Book Review: Emily Hudson by Melissa Jones

Title: Emily Hudson
Author: Melissa Jones
Publisher: Penguin Viking
ISBN: 9780670021802
PP: 360 Pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Price: $25.95
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Written in a combination of narrative and personal correspondence, Emily Hudson is the tale of a beautiful young woman filled with spirit and creativity, who finds herself the dependent of a strict and oppressive uncle after being tragically orphaned. Brought to live at the family’s beach house in Newport she is permitted limited freedom, yet dreams of traveling abroad and exploring her talent for art. Encouraged by her cousin William, she finds a certain amount of contentment and happiness on the Newport shore, especially after meeting the handsome Captain Lindsay.

Emily’s happiness in Newport is shattered when the threat of consumption presents itself and she feels the responsibility to decline Captain Lindsay’s heartfelt petition of marriage. After caring for and witnessing the death of her mother, father, sisters and brother to the terrible disease, Emily can not bare the thought of putting another through such a bitter and tragic experience or risk their health in so doing.

William, ever her champion, brings her to London to study art and improve her health. Yet William’s controlling and demanding persona begins to become too much for Emily and she finds that they are often at odds. Increasingly ill with the effects of consumption and tired of her cousin’s constant tantrums, Emily runs away to Rome where she can surround herself with art and make a life of her own. Fearing her end is near, Emily contemplates her life, her missed opportunity with the man she loved, and an uncertain future.

Emily is a wonderfully well-drawn character and the story is engaging. Over half of Emily’s story is told via the letters that she writes to her loved ones and this is particularly well done. This is a literary historical romance that is passionate and elegantly written.

Melissa Jones is the sister of Sadie Jones, the author of The Outcast and Small Wars and Emily’s story is inspired by the relationship between the novelist Henry James and his cousin Minny.

A sweeping tale of dreams, lies, love and manipulation, Emily Hudson is a highly captivating novel. Jones’ deeply introspective writing style endears you to Emily in a profound way, carrying you through the story as if with a friend.

Book Review: Selected Stories by William Trevor

Title: Selected Stories
Author: William Trevor
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 97806700022069
Genre: Short Stories
PP: 567
Price: $35.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Over the years I’ve derived so much enjoyment from short stories, in some ways my favourite literary genre alongside the critical essay. I really began when I was little with myths and folktales, a tradition for which I still retain considerable affection. By the age of ten or so I was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. From there, in successive stages, I discovered such wonderful story tellers as William Somerset Maugham (his Far Eastern stories are a particular favourite), Isaac Bashevis Singer (a magician in words), Nikolai Gogol (my favourite Russian writer in the medium), Graham Greene (who writes extensively in this genre though he is better known as a novelist), Anton Chekhov, Alphonse Daudet, James Joyce, Ambrose Bierce, Franz Kafka, H. H. Munro (better known as ‘Saki’), William Porter (better known as ‘O Henry’) along with so many others, including Balzac and Dickens, not generally associated with this literary form.

Now I’ve discovered William Trevor, an Irish writer, having not long finished Selected Stories, published by Penguin Books. I suppose it’s not quite true to say that his work is a totally new discovery because I came across him previously, one story, I think, in an anthology of Irish writing, but not enough to form a proper impression. Now I have and there is no doubt in my mind that he will last as one of the great masters of the medium. He writes with such amazing fluency, beautiful limpid prose with a simple realism that reminds me so much of Chekhov. His work is rich in gentle irony with slight overtones of sadness, of empty lives and frustrated hopes.

This collects (not selects, as the title suggests) Trevor’s four most recent books of stories in their entirety. Of the 48 stories, not one may be called second-rate, though some are clearly standouts.

Trevor’s writing is straightforward, his register quiet. Charles McGrath said in a Times review: “He is not a clever or metaphorical writer. Nothing in a Trevor story is “like” something else; things are what they are.” These stories are as close to real life as fiction gets. Trevor’s mastery of scene and detail is so refined that it is not until the last couple sentences of a story that his economy, forethought and grace are revealed; just at the end, the story blossoms.

In general Trevor shapes characters, in complexity or simplicity, who are totally believable. He is there as a narrator, as a third presence, only in the lightest possible way. He does not ‘create’ his people; he allows them to create themselves, to build themselves up through their own words and actions. There is little in the way of a narrator’s prologue; this is life unfolding as we go along, as fate works away.

The language, the use of words, is quite delicious: precise, beautiful, simple and elegant. There is nothing in the least artificial about Trevor’s prose style, which has directness and a sense of realism that I so admire, largely free of a tangled undergrowth of adjectives, something that only the very best writers can command. For the most part these are small and intimate dramas, not covering a huge range of possible situations, and yet paradoxically immense. In over fifty stories at no point did I feel that I was going over the same ground: each situation seemed unique and fresh.

Subjects include infidelity, marriage, piety, childhood, some references to Irish history; but it really doesn’t matter what the story is about. Though he always keeps the plot moving, it is the richness of character that is the mark of a Trevor story. And for this reason, while he’s also a novelist, he is a short story master. “A short story,” Trevor said in a Guardian interview, “is a glimpse of someone’s life or someone’s relationship. You can take a relationship and almost photograph it. And there it is. Often that relationship can get lost in the bigger shape of the novel. I like to isolate it and really look at the characters.”

If you don’t want to read all 500+ pages of this volume, pick up one of the original story collections it draws from: After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side, and Cheating at Canasta

Book Review: Open City by Teju Cole

Title: Open City
Author: Teju Cole
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781400068098
Genre: Literary Fiction
PP: 259 Pages
Price: $25.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

If there is to be a new literature born from the influential shadow of the great W.G. Sebald (who died tragically in a car accident in 2001 at the age of 57) then Teju Cole and his enigmatic, sparkling first novel, Open City, occupies the place of inevitable heir by reaching back through the past while firmly, concretely settling itself in the present. The young Cole (he is in his mid 30s, and is also a photographer and an art historian) achieves this by eschewing traditional plot and using a preternaturally crystalline prose that both invites and calms the reader while shattering expectations of resolution and remapping and redesigning the terrain for that over-used phrase: the Great American Novel. Open City is a novel concerned with questions, not answers, and it is this questioning nature that permeates throughout, stopping to digress on such disparate topics as consumer society (ruminating on the disappearance of a Blockbuster video store), politics, classical music, relationships, books, movies, medical school, and academia.

Julius is in his early 30s and in the final year of a psychiatry fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian. He was born in Lagos to a German mother (who he is now estranged from) and a Nigerian father (who died when Julius was fourteen) and has always felt like an outsider. Being light-skinned he was always aware, while in a Nigerian military school, of not being as black as the others, and in America he feels what it’s like not to be white. In the U.S. Julius is the perpetual “other,” belonging to neither group. A friendly glance between him and a group of young black males carries sufficient weight, though it is fleeting when they pass again:

There had earlier been, it occurred to me, only the most tenuous of connections between us, looks on a street corner by strangers, a gesture of mutual respect based on our being young, black, male; in other words, on our being “brothers.” These glances were exchanged between black men all over the city every minute of the day, a quick solidarity worked into the weave of each man’s mundane pursuits, a nod or smile or quick greeting. It was a little way of saying, I know something of what life is like for you out here. They had passed by me now, and were for some reason reluctant to repeat that fleeting gesture. (212)

Another example portrays Julius interacting with his neighbor, not knowing that his wife had passed away a number of weeks ago. This scene illustrates how the people who live close to us can, in reality, remain forever distant:

A woman had died in the room next to mine, she had died on the other side of the wall I was leaning against, and I had known nothing of it. I had known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him in greeting with headphones in my ears, or when I had folded clothes in the laundry room while he used the washer. I hadn’t known him well enough to routinely ask how Carla was, and I had not noticed neither her absence nor the change–there must have been a change–in his spirit. It was not possible, even then, to go knock on his door and embrace him, or to speak with him at length. It would have been false intimacy. (21)

Hovering in the background of the novel is 9/11, and Julius meditates while wandering the streets of New York thinking about the losses surrounding this event as well. Memory is both a blessing and a curse in this world; we wade through our day to day activities until the detritus of the past reaches out, strikes us cold, and leaves us wondering where we are and why we are here. Julius then decides to fly to Brussels in hopes of locating his aging German grandmother, and while there he meets a woman and, in an internet café, an angry Moroccan student; they eventually have lunch and discuss politics. Various other events accumulate: Julius visits an older former profesor of his; he takes in both a movie and a concert; there are digressions surronding his patients and talks with friends. What this aggregate of “fragments” does is give the reader both a veritable glimpse of Julius’s life and interactions while also portraying the city and the world as a living, breathing essence.

What Teju Cole has done with Open City is usher in a new idea of the American novel. Now, it is no longer strictly “American” but a composite of “others,” populated by the remembered and the forgotten, or like Primo Levi’s, the “drowned and the saved.” This wandering, meditative literature encapsulates a new aesthetic that best exemplifies the new American and new American novel: it asks questions without expecting answers, it is both in awe of, comfortable in, and frightened by the world; it is not loud, sprawling, or in your face, but solitary, enigmatic, and eerily prescient for the strange times we are currently living in.

Book Review: Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock

Title: Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence
Author: Nick Bantock
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780877017882
PP: 48 Pages
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5
Price: Rs. 399

Lovers love, and whatever distance or mystery is tossed between them, they still will love. In “Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence” by Nick Bantock, we begin an intimate journey between two lovers destined to be enraptured in all that is dreamt of. They catapult the divide of geography and join mid-mail in a postal embrace, captured by Bantock in a sweet and phenomenal book.

Griffin is a postcard artist in England and Sabine is a stamp designer for a small Pacific island. Each is perceived as sublimely exotic to the other as they reveal the secrets of their lives through correspondence. Their souls are joined by a mysterious connection — Sabine, a stamp designer raised on a South Pacific island and carrying on her father’s exploration of the natural world; Griffin, a lonely London post card artist struggling to find relief for his ailing soul. How does Sabine find him, how does she SEE his work as if with her very own eyes? What can come of their love story? Is their correspondence enough?

Author-illustrator Nick Bantock reveals the story in letters and postcards. Griffin’s drawings are angular “realism with a twist” while Sabine takes elements of nature and embellishes them. The envelopes are fixed to the page with typed or lettered pages tucked inside, giving the reader a sense of participation in unfolding the letters to read them. The art and design concept are the real story here, though the small amount of text carries complex, well-expressed feelings.

What is the romance of “Griffin & Sabine?” Besides being an ‘extraordinary correspondence,’ it is about two lovers who connect through the artistic passions they share. Like the romances that now happen through the internet, or the Victorian era correspondences, there is an innocence and delicacy to their exchanges of mail.

This is the romance which never happened in “84 Charing Cross Road.” This is what the romance should’ve been in “You’ve Got Mail.” This is what “Cyrano De Bergerac” could’ve been if not a tragedy.

Bantock dangles a sensuous, sumptuous step into the hearts of a fantasy based in a reality that the reader will smile, wondering if the writer knew someone like Sabine, if she has been created like Pygmalion sculpted Galatea.

Begin with “Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence” and follow their story through subsequent tales in other books.

Book Review: Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir by Margaux Fragoso

Title: Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
Author: Margaux Fragoso
Publisher: Penguin Press (Penguin)
ISBN: 9780241950159
Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction
PP: 319 Pages
Source: Publisher
Price: £9.99
Rating: 5/5

This is one of the most visceral and heartfelt books I have ever read. It is a brave and painful book, difficult to read but beautifully wrought. From the time she was eight years old, Maugaux Fragoso was sexually abused by a man named Peter who is 51 years old when he meets her. The abuse lasts for years and years. Peter grooms Margaux, enchanting her with his home that is filled with animals like hamsters, iguanas, a dog and rabbits. He plays with her as if he was a child. He charms her, acts like a father and pretends to give her unconditional love. However, all this time he is truly a predator, attempting to begin the sexual abuse that is initiated in earnest when Margaux is eight years old.

Margaux becomes completely dependent on Peter and believes that he is the only one in the world that loves her. At times, however, she acts out in ways that indicate she has been abused but the adults in her life do not take notice. She has fugue states, terrible anger issues, spends the nights with Peter. Margaux’s mother is seriously mentally ill and encourages her relationship with Peter. Her father is physically and emotionally abusive to Margaux and to her mother. Her father, at one point, suspects that Margaux is being sexually abused, but shows no empathy. In fact, if she were to admit her abuse, he’d put her on the street. When Margaux is in high school, a social worker is called in because people in the neighborhood are suspicious of Margaux’s relationship with Peter but she defends him. It is not that different from Stockholm Syndrome.

I understood the trauma that Margaux was experiencing and her need to believe that Peter was her love. “I was Peter’s religion” she says. She would put on alter-personalities to please Peter and also to believe she had some control over him. One of these personalities is a “bad girl” named Nina. Nina acts rough and tough and streetwise with a foul mouth. She punishes Peter. At times their relationship becomes physical and Peter tries to choke Margaux, gives her a black eye and punches her in the face. “I like being Nina”. “It seemed as though Peter’s other self Mr. Nasty was dependent on Nina and that he needed her to survive. The favors she gave him made him feel guilty and caused him to owe favors in return. This all amounted to me being in charge” Margaux needed to feel some element of control because in reality she was under Peter’s control entirely.

Peter tells her that “all men like young girls whether they admit it or not. Most guys are just dishonest about it”. “If you were to openly admit, yes, I find young girls attractive, you’d be burned at the stake.” Peter also tries to get Margaux to believe that she is his only ‘love’ but she finds out that, like other pedophiles, this is not the case. There have been others, he has been in jail, and is chock-filled with secrets that gradually come out. He brainwashes her over and over again with lies and twisted love.

Margaux begins to believe that only someone like Peter – old, without teeth, perverted – could love someone like her. She is an outcast at school and doesn’t know how to interact with young people her age. All of her life is spent trying to please Peter. “What did kids my own age talk about? If they’d seen me with Peter, who would I say he was? My father? He was so old he could have been my grandfather.”

As to the subject matter, it’s very difficult to stomach. Very. If my circumstances were different, I’m not sure that I would have been able to handle it. I had wanted to read it because I thought it might be an insightful portrait of how a child molester truly preys on his victims (which it is). Having worked in the past with many, many victims of sexual abuse, I was already very aware of the grave misconceptions that abound about child molesters. After reading the review from NPR, I wasn’t sure if this book was going to have what I was looking for but it was Kathryn Harrison’s much more favorable and less ambivalent review in the NY Times that prompted me to try it.

I was concerned about the number of reviews I saw that mentioned that the book “humanizes a pedophile,” including Alice Sebold’s, as I didn’t want to feel pity and forgiveness for a warm and cuddly child molester. I was already aware that vast numbers of abusers come from very traumatic backgrounds and I had already had many experiences seeing the humanity in monsters who had committed truly deplorable crimes. That was not what I was looking for. I consider it a great success of the book that the reader remains consistently aware and disgusted by the despicable behavior of the abuser while simultaneously understanding the perspective of the narrator who felt charmed by and loved by him, who felt sympathy, love and desperation for him. He was humanized in the sense that he was a fleshed out, embodied being that was comprehensible to the reader, and not the one-dimensional caricature of a monster that is typically portrayed. For this reason I think this book is an excellent work. It does no one much good to only perceive pedophiles as the latter description. It certainly makes it easier for us to keep them at arm’s length but it does nothing to help us “see” them. Of course, knowing that they are all around us, people whom we know and interact with everyday, makes it incredibly difficult for any of us to want to come to grips with actually “seeing” them. Yet it is so important that we do so.

I encourage anyone who is in the field of trauma or sexual abuse to read this book. If you or someone you know has been sexually abused, read this book. If you want to read a beautiful memoir written by a brave and courageous woman, read this book. It is without comparison in its forthrightness, pain and hope.

Book Review: The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville

Title: The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
Author: Patrick Somerville
Publisher: Featherproof Books
ISBN: 9780982580813
Genre: Short Stories, Literary Fiction
PP: 307 pages
Price: $14.95
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Looking for a collection of stories that never bores? That always retains its flavor and texture? In his new collection of short stories Patrick Somerville has, with scattered precision, invented a whole new genre. The stories are intertwined in an Escheresque way that allow you to discover them again and again, backwards and forwards, sideways and roundabout. If you are a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Alice Through the Looking Glass, if you enjoy science fiction and love stories, and if you like a little apocalyptic darkness mixed in with your post-millennial philosophy you will fall in love with these stories. If you want to know the answer to: what should you do with a billion dollars? Then read this book.

For example, the opening tale, which gives the collection its name, introduces us to the School of Surreal Thought and Design. SSTD makes an appearance in other stories that do not involve the characters of the first. Similarly, the random stabbing of a young man on the street plays a role in at least three of the stories. Characters, meanwhile, make an appearance in seemingly unrelated stories, serving to provide a common thread. More important, virtually all of the stories are at heart about their characters, characters often broken in one way or another. Those who are damaged often are, as one says, “stuck in time” or, in the words of another, represent “the human mind trapped by itself in a vacuum but there’s a very small window somehow within this empty and airless prison.”

This is Patrick Somerville’s most ambitious book by a mile. The characters and situations here are so delightfully varied. In these stories we encounter a group of college students with bizarre self-designated assignments. A somewhat washed up sci-fi writer and his balding friend. A man in the middle of a nervous breakdown. This book stands in stark contrast with other collections I’ve read recently, where it can feel like the same character is being used in ever story, re-named again and again.

I was also impressed by how comfortably Somerville shifted tone and genre, which came as something as a surprise considering that his earlier books were traditionally literature (with a few shots of oddness here and there). “No Sun”, for example, is a grizzly, stripped down tale of survival in the vein of Justin Cronin’s “The Passage”. The next story, Varra in the Woods, is a straight-up horror story with parental overtones, while “The Wildlife Biologist” is a very honest, naturalistic and probing look at high school lust and middle-age failures.

Combining a light touch of science fiction with greater emphasis on the characters, “The Machine of Understanding Other People” also helps epitomize Somerville’s “genre-busting.” Yet it also reminds us that the work as a whole may be its own machine of understanding other people, one that tends to give insight into not only the empty prison but, more important, the window.

Any fan of genre-bending, compassionate characters and general goofiness should give this book a shot.

Book Review: The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

Title: The Shape of Water
Author: Andrea Camilleri
Publisher: Picador
Genre: Crime
ISBN: 9780330492867
PP: 256 Pages
Source: Publisher
Price: £7.99
Rating: 5/5

This was a fast-moving thriller set in a fictional Sicilian town. The author is Italian, and his hero is a local police chief, Salvo Montalbano. Unlike other crime fiction that is set in Italy but written by foreigners, this stuff is more down to earth and skips a lot of the pretty description and social observation. That is not to say that there is no social observation here – what would be the point of writing something set in Italy without it? But Camilleri, being a local, gets to the point faster and uses a lot of cynical humor and quick dialogue. The style reminded me a little of Simenon, although the characters and situations are different.

The story begins quickly, with the discovery of a leading politician’s corpse, sitting in a car in a sleazy part of town frequented by whores and their customers. Although it is pretty strange that he should be found dead in such a place, pressure is immediately applied to the Montalbano to quickly wrap up the investigation. Feeling that he is being used, this cop instead begins to investigate. Montalbano is pretty much a classic paperback detective, but without the vices. He is tough and rational, but primarily a decent man who tries hard to do the right thing. Camilleri paints a picture of a Sicily that is rife with corruption of all kinds – financial, political, sexual – especially sexual – and a lot of this is taken for granted by everybody. This is, I suppose, a cliche about Southern Italy, but in this case it is employed by an Italian writer.

Montalbano begins to investigate, and discovers that, not surprisingly, things are not what they seem. But neither do they turn out to be the usual type of thing one would expect either. The pace is quick, and things are interesting and hard to puzzle out up thru the ending. The ending is a surprise too – a double ending, in which Montalbano, the only one who seems to have a clue as to what really happened (with one exception), ends up with two plausible explanations for the politician’s death – and no arrests appear to be imminent.

Also coming into the picture are the dead man’s political rival, his party boy son, and the son’s Swedish blonde bombshell wife, who is apparently screwing any man who gets within a few feet of her. This was the first book in a series, and it seems like the author is trying to set up a series. There are an awful lot of characters that pop up in such short book, and I would bet that they reappear in other tales. Camilleri is no poetic prosemaster, but this was a solid, taut, well-designed page-turner with a fair amount of humor to balance out the violence.

This is very cerebral detecting, even given the Maigret-like texture of the narrative. Fans of rough-and-tumble may be disappointed. Those who flinch at the social critique of the South of Italy may find the portrayal of Sicilians to be a bit problematic too.

But I think these objections are misplaced. The real action in this book is on the social and personal level. It is precisely the quality of thought that the ever-humane Montalbano brings to the proceedings that make them exciting. More importantly, his dim-eyed view of Sicilan society and mores is an invitation to reflect on its similarities to our own. Sicily here is not a stand-in for some uncivilized ‘other’. It’s handled with a sympathy that makes it a proxy for all of us.

You can purchase the book on Flipkart here and on Infibeam here

Book Review: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Title: White is for Witching
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher: Picador
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780330458146
PP: 192 Pages
Source: Publisher
Price: £7.99
Rating: 4/5

If you are the sort of person who likes your stories to be straightforward, making perfect sense from beginning to end and capable of being read without the need to really engage the brain, then Helen Oyeyemi’s “White is for Witching” is most definitely not for you. If you like chilling but essentially conventional tales of haunted houses and souls possessed, then you are also probably better off looking somewhere else, despite what it says on the cover.

If, however, you are looking for writing to challenge your complacency about the way you think the world operates, about what is and what is not; if you are happy to be jolted every now and then, forced to forget about constructing a rational and coherent picture of what is going on, and be made instead to feel your way blindly through events told from multiple perspectives (none of them clear but blurred and distorted, as though through smoky or faceted glass) and if you don’t object to an uncomfortable and discomforting ride into new and unfamiliar literary territory, then this book may be just the ticket.

Neither Helen Oyeyemi’s story-line nor her prose style will be to all tastes, but for those who are prepared to sense their way through her words and their flow, rather than try to follow them exactly, will find themselves falling gradually under their spell. This talented young author weaves an intricate web of the incredible around the prosaic and mundane events of contemporary “civilised” life, blending the surreal and the supernatural almost effortlessly with the everyday, to produce a thoroughly modern Gothic novel of loss, denial, betrayal, deceit, madness, love, desire, possessiveness… and much, much more. None of it is comfortable and at times it can be confusing and disorienting, but who said life — or literature — was meant to be easy?

White is for Witching is a strange but rather beautiful book. It’s a story about lots of things – the fragility of family relationships, the bond between twins, sexuality, racial prejudice – but at the same time it isn’t really about any of these. The unfinished themes are held together by Oyeyemi’s prose, which is fluid, lyrical and reads almost like poetry at some points. The narrative is unconventional and initially hard to follow, as it switches between different viewpoints without explaining which is which (oh, and one of the narrators is a house…) although I got used to this quite quickly.

The daughters of the Silver family are cursed with a hunger for things that do not nourish. The Silver girls absently smear their mouths with handfuls of dirt, lick chalk from secret pocket stashes, nibble on plastic spoons beneath the sheets. The family home in Dover holds them through their suffering, unfolds for them and keeps them together. Part One of White is for Witching, “curiouser,” begins with the return to Dover of eighteen-year-old Miranda Silver, an ethereal chalk-eater in stilettos and funereal black dresses, wide eyes and scarlet lips. Her twin brother, Eliot, and her father, Luc, are trying to survive after her mother Lily’s death; Miranda is trying to survive with Lily’s ghost. Part Two, “and curiouser,” begins and ends (well, perhaps) with Miranda’s departure from Dover and her advancing… condition.

The book is not without its flaws: stylistically, some parts come across as experimental and while many of these work and work well, others are less successful. Structurally, there are times too when one feels that the author has simply tried to cram a few too many ideas and issues into too small a framework; there are a couple of plot elements in particular which are left to fizzle out, rather than be resolved or even fully contextualised and which consequently impede and distract from the story rather than contributing to it. These really should have been pruned out by her editors.

The book evokes strong resonances of African-based cultures and could probably only have come this effectively from a black author; not that this means that “White is for Witching” is written solely for a black audience — far from it, in fact; Helen Oyeyemi conjures a rich trans-cultural stew in her cauldron, blending her ingredients with great skill.

If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, “White is for Witching” comes highly recommended, although you would be well advised to sample before you buy.

Book Review: The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor

Title: The Anatomy of Ghosts
Author: Andrew Taylor
Publisher: Michael Joseph (Penguin Books)
ISBN: 9780141018621
Genre: Crime
PP: 469 pages
Price: £7.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

“Books are not luxuries. They are meat and drink for the mind.”

This quote from John Holdsworth, a major character in The Anatomy of Ghosts, is a simple truth. And The Anatomy of Ghosts is a twelve-course feast.

Holdsworth is a widowed bookseller, haunted by his failures as a parent and husband, eking out a living in 18th century London selling used volumes from a handcart. One day he is approached by the emissary of Lady Anne Oldershaw, offering him the position of curator of her late husband’s library, with the obligation of cataloguing and placing a value on its contents in anticipation of its bestowal upon university. This seemingly simple task has a corollary obligation: return Lady Anne’s son Frank to sanity, and thus restored, to London.

Young Frank has been committed to a sanitarium because he insists he has seen a ghost while at school in Cambridge. Holdsworth retrieves him from the hospital and sets him up in a secluded country cottage. While Frank whiles away his time in the fresh country air, Holdsworth is delving into the fact of the ghost…for Frank’s ghost was Sylvia, the deceased wife of Philip Whichcote, and the circumstances of her death are questionable, at best.

Holdsworth is a reluctant sleuth, bound by contemporary conventions of place and social structure, but his curiosity is driven in part by his unresolved guilt over the deaths of his own wife and son, and he oversteps his bounds so carefully those above him in social strata barely notice. He uncovers a secretive society whose chief object is debauchery and blasphemy, and sniffs out a connection between young Oldershaw, the deceased Sylvia, Whichcote, and numerous other players of high rank in the small theater that is Cambridge University. Everything, everyone, is connected, whether or not they are aware of the connection.

Andrew Taylor tells his multi-layered story with clarity and precision. His attention to detail, his ear for dialogue, his creation of character, all are wicked sharp. This sentence, for example, tells the reader everything one needs to know about both individuals mentioned: “The doorstep was whitestoned every morning by a gangling maid named Dorcas, a poorhouse apprentice who feared Mrs Phear far more than she feared Almighty God because He at least was reputed to be merciful.” Sights, smells, sartorial details — all lovingly exposited almost to the point of wishing for a kerchief of one’s own to hold to one’s nose. The Anatomy of Ghosts is a rare treat for a lover of historical fiction and a lover of mysteries. Both are exquisitely contained within this one volume. If I had to make a comparison between them, I’d say with The Anatomy of Ghosts, Andrew Taylor has outdone Caleb Carr’s The Alienist.

Book Review: The Wrong Blood by Manuel De Lope

Title: The Wrong Blood
Author: Manuel De Lope
Publisher: Other Press
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translation
PP: 304 Pages
ISBN: 9781590513095
Price: $14.95
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

There must be something about the way Spanish literature translates into English. Manuel De Lope’s writing kept making me think of the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is very stately and a bit formal but it is also very entertaining and not to be missed.

The story takes place during the Spanish Civil War and then fifty or so years later. The main characters are Dr. Castro, wealthy aristocrat, Isabel Herraiz, Peasant Girl, Maria Antonia Etzarri and Isabel’s grandson, Goitia Herraiz. The women lived together for years, in Isabel’s home. Also, part of the household is Veronica Herraiz, who will become Goitia’s mother. Dr. Castro lives in the house next door to Isabel and Maria Antonia and was the doctor who delivered Isabel’s daughter. On the surface, everthing seems pretty straight forward except for a secret that Isabel, Dr. Castro and Maria Antonia share.

Goitia comes to his grandmother’s house to study for the Civil Law Notary Exams. It is his presence which initiates memories in the mind of the doctor. He remembers the wedding of Isabel and her soldier husband, Julen and the terrible tragedy which left Isabel a new bride and young widow and pregnant with her husband’s child. Maria Antonia experiences her own tragedies during the war when she was raped and misused by Facist soldiers who commandeered her family’s inn. Shamed and confused, she is left to make her own way and is taken in by a family friend of Isabel’s. She is trained as a cook and eventually is hired by Isabel to be her cook and companion. The decades long relationship between the women causes Isabel to leave Maria Antonia her home when Isabel dies. Goitia has asked permission to study at Las Cruces, as it is named, at the bidding of his mother. Maria Antonia agrees, and they spend two months together with the young man studying and the old women taking care of him.

The story of these people is rolled out carefully and well by De Lope. Along with the story of the main characters is a background description of the Spanish Civil War. Although he doesn’t go into depth about the war, we can see the story of this terrible conflict which we have been acquainted with previously in Picasso’s “Guernica; Hemingway;s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Lorca’s poetry and his biography by Ian Gibson. We get a flavor of the trauma of the Spanish as they lived through the war which has been called “The Dress Rehearsal for World War II”.

In terms of the writing, the direction of the plotline is a bit obvious once you begin reading, but that hardly matters in the long run. I only rarely find an author whose prose is so eloquent that I want to read the book again just to appreciate its beauty. And considering this is a translated version, well, I can only imagine how absolutely wonderful it must be in the original Spanish. The story is paced very well; it starts a bit slow, setting the overall tone immediately, while allowing the reader to absorb and appreciate small details that might otherwise be overlooked. The sense of time and place is evoked largely through the use of flashbacks, which take the reader seamlessly and skillfully through the hardships of war into the present and back again, without causing any interruption to the overall flow of the story. It is a book that will you find difficult to put down until the very end.

I highly recommend this book. Even though De Lope has written a number of other successful novels, this is the first one which has been translated into English and John Cullen has done a marvelous job as translator. I hope he will do more of De Lope’s work. This is not a book to read in a weekend. However, I found myself being drawn back to it to sneak yet another page or so in odd minutes. It was a great experience. I hope you will read it also.

You can purchase the book on Flipkart here