Anna Karenina - #23

I don't know what to think of this book. It's a conundrum.

It is brilliantly written. Hands down, no arguments at all. It is immersive and, just, well... beautiful. I was sitting on my back steps the other day  in the blazing Canberra spring (spring can be blazing here, trust me). I was leaning up against the brick wall, sitting on the concrete, with a view of the Brindabella mountains and a gin and tonic as it was so warm, with magpies singing and cockatoos squarking around me. But for the first time I could remember in a very long time, I was so sucked into the writing I felt like I was in a dingy Muscovite hotel, in winter in 1870 or so. The only thing that brought me back was a chicken jumping into my lap. I was astounded, once I had recovered from my confusion and slight shock from a big black chook snuggling into me.

Because of this, I wanted to keep on reading. But I wanted to keep on reading something worth reading. Tolstoy reminds me of a brilliant painter, who only paints still life. While the technique and result is breathtaking, you can't help get over the fact they have only painted a bowl of fruit. Over and over again.

Now don't get me wrong, some of the characters Tolstoy creates are fantastic. I shouldn't of loved Oblonsky but I did. I thought he was wonderful. I liked Anna right until the end. Then she went all weird. Even Vronsky I grew to like, although I didn't find him attractive (too many moustaches and bald spots for me).

But the story... You do want to know what happens to Anna and whether she gets everything to work or not  (although Russian novel should indicate that to you at the start). But if I hear one more thing about hunting or farming I think I will scream. I know that Tolstoy had all these great ideas and that this was how gentleman passed them on to the masses if they couldn't write an interesting essay. Whack a story around your philosophy! But sometimes I think he was trying to be too clever (like the 3 pages inside the mind of the dog. Slightly left field...) or too preachy (the entire last part with Levin).

However, his ability to completely convey what is happening inside peoples' minds is pretty remarkable. Anna's ... how to say this non-spoilery... "journey" at the end of the book while perfectly conveys that way of thinking, however a little too well as I just wanted to shake her and yell "Pull yourself together woman!!" I didn't like her at the end of the book. But I think because she was so real and believable and there is a reason I am not a practising psych.

There was much that I missed with this book, which is fair enough really at over 800pp. Watching this episode of the First Tuesday Book Club again after finishing the book highlighted this (sorry I can't find a youtube link to this one). Thank you Richard Flanagan for explaining the doctor in Kitty's bedroom scene in a way my mind never went to. Makes complete sense, that the doctor may have been, umhum... "servicing" her, in 1870 or there abouts, I just never made the leap (the man has read the book too many times, or enough times I guess).

Back to my conundrum. I didn't love the story, so I want to give it a 3. But I loved the writing, so I want to give it a 4. But 3.5, doesn't sit well with me. But it is the diplomatic thing to do. Also, it looks like the movie has cut out Levin and Kitty completely. I was wondering how they were going to make it 2.5 hours long. Anyway, compromising with 3.5 horrible Jude Law moustaches.

The Cypress Tree - #22

I will preface this post by saying I did check all the screws on my chair before starting.

I thought this book was a novel. It's not. It was a bit of a disappointment. Not the book as a whole. Just when you settle down to read a story and you know, you have a doona and a glass of wine and you've suspended your disbelief and are ready to be transported. Then 10 pages in you just go "Well, fuck." I don't dislike memoirs. I just prepare for them differently to novels. And as I have read a few lately I was ready for story land. While it wasn't the books fault, I felt like I had been slightly tricked into attending a function, and was then stuck up the front where it was just too awkward to leave.

Besides starting the book with the feeling that someone's great aunt has noticed my uncomfortableness and then daring me to leave with their crazy, judging, old lady eyes, it was not too bad. It was the story of the last hundred years or so of Iran through the stories of this woman and her family. She is an exile from Iran after the Islamic Revolution to the UK, and then tells the story of her family as she sort of rediscovers it,  as she shunned it as a teenager in London in the 80s.

It provided a good insight into the history of Iran. She's a journo and so it makes it an accessible read. It explains how Iran has ended up how it is. While she is not a sympathiser with the Islamic Revolution at all, she does explain sympathetically how the country ended up how it is, and points out the benefits and dichotomies of the laws and the actions of the country and especially it's people.

What astounded me was that once again the meddling West (those meddling kids) once again played god with a country that they had no claim over, but then the country decided to stand up to the two big powers in the world and say "Nope, our stuff. Give us a fair price you bastards!". And so they, the West, overthrew a government through CIA and MI6 funding. And what did that do? It gave a little known religious leader in a small town a taste of power and money and a little bit of fame. He also then got exiled himself from Iran by the reinstated Shah, growing his infamy and followers over time. This guy? Oh you know, only Ayatollah Khomeini. The guy who lead the Islamic Revolution and made the most liberal Middle Eastern country the most concerning one. Good work (morons).

The issue of women's rights was really interesting too though. Women had the same rights for divorce in Iran as the men before the Revolution. They could work, study and dress in "wonderful" 70s fashion, miniskirts and all. While it is true now they can still study and work, this was banned for a while, then reinstated and now has resulted in this bullshit.They also had the legal marrying age for women at 18. Then they all revolted and such, had to rebuild their country from scratch and engaged in a war with their neighbours (Iraq). So first thing they changed? First? Women's rights and reduced the marrying age for women to 9. I do not comprehend. I cannot fathom a world that women are so feared, so needed to be controlled. I mean, ours is still pretty bad, but what kind of man gets into power and has war, famine, no public services, and no government to deal with and goes, "You know what's wrong with this country? I can't marry a 12 year old girl." Seriously?

All of that aside, I could have strangled the author more than once when she was all blah blah this happened blah blah and then the revolution happened but my auntie such and such cooked this wonderful thing with rose petals and let me tell you about that. Really? I'm sure you family is fantastic, but you know. Revolution. Kinda trumps dinner. And she was really disjointed at the beginning. I just wanted her to stick with one family or one person instead of jumping around. And maybe it was because I had problems with the names and keeping everyone straight. But I just felt she was like a 3 year old full of red cordial until half way through.

All being said and done, 3.5. I learnt a fair bit, but also felt like I was dealing with a kid with ADD again for the first 100pp. She does calm down, and you get a better understanding of what is happening. But a lot of people wouldn't stick with her.

And now I am on to some fiction!! I think December I may get a little distracted away from my Around the World quest as I have a few other books for a couple of things calling me. But I will come back if I stray.

In the Time of Butterflies - #21

I got distracted again by life. It really needs to stop getting in the way like that. Last book that was half read on the plane and half in a jet-lagged state was In the Time of Butterflies. This poor book got a bit more love than I would like, as I'm pretty meticulous with my books, as I had a mother of a cold on the plane and sneezed, causing me to wave my hands in the air like a numpty, which then collected my G&T and doused my lap and my book in too much tonic and not enough gin. At least I missed the two unfortunate women sitting next to me...

Besides the wiggly and alcoholic state of the book, I actually liked the book. I am hesitant when there are a few narrators and they they use diaries to describe their life events etc. But this book balances it beautifully. It has first person narration, scribbles in personal diaries as well as third person observations about the

....

This post was briefly interrupted by the fact that I tried to shift my weight on my computer chair by leaning on one arm and moving my body. At this stage all the screws holding the chair to the frame fell out on the left hand side of the chair, propelling me over the right hand arm rest I was leaning on and landing on my head on the floor. I have now spent 10 minutes finding the appropriate allen key to screw in all the screws again and am back in business.

....

dictatorship of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and the story of the 4 Mirabel sisters and their attempts through the Underground, where they were collectively known as the Las Mariposas (the butterflies), to overthrow him.

Who am I kidding? I am not going to recover this post!

Good book, well written, nice introduction albeit fictionally into the world of dictatorships in Central America.

What the Day Owes the Night - #20

Next!

Moving on from the wintry and chilling images of supernatural Muscovites, I picked up this novel of the Algerian revolution. The story starts with a boy called Younes, an Algerian boy, witnessing his family losing his family's lands. After a steep decline from that point onwards, his father ends up asking his uncle who has been educated in the West and married to a French woman, to look after Younes and raise him as his own. Younes then becomes Jonas, as he moves from a life of a poor Arab boy to one of wealth and privilege within the educated and colonial elite in Algeria.

We then follow Jonas as he then negotiates the world where his ethnic group is viewed as only servants and possessions, and while these downtrodden people are plotting to take Algeria back for the Algerians. He then has to deal with the consequences of teenage passion, as well as meeting a beautiful girl who drives his group of friends apart. Girls trump ethnic uprisings as deal breakers. Apparently.

I picked this book up now as it was the October read for a group on African Lit. But the benefit of reading it while I was travelling, was I ended up reading it while I was in Paris, and Algeria was colonised by the French. I think this helped the mood somewhat. Ignoring that the book was in the desert and it was 8 degrees in Paris, the Frenchness oozed through into the book.

Otherwise, as I know not everyone is as lucky to be able to read this in Paris, it was a wonderfully written book. But it was accessibly beautiful. Not like reading a book of poetry. It was able to transport you to feel like you were lying on an African Mediterranean beach, even if you were sitting in a freezing cold, open Parisian train station where the French do not believe in seats and so you have to perch on top of your suitcase for 2 hours... >.> ... /end rant.

Also, you could feel the split poor Jonas was feeling between his background and supporting his people (including his family) and maintaining the status quo. I wonder if I ended up feeling this more acutely than the character did in the end. As if I was projecting my own emotions, and ignoring his slightly. But to throw his lot in with the revolution could have separated Jonas from everything that was now his life. That must be heartbreaking.

What I did have a problem with was the romance. I didn't buy the dilemma. I'm sorry. I didn't get it. Therefore, sympathy for decisions made in this regard just wasn't there. And seeing it was what half the book was about, that just annoyed me. So due to that annoyance of the story, it took me down to a 3.5. I'm sure other people won't be as annoyed, but it just detracted from the rest of the book to be annoyed with half the story.

An African In Greenland - #18

I loved the thought of this book when I heard about it. The idea that a young African boy learns about a place like Greenland and then runs off to live there. It’s so ridiculous and yet so fantastical.

That’s the story of Michel. He grew up with his father’s family on the coast of Togo and starts with a lovely whimsical illustration of his life there, starting with an encounter with a snake up a coconut tree. There was something so jovial and carefree about the stories of him in Africa, first in Togo and then as he journeys to Greenland, through the entire north-west of Africa earning money, in to Europe and beyond.

The thing that starts being apparent during this journey is that Michel is a very privileged African boy. He has been schooled and knows a couple of languages (benefit of Togo being an ex-French colony of course). But this seems to have made his transition through Europe and ability to get jobs much easier.  Lucky him of course, but it starts to draw away from his “typical” African boy image.

I really liked the book and was recommending it to everyone, until I got to Greenland.

Now the book wasn't bad from Greenland on. However it began to take on this air of condescending judgement. Michel wasn't happy with the people he found in Greenland. He didn't approve of their lifestyle all that much. He had an idealised idea of what Intuits should be, without much knowledge of the background of the area (Denmark colonised Greenland and was very big on getting the Intuit’s to give up their traditional way of doing things, but without much consideration to what they should be doing instead). As like most people with uninformed, idealised points of view, he was a little disappointed.

 And not to mention had a huge heap of double standards. Alcohol and promiscuity wasn't his thing. Unless he was doing it. He even goes on to mention that he is happy to sleep around, but not happy when it’s “his” girl who does it. I am not sure if this is a result of his home polygamous culture, a result of being a product of the 1950s-1970s or just being a misogynist.

Otherwise it was a good introduction into the ways of the Greenlandic community, their culture and their activities. There is a lot of blood and slaughtering in this book. If you don’t like the thought of people eating meat or whale blubber raw, this probably isn't for you. But if you get over that slight turn of your stomach when he describes his meals there is a lot to learn.

I did enjoy it, don’t misunderstand me. I just am frustrated that a book that started out so well fell into the trap of the usual judgement of other cultures. “It’s not what I expected and therefore it’s not the right way to act”. And hypocrisy always annoys me. So it’s not one I’ll be running out and telling everyone to read any more. But it’s still worth a good 3 stars.

Another Aside - Last Chance to See

Work is insane. I do not believe I will have a lunch break at work until November. However, I have thought to keep me sane during these days, especially when it involves inane activities like filing (I haven't filed since May until last week, as I haven't had the time. I still don't but I was working on piles of paperwork that really should have been locked away) to listen to an audio book. 

I was unsure of audio books. The boy raves about them. He likes to listen to them in the car. I was always worried I would get too caught up in the book I would drive off the road or into someone else. I like things in the background so I can have enough distraction to not be bored but if I tune out due to driving or work, I don't miss anything. I also though have lots of things to read for all these damn challenges I have signed myself on to, so this knocked one out of the way.

But I will say, that listening to this book was the best thing I ever did. There is a very slim chance to my mind that you could get as much out of this book if you weren't read it by Douglas Adams. His tone of voice and way of telling the story enhances everything, which you would expect as they are his thoughts and musings. Now, I don't usually say things like this, but this audio book was close to perfect.

What the book is about is Douglas Adams, being the writer of Hitchhiker's Guide, and a zoologist travelling around the world to see endangered animals, sometimes critically so, in their own environments in the late 1980s. This involved places like New Zealand to see the Kakapo shown above (I will house any Kakapos anyone would like to bestow on me. Apparently they love people) but also places like Zaire (It's changed it's name) to see the White Rhinoceros, and China to see the Yangtze River Dolphin, both of which would have been "interesting" places to visit in 1988-1989. Adams then tells all of their adventures in alarming detail to us the reader.

Whether this is the intricacies and bizarre happenings of Tanzanian airports, chickens being stolen by Komodo Dragons in Indonesia, being lectured by crazy scientists in Mauritius, you feel like you were there. With Adams' matter of fact, but yet sometimes exasperated voice walking you through as some form of spirit guide. The story that made me giggle as it hit so true to home at the moment was the Australian scientist in Melbourne giving them advice about what not to get bitten by in Komodo. That was, everything. And every time he tried to explain himself, he just made it worse. I spend far too much time in the role of the Australian, explaining the exact same thing to all our European visitors at work. It was wonderful to hear this discussion from the terrified European's side for once, instead of being the blasé Aussie.

In short, everyone should read, or more accurately listen, to this book. You learn so much about the amazing animals in this world we take for granted, hear of the ridiculous destruction our species is causing, and to boot get a good workout giggling. And once you have done that, you should do what I'm going to now do and watch the BBC follow up show made 20 years later in 2009. As Douglas Adam's had sadly passed away by this stage, his friend Stephen Fry fills his shoes.

5 very big, Kakapo hug worthy, stars.

The Zahir - #16

I am just going to come out and say it.

Paulo Coelho is a knob.

I dislike this man, his opinions and his writing. I have read The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain in the past and have felt that they were completely over rated. Then a friend links all these "insightful" quotes from him all the time on Facebook. And then there is this article from earlier this month. But all of these were forgivable. Until I read this book. This book lead me to one conclusion.

Paulo Coelho is a complete wanker.

This book, The Zahir, is about an amazing author who is famous, incredibly successful with the ladies, intelligent, accomplished, and did I mention a brilliant writer? Maybe I need to tell you again how good a writer the author is. He is married, but has many girlfriends as he is incredibly attractive, and his wife who is a journalist goes missing. He mopes for a bit, while being a brilliant, amazing writer, but then gets an actress girlfriend. He then gets approached by a man who knows where his wife is, and he has to rediscover himself, by writing another ground-breaking book and some other stuff, before he can go find her. But the actress stays with him until he leaves, because he's great.

In case you forget how wonderful he is, he points out randomly how many languages (nearly all the languages in the world) he has been translated into. The books themselves, while wonderful, are not him or his ideas. 'Everything that's written in my books is part of my soul...' (p101). Yeah right. Get your hand off it.

Also he mentions the Zimbardo prison experiment at one stage, because he can. Why? No idea. It wasn't important or necessary. It was in fact completely out of place, not to mention wrong, and seemed to be mentioned to show off how intelligent he was.

My "favourite" part, was after he came home from spending all night out wandering Paris with the "Tribe" and then come home and didn't want to turn on the tv because they had "run out of things to talk about" so were covering a story of a rebellion in Haiti. So he goes on this whole rant about how is a rebellion important to him as a rich, incredibly successful author in Paris! Who cares! I just wanted to slap him the narrow minded prick! Urgh.

As well as all of this he seems incredibly unhinged as well. He screams at his girlfriend after being out all night with the Tribe, mentioned above, and she doesn't ask him where he was. So therefore as she is not jealous (not interested, jealous) he screams at her for not loving him any more. Besides the fact he has been moaning on about his wife who he loves who has left him for the whole book. I was beyond loving him at p5, no wonder the girlfriend seemed to have had enough by p200. But she hadn't really. She really thought he was great. You know why? Because this unnamed author is fucking fantastic, just ask him.

Why did I finish it? Because I wanted to find out what happened to his wife and girlfriend as I liked them (not worth it, it ended all about him), it was only 270pp, and it was orange (for a rainbow challenge). It gets 1.5 stars as it was well written for self-congratulatory masturbation. Actually, no. After writing this, 1.

Knob.

The Unbearable Likeness of Being - #15

Now I am over my panicked state of last night. Who knew reading for time was so stressful! But fun as well. Ooo we may have created a monster.

So this book was another one for the Olympic themed challenge. And I really enjoyed it. To begin with it seemed like a brag fest about philosophers the author had read. Then a list of sexual conquests. But as the story went on it be much more engrossing than I expected. And not because I was interested in the characters as such, but I was interested in the place and the society.

Part of me does wonder as well if the parts of the book I didn't enjoy was possibly my own lack of understanding of what was being discussed.

Again this book, like Between Shades of Gray, highlighted aspects of the ex-communist states that I had never thought about before. The idea of students having to got to work camps on their university holidays to work in steelworks or some such place. The thought of constantly playing happy music throughout the entire work camp during waking hours, and there not being a place you could go to escape it. To present a facade on how wonderful and perfect the system was... it's brainwashing at it's best! And I sympathised with Sabina who told this story, like I never thought I could with someone who was telling you they hated music. How could you hate music I always thought. How naive I was.

The complacency of the West was highlighted to me in the stories of Switzerland. Especially as I had been musing on them below earlier in the day. The story of Tereza taking her photos to a newspaper in Switzerland of the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia and them not being interested in them anymore as it was old news. Her exclamations that it was still occurring falling on deaf ears as the editors looked at photos of a nudist beach. Her being called a prude as she wasn't interested in the pictures as she has a sense of perspective. And then it being suggested that maybe she should be a fashion photographer... urge... to ... strangle... rising...

Otherwise, besides the usual "I DON'T SPEAK GERMAN DAMMIT!" issues (which to be fair finally did get translated into English around page 220. Would have been useful 200 pages earlier), and the fact that this damn book spoilt the end of Anna Karenina for me (ARGH), it was a really absorbing, incredibly well written read. 4 surprising stars.

Now back to Anna.