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Brilliant:  Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, that is.

I read a few ‘trashy’ books in between – I mean after reading John Le Carre‘s engrossing spy story (The Night Manager) and this one by Atkinson.  Easy-readers keep me awake, I’ve noticed.  I have an urge to get through with it, read until I know exactly what happens, I have no sense of actually enjoying the reading, am simply pushed forward, sleepless, till the bitter end, three in the morning, four in the morning, bleary eyed.   That’s just not good for being bright and cheerful during the day, and productive – I end up feeling groggy and miserable but work does not grant bail.

Voices of the Death by Peter Leonard did that to me:  it caused sleeplessness, somehow I just needed to know how Leonard was going to make sure that Harry Levin survived and that this very bad Nazi failed to win, he really was bad, so bad, that you almost stopped believing in him.   I had my doubts.  My son lives in Germany, I know some nice Germans, I don’t believe that all Bavarians are neo-nazis and gang up to attack innocent tourists just for the sake of it.  Well, they did not really, because it was all a set up.  That whole story turned around two survivors of a murder spree in an extermination camp during the second world war.  Too far-fetched, most of it, I think.  Never mind, it started as a good read, then became a gallop into the middle of the night and great relief when I’d actually done with it.

So now I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s latest book and it is as good as the reviews have proclaimed, no it’s better.  It makes me think not only about the writing process: do you kill off one of your characters or do you make sure that she survives, and start again?  That’s what Atkinson does, but it’s much less simple than it sounds.   The book is challenging, and so very readable.  You have to give yourself time to savour every single page, the story goes back and forth, keeps you on your toes, makes you wonder about your own life: what if?    This is a book about alternative worlds, different outcomes, the haphazardness of it all.

Yes, I love this book and actually, I don’t want to finish it too quickly!

Related articles

• Review: “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson – Chicago Tribune (articles.chicagotribune.com)
• Life after Life by Kate Atkinson (readfulthingsblog.com)
• Review: Life After Life, By Kate Atkinson (independent.co.uk)
• Does the Kindle pay for itself? (reviews.cnet.com)
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (thebookstop.wordpress.com)

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It’s 1991, the wall has come down; Smiley has retired, the Cold War is over; there is no longer the need for deep undercover, for the kind of spy craft that was required in the undercover world of east against west, of Smiley against Karla, western democracy against soviet style dictatorship.

I still miss Smiley and the Circle, I loved the The Spy who came in from the Cold, I adored Smileys People, grew up with Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, read and reread The Honourable Schoolboy, and watched all of the tv series and the films.

The standard for spy fiction in my mind was set by Le Carre and I almost regretted that when the wall came down that meant the end of new spy stories based on the east-west cold war relationship.

I got over it though, there is so much to read, there are so many great writers and, fortunately, Le Carre did not stop being an excellent writer and I greatly enjoyed reading amongst others The Constant Gardener, as well as seeing that film too (which came out in 2005 I think)..

Somehow I missed The Night Manager, his first novel set in a post-cold-war world,  which deals with drugs and weapon smuggling, and I have now made good.  I intend to finish it before his very new book, A Delicate Truth, comes out on 25th April.  Just in time for me to be able to download it before I go on my trip to Singapore (again).  I very much look forward to that: both to my trip and to reading the book!

It took a bit of effort to try to understand what is going on in the first few chapters of The Night Manager, so many characters are introduced and unless you keep a constant tab on names and on who is friend and who is foe, it is easy to get lost.   Le Carre has always been good at innuendo, at representing and developing characters through the way they speak and what they talk about, but you need to give these conversations your full attention.   Close attention pays off however and soon we being to move are inside the world of Jonathan Pine, who we meet as the night manager in a luxury hotel in Zürich.  Then there is the rich Mr Roper who has shady friends and who Jonathan holds (indirectly) responsible for the death of Sophie, brutally murdered.   That is only the very beginning however,and soon Jonathan decides to give up the night job and to do something, he has his connections to The Agency in England and he wants a kind of revenge – he becomes embroiled in the fight against arms and drug dealers.

Sophie had ‘belonged’ to Freddie Hamid, one of the Hamid brothers, who ‘between them owned a lot of Cairo’.  This is the world of the rich of people with a lot of money and it is not always clear how they came by their wealth.  Roper is very wealthy and someone like Leonard Burr in the London-based intelligence community does not like these people.  Burr’s character is drawn out nicely, by what he thinks about Thatcherism, and people who have suddenly become very rich.  This is an example of why I think Le Carre is such a great writer, his ability to draw out in one sentence the way the world has changed from cold-war spy craft to a different world:

Burr has met villains before, before Roper ‘

‘there had been others…. In the dying years of the Cold War, before the new agency was a twinkle in Goodhew’s eye, when Burr was already dreaming of the post Thatcher Jerusalem and even his most honourable colleagues in Pure Intelligence were casting about for other people’s enemies and jobs, there were few insiders who did not remember Burr’s vendettas against such renowned illegals of the eighties as the grey-suited billionaire ‘scrap metal dealer, Tyler, who flew standby, or the monosyllabic ‘accountant’, Lorimer, who made all his calls from public pay phones, or the odious Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, gentleman and occasional satrap of Darker’s so-called Procurement Studies Group, who ran a vast estate on the fringes of Newbury, and rode hounds with his butler mounted at his side equipped with stirrup cup and foie- gras sandwiches.’

None of these were in the league of RO Roper: Class, privilege, everything Burr loathed had been handed to Roper on a salver.  

Newspapers have started their reviews of the A Delicate Truth, for example here’s the link to the review in the Guardian.  There are more links at the end of this post.

It is interesting to read that Le Carre says that he never actually was a spy himself: but rather an MI5 officer happened to be based in Berlin, where he started writing about eastern Europe and spies, his ambition was to be a novelist.  The fact that he was given the green light to publish ‘The Spy who Came in from the Cold’ should give credence to his having made it all up, he would never otherwise have been allowed to publish it.  Nevertheless many of his readers (and journalists) have steadfastly assumed that he was in reality a spy who opened the books on what really happened  - vide: John le Carre: I was a secret even to myself

.

 I recommend all of Le Carre’s books

Related articles

• A Delicate Truth by John le Carré: Exclusive extract, part one (telegraph.co.uk)
• John le Carré reads from his new novel, A Delicate Truth (telegraph.co.uk)
• A Delicate Truth by John le Carré: Exclusive extract, part three (telegraph.co.uk)
• A Delicate Truth by John le Carré – extract (guardian.co.uk)
• John le Carré: ‘I was a secret even to myself’ (guardian.co.uk)
• The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John LeCarré (Victor Golloncz, 1963 {Penguin Audio, Narrator: Michael Jayston) (sophyanempire.wordpress.com)

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It feels slightly less raw, the sun has been out, there is hardly any wind.  The air is still cold, but the sun is trying hard to take over and establish some order.  After all, it is spring but we have not really noticed, except that my daffodils, tulips and hyacinths have tried to emerge.  Some have withered trying to brace the snow and the frost.  Nevertheless, our Easter bunny found shelter in between the shy daffodils.

Today it was sunny, really, and there is hope that we can discard the gloves and the scarves and the boots, we can take out the bicycles from the garage and tentatively plan some rides.

There will be spring, and then summer.

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English: Iain Banks, author, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Sad news today about Iain Banks - it reminds us how short life can be and how fickle.

 

I have read many books these last few months, but not a single one by Iain Banks, although not so long ago downloaded his Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks) – he gets so many good reviews that I realise it’s been a gap in my reading.  It is said to hear that someone so obviously in the prime of writing and such an acclaimed writer has terminal cancer.

 

As I noted, I have read quite a few books by different authors, although I have done little in the way of reviewing.  The usual excuses come up: too much time spent on writing work reports which leave me without much inclination to pick up the laptop once more in the evening or over weekends to write and post some more.

 

Amongst other books I read Toby’s Room by Pat Barker, for the second time, and appreciated it much more this time round.  Nevertheless, I do think Barker’s characters are emotionally kept at a distance from the reader.  There is trauma, but observed through the eyes of someone who does not want to be engaged.  Elinor in this novel comes across as fairly cold, she does not want to ‘engage’ with the (first world) war, wants to keep it at a distance, nevertheless, her friends and family are caught up in it, are destroyed by war and the horrors of war.  The intertwining stories of war, Elinor, her brother Toby, lover Paul, friend  Kit Neville, and fellow painters, are nevertheless gripping, and come together well.  Hermione Lee provides an excellent review of this book (and her other books) in the Guardian here.

 

I’ll catch up with some of the other books although I am seriously reconsidering my approach to this blog.  I want the posts to be short and snappy, rather than long and drawn out.

 

Related articles

 

• Iain Banks, my Fife friend and storyteller extraordinaire – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
• Iain (M) Banks has terminal cancer (iain-banks.net)

 

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Cover via Amazon

Reading Interesting Times and Iron Curtain alongside each other is very interesting – both books focus to greater (Applebaum’s) or lesser (Hobsbawm’s) extent specifically on communism during pre, during and postwar Europe and the impact it had, what it did to people and countries.  Eric Hobsbawm died in October last year, he was a lifelong marxist and communist historian who wrote in a clear and very insightful way about Europe, starting with the Age of Revolution (1789-1848).  The ‘Age of’ series consisted of four books, the last one was The Age of Extremes which deals more or less with Europe during the 20th century (1914-1991 to be precise).  I read him for the first time as an undergraduate student, the first book in the series, such a long time ago now!  Later I acquired the subsequent volumes only to lose them all again whilst travelling the world and unable to ship everything across.

Recently I re-acquired the first book and am also reading, for the first time, his biography ‘Interesting Times (a twentieth-century life)’.  And his account of his life is, definitely, very interesting: his closeness to the developments in Germany, Austria and then, just before the second world war started, his move to England where he was one of the many university students to join the communist party.  This followed his close links developed in Germany, first hand.  Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist, despite what he saw as the flaws and he was critical.

The Iron Curtain, however, is a real eye-opener on what happened behind the curtain, but summons a kind of understanding as to why people would join the communist party:

‘Disappointment with the failures of capitalism and democracy pushed many Europeans to the far left in the 1930s.  Many came to feel that their choices were limited to Hitler on the one hand or Marxism on the other‘, writes Applebaum (p.57), confirming Hobsbawm’s experience.

And until 1939 it seemed that it was quite possible not to think too hard about supporting the Soviet Union as a form of committed anti-fascism.  That changed, however, when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler.

Applebaum considers the crushing of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union in dedicated chapters in her book, treating each area in turn: Communists, Policemen, Violence, Ethnic Cleansing, Youth, Etc.  She develops these themes  in turn for each of the three countries she considers in her book, East Germany, Poland and Hungary.   I thought I knew quite a bit about the history of the second world war, but I really did not.  This book helps you understand how some of the cruelty that took place, often was so much tit for tat, people becoming dehumanized and you wonder how anyone would fare in such appalling circumstances, during and after the war.  Also, of course, countries could remain completely blocked off from the rest of the world, without telephone connections, with a state controlled radio.  It’s hard to remember how really cut-off life could be without smart phones, or even mobile phones or landlines, without internet, twitter, etc.  And it was not that long ago!

Hobsbawm reminds us how, during and between the world wars, it was easy enough in Europe ‘to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future’.  The three elements that distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations  to a new society could be summed up as follows:

1. Marxism – this provided a (scientific) explanation, predicting and testing the certainty of victory

2. The movement was truly international and intended for everyone (without distinction between ethnicity or religious groupings)

3. Finally it involved the tragic element: communists were ready for the worst: the party was born in persecution

These two books are truly fascinating, well written and not to be missed by anyone vaguely interested in Europe and its recent history.  It helps to understand how we have arrived at where we are now.  In particular of course it helps me understand my own family:  With a granddaughter whose other grandparents come from what used to be East Germany, other members of the family rooting from The Netherlands and England and then again Iran.  Well, you do really need to understand your history to make sense of it all!

 

 

 

Related articles

• Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum: review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Life Behind the Iron Curtain: The Ultimate Exercise in Big Government (VIDEO) (heritage.org)

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Norfolk – cold but sunny for one day only.

There were plenty of books again this year, now we need the time to read them.  After a brisk but very cold walk along the coast, we had the cod and chips in the seaview cafe.  Delicious.

Now we’ve tidied up the house, organised the desks and it’s back to work tomorrow.

Reading?  A christmas present:

The Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.   (Full title: Iron Curtain – The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956)Fascinating background to what happened in Eastern Europe prior to , during and immediately after the second world war.  I knew about it all, vaguely, I guess, however, you tend to forget that ‘until 1939 it was possible for all kinds 0f vaguely leftist, committed anti-fascists to support the Soviet Union without thinking too hard about it.’ (p.58).

With son and family living in what used to be east Germany it is a fascinating read and very well written.

Below is a review in the New York Times and one by a  fellow blogger.

Related articles

• ‘Iron Curtain,’ by Anne Applebaum (nytimes.com)
• Anne Applebaum’s IRON CURTAIN (kjmmyblog.wordpress.com)

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Wherever you are, I wish you a happy (reading) christmas, with lots of books, good music (whatever you like) and everything else that you deserve. My house is full and the space around this tree is slowly being filled with tantalising parcels and glittery stuff; there are a few more days to go, filled with anticipation, a panto, more (food) shopping and preparations and, according to the forecasts, lots of rain in this part of the world.
Have fun wherever you are – and thank you for keeping in touch even if I have been very absent these last few months.

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When I place yet another picture of yet another railway station on facebook whilst waiting for the train to take me cross country to Wales my son sends me a link to a poem by David Orr, The Train.  It sums up the sense of alienation, of no longer feeling part of the real world but of having entered an abstract alternative world where connections and connectivity have become lost:

‘Not that anyone will care, / But as I was sitting there / On the 8:07 to New Haven,/ I was struck by lightning, /

and then at the end:

So, ignored, I burned to death. / Later, someone sat in my seat / And my ashes ruined his suit./

I will be gone, leaving only my ashes: and all this frantic activity will have gone without trace, pop, and no one will care one way or the other.

I return late on Friday night, too tired to sleep, tossing and turning, mulling over in my head the implications of the extension of a contract awarded that will once more send me packing overnight bags and off on long train journeys, but work that will see me treading a very fine balance between keeping the peace (and trust) between clients.

My gadgets are a welcome relief in this frantic and tiring existence and I marvel at the ease with which I can now carry around an endless supply of books on my Kindle, whilst also collecting some amazing apps on my Ipad: there are the Shakespeare’s Sonnets including notes, performances, perspectives, and scholarly introductions; there’s an app on Leonardo da Vinci (Anatomy) with background readings and information on Leonardo, and the drawings, detailed and details and readings; a recent one I downloaded is on Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, that allows you to read the book but also explore topics and materials.

I have downloaded a World Atlas App that allows me to click and visit places that my book journeys take me on, places I have never visited.  I promise myself that once I retire from my job I wil spend days, weeks, months savouring every one of these apps from beginning to end.  For the time being I can click on them every so often as a distraction at the end of a day.

I am trying to finish the shortlisted Booker Prize books and am currently reading The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, a mesmerising story of loss and the prospect of memory loss, of forgetting what you have lost:

‘Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember.  My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore of the incoming tide.’

The story of Judge Teoh, or Yun Ling an English speaking Chinese woman, who resigns from her post and retires to Yugiri, the estate left to her by the Emperor’s gardener Aritomo and memories slowly unfold. Yun Ling and her sister were held in a Japanese prison of war camp on Malaya and the story opens up a world for me that I know little about: second world war camps and experiences in Asia, the treatment of the Chinese under the Japanese, the ethnic unrest and distrust.  Along the way, this is a story about the design of a Japanese garden in memory of Yun Ling’s sister who did not survive the camp.

I am impressed by the books on the shortlist: so far I have read Hilary Mantel‘s Bring Up the Bodies’ and Swimming Home’ by Deborah Levy.  The last one an unnerving story of an ordinary but uneasy holiday by two couples and one daughter in the South of France; and a holiday that is totally disrupted by the appearance of an unstable young woman.  Mantel’s book and writing surpasses all, as far as I am concerned: she writes so wonderfully well, the sentences and paragraphs creating a visual story in your mind, fluent and without gaps.  Considering Wyatt’s writing and whether or not he has committed treason by writing verses about the king’s wife, Wyatt says that once he has been taken to the Tower he won’t come out.  People forever wonder what it is that he has actually written, is it about real people and events or is it about an imaginary thing?

‘When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumag they dive below their meaning and skim above it.  They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. ’

and

‘A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.  A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. ’

This is a book that you will want to reread, for the simple beauty of the sentences and paragraphs but also for the story itself, of Cromwell and of a different picture of what life might have been like.

And so we slowly enter autumn, planting bulbs and marvelling at the mushrooms that come up in the most amazing and contorted forms across my garden.

Related articles

• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Man Booker prize shortlist announced (realitynow2012.wordpress.com)

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Canada by Richard Ford

I feel a bit lost now that I have finished this book.  It’s been keeping me enthralled these last few weeks – I haven’t had much time for reading so it’s taken a while.  I did not mind at all, as I enjoyed the slow pace of the story at my own slow pace.  Every sentence, paragraph and chapter takes its own good time, never boring, always just right.  You get into the mood of Dell’s own 15-year old mind in the first half of the book.  He describes, paints, elicits exactly what he sees and observes with such accuracy that it is as if you slowly witness a canvas unravel, as he paints it, stroke by stroke.  In fact, when Dell observes how Florence paints, sitting in the middle of Manitoba Street. ‘Her picture was nothing more than the view straight past the vacant post office and a pair of broken-in houses to the backs of the commercial row where I walked and that had been alive when Partreau was a whole town.’  He cannot quite understand why this is a subject for a painting ‘since it was right there for anybody to see any time, and wasn’t beautiful – nothing like Niagara Falls in the Frederic Church picture, or the flower arrangements my father painted with his numbers kit’.  She still has a lot of filling in to do, just like Dell still needs to fill us in on the rest of his story.

The book has been reviewed quite recently by just about every self-respecting newspaper, and it has received much praise.  Well-deserved.  I have not read any other novels by Richard Ford, but will do after this one.

The story has the most catching first liner ever and it has been quoted widely: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which happened later.  The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed.  Nothing would make complete the sense without that being told first.’  In  Part 1 Dell relates this story, how his father, an ex-army man, decides to rob a bank, helped by their mother who expects that it will provide her with the means to leave their father, with their two children, Dell and his twin sister Berner who are then 15.

This will affect them for the rest of their lives as their parents end up in jail and Dell is uprooted to Canada and Berner runs away.  This is a story of loss of childhood, of loss of what Dell expected his life to be, living in America, with his family.

As I said, I feel quite at a loss myself now as the story was somehow there in the background of my mind during the day, when working, travelling, writing reports, to come back to at night to read a bit more.

 

 

 

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It’s been a while…  I keep thinking about all the books I want to write about, the travelling, the many new impressions.  I just have not…  But I will.  Hang in there.  Time keeps running out, but then that’s the story of our lives, isn’t it?  I’ve taken the lazy option: tweeting at @corrivandestege but then, you say, that’s not the same as writing a proper review.  No it isn’t.  So I’ll try to fit in some more book reviews this summer.

I’ve been on holiday, did I tell you about it?  No, I don’t think so.  I went quiet after visiting my son in  Singapore and after my last mention of The Song of Achilles.  Wasn’t that a wonderful book?  I have had to buy a hard copy, as well as having it on my Kindle.  Just had to.  When books are that good, you have to be able to touch them.

My Kindle: I should say my new Kindle as I sat on my previous one, on the beach in Menorca, hidden carefully under my towel on my sunbed when going for a swim.   Only I forgot.  Sat on it, and felt absolutely and totally devastated.  Why on earth did I do that?  It was only the third day into my holidays and I had downloaded all those fantastic books that I was going to read and review.  Nope.  The screen was cracked and refused to clear up.

I spent the next few days scouring the bookracks on the side of the beach, mainly stacked with easy reading thrillers.

Whilst back at the apartment I managed to read my Amazon books via my Kindle app on my IPad - iPads are wonderful, however, not in the sun as the screen glares at you, your eyes hurt, they’re too heavy to hold up when you’re stretched out.  Besides, there’s the fear of sand, water or any other damage.  Reading Kindle books was restricted to balcony and apartment reading.  Nono in the swimming pool and on the beach.

Menorca was just beautiful, despite not having a decent  book to read in a comfortable way.

Now, having been back for what seems aeons, in reality only 4 weeks, I have many new books on my new Kindle and have read many as well.  Let’s just ignore all that, the summer is overtaking all of it, first there was the endless rain and the intense work schedules (actually, the work is still killing), then there was a week of glorious weather and now we have the  excitement of the Olympics, with rain starting all over again.  Britain in a nutshell.

What am I reading?  Canada.  By Richard Ford.  A fantastically gripping read.  There are some gems:

about the relationship with his father, Dell writes:

‘In truth, we were never very close, although I loved him as it were.’

He’s a very puzzled young man, and the story is a brilliant account of twins, finding themselves thrown into the world on their own when their parents, totally out of character, decide to rob a bank and think they can get away with it.  They don’t, of course.

That’s enough of a review for now.  I’ve got many more books there and will attempt to write some more proper reviews.