Damon Galgut - In A Strange Room - Man Booker Shortlist

What a strong list they are this year. This is a small book some 180 pages but my goodness it packs a powerful punch.

The author experiments with punctuation in this novel and we have no speech marks. This normally irritates me. However, here is only serves to increase the dream like quality of the writing. This book is made up of three journeys. The first two are written in the third person, and we get this kind of detached , dreamy voyeurism, that is a little creepy but very compelling. Then in the third section we move from Africa to India and are brought shockingly into the first person and our emotions are put on an emotional ride that is disturbing and effective. This book stayed with me a long time after I read it. I am at a loss as to how to describe the effect it has or how it is achieved, it is not poetic but it compels and binds in the same way.

So far this is the one I think should win - extraordinary.

Peter Cary - Parrot and Olivier In America. Man Booker Shorlist

Well I didn't think I was going to enjoy this one, as it sounded odd from the jacket . It is odd but I really enjoyed it. The characters are completely off the wall and at the beginning I was completely at a loss. The alternating chapters by Olivier and Parrot worked very well as a device and I frequently found myself laughing out loud.
This book is set after the French Revolution. Olivier is a sickly French Aristocrat and his servant is Parrot an English oddball. To escape a potential further round of Aristocratic culling in France Olivier's mother gets him commissioned to write a report on American prisons. It becomes clear that nothing has equipped Olivier for democracy or America and it is left for Parrot to pick up the pieces.
A very funny book and very perceptive. It is Olivier that predicts in his aristocratic way the future of America as he leaves to return in despair to the disappearing Ancien Regime. Whereas Parrot is the success in settling and making a life in America. This is a book that relates to us on many different levels and again will make an excellent book group read.

Andrea Levy - The Long Song - Man Booker Shortlist

This a wonderful lyrical book despite the seriousness of the content. A truly uplifting and empowering journey. It is set in Jamaica in the Nineteenth Century. July is a slave girl on a sugar plantation. This is a time of the last turbulent years as slavery is coming to the end, and 'freedom' begins. In this book we follow her life as she writes it down for her publisher son.
This sounds serious stuff but it is a very funny book, because Andrea brings to life her characters with such vibrancy and spirit that we laugh along as they mimic and comment on their so called masters. We marvel at how strong physically and mentally a woman such as July could be despite such disadvantages.
It is, of course, also sad, as the life of the slave is portrayed in all it's brutality, and we watch as freedom is hard won and still inequitable. I liked the link with the UK and the thought that, can we really know our own DNA and who we are descended from? Can any white English person be free from the legacy of slavery?

I found this book especially interesting to read so soon after The Help and feel they would be valuable to read on consecutive reading group meetings, there would be so much to talk about....

Rose Tremain - Trespass

Having read nearly all of Rose's book I was fairly confident this would make the shortlist. Wrong! However, it is great, it is about the effect of trespass on peoples lives at various levels. The young child from Paris who attempts to settle in to a new school. The selfish brother who invades the cosy world of his sister and her lover in France. His trespass onto land that does not belong to him. The elderly french woman who may or may not have built her bungalow on her brothers land. An invasion of privacy and revealing of long dead secrets unfold, a murder is committed, and then solved. Revenge is fulfilled. As you follow the lives of these intertwined residents of the Cevennes in France , you cannot fail but be entranced by her beautiful writing and sense of presentment.
This would make a superb reading group read.

The MAN BOOKER Prize 2010

As part of the Read South West Reading group we are reading the short list and exchanging views on the excellent Cyprus Well website, which promotes literature for everyone in the South West. Find it here http://www.cypruswell.com/ I have also included a link at the side of my BLOG.

In preparation I had a look at the longlist and made a few educated guesses. As a result the only one I read from the long list that was not in the short list is the following. I have found it a very strong list this year and will add further reviews from the longlist when I have time!

Salley Vickers - Dancing backwards

I read this on a long train journey yesterday , it is wonderful. I really feel that this is up to the form of Miss Garnet's Angel. I was really bereft when is finished.
Here we have an newly widowed woman, booked on a cruise to New York. In New York she is to meet a former friend who she has had no contact with since she was married. Her children are grown up, her home empty.She is full of regrets about situations in her life, people she let go of, people she feels she has failed, potential opportunities missed. She gained a first at Cambridge and was a published poet before she married and had two children.
As the journey unfolds, so does she, and as she interacts with a variety of characters on board, she heals, to the point that she begins to write again. We learn about her past, her reason for the estrangement from Edwin who she is destined to meet in New York, we feel her guilt and confusion and come away with a strongly drawn character that we can empathise and identify with, and above all like. All the characters that she interacts with on board are deftly drawn, not quite caricatures, but instantly recognisable.They all have a story to tell, a contribution to make and in turn are affected by their interaction with Vi. I have a feeling that Salley must have done a cruise as a writer as Kimberley Crane, writer in residence is fab!
I wonder if this book can do for cruises what Miss Garnet did for Venice? The descriptions of the ever changing Atlantic Ocean were stunning. All in all a very reflective novel, what struck me is how important every human interaction is, even with strangers, perhaps even especially with strangers. This would make an excellent reading group choice.

Kathryn Stockett - The Help

Once again we were extremely lucky to get copies of this from the publishers for use by our reading groups. This book led to a lively discussion and it is no surprise that this is a bestseller both here and in the US.
We all had to keep reminding ourselves that this book is set in the 1960s and as such it is really shocking. Set in Mississippi USA this is the story of a black maid and the treatment of these 'servants' by the white majority of the town of Jackson. It is truly disturbing. More so I think as it makes South Africa at the time look almost reasonable, at least they openly declared apartheid. According to this book, in a nation that prides itself on being the 'land of the free' there was a strong underclass that clearly were not. It certainly to us Europeans gives us some insight into Martin Luther King and what happened to him.
I have to admit that at first I was rather uncomfortable with the fact that this was written by a white woman with a 'black' voice and was grateful that she had written something about this at the back. It might have been more useful perhaps at the beginning.
I do wonder though, where are the black authors of the US, why are they not writing about this, as does say Andrea Levy in the UK? Do they have a voice or are they just not exported and published in Europe or are they but do not become bestsellers?


A powerful book, one that is excellent for reading groups, the discussion will go on and on.........