June - Conclusions

BOOKS I READ
29.6 Nobels testamente av Liza Marklund
25.6 Freja sagan om Valhalla av Johanna Hildebrandt
22.6 Merabs skönhet av Torgny Lindgren
18.6 Den vidunderliga karlekens historia av Carl-Johan Vallgren
12.6 Från doktor Klimkes horisont av Hakan Nesser
10.6 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
8.6 Suck mitt hjarta med brist dock ej av Mark Levengood
6.6 De norrbottniska satansverserna av Ronny Eriksson och Lasse Eriksson
Dr Jekyll och Mr Hyde av Robert Louis Stevenson
4.6 Everyman by Philip Rooth
2.6 Röde Orm av Frans G Bengtsson

BOOKS I OBTAINED
26.6 What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Saftan Foer

BOOK OF THE MONTH (fiction)
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Fantastic classics.

BOOK OF THE MONTH (non-fiction)
Suck mitt hjarta med brist dock ej av Mark Levengood
Levengood is so lovely that you can't stop smiling.

WORST BOOK OF THE MONTH
Freja sagan om Valhalla av Johanna Hildebrandt
Shame, shame shame on the serious publishing house who polluted the bookstore with this garbage.

AUDIOBOOK OF THE MONTH
Merabs skönhet av Torgny Lindgren
Nothing beats Lindgren's fantastic voice when he reads his books, not even Mark Levengood although he comes close.

Prep

What a debut by Curtis Sittenfeld! A novel that really gets into your mind and deals with the question, how to survive as a stranger in a strange land?
This strange land is an upper class high school in the east U.S. and Lee (the main character) is a middle class girl from the midwest. What amazes me in Prep is that all the characters could be pictured as stereotypes but Sittenfeld manages to give life and blood to most of them. No one is 100% pleasant and no one is 100% disagreeable. Even if Lee is quite extreme in her way of dealing with her alienation, my stomach reacts instinctively to the resemblance to situations in my own adolescence.

אפשר לכתוב גם בעברית!

great-beginning-but-mediocre-book-syndrome

The great-beginning-but-mediocre-book-syndrome is something that I have experienced a lot lately - not only in The Shadow of the Wind. I have no doubt that it is hard to write a good book - so don't get me wrong, I admire the ability to write great beginnings its just that it so disappointing every time it happens...

Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies started out great - just read the first few sentences:
"I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn't been back in fifty-six years and I remembered nothing."
First of all I think that it is nice to start with an end - in this case the most certain one - death. With this Auster kind of set the rules for the game as well as indicate that the story will be about change. Beckett does something very similar in his play Endgame which starts with Clov's great line "Finished, it is finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finsihed." A story cannot start with death - as death is static. The narrator/Clov think that the end has come but as the story/play proceeds they realizes that that nothing is nearly as finished as they thought at the beginning.
Then there is the absolute absurd notion that someone would recommend a place to die on! In which kind of casual conversation would this topic come up? Oh, by the way, which place would you recommend one to die at? And even if we do say that the topic would come up - what kind of person would recommend Brooklyn? I would may be have recommended some beautiful place in the nature, a nice hospice, I don't know, but I can't imagine why anyone would recommend Brooklyn as a good place to die at.
And then comes the third sentence that really set off the story. What a great beginning!

Auster really knows how to handle his language. His protagonist is a grumpy, divorced, cancer recovering older man with a very bitter and cynical attitude towards everything - just read how he describes his daughter on the second page of the book:
"Rachel is not a stupid person. She has a doctorate in bio-chemistry ... but much like her mother before her, it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes - all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom."
The last dense sentence is concise bitterness at its best.

Yet in the end, The Brooklyn Follies although it was a nice enough book, didn't manage to keep up the great level it had started out from. A little to predictable, too much closure, too much happiness archived for my taste - almost a little cheesy...

I think that the 2 books of Orhan Pamuk that I have read also suffers from the same syndrome. Both The Black Book ad Snow starts out great, but about half way into the books they start to be very repetitive and loose the charm.

The Shadow of the Wind II

Well, no. The book didn't continue to as good as it started - but it is still a really nice book that I would recommend anyone to read. It has a lot of great characters among which I especially like the character of Nuria.

The Shadow of the Wind contains many stories that reflect each other. Zafon says in an interview that he is writing a "sort of narrative kaleidoscope of Victorian sagas, intrigue, romance, comedy, mystery, and "newly" fashioned old-fashioned good storytelling" which is a good description of his writing style. What strikes me the most is the plentifulness - of character, stories and details. There is a a lot of playfulness and Zafron really has a vivid imagination.

Zafon also seems to really likes Barcelona and his description of its square and streets creates a becomes like a character and has an important role in the book. He does this in a really nice way and you really get the feeling that you would like to wander down the narrow streets of the Barri Gotic quarter.

Throughout the book I still had the feeling that for all its complexities, oddities, stories-within-stories etc, it was still missing something. When I read that Zafon has written books for young adults I thought that it made sense and realized what it was that I missed - substance. The beginning of the book that I liked so much which described the mystery and the sanctuary that the experience of reading is (at its best) is something that do not have any age limits in neither directions (old - young). However, in the end the sum of all the eloquent storytelling, all the parallel narratives, all the characters and textures kind stays just that - textures, which is great, but maybe left a little want of substance. Well, the book is very much a really great book for young adults.