Review: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah

If pressed, I would say that I prefer novels with unity of time, place and action. And not too many characters. Especially, not too many characters. As a teenager, I think I made it through to the end of Anna Karenina but I'm pretty sure I didn't finish War and Peace. Right now, I have stalled on a 20th century War and Peace, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. I keep forgetting who is who - it seems this is expected, because there is a crib sheet of names. It's a pity: I admire Grossman's writing, I think Everything Flows and his war journalism are terrific. But Life and Fate is too much of  a cognitive challenge.

Adiche's book is spread panoramically across three continents, in Nigeria, the USA and England - a bonus for publishers I'm sure - and it has a large cast of characters with names which to me are unfamiliar - just like Tolstoy's - and it is spread over decades. But because it has a fleshed-out core couple at the heart of it - Ifemelu and Obinze -  it doesn't fall apart into a series of scenes. There are scenes but they are managed in such a way that they rarely seem disconnected. In other words, Adiche maintains a strong narrative thread. There is a story, a romance, developed over 477 pages.

There is also a strong thread of social commentary, spun out from the hub of Race. It's often funny, acid but never hectoring. It picks up on the significance of everyday, taken-for-granted acts and omissions, making us see them afresh. It's very well done.

Ifemelu is a complex character - insecure, abrasive, courageous, very clever and very demanding. In the end, the man she wants only gets her when he puts out to the maximum - nothing less will do (I was reminded of Pretty Woman).

Review: Alison Macleod, Unexploded

I bought this book for no better reason than that it had a local setting (Brighton) and a local author - but with "Man Booker Longlist" status.

Set in 1940 Brighton, and indebted to another local author, Virginia Woolf (who makes cameo appearances), it is essentially polite, middle class fiction - the kind of book you could discuss without embarrassment in a Reading Group. It does deal with real matters - the limitations of conventional, bourgeois marriage; the perils of childbirth; the desperate consequences of inhibition; British anti-Semitism; and - most interestingly - the way in which war radically alters childhood experience. But it does so in a manner which allows you to skirt round anything you don't really want to discuss. 

It starts rather tediously but gets better.It uses some fairly conventional tropes to develop its plot - the world of artists and whores as the Other of conventional middle class life, but it manages to turn them in interesting ways. It's not the enthralling page-turner described in the overblown press quotations. It's a decent, well-crafted piece of work in  genres (Virginia Woolf + the War + bourgeois marriage) which have many English readers.

Review: Marguerite Duras, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord

" - And if there is no unhappiness? 

- Then everything will be forgotten "

In 1984, Marguerite Duras published L'Amant - a lyrical, beautifully crafted short autobiographical novel about a teenager's love affair with a man in his twenties. The book was made into a film, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, which Duras disliked and it is sometimes said that she wrote this longer, second book - this second version of L'Amant - to show how the story should be filmed. It is indeed written as a series of filmically conceived scenes, sometimes with explicit notes of guidance about how they should be treated for cinema and it appeared in the same year (1991) as the film.

But there was another motive, which she acknowledges. In 1990, Duras learnt that her first lover was dead - had died some years before - and she set to work on this book. It is her mourning for her lover that is recorded here. And the emotional climax comes in a short passage at page 214 where the young Duras - just turned fifteen - urges her Chinese lover to make sure that one day he tells their story to his Chinese wife-to-be, complete with all the names, all the places, all the place names. Why to his wife? Because her unhappiness will allow her to understand the story. 

" - Et s'il n'y a pas de douleur? - Alors tout sera oublié" (page 214)

The story is in the great tradition of literature which knots together love and transgression. Like Romeo and Juliet,  Duras and her lover are breaking the rules, three rules in fact: she is under-age; she is white in French Indo-China and he is Chinese. She is poor and he is rich.

There will be mean spirited readers who will see her teenage infatuation for the Chinese man as an act of desperation. A fatherless child in a dysfunctional family; a brutal older teenage brother already addicted to opium; a younger brother who she both protects from the older and with whom at the same time she has an incestuous relationship. A mother who is not coping. There will be readers who would have sent the man to prison for a long time - they have such good sex - and the girl to the tender mercies of state care.

But the story she tells is about a child who is not desperate but courageous - or, at least, developing through acts of defiance what will become the courage of later life. 

Overarching everything is an enormous tenderness in her depiction of her characters - even the bit players - and their relationships. Quite often, she brings this out by describing how couples - temporary couples in some cases - dance with each other. These scenes are a gift to the film maker. 

(I am reminded of a story told me by a friend who, looking through a lit college window late one evening, chanced upon a very elderly Rudolf  Laban dancing alone with his partner, Lisa Ullmann).

Review: Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire

This is a fascinating, well-written account of the final months of the Soviet Union. Though Gorbachev is presented as a much rougher, power-hungry figure than I had imagined, the book impressed me as balanced and nuanced particularly in its account of the "dance" between Yeltsin's Russia and Kravchuk's Ukraine in the last five months of 1991 - the period from Gorbachev's house arrest in Crimea by the ill-fated Moscow putschists to his 25 December resignation as President of the Soviet Union. This makes for very interesting reading, especially now in 2014 in the context of the armed Russo-Ukrainian conflict which post dates the completion of this book.

Plokhy has had access to important primary source material, including transcripts and notes on conversations between the first President Bush and Gorbachev, Yletsin and Kravchuk. He has also interviewed some of the important participants in the events of 1991. The book includes a great deal of surprising detail.

Ukraine was important to Russia both symbolically and practically. Yeltsin did not want it to slip away from a "Slavic Union" which would leave Russia with just much-smaller Belarus to face towards the Islamic republics - the half dozen Central Asian Stans. 

It was also still the case, as it had been in 1917, that Ukraine was important to feeding Russia and it is an extraordinary fact that, as Plokhy describes it, in 1991 the Mayors of Leningrad and Moscow were preoccupied with food shortages - there wasn't much in the shops and they feared that by winter 1991 - 92 there would be nothing. It could have been 1917  - 18 all over again. Russian history is often about the question, Who is going to be hungry? In the 1930s, Stalin decided that it would be Ukraine - the food it produced was needed in Russia.

This is one reason why I disagree with one of Plokhy's conclusions:

The death of the Soviet Union differed from that of other empires in that the resource-rich metropolis cut off its former colonial possessions from easy access to those resources. Russia stood to benefit from the loss of its imperial possessions more than any other empire of the past (page 399)

This may be true of oil and gas, but it is still not true of food - nor even of cotton which Uzbekistan produced for the metropolis. I discuss some related issues in my review on this site of Alexander Etkind's Internal Colonization (reviewed on 9 June 2012)

Review: Charles Clarke, The "Too Difficult" Box

I bought this book with a heavy heart. Yes, I got £5 off but pretty soon it will be £20 off in every charity shop. It's a book which will fall dead born from the press.

Charles Clarke is a former British Labour politician who has made a new career as a Visiting Professor. In that role at the University of East Anglia he invited 25 people to come and talk about difficult issues in British politics, nearly all of them Establishment insiders: thirteen are members of the House of Lords and most of the rest could be and some certainly will be.

Now the House of Lords is part of the problem and not the place to look for solutions. It's a comfortable London club of 770 members with house rules so lax as to positively encourage what in ordinary life would be corruption (Google "Baroness Uddin" for example and search out Keir Starmer's reasons for not prosecuting her). Unsurprisingly, no one in this book suggests its abolition - a cost-saving and very effective solution to the problem it creates for the credibility of  "British democracy".

Other parts of the problem do not merit chapters in this book: there is nothing on the baleful influence of the Treasury, the Monarchy or the Established Church (whose Bishops automatically sit in the House of Lords). There is a chapter on the Scottish parliament  - by a member of the House of Lords - but no suggestion anywhere that England might deserve one. There is no mention of Northern Ireland or Wales - the former subsidised from England at around £5000 per local inhabitant and the latter at £4 000. There is no discussion of the jingoism which has us cling to Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands (the latter subsidised at around £50 000 per local inhabitant).

These are matters "too difficult" for Charles Clarke's Establishment. They are committed to thinking inside the box.

Most of them have probably been asked to "talk to students" before and few of them try very hard. Lord Falconer contributes a very tightly argued piece in support of Assisted Dying, arguing for the adoption of the US state of Oregon's model and this is probably the sharpest piece in the box. . At the other extreme, Lord Shephard's piece is merely whimsical and Mary Honeyball's reads like the transcript of a confused but nonetheless self-congratulatory talk on How I Got the EU to Adopt the Swedish Model (criminalising men who pay for sex). Trevor Phillips and David Blunkett also offer unstructured chats.

Very few contributors are angry with the System - Lord Filkin (on an ageing population) is - and that adds to the interest of his piece. The outsiders - Anatole Kaletsky on the Banks and Adam Boulton on the BBC - also show exasperation, though of course neither Boulton or anyone else suggests that public funding of the awful BBC should be withdrawn - cost-saving and effective and no loss.

A couple of pieces are lively presentations of issues by people with deep inside experience - Baroness Hollis on pensions and Margaret Hodge on waste in public spending contribute interesting pieces, and so do Lord Howarth (on drugs) and Tim Loughton (on child protection).

But overall this is not the place to go either for sharp analysis of the nature of a problem or defence of decisive solutions. Overall, it heads towards a Lower Second - about par for modern British political life.

Review: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This is the second Junot Diaz I have read - his This Is How You Lose Her was the first (it's reviewed on this site 28 December 2013)). It's a weightier book which weaves in and out of the terrible history of the Dominican Republic under the US-backed barbarism of Trujillo and since. It could be read in companion with Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat - a terrifying history of Caribbean dictatorships (reviewed on this site 9 June 2012).

It is verbally spectacular and at the same time very raw and direct. There are no euphemisms. The title is actually a little misleading insofar as there are several main characters whose story is told - the story of Oscar's mother Beli is developed at length and is perhaps the most emotionally powerful of the narratives though some readers might select the story of Beli's father, Abelard.

Written in English, a fair amount of text and dialogue is in Spanish. I am not the sort of reader willing to sit with an urban dictionary or to constantly Google. It may be that English - speaking readers in the United States can handle the Spanish but that won't be true of English - speaking readers in other countries (like my England). Maybe there should have been a separate edition for those readers with glosses or translations to make things smoother - after all, Diaz provides English when occasionally he uses French or Latin and it is not disruptive if done intelligently. I wondered if the Spanish - language edition leaves chunks of text in English. If not, then by parity of reasoning nothing would be lost by making this book more accessible to English readers who don't have (much) Spanish as a foreign language

Review: Edney Silvestre, If I Close My Eyes Now

Yes and No. Much of this book is highly readable but some of it is awkward, some sensationalist, and some sentimental. 

The readability is provided by a Murder Mystery investigated by two boys and a retired school cook. The plot is sometimes awkward - Silvestre makes his incest story line as complicated as you can make incest. Some of the sexual violence is effectively edgy but at other times seems sensationalist. The ending is weakly sentimental and disconnected from the very short time frame in which the main narrative is set. In between, there is an interesting social history of modern Brazil  with harsh light cast on its darker side and, perhaps most effectively, there is a story of boyhood friendship.