sight reading

Last time I read a novel by Daphne Kalotay, I raved about it.  So my expectations were set fairly high when I picked up her more recent novel recently.  It was published in 2013, but I'm going to call it a new release anyway.

Sight Reading is a novel about relationships, which happens to be set in Boston, USA, and in the context of the classical music scene.  It takes a journey through three separate periods in the characters' lives, slowly unravelling the ways in which they develop, pull apart and come together again.

Nicholas Elko is a talented conductor and composer who is going places.  He comes to Boston with his wife Hazel and their young daughter Jessica in 1987, to take up a new job in the conservatory.  He meets Remy, the young, determined violin student - and they overwhelm each other.  Suddenly, the Elko family is broken up.

The novel is a story of how these relationships adapt over time.  How does a family learn to cope with functioning as separate units?  With sharing custody and the love of a child?  How will Hazel come to terms with the change in her situation which was no fault of her own, and how will she function, forced to remain on acceptable terms with her ex-husband and his new wife for the sake of their child?  What happens when Nicholas and Remy become used to each other and all their flaws?  What happens when they face their own disappointments and failings?

It is also a story that is interwoven with creativity and people who are creative in different ways (but most particularly in music).  As Nicholas gains more and more critical and popular acclaim, he continues to work on his symphony which he knows will be a masterpiece but which never quite seems to become coherent.

In the end, this is a story that explores the complicated meaning of family and how it can expand and contract painfully, but ultimately beautifully.  It explores the way in which art gives voice to and reflects things that words cannot express.

Sight Reading is very well-written and readable, and the denouément comes strongly and smoothly just when it is necessary.  I normally find books with such sudden leaps in timing more difficult to read, but this moved along smoothly and masterfully.  I have to admit, however, that at times I skipped over passages, particularly descriptions of music that I had no way of hearing.

It was nice to see the author trying her hand at a story with less epic drama than her last novel (Russian Winter) but just as much human interest.  The characters were quite well-rounded and vivid, and the story was engrossing.  I liked how the perspectives changed, and you saw how different people misunderstood each other.

Something wasn't entirely there, however.  I wonder if the characters were all too talented and creative?  Is it really normal to only have friends that do interesting and magical things?  I suppose it might be that way if you work in a music conservatory, but it just felt like normal people were missing somewhere...  I also found myself wondering quite often where the story was going, and what the purpose of some of its elements were.  Sometimes this became clear, and yet sometimes it did not.

I do think this was a very good book.  I wouldn't rate it as highly as Russian Winter but that's not saying much, given that I gave Russian Winter my highest rating ever.  It's the kind of book that you won't regret reading, I would think, and it definitely gave me some thoughts to mull over.  I liked it very much.

evelina

I have just finished reading Fanny Burney's Evelina for the first time, and I found it highly enjoyable.  One of my new year's resolutions this year was only to read really good or really fun books, and this was not a bad place to start.

I struggled a little bit with Evelina's extreme delicacy and tendency to confusion, swooning, inability to act like a normal person in public, etc.  I was more than a little frustrated at her constant sense of duty to everyone else's opinion, and then the fact that she would blame herself when what they said turned out to be a bad idea.  The setting was one where every woman is an angel or a harlot, where intelligence in a woman is viewed with extreme suspicion, where the good characters all seem to be a little bit dull and the bad characters are roundly condemned but much more interesting, although the author doesn't appear to realise this.  I struggled with it, but I enjoyed it as an interesting historical experience.  It was a lesson in appreciating the feminist movement and the changes of the last couple of centuries, and I enjoyed it as a novel, a rollicking read.  This blogger puts it well:

Somehow, it did not bother me as I would have expected. Yes, I wanted to thoroughly shake Evelina every once in a while, tell her to open her eyes and not be so gullible. And oh yes, I even considered slapping her. But all in all, I could not help but be entertained.

As the blogger points out, quoting an introduction written by Edward Bloom, this novel is at least an improvement on a familiar theme:

“In this kind of feminocentric novel, the transition from innocence to experience is conceived not as a fall, but as a narrative of progress and understanding.”

So at least it allows Evelina her (slight) growth as a character without lamenting a loss of womanhood.

It was also a really excellent experience to read something that was in Jane Austen's school of novel-writing, and to really see how wonderfully different Austen's female characters are.  I've always liked them for their independent, clever streak, but I don't think I'd realised how unusual that was for her day and age.

Which leads me to another point - I suppose I have learned satire from Jane Austen, because I struggle with the label of 'satire' being placed on this book.  Yes, it is apparently satirical.  Maybe I am misunderstanding the word somewhat?

Yes, there are a number of characters that appear rather ridiculous, but we see them all from Evelina's rather insipid (though very nice) point of view and so the book seemed to me more Moralistic than Satirical.

But then again I seem to be in disagreement with a number of people - according to this blogger, Evelina is a 'ruthless' character:

Evelina is described throughout the novel by many characters as being innocent, but in fact she is anything but. She is, indeed, quite coldblooded in using her both her femininity and her youth to her advantage to achieve her aims. Evelina is a manipulative young lady who routinely censors what others say when relaying the meaning she wishes to convey.

I really don't see it.  Another blogger doesn't see it:

Evelina the character is boring. She’s passive, she’s perfect, she’s dutiful, she’s self-effacing. She doesn’t seem to have a mind of her own. Her story at the end of the novel is entirely predictable.

This other blogger writes, on a slightly different tack, with a slightly more complex impression:

The story of Evelina is the story of a young girl learning her place in society and grappling with keeping her identity while attempting to fit into the culture of the time.  ... Evelina attempts to con-temporize her self-image while attempting to belong in society. The forces of social convention weigh so heavily upon her, Evelina thinks “…there ought to be a book, of all the laws and customs a-la-mode, presented to all young people, upon their first introduction into public company” (Burney XX: 84). This statement shows the character’s desire to conform to social convention and alter her self-image so as to belong in the crowd. The willingness of the main character to change herself, rather than have people accept her for her faults, shows that the author thinks the force of social convention is stronger than that of free will.

It was really interesting to me to see how different an impression different people have taken from this novel.  If that's possible, maybe my first reading was not so discriminating.  Maybe it is possible to read it in a whole myriad of ways.  I'm sceptical... but I will read it again one day, and maybe I will see something more.

the swimmer

I have just finished reading Roma Tearne's new novel, The Swimmer. I am intending to write a full review for Halfway Down the Stairs, which I will link to at the start of March, so I will keep this brief, but I want to say something about it now.

That something is: This is a lovely, absorbing book. I came out of it feeling a little overwhelmed, and caught up in the lives of a few people who happen to be fictional but who could quite easily be real, I suspect.

It is the story of a man and a woman from very different backgrounds who meet in a small English village - one a refugee and illegal immigrant, one an acclaimed poet - and fall in love. It is also the story of a mother, dealing with loss, and later a daughter, dealing with unexplained history as well as her own loss. The three female narrators intertwine, but it is not for me to show you how. I can only recommend that you read this book. It's not a beach read, it is eye-opening, it engages with politics and difference and hate and resentment and distrust - but it isn't horrible. It is based around strong human relationships and sympathetic characters.

I give it three and a half stars.

his family ... and other animals

I have just finished reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. It's one of those books that I'm delighted to discover now, but really should have come across earlier. Has anyone else coming across this blog read it?

Gerald Durrell was an English (though Indian-born) naturalist and conservationist who also wrote books about his exploits. I've never even considered reading books about animals before, but that was before I realised how much fruit for story-telling they provided him. This particular book is about the five years he spent with his slightly unconventional family on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s, from the age of ten.

It feels like cheating to be able to write a book about your childhood years in Corfu, in a way. Durrell has so much to work with, simply by virtue of living in an absolutely beautiful location, with fascinating wildlife, and interesting people. It also feels like cheating to have such a wonderfully eclectic family, and to have such serendipity in encountering the most unusual variety of people outside the family. But at the same time I get the distinctive idea that Durrell is one of those people who could find interesting things anywhere, and, even if they happen to be swamp-delling reptiles or generous wife-killers, endear them to all his readers.

I laughed out loud for a high percentage of this book. It's full of hilarious moments, brought to the page either by Durrell's family/friends or by animals or by Durrell's family's encounters with his animals. When I wasn't giggling, I was fascinated by the wildlife a teenaged Durrell dug up in various swamps or stumps or seas. Or I was bowled over by his descriptions of Corfu. One particular image stands out: swimming in the sea, at night, with porpoises - the sea so full of phosphoresence that the porpoises shone as they swum underneath or beside him, and the water they splashed sparkling like little diamonds.

I did get bogged down a bit in the descriptive passages at times. But as a whole this book is something lovely to read. A slice of chocolate cake, as books go. I give it three and a half stars.

zombie romance

The December issue of Halfway Down the Stairs is out! HDtS is a quarterly e-zine which I help edit, and this time around I decided to review Isaac Marion's very new novel, Warm Bodies. This is a novel about a zombie who falls in love with a girl.


As you will see if you read the review, I didn't expect much from it. And there were a few small issues with it that I felt I had to mention. All the same, I ended up loving it and I don't think the issues mattered that much by the end - a surprising experience for me. The sum of this book was more than its parts (although it has some lovely parts).

Definitely check this book out if it's available on bookstore shelves near you. I am no fan of zombie stuff in general, but it's one of those genre books that is accessible to a wider audience than its genre normally commands. It's a fun read, a thoughtful read, and ultimately quite a sweet (though suitably grisly) read. I give it three and a half stars.

It's not coming out in the US until March next year but is already being sold in the UK (and obviously New Zealand, since I got a review copy).