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 Batuk is a fifteen-year-old Indian prostitute. She was sold into prostitution by her father at only nine years old, after a less than idyllic, but still relatively happy childhood. Batuk’s path to prostitution is devastating, more so what she has to endure each and every day at the hands of strange men, but writing is her salvation. She writes about her life, makes up stories, and in general endures far beyond what any child should ever have to.
It’s incredibly hard to write about this book. Child prostitution is a difficult and horrible subject. Obviously, it should never happen and it is completely wrong. But it does happen, and James Levine has tried to imagine what that life would be like for a little girl. Batuk has been betrayed by everyone and endures the worst kind of humiliation each day of her life, yet she is portrayed as a hopeful child, still vivacious, making the best of a bad situation whenever she can. The story is even more moving because the reader knows that there are girls like this out there, and Batuk feels real.
It is Batuk herself that is the novel’s greatest triumph. It’s difficult to believe that this girl was written by a man because she does feel genuine in every way. She tries not to think about what is happening to her even as her words give it devastating clarity. She puts up a facade and retains hope even though the reader can sense her unhappiness in nearly every line. She does what she must to make the experience bearable while using the rest of her scarce free time to write stories and remember her past. It would be impossible not to feel for her and wish she could escape this life and go back to the countryside where she was at least an innocent.
It’s difficult to say that I liked this book, because it’s so difficult to read. It’s short, but it’s so moving and heartrending. I think it’s important to read, however, if only so we’re forced to confront ourselves with the horrid reality of what might be for real young girls. The author interviewed child prostitutes and based his book on their stories. It’s fiction like this that inspires us to make a difference, and for that reason I do recommend The Blue Notebook.*
*I received this from the publisher for review. This is an Amazon Associates link.
 When Molly Lane dies, two of her friends meet outside a crematorium to express both their remorse and their view of Molly’s last days. Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday are a pair of extremely successful men who at one point or another had an affair with Molly. Molly died in what they consider a horrible way; she just started to lose it suddenly, became ill, and required her long-suffering husband to nurse her. Clive, the most famous composer of his age, and Vernon, editor of a top newspaper, make a pact after Molly’s death that rebounds against them in a way they’d never expected.
On the back cover, this is described as “a sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel”, and I can’t say it better than that. The comedy to me appears to come from how ridiculous these men are, how they are so wrapped up in themselves that they can’t hear and don’t care about the outside world at all. By the end of the novel, they have each truly become like Molly, lost to the world without realizing what has happened to them. They’ve been overtaken by an illness, and that illness is, according to Ian McEwan, the ills of public society and the selfishness that it takes to ignore the needs and wellbeing of fellow humans while taking care of number one. The disturbing thing is that neither of them realize it; what they’re doing is so normal to them that they don’t understand what’s wrong. They think they’re adding to society when really they’re just adding to the problem.
Anyway, in that way, this novel is so deep in so few pages that it’s hard to say whether or not I liked it. This is one of those books that I want a class on. There’s a lot here to pick at and just writing that paragraph above has helped me clarify it in my mind. I think I could write a paper on it. It’s less than two hundred pages long, so it didn’t take me very long to read, but it packs in so much thought-provoking material in with the ridiculousness of the situation. The worst part is that, when dissected, the behavior of neither of the characters is ridiculous. They’re doing what has been done countless times before and that is eerie and worrying, especially given the extreme dislike I felt for both of them by the end of the novel. Really the problem with the novel is that it isn’t a very good story. The story and the characters exist only to prove McEwan’s point, which is a strong one, but it doesn’t work very well at a surface level.
In conclusion, there is a very good reason that Amsterdam won the Booker Prize. It’s a truly haunting commentary on society that still manages to be slightly ridiculous enough to make it interesting. I haven’t even touched on all the issues here, but I can tell I’m going to continue thinking about this for some time to come. It isn’t as good as a book as Atonement is, in my humble opinion, particularly because it is shallow in everything but its overall meaning. I still think it’s worth a read.
 From the inside cover of The Wilderness:
It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s.
This unusual novel, narrated by a man who is steadily losing his grip on reality, is a remarkable journey through the human mind and memory. I’ve never known anyone with Alzheimer’s, as it thankfully doesn’t run in my family (or they die too young), but if I had to guess what it would be like, this novel is it. Jake’s reality comes and goes; he finds his mind a total blank at times but usually he is just confused. He can’t remember if his daughter is alive or dead, why he is visiting this man in jail (his son), or who the woman sleeping next to him is, except in brief moments of clarity. He remembers his younger life the best and often has flashbacks to himself as a newlywed, in love with his wife, a successful architect, a new father. He can’t decide what is real and what he has imagined, or why some memories have significance and others don’t. In short, he is confused.
I’m not sure how I feel about this book. I wanted to love it more than I did, but I think it was too scary for me. I felt sorry for Jake and I just felt that the inevitability of his fate outweighed the beauty of the life that he had lived. It is powerful and it is moving and I suspect it has changed the way I will think about elderly people forever, but it’s also scary and depressing. This is the undeniable truth about what will happen to many of us if we live to be Jake’s age. He has lived a successful, mostly happy life, which he can piece together and remember gladly, but now he is losing that ability before he has even died. He boils the coffeepot dry, he can’t remember if he is supposed to eat eggshells, he forgets that he’s completed some part of therapy five minutes after it’s happened, and he doesn’t even know if his daughter is alive because he’s just remembered her older, and laughing, but at the same time he remembers her dead.
I do think that this is one of those important books that can open our minds to the suffering of others, one of those books that we should all read and think about. It reveals the wilderness that our brains can become as they lose so much in old age. I’m not going to lie though because it is heartbreaking and it is tough to read. It’s a worthy, worthy book, but it will make you cry.
 Hiroko Tanaka, a young woman living in Nagasaki in World War II, has fallen in love with a German. They know their lives are constantly in danger, but somehow their love has blossomed regardless. On the same day that Konrad proposes, the Americans drop a bomb on Nagasaki. Hiroko’s life changes irrevocably, right down to her skin, on which the birds from her mother’s kimono have been etched in scars. A few years later, Hiroko finds herself at the home of Konrad’s sister in India, where new love awaits. Sweeping onwards through to Pakistan and later the United States, this multi-generational work encompasses the depths of the horror of war and the endurance of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable horror and tragedy.
I’m not sure it’s possible to like this book, although I know I’ve said I do already. It is almost relentless in the danger and the pain it causes for its main characters, particularly Hiroko. In the beginning, it feels too long and it moves very slowly. While I appreciate the messages the book is trying to convey, it takes a great deal of concentration to get through and it might have benefited from a more concise plot. The writing is gorgeous, but doesn’t help matters, although it does feel as though we could live in the settings of the book. Each location feels different, as they should given where they are in the world. Hiroko moves from Nagasaki to India to Pakistan to New York City, all of which are beautifully drawn with Shamsie’s words.
It’s the message that this book has left me with, however, which is certainly both anti-war and almost anti-nation. By taking a large time period, Shamsie can show that as human beings, we haven’t learned from our mistakes, and that war is truly horrible in a way that people who haven’t lived through it don’t properly understand. She also shows us what a lack of education about can do through Hiroko’s son, Raza. Hiroko tries to shield him from the atrocities of the atomic bomb by speaking little about her own experience, but that only means he doesn’t understand what he’s getting into when violence does encroach upon his life and only learns later the meaning and devastation of violence and loss. The mistakes are repeated later with another character, still ignorant of what war truly means. With these characters, it seems to me that the author is trying to express that people are people, by giving voices and faces to those who do cross country boundaries and who may otherwise be considered suspicious. Nationalism only impairs our ability to relate to others as we stereotype them into something Different. It’s unquestionable, in the end, that this book has given me a lot to think about.
As such, I don’t know if I’d call Burnt Shadows an enjoyable book, but it is very deep. I felt that I was left with a lot on my mind and I had learned something about Pakistan in particular in the process (which I did enjoy, I like learning). So I’m undecided as to whether or not I can recommend it, and instead will leave you with just this review to decide for yourselves.
 In besieged Sarajevo, a cellist, gazing out his window, sees more than 20 people die from a bomb while waiting for bread. In mourning for them, he decided to play at that exact spot for 22 days, to honor all of the dead, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, Kenan ventures out most days, embracing danger to get water for his family and inexplicably the neighbor, an old woman whom he has never liked. Dragan feels a burden on his family, his wife and son sent away before the war, and finds some comfort in his job at the bakery. Arrow, a sniper, is determined to wreak revenge on the people in the hills who are killing so many of her townspeople. Together, these characters weave a picture of a city under siege, somehow seeking hope but not yet hopeless.
My favorite character, to whom I wished the narrative would keep returning, was Arrow. She is the most interesting of all of them, a killer, but somehow one that we can love and empathize with even as she chooses her targets and plans her strategy. She’s a murderer who has blocked off her heart somehow, drawing a direct line between the girl she was and the sniper that she is now. I can’t imagine not feeling for her. The other characters were less compelling, especially Dragan, who seemed obsessed with a variety of things and complained too much. The cellist didn’t have much of a personality. Kenan was also a compelling character and I enjoyed the discoveries he made and the thoughts he had over the course of the novel.
Perhaps the only problem I had with it is that I liked it while I was reading it, but now that it’s been a while since I finished, its core meanings have not stayed with me particularly well. War is wrong and savage, and it’s lovely that the cellist brought hope into its midst, but I have read other books about Sarajevo and I’m not sure this stands out as much as perhaps it should. I enjoyed its ruminations on survival while people are out to kill you, how the city holds together as one being, and Arrow’s protection of the cellist, but I’m not left with a desire to reread this one, perhaps because I just never developed a deep relationship with the characters.
I am glad I read it and I would recommend The Cellist of Sarajevo, particularly if you enjoy bleak stories about war with a light shining through the darkness.
 Just after Puttnum is born, his father, Carl, considers breaking his neck to spare him the disappointments of life. At the same time, he wishes for his son to embody certain masculine ideals and make him proud. When Puttnum is seven, he tries to do exactly that by throwing a rock into a boy’s face at a pool party, putting the boy’s eye out. Instead of pleasing his father, he has horrified Carl, and their relationship proceeds in a similar fashion throughout the novel. Puttnum, going from confused adolescent to angry young man to even more confused adult, wars internally with his desire to wear women’s clothing and his need to prove his masculinity to his father and the world. In this book, Jonathan Scott Fuqua takes a close look at the effect both damaging parents and a psyche outside of the norm can have on the life of a well-intentioned and smart man.
One thing that I appreciate the most in a novel is a great character that grows and develops throughout the whole work. With In the Wake of the Boatman, I got exactly that, as Puttnum was a wonderful character. This book is driven by his life and very little else, but it didn’t matter, because I was rooting for him and I wanted him to get past his problems. Puttnum is confused, but his confusion is understandable and carefully laid out, developing as he grows. It’s fairly easy to see that his identity problems are wrapped up with his idealization of his sister, a beautiful girl who has never had any problems dealing with either of their parents, but that doesn’t lessen his journey there.
Even though I have always been perfectly content with my gender, I found it easy to relate to Puttnum’s confusion and struggle with identity, because almost everyone is uncertain about who they are at some point in their lives. He chooses to enter the army to prove his masculinity, but he knows the army is not the right place for him. He struggles with where to go afterwards. He spends most of his life not fitting in. All of these are problems that so many face, and Fuqua handles his character and issues in such a way that he is a genuine person, multi-faceted and actually interesting.
The other characters are unhappy, too. Despite feeling emotions and having impulses that would ease his family, Carl is never able to express them. Puttnum’s sister Mary marries a man too similar to her father to ever achieve happiness; despite being Puttnum’s ideal, she has many problems of her own. Puttnum’s mother, while perhaps the most content of the lot, grows tired and grey over the course of the novel. Yet the book itself is not sad, but ends on a sweetly hopeful note, without real resolution but with inspiration for the future of these characters we grow to love. If Puttnum can discover who he is and be happy with it, perhaps the rest of us can, too.
In short, I really enjoyed In the Wake of the Boatman. It’s a thoughtful, moving read that had me engaged from start to finish.
 When Roland Mitchell comes across a letter from Randolph Henry Ash to Christabel La Motte in the course of regular research, he is so excited that he takes the letter home with him. Randolph Henry Ash, a nineteenth-century poet, is the subject of Roland’s life work so far, and this new discovery could reveal untold new information about his character. Teaming up with Maud Bailey, who is one of Christabel’s descendants and knows all there is to know about her, they seek to discover the true nature of their relationship, what happened, and why, before the other scholars can do so. Interspersed with their research are poems, letters, and journal entries by the historical characters, shedding light on their minds and hearts as Roland and Maud’s own search leads to similar questions in their lives.
If this book hadn’t been published when I was four years old, I would have sworn that Byatt wrote it with me in mind. It is so perfectly attuned to everything that I love that it’s almost ridiculous. All of my actual academic work has been biographical, and as a result I can understand completely their compulsion to know first, to know best, to possess their subject as no one else can or will. I adore Victorian literature. If it was written in the nineteenth century by a British person, I probably love it, and I can’t tell you why, but it’s true. As a result, there is just no way I couldn’t love this book, and I’m beyond glad that I finally got around to reading it after it sat on my shelf for more than a year.
Perhaps what I loved most about it was the dual set of discoveries that goes on throughout the course of the novel. As Maud and Roland begin to unearth the truth of the relationship between Ash and La Motte, their own lives become clearer to them. As a result, we have a fantastic intertwining of stunning and moving character development in two different centuries, with emotions on both halves of the story that feel real. At times, the story is heartbreaking. The ending, where all this goes, is stunning; the book just gets better and better as the reader goes on. I really can’t express how it took my breath away. All I can say is that it was one of those books that makes all the others worth reading just to get to this one.
If I had any problem with Possession, it probably would have been the poetry. I’m not a huge fan of poetry, so I did expect it to slow me down. Somehow, though, it worked here. Maybe it’s because I was purposely reading slower and could absorb the meaning more, but I loved how it completely fleshed out the way these characters were feeling without explicitly saying anything. Reading the literature that they wrote in addition to their thoughts made Ash and La Motte even more real to me (and that’s saying something considering they’re fictional). It added a whole new layer of depth. If I had been speeding through the book, I would have missed it. Byatt has serious talent.
If you love literature, history, biography, poetry, any of these things, this is not a book to be missed. There is a reason it won the Booker prize and I’m thrilled I finally found another winner that matches my adoration of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Possession has firmly earned itself a spot on my favorites list and I look forward to rereadings of it in the future.
 In 1940, Greek geologist Athos was digging in a war-stricken Polish city when a small boy emerged from the mud; no one realized that he was alive until he started to cry. Jakob was only seven years old and his entire family had been taken and probably killed by the Nazis. Athos decides to risk his own life by taking the boy home to Greece, where they settle, hide, starve, but begin to know each other and develop a relationship and education. We follow Jakob into adulthood, watching him write poetry that reflects their haunted past as well as their uncertain future.
This book may have been slightly too literary for me. I loved the idea of the story but I’m never all that fond of books told in abstracts. Perhaps I read it too soon after The English Patient, which I still haven’t found the words to review; both books are similar in their slow exploration of the effects of war on people’s psyche and in their meandering focus on people rather than plot. I’m not sure I’m always in a mood for such a read. A week later, however, I find myself pondering this book, wondering about Jakob.
Jakob’s transition from lost and lonely boy to educated, confident, loving man is quite a fascinating one. We first witness Jakob’s life, then the life of another man who is significantly influenced by him and by the war. There are multiple threads running through the novel; perhaps the most important, I felt, were the bonds of love. Jakob loves Athos; he loves his wives; he loves his parents and perhaps most especially, he loves his lost sister Bella, who he manages to carry in his heart throughout his life.
I was a bit perplexed by the addition of the second character in the final 100 pages of the book. I wasn’t as interested in him as I was in Jakob. I can see the parallels between them and I understand the effect of showing the significance Jakob had after his death, but I felt there were unanswered questions and I wanted the answers. This book would be better read with other people in order to think and discuss more closely its literary significance. I’m sure there is a great deal here that I am not picking up on my own. I’m planning to read it again and see what I can find the next time.
Available via Indiebound, Powell’s, Amazon, and Amazon UK.
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