Untold Stories - Alan Bennett (Faber)

*****

What a wonderful opening to Alan Bennett's memoirs.

"cancer is not a career move" - he feels that his memoirs went by almost unnoticed because he didn't play on the fact that he had cancer when he wrote them. He describes the writing of them as a "laxative"!

He says that autobiography requires no plot.

His memoir opens with setting, describing the landscape as you come north out of Leeds by train. As a former Leodensian, I can see and smell that landscape. Then he moves back to 1966 with some dialogue by the Mental Health Welfare Officer. he refers to his mother as "mam" and the Yorkshire accent is apparent via the dialogue.

He describes his mother's depression and how his father was her carer. He feels that the term "carer" is a modern term and it's actually more the role entitled "coper". His mother imagined people and hid and this fed his ideas for aplay. he's candid in his admission of a lack of tolerance of his mother's irrational behavriour, which would leave him on the "brink of violence".

He describes the noise that he faced when entering the hospital where his mother was incarcerated. He describes the disarray of a Hogarth print.

He writes touchingly with echoes of humour and sadness.

The fact that the family had covered up his maternal grandfather's suicide for 40 years, he felt that it made his own family more exciting! He'd said that there had previously been little material to draw upon for his writing.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (Penguin Classics)

Not having previously been a fan of the horror genre, I firstly read Frankenstein as an A Level student and subsequently for pleasure. It possesses all the classic conventions of a gothic novel, pathetic fallacy, where the weather symbolizes prophecy and romanticism. However, the novel has many other ingredients that contribute to making it sustain the passages of time. One of those factors is that we judge people on appearance and the image of Frankenstein's monster is horrific. Also, with medical advancements Mary Shelley's original idea in 1816 may not be so far fetched almost 200 years later. It throws up issues of medical ethics. Shelley was around 18 when she wrote this book and the writing reflects her youth and naivety. For example hopw did the creature arrive and how did he mature? He was said to be over 8ft, so how would he be able to have been created from human bones? "I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter". What is quite remarkable about this book is the fact that Mary Shelley wrote it as a challenge whilst in the mountains in Switzerland, telling ghost stories with her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. The story is told through 3 narrators and the reader needs to decide which character is the one that they trust.

The Girl in the Picture - Denise Chong (Scribner non fiction) (November 2007) **** Having rarely read non-fiction for pleasure, I was more than pleasantly surprised to read this moving account of a victim of the Vietnam War, Kim Phuc. The book was lent to me by a friend that heard I was going to be visiting Vietnam. It gave great insight to everyday life in South Vietnam and also the social, political and economical structures during the late 1960's and early 1970's. Kim Phuc was to become the most famous face of the Vietnam War. She was 9 years old when she was severely burned in a napalm attack in her village in South Vietnam and she was photographed running naked away from the attack. The photographer caught her fear and pain and this helped turn public opinion against the war. It's a true account which describes her family and the history that was being made at the time. I loved the quote by her aunt "if you kneel down life is a mountain; if you stand up life is at your feet". It is told as an account in the third person and describes the many years of rehabilitation that followed the attack, which although it was told without emotion it was nevertheless, heartwrenching. It was also interesting to hear how she was manipulated by the ruling authorities as she continued to be of world interest. I also knew nothing about the religion that she was originally born into, Caodai, so that was very interesting. She subsequently changed to Christianity where she received many of the answers to her questions, much to her mother's bitter disappointment. She finally managed to defect to Canada which is where she lives to this day with her husband and children.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini - Bloomsbury

****

Having loved the Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's previous bestseller, I lovingly held onto this new book, till I had a decent train journey, whereby I could get a good, long, uninterrupted start. As I opened the book, a fellow passenger who was sitting opposite me asked if I'd read the Kite Runner. I begrudgingly looked up from my first page, and admitted that I'd really enjoyed it. He proceeded to tell me that he'd been at the publisher's house the night before and his wife had been presented with a copy of it, and been assured that it was an even better read than Hosseini's previous book. "Oh great", I said, hoping I could just stick my nose back into my book and wouldn't have to make polite conversation for the rest of my journey.

This book, like its predecessor is set in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban. You can feel the fear and brutality on the streets and the despair amongst the women. It portrays poverty, and cruelty, and the bullying by Rasheed of his two wives and children. It's a tale of love triumphing over evil but moreover, it's a story of an unlikely friendship, told beautifully and with feeling. Courageous Mariam who was prepared to give up her own life for that of Laila's and Laila's children.

The book gives an insight into how Afghanistant people were forced to flee their homes and their country and settle in Pakistan and Iran. Today more than 2 million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.

The title of the novel comes from a seventeenth century Persian Poet, Saeb-e-Tabrizi. Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan but moved to the United Sates in 1980.

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
(November 2007)

*****

This epic explores the effects of the state of emergency on the lives of ordinary people in 1970's India. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize . Although Rohinton Mistry was living in Canada at that time, he wrote the book after returning to Bombay twenty years later. He had planned to write a short novel which began "with the image of a woman at a sweing machine ....As I began writing, though, the story grew, and I found myself getting interested in other details of the characters' lives". This aspect interested me in that he hadn't planned the story exactly but let it run with his imagination. It gives a great insight into Bombay and into village life in that era. He has been compared to Tolstoy and Dickens but explains that he was never particularly drawn to these authors, but prefered American writers like Cheever and Updike. The ending of the book, although not happy, is one of hope for a better future.

It tells the story of a seamstress who sets up in business after the death of her husband. As her eyes begin to fail, she recruits two tailors, Ishvar and Om, Ishvar's nephew. She then takes in a paying guest, a student named Maneck.

The story explores the lives of the characters that inhabit it and is extremely descriptive, with touches of wit.