Nemirovsky, Irene: Suite Francaise

This is the 1st of the 2 World War II stories I'll begin my new year with (after a long leave of absence - it's not that I haven't been reading, but more of other things to do.. :Þ)

Irene Nemirovsky is a renowned Russian Jew authoress who married a Frenchman, thus she writes of WWII from the French point of view (in French). She is well-known for her book David Golder (which I will track down and read, hopefully soon). Suite Francaise was meant to be a set-of-5; unfortunately she had only finished 2 when she was forcefully taken away, and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers (even more poignant when I remember that I was just there, where she would have stood years ago!). How the book got published is a miracle as well, because her whole family was split up in the war, and her manuscripts were saved only because one of her daughters took it along with her, as a keepsake of her mother.

I would say it's not a typical WWII book, nor a typical book at all, as she weaves intricate stories of French people from different strata of society with the bombing of Paris and the eventual addition of German soldiers into French life. Her characters' lives cross in unexpected ways, and are totally believable and French. She does deal more with the middle- and upper-class people, which is to be expected since she was part of that society and would have known it well enough, but does give place for the lower classes in her book, in the sense of their dealings with the higher classes.

It gives us a keen insight into life during those days - how people coped with the onset of war and the influx of strange Germans whom the loved to hate and came to tolerate. You know she's writing about a war, but the war becomes a secondary thing, only something that has caused change, as you are drawn into the characters' lives. She realised that, in the years to come, people wouldn't be interested in the facts of history, but would be interested to know the commonplace details of life, and she made it a point to write about those, and put those into words in such an artful manner, resulting in this intricately crafted work.

The inclusion of her notes for the novel in the end of the edition I read made it clear she hadn't finished with this work yet, but if she had, it would have been one wonderful piece of work. The next appendix tells of her own war story, through correspondence between her husband and other people. The appendices are apt, melding Nemirovsky's history into her own story, her end becoming the story's end as well. It is as if Suite Francaise has become a mirror for who Nemirovsky was and felt, and it can only be so, that her work would tie in to her life.

Rating: **** out of 5

Dunmore, Helen: A Spell of Winter

This book won the Orange Prize in 1996. It tells of Catherine and her brother Rob who have been abandoned by their parents and are living with their grandfather, in relative opulence but with many limitations. We follow Catherine as she "fights free of the past" and breaks the "spell of winter that has held her in its grasp" (words in parentheses from the backcover of the book).

Frankly, I was disappointed. It was shocking in its way, which in itself was a disppointment, but I didn't get it. Perhaps there was a hidden meaning I didn't get, as with some of the prizewinners I've read, but really, there wasn't much point to the story. I ended up despising Catherine for her ways - seducing and sleeping with her brother, getting pregnant, trying to get rid of the lovechild in a backward manner and then having to bear the consequences. And in all this, the brother remained very 2-dimensional, while the grandfather was more 1-dimensional, almost never there.

It was a very weird indulgent story, it was as if she wanted to write this just because she wanted to write a story about a brother and sister who fall in love with each other. Read only if you want to be grossed out. LoL

Rating: *out of 5

Barker, Pat: Border Crossing

Pat Barker is an English writer, who won the Booker Prize for her book "The Ghost Road" in 1995. I was actually looking for that book, but they only had some of her other books, including this one- Border Crossing (written after the Booker Prize success, in 2001).

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It's simply told, focusing on the two protagonists - a teenager who was committed for murder as a child, and the psychologist who enabled him to be trialled in an adult's court. And as the tale is told, she delicately weaves in insights into a juvenile offender's psyche, constructing a picture of a child with a sad background leading a sad life. In the end, I felt that I should feel disgust at this child and what he'd done, yet I felt pity for him too, for the life he's had so far. I guess once you get to know a person's history, it's hard to hate that person, and that's what Pat Barker has done.

I'm a bit disappointed that the suggestion that the child murderer had sought out the psychologist to take revenge for the part the psychologist played in his sentencing didn't get resolved properly, but that's a small thing. This is a subtle book, good for reading at face-value, or for delving deeper into the psychological part and the imagery.

If this book was good, I'm looking forward to her Booker Prize-winning one!

Rating: ****out of 5

McCaffrey, Anne and Todd: Dragon's Kin

I love Anne McCaffrey and her dragons of Pern. I'm not actually sure who started me on them, but it would likely have been Sterf. She spun such a wonderful world where dragons lived, defending Pern from the fall of Thread.
She's quite old though (81 years!), and with this book she's handed down the world of Pern to her youngest son, Todd. They write quite well together - sometimes a bit simplistic in this book I feel, but overall it had the same pull for me as the other dragon-related Anne McCaffrey books. And this isn't actually about a dragon, but a dragon's kin (thus the name of the book), called a watchwher, which is sort of a mini-dragon which can "see" heat. This new addition to the dragon family was a really good idea, because it gives Todd McCaffrey fodder for his new books. Hopefully he still has ideas about dragons themselves too! Looking forward to sampling some of his solo writings.

Rating: ***out of 5

Berg, Elizabeth: The Year of Pleasures

Another book from Berg, and a thin one compared to her other ones that I've read. And it's a pretty low-key and straightforward book as well!

However, Berg still delivers her keen insights even in the lightness of this book. Here she tackles the bereavement of a widow, and how she finds the peace and pleasure her dead husband would like her to have. Her journey from grief to peace is a poignant and believable one, even the number of times the principal character falls back into sorrow then leaps into hope.

It's a believable warm book, and very suitable for summer reading. :)

Rating: ***out of 5

Golding, William: The Spire

William Golding is of "Lord of the Flies" fame, and this book seemed to be thin enough to be a short sample of his other works.

In fact, it was quite hard to get my mind into the book. On first glance, the premise of the book is simple - the dean of a church aspires to build a spire (pun intended) on his church but hits on snags on the way, and I was wondering how he could make a story out of it. He actually delves deeply into the psyche of Dean Jocelin, the main character, exposing his thoughts and feelings, and increasingly, his madness. Golding does this pretty well, and though Dean Jocelin struck me as overly neurotic, I'd guess that was the persona Golding was after, and so his wordsmithy worked.

He also adds lots of subplots and confounding factors - the caretaker and his wife, the master builder and wife, etc. All of which would add up to an eventful read. However, he doesn't state the obvious sometimes, and leaves the reader to guess at the outcomes of several happenings. The truth outs later in the course of the story, of course, but this obliqueness can be quite irritating.

It was hard to get through the book, but once you do that, you'll be rewarded. For me, that reward was the realisation of the meaning of the book, or at least, my interpretation of it. I realised that Dean Jocelin could be considered one with his small church without foundations, and as the forming spire played havoc with the church's foundations, it was also playing havoc with the dean's mental and spiritual foundations. Similarly, if there are no suitable foundations in a person's life, any high aspirations that the person means to build could cause the foundations to buckle, and the whole structure may come tumbling down.

That's the amazing thing about Golding, and a good reason why he rightly won a Nobel Prize for Literature - he can write this kind of inaccessible book at first glance, but its underlying message is not hard to get at, and that message is a pertinent one indeed. So while this isn't his best (Lord of the Flies probably is) it IS a good thought-provoking book.

Rating: ***out of 5

Zusak, Markus: The Book Thief

I was attracted to this book at first because of 2 things:

1. It was a story about books, and book-stealing no less!

2. It was a story told by Death him-/itself. The first line of the book jacket synopsis and one of the first lines in the story is: "Here is a small fact: You are going to die." How appropriate for Death to say that.

In the end though, it was this 3 aspects that drew me into the story:

1. The well-elaborated plot, not only about books and book-stealing (though those books were an integral vein in the storyline) also about the Germans who suffered in the 2nd World War, and the conditions during that tumultuous time. I think a lot is said about how the Jews suffered, and rightly so, but the Germans not involved in the war suffered as well, like that Malay proverb about the innocent deer (kancil) in the middle of a war between the elephants and the tigers suffering (or something like that...). This book brings that suffering to light, while weaving a magical story about a little girl and her love for books.

2. The characters in the book are well thought out and well brought out in the telling of the story. Everyone gets exposition where due; everyone's story is known in some detail. I especially like the main character as she grows with the ever-worrying circumstances around her. Death as narrator is okay, but more on this later.

3. Zusak's style of writing is amazing. I don't know whether it's because English isn't his native language, or it's just that he's found his own inventive ways of description, but there are many new turns of phrases and descriptions of characteristics that at first seemed slightly odd (with the strangeness that new feels) to me, but came to make me delight in reading the story. All these phrases he uses seem so apt, no cliches at all.
The way he structures the book is superb as well - there is no feeling of discontinuity between the different subplots of the story, and Death's interjections within the story helps give the overall feel to the setting without breaking the story up.

2 things I didn't really like:

1. Death as portrayed by Zusak is a bit too human for my liking. To me, Death sounded more like a human who was saddled with this burdensome task of carrying human souls away, rather than more like, well, Death. The only other person who's written about Death from a 1st-person narrative is Pratchett, and even his Death has some kind of aloofness/untouchability that I feel Death should have.

2. The last line - it doesn't really make sense, or fit into the story, for me. I'm not going to put it here, in case you actually want to read the book (which I really highly recommend!) but it's the kind of sentence that makes you think why it's so when you read it, and it's fine as a sentence by itself, in the context that it's in. But taken with the whole bulk of the story behind it, and with the important role of ending line, it just doesn't make sense. There definitely are more suitable sentences to end a superb novel like this with!

Hopefully I haven't leaked out too much of the story (I don't think so anyway) to spoil the story for you, because YOU SHOULD READ IT! Enjoy...

Rating: *****out of 5