THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS by Paolo Giordano (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS by Paolo Giordano (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

Teenage years, almost always difficult to navigate, but most do not have the issues that Mattia and Alice have. Mattia once had a twin sister who was mentally retarded and more than a hindrance to Mattia. When he was six or seven he left her in a park, and she was never seen again. A burden too awful for any family or young child to deal with. Alice, on the other hand, suffered a serious leg injury while skiing, again as a young child, leaving her badly crippled. Both are lonely, both have over protective parents, both have put up massive barriers in dealing with the world around them, and their growing up years are tormented, confusing, awkward, and not at all happy. Through the teenage social rituals of parties, drinking and sex they find each other and over the course of the years never really let go.

They are good for each other, in their damaged tormented states and like all the best friendships, things do go awry from time to time. But they quickly realise they need each other, they may not actually survive this stage of their lives if they don't have each other. Mattia is a maths genius, and he comes up with the idea that he and Alice are 'twin primes', like 11 and 13, or 17 and 19, lonely individuals that are forever linked but forever separated. Although the bulk of the story takes place in the teenage years, it finishes when Alice and Mattia are in their late 20s/early 30s, by which time they have worked through much of their pain and developed into reasonably well functioning adults.

It is not a joyful or happy read, but there is always a sense of hope, that things are going to get better for these two, and they are such real people, You feel their pain, their dislocation. So sensitively and insightfully written, it is quite wonderful. 

THE INCORRIGIBLE OPTIMISTS CLUB by Jean-Michel Guenassia

THE INCORRIGIBLE OPTIMISTS CLUB by Jean-Michel Guenassia (Translated from French)

Can you judge a book by it's cover? In this case -I think so yes. The title for a start is captivating, and the photo - so full of sadness and loss, such a contrast to the title. And it is so long - 600 pages, how can anyone write about optimism for 600 pages! So your interest is piqued, immediately. And you open it....first sentence - "A writer is being buried today."

This is a story of friendship and exile, all taking place at the Incorrigible Optimists Club. Set in Paris over the years 1959-1964 against the backdrop of the Algerian war for independence from French rule, the narrator is 12 year old Michel Marin. Like many 12 year olds he is on the edge of childhood and adulthood, starting to ask questions of the world around him and the people in his life. He is going through the usual traumas that 12 year old boys face - parents, girls, his brother, school, annoying teachers and other adults, thinking about his future. He finds himself drawn to a nearby bistro which is the haunt of a number of exiles from the post war countries of the Iron Curtain, all runaways from communist/fascist regimes - Russia, Poland, Hungary, Germany. They have fled, left jobs, wives, children, in some cases a comfortable and privileged life. Paris is the only place they feel at home and, if anything, accepted.

Michel is both an amateur chess player and a photographer. The unifying force of the Optimists Club is chess. Some play brilliantly, others not. But it is the one language these sad, lonely, exiled and philosophical men have in common. Mastering the game of chess lets him into the stories and worlds of these men and how they came to be living in despair and poverty in Paris.. His own world is expanded and horizons broadened as a result. Stories of sadness, betrayal, and what it costs to follow your ideals. Michel is also facing the same issues in his own family with his brother joining the army to fight the Algerian rebels, then committing the ultimate crime of betrayal to the die hard French nationalist movement - desertion.

600 pages is a lot of pages to tell all these stories. But it never drags, the same steady pace is maintained throughout, the writing is magical, it simply never falters. Essentially a coming of age story, but also a documentary of the lives of those torn apart by the political doctrines that so savagely destroyed much of Europe some 70 years ago.

CALLING ME HOME by Julie Kibler

CALLING ME HOME by Julie Kibler

What a great story to read while on holiday. Cover shows a black boy and white girl, so you know it is a love story and a love story pretty much doomed to fail. Which is exactly what happens. But what terrific story telling it is, leaving the reader with the whole whirl of emotions during the course of the story.

Isabelle McAllister is 90 years old, lives in a small town in  Texas. Like any 90 year old she has a story or two to tell. Over a ten year period, she has developed a close friendship with her hairdresser, Dorrie, a black woman in her 30s. One day Isabelle asks Dorrie to drive her from Texas to Cincinnati, Ohio - a journey of some days - so Isabelle can attend a funeral. The resulting road trip, which would appear to be most unusual venture - elderly white woman being driven across coutnry by young black woman -  draws its fair share of comment and feedback from those they encounter on the way. But it does allow Isabelle to tell her story of forbidden love. Dorrie, a single parent, meanwhile has her own problems with her teenage son, and trying to find the courage to trust what appears to finally be a decent man in her life.

Isabelle's story, beginning in 1939, is riveting, Dorrie's not so much. In fact compared to the social mores of 1939, Dorrie really has nothing to complain about, and by the end of the book she has finally woken her ideas up, sorted herself and her family out. Whew. She really needed to give herself a kick in the pants! But Isabelle, wow she was quite something. As a teenager she falls madly in love with Robert, the teenage son of the family's housekeeper, Cora. Robert and his younger sister Nell, have grown up with Isabelle, whose father is the local doctor. It goes without saying that the ramifications of the love affair are huge, and the funeral being attended by Isabelle and Dorrie now, in 2013, is directly linked to these two families.

There is a lot going on in this story, and it would have been good to have some back story on Robert and his family, as well as Dorrie's family and her love interest. I can imagine black/white relations in 1939 Kentucky being pretty grim, and the writer certainly pulls no punches in her descriptions of these times. She has based the novel on her own grandmother's impossible love affair with a young black man, and it is Isabelle's story which holds the whole book together. Well worth reading, and it would make a fabulous movie/TV series.  

THE TYPIST by Michael Knight

THE TYPIST by Michael Knight

Yet another small book, 190 pages, that contains wonderful writing and a good story. Francis Vancleave is a very ordinary young man, from a very ordinary family in a very ordinary town in the state of Alabama. He does have one talent though - he can type, and type very well, taught by his equally capable mother. After Pearl Harbour, being a dutiful young man, without much of a future in the town of Mobile, Alabama, he signs up for the army. Because of his rare skills, he finds himself attached to the Officers Personnel Section of General MacArthur's headquarters staff. He goes to Australia, then Manila and finally Tokyo which is where this story begins, as America begins the process of helping Japan rebuild itself.

Van is a bit of an outsider, not an officer but rooming with Clifford who is, and so ends up socialising with other officers as well. Unlike many of his compatriots, Van is also married, a state that he is very neutral about, but surprisingly faithful to. He is a bit of an enigma to his colleagues not only for this, but for a rather strange friendship he strikes up with MacArthur's young son. It is inevitable through rooming with Clifford that he finds himself involved in the latter's shady dealings with the defeated Japanese, and there is a sense through the story that this is not going to end well. However, through the months that Van is in Tokyo, recording the process of rebuilding,  transmitting the correspondence, and generally observing what is going on around him, he actually finds himself. He is like a quiet center in the middle of a storm, and the writer Ann Patchett makes this comment on the back cover. I very much felt this when I was reading it - this quiet, thoughtful, ordinary man, in the midst of extraordinary events, other people's disasters and tragedies, and somehow it helps  him make sense of his own life.

PICAFLOR: FINDING HOME IN SOUTH AMERICA by Jessica Talbot

 PICAFLOR: FINDING HOME IN SOUTH AMERICA by Jessica Talbot

Review copy kindly provided via Booksellers NZ by Picaflor Press

Picaflor is the South American Spanish name for the hummingbird – ‘a snacker, nibbler, pecker of flowers’. When Jessica Talbot first arrived in Peru at the age of 32, she identifies immediately with this little bird, calling herself ‘a restless searcher of sweet nectar’ in her attempts to find some sort of meaning and contentment in her life, a place to call home. She has no idea if South America is it, but for this native New Zealander, her life as she has lived it to date in New Zealand and Melbourne has not brought her the peace and reason for being she so longingly craves.  As a psychologist she is well used to analyzing the human mind, but this does not help her in understanding herself. Since her early twenties she has been drawn to South America, and so one day, after a particularly difficult time in her life, she packs her bags and goes to Peru ‘because it seemed exotic and wild and mystical’ for a three month holiday of sorts, first working as a volunteer with street children in the city of Trujillo and for the last month travelling around.

Her gut instincts prove spot on. Everything about where she travels – Peru, Colombia and Ecuador completely captivates her. A holiday romance with the delicious sounding Paco ultimately leads to her packing up her life in Melbourne and moving to Buenos Aires. She learns Spanish, makes friends with the locals, retains her sanity with her other expatriate friends, falls in love with the equally delicious sounding Diego, marries and has a child. She has found her place to call home, living and working in Buenos Aires since 2004 and this book is the story of how she found that inner peace and stability. End of story, happy ever after.

This is not just a travelogue though. Although for anyone considering a move to South America, particularly for a woman, it is great reading. This book is very a much personal journey of self-discovery and growth that we could all take a lesson or two from.  After all, Jessica left a successful career, a comfortable life, family and many friends to go on some sort of wild goose chase in search of some sort of unknown intangible, based essentially on a gut feeling. But the way she tells her story, she was dead inside living in Melbourne, and realized for her own personal survival she did need to change something. This major decision that resulted in her life taking such unexpected and different paths also enabled her internal self to deal with a lot of long buried family stuff, resulting in some much needed resolution between herself and her family.

It would have taken some courage to write this book, and maybe that is why it has taken ten years from when she went to Argentina for her to do so. She works through a lot of ‘stuff’ in this memoir and would appear to come out a happier, healthier, more contented person. Most of us are not really in very deep touch with our inner selves, and her analysis /coming to terms with all this ‘stuff’ is just as interesting and touching as the family ‘stuff’. Being the type of person that prefers reading plot driven books, at times my eyes did glaze over a bit when she was yet again visualizing or angsting about something, for which there is no shortage of material.  I did find her ongoing ‘letters’ to her one time love Daniel annoying, but if this is what helped her process everything going on, then I hope it helped!

Despite my initial doubts, thinking it was going to be another ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, I did really quite enjoy reading this book. I got to like Jessica, and I know this because at the end I was smiling to myself, thinking how great it was that things had turned out for her, how far she had come since she got her picaflor tattoo in her second month. As she says in her author’s note at the very beginning – ‘my intention has always been to write a warm, human story about overcoming a difficult past and creating a brighter future’.

THE LAST DAYS OF RABBIT HAYES by Anna McPartlin

THE LAST DAYS OF RABBIT HAYES by Anna McPartlin

What a wonderful, heart rending, joyful, incredibly sad and superb story! Who needs to go see the movie to be emotionally strung out, when the writing will bring out the tissues, and more than once.

A family in crisis, gathering in 40 year old Mia 'Rabbit' Hayes' home town in Ireland to say good bye to their daughter, sister, mother, aunt and firiend. Rabbit has only days left having done her utmost over the previous few years to fight the cancer that has taken over her body. But not yet her heart or her soul. Told simultaneously through the eyes of Rabbit, her mother, father, 12 year old daughter, best friend, sister and brother the story of Rabbit's life unfolds over the remaining nine days of her life. If there is such a thing as a good death, then Rabbit is certainly on the way to it. The love, the unbreakable bonds of family, literally ooze out of the pages, as does the richness and complexity of all these people. At the very core of Rabbit's story is the charismatic Johnny Faye, the one true love of her life.

The back cover blurb says it all really . "Here is a truth that won't be forgotten: this is a story about laughing through life's surprises and finding joy in every moment". Wonderful stuff. PS don't forget to have the tissue handy. 

THE CHILDREN ACT by Ian McEwan

THE CHILDREN ACT by Ian McEwan

For me, this novel is classic Ian McEwan. Sublime writing, unexpected and difficult conflicts between flawed and haunted characters, and not always a neat and tidy ending. In just over 200 pages of generous line spacing and font size, all of these Ian McEwan traits are well and truly apparent. To write about so much in such a compact manner is a quality writer.

Fiona Maye is 59 years old, childless, lives with her husband of many years, Jack, in London. She is a High Court judge, presiding over cases in the family court, renowned and respected for her sensitive and judicious handling of many difficult and heart rending cases that come before here. Two cases are detailed in the introductory chapters showing us the delicacy and ethical/moral conflict she deals with on what at times must seem like a daily basis. The first invovles the separation of Siamese twins - does one let one twin die to save the other, or is it better to allow both to die so as not to be seen to be 'murdering' the weaker. The second case involves the custody and education of two girls whose father belongs to a very conservative sect of the Jewish faith, and their mother who wishes the girls to have a mainstream education so as to not be bound by the conservatism of the life she has left. But these two cases pale into insignificance when Fiona finds herself the judge in the case of an 18 year old boy who has leukaemia and is refusing life saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. But is it a case of the boy making this decision for himself, or is he being unduly influenced by his devout parents? The judgement she eventually makes is never going to be an easy one, and it does come back to haunt her.

Meanwhile she has her own moral dilemmas to deal with. Her husband has announced that he wants to have an affair with a much younger woman, still declaring that he continues to love Fiona and will never leave her. Does she call his bluff or does she not? Is it the end of the road for this couple or will they both realise that some things are worth saving?

All of this in just 200 pages. I love that so much can be said, explored, touched upon, left unsaid  and still produce a compelling and surprising story.