Book reviews!

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.

The Remains of the Day

I just finished reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which had been on my shelf for ages, but I'd never got round to reading it because it looked pretty dull. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and oh my gosh, I can see why. It was amazing. I haven't read a book that has actually made me cry in a long time. It was just so good.

From the plot, you wouldn't expect it to be good: a butler goes on a road trip through the English countryside to visit an old friend, and reminisces about his past as a butler in a grand old English household on the way. That's it. And when I first started to read it, I thought, oh dear. Because Stevens, the main character, has this incredibly over-formal, emotionally stilted voice, and I didn't see how I was going to endure it for the whole book.

I quickly changed my mind. The narrative voice is the best thing about the book. There's something really haunting about it. Stevens is completely in denial about everything - particularly his own feelings towards the housekeeper, Miss Kenton - but all these undertones and nuances bubble up underneath everything he says, and you get this constant sense of the truth being repressed. It's painful. Stevens seems to have absolutely no interests outside of being a good butler. Even the conversations he has when off-duty are about butlering. As a reader, you want to scream at him, can't you see that you're missing out on everything that's good in life? That you are throwing away every opportunity that's given to you? But of course he can't hear you, which is incredibly frustrating.

There is one point, one sentence, where the human being breaks out from underneath the veneer of the old-fashioned butler, and this is when he realises that it is too late for him to have a future with Miss Kenton:

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

The ending verges on the sentimental - as he sits on a bench on the seafront, a random old man enlightens him on everything he's missed out on. But I didn't really care. It had my eyes watering anyway. I'm not going to say anything more about it. Just read it!

I'm sorry to go all smarmy and book review-y on you. I just had to get that off my chest. It's made me worried about my own writing, though. I don't think I'll ever be able to write anything as good as this. Technically, I'm good, but I just don't have any ideas. I'm starting to think I'll never even finish a novel, let alone publish one. And yet my parents always talk about it like it's going to happen and I don't want to let them down...

Crime and Punishment.

So I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Wow, that was heavy going.

I know pretty much nothing about Russian literature. I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenin and then I read this, and that's the extent of my reading in that particular area. I have to read War and Peace for one of my modules next year, but I probably won't be conscious after finishing that, one so I thought I'd better write a blog entry now.

I'm not going to even attempt to adopt a scholarly tone for this, so here we go: Crime and Punishment is absolutely mental.

Seriously. Not a single character in the book is sane. Where do I begin? There's the main character, Raskolnikov, who murders an old woman with an axe, the reason given to justify this deed being that he thinks he's some kind of revolutionary Napoleon, from what I gather. He's poor and wanders around in filthy rags and lives in a cupboard which he can't pay the rent for, and this woman is wealthy due to being a greedy old witch, and yet he doesn't kill her for the money. He hides everything he steals from her under a rock. Oh, and when people give him money, which they do quite often, he either gives it to someone else or throws it off a bridge. I wanted to yell at him to keep the money and go buy himself a nice meal, since he never seems to eat anything, leaving me to wonder how he survives to the end of the book. He gets very ill, raves deliriously in his bed, broods a lot, wanders around the slums falling asleep in bushes, abuses all his friends and family, and then finally turns himself in to the police. Then he goes to jail, decides he's in love with a prostitute, and that's the happy ending.

Who else is there? He has this friend, Razumikhin, who's also completely off his rocker. He's basically permanantly excited and follows Raskolnikov around like an overexcited spaniel, despite the fact Raskolnikov tells him to get lost on numerous occasions. Then there's Svidrigailov, this weird old lecher who has a creepy obsession with Raskolnikov's sister and flings money at everyone who comes within ten metres of him, before announcing he's going to America and then shooting himself in the head. Porfiry is the clever detective who knows that Raskolnikov murdered the old woman, but he never tells anyone because he has no concrete evidence. Instead he constantly torments Raskolnikov and makes long rambling speeches in which he says "tee-hee-hee!" a lot. There are lots of other characters, but it would take too long to go through them all, and I can't pronounce let alone remember any of their names.

I'll briefly mention the female characters though, because they don't fare much better. Sonya is the prostitute who 'offers Raskolnikov redemption'. I think this is because she is the only person he feels able to confess the murder to. And she loves him and he loves her and she gives him the New Testament and at the end he considers maybe thinking about reading it. Which is good, I guess. Anyway, Sonya spends most of the book trembling and crying and wailing, "Oh merciful Lord!" which was very sweet at first but just got a bit pathetic after a while. The other woman worth mentioning is Katerina Ivanova, Sonya's stepmother, who is consumptive and runs around going "cahuh-cahuh-cahuh!" a lot, and thinks she is a noblewoman despite living in absolute squalor, and goes raving mad when her permanently drunk husband dies, and then forces her children to wear ridiculous hats and dance in the streets. And then dies. Yeah. I do feel a bit sorry for her, but she is mental like the rest of them.

So you've got all these crazy characters wandering around St. Petersburg trying to have conversations with each other, but failing since none of them is on the same page as any of the others. Most of them spout two-page long monologues in which there is no logical line of thought, and which are usually misunderstood by the other characters. Everything is so...disconnected. I suppose it's the real world seen through a framework of poverty and exggerated ten times over. It's a grotesque, gloomy, clownish fantasy world, full of charicatured figures, where nothing feels real and nothing quite makes sense. It completely threw me out of my prim and proper middle-class English Home Counties comfort zone. No one did what I expected them to do, what I would have done, and it frustrated me a lot. By the end of it, I'd stopped expecting anything to make sense.

But then, there was a suggestion at the end that order might be restored - that Raskolnikov will repent of his crime and lead a happy life with Sonya when he is released from jail. Wikipedia tells me that Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian (though I suspect it's more complicated than Wikipedia suggests), which I suppose makes sense of that.

Anyway, I know I have spoken irreverently about Crime and Punishment and its general craziness. But you know what? I thought it was brilliant. Who says literature has to make sense?

I love Hamlet.

If it were possible to marry an inanimate object, I would probably marry a copy of Hamlet. I love Hamlet to the point that it is almost disturbing.

I am obsessed with it: it is one of the very few things in this world that make me cry every time without fail (the other things being Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto and Norrington's death in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie - I have a devastatingly massive crush on Jack Davenport) and I consider it to be the best thing ever written EVER. I can't explain why I love it so much. There's a huge debate about whether Hamlet is feigning madness or whether he is actually mad, but I think that even in his madness he is the sanest character in any play. The way he responds to his tragic circumstances is so convincing - I think I'd go crazy if my uncle killed my father and then married my mother. All of the other characters (except Horatio) betray or totally misunderstand Hamlet, but as the audience you feel like the only people who see who he really is. Every time I watch it I feel like I go a bit mad with him.

I was obviously delighted when my friend offered me very cheap tickets to see Jude Law play Hamlet in London last night. I'm not such a big fan of Law, but I thought it would be interesting to see him attempt the ultimate role when I'm accustomed to seing him in awful romcoms. I mean, The Holiday is pretty much the Bad Movie I compare all other bad movies to. That one really set the bar. My friends and I watched it last Christmas and we rewinded back to the bit where the little girl looks at Cameron Diaz and goes YOU SMELL LOVELY...I LIKE YOUR LIPS! about five times because at the time it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen. Anyway, I'm off on another tangent. Sorry.

Last year I was also lucky enough to get tickets to see David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. We drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon and combined it with a visit to Shakespeare's birthplace. Tennant was so good that I left fancying him a bit, despite his not being particularly attractive and my not being a fan of Doctor Who. I didn't expect Law to better his performance and I was right. So now, like everyone else who has had the good fortune to see both productions, I am going to compare them.

Tennant was far more witty and charismatic. He was excellent at being mad, which isn't surprising considering the quirky, barmy way he played Doctor Who. However, when it came to the soliloquys, the moments when Hamlet is consumed by grief and the desire for revenge, he was surprisingly touching. One minute I was laughing, the next I had to hide the fact my eyes were watering pathetically from the people sitting around me. Law on the other hand went down the angry, brooding, shouty route, which he did pull off well, but at times I felt it lacked any emotional content and he was just speaking lines. He substitued emotion for over-the-top hand gestures, such as pointing to the sky when he said the word 'sky'. Thanks, Jude, I had no idea in which direction the sky was located. At points he was very over the top...but I feel I'm being a bit mean to him. He spoke the lines very well whereas Tennant had a tendency to garble, and he grated on me a lot less in the second half. His portrayal was consistent, he drew laughter from the audience in all the right places, and by the end he had really pulled me into the story.

Hm, what else? My friend and I both agreed that Ophelia in last night's production was unbearable. I just read a review that described her as 'touching'. Ugh. The only thing she touched was my suppressed desire to scream and break things. She was stiff and dull and just reeled off the lines robotically. Her version of madness was wandering around the stage singing in a pretty voice. In the Tennant production Ophelia was running around the stage, shouting, flinging flowers at people, tearing off her clothes. The ghost wasn't, er, ghost-like enough for me last night, and Horatio didn't really do it for me. It's not Hamlet's actual death that always sends me into floods of tears, it's when Horatio says "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" that I begin to bawl like a five-year-old, because Horatio loves Hamlet and stays loyal to him to the end. But this Horatio didn't particularly seem to care, and I only experienced a bit of mild eye-watering (and for some reason nose running, which was very attractive).

Both productions went for the whole gloomy set, everyone wears dark colours vibe, which is probably the best way to go with Hamlet. In the Tennant production it was chilling and atmospheric, but last night's set was a bit...blah. When Law spoke the "to be or not to be" line he was standing in the snow framed by a set of massive doors. I suppose it was a little hackneyed but I quite liked it. Oh, and the scene of Polonius' death was excellent. Hamlet and Gertrude were behind a sheer curtain and Polonius was on the side of the audience listening. Hamlet then stabbed him through the curtain and he tore it down as he died. He ruined this a bit by falling onto his front and then suddenly flopping over onto his back with a massive thud. It made me laugh but no one else found it funny. It was like one of those moments when someone sneezes in a silent exam hall and you are the only person trying to hold back hysterical laughter.

Oh, and apparently Kevin R. Mcnally played Claudius, and I had absolutely no idea until I got home and looked it up online! I didn't recognise him because the only thing I've seen him in is Pirates of the Caribbean as Gibbs, and so I always picture him covered in muck and swigging a bottle of rum (Pirates is another one of my obsessions if you hadn't guessed).

Overall it was a very good performance and I now have a lot more respect for Jude Law - he did very well, though not as well as David Tennant, who is awesome. Law proved that he can act more than one type of character. I read somewhere that Tennant and co. are going to create a film version of the RSC performance to release on DVD, which I am so buying and watching over and over again (and you should too). I suppose the point of this massive blog post is to say that if you've never seen or read Hamlet, please do so. It will make your life better. It might even make you sob like a baby. Then again, that might just be me.