Tag: contemporary fiction

Review 1827: The House Between Tides

~ whatmeread ~ 13 Comments

A house on an island separated from the main island by a causeway only open at low tide is the focus of this novel set in the Outer Hebrides. It’s a dual timeframe novel, which format I have to admit I am tiring of.

In 1910, Beatrice Blake arrives with her new husband, the famous artist Theo Blake, to his home on the island for the summer. In 2010, Hetty Devereaux has inherited the house and is considering turning it into a hotel.

Neither woman has made a good choice of partner. Theo thought Beatrice would drive away his thoughts of his first love Mailí but realizes very soon that she cannot compete and begins to neglect her. Hetty’s fiancé Simon has forced his way into her plans and has hired people to do surveys and look into such issues as financing before Hetty has even seen the property.

Both of these stories deal with how the property should be handled and how much claim the crofters have to the island, but in 2010, bones have been discovered under the foundation of the house. The 1910 story eventually reveals whose bones they are.

I found this novel interesting, and the descriptions of the island are lovely. However, even though I saw complaints about Hetty’s lack of backbone, I was more interested in the modern story than the older one. Possibly it’s because it was obvious to me why Theo is so interested in his factor’s son, Cameron, and also because I wasn’t interested in Beatrice’s romance. The final twist was obvious to me, although I didn’t figure out who the bones belonged to.

This novel is atmospheric but a little hackneyed, I think.

Related Posts

The Forgotten Garden

The Sea House

When They Lay Bare

Review 1822: Shuggie Bain

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

Shuggie Bain lives the first five or six years of his life in his grandparents’ flat in Glasgow with parents and older sister Catherine and brother Leek. The family is poor but respectable. His father Shug is a taxi driver, and his mother and grandmother keep a neat house. Shuggie’s mother Agnes is beautiful and always immaculately made up.

Shug is a horrible womanizer, though, and from jealousy Agnes hounds him by making calls to his dispatcher. Then Shug decides they should move to get a fresh start. What he describes as an outdoor paradise turns out to be a tiny shack next to a mine in a neighborhood built for miners’ families. But the mine is all but closed. It isn’t until the family unloads their possessions that they realize Shug’s aren’t among them. He has taken Agnes and her children out into the country to dump them.

Agnes descends into alcoholism, and as his older siblings grow old enough to leave, Shuggie is left trying to hide money for food, trying to keep Agnes’s drinking buddies out of the house, trying to get her to eat. All the while, he has a growing realization that he’s not like other boys. He likes pretty things and colors and is attracted to boys.

This novel is a moving and empathetic portrait of working-class Glasgow in the 1980’s, when there is not much hope for many people. It’s also a convincing depiction of the effects of alcoholism. It is absolutely gripping and heartbreaking. It was the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it deserves it.

A Little Life

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Crow Lake

Review 1819: Dirty Birds

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Just before I read Dirty Birds, I attempted to read Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, and I was surprised by the parallels. Both protagonists are on a quest to make a woman love them. Although Rushdie’s protagonist is old and Murray’s is young, both are naïve and deluded. Road trips are part of each novel, and so is satire—Rushdie’s for the cult of personality and big pharma, among other things, Murray’s for the Montreal art scene and the young man as artist. I found Murray’s book more successful and a lot funnier.

Milton Ontario is a hapless young man who is not only utterly average but characterized by the extent of his naiveté and inexperience. He gets an idea in his head that he wants to be a poet, even though he writes atrocious poetry (at first dedicated to the love of his life, Ashley, and later to the love of his life, Robin), so he sets out from his small town for Montreal and a tiny room he has rented sight unseen in a dilapidated, filthy house full of students and would-be artists. There he attempts to enter the art scene and falls in love with Robin, the maker of a seven-minute documentary entitled Dirty Birds, who is almost unaware of his existence.

Milton stumbles through a series of horrendous jobs horrendously performed and meets a cast of rowdy, raucous characters. He inadvertently starts a riot and gets to meet his hero, Leonard Cohen, only to find he is a mob boss (where I think the novel starts to go a bit astray). In among all this silly action is a series of footnotes enlightening us about the history of Canadian mistreatment of indigenous peoples, Newfies, and French-Canadians, among others.

Although I think it gets a little carried away with itself (and I didn’t like the part about the late, great Cohen), for the most part, this novel is a hoot.

Quichotte

Cluny Brown

The First Bad Man

Review 1816: Sight

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Hmmm. I find it hard to evaluate Sight because even though it explores very personal thoughts and feelings, it appealed mostly to my intellectual side not my emotion. And I have the greatest response to the latter. Some readers on Goodreads compared Greengrass to Rachel Cusk, and I can understand the comparison.

Sight is concerned with seeing below the surface, both in the obsessions of the main character and in the stories she tells about Roentgen, Freud, and John Hunter, an early anatomist. The unnamed character is at first painfully and neurotically conflicted about having a child, feeling the desire for the child while at the same time fearing the responsibilities of parenthood, but even more so fearing that she will not connect with her child. All the while, she lets us know that in another time she has already had this child and is expecting another one.

We learn that the narrator’s mother, the daughter of a psychiatrist who is an unrelenting self-analyst, had her dreams interrogated so thoroughly as a child that she stopped having them. Thus, her mother attempts to live only on the surface. Greengrass explores how we can know another person, or even ourselves, through the focus of motherhood, daughterhood, and through ruminations about scientific discoveries.

She writes in a lovely, meticulous prose, although she often prefers long, complicated sentences. Like her microscopic observations, though, her style seems distanced from the reader. I read this novel for my James Tait Black prize project.

Outline

4321

Umbrella

Review 1813: Literary Wives! I’m Fine and Neither Are You

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

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!

Literary Wives Needs Your Help!

Recently, we’ve had some members resign, and we will miss them. Now we feel we are getting a little small for a club unless we can recruit a few new members. If you are interested in becoming one, please let one of us know.

What Does Membership Involve?

Although we started out as all wives, that’s not a requirement. Now we would just like people who are interested in reading and discussing how literature depicts wives and marriage. You will need to have your own blog on which to post your reviews so that we can link to it. We read four books a year and try to post our reviews on the same day. These days are the first Monday in March, June, September, and December.

When Would I Begin Working with the Club?

Our next book review isn’t until June, so it’s up to you to decide how much time you need to finish the book. However, right now, we are just beginning to select books for the next couple of years. Members are more engaged at this time in looking at lists of books, reading about them, and voting for their choices. We only do this every other year, but we will begin this process as soon as we get new members.

My Review

What seems at first to be a funny chick lit novel becomes a little more serious with a plot twist. Lately Penelope Ruiz-Kar feels like she’s barely keeping her head above water. She’s the main supporter of her family while her husband Sanjay sells an occasional article. But her job as a fundraiser for a university is stressful and requires a lot of overtime. (Although, just a little comment. The character mentions 50 hours a week, which for people in high tech is not a lot of overtime. Things are changing, though, which is good.) Sanjay doesn’t pick up much of the slack at home, and her youngest child, Miles, wakes her up every night, having wet his bed. She just feels exhausted.

She envies her best friend Jenny Sweet, who seems to lead a perfect life. Although Jenny’s husband Matt travels a lot for work, he seems to adore her, and they are financially better off than the Kars. But Penelope’s illusions are shattered when Jenny dies of an accidental overdose of opiates. Penelope wonders how she could not have noticed that Jenny was in trouble.

When Matt tells Penny that his marriage was in terrible shape despite appearances, she begins to think she needs to work on hers. After a discussion with Sanjay, they decide to give each other a list of things they would like the other to change. I wonder how they thought that would turn out?

This novel is entertaining and well written, but despite a few glitches at first, it went for too easy resolutions. Everyone should have such a near-perfect husband. The end result felt like chick lit after all.

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

Literary Wives logo

Pagán picks a common problem—the difficulties of a working mother. And these difficulties seem realistically portrayed, especially for a woman whose husband’s role as a house husband has largely lapsed without his taking on other duties. This is a fairly good marriage despite the couple’s difficulties, because Sanjay reacts reasonably to Penny’s suggestions (there are many husbands who wouldn’t), and even though they’re in a slump, he’s affectionate to her. It is actually Penny’s personal problem that interferes most with her job and at home, and that’s her pretending everything is okay and not asking for what she needs.

The miracle, and the thing that seems a little unrealistic to me, is that when she begins asking, she begins getting what she needs.

Related Posts

Wife 22

Dept. of Speculation

On Beauty

Review 1800: The Midnight Library

~ whatmeread ~ 16 Comments

I am usually fairly good at spotting books I’m just not going to like without reading them, but I try to keep an open mind. Sometimes I am surprised if I do read one, as I was when I read Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Sometimes I am not.

Nora Seed’s life started out with a lot of promise, but for one reason or other she quit doing all the things she’s good at. Haig begins with a countdown of days and hours before she decides to commit suicide. Having taken an overdose, she ends up in a library of all the lives she could have had, free to try some of them out.

I kept my patience and read through the first alternative life, about a quarter of the book. Then I quit.

Why didn’t I like it? Let me count the ways:

  1. The horrible sprightly tone with which it discusses a character who is so miserable she is suicidal
  2. The choppy rhythm of its writing. Almost every sentence begins subject verb subject verb, more like a children’s book than an adults’.
  3. The lack of character depth, or really any personality at all
  4. The lack of any kind of depth or subtlety
  5. The confused and poorly thought out working of the library
  6. Pretty much everything else about the book

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

A Man Called Ove

The Virgin Suicides

Review 1791: The Lighthouse

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Hapless Futh is recently separated from his wife and is taking a vacation that he is ill prepared for—a walking trip in Germany when he hasn’t been hiking in decades. This holiday, like many things in his life, he has chosen because it reminds him of one of the few happy times with his father. Personally, he seldom picks up on nuances and misses many things.

After a series of odd encounters on the North Sea ferry and in the Netherlands, Futh arrives at the starting point of his walking tour—Hellhaus. There, a misunderstanding at his hotel results in his being ejected before breakfast. He has arranged his tour in a circle with his luggage being transported day by day to the next hotel, so he must return to Hellhaus.

As he proceeds on his tour, contemplating his mother, who left him and his father when Futh was a young boy, and the history of his marriage, we check in periodically with Ester, the landlady of the hotel in Hellhaus. Even though her husband is jealous, she occasionally sleeps with the guests. Years ago, she left her fiancé for his brother Bernard, but now she feels unappreciated.

These are sad, gray lives. Even so, this novel is oddly compelling, and my feeling of dread built with every step back toward Hellhaus. It is also elegantly spare in style.

I read this novel for my Booker project.

Swimming Home

Hot Milk

Umbrella

Review 1777: In the Eye of the Sun

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Best of Ten!

Recently, I remembered liking Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, so I decided to see if she had written anything else. What I turned up was In the Eye of the Sun, which her Wikipedia page confusingly calls her debut novel, even though she wrote one earlier.

In the Eye of the Sun is the story of the maturing of a young Egyptian woman, told over a period of 13 years. The daughter of two university professors, Asya wants to get a Ph.D. in English literature and teach at Cairo University. The novel looks back to 1979 when she is studying for her General Certificate of Secondary Education before beginning at the university and follows her until shortly after she finishes her Ph.D.

Although the novel deals with many subjects—cultural collision, Near Eastern politics, family, sexuality among them—it primarily concerns Asya’s relationship with Saif, who eventually becomes her husband. Asya meets Saif early in her university career and falls madly in love with him. The two want to marry, but her parents insist that they wait until she graduates. They don’t even allow them to become engaged for a couple of years.

At first, their relationship is intense, even though it does not involve intercourse because Saif wants to wait. However, Asya feels him pulling away from her as soon as they are engaged. She has caught him in a few pointless lies, but she doesn’t challenge him with them. However, he stops wanting to discuss anything of substance. Asya does not attempt any kind of discussion of these issues, though, before they are married. Nor does she discuss them with anyone else.

At their marriage, things become even more complicated, because Asya finds sex so painful that after a few attempts Saif stops trying. They never fully consummate their marriage. Even when Asya begs him to try, Saif seems more content to treat her as a sort of doll, picking out clothes and buying jewelry for her. Their marriage becomes even more difficult when he takes a job in Syria while she goes to attend a university in Northern England. There, she finds the surroundings cold and uncongenial and her studies in linguistics difficult.

This novel is quite long, but it is involving and extremely honest. Although a primarily sympathetic character, Asya can be quite annoying in her personal contradictions, for she doggedly continues intellectual disagreements while seldom broaching personal issues. She is brilliant while being occasionally terribly neurotic. I strongly felt that this was an autobiographical novel. If so, Soueif’s honesty is extraordinary.

The Map of Love

The Wife

Under the Lemon Trees

Review 1776: Strangers

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Anita Brookner is a writer I’ve sometimes considered reading but never have until now. I read Strangers for my James Tait Black project.

Paul Sturgis is a 72-year-old bachelor who leads a routine life. He has always wanted a family, but after his last girlfriend, Sarah, left him, he resigned himself to bachelorhood. Since his retirement, he has felt lonely and purposeless. He routinely visits an elderly cousin, but he always feels that he bores her. She asks him no questions and constantly talks about her social engagements.

He takes a trip to Venice and meets Vicky Gardner, a woman some years younger than he. In London they meet again and develop a sort of acquaintance that is characterized again by her talking about herself and asking favors but not asking about him. She is a free spirit of no fixed abode who asks him to take charge of some luggage.

He also meets his old girlfriend Sarah again. She is now a widow, and although she is 10 years younger than he, she has changed from an active, decisive woman to an old lady who is always thinking of her health. She also never asks him any questions.

Most of this novel is concerned with Paul’s ruminations about his situation and the past and his yearning for real company and a different kind of life. Although it is well written, it seemed slow moving and repetitive. The cover reviews refer to its wry humor, but I guess I missed it, because it just seems sad. Paul is eventually galvanized into action, but it takes a long time, and I’m not convinced that the new life he chooses will be much different from the old one.

Sweetland

The New Sweet Style

Outline

Review 1775: My Lover’s Lover

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

At the beginning of My Lover’s Lover, I thought O’Farrell was writing an updated version of Rebecca, and indeed she references the movie early in the book. However, if she had that in mind at all, she moves away from it.

Lily meets Marcus at a party and feels an attraction to him. When he mentions that he needs a flat mate, she asks if she can take the room. However, when she goes to see it, she is surprised to find it still full of another woman’s possessions. She takes the room in the renovated Victorian warehouse with Marcus and his friend Aidan, but she becomes obsessed with Marcus’s old lover, Sinead. Although he refuses to talk about Sinead, Lily understands him to have told her Sinead is dead. Once Lily and Marcus become lovers, Sinead begins haunting her, appearing in the flat.

But Sinead isn’t dead. Once Lily finds that out, she goes to see her to ask her what happened. Then the story is told of the beginning and the end of their relationship.

This is another beautifully written, insightful tale by O’Farrell. Sadly, I think I have now read all her books. I’m going to have to wait for the next one to come out.

After You’d Gone

The Distance Between Us

This Must Be the Place