Book Review: Spook Street by Mick Herron

Today was not a good reading day. Not too much focus, hard to connect smoothly to the books I am reading, and a lack of interest although the topics were usually close to my mind. Tried to switch to French to no avail. German was the lost resort and didn´t work either. 

By default, my only reading companion of the day was Spook Street by Mick Herron. The book had the right recommendations: spy intrigue, set in the British realm, written by an author often recipient of prestigious literary prizes. Smirked and tried to ignore the fact that he is compared to John Le Carré which I am not ashamed to recognize that I do not fancy at all (gave it too many tried to change my mind, sorry). 

For a good couple of pages, action moved slowly, while the characters - former discharged intelligence operatives - kept chatting. But I was drawn to the story from the opening episodes which were very well crafted, creating expectations for more. But shortly after the red carpet of curiosity is set, there is almost nothing taking place. Then suddenly, a big story boom is crushing my thoughts of completely giving up this spy novel because life is short anyway.

The plot idea sounded fantastic: you have stolen and secret identities, spies coming from the East and the West, transfigurated by the rapid changes brought by the end of the Cold War. But the ways in which those spies coming from the Cold operate and again, their never ending dialogues like they have all the time in the world to chat and observe each other...cut my interest to 25%. Nothing changed until the very end of the book. 

Indeed, not all days must be all bookish day. Let´s hope for a more interesting tomorrow....

Rating: 3 stars

´Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine´

A young woman in her early 30s that ´aspire to average´. With a simple lonely life, a stable job of nine years in accounting and apparently a lot of secrets. The kind of person that at the first sight you will find it weird, with her elaborated vocabulary and limited social skills. Also her appearance does not help to make her more ´normal´.

But suddenly, there are things coming up and happening in her life. Eleanor Oliphant had a crush, developed a kind of dialogue with the new guy from IT, together they save an old man who had a heart attack on the street. ´Life felt like it was moving very fast indeed at the moment, a whrilwind of possibilities´. 

Still, Eleanor´s life maintains some given schedule and habits. There is the Mommy´s toxic call every Wednesday, and some gulps of vodka every weekend. 

But her secrets, very slowly are to be revealed in the ways familiar to crime and mystery thrillers. There is a 5% thriller in this story, but more it has to do with human simplicity and fragility. The pace of the story might look a bit annoying and the curiosity to have the truth and nothing but the truth revealed is not easily satisfied. At a certain extent, the story goes as slowly as a serious therapy session goes. Not clear from the very beginning, with many waiting time in-between, in dire need of many intermediate moments and dialogues until the trust is settled and more traumatic things from the past can be extracted.

The style of the book is very personal and invites the reader to be part of the story. The empathy is tested. As in the case of Eleanor´s co-workers who are so rude and lacking any empathy, we, the readers, may have a little fun of the strange wordings and the unusual behavior Eleanor exhibits. And until the end of the book, we are about to learn a lot about respect and towards the unicity of pain of every human being. 

The end is surprising in a way, but with mostly a predictable happy ending. Wouldn´t be so beautiful to learn thus to be more kind and less judgemental towards each other?

I reckon that I did avoid this book for a long time, as I am relatively skeptical about recent popular representations of mental health issues in literary bestsellers. Instead of creating understanding and insights, it brings otherwise serious things to a kitsch-like dramatization that does not do any good to knowledge. I am aware that issues like manifestations belonging to the autism spectrum, for instance, do deserve a better representation in media that might lead to a increasing the tolerance towards those bearing such a diagnostic. But I personally prefer approaches that shed a complex light into the issue instead of being sold a simplified idea that suits very well ´feel good chick lit´ but it is outrageous from the point of view of people suffering and their families. 

Elisabeth Oliphant is Completely Fine stands to its fame and I am glad that I had the time and energy to spend my first half of the day in its company. It encourages me to keep fighting hard against being judgemental and opening my heart more often towards the pain - especially the spiritual one - of other fellow humans.

Rating: 4 stars

A Different Jonathan Coe: The Broken Mirror

The Broken Mirror is a completely different yet fully literary enjoyable work created by Jonathan Coe, an author I am always delighted to discover. 

It was first published in Italian, French, Greek and Dutch before being translated into English three years ago. Considered ´A Fable´ it is more than a children - midgrade level - book as it deals with the ginger balance between dreams and reality, real world versus the power to dream the change.

It is located in the town of Kennaway, a real town in Fife, Scotland, where Jonathan Coe´s grandgrandparents used to live, but as the author himself explains, there is no connection with the real place. 

Claire, the fictional character of The Broken Mirror lives somewhere in England. As a child, in a garbage heap, she finds a fragment of a mirror that projects the creations of her imagination into her real world. ´How could something that she could see so clearly not be real? How could the mirror be showing things that were twice as exciting, a hundred times more magical tghan the dull, wokaday world that was all around her?´

Year after year, she is facing the pangs of growing: discovering the injustices of the world, being bullied in school, retreating in her world from her quarelling parents, feeling in obsessive love with a guy who utterly ignore her. Around her, there is a new world expanding, where the small stores and libraries are destroyed for the sake of ´great´ real estate projects encouraged by a mayor that pretends to put the hometown ´first´. Immigrants are the target of street attacks. 

She mostly ignored the fragment of mirror that makes the world better. Until one day, when Peter, her secret admirer, shares with her the secret of his fragment of mirror. And they are not alone, it seems that there are more and more people that together, will try to put the fragments together trying to show ´how the world might look if it was a better place´. What one can see in the full miror is in the eye of the beholder.

The Broken Mirror is an encouraging read in dark times, both political and generally human. It relies upon us the power to hope and to do not give up the checking once in a while the projection of our worlds into the mirror. It helps although it might not change the surroundings - not right now.

The illustrations, by Italian artist Chiara Coccorese are collages, which is such an appropriate way to introduce dreams and wishes. Aren´t they made of disparate fragments of ideas, concepts and projections?

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Review: The End. And Again

´(...) ahhh, forget it. You wouldn´t understand about Kosovo anyway´.

There is a fragment in Mémoires d´Hadrien by Marguerite Youcernar which says that in-between the periods of big historical change, there is a certain moment of inertia which encapsulates a wide range of possibilities. It´s a moment of perfect freedom that disappears once choices are made and directions are followed. It happens to people, it happens to nations.

The End. And Again, the debut novel by the Slovene author Dino Bauk , a former civil servant, lawyer and writer, published by the exquisite Istros Books is about one of those magical yet risky moments, both at personal and historical level. 

Goran, Peter and Denis are getting high on books, rock´n roll and girls while the former Yugoslavia is crumbling into little pieces. ´Berlin Wall was already in ruins, students lay dead on Tiananmen Square, and the East of his country was in threatening convulsions´. They were lucky enough to live in Slovenia, the most peaceful separation from the federation. 

Denis family was not local though, therefore, upon a night police control he is caught up as an illegal and deported to a reality where his art studies and love for books are replaced by Army fatigues and Kalashnikov. 

Years after those events, what happened to the members of the youthful gang? Mary, a former Mormon missionary that had a short adventure with Denis who left behind her religious limitations enters the story. As her relationships and career fails, she is looking for Denis. Goran and Peter are also trying to write him imaginary letters. Was Denis killed in the war(s), ´somewhere in the Balkans´? What happened with all their dreams and love for books and music? Both Peter and Goran are enrolled in relatively uneventful, non-spiritual daily lives, with their share of failures and glasses of alcohol. 

The back and forth down the memory lane is punctuated by Paul Auster-inspired dreams about bombed libraries that have to be saved from the rain - let´s move the literature to the sheltered floor and move all the economic and politcal books to the level exposed to the downpour - a 24/7 Balkanica libraray, library from the future, from 2002, with books by Hemon and Albahari. 

But it is not enough and books cannot stop wars - best case scenario they can start it. The destinies of Mary, Denis, Peter and Goran got erased into the waves of time.

The book is relatively short although with a high concentration of historical facts and symbols. It is a reminder - for those who know the history of this now forgotten slice of Europe - how wars and conflicts start and how humans were murdering each other based on ´tribal´ affiliations in the very close vicinity to Europe. We are rolling our sensitive eyes when we hear about Syria, Yemen and other hot spots far away from home - it´s so convenient to care about those places because really, how can we go there, how can we understand their culture, we also don´t speak their languages - , but what about the mass graves from the Balkans?

I personally got into the story and follow along, but was relatively unimpressed about the characters as such. They, all of them, including Mary, do have a similarity, including in the ways they think and write which doesn´t have to do with their common memories. I would have love them more personalized as literary characters, for the sake of an even stronger story.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Review: Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin

´(...) once you enter the Ritz, you breathe a little more freely, indulge yourself in ways you wouldn´t anywhere else. Because the Ritz will keep you safe - you have no choice but to believe it´.

This is not how I intended to spend my solitary reading day. Yes, it involved a book, but not Mistress of the Ritz. Not for the most part of it, anyway. My plan was to start reading it until my Kindle is charged for going through a non-fiction book I was burning to read for a long time. 

As a historian myself, I keep a polite distance to historical fiction. I do love history, I do love fiction and the combination of two, but I am well aware of misrepresentations, historical errors, myths and the conundrum of risks that are endangering such genre. In the end, I might spend double the time to check the facts and expose the errors. In addition, when it comes to fiction placed during the WWII I am double cautious. I´ve read, was told and heard real stories compared to which fiction, no matter how beautiful, sounds disgraceful.

Somehow, Mistress of the Ritz caught me and I couldn´t let it until the very end. It is based on real people and true stories, featuring the couple Blanche-Claude Auzello, he being the director of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Blanche, an American, come to Paris looking for adventure, Claude fell in love with her and fought for her with an Egyptian prince. The Paris got took over by the Germans, some of their top military hosted at the Ritz. A hotel that attracted the most interesting - sometimes despicable - gallery of characters, from rebels like Hemingway and Picasso to Coco Chanel and her German lovers. This book has passion, politics, suspense, drama and moral questioning. All those aspects are usually heavy burdens for a literary construction but somehow Melanie Benjamin used the power of words to create humanly approachable worlds.

While trying to accommodate each other within the couple they were trying to build and maintain, things bigger than life were taking place. Jews were rounded up at Vél d´Hiv by their French compatriots, the French Resistance was actively sabotaging the Germans, networks of spies and collaborators were built on both sides. Both Claude and Blanche will have their share, of limited success and pain, stuck between professional obligations and moral choices.

I´ve found the story very carefully elaborated, cautious yet with a strong human message. The characters in the book, all of them, are portrayed in their multiple colours, beyond the black vs. white temptation - because times are harsh and no one really have time to ponder the shades. Melanie Benjamin writes with a human elegance and balance that it´s hard to maintain when delved in the stories of those times, but her success makes the book a literary achievement in a genre covering a complex historical period.

Rating: 5 stars

Kim Jiyoung. Born 1982

A monotonous man´s voice is reading the story of Kim Jiyoung. Born in 1982, in South Korea, a country with the highest rate of university graduates in the world but still with the highest pay gap among OECD countries.

The novel published by Cho Nam-Joo in 2016, her third, but the first to get such an international fame, was on the forefront of the South Korean #MeToo movement, encouraging personalities and women from all kinds of backgrounds to publicly acknowledge their frustrations against the permanent harassment and mysoginistic encounters. Against the traditional family structures that keep women from reaching their potential.

While I am listening the man´s voice though, I think I have a déjà-vu (or rather entendu). We, in the so-called ´West´ we pretend that we are far beyond the historical moment when discourage women to have positions of authority, send them home to take care of the children, cut their professional wings because of their gender or discourage personal contacts - as in touch - in exchange of professional promotions. No? Is it really true or we rather pretend it? Do we really valuate our daughter at least as much as our sons?

Mental habits, especially those perpetrated from a generation to another are hard to erase. They need to be replaced by new patterns that need time to become part of the mainstream mentality and behavior. And if/when the patterns are not replaced, they can be extended and made comprehensive in order to accomodate changes within the society. For instance, síngle mothers, single working mothers. 

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is coping actually with problems that we, here in Europe, deal with too, although at a lesser extent (we don´t end up leaving with our ailing parents, for instance, and we gave up in most schools the opressive dress codes for girls and boys). How many new mothers are going through mental pain coping with the pressure of juggling with being mothers and keeping their jobs and a career. Not everyone can afford a babysitter or two and freelancing is a last resort although not the most stable one. How often people around those mothers are uttering their disbelief that those women are actually ´good mothers´ only because they insist to go on with their professional lives as well. Women fighting against social structures that do not let them go on with their lives, because they are not designed for non-traditional structures (like, for instance, not providing child care covering the usual working hours).

If you are not strong enough to go on, and you start behaving differently, your spouse, friends and relatives assume you are sick. Mentally sick. Like Kim Jiyoung.

The traditional story of a society praising boys as source of money and honour to the family is not very unusual either. In Asian and Middle Eastern societies it is common occurence to have different rituals and much louder celebrations for the birth of a boy. In the ´West´ we cut short those details, but still we will hurry up to give to a male a position of responsibility. 

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has a very high documentary value. It is a local wake-up call, but it has to do with women, in general. The book is part of a wider discussion that has to be maintained and amplified because there is no other way towards change. And if change is not possible, at least in order to show women from all over the world, with access to reading, that they can raise their voice, write, talk, tell their stories. 

I´ve listen to the audio book and I would have prefer a woman´s voice to tell the story of Kim Jiyoung.

Rating: 4 stars

Inca Cat Book Detective Series

A bunch of cats are on a business visit in Russia, accompanying their humans to some French cheese tasting. There is at least one reason to be there, besides some travel adventure: connecting with their family, as the kitties are of the Siberian breed. Their schedule includes a visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg, in a moment when a very precious Fabergé egg was mysteriously stolen. No clues, no suspects, nothing.

But those kitties are not the ´normal´ kind. They are leading a detective office and their Russian adventures are only one episode of a long line of investigative success. They really deserve their slice of delicious cheese, as they work hard, smart and with great results, against all odds. (Ok, a doggie helped too and there is also a robot that is doing some good deeds).

The Case of the Missing Fabergé Egg is the 9th installment from the series, but even if you start with it, there is no problem in following the story. The cats are funny and curious enough to catch your interest regardless the age, they do interact with other representative of the animal realm along the way and although the start is a bit slow, the end is epic and suspenseful. 

The vocabulary and the construction of the story are appropriate for the upper elementary children and even a grown up will appreciate some relaxing cat-related content.

The animals characters are kind, with good intentions and sometimes badly manipulated by evil humans. Empathy normal as the author is involved in various animal protection projects.

My biggest disappointment is the quality of the illustrations. The cover looks good, but the interior of the books deserves a better visual outlook. 

There are more information about other titles from the series on the dedicated website:  www.incabookseries.com

The books were translated also in other languages: Mandarin, German and Spanish. 

I will personally give more than another chance to other books from the series, because it´s always relaxing to have some good detective read.

Rating: 3 stars

The True Story of a Fake Heiress

`New York attracts such a wild range of people: artists and bankers, immigrants and transients, old money and new money, people wanting to be discovered and others who never want to be found. But without exception the people have texture, and texture is character, and character is fascinating`.

Among those New Yorkers, Anna Delvey, introducing herself as a German heiress with a millionaire father, an impressive trust fund, expensive tastes but no job. At her crude age of 26, she wanted to open an art center and was faking hard work meeting lawyers and investors. In New York, there are many things that can come true. 

At a different level, ´Anna Delvey´ is a glossy version of Elizabeth Holmes from Bad Blood: Secret and lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a drop-up that was promising a revolution in the medical technology, got the impressive support of top decision makers and a significant amount of funding, but never delivered her promise.

My Friend Anna is the story of a failed friendship between the ´heiress´ and the author, former photo editor at Vanity Fair. Naively mesmerized by Delvey, Williams become her company during her gourmet dinners, expensive spa and shopping sprees. All went well until she accepted to go on a all-paid trip to Morocco where Delvey´s cards started to get declined and she offered - or was invited to offer herself - to pay over 60k for their stay, with the promise of a late reimbursement. Which, in fact, never happened. 

Anna - Sorokin, on her real family name, originary from Russia whose family of modest upringing emigrated to Germany - succeeded to steal around 275,000$, mostly unpaid bills and loans. In the end, Williams, one year after being promised to get her money back, become part of the investigation that sent the ´heiress´ to prison. 

Both ´Delvey´ and Williams are the victims of their own environment - ´We all want to be included. We crave validation, from friends and from strangers´. The so-called socialite was in fact a lonely girl, unable to interact properly with people from her supposed milieu, a looney with an alcohol problem and some serious mental issues too.

Williams´ memoir - who confesses that at a certain extent wanted to be like Anna, confident, free spirit...how easy those big words can be misleading - has many personal details and can be easily read as a real-life thriller. I would have been curious to find out more about other people that Anna was hanging out, but Williams focused the writing on her own story and the never-ending exchange of messages while trying to recover her money. It was a deliberate choice which limits the understanding of the Anna character. What actually was wrong with this girl?

Maybe there will be a different story about that bizarre con artist one day.

Rating: 3 stars

Walking the Silk Road

There are different kinds of travelers writing about their journeys. Some are completely immersed into the culture and the people they meet along the road. Sometimes, the human encounters are a welcomed contradiction to the usual image that media and cultural representations are projecting upon a group of people or a whole country. Some other travelers are on the road with a plan: they want to see every country in the world, and as we all know, life is short therefore they need to do it fast, at the expense of spending enough time in a place to really get familiar with a culture and society; some visit in specific circumstances - to reconnect with their family or literary stories; some do it because they are interested to experience in a country in specific circumstances, like, for instance, walking across, or crossing on motorbike or bike.

Mid-May 2000, journalist Bernard Ollivier started a journey from Turkey to Uzbekistan, on foot. Or mostly on foot, as sometimes the weather conditions and the invitations to run in a car are more tempting, but this happens only in 5% of the cases. Thousands of kilometers by foot, crossing Iran and Turkmenistan, walking the Silk Road, an important economic destination in the region for centuries, that was resuscitated after 2 centuries of neglect recently, for various political, geopolitical and economic reasons. A welcomed reactualization from the point of view of the travel writing, as it brings back cultures and peoples neglected and misread due to repeated pre- and post-Cold War interpretations.

Walking to Samarkand (originally published in French and recently translated into English) is Olliver´s project of covering this part of the Silk Road, on the way to his childhood dream-destination: Samarkand. It is also a test of resilience and personal achievement, as walking saved his life from depression after the death of his wife. Therefore, the stakes of his travels: ´I want to free my body and mind from the limitations they´ve become to believe in; I would also like to free them from fear´. 

Most part of the book thus has to do with various preparations and adventures encountered while walking, the physical limitations and challenges. It makes sense for the economy of the book but my interests/curiosities both as a traveler and travel writer are related to the reflections on culture and geography and eventually politics. 

The majority of the time he spends crossing Iran - ´Everywhere I go, I´m amazed by the kindness and warmth of the people I meet´. ´Can anyone be more hospitable than an Iranian?´. - with relatively short passing by through Turmkenistan - where policy corruption and the personality cult are the most debated topics - and ending up, as scheduled, in Uzbekistan. While he is not planning carefully his next amount of miles for the day, he is reflecting on his priviledges and lessons learned: `(...) travel affords us with an unparallel opportunity to take a step back and see where we´re from in a new light`. 

I felt missing from the writing a deep personal involvement with his travel experiences, a bit too dry for my taste. Maybe there were nuances lost in translation, but probably this is the way in which the writer himself chose to write about his journey. At a certain extent, it can be enough to make the reader interested in his or her own adventure or at least for starting to see this region through completely different eyes. Definitely, personal travel experiences and individual projects are doing much more for promoting a different kind of travel than the usual travel guides.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Adventures of a Gringo in Costa Rica, and some other Central American countries

Newly married, Joe Baur and his wife Melanie are leaving the American dream for spending a couple of months in Costa Rica. Ciudad Colon to be more precise - the writer mentions more than once that he prefers places usually described as ´too boring or too dangerous´. 

Costa Rica, a country that atracts visitors and adventurers from all over the world, famous for the natural surrounding and the lazy sloth, looks different when you live there on a daily basis. Actually, every country is very different in the reality other than that described in glossy guide books. 

Adapting to a new country means also to deal with the rainy season - when usually tourists are recommended to avoid - or with the various insects invading your private space in the ungodliest time of the year.

Curious as a journalist should be, self-ironic galore, full of humour, Joe Baur - full disclosure, I know the author personally - is documenting in Talking Tico (the name given to the local Costa Ricans) not only a country, but the challenge of becoming expat. (Since then, the author repeated the experience in Germany, where he is currently living together with his wife). From there, he travels to other destinations like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama, beating hard the usual fears and discouragements to avoid such destinations because...´dangerous´ (No offense, but while in the States, was very often warned to avoid some neighbourhours or just walking some streets at all, because...deadly dangerous. It can happen anywhere, you know). 

Writing about the places he discoveres is more than part of the journalist´s job description, it has to do with a credo, a writing mission, unfortunately a rare occurence in the current media landscape. ´That´s why I was going to El Salvador - to meet people and find those real stories and experiences, share them and do my part in changing unfair perceptions, because it´s those exchanges that have killed and that will continue to kill those baseless fears we harbor for one another across manmade boundaries´. As for now, mission acomplished, as the stories shared in the book, some of them previously written for the Costa Rican Tico Times, among others, do encourage more than the touristic endeavours, but has to do with the responsible travel that many people part of this writing industry do believe in. Maybe this lockdown during pandemic can be also used as a time of reflection about why and how we travel. This book can give some good inspiration in this respect.
You can read more travel stories by Joe Baur on his blog.

Rating: 5 stars

On Travels in the Time of Trump

At the very first sight, it is very frustrating to be taken accountable for the politics in your home country. What is your fault that the majority of your countrymen and women decided to vote for someone that not only does not make sense from the point of view of global leadership, but exhibits a toxic mix of alt-right, sexism and intellectual incapacity to understand basic concepts of public accountability - like, for instance conflict of interest? However, when you are represented by such a character at least a little bit of worries and questioning your ´national soul´ should follow because, at the end of the day, it has to do with your present and future. In other words, can you - or how can you - live in a country that at least for the next four years will be moulded based on the political choices of such a president and his well chosen team?

Paula DiPerna is a strategic global environmentalist, writer, political writer that run for the US Congress on behalf of the Democrats. She was involved on behalf of Hillary Clinton and has the occasion to know some areas of the ´deep America´, that, not so surprising, given the political context of at least two decades - poverty, industrial decline among other causes -, voted for Trump. 

The result of the elections requested a moment or two of coming at terms with the reality, she wrote. ´(...) for many of us who call the USA our home, Trump´s election felt like a moment of deep soul-searching. How to spend these four years? More ceaseless opinion making? More noise? More critique? What?´

DiPerna did not have too much time for reflection though, busy commuting all over the world, either professionally or visiting friends. London, Paris, Morocco, Amsterdam, China, South Korea, Thailand, South Africa, Finland, Germany. She travels across borders and languages, often being pitied by taxi drivers or random encounters for coming from Trump´s America.

Sometimes she shares historical and cultural details about the places she visits, sometimes she is just out of time for more than a business meeting and changing airplanes. Her Travels in the Time of Trump are often hectic, like trying to get herself tired enough to forget about what she is running from. This is also a way to deal with such a situation, but the soul searching exposed at the beginning is rather forgotten because the travel fever gives you a certain strength and illusion that you belong to the global world and nothing can get worse. You feel yourself a global citizen, although with a lucky passport in your pocket, no matter who is living at the White House for now. 

Honestly, I was expecting more political focus and eventually, some interesting reflection on the causes and consequences of those times. Indeed, I am the kind of reader and traveler that believe that the priviledge of travel brings higher responsibilities. When you have the chance to see so much of the world, why not understand how important freedom and human rights and accountability are and fight for them with all your might back home? Otherwise, dropping capital cities and global meetings doesn´t impress me at all.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Tesla Travels in Central America

Road trip with a Tesla from America to Panama? Why not? Two courageous Americans, one of them Randy Denmon, proved for the first time that such an adventure is doable. All you need is a lot of courage, some good green money for the tips, 10 to 12 hours of driving the day, plus the motor-less Tesla car.

From Louisiana to the Panama Canal in an electric car, that needs to be charged, this is the journey documented in Off the Grid. Travel lovers looking for details and picturesque descriptions from the countries crossed - Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and finalla Panama - will be a bit (more) disappointed though.

Indeed, there are some observations about landscape and local customs, but most of the interactions are taking place at the borders, when some adventures - not all of them of the pleasant type - awaits, and at the hotels, when looking for some proper charging facilities. The travellers do hurry up to reach their goal or just trying to move fast to escape potential robbery or dangerous encounters with the local organised crime cartels. Some historical details, mostly in connection with the recent history American intrusions and the nefarious United Fruit Company economic presence.

And there are plenty of details about how Tesla works, for how long, what exactly needs to work - electricity, mostly. I am almost convinced that this is what I need for my incoming - lockdown-free journeys around the world.

Take it or leave it, Off the Grid is a story of an unique journey, testing the technical limits of a new, healthier for the environment type of car. The trip was not promoted by Tesla.

Rating: 3 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Book Tour: Into Darkness by T.J.Brearton

Into Darkness by T.J.Brearton is not a thriller for the faint of heart. Although the criminal is relatively predictable the way in which the story unfolds, from the very beginning is fast forward and doesn´t leave you too much time to breath.

Journalists and influencers start getting killed in awkward ways, following a certain pattern. Is it revenge? Might be some Russian realtors with unclear construction businesses be involved? Mabe the cuprit is some follower of an obscure anti-media secret society?

A serial killer is out on the streets and special agent Shannon Ames (finally a literary choice for a woman in such a position) wants to catch him. She is taking her own professional risks, is tracking the criminal and is able to escape twice her own death. She is not a wonder woman and the victims themselves aren´t special super stars either (except the two influencers whose death was determined by the number of likes they got online). What is then the real motivation of the killer? Is the killer just a psycho or he/she is actualy trying to send a message to the world through each of the killings?

Without revealing too much of the main story and its dramatic ending, I will only mention that the motivation is really personal, might stir a bit of sympathy, although it does not excuse the cruel crimes. The victim the criminal wants to revenge may have been herself a victim of the media culture and its oversaturation with sensationalism which does not protect identity and private choices and overexposes life. But what are, in fact, the limits of private life in a life which is aired online? How could one resist its temptation and therefore the risks of revealing in its full cruel disclosure? How prepare are the young people to assume the risks of their media exposure?

Into Darkness opens an interesting stream of thinking about our media culture and online moments of fame. But this is only the framework of the intense thriler taking place. The actions in themselves do count more than anything else and make into the main focus of the story. Every piece of the story is built in detail, from the setting of the crimes to the ways in which Shannon Ames and her colleagues are tracing down the criminal. The logic of the investigation itself is very interesting, trying to make sense from disparate pieces of information spread towards the crimes as well as the choice of the setting where those are perpetrated, the possible motivation(s) and the profile of the victims.

If you are into thrillers and looking for something a bit different - and an interesting woman investigator character, Into Darkness offers a bookish adrenaline rush. 

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of a promotion blog tour, but the opinions are, as usual, my own.

Book Review: The Tenth Muse by Cathering Chung

There are not too many books where mathematics are topics of literature, and even fewer with women mathematicians as characters. In a similar way with the neglect and discrimination women suffered in the field of science, math seems to be a very unpopular topic among literati. Unless the author her/himself has a degree in mathematics, as Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. 

The story is narrated by Katherine, who took the risk of becoming a scientist, a mathematician ambitious enough to try to solve the legendary Riemann hypothesis. In the post-war America where she is struggling for recognition, having your full place as a woman in science is impossible. Men can get infatuated with what women are researching, women with scientific dreams can get in the best case scenario unpaid positions. Maria Meyser who discovered the subatomic structure of an atom won the Nobel Prize but was not enough for being featured in the media as nothing more nothing less as a ´San Diego Housewife´.

Katherine is adviced by her father to not ´show´ too much intelligence and knowlege, because it will limit her professional chances - meaning having a job at all, not necessarily advancing professionally. ´If only you were a man´ she is told with pity by men aware of her potential but feeling priviledged because of their gender.

Her relationships with men are problematic for the same reason. One stole her results and once caught by the university teacher assumed that, in fact, he wanted to help the poor girl. Another one considered her a scientist on equal foot until he submitted a paper on her name based on her results that he further developed. He wanted to make her a favor, to offer her a gift of love. 

In the end, there is the love for mathematics which will stay with her for the rest of her life: ´Math had always seemed miraculous to be because of the beauty it revealed undelying nature, because of the deep sense of rightness that came over me when I understood something all the way through, as it for a moment I´d merged with the grace I only ever caught glimpses of´.

In the Greek mythology, the tenth muse is the one who wants to talk with her own voice; she will willingly give up her mortality for being able ´to sing what she would´. Katherine is one of them.

The book has more than one story: besides pursuing her career as a mathematician, she is also looking for her real parents. The journey will take her to Germany, where her mother, a Jew and a mathematician as her, fell in love with a student from China during Nazi Germany. In a post-war Germany with an ambigous responsibility towards the past, Katherine will discover a relative, a cousin that actually not only knew her mother, but also stole her research and published it as a theory under his name. 

In addition to the story itself, I enjoyed the intelligent dialogues between characters the intellectual background assigned to various parts of the story.

Reading The Tenth Muse change something into the reader: either the perspective on women scientists or on mathematics. Or both.

Rating: 5 stars

Noir from Romania: Zodiac by Anamaria Ionescu

What a roller coaster of a book Zodiac by Anamaria Ionescu is! A beautiful translation from Romanian published by the newly editorial enterprise of Corylus Books, it leads the reader through a maze of facts and characters - so many characters - as well as  harsh rivalries between various branches of intelligence agencies. 

The entire reading experience looks like a race, that starts slowly, as a casual jogging and ends up as a fight for survival. Of the fittest, obviously.

Zodiac is the second installment of what the author calls Sergiu Manta series, but you don´t have to read the first book in order to understand what it is all about. There is enough information about Sergiu Manta in the story, and believe, me, by enough I meant a lot of information. 

Manta, together with a couple of colleagues from law enforcement institutions is called to investigate successive murders that although targeting persons of different status do have a certain pattern, including a mysterious mark left on the victims´ body. The investigation that takes place in various locations in Romania, in Bucharest and the mountainous region of Voineasa, and opens up a complex web of facts and characters with well hidden secrets, complicated histories and human weaknesses. Maybe there are way too many human weaknesses for their jobs but...remember James Bond?

Neither of the characters are what they seemed to be and this is what makes this relatively short yet intensive read hard to put down. 

What I also liked about the book is the local ambiance and the many references about the recent Romanian history, which as the story from Zodiac, is far from being simple and that can be also read as a Noir story. 

I am personally very curious about the next titles the courageous edition project of Corylus Books will bring on the English-speaking market and I am definitely happy that works of authors from this part of the world are translated and thus made available to a wider audience. Many of them deserve it.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Short Stories about Race in America: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Dytopian, violent, cruel - the landscape of race in America is added new dimensions and meanings through the short yet powerful stories of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. (The cover is a very good representation of the content from this point of view.)

Adjei-Brenyah, who s in a writing workshop with George Saunders, is the son of Ghanian immigrants and graduated the writing program at Syracuse University where he now teaches. Friday Black is his debut.

The stories do take place in various places and the characters are different. Their approach to their own ´Blackness´ is different too. What the author brought out of his characters is the so-called ´black box´, where the irrational and the rational are struggling to take over the mind. That point trigged by violence, fear, consumerism and hate, when the behavior gets out of control. It doesn´t matter where you are, the chaos is always around the corner, and it does not spare you black or white. 

The short story that gives the name to the collection, Friday Black, is representative in this respect, as it shows the delicate limits between normality and...its opposite. Consumerism is taking over the souls and minds similarly with violence. It´s a weird meeting with weird effects where what really matters is having more - at a cheap price, obviously. Such a reward brings people close to craziness, blind, as blind as violence might make one.

Friday Black is not an easy read but it is a good, elaborated one, taking the reader to a journey towards the hidden corners of the living in the modern world, eventually while being black.

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

`After a certain age we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain - yet somehow, still, we carry on`. 

In a memoir-like account, Vivian Morris is sharing her life with the daughter of the man who was the big love of her life. A love that, compared to the many encounters with men Vivian had, was not physical but built through the power of shared stories and emotions. 

City of Girls, the latest by the fantastic storyteller Elizabeth Gilbert, doesn´t have a clear geography. Most of the action of the book takes place in NYC, but it reached the girls everywhere. Girls and women that for ages were condoned for their decisions of: not getting married, not having children, having sex, being free...Young talented women don´t have to become housewives.

In many respects, Vivian is thinking well beyond her times - the action of the book starts in the 1940s - but not necessarily surprinsingly her way of being and life - ´Sleeping with men - lots of men - that´s more or less my way of life´ - still can be problematic and easily considered socially inacceptable in our 21st century as well. The hypocrisy of the society openly and harshly condemning and chasing women for ´bad´ behavior but kindly excusing men is apparently here to stay.  

Green and naive at the beginning of the story, Vivian grows into an independent soul, able to assume and be proud of her choices and life philosophy. ´(...) the world ain´t straight. People have a certain nature, and that´s just how it goes. And things happen to people - things that are beyond their control´. 

People will be much happier with themselves if they will stop chasing other people for what they are. Avoiding to utter judgements against what other are doing, they will eventually have more time to focus to fix their own unhappiness. Accepting people as they are, their personal choices of living their life included, will make human relationships better. 

For the reader, City of Girls is another display of beautiful writing by Elizabeth Gilbert. The story in all its elements - from the characters to the dialogues and the background documentation - is charming and once you start reading you will abandon everything else you were doing before until the story is over.

What will Elizabeth Gilbert write about next? Can´t wait to read her new book...

Rating: 5 stars

Book Review: Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Inspired by a true media account of a brutal reform school closed in 2011, Nickel Boys is one of the many stories about the trauma of repeated persecutions against people of colour in America. 

The school that inspired the ´Nickel´ literary equivalent, Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, operated between 1900 and 2011, writing a terrible history of abuse, beatings, rape, torture and murder of students by the staff. However, the refined prose of Colson Whitehead is less focused on the terrible events that destroyed and marked for ever the life of the children, but instead it is dedicated to tell mostly the story of two of the ´inmates´: Elwood and Turner. Only one of them will live to tell the full story and eventually to be a witness against those who traumatized the children. 

Elwood is the strongest character of the book, reflecting the cruel contradictions of his times. He is breathing the optimistic messages of Martin Luther King and believes with the strength of a child´s innocence in change. However, the structures of power and mentalities, especially in Florida where the Nickel School is located are rather favorable to the Klan mentality, including among the middle class. He trusts though the ultimate decency in every human heart and in justice. It was too early, for sure, but this is what protects a good soul from turning into an evil one. 

The more I read about the stories of segregation in America I realize how limited my knowlege about this topic was, due to lack of information and direct insights. Somehow, I was almost convinced that as long as the black soldiers were fighting on behalf of America during WWII, there were no logical reason to believe they did not have equal rights. As Elwood says in Nickel Boys though: `(...) it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door`. It seems I have a lot of serious reading to catch up in this respect.

Nickel Boys is a short yet inspiring read. I got caught by the story, but equally by the elaborated structure of the sentences and the writing in general. I may say that as for now, it´s my favorite Whitehead´s books.

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

I must confess that I am not a pet person and have no experience with cats of any kind; I don´t understand their behavior and also not so keen in spending the evenings with a cat on my lap. But I found the idea of cat companions or even better, The Travelling Cat Chronicles an interesting literary idea. And there is the promise of discovering another Japanese author, Hiro Arikawa.

Satoru and Nana, the stray cat he rescued five years ago, are on a journey across Japan, meeting his friends while trying to find a new place to stay for the cat. Why? We are offered some elegant hints, but we´ll know the tragic reason - ´unavoidable circumstances´ - only shortly before the book ends.

As a kid, Satoru used to have a cat, Hachi (8 in Japanese) that had to give it away after his parents were killed in a car accident and he had to move with his aunt. Nana means 7 in Japanese.

Nana is accompanying his human in a silver van, leaving behind beautiful places in Japan, like Mt. Fuji, Tokyo, Fukuoka, or Hokkaido. (For me, it brought back a lot of beautiful memories from my year spent in this country.) The friends he is seeing are important persons for his evolution as a human, and together, they are ´putting the past to rest´ bringing back dear memories. His journey is aimed at connecting and bringing meaning through the past experiences. The peaceful Satoru who ´blames no one for his troubles, didn´t see any of it as unfair´ needs the human connection, but also the feline companion.

On the other hand, the cat Nana has a different approach to connecting with humans, but also with other ferals (after all, he is a stray cat). Cats, it seems, are individualists and selfish, apparently independent from their parents six months after they´re born. (Actually, there are a lot of cat-related facts I cannot gauge for, lacking the experience and knowledge in this area, as for instance if a cat really can watched focused on TV). Nana from The Travelling Cat Chronicles was given her own voice, used sarcastically to criticize and make fun of the human world. In the end, it is humanly funny this attitude. There is a switch between the Satoru story and Nana´s and the change of voice and register doesn´t always bring echo to the story. 

The story of Satoru and Nana is such an enlightening story of mindfulness, of bringing value to every human experience and connection, including with your favorite cat. It would be so sad to consider life anything but a journey that it is up to us to make it meaningful and free of negativity, including when you are reading a story that doesn´t have a classical ´happy ending`.

The book was translated by Philip Gabril which traslated many of Murakami books into English.

Rating: 4 stars

New from Monica Bhide: Powered by Hope (Sound Bites)

My very talented friend Monica Bhide is back with a series of inspirational stories aimed to offer comfort and hope in time of crisis. Putting at work her unique talent of storyteller, she brings to life old symbols and meanings that suit the soul independently of the geographical and time borders. Powered by Hope. Running on Belief promises  and, at least in this first episode, delivers, a spiritual take on the hardships of life, either at the society level or at the personal level. 

I am a recent convert to audio content and the less than 20 minutes 1 episode offers the right dosage of peace and gratitude. It gives to the listener enough food for thought to come over and over again and catch up with the story again and again. The secret of telling a good story that Monica Bhide is so good at.

The series are available for free on Soundcloud. The cover image is created by another inspirational woman, in the visual field, Simi Jois.

I can´t wait to listen the next episodes of this soul journey.

Book Review: A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi

To be honest, I have very conflicted opinions about this book. I am familiar with Amulya Malladi´s writing from a previous review that I published a couple of years ago, when I enjoyed both the topic and the writing. The Copenhagen Affair was the kind of smart, well written book that is pleasant to read for a couple of hours in a weekend afternoon. I´ve started A House for Happy Mothers with the same aim in mind, but it turned to be rather the opposite: I kept reading it, because I was interesting in the topic, but the more I was reading the more despicable I was finding the ways in which the topic was addressed as well as the characters.

The House of Happy Mothers is a place in India - one of the many - where local surrogacy mothers are serving overachieved professionals - of Indian origin, but not only. The women accepting to carry and give birth to other people children are very poor and sometimes they would accept to perform this task more than once.

Priya and Madhu are a successful couple from the USA that after several tragical attempts to conceive ended up using the service of a surrogate mother. Priya is half-Indian, Madhu has family living there, and she was the one who actually insisted to follow this path against adoption. "Priya really did believe that by using a surrogate, she was helping a woman who could end up on the street. Someone would have a better life while she got a baby``. As simple as that. And this is how the surrogacy is regarded for 80% of the book. Asha, the surrogate mother in exchange, that was encouraged to do this by her own husband, was hoping that the money will help to offer a better education to her gifted son. `The poverty of their past will stay behind them. Every day would no longer be a struggle. They would be able to buy rice and sugar, the vegetables they wanted and not just potatoes`.

This clear dichotomy based on the distinction rich versus poor is predominant and with the exception of the last pages of the book when most of the characters are becoming better, generous persons. No complexity added to the issue, no intellectual debate. There are allusions made to the emotional trauma the surrogate mothers are going through after the child they carried is taken away, but the voices women who did more than once are telling that most probably this will shall pass and there will be more than one surrogate child carried.

I´m obvious to the fact that indeed, surrogacy represent for women, not only from India, but from countries with a high level of poverty, an investment. As it is equally an investment for the parents who instead of finding a surrogate mother in their own countries - where the legislation allows - prefer to go overseas where the market is cheaper. But I find despicable that this dynamic is just presented as a fact, without a serious critical and in-depth emotional and intellectual approach.

Rating: 2.5

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Film Review: The Breadwinner

Inspired by a series of books by the Canadian writer and activist Deborah Ellis, the 2018 Oscar nominated The Breadwinner tells the story of a family living in the Taliban-besieged Kabul. 

Parvana is the heart of the story, that assumed the role of the breadwinner of her family, after her father, a disabled teacher, was took to prison. While she used to spend the day with her father, trying to sell things on the streets, the storytelling about history and geography were the antidote of the gloomy and violent reality outside. Once her father was took away, Parvana keeps living through this stories either when she is putting her younger brother to sleep or when she is waiting for an answer regarding the release of her father from prison. In a sea of hopefulness and violence - with women and girls one of the main targets -, her innocence, despite all odds, is enlightening the day. 

I´ve found the animation inspired, and it uses elements of traditional imagery for the area. The choice of music is also appropriate and adds dramatism to the scenes featured.

The books the film is based were written by Deborah Ellis following her interviews with Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Ellis herself was threatened by the Taliban for her activism and involvement on behalf of the women.

A co-production of Canada, Ireland and Luxemburg, the film is directed by Nora Tworney, Irish animator, producer and director. 

The movie lasts 1h33 and is available on Netflix (I watched it from Germany).

Rating: 5 stars

Trevor Noah South African Beginnings

Trevor Noah, the popular host of the Daily Show was born ´a crime´. He is the child of a black mother and a white father, a relationship incriminated in South Africa during apartheid. 

His collection of short memoir-like stories published under Born a Crime is an account of his life before and after apartheid, the permanent confrontation with the violence - within the society and within the families - that was always ´lurking and waiting to erupt´. As a first person account, the stories have a note of authenticity and represent important testimonies about a racial divide that we read about but we might have difficulties in figuring out on a daily basis. 

Noah´s identity was caught between the various racial projections and representations that took place during the apartheid years. A multicultural and multilingual society was forcefully divided into ethnic and linguistic groups that were hating each other and preferred to live in clusters that refused to communicate to each other. Neither fully black or fully white, Trevor Noah was considered ´colored´ which involved regular bullying and a permanent outsider status. His greatest advantage was her mom who despite all odds and limitations educated him to not believe in limits: ´My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do´. As for his outsider status, the one who was mentioned by TIME in 2018 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, he succeeded to migrate between worlds, get to know them and talk their language: ´I learned that even though I didn´t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing´.

There are a lot of hilarious episodes, but also way too much violence and domestic abuse, with his mother one of the victims. As a personal story, Born a Crime offers a lot of anthropological and cultural inquiries into the various South African ethnic groups.

Personally, I find Trevor Noah more inspiring as a TV host and comedian, as the writing is not sparkling, but there were enough information that keep me interested until the end of the book. 

Rating: 3 stars

Introducing: Bookish Lifestyle and Movie/Theatre/Concerts Reviews

My lovely bookish blog, WildWritingLife is celebrating this autumn 10 years of adventures in the world of books. Each and every one of this year was rich in discovering new books and authors, expanding and improving my writing skills and challenging myself with new literay ideas. 

Not all years were equal though. Although I don´t remember a day when I was not reading a book, I was not always keen to share my ideas, and sometimes I had to take a break from blogging for a stronger focus on my everyday life chores and adventures. The past is history, but it is important to outline that every time I come back fortified, with a better bookish mindset, determined to continue my adventure in the world of books.

From a blog post to another, I tried to make the blog more open to the diversity of voices and genres, reviewing both fiction and non-fiction, interviewing authors and edition houses owners, trying to cover as much as possible as many global voices as possible, in an attempt to not miss any country in the world where books are written and published. From thrillers to graphic novels, I tried to represent as many genres as possible (although I need to focus a bit more on Science Fiction, not necessarily a favorite of mine, but I have to give it more than a try). I tried to cover as well books about writing and dedicated to helping authors to spread the news about their books through social media and blogging, among other topics. 

There is still a lot of diversity to be added to the blog, as I am planning to use in a more organised way my rich linguistic heritage for reading as much as possible books in the original languages I am familiar with - or I am interested to improve. 

Being more active in connecting with other bookish minds is also an aim, as it is to be a more frequent participant to book tours, as a very efficient way to help authors and their books to get known to a wider audience.

New sections were introduced in the last years, as my travel blogging consulting business expanded: Bookish travel, where I am featuring bookstores, memorial houses of authors and libraries encountered during my travels. Hopefully, once the Coronavirus crisis will be over, I can have more material for this section.

However, I still feel that there are some aspects of the bookish life that are still left behind in my blog, and I am ready to accept a new challenge. Or two.

Bookish Lifestyle

Living a life surrounded by books means that there are a lot of rituals and specific needs that you have to fulfill. You need bookshelves and enough space for your precious books. You need your cosy corner where to retire for a page-turning adventure. You need apps and devices to accompany your bookish commuting, when your book is too heavy or when you are looking for better ways to the newest books released on the market.

You may also want some identity markers that will share your bookish identity with the rest of the world: T-shirts, a coffee mug, some cosy socks, a tote with a quote from your favorite author. 

This is your choice of a bookish lifestyle and from this month on, I am starting to dedicate more time researching companies and ideas that suite this trend. I am happy to connect with creators and entrepreneurs, designers and creative minds with achievements and inspiration in this field. At this preliminary stage, any ideas are more than welcomed and I am very excited to embark on this new adventure.

Movie/Theatre/Concerts Reviews

I love both theatre and movies, but unfortunatelly in the last years my encounters in this field were rather sporadic. Lack of time, lack of interest, other professional assignments, my own procrastinations, there are few of the reasons why I am still very bad at catching up with movies and even less familiar with the latest theatre trends.

This year, this is about to change. 

I am introducing a new section on the blog dedicated to reviews of interesting and hopefully inspiring theatre productions. My aim is to cover classical movies, inspired by books but not only, not necessarily successful Netflix/HBO series, but also good entertainment productions, covering as many national cinemas as possible. For theatre, until the normal social life is back on the track, I will look for online resources.

As for now, everything is only a project, I may include in this section various cultural documentaries and contemporary cultural debates.

Last but not least, let´s talk music. As for now, writing about music - opera, concerts - is one of the hardest challenge for me. I rarely did and I am feeling an outsider when it comes to music writing. I feel the need to restart my own musical training - time to get back to my piano lessons that I abandoned for very personal reasons two decades ago - but also want to reconnect with my music soul. How exactly I will share this new passion on the blog, I don´t know, but I will start very small and see where everything leads me.

In other words, April starts with a lot of good news and can´t wait to start sharing with my readers this new intellectual adventure.