A Wordless Sunday Salon

Sluiers van Teheran by Nina Rasmussen (Sunday Salon)

Again a book I started on Saturday and finished on Sunday. Sluiers van Teheran by Nina Rasmussen narrates the experiences of a Danish woman who travels around Iran on her own. I read the book in the Dutch translation, but I couldn’t find if the book had been translated into English (or any other language, for that matter).

For me, the most interesting and informative part of the book, was its female perspective. The writer’s experiences are those of a (Western) woman in a society that is not very woman-friendly. Nina Rasmussen describes her own experiences with always being dressed according to Islamic laws in which women have to cover their hair and cannot show any flesh except their hands and their face, with the segregation of the sexes in public life and with the ways (unrelated) men and women still get in touch and communicate with each other. She pays a lot of attention to the situation of women in Iran and the relationship between men and women. As her travels progress and she spends more time in Iran, Rasmussen also starts to see the ways in which Iranians try to circumvent these strict rules and how they deal with the religious police that controls the people’s behavior and dress-code in public.

To be honest, other than this female perspective, I didn’t find the book very remarkable. Rasmussen basically narrates her travels without providing a whole lot of background information. Already on the first page she mentions she didn’t have the time (or was just too lazy) to learn even some basic Farsi or to read about the country. Instead, she just decided to trust that everything would turn out okay. I can see the author’s point about not planning much and just seeing what will happen (isn’t that part of the fun of travelling around?), but I found the lack of willingness to learn more about the country and the language a bit annoying. I can’t even explain exactly why it bothered me, maybe it was the fact that she already throws this in on page one and I soon got bored by her story.

Much of the first half of the book, Rasmussen is preoccupied with feeling bored and alone and having to wear the chador all the time. She finds it hard to get in touch with people, not just because she doesn’t know the language, but also because she is a woman on her own. She complains that she doesn’t know the language and therefor doesn’t meet many people, and those that she meets don’t speak much English. Rasmussen is annoyed by standing out as a woman alone, and a foreigner at that and by having to deal with the unwanted attention of men staring at her or trying to touch her breasts in busy places. Soon, this got rather boring and I was starting to wonder if it would go on like this.

But halfway through, Rasmussen meets Shahin, a Kurdish man who joins her for the rest of the trip. Things do pick up from here, because there is less complaining, more interaction with people along the way, and there is even a tiny bit of romantic expectation (will they or won’t they? They won’t eventually.). My favorite parts of the book are those where she stays with people for some time and gets to know them and their way of life better.Despite the improving story, I kept having the feeling Rasmussen is basically racing around the country, unable to entertain herself and getting bored in places where they don’t meet people.

Eventually, Rasmussen gave me the impression of being a Western woman unable to adjust to and getting bored in the different, slower pace of life in Iran. Partly, I completely understand this from my own experience in Armenia. Life, especially outside of the capital, just goes slower here as well and both men and women spend a lot of time sitting, doing nothing, gossiping and drinking coffee. Men do this some place outside the house, women gather together at home and sit in the kitchen. It takes time getting used to and if it lasts too long or happens too often I get nervous and bored as well. But for a while, it can be relaxing and bonding in a way.

In short, apart from the female perspective, Sluiers van Teheran doesn’t really get beyond the average travel book for me.

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak (Sunday Salon)

“What will that innocent lamb tell her friends when she grows up? My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant Istanboulian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa! What kind of a joke is that!”

This passage, shouted out by one of the characters in The Bastard of Istanbul, is what got Elif Shafak in court for “insulting Turkishness”, another case based on the by now infamous Article 301. The case against Shafak was eventually dropped, but she became well-known as one of the very few Turkish authors, together with for example Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, who was not afraid to tackle the issue of the Armenian genocide in a way that was not well appreciated (to put it mildly) by the Turkish authorities.

Armanoush is the child of an Armenian father and an American mother who remarried with a Turkish man. She divides her time between her mother in Arizona and her father’s family in San Fransisco. When she feels something in her identity is missing, she sets off on a trip to Istanbul, to stay with her stepfather’s family and find out more about her past. In Istanbul, she becomes fast friends with Asya, the youngest member of her stepfather’s family.

The Armenian genocide is a major theme in the story, but eventually it is one of the ways the bigger theme of dealing with the past is worked out. All of the major characters have something in their past they have to deal with, either by accepting it or denying it or, even before acceptation or denial, by trying to find out what their past actually is.

The first chapter was hard to finish – I didn’t like the writing style, very “flowering” with long sentences and many adjectives. I regularly had to reread a sentence to actually get the meaning. Fortunately, that was only the first chapter, after that I either got used to the language or the style changed (I guess it was a bit of both). Anyway, I got hooked and, having started the book on Saturday afternoon, had finished it Sunday before dinner.

It is a beautifully told story with an interesting plot, if somewhat constructed at times. I felt as if the author wanted to represent all the different opinions on the Armenian genocide in the book. There is the staunch Turkish nationalist who is absolutely convinced that there was no genocide and that, on the contrary, the Armenians killed the Turks en masse. There is the Turk who acknowledges that the Turks did horrible things to the Armenians during World War I, but that that was in the past and that the current generation is not responsible for it. There is also the Armenian who thinks that Armenians still living in Turkey are being repressed and who is convinced that they’d be better off emigrating. There is the somewhat skeptical Armenian who thinks that striving for recognition of the genocide is the only thing that still binds the Diaspora and that once recognition by Turkey has been achieved, the Diaspora will fall apart. Finally there is the Armenian who was born and raised in Istanbul, feels Istanbulite first and foremost and doesn’t want to live anywhere else. This urge to represent all those opinions led to superfluous scenes and even characters in my opinion. I ended up quickly reading the superfluous parts and then diving back into the rest of the book.

There were already so many characters, major and minor, that at times, especially when the perspective changed for example from San Fransisco to Istanbul or from present to past or back, I had to try to remember who was who and what the relation’s were between them. On the other hand, this extensive set of characters was also part of why I loved the book. I especially loved Asya’s family with all their quirky characters. Armanoush initially started out as an interesting character as well, but soon I started finding her a bit bland, colorless, especially compared to colorful Asya and her equally colorful family.

I am not sure the book is among my favorite reads of this year, but I did enjoy it very much and am certainly interested in reading more by Elif Shafak.

This review is crossposted at Internations Musings.

December Bookworms Carnival

The Bookworms Carnival for this month is up at A Striped Armchair. It’s been up for two days already, but I only managed to visit just now. This month’s theme is non-fiction and there are lots of interesting posts there. Eva did a great job, so head over and follow the links!

The next carnival is being hosted by Reading With Becky with the theme of Best of 2007. Just e-mail your posts to laney_po at yahoo dot com by January 14th to participate.

Finally another Sunday Salon

It’s been a while, but this weekend I finally have time to read more than five pages. That’s been a while. I am cleaning up my reading-related to-do-list so I can start 2008 with a new book and no backlog of reviews to write.

In the morning, with coffee and breakfast in bed, I finished the first volume of Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I had been reading this on and off for the last four months or so, reading it mostly alongside non-fiction books and as bedtime reading. Reading all 900+ pages at once would be a major overkill of Sherlock Holmes, but this way it was fine. However, it will definitely be some time before I will tackle the second volume.

In many of the stories the way things happened are actually rather easy to figure out for the reader, the “surprise element” is usually in the motive or in the details. Generally, the most interesting characters in the stories are not Holmes or Watson. They actually are kind of bland, we don’t get to know too much about them, actually even less as the series progress. Insofar as they are actually interesting, the most interesting people in the stories are those that are connected to the mysteries that Holmes is asked to solve.

Reading the stories more or less in chronological order of publishing reveals some interesting inconsistencies or “holes” in the stories. Firstly, already in the beginning there is the wound that Dr. Watson apparently received while serving in the British army in Afghanistan. On the very first page of the very first story A Study in Scarlet Dr. Watson tells us he “was struck on the shoulder by a [...] bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.” In the following story The Sign of Four, however, Watson sits “nursing [his] wounded leg. [He] had had a [...] bullet through it some time before.”
Then there is Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan after The Sign of Four takes place. Watson then moves out of the apartment he share with Sherlock Holmes on 221B Baker Street and takes up his medical profession again. Eventually, many stories later, Holmes famously disappears near the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Due to popular demand at the time, Doyle made Holmes reappear and continue his detective work with Watson at his side. The first stories were published in the early 1890s, Homes reappeared about ten years later and another set of short and longer stories (including The Hound of the Baskervilles) were published.

After his reappearance Watson moves back in with Holmes in their apartment on Baker Street, but there is not one single reference to Watson wife or his marriage. It is not Holmes who mysteriously disappears, but Watson’s wife Mary. The same actually goes for Holmes’ brother Mycroft, who appears in some of the later stories before Homes’ disappearance. Later on, he is not even referred to. Something else that disappears after Holmes’ re-emergence is his addiction to cocaine, though his previous drug use is referred to a couple of times in later stories. I assume Watson’s wound and his wife and Mycroft were in the way of Doyle when writing his stories and he may have dropped Holmes’ cocaine addiction because society and ideas had changed. This is just my guess, though, I am not at all sure about this. The addiction may just as well also have gotten in the way of the author.

After finishing Sherlock Holmes, I got up, did some chores in the house and then sat down again to read. This time I read Armenia: Poverty, Transition & Democracy by Onnik Krikorian. He is a friend of mine who works as a freelance photographer and journalist here in Armenia. His blog is in my opinion the best English language blog on Armenia and one of the best sources of news on Armenia (and no, I am not saying that because I happen to know the guy). He runs another blog here covering the run-up to the presidential elections in Armenia on February 19 next year. Onnik’s book consists of several articles on Armenia accompanied by his pictures. His website and blogs are well worth a look and a read.

I’ve also read a couple of chapters in Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and the Almighty (review to follow once I’ve finished it). I want to finish this book and write a review before the end of the year. There is one other book I read this year, for which I started writing a review but which I never got around to finishing. That I also want to finish before the year ends. Neither should be too difficult a task. Any other reading and writing I will do is optional and undecided yet. I do know that I want to start the new year with a book for the Russian Reading Challenge. I am still undecided which one it’ll be, either Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes or Gulag by Anne Applebaum. Currently I am tending towards the latter, but I have already switched a couple of times depending on my mood, so eventually it’ll be a surprise for you and me which one I’ll pick up on January 1st.

Wishlist Part 2 – From the reviews

This is the second part of my Google Reader clean-up. I had too many starred items with book reviews there. The first part, with recommendations I found through the blogs, is here. This is the second part, with books I found through book reviews in other, non-bloggy places. Again, there is lots of Russia to be found in my book picks.

First off, is the new novel by Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood. Though I wasn’t wild about it, I liked Suite Francaise enough to want to read this one as well. The Guardian’s website has a review here, the NYT Sunday Book Review has a review here and you can read the fist chapter here.

I had never heard of Ellen Litman and her collection of short stories The Last Chicken in America – A Novel in Stories, but this review in the NYT Sunday Book Reviews made me add it to my wishlist.

Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is [..] warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.

Jason Goodwin is another author I had never heard of before reading this review. His The Snake Stone sounds like an interesting mystery novel set in the Istanbul of the 1830s. This book is the second in a series with the eunuch Investigator Yashim as the main character. The first novel in the series is The Janissary Tree.

And again a new to me author with an interesting novel: Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai tells the story of a Jewish family in prerevolutionary Iran.

I didn’t know that Israeli author Meir Shalev has a new novel out, A Pigeon and a Boy, but when I found out, I immediately added it to my wishlist. I read one or two of his novels years ago and I should have them somewhere on my book shelves, so it is high time for me to get re-acquainted with Shalev.

As Yair escorts travelers in safari vests “full of pockets, the kind that tourists and foreign correspondents love to sport while in the Middle East,” he points out the Valley of Hinnom, gets them settled in their hotel rooms, reminds them of the story of Moses on Mount Nebo and orders them coffee — all with the same urgency and import. But just when he thinks he has had enough of both his thankless job and his enervating marriage, his mother gives him some money and advice: go off and find the only two things you really need, a story and a place of your own. The novel serves as his report back to her, telling the tale of a mysterious soldier and pigeon-handler known as the Baby, who died during Israel’s war of independence, and of Yair’s own search for a home.

On to non-fiction. In A Soldier’s War Arkady Babchenko writes about his time as a soldier in the Russian army in Chechnya.

Arkady Babchenko didn’t write about fighting in Chechnya to make his name as an author, nor to mount a political attack against Russia’s rulers. He wrote to recover.[...]What poured out of him – at night, at work, on the metro – is an unflinchingly un-macho record. No comforting heroes or villains; no familiar arc of near-defeat and triumph-against-the-odds. Instead Babchenko presents us with a relentless account of fear, boredom, confusion, filth, cold, disease, hunger, thirst and lingering dread – a world that feels far removed from the gold-embossed bestselling accounts of square-jawed British or American ex-soldiers.

If I manage to find and read this book before the end of 2008, I will let it count towards both the Russian Reading Challenge and the In Their Shoes challenge.

Another book about Russia, but about a very different era is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography about Josef Stalin as a young man, Young Stalin.

Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution.[...]Mr. Montefiore has found his devil in the details, working his way with a fine-toothed comb through previously unread archival material in Russia and in Georgia, where he uncovered a memoir written by Stalin’s mother. Throughout, he connects dots and fills in the blanks, uncovering facts that Stalin, once he assumed power, took great pains to conceal.

Despite the criticism that this book recieved here, I’m still interested in reading this book.

Sebag Montefiore [...] is not one historian but two. The first is capable of serious research and insight, but he is eclipsed by the second, who sees history as scandal and its writing as gossip. Vanity Fair goes to Lubyanka.[...]There is so little insight into Stalin’s development because Sebag Montefiore is too busy glamorizing his hero — “gangster godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist,” “the solitary hunter” and “this ace of conspirators.” Stalin dresses for his role in a world of “swashbuckling heroics and sordid murders” by wearing a “dashing Circassian coat with his trademark black wide-brimmed fedora and a white Caucasian hood tossed over his shoulder.” Like a Bolshevik Zorro he robs banks and forces prison guards to remove shackles from political prisoners.

Again, if I manage to get my hands on this book in time, I will read it for both the Russian Reading Challenge and the In Their Shoes challenge. Reviews are here and here. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Finally, I will mention some books from the NYT Notable Books list that I had already set my eyes on, but that haven’t been mentioned here yet.

Martin Amis – House of Meetings;

Nathan Englander – The Ministry of Special Cases;

Dalia Sofer -The Septembers of Shiraz;

Michael Chabon -The Yiddish Policemen’s Union;

Pierre Bayard – How to Talk About the Books you Haven’t Read

Wishlist – Part 1: From the Blogs

I decided to clean out my Google Reader, when I realized how many book reviews I had marked over the past months. They were so many that I decided to divide them into two posts, one with recommendations I found through the blogs and one with books I found through book reviews from newspapers. In the first part I will share the books I came across in the blogs.

Simon over at Blogian posted about the memoir My Grandmother by Turkish-Armenian Fethiye Cetin. I had heard about this book, knew it was being translated into English but I didn’t know when it would be published. According to Simon the English translation will be available from March 1, 2008. Cetin is a prominent Turkish human rights lawyer who found out only a couple of years ago, that her grandmother was not Turkish, but an Armenian who was saved by a Turkish man during the Armenian genocide in 1915.

When Fethiye Cetin was growing up in the small Turkish town of Maden, she knew her grandmother as a happy and universally respected Muslim housewife. It would be decades before her grandmother told her the truth: that she was by birth a Christian and an Armenian, that her name was not Seher but Heranush, that most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915, that she, along with most of the women and children, had been sent on a death march. She had been saved (and torn from her mother’s arms) by the Turkish gendarme captain who went on to adopt her. But she knew she still had family in America. Could Fethiye help her find her lost relations before she died? There are an estimated two million Turks whose grandparents could tell them similar stories. But in a country that maintains the Armenian genocide never happened, such talk can be dangerous. In her heartwrenching memoir, Fethiye Cetin breaks the silence.

If I manage I will read this book for the In Their Shoes Reading Challenge.

From many different sides I found out about Orlando Figes‘ new book The Whisperers – Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. The book looks at Stalin’s regime of terror and gulag camps through private diaries, letters and life stories from ordinary Soviet citizens. Dovegrey Reader has a review here, the NYT Sunday Book Review has a review here and The Guardian’s review is here.Technically speaking, this book is no longer on my wishlist, as I know that there is a copy waiting for me at my parents’ house in Holland. I plan to read this one, together with Figes’ other book Natasha’s Dance, for the Russian Reading challenge next year.

Another non-fiction book, but a very very different one, I found through the BlogHer site is One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher about “slash careers”. Huh? From the review:

Can you answer, “What do you do” with a single response? I assume most BlogHer members might struggle coming up with concise wording. Enter the use of the “slash” descriptive. As in:

- Pharmacist / jewelry maker / eBay seller
- Manager of human resources / caterer / art collector
- Systems engineer / Champaign importer & connoisseur
- For many of us: / blogger is part of our identities.

My own slash career currently looks something like this: administrative employee/language teacher/website administrator/blogger. The first one I prefer to throw out asap and replace by something more interesting, because that’s the job I have to pay the bills, but it kills my brain and is completely unrelated to my education (law, in particular human rights law). I would like to change my slash career to include more writing, IT-related things, and more of my educational background. However, I do like the diversity I already have very much and the (relative) sense of freedom it gives me to plan my own time and activities. I actually can’t really imagine anymore being stuck in only one job. I guess you get why Alboher’s book appeals to me.

The Guardian’s Book Blog has a post about the Mitford Sisters. Who they were?

Unity, Diana, Jessica, Nancy, Pamela and Deborah. Or, if you prefer: a Nazi with a self-inflicted brain injury, Oswald Mosley’s wife, a communist muckraker, an infamous snob/talented novelist, a muse of John Betjeman turned late-in-life lesbian and the Duchess of Devonshire.

Call the Mitford sisters what you will – and they’ve been accused of many things – but you could never call them boring.

[...] But it’s not just the sisters’ own lives that are so interesting, it’s the way their lives often intersected with other important figures of the 20th century. Related to everyone from Winston Churchill to Walter Mosley, with family friends including Hitler, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou, the Mitford sisters were kind of proto-Forrest Gumps, always on the edge of history and sometimes actively involved.

I had heard of them before, though I don’t remember how I first came across them. I knew there was a biography about the sisters, but never wrote down the title and the author. This blogpost mentioned the book, so this time around I added it to my wishlist. The biography is called simply The Mitford Sisters written by Mary S. Lovell. If I get my hands on it in time, I will add it to my reading list for the In Their Shoes challenge.

On to fiction. Dark Orpheus wrote about Amy Bloom’s book Away, a book about a Russian-Jewish immigrant in New York in the 1930s. Both the book and the author are completely new to me. Dark Orpheus writes:

[It is] a book that doesn’t thrive on dramatic and overwrought emotions. Rather, it stirs me with its stillness, its tenderness. I have said it before, but I shall say it again. Away is a quiet book, the way qualities like compassion and empathy are silent – but keenly felt.

In a nutshell: protagonist Lillian Leyb is a Russian-Jewish immigrant in New York in the 1930s. She is a survivor of a massacre that bereft her of her family. She works as a seamstress, and later plays mistress to a pair of prosperous father and son. Later, through a distant cousin, she finds out her daughter might still be alive and has been adopted by a family in Siberia. So she abandons the life she has reclaimed for herself in New York, and heads off in her quest for her daughter.

Can you tell I have a thing for Russia (well, for Eastern-Europe in general actually)?

Finally, Melissa at Book Nut reviewed another book and author I had never heard of: Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran.

It’s hard to describe what this book is about. It’s a food book, complete with the recipes for the delectable dishes that Marjan — the oldest sister – cooks up for the town of Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, Irleand, where the Aminpour sisters have ended up. It’s one part travel book — lush descriptions of both Irleand and Iran, as we slowly get the sisters’ back story. It’s magical realism; Marjan’s cooking changes lives, Layla’s (the youngest sister) sent of cinnamon and rosewater inspires lust in younger men and remembrances in older ones. The only sister who didn’t have a healthy dose of the magical was Bahar (the middle sister); perhaps it’s because of her past — it was too brutal and too sad (and the reason that the sisters are in Ireland) for it to be magical.

The Norton Book of Women’s Lives – Phyllis Rose (ed)

I read this book already over the summer, started this review and for some reason left it unfinished. I decided to finish it and post it anyway, for two reasons. The first is that I am participating in the “In Their Shoes” Challenge for which the participants read memoirs or (auto)biographies and this post might be a good source of inspiration for other participants. The second reason is very simple: I loved this book!! I was sorry to turn the last page. It is one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently (I seem to be on a roll recently when it comes to good books).

The book consists of excerpts of 20th century women’s autobiographies ranging in length from five to twenty pages. Usually I am not too keen on collections of fragments of different authors, but this one is different. I read it from beginning till end, like you read a novel. I don’t like dipping in and out of a book, reading chapters when I feel like it. There were maybe a handful of excerpts that I was glad they ended when they did, but of by far most I wouldn’t have minded a couple more pages.

Though at least half if not more of the women are from the US, this didn’t really bother me, as within this group the diversity was so big, ranging from the daughter of a museum director to African-American civil rights’ activists from a poor Southern family.

Probably half of the featured women were unknown to me, and many of those that I had heard of were on my one-day-I-want-to-read-this-author list. This book definitely whetted my appetite for more. The featured women are not all writers by profession, though they all had diaries or autobiographies published from which the excertps were taken. The women that I would like to read more by/about are:

Maya Angelou
Nina Berberova
Vera Brittain
Emilie Carles
Nien Cheng
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Jill Ker Conway
Bernadette Devlin
Annie Dillard
Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen (I read “Out of Africa” when I was 14 or 15, might be time for a reread)
Marguerite Duras (her diaries seem especially interesting; the fragment in the book was about her work in the French Resistance during the Second World War)
M.F.K. Fisher
Janet Frame
Evgenia S. Ginzburg (her memoires of the Stalin era have been on my want-to-read list for a long time)
Natalia Ginzburg
Vivian Gornick
Emily Hahn
Le Ly Hayslip
Eva Hoffman (Note to self: if I am not mistaken I have a book about Eastern-Europe by Hoffman in my library in Holland. Will have to look for that when I am there in January).
Zora Neale Hurston
Helen Keller
Maxine Hong Kingston (There was an interesting essay by her in a book on intercultural communications that I read earlier this year)
Onnie Lee Logan
Audre Lorde (I first heard of her through Margaret, and after read the fragment in this book she’s definitely secured her place on the list)
Beryl Markham
Emma Mashinini
Margaret Mead
Jessica Mitford (I hope to get the biography of the Mitford sisters when I am in Holland in January)
Anne Moody
Cynthia Ozick
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Vita Sackville-West
Kate Simon
Sophia Tolstoy (the wife of Lev Tolstoy, the great Russian writer)
Marie Vassiltchikov
Virginia Woolf
That makes 36 out of the 59 women featured in the book, a nice addition to my wishlist.

Do go explore these links, it’s worth spending the time on that! If any of you have any suggestions as to what to read by or about these women, please leave a comment.

In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes

As I mentioned before, I read and reread In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes within about six weeks. That is a first for me, as I am not much of a re-reader in general. And if I do reread a book, the timespan between read and reread is a lot larger (think at least a year) than just a few weeks. There are too many good unread books out there waiting for me.

But after reading In Search of Adam the first time, I couldn’t get myself to write about it just yet. I needed to think some more. And then I felt like I needed to read the book again. And it is not unlikely that I will read it a third time some time. There is something that draws me back to the book, I don’t know what it is. I feel like I have only scratched the surface. There is still a lot left to discover and think about. That is probably also the reason why this review might come across as somewhat chaotic.

The main character of the book is Jude Williams, who is “six years, four months and two days old” at the beginning of the book. She lives in a closeknit workingclass neighborhood on the English coast where gossip rules. At the start of the book, Jude finds her mother lying on the bed. She has committed suicide and left a note for Jude that she has gone in search of Adam. Jude has no idea who or what Adam is. This is not all Jude has to deal with: she is also a victim of child abuse. The search for Adam, learning about the family secret connected with him and dealing with the abuse, about which Jude is unable to tell anyone, define Jude’s life.

The book is told from Jude’s perspective, we are inside her head throughout most of the book. The only part that is not told from Jude’s perspective, is her mother’s diary. But even that we read together with Jude, at the moment that she is reading it. We see the world in which Jude lives from her perspective, with all the limitations in use of language and understanding that a child has. What I loved about this book, is the way typography and sentence structure are used to express the urgency of Jude’s thoughts, Jude’s need for order and regularity and her efforts to try to understand and get a grip on things she sees and hears around her.

I tried to write about this book without giving away spoilers, but that is too hard, so if you want to read this book, you might not want to read the next two paragraphs.

***** WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

As I said, there is a lot left to think about, especially about the three main characters Jude, her father and her mother (even though her mother is technically not a character in the book as she is dead already on page 1, I still consider her one of the main characters). Jude’s father, for example, comes across as a rather unlikable person during most of the book: he beats Jude, doesn’t seem to care much about her. However, as I read the part where he tells Jude his side of the story, I started to feel sorry for him in a way, because he had obviously been incapable of dealing with the death of his wife and especially with what preceded her suicide. But even with that knowledge there is no way I can condone the way he treats his daughter, though it makes it easier to understand why. His daughter reminded him too much of his deceased wife and of what happened in the years before she died.

One of the things that escaped me the first time, but that sort of jumped out at me upon rereading are the parallels between Jude and her mother. Both are addicted, one to alcohol, the other to food. They both chose the same way to die, a pregnancy plays a part in both decisions to die (though in different way). Both see these “pregnancy-events” (Sorry for the funny language. I’m trying to give away as little as possible!) as a “a sign from Adam”.

***** END OF SPOILERS *****

Even though I obviously knew the ending the second time I read the book, it still came as a surprise. All of a sudden I found myself on the last page. And once I had finished the book, I again found myself needing some time to readjust to the world around me.

This is without a doubt one of the best books I have read this year. I do recommend this book very much, but I can also see that it is not for everyone. You have to be prepared to deal with the subject. If you are, then be prepared for an unsettling read and a book that is going to stay with you for some time. There is so much more I’d want to write about In Search of Adam and I haven’t really been able to sort my thoughts out. I am actually still not sure what I really think of the book. To say “I loved it” or “I enjoyed it” is true on the one hand, but on the other it seems wrong: it is not a book to “love” or “enjoy” because of the subject.

In Search for Adam is Caroline Smailes‘ first novel and what a debut! I hope it is not going to be her last book, as I am certainly looking forward for more.