Ratatosk's Reviews

Ride On

2006-06-05T13:57:00.000+01:00

I am reading a collection of Poetry at the moment by Claire Williamson, called "Ride On", and they are snapshots of her pain at given moments, and her reactions to this attack on the safety of her world.  These poems are clearly a way of making sense, and understanding, the terrible onslaughts of emotions.

What I find particularly clever and the hook for me is the way Claire focuses on the trivia of life.  This is so perceptive.  When all else is failing and stumbling around you, you don't focus on the big thing, you hang on to the small familiar objects, routines and minutiae.

Claire does this so well, instead of tackling the whole dynamics of earth shattering emotions, she explores it through the possession, and personalities of the person and the world they lived in.

I do this a lot with Toby.  I don't discuss and deal with the massive things – I concentrate and focus on the little things – "look this is what he can do now…" Oh doesn't he look sweat shaking his head" – as if the whole situation is larger than the view in front of me, and I can only chip at it a chunk at a time.

If I took the whole picture on board I would drown in the slurry of self-pity – and so would the person who asked !!.

Everything will be Alright - Tessa Hadley

2006-05-14T22:55:00.000+01:00

Book Description

England, just after the Second World War. Two sisters are bringing up their children in an old grey house on an estuary. Lil is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends time mysteriously at another house nearby. Vera is a teacher and has unquestioning faith in the illuminations of education and reason; she is exasperated by stories from Lil’s spiritualist séances. In their different ways they have to come to terms with a child’s death and a brother rescued from the mental hospital.
Lil’s daughter Joyce watches them and sees that there is something missing in their lives: men. She doesn’t want to end up like her Aunt Vera, buttoned awkwardly into unflattering clothes, rejected by her husband. Joyce discovers the art room at school: she falls in love with the Impressionists and eventually, with one of her teachers at the art college. In spite of the temptations of the sixties, she is determined to make their marriage and motherhood a success. When Joyce’s daughter Zoe grows up and has a baby of her own, however, she proves impatient with domestic life, and chooses a very different path.
Spanning five decades of extraordinary change in women’s lives, Everything Will Be All Right explores the complicated relationships of one family. The young ones of each generation are sure that they can correct the mistakes of their parents, and live better than they did. The truth, of course, is more opaque. Intricate, insightful and poignant, Everything Will Be All Right is a worthy successor to Tessa Hadley’s acclaimed debut, Accidents in the Home. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, limited by domesticity. When Zoe has a baby of her own, she wants to combine motherhood with an engagement in the wider world of politics and thought.

Shani's Comment.

I have just finished reading Tessa Hadley's Everythings will be All Right. Oh I do wish it would have been.

Even though there were sentences and expressions within, which I found to be very insightful, I found the whole experience of reading the book a terrible chore.

It basically was the life history of three generations of women, seen through their eyes. Their life's were full of self-inflicted grief, and it really was an account of how they got themselves into scrapes and out again, mostly involving men, and a baby thrown in for good measure (not to mention the death from meningitus).

It isn't a book I would recommend, I only finished it because I set myself the task, which felt more like hard labour, and because I met the author, who I found very interesting, unlike her tale - which appears was loosely biographical tales from her family. I also took it's promise on the cover at face value...

"Everything will be alright" - well I wished it had been, but unfortunately it wasn't. Shani 21.09.06

Writing in the Margins

2006-04-24T13:03:00.000+01:00

3 Wise Men

2006-04-05T13:00:00.000+01:00

Book Description

The power is not in the Congress, the courts or in the Whitehouse. The power is in the hands of the men manipulating them…it’s in the hands of the "3 Wise Men". Evil lurks within politics but explodes within the sanctuary of religion. When the lust for power intersects a plan to destroy the world in the name of God, who can stop the lunacy? Only one man and he is running out of time and not sure who the enemy really is. From the PublisherSenator Jack Marshall always believed that his past would come back to haunt him, but he could never have envisioned the nightmare that was about to unfold. When Jack's girlfriend and his son are kidnapped, he has no choice but to help his old partner Terry commandeer a bio-weapons facility at Sandia Lab in Albuquerque. The terrorists holding the lab threaten to unleash bio-weapons on American cities if the US interferes in the sudden and escalating violence in the Middle East. Jack can't see the connection between the threat to unleash weapons and the Middle East, but he doesn't know that Terry is in cahoots with an ex-patriot Iranian and rogue CIA agent who has promised to get him out of the country to avoid prison.
Shortly after the taking of the lab, the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia, the President of Egypt and other mid-East leaders are assassinated; and Al-Jazeera reports it's the work of the Israeli Mossad. Widespread violence ensues as the Muslims swear to take revenge on the Israelis; and despite the Israeli's insistence that they are being set up, all the evidence points to them. The US President is laid impotent by the misinformation campaign, the bio-weapons threat and the squabbling among his own advisors. On Christmas Day an historic Palestinian town is leveled by nuclear weapons and the Muslims blame Israel. The President learns it was the Israeli Defense Minister who fired the American-supplied nukes, but he and the Prime Minister of Israel, who swears he didn't order the attack, blame Al-Qaeda. When the Secretary of State learns the truth about who fired the nukes, he attempts to make it public but is assassinated on live TV. Unleashing nukes on the Palestinians is not the! act of any government or terrorist group; it's the well-calculated act of the 3 Wise Men that brings the world to the brink of Armageddon.
Jack learns the shocking truth about the 3 Wise Men; and clandestinely releases the videotaped proof to the press. The identity of the 3 Wise Men is revealed when the media broadcasts the video and the world is shocked when they find out who the terrorists really are.

The Time Traveler's Wife

2006-03-17T11:53:00.000Z

Reviews
Evening Standard‘A rare book'
SynopsisThis extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's passionate love for each other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
About the AuthorA Niffenegger: Audrey Niffenegger is in her thirties and lives in Chicago. She teaches full-time at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Excerpted from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.THE MAN OUT OF TIME
Oh not because happiness exists,that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything hereapparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange waykeeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
...Ah, but what can we take alonginto that other realm? Not the art of looking,which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,and the long experience of love,-just what is whollyunsayable.
- from The Ninth Duino Elegy,Rainer Maria Rilke,translated by Stephen Mitchell
FIRST DATE, ONE
Saturday, October 26, 1991 (Henry is 28, Clare is 20) CLARE: The library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner, although all I can see is marble. I sign the Visitors' Log: Clare Abshire, 11:15 10-26-91 Special Collections. I have never been in the Newberry Library before, and now that I've gotten past the dark, foreboding entrance I am excited. I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books. The elevator is dimly lit, almost silent. I stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a Reader's Card, then I go upstairs to Special Collections. My boot heels rap the wooden floor. The room is quiet and crowded, full of solid, heavy tables piled with books and surrounded by readers. Chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall windows. I approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips. I'm writing a paper for an art history class. My research topic is the Kelmscott Press Chaucer. I look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it. But I also want to read about papermaking at Kelmscott. The catalog is confusing. I go back to the desk to ask for help. As I explain to the woman what I am trying to find, she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me. "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," she says. I turn, prepared to start explaining again, and find myself face to face with Henry.
I am speechless. Here is Henry, calm, clothed, younger than I have ever seen him. Henry is working at the Newberry Library, standing in front of me, in the present. Here and now. I am jubilant. Henry is looking at me patiently, uncertain but polite.
"Is there something I can help you with?" he asks.
"Henry!" I can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him. It is obvious that he has never seen me before in his life.
"Have we met? I'm sorry, I don't. . . ." Henry is glancing around us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory and realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him. The last time I saw him he was sucking my toes in the Meadow.
I try to explain. "I'm Clare Abshire. I knew you when I was a little girl..." I'm at a loss because I am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all. Everything is in the future for him. I want to laugh at the weirdness of the whole thing. I'm flooded with years of knowledge of Henry, while he's looking at me perplexed and fearful. Henry wearing my dad's old fishing trousers, patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables, French verbs, all the state capitals; Henry laughing at some peculiar lunch my seven-year-old self has brought to the Meadow; Henry wearing a tuxedo, undoing the studs of his shirt with shaking hands on my eighteenth birthday. Here! Now! "Come and have coffee with me, or dinner or something. . . ." Surely he has to say yes, this Henry who loves me in the past and the future must love me now in some bat-squeak echo of other time. To my immense relief he does say yes.We plan to meet tonight at a nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amazed gaze of the woman behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about Kelmscott and Chaucer and floating down the marble stairs, through the lobby and out into the October Chicago sun, running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels, whooping and rejoicing. HENRY: It's a routine day in October, sunny and crisp. I'm at work in a small windowless humidity-controlled room on the fourth floor of the Newberry, cataloging a collection of marbled papers that has recently been donated. The papers are beautiful, but cataloging is dull, and I am feeling bored and sorry for myself. In fact, I am feeling old, in the way only a twenty-eight-year-old can after staying up half the night drinking overpriced vodka and trying,without success, to win himself back into the good graces of Ingrid Carmichel. We spent the entire evening fighting, and now I can't even remember what we were fighting about. My head is throbbing. I need coffee. Leaving the marbled papers in a state of controlled chaos, I walk through the office and past the page's desk in the Reading Room. I am halted by Isabelle's voice saying, "Perhaps Mr. DeTamble can help you," by which she means "Henry, you weasel, where are you slinking off to?"And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches.Obviously she knows me, and I don't know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised to this luminous creature, so I am forced to say in my best librarianese, "Is there something I can help you with?" The girl sort of breathes "Henry!" in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some point in time we have a really amazing thing together. This makes it worse that I don't know anything about her, not even her name.

Writing in the Margins: Quotations that reflect my Soul

2006-02-17T00:11:00.000Z

Writing in the Margins: Quotations that reflect my Soul

Romantic Poems

2006-02-14T12:38:00.000Z

A VALENTINE POEM

What is love,
but the piercing of the heart's shell
a liberation, refutingthe distance
between you and me,
us and them.

A unifying force, it raises us
beyond our former consciousness,
reveals the possibility of no horizons
but those of our own choosing.

By Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, 2/14/06

Driving Over Lemons

2006-02-08T10:51:00.000Z

Amazon.co.uk Review

All Provenced out? Then head further south, to the breathtaking mountainous climes of Andalucia. Just don't be squeamish about driving over lemons. Chris Stewart, skilled sheep-shearer and sometime Genesis drummer, took one look at the Alpujarrás, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and decided that's where he wanted to be. This is the story of his adventures coming to terms with the terrain, the lifestyle and, of course, the locals, who possess all the rugged, homespun charm you'd expect. Stewart soon discovers all the hidden foibles of his bargain purchase, and spends the following year (rendered here in detail) installing the little luxuries of life like, say, water.
However, just when you're worrying that all this might degenerate into a rose-tinted Englishman-finds-nature idyll, Chris's wife enters the fray. Nonsense-free, straight-talking and relentlessly unsentimental, Ada should be a required resource for all travel writers. Ada gets bored with the fake machismo of pig-killing, Ada sees through the selfless "help" of the natives, Ada calls a peasant a peasant. With her on board, Stewart has the perfect counterbalance to his declared optimism, and Driving over Lemons becomes a loving but clear-sighted encomium, economically and wittily written, to a wonderful part of the world. --Alan Stewart
Reviews
Elisabeth Luard. Daily Mail. May 28th 1999."A wonderful book: funny, affectionate, no hint of patronage, a true portrait of place and people, reaching deep into the flesh and bones beneath the skin. Tuck it into your holiday luggage and dream"
The Observer (Travel) - 27th June 1999"A delight".

Shani's Comments: I decided to read the first of these books, after having enjoyed the "sequel" so much. It is early days - but I am not disappointed.

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

2006-02-03T16:54:00.000Z

Synopsis

Chris Stewart turns another leaf on his life in southern Spain in this "Sort Of" sequel to his biography, "Driving Over Lemons". It is in fact part sequel - further (mis)adventures of Chris and his family on their remote Andalusian farm - and part prequel, looking back on Chris's previous lives, drumming with the teenage Genesis and in a circus, shearing sheep in midwinter Sweden and heading off to Spain to learn flamenco guitar.

About the Author

Chris Stewart prepared for life on a mountain farm in Spain with jobs of doubtful relevance. After leaving Genesis (he drummed on the first single), he joined a circus, learnt how to shear sheep, crewed a yacht in Greece, went to China for the Rough Guides, gained a pilot's license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking. Since writing the bestselling Driving Over Lemons, Chris, Ana and their daughter Chlöe continue to live on their farm, with their dogs, cats, chicken and sheep, and to Ana's regret, a brand new guitar.

Shani's comment: I loved this book, a series of connected scenarios giving a flavour and indication of how life in spain is conducted.

The Peppered Moth - Margaret Drabble

2006-01-26T22:40:00.000Z

I have just tonight finished reading "the Peppered Moth" by Margaret Drabble.

So then emboldened by this decided to give the discarded “The Peppered Moth” by Margaret Drabble a whirl. BCID: 487-3534075

Well – the Daily Mail described this book as “Wonderfully fluent and engrossing…dazzling” – they lied is all I have to say. I found the tone patronising and positively nasal in some parts of the tale…
“Now let us return to….” Or “We will hear about that later” The Narrator (which on the last page we discover was in fact the author talking through her psychotherapist, or some sort of excuse vaguely familiar… The author should have been renamed Margaret Dribble. She does though explain her difficulties with sorting out who should tell the story and how she had a difficult relationship with her Mother, on whom the book is based.

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Peppered Moth, Margaret Drabble's first novel for five years, tells the stories of four generations of one family, homing in on the female line, and attempts to explain how genes, DNA and environment can change or challenge an individual. The tale begins with Bessie Bawtry, a gifted young woman from a South Yorkshire mining town, who does not live up to her promise, and ends with her granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, "a bobby dazzler" who's radiant with opportunities and ideas, but who still isn't quite making the most of what she has.
It would be a fairly straightforward and enjoyable tale of family life and inherited characteristics, but for Drabble's tone which is, frankly, uneasy. It wavers from the cod nature documentary voice-over of "we must try to rediscover the long-ago infant in her vanished world" to the embarrassingly elegiac "o poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you?"
The afterword goes a long way to explaining this waywardness. Bessie Bawtry, with her hard-won education, her relinquishing lapses into illness, her life of continually deferred pleasures, is based on Drabble's mother, and Bessie's marriage to kindly Joe Barron, and his "lifetime of tragic appeasement", is the fictionalised account of her parent's relationship, in all its bitter tensions. Consequently, there is the sense of filling in biographical gaps with fictional plots and characters, and then carefully spreading thin scientific metaphor over the whole to smooth everything out nicely. Unfortunately it doesn't work; Drabble is too personally involved and her prose suffers for it. It juts and jars at awkward angles, a gawky adolescent of a book rather than a mature, measured reflection on the consequences of family history. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis

It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. At the other end of the century her granddaughter, Faro, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the town where her grandmother grew up and sees the families who have lived there for longer than anyone can remember. But for all her exotic ancestry and glamour, has she really travelled any further than them?

Our Dancing Days - Lucy English

2006-01-01T23:13:00.000Z

Lucy English – Our Dancing Days…Now what on earth was that
all about…..?

I read this on the back of Lucy English’s previous novel Children of Light – which I had found excellent. I found the first few pages very interesting and set the scene well… then we went off on a journey around and through a number of characters, none of which I was particularly sympathetic or even interested in. They were predictable cardboard cut outs…Downward spiral to tragedy…the death scene was thrown away, and I still expected the hero/villain to appear at the end of the book. Boring and trite. BCID: 592-3534079

Book Description
When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill bohemian, inherits St John's, a run-down medieval manor house in the depths of the Suffolk countryside, he decides to form a commune with Tessa, an artist, and her friend Deedee. They have an idealist's dream of self-sufficiency, sharing and harmony that seems initially to succeed. It is only when they try to build on this fantasy by introducing others - the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, and single mother Helen and her disturbed small daughter Beauty - that the balance is upset. Tensions emerge and friction builds until a tragic accident finally separates them. Years later, Tessa returns to the house to face again the tragedy that made her flee St John's and come to terms with the fact that her friends betrayed her.
Synopsis
Lucy English's third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy. When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs -- the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty -- that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.