Tag-Archive for ◊ deaths ◊

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• Sunday, January 29th, 2012

Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973. His father, a highly qualified chemist who could not find work in England in the seventies, moved with his family to Cameroon, west Africa, where he built a Guinness brewery. Chris Cleave spent part of his childhood there and was back in England when he was eight years old. He first went to Hillingdon state school in London and continued his studies in Buckinghamshire, followed by psychology studies at Balliol College, Oxford.

Cleave, who is a novelist and was a columnist for the Guardian newspaper from 2008 to 2010, has worked as a barman, a long distance sailor and a marine navigation teacher.

He lives in Kingston-Upon-Thames near London with his French wife and three children.

Chris Cleave has written two novels to date plus Gold to be published in June 2012:
Incendiary, published in 2005 was adapted into a feature film.
The Other Hand, published in 2008 and will soon be adapted into a film.
He has also written three short stories: Quiet Time. Fresh Water and Oyster.

Cleave’s first novel, Incendiary, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2006 and was short-listed for the 2006 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. In 2008 he was short-listed for the Costa Book Awards in the novel category for his second novel, The Other Hand (Little Bee).

The Other Hand was influenced by Cleave’s childhood in Cameroon. The novel is narrated by the two main characters, Sarah and Little Bee, each one with her own side of the story. The two of them met two years ago for the first time, on a beach in Nigeria in atrocious circumstances. Despite their difference in age and culture, they have in common the aspiration for a peaceful and happy life.

Sarah is an English, hard-working young woman. She is editor of a glossy, women’s magazine called Nixie and is married to the journalist, Andrew O’Rourke. They have a four-year-old child called Charlie, who dresses and carries on as the fictional super-hero character, Batman. They all live in Kingston-upon-Thames. Sarah is unhappy in her wedlock and commits adultery with Lawrence, a Home Office press officer, who is also unhappily married.

As for Udo, she has changed her name to Little Bee and has managed to escape the horror, violence and corruption in her native Nigeria, caused by big oil company exploitation, by seeking asylum in England. Little Bee’s sense of humour and wit is kept intact at all times, even at the worst moments, which helps to keep her going through all the hardships she has to endure. In fact she is quite hilarious often, creating some sort of comic relief, lightening the serious theme of the novel.

In his novel, the author tackles modern, world-wide, important problems: the immigration, the shameful treatment of asylum seekers and how they are sent to their ineluctable deaths. The reader is immersed in the subject right from the first pages of the novel, which starts in the immigration detention centre in Essex, England, where the main character, Little Bee, is detained for two years following her stowaway arrival from Nigeria on a tea cargo ship.

She succeeds in escaping thanks to a clever stratagem orchestrated by a Jamaican girl who is also an asylum seeker and who manages to rescue three girls with her from incarceration without any legal papers. From this point, the whole story unfolds in snippets, the mystery of sixteen-year-old Little Bee and the shocking encounter with the O’Rourke couple, Sarah and Andrew in Nigeria.

Throughout the novel the author transports us from sunny, warm, corrupt and violent Nigeria, whose delta inhabitants are killed because they happen to be living on the unexplored, rich oil area, to the cold, grey, mundane life in England. The contrast is stunning in every respect between the two different worlds of fortunate and unfortunate people who both suffer in different ways. The two existences portrayed in a captivating and moving way.

There is also the underlining of the choices that some people have to make in life. Sarah had to sacrifice her middle finger to save Little Bee’s life, but on the other hand, while in a panic, she thoughtlessly asked Little Bee to contact the police to come and search for her missing, four-year-old son, Charlie. This ended in having Little Bee uncovered and arrested by the same police officers she had called to the rescue. Little Bee, who is young and innocent, makes the choice of fleeing her country to escape from the killers who are after her. As for Andrew O’Rourke, who is suffering from deep depression, he chooses to commit suicide which is helped by the reappearance of Little Bee.

The story’s end is intense and effective, conveying a powerful message. This is doubtless deliberate on the part of the author in order to awaken the human compassion and sense of decency in the hope of provoking a positive reaction and not having his missive lost like a scream in the desert.

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Category: Book Reviews  | One Comment
Author:
• Thursday, June 17th, 2010

John Banville was born in 1945 in Wexford, Ireland, from a father who worked in a garage and a housewife mother. He is the youngest of three siblings, his older brother and sister are also novelists.

He started his education in a Christian Brothers primary School followed by St Peter’s College secondary school in Wexford.

After leaving school John Banville worked for Aer Lingus in Dublin as a clerk, which gave him the opportunity to travel extensively. He moved on and has worked in journalism since 1969. He was a member of the Irish Arts Council from 1984 to 1988 and literary editor for The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

He lives today in Dublin with his American wife whom he married in 1969 and their two adult sons.

John Banville wrote several novels, short stories and plays. His best-known novel The Sea, which is his fourteenth, was published in 2005 and won the Man Booker Prize the same year.

List of John Banville’s novels:
Nightspawn, 1971
Birchwood, 1973
Dr Copernicus, 1976
Kepler, 1981
The Newton Letter: An Interlude, 1982
Mefisto,1986
The Book of Evidence,1989
Ghosts, 1993
Athena,1995
The Ark, 1996
The Untouchable, 1997
Eclipse, 2000
Shroud, 2002
Prague Pictures: Portrait of a city, 2003
The Sea, 2005
The Infinities, 2009

The Sea is about Max Morden, a retired Irish art historian and a newly bereaved husband in his sixties. Arriving at a crossroads in his existence, he sought some comfort and escapism by returning to live in the same summer house on the Irish coast, where the Grace family once lived many years ago with their twin-children, Chloe and Myles. They became his friends in that memorable summer of his childhood, when they were all in their early teens.

Max Morden, aware of his old age, his mortal vulnerability and obsessed by death, reminisces about the past and lives in a state of constant reverie tinted with melancholic black humour. He is constantly reviewing his previous life and the time he had spent with his late wife Anna who died of cancer. He also dwells on the unforgettable summer spent with the wealthy and attractive Grace family that changed his life.

As if his recent bereavement rekindled the loss of Chloe and Myles, buried in the sea by drowning a long time ago, their deaths made him aware early in his life about the meaning of love and death, an experience which was thrust upon him as a young boy and continued to haunt him as an old man.

After his wife’s death, Max Morden decides to go back to the same Irish seaside resort of his childhood, but this time at the end of his journey, as an old man, in order to seek some solace for his meaningless existence.

The main themes of this short, subtle, remarkable, deep and powerful novel are love, loss and sad memories. Max Morden’s nostalgic thoughts of the past drift swiftly from one period to another, like the high and low tides of the sea or the waxing and waning of the moon.

The Sea has hardly a plot and no suspense, save the twist at the end, when the reader discovers that Miss Vavasour, the Cedars’ tenant, is the one and same Rose, who was Chloe’s and Myles’ governess some fifty years earlier.

The strength and beauty of the novel lies in its eloquence, intense emotions, elegant, lyrical and poetic prose, which makes it a refined work of art, that compels readers to commence their own meditation.