Book Tamers| book reviews

The Magic Toyshop is a descriptive novel rather than a dynamic one. So descriptive that I could say the minute descriptions spread on about half of it. The effect is a positive one though, and I would go even further, believing that it is the one expected by the author, but I will talk about this later.

Melanie’s life, the main character, seems taken from the Before and After column of a women’s magazine. Except that instead of the make-up session or the facial lifting there is her parents’ death. Before is a luxurious life, with daily bathing in hot water, perfumes, dresses and a beautiful house; an elegant mother, a little eccentric father, but reckless enough not to save any money for their children. A happy, careless life, which ends just about when Melanie was beginning to discover herself, at the age of 15. After is a life in a gruesome house, miserable, with a rusty boiler which is an adventure to turn on, with a little piece of home-made soap and fuggy air.

Things wouldn’t be so terrible, if the inhabitants didn’t make up a ”nuthouse”. The house belongs to her uncle, the owner of the toyshop, which he manufactures together with his apprentice. However, he is a terrifying presence, a violent and masterly man of whom everybody in the house is afraid and who has decided to erase from Melanie and her brother and little sister any resemblance to their father, whom he couldn’t stand. Aunt Maggie, who became mute her wedding day, and her brothers, Francie and Finn are the uncle’s puppets. They always obey him and are as odd as the rest of the house.

What becomes clear is that the three have a secret. As time goes by, the reader learns about them through Melanie’s eyes, who observes every detail, while they become close to her, Finn more than the other two. All these details make up an oppressive, overwhelming atmosphere, above which there stands the presence of the uncle, and as the pages become less, one can tell that the disaster is near. This is the effect I was talking about in the beginning. Looking from this perspective, all those descriptions are not as boring as one would expect.

The disaster occurs, the secret is revealed, but the ending is disarming. It is mute to the same extent to which the characters’ souls are explored. It is obvious that the only magic the toyshop ever made is forcing Melanie to become mature, but could this maturity already had turn into indifference?

Seeing Melanie’s terrified face expression, which pictures the apogee of the book, the moment when she plays Leda in her uncle’s sketch, I realize I have finally found a cover connected to the book. However, I cannot catch a glimpse of the resigned girl in the end. If only there had been another page…

Written by Raluca

Khaled Hosseini’s novel, recently adapted into a film of the same name, has all the ingredients of a bestseller: friendship, betrayal, salvation, exoticism, happy ending. They are all decently mingled with one another; however, there is nothing spectacular, on one hand, and on the other, there are also no illegible clichés.

Strictly referring to what it is told and not how it is told, The Kite Runner is a captivating novel: it takes you in the Afghanistan of the ’70s, calm, monumental, in the America of the immigrants, back into the new Afghanistan taken over by the Taliban, in an incredible rhythm, which sometimes seems to be out of the author’s control. It is an amazing story which leaves out its author, which is autogoverning, which, as in fairytales, is beyond credibility.

Amir, the insecure and coward hero of his own story, has the tone of the one that wants to make up for his mistakes: the fact that he betrayed Hassan, his childhood friend, is a burden that he carries with him all his life, until he finds a way to make it up for it. Also, he strongly wishes that his dad would be pleased with him, both during childhood and after they exile themselves to America. This is the world that Amir gets to know and it doesn’t matter that it is about the Kabul of his childhood, the Afghan community in America or the ruins of the city that he sees years after. Thus, even though the social-political context is mentioned, only history at a smaller scale is emphasized. The manner in which the characters are integrated in history has - nevertheless - a certain searched exotism, defending the occidental reader from too much horror and serving images that he’s already used to by the media.

Up to the end, the cliché can’t be avoided: the cliché is a concentrated form of truth, a sort of an instrument. However, it has to be noticed that the story has enough content to be self told: the character’s reflections and those of the author through the character can’t but disadvantage it.

Up till now, it is clear that the recipe for The Kite Runner is working between some limits: what is most important is the story- this is the most important principle. But for me and my personal way of evaluating a book, educated in the European kind of way, the story can’t be told just like that. If there was some subtlety, Khaled Hosseini would have extended the metaphor of the kites up to the one that could say that Afghanistan is controlled by some other states’ strings. With the help of this subtlety, he would have restrained Amir’s intellectualizations, so unreal in its dullness, too flashy if considering the bad times that he experiences.

In the end, I recommend this novel to those that want to be drawn into a tensioned and touching story, in a world that they got to know watching news on TV or movies. Amateurs that would wish to be thrilled could be dissapointed.

Written by Mihaela

In Atonement, Ian McEwan presents one of the most interesting love scenes I have read lately. His most recent novel evolves around the presentation of the first night in the life of a newly weds, in a conservative social context.

Although it is not a real novel, On Chesil Beach resembles a classic drama in five acts.
The story takes place in 1962, a period that is precursory to sexual revolution (a motive that will be very discussed along the book). Edward and Florence are two young people who get married and spend their first night together in a hotel in Dorset, somewhere on the English Channel.

They’re both virgins and they live the thrill of their first night in different ways: Edward’s shyness mingles with anticipation, whilst Florence lives a true inner drama, between happiness and disgust, being actually terrified with the little she knew about sex.
During this tensioned scene between the two, the reader gets acquainted with their past- their families, personalities, their plans and future hopes, their sensitivity, the lack of experience and ease, all these in a time when discussions about sexuality or sexual problems were practically impossible.

McEwan recreates the sexual tension perfectly, blending both past and present problems of the two: Edward’s anxiety of waiting and Florence’s fright concerning sexual intimacy. These unsaid problems will lead to an event that will change their relationship for good.

The geography of the Chesil Beach is characterized by a 25 kilometer land that time and sea have shaped in a certain way. Little rocks are polished and placed in an increasing way, depending on their size, along the 25 kilometer land, so that the beach is like a map of time. The local fishermen pride themselves with the capacity of identifying their exact location by looking only at the size and the form of the stones.

McEwan’s story sets the words as stones on a beach of time. The way the author makes the tension evolve is incredible, even when the whole drama is nothing more than a drama of unsaid words and fear of failure. The social context that influences the two characters’ life decisions is also described carefully and it is actually a good reason to read the book. On another hand, the purity and the exaggerated naivety of the characters, the microscopic structure of the story, and the light analysis of their personalities are not enough to create, in my opinion, a real novel.

As in Atonement, McEwan’s style is subtle, gently graded, with no peak of tension, and which in the end leaves a striking dramatic conclusion: the way a life can change is by doing nothing at all.

Written by: Alin

Alabama Song is not Zelda Fitzgerald’s biography, as we are being cautioned in the beginning of the novel. Actually it would be pretty hard to take it for a biography due to the chaotic structure and the madness of the narrator, a madness that infiltrates every word and phrase up to the point when truth, fiction, time and history itself mingle in a stunning amalgam, at times hard to follow, but so fascinating to read.

The novel begins from the very cover, where lies the sepia portrait of the most talked about couple of the ‘20s, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The portrait is fascinating because of the bizarre attraction between the two and especially because of the look in Zelda’s eyes, who seems to be contemplating a riotously interior world rather than paying attention to the camera. I came back to the cover several times while reading the novel and her look had new meanings every time.

The novel is narrated by Zelda and is written in the form of a diary, but there appear some time discrepancies. Half of a chapter takes place during the First World War and in the other half we meet a nostalgic Zelda (and a little crazy) talking 20 years later. The events are not inserted in their natural temporal order, but are moved back and forth in the structure of the novel in order to create a spider web out of the confused memories of an old and schizophrenic Zelda. I guess that Gilles Leroy chose this kind of a structure to show that one’s life cannot be totally described, not even autobiographically.

But, as I said before, Alabama Song is a novel, not a biography. Zelda will leave the conservatory south of the interwar New York and she will get to France and then Spain, where “The Lost Generation” lives in a self-imposed artistic exile. Her relationship with Scott is of course the central point of the novel, and its description puts the American writer in a very bad light, as he steals her novels and puts her away in psychiatric hospitals. This torrid relationship will eventually destroy both of them, and the great couple’s decline is almost hypnotic to follow. We see again how society finds pleasure in creating idols only to destroy them and watch them fall apart.

I think the great merit of the author lies not in the late defense of Zelda Fitzgerald, but in the way he became one with the character and wrote in her voice. Every sentence is a bizarre mix of venom, nostalgia, hate and love, and Zelda’s madness floats through the letters in rising quantities until it distorts the whole novel. The only disadvantage is that the events are sometimes hard to follow and connect, being pulled out of their natural course.

Alabama Song is a whirlpool which absorbs both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the reader, a whirlpool like the one of the ‘20s which absorbed a whole generation of American writers but at the same time produced masterpieces of great value. Everything stops leaving behind a crazy and tired Zelda, upon whom the reader can draw personal conclusions. My conclusion only regards the novel, and it is a positive one, as it was pleasant to read Alabama Song and discover such a fictionalized version of Zelda Fitzgerald.

Written by Cristi

So Many Ways to Begin is first and foremost a novel about a simple story, about a life like any other, but through the charm and attention of Jon McGregor it becomes a life of historic importance.

A dense novel, minutely built up, So Many Ways to Begin makes use of many starting points, stories that resemble threads which interweave to create the complex story of a simple man, David Carter.

The interesting construction technique

If one can’t find out the reason for the way the novel begins, one’s reading can be hardened and transformed into a tiring and discouraging one by the abundance of short chapters without apparent connection. But as the story develops, three main ideas stand out: David’s marriage to Eleanor, Eleanor’s childhood and David’s wish to shed light upon his past.

McGregor’s narrator is omniscient, although the narrative sometimes bounces between first and third person. However, the humanization of the narrator is achieved through the empathy and heart warmth showed towards the characters.

This aspect is also sustained by the new manner of involving dialogue in the text, by which McGregror manages to sweep away the barrier between words and feelings.

Life built up out of details

…hand-written letters, a cigarette-holder, a child’s gloves, a napkin, a salary note or a “metal, rusty biscuit-box, used as a piggy bank or to keep souvenirs” are the small things which we often miss, ignore and easily push away.

It is these little things that David has an interest in, these “meaningless things” help him discover the pleasure of life and through them he tries to bring out the past which keeps him prisoner. With the help of David we understand why nothing is meaningless, how every thing keeps memories and the force of the past which it represents, how life doesn’t need to be grandiose in order to be beautiful.

The mother as the eternal disappointment

McGregor’s novel abounds in mothers: young, old, with one child, more or none, loving, distant or violent. But none of them manages to have a healthy relationship with her child, to show or to prove her love; they all end up pushed away from the child’s life. From the exhausted and violent mother to the loving but incapable of understanding, to the one who would give her child anything but cannot give him birth or to the absent mother, without substance, maternity remains a failure in McGregor’s eyes.

The curse of the blood

David is the adult who finds out that his whole life has been built upon a false foundation. The truth propels him in a never-ending search and investigation of the past, but leaves him with the disillusion of having only what he has built up in the present, with the past being impenetrable.

So Many Ways to Begin has a devastating force, achieved through the simplicity and clarity of the style. The characters are molded attentively and with patience, the feelings are real and the implications have echo in the soul of every reader.

Written by Ama

A book’s normal course in a publishing house should be the following: translator- editor- translator- imprimatur (the last one being also a person, who checks the book for mistakes one last time before printing). Even though there might be people to say that the lack of spelling mistakes is not the most important thing in a book (and they would be right), this time I had the feeling that the book jumped from the translator directly into the printing house.

Even from the very beginning I came up against phrases that had little meaning because of their awkward construction. Other problems were the sequence of tenses and words that required another translation than the one given, as it was a matter of context. A literal translation of some sentences from Romanian would sound like this: “After that, when the rain had stopped, people are dancing noisily in a horrible place.” I haven’t read the English version of the book, but it is clear to me that part of its value, if any, was lost in translation.

The subject appears promising in the beginning: a female protagonist wakes up in the middle of a bar without knowing where she is or why she is there, as a consequence of memory losses which she claims she frequently experiences. However, the construction of the first person narrative is discouraging but out of a few foreign opinions I understand that this construction is the author’s innovation, the reason she is so appreciated. I find it hard to believe, though, that out oh her original words can be understood as little as from the translation.

Unfortunately, as I turned the pages, I realized that the plot is not as attractive as i thought. Why? Because almost the whole 300 pages are an interior monologue in which Hannah describes her alcoholism, frustrations, her failures, drunkenness and at times the dates with the one who appears to be her soul mate. Nothing extraordinary happens to her.

Two hundred pages of constant drunkenness, the purpose of which I failed to understand. What is the author’s actual pursue? What did she want to prove? Behind the minute introspection there doesn’t seem to lie anything. I don’t think that the intention was to help readers understand alcoholics. The protagonist does nothing to grow in the eyes of the readers, her degradation even increases with every page.

”I have no children, no hobby and I don’t have any plan, I can’t even sing anymore, but I can still rely on my soul, the recording of my sins. My work of a life-time. I am no stranger to lies, secrets and blasphemies, I keep my Sundays busy and filthy, I fight with God and sometimes I resolve to violence and mean forms of theft.”

Written by Raluca

I admit wanting to read this book because I was sure I would crave for delicious meals. Mark Crick is practically an unknown voice in the world of letters and about his first book he says it was funny to conceive. We know it’s true that discussions with writers are spicy; why wouldn’t we know what they are up to in the kitchen? Not everyone is familiar with the secrets of Ars culinaria; not even in the gourmet position we can’t imagine all those presented in the book, but it is a good exercise.

In his Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin says that there is a sensual predestination for gourmandise (a word that can’t really be translated in other languages and which hasn’t its flavor but in French). I don’t know how many are those who could ever imagine Kafka eating, let alone cooking. It is probably the explanation why his recipe is the one that entitles the book. There is a resemblance of the soup can on the cover with Warhol’s can, each chapter being associated with images from Picasso’s, De Chirico’s or Matisse’s works, that Crick himself painted.Whether there are luxuriant coq au vin or plaice à la Dieppe or the more laic mushroom risotto or cheese sandwiches, the fourteen recipes are an occasion for imitation for the author - Crick himself says that it was very hard to render the stream of consciousness technique in Virginia Woolf’s style- and an original method through which the reader gets in touch with the style of an author he doesn’t still know.

The recipes are in no evident order, neither chronological, nor alphabetical, but consist of the four meals presented during a feast, all guaranteeing the good stimulation of the taste buds of a fan of extraordinary foods. My imagination being started, I have to admit that I would have figured that Marcel Proust was more fascinated by a cake with figs and pears, marinated in Jamaican rum and not by the trivial tiramisu. Also, the sexual hints in the chicken recipe à la Marquis de Sade are quite frail; or the relationship between the sexual and the culinary appetite is undeniable.

Parodying the expression techniques of the writers in question does not remove in any way the innovating manner with which the British writer approaches the 14 writers. This book is probably a precedent for the one who will try structuring an anthology about the drinks that influence a writer to write in a certain way.

Written by Ioana

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 actually don’t know if I had to review this book. I stayed a long time tormenting myself about it. I think that it is very bad so I shouldn’t mention it. But people around me were so confused and I got so many “but I heard it is very good” that I decided to write about it. I’m not sure if one could say that Rushdie is a very trendy author, like Coelho or something, but after reading some colleague’s reviews I ended up saying to myself that I should read one of his books. The book was there and I decided to embrace it.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is, as the title suggests it very clearly, just a story, longer of course, during which Rushdie goes after a pattern of this gender. The narrative thread is pretty simple: Haroun and his father, brilliant storyteller, live in a city so sad that it forgot its own name. Actually, the sadness exists also in the nearby towns and people pay a great deal of money to hear Rashid and his wonderful stories. But when his wife leaves home, Rashid loses his gift.

What comes next are the adventures of the two in “the land of stories“, where they end up in the middle of a war (which is not exactly a war) between storytellers and the people who want to shut them up by poisoning their ocean of stories. No matter how bleak the last phrase may be, Rushdie doesn’t succeed to render this atmosphere in the presentation of the situations, for everything seems to be a mere joke.

I imagine that Rushdie meant well: indeed, people are sad, deeply immersed in their gloomy reality, and when it comes to stories, they say they are of no use. However, day dreaming and imagination are the antidote of their fate. You can see that if I accept this, I’m actually not part of their category. I would listen to a thousand stories, but they should be good.

But Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a bad story. It is bad because Rushdie is trying too hard to create a fantastic world. There are too many “creatures”, machines, “processes that are too hard to explain”, each being described by a great amount of extraordinary features, until it becomes unbearable. It’s like an “imagination” competition.

Written by Raluca