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Book Review: Table for Two by Amor Towles

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I’ve read two of Towles’ last three novels and was thoroughly engrossed in his latest. Unusually I had expected a full length novel but instead what I got was a set of stories set in New York and a novella set in Los Angeles.

The stories ranged in size with the novella dominating the second half.

The New York stories were set early last century. A Russian couple accidently get a visa to escape the early days after the Russian revolution. Another tale tells of a bookseller who forges authors signatures and profits from the sale of the books. Then there  is a bootlegger illegally recording music in Carnegie Hall and a man who secretly figure skates in Central Park. Each story is beautifully told, almost fable-like with a moral dilemma. I enjoyed each of them although some were more touching than others.

The novella in Los Angelos follows a young lady called Eve who takes Olivia DeHavilland under her wing, protecting her from the movie business. Understandably this one is completely engrossing.

Towles captures the glamour and hardship of the era beautifully and of course it is very well written. Some of the stories stretch belief but either way they made for a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable read.

Book Review: Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

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I’m not too sure how I feel about this family drama story.

Three successful middle-class sisters, once close, split into destructive paths following the death of their sister, Nikki Blue. A year later, they receive an email from their mother telling them to come and look at Nikki’s thing because their family home in New York is to be sold.

The story is split into each sister’s point of view, how they grapple with the loss and the changed dynamic of their once close-knit family. The eldest Avery has been the glue keeping the sisters together in the absence of adequate parenting from their mother and alcoholic father.  She herself is a recovering addict, made good as a lawyer, married to a woman in England. Next is Bonnie, world champion boxer, then Nikki who is a teacher and the youngest, is Lucky an international supermodel.

There is a lot of telling rather than showing as we learn in intricate detail their background stories as individuals as well as their relationships with others and each other.

Besides grief, loss and love, themes of addiction in families is explored well as is the health issues surrounding endometriosis. Underlying it all is the question of what it is to be a sister and a mother. There is no real plot as such as the reader is taken on a journey with each sister’s reckoning of their grief and their exploration of the new family dynamic.

Families can be complicated and the Blue family is certainly that. I didn’t particularly warm to any of the characters, their grief or their behaviour, bad or otherwise. But I did want to see them succeed and the story arc for each character although predictable is what drove me to keep reading.

This slow-paced novel was well written but I was distracted by the constant interiority, sometimes repetitive and detailed anecdotes some of which did little to enhance understanding of character or place. It slowed the pace and struggled to hold my interest.

However, I did find the relationship between the sisters to be tender and heart-warming at times. The scene with Bonnie helping Lucky was particularly well handled giving a detailed insight into addiction.

The last quarter of the novel was more satisfactory as we were given insights into each sibling, their conflict and resolution. It’s  not a novel I loved but it was okay.

Book Review: Long Island by Colm Toibin

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This is a sequel to Brooklyn which I’d read many years ago. But if you haven’t read it or seen the movie,  Long Island remains strong enough to stand on its own.

In the novel, Brooklyn it tells the story of Eilis Lacey who migrated from Ireland to New York, and married Tony Fiorello an Italian American.

Long Island is set twenty years later where she lives in a separate house in a cul-de-sac where Tony’s three brothers families and his parents also live. She has raised a son and daughter and while the extended family is suffocating and controlling, she has learned to live a good life.  That is until a man knocks on her door to tell her that Tony has had an affair with the man’s wife who is now pregnant. The man tells her that he will not raise the child and when the time comes, will leave the baby on her doorstep.

This event sets off a story of family, secrecy, misunderstanding and forbidden love. Eilis goes back to Ireland to see her mother and faces Jim, the man she abandoned twenty years earlier. The repercussions are complex.

The relationships are complicated and the twists are many as the reader navigates and judges what Eilis should do. Indeed we put ourselves in her place. Why doesn’t she just leave Tony? The family dynamics are so controlling she’ll be cast out. Yet she is clear, the baby has nothing to do with her.

And what of Jim? He is having a secret relationship with Nancy ready to finally marry after losing Eilis twenty years earlier. When he runs into her, the dynamics between them are riveting. Will she end up with him or not?

Toibin’s voice is  unusual and it takes a little while to get used to the flow and internal dialogue. Yet the narrative works and draws you into each character understanding their foibles and their own dilemmas.

There are many layers to this story but one thing is certain, you won’t be able to put this one down.

Book Review: Wifedom by Anna Funder

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It seems everyone is talking about and reading this book. It has courted controversy, admiration and much discussion.

Wifedom was one for our book group and created quite a discussion about George Orwell the man, the writer, and the husband. What Anna Funder does superbly in this book is to put the meaning of what it is to be wife, front and centre and in particular what was to be George Orwell’s wife.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy, herself an Oxford scholar and poet marries George Orwell and Funder meticulously explores her impact and influence on George Orwells’ work as an author, in particular of Animal Farm and the later works, 1984.

Having read both novels many years ago they made a significant impact on my younger self. Understanding the story behind the works now gives me the impetus to read them again.

Funder’s research takes us behind the scenes of this married couple’s life in Spain when Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, his writing and his battle with tuberculosis. More importantly she sees Eileen’s own struggle, to bring in an income to support them, her heath struggles and her utter devotion to doing everything to support her husband’s art.

It’s completely fascinating as Funder draws on the patriarchal system not just in the 1930’s but in current day of unacknowledged work done by women everywhere.

Orwell comes out poorly. His behaviour could be put down to the patriarchal system of the day yet Funder shows us that he was a very poor excuse for a human being.

I wasn’t sure about Funder’s imposition of her own story, while interesting, hardly added much. I did appreciate the incredible research to bring about such an enlightening story about a woman who was truly amazing in her own short life.

Read this one for yourself and you’ll get what all the fuss is about.

Book Review: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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I’ve read most of Sally Rooney’s books and I think Intermezzo is her best so far.

However it may not be everyone’s taste as the paragraphs are long and meander and quotation marks aren’t used for dialogue which can be off putting. But if you persist, then you may just be as surprised as I was with this delightful novel about grief, loss and love.

The novel is centred around three main characters, two of whom are brothers, Ivan and Peter who have just lost their father. Theirs is a complicated relationship made more difficult by a ten year age gap and a divorced and remote mother. The third main character is Margaret, separated from her alcoholic husband who falls for twenty-two year old Ivan, a star chess player. Peter on the other hand as the older brother has his own issues as he navigates the loss of his father all while dealing with the love of two women.

It sounds like a complicated web of relationships and it is. What makes it so compelling is the characters. I stopped reading this one halfway through for two weeks while I was away and went back into not missing a beat as I was so invested in each character. Rooney is skilled at making you care enough to hope for each of them. It’s tender-hearted and beautifully written.

I really enjoyed this one. Give it a go.

Book Review: The Disappearing Season by Cienna Collins

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I’m only now just recovering enough to write a few words about this gripping and thrilling novel by Cienna Collins.

 With the aid of her sister, Georgia Wright escapes the clutches of violent and controlling Andreas to Far North Queensland. There she manages to start a new life as a nanny to young Reilly whose father, kind-hearted Daniel has a few issues of his own. Together with housekeeper Margie the family quickly embraces her.

Georgia handles the dynamics of the household, a spiteful ex-wife and makes friends with Nayla. However, Andreas has other ideas about letting her go and when a full-scale cyclone looms things get very interesting.

Collins cleverly alternates the chapters with background snippets about Georgia’s life with Andreas and this creates a slow building tension from the beginning. Like Georgia, we the reader are never quite settled and relaxed with her new life. The relationships she builds with Daniel, Reilly and Margie are touching and engaging. Indeed, all the characters are well drawn.  We are also privileged to be in Georgia’s head feeling every bit of her uncertainty and insecurity making sure we never entirely relax.

The description of the tropics is vivid and I felt like I was there or maybe since I was in chilly Melbourne, I just wished I was there.

 “The day’s torrid heat is yet to kick in and lift the overnight rain from the shrubs, drops large and glassy on russet and emerald leaves.”

The second half of the book is a heart-racer when things quickly spiral out of control as Georgia’s races to survive in the middle of a violent and deadly tropical cyclone.

The writing is beautiful and this page-turner never lets you be. An excellent read and highly recommended.

Thank you to the publisher for an advance copy and I leave this honest review voluntarily.

Book Review: Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this memoir about Flanagan’s family interspersed with their connection to war, Tasmania, colonialism and the birth of the atom bomb, but I liked it.

Flanagan takes us back in history to when his father was a POW arguing that if the atomic bomb hadn’t been dropped on Hiroshima he would never have been born.

It’s an interesting proposition as he takes us down the rabbit hole of the atom bomb’s invention due to an affair between the writer H G Wells with Rebecca West. Confused? He makes a compelling argument that Wells wrote a futuristic novel called The World Set free where he imagined the splitting of the atom, forecasting its impact as a weapon which would be used to kill hundreds of thousands. And that much is true.

Flanagan’s father was indeed a POW in Japan.  However, on a visit there Flanagan found little acknowledgment of that fact in Japanese history. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the war ended allowing Flanagan senior to be released.

Interestingly there were a further series of events:  physicist Leo Szilard discovered the nuclear chain reaction, a concept created because the man had read HG Wells’ novel The World Set Free.

Flanagan’s study of HG Wells’ writing correlates a link to the attempted genocide of Tasmanian aborigines, and of course we know the deep connection he has to Tasmania.

I loved the chain of events and was enthralled with the possibilities. I also deeply appreciated Flanagan’s own love  and grief for his father. Indeed he’s the man today because of his family and also because he has faced his own mortality after nearly drowning when he was young. If you’ve read any of Flanagan’s books you will know he has mined his own experiences and that of his family often into fictional narrative. This book will be all the more richer if you have read any of his works.

Likewise, this book has so much in it, I don’t think it’s possible to absorb it all in one reading because the themes are deep and thought provoking. I wondered about my own interesting family history and it certainly gets you thinking about who you might be because of where you’ve come from.

Loved this one.