, or The Karamazov Brothers. 

It is clearly one of the best books I’ve ever read, although the fact that I've pretty much never read any other 19th century greats means I don't have much to compare it with. Nevertheless, it probably still needs more time to sink in, as my opinions and recollections fluctuate between awe for the incredibly insightful socio-political commentary, and slight boredom in the descriptive chapters at the start and the ones portraying the lives of either the rich or the poor people at the end of the second part and at the start of the third one

Most of all, I find it really perplexing that not a single one of the characters is actually likeable. Stavrogin is a spoiled little ass who only (barely) recovers towards the end with his suicide note, Stepan Trofimovich is just an intellectual loser (maybe I can relate, with my underutilized PhD and forgotten Cambridge MPhil?) and you just feel sorry for him but don't really like him, Pyotr Stepanovich is just downright scary, and Kirillov is by far the most fascinating character for me, but talk of creepy...