Kay's Bookshelf

In a way I have liked Bruno a lot, as he is honest and cares about other people’s feelings, making him seem at times to be older than his nine years. An opinion which is sort of reversed when it comes to the people on the other side of the fence in general, and to Schmuel in particular, as Bruno behaves, when relating to them, in an unbearably childish manner (outrageously so in the scene where he is carelessly eating turkey in front of his friend). Perhaps his behavior is explainable by the fact he, with his young mind, couldn’t properly perceive what lied behind the fence (especially as Schmuel himself shields him from things). It is perhaps interesting to notice that the life on the other side even seemed attractive to Bruno in his simplicity: so many children to play with, and getting to wear comfy striped clothing all day long!

The style the book was written in is, I think, its greatest asset. Simple words in simple phrases, just as (probably) a child might think. The narration is shielded, no gory details, fit for children and a child’s point of view. Bruno notices things around him and tries to make sense of them as best as he can, but nevertheless he misses details (whatever cannot fit in his idea of the world is shrugged away). A whole other image is formed in the mind of a reader 50 years later — quite an accomplishment of the author I would say, his managing to give just enough details for the reader to realize what’s going on and at the same time few enough so as to keep Bruno (young, innocent Bruno) always guessing.

The book has been criticized by some, saying that it needs strong suspension of disbelief in order to be appreciated. For one, there couldn’t have been a nine year old kid wandering around in Auschwitz as children younger than 15 were either gassed or experimented with. Also, German children were indoctrinated about Jews from an early age so it’s not very probable that a nine year old son of a Commandant would have had no idea about who they were and what was happening to them. Some serious flaws indeed — which is probably why the book is subtitled “A Fable” and meant to be enjoyed as such. Which I did (mostly because I liked the style it was written in :) )

What I liked most: Despite the gravity of the situation Bruno’s thinking of the Fuhrer as “the Fury” (due to a mispronunciation) never failed to amuse me :)

What I liked least: The other mispronunciation, Out-With instead of Auschwitz. While I could imagine the Fury/Fuhrer thing all too easily (although I have no idea if they would sound alike in German too), the Out-With part seemed sort of unexplainable to me and bothered me throughout the book (I wouldn’t say it’s that big a deal though, to spoil a book that I otherwise liked).

Recommend it? Yes. Short and nicely written (albeit on a sad topic).

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Both Luther and Nora are just so… sketchy. There’s nothing much to be said about them other than they love their daughter. Luther is a bit cheap (understandably enough given that he was an accountant) and Nora is just an upper-class housewife. At least I was glad to see that their relationship was strong enough to resist both the attacks of their neighbors and the pangs of regret Nora sometimes felt at having to skip certain parts of the festivities along with the bad ones.

Now that I think about it I don’t quite know why I have started reading this book, having seen the movie a while ago and not quite enjoying it (it had a happy ending but that’s all I ever liked about it). If anything the book was blander than the movie (at least the movie sort of annoyed me seeing all those nosy and aggressive neighbors that seemed to have missed all of was Christmas is truly about — interestingly enough, even though the book sort of had the very same scenes, they failed to raise any actual feeling from me).

Furthermore, I sort of fail to understand the point the author is trying to make: skipping the mindless consumerism of Christmas is bad? I for one cannot but root for the Kranks, both because it’s their right to do what they choose with their time and money and also because Christmas is not about the tree you put up or the things you buy — nevertheless I had the impression that the narrator/author was secretly finding their plight ridiculous, and had a “serves them right” moment at the end where they have to hurriedly prepare everything they resisted preparing until then, with the predictable difficulties this implies (such as nothing actually useful left in stores).

What I liked most: I was a bit amused at the way Luther treated those who wanted to sell him stuff to help various charities: he didn’t buy anything at the moment but he promised them he’ll buy for the same amount or larger in the spring/summer/whenever they were raising money again. Which didn’t quite help his money saving goal :P

What I liked least: Meh. It was too bland overall for anything to actually stand out. What was it with Marty though?

Recommend it? Well, most people at Amazon liked it so don’t let me put you off. It’s a very short book so you might want to give it a try :)

Written by the same author:
Runaway Jury

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The characters were very well built in my opinion. Unfortunately I have found both Wally and Candy to be sort of cliche (the beautiful girl perfect in every way, torn between the love for the guy she knew since childhood and this new hero-type she just met; the beautiful guy perfect in every way, volunteering to fight for his country, presumed dead for a while but all this time kept alive by the memory of his girlfriend’s love and of his love for her), but all the others were plain great. My favorites have been by far Dr. Larch and his two nurses: all three devoting their life to doing good, to taking care of their orphans, to being “of use”, as Dr. Larch put it, all three getting older and older and frailer and frailer as the time went by but never giving up. Melony is sort of their opposite, a very destructive person, so much so that I have found her as a child quite disturbing. She used to scare me all throughout the book as I was certain she’ll end up doing some serious harm, but she sort of mellowed out at the end and I was actually glad to see her ending up happy at Lorna’s side.

I don’t know what to think about what the author has chosen to do out of Homer Wells. The reader gets the feeling at times (while Homer is living his nice apple-picking life) that he is wrong, he is wasting his life in compromising and denying his God-given talent. On one hand I like that because it makes Homer very much more human, very much more real, very much less than a character of a book. After all, so many people make bad choices, so many people with potential lived their lives in compromise and deceit, why wouldn’t such thing happen to Homer? The other hand, well, has to do with the idealist in me, the one that expects perfect things to happen at least in books if not in real life. I would have, of course, liked Homer to follow Dr. Larch’s footsteps from the very beginning. But then there would have been no book to talk about, right? :P

I have liked the way the story is somehow centered around rules, respected or broken (As Wally put it, “‘Some rules are good rules, kiddo,’ [...] ‘But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.’“). The rules (both legal and moral) about abortion, the rules written by Homer in the cider house (never read and thus never respected, people thought they were “something to do with the building’s electricity” as they were always tacked near the light switch), the rules of society, the rules the black apple pickers had between them, and, perhaps most of all, the rules Candy has once set for Homer (while in the cider house — I think these are the very rules that gave the novel its title), that “We share Angel,’ [...] ‘We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out.’“, thus condemning Homer to a life of compromise, a life of lying to an invalid, a life of always wanting what he couldn’t have.

I think the abortion-related part has been handled quite well by Irving, as he lets the reader see both parts of the problem: not bringing unwanted children into the world versus the belief the fetus has a soul ever since conception. He does (obviously) lean towards one of the sides (and what’s more all characters agree that women should have the right to choose what’s best for them), but all in all I feel he has touched every important issue related to the matter — I liked that as I am fond of watching things from more than one angle :)

What I liked most: A moment that I was really touched by was when Candy has pregnant and was waiting to give birth at the orphanage, and everyone there was enchanted by her, especially the nurses: “we’re gonna have a wanted baby!”. It sort of tells a lot about the world they were all living in, a world where pregnancy was associated only with guilt, suffering and abandonment one way or the other.
Also, I was fascinated by Dr. Larch’s plan of reviving Fuzzy and making him a proper doctor, how detailed and complicated it was (all the correspondence Dr. Larch imagined, for once), how many years it spanned (over fifteen), how well everything was planned and how well it luckily turned out. Isn’t it interesting how easy to manipulate history is (history, who is supposed to be absolute), once someone puts his mind to it?

What I liked least: Many things were predictable but all in all it was too interesting a book to let that stand in the way of enjoying it.

Recommend it? Definitely. I find it a very well written book.

Written by the same author:
The World According to Garp

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They say that one can see the true face of a man when in extraordinary circumstances. That couldn’t be more true in Schindler’s case. As his wife states, he was a man who’s done nothing out of the ordinary either before the war or after. In time of peace he was nothing but a man passionate of liquor, a spender and a womanizer. As the author puts it, “He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.“. During those years he was reckless in his struggle for saving human lives, for providing better conditions to as may Jews as he could — so reckless that I couldn’t help fearing for him for a good portion of a book (although I knew, of course, that both him and his “Schindlerjuden” will get through the war unscathed). His courage in playing with the SS (his utter recklessness) are on the verge of incredible and the elements that differentiate him from any other Jew-helping person of those years — there were a lot of factory owners who made their Jew employees’ life more endurable, but no one that I know of took the risk Schindler dared to take.

You know, I have always thought Oskar Schindler a character too good to be true. Yet in this book I got to discover the man behind the myth — and the two were more similar than I thought they could be (speaking of which I have really liked the fact that Keneally warned the reader beforehand when a story people told about Schindler was not supported by evidence, so as to form an image of Schindler as close to the truth as possible — these cases were few and far between though; most of what’s told about Schindler is actually true).

A character worth noting is also Schindler’s wife, Emilie. He never treated her right and the couple would split about 10 years after the war ended, but during the war she was his very match. While she, as a woman, never encountered the risks Oskar took, she nevertheless did whatever in her powers to help the Schindlerjuden through the war — she cooked for them, she nursed them, etc., and I think lots of the Jews in Schindler’s factory owe their lives also to her careful nursing.

Leaving Oskar and Emilie aside, the book is a story about suffering. About hope (for the people in Oskar’s factory), but also about people who didn’t make it through the Holocaust alive, and the mind-bending tribulations of those who did. The moments that I have found the most frightening were some in the first half of the book, when the Krakow ghetto was raided repeatedly by the Nazi soldiers. There is a particular time when some people stand and listen to the megaphones announcing another raid and to the sounds of soldiers getting closer, and my mind can hardly contain their fright (or the fright I would have had in their place): of the horrors approaching, of the fact that these may very well be their last moments of normal life before going to a ghetto — or their last moments of life period. That part of history is truly a dark time, and I do know that this book is one that touches but little the many horrors that have passed. (I see that I use the word “horror” a lot; it is the single one that comes to my mind that I find expresses those happenings well)

This book has made me see some things from some new perspectives — for example, I have never thought about the way the normal, decent people of say Poland have regarded the brutality of what was happening around them. As the author puts it (on Schindler finding out about concentration camps):

“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.”

On a personal note, I was amazed to find out the fact that Schindler has spent a part of his later years in a flat near the main railway station in Frankfurt. I myself have visited Frankfurt last year and have stayed at a hotel very near the main railway station — so it’s very possible that I have treaded the same streets he had treaded all those years before (at least metaphorically speaking as a lot can happen to the streets/pavements in more than thirty years). I feel sorry that I didn’t know that before as I am always very impressed when I happen to be in the same place as a historical character once was.

You know, at first I have thought of this book as a normal novel, and I have been a bit upset that it isn’t written as one — it is written as a documentary and as such it is hard to read at times and hard to relate to at others. At first I would have liked it to have, I don’t know, more dialogue, more things written about the people, perhaps the people’s feelings, not barely the things happening to them. On reaching the end I have understood though that this book isn’t meant to be read as a novel — it’s a testimony, from that time to ours, and as such it’s meant to be based on fact; the dialogues and description of people’s feelings could have only been inventions detracting from its truth.

What I liked most: In a way, what I have liked most (or what fascinated me the most — which is not necessarily the same thing) was the duality of Oskar. I have always thought that people are either good or bad, either moral or imoral. Oskar’s morality is… well, open to debate, as for example he never cared to hide at least from his wife the fact that he took mistresses. As the author once put it, “Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.“. I cannot help feeling it was by a turn of chance, of incredible chance, that Oskar has been pushed, by some event, on this path rather than on any other that he might have taken (not that I want to debase his heroism or his humanity in any way). I’m probably mistaken.
Other than that, what I liked most (actually liked this time) was the fact that the author has been documenting a lot before writing this book: he visited places, he talked to people, he read documents, all that in order to have a book as close to the truth as possible, and I, as a reader thank him deeply for that. I have also liked the way the author follows the story even after Oskar and his Jews parted ways (this book focuses mainly on Oskar though, if you want to know even more of what happen to the Jews, their stories are told in another book written by the same author, Schindler’s Legacy)

What I liked least: Nothing. There is nothing to like least/not like about this kind of book.

Recommend it? If you’re interested in those years — absolutely!

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I started reading this book rooting for Rambo — having seen the movie and knowing him to be the unjustly treated one. The book made me see everything in a different light though: war trauma or not, Rambo kills an awful lot of completed innocent people in order to satisfy his thirst for revenge, so my favorite character became Teasle in almost no time. While definitely not perfect the latter does at least value human lives a lot more (the fact that he personally knew almost all the people involved also helped, I know,but still). Teasle is also a war veteran, having fought one of the more important battles in Korea, but all his instincts are now rusty, and I liked the fact that the author kept him so (instead of, for example, making him turn into a killing machine too), as the story was far more believable that way. I have also liked Sam Trautman, I found him quite believable too, the way he is both proud for Rambo’s “achievements” as a proof he’s been taught how to kill and taught well, but also sorry that a product of his school has turned out to do all that damage.

I have to say I found all initial motivations (the intrigue of the book) a bit weak: Rambo reacts the way he does just because he felt like it, he felt like teaching this very sheriff a lesson, despite ignoring all the previous ones. Teasle felt like messing with this very man (or kid, as he calls him) because he was trying not to think about his wife that has recently left him. Both too unworthy motivations to justify such a bloodshed as will follow. And yet the story manages to unravel in a believable way.

As a bit of trivia, Rambo’s name is inspired both by the French author Rimbaud’s name and by a type of apples named Rambo. I must say that while I have often heard both about Rambo and Rimbaud, I have never thought about there being a connection between the two :)

What I liked most: The way the book is structured — here’s what the author had to say about it:

“I structured the novel so that a scene from Rambo’s perspective would be followed by one from Teasle’s, the subsequent scene from Rambo’s, the next scene again from Teasle’s. That tactic, I hoped, would make the reader identify with each character and at the same time feel ambivalent about them. Who was the hero, who the villain, or were both men heroes, both men villains?”

There is also another thing I had a lot of fun with:
*********************SPOILER*********************************
As we all know by now there are four Rambo movies, with a fifth being thought of as we speak. There are also three books, this one and two sequels (both novelizations of their respective movies, so I imagine they’re both starring Rambo).

But John Rambo dies at the end of the book !!!

For some reason I find that hilarious :D
End book 1:
… and so Rambo died…
Start book 2:
Rambo picked up his things and started walking … (or something, I have yet to find the second book :) )
*******************END SPOILER*******************************

What I liked least: What’s with all the “Teasle saw the world through Rambo’s eyes, thus knowing where to find him” stuff? Isn’t this highly unlikely, not to say impossible? I so hate it when that happens.

Recommend it? Yes, it’s quite well written. Not to mention surprising as it’s a lot different from the movie.

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The real main character in this novel is by far Africa – and the little farm at the foot of Ngong Hills. Almost every little detail of the story is there to give out something more of life in Africa, of African people, of African fauna and so on. About three quarters of the book are spent thus, presenting the country as an idyllic place, hardships vaguely mentioned or at all. Unfortunately the farm wasn’t going as well as it should have so in the end Karen had to sell everything and leave — the fourth quarter tells about how this came to be, how they all struggled to keep it from happening but how she had to let it go in the end. Her love of Africa is as pregnant as ever in these last chapters though – even more so as she knows she’ll have to leave the land behind for good in a short while.

I was amazed to see it in the form it had: an endless account of simple happenings, in no particular order. There are a lot of people mentioned, both Native and Europeans, including Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton, but none of them holds a place in the story more important than Africa itself does, they all seem to be shown as accessories to Africa’s beauty. I was expecting something totally different having seen the movie a while ago. I was happy to see in the novel none of the sentimentality that had bothered me at times in the movie — in the book Denys is never clearly presented as more than a friend of Karen’s (not that his merely being more than a friend of Karen’s had bothered me in the movie :) ). What’s more, the movie Denys was really annoying for me, the way he put himself always first and always did what he wanted without much care for another’s feelings (including Karen’s). In the book he is said to be totally without self interest — which, needless to say, made me like him a lot more in this version. :)

Animals also take an important place in the story – Karen’s dogs, Lulu (the tamed antelope), the giraffes, the lions – all mentions of them trying to underline the farm’s communion and Karen’s communion with the African wild life, with Africa itself.

What I liked most: The feeling I get while reading, that Karen was really fond of Africa and had really enjoyed her stay there (you can sense her love for that land and its people in almost every word) :) Also, the fact that the story is said in bits and pieces in a non-chronological manner, a thing that I wouldn’t normally like but it seems to fit perfectly here :)

What I liked least: There is a particular scene I have found a little hard to understand: One day Karen and Denys drive by a dead giraffe. A lioness was eating from the body and Denis shot it. Then they drove away. All well so far. Only after a while they drove by the same place on the way back. This time a lion was standing on the giraffe’s carcass and both Karen and Denis were impressed by how majestic it looked. And then Karen shot it (!). And then they had a picnic on the spot (!!)(near the bodies of the two lions and the carcass that was getting pretty smelly by the time of their first drive by). So yuck.

Recommend it? Yes, especially to those who love to read about faraway places :) It’s a wonderful book to find out about the Africa of the beginning of the 20th century.

Some quotes:
About Kamante the cook:

“He had a great memory for recipes. He could not read, and he knew no English so that cookery-books were of no use to him, but he must have held all that he was ever taught stored up in his ungraceful head, according to some systematization of his own, which I should never know. He had named the dishes after some event which had taken place on the day they had been shown to him, and he spoke of the sauce of the lightning that struck the tree, and of the sauce of the grey horse that died.”

Also about Kamante:

“Kamante writes that he has been out of work for a long time. I was not surprised to hear of it, for he was really caviare to the general. I had educated a Royal Cook and left him in a new Colony. It was with him a case of “Open Sesame.” Now the word has been lost, and the stone has closed for good round the mystic treasures that it had in it. Where the great Chef walked in deep thought, full of knowledge, nobody sees anything but a little bandy-legged Kikuyu, a dwarf with a flat, still face.”

About the Ngong hills:

“And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.”

About life in Africa:

“Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.”

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Louis is an ordinary man brought in some extraordinary situations. All he wants is a family, a wife and possibly some children. His life turns into a total chaos once he meets Bonnie and falls in love with her – he becomes a fugitive for her sake, leaving behind every single bit of his former life. He is such a simple and honest person and all through the book I kept feeling he deserved so much more than the bits and pieces sometimes Bonnie threw his way. Above all he didn’t deserve his all-consuming loneliness – one sacrificing so much to be with the one he loves shouldn’t feel lonely, right? And yet…

The last thing he said was: “Take care of yourself, Lou.”
“If I don’t, who else will?” Durand answered from the depths of his aloneness. “Who is there in this whole wide world who will ?”

This book illustrates very well the idea of “love is blind”. At first Louis sees Bonnie a way better person than she is, finding her all sorts of excuses for her behavior. Interestingly enough, even when he manages at last to see her true face and to see the real motives behind her actions, he still loves her so much that she doesn’t care. I think we can say that Louis has for Bonnie the perfect kind of love – he keeps loving her regardless to the fact that she stole his money, that she’s greedy and at times vulgar, that her past is a mystery, that she doesn’t love him, that she cheated on him – even when she poisons him and keeps him from seeing a doctor, Louis’ love never wavers.

As for Bonnie… I think the quote best depicting her is the one saying that she had no moral sense at all. All she cares about is money and the pleasure of the current moment. I started reading this book because the movie “Original Sin” is made after it – a movie I like very much due to its seemingly all consuming passion. I expected to find a Bonnie similar to the one in the movie – not perfect but loving Louis the way he loved her. She isn’t and she doesn’t. All she sees in Louis is a way for her to the luxurious lifestyle she so much likes. She treats Louis well as long as he has anything to offer her; stops doing so when he doesn’t, without once stopping to think about him as a man or as a human being.

What I liked most: The wording. Woolrich uses some very nice word constructions to build up powerful imagery (for example when Bonnie leaves the house seems to Louis so filled with broken hopes that he thinks he could actually step on them).

What I liked least: I don’t think I can put here the fact that I didn’t like how Bonnie destroyed Louis’ life, can I? After all there would have been no novel without that. Nevertheless I kept wishing throughout the book that Louis might be spared at least part of his troubles. :)

Recommend it? Yes.

Two quotes:

“A man without a wife, ‘he ain’t a whole man at all, he’s just a shadow walking around without no one to cast him.”

——–

His heart said a prayer. Not knowing to whom, but asking it of the nothingness around him, that he had plunged himself into of his own accord.
“Make her love me,” he pleaded mutely, “as I love her. Open her heart to me, as mine is open to her. If she can’t love me in a good way, let it be in a bad way. Only, in some way. _Any_ way, at all. This is all I ask. For this I’ll give up everything. For this I’ll take whatever comes, even the ace of spades.”

Written by the same author:
I Married a Dead Man

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