Lucrezia’s husband is planning to murder her – what can she do about it? This book is a compelling dive into the personal and political world of 15th-century Florentine royalty. It’s a fictionalised account of a real troubled marriage, with vividly-drawn characters and relationships. I enjoyed reading it even though I found the ending somewhat unsatisfying.
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As usual with Wodehouse, I was chuckling all the way through this book. This is the first Lord Ickenham story I have read. He is a great character, like a haphazardly mischievous version of Jeeves. The many characters get themselves into the stickiest of situations, but Ickenham orchestrates the chaos like a maestro, and all’s well that ends well.
In Search of Lost Time continues. The narrator is now an adolescent, so this book is largely concerned with his newfound fascination with young ladies. The first half of the book continues on from the last book, featuring Swann and his wife Odette and more pertinently, their daughter Gilberte. In the second half, he spends the summer in the seaside town of Balbec, trying to meet girls. (Actually he spends most of time thinking about trying to meet girls.) After much foreshadowing, he finally meets the young Albertine who will play a large part in his life and this novel. I really enjoyed this part.
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In a near future dystopia, we live in a panopticon: we’re all under universal surveillance, and computers constantly weigh up everything we say and do. If the algorithms determine that we are likely to commit a crime, we are institutionalised for an unspecified length of time until we are deemed fit to rejoin society. This is the situation of Sara, our protagonist.
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Parade is quite austere in style, but still packs an emotional and intellectual punch.
The book is in four sections; they are connected, with a few characters’ stories intertwined throughout. Among the cast are three artists, all just called “G”. This is faintly confusing because the narrative viewpoint sometimes changes abruptly – when “G” is mentioned it’s not always immediately obvious which “G” it is. Many of the other characters aren’t named at all. This carries over to the setting – we find out almost nothing about where these people live, even what part of the world, and there’s very little detail. There is also not really a plot as such; more like lots of vignettes with associated discussion. The focus is on people’s internal states rather than external happenings.
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Which artist is the essence of rock music? Who is the greatest writer of the last hundred years? Are we living in a simulation?
These are all interesting questions. This book is about these questions and many more, but mainly about the meta-question:
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Government-controlled time travel: what could possibly go wrong?
The setting is pretty much the modern day, with the addition of time travel: occasional government-controlled time travel, enabling the titular Ministry of Time to research the physiological effects of time travel by bringing people from the past into the present day. To minimise ethical problems and temporal paradoxes, they only bring people who were about to die in their own time.
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I do like a bit of fanciful historical fiction. The narrator finds the titular book, which is unique and strange and possibly magical, and tries to find out about its provenance. The tale goes back to a convict transported to Australia and how he comes to have a job painting pictures of fish. His life is, unsurprisingly, horrific. His situation is Kafkaesque, but he is much more relaxed and accepting than Josef K: his lighthearted and matter-of-fact tone makes the nastiness bearable. The events stray into magical realism in parts, and the shifting points of view mix things up – is the narrator the discoverer of the book or is it Gould the convict? Or is Gould really the convict? After the journey he goes through it’s hard to say.
Most people’s diaries are probably pretty boring to everyone else. (I’m pretty sure mine would be.) But not this one! During an incredibly difficult and stressful two years, Anne Frank chronicles her life cooped up with a bunch of other fugitives, hiding from the Nazis above an Amsterdam office. The diary entries are open and intimate, addressed to a fictitious friend “Kitty”. She writes mostly about herself and her interactions with her family and the others she spends time with. Her views on her family, especially her parents, seem fairly typical for a teenager, but she deals with the frustrations amazingly well given the pressure-cooker situation they are all in.
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This is what happens when a guerrilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood meets an amoral billionaire who is up to no good (typical amoral billionaire stuff). Birnam Wood is set in New Zealand, partly in Auckland, and it’s always exciting to read a book set in a place I know. Unfortunately the characters are all a bit annoying in one way or another; still, the plot plots along at a good pace. But then it all ends with an abrupt cataclysm.
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