10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World - Elif Shafak

"For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the
taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . ."

10 Minutes is separated into two parts, the Mind, with Leila recalling the moments of her life and The Body, the efforts of her friends to recover and bury her. Right there, in that two-part structure is something startlingly radical: Leila is both a mind and a body, a fully rounded woman with four decades of lived experience and a cadaver on a medical examiner’s table. Her death is not where the story ends or where it begins. Her grisly murder is not an outrage to be avenged, nor a puzzle to be solved , there is no brilliant/jaded/antisocial detective , it is simply a tragedy. A lurid death of the type so common in fiction (and upon which a whole genre has been built) – a murdered whore stuffed into a bin – but here the victim is humanised, centred, she is no plot device in someone else’s story.

It is a deeply depressing story of exclusion, sexual abuse, the fall into prostitution, the death of loved ones and an all encompassing feeling of abandonment and hopelessness. But that is not all it is. Yes, there is incredible sadness. But there is also hope, and friendship, and love. For me this book re-affirms how very special life it. What it means to be alive. How and why we can try to make changes and make the world more inclusive and loving.  Most importantly to seek out those with which you will be able to share your life with, those who are meaningful and understand you. 

Shafak's sensual writing abounds. You can smell the scents of spices, cardamom, lemon. You can feel the heat from the sky. The evening breeze on your neck. The lights of the city at night. The sizzle of the food vendor's grill. See the sun reflecting off the harbour. Hear the seagulls careening. The writing is so wonderfully descriptive. 

This is not a perfect novel by any stretch. Leila’s life story is compelling, but not remarkably so; Shafak’s prose style is undeniably lush and sensual, but also occasionally sentimental. Two consecutive chapters open with almost identical lines, which felt slightly lazy. Leila’s ‘found family’ of misfits are drawn with broad brushstrokes and feel more like ‘types’ than real people and their farcical efforts in Part Two are a bit slapstick (Part Two is overall weaker than Part One). 

But along with the mawkishness and melodrama there is poignant charm , wisdom, beauty and compassion. 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a novel that beguiles and seduces despite its flaws.

Age Rating 18+. Sexual abuse of a minor, prostitution, swearing, murder, serious mental illness. 

The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen

"When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-
appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Little does Henrietta know what fascinations the Fisher house itself contains–along with secrets that have the potential to topple a marriage and redeem the life of a peculiar young boy. By the time Henrietta leaves the house that evening, she is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge that is usually reserved only for adults."

I was unsure of what to expect with this book, as I picked it up merely because of an intriguing blurb and an aesthetically pleasing cover. What I found inside was a deeply unusual, constrained, tense yet stunningly beautiful work. This book haunts you. 

Some have said that the main characters, the 11 year old Henrietta and the 9 year Leopold, don't act like real children. I have to beg to differ. The rigid mistrust and hierarchy is very true to the experience of the inner lives of children. (Or at least to my experience of childhood.) Children don't fully understand that they are children, thus their emotions and inner lives are by no means neutered by that fact. 

The plot is relatively simple, a sad romantic entanglement between a group of friends. It's simplicity is what makes it brilliant, it allows Bowen the time and space to really explore the emotions, tensions and atmosphere of these characters. What most struck me was Bowen's writing style. Bowen’s sensibility is heightened to the pitch of a lonely woman in a big house who hears what sounds like an intruder downstairs in the middle of the night. Inanimate objects become animated and not only contribute to the tension of every passing moment but define it. The way light falls or dwindles becomes a coded text of prophecy. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of the book, at once feeling melodiously slow and tensely frenetic. Bowen's primary story-telling device is dialogue, dialogue filled with hidden meaning delivered in staccato. This tempo gets even more frenetic when Bowen writes in monologue, telling a person's thoughts. Bowen covers a range of themes in a relatively short book: the creation of identity, time, secrets and lies, sexuality and sensuality, the constraints of society, death, the relationship between mothers and their children.

The most fascinating character to me was definitely Madame Fisher, the controlling and menacing matriarch. Her ever-watching presence that consumes the house with a creeping ennui. 

A story of passion and heartbreak, of sexual power and destruction - without ever being voyeuristic, it is deeply erotic. Leopold is the living personification of passion spent and lost, and his future, standing at the station in the end, is just as open as his mother's was before her path was chosen. This novel spins an intricate and horrifying atmosphere, that feels at once deeply peaceful and deeply unnerving. A book that is less enjoyed but felt. I would highly recommend.

Age Rating 16+ Adult themes and a unique writing style that might need a slightly higher comprehension to understand/appreciate. 

Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

"In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by
dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two."

I picked this book up on a whim at the library. I had no idea what it was about. I had never heard of it before, and I must be honest, I didn't put the name James Baldwin together with the Civil Rights Activist I was taught about in school. So, I had no idea I was about to read one of best book I have yet read. 

This book unravelled me completely. I felt like my whole body was strung out by the sheer, inexorable weight of this story. During reading, I often found myself having to close the book and just process. Giovanni's Room is one of the rawest, most wounding and open-chested portraits of what it is like to burn with the fires of self-loathing as a result of internalized hate, and to wrestle, every day, from the webbing of a shame that stains, indelibly, yourself and everything you love. 

There is viciousness, lust, loneliness, sensuality, deception, sorrow, tenderness, despair, and ultimately tragedy that makes this book easily one of the top 100 best books I’ve ever read. Every reader will find something of themselves in this book, maybe not the part of themselves that they want to hold up to the mirror, but certainly a fragment, disdainful in nature or worthy of pity, that can not be denied.

It is classified as a "gay book." I think that is a overly simplified grouping, it is a book about doomed love. I do not think that you have to be queer to enjoy or relate to this book. You must only have felt out of place, a stranger in a strange land, to have looked at yourself in the mirror and not liked what you saw. To have felt the deep well of loneliness and meaningless desperation that comes with living as a human. Baldwin explores and expresses the torments of humanity and love, through his achingly beautiful prose that often left me breathless. David is profoundly selfish, and evasive to the attention he receives. He paradoxically wants love but cannot bear the responsibilities that go with it. He is an unlikable man, yet you cannot help but emote with him. You cannot help but feel all of his pain and regret and loathing. 

Truly a haunting read, one that will stay with you long after you have finished it. My review cannot do it justice, I merely urge you to read it. 

Age Rating 16+. An insinuations of rape, murder, execution and prostitution but nothing overt. 

Candide - Voltaire

"Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher's immortal narrative takes Candide around the world to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss -- all is not always for the best."

I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into when I picked up this book, with little understanding of Voltaire's philosophy or the plot of Candide. So you can imagine my surprise at the contents of this wonderful and horrifying little satire which might shape up to be one of my favourite books. 

Voltaire's novel introduces the reader to Candide, a wide-eyed, calm and amusingly bland young gentleman who resides at Castle Westphalia and who believes in the philosophy that "everything in the world is for the best." One of the first scenes is filled with two emotional opposites for Candide who first gets to kiss his love, Cunegonde behind a screen, only to then be kicked out of the castle, literally, by the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh.

Here begins Candide's incredible, fantastical adventure which takes him all over the globe with his mind always believing in "the folly of optimism". Moving on from being a soldier in the Bulgarian army to being shipwrecked, being involved with the aftermath of an earthquake, discovering then leaving the mythical El Dorado, to being robbed and swindled more times than seems fair - our hero has a lot of bad luck. One of the overarching issues of this narrative is to present that it isn't just Candide that bad things happen to and that the world is just pretty damn horrible. Tragic things happen to all our main characters including philosopher Dr. Pangloss, Candide's love Cunegonde, and a nice old lady who saved Candide from certain death. The tale is humorously and satirically presented in short, sharp chapters by Voltaire. Most descriptions of doom and degradation are presented in a highly comic fashion which not only serves to allow the reader to continue reading with less emotional scarring but also highlights the stupidity/horror of optimism and a "positive outlook" in these kinds of situations. Though somehow there where scenes that where just so horrific yet comically absurd that I couldn't help but laugh. 

The heartlessness, negativity, and cold-heartedness of humans is a frequent aura and undertone throughout. The novel features all sorts of nastiness such as rape, murder, torture, prostitution, robbery, and slavery among other nastiness and nonsense. 

The whole cast is, strangely, relatable and likable with each being a symbolic caricature of some aspect of ourselves. Some of the times they meet up with friends spontaneously all over the world is amazingly far fetched and draw attention to the satirical character of the story, allowing the characters to compare experiences, hardships, and evolving outlooks. Two of the main characters are the optimistic philosopher Dr. Pangloss and ultimately pessimistic scholar and travel companion of Candide's, Martin. The juxtaposition here is very interesting, with a "black and white"  of these two view points.

I loved the way that the book ends. I wont spoil it too much, but it was just perfect. The group of lost souls finding a unity in tending and being surrounded by nature and enjoying their own creative hobbies. The difference of outlook being forgotten in the coming together to live as good a life as they are going to get. The ending was surprisingly hopeful, at least to me, for such a horrifying story. You will not be able to avoid suffering as it is a part of life and complete optimism is a stupid outlook with so much pain in the world, however you can still find a life where you can, if not overcome you trauma, at least live with it. 

The story reminded me somewhat of the Journey of Buddha before he becomes the Buddha where the naïve and sheltered Indian Prince first ventures out and encounters all of the suffering in the world. I don't know whether this was intentional on Voltaire's part but it was an interesting thing to note. 

Age Rating 18+. As stated above this book contains every level of awfulness possible and doesn't shy away from it. 

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the
sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”

This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it."

A truly mesmerising and brilliant book. Easily one of my favourite books...ever. 

The inhabitants of this hothouse of New York society is built on wealth, life is lavish, easy and comfortably cushioned, but this world may just as well have been covered in a blanket of cobwebs, as the lives are so sedate and uneventfully dull, despite their opulent surroundings, they appear colourless and motionless. Wharton fills the book with heavy and intricate descriptions that make you feel as oppressed by status and things as the characters are.

It is ultimately a tragic tale that Wharton weaves, and yes, as with a lot of classic fiction based around love, it's told with air of melancholy because this love is one that doesn't really get off the ground. For Newland Archer, the leading male character, there is an imagining of an alternative existence to the one that convention has pressed upon him, he has built within himself a kind of sanctuary for his secret thoughts and longings. Within these walls are his bride to be, May Welland and Countess Olenska, who would change his whole world.

Archer is a perfect product of Old New York, a member of one of the most prominent, historic families. He is engaged to the young, beautiful, and equally impeccably bred May Welland, who is sweet sweet-natured but naive. After twelve years away returns the Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin, who through no fault of her own upsets the balance of Newland's life. She is beautiful, vivacious and intelligent, whose long period of living in more liberal European surroundings has made her innocent of the nonsensical, unspoken rules of the society she has reentered, and incapable of maintaining the shallow facade of her female relatives. Newland feels a life of quiet misery lies ahead, and despairs over Olenska as they grow closer and closer, because he is forced, by his own realisation, to know how Ellen will be treated if she dares to divorce her husband, and advises against it, even though he is devoured by love for her.

Wharton mesmerises with the sheer depth of emotion, pain, and frustration bearing down on Newland's shoulders. Yet much of the romance seems to by symbolic. Both Newland and Countess Olenska represent something to the other. To Newland, Olenska represents a freedom from restraints and convention that is constantly bearing down on him and suffocationg his life of any meaning. To Olenska, Newland represents her idealised comforting fantasy of the chivalrous New Yorker. They cannot be together, not only because of societies condemnation, but because if they acted on their desires the spell that each had woven around the other would snap. This this romance becomes so much more important then merely a personal experience. It is emblematic of the changes of society and the inner conflict of our own ideals. 

It's as important as it is beautifully written. Wharton casts an eye over the New York society, both disdainful and affectionate. There are truly, as strange as it sounds, laugh out loud moments in this book. Where Wharton's razor sharp wit and brilliant command of the English languages cuts through human foibles in a highly amusing way.

Incorporating issues of female emancipation into the story, never has the idea of a woman enslaved by marriage and convention seemed so unattractive from a male perspective. Newland Archer is full of modernity and the call of new ideas, while is still often trapped in the same traditions and stuffy morality.

It's hard to read the ending of this book without feeling emotional, but the exact emotion may differ with your interpretation. Ambiguity reigns supreme as this novel finds its close and even the coldest of unromantics will surely have their hearts pulled along. One of my favourite tragic love affairs.

Age Rating 14+ Nothing out of the ordinary and the language is surprisingly accessible for the time period. 

Everything Under - Daisy Johnson

"The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer
by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.

One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it."

A truly haunting book. Something that sits with you for weeks after you have read it. 

Johnson creates a unique tale, channelling an ancient Greek tragedy, in a voice that is almost unbearable raw at times. Full of a strong symbolism, it is a novel that defies genres and labels. At the heart of the story is the relationship between mothers and daughters. A very particular, very difficult relationship, a bond that is unbreakable, a bond that, more often than not, goes horribly wrong, especially with a mother like Sarah. It is an exploration of a highly problematic childhood, a time of threat, of the moments when the roles of the mother and the child are reversed. The lack of clarity is central to the development of the story. Johnson's prose weaves and loops, hauntingly vague and allusive at times, and painfully and bluntly raw at others. Truly a writer to be watched. 

Told in 1st person through Gretel and in 3rd person through Marcus, words become jumbled, conveying cryptic messages that takes on all of the aspects of a non-disneyfied Grimm fairy-tale. As Sarah is struggling with dementia, there is an extreme confusion of words and intentions and communication is lacking. It is not accidental that Gretel is a lexicographer working on a dictionary and that she and her mother had invented a language of their own. There is also a focus on riddles, often without any provided answers and each character while being fully realised also feels recognisable to traditional fairy-tale tropes. I really enjoyed the representation of trans people, it just felt natural and unforced.

As someone who lives around Oxford it was wonderful to see my city being displayed with such wonderful literary aplomb and the creepiness only fitting the abandoned water pathways in autumn. 

Johnson weaves a tale that is impeccably rich. Piece after piece of the puzzle is discovered under layers of unspoken words and untold stories until you are slapped in the face with a plot twist that you where desperately hoping wasn't the case. We often say that one has to read a book in order to understand it. This phrase finds its true meaning in Everything Under. No one can explain the feelings it causes, you have to experience it to realise its impact. A difficult yet startlingly beautiful novel, easily the best book I have read in a while. Something I can see being studied in years to come. 

Age Rating 16+. Dark, uncomfortable and touches on mental illness, suicide, abuse, abandonment, murder, aging and incest. 

Killing Commendatore - Murakami Haruki

"In Killing Commendatore, a thirty-something portrait painter in
Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist’s home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art."

This is my second Murakami and I think I prefer this book to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. While still infused with Murakami's trademark surrealism and many similar metaphors and motifs, Killing Commendatore seemed more coherent. The plot was simpler and the message that Murakami was trying to convey was elegant and present. 

The painting elements were compelling and beautifully written. There's also a deep point about the life of ideas and how they travel to people and places, moving outside of time and how ideas have a life of their own outside their original thinker. 

However, I feel pretty conflicted. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading it until the final 100 pages or so turned into a slog. I genuinely love Murakami's focus on the mundane and the sense of ennui that it encourages in the reader. On the other, it's repetitive and minimalistic in a way that felt generationally out of touch.

The unnamed main character is in one of these classic Murakami in-between periods in his life, where everything has fallen apart but he's somehow fairly financially comfortable and has time to re-evaluate things. He gets involved with a questionably shady guy, and they start investigating some slowly unfolding mysteries.

That should be great, but the edge parts simply don't work. In particular, the main character has a lot of deeply uncomfortable conversations with a teenage girl about her breasts, conversations which continue on and off for about 400 pages. She's such a poorly imagined character that it seems like it's all she thinks about. Also pretty much every women we meet has their breasts sized up to the point where it is the first thing that we know about them. That's never been ok in these books and it's not ok now.

Murakami novels rely on the uncanny, on coincidence and strange encounters that seem normal but have an undercurrent of anxiety and oddness. The main reason I love them. Some of that was here in a watered down form. The problem is the novel is simply too big for the small amount of story it contained. It has the essence of his tropes but the prose is too weak and stretched to utilise them fully.

Age Rating 16+. Some weird sexual elements with the main character having many affairs and being mildly obsessed on his dead 10 year old sisters breasts. 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf - Marlon James

"Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a
nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all."

Defying the more Western belief in one definitive version of a story, this book is structured as an oral epic in which stories lead to more stories which lead to yet more, ultimately providing the reader with a conundrum of reliability: who tells the truth and whose story is being told? Marlon James chooses to leave that entirely up to the reader. There are many elusive layers of detail to sift through from the very beginning: a test of endurance, almost asking "do you really want to hear this story?"

And I found that my answers was...No, not really, thank you. 

This is a deeply disturbing book. 

First, my purely literary criticism. I don't mind having to sometimes work for a story. some of the best stories take patience to dissect deeper meanings. But what is really happening here is Marlon James hiding behind his fancy words and complicated sentences to distract the reader from the lack of substance and development. The rhetoric in this story is dense, convoluted, and bogged down with false promises of something worth reading. The prose is evasive and meandering, dragging the reader around and around in circles without an end in sight. The pacing is uneven and the whole experience one of crazy disorganisation. It reads like a dreamscape, full of portent and stark brutality. The writing is often staccato, list-like, with small, well-crafted sentences that are a perfect foil for Marlon James’ ability, showcasing his striking imagery and unusual connections. Well, I would like to think that this was a stylistic choice of James's to create a feeling of unreliability or a drug induced haze and the book wasn't just an disorganized mess. Yes, it’s beautiful at times, but, for me at least, emotionless.

Now onto the really disturbing part. The amount of lewdness in the book is obscene. I'm not easily deterred by things sexual in nature, even perverse stuff as sex and the way we use it can give us a huge amount of insight into the human psyche. Bring it on. But this is too extreme for me. A big neon flashing trigger warning is necessary for the following: rape, gang rape, paedophilia, bestiality, incest, mutilation of bodies, graphic murder, physical and emotional abuse, repetitious orgies, torture, constant misogyny in all the characters, etc. and none of it has any relevance to the plot or progression of the storyline. I understand that mythology doesn't shy away from such brutality, but there is a difference between being aware and having these events happen for a reason and just being down right offensive for shock value. This book is the latter. 

Characters have limited realism, some act as symbols, some merely a means of upping the violence levels still further. When read all at once, it’s an endless and eventually numbing litany of misery and horror that loses any meaning. Such a lack of humanity ensures there is nothing redeemable or relatable about this book. Had this been a story about a tracker and a shapeshifter finding love while in search of a missing boy, deeply rooted in African mythology and cultural folklore fantasy, I would have loved this to bits. The concept is phenomenally creative. but this book is nothing that it claims to be. Instead is showcases toxic relationship after another, a disturbingly misogynistic and awful main character (that I really hope doesn't mirror the author's own feelings towards women)  that has zero character growth and reduces queer men's relationships to nigh-  on bestial sex. 

I wouldn't recommend it but it was certainly an experience that brought something new. 

Age Rating 18+. Please believe me on this one. I am not being overly sensitive, just trust me.

The Wind - Up Bird Chronicles - Murakami Haruki

"In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his
wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force."

This is a thoroughly confusing book and very difficult to review as I feel a person's experience of this book will be highly subjective. It certainly is a book to be experienced and left a deep impression on me. The book is a lonely world full of half finished stories, abrupt departures, missed connections and deep silences. A highly atmospheric novel, which I feel is more the point of the book then the confusing and meandering plot. To immerse you in this world of confusion, existential dread and urban ennui. 

While Wind-Up Bird didn't employ traditional clichés, there is the constant introduction of psychic characters who simply "know" things because they were "supposed to know" became slightly trite. Also, while half the characters were functionally omniscient, the other half did things without knowing why, claiming they were compelled by some uncontrollable, unknowable urge or force that often leaves them empty or numb of all feeling (literally, this happens with half of the characters in the novel). This started to feel old and frustrating because of the lack of character motivation that leads to characterisation. 

Some people have also argued that this 600 page book is functionally meaningless. An author can get away with a lot if ultimately the theme or message of the novel is intact. Try as I might, I can't find a coherent message Murakami was trying to express through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami did include a character that thoughtfully reflects on war crimes in World War II, but this subplot was unfocused, and by the end of the novel this story within the story fizzles and suddenly ends without reaching a climax. 

However despite my rather harsh criticism, I actually enjoyed this novel. It danced on the edge of being surreal however I personally never felt that anything that had happen was completely unbelievable just really freaking weird. I think this book is a wonderful representation of the mental space that many mentally ill people can find themselves in. A strange mix of pain, common sense, confusion and loneliness. 

I would suggest if you do decide to give this book, just give up trying to understand it from the beginning. Nothing makes sense, and I think that is actually the whole point. It reminds me slightly of the existential surrealism of Camus or Kafka. 

Age Rating 17+ Sex, murder, war, cheating, rape, concentration camps, rather explicit torture scene. 

Girl - Edna O'Brian

"I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O'Brien's
harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood."

This was a disappointing book. One that I really wanted to learn from and was expecting to enjoy due to the large amount of critical attention that this book has garnered. I really need to stop trusting Literary awards. 

One struggle I was not expecting to have with this book was with O'Brien's prose, but that actually ended up being one of the main issues for me. Structurally it left a lot to be desired; every time a new character was introduced, Maryam's first-person narration would be interrupted, and we would switch to an italicized segment, also first-person, where the character would narrate their life story for several pages. It felt like the linguistic equivalent of flashbacks. 

This is a pretty petty way to say that I was baffled by how bad the prose was. While I do kind of see why she chose to switch between tenses (it does add to the feeling of a fractured state of mind her protagonist has), overall I found this choice clumsy and the writing lacking.

There's a lot more that didn't work for me: the pace of the first half of the novel hurtled by at breakneck speed as if it were running through a checklist of every horror imaginable, and the second half slowed to such a standstill that all potential momentum was lost. I felt absolutely emotionally numb and disconnected reading this, which is particularly noteworthy given how graphic it is (trigger warnings for everything imaginable apply). The exploration of trauma only ever felt surface-level; all I ever really learned about Maryam was about her identity as a mother.  The more I read the less I understood O'Brien's aims with this book. Thus I am left having reading about the worse of human experience, yet I didn't feel anything. I didn't learn anything new and I was never drawn into the story emotionally. Disappointing to say the least. 

Age Rating 18+. Rape, stoning, involuntary pregnancy, horrifying birthing scene, humiliation, exorcism and pretty much everything you can imagine.

Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood

"Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who
returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman—but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate." 

I loved this novel to bits, and it scared me way out of my comfort zone. It was one of the most intensely revealing reflections on childhood and its impact on grown-up life I have ever encountered, simply because the story is so common, and so universal, and so typical. The idea of confronting a childhood bully with one's memories is terrifying, especially as one can never trust the mind to behave as a grown-up when confronted with deeply hidden childhood fears and wishes. 

It touched on a deeply personal aspect of my life. The desperation of trying to understand culture and social realities. The complexity of relationships between women of nearly all ages is often a difficult thing to fully comprehend let alone commit to paper. Generally, we find it easier to communicate with men. While with other women you are forever grasping at straws, unable to determine which layer of superficiality you are dealing with and which of your layers of feigned cordiality or fabricated fellow feeling may win their favour. But Atwood, the mistress of the craft that she is, has brought the private, secretive world of female bonding's alive and demolished one of the greatest pop culture stereotypes ever - that of the mean girl. 

Elaine isn't a very likable character, she does terrible things and becomes a bully in her own right but you can't help but relate to her. She is such a viscerally real person that could be any one of us. She acts believably in every situation, even if it didn't shown her in the best light.  

But Atwood, in her typical style doesn't keep to one theme. While exploring the effects of bullying, Atwood also explores the themes of womanhood and the terrible ways the girls assert dominance and how this snide womanhood follows us into adulthood. This is an exceptional novel and one that I had a difficult time setting aside. The writing is razor-sharp. Based on what I’ve read so far, it seems Atwood doesn’t gravitate towards sentimentality. It works especially well here. There’s much more than what I’ve relayed in this review – you’ll find dry humor, thoughts on marriage, feminism, aging, as well as a child’s exploration of religion. This one, along with Alias Grace, is definitely a clear favourite.

Age Rating 15+. Sex, sexuality, bullying, Adult Topics. 

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russel

"Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a
precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer.

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood."

This book was difficult. Difficult to read, and even more difficult to determine how I felt at the end. 

How do you best write about a fictional love affair between a teacher and a 15-year-old student that is actually a predatory relationship? There are no easy answers to that question but that is what happens in My Dark Vanessa which alternates between 2000 and 2017 as we see how Vanessa Wye is groomed and then raped by her teacher Jacob Strane. We see the repercussions she must deal with as an adult who does not allow herself to realize that the relationship was, in fact abusive. We see how a child is forced to carry the responsibility the adults around her should have assumed themselves. The delicate and fraught nature of adolescence is captured well.

This book is definitely very, very well-written and the first half is well paced. There is a strong sense of place— the landscape, the sparseness. The prose is tight and careful, intimate and descriptive. The protagonist, Vanessa, is fully realized and the author does a good job of showing Vanessa’s struggle to face what she experienced. Her point of view and how it shifts over time is expertly managed and feels honest. You see how pernicious this kind of abuse is because it makes Vanessa doubt herself and lose herself and see herself, rather than the predator, as the problem. There is an interesting and relentlessly claustrophobic quality to the prose. You want to escape the quiet horror of Vanessa’s story while also wanting to see how it all ends, if she is going to be okay. You want there to be a freeing moment of clean air without knowing if you will get it.

There is some interesting cultural context developed through pop culture references, Lolita, and the #MeToo movement. I suspect we are going to see quite a few novels doing this over the next several years as writers try to distill into fiction what has been happening culturally with regard to sexual violence. There were ways the people in Vanessa’s life responded to her that were infuriating and inadequate and that is, all too often, how these things go.

The book does run too long. After about 250 pages, there is a thematic repetition that doesn’t serve the novel well. Vanessa bites her cheek constantly. It’s like, girl, is there anything left on the inside of your mouth??? Vanessa is fully realized but most of the other characters don’t get as much depth, though they really should. 

The real challenge I had with this book is that at times, the abuse felt romanticized, eroticized. It gave me pause. As a mature reader, the way the relationship is described is quietly horrifying. However I am unsure if a less mature reader would fully pick up on the horror. As the novel goes on there were so many rape scenes (and I will always call it rape because that’s what it was), that it just felt… somewhat gratuitous. And, I suspect, that’s kind of the point, that Vanessa, particularly at fifteen, was torn between love and repulsion, that she was shaped into someone who would see the situation as romantic while, with the distance as readers, we understand the situation as appalling. Strane is clearly a horrible piece of shit. Russell makes that crystal clear. But… I don’t know. Does she go far enough?

My Dark Vanessa is certainly not an easy book and I get why some readers have found it to be over the top regarding the descriptions of abuse that the main character faces. I don’t share that same opinion entirely, but there were moments when I questioned the sheer number of rape scenes that Kate Elizabeth Russell chose to include, and/or the gratuitous level of detail they held; because even without explicitly showing the brutal assaults on Vanessa’s autonomy, her “relationship” with Strane was awful and his paedophilia was always obvious to the reader, as was its effect on 15 y/o Vanessa.

Age Rating 18+. The highest rating I think I have ever given a book. This is certainly not appropriate for younger readers. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

"In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers."

This is my first Kundera book and I will definitely be reading more of his work. This book definitely, however, wins the award for Most Pretentious Title Ever. People would ask me what I was reading, and I would have to respond by reading the title in a sarcastic, Oxford-Professor-of-Literature voice to make it clear that I was aware of how obnoxiously superior I sounded.

As far as the philosophy of this book goes, it isn't dense and is fairly easy to comprehend. I thought the writing style actually presented its deeper thoughts in a very accessible and relatable manner. The sub textual messages and thought-provoking ideas were actually my favourite part of the book. Kundera has a strange style that feels like, instead of introducing you to a new concept, he is rather putting words to a feeling you have always felt. Or that was what it was like for me at least. 

What I didn't quite like was the surface level, such as the plot and characters. I honestly didn't enjoy any of the four main characters as people, but I could see that they where merely tools for Kundera to explore certain theme. Kundera even owns up to that fact within the book. I felt for each of the people as they felt so very human in the most highly caricatured way. The descriptions of the quiet despair and entrapment where incredibly moving. 

And we haven’t even touched on the sex yet. Kundera’s book is  rife with sex, sex is the other engine driving this dually powered writer, sex both passionate and routine, sex filled up with deep emotional meaning and sex stripped down to its tangible physicality, sex as recurring motif in one’s life illuminating greater insights into one’s personality and sex as secret door into the aesthetics of our time.

To write, as some have, that the book is primarily about erotic encounters is I think to miss the point. Instead it is a book about tyranny, the large and the small, the ones we endure and the ones we resist, the ones we submit to for love and the ones that always rankle silently. The tyranny of kitsch, as understood by the novel, kitsch to mean a subjective, sentimental folding screen that hides away the sight of death. The questions that the book seeks to explore circle around the ideas of polar opposites, truth and lies, love and hate (or indifference), freedom and slavery, heaviness and lightness. 

The Kundera style is a very delightful bit and piecework manner. We focus on one character, that character’s perceptions, that character’s perspectives, in little miniatures, some essay-like, that elaborate on the character’s psychology or history. Then we shift to another character and learn new things about that person, sometimes touching on the same pieces we’ve seen already.

Overall a wonderful, crazy and unique book. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, however I think worth reading. 

Age Rating 16+. Adult content. Sex, sexual encounters, death and military occupation. 

The Golem - Gustav Meyrink

"The Golem is a haunting Gothic tale of stolen identity and persecution, set in a strange underworld peopled by fantastical characters. The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.

Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...

The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle."

This book is easily the most disturbing, unsettlingly, nonsensical, confusing book I have read in a long time, maybe ever. It feels like an incredibly macabre adult version of Alice in Wonderland. You are dragged from nonsensical reality warping situation to the next, each infused with dark occult symbolism. 

Gustav Meyrink's unique infusion of Kabbalism, Freemasonry and the Wandering Jew mythos into the Golem legend can get murky at ti
mes, but in light of the author's own divided spiritual pursuits it makes sense that clarity remains elusive. As an early fictional reflection of this restless search for inner truth, it is disjointed, confusing and thoroughly disturbing. This novel is at times highly episodic in nature (it was originally published in serial form), alternately dwelling on various possible explanations for what is going on, while only tangentially maintaining contact with the overarching narrative. What is truth, imagined, dreamt or the result of madness is always unclear and I think purposefully so.  Though it comes full circle in a manner of speaking, it is still deliberately vague in its conclusion.

While the actual prose and lyrical descriptions are truly wonderful and haunting in the best way possible, I found the actual content of the book too disturbing to enjoy. It is a relatively short book but I found it a slog to get through as you never really understand what is going on. The characters while all so very promising, such as Rosina, Miriam, and the silhouette artist, are never fleshed out and are reduced to boring paper cut-outs. While I can see that Meyrink is trying to make a point in this book, his use of occult symbolism and narrative structure is too abstract to get his themes across with any poignancy. 

Age Rating 16+. Thoroughly disturbing atmosphere with some sexual illusions.

The Birds Have Also Gone - Yaşar Kemal

"There is an ancient Turkish tradition that promises the person who

frees a small bird a place in paradise. Three boys set up a business of catching birds to enable people to free them, but city people are now sceptical and tragedy lies in wait for the boys."

Only about 150 pages, this was a short but impactful read. The second of my books set in Istanbul, it gave a brilliant yet ephemeral look into the culture. The writing style and descriptive passages are stunning, even if some of the content was brutal and thought provoking. I was disturbed by the tradition of freeing birds, captured for only this reason, that would then be released by a well meaning if deluded person only to be caught again. Trapped in this horrible cycle of capture and release.  

The characters of the boys are equally as unpin down-able as the rest of the story. They are, like many others in the book, disturbed by the fact people no longer want to buy the birds and partake. They take this failing to signify the moral failings of the modern Istanbul and the lack of faith in it's people. They also seem to feel pity for the many tiny beautiful birds they stuff into cages far to small for them, killing many birds everyday. Whether this pity is real or just a selling tactic though is truly hard to make out. The boys don't seem to understand how horrible their actions are, and put all of the blame for the birds captures and deaths at the door of the people who won't buy the birds freedom. 

This was my first Kemal and it did not disappoint. The book is so many things in one: a celebration of a great city, half reality and more than half myth; a lament for passing traditions and a disappearing way of life; a bewildered exclamation against the ravages of modernity, which has brought in its wake so much grief to so many. 

Above all else, this is an environmental story, and the author marvels at the gifts of nature so prodigiously showered on the Bosphorus, so cruelly treated by ambivalent and blinkered custom. The ending is truly shocking - but could it really have been any other way?

Age Rating 14+. Deeply moving, quite shocking and sad. 

The Cellist Of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway

"This brilliant novel with universal resonance, set during the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo, tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.

One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.

In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress."

The futility and horror of war are felt most acutely and despairingly when the young, the helpless and the innocent, bear the ultimate price. At 4 pm on 26th May 1992, in a war-torn Sarajevo marketplace, a mortar bomb killed 22 people, mostly women, as they queued for bread. In homage to each of those lost souls and in protest against the violence and conflict, an unknown Cellist enters the square at 4 pm each day afterwards for 22 days, to play his cello. He is completely isolated, vulnerable and a high priced target for the attacking snipers.

The narration is told through the eyes of 3 characters as they each navigate the shelled-out city at risk of losing their lives. One is an elderly baker travelling across the city to work and make sure he has bread for his family. Another is a man making the daily routine of fetching fresh water from the brewery. The third character is a female sniper watching and protecting the Cellist from the surrounding buildings of rubble.

A quietly stunning and thoroughly haunting book. The prose is sparse and contains a quiet tension and dread. The character's humanity and quite horror but acceptance are all communicated artfully. Truly wonderful prose. 

The author shows the impact of war on ordinary citizens (as opposed to soldiers), and the role of art in maintaining a sense of hope. This novel is not about the war itself, how it started, or any of the ethnic groups involved. It is about how people struggle to retain their humanity in the midst of death, destruction, and chaos. The author paints a vivid picture of what it would be like to live in a war zone, the drastic changes in the way people interact with each other, and the emotional harm inflicted by living with the threat of imminent death. But the book never becomes preachy or overblown, slips into the bombastic or overtly sentimental. It keeps it's sparse prose and characterisation. 

I must quickly mention that I did find Arrows character a little unbelievable and whenever she appeared she pulled me out the the story a little. Why is she such a good sniper?Why was she learning to shot in the "normal world"? Why is she allowed so much freedom to pick and choose her missions in a time full of strict martial hierarchy? 

Overall a haunting book well worth a read. It certainly sparked an interest in me about the conflict, that I shamefully knew woefully little about. 

Age Rating 15 +. Some realistic description of violence, aftermath of shootings and mortar blasts. 

The Seed Collectors - Scarlett Thomas

"Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander’s role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can’t stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.

A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire, and family trees."

A deeply unusual and unexpected book. This offbeat novel about obsession, sex and inheritance is set in Kent in 2011 and stars an extended family of botanists. The concept of a family tree has a more than usually literal meaning here given the shared surname is Gardener and most members are named after plants. We have Great-Aunt Oleander, recently deceased; cousin Bryony and her children Holly and Ash; siblings Charlie and Clem (short for Clematis); and half-sister Fleur, who has taken over Oleander’s yoga centre, Namaste House. The generation in between was virtually lost, perhaps to a plant-based drug overdose, on a seed collecting expedition to the South Pacific. Oleander has left each motherless child one of these possibly deadly seed pods.

First, did I mention the book is saturated with sex? Incest, adultery, illegitimate children, S&M, Internet porn, you name it. But beyond that, the metaphorical language is highly sexualized – bursting with seeds, fertility and genital-like plants. I can’t think when I’ve encountered such oversexed vocabulary. It was unexpected and raw and quite shocking. 

I found the plot very loose. I would say it is my main disappointment. Nothing was really achieved or resolved. There was no momentum or push.  Not all the story lines are truly essential, so the book seems aimless for its final third as it doesn't really know what to do with itself. It definitely could have been shorter and tied together better, perhaps with some flashbacks to the previous generation’s experiences on the island to make the past feel more alive. The spiritual element also remains incredibly vague and a tad shoehorned in, I am still unsure if they where high, crazy or experiencing reality. Although it was a pleasant touch of magic realism along the way in the midst of the raw and brutal character studies. 

Finally on to the characters. They really are the driving point of this book, it really does feel like a long character study. Unfortunately all of these characters are complete unlikable for a variety of different reasons. They are obsessive, cold, angry, stupid, apathetic but all the time so uncomfortably real. I have read some reviews of people commenting that the characters are unrealistic and unlike anybody they know, well then I really envy you. Sure the characters could be said to be boiled down to their key traits but as someone from a large and highly dysfunctional family, the characters and their mannerisms where all too recognisable. 

Despite these reservations, I truly enjoyed Thomas’s unusual writing. She moves freely between characters’ perspectives but also inserts odd second-person asides asking philosophical questions about wasted time and what is truly important in life. I like the range of questions you’re left with as a reader: Is nature malicious? Can we overcome our addictions? How much of who we are is down to our parentage? Does life really just come down to sex? 

Age Rating 15+. Large amounts of sex, drugs, mental illness, alcohol addiction, realistic family dysfunction, abuse and suicide.