Category: Books

Review 2024: The Promise

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Damon Galgut is an excellent writer, but I have had varying reactions to his work. Of what I have read, I liked In a Strange Room best and his last novel, Arctic Summer, least. Despite its having won the 2021 Booker Prize, I feel only a tenuous connection to The Promise.

The novel is about the disintegration of a white South African family over 30 years. It returns to the family roughly every 10 years at the death of a family member.

Thirteen-year-old Amor Swart overhears her dying mother ask her father for a promise. Rachel wants Manie to give the house she’s living in to Salome, the servant who has cared for Rachel and brought up her children. Manie promises, but in the last few years he has fallen under the thumb of greedy Dominee Simmers, so he gives land to the church but does not fulfill his promise and gets angry when Amor asks him about it.

Amor’s brother Anton gives Amor mild support, but he is obsessed by having shot a woman recently during some civil unrest. When he returns to the army after the funeral, he decides to desert.

Nine years later, both siblings return to the family for their father’s funeral. Amor wonders whether the promise will now be kept.

This novel is narrated omnisciently, but the point of view occasionally shifts from one character to another and from one scene to another without warning. It also sometimes takes on a folksy tone, as if the narrator is a storyteller talking directly to the reader.

I felt a lot of distance from Galgut’s characters. The only really sympathetic characters are Amor and Salome, but Salome is only there on the edges—treated in this novel much like she would have been in real life—and Amor is not much of a presence in the novel. We are told she is kind and easy to talk to, but we are not privy to many of her thoughts or or actions as we are to those of some of the other (male) characters. Perhaps that’s why I felt so much distance from the novel.

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Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #16 Private Enterprise + #15 Peace Breaks Out Wrap-up

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Thanks to everyone who participated in reading Peace Breaks Out, the last of this series set during World War II. Those who participated were

The next book is Private Enterprise. I’ll be posting my review on Friday, September 30. Now, we’re getting into new waters, because I think that of the rest of the novels, I have only read one or two. I hope some of you will read along occasionally.

And here’s our badge.

Review 2023: Satin Island

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I haven’t seen anyone say this when I looked at reviews to try to make sense of Satin Island, but the thought that occurred to me was that after a deadpan beginning, the novel becomes an exercise in Absurdism. If that’s not the actual intent, then I don’t see the point in it, which may be the point.

The narrator, U, is a “corporate anthropologist,” whose job at a large, influential corporation seems to be to observe and connect and deconstruct all activity. He has been tasked by the gnomic head of the corporation—who is known for his aphorisms, most of which seem meaningless, at least to me—to write a report encapsulating everything in contemporary life. This is a task that I immediately thought was impossible, but it takes U two-thirds of the book to figure that out. In the meantime, he spends his time daydreaming about oil spills and parachute deaths.

Aside from his work life, he has one friend, Petr, and an enigmatic lover, Madison. But these characters seem incidental and their parts degenerate into absurdity.

I almost stopped reading this novel several times during the first half, when it seemed to be taking seriously some of its meaningless statements, for example, about the corporation’s logo of a ruined tower, “The first move for any strategy of cultural production . . . must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness.” At first, U treats such utterances with complete seriousness, but he becomes more cynical.

Later, the reading became easier and there was almost a plot, but eventually the novel just seems to peter out. Despite liking McCarthy’s novel C well enough, I read this novel with a distinct lack of excitement for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2022: Literary Wives! Red Island House

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

My Review

It seems I’ve been reading books set on islands lately—Greenland, Manhattan, and now Madagascar. Like Madagascar, Red Island House is lush and mysterious, the story of a disintegrating marriage.

Shay comes to the Red House newly married to Senna. They seem an inexplicable couple. She is an American of mixed race, educated, thoughtful, tall, and beautiful. He is much older, short, white, Italian, uneducated, and self-made wealthy, also loud and impulsive. On impulse, he has bought this oceanfront property on a small island off Madagascar. He has built an overpowering but beautiful house, which will be the Senna’s summer home.

In this novel constructed of short stories, Lee tells the story of the Sennas’ marriage in terms of their relationship to the house. Shay feels sympathy for the Malagasy people, and is torn by the feeling that her situation in this huge house waited on by many servants in one of the poorest nations in the world is not very far from colonialism. Thus, from the first, she has an ambivalent relationship with her own role as mistress of the house.

The novel begins with Shay’s understanding that the man Senna has hired to manage the house, Kristos, is her enemy. When the Sennas are in the house, her husband spends a lot of time with Kristos, off fishing and probably carousing, and after Senna has been around Kristos for a while, he snaps and shouts at Shay. Shay is conscious of disappearing goods and money, but when she tries to talk to Senna, he is rude and dismissive. On the surface polite, Kristos undercuts her.

Shay learns from the housekeeper, Bertine, that Kristos, who has contacts in bad places, is using magic against her. So, Bertine takes Shay to see the Neighbor.

As in each story Lee explores some colorful character or incident, the novel covers 30 years in the Sennas’ marriage. Shay’s relationship with the island gains ambivalence after the couple converts the Red House into a bed and breakfast, and it slowly becomes the haunt of Senna’s male friends, who shift their focus from fishing to teenage sex workers as they age.

The novel is gorgeously exotic, serious, and eloquent. It’s about race, class, hope, betrayal, and the couple’s finally divisive approaches to moral problems.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

Lee uses Shay’s relationship to the Red House as a symbol for the Sennas’ marriage. In the beginning of the novel, the couple goes to see its foundation on their honeymoon, and at the end of the novel, she makes a last visit to it to say goodbye to it and her marriage, and I think to meet its inheritor, her husband’s illegitimate son by a Malagasy prostitute.

I find Shay and Senna an inexplicable couple from the beginning. They are such opposites that it’s hard to believe they would even like each other, let alone love each other, but we are informed that they do. And they remain married quite a long time, although Shay has to overlook a lot.

Lee tracks the relationship to the house in one insightful chapter at the end, where she takes it through the newness of the honeymoon period through the burgeoning of having children and farther until it becomes a fantasy playhouse for a bunch of pathetic, randy old men—Senna being one of them.

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Shay’s relationship to Senna also varies as she considers the role she has taken at the Red House. She is too informed about her family’s and race’s past heritage in slavery to feel comfortable in what she sees as a colonial role in Madagascar. Although she feels she can’t understand the country, she understands it much better than Senna, who views it as a place of fantasy. As he spends more time there, she spends less.

Shay is an independent woman, so it beats me why she doesn’t leave Senna earlier. We are told she has been coached by her Italian friends to accept his infidelities, but it isn’t until she has that burst of hurt and jealousy toward the end of the novel that we understand there is still a lot of feeling there.

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Review 2021: A House in the Country

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All during the war, Ruth, her husband, four friends, and the Adam children have been stuffed into an uncomfortable house in London, suffering privations of every sort. As early as 1941, they all began dreaming of taking a house in the country together, where they could have space, good food, and plenty of fresh air for the children. At the end of the war, Ruth finds an ad for a large house in Kent, 33 rooms. They go to see it and fall in love.

They figure that with their combined incomes, they can barely afford it. Ruth will do the housekeeping. The house comes with Howard, a handyman/gardener who has lived there most of his life and whose assistance proves invaluable.

Adam lets us know right away that this plan doesn’t work, but the descriptions of the beauties of the landscape and garden sometimes made me forget this. Written with a deadpan humor, the autobiographical novel tracks the ups and downs of this experience, through employment issues, attempts at agriculture, paying guests, house sharing. But as Adam repeatedly states, the house was built to be served, not to serve.

The story of the hapless occupants is funny and touching. I found it fascinating.

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Review 2020: #ThirkellBar! Peace Breaks Out

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Although Peace Breaks Out begins by returning to Anne Fielding, now almost 19, who was Miss Bunting’s student in the last book, it spends a lot of time with the Leslie family, whom we have encountered in several of the books. Anne has just met Sylvia Halliday, a beautiful, golden girl a few years older, and shortly thereafter, both girls come to the attention of David Leslie.

At 37, David should have toned down his tricks, but he hasn’t, so Anne is smitten while the older Sylvia’s reaction is a bit harder to ascertain. Anne’s being smitten puts her friend Robin Dale in a funk, which is good because he was tending to take her for granted. And David seems to be almost seriously considering her as a wife.

For the first time, we get a true sense of how tired the British are with the living conditions of the war. This is expressed by being upset about the peace, which makes conditions even worse.

In this novel, readers meet or hear of almost all of the main characters from the previous novels. Rose Fairweather, in all her beautiful idiocy, reappears from America, and more importantly, Rose Bingham, a Leslie cousin who we saw a bit of on the occasion of the other Rose’s wedding, returns from the continent.

It’s really been useful for me to have begun reading these novels in order. I only wish I had started out making charts of characters’ relationships, what books they appeared in, and some notes about each one.

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Review 2019: Edith Trilogy Read-Along: Cold Light

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In this third book of Moorhouse’s Edith trilogy, the League of Nations having closed and Edith’s hopes of getting a job with the United Nations dashed, Edith has decided to move back to Australia, thinking that Canberra will “snap her up.” (I was surprised that she thought this after her last job hunt in Australia.) Her husband Ambrose has managed to get a position with the British but is not happy to be there, and Edith has been back for months without any job offers. Her lack of an official title at the League, its spectacular failure, and sexism seem to be getting in her way.

Then her brother Frederick, who disappeared from the family 20 years ago, makes himself known to her. He is an organizer for the Communist party, a true believer. Talk is building up about banning the party in Australia, and in the U. S., Senator McCarthy is building power around this issue, so Edith isn’t sure what to do about Frederick and his girlfriend Janice.

Edith learns that the Canberra government isn’t hiring married women, but she eventually gets a temporary position organizing a conference about the design of the city. When the opportunity comes, she and Ambrose have just decided to move back to Europe and she thinks the job is beneath her, but by the end of the interview, she is sucked in. Of course, she uses this position to shoehorn herself into more opportunity.

I have been ambivalent about this series. At times, it is really interesting, while at other times it dwells too long on the details of some subject. For, continuing on with the theme of Edith being involved in world events of her time, there is a great deal of discussion of Communism from both sides as well as the ramifications of passing a law against it. (Edith has a long discussion with her old mentor, John Latham, a supreme court judge, who she believes voted wrongly on the issue, and it turns tedious.) The novel also deals with uranium and nuclear bombs vs. nuclear energy, as Edith makes herself an expert on uranium.

My other problem is that Edith has always seemed unconvincing to me as a woman. She is a bold and impulsive woman, true, but some of the things she does and the way she thinks don’t seem like the actions and thoughts of any woman I can imagine.

On a related issue, I was kind of fascinated by the cross-dressing aspect of her relationship to Ambrose and the emphasis on it—because there is no such emphasis on any of her other husbands. Robert is around for a millisecond, and she rarely mentions Richard after she marries him except in terms of his kids—not until she decides to leave him, at which point suddenly a chapter is devoted to their relationship.

Thinking about what Moorhouse chooses to talk about and what he ignores brought me to this conclusion. Authors often invest themselves in their characters by imagining that they are their main character (or some other). For a long time, I thought Moorhouse saw himself as Ambrose, but I finally decided that either he saw himself as both Ambrose and Edith herself or perhaps simply as Edith.

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Review 2018: A Death at Fountains Abbey

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Thomas Hawkins escaped from the gallows at the end of the last book in this series, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, but Queen Caroline is still holding a threat over him—her knowledge that his beloved Kitty is a murderess. The Queen has received a request for help from John Aislabie, who has been threatened by mysterious letters. But Aislabie was the mastermind behind the South Sea Company scam, and the Queen fears that he did not destroy the green ledger of its accounts, which would show how much the Crown gained from the scam while so many others were ruined. So, she sends Thomas ostensibly to help Aislabie but really to search for the ledger. He takes with him Kitty, who now poses as his wife, and his dangerous ward, Sam Fleet.

In Yorkshire, he finds Aislabie behaving like a victim of the South Sea scandal instead of its perpetrator, claiming he took the fall for more important people. Yet he seems to have plenty of money, which he is spending on his horses and his grounds. He is not well liked, claiming common land as his own and proclaiming as poachers the families that have farmed and hunted it for centuries. In fact, Thomas finds no lack of suspects for the nasty threats Aislabie has received.

Another strange situation concerns Mrs. Fairwood, who is living with the Aislabies. She has presented herself as his daughter, thought to have been killed in a house fire thirty years before. As her bona fides she has brought along a letter from a servant who disappeared on the day of the fire and a brooch that belonged to Aislabie’s first wife, who also died in the fire. Mrs. Fairwood is also being threatened.

This is another excellent mystery/thriller in this series with its scapegrace hero and heroine. The series books always seem carefully researched and the settings authentic. The ending is quite suspenseful.

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Review 2017: The Aeneid

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When I choose books for my Classics Club list, I try to pick some from very early times. This time I realized that although I knew of many of the stories of Achilles and Odysseus before reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, I knew nothing about that other great classic hero, Aeneus. So, I put The Aeneid on my list.

Regarding the translation, I had heard good things about the Fagles translations of several of these epics, and that was the one described on the library web page when I reserved the book. The translation I got, however, was by Sarah Ruden. Apparently, whoever picked this book off the shelves sees no difference (assuming they actually had the Fagles translation), which is odd for a librarian. I didn’t look into the reviews of this translator’s works, just read it, so I have no idea how that might have affected my enjoyment of the book. Suffice it to say that this version was easy to read and went relatively quickly.

Aeneus and his men are refugees from the fall of Troy who are looking for a place to settle. Prophecies have informed him that he will settle on the west coast of what is now Italy and found a great empire (Rome), but he is a long time getting there. Seven years is mentioned at one point.

In the beginning of the book, the Trojans’ ships are blown off course in a violent storm. Aeneus’s ship is separated from his father’s, but they all end up in Carthage. There Aeneus dabbles with Queen Dido and seriously considers staying, but a seer tells him to go to Italy, so he does, leaving some of his people behind. Poor Queen Dido stabs herself from sorrow. I don’t think he even bothers to say goodbye. What a guy!

I found the first half of the book fairly entertaining. There is a really creepy description of a visit to an oracle, maddened by her visions (and hydrogen sulfide gas, I presume), and not too much tedious listing. That changes with the departure for Italy, as Virgil names each man who comes along, including for some a brief history of their deeds. I envisioned Virgil making sure he has included the names of the ancestors of his potential patrons.

After that, as my husband and I say about ancient stories, “There’s a whole lot of smiting going on” as Aeneus and his men arrive in Italy and proceed to evict the inhabitants. And lots of it is gory. The gore didn’t bother me but the tedium of those described battles did.

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