Afghanistan: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

stify”>Thoughts: I read this book thinking how could it be missed, how could it not have won every award the year it was published, how come I have never heard of it.

Then I got to the chapter inside James’ head and realised why not: the whole thing falls apart on James. The writing is weak, the analysis is poor, and all nuance is lost. How Aslam can so perfectly map the voices of the other four characters yet do James so poorly is mysterious. James’ chapter is like the airport paperback thriller someone left in Ethiopia that I read one night when there was nothing else to do. It is just supremely, amazingly, uninspiringly awful.

And so the book fell apart.

But before the book fell apart, it made me want to dig up my unfinished Afghanistan story and try to work that one through. It’s like a freaking other planet there. I am baffled Afghanistan exists.

Rating: 3.5/5

Poland: The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Thoughts: Long and dark and overwhelming in exactly the way you want a book about a Polish ghetto to be long and dark and overwhelming.

Rating: 5/5

Philippines: Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

Thoughts: The parts I liked, I liked a lot. The parts I didn’t (and there were many), I found hard to get through. I’m starting to appreciate more and more the beauty of straightforward narrative, which this book is not an example of. It’s not a bad book, but there is a lot to get through to get to the end.

Rating: 3.5/5

Sweden: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Thoughts: So I liked this one better than the first, evinced by the fact that I read the first book three years ago and only picked this book up to read now in an airport bookshop where the choices were between this and a variety of Christian romance and/or horror novels. I found this better than the first, not as slow, and more relevant. Funnily, my parents have both read the series (my dad reads about one fiction book a decade). Spoiler (highlight to read): My parents were all disbelieving that any government would cover up foreign nationals for intelligence purposes, since clearly they had never heard of Operation Paperclip and its ilk. Also maybe working in government security for the past eighteen months has made me realise exactly how duplicitous national security officers really all – always the ends justify the means and all that. I also don’t know whether it’s the translation or the writing, but the book definitely plods less than the first, at least when it’s not plagerising IKEA catalogues or detailing the variety of frozen pizzas one can buy at 7-11. You can tell Larsson was a journalist by the way he structures the introductions to characters – more style than substance. In any case, after I finished the novel, I went out to the library to read the third. And now I am done.

Rating: 4.5/5

Ireland: In The Woods by Tana French

Thoughts: I borrowed this book from my mother, who said, in her words, that it was a stupid book. I disagree. It’s a typical murder mystery, but written better than most. It reminded me a bit of Denise Mina, although not as dark. It also made Dublin seem a bit more intriguing than I remember it on my whirlwind three day visit there eight years ago.

Rating: 4/5

China: Half of Man Is Woman by Xianliang Zhang

Thoughts: This is either a book where Communist Chinese policies are an allegory for male impotence or male impotence is an allegory for Communist Chinese policies. I really can’t tell. Punningly however, the protagonist is pretty much a dick for most of the book, so maybe it doesn’t matter in the end which and what is allegory versus reality.

Rating: 3/5

Azerbaijan: Ali and Nino by Kurbain Said

Thoughts: The book flap compares this to Doctor Zhivago, which I sort of dismissed, but after reading it, I can’t think of a better comparison. It’s a love story, but isn’t particularly erotic and people seem more like ideas than people. I probably wouldn’t have read it except for my reading around the world quest, but it was a decent book even if, like many novels from Russia and Central Asia, people give long-winded soliloquies about politics, religions, human nature, etc.

I feel sorry for the Harlequin romance readers – this book was classified as Romance at the Ottawa Public Library, which it is in the same was Zhivago or Anna Karenina or Jane Austin is romance. Someone who is used to ripped bodices and Fabio is going to be mighty bored when they pick this one up 🙂

Rating: 4/5

Japan: Now You’re One of Us by Asa Nonami

Thoughts: Either poorly written or poorly translated. Supposedly shocking except from about the third page you can see how the rest of the novel is going to play out and I’m probably fairly jaded but the shocking bits weren’t even a little bit shocking. Dull. Kept reading though because I wanted vindication in figuring out what was going to happen.

Rating: 1.5/5

India: Mumbai Noir edited by Altaf Tyrewala

Thoughts: The stories in Mumbai Noir are decent. Like in any anthology, some are better than others. Stand-outs for me were The Watchman by Altaf Tyrewala, The Egg by Namita Devidayal, and Nagpada Blues by Ahmed Bunglowala. Nagpada Blues especially channels the traditional noir story line with a down-on-his-luck PI. However, for a book that markets itself as noir, there’s a griminess that’s lacking in a lot of the stories. There’s a sort of sunshine that pervades throughout – maybe because so many of the stories have daylight components.

So a decent diversion for an afternoon, but if you’re looking for a real gritty collection of dark stories, this isn’t it.

Rating: 3.5/5

Kenya: One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

Thoughts: It’s odd that the book is put forward, as above, as avoiding stereotype and cliché, because I read it thinking that this was just like so many other East African memoirs I’d read except for the language. The story is the same but the language makes up for the similarities between it and other stories. If it weren’t for the language, I’d say this book would fade away.

Rating: 4/5