octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is a chatty, readable autobiography from Olivia Hussey. I remember studying Romeo and Juliet in high school (I'd been hoping, fruitlessly, for Macbeth) and the teacher showed us the Zeffirelli film. It was excellent, and so when I saw this book at the library I picked it up out of nostalgia, I guess. Hussey's recollections of the filming was the most interesting part of the book, and it makes me want to see it again sometime.

The rest of the book's adequate. Damning with faint praise, I know, but there it is. Hussey comes across as kind and - as she herself admits several times - almost painfully naive, but while both these characteristics are sympathetic they're not really the issue here. The book consists of a series of (often very) short chapters that are more individual memories strung together than a cohesive whole. It's all a little bit superficial, is what I'm saying, and when the acknowledgements came at the end, it became clear that the book was written with the help of her son, a "first-time writer." It shows. I think the word that most comes to mind regarding both the prose and the narrative is "workmanlike." Interesting woman, interesting life, and I enjoyed the book, but I can't help but think it could have used a little polishing. 

I've had a couple of volumes of poetry published myself, yet I can't honestly say that, if imprisoned by my government for entirely spurious reasons, I'd have the willpower to write more. Yet that's what Mapanje has done, and the anger and resentment that resonates through this collection is palpable. There's one terribly affecting poem here about finally being released just two months after his mother's death, after she waited years for him to be set free. Another, too, about one of his own banned books, and the injustice of censorship, is equally compelling. Furthermore, one of the included poems here is titled "Where Dissent Is Meat for Crocodiles" and that is in itself, I think, a warning of the necessity of freedom of speech, and how badly a government becomes corrupted when trying to undermine it.

I know, it must be said, vanishingly little about the history of Malawi, and so I'm sure that much of this went over my head. However, the experiences of a persecuted writer are something I'm always going to sympathise with, and that's entirely beside the empathy one human being should feel for another under the appalling circumstances that Mapanje and his fellow inmates suffered. 

Okay, this is a doorstopper of a biography, but I was so interested, and it was so well-written, that it ended up seeming a lot shorter than it was. Given that it was sitting on my bookshelf for weeks, looking intimidating, I'm quite pleased about that. Jackson's last two novels are amongst my favourites - Hill House has the greatest opening paragraph of all time - and while I haven't read all her work, everything I have read I loved, so this bio has been on my to-read list for some time.

It's definitely well worth reading. I didn't know much of anything about Jackson's life before this, and I'm almost sorry to know more now. She's a fascinating woman, but that jerk of a husband, and that endlessly carping mother... I wanted her to get shot of them both and live her life freely with her books and cups of stars and piles of rotten fruit to throw at them whenever they started trying to put her down again. As unfortunate as I find them, however, some of the themes of her stories are now a little more illuminated by their presence. Franklin draws clear connections, and her sympathetic and incredibly well-researched reporting of Jackson's life is genuinely compelling. 

I read and reviewed each of the three volumes collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The first volume earned three stars from me, and the two following books each earned four, so the collection rating is an average of these, rounded up.

In a sense, the three books collected here are the same story. Each is a story about two men, one of whom investigates the other as the professions of writer and detective become absolutely intertwined. Each of these efforts results in an obsession that undermines the sanity of the investigator, and leaves him unsure not only of his own identity, but that of his target. City of Glass, the first version, is I think a little clumsier than the others; the protagonist becomes obsessed in immediately alarming ways - almost incredible ways, in that I find it difficult to give them any credence. The descent into compulsion and compromise is more measured in the later books, and because of that they feel more immediately convincing. That drew me in as a reader, making me feel as if the books' laser focus on the investigated man somehow made me an active participant in the act of watching. It's very effectively done, and how disturbing it is creeps up only very slowly. 

The last volume in this trilogy, and it's as weird and unexplainable as the first. An unpublished writer disappears, and his wife contacts an old friend of the disappeared man, asking him to take over her husband's literary effects. As with the rest of the volumes in this series, obsession quickly follows. The absent Fanshawe looms larger and larger in his friend's mind, and the two begin to merge, almost, into a single undermined entity. Fanshawe's actions are never entirely explained - even when he tries to justify himself, it's confused and unconvincing - and I'm left feeling that the two men are never quite stable, or even sane... that each has compromised his identity in ways that can never really be remediated. It's all very odd, and yet the slow collusion, the continued compromises between them, begin to be actually understandable. That's genuinely and effectively disturbing, and if the book leaves me baffled, I'm interested and baffled, which is something. 

I'm not entirely sure if this charming novel is in fact magical realism, but it certainly verges on it, and I get the same feeling from it as I often get from other magical realist texts, so why not. There's not, it must be said, a great deal of plot here. Just a tiny, isolated village in the mountains of Armenia, and how the small population struggles to survive there when earthquakes, mudslides, famine, and the conflicts of the outside world strip that village of its population over generations. I don't know that I'd call it "delightful," because it is in many places too sad for that, but that sadness is beautifully leavened by joy and genuine friendships, and the strongly drawn relationships between the inhabitants of Maran are the real strength of this book. It's warm and sad and there's a lovely romance between two older people who are basically looking not to die alone, but who are surprised to find that their relationship is more satisfying than they could ever expect.

There's something very kind about the tone of this book, and I appreciate that. It's going on my to-buy list, that's for sure, once this copy goes back to the library. 

I don't know why I liked this better than the first volume in the series, especially as they're essentially the same story. Well, this one's shorter. That might do it. Although, that shorter length may result from this volume being absolutely pared down to essentials, with a laser focus on its subject. Blue, a private investigator, is hired to surveil Black, in what is perhaps the most boring watch-job in history. Black's a writer, and his day pretty much consists of spending his hours at home, writing at his desk, with the occasional exciting trip to the grocery story. Blue's understandably bored out of his mind, and his coping strategy is to become absolutely obsessed with the minutiae of Black's life, no matter how much this obsession with another man's life torpedoes his own.

The entertaining thing about this, and by far the most interesting part of it, is how the reader's made into just another watcher, albeit one as focused on Blue as Blue is on Black. It's a sort of nesting doll of obsessive gaze, and the book's just short enough that this reflected experience is a compelling one. 

This was just plain enjoyable to read. The short stories collected here are vivid and frequently violent, portraits of poverty that have an occasional edge of the fantastic. One of them begins with an ox exploding, another (the only straight fantasy of the bunch) involves an elderly man who coughs up a crow with an apparent hotline to the dead. The endings tend to the abrupt, or to the unexplained, and while there's a lot of tragedy here it's often undercut by a sort of wry humour. I was just very, very entertained - I love short stories and read a lot of them, and this is one of those collections where I'm going to have to get my own copy, I think, because I'll miss this one when it goes back to the library. 

Interesting novella, if somewhat flawed. I like the idea - that modern day political upheaval in Eastern Europe has resulted in Dracula being dispossessed of his lands, so he ends up in Mexico City, which has the twin advantages of being highly populated (lots of food!) and possessed of a useless, corrupt legal system... both great advantages to a predator. And as with the original text, a lot of this is filtered through a helpless lawyer, initially employed to procure accommodation for the traveler. 

I found it pretty compelling up until the last quarter or so, I think, where it all falls slightly apart for me. I'm not sure why, exactly, except that I found the ending less convincing than the rest of it. Yet thinking of it now, as I write this short review, I wonder if I haven't misinterpreted. The destruction of the lawyer's family - the corruption of it, rather - is simply playing on that existing theme, except this time it's domestic rather than political corruption, as the weaknesses of a grieving parent cause a surviving child to be given up to horror rather than sheltered from it. If so, it's cleverly done, but I think I would have liked to see the political parallels played up a little more in order to really underline the connection... because that domestic corruption could have happened anywhere, so I wonder if the book really utilised its setting to the fullest extent. 

This picks up nicely after an extremely slow start - I was tempted to stop reading, but in the end I was glad that I didn't. This isn't your usual sort of mystery, though. Nothing is solved, and nothing is certain. More than anything, it reminds me of works by the Japanese writer Kōbō Abe, if more embedded in realism. The protagonist, Quinn, is mistaken for a private detective and decides to run with the deception, become ever more obsessive in his quest to complete his assignment. Homelessness and a mental health crisis follow, and it's all put together very well, with a lot of thought behind it... but there's also no emotional effect whatsoever, at least for me. Abe often induces a real sense of horror as his characters seek to navigate a shifting and unstable world, but the presentation of Quinn is so deadened, emotionally, that while I can appreciate the story here on an intellectual level, I just don't feel anything for it.