This slim volume contains a short story, The Shawl, and a novella, Rosa. In The Shawl, Rosa is in a Nazi concentration camp with her niece, Stella, and her baby daughter Magda. The novella finds Rosa living in Florida decades later.
It’s impossible to discuss the two stories without explaining what happens in The Shawl so if you wish to avoid spoilers I suggest you stop here. Suffice to say: The Shawl is an utterly heartbreaking masterpiece and you should read it.
This is a short but nevertheless immensely famous book, with a huge reputation. It’s clearly heavily influenced (and this is a good thing) by Laclos’ wonderful Les Liaisons dangereuses, and operates in a similar demi-monde. However, it lacks the malice and profound cynicism of Laclos (a bad thing).
I very much liked it, but I don’t really have much to say about it. My only real objection to Chéri is the rather perfumed, satiny and cloying atmosphere of the boudoir. I detest that flouncy shit. Otherwise it is a masterfully written story of love, desire, commitment, wish-fulfillment and loss.
The Myth of Supply & Demand was lent to me by a friend, who knows, through another friend, its author, Michelle Keill. The book was pressed into my hands to the tune of, “I can’t wait to hear what you think”… but I’m willing to bet its author can go a lifetime without that little treat.
This one was a stinker. Stale dialogue, haphazard narrative, a predictable plotline, overuse of adverbs and – O sin of writerly sins! – a protagonist I didn’t so much dislike as want to mow down with the nearest high-end sport-utility vehicle (pretentious, see, just like him), The Myth of Supply & Demand seriously failed to impress.
It was as a result of a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation with a chatty Irish staff member at Foyles that I dug out my copy of Eagles’ Nest. I bought it ages ago, read the first couple of pages, noted a distinct flavour of Kafka and put it on my already over-stuffed shelf. Now I had the impetus to read more.
Sadly, it’s a pretty terrible book, which is entirely derivative. But, worse than that, it’s actually incompetently derivative. The flavour of Kafka that I had detected on first picking it up was there alright, but rather than being influenced by him, Kavan merely attempted – and failed, miserably – to imitate him.
This is the fourth in my series of five reviews of short fiction collections. Close Range is Annie Proulx’s first collection of Wyoming Stories — spare tales of lives lived and lost in a harsh and lonely land.
One of the themes of these reviews is what I believe to be the very art of short fiction: choosing the few words that say the most. More than any other writer today, Proulx does this. She is a master of dialect and cadence, shading in a character’s background, subculture, secrets and losses with just a sentence of dialogue.
Proulx has released three collections of Wyoming Stories, but this is the best-known, largely because it includes the short story Brokeback Mountain. I have been a fan of Proulx’s since long before the film version of this lonely tale was released, but I hadn’t yet delved into her short fiction when I saw the film. Proulx may have won a Pulitzer for The Shipping News, but to my mind, her talent shines most in the short story form. And of all her short fiction, Close Range is the collection I love best.
Alice Munro’s 11th book, Runaway, is the subject of the second in a series of five reviews of short fiction collections.
Runaway is heavy with accolades: it won The Giller Prize, was a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, and made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Award. For so long a Canadian treasure, it seems that Alice Munro is at last getting the international recognition she so deserves.
I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.
Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about three chapters and then dips down into autopilot. Mansell makes an engaging male character (saddled with the hideous lothario name of Johnny LaVenture), makes him warm and witty and generally nice, and then makes him hop around until our heroine deigns to fall into his arms. I know this is always going to happen and it’s not rocket science, but it helps if the story along the way makes its fantasy vaguely realistic, and this may as well be actual Mamma Mia! instead, in which case God help us all.
Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.
Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.
Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.
Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.
The latest instalment of Charlaine Harris’s chatty, witty and hugely enjoyable Sookie Sackhouse novels comes with a clonking great fib on its front cover.
Having spawned the just as enjoyable hit TV series, True Blood, the TV cast adorn the book’s cover despite, in this universe, one of them being dead and another not existing.
But no matter. What will matter is fans of the series launching into this one which would be a colossal mistake given this is number 10: Sookie’s story is miles ahead from the TV series, featuring fairies, werepanthers and others supernatural beasties that haven’t so much as shown up on the box yet.
So while fans of the show should head for the earlier novels (not to worry, they’re so crack-like you’ll rocket through them in a week), Dead in The Family is absolute bliss for established Sookie nuts.
This is a relief more than anything. Harris is a brilliant writer, but ten books is ten books and I was gnawing my nails with worry that, by now, she might have been hit by burnout and expectation (Janet Evanovich’s wonderful Stephanie Plum novels stopped being wonderful around book 10 and yet – grimace – they keep coming).
