All the stories center around Vano and Niko, an inseparable pair. They are at the same time real and not real, human and fantasy, dreamlike. They are male, but they are also genderless, universal, human. In different stories they have different ages, sometimes they are old and sometimes they are young. Sometimes they get older in the span of one story, but essentially Vano and Niko are ageless. Sometimes they are kind and compassionate, sometimes they are cruel and rude. We learn nothing about what Vano and Niko look like. I’d say they are identical, mirror-images, but at the same time they are each other’s opposites.

I wanted to summarize a few stories, to give you an impression, but that turned out to be more difficult than I thought: summarizing the stories makes them seem silly. In one story Vano has lent Niko money, but because Vano is twenty years younger than Niko he feels he can’t tell Niko that he wants the money back – that would be disrespectful. In the end he does get his money back by being patient. In another story Niko is smart and Vano is stupid, and that is basically all that “happens”. By the end of the story, however, it is clear that Niko may not be all that smart and Vano not all that stupid, because it is Vano who is able to enjoy the small things in life, a sunrise, a sunset, love.

My favorite is a two-page story in which Vano and Niko are bored and get into an argument about who is the taller of the two. It turns into a contest in which they put all the mountains they can find on top of each other and climb to the top of their piles of mountains. When they get tired, they put all the mountains back in their places and smooth the earth. Eventually, they stand shoulder to shoulder and they realize that “both are one centimeter taller than the other”. Another day when they are bored, they get into a similar argument about who is smaller and they end up digging holes deep into the earth. In the end they realize that “both are one centimeter shorter than the other”. A third day finds Vano and Niko both with something to do.

Erlom Akhvlediani was born in 1933 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and is also known as a filmmaker. The collection of stories about Vano and Niko was written in the mid-1950s, but wasn’t published until 1961, because it was only then that it became possible to publish such non-ideological and experimental works in the Soviet Union. I couldn’t find much information on Akhvlediani online, unfortunately, but the book itself has a short but informative epilogue by translator Ingrid Degraeve, who is also head of the Dutch language department at Ilia Chavchavadze University in Tbilisi.

As far as I know, these stories have never been translated into English, though they have been translated into Russian, Armenian, German and Arabic among others. The Dutch translation was published in 2003 and was apparently the first literary work translated from Georgian into Dutch. Since then, another book with Akhvlediani’s short stories has been published in Dutch, De man die zijn hoofd verloor (The man who lost his head).

The book’s design is simple, but appealing. It is printed on thick paper with grey letters and black headings. At the beginning of each story, there is a sober drawing in black by Georgian artist Konstantine Sulaberidze. This sober lay out fits Akhvlediani’s minimalistic writing style: he is very sparse with his words and often repeats the same words or phrases within a story.

Vano & Niko is not your usual easy read, but the reading experience is well worth your time.

And yes, all of that is true. Scout is a girl living in Maycomb, a small town in Alabama, in the 1930s. She is six years old at the beginning of the book, though the main part of the story takes place two years later. Scout lives together with her older brother Jem and their father Atticus, a lawyer. During the day a black woman, Calpurnia, works as a housekeeper for the family. Scout and Jem’s mother died when Scout was so young that she has no memories of her mother. Calpurnia has taken up a large share in raising the children.

When Scout is eight years old, Atticus takes up the defense of an African-American man unjustly accused of rape, a court case that not only shakes the small town of Maycomb, but one that deeply impacts the members of the Finch family. As the story is told from Scout’s point of view, we find out little by little along with her what is going on. This worked very well in building up the tension: you can tell something is happening, but you don’t know what exactly. Though admittedly with one’s knowledge of life and of the situation in the US South in the first half of the twentieth century, the reader can fill in some of the blanks. Still, you don’t find out until Scout herself finds out when Calpurnia explains things to her.

Although the book is not very big at about 280 pages, it deals with many themes and issues. The more obvious are racial inequality, tolerance, and Scout (and Jem) learning life lessons, learning about the darker side of life. Two of my favorite themes were that of courage (throughout the book Jem, Scout, Atticus and other characters find themselves in situations that require different kinds of courage) and that of gender roles. Scout herself is a tomboy, wearing overalls, playing outside, climbing trees. The two main women in Scout’s life, Calpurnia and her neighbor Miss Maudie, are independent and strong. When Aunt Alexandra comes to live with the family, Scout is confronted with a whole new set of women and female roles as Aunt Alexandra tries to turn Scout into a ‘lady’. I have the feeling that Harper Lee’s sympathies lay much more with Scout, Calpurnia and Miss Maudie than with Aunt Alexandra and her friends.

As I read on, I realized that To Kill a Mockingbird reminded me very much of my all time favorite book, The Chosen by Chaim Potok (I reviewed it here), though the two books are very different in setting and characters. The Chosen is set in the Jewish Orthodox world of Brooklyn, New York in the mid-forties and at the beginning of the book its main character Reuven is almost ten years older than Scout is at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Chosen covers several years, whereas To Kill a Mockingbird covers by and large one summer. Both children, however, grow up in a family without a mother, both have fathers who reach out to ‘the other’ and in doing so both cross a line that not everyone in their respective societies considers ‘crossable’. In both books the children go through an experience that teaches them something fundamental about life, about their respective worlds, and about prejudice and compassion.

Both The Chosen and To Kill a Mockingbird are books I will reread and rediscover again and again.

For most of the time Tess of the D’Urbervilles kept me engaged. I enjoyed the story, I found it very readable despite all the references to the Bible, English literature and Hardy’s occasional mini-essay-like expansions. Mini-essay-like sounds probably a bit funny, but I can’t think of another way to describe the small theoretical sidesteps he makes, they’re not more than one to three paragraphs long.

Despite liking the story, I found all three main characters to a bigger or lesser extent unsympathetic. Yes, even Tess, though she was not unlikable as a person and I felt sympathy for her. Maybe in her case unsympathetic is not the right word, I felt more something like irritation towards her. I found her way too passive. I know that this was at least in part due to the society she lived in, where women were supposed to be modest etc. Even taking that into account, I think she could have been slightly more assertive and could have taken matters into her own hands. However, providing Tess with a bit more fire in her behind would probably have taken away the vehicle Hardy needed through which to deliver his social commentary. Even when Tess does take matters into her own hands in a very dramatic way at the end of the book, that felt more like the inevitable (but was it really inevitable?) result of the situation Tess found herself in than of her becoming proactive. It seemed to me that for Hardy there was no other way in which Tess could escape the situation, the hypocritical morality of the society she lived in. It was obvious, though, that Thomas Hardy’s sympathized with the heroine of his story.

*slight spoiler alert ahead in this paragraph*
I found Angel Clare a hypocrite, short and sweet, by rejecting Tess because of her past. As Hardy makes clear, Angel fell in love with a rural idyll, not with a real woman. Alec, too, was hypocritical, especially after his conversion and the ease with which he dropped his religious convictions. I understand him seducing Tess the first time: she’s a pretty, innocent, naive country girl, and he a womanizer from a different, higher social class who abuses his position and his power. But I didn’t really understand why he wanted her back. I didn’t really believe his love or affection for Tess were sincere, though on the other hand: why would he go through all the trouble to get together with her in the end? Did he sincerely care for Tess? Was it a way to make amends for the way he had treated her before? Or was it a way to enjoy his power over her again, to bind her to him? Was it again a way to abuse his influence over her? But such a public relationship with a farmer’s girl would surely not be good for his own social position? I understand Tess eventually giving in to him in order to secure a living for her family, but I didn’t (and still don’t) really understand Alec’s motives for pursuing Tess the second time.

Despite these question marks, I did enjoy Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Catherine Parkstone is an English woman in her late forties, divorced with two grown-up children. At the beginning of the book, Catherine arrives at her newly bought house in the Cévennes region in southern France, where she is moving to start a new life and set up a business as a seamstress. Her new home is located halfway up a mountain slope just outside the tiny village of La Grelaudière. Well, village is too big of a word, as La Grelaudière only has twelve inhabitants, including Catherine. We meet the villagers, who accept Catherine, though initially with some reserve. We also meet Catherine’s closest neighbor, the somewhat mysterious Patrick Castagnol, with whom Catherine strikes up a friendly relationship. Starting her business as a craftswoman is not as easy as Catherine initially thought it would be, as she hadn’t counted on the stubborn French bureaucracy that turns out to be something of a barrier. Add to that the visit of Briony, Catherine’s younger sister, who stirs up things a bit.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Tapestry of Love. It is a relaxing, gentle, unrushed read, comfortable and light, easy to read, yet well-written and far from insulting the reader’s intelligence. Apparently, the book is categorised as chick-lit and romance. If it is chick-lit, it is definitely the better sort of the genre. Neither would I classify the book as romance. Yes, there is a romantic thread in the story, but to me that was only a minor part of the book. If there is any love part of the main story line of the book, it is not necessary the love between two people, but it is rather Catherine’s love for her new home – for the Cévennes and La Grelaudière and its inhabitants. For me, this is much more the love that the book’s title refers to.

The story was engaging, the characters and the tiny village of La Grelaudière were brought to life in a wonderful way with an eye for detail. Rosy’s descriptions of life in the mountain village, a life that is at times hard and uncertain, were among my favorite parts of the book. I could imagine Catherine walking from her house to visit Patrick or driving up the winding mountain road to La Grelaudière. I felt that the land and the village were real characters and as such at least as important as the main character Catherine.

I liked Catherine, because she strikes off on her own to start over in a different country and because she is not afraid of her own company. I could relate to her, even though I was almost twenty years younger than Catherine when I moved to Armenia and I am not divorced and don’t have children. I liked that she moved abroad not for work or because her partner was from a different country, but basically because she wanted to.

My favorite quote from the book is from the scene when Catherine has dinner at Patrick’s for the first time. One of the mysterious things about Patrick is that he speaks English extremely well, not just grammatically correct, but also using expressions and idiom in a way that makes it obvious that English must be more than just a foreign language to Patrick. So, even though Catherine speaks French very well, the two communicate in English.

There was something liberating about talking her own language for an evening. It was funny how, for all her competence, she never felt entirely herself when conversing in French with the Bouschets, the Mériels or Madame Volpilière. It wasn’t the search for words – or not always or only that. It was more a feeling of everything being filtered, somehow, like communicating through gauze. She almost felt she was speaking a part. But here, in English, it was all so much more direct. What of Patrick, though – was he quite himself, in this language which was not his own?

I recognize Catherine’s feelings about speaking French: it is exactly how I feel when I speak Armenian or Russian. Though I speak both languages well, I can’t express myself the same way I can in English or Dutch. It isn’t always about not knowing the words. I sometimes feel that when I am speaking Armenian or Russian, I am not entirely the same person as I am when speaking English or Dutch. I also sometimes think that people with whom I communicate mainly or exclusively in Russian or Armenian have a different impression of me than those with whom I communicate in English or Dutch. Sometimes I suspect that both groups would describe me slightly differently. I don’t mean to say that I am two entirely different people, but I suspect that certain parts of my character come out more clearly when I speak English or Dutch than when I speak Russian or Armenian. This may sound strange to some of you, but I also think that those who use multiple languages in their daily lives might understand what I mean. The above quote from The Tapestry of Love reminded me of this blogpost by a native English speaker who is now living in The Netherlands.

For me, The Tapestry of Love was the perfect light read, great for a vacation or a rainy weekend. I can’t wait to dive into Hearts and Minds.

Rosy’s website is here. The page on The Tapestry of Love has links to other bloggers who wrote about the book.

This is the first book by Willa Cather I read and I am definitely going to try to find more of her books. O Pioneers! is probably going to end up among my favorites of this year. At 120 pages it is only a slim book, but I could have easily spent two or three times as many pages with Alexandra Bergson. O Pioneers! was published in 1913 and is set some time in the late 19th century, I assume. From page one I fell in love with Cather‘s writing. With few words, she manages to draw the landscape and the characters. I found the characters very human – none of them is perfect, they all have flaws.

In the first chapter we meet Alexandra when she is in her early twenties. As a young girl she emigrated to the US from Sweden and the family ended upon as farmers in Nebraska. Life is hard for her and her family as Alexandra’s father is dying. In fact, times are hard for anyone trying to farm the stubborn Nebraska plains and it looks like harder times are still ahead. Alexandra’s father has left the farm in charge of his oldest daughter, because he has more faith in her than in her two younger brothers, Lou and Oscar. His third son Emil is only five years old at this time.

The next chapter finds us sixteen years later with Alexandra firmly in charge of the farm. Things have turned around on the plains and farming is no longer the struggle for survival it once was. Alexandra’s farm is now one of the largest in the area. She is a strong woman, succesful in running her farm in part because of her openness for new things. Because of this and because of her strength and unorthodox manners, Alexandra is envied by her two brothers Lou and Oscar, who never managed to be quite as successful as their sister. With her youngest brother Emil Alexandra is much more on the same wavelength, to a certain extent they share an understanding and she has worked hard to be able to send him to university to secure a life for him that is not tied to the land. Alexandra’s life has been so devoted to running her farm, that she mostly ignored her personal life:

[Alexandra's] training had all been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken to do. Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was there, and it was because she had so much personality to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them so completely, that her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors.

The unexpected return of an old friend of Alexandra and Emil’s return to town after graduating from university set in motion a chain of events that dramatically change Alexandra’s life.

This is what other bookbloggers had to say about O Pioneers!:
“Here’s Harmony”
Estella’s Revenge
An adventure in reading
Chrisbookarama
Stephanie’s Confessions of a Book-a-holic

If you also blogged about O Pioneers!, please leave a comment with a link to your blogpost and I will add it to the list.

Emma Woodhouse is the 21-year old heroine of this novel. She lives in the village of Highbury, not far from London. Matchmaking is her favorite pastime, but unfortunately, she is not always successful,  because she overestimates both her own abilities as a matchmaker and the control she has over people and events around her. This time, Emma has set her mind on finding a suitable husband for her friend Harriet Smith. In the process, Emma comes to realize that she doesn’t have as much control over events as she thinks she has and that she doesn’t understand other people’s feelings as well as she thinks she does. Not only that, she also comes to realize that she doesn’t know her own feelings that well either.

As with Mansfield Park, initially I had trouble keeping the characters of Emma apart, though soon enough this was no longer a problem.

After I finished the book, I realized that I didn’t really like Emma all that much, though she is not be a bad person at heart and she acts out of good motives. I thought she was rather spoiled and, more importantly, that she was quite rude and condescending in her treatment of Harriet. Though I have to admit that I found that Harriet on the other hand was way too easily influenced by Emma. I don’t want to go into too much details or give examples, so as not to give any spoilers.

I was struck by the limited world of Emma and her friends: all letters, the smallest of events (or lack of one), everything has to be meticulously discussed and judged from all angles over and over and over again. At some point I found this almost claustrophobic. These eternal discussions of nothing started to get on my nerves at some point about halfway through. But then I somehow got over it or I got swept with the current of the story again and later on I found it less annoying.

Like Mansfield Park, the copy of Emma that I read was from the Oxford World Classics series. Both contained excellent introductions to the novels that added so much to my enjoyment of the books. Though both introductions gave away some of the plot lines, both texts pointed out many themes and motives and gave a lot of background to place the stories in their time. They added a lot to the text that otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed and appreciated.

Though I enjoy Jane Austen’s books, I don’t think I’ll ever be a huge fan of them. Emma and Mansfield Park, the ones I read most recently are not my favorites to be sure. Of those two I definitely prefer Emma, but Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite. I still have Northanger Abbey on my shelves, which I plan to read in a few months, before the end of the year.

Here is what other bookbloggers had to say about Emma.
Eva at A Striped Armchair
Trish at (formerly known as) Trish’s Reading Nook
Amanda at 5-Squared
Wendy at Musings of a Bookish Kitty
Adventures in Reading
Nicki at Fyrefly’s Book Blog
In the Shadow of Mt. TBR

If you blogged about Emma, but your review is not on this list, leave a comment with a link to your blogpost and I will add it to the list.

This collection of William Saroyan’s writings was published in 2008 on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the American-Armenian writer. The book contains short stories, some novellas and plays and some autobiographical work. I read the book over several months, picking it up and putting it down to read other things in between. If I’d read the whole 590 pages at once, I’d have gone crazy and I would have hated the book. I might even have thrown the book somewhere in a corner unfinished. Though Saroyan’s writing style is not very hard to read, I found there’s something grating, non-fluent about it. I couldn’t read more than one story or some ten to fifteen pages at a time before I just had to put the book away for a while.

The first part of the book consists of short stories in chronological order. Initially, I didn’t like the stories at all, the flowing style did not work for me at all and I was wondering how I would ever get through this book. I know I am calling his style flowing now, while two sentences earlier I called it grating and non-fluent. There was something flowing, drifting in the way he put his thoughts into words. But as Saroyan’s writing style developed (and probably his writing grew on me), I started to appreciate and even like the later stories. Many of the stories in the book deal with the lives of Armenian immigrants in California, something close to Saroyan’s own experience, as he was born to Armenian immigrants and grew up in Fresno, California.

The novella My Name Is Aram deals with the same theme as it tells episodes from the life of Aram Garoghlanian, a boy growing up in small-town California among Armenian and other immigrants. I enjoyed this novella more than the short stories. The chapters are short stories in themselves, they can be read separately and there’s not really a story line. In the novella we meet not only Aram, but also his friends and relatives. We get to know his cousin Mourad who steals a neighbor’s horse, his uncle Khosrove who doesn’t like talking and gets annoyed when little Aram asks too many questions and his other uncle Melik who buys a plot of land in the desert to plant pomegranate trees.

In the novella Tracy’s Tiger Armenians play no role at all. It is a somewhat surreal story about Thomas Tracy and his invisible tiger. One day this tiger, that’s not really a tiger at all, turns visible for the entire world, setting in motion a train of events. I initially didn’t care much for this story, though the very last words gave some thinking fodder. It is probably because of those last words that eventually, the story did stay with me much longer than most of the other works in this collection.

The Time of Your Life is the only play in the book. It’s also one of the parts of the book that I cared least of all about. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I haven’t read any plays in ages (Macbeth in highschool comes to mind as possibly being the last one I read), more likely it is because I just didn’t get the point of the play. The intro to the play was my favorite part, though I am not sure I agree with everything it says:

In the time of you life, live – so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live – so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

The last part of the book is taken up by excerpts from Saroyan’s memoirs with The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills reprinted in full. I had a bit of a hard time getting through this memoir that covers his childhood. I felt very strongly that Saroyan was projecting his adult thoughts and emotions on his child-self, giving the young William Saroyan ideas and thoughts about life that were hardly those of an approximately seven-year old or early teenager. I know that this is to an extent inevitable when an adult writes about his childhood, but in this case, it started to annoy me after a while. There was just something about it that grated. The thing I did enjoy very much about The Bicycle Rider are the references to some of the other works included in this reader that show to what extent these works, most notably My Name Is Aram, are autobiographical and that put these works into perspective.

The last two parts of the book are excerpts from Saroyan’s memoirs Obituaries and More Obituaries. These are all sort of short non-fiction essays that I had a hard time working my through. Together with the play, these were the parts I didn’t care about at all.

Looking back, I most definitely enjoyed William Saroyan’s fiction in this collection much, much more than his non-fictional works. The latter didn’t hold my attention at all and I had a hard time just ‘getting’ them. I’m not sure I will ever care about revisiting Saroyan’s writing. I suppose his style just isn’t for me.

On Saturday, in between napping, I read Louis de Bernières’ A Partisan’s Daughter. I am not sure I will write a review about it, because I have no clue what to say about it. For now, suffice to say I was not impressed.

After that, I picked up The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. That one fared much much better with me than A Partisan’s Daughter. The Winter Queen is the first in the Erast Fandorin mystery series, a series set in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Erast Fandorin (link goes to a site in Russian) is a young man from a well-off background who lost both his parents before he turned twenty years old. At the beginning of the book he has just started working as a lowly ranking clerk at the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Police. He is modest, a bit naive and something of a softy, who started out at the police with all kinds of misguided ideals and dreams of catching criminals. Or at least that’s how his boss Xavier Feofilaktovich Grushin sees Fandorin and why he doesn’t think his protegé will ever make it big at the police.

Then one day the file of what looks like a clear case of suicide comes across Grushin’s desk. Fandorin intuitively senses something fishy about the case. To indulge his assistant, Grushin sends him off to make some inquiries. Before long, it indeed looks like there is more to the case and a hotshot from the criminal police in Saint Petersburg (then the capital of Russia) comes to take over the investigation. What follows is a tale of beautiful women, travels across Europe, and a global conspiracy.

Initially, I had to get used to the flowery, wordy writing style of Akunin, but very soon I was drawn in and enjoying the story. Once I got used to it, the writing style suits the setting very well.

Erast Fandorin is a sympathetic character, and yes, he is a bit naive and soft at times, though in the moments when it counts he does not lack courage. Fandorin grows as a person throughout the book and, taking the final chapter into account, I can only imagine he matures even more in the following books in the series.

Though the two series could not be more different in setting, characters and plot, The Winter Queen reminded me of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. The Winter Queen contains more violence, the main character works for the police and there is one main mystery to solve instead of several smaller ones, in short, it is more of a “traditional” detective story. But somehow Erast Fandorin reminded me of Precious Ramotswe, the heroine in McCall Smith’s series. Both stumble into the detective work more or less by accident, neither are anything close to “hardcore detectives”, they both find their clues sort of in a roundabout way, often through socializing with other people (instead of interrogating them purposefully). I am curious if anyone who is also familiar with both series, had the same impression.

The Fandorin series is definitely another series I will be reading more of.

This is what other bloggers have to say about The Winter Queen.
A Striped Armchair
Leap in the Dark
If you also reviewed this book at your blog, leave a link to your review in the comments and I will add it to the list.