The Haunted Bridge

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

First things first, thank you for all your lovely birthday wishes! And now onto another review…

Despite having a card index system of all my books (yes, sorry, I do) I am usually a disorganised person. Just ask my family, who claim to love me, disorganisation and all. Some bloggers have very complex systems with the books they receive for reviewing – shelved in date order, say, or kept in a separate part of the house from their other books. I sort of have a shelf for them, but the shelf was filled about a year ago, and the rest get put wherever I can find some space. And so, of course, I often forget I have them. Ironically, something placed on my ‘must read very soon’ shelf (only it’s not a shelf, it’s a bit of my desk next to a CD player and a mug-in-a-jumper of pens) is likely to be overlooked for a long time.

This is all a long run-up to saying that, somehow, it took me ages to read Jane Gordon-Cumming’s The Haunted Bridge and Other Strange Tales of the Oxford Canal, despite the fact that it appealed as soon as it dropped through the letterbox. Jane G-C, you may remember, wrote the funtastic [spelling error deliberate on my part, in an attempt to be youthful and hip] A Proper Family Christmas, which I reviewed back here. This time she has turned her attentions to ghost stories…

Now, if your first response to the words ‘ghost stories’ is – like me – to curl up under a duvet and repeat happy thoughts to yourself over and over again, then fear not. The stories in this collection – well, except ‘Landscape of Ghosts’, the final one in the book – aren’t scary. They’re interesting and fun and send a tiny little shiver down your spine, but not in a hide-behind-the-curtains way. This coming from a man who was incapable of watching Scream 2 – and, indeed, the spookier episodes of Doctor Who. So, fear not… and read on, as Mr. Bennet would say.

Each story is nice and short, quick impact, and takes place along the Oxford canal. There is a nice touch (suggested by Colin Dexter, no less) of a map in the front, indicating where each story takes place, and the collection is organised geographically – moving up the river.

My favourite story is ‘Flying With The Angels’, which takes place at Shipton-on-Cherwell (drove past there today on a return visit to Jane’s Teas) which has parallel stories of a Victorian girl and a modern woman travelling along the same track on Christmas Eve in 1874 and ‘today’ respectively. I wanted to type out a section for you, but I think any chunk would actually spoil the impact, so I shan’t…

All in all, this is a fun little book – especially for anybody who knows the canal or Oxford, it would make a great gift or souvenir. And Jane Gordon-Cumming is a natural storyteller who, thankfully, cannot resist a light and humorous touch even when she’s writing scary stories. Take note, Stephen King, take note.

(If you want to hunt down a copy, try Amazon or, even better, Jane G-C’s website directly…)

Happy Birthday Moi! And other celebrations…

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I never remember the exact date I started this blog, but when I checked yesterday I discovered… it’s today! Three years old today – that calls for a stock picture of balloons, wouldn’t you say?


Agreed. As always on celebratory blog occasions, I want to go all mushy and say thank you to everyone who reads Stuck-in-a-Book, for all the wonderful bloggers making the Blogosphere such a fun and rewarding place to be, and especial thanks to those lovely people who have sent me emails over the years filled with general niceness. Always a highlight for me. Oh, and thank you authors and publishers for keeping me stocked up on books! Thanks all round, basically. Oh, and UK Bloggers – there’s still time to join us on the 8th May for a UK Bloggers Meet Up (and to tell your friends to email me about it) – final details will be going out sooooon.

So, 795 posts later (which is actually only 265 a year, by my quick calculation, which means I have a hundred idle days each year) I’m enjoying blogging more than ever, and especially – check out this seamless link – events like yesterday’s Sceptre Bloggers Event.

I read enviously of all the bloggers heading off to the Headline event, so was delighted to be invited by one run by Sceptre – where I had the pleasure of seeing Karen/Cornflower and Claire/Paperback Reader again, as well as meeting other bloggers, several authors, and the lovely people who work at Sceptre (who, like the good people of Bloomsbury, made me realise I will never be stylish enough to work in publishing. Or perhaps even to live in London.) They were all very welcoming, friendly, AND gave me a goody bag of books – they know the way to a blogger’s heart. Oh, and I share my blog birthday with little Scarlet and Stanley, twin son and daughter of Jocasta, Sceptre’s deputy publisher. Happy birthday, S & S, hope it’s as sunny in London as it is in Oxford! Cue another (rather sweet) free stock image:


The authors in attendance were Emma Henderson, Natasha Solomons, and Ned Beauman – whose respective books Grace Williams Says It Loud, Mr. Rosenblum’s List, and Boxer Beetle are all coming out this year. The only one I’ve had to read so far is Ned Beauman’s Boxer Beetle – completely not my sort of book, and yet I thought it was brilliant. It’s not out til August, so I’ll write more about it later in the year, and I’m hoping to snare an interview with Ned B before he becomes too rich and famous to appear on a humble blog… I predict big things!

So, more thank yous to the lovely people at Sceptre – and for Claire for rescuing me when I got lost wandering around London. I’m off to enjoy the sunshine…

Coincidences

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A quick post today, because inspiration is not hitting… on the topic of reading coincidences (with a completely unrelated picture of a pretty building I saw in Paris). I’ve just started a novel where a woman lives in a hut in the wood. And I’ve also lent my housemate a different novel where a woman lives in a hut in the wood. It’s probably not the most important aspect of either novel, but it comes to the fore because of this coincidence.

Do you find this? Something in a novel will call out, because it also happened in another novel? Small details cross over… I remember reading Late and Soon by EM Delafield quite soon after Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton – both of them feature a woman whose Chinese shawl is repeatedly caught in her chair. I thought perhaps this nuisance plagued the first half of the twentieth century, but I haven’t come across it again… More bizarrely, a couple of years ago I read two books close to each other where women killed themselves by deliberately driving their cars into trees. Shan’t tell you which ones, as it would rather spoil them…

Has this happened to you? Details please! Or am I alone in these strange criss-crossings and overlappings between books? Surely not…

Identity

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

When I reviewed (and reviewed enthusiastically) Immortality by Milan Kundera earlier in the year, I suggested that I wouldn’t read another for a while. Much as I admired and liked the novel (if a novel it can be called), I was left a little exhausted, and fancied a five year break before I returned to Kundera…

…but then I discovered that he wrote short books too! And you know how I love a short book. Identity has enormous font and wide margins too… But, before you think me a complete imbecile, this is the jacket blurb which persuaded me:
Sometimes – perhaps only for an instant – we fail to recognise a companion. When this happens to lovers, the effect is acute: for a moment the identity of the loved one ceases to exist, and we come to doubt our own.Doesn’t that sound an intriguing starting point for a novel?

Identity isn’t as postmodern as Immortality (those titles are so similar, I’m bound to get them mixed up at some point in this blog post… hopefully we’re on the same page so far). While Immortality really seemed to reinvent the novel structure, Kundera sticks more closely to a conventional form with Identity, despite being published eight years later (1998, compared to Immortality’s 1990). There is the odd dabble in unusual images and abstract thought (cue quotation…)

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, friends.
…but, in amongst Kundera’s very individual – and to my mind, very good – writing style, there is a surprisingly traditional romance. But very nuanced, and very subtle.

He reflected that she was his sole emotional link to the world. People talk to him about prisoners, about the persecuted, about the hungry? He knows the only was he feels personally, painfully touched by their misfortune: he imagines Chantal in their place. People tell him about women raped in some civil war? He sees Chantal there, raped. She and she alone releases him from his apathy. Only through her can he feel compassion.
I think that’s quite a brilliant way to describe the closeness of a relationship, romantic or otherwise. Chantal and Jean-Marc are the couple in question – and it is Chantal whom Jean-Marc fails to recognise (or, rather, he thinks somebody else is her, until he gets closer to them). She, in turn, thinks that men have stopped finding her attractive – which shakes the identity she has formed for herself. And so it is with a mixture of pleasure and displeasure that she receives a letter saying that someone is watching her. These letters grow more complimentary, and instead of throwing them away, she keeps the letters in her underwear drawer – and starts trying to work out who is sending them.

Such is the plot – but Kundera weaves far more around this simple premise. All sorts of interesting musings about a myriad of topics, and (like Immortality) exceptional insight into the interaction of people, with all the subtlety and complexity of real emotions. How he does it is beyond me…

And then the narrative does get a bit more postmodern, dabbling between fantasy and reality without telling you quite where the line is. It feels just a little bit thrown in, and I’d have liked it to be a bit more developed, but it’s also an interesting touch… and obviously done because Kundera can’t help himself, rather than for any big effect.

Second Kundera, and I’m still very impressed – I still admire him more than I love him (and isn’t there sometimes a big difference!) but that isn’t to say reading him is a struggle, because it isn’t. Just – as, indeed, I finished my last Kundera review – not one to curl up with in front of the fire. And no, that delightfully bizarre cover never makes sense.

Easter Goodies

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It has not been a barren Easter, book-wise. My friend Lucy and I (she is also on Project24) exchanged books as Easter presents (admittedly picking from each other’s Amazon wishlists) and I was also lucky enough to win a prize draw of Agatha Raisin books from Simon S. What bounty!


There they are – except for A Spy in the Bookshop, which Luce also got me and which is still in Oxford. I mentioned it on here a while ago, bemoaning the fact that I didn’t have it, and now I do – aren’t blogs useful?

So, those in the picture – Winifred Holtby’s 1936 memoir of Virginia Woolf (which I am really glad Lucy chose, as it’s the one I secretly wanted most) and four Agatha Raisin books – Agatha Raisin and… the Walkers of Dembley; the Quiche of Death; the Vicious Vet, and the Potted Gardener. I’ve just spotted that the series also has Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham. Since I went to school in Evesham, I should check that one out too…

Hope you all had a lovely Easter – and if you got books instead of chocolate, or even as well as chocolate, let me know what you got!

How many Hectors make an acre?

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

I mentioned a while ago that I was dabbling in various translated novels, and when better than after a trip to Paris to finish off two novels translated from the French? Well, yes, perhaps *on* a trip to Paris would be better, but there’s a 782 page reason that I didn’t, which will be revealed in a week or two.

Instead, it was my train journey home where I finished a couple of novels (I think I surprised the girl I sat next to, as my bag seemed to have an inexhaustible number of books emerging from it) – and, first up, Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord, courtesy of Gallic Books (thanks!)

Apparently Hector has sold over a million copies worldwide, and Gallic have just brought his words of wisdom to the English speaking world. Having just read books translated from the French by Lelord, Kundera, and Veronique Olmi, I can only conclude that there is no ‘French style’ which is universally carried across – because the style of this novel is quite unlike anything else I’ve read. It tells of Hector, a psychiatrist, wandering around the world trying to find out what makes people happy. Or, perhaps more importantly, what makes people unhappy – especially when there seems to be no external reason for their unhappiness.

Lelord is himself a psychiatrist, and so he knows what he’s talking about, but as I said – the style is very unusual. Every now and then it’s in the second person – the second person, you know… oh wait, that’s an example – and it’s all written (how shall I put it?) quite childishly. As though it were aimed at children, I mean, rather than telling immature jokes and so forth. Here’s an example, which also amused me because I live with one:A psychologist is somebody who studies how people think or why they go a bit crazy or what makes children learn at school and why some don’t, or why they hit their schoolmates. Psychologists, unlike psychiatrists, don’t have the right to prescribe pills, but they can make people take tests or choose the right picture in a box or calculate things using dominoes, or tell them what an ink stain makes them think of. And after that they know something about the way your mind works (but they don’t understand everything, it has to be said.)Of course, sometimes writers use a faux-naive voice so as to subtly work on two levels, a sort of knowing wink to the reader – but I don’t really get that impression with Hector. Lelord just seems to have chosen quite a guileless, ingenuous narrator – and it works quite well, so that we get a character exploring happiness without an ounce of cynicism. Which just wouldn’t happen in the pen of a British writer – we do ooze cynicism with every ink drop.

As Hector travels to far flung places, getting himself into situations which are awkward, dangerous, serendipitous and fun, he compiles a list of lessons about happiness. These are the crux of the novel, so I shan’t spoil them now, but to give you an example – the first two are ‘Making comparisons can spoil your happiness’, and ‘Happiness often comes when least expected.’

These sorts of lists could be saccharine and irritating – ‘happiness is like a butterfly of joy, flapping its wings of laughter’, that sort of thing – but luckily Lelord never wanders into that territory. Each lesson comes from an event in the novel, not just phrased in overly abstract terms. And, since Lelord is a psychiatrist, you realise that the lessons – seemingly off the cuff – actually come together to mirror psychiatric and psychological research, in the least off-putting way imaginable.

All in all, this is an unusual and fun novel, but one which might just have something worthwhile and interesting to say as well – for something else worthwhile and interesting, check out Cornflower’s review here!

From Paris to Somerset…

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What a jet-setting lifestyle. About a day after arriving back from Paris, I was off to Somerset, which is where I now am, tucked up in bed in chilly Chiselborough.

Quick entry – to say that, after years of meaning to (and none too subtle hints dropped, to no avail, when I was in Paris in 2005) I have been to Shakespeare & Company bookshop! Here I am in front of it…


(Yes, fact fans, that is the first – and probably last – time I’ve put a photograph of me up on here – that’s how big a deal a visit to this bookshop was!) To be honest, it wasn’t a huge temptation away from my Project24 resolve – because it’s mostly a new-book bookshop, and the lovely floor of older books upstairs are browsing only (so I didn’t look at them too carefully, lest there be anything I really wanted and couldn’t have.) But the shop has a lovely feel, and I was keen to have a souvenir to take away from it, so step forward book no.8…


I love the NYRB Classics series, both for book choices and for production quality, and I love Sylvia Townsend Warner. I could have bought Summer Will Show anywhere, it is true, but it seemed appropriate to have it as my Shakespeare & Co. souvenir, since it’s set in Paris. More on it when I read it… cos I’m going to bed now. Au reservoir!

Croc Attack – Assaf Gavron

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

A name you might well recognise from the blog comments here, and across the blogosphere, is ‘Dark Puss’ or ‘Peter the Flautist’ – well, Peter took me up on a challenge a while ago to write a review of Croc Attack by Assaf Gavron. I’m always delighted to post regular readers’ views on books, and since I thought there’d be people better qualified than me to comment on this novel, I was very pleased when Peter offered to review it for Stuck-in-a-Book. Without further ado…

Croc Attack by Assaf Gavron
Simon very kindly sent this book to me to review and I will try my best to write something that won’t let down too much the high standards he has set with his reviews.

The internal battles of the near Middle East, particularly between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, are so horrible, Byzantine and yet sadly so much part of our culture that I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have not read any novels that relate to them. Croc Attack changes all this. The story is straightforward, perhaps even a little cartoonish. The protagonist of the title, Eitan Enoch, narrowly misses being killed in a suicide bomb attack on one of the little buses in Tel Aviv. Further bloody bombings and their inevitable reprisals follow and Croc begins, against his wishes, to become something of a celebrity as the man who cannot be killed. Ultimately this exposure makes him the explicit target of a suicide bomber, Fahmi, who co-narrates the story while lying badly injured and in a coma in hospital. The two stories are neatly entwined with both musing on the inevitability of conflict, the lack of any possible resolution and indeed the almost familial need to go on killing and being killed.

So far so bleak but, despite the gravity of its subject matter, this book isn’t. Indeed it has several moments of, admittedly dark, humour. It also fails to take any obvious sides, empathy and sympathy being shown for all who are caught up in this ghastly conflict. The alternating story telling mostly works, though Fahmi’s is the weaker and there are some implausible coincidences at work in the plot but overall I think the structure works pretty well. There is some interesting commentary on high-tech commerce, Croc works for a company dedicated to the reduction of time wasting in call centres, directory enquiries etc., and on the bear baiting of low grade chat shows. Perhaps the female characters are a little weaker but the thing that did strike me as well described is the strange feeling you get when travelling on public transport in the aftermath of an attack. I live in Central London and travel daily by tube. I can remember vividly the feeling in my mind the day after the 7th of July attacks, the suspicious looks of fellow passengers, and the alarm at sitting next to someone with a rucksack and the complete futility of those concerns since I really had no sane alternatives. Gavron captures this very well and the long term after effect is of course the terrorists’ primary weapon in destabilising society. I haven’t, thankfully, been on the other end of a military reprisal but I am sure that living with the threat that you and your family might be wiped out with no warning by a laser-guided missile must be a very similar experience.

It’s not all death and despair, there are some episodes in which characters are allowed, for a few hours, to escape from their daily fear and profess love and/or lust. Simon usually puts at least one quotation into his reviews and I’ll end with one too.

‘What was the message you wanted to give me?’

A second passed before I realised what she was talking about.

‘I don’t know’ I said. ‘He didn’t get to say it. He was thinking. But I’m pretty sure that he wanted to let you know that he loved you. Something like that.’

She looked at me.

‘His look had that kind of meaning. It wasn’t a “tell her to feed the cats” kind of look.’ I said, staring at the gearstick. ‘And I can understand him.’

‘He didn’t have any cats. He couldn’t stand them.’

‘I can understand him on that one too.’

She smiled. So I wiped her smile with a kiss. Her lips were soft as feathers, as deep and salty as the sea.
I found it a great read, essentially it is a thriller with some genuine political and human insights into the Middle East conflict, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.