Book Tamers| book reviews

I like most part of Neil Gaiman’s work. I loved some stories in Sandman (one of the most popular comic books series ever made), I really enjoyed American Gods, I laughed when reading Anansi Boys. And I loved the first chapter in Stardust. I would have wanted to like it as a whole, from the beginning till the end but this could not be, for Gaiman has many “hit or miss” moments.

Stardust begins very well, in an English village named Wall, set at some granite hills. Beyond those hills there is the fairy land. Young Tristan Thorn promises his lover, Victoria Forester, that he will find the star they both saw falling beyond the wall and she will marry him. Inevitably, Tristan begins his journey to the fairy land, although the star proves to be a young woman, not a piece of a meteorite. The adventures will reach epic proportions when many parties prove to want capturing the girl, from various reasons.

The most impressive thing is right from the start, the language, that in some moments, it becomes rather poetic, rivaling with Shakespeare (especially when they cite from Shakespeare). From metaphors to epithets and comparisons, Stardust is a refined text from the esthetic point of view. The fantastic world is a world pre-Tolkien, evidently and abundantly influenced by British folklore. Characters are though stereotypical, from the young man looking for adventure, to the bad witch, the dying king, or sociopath princes that kill each other for the crown (the dead princes’ choir is still remarkable).

Stardust is a fairytale from a modern perspective and that is obvious when talking about its tone and rhythm. It is a strange mix of modern intrigue and traditional atmosphere, but this doesn’t go as well as we hoped for. Characters are one-dimensional, there is an inconstancy regarding the development of the story, and many turn-ups seem forced, many situations are solved in a deus ex machine style and the ending is disappointing.

The book is fit for an occasional reader, the kind of reader who wants a simple and short story. The screening is as fit as the book. But for the passionate for fantasy literature, Stardust is disappointing especially because Gaiman already proved he can do more that that.

Written by: Cristi

Evil needs to be cut from the root, people say. And when your teeth hurt, it means one has a problem with the roots. It’s not surprising that characters in White Teeth search for roots: cultural, ethnic, historical, as long as they live in an ineffable world, where nothing can be predicted or guessed and where nothing can be controlled. The explanation must reside in the past. For almost twenty five years, the Jones and the Iqbal families are in the middle of a saga that gets from tragic to hilarious, from small things to big history.

Archibald Jones knows Samad Iqbal during the second world war; a supposedly heroic act unites them; then, there are the weaknesses: Muslim Samad makes deals with Allah in order to be absolved of some little corruption imposed by modern world, and Archie lives his days as they pass him by. He has a first bad marriage, he gets stopped from committing suicide, and he falls for Clara, who has no teeth in the front of her mouth. He has a girl, Irie, who tries to find herself in the Jamaican story of her grandmother, Hortensia, born in an earthquake and convinced that Jehovah’s witnesses show the end of the world to sinners.

On the other side, Samad has long speeches about the European world’s perversity, compared to Bangladesh’s honesty, always on the verge of a catastrophe. His main obsession is however perverted, for the glorious role in the world’s history that he wants to assign to his roots- grandfather Mangal Pande – is inexistent. It seems his heirs, twins Millat and Magid, already Europeanized, get to know more profoundly what defines them, after long searches for identity. Samad remains a wanderer, he never succeeds in going from intention to action. His sons are the perfect image of the two worlds where he no longer finds his place: Millat gets in touch with a fundamentalist movement named KEVIN, and Magid participates in a glorious project of genetics.

As the characters’ lives, narration ramifies visibly, becoming hard to control or explained without detailing or deviating. Of course, a novel of these proportions and structure doesn’t present only “ the animal in its own habitat”, the environment being a cosmopolite London, visible in its behavior and values for those who know it, but get beyond- with the help of humor and empathy- naturalist observation. Moreover, the moralizing note, controversy (the Future’s Mouse genetic experiment), parallelism, and type phrases and divagations are very natural.

The great Literary Discovery, as Sunday Times calls her, this remarkable debut, as following volumes, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, seem to lead to the conclusion, maybe hasty, that Zadie Smith will be counted amongst the 21st century’s classics. Anyway, White Teeth is an excellent epic construction, written with verve, humour and commitment, that I recommend with no hesitation.

Written by: Mihaela

In a letter to Durrell, Henry Miller states that there is nothing that compares to Justine in the English literature. The first book in the The Alexandria Quartet, Justine, is incandescent, demanding, melancholic and painful. Words become phrases that change their form and texture throughout the novel, like Justine, like Alexandria. Durrell passes from the woman to the city, from dark secrets to the attempt to redemption through decadence.
Through Justine, Durrell lifted Alexandria together with the character-cities, next to Joyce’s Dublin and Dickens’ London. But Alexandria benefits from personifications, which next to implying its animal side, they render it as an independent existence, away from the people. This time, it’s not the people, they don’t get to create the city, but the city creates its own people, and Alexandria becomes a beautiful beast that influences the destinies of its subjects.
The whole Quartet is based on this prismatic vision. Alternating perspectives through narrator changing gives the impression of an uncertainty over reality. Durrell playes with us, leading us on false paths, leaving an opinion shadowing another one, for a third voice to add a new total side on the truth. In Justine we are always on uncertain ground, suspecting there is something else beyond what it’s being told, hoping to get through the other side of the same prism.
But beyond style and the fantastic description of the city, Justine remains a love story. Having as a motto a Freudian quote of love consisting of four people and a quote from the famous Justine written by the Marquis de Sade, the novel sets its obsessive center around the mysterious Justine. Nessim, Justine’s mature husband, impresses the reader by his dignified and silent love, by his abnegation. However, he is not absolved of the sin of not understanding her and free her from the curse of the past, striking her very own foundations. Darley and Arnauti confound themselves in feelings (comas that separates their speech are not very persuasive) and courageously assume the merit of understanding her. That is why they are the ones remaining disconcerted of her actions. The feminine vision is rendered on one hand, by Melissa, Darley and Nessim’s mistress, but she is a too humble and too slightly outlined to be credible. On the other hand, Clea’s voice, herself in love with Justine, is a firm and clear one and it seems that it is the only one who knows the truth. To this, there is the high number of secondary characters, well defined typologies that have a big contribution in forming another side of the same woman.
Justine, the personification of Alexandria, is a woman surrounded by mirrors that offer her another reflection. Loved, desired, envied, Justine is incapable of finding herself. She always changes into someone new when someone approaches her and tries to understand. She keeps Alexandria’s animal sensuality, the perversity of its night life and ends up by ruining herself.

Written by: Ana-Maria

Most certainly, the title of this novel is catchy for those who, even though they love their families, they sigh in amused exasperation when they are called for a family reunion. And yes, the novel will answer all expectations!
The Drummonds are not a typical family (which family is, anyway?) and there is no actual need for a certain thread of action when they get together.
Janet (the matriarchal figure that dominates the novel) was left by her husband, gets infected, in a terrible accident, with AIDS by her own son and lives with the guilt of having a daughter deprived of one arm. Ted, the alcoholic and degenerated father, leaves his wife and family for a trophy-woman. Wade, the elder son, a wanderer smuggler, with AIDS, decides to have a family with devout Beth. Sarah, the family’s hero, born without one hand, prepares to launch in space. Bryan is the suicide who militates against globalization, and future father of a child who will be sold by his anarchist girlfriend, Shw.

Starting with the first pages, Coupland gathers a whole pleiad of events that sets the novel as an explosion of absurd. We go through different ages of the family’s history and find out almost simultaneously that: Wade slept with his step mother, Ted tried to shoot his wife but the bullet stuck into one of the kids and Bryan is convinced that Shw wants to get rid of the baby inside her.
Janet is probably the one character towards whom we have sympathy and attachment. Dedicated traditionalist wife, being jilted by her husband, truly finds herself and starts living her own life. HIV infection and continuous struggle against AIDS don’t tear her apart; in fact this is a pretty good reason for her to fight back even more strongly. Her passion for the internet, the understanding she shows for each of her children, the patience in listening everyone around her, transform Janet into one of the most complex and most loved Drummond member.
Illness is a theme described all along the novel, from total abandon to serene acceptance. AIDS is a subject everyone talks about freely, maybe in a dark tone sometimes. If at first, disease as a miracle is perceived only as a metaphor, the novel’s denouement transforms it into an incredible reality.
In All Families are Psychotic, Coupland proves to be an incontestable master of relaxed and natural dialogues, of emotional descriptions and cruel realism, sprinkling the text with new and delightful types of metaphors, in the most unexpected places.
His writing conquers the reader in reading the novel as he wants it, in his own rhythm, alternating skillfully the crazy action with quiet and loving times.

Written by Ana-Maria

Leviathan is a water monster originally appearing in the Bible and then in Tomas Hobbes’ philosophical work where it represents the State, in opposition with the new ideal organization form suggested by the author. In our book, Leviathan is the name of a very big cruise ship that makes the connection between France and India. It is the point between the crimes that already happened and the criminal’s final target.
This is a detective book where the story is not that important, but the way it is presented is.
To get started, we read about ten crimes, all done in the same night, at the house of a collector of Indian antiques. A Shiva golden statue and a shawl were stolen. These are the facts Commissar Gauche is confronted with. Also, he has to deal with the fact the golden statue was found days later in a lake nearby …
The relation between the crimes’ scene and the Leviathan is made by a golden emblem that was found in the collector’s hand, and that was specific to those who bought a first class ticket on the ship. As a consequence, we will watch Commissar Gauche going on a cruise in India, looking for the one that doesn’t have his emblem anymore, nor an alibi …

Up to now, one can easily figure out that this a script that any other detective story would use. The interesting stuff is, as I said before, the way the story is told.
For among the suspects there are French people, a Russian, two English men and a Japanese, the author will come up with elements from each other’s culture, judging them through it. He will emphasize especially the divergences between Englishmen and French and the specificity of the Japanese culture in opposition with the European one. For the crimes’ purpose was an Indian shawl and the criminal is in his way to India, the author will come up with some moral stories specific to the Hindu mysticism. As a sequel, the story will be put both in a political context and in a cultural and philosophical one.
The way events are linked to one another is as interesting as the manner in which the story is told. Generally, detective stories are supposed to be unpredictable, but this time I actually couldn’t get used to the fact that nobody is what they seem to be and that at the end, even the Commissar, who should have found the killer, steps aside of the law becoming a criminal himself …
I won’t reveal any other details of the story so that I couldn’t spoil the surprise for those who want to read it; I will add though that the one that will untie the crimes’ mystery and the killer’s motivation is the Russian, the one that reveals himself as the most clever of all characters. His name is Erast Fandorin and he is present in the author’s other books and he is an atypical character, very rational and smart, stammering a little, ironic, determined and though shy.

Written by Gia

I was pretty dazzled by Tolstoy’s 60 pages story. I was irritated by words that were meant to express the main character’s “decency”, stringency, gaiety and the sociability. The upstartness, the egocentrism of all the characters deploying in front of us, the “obligations” that a so-called normal person has towards his fellow creatures were quite irritable. The fact that hypocrisy is so present nowadays, the fact that we all show a fake kindness, keeping the appearances, the display of a certain decency in our relations with others and of a minimum of moral integrity, that must be shown with every occasion, these are all the reason for which every human being feels attacked and shook.
Golovin dies. There is no point in not talking about this; death is present even in the title. Although we know Ivan Ilyich’s end, this seal does not really transform him into a nice character. As in other works, we feel the weight the author puts in describing the social environment that has a defining influence upon the hero’s evolution. The society forms his opinions and feelings, modeling his character as it did with his high-maintenance friends. He is a nice and capable person, with a spiritual easiness that is so bourgeois of him, and his actions are always influenced by the collective common sense, and not by his own wishes. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even feel the need to find out which are his real.

The marital relationship is roughly regarded by the author. Marriage of convenience, made without a clear and precise intention, just because a thought popped and said: “In fact, why shouldn’t I get married?” doesn’t count for making a solid marriage. This man, with a robotized existence and who keeps the distance from everything and everybody can’t become personally involved in professional relations (which is actually praiseworthy), and he can’t even take chances in adventuring in his own life, because of the stupid and pathological need of easiness, pleasure and decency.
Hypochondria and fear of death, presented in a very naturalist manner, are exploited for the author wished to emphasize the fact that the way one lives is more important. Each human being’s loneliness when facing death is doubled here by the uncertainty of his own life, suppressed by the thought that he did everything comme il faut. His questions and anxieties remain silent.
I may have been a little tough on Ivan Ilyich. It’s true that at the end I pitied him; I hated him in the beginning for his empty life and rejected all the people around him. I hope it was the normal reaction of a person who can empathize, who knows that weaknesses are in each and every one of us, that it’s easy to forget about yourself, about what you want, and that is easy to justify yourself for failures and that a “settled” life doesn’t necessarily mean happiness.

Written by Ioana

A Confederacy of Dunces found me completely unprepared. I never thought I would discover such a humorous masterpiece or such a character.

The story behind the book is a sad one, though. The author committed suicide in 1969, before seeing his book published. His mother found the manuscript and led a tough battle with the publishers in order for them to read it. Embarrassed by her mourning, they finally read the book written by Toole. And they couldn’t believe their eyes what they discovered.

A Confederacy of Dunces is very hard to label, a book which stands out because of its characters, the absurd situations and of Ignatius J. Reilly.

Ignatius is a massive young man, with a university degree, eccentric and idealistic. Although his intelligence and education could ensure him a successful career, Ignatius lives in isolation, together with his mother. He spends his days writing one sheet of paper after another about The Middle Ages and the decay of mankind, hoping, with great patience, to write a great book, because, after all, neither was Rome “built in a day”; or he watches films, to criticize the decadent spirit of contemporary society.

A rebel when it comes to clothing, Ignatius becomes easy to identify on the streets of the New Orleans of the ‘60s: his grotesque suit becomes characteristic and the green hunting cap is transformed into a genuine leit motif of the novel.

Apparently an independent, ungrateful spirit, Ignatius is in fact terrified by solitude and this is why he constantly needs maternal care. A paranoid and a valetudinarian person, he lives his life without any every day worry. Concentrated only upon himself, upon his body- the valve being his main concern- Ignatius seems to have infinite spares of selfishness and carelessness.

Through a series of comic accidents, Ignatius is taken by force out of his den and thrown into the working field. His personality finds here an even larger space of manifestation and the interaction with the other characters gives the novel its mad humor. A clerk at a trousers factory, a peddler, or disguised in a pirate’s costume, are the jobs that Ignatius finally takes. But everywhere he walks by, like a devastating storm, he only leaves behind disaster and chaos.

Completely careless towards the surrounding world, Ignatius continues his rich, interior existence, unmoved.

The secondary characters are shaped flawlessly, they are vibrant and comic. From the mother who mostly loves drinking and bowling, to the exotic dancer who trains her parrot to undress her, to the rich, bored woman, with psychologist aspirations, tormenting a poor senile old lady, up to the police officer punished to arrest suspect persons (a ruthless satire of the “witch hunt”, the phobia of communists infiltrated in the American society). To this group another important character is added, young Myrna, Ignatius’s college girlfriend who believes that sex solves any problem, including that of the minorities. Their correspondence appears throughout the novel and Myrna’s attempts to submit Ignatius to a Freudian psychological analysis are moments of remarkable irony.

A cult-book, A Confederacy of Dunces brought Toole a posthumous Pulitzer (1981). It is a novel which I recommend to anyone who wants to read an intelligent, ironic book with deep implications. This is because, leaving aside the humor of Ignatius’s story, this novel is a troubling story of man’s alienation in society.

Written by Ana-Maria

Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando are the main characters of the filmed version of this book. With their images in mind it’s hard to imagine this story as a simple Southern one, a violent coming out of the routine, a piece of news from the “local dramas” column. This short story is as awkward and disquieting as all of Carson McCullers’ writings; she prefers the depressing certainty that all of the world is different, that deviation is the new normality and this is probably where the first signs of McCullers’ fame as strange came from. However, more important is the fact that, two decades before Capote’s In Cold Blood, although in a different manner, Reflections in a Golden Eye searches for a meaning in crime and refuses the absolute portraits of victim and murderer. All the characters are victims and at the same time someone’s murderer.

The book’s most visible quality is concision: in less than 200 pages there appear a few stories so desperate and characters so minutely described, that it seems hard for the author to solve them till the end of the book. And still she does it in a very simple manner, through an expected denouement.

Until the end, the story has the aspect of a tense observation: on the one side private Williams grows an obsession for Leonora, captain Weldon Penderton’s wife, watching her quietly until he is discovered; on the other side, the captain, his wife and major Morris Langdon form a confused amorous triangle, given the captain’s latent homosexuality and Leonora’s appetite for flirting. Also, captain Penderton himself is examining private Williams, whose primitive calmness irritates and attracts him.

Private Williams ”had the strange, meditative face of a primitive man from Gaugain’s paintings”, is written somewhere, and this is a detail strong enough to indicate that the private’s opacity and simplicity are worse than fury and violence.

In the same sad, contemplative way, without facilitating any moral conclusion, is Penderton also described:

”This quantity of medicine caused him a unique, voluptuous sensation; it was as if a big, black bird halted on his chest, looked at him with fierce, golden eyes and stealthily embraced him with its dark wings.” He is an ailing man, overwhelmed by his aunts’ excessive carefulness, haunted by childhood memories, untruthful to himself, uncertain of whether he loves his wife or her lover; a complex character, with his soul caught in the strings of abstinence and cowardice.

The Major’s wife, Alison, and her devoted servant, Anacleto, represent another point of interest: two awkward, marginal figures, with their own childish and touching rituals, and their discussions about the quality of dreams, music, beautiful clothing materials, peacocks, as if making fun od the others’ so-called social-life:

”And the dinner from the evening of that last concert! Amacleto stepped victoriously and proudly behind her in the hotel’s dinning room, dressed-up in his orange velvet sack coat. When his turn to order came, he lifted the menu in front of his face, and completely closed his eyes. To the surprise of the colored waiter, he ordered in French.”

Their project of escaping the military fort’s somber reality, out of their status as observers, fails. In a way, their ridiculous plans have more meaning than the events that surround the amorous triangle Leonora- Morris- Weldon, followed by private Williams as by a shadow. However, without an ending, their project remains an illusion. Actually, the only way to come out of a situation that has made them both anxious watchers and watched, is death. But the final scene, of a grotesque beauty, motionless and perfect, casts doubt upon this solution: it might be that death doesn’t solve anything.

Doubt, dilemma are not unusual effects for the world Carson McCullers writes about, even if the author has the precision of a scalpel when it comes to evaluating the humane aspect: what is certain cannot be reached, what causes one fear is the thing closest to one, what one wishes for goes further when one believes it is the closest. Simple? This is another way of asking the question:

”Do you mean that any achievement gained with the price of normality is wrong and should not be let to bring happiness? said Captain Penderton.”

Written by Mihaela

Ishiguro is one of the few writers I would recommend entirely. Because every time I read one of his books I was completely fascinated: from the plot, to the language, to his capacity to create a hallucinatory and bizarre world and to his charming and complex characters.

When We Were Orphans is a strong, magnificent novel, a novel which goes beyond its appearance as realistic in order to become a postmodernist jewel.

A combination between the suspense of a detective story and the sensitivity of a confession, the action swings between England (the image of the old centre of Imperial power) and Shanghai, where the West meets the East, the product of the Western hegemonic ambitions.

Christopher Banks, the main character and the narrator, grows up in Shanghai and comes back to England, after his parents mysteriously disappear. Tormented for the whole of his life by this mystery, he becomes a famous detective and decides to go back and find out what happened to his parents. Upon his arrival in Shanghai, the novel radically changes its shape and we are introduced in an unreal, Kafka-like world.

Growing up under the protection of colonial power’s enclave, Christopher is even more surprised by the kidnapping of his parents by the Chinese anarchical troops. But Ishiguro suggests that beyond the protagonist’s failure to find his parents there lies the West’s and Japan’s failure to conquer China.

The novel is structured around seven dated chapters. But this dates have no relevance to the story line, as they only represent the date when they were written, when the narrator remembered the events he writes about. And although Christopher assures the readers that he is an objective observer and that the data he presents belongs to a professional detective, most of the times he has to admit to the feelings’ influence and his incapacity of keeping distance from the events he narrates.

When We Were Orphans owes much of its charm to this continuous uncertainty and to the fact that Ishiguro denies the traditional chronology. The construction similar to a puzzle patched up with uncertain memories, gives the unmistakable color of the world created by Ishiguro.

Written by Ana-Maria

At first sight, The Devil’s Larder wasn’t appealing at all. And that is mainly because the presentation has nothing exciting on the surface (it has a rather tern cover). Jim Crace was an unknown name to me. And maybe it would have stayed that way if I hadn’t picked up The Devil’s Larder.
Crace’s book has 64 stories and reminds us of the “hidden goodies” of the human lusts, it says something about things that are maybe impossible to “digest”. And that is because characters in The Devil’s Larder have cravings that are hard to be satisfied, they become people submitted to instincts. And nothing is more exciting than a secret that has been discovered.
If at first sight Crace takes into the universe of larder full of food that can be explored and tried, later on I understood the author’s aim: food is left aside when human feelings and their interaction come up. Food is just an instrument that awakes the sense, temptations, guilt, disappointment, fear, etc. It is about those senses that most of us don’t feel when we eat.
Even though I’m not a fan of a soup made of an old leather purse, one can’t skip the intriguing food. It is actually the surprise, the uncertainty of what characters might eat that makes The Devil’s Larder a “delicious” book”!
Of course, it’s hard to explain what hides beneath the 130 pages of the book. But The Devil’s Larder gives me a strange feeling, a sweet guilt and pleasure and that is why I’d read it again. What did Crace gave me? Well, recipes that will tell me if I’m going to be a great cook, neighbour or wife. It gave me the taste of some sauces that can become and foods that stir imagination.
I can’t do anything else but to invite you all open this fantastic book and choose from its shelves a box, a can or food. I’m sure you will find something to your taste.

Written by Cristina