Tag: friendship

Book review: Passing by Nella Larsen

Passing book coverI probably hold on to more of the books I read than I will ever realistically reread, but there are some I know I will come back to. Like Passing by Nella Larsen, which I recently read for the second time in 14 months. It was chosen by my book club (with my encouragement) and I’m pleased to find I loved it second time around (as did all but one of the book club).

In this 1929 novella, two Black women reconnect years after having been children together. Irene and Clare bump into each other in a whites-only restaurant in Chicago. They’re both passing, but for Irene it’s a brief convenience to drink a cool drink on a dusty summer’s day. Clare is living her whole life passing for white – including being married to a racist white man who has no idea she’s Black.

Irene is married to a Black man who is a doctor and fund raises for civil rights. They’re prominent members of society in Harlem. She doesn’t approve of Clare’s life choices – even more so when Clare starts coming to socialise in Harlem when her husband is away.

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things, for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other such silly rot…Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.”

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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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Book review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow book cover

Preconceptions and assumptions can be dangerous, or at least misleading. I thought Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin was time-travel SF – I guess I didn’t recognise the Shakespeare reference. But perhaps if I had, I’d have expected something very heavy and “worthy”, and might not ever have read it. Which would have been a true shame as this is a gorgeous novel.

Sam and Sadie first meet in the 1980s as 10-year-olds in an LA hospital and bond by playing computer games. Sam is a patient; Sadie’s sister is a patient. For a while they’re best friends, until an argument leads to them not speaking.

Years later while at university they meet in a train station in Boston, where they are both studying. They gradually grow to be close friends again but old habits die hard and failing to tell each other the whole truth leads to years of misunderstandings and resentments.

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Book review: Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen

boy friends book coverThe world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

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Book review: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Robber Bride book coverIn my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of Margaret Atwood as a literary fiction writer and I remember my surprise on discovering she also wrote brilliant science fiction.

These days I think of Atwood as primarily a writer of science, or speculative, fiction. So I experience the opposite surprise when I pick up one of her books that’s straightforward fiction. The Robber Bride was published in 1993, Atwood’s eighth novel, of which just one had been science fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). It is loosely based on the folktale The Robber Bridegroom, but with all the major characters reimagined as women.

In October 1990 three old friends meet for lunch in Toronto. Roz, Charis and Tony met at college back in the 1960s, but the real reason they have stayed friends is Zenia – and their shared hatred of her. As they finish their lunch Zenia walks into the restaurant. Which is surprising as they held a funeral for her four and a half years ago, truly thinking her dead.

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Book review: Girlcrush by Florence Given

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Paperback book called GirlcrushEarlier this year I realised that most of the books on my TBR are serious in tone and/or topic, and I needed more fun reads to intersperse in-between. So when I had a day out with a friend in Bath and popped into Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, this paperback jumped out at me with its bright shiny red lips on the cover.

Girlcrush by Florence Given is a near-future novel about friendship, relationships, identity, social media and celebrity. And it’s very fun and easy to read while still being genuinely good.

It’s 2030 in a fictional British city and Eartha, an artist, has just realised that her long-term boyfriend is a cheating asshole and that she is bisexual. She makes a messy, drunk confessional video and posts it on Wonderland, the social app that everyone is plugged into obsessively, and it goes viral.

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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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Space itself: a straight line from every point to every other point

Measuring the World book coverMeasuring the World
by Daniel Kehlmann
translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway

This is my Austria book for my EU Reading Challenge. It’s the fictionalised story of two real German scientists whose lives and work intersected, despite their very different backgrounds and temperaments.

Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt are unlikely stars for a comedy, but Kehlmann’s style leans towards the comedic. He also shows a fascination with facts and scientific process, which makes these two men a great choice for him.

Humboldt and Gauss both did work mapping and measuring the physical landscape – distances and heights primarily. For Gauss this was unwelcome, unpleasant work that forced him to be outdoors and interact with people in return for food and shelter. He much preferred to be at home with his beloved wife observing the stars and calculating the maths that governed their movements.

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I should have known that someone would come along and spoil it

Queenie book coverQueenie
by Candice Carty-Williams

I loved this novel. It starts out riotously funny and gradually introduces its themes until it becomes clear that it’s talking about some very serious shit. But it remains extremely enjoyably readable to the end. Which is saying something right now, as having a puppy is very distracting.

We meet Queenie texting her boyfriend Tom from the stirrups of a gynaecologist’s table, while she waits for a series of nurses and doctors to come and take a look. Through the rest of the day, between her aunt Maggie’s ceaseless chatter and her quiet evening at home, we learn that all is not rosy between Queenie and Tom. But the reasons for that take a while to emerge because they are filtered through Queenie blaming herself and idolising Tom for “putting up with” her. While she is frank about some things in her life (sex, mostly) she is less open on other matters.

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Who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

The jane austen book clubThe Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler

I picked this book from my TBR because I suspected it would be light and fluffy and that was all I felt capable of reading this past week. It was exactly right.

I should say upfront that I am not a big Jane Austen fan, and have not read all her works, and that didn’t impede my enjoyment of this book. In fact, it gently mocks those characters who are major Austen fans – then again, it gently mocks all its characters. I have read four of Austen’s six novels, but if you were to come to this as a complete Austen newbie, Fowler includes synopses and select quotes from literary critics at the end of the book.

The format is that each chapter is based around a meeting of the book club – so it’s a new month, a new book and a new setting (the club’s six members take it in turn to host). As is perhaps predictable, the earlier chapters contain more earnest dissections of Austen’s work, while later on it is the club members’ lives that are being analysed, for the most part.

They’re a disparate group to begin with. The club is started by Jocelyn, a middle-aged dog breeder who is worried about how her childhood friend Sylvia is handling the break-up of her marriage, so she decides this will be a useful distraction. I’m not sure that Austen’s concentration on love and marriage is actually the best distraction for Sylvia, which of course tells us something about Jocelyn.

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