octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is an adaptation of an Agatha Christie play, Black Coffee, which I read a month or two back. It's not written by Christie herself, having been adapted long after her death, but it's very much in her style. It's a straight adaptation of the play, with very little added or altered, so the novel itself is not particularly long, and its main advantage is that it's rather more easily accessible than the play. (It's taken me years to track down a copy of the play - there's one in the Auckland Public Library, however). The novel is much more widely available. And it's enjoyable, too, in exactly the same way that the play was enjoyable: a well-constructed mystery, with Poirot being Poirot. You know exactly what you're going to get, and if it doesn't reach the heights of some of Christie's better work, it's still an entertaining couple of hours. 

This is a sort of very grim farce, or so I thought at first, but by the end it was just very grim. The humour fell off when the main character started being tortured, and don't get your hopes up for a happy ending. That being said, there's a very appealing sort of unreality going on here - the book's set in an Albanian city at the time of the WW2, and subsequently in the time of Stalin. It's not a fairy tale, but there are aspects of the book that could be interpreted as being influenced by fairy tales. Which is a useless description in itself, but the potential for doppelgangers, and for the dead turning up as dinner guests, are seeded through the text, albeit with subtlety and great restraint. It all tangles together in a mix of interrogation and multiple remembrances, all of which take place in a setting characterised first by war, and then by the kind of seeping, amorphous institutional instability that you'd find in Kafka... and because of this, when what initially appears as comedy turns to tragedy, there's really no adequate explanation or justification for any of it.

It's weird and interesting, anyway. I've never read anything by Kadare before. Unfortunately, I think this is the only book of his the library has here. I'll have to keep an eye out though, because I'd like to read more from him. 

What an inspiring read this is! And honestly, it's one that makes me feel a little lazy and incompetent. Kamkwamba, who has to drop out of his first year of secondary school, due to a drought that has catapulted his farming family - his entire country - into starvation and abject poverty, resorts to the local primary school library, trying not to fall completely behind the kids his age who are able to stay on in school. In the library he finds a book about energy, and his inventive brain - the product of a boy who is desperate to be a scientist - uses the book, and the bits of scrap he can find in a local junkyard, to build a windmill that brings electricity to his home. It's absolutely incredible what he manages to accomplish with the most basic resources. Lacking a drill, for example, he forces a nail into a corncob and, using the cob as a handle, heats the nail in a fire, until it's hot and he can push it through metal. 

Thankfully, by the end of the book his innovation has been recognised, and he's not only speaking at a TED talk, but has accrued enough sponsorship that he's able to continue his education. And while it's honestly terrible that he has to be a genius before he's allowed an education - think of all the kids who aren't nearly so lucky, but would still benefit enormously from the same - it's also such a relief to know that this amazing kid and his dream of being a scientist succeed in the end. Because if he didn't... what a criminal waste that would have been. (What a criminal waste it is for any kid to go without like this.)

Also, if this book isn't an argument for the necessity of libraries, I don't know what is. 

I read and reviewed both of these books separately, so this is basically for my own records. Both books got three stars from me, so it was easy to rate the box set. They're fun romance stories, and Don has an amusing voice, although all the humour comes from a thought process that he doesn't find funny at all. Don isn't neurotypical, and his attempts to navigate the world around him, to fall in love and have children, are complicated by the fact that he finds it difficult to communicate effectively, and to empathise, with people who are. That said, he's still a genuinely good person, so I want to see him succeed... although, as I commented in both individual reviews, it does feel as though I'm expected to laugh at him, instead of with him, which is less rewarding. 

I liked this, but not as much as the first book. I know it's humour, and it's relying on artificial exaggeration for effect, but the circumstances that Don routinely finds himself in were often so far over-the-top that it seemed forced - being mistake for both a paedophile and a terrorist stretched my credulity to breaking point. It was still funny, but as with the first book - more so, actually - I felt as if I were being invited to laugh at Don, rather than with him. I do think that the secondary characters introduced a welcome attempt at balance, though. Especially Dave, the refrigerator guy. I liked him. Don's most appealing in his friendships; he tries very hard to be a good friend, and earns his successes there. 

Wilde's complete works are in many ways, I think, a mixed bag. I did not care for his (extremely purple) poetry - with the exception of "The Ballad of Reading Goal," which was quite unlike the rest and therefore outstanding. I did not much care for his essays either, finding them witty, but not witty enough to make up for their pontificating length. His short fairy stories can be mawkish. His one novel has a fantastic idea and is perfectly interesting, but not outstanding. However. However. The Importance of Being Ernest is delightful in every respect, and any collection that contains it, Lady Windermere's Fan, and "Reading Goal" deserves at least four stars.

His plays are the best of him, I think. The more famous ones, at least. Some of the minor plays don't reach above average, and one (Salome) is absolutely dire. Reading the plays, there are so many lines that have come into common use, so many quotable instances, so much humour and wit, that Wilde's reputation deservedly rests on them. I think if I were completely honest in my averages, this would probably be more like three and a half stars from me, but I love "Reading Goal" to the bitter end, it's one of my favourite pieces of poetry, and it and the two plays mentioned above are dragging the rating up by sheer strength. 

This is very witty, and as with the other plays I've read by Wilde, I recognise a number of lines. He's certainly a very quotable writer! I can't help but think that more attention has been given to the prose than to the story, however - and it does seem a bit lumpen, that story. Perhaps it's because the romance in it is only a secondary thing, between two secondary characters? For the most part it's a straight drama that centres on the confrontation of Lord Illingham with the woman who, twenty years ago, he'd seduced and abandoned. Much of the play is concerned with the differing standards that men and women are held to under such circumstances: she is ruined, while he is allowed back into decent society, even if he is the more at fault. I'm completely with Wilde on this, and I suspect with a very good actress Mrs. Arbuthnot would be enormously affecting - she's affecting even when only reading the play - but I read Lady Windermere's Fan a couple of days ago, also by Wilde, and when it comes to portraits of so-called fallen women, Mrs. Erlynne leaves Mrs. Arbuthnot for dead. 

I think I like this just slightly better than Wilde's Happy Prince collection, not that I don't enjoy its title story, but overall Pomegranates is a little less mawkish in its moralism, although the final story in the collection, "The Star-Child," certainly wallows in its sacrificial sentiments. Of all Wilde's short stories, though, I think my favourite, which I've just read here for the first time, is "The Fisherman and His Soul," which reads like a deliberate response to Anderson's "The Little Mermaid," another fairy story I've always enjoyed.

I have to say, though, points to "The Birthday of the Infanta," which has a conclusion of breathtakingly thoughtless cruelty, and is therefore far more effective in its moralism than stories such as "The Nightingale and the Rose" (from Prince). 

Lady Windermere's marriage is on the brink, as her husband is giving away great gobs of time and money to some strumpet. Lives are about to be ruined, until the other woman (who is not quite the other woman) manages a reconciliation. It's quite obvious just who Mrs. Erlynne is some time before the big reveal, and the misunderstandings here are entirely based on the Idiot Plot device of characters who refuse to communicate sensibly with each other, but it's still very witty and quite touching. Mrs. Erlynne is the most compelling character of the lot, but then she's got the backstory for it.

I've only ever read this, and never seen it performed, but it's going on my list of plays I really want to see. I have a feeling that the humour and emotional effects will be heightened through performance, which is something that should happen with plays as a matter of course, but frequently doesn't. I don't know if I'd find it as purely entertaining as The Importance of Being Ernest, but it would come a close second. As in that play, I kept coming across lines that I knew, lines that have come into common parlance, and having the happy realisation that this was where they came from. 

A short collection of five fairy stories by Oscar Wilde. Three of them, admittedly, are rather mawkish, and I say that even though I really do like "The Happy Prince" very much indeed. That sickly sentimentality tips rather too far in "The Nightingale and the Rose," however, and Wilde's simpering sense of sacrifice, sacrifice beyond all sense, pops up again in "The Devoted Friend." I think I am supposed to feel sorry for poor downtrodden Hans, but I don't. The Miller is a terrible person, a user of the first degree, but when someone is so desperate to be a doormat, well, I won't say that they invite people to tread on them, because that is awful, but Hans might as well have written Kick Me! all over himself in indelible ink. I can't help but think that the Miller, as with the titular protagonist of "The Remarkable Rocket," represent some of the strongest characterisation here, even if they are satire. Everyone else is just so unrelentingly saintly, especially the poor doomed birds. Wilde does love his doomed little birds.