A motto of any reader should be: when struggling to finish a book, book in a long train journey without any iPod headphones. That should spur you on. On Tuesday I spent the day in Leicester, in my university library, working on a 5,000 word assignment which is due in tomorrow. It’s basically finished now, although drastically over the word count, a little bit wonky with one section much longer than the other and doesn’t yet have a bibliography, but nevertheless most of the hard work is done. Anyways, a couple of days ago my dad came home (he’s been at work in Africa for the past 2 months) and seeing as my mum takes one car to work with her, I couldn’t really take the other car and drive to Leicester and leave my dad stranded for the whole day with no transport. So I took the train, and spent about four and a half hours either in a train station or in transit. And, due to a melted-chocolate-in-bag incident last week, I had no iPod headphones, so I had no choice really but to plough on through Angela’s Ashes – so now I can finally write a review for you!
I realise that I’ve made it sound like Angela’s Ashes is a right slog to read, seeing as I needed to be incarcerated on a train for several hours without alternative entertainment in order to finish it. But that’s not been the problem really, it’s just that I’ve had tonnes of university work to do (see previous post) and I’ve also had shedloads of shifts from the hotel where I work part-time, so casual reading/blogging time has been in quite short supply! The book is actually almost the exact opposite of a slog – really easy to read, once you get settled in the pages just fly by.
So, for those of you who haven’t read it, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s autobiography, describing his childhood in New York and then in Limerick during the ’30s and ’40s. And a “miserable Irish Catholic childhood” it was too. It was a life of grinding poverty and deprivation – McCourt’s father regularly drinks the dole money (or money he earns in a series of sporadic, short-lived jobs), leaving his baby siblings to be fed on sugar and water and the rest of the family to survive on bread and tea. The family’s house in Limerick was regularly flooded in the winter, forcing them to abandon the ground floor for a good portion of the year. Most tragically, a total of three of McCourt’s younger siblings died as infants, presumably from the squalor of their living conditions and malnutrition – one in New York, before the family returns to Ireland, and two more in Limerick.
This sounds grim, right? How could anyone derive any pleasure from reading about such awful circumstances, I hear you ask. Well, that’s probably firstly because it’s got a strong thread of humour running through it. Yes, it’s quite black humour, but if you don’t laugh when a boy who bemoans the fact that his grandmother isn’t blind because if she was the state would have given her a radio like the woman next door, I personally think your funny bone needs looking at. I also laughed quite a lot when small Frank, obviously oblivious to the birds and the bees, is told by his father that his younger brother was brought by an angel and left on the seventh step of their stairs – so for years afterwards Frank goes and sits on the stairs and talks to the Angel on the Seventh Step.
It’s also got an immediacy to it which I think makes you read at a fairly speedy pace. This is partly because it is written in the present tense, in the voice of McCourt’s childhood self. But there’s another part to it as well. Obviously there’s quite a lot of dialogue in the book – but no speechmarks at all, instead mostly using capital letters to differentiate speech. I can see how this might annoy some people, but I liked it firstly because I think it helped capture the rhythms of the language and the colloquialisms and the way people “really” spoke, and also because it made the presence of the narrator even stronger, because without speech marks and direct speech you seem to have reported speech, as the narrator tells you what was said. So in other words, you’ve got the best of both words – you can hear the dialect and the idiom in what you read with that feeling of immediacy I talked about, but also have that connection with the narrator as he reports the speech back to you. I’m not entirely sure I’ve explained that very well, but hopefully you’ll give the book a read and you’ll see what I mean.
I think that the fact that the book is told by McCourt as a small boy produces an interesting tension. Everything is seen from his point of view, with the relative innocence and simplicity of a child who knows no other life than the one he has. So this means that his father, Malachy Senior (McCourt’s younger brother is also called Malachy), is viewed as a way more positive figure than perhaps he would have been if told from the point of view of the adult writer. Remember, the man’s an alcoholic who drinks the vast majority of the family’s money, and when he goes to England to find a job during the war he only once sent the money home. And yet the child McCourt describes him almost tenderly – certainly more tenderly than the sharp shame he feels later on when he sees his mother begging for food. Every time I put the book down (which is similar to something one of the audience on the Bookclub programme for this book said) I remembered that this had really happened, these had been real children, and no matter how many cosy early morning moments McCourt and his father had together or how many stories his father told him, this man near enough abandoned his family to starve. So throughout there’s this strange contradiction between the uncritical eyes of the younger McCourt, and the knowledge of an adult reader.
Anyways, I had best get on and do some revision – the morning’s slipping away from me! If you can stomach the harrowing parts, I think Angela’s Ashes is quite rewarding because it’s pacy, sharp, well-written and funny in a lot of places, and definitely doesn’t leave you feeling depressed…much.
This is going to be a speedy little post because I’ve got about 20 minutes before I have to get ready for work. But I know that I haven’t blogged in what feels like a REALLY long time, so I just wanted to wave to my lovely followers and ask for your patience with my slowslowslow pace with which I’m getting through my current reads. I’ve got two things on the go at the moment – Children of England by Alison Weir, which is non-fiction on Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I and Elizabeth I; and Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, which is the next book in my Radio 4 Bookclub Challenge. I only started the Weir book because Waterstones didn’t have Angela’s Ashes when I tried to buy it so I was waiting for it to arrive, but now I’m invested in it. There’s also a lot of other reading going on in my life at the moment – last week I finished writing an essay on the impact of slavery on Africa, my current essay is on the historiography of and the primary sources important in the study of settlement law and removal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and I’m revising for two exams which are at the end of May. So that adds up to A LOT of reading. I’m powering through though, and hopefully will have a review for you within the next week or so. Going for a pre-work cup of tea now – have a nice evening everyone!
Happy Easter holidays everybody! I spent a lot of yesterday packing up all my stuff, and this morning my mum arrived to give me and all my stuff a lift back home to Shropshire for 5 weeks of Easter holiday. I’ve been SO READY for home for about a week now – Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week were just insanely busy and I also think I’ve been fighting some kind of unidentifiable bug off, leaving me feeling drained and headache-y and vaguely sick for most of this week. Yesterday evening was the first time in a few days that I really felt interested in eating, so obviously I ate my own weight in food at an end-of-term gathering I went to and proceeded to give myself a stomach-ache. I refuse to regret it though – the homemade cookie dough ice-cream is probably on the menu in heaven. But anyway, it’s so good to be home – and, apart from anything else, not have to make your own cups of tea!
But I digress. On to Wild Swans. It’s a bit of a brick, this one – 650 pages. It’s taken me quite a while to get through – and frankly I’m relieved to have finished if only because it’s quite an inconvenient size to carry around with you (I always have a book with me. Always. I even brought one to Alton Towers once – although my boyfriend made me leave it in the car. If you ask me, you never know when you might need a good book). Technically, I suppose you’d class this book as an autobiography, but I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate term just because it doesn’t start with Jung Chang, the author, but with her grandmother who was born in 1909, had her feet bound as a toddler and as a teenager became the concubine of the chief of police in the warlord government of Peking. The narrative follows the life stories Chang’s grandmother, mother and Chang herself, and through them the life story of twentieth century China, in all its revolution, idealism and horror.
I think it’s probably important to say from the outset that I am not exactly an aficionado of Chinese history. I’ve never studied it, or really read about it in any great detail – save for two novels by Anchee Min, Empress Orchid and Becoming Madame Mao. I could have chosen a module on Chinese history for the term I just finished, but I decided not to – possibly because I find its scope and its extremes quite daunting. I also (ashamedly) knew next to nothing before this book about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I knew millions of people died – but to be honest, that assumption can be applied to the history of any number of different countries. However, I think that coming at this massive history this way – through the story of 3 generations of one family – was a really powerful way of getting to grips with it. Chang’s parents were both active in the civil war between the communists and the Kuomintang (a political party in pre-communist China) and ended up as senior officials in Mao’s new order – but through this family the reader gets to see not only the highs of communist China but also the tragic-on-a-mass-scale lows: Chang’s parents were denounced and tortured (her father to the point of mental and physical breakdown) and she and her siblings were exiled to peasant villages in the most remote parts of the country to do hard labour. Around the personal stories about her family, Chang is able to paint a picture of the wider trends and movements in China, as well as regularly focusing on Mao, the centre of her universe for so much of her childhood and young adulthood, and supposing his thought process behind some of his more mind-boggling decrees.
I found the calm, reflective tone which Chang adopts when telling her story – horrendous events, heartbreaking events, and events so mind-boggling that you just have to laugh – very striking. Considering the extreme emotions encountered on almost every page, and indeed the emotions recalling these happening that must have been caused in the writer, the reader never feels immersed in those emotions; you are always slightly removed, slightly apart from the action. However, in contrast with this, an unusual aspect of the way the story is told is the way Chang very rarely uses the names of people in her family – they are always “my grandmother,” “my father”, “my mother.” This is how she writes right from the off, from when her grandmother is a teenager – long before she herself is born. I found this quite uncomfortable, particularly at the beginning when you get a lot of “my great-grandfather”, “my great-great-grandmother” etc, which can get a bit confusing. I also thought there was a bit of tension between the objective way Chang was telling the story and at the same time the way she identified the main actors in an intensely personal way. Maybe she was trying to keep hold of the wider scope of the narrative (not a mean feat considering the amount of detail provided around every corner) and yet still keep the story fundamentally one about a family, her family. In fact Chang actually says in her Radio 4 Bookclub interview that she wrote the book primarily to try and understand her mother better – and that once she had drafted the book, she went back through and cut out most of the overly, overtly emotional parts in homage to her professional calling as a writer.
Wild Swans definitely isn’t a cheerful read. When I was ploughing through the parts about the Cultural Revolution in particular, it was pretty hard-going just because there didn’t seem to be even a glimmer of hope or positivity in the China that Chang and her family were inhabiting. I used to read a chapter or so while eating my breakfast in the morning – and sometimes by the time I’d finished I was so traumatised I felt like I wanted to go back to bed! But I would probably go so far as to say that it’s an unforgettable book. On the back of my copy, there’s a quote from a journalist at the Sunday Times describing it as “a portrait of the brain-death of a nation” – I don’t think you could sum it up any better. Definitely give it a go, but take a deep breath first – it packs quite a punch.
This is only going to be a little post – I’ve spent the last week or so wondering about which blogs I should nominate, as per tradition, for the Versatile Blogger Award, and I’ve finally chosen! You should all check them out, because they’re blogs I just keep coming back to.
Oh yeah, before we get going on that I just wanted to say that I’m not going to include Marilyn at communicating.across.boundaries, because even though I keep going back to her blog, she already has this award! So I’m going to spread the love around.
1. the cook, the baker and the biscuit maker – those of you who read my happy blogversary post will already know about this fab recipie blog written by my lovely friend Hannah. Nom nom nom!
2. Vulpes Libris - also featured in the happy blogversary post. Loads of wide-ranging, well-written, passionate book reviews
3. Doodlemum – her drawings brighten up my day
4. Love and a Six-Foot Leash – a fab blog about fostering pit-bulls. Just goes to show blogging gets you interested in things you never knew about before!
5. Jenniferkoman – the only journal-esque blog I read, because it makes me chuckle and I love the day-through-photos thing they’ve got going on over there.
Enjoy everyone 
My current read, Wild Swans by Jung Chang, seems to be taking me quite a while at the moment, but while I’ve got a spare evening I thought I’d just say a big thank you for a couple of blog-related chunks of happiness that have come my way recently.
Firstly, a couple of weeks ago the lovely Marilyn from communicating.across.boundaries, via my About page, nominated me the Versatile Blogger award. As I understand it, the Versatile Blogger Award is something bloggers pass on to each other when they particularly enjoy a certain blog. It’s a chain thing, and the idea is that you in turn then nominate other bloggers, and so the chain goes on. Another rule seems to be that you as the nominee also have to share some about yourself.
So before we do anything else, I would like to thank Marilyn very much for the nomination, and it’s particularly flattering to be given the seal of approval, so to speak, by a fellow blogger who writes a damn fine blog herself! Those of you who’ve visted before will know that in my blogversary post I mentioned three of my favourite sites from my first year as a WordPress user, so I’ll have a bit of a think about some other blogs that I really enjoy (there are getting to be quite a lot to choose from these days!) and I’ll write a separate post for those ones. So now all that’s left is for me to tell you some things about myself – and I’ll try to make them different from the loves and hates that are on my About page! If any of them particularly tickle your fancy, let me know and I’ll write a proper post on them in another of my in-between-reviews stages!
- I have lived in three different countries, and although I was born in Britain I left when I was 4 months old and we didn’t come back until I was 12. Cue a fairly significant culture shock.
- I’m a major morning person and I don’t like to feel like I’m wasting the day by sleeping in too late. In conflict with this are both my great love of sleep and my boyfriend, who definitely likes lie-ins and cannot comprehend my almost pathological need to get up at a “reasonable hour,” and therefore force him to get up too.
- I have been to V Festival 4 times. I was the designated driver the fourth time, which was also the only time we got lost on the way home.
- My dad is a captain in the Merchant Navy, and he’s just started a new job working in Africa. Nice change from the North Sea!
- My middle name is Margaret. It was almost my first name – thank heavens for small mercies.
- I had an unexpectedly traumatic experience when applying to university, which I think scarred my sister a bit – who subsequently went on to have the perfect application experience.
- Gollum from Lord of the Rings terrifies me. The prospect of him can still scare me enough to sleep with the light on.
I think that’ll do for now, don’t you?
Before I trot off to watch something funny and brain-relaxing with my housemate, I am also going to say hello and thank you to Elle and Emily, two lovely ladies who are very kind and complimentry about this blog whenever they see me and remind me that I’m not just blogging to indifferent white noise – well, not all the time anway! Hi girls *waves*
Anyways, I’ll get cracking on Wild Swans, and hopefully have a verdict for you quite soon. Halfway through!
So it feels like it’s taken me a reeeeeaally long time to finish Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, book 4 on my Radio 4 Bookclub Challenge – but I finally managed it late on Friday night. I was knackered with a capital knack because the university big band that I’m a member of played at the Medics’ Ball, just background music really and we played rather well all told, but it was 2 hours of performance altogether which is a bit hard on your brain as well as your lip – especially when you’re trying to read your music in a function hall with red-tinged “mood lighting”! But I was sooo close to the end that when I got into bed I just had to keep going until I’d finished. Lucky I didn’t have to get up for anything on Saturday!
Isn't it a beautiful cover? You don't get this from an ebook!
The first thing I feel like I should say is that if you buy/borrow/steal (we at givemestories do not condone this third option) this book, the blurb is misleading. I know that when you really get into a half-decent novel, most blurbs are misleading, but thing about this one is that it starts with Captain Corelli: ‘It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces…’ It’s not misleading because that’s not what happens – that, in fact, is exactly what happens. But not until page 188. By the time he arrives, we are happily settled down with Dr. Iannis, his daughter Pelagia, Psipsina the tame pine martin and a whole motley crew of characters from their village in beautiful, eccentric Cephallonia. Pelagia’s fiance, the fisherman Mandras, has gone to war and is being thoroughly traumatised and not answering his betrothed’s letters, and Dr. Iannis is trying and failing to write an epic Greek history. In amongst all this we have also been treated to snapshots of political goings on in other places in the world – including a brief sojourn into the consciousnesses of Mussolini and Greek Prime Minister Metaxas – and the inner workings of a tortured homosexual Italian soldier, at war against the Greeks alongside a man he is secretly in love with. But then, of course, Corelli arrives. He is billeted in Dr. Iannis and Pelagia’s house, and he and the latter fall in love. Then the Germans get in on the act in Greece, and the “real” war impedes more and more on the lives of our characters. Eventually Corelli is forced to leave the island and we are left to wonder if he will return, as Pelagia and Dr. Iannis struggle on. That isn’t the end of the book, but I feel like I have to stop describing now otherwise I’ll ruin it!
It’s quite hard to describe how this book’s written. There were a few parts where I was reading and thinking “this is almost like a fairy tale.” There are huge men who can achieve incredible feats of strength, for instance, and there’s a scene where an annual mad-person-being-cured-by-a-saint takes place. More generally, though, the voice of the omniscient narrator is very strong throughout the whole thing, regularly making references to things that will happen in a particular character’s future – so you often don’t feel particularly secure in that character’s present, because you’ve started thinking about this future event that the narrator has alluded to.
Something I really feel like I should say is that it’s funny. There are some parts that really made me chuckle, and for some reason I wasn’t really expecting that. Dr. Iannis is really dry and witty, and there are some very comical scenes – one of my favourites being Dr. Iannis crawling through the undergrowth with a small girl of the village to rescue an injured pine martin (Psipsina). It’s also a book full of love for the island of Cephallonia itself, and its history. On the Bookclub programme featuring Louis de Berniéres, he said that what he really wanted to do was tell the readers about Cephallonia’s history, and so he used Dr. Iannis’ efforts to write a history of the Greeks as a kind of cipher for that need. The community in which Pelagia and Dr. Iannis live is almost a character in itself – quite late on in the book the island suffers an earthquake, and I was almost as upset by the near destruction of the village than as by the deaths of individual people at various points.
In contrast to that, the parts written about the war – firstly about Carlo, our gay Italian soldier (who ends up on Cephallonia as part of Corelli’s division) fighting hopelessly in freezing mountains against the Greeks, then about Mandras’s suffering, and then much later when the Germans, for want of better phrasing, get really nasty with the inhabitants of the island and the Italian soldiers – are very, very good. Not as good as the war sections in Birdsong, but still very powerful and intense – about 2 thirds of the way through there is a firing squad scene that I was mentally hiding behind my hands whilst reading.
One of the most interesting things, I suppose, is that Captain Corelli really isn’t the main character. In fact, I didn’t even find him particularly interesting – my focus was all on Dr. Iannis, Pelagia and, maybe to a slightly lesser extent, Carlo. They were the ones I really cared about finding out what happened to. Some of the most moving parts were the sections told from Carlo’s point of view – in fact, I might even go so far as to say he’s my favourite character, because he’s brave and noble and selfless and just good all over. I actually – whisper this gently – didn’t care that much about the love story between Corelli and Pelagia. I mean, it was fine, but not exactly heart-pounding-in-your-chest, entirely-emotionally-invested-in-this-relationship kind of thing, apart from maybe a couple of dialogue exchanges shortly before Corelli lives which were nice. Some people might say because there’s no connsumation, there’s no sex, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s because I just didn’t feel like they had much of a connection – I almost didn’t understand why they were in love with each other. I got way more interested in Pelagia after Corelli left, in the last 100 pages or so – I almost forgot about Corelli, but not quite. He kind of hovers over the rest of the book like a shadow, while the rest of the characters get on with their lives and wonder if he’ll come back.
So overall, a mixed bag I think. Definitely not the best love story there’s ever been, but the overarching narrative of the island pulls you in for the long haul. I loved Dr. Iannis and Carlo, I got gradually fonder of Pelagia and I really loved Cephallonia, and its history, and its enduring nature. Worth the read, once you get going!
This time last year, I agonised over a blogname and title, blundered my way through themes and widgets, fashioned a blathering first blog post and tentatively sent it out into the wordpress world. And here I am, a year on, still writing the thing. I’m actually quite proud of myself that I kept it up – when university gets really crazy-busy, often I don’t write for weeks, and it would be so easy just to forget about it and let the blog get covered in digital dust and move further and further down search engine result lists. But somehow I’ve kept coming back, I’ve kept telling you all about the books I’ve been reading, trains of thought that I’ve been having, and even though it hasn’t exactly catapulted me to internet fame and fortune, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.
I’ve also enjoyed encountering lots of other bloggers, many who are talented, funny, insightful, out there in the world. So I thought I would use this, my blogversary post, to share a few of my favourites with you, as a review of my blogging adventure so far (and to gain them a few more well-deserved followers!):
- The cook, the baker and the biscuit maker - I have to confess that Hannah who writes this blog is a very dear friend of mine who I’ve known since we were both spotty and brace-ridden (actually, I don’t remember her ever being that spotty, that must have just been me), but my potential for bias shouldn’t dissuade you from checking out her blog. She is at the moment in her final year of an Art History undergraduate degree, but is also an enthusiastic and increasingly knowledgeable cook, and her blog is stuffed full of recipies (all of which have been tried and tested by her) and helpful hints and tips to get more food for your money, and more enjoyment out of your food.
- communicating.across.boundaries - this is one of my favourite blogs that I’ve discovered on my blog-travels. Its author, Marilyn, is a true cross-cultural individual with experience of living and embracing many different countries and cultures. Her blog is massively wide-ranging, and Marilyn writes intelligently, passionately and often movingly on anything from arranged marriage, breast-cancer screening, kindles and children growing up and leaving home – and they are just some of her more recent posts! The discussions in the comment sections of her posts are always polite and respectful without veering into insult or slanging matches (not something so easily found in the vicinity of potentially inflammatory subjects these days!), and I always look forward to her new posts.
- Vulpes libris - this is a blog where I feel among kindred spirits – other people who are excited by books and inspired to write about them! Vulpes libres is written by a group of authors, and it consists mainly of book reviews of significant diversity, with the odd guest post or author interview thrown in occasionally. One week you can be reading a review of contemporary fiction, the next a poetry anthology, and the next a non-fiction tome or pamphlet. I particularly like that at the beginning of each week the book foxes provide us with a “coming up on vulpes libris” post, where you can find out what’ll be being reviewed for the rest of the week. The reviews aren’t ever too long (a trait I think mine suffer for sometimes) but are always thoughtful and well-written.
I think these are my top three blogs of the year – meaning the ones that I visit most often. I enjoy lots of others, including the fabulous Doodlemum, Jenn Koman, Make Wealth History and the newly-discovered Love and a Six-Foot Leash. I hope to discover lots more interesting and entertaining bloggers in the year to come, but for now I’m just going to thank you for reading, hope that you’ll come back again soon, say a big “happy blogversary to me!” and rush off to band rehearsal. I think I’m late…
