Book Reviews

Book Review #40: The Glass Room

September 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

I took this away on holiday to read for the Love-a-Book group. I’m really enjoying having books I ‘have’ to read each month. It has been another good way of stretching my limits. Next year, when I’m released from trying to read 60 different authors (looking a tad optimistic tbh) I can go back and pick up more from the people I have enjoyed this year. After several years of sticking within a very few authors, this is good for me 🙂 I’m tempted to try to read my way through the Book or Orange Prize short lists or something too, just to make myself become properly well read. Chick Lit really doesn’t cut the mustard these days.

Anyway, The Glass Room is a fictionalised account of the history of this house in Czechoslovakia (as was). It describes the relationship of a couple (who the author says are fictional rather than a description of the real versions) who build the house in a fictional town, in the run up to the second world war. The book itself is a study in the ideas of contemporary art, relationships between people governed by ideals, the concept of a sort of non spiritually based asceticism, architecture, family and friendship ties, marriage, politics – the themes are a bit endless to be honest. It’s all done through a kind of frosted glass filter of this minimalist house designed to strip away all ornament and fafferery, all nods to the past and all romance. The story at it’s most basic level is how this house, an actual representation of the ideals they say they aim to live by, actually affect themselves and their friends and the way they interact.

In a nutshell, the story follows this group of people through pre-war, occupation, wartime, two Czech revolutions and into the present, with the house as a touch stone (a cold and unemotional one!) for them all. There is the story of a Jewish family, the Nazi’s, scientific and genetic idealism, capitalism and communism, rebirth in terms of the house and also how they all survive such turbulent times. It’s complicated, long and one of the problems I had with it was that he so successfully infuses the novel with the artistic ideal of the theme, that it is really hard to care about that characters. He almost too successfully makes the cold people cold, the hardened indifferent and the colourful loveable. They all feel real, but I didn’t feel much like I cared if any of them made it. This was no Charlotte Grey; I didn’t weep for even the deserving Kata, much less some of the more central characters.

I spent a bit of time wondering why this was. In fact, I think it comes down to very personal affiliations and likes. For one, I am not fond of that style of architecture or art, nor really people who admire it and live by it. For another, I had the great fortune to travel a lot in Europe as a teenager and I must admit I found the ageing, rotting carcasses of such buildings to be a bit of a landscape blot. They do nothing for me; I’m all about beauty and ornament and history and passion. I spent a few week in Germany when I was 14, living with a family and attending a school; both home and school had the sculpted, simplistic, artistic thing going on and I found it cold and uninspiring. I’ll say many things about my school, but it was warm and beautiful and far more inspiring than any rectangle of glass and concrete ever could be for me.

Part of those trips abroad – and indeed my childhood – had much to do with Czechoslovakia. Through his work my dad knew several people living there during Russian occupation, was indeed asked to help people escape. We went to stay there for a week when the last revolution was only over by 6 months. I watched the daughter of our host, 8 years old, spit in the road at a Russian soldier. I saw my host stare across the field at the back of his home and claim not to be able to see the war planes taking off there. I saw the empty shops, the beautiful buildings of Prague held up with wooden scaffolding and with concrete flyovers built through them to humiliate ornate squares and historical architecture. I was asked to sell my trainers and saw Emmanuel XXX on at the cinema, capitalism seeping back in.

They were not a passionless people; they were not people who shrugged at history and beauty. They were not even a people worn flat by Communism, as the books younger characters seem to be by the end. I think the fictional builders of the glass house were perhaps a minority and in my head I think I felt they were rather betraying their wonderful heritage by dismissing it. It made them hard to like, hard to care for and hard to mind about what befalls them all.

That said, though I initially gave the book 3/5, I upgraded it to 4/5. I might not quite have liked it, but it was a good book. It was well written, interesting, something I would recommend. It just did what it set out to do a little too well, a little too coldly. I like to weep for my characters and to be honest, by the end of this, I could barely remember their names.

Books #38 & #39: More Chalet Books.

September 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Not going into detail with these, but just for the record….

Deira joins the Chalet School – a Caroline German fill in and really excellent. Liked it very much indeed. Caroline, you really are good! Am loving seeing those early years in the tyrol filled in and fleshed out 🙂

Ruey Richardson – Chaletian; I had the abridged 1980’s paperback of this and always liked it best as one of the Swiss ones (which are not generally so good really). Reading the full text was interesting. Mostly it was either religious references, filling out characters and relationships or talk of uniforms. I love that FOCS and GGB have added forwards and articles to these books and the addition of a an article on uniform in schools was great – thank you 🙂

Book Review #37: Last Train from Liguria

September 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Another of my 99p Kindle downloads for the summer, Last Train from Liguria turned out to be the perfect (for me) summer holiday read. It was one of those books which manages to be moving and interesting and yet also gentle and I enjoyed it very much, giving it a 4/5 on Goodreads and Amazon. Yes, I’ve done that a fair bit recently, but I’ve been choosing good books 😉

The story starts by meeting two characters who become central to the plot, both at the end of a period in their lives which has been unsatisfactory or alarming and makes them ready to move on. there are elements of both these characters that you never learn more about, adding a sense of the “snippet of time” theme of the book. A bad back, an eating disorder, a dead sister – all hinted at but unexplained – just part of the baggage people have when they are 30 or so. It moves quickly to Italy, both of them having journeys that in many ways define their personalities, and establishes them in the household of a wealthy and, as it turns out, Jewish, family in Italy during the late 1930’s.

Unsurprisingly the book explores the experience of Jews as Mussolini and Hitler grow in power but also the relationships between the people of the house and family, the love their share for their young charge and the stifling experience of living abroad during times of trouble. It’s a book of understated emotion, of stiff upper lips contrasted with hot and hazy southern European days and the tyranny of idealism and excellent for it.

Interestingly the most dramatic element of the book, one that if it were a film might encompass far more of the action, comes near the end and occupies a very tiny chunk of the narrative. But then, I suppose, life changing events are often like that – just a snippet of life, a moment, that changes everything.

I’d definitely recommend this as a read. it’s not exactly unpredictable but it is well written and moving and definitely a slightly new take of that whole war time troubles scenario.

Book Review #36: Pigeon English

August 22, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

I feel like I should preface this by apologising for giving it 3/5 on Goodreads. I’ve read a lot of very good, extremely enjoyable books this year, perhaps partly because I vet my choices quite closely and so have ended up awarding lots of 4 or 5 out of 5’s over there.? And Pigeon English WAS good, very good in fact and well deserving of its awards and acolades so far.

The book is written from the point of view of Year 7 Harri, a recently arrived new resident of London who previously lived in Ghana. He’s adapting to a new life, missing his old one (though he is relentlessly positive) and missing his Papa and sister who have not yet come over. His mother is a midwife working hard to pay off a dubious financial arrangement which got them here, his sister is his ally but also struggling to cope with the pressures of teen life in inner-city London. Their relationship is touching in the extreme, perhaps the most identifiable element of the story; they alternately? support each other and try to sit on one anothers head when they drive each other mad. As Lydia gets sucked into gangland secrets, Harri skates along the side of them; he knows that bad things happen, the story opens with him seeing the body of a young friend of his who has become a stabbing fatality, but he has yet to work out that it is not all a game.

The best of this book is the? use of language between the boys Harri is friends with and the portrayal of tower block, inner city life among warring groups who make fights and enemies for something to do. there is no clear criminal activity at fault, no obvious drugs, nothing more than petty theft; what happens is very much the result of boredom, small lives without enough meaning or interest and environments where anything good gets destroyed. Harri is lovely; even when he misbehaves, you just want to whip him away to a place where is soul will be safe, he is likeable and genuine and a proper hero of the story, a champion who knows what is right but is young enough to be swept along on the edges of the politics of where he has found himself. When he gave his sister her birthday present I could have wept for them both; it was a powerful reminder of how innocent children stay even when bad things are happening and how very wrong indeed things have gone when children stop behaving with a moral compass. And I thought the game he and his friend played, investigating the death of the boy, was very clever. You watch him dance ever closer to the truth, knowing he’s stepping on the toes of danger and also knowing that he doesn’t see it – neither of them are old enough to see that their game is a threat to the people around them.

Perhaps that last point made the book hardest for me. I read it when the riots were happening and it was just too painful an illustration of the whys of that. The riots were so impossibly sad, it was so grim to watch kids no older than my eldest two behaving so thuggishly and this book is similarly difficult to read, if like me you are a lucky middle classed person with children who might have had traumas, but are not broken by them. The reason for that lost point was that I didn’t really enjoy it for that very reason; it just hurt a bit too much to face up to that reality. It was a good read certainly, interesting, thought provoking and well written (although I think the criticism I have read that it is rather ‘self-conscious’ is also a fair one) but a book with such painful subject matter is hard to ‘enjoy’. But I recommend it – and if like me you have a teen who has been interested and thoughtful about recent new stories of riots and stabbings, then I think you could hand it on to them too. But watch out for the ending – it will make you cry.

Read as the August LoveABook reading group book.

Book Reviews #26 & #35: Chalet School Fill Ins.

August 22, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

More for the record in my 60 books in a year challenge than anything else. I’m not expecting to inspire anyone to read Chalet books but they were a childhood love of mine and I still dip in occasionally. over the last few years there has been a good few ‘fill in’ titles written, published fan fic that fits into the holes left in the series by the author, Elinor M Brent-Dyer. All the ones I’ve read have been very close to the original style and really kept to the plots that are alluded to in other parts of the series.

The Guides of the Chalet School is one of the early terms and sees the beginning of the school Guide company. It’s not the most fast moving of plots but the detail is great, clearly well researched and interesting. The first aid from the 1930’s was perhaps more scary than interesting and the book rightly carried a warning not to use such methods today! The characters were all true though and I loved having that extra bit of the early Austrian days which were under-used really and by far the most charming of the Chalet years.

Juliet of the Chalet School was a bit of a triumph and Caroline German should be rightly proud of it. Juliet is a great character and I have no idea why EBD didn’t stretch her and keep her at the school longer, especially as some characters managed to stay till they should have been in their early 20’s! (The notes to this book are also great; here is a woman with full on timeline OCD!) Juliet is very real, the tribulations with various middles excellent and lots of the other characters really come to life. Another book the series is better off for having.