How long do you give a book before you sack it off?
Further to this question: 24 pages in the case of 'A Man Called Ove'. Dull as fucking ditchwater. A grumpy old man acting the cunt is not automatically funny unless you actually make it funny.
Anyway. My recent reading matter:
As threatened, I cheered myself up after 'Autumn' by reading Elizabeth Strout's
Amy & Isabelle, her first novel, which was very good, if not up to the heights of 'The Burgess Boys' or 'Anything Is Possible'. The story of a fractious realtionship between a mother and daughter, exacerbated by the mother's closed-minded righteousness and the daughter having an affair with one of her teachers. The opening up of Isabelle's mind is done well, with glimpses of a happier future beyond the book's ending. In the slimy and odious Mr. Robertson, we have an amazing picture of a predator worming his way into Amy's affections. And, as ever, the smalltown cast of characters that surround them is sharply drawn. Now I only have one of her books left unread! I'm going to have to try and be strong and keep that as something to look forward to.
Then I went back to another author's debut, Paul Beatty's
The White Boy Shuffle. The title is a non-sequitur that is explained in a throwaway scene halfway through the book. In a lot of ways, it does feel like a dry run for 'The Sellout', with a lot of the themes being shared, and Gunnar Kaufman does seem like a very similar narrator to the unnamed main character in the later book. It still stands up in its own right, I should add, and anybody who enjoyed 'The Sellout' will definitely enjoy this. It does tread a fine line between the furious humour and moral outrage that it doesn't quite maintain throughout - it gets a bit preachy towards the end - but Beatty is the king of one-liners, and the only book I've laughed at quite so much in recent times is....yeah, 'The Sellout'.
Next was the recently republished-for-the-first-time-in-years
Nightmare In Berlin by Hans Fallada. The title is a cheeky bit of renaming after 'Alone In Berlin' became such a huge success in recent years - its real title is simply 'The Nightmare' (though of course, 'Alone...'s real title is 'Every Man Dies Alone' anyway.) While not quite up to the same heights as 'Alone...', this is a bloody fantastic book, mercilessly autobiographical, and I pretty much read it in one sitting. I was relieved that I liked it, as the only other Fallada I've read was 'Little Man, What Now?', which didn't grab me as much as 'Alone...', and I was worried that that might have been a one-off.
Then another (more recent) debut, Nicole Dennis-Benn's
Here Comes The Sun, a novel about the impact that the tourist trade has on Jamaica, as seen through the eyes of three generations of a working-class family who live in a village which depends on the tourists and at the same time is being overwhelmed (and then destroyed) by them. The mother and elder sister, Delores and Margot, are very complicated characters, who are basically villains, but both are shown in a light that adds sympathy to why they've become this way. Margot in particular has another major plot strand concerning her homosexuality, something which is not looked upon well in Jamaica, to put it mildly. The heroine of the book is Thandi, the younger sister, who is fighting against the life which her mother and elder sister are trying to place her into (with their own, seemingly good, reasons), and there are also more likeable characters in Charles, the boy who Thandi develops a relationship with, and Verdene, the woman who makes Margot realise her own sexuality. The bigger villains are the rich white Jamaicans and developers who just see the island and its people as an exploitable resource. A fantastic book, and I'll be keeping an eye out for whatever she writes next.
And then Elif Shafak's
Three Daughters Of Eve, which was also bloody fantastic. I've never read any of Shafak's earlier work, but again, I'll definitely go back and check some of it out. The main character is Peri, a Turkish woman, whose story is told in two strands - one covering a single evening in 2016 in which events make her look back over her life, and the other running through that life from childhood through to her years as a student at Oxford. The main theme of the book seems to be the question of how we approach our belief (or disbelief) in God, and for the most part it's a pretty even-handed look at this question, although my one quibble is that anybody showing an inclination to atheism is shown as a loud-mouthed buffoon, as opposed to the religious characters who are mainly made more likeable. That mis-step aside, I was pleased that this book confounded my expectations - at one point, I thought the plot was going to go in a direction which seemed tired and overdone, but then veered off somewhere else entirely. The writing is also some of the best I've read this year. Completely recommended.
