Goyhood

Goyhood is the story of twins, David and Marty (now Mayer), who find themselves cast away from their lives when their mother dies suddenly. In grappling with this news, they also uncover that they are in fact, not Jewish, as they had known their entire lives. David is usually up to no good and in true form, largely sticks to this script in the aftermath. Mayer, however, as a Talmud scholar married to a rabbi’s daughter, is cast adrift in the spiritual sea. What follows is the incredible journey of the brothers, a one-eyed dog they rescue, and Charlayne, a friend they find. Together, the reader journeys with them through America’s deep south as they try to work out who they really are and what this means for them.

At its heart, author Reuven Fenton’s story is one of identity. Who are we really when the layer of race, religion and social stratum are peeled away? What is the difference between the faith we have and the religion we follow? How much of our spiritual compass shapes our everyday? Through the twins’ journey we learn that coming back to your roots may not always be as you imagined. And you may have to recalibrate your life, and in Mayer’s case, your now void marriage.

The other theme that runs through the book is the sibling relationship. Originally close, Mayer and David have been estranged for a while. Their personalities are completely different and they have chosen different paths for life. But the death of their parent throws them together in this mayhem and they have to provide support for each other, or they’d lose their way. Plenty of hilarity ensues too, not least in the form of fireworks which leaves the reader in splits.

For those of us unfamiliar with Judaism, some of the terms were a little difficult to understand at the start. But I got the hang of them soon enough and I also appreciated learning more about a religion different to my own. The pace of the story is fast and the author’s style is engaging and entertaining, which is great for a debut novel.

Read this over the summer – and contemplate, if you lost your parent and found out that you weren’t the religion you thought you were, what would you do?

Pipe Dreams: Secret Diaries of a Neighbourhood Plumber

This book was recommended to me by a friend. The author is married to her cousin. Occasionally, I like books like this – lighthearted and an easy read. This is the memoir of the author Nicholas James, or Nick, who gives up his regular 9-to-5 job to retrain as a plumber. The book is a collection of episodes, stories and anecdotes of the people he meets and his clients as he plumbs through London homes.

The book is wonderfully written. The situations and charaters are larger-than-life, vibrant and jump off the pages. Nick comes in contact with the wild and wonderful of London, and as a Londoner the experiences are a hundred percent believable. Some might argue that fact is stranger than fiction though, especially in some of the whacko characters he meets.

There is a great sense of humour in the author’s style. And some edge of the seat moments too, particularly when there is a plumbing problem he doesn’t quite know how to solve or a stopcock that is about to burst and flood the house. But Nick manages to save his clients’ house (and his job) by a hair’s breadth most times. It’s also heartening to read about how he manages his kids and family life in amongst the demands of his chosen career.

Overall, if you are looking for a light peppy read, full of memorable characters that paint a true picture of modern-day London, then I would recommend this book!

The Lamplighters

I bought myself this book for my birthday this year, having seen it in a bookshop and unable to ignore the blurb. I am fascinated by lighthouses – I believe it stems from having spent my childhood at airports, playing in and aound closed terminal buildings, under the watchful gaze of air traffic control towers. They would have a beacon, and my earliest memories involve countine to 10 in between every sweep of the beam of light.

In adulthood, I have visited a few lighthouses, but there are my top three – the lighthouse at Kaup Beach near my university town Manipal, the one at Ardnamurchan Point in Scotland and the Portland Bill lighthouse in Dorset. Anyway, author Emma Stonex has captured perfectly the thrill and mystery surrounding lighthouses in this ‘locked room’ thriller, based on the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers on Eilean Mor.

Three keepers vanish mysteriously, the table is set for dinner, the lighthouse is locked from within and there is no way anyone could have gone in or out. They leave behind families – wives, children and a girlfriend. The investigation of their disappearance yeilds nothing – no bodies, no clues, nada. Decades pass and then an author decides to do some more digging, beginning with interviews of the family.

The plot is watertight and Stonex builds up the pace brilliantly. And her style of writing is excellent, with every chapter like peeling away the layers of an onion, revealing more and more. However, I feel the author does herself a disservice towards the end by merging fact, fiction and imagination. To the point where it becomes hard to figure out who killed who, when and why. There are so many people with so many motivations, but somehow it doesn’t quite come together satisfactorily. I’d still recommend this book, for the journey rather than the destination. Enjoy!

Around the World in 80 Trains

I love train travel. When I was a kid, we lived in a different city to my grandparents and so multiple times a year I would get on a 2-day long train to go stay with them. Even after I grew up, when most of urban India had switched to low cost flight travel, my family and I took many trains across the country – visiting places like Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. In the UK, I have also taken so many trains, most notably the LNER service between London and Edinburgh once a month for many months.

The author Monisha Rajesh seems to be my ‘kindred spirit.’ She takes train travel to a whole new level by taking 80 trains around the world. There are 3 trains in particular that have been on my own list for years – the train to Lhasa, Tibet, the train across Canada and the Orient Express in Europe. She describes her travels with her fiancee on all these trains and many more.

An account of people, places and cultures; but more importantly this book is an account of the author’s own impressions. She meets a remarkable number of characters along the way and particularly in more curtained parts of the world like North Korea and Tibet, these people jump off the pages to tell their stories.

I must admit, I have not read her book about Indian train travel yet, and it’s gone on my tbr now. But as she says in her book, worldwide, train travel means so many things to different people. To some it is a form of escapism, to others a unique way to see the world. And again to some, it is just a way to get from Place A to B. But whatever it is, it is impossible to deny the thrill of a carriage and the gentle lull of the sounds of wheels on tracks. A wonderful read, and I will finish by sharing my favourite rail poem.

From A Railway Carriage (1885)

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

The Island

I really love Victoria Hislop. I like her style, the fact that she writes about Greece, Spain, Cyprus; and just the way she spins stories. They are stories about everyday people in remarkable situations typically set against a period of historic significance.

The Island had been on my TBR for a while, but I saved it until I got to THE island. Yes, read the book while on a vacation to Crete and a visit to Spinalonga, the 20th century leper colony that housed so many people plagues by leprosy. It’s a disease that has faced so much stigma and shame historically, that a person contracting it is instantly shunned by society.

The story really is Alexis’s grandmother – Eleni, who is a mother to two daughters, Maria and Anna and wife to Georgio. When a trip to the doctor alters her simple life, she must face her tragic reality. The reader is instantly drawn into the lives of the daughters, their contrasting personalities, and their aspirations in life.

Simple village life on Crete takes on larger proportions through themes of love, passion and ultimately the human spirit against challenges. Such a wonderful read, no surprise that it is prize winning and has sold millions of copies. Here is mine in the Cretan sun.

The Return

As far as lightweight summer reading goes, Victoria Hislop is one of my absolute favourites. She writes in a beautiful, natural way, her stories have a nice flow, and the books are so easy to read. In The Return, the reader is transported to Granada, in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War.

Our modern day protagonist Sonia, trapped in a marriage with a man she doesn’t even recognise anymore is hoping to let her hair down on a trip to Spain with her childhood friend. But a chance meeting with a stranger in a cafe will lead her into the past. Here she will discover the incredible story of the Ramirez family as they live in a war torn Spain, and the remarkable journeys they go on.

Of all the places I have been to in Spain, Granada has always tugged at my heart. The Moorish quarters, the winding streets of the Albycin, the impenetrable majesty of the Alhambra – it is a city with magic. It also has an incredible history as one of the foremost cities of Andalusia and of great importance in medieval times. Hislop manages to lift these scenes of the pages through the stories of the past.

The reader is completely drawn into the tale of the Ramirez children and the story of this family, as it is brought to the brink of extinction by the Civil War. The backdrop is terrific and really shows that democracies that we take for granted in the modern day were one day, bitterly fought for and snatched from the greedy mouths of dictators.

This is a wonderful book and I very much recommend as a summer read if you are looking for one this year.

Just the Plague

Just the Plague by Ludmila Ulitskaya is set in 1930s Russia. Stalin is at the helm. And in a small town, Maier, a microbiologist, is slogging away developing a plague vaccine. Nothing particularly dramatic happens until he is summoned to Moscow to give a progress update to the powers that be. As Maier struggles with what to actually report, things take a darker turn.

A plague like disease suddenly begins to spread, leaked from a lab. Little by little, it transpires that more people are affected. The primary way to contain the disease is to quarantine anyone who catches it, which stops the virus from spreading to others. State machinery kicks in, aggressively tracing contacts of patients displaying symptoms, and taking them into quarantine. To guard against panic, State officials are only giving basic information to those being rounded up.

For the citizens’ greater good, the State puts controls in place. But do people really want their State officials to turn up at their door at any hour, demanding that they drop everything immediately and accompany them? What are the limits of personal freedom vs the boundary of the State? Where do we draw the line? These and other themes, in this novella, far ahead of its times and uniquely prescient, is Ulitskaya’s masterpiece written in the 1980s. Must read.

The Salt Path … a review

It gives me a lot of pleasure reading books about travel while we are in lockdown. My family is the third generation of travellers, and we have been much deprived during Covid. This part-memoir, part-travel-guide book is about a couple’s immense misfortune, that leads to the loss of their entire lives’ savings, including their home.

Then Moth, the husband, is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Ray, his wife and the author, then pack their rucksacks and set off to walk the south-west coast of England. This of course, is the famous part that juts out into the Atlantic as Land’s end. They walk from Minehead to Poole, whilst camping wild. The description of the natural world is beautiful. Raynor Winn may have lost everything in life, but has a beautiful gift of words. Page after page is filled with the vastness and immenseness of the coast brought to life. As their homelessness endures, we also see the attitudes of everyday people as well.

But as they walk, will they figure out what’s next? With two children at University, their home gone, and a debilitating disease that makes Moth weaker each day, is there any point in their future at all? These questions are answered against the backdrop of cliffs that form the southern boundary of our island in the ocean. A beautiful read.

Ladies Coupé … a review

I spent Christmas last year at my friend’s. M is an author herself, works in publishing and is one of the most prolific readers I know. So staying over at hers means picking something unusual off the copious bookshelves and coming back with a read or five. This time, I picked up Ladies Coupé by Anita Nair. I never got round to reviewing it at the time, so here goes.

This book follows a life-affirming journey of the protagonist – a young Indian woman named Akhila. She works in income tax, is 45 and single, and has just bought herself a one-way ticket to Kanyakumari. While she is trying to escape her stifling Tam-Brahm (slang for Tamil Brahmin – usually denotes a small-minded, conservative culture) life, she is also travelling towards something. On the train, she is sharing a coupé with five other women.

The reader is looking into a fishbowl in which these characters interact. Each woman has her own story and the narrative takes turn in acquainting us with each. Different themes are explored – physical love, the need (or not) for a man, happiness, and the expectations of society from a woman, amongst others,

I read this book over 3-4 days and it completely consumed me. It is deeper than it looks from the blurb, and explores many nuances of hidden emotion. What will we learn, and will we find any answers? Whilst the reader is drawn to Akhila, there is a remote-ness about her which is unsettling. This is a fine novel, and a great example of women’s literature from the subcontinent.

A personal note here: over the last few weeks of lockdown, a number of friends have casually mentioned this blog. I always think of it as rather personal (always have) and I’m flattered that you indulge me so… thank you.

The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man … a review

Two coffins gets mixed up. At a 12 year old Swedish girl’s funeral arrives a black coffin with red Swastikas and yellow fire flames. And a neo-Nazi goon who is mourning his Nazi brother receives a blue coffin with white clouds and little bunnies along the side. The Nazi is pissed. I must admit, this book made me snort so many times that beverages kept going the wrong way and choking me! And that’s exactly what I expected from this sequel.

Like its predecessor,  this book is a fantastic work of modern humour. A number of heads of state feature – including the US, Russia, Germany and North Korea. Our 101 year old protagonist and his good-for-nothing pal take them on a ride – but all is well in the end of course, as the 400 kilos of nuclear uranium is where it is the safest. I will admit, I was hoping both Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern would also have cameo appearances – so here’s hoping for yet another book from Jonasson!

This book is a very easy read, it is effortless although long. If like me, you need a light read during this seemingly endless lockdown, then I highly recommend this book. Its light-hearted approach to modern day politics is exactly what we all need to lighten up and laugh a little. Or a lot! Enjoy, and stay safe x