I should probably stop underestimating westerns. I read ‘No Country For Old Men’ a few months ago and really liked it. I went to see ‘True Grit’ at the cinema last year on a friend’s recommendation and really liked it. This week, I have been reading ‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick DeWitt having only picked it up on the basis of its Man Booker Prize nomination… and also really liked it. Something tells me that I might not be as indifferent to westerns as I thought I was. Continue reading
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The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Apologies for lack of posts this week but at the beginning of the month it was looking as though my blog word count was in danger of overtaking my coursework word count and as much as I like blogging I do kind of need a degree… So this week, in between revising for my first exam on Wednesday, I have read ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark – a short, witty novel about betrayal and shattering illusions. Set mostly in Edinburgh in the 1930s, the crème de la crème of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls are taken under the wing of eccentric Scottish schoolmistress Miss Jean Brodie whose influence on her impressionable pupils has huge consequences on all of their lives. The plot is almost as unconventional as the characters and the structural complexity of the novel is extremely subtle making the reader feel almost as manipulated by Miss Brodie’s glamorously eccentric ways as her pupils are. Spark’s method of revealing what happened to each of the Brodie Set before and after the betrayal is also very effective and shuttles backwards and forwards over time effortlessly. Her dry wit is perfectly weaved into her deceptively simple style of writing with its sinister undertones.
Is Miss Jean Brodie truly evil or just an egoist? Either way, she is certainly an immortal creation and the book remains in its prime some five decades after its first publication.
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’ These are the words Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother said to her when she left home at the age of sixteen after falling in love with another woman. Her memoirs mostly recount her childhood growing up in working-class Accrington living with her adoptive Pentecostal parents and her later search for her birth parents. I used to think that no autobiography could be more bleak than Frank McCourt’s account of growing up in poverty in ‘Angela’s Ashes’ but Winterson’s description of her fearsome adoptive mother was particularly harrowing. To say her childhood was appalling is probably an understatement and yet she poignantly reflects on love and life without succumbing to self-indulgence. Her search for her birth mother is very moving and you will feel her frustration at the bureaucracy process coming off the page. Continue reading
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Room by Emma Donoghue
‘Room’ tells the harrowing story of Ma, kidnapped seven years ago by captor Old Nick and her five year old son Jack who are imprisoned in a single room. Partially inspired by Josef Fritzl’s incarceration of his daughter, there are no real surprises to the plot of this novel if you are familiar with the background of this case. But whereas the hysterical media coverage of such crimes often focuses as much if not more on the abusers than the abused, Donoghue has wisely chosen to focus on the story of Ma and Jack rather than Old Nick who only makes brief appearances throughout.
For Ma, Room is a prison where she has been abused and raped. But for Jack, Room is home and he knows nothing else. It is his struggle to deal with the alien concept of Outside that is the most affecting aspect of the book. As well as writing very convincingly on this subject, Donoghue is also excellent at building suspense and evoking the claustrophobia of solitary confinement. Continue reading
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The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Being British, I know virtually nothing about baseball. What I do know, I learnt from Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip, meaning that in fact, I probably know even less than I think I do about what is probably the most American of sports. Happily, as far as I can tell, this did not really hinder my enjoyment of ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach. It does feature a lot of baseball especially in the first few chapters and some other passages which I admit were kind of lost on me. But the book as a whole is more about relationships which is something anyone can identify with (baseball fan or not) and the college experience which most people can identify with (American or not). Continue reading
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
It’s just as well that I don’t judge books by their covers because let’s face it, this cover of the hardback English language version of Michel Houellebecq’s ‘The Map and the Territory’ is pretty bad. Happily, the contents are more rewarding as the enfant terrible of modern French literature has produced his most innovative work yet. Perhaps more subtly provocative than his previous novels, ‘The Map and the Territory’ follows the story of Jed Martin, a French artist who discovers fame by taking photographs of Michelin maps and completing a series of portraits of people and their professions whilst dealing with personal crises such as his father’s illness. Houellebecq includes himself as a fictional character in the book working on the text of Martin’s exhibition guide and his comical self-caricature is one of the most amusing aspects of the novel. Continue reading
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