book review

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Ragnarök – The End of the Gods by A.S.Byatt

Seduced by the cover and the promise of something a little different from her norm (having read ‘Possession’ and ‘The Children’s Book’), I picked this up in its beautiful hardback form and for once allowed the impulse a rare indulgence.

Part of The Myths series, which includes Margaret Atwood’s, ‘Penelopiad’, the publisher Canongate invited select writers to retell a myth in their own way and this is A.S. Byatt’s contribution.

Ragnörak is a Norse myth, the story of how things came to be and how they and world are destroyed after a series of conflicts, revenge takings, mutations and natural disasters. Byatt’s version is neither a short story or novel, more of an insight into the myth, the perspective of a thin young girl in wartime, an immersion into the created world and its end, concluding with the author’s thoughts on myths.

Yggdrasil, the imagined world

Coming to it without knowledge of the mythological background, I found myself immediately immersed in life forms that grew and transformed, creatures that came into existence, hunted, survived, wrapped their tentacles around and invaded trees, forests, lakes, streams, oceans and the planet.

Strange but alive, it is a kind of living nightmare; the young girl (who I immediately came to think of as the author as a young girl) tries to understand and make sense of the world around her, while rereading her ‘Asgard and the Gods’ stories that invade her imagination and develop her awareness and understanding of belief or disbelief as it turns out.

She did not believe the stories in ‘Asgard and the Gods’. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive.

The pages are infiltrated with images of nature in abundance, colours, textures, millions of living things and creatures, moving, sliding, digging, squirming, biting and gulping, with an omnipresent sense of foreboding. The Gods celebrate as they always do with fighting and shouting, self-destruction an ever threatening accomplice. Jörmungandr, the angry, sensuous, snake with an insatiable appetite is particularly haunting and memorable.

In her ‘Thoughts on Myths’ at the end, Byatt notes the difference between fairy tales and myths, the former giving the reader the pleasure of recognizing repeated variations on similar narrative patterns, while myths often torment, puzzling and haunting the mind who reaches into them.

We are reminded of the world we live in and the corruption, contamination, pollution and ultimate destruction of the living organism we inhabit and can only wonder if we too are destined for such a fiery end. For me, it was more of a beginning, another entry point into the mysterious and meaningful realm of ancient mythology.

Further Reading:

Peter Conrad, The Observer

M John Harrison, The Guardian

Ursula K Le Guin, Literary Review

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Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Emerging from Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone reminds me what it was like returning home after three months travelling in Asia. Home is familiar, but everything else feels strangely altered by the recent experience.

Except it is not Asia I traverse, but reading my way through Addis Ababa in central Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, via the eyes, ears, heart and hands of Marion Stone.

Marion and Shiva are identical twin boys left orphaned when their mother dies during childbirth and their father, unable to cope with the revelations of that day, abandons them for good.

Raised by Hema and Ghosh, doctors in the Mission Missing Hospital, kept running by Matron’s unrelenting pursuance of international donors, they become a close-knit family, often struggling but nearly always overcoming the day to day dramas of the hospital and the equally unpredictable events of a volatile political environment.

Marion and Shiva follow their role models into the medical world and we too enter the operating room with such verisimilitude, it’s almost like watching an episode or ER (the nearest I have come to knowing what trauma surgery might be like).

Ethiopia & the Horn of Africa

Five hundred plus pages of bliss, I don’t recall when I was last so content that a book continued after 400 pages, so happy was I to enter the author’s realistically created world, taking me to those exotic but familiar to him locations, putting me through numerous experiences I will likely never encounter.  

Verghese’s words on the page bring a life-like quality; there is a richness to his prose that is metaphorically beautiful and a perceptive tension that is heart racing mad. It’s a roller coaster ride from start to finish and by page 472 tears of joy were flowing.

Gripping, enticing, compassionately delivered, eye-opening, heart racing, it is an unforgettable journey and a thrill of a read.  I finished it on the first day of 2012 and I can’t imagine reading better than this for a while, it could well become one of my best reads of 2012.

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Memorable Reads in 2011

It has been a memorable 2011 both in reading and sharing, one of my aspirations this year having been to learn how to create a blog.

What joy it has brought, the creation, the writing, the reading, the sharing and the community of readers and wonderful like-minded souls who comment and share and have opened their worlds to me. I didn’t expect or foresee all the joy and wonderful interaction that would come from creating a virtual entry into my world of books and reading and that this would lead me to so many others.

So thank you to all those who follow this blog, my wish for 2012 is that the inspiration and motivation we provide each other will long continue.

To rank anything would be torturous, and even to list favourites is near impossible, so I will mention some memorable reads in no particular order and no doubt regret those I have left out later.

muze 62

1. Muze No.62    ҉   not a big consumer of magazines, in February I discovered this volume at Le Mans TGV station. The words CULTURE, ECRITURE, LECTURE jumped out at me, then Louise Bourgeois – Eugénie Grandet, Proust à l’écran, Flannery O’Connor, Argentine and Le Sacré excited me and the cover just melted my heart. It did not disappoint, I now have another favourite magazine (and a most enjoyable way to improve my French).

2. Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb    ҉   Recommended by mon amie B, this was my first foray into popular French fiction. A hilarious account, said to be based on the author’s experience of a year working in Japan, you end up thinking she’s either a saint or a masochist as she fails to integrate into the work environment.

3. The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt   ҉   having not read her work for a long time, I was pulled into this Edwardian world of potters, ceramics, the Victoria & Albert museum and the varying sensitivities of children. A mesmerising and colourful journey.

4. Seven Days to Tell You by Ruby Soames   ҉   will remain with me always as a turning point, the first book I read prior to publication, fear and delight combining to produce this review.

5. The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper + The Professor by Yoko Ogawa   ҉   I will remember 2011 for discovering Yoko Ogawa’s short story collection in Oxfam, introducing me to her gripping and evocative style, followed by the poignant and memorable novella ‘The Housekeeper and Professor’.

6. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh   ҉   this classic collection of ‘coming of middle age’ essays published in 1955, stays with me because it arrived the day my daughter was admitted to hospital and was one of my choices of books to accompany me during those challenging two weeks.

7. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver   ҉   the ten year wait club, I recall awaiting Louis de Berniere’s ‘Bird without Wings’, one of my all-time favourite books and this year there was Jeffery Eugenide’s long awaited ‘The Marriage Plot’ and Kingsolver’s ‘The Lacuna’ which I loved and review here.

8. A Kind Man by Susan Hill   ҉   shortly after reading an author’s interview in Mslexia and a subsequent visit to Daunt Books in Marylebone, I couldn’t help but be tempted (and indulged, thank you G) by Susan Hill’s ‘A Kind Man’. I respected her attitude and perspective in the interview and instinctively savoured each page of this fable-like novella. I then read ‘The Beacon’ confirming Hill as a writer I know I will continue to read, happy there is a lengthy backlist.

9. The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B by Sandra Gulland    ҉    my first blog review and wonderful memories of two trilogies shared with my best book reading buddies C and M.

And finally, no memorable list could be complete without mentioning the companionship of:

10. Mslexia   ҉   the quarterly magazine for women who write and more often women who juggle at least one or more jobs, a family and numerous responsibilities but who find 2, 5, 10, or just any hours to dedicate to writing, they are all an inspiration to me and I love to read all those who succeed in becoming published through its pages. An inspiration, a writing prompt and always a great read.

Happy New Year Everyone!

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Passionate & Dedicated – Aung San Suu Kyi ‘The Lady’

It seems appropriate in the year that three women won the Nobel Peace prize, that we remember ‘The Lady’, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won this prize twenty years ago in 1991, nominated by the admired leader and humanitarian, former Czech president Václav Havel, who died this month.

It is debatable whether most know Aung San Suu Kyi for her steadfast dedication in promoting the ideals of democracy and metta (a Buddhist term meaning loving kindness) to the people of Burma, or for the longevity of her term as a prisoner of conscience, held under house arrest for 15 of the 21 years from 1989 until her release in November 2010.

Winning the Noble peace prize increased her prominence and brought her cause and the plight of suffering Burmese and hill tribe people to the attention of the international community.  Just this year she was visited with open arms by Hilary Clinton, not long after announcing she would run for election in upcoming byelections.

I picked up Justin Wintle’s book ‘Perfect Hostage’ Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals, believing it a biography, mislead perhaps by the striking portrait which graces the cover and select testimonials describing it as so. In fact, I would call it a historic treatise of Burma and while of significant interest in itself, I did find it frustrating that it took close to 200 pages to encounter Aung San Suu Kyi within its covers. Though there is depth in the historical account, I found the reverse to be true in terms of the author’s evocation of Aung San Suu Kyi, in fact I found many of his comments patronising and uncomfortable:

‘Had SLORC not placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, it is improbable that she would have been given the Nobel Prize…‘ and on a tribute she wrote about her father ‘ This, the notion of St Aung San, may have been over-egging the cake’ and ‘When I saw that Aung San Suu Kyi had got a third class degree I let out an involuntary chuckle.‘

I am certain that the author interviewed many people, that is clear, but as to coming to some understanding and appreciation of Aung San Suu Kyi and her perspective or her personality, the text remains curiously detached.  Dare I say, I detected a hint of what could almost be compared to a colonial attitude, as referred to in George Orwell’s novel ‘Burmese Days’ (himself born in India with unacknowledged Burmese relatives in the family). That would be going too far I am sure, but it frustrated me enormously and made me yearn to read something actually written by Aung San Suu Kyi herself, something this book is remarkably short on.

However, letting go of the expectation of an exquisite biography and seen as the historical treatise that it is, I find a thorough and detailed account of a remarkable country and ethnic melting pot of people who have long been subject to tyrannical rule. Sitting between India in the west and China in the east with borders that touch so many countries, Tibet, Laos, Thailand, Bangladesh, it is not surprising that it comprises so many ethnic groupings and hill tribes and has encountered so much conflict.  It has a unique history of rising to great prominence and descending into chaos, as each successive victor sought to impose their will.

It provides an interesting introduction to Aung San Suu Kyi’s father Aung San, his haphazard entrance into politics and the fraught relationship with Japan, set up to assist in the removal of the British, only to find they had replaced one empire seeking power with another.

‘I went to Japan to save my people who were struggling like bullocks under the British. But now we are treated like dogs. We are far from our hope of reaching the human stage, and even to get back to the bullock stage we need to struggle more.’ Aung San, at Maymyo, June 1942

With independence secured, the future looked positive in many respects. Democratic elections in April 1947 elevated Aung San to leadership, until he was betrayed and assassinated by one of his fellow countrymen. The country struggled to take advantage of its newfound independence and while the coup in 1962 was seen by many at the time as a hopeful resolution, it signalled the beginning of torturous dictatorships that have cost many lives, exiled others and kept Burma’s icon for free, democratic choice under arrest.

Aung San Suu Kyi was a reluctant hero; married with two children to the Oxford academic Michael Aris, a leading Western authority on Bhutanese, Tibetan and Himalayan culture, she returned to Burma to nurse her mother after a stroke and found herself sharing the hospital ward with many student victims of the atrocities occurring under the regime.  Astounded, she absorbed the horror of their stories and they listened to her reflections urging her to become actively involved in the struggle.

Just as Buddha gave himself up for the betterment of sentient beings, so Aung San Suu Kyi by offering herself to the people of Burma, was put in such circumstances she had little choice but to leave her family behind, a test the regime continued to dangle in front of her, in their hope she would leave and the people forget her. Her persistence in staying kept the candle of hope burning for millions and perhaps we may now see the fruit of that hope manifesting in their upcoming elections.

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The Housekeeper + The Professor

Having recently discovered and read Yoko Ogawa’s
‘The Diving Pool’, I was further intrigued when I saw this novella displayed in my local bookshop and couldn’t resist another of her works with its beautiful cover and the promise of an alluring story about a woman who visits an eccentric mathematics professor each day to clean his home and cook his meals.

Reading ‘The Housekeeper and the Professor’ is a little like a meditation in mindfulness; although we might escape into the book, we are held in its present, for each day is a repeat of the previous and follows a pattern, such as we might too if our memory were constantly erased after eighty minutes, the habits we would continually follow, because we have been reduced to the very core of our nature, without the accumulation of memory from yesterday, last week or last year.

The Professor is a mathematics genius, whose memory ceased functioning after an accident some years before, so while he retains his mathematical genius and his long term memory before the accident, he has lost his short term memory.  It lasts only eighty minutes and so he has devised crude methods to remember things, such as pinning small pieces of paper to his suit to remind him of important facts, otherwise he starts every day anew.

The housekeeper arrives each morning and introduces herself as if they have never met. Slowly, she and her ten year old son, whom the Professor refers to as Root – a reference to the square root sign and his hair, are drawn into the Professor’s reduced world where numbers reign supreme and the two visitors begin to understand the magic and meaning behind what they had always thought of as ordinary numbers.

Whether you hated mathematics at school or loved it like I did, you will find yourself attracted to the arithmetic secrets the Professor unveils, which stir more than a mild curiosity in the significance of certain numbers and the challenge of elegant equations, as both the housekeeper and her son discover to their own delight.

Eternal truths are ultimately invisible , and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression – in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.

In essence, it is a meditation on the simplicity of life and an introduction to the complexity and significance of numbers; it is about letting go and accepting things the way they are and deriving small pleasures from the mundane.

Yoko Ogawa’s writing and storytelling flows like a sparkling river, it draws you in and carries you along; there are few surprises just gradual awakenings. There is a vulnerability to each of the main characters that we pick up on, which forewarns us, characters we become sympathetic to, whom I was sad to leave behind but will be revisiting again for sure.

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Time Passes, Reality Bites – A Visit from the Goon Squad

‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan (winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction 2011) was recommended in a comment on my post ‘Why People don’t read short stories’ and I then had the good fortune to swap books with a book buddy and was delighted to discover that this was the treasure she was trading.

There has been much discussion already about the title; what exactly is a ‘goon’ and is this even a relevant question? I decided not to search for an answer and instead to come up with my instinctive response at the end, I prefer to hazard a wild guess although the cynic in me did wonder if it wasn’t just a gimmick.

A novel or a set of stories, each chapter is separate yet connected by the barest of threads to the previous, sufficient to surmise a pattern, although like many creations, the complete picture does not become clear until the work is finished. It reminds me of six degrees of separation, that we are all connected and that even when we are, there are gaps in history’s, we only ever know part of a person’s story.

It is a testament to Egan’s writing  and one of its strengths that her book reads like a novel because we are immediately drawn into and engaged within the world of her well cast characters, mentioned briefly in one chapter, discovered in depth in the next, it is not like starting a completely different story, more like starting an abstract jigsaw puzzle in opposite corners knowing that eventually the pieces should add up. We read and make the connections, searching for them, perhaps even creating them ourselves. I wonder, is that my imagination at work or the writer’s – or both working in unison?

We encounter this in Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter Night a Traveller’ and also in Alice Hoffman’s ‘Blackbird House’, a slim thread enough to spur the reader on in the quest for enlightenment.

In Egan’s novel we meet Sacha who works for Bennie in the music industry, Bennie himself, his wife Stephanie, her ex-convict journalist brother Jules, Dolly who used to be Stephanie’s boss, Ted, Sacha’s Uncle and others whose lives have interacted at some point. We meet them at different periods in time, during particular episodes in their lives where even the young seem to have already lived numerous lives and carry a burdensome past that haunts their present. There is an underlying dissatisfaction with how things have turned out, the inevitability of time passing and taking with it something vital and essential.

Which reminds me, the goon squad; as Bosco says on page 134 ‘Time’s a goon, right?’ and so too I believe that a visit from the goon squad is just this, time passing and the oft harshness of reality.

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If on a winter’s night a traveller

If you have never read Italo Calvino this may be a misleading book to start with, it’s certainly not reminiscent of his short stories and I believe it is unlike his other novels, but it has a kind of cult status in that it is was an original and much talked about experimental work.

‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’ starts out as a conversation, Calvino entering and leaving the exchange within the pages of his novel in an unpredictable fashion. This is not a book to lie back and lazily escape into, it requires your attention and concentration to stay with where you are at and to understand what is going on and then just as you are spirited away by his seductive prose and enjoying the ride into the depths of one of his stories, you turn the page and Monsieur Calvino is back.

I enjoyed the diversions, although I was disappointed that he was unable to find a way to leave the sex of the reader neutral, having been almost convinced he might well be speaking to me, it becomes clear he is speaking to his male readers, political correctness not in full swing in the early 1980’s when this was published. But I readily forgive him, especially when assured by Lorna Sage, author of the memoir ‘In Bad Blood’ who wrote in the Observer:

‘devastating, wonderfully ingenious parody of all those dreary best-sellers you buy at the airport…It is a “world novel”: take it with you next time you plan to travel in an armchair’

Chapters are interspersed with stories, the titles of which are referenced in each preceding episode, the stories are the beginning of novels and you the protagonist are searching for the rest of the story while listening to Calvino expound on readers, reading, and writing. Best described in an extract from one of the stories themselves, where he writes:

‘I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion…I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn’t allow light to pass…so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him…’

Playful, impossible to label, is it a…, it is a question, a poem, a collection of stories, a novel and a conversation with Italo Calvino. The author imposes himself and his voice within the pages and we as the reader also become involved in the action as Calvino switches into the second person narrative. If I were an academic I would probably be littering this text with a lot of technical terms describing the literary tools Calvino plays with, literature students are likely to come across it, or at least they did in the past, as David Mitchell, author of ‘Cloud Atlas’ reminisces about here, when he rereads it for a second time.

It’s an oeuvre that defies categorisation, which plays with the reader and will entertain some while annoying others, myself I am content that it has now stopped taunting me from the bookshelf, my curiosity sated, it can now be talked about with some knowledge of its interior. That curiosity won’t rest long however, no doubt it will soon find another dusty volume to settle on, another book I haven’t read by that author I have often read about but have yet to enter their imagined world.

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How to Spot a Psychopath – A journey through madness or a mad journey?

In the early 19th century, French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel coined the term ‘manie sans delusion’ referring to the one per cent of the population that appeared normal on the surface but lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. In 1891 it became known as ‘psychopathy‘.

I have just finished reading Jon Ronson’s riveting journey into the heart of that difficult to detect but fascinating to read about affliction, in his recently published book ‘The Psychopath Test’.  An extract from the book published in the Guardian piqued my interest as I was 1500 words into writing a short story around the theme of ‘Ego’ and I had a notion that one of the protagonists was a psychopath, or at least had psychopathic tendencies, so I was interested to know more about how to identify and make those behaviours manifest through a character. Through Ronson’s article I followed a trail and found myself eventually consulting Bob Hare’s 20 point checklist and thus had the insight I was looking for.

‘The Psychopath Test’ is no textbook and it shouldn’t be used to do what he did – random analysis of people you know; its part mystery, full of intrigue, with equal doses of curiosity and anxiety as we follow him equipped only with his journalistic tools into a world of charm, deception and manipulation where nothing is as it appears to be, or is it? He uses his tools to excellent effect to present us with investigative stories he pursued which read more like a detective novel than the work of non-fiction it is. Only it’s not a detective novel because ironically you would need more the qualities of a psychopath to be a successful detective than the anxieties and overdose of empathetic feeling the author has. Ronson is very entertaining, he admits and shares his anxieties and self-diagnoses his own mental deficiencies in a playful and identifiable way.

He presents a look into a field that has had its share of experimental and controversial programs, practices and institutions as well as its staunch adversaries such as the Scientologists, who continue their campaign to discredit the profession and individuals within it to this day.

Having tried to solve the initial mystery of uncovering who has sent a group of neurologists and academics copies of the same cryptically puzzling book, Ronson sets out to acquire basic skills in identifying potential psychopaths and arranges interviews with likely candidates, searching for and pleased by anything that seems to fit with his criteria and admitting his disappointment when their responses don’t quite fit the profile.

'How to Spot a Psychopath' by Lo Cole is available as a limited edition print from http://www.etsy.com/listing/76743583/spot-the-psychopath

Fascinating though the extremes are, it is interesting to see how many ordinary people give accounts of behaviour in pursuing high achieving goals at work, which border on psychopathic behaviour, such as detachment, the eradication of empathy and remorse. What’s more the percentage of psychopaths in the corporate sector, while low, is three times above the general population and cause for some concern, although I found myself not entirely surprised by this revelation after watching some of these executives under questioning from government officials and judges in the recent financial crisis, where a lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility and lack of remorse or guilt seemed to be common traits.

It’s an imprecise malady with no known cure and involvement best avoided if one encounters anyone with an overabundance of the suggested characteristics, and while we might think it shouldn’t take a neurologist or a psychiatrist to point that out, to be human is not always to be logical or to follow common sense, especially while under the spell of a charming, manipulative liar.

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Slaves and Siblings, Sorcery and Sadness, Strength and Salvation – Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea

Isabel Allende.

I well remember being introduced to her debut novel ‘The House of the Spirits’ in my early twenties by a good friend and discovering this wonderful story teller. We became immersed in the lives of members of a Latin American family, following it during a time of political upheaval and personal transformation and though it was far from our own reality, it was pure joy to escape into.

Whenever I came across a new book I read it, including two of her wonderful young adult books ‘City of the Beasts’ and ‘The Kingdom of the Dragon’ and who could forget the heart-breaking but beautiful ‘Paula’. I haven’t read all her books, but I will continue to read those that cross my bookish path, just as ‘Island Beneath the Sea’ did recently, spotted on my book buddy’s shelf while feeding her son’s cat Oscar.

In this gripping novel, Allende takes us on a troubling but engaging journey to the sugar cane plantations of what was the French colony Sainte-Domingue, in one of its most historic and transformational eras during the late 1700’s and ends in New Orleans as Napolean trades terrains as if they are commodities with the Americans.

Toulouse Valmorain arrives in the colony from France where the dauphin King has just married Marie-Antoinette and few anticipate the changes to come with revolution in France or the effect that will have on this prosperous Caribbean island where slaves labour on crops that produce a third of the wealth of France and whose usefulness once they set foot on the island averages eighteen months; the fortunate dubbed the Maroons fleeing to the hills, the less fortunate en route to that place they believe all souls go, the island beneath the sea.

Knowing little of changing French laws that might change their status in the colony, many of the slaves find respite through voodoo and belief in men who escaped like the legend Macandal ‘The Black Messiah’. The Maroons will make history as they lead a slave revolt eventually resulting in the first black republic of Haiti.

Valmorain never expected to visit the family plantations but the premature death of his father and the necessity of supporting remaining family in France drive him to the colony where he must take over the family interests. Through him we meet high profile cocotte Violette Boisier, a free woman of mixed African heritage, the teenage slave Zarité, maid to Eugenia the troubled Spanish wife and her brother Sancho, Valmorain’s business partner. The story follows these characters as their fates intertwine and their lives are affected by society’s strictures and historical events.

The characters of Zarité and Violette jump off the page in a way that almost makes me wonder whether the author had her ‘favourite’ characters, we see them in situations and feel their struggles whereas I didn’t get quite the same feeling with the character of Eugenia, I found myself wondering how it really was for her as the drumbeats got inside her head and slowly drove her to madness. She wasn’t a strong character and although she suffered, we learn of it rather than experience it.

I realised towards the end that much of the novel is narrated, which also made me wonder how much longer it could have been if more of the narrative had been portrayed through the events themselves and dialogue, the characters are certainly engaging enough but at 457 pages, it is lengthy already. After being totally engaged with Josephine Bonaparte’s story beginning in another Caribbean plantation in Martinique, I could easily have been tempted by a sequel.

Allende narrates great stories and brings the reader to unforgettable settings during fascinating historic periods; she places interesting characters in this context, constructed with great clarity and insight and history comes alive as if it is the present and the reader is witness to it. For me ‘Island beneath the Sea’ was a real page turner and I was sad to finish it.

What Allende could never have anticipated while writing this book, was the major earthquake in 2010 that would disrupt this country, now known as Haiti, however it is a timely reminder of the previous chapters in the history of this trailblazing republic.

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The Forest for the Trees – An Editor’s Advice

Reading books on writing is a little like panning for gold. Most of what we read washes away, some of it is interesting to consider but doesn’t necessarily gel and then occasionally we find a gem.

Unlike gold, one woman’s gem doesn’t necessarily guarantee universal approval and when I recall the books I thought were fantastic ten years ago, I realise now how far I have moved on, now those same inspirational pages from yesteryear elicit nothing more than nostalgic fondness, no longer capturing the thinking place I am at today.

I remember with absolute clarity coming across Dorothea Brande’s 1934 classic ‘Becoming a Writer’ during the period I enrolled in my first creative writing class with writers Maggie Hamand and Henrietta Soames at the Groucho Club in London and how it seemed to speak to me and contain all the questions and doubts I had at the time. There is definitely gold in this book for someone starting out on the writing path, though I have given my volume wings and allowed its pages an airing by passing it on rather than let it languish on the shelf unread.

‘The Forest for the Trees’ was recommended on writer Sandra Gulland’s blog and I’d just finished reading the Josephine Bonaparte trilogy, so I jumped in and bought it on impulse. Divided into two sections Writing and Publishing, is a little misleading, the first half reading more like a psychological analysis of writer behaviours, who are the ambivalent, the natural, the wicked child, the self-promoter, the neurotic or touching fire, along with numerous anecdotes to validate these suppositions. Whilst I have no doubt, the author has come across each of these stereotypes, I found the labelling patronising and found myself wondering about the hidden majority who don’t fit so clearly into these headings – or do I just need to get out more to meet these people? Tell me writers, do you identify with one of these labels?

The frequent references to Truman Capote created a distance that was difficult to bridge and too many of the examples seemed like exceptions; I admit I was searching for the paragraph that I could identify with, an example of someone who seemed like an ordinary person, the kind that might convince the reader that to write successfully and be published is possible. It’s the cult of the celebrity factor again, with hindsight one can look back and select anecdotes about writers who were the exception rather than the rule. Disillusioned, I blame my market research background where the anecdote has little credibility and witnessing the propensity of politicians and tabloids to use them in the place of verifiable evidence.

The main message in the second half was: be respectful and patient with your editor and publicist, they’re all juggling multiple balls, you don’t really understand what goes on behind the scenes, if you did, you’d leave us to get on with the job. This debate is likely to continue with the advent of electronic publishing and the industry having to redefine its role and prove its value, however I found this section more insightful and it did highlight many of the strengths and weaknesses of the publishing process.

If you are looking for a tongue in cheek attempt at writer’s psychological profiles, interesting and funny anecdotes and an inside look at one editor’s career path, then this will entertain. We can also learn much about the industry by keeping up with writer’s blogs and online communities, which without a doubt reflect the situation of writers today, whether persevering towards it or already succeeding to be published.