The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie - Ágota Kristof

My rating: 5/5


Book review:

When I was younger, I used to have a recurring dream about a world I haven't experienced in real life: I found myself in a place that was being bombed. I was hiding inside a house, a deafening noise around me; through the windows I could see the planes and hear the explosions. I was living intensely in a dimension that was at war; I felt the terror, the helplessness. I have no idea why I had those dreams. I haven't lived through a war, I don't know how bombardments feel like. But my dreams felt real nonetheless. It could have been my reality in another life, if I were to believe in it. Or it could be the reality of my dreams, a realm where my mind continues to live without my body.

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Independent People - Halldór Laxness

My rating: 5/5


Book review:

What does it mean being independent? Stop for a moment and think: do you consider yourself an independent person? I've never asked myself this question seriously before reading this novel, although I've always tried to preserve my freedom by sticking to a few personal guidelines: I avoid becoming a working slave; I can't keep my mouth shut when I observe injustice or stupidity; I can't keep my head down to gain favors; I can't stand being tied to a person just out of politeness.

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Our Circus Presents - Lucian Dan Teodorovici

My rating: 3/5

Book review:

What is it that pushes people towards committing suicide? I thought the answer was simple: a grief and desperation so great that would obliterate any trace of hope and desire. One of the characters in Our Circus Presents has a different opinion, though: besides being the ultimate artistic act that a human being can perform, a true suicide is one without a motive. If one has desires, even the littlest of projections into the future, it means that one is not really capable of committing suicide. The same character asks: what was the reason behind God's creation of Earth and people? He couldn't have made it either from love, wisdom or desire for power and justice. He concludes that God had no real motive, it was just because. An authentic suicide should be the same, just because.

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Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me - Javier Marías

My rating: 5/5

Book Review:

This novel blew me away and I'm still working to fit my pieces together. I got lost into Marías' winding train of thoughts and I'm still trying to find my way back to reality. What was it that I liked so much about this novel? Well, everything: the plot, the subtle humor, the flow of words, the ideas, the profound pondering. I found and lost myself at the same time, and I really can't explain this; if you haven't done it yet, you should read the novel and see for yourself.

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The Gardens of Light - Amin Maalouf

My rating: 3/5


Book review:

Prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism, is one of the forgotten figures of history, although he was very popular (and also much hated) in the 3rd century Babylonia - today's Iraq. Forgotten is also the town of Ctesiphon (near present-day Baghdad), capital of the Persian Empire under the Sassanid dynasty, where Mani was born and where he spread his religious beliefs.

Little information about the prophet was preserved throughout the centuries, until a parchment was discovered in 1969, containing accounts of Mani's life and fragments of his writings.

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The Fish Can Sing - Halldór Laxness

My rating: 5/5

Book review:

The fish can sing just like a bird,
And grazes on the moorland scree,
While cattle in a lowing herd
Roam the rolling sea.

Starting from this Icelandic paradox put in verse, Halldór Laxness weaves an enchanting tale on the outskirts of Reykjavík, in a time when the price of a Bible was equal to that of a heifer and people still tried to cure headaches by smearing their faces with warm cow-dung. Some say that The Fish Can Sing is a coming-of-age novel, but I don't really see it that way; it is more the diary of a place, Brekkukot, and the portrait of a generation long gone, in a time when Reykjavík was just a bunch of houses inhabited by farmers and fishermen.

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The Ice Palace - Tarjei Vesaas

My rating: 5/5


Book review:

A novel with a scarcity of words but with a delicate, dreamlike poetry; a story that makes you taste the coldness and isolation of winter in the middle of the summer; an adult writer who can see through the soul of an eleven year girl, down to her utmost fears; a remembrance of childhood with all its awkward moments; two girls that are linked in life and beyond; a secret that is never spoken, buried forever in ice; a promise that is kept, no matter if it brings estrangement; a wonder of nature, the ice palace, with its cold and deadly beauty.

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Little Fingers - Filip Florian

My rating: 4/5


Book review:

I haven't read a novel by a Romanian author in a long time. I, along with many other young people here, tend to avoid local literature because:
a) it may be full of social commentary and communism issues (people are already fed up with it, yet it may prove interesting for a foreigner); 
b) it might be brimming with obscene words (although there is a market for that, I'm sure); 
or, simply, c) it may turn out to be a disappointment. 
Surely, this could be a reaction of a country whose members are not overly patriotic, read less and less and are not able to come to terms with their place (and time) in history.

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Târfe asasine / Putas asesinas - Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 4 out of 5

Book review:

Putas asesinas or Murderous Bitches is my first encounter with the prose of Roberto Bolaño. What can I say? I'm hooked by his talent as a story teller, by his imagination, weaving real life facts with fabricated ones. What I liked the most was the dreamy feeling I got while reading his stories, like I was sitting together with Bolaño at a bonfire and he was murmuring some tales about his life. And they felt so real that I could have believed everything he would tell me.

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The Door - Magda Szabó

My rating: 5/5


Book review:

Romanians and Hungarians have a long history of not liking each other. I'm no xenophobe and I have a few friends in Budapest, yet I was sometimes wondering: what does Hungary have to offer in terms of art, music and literature? They could say the same about Romanians, too; what the heck, we are questioning our place in art history ourselves! Well, after reading this novel, I've come to think that Hungarians do have their hidden gems, just the same as we do. Magda Szabó's novel was my first foray into Hungarian literature and my first step towards abating my ignorance. 

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The Ghost Rider - Ismail Kadaré

Rating: 4/5


Book Review:

The Ghost Rider was initially published in English under the title Doruntine and it is another case of translation from French, not from the original Albanian. This situation puzzles me and has turned many people off from reading Ismail Kadaré's The Palace of Dreams, which I find a really good novel (but then, I've read the Romanian translation). Is there a serious deficit of translators from Albanian into English? It seems that Kadare’s works were regularly translated into French by his long-standing collaborator, Jusuf Vrioni, and the English editions have the latter's translations as a starting point. Weird.

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I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

My rating: 4/5


Book review:

I haven't watched the movie for one particular reason: there was a dog on the poster and only the thought that it might suffer and die (which I didn't actually know for a fact) was enough to avoid the movie. The same thing happened with The Road, because there was a child on the poster who might suffer (not die, though, as children don't usually die if they are main characters).
I'm quite upset with myself that I feel such a heart-wrenching pity for animals, because I can't properly watch certain movies (for example, Hachiko was more than I could bear). I also can't stand torture scenes - yuck! Curiously enough, I have a fascination with horror movies...

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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll

       

Rating: 4 out of 5


Book review:

The voice of this novel was something new to me: it is written in the form of a report, apparently reserved and unbiased, which presents the slow but effective process of Katharina Blum's public humiliation by police and press.

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Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Rating: 4 out of 5


Book review:

I began reading this book in English, but something didn't feel right. The musicality of Márquez' writing was not there. I couldn't believe the old man changed his style over the years. I looked for the Romanian translation and felt relieved: everything sounded the way it should with Márquez. The poetry was still there. That was the first time I looked admiringly to my native language - it has its positive attributes after all, mainly the kinship with Latin. Now I may only imagine how the original sounds like, another reason to feel sorry for knowing Spanish only at a basic-medium level.

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The Obscene Bird of Night - José Donoso

My rating: 4/5

Book review:

The Obscene Bird of Night is one strange, twisted, haunting, obscene book. It may well be the most difficult novel I've read so far. There were moments when I felt that I could connect to it and even understand it, but most of the time I felt like floating inside a grotesque nightmare, with walled-up windows and doors, not being able to find my way out. If, by chance, I was brusquely expelled into reality, I was compelled by an utter fascination to go back in and have my brains turned to mush.

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Doctor Glas - Hjalmar Söderberg

     

Rating: 4 out of 5

Book review:

This short novel is a melancholic guide of Stockholm. It is a compendium of thoughts and reflections upon life from a peculiar character. It is a story of alienation and unrequited love. And it is also the story of a planned murder.

Although more than a hundred years old, this novel feels as fresh as if written yesterday. The only hint of its age are depictions of places in Stockholm that no longer exist and some obsolete debates (on abortion, for example), but otherwise the language doesn't fell dated and the ideas are as universal as ever.

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The Guillotine Squad - Guillermo Arriaga

My rating: 4 out of 5

Book review:

I haven't seen any of the Arriaga/Iñárritu movies because they seemed too tough to watch, but this doesn't mean I wasn't curious about this Mexican (script)writer. Especially when I found the first book he had published in a second-hand bookstore, for 1.50 $. Yup, sometimes my reading flow goes with the bargains that I find on the way.

I was neither prepared to like it, nor dislike it, a state of mind that I wish I had with every book that I read. What I enjoyed most of all in The Guillotine Squad was the dark humor, a feature that I've always welcomed in books and movies.

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Ice - Anna Kavan

Rating: 4 out of 5


Book review:


Edit (104 days later): Despite my initial 3 star rating, I feel compelled to give this book another star. I must admit that Ice is still haunting me, as some of the powerful images it aroused are still vivid in my mind. Few books have this power over me.

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While I found Ice to be an interesting read, with moments of pure beauty and originality, in the end I was glad it was over, because it had failed to keep me under its spell for its entirety. While being a short book, to me it seemed awfully long, possibly because it is repetitive on the verge of becoming annoying. The magic that worked its charm in the beginning started to lose its power when the same things happened again and again, when I got tired of the uncertainty and wanted to tell the difference between what was real and what was not. And I do love tangled, fantastic tales (Mulholland Drive is one of my all-time favorite movies).

At first, I was mesmerized by the strange story of a man set out in search of a fragile girl with white hair, in a menacing landscape that is gradually overtaken by ice. His quest becomes an obsession and he  follows her to some disaster-stricken places, but she always seems to sleep through his fingers. His search is impeded by a third character, the Ward, who seems to have taken possession of the girl, but also by the fact that the girl herself does not want to be found and rescued by the man.

Ice has no actual plot and no reliable storyteller. It's like falling through a series of weird dreams, not being able to tell the difference between reality and unconsciousness. The nameless narrator has some recurrent daydreams about the girl he is chasing, some of  which left a powerful impression upon me, and for that alone it was worth reading this story.

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

My rating: 5 out of 5


Book review:

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is only partly a coming-of-age novel. There are several threads of the story, following the five main characters of the book, all interesting people, with a deep inner world. One would think they could cure their loneliness once they get to know each other, but things are more complex than that and don't always turn out the way they should. And do they actually come to know each other in the end?

John Singer is a deaf-mute who is living with his only friend, a fat Greek, Spiros Antanopoulos, who has the same handicap. After the latter is sent to a mental hospital, Singer moves to a boarding house and gets to know a handful of people, who from then on start to gravitate around him, eager to speak about their thoughts and torments, having the impression that the mute has a superior understanding of life. While with Spiros, he was the one who used to talk with his hands every evening, but now he has become the one who listens. 

Mick Kelly is a 14-year old girl with a complex inner world; she dreams of becoming a musician and of travelling to distant countries covered in snow. She is slowly discovering her womanliness and sexuality. I loved the metaphor of her soul divided in an outer and inner chamber, I loved the way she perceived music.
Her connection to music was disturbing for me, as I too used to hear music in my head and dreamed of playing it on the piano. Not unlike Mick, I studied the piano for eight years, yet I got lazy in the end. Reading about what she felt about music brought about memories of my own ambitions and felt sadder to have failed. 

Dr. Copeland is an intelligent black man whose purpose in life is to educate his people, to transform their beliefs and help them transcend their condition, in order to make a better life for the black race. He became estranged from his wife and children and he had failed to pass his revolutionary ideas onto them. Through his story, we get to know the harsh lives of black people and their resistance to change. 

Jack Blount is a half-mad guy, a wandered who made a sudden appearance in town, claiming he could understand, that he knew a truth that others were too blind to see. He finds comfort in the mute John Singer, whose silence gives him the aura of understanding and knowing. 

Bill Brannon is the owner of a cafe where all the characters gather to eat and drink. He doesn't say much, but we get to know his thoughts. He is attracted by strange people, by outcasts, and so he takes pity on Jack Blount. 

I was wrong about this book on so many levels! First, I thought it was written by a guy, when instead Carson was a woman, who was merely 23 when she wrote this book. Wow! Such complexity of language and ideas is usually bestowed upon writers much later, after life has granted experience and depth. I can't imagine how someone can write like this at 23!
  
Secondly, I thought I was getting a cheerful, carefree coming-of-age novel, when instead I was immersed in a complex, serious and heart-wrenching story. There's so much loneliness in here and the events seem to head for disaster. I would imagine all sorts of terrible things that could happen to the characters. The pressure was constantly building, it seemed a question of paragraphs until the disaster would struck, yet it only came towards the ending.

Thirdly, I expected some romance going on, but I didn't get any - in the standard form, that is. There was love, but it was awkward, unfulfilled, sometimes twisted. The strangest of them all was the powerful attachment that Singer felt for his friend Spiros, despite the Greek's passive, greedy and mean character. In the end, nobody was capable to understand what lay beneath Singer's calm, friendly appearance and what went on in his soul. They were just as lonely and estranged as in the beginning of the story...  

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The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton

My rating: 2 out of 5

Book review:

The Forgotten Garden was rather disappointing, as I was sure that I would love this book. Secrets, mystery, a hidden garden...these are ingredients that I love. Just not the most fortunate use for them in this plot. 

For one thing, this book should have been half its length - so many and not particularly beautiful descriptions, detailed rendering of unimportant gestures and unnecessary talk. And the secrets were not really secrets, I could glimpse at several possibilities, one of which turned out to be true in the end. If the mystery were deeper, the writing more alert, it would have made a perfect easy read. I made sure to be a fast read though, as I couldn't waste too much time with this book, seeing that it didn't please me the way a good book should.

Some parts of the story are indeed catchy, the setting of Blackhurst estate is amazing (though I made little use of the map enclosed), but some of the characters and events are not quite believable. Nell, for one thing, behaved in a stupid manner; no matter the author's attempts to explain her behavior, I just couldn't relate to her choices. On top of that, I wasn't fond of any particular character in this novel, because they were not easy to like. 

If you made a résumé of this book, the resulting story would be interesting enough, but the 500 pages are not worth the time spent in its company, if you're looking for a gripping, fast-paced novel. 

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