Category: Reviews

Book review: Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

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Monkey Grip book cover

Tim is a fan of Helen Garner and has been telling me to read her for ages so I finally gave her a chance. As I should have known, I completely agree that she is excellent.

I didn’t want to start in the same place Tim did. Garner’s most famous book is This House of Grief, a true crime story about the murder of three children. It is apparently stunningly well written but I don’t think I will ever feel able to read that.

Monkey Grip was her first novel, based on her own life in Melbourne in the 1970s. The degree to which it is or is not fictionalized has caused Garner some negative press over the decades since its publication. But as she points out in this essay, even if she did just edit her own diaries and change all the names – she wrote those diaries in the first place. This is still original writing by her. And it really is original.

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TV review: The Durrells

Still from TV show The Durrells

Soon after we moved to Bristol, I stumbled across three of the books from the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell in beautiful matching Faber editions. Tim bought me the missing fourth book and in 2012 I embarked on reading this complex tale of love, politics, friendship and betrayal in Egypt written in the 1950s. I loved them. I loved the language, the settings, the obfuscation of multiple layers of narration. Ever since, I have intended to read more by Durrell and learn more about him.

A couple of years ago I became aware there was a TV show called The Durrells (ITV, 2016–2019) and wondered if it could be about the same man. Well – yes and no. I’m three seasons in, so I’m enjoying it. But what have I really learned?

Lawrence Durrell was the eldest of four children (technically five, but one sister died very young) born in India to British parents. When their father died, Lawrence was already in the UK at boarding school. His mother Louisa decided to move to the UK with her three younger children. After an unhappy few years, all five of them moved to Corfu in 1935. (Right now, in a cold wet January, it is easy to sympathise with the idea to leave Britain for sunnier climes.)

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Book review: The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

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The galaxy and the ground within book coverI think the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers is my favourite science fiction of this past decade. So I’m a little sad that I’ve read them all now. But the fourth and final part, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, is pleasingly excellent.

In this novel, three strangers are passing through a small habitat dome on a planet called Gora while they await their turn entering a wormhole to continue their journeys. A disaster leaves them temporarily trapped with just each other, their host and her young child. The visitors are all different species, living very different lives. They have expectations and prejudices to deal with, as well as concerns about their delayed journeys.

Pei is captain of a cargo ship, an Aeluon who was introduced in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Aeluons largely communicate by changing the colour and patterns of their fur. They don’t have vocal cords but most have an implant that enables them to approximate speech sounds.

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K-drama review: Chocolate

Chocolate K-drama poster
The characters Lee Kang (left), Moon Cha-yeong (centre) and Lee Joon (right) all have decent character development in Chocolate.

I love a TV show that centres food, so the K-drama Chocolate (JTBC 2019–2020) sounded ideal. It’s about a doctor and a chef who reconnect as adults after meeting briefly as children. It’s a sweet and surprisingly moving story. With lots of delicious-looking food.

Lee Kang (played as an adult by Yoon Kye-sang) is raised in the small seaside town of Wando. His mother runs a restaurant, his father died when he was a baby. They’re happy, but one day his rich grandmother shows up and announces she wants him to come to live with her in Seoul.

Next time we meet Kang, he’s abandoned his dream to become a chef and is working as a doctor for the hospital his grandmother’s company owns. He’s constantly pitted against his cousin Lee Joon (Jang Seung-jo, from Snowdrop) and picked on by his aunt and uncle. He seems grouchy and difficult with everyone except his room mate and best friend Kwon Min-seong (Teo Yoo).

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Book review: Resist: Stories of Uprising edited by Ra Page

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Resist book cover

Earlier this month I watched a group of masked protestors (or technically counter-protestors) march towards a riot police cordon chanting “Anti-Fascisto”. They were trying to prevent the police from protecting a (thankfully small) protest led by “Bristol Patriots” against a hotel housing asylum seekers. It was a powerful moment to witness. And I realised I knew a lot of the history behind it thanks to the book I was in the middle of reading.

Resist: Stories of Uprising edited by Ra Page is a collection of short stories and essays about moments in British history when people rose up in protest. From Boudicca’s rising in 60/61 to Grenfell Tower in 2017, there’s a whole range of stories. People have revolted for many different reasons in many different ways, and most were countered with violent pushback.

These examples were not always successful protests in the eyes of the people protesting. “The done thing” by Luan Goldie explores the Ford Dagenham Women’s Strike 1968 through a modern-day scene of an old woman who participated in the strike and doesn’t want to talk about it. The strike was a major news story that probably contributed to equal pay legislation, but at the time there was a lot of disillusionment and guilt among the strikers as technically they capitulated and accepted a lesser pay offer. And of course, we know the residents of Grenfell Tower were not listened to in their many complaints and concerns before the horrific fire.

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Book review: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild coverWhen Tim mentioned our planned France holiday on a night out back in August, a friend recommended a book set (roughly) in the region of France we were heading to. Which seemed like an excellent idea for a holiday read. I duly bought The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne) and started reading it during our idyllic week on l’Ile d’Yeu.

I didn’t completely love this book, but it definitely added a certain something being in the same landscapes I was reading about. The story is (mostly) set in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a small village at the border of the Vendée and Deux-Sevres departements in west France. It’s a rural landscape of farms and villages, getting marshy as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. The Vendée is famous for its salt. Salt pans border the roads, between a grid of narrow channels that help to guide the water, with grazing animals and water birds far outnumbering the signs of human life. It honestly looked a lot like the Somerset levels from the bus we took through the area. Similar weather too!

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K-drama review: Twenty-five, Twenty-one

Twenty-Five, Twenty-One poster

I occasionally like a more grounded K-drama – less glitz and designer clothes, more money troubles and friendship drama. Twenty-five, Twenty-one (TvN 2022) really hit the spot for me. It’s a coming-of-age drama that reminded me a lot of Reply 1988 – which is no bad thing.

Like the Reply series, we have two timelines. In 2021 a teenage girl, Kim Min-chae (played by Choi Myung-bin), is reluctantly attending a ballet exam. She does badly and in a pique runs off to her grandmother’s house where she find a diary of her mother’s from 1998.

Cue the story of Na Hee-do (teenager played by Kim Tae-ri, who co-starred in the excellent film The Handmaiden; adult played by Kim So-hyun, who is a major musical theatre star). Hee-do was a child prodigy in fencing but, now in her penultimate year of high school, has failed to live up to the early promise. She has developed an obsession with Korea’s top fencer Ko Yu-rim (played by Bona) – a girl her own age, also living in Seoul. When Hee-do’s school axes its fencing team due to the IMF crisis, Hee-do manoeuvres her way into Yu-rim’s school and its fencing team. But Yu-rim’s friendship is not easily won.

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Book review: Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook

please look after mother book cover

Last year I looked up recommendations of Korean literature available in translation. Not so long ago, the options were fairly few but that’s changing fast. I have multiple novels by Kyung-sook Chin on my want-to-read list and I’m happy to find I really enjoyed the first one I tried, Please Look After Mother (translated from Korean by Kim Chi-young).

The premise is simple. But the psychology and emotions are far from simple. An elderly woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the busy crowds at a central Seoul subway station. The novel follows her family’s search for her and their gradual discoveries about this woman they thought they knew.

Chapters are told from the perspective of different members of the family in turn. Some sections are written in second person, which I don’t always get on with. And it did put me off a little to begin with, but Chin won me over.

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Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

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sex and lies book cover

I like essay collections but I tend to buy them at a faster rate than I read them. I fear they’re going to be less gripping than a novel or deal with serious subjects with less levity than fiction usually adds. Neither of which was a problem with Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani (translated from French by Sophie Lewis).

I first heard about Slimani when her her novel Lullaby was published in English in 2018 and everyone was recommending it. I took one look at the synopsis and decided it was far too dark for me. That novel won Slimani the Prix Goncourt, making her the first Moroccan woman to do so. But it was actually her previous novel Adèle that triggered the conversations that led to Sex and Lies.

Adèle is about a woman living with sex addiction. When it came out in France, there was publicly expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could have written on that topic, or indeed anything related to sex. Slimani didn’t set out to be shocking or controversial. She was after all following a centuries-old tradition of Arabic-authored literature that is frank about sex. But she acknowledges that in recent decades, things have changed on that front in her native country.

On her two-week Moroccan book tour for Adèle Slimani found that women and young people were keen to discuss sexual topics. But the conversations kept turning to the lack of freedom in modern Morocco. So she kept the conversations going, meeting people – mostly women – who were willing to be interviewed, albeit anonymously for the most part.

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Book review: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

The Book of Disappearance

Of the Palestinian books I’ve read in recent years, The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem is possibly the most educational, yet is also highly entertaining.

Alaa and Ariel are friends who live in the same building in Tel Aviv. They hang out most evenings, work in similar jobs and have friendly disagreements about the history of their city. But then one day Alaa disappears without warning – along with all the other Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Ariel must now confront how well he knew his friend, and how he feels about Palestinians in general.

The narrative skips between Ariel’s story and excerpts from Alaa’s diary. In between are vignettes about how other non-Arab Israelis are affected by the disappearance of the Palestinians. From a farmer wondering why none of his day labourers have turned up, to a patient whose surgery is cancelled because the surgeon hasn’t come to work, at first the rumour is that “the Arabs” are on strike.

But how can four million people have just disappeared? Rumours swirl, security alerts are raised, official statements from the Knesset and IDF top brass are minimal.

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