Book Buzz

KAREN CONNELLY

This memoir highlights the year Connelly spent living in a small town in northern Thailand. She was seventeen when she left for Thailand and the writing reflects this. It is not a mature work. But I enjoyed it for the insights into daily life of the Thai people, their language and their culture. When I was in Thailand I asked someone to teach me to count to ten. “Nung.” I repeated, “Nung” and the people howled with laughter. I couldn’t hear the tones of the language. The same word can have five or six meanings depending on the tone used in speech. I really never learned any Thai. But Karen lived with families and went to school with the young people. Immersion is the best way to learn a language. But of course it wasn’t easy learning the language and accepting the restraints of the culture. Being the only “farang” (foreigner) in the area she had little privacy. Being a woman she didn’t have the freedom and choices she was used to in Canada. The writing improves through out the book. She calls Thailand “the green country” and the inhabitants “the gentle people.”

What drew me to this book is some of Connelly’s other writing. The Lizard Cage is an excellent novel of modern Burma.

A good read if you are interested in Thailand and Asia.

NANCY WERLIN

SURVIVAL is the story of three siblings and their trials to survive their crazily abusive mother Nikki. The father of Matt and Callie, the two oldest, is unable to stand up against his ex-wife and protect his children. Matt dreams for a superhero who will take them out of their situation. The story is a letter written to Emmy the baby of the family. He wants her to know the true story so that if Nikki turns up again she will know to stay clear.

It is a well written and well thought out novel for young adults. A touching read that won’t be forgotten easily.

JAMES A. LEVINE

Not an easy book. Batuk is a child prostitue. She was sold into the trade by her father.  Auctioned to wealthy man, her owner likely received more from that first customer than the father was initially paid. Life goes downhill from there being sold to increasingly cheaper, less classy brothels.

She befriends a boy in the brothel. Puneet earns at lease double to what men pay for her because he is a boy. But after a visit from two police officers he is left bleeding and wounded from have a night stick inserted into his wiry  frame. The men leave the brothel laughing.

Author Levine is a doctor at the Mayo clinic. He was inspired to write NOTEBOOK after doing medical research in India. He devoting the proceeds from the sale of the book to help exploited children.

Well worth reading despite the pitiful ending.

MICHAEL GRUBER

Someone left the witch a baby.  She knew that she shouldn’t but she keeps the child to raise as her own. The ugliest child ever born she calls him Lump. A she bear suckles him and is his nurse. Lump grows up believing himself to be beautiful and pities human children when he catches a glimse because they are so repugnant. When he realizes how the non-enchanted world operates, he covers his face with a mask. He developes intois a most angry young man. The most fun is when Lump meets characters from fairy tales. In these revised tales the stepmother is never evil. Hansel and Gretal run away from an abusive mother and are saved by the witch.

A good fairy tale. Superb cover illustration.

WILL EISNER

So many graphic novels are aimed at a youth audience, it is refreshing to chance upon a graphic novel for adults. However this is not a pretty book. Eisner tackles some major issues of our time. The father is incapacitated due to age? Alzheimer’s? The family reunites to discuss how to take care of him. Buried resentments and past abuses surface for each child. Be happy that this is not your family in crisis.

But like all graphic novels powerful graphically but still a quick read.

AMITAV GHOSH

What pulled me into this novel were the great characters. Characters were introduced with such rapidity that I wrote a character sheet to keep them straight. Deeti  is a young mother living by the Ganges some 50 miles east of Benares. She grows poppies because she must (the destruction of the rural economy is of no concern to the British), but though she is not  user, her husband is an opium addict. The people are no longer aloud to grow crops to feed themselves, they must supply the British with opium to sell to the Chinese, who don’t want it. This book reminds me of all I learned in Liquid Jade about the opium trade and wars in colonial times. Historical fiction puts it in a human context.  All the main characters come alive. Ghosh’s characters breath life into the story.

I also enjoyed the use of local and antiquated vocabulary. There are words and expressions from Hindi, Urdu, Hindustan and others as well as colonial and sailing vocabulary.  Though it got waring by the end of the novel.

At almost 500 pages the novel was too long. It dragged in the last quarter though the very ending picked up speed. The final ending seems to lead to a sequel and isn’t  diffinative  which was disappointing.

But all and all worth the read. And this type of  historical fiction usually isn’t my first choice.

NOTE:  image not the book cover but Sea of Poppies by Louise Southan watercolor landscape (http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dreamgallery.co.uk/watercolor_e_detail/sea_of_poppies.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.dreamgallery.co.uk/watercolor_e_amain/aimage04.htm&usg=__6bc7Hqj9dvlZEQK-yofZVwVX6lE=&h=300&w=432&sz=72&hl=en&start=7&sig2=nREF97fXnX68HDPZWom2PQ&tbnid=3PTuBbYAJUKgsM:&tbnh=88&tbnw=126&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsea%2Bof%2Bpoppies%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG&ei=cEe0StqpBovUMtb7-doO

MICHEL TREMBLAY

I’ve been wanting to revisit this old friend ever since it was part of Canada Reads on CBC. I had forgotten what a challenging read it is. I had to map the author’s family tree – the characters in the book – to keep them straight. Tremblay said he wrote this novel and the next three in the series to tell his family how much he loved them. Beautiful. The novel takes place in one day. The Fat Woman is Tremblay’s mother pregnant with him. Welcome to the family.

I tried to included the family tree but the format is lost so I created a web page. Please take a look. Other character besides family are listed as well.

ARAVIND ADIGA

I discovered this book by reading this review in the New Internationalist:

Top of the swaying piles of books that pedestrian street-hawkers navigate through Mumbai’s traffic jams is Adiga’s controversial first novel. Apart from winning the prestigious Man Booker prize in Britain, The White Tiger has also taken India by storm. But in his native land, Adiga’s efforts have elicited admiration and anger in equal measure. For some, The White Tiger is a bold, honest work that unflinchingly ‘tells the truth’ about contemporary India; others have dismissed it as ‘inauthentic’ and peopled with ‘grotesque caricatures’.

The first-person narrative is dominated by the book’s hero, Balram Halwai, who is writing a letter to the Chinese Premier. The latter is about to visit India to find out about ‘entrepreneurship’ – something ‘India Rising’ has in abundance and China lacks. But what do Indian politicians and élites know about it, asks Balram? Listen to me, he says, and he starts to tell his own dark, intriguing journey to success, from low-caste village boy in ‘The Darkness’ (the northern state of Bihar) to wealthy business owner in the IT hub of Bangalore. It’s a tale of servitude, abuse, betrayal, murder, corruption, theft and ruthless cunning. The message is stark: if you start life at the bottom, this is how you escape poverty and humiliation in India’s ‘democracy’.

The wit is mordant; the politics trenchant; the vision as unforgiving as neon light. Compassion is entirely lacking in Balram’s dog-eat-dog world. There is just one perspective – the protagonist’s – and his distinctive voice, as he tells his story brilliantly, incisively and – of course – controversially.

http://www.newint.org/columns/media/books/2009/01/01/white-tiger/

Great read. Interesting picture of Indian society.

LOUISE PENNY

A dysfunctional but rich family has a reunion at a lodge in Quebec. One of the siblings, the black sheep, meets an untimely demise. Which one of the other family members executed her is such a symbolic way?  It just happens that Chief Inspector Gamache is vacationing at the lodge with his wife so the investigation starts immediately.

Lousise Penny is a good writer. The insult “slid off his back landed on the floor and disintegrated.” However it took Penny 89 pages to get to the murder. I found this title from CBC’s Canada Reads Blog. August was the month to discuss mysteries and their authors. Worth the read but not great.

Dalia Sofer

When I first started reading SHIRAZ, I thought that it wasn’t by far the best fiction about Iran. But the more I read the more I enjoyed and started to love this story and its writing. It is the story of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran shortly after the revolution.

Isaac, the father, is a successful jeweler and gem merchant.. In the opening chapters, he is arrested by two armed Revolutionary Guards, taken from his office at lunchtime on a routine workday.  ” What crime has he committed?” is frequently asked. Before the revolution he had  been patronized by many in the aristocracy, including the wife of the shah. This economic class separation between the middle class before the revolution and the revolutionary guards after, was not something that I understood before this book.

Well worth reading.

DAVID MAINE

A thought provoking and well written retelling of the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Able. The book starts with Cain  an old dying man. Each chapter starts at a previous time than the last chapter. The unusual structure is quite engaging. The characters have been realistically  fleshed out. A good read.

MARIATU KAMARA with SUSAN McCLELLAND

The Bite of the Mango is the true story of Mariatu Kamara, a girl born in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone, an impoverished country on the west coast of Africa, was in a horrific civil war while Mariatu was a child. Despite the poverty in her tiny rural village, Mariatu’s first few years are happy ones, filled with friends, games and chores.  Mariatu’s father has two wives, neither of whom seems very pleasant. Mariatu is given to an auntie to raise, which likely would have been a great idea had the village not been attacked by rebels. At the age of 12, Mariatu had her hands amputated by boy-rebel soldiers. She had been previously raped and impregnated by an older man in the village who wanted to marry her.

Despite the extreme pain and suffering Mariatu’s story is one of hope and redemption. She now lives in Toronto where she attends college. She also tours North America as a UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

A must read.

THOMAS FOX AVERILL

A book for food lovers, especially lovers the spice and heat of latin cooking. The name Tsil comes from the god-avatar of the chili pepper in the ceremonial dances of the Hopi. The story and recipes are loaded with chillies one of the true North American foods. Native north Americans had domesticated the chilli long before the arrival of the europeans.

I read this book some years back so my remembrance of plot is sketchy but what I remember is loving the mix of story and food fact and restaurant lore. Not great literature but a great read.

SARA WATERS

Suspenseful haunting was the theme but this time Waters didn’t achieve her goal. Quite disappointing from an author that was recently nominated for the Booker Prize.

Gentrified family post WWI, the time that great estates were crumbling. A young doctor befriends and tries to help an ageing chatelaine and her two children keep the family home and estate. But something is “funny” in the decaying manor.

At almost 500 pages it is not worth the time.

NANCY HUSTON

Elegant pianist-instructor’s child is born only slightly over two pounds, one kilo. So often there are major problems when children that young are kept alive outside of the womb. This live birth is after several pregnancies that ended midterm. The ICU pediatrician tells Lara that the only way her daughter, Maya, will survive is if she is the child’s life line. She dedicates herself and her life to her daughter. The marriage disintegrates but the child lives. She grows into a little angel, petite and full of joy and lightness of being.

But what will happen when their roles are reversed? It is a slim volume, well worth the read.

TIMOTHY TAYLOR

Chef Jeremy is owner operated of a increasingly popular bistro on the edge of cuisine in Vancouver. With a great staff the menu changes daily focusing of local ingredients. Unfortunately Chef is not a good manager, when one credit card is maxed he simply applies for a different credit card to keep the restaurant alive. He needs to sell the controlling interest (95%) to coffee mogul and former next door neighbour, Dante, owner of Inferno Coffee. The new restaurant is the extreme opposite of local trying to be as international as possible, as the controlling interest wants. Meanwhile he is developing a closer relationship to the Professor, his father, who lives in Stanley Park studying the homeless who live in the park.

Several subplots and all of the epicureanism as well as good writing make for a great read.

ANDREW X. PHAM

The subtitle is so provocative and sad, to have lived the majority of your life in a war zone. We are so blessed. I have often thought about Vietnam what a poor country. And then after all those years of war to be neglected by developed nations due to the US embargo.

Pham has these interesting ideas on memoirs as a foreword; “it seems to me as memorists, we are not historians, not even of our own lives. That is the job of biographers. Memoirs are our love letters and our letters of apologies, both. They hold our few gems, the noteworthy lessons of our journeys.

I did not set out to write my father’s biography. I have lent his life stories my words. ”

This superb book tell the author’s father’s story from 1940 when he was living in North Vietnam a rich landowner’s son, until 1976 when he is released from a communist reeducation camp. The father realizes that he still must leave his home country.

ANITA RAU BADAMI

When his daughter, studying in Canada, rejects her Indian betrothed to marry a foreigner, Sripathi disowns her telling her she is for bidden to return home. A clash between the old, ancient and new, modern values of Indian culture. This family is from the Brahmin cast. They look down on their neighbours from lower casts, especially the matriarch, Sripathi’s mother. But they are living in debt, in a house that is falling apart.

When the daughter is killed in a car accident along with her husband, Sripathi flies to Vancouver to pick up his granddaughter who he has never met because of his edict sentenced before she was born. There are many changes with the arrival of the child – a lot of blaming and healing. The book is slow but worth the time. It won the 2000 Commonwealth Prize for fiction.

MARC ACITO

Marc Acito is funny. College is a comic novel about a talented irresponsible teenager who schemes to steal his college tuition money when his wealthy father refuses to pay for acting school. Dad says business school at step mom’s urging.  Realistic no but side splitting yes. The sexual openess of the bisexual characters and the jock that is into drama does not ring true for the 1980’s but is still good for a laugh. Great for when you are in the mood for a light some what trashy read – pick this one up.

ROB HARASYMCHUK

Dingo parents his sister and his special needs brother since the death of their parents. But in many ways this loss had happened years ago: the father had withdrawen into alcohol, the mother, depression and mental illness. His need to support his family leads him into temptation and activities outside of what is legal. What starts as a drama turns into a thriller when Dingo last heist is a farm chemicals plant. Set in Saskatchewan and Saskatoon Dingo is a good read.