Category Archives: Book Reviews

January 11, 2010 · 12:43 am

Infidel: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Book Review

I hadn’t intended to read Infidel. It was a book on a way to another book and also I am rarely  able to make my way through non-fiction. This book, however, was an exception in spite of the fact that I didn’t find the writing to be that great. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life story, on the other hand, is interesting and so foreign to any life story I know that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perhaps better known as the outspoken Dutch parliamentarian and women’s rights activist who collaborated on a film with Theo Van Gogh that highlighted the abuses of Islam against Muslim women. Van Gogh was murdered and found with a note pinned to his chest saying Ali would be next.

Infidel is a memoir of her life growing up in Somalia and Kenya where she was regularly beaten by her mother, abandoned by her father and eventually promised in marriage to a man she didn’t know. She escaped to Holland where she sought refugee status, worked as a translator in abortion and women’s clinics and ultimately went to university to study politics.

It is through her ‘awakening’ in Holland to western values of equality, government, marriage, self-determination and women’s rights and her work in the clinics that drives her to fight for the rights, particularly of immigrant women in Holland. She is shocked when she learns of the sexual excision of young girls and honour deaths in her newly adopted country. But her desire to open dialogue on these issues spawns a hostility that forces her to live under guard 24 hours a day under threat of death.

This is one of those books that rips you out of your western centric comfort zone and forces you to see that the world is an entirely different place for many people but particularly for many women the world over. She obviously has a very strong view on arranged marriage, the role of women within Islam and the ability for Islam to adapt to allow women an equal role and self-determination. I don’t know enough about this part of the world to exercise any kind of opinion but I can say that the dynamics in her life story are overwhelmingly paternalistic. The quality of your life depends on the good will of almost everyone around you.

That she managed to break the mold and re-invent herself as a feminist and atheist seems shocking to me given her background. She talks about the influence of reading romance novels at a young age. She would often compare her girlfriend’s experiences with marriage to these fantasies and was determined to seek a different kind of life for herself.

I think she is a brave woman. She has guts, stamina and a burning drive to make the world a better place for women.The book, for me, was a bit depressing though. If nothing else it underlined the enormous chasm between the West and Islam and given the world’s circumstances it makes me feel less hopeful that a bridge can be created between these worlds. Maybe this is a simple view but towards the end of the book when she essentially had to leave Holland because of her public outspokeness,  I felt outraged and sad (maybe sadder than usual) about the crappy world we live in.

Next book: Loving Frank

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January 8, 2010 · 5:26 pm

The Elegance of the Hedgehog: Muriel Barbery A Book Review

I thought this was an absolutely beautiful, wonderful, funny, heartbreaking book. Wow. This book made me think, feel, laugh, and cry. Muriel Barbery is a philosopher by trade and you can certainly see this in the story of the novel’s two protaganists. The story takes place in a very chic apartment building in Paris where Madame Renee Michel is a self-described thick set, bulbous, cantakerous concierge who is scornful of the building’s wealthy, snobbish tenants. What they don’t know, and what Madame Michel doesn’t allow them to see is that she has a keen intelligence, a prodigious love of philosophy, art and Japanese culture and is extremely well versed in the arts and culture.

The novel’s other protaganist is 12 year old Paloma Josse, the precocious, brilliant daughter of socialist parents. At the beginning of the novel Paloma is determined to set her parents’ apartment on fire and kill herself by her 13th birthday.  She has a keen eye for artifice, cruelty and deception and she feels trapped by her family and social status and doesn’t understand the value and meaning of life.

When an intriguing, wealthy Japanese gentleman moves into the building, who against all social convention, befriends Paloma and Madame Michel, it sets in motion a series of self-revelations that can only take place in the face of true life changing friendship.

What we see through the eyes  Madame Michel are the often cruel prejudices  exercised against people that are considered ‘below our station’ and that render them invisible. But what she brings to us are those incredible moments of arresting beauty that make us carry on in spite of everything.

With Paloma we see something different. As a member of the privileged class she has the unique intelligence to play cat and mouse with her ‘victims’ that  reveals their shallow stupidity. Her journey to try and find the meaning of life in all of this is what is so extraordinary.

While all of this sounds quite serious the book is really quite funny. Paloma and Renee are really the same people in different bodies and in different situations but they both have an extraordinary wit and a deep love for language and culture which reveals itself on every page. I will read this book again.

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December 14, 2009 · 5:39 am

The Book of Negroes:Someone Knows My Name Book Review

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is a fictional account of the life of a woman who is captured and enslaved as a young girl and sent to America  to work on a southern indigo plantation.

This is, of course, an old story that we know all too well. But in Lawrence Hill’s capable hands we traverse this dark period of history through the eyes of a woman who recounts her brutal life story from enslavement to freedom.

What is clear, from the moment Aminata Diallo  is captured and brought to the New World is that nothing in her life will ever be easy. As a black woman, whether enslaved or free, there is no place she can go that will ever truly grant her the freedom she seeks. Even when she finally escapes to New York then Nova Scotia , Freetown and finally London,  she is trapped as much by whites as she is by blacks and by freedom as much as slavery.

What I find interesting is that Lawrence  gives us a character who is taught to read and right. Aminata is fully literate and has a passion for language and stories. It’s clear that the moment she speaks that her literacy makes her  different even within her own community. She sounds like a ‘learned, educated woman’ which she is.  In the end her ability and desire to be a ‘storyteller’ to tell her own story is her humanity and her freedom.

When she is brought to London by a group of abolitionist to ‘tell the story’ of slavery, to show that blacks can be educated, they insist on writing her story so that it can be used as a weapon in their fight to abolish the slave trade. Aminata knows that the only one who can tell this story is her. As witness to her life she owns her tale and won’t allow anyone to take this from her.

This reminds me very much of Chimananda Adichie’s TEDX talk where she tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

The Book of Negroes reminds me of the importance of telling stories and the importance of listening. It’s a worthwhile read just as Chimananda’s talk is worth a good listen.

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September 1, 2009 · 7:25 pm

The Glass Castle: Book Review

Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle isn’t exactly the lightest kind of summer read but who says summer reading has to be light.

The truth is I did find Wall’s memoir of her childhood growing up moving from town to town with her peripatetic parents and her brother and sisters quite refreshing for the first quarter of the book. Her mother is an artist and her father is a brilliantly imaginative man who uses the power of imagination and the innocence of childhood to help his children believe that their world of increasingly grinding poverty is a magical and special place.

The Wall children, not knowing anything but the life they have, for a long time believe that while other children have Christmas trees they have stars in the sky, while other children live in homes with running water, food and beds, they one day will have a Glass Castle, a home their father promises to build.

But as their mother spirals into depression and their father into alcoholism the family’s troubles increase. When they settle into Rex Wall’s hometown in Virginia the parents leave their children to fend almost entirely for themselves.

While other children eat lunch, the Wall kids scour garbage cans to find something to fill their stomachs. Beyond their emotional and addiction issues there is a selfishness to the Wall parents that is often shocking. Mary Wall secretly eats a chocolate bar while her children starve and Rex’s drunken charm finally reveals its true character when he sends his teenage daughter Jeanette off to a gambling buddy’s apartment to potentially pay off a debt.

Ultimately the image of the Glass Castle which is sustained as a beacon of hope throughout the book, is finally broken when the place where it is to be built is turned into a mountain of the Wall family’s refuse. Dying to leave home,  Jeanette’s older sister moves to New York as a teenager to find her fortunes as an artist and Jeanette follows soon after to pursue  her love of journalism. Jeanette’s father begs her to stay saying he’ll finally get to work on building their dream home but her childhood illusions of her father are finally broken and  she moves to join her sister knowing that the Glass Castle exists only in Rex’s imagination.

Ultimately the entire Wall family end up in New York. As dysfunctional as this family is, the one thing all the Wall’s children end up doing is pursueing their life long dreams. While their parents end up living on the streets and squatting, Jeanette, her sister and her brother fall successfully into their respective careers.

As difficult as parts of this book is to read and as angry and you might become at Rex and Mary Wall for their crazy selfishness, it does strike me as amazing that these kids managed as well as they did. They survived and then some.

Jeanette Walls does a great job of balancing the emotional territory of telling a very difficult personal story without engaging in armchair psychoanalysis or even judgement. It’s clear that her early life was very difficult but she also brings to life the magic and the power of her father’s imagination and in that way the book serves as a kind of tribute to Rex Wall.

Check out Jeanette Walls on Youtube discussing The Glass Castle.

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June 1, 2009 · 1:58 am

Late Nights on Air and The Ten Year Nap

My current schedule of everything including my heavy thinking on training for a triathlon (thinking only at this point folks, no real action taken but thinking requires a great deal of, well thinking), as well as waking up in the middle of the night with creative fb status lines and 140 character tweets about nothing, is keeping me very pre-occupied. This, in addition to the nervewrecking business of trying to sell and buy a house, means that I have no time to do anything like write book reviews. Forgive me but I’m giving in to serious mental laziness. I heard that this is what happens once you reach a certain age. My mother will tell me it’s because I’m airy. “You’re so airy” she told me this week. I’m airy. Airy or not here I go. I won’t be doing these books justice but neither do I want to pass them over because they were great reads.

Over Christmas or sometime around then I read Elizabeth May’s Late Nights on Air. The book chronicles a year (or something like that) in the life, of a small group of people, who find themselves working at a small radio station in Yellowknife, NWT sometime in the 70’s. Eventually a group of four set out on a canoe trip following in the footsteps of John Hornby who perished on his trip through the Barren Strait almost fifty years earlier.  There’s something beautiful, quiet and spare about this book.The late night radio anchors’ voices reaching, almost dream like,  out to the listeners in this remote community seemed so intimate and personal in spite of the public nature of the medium. The northern landscape also seemed like a character in the story and I found that interesting. But northern life (all life perhaps) is defined by this natural backdrop and I loved how the characters interacted with the landscape sometimes with tragic consequences but almost always as a part of a journey to greater understanding of oneself. Cool book. I’d recommend it.

The latest book I’ve read is The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. This book chronicles the life of four women who have chosen to give up their careers and raise children. Now at the age of 40, with their children growing up, they question how they arrived where they are and what it means. At the heart of the narrative is the question of whether women can do it all, should they,  and do they even want to do it all?  The book almost felt like a sociological study of women in contemporary society. The details and the minutiae of all these women’s lives was so carefully captured that anyone reading it fifty to hundred years from now would have a snapshot of middle to upper middle income women in urban America the early 21st century. It’s also interesting that the mothers of these women made brief appearances offering a historic trajectory of feminism (or the plight of domestication on the female species). Good read.

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March 26, 2009 · 4:42 pm

Fay Weldon: She May Not Leave Book Review

Now this was an interesting read. She May Not Leave is by British writer Fay Weldon. In it Weldon tells the story of a young unmarried professional British couple Hattie and Martyn and their new baby Kitty. The narrator is Frances Watt, Hattie’s grandmother who she tells the story of what unfolds when Hattie decides she must go back to work before her year’s mat leave is over and against Martyn’s wishes hires an au pair to care for Kitty.

Soon Agniewska arrives and domestic order is restored to the household. Kitty adores Agniewska, the house is beautifully cared for, and dinner is served on time. The money that Hattie brings in as an editor in a publishing house gives her a sense of well being and self-confidence and eases the financial burden on Martyn. Although she loves Kitty and Martyn, domesticity is a form of imprisonment for Hattie.

Martyn, who works as a writer at a political magazine, doesn’t quite make enough money to support the family which adds significant stress to their lifestyle. Martyn also harbours political aspirations and along with Hattie holds many ‘politically correct views of the day’ including reservations regarding hiring ‘foreign labour’or an au pair.Although outwardly he embraces women’s right to work and equal opportunity he secretly wants Hattie to embrace domestic life and feels betrayed by her desire to bring a stranger into their small home. The domestic bliss that he secretly longs for, however, is quickly restored by Agniewska’s domestic prowess. She performs her domestic duties so well that soon Martyn and Hattie can’t imagine life without her.

Slowly both of their previously held moral objections are eroded as their desire to ‘have everything’overcomes them. Agniewska will stay at any cost even when it becomes apparent that she is not exactly whom she claims to be. When Hattie decided that Martyn should marry her in order to prevent her deportation he agrees and it quickly becomes apparent that perhaps this is exactly what Agnieska had planned all along.

Throughout the narrative Frances Watt threads the story of her own life through Hattie and Martyn’s tale. She and her sisters are raised by their strong-willed mother through the 50’s and 60’s. As a single parent family, their life is precarious and they ultimately spiral down the economic scale. Although Frances and Serena live very full sexually adventurous lives, it’s clear that it’s through marriage, however imperfect they are, that they find security and stability.Those who are left single, much like their mother, are the ones that are left to struggle to raise and care for their children and are often looked to, to take on unwanted familial responsibility.

This is an interesting reflection on the role of marriage in modern times. It seems to me that Weldon uses Frances as a device to comment on the role of marriage then and now. Although marriage offers no easy salve to personal happiness the rules of engagement at the very least appear to be very clear in earlier times. In both generations, however, marriage and domestic life are an arrangement that women must negotiate to ensure a certain type of stability and therefore must be be played on some level. The book at first glance seems deceptively simple but I realized as I was reading it that Weldon presents the complexities of women’s lives and relationships throughout generations quite expertly.  She May Not Leave really gives food for thought and is an intriguing read.

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January 15, 2009 · 5:21 pm

Book Review: DeNiro’s Game: Rawi Hage

Deniro’s Game. is an award-winning first novel by Montreal based writer Rawi Hage. This is an interesting book. Set in the 1980’s during the Lebanese civil war, its the story of Bassam and ‘DeNiro’ two childhood friends who grow up in war torn Beirut. Bassam goes on to become a small time crook who dreams of escaping Lebanon while ‘DeNiro” joins forces with the crooked head of the Christian militia that rules his section of the city. It’s not long after DeNiro joins the militia that cracks begin to appear in their relationship. The lure of lawlessness that reigns over the city pulls each of them in different directions. Continue reading →

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November 13, 2008 · 7:45 pm

A Child in Time: Ian McEwan – Book Review

I just finished reading Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time. It’s the first of his books that I’ve read that I haven’t loved automatically. Yet, the book poses questions that still has me thinking about it days after I’ve finished reading it.

The Child in Time deals with a  compelling “McEwanesque” theme in which the protaganist’s life is irrevocably change by a single act not of his own doing. In this case, Stephen Lewis, a successful children’s author’s, three year old daughter disappears one Saturday morning when the two are grocery shopping. His attention is averted for less than a minute and when he looks up again, she’s gone. The extraordinary ordinariness of the events leading up to that horrific moment and how the rhythm of every day life resumes for everybody except him and his wife Julia, becomes the structure on which the narrative is based. Continue reading →

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September 21, 2008 · 6:49 pm

Sweetness in the Belly: Camilla Gibb

Tessa: I am currently slogging my way through a book I hate, in fact, I haven’t touched it in two weeks, which has given me an even greater appreciation for Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, a little light read I picked up this summer.

I didn’t know anything about this book when I first picked it up. I didn’t even read the back jacket copy so when I started reading the book I really felt like I had been plunged into a completely different world. And I had.

Gibb tells the story of Lily, a little girl English/Irish girl who is orphaned in Morocco when her parents are killed. She is raised by Sufi’s and ultimately led to Ethiopia in the 70s when she is still a young teenager.

She earns her keep with a single woman and her family in Harar, a muslim enclave in predominantly Christian Ehtiopia, by doing household chores and teaching the Qu’ran to the local children who are too poor to attend school.

Here she is deeply immersed in the life, customs and the daily rituals of a rich muslim society where time has almost stood still. Gibbs paints such a vivid portrait of the muezzin that you can almost see the colourful headscarves, smell the coffee, incense, and feel the local customs. Sweetness in the Belly brings the reader close enough to this world that they can almost smell it. It’s this familiarity that allows you to understand the dynamics of how certain customs like female castration take place and the tribal, religious and cast differences that both divide and unite this culture. It also allows you to understand Islam as a faith and a way of life

Because faith is how Lily has protected herself from the changes and losses in her life she guards it fiercely. But it is tested  when she falls in love with Aziz a half Sudanese doctor. “The desire to remain in his company overwhelmed common sense; I would pick up my good Muslim self on the way home.” Although he is Muslim he is a moderate muslim who seeks change particularly where women’s health and politics is concerned.

But their relationship comes to a bittersweet end when Haili Salasie’s regime is overtaken by the Dergue, Aziz like thousands of others disappears and Lily finds herself a refugee in her native England.

What I love about this book is that for the first time I was able to understand the cultural dynamic of why and how certain cultural customs take place, and how cultural customs mix with religion to create an entirely unique social mix.

The Islam we hear about in the west is through the lense of post 9/11 where media and propaganda have created a fearful portrait of a militant islam that doesn’t reflect the reality of most of the islamic world.

Gibb’s portrait of Lily’s experience in London as an outsider also really brought home the difficulty and some of the hostility people face when coming to a new country.

On a lot of different levels Sweetness in the Belly succeeded in giving me an insider’s view not only of a woman’s journey to finding her home but also to a world and culture I know very little about. And she told the story in a way that touched my heart.

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August 24, 2008 · 8:41 pm

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan – Book Review

I just finished reading On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan’s latest novel and loved it as much as I have his other more recent but larger works, Saturday and Atonement. The themes that underpin his larger works are evident in spades in this compelling love story. Here MacEwan explores how the lives of two ordinary people are irrevocably changed through a moment of indecision.

Set in Britain in the early sixties, it chronicles the relationship between Edward and Florence, two young lovers from very different worlds. Edward grew up in the English country side where “the beds were never made, the sheets rarely changed,” the bathroom never cleaned, his mother absent. Florence, an aspiring classical musician, grew up in a well-to-do family that skied, played tennis and served bouillabaise, and exotic cheeses. He loves pubs, she loves concerts.

Yet, the differences that separate them is overcome by love that at least for a time, has the capacity to bridge their social worlds. So much so that even though it’s clear that Florence has an inability to deal with physical intimacy and indeed is repulsed by it neither of them venture a discussion concerning it during their year long courtship. Instead Edward choses to believe, albeit frustratingly, that Florence’s modesty will dissolve with the safety and security of marriage. But what Florence feels, is in fact, sheer terror and revulsion at the thought of the consummation of their marriage that only continues to build as their wedding day approaches. Florence regards the mere thought of intimacy with “a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness.”

It’s no surprise of course, that their wedding night is a disaster. But what makes this story so compelling is MacEwan’s ability to lay bear the elaborate ritual of love and repulsion, the tension between marriage and obligation, trust and ego. Although there is a reference that perhaps Florence had suffered some abuse this isn’t explored any further. What we have are two individuals who ‘love’ each other but don’t essentially know each other. And at the critical moment when they must lay themselves bare she suffers a failure of courage and he allows his ego to betray his heart. This time love can’t save them.

Although Florence and Edward aren’t exactly products of the Victorian age, neither are they a part of the pop culture/sexual revolution that was already starting to take the western world by storm. But even if they were, would that have made any difference at all? What McEwan explores so beautifully is what lies at the heart of being human; that we are flawed and that it is this that sets the course of our incomplete lives.

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