One more 'round the world - eairo reads from Helsinki to Helsinki

I've been watching the round the world threads, and the more I've seen them the more I've felt an urge to pack my books and go.

Now, after a few formalities (a couple of library books to read and return before I go), I think I am ready to leave.

Last year while doing the 888 challenge I found out I liked about everything else about the idea of reading challenge except counting books and time. So, this trip may last as long as it will and I will read an undefined number of books while traveling.

Here are my Rules:

* My journey starts from Helsinki, Finland and it will end here.

* I will read the books as I go. I will not list books read earlier unless I read them again.

* I will travel by land, moving from country to a neighboring country or across the sea to a reasonable place on the other side. (Will have to think about this later, especially in the case of the Oceans, I guess.) (Exception: if there is traveling in the book, I may move along and continue where the book leaves me.)

Example: I'll begin with one Finnish book set in Helsinki, then move on to Sweden with a book where a person (luckily for me) moves from Finland to Sweden, then enjoy a couple more bookfuls of Sweden before moving on to Denmark, Germany and on and on...

* Book's connection to a country may be the setting/contents or the author's nationality, place of residence etc.

* I may make exceptions or change the rules if I get stuck.

Not rules but guidelines or goals:

* One book / country is acceptable, but a couple or a few is better.

* I will try to visit all the continents or at least all of them where books have been or are being written.

Here's the map:


visited 50 states (21.66%) - Create your own visited map of The World

And here is my route from book to book.

This sounds like a very ambitious challenge. I will be watching with interest.

I so enjoyed your 888 Challenge thread last year -- the types of books you selected and your intriguing comments -- and your intro here promises more! I look forward to following your journey.

Hi eairo, I'm looking forward to following your journey. (I'm laughing at your last rule, "I may make exceptions or change the rules if I get stuck" - I have the same rule for myself!)

Thank you all for your encouraging comments.

I have now taken my first staggering step, finishing today the good bye home book, Pussikaljaromaani, which is a one day novel about three not so young men drinking beer and walking around (a very special part of) the city, talking a lot and trying to play dice. Well, eh, the description of the beer drinking and its effects were so vivid that I feel myself a little dizzy.

Maybe tomorrow I'll feel better and more capable to say something constructive about the book.

Or else I'll just step on board and sail to Sweden.

The day after

The book is actually not just about drinking or trying to drink beer, but about friendship, and it is also an ode to Kallio, the old working class district where the book takes place.

The setting has a special meaning to me too, as I lived there seven years. I loved it then and I still miss it sometimes. The places are really well described, only few street and bar names are actually mentioned but one who knows the area can recognize so many spots, shops, parks and houses. I don't know how appealing that would be to someone who doesn't know.

Another strength (or weakness) of the book is its language. It is very much like something that might be spoken by a group of guys living a life in limbo, with nothing else to do than walk and talk (a have some refreshments once in a while): lots of new but recognizable words, creative misuse of language and just having fun with it. Great at its best but gets a bit tiresome sometimes. And is annoyingly contagious, I realized at some point between pages 150 and 250.

All in all a nice book about friendship and a place I love. A good way to say goodbye to my hometown for a while.

I love your travelling challenge and will also be following with great interest. Perhaps since you are in Sweden already, this is irrelevant, but it occurred to me that Lenin travelled frequently between Finland and Russia. So if, following your rules, you had a Lenin book, you could then move on to Russia, and from there easily explore Asia, instead of heading to Europe, which would give you more exotic books. But you could also say, "YOU can do it that way, polutropos, but I will do it my way, which is through Europe". :-)

Russia was a tempting option to the last minute. A couple of weeks ago I found in the library a recent translation of Daniil Kharms stories and Let the right one in by JA Lindqvist at once -- and I have to say Swedish horror sounds more absurd than Russian absurdism :).

Plus I just have books from Sweden, Denmark, France, UK, Spain waiting to be read.

erkko, I will be following your challenge with interest, too! Happy travels!

I like this approach! I am looking forward to seeing it. Are you going around in an easterly/westerly direction or a northerly/southerly direction?

#9: At the moment I think I'll go through Western Europe to Africa and ... I don't know yet. I'll have to find African books and see where they'll take me.

After that I will probably move to South America and read my way back North.

I moved from Finland to Sweden with "Refugee on a Raspberry Boat" (Vadelmavenepakolainen). (Raspberry boats are Swedish winegums.)

Mikko Virtanen is tired of being a Finnish man, especially he does not want to a typical Finnish man. Tough luck! Being Mikko Virtanen in Finland is approximate equivalent of being Mr John Smith in the English speaking world.

Mikko believes in Sweden. He believes it is a social democratic utopia build by O. Palme et al.: a safe, functional and happy society. And safe once more. He wants to be part of it. He wants to be Swedish, a native barefoot Swedish man. Actually he believes he is one. He was just by some error of the nature born in a small town in Finland. He is like a transsexual but nationalitywise.

That is an interesting and fun premise, I think, the relationship between Sweden and Finland being a mixture of envy and admiration, a schizophrenic combination of superiority-inferiority complex it is.

The story of Mikko's making himself officially what he believes he is, is told in a format of a diary. The tone is satirical to the point that one knows from the beginning that anything can happen. And when that anything happens it does not surprise you anymore.

The book turns into a bit repetitive list of all the prejudices Finns have for the Swedes combined with the ones we think the Swedish have against us. (I don't know whether they do or not.) The author gets something fun out of some of them -- I did laugh from time to time -- not so much from others.

The book is, however, well enough, or lightly enough (even the horrendous bits) written so it was easy to read, no problems there. All in all it was just a little less than what I expected based on what I had heard of the book and even after reading the first thirty-forty pages.

I am sure, however, this was a good introduction to my next one: Let the right one in, which is a Swedish book by a Swedish author, and a horror story I suppose is also a story about how Sweden is no longer the utopia Mikko Virtanen believed in.

Wonderful review, thanks.

Reminds me of a line I came across recently:

"I want to return to Newark. The problem is that the Newark I want to return to no longer exists."

:-)

Right, polutropos, :) -- though Mikko Virtanen has a problem even bigger: he wants to return to somewhere he's never been to.

But I got there ok. I took my first steps on the blood-soaked ground of Swedish suburbia of the '80s last night. Let the right one in seems promising, though I have to say it's been ages since I last time read any kind of horror, and even longer since my last meeting with vampires; i.e. I am not a specialist.

Hi, eairo, that's a neat way to do the challenge. I'm looking forward to seeing where all you go.

The first two books seem particularly appropriate since they both seem, in their different ways, to be very much about place/country. The last book made me think about I used to have rather romantic notions about Argentina, where I was born but of which I don't have any memories (excepting the few from visiting).

I heard quite a few good things about Let the right one in over on the horror group (Thingambrarians that go bump in the night), so good luck with the vampires.

"Blackeberg. Everything. These houses, streets you walk on, places, people, it all is just so... like one big damn disease, you see? Something is wrong. This place was designed and everything was built to be... perfect. But in some bloody way everything went all wrong."

And the King opens a new bridge somewhere in his kingdom every week.

Like I said somewhere before, the idea of a Swedish horror story was something so absurd it is irresistible. The image of Sweden is so safe one thinks vampires (etc.) would be bored to death in no time in there. But no. This was a refreshing read, it certainly was something new to me, as a vampire story -- genre little known to me; I know Dracula and I've tried Anne Rice (not liking her effort very much), but that's about it.

There is nothing fancy about the vampire (un)life here. Eli is an outcast who lives in the suburbs in the lousiest of flats, she uses the most miserable human beings to survive, and she has to keep on moving due to her murderous habits and need for blood.

The vampires are killers, as usal. Some of them cannot live with it, and even the ones with life lust stronger than the guilty conscience suffer from it. And they are not any worse than the "normal" human beings.

The usual horror stuff is there too: the gory, graphic violence, disgustingly detailed even splatter-like at times. On the other hand there is not much suspense, no sudden frights. The true horror is the fear of the characters. Their fear facing the unknown, unthinkable and most of all their fear facing the fact that people can do and do frightening things to each other.

Let the right one in covers about three weeks of the life of Oskar, an "almost thirteen" years old guy living with his mother in Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm built in the 1950s. The story happens in early the 80s, and if the place ever was something special, that has worn off a long time ago.

Oskar is bullied by his schoolmates. He escapes into violent fantasies where he pays them back; he does thieving at local shops to show himself if no one else he is not totally powerless; and he says he likes reading. Then one night he meets Eli who is pretty, smells funny and only shows up after dark -- weird girl, but she wants to be with Oskar. She is also a 200 years old vampire in a body of a 12 years old child. They find out they have something in common, they become friends and allies. That changes their both's lives. And ends a few.

Next stop Ystad or Sikalat or The Pig houses.

Where there is light there must shadows too. Not even--probably--the most evenly distributed wellbeing mean an equal share of wellbeing for everyone. Where there is variation there is an extreme.

Sikalat by Susanna Alakoski is a stunning book, a coming of age or survival story told by Leena, a daughter of Finnish immigrants in Sweden. She is six years old in the beginning and thirteen in the end. She grows up during those years in many ways, seeing her parents turn from weekend party drinkers into weeks-without-end-of-drinking drunks who hurt themselves and every one who come near enough.

The narrative evolves while Leena grows, she sees things and becomes more able to tell about them, make connections. There are many great short notions that express the girl's impossible situation very well in just a few words: "I grew old but in a way that don't show in the mirror" or "I became unreal." (After several weeks of her parents' continuous drinking.)

There are many many very convincing and eyes opening descriptions of Leena's horrendous family life; shame, guilt, envy, violence, you name it, it's there.

But still maybe the most heartbreaking thing is the way her hope--for there are periods of relative normalcy in their life--fails after each such period. The bad times always come back. It is like the succession of the seasons. Like a law of nature.

This is adark story--no happy ending really, but there is a glimpse of light for Leena on the last pages, so after all this is not a totally depressing read.

(But still, I am quite happy to move on to Denmark next.)

I thought "this is something special" when I first read Smilla's sense of Snow in the early 90s. I guess there were others who thought the same. It was a phenomenon. There was so much talk about it. Everyone who reads read it, didn't they?

I don't actually remember much about the book or its story any longer, but the feeling remains. I've read all the book by Peter Høeg available in Finnish ever since, and I've more or less liked them. But still, apart from some of the short stories, nothing has ever felt quite the same since the Sense.

Here I go again, quite happily. I guess I'd read this one sooner or later, but what makes me especially curious is that Quiet Girl was recommended to me by my colleague, a fellow acoustician with whom I've worked for almost fifteen years, and not once have our reading interests coincided (not that I remember anyway) before.

After reading the first chapter of the book I am really intrigued, I have--hopefully not too--big expectations. The idea of using the concepts of sound and voice, music and acoustics turns me on even though I am quite conscious that the use of the terminology or concepts does not have much to do with the "real world" (ah, how boring) acoustics I am normally dealing with.

And hey, now that I am in Denmark: Kelly, I'll be on the Strandvejen on the page 319. Be there.

I'm enjoying watching your path fill in, in the map in Message 1. Nice little geography refresher to be reminded how tiny Denmark is.

I a also enjoying your travels. I was wondering, if you can find time and space in message one, could you (one day) post the chain of connections you have followed as well? It would be great to see how your reads lead you around the world, one by one.

This is probably not exactly what you meant, but I added "my route book by book" to msg 1. Does it work as it is supposed to? (I know it works for me now that I set up my view, but how about the others?)

I hope I haven't written my rules too unclearly to make the rest of you expect too much. That "chain of connections" made me think so. I suppose most of the time I will just read books from one country and next from one its neighbors. If I find books that actually connect countries together that will be extra or secondary way of moving around--but I think that such a rule would be too restrictive.

Depressaholic, detailmuse and anyone visiting the thread:

Feel free to recommend me books from the countries I am visiting or in their vicinity. I have a route from Denmark to Algeria in my mind already, with one or two books for each country, but I don't mind extended stays or little detours if something interesting comes up.

I will surely at some point depressaholic's--and others' as well-- around the world challenge threads as a source for book titles. I am following a few of them even though I have not commented.

Lots of good reads from my part of the world (I'm Swedish).

Vadelmavenepakolainen sounds like something I could read - I hope they translate it into Swedish... :)

I'm currently waiting for my mum to send me a copy of Let the right one in in Swedish. I'm not a huge fan of horror, but everyone talks about that one, so I feel I should read it. "The image of Sweden is so safe one thinks vampires (etc.) would be bored to death in no time in there." LOL! I agree - that's what I thought too when I first heard of it!!

I read Svinalängorna (which is what Sikalat is called in Swedish) and it was interesting, but I just found it too darn depressing. There's a bit of light at the end, but I just wish there was a little more - maybe I'm too much of a sucker for happy endings. :)

My first Høeg read was Tales of the Night (at university) which I loved and I tried to read Smilla's when it was published, but I just couldn't get into it. It was quite a while ago, though, so I think I'm going to give it another try! I'd kinda forgotten about it, so thanks for the reminder.

Where are you going after Algeria? If You're going east and end up in Israel, I'd recommend any of Etgar Keret's collections (he writes flash fiction), Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and A Boy (it has some elements of magic realism, which I know some people abhor, so that's a warning...), or Ron Leshem's Beaufort, which takes place during the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, but the story is about the soldiers' experiences and their camaraderie.

I'm starring your thread so I can follow along!! Happy reading!

Thanks, bookoholic. Israel is not out of question. I was once planning to cross over to South America from Africa, but a tour of Africa and then the Near East might be interesting as well.

One funny thing I realized a couple of days ago. At least in one respect this is like real traveling. I found a few more interesting Swedish book than those to mentioned above. But Sweden is so close. One can visit it any time. Need to move on. Want something more exotic.

#25 I think your idea to travel from border to border is excellent - otherwise it's so easy to get stuck in one country as they all have so many interesting books. Just like when people go on interrail and somehow never make it beyond Amsterdam.... :)

The Quiet Girl by Peter Høeg is like a dream: anything can happen and it makes perfect sense while you are in it. The logic is clear, everything is where it is supposed to be. But when you are out of it, when you put the book away, it is like 'what was that?' 'What was going on?'

I like -- no, I love the idea that the basic element of the universe is not matter but sound. And only quietness is greater than sound.

Kasper Krone is a clown, a swindler and he has "a tax debt that would bankrupt a big casino." And he can hear. He can hear the sounds behind ordinary sounds, the tunes and tone of everything. But the quiet is what he wants to find.

There are a lot of musical metaphors and description of feelings or situations in musical terms and using comparison with great classical music. Especially Bach and his work is often mentioned. (And no such book can be bad.) There are also plenty of great ideas, a lot of food for thought in the book. It is almost like a philosophical work or declaration of world view disguised a novel.

And that is also its weakness. A novel needs a story, and the story in this case is ok but it is not great. A mixture of high action thriller, super hero comic and a romance. And even though the book is well written, meaning it is easy to read and the text flows easily, the story is hard to follow two thirds from the beginning due to sudden time shifts back and forth in Krone's life.

There are a lot of great chapters in The Quiet Girl, they just don't come together perfectly.

As an afterthought to the Quiet Girl, maybe it would be a bit too much say this a philosophical work, rather a declaration of worldview.

There are a lot of smart and possibly even deep ideas and notions of the goings of the world. Still, the most lasting effect of the book may be that I found a couple of new to me works by Bach. I got some records while still reading the book and there are more waiting thei turn.

After the Quiet Girl I started Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Advance has been slow so far -- though it is not just the book, been busy.

On the other hand, I don't know yet what would I like to read from Germany, so I am in no hurry to get out of Denmark.

Ideas? Recommendations?

Hurry out of Denmark and get to WWII Nazi Germany in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Might even be one to read with your daughter.

Thanks for reminder, detailmuse, that's what I'll do! (Except maybe for the hurrying part.)

My wife read The Book Thief late last year, and she liked it so much I bought it for my niece for Christmas. And by now I'd forgotten I wanted to read it too.

Seven Gothic Tales were stories well told. They were not exactly the kind of material I enjoy the most, but I still think the time spent reading them was time well spent. For, like Carlos McRey (*) has said, "Dinesen certainly has a talent for storytelling, which is featured in the frequent stories within stories. The best use is probably in 'The Dreamers' which has an Englishman in the company of two Arabs on a boat tell the story of his ruination, which then becomes several stories which coincide strangely."

I also and especially liked the story about "The Deluge at Nordenay", its mood and the surprise by the end.

The stories are quietly wise, wise without making a fuss about it, or themselves.

I am inspired by your travels. I just may have to start out on my own from Baltimore, with Madison Smartt Bell's Charm City. Haven't decided whether it is N, S, E of W from here yet but I plan to be crossing seas and rivers, climbing mountains, etc to get from "here" to "there", wherever "there" is.

#32: Nice! Feels good to hear someone is inspired by something I do. And the more the merrier. Wouldn't it be great to "meet" another person in some exotic place ... or book -- reading the same book at the same time in very different sequences of books. (Hmmm... I'm not sure I get the idea I was trying to express.)

I am in Germany now, the War is about to begin... started The Book Thief last night.

Sweden never feels like really being abroad (even though it is), Denmark is more like that but it is still a nordic country like Finland. Germany is. A foreign country. Something else. Though it is not really far away.

to #34 " A foreign country. Something else, Though it is not really far away"...

that can also just be a place a few miles away - a place so different that it feels like a "foreign country".

Happy travels . . .

re 35: And that is especially true in book. Just turn a page or two and you never know where you'll end up.

Thanks catarina and sorry for my slow response, I've been reading :)

Germany. The Book Thief, thanks again detailmuse, and well, is there anyone out there who does not know what the story is about? Life, Death, books, right and wrong, love and hate of many kinds, Germany, WWII, the other side of it all... I don't know, I just finished it today and I cannot yet say anything very coherent.

The story is Great, the book is "just" very good. I don't know if it was just that I expected even more, but I have to say it took me almost 200 pages to really get into it. The Death as narrator felt like a gimmick. It (she, he?) said a couple of good one-liners & made some good points even before that but it was only later in the book I really thought I got the idea. Did this choice of narrator made the good better? I am not sure. And if it did not, was it a good decision? I don't know.

I am well into the next book already--Reader by B Schlink, in some ways not so far from this one--but The Book Thief still haunts me, haunts me like the humans haunt the Death of the book.

What mostly gets back to me is how convincing the story is in so many ways. The child's perspective, the superficial naivety of it, and its broadening by the years when Liesel grows and sees what is happening around. And the idea that one thing can be so horrendous and so beautiful at once: words, which Liesel so much learned to love; words which Führer used to seduce the nation.

The Reader (Der Vorleser, Lukija in Finnish), my second German book was a seemingly small one but it turned out to be heavy inside.

The big thing at the background is the holocaust. I guess this tends to make any book heavy. The Book Thief showed a new angle to the theme, and this is also true in this case. Furthermore the book can be approached from many angles. I have read a few other reviews and comments on it and readers have emphasized so different things: pedophilia, holocaust, illiteracy, guilt, shame, vanity... I have now spent more time trying to find my angle of approach than it took to read the book. The Reader provides the reader plenty of food for thought.

The book is dividen in three parts, three different ages, three different phases of Michael Berg's and Hanna's lives that become wound together. Especially Michael's life spirals around Hanna ever since their first encounter. Many years pass from the first to the second contact and more to the third, but they always come together.

Someone sensitive to SPOILERS may want to skip the rest.

In the beginning, some years after the war Michael who is then 15 years old and Hanna, 36, become acquianted and end up having a relationship (of sexual and read-aloud nature). Their involvement lasts a few months. She disappears.

The reader (one reading the book, not the book) knows from the beginning Hanna has a secret, even though part of her mystery can be explained by the youth of the boy at that time.

Hanna turns up again eight years later when he, a law student, is attending a holocaust trial as a part of a class he is taking at his university. She is being accused of her work as a guard in a work camp during the war. She is both co-operative and arrogant at once in the court--the sense of her strangeness grows stronger.

During the trial Michael--who comes to the court every day and not once a week or so like the other students--realizes that Hanna's secret is not her SS-history but her illiteracy. Michael understands that this secret of hers explains nearly every strange twist in Hanna's behaviour, past and present: why she applied to be a camp guard just when she had been offered a better position in her civil job; why she disappered when they first had met (a better position at work again, making it harder to conceal her illiteracy); why she seemingly sabotages her own defence at the court; and it explains why she always enjoyed his (and others') reading aloud.

Or, should I say this is one possible interpretation. The story is told by Michael, as he sees and remembers it--and he often uses phrases like "I am not sure" or "I don't actually remember"--and is open in many ways.

Michael and Hanna do not speak to each other a single time during the trial section of the book, yet both Michael and the reader get more information about Hanna than in the other parts of the book.

As a result of the trial Hanna is sentenced to life in prison. Michael is not ready to encounter her and she slips out of his sight again but not out of his mind.

Later on (in the part three) Michael starts reading for Hanna again. He makes recordings and sends the tapes to the prison. He does not write letters, he does not visit her, he just reads and sends in the tapes. Only later and only once they meet again after the warden of the prison ask him to come to visit her, and to help her back to civil life--she is to be set free after 18 years.

The holocaust is there, and the guilt of the guilty is there, but even more than that, I think, this is about the ones who came after and their life with and among the guilty, who may be their parents or lovers. What should they do with themselves, their mix of anger and love, their (mis/)understandings, rationalizations and their own guilty conscience. When is it the right time to stop pointing fingers? Or is there such time?

The Reader is a strong book.

It took me so long to formulate my messy thoughts about The Reader above that I briefly visited Switzerland while doing that.

I found Lastentarinoita (Children's stories) by Peter Bichsel while looking for one more German book at the local library. The author's name looked promisingly German. Well, he is Swiss, but the stories--short ones and there are only seven of them in the book--seemed to be quite fun so I changed my travel plan. (I was first planning to go to Belgium after Germany.)

These stories are written in a very laconic language, quite often starting with a very simple and matter-of-factly statement like "Earth is round" or "Table is a table"--both titles of stories--, advancing with a child-like (and yet not) logic based their (kids) habit of taking words literally, which more often than not leads to total misunderstanding. They also often reveal the absurdity of the adult life, or at least what it may look like to child's eyes.

Nice, fun and at times touching and thought-provoking. Suitable for children but not only for them despite the title.

(I don't know whether this collection has been translated into English, but looking at the book titles at the author page it seems that at least something similar is available.)

Next day thoughts about Children's stories--maybe these aren't so much stories for children, but stories by children... about the funny big people.

After the brief but refreshing visit to Switzerland I am back to Germany again, and it seems I am going to stay for long: started today My Century (Minun vuosisatani) by Günter Grass.

There are one hundred short stories in the book. One for each year of the 20th century. I think that sounds quite interesting, which is why I picked this one even though it has been said this is not one of the very best of Mr Grass' works.

My Century is the history of the 20th century told by Günter Grass. One hundred little stories, one for each year of the century. The point of view is often that of a German individual: the author's relatives, the author himself and various other writers, his and others' fictional characters have their say as well as many many unnamed citizen from very different social classes and backgrounds.

I can understand--though I have only read one other book by Grass--that this is not considered as one his best works. But it is still a good read. This is history through German eyes, but it is still universal and generally human enough to be interesting to anyone. Whatever really important happened during that century is there, and only few times it happened that a story left me cold, not knowing anything about the subject of the story in question.

But, there is a but... Like said by the author's mother (dead by then) in the last 'year' of the book: "...now I should tell you all what it was like in the old days and even before that. And what else would it have been but war, war all over and then again with just a little break in between." It truly was. The first half of the century was like preparation for the big one and then the next thirty or so years were spent trying to recover from it all; trying to figure out what on earth happened and what should we do about it.

After three books--The Book Thief and The Reader befor this one--heavily circling around the WWII and its aftermath I needed something else. (I tried to read stories by Heinrich Böll on the side, but it definately was not something else). To move on or to give Germany another chance?

Well, I chose to read one more German book: Strange News from Another Star, and other stories, which I knew would be something else.

And, to be fair, My Century is not just war. There are stories on fashion, sports, developments of the civil technology: graphone, the radio, the television and about a number of other things.

(And yes, I am quite happy now that I did not try to read Les Bienveillantes as one my German books.)

>33 eairo: Wouldn't it be great to "meet" another person in some exotic place ... or book -- reading the same book at the same time in very different sequences of books

I love this! You conjure an image of shared physicality vs the usual group-read's shared mentality.

And now to add My Century to my wish list ... and pout that I can't find Peter Bichsel's book in English!

#44: I have yet to experience that kind of meeting with another literary traveler in a book. Closest I have managed to get so far: my route and my favourite reading group's reading and discussion schedule will cross in Belgium and the book Samuraisyleily--I don't know the English title--by Amelie Nothomb.

(Tried to fix the touchstones with no success.)

Strange news from another star did what I hoped it would do. It was something else after the holocaust and war.

The stories in the book are fairytale-like. That is not bad in itself, but reading the stories now made me wonder how come I have been so impressed by Hesse's work before. The stories were ok, not great and the collection was repetitive.

It has been a long time since I've read anything by Hesse, though, so it is possible I have changed, even evolved. Then I found a review of the collection which stated that these stories were quite unlike his novels. So, I don't know which one of us had changed :)

eairo -- I haven't visited your thread for a long time and didn't know what I was missing.... Swedish vampires, Danish musician/philosophers and Grass's century of stories! As a fourth generation Swedish American, I am woefully ignorant of anything Swedish past Ingmar Bergman. I must reacquaint myself with the descendants of my ancestors who stayed in Sweden ....

#47: If you know Bergman there is no need to feel sorry for yourself--he and his work is enough for a lifetime. Though he is not the only good thing coming from Sweden.

Samuraisyleily (Ni d’Ève, ni d’Adam or Tokyo Fiancée) by Amelie Nothomb was my first touch with the author. Her work has been on my tbr-list for a while though I do not exactly remember which titles originally made me interested.

I started with this one because it was picked by my reading circle.

I read the book, finished it today, I barely remember what it was like. I was not impressed.

The story is about about a two years relationship of a young Belgian woman, Amélie, and a Japanese young man and all the possible misunderstandings and cultural collisions that kind of a relationship may raise.

Her observations aren't wery original and she does not develop them anywhere.

But it was an easy read. Not too long. I did not feel like quitting.

I will give Nobhomb another chance. The Stranger Next Door is waiting next to me right now.

The Stranger Next Door was my least favourite of Nothombs works. (I have read four)
Nice to see other Finns around here. =)

Kiitos samoin, hauska tavata.

Which ones are those you like more than Stranger Next Door? I ask for possible later use. I read SND today, and that was enough Nothomb for now.

Hauska tavata sinutkin. (Jotenkin tuntuu hassulta tämä kielten vaihtelu =)

Nöyrin palvelijanne/Stupeur et tremblements/Fear and Trembling is the best IMHO so far.I think it´s also the best known of her books.

I guess you are right about Fear and Trembling being the best known, possibly also about it being best. Samuraisyleily/Tokyo Fiancée is, by the way, kind of prequel/sequel to that, telling what happened to Amélie before and little after.

I think I should've believe what others said, but I started with that book because it is the book of the month at Hesarin Lukupiiri.

Stranger Next Door was more interesting and more ambitious work than Tokoy Fiancée. So much so that it was actually interesting.

An old married couple, a retired teacher of classics and his beloved wife find their dream home or Home at the countryside. They buy it and they move in and they think they are both lucky and happy. Until their new neighbor makes it his habit to visit them every day at 4 p.m. for a cup of coffee.

Ordinary turns into extreme, personalities turn out to be unstable, identities less than clear, the self unknown. That is interesting. The story is.

Still, there is something in the way Nothomb tells her basically interesting story--cynicism, nastiness, something--that turns me off. I can not say I really liked this one. But it is interesting.

One more thing: is there anyone out there who could explain me the original title "Les Catilinaires". It obviously refers to the protagonist/narrator's background and expertise, but everything I found on the net was in French...

There were not too many options when trying to find more Belgian books. I did not want Nothomb being my only impression--apart from Hergé--on the country.

Most of the titles I found were books on or set in Belgium or not very interesting looking thrillers and then there was The Sorrow of Belgium. Its nearly thousand pages made me hesitate but I borrowed it anyway, and most the reviews I found here at the LT and on the net elsewhere were positive.

Maybe someone reading looooong books might be interested in sharing this experience?

--> 50

...and I simply *loved* The Stranger Next Door. It's been my Nothomb favorite!! I do love to read books that are a bit bizarre, and that one sure takes the cake!!

#56 That shows yet again how wonderfully different we are here in LT. =)

i hope you enjoy The Sorrow of Belgium as much as I did. you may also want to try another Belgian author, Georges Rodenbach who wrote novels set in Bruges, Bruges-la-morte and Bells of Bruges.

re 58: Yes, I like it -- I can say that even though my advance has been slow so far. This book (well, most of them) would deserve a more concentrated read with less interrupts and breaks. The thing called life get on the way, but I think I can't do much about that.

The Sorrow of Belgium is a big book, large as life (and has nearly a thousand pages).

Book is set in Belgium just before, during and little after the WWII and the story is about and told by (more or less) by Louis Seynaeve who during those years grows up from a ten or so years old boy to a young man. It is all there: life from birth to death; love, sorrow, joy and deceit in between ... and, and, and ... The story goes into so many directions it is hard to describe briefly.

But most of all: it is a very enjoyable read. Deep and broad but not difficult.

A look back: I recently saw The Reader the movie, and it definately is one of the better adaptations I have seen. I cannot say it adds anything really important to the experience after reading the book but neither does it miss anything important. And it reminded me again how substantial the book is. How a complex and thought-provoking story it provides in less than 200 pages.

I think I once read somewhere that the best known symbol of London outside the UK is the map of London Underground. Besides, what I remember being the first thing done when visiting London was to get from where I was to somewhere else. From station to station. By underground

Therefore, what could be a more suitable start to my visit to the UK than 253? A seven and a half minutes ride on the Bakerloo line with 253 other people. Also available here.

253 characters, 253 words for each of them (+the titles, ads and footnotes (misleading and untrue)), set in a London Underground train on the 11th January 1995 coming to the end of the line.

Interesting to say the least. And it works. (As a book.)

It is morning. Most of the people are going to work, some of the are going nowhere special. Some of the stories, or characters, are linked into beautiful (or not so) chains by acquaintance/geography/random occurrences/most anything, some of them are "loners". Like in life. Some of them are quite uninteresting, some of them are unbelievably interesting. Or just unbelievable. Like in life. Some of them are just jokes, good or bad, some are heart breakers. Variety, variation,

I am a curious person. I look at other people on the underground (even though the one in my home town is quite pathetic one-liner) or bus, wondering and pondering what is going on in their minds and in their lives. I talk with them if they do. And once in a while even if they don't. So, I guess one could say I belong to the target population for this book. Thanks a lot, detailmuse, for telling me about this one!

This is a book of many ways. The stories in the book are ordered according to the sitting order, which is not, however, the optimal reading order. Following the links (the internet version helps here--I found it easier and more convenient to read near a computer and check the links with it, even though I was reading the printed edition) and going back and forth in the book makes it even more interesting, and there is not only one right order: skip one link or choose one before the other and you've got a different book.

Actually I am not even sure I read all of the 253 "stories"--but I did read quite a few of them more than once, so I think that makes it even and I can say I've read the book--so unordered was my reading. Once or twice I followed a link to a section of the book I thought I had read to find out I had not.

Try it at http://www.ryman-novel.com/

Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien includes an essay, On Fairy-Stories, a short story titled Leaf by Niggle and and a poem Mythopoeia.

It was nice to read the essay now as I am reading The Hobbit to my daughter (to be followed by the LOTR). To read Tolkien's thoughts about what fairy-stories could be, should be and what they are not. I found ideas I could agree with, some that made me think (twice) and a few new angles too.

The story of Niggle was ok too. Niggle was a painter who was very carefull with the details but he had a problems finishing anything.

And the poen, Mythopoeia, was like the essay in another form and in brief. The themes and ideas were alike.

oh, serendipity! I rarely (till now) looked at my LT connections/recommendations -- but did recently, at the same time you happened to add 253. I'd started it last year from a library copy but had decided I needed my own copy ... and then forgot about it until I saw you'd added it. It's out of print but I found a used copy in new condition. I'm looking forward to it; love your comment above about navigating through the stories: "skip one link or choose one before the other and you've got a different book". Kudos to Ryman for accomplishing something like that.

Another book you might enjoy if you can find a library copy: The Other Side by Istvan Banyai. A short picture book about looking at things from different perspectives: front/back, up/down, inside/outside, this person/that person.

Glad to be of help.

No library luck with The Other Side. It was also out of stock at my favorite internet bookstore.

But that reminded me of one thing you might like to see: Codex Seraphinianus. This is probably the strangest book I have. It is not a cheap book, and hard to find at times, which of course makes it more exciting.

I think this is where I first learned about it.

Next book but still in Oxford where Tolkien took me. One murder, four witnesses, four truths--An Instance of the Fingerpost.

I am halfway through the first part of the book now and I quite enjoy it. The descriptions of the Old England and of the ways and the practises of the "physicks" & other great men of science are both hilarious and horrendous.

The first part of An Instance of the Fingerpost was narrated by an Italian student of medicine, an obedient son of a merchant and a young gentleman of the first class. There is no need or reason imaginable for him to lie on the case of Sarah Blundy or the murder she obviously committed.

But he, like many others, sees what he wants to see, he makes hasty conclusions and he may also remember wrongly.

I am really curious to see what the next (three) part(s) will reveal.

But still, I think I will read something short something else before I go into the next report of the same case.

I decided something else now means short stories by Roald Dahl. This collection titled Nahka ja muita novelleja (Skin and other stories---this Finnish edition if different from the U.S. edition of the same name) contains ten stories from Kiss kiss and Someone Like You. Dark dark humor.

For some reason or the other I had never read anything else by R. Dahl than his stories for children. Now that I have I can only wonder why. I liked the stories a lot, especially "The Sound Machine", "Genesis and Catastrophe", "The Wish" and ... actually I liked most of them.

Most of the stories were of the kind that makes you laugh a little nervous and unsure laugh and wonder if you're all right laughing to these things. A couple of them, on the other hand, get under your skin and and make you ooooh. No laughter.

The only problem I had was that the stories were quite similar: a quite every-dayish setting and then a twist that turns everything out of the ordinary. I might appreciate these stories more if I had read them in slower pace and not one story after another in three sittings.

The second take on the case of Mr. Grove (An Instance of The Fingerpost) was quite a different story.

The narrator this time is a young empoverished gentleman, Jack Prescott, whose father seemingly was the biggest traitor of the cause of the king during and shortly after the English Civil War. The son cannot, however, believe it and he is determined to remove the stain from his father's name and his own as well.

About the first thing he tells us is that the murderer was not the one named in the first part of the book--yes, this section is a commentary on the former. Then he names his own canditate, and then tells his own version (he was mentioned a couple of times in the history by Mr da Cola, the author of the first section) of the events.

People see what they want to see and even after seeing they most often believe what they already believed. That has become clear by now, as is that there is more to the case than it first seemed. One may even start to wonder who is this da Cola anyway, and why did he forget those things out of his story that he did... or is it Prescott who is not telling everything straight...

"Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens" sung the Talking Heads once. Hell, on the other hand, seems to be a place where anything can happen, and happens, and again---at least according to The Third Policeman.

I had expectations when I started the book. Based on what I had heard I thought this were to be a book I would really like. I liked it but the expectations were not fulfilled. Maybe the time was not right.

Two men commit a murder and robbery, for which they have different reasons. They hid the money and then spend three miseralbe years together waiting for the things to settle, says jyugthe one who knows the hiding place of the loot.

When they go to get their treasure something goes wrong and the hell begins.

The inhabitants of hell are friendly folks. The two policemen (and the rest of the lot) are obsessed with bicycles and they have some extraordinary ideas (like peculiar atom theories) and hobbies (like building a series of cascets where the next one always fits inside the previous, ad infinitum). And they know where the Eternity is, and they are ready and willing to take the narrator there.

So far so good. I like bicycles. I like funny theories and I think I have a reasonably good tolerance for nonsense. But, still, I think that this book was really enjoyable just here and there: the cascets building section, some of the de Selby stuff, and the description of the Eternity, and the end, were great. In between the good parts I felt a bit like drinking a soda gone flat.

(Maybe I just don't know enough of Irishness to appreciate the satire related to that, among other things.)

After Ireland I quickly returned to Oxford. The third section of the Instance of the Fingerpost begins intriguingly. It is once more a commentary on the former sections, denouncing with harsh words especially the first testimony by Mr. da Cola.

My stay in Oxford and London has been longer than I expected. Must be the roads of the 17th century England, full of dangers, full of delays.

The third telling of the murder of Grove takes us deeper into the shady side of the politics and the court life and the paranoia within, even though the narrator is not an actual participant in either but rather an informed observer.

Dr. Wallis is a mathematician and especially a cryptographer whose services were used by both sides of strifle. Whoever was in power was equally worthy in Wallis' eyes for it was order he valued, order and stability in the country.

So, he got a lot of information from the both sides. And he claims that one of the two previous narratos was a liar and the other delusional.

And he himself was blinded by his hate---for this matter became personal to him at one point. He, like the others, had his own truth, which in some respects was close to the actual truth, and could not have been farther away from it elsewhere.

It was fun to read the Wallis' account. It became more and more evident that the earlier two were not the whole truth, and even more obvious at the same time, that this definately isn't.

I think I'll skip the in-between-parts-book now and read the fourth part right away.

Finally finished the Instance of The Fingerpost last night.

It left me a bit unsure. Basically everything was neatly wrapped up---maybe even too much so. And then again it wasn't. That's fine with me.

What we got? Four narratives, four murderers and four views of what the murder was about. Stories about truth, or what it is that we call the truth. History made alive, interesting characters, shocking events, life, love and death. A fine book.

re >66 eairo:
Oh yes. Anything connected to McSweeney’s is guaranteed wild, clever, original, mind-bending.

Also, thought of you and the connections within your chosen reads when I saw the 6 Degrees of Separation challenge.

It happens to me sometimes that when I go shopping for the daily groceries, somewhere between the bread and butter I realize "this is not what I want today---not this but something special." Not knowing exactly what that special good should be easily leads to quite random collection of what I think is Good.

If and when the indecision goes on at home when it is time to prepare the Special Meal (hungry already, not at my best at all), the easy way is to put it all together, hoping for the best. The result usually isn't the best. The good stuff is still good, but the result is less than the sum of its ingredients. And you know that all the way.

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks is that meal. There are lots of good things in it. I really admire his imagination, his ability to create societies, cultures and lifeforms, and story (of a search for a secret network of wormholes, the fastest way to move about in between solar systems and galaxies in a universe where hyper space has not been invented) isn't bad either, some of the twists are clever, some feel cheap, and the best are such that you can not decide which one it is.

But I often thought there was a bit too much of everything. There were loose ends, character development that did not develop and a few tedioud descriptions of this or that dwellers of one or other planet. And it all adds up to zero...

The translation was ridden with stupid errors, but I don't blame Mr Banks for that.

The Algebraist finished my stay in the UK---there are a lot of books I should and I'd want to read related to UK but I also feel like moving on.

To France, or something like that: my first French book is actually a Finnish novel, Kadonnut Pariisi, The Vanished Paris.

What if Paris wasn't? What if all the literature, art, streets, cafés, buildings, postcard made in, situatued in and sent from Paris were just a cheat? (Not to mention all the people who thought they were living in Paris...) Plenty of (cultural) history rewritten, I guess. I'll see.

re #76: Thanks for the link to 6 degrees... I am tempted, not signed in yet but I probably will. I think I'll make it some sort of detour to this around the world challenge; that the first and last book should be same for both challenges or something.

Before I forget: Kadonnut Pariisi, which could be translated Paris Lost, was a very nice appetizer for Paris (France): rich with ideas, easy to read and funny in many places.

Not only a "what if" (Paris were lost) but still, maybe, at times, a bit too much of it.

What was good was that not one of the theories for the disappearance of Paris was proven but they were left open. The main characters were likeable but none of them came very close, which is a bit of a problem as I think this was more about the people looking for the lost city, not about actually finding it. And yet there was a little too much about the search and the theories related to the occurence---just a little bit though. Like the book was not sure of its identity.

But the basic idea is great. Paris is an iconic city. This would really be a different world if it did not exist, and more so if it just disappeared one day.

Life A User's Manual is, despite or maybe because of its name, a playful, funny and mostly easy to read big book. So far, at least---I have read about half of it now.

I was expecting something interesting when I started Life A User's Manual. Beyond that, I was not sure. The book has been labeled 'experimental' and 'a masterwork'. Either one of the attributes alone could mean anything from a finest experience to difficult to frustrating to disappointing.

Life AUM is a network of stories. Its sub-subtitle Novels describes the book well. This 'novels' is divided into 99 chapters, the appendix titled Some stories told in this book names more than a hundred of them; some of the stories are mere anecdotes told in a few sentences and some of them last the book's whole length. This network covers most of the world and several hundred years of history. Everything comes together at 11 Simon-Grubellier Street (an imaginary address) in Paris.

Every chapter begins in one of the rooms (or stairways or storage cabins) of the house but the lives and the histories of the characters or things encountered spread all over the world, or into a painting or a book: there are a few very detailed descriptions of pictures or stories about them, a couple of synopses of other novels, probably fictional, at least one of them written by one of the characters of this book, and some scientific articles and books.

You get the picture? A puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle to be exact. The foreword talks about jigsaw puzzles, jigsaw puzzles have a significant part in one of the longer stories in the book, and the whole structure of the book can been seen as a jigsaw puzzle. There are textual games and references, wordplay, language games and probably a lot more that I didn't recognize or realize. For example, characters have been hunting bears somewhere near Macondo, and the text of the foreword is repeated later in book but in a different context giving the reader a whole new range of possible interpretations.

The lists. There are lots of lists. Short lists and long list. Lists of things in the rooms now (for there is a now in the book), lists of things found in the staircases of the building through its history, things stored in the basement and lists of words as in a dictionary---which reminds me of one my favourite characters (though a minor one) in the book: Cinoc, whose name one one could pronounce, is a word-killer. He works for a publisher of dictionaries and his job is to find words that are not used any more and to be removed from the dictionaries in due time. He boasts he has killed thousands of words during his career--- to realize these forgotten words became dear to him. He is now editing his own private dictionary of lost words.

These lists are a bit tedious at times, exaggeration of the realism, or whatever they represent, and I skipped a few items on the list of hardware manufacturer's catalogue, I must confess. But I read the rest of them and in a strange way they began to feel meaningful at some point, the amount of detail provided a special sense of presence.

Masterwork? Yes, that can be said. Experimental? Surely. Not in a difficult but rather in a reader-friendly way; definately not frustrating, maybe a bit demanding on the reader's memory, the stories and character---and they are many---appearances are scattered all over the 550 pages of the book; a fine reading experience, book full of Life.

Book started: Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds. Still in Paris, though the connection is, again, sort of thin.

The first chapter was like something that might have been Paris some decades ago, but in the second one the story jumped to a so far undefined moment in future where researchers come to Paris from something called Tanglewood which is hanging somewhere above the earth. They come to recover artifacts of the past when people actually lived in Paris.

I am curious to see where this one takes me.

I picked this up because Mr Reynolds recently visited here (Helsinki), and because a friend recommended the book to me knowing I am in Paris.

Century Rain was my first touch with Mr Reynolds. I guess I'll give him another chance, though I was not convinced this time.

The setting of the book was great: year 1959 on Earth, there had not been the WWII, the German had failed, France and the rest of the Europe had not been invaded and occupied, the technology had not developed much since the thirties. However, something was going on in Paris, France, something strange; on the other thread of the book the 23rd century (my mistake above) Earth is dead, people live in the Near Earth space, divided into Slashers and Threshers who have a very different view on the advanced technology and its use(fulness). These separate times meet, though it is not about time travel---more imaginative than that, I must say.

That is what was fine, and everything derived from here was cool.

But most of what is related to the characters is not that great. They are annoyingly simple and shallow, the dialogue was ridden with way too many smart one-liners and explanatory techno babble, not to mention the 'romance' bit... Shallow characters are not an exceptional problem in this genre (space opera) but the author makes the reader spend so much time with the characters and their relations it becomes a problem here. Had he stuck with what he's good at, this would be a fine book---now it is just ok. But I've heard this is not one of his best.

I'm a bit late to add my bit to the Nothomb conversation. Having read several of her books which strike me as fiction-lite, I will say I found her childhood memoir The Character of Rain lovely.

I am heading south and to other books but otherwise it is never too late, or not yet, at least; the books are still there for anyone to read.

And thanks for the tip anyway. I wasn't able to decide whether Nothomb is exceptional or exceptionally annoying, so I guess I'll have to return to her one day.

Moving on. For some time I was feeling like a change of scenery, and country, and a bit guilty at once that only one of my French books was actually French.

Solution: Man's Hope, a book on Spain by a French author.

Man's hope was my transition from France to Spain. The road was long and rough, I almost lost my hope with this one ... revolution, rebellion, revolt, counter this and that; unions, parties, syndicates; communists, anarchists, falangistas, recruits, mercenaries, volunteers ... confusing.

I did not find a story in the book but lots of little ones. They were, of course, tied together by the subject matter and the setting, but they still did not come together.

This was more an interesting book than a good book. I guess that is why I actually finished it. There is nothing wrong with the writing. Reading was easy but it was also easy to put the book away. There were exceptions: the fight over Madrid was more than just interesting, and some other shorter sections after that were gripping too.

Another extra interesting point is that this book has been first published in 1937. It ends in March 1937 (starting about eight months before), so it has been written in the middle of the fights it tells about, or at least very quickly after, while the war was still on.

And what strikes me is that the ending is hopeful, and knowing now what happened afterwards, that is nearly tragical, sorrowful at least.

I didn't think much of Century Rain either. I enjoyed Reynold's Revelation Space and Redemption Ark much more. The stories are much more complex.

That's what I've been told elsewhere too. I think I'll get back to Reynolds when I'll next time want a break from my world tour. Or the time after the next time, at least ... (Just remembered I have another challenge going on too.)

In The Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas an unsuccessful writer Javier Cercas is writing a book titled Soldiers of Salamis, which is not about the battle of Salamis but about an incident that happened a long time ago during last few weeks of the Spanish Civil War.

One of the main ideologists of the Falange (the Spanish fascist party later hijacked by Franco), Rafael Sánches Mazas -- "a good but not great author" says Cercas, by the way --, manages to escape the firing squad and hides in the forest. He is found but the militia man who finds him lets him go -- they look into each other's eyes, and the soldier turns away.

Sánches Mazas tells this story over and over, and his son years later tells it to Cercas (the author in the book, who may or not be the author of the book) who becomes intrigued: what happened? Why? And could this story be the one that saves his literary career?

Cercas starts working on the story, he finds people who were there, he finds more stories, some answers and many questions. Or that's what I found. (I think I'll have to reread this.)

This was my second Cercas book after The Speed of Light (which is a later work). Cercas has an interesting style, he writes long long sentences and very very long paragraphs, not to mention his chapters, there are only three in this book. While I'd say the Soldiers of Salamis is in some ways a better or more interesting book, the author's mastery of style has improved since, for The Speed of Light is easier to read. Now I had to reread a few complex sentences and I was often lost, which did not happen with the Speed of Light.

Roberto Bolaño visits this book, Rafael Sánches Mazas was a real person and I guess Javier Cercas is too. This is interesting, but what is it?

I just read another review on The Soldiers of Salamis which points out a funny thing I missed:the search for the missing person in the end is so exciting that one waits for the final outcome more than the one of most detective stories, even though now we are looking for the man that did not kill.

One more book in Spain started: The Shadow of the Wind.

I'm not sure whether I was a bit suspicious about this book or afraid of expecting too much from it but at least now after 50 first pages it is clear that the author is a great storyteller.

The Shadow of the Wind is a rollercoaster of a book, one with more speedy downhills than uphills (where do one end up with such a ride?). I am a slow reader but more than once did I realise I had read 60 70 pages in a breeze.

The story is very good, there is mystery, there is love---for books, always a plus, I guess as well as romantic---, colorful characters; all you need for a good fun interesting read, that is. It is well enough written, easy and enjoyable.

Still, it is just a very good book, not a great one.

I never thought I'd write this: the action was good but the slow parts were too much too slow. I started to think while there wasn't happening so much: why does everything turn out so neat? Why does everyone trust Daniel so easily? He's nice but not that nice.

The 450 or so pages built the mystery very well but the following explanatory part was too thorough. No stone was left unturned, no sense of mystery was left at the end.

I'll probably read The Angel's Game some time, but not right now. Enough is enough.

Decided to visit Portugal now though I have plans for one or two more books of Spain.

The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy is a reader of seventeen stories by fourteen authors. The first one I read tonight did not take my breath away but I hope things will get better.

In #24 bookoholic13 wrote: "Vadelmavenepakolainen sounds like something I could read - I hope they translate it into Swedish..."

Your wish has been granted. See here

#96

Hallonbåtsflyktingen?!?! That's the best title ever! I love Finnish compound words! I'll be going to Sweden in October and this is definitely on the to-buy-list! Thanks for the heads-up!!!

So what do the titles mean in English? Will it ever be translated thataway?

#98

It means Theraspberryboatrefugee. I'm stringing the words together, because in both Finnish and Swedish you can make these fantastic compound words that just make my heart leap with happiness!

/geekiness

Any connections to lingonberries?? If so, I'll come aboard as a refugee too.

re #100: No, different berries.

But raspberries are even sweeter... and the boat we're talking about are the red things on the book cover here.

Sorry to say but an English translation is not very likely.

#101

The cover is fab! But now I'm craving hallonbåtar... :( I think they have them at IKEA here, but I'm not sure. I don't normally like them, even! :)

#98

I'm with eairo in guessing no English translation forthcoming - I think you have to be Finnish or Swedish to "get" the Finland-Sweden who-belongs-where issue...

The Dedalus book of Portuguese Fantasy is an anthology of 17 stories by 14 authors from 19th to 20th century. Despite the title the stories actually range from pure fantasy to absurd to folkish ghost stories to sort of horror.

Could not finish one, enjoyed four or five, worked through the rest.

Mostly it was the more recent material that I actually liked; the ones worthy a special mention were The Turtle by José de Almada Negreiros, Our Lord of All Seafarers by José Maria Ferreira de Castro and the four stories by Domingos Monteiro and Mário-Henrique Leiria.

bookoholic13 -
what a hallonbatar? I've tried googling it and only found that it is either a Swedish rock group or some type of candy.

#104

LOL! It's a type of jelly candy (the band is named after the candy). If you have an IKEA around where you live, they should carry them. They're pictured in the link in eairo's message (#101).

#104&105: Oh mine, what kind of a rock band names itself after a candiy? Soft, whimpering jelly candy of all... :)

Just finished Declares Pereira (Sostiene Pereira)---I was impressed how such a little, quiet and understated book can be so strong.

It is 1938, the civil war in Spain is raging, news from Germany are worrying and Portugal is going the same way.

Pereira is an aging Portuguese journalist, working as a sole editor of the cultural section of a "little but respectable" afternoon paper in Lisbon. A man who has lost his wife, who is lost in nostalgia and lost in the world going mad around him. He is gaining weight and his heart is not well.

Pereira over-indugles his sorrow, he eats a bit too much and drinks way too many sweet lemon juices. He would like things remain the same, or rather he'd like things be like they were when he was young (and not so overweight).

But the world changes and not in a good way in Pereiras opinion, and the world won't leave him in peace, for whatever Pereira wants he still lives in this world. All the way he fights an internal fight between his wanting to remain unnoticed and as is and his urge to do the right thing.

In the end he does the right thing, for better or for worse, but he becomes alive again.

The book is narrated in a very interesting double third person way. There clearly is an outside narrator but he quite often adds the words "Pereira declares" or "declares Pereira" so the reader cannot for a moment forget that this is some sort of retelling of a story or a story based on documents, like police interview reports, might one think considering the way of the world back then... but that is not stated and that is not the only possible option.

There is not much action, and the way Pereira is he cannot provide much of that: he's fat, he does not want do anything, he does not want anything to happen. No, there are conversations, thinking, Pereiras slow paced goings and comings---often to and from his favorite café where he eats omelettes and hears the news of the world from the waiter, because "the newspapers don't tell you anything real anymore"---and more conversations with Pereira's friends, boss, the concierge (possibly a police informer), doctors, and quite often with the portrait of his late wife.

Pereira's declarations provide a rich and deep image of a lost man finding himself in the middle of 1930s madness in Portugal, Europe and the World.

(edit: typos)

Book started: All the Names. Still in Portugal, though moving from the humble editing office to the central population register.

I enjoyed your review of Pereira Declares: A Testimony. I'll add this to my wish list.

re 109: Thanks to you for visiting my thead: I found several of your reviews enjoyable and quite a few of the books you had reviewed interesting.

You're welcome! I follow your thread pretty closely, and have enjoyed your reviews, but hadn't commented on them previously.

After finishing All the Names I had to check what others have said about it ... I wasn't sure what to think or say. Most of the reviews were on the short side (but positive), so I guess I am not alone.

I could of course write a summary of the story where a next-to-nobody clerk at the Central Registry becomes obsessed with finding an unknown woman whose information card comes to his hands accidentally. He meets obstacles and gets past them. More obstacles, bigger, more absurd and stranger arise, and... but what was this about? Life? Identity? Order vs. chaos, or that they're about the same? And a few conversations with a plaster ceiling...

I liked reading the book, I enjoyed its company. Saramago is a masterful writer---and easy to read despite his quite original punctuation---there are lots of great sections and lines all over the book, as well as hilarious ideas and plenty of material for deep thought.

Somehow, still, I feel no great urge read more Saramago right now. Later.

Good bye Portugal. Back to Spain, my next stop will be the Bay of Arráez where I'll meet The Painter of Battles.

The Painter of Battles is Faulques, a veteran war photographer who had spent thirty years on the wastelands of humanity all over the world. He has now put the camera away and paints instead. He has isolated himself to a tower near a little village by the Mediterranean where he paints a mural around the inside of the round tower. It is to be the picture he never managed (or never could have) to photograph.

One day one of Faulques' past works comes alive: a soldier from one of his award winning pictures visits the tower. The man, Ivo Markovic, tells the Painter that the photograph that had made him famous also had turned his life into hell. He also says that he has come to kill Faulques.

Markovic does not, however, want to finish his work straight away. He wants to talk, he wants to learn and understand. And he wants Faulques to learn and understand.

And they sure talk, they talk about the mural, about photography and photographs, art, life and deaths, causes and effects, and what they were and what they are, and about the last picture Faulques took during the Balkans' war.

Beside the converstations there are a few sections that are Faulques' memories of his career.

In the end all three things converge: Faulques' memories, the conversations with Markovic and the painting.

"...I don't know if it is good, but it sure makes one think", says Markovic about the mural the Painter of Battles is working on. Same could be said about the book, though it is good. Maybe not a masterwork, but good.

I could point out a few shortcomings in the book if I wanted to make a point being critical. But I don't feel like that now. Find them out yourself. Read the book, I think it makes good to anyone who has even once seen a war photograph. Or any journalistic photograph for that matter.

I don't know if Faulques is based on any real-life photographer, but there are lots of real painters and paintings mentioned that Faulques had used as his learning material and models. I didn't check the all but all that I decided to look up could be found on the net. Seeing them was rewarding in itself---I don't know art history very well so they were mostly new to me---but also helped me to "see" the Faulques' mural more clearly. It enhanced my reading experience, they made a point.

I mostly talked about the food-for-thought -point of view above, but don't let that make you think The Painter of Battles is just that. It is a well enough written and constucted story to be enjoyed that way too, just reading it.

Izas, rabizas y colipoterras : drama con acompañamiento de cachondeo y dolor de corazón is a small book with text by Camilo José Cela and photographs by Juan Colom. I will not review it or rate this one --- my Spanish being rusty as it is I really can't say I understood too much of the text. It was, however, fun to read something in this way, enjoying the words and the rhythm of the language ... and the photos.

Seems I almost have little treasure at hand: http://www.photoeye.com/auctions/Auction.cfm?id=2321. I have different, newer, edition of the book though.

I like it here in Spain, so I'll delay my departure, "Partir", to Africa a few days. I have more Cela and El sur seguido de Bene (in Finnish though), a book of two novellas by Adelaida García Morales already waiting their turn.

The South and Bene are two short stories by Adelaida García Morales---not as in short stories, but short in page count---where the narrator, now a grown-up woman, looks back to her childhood in a dysfunctional family. The tone is conversational, in The South the narrator's father is addressed and in Bene her brother, both long dead.

In The South the girl's life circles around the father to whom she adores and who is close and distant at once, her only ally in the family but still someone with a life and secrets of his own. And his own death -- which he finally chooses and which terminally separates the girl from everything that she once held meaningful. South is where the father was from, South is where the girl looks to to find answers she was never given at home.

Bene is the name of a servant that comes to work for the family, or the what's left of it: the mother is already dead and the father is mostly away; the siblings, the narrator and her brother Santiago, are being brought up by aunts and servants. Bene seems to have a past, and everyone seems to think different things of what that past is what it means. The child hears things but she probably doesn't hear all, and at least she can't understand what the adults are talking about. But she understands she's not being told everything. The brother is older and he is already moving from childhood to the adults' world, and again the child is left alone. Of these pieces she makes up her own story of what's going on with Bene and the family.

The stories are emotionally strong and well written, though I have to admit that at times the same thing happened to me that sometimes happens when reading old stories: the charaters' mindset and sensibilities are so different than mine and their reactions to things is so different from what I think would be 'normal' that I can't relate. Sometimes that means I'm left cold, like studying an alien species --- sometimes it makes me interested. This time it was, more the latter than the former, though.

Victor Erice has directed a film based on The South (El Sur) which is also well worth seeing, one of the really good book to film adaptations, even though it actually uses only about two thirds of the story.

This is like an adult version of A Series of Unfortunate Events -- in good and in bad -- was what I was often thinking while reading The Family of Pascual Duarte.

I read the first half of the book intensively, my curiousity kept me going on: what kind of maladies will Pascual encounter (or draw over himself) next, and then, and...

The other half was a bit repetitive but still well enough written to finish easily.

Had a quick reunion with Bene of El sur seguido de Bene, "talking" Spanish this time. Enjoyable.

I just now realised it may be more fun reading a book in a language-not-so-very-well-mastered using a translation as a helper rather than a dictionary.

Started my last book for Spain: The Beehive; spending lazy afternoons with the regulars at Café doña Rosa, people who believe that what will happen will happen, and there is no point doing anything to change anything.

The Beehive sounds like my kind of place. Too bad you are leaving Spain so soon. Nada by Carmen Laforet is excellent.

"So soon"? I've been staying here for nine books, liking it all the way, I admit, but still, Africa is waiting...

On the other hand, Nada seems to be easily available at the city library, only a few mouse clicks away, ahhhhhh, this is difficult.

Madrid is The Hive is Madrid, full of buzz and fuss, life in all its forms and ways. People use each other, they are used, they love, they are alone, they get hurt and yet they survive.

Cela doesn't just tell a story, he more like weaves stories together that form this novel. There is no plot, it is more like a view through a window -- you see something but you know that is not all there is. These people walk past your window, some of them do it every day and some of them you see only once.

The novel is made of fragments of a few paragraphs or two or three pages at most. The stories advance a bit and then you'll be taken to another thread, to someone else's life. There are a lot of characters, and they are often referred with different names: first name, whole name, don or doña this or that, or some diminutive form of their names -- I wasn't always quite sure with whom I was. This was, however, the only problem for me. All other thing mentioned before: the fragments, no plot etc were not negatives.

Cela is a good writer. Reading was easy and enjoyable even when I was a little lost. And his characters are real, even though we don't get to know them really well. But that is how life is in a big city.

Well, The Hive was, in my plan, supposed to be the last one for Spain before Africa. But, it--and I don't know exactly what--just happened ... I walked out of library with both Nada and Sefarad.

Finished Nada last night and started Sepharad, my second last book for Spain.

Nada is still on my mind ... working on some comments.

Nada seems to be a modern, though somewhat local, classic in Spain. The front cover has a blurb by Carlos Ruis Zafón and there is a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, praising the book, naming it the Spanish equivalent to The Catcher in the Rye.

Andrea comes to Barcelona by train, no one is there for her for she is late. She takes a cab for her relatives' place where she is going to live. The city looks exciting, mysterious, inviting and free to a country girl.

All is well for about a half a page, until she comes to her new home, a wasted apartment in a house that has seen better days (many many years ago), inhabited by a family of Munsters without comedy or humor: two abusive uncles and a not much better aunt, a nasty servant, half-crazy grand mother (nice, though) and Gloria, wife of one of the uncles and their baby boy.

The book covers a year of Andrea's life, most of it not so happy times because of the above, and her poverty and hunger. But there are good days and things too. She finds friends, she finds the Barcelona inviting, exciting and mysterious too. And she survives.

This was and wasn't a book for me: Barcelona was great, Andrea's hunger and hysteria were very well and lively present in the story. But at times the drama was too close to melodrama and the turbulences were a few too many to my tastes.

This was obviously a young author's work in both good and in bad.

Another thing about Nada that may be one of the reasons I did not enjoy it as much as others seem to have: it was an English translation, and I usually avoid reading translations other than Finnish. I think I read English ok, and I have no reason to think that Finnish translators do better job than others, but it is different to read a translation in a language of my own than in some other languaga compared to something originally written in that other languag -- there are more layers of "translation" in the latter case, the second, not so professional, happening in my head. In case of Nada, for example, if read in Finnish, I would not need to think about these things and I'd have more time just enjoying the book.

Alas. eario says nada to Nada.

Well, others have said that "there was nada after Nada" ... had to come up with something else.

All is nada.

I've been a lurker for a while but had to pipe up at the mention of Nada. I had to read that in a Spanish lit class and didn't enjoy it at all. I can't even tell you what it's about anymore. In fact, reading your blurb, it was like I was reading about a whole other book.

I've also read El sur seguido de Bene from that same class and although it was much more enjoyable I can't remember what its about either. Goodness.

54 -
"One more thing: is there anyone out there who could explain me the original title "Les Catilinaires". It obviously refers to the protagonist/narrator's background and expertise, but everything I found on the net was in French..."

A catilinaire is a type of hate speech; basically a strong, abrasive speech in the direction of another person.

Obviously post 54 is from a while ago but I hope that answers your question. :)

#130: Thanks, that was the only answer I ever got. An understandable title to the book, by the way.

"One day they disappear, being dead or not, they vanish and their image is erased from our minds like they had not even existed, they change into something else, products of imagination or ghosts in whom the person they once were is no longer recognizable..."

Sepharad consists of 17 chapters or stories, which at first seem to have nothing much to with each other, but this isn't a short story collection. Reading on, at some point comes a feeling that I've heard of this or something very similar somewhere, I know that character, or place, or incident. Paths cross, connections are found, reader is enlightened.

The stories also circle around the themes of exile, alienation, identity and memory; they are about people left their homes and home lands, forced or to find something new; they are about outsiders or ones who become such; they question who am I, what do I think I am and what do you think I am, and what difference does that make?

They circle around the history of Jews in Europe and Spain, since they were expelled from Spain in 1492, the holocaust in the 20th century and years between. But I don't think this is just about them, rather their history and what has been done to them is used as an example of something more general in humanity; not a nice picture, yet it is not a desperate one: anyone with a human heart is potentially evil, but not every one is.

I read books from eleven countries to get from Finland to Spain. I have visited nine of those countries in real travels, and funnily, I realize that in many cases I have traveled on train quite similarly as I did now when traveling in books: I rushed through certain countries and stopped in others for more time -- though, I have to say that I spent more time in books in the countries I was just passing through than in the countries I actually stayed when really traveling.

From Finland to UK was mostly just traveling, though I will not forget Let the right one in, The Quiet Girl, Book Thief or The Sorrow of Belgium soon. UK was more like being somewhere, the Instance of the fingerpost being one of the high points on the way so far.

I visited Ireland only for one book, but I read Ulysses just before starting this journey. Enough is enough.

The Algebraist may seem a bit far fetched in the context of Reading Globally but having read other books by Banks the interstellar adventure in this book wasn't really that different from his Scotland material.

France, I don't know why but it has always left me cold, but Life a user's manual didn't. I am glad I read it.

Spain, on the other hand, has always been a special place for me (though I have been there only once), and the eleven books exposure to Spain did not spoil the magic. It is still a special place.

So, I am leaving home ground, not knowing what is ahead. I have never been to Africa and I have also read little African literature, probably more books about or set in Africa, but that is going to change now. Another change from now on: Traveling through Europe was, with only few exceptions, traveling through my TBR list. In Africa I'll probably have to look for books to read and I'll read more books by new to me authors than in ages. I am excited, and I am ready to Partir.

Bon voyage!

In Africa, Morocco ... Europe is still near. All the characters in Lähtö (The Departure) by Tahar Ben Jelloun are looking at the lights of Spain behind the water, yearning to go. To leave at any price. One's life often becomes the price of the trip, humiliation, misfortune and shame being the other options.

Azel is one of the educated but unemployed Moroccan young men who have nothing to do in their homeland but to make plans how to get away. He sort of succeeds, finding a protector in a Spanish art gallerist who takes Azel with him as his lover. Not being gay this does not work for Azel and the what follows is mostly sad.

Azel is the center of the novel, other stories are told by his sister, friends in Morocco and in Spain and other people he meets.

There are some who can manage holding their head high, they get hurt, they may even die but they can retain some self respect, and survive. There are more of those who bow down low, and they become pushed even lower.

The novel is interesting, even important, due to its subject matter -- pity it isn't a great literary work as well, just ok.

I haven't read that book by Tahar Ben Jelloun, but I did read This Blinding Absence of Light several years ago, which was very good.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll think of that, or the other works by him after I finish Désert (or Autiomaa in Finnish) by JMG Le Clézio.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is very much translated into Finnish: Lähtö/Partir is or was, according to the cover, his twelft work published here.

From your description, I would guess that Partir is the same book as Leaving Tangier; looking at Jelloun's Wikipedia page in English, it appears as though this is his twelfth book published in English, as well.

I'll be interested to get your impressions of Désert, which I'd like to read this month or next.

Off to USA to spend some time with The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice. I loved her Cry to Heaven. I believe that this is going to be something entirely different and it was recommended by my son who is into everything of a gothic nature.

re #139: ... that surprised me and I felt lost for a moment until I realised it wasn't me off to USA.

I am still thinking of the Désert, though the book just took to Marseille with Lalla.

Oops! Sorry eario if I confused you. Obviously I posted on wrong thread. My profuse apologies.

Wow, this is a great thread. I'll have to read it in more depth. Sounds like you are reading some challenging/long books (Life is a User's Manual, Ulysses, Fingerpost, so an inspiration to me to keep climbing the high mountains.

>133 eairo: If you need recommendations for African books, feel free to check out my Profile or the Profile of depressaholic-although there are some great threads with suggestions elsewhere.

#141: That's ok. I was trying to be funny, which, obviously is not one of my strengths.

#142: Thanks! I hope you'll find interesting, even inspiring stuff here. I'll see your profile, recommendations and suggestions are always welcome.

Just finished the Désert and -- I don't now how many times I've said this before -- have mixed feelings. Most of the time that is a good sign, to have feelings, even mixed ones. Very well written book yet I am not sure what to think about the ideas I found in it.

Désert by JMG Le Clézio has two storylines happening in two different times: early 20th century and the present (or what was present in the 70s/80s).

The historical sections are about the last days of the last free nomads in the Western Sahara, People of the wind and the sand, telling their at first hopefull gathering and journey to find a place, a home that turns into a desperate run for their life. It is a clash of different world views or lifeforms, like a head-on collision of a man and a train.

The other story is one of a girl growing up, living in a place that sounds like a slum outside a town. She is a descendant of the people of the other story, what is left of them. She is poor but happy, sort of, most of the time. There is not much happening. The girl's story is more about how she experiences things around her, the wind, the sand, the sea - natural mysticism, poetically written, and very beautifully, but romanticized, which at times turns agains itself. This section of the book is titled 'Happines'.

The other part is 'Life among the slaves'. The girl moves to Marseille, and, well, the title pretty much says it: her happy poverty turns into a miserable one. And what she sees around herself, is mostly worse. Even her brief period of fame as a model does not change that. City life is not for her, not for most anyone - I guess that is one of the things the author is trying to say.

Desert was surprisingly close to Leaving Tangier (Partir), thematically, not in style. The historical story can be seen as an early stage of the development that has led to the desperate situation of the young people in Morocco that the latter book is about. And the modern girl's story, especially the trip to Marseille, could almost be one of the immigrant stories in Leaving Tangier. Desert was, however, better written.

I already had the Blinding absence of Light in my hand, but even the title felt depressing ... November in Finland is dark, dark, dark ... don't need more absence of light right now. Picked up The Almond instead ...

I'll probably read Désert next month or early next year. Thanks for that nice review.

This Blinding Absence of Light was a pretty grim read from what I remember of it. Good move to put it aside for now.

146: When you get to the Desert, please let me know if you write a review, or post a comment here.

Will do, eairo.

The Almond, subtitled 'an Intimate Story' in Finnish or 'Sexual Awakening of and Muslim Woman' in English.

The woman in question tells her own story, looking back her life from her fifties, interlacing episodes from different times in her life: childhood and youth in Moroccan countryside, and a loveless marriage from which she escapes to Tangier to meet Driss who becomes her lover and the engine of her awakening, and back to where she begun later in life, the last few pages of the book showing peace and serenity found later in life.

During most of the book, or the life of the protagonist and narrator, everything is very sex-centered, and while this is sort of interesting in the sections about the old fashioned country life of Morocco -- hypocrisy is the word -- it is often sad and tedious elsewhere. Liberation becomes obsession, love very hurtful and life empty.

(I have never seen so many expressions and euphemisms for genitals, both male and female, in so little number of pages (around 200, and the lay-out is spacious), so I guess this is, in a way, educative book too.)

Found an interesting and critical review of The Almond in the blog by Laila Lalami: http://lailalalami.com/2005/nedjmas-the-almond/

Meanwhile, I have finished the Women of Algiers in Their Apartment -- processing my thought on that -- and will start The Plague soon.

Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar was a serious book, a collection of stories + an essay. The stories were about the women's position in Algerian society before, after and during the National War: being silenced, made invisible and held prisoners in their homes. About how little has changed in 150 or so years. Interesting but reading this was hard work for me. The stories were going many ways, circling around the same subject, having a message, manifesto, a point-to-be-made.

In fact the essay on the background of the stories and the Delacroux painting that had given the title to the book was the part that I liked the best: easy to read, being more 'honestly' what it is yet interesting all the same.

I can see why The Plague is a classic. I can also somehow understand why some think it is boring. What surprises me is that someone thinks the writing is "dense" or "hard to follow", which, according to some LT reviews, is the case. To me this was easy and quick read.

There is not much action, the plot is nearly medical, following the development of a plague epidemic from the beginning to the end: people die and people fight against the disease. The fight, and that most of the people do the right thing, is the easiest to get and the most superficial message to "get" from this book, as pointed out near the end: "there is more to admire in human beings than to despise."

I believe there are many more possible interpretations and things to find here, many reasons to return to this story again. Which I think I will do - this being my first time reading.

Additional thoughts related to my world tour

The story is set to Oran, Algeria, but one could say that Algeria, or Africa, is very superficially present: climate and weather are described as what one might think of being African. Arabs, black people are both mentioned once. And that's about it, other than that, this is France.

I guess this is not about Camus not knowing what Algeria is like - he was born there and grew up there. Maybe he thought the story did not need more authenticity (then, why name the city Oran in the first place?), or maybe--more frighteningly--life in a colony was, or could be like that: maybe the indigenous were invisible and could be forgotten ... just a decade before the Algerian war started.

Book started, Sundiata, my entry ticket to Mali.

ahh -- Sundiata is wonderful. Gotta love his mother!

Yes, it is fascinating, made me read a few extra pages after finishing the actual story to become even superficially informed of what I had just read.

Seems there are quite a few different editions (and possibly translations) around.

The legend of Sundiata has been oral tradition for centuries, and the books we are reading may be transcribed from various sources. The Finnish edition I read is compiled from transcriptions and translations of recordings of three griots' versions of the legend, the recording being from the '60s by en English ethnographer (whose name I don't remember).

All this just because I didn't quite get the "Gotta love his mother!" at first. We've read a different book!

The mother had no special part in my Sundiata book. Apart from giving birth to 20 pairs of twins before Sundiata, which of course is an admirable labour ... and being pregnant for seven years with Sundiata.

The legend is fascinating in many ways. The story is good, and it is African and universal at once. Many elements are familiar from other similar legends from all around: the king to come is a cripple and weakling first, but he rises when required; there are tests or qualifications where he must show his greatness yet remain humble; exile, and finally his return to home and the victory.

Sundiata was just the right introduction to Mali, even though this Mali probably isn't exactly what we see on the map today. Another great thing that came up while looking for reading material for Mali was the music. Not to be forgotten when trying to get into the mood for Mali. Check out Amadou & Mariam!

(Another thing that came up all the time were the birds. Field guide to the birds of Western Africa is tagged for each every country around here.)

I've also started Timbuktun hetket, a Finnish science fiction novel set in Mali.

Just realized that Sundiata was actually the first really non-European read after coming to Africa.

I said above that Sundiata was universal, it had elements familiar from legends of different cultures, yet it is very different in form and the rhythm and narrative were different from the previous four 'African' books. All of them, written by Africans or Europeans, were all the same very similar in many ways. Modern Europe (or western world) was near, the books are all sort talking with Europe, or conscious about Europe somewhere near. They, even the ones by African authors, were probably written to be read by European/non-African readers.

In Sundiata, the influences are older and less recognizable to me. It feels more rootsy, the whole world is near while reading it.

I am not saying one or the other is better thing or reading experience; just different.

eairo,
Loving your journey so far, and fascinated to see how west africa pans out. There are tonnes of Nigerian writers out there, but many of the other countries in the region are not easy to find books for.

Just a quick thought on your comments in 152 and 156. There are many times that a book from a certain country has failed to match up to my preconceptions about what I expected to find. I have come to view it as a learning experience about that place, and about my attitudes towards it. When you say that your reads haven't been 'African' so far, could it maybe mean that your idea of Africa need tweaking? I have said this on a lot of threads in a lot of different contexts, and don't mean anything insidious by it, but 'Africa' is a continent, not an idea, and bits of it do look very 'European'. That just means that this 'European' idea is part of the African continent too. I think all 5 of your books so far (even the Camus) reflected different faces of Africa.

I am loving reading about your travels. I read Sundiata for Mali earlier this year as well, fascinating legend - I also read up on it after reading. I also read Women of Algiers for Algeria, I loved it, but not as much as I loved her So Vast the Prison.

What are you planning on reading for Nigeria?

157: I agree with what you say. My idea of Africa will probably change, at least if I'll find enough reading material to change it. I will learn.

"European idea is part of the African continent too." I think that was what I was thinking about, or something like that at least, when I wrote above that Europe is near. That should be no news, and it wasn't, but I guess I had forgotten it ... and got a reminder.

Africa is more familiar to me through music but the truth is most of the African music that is available to me is produced for and by European/American market.

Why would it be different for books?

Some of them may even be written primarily for European readers (or buyers) however African they seem to be, which was one of the points made by Laila Lalami in her critique on The Almond (see #150). She shows the lack of authenticity and, more seriously, lack of 'emotional truth' in the book in her writing. I just thought The Almond wasn't very well written. Publishing is business too.

But how am I supposed to learn if my learning material is bad?

But, again, this is not a simple good-bad thing. African authors are not supposed to write 'African' books or something representing their country for me. And I'll gladly see the face of Africa (or the World) through anyone's eyes if (s)he writes well enough.

Above all: this is just one world; the borders are imaginary in many cases, arbitrary in others.

#158: I have no detailed plan for Nigeria yet. I know there are lots of books easily available - I'll enjoy the abundance when I get there ... and I actually don't know how to do that without bending my rules. (Buying books is an option of course but I've got this far using mostly library.)

My boyfriend is Nigerian so I've been reading a bit more Nigerian authors this past year. Ben Okri is OK, Chinua Achebe is great, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was my favorite though.

Thank you for the recs ... books by all three authors are available at the city libraries here, in Finnish and in English. I'll see to them when in Nigeria.

You are welcome! There are so many good authors from there, from what I've heard. I am kind of hoping you read something else too so that I can steal ideas ;)

Just an interesting note - Adichie has been living in the US for quite a while. she completed a masters in creative writing here in Baltimore at John Hopkins Univ. around 2003, I think. I saw her at a reading and Q&A at the local Barnes and Noble just about the time Purple Hibiscus was published. And I would second Amchie recs. Of the three writers, I like her best.

#164 ... made me think ... about languages these authors write. English? All these three authors mentioned above seem to write, or at least publish, in English. Is English as in American, or English like something else? Do you, who have read their books, and (I guess) are native English readers, notice any difference between their English and some American or British author's English?

I'm not sure what I am after... maybe it is the idea that I heard some time back that different languages induce different thinking, or something. Translated work is always somewhat different from the source. But if an author masters more than one language, s/he makes a choice when s/he writes in one or the other. Would it be the same book if s/he did the other choice?

Interesting thought. Ben Okri has some Pidgin English in his books which was neat. They all seemed authentic though in the language when comparing to how the Nigerians I know actually speak. English is one of the main/official languages there and is spoken by a lot of people, though with some differences from American English, and some differences from British. Closer to British though.

-->165 eairo:
There can be huge differences between British and US English translations. It really ruins a book for me when a character from the UK speaks in American English (vise versa also annoys me, but slightly less, for some reason).

166 & 167: Thanks for your comments. I'll try to think these thoughts again when I'll get there. Nigeria will probably be the first African country where I'll have a choice of material (booktitles, authors, translations...).

I've been busy and away so I haven't even written my review of Timbuktun hetket (which was ok).

I have also struggled with Bound to Violence in Swedish - it beat me, I lost, I had to give up somewhere near page 50. Not because of the book itself, which I think might have been an interesting read. I just couldn't get into it due to my not so good Swedish.

I'll start God's Bits of Wood next, traveling to Senegal with it.

Timbuktun hetket (Moments in Timbuktu) is a Finnish speculative fiction novel set in Western Africa in near future.

The area is then the leading economical power in the world due to availability and importance of solar energy and some lucky developments in the area of information technology: someone made the right piece of software and set it free in the right moment ... thanks to him the Western African section of the n:th generation internet works better than the rest - and as "everything" happens in the network, this is crucial. It goes even further: part of the network evolves to consciousness.

This is just a "let's reverse the things", this is not alternative history, for the history that is referred to in the book is quite like the present. Alternative future? A future quite different than the the daily news from Africa makes one expect. Good. The author shows knowledge of the culture of the area (I believe what others say here; a reviewer who has lived there) - and respect to it. Good good.

Western African Union is not paradise, though. Where there is power, there is always someone who'd like to take it. This is what the story is about: the bad guys try to get the power and the money, using a few innocent fools as their tools, and an unlikely hero (or three of them; one being the conscious piece of network control software who calls itself Light) stops them.

Sadly the story is not as interesting and good as the setting. The plot feels like something borrowed from the tales of adventure I happily consumed when I was twelve years old (or ten), and the characters probably come from the same source.

God's bits of wood (Jumalan puupalikat in Finnish) is set in 1948, in French Western Africa, now Mali and Senegal. It tells a realistic story of the strike of Dakar-Niger railroad workers. They are poor in the beginning, and their powerty turns into misery during the six month strike. But they don't bend (or at least they don't break).

The story is set in three places, Bamako, Thies and Dakar, and it is told from the points of views of several characters. Their different situations and different attitudes to the strike. While most are wholeheartedly for the fight and the strike, some have their doubts and moments of weakness. Some of the don't even think the fight is right. They all are humans. This is convincingly conveyed. Mostly so: Bakayoko, the strongest of the strike leaders, becomes nearly a mythical hero; and the white characters are just bad or stupid, or both.

The role of the women is interesting. While the(ir) men play with big things and fight the big powers, the women still have to provide them and their children - food, support and an orderly home to come to. The harder this comes the stronger they become. They take their place and they make their voice to be heard: both the men in strike and the people with power are made to listen, loud and clear. Their long walk from Thies to Dakar to confront the company leaders finally becomes the act that turns the tide. Ather the march other worker's unions join the strike and finally ends it in their favor.

Everything doesn't turn good overnight, but in the end it is obvious that the first steps to the right direction have been taken.

I was going to add this to my wish list, but it's already in my library! Thanks for the review, eairo.

Beggar's Strike by Aminata Sow Fall (or Kerjäläisten lakko) was a nice short read.

An incompetent government officer, Mr Ndiaye, is given a task to do: the streets of the City are to be cleaned of the beggars. The minister, his boss, and the president believe their presence everywhere repels tourists and foreign businessmen and is therefore harmful to the economy of the Country.

Mr Ndiaye is not capable of getting the job done, but luckily he has an employee who is.

According to Islam giving alms is a duty for every one who has something to give. "Your riches have no permanent home with you. You are to remember they are only lent to you by God", remind the religious wise men Mr Ndiaye who, being the incompetent fool he is, needs every blessing he can get to advance in his career. (And he would very much like to be the vice president.)

The problem for Mr Ndiaye is there is no one to give to when the beggars are wiped out of sight...

Finished Rihata or Season in Rihata, which was set in an imaginary African country--ex French colony, though, not far from where I am I guess--, so I could not paint more red to my map, and I will continue from Senegal where I was before the visit to Rihata.

Next I'll visit The Gambia, which is sort of inside Senegal. The Road to My Village and Reading the Ceiling are waiting.

The Road to My Village wasn't an experience I'll remember very long.

It really wasn't a good book, but wasn't all bad either ... there was some informative bits and a homey feel to it. But as a literary work it was of low quality and quite poorly composed.

A young man comes from the city to visit his old home village in the Gambian countryside, remembering how things were and to see how they are, and to prepare himfelf for even longer absense: to leave for Europe. This was revealed to me late in the book. For a long (not really, actually, for the book has only 80 pages, but relatively) time I thougth the book was just a collection of musings and anecdotes, some of them quite nice, actually. Had it been longer, I probably wouln't have finished it.

>152 eairo: If you're interested in revisiting The Plague, a group read is forming here, probably for April.

#175: Thanks, again. I starred the thread. Don't know if I'll be able to make a contribution but I'll come to see what other have to say.

Is that your challenge this year?

>174 eairo: - dear eairo, who was the author of Road to My Village...I can't seem to find it on amazon.com

Will you have to read another Senegalese novel to escape The Gambia, or are you allowed to take a plane out?

re The Road to My Village (still no touchstone): here is a link to its work page. As you see the copy I have (from the library) is the only one at the LT - a true rarity. The author is Bala SK Saho.

No wonder you didn't find it on amazon, the book has been published (only, I guess) in Finland by a very small publisher. I think it is somewhere near the border of self-published and actually published book. (Not saying that all the self-published books were bad.)

Mr Saho was living and studying in Finland in the 80/90s. He seems to have published one more book: http://gamwriters.com/africa/gambia/post/2008/8/22/bala-saho-1963

#178: I will read my way out of Gambia. I have So long a letter waiting.

Started Reading the Ceiling last night, and wow what a contrast there is after The Road... and I am not talking about the quality, but the difference in the image of the country that is supposed to be the same.

>176 eairo: eairo
no challenge this year, except to apply the (improved) reading habits I've developed over the past couple of years. I'm keeping a 2010 reading thread here.

>159 eairo: eario,

I completely agree. As a result I tend to avoid African fiction these days. By the way, when you make it to Lebanon, check out The Hakawati. Alameddine uses the story with story frame (the shape of The Arabian Nights to tell a story that moves back and forth in time from the Arabian Night-like tales to the stories of a Lebanese family. The book was on my top list for 2009.

I wouldn't give up entirely on African fiction. Since reading Wizard of the Crow, which I thought was a wonderful book, I have read quite a bit of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and he has written on the very topic of who Africans write for and in what language, for example, very interestingly in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature and less interestingly in Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. He has started writing in Gikuyu instead of in English, and then translating it into English.

I couldn't agree more.

>179 eairo: Thanks for doing the research for The Gambia. It's one of the African countries I need so this saves me time. Is The Road to My Village in English, fiction, set in The Gambia?

#182-184: I rather find books to read than reasons not to read them. What I wrote above in #159 is something to be recognized but I can live with that.

Colonial times are still relatively close in time. It would be strange if there were no trace of it to be seen (in literature). In fact written literature vs. oral tradition is a newcomer in Africa.

Thanks for the tips both of you ... The Hakawati and Decolonising the Mind were both new titles to me, and they both are available in libraries here.

Wizard of the Crow was one of the two African books on my tbr-list when I "arrived" Africa. The rest I've found on the road.

#185: Yes it is, all that ... but it may also be very hard to find, see msg 179.

I'm sure Reading the Ceiling is easier to find. And the writing is better.

>185 shawnd:, 187 - I just found Bala Saho. He's at University of Michigan in US and I am in an email conversation with him now. If you have any questions of him let me know, or if you want to contact him.

#188: Oh, the world is so small these days! Just say a hello from Finland: his book is still alive and being read.

In fact, it seems to be available at two or three bookshops, at least (the ones I found do not deliver outside Finland, though).

I have to take back some of my words. I will remember this book for some time.

"Once there was a girl, Ayodele, and her life can be told in many ways."

Ayodele is Gambian girl and Reading the Ceiling tells her life, after a common prologue, in three different ways. It begins on her 18th birthday, she is to party with her friend, school is almost behind, future is waiting full of promises.

There is just one thing she thinks has to be done first. She has decided to loose her virginity "to be over and done with it". She just has not decided with whom she is going to do "the deed" as she labels it.

With whom is the detail that initiates the three different life stories that follow.

The idea is executed well. The single thing ("who") does not dictate everything that comes after. There are other big things and decisions to be made later in life, but that special night could very well be a crossroads where the initial direction is set.

It is also nice how Forster crafts the altertaitve stories together. There are a few common characters (family, friends) whose life is more or less similar or different depending on where and how Ayodele has spent her life and time. These were mostly little things that were fun to notice.

Ayodele's lives were all possible (realistic), I think ... studies in London or Dakar, coming back or not coming back, different marriages (including one as a second wife in a polygamous marriage) and different professions following different educations.

Fitting three lifetimes in 250 pages requires a few quick turns and a couple of jumps. The stories weren't full accounts of every year of Ayodele's life, there were a few big gaps in timeline and jumps from place to another. Only a couple of times it felt that the characters were acting out-of-character-ways after a time gap or change of scenery. Most of the time the gaps were well written and worked fine, one could imagine the missing years.

Another minor complaint is that somewhere in the middle, during the second life or so, I lost my interest for a moment but that went past. I don't know exactly, why that happened. Just a little something in the middle of an otherwise good novel.

So long a letter is what the title promises: a Senegalese, recently widowed woman, passing the appropriate 40 mourning period at home, writing a letter to her best friend, who has emigrated years ago.

The things she writes range from little everydayish happenings to memories of their common youth to commantary on the state and the developments of the society; her late husband's betrayal, which consists of abandoning his youthful ideals and his first family and taking a second wife, arouses a few bitter comments (on men and their ways), and the family matters with 12 kids are also worth mentioning.

The range of themes is fun, it feels authentic, letter-like (though this feel of authenticity suffers a bit from too much explaining things that should be obvious to the supposed reader of the letter, though maybe not of the book), and fresh.

The book is from the early 1980s, the writer is of the generation who were young and active during the first years of the independence of Senegal. She also belongsto the first generation of educated women in her culture. This background shows, there is talk about ideals and sacrifice, and of work for the future ... and wondering of what happened to that future they (the writer, her husband and their friends) were supposed to be building together.

The only thing that bothered me was that there were some, a few, too many direct statements of what's right or wrong. I had no problem with ideas and ideals of the writer, just the way they were expressed felt a bit preachy.

The writing is good, though, clear and easy to read. Just what you would expect from a teacher of about 50 years who takes herselft seriously?

One year on the move!

I started Pussikaljaromaani, the first book marked for this journey, at the end of the January 2009. It has been a good year. I have read many books I have liked, some of them from my ever growing tbr stack, and quite a few I had never heard of before--books I found just because looking for a book from, or related to, a specific country.

That is just one the goods of the challenge, finding new books to read. The orderliness (is that a real word?) is great too. Advancing slowly, reading books that are set (or from) geographically close (not thinking of The Algebraist here) to each other makes sense. It often shows they are from neighboring countries or cultures. Books from Spain referred to Portugal more often than Russia--even though that happened too--or their characters visited France, or Morocco, and vice versa. There are connections to be found or created, and it easier to find them this way. What I am saying is that reading these books this way, in this specific order, is different from reading them in random order, and I like it that way--nothing more, nothing less.

Numbers: 52 books (one unfinished) from 17 countries. I am in Guinea, Western Africa now, 4000 km from home. When I started I thought this might take something like two years but I guess I'll have to re-estimate that, or double it. If I remember right, I've read only two fiction books outside the challenge during the year, so I've been quite faithful.

"Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star"
(From The Hobbit. Later comes a verse about turning homewards, but I am not that far yet.)

eairo,
Congrats for sticking with it for the year. Your thread has become one of the most interesting in this group (a very interesting group to begin with), and I am always excited when I see that you have added a new post. Its also been very interesting, for me, to see what books are available to a Finnish reader, compared to what I was finding.

When I started my challenge I read pretty much 'at random', at least regarding geography. Gradually, I got into the habit of reading 5 or 6 books from a specific region and, like you, found it really rewarding. I think if I started again (something I'm NOT going to do), I would copy your method of reading a few from each country, then hopping the border to the next one. Even now, when I am running out of clumps of new countries, I tend to read new countries together with a few books from adjoining ones, whether they are new or not. If there is anyone out there thinking of starting a global read, I really recommend they give some though to doing this.

Anyway, you are now entering a part of the world that I had difficulty finding lots of choice for (though I have managed to find something from almost all of West Africa, some of which is currently unread). I will, as ever, be looking with interest to see what you turn up.

All the best, and hope you make it back to Finland one day!

eairo,

I too have really enjoyed following your thread. I've mostly lurked, but I come back to find books from particular parts of the world that I am curious about. It's apparent that you're enjoying your world tour -- why not let it stretch out for longer than expected. Doesn't the reward come in the travelling, not the arriving?

Enjoy your wanderings!

#193 & 194 - Thank you for encouragement & kind words.

It is true there isn't much to choose from for countries from Senegal to Nigeria, Ghana being an exception en route. But I think I'll get there without changing my rules ... I may need bend them a bit and buy a couple of books, which I haven't done much so far.

Being able to read French, or even Swedish, would make things easier.

The African Child is Camara Laye's autobiographical account of his boyhood in (then French) Guinean small town and the countryside around it, in the 1930s and 40s, and his way to the capital and abroad for education.

The book's strenghts and weaknesses are possibly the same, depending on the viewpoint: it is quiet, slow, down to earth, the language is simple but wordy ... with a lot of words and with admirable, nearly ethnographical accuracy, the happening of nothing much is described. This may be interesting or boring.

Once again it is not possible to avoid the feeling this has been written for outsiders, Europeans; explanations, descriptions, repetitive use of expressions like 'our custom'.

To me, now, the most interesting aspect of the account was that it, in a way, illustrated the background of a character I've met in so many other books from the area: an intelligent young man (or woman in few cases) from French Western Africa who receives a scholarship in France--once in a lifetime chance. He leaves his homeland heart and head full of ideas and ideals. He will work hard and come back to do good for his (newly independent) country. Well, they usually do come back. But they come back changed, or to a country that has changed; unable to do the good they were thinking before, or too busy with their own good.

The colonialism is strikingly absent from the account. No comment on its goods or bads is given. The schooling is the only thing where the presense of the French shows. Everything else seems to be as it has always been. I don't know what does this indicate, but curious it was, considering the age of the book, the account ending just about 10 years before the country's independence, and in comparison with most of the other books I've recently read.

I have another book by Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King, but it has been on the TBR for several years. Your review makes me interested to take a look at it and maybe move it up, although it has a very mixed review here on LT.

The Radiance of the King, and the reviews I've read, make me curious too--not enough to buy it, though.

I just read elsewhere it was highly appreciated in its time by other African writers, and that it was said to "represent an African conception of the world unknown to us" (Europeans) yet "being a very European novel, Kafka's the The Castle transfrerred to Africa".

Off to 19th Century Crimean War with The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon.

Moving on to Sierra Leone with the Ancestor Stones, which after 25 pages or so seems engaging, and Two African Tales by Abioseh Nicol (not started yet).

I also found three promising anthologies that I'll read along the the novels or, in case of emergency, use for a quick visit to some country if nothing else is available: The Heinemann book of African women's writing, Afrikka kertoo (Africa tells, selection of modern African prose; 1962) and Ilon ja kivun kääntöpiiri : Afrikkalaisia novelleja Saharasta etelään (The Tropic of Joy and Pain : African short stories South of Sahara).

A year! Congratulations, especially on keeping so faithful to the immersion; I find that's impossible with even the next six or so I plan to read :) Looking forward to your further travels.

Ancestor Stones tells stories of life in Sierra Leone during most of the 20th century.

Abie returns to her homeland and village after years spent in Europe, meets her four aunties and listens to their stories that range from the 1920s to the 1990s; from the times the pale moon shadow men scared little children who'd never seen such a thing before to the 'stability' of the British governance to the years of independence, corruption and a bloody civil war.

Each of the four narrators are given four chapters in the book, and their ages differ so--they all have same father but different mothers--that the 4x4 structure covers the mentioned 80 years period and a wide range of women's lives in different ages.

The structure works well on displaying the history of Sierra Leone and (woman's) life there. Maybe even a little too well, might one think: at times the characters feel like samples more than real people. I had problems distinguishing the aunties from each other. Spending 15 to 30 pages with on and then 80 or so with three others did not help here. When starting a new chapter I often needed to browse back to check what had happened to this auntie before.

Other than that the book is great, especially in little details. There are several lines and passages that are either funny, thought provoking, or both.

More on Ancestor Stones ... some of the little great things I mentioned: how the Europeans tend to do things the most diffucult way (when carrying things around with their hands and not on their head); or descriptions of how difficult it was to identify a person giving his or her vote when the name people actually use may be quite different from what is listed on the registers, and it may even depend on whether the person in question has made the hajj or not; or, more seriously, the way 'democracy' was brought in the country should make one wonder if democracy is such a great thing at all; or the concept of country or state ... what is the point of a national state when there is no nation?

And then there were the mambore, women who choose to 'abandon my birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man' ... made me curious. Has anyone heard of them elsewhere? I tried to google, but what I found was from this book.

An interesting document I found, worth a glance for a reader-traveler, I think: The paradox of constructions that construct us.

Ancestor Stones seem to be an interesting and thought-provoking read, I'll be on the lookout for it.

On your additional comments -- about carrying things on their heads, this reminds me of what Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in The Shadow of the Sun that for thousands of years the people in Africa walked. They were unable to adopt the concept of the wheel, and when they walked, whatever had to be transported were carried, most often, on their heads. Indeed the question about democracy and nation state makes one wonder if such alien or western concepts present the right path for such peoples who have been governed for millennia by ethnicity.

There is a very similar practice to mambore in Albania. There "women who become men" are called virgjinesha or "sworn virgins." This is observed mainly in the north, following a code of ethics called Kanun which decrees that all families must be patrilineal and patrilocal. Here is a short article on this http://www.jolique.com/gender/crossing_boundaries.htm

>203 eairo:, 204
very interesting, the book and your comments.

Thanks for the link in #204, that was really interesting. There are a few differences but some things seem to be identical in these two traditions, based on what little Forna tells about the mambores.

I am still in and around Sierra Leone with Two African Tales, first of which was set in Nigeria, and the second in Kissiland, which is probably somewhere near the borders of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

I also briefly met Syl Cheney-Coker whose short story about a lady preparing herself all afternoon to attend a concert--live on the television--was in one of the anthologies I found (#200).

The Two African Tales left me confused. They have been written in the sixties, if not earlier, in different times when people had different sensitivities and consciousness, I guess. A (refreshing) gust of wind from the times before political correctness...

The author also states in his foreword that one thing he wanted to show with these stories was that it was possible for white and black people to be friends and to respect each other in the colonial times too. This shows a little too much, there is a certain educative tone.

The stories were about the relations of black and white in West African British colonies: about a leopard hunt gone wrong, the only black partisipant of the safari dying; and about a white district officer's area being inspected by an African civil servant from the capital, and their dinner together.

The latter was better written and constructed ... but all in all, interesting is probably the best word to describe these stories--interesting among the other texts I've read about the area, but not much more.

I chose Allah is not obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma to be my book for Liberia, though the author and the main character(s) are Ivorean. Most of the book is set in Liberia during the recent civil war.

The story is narrated by Birahima, a "street child and small-soldier with no fear and no shame", looking for his auntie who is supposed to look after him after he has lost his mother. The aunt has moved to Liberia and the boy must follow, despite the war.

This is not one of those "true stories" or "survivor's tales". No, Birahima is an optimist and opportunist, he changes sides when he needs to (to follow the auntie), fighting for and against all parties in the absurd war; he thinks it is cool that a boy like himself can have anything he needs and wants ... thanks to the kalashnikovs they are given. He stubbornly refuses to become a victim.

Yet the horror of the war is there too. People die, children die (despite all fetishes they are given in addition to the rifles), and Birahima makes requiems to those he used to like. It is there but is always shown through the satirical view of our hero.

There are a few informative sections about the background and the parties of the war, possibly too many for someone's tastes; so much so that once in a while you may forget you're reading a novel. Otherwise the writing is good (the language being foul, however, if that matters), good enough to make me order another book by Mr Kourouma.

The only text by a Liberian author I could easily find was a speech by one of the country's past presidents. One of those being more or less a dictator.

The speech was from the 1960s but it could have very well been held by one of the many leaders described in Allah is not obliged. Hilarious. Chilling.

Found two nice but not great short stories by Veronique Tadjo. The stories were fantastic having some elements of folk tales and allegoric ... one was better than the other, but I wasn't really impressed. I am in Ivory Coast now, however, Waiting for the wild beasts to vote.

Found another collection of stories, Chasing The Sun : Stories from Africa, edited by Ivorean Veronique Tadjo. Stories are by different authors from different African countries, both known to me and new acquiantances.

Some of the stories are based on or influenced by old folk tales/oral tradition -- this shows positively. Others are clearly modern stories written recently, which is ok too.

Book started: Waiting for The Wild Beasts to Vote, 70 pages into it now, and liking it so far.

This is the story of "...Koyaga, hunter and President-dictator of the République du Golfe", narrated by sora Bingo, the bard-storyteller, assisted by Tiécorura, his koroduwa, the responder, apprentice, fool (as in jester or joker, not stupid) in form of donsomana, an epic traditionally told by a sora.

Koyaga is present---he is often directly addressed by the narrator, and he answers and comments once in a while---and seven others, the greatest of the Hunters and His Ministers.

And this is how it begins: "President Koyaga, General, Dictator, here we will sing and dance your donsomana over the feast of six vigils. We will tell the truth, about your dictatorship, your parents and your collaborators. The whole truth about your dirty tricks, your bullshit, your lies, your many crimes and assassinations..."

I thought this very promising from the start and it has kept the promise so far ... during the first vigil I was told the stories of Koyaga's parents and given some advances of what is to come.

This sounds interesting; I've added it to my Amazon wish list, but I'll look for your review before I purchase it.

Waiting for The Wild Beasts to Vote (see also #212) ... the feast of six vigils is held for purification. To prepare the Dictator, the Father of the Nation, the Supreme Guide, The Master Hunter, for the biggest challenge of his life: democratic election.

Each vigil has a theme and the book is structurally very clear and easy to follow. It starts with Koyaga's pre-history, his parents, as I said above.

The second vigil is about his life from childhood to the start of the days of his power, to the day of the coup d'état.

The third vigil detours a bit, it is about Macledio, his closest minister, but it is stated it is important to know Macledio's travels and life to understand that of Koyaga's, for Macledio "can obliterate the distinction between truth and lies and carry out the master's every whim for thirty years."

The fourth one is about Koyaga's dictatorial initiation. He visits a few of the many African dictators -- Africa "is as rich in them as it is in vultures" --, "the other saviours of the world", for educational purposes. They give him most cynical advice, and he is an avid learner. After this he (and we) knows, for example, that true African chieftain must be the wealthiest man of his country, and to achieve that he must not make any distinction between his property and the treasury of the state; that prison is the most important institution in an African one-party state; etc etc ... this is the weakest part of the book in my opinion, chilling in the content, but a little repetitive.

The fifth vigil is about staying in power and about betrayal, which come hand in hand to an African Leader (Supreme Guide, Father of the Nation, you know). "Your enemies will not betray you, so keep an eye on your friends." Attempts of assassination come two or three a year, and each time Koyaga survives, he stands up bigger and stronger, his myth grows more mythical.

But all things come to an end some time. The cold war ended, and neither the West nor the Communist Camp did need Koyaga or his colleagues in Africa no more. No more money, no more weapons, no more honorary doctorates or visits from the heads of states of the West. Koyaga does not give up, though: the world may change, the words may change---democracy is nice word---but he will not. May the election come, and if the people will not vote (him), the wild beasts will for he is The Master Hunter. This is what this book is about, the feast of six vigils.

The first half of the book is excellent and the rest of it good. Bingo, the sora, puts it just right in one his many proverbs: "Once you have said that the anus of the hyena smells bad, you have said it all." Kourouma tries to say a lot more, and it becomes too much at some point, it overflows. Yet this is an important and interesting book (or Important and Interesting :) ... cruel, brutal, sad ... magical and probably too true.

Changes : a love story (Muutoksia in Finnish): Esi, an emancipated Ghanaian woman, is frustrated in her marriage and divorces. Soon after she falls in love and ends up being a second wife to his new love.

She is "modern" but she can not avoid facing the fact that marriage in Ghana is not a business of two persons, like the old folks often remind her.

In a way this story has a lot of common with the So long a letter, but from a different point of view, the second wife's. Men enjoy the advantages of both the traditional system and the modernisation while women are reduced to being lesser workers/wives/beings in both worlds.

The book has its moments: the meetings with the older people were well written and it shows that the author has a view and a point in in the large scale of these matters. She just doesn't handle her characters very well. It is written too much like a cheap romance to my liking. There is a lot of talk about the characters' feelings but it is often told not shown. The author even apologizes for the book being a "love story" in her foreword.

Book started, another one from Ghana: Fragments (or Pirstaleita) by Ayi Kwei Armah. "Everything that goes away comes back, and nothing disappears for ever."

Fragments was, after Changes : love story, like taking a few steps back in time. Yet they have something in common, and yet again I found something very familiar in the two main characters, Baako and Juana, and in their mentality.

Baako was sent to the US for education. Five years later it is time to come home. He is eagerly waited for, supposedly wealthy, ready to take his place in the educated elite of the underdeveloped country. Except that he is not. He has become a writer. In a country with very few who can read... well, he is out of place.

Juana is a Puerto Rican doctor who has come to Ghana to help, and to get away from her past life (not explained).

They both become frustrated, not being able to do what they think they want to do, or believe the right thing to do, nor meeting the expectaitions of the other people around them.

They find each other, they can do each other some good. But not enough to make a happy end.

Addition: I liked this one. It is far from perfect, not maybe even great, but good and likeable.

"True stories are not always the best ones, but what is true about them is that they could be good."

An African in Greenland, a memoir by Togolese Tété-Michel Kpomassie, is probably as good as they get.

As a young boy the author has a nasty encounter with an angry snake in a palm tree. He is injured badly and cured with traditional Togolese methods, including more encounters with snakes and an offer to become a priest of the local snake cult. He is not very happy about that; his father is, though, so what can he do?

Soon after the boy finds a book about Greenland and the Eskimo, which makes an impression ... "when I had finished reading, one word began to resonate inside me until it filled my whole being. That sound, that word, was Greenland. In that land of ice, at least, there would be no snakes!"

Off he goes, and almost a decade he travels through the Western Africa and Europe, working in odd jobs and staying with people he meets on the road, before he finally reaches his dreamland.

The first third of the book covers the time in Africa and the journey to Greenland. It is clear already at that point that the author is quite an extraordinary personality; the ease with which he always finds protectors, his determination to reach his goal prove that.

The rest of the book recounts his time in Greenland, from the day of his arrival 'til the moment of departure 16 months later.

During those months he finds out Greenland is not the country he had dreamed of, nor are the Inuit the people he thought they were in his ideals. Despite his 'disillusionment' he still thinks in the end he could spend the rest of his life in Greenland. He doesn't miss Africa, not the warm or home light--but he misses his family and decides to go back.

By that time he has hunted and fished with and like them, eaten a lot of seal and whale blubber and intestines (mostly raw), dog meat (raw and boiled), ridden (and fallen off) a sledge, survived both the arctic night and day; become a "true Greenlander" according to his own words.

The author's personality, his endless curiousity, and the sort of sympathetic naïvety, the way he makes observations and puts himself into everything 100%, are fascinating and make reading the book well worthwhile. Even for those who are not into true stories.

The previous book almost took me off my route, from Togo to Greenland. It ended, however, on the journey back to Africa, so think I can (without guilty consience for breaking my own rules) go on traveling from Togo to Dahomey/Benin with The Viceroy of Ouidah and Kasvokkain (Face to face).

Great review of An African in Greenland, eairo. I was supposed to have read this last year, but somehow never got around to it. Maybe this year...

I thought I'd had this book for years and then discovered I didn't (so maybe it's buried somewhere), and then went out and bought the NYRB edition, but haven't read it yet. Maybe I'll move it up on the TBR . . .

220 & 221: Thanks. Hope you like it when the time comes. Like said, its strength is its authenticity, not so the literary values; by which I don't mean that the writing was bad.

If found The Viceroy of Ouidah quite accidentally reading my Dictionary of Imaginary Places, where it was introduced as an imaginary city in an historical kingdom of Dahomey, now Benin.

I had trouble finding anything else related to Benin so I decided to go for imaginary Ouidah.

This small book is tells the story of Francisco Silva (EDIT to correct: in the novel the name is Silva, not Sousa as in history), or Dom Francisco, a founding father of once powerful but degenerated family, friend and business associate (and even a blood brother of one of them) of the local Kings. All this makes a sort of "from rags to riches and back" story.

Slave trade made his rich, it also made him an outcast for he was one of the last great slavers. In his later years being a slaver was not an honorable profession for a Brazilian gentleman--which, however, did not stop the gentlemen profiting from the trade invisibly.

The modern day descendants live looking back, they are sorry for themselves, for the property and power lost when slave trade was finished.

Nearly all characters in the book are equally hard to sympathize, yet you can understand them, at least some of them. Which is, in a way, scary, considering what they do and are.

I have liked many Chatwin's books and what they are about but, apart from In Patagonia and Songlines, they have not usually made a lasting effect on me.

I guess the same will happen with this one. It was something I should have liked but I had hard time concentrating on it for more a ten-fifteen pages at a time, and it took days before I got myself writing this review... I don't know, maybe I'll have to reread In Patagonia when I get there.

Edit/Add: I later (right in the beginning of the next book) found out that Ouidah is not and imaginary place, and that this book actually "is a fictional retelling of the life of Francisco Félix de Sousa, the Sousa family founder in Benin and that of his powerful local descendants,..."

Another: Dom Francisco has a brief Wikipedia entry which states that he was of African origin himself, "the greatest Portuguese slave trader" and "deeply influential as an intermediary between European and African cultures."

Life is complex.

In the "Slave Kingdoms" episode of Wonders of the African World (PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wonders/), Henry Louis Gates interviews Martine de Souza, a descendant of the slave trader. She also shows him the house where de Souza lived and died and is buried. I think you can watch part of the video here: http://www.pbs.org/wonders/fr_e3.htm

224: Thanks, that was interesting. Not just the video clip, but rest of it too. With the Viceroy still at the back of my mind these pages and others I've been reading make me think again of the books value. Despite the somewhat slow and less than enthusiastic reading experience, I am beginning to appreciate it more.

There is also a movie adaptation of The Viceroy of Ouidah titled Cobra Verde by Werner Herzog. I guess I'll have to check that out. According to the imdb-reviews it is at least interesting and impressive, maybe even good.

(Cobra Verde, a Brazilian bandit, is mentioned in the book, but is not the main character. In the film they have been combined into one.)

Another Benin novel is Snares Without End. Touchstones not working.

Just an offer - If you click on my name above (or go to the Search tab in LT and type 'shawnd' (without the quotes) in the Members and Locations box, and then click on the shawnd link in the midst of the others) you'll go to my Profile page where you can see African books by country and I have probably 30 African countries so far...

If you like history, the famous British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote about Dahomey.

Yes, I found Snares Without End a couple of weeks ago, and I've read both your and depressaholic's reviews. I've even located a library copy of the book near me... Thanks anyway for the reminder.

Time flies. I've been stuck in Benin, being too busy to go to the library to get the next book, and even to comment the previous one...

Kasvokkain (originally Detta möte in Swedish, could be something like Encounters : notes from Benin in English) is a journal or notebook of observations and happenings of a period of a few months spent in Benin.

The author is a Finnish, Swedish-speaking actress and traveler who has written and published a few similar travelogues and Spanish text book before.

The writing is fine, and though the author isn't too modest about herself, she is has open eyes and mind, and can relate to other people's situations.

A (white) European is, however "poor", still rich and privileged in countries like Benin. Which is surprisingly awkward situation for someone from Finland, for example, where (a sort of) equality and ability to take care one's own matters is valued, and being "served" is mostly uncomfortable--quite a few of the Finnish* tried, after a couple of weeks stay, to help the locals in their work, causing them trouble and feelings of insult.

Yet "we" are not the center of the world for the Beninean. The author took lessons in Mina, one of the two main languages spoken in the area (the other being Fon), and when it was time to learn the names of the nationalities, she found out there wasn't much to learn: the American and the English were the same, there were words Germans and the French, and the rest were just "white". And Europe is just the place where the "white" come from. A good thing to remember for us, rich and privileged.

(* The journal covers two visits to Benin. First the author stayed some three month in a Finnish cultural centre Villa Karo, and later a few more months on her own.)

I never got around to get Snares without End and finally moved on to Nigeria. For the first time in months there are books to choose from, in Finnish as well as in English, naturally. That's a new kind of problem: now that choice must be made I can't...

I started my time in Nigeria with three short stories, Mother was a Great Man by Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, The Pay-packet by Ifeoma Okoye, and Saltless Ash by Zaynab Alkali.

All were brief and quick reads, and fall into the category of "interesting" rather than "great".

Mother was a great Man deals once more with the interesting unconventional possibilities of gender roles similarly, though not identically, than Ancestor Stones.

Hi eairo! I hope I am not too late. If you are still in Nigeria when you read this message, I would suggest the Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta.
If you plan to visit Ivory Coast, I wouls suggest a very good African author, Ahmadou Kourouma. My prefered one is Allah is not obliged, and my second choice The suns of independence. Enjoy West Africa!

>230 raton-liseur:: Yes, I am still in Nigeria, just getting started really.

After a couple of more short stories from anthologies I've been reading on and off between other books, I got Palm-Wine Drinkard and the Season of Anomy today.

I'll keep Buchi Emecheta in my mind for later. Some of her books, though not Bride Price, are available the libraries here.

Looking back to Benin: watched Cobra Verde the movie, which was ok, and went to a concert by Angelique Kidjo, which was more than ok, it was great! (For a first-timer, at least.)

I'm a big fan of the whole Herzog/Kinski thing, but I have to admit not being hugely keen about Cobra Verde either.

Let me know how the Palm Wine Drunkard goes. I am going to start on my Africa pile soon, and have a different Tutuola (Ajaiyi, I think its called), so it will be interesting to compare.

>233 GlebtheDancer:: Here you are:

Palm-wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-wine Tapster in Deads' Town is an impressing title, to say the least.

I read somewhere someone describing reading Tutuola was like "reading Kurt Vonnegut for the first time again." That made me curious, and to pick this classic to be my first (more than a short story) read for Nigeria. After finishing the book I see the parallel, though I wasn't that impressed.

Palm-wine drinkard likes to drink, and he does, a lot. Until one day his excellent palm-wine tapster, who pours the palm-wine like no one else can, dies.

After too many days without proper drink Mr Drinkard decides to find his tapster and bring him back home.

The story is an odyssey. Odyssey of the bush for that is where he travels: in the bush and from bush to bush, making magic, changing spape and doing other wondrous things ... finding a wife and getting married too. He (or they, after the marriage) meet a lots of different challenges and many mythical creatures, both helpful and hostile, wonderful or horrible. Finally the tapster is found, and later on they also find their way back home to live a wealthy life.

The story is funny, a quick read too, it may be wise (or not), but the comparison to Vonnegut set my expectation probably too high. I liked it, it was good as it is, but more (in one book) might have been too much.

I guess the writing is originally some sort of Pidgin English. The Finnish translation uses very unformal spoken-like language to convey this. There's nothing wrong with that but afterwards I thought I'd probably liked this better in the original language.

Finally finished the Season of Anomy -- it took almost a month to read!

Season of Anomy is hard to summarise or review. It is well written. The text flows enjoyably, I advanced quickly, tens of pages at each sitting. When I read it. After putting the book away, I felt no need to start again, and it stayed that way for days.

Well written but structurally challenging. The big picture is held back, it is not described directly at all. Rather the setting is revealed in the dialogues of the characters during the first half of the novel or so, little by little. For many a times the question was: what is this about?

The novel is set in a country (unnamed but identifiable as Nigeria) suffering from a tyranny of The Cartel that controls everything, a faceless entity whose puppets the politicians, businessmen and the military all are.

The story is about an privileged intellectual, Ofeyi, who is basically in good terms with the status quo. He is a wonder boy, an artist or film maker of some sort and a master mind of the white-washing campaigns of the Cartel. (I think so, all this is very vaguely told).

His eyes open to see things are not right, and he changes to become an organiser of people's revolt. Workers arise, they are beaten, massarce and madness follows.

The model of making things right is taken from a traditional/idealized/mythical African community model which has survived in Aiyero, a small fishing society, part of the same country and yet somehow isolated from everything around it for decades.

Ofeyi remains mostly outside of the action (he is in exile a good part of the novel, actually). His personal involvement is his search for Iriyise, his lover and the model girl of his Cartel campaigns, who is kidnapped in the middle of the chaos. Ofeyi worries and feels guilty for what had happened. He sees he had started things he (or anyone) could not control.

I believe the way the end part (and the end) of the book is written, Ofeyi's search for Iriyise is to symbolize something imprortant, something I did not quite get while I read it^*, though I have to say that the second half of the book, the search the action parts in general, was more easily accessible that the beginning.

And at the end, even though everything seems to have gone astray, is hopeful. Ofeyi escapes from the prison (with a little help from his friends) where he had tracked Iriyise, alive but comotose, at the dawn.

*:This article helped me afterwards.

After finishing the Season of Anomy I already had Half of a Yellow Sun waiting for its turn.

However, yesterday I luckily found information on a Nigerien novel translated into Finnish, and later on found out it is available in a library near me.

Started Lähikuva (Gros Plan in French, probably not available in English) by Idé Oumarou last night.

-->234 eairo:
Thanks for the review. Although it wasn't completely positive, it definitely strengthened my resolve to get a copy. This morning I saw one in my local charity shop for 40p (about 60 US cents) and...well you know what happened next. I now have two unread Tutuolas, so I hope I like him.

Lähikuva or Gros Plan is a confession of love to the city of Niamey and Nigerean life disguised as a novel.

There is a story with human protagonists in the book: an opportunistic though more or less honest business executive becomes arrested due to a misunderstanding. The whys and whats what led to this occurrence and what came of it are superficially what the book is about. The story is told mostly from the pov of the chauffeur of the exec, an honest/decent but uneducated/poor man.

The author, however, uses every opportunity to spend a half a page or more to describe the life in Niamey or Niger in general, so often and so thoroughly that the 'plot' actually becomes secondary.

On the whole this book was more interesting as the only novel available from Niger than as a literary work.

From Niger to Nigeria again with the Sozaboy, which is slow and not-so-very-easy but great, I think.

>239 eairo: Bravo on getting something from Niger!!! So hard to pull off.

>241 shawnd:: Hail the one that decided to translate the book and publish it. I just got lucky.

"...one of the great achievements of African Literature." blurbs William Boyd on the cover of Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa

For once it feels the blurb is just right. I am of course talking about the little that I know of African literature.

The story is simple but effective. One young man's change from one wanting to be soldier or soza, because the uniform looks so good, to a disillusioned, disappointed and bitter veteran of one of the "useless" "nonsense" wars of the world.

"And I was thinking how I was prouding before to go to soza and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me your sincerely."

The people who really should read this (kind of a) book, probably never will, but, you, do read it. It makes you good, itis enjoyable for its language and quality if not for the subject matter. The subtitle by the author: "A novel in rotten English" says it all. Rotten but great.

Ken Saro-Wiwa is, by the way, probably the only Nigerian author who has visited the #1 position of the Finnish pop-charts, in a song dedicated to his name.

Finished Half of a Yellow Sun, which was well written and crafted, touching and humane; good is the word.

But, still, I'd say Sozaboy is the one of these two Biafra books that I will remember.

I was planning to move to Cameroon after the Half of... and I visited the local university library for Houseboy. It just happened that I came out with six other books. Two of them are Nigerian, so I'm staying, with Girls at War and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

>244 eairo: nice library!

>245 shawnd:: So true. Pity I didn't go there earlier, just because of being lazy -- the city library is closer and has provided me quite ok so far.

Girls at War by Achebe was mentioned by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as an inspirational work in the extra materials of Half of a Yellow Sun, which inspired me to read it too.

There are 13 stories in the collection written during 20 years from the early 50s to the 70s.

The war mentioned in the book title is the Biafran war, of course, but only two of the stories are about it. Others range from student-joke (probably written as a student) to descriptions of the arrival of the "modern" (the white man ways) to Nigeria and the conflict between it and the traditional ways.

The war stories were the strongest of the collection. The best of the others were refreshing just because they were about something else than the war, for change. However, the best-before date of the joke-stories has gone a long time ago.

I came to Nigeria with Amos Tutuola and I leave the country after a work of his.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is very similar to Palm-Wine Drinkard. What was good the first time is still good: hilarious imagination (the characters, their ups and downs) and great (ab)use of language. The problems remain the same too: not much of a story.

I believe these books/stories would be great subject for a research, but ...

Next: Cameroon, Houseboy

Wow! your map of western Africa is really filling in. I'm wondering if your immersion for so long there has affected your "real life"? -- has a part of you "moved" there or do you feel as firmly rooted in Helsinki as ever?

Hi eairo,
I was messing about on the internet and found a different map making site. It has the advantage that you can focus your map on individual continents. Just thought I'd mention it as your travels are exclusively African at the moment.

http://bighugelabs.com/map.php

#250 - This one looks nice!

>249 detailmuse:: At first, after seeing your question, I thought "no", it would be too much to say such a thing.

But then again, all this reading and thinking of the area ... my mind is partially there, and with the same mind I am supposed to be living here at home. It must show.

>250 GlebtheDancer:: Thanks, looks mostly good. Especially the focus function is very nice. (Though I have to say that my corner of the world looks strange on the focused European map: no sea at all between Finland and Sweden!).

Houseboy (translated from the French (Une vie de boy) by John Reed) was one the strongest stories I've read lately.

A boy is (or was), in the colonial setting of this book, the native worker who is closest to the Europeans. He is supposed to be present, to be used, at all hours. Therefore he also witnesses his employer's weakest moments, he knows most of his secrets.

When a scapegoat is needed, he is the one who is there.

The book is structured so that the reader knows from the beginning that this is goind to end badly. From the poor beginnings Tounda (the houseboy) gets on well and advances. Things go well for a while but when the turn comes it is quick and total.

I guess the most tragic thing about the fate of Tounda is how easily it all happens: his life is spoiled and taken from him -- just because... Yet it is very easy to believe such things have happened in the not so far past, only some decaded ago.

->252 eairo:

Looks like a short walk over to Finland from Stockholm (or Umeå) so I wouldn't have to go on a ferry (they make me seasick). I like that map!! :)

my mind is partially there, and with the same mind I am supposed to be living here at home. It must show.

Nice. Maybe it's your faithfulness to books on your journey; probably it's your path and steady pace -- you're developing a sense of immersion even in me, reading this thread.

>255 detailmuse:: :)

I first thought Cameroon would be one of the countries I'd "be done with" after reading one book only. That was mainly because no other books than Houseboy seemed to be easily available (here). That changed with the visit to the library mentioned in #244: I am now two thirds into Tales from Cameroon and I have three more books waiting.

The Tales... are originally two separate collections of stories and anecdotes and one longer story brought together by the translator (from the French to English).

So far the tales have been more interesting for their genuine-feeling local atmosphere and informativeness than literary values (though improvement on that field has happened in two stories I have just read).

Tales from Cameroon is interesting, and unlike most of the other books from the countries I have recently visited, it feels like it was written primarily for a local audience. That was good.

Most of the stories start with some very everydayish---in Cameroon of the 50s or 60s, that is---event or situation, from where a little drama is built and a resolution found in the end. They are (maybe a little too) obviously meant to be instructive; for the better of independent Cameroonian society.

The aim is good but the literature suffers, at least in most cases. The last three stories are better, better built and plotted, and not so annoyingly didactic.

My favourite was the one about a man who was wasting and withering without an obvious or detectable medical reason after using the services of a witch-doctor. The man believed there was a poisonous snake living in his belly, put there by the witch-doctor. (The snake was supposed to make the man rich, which it did not, and the witch-doctor had also vanished soon after receiving his huge payment.) The victim was, however, cured by a real doctor using his own "medicine" right after the suffering man finally confessed and gave the doctor a detailed description of what was to be removed from him.

There were also two animal stories---about a goat that made a pact with hyenas; and about how dog became the man's best friend instead of the chimpanzee (and how these guys who once were good friends became enemies)---based on local folk-tales. The themes were typical to this kind of tales, but in a way both were quite different from what I'd heard before, which is always nice.

Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti (transl. by John Reed, from the French), Wole Soyinka praised its realism, Chinua Achebe chided Beti for romanticizing the pre-colonial past, while Donatus Nwoga criticized Beti's "cynicism" on the same topic. And I don't know where to start.

The story begins with a young student, Medza, on the way back to his village home after college year in the city. He has failed his tests and is not waiting for a warm welcome. But, his father is not home and others at the village doesn't mind, despite the failed test he is still the only person with diplomas and the certificates at the village: Just the right person to be sent to retrieve a run-away wife from another far away village behind five river-crossings and twenty mails.

This rescue mission is chronicled minutely, one farcical event after other, and in the end Medza returns home as a wealthy married man ... whose father is still pissed with the failed test.

The story is funny but there is more: the village-life is not just happy-go-together, and both the old and the new ways of life are critisized.

The problems I had with the book were with the format and the style. It is written as a sort of memoir, looking back, analyzing and explaining certaing views, customs and occurences -- something I don't really like; and the narrator often addresses the reader directly with remarks "but you know all about that" etc, which also put me off.

I don't know if I actually liked the book, but I certainly think it was worth reading.

I'm very impressed with your library!! My local library here will be a horrific go-to when I get to the African part of my challenge. I did check my mum's local library in Sweden and they carry loads, so it looks like I'll be reading those parts when I'm on vacation! :)

Yes, they are ... the city library is good and the university library is great.

And I can believe that about the Swedish one. I would have loads more to choose from if I could read Swedish books. They are many even here.

In Agatha Moudio's son (org. Le Fils d'Agatha Moudio) Mbenda looks back in time, his youth, years he married.

The setting is a village near Douala, the bigges city in Cameroon, and the theme of the story in once more the clash of the the cultures, African and European, old and new.

Mbenda is the best of the young men in the village. In the first chapter he confronts the white hunters to get compensation for the village for the resources they use, and gains a nickname of La Loi, The Law. One of his admirers is Agatha Moudio, the pretties of the young women in the region who is also the bad girl of the village -- going around on her own, seeing city men, even white ones, and doing who knows what with them...

Mbenda falls in love and wants to marry Agatha but the problem is his father has, long time ago, in his death bed asked for his best friend's daughter for wife for Mbenda.
To Mbenda's mother and to the elders of the village this engagement is valid, even though it was set before the girl was even born.

Mbenda is not a rebel, he submits and marries Fanny, the girl in question. Unlike he possibly hoped for, this marriage does not diminish his love for Agatha. His young wife sees this and she finally suggests that Mbenda should take a second wife.

Socially that would be ok, but this is not what Mbenda had had in his mind. He, and other young men of his age, would rather marry once. And Agatha's reputation was another problem, Mbenda's mother would never give her blessing for this second marriage.

Children, however, change everything in an African village/marriage too. That said and seeing the book's title, you can probably guess rest of the story ... except for the a couple of plot twists I leave untold.

There is, however, more to this book than just the story: vivid descriptions and illuminating examples about village life, fishermen's life, and the whole form of life in change; it is not just the individuals that have to encounter the new, but the whole society where village is the elementary unit, rather than family or individual.

New things come and things change and some of the changes are good. But old ways cannot be dropped just like that, because these people realise that doing so, they wouldn't really know who and what they were anymore.

So far so good, this is a great book without too many pages. The only not so great thing I'd say is the writing is sort of average, it drags a bit at times, reads ok but doesn't take your breath away.

More about this book: http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/agathamoudiosson.html

Some afterthoughts on Agatha Moudio's son ... I said there are 'vivid descriptions and illuminating examples' without a single example of what I was talking about.

One of them was the most compact definition of what (African) superstition is about: 'we don't believe in co-incidence'. Everything that happens can be explained, and if no other explation is found, a witch or a sorcerer or the spirits will do. Life was simple.

Another memorable section was the arrangement of Mbenda's and Fanny's marriage. The times were changing, and no one, not even the old folks, village-elders wanted to talk about bride-price any more; 'our women are not sold or bought as they were before'; but presents, gifts and price for organization of matters were acceptable, and the exact sum to be spent on those was still a matter of negotiation. And Johnny Walker was a great negotiator.

And then there was the case of the public fountain, or the water tap brought by the whites. It was quite commonly considered as 'progress', but it also caused discord and even fights among the women of the village. Sharing a single tap required taking turns and waiting, which in turn, at times at least, created a sense of hurry (when there was no time to wait); quite unlike before when water was taken from the river.

These observations, which were a few, made the book good for me.

eairo, you are certainly reading some great books. I've been following your journey for some time now, particularly your African sojourn. You have listed more than a few books I'm not familiar with (which is always good!)

>263 avaland:: "... more than a few books I'm not familiar with (which is always good!)"

Right! Isn't that one of the best (or worst, depending on the height of the Mount TBR) things about the LT: where ever you look, you're bound to find more books you've never heard of, which you should read.

Old Man and the Medal by Ferdinand Oyono, the author of Houseboy, was my last book from Cameroon for now.

It is set in the same town of Doum as the Houseboy was. Some familiar names are mentioned but other than that, this is different work. Old Man... satirizes the relation of the Europeans and the Africans, and while some serious questions about African identity and self-esteem are made, this is a lot lighter in tone than Houseboy.

Old man Meka's life seems to turn around when he is told that he will be given a medal for being a co-operative and conforming representative of his society, who has given his land and his two sons for the "common cause".

The first third of the book tells us about how Meka and the whole village prepares for the great day. During these few days the story grows and in the end the Chief of All the Whites from Paris in person is coming to give the medal to Meka...

After the ceremony a party is given, where speeches of friendship and mutual respect are held and plenty of whisky drunk. Meka's journey back home from the party is not straight (whisky): it includes waking up alone in total darkenss at the party site, getting lost in the storm, being arrested and, of course, missing the medal.

"What has become of us", Meka and his family and fellows question themselves afterwards, and "what has happened to us?"

"The Whites, just the Whites" was given as an answer once or twice to the second question; the first one remained unanswered.

Funny and sad at once; a little aged; worthwhile.

New books, a new country: African Psycho, The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez and Brazzaville Beach (Nainen rannalla in Finnish) on my tbr for Congo Brazzaville.

Compared to the great majority of my African reads African Psycho is a new book. It was nice to read something contemporary for change. That was, however, about the only thing nice about dwelling two days in the head of a wanna-be (but failure of a) murderer.

Seven solitudes of Lorsa Lopez is a thin book, but so dense it made me sleepy most times I read it, and it took nearly for ever to finish. Yet I did not feel like quitting, not once.

Well written, a little too much like One hundred years of solitude, full of great ideas (not unique but good) and one-liners, but most of the time I was not sure what it was about.

Lorsa Lopez kills his wife that he loves. Because she gave her lice. After the murder the city of Valancia enters a sort of limbo. No one dies unless murdered (or by committing suicide), people wait for the police to come. More murders, the victims rot, get buried, exhumed, buried again... the mayor reconstructs crime scenes again and again. It takes nearly fifty years for the police to come -- a talking parrot is taken to the court of law and sentenced, to death.

Conclusion: pride and honour (this is what the waiting is about) sour; they poison people as effectively as malice and corruption.

"... love, all love, is nothing if not a scandal."

Brazzaville Beach -- Hope Clearwater, living in a beach house, looks back at two important phases of in her life, narrating them to us.

In England she had studied, graduated, studied more to reach her doctorate, and married ... her marriage is central to Hope's English story. How she chooses her man, an intelligent, ambitious and eccentric mathematician, who later on is lost into the world of his studies, game theories and the mathematics of turbulence.

In Africa, in an unnamed and probably imaginary equatorial country, Hope worked as a researcher on partisipating a big and long-lasting project on chimpanzee life in their natural habitat.

Some of Hope's observations conflict with the knowledge and the theories of the project manager Mallabar, the Grand Old Man of the chimp studies, whose life work this project has become. Hope's evidence is destroyed, her notes are burnt, and her statements nullified ... (common academic behaviour in competitive situation, might I say) ... until their confrontation escalates to an open conflict.

Very interesting, well enough written. It was nice to read about scientists at work, of their ambitions, and where it may lead them (us), and their vanities. The story shows humans are humans, whether scientists or fighter pilots, and whatever their field of study is.

The chimpanzee presence -- the contranst of superficial differences and yet obvious similarities with humans -- gives these reflections of humanity extra depth.

The plot is also well crafted, there is action and adventure (the Africa part, not much adventure in England), entertaining and almost believable.

This was my first acquiantance with William Boyd, but I'll gladly read more.

Addition: I started this book as a "Congo-Brazzaville" book, but it was obvious from the first page that it is not set in that country. It is clearly stated that Brazzaville Beach is named after Brazzaville in another country.

Moved on to Congo-Kinshasa with The Rift.

"Look ... Raise one finger ... I'll move my head ... You move your foot ... I cough ... Shall we start?"

The Rift ... is ... very much like that.

Supposedly a journal of an Africa historian pressured by his work, his revolutionary communist friends, therapist to whom he talks a lot, and women of past and present ... he bounces from one to another ... and very fragmentary.

The writing is basically fluent, but the fragmented flow, and that the "notes" move freely in time and space, make it hard to follow. For example, the writer often, in the middle of a dialogue, falls back to an earlier, similar conversation with other people, and after two lines come back to the first one; difficult and tiring at times.

But among the bits and pieces, there are ideas. The journalist's once wrote about the ancient Kuba ways--his work--and stated that back then "Strength was proof of honesty."

This simple notion helped me understand, or at least gave me a new angle to a few things from the earlier African books that felt unclear before.

Add: the author is Congolese (Kinshasa) but the country in the book is unnamed, and the the only place name mentioned seems to be imaginary.

Leokongo tells the story of Congo from the days of Stanley, through the years of Congo Free State to its early independence and the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

The form is sort of epic poetry, quite prosaic, though -- easy and quick to read. Except that the story is so sad, the amount of cruelties overwhelming.

Each poem gives voice to a named or anonymous individual. Leopold II, his secretary, his wife and family, Mr Stanley ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") and many more. The poems all are written in first person, past tense, like the people were looking back to those days decades or more than a hundred years ago, and commenting them now.

This works, it makes a point.

The atrocities were many and monstrous, that becomes clear early. It would be easy (and nice) to condemn what happened, and then forget about it ... it was a long time ago, anyway. But the way these things are told makes one think the robbery is not over yet. As it very well may not be, even though the forms have changed and it may subtler now:

What I remember of the Congo civil war of the 1990s, along the actual war news, are the speculations of how it would affect the electronic industry, as the area was and is, I guess, a major source of materials for semiconductors.

The King Leopold says near the end (freely quoted): Nobody wanted Congo, but the profit it produces is good enough for every one.

The author, Juha Vakkuri, is a Finn who has lived in various places in Africa, on and off, since the 1970s. He is also the founder of the cultural centre Villa Karo mentioned in #228. And the book is in Finnish, only.

Errko: I've enjoyed reading through your posts. You've read a few books that I read in high school (All the Names, The Palm Wine Drinkard) and had nearly forgotten about, and a lot of African books that sound very interesting. I managed to find a cheap copy of Une vie de boy, so I'll give that a try soon. I also ordered a copy of Life: A User's Manual, because that book seems like it's right up my alley...

I agree with you on The Plague, it was quite a page-turner for me as well. I went through a phase when I was 12 years old or so where I wanted to learn all about epidemics and viruses, and I struggled with the book then, never finishing it. As an adult I rememebered that first reading experience and though it would be a laborious read, but I didn´t find that to be the case.

Also, I´m quite interested in the Nigerien book you read. I´ve spent some time in Niamey (my girlfriend lived in Niger for more than a year) and would love to read something written by a person from there.

Anyway, it is fascinating to see how many books are translated into Finnish. Good luck with your wanderings through Africa!

> 272: I am often surprised too of how much reading material there is available from or about any place.

The Nigerean book: you better learn Finnish then - seems the book is easily available in the libraries and second hand book shops here.

After Leokongo I had three options: Before the Birth of the Moon, Poisonwood Bible or Heart of Darkness.

The Rift made me have second thoughts about Mudimbe, Poisonwood Bible is very big (and a re-read) ...

León Rom is one of the characters in Leokongo ... "I know, I know", he says -- "Maybe I shouldn't have decorated the flowerbed with those sculls. But they are so many around, and you have to put them somewhere..." That's it: to Heart of darkness!

eario, some of your recent African reads seem really interesting. I don't think there is much literature from the Congo (either one) to choose from. Thanks for sharing all that with us.

>274 avaland:: You're quite right about book from the Congo. More to choose from if one could read French, though.

And books about Congo are plenty ... I finished Heart of Darkness today. This was my second reading of the book, and I think I appreciated it more now than I did twenty-something years ago.

#275> Cool. I read Heart of Darkness about every other year or so. Blows me away every time, too.

I read Heart of Darkness years ago, when I was about 20 or so. If I remember right, the only thing I knew about the book then was that Apocalypse. Now. was "based on" it. I wasn't disappointed, I wasn't deeply impressed ... I guess had been expecting something else.

Now, reading the book again, knowing what to expect, knowing more about the setting, and especially reading it after a book like Leokongo, I was impressed.

What I liked the best was the first two thirds of the book, the trip up the river, the empty villages, which were no more than mentioned, silence, the threat -- the Darkness. Knowing what was and had been going on, made all this more sinister and meaningful than before.

The rest, what happens at Kurtz's station, and his insanity still remained somewhat distant to me. I have a feeling there is more to that section of the book than I could get. What actually happened to Marlow; what was it that makes Kurtz what he is -- in this story and in literary in general... (I see there is a Wikipedia entry on him that gives some interpretations and possible answers to these questions.)

I guess I'll have to reread the boo again some day.

Book started: Before the Birth of the Moon by the same author as The Rift mentioned above.

This one is more accessible and enjoyable, even though the style is recognizable, and easy is not the first word that comes to mind to describe the book either.

Heart of Darkness is a favorite of mine. Especially since it was an assigned text at Uni and I had expected it to be slow and dull from the description of the plot. I need to reread it!! The copy I have includes a bunch of critical articles and reading those helps to give different perspectives on the text as well.

And I think I should see Apocalypse. Now. again. I think it was a good film, and the way it is related to Heart of Darkness is the way adaptations work the best - take something and make something new of it.

Before the Birth of the Moon is an interesting study on power and human relations in a post-colonial (near) civil war setting in Congo-Kinshasa in the 1965.

The country is in turmoil, one of the Chamber Ministers writes love letters to (one of) his mistress(es) and waits for the night with her. She, in turn, is not sure whether she wants to go on or move on. She is, however, through tribal ties connected to the rebel movement. They force her to continue the relationship & spy on his lover. She does, because that is the right thing to do, but she also more or less falls in love with him during the process.

The books asks, what has actually changed since the the colonials left? Country has new masters with different skin color and background but very similar manners than the old ones. On individual level there are good points about right and wrong. These characters commit quite horrible deeds in the secret, against each other and other people too, and their relationship becomes a game ... yet it somehow seems they care for each other too.

What makes reading the book challenging is that the author changes from third to second to first person narrative several times during the book, and very little names are used: most of the time the characters are just you, he or she ("she held her hand" or "he said him").

There is a pattern in these changes, and an idea behind it, though I am not sure I know what it is... my guess is it is about gradually getting closer to the main characters: first they are introduced to the reader and third person is used. In the second phase we get a little closer and the narrative is in second person. Then the two main characters both have their say in first person--we spend a monent inside their heads. Near the end the distance grows again and the narration goes back to second person. In a way, this works, though it makes the book a little more demanding and harder to follow.

After The Rift, in which the "experiment" was taken a lot further, this was a positive surprise, and I am glad I gave it a try.

I have come to a three way juction, and I am not sure which way to go.

Initially, when coming to Africa, my intention was to read my way to Kenya to meet the Wizard of the Crow. Now, in Congo, I am only two countries from there.

But I just found a very interesting looking book from Angola, The Return of the Water Spirit (Kiandan tahto in Finnish), which I'd like to read, but that would make quite a detour.

Another, shorter but not direct route would go via Rwanda and A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Kigalin sunnuntait).

The straight way to Kenya goes through Uganda with the Abyssinian Chronicles (Abyssinialaiset kronikat)...

Argh.

We tried to do Abyssinian Chronicles as a group read a few years ago. It was hampered by the fact that it is a big book and we all (pretty much without exception, I think) hated it. I am not trying to influence the direction of your journey, but I would recommend reconsidering your Ugandan choice.

I also read the Pepetela It was short and interesting, and worth a look.

Thanks for the warning.

I looked last night into The Return of the Water Spirit and now it seems I'll take the Southern route.

I'll decide later what to do with the Abyssinian Chronicles. I have book at home already, so maybe I'll try it and see what I think of it. There are also some alternatives available, though not many.

Whichever route I'd suggest making sure you read Wizard of the Crow. Amongst all the African novels, this had to be in my top 5.

I'm in Cape Town, South Africa in Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer. This is a really good thriller--I give it 5 stars.

Return of the Water Spirit is a little book that provides a sort of a soft view on the corruption of the once idealistic independence activists and the post colonial civil war in Angola, seasoned with a bit of mythology.

The war, which as far as I know was cruel and bloody and lasted more than fifteen years, is barely mentioned. The corruption of the political activists (who never needed to suffer from the war) is given more coverage, but the style is exaggerated and satiric which makes the book a light read.

The mythology part is what gives the book its title. While the war rages and the party people (as in politics) increase their wealt by robbing the country (and João the protagonist plays Civilisation on his computer), the Water Spirit prepares to return: houses begin to collapse, and only a child sees and hears what is coming, and only one old man listens to, believes and understands what the child says.

I don't really know what to think of the book on the whole. The different elements didn't come together. I guess there is a meaning to these things (the myth of the Water Spirit, the games of the politician and the war), but I don't know what it is.

Great review. I felt pretty much exactly the same about the book. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but couldn't work out what a lot of the elements meant (allegory? allusion? oblique magical realism?). It spurred me to read more about the civil war and its place in the wider cold war.

And you just said, with less words, what I was trying to express: "I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but..."

My next take on the same war (and the revolution "industry" promoted by the Soviet Union in the past) is far from light: Human Love (Vain rakkaus) by Andreï Makine is gory, full of cruelties and disillusioning scenes ... but very beautifully written and too real in too many ways to put away.

I finished Human Love tonight. That sentence, as horrible as it may sound, is just so fitting -- that is what the book is about: about horrendous things humans do, and of love that makes it bearable, sometimes. (More to follow.)

Human Love (Vain rakkaus) is basically a simple story of a man, Elias from Angola, told by another man, a writer from Soviet Union (Russia, later).

They meet for the first time when they both are being held captives by fighters of one of the Angola's many rivalling political sects. Their lives could be finished any moment. They start talking, Elias tells his life story to the young writer.

He has seen his mother being prostituted by the Portuguese colonials, his father fighting against them, and he has seen them both die, eventually. He had once met Ernesto Guevara in the Angolan jungle, and he was mesmerised by his words. He believed.

Following his father's path, he travels to Cuba, to Moscow, to be trained to become a fighter for the Cause. To fight for a world where no such things happen. No child should see his or her mother being violated and killed, nor his or her father being forced to fight for what is rightfully his.

Yet what he becomes is a professional revolution fighter, who kills anyone who stands on the way of the new world, including children if needed. He still believes, and he continues the figth, even though he gradually begins to question his ideals.

Elias' story is told chronologically to the point where the two men met for the first time. After that, their had both gone their different roads and they only meetonce in a while, and we are filled in in fragments what is going on with Elias in later years. In the end the Soviet system collapses and Elias is no more needed by them, nor can he return to his own country where the new regime would kill him instantly.

Simple story, I said, but with many layers: the growth of the professional revolutionary; his choices are believable at the time and in the places they are made in - even though we now see how absurd they may be; he sees enough of what happens behind the scenes in Cuba and in Soviet union to begin to question; but he is too deep in the system to step aside, there is no way out... And then there is love. During his education in Moscow, Elias meets Anna, who becomes the love of his life. Together they visit her home in Siberia, where he actually finds what is closest to his ideals of the new world and new kind of humanity -- among the outcasts of the country that was supposed to make those ideals true.

This love lasts, even though Anna marries to another, and they only meet few times after their initial time together in Moscow. Love keeps Elias sane, it seems to be his last link to humanity in a profession that practically requires denying such things. And it also is a sort of reference that shows Elias how far from his ideas and ideals he ends up.

This layer of love is also the weakness of the book. I see it is necessary to the story told as it is, but it is also the one thing that stretches the limits of believability of the character Elias. A killer thinking so much of love, would that be possible?

After all, Human Love is important book about recent history of Angola, Africa and the World. And despite the one thing that does not work perfectly, it is also a very good book, masterfully written and thought provoking.

South of Nowhere (Hevonkuusessa) was a slow, rough ride ... through a night, from bar to bed to bleak goodbyes in Lissabon, and, more so through two years of hell in Angola.

The novel is a monologue by a Portuguese veteran of the colonial war in Angola. Basically it is a one-night-novel: a man, a woman, a few hours and more than a few drinks in a bar, a walk to his place, failure in bed and then goodbye.

The man talks all the time and all the time, whatever he starts with, his talk returns to Angola. How bad and wrong it was, how it ruined his life, his marriage, and how it wrecked him.

Good stuff, but requires concentration, which is what I didn't have. The monologue-style takes some time to get into. I read the book during two weeks, chapter or two at a time, so I had to adjust myself into it many, many times. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I could have read it more quickly.

I also liked the the "frame", the bar setting, man talking, ordering drinks, downing them ... (And I more than once wondered what kind of a woman is that who listens through all that talk and still goes on with the man.)

Kauimpana kuolemasta (could be Farthest from Death) is a Finnish novel set (mostly) in Zambia. The main characters are a Zambian woman and a Finnish man who has spent his childhood in Zambia.

They both have a past: her best friend disappeared/escaped when they were young, and she has spent her life trying to find her... he has, according to his own words, failed in work, failed in marriage and is a failure as a father ... only thing he has been succesful in has been one marathon run.

He returns to Zambia in the middle of his midlife-crisis, and she has jus lost her lover. They meet, they do not become a couple.

This book is very well written, intelligent and honest, I believe. It shows a realistic picture of the the so called "development co-operation" and "development" it produces, the state of democracy in Southern Africa and the people involved.

It could be very cynical or dark, but it is not -- hopeful, yes, even though the subject matter does not provide very many reasons for that.

After reading quite a few novels written by Africans, from Morocco to Angola, I can very clearly see this is not an African novel (and the author does not claim it to be). It is about people, who can find a common ground and a connection despite their backgrounds or where they come from.

The book has not yet been translated to English or, as far as I know, to any other language, but I guess it is possible it will be -- at least the author's first work, When I Forgot was seemingly well received.

I read in an article I found while looking for Zambian books that the country's literature scene is the smallest of the whole English speaking Africa.

Indeed, very few titles I found. And only one of those was easily available to me: The Tongue of The Dumb started today.

eairo -- I just want to tell you how much I enjoy reading your thread and admire your persistence in this journey that you are on. While I don't have the time or focus to travel as you are doing, I know I shall come back here often to pick up some of the books that you have so thoughtfully commented upon. Thanks.

Thank you. I must have said this before, but it is always nice and encouraging to know someone is reading any of this. And bothers to say so.

After more than two more weeks in Zambia, finished The Tongue of The Dumb, which is the first and nearly only Zambian novel that has reached any international notice.

It is one more story about the conflict of the African traditions and the Western culture, this time mostly from a religious point of view.

The setting is interesting. The good Chief has a rotten Counselor, who would very much like to be the Chief in Chief's place. He is ready to do nearly anything to gain the throne, and what he finds most effective is to accuse the Chief of witchcraft -- after that claim anything the Chief does actually makes him seem more and more guilty.

All the talk about witches and witchcraft reminded me of Agatha Moudio's Son where the theme was cristallised in one simple statement: "We don't believe in co-incidence."

On the other hand, quite a few pages of the book are spent in a nearby mission, where there are three very different brothers. The Superior is a veteran, and he appreciates the Africans as they are (even too much so, considering the witch hunt going on in the village); his counterpart is the young and effective Father Oliver, who is there to change things; the third one is killed by a lion before his part grows to be very important.

What ties the village and the mission together is the Teacher, a native christian convert who tries to provide education to the children of the village. He becomes drawn into the power struggle, and gets his part of the witchcraft accusations. Which, I guess, is mostly makes the fathers look that way at all, which finally saves the Chief at the last minute.

The author is a native Nsenga (the tribe whose traditions the book describes) but raised Caholic. Seems he knows both sides: the power struggle, and the witchcraft accusations are pure cruelty; but the Fathers are not nice guys either.

But in the end the ways of the "people without skins" win, or at least they make the difference that keeps the Chief alive and exposes the Coulselor's evil schemes.

Interesting, but ... let's say this is a four star story that suffers in the hands of not a really good writer, resulting a slow paced and at places a little bit boring novel.

Nice review of The Tongue of the Dumb, eairo. I'm sorry that you found it boring, and I won't add it to my planned reads for next year.

I was not that boring...

After The Tongue of the Dumb I moved to Zimbabwe with Zenzele: A Letter to my Daughter.

Like the title shows, this is an epistolary novel. There are 12 letters in it that Zenzele's mother has written to her daughter who is leaving home to start her university studies in the USA.

Each letter provides different advice or information for the youth. The mother talks about being African, passes on traditional African wisdom, tells stories about their family and their homeland's history, and finishes some previously unended converstions between mother and daughter.

The wisdom is wise, and the stories are interesting. These two women are clearly of very different generations. The mother had grown up in colonial Rhodesia and she has seen and been through the war for independence, while the daughter and her peers are very clearly children of a new age and world: everything seems possible for them and the world is there for them to be conqurered.

If the letter were just "regular" mother-to-daughter-stuff I guess it would not be special the way it is.

The reflections on being an African and what it means in different times, and the stories about forming of Zimbabwe, and its meaning:

"I had inhabited Rhodesia, but in Zimbabwe, I lived",

writes the mother once about the times past.

And elsewhere, knowing where her daughter is now:

"I am being serious, Zenzele. You must not take the Western anthropologists’ view of our culture. They perceive our culture through their lens."

The colonial times in Africa are over, but the colonization of the (African) mind is going on, the mother seems to say, and for a good reason, I believe.

This book a great example of how something that seems very personal can sometimes become universal. I believe this book can give different things to different readers for there is a lot give.

However, it must not be forgotten what Zimbabwe has become now, after the time-frame of this book: one more pathetic example of post-colonial corruption and tyranny (or so it seems from afar)... makes me sad for these people and their fight, their ideals and their hope.

More on that later. An Elegy for Easterly seems to provide some insight on the present state of the country.

I also started Butterfly Burning, but the first chapter was too slow and descriptive for me now: cutting grass under the hot sun, music and wasted love in the heat of the night. Not a single hint a story actually, or of the characters I should meet. Maybe later but not now.

An Elegy for Easterly is a collection of short stories from and about Zimbabwe -- mostly -- today. The stories range from sad to grim, but mostly with a humorous twist. There is not much hope, but the attitude seems to be that laughter is the only thing that makes life bearable when everything else looks bad or worse: AIDS rules, inflation runs beyond comprehension, the official news make no sense, the leaders of the nation lie and get rich...

This could be depressing, but no so. Good.

While you're in Zimbabwe, I would recommend The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini. It was a wonderful novel!

Thanks for the rec!

I was planning to move on to Mozambique, but this one looks interesting and seems to be easily available at my city library, so I'll extend my stay.

Looking back: Zenzele and An Elegy for Easterly were an excellend pair of books from Zimbabwe.

One picturing the fight and will that lead to independence, and the idealism behind -- there are other sides to the book too, the mother-daughter-thing, but that is another matter; the other showing what has become of the country twenty-thirty years after. Not a pretty picture but yet so much alive.

Yesterday I got from library and started The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini, which nicely seems to fill the gap (in time) between the two previous books. On page six "Mr. Robert Mugabe took his oath, his hand firmly on the Bible ... so help me God..." and we know where that was to lead later on.

The Boy Next Door is Ian, and it is his neighbour Lindiwe Bishop, who is telling the story. He is a Rhodie, descentant of the the colonials, and she is a colored Zimbabwean.

The beginning is dramatic: his stepmother is burned to death, he is accused, arrested, convicted, then freed and cleaned. After this Ian and Lindiwe become improbable friends and more.

This is their story and it is the story of their homeland -- from the days of early independence in the 80s to the late 90s. During those years the country slides from hopeful democracy to a corrupted dictatorship. Things fall apart around them, and in their lives too. Nothing comes easy for them.

The narrative is captivating, it feels so true, and very well written. It jumps back and forth in time through flashbacks and memories, which could make it hard to follow, but not so. It just works, it makes this really feel like she is telling about her life now and here.

The writing is also very economical and efficient: very big things are told within half a page. (This is not a small book, though, 400 pages, so there is room for many big things ... and small too.) For example, the totality of Mugabe's rule, and the ways he uses power:

Ian is a photographer, a self learned photojournalist, who has worked in South Africa, photographing the collapse of apartheid there. His work in Zimbabwe could show the world things Mugabe, or Bob, would not like the world to see.

Ian is asked to make some official Bob portraits. First Ian and Lindiwe sort of joke about this saying "hope he likes your pictures" ... he does, and the next thing is Ian is tied to Mugabe's next presidential campaign ... one of those offers you cannot turn down, you know. Which would, conveniently, make his work as a critical photo journalist less than convincing. Being difficult could make him disappear, and he would not be the first to do so. And Lindiwe, and ... well, there was a way out for him, and for them too, in the end.

This was another great sad story. Recommended.

Have to say reading this made the rethink Zenzele ... I liked it when I read it but its lack of social consciousness and idealised view of the independence war (these were not the main themes of the book, but they were there, in the background) seem a bit naive, or pathetic, or something.

Oh, I'm glad you liked The Boy Next Door! I always get nervous when I recommend a book :)

Zimbabwe holds a kind of dreaded fascination for me. When we lived in NYC in the late 70s and I had my first baby, I had a babysitter who was Zimbabwean -- her husband was a graduate student at Columbia U when I was a grad student at NYU. We didn't get to know them very well, but she was very kind and caring. It was just as Zimbabwe had gained its independence and there was a wonderful sense of expectation. I've often wondered what happened to them when they returned to Zimbabwe -- what a sad journey that country has taken.

306: Thanks again you did it - I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

307: Oh you're so right about the sad journey ... I've known Bob Marley's Zimbabwe song for years, and I did know it was made to celebrate the independence of Zimbabwe (according to the Boy Next Door, Mugabe would rather have seen Cliff Richard performing there then instead), but I haven't really thought about what it meant, or what became of it.

I googled around to check some things mentioned in The BND, and I found my way to websites and discussion boards that still state that "Rhodesia is Super" or speculate on how Rhodesia could return, and what it would/could be like ... weird, sort of scary.

Under the Frangipani was my only book for Mozambique.

It is set in an old fortress turned into an old-folks home somewhere on the coast of Mozambique. The story is narrated by a ghost, a restless spirit who wants to find peace, and a police officer and a murder.

The manager of the home has been brutally killed, every suspect -- who are the residents of the fortress -- in his or her turn confesses the crime to the police hearing them. The confessions become life-stories of the people, and each of them tells something about the post-colonial, post-civil-war Mozambique.

Others have said this reads like poetry, or that it is like Waiting for Godot with/by Agatha Christie. I agree with them.

I liked the book like you like a nice book. But it was so different in style from the previous books I'have read that it was hard to get into it.

Paradise is a coming of age story set in late 19th century (my guess) East-Africa, what later became to be Tanzania.

At the age of eleven Yusuf has to leave his home and his parents. He is given to his 'Uncle' Aziz as a rehani, a debt slave. He doesn't know or understand what is going on, not for years, even though his closest 'friend' or 'older brother', Khalil, who is in the same position, tries to make Yusuf see.

This is, once more, a very well written and constructed novel, that certainly makes one think. There is beauty, there is mystery, even some sort of romanticism (Yusuf's travels with the caravan to the inland) ... and there are a few notions and statements about the human nature so dark they are nearly cynical.

Yusuf travels, he sees places and people, he is never treated badly, he often feels he has been taken to Paradise, to beautiful places, but after a while he sees the Paradise is a bit further away -- and in the end, when he finally sees what has become, what Khalil has been trying to make him see for years, this is what he sees:

"Just beyond the shade of the sufi tree, he found several piles of excrement, which the dogs were already eagerly nibbling at. The dogs glanced suspiciously at him, and watched him out of the corners of their eyes. Their bodies shifted slightly to shield their food from his covetous gaze. He looked for a moment in astonishment, surprised at this squalid recognition. The dogs had known a shit-eater whe they saw one."

Moved on to Rwanda with Baking Cakes in Kigali.

This is a post-genocide story told from the pov of a Tanzanian lady who makes cakes, listens to her customers' and friends' worries and often manages to help them to find a solution or to see the bright side of the problem.

The book is full of good observations and intentions, I believe, full of niceness, to the point of becoming a little bit too sweet. BUT for a book so nice, it quite honestly and bravely talks about ugly and nasty things.

Easy and quick read, the writing is fluent etc., but there were two related thing that became problems for me:

There is a lot talking here, and the characters all have very similar 'voices'. They were distinguishable only by their names, and what they talked about

Most of the chapters repeat the scene of Angel, the protagonist, and her cake-ordering customer having a conversation, and a cup or two of Tanzanian tea. Repetitive.

But nice.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Kigalin sunnuntait in Finnish) covers the last few week before the Rwandan genocide, the days of murder and some of what came after.

The point of view is that of a Canadian journalist, Valcourt, who works for one of the numerous development operations in Rwanda; jaded, a bit bitter, but good hearted and observant.

Varcourt's actual work does not lead anywhere, so he spends his days meeting friends, walking around and seeing what is going on: the tension building, the hateful propaganda turning to open action.

Beside a real-life horror story there is a love story, Valcourt falls in love and marries, and a story about many friendships, about humanity in all its various forms. Children are born, people live and die, both of AIDS and machete.

But of course, first of all, this is about the genocide. And even that alone, this is a shocking account in many ways, but I still don't know which was more shocking: what actually happened or what did not -- according to this book it would have been possible to stop it before it started if the UN and the rest of the West just had acted. They were told what was happening, there was enough time, and they had the power.

I had trouble with the writing, but as no other review or comment mentions this, I guess it was just the translation. It felt a bit clumsy.

Abyssinian Chronicles is, despite its title, about Uganda. Like a good book usually does, it raises different emotions, mixed feelings.

The book chronicles the history of the narrator's family, in parallel with the history of the country. The boy is 11 in the beginning, in the 1971 when Idi Amin takes power.

The book is divided in seven parts, each covering a different phase in the boy's life (and the country's situation): first the pre-history or "how did we come to this", then his early teen years when the family life all the is, the years in the seminary, student years etc. up to late 80s in Europe as an illegal immigrant.

The early parts, when it is mostly about life in family or the seminary years works ok. The settings a small and controlled, the writing is fine, and these sections are full of dark humor.

What does not work is that these stories are meant to be a metaphor of life in a country under dictatorial powers in general. The horrors of Uganda under Amin rule are referred to, but not described directly. The idea is sound, but Isegawa does not really make it alive. Being always conscious of that there is more to this, but not really getting what more, prevents you from fully enjoying the stories as they are. The book would be better (not just easier to like, but easier to appreciate), if it were just a coming of age story of a boy, without the omnipresent idea of Uganda in the background.

The parts five and six are directly about Uganda, the civil war, the change for Amin's rule to Obote's and more war after that. These parts are based on history books (says they author in his acknowledgements), and it shows. What was good in the early parts (even with the shortcomings) is gone, and this makes one third of the book hard to read and like.

The last part is better. The narrator has left Uganda, and the story of his life in Amsterdam, as an illegal immigrant, is more readable again. The fear, everyday problems, the small circles of an illegal, and the fact that this 'Garden of Eden' isn't a paradise for everyone, are well related.

Is this a good book then? It made me think, it gave me information and insight I didn't have before. I didn't feel like wasting my time reading it. But it was hard to like (and even hard to read sometimes), and it could have been better in so many ways. Yes? No? Maybe both.

Wizard of the Crow was one of the two books set in Africa I knew I wanted to read when I started reading Africa more than a year ago (in message 135).

And now I have made it, read my way to the Wizard and through the Wizard... which is a great big book... which is all I can say after just finishing it.

I still can not say much more about the Wizard... except that I liked and enjoyed it.

I just finished Maps by Nuruddin Farah which I also liked, though differently than the Wizard. Or maybe, more excactly, this is the kind of book that you appreciate more than like it: intelligent, intelluctual, interesting ... but a little distant to get really excited about.

Askar is a Somali boy raised by an Ethiopian woman, Misra. This happens in Ogaden, an area ruled by Ethiopia but inhabited by Somali people. His father and mother have both died and Misra is the only one the baby accepts after that.

Misra is an outsider in the community, Askar is of honored origin. They should not be together (by the rules of the village) but there isn't much to do. Misra keeps Askar very close and that is where he wants to be for a long time, not understanding the complexities his foster mother's and his backgrounds incompability lead him to. Later on Askar is sent to Mogadishy to his uncle. Misra stays back home, and for a long time the are separated by distance and by war (Somalia tries to conquer the Ogaden area to create one Somali land). Only years later they meet again, and see how much they have influenced each other's lives.

Identity - national, familiar and individual - is the main theme of focus of the story. There are lots of conversations about these. Askar and Misra's story is told many times, from many points of view and with many voices, and in the end one is not sure what actually has been going on and who were these people you were reading about - which is a positive thing this time - you feel what the characters feel: "Who is Askar", asks Askar near the end of the book.

Nice review of Maps, eairo. I just bought this book on Wednesday, so I appreciate your thoughts about it.

And I hope I'll see your opinions on it when you read it. Drop a note if you write a review or a comment somewhere.

One thing I did not directly write about but is often mentioned in the reviews of this book: the narrative alternates from first to second to third person, and there are a few dream sections (some in first and others in third person). These are the many voices and the many points of view I mentioned. Everything else worked for me but the dreams. There were same element in them as in other parts, but still.

I have moved on to Ethiopia to meet the Emperor. Only 30 or pages into it but it has been impressive so far.

Emperor is great, long live the Emperor ;)

During the last year and half I have read quite a few stories of terrible/sad/delusional/absurd and imaginary (African) dictators and their countries. Some of them have been images of real ones and very good books.

Yet this one about Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, starring as himself, as portrayed by his more or less loyal and humble court employees, beats those stories in most respects. It is, or he was, more absurd/sad/delusional/fearful than the imaginary ones.

More than that, the book is very well written and structurally interesting. It based on interviews of the palace employees and servants of the old rule immediately after the Emperor had been displaced. The narrators are only identified by their initials, the author's own thoughts and interpretations are printed in italic, and the segments are edited and ordered to form a fluent story in three parts: life in the palace when all was well, the beginning of the hard times (for the palace) and the end. Good.

I've been reading Cutting for Stone for weeks, it is big and slow to read book, yet interesting and well enough written to keep on going.

The authors connection to Ethiopia is that he was born (of Indian parents) and raised there, even though he now lives and writes in the US.

The two protagonists, twin brothers Marion and Shiva, are of his age, so one guesses the perspective of the boys on what was going on in Ethiopia during the last years of the Emperor Haile Selassie is personal.

Also, being a medical doctor, he shows in his writing he knows what he is writing about when he describes the happenings in the Missing Hospital where the boys live, their foster parents being doctors. I don't remember reading other novel where the hospital setting, diseases and medical operation has been used so effectively.

The political stuff, both the Emperor's popularity and his regime's backwardness and corruption, is at the background but details and facts given make the book feel real. They also match what was told in the Emperor.

The the palace and hospital and the boy's lives are tied together in two ways: Missing Hospital has good (foreing) doctors that the Emperor's family use, and secondly, one of the main architecs of the first attempted coup agains Haile Selassie, is once saved by Ghosh, the foster father, and became his friend ever since.

All the thing mentioned, and some more, make this a good read. Yet there is something that makes my advance very slow. But I still hope I'll get through the other half of the book in next two weeks or so.

The second half of the book, Cutting for Stone, was quicker to read -- I also had more time to read -- faster in pace and more action packed than the first half. And in a way, most of those things that made reading easier and quicker also made the book less interesting and, well, less the book it was first. Or what I thought it was. Marion's move to America, more family stuff and less Ethiopia, too many too neat plot turns and "surprises" that had been carefully grounded a hundred or two hundred pages before, and the explanatory part in the end -- nothing was left open --, reduced my appreciation for this book.

However, the author's views and knowledge on human beings that talked to me, and the ideas that made me say "I see" or "That's a good point", more than his writing skills or ability to craft a great novel, made this absolutely worth reading, and an above average read in the end.

And, despite the abovementioned shortcomings, despite not being a really great novel, this still a good one, with an good and informative* story.

I will next travel to Sudan as it is the Season of Migration to North.

* There is a LOT of medical stuff intervowen very well with the story, things I didn't know before, never heard of before, worth knowing.

Season of Migration to the North is a small novel about big themes of intercultural misconceptions and conflicts taken to personal level.

The cover text describes it the Arabian Nights in reverse, the reviewers here say more often it is like the Heart of Darkness backwards. I see the analogies ... stories told at night, going down the river and across the sea, to a foreing land, from Africa to Europe, being corrupted there.

Young man returns his home village 'in the bend of the Nile' after university studies in the UK, and meets the village mostly as it was plus a new villager (which is almost unheard of there). Their lives become connected and they have more in common together than either of them has with the rest of people of the village, yet they are very different.

The stories of the two European-educated men and various fragments of the lives of the villagers, mostly of the young man's grand father and one his peers who has stayed there, are told to show (I think) the possibilities and the impossiblities of the encounters and clashes of people of differents cultures and different times. They see in others what they want to see and act according to that. Personal tragedies, bitterness and failures follow.

On the political level the story talks about how the colonialism was bad and what replaced it is not much better. But this is not given very much space. It feels almost like something included there 'just because'.

The writing (and the translation) are excellent, the stories of the Sudanese life are great, and the ideas or themes of how (wrongly) people see other people and cultures are interesting and ever actual. But the way the emotions and sentiments are written about has aged, what little drama the author tries to build is not very dramatic now. But: there is more good than bad to this novel.

I have now, after finishing this one, read the first short story from the collection The wedding of Zein title The doum tree of Wad Hamid, in which a some of the same themes are concentrated in less than twenty pages leaving out what I didn't like here. Very good.

I've been a lazy writer lately, but still reading on.

The wedding of Zein contains two short stories, "The doum tree of Wad Hamid", and "A Handful of Dates", and a novella length title-story about how Zein, a man who no one thought would ever marry, gets married ... and even more than about the wedding itself, it is a story about different (groups of) people of Zein's home town. They are introduced to the reader through their reaction to the news of the improbable wedding. Then we are told more about their ways of life and the social network they form. Rich and enjoyable, and cleverly composed.

The handful of dates is a brief story about a boy's eye-opening experience with his grandfather, who has always been a sort of father-figure or even a hero to the boy. In this story he sees that the grandfather is, however, a petty and hard man, mean if need be. Child is child no more, and that hurts.

The doum tree of Wad Hamid tells about an unnamed village beside the Nile. The village 'has always been there' as has the doum tree at the outskirts of the village. The life of the village revolves around the mythical tree: it is the local landmark, the people go to the tree when they are ill, they go there when they get well, and they dream about it in their dreams.

The times they are a changing, though. The progress is persistently trying to come to the village -- despite the sand flies and the horse flies (big as lambs) that infest the region, and despite the opposition of the villagers.

The old man telling the tale of the Tree and the Village to the latest harbinger of 'better future' has to, in the end, sadly, admit that the time is near, when the people no longer see the tree in their dreams, when the youth go to school to the city and don't come back, when the good old times of the village are over.

Lyrics Alley is a new book but the story takes us back in time to the 1950s just before Sudan's autonomy and independence when it was still closely related to Egypt and the British were there too. But most of all, this is a family history. One of the main characters is based on the author's uncle, poet and songwriter, Hassan Awad Aboulela, Nur in the novel. Other central charaters are Soraya, Nur's love of life, his father and his two wives, and other family members, and one or two people outside the family. In each chapter the point of view is given to one of these ten characters. We see the life in Umdurman and Cairo from different angles, which nicely gives the story perspective and depth.

These people live their own lives with their personal troubles and pains, but they are all connected to Nur in one way or other. Because Nur, seriously injured and in his first "own chapter" and paralyzed ever since, does not move, the others often come see him, and that is also where they often meet each other.

Nur's accident changes his life, of course, and it affects every one else's life in the family. He, a cripple (his father's words), is not allowed to marry Soraya; his brother is now more than ever expected to take responsibility in the family business (which he is not capable of doing); Nur and other family children's teacher becomes more a friend to him, always supportive and encouraging; Nur's mother, his father's first wife regains her position beside his husband, whereas the second wife, a younger and more modern woman, looses hers; and his father, Mahmoud, the family patriarch, who has hard time taking in that such a thing should happen in his family; etc, etc...

Beside the changes in the relations among the family, the world is also changing: Sudan is changing from a colony to a state, women become educated and no longer yield to their fathers and husbands' will without questions -- and popular poetry and music is becoming a respectable and meaningful profession, which is the path Nur is struggling to follow now that he can not become the man he was supposed to be.

The story is good, there is drama and it is full of interesting information about the versatility of life in Sudan and Egypt in those times.

Problems of the book are related to the characters.Like I said, the big cast of characters gives the novel perspective, but this also means we don't really spend very much time with them. They remain characters, they don't really become persons, which in a novel like this, is a a failure. I had a feeling that the author, in additions to just telling the story, wanted the reader to get close to the characters. Now there is "the patriarch", "the first wife", "the second wife", "the good son" (troubled), "the failed son" (but not really bad), "young woman", and "humble man" (the teacher).

Despite this Lyrics Alley is a likeable book.

My yesterday's criticism on Lyrics Alley's characters seems a bit harsh now. It is probably more accurate to say that some of the many characters remain characters. Mahmoud, the patriarch, and Nur the Poet are actually given more space and time to develop than others and they also become closer to the reader. Many others don't.

The Yacoubian Building is quite a different book in tone, but it also shares a few features with the Lyrics Alley: there are many central characters, their stories are connected by one thing, a house in this case (Nur in Lyrics Alley), and they remain characters, types.

In this case the lack of character development is a lesser failure. It feels, well, not intentional but let's say the opposite has not been the intention of the author. This book is more about the diversity of life in Cairo and its change (from the 1950s to 1990) than about the various character's personal destinies, or tragedies in most cases.

The book is set in 1990 (The first Gulf war), but it looks back a lot. The Building was build in the 1930s -- in reality and in the novel -- and during its first two decades it had been the "one of the most luxurious and prestigious apartment blocks in Cairo". After the military coup of 1952 many of the original inhabitant had to flee, and life in the building, and in Egypt, started to change. The people living or working in the apartments of the building are still wealthy, but on the roof the old storage rooms are taken over by poorer people and a slum is generated there.

The characters of the novel come from and represent all levels of social ecosystem in the building. There are people with old money, others with corrupt money; intellectuals and new elite; and the poor with practically nothing. They all are described with warmth and understanding, even those who end up doing nasty things or who mess their own as well as other people's lives. In most cases this feels reasonable and even refreshing, though it also creates a feeling that the characters are just victims of their circumstances. I am not sure what to think about that.

However, the main characters and their stories create a vivid and rich picture of life (in Egypt).

Taha and Busayna are young sweethearts who have grown up together but life tears them apart. He is smart, and for his brain all doors should be open for him, but being a son of a doorman he can not become what he dreams of, so he turns to radical Islam; she can only keep a job (any job) by tolerating sexual advances of her bosses -- and that's cool by her mother.

Zaki is an elderly "gentleman" to whom all was possible forty years ago, before the coup. But in the 1950s Egypt his background (as a foreign-educated engineer) and opinions were wrong. In a way he is a "Taha" of his generation. What produced islamism in the 80s and 90s produced harmless bitter buggers earlier.

Hatim Rasheed is a son an Egyptian father who was a noted legal scholar (Zaki's generation) and a French mother, neglected as a child, and openly homosexual as adult in a society which does not want to know about homosexuality. Which leads to dangerous life.

Malak and Hagg Muhammed Azzam are two men ready to do about anything to advance. They are in a way very similar characters but in different phases of their careers: Malak is a newcomer to the Building, still on the roof but already scheming plans of how to make his way to the actual apartments of the house; Hagg once was a shoeshiner but now a millionaire (drugs) and his next step is to the Parliament (corruption).

I read this book mostly a description of richness of life in Cairo. I knew and saw there was criticism of what had become of the Egypt during the 40 years after the coup. Not really knowing Egypt all I can say of that is that author seemed to know well what he was writing about ... after seeing what happened there a few months ago.

Interesting that you read this after what happened in Egypt and found it rang true. I read it and really liked it when I read it several years ago and, as you know, it was a sensation in Egypt. But after I read the author's Chicago which I found unpleasantly stereotyped (and in an outdated way, at that), I began to wonder about TYB too, since I had no way of knowing whether it was stereotyped too.

OK, corrected touchstone.

Of course what I feel is just what I feel, but yes, it rang true. Knowledge from other sources & 'coup' this year make the corruption part and the radicalization convincing and the rest feels right.

But I think I see what you mean by "stereotyped". This is borderline stuff, I guess. You can see the characters are there to represent something, they are "just" "types", but in my opinion, they -- or the author -- get(s) away with it.

Well, in Chicago it wasn't borderline at all. It was as if he absorbed all the racial and crime stereotypes when he was in the US in the 1980s and imported them into a contemporary story.

I'll give Al Aswany another chance for I found his story collection Friendly Fire yesterday. Once again I visited library just to return my loans and walked out with more books than before.

Egypt is one of the three or four African countries where the problem is not finding something to read but choosing the ones you really want to read.

Midaq Alley is like "The Yacoubian House" fifty-sixty years before. Or maybe it is the other way round?

Here the Alley and its inhabitants represent a cross section of Egypt and its people. Some of them are strikingly similar (as characters, or represtations) in both books, and their destinies too, with a little different flavour, due to different times, though.

Midaq Alley has seen its best days, the better-off people have moved elsewhere, and even though most of those who remain are quite respectable citizens they are doing mostly so-and-so, and the less than respectable ones have found their place at the alley too.

There is a girl who ends up prostituting herself, a barber-boy who loves her (and ends up dead, but not as a terrorist), a coffee-shop owner who chases young men, and a hard-working businessman with over-active libido -- all having their counterpart characters in the Yacoubian House.

Similarities are not all there is, and this is not negative. It was nice to read these books one after other. They are from different times and from different authors who have different voices. The country was in a different position in those times and while that had changed many things, the people, their needs and ways change little and slowly.

Jumalan pikkusormi or God's Little Finger is a Finnish eco-thriller set (mostly) in Egypt. As far as I know this is only available in Finnish.

As a thriller this was average but the eco-part made it interesting. And what does "eco" mean here? This is about energy. A German consortium of companies is building a new kind of solar power plant, based on the idea of solar chimney, near Siwa in Western Egypt.

Because this is fiction the plant is to be huge, three kilometers high, and its capacity is to enough to provide electricity to most of Eurasia. The guys controlling the remaining oil and the ones who have just invested in atomic energy don't like the plan, and they are ready to do about anything to stop it.

The author's thesis is that things both should and could be made differently, and the reasons for not doing things right are mostly wrong, stupid or both.

He (the author) has a reputation of doing his background work well, and that his facts are mostly right. I can't estimate how right, but that's what I've read elsewhere. His visions of the right way of doing things may be "mad professor" stuff, but just a little bit... so why don't we do it right?

I've spent two last week In the Country of Men, or Libya.

It is one of the few novels set in and related to Libya easily available, so a few new reviews have been written during past months. Others have pointed out this story does not help one understand the recent developments in the country. Yes, the story is mostly about family dynamics and different kinds of love within family. But it also about life in Libya, The Guide is there, and the informers, the corruption, political violence ... and an early movement for democracy. Which ends badly. (The main protagonist and narrator, Suleiman of 9 years, has his part making it end badly.) The saddest thing is that this is set in 1979. More than thirty years ago. And only now the change finally seems to come.

"They were the people I loved most. They were the ones always ready to keep me away from truth." This thought of the adult Suleiman looking back summarizes the story. 'They' are his parents. The drama builds on the conflict of parents protecting their child, and the child wanting to know, making his own conclusions and filling in the gaps when he is not told (anything). Not knowing, not understanding Suleiman says wrong things to wrong people, and the democratic movement comes to an end. (His father and his friends are the movement.)

All the ingredients for a great novel are there, but somehow they do not come together. It is not the writing for the book reads great. To me it was something emotional, somehow the I just didn't believe in it at all times. (Not talking about 'could this have happened or not' kind of believing, you know.)

Suleiman is made to leave the country and move to Egypt where he grows up in the family of one his father's friends. The story ends in Alexandria, so it is most appropriate to read some Cavafy next.

Blood Feud -- a collection of short stories by Yusuf Sharouni. The stories range from average to interesting, a few of them are interesting because of being informative about Egyptian life and some of them even on a more universal level.

Have to say, though, that most of the titles are very intriguing: "The Eighth Condemned man", "Glimpses from the Life of Maugoud Abdul Maugoud and Two Postscripts", or "Confessions of a Man with a Weak Bladder".

There are two kinds of stories: reflective ones that circle around "man's feeling of inadequacy and impotence in the face of the pressures of modern living" (from the back cover of the book) and others that are more like plain narratives of one or other incidence.

The ones I especially remember, ones that were somehow special, were "News Bulletin" about a wedding party held on a roof of a house that collapses mixed with national and international news blaring on the radio in a shop across the street from the house in question, the collapsing house, of course, becoming a news item itself; and the one where the Man with a Weak Bladder becomes a murderer outside an occupied toilet.

Death of an Ex-Minister (Herra ex-ministerin kuolema in Finnish) by Nawal El-Saadawi is subtitled a collection of short stories. These are not just regular stories telling about what is going on or happening, more like reflections of what has ready happened. The action is over. In most cases what remains is suffering, emptyness or disappointment. For women, mostly.

The book is not a big one, the texts aren't long, it is basically a quick read but not an easy one. What kind of a society can treat half of its people this way? Who are these people that let it happen and make it happen? What is wrong with them? Questions, no answers.

Saadawi's observations are sharp and they feel accurate, her writing is straightforward, and straight to the point. This is emphasized by the letter-like focalization of most of the texts. There are actually two titled as letters and many more which could be. Like letters, these are one-sided dialogue. "You" is often addressed but the "you" never answers. You, the reader, know you are not the you, but still it made at least me very alert. Being talked to like that (and not really being).

Friendly Fire : stories is a collection of a novella and several short stories by Alaa Al Aswany, the author of The Yacoubian Building. These are his earlier works, published after the success of the Yacoubian Building.

I've finished the novella and two first short stories so far. They are sort of ok, but I have to say something is missing compared to The Yacoubian Building - the warmth or something. I'll read on though.

I've also started The Egyptian or Sinuhe egyptiläinen (in Finnish), which is locally one of the most successful post WWII novels, and probably the most translated Finnish novel in the 20th century. This is a very big book so I'll read it slowly at home in the evenings and read the short stories by Al Aswany and other while on the move.

Fascinating reading, eairo -- and most timely. I heard a mention of In the Country of Men on the radio driving home from work and thought about picking it up -- maybe not now, from your review.

Glad to be of help. But now, not reading the book, you won't know if my estimate is right... ;)

Finished Friendly Fire : stories weeks ago, but I had hard time reading it and not very inspired to write my comments.

That may sound like a really bad book, but that is not true. It is not that bad. Mostly just less than I expected.

From the foreword I learned that the novella (title forgotten) was the author's first that he tried to publish. And the short stories he wrote while trying. Then, after the success of The Yacoubian Building the publishers wanted anything by him.

This shows. The novella is not as good as the Building, the twist at the end is not very original, and even the main character isn't very likeable.

The novella covers nearly half of the book and I almost finished there, but the first short stories that followed were short, so I gave them a try. They are better, and I am happy I didn't finish before them. No masterpieces here, but readable and sometimes even enjoyable, even though most of them are a bit bitter or they are about the not-so-nice sides of human life (in Egypt).

A curious problem I had with a couple of the was that I couldn't understand them. I missed the point because I don't know what an Egyptian knows. I knew, where the climax was, the definitive sentence or paragraph that made the story, but I could not tell what was The Thing there.

I am still (slowly) traveling with Sinuhe The Egyptian I've also started another collection of short stories: A Distant View of a Minaret, which is very good so far.

Distant View of a Minaret (or Kaukana siintää minareetti in Finnish) was a pleasant find ... a surprise, might one say. An author I'd never heard of and a modest looking little book.

This is a collection of short stories by Alifa Rifaat who, according to the introduction by the translator (to English, though the book I read was in Finnish), became a published writer at an "advanced age" and had no literary background to mention. Maybe it is just these two qualities that make the collection so enjoyable? Confidence and freshness.

The stories are about women, sexuality, gender and generation schisms, and their settings are mostly very everydayish: a home, a certains street in Cairo, a village... One of the stories has fantasy elements in it, though, the protagonist having an relationship with a snake queen that protects her home.

These stories are basically a lot like others I've read and yet there is something special in them, something impressive, something convincing. Maybe it is that she writes more openly about female sexyality and the problems related to it in Egyptian culture than most (I've heard of) do, and yet she is not a rebel. She sees and knows things are not as well as they could be, she wants to work to make them better but she is not starting a revolution.

Recommended.

339 -
I remember reading that in 2004. A good little find indeed. I put the writer up there with Nawal El-Saadawi so I always wonder when she'll get a little bit more press.

I agree she and her work deserve to be known and read more widely.

Her writings, described as controversial in the wikipedia, were not controversial enough, compared to those of El-Saadafi, for example.

So I doubt that day will ever come. Life isn't fair.

I have (finally) finished The Egyptian (Sinuhe egyptiläinen). It took more than two months but that was not the book, just me being busy. And it is a big book.

The Egyptian is set in the 14th century BC Egypt. It not very much about Egypt, and it isn't Egyptian, but a Finnish novel from the 1940s, and it is about us humans, in any time ... power struggles, sex, deceit, eating and drinking; about people trying to be good and do good; and how all that most often turns evil.

Sinuhe is an orphan raised by a doctor for the poor who later becomes a physician too. And more than that, being in the right place at the right time, he becomes a friend and trusted one for the most powerful people in the Egypt the Pharaoh Ekhnaton, the army leader Horemheb. He sees very closely what there is to see, and more often than not he also becomes a tool for their deeds that he himself abhors.

There are plenty of reviews and plot description for this book here at LT and enlewhere in the I-net. I won't go into that now. Read them, and read the book! it is absolutely worth it if you're interestest in any or all of the following: a) Egypt b) humans in good and in bad or c) good books.

Thanks for your review of The Egyptian; I've added it to my wish list.

I have a copy of The Egyptian back home in Sweden, so I'll try and make it my holiday read when I go back in May. I can't understand why I haven't gotten to it before - it sounds fascinating!

Oh, I cant understand why I didn't get to it before. I've known the book, and that I should and I would read it once, since I was a kid. The Egyptian, among others by the author, was one of the few books I know my late father had read and appreciated.

#344: Hope you have the Swedish translation which, as far as I know, is unabgridged, unlike the English one .(FYI, Darryl)

Abridged??? Why???

And, yes, my copy is Swedish: Sinuhe egyptiern : femton böcker ur den egyptiske läkaren Sinuhes liv omkr. 1390-1335 f. Kr hardback coming in at 595 pages - does that sound about right?

Sorry for 'a little bit' delayed answer Eva: that sounds a little short Egyptian too. But I don't know.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa.

"On the March 20, an suicide bomber had killed seven Israeli people to take revenge for Israel killing thirtyone Palestinians on the March 12 to take revenge for the Palestinians killing eleven on the eleventh, which in turn was a revenge for Israel killing fortytwo on the eighth of March, and so on and so on." Palestine/Israel, from 1941 to the 2000s ... and thats about what it comes to.

The novel is written from a Palestinian point of view, which seems to annoy some and feel fresh and eye-opening to others. I think I am more of the latter opinion, though I see that the narrative is quite one-sided. I can live with that.

The story is mainly told by Amal, starting from her grandparents generation and about how they lived in a village near Haifa. Her parents get married and she is born (and that is when the narrative swithces from third to first person); Israel is born, the village life is over and come the years in Jenin refugee camp and so forth, the story is told chronologically. Destruction, death, move to the US, to Lebanon and back again.

The starting is stong, the early history and the first period in Jenin made me feel for Amal, her family and her people. Then she somehow loses her best grip. The next few episodes (the orphanage, the student times, Lebanon) are shorter and more superficiall told, and they don't feel really important for the character development. The Lebanon period even becomes nearly cheesy before turning to horror (real-world horror). Somehow it starts to fly again in the end, in Jenin again. Not because of what happens there, but the author somehow gets more out of her characters and story there.

Two wrongs won't make it right.

I've read The Bus driver who wanted to be God by Etgar Keret (thanks, Eva) after this one, and I think I'll start A Tale of Love and Darkness tonight, but more on those later.

That's a shame if the Swedish version of Sinuhe is also an abridgement - I'll give it a shot anyway since I have the copy.

Hope you liked Keret!!

Yes, I did!

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God is a collection of very short stories plus one longer one titled Kneller's Happy Campers.

This was my first encounter with Keret but as far as I know the shortness of his stories is typical, yet this longer one is his best known work. Several (short, I guess :) films has been made based on his work.

There is a blurb on the cover of this collection saying "Warped and Wonderful short stories", and for once this is very true. These stories are... they are... hmmm... just that: Warped and Wonderful.

The bus driver in question, for example, is a man of principle: he never waits for a passenger that runs late to a bus stop. He is not mean. But if he waits for the one who is coming late, that person saves the ten minutes or so, right?. But what about the 30 or 40 people on the bus, who came in time? The 30 seconds spent waiting for the latecomer are 15 to 20 minutes loss for a busload of people together. Isn't it obvious what is the right thing? This is the way our man thinks and acts until he once remembers that before he came a bus driver he wanted to be God. A merciful God. Remembering that he realizes he can make, or he has to make, exceptions sometimes. The first exception he (thinking about the God he wanted to be) makes is waiting for a guy who is running late from his first date with the loveliest girl he'd ever met. The bus driver waits and the guy gets on and comes in time to his date. The girl doesn't show up, though, but that's another story. Even god can't do everything. Especially if he is just a bus driver.

I spoiled one story but there are plenty of others to enjoy. I think the Bus Driver... is a nice good example of these stories. They are full of surprises and anything can happen, but they are mostly very likeable. Nasty things may happen, and the characters are mean sometimes but tone is understanding and warm. So, beside making you laugh they make you feel good. Or that's how they worked on me. Mostly: there a couple of stories that were just nasty. And I guess someone may see the themes and subjects too depressing or provocative to enjoy. Quite a few of the stories contain dying, killing, suicides etc.

Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other places in Israel are mentioned and used as a setting, the Israel/Jews/Palestine/Arabs -conflict is central to one story, and on the background in another, the Holocaust history and remembrance is mentioned once or twice. So, this is clearly a book from Israel. And more.

Very good to hear you enjoyed it! Keret is one of my favorite writers and, I think, the foremost writer in the flash fiction genre.

I'd like to read more Keret during my visit to Israel. The city library has two translated collections. But then, while was reading one of the two, there was a full page article on him and his work in the local newspaper, and now both of them are on hold for weeks.

Have you seen any of the movies, by the way? Especially Wristcutters, based on Kneller's Happy Campers might be interesting ... Tom Waits as Kneller sounds almost irresistible.

Oh, that's almost a shame. I do want more people to know of Keret, but the timing was poor for your purposes.

I have seen Wristcutters and it's definitely watchable (Tom Waits is good, but made a smaller impression than expected), but I have a feeling it doesn't quite work unless you've read the novella first. I've also seen $9.99, which is a stop motion version of one of his stories (if you get the DVD, it'll have a few other shorts as extras), which is accomplished but odd. I'm not convinced that his stories work in adaptation because they are so imaginative and suggestive that visual adaptations lock them in and makes them feel smaller. However, Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, have made a film called Jellyfish (מדוזות), which is brilliant and I'd recommend watching that if it's available.

If you need some any ideas, some of my other favorites are Eshkol Nevo, Assaf Gavron, Meir Shalev, and Yehoshua Kenaz. Ron Leshem's Beaufort and Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir can also be recommended for the "obligatory" war literature (although the film of Waltz with Bashir is definitely comparable to the book). And, of course, you can't go wrong with the heavy-hitters David Grossman and Amos Oz.

Hope you have a great Israel visit!!

I spent rest of the January in Jerusalem with Amos Oz and his family or the Tale of Love and Darkness.

It is a big book with about 650 pages, a rich texture of both longer stories and brief anecdotes.

The main storyline is little Amos's childhood from his first memories to the day his mother died when he was twelve years old. On the way one is, however, shown a lot more: the family histories of both his father's and mother's side, centuries back; Jewish history through the years of diaspora in Eastern Europe; them finding their way to Palestine; and the birth of Israel including the conflicts and trouble (both with the Arabs and the different groups among the Israeli) it brought; as well as happenings from Mr Oz's later years, growing up, becoming a writer, husband, father etc., all the way to 2002 and writing this book.

Oz is a good writer and great storyteller. Most of the stuff is interesting in itself. And even the parts that are not that interesting read well and feel true and alive in his text.

The love is love in the family, for they did love each other in their own ways, little Amos and his parents, even though they never learned to be together. And the darkness is the one between them, light years of it separating them from each other, at once. Love and Darkness.

Great review! It's on my Mt. TBR and I'm looking forward to getting to it, hopefully soon.

Thanks. I suppose you know other Oz's work, and I think that will give you some extra enjoyment with this one. He refers to his own book a few times, how some occurence or a person found its way to a story years later. Made me want to read some of those stories, of course, but even more it made me want to have read them before.

I am now in transit from Israel to Syria: Death of A Monk is novel by a Israeli author Alon Hilu set in the 19th century Damascus. Interesting but a bit hard to follow at times, which makes it a slow read.

I'm glad that you enjoyed A Tale of Love and Darkness. Amos Oz has become one of my favorite writers, and I loved his latest book, a collection of short stories entitled Scenes From Village Life.

Looking forward to hearing what you think of Death of A Monk! I started it and only got through a few pages before I was lost, but I really do want to read it, so it'll be interesting to hear how hard it ends up being.

>357 kidzdoc:: He is one more author I'll bring home with me and I know I'll get back to his work after this world tour. If not sooner.

Death of A Monk is a fictional retelling of a historical episode that happened in Damascus (Syria) in the 1840. (See Damascus affair in Wikipedia for more info).

If I got the background info right, the mystery of the (supposed) death of the monk was never solved. Except that the ones who read this novel now know what was going on.

The narrator and protagonist is Aslan, an outsider in his family and among his school mates, gets involved with Father Tomaso. The poor monk dies when their involvement reaches its peak. Aslan panics, hides the body and goes back home, hoping he's unniticed.

Aslan is not only afraid his guilt be found -- he takes an active role accusing others. The Jewish community of the city becomes the prime suspect, and even though being one of them, Aslan eagerly testifies against his family, confirming any wild accusation thrown against them.

It seldom happens to me that I don't like a book just because I don't like the central characters. But this one was a hard case in this respect. The first person narrative is written so strongly it really feels Aslan is talking to me here and now, and he doesn't paint a nice picture of himself. He is, according to his own precise definition "a big pampered baby", a looser, a liar and a coward. He did not kill the monk but he was ready to let a townfull of people, his father among them, suffer and die just not to be discovered. (Yes, I see he would have been stoned to death for what he did even though the death of the monk "just happened".)

But it is however very well written and in many ways interesting novel, maybe just a little bit long at places. And very homosexual.

I spent more than a month with the stories of The Hakawati, the Storyteller. Once again it felt like long time reading a book. Then again, there are hundreds of years of stories in the book.

This is, mainly, a family history told by Osama al-Kharrat who comes back to Beirut to meet his father for the last time. The are bedside episodes in the hospital, anecdotes from the past of the family three generations back, and old fold tales and tales from the Thousand and one Nights (modernized versions or inspired by). Stories are told by different family members and by characters in the stories told by others -- layers and layers of stories and fragments of stories. Jumping from level to level and from time to another.

The stuctural versatility is both fascinating and the main problem of the book. The author is a great storyteller himself, but not the best of novel constructors. There is a lot of great stuff in the book but it often made me wonder what was going on and where it was going.

It was sort of funny when it was said, somewhere near page 300: "Now, listen. This is where our story begins." And yes: the multitude of stories begun to converge and they came more or less together.

EDIT: corrected a couple of typos & added some missing word.

Sounds fascinating.

Looks like it'll be an "interesting" experience when I get around to reading Death of A Monk... :)

I had a copy of The Hakawati, but gave it away a while back - sounds like it should probably go back on the wishlist.

I've been meaning to read The Hakawati for a year or two -- my husband read it and really enjoyed it.

I bought The Hakawati several years ago, but haven't gotten to it yet. I'm glad to hear that you liked it.

Oh yes, The Hakawati is fascinating, and worth a try if at hand. I would not say it a masterpiece on the whole, but the especially the pieces on Baybars were very, very funny.

I am now nearly 200 pages into The Dark Side of Love (blandly translated "The Lovers of Damascus"), which, again, is, mainly, a family history. Or a history of two rivalling families in Mala and Damascus. The story also tells a lot about the history of Syria, and I can see the development of what is going on in the country these days, even though the story seems to end in the 1970s.

The Dark Side of Love is a novel about forbidden love, about the meaning and power of family in Arab societies, and it is also very much a novel about Syria in the 20th century, and Damascus. Many things to be for one novel, but it is a big book with 900 pages. There is plenty of space for all those things. But despite its size it is easy to read and enjoy.

The novel starts with two introductory chapters that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. In the first one Farid and Rana speculate about the chances of their love to survive. They are members of two rivalling families that are in a vicious circle of vendetta. The second opening shows us a mysterious murder. A high rank secret police officer is found dead in a basket hanging outside a church.

These things happen around the 1970 in Damascus. We are then taken back in time to 1907 and to a little village Mala somewhere in the mountains of Syria, and from there the stories unfold: what makes the love of Rana and Farid so desperate and impossible, what is behind the enemities of the families, the colonialization and the forming of the state of Syria, the successive coups and dictators, and the richness of life in all this. The novel covers 60+ years and goes around from Mala to Damascus to Beirut to Aleppo and back.

What I liked the best was the feeling of "being there", the richness of the storytelling, this is full of stories and anecdotes (one more thing this book is about), and the novel once more showed me how different and how essentially similar life is or can be in different parts of the world. The character development, on the other hand was a bit clumsy. One thinks that in such a long novel you'd learn to know the characters really well but in this case they (mainly Farid) did something surprising (not so bad) or out of character (worse) when the novel moved on to a new phase in their lives.

Sirens of Baghdad is a story of making of a terrorist, about how the "war against terrorism" produces terrorism.

The unnamed narrator is from Kafr Karam, a little nearly forgotten village somewhere in the middle of the desert in Iraq. Baghdad is distant, people are poor, things are mostly like they have ever been. For a long time it seemed that even the war forgets the village. But no. Shocking and more importantly dishonourable things meet the village and the narrator's family. He has been a quiet an pasific boy and young man all his life but when it comes to honour a young bedouin man must act.

All this is told convincingly -- it sort of makes sense even though it doesn't in my everyday thinking.

He travels to Baghdad and gets involved with the resistance, bombings and killing, and in the end "with the biggest offence on the enemy ground ever -- something that makes the 9/11 look like schoolboy squabble."

This is an important account but unfortunately not great literature. Four star story in a three star novel.

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf (translated to Finnish by Annikki Suni) -- I marked this one for Iran because the most of the it is set in Isfahan and Tehran, even though it was called Persia back the and the borders were different.

The novel tells the story of (fictional) handwriting by Omar Khayyam, from the days he wrote it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean where in ended up with the Titanic in 1912.

I read that there really is a book of Khayyam poetry in Titanic, not an original handwriting but another one, made later but still an unique one. Maalouf has built the book in many ways like this: combining facts and fiction seamlessly, telling us about the encounters of the East and West throught the centuries. Like the handwriting, some characters are historical but the narrator, for example, is fictional; a few historical occurences are included in the book, and undoubtedly they are spiced with details by Maalouf.

Khayyam (of this fictional book) wanted to live in peace, study the stars and sciences, and write his quatrains. He could not avoid the power struggles of his days, and nor could his book in later centuries. After Khayyam's death the book spent some time in the hands of Assassins in the Alamut, disappeared for centuries when the sect was destroyed, surfaced briefly in Paris and traveled back to Persia again, and was found again in the middle of the democratic revolution of Persia in the 1900s. An American Khayyam aficionado finally gets it, and a Princess too, and tries to bring both to America -- on the Titanic.

Behind the main story I found this: Ideas, knowledge and people have "always" moved both directions, developing and maturing on the way. And the people who build this connection have always been used and mostly destroyed in the end by those who have or want to have power. East and West are connected, and they are different and similar at the same time.

The writing is good, easy to read and enjoy. The story flows and floats, lightly and effortlessly -- a little slowly and a maybe little too lightly at times. This book touches but it may not make a mark that lasts for long.

Tuhat ja yksi yötä is a newish selection of stories from One Thousand and One Nihgts, selected and translated by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila. Apart from being a fresh translation this is also the first time these tales have been translated directly from Arabic sources.

The translations are good, and so is the selection of stories: there are bot the must-stories of Sindbad's travels, Ali Baba, and The Magic Lantern, as well as a few examples of less know, or unknown to me, tales.

It was nice to read these tales again. There is a strong sense of both everyday life and fairytale, like in so so many other stories from the area. And even if the stories are old they feel more like timeless. New stories bring new stuff but there are a lot of elements and things that have changed very little in hundreds of years.

After the old tales I moved to a more specified location of Northern Iraq with My Father's Rifle. This is a coming of age story of a Kurd boy. The name of the boy in the story is not same as that of the author but this is supposed to be more or less a memoir.

The little book covers a period of little more than ten years from the sixties to late seventies. The boy sees and feels the hopes of the Kurd nation fail more than once: no independence, no own country, not even autonomy, no school education in their own language, no good or important jobs. Their homes are burned down or they must be left behind, more than once in many cases.

The boy grows up and his consciousness of what is going on around grows. Hir worryless day are left behind. First he hears and sees things and later on comes to experience the trouble too.

You get it? The story is touching. No problem there, but that is about all it is. This is not a novel, not a great literary work. But not expecting more it is still worth reading.

I started my stay in Turkey with The White Castle (Valkoinen linna in Finnish) by Orhan Pamuk.

This was the first book by Pamuk I ever read. I guess this is not one of his great works but this came my way suitably and for free so I grabbed it first.

Superficially The White Castle is an easy to read historical novel with quite catchy and adventurous story -- though it stalls and becomes a bit repetitive at the middle. Despite being easy it provides food for thought and possibilities for different interpretations.

The story is told in first person, the "I" being an Italian young man who is captured by Turkish pirates and sold to Hoca, a sort of scientist trying to work his way to the favour of the court. The Italian teaches Hoca what he knows. They live together and work together and more that that they look like each other too. The two man's likeness is the "food for thought" material under the plot. Who am I? Or what is I? And who and what is you? Are they interchangeable, and what if we swap? The I of the book changes, or the narrator---both are possible interpretations. Questions arise, answers must be found elsewhere.

Like I said, the story stalls for a moment in the middle, but other than that this book made me want to read more Pamuk.

I always enjoy following along on your travels and reading!

And I do too, even when I don't have a lot to say! (Or anything, for that matter.)

Thanks! Again. It is nice to know that you are following my tour. Makes writing really a lot more meaningful.

I've been reading on but mostly away from computer so this thread is a behind.

After The White Castle I read The Birds Have Also Gone, The Bastard of Istanbul (Kirottu Istanbul), My Name is Red (Nimeni on punainen), and Liaisons Culinaires (the title of the English translation is in French; what I actually read was Herkullisia suhteita in Finnish) which took me to Greece.

The Birds Have Also Gone was a sad, nostalgic story set in the Istanbul of the 1970s, looking back to even older times. An unnamed first person narrator watches and comments three boys' effort to earn some money trying to revive an old tradition of catching birds and trying to sell them outside mosques and churches of the city for the buyers to set them free.

"Fly and be free, meet me at the gates of Paradise" is supposed to be a symbolic good deed. Good karma for the buyers and money for the bird catchers. But times have changed. Only few remember this tradition, even fewer care about it, and those who notice the boys mock them. They may feel sorry for the birds but rather than paying to set them free they frown on them being catched and stuffed in the cages in the first place. And, unlike the author meant it, my sentiment as a reader was the same. Times truly have changed. So, this one did not work for me.

The Bastard of Istanbul ... well, I read this two or three weeks ago or so, and now I realize, I don't have much to say about it. It was sort of interesting, I read it quickly, and then forgot it as quickly, it seems.

The story is set in a household of women in four generations in Istanbul. The main protagonist is the youngest of them, Asya. She is the Bastard, her father is the family taboo. She grows up full of anger, lives recklessly, but being surrounded by loving (each in their own way) aunts and grandmothers she is cool. The lack of men in the family is explained by a family curse: they all die around the age of forty. The only living man of the family, Mustafa, Asya's uncle, has been sent to the US to escape the early death.

He's been there twenty years and he has no intention of coming back. Not until is stepdaughter Amy, who is American-Armenian, decides she has to travel to Istanbul to search her (Armenian) roots. Her American mother follows her and makes Mustafa to come along. And you know how that ends... with curse and all.

The Armenian genocide and especially what it means to the Armenian living outside Turkey, and how the present Turks know practically nothing about is the strongest material of the novel. The two nations are bound together by a long long history, which has not always been pretty. The book tries to tell that the way the Turks live in denial and the Armenians dwell in the past wrongdoing of their neighbours does no good to either one.

(The open discussion of the Armenian genocide in the novel caused the author to be sued in Turkey. She was not the first one, though, the same laws had been applied to Orhan Pamuk before.)

The framing family story and plot are full of stuff: the curse, peculiar, more or less crazy aunts, some magic etc... too much of everything to my taste, and the narrative style is nearly chic-lit (I imagine, not that I really know what that is), but that is forgiven. The big story is wise and humane.

I refreshed my memory about The Bastard... by reading a couple of other reviews, and the reminded me about the other strenghts of the book: the city of Istanbul is very alive here, you feel and see some of the scenes there, and both the Armenian and Turkish food culture are tastefully present too.

My Name is Red was another one for Turkey, and again set in Istanbul. Is Istanbul the only place in Turkey worth writing about?

I said above that The White Castle felt like an 'early work of a master to come'. This is only his second or third book after that one, and the master had come, indeed.

My Name is Red is a historical novel, a love story, and a crime mystery at once. And it is also a story about a clash of Eastern and Western cultures. The story is set in the 16th century, the lovers get each other in the end, and new ways of seeing and painting the world cause trouble among the miniature painters serving the great Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

The society of the miniaturists is in the center of the novel. They are a controversial group in islamic culture anyway, balancing between making decorations and actual pictures (which is not acceptable). They have developed their ways for centuries, symbolic styles so that you don't actually paint what you see but what is the soul of the subject. But there are some who are interested in, or even tempted by the European (Franks or Farangi) way: to paint so you could actually recognize the tree or the person in the picture, and the perspective. While some are tempted others fear. Then one of them is killed... and the book becomes a murder mystery too.

One thing probably mentioned in every review of My Name is Red is that there are plenty of narrators: nearly 20 voices tell the story: the dead miniaturist in a well begins, and later on the murderer, colour Red, a tree, horse, and several named characters, things and creatures have their say. This might become messy but it works. The narrators aren't very unique, which may help keep this thing together and make following it easy. You rather recognize them because they always introduce themselves. Of course they have different information about the case.

In some way this reminds me of The Name of The Rose: the rather closed society whose members start killing each other, as a secret work of art becomes a threat to the society.

I really enjoyed reading the book. It is interesting and well written, informative and entertaing ... recommended.

(Edited to correct some typos and add a few missing words.)

Nice review of My Name Is Red, eairo. I'd like to get to it, and The Name of the Rose, early next year.

Thanks, Darryl. They are both worth getting into. I read The Name of the Rose a long time ago, but I listened a radio adaptation of it last year that made me want to read it again some time.

Last night I realized my two books and two thirds stay in Greece in ending and I haven't commented even the first one yet.

Liaisons Culinaires by Andreas Staikos (Herkullisia suhteita in Finnish) is a novella about two men's shared passion for good food and a woman. These things connect two neighbours Damoklis and Dimitris, who little by little and one after the other realize their lover is same woman, Nana.

Nana loves good food and she likes to play with the two men. They start to compete for a perfect dinner to win Nana's favours. They make deals and rules, and break them at the first opportunity. And in the end Nana surprises them both.

The meals and their makings are described deliciously (all the recipies are there), but the relationship games made me sad. I don't want to be that cynical. Not even for a while.

(The name and the themes are obviously an homage to Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Staikos has indeed translated that one into Greek.)

"The Greek Trainspotting" say the back cover. Well, may be. But the comparison is not necessary. Sano Morfiinille et mä etin sen vielä (no English title available, but that would be something like "Tell Morphine that I'll come for her") is an intreresting trip to druggy street life in Athens.

Riki likes trips (chemical sort) and motorbikes (stolen if not available otherwise), (s)he (?) doesn't have a home at first but then (s)he finds one, and a cat. The cat is the Morphine of the book title, and a turning point in Riki's life. Life which isn't pretty -- but as it is told in first person, it is told lightly, like it were normal the way it is. (S)He learns to care, and to trust. And just when things are about to go real bad (s)he sees it is time to leave, and (s)he does too. So, this is a quite lightful little (number of pages) novel despite the potentially grim world it is set into.

The introduction, in addition to the comparison I already mentioned, tells this book was the first one ever written in modern (in the 1990s) street Greek, and therefore notable. Well, even though it isn't the first of the kind in the world, there was some sort of freshness to be seen, even in the translation.

Speaking of Helsinki, my wife and I had a great time in your city. Thanks for all your great recommendations. Can't say we followed all of them, but we have a habit while on vacation of starting out for one place and ending up someplace else. Not lost, just easily distracted! We had a great day out at the fortress, were fascinated by the Museum of Design, and generally just had a blast exploring the streets and neighborhoods. Then we drove north, spent a few days in Kajaani and went as far north as Hossa, where we stayed in a cabin with no electricity on the banks of a river rapids (koski!) for two days. We also took the train to St. Petersburg, where we spent two days. Anyway, it was a great trip and we are now huge Finland fans. Cheers! (Sorry to interrupt your book thread :) ).

Good to hear you enjoyed your visit. And it is always nice hear from home while away ... in this thread ;)

Thanks for the Greek reviews!

You're welcome. Here is one more:

Elämäni Pythagoraana (which would be "My Life As Pythagoras") by Fredrik Lång is a fictional biography of Pythagoras, probably best known for his theorem on relations of right triangle, and a little less for musical theories on harmony and tuning.

The novel tells his story largely based on facts--the Wikipedia article on P can be read as a synopsis of the novel--filled with details where necessary. In addition to being just a "story of his life" this novel tells about the world views of that time (appr. 500 B.C.), seedlings of some ideas that have survived to our times, formation of an academic/mystical society (and how it was broken), early scientific work and many other things.

There four parts in the story: Pythagoras' childhood (he was brought up to believe he was half-god, son of Apollo, and even as a scientist he had no problem with that) and youth in Samos, his travels to Egypt and to Babylon and back home. In the beginning of the second part, back in Samos, the narrator of the story introduces himself: Zalmoksis was Pythagoras' slave, given to him by the tyrant of Samos, and later his servant and companion to the end (I suppose he is a fictional character). They travel together west from Samos, all the way to Croton (Italy, part of Greece then) where Pythagorean school is founded, and where he spent the rest of his life.

I greatly enjoyed this book. It was quietly funny (thanks to Zalmoksis, mostly), intelligent and wise and informative. The only thing I knew before about Pythagoras was the theorem, but he and his students were seemingly interested (curious) in about anything, they found out lots of things and truths--and that was actually what brought an end to their world (and the school) as they knew it, finding out things they were not able to handle intellectually: irrational numbers. They did not actually invent them, that was the part they could not handle. But they found relations in common forms that were later on explained by irrational numbers, which they did not know.

How fitting and how familiar that was. How little have people changes in 2500 years. I work in a research institute and I have seen and I can easily imagine such things happen at my workplace.

Only two days after finishing the book I heard a radio program about the Old music movement, the evolution of musical tuning systems etc., and of course Pythagoras was mentioned a few times. Like I said, I'd never noticed his importance on that area before. But after reading this one I could listen to the show nodding myself: "Right, just so."

I would like to recomment the novel to anybody, but there are probably only one or two persons out there reading this who could read the book (in Swedish) .

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Like I said the book took me from Greece to Croton, Italy, and that is where I read now: in Sicily and Rome with Luigi Pirandello.

Luigi Pirandello was a Nobel laureate, according to the translator's notes in the collection I read he was hugely productive in all categories of literature, from short stories to novels to play to movie scripts. Despite alla this he was a new acquaintance to me when I picked up the book from a pile in a discount bookshop. After reading the book, I can say it was a pleasure to meet him.

Ahdas frakki is a collection of 22 short stories from 1901 to 1923. The age of a hundred years did not matter. These stories have aged well. In most cases their themes still--or again--feel "today". The translations are recent, which of course may help make the stories feel fresh.

Pirandello covers many areas of life, family relations and love affairs, people at work and in war, their fears and vanities, modernization of the society, movement from countryside to cities. People join together and they are separated from each other, often by death or by other people. Some of the stories are funny or satirical, some of them serious, most often both.

In the title story, an old professor who never dresses formally, must make an exception, for he is to attend a wedding, but even the best fitting tailcoat he manages to find is too tight. With the help of his tearing apart coat he manages to turn the wedding turning into a funeral to a wedding again. In another one a newly married wife tries to re-live his first marriage with his new husband, and turn the poor man's life into a hell, and drives him to cheating his wife with her best friend. Only to find his dead competitor in her bed too.

In one story a catholic priest and teacher commits "unspeakable" crimes with the boys he was to look after and educate. And the bishob would be ready look the other way and let the dust settle. In one story a man pushes his pregnant neighbor into river, because he just can't stand the idea of one more crying, peeing and to-be-uneducated child around the decaying neighbourhood they live. These strories are plain serious, no humor here.

Another thing I liked in Pirandello's stories was that in many cases he gives the last word to some improbable character of the story, like to the young lady, one day crying for her lover sent to war, and enjoying the company of another soldier the next day.

The Complete Cosmicomics (Finnish: Koko kosmokomiikka) did not provide much local feel to my stay in Italy. It has broader perspectives: this is about everything -- the history of the universe from point zero to the preparation of its end.

All this in 24 stories told by Qfwfq who was always there: he remembers how crowded it was before the Big Bang when everyone and everything was together; he tells about his childhood games including hydrogen atoms and other chemical elements; and how the moon was once so close to Earth that the people used to jump up there to gather moonmilk and what happened then; his time a one of the last dinosaurs...

Qfwfq's style is usually small talk like and chatty. Stories always (except once) begin with a quote from a scientific text, and then he says something like "Oh yes, I remember..." or something like that.

There are both hits and misses among the stories. All of them are well written and funny but some are better thought out than others and provide more food for thought. I might even say there is wisdom hidden in the "better" ones, while the rest "only" bring a smile to your face.

The original Cosmicomics was published in 1964 and it consisted of the first 12 stories of this complete edition. The rest of the stories were written between 1965 and 1984 or so. I have a feeling that there were more hits among the original stories and more misses among the newer ones. So, if you're an opportunist go for the original edition. But then again, then you'll never know what you'll have missed.

I've not read any of Pirandello's stories, but his plays are fascinating -- full of questions of identity and reality. A collection of them in English is titled Naked Masks which includes Six Characters in Search of an Author.

I recognize those themes, questions of identity and reality, from the stories I read too. His work has been little translated into Finnish. I checked the library catalogue, and there are more titles available in Swedish and Italian than in Finnish. Even less in English, though.

I have also moved on: I am now reading The Periodic Table, slowly, one or two stories a day, and I am enjoying it a lot. This is one of those books you'd want to last forever.

I read The Periodic Table many years ago, but I really loved it. It's probably a book I could reread.

I finished reading The Periodic Table this morning -- the end came after all -- and I am sure I'll say the same after a few years. I loved it.

It is well enough written to enjoy just for that, but that was not the main reason for likin, loving, the book for me. It hit me on so many levels: the stories were good or great, I liked the author's style and his quiet humour, and the taste of life, sometimes bitter, always there, true or at least believable, Levi's humanity, his weaknesses and the wisdom, the combination of science and literature, and, and, ... You see?

Zeno's Conscience (suom.: Zenon tunnustuksia) took me to Trieste of the early 20th century, part of Austria back then.

Zeno is an aging, seemingly wealthy "businesman", well-meaning but always faulty: untrue husband, indecisive, hypocondriac, overtly sensitive, and many more things. The novel consists of his confession-like writings to his therapist, doctor S. Four first chapters cover his life from different perspectives, like "The last cigarette" (most of his cigarettes were last ones ;), "The Wife and the Lover" etc., and in the last writing he renounces the therapy, and confesses that he hasn't been totally honest and true in his writings.

The funny thing about the novel is that most descriptions about what Zeno writes about make it sound dull or uninteresting---except the one about the last cigarettes--for his life is quite uninteresting. But the novel is not. It is quite often funny (in the way that makes you smile, not necessarily laugh out loud) and even more often so perceptive on Zeno's humanity.

Good review of a book about a time and place for which it is hard to find books. I will look for this one.

Hope you'll enjoy it. I'll try to write some thoughts on Zeno in the "classics in their own country" some time soon. When the thoughts come to me...

After Zeno I tried the company of Zen, Aureliano Zen that is. Blood Rain and And then you die are number 7 and 8 in the series of crime mysteries by Michael Dibdin. I do not read mysteries very much or often, but these I do like. Zen is nearly a person, not just a character, and even as a character, he is something I like: a hero that is nearly a loser, unambitious, crooked yet uncorrupted, he always falls on his feet in the end.

For those who do not know, the concept of this series is that in each book Mr Zen is sent to different parts of Italy to solve (or something) a crime that is often politically sensitive. The actual crime or mystery is most times not the main thing. What I enjoy is the sense of place, the feel, and the apparently good knowledge of Italy and its political/criminal/regional/etc culture and the point of of view of an outsider at the same time.

In these two books Zen first visits Sicily where he meets the very classical mafia families and their ways of work. He's nearly killed in the end of Blood Rain, so what he needs next is rest on the beach in Tuscany. But he cannot find peace even in there. He was just nearly killed in the previous book, and it seems someone has been able to follow him despite the government protection to finish the job in And then you die.

Foucault's Pendulum ... I finished it days ago and have been thinking about how to review it, how to start. First: what is this thing? What to say that haven't been said several times?

What has been said: It is "Eco's best", even "The best book I have ever read". Others find it "Frustrating" or "Difficult" or both. Yet other describe it "Intelligent" but on the other hand "Intellectual masturbation" has also been mentioned."

Go figure! My reading was somewhat dualistic too. I enjoyed reading it. I also often thought it was silly. Spending so much energy on something so obviously stupid. And then I was once more remembered that there probable are lots of people who do.

The framing story that tries to convince the reader that there is a story is about three friends who work for a vanity press publishing house. Anything goes as long as the artist (or anybody) pays. They once have to review a manuscript about the Knight Templars and their big secret. From there they derive their own intellectual game, The Plan. Their Plan covers and explains practically everything from the 12th century to present, from the crusades, to the building of the great cathedrals to the birth of modern science to the Eiffel tower to the WWII and the holocaust. Which is what I meant when I wrote that the "story tries to..." for the stuff about the three friends isn't the main thing in this book. What matters is the showcase of all the occult societies and ideas of the past few centuries. The novel (or metanovel) is like
the Plan: an intellectual game, text about other texts.

Eco is a good writer so he pulls this through. The result is enjoyable if you let be so, if you play along. Otherwise I am sure it can be quite frustrating.

This was actually my second try with the book. I guess I wasn't ready to play along the firts time I tried it.

William N. Päiväkirja by Kristina Carlson is a Finnish novel that is set in Paris. The book is written in the form a diary -- a fictional diary of a historical person, William Nylander, a Finnish researcer of lichen who actually stayed the last years in Paris and died there in 1899. If I counted right he was in his 80s then.

The diary begins in November 1897 and the last note is from March 1899. There isn't much storytelling here. Mr Williams notes are mostly brief, ranging from everydayish to wise and from funny to bitter.

The diary shows Nylander as an aging loner, a difficult person, and he knows that too. He tells us about many people he has broken up with during his long life (mostly due to scientific disagreements) but that being alone is ok ... the problem is just the company he has to be alone in. He has his convictions he holds on to, wrong or right, and his preoccupations he often and diligently writes about most days: the room temperature in his home, his work on catalogueing his dear samples and scientific writing (often slow because his place is so cold) ... and every mouthful of food he eats.

The book is not very long or big but its atmosphere is stong and the ideas it conveys are big. I think this will remain with me some time and I'll return to at least some fragmens again.

(Not available in English.)

And The Sun Also Rises took me from Paris to Pamplona to Madrid. Jake Barnes and his friends' (nearly) self-destructive drifting was sort of interesting: I guess the way they lived was somewhat new back then in the 1920s. Or maybe not? But certainly it has not disappeared in the the following nintey years. The lost generations today certainly do different things, but the mentality is still there. Though I think that mostly people go through the "lost generation" phase of life younger than Jake et al. who were mostly around 35 or so.

The book has been translated into Finnish in 1954, nearly 30 years after its publication. Still I have a feeling the translation has aged more than the original English. The language, some words and expressions and especially the way the people talked felt funny. Readable and enjoyable, though.

The book left me in Madrid, which is fine: I have acquired at least two more Spanish books after I last time left here more about three years ago (!): I already started The Silence of the Sirens and The Angel's Game is waiting.

(Edit: touchstones)

The Silence of the Sirens (Finnish: Seireenien hiljaisuus) took me to South Eastern Spain, in an unnamed isolated village in the mountains of Alpujarras.

The narrator, María, is a teacher who comes to work at the village school. She is an outsider the and the locals make her know and feel it. She soon comes to know the other outsider there, Elsa, and becomes involved in Elsa's strange distant-love affair of the strangest kind. Elsa has met the man only twice, and anyone else but her would say that "nothing" had happened. Elsa had since retreated to the distant village to build her love story based on (imaginary) signs, obscure references and incidents. María's involvement means she tries to encourage her friend to act, unable to see it is not the man Elsa wants but "to feel love" as she says near the end of the story.

The title of the novel refers to a short story by Kafka that in turn ties the story to the sirens Ulysses once met. These references are written in the story. Not knowing the Kafka's story I cannot say what is their deeper meaning.

I'd say reading the description above would stop me even from beginning the book. This was, however, my second reading of the novel. What made me to is the atmosphere. The isolation of the village, the near-hostile attitude of the villagers and the strangenes of Elsa's "love" have been woven into a captivating network of something that makes the little novel readable and even enjoyable for me. (Have to say though that were it longer the enchantment might not last.)

Interesting reviews as always. It has been decades since I read The Sun Also Rises (and I'm not a Hemingway fan) so I don't remember it that well, but I think one of the reasons they were lost was because of the first world war changing the world so completely, not just because they were drifting. So maybe their ages have something to do with that.

What you say about the war is probably true. At least two of the men mentioned war and army. I thought about the personal effect it might have had, but not so much about the rest of the world. But of course, yes.

401> Yes. This effect is personified, if you will, by Jake's war wound, which has left him unable to consummate a physical relationship with Brett. This factor, I think, is meant to provide the immediate source of their discontent (certainly his), but I agree with you, Rebecca, that this is meant to stand for the general wounds rent in the European and American psyche by the horrors of the war and the ending of the world as people knew it. It's more or less considered a truism in historical circles, I think, (or at least I've seen it expressed often), that the 19th Century really lasted until WWI and ended there, and the 20th century ended early, with the falling of the Berlin Wall, all this at least from a Western perspective, I guess. Anyway, The Sun Also Rises gets to that "the world as we knew it and felt comfortable in it has ended" feeling pretty well, in my opinion. It was in high school that I read it, though. Clearly it left a strong impression on me, but then I had an excellent, excellent literature teacher to present it to me. Maybe time to re-read it!

Thank you, Jerry ... I read the book (or books in general) and I try to think too, but more often than not I get carried away by the story and the thinking stops. I know I knew the ideas you mention but they did not connect to the story (in my head) when I was reading.

I see it's been since my last posting. I have been quiet but I have been reading.

I visited Barcelona to see The Angel's Game which I enjoyed a lot, even though it wasn't as impressive as the first one in the series, The Shadow of the Wind. I think this kind of book works as a comfort literature for me, a lover of books, stories and storytelling. It provides a story that you basically know from before, with a couple of surprises, and more than a couple of references to other books you know.

And then there was W, or The Memory of Childhood where Perec writes about his memories---after he claims he does not have them---and tells a story of W, an society built around a cult of Olympic ideas ... representing you know what... The writing was good but to be honest I did not really get into it. It may be that after the Angel's Game I was in a mood for great storytelling, and not so much for such a reflection and intellectualism? Or maybe the book just wasn't for me.

W, however took me back to France, from where I was planning to leave immediately for South America with Hopscotch. But I'm held back with some unfinished business in Europe. I was not ready to go yet. Waiting, hanging around I met Renèe Michel who now is giving me a lesson on The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Finnish: Siilin eleganssi) starts slowly and it was even a bit heavy in the beginning, loaded with philosophical references and recflections. After the first third or so, I was absorbed into these musings, and found the story behind them.

There are two characters who alternate telling about themselves and their ideas. They both feel and try to isolate themselves from others around them. They both have their own reasons. Paloma, 12 years old, intelligent and even wise, even though unexperienced, does not want to become what her family is. Renee is older, in her fifties, is the concierge of the house where Paloma, her family and other very well-off Parisian families live. She is the countryside, with a poor background, and in the city she is very working-class-character in an environment where the class matters. Despite her background she has always appreciated learning and is very well read and civilized, but as said, to protect herself, she keeps to herself and hides behind the facade of a simple doorwoman.

Then (obviously (?) as this a work fiction) a Japanese gentleman buys an apartment in the house and moves in, and immediately makes an connection with both these special characters. He manages to gain trust with both, and sort of open their eyes and helps them see more and further away.

The story of these three persons, from isolation to togetherness and from solitude to friendsip, was touching and beautiful. The book is also full of observations that made me smile like a fool, feeling happy being a reader, once again. The ending is tragical, though. In a way the finish was so rough and quick twist that it made me think that the author wanted to avoid being too sugary. Or maybe she just wanted to remind us that nothing is perfect in this life.

In four years and more than 400 messages this thread has grown old, long and slow.

The Hopscotch took me from Paris to Buenos Aires ... new continent ... maybe it is also time for a new thread!

400+ is quite an achievement. :) Next time it's time for a new one, though, click the link below ("Continue this topic in another topic") and everyone's stars will follow to the new thread. *Going off to star the new one!*

# 405. I have The Angels Game sitting on my shelf just waiting for a holiday so I can read it.

Thanks, Eva, for the hint.