Vale Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City on March 29, 2004. © The Richard Avedon Foundation. From The New Yorker.

How sad I was to learn this week that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had died. He was truly one of my favourite writers. I started reading his work in high school, when our curriculum included the book of stories, Leaf Storm. I loved it so much I graduated to One Hundred Years of Solitude and then Love in the Time of Cholera, which remains one of my favourite books of all time. Since then I have tried to read as much of his work as possible. Most recently (several years ago) I read his novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. 

I loved Marquez's writing, but he also introduced me more generally to the world of Latin American fiction, and to magic realism. Marquez was my jumping off point into Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Esquival, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. And my mother, a great reader and a great influence on me, also loved Marquez. It was her copy of  One Hundred Years of Solitude that I read, complete with her pencilled-in, ease-of-reference family tree covering the title pages of the book. That book contains one of the great opening lines in all of literature: 

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

It's right up there with the opening lines of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Perfection. 

Hearing of Marquez's death was a shock, for some reason, even though he was 87 years old. In honour of his writing and his life, I am going to turn back to his work in the next few months. I would love to re-read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I would also like to read some of his work I never got around to - like The Autumn of the Patriarch. 

Who is with me? Let's have a Marquez love-fest. I will post details when I have decided which book of his to read first.

A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven

Don't you love it when you pick up a book, turn to the first page, and know immediately you have found something special? For me, this was one of those books. I was immediately engaged and remained thoroughly engrossed for the rest of the novel.

With May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes has catapulted herself into a top ten position on my favourite authors list. This is a wild, rollicking adventure of a book, tragic but simultaneously hilarious and moving. Jeanette Winterson calls it the great American novel of our time, and it is certainly the best book I've read this year. Which is saying something, as you know.

The book opens on a family Thanksgiving dinner. While his brother George sits at the table, ignorant of the fact that help is needed, Harold ferries plates back and forth to the kitchen to assist George's wife Jane who has prepared all the food. She interrupts him as he picks at the turkey carcass, 'fingers deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in' to kiss him full on the mouth. It is a kiss that is described as 'serious, wet, and full of desire', and like Helen of Troy's face, it is a kiss that launches a wild ride. The story takes off, galloping through a fatal car accident which leaves behind an orphaned boy, a very brief adulterous relationship, George's mental breakdown and ensuing hospitalisation, and finally a murder.

All in the first 50 odd pages. At which point I quite honestly wondered where Homes could possibly take the story next, what the next 400 odd pages could feasibly hold. But as Salman Rushdie says in his cover quote, this book starts at maximum force - and then it really gets going. The narrative speed does not stop or slow, nor does the story ever become boring. From here we are shuttled through the sometimes dirty, sometimes downright dangerous world of online dating, to the peculiar realm of alternative correctional facilities; from life at a posh American boarding school to village society in rural South Africa; from the world of academia and whispers of forgotten works of fiction by Richard Nixon to attempted car-jackings, inappropriate teacher-student relationships, a missing girl, a wedding in a senior care facility, a stroke, watered down Judaism, lots of Chinese food and the life of modern immigrants to the United States.

Harold is left bereaved, divorced and caring for George's two children, Nate and Ashley. His life has changed irreparably yet he conducts himself with aplomb. In church at the kids' mother's funeral, he brings out some Gummi bears for the kids and finds a mother behind him leaning in to ask 'how do you know about snacks?'. When Ashley calls from school, in tears and upset, Harold finds her mother's Amazon account and orders books to be sent to her. Touching moments like this are what set this book apart, charging it with humour in the midst of horror.

In the middle of the book Harold realises that he has never tried to do anything with his life, to succeed. He has always been satisfied with mediocrity or less: "...it's all coming back like a kind of psychic tidal wave, and there's a bad taste in my mouth, metallic and steely, and I'm feeling how much everyone in my family hated each other, how little we actually cared for or respected anyone but ourselves. I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt." He pulls himself out of this mire, and out of the guilt he feels for his part in Jane's death, to create a family around him that is everything his family was not - loving, supportive, close.

Harold's journey is a new-age picaresque of sorts, but without the cynicism David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole lend to the genre. His story is an uplifting tale of self-discovery and redemption, that is simultaneously unsentimental and deeply moving. And Harold himself is a genuinely sympathetic character, someone whose self-doubt is matched only by his warmth and ability to care for other people. He is the most maternal male character I have ever read, naturally taking in both human and animal strays and treating those around him with compassion and empathy.

I laughed outloud so often whilst reading this that Bibliohubby came to refer to it as 'that funny book you're reading'. But my laughter was as often prompted by astonishment as humour. Homes's writing is fresh and unexpected and compelling. I absolutely loved this novel.

Overall Assessment: 5 out of 5. Outstanding. Homes writes beautifully, and her story-telling is top tier. Such an imagination. I now want to go and find everything she's ever written and read it.

Note: This book also won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) this year, beating works by Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and Kate Atkinson. So I am not alone in my stellar assessment of it!

Maggie O'Farrell - The Hand That First Held Mine

After I finished work, in a stressful sprint to the finish line, I found that my brain had temporarily stopped working. Or like my Russian obstetrician with the bedside manner of a KGB henchman said to me yesterday, "very leetle brain activity". So anyway, I needed something lighter to read, and a friend of mine recommended the fiction of Maggie O'Farrell - well-written chick lit, she said. And I like chick lit, but I do require that it is well-written, so this seemed to fit the bill. Then I read an article in The Guardian that said this book, The Hand That First Held Mine, marked O'Farrell's transition from chick lit to big 'L' Literature. Hm. Not so sure about that.

It is true that Maggie O'Farrell writes well, although her style is not  always to my taste. Occasionally, in this book, she writes from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who is self-consciously standing on the outside of the action, looking in - like the Morgan Freeman narration of an epic film. For me, this doesn't work so well; I would always prefer to be caught up in the action, and the occasional plot give-aways handed out by the narrator seemed unnecessary - and sometimes even jarring.

The Hand That First Held Mine follows two different storylines which eventually collide in a way that, by that point, comes as no surprise to us readers. The rebellious Lexie Sinclair runs away from her suburban childhood home to settle in London where she leads a glamorous life in 1950s bohemian London. She becomes an art critic under the guiding hand of Innes Kent, the star editor of a ground-breaking arts magazine. After tragedy strikes her life for the first time, Lexie leads a complicated existence involving several love affairs, one of which leaves her with a son to whom she is entirely devoted.

Elina and Ted are a modern-day couple, dealing in today's London with a newborn and the aftermath of a traumatic caesarian birth. As Elina gradually recovers from the temporary memory loss incurred by that trauma, she finds her relationship challenged when Ted starts suddenly to remember things from his childhood that are not in keeping with the memories he has always had about his own family.

Whilst O'Farrell's experienced hand kept me reading from beginning to end,  it took me a while to develop any significant interest in the story. I wasn't quite sure why I was supposed to care about these characters. When it started to become clear how the two disparate storylines were connected, my interest grew and I did want to know how things would work out, how the characters would be brought together, what would happen.

In the end the storylines were deftly woven together and I found the book ultimately satisfying. However, I wouldn't necessarily say it was memorable.

Admittedly O'Farrell might have suffered by comparison, in that my reading recently has focused on writers like Edward St Aubyn and Jennifer Egan. At the end of The Hand That First Held Mine I still wasn't quite sure why I should care about this story; it was diverting, and an enjoyable read, and I know that should be enough - but I have been spoiled, recently, by writers whose story-telling is matched by their ability to explore broader themes, and I missed that, here. I wonder whether that is also what separates big 'L' literature from genre fiction. A topic for another time.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. It was a good distraction, this read, and I would recommend Maggie O'Farrell if you are looking for well-written women's fiction to pass the time.