Less than an hour to go before Sunday is over and I’ve just read the first six pages of my next book. This one was recommended by my baby sister.
See you all in the salon next Sunday. Happy reading if you manage to get any done in the week. Be strong those of you who are on a book-buying diet.
So I have done hardly anything today except read. You could say that Ruth has been drowning in “Drowning Ruth”. I’ve already seen a comment from someone who said that the they were annoyed by the book but that it redeemed itself by the twist at the end. Someone else, Ann, I think said that it split her reading group. I seem to remember that a lot of people raved about this book a month or two or a year ago. So where will I place myself or will I just sit on the fence? I can’t explain what it was that kept me reading so avidly. Maybe I just needed a reading day. Maybe I’m just back in a reading phase of my life, after all I did find it difficult to put “The Brief History of the Dead” down or have the really good books just worked their way to the top of the TBR pile? I have a penchant for books that are set in a Noman’s time. You know what I mean. It’s Little House on the Prairie time, Little Women time. Heidi time. We know the characters wear petticoats and don’t drive around in cars and a woman’s place is usually in the home apart from our heroine who is a bit tomboyish or feisty and knows deep in her heart that women are equal to men. So although the book clearly starts just after the end of the Second World War because Amanda tells us that “if I had not gone home that March in 1919, Mathilda my only sister , would not be dead” it is also in my favourite Noman’s time. The way that the protagonists deal with what arises is of course all due to social expectations and mores of the time but it isn’t really what people do but rather the feelings and relationships that feed into the situations that arise.
Initially the “cast list” is small, almost claustrophobic and for the majority of the novel it feels that it will stay that way but as we learn more the doors open up, it feels as though a breeze from the lake will blow some of the stuffiness away but disconcertingly this breath of new air just complicates the truth that we have come to believe or suspect.
Once again it is demonstrated that secrets hardly ever remain so. Once again we learn that a small adjustment of the truth leads to compound untruths and that every action we take is likely to have repercussions that can be good or bad.
This is just the sort of book that I would be pleased to find if I was on holiday in a remote cottage somewhere and the weather turned nasty. Pile the logs on the fire, heat the milk for the cocoa and be pleased that Aunty Mandy isn’t sending you out to move the sheep.
Aaaah!
I’ve already confessed in a comment on my sister’s blog www.anneholloway.wordpress.com that I bought two books while doing the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. I never look at the books in supermarkets because there is no ambience in those places. The lights do my head in and in some of them (certain branches of Tescos, Safeways + M&S I actually feel sick if I subject myself to more than a few minutes instore. But she tempted me by saying she’d picked up a certain book and couldn’t put it down. So I looked and found .. and was also lured in by the cover of another book. Subliminal recognition and I didn’t even know it! When I got home I realised the cover was by Petra Borner about who I waxed lyrical a post or two ago.
I didn’t need the book, I have a TBR mountain range but I bought the book. But I have been punished. Now that I take the book in my hands I see that the “Richard & Judy’s book 4 club, Galaxy British BOOK awards 2008” sticker is NOT a sticker but is printed ON the book all over my beautiful Petra Borner cover. WHY?????? The words “Mister Pip” and “Lloyd Jones” need no explanation or apology they are after all the title and author of the book. I have no complaints about the discreet “Shortlisted for THE 2007 man BOOKER PRIZE” but I feel that Richard & Judy, Galaxy et al owe me that circle of cover that they have denied me. Please don’t deface my books it’s bad enough that there are so many tacky covers out there.
OK – rant over …… for now.
OK I’ll have a go at this Sunday Salon thing as well. Let’s hope I’ve done the right techy things to get it to work. I have my doubts.
“We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen. Your mother wants to
see you now.Sophie. She does not want you to forget who your real mother is. When she left you
with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She
left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances
with you.”
The narrator, Sophie has been raised by Tante Atie, her mother’s illiterate elder sister. All she knows of her real mother she has learnt from this mother substitute. She only knows her mother’s voice from the spoken cassettes that are sent several times a year. Then one day the inevitable happens, a ticket is sent and Sophie must join her mother in New York.
“My angel, she said, I would like to know that by word or by example I have taught you love. I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. that is why I could never fight her about keeping you here. I do not want you to go and fight her either. In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children.”
And so it is that Sophie moves from the simple traditional way of living in Haiti to the life of an immigrant in New York, looked down on and called names by classmates. In her luggage she carries not only her few belongings but the weight of the past.
In her mother’s apartment she discovers a photo,
“I moved closer to get a better look at the baby in Tante Atie’s arms. I had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother’s but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that I noticed that I looked like no one in my family. Not my mother. Not my Tantee Atie. I did not look like them when I was a baby and I did not look like them now.”
Though Sophie, her mother and other Haitian friends now live in New York tradition casts a long shadow. The old ways are not easy to leave behind.
“Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.
According to Aunt Tatie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn’t her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.
The strength of women holds the generations together despite what is done in the name of tradition and inheritance. My reading of this book was at a very superficial level, concentrating on the relationships between the generations of women. There is much more to be excavated but first I would need to understand something of the social and political history of Haiti a place where the indigenous population was wiped out, replaced by African slaves under French rule. Ssubsequent interference by a variety of nations followed by a long period of dictatorship in which African roots were emphasied and used against the people by bringing to life the Tonton Macoute or bogeyman of traditional tales.
Don’t be put off by that last paragraph of mine. The book is told through the eyes of the child, Sophie, as she progresses from childhood to womanhood. The warmth of affection between Sophie & Tante Atie manages to keep out the underlying chills.
C r a f t y P e o p l e ---- confessions of a lapsed reader 