Saturday 24 March 2018

Fred's Funeral by Sandy Day


Fred's Funeral by Sandy Day
Self published in November 2017.

Featured in 5Books1Theme: The Great War and one of my 2018 IndieAthon Reads

Where to buy this book:



How I got this book:
Received a review copy from the author

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Only at his funeral, does a family come to know a long neglected and shell-shocked soldier from WWI. Based on a true story.

Fred Sadler has just died of old age. It’s 1986, seventy years after he marched off to war, and his ghost hovers near the ceiling of the dismal nursing home. To Fred’s dismay, the arrangement of his funeral falls to his prudish and disparaging sister-in-law. As Viola dominates the remembrance of Fred, his ghost agonizes over his inability to set the record straight.

Was old Uncle Fred really suffering from shell shock? Why was he shut away for most of his life in the Whitby Hospital for the Insane? Why didn't his family help him more?

Fred’s memories of his life as a child, his family’s hotel, the War, and the mental hospital, clash with Viola’s version of events as the family gathers on a rainy October night to pay their respects.

Fred's Funeral is a charming novella exploring mental health and its treatments through the life of a Canadian WWI veteran, Fred Sadler. Sandy Day used the real-life letters of her relative as the inspiration for this fictional account so I felt a strong sense of authenticity throughout the story. We first meet Fred's spirit inexplicably still hanging around at his funeral although he has already caught a glimpse of an afterlife to which he is keen to go. His wishes ignored through most of his life, this seems little changed in death except now he can at least show us, the readers, what he believes to be the truth of his life while his sister-in-law, Viola, recounts alternate versions to the gathered family members.

I think Fred was probably suffering from PTSD, shellshock as it was back in the 1910s and 1920s, and the condition remained untreated during his life because it wasn't understood. His bursts of antisocial behaviour couldn't be accommodated within his family so Fred finds himself in and out of an insane asylum for decades, a shameful half-secret. We see how attitudes change over the decades and with different generations. I appreciated Day's allowing Fred to tell his story in all its uncertainty and confusion. This man doesn't understand himself any more than his family does and I found his predicament very poignant. This is a lovely, thoughtful story.


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Books by Sandy Day / Novellas / Books from Canada

Thursday 22 March 2018

The Spider And The Stone by Glen Craney


The Spider And The Stone by Glen Craney
Published in America by Brigid's Fire Press in November 2013.

One of my 2018 IndieAthon Reads
One of my 2018 Take Control of Your TBR Pile Challenge reads

Where to buy this book:



How I got this book:
Received a review copy from the author

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As the 14th century dawns, Scotland's survival hangs by a spider's thread. While the Scot clans scrap over their empty throne, the brutal Edward Longshanks of England invades the weakened northern kingdom, scheming to annex it to his realm. But one frail, dark-skinned lad stands in the Plantagenet monarch's path. The beleaguered Scots cherish and lionize James Douglas as their "Good Sir James." Yet in England, his slashing and elusive raids deep into Yorkshire and Northumbria wreak such havoc and terror that he is branded the Black Douglas with a reward placed on his head for his capture.

As a boy, James falls in love with the ravishing Isabelle MacDuff, whose clan for centuries has inaugurated Scottish monarchs on the hallowed Stone of Destiny. His world is upturned when he befriends Robert Bruce, a bitter enemy of the MacDuffs. Forced to choose between love and clan loyalty, James and Isabelle make fateful decisions that will draw the opposing armies to the bloody field of Bannockburn. Isabelle will crown a king. James will carry a king's heart. At last, both now take their rightful places with Robert Bruce, Rob Roy, and William Wallace in the pantheon of Scot heroes.

Here is the story of Scotland's War of Independence and the remarkable events that followed the execution of Wallace, whose legend was portrayed in the movie Braveheart. This thrilling epic leads us to the miraculous Stone of Destiny, to the famous Spider in the Cave, to the excommunicated Knights Templar, to the suppressed Culdee Church, and to the unprecedented Declaration of Arbroath, the stirring oath document that inspired the American Declaration of Independence four hundred years later. The Spider and the Stone is the unforgettable saga of the star-crossed love, religious intrigue, and heroic sacrifice that saved Scotland during its time of greatest peril.

The Spider And The Stone covers most of James Douglas' life and provides an interesting narrative of this period of Scottish history. It mainly focuses on Douglas himself, Robert Bruce and Isabelle MacDuff, but also introduces many other famous characters such as William Wallace and the trio of English Plantagenet Kings named Edward. The supporting cast is so numerous that I often found it difficult to keep track of who everyone was, especially when some people only put in brief appearances, but several years apart. Craney has obviously done a lot of research in order to compile this novel. It often reads more as a nonfiction book and I did wonder if the narrative might have benefited from a deeper focus on fewer events which would have allowed the characters to fully develop. I felt I got a good sense of Douglas and Isabelle in the earlier chapters, but this faded as the story progresses and we jump from battle to battle to battle. The story becomes disjointed in the later years and I was frequently irritated by key events happening off the page. I think The Spider And The Stone is a good effort at recounting a complicated period, but for me it didn't really work out.


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Books by Glen Craney / Historical fiction / Books from America

Wednesday 21 March 2018

Over Glassy Horizons by Nico Reznick


Over Glassy Horizons by Nico Reznick
Published in the UK by B*Star Kitty Press in September 2015.

Where to buy this book:



How I got this book:
Downloaded the ebook from Amazon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This collection features poems written over the past fifteen years, covering such themes as bureaucratic injustice, the indulgence of heartbreak, the tragedies of ageing, the perils of giving power and fame to the wrong people, and the terrifying possibility that we might all be unwitting test subjects for our cats' psychology experiments. 

By turns caustic, irreverent, tragic, philosophical, anarchic and occasionally even sentimental, this first collection features twenty-five poems from an emerging talent, including the popular 'Whimper', a poem for our times in response to Allen Ginsberg's seminal 'Howl'.

I was blown away by Nico Reznick's first novel Anhedonia so was eager to take advantage of a temporary free download of this volume of her poetry entitled Over Glassy Horizons. The twenty-six poems span fifteen years of her writing and a wide range of subjects from advice to other poets to sexual frustration to the mindlessness of modern life to Piers Morgan's American reinvention of himself. I did find the whole collection to be a bit hit and miss for me and didn't feel I completely understood works like 41, but others are surprisingly vivid and inventive.

My personal favourites are Goldfish Smile which examines perceptions of freedom, Starting Over where a couple move house but fail to make a new start, and Paisley Lassie which is a very moving portrait of an elderly woman in a nursing home. Reznick also penned a long poem, Whimper, in response to Allen Ginsberg's famous Howl which I hadn't previously read but have now found online in order to really appreciate Whimper.


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Books by Nico Reznick / Poetry / Books from England

Thursday 15 March 2018

Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz


Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz
First published in Polish in Poland in various collections during the 1930s. English language translation by Madeline G Levine published by Northwestern University Press today, the 15th March 2018.

My 1930s read for my 2017-18 Decade Challenge, featured in WorldReads: Poland and my Book Of The Month for March 2018

How I got this book:
Received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where to buy this book:

The Book Depository
Wordery
Waterstones
Amazon

Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño.

Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobych, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As Father, one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.”

This comprehensive volume brings together all of Schulz's published stories—Cinnamon Shops, his most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, and an additional four stories that he did not include in either of his collections. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.

It's only half way through March, but I am pretty confident that Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz is going to be my book of the month! I absolutely loved his rich language and gorgeously vivid descriptions, deep prose and frequently bizarre storylines. Originally written in the 1930s these stories have a sense of history about them. I could picture the unnamed town as Schulz's protagonist wends his way through its streets. Kafka is namedropped in the synopsis and I did notice ideas that could have been inspired by him, particularly in certain elements of Father's daily life which sometimes reminded me of The Metamorphosis. I was also reminded of the Daniil Kharms short story collection I read last year in the often absurd turns Schulz's stories take.

Although each story is essentially independent, repeated themes, characters and locations made reading this book feel more to me like reading a novel than a short story collection. Schulz focuses in particular on the changing seasons, his Father character's dementia and the daily routine of maid Adela. He notices the natural world in its urban setting, giving frequent chapters over to detailed descriptions of plant life, especially wild growing weeds. He also uses repetition of particular words and phrases to great effect in linking the stories. Motifs from one tale spring up again and again to reinforce ideas and impressions.

Bruno Schulz uses lots of words, writes beautifully dense prose and, to me at least, is all about atmosphere, description and character. I don't expect this book to appeal to readers who prefer action, tightly-plotted storylines and concise ideas. Instead this collection is more a slow-flowing river. There is a lot happening, but its obscured and you have to sit watching a while before you begin to move with the current. Personally I loved getting swept up and away!

Forgotten by the great day, all the herbs, flowers and weeds multiplied luxuriantly and silently, gladdened by this pause that they could sleep though outside the margin of time, on the borders of the endless day. An immense sunflower, held up on a powerful stem and sick with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning dress the final, sad days of its life, sagging beneath the excess growth of its monstrous corpulence. But the naive surburban bluebells and the modest little muslin flowers stood there helpless in their starched pink and white little shirts, with no understanding of the sunflower's great tragedy. (from Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz)


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Books by Bruno Schulz / Short stories / Books from Poland

Thursday 1 March 2018

Stray by Bernard Farai Matambo


Stray by Bernard Farai Matambo
Published in America by University of Nebraska Press today, the 1st March 2018.

One of my WorldReads from Zimbabwe

How I got this book:
Received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Where to buy this book:


The Book Depository : from £13.99 (PB)
Wordery : from £10.74 (PB)
Waterstones : from £13.99 (PB)
Amazon : from £8.33 (used PB)
Prices and availability may have changed since this post was written

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Zimbabwean writer Bernard Farai Matambo’s poems in Stray favor a prose-shaped line as they uncover the contradictory impulses in search of emotional and intellectual truth. Stray not only captures the essence of identity but also eloquently articulates the pain of displacement and speaks to the vulnerability of Africans who have left their native continent. This collection delicately examines the theme of migration—migration in a literal, geographic sense; migration of language from one lexicon to another; migration of a poem toward prose—and the instability of the creative experience in the broader sense.

Bernard Farai Matambo writes prose poetry so each of his poems and chapters in this collection are vignettes of life in Zimbabwe and of life for a Zimbabwean man in Nebraska. As someone completely removed from both those cultures, I edged my way slowly into these poems over several readings. Poems from Preamble To Fever to The City I found immediately accessible because I was already aware of the terrible events in Zimbabwe that had led to mass starvation. Matambo shows the people's desperation and the many bloated corpses in horrific detail, all while a young beggar girl sits quietly by and watches.

For other poems however, I was grateful to the insightful introduction by Kwame Dawes for my understanding and for giving me starting points to research Matambo's references. Readers familiar with Zimbabwe will no doubt get a lot more from Stray than I could, but I feel I have certainly learned from reading these poems. I enjoyed the prose style which is very different from other poetry to recently come my way. Revisiting each work after taking time out to study allowed me to appreciate layers and references that might well have passed me by otherwise and made reading Stray a richer experience.  This is one of a number of collections in its African Poetry Book Series and I am encouraged to seek out more as a result of reading Stray.


Search Lit Flits for more:
Books by Bernard Farai Matambo / Poetry / Books from Zimbabwe