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nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews
Scandal Takes a Holiday by Lindsey Davis
http://nhw.livejournal.com/162111.html[return][return]Of course we know right from the start that the journalist Falco is sent to Ostia to trace is probably dead, but there's an entertaining chase through various other aspects of criminality in the environs of first-century Rome and some impressive misdirection of the reader by the author in her helpful maps and charts at the front of the book. Back on form, I think.
Wilt In Nowhere by Tom Sharpe
http://nhw.livejournal.com/895971.html[return][return]I read the first third and cannot care enough about any of the characters to finish it: the bits set in England are tired ranting, the bits in America are unfunny stereotypes. As a teenager I read the first two Wilt books and was mildly bemused by the adult humour; in this latest book Sharpe has clearly lost his way. Wilt and his wife central characters were children during the second world war and yet themselves have pre-teen children in 2002, and they are not really timeless characters. I picked this up last year in Heathrow airport where someone had cast it aside. Now I know why they did so.
The File on H by Ismail Kadare
http://nhw.livejournal.com/743751.html[return][return]It is short but very deep: the tale of two ethnographers visiting Albania in the 1930s during the rule of King Zog, to record ancient epic poetry (the H in the title stands for Homer). The two ethnographers are supposed to be Irish, but might as well be Japanese for the purposes of the story: the novel is about Albania, not about Ireland. (Perhaps it was in part a response to Andri's foreigners encountering Bosnia in The Days of the Consuls?)[return][return]But it's also about the construction of truth, how stories are told, especially when the state tries to regulate knowledge and information. Although the patriotic version of Albanian history - 1878, 1913 - is the only one told here, one senses that Kadar
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
http://nhw.livejournal.com/776257.html[return][return]Woman discovers she has been made the executor of her ex-husband's will, and is sucked into a bewildering world of conspiracies around subversive alternative postal systems. Reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and associated books, which presumably drew some inspiration from this source. But it didn't really grab me. At least it was short.
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1166285.html[return][return]A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance - some similarity with McEwan's Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. I found the narrator very na
The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
http://nhw.livejournal.com/700900.html[return][return]Harmless, funny stories.
Jennie by Paul Gallico
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1182284.html[return][return]Gallico wrote a number of sentimental novels about cute animals, and this is one of them: a young boy is turned into a cat, and gets to know the feline world of London (and Glasgow) under the loving tutelage of fellow cat Jennie. It's sweet and even moving in places. Also not very long.
Astra and Flondrix by Seamus Cullen
http://nhw.livejournal.com/1109706.html[return][return]A rather bizarre and somewhat distasteful fantasy novel: Elvish genitals come in pairs, while Dwarves have a more complex spiral arrangement (on which the male Dwarves spring across the countryside). I read to the end hoping there would be a punchline; but there wasn't.
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
http://nhw.livejournal.com/438482.html[return][return]The first installment of Manning's books about the second world war. In book 1, Harriet Pringle, recently married to her husband who works for the British Council, arrives in Bucharest just as the second world war is breaking out around them. The book finishes with the fall of Paris. In the second book, Romania gradually crumbles into the German sphere of incluence. In the third, the Pringles have made it to Greece, which also falls to the Germans at the end, though they have escaped to Egypt. The story is heavily autobiographical.[return][return]I really enjoyed the first two books. I don't know Romania particularly well but the whole mentality seemed very familiar from my Bosnia days and from my subsequent experiences of other former Ottoman territories. There were several aspects of the story that I felt very familiar with: the personalities and quirks of the small expat community, the total uncertainty of what is going on will happen next.[return][return]And the relationship between the Pringles is delicately, almost painfully observed. Harriet Pringle's leap of faith, moving to a Romania with a husband she barely knows, is almost incomprehensible, and her difficulties therefore seem a bit self-inflicted, though at the same time her husband's behaviour is rather self-obsessed.[return][return]The last of the three books, chronicling their time in Greece, is rather different, and a bit disappointing. Greece was and is of course much more integrated with Western Europe than Romania, but it's a country I don't know particularly, so I found the setting more unfamiliar. Harriet's long drawn-out dalliance with a potential lover is I suppose understandable but I found it a bit frustrating that they took so long to get to the point. And the casual disposal of Prince Yakimov, one of the more attractive characters from the series, was a bit sad.[return][return]I never caught the 1987 BBC miniseries based on Olivia Manning's books, but knowing that it was made allowed me to imagine how bad Ken and Em would be in the title roles. To my delight, the one character who really ought to be played by Alan Bennett, Professor Lord Pinkrose, actually was played by Alan Bennett. I'll look out for the DVD, but second-hand, I think.[return][return]Summary: enjoyed the first two books, less so the third.