When God Was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman
Winman's debut novel is narrated by Elly, the daughter in a family of four living in Essex. She looks up to her older brother Joe and he protects her from the unknown world that looms, often menacingly, beyond the safe boundaries of home. Elly is at odds with many of her classmates, but she makes one strong and endearing bond with 'Jenny Penny', the girl with frizzy hair and an equally wild Mother. She also finds solace and comfort in her pet rabbit, 'God'.
The novel spans four decades, and moves between Essex, Cornwall and New York. Elly's narrative voice is so distinct, it really drew me in to her character. It echoed with the hopes and fears of any child and reminded me of the excitements and disappointments of growing up. Elly takes us on a journey from childhood to adulthood. She maps the nature of a world that is often frightening, but can always be triumphed by love. The book is essentially about family, and connections; love in all its forms. It is about the power of our relationships and their ability to see us through the trials and tribulations that life has to offer. I was going to try not to use the word 'heartwarming', but it sort of is.
Habibi - Craig Thompson
Having read 'Blankets' (2003), I was excited about this graphic novel from the same author. I wasn't disappointed. It was totally different, but I found myself once again in awe of Thompson's craft.
I found this book more impressive than 'Blankets'. It took Thompson seven years to complete. The illustrations are incredible. They are in black and white, and so intricate in design. Panels illustrating the narrative are enhanced by layers of scripture in calligraphy and decorative mosaics.
The story too is ambitious. 'Habibi' translates as 'My Beloved'. The book unfolds the story of Dodola, an Arab girl sold into child marriage by her poor parents. Her husband produces script and teaches Dodola to read. Her love for stories blossoms, and weaves its way through the narrative. Dodola elopes with Zam, a young African child slave. They set up home in a derelict ship in the desert and Dodola raises Zam as her own. Dodola's story-telling sessions with Zam provide a device through which Thompson explores the similarities between the faiths of Islam and Christianity.
The book occurs in a timeless Middle East and explores the roots of Christianity and Islam as well as the love between two characters brought together by fate from different backgrounds. They are ultimately everything to each other: brother, sister, mother, father, lover, friend. It's all there in the one true, trustworthy relationship either of them are ever able to experience in life. A beautiful book, and such an accomplishment for Thompson.
Click here for a lovely peek at the making of the book and the creation of the illustrations.
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
This book has been sat on my bookshelf since it was first published in 2000. It came to Uni with me, to a new flat, and now home again. I knew it received rave reviews, and I loved 'On Beauty' (which followed 'White Teeth', and somehow I got round to reading first). I knew I liked Smith's writing. All in all, I'm not sure why it became such a chore to pick this book up. Sometimes when a book sits on a shelf for too long, it loses appeal.
Anyhow, I am glad I finally got to grips with it and devoured the thing. It was worth it. It tells of the post-war friendship between Samad Iqbal (of Bangladeshi descent) and Archie Jones (of English descent). The men meet whilst serving in the British army during World War II. Both men marry following the war. Samad's wedding is a traditional arranged Indian affair to Alsana. Archie marries the Jamaican Clara, much younger than he is. Clara is keen to escape the cluthes of her devout Jehovah Witness mother, Hortense.
Both families live in Willesden, where they raise their children. The story maps the lives of the two families, as well as introducing another, quintessentially English, and annoyingly egotistical family who fly into the web of the two aforementioned families.
Smith has been prized simply for her ability to write, for one. Secondly, for her balls and tenacity in doing so. She writes about multicultural London and its immigrant communities with honesty, humour and no sense of eggshell stepping or cracking. There are in fact, no eggshells, because she doesn't see the topic as a risk or a problem. She just talks about it, and evokes each culture, as it is. Perhaps her own multicultural roots allow her a wider frame of reference and authenticity to do so. Or perhaps all of that is bullshit too. Does it matter where she comes from? The story speaks for itself because the characters seem authentic and true.
It's a good read and as suggested by many critics, a pretty impressive debut for a 24 year old fresh out of University. In all honesty, I finished it feeling a little pinch of jealousy.
Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
Rulfo was born, lived and wrote in Mexico. This was his only novel, written in 1955. The book pre-empted the 'boom' of Latin American literature that occured in the 1960s and 1970s. The boom saw many writers drift away from the realist narrative modes adopted from Europe, and the birth of the magical realist genre. The mixture of magic with the everyday characterises much of Latin American literature during this period. 'Pedro Páramo' was one of the first novels to embrace the genre and it is up there with the likes of Jorge Luis Borges' 'Fictions' (Argentina) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'(Colombia).
Juan Preciado sort of forms the protagonist of 'Pedro Páramo'. I say 'sort of', because although the book opens in his voice, there are constant switches in narrative perspective and between the third and first person format. The book opens with Juan returning to his Mother's birth town 'Comala'. Upon her deathbed, she has asked that Juan returns to the village, and makes his father Pedro Páramo pay 'for all of those years he put us out of his mind'.
From the moment Juan arrives in Comala, the story melts into a confusing thread of scattered voices. We learn that the people Juan comes across, are actually dead. The town, is quite literally, a 'ghost town'. The voices and episodes he encounters echo through the streets and are relived by ghosts rattling eternally through the town in purgatory.
The book was so unusual that I could understand why it was hailed as such an achievement. What a great concept, and there was some beautiful prose to boot. I think a second read would root it in my mind, as the first just left my head swimming with shipwrecked voices. No doubt, this is a successful result, considering the premise of the book.
Juan's take on Comala near the beginning of the book:
'This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping on your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years.'
The novel doubles up as a reflection of life in rural Mexico during and after the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Rulfo also wrote a notable short story collection in 1953 called 'The Burning Plain and Other Stories' that relate to similar themes.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell
I have been meaning to read this book for ages, so I finally bought a £2 battered Penguin copy in Hay-on-Wye recently.
The novel centres around Gordon Comstock; aspiring poet and staunch anti-capitalist. Gordon's family are at the poorer end of middle-class. They slave away to the tune of the 'money-god', who never really fills their pockets enough for them to make an impression on the world (as Gordon sees it). As the 'clever' son of the the family, the Comstock's invest their limited funds in a good education for Gordon, in the hope that he can make something of himself and lift the family to higher status. At school, Gordon becomes aware of his poverty in relation to the other boys and comes to resent money. As a consequence he later walks out of a well-paid job because he wants out of 'the system'.
The novel is really a coming-of-age story. Gordon muses throughout about the effect of money and simultaneously despairs at his lack of it. He lives as a would-be poet in poverty because he disagrees with his job in advertising, which he describes as 'the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket'. By trying to sidestep the 'money-god', Gordon actually becomes painfully more aware of and obsessed with money. The dreary aspidistras seated in every window he passes, come to represent 'mingy, lower-class decency' to him. They are a symbol of the dreary submission of every lower middle-class man to the system he was born into ('creeping like unclean beetles to the grave').
'Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra. Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it - starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased existence.'
I won't give away the ending, but the story is one everyone can relate to in some sense I think. I am sure I'm not the only one, who as a teenager, rebelled (at least in thought) against the 'money-god', the futility of consumerism and 'the system' in general. As Gordon himself references in the book, 'every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait'. The difference here, is that Gordon acts on his principles and hangs on to them well into his twenties. Unfortunately, the vision of the consequence of living in accord with one's principles isn't triumphant, but actually, pretty dreary and depressing. Gordon is rendered minute and insignificant compared to the might of the 'money-god'.
Worth a read, and in keeping with the autobiographical depiction of poverty that runs through 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (published three years earlier in 1933).
The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad For Us and Fixing Things Feels Good - Matthew Crawford
I usually prefer fiction over fact when it comes to reading, but this title jumped out at me in a bookshop and I invested and enjoyed it. I even found myself absorbed in the technical parts about fixing motorbikes!
Crawford is a philosopher and a mechanic. He has worked as an electrician, and in academic circles and offices including a well-paid job in a 'thinktank', before opening his own motorbike repair shop, which he still runs today. He is, then, more than qualified to draw comparisons between 'white collar' work of the 'thinking' man and 'blue collar' work of the tradesman.
Crawford is not a spiritualist, but a practical man, looking for a lifestyle that fulfils him. Anyone who has worked an office job, has upon occasion, felt that tinge of the 9-5 groundhog day vacuity; the feeling that you're on a roundabout and getting sort of dizzy, seeing the same thing day in, day out. Crawford aims to articulate and explore that niggle that many of us have felt about our work and its worth.
Crawford highlights the importance of 'thinking and doing' as an integrative process. He pinpoints the introduction of mass production lines in Britain in the early twentieth century as the time where 'thinking and doing' started to become divorced in our working lives. Building a car for example no longer required all-round experts in the field, but merely men who could repeat one stage of the process over and over again. In this sense, the pride and achievement that come with working through a project until the end also diminished. Men became like machines. The mass-production conveyor belt spread into every field that it could, including office work.
'The activity of self-directed labor, conducted by the worker, is dissolved or abstracted into parts and then reconstituted as a process controlled by management - a labor sausage.'
Such compartmentalisation of the work process diminished independence and job satisfaction. Wages became compensation for drudgery. Moreover this divorcment of thought from action is reflected in our passive relationship with objects today. We are encouraged furthermore by advertising to buy replacements, rather than fix things. We are under the impression that our 'things' are too complicated for us to fix, or it is simply 'not our job'. We are dependent.
Crawford goes on to reverse the concept that trade work is second rate to an office job. Who says a job at a desk is more intellectually demanding than a job under a bike with a wrench? Working with your hands in such a way on a machine that was built by an outside source demands constant problem-solving, learning and trial and error techniques. It is a consuming and rewarding (although at times frustrating) practice. It also relies on the ability to look at a problem outside of oneself, thus diminishing the narcissism imminent in the modern man today.
With the current economic climate, and the influx of graduates with extortionate student loans to repay and no job prospects, this book is timely. As capitalism totters on its platform stilettos and struggles to walk any further, and we head towards a post-industrial society, isn't it high-time we re-thought our work and atttitudes towards it? If nothing else, because that dissatisfaction has been breeding for some time like yeast in rising dough for many of us. Crawford suggests looking for the gaps in which we can encourage knowledge and practise excellence in the world.
How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less - Sarah Glidden
This graphic novel recounts Sarah's experience of a free Birthright tour of Israel in 1997. Any Jew between the age of 20-26 is able to apply for this free supervised tour of Israel as I understand it. Sarah is a young left-wing American Jew. She has prepared for the tour by reading extensively about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz. Sarah is smug at the outset, and armed against attempts at 'brainwashing' participants into pro-Israel mindsets on the tour. She feels her background knowledge and opinions against the State of Israel and their treatment of Palestinians will protect her.
As the book unravels, we see the complexity of the situation in Israel send Sarah into a tailspin. Sarah's stubborn opinions are questioned as she realises nothing in the Middle East is black and white. The history of Israel is such that it demands empathy on all sides. Who is in the wrong? Is anyone really in the wrong? And can there be a solution to satisfy all parties?
A great read. As someone who knew little about Israel to begin with, this is a great introduction to a complex country and history. It left me wanting to find out more.
