'Case Histories' (Kate Atkinson)

This is the second book by Kate Atkinson that I have read, and Gosh did I enjoy it... I only confirmed my-previously-made opinion that Kate Atkinson is a brilliant writer.

Different cases, in different time - yet all connected as one private detective - Jackson Brodie - investigates them. A mystery of a child that dissapeared over thirty years ago, a murder of a young women ten years earlier, a story of a young mother sentenced to prison for murder of her husband... All is revealed in the end but the reader is kept in anticipation as the facts are given out slowly and in moderation presented within a totally manipulated timeline - once we are in the present, than in the past, then something happens then we are reading about what happened just before, than again we are going back to the past, all a bit gloomy yet written in great style.
 

I am so pleased  that there are more books by Kate Atkinson in my local library.

'Portrait in Sepia' (Isabel Allende)

I have just finished reading this wonderful novel and I am totally under the spell of the style and the characters in the book. I borrowed it from one of the participants of the  'Spanish - Conversation and Culture' class I attend each week. I assumed that I would not be returning it for a few weeks as I was in the middle of reading other books at the time. I couldn't have been more wrong. The moment I opened the book and immersed myself in reading the first few pages my attention shifted - I put aside all the other books, to read them later. I simply had to continue reading the 'Portrait...' It didn't take me long - I simply 'swallowed' it (I mean I read it very quickly).

Sitting on my sofa at home with a cup of coffee or tea in one hand and the book in the other, I was transferred to the 19th century San Francisco (US) and  Chile (with a quick visit to London and Paris). The story takes place before, during and after the War of the Pacific up until the first decade of the 20th century. A family saga with the most colourful, powerful and unpredictable characters one can imagine. Aurora del Valle is the narrator in the book. She describes her upbringing and the stories of her maternal and paternal relatives. Yet, not everything is revealed straight away as she does not actually know for a very long time who her parents were. She is in a strong need for closure and slowly over the years she keeps on finding out .... Aurora, suffers from terrible nightmares where people in black pyjamas appear. In the last pages the horrible truth behind the black-pyjamas people is revealed.

Aurora was brought up by her paternal grandmother - Paulina del Valle - a huge-in-size business-orientated extremely-rich matron with the most interesting and headstrong personality - firstly in San Francisco then in Chile.  Her paternal grandmother was Chilean. Her maternal grandparents were Chilean and Chinese, but she could not remember them since she had lived with them only until she was 5. Throughout her life she missed her Chinese grandfather emotionally (as if there was a huge hole in her)even though her little head could not remember him physically (and she did not even know for a very long time he even existed) - as a little girl she had had such a strong wonderful bond with him that it affected all her life.
In my opinion Tao Chi (Aurora's Chinese grandfather) is the most beautiful character here - with his eagerness to help people (he had an acupuncture clinic in San Francisco), wonderful love for his wife, his children and Aurora, and humble yet noble personality and dis-attachment to material things (as for whatever money he could save he would buy young slave-prostitutes from the brothels of china town to set them free and give them chance of a descent life). There are many other brilliantly portrayed personalities: Paulina del Valle, her English butler Williams (later her second husband!), Severo del Valle (who married Aurora's mother when she was pregnant), and Nivea - second wife of Severo (with whom she had 15 children!)...

I am definitely going to read more of Isabel Allende.  I already have one of her books on my Kindle and there are plenty in the local library. I might even treat myself to one or two of her books in original Spanish.

 

Quotes:

 

" 'I'm going to die' I screamed, throwing myself on her.

  ' This is not a convenient time to do that,' my grandmother replied dryly."

(Aurora just discovered she was bleeding (menstruating) for the first time, on the same day Civil War broke out)

" 'You already lost one leg in the war, Severo; if you lose the other, you'll look like a dwarf'.
'I don't have any choice, I'd be killed in Santiago anyway.'
'Don't be so melodramatic, this isn't the opera!' "
(conversation between Severo and his aunt Paulina before he left for another war - he indeed had lost one leg in the previous war)

" 'A printing press? Here? In my house?' my grandmother bawled.
  'I'm afraid so, Aunt,' murmured Nivea.
  'Shit! What will we do now!' And the matriarch fell back into her chair with her head in her hands, muttering that her own family had betrayed her, that we were going to pay the price for such incomparable idiocy, that we were imbeciles, (...)

"Since she was always pregnant. Nivea never relied on counting days but calculated instead the proximity of the coming delivery by the number of times she used the chamber pot. When for two nights in a row she got up thirteen times, she announced at breakfast that it was time to send for a doctor, and in fact her contractions began that same day."

"He was breathing, but his soul was already travelling through other dimensions. 'Good-bye, Papa,' I told him. It was the first time I had called him that. He agonized for two days more, and at the dawn of the third day he died like a baby chick."
(death of Aurora's father - she found out he was her father only a couple of months before)

" 'Light is the language of photography, the soul of the world. There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain,' Don Juan Ribero told me seventeen years ago during the lesson he gave that fist day in his studio on the Plaza de Armas."

"Leaf Storm" (by Gabriel García Márquez)

It has been such a long time since I read Márquez! I am still remembering what impression ´One hundred years of solitude´ made on me when I read it as a teenager (in Polish). Everyone was reading it those days in Poland (I am talking late 80s here). Anyway, since then I have not come back to reading Márquez till now.

 

This novella (short novel) introduces the village of Macondo (which is exactly the same place as in ´One hundred years of solitude´). It is just that ´Leaf Storm´ was published in 1955 and ´One hundred years...´ in 1967. One can read ´Leaf Storm´ at one sitting really as it is not exactly long. But it is not a light read. Written from the three individuals perspectives - the grandfather (the Colonel), his daughter and his grandson. Three of them go to the corner house to the wake of the hated-by-the-whole-village doctor. They come to fulfil the Colonel´s promise given to the doctor years back - the promise to bury the body of the doctor when the time comes. It is a gruesome scene - filthy neglected house in which lonely, withdrawn and rejected (with quite peculiar and not exactly pleasant personality) doctor hang himself. His body gets put in the coffin, one shoe left behind.... They are waiting for the official permission to bury the body. Time is dragging, and in the meantime the reader is being told the story of the doctor (and bits of the town´s story) in retrospection and in no particular order by entering the thoughts of those three characters (granddad, daughter and her son). It kept me guessing and interested. Yet, not everything is revealed - not even the name of the doctor, or where he really came from nor what happened to his Indian mistress (who mysteriously disappeared years earlier). Gloomy but brilliant!  

 

I am planning on reading ´One hundred year of solitude´ again but in original - the copy of the book on my book shelf - a gift from my partner - awaiting me patiently. I know it is not going to be easy to read it in Spanish (even though I have  read it before and in my native language - but it was over 20 years ago so it does not count) but I have been wanting to do it for quite a while now. 

'Gandhi' A photographic story of a life (by Amy Pastan)

It is a very well written biography and a quick interesting read. I know it is primarily written for younger people to introduce them to this important character of the relatively recent history, but I would very much recommend it to anyone who is interested in finding out about Gandhi's life and work but would not want to get into all the detail. Feel-good shiny quality paper and the content loaded with photographs and notes explaining key terminology or briefly introducing  other important characters in Gandhi's life make it feel like a treasure. I think this book would be a brilliant gift to a teenager. I fairly enjoyed reading it, and will strongly recommend it to my daughter in the near future.