Book Review: All My Mother´s Lovers by Ilana Masad

´(...) and in the soothing tide of life going on as normal, she died´.

I waited almost one year until reading All My Mother´s Lovers by Ilana Masad as the book was on my TBR for the last year. The waiting was really worth because the book is like no other book I´ve read before both in terms of style and of topic.

Before one will reach the end of the story - which for reasons I will explain later was not as impressive as the rest of the novel - there is the chiselled wording which impresses. It seems like every detail of the story is well pondered and described in a thoughtful way. Reading the book is a pleasure for the sake of the reading. Thus, it took me a long time to finish it as I felt like sipping every sentence and paragraph and page.

Then, there is the subject itself. 

´How would you feel if the person you thought you loved was someone totally different?´ Maggie Krause, in the middle of a love encounter with her girlfriend, Lucia, on her way to an orgasm, is announced that her mother died in a car accident. But as she will mention herself ´(...) dead isn´t about the person who´s dead; it´s about the people who are still alive´. In the next days, Maggie took upon herself the duty of distributing letters written by her mother to be delivered when she would die to various men that she had relationships with, while being married with her father, Peter. ´(...) all this time she thought her parents marriage was so perfect, that she could never do what they did, have what they have´. From a letter to another, she is about to discover a completely different Iris. Not only her mother was married before but she was involved in years-long relationships with a very different lot of men. Some will share their common story, in one case she will read the letter herself as the recipient died. Faced with her own coming out and her tensed relationship with her mother, Maggie is transformed through the step-by-step revelations. 

The family mystery is revealed in the end during a discussion with her father, Peter and is the least surprising part of the book. The end lacks any tension and it is also predictable at a certain extent but it does not diminish the love story which overcome the small details of the encounters and illicit affairs. 

All the characters do have a very deep profile and are at a big extent relatable. All My Mother´s Lovers includes a rare encounter between strong built characters and an interesting story line. Personally, I was more entinced by the mid-development of the narrative but for a debut novel, the book is really impressive and can´t wait to read more by Ilana Masad. 

Rating: 4.5 stars 

Random Things Tours: Diving for Pearls by Jamie O´Connell

 

While ´an international star´ was about ´to conquer the world´s tallest building´ a young rich girl from a Muslim family in Dubai was living her last moments of her life. Hiyam corpse will be soon discovered floating at Dubai Marina and a search for the perpetrator will soon start. A search that will change the life of at least six persons for ever. 

Diving for Pearls, the promising debut novel by Jamie O´Connell is a highly entertaining and besides the whole glamour that is associated with Dubai and is well present into the book, it has a very thoughtful - not always obvious in the story - line. It is a deeply philosophical thought about the sadness of the dreams sunken when meeting the brutal reality. Almost all of the six of the persons in the book affected by th crime are here looking for a dream - a better future back home, sending money to their poor families, hiding their troubled past, hiding their own self. 

The book is rich in various stories intertwined with a focus on the human nature and their liabilities, the weaknesses that we rarely see through the everyday mask we wear, including in relation with other family members. The story may looks sometimes like a ping-pong game from a character to another with the clear connections between the characters reveals only later but at the end of it I had the good feeling of exhaustion because it is not such an easy reading. 

Diving for Pearls is more than a story about finding the culprit of a crime but about life stories and human expectations and betrayal. I´ve found the reading intense and kept me interested until the very end, although I wished the stories within the stories a bit more sharp and focused. 

But the writing is very promising and I could only expect more good books by Jamie O´Connell as I see an impressive potential for creativity and who doesn´t need nowadays good written complex stories?

Rating: 4 stars

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

Random Things Tours: The Draftsman by Laurel Lindström

 

A house means more than a place to live. It is a place that often breaths in and out the souls of his past and present inhabitants. There are not only walls and wood and concrete, but real humans who lived there and therefore left their spiritual imprints and shared their stories within those walls.

The Draftsman, the debut novel by Laurel Lindström, explores the impact of a story shared within the precincts of a house into the life of the new owner. Martin Cox is the right match for being the recipient of the story: gifted but afraid of his own gifts, intelligent and rich. By buying the property in Shadowhurst Hall he is becoming not only the owner of a piece of real estate, but of a story he is decided to explore and put his genius mind at work, trying to understand its message and search for the characters.

Personally, I´ve found the idea of the book fascinating, and the same goes for the main character. The writing is precise, intelligent and poetic with beautiful descriptions and evocative passages. Sometimes, the dialogues do not fit well into the story and are not easy to follow and maybe the elaboration of the story is not necessarily punctilious but overall, it has a captivating thread which does not let you say ´good bye´ until done. 

The Draftsman ignites the kind of curiosity that is not necessarily the result of a certain pace or built-in emotional suspense, but due to the inherent stroke of personality of the characters. The strangeness - both of the story and of the characters - are wrapped in a beautiful wording and that´s in my case the recipe for keeping me interested in reading a book in one sitting. 

A note of appreciation for the cover which is really special and illustrates in a very creative outstanding way the chore of the book. It´s not happening very often therefore it deserves the praise.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Copy offered in exchange of the participation of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own.

Audre Lorde´s Essays and Speeches

´The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences´.

Reading the prose of a poet is not only a different intellectual experience but also offers access to layers of understanding of the author´s work which is revelatory for the literary personality and its realm. Sister Outsider is a collection of 15 essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, covering mostly engaged discourses on behalf of the militant Black feminism but also two interesting travel stories from the Soviet Union, respectively Grenada. The main topic is not necessarily relevant as it is no surprise that Lorde was a Lesbian Black Feminist involved in the fight for social rights and equality, but the verbal expression of her militantism. 

Sister Outsider clarifies the social and economic context of her poetry, the personal nuances and the historical details of the social involvement. And, first and foremost, how the discourse articulates and what are its verbs. How meaningful coalitions can be created. 

If the Black story is a story of survival, a Lesbian Black Feminist is struggling to survive within the own community and outside in the majority. The nuances that are so clearly and firmly stated in this collection of essays and speeches are noteworthy for understanding the roots of her poetry and the meaning(s) of her public discourse. 

As for the two travel reports, I was less impressed, as the ideological imprints are too clear and stated on purpose therefore diminishes the creativity and spontaneity of the writing. 

 

Book Review: Des Ailes Au Loin by Jadd Hilal

 

From many respects, Des Ailes au Loin (approximatively translated into English as Away on Wings; an official English translation does not exist as for now) reminded me of one of my favorite reads in 2019 - A Woman is No Man. The fate of the four women featured in the beautiful debut by Jadd Hilal are faced with the men´s aggressivity and random outburst of hate. 

The women are nevertheless the main characters of the relatively short novel: they are sustaining the family through their heritage, as storyteller and bearers of an identity who is itself undergoing a dramatic shift. Out of their discomfort zones, where there are wars and forced to a refugee status, the ´West´ - specifically France or Switzerland - are the place where nothing happens. It is that normality and out-of-history state of mind that you cannot experience in Lebanon. 

I liked the idea of a multi-generational story, with women brought together to express their version of history, because besides being refugees, they were also mothers and wives of men who lost their minds and sometimes also their lives. I also appreciated that the book is more literature than politics, using the politics as a context but not taking the unliterary risk of an ideological bias.

Besides being an author, Jadd Hilal is also a philosopher and maybe this atemporal orientation is the reason why Des Ailes au Loin is more a story of ideas than a political manifesto. I am personally pleased by this literary discovery.

Rating: 3 stars

5 Movie Recommendations for A Long Weekend

Movies save my days faster than a book can do. Immersed in the images, my mind race is outpaced by the fast succession of the visual episodes. Reading takes time, as one need to read, figure out the word and then connect it with the others to create a context. Films are fast and instantaneous. 

In the last week, I spent a couple of interesting hours watching a very eclectic selection of movies, that I am happy to share, as a possible inspiration for those in need of a visual heeling through films.

The Salesman directed by Asghar Farhadi

Iranian cinema is such a gem and often has a dominated strong social and moral message. It has its source of inspiration, besides the dramatic local everyday reality, into the Italian and Romanian cinema, mixing sometimes dream and reality in a very brutal way.

The Salesman by Asghar Farhadi (with whom I was already familiar through A Separation, which also raises in a very thoughful way deep dilemma about love and responsibility towards children). The film won a Oscar nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film. The title is inspired by the play by Arthur Miller which is played by the main protagonists of the movie, about a salesman disappointed with his life. The film plays as a thriller à revers, as the husband is searching for the man who attacked his wife in their newly rented apartment. The search is becoming an aim in itself, as the husband, a teacher by day and an actor by the evening is confronted with his fears and failures which are exposed in his cruel treatment of the perpetrator of the attack. The cultural context of the story - which takes place in Iran - is also relevant, but it goes beyond the everyday limitations, as it display a human behavior under deep distress.

Compared to A Separation I´ve found the movie too focus on the emotions but nevertheless it is a challenging approach that made me think about it for a couple of good days.

La Source des Femmes directed by Radu Mihăileanu

The Romanian-born France-based film director Radu Mihăileanu is always a winning choice for mz movie cravings, given his unique sense of humour and easiness of approaching no matter what life-and-death topics. I still have a couple of movies he directed to catch up and this time I went for The Source. 

The main inspiration is the Lysistrata play by Aristophan about the women who refused to have any physical contact with their husbands until they will end the Peloponnesian War. The context is transposed in an unnamed Maghrebian (a geographical entity designating the North African part bordering the Mediterranean sea) country. The women in a remote village decided to start a ´love strike´ until their husbands will find a solution to the risky tradition of women carrying the water from the top of the mountains. It´s a permanent clash which ensues, between men and their wives - ending up in violent outbursts - within the women families themselves, especially their mothers-in-law, between the women themselves as well. The main character, Leila, a foreigner to the village, married with the village´s teacher who brought her there from the city, admirably played by Leila Behkti is ready to go against all odds to put an end to one of the main ways of domination the men displayed against women. Because, some of them will debate at the table where they lazily spend their days, if the women will have too much time on their sleeves, they will ask for more and more - like a washing machine. 

There are many other topics inserted such as the corrupted city bureaucrat figure, or the love for Mexican soap operas which even inspire their love and relationship expectations as well as the tragi-comical use of technology in the village: such as the Ericcson mobile phone hanging on the laundry wire for catching up the signal.

As usual, Mihăileanu directed a movie which is both insightful about serious everyday life topics and humorous in its take. Life is too short to take everything too serious and not see the comic side of the tragedies.

Samia directed by Philippe Faucon

With Samia by Philippe Faucon I remained in the Maghrebian French-speaking realm. The six daughter of an Algerian family living in the outskirts of Marseille, Samia is a rebelious girl who wants to live her teenage life, while trying to escape an aggressive big brother who wrongly tried to assume the role of the family father. He is ruling his daughter with the motto: ´C´est la tradition, on la respecte´ - This is tradition, we have to respect it. For those Algerian family who moved to France in order to secure a better future for their children, virginity before marriage is more important than the studies, therefore the mother takes often their daughter to gynecologist for a hymen integrity checking.

As usual in the case of traditional families living in modern Western societies, they do not realize that sooner or later their children will not only be influenced by the values of the societies, but they will also want to be like them, including by finding mates belonging to other cultures.

Samia offer a good insight into those interactions between worlds and the expectations of youngsters belonging to traditional societies living in France.

Les Deux Amis directed by Louis Garrel

Les Deux Amis - Two Friends - directred by Louis Garrel, who is also acting in the movie (as the charming Abel), is all about puting friendship at test. Clement, a minor actor, is falling crazingly in love with Mona (played by the sensual Golshifteh Farahani), who sells sandwiches at the train station. Clement will ask the advice of his best friend Abel, who happens to fell for Mona too. But Mona has a secret that she is not keen to share with anyone therefore she is walking through life with the loneliness of people who have not too much to lose. As for now.

The story is simple but entincing, and Farahani plays good the role of the rebel that she actually is.

Yves Saint Laurent directed by Jalil Lespert

I had this movie, Yves Saint Laurent directed by Jalil Lespert, on my watching list after reading the beautiful graphic novel about Christian Dior and figuring out I hardly know too much about fashion history more than a couple of lines and logos and maybe some information about style. 

With two main actors with stage experience, the movie is a testimony about the tormented life of the fashion creator and the price the genius may pay. It is focused more on the personality of the fashion creator than on his achievements and it pays off, particularly for curious people like me. It helps to understand the mentality of the one who contributed to the profiling of the ´new woman´, who not only wears smoking as a fashion statement but is also versatile and courageous and ambigous towards her sexual choices.

Book Review: Little Gods by Meng Jin

 

For a time I don´t remember starting, I am very interested in Chinese narratives and identity writing, before and after the Cultural Revolution, but particularly after Tienanmen revolt. Thanks to the works in translation and to the many strong voices of the contemporary Chinese literature, particularly the immigrant writers, Chinese-American especially, there is an impressive pool of creativity which challenges the identity narrative in Asia and abroad.

I had Little Gods by Meng Jin on my TBR for a couple of months already but I was lacking the proper mood and emotional availability to listen. It is true that lately I am very much busy with immigration/language/cultural dislocation stories and at the end of each and every one of them I felt terribly drained because this is how it feel when a plant is having delicate roots spread all over the Earth.

The fact that I listened to the book in audio format, read by three different voices made the experience very interesting because otherwise I suspect that just reading the words on the paper would may not have been such a clear experience of the multitude of voices raised in this book. The voices of the Little Gods are the main characters in the story, people belonging to the family of the successful Chinese physicist Su Lan who migrated to the US shortly after Tienanmen events. 17 years after her death, her daughter is moving to China to discover her mother, to reconnect to a line her mother had cut willingly. 

The past is not for living it and it is actually a plural word, as people part of our past may have a different version of it, maybe more than one version in fact. We can live in the present without acknowledging too much of it, but often we refuse to see our future without a clear vision of a past. One of the many possible visions. Thus, without always acknowledging it, we allow the past, including other people past, to bring more trauma and secrets of dislocation, a challenge for a DNA already under the generational pressure. 

The intertwined stories are poetic and individual and can be read as individual testimonies as well. Su Lan´s daughter is one of the voices and she is about to build up a different past from the one she was told she had by her mother. It started from her place of birth and to her own identity history that started in China. The meticulous personal research is requested with the emergency of a psychological introspection meeting hypnosis. There is something back, in that past, that do not let her live her future and the search for her father is part of it.

Little Gods is very powerful for its actuality but also for the strength of the wording. The Shanghai-born author is creating an authentic story also through the linguistic game of words, explained in their different contexts and use. In the game of memory, language is one of the most important tool of creating and rebuilding - but also of destroying - an identity. Through the choice of words and its subsequent explanation, the daughter is setting the tone of the story, reveals as the one for whom but also by whom this story was written.

This debut novel is inspiring for all those looking for finding their own voice to tell their identity saga. It adds literary diversity and content to all those stories published lately about roots or rather the lack thereof.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Book Review: The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza

 

Many books about Iran wrote in diaspora for a non-Iranian audience do usually include a long historical introduction to facts and characters mostly unknown to the public. Mossadegh the prime minister praised for his desire to rule independently of foreign influences is a favorite character of such narratives. Some stories succeed to go beyond this matrix, some not.

The Gardens of Consolation - which I´ve read in the original French as Les Jardins de Consolation - by Parisa Reza, the 2015 recipient of Prix Senghor - is using the long historical evolution of the contemporary Iran - until Mossadegh - to create a unique family portrait. 

It starts with the love story of Sardar and Talla, two illiterate young peasants who are leaving their village going out of their world, near Tehran, where they build up a future based on hard work and a kind of strong connection that only people who only have each other may develop. Their son, Bahram, will be the only graduate ever from the history of the locality, the poster boy of the kind of Iranian the Pahlavi dynasty aimed at building: successful, secular, educated, leaving behind his obscurantist past. But he is also something more: a socialist by belief which would not be able to overcome easily the limitations of his class and genealogy. Not this generation, anyway. 

Bahram will realize his limitations once he is trying to courtship young women with a radically different background from his. Women dancing, drinking champagne, to whose parties the brother of Reza Shah himself takes part. 

Besides a sociological tracing of Iran, Les Jardins de Consolation plays an interesting game of voices. At the beginning, the world is described through the eyes of the simple-minded Talla. Bahram´s growing up is reflected through his own relationships with women, from the blonde Germans he accidentally encounter while trying to sell a rabbit his father caught to the flirting game with sophisticated girls at the university. The secret life of men desires is for me a game I not always figure out. The author´s voice is also present when projecting events into a future that we will never encounter. Not in the pages of the book, anyway.

And there is another element which permeates the story: fear. The fear of moving out or of never moving at all. The fear of the other, of adults, men, religious restrictions, the Shah, of changes. Big fears and small fears, fears that can be fought against or fears that are a lifelong companion.

At certain points, the family dynamics between Talla, Serdar and Bahram is not always balanced and the relationship between the three of them, as a family is not necessarily clear and authentic, but this is my only serious observation about a story which follows a pace of an epic poetry.

Rating: 4 stars

´Signs Preceding the End of the World´

 

The refined prose of Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera redefines the border crossing discussion from an average list of things one may have to talk and write to a dimension that reunites human and physical geography. At the end of this beautifully translated book from Spanish by Lisa Dillman I felt sorry for wasting my time reading novels about a relatively similar topic but executed in a very mediocre way. 

The book is very short and follows Makina, a young Mexican girl going ´on the other side´ to find her brother. She is set on an assignment. Every single step of her journey is turning into a mythical upgrade. There are the words and the gestures, the precision of words displaying the details of the crossing, creating the adequate feeling of being a small point in a long chain of circumstances. ´Makina thought she could hear all the water in her body making its way through her skin to the surface´. Makina is actually the best portrayed character in the book but her role is to magnify the details of the borders - not only the preparations to go over and the human peculiarities, but the ways in which the border itself reflects into her humanity. 

I would have love to read this book in its original Spanish and the end of the book has a special section dedicated to how exactly the translation was done, the details and the challenges. I would also love to read not only more by Herrera, but more literature able to explore in full responsibility and with poetic curiosity the world around, especially the border situations. Because border means always more than a random delimitation. 

Rating: 4.5 stars 

Communication Advice for Doctors and Patients in Germany

 

My health adventures in the last year and a bit brought me very often in situations that brought me a deep knowledge of the German medical system and particularly of different ways of communication between patients and doctors and the overall communication of the health system. 

Dr. Yael Adler is not only a medical doctor with a good reputation in Berlin, but also a book author. Her latest book is addressing an impressive amount of serious problems dealing with the communication between doctors and patients, in a very easygoing and empathic way. The audiobook - in the original German language - read by the author only helped to understand the issue and its many possible approaches.

First and foremost it is a book about communication and as before being a patient I used to be a patient, it helped me to improve my knowledge in this respect. Some doctors and nurses I happened to meet were empathic and with a high knowledge of the intimate emotional needs of patients in dramatic medical conditions. Sometimes, the patients themselves put the medical personnel in complicated situations. 

I was really happy with the diversity of the points of views shared in the book by dr. Yael Adler, connecting in the smartest way the patients and the doctors. The set of advices are useful for both. The authenticity of the voice is given by the many examples that were offered in the book, pertaining from the both domains. 

Although there are many chapters that applies particularly to the German system, for instance the aspects related to patients´ rights and the ways in which a medical practice operates or ofering tips and phone numbers of emergency systems that can help getting an appointment sooner than in a couple of months, it has many directions that actually apply to any kind of doctor-patient communication. Among others, it requires the patient to ask the right questions and to better read and display body languages and non-verbal communication in general.   

I was very pleased to listen to this audiobook. It helped me to understand but also to better prepare my medical visits and the interactions with the German medical system in general. 

Going beyond the Gender Binary

 

´Imagine how beautiful it would be if the way we navigate the world was about creative expression, not conformity to arbitrary norms´.

Understanding is very important and books have the role, among others, to facilitate it. Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon published by Penguin has the role of creating awareness about what does it mean to be non-binary and particularly what we, the other people, should behave and acknowledge about it. 

An exercise in self-love and a first person story of finding a place in a non-emphatic world, Vaid-Menon is making a successful exercise in explaining. However, understanding is not always the key, just accepting that other people are different may be enough. ´They can´t even consider that maybe we look this for oneselves, and not for the other people. We are reduced to spectacle´. 

Gender definitions and roles are largely political and engeder serious consequences in the field of health, employment and educational policies. This book is helpful not only for the general public, but also for the decision makers and educators, as well as for parents who may be faced with non-binary children or colleagues of their children. 

First and foremost, exercises in empathy, of any kind, towards any human being, is one of the most helpful attitude. No one needs the condescendance of majorities, but learning empathy and tolerance is key for a better society and life in general.

Rating: 5 stars

Ending the World, in a Comfortable way

 

The end of the world would be nothing but boring. No matter the religious or the secular projection, the literary description or the poetry of it. There should be a great noise and worlds collide and tremendous skies opening...you know it.

In Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam there is a kind of boom heard around, but it is wrapped in a pinky - flamingo-like (note: I have no intention to denigrate the poor birds who happen to be my favorites, just for the record) - cloud of comfort and slight daily-alienation. From a certain viewpoint, it is fully in line with the predictable life of the characters: a middle-class American couple spending their week in an AirBnb apartment in the Hamptons together with their children. In the middle of their average vacation, the owners of the apartment, a Black middle-class couple, are back from NYC without prior notification and they spent the last days together before leaving the world behind.

I have a bad habit of rarely giving up books that I start - especially novels that receive a certain public notoriety. On one side it is the curiosity to challenge my own literary values with someone else´s, on the other is a professional curiosity to understand why exactly some novels do receive such a welcome, what does it say about our values and mentalities (sorry, I studied history, French-style, Annales kind of school). Lately though, I realized that I wasted way too much time of my precious life with books that are not going anywhere. 

Don´t take me wrong. As someone who happens to deal sometimes with very very badly written books, not all of them self-published - some sent to me for translation in various languages - I don´t blame the writing in the book. There are style-related aspects that I loved in the book, for instance, how the silence between the characters is filled with words and meanings, making sense of their thoughts. How, for instance, all the characters are allowed their own voice and how together they create a dialogue. The fine irony of the episodes following the meeting between the two couples. 

But the technocratic self-sufficiency described in all its manifestations, over and over again - excuse my French - bores me to tears. At least, after going through all this for eight hours I am allowed to say it. The matrix of those couples can be translated in any genre - from crime to romance - but as in real life, there is a finality, a sense which is missing from this arrangement. In real life I don´t have nothing to do with such humans, in literary encounters even the less. And from now on, I promise myself to just give up following a book whose way of ending the world is so unspectacular.

Rating: 2 stars

Book Review: Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

 

Born in Dar el Salaam, Tanzania, from an Ghanian father and an Armenian-American mother, Nadia Owusu followed a journey of displacement all over the world. For those who read/are told about such a round the world experience, with international school - his father was an UN diplomat - it sounds fantastic. For those experiencing it - Nadia and her sister - it was more than a superficial world trip, when one may gather names of countries and cities. Dislocation, running with no roots, it is not a feeling easy to cope with. ´I never know how to answer the question of my origin´, she confessed.

A fantastic life, indeed, but what about the shocks? 

I loved Aftershocks. It is a memoir that it´s addictive and deserves all the hype it recently received. The audiobook read by the author is a magnified experience of the writing, because one can feel in the writer/reader voice the dramatism of some moments and the lightness of others. 

What really impressed me in this memoir that should be considered a study case of writing of this genre is the deep of the analysis. From personal stories to international configurations, Owusu is able to discern, dissect and re-evaluate. Each chapter goes deep and deep into the episodes of trauma and everyday racism she experienced. There is no hate or outrage in her stories - even when talking about her mother who abandoned her and her sister, or the cruelty of her step-mother. She is mentioning the weight of the traumatic experience of the Armenian genocide her mother was carrying in her blood. This candid historical explanation - which makes sense, after all - is for me one of the most moving part of Owusu´s personal story. 

Managing so many memories may create sometimes confusing when it comes to the exact time-related account of those memories. In several occasions, I had the feeling that a better precision of who exactly is the source of those memories may have avoid pretending to re-enact the voice of a couple of months old child or even 2 or 3 years old. The voices of her sister is mostly absent and echoing through her memories only. A bigger diversity of the tones and register of memories would have created a multiphonics experience. 

Last but not least, her writing about jazz is so beautiful and encapsulates enthusiastically not only the creative vibe of this music but also its roots and enlightened philosophy.

Aftershocks is one of the best memoirs I´ve read in a while for its strength and power of coming at terms with the past, any kind of past, through the force of understanding and empathy. As for the writer, I can´t wait to read more from her. Sooner than later.

Rating: 4 stars

Children Book Review: The Girl from Glochen´s Glen by Andy Wolf

 

For hundreds of years, a girl is living in the forest, together with birds, tortoises and fish. The food is always within her reach and she can talk with the clouds and the sky and the deer. She is missing a human touch, another being to talk with. She is all alone, left to her own life, out of time.

This was until Polly Porter, whose family set up house alongside the forest border appeared into her life. They will become best friend, the girl will be given a name - Milly - and start having the life everyone has, the humans I mean. She will end up growing up, as everyone does out there, while her connection with nature will be for ever lost. 

It´s a story of longing for the outside world and of separation. Of breaking up genuine, natural ties for the sake of the human connection. One brutally excluded the other because it seems like the human time is by its very nature involves a limitation. 

The Girl from Glocken´s Glen by the award winning novelist and playwrighter Andy Wolf is an inspiring chidren story told in verses. The illustrations by the Canadian-based Chad Leduc may look a bit Gothic, at least for my taste, but they do add a visual nostalgic touch to the story. In the end, there are a good match, the author´s words and the illustrations.

I´ve read lately many books aimed for a young and very young audience with an open nature-oriented message, which do resonate with a human soul nurturing to exist besides and separated from the technicalities of all kinds. Especially after such a hard year for children who were completely uprooted from their daily schedule and very often confined to the unfamiliar four-wall houses, out of their friends and playgrounds, such messages resonate strongly and meaningfully. Reconnecting with nature during those times is a soothing activity and life goal in general. However, one may try to avoid too much ideal mental projections of the nature, as I bet none of us will be able to survive too long in the forest. We are supposed to be in a different place, evolution-wise.  

Rating: 4 stars

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

Book Review: Mitsuba by Aki Shimazaki

 

Every time I am confronted with the reality of Japanese relationships, and dating in general, I am baffled. Although I am used with a kind of dating which is mostly oriented to marriage and family, in the Japanese case the practicalities are so bizarre that sometimes it is not my undestanding which lacks, but the acceptance of this kind of relationships.

Mitsuba by the Canada-based Japanese author Aki Shimazaki is the story of a young successful business man, Takashi Aoki. Shortly before being sent abroad by his company, while improving his French language skills, he meets Yuko Tanase, apparently an independent woman, in her early 20s, single, and which may look as a good match. The courtship lasts a couple of weeks at the end of which he is convinced that they should get engaged to be married. However, she will leave him for the rich son of the bank with whom the company has a long lasting business relationship. Instead of being sent to France, where Yuko Tanase was supposed to relocate with her new husband, he is assigned the mission of creating an affiliate in Canada, at Montréal.

Actually, it is more to the story than this failed love story, as it reveals the complex business/work loyalties and the everyday social pressures in the post-war Japan, when the WWII defeat was lucratively changed into the ambition of becoming a victor on ´peaceful´ domains, business being one of them. 

It´s a short novel, with a remarkable sociological value, about Japanese society and the relationship stories where love is the last element who really count - yes, I know that love is a very modern invention, but still, the brutality of the interest-based relationship is too transactional even for the less romantic humans like the one writing those lines. Therefore, I´ve read it more with the curiosity of the sociologist/anthropologist than with the excitement of the literary critic. Not that the writing is bad, it´s just clean, using properly the words for telling a story with a journalistic accuracy.

Aki Shimazaki has herself a business background and started to learn French in her 40s. She currently lives in Canada and writes in French.

Rating: 3 stars

Book Review: Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

I deeply hate to compare one book to another, especially when one of the terms of the comparison refers to a book that I haven´t enjoy for many reasons. However, such comparisons are useful for realizing the qualitative differences between a literary approach and/or authenticity and another. 

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, that I had access to in audiobook format in the reading of the bilingual actress Inés del Castillo, wipped away all my previous experience with a book dealing with South-American immigration to America. Patricia Engel is a dual national Colombian-American, the first woman to receive Colombia´s national prize in literature.

Elena and Mauro leaved their guerilla-torned Colombia for America. They are looking for opportunities and a better life but the turn of events and personal issues will separate them for 15 years. Mauro will be deported and will leave Elena and their two other children on their own, she keeping doing her cleaning jobs as a undocumented immigrant. Their other child, Talia, born in America, will be sent back to Bogota. 

It is a classical immigration story, with two adults never able to do more than menial jobs, but with their children being offered a better future, in an America ´at war with itself´. America, that country which haunts the minds and hopes of all those looking for better beginnings. An America undergoing the 11/9 which - happily - does not occupy the stereotypical space usually devoted to this tragic moment in the recent US history as being blamed for all bads - as the immigration policies were ever friendly anyway - which keeps being a dream, that dream, despite its brutal way of treating foreigners.

Infinite Country delivers a story which is beautiful in its simplicity, with characters that do have their own individuality and reality. It develops a compassionate story as well, deeply rooted in the Colombian reality, which turns often to the mythical register of tradition and fantastic stories. While reading/listening, you feel the weight of the moment, the genuine violence which does not operate en masse, but permeates the everyday peace because there is no way out.

The book does not aim at revealing anything, just telling a story, one particular story, of Elena and Mauro and their children. I appreciate simplicity, especially when it seems to be such a difficult skill to attain, particularly in the literary world. 

Rating: 3.5 stars