Jessica

There's usually a comforting kind of consistency with Kurt Vonnegut's books – they're never my favourites, with the characterisation being too shallow for that – but they're witty, left-wing, and usually just kinda fun.

Unfortunately, I didn't find this one as fun. I kept getting the characters mixed up and then it all got a bit silly at the end.

This has been marketed as a thriller, but it really lacks the compelling, page-turning quality that “thriller” implies. It has, however, also been marketed as a mystery, which I think is the accurate label.

It's an alright book. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but I have to admit I probably wouldn't have bought it if it hadn't been cheap in the Kindle Store!

So, yes, I broke my rule about no longer reading novels with male academics for protagonists, and was promptly punished for it with the character of Antonio Yammara, a boring and stereotypical womaniser who sleeps around with as many drunk female students as he can get a hand on, until he gets one pregnant and has to marry her. I wish I could avoid ever reading a novel with such a plotline again, but it seems boring and unimaginative male academic writers think that every novel they write is some kind of confessional, and they have to write about their own exploits, even if it is totally irrelevant to the actual story they're trying to tell, as it is here.

Which is a good thing, because (although I almost didn't get to see it, since I almost ragequit at the end of chapter 1) the actual story being told here is pretty good. Mostly, this novel tells the story of Colombia, and Bogotá especially, a country and a city just beginning to recover from the drug wars of the 80s. It's evocative and poignant. The middle section of the book is, blissfully, not from Antonio's perspective at all but tells the story of the Laverdes, one of many families deeply affected by the drugs trade. Then it returns to Antonio being an asshat, of course.

As I got to the end of the book, I started to feel like Vásquez knew what he was doing with the character of Antonio, that if he was an authorial self-insert at least he wasn't an idealised one. Antonio is incredibly selfish, if not particularly self-reflective, which is illustrated by the way he abandons Aura without a word on the trail of the story of Ricardo Laverde. And then, naturally, he has to have sex with Laverde's daughter, Maya, because how can a heterosexual man connect with a woman except through sex? I don't particularly care for the way he justifies himself – Maya understands me, for she was here in Bogotá in the 80s too, unlike Aura who spent those years in México and Santiago de Chile! How could she ever understand what I've been through! – as if his formative years were any more than superficially similar to Maya's. I guess I can't fault Antonio for being unrealistic, he's just an archetype I thoroughly despise reading about.

In short, if this had just been a book about Colombia, the drug wars and the Laverdes, it'd be getting four stars at least. On the other hand, if the whole book had been like chapter 1, it would be getting one star, and less if Goodreads allowed half-stars. It's getting three because the depiction of Colombia and Bogotá, of Colombians and bogotanos, was really absorbing. Too bad about the protagonist!

This is another of those books that a lot of people studied at school, but not me. It was recently really cheap in the Kindle Store so I grabbed it. It turned out to be a really nice little book, although I'm not sure there was much about it to study at school (so probably a good thing I didn't read it there, or I would've ended up hating it).

The novel has a couple of different threads – one following the protagonist, Stanley Yelnats, at the hellish Green Lake Camp; another following his family history; and a third that really ties in with the second one that follows the decline of the long-gone town that the camp stands on the site of. The three threads all tie together nicely at the end, and the character of Zero really tugged on my heart strings.

This is yet another of those books that really deserves three and a half. It's a lovely children's book, but it wasn't as meaningful to me as an adult as it might've been if I'd read it when I was younger (without studying it at school). So, three it is. But I still really recommend it.

This is certainly an ambitious book. It spans two countries, half a century, and more characters than you can conceivably keep straight (unless you take notes, which might be your best option). It wants to impart so much thought on Christianity, alienation, murder, etc, etc..

YMMV, of course, but it didn't convince me. I couldn't keep track of all the characters, especially the ones who went by multiple names. While the novel plays around with different formats – sometimes narrative, sometimes letters, sometimes music journalism – the actual “voice” of the many different characters was very samey. It was also really preachy in some parts, which was bad enough when I agreed with the sentiment, and worse still when I didn't. (I just can't buy humanity being inherently evil.) I also did not care about any of the serial killers, bank robbers, etc. whose life stories got infodumped and ended up taking a lot of space in the novel. Lastly, while I appreciate that this novel sets out to include representatives from different social groups that are usually marginalised, I agree with this excellent review that their treatment often seemed tokenistic (I'm thinking especially of the trans band member).

I don't really want to be all doom and gloom, because the writing certainly had potential, and maybe if the themes (Christianity, humans being evil, etc.) had been more to my taste I'd have been able to overlook the other stuff. So, I don't know. I would certainly recommend this for anyone interested in serial killers/mass murderers. Provided you don't mind some fantastical elements like demons thrown in, of course.

I read this because two of my favourite authors ([a:Carolina De Robertis 2740834 Carolina De Robertis https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1340129708p2/2740834.jpg] and [a:Isabel Allende 2238 Isabel Allende https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1341879973p2/2238.jpg]) wrote complimentary reviews of it, and I thought I'd really better! As the blurb suggests, it follows the lives of three Chinese-American women working in San Francisco's nightclubs in the 1930s and 40s: Grace, a young runaway from an abusive father in the Midwest; Ruby, a promiscuous Japanese woman who pretends to be Chinese (with good reason); and Helen, slightly older than the other two and from a rich family that lives in a compound.It took me a while to get into China Dolls, because the writing style is deceptively simple (especially Grace's chapters...) and for a while I was wondering if I'd picked up a YA book inadvertently. It certainly begins when the trio of protagonists are rather young (I'd guess that Grace and Ruby are both still teenagers, though probably not Helen) and the narrative has strong “coming of age” themes – trying to work out your place in the world, struggling with your identity, relationships with crappy boys, friendship. Overall, if the conventions of the young adult genre weren't so prudish (which this book is not!) you could fairly characterise it as that.That said, the book was really good, and I got completely sucked in. Being “young-adult-like” does not make it bad quality! If you like historical fiction and strong female characters, are interested in the Chinese and Japanese communities in the US, or women there during the Second World War, or how the US entertainment industry used to be, this novel has got you covered.I do agree with some other reviewers who've said this novel may have worked better if it had stuck to Grace's perspective. Grace is the real protagonist of the three. She's by far the most likeable, she gets a fair few more POV chapters than either of the other two, and what's more, even when Ruby and Helen have POV chapters they conveniently never think about anything they happen to be hiding from Grace at the time, ensuring that whatever is unknown to Grace is unknown to the reader – but of course, if she should hide something from the others the reader is in on it. It just seemed strange not to formalise the deal by having the novel expressly from Grace's perspective, instead of nominally being about all three.As well, if you're looking to read a novel about the strength of women's friendships, this is not really the one to read. What it depicts far more is their fragility. I found it telling that early in the book, the three young women pledge never to let a man get in the way of their friendship, and, well...I thought the ending was good, if not uplifting. I didn't think Helen's self-described motives for dobbing Ruby in to the FBI and then blaming Grace made a hell of a lot of sense though – was it because she was traumatised by her husband and son being murdered by "Japs" in China? or because she was jealous of Ruby and wanted Grace all for herself? if she really wanted Grace to get all the opportunities she claimed, why did she then turn everyone in the nightclub against her to get her fired, before Ruby was even out of the damn internment camp to need lying to?! All in all it just made her seem deeply irrational and selfish, which was out of character. I was also irritated that Grace would forgive Joe and agree to marry him after he'd already broken her heart twice, even if I appreciated the depiction of returned servicemen as traumatised, not cheerful heroes. But I was relieved that she finally cut the poisonous Helen and Ruby (mostly) out of her life, even if it resulted in the awkward conclusion of choosing a man over your female friends being the path to happiness.I think I'll have to read more of Lisa See's books!

Apparently this is not one of Megan Abbott's better books, but it was the cheapest of them in the Kindle Store when I bought it. It was still one of those books that made me wish Goodreads allowed 3.5 star ratings... I don't even care about any other half-star levels, I just want 3.5! This is to say I liked it better than “just” liking it, but did I REALLY like it? Eh, well...

The problem with this book is that the first two-thirds or so are pretty slow. It is not that fun reading about Marion Seeley drinking with her new friends or getting seduced by an asshole serial womaniser. By the end of the book I was glued, getting fed up when my train got to the station where I had to get off and go to work for eight hours – but all of that compelling reading was just in the very last part of the book! And it's not even a very long book! It just seems a bit wasteful.

This, however, is something that established Megan Abbott fans have complained about in their reviews of this book, so I'm determined I should try another. If it's like the last third of this book, I'll love it.

So evidently, that moratorium on reading books with male academic protagonists isn't going so well. I have heard of the principle of “write what you know”, but this is really boring and I think male academics need to get some imagination.The book itself is an alright read; it's basically [b:Atonement 6867 Atonement Ian McEwan https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320449708s/6867.jpg 2307233] in South Africa, though. At least, from what I can recall of that book they have a lot in common. The title, obviously. The concentration on wealthy white people. (Although to be fair to McEwan, Atonement is the book of his I remember being less obsessed with wealthy white people than usual. At least, I don't remember getting frustrated by how much I didn't care about any of his eye-rolling self-absorbed walking moneybags the way I did with his other books...)This novel centres on an elderly white South African author, Clare Wald, and her biographer Sam Leroux – also a white South African, but having been living in New York for a very long time. Their relationship goes back a long way before that, but to explain it would spoil the plot. It's a novel about history, truth, memory... but also a novel where the only black characters are domestic workers, thieves, and obnoxious police officers, which I found more than a little problematic. I mean sure, from what I've heard, white South Africans prefer to live in isolated communities and see as little of people of colour as possible (except as servants), and my complaint isn't that Flanery should have written white South Africans to be more inclusive than they really are. It's more that I don't understand how he expects me to care about anyone in this novel. I find it really hard to sympathise with these characters with more money than they know what to do with and domestic staff to do their chores. I found it especially hard to sympathise with Clare Wald feeling so guilty about having tipped off leftist militants as to the whereabouts of her National Party brother-in-law and sister, probably enabling their assassination. She did good! What the hell is she so upset about? Jeez...There are some other aspects of the plot I didn't find very satisfying – the eventual explanation of what happened to Laura, Clare's daughter, for example. I didn't feel that what Lionel and Timothy had to say about her constituted an authoritative answer, and yet there was no more explanation after that, so I guess it was so supposed to be, inasmuch as anything was supposed to be? But I struggled to re-analyse all those snippets from her diaries and such as having been written by a fanatical supporter of the regime. You could describe this novel as a mystery novel, with Laura's fate being the matter under investigation, except that the denouement is hearsay, untrustworthy and unclear. I get that that happens a lot in real life, that real mysteries are never explained. But I don't read mystery novels to get the kind of lack of answers I can get in real life.Despite all of this, I kind of enjoyed the novel, though. Lacking an emotional investment in any of the characters, I took it as a mystery and ended up disappointed, but until the disappointment it was hard to put down. The differing versions of the same events were intriguing. I wanted to get to the ‘truth'. Alas...

A good neo-noir thriller with a feminist message. A company, Dreamcom, has developed sexbots (‘dolls') to the point that they're practically indistinguishable from women, and encourage men to act out their most depraved and sadistic fantasies at their dollhouses. One day in San Francisco, a bomb goes off in one of these dollhouses, levelling the building and killing everyone inside. Daniel Madsen is one of those tasked to investigate.

Obviously the novel gets to an awkward point where Madsen and his ally, Shahida Sanayei, are racing to save more dollhouses and their patrons from getting blown up, but that's the nature of the genre. McCabe does not shy away from exposing the misogyny at the heart of the sex industry, and in this light the highlight of the book is probably Madsen's interview with a feminist activist he suspects of being involved in the bombing.

In short, if you stand for women's liberation and like thrillers, this is definitely a book you should read.

I understand that this book is supposed to be enormously influential, inspiring a large amount of British satire of class stratification... and yet... I feel like by now, it's been done so much better so many times that this just isn't that good. I didn't even get a laugh out of it...

The characterisation of the female characters, in particular, bugged the crap out of me. It seemed like Dixon, the protagonist, didn't have anything to think about them except for what they looked like, and how irritating he found Margaret's emotional instability. There weren't really any times he seemed to enjoy the company of either of them or have any of those really good conversations you have with people you're attracted to. His entire thought process just seemed to be, “WOW Christine is hot and I hate her boyfriend, I hope I can steal her away from him!! also Margaret is ugly and crazy, blech.” I ended up not liking him much at all. I also wasn't a fan of the scene at the end that came almost out of nowhere to cast Margaret in a really nasty light. I don't even think the revelations of that scene were in character for her. I just did not like it.

The rest of the book is okay. You have a lot of elitist upper-class academic types being skewered, which is always alright. I liked seeing Bertrand get his comeuppance. But the book as a whole just left a sour taste in my mouth.

So this is the story of Cécile, a seventeen-year-old upper-class French schoolgirl with this kind of womanising, playboy dad. Playboy Dad more or less lets Cécile do what she wants, but then he randomly decides to marry someone he just met (?) and she is actually a pain in the arse, so Cécile spends the rest of the novel scheming to get rid of her.

I did find it vaguely amusing, and I enjoyed Cécile's cynicism about love and her relationship with Cyril, but overall... it was an amusing little read but not much more than that.

Maybe this is the kind of book you have to be in a certain mood to enjoy... it was a page-turner, sure, and I kept thinking about it when I put it down, but it made me miserable.

I think the blurb oversold it, too. Like, the claim that it “captures the mood of an entire generation”? Well... it's about ultra-rich people divorced from any kind of reality. It's about Maria going crazy and being helpless. It was just very individual; I didn't think it said anything much about “the mood of an entire generation”, much less the “generation” of the late 1960s.

It's a good book... but all the same... it made me uneasy.

I don't have a lot of say about this but I thought it was a wonderful novel about memory, with the third part being extraordinarily powerful (nicely making up for the driness of part two). To entice you, here is a quote about the war dead, both of Spain and France in their respective wars:

Nobody remembers them, you know? Nobody. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn't have a wife and children and a sunny room; nobody remembers, least of all, those they fought for. There's no lousy street in any lousy town in any fucking country named after any of them, nor will there ever be.

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Harsh rating, I know. The main problem I had with Embassytown is that the first half was very slow, and I never really got sucked in like I did with [b:Perdido Street Station 68494 Perdido Street Station (Bas-Lag, #1) China Miéville https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1393537963s/68494.jpg 3221410] which had a similar problem.The world-building wasn't as intricate, even though it was pretty damn intricate compared to a lot of other fantasy/science fiction writers' works. The Ariekei in particular, despite being the centre of the book, are so underdeveloped. The reader ends up knowing nothing about their culture or social structures. This might have been because the narrator of the book is a part of the settler-colonial society, which (having parallels to the British Empire) doesn't care so much about the cultures of the colonised. But I still thought this aspect was pretty weak, a cop-out.But I couldn't get very invested in the human characters, either. The only one who really tugged my heartstrings at any time was Vin, and only because he was so devastated that Avice hadn't been able to distinguish him, who loved her, from his doppel Cal, who had never even touched her in bed (as she afterwards realised). Avice was kind of cool in theory but didn't seem that way in practice. I spent most of the book desperately wishing it was about her travels through space instead of about her being stuck on this boring, conniving backwater. Those travels sounded more interesting. And her husband Scile was a dickhead too.I guess this book is very interesting if you don't care to get emotionally invested in any characters and you just want to read about high-brow concepts (a “language” that has never developed the symbolic nature of the sign??? how) in an applied, fictional form. It wasn't for me, though. In this light, I'm not sure what Miéville I'll aim to read next; maybe [b:Kraken 6931246 Kraken China Miéville https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320551670s/6931246.jpg 8814204]. Once I've put a dent in what's already on my “to read” list, though!

This is a bit of a tough read at times, with a great many gruesome torture scenes, but ultimately I found it compelling. It follows a particular well-to-do family in Ethiopia during the “revolution” and terror of the 1970s, along with some of their acquaintances – all in all it amounts to a huge and unwieldy cast. Unfortunately this means that most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but the sheer breadth of the work distracted me from that while reading.

This novel's main strength is the unflinching detail in describing the horror of dictatorship. It's really unfortunate that within the text such dictatorship is equated with “communism”, as if intense repression was in any way the same thing as the democratic control of society by the working class, but y'know, Stalinism (and McCarthyism too, I suppose) should really take the blame for that. The other problem with the novel is that there are some rather unbelievable twists in the plot (mostly where the Colonel apparently had his own daughter arrested for handing out pamphlets, and she somehow without his authorisation got brutally tortured? how exactly was that supposed to have worked?!), as well as some turns that just didn't seem to come from anywhere. But nonetheless, I thought the novel evoked imagery very well – images of Ethiopia, of totalitarian regimes, etc.

I'd really feel more comfortable giving this three and a half; four seems too generous but three too harsh, considering that despite all the flaws I mentioned above I still found this gripping. I guess I would recommend this more as dystopian fiction than historical, and if you're coming at it from that interest, you'll probably enjoy it more.

A beautiful, engrossing novel about Palestine, set shortly before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. It follows a sixty-something-year-old writer, Walid – who would seem to be based on the author himself – as he returns to Palestine for the first time in thirty-eight years, having been forcibly separated from his family by the occupation, and observes the ways in which his homeland, his family and his friends have changed, mostly for the worse. The Khan Younis where he spent his childhood has been lost, and many of his loved ones have met tragic ends. The novel is naturally scathing of Israel, of the daily humiliations meted out on the Palestinians, of the violence of the occupation, and the theft of the land in the first place, including Ashdod, where Walid was born.

It's not a novel that dehumanises Israelis though, which is the role that the titular “lady from Tel Aviv”, Dana, has to play. Honestly I was expecting Dana to play a bigger role in the novel, what with the title and half the blurb being given over to her, but she is what she is. She's someone fed up with the conflict, who wants peace, but isn't political beyond that. I don't really want to spoil her subplot, so I'll leave it there...

The best part of this novel is the little things, in the observations of occupation. I get the sense that Walid is a thinly disguised version of al-Madhoun, that the novel Walid is writing represents this novel, and so on. Walid's difficulty simply entering Israel was compelling reading, and rang true; I once knew someone, a Palestinian who'd grown up in exile, who tried to visit home but was interrogated at Ben Gurion airport for twelve hours and sent back to Australia. Al-Madhoun makes sure to contrast the difficulty Palestinian exiles and refugees have accessing home with the ease that all Jewish people in the world have, and so he should.

The main problem I had with this novel is that the plot didn't seem very cohesive or unified; it was more like, “this happened, then this, then this, then this”. Admittedly, this makes more sense if you think of the novel as a fictionalised retelling of the author's own experiences, but... it was narratively unsatisfying. Therefore I can't say I “really liked it” (which is Goodreads' definition of four stars) but I heartily recommend it.

EDIT: I'm bumping my rating up to four stars; in retrospect I was too harsh on it for how much I liked it! Maybe the plot is a bit thin, but it it has many more compelling qualities.

Al empiezo encontré esto un poco difícil, pero seguí leyendo y fui recompensada con un final compulsivo y brillante. No importa que se saben los matadores desde la primera oración del libro – de hecho, eso hace el final más brillante, una verdadera tragedia, como ves todas las piezas cayendo en su lugar.

Lo doy tres estrellas porque mientras me encantó el final, lo que pasaba antes no me parecía tan compulsivo. ¡Quizá no estaba en el estado de ánimo correcto los días anteriores! Pero es definitivamente el mejor de García Márquez que he leído.

Una lectura profundamente incómoda. Aquí, pintor Juan Pablo Castel relata la historia de su relación con la mujer que mató, María Iribarne. Él es completamente demente, y tenía que preguntarme porqué María no se quedaba muy, muy lejos de él - porque le gustaba su pintura, ¿en serio? Pero supongo que no habría ninguna novela si ella hubiera tenido algún instinto de conservación.

Todavía, me gustaba el libro. Es una novela corta, y el lenguaje resultó bastante fácil para mí. Estoy feliz no tener que pasar más tiempo en el mente de este narrador trastornado, pero no me arrepiento de haber hacerlo.

The content chapters, where he actually talks about history, are mostly good, but the political statements of the introduction and conclusion are frustrating (mostly for being wrong). In one breath he'll whinge about “social history” not being adequately individualist, and in the next he'll say that he himself is taking a social-historical approach. He complains that Marxists', feminists' and the aforementioned social historians' focus on social groups denies that “individual dissidence” is a thing – that is, he seems to believe Marxists, feminists and social historians argue that workers, women, whatever group it may be are all monoliths, and who on earth would argue that?! He can't tell the difference between bourgeois and workers' revolutions, and therefore argues that the “Spanish Revolution” may have had more success if only they'd managed to convince the bourgeoisie that they were committed to defending private property. He doesn't think the Nationalists were actually fascists, either. So, I don't know. He takes a good, “history-from-below” perspective to history but his politics are quite messed up and annoying. Skip the introduction/conclusion if you can, maybe.

It's easy to feel like this book is a guilty pleasure, especially in the first third where the narrator, Isabel, simply describes half a dozen or so times she had sex with complete strangers. Still, I don't think a book is necessarily frivolous just because it's all about sex, and so with this. Najat El Hachmi isn't afraid to describe sex that's really bad, just as she criticises the dominant Western sexual culture and discusses alienation quite powerfully.

The book does have a somewhat weird format; most of the book takes the form of Isabel talking to the middle-aged, male writer for whom she cleans. He advises her about what he thinks she should do, but that actual advice – anything he says to her between these monologues – isn't in the book. However, the second part is a bit different because there are sections in the third-person describing the writer's daily routines alongside Isabel's monologue, which are italicised for this part. It comes across a bit experimental and I'm not sure what the reasoning is behind it, but I didn't exactly mind, either.

Mostly, though, I love the audacity of, having already written the requisite “migrant experience story”, deciding that the haters can go fuck themselves because you want to write about sex in Catalonia now. I mean, why not? But you still can't say it's that common! I'm excited for any further books El Hachmi puts out.

PS: here's The Independent's review of The Body Hunter. It's not bad, and for the most part I agree with it, but I do disagree with the idea that in the end it's a “conventional morality tale” (even if only “to some degree”), because in it “promiscuous sex does not bring happiness”. It's not moralising to admit that for the majority of people it does not, and especially for the majority of heterosexual women, who have to deal with men who don't bother to make sex enjoyable for them and don't have much respect for them, either. I just found it realistic and logical that meaningless sex with strangers just didn't have much effect on Isabel's loneliness or alienation. But hey...

I have to give this two stars and no more because, ultimately, I don't think it held together very well. Making Aurora Del Valle the narrator, rather than opting for a third-person narration like in [b:Daughter of Fortune|16527|Daughter of Fortune|Isabel Allende|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1299666780s/16527.jpg|3471915], left Aurora narrating lots of things she wasn't present for and has no realistic way of knowing the details of. It didn't work.

And furthermore, Aurora Del Valle just isn't that interesting. She's surrounded by interesting people, but she doesn't have much going for her herself – only her love of photography which didn't interest me at all. She's no Eliza Sommers.

I liked some things about this book. I liked that we finally got to see Eliza Sommers and Tao Chi'en consummate their love, although it would have been nice to see at the end of the last book. I got invested in hating Matías Del Valle (Aurora's biological father), was pleased to see him meet his doom, and I liked Severo and Nivea. I don't remember [b:The House of the Spirits|9328|The House of the Spirits|Isabel Allende|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358615501s/9328.jpg|3374404] very well, so it took a long time before I remembered what role they played in that book, but I was almost tempted to put it on the “to reread” list to see what happened to them. Maybe one day.

I have to say that this book was better as a sequel to Daughter of Fortune than as a prequel to House of the Spirits. The latter draws on the magical realism tradition, unlike the other two, which are straight historical fiction. This leaves Aurora, in this book, having to say things like, “and then the strangest thing happened, wouldn't you believe it, and this child had green skin! if only I'd had my camera...” It stood out and bothered me, I guess.

I did read this in Spanish, but I was too lazy to review it in that language (mostly I got stuck on how to translate “held together” from the first sentence of this review, so I gave up). The Spanish wasn't too tricky, although as always, it slowed down my reading. Overall, you might as well read it if you finished Daughter of Fortune and feel cheated by the ending, but otherwise it's not that great.

I really want to give this two and a half... I liked it, but it felt like a guilty pleasure. It's a novel about alienation, about Ari, an unemployed nineteen-year-old boy who takes drugs and has unhealthy, anonymous, vicious sex as a way of life. Tsiolkas injects some politics into the tale – it reminded me a bit of a better, Melburnian version of [b:Less Than Zero 9915 Less Than Zero Bret Easton Ellis https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1282271923s/9915.jpg 1146200] – but Ari himself hates the world, states at one point that he wants to destroy it all in a nuclear holocaust.So I don't know. On one level it was a fun read, but on the other... I felt that the political tangents didn't really “fit” with the rest of Ari's drug-fuelled evening, like it was too heavy-handed. There's a lot of “Melburnia”, but unlike with [b:The Slap 5396496 The Slap Christos Tsiolkas https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1330062364s/5396496.jpg 5464024] I don't think Tsiolkas got all his facts right; for example, he had Ari insist that Greek migrants settled here only north of the river, even though Oakleigh in the south-eastern suburbs is the hub of the Greek community. He also listed Bentleigh as a leafy eastern suburb, up there with Balwyn and Boronia, when it's actually just west of Oakleigh and was for a long time a working-class area... populated by people who worked in the factories in Oakleigh (and a little further afield, like in Moorabbin and such).I guess it kind of bugged me that this was a city I almost recognised, but not quite. Its setting in time had a similar effect – having been published in 1995, it's stuck in that limbo where it's not quite old enough to be considered a representation of a historical period, but old enough that it's quite dated. Ari buys two drinks at a club and pays $5 for them. He has to call people at their homes on Saturday afternoon to plan where he'll bump into them at 1:30am. That kind of thing!But like I said, overall, it was fun. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll round up to three for that.

It's easy to see how and why this has become one of the most influential novels in English-language African literature. It's been referenced so much in so many novels I've read set afterwards, in the post-colonial era, and I can see why even if the overuse of the phrase “things fell apart” in [b:We Need New Names 15852479 We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1352225506s/15852479.jpg 21600154] was a bit irritating. It's a brilliant precursor to all of those novels, honest and sombre. I feel that a lot of people who didn't like it have oversimplified it; it makes them angry that he acknowledges the problems (in particular, the intensely patriarchal structures) in Igbo society before colonisation, and some of them have gone so far as to say doing so glorifies the colonists. I didn't see this at all. The colonists are arrogant and brutal, but at the same time there were reasons why people gravitated towards their ideological servants, the missionaries... people like Nwoye, who is furious that his father killed his best friend, and a woman who keeps giving birth to twins that tradition dictates she must leave to die. It's simultaneously mournful for what was lost and truthful enough to say that what existed was no utopia. Highly recommended.

The shortest way for me to describe this book is that it's the spiritual predecessor to [b:We Need to Talk About Kevin 80660 We Need to Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327865017s/80660.jpg 3106720]. Where that book asks, “Why do we even have children?” this one asks, “Why do we ever abandon our dreams of glamorous, cultured inner-city lifestyles, move to the suburbs and then have children?” Of course part of the answer for this book is that abortions are more condemned and harder to access in 1950s America than they are today, but still, you know.So this is the story of April and Frank Wheeler, who were happily sharing a cultured if impoverished life in New York City when, against all their plans, April fell pregnant. She wanted to abort it, but Frank didn't – not because he actually wanted a child, mind you, but because he felt it was an affront to his masculinity for a woman to not want to bear his child. So they move to the suburbs into a dull, mind-numbing existence – she as a housewife, he with an unimaginably boring office job in the city – and years later, with their marriage dysfunctional as hell, they decide to move to Paris, as they'd dreamed so long ago.The plot as it unfolds from there is not exactly unpredictable, but it's compelling and tragic (an easier read than We Need to Talk About Kevin). It's a condemnation of the nuclear family, of the way the pursuit of this ideal demands conformity and abandonment of one's dreams. Of course it takes the madman, John Givings, to voice all of this and point out to people what they're doing, even as his mother tries to shut him up – not particularly subtle, this book, but great all the same.

Latin American literature is famous for the genre of magical realism, but this was really only “magical” (and how I wish I meant that as a euphemism for “good”). It blends myths and concepts of magic from the Spanish, African and Chinese cultures that contributed to making Cuba, placing this hybridised concept of magic even in present-day Miami, which could potentially be interesting, but in this book it's not.

To be honest, most of this book is not interesting. As the blurb will tell you, the novel begins when reclusive Cuban emigrant Cecilia is dragged out of the house by two male friends who she ditches to meet an old woman, Amalia, at a Miami bar. The book is made up of short chapters that alternate between telling Amalia's entire family history and Cecilia's very boring, mundane existence.

Basically, Cecilia is a journalist and she is investigating some ghost house, since apparently she works for the kind of publication where a ghost house is a valid idea for a story. She gets involved in a lot of kooky New Age stuff and she also, at some point, meets a guy (Roberto) who is a rich businessman who just can't stop talking about his successful business and also, all the businesses he will open in Cuba once his profit-minded family can return. Cecilia doesn't even like him that much but she's devastated when he dumps her, to the point that she develops a psychosomatic illness that she is able to banish just by willing her blood pressure to go down. Hmmm...

Amalia's family history is more interesting, but still not that great. The characters aren't very well realised; they mostly just kind of blur together and I had to keep referring to the family trees in the first few pages because I just could not remember who had done what, or even who was who. Also, guess what, (almost) everyone was a successful small business owner. It was very unrealistic.

So we come to the other reason I didn't like this book – in addition to the badly realised characters, the awkward pacing, and so on, it was kind of right-wing. When early on it talks about shortages (Cecilia's musing that she'd never had hot chocolate in Cuba), the US embargo goes unmentioned. Later, you have the clairvoyant Delfina claiming that the failure of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion will be the greatest tragedy ever to befall Cuba, you have one of the small-business-owning (actually by this time, franchise-chain-owning) characters whingeing that he supported the rebels and don't they understand that private property is sacrosanct... blah blah blah blah blah. Over the entire book, Cecilia alternately conceives of Cuba as hell or else a once-beautiful country trashed and burned by criminals. This is frustrating. Mostly, it's just so damned shallow. I'm not trying to say it shouldn't have criticised Castro's regime at all – the pettiness making emigrants wait years for their exit permits, the stifling of dissent, persecution and harassment of dissidents etc. are all important – but any analysis of Cuba that states that the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was the greatest tragedy ever to befall Cuba is just trash. I mean, it's also a book largely set among the Cuban emigrant milieu in Miami written by a Cuban emigrant, so maybe I'm expecting a bit much from this politically. But like, there is left-wing criticism of the Castro regime and there is right-wing criticism, and I wasn't expecting this book to be so far to the right (the blurb makes it seem pretty apolitical).

So. Ultimately this is a kind of boring book that serves as a lament to the losses of the old Cuban bourgeoisie, and I did not like it. Unless you have no choice (like you find yourself in an airport where the bookstore has nothing except copies of this?), avoid.