Tag: politics

Book review: Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh

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Occupation Diaries

Palestinian author, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh has won prizes for his writing and his humanitarian work. Occupation Diaries is one of several non-fiction books he has written about Palestine through the lens of his own life. Born in Ramallah, he attended law school in the UK, then moved back to Ramallah to join his father’s law practice. To the best of my knowledge he still lives in Ramallah now and certainly that’s where he was living in 2012 when he published this book.

As the title suggests, Occupation Diaries is a series of diary entries covering the period December 2009 to December 2011. Shehadeh writes about his daily life but adds in historical and political detail.

In the opening entry, Shehadeh travels with a group of friends to a countryside spot called Wadi Qelt. As they spread out their picnic on a rock next to a picturesque pool, a large family arrives and settles on a rock on the opposite side of the water. Shehadeh’s group are Christians and/or foreigners dressed in Western clothes; the family group is local and Muslim, with the women in hijabs and long black skirts. Mutual suspicion quickly grows and there is a brief shouting match, though it is quickly defused.

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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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Invisible boundaries kept me boxed in from the real life of other people going on all around

Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford

I am not the first person to be fascinated by the Mitfords. For a few years now, I have felt that I need to read something by Jessica to better understand the family. She was the outlier, the one who left. And y’know, not a Nazi.

This is Jessica, or Decca’s, memoir of the first portion of her life. She recounts her childhood, her political awakening and her relationship with Esmond Romilly. I laughed, I cried, I shook my head often in disbelief.

As she admits, her childhood was unconventional. They were old-fashioned upper-class toffs, distantly related to royalty and less distantly to Winston Churchill. Jessica and her five sisters received no formal education (though their brother was sent away to school). They instead enjoyed a series of private tutors whom they teased and tortured. This meant they reached adulthood in a state that was both worldly and hugely naive and sheltered. Perhaps this explains the extreme political allegiances of at least three Mitford sisters.

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Do not be frightened by my beard

The reluctant fundamentalistThe Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid

This was the first book I read for my Easter weekend readathon and it was an excellent start. It’s gripping, beautifully written and warmly inviting. In fact literally so, as it directly addresses a second person – a listener to the tale, inviting you right into the heart of the story.

The setting is Lahore, a cafe in one of the city’s squares, where a local man, Changez (the narrator) has approached an American visitor and offered to act as his guide. Over tea and then dinner, Changez tells his story – one that is surprising and seems to be building up to something.

We learn that Changez spent a few years living in the USA, thanks to an Ivy League scholarship and an excellent job on the back of that. But then everything changed – in his words, the city he loved (New York) and the woman he loved there both betrayed him, though it becomes clear that the reality is more complicated.

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Love…it means too much to me

Anna KareninaAnna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
translated from Russian by Rosamund Bartlett

Phew, I made it to the end! This is a big book and it took me a month to read. But it wasn’t a slog. I found Tolstoy’s writing much more accessible than Dostoevsky or Dickens, his contemporaries.

I had a rough idea of the story before I started this book, but hadn’t realised that the story of Anna is not the only plotline. As its famous opening line suggests, the novel follows a few interlinked families, and Anna is not the focus of the first nor the last chapter. We open in Moscow with her brother, Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, who is in trouble with his wife, Princess Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly), after cheating on her with the nanny. Only the arrival of Anna from St Petersburg manages to calm the household down.

At the same time, Oblonsky’s close friend Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin has come to Moscow to propose to Dolly’s younger sister, Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (Kitty), but unfortunately while he has been away at his country estate, Kitty has taken up a flirtation with Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, a dandy young cavalry officer from St Petersburg. In confusion between her two suitors, she turns Levin down. But just a few days later, at a society ball, Vronsky meets Anna and their mutual attraction is immediately obvious to all.

“It was as if tears were the essential lubricant without which the machinery of mutual relations between the two sisters could not operate effectively – after the tears the sisters did not talk about what preoccupied them, but they understood each other even though they were talking about other things. Kitty understood that she had deeply wounded her poor sister with those words she had uttered in a fit of pique…but that she was forgiven. For her part, Dolly understood all that she had wanted to know.”

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Jack Parlabane: books 1–3

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As of April this year, there are nine books in Chris Brookmyre’s series about Glaswegian investigative journalist Jack Parlabane. I read a lot of Brookmyre back in the early 2000s, so I had read the start of this series before, but then years elapsed and rather than pick up where I left off, I thought I’d start from the beginning again. It’s been a real pleasure.

Quite Ugly One Morning
by Christopher Brookmyre

Parlabane is introduced in style in this action-packed romp. Recently returned to Scotland from LA after a difference of opinion with someone powerful who wants him dead, he is laying low in Edinburgh, until suddenly he’s face to face with police. It turns out there’s a dead body in the flat directly below his, which he discovers when he has locked himself out of his own flat, half undressed. By the time he has persuaded the police that he’s an innocent bystander, his journalistic interest has been piqued and he is pulled into a complex plot involving nefarious businessmen and Tory Party shenanigans. Each of these books has a political angle and in this case Brookmyre’s target is the Tory restructure of the NHS. It sounds like a dull basis for satire, but he efficiently finds the interesting angle and digs the knife right in, mercilessly mocking Tory policy. I can’t say I mind, as a fellow liberal lefty, but I do wonder how right-wing or non-political readers would take this. Personally, I think it’s a lot of fun. And I do love the character of Dr Sarah Slaughter.

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Fresh from the experience of an invisibility hitherto unknown

Nowhere People
by Paulo Scott
translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

I’ve subscribed to And Other Stories for a few years now, and I tend to know little or nothing about the books they send me before I read them. I mean, I could read the blurbs, or the e-mail newsletter I get every month, but I’m going to read them anyway so why risk spoilers?

And I’m glad in this case I had so little idea of where it was going. Which leaves me with some difficulty when it comes to writing a review. Not that the plot is hugely twisty turny, but it does cover a large span of time, and much of what happens later is the result of something I don’t want to give away.

The book opens with Paulo, a Brazilian law student and activist, driving along a highway in torrential rain and spotting a poor indigenous girl at the side of the road. Stopping to give 14-year-old Maína a lift sets in motion events that reverberate through two decades of relationships, politics and activism.

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January 2017 reading round-up

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This month had some pretty big ups and downs. I had a lovely birthday. I successfully managed to run three times every week. We had a fantastic weekend in London, looking at art and watching the stage show Lazarus.

I have also despaired at the news even more than usual. On Monday evening I joined thousands on College Green in Bristol protesting against the US “Muslim ban”. These really do feel like dark scary times but I have to hope that continuing to raise my voice against injustice helps.

To distract myself from world affairs, I’ve managed to read a decent amount and I’ve also watched a lot of films. I thought La La Land was a lot of fun in the first half, then kinda bittersweet. Not the best film ever but very good nonetheless. Plus Tim and I have ploughed our way through almost four whole seasons of Dexter. (Speaking of which: has anyone read the book it’s based on, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay? Would I like it?)

Here’s to February, hints of early spring and escaping into books! In the US February is Black History Month but in the UK it’s LGBT History Month (we do black history in October) so I’ll be choosing some reading based on that. What are your February reading plans?

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Sunday Salon: #Diverseathon

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The Sunday SalonDuring Trump’s first nine days in office I have been constantly thinking about civil rights, women’s rights…human rights, basically, and how they are being threatened and outright denied. As well as doing practical things to help – donating to refugee charities and subscribing to newspapers that I feel are doing vitally necessary journalism – I also wanted to base my reading around these subjects. And then I heard there was already a BookTube project to do just that.

#Diverseathon runs from 22 January to the end of today and is co-hosted by Simon Savidge, Monica Watson, Christina Marie and Joce. The primary aim is to encourage everyone to read more diversely, but there are some more specific goals. There was a group read of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which I didn’t join, but I’ve thought the book sounded fascinating since I first heard about it on the Slate Represent podcast.

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Languages are different for a reason

alif the unseenAlif the Unseen
by G Willow Wilson

I was eager to read more G Willow Wilson after discovering her writing in the Ms Marvel comics. This is a lovely easy read that deals with some pretty deep complex issues but manages to never feel like an “issues” novel. Which is a clever balancing act. It’s probably the fantasy elements that help keep it light and fun. Mostly.

The story follows Alif, a young man in an unnamed Arab Emirate who works as a “grey hat” – a skilled hacker who helps paying customers to remain hidden online. He keeps a vigilant watch for the state’s top internet security expert “the Hand” but is widely acknowledged to be the best and therefore safest from arrest. He is also conducting a secret affair with Intisar – secret because although they are both Muslim, their social classes are very different and neither set of parents would approve. But Alif is a romantic and assumes they will somehow find a way.

When the book opens, Alif (which is his screen name, not his given name) has not heard from Intisar (ditto) for two weeks and is trying not to worry about the possible reasons. Then the Hand manages to break most of the way through his computer’s encryption and he is suddenly at real risk of arrest. Friends help him out but there comes a point when he needs more than friendship – he needs another kind of aid entirely.

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