Darkness held a vague terror for these people

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things-fall-apartThings Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

I first read this Nigerian classic for my A-level English. It was probably the first book I had read by an African author. Back then I didn’t have much to compare it to but I’m grateful to Linda, my English teacher, for introducing me to it.

I remembered this as the story of the arrival of the white man in Africa, and the effect of Western religion and imposed rule, but that’s really only the end of the book and not the main thrust at all. This is primarily the tragedy of Okonkwo, a great and celebrated hunter and wrestler, whose obsessive need to not fail like his father sows the seeds of his destruction.

Okonkwo’s father was lazy and died in debt. So Okonkwo makes a point of opposing everything his father enjoyed, such as music and arts, and becoming great at the things his father did not do well: farming, fighting, war. He has three wives and several children and is an elder in his village, Umuofia. Everything is on track to him earning all the great titles of his tribe. But his determination to succeed is his own downfall.

“When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists.”

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Books on the Nightstand Book Bingo

The truly excellent podcast Books on the Nightstand sadly came to an end on 7 July this year, but hosts Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness kindly left us with one last Summer Book Bingo.

Yes, I know it’s 5 September, which seems like an odd time to announce a summer reading challenge. The thing is, the official challenge runs from 30 May through 5 September, but I had a busy summer so I decided my own personal book bingo would run from 5 September until the end of the year. (Ann and Michael encouraged their listeners to make rules that suit them!)

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The Downs Concert

Back in May, Tim and I queued for two hours for tickets to see Massive Attack’s first concert in Bristol for 13 years. Yesterday, the big day finally dawned and it was wet and windy but excitement won out over cold and we headed up to the Downs.

Kate Tempest

The concert had expanded from a handful of special guests into a small festival, with three stages packed with acts. The one I was most excited about, after Massive Attack themselves of course, was Kate Tempest. After seeing her on TV and in YouTube videos, I had the brief pleasure of experiencing her live last year and have been itching ever since to see more of her. Yesterday, I got my wish.

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A wild and unstoppable song of triumph

zennor in darknessZennor in Darkness
by Helen Dunmore

I picked this off the TBR because while on holiday in Cornwall I’d spotted a signpost to Zennor and remembered I had this book. Plus I like Helen Dunmore’s writing. This was actually her debut novel, which also intrigued me.

Zennor is a small village near St Ives. It’s 1917 and the Great War is at its height. Clare Coyne has always felt like an outsider in her home town, having been raised by her outsider father after her mother’s death. She has cousins, aunts and uncles just a few streets away, and counts some of her best friends among them, but she is still very much separate from them.

“Better not think about it. It’s like a bruise, and the day is magnificent. You could sing aloud, glorying in it. You could understand that the Magnificat was once a wild and unstoppable song of triumph, not a delicate lacework of church voices. Little complicated fields glitter…On her right the sea shines like shield.”

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August reading round-up

The summer turned out quite nice in the end here in Bristol. But perhaps I’m biased because August ends with mine and Tim’s anniversary. This year we celebrated 14 years. That’s two-fifths of my life!

My reading has been fairly eclectic this month. I took more than two weeks to read a perfectly ordinary short novel so then I turned to easy reads like superhero comics. I think I’m back on track now, but I did only manage one book towards Women in Translation Month in the end, which isn’t as good as I’d hoped.

I did treat myself to a little book shopping. Because new books! Here are my purchases:

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Sunday Salon: Women in translation

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The Sunday SalonAugust is Women in Translation Month, and I know it’s almost the end of the month already but you see, the thing is, I had plans. I was going to pick out half a dozen books from my TBR by women translated into English, starting with Elena Ferrante and rinse the hell out of this reading promotion that seems so perfectly suited to me.

The thing is, my reading has been rather capricious of late. I could blame it on a busy period at work, or a mini-flare-up of my lupus, or the wrong choices of books. But every time I looked at those translations on my TBR shelves – Elena Ferrante, Isabel Allende, Marie Sizun, Linda Stift – something in me resisted. Something in me said that they would be hard work and that I wanted an easy read. Which is silly on two counts. One: a translation is not necessarily any harder a read than a book written originally in English and I’ve read enough works in translation to know that well enough. Two: I don’t tend to get as much satisfaction from easy reads as I do from books that challenge me at least a little.

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The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit

ugliesUglies
by Scott Westerfeld

This is the first part of a sci-fi young-adult trilogy – not my usual fare, but having sampled and quite liked The Hunger Games earlier this year, when my book club picked this title I figured it couldn’t hurt. It got a similar reaction from me: quick easy read, engaging, characters I cared about the fates of, but occasionally clunky and/or predictable.

The Uglies of the title are all the people born in the City from the age of 10 (I think) to 15, between being a Littlie (i.e. a child) and a Pretty. On their 16th birthday, everyone has the operation – a kind of extreme plastic surgery with the aim of making everyone look, while not identical, an identical degree of beautiful. (As the operation is so extreme I was a little bothered at the lack of detail about how it could possibly be done in a single day and with zero recovery time, but I guess I can let that go.) New Pretties live a life of drinking and partying, indulging in clothes and other superficial delights for a few years until they choose whether they want to return to studying.

“The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavoured cat food for a while, to get the pinks right. The scudding clouds did look a bit fishy, rippled into scales by a high-altitude wind. As the light faded, deep blue gaps of night peered through like an upside-down ocean, bottomless and cold”

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Literary tourism: Fowey

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Fowey is most famous for its links to Daphne du Maurier, but it actually has a history of attracting authors to its salty shores. The writer with probably the longest history in Fowey is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, or Q, who moved to Fowey in 1891 and lived there until his death in 1944. He loved the town so much he called his daughter Foy. Seriously. I’ve never read any of his books but I do now have one in my TBR. Sort of. When he died he left an unfinished manuscript called Castle Dor, a retelling of the Cornish myth Tristan and Isolde. Years later, Daphne du Maurier completed it, at the request of Q’s daughter Foy who had become her good friend.

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The white sea-mists of early summer turn the hill to fantasy

TheKingsGeneralThe King’s General
by Daphne du Maurier

I picked this book to read while on holiday in Fowey. Du Maurier wrote this historical novel while living at Menabilly, and loosely based it on the house’s occupants during the English Civil War. In her author’s note she calls it a “blend of fact and fiction” – as far as I can tell, the names of people and outcomes of battles are correct, their personalities and feelings about each other are presumably invented.

It’s a slightly uneven novel, weaving a questionable romance into what is otherwise a fascinating mix of characters and events. The narrator is Honor, who structures her story around the Grenviles, a pair of siblings who came into her life when she was a young child. Richard Grenvile is dashing but pretty much a bastard. For the first part of the book he doesn’t even come across as the roguish antihero he later becomes, he’s just nasty and it’s a little hard to see how Honor could, as she does, fall in love with him. Then again, she’s very young and nice girls falling for bad boys is a classic trope for a reason, right?

Richard’s sister Gartred Grenvile is similarly beautiful and treats people like dirt. She is an interesting baddie, always acting out of self-interest rather than any inherent evil. This puts her at times in an uneven truce with Honor, while at others they are clear enemies.

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The numbness didn’t happen all at once

monsters-daughterThe Monster’s Daughter
by Michelle Pretorius

My knowledge of the history of South Africa is a little sketchy, or at least it was before reading this book. But it’s so much more than a historical novel. This is genre-bending fare, combining crime, science fiction, social and political history – and it works.

The book opens with the discovery of a murder in a small town called Unie in 2010. The head of the police investigation, Sergeant Johannes Mathebe, is a straight player and he’s not getting on well with his recently appointed assistant Constable Alet Berg. She drinks, she swears and she resents being in this small town – a punishment for having an affair with one of the senior officers during her training.

The next chapter opens in 1901, in the midst of the Boer War. British troops are clearing out the Dutch farms, taking the people they find – mostly women and children – to concentration camps. A young woman called Anna is picked out from the Bloemfontein camp for something else, something worse, something that will echo through the next 109 years in its awfulness.

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