books

Book #16: The Hare with Amber Eyes

April 16, 2011 by Merry 6 Comments

The is the story of a family, a Jewish family from… well, all over Europe, the Ephrussi family. It tells the story of them across several generations, how they lived and operated, how they lived an opulent and wealthy life, a powerful family across Europe with banks in all the major capitals and fingers in every money making pie. Beginning with Charles, it describes their art collections, their holidays, the delight of having money, being good at making money, being close to painters, poets and artists, being patrons and collectors and a family who could, by speculating with grain and supply and untold wealth, effectively hold a country to ransom in the name of fairness and saving their people.

It is the story of being Jewish, wealthy Jewish, at the end of the 19th and early 20th century and in some ways, it describes perfectly how the Jews of their class provoked such jealousy and hatred. Anti-Semitism was hardly new, of course, but it is a catalogue of how to be disliked. They were a family who wanted to be ‘assimilated’, wanted to live as the French and the Austrians in the countries they moved to did, but they were set apart by not just success, but attitude, effort and their own unique ability to fashion a world around them.

It is also the story of a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese figures and how they passed from hand to hand, through the generations until they came to the hands of the author.

I found the early part of the book slowish – interesting, but slow. De Waal has a knack for words and brings the characters to life, he has a talent for painting a picture with his descriptions and in the early part I found myself googling for the painting mentioned and discovering that, yes, the one I had in my head from the bottom staircase at school, was indeed the one her meant. I learned a lot, not least why so many Monet pictures are Japanese influenced. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed following hisjourney in uncovering his past, but I wasn’t grabbed.

Then came, in Vienna, the first world war and that caught me; it keyed into something I knew about, bizarrely enough from Chalet School books and I was fascinated by this different view of a war I know about. I raced through it, keen to know they all survived.

And then… and then… with the inevitable crunch of knowing history… the Anschluss. He can’t hide his emotion and his horror at what happens as the Nazi’s march in with planned and premeditated attacked on the wealthy Jews happening within hours, was absolutely gut wrenching. It is, quite simply, horrific to read descriptions of a house you have come to know being pulled apart and people you care for, with all their quirks, being beaten and rendered to nothing. It touched part of me from other books I know and love; the Chalet School in Exile, the proud and desperate characters of those children’s books and the stoical fortitude of the Jewish characters in The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson. It was like lifting a rock you know well and finding the slime and creepy crawlies underneath that you knew about but pretended didn’t exist.

I read the second half of the book in a morning, I simply couldn’t leave them in the limbo of being half read. And The Hare with Amber Eyes went from 3 stars to 5 stars in no time at all.

Book #15 Love Stories in this Town

March 28, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

For reasons which will become obvious, I read this quickly and with one eye slightly shut to minimise the impact; it became a bit of an honour pact with myself to get through it and prove I could do, without falling apart.

Love Stories in this Town is a collection of short stories, focusing first on a set of people and then on Lola, a girl who turns gradually into a woman. As a set of stories, they are well written, tender snapshots of brief moments in the life of people. It struck me this is exactly what I might like to write – and could write. Whether I could do it well enough to get published is of course a moot point, but as a project it felt like someone starting out in writing and doing a good job of their first project. So from that point of view, very well written and worth reading. I’d go and read more of her later works based on this.

From a personal point of view though, it started with ttc, went on to miscarriage, included infertility, marriages falling apart, fear, childlessness, loneliness, lost babies and even a brain damaged one. So not really one for the babylost 🙄

I do think books should have warnings on them sometimes. I picked up one solitary book in the library last week and it was about a Frederick – even Amelie said the other day that both her current reads have Freddie’s in them.

However, an okay book. Not brilliant or unputdownable but a very solid collection of short stories to showcase an undoubted reading talent.

Book #12 Started Early, Took My Dog

March 11, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

The first time I read a Kate Atkinson book, it was because Max, having heard a review of it on the radio, bought me Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It remains one of my all time favourite books. After that came another couple by her, neither of which caught me enough to read them again (although now, I wonder if I was just a bit young, I might try them again) and then she moved on to her Jackson Brodie series.

Jackson is a private detective; he’s a decently good one too, without being a Poirot style, wrap it all up character. Bits of story trail through the books so that you can never be entirely sure that something, or someone, is finished with – unless they are dead. Which does, admittedly, happen a fair bit. Even to Jackson. Set in the UK, mostly in the north, they are the definition of gritty and it is hard to imagine Jackson having a day that is light hearted and in bright sunlight. He’s always up against it – and it is usually raining.

It is impossible not to like Jackson. He’s remained endearingly the same throughout the series, while also changing as his experiences go from the bizarre to the slightly insane and surreal. He’s recognisable from the first book, certainly, and the cast of characters surrounding him fleshes him out enough that I always feel he could potentially just turn up at my house and I’d find myself asking about his daughter and ex-wife.

Kate Atkinson has a great style; it’s neat, funny in a razor at your throat for a joke sort of way and reads as if she is speaking. Phrases drop in and out of it like afterthoughts but they are beautifully placed so that reading her work is pacey but a delight. I’d kill to write like she does, to be quite honest.

Started Early, Took My Dog is certainly more out of the same mould; it’s a good story and perhaps more than ever it has a huge sense of who Jackson Brodie is. He’s at a cross roads in his life, brought to a particular place by circumstances that have left him rootless and bemused and it shows. His detective work is less clinical than previously and you sense that he’s a man with much on his mind who happens to get answers by luck and experience as much as by cunning. The strength of the book is in fact in the characterisation of some of the other people, Tracy and Tilly in particular. You really get to know them even though, in some respects, they are almost incidental to the plot. Tilly in particular is the most extra-ordinary characterisation of an elderly woman plummeting fast into dementia. She’s beautifully drawn despite having just two moments where the plot actually pivots on her at all. Tracy, well, I sense she has more to tell us yet.

There were aspects of this I found less perfect. For the first time, Atkinson seemed determined to place the novel in time, with lots of references to the current financial crisis (I’m sensing she’s angry!) and recent programmes like Life on Mars. It made me wonder how well it will age, in some respects. Some of the cast, a nondescript bunch of thuggish policemen, were hard to grasp and separate – this may have been deliberate, as a device it would certainly work, but their identities were important at various parts and I struggled to keep hold of who was doing what.

A solid 8/10, maybe even close to 9. I’d read it again, I’d happily recommend it, I read it on my Kindle but it could well end p on my bookcase too.

For BabyLostMamas – this is a bad one; there is a mother mourning her baby, a host of lost/gone/missing children and babies, grief and emptiness, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth and even a little white coffin being carried in loving arms. So err… you know…

Book #10 Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match

March 3, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

You can sum this story up in one phrase: “What a rotter!”

If you want a 400 page documentary on why you are lucky not to live in Georgian times, then Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match is probably it. You’d have to be having a bad life indeed not to feel you got off lightly compared to Mary Eleanor Bowes.

Wedlock is a factual account of the life of the Countess of Strathmore, ancestor of our ‘Queen Mother’ – the Strathmore surname was Lyon and subsequent generations amalgamated the two names, for reasons which become apparent during the book. A woman of quite extraordinary wealth, and apparently either a slight lack of foresight or a very gullible nature, it tells the story of her two marriages, starting with the moment (between the two) of a dramatic duel in her honour and then exploring both her life up to that point and her life afterwards. Despite not being fiction (which I didn’t realise when I started!) the book is engagingly told and contains enough drama, information and salacious detail to rival most stories. Wedlock is as much about the time as the people and the exploration of the changing role of women, their legal status and the way in which Georgian law and society was operating and altering during the late 1700’s. In fact, this is the great strength of the book for me, as some elements of the narrative left me a little cold at times.

The bulk of Wedlock regards her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney and it gives no more away than the title does to say he is something of a cad and a bounder! This book was my library reading groups choice after Washington Square but Stoney leave the villain of that piece standing! He is sadistic, vile, manipulative and abusive who really out villains the very worst of fiction. I’d go as far as to say I might have abandoned the book as being unlikely had it been a story rather than history.

The best of this book was certainly the insight into the times. For me, the least appealing aspect was the endless focusing on his cruelty and violence and I did eventually begin to feel I was reading one of those endless “my mother locked me in a cupboard for 18 years ” books. Just as I was beginning to consider giving up though, the plot move on t the conclusion, which was a relief as I thought the endless catalogue of domestic violence was a little overplayed.

For a Kindle reader, the narrative itself stops at 75% (just in case you start to lose the will to live!) and the remainder is footnotes. This type of book perhaps lends itself less well to a Kindle as flipping to the footnotes is not really an option in the same way you can with a paperback. I enjoy being able to do this with historical books and I didn’t bother to look at the sources etc with Wedlock in the way I would have done had I read it conventionally.

My favourite bit? Discovering that the expression “Stoney broke” is attributed to this unpleasant character’s tendency to be in debt and out of cash.

For the babylost? Mild to moderate; there is significant birthing of babies, in a non graphic way, considerable discussion of abortion the 1700’s way and she is separated from her children for many years. But I coped fine with it.

For me – of course virtually every date quoted was either my birthday, or the 2nd, 13th or 28th April! I don’t think I would read it again, but I would certainly recommend it and it whet my appetite for more fiction from that era in a way that nothing else particularly has.

7/10 an interesting read.