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. 

Long Island - Colm Tóibín

 

Perhaps it was a mistake to read this without having read Brooklyn, but hey it is a standalone book after all. 

I read it to understand what makes Tóibín so popular and I can see that. The writing is extremely smooth, his ability to talk about reality in a small village is remarkable, and the stereotypical descriptions of how gossip spreads in a small place somehow don't really feel stereotypical. 

Yet, I'm afraid this was also a novel that attempted to appeal to a sentimental side of me that I have long repressed (and/or that I've never possessed) and as a result I didn't get out of this book as much as other people did. 

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. 

Normal People - Sally Rooney

And this is the third book of Sally Rooney that I've read, and probably the one that I liked the least (though in all honesty I was most likely put off by the mention of the "Netflix series inspired by this book" on the cover). 

Problem 1: the decision to only look at particular episodes in the characters' lives and jump ahead in time feels overdone (I find it cheap in general, though at least Rooney does it better than Michael Cunningham in his latest book)

Problem 2: the 50 Shades of Grey turn left me indifferent to say the least

Problem 3: Marianne comes across as a bit too desperate and devoid of agency by the end of the novel, which I found a bit too much of a downer

The Bee Sting - Paul Murray

 

Beware the Ides of March. 

But also, beware the "instant classic" (The Washington Post). 

This is a novel that I thought desperately tried to be a Great American Novel. Except it isn't great, and it isn't American (on the plus side, it's a novel). As I was reading it, I often had to remind myself that the book wasn't set in the American Midwest, but actually in Ireland. And when I thought the plot was getting almost incestuous, well, it got even more incestuous. 

On the plus side, it was a pretty quick and almost effortless read. At times it was even quite pleasant, but between that and considering this one of the best novels of the last few years there's a big difference!

Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney

And this is the second book book by Sally Rooney that I read. 

I suspect my impressions of it were influenced by sky-high expectations after having read Intermezzo and by the fact that I read Conversations with Friends at a time in which we were beginning to gut out a house, living with an army of burly builders working around us, and sleeping in blankets covered in dust. 

Still, I was somewhat underwhelmed by this book. While I still recognised Rooney's ability to explore social relations and write a good book with something somewhere between a very simple plot and no plot at all, I ultimately couldn't bring myself to be interested in the lives of these characters, be them young artsy types trying to find their way into the world, or middle-aged rich people who are a bit bored and/or a bit dysfunctional. 

Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

 

I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And, wow, turns out the fuss was about a truly excellent book. 

Having never read anything by Rooney, I didn't quite know what to expect, and was truly carried away by her ability to make the reader care for (while not necessarily like) what happened to all the broken and flawed characters in this book. 

It wasn't enough to tempt me to learn how to play chess (luckily, most likely!) or return to Ireland (my one visit to Dublin remains rather underwhelming, though I really should visit the rest of the country), but it was enough for me to binge on all the other Rooney novels so far (which, good as they might be, in my opinion pale in comparison to Intermezzo). 

Prophet Song - Paul Lynch

Every now and again I have to read a dystopian novel. And every now and again I have to be reminded that I don't really love them. Unless they are The Road. 

Prophet Song is undeniably good, but the fact that the dynamics of the frictions between the two warring factions are never discussed (the novel begins as the situation is already beginning to spiral out of control, with almost no explanations) made it quite hard for me to "buy into" the book. 

That said, I really was impressed by how the author makes the reader realize that so many of the main characters' decisions are, ultimately, wrong, yet dramatically understandable and justifiable. 

The Lock-Up - John Banville

 

Why did I read another John Banville detective story after being recently bitterly disappointed by a John Banville detective story? Chiefly because I think John Banville is one of the greatest contemporary writers and wanted to give him another chance, and because I am almost out of readable titles from the Southwark eLibrary. 

Sadly, if at all possible, I enjoyed The Lock-Up even less than I enjoyed Snow. The reason for that is essentially that, in this one, in addition to the eternally meddling Catholic church (duh) the reader also gets a wonderful peek into the world of former German Nazis and their dodgy collaborations with a state of Israel in its infancy. 

And as a matter of fact, a couple of weeks after finishing this book I don't remember much about it, other than the general feeling of "duh-ness"...

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. 

The Singularities - John Banville

  

I've only read a couple of Banville's books, and I think that to make the most of this novel one ought to be much more familiar with the author's body of work (with apologies to Alex Clark of The Guardian who claims that neophytes will enjoy the book just as much). 

I did catch the allusions to Shroud, and those pages made my interest peak, but besides that I struggled with a book where beautiful prose is omnipresent but action is ultimately lacking (particularly surprising considering the criminal past of the first character to enter the novel). 

And I was also left wondering if having a novel ending without answering (m)any of its open-handed questions is a deliberate choice or a sign of an author not at his absolute best (though, to be fair, Banville has set the bar quite high for himself!).

The Untouchable - John Banville

  

Not original. Not just in that the story of Anthony Blunt (or whatever kind of pseudonym he is hidden behind) is relatively well-known, but in that even Alan Bennett had written a fictional portrait of him well before Banville did. 

And yet, for once, I'm thinking: who the hell cares? The story remains fascinating and one of the few things that occasionally make me feel a bit of nostalgia for Cambridge, and Banville is one of the greatest living authors. 

So yeah, I thought this book was great, and thinking that The God of Small Things won the Booker that year makes me cringe a bit.

Shroud - John Banville

A book taken from the book-crossing shelves at Turin airport that manages to be so delightfully Turinese (even in its title) despite being written by an Irish author.

I didn't know anything about Banville (bad me, I mean, the guy even won the Booker Prize) and my mom, right as usual, persuaded me to read this book despite not having even read it herself.

The book is beautifully written, though at times it is possibly a bit too deep and ponderous even for me (or maybe I'm just not as good a reader as I think I am!). The shadowy identity twist from the main character's WWII years, and the decadence of the contemporary setting, however, made this an excellent read. Though, after consecutive books with big WWII discoveries, I really needed something solely focused on the contemporary world and without Nazis around!

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Having almost run out of books at home, I am now going back to the 18^th century.  And it’s actually better than I expected. Gulliver’s Travels surprised me by not just being about Lilliput (but then again, that’s solely due to my ignorance), by being written in a remarkably understandable English, and crucially by not being boring.

Not all travels are as interesting – the third one in particular gets to be fairly dull after a while, at least for me – and some of Swift’s comments just make you cringe (the depiction of women being one, but also the continuous praise of Britain and its empire).

But the irony and criticism are still fairly current, although one thing that I found really curious is that for all the things that Swift imagined, he never seemed to envisage a different political system other than a monarchy (at least for humans).

Gulliver’s Travels was a surprisingly pleasant read, but that’s probably also because at the end of it all he comes back to “his” (and also “my”) Rotherhithe. 

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

I think I first got a copy of Angela's Ashes as a gift from one of my seniors in my Canadian high-school 12 years ago. I then handed it over to one of my juniors without reading it. And ever since I kept on finding it, unsurprisingly, in all sorts of second-hand bookshops. I think the copy I ended up reading was coming from the Stratford Books for Free, but I might be wrong. Anyway, as I am now finally running out of paperbacks so I decided it was time for me to read this.

And it was, well, alright. Some parts of it were positively interesting and entertaining, in particular when young Frank starts to find a way to make money, but the novelty of some others wore off rather quickly (I understand the author’s life was marked by his father’s alcoholism, but hundreds of pages of stories centred on various stages of drunkenness bored me a bit after a while).

I’ve read that a number of people questioned the truthfulness of the account, but I don’t really see the need for that. After all these are childhood memories, and if I think back to my own childhood I distinctly remember having tamed a lion in the mean streets of Bra, Italy, having arm-wrestled (and won) against Olympic athletes at the peak of their fitness, and having read the Odyssey in its original version when I was 5. But I might have got some of the details a bit wrong…

Dubliners – James Joyce

How I remember my high-school classmates spending months and months reading (?!?) this collection of short stories and pretending that it was the most meaningful book they had ever read. Having read it over a lazy weekend I have a couple of thoughts (both for them and for whoever happens to read this blog):

1.       I understand it was cool to say that one was reading Joyce as a teenager, but, seriously, spending 2 months carrying it around feels a bit excessive – maybe my classmates needed to show off?

2.       I understand it was cool to say Dubliners was the greatest book they had read (perhaps it was factually true, as for a number of them it could have been their first book not written by Roald Dahl), but, honestly, what’s the point?

I have the feeling this is something that you can only appreciate if you’re Irish (probably like you can only appreciate Fenoglio’s short stories if you’re Italian), but if you aren’t – well, to restate my thought above, what’s the point?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

I have read somewhere that, alongside In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Ulysses is the book that most people claim to have read without actually having done so. Why reading Joyce is something meant to be so cool that you should lie about is just beyond me.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is now a century old, and it feels that way. What do we need to read this book today for? Bore us to death? Possibly. Tell us Catholic life could be grim and miserable? Seriously overdone.

I’ve read this book less than a year ago, and all I seem to remember is (in alphabetical order): Apathy, Boredom, Catholicism. Maybe I’m not enough of an aesthete, but I wonder what’s the point of this book nowadays. In order to be considered one of the greatest writers ever, shouldn’t your masterpieces be, erm, readable?!?