Category: Reviews

Book review: Segu by Maryse Condé

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Segu by Maryse CondeI started this book in August for Women in Translation Month, but it turns out that historical epics take a while to read and even longer to process. Segu by Maryse Condé (translated by Barbara Bray) follows one family in the city state of Segu, in what is now Mali. Though they don’t all stay there, allowing the family saga to become epic in what it encompasses.

The story begins in 1797. Dousika Traore, trusted adviser to the king, has four sons by his various wives and concubines. (I have already forgotten whether he also has daughters, which I think speaks to how generally the women in this book are barely mentioned, though a few do get a bigger role.) They are wealthy, with a large home and money to pay the fetish priests to ensure the continuation of their good fortune.

The first dent in that fortune is the oldest son Tiekoro, who is intrigued by the newly arrived religion Islam – and in particular the access to knowledge that is provided by learning to read and write, a necessity in Islam that is forbidden for the rest of the Bambara (who make up the majority of Segu’s population). Most Bambara – including the king and his other advisers – are deeply suspicious of Islam and look down on Dousika when his son’s secret is revealed, but Dousika sees an opportunity to make strategic alliances through his son. The decision will reverberate through generations and Condé makes no clear statement as to whether Dousika’s choice was right, wrong or inevitable and therefore no choice at all.

The other major force of change is European colonialism. In 1797 the Atlantic slave trade is at its peak but soon Europeans will abandon it one by one and turn to other means of stripping resources from West Africa. Condé depicts the ways in which slavery was part of daily life for many West Africans, and how that is different from the industrial-scale torture introduced by the white men. She doesn’t depict the “local” slavery as good or acceptable, simply shows that it was a part of life at the time.

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Book review: Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández

Slash and Burn book cover

August is Women in Translation Month (WITmonth) and so I picked a handful of books from my TBR that meet that description (as well as adding lots more to my to-buy list, thanks to all the great WITmonth reviews and conversations). I decided to start with a novel that I only own because I used to subscribe to the publisher – I cancelled the subscription after a string of their books had failed to move me, but this one almost persuaded me to sign back up (the size of my TBR alone deters me now).

Slash and Burn by El Salvadorian author Claudia Hernández (translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches) is a novel about a woman who fought in and survived the civil war; about the life she built after the war with four of her five daughters; about her efforts to find and reconnect with her lost daughter; about her coming to terms with the world she now lives in and her place within it.

It’s one of those stories that manages to be profound and universal by being specific. Though its main storyline covers only a couple of years it feels epic, taking in her memories of the war and its immediate aftermath but also the perspectives of many other people in her life – mostly women.

“Perhaps it was fate of rings to be lost just as they’d lost the lives they thought they’d have, leaving no memory of the promises they’d made each other. Maybe this was the meaning she’d been seeking for so long and striving not to see. She would have liked a different ending.”

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Book review: The Biscuit: the History of a Very British Indulgence by Lizzie Collingham

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The Biscuit book cover

I love a biscuit and I love well-written social history, so I was pretty keen to read The Biscuit: the History of a Very British Indulgence by Lizzie Collingham. It’s a fascinating book that had me frequently spouting interesting nuggets at anyone who happened to be around.

Collingham tracks the history of the biscuit from its Roman Empire beginnings as twice-baked bread, to being a culinary centrepiece for the super rich of the 17th century, to becoming a factory-made staple of every British household (and indeed much of the rest of the world). There are recipes dotted throughout, several of which I bookmarked.

The definition of biscuit is fairly wide here. In one chapter, Collingham explains how wafers and waffles can trace their origin to unleavened bread. In the first and second centuries CE, Jewish bakers began pouring unleavened batter into tongs to create thin wafers decorated with animals and flowers for Passover. Soon after, Christian bakers copied the idea but replaced the designs with their own religious imagery. As the practice spread of churches handing out wafers at Easter, over centuries they became a staple at bakeries, especially after sugar and spices spread to Europe and became part of the wafer recipes.

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K-drama review: It’s Okay to Not Be Okay

Poster of the four lead actors in It's Okay to Not Be Okay

Sometimes I need an engrossing, hyper-real, overwrought drama with plenty of romance and a little comedy, and only a K-drama will hit the spot. The previous few I watched hadn’t quite worked for me, but It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (tvN/Netflix, 2020) was just right. It’s far from a perfect show but it is very entertaining in its heightened mishmash of styles.

Our lead character is Moon Gang-tae (Kim Soo-hyun), who works as a caretaker in psychiatric wards/hospitals and lives with his brother Moon Sang-tae (Oh Jung-se, from When the Camellia Blooms) who has autism and works various low-paid jobs. They move homes and jobs frequently, which is related to Sang-tae having witnessed their mother’s murder when they were young.

Gang-tae is both sweet and very capable, but to cope with the difficulties of caring for his brother and their frequent moves, he can come across as cold and unemotional. This makes him an ideal sparring partner for Ko Moon-young (Seo Yea-ji), a popular children’s author who is brittle and quick to anger.

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Book review: The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

The Well of Loneliness book coverI had been intending to read The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall for years and I recently spent a few months making slow progress through this classic of lesbian fiction. As it’s Pride Month, this seemed like a good book to pick out from my read pile to write a longer review. First published in 1928, this is both very much of its time (in style) while being very ahead of its time (in content).

It’s the story of Stephen Gordon, a woman raised in all the comforts of a large country estate, the only child of a doting father who teaches her to ride, hunt, study and fence. It’s a life of privilege and would not be out of place in a Jane Austen novel, except for the repeated reservations of Stephen’s mother and neighbours about raising a girl quite so much like a boy.

When it gradually becomes clear in her teens and early 20s that Stephen is attracted to women, her father and her tutor Puddle understand before she does and try to protect her, while her mother is disgusted. The rest of her life follows a similar pattern of finding people who accept her and people who hate her.

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Book review: The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

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I remember the first time I heard “Make Me Feel” by Janelle Monáe I was astonished. I initially thought it was a Prince track I’d somehow never heard before, but it’s not just his influence on Monae that makes it a great song. It’s a joyous sex-positive song with smart lyrics that question the status quo. I bought the single, then a few months later her album Dirty Computer, and marvelled again.

This wasn’t just an album, it was a rock opera (albeit spanning multiple genres beyond rock) telling a sci-fi story about androids and humans facing oppression. It was even accompanied by a short film, in which abbreviated versions of the album’s songs are strung together in a sci-fi narrative about heavily restricted sexual and romantic freedom. Monáe herself stars as a woman (or android? it isn’t clear) captured by authorities whose memories are being deleted so that she can be made “clean”.

This dystopian vision has now been expanded on in The Memory Librarian – a collection of short stories by Monáe, working with a different experienced sci-fi writer for each story. I have been excited for this book since Monáe announced it last year but I was going to wait until it turned up in bookshops to buy a copy in person. So imagine my surprise (and delight) when I received a signed (!) copy in the post the day before release, thanks to my wonderful partner Tim having pre-ordered it for me.

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Book review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

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Left handHof Darkness book coverWhen my book club put out its call a few months ago for book suggestions on the theme of gender, I felt that science fiction could be a good angle from which to explore this topic but I feared that might put off some of the group. I needn’t have feared. Not only was my suggestion of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin the vote winner for our March meeting, it was also a really well attended (virtual) meet-up and a very fruitful, lively discussion. I should never have doubted them.

This novel certainly provides a lot of fodder for discussion. It’s difficult to boil down the plot succinctly (which is perhaps why looking in different places you’ll see very different synopses that sound like entirely different books) but here is my attempt. Genly Ai is an envoy from the human interplanetary collaboration the Ekumen. He has been sent alone to the planet Gethen to see whether he can persuade the inhabitants to join the Ekumen. Between the planet’s perpetual wintry conditions and the Gethenians’ androgynous nature, Genly is struggling with his ambassadorial role. His primary contact is Estraven, who seems to want to help, but can they ever truly understand and trust one another?

For me – and most of the book group – this was a slow burner. There is a LOT of background to set up about Gethen’s people, politics and languages. On reflection there is also a lot of plot and character development from the start as well, but for me that got a bit buried under my trying to get to grips with the world building. And then around the halfway point I realised I was really enjoying the book and by the end I loved it.

As with every aspect of the novel, Le Guin goes into a lot of detail of the Gethenians’ androgyny. She has invented something called “kemmer”, a period of fertility akin to mammals in heat. During kemmer, Gethenians experience sexual urges that are overwhelming to the point that no-one is expected to work during that period. Though some Gethenians do have an equivalent of marriage, most are promiscuous and go to communal “kemmer houses” to have their sexual needs met. Genly finds this all a little strange, but what I really liked is that Le Guin has the Gethenians find Genly revolting because to them, he’s sexually aroused (or capable of it) all the time.

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Book review: The Memorial by Christopher Isherwood

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The Memorial

I forget when I discovered Christopher Isherwood, but of course the first of his books that I read was Goodbye to Berlin and I was hooked. I have been gradually adding more of his books to my library and none of them has yet disappointed.

This is Isherwood’s second novel, published when he was just 28, which is remarkable in hindsight. It depicts a group of family and friends in the aftermath of the First World War, jumping around in time in the 1920s.

The two primary locations are London and a small Cheshire village. Sisters-in-law Lily and Mary do not get on well with each other, but having both lost their husbands in the war, their lives move closer in some ways, as do those of their children.

Each chapter is not only set in a different year, it is told from a different character’s perspective. From the large ensemble cast, we not only get to see through the eyes of Lily and Mary but also Lily’s son Eric, as well as Edward – childhood friend of Lily’s husband.

“Edward didn’t feel the cold. He started forward again, his overcoat flapping loose around him, singing to himself. He was beautifully warm all over, and the thing which kept whizzing round in his head gave him a pleasant sensation of deafness which was in itself a kind of warmth, blunting the edges of the freezing outside world.”

The book opens in London, with a fairly cosy, chatty look at Mary’s bohemian home filled with artistic and activist friends. Equally cosy is Lily getting close to a new gentleman friend, while fretting about her son who has disappointed her in some unnamed way. It’s a shock then to jump to Berlin, where a lonely Edward is struggling with survivor’s guilt and PTSD, contemplating suicide.

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Book review: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

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A fine balance book coverAfter tearing through books in the first half of January, I decided it was a good time for a big book and Rohinton Mistry’s epic A Fine Balance certainly fit that bill.

A Fine Balance is epic in scope, but the bulk of it takes place in one single year: mid-1975 to 1976. In an unnamed Indian city on the coast, four people are thrown together, their lives increasingly integrated as political unrest leads to restricted freedoms in the form of the Emergency.

Mistry does a wonderful job of giving all the characters complex backgrounds and motivations, so that time after time, someone who is introduced as an annoyance or outright villain becomes a sympathetic character, even someone to root for. He also takes the time to give thorough backgrounds for our four leads before the main narrative gets going.

First we have Dina, a Parsi woman who was widowed young and has struggled to maintain a life independent of her controlling older brother. She is brittle and judgmental, but this is often a facade to hide her fear of losing the life she has. After years of working as a seamstress to make ends meet, her eyesight is now failing and she must turn to two new sources of income: taking in a tenant and subcontracting sewing work to tailors she can supervise.

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Book review: Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh

Around the World in 80 Trains book coverThe book club at work picked Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh for our December meeting and I’m so glad I was encouraged to read it. It’s a travel memoir where (almost) all the travel is by train and was actually already on my TBR.

Rajesh has a chatty, witty, conversational writing style, coming across as very open and honest from the start, where she shares the discussions she and her fiance Jem had about the trip before deciding to travel together. This was Rajesh’s second epic train adventure, as she had previously travelled alone around India (also in 80 trains). But that was before she met Jem and in a country she knew at least a little. This time, most of the countries she was heading to would be new terrain for her, and of course it would be nice to share the adventure.

So the couple hop on the Eurostar armed with Eurail passes and a fairly detailed plan for travels through Asia and America – but for some reason almost no plan for Europe, which quickly causes them problems. Perhaps it was a simple misunderstanding, but Rajesh had failed to realise beforehand that Eurail passes only really save you money if you make a plan and stick to it. Otherwise, in most of Europe outside the UK, trains are cheap enough that you may as well pay as you go. With their attempt to be spontaneous, their journey gets off to a rocky start of fines and fees that makes her writing about Europe decidedly gloomy.

This was not a good start. I have never in my life travelled for more than three weeks at a time, but even the first time I took the train alone to the south of France, aged 18, I had done more research and enjoyed a smoother experience than this supposed travel writer. I certainly know not to go to a dry cleaner with my dirty clothes, but instead find a self-service laundry, if I want to have any money left.

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