Archive for May, 2024

28 May

‘The Spoiled Heart’ by Sunjeev Sahota – The Old Left vs. The New Left, Unwoke vs. Woke

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘The Spoiled Heart’ by Sunjeev Sahota       (2024) – 329 pages

 

At the center of the novel ‘The Spoiled Heart’ is an election in England for leadership of the labor union Unify between Nayan Olak and Megha Sharma.

Nayan has the values of your traditional labor organizers, ie., it’s about the money.

“Because it is not a lack of respect the working class suffers from. It’s a lack of money. Of means.”

Nayan’s labor philosophy can be summed up by the following:

“Meaningful employment, good housing, a decent education….and we’ll only win those things if we organize and fight for them together.”

Meanwhile Megha is the head of the union’s D.E.I., an acronymn I’ve only recently encountered. It means “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”. Her main push is for diversity in the workplace, acceptance of people’s differences.

At the beginning, Nayan has a big lead in the union leader election, due to his long standing work for the union. However Megha accuses Nayan of racist behavior and even accuses Nayan of assaulting her by twisting her arm.

Since Nayan is the main character in ‘The Spoiled Heart’ and most of the novel revolves around his backstory, we necessarily get his point of view more than Megha’s.

And what a backstory it is. Nayan had a family of his own, a wife and a young son. However he lost both his mother and his son in a fire resulting from his own father’s irresponsible behavior. Nayan’s father was “a pubber and a drinker, that he slept with women that weren’t his wife”.

“Yeah, he hated himself, his life.” Nayan gave a faint, low, exasperated growl. “Isn’t that usually why we treat others like shit? Jealousy, bitterness, self-hatred.”

A few years after they lost their young son, Nayan and his wife divorced, and now Nayan lives with his now doddering father. Much of ‘The Spoiled Heart’ revolves around Nayan’s affair with a neighbor woman, Helen Fletcher, and her college age son Brandon. At one point, Brandon is also falsely accused of racist behavior, so this is a theme that runs through this novel.

The author of ‘The Spoiled Heart’, Sunjeev Sahota, has a gift for creating scenes – both those that are domestic and those that are away from home – that are poignant and meaningful. I’m not sure that being falsely accused of racist behavior is as big a problem as it is made out to be here or at least not as big a problem as racist behavior itself, but the novel held my interest throughout.

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

21 May

‘Poor Things’ by Alasdair Gray – Preposterous and Comic, They Don’t Make Novels Like This Anymore

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Poor Things’ by Alasdair Gray     (1992) –  318 pages

 

Have you noticed a certain well-edited or over-edited sameness to much of today’s fiction? Then ‘Poor Things’ may be the novel for you. This preposterous novel breaks all the rules. It is a delight, in that sense.

A doctor in Victorian times, Dr. Godwin Baxter, reanimates a dead woman, Bella Baxter, and implants the brain of her unborn baby into her head. Bella calls Dr. Godwin Baxter “God” for short. At first, Dr. Baxter’s friend, Dr. Archibald McCandless, is taken aback upon meeting Bella.

“Only idiots and infants talk like that, are capable of such radiant happiness, of such frank glee and friendship on meeting someone new. It is dreadful to see such things in a lovely young woman.”

But he quickly falls in love with this grown woman Bella with the mind of a child. He agrees to marry Bella in order to take her away from her creator.

“You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages; the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman. I will not allow it, Baxter.”

Of course no reader could take this plot seriously, so there is always a humorous sly undertone to this story.

The guiding lights of ‘Poor Things’ are those old favorites, the King James version of the Bible and Shakespeare, with an occasional stop-off for the great Russian literature of the 19th century.

“She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity,”

‘Poor Things’ is a pastiche of a novel, a hodge podge of stuff taken from different sources. It is supposedly the published memoirs, written in 1880, of Dr. Archibald McCandless titled “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Health Officer”. So here we have a book within a book. In his memoirs, Dr. McCandless also finds room to put in a letter from Bella Baxter and a letter from her first man friend, a fool named Derek Wedderburn.

‘Poor Things’ also contains wild drawings made by our real author, Alasdair Gray himself.

The last forty pages of ‘Poor Things’ is devoted to critical and historical notes from the author Alasdair Gray. Usually, in a work of fiction, the author’s notes clarify some points raised by the story. Here, in ‘Poor Things’, these notes are part of the fiction, telling what happened to these fictional characters after the novel ends.

‘Poor Things’ is a wild and woolly Victorian story, but unlike most Victorian stories, it is filled with sex.

It has been a while since I have read an amusing pastiche novel like ‘Poor Things’. They don’t make novels like this anymore.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

16 May

Burning Secret’ by Stefan Zweig – “Oh, if He Only Knew the Secret!”

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Burning Secret’ by Stefan Zweig     (1913) – 124 pages                Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

 

The Pushkin Press has reprinted a huge selection of fiction by Stefan Zweig including this novella, ‘Burning Secret’. The reprinting of so much of Zweig’s fiction is quite unusual for a writer who has been gone from us for over eighty years. After reading ‘Burning Secret’, I can fully understand why the publisher has taken such a huge interest in this writer. Stefan Zweig will be one of my “go to” writers in the years to come.

In ‘Burning Secret’, the Baron is staying in Semmering, a skiing resort in Austria, on holiday. The Baron is a young man “who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman’s sensuality and explores it”. The Baron is a ladies man, a seducer. There is a woman, Mathilde, staying at his hotel with her 12 year-old son Edgar. Her husband is not around, and the Baron is attracted by her and sets his designs on her.

The Baron uses the strategem of befriending the boy in order to reach the boy’s mother. This ruse works perfectly. However, when the boy Edgar senses that the Baron and the boy’s mother are paying more attentions to each other than to him, he gets angry and begins to interfere with their plans to see each other behind his back.

Edgar tells his mother that the Baron is a bad man.

“He’s a liar; he’s only pretending. He does it out of mean horrid calculation. He wants to get to know you, that’s why he was nice to me and promised me a dog.”

Edgar does not yet know what the Baron wants from his mother. That is the burning secret.

Meanwhile Edgar’s mother tells Edgar to stay out of her and the Baron’s way.

“Children don’t understand these things. You have no business meddling in them. You must behave better, and that’s all there is to it.”

The author tells this story of a boy starting to figure out what it is all about between adults, men and women, in a clear and vivid fashion. It was a real pleasure to read this novella. Since his fiction deals with elemental situations between people, the writing of Stefan Zweig will last.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

13 May

‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett – After All, It is an Irish Novel

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett    (2024) – 255 pages

 

At the center of ‘Wild Houses’, the new novel by Irish author Colin Barrett is the hapless Dev Hendrick. Dev is in his late thirties. He lives by himself and keeps to himself out on his family farm, outside of town. He loved his mother, but she died a few years back.

“She could bear in on him of course, could berate, hound, and guilt-trip him like any mother, but she was the only living presence he could bear when he was at his lowest. Which was often. For as far back as he could remember, he had been prone to long consuming lows, but only ever felt half-alive, and half the time he wasn’t even that. It was the mother who kept him going during the worst years. She had.”

Only an Irish novel would have an unfortunate case like Dev as its “hero”. That is why I really like good Irish novels such as ‘Wild Houses’. I like that the characters in these novels are not defined by their income or their position, but instead are allowed to wander their own ways. I find it humorous yet realistic. Happily or sadly, they are humans.

Dev did have a job but quit it without a good reason back when his mother was still alive. His father is housed in town where they keep the severe mental cases. Dev has never gone to visit his father.

The drug dealers in town store their drugs they are going to sell on Dev’s remote farm after he gave them permission to do so. Now two of them, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, show up on Dev’s farm unannounced. They have kidnapped a young guy, Doll English, who is still in high school. They are going to keep Doll at Dev’s farm, because Doll’s older brother Cillian English who is also a drug dealer owes them money. If Cillian doesn’t pay up, Doll’s life is in danger.

Most of the male characters are either criminals or mental cases. The women are given a little more leeway. Nicky, the main female character is a bartender at one of the town’s many pubs. The young guy Doll had been out at the town bars with Nicky. They got separated that evening, and Nicky at first doesn’t realize that Doll’s been kidnapped. Nicky winds up at the final showdown.

There is very little explication or explanation of actions, thoughts, or feelings in ‘Wild Houses’. Colin Barrett does not force his characters to be a certain way. They are who they are, and nothing more can be said.

So what we have here is a wild Irish crime novel with offbeat characters. While this cast of off-the-wall crazies makes for an amusing fun ride, ‘Wild Houses’ also works as a well-plotted crime story.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

7 May

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan – A Social Media Crime Story

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan     (2024) – 297 pages        Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I am both the very wrong person and the very right person to review ‘Kids Run the Show’. On the one hand, I have never watched a reality TV show except for a few early episodes of American Idol. On the other hand, I share the same disdain and distrust for these reality shows as Delphine de Vigan displays in this novel.

In ‘Kids Run the Show’, young French woman Melanie Klaux started her foray into reality TV as a contestant on “Meet You in the Dark”.

“Would they find love? Three women and three men, all single, convened in a big villa, the men on one side, the women on the other. The only common room was a dark room equipped with infrared cameras, where the particpants were brought to get acquainted in total darkness. They went on to choose a partner they’d be alone together with in the dark room.”

That show lasted only a few episodes before it was understandably dropped. Now, several years later, Melanie is a young mother with two little pre-school children, Kimmy and Sammy. Melanie has set up a YouTube channel, “Happy Recess”, where she posts videos of her and her children on a daily basis. Her channel has become tremendously popular with millions of subscribers tuning in to YouTube to watch these videos. Now Melanie’s husband has quit his job to help with the videos since they make a very good living through company product placements in these videos. The children Kimmy and Sammy have become YouTube stars.

“And in every corner of the planet, hundreds of families were sharing their daily lives with thousands of viewers.”

But is being filmed constantly having adverse effects on these two small children?

One day the kids have a rare opportunity to play with the neighbor kids, and they play hide-and-seek. Sammy who is “it” looks all over for Kimmy but can’t find her. Has Kimmy hid herself really well or has she been kidnapped? When the parents can’t find her, they call the police. Clara Roussel is a young police officer, assigned to the case after Mélanie’s daughter Kimmy is abducted. Several days pass, and Kimmy has still not been found. Does the disappearance of Kimmy have anything to do with those YouTube videos?

I’m not sure that these YouTube family video channels are as big a problem as Delphine de Vigan makes them out to be, but it’s a great plot for a novel and is well executed.

They “have been confronted, from their earliest childhood, with demands no child should ever be subjected to: they are expected to be charming, promote products, respond to fans, manage their image, and so on. Today many of them are paying the bitter price for it all.”

 

Grade :     A