The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

My ongoing quest to discover American literature continues.  So far I've discovered that Hemingway is probably not for me but Willa Cather more than likely is.  The Great Gatsby is my first time reading Fitzgerald and all I knew before starting it was that he famously wrote about the glamour and decadence of the jazz age in 1920s America.

The Great Gatsby is the tale of Jay Gatsby, a self-made man who lives in comfort in a large mansion and holds the kind of parties that people come to from miles around.  Despite having all the luxuries money can buy, he longs only for Daisy Buchanan, an ex of his who is now married.  His neighbour, Nick Carraway, witnesses the tragic consequences of Jay and Daisy's affair.

A few days after reading this book, I'm still not sure whether I liked it or not.  There's no question that Fitzgerald is a very talented writer and he makes remarkably perceptive insights about the characters and events in his book.  I enjoyed his writing so much that I found myself deliberately slowing down my pace and rereading certain sections throughout.  The Great Gatsby is short and very tightly constructed; no word is wasted.  The central character of Jay Gatsby was intriguing and Fitzgerald managed to show his loneliness despite always surrounding himself with people.

I think what threw me off with this book was the author's ambivalence towards the decadence he was writing about.  At some points Gatsby is portrayed as 'living the dream' and Fitzgerald certainly seems to approve but  in other sections he makes it clear that the party-goers are drifting loose from their moral fibres and that the lifestyle doesn't lead to happiness. These parts read as a commentary on the corruption of the American dream and how it had been ruined by too much money, alcohol, greed and selfishness.   I got the impression that Fitzgerald both loved and hated the themes and characters in his novel.

My other quibbles with the book are minor.  Reading it in 2012, the wild parties don't seem as wild as they might have done to a 1925 audience.  I thought the ending was a bit too dramatic.  But The Great Gatsby is well worth reading if only for the beautiful prose;

  "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars." 

I got this book as part of a set with Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned.  I will be definitely be reading both at some point in the future.

Verdict: Beautifully written classic novel about the Jazz Age.

Source: Owned

First Published: 1925

Score: 3.5 out of 5

The Winter Palace by Eva Stachnaik

Although the subtitle of The Winter Palace is 'a novel of Catherine the Great', it's really a novel about a young Polish woman called Barbara (Varvara when she arrives in Russia).  The daughter of a bookbinder, she is orphaned and left in the care of Empress Elizabeth's Court in the Winter Palace of St Petersburg.  Initially a lowly seamstress, her intelligence and quick wit catches the eye of Chancellor Bestuzhev and she is trained as a 'tongue', or spy for a variety of masters.   Eventually, she throws in her lot with Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine the Great and becomes entangled in many plots and intrigues.

The Winter Palace was a well written book, the kind of historical fiction that I enjoy.  It was obvious upon reading it that Stachniak had done her research and was keen to share this with the reader.  Aside from the lives of the main characters, there were lots of smaller facts and details that made it easy to imagine the court and the cast of secondary characters.  There was also a romance about the Russia Stachniak set her story in; she has Varvara at one point feeling homesick for;

 "January nights, white not from the sun that refuses to set but from the silver light of the moon.  For ice floes screeching as they rub again against one another, for rocks in which precious stones look like frozen drops of blood. For sacred places where, in a solemn moment, you can peek into the other world."

Russia itself was almost another character in the novel and the Russian winter was always intruding on the lives of the protagonists.  I loved this element of the writing.

Despite all of this, I didn't love The Winter Palace.  Although I enjoy detailed historical fiction, I felt as though this novel was over-long in parts.  For whole sections of the text, Varvara is away from the Court and the royal characters and these sections could have been shortened.  I was interested in what she did during these times, I just wanted to get back to the main action as well.  And whilst Varvara was a wonderfully drawn character, the royal characters did feel a bit one-dimensional.  It's only in the closing sections that we get a glimpse of the ruthlessness Catherine the Great was famous for, and Peter III comes across as childish, rather than the unpleasant character he really was.

Still, at the end of this novel I felt as though I had learned a lot about a period of history relatively unknown to me.  Fans of Juliet Grey's Becoming Marie Antoinette will definitely enjoy this one.

Verdict: Well written historical fiction with the unusual setting of the Russian court.

Source: From the publisher, via NetGalley

Score: 3.5 out of 5

The Winter Palace is published tomorrow, January 10th 2012.

Why Do I Buy Great Books And Then Not Read Them?

  

Something that I do too frequently and am trying not to do in 2012 is buy books that I've heard great things about and then proceed to ignore them in favour of books that aren't as good.  I don't know why I do this, but I possess many books that are either critically acclaimed or the subject of much positive hype that are simply sitting collecting dust.  I buy them and can't wait to read them - and then just don't.

Part of the problem in the last year has been review commitments.  It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of review copies, especially when you can actually access the good books from the good publishers on NetGalley, but it does meant that the books I own are getting less love.  I have quite a few to review early in the year but I'm being much stricter with myself and refusing more this year.

Another problem is the hype itself.  Often I see a book reviewed positively so many times that I almost don't want to read it myself - what if I don't like it?  What if it isn't as good as it is supposed to be?  It's easier in a way for me to read more obscure books or books that are not as loved.  I can also be fickle - if I don't read a book very soon after purchasing it, it gets overshadowed by more recently bought books later on.

But this year as a personal goal I want to read some of these great books sitting on my shelf. I have some review commitments to clear first then I hope to get back to my own books. I haven't included my Christmas gifts of The Marriage Plot and The Night Circus in this list, as I'm hoping they won't fall victim to dust-gathering.  The books I already own that I really want to read this year are the following (links take you to goodreads):

1. The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

3. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
4. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
5. Between Shades Of Grey by Rutya Sepetys
6. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
7. The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
8. The History Of Love by Nicole Krauss
9. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
10. The Memory Of Love by Aminatta Forna
11. Room by Emma Donoghue
12. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Realistically, I am not going to read everything on this list as I also want to read more classics and reread some of my favourites, but I want to make at least a dent in this list.

Am I the only one who does this, buys great books and then doesn't read them?  If you do it too, why do you think this is?

The Girl With Three Legs by Soraya Mire

The Girl With Three Legs is a brutally honest memoir about the horror that is female genital mutilation (FGM).  At age thirteen, Soraya starts being teased by her friends for having 'three legs'.  When she goes to ask her mother what the nickname means, her mother tells her that she is going to receive a 'gift'.  Soraya's flesh is cut off (she describes hearing the sound of the scissors cutting her) and sewn up, leaving her with an opening just the size of a cotton bud/Q-tip.  The memoir describes frankly the medical problems that this caused and the long recovery period Soraya faced when she moved away from Somalia to Europe.  It also covers Mire's later career as an activist, campaigning for the end of FGM.

The Girl With Three Legs is a very successful memoir in that it shines a light on an issue that is important and could do with more attention.  The scenes where Soraya is mutilated and when she faces pain and complications afterwards are graphic and I found myself wincing in horror.  Mire also successfully shows how ingrained the attitudes leading to FGM are in the certain cultures and how it is often women doing this to their daughters for fear of their daughters being seen as unclean. When Soraya becomes an activist in her later life, she faces opposition from her native culture and even ostracism from her own family.  

That being said, The Girl With Three Legs isn't the most well-written memoir I have read.  It seems to jump around a lot and in certain places was hard to follow, especially when Mire describes the Somalian culture at the beginning of the book.  There are also sections when Soraya is going through an incredibly tough time after the surgery that are hard to follow; her descriptions blur into each other and it's hard to always know what she is referring to.  The chapters about Soraya becoming an activist could have been edited down a little.

I am glad I read this book.  FGM does occur in Western countries, where immigrants send their daughters back to Somalia or Egypt for the treatment in their school holidays, or even find a private doctor willing to carry it out for them.  The Girl With Three Legs shows why this is always unacceptable, no matter how tolerant of other cultures we want to be.

Verdict: Memoir about an important issue that is hard to follow in places.

Published: 2011

Source: From the publisher via NetGalley

Score: 3 out of 5

Wordless Wednesday

Dreams Of Joy by Lisa See

Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Shanghai Girls, which I read and loved back in August.  Those of you who have read Shanghai Girls will remember that Joy had just found out that her mother Pearl isn't really her mother at all but her aunt, and that her biological father is an artist still living in China.  With the impulsiveness and surety of youth, Joy gives up her American life and travels to Communist China to 'help build the New China'.  Looking at everything through rose-tinted glasses, she thinks she has found a rural idyll and a simple life far away from the consumerism and prejudice she has experienced in America.  So she thinks nothing of surrendering her passport, of losing her ability to travel around China, of falling in love with a man from the village (now Dandelion Commune number eight).  Pearl, with the wisdom of experience, can see the trouble her daughter is involving herself with and also abandons everything to travel to China in an attempt to bring her home.

I was apprehensive about reading Dreams of Joy, as I enjoyed Shanghai Girls so much, but I shouldn't have worried - I loved it.  Throughout the whole first half of the book, as Joy embraced Communist China and commune life and all it stood for I wanted to reach through the book and shake her.  Having studied The Great Leap Forward and Communist China, I had a great sense of foreboding and was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Joy is so headstrong and so determined to love everything about China and village life that she is beyond being made to see otherwise, and at a certain point, Pearl has to let her make her own mistakes. Other reviewers have complained of Joy's naivety for thinking everything is charming and perfect in the communes, but I thought it fit with her character - when you are so determined for something to be right, you simply don't see the bad.

In the second half of the book, the other shoe drops as See starts describing the effects of The Great Leap Forward.  Communes were led by leaders that had no clue about farming, leading to mistakes in planting and harvesting and consequently a radical drop in food production.  At the same time, the pressure was on to have higher and higher yields leading to a massive famine, with some estimates putting it at 45 million dead.  People started to abandon and even eat their own babies and children out of desperation.  I thought See effectively conveyed the suffering of people that had been made to abandon the farming practises that they knew worked, for those that they knew wouldn't, but were unable to speak up due to terrible consequences for those that did.  Starving must be truly a terrible way to die.  Other aspects of Communist China are touched upon - meetings where 'rightist elements' are denounced, internal travel restrictions, cruelty towards anyone who had been well off before communism, unrealistic targets and announcements.  As always, See had done her research and wrote about these topics knowledgeably.

Some parts of the plot did require a bit of suspension of belief in the way that the characters were able to move around the country and make plans to leave whilst remaining undetected.  I also missed the character of May, who stayed in America and was only in the novel in the form of letters she wrote to Pearl.  The dynamic between the two sisters was something I enjoyed about Shanghai Girls and this was missing in Dreams of Joy.  But these are minor criticisms compared to how much I enjoyed reading the book - in the final chapters I was reading as fast as I could as I was desperate to see what would happen to Joy and Pearl.  Highly recommended.

Verdict: Excellent sequel to Shanghai Girls that illuminates Chinese suffering during the Great Leap Forward.

Source: Library (reservation)

First Published: 2011

Score: 5 out of 5

Smut by Alan Bennett

I'm going to start this review by stating that I am a big Alan Bennett fan (The Uncommon Reader is amongst my favourite books), so I had high expectations for this collection of two new novellas and jumped at the chance to read and review them via NetGalley.  Smut contains the stories "The Greening of Mrs Donaldson" and "The Shielding of Mrs Forbes" and both are about the secrets behind the net curtains of middle-class England.

The Greening of Mrs Donaldson is about a widower who takes on a job as a 'demonstrator' at the local hospital, which involves her pretending to have various illnesses so that medical students can practise their diagnostic skills.  She also rents out a room in her house to students and this signals a kind of sexual awakening/liberation.   The Shielding of Mrs Forbes, the novella I preferred, is about a middle class, middle aged woman who believes that everything in her family is normal, despite having a gay married son who is being harassed by a police officer and a daughter in law that's having a secret affair with her husband, and who isn't as stupid as Mrs Forbes believes.

Smut was a big disappointment for me.  While there were elements of satire and humour in both novellas, Bennett's writing felt flat, not razor sharp like it usually does. Neither story really hooked me in and whilst I could take a stab at inferring all of the themes that Alan Bennett was covering in the novellas, this lack of an interesting and engaging story was too big of a flaw for me to get past.  The things that happened in the stories seemed random, especially in The Greening of Mrs Donaldson.  I probably wouldn't be as harsh in my review if not for that fact that I really am an Alan Bennett fan, and have read much better from him.  I would advise readers new to Bennett to start somewhere else.

Verdict: For me, a disappointing collection of two novellas lacking the satire and humour of the author's previous works.

Source: From NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Score: 2 out of 5  

Smut is released in the US on the 3rd January 2012.  It is already available in the UK.