Posts filed under 'Reviews'
Dan’s creating a curry…and I’m free to tap away, and come up with a new blog post.
To be honest, it’s a chance to sum up a lot of what the holiday has been about. Food, reading, and a bit of tinkering around the house.
Food…it’s been a nice opportunity to cook. Admittedly most times of year are good to cook, but staying at home means there’s a bit more time for it. Managed to feed one couple who have entertained us many times, but also a good friend back in Edinburgh from her home in Bangaldesh. Hopefully the start of a bit more hospitality at home this year.
Reading…an opportunity to introduce “The Kitchen God’s Wife”, by Amy Tan, which I’m working my way through. Some books you speed through - this one you don’t. Reading about the Cultural Revolution is sobering stuff, even if the characters are (probably only somewhat) fictionalised.
On the plus side, you can certainly get caught up in the descriptions of the places, the landscape, the names of cities that slowly I’m learning, through hearing them via colleagues who work on programmes with China. Given those all-important Olympics this year, probably no bad time to be learning a bit more about China.
And tinkering…some mine, some from Dan’s mum. A year or so back, we were given his and hers aprons. Although I like a little light kitchen goddessery, I was slightly taken aback to have a) named aprons and b) ones bearing the terms ‘kitchen god’ and ‘kitchen goddess’. Jen kindly aided us to bring the aprons back to a plain state.
So. New year. New aprons. They’re what every respecting god and goddess are wearing.
January 6th, 2008
Just written another post about how to prepare for Christmas. Grant you, it won’t get the turkey bought, or the crackers pulled. But here’s another option.
Back in my teens, I came across a book called “A Formal Feeling”, by the American author Zibby Oneal. The book tells the story of Anne, coming home for Christmas from boarding school. The home she comes to is not quite home - her mother is dead, and a new stepmother is there. Traditions have changed.
Anne struggles with the changes, not just in the home, but in her father and brother, who seem happy with the new arrangements. Slowly, Anne starts to remember that not every Christmas was perfect…
For some reason, perhaps because of the way the book builds up the details of Christmas - choosing the tree, singing carols in the choir, making the adjustment from being at school to being at home all day - it became part of my preparation for Christmas for many years. Somewhat like an advent calendar, I would read a chapter a day, building up the picture of Christmas, building up the picture of Anne, and her mother.
This year, I’m starting late. 17th already. But having lost five different people this year, friends and family, somehow I hope I can use reading this book to reflect on those I want to remember. In some cases, there are shared memories of Christmases, and times after Christmas and into New Year, together. In others, I don’t know how they spent their time.
Christmas is a time of repetition. We start a way of doing things, and soon build up our own traditions, that are almost easier to keep than to question. But Christmas soon turns to New Year, and new beginnings, even if we don’t want the resolutions that might go with them.
Somehow, I trust that reading this book will help me remember the repetitions, and look for new beginnings too. And, like Anne, that it will help me tease out what I think I remember, and what else was part of those relationships.
Perhaps, one of the best presents is being able to accept life as we and others have lived it, good and bad, cut short or lived longer. The title of the book comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, which ends:
“This is the Hour of Lead-
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snow-
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go-”
December 17th, 2007
Book clubs. Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?
Your choice. Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them. But there is something good about seeing what others think - memories of class discussions in English Lit classes. To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips. (Or maybe not. Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)
It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well - a kind of book club of one, if you like. Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc - why not regular books too?
Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves - and film and music collections too - to show off your favoured artistes. I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.
Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath. Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath. Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water. Books it has to be.
So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year. As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.
I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think. I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction. It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).
So far, so good. But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”. Less cheerful. The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind - and the same man who himself has no personal smell.
Other reviewers have called his work Gothic. You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical - and even illogical - conclusions. This is where the book gets its power - there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.
Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story. The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant - their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil. Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society. But as those around him perish - and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid - there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not. As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.
In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction. Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end. There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.
Enough thoughts for now. But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise. The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others. Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it - online - I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”
December 5th, 2007