The Zahir by Paulo Coelho

 

“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused. This force is on earth to make us happy, to bring us closer to God and to our neighbour, and yet, given the way we love now, we enjoy one hour of anxiety for every minute of peace."

The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years, Esther, is a war correspondent who has disappeared along with a friend, Mikhail, who may or may not be her lover.

Was Esther kidnapped, murdered, or did she simply escape a marriage that left her unfulfilled? The narrator doesn't have any answers, but he has plenty of questions of his own. Then one day Mikhail finds the narrator and promises to reunite him with his wife. In his attempt to recapture a lost love, the narrator discovers something unexpected about himself.

I should have known better than to expect a standard storyline, don't be fooled by the blurb on the back cover - this book is not a conventional love story.

At first I struggled with the plot - if someone went missing without a trace and the police were called in to take away the husband as a suspect, then surely that would not be the end of the discussion. Wouldn't an investigation have to go on? And wouldn't there be a way to find her - credit cards, passports tracing etc. And I found it hard that it took 2 years for the narrator to get motivated to find where she went - surely he couldn't be that shallow??

You never find out the name of the narrator and I wonder how much of the story and characters are based around Paulo Coelho's life.

For me personally, I found the conversations about love and life happiness between the characters interesting and thought provoking, and while some struck a cord with me, others did not as much.

I really found the metaphor for the writing process interesting on page 69, and also the railway tracks defining a marriage on page 136.

If you a fan of other Paulo Coelho novels then you will also enjoy this one - but if you haven't read any of his other books, then relax, don't fight it, and let the story take you on a journey.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

For some reason I am finding it really hard to write my review for this book. I'm not really sure why - I really enjoyed it.

It was easy to read, but was written in a way that made me look for deeper meaning in what was being said.

I loved that there was a supernatural theme that surrounded Faina - she was a little girl who lived in the snowy Alaskan woods, but there was some magical force around her and the snow right through to the very last sentence.

Mabel transforms throughout the story - she starts off 'grey' and depressed, but slowly the life comes back to her and the love rekindled in her marriage. By the end of the story she is a strong woman.

Very well written and a lovely read on a cold wintery weekend.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, The Great Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. 

After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

There was so much hype around the movie, so I wanted to read the book before I let Leo distract my appreciation from the original.

For the first half of the book, I found the storyline quite 'scatty' and the characters dialogue jumped around as if they weren't having a conversation, but were each talking about separate topics.

It also took me halfway through the book to feel any kind of engagement with the characters - other than Nick, the main characters weren't featured as often until the last 50% of the book.

So after nearly quitting, I persevered, and I'm glad I did, as towards the end it all fell in to place and I could appreciate it all a bit more.

Originally I thought I would enjoy the movie more, but after I finished I'm glad I read the book first. 

I read a caparison online before writing this review (which can be read here http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/55013084/great-gatsby-book-vs-movie?page=all). It also made obvious a lot of subcontexts within the story (e.g. Daisy's superficial relationship with her daughter and her materialism). I still haven't watched the movie, but now I can't wait to see if I agree with this. 

I'm glad I read it. It is a classic and must read for all.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

I usually love books that are based in Paris, but I have made it through 50% of the book and I am sitting on the fence about it.

I have enjoyed reading it so far. The characters are not unlikeable, the writing easily transports me to the location of the story and I wouldn’t class it as boring by any means – it reads like you are having a sneak peak in to Renee and Paloma’s private lives making it feel even more real - but so far I can’t really see the point of it all.

I’m putting my decision to stop reading it down to me wanting to read something a bit exciting and modern – the story so far has been moving along at a slow and steady pace. Apparently the best part of the book is the last quarter so I am keeping this in mind and will most likely come back and finish it at another time.

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

“Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.” 

Maggie O'Farrell has a singular knack for sensing the magnetic fields that push and pull people in love, and in The Hand That First Held Mine, she summons those invisible forces to tell two stories. 

The first is the spirited journey of Lexie Sinclair, a bright, tempestuous woman who finds her way from rural Devon to the center of postwar London's burgeoning art scene. Her force of personality makes her a natural critic (she's a wonderful tour guide to Soho's Bohemian circles), and she soon falls deeply in love. 

Fast forward fifty years and you'll meet Ted and Elina: a contemporary London couple who've just had their first child, both afflicted with a crisis of memory--Elina can recall only bits and pieces of her life before the baby, while Ted fights off memories he can't even recognize. 

O'Farrell alternates these plots artfully, always keeping the incorrigible Lexie in forward motion, while letting Ted and Elina wade further back in time. Inevitably, the two stories collide, and the result is a remarkably taut and unsentimental whole that embraces the unpredictable, both in love and in life.

Right from the opening paragraph (above) you could tell Maggie O'Farrell was going to take us on a special poetic journey with this book. Everything was described in such lyrical detail that you could see it all painted clearly in the back of your eyelids as you are reading along. 

I liked how the two stories were woven together. The 'bizzy spells' were cleverly aligned with the counter story and but it wasn't until towards the end that I saw what was happening - it was done in a way that wasn't glaringly obvious which was nice for a change. 

All the characters played their part well (even though some of them weren't particularly likeable), but my favourite character was definitely Lexie - smart, bold, and confident - I loved seeing her character develop over time (towards the end of the book when she is swimming in the ocean thinking of her son was really beautifully written).

For those who are thinking of reading this book - stick with it. It isn't until a few chapters in that you get the hang of the two story lines (and the memory loss of Ted and Elina) but once you see where they are heading and get a feel for the characters and time/setting, you will see it is worth seeing through until the end.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

“Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.” 

A mesmerizing, moving, and elegantly written debut novel, The Language of Flowers beautifully weaves past and present, creating a vivid portrait of an unforgettable woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others even as she struggles to overcome her own troubled past.

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating grief, mistrust, and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.

Now eighteen and emancipated from the system, Victoria has nowhere to go and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. Soon a local florist discovers her talents, and Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But a mysterious vendor at the flower market has her questioning what’s been missing in her life, and when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.

A book about flowers was not something I thought I would enjoy, and when this book was recommended to me the title gave me an initial vision of a different story, so I was surprised to start reading and see that Victoria's story was set in modern San Fransisco.

Although her personality was a little prickly to start off with, there were two stories of Victoria's life that moved along side-by-side; one about Victoria today, and one giving insight in to her childhood, so that as things were developing today, you could understand why or how they were happening. 

The characters were well written - even though most of them do not appear like conventional heroes, but they each have an endearing quality...that they all want to help the underdog (Victoria) using their individual means available and without expecting anything in return. If only more people were like this in real life!

When I got to the end I liked that it had a happy, yet realistic finish - where the main character is admitting that it is going to be a hard road to realise her ultimate happiness, rather than it all just working it out in the end magically.

I would definitely recommend this book, and as it isn't very offending I think it would suit most readers.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan’s earlier life in which – remarkably – he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century. Already a huge bestseller across Europe, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun and feel-good book for all ages.


I loved this book, which to me was equal parts thriller, murder mystery, comedy and Forest Gump.

It moved surprisingly fast and it a lot in the story, there wasn't once when I got bored or skim ready over parts.

The characters were all very likeable and didn't fluff around too much - every word was true to their character and helped move the story along, keeping you engaged right until the very last page.

In high school history wasn't one of my favourite subjects but I loved the way this book creatively wove the major historical events together in a tall tale of the centenarians life. It covers a plethora of interesting and historical events that span the last one hundred years - communism in China, World Wars, The Cold War,  and much more. 
His interactions with various officials including sharing meals and more with everyone from Stalin, Churchill, and Truman to Mao, Franco, and de Gaulle, teaching life lessons in an unbelievable but highly entertaining way.

This book will suit most readers and bring smiles and spontaneous laughter along the journey.