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

Ethiopia: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Thoughts: A long time ago when I read Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I wrote about not wanting to continue because it would all fall apart. That book didn’t. This book did.

Maybe we shouldn’t write books about children who then get older. Maybe we should just stop at children or write about adults. Marion as a child is interesting. Marion as an adult is a bitter mess that I want nothing to do with. The virgin/whore dichotomy gets tiring. Even though he’s an adult by the end, there’s a desire to tell Marion to just grow up already.

The second half meanders and the poetry of the first is lost. Parts read like a poorly written textbook. I kept going because of the first half, but got more and more frustrated. The first three hundred pages I thought this would become one of my new favourites. The last three hundred pages I just kept mourning how badly the novel turned out to be.

Rating: 4/5

France: Underground Time by Delphine De Vigan

Thoughts: I kept putting off reading it because of some of the reviews on Librarything, but I shouldn’t have: Underground Time is an extraordinarily well-written treatise on the loneliness one feels even when surrounded by people. The language is sparse but beautifully rendered. The city is real and the desperation of the characters is palpable.

Of the two protagonists, Mathilde’s story is stronger than Thibault’s. The stories don’t parallel as closely as I think they were intentioned to and often Thibault comes off as nothing more than clingy and whining to Mathilde’s quiet desperation. But without Thibault, I think the novel would falter. It’s a quick read as it is, but a very worthwhile one.

Spoilers (highlight to read): Many people complain that Mathilde and Thibault have only a second together at the end when their eyes lock on the subway. The whole novel is structured so that you expect Mathilde and Thibault to meet and recognise something of themselves in each other. And they do. For a second. But that is life. We are surrounded by the same despair and we never reach out either. That’s the point the book is trying to make.

Rating: 4/5

Disclosure: I received this book to review through librarything’s early reviewer program.

New Zealand: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

Thoughts: Sometimes I read novels and get mad that I am not writing novels because I want to write novels like this one. Well, most of the time. The rest of the time it felt more like a technical piece than anything enjoyable – sort of like eating kale, you know it’s good for you but you’d really rather have the cake. I’m also a bit over the is-it-real-or-not trope that keeps coming up, especially it seems in first novels. I guess you have to prove you are clever to get published. I am not clever, nor have I written a novel so I should probably just be quiet now.

Rating: 4.5/5

Iran: Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur

Thoughts: Like all short story collections, there are some parts that resonate more strongly than others. I found Munis’ story the most compelling; something about the way she was trapped seems similar to my the situation of my own making in which I find myself. The weaknesses in the story generally come from the fact that I am not the audience the author was writing for, and as someone who grew up after second-wave Feminism, sometimes I find it hard to accept the actions of women who are in a different cultural landscape.

I also hoped that there would have been some meaningful resolution. Again, this is probably because of the different expectations I have, but with the coming together of all the plotlines, I wanted there to be some sort of critical mass, but the women all together just seemed so unhappy with each other and then parted ways. I guess the fact that there isn’t is probably a symptom of their environment – if you are trapped in an overbearing, patriarchal society, you can escape for a time, but not permanently.

Rating: 3.5/5

United Kingdom: The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Thoughts: Decent escapist yarn, although it seems like the author’s understanding of what the UK is like is gleaned almost entirely via Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous episodes – like Americans are brash and loud! Brits are calm and reserved! People from London are sophisticated and cosmopolitan! Village life is quaint! But the story moves fairly quickly and there isn’t too much bad writing to distract from the story. I wish the characters were more developed; each one seems just to be a stand-in for some sort of character trait like diligent or religious or bitchy. I did like the book, which is why, strangely, I have so many criticisms about it – the few little things that didn’t work stood out so much and kept it from being a really great book. But it was a good read and took my mind off some of the things my mind is stuck on the past few weeks, and I appreciate that.

Rating: 4/5

Italy: The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

Thoughts: For awhile in middle school, I got really obsessed with criminology and read probably hundreds of thousands of pages on true crime stories. So reading this took me back to those heady seventh grade nights home alone scaring myself senseless reading about serial killers, except, of course, this book was well written and I wasn’t home alone this time – there was both me and Tesfa that I could envision being slaughtered or mutilated by some sort of maniac. Note to future meghan: Do not read books about serial killers after dark while home alone. It is not good for your brain.

There are a lot of people in this book. Sometimes I found it hard to follow. But there is both a helpful index and a helpful list of characters in order of appearance. This mitigated the confusion. It really isn’t as sensationalistic as the blurbs make it out to be either. A good read but I’ll probably forget all about it in a few years. It doesn’t have a great deal of stickiness or memorability.

Rating: 4/5

Russia: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

Thoughts: I’m starting to wonder if really what I should call this section is reading around the other world, since my book for Canada was actually about la nouvelle France, my book for Zambia was actually about Rhodesia, my book for the United States was alternate history, and this book for Russia is actually about the USSR.

There is a part in the introductory chapter of this book where the author makes the same point I’ve been making since sometime in like 2001 – why is Soviet stuff kitsch but Nazi stuff verboeten? I still don’t know. My only guess is that in the west, everyone knows someone whose family was directly affected by the Holocaust (I dated someone in high school whose grandmother was a concentration camp survivor). Since so many people either died in the gulags or weren’t permitted to leave after the fact or write about it openly, there is no personal connection. I also came up with the idea that the Nazis were tangible. The parts that everyone always associates with the death camps are from ~1941 to 1945. That’s four years. Four years is manageable. The gulag was from the 1920s to the 1960s, then dropped off for a bit, then increasing again. Maybe my mind can’t imagine bad happening for forty years straight in the same way that most people can only hold seven numbers simultaneously in their short term memory.

All this means that I should care as much about people sent to slave labour camps north of the arctic circle as I care about people being lined up for gas chambers, but I don’t, even after reading this book. That’s why it only got 3.5 out of five stars. I know a lot about the gulag system now, but I still don’t have the visceral reaction to it in the same way as the Nazi concentration camp system.

Rating: 3.5/5

Canada: Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers

Thoughts: Bride of New France is a rather simplistic novel. Not that there is anything bad about that, but it definitely reads more like a YA historical novel than one that would necessarily appeal to adults. The characters are fairly flat and there’s no real sense of conflict. The narrative is straightforward and has a “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened” feel. I found myself skimming through the pages at the end because of how easy and unchallenging the narrative was.

Bride of New France is not a bad novel. It’s an amusing way to spend an afternoon or two, but it’s not much more than that. I doubt that I’ll remember that much about it in a year or so.

Rating: 3.5/5