Category: Book Reviews (Page 32 of 45)

This book is as charming as its cover! De Bernieres’ collection of short stories showcases the eccentrics of a fictional English village named Notwithstanding. It’s a wistful look at the village’s inhabitants, who, according to the afterword, are based on De Bernieres’ childhood neighbours in Surrey: “the belligerent spinsters, the naked generals, the fudge-makers, the people who talked to spiders.”

One of my favourite characters is the “hedging and ditching” man who is constantly reflecting on the objects he discovers in the muck of the ditches. “The generally credited rumour was that he was the wealthy scion of an aristocratic family, who hedged and ditched in order to escape the fathomless tedium of an idle life filled with scones and trivial conversations.” Eye roll. Of course. He couldn’t just be a hedging and ditching man.

Then there’s Mrs Mac, who talks to ghosts, and Peter, who catches the Girt Pike, and the auspicious encounters of the famous Notwithstanding wind quartet.

I’m a fan of short stories and these interconnected tales tell a charming and witty history of a handful of quaint villagers who are a curiosity to everyone but themselves.

Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernieres (author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin)
Published by Vintage

Idaho Winter is one of those books that is going to mess with your mind. The cover makes it seem like it’s a reprint of a book published in the 40s or 50s. The opening scene is reminiscent of Harry Potter, in that Idaho is the boy cramped in a tiny room and unloved by his family, and Back to the Future, where McFly is bullied by Biff. Like Harry Potter, the reader learns what’s happening at the same as Harry does. In this case, the reader learns what’s happening at the same time as the author, who is our narrator and main protagonist, that is once it switches from Idaho. Very post modern. Like Back to the Future, Marty McFly can mess things up and prevent his parents from getting together. In this case, the author, or any character, could, and has, messed things up.

Confused? Let me tell you a little about the story.

Idaho gets beaten up, flees to the river, where he finds Madison, who wants to be his friend, but the kids, dogs and adults of the town chase him down and sic the dogs on him. But the dogs get Madison instead. Then Idaho becomes a giant and there are Mom-bats and secret caves and people turn into chocolate. Not kidding.

Idaho Winter is one of the most bizarre books I’ve ever read. I don’t mean that critically either. Do you know how dream stories are bizarre when told in the light of day? Well, that’s Idaho Winter. Characters morph into other characters. Perspective changes. Landscape shifts and changes. Things that are unexplainable make perfect sense, at the time.

Related Links:
Amazon Search Inside
Buy the Book from Publisher ECW Press
More reviews on GoodReads

Mary-Ann Kirkby is a fantastic writer. Her first book is I Am Hutterite, which chronicles her childhood experience living on a Hutterite colony and her family’s integration into community life off the colony in the 1970s. It’s jarring and enlightening for both the reader and the 10-year-old version of Mary-Ann in the book.

In 1969, Mary-Ann was happily living on a Hutterite colony near Portage la Prairie, MB, which is about a hour drive from Winnipeg. With seven children in the family and an insular lifestyle, Mary-Ann’s family is representative of the Hutterite families I knew growing up.

In case you’re not from that part of the world, the prairies are home to the largest concentration of Hutterites in the world. They dress very conservatively, with women wearing handkerchiefs and long dresses. The community lives together and shares resources, including childcare, food preparation, farming and manufacturing. Like the Amish and Mennonites, they trace their roots to the Radical Reformation of the 16th century and most of their beliefs and practices have been passed down through the centuries.

Mary-Ann’s portrayal of life on the colony is certainly an eye opener. I only visited 1 colony growing up and was at a teenage stage where I couldn’t imagine having grade 12 education and then cooking and cleaning for the rest of my life. My other experiences were with kids whose families had left the colony or with young men from the colony who would visit with my step-father to discuss farming and to sneak in a little bit of hockey watching in our family room.

Mary-Ann’s insights open up that world and the hierarchal structures in a way that is charming and enlightening. Her take on both colony life and off-the-colony communities was interesting to me since I’ve been hearing more Canadians talking about “co-housing” and other options for community life. Mary-Ann’s portrayal of the traditions of colony life offer interesting checks and balances to those co-housing models. But, back to Mary-Ann and her book …

In Mary-Ann’s case, her parents decided in 1969 that the support of the colony was no longer viable for them. Intolerance and mistrust forced their hand and they moved off the colony. The majority of the book chronicles life on the colony, with the final quarter or so being about Mary-Ann’s trials and tribulations trying to figure out how to fit in with the English kids at school. Not only is clothing different but lunch, dancing, and social structures are fraught with misunderstandings–all of it is at times overwhelming to her.

Since the release of I Am Hutterite in June 2007, the self-published book has sold 75,000 copies and surely deserves to sell more. A great book. You can buy the book here.

While recovering from my head cold on the weekend, I was looking for an escape novel. Something fun to read. I wasn’t convinced that this book was going to be fun considering it’s called The Solitude of Thomas Cave. Doesn’t promise a rollickin’ time, does it? But I was hoping it would be well written and worth the time investment. And it is.

The Solitude of Thomas Cave is a survival story. As I tried to make it to the 4-hour mark when I could have another dose of Tylenol sinus, my hero was trying to survive the elements on a remote island in the Arctic in 1616. Dear Thomas is left there by his whaling crew, and quite purposely. The whaling ship Heartsease ventures each year into the Arctic and returns home with their bounty of whale meat and blubber. On 1616 tour, Thomas calls out Mate Carnock as he mocks William Sherwyn’s tale of a sailor abandoned in the North who survives the year. What’s called into question is whether it’s possible for a man to survive. Thomas decided that he will take the wager that he can stay and survive a year until the crew’s return.

This is a literary castaway story about the lonely realities of living amongst humans and the vulnerabilities of living among nature. Left to fend against blizzards, avalanches, bears, and his own misery over the lost of his wife and baby son, Thomas reasons his way through the days, trying not to be taken in by the phantoms around him.

I was on cold medication, but I’m certain this was a beautifully told story of survival.

The Solitude of Thomas Cave
by Georgina Harding
Published by Bloomsbury
This seems to be the latest edition on Amazon.ca

I know Michael Chabon’s work only because of his Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but I recently borrowed a copy of The Final Solution: A Story of Detection from my friend Julie, who enjoyed the novel, as did I.

The Final Solution is a quirky little detective novel, sort of like a pop culture version of a Sherlock Holmes tale. Although, it is set during WWII so maybe not “pop culture” but more pop than Sherlock. Like Sherlock, Chabon’s detective spends his retired days tending to his bees. (In fact, perhaps Chabon’s 89-year-old detective is the great Sherlock Holmes.)

This caper involves a 9-year-old, mute, dyslexic Jewish refugee and his African grey parrot who is prone to singing and repeating numeric sequences. There’s a murder, the parrot goes missing and old man “Sherlock” goes to work on the case.

A pretty fun way to spend a Sunday.

The Final Solution on Amazon.ca

Have you heard of Madras Press? They are the publisher of Andrew Kaufman’s story The Tiny Wife but, most important, they publish small square books and donate the proceeds to charities nominated by their authors. Very cool.

Now, Kaufman is one of my favourite authors. His two previous books, All My Friends are Superheroes and The Waterproof Bible, are top reads on my list. I was really excited to get this book!

The Tiny Wife begins with a bank robbery.

Quote: The robbery was not without consequences, the consequences were the point of the robbery. It was never about money. The thief didn’t even ask for any. That it happened in a bank was incidental. It could have just as easily happened in a train station or a high school or the Musee d’Orsay …

‘While this is a robbery …’ the thief said. ‘I demand only one thing from each of you and it is this: the item currently in your possession which holds the most sentimental value.’

Now, what would you hand over?

For the narrator’s wife it was a calculator. I’ll leave you to read the story to understand why, but the consequences are that she starts to shrink. Although this is alarming, it’s not as alarming to me as the character whose lion tattoo comes to life to chase her around the city.

But I don’t want to give anything away so what you should do is go to Madras Press and pay the full $7 for this awesome work. The sales benefit SKETCH, a community arts initiative in Toronto.

UPDATE: Andrew Kaufman’s The Tiny Wife is available from Cormorant Books

Andrea Levy’s 4th novel, Small Island, which won her the Orange Prize, was one of my favourite books of all time. In that novel, the Jamaican heroine finds herself in post-war London speaking a version of the Queen’s English that is unfamiliar to her English neighbours. It’s a story of prejudice and isolation as well as love and acceptance.

In The Long Song, Levy brings us to the Jamaica of the 1830s, which is full of unrest and slavery. On the sugar plantation Amity, our heroine, named July, is a mulatto born to a slave named Kitty and a Scottish overseer, Tam Dewar, who has taken advantage of his position. July is a force to be reckoned with. She is pulled into the household as a lady’s maid and we follow the drama that comes with that position.

What I loved about this novel was the post-modern nature of the narrator chatting to the reader about the consequences of writing such a tale, and the interventions by her son, the editor of her tale.

Overall, it’s good. I liked it a lot.

Related links:
Globe and Mail review
Amazon with a video of Andrea Levy talking about the book

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon has sat on my bookshelf since January 2008. Then I almost gave up on it after 100 pages.

Raimund Gregorius teaches classical languages at a Swiss lycee and has an otherwise routine, and dull, existence. Until one day, walking to school, he encounters a Portuguese woman on a bridge who is so distraught that Gregorius believes she’s going to jump. Instead she tears up a letter, throws it over the edge, panics and writes a phone number of Gregorius’ forehead.

Sometimes the smallest things change us, sometimes the most bizarre.

The encounter rattles Gregorius out of his quotidian life and he ends up on a night train to Lisbon, where he proceeds to re-construct the life of Amadeu de Prado, a doctor conflicted by religion, love, friendship, dictatorship and betrayals of many kinds. Based only on a slim volume of Prado’s published work, Gregorius finds family members, neighbours, and friends who all contribute bits and pieces to his patchwork understanding of what made Amadeu de Prado tick. Thankfully Prado was an interesting a guy.

I can’t match up my feelings of the book with the blurbs.

“A book of astonishing richness … visionary … a deserved international smash.” , Le Canard encha√Æne

“One reads this book almost breathlessly, can hardly put it down … A handbook for the soul, intellect and heart.” , Die Welt

I don’t share the enthusiasm of the French and German reviewers of the time, but Mercier has certainly provided a philosophical tale of repression, resistance and the struggle of men to achieve something memorable. I made it all the way through the book because of Amadeu. Gregorius’ measured uncovering of this figure was rewarding. There are lots of passages that are still resonating with me, but overall this was a slow read.

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a New York Times bestseller, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman was certainly on my radar as a book that I missed reading in 2010. The first I heard of it was actually in a holiday round-up by the Guardian, then it appeared in other round-ups and the next thing I knew, Tom Rachman was doing a reading at my local bookstore, Ardea Book & Art.

So Tom, let’s see what you’ve got.

The Imperfectionists is a series of linked stories that together form a novel. The characters are various staff members of an English-language newspaper in Rome. Each character is imperfect in his or her own way, as is the newspaper they run.

The table of contents is pretty clever:

Quote:
“BUSH SLUMPS TO NEW LOW IN POLLS”
Paris Correspondent, Lloyd Burko

“WORLD’S OLDEST LIAR DIES AT 126”
Obituary Writer, Arthur Gopal

“EUROPEANS ARE LAZY, STUDY SAYS”
Business Reporter, Hardy Benjamin

…

Some of the stories were pretty brilliant. My favourites being the interspersed italicized stories of the paper’s original publisher, Cyrus Ott.

The novel, overall, was memorable, but I felt like Rachman’s writing was trying too hard to be clever. Its jolts of insight are many and often back to back, which at times is like reading a series of Jon Stewart intros.

The NY Times review highlights most of the characters and provides a good sense of the novel. I found it enjoyable, and kind of like a newspaper in that some articles are more intriguing than others.

The Imperfectionists: a novel by Tom Rachman
(Published by Anchor Canada)

The Hunger Games trilogy is LOST meets Man Tracker meets Big Brother. In this post-apocalyptic world, North America is now Panem, a nation with a Capitol district and 12 outlying districts, each in charge of providing something to the Capitol, like agriculture, electronics, or weapons. As a measure to remind the districts of the rebellion of District 13 and the consequences of that defiance, each year the districts offer up two children, a boy and a girl, who participate in a televised fight to death. Only 1 can be named the victor, and they and their family get extra food for the upcoming year.

It’s cruel and awful, yet is a spectacle that glues Capitol residents to the tv (who are exempt) and equally engages the districts as they fearfully watch the fate of their loved ones.

The trilogy follows 16-year-old Katness Everdeen through the ordeal of 2 Hunger Games and an even deadlier match that pits the districts against the Capitol. Survival of the fittest is often about compassion, humanity, loyalty, friendship and compromise.

I really can’t tell you much about the series without giving away the plot, but it is riveting. I found the second book a bit formulaic in that the structure and outcome is much like the first, but it’s like Lord of the Rings in that you need a middle that bridges the beginning and end, which isn’t a weakness to the narrative at all.

If you missed the first round of fandom regarding this series, you might want to read it before the movie trailers hit and you’re inundated with the Hollywood version of these characters.