Thoughts at the half way point of Natasha and other stories

These stories have a distinctive voice that of someone far from home in a country that his family is trying to make home. The Berman family has escaped Brezhnev's Russia and moved to Toronto but as Bell and Roman and their son Mark try to get to grips with the new language they also face challenges coming to terms with their past and the complete change Canada offers.

The book opens with a great story Tapka that captures that moment when you grow up and realise that you joking around has serious consequences. As a six year old Mark tears up the trust shown in him by fellow immigrant neighbours after he almost kills their dog Tapka.

In The second tale about how his father tries to set up his own massage business, Roman Berman, Massage Therapist, it shows how hard it is for immigrants to break free of poverty and how crucial their own communities are in opening doors.

More to come on completion...

book review - Young Hitler - Claus Hant

"‘It’s alive. Alive in a man. He is the Chosen One.’ Her eyes shone as she looked at me. ‘I know you don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘ But mark my words: it will happen here. In Munich. Not just according to Sebottendorff. Astrology has predicted it too. And Nostradamus.’
‘So where is this…”Chosen One”... now?’
‘No one knows where He is. But we know He’s coming. Soon.’"

It is always going to be difficult writing a book about Hitler as a 16 to young 30-yr old because of the monstrous things he later carried out. Claus Hant manages though to introduce you to someone who is interesting and able to exploit problems, mainly economic as well as political, to seize the moment to emerge from the shadows as the Fuhrer.

But Young Hitler is also selfish, cruel, mad and a totally unpleasant friend to have as the voice of the narrator manages to convey repeatedly. By combining four friendships Hitler had at different stages in his youth it is possible to have an uninterrupted narrative of the Hitler who walks into a Linz cafe one afternoon to the man who flunks art school in Vienna, ends up in a tramps hostel selling his small paintings in Munich and then a solider winning the Iron Cross in the First World War.

For me that was the biggest lesson of reading this book. I had seen the picture taken of a young Hitler with his smudgy moustache taken at the front but had assumed that he saw little action and spent most of his time well behind the front line. Because that view was wrong it has made me think again about some of the moments in the Second World War when Hitler told his generals what to do. It makes slightly more sense considering he had a fair amount of military experience.

But back to the selfish maniac and Hant portrays Hitler as a man that essentially has two skills. The first is to take the views and histories of others and simplify them, combine them and retell them in his own forthright homespun philosophy. This means that occasionally he contradicts himself, is bluntly opportunistic when he gets the chance and is always refining his views with them getting progressively darker and more anti-semetic.

The other skill that emerges towards the end of the book is his ability to keep a hall of thousands hanging off his every word. His hypnotic eyes and thunderous speeches of course became signatures of his leadership but here they start with Hitler trying to convert and convince his friend Martin and then fellow soldiers and eventually the Munich population.

The character of Martin, the narrator, just about works although you do wonder why he doesn't leave someone so selfish. He is used as an extension of the German people feeling magnetically pulled back to this man who is clearly known as a monster to those around him. The eyes, the conviction and the energy levels make it difficult to ignore someone who is after all a failed student and oddball.

The tragedy is of course that just as the country started to fall apart after the end of the war and a messy peace with communists and then right wingers fighting on the streets Hitler emerged as a strong voice. His real talent perhaps lay in knowing when to step forward. But of course the causes of his later downfall were all there from the very start and those, like Martin, who were closest to him had seen them exhibited all the way through his youth.

There is quite a lot of useful information about the book over at the Young Hitler web site.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Young Hitler

Having read Castle in the Forest the idea of reading about Hitler's youth is one that fills you with apprehension. Not just because you fear Mailer type oddness but because this is a character that you instinctively can not like.

But a book coming from the man behind the screen play of Downfall, Claus Hant, is going to have an authority on the subject that perhaps other authors would lack.

You meet Hitler at the age of 16 when the year's of parental abuse from his father are behind him and he is reading widely and starting his political education. Hant merges into one character the four friends Hitler had at various stages of his youth and through the eyes of piano playing Martin you start to see Hitler develop his ideas.

His only positive quality is his boundless energy and his talent lies in simplifying ideas from others and merging them into his own philosophy. But his cruelty, selfishness and tendency to opt for views from the more bizarre ends of the spectrum are worrying.

A review will follow soon...

Review of the month - April

April turned out to be a really good month reading wise. Got the tempo back and managed to knock off quite a few books. It probably helped that there wasn't a book of the month coming from the industry so I could read in a hypeless vacuum.

Books read this month:

A Month in the Country by J.L Carr
The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill
How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel
Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard
Tofu Landing by Evan Maloney
The White Castle by Orhan Panuk
Untimely Death by Cyril Hare
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

If there was a theme then it was probably two fold with crime represented by Cyril Hare and Walter Mosley and the second world war and its impact a subject covered in A Month in the Country and How I Came to Know Fish.

bookmark of the week

Not sure where this one came from but picked it up on the travels round London. One of the things you don't have to hunt that far for is something to do with Churchill he is still a symbol that populates museums and souvenir shops. This bookmark is praising him for his speeches. made of some sort of plastic.

bookshops worth a visit - Parliamentary Bookshop

With the election in mind thought it worth mentioning one of the specialist bookshops that exist in London to serve a particular readership.

Those interested in politics can flick through the biographies and texts pondering the use of power and look up from the shelves and take in the view of the Houses of Parliament at the Parliamentary Bookshop.

book review - Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley

"I never saw him again. I often think of how so many people have walked into my life for just a few minutes and kicked up some dust, then they're gone away. My father was like that; my mother wasn't much better."

When literature works, even books that some might sneer are just pulp fiction thrillers, it takes the reader into a different world that is believable. That happens here with Walter Mosley introducing you to the tough and tense world of LA a few years after the Second World War.

With the hero of the tale being a black factory worker who has come up from Texas to make a better life for himself the world you enter is one of illegal bars, a community of southern migrants and one that is full of racial tension.

When the main character Easy Rawlins is introduced to a white man in a white suit at a bar and given the assignment to find a woman it marks two worlds colliding and the result can only be trouble for Rawlins. In many ways the laborer, who has juts lost his job, is tougher that he at first appears with his life being a hard one. He has been left by almost everyone and his best friend, Mouse, turned out to be an unhinged killer forcing Easy to head to LA when he did.

Rawlins finds the girl but that's when his troubles start because he realises that his own life is in danger. He has to outwit and outshoot those that have hired him and plan to discard his services permanently once the job has been completed.

As you would expect with a thriller that has massive Chandler overtones the men are hard, the girls sassy and the guns big and blazing. Blood is split and bags of cash are chased down by desperate men. But unlike Chandler the subject of racism is tackled here from a different angle. The discovery that one of the main characters comes from a black upbringing turns the tables on assumptions of identity and Mosley is challenging you to look at the world with different eyes.

In terms of enjoyment this matches a Chandler and in terms of its intelligence is is also up there with the best.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Devil in a Blue Dress

Apologies for the crime theme but this book came through as part of the Serpent's Tail Classics range being launched early next month and it just screamed 'Read me Now!'. Mind you having said that unfortunately so do quite a few books at the moment!

Anyway here are the thoughts at the half way stage:

The prose reminds you of Raymond Chandler, the background has the feeling of other pulp post-war gangster novels but the angle here is completely different.

Through the lead character Easy Rawlins, a black man who has traveled to LA to escape Houston and the South, Mosley takes the reader into a world that none of Chandler's character's would have been able to go into with such confidence.

LA becomes a city of crooks, drinking dens and rough pool halls but all within the black community. So when a white man comes calling asking for someone to help him track down a woman with a French name and a rich boyfriend Easy is given the job.

Easy finds things getting more and more complicated as he navigates through a world where he is not only facing trouble from his own community but also the police. Finding the woman proves to be fairly straightforward but after that it becomes a more serious game of trying to keep his own life.

A review will follow soon...

book review - Untimely Death - Cyril Hare

"He had time for a glimpse only, but it was enough. As in a nightmare, he realised that once more there was a dead man on Bolter's Tussock."

This book was one of the great charity shop finds and never having come across Cyril Hare before it was a combination of the title and the cover that influenced the decision to part with £1.40. That plus the sign that publisher Faber & Faber had backed it by printed a version of the story in 2008, 51 years after it first appeared in print.

What you can gather from Hare is that he knew his law and his main character Francis Pettigrew is a retired law man and the book feels like it has moved from firm ground to rock solid concrete when you reach the court scenes.

In one main respect the story both intrigues but fails to deliver satisfaction. At the heart of the thriller is the idea that as a young man Pettigrew stumbled across a dead body in a remote spot and after his pony bolted and he managed to get home he never said anything about it. That source of regret has clearly stayed with him so when it happens again he faces the challenge of doing things properly.

Except he dodges it really and relying on the more official efforts of a retired policeman who is a friend he manages to take a back seat as the investigation carries on around him. That investigation once the dead body reappears on Tuesday morning focuses on the timing of the death. There is an inheritance at stake and the dead man stands to lose out if it can be proved that he died before he came into his money.

At that point the action, that is perhaps not the right word, moves to the court room. Where a modern reader perhaps misses out on fully understanding why Pettigrew acts the way he does is because society has changed so much in the last 50 years. The moments when he keeps his own counsel often seem to be mystifingly over cautious but perhaps back then people simply didn't speak out.

Add to that 'the how do you do sir?' and the quaint idea that a coach and a couple of cars signifies rush hour on a road and maybe the way to get the best out of this book is not just to see it as a thriller but also as a way of walking back into a past. A time when people were trying to forget the horrors of a decade earlier and when life was that bit more 'gentle' than it is today.

Sad news about Galloway & Porter

One of the reasons I still go to Cambridge has been to visit the excellent Galloway & Porter. But sadly the town has lost one of its attractions with Galloway & Porter falling into administration. The bookshop and its legendary warehouse sales were a reral highlight after the schlep up the M11. What a great shame that things have come to this.

Thanks so much to Amro for alerting me to the news and it's a shame that neither of us could get to the closing down sale which started last Saturday. Mind you through this recession there have been several opportunities to go to closing down sales and it feels like intruding in a clown suit at a funeral.

reading is forever not just when the books are cheap.

Thoughts at the half way point of Untimely Death

If you were looking for a word that would describe this book to someone asking what the tone of this thriller was it would havfe to be 'gentle'.

Set in the 1950s in Somerset the shocks of the war are left in the past and even when a dead body is found up on heathland it is discovered in a fairly gentle way. The reader is given none of the detail that other authors might have put in around blood, wounds and ghoulish expressions on the corpse.

But what makes this story interesting is the fact that the body found by the main character Francis Pettigrew is in exactly the same place as one he discovered when he was a child. His inability to talk about that crime when he was a child is repeated and it looks like his silence might prevent the crime from being solved.

A review will follow on completion...

bookmark of the week

Shaun the Sheep is a children's programme made by the people at Aardman responsible for Wallace and Gromit. So it includes the great humour and the facial expressions that Gromit is famous for as animals as we all know can't speak. This magnetic bookmark shows Shaun at the top of a pile of his friends.

Author interview: Evan Maloney

The author of Tofu Landing has very kindly agreed to answer some of my questions following the reading of his book. I'm very grateful to Evan Maloney for answering my questions with such care and interest.

Q1. Where did the idea for Tofu Landing come from was this flat full of larger than life characters an experience you had gone through yourself?

I have never experienced anything like the world depicted in Tofu Landing... although I'm not entirely unfamiliar with it, either. It's hard to pinpoint the source of inspiration for any story, I think that is part of the magic of storytelling. I worked in the Arts and the media in London so I was working a lot in Soho and had a peripheral experience of that mad-edged media world where talent was often subordinate to publicity and drugs were a tool that people employed to keep reality at a distance.

I was always a bit dismayed, as a writer, by the way the Arts and media industries worked. It seemed to be a world that lacked genuine reflection and insight in many cases - the publicity machine is not really something that values genuine reflection, it's simply a means to an end. I thought a character like Pete Doherty was a fine example of all the worst aspects of that machine, and I obviously based Tristan Russell and some parts of the story on his life, but there was a pot-pourie of sources and inspirations and, finally, it's all about imagination. Damien Hirst did a similar publicity drive to Bridget's for one of his exhibitions, Tracy Emin was a hotel reviewer for a glossy magazine.

It might sound odd, but Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall was the novel that I read just prior to beginning Tofu Landing. Initially I had intended to stretch the narrative far beyond anything akin socially realistic representation, but I finished the first draft and realised, with a kind of bemused wonder, that even though the story was wildly far-fetched at times, it was far closer to social realism than satirical farce.


Q2. Art is a constant theme through the book is art important to you and in that respect do you share the views about the importance of Art voiced at various times by Declan?

As a young boy growing up in the country I wanted to be an artist and I thought I was exceptional. At the age of ten I moved to the city (Melbourne) and there was a boy in my class who was a better draftsman than me. It shattered my confidence a bit. I thought that his was the level of talent I had to compete with in the big city. I decided then that I would focus on writing, but I have always felt a bit like a painter who writes (which is ironic given Declan's views on the literary nature of contemporary art) In fact, that boy I went to primary school with, Cameron Hayes, is still a close friend and now one of Australia's most celebrated artists. He is represented by Ronald Feldman in New York City, who runs one of the most prestigious galleries in NYC. Cameron paints massive narrative paintings that work in man ways like a novel.

Regarding Declan's views on art: I think it is important to note that Declan is an artistic person who is not productive. He has lost his creative potency. As such, his views are slightly aimed at self-justification. It's a common trait among people in the arts who struggle to be artistically productive - they blame the industry when, ultimately, I think a genuine artist is always productive regardless of the zeitgeist. I think Declan is a sentimental character, too, and sentimentality is, like drug taking, another form of false comfort that corrupts a person's vision of reality.


Q3. Drugs also play a massive role in dividing the past and the present and the idea of reality and imaginary lives. Was drug use meant to be used in that sense of blurring truth and personality in the first two thirds of the book?

This is a great observation. I wanted the drug references to be vivid enough to make a person feel a kind of specious euphoria initially. People take drugs for a reason: they can be a lot of fun, and I wanted to give a real sense of that at the start of the novel. But I also wanted to create a sense of overload towards the end of the story, so the reader would feel sick and tired of the drug taking, as if it were something they themselves had been subjected to and wanted to move on from.

The whole "drugs are so much fun" ground is a superficial one, and if you dig beneath the surface, what you find is that many of the characters in Tofu Landing have suffered some personal experience that is blocking their path forward in life. They are trapped in the past and the drug taking is one expression of that entrapment. Sexual abuse is one common experience that many of the characters are dealing with and yet it is not presented in a way that is particularly honest. It is sort of glossed over in the narratives the characters offer, and I think this is one of the legacies of drug taking - people do not approach their own experiences honestly and try to work through them like mature adults.


This unreal approach to personal trauma is also referenced in some of the art works discussed. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, which is one of the most beautifully sculptured works of art ever created, is about an attempted rape. I don't think for a moment Bernini was cognizant of the event he depicted as one of great psychological trauma for the victim. The tone of the novel is, perhaps, inspired by that sort of work of art, it is trying to dazzle the reader with a story that works beautifully in an objective manner, but if the reader stops and thinks about the events described they might feel slightly disturbed, because the depictions are somewhat false.



Q4. There is a passage about the invention of Tofu being an accident and how sometimes life can mirror that. Is that something you believe and have experienced yourself?

It's the Panglossian view of life, isn't it, which Voltaire had such fun with in Candide. Voltaire was satirising the Leibnizian mantra through Dr Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". Having grown up Catholic, and carried a lot of guilt and remorse baggage through my life, I can see the appeal of this view, but it is an indulgent one as well, and one that has a distinctly Western, First World aftertaste. I'm sure all the kids working in sweatshops in 3rd World countries would beg to differ that what happens in their lives is all for the best.


Q5. Declan occasionally shows his frustration with some of the people he is living with but most of the time he is remarkably tolerant. Were you keen to make sure the reader made their own judgments about the characters?

Absolutely. I think the 3rd person narrator is oblique for most of the book. Tone was an issue I struggled with a lot while writing the book, because much of the novel is essentially toneless. The narration only develops some kind of tone late in the book, and that is meant to reflect the fact that Declan himself has developed a point of view in relation to his life and the world he inhabits. I think this was something that failed to impress some publishers, who probably only read the first third of the book and thought that that was as good as it got.


Q6. Finally as we leave Declan as a man who has come through not just an interesting experience but one that has enabled him to grow into a more stable person is he a character that would appear again in your writing?

This is a question I've been asked by a few people who have read the book. At the moment I feel the book is finished and I have moved on. I got the publishing deal in May 2009 and started my second book the same week. I finished the first draft of the second book a week before Tofu Landing was launched in February this year, and then I spent two months rewriting it. It is about as a removed from the world of Declan and the Posse as I am from the Roman Empire.

The second novel is about a group of multicultural Australians whose parents and grandparents arrived in Australia as refugees from Lebanon, Poland, Vietnam (and a "ten-pound Pom"), as well as an aboriginal, who have taken up arms and are resisting the occupation of Australia by a powerful Asian neighbour. It is set in the near future. This disparate group are all fighting together for their land, and it's been very liberating to create characters that are so unique and distinct, and to set them in a dystopian society that requires a more pure from of imagination to create. Off the top of my head, Michael Ondaatje is the only writer I've read who has successfully reprised characters from one novel and written a second novel of great power (The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient).

There are probably others but, generally speaking, I find the whole idea of writing a sequel evidence of either a lack of imagination, a fear of trying something new or a desire for a paycheck. Of course, I might reconsider these views if Tofu Landing ended up selling a million copies.

book review - Tofu Landing - Evan Maloney

"He had moved to London two years earlier because it had an appeal that even the greyest skies could not darken. it was a place where anyone could lose themselves, a place where anyone could lose themselves, a place where anyone could remain anonymous."

Take the idea of a bunch of people that live for pleasure and put it in a book that charts their excesses and eventual crash to earth and you have Tofu Landing in a nutshell. But add to that mix some characters that reflect back at the reader celebrities that they would recognise and a culture of drug taking they might have suspected existed and you have a mix that is much more challenging.

The reader is challenged here to make up their mind about not just how they feel about the house full of extreme characters but also the wider world they inhabit. Sitting on the shoulder of failed artist Declan Twist you enter a drug fueled world where no one is real, where fame is desperately hunted and where ironically there is a media world ready to support just those sorts of ambitions.

As the quote on the back says "If you arrive in London knowing nobody then you have the power of an actor improvising onm a stage". Declan is surrounded by people that decide to follow their own rules from the Tracey Emin like Bridget who manages to fool the art world with her Polaroid art show of blurred poor quality pictures, Juliet a pharmaceutical rep who has a drug dealing business on the side, Drake who sells drugs but dreams of being an actor and the Pete Doherty like Tristan and his girlfriend who plough through the drugs and onto the pages of weekly gossip magazines.

None of them is real but they are all aiming to get something that they believe is real but as they find out the fame game is a cruel one and luck can turn on a nine pence and after the death of one of their group the limited gel that held them together disintegrates. Through it all Declan is more than a removed observer and is quite capable of taking as much drugs as the rest of the group, taking the media dollars by appearing on TV and falls in love with Juliet. But he decision to finally leave that world is one that show it is possible to grow up and exit the party.

There are moments when the drug taking gets too much and the characters become so loathsome it's difficult to see where the story will be resolved but Maloney is trying here to take you on that journey and hoping that you will make the same resolution as Declan and see the shallow world of chasing fame and celebrity for exactly the hell it is.

Thoughts at the half way point of The White Castle

Although this starts with the classic 'I found this manuscript in a box' type preface it doesn't delay for too long and gets straight into the story.

The tale of the young Venetian sailor who is captured and sold in Istanbul as a slave unfolds quickly as his ship is captured. He does what he can to survive representing himself as a doctor to avoid being put out to hard labour.

He manages to attract this interest of the Pasha because of his knowledge of astronomy and science and he is given the responsibility for organising a firework event with a man who resembles his double. This same man, Hoja, becomes his master and the relationship between them starts off as student and teacher but that starts to change as the captive is reminded of his status.

But having seen the importance of the search for knowledge and the desire nhis master has to be right the captive starts to turn up the psychooloigcal screws.

Review will follow on completion...