BOOK 153: THE HISTORY OF LOVE: NICOLE KRAUSS

This is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The book was optioned by Warner Bros. in early 2005, and was set to be directed by Alfonso Cuarón. He has since dropped out of the project. As of 2015, Radu Mihăileanu is directing the movie based on this book. The film, which is being shot in Montreal, will star Gemma Arterton and Derek Jacobi. It is expected to be released in 2016.

BOOK 133: WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES: KAREN JOY FOWLER

Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.

Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.

And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

(Goodreads.com)

MY VERDICT: I don’t have a lot of time for a well thought out review but I will give an overview of what I thought.  The primary idea is a good one (don’t worry no spoilers here.) There is a twist (although not as monumental as the blurb and reviews would have you believe.) I just feel that the wonderful idea behind the book was lost by an almost boring narrator who pushes away anything that might be interesting for relevant plot points that need hitting to tell the version of the story she wants to tell. The most annoying thing was how the twist was revealed, it literally took any shock or enjoyment at discovering a new point of view on the story and spoilt it by being condescending. I was looking forward to the twist and that spoilt it.  I read to the end but was genuinely disappointed, I was always reading on thinking it would get better. And I didn’t get the relevance of the 60-something year old author setting a book mostly in the late 90s narrated by a 20-something?

BOOK 130: NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU: MIRANDA JULY

July's collection of short vignettes was published by Scribner in 2007. In her review for the New York Times, reviewer Sheelah Kolhatkar gave the collection a mixed review writing, "A handful of these stories are sweet and revealing, although in many cases the attempt to create “art” is too self-conscious, and the effort comes off as pointlessly strange." The collection was highly regarded by other writers and critics including George Saunders, Dave Eggers and Amy Hempel. As of 2015 the collection has more than 200,000 copies in circulation.

MY VERDICT: First of all I’m going to say, I’m not a fan of short stories. I like to feel connections to the people in stories I read, in a short story you just don’t get the time.  These stories were, like with some of July’s other works very hit and miss.  I loved watching Me and You and Everyone We Know but felt that The Future was sub par.  She makes me feel uncomfortable, I think a lot of what she says is quirky for the sake of being quirky and it’s not as real as I think it should be.   I know I’m not making a lot of sense, I think I was disappointed and expecting more?

BOOK 128: ANY HUMAN HEART: WILLIAM BOYD

Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a Scottish writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf in London, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce in Paris, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway that spans several years.

Boyd spent 30 months writing the novel. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on publication, but has sold well. A television adaptation was made with the screenplay written by Boyd, first broadcast in 2010.

Richard Eder praised Any Human Heart in the New York Times: "William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks." Christopher Tayler, in the London Review of Books, called the characterisation of Mountstuart weak and wondered if he was merely a device through which Boyd could write pastiche about 20th-century writers, "Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey." In The Atlantic Monthly, Brooke Allen liked the Mountstuart character: "he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life", thus making an "attractive central character" and Boyd's writing showed "a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism." The Atlantic Monthly selected it as one of the "books of the year".

In The Observer, Tim Adams complimented the opening sections as "nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student" but criticised the "predictability" of Mountstuart's "walk-on part in literary history" and ultimately the suspension of disbelief, particularly the Baader-Meinhoff passages, concluding "For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion." Tom Cox in The Daily Telegraph disagreed: he praised the characterisation, calling Mountstuart "a man whose fragile egotism and loose-fitting story has you frequently forgetting you're reading fiction, and even more frequently forgetting you're reading at all." Giles Foden, in The Guardian, found the New York art-scene sections weakest, saying they "puncture the realism Boyd has so carefully built up in the rest of the novel." Michiko Kakutani agreed that Mountstuart's youth was well evoked, but that the description of his retirement and poverty was "as carefully observed and emotionally resonant". While in the early part of the book "the characters' marionette strings [are] carefully hidden", later Boyd tried to play God, resulting in "an increasingly contrived narrative that begins to strain our credulity."

Boyd spends his summer in the south of France and has a large audience there, and several French journals noted the publication of Any Human Heart. L'express called Boyd a "magician", while Le Nouvel Observateur called it "very good Boyd. Perhaps even his magnum opus."

The novel was in the longlist of the Man Booker Prize in 2002, and on the shortlist of the Dublin Impac Literary Award in 2004. In 2009, Boyd commented, "[it] didn't get particularly good reviews, yet I've never had so many letters about a novel. It's selling fantastically well seven years on, and we're about to turn it into six hours of telly for Channel 4, so something about that novel gets to readers."

MY VERDICT: I was given this book by my friend at work.  He said if I didn’t like this then he’d give up with my literary education forever.  I am pleased to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was explaining the story to my boyfriend and he thought I was describing the adventures of a real person, so easy is it to forget that this book is a fictional account of a fictional life.  It is truly engrossing and despite knowing what is happening in the world at the time of each entry, the effects of events and the minutia of a man’s everyday life can still surprise, shock and intrigue. I didn’t want it to end and I saw sorry to say goodbye to Logan Mountstuart.

Sunday Shelfie bookcase

http://paperdarts.org/literary-magazine/category/art

Book 89: Youth – J M Coetzee

A little bit about the author (from Wikipedia):

Coetzee is known as reclusive and avoids publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person.[44][45] South African writer Rian Malan has said that:

Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.[46]

As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after.[19] Recognising this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, a series of limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.[47]