by ELG Gray

The Sense of an Ending

I’m back! After a ridiculously long hiatus (during which time I could only bring myself to read books with either a) happy endings or b) containing at Least One Of dragons, wizards, or gnomes), here we go again.

So I started with Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending; short and sweet. It was a superb re-introduction to the world of Serious Literature. (Not that I’m knocking the fab genres that have filled my last 18 months. Fantasy books, I love you.) I haven’t read Barnes before, and, in spite of an ending which I have a strong sense of leaving me unfulfilled, I really enjoyed my first foray into his work.

The Sense of an Ending is a personal history – the memoirs of Tony Webster, focusing on the events of his adolescence and young adulthood. It confronts suicide, sex, depression, history, mental health, and a host of other huge issues in a hyper personal, extremely specific way. In a way that is almost light hearted … only it isn’t, quite.

One of the most fascinating things about the book is the sense of perspective Tony, our protagonist and narrator, gives us. I like him. I want to believe him. But he proves that his own memory (and indeed his own interpretation of his memory) is suspect. Sometimes he owns up to that – other times less so. So what do we believe? Is there an answer?

As the title suggests, this book is really all about the Ending. Essentially the critical pieces of the puzzle are only unveiled in the final two pages. At which point it is far too late to ask more questions of Tony, or really to figure out what, exactly, happened. In many such books I end up Angry – WHY would the author do this to me!? What a friggin’ cop out! But somehow, with Barnes, I got the sense (pardon) that he Knew what he was doing. And that there IS an answer, if only I was smart enough to unpick it. The book meanders so much and yet is so concise, I really can’t fault it. It’s a splendid contradiction.

So I ask of you – please go read this book. And please tell me what you think of the ending. I would love to figure it out.

01.02.15

by ELG Gray

American Pastoral

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 4 stars

You know the expression, ‘so good it hurts’? Well, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is sort-of the inverse of that. It hurts so much … it’s good. The story is so gut-wrenching. So over-the-top human, you get sucked in and hurt along with the main character’s hurt. It definitely isn’t a happy book, but it is compelling and thought provoking.

In American Pastoral, the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish man living in the 1990s (now in his 60s) recounting not only his own life, but the life of his childhood local hero – Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov. Needless to say, the Swede’s charmed existence of being the realisation of the American Dream in the heavily Jewish New Jersey of the mid-century doesn’t last him through his entire life, though it takes Nathan some digging to uncover what happened. Precisely what *does* happen, and how the Swede himself feels about it is never entirely clear, but Roth does a phenomenal job of showing us our options for interpretation, and getting me to ponder imponderable questions about social upheaval and personal trauma.

The focus of the work (there are lots of intricacies, and don’t want to over-indulge details) is Nathan uncovering the fact that in the 60s/70s the Swede’s daughter is somehow involved in a local Vietnam war protest which involves blowing up a pharmacy. It kills an innocent pharmacist. How can a ‘together’, charming, good-looking man have produced such a child? Who is this teenage horror? Are her beliefs justified? Did she do it, anyway? And how does this effect his relationship with his own parents, brother, and wife?

As we read more and more about the back-story and the ‘present’ day (the book does a lot of flashing back, reconstructing, and surmising) it becomes teeth-suckingly painful. I wanted to read more, but had to pace myself simply because of the intensity.

Like Roth’s other book I’ve reviewed, Portnoy’s Complaint, the title character certainly has the tendency to ramble and rant, but here it is more targeted, more focused. And I developed a real sense of empathy for a few of the main characters which I lacked in Portnoy. To be honest, I didn’t at all expect the drama/trauma of what I subsequently experienced in reading American Pastoral, but it was well worth it. A definite must-read.

06.08.14

by ELG Gray

The Orphan Master’s Son

Pager turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought-provoker: 9/10
Overall: 4 stars

The Orphan Master’s Son is about North Korea. And it is brilliant.

What is so powerful about it is that it brings to mind other dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984, only The Orphan Master’s Son is (essentially) real. Or based in a real place, where unspeakable things happen. Perhaps I should caveat that to say that of course unspeakable things happen everywhere in the world, but the particular ones that Adam Johnson narrates in TOMS were beyond anything that my little Western mind had ever even considered within the bounds of modern reality. Shows what I know.

The book is in two parts – the first tells the story of the protagonist Pak Jun Do’s young-young adult life and the second is the story of Commander Ga. It is difficult to explain how the two relate without giving the essential narrative ploy of the book away (have you seen ‘The Sixth Sense’?) but Johnson’s story-telling technique in breaking up the book this way is elegant, simple and very effective.

Pak Jun Do grew up in an orphanage, and being an orphan is apparently the worst thing to be in North Korea. Though never overtly explained, the implication is that if you have no parents to protect you, you are at the whim of the State to make use of you as it sees fit. So the first half of the book is really a series of horrible, entertaining, mind-boggling misadventures. Tunnelling, pain training, starvation, kidnapping, sailing, shark attacks and (of course) American Sneak Attacks! are all present. It starts a bit slowly but, given all that action, it is safe to say that it builds and becomes engrossing.

The best way to summarise the second half of the book is to say that Commader Ga’s world is a world-turned-upside-down. Imagine putting your whole reality under a microscope and questioning every-single-tiny assumption. It’s like that. It’s scary (but not hide in the corner scary – it’s blow-your-mind scary).

Throughout the book Johnson tells the story of the Orphan Master’s Son through a few different voices, including that of the omnipresent loudspeakers blasting ‘news’ to North Korean citizens. The technique works to force you to consider the different perspectives in the book, but there are a few chapters/characters that I think have more limited success simply when juxtaposed with the Greatness of the others. Similarly, I couldn’t wait to find out what happens and to explore the other-worldliness of North Korea, but the book is 575 pages long. I noticed.

For such an undertaking, I can totally see why Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer for The Orphan Master’s Son. It’s astonishing – both in the setting/story and the way he manages to tell it. I heartily recommend.

04.06.14

by ELG Gray

Schindler’s Ark

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 10/10
Thought provoker: 8/10
Overall: 4 stars

Schindler’s Ark is an absolutely phenomenal book. This story of the holocaust is really only believable because it is true. It is fact that the work only barely qualifies as one of fiction that I have struggled hugely with rating it ‘fairly’.

The story of Oskar Schindler and how he saved the lives of over 1,200 Jews during WWII is outrageous. It is a tale of bravado, of love, of ridiculousness, and of cunning. And it is true. The reason that Thomas Keneally chose to write it as fiction seems to be because a) that was the fashionable thing to do in the early 80s and b) to allow him to guess at a few conversations of which there are no records.

But the story reads like non-fiction. It reads like a biography of Schindler – and regularly quotes the many people who were interviewed as part of the book. His Jewish advisers and beneficiaries, his stoic wife, some Polish/German observers and Nazi participants all contribute. As such, how do I compare it with the ‘actual’ novels on this list? Keneally gets credit, of course, for choosing the topic and the breadth of time covered. He crafts the swathes of anecdotes, formal interviews, and historical documents into a incredibly readable, tragic, brilliant work. But it isn’t ‘his’ story. Not in the way that Hilary Mantel inserts her imagination into Crowmwell’s Wolf Hall. Or at least, it doesn’t *seem* to be.

I gave it a four because I feel like I should be rewarding a novelist’s originality. Otherwise, this book deserves a 5. Keneally brings the characters and personalities off the page. Schindler is very much a flawed man; but one who became larger than life as circumstance and coincidence presented himself with an almost-godlike opportunity that he uniquely is able to seize.

The haunting image of Genia, in red, taken from the film Schindler’s List based on Schinder’s Ark.

I have read a lot about the Holocaust, and Schindler’s Ark stands above all the other books I’ve read. It does a brilliant job of balancing the vastness of the loss of life in that era with the reality of the pain and horror of individual losses. How the loss of many millions of lives is in fact the loss of one life, then another, many millions of times.

And, especially for those people who have seen the film adaptation Schindler’s List, who can forget little innocent 4-year-old Genia, dressed head-to-toe in her favorite color red as she toddles towards death? Keneally must have somehow managed to connect Schindler’s memories of the girl in red with the thousands of anecdotes of Cracow ghetto survivors to determine who the girl really was.

Schindler’s Ark is haunting. Triumphant. Read it.

02.22.14

by ELG Gray

Life of Pi

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 5/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 4 stars

The Life of Pi is a coming of age shipwreck story, about religion and zoology. What more can you ask for?

Yann Martel’s mind must work in such a different way. I suppose that is what creativity is. But the very fact that he managed to construct a story where an Indian boy can be Muslim, Hindu, and Christian (because he ‘just wants to love God’) grows up, literally, in a zoo and gets shipwrecked with a tiger (probably) tipped this book to a four from a 3 plus. That’s quite a lot to fit in. And he does so with aplomb.

What’s interesting to me about the Life of Pi is that I read it for the first time probably about 10 years ago and managed to remember so little of it. I usually can recall most of the major themes of a book, and with this one all I remembered was the shipwreck and the tiger. There’s Quite a lot more to it than that – so I do wonder why my brain didn’t retain them the first time ’round. Maybe I was too overwhelmed by the different themes? I have to say that I definitely enjoyed it more this time than my memory of it a decade ago. I *like* that a boy manages to be three religions. I choose to interpret that move in a way that pokes fun at the institution of religion (rather than the spirit behind it), which appeals to me. But there are enough religious overtures in the book that I also see there is room for different interpretation, and for controversy.

I liked the Life of Pi because I like the story. And the fact that really it is a story for the sake of a story, makes it all the more appealing. I’ll ruin then end if I explain that further, but if you’ve read it you will know what I mean. Which I quite appreciate. There are times when Martel pushes implausibility to become ridiculous, but I can still forgive it. There are a few needless points of view, and I found that I never got particularly upset at any of the more tragic turns of events – which is a bit surprising.

Still, I very much recommend Life of Pi as being something totally different, interesting, fun, and full of animal-life. It’s a grown-up bedtime story.