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BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 5

26/3/2020

My last book for this week is a real page turner. Set in Iceland it is based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir. BURIAL RITES was written by the Australian author, Hannah Kent as part of her PhD thesis.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD.

Set in Northern Iceland in 1829.
A woman is condemned to death for murdering her lover.
A family forced to take her in.
A priest tasked with absolving her.
But all is not as it seems, and time is running out:
winter is coming, and with it the execution date.

Only she can know the truth. This is Agnes's story.

A fascinating glimpse of Icelandic life in 19th century, interwoven with myths and legends that still influenced the islanders way of life and attitudes. This is more than a crime novel.

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BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 4

25/3/2020

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My book for today is INTO SUEZ by the Welsh novelist, Stevie Davies, whose books have often cropped up on the short list but never claimed a prize.

1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs; Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt. "Into Suez" is a compelling human and political drama, set in the postwar period when Britain, the bankrupt victor of the Second World War, attempted to assert itself as an Imperial power in a world wholly altered. The novel is set in the run-up to the Suez Crisis, a template for future invasions (Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent). In this moving story, Joe's tragedy is that of an ordinary working man of his generation: he's a lovely, humorous, emotional man in whom the common ration of racism and misogyny becomes a painful sickness. Ailsa, intelligent, curious and craving to explore the realities of the Egypt she enters, meets on the voyage out Mona, a Palestinian woman who excites in her yearning for a world beyond her horizons. When Joe's closest friend is murdered by Egyptian terrorists, their relationship spirals towards tragedy. Through it all, love remains. Looking back in old age, their daughter Nia follows in their wake to sail the Suez Canal with the aged Mona. Nia has been told her father was a war hero: now she will face a more painful truth.

REVIEW FROM THE GUARDIAN

In Davies's story, Ailsa is an intelligent, self-sufficient young woman from the Welsh valleys who, accompanied by her young daughter Nia, sails out in 1947 to join her husband who is serving in the RAF at Ismalia in the Western Desert. Life in the world's largest military installation has some compensations, such as unrationed cherries in the company store. But the salt marshes of Suez are pitilessly inhospitable – "a lunar landscape as flat as Suffolk and sterile as death" – which leaves Ailsa to wonder "how many Arab labourers died to dig this . . . ditch the Roberts family was arriving to defend as somehow British as the Manchester ship canal"?
Wives of the rank and file are expected to keep their heads down and confine themselves to quarters. Yet Ailsa is spellbound by a sophisticated, dark-skinned concert pianist named Mona with whom she forms an attachment on the boat. Mona's husband is an Israeli army psychologist, which leads Ailsa to assume Mona must be Jewish; yet it transpires that she is an exiled Palestinian Arab.
Also on the voyage is a young German refugee travelling to be reunited with her British husband and a querulous Welsh woman whose hostility towards anything foreign encapsulates the narrow, British fear of displacement. It's a cast of characters whose nationalities and circumstances are as confused and combustible as Suez itself; and though the story culminates in a distressingly well-executed denouement, Davies's main theme is what occurs when protocols are breached and privates' wives drawn into unguarded intimacy with the officer class. "What was Ailsa guilty of? Just getting out of line. Being, not even a black sheep, but a piebald sort of sheep in a field of whitish fleeces."
As the daughter of an RAF officer herself, Davies has firsthand experience of being shunted round the remnants of empire: "The war had beggared and bankrupted Britain. We'd scuttled out of India and Palestine and we'd have to scuttle out of the rest of the Middle East. Scuttling was all we were good for." Davies first dealt with the traumas of being a bullied army child in 2001's The Element of Water; and her picture of the cruel indifference and blind prejudice of the British occupation of Egypt seems to have been further honed by her understanding of the average British forces boarding school.
Davies frames the historical action with the contemporary account of Nia, who travels back to Egypt to meet her mother's friend Mona, still a celebrated and charismatic concert pianist in her old age. Nia's recollection of the 1950s is fragmentary, but formed of vivid impressions such as the sight of "stricken animals bleeding in the water". In one of the novel's most memorable scenes, we discover how bored British troops sailing to Suez used porpoises as target practice. "Ordered to do so, someone said. Uproar. Barbarians! Oh God, porpoises are only fish. Get a grip. Don't you eat fish and chips then?"
It has to be pointed out to them that the creatures are warm-blooded mammals, like ourselves. But the incident serves as an example of Davies's remarkable ability to encapsulate imperial wrong-headedness in a single, indelibly recorded incident: cynical, gratuitous – neither sense nor purpose.

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BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 3

24/3/2020

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Day three and my choice is by an Irish author (in my opinion some of the best writers come out of Ireland) Niall Williams. His novel "HISTORY OF THE RAIN" is a bitter sweet story set in County Clare, where the author lives. It was long-listed for the BOOKER PRIZE in 2014.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...
Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to grandfather Abraham, to her father, Virgil - via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight books piled high beneath the two skylights in her room, beneath the rain.
The stories - of her golden twin brother Aeney, their closeness even as he slips away; of their dogged pursuit of the Swains' Impossible Standard and forever falling just short; of the wild, rain-sodden history of fourteen acres of the worst farming land in Ireland - pour forth in Ruthie's still, small, strong, hopeful voice. A celebration of books, love and the healing power of the imagination, this is an exquisite, funny, moving novel in which every sentence sings.

And this is my Amazon review:

A mesmerising story, written from the point of view of young girl who is confined to her bed. A kaleidoscope of Ireland's society and recent history, a mixture of myth, legend and literary culture. The girl is a reader and the story is punctuated with references to characters and scenes from novels that she has read. Charming, funny and hard to put down.

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BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 2

24/3/2020

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My choice today is THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS by Robert Dodds, and is for lovers of historical fiction.

"A gripping and absorbing read" HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY

It is 1490. Northern Europe is in the grip of sweeping plagues and religious inquisitions, and in daily terror of the Day of Judgement. In the town of Den Bosch, the artist Jerome (Hieronymus Bosch) paints his visionary denunciation of sin and folly, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, while his neglected wife Aleyt strays into sin herself. But Jerome is not immune from the world he portrays. A rival artist and a corrupt Abbess concoct a hellish plot that threatens to destroy him.

Here is my Amazon review:

What a gripping book. I'm not a great fan of Hieronymous Bosch's paintings, skilled though they are—too may demons and visions of hell—so was not sure if I would enjoy a novel based on his life. However the characterisation of the protagonists, especially Bosch and his wife was so true to life that I couldn't put the book down. I just had to know what happened to them. Dodds describes life in the small town where Bosch lives in great detail, showing his extensive research into the period and the course of the Inquisition in the Netherlands. But it's the human side of the story, with all its strengths and failings that brings it to life. His 'bad guys' are truly bad, but we still see a glimpse of why they are what they are. No stereotypes here.

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CHOOSING A BOOK TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS day 1

24/3/2020

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While we are all in our own way trying to survive the coronavirus I thought that each day I would share with you one of my favourite books. You will soon realise that if I find an author I like, then I try to read all of their books. My first selection is a Scottish author and poet, Andrew Greig, and the book is, "In Another Light."

A young man leans over the railings of the ocean liner bound for the exotic shores of Penang. It is early in the 1930s and Dr Alexander Mackay is on his way to take up his post running a maternity hospital in the colony. During the voyage he meets two beautiful sisters and the seeds of a scandal are sown.

Seventy years later Edward Mackay wakes after a major brain trauma. In the hazy shadowlands of illness, he conjures the figure of his dead father, a man he knew so little about. This near-death experience provokes a move to the wilds of Orkney, where Edward joins a project to harness the tides around the island as a renewable source of energy. But in the tight-knit island community passions also run high.

These were my thoughts on it after I had read it:

What a magnificent book - I never wanted it to end. Greig has such a delightful way with language, whether local Scots or English. He is also a poet and this is very evident in his lyrical prose. In Another Light is the moving story of two men - father and son. The son, recently recovering from a near-death illness becomes obsessed with learning more about his father's life before he met his mother. The novel is set partly in Penang, where the father served as a medical officer, and partly in Orkney, where the son is working on a renewable energy project. The story of the father twists and turns and at times runs parallel to the son's life until it all comes together in the last few pages. It is a fast moving plot and the mystery surrounding his father is revealed clue by clue, with a final twist to the mystery right at the end.

Available on Amazon as ebook and in paperback.

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International Women´s Day 2020

6/3/2020

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International Women's Day, whose theme this year is “I Am Generation Equality: Realising Women’s Rights,” is celebrated on the 8th March. It was first organised in 1909 in New York by the Socialist Party of America to draw attention to women’s rights, and to bolster the demand for women’s suffrage. For years the day was associated with Socialist and Communist movements; in 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibárruri, a leading member of the Spanish Communist Party, headed a commemorative march through Madrid. Then in the 1960s the feminist movement adopted the day as their own, and later in the 70s and 80s, it grew in popularity as more and more women called for equal rights, equality of pay and protection against domestic violence.

Now International Women’s Day is celebrated across the world; in some countries it is a day of celebration, and in others a day of protest; in 2007 a women’s rally in Iran was broken up by police and many people were arrested. In Spain, on International Women’s Day last year, hundreds of women went on strike, either staying away from work or abandoning their normal domestic duties, leaving their husbands to care for the children or the elderly.

Although the situation of equality for women varies greatly from country to country, here in western Europe women have achieved much of what they wanted, especially in Spain. Spanish women have come a long way since the death of Franco, but sometimes it is good to look at the past and see just how far that is.

When I first moved to Spain, I decided to write a book about the lives of women under the dictatorship. I called it Daughters of Spain.

Before the Spanish Civil War, women had gained many rights: they had the vote, and were given full legal status within the state. They could have their own bank account, adultery was no longer a crime and abortion was legalised. Women were allowed free access to the labour market, some limited maternity leave, and the length of the working day was reduced to eight hours, leaving women with more time to work in the home. All that changed when Franco came to power and I found it heart rending to listen to some of the things the women whom I interviewed told me. Like, “J” who was not allowed to have her name put on her baby’s birth certificate because she was unmarried, and subsequently had no rights whatsoever regarding her own child. And “L,” whose husband kept her virtually a prisoner for forty years, without friends and family. Or “MJ” who was divorced, and concluded our interview with the words: ‘Am I happy? Yes, I’m happy with what I’ve done, but truly happy? I don’t know. At least now I make the decisions; first it was my father making decisions for me, then my boyfriend, then my husband; now I make the decisions.’

Will this Sunday be a day of protest or celebration? One of the main issues for women throughout the world is domestic violence. In Spain last September women came out in protest over a summer of violence where 19 women were killed by a husband or partner. By the end of 2019 there had been 55 fatalities. Already this year thirteen women have been killed by their partners or husbands. And that is despite the law against domestic violence that was passed in 2004.
And Spain is not the only country in Europe. In fact it is well down the league table of these horrific crimes, below the UK, France and Germany.

Whatever you do to celebrate International Women’s Day, whether you are 65+ or a teenager, remember that here in Europe, women have a voice. Maybe women haven’t achieved all that they would like, but at least they are going in the right direction and that’s something to celebrate.

By the way, did you know that there’s an International Men’s Day as well? It’s on 19th November. Can’t say I'd heard about it before, but it's focus is on men's and boy's health, improving gender relations, promoting gender equality, and highlighting positive male role models. Sounds good.

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BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 5

BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 4

BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 3

BOOKS TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS DAY 2

CHOOSING A BOOK TO WHILE AWAY THE HOURS day 1

International Women´s Day 2020

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