The Infatuations

Title: The Infatuations

Author: Javier Marías

Genre: Novel

Year of Release: 2012

Review: A chilling and brutal murder appears at first glance to be a random act of violence, but over time a more sinister explanation emerges. This writing trope is the premise for The Infatuations, where a man is slaughtered in the streets of Madrid by a stranger. Surprisingly, I wouldn’t classify this novel as a murder mystery, as it tries to diverge from other works in this vein by removing all the suspense and instead going philosophical.

Disappointingly  all the originality in this book is done to the death with needless repetition. There’s no action to drive forward the plot – although the writing is pleasant enough, it’s dreary to read half a dozen consecutive chapters of the protagonist self-analysing. And that’s what The Infatuations is – a muse drawn out over 350 pages concerning human nature.

It’s near impossible to relate to the kind of overwhelming love that can allow people to overlook the worst elements of humankind, meaning that a character who we are obviously supposed to empathize with is unfortunately alienated. It feels a lot like the kind of book I might try and come close to writing if I get pretentious and philosophical enough (i.e. drunk enough).

Despite myself, I enjoyed stretches of the story, but the thing is, I don’t know why. On paper, it’s got all the makings of a  great short story, but there’s just not enough happening for it to work as a novel. I do think that’s true, yet somehow it’s got a feel that goes a long way in making up for its faults.

Rating: 7 stars

Quote: “[…] murder is something that happens, an act of which anyone is capable and that has been happening since the dawn of time and will continue to do so until, after the last day, no dawn comes […]”

Alice In Wonderland

Title: Alice In Wonderland

Author: Lewis Carroll

Genre: Children’s Fiction (Apparently)

Year of Release: 1865

Review: I’m having to write this review from a combination of old memories and spark notes, seeing as after reading the book as a kid, I hid it in the back of my cupboard where the scary books went, and where I can no longer get into.

Alice in Wonderland is not a kids book. It reads like a nightmare – nothing goes right, it’s perplexing and impossible and suspenseful and terrifying. It makes the Theatre of the Absurd seem sensible. The Cheshire Cat is one of the worst literacy villains I’ve ever had sleepless nights over. He could literally be anywhere.

And the ending – *150 year old Spoiler Alert* the whole ‘it was all a dream’ thing is just lazy writing.

Essentially, if I got super high and wrote down all of my worst fears, it would look more or less like Alice in Wonderland.

Rating: 1 and a half stars (only because I like the idea of a rabbit wearing a waistcoat – it’s so useless)

Quote: ‘”Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”‘

Shantaram

Title: Shantaram

Author: Gregory David Roberts

Genre: Fiction, Semi-Autobiography

Year of Release: 2003

Review: I have an on-again, off-again relationship with Shantaram. Sometimes I’m certain it’s in the top 5 books I’ve ever read. At other times I think it’s pretentious and narcissistic. I reckon it depends on how I’m viewing the world that day.

Roberts started out his adult life as a poet, and it shows in Shantaram. The language  is simply stunning, and often I’d read over sentences multiple times just to appreciate them. But, as I’ve said before, beautiful words do not a story make.

Fortunately for the book, the plot has a lot going for it. Much of the storyline is based on events that happened in Roberts’ life, like joining the Mumbai mafia and gun running in Afghanistan, and it’s anything but boring.

The real joy in this book for me is the love story between the two main characters, a sort of twisted inverted fairytale that feels real. But the thing is, it’s not. It’s very easy to mix up fiction with fact, especially when the book itself appears to advertise itself as an autobiography.

The trick to reading this book is to appreciate it as it actually is – a work of literature, not some all-knowing true story with a real life hero to idolise.

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars

Quote: “At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.”

The Handmaid’s Tale

Title: The Handmaid’s Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

Genre: Dystopian novel, Science Fiction

Year of Release: 1985

Review: Why is it in dystopian novels and films, it more often than not is set in America? Is there something unique in the makeup of that country that makes it prone to collapse on a gargantuan scale? And does the rest of the world just ignore the chaos erupting in that corner of the world, and continue on sanely?

The particular oppressive regime in The Handmaid’s Tale has come as a result of the most evil of modern innovation – contraception. Falling birth rates have triggered a mass revolution by conservatives who view abortion and contraception as ultimate attacks on God. Who knew conservatives could be so influential in the States? In an astonishingly short amount of time, they transform the once liberal society into a veritable Garden of Eden. Well, for the fortunate few at least.

Women are granted three options in this new virtuous society – become a Wife, a Martha (a maid, essentially), or a Handmaid.  The Handmaid’s purpose is to redress the catastrophic effects of liberalism. Basically, she’s a baby making machine.

The story is written by one such Handmaid, Offred (who belongs to a guy called Fred. The length of time it took me to figure out her name was Of Fred is embarrassing). In places, the tension is palpable. You don’t get second chances in this book. One slight infringement of the rules and you get taken out. It’s like the Mafia.

The writing is expertly precise, the premise is original and the narrator is genuinely likable.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars

Quote: “The three bodies hang there, even with the white sacks over their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the necks in a meatshop window; like birds with their wings clipped, like flightless birds, wrecked angels.”

One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Genre: Magic Realism

Year of Release: 1967

Review: If you ever happen to be in the beautiful country of Colombia, don’t go looking for the town of Macondo. Not only is it fictional, it is also a very unstable place to live. Plagues of insomnia, rain storms that last for years, sieges and civil wars – it won’t make a great tourist destination.

The Buendia family are not destined to live normal lives. From the retired guerrilla fighter who spends decades shaping little metal fishes, only to melt them down again, to the Sanskrit-studying hermit, unaware of a life outside his house – solitude proves itself the defining family trait.

Six generations pass through the book, over 100 years of the Buendias, and you get to know each of the family like they were your closest friends. The only difficulty is not getting confused by the names, they are remarkably unimaginative when it comes to naming their children – Colonel Aureliano has 18 sons, all called Aureliano (he really could have put more thought into that).

This book is bonkers, but in a way that makes you wonder if it could actually be real. If I were on hallucinogenic drugs at an exhibition of Salvador Dali’s weirdest sculptures, I still couldn’t dream up a story like this. Yet under Marquez’s skilled hand it somehow all makes sense in the end. What it means, however, I couldn’t tell you. Beautiful book.

Rating: 8 and a half stars
Quote: “They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew only their own language, handsome specimens with oily skins and intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed a panic of uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and the multiple-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that Jose Arcadio Buendia must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all.”

Farenheit 451

Title: Farenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Dystopian fiction

Year of Release: 1954

Review: A world where firemen start fires.

I want you to close your eyes for a minute.

Not literally, of course, because then you wouldn’t be able to read this blog and where would that leave me? If you did though, congrats, you’ve just had a mini mini nap. No, I want you to figuratively close your eyes. It’s easier than it seems. Now that you’ve figuratively closed your eyes,  and not literally I hope, try to imagine a world where firemen don’t put out fires, they start them. That’s a bit crazy, isn’t it? I agree. Bear with me. Now imagine that they start these fires to burn books.

“What an atrocity!” I hear you shout. Don’t worry, we’re on the same page.

This is the world that Bradbury has conjured up in some twisted nightmare. Guy Montag is one of these backward firemen, and there is nothing that he loves more than burning books. Conformity is his safe haven until he meets a girl who asks him if he has ever read the books he burns. It’s only once he has started on a path of knowledge that he realises his decision to think has condemned him.

Farenheit 451 is a marvel; beautiful, stylistic, yet concise writing – it can be done! More than anything else for me, the way he writes is what makes this book. Content – great. Characters – complex. Writing – beyond superb.

How could we ever do without books such as this?

Rating: 7 and a half stars
Quote: “Pity, Montag, pity. Don’t haggle and nag them; you were so recently one of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty light in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.”

The Hunger Games

Title: The Hunger Games

Author: Suzanne Collins

Genre: Dystopian fiction, YA Fiction

Year of Release: 2008

Review: I’ll be the first to admit that I discriminate. I have a prejudice against books that come with a big hype. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be some sort of book hipster. I read a lot of famous books, after all, they have that reputation for a reason. But I steer clear of fad books, ones that attract a cult following by people who claim insert title here has changed their lives.

I do have reasons for this aversion. When people exaggerate how inspiring/tragic/hilarious/romantic the latest craze is, you’re always going to be set up for disappointment. And they tend to be poor quality gush cleverly packaged to suggest a ground-breaking book wildly different from anything you’ve ever read, which just isn’t true.

All that said, I must admit that I misjudged The Hunger Games. I expected a pale imitation of so many other dystopias, a sort of mass produced novel screaming, “won’t anyone think of the children?!” at passers-by. But it’s not that. It’s something fuller, the edges of the story have been filled in. It’s thought out.

Briefly, x amount of years in the future, society is divided between 12 districts, and the Capitol. The Capitol controls all, and as a demonstration of its power, every year each of the districts must send two children to fight to the death on tv. Clearly, it’s a bit messed up. So one year Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist and general badass mofo, volunteers to save her sister. Cue descent into hell.

The writing is simple but generally enjoyable, but it’s the subtle attacks on capitalism, consumerism and desensitising of violence that impressed me. There’s some substance beneath the awkward love triangle and bickering. Light fiction but not fluff.

Rating: 6 and a half stars
Quote: “I enter a nightmare from which I wake repeatedly, only to find a greater terror awaiting me. All the things I dread most, all the things I dread for others manifest in such vivid detail I can’t help but believe they’re real. Each time I wake, I think, At last, this is over, but it isn’t. It’s only the beginning of a new chapter of torture.”

We Need New Names

Title: We Need New Names

Author: NoViolet Bulawayo

Genre: YA Fiction

Year of Release: 2014

Review: Darling dreams of moving to America with her aunt where she will have dolls and she’ll never be hungry. But she’s a world away, in Zimbabwe where she lives in a shack and her best friend is pregnant at age 11. Yet in these circumstances, she still has a mostly happy and safe childhood.

That doesn’t mean, however, that when the opportunity to move halfway across the world is offered, that she will pass it up. Once there she begins to discover that the American Dream may be harder to reach than she had anticipated.

I really loved this book. It doesn’t sugar coat the reality of moving to the USA and the disillusionment felt by many immigrants. At the same time, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Especially in the first half of the book, it can be pretty funny. It feels real, because it is. Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and then moved to the States, so I think it’s safe to say at least some of the story comes from her own life.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; progression is key. This is a spot on example of how to transition from a child’s point of view to a young adult’s.

A wonderfully different perspective, and a completely fascinating book.

Rating: 7 and a half stars

Quote: “Then Maneru’s grandfather comes sprinting down Freedom Street without his walking stick, shouting, They are coming, Jesus Christ, they are coming! Everyone is standing on the street, neck craned, waiting to see. Then Mother shouts, Darling – comeintothehousenow! but then the bulldozers are already near, big and yellow and terrible and metal teeth and spinning dust.”

The List Of My Desires

Title: The List Of My Desires
Author: Grégoire Delacourt
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
First Published: 2012

Review: The story of your average Joe, conveniently called Jo, who lives her ordinary workaday life until she wins big on the lottery. What will she do, what shall she buy?

Not much apparently. Her greatest pleasures in life are seeing her children and going on weekend trips with her husband. The fact that she is happy with the status quo is, of course, lovely, but, contentment does not a great story make. There must be some discord, and there is, but it just didn’t make me care about plump little Jo and her haberdashery shop.

This is sweet. A little tableau of life with its ups and downs. But that’s all it is. It never really develops into anything meaningful. At the end I had to ask myself, what was the point? It’s very pleasant and the writing is fun, so it will mean a nice hour curled up with a cup of tea on a rainy day. It won’t, however, make you think about anything at all.

Rating:3 and a half stars

Quote: “Being rich means seeing all that’s ugly and having the arrogance to think you can change things. All you have to do is pay for it.”

The Trial

Title: The Trial
Author: Franz Kafka
Genre: Classic
First Published: 1925

Review: Perplexing, disturbing and bizarre in the extreme. This book buzzed around my brain like a demented bee.

Josef K wakes up on his thirtieth birthday to discover that he is under arrest. For what, he does not know. So begins an increasingly frantic mission to prove his innocence and above all, remain logical, even when nothing makes sense.

A word of warning: The Trial is deliberately frustrating and misleading. It twists and turns so quickly you risk whiplash. When I look back at my first notes, I have written across the top: “What is this??”. Even a few months later I have no idea what it is. All I can say is that it is an experience.

Rating: 7 stars

Quote: “The court asks nothing of you. It receives you when you come and it releases you when you go.”