Mohsin Hamid - How to Get FILTHY RICH in Rising Asia

Finally, finally, here it is - the review I promised you so many months ago.

I stumbled across this book by accident. I loved Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist but had no idea Hamid had published other books since. I was looking for a new book to read and trawled through my go-to book-related sites (which include various book blogs, Amazon, the Guardian books section, the New York Times and Goodreads). And I started hearing good things about this book with a funny title. In a Booker discussion group on Goodreads, for example, this book joined members in unanimity - they all thought it was a shoe-in for the longlist (in fact it was NOT longlisted, though Hamid has previously been on the shortlist for TRF).  When I saw that it was by Mohsin Hamid, my mind was made up and I lifted my finger for that all-important 'click' which is the simple action of purchasing a Kindle book on Amazon.

It was soon obvious this was a good choice. After reading only a few pages I was in. The story moves at a galloping pace and the portrait depicted of Pakistan is neon vivid. Bearing some initial resemblance to Aravind Adiga's book White Tiger (though that was set in India), How to Get Filthy Rich is the story of a poor boy rising to the heights of corporate success in Asia.

Hamid chooses to tell the story in the second-person, which is quite rare, and he uses an unusual conceit: the book is written as though it were a self-help book. Each chapter doles out a different piece of advice about how to transform oneself from a peasant living in an impoverished rural environment to a wealthy entrepreneur in a big city. There are chapters entitled 'Learn from a Master', 'Work for Yourself' and 'Befriend a Bureaucrat'. Hamid is heavy on the irony and much of the book is darkly comical.

Initially I was resistant to both the second-person narration and the self-help lingo, but I soon fell into the story. The thing about second-person narration is that it forces the reader to become subjectively involved in the story. It personalizes everything. You become the hero. So that when something happens to 'you', we feel like it might be happening to us. It works.

The facade of the self-help book, however, is potentially a different story. Yes, it provides Hamid with the ability to comment, at the start of each chapter, on the plight of those living in modern-day Asia, on the notion of self-help books as a genre (a genre which is parodied here with brutal accuracy), and on the notion of selfhood itself - 'the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one'. It allows him, in short, to ruminate on bigger political and philosophical issues, outside of the story he is telling at the book's core. The obvious problem with this is that it takes him (and us) outside of the story. But the conceit also allows Hamid to tell a story that is bigger than the characters. The characters are devices, in some way; their story is a synecdoche for the greater story, that of Pakistan itself.

Hamid is such an effective story teller that I was never weighed down by lofty political commentary. I was quickly caught up in the vivid coming-of-age story at the centre of the narrative, about a man (whose name we never learn), his quest for success, and the woman he has always loved. It is a tale about what it takes to succeed in a land still weighed down by a deeply entrenched class system and systemic corruption. The frequent interruptions for philosophical musings didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in retrospect, they probably enhanced it. What might seem clunky and contrived at the start becomes contextual enrichment by the end. Reviewing the book now I realize that it is about so many things - Hamid does so much, so well. This is a love story and a political story. It is a farcical self-help book. It is a book about the notion of 'self', about how fast life moves and how critical it is to seize what is important to you when you have the time to do so. It is also a book about writing and creating fiction. All of this works to keep us readers distanced, to some degree, from the characters central to the Bildungsroman around which all of this is constructed. And yet by the end I was surprised at the extent of my engagement with that story. I was so engaged, in fact, that I was moved to tears by the final scenes.

This is such an original book and, mostly, it works. Hamid is a wonderful writer. I thought of the book several times during our travels, so it has stayed with me. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, to anyone who likes a good story told in a new voice, to anyone who enjoys a bit of politics spicing up their fiction.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.

Favourite Passages: 'We are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.'

'But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you'll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.'

Jennifer Egan - Look at Me

So, I turned back to Egan as promised in order to determine whether she really does hold a place as one of my favourite female writers, whether A Visit from the Goon Squad was her literary highlight, whether her voice in more traditional story-telling mode is as magnetic.

Look at Me is a hugely ambitious book. It is beautifully written and plot-driven, but it also acts as an in-depth exploration of larger themes and philosophical questions, particularly over the nature of identity, and the modern prioritisation of image at the expense of authenticity.

Egan took six years to write this book and it shows; it is populated with a large cast of characters, each taking turns in the narrative spotlight, and each illustrating Egan's theme from a new perspective.

Really, though, this is a tale of two Charlottes.

Charlotte Swenson is a 35 year-old model whose face has been wrecked in a car accident and whose reconstructive surgery leaves her with a face so different from her old one that nobody recognises her. Charlotte is an enigma. She is consumed by the desire to succeed in the public eye, to enter what she calls "The Mirrored Room", that elite space reserved for those in our modern society who have obtained a glorified celebrity status - the rich and famous, the beautiful. Her ticket in, before the accident, was her beauty, her face. Although she never made it to the realm of true, stratospheric stardom, she was close enough to be considered 'one of the beauties' on a circuit of wealthy hotspots around the world and in the exclusive nightclubs of New York City. But there is a deeper side to Charlotte, revealed in her ability to glimpse people's 'shadow selves' - their true selves, their real identity, which most people take great pains to hide from the world in favour of what they want the world to see. After her accident Charlotte also starts seeing the 'shadow self' of Manhattan - old signs, hidden behind modern buildings, still plastered on old brick walls, representing a bygone era. Interestingly, these glimpses of the past soothe Charlotte, who otherwise seems so preoccupied by flashy facades.

After realising that her new face means she will never succeed again at modelling, Charlotte finds a new way to sell her soul - to a dot com start-up. Extra/Ordinary commoditises lives on the internet, in an attempt to capture reality and expose it for the masses to see. Inevitably, the 'life' represented online is a departure from reality rather than its essence - it is manufactured, with the manufacturing done by other people: ghost writers, film directors, 'experts'. Even as she achieves the kind of success that she has always dreamed of, Charlotte becomes deeply uncomfortable with the artifice of her manufactured life. She has sold her soul to gain entry to the mirrored room, which she ultimately recognises for what it is: an arbitrary space filled with empty, superficial people, "chimeras... the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away". She finally realises this is not what she wants, after all, and it thus becomes clear that the loss of Charlotte's face in fact marked the start of her painful journey towards authenticity.

Charlotte Swenson's life is played out against the life of another Charlotte, a high school girl who lives in model-Charlotte's hometown. Young Charlotte suffers at school because of her plain looks and her initial unwillingness to play the games that characterise some of the more shallow social interactions between teenagers. She is a strong young woman with a fierce sense of her own independence and self-worth, traits which have no doubt been developed in response to her younger brother's struggle with leukaemia and her parents' understandable preoccupation with their son's well-being. As she distances herself from her cliquey school and her popular friends, young Charlotte finds herself increasingly drawn to two men. One is her uncle, Moose, who battles against a madness caused by an epiphany he had years earlier, in which he recognised the past as ever-present behind the superficial trappings of modern day America - much as model-Charlotte sees the shadow-self of New York City behind its new facade. Moose's x-ray vision, however, has led him to believe that the modern structures of current-day society, which hide beneath them the true history of America, spell the doom of humanity. He is frustrated by his inability to relay this vital doomsday message to anybody else and hopes that young Charlotte might be his protege, teaching her obsessively about the history of their small town in the hope that her own epiphany lies around the corner.

The other man in young Charlotte's life is a mysterious maths teacher called Michael West, who is not from the West at all, but who arrived in America from somewhere far East with the intent of destroying America, or some part of it. Michael West believes, upon arriving in the States, that the intoxicating images that are exported from the USA to the world, of beautiful women in night clubs and tall buildings made of steel and glass, and the global dissemination of these artifices through ubiquitous fast food and Hollywood movies, are signs of an American conspiracy to take over the world through eroding the authenticity and cultural reality of other places. It is not until he arrives in America that he is gradually lulled into the peaceful acceptance that there is no conspiracy. Americans themselves, he realises, believe in the images they project, and they are too drugged by the artifice to recognise the danger these represent to the rest of the world.

A South African friend of mine once said that the secret to world peace was a backyard and a two car garage - that once people were relatively happy with their lot in life they were far less likely to go and fight wars. Michael West's desire to destroy America dissolves as he gradually absorbs the American life, even going so far as to adopt a layer of fat over his taut physique from ingesting McDonald's, that iconic symbol of American imperialism. He comes to realise that he can be a part of the image he had previously so despised, and that this is a much easier way to live than maintaining his struggle against the artifice and a rage so intense it has caused him to walk out on marriage after marriage, life after life.

Young Charlotte, fighting against the perceived importance of beauty that is the reality at American high schools, feels a kindred tie to both of these men, but does not consciously recognise why she is drawn to them. She is looking for something but cannot explain even to herself what that is.When her own beauty gradually emerges - through the artifice, of course, of well-applied make-up and (like Clark Kent into Superman) the removal of her glasses - she finds the complications of trying to live like her Uncle, or emulating the secrecy and just-suppressed rage of Michael West, too difficult. What she most wants, after all, is what all high school students ultimately want: to fit in, even if that is at the expense of their true selves.

In direct contrast to model-Charlotte, she moves from determinedly gripping onto reality and actively pursuing authenticity, to embracing shallow artifice.  Like Charlotte, though, the vehicle for her transformation is her face, in this case the adoption of a false one which allows her to sink easily into the contrived homogeneity of a high school crowd.

The various storylines of this book eventually collide and we are left with a scathing view of modern society, and a dire prediction for the near future, a future which has, to a large extent, already come to pass since the publication of the book in 2001. With the advent of Facebook, the rise and growth of reality TV, the obsession with sharing our lives with the world through Twitter, Instagram and so on - much of what Egan seems to be warning against in Look at Me has already happened. I wonder whether she now feels that it is too late for the world.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, but somehow it hasn't touched me as deeply as I think it should, given the subject matter. One reason for this may be the ending, which for me didn't quite come together with the emotional impact it could have, or should have. The project may have been overly ambitious. Many clever parallels are drawn between the two Charlottes that don't quite add up - model-Charlotte's obsession with 'Z' and young-Charlotte's obsession with Michael West, for example, mark a mid-point in both of their journeys where they were in the same place, emotionally, though moving in opposite directions on their journeys to/from authenticity. But this doesn't hit home for readers in any significant sense because the story is too big.

Pros / favourite part(s): Egan's writing is beautiful; I highlighted large sections of text simply to remind myself later how extraordinarily apt were her metaphors, how unusual her capacity to describe ordinary things in a way that made them somehow extraordinary. Her writing reminds me in some ways of Jonathan Franzen's, or perhaps it is the other way around - they certainly share some similarities. Her story-telling is for the most part gripping, and reminds me in places of Anne Patchett's. It is safe to say that Egan does now hold a position in my library as one of my favourite female writers.

There were scenes in this book that gave me chills. For example, soon after returning to New York post-accident, model-Charlotte thinks she still has a chance to succeed in the modelling industry when she is offered a photo shoot with Italian Vogue.  Paparazzo turned fashion photographer Spiro is at the helm, having become an instant sensation after a shoot replicating gang violence, which has spawned a trend in fashion photography for photographing 'real' people 'from the news', rather than mere models. All seems to be going well until the make-up artist takes out a razor blade and it becomes clear that, in this shoot, authenticity is to be won through actually cutting the models and recording their fresh blood. Charlotte, with her fragile, newly recovered face, a face put back together with 80 titanium screws, refuses to go through with it - only to be told that she 'doesn't get it', she's not real enough. She is replaced on set by a real refugee of North Korea, a girl so empty of power that she cries silently as the razor blade slides across her cheek.

As Egan writes towards the end of the book, reality, or truth, is something that burrows further inside a dark, coiled privacy when the light of publicity is shone on it - "it dies the instant it is touched by light" because "life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes". Moments like these were deeply touching.

Cons: The ending is disappointing. I feel as though Egan had wanted to write a climax in which all of the strands of her story came together powerfully, in one momentous scene (like the ending of John Irving's A Prayer from Owen Meany, one of my favourite books), but it didn't quite work. For one thing, the life of model-Charlotte somewhat outshone that of young Charlotte, and so it was difficult to see them or treat them as two sides of a coin, which I think they were meant to be. Young Charlotte's transformation did not seem nearly as meaningful as the transformation of model-Charlotte, which was perhaps a result of the fact that Moose and Michael West to some extent took over as minor protagonists of their own in her story.

I still finished the book feeling it had been a very good read, and a fascinating one at that - but I was also left thinking that at the time of publication, Egan's potential as a story-teller was yet to reach its zenith. Perhaps the Pulitzer-prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad is that zenith, or perhaps it is still to come. I hope for the latter.

Note: Egan suffered upon release of this book because it came a few short months after 9/11, though she had finished the writing of it well before that tragedy. The terrorist character of 'Z' in this book is therefore sometimes seen as outdated, and she has written a note at the end of the book to explain the reason for this. For my part, I wasn't irked by my awareness of intervening events in America, although it does date the book. American readers might feel differently.

Edward St Aubyn - Some Hope

I hope this isn't too boring for all of you. Once I find an author I like, I can be like a dog with a bone - I like to read through a number of their books immediately,  until I am familiar enough with their work to know if I will want to buy the next-released book as a matter of course, or whether the book I read first was a stand-out anomaly. So I emerged from Edward St Aubyn's explosive Bad News and turned immediately and greedily to his next Patrick Melrose book, Some Hope. I do promise that I will pick up a different writer next, to prevent this blog from becoming exclusively St Aubyn-themed!
This novel opens on Patrick Melrose in his 30th year. I now feel that it would be accurate to describe at least the first three parts of this five part series as the story of Patrick and his relationship with his father. Although his father is dead by the time the second novel begins, the personhood of Patrick throughout his life is obviously shaped by his feelings about his father. In this third instalment, we see Patrick clean, after successfully battling his addictions through numerous stints in rehab, still miserable, trying to find a way somehow to make peace with his dead father so that he can move on and, perhaps, find a way after all to live a useful life.

The backdrop to all of this internal strife is the gathering of various guests for a grand party at a country estate, in honour of Princess Margaret. St Aubyn here returns to the omniscient third narrator he used in Never Mind, and again uses it with wild abandon - the first half of the book leaps around to so many different characters that I found it quite difficult to remember who was who, and started wishing I had kept notes to remind myself. I actually think this would have helped my reading. As it was, I read this far more slowly than I did the first two books, with less absorption. But in the end it didn't matter - eventually the plot coalesced and the description of the party itself is a riotous read, rife with the colourful depictions of grotesque English upper-class arrogance that were so successful in the first book of this series. Really the success of these books is the ability St Aubyn has of defining and commenting so astutely on an entire class and country of people whilst keeping readers meanwhile occupied with the intriguing but smaller story of just one member of this class. As it stands, the Patrick Melrose series is a scathing indictment of the British upper class and what it represents, and how archaic, ineffectual and irrelevant it now is. In this book, St Aubyn flirts with controversy by including royalty in his critique. Princess Margaret is painted as a fatuous, mean-spirited megalomaniac - not very different from many of the other attendees at the party - and I felt as I read the account of her that St Aubyn had probably got it spot-on.

At times while I was reading this I thought nothing much was happening - but then I finished it and realised that actually tons had happened. Patrick determines that perhaps one way of dealing with his past is to be truthful about it, to talk about it, and he takes the giant step of confessing to his great friend Johnny Hall what happened to him as a child. Whilst this doesn't immediately heal all, it does help Patrick realise that forgiveness, something that has been eluding him for years, might not be necessary after all; perhaps a simple acknowledgement and acceptance of the person his father was, and of what had shaped him, was enough. Various characters from the previous two novels in the series return, some quite surprising. Bridget, who was a pretty but common girl brought along to France as the sexual plaything of the contemptible Nicholas Pratt (and so he is) in the first book, reappears after a society marriage as the hostess of the chic party central to Some Hope. Her husband, Sonny Gravesend, has been having an affair that everyone knows about and which will come to a head at the party itself. One of Patrick's acquaintances from the drug years returns in a very unexpected cameo. And the French ambassador to England has an embarrassing and very public moment when he accidentally spills sauce from the dinner he is eating over Princess Margaret's dress and is required by Her Highness herself to kneel before her and clean it up, in front of everybody.

Critics have compared St Aubyn's brilliantly sardonic comic writing to Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene - or an English Philip Roth. Certainly he has a sensational power to paint vivid pictures in the mind, and to draw memorable characters. It is increasingly clear as the series progresses that St Aubyn is also deeply interested in the notion of identity, what it means and where it comes from. Patrick is the perfect vehicle within which to explore this theme, and I look forward to seeing where he takes us next. At the end of this book we are left - as the title would suggest - feeling that there might be some hope for Patrick after all.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5 - not quite the same level, for me, as the earlier two novels in this series, but fascinating nonetheless, and certainly this book does not detract from the genius of the enterprise as an entirety.

Pros / favourite passages: Patrick's obsession with and difficulty escaping from the legacy of his father is brilliantly portrayed. "The memory of his father still hypnotized him and drew him like a sleepwalker towards a precipice of unwilling emulation." "He wanted to break into a wider world, to learn something, to make a difference. Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent." "How could he find any firm ground when his identity seemed to begin with disintegration and go on to disintegrate further? But perhaps this whole model of identity was misconceived. Perhaps identity was not a building for which one had to find foundations, but rather a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence, an intelligence that knew the history of the impersonations and eliminated the distinction between action and acting." "What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?"

On telling the truth about what happened to him as a child: "But which words could he use? All his life he'd used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe. How could they avoid being noisy and tactless, like a gaggle of children laughing under the bedroom window of a dying man?"

Cons: The narration here moved awfully quickly and for me prevented a full surrender to the story until quite late in the book.

Also, and this is not really a con, but an observation of something I find troubling: these people are awful towards their children! After the wry observations by David Melrose and Nicholas Pratt in Never Mind, here Bridget represents stiff-upper-lip British parenting: she leaves her young child with a brutal nanny and refuses to spend time with her. She is also awful towards her own mother, which, as a mother myself, I found somewhat hard to believe - if there is anything motherhood teaches you, it is how much you owe your own parents! Interestingly St Aubyn uses the notion of attentive parenting to define Bridget's turn-around towards the end of the book: when she finally, bravely decides to walk out on her appalling husband (at least temporarily), she takes her daughter with her, and her mother, leaving the nanny behind. Perhaps there is hope here, too, although what is fascinating is that this move simultaneously represents a return from upper-class society back to the common origins from which Bridget stems. As though St Aubyn is telling us that belonging to the upper crust of British society is mutually exclusive with real emotion, with genuinely close family relations, with loving one's children.

Edward St Aubyn - Never Mind

This is the first book in a five-part series, and I felt after finishing it that I had really just read an extraordinary introduction to a larger story. Which is not to say that this book is not satisfying in and of itself - it is, deeply so - it just left me ready to immediately plunge into book two (which I did, by the way - with the next review to follow promptly).

I have had two people (one of them my erudite, extremely well-read mother) recently recommend St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series to me, in particularly glowing terms. Maybe it was that hype which influenced my reading of the first few chapters, so that I was initially disappointed. Although the writing was spectacular from the beginning, for me the story unfolded slowly, like the earliest budding of a spring bloom. The exception, of course, was a scene in the first chapter describing a date which involved an extraordinary request by David Melrose, one of the protagonists, for a repulsive act of submission from the woman who would later become his wife. As it turns out, this was not even close to the most disturbing scene in the book.

St Aubyn chooses to tell Never Mind from the perspective of a third person omniscient narrator, and he employs this style to its hilt, by rushing in and out of the minds of different characters at dazzling speed. Very few writers can pull this off so convincincly - St Aubyn is one of them. I think the chopping and changing of the narrative threw me off initially, so that it took me a few chapeters to become fully immersed - but then, all of a sudden - whoosh! After three chapters or so of umm-ing and ah-ing, I was sucked in so thoroughly that the next time I looked up I was only a few pages away from finishing the book! Very odd indeed. I felt like I had been pulled into a vortex and then cast out the other side gasping for air, and gasping for more. I don't know if that has ever happened to me before, with a book. It was truly a bizarre reading experience, and I already know that more of the same awaits, in the next books of the series.

Never Mind covers a period of about 24 hours in the lives of exceptionally well-off British aristocrats who represent the very worst of English arrogance. David Melrose and his wife, Eleonor, live in Lacoste, France, and are hosting a dinner party for some of their 'closest friends' - none of whom escape David's scathing tongue or social critique. The book follows the various invitees in the lead-up to the dinner party, and during the party itself, but central to the story - although he is too young to attend the dinner - is the five year old son of David and Eleonor, Patrick Melrose. I have never read such a heartbreaking account of the abuse and pure neglect of a child. For St Aubyn to have conveyed this bleak, desperately sad childhood through the detail and description of just one day in the life of young Patrick, is quite remarkable.

Patrick is a loner because he has no choice in the matter. His father is a sociopath and his mother is a drug-addled alcoholic who is too weak to leave his father and too insecure to exert even the most basic maternal effort. He once had a nanny, but she has died by the time the book begins and his father has asserted that - at five - Patrick is too old to have another one. Patrick's valiant attempts to overcome these significant obstacles, by resorting to the very essence of boyhood, running around outside, taking daredevil risks as he climbs and scrapes his way through the forest landscape, making up his own games, stealing food from the kitchen, are thwarted in the period St Aubyn writes of by his father's indescribable offences against his person which escalate on this particular day to an abuse from which Patrick will never recover.

All of the people depicted in this book (other than Patrick Melrose, and perhaps the American, Anne, who seems to exist in order to provide a cultural counterpoint to the British upper crust) are thoroughly despicable, and they are described doing horrific things: sado-masochism without explicit consent, violent rape, child abuse, paedophilia. Yet once the pull of St Aubyn's narrative current sets in, it is impossible to stop reading about them. This was one of those books that kept me awake after lights-out, hiding like a child again with my book under the bedcovers so as not to disturb Bibliohubby, fighting against fatigue in order to read just one more page, one more page after that, and so on. Extraordinary.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5

Pros / favourite passages: The writing is achingly beautiful, and stands in stark contrast to the dark subjects St Aubyn explores. It is also funny, exhibiting a dry wit peculiar to the English: in describing a school friend's current occupation, David Melrose says he was "a civil servant who was widely thought to be a spy because his job sounded too dull to exist." David himself is described with great subtlety, including observations like this: "To break even the smallest rules by which others convinced themselves that they were behaving correctly gave him great pleasure." And this: "David grinned. He was in the mood for fun. After all, what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about."

The particular class of people who populate the novel are rendered with great care, not just through physical descriptions but also through the philosophies they espouse: "'What one aims for', said David, 'is ennui.' 'Of course,' said Anne, 'it's more than just French for our old friend boredom. It's boredom plus money, or boredom plus arrogance. It's I-find-everything-boring, therefore I'm fascinating.'" And from David's wife: "Eleanor still found it inexplicable that the best English manners contained such a high proportion of outright rudeness and gladiatorial combat. She knew that David abused this licence, but she also knew how 'boring' it was to interfere with the exercise of unkindness."

David justifies to himself his cruel and inhumane treatment of Patrick by the viewpoint he expresses in a conversation over dinner: "The proposition I want to make, is that education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything." His friend Nicholas later chimes in: "I may be a frightful reactionary, but I think that all you have to do for children is hire a reasonable nanny and put them down for Eaton."

These views are beautifully borne out by the fact that we as readers know that while this conversation is occurring, poor little five year old Patrick is sitting miserably on the stairs, waiting for his mother to come and comfort him after having lived the worst day in his young life. But she never does come.

After reading this book I held Iggy closer and cuddled him tighter, and was reluctant to let go of him even so that he could sleep in his own bed. What a devastation it is when love is withheld from a child, and what an inevitability it surely is when that child subsequently grows to become an adult who is capable of living only on the very edges of society.

Cons: I am hard-pressed to find them, though I have given this just shy of 5 stars because its subject matter is so very dark. I was left after reading this feeling shell-shocked, and now that I have read the second one too, that feeling is only enhanced.

Derek B Miller - Norwegian by Night

I have to confess something shameful: I would not usually have picked up this book because the name of the author, Derek B Miller, for me evokes the image of a crass kind of stereotypical American male - over-confident, overweight, over-loud. He sounds to me like the kind of writer who would pen thrillers in which there is less-than-credible action on every page, and none of the characters develop, but all of them pull together at the end for the protection of the American way. 

Grossly unfair of me.

I took up the book on the recommendation of a friend and was immediately intrigued when I learned it was set in Norway.  Last winter Bibliohubby and I became deeply engrossed in the first season of Danish television series The Killing, and I have since developed a taste for Scandinavian crime fiction. Although Derek B Miller is American, he currently lives in Norway and has lived in Europe for many years. With this book he pulls off the twin feats of writing convincingly in the genre of Scandinavian crime fiction and creating a multi-faceted all-American protagonist. I found myself inevitably picturing The Killing's enigmatic Sarah Lund during scenes that were focused on Police Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard, at the same time as I warmed to 82-year old ex-Marine Sheldon Horowitz, who feels entirely out of place in Norway because he is both American and Jewish.

Don't get me wrong; the book is a thriller, through and through. It is a page-turner with an archetypal villain who is blessed with no shades of grey. Enver's first person account of raping the woman who ends up bearing his child is disturbing not just because of the pleasure he derives from it - when he finds her hiding alongside 'a soft little one' he believes it to be a gift from God - but because of his interpretation of the sounds she makes as he rapes her, some of which he believes are sounds of 'confused pleasure'. Charming.

But Norwegian by Night is more than this, too.

Sheldon Horowitz has moved to Norway from Manhatten after the death of his wife to spend time with his granddaughter Rhea, who has just announced she is pregnant with her first child to her Norwegian husband Lars. Rhea is convinced that Sheldon is suffering from a dementia which causes him to believe that he was a sniper during the Korean war, rather than a mere clerk as he had informed his family upon his return. One day when Rhea and Lars are out of the house Sheldon witnesses an awful crime in which the mother of a small boy is killed. He hides the boy to protect him from the fate that has already befallen his mother, and then, sceptical of the integrity of the police in a country that is foreign to him, Sheldon decides to run away with the boy rather than turn him in. So begins a journey across the lakes and wooded hills and vales of Oslo and surrounding areas. Anticipation and excitement builds as the police close in on the perpetrators, who themselves are closing in on the summer cabin to which Rhea and Lars have retreated, and to which Sheldon and the boy are also headed.

The tale is told from various perspectives and it moves at pace, although Sheldon's flashbacks to Korea, and his imaginary flashbacks to the war in Vietnam, where his son Saul (Rhea's father) was killed many years before, have the effect of slowing things up from time to time. The flashbacks to Vietnam in particular are jarring because we are aware, as readers, that they are entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, for the most part these scenes work, largely because the theme we are asked to explore alongside the 'action' is the veracity of memory. As readers we know that Rhea believes her father is suffering from dementia, and we know that Sheldon's wife believed it too. But we are asked to decide for ourselves whether or not his memories are true, a decision we must make based on Sheldon's actions and the inner workings of his mind, which include these flashbacks to war as the inevitable side-effects of an ex-Marine going undercover and on-the-run in a foreign country with a boy whose language he does not share. The only time I resented these interruptions to the flow of story was towards the end, when Miller had expertly pulled together the various elements so that Rhea and Lars, the boy, Sheldon, the bad guys and the police were all descending on the summer house at the same time. I wanted to know what was going to happen, dammit! When the narrative moved from this fantastic set-up to another Sheldon flashback, I literally sighed outloud and put the book down. Very frustrating. But for the most part I think the device worked.

Miller writes extremely well and in spite of the one-sided villain, this is more than your run-of-the-mill thriller. It is an exploration of culture, the after-effects of war - World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Balkan War - and the effects of grief and age on the mind. And it's a pretty great story, to boot. I shed a small tear on the last page, because by then I cared about the boy who is central to this book, and I cared about Sheldon. It doesn't surprise me to learn that this ending (don't worry, no spoilers here) came to Miller as he waited in hospital for the birth of his son.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5. A great read.

Pros / favourite passages: Miller's use of language is lovely and evocative; the landscape through which Sheldon escapes and the bizarre (yet brilliant) tactics he uses to evade police and bad guys alike were painted in vibrant colours in my mind. And Sheldon himself is a wonderful hero - a father whose grief at losing his own son has never quite left him, and whose strategic brilliance is inevitably compromised by the weaknesses of his ageing body. I also loved the occasional wisdom Sheldon spouts, even if most of his musing is never shared, but restricted to his own mind:

"Only the educated stop to look for words - having enough to occasionally misplace them."

On his wife Mabel's approach to ageing: "Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again, and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. Those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much lost love and not fear it - who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves - those are our saints. Ir is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs."

On whether or not his memories are true: "It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing - from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowed the present and past to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention."

Cons: Occasionally the flashbacks to Vietnam, in particular, dragged on a bit.

Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists

I loved this book. I bought it in Portland, at Powell's Bookstore, which is now amongst my favourite bookstores in the world, where this was displayed prominently in the fiction section and classified as an 'Old Favourite'. It was published in 2011, so really it's not so old; but I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Presumably if I lived in the United States I would have. It was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times Bestseller.

Rachman is a journalist who has been both a foreign correspondent and an editor of The International Herald Tribune. This book is loosely based on the heritage of that paper. It is set largely in Rome, and describes the lives of ex-pat journos working on the paper whilst leading ordinary human existences in Europe.

For me, the astonishing success of this book is the fact that Rachman pulls off a novel about the newspaper industry which tells simultaneously the story of the historical rise and fall of a particular paper, and the story of the journalists and staffers employed by that paper at a given point in time (the present, as it were). Each chapter title consists of a headline, and each chapter focuses in on the life of one of the staffers. But at the end of each chapter is another mini-chapter which follows the historical life of the paper from the 1950s to its demise in the present day, as it changes hands, as its publishers grow old and hand the paper over to the next generation, as the print media environment undergoes major shifts and changes. By the end, we have in effect read two books in one. As Christopher Buckley of the New York Times Book Review says, "I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off." For such a young man, Rachman is extraordinarily accomplished.

My grandfather worked in print media (magazines), and newspapers and magazines (as well as books) were ever-present in my European childhood home. The newspaper we read as a family was The International Herald Tribune. So I suppose I was always going to be a sucker for this book, also because the best job I have ever had was working in newspapers. I am a lawyer, not a journalist, but working as an editorial lawyer alongside editors and writers seemed to fulfil several of my career ambitions at once and I absolutely loved it. I loved the buzz of the newsroom floor and the frantic rush as the print deadline approached each day, and I loved the fact that history hung tangibly in the air. It was easily possible, looking around the newsroom, to envisage the olden days of typewriters and the haze of cigarette smoke. After being taken on a tour of the offsite printing presses (a memory I will always treasure), it was possible, also, to imagine what it used to be like in the building I worked in, when the printing presses sat in the basement (which now houses a library), and staff throughout the building could hear and feel them running, and when it was in fact possible to run downstairs and yell "Stop the presses!" and have that mean something.

Losing that job to the same fate that Rachman describes in his book (financial struggles of the paper at the hands of a rapidly changing media environment, and a re-structure that had editorial legals outsourced to an external law firm) was heart-breaking, and I found reaching the end of this book similarly emotional.

Rachman is a brilliant writer. I became deeply absorbed in every chapter of the book. He writes extraordinarily well in a cacophony of voices - young girl, older woman, old men, younger men. All perspectives were convincing. Not an easy feat for any writer. I started caring about each character almost as soon as a new chapter started. Leo Ott, the wealthy entrepeneur who started the paper as a labour of love for a woman who would never know, even after his death, just how much she was adored. Arthur Gopal, the obituary writer whose job is unimportant to him whilst he is in the company of his young daughter Pickle, who reminds him of the more visceral joys in life, but whose life changes irrevocably in the most heart-wrenching way. Winston Cheung, the rookie journo trying to make a go of it reporting from Cairo, only to be bulldozed by veteran hack Snyder. Ornella de Montericchi, a woman whose lonely life gains meaning from her methodical reading of every word in every edition of the paper, and whose world collapses when the paper does, too. And finally Oliver Ott, the grandson of the paper's founder, whose only friend is a dog by the name of Schopenhauer.

It was interesting to read this novel so soon after reading Egan's a visit from the goon squad, which I enjoyed immensely but failed to wholeheartedly connect with on account of the unusual and disjointed way the story was told. Rachman too uses a method that might have readers proclaiming the book to be a series of short stories rather than a novel, but because the protagonists of all of his stories occupy the same space (the newspaper) and the same narrative present, they are united in a way that Egan's characters were not. And in any case, the protagonist of this novel is actually the newspaper itself, a device that works wonderfully well.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I loved it. Of course, it may have resonated with me more than with most people, so perhaps take that into account if you are considering picking it up.

Cons: The last chapter ends with an event that is brutal and shocking and unexpected. I think the brutality here is intended by Rachman to provide a mirror image of some sort between life itself and the life of the paper - so that the impact of the death of the paper - on the characters who populate it, but also as a deeply significant cultural development - is felt keenly even by readers without a newspaper background or a particular interest in print media. It works, but it is deeply unsettling and I think some readers might be put off by it.

Note: The edition I read has an interview at the end between Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell, a hero of mine. What a fabulous bonus! This is a terrific interview and such a worthwhile read. So many great observations were made by these erudite men in conversation, on the topic of writing, in particular.

For example: "Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives." Beautiful! And the two men then proceed to discuss whether or not this sympathy for fictional characters translates into greater sympathy for people in life. A great defence of fiction. 

Jennifer Egan - a visit from the goon squad

I put off reading this book for almost a year, due to a series of misconceptions I had formed about it. First, the cover of the paperback I ordered from Amazon is, in my opinion, poorly chosen - the graphic looks like a montage of photos taken at a performance of a children's entertainment group, which is neither appealing nor indicative of content (yes, yes, I know, never judge a book by its cover - but we all do, a little bit, don't we?). Second, the title - goon squad? It sounds like a book about old-time gangsters arriving at someone's door to rough them up a little - not my 'thang', as it were. Of course, having read the book I now get the title and appreciate it. Finally, I had formed an impression, somewhere along the way, that Egan's tour de force belonged alongside popular modern-day books such as Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story - books that are thematically linked by their dystopian outlook on life in the near future. I do like the occasional dystopian novel - l Iove Margaret Atwood's futuristic take, for example, in many of her books, from The Handmaid's Tale to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. But I get a bit tired of dire futuristic outlooks when they are paired with a cynical and ostensibly humorous narrator's voice that is really a weak pastiche of John Kennedy Toole's dark wit. Often the result is a dismal portrayal of a future just ten or twenty years hence in which nobody cares any longer about things we now care deeply about - in which it is in fact fundamentally uncool to care deeply about anything (hipsterdom on steroids?), but which we are for some reason supposed to find amusing. I had understood that Egan was a Shteyngart-esque writer, and this assumption, combined with the reference to goons, put me off in spite of the fact that a number of people had recommended her to me, and in spite of the knowledge that this book has won so many prestigious book awards (notably the 2011 Pulitzer and the (US) National Book Critics Circle Award ).

In fact, there are no goons in this book, not in the original sense of the word anyway. Instead time itself is referred to by one of the characters as a goon - coming as it does to roughen us up, to steal away our youth. And only one chapter - the last - takes place in the future.

After reading just a few pages of this book, I turned to Bibliohubby and told him I might have found a new female writer I adored, who - if the book continued as it started - I might end up listing in my top ten. This is significant because I realised recently, after reading a number of blogs on the topic and having a think, that I have a slight tendency to prefer male writers to female - not because of gender, of course, or not consciously anyway. The apparent preference is disconcerting. It worries me.

But more on that some other day.

The rest of the book did not unfold quite as I had expected. Indeed, to call this a 'novel' is to reinvent the term, something which critics and readers alike appear to have done with surprising ease, welcoming Egan's story-based form as an innovative and inventive post-postmodern way of telling a bigger story. Egan herself, though admitting that the format of the book makes it hard to classify, has said that she leans towards considering it a novel. Were one to categorise the book along more traditional lines, however, one would have to conclude that it is a book of independent short stories featuring characters who are all loosely interconnected. We meet some of the characters repeatedly throughout the book, sometimes through stories focused on their lives, sometimes through stories in which they play only a peripheral part. The stories hop around in time, from the 1960s to the near future, creating a vivid portrayal of the characters' lives as they unfold over a lifetime. We see them both young and energetic and old and rough - once the goon of time has ravaged them. The result is a vaguely cohesive tale centring largely on Bennie Salazar, a music producer, and his assistant Sasha. The cast of characters making up the meat of the book are all linked to Bennie and/or Sacha at some point in their lives, and most have something to do with the music industry and its profound changes over time.

In addition to the unusual structure of the novel - if one wants to call it that - Egan plays with form and structure within the stories themselves. The story / chapter that has received the most publicity is the one which is told entirely in the form of a Powerpoint presentation - something that the young narrator-protagonist of that story calls a 'slide journal', and which is indicative of the future Egan sees unfolding - one in which technology has taken over to such an extent that Powerpoint is writing, and where words like 'friend' and 'identity' have ceased to have any real world meaning outside of technology. I knew this chapter was coming and I was as curious about it as I was resistant to it. But in fact, in the context, it works beautifully. It's surprising how much can be told about character and meaning and story in just a few words on a Powerpoint slide.

In many of the other stories, Egan will pause in her narration to suddenly take us forward 40 odd years in a character's life and tell us where they ended up, or what happened to them - all within the space of a paragraph. Similarly we are sometimes thrown backwards to learn of a character's early, formative years. In this way time is constantly interrupted and warped, disturbing the usual linear coherence we expect from storytelling. One reviewer has pointed out that the originality here - because of course many authors use flashbacks and flash-forwards - stems from the absence of a narrative present. We can't pinpoint what the 'present' is, here, so even the use of terms such as 'flashback' and 'flash-forward' seems inappropriate.

One is left, after finishing the book, with a strong attachment to some of the characters, and with a sense of sadness about the inevitable changes brought about by the ravages of time. It is a book that will stay with me, I think.

My personal preference is usually for a novel that has some continuity of story. I rarely finish books of short stories, although I know the form is difficult to master and can be even more powerful than longer form writing.  As much as I admire Egan for her obvious electrifying ability to write in a variety of ways about such a cacophony of characters, I think I would have enjoyed this more if it had been written as a more traditional novel. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. One of the complications of the structure Egan has chosen is that one never knows which character will feature in the next story, or which character we will have the pleasure of revisiting later in the book. Some of the stories focused on characters I would otherwise have thought of as 'minor', and I was disappointed, then, at the end, to find that other characters who I would have considered to be significant in the overall plot never re-occurred. For example (spoiler alert!), whatever happened to Alice, the girl Bennie so loved who Scotty ended up marrying? And they were never tipped to be major characters, but the point of time was so powerful that I really wanted to know whether those two delinquent musicians to whom Scotty handed Bennie's card on the pier ever followed up and called Bennie, whether the dude ended up being the great musician his girlfriend claimed he was, whether they made it big. And I was sad to hear Bennie, late in life, talk about Sasha as having 'sticky fingers', something for which he ended up having to fire her. I never anticipated that ending to their friendship, which at times seemed like so much more than mere friendship, and it was strange having that unlikely fact handed to me as an aside in an unrelated conversation that took place years after the event.

However, I do understand that Egan's challenge was to write about time and its effect on people and their lives. This was very successfully achieved through the structure she chose, and would have been difficult to pull off had goon squad been written in customary novel-form.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. As much as I enjoyed a visit from the goon squad, I am left with a keen desire to know whether that strong voice I loved at the beginning of the book is able to be sustained through a proper novel - goon squad didn't provide me with the answer. I want to read Egan's earlier books, three of which are actual novels, to find out whether my suspicion that she belongs in my basket of favourites is justified.

Pros: Wonderful writing, intriguing characters, thoughtful themes.

Cons: As discussed above, I simply prefer a novel to a collection of short stories, and the fact that this was written in such an unusual way meant that I felt I missed out on some material that might otherwise have been included. Also, to be truly cynical, there is a touch of self-conscious try-hardedness (not a word!) here - it's a good way to win a prize, isn't it? To sit down and show you can write successfully in many different voices, to show off one's skills  by convincingly writing from both male and female perspectives, as a youth as well as a senior, in traditional formats as well as in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. I don't like feeling played, and there is a little bit of that going on here, even though Egan pulls this all off effortlessly.

Madeleine Wickham aka Sophie Kinsella

Go on, how many of you will 'fess up to reading the Shopoholic series? C'mon... I'm not talking about the god-awful movie that was produced starring Isla Fisher (who can be so very funny, but like all actors requires a half-reasonable script to get her part of the way there). I'm talking about Sophie Kinsella's laugh-out-loud books about Rebecca Bloomwood, the financial journalist incapable of managing her own finances due to her out-of-control spending.

Sure, it's not high-brow, but as far as chick lit goes this is some of the best in the genre. Few books have made me actually laugh until I have tears running down my face, but Kinsella consistently get this reaction from me. I have read the entire Shopoholic series as well as her other books (her new one, I've Got Your Number, is a true return to form, I highly recommend it if you're looking for a light comic read).

So imagine my delight when, during an Amazon browse (I do so love an Amazon browse when I can't physically get to a bookstore) I stumbled across the unexpected information that she has written many more books than I realised, and under a different name. Sophie Kinsella is a pseudonym!

As Madeleine Wickham (her real name), and whilst working as a financial journalist, she published her first book aged 24. After it received both critical and public acclaim, she wrote 6 more novels under that name before writing the first Shopaholic book and submitting the manuscript unsolicited to her existing publisher as Sophie Kinsella, without informing them that she was the same person they had been publishing for years. The novel was immediately accepted for publication and there you have it. It wasn't until ten years later, in 2005, that she revealed her true identity.

This story impresses me because it shows what a naturally talented writer she is: she has been twice accepted as an unsolicited first-time author by a big publishing house. That is extremely unusual, these days - and I know the industry was probably different ten or fifteen years ago, but not so different as to make this an easy feat, even back then. There have been experiments done, as most have you have probably read, where the famous works of classic writers have been submitted to unsuspecting modern-day publishing houses and rejected across the board.

Anyway; as soon as I found out about Madeleine Wickham I went on an e-book binge. I downloaded her first novel, The Tennis Party (also published as 40-Love) and loved it, and then immediately downloaded and read all of the others in quick succession.

A scan of online reviews reveals that most Kinsella fans are disappointed by Wickham's writing, largely because it is not what they are used to. Wickham's books are darker. Unlike Kinsella's characters, Wickham's are real and, therefore, inherently flawed. As Madeleine Wickham, she writes contemporary women's fiction that is also a social critique of British society and its class striations. None of the characters are entirely likeable, but the storylines are sufficiently diverting that it doesn't matter.

In Swimming Pool Sunday, the separated parents of a girl who suffers a head injury in a neighbour's pool need to decide whether to carry through with a damaging lawsuit against their neighbours, even though their daughter seems to be recovering well. In The Tennis Party, a group of friends who, many years ago, used to live on the same London street, meet at one family's new country mansion for a leisurely weekend during which the current differences in their economic status and the individual greed of some members of the group threaten to ruin any prospects of ongoing friendship. In The Gatecrasher a funeral-crasher cum con-woman toys with the possibility of redemption when her latest target provides a domestic stability she has never before experienced.

I would give each of her books a solid 3 out of five. Don't pick them up if you are hoping for more Sophie Kinsella; but if you like British social commentary and contemporary women's fiction, you will enjoy Wickham's writing. And isn't it fun to find a hidden store of novels written by an author you like, even if they are somewhat different to what you've come to expect? A little hidden treasure trove.

Aspirational reads for 2013

Inspired by a friend, I have decided for the first time this year to make a list of books I want to read in 2013. It is not an exhaustive list of all books I intend to read (baby and all!), but rather an aspirational list of a limited number of 'classic' books that I aim to get through this year. I put 'classic' in inverted commas here because they are classics by my own reckoning only, rather than by virtue of appointment by any Canon gurus - I ceased being dictated to by Harold Bloom et al the minute I finished my MA.

Here is the list I have come up with thus far:

• Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (I love his essays and have wanted to read this for a long time; now that I have downloaded it onto my Kindle the sheer size of it and the unwieldiness of lugging it around ceases to be an excuse)
• In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust (not all of it, God no, but book one, or else a selection of excerpts as recommended by one of many experts - enough to give me a good taste)
• American Pastoral - Phillip Roth (I am embarassed I have not yet read this)
• Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (this is cited as an inspiration for so many of my favourite modern writers, including Paul Auster, and appears so regularly on 'best books' lists, that I feel I have to read it)
• Scoop - Evelyn Waugh (a Canon classic, as well as a Bibliofilly one, and I've read too little of his work, a situation that must be rectified)

And to re-read:

• The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
• Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

Both re-reads are books I loved in high school, and which come up again and again in conversation. I need to re-familiarise myself with them.

Note that this is not at all a fulsome list of all the great good books that I would like to read - but it is more than enough for this year, which will be a busy, busy year. I hope to fit my reading of these works in and around other reading, of books that are lighter in character, or that are surprise recommendations, or that I happen to stumble across during the year. I will keep you updated on my progress.

How about you? Any aspirational reads for the year?