Local bookshops: Beware of the Leopard

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Beware of the Leopard is a secondhand bookshop in the heart of Bristol’s Old City, overflowing with books and a particular treasure trove of old annuals. Not to mention that awesome name (a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

Beware of the Leopard

It occupies two units opposite each other in the covered market, plus as many boxes and shelves in-between as they can fit. It looks haphazard but is actually well organised, you just need to know the system. It’s not really a place to go with a specific book in mind, it’s more of a browse and stumble across several gems sort of a place.

Just browsing

The shelves are crammed close together so that you are constantly manoeuvring around other customers, which makes for a pretty friendly experience! And the staff know their stock, so it’s always worth asking.

Beware of the Leopard benefits from having a fantastic location within St Nicholas Market, which is my (and many other Bristolians’) favourite lunchtime venue. So many tasty foods to choose between, my mouth is watering at the thought. And when you look up, it’s an impressive building too.

Untitled

Beware of the Leopard
66–69 & 77 St Nicholas Market
St Nicholas Street
Bristol
BS1 1LJ

The places to which your blood is anchored

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The Tiger’s Wife
by Téa Obreht

I am trying not to let my jealousy of young, beautiful, successful Téa Obreht colour my feelings about this book because she is undeniably talented and deserving too. This novel felt original and inventive by using traditional folktale-type storytelling.

How do you describe what this book is about? It’s about the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia; it’s about love in its many forms; it’s about the affection we bestow on objects, animals or even people who can never return it; it’s about how superstitions and folk stories are created and why they are important. But it begins and keeps on coming back to the death of a beloved grandfather.

The narrator, Natalia, is a doctor who is travelling to an orphanage across the newly formed border to deliver vital vaccines and other medical care when she receives news of her grandfather’s death. This story is already complicated by odd details and family secrets, and then when she arrives at the orphanage she finds another complicated situation awaits, tied up in distrust and superstition and national identity. Obreht weaves into this story not one but effectively three further plots: Natalia’s relationship with her grandfather, the story her grandfather told her of the Deathless Man, and the story she pieced together after his death of the Tiger’s Wife.

At first, the “facts” within the novel versus the fictions seem clear, but as the novel progresses they are increasingly wound up together until they cannot be separated. The main recurring theme is the tiger. During Natalia’s grandfather’s childhood, a tiger escapes from the zoo in the big city and comes into his village, triggering local legend for generations to come and consolidating the boy’s love of The Jungle Book, a copy of which he carries with him for the rest of his life. Natalia’s earliest memories are of going to the zoo every week with her grandfather and his particular love of the tiger there, and later his distress for the tiger during the zoo’s war-enforced closure. Obreht describes scenes from the tiger’s point of view and yet never once anthropomorphises him.

The writing is lyrical without being longwinded. In fact, a lot is packed in and it was a long way into the book that I realised just how much it was about the war that broke up Yugoslavia. In a way, this is dealt with in an underhand way because the country is never named. Natalia’s home is just the City and all the other placenames given are fictitious. But between Obreht’s background and the details that are given, it seems likely that the setting is the Balkans. The City of two rivers that is untouched by years of civil war until a sudden onslaught of bombing might easily be Belgrade. I don’t know if the names are withheld out of sensitivity for which side of the new borders the characters are from, or if this is just another element of mystique adding to the fable quality of the story. Certainly, when the narrative delves into the histories of characters they seem to match up with the history of the Balkans, with invasions from Turks and Germans, and there is an interesting discussion of people who have only just become one nation, with one identity, coming to terms with its dissolution.

“When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unravelling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed by it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”

Obreht does a good job of combining a modern feeling in the first-person narrator, who is real and rounded, and an old-fashioned round-the-fire storytelling vibe. My only gripe would be that toward the end I started to feel that there were too many stories at once. Every notable character within each story gets a full backstory and I started to notice that details overlap or repeat, which I am sure has significance but was too many levels for me. But maybe that just means that it will reward re-reading.

First published in 2011 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.

Let our life stories become tragic art

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See

This is the kind of book I went through a phase of reading several years ago – Asian country, female narrator, historical setting (often during a civil war) and generally following the daily life of poor(ish) folk. So I have some comparison. This one stood up well in terms of teaching me new stuff but less well as regards quality of story. Sadly.

Lily is born in 1830 to a modest farming family in the Chinese province of Hunan. As second daughter she has little worth and is just another mouth to feed until the Matchmaker delivers surprising news: if her feet are bound properly, she will have perfect feet, which will secure her both a good marriage (which her family will benefit from) and a laotong – a lifelong best friend (other girls must leave their childhood friends behind when they marry). But secrets, reversals of fortune and an attempted peasant rebellion all threaten both her happiness and her friendship.

The book is narrated by Lily, from her earliest memories aged five or so, and from the age of seven she is largely confined to the “women’s chamber” and discouraged from paying attention to the world of men, so we hear little about the history or politics of the time, but there is still plenty to tell. See did a lot of research into nu shu, the secret women’s writing, and frames her story around it, but she also details the horrors of foot binding, the rituals of daily life and special occasions to the point that I frequently felt I was learning a lesson rather than reading a story. It’s a fascinating lesson, and after years of research I understand why she wanted to use what she could, but it might have been nice to have a little more, I don’t know, insight?

Perhaps I wasn’t helped by my dislike of Lily. She and her laotong Snow Flower are matched at the age of seven, visit one another often and write to each other in-between, so they appear to be extremely close. Yet they almost always stick to formalised language that allows for misunderstandings and misinterpretations that cause them both pain and suffering:

“My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart,
An invisible rebellion that no man can see.
Let our life stories become tragic art.
Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me.”

I can accept that their writing might have remained this rigid but in person too? They are often alone together – after they are married, when they visit they share a bed with each other and banish husbands to another room – so how come they never speak naturally even then? The insinuation of Lily’s narrative is that she insisted on this formality and in that way caused all the ensuing problems. But really?

Maybe I am struggling with suspension of disbelief. I’m not saying it’s a bad book. I was very interested and entertained but I did not feel absorbed.

First published 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Sunday Salon: Holidaying

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The Sunday Salon

It’s been a busy busy week. Amazing how much more you can do when you don’t go to work! Okay, so I’m on holiday for a week and a half, which we are filling with three short breaks in a row. We seem to have managed once again to coincide our plans with glorious sunshine, which is not strictly good for me but I love how happy it makes everyone.

Part 1: London
In London, we went to museums with Tim’s parents, watched fox cubs playing from a friend’s balcony and sat reading in royal parks.

Urban fox

Part 2: Bristol
Then we came back to Bristol and enjoyed our city at a slower pace, took in a film at the excellent Watershed and went on a day trip to see the amazing sand sculptures in Weston-super-Mare.

Grumpy

Part 3: Melton Mowbray
Finally, we hopped on a train to Leicestershire to chill with friends in the countryside, which is where we are now.

Red

I am relaxed, I have done lots of reading (you can read my reviews of Enduring Love and Mr Fox, posted earlier this week) and I didn’t have to dip into my savings. Who needs fancy foreign holidays? (I’m not saying I never want one again. Just to be clear, I still want to see the world. But this has been a good holiday. That is all.)

A person could die trying to love him

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Mr Fox
by Helen Oyeyemi

This is a strange and beautiful book. It has disjuncts that cannot be explained but somehow the whole works anyway.

St John Fox is a writer in New York City with a sweet, devoted wife in Daphne and a spirited muse in Mary Foxe, who is no less of a threat to Mrs Fox because her husband made her up. After, all that makes Mary his perfect woman.

Mary accuses St John of killing her off in one of his stories and so begins their game. His short stories are interspersed into the narrative, often starring Mary and/or himself. But the reality, after all, includes an imaginary woman, so is that just one of Mr Fox’s stories too?

Through St John’s imagination Mary can switch from wickedly playful to sweet and timid: from “Abominable Mr Fox, Contemptible Mr Fox, Nefarious Mr Fox,” to “But what can I do for Jonas? Last summer I spent almost an hour blowing dandelions off their stems towards him, so that he had a chance to wish for everything he wanted. He was very polite about it, but it can’t have meant much to him. Jonas thinks about eternity and other things that make wishes seem tiny and silly.”

The stories are disconnected by place (Europe, Asia, Africa) but also time. Mr Fox appears to be living and writing in the 1930s but some of the integrated stories (possibly all?) appear to be set in the present. Not the 2010s as someone in the 1930s might have imagined it, but as it really is. There are also some stories that appear to have no link at all to Mr Fox and his two women, aside from the fact that he is trying to write a love story with a happy ending (at which he continually fails).

These sound like problems or accusations, but they are somehow not. I loved this book. It is magical and inventive and surprising. Oyeyemi’s language is wonderful; simply phrased but with such imagination.

“She looked into his eyes – they were like a famine. Seeing them sent hurt and light through her. His eyes kept asking, asking, and she knew that a person could die trying to love him.”

A real treat.

Published 2011 by Picador.

What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths

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Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan

This is a story of love in all its forms, and both how painful and how uplifting that love can be. It also manages to be a compelling thriller, beginning with an event that sets wheels in motion for a series of misfortunes, building up to a dramatic climax.

Clarissa and Joe are happy, utterly in love after many years together. While at a picnic, they unwittingly become part of a terrible accident. At first it seems that the rest of the book will be them coming to terms with tragedy. But it quickly turns out to be something else, or at least, as the narrator, Joe keeps insisting that something else is going on, but Clarissa and the police don’t believe him. Is this a classic case of the unreliable narrator? Or is there a genuine terror stalking Joe and Clarissa, ready to erupt at any time?

For a start, Joe is easily lost in daydreams or work-related thoughts from the reality at hand. From the first page he is challenging his own memory. Did it happen the way he describes? He knows certain details conflict with other witness accounts gathered by the police and Clarissa’s memory. He says, “I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.”

Joe is a freelance science writer, a successful one, but also a man who feels that he made a mistake leaving research behind, so he is not entirely happy with where he is. He loves Clarissa unreservedly but she is unable to have children, which has always been a huge source of pain for them both. It’s a set-up that allows pure happiness to fall apart very quickly.

Through a psychological thriller framework, McEwan examines relationship love, parental love, religious love (though only at the extreme end), the love shared in friendship, sibling love (quite briefly) and obsessive love. It also examines a few forms of psychological instability, from the uncertainties of grief through to a far more troubling example.

McEwan writes well and keeps the possibilities open as he carries us along to the climax. In true thriller style, the augurs are all there that something is coming, but as a literary novel you know that the actual ending may be a more mundane realisation of truth.

I didn’t greatly like Joe. He is a bit dismissive of Clarissa, even condescending at times. While he has acquired tidbits of knowledge from far outside his original physics training, he seems to assume Clarissa’s only interests are her scholarly work on Keats, and children. I’m not sure if this is a failing of the character or of McEwan. Certainly, neither of the other female characters comes off well from Joe’s descriptions either. One is a widow too distracted by her loss to pay attention to her children, the other essentially a bimbo. I hope the problem is Joe’s.

Interestingly, although this all sounds plot-driven, despite having watched the film made of this book a few years back, I could not remember where it was going. Perhaps that’s just my memory, or the film was somehow incoherent, but perhaps it is because this book is sneakily about the writing after all: “What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness.”

First published 1997 by Jonathan Cape.

Musical interlude: When your mind’s made up

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I’m still getting back into the swing of reading after a bad couple of weeks so in the meantime here is a lovely chilled song for a summer’s day: “When your mind’s made up” by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend the film this comes from, Once.

Happy Thursday!

Sunday Salon: Happiness

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The Sunday Salon

For no special reason and after a bit of a rubbish week, today I am feeling good. Really truly happy. Which is nice.

I have barely read 100 pages this week and life is pretty busy so reviews might be a bit sparse for a while. But we have some holiday coming soon so hopefully I’ll be able to play catch-up then. If we can manage not to plan ourselves too many other activities!

I have found time/brain power to post reviews of The Library Book and The Big Sleep, both of which I recommend. And my tired brain was glad that I now have a system for headlines so I didn’t have to pluck something out of thin air. I pick a quote from the book. Do you have a system for writing headlines? Do you use the title of the book you review?

I’m off out now to explore the Southbank Bristol Art Trail (I love my city). In the meantime, to spread my mysteriously good mood, here is a picture of gorillas having fun at our local zoo.

At play

I may break a few rules

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler

The first book in the Philip Marlowe series (though not the first I’ve read) this blackly funny story of the darker side of LA confirmed my love for Chandler and his purple prose. I read it for book club, which led to a hilariously highbrow conversation about what has never aspired to be more than pulp fiction. But it’s good pulp fiction.

The plot is…complicated. I was beginning to think I had missed something towards the end and then Marlowe explains the whole thing to another character, which I suspect his publisher made him put in there. The story begins with the private detective being hired by dying millionaire Sternwood to deal with a pesky blackmailer. It seems straightforward but one bad guy leads to another and Sternwood’s two daughters are both troublesome, turning it all into one big knot of murder and intrigue.

Marlowe himself is an intriguing character. He’s a good guy and has a strong moral code that he imposes on himself, yet he delights in pissing off the police or letting people believe that he’s up to no good. And he’s not above kissing a girl and then discarding her. He’s clever, but not so clever that he’s pieced it all together from the start. He gives the impression of a devil-may-care attitude but looking closely at his actions you realise he actually cares very much. As he explains to Sternwood, “I do my best to protect you and I may break a few rules, but I break them in your favour.”

Chandler’s LA is of course marvellously seedy. Even the rich Sternwood girls are caught up with gangsters and crooks, from the petty to the top of the pile. It is his (and by extension Marlowe’s) understanding of the criminal world, and how several seemingly distinct cases are tied up together by the associations between people, that makes the book brilliant and confusing.

And it’s funny. Marlowe’s narration is full of sharp observations and ironic humour. I love lines like “You have to keep your teeth clamped around Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes.” The language in general is gorgeously overblown, which is a style some members of my book club found offputting. But I can’t help adoring a book that sets a scene: “I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog.”

For a book written in the 1930s, there is an interesting attitude towards homosexuality. Marlowe uses language that would be considered homophobic today but elsewhere he appears open-minded about such things. When joking about his impending death, he says “Don’t scatter my ashes over the blue Pacific. I like the worms better. Did you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?”

I think I preferred Farewell My Lovely, but this was still a great read and I fully intend to read the rest of the series.

First published 1939 by Alfred A Knopf.