The Global Voices Book Challenge

[Updated to add about the gvbook09 tag.]

I am not showing many signs of live on here these days, I know. I have infrequent access to a very, very, very slow dial-up connection, so I just barely get to read my emails these days. Besides, I am working one-and-a-half  jobs plus teaching and at work I am spending almost all of my time staring at a computer screen (and no, I don’t have internet access there, unfortunately), so when I come home I am toast and I need to give my eyes a rest. I basically come home, eat, read a bit in bed and fall asleep. I hope this will change in about three weeks, when I will get a better internet connection at home (I am waiting for my salary – getting internet in Armenia costs more than in Europe or the US) and when one of my jobs will finish and my teaching will slow down. Until then, I am reading but not blogging. I currently have four books to review and another three draft-reviews, that I haven’t gotten around to polish and post.

In the meantime, I want to point you to a reading challenge that Global Voices is hosting in connection with the UNESCO World Book Day on April 23:

April 23 is UNESCO World Book Day – and just because the Global Voices team loves blogs, doesn’t mean we have forgotten other forms of the written word! In fact, because we think reading literature is such an enjoyable way to learn about another culture, we have a fun challenge for all Global Voices contributors and readers, and bloggers everywhere.

The Global Voices Book Challenge is as follows:
1) Read a book during the next month from a country whose literature you have never read anything of before.

2) Write a blog post about it during the week of April 23.

UPDATE: Tag your posts with #gvbook09 so we can find your posts.

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Once you have read your book (and written a post!) let us know – we’d love to discover what you learned on your literary expedition.

You can give book recommendations and link to your reading the comments here.

For those of you who have never heard of Global Voices, I very highly recommend a visit to their site and to browse a bit. From their About-page:

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

Our international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your guides to the global blogosphere.

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs – and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting.

I have been following GV pretty much from the beginning and it has long been one of my favorite sites. I mostly follow their blogging from and about the region where I live, the Caucasus, and the Middle-East, but through GV I have come across many more interesting blogs from all over the world.

Thanks to Onnik for the link (I totally missed the announcement due to my limited internet time).

Means Of Evil by Ruth Rendell

Though I don’t often discuss short stories here on my blog, I do read them frequently; one each day to be precise. Each morning, when I wake up I make coffee and breakfast, take it back to bed and read for anywhere between half an hour and an hour (longer if I don’t have to get up early). Usually my cats come and join me curled up on my feet or under the cover. I love this start of my day. Readingwise, for me it is a much better way to work my way through collections of short stories, because I don’t race through them but instead give each story the attention it deserves. Also, during quiet or boring moments of the day I find myself frequently going over the story I read that morning.

I should talk more about the short stories and anthologies here on my blog, but right now I have a hard time as it is, keeping up with the blogging goals I set myself for this year. I have read some excellent anthologies recently, most notable one of stories by Irish writers and the one I am currently reading, Telling Tales (there’s a link to a review in the sidebar). Both I highly recommend. I do mention the books of short stories I read in my list of books read.

Last week I read the five stories collected in Means of Evil by Ruth Rendell. The reason why I am reviewing this book here, is because Dewey sent me this book shortly before she died. It arrived the day before Dewey’s husband announced her death. This review is in a way a tribute to Dewey.

Spending some time with Chief Inspector Wexford mulling on his cases was a great way to start my day. I’d be hard-pressed to give you a favorite, I liked them all. None of the stories stood out either way, positive or negative. Each of the stories is about 35 pages, long enough to build up a story and give its characters enough of a background to make them believable. I think that is actually one of the things I liked best about Rendell’s stories: how she is able to create fairly rounded characters in such a limited space.

The first story, Means of Evil, sees a young woman falling to her death from the balcony of her apartment. Initially it seems a straightforward case of suicide. But is it really? Chief Inspector Wexford and his sidekick Inspector Burden have their doubts.

In Old Wives’ Tales Wexford is investigating the death of ninety-two year old Ivy Wrangton. Neighborhood gossip has it that her death may not have been a natural one. But who would want to kill a ninety-two year old? And why?

Ginger and the Kingsmarkham Chalk Circle sees Wexford looking into the disappearance of a baby girl who was taken out of her pram when left unattended. The strangest aspect to this case is that a baby boy was left in her place.

Achilles Heel finds Wexford and his wife on a well-deserved vacation on the Yugoslav coast. But you guessed it: strange things happen while they are there , the meaning of which all becomes clear once the couple returns to England.

In the final story, When the Wedding was Over, Wexford does Inspector Burden’s new brother-in-law publisher Amyas Ireland a favor by reading a manuscript. There is something fishy about it, so Ireland wants an expert’s opinion before he decides to publish the book. Since the manuscript concerns a murder, Wexford is the expert Ireland needs.

As a sidenote, I think most of you are long aware of this, but for those who are not: Many of the projects Dewey started, have been taken over and continued by other bookbloggers. The site for the Weekly Geeks is here, Rebecca has been hosting the Martell-Harper Challenge this first quarter of 2009 (she will also host the challenge the second quarter) and the Bookworms Carnaval has found a new home here.  There is a challenge going on to read books Dewey reviewed on her blog. More info on that is here.

De pianoman by Bernlef

De pianoman (The pianoman) is a novella of barely ninety pages by Dutch writer Bernlef inspired by a story some you might remember from a few years ago when a man appeared out of nowhere in the English town of Sheerness. He didn’t speak, but he did play the piano. Hence his nickname Pianoman. In this novella Bernlef gives his interpretation of that story.

In Bernlef’s story, the pianoman’s real name is Thomas Boender, a young adult (some eighteen years old) from the countryside in the north of Holland, a part of the country known for it’s introverted people, who don’t say much more than strictly necessary. Thomas grew up the only child in just such a family where very little was said and with an abusive father. Thus, Thomas himself didn’t start speaking until he was almost four years old. Throughout his life he keeps feeling uncomfortable with words and is not very confident in his communication with others. Add to that latent homosexual feelings which Thomas himself doesn’t seem to recognize for what they are.

One day, Thomas decides to take the train to Amsterdam to escape his father and to see what is out there, beyond the world he knows. In Amsterdam he hooks up with an English girl, with whom he travels to Paris and from there to England. Eventually, Thomas ends up alone in Sheerness, on the English coast. There, he is picked up by the police and put in a mental hospital, because the police don’t really know what to do with Thomas: not only is his English very limited, but he doesn’t say a word at all.

I found the beginning and the end the best parts of the novella, the parts where Thomas is in his native village. Especially the first third or so of the story, describing Thomas’ youth, kept my attention. Maybe because I know the part of the country, the type of landscape and village well. I grew up in a part of Holland more or less just south of where Thomas comes from. My dad grew up in the very north of Holland and on our way to my grandmother we would drive through exactly the kind of landscape described in De pianoman. Maybe I also preferred the first and last part of the story because that’s where Bernlef’s writing style matched the story, the surroundings, the people. Somehow, the middle part, the part of Thomas’ trip, seemed out of place. But then again, maybe that was exactly the author’s intention: Thomas does feel out of place during his trip. He doesn’t seem to fit in outside of his native village. Bernlef’s writing enhanced the feeling of Thomas’ dislocation.

I am not sure I found Thomas an entirely believable character. He doesn’t seem to know anything about the world and there is no learning curve, no process. During his trip Bang! all of a sudden he realizes that he has been used, taken advantage of and then just dumped. I found Thomas too naive to be convincing, not just when it comes to human relations – which to a certain extent can be understood from his upbringing. There were other, more eyebrow raising things. For example, at one point Thomas is on the beach in Sheerness and he is surprised that the sea “has disappeared” when he wakes up after a couple of hours of sleep. As if he knew nothing about the tides of the sea. On the other hand, this same naivety seemed to work better in regard to Thomas’ latent homosexual feelings. There it was more convincing, seemed to fit in better.

Taken as a whole, I am not sure I found De pianoman very convincing, but there were certainly parts that I enjoyed, mostly those parts of the story set in Thomas’ native village. Reading De pianoman has put me in the mood for a reread of Bernlef’s most famous novel Hersenschimmen (translated into English as Out of Mind).

There’s another review of De pianoman in English here.