Monthly Archives: February 2020

Book Review: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

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This book is a difficult one to review as I have mixed feelings about it. I’d read The Natural Way of Things which won the Stella Prize and was blown away by it.

The Weekend is absolutely nothing like it. The story is about three seventy-something- year- old women who come together over Christmas to clear out the house of their dead friend. The relationship of the women is complex, as it is long, having known each other for more than forty years. Jude is an accomplished restaurant manager, Wendy, a published academic who owns a very old dog, called Finn and Adele is an ageing and out of work actress. Sylvie, the dead friend is the connection for the four and we are taken on a journey tackling their losses, loves, friendship, grief and betrayal.

It’s well-written and the setting on the north coast of N.S.W. is divine. Yet I struggled to find any real connection to any of the women. They didn’t seem like good friends, instead they each came across as needy and selfish, barely tolerant of each other. I didn’t understand why they were indeed friends. Jude was an odd character. Confident, well organised, supposedly self-reliant earning her own money yet she’d been a kept mistress for twenty years. The dog, Finn dominated the story a lot in an almost repetitive way. Wendy, seemed a bit dithering and Adele was narcissistic and self-absorbed, more like a teenager than a mature woman and that was a challenge for me to accept.

Yet, I was compelled along as it was an easy read. The second half of the book was almost like watching a dramatic play and I could easily visualise it. Perhaps this was intentional, perhaps not. In the end, I didn’t love it but I didn’t mind it.

Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

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It’s taken a few weeks to find the words to describe how powerful this book is. And even so I probably won’t do it full justice.

Girl, Woman, Other written by Bernadine Evaristo, together with The Testaments by Margaret Attwood, won the Booker Prize in 2019.

This book, set mostly in Britain contains twelve different stories in various timelines about a group of diverse women, most of whom are black. The reader is taken on a journey with each of the women and we learn about them and their lives with an almost brutal honesty.  This book is a social commentary of what it means to be black and a woman in modern Britain and predictably it’s not always pretty.

There’s Grace in 1905 an orphan, Winsome in 1953, a migrant from Barbados, Amma is 1980 who sets up a feminist theatre. Then there’s Carole, the high flyer in 2008 who turns her back on her Nigerian heritage, and Morgan, once known as Megan in 2017 navigating her way to independence.

These are almost stand-alone short stories except that there is a connection which comes together with an incredible last chapter via Penelope who bears the brunt of family secrets in a calamitous way.

The characters grow on the reader quickly because the writing is succinct, poetic yet direct. The absence of regular punctuation such as full stops and capital letters to start sentences doesn’t call attention to itself as the reader gets very used to the easy to read style within a few short pages.

Amma misses her daughter now she’s away at university

not the spiteful snake that slithers out of her tongue to hurt her mother, because in Yazz’s world young people are the only ones with feelings

but she misses the Yazz who stomps about the place

who rushes in as if a hurricane’s just blown into her room –

 

A word of warning: The connection between the many characters can be confusing and a map would have helped on occasion to prompt the memory. But if you read the book quickly, it shouldn’t worry you too much. And it is very easy to read. But my advice is to take it slowly and saviour it as each word earns its place.

This one is an important book to read, enlightening us all about the history of the black women’s experience in Britain.

I simply loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

Movie Review: The Professor and the Madman

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Most of us have or have had an Oxford English Dictionary.  The Professor and the Madman relays the fascinating story about how the Oxford Dictionary came to be compiled during the mid-nineteenth century.

Professor James Murray, (played by Mel Gibson) is tasked with the enormous job to edit the floundering English dictionary begun by Oxford University’s Fredrick Furnivall (played by Steve Coogan). Murray is given seven years and seeks help from the public across the Commonwealth by placing notes inside books requesting help with words and their origins.

William Minor, (played by Sean Penn) an ex-soldier having been a surgeon in the American Civil War is in a psychiatrist hospital in England. He’s there because he killed a man who he believed was someone haunting him from his days in the war. He receives a book and rises to the task to provide help to Murray by providing over 10,000 entries.

Because Minor helped save a guard’s life, he is allowed privileges one of which is bringing his books into the Institution. His brilliant mind is astonishing even to Murray who fights hard to get Minor’s work acknowledged against vast opposition by the University. Minor tries to make amends with the murdered man’s wife who is left with six children and a relationship of forgiveness evolves.

Based on fact it is an incredible story of two brilliant minds coming together to accomplish a monumental task in a short amount of time. In further research I found the dictionary actually took seventy years to compile. Astonishing.

Mel Gibson bought the rights to the book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester in 1998 and the film was caught up in legal battles over creative differences.

The way mental health was dealt with in the 1800’s was hair raising and was covered very well in the film. Sean Penn was amazing as the anguished and haunted Minor.

The only difficulty I had was in the Scottish accents by Gibson, which was incredibly authentic but so much so that it was hard to understand some of the dialogue. Likewise, I found the same for Penn. This could well have been the quality of the sound in the movie theatre I visited rather than the quality of the sound of the film. Nevertheless, it wasn’t bad enough that I didn’t know what was going on.

It’s a very enjoyable movie and I learnt a lot. For all of you word lovers, check it out and for everyone see it anyway. It opens Feb 20 in Australia.