1stBookReview.com

Books We Will Be Reading In The Coming Months

2009-07-03T15:54:00.002+02:00

Dear Ladies of the UNWG Book Club,

Here is a list of books we will be reading in the coming months:

Friday, 25th September 2009
Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

October 2009
That Summer In Paris by Abha Dawesar.

November 2009
There will be no Book Club meeting due to the UN Bazaar.

December 2009
The Island by Victoria Hislop

2009-07-03T15:46:00.004+02:00

Dear Ladies,

Our first Book Club meeting of the season will take place, exceptionally, in the Thai restaurant:

The White Elephant

where we will be discussing our book of the month, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel that tackles many interesting subjects, historical, cultural, love, endurance and loyalty. The story is centered around the twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, along with their family with the 1960s civil war in Nigeria as a background.

Date: Friday, 25 September 2009

Time: 12 noon

Place:
The White Elephant Restaurant,
4, rue du lièvre,
1227 Les Acacias, Geneva.

For further information, please contact

The Agüero Sisters By Cristina Garcia

2009-06-09T05:30:00.010+02:00

Cristina Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba in 1958. After Fidel Castro came to power in the early sixties, she moved with her parents to New York and following an early Catholic education, she obtained a bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1979 at Barnard College, at Columbia University. She later entered the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and in 1981 obtained a master's degree in International Relations.

In the early eighties, Garcia worked for several publications: the Boston Globe for a short time, then United Press International, The Knoxville Journal in Tennessee and The New York Times. She was a correspondent at Time magazine in New York city in 1983 and also worked in San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles.

In 1990 Cristina Garcia decided to devote her time to writing fiction in order to highlight the life of Cuban immigrants in the United States. In 1984 she travelled to Cuba to meet her relatives for the first time and five years later her trip provided her with the incentive to start writing her first book, Dreaming in Cuban, published in 1992, followed by The Agüero Sisters published in 1997 and Monkey Hunting in 2003.

Cristina Garcia has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and the recipient of a Whiting writer's award. In 1990 Garcia married Scott Brown, with whom she had a daughter, Pilar born in 1992. Garcia now lives with her daughter in Santa Monica.

The novel of The Agüero Sisters is made up of several family stories (with multiple narrators) interlaced with each other in the past and the present. It's the rich complex story of Constancia and Reina Agüero, the two very different sisters, who were separated for thirty years.

Reina is forty eight years old, tall, dark and beautiful, liberated and a skilled master electrician,who supported the revolution and therefore remained in Havana. While her sister is the fifty one year-old Constancia, the pale, petite and conservative wife and business woman who immigrated with her husband to the United States after the Cuban revolution and adopted her new country's culture.

What they both have in common is the intriguing, haunting and mysterious death of their mother and father, who both died many years ago, but whose memory still lives vividly with them after leaving them to inherit half truths, secrets and lies.

The author describes the Cuban landscape in detail, but not much detail is provided about Cuba before and after Fidel Castro took power. The novel mainly relates the lives of Cuban-Americans and the mysteries and myths that they carry with them and the beautiful American dream. There is also the uneasy relationship between children and parents and the hard-to-resolve question of identity.

Cristina Garcia is interested in emotional inheritance "and how those get played out subjectively in different times and places." She said the beauty of being a novelist is that you can explore your obsessions at length.

Despite the jumps back and forth in time, the prologue gives us the main theme of the novel.

Although Garcia has an elegant style of writing and a fine description of characters, her plot is incomplete. She never reveals why Ignacio kills Blanca and two years later commits suicide. Nor has the author explained the reasons for Blanca's disappearance and returning to her husband and child, heavily pregnant by another man, who remains anonymous throughout the book. The characters of Constancia and Reina's daughters are neither fully developed nor do they contribute much to the story.

Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable, colourful book to read.

So Many Ways to Begin By Jon McGregor

2009-04-27T21:01:00.005+02:00

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976 while his father was appointed as a vicar there. The third of four siblings, he spent his childhood in Norwich,Thetford in Norfolk, England, where he later joined Bradford University to study Media Technology and Production.

He started writing during his final year at university. He had a short fiction published by Granta magazine, and a short story : While You Where Sleeping, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He now lives in Nottingham with his wife.

Jon McGregor has to date written two novels: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things published in 2002 which won several awards and So Many Ways to Begin, published in 2006 and which took Jon McGregor three years to write and was short listed for the Encore Award in 2007 and long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

So Many Ways to Begin has an uncomplicated, slow-paced plot of an uneventful story of love, disappointments, frustrations, resentment and family secrets. A sad story where “chances” play a big part. The author recognises and celebrates the triumph of love over the hardship that life brings; it's emphasized by the undying and intact love of David Carter for his adopted mother, Dorothy and to his wife Eleanor.

David Carter, a museum curator, dreams of one day having his own museum and leading a happy and peaceful life with the girl he loves and marries. But he ends up having his dreams and his wife's dreams slowly suppressed and shuttered in the commotions of everyday life.

His wife, not being able to continue her studies to become a geologist, often succumbs to debilitating bouts of depression and he will never own a museum, or even succeed in keeping his job as a curator in the Coventry museum and ends up without even achieving a career.

His life will take a different turn when he finds out, inadvertently, in his early twenties, that he was an adopted child. His hunt for the truth and the search for his biological mother will begin without success. But he doesn't give up, and when he reaches his fifties he goes on another journey of self-discovery by working out all the missing pieces of the past to unravel his roots and in order to find his own identity and with it his own salvation. As he was never able to come to terms with the ship replica in the museum, he could never accept nor live with a false identity.

The novel, set mainly in Coventry, England, covers three generations of the Carter family by going back and forth through several decades, from the first world war to the present time.
Each chapter is headed by various mundane artefacts description, like in a museum catalogue, in an attempt to try and uncover the secret behind them and to underline the strong feeling of attraction, of the main character, to debris and discovered old objects.

The author also wanted to prompt the reader to make the connections about, where does the object come from? How did David get hold of it? And what further narrative information does it bring? The characters, although somewhat distant, are described in a touching, moving and human like way, with their different emotions and their everyday trials.

In So Many Ways to Begin, the author mentions the different, unexpected things that can change one's life, like : “chance meetings, over-heard conversations... history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record... But what he had would be a start, he thought, a way to begin.”

In an interview with Jon McGregor, he was asked, what is So Many Ways to Begin about? His answer was : “It's the story of a marriage; it's the story of two people trying to make a life together, and the way their own families and histories impact upon this life. It's also about museums, identity, story-telling, and the difficulty of starting again”.

The Blood of Flowers By Anita Amirrezvani

2009-03-27T18:53:00.009+01:00

Anita Amirrezvani was born in Teheran, Iran in 1961 and raised in San Francisco by her mother, after her parents separated when she was two years old. She began going back to Teheran at the age of 13, several times afterwards, to spend time with her father and her Iranian family. During the nine years spent writing her first novel, The Blood of Flowers, she visited Isfahan three times to study the settings described in her novel on location.

She read many books about 17th century Iran under the reign of Shah Abbas and also spent time informing herself about art during this period; like paintings, architecture, textiles and the art and techniques of carpet making.

Amirrezvani worked as an art journalist and a dance critic in San Francisco for ten years.

The Blood of Flowers was published in 2007. It was short-listed for the 2008 Boeke Prize and long-listed for the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction.

The Blood of Flowers, set in 1620 Isfahan, is a tale of endurance that led to success. Each detail in the novel is meticulously described. The colours are vivid, the flavours are mouth-watering and the fragrances are powerful as much as the emotions.

In order to enhance her fairy tale, the author has chosen an exotic background for her story about the craftsmanship of carpet making, promoted by Shah Abbas the Great, as a fine art. Like Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, it's a detailed description about how miniature drawing in the late sixteen century Turkey under the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III was also a very refined art.

Amirrezvani and Pamuk have both chosen the colour "red" to describe on one side, the colour used by the artists to enhance their work - the blood of flowers - that is used for dying the wool, and on the other side to describe the colour of blood. In Amirrezvani's case it refers to the precious virginity while in Pamuk's case it refers to the human incessant bloodshed.

Amirrezvani reveals in her novel that she is clearly influenced by folk tales, an old Iranian tradition. The seven tales woven into the main story, is a homage to the traditional folk storytellers throughout the ages. Another tribute in the novel is given to the anonymous carpet artisans, who will always remain unknown and whose beautiful work has survived many centuries and who are portrayed by the unnamed narrator.

The story is about a painful striving of an innocent immature, ambitious, strong-headed young girl through her journey to the harsh world of adulthood and through her many attempts and her final victory. She is faced with a dilemma; either to forsake her dignity and lead a degrading life of servitude, under her weak-willed uncle's and his wicked authoritarian wife's roof, or take the big risk of fighting for a better independent tomorrow, for herself and her mother.

The narrator discovers that a very thin thread exists between the strong will, love and happiness. She is portrayed as an early determined, strong-headed feminist, quite precocious for her time, despite the male dominated society she lives in.

With time and experience the narrator begins to understand her own worth and refuses to live with her "temporary husband" Fereydoon. It's an unsettled life where she has to keep his interest by being constantly inventive during their night frolics in order for him to keep renewing their marriage contract - called the "Sigheh" - every three months. The explicit sex passages described in detail by the author are unnecessary to the plot.

Instead of being like the submissive Sheherazad in the tale of One Thousand and One Nights and her endeavour to keep the king's keen interest in her tales in order to escape her death sentence, the narrator chooses instead to face poverty and starvation, in the hope of reaching her target by becoming one of the finest carpet makers of her time.

The description of the beautiful, painstakingly crafted carpets produced by the narrator and her women artisans, contrasts with their own abject poverty and suffering.

A good and rich insight of the old Iranian history and culture. Skillfully written with many themes that are still valid in today's world.

Upcoming Books For UNWG Book Club

2009-03-04T09:36:00.006+01:00

Dear Ladies,

Here are the next two books we will be discussing:

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
on Friday, 27 March 2009.

So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor
on Friday, 24 April 2009.

Thanks,
Chouhrette

Mothers and Sons By Colm Toibin

2009-03-04T09:19:00.002+01:00

Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in the South East of Ireland in 1955. His father who was a school teacher and a local historian, died when Toibin was twelve years old.

Colm Toibin is the second youngest of five children. He went to St Peter's college in Wexford and later studied English and History at University College in Dublin. After graduating he left Ireland and taught English for four years in the Dublin School of English in Barcelona (Spain).

He went back to Ireland in 1979 and worked as a journalist at In Dublin, then at Magill magazine followed by the Sunday Independent in Dublin, was a contributor to Esquire, the London Review of Books, New Statsmen, The Times Literary Supplement and the Irish Review.

He has been visiting professor at Stanford University and The University of Texas in Austin. He also lectured at other universities, including Boston College and New York University. Colm Toibin lives and works in Dublin. He is one Ireland's leading contemporary writers.

Toibin won several awards. He is the author of number of fiction and non-fiction works.
Fiction:
The South, 1990
The Heather Blazing, 1992
The Story of The Night, 1996
The Blackwater Lightship, 1999
The Master, 2004
Mothers and Sons, 2006.

He has also written ten non-fiction books and a play staged in Dublin in 2004 called: Beauty in a Broken Place.

Mothers and Sons is Toibin's first collection of short stories. Three long stories and six short ones of which, eight stories are set in contemporary Ireland and the last one in a village in the Pyrenees in provincial Spain.

In his book the author describes the relationships forged between mothers and sons in their adulthood; the very fine unseen tie woven between them,their lack of communication and understanding with what it entails of heartbreak and sadness, despair, loneliness and sometime guilt. The author also tackles the problem of how to deal with one's losses of a dear one.

Toibin succeeds in conveying with great sensitivity and melancholy, the psychology that shapes, each time differently, mother to son or son to mother. Whether the son is a professional thief, or faced with his estranged mother, or a paedophile priest, or sad over his mother's death, or suffering from depression, or looking for her under the snow.

The nine stories, despite the book title which infers love and warmth, are all gloomy, unhappy and devoid of the cosy feeling that could be expected between mothers and sons. Instead there is the deep pain inflicted by sons on their mothers and the consequences of mothers' behaviour on their sons, which combined with the harsh reality of life that each side is faced with, helps to create an isolation between the two sides.

Toibin's choice of short stories, lack of landscape description, or any usage of flowery prose for this delicate subject is deliberate and most suitable. His way to make the readers feel the pain of the character, by keeping the intensity of the feeling which could have been easily lost in a long story.

Toibin's description of endurance, separation and longing with such depth, shows a keen understanding of the complex human psychology and its frailty, which is movingly haunting and thought provoking.

The author didn't impose himself as a moralist, in fact the reader is not sure who is the unscrupulous and who is the sympathetic character because of the palpable but unspoken emotions. All the stories are left without a classical ending intentionally. Toibin wanted to withhold the conclusion in order to confront his readers with a conflict,dramatise it and leave it at that.

Mothers and Sons is melancholic like all other Toibin's novels. The answer of the author to that, is in one of his interviews, he says : "When I started out writing I would have considered myself to be quite happy. I'm not a sad boy, but the books are full of terrible melancholy. I've learned about it from writing the books. If I had known all this about myself before I started, I probably would have gone into serious therapy instead of writing."

Toibin's style of writing is pure and neat without being cold. Mothers and Sons continues to collect international acclaim.

The Miniaturist By Kunal Basu

2009-02-01T19:44:00.003+01:00

Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta, India in 1956 to middle class communist parents, a publisher father, Sunil Kumar, and an author and actress mother, Chabi Basu. He studied in South Point High School in Calcutta and graduated in 1978 in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University in India.

With his doctorate in hand, he taught at McGill University in Montreal in Canada from 1986 to 1999 and since 1999 he has been a professor of marketing and management studies at Oxford University in England. He was married in 1982 , has a daughter, and still lives in England.

Kunal Basu's three acclaimed novels are: The Opium Clerk published in 2001, The Miniaturist published in 2003, and Racist published in 2006.

His most recent book, The Japanese Wife published in 2008, is a collection of short stories.

Kunal Basu, through his historical, enthralling fiction and minutely described tale, The Miniaturist, carries his readers into the exotic world of 16th century India at the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, who reigned from 1460 to 1535, and the prodigy painter Bihzad.

It's a sumptuous tale, similar to the One Thousand and One Nights, full of harems, eunuchs, slaves, servants, luxurious palaces, kings, courtiers, love, jealousies and intrigues.

In The Miniaturist, like My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, the reader is transported to the same era, its artistic ground and its culture, which was no doubt one of the most advanced world wide for centuries, since it yielded the most sumptuous miniature paintings in the history of art.

The main figure in this vividly portrayed tale is Bihzad the Persian, the most gifted and talented artist of his time. The story follows Bihzad from his childhood to an advanced age. The Khwaja, Bihzad's father, brought him up as a recluse. Deprived from any education or social life which could have a corrupting influence on his art, he had to remain pure. Unfortunately, Bihzad like all geniuses is tormented; he questions himself about the true value of art and of artists. He rebels by refusing to follow in his father's footsteps and becomes a courtier and to be like other artists a copier, his renunciation of life is most moving. Bihzad believed that a true artist must set his creative spirit free.

He wanders aimlessly on a journey of self repudiation and in the midst of his suffering the voice of his wife Zohra, the daughter of the Hazari ruler, resonates in his ears: “Your gift is your curse. Your defect. It'll make you suffer. Even if you wanted to escape, it wouldn't spare you. It'll cripple you, even if you flee, it will seek its revenge”.

He inflicts on himself blindness by tying his eyes firmly in order not to relapse and paint again before he could achieve the fundamental vision that he seeks. He leads a life of a beggar, suffering and enduring in order to purge himself in the hope of reaching the Nirvana and to be at peace with the world and within himself.

The liberation comes at the end when he meets the emperor Akbar on his deathbed. Now the penniless beggar, Bihzad the wanderer, seems to have reached his destination, at last. Akbar has forgiven him and called him not an artist but a saint, because “only a saint is truly blind, seeing none but the God inside him”. Now he can unfold his eyes and draw again for posterity his beloved Akbar dying, to fulfil his emperor's request and “turn into an artist for the last time.”

Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith

2008-12-24T12:57:00.001+01:00

Alexander McCall Smith was born to a Scottish family in Bulawayo in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in 1948, the youngest of four children. His father worked in Rhodesia as a public prosecutor, in what was then a British colony. His mother wrote a number of unpublished manuscripts. After finishing school in Rhodesia, McCall Smith moved to Scotland to study Law at Edinburgh University.

After graduating, he worked as a professor in Scotland,then returned to Botswana to teach law at the University that he managed to create.

Alexander McCall Smith is an expert on genetics, he held roles in a number of national and international Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. He retired as a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University in 2005 due to his belated success as a writer. His other commitments could not be pursued because he preferred to dedicate his time to writing books and playing bassoon in an amateur orchestra that he co-founded in 1995, called “The Really Terrible Orchestra”. He currently lives in Edinburgh with Dr. Elisabeth Parry whom he married in 1982 and their two daughters.

McCall Smith twice received the Booker Prize for The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency in 1998 and in 2004 he was named “Author of the Year” by the Booksellers Association and British Book Awards. In 2006 he was appointed a CBE -Commander of the Order of the British Empire- for services to literature and was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Law in Edinburgh in 2007.

Alexander McCall Smith is a prolific and diverse writer; he produced an abundant and varied number of books ranging from children tales to picture books to legal text books to novels. But he became internationally known through his Botswana detective series first published in1998. The series in English sold millions of copies round the world and was translated into many languages. It was made into a television series and broadcast on BBC1 in 2008.

Tears of the Giraffe published in 2000 is the second Botswana detective story taken from the author's Botswana series of nine novels. The first was The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Then followed Morality of Beautiful Girls in 2001, The Kalahari Typing School for Men 2001, The Full Cupboard of Life 2003, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies 2004, Blue Shoes and Happiness 2006, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive 2007, The Miracle of Speedy Motors 2008.

McCall Smith was born and raised in Africa, which helped him in his writing to successfully convey the essence of the African landscape, culture and society in its real day-to-day life and in all its complexity especially between the old and the new traditions and values. He doesn't omit to describe, through his well developed and uncomplicated characters, the genuine Botswanan's sense of courtesy and dignity which impressed him when he lived there and which stand out more in his books than the detective stories.

His style of writing is clear, passionate, charming and warm hearted which make his novels very popular even in Botswana where people liked the way the author portrayed their world. That is because they probably felt that, despite being a foreigner, he understood deeply the Botswanan's nature.

Precious Ramotswe reminiscent of Agatha Christie's miss Marple, is the star of the series, she owns the first female private detective agency in Botswana and probably in the whole of Africa. She deals with problems related to human lives more than serious crimes. An American mother who missed her son in a commune on the outskirts of the Kalahari desert ten years ago, seeks out Mma Ramotswe's help to discover how and why her son died.

Mma Ramotswe, being kind and having lost a child in the past, accepts the sterile case out of compassion. The second case, a butcher who wants to know if his wife is cheating on him. The detective gives the simple case to her, now promoted secretary to the job of assistant, to investigate. Makutsi discovers that the wife has been cheating on her husband and that their son is not his. The moral issue arises: is it not better to protect an adulterer wife to avoid greater damage to the son's future? There follows the debate between Mma Ramotswe and Makutsi over a cup of bush tea, about doing wrong in order to attain the right outcome.

Precious Ramotswe was not trained for detective work, yet she is successful because she relies mainly on her accurate intuition, her intelligence and wisdom and also on her valuable Principles of Private Detection manual. She is an old fashioned lady with old fashioned principles, just like the two other main, endearing characters in the book, her kind fiancé Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, the master mechanic of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and her trustworthy secretary/assistant Mma Makutsi.

The deep and detailed description of the main characters reveals a very positive portrait of the Botswanan people. They are hospitable, compassionate and value genuine love, taking their commitments seriously.

The author reveals to the readers at the end of the novel the meaning of its poetic title, when Ramotswe solves the mystery of the dead American son and offers the mother a traditional Botswana basket, woven with the giraffes' tears; the only present a giraffe can offer.

In one of his interviews Smith admits that when he wrote the first book of the series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, he became so fond of the character of Precious Ramotswe that he could not let her go.

An Old-Fashioned Arrangement by Susie Vereker

2008-10-24T20:05:00.005+02:00

Susie Vereker, daughter of an army officer, was born in the Lake District in northern England. She spent a great deal of her life travelling, first with her parents and later with her diplomat husband. She was in Germany, Thailand, Australia, Greece, Switzerland and France, and spent much of her life trying to adapt to the countries and their traditions.

She became a widow in 2001 after a long and happy marriage, has three sons, and now lives in a small Hampshire village in the south of England. Susie Vereker was nominated for the RNA Foster Grant Award 2006, for her novel Pond Lane and Paris.

Susie Vereker has written three books to date:
Pond Lane and Paris published in 2005.
An Old-Fashioned Arrangement published in 2006.
Paris Imperfect will be published in December 2008.

An Old-Fashioned Arrangement, like the Pilot's wife by Anita Shreve, commences with a wife who receives the visit of her husband's office colleagues, at home early one morning. They announce his death in a plane crash in the Indonesian jungle, while on a business trip. Bewildered and under the shock, Kim, the charismatic and life-like main character, tries to gather all her strength in order to sort things out for the sake of her 11-year old son, James. Like Kathryn did the best she could to protect her 16-year old daughter Mattie in The Pilot's Wife.

But unlike The Pilot's Wife, the atmosphere in the Old-Fashioned Arrangement is less gloomy, less cold and oppressive. The story takes place in beautiful, peaceful and wealthy Geneva, which contrasts with the state of destitution that English expatriate Kim finds herself thrown into after her husband's sudden, unexpected death. She is penniless, she has been following her unreliable, egoistic husband, Richard, round the world without any pension or cover scheme, even the money in their bank account has been withdrawn by him.

She will now have to leave the comfortable house in the privileged Genevan suburb, Cologny, within a month, without knowing where to go. Her Swiss neighbour and landlord, Henri, who always silently fancied her, besides liking her son James, proposed “An Old- Fashioned Arrangement” to her. “The arrangement” was meant to help Kim solve her financial problems and lead a care free life without uprooting her young son.

Kim is in her forties and Henri is a refined old gentleman who loves women. For her to become his mistress is against her ethics. She goes through a dilemma before accepting the proposal, but finally, having no family, hardly any friends and no home base due to her nomadic life, Kim sees no other choice but to follow her female instinct and succumbs to the offer. She accepts the deal for the security of herself and her son and not out of love.

But she will end up loving and caring for her guardian angel, Henri, to the extent of refusing the advances of Mark, the handsome English diplomat she happened to meet after her relationship with Henri. But after Henri dies, Kim who now knows the taste of freedom, will take more care before accepting to marry Mark. She will want to know him better before tying her life to his. Age and experience have taught Kim to be wiser, rational and less emotional.

Kim didn't love her husband, Richard. She was even thinking of a divorce and his death would have been a relief if it wasn't for the lack of money to survive. All these years she depended on her husband and now she will learn,at last,what it feels like to be emancipated.

The characters in the novel are very realistic, humane and well portrayed, any woman in the world can identify with Kim's big problem, which makes it difficult for readers not to feel involved, especially with the author's endearing and humoristic style of writing.

Although lighthearted, this novel treats a serious issue and has several unexpected suspense elements, in combination with a few twists, which makes it difficult to put down.

"My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk

2008-09-27T10:46:00.007+02:00

Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul into a large, prosperous middle-class family, of civil engineer builders of railroads and factories from grandfather to father and uncle. He attended the American Robert College prep school in Istanbul and studied architecture at the Istanbul Technical University, which he left after three years, and instead graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976. He decided to become a full-time writer, but especially a novelist.

Pamuk lived to see the change in Turkey from the conservative Ottoman traditions, giving way to western lifestyle; an East vs West theme that occurs often in his books. In 1982 Pamuk married Aylin Turegen, a historian, and a daughter, Rüya, was born in 1991,to whom he dedicated My Name is Red. Aylin and Pamuk were divorced in 2001.

In 2005 a criminal case was opened against Pamuk, for “insulting Turkishness”, based on a complaint filed by an ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, after he mentioned in a Swiss newspaper, the genocide of one million Armenians and the killing of 30.000 Kurds towards the end of the Ottoman Empire era, between 1915 and 1917. Pamuk was forced to flee Istanbul temporarily in 2006 because of a hate campaign against him, and took a position as a visiting professor at Columbia Univercity in New York. The charges against him were dropped in January 2006. Pamuk was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in his beloved Istanbul in the same building where he was raised, and has become one of Turkey's most famous, and most read, novelists.

Pamuk is known in Turkey as a social commentator, although he considers himself primarily a fiction writer with no political views, but he believes in freedom of speech and thought. Pamuk hopes that novels can help people to understand each other's unique history. He said: “Obviously we cannot hope to come to grips with matters this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines or by watching television.”

Pamuk's bibliography is long. He became internationally known with his third novel: The White Castle, published in Turkish in 1985 and translated into English in 1992. But the real break-through came with his two novels: My Name Is Red, published in Turkish in 1998, translated into English in 2001, and Snow, published in Turkish in 2002 and translated into English in 2004.

He won several literary prizes and awards. He also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. My Name is Red has been translated into 24 languages. It won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

My Name is Red is the story of Ottoman and Persian miniaturists and illustrators of the Ottoman court in the 16th century Istanbul, who were divided between the old and new, East and West tradition of painting,which lead to passion, violence, intrigues and murder; A killing by a fellow miniaturist out of art ideology conviction. After several narrations, the plot slowly unravels towards the end of the novel to identify the culprit of the two miniaturists, Elegant Effendi's and Enishte Effendi's murders.

The intensely heavy, involved subjects are divided into 59 chapters narrated by different voices: Human: Black, Shekure, Olive, Stork etc...Things: a tree,a coin. Animals: a dog,a horse. Unseen Spirits: a corpse, Death and Satan, Colour: crimson. The story thread is handed from one to the other voices, in a richly described, slow-paced novel. It's fiction with a genuine historical background. Pamuk, throughout the novel, constantly and masterfully flows from fact to fiction. It's a magical tale, reminiscent of The Thousand And One Nights, but with philosophical ideas about Art and the study of Islamic Illustration.

It took Pamuk six years to write My Name Is Red. He did intense research, which he said he thoroughly enjoyed. He was helped by well-preserved Ottoman records, and especially the records of the governor of Istanbul, which were well kept and published.

The first dramatic chapter of the book: “I am a corpse” sets the tone of one of the main themes of the story, the others being, religion,power, wedlock and the half-convincing romance between the two main characters, the non-charismatic Shekure, and the helplessly wandering Black,( the love story forms an integral part of the plot and the murder, and helps to break the density of the novel ). Also the very important and interesting extensive pedantic debates and views amongst the miniaturists, about how Art can be genuine and pure, the tie between God and the artist, and how the own style in Art, according to some master miniaturists, is wrong because the artist fails to paint the world as God sees it.

The very gifted miniaturists, like the Persian master Bihzad and the Ottoman master Osman and others, inflicted blindness upon themselves with a sharp needle for various reasons, in order to keep for ever in their memory the vision of God's world, as Allah first saw it, freshly created. Or because they do not wish to be able to see anything after looking at the “Book of Kings”. Or to avoid being forced to fulfil orders received from the new masters of Herat to paint in a different style from the one they are accustomed to.

Art is noticeably the author's subject of predilection. Pamuk who originally wanted to become a painter before deciding to dedicate his life to writing, is showing his artistic talent in his minute, colourful and vivid picture-like descriptions of Istanbul in late 16th century Ottoman era. The minutely detailed descriptions are made to look like a stroke of a paint brush. The same scenes are revisited by the writer in order to bring a new special effect.

Pamuk said: “Beginning at the age of six, I've always thought that I would be a painter. When I was a kid I used to copy the Ottoman miniature that I came across in books. Later, I was influenced by western painting and stopped painting when I was twenty when I began writing fiction.”

The “Red” in the title of the novel, to which Pamuk has dedicated a whole chapter, called “I am red”, evokes the colour red used in paintings and how apprentices applied it with their refined brushes to paper, and how it was also used to decorate walls and beautiful carpets. Red is also the colour of blood shed in battles. In fact, according to the author, red can be found everywhere.

Pamuk wrote: "My Name Is Red, is the novel that perplexes my mother: She always tells me that she cannot understand how I wrote it...There is nothing in any of my other novels that surprises her; she knows that I drew upon the stuff of my own life. But in My Name Is Red there is an aspect that she cannot connect with this son she knows so well, this son about whom she is certain that she knows everything...This must, in my view, be the greatest compliment any writer can hear: to hear from his mother that his books are wiser than he is...Because as I write these words at the age of 54 in April 2007, I know that my life has long since passed its midpoint, but, having written for thirty-two years now, I believe that I am at the midpoint of my career. I must have another thirty-two years in which to write more books, and to surprise my mother and other readers at least one more time."

"The Lady on My Left" by Catherine Cookson

2008-09-13T14:17:00.002+02:00

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, Newcastle England in 1906 as Kate McMullen (Catherine Ann Davies), an illegitimate child who believed that her alcoholic mother was her sister. She was raised by her grandmother Rose McMullen and her step-grandfather John McMullen. She left school at the young age of thirteen and worked in a laundry. She did not marry until she was thirty four years old, in 1940, to Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School.

Catherine Cookson wrote novels as a remedy for her depression, after having several miscarriages due to a rare vascular disease. Her bibliography is quite extensive: she wrote about a hundred books, selling more than 123 million copies. Sometimes she wrote under the pseudonyms Catherine Marchant or Katie McMullen. Her novels have been made into films, radio and stage plays.

Catherine Cookson was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle. She received the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside. The Variety Club of Great Britain
named her Writer of the Year. She was also awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1985 and was elevated to a Dame Commander of the order of the British empire in 1993. She died at the age of ninety one in 1997.

The Lady On My Left was published in 1997. It's a story set in a small village called Sealock. The main character in the novel is Alison Read, an orphan who falls in love with her guardian, Paul
Aylmer, an antique dealer who concealed a secret for many years, which when discovered by Alison transforms her life and leads the plot to a dramatic happy ending. It's a story divided between love, jealousy and mystery. An easy-to-read novel without any character depth nor any complicated intrigue. A wide public read.

"The Speed of Light" by Javier Cercas

2008-05-31T19:28:00.005+02:00

Javier Cercas was born in Ibahemando in Caceras in Spain in 1962. In 1980 he was a teacher for two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA. Since 1989 he has been a lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona in Spain where he lives.

He is a constant contributor to the Catalan edition of El Pais newspaper and the Sunday supplement. Javier Cercas is a novelist and essayist. He received several literary prizes for his book about the Spanish civil war, Soldiers of Salamis, published in 2001. It was translated into fifteen languages, sold about half a million copies and was made into a film. He also wrote:
The Motive in 1987
The Tenant in 1989
The Belly of the Whale in 1997
True Tales in 2000
The Speed of Light in 2006

The Speed of Light (La Velocidad de la Luz) is a short book covering a period of sixteen years, in which the author deals with many themes: Guilt, the impossibility of redemption, the difficulty of forgetting the too painful past, the true significance of success and failure and how success can be a source of corruption, the suppressed evil in human nature, psychological trauma due to the Vietnam war and also the valuable legacy of a writer. "I write novels about the adventure of writing novels" Cercas said.

The novel begins with the quiet and uneventful life of the nameless narrator in Barcelona, then his life in Urbana in the USA where he becomes a teacher of Spanish for two years. The climax is reached towards the middle of the book, with the discovery of Rodney Falk's involvement in the Vietnam war, which will shed a light on Rodney's solitude and peculiar behaviour. The story comes full circle at the end of the novel, when the narrator concludes that fame like war, can destroy a person's life. That is the main strong tie that linked Rodney to the narrator, and what made the narrator obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past, in particular about what happened in My Khe by the elite fighting unit called Tiger Force, of which Rodney was a part.

The book is not about the Vietnam war only. The Vietnamese war was used to illustrate the author's message, about how a healthy-minded and ambitious young person (like the character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness, which takes place in the Belgian Congo and the same Kurtz in the Francis Ford Coppola film about the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now), can turn into a monster due to harsh circumstances. Like success and fame can also be strongly damaging to a man.

It's "the reality of evil, the impossibility of redemption" and the catastrophe of fame. Cercas suggests in his novel that one can be successful without falling into narcissism. The narrator analyses himself as well as his friend Rodney throughout the novel and enjoys his lengthy literary and witty conversation with him.

Although the novel never reveals the narrator's name, the narrator in The Speed of Light is none other than the author himself. Like the narrator, Cercas has also taught Spanish in Urbana for two years and while he was living there he met a Vietnam war veteran who was sitting on a bench, watching some children play ball. Cercas then asked himself: "What does that man's look hide? What is he doing there?" That image, which refers to Rodney Falk's character, was the starting point of the novel. Cercas, like the narrator, had also a very big success with his book about the Spanish civil war called Soldiers of Salamis. Too many similarities.

Like the French novelist, Marcel Proust, Javier Cercas, in The Speed of Light, has a heavy style of writing long sentences, some of which can extend to almost a page.

Cercas said in one of his interviews: "Most writers, or at least myself, don't have motivations before writing a book. I decide to write a novel to solve a question that I have asked myself, and as I write the novel, I begin raising moral, political, and other types of issues... Novelists aim at persuading their audience that what they are reading is true... I invite my readers to join me in the process of writing the novel. So on one hand I tell them, "this is a novel", and on the other, "this is completely true; this has happened to me and it could happen to you". It's all about shaking the reader's conscience".

Cercas, when asked why he likes to write books about wars, answered: "There is a story my mother has told me hundreds of times that's always fascinated me. The beginnings of my interest in the war may well stem from this. It's the story of the family hero, her handsome sixteen-year-old uncle”. He went to war, died as a hero, and was never forgotten by his niece.

The narrator mentioned twice in the book about traveling at the speed of light in order to uncover the future, once towards the middle in page 106, and the second time towards the end in page 253. He said: "I had the impression that everything had accelerated, that everything had started to run faster than usual, faster and faster, faster, faster, and at some moment there had been a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, I thought I'd unknowingly traveled faster than the speed of light and what I was now seeing was the future".

Books We Will Be Reading In the Coming Months

2008-05-31T18:55:00.008+02:00

Dear Ladies,

Here, as promised, is the list of the books we will be reading in the coming months:

Friday 26th September 2008
My Name Is Redby Orhan Pamuk.

October 2008
An Old Fashioned Arrangementby Susie Vereker.

November 2008
No Book Club because of the Bazaar.

December 2008
Tears of the Giraffeby Alexander McCall Smith.

January 2009
The Miniaturistby Kunal Basu.

February 2009
Mothers and Sonsby Colm Toibin.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

All the very best,
Chouhrette

"Keeping The World Away" by Margaret Forster

2008-04-26T19:51:00.005+02:00

Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle (England) in 1938. She was educated at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. She won a scholarship to Sommerville College, Oxford where she was awarded an honors degree in History.

Margaret Forster married the writer and broadcaster Hunter Davies in 1960. Today they live between London and the lake district in England. They have three children, two daughters and a son. Their eldest daughter Caitlin also became a novelist.

Margaret Forster worked as a teacher in Islington, North London from 1961 to 1963. Starting from 1963 she worked as a novelist, a biographer, a contributor to newspapers and journals, and as a regular broadcaster for the BBC. She was also on the Arts Council literary panel for three years, and a chief non-fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard.

Since 1964 Margaret Forster has been very prolific. She has written biographies, criticism, fiction and non-fiction. She has won many prizes and awards for her fiction and non-fiction works. Her bibliography is quite long, amongst her novels is the very successful 1965 Georgie Girl, which was made into a film in 1966, and a short lived Broadway musical in 1970.

Keeping the World Away is the story of a painting, the women who owned it, and the message it bestowed on them. In the prologue, the young school girl Gillian, introduces the original theme of the novel; how about if a painting had a real life of its own, according to who owned it, and what it conveyed to the people who looked at it.

Gillian says to her teacher after staring and staring at one painting in The Tate Gallery for a while and noticing that "something was there which she couldn't quite grasp... The lives of the actual paintings, especially one of hers. I was wondering where it had been, who had owned it, who had looked at it. And other things - I mean,what effect did it have on the people who have looked at it ? What has it meant to them, how have they looked at it, did they feel the same as I did, did they see what I saw."

Keeping The World Away portrays the struggle of female artists in finding their way, their independence and freedom. Margaret Forster who is a feminist, like her predecessor Virginia Wolf in A Room Of One's Own, describes how women from the early days of the twentieth century aspired to gain recognition from a society monopolised by men. They wanted their financial freedom as well as their mental freedom. Virginia Wolf said : "There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of the mind."

The novel is divided into six sections. The first section is a semi-fictionalised story based on a real painting, the corner of Gwen's room in Paris, produced by Gwen John at the beginning of the twentieth century, and of the genuine Welsh artists Gwen John and her brother Augustus who where born two years apart in Haverfordwest, South Wales, Gwen in 1876 and Augustus in 1878 and both became artists. Gwen went to live in Paris and fell madly in love with the famous sixty four year-old French sculptor Rodin. Her passion was short lived by her lover who distanced himself from her young, "vigorous" and "voracious" needs.

Feeling lonely and forlorn, but at the same time serene, Gwen painted the quiet, and what she perceived as a peaceful corner of her Parisian attic room, yearning while waiting for her inattentive lover, Rodin to come and visit her, like in the past. She worked with a great deal of concentration and minutiae, putting her feeling and strong emotions into the painting, in order for her lover to understand her state of mind, and her longing for him: "she had wanted it to prove her own triumph. She had wanted to show Rodin that this was evidence of her transformation. She had imagined him walking into her room and being transfixed, overcome with admiration for what she had achieved." Didn't he tell her that "she must be composed and calm and let his own tranquillity enter her soul. Only then, he told her, would she do good work."

Gwen waited patiently for Rodin who never went back to her. She offered the painting to her dear friend Ursula, who lost it during the journey back to England. From then on the saga of Gwen's room corner painting begins.

The following five parts of the novel follow the journey of Gwen's painting: The different women who owned it, loved it and shared the same aspiration felt by it, despite the different message the painting bestowed on each one of them, and how it had affected their lives, and that true art can have a life of its own.Charlotte, the dreamy, intellectual and art appreciator. Stella, the ex nurse and amateur artist. Lucasta, The artist specialised in portraits. Ailsa, Paul Mortimer's oppressed wife. Then the novel ends as it started with Gillian who is now studying art in Paris and will be inheriting the Gwen's painting after Mme Verlon's death.

The painting of Gwen John's room in Paris is today hanging in the Sheffield city art gallery in England.

The title of the book is taken from Gwen John's own note book. She wrote : “Rules to keep the world away: Do not listen to people (more than is necessary); do not look at people (more than is necessary); have as little intercourse with people as possible.”

Gwen John (1876-1939) and her brother Augustus John (1878-1961) studied at the Slade school of Art in London. During their life time, Augustus became famous at an early age, while his introverted, solitary sister Gwen, who was obsessively in love with Rodin, remained in the limelight. Her paintings mainly depicting interiors, still-lifes and portraits were less appreciated than her brother's bold style of painting. He was considered a great artist of his time. Recently,Gwen's art became internationally renown while by contrast her brother's paintings seem to have fallen into the shadow.

Margaret Forster's combination of fact and fiction is done in a masterly way, with an easy-to-follow plot and a clear and limpid writing.

Books We'll Be Reading In May & June

2008-03-29T20:59:00.002+01:00

Dear Ladies,

This is just a confirmation of the dates for the upcoming Book Club meetings:

Friday, 30th May 2008: The Speed of Lightby Javier Cercas.

Friday, 20th June 2008: The Lady on My Left by Catherine Cookson.

"The Cairo House" by Samia Serageldin

2008-03-28T20:01:00.003+01:00

Samia Serageldin was born in the early fifties in Cairo, Egypt, the daughter of a wealthy landowner of a renowned Egyptian family. She married at twenty and went to England where she obtained an M.S. Degree in Politics from London's school of Oriental and African Studies.

She emigrated with her family in 1980 to the U.S.A. and has lived since then in Michigan, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. She has two adult sons who live in two different continents from hers.

Samia Serageldin worked as a professor of French and Arabic language, an interpreter for an international company, a book columnist, a free-lance writer and as a public speaker on current affairs.

The Cairo House is Samia Serageldin's first novel. It was first published in the USA in 2000, the UK publication followed a few years later in 2004. It's semi-autobiographical, a way for the author to reconcile the present with the past. The book is about the changes and developments in Egypt during the decades following the 1952 Egyptian revolution.

Gigi the main character in the book relates her day-to-day life during the time of the four presidents who took power after king Faruk. President Naguib, then Nasser, followed by Sadat, and then Mubarak.

She starts her story in the good old days, the belle époque, of an Egyptian privileged wealthy, landowner family who went through hardship after president Nasser sequestrated their lands in the sixties. From then on, life will never be the same again neither for Gigi, her family, nor for Egypt.

Gihan (Gigi), the narrator and main character, is an introverted, complicated and tormented person. She hastily married a man who is a complete stranger to her, saying that "she was tired of waiting for life to begin." She was young, inexperienced and believed innocently that life started with wedlock.

The expected happened, her married life was a failure. Her second marriage was not a great success either. Like most expatriates, she didn't feel at home in the USA and she felt out of place in the new Egypt. She seemed to be helplessly lost until the end of the story, seeking a way out of her dilemma.

Despite that, it's not easy to feel much compassion for Gihan, her character lacks some depth. The events and turmoil surrounding her life are described more elaborately, although some subjects could have been more developed.

The metaphors of the Chameleon for the constant readjustment between the two worlds, the East and the West, and the kaleidoscope for the change in fate, which are mentioned in several parts of the novel are, of essential importance to the author. It conveys what destiny is about. The slightest change in the kaleidoscope, like a small occurrence, can alter the route of one's life and therefore make a substantial difference to one's destiny.

The story of Gihan and her clan in The Cairo House reveals Egyptian culture, traditions, politics and unrest amongst the different classes in society under each new regime. The novel starts with a vivid and rich description of Egyptian society of the time, but as the author moves her character to the western world, the images are fading and are no longer of substance.

The Cairo House is an entertaining book to read. Written by an Egyptian who lived the various events that occurred in her country first hand, it's valuable historically for the important Egyptian period of the first half of the twentieth century and the significant changes that followed whether in politics, culture, way of life or even the country's infrastructure.

Samia Serageldin, in one of her interviews, says about The Cairo House : "I've been often asked why, since The Cairo House draws so heavily from my personal history, I did not simply write a memoir. It is often said that a memoir is fiction in disguise and a novel is fact masquerading as fiction. For me, at least, I could not have written as freely without the fig leaf of fiction...The great satisfaction of being read comes from taking others with you on that fascinating journey."

"The Swallows of Kabul" by Yasmina Khadra

2008-03-01T12:22:00.005+01:00

Yasmina Khadra is the pen-name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian ex-army officer who while still in the army used this pseudonym in order to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by the military censors, due to his notoriety which irritated his superiors. He was encouraged by his wife to work clandestinely by using her first two names, Yasmina Khadra.

He started writing his collection of stories "Houria" at the age of 17. Six more novels were published under his real name while in the army and before adopting his pen-name, Yasmina Khadra.

Mohammed Moulessehoul was born in Kenadsa in the Algerian Sahara in January 1955. His father joined the National Liberation Army in 1956 in the war against the French occupier. After Algeria's independence in 1962, Mohammed Moulessehoul was sent by his father to cadet school to become an officer which also satisfied his mother's wish.

After thirty six years in military service, Mohammed Moulessehoul decided to go into exile in France in 2001, and devoted his entire time to writing. He currently lives in Aix-En-Provence in the South of France.

Mohammed Moulessehoul received the Médaille d'Or from the Académie Française in 2001 and the Prix des Libraires in 2006. He was also awarded the trophy of Créateurs sans Frontières, presented to him on the 19th of February 2008 at the Quai d'Orsay, by the French minister of foreign affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

Some of Mohammed Moulessehoul's books have been translated in 25 countries, but only a few books were translated from French into English : "In the Name of God" in 2000, "Wolf Dreams" in 2003, "Morituri" in 2003, "The Swallows of Kabul" in 2004 and "Double Blank in 2005.

He wrote several books about the civil war in Algeria and is today one of Algeria's most important writers. The Swallows of Kabul has been a best seller, it will be made into a film and will be released soon in the cinemas.

The Swallows of Kabul is a parallel story of two doomed Afghani couples who have seen better days but now have to endure a hard life under the Taliban's oppressive regime.

Mohsen Ramat and his wife Zunaira are well educated, they meet at university, he comes from a middle-class family of prosperous merchants and she is the daughter of a distinguished man. Mohsen is looking forward to a diplomatic career, and Zunaira's ambition is to become a magistrate. She is a liberated feminist and a human rights activist when a student at university. All these dreams are shattered when the Taliban come to power. Mohsen's family business is destroyed and Zunaira has to stay home because women under the Taliban ruling are not allowed to study, have a job or go out without wearing the burka, which Zunaira felt was stripping her of her identity and her freedom.

Atiq Shaukat an ex-mujahideen fighter from the Russian war, and now a part time jail keeper, lives with his wife Musarrat an ex-nurse who is suffering from a painful and terminal illness. He married her twenty years ago out of gratitude because she saved his life when he was severely wounded by the Russians during the war. He doesn't love her and can't bear the thought of coming back home to find her lying in her corner and him having to deal with the household chores.

Mohsen and Atiq have many things in common. The dissatisfaction of their gloomy life, the fear of the unknown, the boredom and the aimless and endless wandering in the streets of Kabul day after day, and the rejection of the intolerable situation the Taliban had led the country into. The two couples are deeply depressed and distraught by the frightening nightmare they are going through. They try to remain sane amongst all the insanity surrounding them caused by the Taliban's repressive regime and the state of advanced decomposition in the city.

Mohsen releases his rage by joining a crowd stoning an adulterous woman to death. He always had a gentle nature, he felt horrified by his act, and couldn't even believe that he was capable of such a deed. In order to unburden himself of such a heavy weight on his conscience, he had to confess to his wife what he had done: "I don't know what came over me. It happened so fast. It was as if the crowd put a spell on me. I don't recall gathering up the stones. I only remember that I couldn't get rid of them, and an irresistible rage seemed to come into my arm... What frightens me and saddens me at the same time is that I didn't even try to resist."

Atiq doesn't know what's happening to him, he can no longer withstand the pitiless violence of the Taliban regime he genuinely believed in at the beginning. He feels claustrophobic in his prison cubby hole called an office. He feels disoriented and lost : "What's happening to me? I can't bear the dark, I can't bear the light, I don't like standing up or sitting down, I can't tolerate old people or children, I hate it when anybody looks at me or touches me. In fact, I can hardly stand myself. Am I going stark raving mad?" "The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage."

Zunaira loses her mind by becoming shockingly extreme in her attitude and behaviour towards her husband. She doesn't want to see him any more because she holds him responsible for the shame she had to endure from a Taliban police agent in the street. She no longer respects him. In order to stop her husband arguing with her she pushes him violently, his head hit the wall, and he dies instantly.

Musarrat leads a tortured life without any hope of recovering from this long, mysterious and consuming disease. She decides in her own drastic and extreme way, to sacrifice herself in order to make her husband happy. She wants to substitute herself for the woman he fell in love with and who is sentenced to death. She tell her husband : "I've been inspired by the Lord : That woman is not going to die. She'll be everything I couldn't be for you. You have no idea how happy I am this morning. I'll be more useful dead than alive. And at long last, you're being offered a chance. I beg you not to ruin it. Listen to me, just this once..." She is a selfless, angelic figure amongst all the surrounding abominations.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in his powerful, realistically disturbing and traumatic, short but very dense story is able to convey the misery, injustice, suffocation and oppression of the devastated city of Kabul under the Taliban regime. He writes with great compassion about the complexity of human nature when faced with extreme hardship, absurd rulers and rules, and how extreme repression and senseless violence can bring people to the brink of helplessness and despair to the extent of losing their souls. They end up dying or raving mad.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in The Swallows of Kabul is writing about an Afghanistan that he has never visited. He says in one of his interviews that he understands the era of the Taliban very well.

"I understand that Taliban mentality very well. The landscape, the struggles, the hardness of life-all these are just like my homeland." He points to the cover of his book: "Look at that photo (of a woman in a burka crossing a parched, desolate city scape) , that could be the Sahara village where I was born... I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan. And to bring to it a western perspective at the same time. When there are two perspectives there is a better chance of understanding."

Understanding that it is extremism which is the cancer of Islam.

"Staying On" by Paul Scott

2008-02-03T18:49:00.000+01:00

Paul Scott was born in the north London suburb of Southgate in 1920, from a Yorkshire commercial artist father and a South London mother Frances Mark, a former shop clerk. He was the younger of two sons.

Paul Scott was educated in Winchmore Hill Collegiate, a private school where his education was abruptly ended at the age of 16 due to his father's business being in financial difficulty. He decided to make a career in accountancy.

Paul Scott was conscripted to the army in 1940, and in 1941 was married in Torquay to Nancy Edith Avery called Penny. He was sent to India in 1943 as an officer cadet and ended the war as captain in the Indian Army Service Corps.

After completing his duty in India, he went back to live in London with his family. His two daughters, Carol and Sally were born in 1947 and 1948.

In 1950 Paul Scott became a director while working for the literary agent Pearn Pollinger and Higham and from 1960 onwards he dedicated himself full time to writing. His books were not recognised until quite late and he died in 1978 in hospital in London from colon cancer.

Paul Scott wrote several novels:
Johnnie Sahib in 1952.
The Alien Sky in 1953.
A Male Child in 1956.
Mark of The Warrior in 1958.
Chinese Love Pavilion in 1960.
Birds of Paradise in 1962.
The Bender in 1963.
The Corrida at San Feliu in 1964.
The Raj Quartet:
1. The Jewel in the Crown in 1966.
2. The Day of the Scorpion in 1968.
3. The Towers of Silence in 1971.
4. A Division of the Spoils in 1974.

The Raj Quartet was made into a television series under the name of "The Jewel In The Crown".

Staying On in 1977 won the Booker Prize award and was made into a film in 1979 by Granada television. He also wrote reviews for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and Country Life.

In 1976 and 1977 he was "visiting professor" at University of Tulsa in Oklahoma U.S.A.

Staying On is a sequel to The Raj Quartet set in the Anglo-Indian frame several years after India gained its independence in 1947.

The two main characters are Tusker and Lucy Smalley, a retired ageing British couple, mentioned briefly in The Raj Quartet novels. Married for forty years and living an uncommunicative marriage, they decide to Stay On in a small bungalow in the hills of Pankot, a small town in India. Despite being deprived of their colonial status and despite the changing times in India and the seediness of the place, they opt to stay rather than return home to England due to financial need. "I knew the pension would go further in India than in England" Tusker says to his wife.

The novel is set in 1972. It narrates the present and the past with funny, sometimes sad and sometimes touching style, the poignant silent loyalty and the resentful trust and reliance between the ageing couple (Tusker and Lucy).

The story starts with Tusker's death. All the events in the book are a flashback till the end when the author brings back Tusker's death in order to re-knot the beginning with the end.

Throughout the book Tusker is painted as a selfish, inconsiderate, grumpy character, but by the end and before his death, he reveals his soft, hidden, endearing side, which makes his departing deeply moving.

Nothing much appears to happen in the book, but the story is still engrossing due to the vivid description of the characters and the bittersweet subject.

Tusker and Lucy have seen better days during the time of the Raj, but those days are over and now they have to lead a modest life, “hang on”, swallow their pride, and endure the grotesque Mrs Bhoolabhoy's bad temper. “ 'Oh, Mrs Bhoolabhoy, Lucy began, we're expecting a guest on Wednesday. I wonder if you'd kindly book a room-' 'I have already told Colonel Smalley I can't be bothered with that... I have other things to deal with. All I want to know is about the shears.' 'Shears?' 'Shears. Shears. Shears!' Mrs Bhoolabhoy raised her arms and made motions. Snick-snick. Shears!' she shouted... I will not have my property taken off the premises...She waddled away, leaving behind her a trail of sandalwood perfume which,to Lucy, was like the pungent smell of her own smouldering outraged dignity.”

Ibrahim, the Smalley's manservant is etched in a funny light hearted way. His conversation with the mali gardener, Joseph, is hilarious : “'Ibrahim,' Joseph said,'what happens if you are pushed by both Sahib and Memsahib ? 'Given push, not pushed. Get idiom right.' 'what happens if you are given push by Sahib and Memsahib at one and the same time?' Ibrahim looked at him thoughtfully. He said.'Suddenly you are a philosopher as well as a gardener? You are entering realm of metaphysics ? Joseph Einstein is it ? Versed in the theory of time and relativity? Haven't I just made it plain that Sahib and Memsahib are always at logger-heads and that sometimes they do not even know what time of day it is, even in Pankot ?”

Paul Scott chose India as a rich and colourful frame work for his books, because since the time he was posted there, he fell in love with the country and wanted to convey his enthusiasm to English people, in particular for those who heard about this vast country but never visited it nor interested themselves in discovering its varied cultures.

In 1972 referring to his whole career to date, Paul Scott told his audience during his British council tour of India : "My proper answer to the question,'why do you, as a modern English novelist of serious pretensions, bother to write about the time-expired subject of the British Raj?' is, must be, if my novels are novels at all, because the last days of the British Raj are the metaphor I have presently chosen to illustrate my view of life."

"The Pilot's Wife" by Anita Shreve

2008-01-31T17:42:00.000+01:00

Anita Shreve was born in Dedham Massachusetts in 1946 from an airline pilot father and a housewife mother. She graduated from Tufts University. She worked as high school teacher at Amherst College, Massachusetts. She started writing her novels while working. She was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her book "Past The Island, Drifting".

She then stopped writing fiction in the late 1970s and worked as a journalist in Nairobi, Kenya for three years. She wrote for Quest magazine, US magazine, New York Times and New York magazine. She decided to give up journalism and dedicate herself full-time to writing fiction. Her books were translated into many languages and she won The Pen L.L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. She currently lives between Longmeadow Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Anita Shreve wrote several novels :
Eden Close in 1989.
Strange Fits of Passion in 1991.
Where or When in 1993.
Resistance in 1995.
The Weight of Water in 1997.
The Pilot's Wife in 1998.
Fortune's Rocks in 2000.
Sea Glass in 2002.

She wrote non-fiction books :
Dr. Balter's Child Sense in 1985.
Dr. Balter's Baby Sense in 1985.
Working Woman in 1986.
Remaking Motherhood in 1987.
Who's in Control in 1988.
Women Together, Women Alone in 1989.

Kathryn is the pilot's wife and she is the main character of the novel. The story is about her tragedy, her distress, her love, her deceit and her rage, and how she has to deal with the initial shock when she is woken up in the middle of the night by a knock on the door to be told by Robert Hart, the pilot's union employee, that her husband died in a plane crash with 103 passengers, 10 miles off the coast of Ireland and that there were no survivors.

The novel is divided in two parts, the first half describes in simple, clear prose Kathryn's struggle to deal with her shock, loss and grievance, while trying to pull herself together for the sake and protection of her 16-year old daughter Mattie, with the help of the kind Robert Hart.

This part holds some hints to prepare readers for what follows in the second half which is full of unexpected painful revelations, challenging Kathryn's prowess to deal with the truth of her marriage and what has become of it. What appeared at the beginning to be a sad and quiet story turns out to be a gripping one, a thriller combined with the difficult defiance between loss, love and betrayal but also about some hope for the future.

Anita Shreve manages to make a good, captivating read out of a banal, common theme of betrayal and adultery.

Kathryn finds it very hard to bring together her happy memory of a stable, peaceful and uneventful married life in a beautiful home overlooking the ocean in Ely, New Hampshire, a bright teenage daughter, with a husband she cared for dearly, and thought that she knew, with the harsh deceitful reality of who Jack really was. A mixed feeling of grief and danger which triggers her determination to seek the truth at any cost after hearing all the unbelievable rumours, and after discovering various pieces of paper in Jack's pocket and in his bath-robe with initials and phone numbers which she knew nothing about. She was ready to go through it all even if its outcome turns out to be devastating for her. In any case Kathryn knew that nothing will ever be the same again.

Anita Shreve portrays Kathryn's confusion and disbelief in switching the chapters constantly from the present with all it's unpleasantness and cruel devastation, to flashes of the serene, tranquil and more reassuring past. She has masterfully succeeded in conveying Kathryn's feelings by contrasting the two lives through juxtaposition.

Anita Shreve's books are often categorized under "women's novels" due to her acquired art of describing women's distressful feelings and sensibilities. The Pilot's Wife appears to be a puzzle that Kathryn tries throughout the novel to unravel piece by piece. She thought she knew her husband but found out that she was living with a complete stranger she knew nothing about.

The readers are aware of that through what Mattie was telling her mother about the rumour that the pilot committed suicide : "Mattie you knew your father." "Maybe". "What does that mean ?" "Maybe I didn't know him" Mattie said. “Maybe he was unhappy”. “If your father was unhappy, I'd have known.” “But how do you ever know that you know a person ?” she asked. What Kathryn didn't know is that no matter how well you know a loved one intimately, there is always a little secret garden that each one keeps to oneself.

After meeting Muire Boland, Jack's second wife and seeing their two children, Kathryn was overwhelmed with the sad and crude reality of her suspicion, which led her to drive all the way to the Irish coast, where the plane crashed. She decided to unburden herself from the weight she was carrying by throwing her wedding ring into the sea to join Jack at the bottom of the ocean. She wanted a new start by getting rid of the past and like that the healing operation can take place.

The Pilot's Wife is an easy, readable book, the style is clear and simple. The plot was progressing well but then the author decided to end the story abruptly leaving a couple of loose threads untied.
The involvement of Jack with the IRA which led to the plane explosion was not explained sufficiently, and the relationship between Kathryn and Robert Hart was left undeveloped.

Anita Shreve was asked in an interview where did she get the idea for The Pilot's Wife? She answered : “A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel... I overheard a conversation between a pilot and a woman at a party. Something he said lodged in my consciousness and wouldn't go away. The thing he said was : When there's a crash, the union always gets there first. He meant that when there was a crash of a commercial airliner, a member of the pilot's union made it a point to get to the pilot's wife house first. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most important of which is to keep her from talking to the press. And there was a collision of ideas.” which produced The Pilot's Wife.

Books We'll Be Reading In The Coming Months

2007-12-06T05:05:00.005+01:00

Dear Ladies,
Here as promised is the list of books we will be reading in the coming months in The Book Club...

1. The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve will be discussed in the Villa at
2pm on Friday 14th December.

2. Friday 25th January 2008: Staying On by Paul Scott.

3. Friday 29th February 2008: Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra.

4. Friday, 28th March 2008: The Cairo House by Samia Serageldin.

5. Friday, 25th April 2008: Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster.

6. Friday, 30th May 2008: The Speed of Lightby Javier Cercas.

7. Friday, 20th June 2008: The Lady on My Left by Catherine Cookson.

Have a wonderful holiday, a Merry Christmas and a good and healthy new year.
All the very best,
Chouhrette

"In The Country of Men" by Hisham Matar

2007-10-27T18:00:00.000+02:00

Hisham Matar was born in New York in 1970 to Libyan parents. His father worked for the Libyan mission to the United Nations. But in 1979 being against the regime, he left Libya and went into exile in Egypt with his family. After living in Cairo for eleven years, his father was kidnapped and sent back to Libya where he was sent to prison and since 1995 Hisham Matar has no news of his father's whereabouts. His mother and elder brother still live in Egypt.

Hisham Matar spent his young years in Tripoli and Cairo. He lived in Cairo for four years, and at fifteen went to boarding school in England. Then he studied architecture at Goldsmith college London University and still lives in London, married to American photographer, Diana Matar. He is working on a new novel set in Cairo and London.

In his twenties Hisham Matar worked as an architect and also wrote articles for the London based Arabic daily newspaper, Al Shark Al Awsat. His essays have been published in The Independent, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Times. In 2002 he was a finalist in East Anglia's Best New Talent Awards for his poems, before preferring prose to poetry.

Hisham Matar's first novel In the Country of Menwas first published in 2006 and was nominated for The Guardian First Book Award. It was on the short list of The Booker Prize of 2006 and won The Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2007. "In The Country of Men" was a big success and has been translated into 22 languages. Despite its short length it took five years to write.

The novel is narrated by a bewildered nine year-old Suleiman who is trying to decode the adult world that takes place inside his own family and in Tripoli, ten years after the 1969 Libyan revolution. The book starts in 1979, the year before he left Tripoli to go and live in Cairo.

Little Suleiman is confused as would be a nine year old who lives with a depressed, domineering, alcoholic and emotionally unpredictable mother (Mama), a nearly non-existent figure-head of a businessman father (Baba), and suspicious men (the secret police) moving around Tripoli and his neighbourhood.

Apart from Suleiman's mother, the main character in the story who plays an important part in Suleimen's life, the story is mainly about men, as the title of the novel suggests. The novel is not only about politics, it's also about strong emotions, compassions and relationships between people sharing almost the same fate.

The story is poignant. Suleiman who at his age should be living a carefree life, is burdened by the cruel events surrounding him. Like nine year old Michele in "I'm Not Scared" by Niccolo Ammaniti and twelve year old Amir in "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini, he is ejected too soon into adulthood due to circumstances and without any mercy.

Throughout the novel there is a sense of danger, fear, betrayal, and a very heavy atmosphere of oppression, that the nine-year old child caught in this claustrophobic world would rather not even attempt to decipher but instead escape to a freer place.

Nevertheless, the story is evoked with great subtlety and compassion. "In The Country of Men" is an interesting novel because it's about Libya, a country which has encountered many world-wide controversies in recent years and yet remains completely unknown to the outsider.

Very rarely would one come across a book about Libya, its every day life and its regime. In one of his interviews Hisham Matar says : "I would have liked to write a book that had nothing to do with politics... I'm not really interested in politics, but politics was part of the canvas. I had to say something about it, otherwise all the different forces that are shaping these characters would be abstract."

The characters in the novel are not fully developed but rather sketched apart from the character of Suleimen's mother who stands out vividly among the other hazy characters, emphasising the endearing love binding the little boy to his mother, love that will remain just as strong even when the little boy becomes a young man in exile in Egypt.

"I look down at my legs, my grown-up legs in their grown-up trousers.... You're a man, I tell myself. And she (his mother) is coming to see you, to see what has become of her darling boy, her only son. How will she be? ...What will she think of me... Then I see her. She is standing next to her suitcase like a girl in the city for the first time... Mama, I say and say it again and again until she sees me. Mama! Mama! When I reach her she kisses my hands, my forehead, my cheeks, combs my hair with her fingers, straightens my collar."

The style, in its unpretentious appealing simplicity, speaks to the heart on an emotionally realistic level. In one of his interviews, Hisham Matar denies that his novel In the Country of Menis autobiographical. He said it's pure fiction and that he chose to fictionalise events of his childhood:

"The book is a product of my imagination: a human faculty that many, I am learning these days, are suspect of. This book took me five years to write; I am not yet interested enough in my own autobiography to spend that long writing it down. Besides, knowing what will happen next bores me... I enjoy the pleasure of inventing characters and their circumstances on the page. They remain mysterious even after the work is complete; in some ways even more mysterious. It's magic."

"Libya is a silent and silenced country. Somewhere between the covers of my book is a Libya that speaks. But most of all, I hope anyone who reads my novel is entertained and perhaps nudged a little."

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2007-09-30T06:04:00.000+02:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Arcataca in the north of Colombia in March 1928. His parents struggling to make a living,little Gabo was raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather was a Colonel, a liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, a hero and a very good story teller who lived an intriguing life.

His grandmother was full of superstitions, premonitions and ghost stories. She was also a very talented story teller and had the art of telling tales as if they were real.

Garcia Marquez will be deeply influenced by both his grandparents. Many years later he will use these unforgettable tales in his famous and most successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years Of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness." Garcia Marquez will say later in his life: "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents".

When he was eight years old he went to live with his parents in Sucre, a department in the north of Colombia, due to his grandfather's death and to his grandmother's blindness. His father was a pharmacist. The young Garcia Marquez was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city in Colombia. He was known as the shy, serious, non-athletic boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons. At the age of twelve he was awarded a scholarship in a Jesuit-run secondary school for bright students.

After graduating at eighteen in 1946, Garcia Marquez, to please his parents, enrolled in the Bogota University as a law student against his wishes. But he didn't like his studies. He quitted university.

His life changed when he came across Kafka's famous book "The Metamorphosis". He says: "I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing long time ago... That's how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice."

From now on Garcia Marquez is going to read many books and dedicate his life to writing. He started his career as a journalist and moved unto literary writing.

He wrote fiction:
"In Evil Hour in 1962
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 1967
"The Autumn of The Patriarch" in 1975
"Love In The Time of Cholera" in 1985
"Of Love And Other Demons" in 1994
"Strange Pilgrims" (twelve stories) in 1992
"Memories of My Melancholy Whores" in 2004

His Novellas:
"Leaf Storm", "No One Writes To The Colonel", "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" in 1961
"The General In His Labyrinth" in 1989

He wrote non- fiction:
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailorin 1970
The Fragrance of Guavain 1982
Clandestine in Chilein 1987
News of a Kidnappingin 1996
For The Sake Of A Country Within Reach Of The Childrenin 1998
"Living to Tell the Tale" in 2002
He also wrote many short stories.

In 1981 Garcia Marquez was awarded the French Legion d'honneur medal, and in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude had sold 36 million copies by July 2007.

Garcia Marquez has been married since 1958 to Mercedes Barcha and has 2 children, Rodrigo Garcia, the television and film director in the USA, and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, who also works as a title designer for the cinema in the USA.

In 1999 Garcia Marquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He lives in Mexico city.
He has released the first volume of a promised set of three volumes of his memoirs in 2002, "To Live To Tell It", the story of his life till 1955.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a spell-bound novel with multiple events and stories. An epic, like La Chanson de Roland, it has its base seamlessly interwoven from reality combined with fantasy. A chronicle of life and death. A tragicomedy with many characters and through these characters we are introduced to the life of the mythical village of Macondo which is in reality the story of Colombia and its civil war between the Liberals and the Conservatives which had the peak of its bloodshed in 1899 and ended in late 1902.

And like his novella, "In Evil Hour", where Garcia Marquez writes about the killing of a hundred and fifty thousand Colombians by 1953, in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" Marquez describes the terrible massacre of a hundred thousand people with the defeat of the Liberals. Garcia Marquez's grandfather fought in that war. He also wrote about the anti western massive workers strike against The United Fruit Company and their banana plantations in Macondo, and the massacre that followed.

The author has mixed together reality, fantasy and history with great magical success. The influence of Marquez's grandparents is strongly felt in the book, with the raging war between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the mysterious gypsies, like the enigmatic Melquiades and his prophecies, and his ghost that kept on appearing and disappearing in the house. Also the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar who keeps on inviting itself into José Arcadio Buendia's house after being killed by the latter because of jealousy over his wife Ursula. For many years after his death he will haunt the house in search of water to clean its wound and Ursula taking pity on him and leaving for him water jugs in every corner of the house.

The story of Macondo is the story of the people who founded the village from beginning to end during a hundred years. It all started with “twenty adobe houses,built on the bank of a river of clear water... It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and no one had died.” The head of the tribe was José Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran. They will have children, grand children and great grand children. Five generations of descendants, who all seem to follow the same pattern of character, each living his self imposed "solitude" and despair, their own way.

José Arcadio Buendia is fascinated by the unknown, sadly he is incapable of differentiating between magic and knowledge. He has his lab where he works and tries all sorts of inventions in the hope of making gold, till he ends up going mad.

Ursula Iguaran, his wife, is hard working, she cleans, cooks, and has a little business in candy animals, and raises the offspring of the Buendia family. She is strong-willed and remains lucid till her death at over a hundred years old.

It's a gigantic saga where cruel and violent reality are mixed with a wholly fantastic world of the author's fertile imagination. All the people killed during the war. Aureliano, the military leader, and his prolific sex life. He had seventeen children from seventeen women, all queuing to have heroes from him. The tragedies of Renata Remedios who couldn't marry the man she loved, her mother's guard fired a bullet into his spine “which reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest...tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies.” Renata Remedios was put by her mother into a convent for the rest of her life. The tragic death of Amaranta Ursula while delivering the baby she was carrying from her nephew.

Funny moments, like Mauricio Babilonia and his trail of yellow butterflies, the tricks that the grandchildren played on their nearly blind grandmother Ursula. And Remedios the Beauty who ascends to heaven with a sheet while hanging out laundry in the back yard. Not to forget the most unusual insomnia illness and collective amnesia, a weird “plague” that attacks the whole village, an infection from some Indians who were passing the village with gypsies.

Garcia's style is easy, natural and simple. Without any doubt he mastered the art of magical realism. He skillfully blends the tragic and the comic in his astonishing novel where there is always a new amazing happening. Like a magician, under his wound Macondo becomes an enchanted village from The One Thousand And One Nights. Pungent with life, the surreal, undefined, uncertain, whether it's time, place or people, seem to be most conventional in the novel.

Unfortunately, Macondo the village of mirages is cut off from any civilisation, it has prostitution, incest, and “Solitude”, so like its inhabitants it was doomed to disappear. The incestuous marriage of José Arcadio Buendia and Ursula and five generations later the relationship between Aureliano Babilonia and his aunt Amaranta Ursula, resulting in having a baby born with a pigtail, illustrate what Pilar Ternare,the fortune teller knew : “There was no mystery in the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught her that the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.”

Macondo the village of all fantasies goes back to oblivion with its inhabitants after witnessing a hundred years of violence, cruelty, love, passion, hatred, ghosts, fantasy, prostitution, incest, but most important of all, witnessing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Books We Have Read At The UNWG Book Club

2007-09-06T07:24:00.000+02:00

Dear Ladies,

As a follow-up to my last post, here is a list of the books we have previously read and discussed:

24th October 2003: “The Life Of Pi” by Yann Martel.
12th December 2003: “The Human Stain” by Philipp Roth.
6th February 2004 : “Palace Walk” by Naguib Mahfouz.
26th March 2004 : “The Alchemist” by Paulo Cuelho.
10th May 2004 : “Youth And The End Of The Tether” by Joseph Conrad.
11th June 2004 : “English Passengers” by Matthew Kneale.
24th September 2004 : “Samarkand” by Amin Maalouf.
15th October 2004 : “Portrait In Sepia” by Isabel Allende.
26th November 2004 : “Youth” by John Coetzee.

14th January 2005 : “Waiting” by Ha Jin.
11th February 2005 : “Silk” by Alessandro Baricco.
8th April 2005 : “Notes From The Hyena's Belly” by Nega Mezlekia.
20th May 2005 : “Crabwalk” by Günter Grass.
17th June 2005 : “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath.
23rd September 2005 : “The Shadow Of The Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
18th November 2005 : “The Remains Of The Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.
2nd December 2005 : “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe.

13th January 2006 : “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.
24th February 2006 : “Fear And Trembling” by Amélie Nothomb.
31st March 2006 : “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri.
5th May 2006 : “Eve Green” by Susan Fletcher.
9th June 2006 : “The Palace Tiger” by Barbara Cleverly.
22nd September 2006 : “The Time Traveler's Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger.
27th October 2006 : “The Buddha Of Suburbia” by Hanif Kureishi.
1st December 2006 : “The Pickup” by Nadine Gordimer.

12th January 2007 : “The Bookseller Of Kabul” by Asne Seierstad.
23rd February 2007 : “The God Of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy.
30th March 2007 : “Embers” by Sandor Marai.
11th May 2007 : “Palace Of Desire” by Naguib Mahfouz.
11th May 2007 : “Sugar Street” by Naguib Mahfouz.
15th June 2007 : “I'm Not Scared” by Niccolo Ammaniti.

"I'm Not Scared" by Niccolo Ammaniti

2007-06-16T17:35:00.000+02:00

Niccolo Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He studied at Liceo Classico and then at university where he read biology. He quitted university before obtaining a degree and decided to breed fish in his bedroom in twelve aquariums containing two thousand litres of water, as a business, in order to earn some money.

Ammaniti wrote his first novel “Branchie” in 1994 and in 1995 published an essay titled “Nel nome del figlio”. In 1996 a collection of short stories called “Fango” came out. As for his great rural novel “Ti prendo e ti porto via” which was written in Scotland during his six months there, it was published in 1999. He then went to the United States in 2001 in order to write the script for an American production called “Gone Bad”. His third novel, "I'm Not Scared" (Io non ho paura) was published in Italy in 2001. Niccolo Ammaniti is the youngest ever winner, at the age of 34, of the prestigious Viareggio-Repaci prize for his novel “I'm Not Scared”, which has been his biggest success so far.

"I'm Not Scared"became a best-seller in Italy for months, and was translated into 20 languages. It was also made into a feature film directed by Gabriele Salvatores, the Academy-award winning director of “Mediterraneo”. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2003. Niccolo Ammanity, who lives in Italy, mentioned that he is longing to be a film director, and that his novel “I'm Not Scared” was originally conceived as a film project.

In "I'm Not Scared"a thirty year-old Michele remembers a shocking episode from his childhood in the very hot summer of 1978, twenty years ago in Aqua Traverse, an isolated community living in a hamlet of five houses in the middle of wheat fields, in an unidentified poor region in southern Italy, a nine year-old boy Michele discovers a horrifying secret, unbearable for his age, which is going to change his whole life. He will be thrown into adulthood when he loses his innocence and his faith in the adults around him,and realises that those closest to him are not what he thought they were. And through finding out adult cruelty in kidnapping a child his own age and demanding a ransom from his parents. Michele is put through a dilemma, whether to keep his promise to his father by not going back to see Filippo, or listen to his pure heroic nature. He is helpless and confused as a child and yet courageous and righteous as an adult. The complexity inherent in growing up.Having lost faith in his idealised father and mother and all grown ups surrounding him, he has to work things out by himself and act like a humanitarian hero.

The whole novel is narrated through the nine year-old Michele's eyes, therefore the language is simple, the sentences short, the paragraphs brief and the image clear, which conveys strength and authenticity to the narration. The author writes with great accuracy the feeling of fear and fantasies of corpse-eaters, ghosts, monsters, and bogeymen that come out at night, which are part of everyday life of a child. Michele is intimidated, like the other children of the hamlet, by Skull (Antonio), who seems to have hold over them through fear and seems to take a sadistic pleasure in ordering his friends around and getting away with it. There is also the fear of Skull's brother, Felice Natale, who is portrayed as a despicable character.

The story is very well constructed, Michele's character springs to life while the adults are portrayed in a sketchy way. Ammaniti excelled in capturing with great precision, Michele's childish thoughts and vocabulary.The story starts in a slow rhythm which conveys the stifling summer heat and also the isolation of the Aqua Traverse people. Nothing much seems to be happening, the children are glad to get together every day to go cycling in the middle of the wheat fields, happily, innocently and without any worries, away from the adults' evil tension, kidnapping, blackmail and guns. Then comes the black side of the story, the dark black hole opposed to the sunny wheat fields, Michele's terrible discovery which he keeps to himself. Then follows the tension and violent arguments among the adults which holds the suspense going strong à la Hitchcock, leading to the climax which carries the twist at the end.

Niccolo Ammaniti, a talented story-teller with vivid imagination, is considered one of the best novelists in Italy.