Orange Prize – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE LIZARD CAGE by Karen Connelly /2011/the-lizard-cage-by-karen-connelly/ /2011/the-lizard-cage-by-karen-connelly/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 15:27:25 +0000 /?p=19278 Book Quote:

“It’s hard to catch a lizard with your bare hands.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 23, 2011)

Burmese politics, including their political prison system, is harrowing and vicious. Not a lot has changed in the past fifty years or so, other than changing the name to Myanmar. Until very recently, they were under military rule and they are still one of the least developed nations in the world. Karen Connelly has not only written a striking and engaging tour de force about this area, but she has brought a country’s atrocities into focus that needs attention badly, and help from developed nations. However, she hasn’t forgotten the novelist’s rule of thumb to entertain. It doesn’t read like a diatribe or soapbox, it reads like an exquisite, dramatic story of friendship, endurance, compassion, love, and faith in the human condition.

Teza is a young man of (approximately) thirty who is revered by freedom fighters in Burma (Myanmar) for his political songs that expose the corrupt government, and give hope and spiritual fuel to the people. He is in solitary confinement in his seventh year of a twenty-year sentence for this “crime.” The conditions in this prison are something beyond harsh and cruel–absolutely appalling, savage–with lice, scurvy, rickets, bed bugs, and other illnesses invading the prison population. Also, the jailers frequently abuse the prisoners physically.

Teza has become adept at his Buddhist meditation practices and has a strange but beautiful relationship with the lizards, spiders, and ants that share his cell. The most desired item for prisoners, besides food–as he is practically starved by the warden and guards–is pen and paper. If caught with it, it adds another several years to your sentence. Teza is therefore in isolation with nothing but the creatures, a dirty mat, stinking water, inedible food, and his mind. He lives by the power of his heart and mind. Teza knows how to be free in this cage, and his subtle power over the jailers, a different kind of power, is fascinating to comprehend.

Little Brother is a twelve-year-old orphan whose father worked for the prison until he died. This young boy, who doesn’t read or write, knows nothing outside the prison, and has no desire to leave. He is afraid of the outside world. He spends his days running errands for the guards or helping the top-tier prisoners–the ones with lots of pull and power–get extras of food. He is beloved by the few that have half a heart, but generally treated as sewerage by those in power.

The story moves in graceful, gradual, lyrical strokes, bringing the world of the inmates and the jailers to a taut climax. The building relationship between Teza and Little Brother is the most weighty of all. It works brick by brick, like the building of a cell, layer upon layer, surging into an intense, suspenseful, atypical thriller. There are hints of Papillon,(although that story was non-fiction), but this is not a jailbreak thriller. But, like Papillon, it has much to do with the life inside the mind, and the cultivation of formidable inner strength, and the bonds between people who are seemingly so vastly different, and yet connected.

If you only read a handful of books this year, do read this one. Besides its presence as a quietly exciting, non-formulaic suspense thriller, it will invite and heighten interest in this culture and this country. You will thoroughly inhabit these characters and story, page by page; the quintessence of fine literature is actualized in the characters of Teza and Little Brother. Finally, this an unforgettable story that lives in, breaks, and mends the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 20 readers
PUBLISHER: Spiegel & Grau (April 8, 2008)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Karen Connelly
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: 

Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/the-lizard-cage-by-karen-connelly/feed/ 1 THE ROAD HOME by Rose Tremain /2009/road-home-by-rose-tremain/ Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:22:14 +0000 /?p=6856 Book Quote:

“…it was known across the world: the English were lucky. Well, thought Lev, I’m going to their country now, and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. I’ve left Auror, and that leaving of my home was hard and bitter, but my time is coming”.

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 16, 2009)

The eminent, award-winning British Author, Rose Tremain, has written another lovely book. The Road Home is about Lev, an eastern European immigrant and his travails and successes in the big city of London. Lev is a widower who has left his child with his mother in Auror, a small town in eastern Europe. Lev hopes to seek his fortune in London, expecting to make a lot of money and be able to send it home to support his family. He has arrived in London with about 100 pounds in his pocket and nothing else. On the bus that takes him from his small town of Auror to the big city, he is seated next to a woman named Lydia who shares her hard boiled eggs with Lev and gives him advice. She is fairly fluent in English and expects to get a job as a translator in England. Lev is Candide-like in his expectations, not really understanding the social or economic influences that will come to play in his life.

Once in London, Lev spends 20 pounds of his 100 pounds for a Bed and Breakfast his first night, naively realizing that the one hundred pounds won’t last him very long. He walks into a few establishments asking for work and winds up meeting a man named Ahmed who runs a mid-eastern restaurant. Ahmed hires Lev to distribute fliers at a very small wage. Ahmed, though, is nice to Lev and talks to him about being an immigrant in England. This is a recurrent theme in the book. Despite the difficulty of the immigrant experience, Lev runs into several people who are kind to him and take the time to help him with the huge transition he is facing.

Lev loves to drink vodka, any time any place. He reminisces about his friend Rudi, his best friend, back in Auror. Rudi has a “Tchevy,” an old second-hand Chevrolet that he loves like a baby. Lev has wonderful and humorous stories that he shares about his adventures with Rudi and the “Tchevy.” In fact, Lev is a dreamer and very caught up in the past in many ways, not always nostalgically like with memories of Rudi and the “Tchevy.” Lev thinks a lot about his dead wife, Marina, who he loved very much, and these thoughts haunt him. Marina has been dead for several years now and Lev has yet to have another relationship with a woman. Lev also worries about his daughter and mother, subsisting in Auror.

Lev finds himself sleeping on the streets for a few nights, down and humiliated. He decides to call Lydia for help in finding housing and a job. Lydia left Lev her mobile number but Lev was reluctant to call her, not wanting her to think he was interested in her romantically. Lydia does help Lev secure a job as a dishwasher in a posh restaurant and find a room to rent in a nice neighborhood. However, his relationship with Lydia becomes difficult because Lydia wants more from Lev than just a friendship. Lev has difficulty coping with the challenges he faces with Lydia and frequently behaves impulsively and angrily.

Lev thrives in his restaurant job, realizing that he loves the atmosphere and wants to learn how to cook. He is a very hard worker who also is kind to other employees who are having difficulties with their job. He is very attracted to Sophie, one of the restaurant employees. Lev eventually winds up getting promoted to vegetable cutter and tries to memorize as many of the recipes that he can. When things don’t go as planned in his relationship with Sophie, Lev has to leave this job and finds himself hired as a cook at an old-age home where he has done some volunteer work. He is also working as a waiter in a Greek restaurant – – two full-time jobs. He has a secret dream and this sustains him as he works grueling hours to save money.

Lev’s housing situation in London goes well. He and his Landlord, Clancy, become friends as well as tenant and renter. Clancy is a plumber who is recently divorced and drinking too much. He is not allowed any time with his daughter except for supervised visits. Lev and Sophie help Clancy to arrange time with his daughter and they all go to the beach together. Clancy and Lev spend hours drinking and talking about their pasts, their present and their dreams.

One of Lev’s primary difficulties in London is the culture. He goes to a play about incest and becomes incensed at the theme – – to the point of rage. He thinks about his lovely child back in Auror and can’t imagine someone wanting to have sex with their own child. He gets into a fight with someone at the theater and ends up getting into trouble with the police. There is a deep rage in Lev that tends to surface when he is faced with cultural predicaments which he doesn’t understand and for which he has no coping skills.

The book is beautifully written with wonderful character development. When I finished the book, Lev, Lydia, Sophie, Marina, Clancy, and Rudi all seemed like real people to me. Ms. Tremain has a gift for fleshing out her characters. I also appreciate her hard look at the problems faced by immigrants and the way that they frequently misconstrue language and cultural differences. The book leaves nothing hanging. By the end, all the elements come together beautifully and we are privy to Lev’s dream. This is indeed a wonderful novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 32 readers
PUBLISHER: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (May 21, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE: The Road Home
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Rose Tremain
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Trespass

And more Orange Prize winners:

Small Island by Andrea Levy

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Bibliography:

]]> THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver /2009/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:39:08 +0000 /?p=6758 Book Quote:

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (DEC 10, 2009)

Harrison Shepherd’s odyssey through three tumultuous decades of the 20th century begins in a lonely boyhood between two worlds – America and Mexico. It continues through the Depression and World War II, and culminates in the ugly, surreal hysteria of the Red Scare.

Along the way Shepherd mixes plaster for the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, becomes a confidant of his colorful wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, serves as secretary to the exiled Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, and becomes a celebrity in his own right. Readers will bond with his kind soul, his boundless curiosity, his youthful exuberance and his self-deprecating wit as he experiences the best and worst his times have to offer.

An ambitious, tightly organized novel, Kingsolver’s latest is mostly assembled from journals Shepherd began keeping as a boy – journals in which the pronoun “I” is seldom used. Archivist’s notes, letters to and from friends and enemies, newspaper articles (both real and fictional), and even congressional testimony offer added perspectives.

Uprooted from his suburban Virginia home at age 12 in 1929 and transplanted to an isolated island hacienda in his mother’s native Mexico, Shepherd pretty much brings himself up, making himself useful in the kitchen and spending hours learning to navigate a mysterious underwater cave (the first lacuna). With his feckless mother flitting (downhill) from lover to lover, Harrison’s schooling is sparse, but his reading is prodigious.

When his mother takes up with a man from Mexico City, Shepherd avoids a Catholic school for hopeless cases by putting his bread-making skills to work mixing plaster for Diego Rivera. Eventually his American father is induced to take him back – but only to put him in a Washington boarding school.

Ostracized by the other students, he takes up with an older boy whose formal education has been interrupted by the Depression, but whose knowledge of the world is as fascinating as it is mystifying. Most of this tortuous interlude is expunged (the relevant journal destroyed in 1947), and the reader will surmise that Shepherd’s budding homosexuality has something to do with that.

Returning to Mexico, he joins the Rivera-Kahlo household as a domestic and is treated as a servant or a member of the family as it suits them. Ardent communists, the flamboyant artists are all for workers’ rights – as long as it doesn’t impinge on the smooth workings of their household.

Trotsky takes refuge with them and Shepherd takes to him immediately – a kindly, fatherly, unflappable figure – pursuing his cause despite Stalin’s death threats and rabid persecution by the press. After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd flees Mexico for the U.S., the household in upheaval and under suspicion.

Settling in Asheville, N.C., Shepherd, not yet 30, becomes an agoraphobic recluse, his sexuality carefully closeted, his exuberance taking flight in his writing. His first novel – a swashbuckling tale of Aztec downfall – is an immediate bestseller. He struggles to reconcile his horror of the limelight with his joy in success.

As fame begins to get out of hand, he hires a sympathetic widow, Violet Brown, who becomes his amanuensis and eventually his archivist. A countrywoman with a practical turn of mind, Brown nudges him into the world and discovers a wider world for herself.

Her loyalty and the hysteria of the anti-communist tidal wave drive the last section of the book, while Shepherd guards himself with dry wit and naivety, his privacy battered by rumor, half-truths and lies.

The lacuna – a gap in the whole – directs the flow of this vivid, atmospheric story. From the start Shepherd shapes himself by what’s missing. An absent father and flighty mother make him resourceful. He notes the strangeness of the world around him, makes friends with people unlike himself. He attaches himself by being helpful and acquires skills that come in useful throughout his life.

Sources outside the journal fill in some of the things he leaves out – from book reviews to hints at his sexual life – as well as pointing out the sometimes yawning abyss between truth and perception.

The book is as demanding as it is captivating. The form sometimes leaves a distance (yes, a gap) between the reader and the protagonist, which can be exasperating. And Kingsolver’s left-leaning politics are almost shrill in their insistence on outrage.

These are small quibbles, however, and Kingsolver’s mastery of the partnership between big themes and personal engagement should please her fans and win new ones.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 620 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Barbara Kingsolver
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

And if you like this novel, you may also like:

Bibliography:

Poetry:

Non-fiction:

]]> THE BOY NEXT DOOR by Irene Sabatini /2009/boy-next-door-by-irene-sabatini/ /2009/boy-next-door-by-irene-sabatini/#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:02:29 +0000 /?p=5529 Book Quote:

“There goes Mandela looking bemused in his trademark paisley-print outfit. Twenty years of incarceration and look, look where I find myself, his look seems to say, what I’ve been missing all those years cooped up in Robben Island.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 11, 2009)

We meet the protagonist of The Boy Next Door, Lindiwe Bishop, when she is just fourteen. The white woman next door, Mrs. McKenzie, mother of Ian, has just burned to death. Set afire. It is Africa in the 1980s and Robert–Bob–Mugabe has just taken his oath, “… his hand firmly on the Bible…and so help me God…Zimbabwe was born.” This is the stage set, at the intersection of culture and identity (personal and national), in the opening pages of this delicate and beautiful debut novel.

That night Lindiwe lies in bed. “I wanted to find out low long you would have to burn to become just bone. I wanted to know if Mrs. McKenzie had burnt all night while I had been sleeping. I tried to think what I had been dreaming of. I wanted to know if something had happened in my dreams that should have made me wake up, draw back the curtain and see…what? Would I have seen her? Heard her? Smelt her? I tried to remember when was the last time I had seen her live, but I couldn’t see it, that exact moment.”

Within days the son, Ian, is carted off to prison. It is reported that he confessed to the murder. A year later he is released on lack of evidence. He returns home and Lindiwe quietly observes him from across her fence. “He came home today. We all saw him. He stood just looking up at the house. Mummy said he looked like a criminal. I didn’t think she was right about that.” Sabatini builds from this premise a striking relationship between the young Zimbabwean Lindiwe and the young white neighbor.

Lindiwe grows accustom to his presence and soon he is giving her an occasional lift to school, though out of her parent’s view. A friendship blossoms. Through the course of this novel we follow the interweaving path of Lindiwe and Ian for almost twenty years. Along the way we monitor the birth of Zimbabwe and watch it collapse and creep to the edge of civil war. We observe the destruction of families, specifically Lindiwe’s, torn apart by infidelity and political intrigue. Was her father a Rhodesian army officer and did he partake in atrocities? We watch as white racism is reversed and then surpassed in a nascent reign of terror that includes fleeing whites and politically opposing blacks. Mugabe, a distant, though fascinating character throughout the novel, strengthens his grip on the country and eventually includes Ian in his grasp. AIDs is evidenced and begins its horrific march across the continent. Yet, through it all, we trust the voice of Lindiwe, so masterfully does Sabatini draw her. We trust her observations. Her voice rings true. The reader is carried along in this narration in a deceptively fluid and deft manner. It is hard to believe this is Sabatini’s first novel, she is so adept.

Coming of age tales, novels of Africa, stories of AIDS and political malfeasance, all themes here, are well worn paths. Yet cliches are avoided in the novel. There is so much hope and beauty seen through the eyes of Lindiwe that we are never burdened by the complexities and horror of her life in a country spinning out of control. Though families and lives are destroyed, we are never set adrift in despair. Her voice is unburdened, her story one of control and aspiration.

Lindiwe and Ian survive the years. He becomes a photojournalist and gains international repute with his images from South Africa. She works for NGOs, and goes to University. While all about them crumbles they carry on. When they meet again after years of separation, they pick up effortlessly where they left off, like the two kids they once where. Ian spots her from a car and pulls over.

“If you want, I can drive,” she offers.
“You can drive?” Ian asks.
“Yes, don’t look so shocked.”
“I have to get used to you like this.”
“Like what?”
“Grown.”

Lindiwe has a secret and when Ian discovers it, their lives become inextricably fused. Their mixed-race relationship is subject to forces that are designed to drive them apart, even make them enemies. Yet, through trial and challenge, one after the other, they return, one to the other. Eventually they escape and set upon a new world and a new life, perhaps to be free and unburdened.

There is so much that is horrible about the world in which these two exist. Too often, modern fiction of this type bludgeons us with scenes of aching despair. But not here. Yes, their horrible world is portrayed. And yes there are scenes that we fear will creep up on us and pounce, yet the narration stops short of that. We are allowed to breath in the grace of these lives laced with hope and commitment. I look forward to Sabatini’s long career. She has much to say, and she says it so wonderfully.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 16 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Irene Sabatini
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More African novels:

More coming-of-age in difficult times:

Bibliography:

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