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.

06.30.14

by ELG Gray

The Luminaries

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 4/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, gets off to a pretty strong start. It has quite a gripping middle. But I was massively underwhelmed by the ending.

The trouble I had, I suspect, is in it’s re-readability. In my ignorance, this wasn’t really a category I had considered before, but I have learned (courtesy of my friend, Dan – fount of all knowledge) how critical it is in an award-winning book. And all the moreso here. Let me explain:

I read The Luminaries once, and mostly, I read it for the plot. It is (seemingly) a murder-mystery set during the New Zealand gold rush. It features a whore and a missing person and at least one ghost. So pretty action packed, and full of twists and turns. All along the reader notes that the chapters open with signs of the zodiac, and there are some overtures to other astrological symbolism. But, frankly, I pretty much ignored it. A bit too airy fairy for me. Besides, there was just too much going on! There are well over a dozen ‘main’ characters in the book.

The trouble is, the ending really quite clearly ISN’T about the plot. It’s a pretty big anticlimax. It is MUCH more about the astrology, and the paths the characters lives take. So I was massively disappointed. But upon reflection, if I read the book again and had the time/patience/inclination to take more note of the star signs throughout, I think it would be a much subtler, cleverer book. And, returning to my original point, a book only wins an award after the people reading it have read it a good many times. I suppose it makes sense that the panels of people giving the prize have to read and re-read countless books in order to give them all a ‘fair’ comparison. I suppose.

Whilst I can understand that a Great book could/should have multiple layers, I think that only really being ABLE to access them through multiple reads feels a bit inappropriate. I mean, I loved watching the Sixth Sense, and watching it a second time was pretty awesome, but I didn’t NEED to do so in order to get a lot of out of it. Also, the Sixth Sense’s running time is 107 minutes and the Luminaries weighs in at an incredibly hefty 832 pages. The prospect of reading it again makes my shoulder hurt.

All that said, it is a good book. And shout out to the only-28-year-old Ms. Catton. What a hugely impressive accomplishment pre-30. The very nice thing is that if The Luminaries is any indication of future work, I look forward to reading more by her again in the future!

06.22.14

by ELG Gray

The Sea, The Sea

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 3/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 2 stars

The strongest single word I can think of to describe Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea is:

Insufferable.

I realize that normally the word is applied to a single character, rather than an entire book (of them), but it still fits.

At first I found The Sea to be a bit quaint … sweet. A retired theatre-man by the name of Charles Arrowby turns out to have some hidden depths! He likes a more ‘basic’ life by the ocean, he starts to write his own memoirs/diary/autobiography. He has a way with words, and not too bad a means of doing ‘character sketches’ of the many people that have passed through his life. Sure, he’s a bit arrogant and self centred, but, so what?

But then the book keeps going, and not only does his own self-absorption become more apparent, so too does that of ALL the other characters. They all seem to be caricatures of themselves. Those whom Charles loves, we (the readers) quickly cannot stand. Don’t even get me STARTED on Hartley. Yes, he finds his ‘one lost love’. I don’t even feel bad telling you that. She’s … gross. Get over it.

Now, much of the point of the book is to really dig deep into the motivation of people – how love affects (and disaffects) us all, in so many ways. But do at the main characters need to be so insufferable to tell such a story? And did Murdoch need to throw in a few gratuitous hallucinations of dragon/Loch Ness style monsters and ‘Orientalism’ in the form of super-natural rescues? I really don’t think so. Maybe it was meant to be a nod to magical realism or some such. I just found it a bit peculiar, particularly in the context of this narrative.

So, clearly, not a winner for me. I read it. I’m OK with having read it. I liked BITS of it – there are moments of drama and of quiet smiles. But overall? Nah.

Nifty cover, though.

The Sea, The Sea

05.05.14

by ELG Gray

The God of Small Things

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 9/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 5 stars

I savored The God of Small Things. And savoring a book is a hard thing to do for a person not Reknowned for her patience. Someone whose personal tastes, normally, probably weight the page turner category a bit more than she should in the overall liking of a book. But not this time.

Cover of my copy of The God of Small Things. Check out the quote.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a masterpiece. I admit that I’ve nicked the word from the cover of my copy of the book which has a quote from a review that calls it ‘A masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way’. But still.

The book is about the childhood lives (or really, a week in their life) of twins Esta and Rahel, their immediate family, and the not-so-immediate consequences of tragedy and loss. It is heartbreaking – but you know it will be from the start – so you have time to prepare. And time to be swept along with the current of the book.

When I first started thinking about what I would write about this book, the analogy that popped into my head was a lazy river. Where you sit back, close your eyes, and when you open them again you’ve got a heck of a lot further than you thought you had. You moved and didn’t realize, as you were so set focusing on the here-and-now. The Small Things. And yet there you are. At the end.

The imagery and the language of this book carry you along. I (obviously) like the use of the occasional capital letter for Emphasis. So does Roy. Who also mixes sentence length, type, and rhythm enough to give variety, but consistently enough to give unity. The book is lyrical.

The plot itself at first doesn’t seem to have that much to it, but it deepens and thickens (remember that river? the depths? murky waters?). Rahel has Returned ‘home’ after years and years away, at precisely the same age as her mother was when she died (a vi-able dieable age). And the story is told in flashbacks, only they are so seamlessly interwoven around Rahel’s interactions with the main characters that ‘flashback’ is far too jolting a word. The story unfolds as Rahel remembers and rediscovers. Again, you almost don’t notice.

The God of Small things is beautiful and profound. You know those people who unwrap presents tortuously slowly, not tearing a single bit of paper? It’s painful, but you can’t tear away your eyes. This book is sort-of-like that. It’s a gift.

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.