Shroud by John Banville
Published in: 2002
Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2002)
Reviewed by: Book Worm and Jen
Find it here:Shroud
Synopsis (from Amazon): One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton’s Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville’s masterful new novel, is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie.
Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls “Miss Nemesis.” They are to meet in Turin, a city best known for its enigmatic shroud. Is her purpose to destroy Vander or to save him—or simply to show him what lies beneath the shroud in which he has wrapped his life? A splendidly moving exploration of identity, duplicity, and desire, Shroudis Banville’s most rapturous performance to date.
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
First Published in: 1915
Reviewed by: Jen and Book Worm
Find it/buy it here (free on kindle): The Thirty-Nine Steps
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Richard Hannay’s boredom with London society is soon relieved when the resourceful engineer from South Africa is caught up in a web of secret codes, spies, and murder on the eve of WWI. When a neighbor is killed in his flat, Richard, suspected, decodes the journal, runs to the wilds of his native Scotland in disguises and local dialects, evades Germans and officials.
Book Worm’s Review
Rating: ★★★
Credited as one of the earliest spy novels and set in 1914 before the outbreak of WWI this is the story of Robert Hannay. Hannay, who recently moved to London from Rhodesia is finding life rather dull until the mysterious Scudder turns up on his doorstep and tells him about a German conspiracy to assassinate a key public figure.
When Hannay comes home to find Scudder murdered in his flat, he realizes he is being set up for murder. Instead of trying to explain things to the police and clear his name, he decides to continue Scudder’s work and escapes London for the wilds of Scotland.
Told entirely in the first person, this is a fast-moving adventure story. The only problem is that Hannay is unbelievable as a character. He is too skilled at everything. Nothing fazes him and he is a one man spy network. While this makes for an exciting read, you do need to suspend your disbelief and just go along for the ride.
Jen’s Review
Rating: ★★★
The 39 Steps is a fast-paced and entertaining, but completely unbelievable man-on-the-run, spy novel. Richard Hannay is bored with society life and is saved from his boredom just in the nick of time by a stranger who turns up in his apartment only to trigger a series of increasingly unbelievable events.
In many ways, Hannay is the like the movie version of James Bond (the book version of Bond being much more believable), but without all the spy training — he just happens to be naturally brilliant at handling explosives, disguising himself, decoding military secrets. Mix in a little Sherlock Holmes and you have Richard Hannay. Reading this book, you can’t help but see how it would translate into a great movie. In fact, several film translations exist, including a 1935 Hitchcock version.
The writing style is rather sparse and typical of the dime novel genre. Buchan worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau and this book, originally published as a magazine serial, was highly popular among men in the trenches during WWI. The Guardian listed 39-Steps as one of the 100 Best novels and Boxall considers it to be one of the 1001 books to read before you die. It’s a relatively short and entertaining read — if you don’t require realistic scenarios in your novels. It’s worth reading simply because of its contribution to the genre.
Want to try it for yourself? Find it (for free on Amazon) here: The Thirty-Nine Steps
Have you read this book? If so, what did you think?
Synopsis (from Amazon): In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance. A young woman’s association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence.
Jen’s Review:
Rating: ★★★★
Katharina Blum is an upstanding young woman who seems to be the model citizen but she just happens to have murdered a man. Don’t worry, this is not a spoiler! The book begins with the disclosure of the murder and works back and forth in time to uncover the events that led up to the murder. Böll poses the question of how ordinary people may be driven into acting in violent ways. The novel is a short, quick, and engaging read that probes into the responsibility of the media in creating stories that impact the lives of people in a harmful way.
I really enjoyed the book. The narrative style was unique and engaging and it resembled an investigative journalism piece with seemingly objective reporting. The story was pieced together with flashbacks, written statements and transcripts, lists, and commentary from the narrator, some of which was humorous. The book raises interesting questions about a) what the role of the media is and should be, b) which sorts of information should be private/public, and c) how media and social opinion can impact the lives of individuals. Very relevant to today’s society and in an interesting perspective on journalistic ethics and sensationalism.
I find Böll to be an extremely skilled author who is remarkably adept at capturing social issues in a believable way. His ability to craft complex characters and to understand the human psyche is impressive. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1972 and in my opinion is a must-read author.
Book Worm’s Review:
Rating:★★★★
Opening with the confession of Katharina to the murder of a journalist in her flat, this novel presents the events that lead to the murder and asks the reader to decided who committed the biggest crime: Katharina or the people whose actions drove her to it?
This novel, told by a detached narrator, contains a warning about believing everything you read or hear in the news. It illustrates how lives can be destroyed by the manipulative actions of both the media and those with a vested interest in keeping the real story hidden.
Katharina is an ordinary woman, a house keeper by profession whose life is destroyed by being misrepresented in the media, her only crime falling in love with the wrong man.
This is a powerful read and is still relevant today. This morning I was watching a news article about Jeremy Clarkson. The report claimed he had said that being fired from Top Gear was “worse than losing a child.” What he actually said was “Top Gear was my baby, I am lost without it” or words to that effect. I find that kind of manipulation and misrepresenting reprehensible and entirely unnecessary.
Have you read this book? What did you think? Have you read others by Boll? Share your thoughts with us.
The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille First Published in: 1928 Reviewed by: Book Worm & Jen Find/Buy it here: Nope, not this time. You REALLY don’t want to read this or if you do, this blog is probably not the best fit for your reading tastes. If you really must, the PDF is available for free online.
Synopsis from Amazon: A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille’s Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Joachim Neugroschal, and published with essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century. Read more
Alamut by Vladimir Bartol First Published in: 1936 Reviewed by: Book Worm & Jen
Find/Buy it here:Alamut
Synopsis from Amazon: Alamut takes place in 11th Century Persia, in the fortress of Alamut, where self-proclaimed prophet Hasan ibn Sabbah is setting up his mad but brilliant plan to rule the region with a handful elite fighters who are to become his “living daggers.” By creating a virtual paradise at Alamut, filled with beautiful women, lush gardens, wine and hashish, Sabbah is able to convince his young fighters that they can reach paradise if they follow his commands. With parallels to Osama bin Laden, Alamut tells the story of how Sabbah was able to instill fear into the ruling class by creating a small army of devotees who were willing to kill, and be killed, in order to achieve paradise. Believing in the supreme Ismaili motto “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah wanted to “experiment” with how far he could manipulate religious devotion for his own political gain through appealing to what he called the stupidity and gullibility of people and their passion for pleasure and selfish desires.
The novel focuses on Sabbah as he unveils his plan to his inner circle, and on two of his young followers — the beautiful slave girl Halima, who has come to Alamut to join Sabbah’s paradise on earth, and young ibn Tahir, Sabbah’s most gifted fighter. As both Halima and ibn Tahir become disillusioned with Sabbah’s vision, their lives take unexpected turns.
Alamut was originally written in 1938 as an allegory to Mussolini’s fascist state. In the 1960’s it became a cult favorite throughout Tito’s Yugoslavia, and in the 1990s, during the Balkan’s War, it was read as an allegory of the region’s strife and became a bestseller in Germany, France and Spain. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the book once again took on a new life, selling more than 20,000 copies in a new Slovenian edition, and being translated around the world in more than 19 languages. This edition, translated by Michael Biggins, in the first-ever English translation Read more
Crash by J.G. Ballard First Published: 1973 Joint review: Jen & Book Worm
Synopsis:When Ballard, our narrator, smashes his car into another and watches the driver die, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of auto-erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.
First published in 1973, ‘Crash’ remains one of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century and was made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg.
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes First Published in: 1984 Reviewed by: Book Worm and Jen
Synopsis (from book jacket): Which of two stuffed parrots was the inspiration for one of Flaubert’s greatest stories? Why did the master keep changing the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes? And why should these minutiae matter so much to Geoffrey Braithwaite, the crankily erudite doctor who is the narrator of this tour de force style and imagination?
In Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes, who has been compared with writers such as Joyce and Calvino, spins out a mystery, an exuberant metafictional inquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it; a look at the perverse autopsies that readers perform on books an lovers perform on their beloved; and a piercing glimpse at the nature of obsession and betrayal both scholarly and romantic.
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert’s Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality
Bookworm’s Review Rating: ★★★
Flaubert’s Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed. Read more
★ Hated it & no redeeming additional qualities noted. Recommend avoiding it.
★★ Disliked it, may have 1 redeeming quality (writing style, novelty, etc).
★★★ Liked it or may have a few interesting qualities.
★★★★ Really liked it & it has at least a couple interesting qualities.
★★★★★ Loved almost everything about it. Only a few, if any, minor limitations noted.
Book Worm’s rating system
★ Bah I really hated this would not even pass this to my worst enemy
★★ I really didn't like this but would consider giving it to my worst enemy for vengeful purposes
★★★ this was an enjoyable way to pass the time not great not horrendous
★★★★ really enjoyed this book there was something about it that made me think
★★★★★ wow I loved this book I am now out recommending it to all my friends, will keep to re read even though I have banned re reads
The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum by Heinrich Böll
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