Both Eyes Book Blog

“Half Blood Blues”

Here is Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, the one book I didn’t correctly guess would make the Man Booker short list this year.  Now that I’ve read it, I can understand why it was picked, but I still don’t think I would have chosen it over The Stranger’s Child if I had it to do over again.

Half Blood Blues gives us a look at Nazi Germany from a perspective we most likely haven’t seen it before – that of American blacks and mixed-race Germans.  Added interest comes from Edugyan’s skilled evocation of pre-war jazz.  Friendship, rivalry, failed romance, and an unconventional beauty make this an interesting, unpredictable story.

I confess, though, that I found the dialect tiring to read.  While the plot was intriguing, it seemed like the most dramatic moments happened offstage.

“Snowdrops”

A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops seems to have riled up at least a few critics following the announcement of the Man Booker short list.  I don’t know what the fuss is about because I thought it was great.

The problem is that it’s a decadently easy read, almost an airport novel.  It has many of the elements of a spy thriller:  sexy women, mysterious men in suits, fancy cars, corrupt politics.  It’s like a James Bond story in which James Bond is kind of a dork and doesn’t have a gun.

It also has a great minimalist sensibility.  It made me think of Kawabata’s Snow Country.  It’s atmospheric and thoughtful, with that great Russian sense of depressive nostalgia.  Granted, it won’t win the prize this year, but I think it’s deserving of its spot on the short list and I’m curious what Miller will write next.

“A Cupboard Full of Coats”

I read A Cupboard Full of Coats because it was on the Booker Prize long list, although it breaks one of my cardinal rules:  Never read a book with a headless woman on the cover.  It’s the publisher’s way of indicating that the book will annoy me in some way.

Which, unfortunately, this book did.  I was irritated by most of the characters.  I didn’t buy the chemistry that was supposed to exist between the protagonist and her main love interest, and the sex scenes were straight out of a romance novel.  The emotional development didn’t quite ring true.

There were things that worked in this book.  Yvvette Edwards has an ear for dialogue.  I was interested in her exploration of the spiritual arc of an unlikeable character.  The battered-woman storyline made sense.  All together, though, it clunked along between sections of inconsistent quality.  I’m not really sure why it made it onto the Booker long list in the first place.

It would probably make a good film, though, with the adaptation in the right hands.

“The Last Hundred Days”

Okay, Patrick McGuinness was robbed.  Robbed, I tell you!  The Last Hundred Days is a pretty much perfect book.  Surely a place for it could have been found on the Man Booker short list.

Perhaps it’s the topic, which is about Romania in the late 80s before the revolution.  Perhaps it’s the length – the other short listers were all, well, shorter.  Otherwise I have no explanation.

What’s great about The Last Hundred Days is the way McGuinness captures the irony and humor of Eastern Europe in the face of political repression.  I’ve read a number of books in translation by authors of the region, and it seems that he really nails it.  The details make the story believable, and, as it turns out, the author did live in Romania during this time period.

Anyway, I thought it was great.  Good luck getting it on this side of the pond, though – it doesn’t have a US publication date scheduled at this time.

“The Testament of Jessie Lamb”

Here we are racing through the Booker long list, trying to get our picks sorted for the announcement of the short list tomorrow.  I picked The Testament of Jessie Lamb because speculation consistently puts it at the bottom of the list, and I wanted to see for myself.

This is a standard dystopian novel that reads like a YA novel.  The premise should pack an emotional punch for teenage girls.  In fact, I think it would make a great read for girls that age, at a time when they are vulnerable to ideology and grand political gestures.  For the rest of us, and I am speaking as a vegan here, the “mankind has ruined our fair Earth” message can come across a bit strident and heavy-handed.

There are flaws in the book that cause me to agree that it is not long list material.  For instance, “Maternal Death Syndrome” simply doesn’t sound scientific enough.  The plot is similar to The White Plague, and we can’t blame Jane Rogers for not being Frank Herbert, but, well, she isn’t.  Most of all, though, I just absolutely can’t stand it when different fonts are used in a book to represent different time frames or the voices of different characters.  Pet peeve, what can I say?

“The Stranger’s Child”

One of the fascinations of The Stranger’s Child is in working out what Alan Hollinghurst means by the title.  It could indeed be followed by the subtitle: Closeted Gays of Upper-Class Britain.  This book has a vast cast of characters, and so many of them are gay that we start to realize Hollinghurst is trying to tell us something on a different level.

The Stranger’s Child is an ingeniously inverted meta-biography.  It begins with the visit of Cecil Valance to the home of a school friend.  We see him through the eyes of various occupants of the house, and, through the rest of the book, other people who have become interested in him over the next 70-odd years.  These include actual biographers.  Tension results when possibly inaccurate perceptions and imperfect memories meet with the desires of writers who want an objective portrait of a subject they haven’t met.

It’s like life, isn’t it?

To my thinking, the title The Stranger’s Child alludes to more than the few characters in the story whose parentage is in some dispute.  In a sense, it’s about a literary work.  The poem everyone memorizes but nobody fully understands, though everyone assumes it can be used to gain insight into the poet.  Even more so, the biography produced by an unlikeable researcher who certainly isn’t part of the family, but may understand that family in some ways better than it does itself.

So what is the deal with the gayness of it all?  I think it’s a great metaphor for man’s secret side.  On the surface, inquiring minds want to know who is and who isn’t.  Underneath is a sense that, try as we might, we can never fully know another person.  We may be close to someone and have the wrong idea entirely.  What is someone like, really?  Who decides?

One of the great things that Hollinghurst does with this book is to show the sweep of history:  the way things change and crumble over time.  It’s done with a touch of humor.  All these people, so full of passion and intrigue in their youth, grow into crotchety old dears.  The grand houses are demolished and documents are found or lost.  In a hundred years, will anyone remember?