Holiday reading

After the high thrills and spills of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I returned to the relative tea cake safety of Agatha Christie with Death in the Clouds (a Hercule Poirot Mystery). In capable hands with Agatha and her charming gentleman Hercule, evil is often tempered with a touch of romance and a (ahhh) happy ending.

Then on to another well loved author, Banana Yoshimoto, 2005, Hardboiled, Hard Luck, translated by Michael Emmerich. Faber and Faber. Dreamscapes, ghosts, reminiscences, hospitals and strange travels.

I was used to this scene by now, though from time to time I would still see it in my dreams, and somehow the shock I felt on waking was much worse than what I experienced when she was actually lying there before me. p93

Peter Carey, 2009, Parrot and Olivier in America, Hamish Hamilton.

Two characters travelling from revolution era France to America. One a youthful nobleman (Olivier) sent away on the pretext of studying American Prison system, the other an older man engaged to serve him (Parrot). The exchanges between the old and new worlds and the two main characters give the narrative full scope to tell their stories. Parrot and Olivier chafe against each other and through their disagreements and assumptions create a comedy of the bigger events that happen to and around them; democracy, love, courtship, the good life. Happenings are told in at least two overlapping non linear voices. The book is populated with glorious characters. The slipperiness of their names for each other is joyful. Lord Migraine, indeed...

Therefore, in company with a fishwife and a press of burghers, I strolled out on the jetty and peered into the mist and coal smoke which had democratically arranged its factions in stripes of brown and white, the whole illuminated most tremulously. From this spectral effluence appeared the Phoenix, looming high, klaxon loud. On the starboard side, as it drifted silently toward the dock, stood what might have been the emblem of America: frockcoated, very tall and straight, with a high stovepipe hat tilted back from his high forehead. I thought, This is the worst vision of democracy - illiterate, hard as wood, overdressed, uncultured - with that physiognomy I had earlier observed in the portrait of the awful Andrew Jackson - a face divided proudly in three equal parts: hairline to eyebrows, eyebrows to nose, lips to chin. /In other words, the face of one who will never give any weight to the wisdom of his betters. To see the visage of the president is to understand that the farmer and the mechanic are the lords of the New World. p275

Anita Desai, 1977, Fire on the Mountain, King Penguin.

As she passed the Tibetan shawl sellers who had spread out their bright, cheap woolen ware on the street, she looked at their babies and puppies gambolling together in the middle of the road with a fine carelessness that she envied. There was a zest about them, a warmth of life's fires burning brightly in their shabby, grubby bodies... p 136