In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover

of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

In the Country of Men is Matar's debut novel first published in 2006 by Viking. It was nominated for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. It has so far been translated into 22 languages and was awarded the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize as well as a host of international literary prizes. The book was also nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.

The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli in Libya, stuck between a father whose clandestine anti-Qaddafi activities bring about searches, stalkings and telephone eaves droppings by Qaddafi's state police, and a vulnerable young mother who resorts to alcohol to bury her anxiety and anger. The only people he has to turn to are his neighbour Kareem, and his father's best friend Moosa. The book provides a description of Libya under Qaddafi's terror regime, and a narration of ordinary people's lives as they try to survive the political oppression.

Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff

As part of my reading habits I have been working through the Booker/Man Booker shortlists since the beginning of their time.  I always have several novels waiting in the wings and my reading of these is interspersed with more current titles, and novels which are less demanding and of the more popular thriller variety  As it happens this novel was the first I spotted in my basket of 'wallflowers'. 

The subject matter turns out to be so relevant to my place at the moment.  With my own mother in her last days of the cruel disease which is Alzheimers, this and the way the fictional family in Ignatieff's novel deals with it forms the very relevant core of the novel. 

At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the bonds of memory, their configuartion in self-identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty, and death. 

It is a son's account of his mother's voyage into a world of neurological disease and anyone, and there are so many of us, who has lived their parent through that journey will find much that resonates in this memoir.  I find it a particular point of interest that none of the main characters is given a name...   Wikipedia gives a plot summary as follows:

The book details one woman’s struggle with Alzheimer's (or dementia, it’s not clear) and how her family respond to it. In particular, it is one of her son’s voice the reader hears since he is narrating it. Another son isn’t involved so much as he is living in Boston practicing as a neuroscientist. So it is the narrator who bears most of the burden. And all the while, he is trying to work on his marriage and his career as a philosophy professor. His own family life is hardly acknowledged and tears in his marriage begin to show, towards his wife; there for moral support but can't come to terms with him not being a consistent, central figure at the moment.

While her illness begins with her repeating stories ad nauseam, things get much worse as she starts to be incapable of recognizing her own family. Thus the prime caretaker – the son – ends up separating from his wife and living in derelict conditions. Nonetheless, he remains positive about the nature of life and death, even once he has lost both his parents, concluding that he “know[s] that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment…I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine

How the Light Gets In

How The Light Gets In by Louise Penny

When I have been browsing in charity book shops I have occasionally seen books written by Louise Penny.  I have allowed my eyes to slide past these books and their titles.  I have to be utterly honest and say that the format of the paperbacks has not sold itself to me in terms of being a novel worth my reading time.  How judgemental, how misguided.

My reading neighbours in St Vaast handed me this book, it being a second copy for which they did not have any use.  Never being one to look a gift horse in the mouth I decided to give it a go.  At least I reasoned as I looked at the dust jacket, it looks as if it is a detective novel.

When I google I am amazed to see that 12 other Inspector Gamache novels have slipped me by.  True to form I will now go and start with the first in the series, Still Life.

There is something about Penny's plotting that goes beyond the run of the mill necessity to provide an arena in which the detective/criminal scenario can be played out.  A suite of credible characters and a plot based on the lore around a famous set of Canadian quintuplets, born before the days of test tube fertility treatment are brought together to give a narrative of substance.  I really enjoyed this read:

A DETECTIVE
As a fierce, unrelenting winter grips Quebec, shadows are closing in on Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department and hostile forces are lining up against him.
A DISAPPEARANCE
When Gamache receives a message about a mysterious case in Three Pines, he is compelled to investigate -- a woman who was once one of the most famous people in the world has vanished.
A DEADLY CONCLUSION
As he begins to shed light on the investigation, he is drawn into a web of murder, lies and unimaginable corruption at the heart of the city. Facing his most challenging, and personal, case to date, can Gamache save the reputation of the Sûreté, those he holds dear and himself?

Ingo

Ingo by Helen Dunmore

Ingo is a delightful story full of beautifully serene imagery and magic. It’s a children’s book, yes, but it captured my imagination .........

Master storyteller Helen Dunmore writes the story of Sapphire and her brother Conor, and their discovery of INGO, a powerful and exciting world under the sea.  Sapphire’s father told her the story of the Mermaid of Zennor when she was little. She fell in love with a human, but she was a Mer creature and so she couldn’t come to live with him up in the dry air. She swam up the stream to hear him sing, then one day he swam down it and was never seen again. He became one of the Mer people…When her father is lost at sea she can’t help but think of that old myth; Sapphire is convinced he’s still alive.

The following summer her brother Conor keeps disappearing for hours on end. She goes to the cove to find him, but instead meets Faro, an enigmatic and intriguing Merman. He takes her to INGO and introduces her to a world she never knew existed. She must let go of all her Air thoughts and embrace the sea and all things Mer.

After her first visit she is entranced – merely the sound of running water makes her yearn to be in INGO once more. INGO blood runs strongly in Sapphy, and Conor fears she will leave the Air world for good. He pleads with her to ignore her craving for the sea and stay safely in their cottage up on the cliff.  But not only is Sapphy intoxicated by the Mer world, she longs to see her father once more. And she’s sure she can hear him singing across the water…
“I wish I was away in Ingo
Far across the briny sea…”

As it happens I was doing a jigsaw during the same interval in which I was reading Ingo.  This jigsaw has probably been made on more occasions by us than any of our other puzzles.  It's subject is close to the heart.  Within the small frame of the illustration you see representatives of most of the key invertebrate groups.

Maya's Notebook

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende

In a nutshell this novel, encompasses a crime story, an addiction-recovery narrative, and a family drama..

Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Maya has been brought up by her tough grandmother Nini and her gentle grandfather Popo. But at school, the teenage Maya finds herself drawn towards the wrong crowd. Before she knows what’s happened, Maya’s life has turned into one of drug addiction and crime.  Things go from bad to worse as Maya disappears into the criminal underworld. To save her from her old associates, Nini sends Maya to a remote island off the coast of Chile.  Safe amongst her new neighbours, Maya feels compelled to write her story and slowly she begins to heal. But can she learn to live with her scars, and will her past ever catch up with her?

Character portraits and sketches of other lives abound, although Maya is the main focus "with hair dyed four primary colours and a nose ring".  In the opening pages we find Maya on a remote island in the Chiloe region of Chile, on the run from "the FBI, Interpol and a Las Vegas criminal gang."  .

                          

Fortunately, she has a loving grandmother who has arranged this sanctuary, and despite recent ordeals, her confident, upbeat nature soon charms the locals. She is smart and curious, and the novel brims with her discoveries about the archipelago and its people: tourist fantasies and harsher realities are described with great feeling. On the island Maya begins to write down her story, from her grandmother's flight from Chile in the early days of the Pinochet regime to her own childhood in Berkeley, teenage loss and three years of plummeting crisis. At the same time, the Chilotan narrative moves forward, and Maya gets involved in village life, forms close bonds, and begins to uncover horrors from the past.

Maya is the lightest of narrative guises: wise beyond her 19 years but convincingly coltish, she gives us an outsider's observations ("happiness seems kitsch to Chileans") and has a chirpy, wry sense of humour; when she falls in love, she writes her adoration and despair with hyperbole, exclamation marks and teenage wholeheartedness. The sections describing her own past are dominated by the energetic narrative impetus and lose track of any feelings of abandonment, terror and hurt at the story's centre. This may be due to the pressure applied by the crime plot, or the need to drive this book in the direction it is headed – towards a story of survival.

Maya used to read the dictionary with her beloved grandfather, something we're reminded of when she drops words such as "lapidary" and "telluric". Harder to reconcile are the almost anthropological observations, such as this, of her teenage gang: "We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language." Little of that coded language finds its way into the book, even during intense scenarios with her best friends and sometime boyfriend, a hapless fellow in low-slung baggy jeans. The slang is mild: "dumbass", "man". The crime boss she works with in Vegas explains, "Heroin doesn't kill: it's the addicts' lifestyles that do…" The effect is a bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the window, but the bus has moved on.

The prioritising of story over voice suggests that it's not the aim of Maya's Notebook to plunge the reader into the grim existence of a real-life Maya; this is a tale of revelations and resolutions, and the plot is more answerable to its own turns than to the brutal possibilities of reality. Despite the observations about the number of young people lost to street violence, crime and slavery, or because of them, the driving force of this novel is ultimately resilience – the power of love and acceptance to face down terrible things.

In this worldview, perhaps, the wise perspective of the narrative voice can elide with the young narrator: "I'm not going to be weighed down [by past mistakes] till the day I die," Maya insists. Her argument is compelling. She hits some nasty snags on the way to her rock bottom, but emerges (after a rather idyllic sounding rehab) with her joy in life intact, able to heal others. Whether a consequence of characterisation, magical thinking or authorial determination, this girl and her community are going to be all right. "The whole world is magical," says Manuel, the man who has survived much and becomes Maya's protector, and the book is best read in that spirit.

Méli-Mélo

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

North and South is a social novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television twice (1975 and 2004).

The later version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor; North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city. The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil, rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton. She witnesses the brutal world wrought by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes. Sympathetic to the poor (whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends), she clashes with John Thornton: a nouveau riche cotton-mill owner who is contemptuous of his workers. The novel traces her growing understanding of the complexity of labour relations and their impact on well-meaning mill owners and her conflicted relationship with John Thornton. Gaskell based her depiction of Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_and_South_%28Gaskell_novel%29

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us.

We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?

In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going.

Sapiens is a thrilling account of humankind’s extraordinary history – from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age – and our journey from insignificant apes to rulers of the world

‘It tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language. You will love it!’ Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel

'Unbelievably good. Jaw dropping from the first word to the last' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2

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The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin

This is the first book featuring Erast Fandorin, the famous gentleman sleuth.

Moscow 1876. A young law student commits suicide in broad daylight in Moscow's Alexander Gardens. But this is no ordinary death, for the young man was the son of an influential industrialist and has left a considerable fortune.
Erast Fandorin, a hotheaded new recruit to the Criminal Investigation Department, is assigned to the case. Brilliant, young, and sophisticated, Fandorin embarks on an investigation that will take him from the palatial mansions of Moscow to the seedy backstreets of London in his hunt for the conspirators behind this mysterious death.

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The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent (Author), Ros Schwartz (Translator)

Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a book pulping factory in a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life . . .
Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain recites aloud from pages he has saved from the jaws of his monstrous pulping machine. But it is when he discovers the diary of a lonely young woman, Julie - a woman who feels as lost in the world as he does - that his journey will truly begin.

⟹  The Independent says

Every day, Guylain Vignolles catches the 6.27am train to a job he detests. Guylain works at a book pulping factory, destroying what he loves the most. At the end of the day, he rescues pages of books from the murderous pulping machine that he refers to as “The Thing”. He dries them out and the following morning, on his daily commute, reads aloud from random sheets. He loathes his supercilious boss, “old Fatso”, and bigoted workmate Brunner. His one comrade is Yvon the factory’s security guard, who loves declaiming poetry and speaking in alexandrines.
Outside work, Guylain’s life revolves around feeding his goldfish, Rouget de Lisle, and visiting his solitary friend Giuseppe, formerly chief operator at the factory. Giuseppe lost both his legs in a horrific accident when “The Thing had devoured his lower limbs, right up to his mid-thighs”. An obsession with collecting copies of a particular book, Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days, made from the recycled paper pulped the day he lost his legs, offers Giuseppe some comfort. One morning, Guylain discovers a memory stick. He opens it to find “72 text files called only by their respective numbers”. From this unpromising start comes the diary of a young woman, Julie, who works as a lavatory attendant in a shopping mall. Every day, she counts the tiles in her miniature kingdom, describes the regulars and their habits, and dreams of finding Mr Right. Guylain finds himself unexpectedly smitten and begins to share pages of her diary with his fellow commuters. Meanwhile, Giuseppe decides to help locate Julie for his friend.
The Reader on the 6.27 is a delightful tale about the kinship of reading. Jean-Paul Didierlaurent explores the redemptive power of books, and plays with the notion that everyone can spar, find poetry in, tempt or seduce with words, whatever one’s station in life. For Giuseppe, books become the legs he lost. Guylain beguiles his fellow travellers and is then begged by members of the local old people’s home to read for them. 
It’s also a love story. Much of the book’s charm resides in the simplicity of Didierlaurent’s prose and his vivid characterisation. Ros Schwartz’s translation perfectly conveys the warmth and eccentricities of his memorable cast. Already a bestseller in France, The Reader on the 6.27 looks set to woo British readers and become a book club favourite.