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Much as I enjoy pontificating about books, there are times when I genuinely don't have much to say. It might be because I haven't connected strongly with the style or story. It might be that my mind is too busy elsewhere. But I do like using my blog and Goodreads as a kind of reading archive. This is my first experiment in using both for bite-size reviews.
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Last Friends by Jane GardamMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sadly not up to the standard of the other two novels in the trilogy (or maybe it works better if you don't leave a gap of ten years between reading them).
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Luckenbooth by Jenni FaganMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Magic realism meets dirty realism in an Edinburgh tenement across nine decades.
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Go, Went, Gone by Jenny ErpenbeckMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Reading this for my book group, this was my assessment two thirds of the way in:
White man needs a retirement project. Black men need to stay alive. Author wants to process her thoughts about Europe’s neglect of African refugees and asylum seekers. Reader is neither educated nor entertained.
While, in the discussion, we remained divided on the issue of Othering (they felt the novel was a process of de-Othering the refugees; I maintain that putting a white man between the refugees and the reader is Othering), their perspective helped me appreciate the remaining pages a little more. (Apart from the ending, which I found trite.)
So my overall assessment:
Schroeder’s cat, people made stateless, an ageing man holding unprocessed trauma from infancy, a body unretrieved from a lake: this is a novel about being simultaneously dead and alive.
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Touring the Land of the Dead by Maki KashimadaMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This consists of two novellas. In one, a woman who has been bullied by her mother and brother takes her disabled husband to a hotel she knew as a child. There, through his example, she learns acceptance. In the other, the youngest of four sisters who live with their mother observes how they compete for a man’s attention.
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I’m still intrigued by the notion of being simultaneously dead and alive, which I picked up from Go, Went, Gone, although the concept isn’t entirely alien to me. I thought it might be a good place to go with my 99-word story using the word frozen. |
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Catatonia
It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t defiance. Yet they prod me, pinch me, pose me in increasingly awkward positions. I challenge their apothecary, so they challenge me.
They think I can’t feel, yet the ache in my muscles, the cramp, proclaims I’m alive. At night, when my head hits the pillow, I sleep like the dead.
In another life, I’d paint myself silver and wink at the children pitching coins in my hat. Or I’d serve as a sentry outside some palace. But I’m in the madhouse, frozen in sorrow, starved of volition. If an icicle bends, it will snap.
It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t defiance. Yet they prod me, pinch me, pose me in increasingly awkward positions. I challenge their apothecary, so they challenge me.
They think I can’t feel, yet the ache in my muscles, the cramp, proclaims I’m alive. At night, when my head hits the pillow, I sleep like the dead.
In another life, I’d paint myself silver and wink at the children pitching coins in my hat. Or I’d serve as a sentry outside some palace. But I’m in the madhouse, frozen in sorrow, starved of volition. If an icicle bends, it will snap.
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