Purity - Jonathan Franzen

 

And I actually liked it. I liked it better than Freedom, the book it displaced on my bookshelf. Granted, I might be biased as a big chunk of it is set in my wife's hometown (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, is not exactly the most literarily visited of places, the only author I know that has written about it was Mario Vargas Llosa, but that doesn't count as he lived right next door!). 

I don't think anything will ever come close to The Corrections, but Purity has enough flashes of genius to remind the reader of how amazing a writer Franzen can be. Said flashes of genius (first among them Andreas Wolf's first TV interview outside the Stasi archives) are enough to make one overlook some unpredictable turns of events that are actually not so unpredictable. 

The penultimate chapter (The Killer) felt absolutely eternal, and I do think Franzen could have shaved a fair few pages from the 563 of the book, but it remained a great read to end 2019. Also, this book is so very reflective of his disdain and disregard for a number of contemporary developments and trends, and to me it appears clear that Tom Aberant is in the end his favourite character. 

Chocolat – Joanne Harris

I found this old best-seller in a phone box turned book exchange in Lewisham and I’ve only really picked it up because once upon a time my mom won a literary award that was presented to her by Joanne Harris (I was more interested in the 10kg of chocolate that came with it though).

Unfortunately, the book is way more The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (minus its underlying racism and a little less shallow) than Babette’s Feast. The characters are overall so dreadfully predictable, the attacks on the Catholic Church and on life in small villages not inventive, and the plot, well, borderline pathetic. The only remotely interesting part was the children story-esque ending, with the evil priest gorging on chocolate before fleeing.

Really not a wonder then that this book sold so many copies. 

La Storia – Elsa Morante

A book from a time when Italian literature was worthy of that name. This “history” book is, for once, not about Fascism – although the bulk of the novel takes place during the years of the Second World War it has very little to do with a political commentary of the dictatorship.

It is different from many novels in which personal histories overlap with the great events of history, mostly because of the disarming simplicity of the lives of the two main characters (something that doesn’t lose its appeal even after more than 500 pages) and because the book is not an epic family history, and Useppe and Ida are not the charismatic and inspiring leaders of tightly-knit family clans, but rather two tiny figures essentially alone in the world.

The book is touching in a way that I never experienced before, and one of the few instances in which I was able to appreciate the uniquely feminine touch of the author.