Helene Wecker – The Golem and The Djinni

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Book Review, Fantasy Fiction, Helene Wecker, The Golem and The Djinni

Fantastical, imaginative narrative exploring the nature of freedom of choice in nineteenth century New York

I must admit to gobbling up Helene Wecker’s delicious, sprawling-yet-tightly plotted account of the meeting of two mythological creatures from two different cultural and religious traditions – The Golem from Kabbalah/Central European Judaism , the Djinn from Bedouin/Middle East/Islamic as if it were the fabulously tasting confection it is, and I were a sweet toothed literary addict starved of my life-line supply of a tall deep tale excellently told.

The reading far into the night, the laying aside of tasks which needed to be done, the rushing away from social encounters to indulge my fierce craving to read on and on and on, is finally over, the book finished Blast. Blast! BLAST! It’s her first novel too – there are no earlier ones to discover hidden in the confection box

Wecker tells a tall, yet beautifully grounded in reality tale of the Golem, a creature fashioned by man, not by God, from clay (like Adam) but to serve his or her master like a slave. Golems are allowed no desire but that of their master. Hugely powerful, enslaved though they are, if angered, they are an unstoppable force, a Frankenstein’s monster indeed. This particular Golem is female, and is also constructed with intelligence and curiosity – and an overwhelming sense of empathy, so she is pulled hither and thither by the different, competing wants and desires of people’s thoughts.

Set against this proper creature of earth, learning to restrain the voices in her head, the competing empathic sense towards the denizens of her environment, is the fiery untamed voice of freedom to indulge desire, with no responsibility, with no sense of the wrong done to other, as represented by an ancient Djinni (the genie figure of Aladdin’s Lamp is one such creature). Our Djinni, like the Golem, has also been enslaved. He was his own creature, bound by magic, she was created by magic, and is learning to impose a certain freedom of choice in seeking to tame her own destructive side, in learning how to turn down the clamouring, conflicting needs and wants of the people she comes across. Her compassion is her cross to bear, as much as her potential for destruction. The Djinni’s journey is to learn to accept that merely indulging one’s own whim, may also cause devastation.

Our two protagonists are embedding in a rich immigrant community – Jews from Europe, Maronite and Eastern Orthodox Christians from Syria, interspersed with the Djinn’s 1000 year old history in the desert, and Islamic culture

How Wecker weaves all this together, as intricately, beautifully and satisfyingly as the Golem’s bakery skills or the Djinni’s artistic metal-work creations, is a wonderful thing to read. There is a dark, believable story, there are metaphysical concepts about how free any of us are – bound by our own nature, how much of our choices do we really make, where does the ultimate responsibility lie? And if we do an evil or a thoughtless act, because of our natures, how much of all the events that transpire are our fault, how much do other peoples’ choices also contribute to where responsibility lies?

I can’t praise this highly enough. It is a gorgeous, page turning, remarkably easy read, which is at the same time ‘about stuff’ – as indeed myths often are, with their meaning, like icebergs, lying below the surface and waiting to ambush us

And how I wish I had not yet read it, and had this wondrous journey to begin! O still-to-read-this person – how I envy you!

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK. Lucky me!

The Golem and The Djinni Amazon UK
The Golem and The Djinni Amazon USA

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Aimee Bender – The Color Master

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Aimee Bender, Book Review, Fairy Stories, Myths and Legends, Short story collection, The Color Master

Finally a short story collection which validates the genre itself

I have always found the short story – or rather, the collection of short stories, to be a problematic venture. To a fast reader, one story is not enough for a reading session; yet a well-written story demands a pause for absorption. This is why possibly its best placement is within a magazine, as a single. With a short story collection, if it is the collected works of several writers, the difference in voices, one to another, is a bit like eating a spoonful of steamed fish, followed by a Yorkie Bar, followed by a raw egg, and so on. Or like a collection of literary slaps in the face.

When it comes to a collection by the same author, unless they are highly skilful, the reader quickly masters and absorbs the writer’s literary tics and style, and starts each new story becoming surer and surer of what the author is doing and will do – a sense of déjà vu sets in, the sense of one story written again and again with marginal variation.

Rare is the author who masters this, who can work creatively WITH the form, again and again, but not be mastered, or stultified by it.

Preamble over – I do believe Aimee Bender IS that master. There is a deft, sure use of precise writing, there are (very different) narrative journeys, the volte-faces are satisfying, the characters individual, Inevitably there are some stories which are close to perfect, others a little less satisfying – but, rare is the novelist without the occasional phrase, character, or event that doesn’t act like a sudden stumble, on the reader’s eye and ear.

I was particularly enchanted by the tight little story about a boy from a clearly dysfunctional family, Faces, a story for all the world like a recounting of a case from Oliver Sachs The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, with its beautiful sting in the tail ending. This was a tale which seemed, once the reader sees it, to be about reality. But Bender masters whimsy and fantasy beautifully, too.

Tiger Mending is a sweet and heart-string plucking story which could almost have come from one of Kipling’s Just So Stories – poor fraying tigers in need of help and repair, howling plaintively at their plight. Another story, The Red Ribbon, looks at the adult theme of sexual boredom within a marriage. In The Fake Nazi, is the contrast between those who deny responsibility for their crimes, and those who believe they are responsible for all crimes, even when they could not possibly have committed them – with a devious sting about the durability of our illusions about ourselves, for good or ill. Some fine psychological insights in this one.

Giovanni Lanfranco: Norandino and Lucina Discovered by the Ogre. Wiki Commons

The stories are divided into three sections, with the last section mainly moving away from the realistic, to magical or myth realism, particularly with some longer stories retelling traditional fairy or folk tales, including the title story, The Color Master, and the final, particularly potent re-telling of the story of a woman who marries an ogre, The Ogre’s Wife. For this reader, Bender lays all her glittering skills out in that tale , for the reader’s delectation and delight – finely crafted writing, narrative with dark twists and turns, a simple fairy tale uncovering the chasms beneath, wonderfully casual, unlaboured humour, and finally some irreverent, surprising juxtaposition of physics, myth and humour for the ending and beginning of the universe. I particularly liked the arrangement of this, as an end story, flipping me back to the placement of the first story, Appleless, which, though about other things, by choosing to be based around a woman who won’t eat apples, but tastes of bread, inevitably suggests an untempted Eve, religious symbolisms about bread and Christianity, and a myth of the creation of humanity, which the last story closes, to begin again.

It is difficult to give an example of Bender’s wonderful sense of humour, which has almost a cosmic joke property, as it is simply the placement of a phrase, almost as an aside, within the context of the story, which amuses, but the following, from The Ogre’s Wife made me chortle whilst also going `ouch!’:

The ogre’s wife disliked firmly only one aspect of her husband: his interest in eating the children of humans. It could’ve been me! She told him once in bed while he twirled and twisted her hair over his fingers

And, from a more realistic story in Part 2, The Doctor and the Rabbi:

Although he had initiated the conversation, he found the word “God” offensive, the same way he disliked it when people spoke about remodelling their kitchens

There is a cake vision – read the book and find the story!

A wonderful, assured collection, – if only all short story collections were as satisfying as
this, and all short story writers could produce such a variation in style, genre and approach

I’m grateful to fellow reviewer and blogger FictionFan who assured me The Color Master came with a `Lady Fancifull will absolutely love this’ label attached. She was so right! – here is her review of this wonderful book.

I received this as a digital review copy from the publisher. This is one gifthorse that has all its teeth perfectly formed, thank you very much!
The Color Master Amazon UK
The Color Master Amazon USA

Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places

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Book Review, Nature Writing, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, The Natural World, The Wild Places

There are Wild Places Almost Round The Corner

Robert Macfarlane writes a lyric, prose poem to the English landscape, which I enjoyed enormously, but with a sense of panic and loss, during the first two thirds of the book, where his focus on ‘wild places’ were those areas probably untouched by man, almost impossible to access (you need, paradoxically, a car to get you within a day or so’s walk of them!!) and, of course, disappearing fast. He focuses inevitably upon the far North (Scotland) and the far West (Ireland)

However, as he moves South, walking with his friend the late wonderful Roger Deakin, he begins to shift emphasis, and ‘sees heaven in a grain of sand’ – the wild is not only far away and up mountains, the wild is also the untramelled, fertile growth of green things, the way nature reclaims landscapes, though of course, even this is under threat as we rip out hedgerows, tarmac the earth and lay roads. Macfarlane shifts his view from ‘big wild’ – high snow capped mountains, harsh and cold, to small, almost secret wild, for example, the mysterious ‘hollow ways’ relics of our past walkings, of landscapes eroded by feet, hooves, cartwheels and water, to form hidden ravine type lanes, particularly in the chalklands.

I also really was taken with his exploration of mapping, and the difference between our measured, linear maps – OS and road maps, and another kind of mapping, which tells a story and is the narrative of a person or a community in connection with their landscape.

The book also serves as the story of a lovely kindred soul friendship between him and Deakin.

Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places Amazon UK
Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places Amazon USA

David Mitchell – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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Book Review, David Mitchell, Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Exceeding all the wildest accolades – prodigious achievement

Sometimes you come across a book which is so wonderful that reading it is as much of a sorrow as a pleasure – especially when the end of the book begins to come in sight.

This offering by David Mitchell is just such a book. He really is a quite extraordinary writer, his prose is beautiful and clear, extremely well-crafted, at times poetic, without seeming forced or contrived. There is a crystalline, lucent quality to his work, and great and refined tenderness. He’s a writer with vision, intellect and heart. And a quite extraordinary ability to metamorphise into different voices – this was stunningly evident in his first book, Ghostwritten.

In this, his fifth, he stays with one narration, but there are 3 major protagonists in the story; the subtlety of his writing shifts the perspective so that the reader is drawn into all three, separate, stories, and can find each character fascinating, layered and moving.

The book is a kind of love story, in the fullest incarnation of what a story about love might mean. Japanese, Dutch and English culture and history collide as individual stories are unfurled.

Set in an island off mainland Japan in the late 18th and early 19th century, the research which Mitchell has done must have been prodigious, though he wears his learning lightly and the reader absorbs much information without pain. There is a combination of great delicacy in the writing, and some very graphic and visceral descriptions of medical procedures, beautifully done, even though inevitably they are shocking.

Towards the very end of the book, there is one chapter, the 39th, where the writing is of such assured mastery and beauty, and the narrative so profound and full, that it almost becomes impossible to imagine being able to read a book by another writer. Mitchell has exceeded all the accolades he has garnered.

When I reached the end of the book I burst into tears, at an ending so right, so tender, so truthful.

Apparently the book took 2 years to gestate. So I guess there may be a long wait for Mitchell no 6. Time enough to re-read his entire canon.

Mitchell has the most beautiful understanding of human nature, its frailties and its glories, and a mastery of the craft of writing equal to the high content of his work. Style AND substance, by the barrel load

I was reminded how much I value Mitchell’s writing, and this particular book, by coming across another blogger, reviewing her past wonderful reads, and this was the one: see Roxploration’s review of it

I originally received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine UK programme

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Amazon UK
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Amazon USA

Susanna Jones – The Earthquake Bird

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Book Review, Japan, Psychological Thriller, Susanna Jones, The Earthquake Bird

Author In Search of An Ending

This, the third novel I’ve read by Susanna Jones, is in fact the first novel she wrote. And it shares the strengths and the weaknesses of the other two (though curiously, less of the major weakness. More of which later)

Set in Japan, a strange country, a different culture entirely, for most of us, her strange and alienated female central character Lucy Fly, a misfit in her own country and in her own family, has found a home, and assimiliated in Japan, where she works as a technical translator. So there is an undercurrent of everyone speaking different languages, and trying to understand and communicate with each other.

Lucy has a Japanese lover, not quite a conventional boyfriend, as both he and she have large no-go areas in their relationship, which seems predicated on that being fine, and that the strength of the relationship is in fact that weirdness and unfamiliarity to each other.

Into this mix comes an equally, though differently alienated English ex-pat, another rather gauche drifter, Lily. We know, right at the start, that Lily has been murdered, and Lucy is the prime suspect. The story unravels backwards and forwards as Lucy revisits, in her mind, and makes the stories of all their pasts.

The strength of the book is in the interesting, well crafted characters, the sense of strangeness and dislocation, uneasy and unsettling.

However, like those other two books, as I approached the end of the story, and where it was going to go, my overwhelming sense was of disappointment. An ‘oh – so what’ , as the structure and journey Jones has been carefully building ends with a slight feeling of having been cheated. Curiously, as THIS is her first book, she managed the ending rather better than in the other two I’ve read. I obviously can’t say what the ending is, for fear of spoilers, but somehow her endings are too mundane and not really in keeping with what is, for the most part, a sure, fine imagination and mastery of the craft of writing

The Earthquake Bird Amazon UK
The Earthquake Bird Amazon USA

Otto Dov Kulka – Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination

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Auschwitz concentration camp, Book Review, History, Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination, Otto Dov Kulka, Theresienstadt concentration camp

There can be no way to analyse accounts of the the unendurable

This is a book I found it impossible to assess a clear response to. It is, of course, a book which should never have been written, since the fact that this history happened at all is horrifying beyond the imagination of horror itself.

Yet, having happened, books such as these MUST be written, and even more importantly, MUST be read. We must know what we are capable of for good and for ill. But how can a reader like, love, think its okay, not like or hate a book such as this?

I have (fortunately) no concept of an existence like this; I have only encountered people who lived through those times, and suffered what was suffered, who, try though they might cannot tell what they endured, because those of us who did not have these experiences cannot comprehend or imagine them.

And those that suffered them, however well they survived them were of course scarred deeply.

Otto Dov Kulka, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. was a boy in the ‘family camp’ at Auschwitz, via Theresienstadt.

He seems to have survived in terms of his emotional, mental, spiritual sense of himself, through an element of dissociation – which is of course the third response the autonomic nervous system has to danger – aggression fight, fear/flight, or freeze/dissociation. Tellingly, he recounts (and this is horrific, heartbreaking, and at the same time astonishingly awe-inducing) a childhood (camp) memory not of the horror but of the blue skies, in the family camp. That is, he somehow managed to find a sense of the blue remembered hills idea of childhood, so many of us remember, despite the unendurable reality of the death camps. If an individual is to survive and recover from these sorts of horrors, the way it can be done may be strange indeed. I had a sense, reading this, that Dov Kulka got through by analysis, intellect, discrimination, judgement, forcing himself into a sort of objective overview response, withdrawing from the personal, subjective loss, pain and suffering. It is no surprise he became a historian, existing at the overview of events, drawing clinical assessments of them.

This is a book beyond my comprehension, shocking, dreadful, humbling. He spares the reader gory graphic individual details. It is enough that we know that those personal sufferings he spares us were, dreadfully, day to day mundane facts of what life was like, in those days, for those millions who lived and died in those unimaginable places.

It is also a book which escapes and transcends any categories it may be put into, leaving this reader bewildered, appalled – and in awe of those who, like Dov Kulka, so clearly escaped the concerted, deliberate, vicious procedures which were designed not just to physically mutilate, torture and kill, but to destroy the individual and collective humanity, the soul, the sense of self, before the final physical destruction.

It is not the physical survival of those who survived the Holocaust which humbles us, it is the evidence of the survival of their humanity – and sometimes a greater, wiser humanity than those of us fortunate enough not to be scarred and damaged by what we can darkly do to each other.

I am not saying anything about suffering like this ennobling – it doesn’t, that sort of suffering is deliberately designed to degrade and destroy and remove nobility. However, some people seem to have the ability to be as greatly transcending their baser selves, as some others have to embrace only what is most monstrous

I received this an a review copy

Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination Amazon UK
Landscapes of The Metropolis of Death:Reflections on Memory and Imagination Amazon USA

Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova

Tags

Early Music Review, Orlando Consort, Philippe de Vitry, Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova

Joie de Vitry!

This is a stunningly pretty collection. The fourteenth century composer Philippe de Vitry  here is most joyously rendered by the Orlando Consort, who float and weave their musical lines with effortless grace (so it sounds) It seems impossible such voices should issue forth  from the gentlemen on the left!

The pieces lack the intensity of the religious/spiritually inspired pieces of early vocal music.

These are for the most part secular, and range from lively little airs, with a jaunty, spring like feel, like a French version of Sumer is a cumin in – to full bodied plaints which sound like an ardent swain pleading for his lady’s favours – a wooing song, a love song, no less, and pieces which just seemed designed to show off the composer, lyricist and singers’ artistry, in an `oh how did they do THAT’ sort of way, for the listener, and leave us applauding their skills and the pleasure this music brings.

It’s possible (not having the texts on an mp3 download) that some of these are songs of praise, but if they are, it is to a divinity who a friend, not to a being who is full of awe and majesty. More of a lares and penares sort of providence.

This is such smile filled music!

Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova Amazon UK
Philippe de Vitry and the Ars Nova Amazon USA

Simon Callow – Charles Dickens and The Great Theatre of The World

Tags

Biography, Book Review, Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of The World, Simon Callow

The writer who adored the theatre, by the actor who adores the writer

Simon Callow has written a wonderful biography of Dickens, with a specific focus on Dickens adoration of theatre, and the links between the passionate, flamboyant theatrical heart in his writing, and the man who virtually killed himself by addiction to giving all of that passionate heart to audiences, in the punishing Reading tours he gave, both in this country and in America.

I loved an earlier book by Callow, My Life in Pieces, a collection of his published writings from newspaper columns, and remember particularly being struck by the way he wrote about Dickens, who he has clearly adored for ever. There is a pretty good fit between this larger than life, generously natured actor, and the larger than life, generously natured, and adored, writer, social campaigner and performer of Victorian England. I knew a little about Dickens the man (mainly, the details of his early life and the difficulties later in his marriage and his hidden liaison with Ellen Ternan), but the prodigious nature of his energy, and the extraordinarily wide scale of his talent – not just as novelist, but as editor, journalist, fosterer of younger writers, actor, monologuist/performer, director, producer, republican, radical, social campaigner and philanthropist in his life, not only his art, – has been revelatory. Dickens was adored by his public, transcending class, and was clearly a man who lived many lives in one, burning away with prodigious energy which must have been exhausting to keep up with. Emotionally highly volatile, he had close and loyal friendships with both men and women, although as someone with a keen business sense he also had some rather violent breakings of loyal friendships with his various publishers.

Dickens the Performer of His Works

I was particularly interested in something slightly throwaway which Callow suggested, fairly early on, wondering, if Dickens had lived today, whether the particularly febrile quality of his energy, drive, imagination and passion, which lurked alongside deep despair, might not have led to the suspicion of mild bipolar disorder.

This is an excellently researched and written book, but it is Callow’s warmth,
appreciation and passion for Dickens which takes it out of the academic and ensures Dickens get placed not just in Callow’s heart, but this reader’s. And the life of the man, in Callow’s book, definitely illuminates that man’s art.

Callow as Dickens courtesy of a Time Lord and the Tardis!

I received this initially as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK, and once again was grateful to fellow blogger and Amazon Viner FictionFan for alerting me to this book in the first place. Here’s the link to her review.

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre Of The World Amazon UK
Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre Of The World Amazon USA

The Silence

Tags

Anna Lena Klenke, Baran bo Odar, Burghart Klaussner, Film review, German Cinema, Jule Böwe, Sebastian Blomberg, The Silence

From the Dark Side of The Psyche

Don’t expect ‘The Killing’ despite the DVD publicity cover by-line – this is not a who-done-it, it’s not even particularly a why-done-it (though that does get revealed,though its isn’t particularly the point of the film) The crime and the perpetrators are clear within minutes of the start of the film. The journey of the film is the effect of the rape and murder of a child upon the lives of the community – a bit like dropping a stone into a pond, and setting off wider and wider ripples. It isn’t an on-the-edge-of-your-seat sort of film, its a settling ever more steadily into darkness, dysfunction, despair. In keeping with the title of this German-with-subtitles film, there is indeed a lot of silence. Not just between people, but also a lot which goes unsaid, underneath the words which are being spoken, and also the silence within a person, trying to bury thoughts and words and memories which are horrific, foul or unbearable.

A very uncomfortable subject indeed – paedophilia, the rape and murder of a child opens the film, and the investigation of that crime, and the ‘copycat’ crime 23 years later is the exterior journey. The audience knows everything about this very quickly, so what we watch is character and relationship, and the exposition of damage. Perhaps startlingly the perpetrators are also handled with a judicious and cool eye. We, (the audience) are not allowed the comfort of purely dismissing them as monsters – horrible and unforgiveable though they are – they are shown to have the same need for connection with another human being as we all do. The director and actors manage a very difficult balancing act here. The crimes are appalling indeed, and we are asked, not to condone or to forgive the perpetrators but to nevertheless recognise that the ‘monster’ is an ordinary person as well as monstrous. The film flings the sometimes awful, uncomfortable truth that we want the good to be rewarded, the bad to get their just deserts, but life itself is not so tidy. Unlike Hollywood, there are no ‘wraps’; whatever happened, goes on happening.

To add to the disturbance, there are scenes of bright primary colours, yellow cornfields, blue skies, in fact the brightness of the colours are almost sickeningly so at times, whilst other scenes are shot very very darkly lit indeed. Uncomfortable viewing indeed, but again, unlike Hollywood splatter gore-fest films, this is in no way a gratuitous or sick film; its grimness is in its refusal to give the audience release, any more than the characters in the film are allowed release or ‘closure’. Sometimes, refusal to ‘resolve’, leaving the viewer uncomfortable and disturbed, is what makes a movie work.

I received this as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK

The Silence DVD Amazon UK
The Silence DVD Amazon USA

Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days

Tags

Douglas Perry, Janice Pendarvis, Kronos Quartet, Linda Ronstadt, Philip Glass, Songs From Liquid Days, The Roches

And The Music Spins Dynamically Round And Round

I love Philip Glass’s edgy, insistent, questing rhythms and arising melodies. The inexorable, subtly building and changing repetitions remind me curiously of Wagner – much cooler, much more cerebral, less viscerally overpowering, but as wonderfully getting under the skin.

This particular venture, quite old now, was a collaboration between Glass and respected, interesting lyricists – Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson  are some of that number

For me the tracks which particularly stand out are:

Lightning (lyrics by Suzanne Vega) sternly sung by Janice Pendarvis, for the brilliant, almost hurtfully quicksilvery use of brass and beat – as electrically charged and unsettling as the storm it describes, and the releasing gentleness of the strings once the storm has passed – only to start up again as the next storm burst happens again. Great stuff

Open the Kingdom, lyrics by David Byrne, has the liquid indeed vocal line sung by Douglas Perry rising and flowing exultantly over Glass’s rich orchestral textures, the whole like the experience of watching a bird in flight across the endless, eternal sea.

And then there’s the beautiful combination of Linda Ronstadt‘s voice with Glass’s music, played by the Kronos Quartet – plangent, soulful, tender on, firstly, Vega’s lyrics on ‘Freezing’ –

 If you had no name, if you had no history…..if it were only you naked, on the grass

and finally the love song in reflection, as the man who can’t sleep thinks of the women in his life and what they brought….a beautiful recounting of human qualities, in Laurie Anderson’s lyrics on ‘Forgetting’ enunciated over and over again by the Roches

bravery, honesty, generosity, compassion…………..love

over music which has a climactic, swinging, rocking to and fro movement. Yes its sexy!

Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days Amazon UK
Philip Glass – Songs From Liquid Days Amazon USA