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Book Review: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks (2021)

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You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, right? In this case, I probably went for the book by its title alone. I like snow and I like writing about snow. I like snow in words. I probably like words in snow. Being a fan of the author as well, his name on the cover will have added to the persuasion. Thus, I picked up and began this novel some time ago, and although I’ve only just finished it, I actually read it very quickly. It’s just that certain other things intervened (including Sylvie Simmons excellent biography of Leonard Cohen). Once I settled down to it, I found this latest Sebastian Faulks offering to be another very enjoyable read. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t recognise the style of his writing compared to when I read his work many years ago, but I have a feeling that it might be me who has changed, rather than him. It would be interesting to re-read some of his earliest works to find out. Ultimately, the title of this book proved to be a bit misleading, as there...
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Book Review: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (2014)

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  I bought this book in England during a visit home last Autumn, and read the last page here in Tromso, where we are enjoying a winter holiday in February. The snow outside has abated but the sky is dark, blotted with clouds, and the northern lights will probably not be dancing tonight. It’s taken me a while to complete this novel, but in my defence, it’s another long book and I am rather busy these days (hence the paucity of new posts here – sorry for that), and it’s certainly not an indication of a lack of enthusiasm for this latest Mitchell addition to my blog. At points through the middle of the story I thought The Bone Clocks might well end up my favourite work by this author, but in the end I think it comes in just behind Cloud Atlas . There are many familiar traits in Mitchell’s sixth novel, including its composition, divided into six stories, the first set back in the 1980s, and each subsequent instalment jumping forward about a decade in time. This means the fourth stor...
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Book Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (2006; transl. S. Snyder, 2009)

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What you need to know about this novel: it’s set in Japan and the original was written in Japanese. There is a housekeeper who is employed to clean and cook for an elderly mathematics professor. She is a single mother with a 10-year-old son, known in the story as ‘Root’. The intrigue in the plot is the professor’s unique condition – since he was involved in a traffic accident some 30 years ago, the span of his memory has been limited to 80 minutes. As you’d imagine, this creates quite a challenging and unusual scenario. Indeed, all of the professor’s previous housekeepers had, for unstated reasons, left his employment after only a brief period. Each morning, the professor is effectively meeting his housekeeper for the first time, not having any recollection of the happenings of yesterday. He keeps notes pinned to his clothes to remind him of the most important facts that can’t stay in his mind (the most prominent of which is ‘my memory only lasts 80 minutes’). This way, he knows that h...
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Book Review: Summer, by Ali Smith (2020)

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  Summer has come and gone, and I’ve completed the seasonal set. Actually, it’s now early March, winter is blowing out, and I was referring to the literary rather than literal summer. I’m not too sure of the significance of each title to the story the respective books contain, there is a loose grounding of each narrative to the season they are tagged to, and the descriptional stuff plays on the nominated time of year for each novel, which is nice, but overall the book titles seem a bit arbitrary. That’s unless I’m missing something, which I most probably am. There must be something in having gone full cycle, so to speak; an end and beginning again, continuation. I’m aware that there’s a lot in these works by Ali Smith that I probably didn’t get, or haven’t got yet. Each book’s links to plays by Shakespeare, for example, is something I’ve read about, but am likely never to fully appreciate. As I’ve said before, I already look forward to rereading these books, discovering things I ...
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Book Review: Spring, by Ali Smith (2019)

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It’s been a long time, dear reader! 2022 hasn’t been a big reading year, for various reasons, but here I am, as winter draws in, to tell you about a book I’m not certain I understand. The thing is, I don’t need to understand Ali Smith’s stories in order to enjoy reading them. Her style of writing (see previous reviews) is a pleasure to experience on its own. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter if the story doesn’t appear to be about very much. The words flow as if the writer is chatting over your shoulder. And of course, it isn’t the case that the story’s about nothing. Like standing over a body of water, you can probably choose how deep you want to go. (I’ve also read from another commentator that returning to these books a second or third time is highly enlightening and rewarding.)   As with the other seasonally titled novels in the series,  Spring  is a study of the state of present-day British society and politics, this time examining the cruelty and criminality of th...
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Book Review: Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell (1999)

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  This was David Mitchell’s debut novel. As this blog shows, I am a fan of his and have decided to read his remaining works in the order in which they were published. At the time, this book must have been a great taster of what was to come from the author, having a style and structure similar to his later novels that I’ve already enjoyed. Characters also show up here who we get to know better in more prominent roles in his stories that were yet to be written. The plot jumps from person and place, with the fate of each having an unknown influence on the other characters and scenarios in the book. The death of an expat lawyer in Hong Kong, for example, leads to the collapse of a finance company, causing the demise of a plot to steal masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Death, in fact, is a feature of the narrators of the individual sections of this novel, either causing death or reaching death or having death inflicted upon them, living with a ghost, or even not ...
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Book Review: Winter, by Ali Smith (2017)

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This is the second installment in Ali Smith’s series of four books, each of which is named after one of the seasons. There is no connection between this novel and the previous, with new characters, situations, and circumstances. Like the last, this book also highlights the work of a lesser-known female artist (in   Autumn   it was Pauline Boty; this time it is Barbara Hepworth). A narrative is also included of the attritional protest held at a US army base at Greenham Common in the early 1980s against the installment of nuclear weapons, which developed into a permanent female-manned peace camp that lasted for years. Winter  has a stronger storyline than  Autumn  did, and I enjoyed reading this book more. Commentary on politics and society is still there, but more subtle and in the background than before. The plot involves few characters. Art is a somewhat aimless young man from London who has had one argument too many with his girlfriend Charlotte, prompting her...
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