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

A Woman in Jerusalem

A.B. Yehoshua

translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Halban . London. 2006

After reading 'Friendly Fire' by the same author I've been looking forward to reading his earlier books. This one covers slightly similar territory; the almost metaphysical ramifications to life and terrorism in current day Israel. People are overcome with powerful unexplained emotions; snappy, moody and hysterical (in a really good way). Hysteria with subtlety and beauty.

"That's love's secret" the weasel continued as the vehicle slowed to take the hairpin bends. "There is no formula. Each person has to find the secret for himself. That's why Eros is neither god nor man. He's a daimon, thick-skinned, unwashed, barefoot, homeless, and poor - yet he links the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal..."p.157

Curriculum Vitae

Yoel Hoffmann

translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole. A new Directions Book. 2009

She was always right because by nature a woman is better constructed. She's music and she's the musician, and the man is little more than the person who stands at the musician's side and turns the pages. [section 23]

I've forgotten who the Huguenots were ( I think they were French Protestants). But without a doubt they clung to the earth so that Suzy Ortal- Kipnis could study them. [section 67]

Memoir in snatches mixed with imagination passages. Rambling in parts, other times clear and funny. Imagine Marcel Proust as a Zionist writing Habuki.

The Broken Shore

Peter Temple 2005 The Text Publishing Company

They ordered bacon and eggs a the truckstop on the edge of Cromarty. An anorexic girl with a moustache and a pink-caked pimple between her eyebrows brought the food. The eggs lay on tissue-paper bread, the yokes small and pasta coloured. Narrow pink streaks of meat could be seen in the grey pig fat. p 199

The Pedant in the Kitchen

Julian Barnes 2003 Atlantic Books , London

Julian is the pedant making fun of his cooking mishaps in a book of short stories. Funny, witty, relate able. I'm now a happy owner of a pressure cooker. Will no doubt have many of my own tales to tell.

(8) Never replace your tatty old Jane Grigson or Elizabeth David with a new version containing exactly the same text, even if it does now have picture (see 1). You will never use it and will go back to the original tatty paperback because it has your marginal notes and you rightly feel comfortable about it.p29

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Alain De Botton

Hamish Hamilton 2009

The flat is quiet and guilty. Nothing here moved while, on the banks of the Thames, the accountant was meeting with IT and striving to keep his temper with an intern. He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorsefully tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear motional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life. p266

We walked for three hours in the rain until the line took us to the edge of the town of Sittingbourne, where we decided to stop in the hope of finding something sweet to eat. It was a place where, as often and inexplicably happens in small communities, everyone had chosen to enter the same profession - in this case, hairdressing - as a result of which most enterprises appeared to be close to bankruptcy. Luckily, we found a teashop advertising homemade cakes and what was termed an Old World atmosphere, and took our seats at the back. How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence. A woman wearing a historically styled bonnet arrived with a opt of tea. 'I'll let one of you be mum,' she declared - which for a time prevented either Ian or me from taking the initiative. p208

I was told there'd be cake

Essays by Sloane Crosley. 2008. Riverhead Books

Another reading while turning pancakes book. Just right for my current short attention span. Sloane writes about her evil bully of a boss, her level of vegetarianism weakened by sashimi, origins of her name, being cornered into bridesmaid duties by a forgotten high school friend, a collection of toy ponies she wheedles out of her boyfriends then feels pathetic about, being a slack volunteer at the butterfly exhibit of the Museum. Her humour is dry and the range of references is very young-lady-in-New York.

The subplot of modern marriage assumes that a wedding is the crown jewel of any best friendship, a time when otherwise rational women are legally permitted to misplace their minds, and treat their friend like heel-skin-shaving employees. This is something we tolerate of our closest pals, but I had barely spoken to this woman in a decade....It's a wedding, not an episode of This Is Your Life. p146