The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Maggie O'Farrell is a British author, who has written 5 novels this far. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is her fourth novel. It was first published in 2006. 

I had had The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox on my TBR list for a long time. Just like with The Picture of Dorain Gray I am really happy I finally read this novel.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox starts with Iris, a young single woman receiving the information that she should come and pick her great-aunt up from the mental institution where she has spent over sixty tears of her life. Little by little as the story progresses we get to know (at least most of) the story that lead to Esme's being forced into an institution at the age of 16. The story is told from three points of view: Esme's, who recollects her childhood and youth, Iris's contemporary view, her problematic love life and the surprise of finding a, maybe mad, great-aunt (or is she mad after all?), and thirdly through the fragmentary memories of Esme's sister Kitty, who has Alzheimer's.

The novel has been said to be gripping and "a horrifying story of jealousy and betrayal" and I wholeheartily agree with these comments. It was astonishing, apalling really, how totally Esme's parents seemed to misunderstand her, how horribly she was treated by her own family and also by some others. I also liked Iris's storyline, small as it was, and would actually have liked to know more about her. All in all I found O'Farrell very clever in revealing small parts of the plot along the way.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox was a quick and enjoyable read. I am pretty sure I will read more O'Farrell in the future. But now I'm facing the terrible problem of which, oh which, book to read next! I have too many possibilities...

Teaser Tuesday 29.6.2010

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share 2 teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers.
• Share the title and author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

I'm trying to fill in some gaps in my reading and am at the moment in the middle of two totally different classics: Middlemarch by George Eliot which I'm trying to get read for Nymeth's readalong, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov which I have read many praising comments about. My teaser this time is from The Master and Margarita.

'Among other things,' the prisoner recounted, 'I said that all authority is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will be no authority of the Caesars, nor any other authority. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for any authority.' [p. 36]

What are you reading at the moment?

The Lovers of Algeria

It's the long Midsummer weekend over here and I have been celebrating with enjoying the days off and, surprise, surprise, reading! :) I spent most of yesterday with one of the books from my latest library loot, The Lovers of Algeria by Anouar Benmalek.

The Lovers of Algeria is a heart-wrenching novel about two lovers separated by circumstances they could not have done anything about. It is also a novel about the insanity of war, terrorism and colonialism.

The story begins in 1955, when Swiss Anna, a former circus artist, and Arab Nassreddin have just been married in his native Algeria. Forty years later Anna returns to Algeria to visit the graves of her and Nassreddin's murdered twins. Algeria in the 1950s was not an easy place to be for a mixed race couple, and Algeria in the 1990s is a very dangerous place for foreigners. As Anna decides to try and reach Nassreddin's old homestead she employs the little Jallah, a street-urchin from Algiers to act as her "grandson". Before leaving Algiers Anna sends a telegram to Nassreddin without knowing if he is still alive or not.

Something very bad happens during Anna and Jallah's trip. Here the writer very cleverly turns the narrative into reminiscences from Anna's, and also Nassreddin's childhood and yound adulthood. We get to know how they actually met and fell in love and what happened to their children.

Well, I think I'll leave telling about the plot here. You just have to read The Lovers of Algeria yourselves to learn more about what happenes in the story! All I can say that this was a book that I did not want to put down. I started reading it on Friday and spent most of Saturday with it in order to finish it as quickly as possible. I wanted very badly to know how the story ends! And I must say that even the ending was very well written.

This is the only book I've ever read that is set in Algeria. My only critisim with the book is that it was sometimes a bit too violent for me, but I also acknowledge that the violence was an integral part of the narrative and simply had to be there.

I'm a bit behind with my participation in the Reading the World Challenge. I did not finish any book for the challenge in May, and will thus not be able to complete the challenge in time in July, but I hope it is okay to bend the rules a little. :) I will count The Lovers of Algeria as my Africa book for the challenge. Let's see if I then try and read my two remaining books (South America and Antarctica) both in July or I might also read one in July and the other in August.

Icelandic Memories

 

This week I had the great priviledge of participating in a creative learning camp in Reykjavik, Iceland, where ca. 70 library professionals from 7 different public library systems in the Nordic countries spent two work-filled but fun days creating ideas for common Nordic concepts for public libraries. On our last day in Iceland some of us spent the evening taking a tour to see some of the natural wonders of Iceland. Most of the photos in this post are from that tour. The link above is for the Nordic Camps Ning. If  you want to see some pictures from the camp, here's a few of group 6 to which I belonged to. I'm the one wearing the gray Greenwich hoodie. :) And if you are wondering what an earth are we doing in the first few pictures... We were preparing our final presentation, or pitch as they were called on the camp, and we decided to do that through a little play. Much more interesting and fun than a couple of PowerPoint slides, don't you agree? :)

During my stay in Reykjavik I also learned about the Literature.is -website, which is an English language website dedicated to contemporary Icelandic fiction writers. Do take a look! The site also lists all the translations available of the books.

1. The photo above: Geysir park. This was the most spectacular of the geysirs.

2. Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland

3. A lake in a volcanic crater

4. Standing on the American Plate & looking over the rift area towards the Euro-Asian Plate

5. Another picture of the geysirs

6. The Golden Waterfall (Gullfoss)

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's only published novel, is a book loved by many. I had tought of reading it many times along the years, but somehow just never managed to get to it. Then finally I bougth a pretty, little Penguin Classics edition of my own. Still it took me months to actually read the book. I'm very glad I finally did.

I knew the general idea of the book before reading it. The man would stay young while his portrait would age. But other than that I did not quite know what to except. I reasoned that this could not be a humorous story full of that famous wit of Oscar Wilde. Actually I was wrong. Actually the book was very different from any of my expectations! There was, maybe not humour, this was surely not that kind of a book, but wittiness and great charm, and also degradation and pure evilness. I found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a multifaceted story that simply cries for a reread.

I will count The Story of Dorian Gray as one of the books read for the GLBT Challenge because of the author.

Train to Trieste

As I mentioned earlier I 'm again very much into reading books set in Middle/Eastern Europe. I guess, for me, nothing beats The Cellist of Sarajevo, the best book I read last year and one that immediately went into my all time favorites list, but there really is so many interesting novels set in Middle/Eastern Europe. I'm writing Middle/Eastern because geographically some of those countires are in the middle of Europe (actually Finland is geographically much more in the East than many of these countries) and here in the EU we are trying to learn and talk of them as Middle Europe, where as back in the day all those now ex-communist coutries were called Eastern Europe for a political reason. 

I have had a pause in reading novels about the Balkans or any of the other Middle/Eastern coutries, but I must say, that I wanted to read Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu immediately when I say it in a bookstore simply because of its name. Back then, however, I tried to be reasonable and did not buy it. :)

The copy I read now is form the library. But Trieste! That town has always had a magical sound in my mind! It is a port from where ships left for exotic places already in the 18th century, and I have wanted to visit Trieste for a long time. Thus, it was the name of the book that made me pick it up in the first place.

Trieste in the book, is not only a real town, but also a symbol. The train to Trieste is a symbol of freedom, and a concrete way to freedom for some in Ceausescu's Romania. And that is what the novel is really about. It is a story of Mona Manoliu, a young woman from Bucharest, who falls in love with Mihai, a boy from another town. They meet during holidays and at one point Mihai even moves to Bucharest, alledgely to be closer to Mona. But in Romania in the 70s and 80s it is difficult to know who to trust, who is for Ceausescu's dictatorship and who is against it, who works for the resistant and who is an informer. Mona begins to doubt Mihai. Maybe he is a member of the secret police after all? When Mona's father gets repeatedly harrassed by the secret police and some people close to her die in suspect circumstances, Mona's parents think it better that she leaves the country. The next twenty years Mona tries to build a new life as an exile in a new country, but in the end the loose ends of her past make her return to her native Romania.

I liked this novel a lot. I liked Radulescu's writing and I especially enjoyed the first half of the book that was set in Romania. At some point during the story of Mona's exile years I lost my interest just a tiny bit, but it was soon rekindled, and the ending was just perfect. I would warmly recommend Train to Trieste to anyone interested in a book set in Romania or really for anyone wanting to read a love story that has a bit more substance to it and is not so straight forward than many others.

Random House's page about Domnica Radulescu and her book is here.

An interesting video interview of Domnica Radulescu can be found here.

Life According to Literature, Take 2

I did this meme once last year. You'll find that post here. Already back then I thought this would be something fun to do every once in a while, so here comes:

Life According to Literature, Take 2:

To answer the following questions I'm using only books I have read this year (2010). Click on the title to find more info on the book. 

Describe yourself: Empress of the World

How do you feel: Little Boy Lost

Describe how you currently live: In This House of Brede

If you could go anyway, where would you go: To the Lighthouse

Your favorite form of transportation: The River

Your best friend is: The Lieutenant

You and your friends are: Bluestockings

What's the weather like: Greengage Summer

You fear: Consequences of Sin

What is the best advice you have to give: How Beautiful the Ordinary

Thought for the day: Rapture

How I would like to die: Before the Throne

My soul's present condition: Happenstance

Library Loot 16.6.2010

It's been quite a while since my last Library Loot post. I love to read what others have borrowed, but have just not managed to post anything about my own library finds. As I work in a library, it is very seldom that I come home with a big loot, as most of my library finds are either books I have reserved or books that just have caught my eye while working, but probably most days I either return something or borrow something. :)

Library loot is a a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encouragers bloggers to share the books they have checked out from the library. If you would like to participate, Mr. Linky lurks on Eva's blog this week.

Here's my loot in alphabetical order:

• Anouar Benmalek: The Lovers of Algeria
  This is a love story and a novel about Algeria's tragic past. A Swiss woman returns to Algeria  to search the names of her murdered children on a cemetery. They have been murdered in the 1960s during Algeria's fight for independence.
• Olga Grushin: The Concert Ticket
  This book is a novel about a Russian family struggling through difficult times. An exiled composer is rumoured to be returning for a concert and there might be tickets for sale. The acquisition of a ticket becomes an obsession for the family of Anna.
• Askold Melnyczuk: The House of Widows
  This is said to be "a bewitching maze of storytelling that takes its postwar American hero on journeys to and through Europe to discover the secrets of earlier generations of his family.
• Montherlant, Henry de: Chaos and Night
  This is said to be a modern take on Don Quixote. Don Celestino is an old man, who has been exiled from Spain for over two decades. When Spain starts to open up in the 1960s, his daughter wants to go to her native country and Don Celestino has no choice but to follow.
• Maggie O'Farrell: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
  A story of jealousy and betrayal. In 1930s something has to be done to Esme, the unconventional daughter of the Lennox family. Decades later a young woman receives a letter telling her that her great-aunt is to be released from a psychiatric hospital. She has never heard of this great-aunt before and also other members of her family seem unable to answer her questions.
• Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North
  "An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions."
  Several experts on the Arabic Summer Reading Challenge page mention this book as one of their five must read Arabic books.

ps. Here are some photos of our library, if you want to take a look.

Teaser Tuesday: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share 2 teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers.
• Share the title and author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser today is from a classic: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. And I did not quite manage with 2 sentences. :)

" The love that he bore him -for it was really love- had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now." [p. 115]

Rapture

Oh my, I don't know how to review poetry! I read quite a bit of poems, I have my favorite poets whose work I read again and again (Sylvia Plath is my absolutely favorite poet), I have a little brown and gold book where I collect poems I like and which I illustrate with photos I have taken myself. I am no stranger to poetry, but I have no idea how to review it! Well, as tennis legend Martina Navratilova wrote in her excellent book Shape Your Self: An inspirational Guide to Achieving Your Personal Best "if you are afraid of something, you won't achieve anything", so here goes:

Carol Ann Duffy is a highly merited Scottish poet and playwright. In 2009 she became the first female Poet Laureate in Britain. I own a copy of her prize-winning 2005 collection Rapture, which I have read before, but reread now for the GLBT Challenge. Duffy is herself a member of the GLBT community and some of her poems describe love between women. Rapture is a love story from falling in love to the grief at the end of a relationship. It is an excellent collection and some of her setences are very, very beautiful. My favorite poem in the collection is a poem called Finding the Words. And my favorite line in the collection is from a poem called You, where she writes, that falling in love is glamorous hell. I tought that was brilliantly put! ;)

You can read You here and listen to Finding the Words here.

Jeanette Winterson's interesting interview with Carol Ann Duffy can be found here.

The American Girl

Monica Fagerholm is an award-winning Finnish author, whose books have found a large audience not only in Finland but also in other Nordic countries. She is also one of the not so many Finnish authors whose books have been translated into English. Her novel Wonderful Women by the Water was a huge success in Finland, as was the movie made from the novel. In February another one of her novels, The American Girl, was published in the US by Other Press.

I find it interesting to see which Finnish books get translated into English, as sometimes it seems quite random. Many books well worth a wider audience (we are less than 5,5 million here) never get translated and of those that do not so many into English. I don't know, there probably aren't so many possible Finnish to English translaters out there, or maybe it is a question of marketing... I mention the Finnish to English translators because Finland is a bilingual country (the national languages are Finnish and Swedish) and just by browsing the translated Finnish fiction section in my favorite bookstore I got the feeling that just maybe Swedish to English translaters are easier to find. Finnish just isn't one of the world languages and compared to Swedish it surely is much harder to master for an English speaker -well, for anyone (exept maybe for our southern neighbours the Estonians) probably! ;) Monika Fagerholm belongs to Finland's Swedish speaking minority. So, as I read The American Girl in Finnish, I , too, was reading a translation. :) And why was The American Girl translated into English and published in the US? In addition to its literary merits I guess the answer to my question is rather obvious... ;)

The American Girl starts in late 1960s with Edwina (Eddie) de Wire, an American girl, coming to a small Swedish speaking community near Helsinki, Finland to visit relatives and later she drowns in a pond. When Eddie's Finnish boyfriend Björn then hangs himself lots of speculation on his role in Eddie's death follows. The novel, however, is not a thriller, it is a multifaceted coming of age story concentrating mostly, but not solely, on two girls, best friends Sandra and Doris, who later also have a sexual relationship with each other. Doris had a very difficult early childhood with abusive parents while Sandra had a cleft lip (that was later operated) and lived in the shadow of her glamorous parents. Both girls get almost obsessed with the fate of the American girl and try to find out what really happened to her.

Fagerholm's language is innovative and she uses a kind of ebbing and flowing writing style consisting of many fragments of the story told by multiple narrators. The Finnish translation is excellent. I hope Katarina E. Tucker's English translation is, too. The sequal to The American Girl was published here in October. According to Kyle Semmel's review of The American Girl the sequal will be published in English next year.

I enjoyed reading The American Girl. I liked Fagerholm's writing style, which some might find confusing, but I found quite fabulous and I also liked the tragic story of Sandra and Doris. I already borrowed the sequal from the library and will start reading it soon. I highly recommend The American Girl to anyone wanting to read some more Northern European lit!

More about The American Girl on the Other Press website here.

I will count The American Girl towards my personal FINNishing Up -challenge. I am so lagging behind in this challenge...

Teaser Tuesday: Train to Trieste

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by LizB of Should Be Reading.

The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share 2 teaser sentences from somewhere on that page.
• Be careful not to include spoilers.
• Share the title & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesday participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

I'm reading quite a few books at the moment: short stories, a classic, two more or less cosy mysteries and a novel set in Romania during the Ceausescu dictatorship. My teaser is from the latter. The novel is called Train to Trieste and it is written by Domnica Radulescu, who was born in Romania but has lived in the US since 1983. I'm only on page 32 of the book now, but it seems really promising. 

Here comes the teaser. Mona Maria has just met her boyfriend and starts sneaking out early every morning to meet him. Before going out she wants to wash her hair. I love the subtle humour in Mona Maria's comment on the Party. :)

" Sometimes we don't get water at all early in the morning or late at night. The Party is always trying to make us economize for something, heat or energy, frantically pushing us towards the Socialist utopia that will be here any day now." [p. 13]

Last year I became very intereated in reading novels set in Middle & Eastern European countries. It seems that that interest has returned. :) I have two books set in Bosnia Pretty Birds by Scott Simon and Sarabande by Marcus Fedder , and a collection of contemporary Slovene fiction with the lovely name Angels Beneath the Surface in my TBR pile. Hmm, I really should get to Angels Beneath the Surface before my upcoming trip to Slovenia in July...

What are you reading at the moment?

The Book List: 3 Books I Thought I Would Hate But Ended Up Loving

The Book List is a fun, short meme hosted by Rebecca over at Lost in Books. This time we are asked to name three books we thought we would hate but ended up loving.

I must say it was surprisingly hard to think of three books I thought I would hate or even dislike before starting to read them, as I hardly ever start a book I do not want to read! My philosophy is to read books I like. Books are for pleasure, they are someone new I want to befriend with or old friends I want to revisit. There is hardly ever a feeling of having to included in my reading. I read because I want to, what I want to and mostly when I want to. Still, sometimes especially the timing might go wrong. 

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I bought this junkster, because the idea of an early 19th century Britain where magic is real appealed to me. I also liked the fact that the book uses footnotes. (Yes, I'm strange that way! :)) However, after buying the book I lost all interest in it and it sat on my bookself unread for a number of years. I even thought that I might never read it, before I finally tried it last year for the 9 for 2009 challenge and ended up liking it quite a bit! :)

2. Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is one of my favorite writers. I bought this book, subtitled Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, because it was written by her and in some of the essays she writes aboutthe work of another of my favorite writers Virginia Woolf. But it was more because I felt I should own the book than for any storng desire to actually read it, as at the time I was quite allergic to literary critisim or really any nonfiction about books and writers. I did not want to read someone explaining fiction, I just wanted to read the books myself and make up my mind about them on my own. Don't worry, I have since improved on that aspect, largely thanks to Winterson and Art Objects. After my initial hesitance I ended up loving every page of the book.

3. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This is a perfect example of wrong timing. The first time I read this novel set in revolutionary France I was simply too young to really appreciate it. I reread it two years ago and loved the story.

What are the 3 books you thought you would not like but ended up loving instead? To participate in this meme visit Rebecca's blog and use the Mr. Linky function over there.