The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

No boring mythology here.

Synopsis of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes. 

My two cents

Throw away the tale of the invincible Achilles foiled because of that vunerable spot in his heel that wasn't touched by the waters of the river Styx. Now replace this with a man-god who falls in love with his childhood friend Patroclus, a man who would follow him to the ends of the earth. But Achilles needs to choose his path: will he answer the call of his destiny to become a god? Or will he choose true happiness with the man he loves?

***

*Sigh.* I've fallen in love. Again.  

This was among my favourite reads for 2013. I had been meaning to review this but I seem to have such a harder time reviewing books I love because I agonize over how to express why I love the book so much. In the meantime, I decided to re-read it and now I have to put this book among my all-time favourites.

I got my first taste of mythology in high school through, you guessed it, Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. I remember I was ahead of the pack in high school because I really enjoyed mythology; something about it just drew me in. Revisiting mythology through this award-winning book was such a treat! I honestly could. not. put. this. down. I remember feeling like this when I first discovered Philippa Gregory... so excited and wanting to read more in the genre! (What is this genre Miller has created, I don't know: mythological retellings?)

If you got bored with mythology in school, this is a far cry from it. This is well written, engaging and entirely accessible. It features a bevy of gods and goddesses but with oh-so-human feelings and personalities. There is drama, love, backstabbing and politicking, and epic heroic battle. There are lessons to be learned. There are stories to be immortalized.

This is about tortured souls, heartache, and ambition. The golden boy Achilles torn between true happiness of loving and of the call of his destiny for godhood. The weakling Patroclus who eventually grows into his own and is torn between protecting Achilles' reputation as a god-man and of declaring to the world his love. The chilling sea nymph Thetis is torn by her raw ambition for her son's success and her deep love for him. 

If you want to feel every emotion, hang on every word said, and find out how this love story plays out, I urge you to pick this up. I am willing to bet that you will love it just like I did.

There are books. And there are books that are a cut above the rest. This one is way above those.

Verdict: An intimate retelling of the love story between the mythological characters of Achilles and Patroclus, this book will throw away any misconceptions that mythology is dull or boring and will seal your love of all things Madeline Miller.

Shout out to Ellie of Curiosity Killed the Bookworm -- I won this over on her blog during a Literary Giveaway Blog Hop last year!

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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Immigrant life at its insanest.

About A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka: Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside feuding to save their engineer father from gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths secrets and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget.

My thoughts

The book in one sentence: An old man, a Ukrainian immigrant, wreaks havoc on family life when he marries a much, much younger gold digger.

***

I was trolling Oprah and decided to read A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianbecause I saw it was one of Vera Farmiga's memorable reads. She relates because she is the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrants. (Vera is the fantastic actress in Up in the Air, The Departed and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.)

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. The first few sentences, which also happen to be on the front cover, sets the mood:

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

Reading this will make you alternately laugh and cry (or cringe). Hilarious and tragic, the story is told from the viewpoint of Nadezhda (Nadia), the younger daughter. When their father Nikolai goes a'courting and eventually remarries, Nadia and her sister Vera have no choice but to join forces against the wicked witch Valentina - Valentina of the big boobs paid for by their father, and her supposed savant son who is to be Oxford educated, again to be paid for by their father.

Immigrant life is difficult. We are given a peek into their lives of poverty and hardship when their mother was still alive. And the ruthlessness by which Valentina is portrayed drives home this very point, to the dismay of Nadia and Vera. At every turn, Valentina outsmarts the two sisters with getting her "needs" met by their father's fast dwindling savings and pension - be it a car (or two), or a modern oven. This common adversary draws the two sisters closer, and they learn that their lives are not as simple as they believed it to be, as old rivalries and family histories come to fore.

Your heart will go out to our octogenarian hero, who in his second childhood, only wants to be love and be loved (ok, he is unabashedly lecherous). He revisits his life, and his roots, and the product is a history or treatise about tractors written in Ukrainian. Read between the lines and it is a love story of his beloved Ukraine.

This is a beautiful story, which will resonate with immigrants Ukrainian or not. It urges you to look back on your own family history, family dynamics, and the legacies that your family leaves you. And while there is comic relief because of the sheer outrageousness of some events, it is actually a very real and even painful probe of life. Everyone's family has its own secrets, and the wonderful thing about it is that we are the product of it!

Verdict: A must-read - entertaining yet enlightening. I'm glad this one was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Serious summary of The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai: This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty. {Via}

My two cents

OK bits: I love Desai's writing. She has a comfortable way of describing the most mundane while capturing her character's moods. For example, when Biju finally gets his American visa:

"Raw sewage was being used to water a patch of grass that was lush and stinking, grinning brilliantly in the dusk."

It's been a while since I've read a novel which hits home, as the Indian experience is so very much like the Philippine one (a long history of colonial rule, every family is bound to have one immigrant, persistence of colonial mentality). While there is always a drive to seek a better life, immigrant life is not easy. Desai captures so many issues in her book - the phenomenon of globalization, economic inequality, of power (and lack thereof), multiculturalism, colonialism, prejudice and racism, and the whole struggle for self-identity and the issue of nationalism when being part of both Western and Eastern cultures.

However, while these bigger themes are running thoughout the storyline, she still manages to retain her readers' emotional empathy to each character. For example, I liked the love story of Sai and Gyan as well as the struggles of Biju. People have coped in different ways to the changing world and how Desai explores this is fascinating. Desai gives immigrants a voice.

As a sidebar, the description of the sacrifices made and the visa issue system is highly accurate based on what I have heard from other immigrants.

Boring bits: I didn't find anything boring in this one. The multiple stories kept me going as I had to find out what happened to each character.

Just don't read this if you're feeling down, as reading misfortune after misfortune can get a bit depressing. It may come across as bitter, bleak, cynical - I say it's honest.

Verdict: Powerful. A very worthwhile read.

***

First line: All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows.

The book in one sentence: The stories of heartache of Indian immigrants (to New York and England) and of the families and communities they have left behind.

Who would you recommend it to: Readers who are not reading for escape, but are ready to face the very sad reality of injustice in this world.

Factoids: Desai, at 35, is the youngest female winner of the Man Booker Prize which she won in 2006. It took her eight years to write The Inheritance of Loss. She is the daughter of novelist Anita Desai who was nominated for the Booker Prize three times but never won.

Desai has retained her citizenship of India and is a Permanent Resident of the United States.

Random quotes:

Love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love is the ache, the anticipation the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

... he forgot how to laugh, could barely manage to lift his lips in a smile, and if he ever did, he held his hand over his mouth, because he couldn't bear anyone to see his gums, his teeth.They seemed too private. In fact, he could barely let any of himself peep out of his clothes for fear of giving offence. He began to wash obsessively, concerned he would be accused of smelling. To the end of his life, he would prefer shadow to light, faded days to sunny, for he was suspicious that sunlight might reveal him, in his hideousness, all too clearly.

Interesting links:

• Man Booker Prize interview
• Interview by Abe Books
• Interview by Random House
• Wounded by the West

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

About Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

My two cents

Spoilers, don’t say I didn’t warn you! I was blown away by this book! The third Atwood I’ve read (The Blind Assassin and Handmaid’s Tale), this is by far the best.

Dystopia, according to Atwood, becomes horrifying plausible in this tightly crafted tale of genetic engineering gone awry – overrun by living experiments such as pigoons (pigs bred to manufacture human organs), wolvogs, rakunks, chicken parts grown as chicken parts, and a whole host of horrors.

When man crossed that unspeakable boundary, becoming god and nature, this dystopia is the result. The book opens up the whole discussion of “when is too far, too far?” Is this what awaits us with our tampering of genes, in the name of science, in the name of the greater good?

Snowman, the “last man on earth,” recounts the story of how his genius friend Crake and his Oryx, from their kiddie-porn online obsession, end up breeding a new Homo Sapiens of the green eyes and superior genes. This is a new world where man becomes god to his new creation yet is threatened to extinction.

The horror of the ending, purposefully vague, shows Atwood’s propensity for suspense as well as a healthy respect for her reader’s opinions on this highly debatable, but very real issue of genetic engineering and its potentially catastrophic consequences.

Verdict: A must-read. Now one of my favorites.

1st line: Snowman wakes before dawn.

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The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve

Synopsis of The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve (from Publishers Weekly): In 1873, two women living on the Isles of Shoals, a lonely, windswept group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. A third woman survived, cowering in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, Jean, a magazine photographer working on a photoessay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter, Billie, aboard a boat skippered by her brother-in-law, Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend, Adaline. As Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders, Thomas and Adaline find themselves drawn together-with potentially ruinous consequences.

Shreve (Where or When; Resistance) perfectly captures the ubiquitous dampness of life on a sailboat, deftly evoking the way in which the weather comes to dictate all actions for those at sea. With the skill of a master shipbuilder, Shreve carefully fits her two stories together, tacking back and forth between the increasingly twisted murder mystery and the escalating tensions unleashed by the threat of a dangerous shipboard romance. Written with assurance and grace, plangent with foreboding and a taut sense of inexorability, The Weight of Water is a powerfully compelling tale of passion, a provocative and disturbing meditation on the nature of love.

My take

I love, love, LOVE this book! I even read it twice because I felt like I didn't give it the attention it deserved when I read it the first time around.

Shreve's style feels like you are flipping through the pages of two books in your lap. Although at times it is jarring, the sudden shifts will definitely keep you on your toes ... and wanting to keep reading.

One story is told by Maren, the survivor of the 1873 axe murders (true events, by the way). The first story's facts are so well-researched; you'll be surprised at the amount of material available online, and how Shreve brings these century's old characters to life. What struck me most was how Shreve so skillfully described Maren's life back then, first in Norway, then later on her hardships and loneliness on the barren and godforsaken island of Smuttynose, America. I got drawn into the depictions of Maren's childhood, her relationship with her siblings, and her relationship with the man she married but obviously did not love.

Jean, a photojournalist in the presentday, is on assignment. While researching Maren's story, she too recalls her own life ... her love story with husband Thomas, a poet and their lovely daughter Billy. Stuck on a cramped boat with Thomas' brother and girlfriend Adaline, Jean can't help but notice the charged exchanges between Adaline and Thomas. Jean starts to question her own marriage. She finds refuge in her lovely daughter Billie, and somehow but wrongly in someone else ...

The juxtaposition of these two stories highlights how our lives are basically the same despite time or place. Getting to the endings, they are severely tragic. But I didn't feel shortchanged because of the unusual way to which I reached them. Granted that many people find the story (stories) depressing doesn't lessen that fact that these characters  became real and I felt for them, both sets of characters. I highly recommend this read.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Back blurb of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel.

Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

My take

I started out pretty well, then slowly got more and more disoriented. With more characters introduced, I felt things getting murkier. After recovering several chapters in, and sorting out who was who, backtracking to understand the importance of newspaper stories interspersed … I started picking up pace and started enjoying myself. I was hooked.

Once in that quagmire of several stories happening all at once, I actually resisted leaving. I felt like I was racing to the finish line. Seemingly discrete characters and mini-stories magically melded and converged at the end. I was ecstatic yet reluctant at having finished the last page. It was like I had became privy to a huge secret. Atwood is truly a master at pacing her readers!

This is my first Atwood book and I am blown away by how unpredictably she has treated the oft-times predictable themes of familial love and dynamics. Isn’t the title brilliant? You read so much into the title alone … who is the blind assassin? Who killed whom? Was the character truly blind or merely casting a blind eye?

Spoilers here: On the other hand, I can’t say that this book isn’t without its flaws. For one, I disliked the two main characters. Our protagonist Iris is a boring old lady and somehow I was nagged that I couldn’t plausibly reconcile the risk-taking lover with the old lady she had become. While I enjoyed the character of Laura, she too became quite a tired, predictable character, at least she was consistently inconsistent throughout. Most of the characters were quite flat and stereotyped, particularly Iris’s husband Richard and her sister-in-law Winifred.

Are Atwood’s storytelling devices maybe, maybe overshadowing the story itself? The pulp science-fiction story narrated by Red, the lover, was interesting but did I miss the metaphors? I felt a little lost here. Sometimes the loveliest of tales don’t need any bells and whistles, a good yarn is a good yarn. Reduce the story to its bare bones and somehow the book loses its appeal and sad to say, is actually lackluster.