Touchingly Naive Books

The book started slowly and I was wondering for the first 50 pages or so whether the story would ever get going… It did, eventually, and once it had I think it was probably worth the wait. (Although I can see that this might have been more successful as a film!)

The story starts when teenaged Grace and her horse, Pilgrim, are involved in a horrific road accident, in which her friend and another horse are killed. Grace and Pilgrim survive, but with terrible physical and emotional damage. The physical wounds can be healed, but it is only when Grace’s mother, Annie, finds Tom Booker – the “horse whisperer” – and persuades him to work on Pilgrim that Grace or Pilgrim begin to recover, little by little, their old selves. At the same time, Annie too finds a way out of her old unhappiness.

The writing is sometimes a little clumsy – odd moments when the author’s voice seems to waver, slightly-too-obvious hooks, that sort of thing – but on the whole a decent read.

Here is an Amazon link.
I got the book from the local library.

In this the fourth No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency story, Mma Makutsi sets up a typing school for men – businessmen, for example, who wish to learn to type but would be embarassed to do so at a secretarial college with the women. It is an instant success, and Mma Makutsi even finds a man. :-) Meanwhile, the agency is having a spot of trouble with some new competition…

Others in the series:
The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls

This is the third story featuring Mma Ramotswe.

(The others were The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and Tears of the Giraffe.)

It is well up to the usual standard and, if you liked the first two, you’ll like this one as well. Since I have waxed lyrical about the characters and setting in the last two posts, in this one I may as well tell you about one of the cases.

The case after which the book is named – one investigated by the blossoming Mma Makutsi – is a piece of background research into the finalists for a beauty competition which has in the past been plagued by embarassing bad-girl winners. The ladies are to choose the winner in advance, based on her character rather than her looks – now doesn’t that make a novel and refreshing take on the way these contests are fixed?

A sequel to The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, this book is again just as much about Mma Ramotswe herself, and her life in Gabarone, as it is about the cases she has to solve.

In this sequel we really start to know her and her friends – Mr J L B Matekoni, the marvellously gifted and honest car mechanic who has asked her to marry him; Mma Matsuki, her clever and ambitious secretary; Mma Potokwane, the irresistibly determined woman who runs the local “orphan farm”… In fact, the people and places are what really makes these books: they are so distractingly memorable, that it’s hard to see the cases as anything but a sideshow!

Mma Ramotswe is a traditionally built woman living in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana. She runs her own private detective agency, which she set up after her beloved father died, leaving her wealthy enough (which is to say, with a large herd of fine cattle to sell) to do so.

The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is a rambling tale about a kind woman solving other people’s problems with uncommon cleverness and bravery. The one thing that shines out in the book is Mma Ramotswe’s unwavering love for her homeland, for its people and its ways and, above all perhaps, for her late father. A lovely read.

On the front of this book it says “a work of comic genuis” (Independent on Sunday). It’s true.

This is the story of a Tuscan mountain with two foreign occupants. One is writer Gerald, a camp and wildly self-deluded Englishman, ghostwriter to assorted strange celebrities. The other is musician Marta, a talented fugitive from fictional East European hell-hole Voynovia, and in denial about the fact that the intellectual film with the famous director for which she is composing the score is, in fact, a porn movie.

Gerald and Marta both wished for total isolation so having any neighbour at all is a disappointment but, worse, they cannot stand one another. Yet they become increasingly neighbourly somehow and drink startling amounts of Fernet Branca, each astonished by the quantity that the other manages to consume.

The best bit is the recipes. They are insane. The book is worth reading, just for the recipes.

This is the story of a Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, who comes to London to be the wife of Chanu, a much older man. As a character, Chanu is a particularly memorable: infuriating, hilariously self-important but, in the end, a real person too, with insecurities, humility and love.

The book is funny, touching and absorbing. It is the story of how Nazneen grows into her new life, far from home. She learns with painful slowness how to make sense of this wholly foreign land and of her children, who grow up to reject their parent’s traditional values. Eventually, surprisingly, she becomes something much more powerful than a mere dutiful wife and mother.

Letters and Telegrams to Pavel M Litvinov, December 1967 to May 1968.
Edited and annotated by Karel Van Het Reve, University of Leyden

In September 1967, the Russian physics professor Pavel Litvinov was interviewed by the KGB. He was preparing for distribution a report of a trial recently held of a man called Bukovskij.

(Bukovskij’s own “crime” was to organise a protest about the arrest of four men accused of being involved in the preparation for distribution of a report about the trial of two writers. The “crime” committed by those two writers, called Sinjavskij and Daniel, was to have published work abroad without the approval of the Sovient censors.)

After the interview, Litvinov wrote down the full conversation from memory.

Here is an extract from it:

KGB: We are informed that a group of persons including yourself intend to prepare and distribute a report of the recent trial of Bukovskij and others. We warn you that, if you do this, you will be charged with a criminal offence.

PL: … I don’t understand how such an action can be punishable as a crime…I can’t imagine what law could be broken by the compiling of such a document.

KGB: There is such a law – Article 190-I…

PL: I know that law perfectly well… It is concerned with slanderous fabrications, defamatory to Soviet society and the Soviet political system. What can be slanderous in a report of the hearing of a case before a Soviet court?

KGB: But your report will distort the facts in a tendentious way and slander the conduct of the trial…

PL How can you know that in advance? And in general, instead of holding this silly interview, you ought yourselves to publish a verbatim report of that trial, and put a stop to the rumours that are running round Moscow…

KGB: But why should we publish it? It was just an ordinary case of a breach of public order.

PL: If that is so, then there is all the more reason why you should make the information available, so that everyone can see that it really was just an ordinary case.

KGB: Everything about the case appeared in Evening Moscow of 4 September. Everything one needs to know about it was there.

PL: In the first place, the information given was meagre… In the second place, the information given was false and slanderous…

KGB: Pavel Michajlovic, the information was perfectly correct; keep that in mind.

PL: They said that Bukovskij pleaded guilty, but I have looked into this case and I know for sure that he did not plead guilty.

KGB: What does it signify what he pleaded or didn’t plead? The court found him guilty, so he was guilty.

The rest of the book, after the transcript, consists of letters and telegrams received by (or, at least, sent to) Pavel Litvinov in response to his having sent this transcript, and a letter, to Western journalists who published it. There is also a public appeal, addressed “To World Public Opinion” relating to the trial of the four men involved in publishing details of the Sinjavskij and Daniel trial: Glanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovskij and Laskova.

Most of the letters express support. One of these letters is signed: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, Stephen Spender, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestly, Jaquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Mrs George Orwell and Igor Stravinsky. An impressive list of names, even 40 years later. Most of the letters, however, are from Russians: students, academics and ordinary people. These are people who risked action by the KGB merely for expressing support, some of whom feared to sign their letters or to give an address, for fear of recrimination.

Some letters express outrage that Litvinov should “write a libel on the Soviet power and send it to filthy journalists to be used in a filthy broadcast by the Voice of America… You should be exposed in Revolution Square for passers-by to spit in your mug, you traitor.” Others express dismay that he should air his grievances to foreigners, particularly to corrupt foreign journalists who would take great delight in this opportunity to slander the USSR.

The book – published in Holland in 1969 – must produce a profound effect even on the modern reader. The voices – some ordinary people, some academics, all authentic – bring alive what to most is really a rather dull and uninteresting “subject”. It makes the experience of Russians living under Soviet oppression a real experience, one into which the reader is given a precious, powerful insight.

Epilogue: in 1968, shortly after the events which are the subject of this book, Litvinov was arrested for protesting against the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was tried and sentenced to 5 years in Siberia. After serving his sentence, he emigrated to the United States where he recently expressed the view that his experiences were quite a bit worse than those of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He (rightly, of course) refused last year to lend his name to Amnesty International’s characterisation of that prison as a “gulag”.

Aah, crime fiction of the 1930s, and classic crime fiction at that. Walter Huff is an insurance man who fantasises about the perfect insurance crime. When he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a client, they begin a strange affair and plot the murder of her (insured) husband. But Huff finds that he is getting into a lot more than even he bargained for.

Tense and clean, but not one for you if you are (a) someone in whom feminist passion is easily aroused or (b) someone who cannot take seriously the suggestion that someone called Phyllis could really be either beautiful or dangerous. Blue rinse, more like…

This is the story of Ivy Ames, who is summarily evicted from her plush and powerful lifestyle and (after a bit of wallowing, of course) ends up launching a consultancy specialising in getting the small kids of rich parents into the best kindergartens of New York.

I read this book in the milkshake shops of Brighton last summer, or maybe the summer before, and giggled unattratively and frequently. There is nothing very profound or enlightening about it, it’s just a truly wicked comedy on the astonishing stupidity of obsessive modern parenting, as apparently practised by the very rich. Laugh out loud and shake your head with amazement. If you like to glory in the schoolish perversion of education, so much the better.