Tag: Books

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One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

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The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life. Elin Anna Lanna’s novel The Home of the Drowned, traces the story of a family- Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Anne – from 1942 to 1982. At a nearby lake recently dammed to build a hydroelectric power station floods their village. Their home, a type of hut called a goahti, is being submerged by the water. The Sámi are an indigenous people who historically inhabited northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. Due to state-sanctioned assimilation policies over the … Continue reading One’s own story submerged by someone else’s

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Memoir of self-development

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  When Irish writer, Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. But his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at least he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia liveup to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to is author, what it enabled and denied between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, … Continue reading Memoir of self-development

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Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

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The Left and the Lucky is the moving large-hearted story of a young boy in danger of slipping through society’s cracks and the unlikely father figure who takes him under his wing. “And try to breathe, man. You gotta remember to breathe. You won’t get so panicky if you can remember that.” This novel is about neighbourliness in Portland, Oregon. Eddie Wilkens runs his own house-painting business ( a job Vlautin did in his thirties while trying to make it as a writer and musician). Eddie primes and refreshes the walls and windows of well-heeled locals, while covering up the cracks … Continue reading Friendship that can shatters people and compassion that can hold some of these pieces together

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Mimetic anonymity voice control

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Trained as a Soprano for music theatre in the 1990s, at a stage school in New York, she learnt to control her voice into mimetic anonymity to fit the female characters of Walt Disney films and Broadway musicals. Mastering the problem of her vocal break the passaggio  the yodel-ish sound  that happens to everyone when their voice moves register, from chest to head was critical for stamping out individuality in her voice. In Vocal Break, Lauren Elkin seamlessly blends memoir, feminist manifesto and cultural history to explore a plurality of female singing voice- and how women have used them to defy convention, … Continue reading Mimetic anonymity voice control

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Monsters within her…

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Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care … Continue reading Monsters within her…

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Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Erica Wagner’s Wash tells the story of a boy Washington Roebling growing up in Pennsylvania under the eye of a brutal but brilliant father. He is a young man at college, enduring the choices that have been made for him and finding brightness and beauty all the same. He is a soldier in a dreadful war who- despite that awful conflict- finds an extraordinary woman who was the love of his life, and her tale inextricably twines with is. He is an engineer who builds one of the great wonders of the modern world. His life holds the possible and … Continue reading Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Tahmima Anam’s Uprising reveals a group of children witnessing their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude on a desolate sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Bought and sold by Amma, the ruthless madam who was once herself sold into slavery, as the victim becomes the perpetrator, the women have accepted their fates as sex workers. Yet their children weave fantastic tales, imagining that someday they will escape the island and enjoy a life of freedom.  When Kusum Khan, a young educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. … Continue reading Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Henry Snow, US Labour and economic historian, reminds us that he idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother Samuel, who fascinated by shipbuilding, undertook a high-level apprenticeship in the late 18th century that equipped him with “both a trademan’s knowledge and bourgeois European science”. Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon Warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers- and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor … Continue reading Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Mysteries of male friendship

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Andrew Meehan’s Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades. The story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian, a lonely teenager finds himself lodging with his father’s cousin, thirty-year-old actor Tommy Carmody in London. He needs to get away from the family home: his mother is dead and Ian and his father have not only buried her; they’ve buried the memory of her too, distracting themselves with anagram games.  “Eric Clapton, he said. Narcoleptic, I said.”  Tommy will be a change for Ian. He’s “What you ‘d call a character … Continue reading Mysteries of male friendship

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Can a fox be tamed? 

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While some of us crave crime and violence or in depth factual books on politicsor finance as well as self help bibles, some of us feel enlightened and soothedby human interest stories which follow relatively ordinary people and their lifeexperiences especially if animals are involved.So if you want to take a side step and read about Wilf and his foxy friendtogether with elaborate characterisations of many people vital in the story trythis novel which is a debut for Richard Tyrrell who has a degree inPharmacology and has worked as a book reviewer for mainstreet papers andwas a finalist in The … Continue reading Can a fox be tamed?