The Submission by Amy Waldman

Many books, fiction and non-fiction, have been written about the horrific events that took place on 11 September 2001. In this incredible book, Amy Waldman has used the physical space created by the absence of the towers as the bedrock around which the novel centres; and outward from there, she explores the political and emotional state of America two years after the attacks.

The novel opens with a jury deliberating anonymous submissions for the creation of a memorial at the Twin Towers site. This has been going on for four months and it has been whittled down to two designs – The Void, backed by Ariana, a famous artist, and The Garden, backed by Claire Burwell, the beautiful grieving widow who represents the families who lost people in the attacks. Finally the decision is made and The Garden wins.

Relief all round now that the decision had been made, until the head of the jury opens the envelope with the architect’s name, which turns out to be Mohammad Khan, an American Muslim. When the note is passed around, reactions vary from ‘Oh‘ to ‘Jesus  fucking Christ! It’s a goddamn Muslim.”

So the first domino falls and the novel moves into the effects of the submission on different communities in New York. The head of the jury wants the Khan (Mo, as he is known to his friends) to withdraw his submission and drop out of the competition. Khan refuses to: he is highly ambitious, totally secular and wholly American. He is contentious, for example, he grows a full beard to test the American citizens. Claire supports his design in the belief that it could symbolise healing, others are unsure and some people are vehemently against it.

Divisive groups form: Save America From Islam; the Muslim American Co-ordinating Council, the Grieving Family Members, and different characters emerge around whom the novel builds. Sean Gallagher, who lost a brother in the attacks, becomes the unofficial leader for the families; he wants Khan to withdraw. Then there’s Asma Anwar, an illegal Bangladeshi, who lost her husband in the attacks – he was a cleaner – but because they were illegal aliens, she is not sure who to approach. The Muslim American Co-ordinating Council backs Khan but only on certain conditions. There’s also the beautiful Muslim lawyer, Laila Fathi, with whom Khan has an affair; as well as a sharp, trouble-causing female journalist.

Khan won’t back down; neither will he answer questions in an interview on the intentions and influences behind his design. They would not be being asked if he were not American, he insists. His refusal causes further ructions and speculation amongst the groups.

It is an intriguing read – beautifully written with a sensitivity towards the subject, but with not glorifying it, not taking sides in any way. I have read other reviews where the reader has not liked it, but I think it is well researched and written. It has an underlying tension throughout, as though another attack could happen, or a murder. It made me think about the subject a great deal, and wonder whether America has become more tolerant in any way.

In reality, a similar method was adopted for submissions and, out of five thousand submissions, a man called Michael Arad won for his design of reflective pools. As he is Jewish, that caused a bit of a stink as well, so perhaps America hasn’t moved along much.

Related articles

• Amy Waldman On Christmas In Afghanistan (thinkprogress.org)
• Book Review: The Submission by Amy Waldman (chalkthesun.wordpress.com)

Odd picture popped up?

Sorry about that. It is of Christopher Wakling, the author of What I Did. It was supposed to go into the review and not make itself into a study of the rather gorgeous author.

What I Did by Christopher Wakling

This was one of those books that was so good I had to wait a couple of days before starting another. It is, apparently, Wakling’s sixth novel, but I have never read anything of his before and I don’t know if any of his previous writing is so good.

In a way, this book has an echo of ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue in that it is also narrated by a child. In another way, it has a similar theme to ‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas in that it revolves around someone slapping a child, yet it stands out by itself as a brilliant piece of writing. (I didn’t like ‘The Slap’ at all.)

It is narrated by a six-year-old boy, Billy, who lives with his mother and father. His mother works night-shift so often his father looks after him, especially in the early morning. Billy is not labelled as being a ‘special needs’ child by Wakling, although he fizzles with ‘electricity’, which makes his body jump and run without meaning to. He cannot sit still, nor walk slowly. A nature lover, Billy describes people as animals – his mother is a prairie dog who never stops working. Billy is a wolf that can lope for hours, “a tireless method of hunting their prey“.

Billy also uses malapropisms, some so nearly exact that the reader could miss them. Wakling is clever enough, though, not to use too many so it doesn’t become a cute narrative device to endear Billy to us.  Billy’s dad makes pancakes with golden stirrups; we inherited reflux from our ancestors.

On an early morning walk with his cantankerous father (who can blame him, since Billy had woken him up at 5.30?). Billy decides to run away from his father.

“…Instead of walking back towards where his voice is coming from through the trees, I decide to do the exact opposite and I begin loping tirelessly further away towards the road with cars on it instead.”

As he reaches the road, his father grabs his coat, yet Billy manages to wiggle his arm out of it and runs into the traffic. His father grabs him “with tremendous peregrine speed,” pulls him back and explodes in anger at him.

“His good hand (one was in plaster) smacks me once, then again, and another time, very, very, very hard across my bum and thighs, backs of my legs.” 

It happens, all of us parents know what that anger is like, but a passer-by sees it happen and reports his father to social services. So the downhill slide towards emotional hell for the family starts, firstly with a social worker’s visit, then a medical examination until Billy’s father can’t be with his son unless supervised. Billy observes all this through his eyes, calling the social worker the Butterfly; the next social worker is the Giraffe. Through the whole process, we end up unsure whether Billy’s father is an abusive father, or whether Billy has confused things and ends up telling social workers what they might want to hear.

The novel is an acute study of emotional family life, the difficulties of being a parent and the complexities of a child-parent dynamic. It is funny, I couldn’t help laughing sometimes, but it must be classified as tragicomic, as so much of the story is heartbreaking. Billy’s six-year-old voice never wavers throughout; I felt like I was with Billy the whole time seeing the experience through his eyes and that alone, I think, is the mark of an extremely accomplished writer.

Related articles

• What I Did, By Christopher Wakling (independent.co.uk)
• To smack or not to smack? An interview with Christopher Wakling (romankrznaric.com)

In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Image via Wikipedia

Anyone interested in history, and particularly World War II, will enjoy reading this book. Written in a very accessible way, the book tells the story of America’s first ambassador to Germany when Hitler comes into power. It is a true story and gives an outsider’s point of view of the changes happening in Germany at that time and the rise of Hitler.

No one wanted the job of ambassador to Germany in June 1933. As newly elected president, Roosevelt had to fill the position of the ambassador to a country going through a brutal revolutionary change. Eventually, he chose mild-mannered professor from Chicago, William E Dodd, who at 64 was ready for a change from his professorial life. His main ambition at that stage was to finish the book he was writing about the history of the Old South. He was looking for a job that was ‘not too demanding, yet would provide stature and a living wage and, most important, leave him plenty of time to write.’ And so he accepted the ambassadorship when Roosevelt phoned to offer him the position.

He left for Germany with his wife, son and flamboyant daughter, Martha. From then on, the book focusses on Dodd and his daughter and very little is written about the wife (also called Martha) and the son. The family were initially housed in an opulent hotel, which went against Dodd’s desire to live ‘most inconspicuously and modesty’ but he understood that the German officials would expect his standard of living to be worthy of his position. On their first night in Berlin, they saw no soldiers nor police and, as they walked through the Tiergarten (the large park in Berlin), Martha reflected:

“I felt the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.”

Once the family was in their official residence, so began the protocol of diplomatic entertainment, which Dodd abhorred. He was overwhelmed by the number of people and the vast cost. Protocol would have it that senior German officials were invited, so many Nazis visited their house, most of whom the Dodds found charming. For example, Dodd found Goebbels to be ‘one of the few men with a sense of humour in Germany’. Goring (I don’t know how to do the umlaut on top of the o) was considered likeable.

Someone who especially found many of the Nazis attractive was Martha. As a character, Martha is astonishing. She was considered beautiful and she was a woman who enjoyed her sexuality. She seemed to sleep with countless men and flirt with even more. Often she saw two or more men at the same time, none of whom seemed to mind. She found the Nazis attractive and this flavoured her view of Germany, in which she saw much good in what was happening. I am astounded that her parents didn’t try to curb her behaviour, but she seemed to be able to do what she wanted with whoever she wanted and became part of Berlin society.

Throughout the book, we are exposed to this dichotomy where many people thought that Germany was on a new path being led to better things, and the others who recognised the anti-Semitism that grew by the day. Dodd was unsettled by the attacks upon Americans, all of whom were Jewish. In his first meeting with Hitler, Dodd complained about the attacks, to which Hitler ‘was cordial and apologetic’.

Though the session had been difficult and strange, Dodd nonetheless left the chancellery feeling convinced that Hitler was sincere about wanting peace.

Yet Dodd soon wavered in this belief, feeling a foreboding that the path Germany was on was violent and discriminatory. Dodd made himself unpopular amongst his staff, many of whom felt he was on the wrong track with his opinion of Hitler and the Nazi party.

It would be an extremely long review were I to go through the trials and tribulations that Dodd encountered in his position as ambassador, so I will leave it to the reader, suffice to say that by 1937 the stress of the job caused Dodd to deteriorate health-wise and resign. Roosevelt was reluctant for him to leave and persuaded him to stay on six months longer. Once back in America, Dodd embarked on a campaign to raise the alarm about Hitler and his plans, and to combat the increasing drift in America towards isolationism.  He warned that ‘Hitler would be free to pursue his ambitions without armed resistance from other European democracies‘.

Dodds Presents Award to Normandy Veteran (Photo credit: DUP Photos)

You know the dreadful outcome of that warning. It seemed as though Dodd had not taken a strong enough stand to help prevent the events from happening, yet the book concludes with the sentence:

‘In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in  a land of gathering darkness’.

Hitler, however, must have felt he was a threat. Years after the war, old documents were discovered in which conversations between Hitler and his men came to light. In one of them, Hitler berates his colleagues by saying, “To think that there was nobody in all this ministry who could get his clutches on the daughter of that American ambassador, Dodd – and yet she wasn’t difficult to approach.’

I would whole heartedly recommend this book for anyone interested in history.

Related articles

• Tom Hanks to Star in WWII Hitler Drama – IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS (geektyrant.com)
• Resisting Hitler’s Rise In 1930s Berlin (npr.org)

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson has written an autobiography of such exquisite honesty that it rates as the best autobiography I have read in many years. It is essentially a book about Winterson’s pursuit of happiness, an emotion that her adoptive mother did not believe in. It is a book about searching for love, an identity, a place to call home, and the need for a real mother.

Winterson was adopted by a couple who should never had had children and who live in the grim, industrial working-class part of Manchester. She describes her adoptive mother as a ‘flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer and bullets in a tin of Pledge.” This was a woman who would stay up all night baking so she didn’t have to share the bed with her husband, and who had two sets of false teeth, one for everyday life, the others for guests. She and her husband were the worst sort of religious people – fervently Christian, avid bible-readers and abusive to their adoptive daughter. The husband does not appear much in the book, as he did not have great an influence on Winterson’s life. It was her mother who when angry would say, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” It was her mother who would lock her out the house, leaving her to sit on the front step all night. She sent Jeanette to school a year late, because it was the ”Breeding Ground’ – like the sink would be if she didn’t put bleach down it.‘

Winterson writes: “My mother, Mrs Winterson, didn’t love life. She didn’t believe anything would make life better. She once told me that the universe was a cosmic dustbin.”

There were a total of six books in their household, one of which was the Bible. Her mother believed books would have a secular influence on Winterson and banned her from reading fiction (although she would send Jeanette to the library to collect her stash of murder mysteries). As a result, Winterson began to read books in secret, escaping into stories that took away from the grimness of daily life. “Books, for me, are a home...,” she writes, “…I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.”

As a result of such a dysfunctional relationship with her parents, Winterson tells us how her need and her search for love began and how she sought for it through her life. “Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent….I didn’t have that and I was a very nervous, watchful child…..I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health.”

At 15, she does the worst thing possible in her mother’s eyes – she falls in love with another girl. When her mother finds out, ‘then the air raid happened.’ Jeanette was locked in the parlour for three days with the curtains closed, with no food, or heating. One of the elders of the church forced her to repent, by pushing her to her knees, and trying to kiss her because it’s better with a man than a girl, it’s normal.

She leaves home at 16, lives in various places, survives and most of all, though, applies to Oxford to read English, ‘because it was the most impossible thing I could do.” She does get in, despite being told by her tutor on her first evening there that she was the working class experiment, and another woman was told she was the black experiment. “We soon realised that our tutor was malevolently gay and that the five women in our year would receive no tuition. We were going to have to educate themselves.” Winterson finds happiness in her studies, being amongst women with similar passions for reading, thinking, knowing and discussing.

She leaves university and starts writing, achieving success, yet her life is never happy. After a break up with a girlfriend, Winterson descends into ‘madness’ and tries to commit suicide, although she survives. As a reader, I was almost flattered to be allowed to read Winterson’s understanding of her mental state and sometimes psychosis: “There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace…she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life…This misshapen murderous creature with its supernatural strength need to be invited home – but on the right terms.”

Winterson starts working again, and slowly pulls her life together. She decides to try to find her biological mother and starts a long journey that does, in the end, result in meeting her. That is the end of the book, in a way, although there is no linear form to this story, and we grow with Winterson as she discovers herself. I wish there were more, or that she would write another – I became so invested in her life.

This book is an autobiography, but I found it more than that. It is a psychological insight into a person who has been so damaged by relationships with family that she battles to relate to anyone; it is also a reflection of the redemptive power of words, fiction, and poetry. It is about the deep need for love and affection that humans have, and for a place to call home. It is also – luckily – very funny in parts.

Related articles

• Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette Winterson (independent.co.uk)
• VIDEO: Winterson: ‘My mother was a monster’ (bbc.co.uk)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

While reading this book, I kept thinking that it would make a great movie. It has an exotic setting, eccentric characters, a mystery, suspense, some humour, and a death. I hope a director picks it up one day and gets a screen writer onto it immediately.

It wasn’t a mind-blowing novel, but it was a good story that kept me turning the pages. I enjoy Ann Patchett‘s writing and have read a few of her previous books. I loved Bel Canto, and was fascinated by Truth and Beauty, the book in which she describes her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a fellow author whose face was disfigured by a childhood cancer.

I admire Ann Patchett’s imagination in creating ‘State of Wonder’. It is partly set in the in rainforests of the Rio Negro, in Brazil, where an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could allow women to fall pregnant until late in their lives. The company for whom she works sends a lab researcher, Anders Eckman, to go and find her as she has stayed in the jungle for too long and they want her drug. He, however, dies there under mysterious circumstances. Marina Singh, Anders’ colleague, then goes to uncover the truth behind Anders’ death. She leaves the comforts of Missouri for chaos and heat of Brazil and, after a tortuous journey down the Rio Negro, she finds Dr Annick Swenson deep in the jungle, working with the Lakashi tribe, uncovering their secrets of everlasting fertility. Marina is drawn into the community and finds herself not wanting to leave, until her boss (and lover) comes to find her.

Ann Patchett

Those are the bare bones of the story, yet there is far more to the story than this. It turns out that Marina was a former obstetrics’ student of Dr Swenson, who was witness to Marina’s botched surgery that results in a tragedy and in Marina’s leaving obstetrics for the safer field of research.  Thus Marina is forced to face her ghosts, as well as having to deal with a recurring horrific dream brought on by the anti-malarial drugs she is taking. There is an echo of ‘Heart of Darkness‘ in the story, as she goes down the ‘black water’ of the river deep into the jungle.

Patchett has written a big story, but it is the minutiae of detail that make the novel so readable – her descriptions of the Lakashi tribe, the insect life in Brazil, the board room meetings. She has a wry sense of humour that comes through subtly in the writing, and is kind to her characters: each one of them turns out to be likable and inherently good.

It is a book worth reading in my mind and has all the elements that I like in a novel: readability, a good story, well cast characters, an interesting setting and a twist in the tale.

Related articles

• Amazon UK Kindle Daily Deal! State of Wonder by Ann Patchett for £1.29! (randomizeme.wordpress.com)
• Book Review: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (imjustmea.wordpress.com)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 and is an exquisitely written short novel. It also has the most beautiful cover I’ve seen in a book for a long time – dandelions flying in the wind and pages with black stained edges.

Julian Barnes is at the peak of his talent as a writer. This is an incredibly well-crafted book, written with precision where not one word is superfluous. It is a book about memory, the malleability of memory, and how different people remember the same events differently. It is about time and how time affects memories.

Tony Webster is the main character – he is retired, divorced, he gets on well enough with his daughter and listens to classical music. He’s a boring man, really, and not particularly likable in my mind.  He’s had a good career and gets on well with his ex-wife. He is, in his words, a “peaceable” man; in others’ words, a coward. The book starts with a list of some of his memories: “a shiny, inner wrist, …. gouts of sperm circling a plughole … bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.” Of memories, he says “…what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed,” a statement that encapsulates theme of the book.

An unexpected letter arrives for him one day  and this forces him to go back in his mind to his school days, when he met Adrian Finn for the first time. Adrian joins Tony’s tight clique of friends: himself, Colin and Alex. “Adrian allowed himself to be absorbed into our group, without acknowledging that it was something he sought. Perhaps he didn’t.” Adrian is part of the group, yet remains an individual – clever, musical, philosophical, ‘essentially serious unless he was taking the piss’.

I love Julian Barnes’ descriptions – he refers to the three boys as seeing school sports as being ‘a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive’. He describes them as being ‘book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic’. At times I found this book to be funny, something I didn’t expect.

After school, they drift to different universities and keep in touch with the occasional letter. Tony goes to Bristol University and falls in love with Veronica Ford, whose ‘sexual policy’ is to go so far and then say, ‘It doesn’t feel right’. She is a manipulative character, who takes Tony home one weekend only to leave him to the mercy of his scathing father and mean brother. I squirmed reading that section of the book. Only her mother treats him kindly and warns him not to let Veronica get away with too much. He and Veronica drift along in their relationship, until Veronica confronts him on the future of his relationship – Tony is unable to commit, nor can he put words to his feelings, and so they break up. However, he does tell us that after they broke up, they slept together. He remembers it as being  mutual decision; she remembers it as being practically a rape.

Julian Barnes

He tells us how sometime after that he receives a letter from Adrian telling him that he and Veronica are going out together. Tony remembers sending a letter back to him: ‘I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent, because …. Veronica had suffered damage a long way back.’

When Tony finishes university, he goes to America and travels around, doing odd jobs. When he gets home six months later, however, he is confronted with the news that Adrian has committed suicide, cut his wrists in the bath and bled to death, but that Adrian had been happy and ‘in love’ when he died.

Tony’s story fast-forwards through his marriage, career, divorce and children until we are at the time of his telling us the story of his memories, all sparked by a lawyer’s letter he receives out the blue, in which he is told that he had been left 500 pounds and  two documents by a Veronica’s mother. The one document is a fragment of a page on which his friend from school, Adrian, had written, but which has no conclusion as the next page is missing. The other document is Adrian’s diary, except it isn’t given to Tony because Veronica still has it.

This reconnects Tony to Veronica as he wishes to get the diary from her. She is extremely reluctant to see him again, she won’t hand over the diary. She is nasty, rude and bitter towards him and yet Tony fantasises about their getting together again. She gives him the letter that he wrote her and Adrian all those years ago when they told him they were going out – it is hideous, vicious, bitter and wishes bad luck upon them. It made me, as the reader, dislike Tony intensely. She also, during their present-time meetings, keeps telling Tony that he just ‘doesn’t get it’.

As a reader, I didn’t understand what Tony was supposed to be getting and here is where the book became frustrating and exasperating – though still intriguing. I have encountered people who have found the end of the book irritating and senseless, but there is a twist to this story that kept me thinking about the book for ages afterwards. I had to go back and read it again to see what clues I had missed, what is was that gives the story the ‘sense of an ending’.

This is a novella, it is a quick read, but one I won’t forget in a long time and one that will keep me discussing the twist with friends for ages to come. I’m not going to give a hint of what it might be, but my advice is that you read the book again once you have finished it and, if you are still curious, go onto the internet to read some fascinating discussions about it.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

This was a book I never got round to reading last year, but I have now and am glad I did. It’s a quiet book, beautifully written by a man who is, apparently, one of the world’s leading ceramic artists. He must apply the same care to his writing that he does to his ceramics, as this story – about his own family – is gently and sensitively told.

Edmund de Waal inherits a collection of netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie – 246 Japanese wood and ivory carvings – and this sparks an interest in him to find out their history and how they came to be in his family. Netsuke are small carvings, from 2cm to about 10cm high, which were popular in Japan from the late 17th century to the 19th century. They were often used as toggles on kimonos or wallets. As it says in the blurb on the back of the book, de Waal’s journey to find out the history of these netsuke is part ‘treasure hunt’, as he traces his family back nearly two centuries to find out when and where they were first bought. He goes to each city where the family members have lived, including Japan to his great-uncle Iggie who is still alive when de Waal starts his research and where he encounters the netsuke for the first time.

What results is the most fascinating insight into an extremely wealthy family – the Ephrussi family – who owned an empire of business interests ranging from Prague to Vienna to Paris. In 1860 the family was the greatest grain-exporter in the world; ‘Jews with their own coat of arms’, as de Waal describes. The Rothchilds were known as the ‘Kings of the Jews’, the Ephrussis as the ‘Kings of Grain.’ Charles Ephrussi, the youngest son, goes to Paris. “He is free to do what he wants,” de Waal tells us.

A netsuke

What a wonderful life : Charles starts collecting – paintings, furniture, art – and becomes noticed in the salons. ‘Japonisme’ becomes the rage in society; the collection of Japanese objets. With his mistress, Charles buys beautiful black and gold lacquer boxes; he buys Japanese prints, and he also buys a collection of 246 netsuke which he puts in a black vitrine.

Charles becomes influential as an art collector after a time, and works as the editor of a respected arts journal. He starts collecting paintings by the Impressionists: Monet, Manet, Pisarro, Sisley, and becomes friends with them.   I had forgotten how radical these painters were seen at first, ‘assailed in the press and by the Academy as charlatans’.

When Charles’ first cousin gets married , he sends the couple the netsuke in their vitrine box as a wedding present, and thus the collection goes to Vienna in 1899, to Viktor and Emma. As early as that time, de Waal finds out how rife anti-Semitism was. The mayor was noted as saying ‘…Jew-baiting is an excellent means of propaganda and getting ahead in politics.’ A great deal of the book focuses on this family and, with this investigation, de Waal learns more about his past than he had ever realised, especially the realities of being Jewish in Europe over the decades.

Viktor and Emma lived in a mansion (in fact, more than a mansion; a palace, the Palais Ephrussi) in Vienna. The netsuke were kept in Emma’s dressing-room and de Waal writes enchantingly about how her children would come in there and play with them while she was dressing for dinner. One of the children was Iggie, the uncle who passes them onto de Waal. During the war, ‘the household and the family make their sacrifices’ – only a few members were staff are kept on, but ‘Emma still dresses up every evening, because it is important not to let standards slip’.

And then, so soon after that war, a second world war started and this one had a direct effect on the Jewish Ephrussi family. Palais Ephrussi was decreed to become fully ‘Aryanised’. The family had to move out, and all objects of art had to go to the Property Transactions Office to be valued  - many were sold on or auctioned off to raise money for the Reich. The ten very best pictures were photographed and the photos sent to Berlin for Hitler to look at to see if he wanted any. Anna, Emma’s long-time maid, was responsible for packing up the house, and in an act of love for the family, she carefully hid a few netsuke a day in her clothing and put  them under the mattress of her bed. ‘Now you are back,’ she said to Elizabeth, Emma’s daughter, when they reunite in 1945, ‘I have something to return to you.’

Elizabeth took them back to England with her, where she was now living, safely stored in a little attaché case. When Iggie, her brother, came to visit her, she opened the netsuke case and showed them to him. ‘A melee of rats. The fox with inlaid eyes. The monkey wrapped around the ground. His brindled wolf.’ They took them out and looked at them, remembering playing with them when they were young in their mother’s dressing room.

‘It’s Japan,’ Iggie said. “I’ll take them back.”

Iggie headed off to Japan, and fell in love: with the country and with a younger man, Jiro. He never left Japan again. He designed a new glass case for the netsuke, and they were put on show again in his house to again be admired. In the 1970s Iggie pasted little numbers onto the bottom of each one and had them assessed. They were more valuable than expected. When de Waal inherited them after his death, he brought them back to England, to London. He bought an old vitrine from the Victoria and Albert Museum – seven feet high and made of bronze. “It is next to the piano, and unlocked so the children can open the door if they wish to. The netsuke begin again.”

I have written the facts of the memoir in a very brief way, doing it no justice at all. The writing within the story, for example, is one of the reasons I found this book so fascinating. de Waal questions his right to be investigating his family as he does, digging into their privacy; he has faces his Jewishness; he falls in love (metaphorically) with members of his family, and he explores the streets they lived on and the houses they lived in. He writes in the past tense mostly, but often switches to the present tense to bring the reader right into a scene and be immersed in what was happening.

He takes two years of work to explore and research, all the while holding a netsuke in his pocket as a reminder of the origin of the journey on which he has embarked.

The author

Related articles

• Seeing is believing the beauty of the netsukes (telegraph.co.uk)
• Op-Ed Columnist: The Netsuke Survived (nytimes.com)
• Edmund de Waal: a passion for pots (guardian.co.uk)

Good Girl Wants It Bad by Scott Bradfield

I hadn’t read anything by Scott Bradfield before or even heard of him, although I read in a review that he is considered a star in the literary world by his peers. That, of course, made me feel ignorant.

The cover

The first thing that struck me about Good Girl Wants It Bad was its cover – alluring; sexy, a hint of what lies within. Within, we meet Delilah Riordan (called Lah) who is in the West Texas Women’s Penitentiary on death row. Lah is a nymphomaniac who has been charged with murder and torture in Connecticut, California, New York, Idaho and Texas, as well as a few European countries. She is a serial killer who is gorgeous – ‘hotter than Texas asphalt’ – apparently irresistible to men, which lands many them in all sorts of trouble (and a nasty death).

We meet Lah through her daily journal as she counts down to her execution. She is not a nasty, rebellious multiple murderer; Lah is cheerful, naive and dutiful in prison. She writes, “I want to express my basic good nature as a human being, which has been overlooked by all the press reports I’ve read.”  Armed with the knowledge of her innocence, she attends Rehab Chat sessions with Dr Reginald and Confrontational Analysis with Dr Alexander; through these sessions we, as readers, are exposed to the horrors of the crimes she allegedly committed.

Bradfield has created an intriguing character in Lah. She is complex, self-delusional, psychotic, uses her body to her advantage, and humourous. She is also a desperately sad woman, with a history of sexual abuse, who gives birth in prison and has her daughter taken away from her. “Never give up, little daffodil, Mommy loves you very much,” she writes, haunted by the fact that her daughter is somewhat out there and will learn down the line that her mother was a serial murderer. Lah has a boyfriend, Manuel, (you need to decide whether he is imaginary or not), and often writes about, “my Little Secret” who she believes will help her escape from prison. She adores her father, who is in a coma in hospital, and only sees his ‘love’ for her when she was little as totally normal.

“You can’t be a good girl unless you have the choice to be a bad girl, as Daddy used to say. And vice versa.”

‘Fans’ from the public writes to Lah (isn’t it strange how people are drawn to prisoners on Death Row?). She receives a series of them from Oliver, a boy in sixth grade, who would like help with his Social Studies project, but who also finds her very beautiful and requests photos from her. The correspondence between them continues until Oliver’s father sends an irate letter to Lah, freaked out by her behaviour. Rhonda Merrivale writes to her asking for “information on your severe personality disorders”, as she finds herself having fantasies of killing her husband and oldest child and wants to know if these are normal.

Bradfield maintains Lah’s voice well throughout, and never gives us too much detail about the murders. I experienced a few misgivings about Lah – I found it unbelievable that she was so hot that no man could resist her. Her naivety and self-delusion were overplayed in places, although I supposed it is psychologically possible for someone to be so cut off from reality. However, the count down to her execution works well as a narrative device and a sense of urgency builds as Lah writes a last letter to her daughter, hours before she has to walk down Death Row.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the book as it was so unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. It was sad, poignant and funny; not what I would have expected from a novel about a prisoner on Death Row.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan

I’m often wary of books that win big prizes; hesitant to read them either because I worry that I’ll be disappointed after all the hype, or that I’ll be overwhelmed by their worthiness.

A Visit From The Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 and I don’t know anyone else who has read it yet, so I came to it with a fresh attitude and a liking for its quirky cover. I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but I usually do. I’m not often at a loss for words when talking about novels, but this one has left me unsure of how to express what I felt about it. It is an incredible book; unlike anything else I’ve read.

I think Jennifer Egan has perhaps invented a new genre. Some people have likened it to a collection of short stories, however I didn’t experience as such. I found it to be a book with a thread that ran through it, sometimes taut, at other times winding back on itself, sometimes slack. The writing had a rhythm to it that beat through the chapters, with each note tripping on one after the other, each separate but connected to make a concerto.

Egan follows none of the accepted writing rules through this book. She writes in the first person, the plural first person, the third person and even the second person. She writes in the past tense, present tense and future tense. There is no set plot. Different narrative techniques are used, including a journalist’s report on an interview with a movie star (with footnotes included) and, incredibly, a Power Point presentation put together by a teenager about her family, which runs for 74 pages. She writes with a mixture of irony, black humour, poignancy and sadness.

Book cover

And it all works – she has produced a book that is totally captivating and kept me fascinated for hours.

A goon squad often refers to a group of thugs, employed by someone to beat other people up; however the goon in this book is Time. Egan writes: “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.” She studies the effect of time on the characters, on how past behaviours have affected present situations and how present actions might affect future events.

If there are main characters in this book, the two main protagonists would be Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who we meet in the first chapter, and Bennie,her boss, an aging music executive. Tendrils curl out from these two, drawing in other characters, all of whom are related to each other in some way; and thus the chapters gain a rhythm. It sounds as though it may be confusing, but it wasn’t to me. Egan creates each character perfectly. Bennie, for example, sprinkles gold flakes into his coffee in the belief that it will make him more potent. La Doll (a disgraced PR agent) works for a genocidal African dictator, who I’m sure Egan based on Robert Mugabe. The children in the book aren’t cute and innocent; they are shrewd observers of the situations they find themselves in because of the adults around them.

If there were a theme, or themes, to this book, I suppose it would be music and time, and how music changes through the passing of time, yet I feel such a definition would narrow the scope of the book. It is a book that has to be read, rather than explained, as I believe each person’s experience of it will be different.

I certainly have to read it again, as I feel as though I have just scratched the surface of it. I would highly recommend it and would love to get feedback from others as to what they think of it.

 

 

Related articles

• Short stories: Julian Barnes and Jennifer Egan (guardian.co.uk)
• Amazon UK Kindle Daily Deal! A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan for £1.29! (randomizeme.wordpress.com)