Other Recommendations - for the unenlightened

[Nesacat]

Viriconium is a good read indeed. Read it ages ago when I was in university and M John Harrison was a guest at a convention.

Invisble Cities was the first Calvino I ever read. And yes it is vertainly on par with Harrison. Very surreal dreamlike writing.

I loved Invisible Cities enough to look for the rest of his books but my heart belongs to Traveller.

[tiny99]

"Awaydays" by Kevin Sampson. Retro novel about football violence that culminates with indictment of eighties society against a backdrop of urban decay

[Nesacat]

Silk by Alessandro Baricco:

This powerful and erotic tale reveals how one's man desire threatens to ruin his life.

It is 1861 and Herve Joncour is a silk breeder from France who is happily married to the beautiful Helene. Compelled to travel illegally to Japan alone in search of disease-free silkworms, Herve comes across a "girl who does not have oriental eyes" and, despite not exchanging one word with her, falls deeply in love.

Over the course of several years Herve continues to make return trips to Japan in order to buy more silkworms and to feast his eyes on the beautiful and intriguing woman to whom he has become enthralled.

When the woman gives him a note that reveals her love for him, Herve finds his life in France unravelling as he becomes more obsessed with the woman at "the end of the earth".

He channels his frustrations into building a beautiful park in the grounds of his home and takes his wife on exotic holidays to hide his unhappiness.

When a second erotically charged letter arrives from his lover he is distraught by the contents, for while it is professes love and devotion it also warns Herve to never seek contact with her again...

In the style of an old-fashioned fable, Baricco has crafted a beautiful and mesmirising novella. Some of the chapters are so short they read more like poems, which adds to the charm and mystique of the story. The writing is hynotic, repetive and deeply affecting.

I read this book in under an hour and found myself greatly moved by the love affair. And the shock ending left me feeling stunned, so much so I wasn't quite sure if I had fully understood what had happened.

Ultimately this is an astonishing piece of writing. Heart-breaking, bewitching and very passionate.

[j. d. worthington]

Sounds like another recommendation I'm going to have to seek out in short order... Thanks again, Nesa!

[Ozymandias]

Bukowski- Notes of a Dirty Old Man

All of Kafka

Albert Camus- The Stranger

Flannery O'connor- A Good Man is Hard to Find short story collection and the novel Wise Blood

William S. Burroughs- Junky

Jack Kerouac- On the Road

Hunter S. Thompson- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

[Nesacat]

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Margaret Lea is a bookish, single woman living with her parents in London. As a serious but minor biographer, she is shocked when a letter arrives one day from Vida Winter. A popular author in England, Winter has given many reporters her "life story," not one of them true. She is, above all, a storyteller. Nothing about what she has told people has been true. Even her name has been fabricated. Now she wants Margaret to tell her story. Her life is fast coming to an end and she does not wish to die with her secrets.

Margaret has always preferred to read dead authors. Live ones have never held her interest - not until now. In her father's antiquarian bookshop, she locates a Winter volume entitled "Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation," which she eagerly devours, to her great surprise. But when Margaret reaches the end of the book, she finds that it contains only twelve tales. What happened to the thirteenth tale?

The book intrigues her enough that she accepts Winter's invitation to a preliminary interview at her home in Yorkshire. But after listening to her offer of an exclusive chance to tell the real story, an unimpressed Margaret declines. The old woman has played too many games and tricked too many people to be taken seriously. Winter has failed to convince Margaret of her sincerity, and she starts to walk out. Only by invoking the magic word "twin" does Winter make her offer irresistible, for Margaret has been troubled by the loss of her twin sister her entire life.

A deal is made: Winter will tell her story in her own way. Margaret will not be allowed to interrupt with questions. Once the ground rules are set, Winter begins the tale of a pair of twins, Emmeline and Adeline Angelfield, growing up in a family of madness. Winter claims her real name is Adeline Angelfield and her twin sister died in a terrible fire many years ago.

Finding Winter's story to be shocking, surreal, sad and captivating, Margaret travels to the ruin of the Angelfield mansion. There she wanders through the old wreck of a house, feeling the ghosts of the people she has been told about. And feeling the eyes of the living watching her.

With a backdrop of the Yorkshire countryside, the shrouds of fog that creep across the landscape provide an eerie setting for the brushes with the spirits Margaret imagines she has. Or is it her imagination? Drawing out the truth nearly destroys her and she must find a strength deep within herself to go on, for the thirteenth tale is the last and the best of them.

THE THIRTEENTH TALE is a gripping and spellbinding novel with a haunting quality. The story within the story extends beyond mesmerising in a way that will transfix every reader. Setterfield has a gift of making each beautifully constructed sentence draw her reader deeper into her tale.

[j. d. worthington]

You know, Nesa... you really should start charging for these things! Another very intriguing review making yet another for me to add to my "must read" list.

*sigh* You're too darned good at this, Cat!

[Allegra]

Nesacat, about Silk, the film is in production (will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007) directed by the very talented Canadian film maker François Girard, who also directed/produced extraordinary films such as The Red Violin, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, etc. Haven't read the book yet but thanks for the review and also for the review of The Thirteenth Tale which sounds a yummy to me.

[Nesacat]

You're welcome Allegra. Thanks for the information about the movie. I would like to see in on the silver screen. It's such a lush book. It would do well being translated into the a movie. I hope you like reading both the books.

[j. d. worthington]

The Sandglass, by Romesh Gunesekerah

As with all his work, The Sandglass is a seemingly simple tale, in this case of two families and their effects on each other over the decades, beginning with the purchase by Jason Ducal of a part of the land once belonging to the Vatunases -- a portion sold by Buttons, the patriarch of the clan, to spite his son, who is determined to get it back, as he is determined to control all around him -- as a home for he and his wife Pearl, and traced down through the birth of their great-granddaughter. The novel actually opens with the death of Pearl, and the return of her son Prins to England from Sri Lanka, from which the family had come and to which he had returned in attempting to escape what he felt was their pointless existence in England. From this point on, the narration relays the struggle to put everything in perspective, to understand the past and how the various members of the families have ended up at the crossroads they find themselves and their respective countries facing now. Convinced that his father's death in 1956 was not, as the official report states, accidental but an assassination, Prins is determined to find out the facts about his father's life and the reasons why his mother abandoned Arcadia, their home in Sri Lanka to move to England.

Told through the first-person narration of his friend Chip who had, in the intervening years, come to know Pearl better than anyone in her own family, what both Prins and we discover is that to look for such answers is to discover the web of all the tales that surround us, and how the many meanings of the words we use create and shape the meanings of our lives, as well as how we view those around us.

Having read both his story collection, Monkfish Moon, and his first novel, Reef, it seemed to me there was a subtle shift in his style in the earlier portions of this novel; some places it seemed to be a bit more of a crisp, almost noir-ish feel to some of the writing, an almost brutal simplicity here and there, offset by other places where it had a restrained by powerful lyricism -- much in the manner of the best of the hard-boiled detective school (Hammett, Chandler and, more recently, Ross MacDonald)... which would be rather fitting as the structure subtly reflects that, as well (especially MacDonald), as it is something of a detective story in its own right, and it also bears some of that same "hopeful cynicism" in tone. I've no idea whatsoever whether Gunesekerah has even read any of the writers mentioned above, and certainly the prose doesn't show any direct influence ... but I see similarities to some of the strengths of these writers. Regardless, it's his own novel all the way ... he owes nobody where that's concerned.

And I remain impressed by his deceptively easy control of his tale, such as the way he handles things with the penultimate chapter, "Dawn" ... there are some passages here that are almost heartbreakingly beautiful, yet in bringing in the birth of the child at the very point when there is such intense despair, he ran the risk of lapsing into sentimentality ... and pulled it off without ever falling into that... and then recast it all again by the final section, taking what could have so easily been a hopeful, upbeat but slightly false ending and making it instead simply one movement in the dance of life ... neither the most nor the least important.

As I've said elsewhere, he loves to tackle the big issues: Life, death, love, loneliness, alienation, what it means to be a displaced person both in your own country and elsewhere.... all done with a quiet, simple dignity that avoids making any of his characters pitiful, but is full of pathos and meaning and, as with all his work that I've read, rich in layers and such a skillful handling of metaphor that it can easily go unnoticed. To put it simply: The man is good!

[Nikitta]

I've recently read The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow, for a change of genres.

It is a story taking place during the witch trials and starts with a young girl whose father is a witchfinder and whose maternal aunt studies the sciences of the time. Her aunt is accused of being a witch and burned, but this young girl promises her to fight the entire witch trial thing, which is already somewhat on the decline.

She seeks help and inspiration from Isac Newton and Benjamin Franklin among others.

The narrator of the story is a book - Newton's Principia and it tells the story as it sees it, and of its battle with another book - The Witch Hammer.

I like the way the book at first switches between the studies of the aunt who teaches her, and what the father does when putting the suspected witches under trial and teaching this to her brother. It really contrasts the two things sharply and throughout the book you get a feeling of those two being well contrasted.

You follow this girl thorugh her very eventful life and search for the ultimate argument. I think that the book is very captivating and it's one I won't forget soon.

[Nesacat]

Embers by Sandor Marai; Translated from Hungarian by Carol Brown Janeway

In a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an old aristocrat waits to greet the friend he has not seen for forty-one years. In the course of this one night, from dinner until dawn, the two men will fight a duel of words and silences, of stories, of accusations and evasions, that will encompass their entire lives and that of a third person, missing from the candlelit dining hall - the now dead chatelaine of the castle.

The last time the three of them sat together was in this room, after a stag hunt in the forest. The year was 1900. No game was shot that day, but the reverberations were cataclysmic. And the time of reckoning has finally arrived.

Embers is a story of obsession, of a friendship that never truly existed, of a man who waited forty-two years for answers to two questions that are never really answered. What lovely, lyrical prose. The author writes beautifully and with insight into the human condition.

Konrad and Henrik meet at age twelve and become fast friends, living their lives as one. Reaching maturity, the young men enter the military service together. After Henrik's marriage to Krisztina, they become a threesome. Abruptly, Konrad leaves Hungary for the tropics and Henrik starts his forty-two years of waiting for answers.

We are invited into his Austro Hungarian castle, where we spend time with Henrik and try to comprehend how a man could wait so long in solitude, in a self-imposed prison without bars.

This is a lovely, moving tale of lost friendship and love. A book of sadness, passion and the beauty of life.

[j. d. worthington]

Sounds like another winner, Cat. As is so often the case, I'm going to have to look this one up; I long ago learned to trust your recommendations as being well worth the effort.

You do realize you are doing serious damage to my reading programme, don't you?

[k----20]

1-my name is red-orhan bamuk
this novel is the best of what this nobel brize winner have ever write
you will discover a new experience that you will never forget
this book is realy different about every thing .
2-the trilogy-najeeb mahfoz
this also are the best novels in this nobel brize winner works
this series is about three generation of an egypt family
this series is the best arabic novels have written till now.

[The Wanderer]

The Onion Field - Joseph Wambaugh
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
The Wild Palms - William Faulkner
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
Ronbinson Crusoe - Daniel Dafoe
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Malay Trilogy - Anthony Burgess
The Perenial Philosophy - Aldous Huxley
Soul Catcher - Frank Herbert
Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
Crime and punishment - Fydor Dostoyevsky