Lily’s Blog

Yes our new BBC, our Blog Book Club is up and running.

So far we have seven members, Marian, Treasa, Cathy, Marie, Lorna, Val and yours truly.

Our first book has been selected ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’, the 2007 novel by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini, as suggested by Marian.

We will all be busy reading, ready to post our reviews midday, Easter Sunday.

Who knows, maybe this time next year our fledgling online book club might be celebrating its first birthday at the Ennis Book Festival with all the other book clubs

Update to above. We are now at nine members, Edie and Jenn have just joined.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

Today is World Book Day, the biggest annual celebration of books and reading in the UK and Ireland.

Ennis Book Club Festival is on this weekend with readings/talks by authors such as Lionel Shriver, Joseph O’Connor, Paul Durcan, Tim Pat Coogan, Diarmaid Ferriter and David McWilliams to name a few. More information here. I have something else on so can’t go to the events I would have been interested in. Pity. I read the quotation above on their brochure.

With all the talk of books, it’s such a pity to hear that Hughes & Hughes, one of the Ireland’s largest bookshop chains, has just gone into receivership. I met Derek Hughes a few times and he seemed to be a very nice, hard-working man. I hate to see yet another company go … 225 jobs just like that.

Now to the idea I mentioned. Would any blog readers be interested in forming a ‘BBC’, a ‘Blog Book Club’?

What I suggest is if a group of bloggers were to read the same book each month, write a review of it and post it on their blog. The book to be read each month would be selected by the members. We could agree that we would simultaneously post on a particular day/time each month, say midday on the first Sunday or some such time. It would be very interesting to read different people’s review of the same book.

It’s much along the lines of a traditional book club except this is done through blogging.

What do you think? If you are interested, please leave a comment below.

I did very little last weekend except read this second book in the trilogy.

The three of the books together add up to 1704 pages, 1.6kg in weight. (And they’re only paperback).

Just some light reading!

I really loved but also complained about this second book.

Though the story continues from the first book, it took a while to get started into the second book’s plot. Having finished it, I’m not sure the real relevance of the first section of the book – Salander’s time in Grenada. The book is long. I felt it could have been edited a bit more.

Another quibble is there was a little too much coincidence for my liking. Examples. Though not in contact, Blomkvist just happens to be outside Lisbeth’s apartment at 2am just when Lisbeth emerges and just happens to be attacked. Lisbeth and Blomkvitz, both just happen to independently visit an apartment (visiting people whom they weren’t in a habit of visiting) on the exact night before (Lisbeth) and after (Blomkvitz), a murder is committed.

One would want a strong constitution for some of the detail. Graphic description of rape, murder are all normal copy. No shrinking violets need apply read. I’m no shrinking violet but found myself beginning to shrink. I found myself saying to myself sometimes, ’spare me the detail please’.

By comparison, Scarpetta seems almost a romantic novelist.

Sometimes I felt I needed a pen and paper beside me when reading to keep track of all the characters. Blomkvist, Salander, Björck, Sandström, Zala, Bublanski, Bjurman, Nesser, Modig, Erkström, Svensson, Wu, Andersson, Faste, Bohman, Hedström, Roberto, Lundin, Nieminen. Nineteen and counting. Try keeping track of all them and that’s a very incomplete list!

My children used accuse me that if I ever went shopping, the first thing I had to do was ‘have a cup of coffee’. I think Sweden would suit me. They always seemed to be drinking coffee.

I finished this book late Sunday night. Despite all my protestations above, there was nothing I would have liked better than if Monday didn’t follow Sunday and that I could have stayed in bed all day and read the third book. Sadly work beckoned.

Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t started the third book but am guessing that once I do, there again won’t be much else done.

Husband and youngest mouse look out!

I’d thoroughly recommend ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’

This book is the first of the Millenium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The trilogy was part of D’s Christmas present from moi. He has read the three books and enjoyed them.

Sadly, Stieg Larsson died in 2004, aged 50 before the trilogy was published. I read the wikipedia article on him after I had read this book. It gave interesting background information.

I liked the book but almost expected to like it more from all I had heard about it from a number of people who have read it.

There are three main characters; Michael Blomkvist, a journalist, Lisbeth Salander, an angry, young computer hacker, after whom the book is named and Henrik Vanger, a wealthy, Swedish Industrialist.

Forty years earlier, Harriet Vanger, a niece of Henrik’s, disappeared from the family’s island. Nobody could tell what happened to her and no corpse was ever found. Henrik Vanger, now elderly, has been tormented all his life by her loss and is convinced that a family member murdered her.

The journalist Blomkvist has recently lost a libel case concerning his reportage of a financial scandal, and is now ‘lying low’. Vanger commissions him to research this unsolved mystery. Early on, Blomkvitst sees a link with a number of other murders committed around the same time. Blomkvist seeks the assistance of Salander, this genius hacker. Blomkvitst and Salander, though an unlikely pairing, work well together to eventually solve the mystery. The book is somewhat a love story.

I read with interest an article in last Saturday’s Irish Times that the Larsson’s authorship of these books is questioned.

Quoting from the article:

Lately, however, most talk of Larsson’s work in Sweden has centred on public criticism of his reporting methods and his talent as a writer, as well as allegations that his life partner of 32 years could actually have written much of the trilogy … Hellberg, now a journalist for Sweden’s top-selling morning paper, wrote that while Larsson was a masterful researcher … he was an awkward writer who had probably called on his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, to do much of the writing for the trilogy.

This is interesting because Wikipedia’s article on Larsson states:

In May 2008 it was announced that Larsson’s 1977 will, found soon after his death, declared his wish to leave his assets to the Umeå branch of the Communist Workers League (now the Socialist Party). As the will was unwitnessed, it was not valid under Swedish law, with the result that all of Larsson’s estate, including future royalties from book sales, went to his father and brother. His long term partner Eva Gabrielsson, who found the will, has no legal right to the inheritance, sparking controversy between her and his father and brother. The two never married because, under Swedish law, couples entering into marriage are to make their addresses (at the time) publicly available; marrying would have been a security risk. Owing to his reporting on extremist groups and the death threats he had received, the couple had sought and been granted masking of their addresses, personal data and identity numbers from public records, to make it harder for e.g. stalkers to trace them; this kind of “identity cover” was integral to his work as a journalist and would have been difficult to bypass if the two had married or become registered partners.

It further states Gabrielsson claims the author had little contact with his father and brother and requests the rights to control his work so it may be presented in the way he would have wanted.

Ouch!

This is the second book I have read by Hungarian author, Sándor Márai. This book, written in 1939 was first published in English in November 2008. It was translated by English/Hungarian poet George Szirtes, who writes an interesting blog. Esther’s Inheritance is really a long short story, only 148 pages in all. It’s such an engaging read that I actually started and finished it in a night. Frances O’Rourke reviewed this book very recently in the Irish Times. Eileen Battersby in an article in the same paper, listed Esther’s Inheritance as one of her top 25 (actually 26!) reads of 2009.

Esther, an unmarried woman in her forties has been living a quiet life when one day, she receives a telegram from Lajos, the great love of her life. Lajos abandoned Esther twenty years previously, and married her sister, Vilma, now deceased. The telegram tells that he is coming to visit the next day. Esther tells Nunu, with whom she lives. Nunu’s amusing reply was “Good … I will lock away the silver”. Esther has not forgotten that Lajos is a fantasist and a liar, nor has she forgotten that he caused her a lot of hurt, yet he still has a strange hold over her. The book tells of family secrets, love and betrayal.

Esther’s Inheritance is now also a film.

I was interested to read the Guardians review of this book which concluded with a broader interpretation of the story. Throughout the war, Márai opposed the Nazis and their fascist allies in Hungary’s authoritarian regime (his wife was Jewish). In his heroine’s trance-like capitulation, it is tempting to see a larger drama of mesmerised masses, swindled of their inheritance by charismatic fraudsters with false promises, sleepwalking into disaster. “Wake up, Esther!” Nunu scolds her for refusing to accept that Lajos swapped her mother’s jewelled heirloom for a fake ring. At the close, a dozing Esther, who has neglected to install electric lighting, finds an “end-of-September wind” tearing open the window and snuffing out the candle. The world is engulfed by darkness. But Esther sleeps on.

Márai committed suicide in 1989, so he never witnessed the collapse of communism. He also died before his large collections of books started to be translated and available to a much wider audience. I previously reviewed his book Embers here.

Kati who works with Denis in Hungary sent me this book for Christmas. It was a very enjoyable read – the only book I managed to get read over Christmas.

Set in the autumn of 1899, this is a portrait of provincial life in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The book describes one week in the uneventful life of an elderly retired Hungarian couple. Their unattractive, (my word, the book uses the word ugly), spinster daughter, nicknamed Skylark has left them for an unprecedented week’s holiday with relatives. At first the couple, whose entire existence revolves around their daughter, are devastated by her absence. Slowly they rediscover a life in their small-town society doing things they normally didn’t do when their daughter was there; eating out in the local restaurant, going to the theatre. The husband, Ákos, meets up with the members of his old club, who despite their advancing years, meet weekly for a lively session of drinking, dinner and card playing. The night before Skylark returns, the elderly couple reach the shocking conclusion that their daughter is a burden to them.

The beauty of this book is in its descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life, in its character descriptions, in its pace. From this vignette of Mr and Mrs Vajkays’ life, we get a great glimpse of life in this provincial town, all those years ago.

The Times described the book The most original, economical and painful novel I have read in a long time

Kosztolányi was born in 1885 in Szabadka, a town which today belongs to Serbia. Sárszeg, the fictional town in which this book is set is based on his hometown. He studied at the University of Budapest and then for a short time in Vienna before quitting to become a journalist, a profession he stayed with for the rest of his life. In 1908, he became a reporter for a Budapest paper. In 1910, his first volume of poems brought him nationwide success and marked the beginning of a prolific period in which he published a book nearly every year. He died from cancer at the age of fifty one.

His last finished novel Anna Édes is also available in English. I’ll add that to others by Hungarian author Sándor Márai to read.

Now all I need is time, lots of time!

Denis, Tommy, Work … do ye want to go on unprecedented week’s holiday?

Thank you Kati for introducing me to two great Hungarian authors.

This is Anita Shreve’s fifteenth book. I previously read and liked all her other books and reviewed Testimony here.

I like Anita Shreve as a writer however this is the first book, I really didn’t care much for. Whilst I read it to the end and was very interested to see how it would actually end, it’s not one of her better ones.

The story is of Margaret and Patrick, newlyweds who set off for a year in Kenya. The year is 1977, with Kenyatta still in power. Margaret realises that there is a lot that she doesn’t know about the culture of this new country, nor indeed about her new husband.

Though with little climbing experience, they eagerly take part in a climbing expedition with friends to the summit of Mount Kenya. During the ascent a horrific accident occurs. The remainder of the book is really the story of Margaret trying to make some sense of the accident which has major repercussions for her and her marriage.

I didn’t like this book because I thought it meandered without any great plot. I felt the story after the incident on the mountain was somewhat disjointed from the earlier part.

My reading of this book wasn’t helped because I actually thought the main character, Margaret was a bit daft, her husband unlikeable, the journalist … whatever.

My ‘rule of thumb’ is to give any book one hundred pages, before I’ll give up on it, if I don’t like it. I was more than happy to read this book to the end, but I wouldn’t be racing to recommend it. Having liked fourteen out of fifteen Anita Shreve books though, I will still be reading her next one, whenever it’s published.

If you haven’t read any of her earlier books, I would recommend them.

This is really an enjoyable book and I easily read it in a few hours, last weekend.

It’s easily read because it’s beautifully written and hard to put down. And because of the awful weather outside.

At least there’s something to be said in favour of unrelenting rain!

The story takes place during the course of a single evening in a Lahore cafe, where a Pakistani man called Changez tells a nervous American stranger about his love affair with, and eventual abandonment of America. It was really a monologue by Changez over the course of that one evening. Reading this book was like reading a play.

Here is the publisher, Penguin’s synopsis of the story:

… Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfilment of the immigrant’s dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

Interestingly although this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, the Guardian gave it a mixed review here, concluding:
There’s undoubtedly a great novel waiting to be written out of the anguished material of these kinds of east/west encounters. This book may not be it, but its author … certainly has the potential to write it …

While we are waiting for THE book, let me just say, I enjoyed this book immensely and would certainly recommend it!

The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 by Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro. I wrote a post on another of his books here.

The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989 for Best Fiction.

It was adapted into an Academy-Award nominated film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. I haven’t seen the film.

The book tells the story of Stevens, an English butler who has dedicated his life to the loyal service of Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall. The book begins with the butler receiving a letter from Miss Kenton, (now Mrs. Benn), an ex-employee of Darlington Hall. In the letter she describes her married life, and Stevens feels she hints at an unhappy marriage.

Darlington Hall has recently been sold to a new American Mr. Faraday. Stevens has difficulty adjusting to his new American employer. His efforts at bantering are touching.

Miss Kenton’s letter prompts Stevens to think about her possible re-employment at Darlington Hall, as they are now short-staffed.

Mr Farraday, encourages Stevens to take his car and go on a ‘motoring trip’, while he (Mr. Farraday) is away. Stevens decides to do this and go and visit Miss Kenton.

As the book progresses, Stevens ponders on various themes. On his loyalty to Lord Darlington, on the meaning of the term ‘dignity’, on his relationship with his father and on his relationship with Miss Kenton. The recollected conversations between Stevens and Miss Kenton show a professional friendship, which came close, but never dared, to cross the line to romance.

When they meet, Miss Kenton, now married for over 20 years, admits to occasionally wondering what her life with Stevens might have been like. But she admits that she has come to love her husband, and is looking forward to the birth of their first grandchild.

The question of her re-employment does not arise.

At the end of the book, Stevens focuses on the ‘remains of (his) day’ i.e., his future service with Mr Farraday.

The book is beautifully written and is hard to put down. (I’m getting a good few of these type of books recently!) It shines a wonderful light on a past life of English duty and service. One can’t but feel for Stevens and the missed opportunities his life of loyal service, has cost him personally.

Denis also loved this book and recommended it in his guest post. Thanks Patrick for introducing me/us to Ishiguro.

This was a very enjoyable and interesting read. Kati, a Hungarian friend gave me this book when I was in Budapest. It’s an English translation of the Hungarian novel, A gyertyak conkig egnek, originally published in 1942.

Márai was born in Hungary in 1900 and by the age of thirty was one of Hungary’s leading novelists. He was driven into exile in 1948 when the Communists came to power and banned his books. He lived first in Italy and then in America. Sadly he committed suicide at the age of eighty-nine.

In the novel, two old men, once the best of friends, meet for the first time in forty-one years. They dine together, sitting in the exact same places as at their last meeting, all those years ago. Later they sit in front of a dying fire, one of them nearly silent, the other, the host, slowly speaking. At their last meeting, in the company of a beautiful woman, an unspoken act of betrayal left all three lives shattered – and each of them alone. Tonight they talk of old passions and that last, fateful meeting.

I felt this book was beautifully written and found it difficult to put down. It gives a great glimpse of life in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The book was described by the Times as ‘Magnificent. A spellbinding story driven by intense passion.’ and the Observer, ‘Extraordinary. Elegaic, sombre, musical and gripping. An immensely wise book.’

There is a Sándor Márai blog, written by Erik Ketzan, a first-generation Hungarian-American. There I read that Jeremy Irons had starred in a stage adaptation of the book in 2005 and that a Hungarian film adaptation premiered in Hungary in 2006 at the 37th Hungarian Film Festival.

Márai wrote forty-six books in all. To date, five have been translated into English. They include: Memoir of Hungary, Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels and Esther’s Inheritance. I am interested in all of them particularly Memoir of Hungary as it apparently provides an interesting glimpse of post World War Two Hungary under Soviet occupation. It was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 era. One gets a sense of this period of Hungarian history when talking with Hungarian people.

A point of interest is that the Hungarian form of the author’s name is Márai (surname) Sándor (first name). The Hungarian style is always to write the surname first. I have got used to this with our Hungarian friends. I notice that the English translation of this book uses our convention however.