Desire for Chocolate

Care Santos

Alma Books

9781846883644

This entertainment  is several tales in one; for instance: a modern-day love-triangle, a detailed examination of the social and cultural mores of 18th century Barcelona from the point-of-view of a lowly house-maid and industrial espionage and intrigue among the English, French and Catalans - all tied in with the production and consumption of chocolate. The descriptions of Barcelona one and two centuries ago are good enough to suggest personal experience, and the ’voice’ effortlessly changes to follow the story, whether the humble but strong-willed maid is talking or it’s the innocent Frenchman at loose in the back streets of old Barcelona - or the ‘voice-over’ of the author herself. Mind you - maths has never in any way been my thing, but in Aurora’s tale, I stumbled over the suggestion that the chocolate business could increase a hundred-fold in one year... However, it seems to work out.  Care Santos has used a good deal of influence from the cinema, both in the shape of the whole book and in the cutting of individual scenes . The obvious movie trick was to follow the adventures of one ceramic chocolate pot from hand-to-hand, over the centuries. It ties up like the portmanteau films of the Fifties. I can almost hear the music.

The Insect Farm

Stuart Prebble
Alma Books
ISBN 978-1-84688-361-3

Like any good novel, The Insect Farm may have you looking back at your own world in a new light, and questioning your fix on reality. Jonathan is his brother Roger’s carer. Roger is obsessed with the elaborate universe he constructed in a shed in their parents’ garden, populated by millions of tiny insects. His obsession is equalled by Jonathan’s obsession with his beautiful, talented and absent girlfriend Harriet.

As Roger lives in an impenetrable world of his own, after the mysterious death of their parents Jonathan was forced to give up his studies to take care of him. This obligation forces Jonathan to live apart from Harriet – boosting his already jealous nature. Halfway through the 'deftly plotted' tale their obsessive little world is shattered by a new trauma, and we begin to wonder if it is Roger, not Jonathan, who is the ‘carer’ in their relationship.

By now we readers have become so used to being inside Jonathan’s mind that we can’t put the book down until we are sure of his survival. But even the existence of a threat to that survival is increasingly questioned. If Jonathan knows more than he is admitting, he never quite lets us know. Despite the shock near-ending and a couple of unexpected twists, the plot remains in full flight right up to the final page.

Susan Greenfield

Mind Change

Random House

In her new book, neurologist Susan Greenfield asks this question: We know that the human brain adapts to its environment so, in the new unprecedented cyber environment of the 21st Century could our brains be changing in unprecedented ways? And if so, what implications might such changes have for the generation of ‘digital natives’ whose brains will be influenced at a crucial time in their development?

Drawing on over 500 ‘peer-reviewed studies’ Greenfield explores (for the first time, it says here), what those changes could be. She examines three different aspects of the digital landscape: social networking, and its impact upon interpersonal skills and identity; computer gaming and its impact upon attention, as well as links with addiction, aggression and risk-taking; and the use of search engines and their effects upon thinking, learning and memory.

Greenfield’s interest is in finding how we can create a world where our technology does not frustrate, but actively fosters, some of the key features that make us human: deep understanding, creativity, sense of identity, and real fulfilment. These last three she listed in her introduction as part of Bristol Festival of Ideas as her ‘must-have’ items. Although she touched on the possibility of there being a whole generation of kids with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortexes as connecting with others via the Net instead of talking face-to face with the attendant body language and mutual consideration results in pretty raw, ill-considered talking, (True- see the comments column on any site, especially if it’s linked to the news media), Baroness Greenfield was able to remain optimistic about the cognitive near future. In her short talk in Bristol  she was able to touch on other related things, like the difference between facts and knowledge, and the chicken-egg relationship between low seratonin and clinical depression. Maybe that problem could be compared to an endless game of tennis, cause and effect constantly changing sides.

As for fulfilment, she allowed that we could get that out of a witty verbal exchange as easily as from creating something bigger, a symphony for instance.

And there we’re talking psychology as much as neurology.The important thing is to keep the game going.

Another thing that occurred to me was: we each can alter our mind’s environment to an extent. Noel Coward’s recipe for a Good Life was to ‘enjoy yourself as much as possible. It passes the time pleasantly, and gives you some memories to enjoy in your old age.’

And for Mr Coward, enjoyment was work. Perhaps I’d sum up the whole thing by admitting that nothing succeeds like success, especially in the cerebral cortex.

The Hundred Foot Journey

Richard C Morais


Alma Books
ISBN:978-1-84688-133-6


Simon Callow described this as being for anyone who loves food, and cares for character. He’s right on both counts. Morais’ stories tend to be heavily populated but he manages to give each face in the crowd depth of character and degrees of back-story, without dragging down the pace of his narrative.

His delving into food is also deeply believable, and so enjoyable that often I felt that I had in fact been eating quite a lot. While giving us these gorgeous word pictures he manages to colour-in the cultures they come out of. And he is convincing at giving himself the voice of his protagonist, which immediately strips away a layer of distance from the action.
He has done his research, but doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. Instead we can feel we are reading between the lines when we pick on several tricks of advanced cookery. This is no doubt the time history will remember for popular obsession with food and cookery, both on the airwaves and on paper, but this book rises above the genre.


Coinciding with the paperback publication of this, the film (starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri, director Lasse Hallstrom) is due for release. To see the trailer, click here: http://collider.com/the-one-hundred-foot-journey-trailer/

Felix Dennis

The youngest of the three infamous Oz Editors, Felix Dennis was a rare creature, being born with the kind of wisdom most of us have to get through hindsight, and enjoyed, inevitably, a successful life of creativity and good living. His poem, Never go back, kindly passed on some of his wisdom. And his predilection for cigars which gave him such a fine reading voice may also have had something to do with the cancer that has killed him in his own memorable sixties.

100 years in Variety

Stage Door, The Bristol Hippodrome, 100 Years
Gerry Parker and John Hudson
Published by Redcliffe Press

Bristol Hippodrome - from the stage C G Hanley

This well-illustrated soft-cover book is a pleasure to handle. Good to give as a present to anyone with an interest in the theatre or show-biz; even to yourself. The history of the Hippodrome takes in its early years as a twice-nightly variety theatre to being the venue of choice for ballet, major theatrical tours and visiting stars including Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney and regular visitors The Hollies. It was famously Eddie Cochran’s last gig. The tale also covers the early career of Oswald Stoll, who teamed up with Mr Moss to build an Empire.
And of the nuts and bolts: “Frank Matcham was one of the great British Architects, and I have, over the years, performed in many of his theatres, The Bristol Hippodrome being my favourite. Modern architects don’t go to the theatre, which explains why the theatres they design resemble television sets. Matcham’s work was created with love. The Hippodrome was in construction at the same time as the Titanic was in Belfast. But the old Hippo, magnificently and lovingly restored by the people of Bristol, is still afloat.” Barry Humphries, February 2014

Buddhaland Brooklyn

Richard C Morais
Alma Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84688-241
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84688-273-9
 
First of all, this is  an intimate examination of the ‘culture clash’ experience. You may find as I did, that reading it will have you re-visiting your own past encounters both as the  “I” and the “us”, with a new clarity. Morais has an uncanny ability to inhabit the voice of his protagonist, who suddenly develops  a colloquial streak, almost exposing a latent sense of irony, on arriving in hyper-active Manhattan - after speaking in nothing but literal terms of his simple upbringing in the cool, clear mountains and temples of Japan.
The language does a lot for the unspoken scenario - it’s the HD effect added to the already colourful descriptions as the Reverend Oda strives to turn adversity towards enlightenment. Morais' last novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, made it on to the silver screen; I'd like to see this one get the same treatment.

The Two Roberts

　

THE LAST BOHEMIANS
Roger Bristow
Published by Sansom & Company

“They came in one day and I was mesmerised by them. They were dressed in black from top to toe... I thought - Christ, these are real Bohemians!” Ken Russell

The two largely forgotten giants of Scottish art, known to pre-‘cutting-edge’ art students, particularly in Glasgow, and not that many art lovers and collectors, as The Two Roberts, have influenced countless younger artists through their followers. Joan Eardley, who created her own brand of expressionism, picked up their 'virus' in her earlier work, and successive generations have picked up and disseminated their influence. Many young artists will be employing elements of their vision without even having heard of the two 'R's.

But the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, burnt out too young to capitalise on their youthful success, which went up like a firework and hardly survived longer. Their story is of talent versus human frailty. A timeless kind of saga, but it has never been told yet, so the world has made do with the myths that surrounded these two lovers; some of the myths being their own inventions and others just growing to fill the spaces. One of their own making was the one about their having stolen the Stone of Scone while drunk, eagerly believed by several following generations of art students. And like John Byrne’s modernist play of 1992 produced at the Royal Court Theatre London, which had them sleeping rough out in Cork Street to force a gallery to give them a show, an excellent story, but typically not true - they didn’t have to struggle for the gallery. They doubtlessly camped, but not in a tent.

Roger Bristow has devoted nearly twenty years to hunting down the surviving contemporaries of the Roberts. In many cases he was just in time. Those he spoke to include Prunella Clough, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Ken Russell, George Barker, Jon Craxton and Daniel Farson. Fortunately the kinds of people who inhabit bohemia write letters, and keep them; so correspondence has added dialogue to the tale.

Colquhoun and MacBryde were both born to hard-working families in Ayrshire and grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. Colquhoun had the luck to be supported by his art teacher, who convinced two local patrons of the arts, one in the Church and one in the whisky industry, to provide grants allowing him to remain at school until he applied for a place at Glasgow School of Art, instead of becoming an apprentice as his father wanted. And in that, he was already the embodiment of the Scottish antisyzygy.

MacBride, as he was named until leaving art school, showed an early talent for singing, dancing and entertaining as well as drawing. But despite his artistic skills being encouraged at home and at school, unlike Colquhoun he had to slog through a succession of menial jobs before making it up Scott Street to the then recently-built Charles Rennie Mackintosh building.

Their budding friendship as fellow Ayrshiremen on the daily train-in became mutual devotion when they began sharing a flat near the School. Years later, Colquhoun’s mother, in this precious quote, summed it up ‘defiantly’:

“Bobby met Robert MacBryde on the first day he attended Glasgow Art School. They became such close friends, what could I do about it? And where would Bobby be without MacBryde? Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby.”

It was in the pressurised atmosphere of student life that the two, recognised for their precocious talents as much as for their reputation as loners, became known as ‘The Two Roberts’ - or just ‘The Roberts’ - a composite person. If any of their friends or lecturers suspected that their relationship was intimately physical, they would either have ignored the signs or have been unable to believe them. Scotland, socially and legally weighed down by the presence of the Presbyterian Church well into the 1980s, would have been the last place to openly admit to being homosexual, and the Roberts were so successful in keeping themselves to themselves that one close friend and one-time tutor, Ian Fleming, went to his grave convinced that they were ‘definitely not homosexual... certainly not while they were in Scotland.’

Fleming’s double portrait of the boys, while not being ‘great painting’, speaks volumes about them and about their relationship. I found myself referring back to it while I read the book. Colquhoun is moody, unstable and looking outwards while MacBryde plays The Wife, sitting behind, enigmatically smiling towards his friend and very much in charge. Despite MacBryde’s laid-back appearance in the portrait, he was the one who would tend to break into song or dance at the slightest opportunity, while the dangerous-looking Colquhoun was in fact the more withdrawn and introspective of the two, and both attractive to and attracted by women.

When their art school life came to an end with diplomas in drawing and painting for the two, Colquhoun won the Travelling Scholarship for 1938. This posed a problem for the two, as they would be forced to function for a time as separate halfs - two shells with no oyster. Even the School governors and staff were aware of this. But the Chairman of the Board came to the rescue with a personal donation to MacBryde.

And so the two set off on the Grand Tour, doing Europe: including Paris, Amsterdam, Florence and of course Rome, where they were arrested, in the current amosphere of antipathy, by a policeman who mistook them for Frenchmen . They were forced to return quickly as war broke out across Europe again, and held an exhibition of drawings from the journey, in Kilmarnock. This and other student shows were the only times their work was exhibited for sale in Scotland during their lives.

On their return to Scotland though, they eventually had to contend with the effects of the war. Colquhoun was conscripted; the experience led to serious deterioration in his physical and mental health, and MacBryde, partly out of concern for his partner, decided to drop his conscientious objections to soldiering and sign on. He, too, was found to be unwell, enough to be rejected by the army. A long-established problem with his lungs had left him open to tuberculosis while living in poverty after the European tour.

It was in the midst of this despairing scenario that MacBryde met John Tonge, journalist and art critic, in Waverley Station. A slim chance that reversed the Roberts' fortunes. Tonge was the fast-track connection to London, and this was followed by Colquhoun's discharge from the army.

The two moved south, their painting styles coincidentally maturing into a kind of Euro-modernism; happily in tune with society's reaction against the drab inter-war years. Being homosexual also helped give them entré to patrons and collectors. Their personas as exotic, mad, Scotsmen contributed to the spread of their fame as much as their work did, and they became the Golden Boys of Bond Street. They inevitably had their decriers, being accused of posing as professional Scots (they tended to wear kilts; this may have been an affectation they only took up in London) but on the other hand had to defend their heritage from people like Michael Ayrton, who carelessly included Colquhoun in a radio programme about English art.

In London with its webs of intrigue, the power games, the triumphs and disasters, the account begins to read a little like a thriller. Despite that, there are so many players and so many galleries, publications, new homes and pubs that it could add up to a dry catalogue of facts, and with the added look at painting techniques at best a scholarly exegesis, but Roger Bristow is able to keep it moving along. The Roberts' fame was such that in 1949 The New Statesman could run a clerihew competition about them:

‘There’s a trick we haven’t tried, MacBryde.’
‘We will soon, Colquhoun.’

Before the slow fall from grace, their regular studio soireés attracted Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton,and Dylan Thomas among many.

MacBryde lived on, incredibly, well into the Swinging Sixties, convincingly sporting a Beatle jacket; a man from another world - his lonely vigil ended by a hit and run driver.

This may not be the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, but there are more than enough reproductions to keep the afficionado happy and to wise-up the uninitiated, and while there are no smoky shots of the Coach and Horses or the French House, the photos add flesh to the text. This is, with its exhaustive catalogue raisonné and fastidiously compiled index, The Book.

Yet more, by Frances Spalding, at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/24/last-bohemians-roger-bristow-review

Isabel's Skin

Peter Benson

Alma Books

ISBN: 978-1-84688-206-7

I hesitate to describe this novel as “gothic”, as that is rather a cliché in reviews, but this is a  story about a rare book valuer who is called upon to visit a remote estate to study the late Lord Malcolm Buff-Orpington‘s collection , whose cab driver abandons him before the journey’s end, who is assailed by the locals with dark warnings about the Lord, meets the mysterious Professor Hunt, becoming aware of his  sister (Isabel), when he hears her cries of pain from somewhere back in the house, and even before setting out has this to say:

“So this is my house at the edge of the marshes with its roof, doors and chairs, and there go a flock of geese, and this is my house too. It is like everyone’s other house, a place where secrets, promises, dreams and terrors are kept. Mine is like this.”

-so I feel quite at ease in calling this gothic. It wanders close to becoming a pastiche of a Victorian novel, but the occasional twentieth-century phrase drags it back to the present day; not entirely convincingly. And the protagonist, with the reassuringly ‘normal’ name of David Morris, survives to see it through, despite the warnings.

Drone warfare - killing by remote control

Medea Benjamin
OR books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-O77-3

As far as this blog is concerned it goes without saying that the current upsurge in the use of drones for killing, making war as un-involving and casual as a shopping-mall game, is a genuine evil which too few people recognise as such. Medea Benjamin has been on the road introducing her book on the subject, and recently appeared at Bristol Foyles bookshop as part of that city's innovative Festival of Ideas.

Weeks after the 2002 American invasion of Afghanistan, she visited that country. There, on the ground, talking with victims of the strikes, she learned the truth about the “smart bombs” on which U.S. forces claimed to be increasingly reliant. Now, with the use of drones escalating at a pace unthinkable just a few years ago when this was science-fiction, Benjamin has written this highly readable, hard-fact book as a call to action: “It is meant to wake a sleeping public,” she writes, “lulled into thinking that drones are good, that targeted killings are making us safer.” 

Medea Benjamin is also a driving force behind Code Pink, which is well worth visiting if you want to know more or better still, be active.

The Art of Leaving

Anna Stothard
Alma Books
ISBN: 84688-237-1

After her hi-definition trawl of Los Angeles in'The Pink Hotel', Anna Stothard does a similar, fascinating, job on a recognisable corner of her home city, London. The story is also an in-depth study of someone, Eva, who doesn't take easily to closeness and is always looking for an escape route. As a way of life this only works as long as she is in control; and you, the reader, are free to roam at will through her mind as she copes with being left instead of leaving - while juggling the two men and the one, mystery, woman in her life. If you want more: although she doesn't happen to be a writer, Eva has the kind of feverish imagination many authors would kill themselves for .

The Great Survivors

Peter Conradi

ISBN: 978-1-84688-234-0

Alma Books

Peter Conradi, by being a kind of insider and by attending to his research, made quite a success of The King’s Speech, the best-seller that as a film won an Oscar. He returns to the territory with this look at the entire phenomenon of European monarchy, in an attempt to understand the archaic anomaly; and why and how it survives in post-industrial democracies where unearned deference is otherwise strictly a thing of the past. We aren’t just dropped in it, though: the book starts off with a race through the history; the rise and fall and rise again - opening with the highly visual Final Walk of King Louis-Auguste, followed by his wife Marie Antoinette. This might equally be the way to open the story if you were telling it as a film instead of a book. It could have been the beginning of the end for European monarchy(if Cromwell’s men hadn’t already done that in London a long time before), but in fact after this, whenever a country was faced with a choice of options including having an unelected toff as head of state they (including France after the revolution) tended to re-establish, and even newly created countries like Belgium wanted one, too. Today the subject has been mooted in Scotland (not entirely unseriously) as independence is news again.

We know, though, why newspapers and the rest of the news media pay so much attention to the royals. It sells. But the rest of it remains a complex puzzle. This book makes very good sense of the reasons for monarchy's survival into the twenty-first century.

Hillary Clinton admits USA created al-Qaida

The US Secretary of State has  had the guts to go public with the non-secret about her country's game-playing in the Middle East. More or less - just as the US set up and supported Saddam while he did what he was told and didn't try to set up shop on his own account, so they did with the Resistance in Afghanistan under Russia's invasion. Any casual look at what happens to a group of men who bond in extreme circumstances would have made it easy to fortell what would happen when Russia, having done its damage, was defeated and withdrew. As GIs and airmen, unable to conform to civilian life surrounded by people who had not shared their experiences in WWII, formed the Hell's Angels, so the Mujahedin became al-Qaida. And in their circumstance there was even more reason to keep on, as their country remained under intrusion, now from the West instead of the North. Graham Greene may have been attacking the chess-board approach to international politics in The Third Man, but the  blueprint prevailed, put into action by Henry Kissinger and several American  presidents,  leaving a messy legacy.

Vienna, Greeneland

White Truffles in Winter

N.M. Kelby
Alma Books ISBN 978-1-84688-207-4

It’s a particular pleasure to read a story which uses food, with the labour and rituals of preparing it, as a metaphor for the meaning of life. The first author I discovered who could write about food and feasts at length without boring or nauseating the reader was Enid Blyton, who with her descriptions of picnics invented a kind of gastro-pornography. She obviously relished her food; and believe me, when it came to relish, she used a little trowel.

But this fictionalised account of the coming together of probably the first celebrity chef, Escoffier, and his young bride and collaborator Delphine is really more about the business of living, with an almost religious devotion to producing near-perfect dishes from tending the vegetable plot to setting the table, as the unifying strand running through it. The author is able to shift from the bucolic surrounds of village fields or the kitchen, to war, to the horse-trading involved in setting up marriages without letting go of a quiet, laid-back sense of humour which gives the whole story a kind of warm irony. So there will be an overdose of morphine halfway through but life must go on; we are on to the chocolate sauce before getting to the next page. And if you think you know tomatoes, think again.

“He picked a ripe tomato, bit into it and then held it to her lips. 'Pommes d’amour, perhaps this was the fruit of Eden.’ The tomato was so ripe and lush, so filled with heat it brought tears to her eyes and he kissed her.”

Although this is a work of fiction, it is based on truth, and fortunately in lieu of petits fours there is a list of sources and references, including of course Escoffier’s own writing.

Anna Stothard

In my review of Anna Stothard's book The Pink Hotel, which is jammed full of bright, noisy imagery, I couldn't help speculating about its chances of being filmed. I've been able to ask Anna herself about that. Thinking of the many 'first goes' that had to wait for the success of the next one before getting printed, I asked her if The Pink Hotel was her first attempt at a novel.

No, she replied - when she was nineteen she wrote a novel called Isabel and Rocco, about a teenage brother and sister abandoned by their parents and living alone in a disintegrating house in Camden Town. It was written from the perspective of the sister, cataloguing all her 'first times' and how each one solidified her further into being an adult.

“I was a very antisocial child though, so there were other attempts before Isabel and Rocco - my first attempt at a full length novel was called Virgin Megastore, about a bunch of teenagers hanging out at the fun fair on Wimbledon Common.

'Then there were two novellas about demonic circus performers and psychic mermaids when I was thirteen.  I found a copy of it in my Dad’s bookshelves recently – sweet that he kept a copy, considering it’s exactly the opposite of what I expect fathers want to know about their adolescent daughter – I was appalled at what was in my thirteen year old head. There are very detailed descriptions of people turning into animals, lots of screaming and groaning and body-transformation, and lots of confused adolescent sexuality.”

- It's very visual, I said - has there been any whiff of interest from film production?

“Yes, excitingly, the contract is being finalised at the moment. It's with an indie company in LA. I'm a big fan of the people involved and very excited, but I don't want to speak too soon. I haven't signed on the dotted line yet...

'Los Angeles is a very visual place. While The Pink Hotel explores the underbelly of the city and hardly touches on "the industry" (except that David, the love interest, is a paparazzi), I wanted the book to feel a little cinematic.”

I’m fairly confident that Pink Hotel could be a damn good movie. If ‘fairly confidant’ sounds lacking in actual confidence, think of (for instance) ‘Bonfire of the Vanities', which on paper reads like a can't-fail blockbuster; but by the time it got produced it came over as rather more ordinaire.
Isabel and Rocco sounds to me like yet another contender for the silver screen. I live in hope... Altogether now: ‘We believe in Tinkerbell!’

A Glowing Encomium

My thanks go to Mrs Doris Bangol for the following good words:

I found a large-scale publish company. There are favourable price and fine  quality goods very much. When I ordered the "Springheeled Kate", in one week, I  received it and found it very well in the quality. I am very happy for the purching. I hope  that you can share my happiness.

Doris Bangol (Mrs)

Living Souls

Dmitry Bykov

translation: Elaine Feinstein

pp 439

ISBN: 978-1-84688-126-8

AlmaBooks 24/02/11

There is a tradition in Russia, as there is in America, of the brick-shaped novel. Although life is short and most of us have a limited amount of time to spare wandering through the pages of another world, writers such as Dmitry Bykov believe that we should abdicate weeks of our own reality in favour of his fantasy of the near future. An impoverished Russia, permanently at civil war between the northern Varangians, who claim descent from the Aryan founders of Russia, and the southern Kaganate, made up of Khazars and Jews driven out of Moscow. These base their right to Russia on the skills that they believe once brought prosperity to a land now derelict. In the middle, the peasantry takes comfort in superstition and folklore. As it is set in the near-future, the history of modern Russia, Soviet crimes and the massacres of the Second World War hang over it throughout. Russia’s economy is destroyed. The world has turned to a new fuel, Phlogiston, and is no longer buying oil. The country is marginalised, and has turned to war, the only productive activity apart from oil sales its rulers can organise. War brings no tangible results, partly because Russian officers exterminate more of their own men than the enemies can.
As the story opens, Gromov, a Varangian officer, battles to recapture the village of Degunino before nightfall, chiefly to prevent his leave being shortened. Meanwhile, a nervous Private Voronov has fallen into the hands of an old KGB sadist, amusing himself before arranging his execution the next morning. An army priest, Ploskorylov, struggles to align his work with the enormously detailed army rulebook:
“ What’s wrong? You think I tricked you into a test? I love you, you idiot!” Gurov said with a short staccato laugh, flapping an arm at him and noisily kissing his cheek.
“In a church...” Ploskorylov gasped, barely able to breathe.
“Forgive me Father, I’ve sinned, Gurov grinned. ‘Right, fuck off, Priest, I’m going to inspect our troops.’
It certainly does read as a satire, and one about bureaucracy and procedural red tape as much as anything. We are not expected to love the Varangians, whether they are poltroons, sadists or book-punchers, although there is an air of melancholy drifting through the story which carries us with it. And grim though it may be, it is funny, too.
The soldiers find some light relief in the arms of the peasant women, who have to be equally welcoming to all warring factions as they pass through. In fact, only the peasantry in general have a sympathetic light cast on them. Although this has been described as the Catch-22 for modern Russia there is no central character as likeable as Yossarian; it is so well-populated that there is hardly enough room for one man to be central to the whole epic. The strangest thing about this tale is its overall tone of being set in the late nineteenth century, and it sticks there despite the soldiers’ occasional use of mobile phones and casual references to 20th century phenomena like TV serials and ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
Does the original Russian title, the abbreviaton Zhd, mean Yidzhivye dushi (living souls), in acknowledgment of Gogol's epic Dead Souls (1841), which inspired Bykov's book, or yid? Apparently the English translation removed a lot of the original references to yids but ‘yd’ pops up a few times: Major Volokhov, once a historian, wishes to marry his lover, Zhenka, who lives in the Kaganate , but she refuses because she is a “Yd”. Volokhov’s friend Everstein is also a Yd. We have to judge for ourselves. Certainly, his characters have it in for the Jews (Zhydy), but plenty of them also hate the Russians; and he has pointed out that he does in fact have it in for everyone. Bykov is a big name on the Russian literary scene. His novels (five, plus a biography of Pasternak) have won the two most prestigious prizes and he is a well-known poet and TV face. Half-Jewish, he answers accusations of anti-semitism by pointing out that he attacks Russian nationalism too. His enormously inclusive book - the translation is long, but the original is even longer - caused a furore in Russia when published in 2006. Blending a ‘novel of ideas’ with a dark urban fairy-tale and lyric satire not unlike Raymond Queneau (‘The Sunday of Life’), he leads his characters to an inevitable collision maybe like the one they came from before the book opened. The survivors say, “Let’s go,” holding hands as they move on. Not necessarily going to a rosy future.

Ian McEwan stirs it up in Jerusalem

British novelist Ian McEwan has accepted an Israeli literary prize in Jerusalem while criticising Jewish 'settlements' in the West Bank, despite widespread grumblings about the importance of observing the Boycott, and not only from British and Palestinian writers.

In his lecture on Sunday, McEwan defended his visit to Israel, saying it encourages dialogue. Having inserted himself into Israeli academe, he revealed himself as a bit of a Trojan horse.
At an acceptance ceremony with Israeli president Shimon Peres and the mayor of Jerusalem, for the Jerusalem Prize, McEwan praised Israel's technological and artistic advances but asked: "Where is Israel's political creativity?"
He criticized Israel's 1967 annexation of east Jerusalem, legally outside "Israel" and the part Palestinians claim as the capitol of a future state in the fiction that would be the Two-state Solution.
McEwan is the author of the best-selling Atonement and Comfort of Strangers, and has won numerous literary prizes for his books.
While in the country, on Friday the 18th he joined Israeli author David Grossman at an anti-demolition demonstration in the Sheikh Jarrah district.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/20/AR2011022001600.html

The Pink Hotel

Anna Stothard
288pp
ISBN: 978-1-84688-131-2
almabooks Ltd. London 18th March 2011

Anna Stothard's second novel is palpably visual: each line cluttered with voluptuous images like brightly coloured cakes jostling off an assembly line. It takes a lot from cinema in the way we are 'dropped right in it' from the start, and then the girl's persona and back history are gradually revealed as she stumbles onwards into the unknown.

She has flown from the sepia-toned West Hampstead to sun-blasted Los Angeles for the funeral of her mother, last seen when she was in her childhood. She stays in the sun, living on the edge of society while she tries to find out who and what her mother was. Living on the run is natural for her: she sees pain as the status quo, while hoping for love. The story is populated by exotic characters (the serious drinkers, the Armenian ladies, the fake gangsters) who might hardly have been able to exist in the relative monochrome of London; although I am sure that Anna Stothard could paint Brits just as crumblingly bright.
The girl's inner dialogue is facinating, too - including the intensely observed momentary lapses of perception linking actions which we all get to a greater or lesser extent, and which many readers will think about for the first time.

Having read this book in three sittings, I will probably dip into it again from time to time - there are so many 'favourite' bits - quite like the movie I hope to see it become.

Anna Stothard (who is the daughter of Peter Stothard, TLS editor, and of novelist Sally Emerson) came to write this novel because one day she found a bunch of love letters from 'Hitch-hiker' author Douglas Adams to her mother, with whom Adams had a long affair before his premature death in 2001.

My Father Was a Freedom Fighter

Gaza, Mohammed and my mother

By Elana Golden

My Father was a Freedom Fighter is a page-turner though I read it in small bites, the way you would eat a rich chocolate cake. It is a great read not only for those interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict but for anyone who loves books about family, courage, hope and resilience.

For while clearly illustrating the trajectory of the long and complex history of the conflict – My Father was a Freedom Fighter tells a story of survival that is beyond this particular conflict. It is a personal story told through the keen eye of Ramzy Baroud, it reads like a novel, and is universal in its tone, its humanity, its psychology.

Mohammed Baroud, the 1948 Palestinian refugee, the subject in the book’s title, who lives in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip “is” my Jewish mother who lived under the military fascist regime in Bucharest, Romania that collaborated with the Third Reich. Or anyone who’d been occupied and brutally treated! Mohammed “is” also my mother for they share an exaggerated concern for their children, choices they were forced to make to feed their families, a cynical view of the world, their humour, dignity and pride, and down to the long-Kent-cigarettes they each smoked, Mohammed in Gaza, my mother in Tel Aviv.

On the personal level, I appreciated the disclosure of family dynamics, the dark side, the wound: Brothers’ rivalry, domestic violence – patterns and attitudes that are part and parcel of many societies at all socio economic and educational strata. On the political level the book sheds light on the growing split between the factions in the PLO and how this split was created. And why Mohammed, an atheist and a Marxist, puts on his best suit and goes to vote for religious Hamas.

The book is filled with unforgettable scenes, many that bring tears, but what’s a Palestinian story without humor? In his desperate attempts to keep his dignity and his livelihood, Mohammed falls into all kinds of mishaps and disastrous traps that would make a great comedy of errors. You really don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. And he is so intelligent, so resourceful, that I wished I could get his advice on my own problems! But Mohammed is also a man who never got over the loss of his family’s house and field, and his people’s lands and freedom! His brokenness is inconsolable. It is one face to a dispossession and expulsion tragedy.

As someone who grew up in Israel, it hurt me so much while reading the book to think back at Palestinians like Mohammed who worked in Israel after the 1967 war, how they were humiliated, shamed and exploited. I also remembered Prime Minister Rabin’s policy “break their bones.” To experience this policy from the point of view of young boys in Gaza, as so movingly described in the book, broke my heart and made me understand the emotional mind set of a Palestinian boy who holds a stone in the face of a tank, the mixture of fear and revenge, and the moment the stone is hurled toward an Israeli soldier and the boy becomes a man...

My Father was a Freedom Fighter was written from a generous heart and will appeal to the hearts of many worldwide, not only to those interested in political science or the Palestine/Israel conflict.

Though get ready for a story that is very different from those told on FOX TV and all other corporate media outlets!

My Father Was A Freedom Fighter – Gaza's Untold Story. Ramzy Baroud. Pluto Press 2010

- Elana Golden, screenwriter, director, creative-writing teacher, Palestinian rights activist, Women in Black – Los Angeles. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.