SURPRISE hit of Christmas, Julia Kelly's first novel, With My Lazy Eye, is a really gorgeous evocation of the time from childhood through adolescence.
A surprise because of its newness and its drab cover, by the way, not because of the writing, which is masterly.
Lucy Bastonme ("based-on-me"?) is as eccentric as every child, especially every middle child, squashed between the wonder of the firstborn and the adorableness of the baby.
With her lazy eye and her definite refusal to conform - as we first meet Lucy, she's gazing down the plug-hole at the finecomb she thrust down there when her mother tried to remove her population of lice - she watches the family and friends from an ironic distance.
This is a big writer, whose work we're seeing in its first flush. Kelly's ability to focus on the tiny things, so that this shortsighted peering opens out to reflect a whole vision of life, is the mark of a master.
Kelly has worked as a desk editor for Irish and British publishers, and has written a monthly column for dSide magazine for several years; on reading With My Lazy Eye I went hunting hopefully online, but unfortunately they're not there.
If you want a book to curl up with while you recover from that whole Christmas effort by taking to the bed with a mug of tea and a bowl of reheated Christmas pudding and brandy butter, rush out and buy With My Lazy Eye - if there are any copies left.
Saturday, 29 December 2007
The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa
MARIO Vargas Llosa wrote one of the funniest books ever, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and in The Bad Girl he's back with another coyly distant seductress.
We meet her first as the teenager from Chile who electrifies the middle-class parties of 1950s Lima with her sexy dancing and sexier high-falutin ways.
Narrator Ricardo adores Lily, but she won't ever agree to actually go steady, always holding hands and going out with him, but keeping him strictly at a distance.
Until the disastrous day when, at the birthday party of one of the jealous local girls, she's introduced to an actual Chilean, and is outed (gasp!) as a working-class girl, and banished from the parties and girly teas - though the boys still pursue her.
Cut to Paris in the 1960s, where Ricardo, still earnest, still solemn, is happily studying to be a translator, while giving a dig out to the would-be Communist revolutionaries.
Bringing in a batch of trainee Che Guevaras from the airport, he recognises one - it's Lily, rebranded as Arlette.
But he's too chicken to follow through, and in a breath she's in Cuba training for the liberation of Peru. Then Ricardo hears that she's the lover of the big man of the Cuban revolution.
Then he meets her again in Paris - now glammed up and the wife of a diplomat.
Famously, this is a homage to Madame Bovary, but The Bad Girl has its own South American way, and is funny and very winning.
We meet her first as the teenager from Chile who electrifies the middle-class parties of 1950s Lima with her sexy dancing and sexier high-falutin ways.
Narrator Ricardo adores Lily, but she won't ever agree to actually go steady, always holding hands and going out with him, but keeping him strictly at a distance.
Until the disastrous day when, at the birthday party of one of the jealous local girls, she's introduced to an actual Chilean, and is outed (gasp!) as a working-class girl, and banished from the parties and girly teas - though the boys still pursue her.
Cut to Paris in the 1960s, where Ricardo, still earnest, still solemn, is happily studying to be a translator, while giving a dig out to the would-be Communist revolutionaries.
Bringing in a batch of trainee Che Guevaras from the airport, he recognises one - it's Lily, rebranded as Arlette.
But he's too chicken to follow through, and in a breath she's in Cuba training for the liberation of Peru. Then Ricardo hears that she's the lover of the big man of the Cuban revolution.
Then he meets her again in Paris - now glammed up and the wife of a diplomat.
Famously, this is a homage to Madame Bovary, but The Bad Girl has its own South American way, and is funny and very winning.
Saturday, 22 December 2007
The Secrets of Married Women by Carol Mason
EE oop, girls in their married bliss in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Jill is married to Rob, but he's gone off her ever since they found out that his sperm count was too low for them to have kids.
A tasty lifeguard is giving her the glad eye, which could be some consolation, if she wanted anything but her husband's love.
Jill's best pal, Leigh, is in the opposite position: Botoxed to the hilt, she's gone off her adoring husband but the lads she wants don't fancy her.
She's looking for fun, and not too fussed where she gets it.
And Wendy? Wendy has it all. The most gorgeous hunk you ever saw, a top cop, clone of the young Paul Newman.
All nice comforting chicklit, to be read while drinking a warm glass of Zinfandel before a cosy fire while the kids sleep sound upstairs.
There's dark stuff here, though. Wendy's loyal, loving husband loves to be lovely, and loves to be loved, and one woman just isn't enough. And Jill's mother is fading into the darkness of Alzheimer's.
But it's the kind of story that promises you a happy ending. Fear not.
This is Carol Mason's fourth novel, but the first one to attain publication, and it's got the raw realism of someone writing about a world she knows.
A grand little book for the festive fireside.
Jill is married to Rob, but he's gone off her ever since they found out that his sperm count was too low for them to have kids.
A tasty lifeguard is giving her the glad eye, which could be some consolation, if she wanted anything but her husband's love.
Jill's best pal, Leigh, is in the opposite position: Botoxed to the hilt, she's gone off her adoring husband but the lads she wants don't fancy her.
She's looking for fun, and not too fussed where she gets it.
And Wendy? Wendy has it all. The most gorgeous hunk you ever saw, a top cop, clone of the young Paul Newman.
All nice comforting chicklit, to be read while drinking a warm glass of Zinfandel before a cosy fire while the kids sleep sound upstairs.
There's dark stuff here, though. Wendy's loyal, loving husband loves to be lovely, and loves to be loved, and one woman just isn't enough. And Jill's mother is fading into the darkness of Alzheimer's.
But it's the kind of story that promises you a happy ending. Fear not.
This is Carol Mason's fourth novel, but the first one to attain publication, and it's got the raw realism of someone writing about a world she knows.
A grand little book for the festive fireside.
Hidden by Cathy Glass
HOW to be happy: it's the most difficult question, especially around Christmas, when happiness is mandatory, and sometimes pretty difficult.
Misery lit, as they call books about the deeply unfortunate, isn't any help either. Reading about children "surviving" (yeah, right) abuse, violence, mental cruelty and hunger isn't a road to calm.
But sometimes there's a story that's genuinely heartwarming, like Hidden, by Cathy Glass.
Foster carer Cathy (not her real name) here tells the story of Tayo, a 10-year-old assigned to her, who seems to have no past.
Tayo's mother, a drunken, screaming wreck who seems to live by freelance prostitution, exists in the English social system under several names linked only by her fingerprinting during arrests.
Tayo is not a mirror of his mother. Instead, he is polished, with perfect manners and an upper-class accent.
Gradually Tayo's extraordinary story comes out. At first he insists that he's white and won't eat "foreign muck". Then, as Cathy slowly gains his trust, he starts to claim that he grew up with his father and his grandmother in Nigeria, before his Malaysian mother stole him.
Cathy and Tayo's social workers don't really believe his story - but it proves perfectly true, and his father comes to claim him and bring him home to Africa.
So yes, there is real happiness.
Misery lit, as they call books about the deeply unfortunate, isn't any help either. Reading about children "surviving" (yeah, right) abuse, violence, mental cruelty and hunger isn't a road to calm.
But sometimes there's a story that's genuinely heartwarming, like Hidden, by Cathy Glass.
Foster carer Cathy (not her real name) here tells the story of Tayo, a 10-year-old assigned to her, who seems to have no past.
Tayo's mother, a drunken, screaming wreck who seems to live by freelance prostitution, exists in the English social system under several names linked only by her fingerprinting during arrests.
Tayo is not a mirror of his mother. Instead, he is polished, with perfect manners and an upper-class accent.
Gradually Tayo's extraordinary story comes out. At first he insists that he's white and won't eat "foreign muck". Then, as Cathy slowly gains his trust, he starts to claim that he grew up with his father and his grandmother in Nigeria, before his Malaysian mother stole him.
Cathy and Tayo's social workers don't really believe his story - but it proves perfectly true, and his father comes to claim him and bring him home to Africa.
So yes, there is real happiness.
Sunday, 16 December 2007
Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett
ZUGZWANG is a chess term used when a player must move, but any move makes his position worse.
In Ronan Bennett's thriller, Jewish psychoanalyst Dr Otto Spethmann is a man who stays away from politics.
But in the Russia of 1914, where Bolsheviks and Tsarist secret police are conducting an underground war, and the Black Hundreds - the anti-Semitic fascists - are hunting down supposed Jewish plotters.
Spethmann has two new patients. One is Avrom Chilowicz Rozental, a neurotic but brilliant chess player. "Rozental seemed destined to become the third World Chess Champion, feted everywhere from Berlin to New York, Tokyo to Buenos Aires."
But in the days before the St Petersburg chess tournament of 1914, Rozental is close to total breakdown, and the slithery Polish violinist and (possibly) political activist RM Kopelzon brings him to Spethmann for analysis.
The other new patient is the famous beauty Anna Petrovna Ziatdinov, wife of a "little lawyer with a violent temper", but more to the point, daughter of the terrifying man known as the Mountain, suspected of funding the Black Hundreds.
Spethmann and his beloved and wayward daughter Catherine soon become the target of the secret police. Both in his life and in the chess game that inhabits the book and reflects the action, he is in zugzwang.
A story impossible to put down, yet a little distant in its engagement with the era of revolution, Zugzwang works better as analogy for today's 'war against terror' than as a straight thriller.
In Ronan Bennett's thriller, Jewish psychoanalyst Dr Otto Spethmann is a man who stays away from politics.
But in the Russia of 1914, where Bolsheviks and Tsarist secret police are conducting an underground war, and the Black Hundreds - the anti-Semitic fascists - are hunting down supposed Jewish plotters.
Spethmann has two new patients. One is Avrom Chilowicz Rozental, a neurotic but brilliant chess player. "Rozental seemed destined to become the third World Chess Champion, feted everywhere from Berlin to New York, Tokyo to Buenos Aires."
But in the days before the St Petersburg chess tournament of 1914, Rozental is close to total breakdown, and the slithery Polish violinist and (possibly) political activist RM Kopelzon brings him to Spethmann for analysis.
The other new patient is the famous beauty Anna Petrovna Ziatdinov, wife of a "little lawyer with a violent temper", but more to the point, daughter of the terrifying man known as the Mountain, suspected of funding the Black Hundreds.
Spethmann and his beloved and wayward daughter Catherine soon become the target of the secret police. Both in his life and in the chess game that inhabits the book and reflects the action, he is in zugzwang.
A story impossible to put down, yet a little distant in its engagement with the era of revolution, Zugzwang works better as analogy for today's 'war against terror' than as a straight thriller.
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
FIRST published four years ago, Brick Lane has taken off again as it's "now a major film".
Its filming in London caused furious controversy among touchy Bangladeshi immigrants who said it caricatured them.
You'd have some sympathy - here, familiar to every Irish person from our own touchiness, is the self-educated father boasting to his children "We saved their culture in the Dark Ages, copying out Plato and Sophocles".
Here is the highly respectable moneylender, no one admitting that moneylending is what she's doing and interest is what she's charging.
And here, at the centre of the story, is Nazneen, the young matron, married off to a much older husband.
In one telling scene the doctor who comes to treat her friend's addict son - drugs are another unacknowledged secret of the immigrants - wistfully tells her that there are two kinds of love.
He says there's the kind that starts out big and you keep carving bits off it till none is left, and the kind that starts small and grows like a pearl with the repeated irritations of married life.
Nazneen experiences both kinds. She has passion with handsome young radical Karim, who grows more and more Islamic despite their adulterous love.
But deeper in the end is her affection for her husband, the darling Chanu, a man full of theories and educational ambition, and in the end the better man.
Very funny and absolutely lovable, this deserves every copy it sells.
Its filming in London caused furious controversy among touchy Bangladeshi immigrants who said it caricatured them.
You'd have some sympathy - here, familiar to every Irish person from our own touchiness, is the self-educated father boasting to his children "We saved their culture in the Dark Ages, copying out Plato and Sophocles".
Here is the highly respectable moneylender, no one admitting that moneylending is what she's doing and interest is what she's charging.
And here, at the centre of the story, is Nazneen, the young matron, married off to a much older husband.
In one telling scene the doctor who comes to treat her friend's addict son - drugs are another unacknowledged secret of the immigrants - wistfully tells her that there are two kinds of love.
He says there's the kind that starts out big and you keep carving bits off it till none is left, and the kind that starts small and grows like a pearl with the repeated irritations of married life.
Nazneen experiences both kinds. She has passion with handsome young radical Karim, who grows more and more Islamic despite their adulterous love.
But deeper in the end is her affection for her husband, the darling Chanu, a man full of theories and educational ambition, and in the end the better man.
Very funny and absolutely lovable, this deserves every copy it sells.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Essential Guide to Car Care for Girls by Danielle McCormick
RTB Media €9.99
USEFUL and funny - what more can a girl ask of a book? Dubliner Danielle McCormick's hands-on manual has everything.
It's very pink, shamelessly girlie-ist, and chock-a-block with tastefully photographed mechanics. These, for some reason, appear to prefer to work stripped to the waist.
They don't seem to pay that much attention to the very clean engines they're dallying with, instead gazing at the girls in tight T-shirts who are tuning up their lipstick, leaning on the car, casual like.
Apart from the mechanics, there are other great photos - of the four-stroke combustion cycle, the head gasket, the transmission, the timer belt.
There are even instructions on how to change a wheel (while wearing stiletto heels).
Your mileage may vary, but most women find that trying to change a wheel while wearing stiletto heels results in cars full of men screeching to a halt to help. But maybe that's useful too.
The book has everything from the basics of how an engine works to what the alarm symbols on the dashboard mean, and basic first aid - flat tyre, jump-start, lost keys. It's got a great troubleshooting Q&A at the end.
Some basics that are apparently coded into Y chromosomes are handily explained - how to add screen washer, oil and anti-freeze, check the tyre pressure, change the wipers and so on.
This is a great Christmas book - the perfect stocking-filler for any women who drives.
USEFUL and funny - what more can a girl ask of a book? Dubliner Danielle McCormick's hands-on manual has everything.
It's very pink, shamelessly girlie-ist, and chock-a-block with tastefully photographed mechanics. These, for some reason, appear to prefer to work stripped to the waist.
They don't seem to pay that much attention to the very clean engines they're dallying with, instead gazing at the girls in tight T-shirts who are tuning up their lipstick, leaning on the car, casual like.
Apart from the mechanics, there are other great photos - of the four-stroke combustion cycle, the head gasket, the transmission, the timer belt.
There are even instructions on how to change a wheel (while wearing stiletto heels).
Your mileage may vary, but most women find that trying to change a wheel while wearing stiletto heels results in cars full of men screeching to a halt to help. But maybe that's useful too.
The book has everything from the basics of how an engine works to what the alarm symbols on the dashboard mean, and basic first aid - flat tyre, jump-start, lost keys. It's got a great troubleshooting Q&A at the end.
Some basics that are apparently coded into Y chromosomes are handily explained - how to add screen washer, oil and anti-freeze, check the tyre pressure, change the wipers and so on.
This is a great Christmas book - the perfect stocking-filler for any women who drives.
Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky
Chatto & Windus
COUNTRY people have their secrets. So do city folk, of course, but people who have lived in isolated but interconnected farmsteads brood more, and the secrets live on and poison generation after generation.
Irene Nemirovsky, a city girl born and bred - brought up in St Petersburg, then in Nice when her wealthy family fled the Russian Revolution, took shelter in her old nanny's village of Issy l'Évêque when the Nazis came to France.
Before she was shipped away to die in Auschwitz, the best-selling author wrote Suite Francaise, discovered and republished in 2004 to well-deserved acclaim.
Fire in the Blood is set in the same Burgundy countryside, and written at the same time, in 1942, but here we're in old France, before the time the Nazis came.
This is a slow starter, with Nemirovsky's fabulous descriptive prose ripening the story gradually. At first, it's as wholesome as a basket of russet autumn apples.
The story is told by the elderly Sylvestre, seemingly an outsider to all the dramas he watches with such an air of detached cynicism. It's all brilliantly translated by Sandra Smith.
Centre of good - also seemingly - is Helene, Sylvestre's cousin. Centre of bad, then, must be the luscious Brigitte, who has married a wealthy, ill-tempered old man, but is carrying on a quiet affair.
The story, so slow in the first pages, unreels rapidly at the end, and has one of the best, and nastiest, last lines in literature.
COUNTRY people have their secrets. So do city folk, of course, but people who have lived in isolated but interconnected farmsteads brood more, and the secrets live on and poison generation after generation.
Irene Nemirovsky, a city girl born and bred - brought up in St Petersburg, then in Nice when her wealthy family fled the Russian Revolution, took shelter in her old nanny's village of Issy l'Évêque when the Nazis came to France.
Before she was shipped away to die in Auschwitz, the best-selling author wrote Suite Francaise, discovered and republished in 2004 to well-deserved acclaim.
Fire in the Blood is set in the same Burgundy countryside, and written at the same time, in 1942, but here we're in old France, before the time the Nazis came.
This is a slow starter, with Nemirovsky's fabulous descriptive prose ripening the story gradually. At first, it's as wholesome as a basket of russet autumn apples.
The story is told by the elderly Sylvestre, seemingly an outsider to all the dramas he watches with such an air of detached cynicism. It's all brilliantly translated by Sandra Smith.
Centre of good - also seemingly - is Helene, Sylvestre's cousin. Centre of bad, then, must be the luscious Brigitte, who has married a wealthy, ill-tempered old man, but is carrying on a quiet affair.
The story, so slow in the first pages, unreels rapidly at the end, and has one of the best, and nastiest, last lines in literature.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
World Without End by Ken Follett
Macmillan
ON THE cusp of the Middle Ages and the modern world, Ken Follett's characters don't know how radical a change is happening.
Four children see the biggest secret of the 14th century: a merchant's daughter, a knight's two sons and the daughter of a thief.
World Without End follows them through an era that makes the last century in Ireland seem dull.
The boys, of course, want to be knights like their father - little knowing that the age of knighthood is ending, and that of merchant power coming into flower.
The Black Death is about to sweep across Europe, cutting the population by one-third and shattering a social system that had endured since the time of the Romans.
Follett's characters are engaging: Merthin, the knight's son who becomes a genius of architecture; Caris, laughed out of it when she says she wants to be a doctor, as if she were a man; Gwenda the honourable thief; Ralph the bully.
When the town's bridge crashes down, church, guilds and nobles are set at odds over the costs and profit of rebuilding, and whether to hire the brilliant dismissed apprentice or his stupid master for the job.
Follett's story twists and turns delightfully with great plots and subplots. At over 1,100 pages, you're going to need wrist guards, because it's hard to put this down.
Follett has avoided the "I spake truth, my liege" kind of clichéd writing, and these are people you believe in - yet his gritty descriptions of the bestial norms of medieval life are absolutely telling.
It's a book to make a noble put his sabaton through a stained-glass window.
ON THE cusp of the Middle Ages and the modern world, Ken Follett's characters don't know how radical a change is happening.
Four children see the biggest secret of the 14th century: a merchant's daughter, a knight's two sons and the daughter of a thief.
World Without End follows them through an era that makes the last century in Ireland seem dull.
The boys, of course, want to be knights like their father - little knowing that the age of knighthood is ending, and that of merchant power coming into flower.
The Black Death is about to sweep across Europe, cutting the population by one-third and shattering a social system that had endured since the time of the Romans.
Follett's characters are engaging: Merthin, the knight's son who becomes a genius of architecture; Caris, laughed out of it when she says she wants to be a doctor, as if she were a man; Gwenda the honourable thief; Ralph the bully.
When the town's bridge crashes down, church, guilds and nobles are set at odds over the costs and profit of rebuilding, and whether to hire the brilliant dismissed apprentice or his stupid master for the job.
Follett's story twists and turns delightfully with great plots and subplots. At over 1,100 pages, you're going to need wrist guards, because it's hard to put this down.
Follett has avoided the "I spake truth, my liege" kind of clichéd writing, and these are people you believe in - yet his gritty descriptions of the bestial norms of medieval life are absolutely telling.
It's a book to make a noble put his sabaton through a stained-glass window.
It's all about Him Colette Caddle
Pocket Books
WORRIED mother Dee has it all together. Her home cooking is selling like hotcakes, and her big house has been turned into a crèche, solving the problems of single parenthood.
She has a nice boyfriend - a farmer who's able to turn his hand to anything - and his parents, happily retured and running a bookshop, love her.
Her son Sam, always sickly with asthma and eczema, is turning into a happy, bouncy kid.
Boyfriend Conor seems committed, but isn't waving any ring boxes under her nose.
Life is going on, fairly ho-hum, with the odd money problem. The only excitement is when a reporter corners Dee in the supermarket and she becomes a local expert on food additives and their effect on vulnerable children who eat packaged foods.
Dee knows her stuff because young Sam reacts dangerously to common additives.
It's a rather sedate story so far.
Then one day in walks Sam's father Neil, an addictive gambler and liar who stole from her and abandoned her when she was pregnant. He promises that he's now reformed.
Dee must choose between the life she's made for herself and the chance of Sam having a real father.
It's all about Him is a slow-moving read, ideal for those who don't want any sudden wild surprises, but like novels of ordinary life.
WORRIED mother Dee has it all together. Her home cooking is selling like hotcakes, and her big house has been turned into a crèche, solving the problems of single parenthood.
She has a nice boyfriend - a farmer who's able to turn his hand to anything - and his parents, happily retured and running a bookshop, love her.
Her son Sam, always sickly with asthma and eczema, is turning into a happy, bouncy kid.
Boyfriend Conor seems committed, but isn't waving any ring boxes under her nose.
Life is going on, fairly ho-hum, with the odd money problem. The only excitement is when a reporter corners Dee in the supermarket and she becomes a local expert on food additives and their effect on vulnerable children who eat packaged foods.
Dee knows her stuff because young Sam reacts dangerously to common additives.
It's a rather sedate story so far.
Then one day in walks Sam's father Neil, an addictive gambler and liar who stole from her and abandoned her when she was pregnant. He promises that he's now reformed.
Dee must choose between the life she's made for herself and the chance of Sam having a real father.
It's all about Him is a slow-moving read, ideal for those who don't want any sudden wild surprises, but like novels of ordinary life.
It's all about Him by Colette Caddle
(Pocket Books €??)
WORRIED mother Dee has it all together. Her home cooking is selling like hotcakes, and her big house has been turned into a crèche, solving the problems of single parenthood.
She has a nice boyfriend - a farmer who's able to turn his hand to anything - and his parents, happily retured and running a bookshop, love her.
Her son Sam, always sickly with asthma and eczema, is turning into a happy, bouncy kid.
Boyfriend Conor seems committed, but isn't waving any ring boxes under her nose.
Life is going on, fairly ho-hum, with the odd money problem. The only excitement is when a reporter corners Dee in the supermarket and she becomes a local expert on food additives and their effect on vulnerable children who eat packaged foods.
Dee knows her stuff because young Sam reacts dangerously to common additives.
It's a rather sedate story so far.
Then one day in walks Sam's father Neil, an addictive gambler and liar who stole from her and abandoned her when she was pregnant. He promises that he's now reformed.
Dee must choose between the life she's made for herself and the chance of Sam having a real father.
It's all about Him is a slow-moving read, ideal for those who don't want any sudden wild surprises, but like novels of ordinary life.
WORRIED mother Dee has it all together. Her home cooking is selling like hotcakes, and her big house has been turned into a crèche, solving the problems of single parenthood.
She has a nice boyfriend - a farmer who's able to turn his hand to anything - and his parents, happily retured and running a bookshop, love her.
Her son Sam, always sickly with asthma and eczema, is turning into a happy, bouncy kid.
Boyfriend Conor seems committed, but isn't waving any ring boxes under her nose.
Life is going on, fairly ho-hum, with the odd money problem. The only excitement is when a reporter corners Dee in the supermarket and she becomes a local expert on food additives and their effect on vulnerable children who eat packaged foods.
Dee knows her stuff because young Sam reacts dangerously to common additives.
It's a rather sedate story so far.
Then one day in walks Sam's father Neil, an addictive gambler and liar who stole from her and abandoned her when she was pregnant. He promises that he's now reformed.
Dee must choose between the life she's made for herself and the chance of Sam having a real father.
It's all about Him is a slow-moving read, ideal for those who don't want any sudden wild surprises, but like novels of ordinary life.
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