Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book. I have never read anything quite like it.

From the beginning I was hooked. Mallard was a strange place; a strange premise for a story. It was interesting to subsequntyl learn that such settlements did indeed exist. I had no idea that the story would unfold the way it did. Switching focus on different characters in different timelines was like discovering something one step at a time. The book was about the way that people change, some significantly, some less so. But no one stays the same. It was also about the stories that people construct for themselves, sometimes based on lies or distortions. And it was about the damage that living a lie can do to a family. It was about love, trust and being faithful to oneself. The amazing thing was realising just how complex and deep a story about the struggles of black people can be developed in a comprehensive and fulfilling way, without making the story itself about race or colour. It was about self-identity, and dealt with issues that are universal.

I really enjoyed the way that Stella disappeared and transformed herself, and then noticed that it wasn't just about her transformation. When Reese was introduced, I was struck by his change from girl to boy. Then Early changed from hunter to protector. Barry changed every second Saturday into a drag queen; Desiree changed into an adult; Adele changed massively through dementia; Kennedy changed every time she took on a new stage role…. Everyone was in a state of flux and the author held it all together, adjusting relationships and adapting with great skill to the shifting times, contexts, locations and personalities. The characters were richly drawn and each very distinctive. And every character is written about in such a sensitive and non-judgmental way. That made it easy to like them and sympathise with each of them. The last few chapters were very sad, but also filled with resolution.

All in all, a brilliant book, and I am recommending it to all who will listen.

View all my reviews

Review: The Soul of Kindness

The Soul Of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Flora is the only child of a widowed and over-protective mother, and a sheltered childhood. These have led her to grow up in a kind of fantasy world of prettiness and innocence, like an overblown Disney cartoon. She is well-meaning, but dim. Her limited life experiences mean that she has close to zero empathy and no self-awareness. Kindness is a virtue, and she seeks to embody this ideal. However, Elizabeth Taylor develops a witty and elegant narrative around Flora and the people connected to her, whether directly or indirectly. While some readers may feel that Flora is manipulative, I don’t think this is really the case. She has no ulterior motive in her kindness and does not seek betterment through her kindness. Why should she when she lives such a cosseted and luxurious life?

I enjoy the ironic humour running through this book. The excessive kindness is not narcissistic, but naïve. And it is this naïveté that results in a series of episodes each of which seems more extreme than the last. Her father-in-law, Percy, is given a cat by Flora, out of kindness, which he then has to look after, so that it becomes a chore, rather than a pleasantry. Worse, Flora encourages Percy and his long-term girlfriend, Ba, to get married, even though they are each perfectly happy living in their own homes and meeting when they wish to. They end up under each other’s feet in the same home, finding that marriage, for them, is a much more difficult way of life than the balanced and happy life they both had before. And so it goes on through the book as Flora heaps her kind suggestions and encouragements on people ill-equipped to deal with the conflict between fantasy and reality. (view spoiler)[The final episode in the book occurs after Kit, the brother of Flora’s pal, Meg, has managed to drop his hopeless ambition of being an actor and got an ordinary job earning an ordinary salary. When he is ill in bed with flu, Flora visits and, out of kindness, tells him again that he is very talented as an actor, that he has something worth developing, and that he should rejuvenate his aspirations. At first, he is buoyed up by this. But in the depressed state of mind brought about by the flu, he subsequently gets so depressed that he tries to kill himself. Of course, Flora cannot even begin to understand this, even though everyone else around her knows that her misplaced kindness was the spark that ultimately pushed Kit into suicide, which he fortunately survived. The immediate help and assistance of the Pakistani next-door neighbour was the type of kindness that was really meant when people praise it as a virtue. He selflessly helped to rescue Kit, and knew immediately not to call a doctor or any emergency services, since attempting suicide was not only a tremendous social stigma, but was also a crime that carried a prison sentence until was decriminalised by the Suicide Act 1961. (hide spoiler)]

So, the narrative has an elegant arc, beginning with an innocent and childlike kindness being displayed to small animals and children and developing through progressively more damaging episodes until it becomes life-threatening for some of the characters. What I take from this is a serious question about how to deal with someone like Flora and teach her about empathy and the damage that misguided kindnesses can do to people. A difficult question that I cannot yet answer.

This serious question is ornamented throughout with incisive writing that it is often witty and always beautifully observed. For example, when her baby was born, she suddenly wanted her friends to be godparents. This was a great example of her complete lack of empathy:

‘You will be one of Alice’s god-mothers, won’t you, darling?’ Flora asked. ‘It’s very kind of you, but may I remind you that I’m Jewish?’ ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t matter,’ Flora said. When Meg came, Flora asked her the same question. Meg looked quite astonished. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in God.’ ‘But of course you do, darling,’ Flora said comfortably. To Richard, that evening, she said: ‘It’s so miserable of everybody. I thought it would please them to be asked. It would please me. And if I were in their place, I’d do anything rather than spoil my happiness.’

Unlike Flora, Elinor, the wife of the MP Geoffrey Pringle, and Richard’s neighbour, constantly wrestled with things in her life that were not working out they way she would have liked. One listless Sunday afternoon, when she was lonely and feeling bitter about how busy Geoffrey was with trying to write a play instead of keeping her company, she took herself off for a walk. The inner turmoil in her mind was nicely represented in this passage while she reflects on where her life choices have led her:

In the St John’s Wood gardens, lilac trees tossed and lowered their branches, heavy with battered blossom. It was surprising what they could endure – or had to endure – of strain and stress. Oh, yes! God, she thought bitterly. (‘I’ll spend my Sunday tormenting those lilac trees I made.’) They haven’t even got free will, she thought dolefully. So that no one can make that an excuse for their misery.

One character with bucketloads of free will, of course, is the artist Liz Corbett, whose slovenly ways and squalid flat are part of a complex personality that produces paintings of increasing originality and artfulness. She seems to be the only female character in the book with a sense of identity and purpose in life. Even though she has never met Flora, she knows people who have, and she understands immediately how damaging and dangerous Flora can be. Ultimately, she is the only person who has the will and the sense to criticise Flora’s cruel acts of selfish kindness. Liz does not appear a lot in the book, but she seems the complete antithesis of Flora, being earthy, hard-edged and unsentimental. I think she is an essential character in the story to complete the panoply of contrasting characters.

And, of course, there are many sentences that are poetic in their structure and economy of words, such as:

Rain hissed hard into the bright, clean shingle and the crowds scurried for shelter.

I learned some new words from this book, which I shall try to remember: accidie, farouche, gyve, schizogenesis, to mention a few. Elizabeth Taylor had a rich vocabulary, and she knew how to use it.

There is much to admire about this book. The wit, the intelligent writing, the insights into the motivations and aspirations of different people and the dangers and insincerities that lie just beneath the ever-so-thin veneer of respectable suburban life. I recommend this book.

View all my reviews

Review: Mrs Bridge

Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very well-written book, dealing with the life of a middle-class, wealthy woman in Kansas City. Evan S. Connell develops the picture of her life through a series of small vignettes that are related in a way that is rich with detail, with no words wasted. I really enjoyed his style of writing. He can put across in a few words what other authors waste pages upon. The language is very accessible and does not get in the way. There seems not to be a storyline, as such, until the very short chapters, each written as a small vignette, build up, layer upon layer, into a complex picture of a woman who wastes her entire life on living up to her interpretation of the expectations placed on her by middle-class society. As she struggles to keep her husband and her children in the manner to which she thinks they expect, she gets increasingly confused. On the face of it, she is doing everything correctly, but really, she has nothing to, nowhere to go, nothing to think and becomes an empty and confused shadow of what she could have been. The contrasts between her and the other people in the story are stark. She is surrounded by people living their lives in a way that is engaged and difficult, but real. Whereas she has nothing. A servant takes care of the domestic side of life; her husband is nearly always at work; the children don’t really need her or respond to her. The irony running through the book is very telling.

An early example of the quality of the writing is this sentence on page 2: “For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep”. How refreshing to not have to wade through sordid paragraphs of unnecessary detail regarding the wild groping and exchange of bodily fluids that seems so beloved of writers struggling to engage their readers. And another sentence that seems to epitomize the whole subject of the book, on page 174, “…when she and Grace Barron had been looking for some way to occupy themselves, and Grace had said, a little sadly, ‘Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale – the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?’” This left me thinking, what sad and empty lives these people live, even though they have position, wealth and love.

Overall, I found this book completely absorbing, quick to read and beautifully written. It related the sad life of one lonely woman who was surrounded with amenable people and who had every material need met. In the end, the poverty of emotion, ambition and self-awareness conspired to leave her hollowed out and useless. An awful fate for anyone, but a fate that seemed inevitable from almost the first page. It demonstrates most profoundly why we should challenge conventional thinking and never fall for the temptation of conforming to what seems to be the ideal life. Anyone who seeks to fit in and not make a fuss should be urged to read this book as soon as possible!

View all my reviews

Review: I am, I am, I am

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O'Farrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an interesting premise for a book. The opening Chapter was chilling and beautifully narrated. It was as clear as if I'd been there. Maggie O'Farrell is a very accomplished author, and really good at the aft of writing. As we lurched from one near-death experience to antother, some short some long, the variety of events was interesting. The time-line was a little difficult because, although the year was given at the beginning of each tale, I had to constantly try to remember how old she was. After a few Chapters, I was wondering whether there was a reason for putting them in the chosen sequence. I couldn't see any logical thread or flow, so they appear to come up randomly. So why not put them chronologically? Maybe it is to do with the intensity, with a high intensity experience at the beginning to draw you an, and very involved and exhaustive one at the end, so give you a sense of an ending. I think that was probably the rationale.

The problem with that sequence was that there were quite a few that were not as intense as the first and last. And as each brush with death followed from the previous, I became somewhat immune to the shock. Once the shock of being so close to death was dulled, the whole book became dull. Round about the eighth Chapter, I was thinking, here we go again. What kind of narrow escape from death this time? Frankly, half way into the book, I moved from feeling indifferent to sudden death to being really rather bored, as the tales, taken as a collection, do not go anywhere, as a whole. Each is a short story inits own right, with some strands recurring, but not in way that lends progress or continuity to the book.

I would have preferred to have put the book down after the first few Chapters, but I stuck at it because it was a Book CLub read. However, I cannot claim to have given much attention to the last half. It all got a bit too repetitive, especially the way that there was little learning or development from each incident. We can take our own lessons from these incidents, of course, but I wanted to know more about how she made sense of all of this and how each experience prepared her (or not) for the next. I do get a bit bored when life happens to characters in books as if they had no agency over their circumstances. And, despite her evident skills as an author, I found this memoir uninteresting and of little value.

All in all, this project was a lost opportunity. For me, it is just a catalogue of calamities with no redemption. I would not recommend it. The very best part for me was the title, being a quote from a Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar: "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am." That was such a powerful thing to be reminded of.

View all my reviews

Review: Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What a dreadful book - from beginning to end. The story starts does not get going until about halfway through the book. Many of the disjointed Chapters near the beginning are setting up the events that the last part of the book is about. It takes so long to get there that the result is "disappointingly banal" (to quote the author). The writing is padded out with far too many adjectives that get in the way of communication. It is a very weak writing style.

The characters in the story are all one-dimensional and they each seem to have been selected to represent a different thing. One is a manic depressive, another is bereaved, another is a committed health professional, and so on. However, underneath these apparent differences they are all resentful, spiteful, needy, narcissistic and constantly whinging. It absolutely awful being inside these dreadful heads. Their internal monologues go on for pages and never get anywhere; just constantly repeating the same mawkish yuck. It is hard to pick out plot spoilers when there is almost no plot. This must be the dullest book I have ever read (to the end). If it had not been a Book Club book, I would have ditched it before getting too far in.

Most of the character stereotypes are here in one form or another. I guess that is why there are nine strangers; to get all the stereotypes covered! Still, it avoids having to deal with the complexity of real people... These people, even the females, judge women only by their breasts and anyone of the opposite sex is only of interest to the extent that they might become a sexual partner. There are no friendships, no banter, no real conversation. Just internal seething resentment and an obsession with the biology of copulation.

The actual denouement of the book is utterly, utterly stupid. It bears no resemblance to anything in real life and has no connection to anything that had gone before in the book. Except the names of the people didn't change. Small mercies, eh?

So, there we have it. I actually managed to write this without using profanities. That is a small triumph. I watched the first episode of the TV adaptation. It is nowhere near as bad as the book; but it is still completely dreadful and the best thing to do is avoid it.

View all my reviews

Review: This accursed land: An epic solo journey across Antarctica

This Accursed Land: An epic solo journey across Antarctica by Lennard Bickel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I came across this book in a second-hand bookshop and my friend was very enthusiastic about encouraging me to read it. I am so glad that he did.

The tale of Douglas Mawson's intrepid exploration of parts of Antarctica was put together by Lennard Bickel (1913-2002) and published in 1975. Bickel had been a journalist before becoming an author and knew how to do the background research needed for this kind of book. The result is a splendid and dramatic account of some of the most gruelling and difficult journeys imaginable. So many strong and intrepid men died in these explorations. The pursuit of knowledge, the exploration of new lands and the training and preparation required for such adventures are covered in good detail, without getting too bogged down in documenting everything.

The book did not capture my imagination immediately, as the early Chapters provide the context for Mawson's explorations and his associations with other, more famous explorers, such as Scott and Shackleton, with whom he had travelled to Antarctica before the journey covered in the main part of this book. After all the preparation for the journey, finding the funds and the establishment of the base, the story gets into the exploratory journey across the ice and snow in weather conditions that are still, to me, bordering on the unimaginable. So many of these journeys stretched from months into years! The commitment of these people is incredible and inspirational.

I have been to the Arctic, in Northern Sweden and in Svalbard, but nothing in the North would give an insight in the conditions in Antarctica. The explanations, in passing, of how the geography of Antarctica affects the blistering winds and endless storms are useful and very interesting. There are so many fascinating facts in this book, such as the extent of the land and the ice, the sheer size of the glaciers and the savage beauty of the place that pulls people back to it with an urge to spend more time there.

I guess this book would no appeal to everyone. But if you like to read ripping yarns about intrepid people taking themselves beyond the limit of human endurance, then this is the the kind of thing you should read. Because of the slow start to the book, and the gradual build of tension and pace, this one of the few books that led me to read it again immediately on finishing it. The imagery of Antarctica and the personalities of the characters will stay with me for a long time.

If you have got this far in my review, then I am sure you will enjoy this book!

View all my reviews

Review: My sister the serial killer

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I thought this was going to be a good book judging by the cover! Also, it seems to have generated many positive and enthusiastic reviews. But ultimately, I was disappointed. The book did not really have a point or a purpose. It was just a narrative about a people who were mostly self-interested and sociopathic, to the point that some of them were psycopathic. Some of the nice people were given rather marginal roles that could have developed into major roles, but not much was done with them. It was a very interesting premise and could have been a macabre tale with twists and turns, leading to an interesting conclusion. However, it seems that many opportunities were lost along the way.

Korede is resentful of her beautiful sister, Ayoola, who develops habit of killing her boyfriends for no real reason. She seems largely driven by disinterest or ennui coupled with the wish to avoid confrontation. Korede feels that it is wrong for her sister to be murdering men, and resents having to clean up and dispose of the bodies, but not suffciently to actually confront Ayoola or, indeed, do the decent thing and report her to the police. It seems just too much trouble to deal with this situation in any kind of principled way. Resentment seems sufficient, it seems.

I think a lot of this tale was intended to be darkly funny. But the way the characters were developed and the way that they behaved revealed people who were self-obsessed and not very interesting, as a result. They only wanted what was best for themselves. None of them seemed to have a sense of being part of anything greater than their own lives. This portrayal of unpleasant people through their own eyes is something that the author does well. But, despite the build up on the cover of the book, there is nothing of the thriller here. Those who are not evil are sidelined and disadvantaged, each in their own way. Those who are inherently evil, the two sisters, come closer together and develop a stronger relationship based on their complicity in the murders. Through their eyes, everyone around them is lazy and useless, and that feeds their deep resentment about the world.

I didn't enjoy the lack of character development; I didn't enjoy the lack of any aspect of a "thriller" in the tale; I didn't enjoy the lack of humour and I didn't enjoy the clumsy way in which one psycopath indulged herself in murders, helping her sociopathic sister to become comfortably complicit in the murders. While it was ejoyable to think about life in Nigeria and pick up a little of the fascinating Nigerian culture and way of life, I am left thinking that I wish I had not read this. It just so utterly disappointing on every level. It was not satirical, or funny, just a dull narrative of a sequence of rather disgusting events with no real point or purpose. It was, actually, quite boring.

View all my reviews