Book Tamers| book reviews

At this point, my idea of rashness evolves around one single thought: should I go to Prague and watch the rain from Cafe Arco, the place where Kafka read from The Process to his friends or should I taste a delicious croissant croustillant at Les Deux Magots? If that’s not possible, please let me walk on Nevski Prospekt during the white nights …

On the fourth cover of the book, I read in bewilderment that this is the first romance that Llosa wrote. At 70. Love… I would probably say that it is more like an obsession, that deviant behavior that makes us, in a perverted way, to become emotionally attached to people who hurt us most.

The bad bad girl

Maybe the reason why I’m so suspicious about this novel is because everything is baldly told. Or too abruptly. The reader is “told” everything, can’t imagine things, can’t perceive essential things about the characters. That’s why even the hero is not very consistent. The woman (we find out her real name only later) runs a chameleon-like existence, which leads imagination to the “mean reds” girl, Holly Golightly. She is a master of disguise, she adjusts very easily to each and every environment in which she needs to survive, being an insensitive self-seeker, restless and proving immature behavior. Maybe just in the end, when she becomes physically challenged, when it is impossible for her to be mean anymore, she cools down.

During four decades, the narrator pursues this complicated story of love for an unstable little woman, always on the run. This rash girl continuously appears in the life of the short translator, who desperately loves her and who wails that she is the reason why he cannot lead a normal life. Emphasizing the moments where the two of them are together (hazardous meetings for her and due to fate for him), the story’s background is rendered by Lima, Paris, London and Tokyo. In Peru, the mean girl is still forming her personality, in Paris she is very charming and mysterious, in England a true lady, while in Japan she becomes really cruel, going from naivety to a fierce perversion of both her body and soul.

The good boy

The narrator, who actually leads an interesting life with his job as an UNESCO translator, with missions in different countries which give him the chance to live his childhood dream (that of living in Paris), violently scorns himself when he finds out that “his girl” has left again. A man who is actually strong, with a great concentration capacity and who gathers around him people as interesting as he is (the atypical hippie, Barreto, or the lead soldiers collector, Toledano). The life of this “good boy” is arid because he doesn’t really manage to fit in, in opposition with the woman of his life who feels everywhere like home. His passions, the movies, the plays, disks, translations from Russian classics, the persevering work or the political life of those times (as agitated in Europe as in Latin America) are silenced by the volcano represented by this woman who always manages to ruin him, both physically and morally.

The speech is to be noted, their conversations always start in the same way, she wants to hear sweet things from his mouth and he wishes to marry her in order to consume the bourgeois lifestyle that he was meant for. One thing is for sure: the American movies lied: “the good boy ” and “the bad girl ” can’t live together because they are driven by selfishness, immaturity and a languor that can’t be understood, who makes them unable to set things clear.

Written by: Ioana

When David Ogilvy says that nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising before reading Scientific Advertising seven times and that this book has changed his life, there’s nothing to add. You just read it. When a name with such resonance in the advertising field expresses this kind of precious opinion, anything else would be out of place.

In our country, Scientific Advertising, published in 1923, appeared in a book that contains Claude Hopkins’ autobiography, My life in advertising, that was written four years later. I think this is a good strategy, meant to persuade especially the skeptics that Scientific Advertising is indeed a reference book in this field.

Claude Hopkins` Life

Reading this book, some strange things happened to me. First of all, even Hopkins’ autobiography appears to be like a handbook, which teaches you how to be successful in life and in advertising. Hopkins tells the story of what he did to support himself at the age of 9, giving details about his first selling experiences that happened around that same age. He explains his way of thinking, his way of approaching things, mentions all the companies he promoted and how he ended up in that situation.

Apart from this, there are two important facts: concerning life in general, one must work in order to succeed. Although he doesn’t recommend anyone to do so, he says that his work day started at 6 am and ended at 2 pm. His resistance, for 35 years, was due to his love towards work that was like a game to him.

Claude Hopkins` Work

When he talks about advertising, he says that the road to success runs through common people. Hopkins always thought that he had an advantage because he went from an average and poor person to a wealthy individual. And he often admonishes those who try to sell things without knowing the target, those who don’t try to find out what are the wishes and the needs of the regular people.

The second strange thing is that although both books seem to be a pair of handbooks (Scientific Advertising is actually a handbook), I didn’t perceive them as such; there was no stiff speech or never ending examples, no mathematical calculi or other obstacles found in science books. In his own way, Hopkins made his books accessible to common people.

As for “the book that has to be read seven times”, I would like to praise the fact that the rules are structured in clearly entitled short chapters and exact explanations. Also, Hopkins says that any advertiser should take into account that they are not to be cheered at, but to sell. All advertisers should consider that.

Written by Raluca

I assume that this uncertainty which prevents me from writing about this book comes from the fact that I have already read Frederic Beigbeder and his younger feminine version Lolita Pille, who share the same bohemian spirit, the same spleen, the same boredom, like “the charming little monster”, Francoise Sagan. Well known for her parties and betting habits, naming herself after a character in Remembrance of Things Past, and entitling her first novel after a verse from Paul Eluard, Francoise Sagan faces a scandalous success at 18, when she writes this novel, which has been translated afterwards in many languages, allowing her to live the decadent life she was meant for.

Hello, sadness

“Hello, sadness” speaks of immorality, disgust and apathy of all kinds. Boredom is called sadness. Spoiled Cecile spends her summer holiday in her father’s villa, in the Mediterranean. The latter, an older version of a Don Juan, is attended by one of his numerous conquests, a shallow and demimonde woman, Elsa. The three of them live in the sweet decadent spirit until the arrival of an old friend of Cecile’s late mother, Anne.

Anne is serious, intelligent, has quiet and profound friends. Her arrival confuses Cecile’s world, pushing her to study and making her use her mind. Her inner peace and carelessness make her look too polite and distant. Frivolous, the relationship with her father, once warm and friendly, starts to fade away. Anne succeeds in interposing herself between Raymond and Elsa, making him wishing she was his wife. The story goes on and we get to know a very wicked Cecile. It all ends tragically for one of the two women who compete for Raymond’s heart.

Goodbye, sadness

After years spent in a monastery, Cecile lets herself go and enjoys water, sun and the little pleasures of life. Tasting love with a man eight years her senior, who becomes mad about her, she proves to be a very sensual woman: not only love gives her pure physical pleasures but it is also a great intellectual stimulus. The proximity of the verb “to make”, material and positive, to the word “love”, a poetical abstraction, offers her strange sensations. Exterior excitement during night life and smoking and drinking from a young age are a compulsory premise for inner well-being. Father and daughter go back to the superficial life they had before. Their existence appears shallow, with problems and responsibilities that are never truly there, with tears and loneliness which are never sad. No honorable sadness, just obsessive boredom and sweetness.

Written by: Ioana

I admit that there were a few moments when I actually wanted to stop reading this book. Pages with no dialogue really bore me and the continuous narration makes me skip paragraphs while searching for clues that something interesting is actually going on. If one considers the fact that this novel counts no less than 500 pages, it could be easily understood why I had the impression of wasting my time on it. But I soon discovered that the lines had something that hypnotized me, almost like the “cat’s eye” in the title, the hero’s lucky charm.

An autobiography

It is firstly the heroine’s, Elaine Risley, autobiography, which is built like a bildungsroman with few missing points. Then, it is the author’s autobiography, who lends lots of her own memories to her heroine. Elaine is an artist. Not a writer but a painter. She is mother of two girls, wife and successful painter (a lively one!). So successful that she even has a retrospective exhibition at 50. Although it makes her feel old, this is not the reason why she would rather not attend the exhibition. That is because it takes place in Toronto, city of her childhood, her teenage years and young adult years, and the place she escaped from and would never come back to.

One can realize that this period was terrifying for her. That, once in Toronto, she felt more ostracized than those who were exiled from Europe. It is obvious that most of her childhood and her teenage years she was struggling fit in, to improve, to be “the same”. Maybe this is the reason why now, at an adult age, she can’t stand any kind of labeling.

With this kind of family …

Once arriving in Toronto, in her first husband’s studio, Elaine begins her journey into her own past. Its remembrance is done at present tense and it often mingles with thoughts and feelings from the moment of the retrospective exhibition. The first things we find out are tied to her family. Her father studies insects on the field, so the family is always on the road, sleeping in tents or in camping houses, eating food from cans, heated at camp-fire. Her mother is an atypical housewife, wears pants and takes walks by herself. The elder brother collects anything, he has a deep-rooted passion for aliens, space, time and later for physics and he is the only one playing with little Elaine. The latter has not yet been baptized, she is not afraid of her parents (she has no reason to), she searches for worms and grubs under the stones with her brother and her behavior better suits a boy than an 8-year old a girl.

The age when one can forgive anything?

I was reading the other day on a blog (I ended up there by chance but I can’t remember the address) something like this: “memories from that age when by nightfall you have already forgotten friends’ wickedness”. At about that age, Elaine goes to Toronto, where her father gets a job at the University. It is obvious that she needs to fit in and part of this means having friends of the same age. One of them is Carol, to whom Elaine is pretty much an exotic person and who wonders endlessly: “You’re sleeping in these beds?”, “Is this what you’re eating?” Another one is Grace, the eldest, which the other two are desperately trying to please. However, when Cordelia shows up in the picture, the other three become some kind of slaves. Cordelia dominates them, giving them orders, being more powerful, and the girls feel accepted when she shows few tokens of kindness.

Among them, Elaine is still the weakest and she soon becomes the perfect target for her friends’ mockeries and one surely cannot understand how little girls of 10 or 11 could say or do such things. Cordelia pretends that Elaine must improve and it is because they are her true friends they always must criticize and punish her with exile from the group. She accepts everything, her personality being crushed little by little. She becomes terrified of them, starts tearing her skin off her feet and even avoids them for a while. But she continues telling herself that they are her friends and finds herself in the same situations.
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“-Come on, says Cordelia. Do what you’re told to.
-She doesn’t obey, says Grace.”

How long can a memory haunt you?

Humiliations become more and more diverse and when Cordelia goes too far, putting Elaine’s life in jeopardy, the latter comes back to her senses. She still fears her friends, nothing being changed. However, she finds the strength to leave them. Now free, Elaine defends herself through forgetfulness. She doesn’t forgive but she forgets, reaching a kind of pathological oblivion. Only later, in her fifties, she recalls all these happenings. Although they switch roles at a given moment, Elaine realizes that “her best friend” didn’t do more than stir some emotions that she herself felt when she was at home. And it’s at this moment that she sets herself free from the fear of Cordelia. This is why now she wishes to see her, because she is no longer a threat.

Up to the end, even though I got bored at the beginning, I found myself avidly turning the pages, “hunting” for Cordelia’s, Grace’s or Carol’s tainted appearances. I was anxious “seeing” Cordelia entering the room the night of the exhibition. I ended up closing the book amazed how a novel so boring in the beginning, well written and emphasizing the most important details though, could have taken almost an entire day to read.

Written by Raluca