Freewheeling Andy
-
Posts
1,119 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Books
Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
-
-
I started on it yesterday, Kell, then finished A Traveller's Life. About to get more stuck in. The style isn't exactly what I was expecting, but I really need to read more to get a stronger opinion.
-
It's a big novel, and incredibly rich. The subjects covered, of immigration and separation, of loss and so on, are taken on with very light touch.
-
Update: Finished Wicked, so will try and post a review soon. I've also updated my Want list after reading two fantastic articles last week by Oliver James and Kate Figes, and after getting a couple of recommendations from a friend (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Carter Beats the Devil).
I absolutely love Kavalier and Clay. It's a wonderful book. I hope you enjoy it.
-
I've heard mixed reviews of Kafka on the Shore. I love Murukami, but perhaps he's not for everyone. The people who've loved stuff like A Wild Sheep Chase or Norwegian Wood weren't completely excited by Kafka, though, so it may be worth trying something else.
-
I'll agree about Merlot. As a grape variety it makes smooth, fairly easy to drink red wines. Sort of full, and fruity, I'd say.
Shiraz is a grape, like merlot, Pontalba. (It's called Syrah by the French, but they're the same thing). Shiraz is fairly accessible, I think, but it's generally much bigger and bolder in terms of flavour, and you tend to get blackcurrenty kinds of tastes. The most famous of the French shiraz wines are Cotes du Rhone ones like Chateauneuf du Papes, but it's safer, and probably better (until you're spending a bit more), to drink Australian shiraz .
-
Ah. Oops. There I go being an idiot. Sorry. We weren't staying at Quartier Francais, but somewhere else with a French name (Manoir de Brendel - not that great). We did eat at the bistro at Quartier Francais, after despreately trying, but failing miserably, to get into the tasting room.
The best meal in Franschoek was at Le Petit Ferme, which was just above Hautes Cabrieres, on a glorious road which went over a lovely pass and into a national park area. The best wine was probably at Warwick, where all the wine was fantastic; although Boukenhootskloof (if I've spelt that right) was also impressive - we love their "Chocolate Block".
The whole winelands area was brilliant, as was Constantia on the Cape.
-
Was the tasting room as good as it was meant to be? It has an amazing reputation.
-
Andy we stayed in Franschoek in Le Quartier Fran
-
I had a grim Greek wine last night. Best avoided.
-
I really like the Graham Beck wines. I think some of them are excellent (as is his sparkling "champagne"). We were staying about 3 miles from the winery when we were in Franschoek over New Year.
-
Don't feel bad at all. I only discovered him a couple of years ago, through a website recommendation.
I partly posted this in the hope that other people might find the name and see some interesting subjects.
The Soccer War is astonishing, just for the number of revolutions and civil wars he accidentally finds himself in. There's one particular scene where he's walking around pitch dark Honduras trying to find his hotel in the middle of an air raid.
-
Died yesterday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6293005.stm
I've only read The Soccer War of his books, but it's a great book, and he was a fascinating author. I must read Imperium.
Anyone else read any?
-
I'm not a big fan of decective stuff on the whole, like you, but I love The Big Sleep. I'm not quite sure why. It might be the atmosphere that's generated, that it's not so much "Whodunnit?" It's more about Marlowe with the investigation running in parallel.
-
First I need to declare an interest: Rachel was in my year at school, and one of my best friends from school was very good friends with her.
Anyway, she was nominated for a Booker for her first novel, and this is her first collection of short stories. It seems that many of the themes from the novel are carried through into the more interesting of the stories.
I guess you could categorise them into the political and non-political. The non-political ones seem to be non-stories, really, and I didn't much enjoy them. They're "family does something, er, that's it" vignettes that might have worked in school creative writing, but I don't think they do much for me.
The better stuff is the "political". Rachel has German parents, and has been living in Berlin for a while now. And the interesting stories are about the jarring nature of the interaction of German past with German present, either of the Nazi and war-time past jutting up against modern liberal Germany; or equally hard, the jarring of the communist East jutting up against modern, commercial Germany. These, plus stories set across eastern European frontiers, show fascinating insight into the contrasts that exist, and more crucially (and less widely reported) the impacts of these contrasts on individuals and families.
Anyway, half of these stories are great. Half are just a bit dull, really.
-
This brief book is wonderful. It's one of those books that written in a crisp, empty way, where as much as said between the lines as is written in the text itself. A mere 200 pages, of sparse, clear literature.
My initial reaction to the premise - a bleak book which won the Booker prize, written about a university professor - was worse than trepidation. These are all kinds of pointers to a book I don't want to read. Yet, on the persuasion of friends with better taste than myself, I read it. And was not disappointed.
The story is really quite simple - a rather lecherous old professor, whose powers in his field of work are failing as much as his powers in romance, has a brief fling with one of his students, and rather than admit he was in the wrong, he leaves the university in Cape Town.
In disgrace he leaves for the rural setting where his daughter is trying to run a small farm. All his chauvinistic prejudices are then shown to carry through to his views about his daughter and her attitude to life. Then, just as he settles in to his life on the farm, reassessing his own lack of skills, there is a brutal, violent attack. This brings into focus the violence and the racial edge of modern South Africa.
The core of this book is about how people with rigid views deal with, or fail to deal with, changed circumstances, both for themselves, and within the new politics of South Africa.
It's so enlightening, if not exactly life affirming.
-
I would say that's normal for Murakami, although it's probably worse in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle than anything else of his I've read. This had a bit more of a contained plot, but it's still not exactly obvious what is happening, nor why. But that's one of the things I like about these novels. They're so unlike most other books.
I guess they're perhaps similar to some beat novels like Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout, or to some of the Philip K Dick, I think.
-
Ahhh!
As one of the reviews on Amazon I've just been looking at says: Read more Murakami.
Dance, Dance, Dance is a sort-of-follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase, although you don't have to have any background from Sheep Chase to appreciate Dance, Dance, Dance.
It is, really, very, very Murakami. It's quite weird coming to this straight after reading David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which is very much a homage to the former. They both play with the ideas of interconnectedness of events, with the strangeness of modern Japan, and with the impact of the extraordinary on very normal people.
The difference, though, is that Mitchell ties everything together with "real" stuff; whereas with Murakami everything is linked together in a semi-mystical way where there is another plane connecting everything.
In this way, he is perhaps closer to cyber-punk than to anything in modern fiction. It's taking William Gibson back from the techies and placing it in mundane middle-class suburban Japan.
In Dance, Dance, Dance, the narrator is linked to a series of deaths, and keeps encountering more and more bizarre characters who in turn threaten him, and give him a charmed, charmed life. I'm not sure there's really much place for describing the plot in the review, as there never is really, with this author. It's all about the place, the characters, the weirdness of events which you discover are interlinked.
Anyway, this seems like a useless review, but perhaps it is actually impossible to really review Murakami, except to mention the characters, the 13 year old not-girlfriend girlfriend, the one armed poet, the deranged photographer, the hotel clerk who embodies hotel-ness.
I guess, like others of his books, it's about how even the most mundane and linear of suburban Japanese salary-man lives can get transformed by extraordinary events. But that really doesn't do it justice.
What I really mean to say is Read more Murakami.
-
".. until its abandonment between 1850 and 1853, in the reign of the drunken and wildly extravagant Sultan Abdul Mejid, who was so enfeebled by excessive indulgence in the pleasures offered by his Haren that he was unable to enjoy even the incomparable views from his palace across the Bosphoros."
A Traveller's Life by Eric Newby
-
Water! Not wine!
I'm sure I'll be back on the wine by the weekend, though.
-
Yep, but now I'm thirsty dehydrated.
-
I'm not sure the dry vanilla whites are really what you get from Germany (well, there are some weisserburgunder type wines from further south). On the whole you're getting full, sweet or medium dry wines. Lovely, in my opinion, but not the kind of thing that would normally be to your tastes.
I am, at the moment, completely wined out. After 3 days of touring Stellenbosch and Franschoek at the end of the trip to South Africa, and going to maybe 4 wineries a day and tasting maybe 4 or 5 wines at most of them, my palate is incredibly jaded and I need a few more days off.
-
Just added Japan and South Africa.
-
OK. Let's just continue this on into the new year, eh, rather than split it aritficially at Jan 1st.
So, on the Christmas hols I read
Dance, Dance, Dance by Murukami which was brilliant, and probably my favourite of his other than Wild-Sheep Chase. Complex and lovely and weird and cut between mundane and fantastical. Ah, yes.
And then Disgrace by JM Coetzee which was equally wonderful in a very different way, all about race and fear and love in modern South Africa, and how people deal with what goes on.
And then Field Study by Rachel Seiffert, a bunch of short stories by an old school-friend who was nominated for the Booker a couple of years ago. Great stories, some of them, others perhaps a little bland. Generally ones about normal people living normal lives. Others, and possibly the best ones, about the fractures in modern Germany.
And I've just started Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life, which is so far rather fun but not much to do with travel in the first few pages.
-
I loved At Swim Two Birds when I read it. One of the funniest things I'd ever read. It was pretty weird, though, the multiple layers of stories within stories within stories.
-
This is Mitchell's second novel, shortlisted for the Booker prize. Some people ahve suggested it's his weakest, and his homage to Murukami. I think both criticisms are slightly unfair.
On a basic level this is the story of a young boy on a quest to find his missing father. It's interweaved with a Yakuza crime tale. It's certainly the most Japanese of Mitchell's novels, almost exclusively set in weird, seedy, shiny, glossy, fractured Tokyo. But as Mitchell was a native of Tokyo when writing it, it doesn't seem like that dissonance you get from not native's placing characters in scenery that's unfamiliar to the author.
The story of Miyake is interweaved, in each of the 9 (actually 8, for reasons that become clear) chapters/dreams, with different fragments - either from a world war two log book; or from Miyake's own imagination; or from dreams; or writings.
The playfulness with the structure, along with the strength of the characters, makes this brilliant.
All the more so because the hero-protganist is not a hero, his heroism comes from being basically mundane and normal, and he doesn't realise. This isn't the implausible genius of the James Bond style thriller - but then, I suppose, he doesn't save the world.
I absolutely loved this book. I was browsing through some Amazon reviews, and it seems some people really dislike the ending. They're all wrong. How can a book that's all about dreams and the boundaries between reality and dream have anything other than an ambiguous ending (better still, it's an ending that you're not quite sure is ambiguous, although it probably is).
Wonderful. If I gave stars to my book reviews, David Mitchell's books would get them all.
Andy's Blook bog (started 2006)
in Past Book Logs
Posted
Well, I really should catch up.
I finished A Traveller's Life, which at times was excellent but was slightly unfulfilling as a book. Newby writes lovelily and had done more cool stuff in his lifetime than anyone rightly should. But the book is sort of a mix between autobiog and travel writing, except that it leaves out all the stuff he's written proper books on, so it skims over the best parts of his life. Probably the best chunks of the book are his wartime experiences.
Now I'm on to The Bookseller of Kabul.