Category Archives: Novel

Barbara Trapido: Sex & Stravinsky (2010)

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This was my first book by Barbara Trapido but I think it will not be the last. It has flaws but I could generously overlook them as there is so much to enjoy in Sex & Stravinsky.

Sex & Stravinsky is told in alternating points of view something I usually  don’t like unless it is done as well as Barbara Trapido does it. What is really impressive is how different those voices sound. The story could be told in a few words as the book is really focussing more on the characters than on the plot.

The Australian Caroline meets Josh, a South African, in London. Josh is fascinated by opera, ballet and pantomime, dedicating his whole live to these topics. They have a daughter Zoe who would love to become a ballet dancer but since money is tight she has to make do with reading ballet books that are written by Hattie whom she doesn’t know.

Hattie is the secret love of Josh’s life. She still lives in South Africa with Hermann, the tall blond of Boer descent. They have a daughter Cat who is highly creative but hates her mother’s guts.

And there is Jack, Jacques or Giacomo, depending on the mood of the day, a young man of modest background who reinvents his own story as he moves from South Africa to Senegal, to Italy and back to South Africa.

There are a lot of coincidences in this book that seem unrealistic and still Barbara Trapido can get away with it as her characters are truly wonderful.

At the beginning of the novel, the couples are in their respective countries, at the end they all meet in South Africa, more or less by chance.

Caroline is by far the most appealing character and I could relate to her story. She was followed to London by her awful mother who exploits and abuses her whenever she can. Although Caroline is strong – she can renovate and redecorate a house like any man could, she is over six feet tall and a stunning blonde beauty, she transforms a bus into a little paradise, she knows how to cook delicious meals out of nothing, sews the most wonderful clothes out of old pieces -she cannot fight her own mother and her horrible sister. Unfortunately the description of her mother, the event of her cerebral hemorrhage including the story of the will and the unhappy discoveries linked to it felt all too familiar…

Each one of them does not live the life they had dreamt of but they will all get their chance in the end.

I really enjoyed this book. It exudes globalization and all the elements of living in a multicultural world. We hear as much about Stravinsky as about the masks of the Dogon. But, and this is my critique, it sort of flies over these cultural elements. It is a bit like standing at an enormous buffet with fingerfood from every corner of the world. A little taste of Moroccan cuisine, morsels of Northern Italian anti-pasti, a sandwich with a Caribbean spread.

Still, I liked it a lot: I loved the descriptions of the characters. Talented Caroline, Hattie the petite dancer, rebellious Cat, adopted Josh, Herman the boorish architect, little Zoe who discovers France on a school trip.

Zoe’s school trip to France is one of the best parts. Poor Zoe lands in a dysfunctional lower class family with unhealthy habits, a lot of shouting, awful driving in a smoke-filled car.

One theme that we find in the whole novel is legitimacy. There are three characters in this book who don’t know who their real parents are.

I believe Barbara Trapido just invented the genre of the  21st century multicultural fairytale.

One thing I would be interested in however, why did she choose this title? Has anyone an idea?

Katherine Pancol: Un homme à distance (2001) An Epistolary Novel about Books

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This little book, Un homme à distance, only 160 pages long, is a real gem. I was so enchanted by it. In the evenings I could hardly wait to get back from work and go on reading. Why it has not been translated is a total mystery to me as it would find a multitude of readers in the English-speaking world.  It is also surprising since Katherine Pancol lived in the States where she took creative writing courses at the Columbia University. It is a novel in letters and a novel about books that has been compared to 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. We find the same passion for books, the same enchantment. The story is quite simple. A young woman, owner of a book shop in Fécamp (a fishing port with an attractive seafront promenade located between Le Havre and Dieppe, in the French Normandy region), starts a correspondence with a mysterious man. They exchange their thoughts on all sorts of books, some I had never heard of before but, as a true addict, had to buy immediately since I knew the others and they are all outstanding.

The tone of this novel is quite melancholic. The young shopkeeper is heartbroken about the end of an affair which makes her live like a recluse. This correspondence brings her back to life. The end stunned me. It was not what I had expected.

Let’s hope  she will be translated or that the one or the other reader of this post does read  French.

As many of the books mentioned are absolute favourites of mine and the others seem to be must-reads too and for all those who are curious, I made a list.

Contrary to Pancol’s books they are all available as translations.

The Great Meaulnes or The Lost Estate by Henri Alan-Fournier. The Princess de Clèves by Mme de Lafayette. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids  Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. Three Horses by Erri de Luca

Bakunin’s Son by Sergio d’Atzeni. The House of Others by Silvio d’Arzo. What Maisie Knew by Henry James

Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan  Zweig. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

Cousin Bette by Balzac. Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly. Doomed Love Camilo Castelo Branco. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert.

A Selection of the Chroniques by Guy de Maupassant. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by  Elizabeth Browning. The Journal of Delacroix

The only one that has not been translated is Confidence africaine by Roger Martin du Gard.

One that would need to be rediscovered is The Lost Estate. It is probably the novel that influenced Fitzgerald in writing The Great Gatsby. But, as stated before, all the books on this list are excellent and remarkable.

Katherine Pancol has written quite a lot of books. They have all been very successful in France, even more so than this one. The most notable seem to be Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles, La valse lente des tortues and Les écureuils du Central Park sont triste le lundi.

You can visit Katherine´s French/English Homepage.

Margaret Carroll: A Dark Love (2009) A Novel of Romantic Suspense

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I just recently discovered that I like Romantic Suspense. I thought I did not like any kind of romance too much, with the exception of some Paranormal Romance that is and… There are other exceptions. As a matter of fact, the genre is better than its reputation. I’m just not into the sugar-coating kind. And marriage at the end? I couldn’t care less.  And explicit sex scenes are not my thing either. When it comes to Romantic Suspense, there is quite a wide range. Keren Rose is known to write Romantic Suspense, but Tess Gerritsen, bettern known as a plain thriller writer (The Mephisto Club) has also written some books that are labelled Romantic Suspense (I read The Surgeon and found it very good). When I was still at the university I had a Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy phase as I had no TV and needed something to unwind from the exam preparations. She is definitely the mother of Romantic Suspense or “Woman-in-Jeopardy” or Gothic Suspense as she has been labelled. When it comes to more contemporary writers, apart from Keren Rose and Gerritsen I haven’t read that many so when I recently read some enthusiastic reviews on amazon. de of Margaret Carroll who has just been translated into German I had to give it a go.

Sure this is not the height of literary perfection but is an extremely entertaining read. Even tough it is a bit predictable. Margaret Carroll’s style  has a lot in common with Mary Higgins Clark and Carlene Thompson + romance.  The romance part was quite nice actually.

Caroline Hughes is a young woman who has married the wrong man. At the beginning of the novel, we see her leave her husband. All she has taken are 4000 dollars and her Yorkshire terrier Pippin. She flees from Washington D.C. to Colorado where she wants to hide somewhere high up in the Rockies. Before she boards the Greyhound she dyes her brown hair blond. One more measure, she hopes, to not get found. Her husband, Dr. Porter Moross is a renowned psychiatrist but, as we soon understand, he is by far more deranged than any of his patients. Bit by bit, all through the novel, we see how sick he really is. A real pervert. There is a scene that made me cringe. It even haunted me at night in a dream.

How a young promising art student and aspiring painter did fall for a man like this is not a hundred percent clear. We get hints that something terrible happened in Caroline’s childhood that Porter exploited. Somehow he made her believe she was to blame.

Caroline and Pippin escape to Storm Pass Colorado. A little town in a spectacular setting. Luck is on her side and she gets an employment with an elderly woman who owns a Scotch terrier. There are quite a lot of animals in this book which gives it a very nice touch. They seem very real with individual traits like the people in the novel.

Soon after her arrival Caroline meets Ken a former football player who has been left by his wife after he’s been injured and had to abandon his career. Ken is a very appealing person. Good looking in a very masculine way but not too macho. He even seems to be a bit of an introvert and he certainly is a very sensitive man. Caroline who so far only knew contempt and ridicule feels understood for the first time in her life. She even tells Ken she hopes to be a painter once. They are both admirers of  Georgia O’Keeffe.

As the days go by, winter approaches which gives the author the opportunity of some nice descriptions. Snow flakes falling against a grey sky, a cozy fire inside the house.

Of course we know all along that Porter will track her down sooner or later. I am not giving away how he did it and what follows after he does. You need to find out for yourself.

All in all this was a satisfying and entertaining read. I found it psychologically believable even though maybe at bit stretched. It is quite suspenseful and the characters are well rendered. The descriptions of the landscape and  the weather are well done. This remote place of great beauty in the wilderness does come alive.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I prefer Romantic Suspense to other kinds of thrillers or crime but I enjoy reading a good book of this genre for a change. Considering this was Margaret Carrolls first novel I think she did a good job and I would probably read her latest Riptide if I felt in the mood for the genre again.

Lauren Groff: The Monsters of Templeton (2008)

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This is quite an unusual, hybrid book. There were passages I enjoyed a lot. The atmosphere and description of Templeton were something to savour. The idea of a monster living in the lake and the ghost in Willie’s bedroom appealed to me a great deal as well. But as much as I loved the beginning and many later parts I lost patience at times. My biggest problem was that I found it too exuberant and too artificial. It is full of great descriptions but totally lacks any psychological depth. The characters, Willie, her mother Vi, Cassandra and many others are charming but they are two-dimensional. Still I can understand that this book found his ardent fans.

At the beginning we see Willie depressed and sad. She is pregnant from her affair with her professor and comes back to Templeton where she grew up looking for refuge. She considers this to be a total failure. She has left Templeton for San Francisco a few years back. Templeton, as we read in the foreword, is actually Cooperstown, Groff’s hometown. It is also the hometown of James Fenimore Cooper. A small town with all the charm of a small town. While away in California Lauren Groff was so homesick that she decided to write about her town.

Apart from being pregnant and desperate, Willie hears from her mother,  that she is actually the daughter of someone from Templeton. After having thought she was the offspring of her mother’s casual encounters with different men during her hippie days, this comes as quite a shock. Willie being an archeologist and trained in research takes this bit of information as a challenge. She starts to investigate the story of her illustrious family, descendants of the great Marmaduke Temple (aka James Fenimore Cooper) in order to find out who her father is. She knows that one of the men in her genealogical tree is illegitimate and this information will lead her to her father.

The story of Willie is interspersed with journal entries, letters, diaries, stories of her ancestors. They are quite different in tone, some are like short stories in their own right and seem to have been written in another century, some were, for me, just tiresome diversions.

In the end, Willie knows the name of her father. She has learnt a great deal about her family and her town. The weak and depressed Willie of the beginning is strong again and able to go out into the world where a brilliant future is waiting for her.

This book deals with some heavy and important themes like illegitimacy / legitimacy / roots /origins /  parenthood/ history. In the beginning there are a lot of  signs of the insecurity of the times we live in but throughout the novel this is more and more abandoned. It is as if the author wanted to say: When you know your origins and where you belong you can never get lost and nothing can really harm you. I am not sure I agree with this.

Be it as it may, this is an original book and some parts are memorable. It’s just somewhat flawed as  a whole.

I would really like to do Lauren Groff justice so maybe I should let her speak for herself:

Taking the R.I.P.V Challenge

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Thanks to Danielle from A Work in Progress, I found this challenge that is truly to my liking. Being a Goth at heart I am really looking forward to this. Participating and reading alike. It has started end of September and finishes on October 31st. Since I am maybe the only or one of a few non-native English speakers participating I tought it might be my own personal little challenge to find German examples.

And here goes:

My choice for a novel is going to be one of Gustav Meyrink’s. It will be either :

The Golem

The Green Face

The White Dominican or

The Angel of the West Window

The short story has already been chosen. It is going to be the following:

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman

Last but not least., I chose a classic movie namely   M.F. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Anyone who sees this and would like to join, please got to Stainless Steel Droppings for details.

Lisa Grunwald: Whatever Makes You Happy (2005)

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Whatever makes you happy is probably a book you either love or hate. It is a blend between fiction and  non-fiction  and very frankly this did not work for me. I found it highly artificial. But it is not boring, so that is one good thing.

Sally Faber, a 40-year-old writer, is trying to write a book about happiness. While struggling with writing she faces a lot of challenging moments in her life. Her little girls leave for the first time for two months to go to summer camp. Her mother leaves her with the challenging task to empty an appartement she owns whose inhabitant, a psychiatrist, has died without leaving any heirs.

Despite all of this Sally seems to have it all. A great live, cute girls, an understanding gentle and successful husband yet she endangers all of this by starting an affair with a megalomaniac self-centered artist who supposedly understands her better than her husband.

The idea to let us dive into Sally’s research was already quite artificial but to sort of test some of the theories by inventing this odd affair was even more so. It just did not make any sense. I did not understand what she did. In the end it felt less like a novel than like an experiment and playing around with the concept of happiness. Sure, there are quite a few insights, views and bits of information that are interesting, which is probably why many readers liked this, but it spoilt the novel for me to have it presented in this way.

Aspiring writers learn to show and not tell, and that is exactly what I would like to tell Lisa Grunwald.

I think it is disappointing because the idea of a novel about happiness appealed to me. The only bit I really liked was the way she described Sally´s feelings for her little girls. That was truly touching.

I should have known what to expect since this novel was recommended by Gretchen Rubin whose Happiness Project I found equally disappointing.  More of that in my next post

Ayelet Waldman: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)

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I was so curious to read this. I had heard such a lot about Ayelet Waldman and most of it was fuelled by hate. I still do not understand this at all. Just because she questions motherhood? Because she admits, it is no picnic? Be it as it may, I really liked this book. It just swipes you away.

Emilia is married to the love of her life, Jack, but she is not his first wife. And there is also William, his son from his first marriage. A precocious and at times obnoxious child. Emilia cannot handle him and cannot handle her guilt either. Guilt that she was the reason Jack broke up with his wife Caroline, and guilt because she feels responsible for the death of her daughter Isabel who died on her first day home from the hospital just after she was born. This grief and her guilt overshadows everything. And the fact that her father left her mother for a young Russian prostitute.

A lot of heavy stuff but the prose is very light and funny enough this book is never depressing. I found it extremely interesting. It is also a portrait of the city of New York and a description of what it is like to be a mother in New York. Many things that probably only a New Yorker knows, like urbanbaby.com, the running moms of Central Park, A Walk to Remember. Movies and books about New York hold a special appeal for me. This one is no exception. I loved to read these insider descriptions of  walks and places that you would visit with a kid or on your own.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is a book that will engage you, make you think, make you wanna discuss it. It is courageous and tackles topics that are of great importance to everybody. Even to women like me who have no children.

It is really worth reading and I do also feel tempted to watch the movie.

Some questions that would be interesting to discuss:

How difficult is it to be a stepmother?

Can there ever be a conflict-free patchwork family?

How do you survive the death of your child?

Is it easier to lose a child when it is a bit older?

Is it better to share your feelings with people who have been through the same or should you see a counselor?

Would you want to replace your dead child?

Should you give him/her a name?

There are many, many more… A lot of food for thought as you can see.