Here's One I Wrote Earlier

By the time you read this post I will be on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, to be interviewed by German and Swiss journalists for the release of "Gotter Ohne Manieren", available in all good German and Swiss-German bookshops now, schnell schnell! But happily Blogger allows me to post in advance, which is a nice little feature. (Another nice little feature is my new-style blog-roll with snippets from recently updated blogs, over there on your right. How much are we loving that? How much time are we going to waste now? Per-lenty.)

Anyway, seeing as I am headed to a book fair, I thought it was a good time to update you on my book purchases from this recent post, and let you know what's on my new to-read pile.

First up, The Position by Meg Wolitzer. This is the one about the kids who discover that their parents have written and posed for the illustrations for a Joy of Sex style book. This is one of those state-of-America-through-one-family books, exploring different aspects of modern love and sex (very much not the same thing) by switching viewpoints between the four kids - now grown up - and their parents. The nearest touchpoint for tone and content that I can think of is Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections. Like that book, it's sharp, insightful, intelligent and funny - though maybe a little less funny than I expected - and pleasingly broad in scope. It's also of the most convincing novels about sex (as opposed to novels featuring lots of sex) that I've read. My only disappointment was that there wasn't more of it - which is the best kind of disappointment to have, as it tends to mean you enjoyed everything there was. The story leaps forward thirty years after the first chapter, and you gradually discover what has become of each member of the family in the interim, but with so many characters and so much time covered what you get can feel sketchy. Having said that, this comes highly recommended from me.

Next is The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank. This was the biggest surprise of the three. It's marketed as chick lit - consider the blurb:

When it comes to the mating game, Jane's still learning how to play. As a teenager she tried to understand relationships by watching her elder brother falling in and out of love, and now, older and wiser, she embarks on her own affairs. There's the boyfriend with the irritatingly beautiful ex; the witty and worldly older man; the commitment phobic who calls her 'honey' but never uses her name. Plenty of fish in the sea - but how do you meet a man worth catching? When she finally resorts to 'How To Meet And Marry Mr Right', a hilariously old-fashioned guide to hunting out and reeling in the man of your dreams, Jane discovers that with love, life and men, a girl doesn't need rules...

OK. Stop there. THIS BOOK IS NOT CHICK LIT. The usual caveat: there's nothing wrong with chick lit if that's what you like. There's a lot wrong with marketing things as chick lit when that's not what they are. What happens when you do that is loads of people who would love the book never read it, and an equal amount who want chick lit leave baffled comments on Amazon saying it wasn't what they expected. Anyway, what this book actually is is a portrait of a young woman told through interlinked stories about her relationships with the men in her life: not just her boyfriends, but her brother and father. It's thoughtful and considered, a character study most of all, honest and truthful about the roles men play in our lives, and how confusing and difficult it can be to figure out when and whether love should be lasting. Yes, it's about relationships, and yes, it is funny, and yes, it is written by a woman, but it doesn't conform to the tone or any of the conventions of the chick lit genre. It's a very good book which needs a different audience to the one it's going to get.

Last of all Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. This book is set in a post-apocalyptic England steeped in a mythology that has evolved from a combination of Christian myth and the history of the cataclysm that has broken the world. Narrated in an idiosyncratic English that has evolved - or deteriorated - from our tongue, it's a technically demanding but richly rewarding story of one boy trying to make sense of his life, his heritage and his place in the world. It's an excellent, unique book, linguistically brilliant - at the author's request, it has never been translated, because the language is so integral to the storytelling - and worth every effort that you are asked to make with the prose. So yet another enthusiastic recommendation from me.

Three from three! I wonder if my latest haul will prove so rewarding? On the new pile:

- Michal Ondaatje 'In the Skin of a Lion' - the predecessor to 'The English Patient'
- Margaret Atwood 'Moral Disorder' - her latest, a book of interweaving stories telling one woman's life
- E.M. Forster 'Where Angels Fear To Tread' - a classic that I know very little about
- Penelope Fitzgerald 'The Blue Flower' - set in 18th Century Germany, based on the true story of Friedrich von Hardenberg's engagement to a twelve year old girl.