Until Women of Karantina, I haven’t had much luck in Arabic literature. Granted, having read only two books originally published in Arabic (In Praise of Hatred and Girls of Riyahd), that’s hardly a statistical sampling. So now, with book three that I have read from Arabic, I can proclaim Women of Karantina to be the best book translated from Arabic I have read (to the best of my knowledge – maybe I read another book translated from Arabic when I was a kid but the fact that I don’t remember it, even if I did read one, likely says it wasn’t very good).

Reading, I kept being reminded of something. It took a good third of the way through the book for me to figure it out. Women of Karantina was reminding me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both have a family, although in Women of Karantina, some members are bonded by blood, others bonded by proximity. They have exploits, wild, crazy, revolving exploits, in Alexandria, whirling up and pulling more and more people in, like being swept down a drain or swept up in a sandstorm. The whole thing is a folly, the silliness and the megalomania and the scheming and the treachery and every plan failing and succeeding marvelously at the same time. Is it as polished and magical as One Hundred Years of Solitude? No, but it comes close.

Once he told his Mama that he felt like a zero before the decimal, like something worthless.

(Oh Hamada, sometimes I feel like that too.) But, with the above quote, we can see how Women of Karantina isn’t as accomplished as One Hundred Years of Solitude; do we really need that added phrase “like something worthless”? That’s understood. Trust your readers to figure it out. There are also repetitions of certain phrases, characters changing personalities and tastes on a whim, a narrator that is sometimes a bit too intrusive for eir own good, and background about Alexandria dumped into the story when I would rather get back to the story of the main characters, not learn about how Alexandria once tried to ban tobacco and hookahs. We have dreams (but that’s clearly an issue I have no one else, since every book I read people talk about their dreams) as shortcuts for character development, and the cheap trick of someone’s friend turning out to be dum dum dum a figment of his imagination. Plus the use of faggot for virtually every insult. Oh my goodness, you have all of Arabic at your disposal, switch up the insults (or at least, drop the homophobic one for something else). So almost magical, but not quite.

As to the translation, my knowledge of Arabic hovers an epsilon away from zero, but often the verb tense didn’t fit. There’s a lot of the omniscient narrator using (and I had to look this up) present continuous in the story, i.e. “We are still in the early days of Spring” and “Inji and Ali are now satisfied that their path is secure.” Each time it happened, I was pushed out of the story. Perhaps this is how the present tense works in Arabic (come on Duolingo people, let’s get working on an Arabic course for me) and the translator wanted to keep the feeling of a tale originally spun in Arabic? I don’t know. It stuck out.

Still, for all my whinging in the last few paragraphs, I enjoyed Women of Karantina. Awful people doing awful things to each other, but still, it earns my smile.

Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy went on sale January 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not sure how I should write about A History of Loneliness by John Boyne. It’s a book that made me want to throw my kobo against the wall. I think that’s what Boyne wanted, for people to be angry about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, but my anger at this book wasn’t for that; my anger at this book was for how glossy it was. My anger at this book was for how insensitive Father Odran Yates, the protagonist, is. My anger at this book is just all encompassing and I want to stop reviewing and never have to think of it again. Every comment I made in the (electronic) margins on my kobo is caustic and rude and I am going to try and smooth them out and hopefully not give into the nauseated feeling in my stomach.

So we have a priest, Father Odran Yates. He is a good priest, feels the calling of God, enjoys his priesthood. There’s some unnecessary intrigue when he’s sent to the Vatican and is embroiled in the deaths of Pope John Paul I and whoever was before Pope John Paul I (my Catholic family members are pretty embarrassed for me right now, not knowing who came before Pope John Paul I). The novel suggests that Pope John Paul I was going to do something about some nascent scandal within the Irish Catholic church, which the reader assumes to be the rampant sexual abuse, and hints that Pope John Paul I was murdered for this. The novel then becomes quite scathing against Pope John Paul I’s successor, Pope John Paul II. Less hints this time: That man hates women. Direct quote. There’s also some unnecessary back story about Yates’ brother who drowned and Yates’ widowed sister with dementia that could be excised completely without much fuss, although I suppose it’s meant to counter the argument that people with lousy upbringings will do lousy things, like rape children. Because Yates had a lousy upbringing and still managed to keep his penis to himself.

Back to Father Odran Yates, who, for the most part, is upset regarding the unrestrained sexual abuse by priests because it makes him look bad. It means people don’t respect him on the Luas. It means men are angry with him in coffee shops. It means that he grows tired of having a chaperone when he talks to his altar boys. For something like eighty percent of the novel, Yates does not seem to understand that this is not about him. People are rightly angry because of the years of abuse perpetrated by the church. He has no compassion for the victims of sexual abuse, instead painting himself as the true victim in all this. This infuriates me. I am incensed. It’s taken me hours to write this review because I get so angry and I have to walk away. I suppose he comes around when he realizes that his friend, another priest, sexually assaulted Odran’s nephew (which he then makes about himself, visiting the nephew even though the nephew has cut off all contact with Yates, because Yates needs the nephew to absolve him. Yep, back to what Yates needs rather than what anyone else does), but for a priest who goes on and on about how this is his true calling, he seems to have no ability for humility and no compassion. No Matthew 9:36 (Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd) for Yates. This is all about him. The book ends with Yates realizing he must have known about other abuses, but chose to look away. The End. No self reflection or anything about this. Just stop.

Ignoring the repugnance of the plot, the writing is all right. Not spectacular, and I’m still biased towards spectacular Irish writing after my time with Frank O’Connor earlier this winter. It’s really slick, the writing. It’s not uncomfortable the way it should be to reflect the content. I know that seems like an odd criticism, that the writing is too smooth for the context, but I can think of no other way to put it. Facile maybe? I know people are going to connect with this book and it’ll likely sell millions of copies (the author also wrote The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), but there’s no depth. It’s like a puddle rather than a sea.

You want some amazing writing about Ireland: read Frank O’Connor. You want a meaningful fictitious book on sexual abuse within the Catholic church: read The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre instead.

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne went on sale September 11, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

On Netgalley the other day, after checking off I reviewed The Book of Strange New Things, I mosied on over to the Graphic Novels or Comic section or whatever it’s called. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked there before, since there is really no point in reading comics on my teeny kobo and I generally can’t be bothered to read things on the iPad. So I wasn’t expecting much, but then:

A Katamari comic! (NB: this picture is not from the comic but from deviantart.)

Even better, a Katamari comic that I didn’t even have to request. It was free free free to anyone who wanted it. You better bet I was going to roll that comic up into my life.

(For those unfamiliar with Katamari Damacy, it’s a series of Japanese video games in which one is a diminutive green prince with a sticky rolling ball that collects objects on Earth under the watchful eye and abusive tones of his gigantic king father. It’s quite Japanese and beneficial to play prior to visiting any place in urban Japan. I’m pretty sure the only thing that got me through my first two jetlagged days of Tokyo was pointing out, ad nauseum to Geoff and Lydia, objects that I had, at one point, rolled up in a Katamari game.)

The book brings together a collection of webcomics, a few story arcs, and a few one-offs (including flow charts on whether or not you are trying to roll things up with a Katamari or a blueberry). The stories are cute and very much in the style of the Katamari universe. There is the king, a cameo by the queen, many cousins, Michiru (the little girl who is always talking about feeling the cosmos in the first game), Jumboman, cutie animals, they’re all there. The colours are as vibrant and the corners, metaphorically and literally speaking, are as cutely rounded as they are in the game. Comics are a logical step to continue the Katamari universe; I can only imagine the sheer number of adjectives necessary to write a Katamari novel. There is a lot of detail in the panels, most of which I overlooked until I read the creators’ commentary; the book is structured a bit like a “director’s cut” with Culang and Castro writing little blurbs on most pages about the story or what is hidden in the panels. Generally, I don’t read comics correctly as I only ever read the text bubbles and never give the pictures more than a peripheral glance, so having reminders to actually look and see what is happening is helpful to text-intensive lovers like me.

The commentary, however, ends up a double-edged sword. One joy of Katamari is how genderless it can feel. There are a slew of male characters, but, outside the story line, the game is not testosterone-driven, angry, or violent (other than the cops that shoot at your Katamari and a few Hey’s, no one quite seems to mind being rolled up). It’s just a colourful, fun, way to spend a few hours. But the commentary of the creators lends a definite lad feel to the whole comic, likely not in an intentional or an exclusionary way, but there’s definitely a more masculine feel to the comic than to the series. While there are some girl cousins chosen to go on the adventures (Daisy and June in particular) and Michiru is around, I still get the default to male feel, i.e. that anything that isn’t specifically gendered is masculine. Then, once I started thinking that, I couldn’t stop. Then not even the colours of a Royal Rainbow could cheer me up.

As for reading it on my iPad, not a fan. I have one other comic I got to read on my iPad, and then I think I’m done. The font is too small for my firmly-ensconced-in-my-thirties eyeballs, and it’s a hassle to have to keep zooming in and then zooming back out to turn the pages. It would seem that an iPad is a perfect container for comics, but maybe the ratios just aren’t right yet, or trying to smush a webcomic meant to be read on a big monitor into a tiny one is beyond the capabilities of current aesthetic technology. I think this book deserves to be big and glossy and coffee-table size for optimal viewing.

Still, KA-TA-MA-RI!

Katamari Volume One by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro went on sale January 2, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a type of book that you really wish you could rate in parts, like pages one through one hundred are 3/5, pages one hundred through three hundred and fifty are 2/5, and pages three hundred and fifty to the end minus one are 4/5. End isn’t the great. It’s a book outside my comfort zone (science-fiction and religion) and it’s a book that’s too long. It’s a book where some of the surprises are obvious and where one of the surprises manifested itself in a way I wouldn’t have expected (the Oasans physiology with respect to healing in particular).

So this is a book that goes here and there. A book where I got frustrated and then I got surprised and then frustrated again.

We are focused on Peter, a Christian preacher of indeterminate denomination (I think he says he’s not Baptist or Lutheran and he isn’t Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) who is sent to another world to minister to the local species of a faraway planet, under the employment of a somewhat sinister, somewhat benign corporation. Peter leaves his wife Bea behind, but gets to communicate with her via a sort of internet contraption, which is seemingly the only nod to modern technology in the novel (that and the space travel, I have to concede). Bea on earth never mentions WiFi, rarely mentions cellphones, there doesn’t appear to be tablets or smart phones or Internet. Is this an alternate past? I mean, first world people freak out when they can’t get twitter for an hour, so one would assume that the first sign of societal collapse would be the collapse of telecommunication infrastructure, but that isn’t even mentioned. Perhaps Faber does what I aspire to do more of: live without all the trappings of constant contact, so this isn’t a concern for him in his books. But it’s the little things like this that make all of The Book of Strange New Things feel off.

Anyway, I started the last paragraph about Peter. We know that Peter is a complex person because he used to be a drug addict. Ooooooooh. Put in the scary Just say no kids music from those eighties drug advertisements. Then he found Jesus through Bea. And now he is definitely in the running for Most Boring Protagonist of 2014. He’s just completely bland. His struggles are, relatively, nonexistent. Bea graciously (at the start) accepts his interplanetary mission, the Oasans readily accept him and a large group are eager to learn about Jesus, he has a beautiful woman on the space base looking out for him and rescuing him from many of his more idiotic endeavors. Peter pretty much gets whatever he wants and chalks it up to his deep-rooted belief in prayer. I don’t understand Faber’s endgame here. Does he mean this book to be an active call to a Christian life? Peter gets what he wants because he truly believes and prays. When other people don’t get what they want, it’s because they aren’t praying hard enough. Then, when they do pray, truly and meaningfully, better things happen (like the impromptu garbage pickup Bea writes about; I know that sounds bizarre, it makes sense in the context of the story). Is it just a story? A Christian allegory? The meaning is muddled. We’re back to being muddled.

The scientists at the colony are cutouts that would be more interesting than Peter, but who aren’t delved into much. There’s a subplot about a linguist who goes missing that sort of peters out. Pages and pages are devoted to how well the vetting process is for the mission, only to have one character have a breakdown that exists, it seems, only to add impetus to Peter’s narrative. And then when Peter gets muddled, he prays (of course) and realizes the answer. Then the book ends, unsatisfactory, although the unresolved ending might be a way of setting up a sequel.

This book is very much like a flatline, slow burn. Much is said about how the terrain of the planet is flat, unchanging, soaking in and not giving back, all descriptors you could apply to this book. It’s interesting conceptually, but in practice, there needs to be more depth. The book needs to be simultaneously longer and shorter. And the book needs some of the characters to have at least a little more pizzazz, not just loner scientists and ministers whose pasts are supposed to make them exciting rather than having anything innately compelling in their own personalities.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber went on sale October 24, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So, the first burning question: would I have ranked this book higher or lower if she spelled her first name the same way I do? I can’t recall meeting another Meghan, so I don’t know how I’d feel about that.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to reviewing.

Almost Famous Women is a book of short stories about (wait for it) almost famous women. Conjoined twins, heiresses, female’s pushing against the norm. Lots of lesbians or, at least, women interested in women as well as other men. Race car drivers, ambulance drivers from World War One, high divers, dancers, the sister of Edna St Vincent Millay. All women, all the time. Nothing wrong with that. I like women. I like pretending I’m rich and living in 1950s London (especially so close after my re-read of The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets). Or on a private island near Cuba. The little hints of the exotic are what give the stories momentum. A quick read. I read most of the book on an airplane.

But then, Almost Famous Women is also full of completely self-involved, unlikable, egotists. Yes I know, we’re not supposed to want to be friends with fictional characters, but it’s hard to really feel compassion for someone who denies her servant medical care to prove a point or to not ruin a party or, really I have no idea why Joe (who’s female, just got a masculine name) doesn’t want to take Celia for medical aid. It’s hard to feel much for someone who sells her coat for morphine and then rubs the fact her lone friend’s face. It’s hard to feel for a painter who is miserable to everyone around her out of obstinacy only. These women, and most of the stories are based on real women, skirted the edges of propriety, eager to be iconoclasts, but at the same time, many can only be described as unpleasant people, grating and aloof. Most of the stories aren’t long enough to go deeper than that initial repulsion and many of the stories end, it seems, mid-thought. Sure, the sentence ends, but they’re all so abrupt. My kobo is full of my notes of Why end here? and Another brusque ending. It’s almost discourteous of the author to give such tantalizing hints at characters that could engage the reader, and then yank it away by ending the story and starting anew. It makes this collection feel less like a collection of stories and more like a collection of architectural plans of stories: with imagination you can see what the roof will be like and the shingles and where the bath will go, but it isn’t real yet. Or is that the point? A short story should leave you wanting more? But these feel incomplete, so I don’t think it works.

But of these story/plans, what did I like? My favourite stories in this one: Expression Theory or The Pretty Grown-Together Children. Funnily, they are the ones that are the least solid in terms of time passing or reality or any of that jazz. Maybe the book could have used with some actual jazz music. In a way, it reminds me of difficult-to-approach music like that.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman went on sale January 6, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.