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.

No Reading in Paris

I spent last week in Paris watching tennis at Roland Garros. In addition to most of my favorite players on the women's side I was lucky enough to have a ticket for the main stadium for one of Roger Federer's matches. :) Now I'm back home and back to work -and hoping to have more time for reading in the weeks to come!

This is my May wrap up:

Books read: 4

Books read in English: 1

Books read in Finnish: 3

Finnish books read: 0

Fiction: 4

Nonfiction: 0

Books reviewed: 1

List of books read in May:

-Dorrestein, Renate: Pojallani on seksielämä ja minä luen äidille Punahilkkaa (originally written in Dutch, not available in English as far as I know)

-Morgan, Terence: The Master of Bruges

- Shields, Carol: Ellei (Unless) (reread)

- Neville, Katherine: Kahdeksan (The Eight)

What a meagre list of books read I have for May! :( But there is also some books I started in May but am still reading that did not quite make this list. After many years I felt I wanted to read some Agatha Christie and am half way through Miss Marple's Final Cases now. I'm also reading Middlemarch by George Eliot for the first time, and I finally got into reading An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah, but have only had time to read the two first stories this far.

Well, I'll leave you today with a photo taken on a bit rainy day in Paris. And yes, that is Roger Federer sitting on the player's chair there on the right. :)

The Master of Bruges

I love making book lists for challenges, but the funny thing is that I actually seldom follow my lists. More often than not at least some of the books I read for a particular challenge have not been on my list and very often I have just kind of tumbled on them somewhere on the way. One such book is Terence Morgan's debut novel The Master of Bruges. I saw the book at work, loved the cover picture, found the cover text interesting, and decided to borrow it, and it was not until I had started reading the book, I might have even been already half way through it, before I realised that I could use this novel in a challenge. 

The Master of Bruges takes place in the latter half of the 15th-century in mainly Burgundy and in England. The master in question is painter Hans Memling. The novel, which mixes real life events & people and fiction, follows Memling's life from a painter's apprentice to a revered old master. The Duke of Burgundy takes young Memling under his wing and later Memling falls in love with the Duke's daughter Princess Marie. While an ordinary Marie could marry Hans, Burgundy cannot marry a painter and Hans Memling is to be dissapointed in his love of Marie, who marries Maximilian of Austria and rules Burgundy with him after the death of her father. However, the lives of Hans and Marie weave together quite dramatically all the way till the death of Marie.

At one point Hans, now a succesful painter of both religious pictures and portraits, gives shelter to some refugee Englishmen. Only after a while does he realise that the Dick and Ned he has been sheltering in his house are the dethroned King of England and his brother. It is the time of the War of the Roses. When the fortunes of war change King Edward IV returns to power and later Memling travels to England to finish a painting for an English customer, but he also gets invited into the court and becomes involved with what happenes to the sons of Edvard IV, the so called Princes in the Tower.

The Master of Bruges is an easy book to read. It is a thrilling historical novel, where the author has used his imagination and created a plausible story mixing facts and fiction. I enjoyed reading this book a lot. I only wish that I had used either the net or a book of Memling's art as a reference while reading. It would have been fun to take a look at the paintings mentioned in the book.

I read The Master of Bruges for the What's in the Name 3 -Challenge. The book's name has a place in it, thus this is my PLACE-book for the challenge.

One Long Overdue Review and a Wrap Up

Yes, yes, I know April is long gone :), and I am totally behind with my reviews, but unfortunately I had no time for posting these past few weeks (been happily busy with my dancing). I read one challenge book for the GLBT Challenge in April. So, here comes a short review:

The Others by Siba Al-Harez

I read this book for the GLBT Challenge and had very high hopes for it. It is a novel written by a young Saudi woman and set in the largely Shi'ite eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The novel tells the story of a young nameless woman at a girls' school who is seduced by one of her classmates. The glimpse into a culture and society so very different from my own was interesting, but the unhealthy, violent aspects of many of the relationships whether straight or gay in the novel alienated me from the story as did the odd figures of speech all over the text. The book was originally written in Arabic (it is described in the dust jacket as having been a bestseller in Arabic). I don't know Arabic, but I have an idea that it is a very poetic language full of great figures of speech. If that is true, then maybe the oddities were Arabic sayings translated all too literally into English. Anyway I found the text really difficult (as in heavy going) to read. Of course English is not my native tongue, so maybe that played a role, too. Actually it would be really interesting to hear what a native English speaker would say about the translation. All in all The Others was a dissapointment for me. I did not feel any sympathy towards the characters and I had to struggle to get to the last page.

This was my 5/12 read for the GLBT Challenge.

April Wrap Up:

Books read: 5

Books read in English:5

Books read in Finnish: 0

Finnish books read: 0

Fiction: 5

Nonfiction: 0

Books reviewed: 2

List of books I read in April:

-Al-Harez, Siba: The Others (see review above)
-Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
-Heyer, Georgette: The Reluctant Widow
-Laski, Marghanita: Little Boy Lost
-Shields, Carol: Happenstance