The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

 

It took me about a month to read this book. In part because of its fairly imposing size, but mostly because the book is full of snakes. Literally to the brim. And if my phobic self had realized that before the start, I wouldn't have even started this novel...

Yet, I enjoyed it more than The Goldfinch. It's a bit of a 21st century Stand By Me with a hint of To Kill a Mockingbird, detailing the stories that children tell themselves to explain events around them, the risks that they obliviously run and their first experiences of love or something resembling that. 

Needless to say, though, it's not exactly the kind of novel that makes me want to visit rural Mississippi anytime soon, and not just (though mostly) because of the snakes. 

Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

Frankly, I would have never believed that a contemporary revision of Shakespeare's Tempest (with all its meta aspects) would have been such a hit with me. 

Instead, man did I enjoy this book. Theatre in prisons is something that has fascinated me since Caesars Must Die by the Taviani brothers. Plus, the wider setting reminded me of Bob Smith's The Boy Who Loved Shakespeare, just in a fictionalized way. 

And I do love, in this case, a revenge against petty career-advancing characters. Add to this the fact that, for once, I was able to see Margaret Atwood in all her quirky humour, and you end up with a book that I enjoyed well beyond my expectations. 

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

With my wife and baby daughter gone for six weeks (!!) I decided this period was my best chance to read the thickest book I had on my shelves.

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read – parts of it reminded me of Stevenson, others of Verne, and I suspect quite a few would have reminded me of Hugo (this remains only a suspicion because, erm, I’ve never actually read any Hugo). The vendetta is at times a bit too prolonged, and I would honestly differentiate between the degree of guilt of Fernando, Danglars, Villefort and Caderousse, but I don’t really hold Dantès responsible for the death of young Edourad de Villefort (much like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dantès plays no role in the outcome of this subplot).

However, for spellbinding that the book is, I really don’t think this is great literature. It’s honestly just a bit too easy to read and to follow (the only intimidating thing being the thickness of it in the end), I never got even remotely confused by the plot or by the characters in it. As one of my colleagues rightfully said, it’s probably just a book that used to be low-brow and that is now considered to be high-brow because of the passage of time and historical setting.  

Solomon Gursky Was Here – Mordechai Richler

Like my parents, I read this book the summer before I moved to Canada. It was one of the things that reassured me that I was making the right decision. Rarely have (fictional?) family histories been this epic and this well-written. True, Barney’s Version might be the better book, but Solomon Gursky is the more captivating of the two.

The richness of its anecdotes is something that I often think only Jewish North American writers can provide, with the characters showing the reader how to kill a polar bear and how to smuggle alcohol. The charm of Ephraim (Solomon’s granddad) reminds me of that of Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude. And whenever I see a raven (and I see a lot of them in London) I think of this book.

One of the few novels that I think I should re-read, pulling out the old family tree I had made for myself  11 years ago, and this time with a pen and paper besides me to note down all the wonderful anecdotes that I have now forgotten.