Victory City

 by Salman Rushdie

This is the story of a young woman who, after seeing her mother die on a funeral pyre, takes some seeds and creates a city from them.  I have not read anything by Rushdie before.  He has a lovely writing style however while it was a good story I didn't feel it said anything particularly new or profound, as one review says "His new novel is about a kingdom that is founded on pluralism but fails to live up to its ideals".

Two cattle herders? come to the city and take power as King, first one brother and then the other.  The young woman, Pampa, ends up marrying them both.  She attempts to direct things to a society where women are equal and all views are respected but has limited and no lasting success.  The story is all about how people scheme and fight for power and in the end the city is destroyed. Pampa lives to be almost two hundred years old so she is witness to, and documents, the history of her city.

 

Lessons

 by Ian McEwan

I really enjoyed the last book I read by McEwan, Machines Like Me.  It was fascinating and thought provoking.

I absolutely hated this book and had to force myself to finish it....I skimmed over the last 60 pages.

This is the story of a man Roland Baines who really has a sad life.  As a child his soldier father and mother ship him off to boarding school at an early age.  His mother had two children from a previous marriage but they also have been shipped off so he does not have much contact with them til he is an adult.

While he is at boarding school the Cuban Missle Crisis occurs.  The boys at the school are worried about the end of the world and that they will die without having had sex.  Roland starts taking music lessons with a female music teacher.  She thinks he has talent but she also lusts after him.  Roland quits lessons and his school work suffers but eventually he goes to her place and they start having an affair.  Eventually he goes to live with her and she basically keeps him trapped in her house, wearing pajamas all the time.  She plans for them to go to Scotland when he is 16 where it will be legal for them to marry.  He is shocked at this news and leaves her.

It was thought he could have a brilliant musical career but he doesn't go on to university and instead drifts around different jobs and with different women.  He seems obsessed with sex but unable to commit.

Eventually he meets a woman and marries her.  He is trying a career as a poet without much success.   They have a baby and when the baby is about 18 months old his wife leaves him.  At first the police think he may have killed her but she sends sporadic postcards for awhile.

When he happens to be in Berlin at the fall of the  wall he happens to see his wife in a restaurant.  She a become a successful author.  She tells him she wants no contact with him or her son.  Her mother felt that her life was ruined, her career plans erased, when she had children and Roland's wife doesn't want that to be her fate.

Roland reads her books and realizes she is a great author and that she probably couldn't have achieved what she did staying with him.  He raises their son and seems to be a caring father.  He seems to scrape by playing piano in a hotel bar at night.

Eventually he meets another woman and they start a relationship but while their two sets of kids get along they keep separate households. He thinks of asking her to marry him but doesn't get around to it.  He is sad when she decides to get back with her abusive husband.

His son eventually finds his mother and she basically slams the door in his face saying she wants nothing to do with him.

At one point Roland goes to see the piano teacher and threatens to expose her.  She doesn't think he has proof but he has the train tickets and marriage licence.  He decides not to proceed with anything.

Eventually Roland gets back with the second woman, who has divorced her husband.  He asks her to marry him but before they get married she finds she has stage 4 cancer.  He looks after her til she dies.... what is the world trying to tell me, many thinks I have read/watched laterly are about spouses dying o cancer.  It is so depressing.....

Anyway, the woman asked Roland to sprinkle her ashes but a bridge in the country but only when he was ready to do it. Her ex starts bugging him to get the ashes to disperse them or come along.  Roland knows his wife wants her ex not to have anything to do with that.  He sets off to the country and is in the process of scattering the ashes when the ex shows up.  They wrestle, the ex pushes him off the bridge and dumps the ashes.

Roland returns home "somewhat sad" about what transpired.  He is not alone.  He seems to have a good family around him, his son, step children and their partners and a german granddaugter who really loves him.

Shortly after his ex wife gets in contact with him through her publisher.  She says she wants to see him.  She is in a wheelchair as she has had to have a foot amputated.  He is furious with her because in her last book she wrote of a couple, living in the town they lived in.  The woman in the story left an abusive husband.  He believes people will think she is writing about him.  She dismisses this saying people will know it is fiction.  She tells him that she really did love him but his neediness was too much for her. 

Various stages of the man's life mention major historical events: Bay of Pigs, Chernobyl, Berlin wall coming down, Brexit and the pandemic.  Not sure what the point of that was... other than to place his life in a particular time period.

I hated this guy, he had no drive, just seemed to float through life.  The only thing he seems to have done right was his care for his son. I know he had a traumatic childhood but geeze pick yourself up and make some decisions.  I hated the guys wife for what she did to him and their child. The piano teacher was despicable.

Some reviewers say the book is reflecting the ennui of our times.... maybe.  But I certainly did not enjoy any part of it.

The House on the Cerulean Sea

 by TJ Klune

I read another book by this author, Under the Whispering Door.  I really liked it, it made me laugh and it made me cry both times I read it.

I think this book is even better.  It is about a caseworker for the Dept in Charge of Magical Youth, who is sent to an island to do an assesment of a care home there.  The care home has some strange children, a female garden gnome, a pixie, a boy who tranforms into a terrier when he is scared, a creature like a octopus or jellyfish who aspires to be a doorman at a hotel another creature and last but not least Lucy, the AntiChrist who loves old blues and rock and roll music.

The caseworker Linus, is very nervous at first as he is really out of his comfort zone, but he has been entrusted with this task because of his very objective reporting on previous facilities.

However, Linus becomes anything but objective as he comes to know and love the children and their caregiver, Arthur.  The children are feared by people on the mainland.  Linus thinks the kids should go on an outing to the town.  It goes well for the most part but a couple residents are not happy with the visitors.

Linus files his reports including his final report that the facility should stay open.  His recommendation is accepted, much to his surprise.  He decides life on the island is more appealing than his job so quits and goes back to the Island to marry Arthur and help raise the children,

It was a fun, very senstive book.  I really enjoyed it.

The Personal Librarian

 by Marie Bendict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This book is the fictional story of a real person Belle de Costa Greene who gets the job as the personal librarian for J.P.Morgan who is trying to build a library of early books to rival the Medici library that was developed in Florence.

Belle has a secret, she is really of negro ancestry but her mother has chosen to make a life for them where they are pretending to be white.  Belle's parents separate when the family moves from Washington to New York.  The father is the first black graduate of Harvard and is actively working for black civil rights.  He cannot agree with what his wife is doing.

Belle had been a librarian at Princeton.  She is recommended to Morgan by a young relative.  As time goes on Belle studies Greek and Latin and ancient art and literature and becomes not just a librarian to Morgan but also a confident and even a buyer for him, travelling the world to attend auctions and bid on items for the library.

All the while she is terrified her background will be revealed.  She keeps telling people her skin colour comes from a Porugese grandmother.

She becomes the toast of New York for her succes and eventually has an affair with a married man, an art historian and art dealer.  When she becomes pregnant he arranges for her to get an abortion in London but he is not there for her.  She is distraught at his treatment and eventually they carriy on a correspondence over the decades.  His wife is okay with their affair.  However, she finds that rumours are swirling around her and she has to lie to Morgan that she is not having an affair.  He seems to want  her for himself (not as a lover).   She feels he is treating her as his property, a slave, but she stays working for him.  When Morgan dies she receives a big bequest which helps her family's stability.  She has been supporting her mother, siblings and ultimately their spouses for years.

I found the book, especially the first half , really slow and uninteresting.  It was about her early years as the librarian which is okay but then had lots about balls and operas, etc.  I think most of that could have been shortented.  At times she was so stressed she started to drink too much and could have done something to damage her reputation but she managed to keep her secret over the years.  I don't know how or when the truth actually came out.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

 by Shehan Karunatilaka

This book won the Booker Prize this year.  I can certainly understand why it was selected.

It was a very creative, powerful, commentary on the conflict in Sri Lanka.

The main character Maali is killed. He is a photographer, a gambler, and a closet queen.   He can't remember how or why he died.He finds himself in a nether region where he is told he has seven days to do what?  Not sure? But his main goal becomes contacting two close friends to get them to display photos he has taken which he hopes will rock Sri Lanka.

Mention is made of going into the light.  What is the light... he gets different answers: heaven, rebirth, oblvion.

Maali was not a very principled person in life.  He gambled a lot, took photos for anyone in the Sri Lankan conflict who would pay him, the government, ngo's or the "terrorists".  He even took photos of things he knew were not true, for example some rural people are massacred and dressed in uniforms of one of the rebel fighters.

He is having a homo sexual relationship with a young man who asks him to be faithful and he says he is, but that is a lie. There is a young woman, a friend he lives with, along with the young man, who seems interested in him but he won't tell her he is gay.  He promises his lover to go away to a place where they can live safely, but he never follows through with that.

As Maali travels in the netherworld he finds he can fly on the wind and get to places he has been before including his family home, his own home, etc.  He meets ghouls and other ghosts and ghosts who claim to be there to guide and assist him.  Can he trust them?

As the days pass he comes to remember that he was killed by some thugs and his body dismembered with his head thrown into a river/pond (like others have been disposed of) and his body bagged and disposed of elesewhere.  

His friends and family report him missing and seek the help of two police officers who agree to look for him once some money crosses their palms. Eventually he is able to put ideas into his friends heads so that they can find the photos he has stashed away.  

At one point his girl friend is arrested by officials and is taken to a building where she is going to be tortured.  Through his intersessions he is able to get her out before she is hurt.

But the government officials take the photos from them.  Eventually he is able to tell them where he has the negatives for the photos and the friends make copies of the photos and put them on display.  Some photos he didn't plan to have displayed (of gay lovers) also end up on the walls.  People come to see the photos including goverment officials who take some of them away.  The pictures obviously do not have the desired effect he expected.

At one point in the book a person decides to take a bomb to the government building where people are tortured.  Maali doesn't want the bomb to be set off as innocent people as well as the bad guys will be killed but the explosion occurs.  It is around this time that Maali learns that the father of his lover, a goverment official, is the one who had him killed becasue he didn't want his son in a homosexual relationship.

As the seventh moon approaches Maali is given a choice to drink from one of several cups.  One would take him to the light, one would take him wherever he was needed, I can't remember what the options were.  He chooses to be where needed and becomes a greeter to the dead where he helps someone.  He is then offered another drink and decides to stay as a helper.

This book was very diffiult to read at times because of the violence but it was amazing the world of the dead that was created and how the author developed the story as Maali regained his memory of his death.  In the end he seems to have transitioned from a very unprinciped, unethical, totally self-centred waste of space to someone who truly cared about others and wanted to help them.

 

A World of Curiousities

 by Louise Penny

I always look forward with anticipation to the Louise Penny books.  She is my favourite mystery writer.  However, while this book was very good I found the premise of the story a bit far fetched and the ongoing focus on criminals and revenge on Inspector Gamache less satisfying than a good old murder investigation.

She certainly knows how to develop a plot and build suspense.  The story starts in the past, early in the careers of Gamache and Beauvoir his assistant.  A woman's body is found at the edge of a lake.  It is later determined that the woman was a prostitute and drug addict and was pimping her kids to people including the local police.  The conclusion is that the children killed their mother.  The oldest child, a girl, is sent to prison, her brother is put in care.

Gamache and his wife continue to support the girl including helping her get an engineering degree while in prision (is this possible??).  Gamache didn't and still does not like her younger brother.

The book then jumps to the present when the niece of Myrna, the former psychologist and now owner of the Three Pines used book store, and the girl who was imprisoned for killing her mother are at a graduation ceremony.

The celebrations continue to Three Pines and the brother shows up much to Gamache's disgust.  He and his wife are hosting the boy's sister at their house as they have in the past but Gamache won't invite the brother to stay with them.  Later the boy gets his sister to let him into the house and he moves things around so that Gamache will know he has been there.  He also takes photos in the house.

While this is going on Myrna decides she needs more space in her apartment above the bookstore.  It is discovered that there should be more space and then her boyfriend receives an old letter in the mail indicating a bricked in wall.  They eventually break through the wall to find a modified reproduction of a famous painting (with alterations that appear modern, not 100 years old, an old book of spells.

Then things get really elaborate and complicated.  We find out that a dangerous serial killer that Gamache had imprisioned has escaped from prison, by paying off prison officials.  This killer has someone take his place in prison (how??).  The killer has produced this modified painting, broken into Myrna's place while she was away and inserted it through the ceiling of the bookstore).  He has also arranged for the boyfriend to receive the strange letter about the bricked wall.

To me all this preparation, the letter, the painting, the breakin etc are too hard to believe.  Supposedly the prisoner worked on it while in prison and imbedded some code into it as well.

In the end we find out the prisoner is the father of the girl who was imprisoned for killing her mother. Gamache, his wife and Beauvoir are almost killed when the criminal and the girl's brother hold them hostage in their home.  Gamache ultimately kills the serial killer who has been involved with two more recent killings, along with the boy.  The boy and girl go to prison for the killings and kidnappings.  The boy hates Gamacher for ruining his family, taking his sister away from him, and ruining his life (being in care) and also for rejecting him while helping his sister over the years.

It was an action packed read but as I said I wish she would stop the plots that are so personal against Gamache and go back to some good old crime solving.

A Killer in King's Cove

 by Iona Whishaw

This book is by a Canadian author.  It is set in Nelson BC just after the second world war.  

A young British woman who worked as a spy during the war has moved to Canada to try to get away from her memories of the war.  Locals are curious about her.  A local young man is pestering her for attention.  There is an American couple that is also a curiosity to the locals.

She has a very grumpy neighbour.  One day she discovers she has no water.  As she is going to go to investigate her grumpy neighbour comes to tell her has no water either and blames it on her.  They go to investigage theit water source and find a body stuffed in a wooden channel.

The police are summoned, no one knows who the dead person is, he isn't a local.  They young woman is arrested temporarily.  The police officer is attracted to the young woman and has trouble believing she could have committed the crime

The police are surprised when a British official arrives and the police find out that both the dead man and the young woman were working as spies and are sworn to secrecy.  The British official tries to force the young woman to return to Britain to work for the government but she refuses.

Eventually it comes out that there was no connection between the two Brits are not connected.  The young man was actually coming to find his birth father.  He had recently discovered he was adoopted and that his mother had put him up for adoption.

We find out that the man's father attacked him, not knowing he was his son and the young suitor disposed of the body.

The book has a curious cast of characters including one "mad" woman who goes around the area with a gun shooting at things.  It was an okay read.