Books read in the holidays

Posession: A.S. Byatt
She's come undone: W. Lamb
The Secret River: K. Grenville
Romulus, My Father: Raimond Gaita

brick lane

Just a short write up: I’ve got lots to catch up on…and holiday again next week and I’ve just been to the library to lend a stack of other books…

So, brick lane, by Monica Ali. Set in London, through through a correspondence, Dhaka in Bangladesh is also a background to the novel, brick lane is seen through the eyes of namzeen, a young moslim bangladeshi who moves to London with her husband, product of an arranged marriage. I liked several things about the book: the thoroughly portrayed characters, the changes in the sfeer and setting of a ethically populated housing estate in urban England over the last decade (very recognizable in the suburbs of my home town too), the variation in narration. Less convincing I though was the development and growth of the main character: her sudden move to take charge of her life and not leave things ‘up to fate’ made less of an impact on me than the depiction of the surroundings, and I couldn’t really grow to like or empathize with her. I guess her passivity, her inability to play an actrive part in the life going on around her, sometimes irritated me (I’ve had the same feeling in several books where the main character, often a woman, stands back and observes). While her husband, chanu was less likeable, I found him more understandable and could fathom his motives more than I could hers. The contrast between her life in London, and the life of her sister, who’d always fought fate, was a little unsubtle, but had the effect of wanting to read more, to see in which direction the winds of fate would push both ‘unlucky’ sisters.

ok, this was a bit strange: reading an originally dutch book translated into english by an iranian writer, Kader Abdolah (aka Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani): my father's notebook. i was looking in the library and came across it. i always try to read books in their original language, but all the dutch copies were out. it was a quick read: on holiday at last and i had lots of time to power-read through 3 books...to be honest, i wasn’t too inspired by it, due partly to the writing style, and partly possibly due to translation problems or the nature of the original language (as i've mentioned earlier, dutch is a short, sharp and concise language and the sentences in the book were also to the point, and sometimes a bit stilted i thought). the book tells the story of a father and son in iran through two perspectives, the son himself, and an omniscient narrator who lives in the netherlands. i kept associating the two and maybe they were one and the same after all, i'm not sure. I even started thinking the book was semi autobiographical, as the author also studied at the university of Teheran like the son, was involved in left-wing politics, and fled from iran to the Netherlands in 1985.

the story tells the story of the life of the father, a deaf mute, and the life of the son (of course interwoven with the father's life), with the tumultuous history of iran unfolding in the background (the shah’s, the left communist movement, the ayatollah). these were interesting parts for me, as i didn't really know much about the recent history of iran and always like books that tell the story of a country or time period as well as about its characters. the writing style bugged me sometimes: the author added seeming unnecessary sentences and dialogue in parts of the book; other sections seemed to jump back and forth like the ramblings of the authors mind, without helping the reader to understand why these associations came to mind. the end was quite abrupt, with one of the characters disappearing never to reappear. but I guess that was what hit me the most after reading this book: the lives that even everyday people live in countries ruled by dictators. how a man grown up in a village can end up fleeing his country of birth over the mountains (for writing subversive pamphlets) and end up in the netherlands, never to see his father again…and survive to tell the tale

brother fish

brother fish is a nice big chunky read by Bryce Courtenay, this is the most recent book on the 'back to the library' pile. i've read a few of Courtenay's other books (The Power of One, Thommo and Hawk) and my brother's a huge fan, so it wasn't an unexpected choice when i saw it in the new books section at the library. brother fish is a story about mateship and the aussie battler, something typically australian, combined with something also typically australian - undercurrents of narrow-mindedness, racism and grappling with a national identity. narrated by brother fish himself: jacko, who is a tasmanian from a poor fishing background with the luck to have been taken under the wing of the local unmarried former english rose spinster -librarian and justice of the peace - (hence the mix of aussie slang with wordy literary passages). he goes off to war (korea, a neglected war in the Australian history books) and meets jimmy, an african american who has the knack of bringing the best out in everyone and united men for the greater good, even in the most awful of circumstances. however, jimmy consistently refuses credit for these personal virtues and attributes their successes to jacko's prowess as a harmonica player (his nickname is derived from a folksong that he learned from a korean guard). their friendship is the backbone of the story and a good half of the book tells (at great length) of their experiences as POW in various locations. the second half of the book focuses on what they do after the war - return to tasmania and resume the friendship (and tutelage) of the librarian, building a (cray)fishing empire and learning more about the mysterious past of the librarian.

while the book is an easy read, a real yarn which connects you from the beginning with the well fleshed out characters, i found myself several times in the book wondering where on earth it was heading to, and how it would ever draw to a close. it probably would have been just as good a read for me if he had rounded things off after the war, as the second half was fun to read but i missed the substance and a strong reason to keep reading. Courtenay does make a point in the second half of the book, that insidious racism still very apparent in australia today, and even more blatantly then: the white australia policy being the reason why jimmy must struggle to be allowed to settle in tasmania in the first place. while it's a story you would probably hear at any anzac day breakfast, it's well researched and full of facts and figures neatly disguised in colloquialisms.

slaap

this is my bookclub book, by a Flemish author, Annalies Verbeke, and i'm reading through it in a hurry as we're meeting tonight...i'm not too enthralled by the book, though the idea behind is is interesting, and it received a heap of accolades in the Dutch press. The book focuses on two characters who both suffer from insomnia, we begin with Maya who seems to have just begun to have trouble sleeping, though later she reveals having problems sleeping from an early age. her lack of sleep causes her to be jealous of all those who can shut their eyes and drift away to the land of nod. when the rest of the world is in bed, she roams the streets in search of mischief. during one of these nightly escapades whe meets Benoit, who is also awake, and also can't sleep.

intersting idea, right? however, the book is written in typical blunt first person Dutch, in your face and leaving nothing to the imagination, though at the same time through the lack of adjectives the feelings and emotions of the characters remain blunted. each chapter is written from the perspective of either Maya or Benoit, and you learn more about their backgrounds and histories, but still seem to remain at a distance. maybe it's just my oft felt irritation at the shortcomings of the Dutch language and my own shortcomings in being able to properly understand the subtleties of Dutch writing: i often have the feeling i'm readingthrough cotton wool and am missing half of the nitty gritty stuff. either i'm missing it, or it's not there, and i'm never sure which is the right conclusion to drwaw...maybe i'll gain some more insights on my reading of the book after tonights bookclub meeting...

the optimistic child

ok, enough about work, back to reading..quite appropriately, before the latstest workcrisis broke out i was reading 'The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience' by Martin Seligman. it's a down to earth, easy access guide for parents to help them 'avoid' bringing up their children as pessimists, according to Seligman something that has become a 'trendy' thing to be...which is something i ddin't automatically link with the average american citizen. i always had a sterotyped idea of americans being on average overly optimistic and self-assured, but if you believe the author, the current generation of american children (at least, back in '95 when the book was published) are growing up making unhelpful attributions, what Seligman coins the 3 p's: pervasiveness, permanence and personal explanations about things that go wrong. if these 3 p's characterize a childs thinking, they are more likely to show depressive symptoms.

the book give tips to parenst on how to check whether their child has depressive symptoms, and also makes has a 3 P thinking style. and also gives nice examples of how to combat this negative way of thinking and promote an optimistic way of thinking (but not overly so, that point is made clear in the book a few times - the idea is that the child starts thinking realistically, not blindly making external atttributions for everything)

Seligman is famous for coining the term 'learned helplessness' (and demonstrating it empirically), and for being an advocate of positive psychology.

for me, it was nice to get the full picture of the theory of learned helplessness, and how it can relate to bringing up your kids as positive thinking people: the idea that there are certain ways of explaining events and attributing causes leading to depression -like if you think that something will never change, why bother. in his experiments they gave dogs electroshocks and when the dogs couldn't escape them (they had no control over the adminstration of them), they began to show symptoms like not eating, listelessness, etc.

at the moment i sort of feel like i have no control over the shocks life is throwing my way. my life is characterized by weird fluctuations - periods in which everything goes well - feeling intense happiness at the sight of the smallest things - an embracing couple, a child reaching for his mother. and then i wake up and the world is somehow less rosy, and my pessimistic 3 P way of thinking gets activated. then everything is a blur and i feel like i'm being dragged through the day by my hair, carried by a current in my own glass bubble. i guess i feel sometimes that i don't have any control over what life throws at me, and at those times i have less energie to say to myself that i can exert some influence. thinking away the 3 Ps is easier said than done, but acknowledging them is the first step i guess.

geen afleiding

nu kan zelfs een goede boek me niet afleiden...volgens mij is het project echt op een breekpunt – conflict tussen mijn leidinggevenden en ze kunnen allebei nu heel moeilijk terugkrabbelen en toegeven. nu afwachten, volgens mij kunnen we nu niets doen behalve dat. en dan…tja, het is echt heel lastig om te voorspellen…