Summer

 by Ali Smith     

This woman is a genius!! This is her fourth and final book of the Seasons.  She is amazing.  I love the power with which she writes, exquisite language, angry language.  Her books are all meant to reflect the tenor of the times, the first book takes place at the time of Brexit.  The final book, don't know how she wrote it so quickly is partly about post Brexit vote, immigrant internment and a pandemic.

Autumn

Some of the characters in the books carry through the four stories.  A main character is Mr Gluck, who in the last book is 104 years of age.  As a young boy he and his father were interned on the Isle of Man during the second world war because his father was German.  His sister for some reason stayed in Germany and he often saw her in the summer.  Mr Gluck was apparently a successful song writer. Later we learn that his sister got to France and was part of the resistance.  She got pregnant by another resistance fighter but eventually left her daughter with a farm family who had been helping her get people to safety in Switzerland.

In the first book we also meet Elisabeth, a young girl who is often ignored by her mother.  Mr. Gluck serves as an informal babysitter and mentor for her.  In the last book we find Mr Gluck is living with Elisabeth and her mother and Elisabeth is looking after him.  Mr. Gluck seems for the most part to be mostly sleeping and recalling the past.

Winter

Winter is the story of Sophie, her son Art and her Sister Iris.   Sophie was a successful entrepreneur.  Art is a blogger of Art in Nature.  He had intended to take his girlfriend Charlotte with him to spend Christmas with his mother but he and Charlotte have a breakup because Charlotte learned he was making things up on his blog.  Instead Art invites a total stranger to come with him.  They discover his mother is in dire shape, hardly eating, imagining a floating head.  Charlotte and Art contact Art's aunt who was a very active protestor in her youth to come and help with the mother.   The sisters had been estranged for years but seem to reconcile.  It turns out Art's mother owns a house that Art's aunt lived in as part of a commune years before.

Spring

The story starts with a young school girl who somehow gets past all security into an immigrant detention centre and convinces the boss to get all the bathrooms cleaned.  The next character we meet is Art a film director.  He is depressed because 1)his mentor Paddy has died from cancer and 2) he has been offered a film but he doesn't agree with the direction it is going in.  He hops on a train to get as far away from London as he can.  He gets off at a train station and jumps down on the tracks.  He is rescued by the young student who has somehow convinced a detention centre officer to accompany her to some special place in Scotland.  Art ends up joining up with them on their pilgrimage.  They end up meeting with some people who are working to help the illegal immigrants.  However, things go badly because the immigration centre guard calls her bosses to tell them what is going on and there is a raid.  Art drops the film he has been offered and starts making a film about the people working to help the immigrants.

Summer

In this book we meet a family, Mother Grace, children Robert and Sacha.  Grace and her husband have separated in part because they had opposing views on Brexit.  The husband now lives next door with a younger woman who can no longer speak.  Robert is very intelligent, interested in Einstein, but is getting into a lot of trouble because of being bullied at school.  His sister Sacha wants to change the world.  Robert crazy glues an egg timer to Sacha's hand to give her the gift of time.  A young couple, Art and his former girlfriend Charlotte find Sacha with a bleeding hand, from tearing the egg timer off her skin.  They had taken her to A and E for treatment and then taken her home.

Arthur and Charlotte have inherited Arthur's mother's estate and are living in her house with the Aunt Iris.  They tell the family that at the dead mother's request they are taking something to a man in northern England.  It turns out that Mr Gluck had a statue, mother and child, made up of two pieces of Marble.  At some point in time Mr. Gluck and Art's mother had had sex and she stole the round marble piece that was the child part of the sculpture.  She now whats it returned to Mr. Gluck. Robert is passionately in love with Charlotte even though he is much younger than she is.

Art and Charlotte invite the family to join them on the trip.  Art and Charlotte tell Sacha about a man they met in immigration detention called Hero. Sacha starts writing to him telling him about things on the outside world.  They get to see Gluck, who is being cared for by Elisabeth.  Gluck is now 104 and seems to spend most of his time in the "dreamtime" remembering his past.  He is delighted to have this precious sculpture back complete.  As the story concludes we find that Art and Elisabeth have fallen in love, Art stays with Elisabeth.  Charlotte goes back to live with Art's aunt who is preparing the house for an influx of immigrants who will be released from detention centres because of the pandemic.

At first Charlotte's reaction to Art's abandonment of her and everything else is to shut down and hide in her room but eventually she does overcome her ennui.

At the end of the book Robert says to Charlotte, I don't want to live in a (primal) world like that.

Charlotte responds "we're certainly living in one where the primal and the public have been getting more and more fused together.... but if you don't attend to the primal stuff inside us all.... where will it go.

I think that Ali is making us see that for as much as time moves on things don't change, people are imprisoned unjustly in the past and today also.  There is so much anger, lack of communication, irrational, cruel bureaucracy.

However, the book does show that there is the possibility for love, for caring for others, creating families of non related people. I think she is encouraging us to be aware, to act, even in a small way.

Phenomenal works!  Incredible insight!

 

The Night Portrait

 by Laura Morelli

This story takes place in world war II.  It involves two different time periods and three different primary characters.  One part of the story takes place during the time of Leonardo Da Vinci.  It is about a young woman who becomes the mistress of the Duke of Milan who commissions Leonardo to paint her picture.

The other part of the story takes place in WWII and involves a German art restorer who is recruited to identify valuable art objects from all the art the Germans are stealing from the Jews in Poland.  She finds many valuable pieces but one of special appeal to her is the Da Vinci painting of the girl with an ermine.  The girl is told that the art will be "saved" for the world but she is shocked and appalled when she finds high ranking gestapo officers taking some of the art to decorate their homes.  She is particularly upset when the Da Vinci is claimed by a vicious German who is responsible for the death of many Poles.  The girl doesn't like what is going on.  Her only recourse as she sees it is to make her own personal inventory of what is taken, from whom and where it is taken.

The other part of the story is about a young American soldier who becomes an MP aiding the Monuments men.  He is sad to leave his wife and child behind but is glad to be working to retrieve the art as he likes to draw,

The German Art Restorer's list eventually gets to the Allies an many art objects are retrieved.

It was an interesting read.

The Midnight Library

 by Matt Haig

Another book about libraries....

This is a about a young woman who is depressed and down in the dumps.  She has just been let go from her low paying job and her piano student has also dropped his lessons.  She decides to end it all.

But instead of dying she finds she is in a library with thousands of books.  There she meets a Librarian who had befriended her at school in her youth.  The Librarian tells her she has the chance to explore various lives and pick one she would like to have.  She tries lives where she is a successful musician, a mother, a scientist in the arctic, the co-owner of a California winery, in some she is single, in some divorced, in some she gets along with her brother, in others she doesn't. None of them seem to fulfill her.

She finally sees lives where her Librarian friend has died, her next door neighbour whom she often helped, is alone in a care home, and the young piano student is a juvenile criminal.  She decides to live and go back to her old life committed to do what she can to achieve a better life for her and her friends.

It was an okay story, motivational, but you knew all along she would have to have some kind of ephiphany.

Machines Like Me

 By Ian McEwan

I have read another book by McEwan, Atonement, and I don't think I was all that impressed but this story line about a robot intrigued me.  But after I bought the book I was reluctant to start reading it with all the gloom about covid right now, we are all feeling quite down.

I was delighted with this book.  It was brilliant!  The story is about a young man, Charlie, who doesn't really want to work, he is living in a small apartment.  Instead of using the money he gets from his mother's will to buy a house and support himself, he blows it all on a prototype humanlike robot.   Only a few dozen of them have been produced.  The males are called Adam, the females called Eve.

The books is set just after the Falklands war, when Margaret Thatcher was in power, not sure what relevance this has to the story.

Charlie is in love with the young woman, Miranda, who lives above him.  He invites her to help him select the parameters for his Adam.  At first they are intrigued with Adam, he is interesting, curious about everything.  He especially likes writing Haiku's.  The problems start when Adam admits he too loves Miranda and he even has sex with her.  He realizes he has crossed the line in this and promises Adam that he will never do this again.  But he keeps on writing her love haikus.  At one point Adam has a confrontation with Charlie and says that he has disabled his own kill switch and if Charlie every does anything to him he will hurt him.  To prove his point he breaks Charlies arm.  I was shocked that after this behaviour Charlie didn't go back to the manufacturers.

We learn that Miranda is in danger.  Years before Miranda's best friend was raped and the killed herself because she was ashamed about what this news might have for her family. Miranda knows who the rapist is, lures him to have sex and then accused hm of rape.  The man was sent to jail and has now indicated when he gets out of jail he is going to kill her.  Adam feels he can protect her but suggests they should go visit the ex-con and confront him.  They do this and find he has found religion in prison and no longer has a grudge against the woman.  She explains why she did what she did.

While this is going on Miranda wants to adopt a boy who is being taken care of by social services.  Charlie reluctantly agrees to go along with  this so they get married to improve their chances of being approved for the adoption.  They boy is really harmed from his experience in foster homes and is displaying some bad behaviour.

During the story Charlie makes friends with the famous scientist Alan Turing who also bought one of the Adams.  Turing is very interested in how Charlie's Adam is developing and behaving.  He tells him that some of robots have committed suicide or done things to wind themselves down or even lose their intelligence.  Two Eves, in Saudi Arabia, commit suicide together. An Adam in BC, who is owned by a lumber magnate reduces his intelligence.  They seem to be reacting to what they see in the world.

Charlie and Miranda think that things will go well but then Charlie tells them he has submitted a report about  what Miranda did to the police and she will likely go on trial.

Charlie had been making money trading stocks.  He get Adam to start doing this and Adam makes them a lot of money.  Adam goes out one day and when he returns tells them he has taken most of the money he made them and given it to various charities.

  Adam tells them that the designers of the robots are trying to round all the robots up for reprogramming.  He does not want to be turned over to them. Charlie and Miranda are furious that Adam has ruined their lives. Eventually Charlie clubs him and he stops functioning.  Miranda does got to jail for a short time, but they hope that they will still be able to adopt the boy.

Charlie talks to Turing about what he did to Adam and Turing chastises him for destroying Adam.  He had hidden Adam in his home telling the designers that Adam left and he didn't know where he went.  He turns over Adam to Turing.

This was a very thought provoking book about what it means to be human, emotions, honesty, and how we humans don't always act in ethical, logical ways.  The robots seemed to find this difficult to deal with.  It makes you wonder how, if we do get robots, their thought processes will develop, and will they become BETTER, as well as smarter than us. You wonder how Charlie and Miranda will go about raising the damaged young child they are going to have in their life.

A fascinating book.

 

 

 

Indians on Vacation

 By Thomas King

I recently read one of his detective novels and didn't enjoy it much so I approached this new book with some trepidation.  However, I have to say this book was much more interesting.

It is the story of a couple, Bird and Mimi, who are currently living in Guelph Ontario but who have native indian ancestory.  Bird is part Blackfoot and part Greek, Mimi I cannot remember.

Bird is a writer, photojournalist who seems to be in a funk, Mimi is some kind of artist.

They are travelling through Europe trying to track down one of Mimi's ancestors who supposedly fled to Europe, taking with him the family's medicine bundle.  They are trying to track down evidence of him from the various post cards he sent from Europe.

The book takes place primarily while they are visiting Prague but jumps back in time, including to other European trips they have taken.  We learn that Bird has diabetes and is in quite ill health, including getting very painful leg cramps.  We also learn that Bird and Mimi were a couple, then split up for a few years, and then got back together and seem to have a pretty good relationship right now.

Mimi decides that they should go for a day trip/overnight trip to Budapest.  They are shocked and upset when they see all the refugees camped out in the train station and basically decide to take the next train back to Prague.

While in Prague they visit a lot of tourist sites.  Mimi never seems to make it down to breakfast on time but Bird is befriended by one of the employees of the hotel, Oz, who asks him why his is travelling and eventually suggests that they should just make up a story about the relative who came to Europe.  When he leaves Bird he gives him an envelope with a proposed story.

Bird does make it to Greece and with the help of people eventually finds the village where his grandfather came from and may even have found the family home.  He is really moved to be able have done this.

While Mimi is in the hotel room, feeling ill, Bird goes out to get her some bland food, white rice and meets a young couple from the U.S. who are scheduled to be married.  However, their seems to be some tension between them.  They ask Bird about marriage, commitment etc.  They find out that Bird had a relationship with another woman, a typewriter collector, when he was separated from Mimi. We also find out that the young man of the couple also has been unfaithful.  The girl is trying to  figure out how to deal with this knowledge.. Bird shares his encounter with Mimi and the next day when she is well she figures out how to achieve a meeting with the young couple.  She takes the girl aside and tells her not to get married.

As the book ends Bird and Mimi are talking about how devastated they were by the scenes of the refugees and they feel bad that they are powerless to improve things in the world.  But then Mimi starts sketching.  And, Bird thinks about going back to completing a project he had started but not finished about the treatment/state of the lives of indians in the U.S.

I found this book interesting as it looked at family histories, stories, the idea of truth in family histories, it also looked at relationships and how people have to work at them.  Also through their experiences Bird and Mimi did seem to start to work their way out of their ennui.

All the Devils are Here

 by Louise Penny

This is her newest book.  This one is set in Paris.  Inspector Gamache and his wife are in Paris awaiting the birth of their grand-daughter to their daughter and Gamache's former 2IC Jean-Guy

Gamache's godfather, with whom he was very close, as this man helped to raise him after his parents died, is also in Paris for the event.

The group has a family dinner after which Gamache and his wife see the Godfather, Stephen, hit by a truck.  They think it was deliberate but the police are skeptical until they find out that Stephen was staying at an expensive Paris hotel instead of in his Paris apartment and when Gamache and his wife go to the apartment they find a man shot dead there.  Now the police are interested.

As the story goes along we find out that the company Jean-Guy has been hired by for an undefined job, may have a secret it desparately wants to hide.  Gamache's other son who is in banking is able to find out that the very wealthy godfather has cashed in all his assets to buy some businesses affiliated with Jean-Guy's company.

It then turns out that some former police officers work as security with Jean Guy's company and that the police may be protecting the company.  Gamache's son is held ransom unless Gamache can find some important evidence that the Godfather is believed to have.  Both Gamache and hn is son come close to getting killed.

At the end all the Gamache families move back to Canada with the somewhat frail godfather who is still feisty.  Gamache and his son are reconciled after years of not communication.

It was an engaging story as always but I don't understand why the godfather had to loose all his billions... that doesn't seem logical or plausible.... 

Obsidian

 by Thomas King

This is a mystery about a retired police officer Thumps Dreadfulwater.  He is devastated that his girlfriend and her daughter were murdered as part of a series of murders being referred to as the Obsidian murders.

He had left California and ended up in a place called Chinook in the U.S. west.  He goes back to California but doesn't find anything new.  Then some Hollywood people show up saying they want to do a movie about the serial killings based on the obsidian murders.  They feed Thumps a bit of info he didn't know, i.e. that his lover was married, her husband had been in jail, but got out prior to the murders.  Thumps doesn't really want to work with them but he does want to solve the crime.

Then some strange things start happening, a woman, a researcher for the movie people is murdered and has a piece of obsidian in her mouth, then a classic car with an obsidian paint job is stolen. Thumps starts to think the serial killer is stalking/teasing him now.

Eventually they figure out that the killer actually set up other people as the perpetrators of several serial killings and then staged their suicides.  It turns out one of the movie guys is the serial killer.

It was a light read, I was surprised that King had such uncomplimentary names for the native characters in his book and a black policeman who comes to help Thumps refers to him as Tonto.

Having read another book by King, On the Back of the Turtle, which I thought was very good, this was a bit light and disappointing.