I'm back at uni! I was dreading it slightly, because I got settled into such a comfortable routine at home, but now I'm here I'm so glad to be back. When I first came through the door two of my housemates were slouching around in bed watching pointless Youtube videos, and I ran in and jumped on top of them, and it was just as if we'd never been apart for five weeks. Once I'd unpacked everything I realised how lovely my room is; it's far bigger than my room at home, and now the weather is improving it's actually warm in here and I don't have to wear fingerless gloves, two hoodies, a dressing gown and a scarf when trying to work.
It's strange to be back because my timetable is practically empty. There are revision lectures and seminars, but they're optional and only run for two weeks, and once I'm done with them I'll have absolutely jack all to do. I'll have to take my education into my own hands. I plan on spending all day in the library revising, but I don't know how long that resolution will last, because the library sucks your soul out of you. Honestly. Grey carpets, grey walls, grey ceilings, garish strip lighting, heating always on a bit too high - it's designed to make you lose the will to live. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Anyway, onto the point of this post... In my campaign to be more interesting, I am going to write some book reviews! Three book reviews, in fact, because my mum bought some books on the 3 for 2 offer in Waterstones and I got so bored that I read them all in about two weeks.
Brooklyn - Colm Toibin
This is a novel set in the 1950s about an Irish girl, Eilis, who moves to Brooklyn to find work. She finds work in a big department store and lodges in a house with several other Irish girls. At first she hates the big city and suffers from extreme home-sickness, but she slowly adapts to the glamour of the city, becomes more and more sophisticated, and meets a boy called Tony, whom she falls in love with. Then her sister dies (bit of a spoiler there, sorry) and she has to go back to Ireland for a few weeks to comfort her mother. Before she goes, Tony encourages her to secretly marry him to prove that she intends to return, and she does. At home, however, she meets and begins to fall for another man she knew when she was younger. She receives a good offer of a bookkeeping job, and realises that her life in Ireland would be happier than her life in Brooklyn: if she returns to Tony she will become a housewife and will never be an independent woman. Eventually, she accepts that she does not love Tony anymore. Will she return to Brooklyn out of duty to her husband, or remain in Ireland where she will be happy?
At first I thought the book was pretty dull - Toibin has a really simplistic, understated writing style. "She went upstairs to make a cup of tea, then she went to bed and revised for her exams. She took the exams two weeks later and they went well." That kind of thing. That's not a quote, because I left the book at home. There is very little description of what people or places look like, unless it's a simple inventory of a room or the colour of a dress someone is wearing. While he tells us Eilis' thoughts - her narrative voice is very naive and childish - we rarely get any strong displays of emotion from her. I was especially taken aback when she hears that her sister has died, and she barely has any reaction at all. Toibin says that she cried, but it is all skimmed over very quickly. I appreciated that he was trying to avoid melodrama, but it seemed like he had taken the opposite extreme.
However, as I got further into the book I realised that the understated prose is perhaps the best thing about it. This sounds stupid, but I realised this when I was reading the book at about ten in the evening and decided I wanted a cup of tea. "But if I drink tea now won't it stop me from sleeping?" I wondered. Then I thought, "No, it's fine, because Eilis always drinks tea in the evenings." I'd started to think about her like she was a real person. That's when it hit me that Toibin had slowly, craftily tricked me into completely sympathising with his character. She does things which are utterly idiotic, like allowing herself to fall for the boy back in Ireland - if I were her I would have kept a mile away as soon as I started to feel something - but at the end of the book you find yourself really feeling for her. So overall, I'd recommend this book. I'd class it as a light read, but it does remain with you after you've read the last page.
Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro
After my rant about how much I love The Remains of the Day, I was really keen to read the new Kazuo Ishiguro book. Nocturnes is a collection of five short stories, all based around the themes of music and lost love. 'Bittersweet', 'melancholic', 'nostalgic' are all words I have heard used to describe it. All the stories are good, but none of them touched me in the way The Remains of the Day did. Ishiguro uses a very casual, familiar style of narrative, as if the narrator knows you and is chatting to you, telling you a funny story. And most of the stories are quite funny, at the same time as actually being very sad and poignant.
My favourite was "Come Rain or Come Shine", in which a man goes to stay with some old university friends who are having marriage troubles. It transpires that the husband, Charlie, has only invited the narrator, Ray, to stay because he wants his wife, Emily to see how much worse off she could have done. Emily and Charlie both see Ray as a total failure because he is single, has no career prospects and has not settled down yet. They make him feel like a pathetic charity case despite the fact he actually seems happier than they do. Alone in their house, Ray reads Emily's personal appointment book and finds that she has written some pretty nasty things about him. He tears the page in anger, then realises he has to cover up this mistake. He impersonates a dog, pretending it has destroyed the house, knocking over vases and tearing Emily's book in the process. Emily walks in the find him crawling around on all fours, boiling a shoe in a saucepan to try and recreate the smell of dog, and thinks he's on the verge of a mental breakdown. It's absurd, and probably quite unrealistic, but funny all the same. It's the sort of thing that would happen in one of my stories.
Several of the stories overlap, suggesting that the world is full of bittersweet songs and stories such as the ones we encounter in the book. Some of them seemed too similar for my liking, though there are subtle differences which I am probably too unsophisticated to pick up on. Overall, the stories were sweet and not overly sentimental, but I wasn't blown away by them. I've never been a fan of short stories, to be honest; I can't get involved in them the way I can with a novel because they're over too quickly.
One Day - David Nicholls
My friend thought I'd like this book because of its relevance to our situation in life. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation - she has a first-class degree, he has an average degree, and they both have no idea where they are going in their lives. The book then follows them over the next twenty years of their lives, charting the ups and downs of their friendship, their relationships, and their careers. They're clearly meant for each other, but of course they don't get together until the end of the book.
At first I thought Emma was disturbingly like me, and not just in the name. She graduates with an English degree, she's quirky and arty, she wants to work in publishing. The reason this is disturbing is because she ends up with a dead-end job in a disgusting restaurant and a grotty flat despite her brilliant degree. But I stopped sympathising with her after a while, because I don't think she's a convincing character, and neither is Dexter. They don't speak like real people. The amount of totally unrealistic, far-too-witty banter exchanged between them is up there with Gilmore Girls. And I hate Gilmore Girls.
The whole novel is pretty predictable in general too. Emma initially goes nowhere with her career, while Dexter travels the world and then gets a job in television, becomes a TV presenter and earns heaps of money. But then we realise that actually, Dexter isn't happier than Emma because he has no moral fibre and he's addicted to alcohol and drugs and his flashy lifestyle is nothing more than an empty shell. And then he spirals out of control, while Emma settles down and becomes a teacher and gets a boyfriend and it's all just so obviously trying to shove the question of what does success really mean in my face. And they go through all these failed relationships and the whole thing is so tediously will-they-won't-they-will-they-oh-they-almost-did-no-not-quite-oh look they did after all. And then they get married. And then Emma dies. That's not exactly a spoiler because I saw it coming for miles off. Of course, once they finally get together one of them has to die. That's what has to happen in overly sentimental books... Well, she got squashed by a taxi but at least she finally found love. Nawwww.
So I didn't really like it. Twenty years is a long time, it dragged on and on, and about ten years in I already wanted to punch both of the characters in the face. Dexter's essentially an arrogant pig and though Nicholls tries to give him all these redeeming 'but he's a good guy underneath!' features, I'm not convinced. Emma is facetiously self-critical (she clearly loves herself) and can't conduct a single conversation without hitting someone in the face with an irony sledgehammer. So I felt absolutely nothing when Emma died and Dexter (surprise surprise) got back on the bottle. But then I can be quite aggressive to fictional characters. I already want to kill half the cast of Neighbours.
Apologies for length; maybe I shouldn't have tried to cram three book reviews into one post. But I have nothing to structure my life anymore, and waffling away on this blog is probably the only thing that's keeping me (debatably) sane.
