The Empress of Ice Cream (Anthony Capella)

I'm not entirely sure why I enjoy Anthony Capella's writing so much. Is it the gastronomic erotica that he writes with such ease? Or is it the vulnerable characters he writes with such panache? The romances?

No, not the romances. He is not good at that.

And nut the vulnerable characters. I don't like reading about vulnerable characters. I like reading about people filled with unbelievable strength, charisma, sexiness and boldness. In short, I like my characters to be straight up Mills and Boon caricatures.

Joking!

(Sort of).

But I am pretty sure it is the gastronomic erotica that draws me to Capella's novels. Take The Food of Love for example. It is set in Rome and centres around a young, talented chef cooking entrails and offal for the love of his life in the hope that she will be aroused by eating such earthy, bloody foods and find herself also in love with him.

It works.

I have my doubts.

But The Empress of Ice Cream is the focus of this review. It is Capella's latest and tells the story of a young, penniless apprentice ice cream maker who rises to glorious heights in both the courts of France and England as he makes ice cream confections for the royalty.

I have always been a bit ambivalent about ice cream. I would rather devour a cheese plate for two than eat ice cream. But now I find myself drifting into the ice cream camp. Who wouldn't be seduced with the promise of strawberry ice cream garnished with peppermint cream and topped with a sprinkling of white pepper? Or the luxury of champagne and peach ice cream? Or the unbelievably heavenly taste of white chocolate and red currants?

The romantic story was negligible and the historical events are arguable, but the sheer deliciousness of this tale cannot be questioned. If you like fluffy grastronomic stories, you will read this story with the desire to lick every page in hopes that some of the creamy dreamy loveliness will actually emanate out of the words into your mouth.

Rating: 7/10.

The Private Life of Books

Looking down the list of my draft blog-posts which never saw the light of day I can see that most of them start with "am feeling so guilty about not having posted in weeks/months/centuries" and then I start writing about a book and then my internet cuts out and I get fed up. Admittedly I have dodgy internet that does cut out a lot- normally when I am trying to balance laptop and dinner on my lap on the couch whilst watching Peep Show. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? Anyway, since I spend a lot of time writing about my guilt, I've decided to absolve myself of any guilty feelings and just get down to it.

This article in the Guardian about the private lives of books made me think of my favourite second-hand-book-buying story. I warn you now, it is a bit pretentious, but when you're talking obscure dyslit gems found in the south of France, how could you be anything but?

Picture this- my first year of university, I meet french learning, guitar playing, dyslit reading Russian. (Le sigh). Said Russian turns up to class to tell me he found copy of 1985 on the weekend. I gently correct him, saying "I think you'll find it's 1984". He looks at me like I am an idiot and says "Uh, no. 1985. Anthony Burgess' critique of 1984 which consists of a theoretical essay followed by his own fictional account of the future". I blush. Then spend years futile-ly trying to track down a copy of 1985- I love Orwell, I love Burgess... but I didn't love the Russian any more thus borrowing his copy was out of the question.

Three years later, I was backpacking in Avignon, have run out of books to read and facing a six hour train trip the next day. I spent a little while googling until I found evidence of an English bookshop. I made a trek across town. I found a bookshop in the middle of nowhere. There I found found a copy of 1985... cue delirious excitement. I started reading and things became even more exciting. The previous owner of the book had some pretty strong views on some of the stuff Burgess wrote. Lots of underlining. Lots of '?!' in the middle of paragraphs. A couple of instances of 'ugh!'. My personal favourite, which made me burst out laughing during Burgess' musing on the state of socialism: a whole paragraph underlined and a single word "BALLS!" written in the margin. Fantastic. I do not know who Mr Millwood is (and that is my assuming the previous owner was a man) but I owe him a most exciting book find, and an entertaining read.

If you do ever come across a copy of the (obviously) out of print 1985, I highly recommend picking it up.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rainer Maria Rilke)

I am a creature of extremes. Some days, I will achieve nothing. Yes, I will rise. Eat. Continue to exist. Ensure none of the children left in my care catch on fire. But those little yellow slips listing activities to achieve will remain depressingly devoid of bright red ticks. Years ago I worked out the trick. If I do just ONE THING on one of those lists I will inevitably do everything I wanted to achieve that month in a single day. ONE THING is all it takes to get the ball rolling.

This morning, my friends, that ONE THING was deep-fried Cadbury's Caramel Eggs. Frozen caramel eggs, wrapped in doughnut batter, deep-fried. I could attempt to justify these mini odes to heart failure, but I fear any defence I cobbled together would essentially be semantically null. I had promised the kiddywinks an Easter treat and, having delivered what can only be described as the Best Easter Treat That Ever There Was, I immediately rolled onto the next thing on my list- my next review!

I apologise so very much for the lack of posting this year. A friend who reads the blog regularly confessed that he now diligently reads every book we post about. Considering the speed of his reading and the turtle-slowness of our reviewing he is filling in the gaps with In Search of Lost Time. Kudos to N in that this is probably the best way to read Proust. I read all seven volumes one after the other and by the end of it my amazement with the prose was rather over-shadowed by my great desire for Proust to have run out of paper and ink about ten thousand words earlier.

Today, however, is not about good old Marcel. Nor is it about deep-fried Cadbury's Caramel Eggs (thank you Peabody), contrary to what the first part of this post may indicate. It is about Malte, the overly morbid and depressing young narrator of the German poet Rilke's only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

I am in the very bad habit of scribbling on books that I read. It's because I am an English major. Mostly it is incoherent scribbling, but I do like to underline little bite-sized lettered gems that tickle my fancy. If I were to do this in Notebooks, entire pages would be underlined. For Rilke, plot seems to be largely irrelevant, especially the establishment of any discernible linear structure to said plot. Instead, each paragraph tackles a new idea afresh, with characters only occasionally overlapping. An unknown man in a hospital waiting room is given as much importance as Malte's father, demonstrating the author's erratic fixation of topics as well as Malte's emotionally absent state.

As a result of this format, this became a novel I was able to pick up and put down, which is helpful when taking into consideration my line of work, the London transport system and my woefully short attention span. One particular topic Malte expounds on is the 'woman who is left behind', when her lover betrays her or is brutally slain in battle (obviously there are quite a few other ways in which she can be left behind but those two in particular spring to mind.) There is a bemused worshipping of women that occurs throughout the novel, Malte seems to understand women all too well, he is startlingly sensitive when talking about them, but his tentativeness seems to suggest he suspects women (as a whole) could turn on him at any time. This timidity probably stems from the fact his mother used to dress him up as a girl and refer to him as Sophie.

You can see why Rilke is known as a poet rather than an author- this is really a collection of lengthy prose poetry, without any rhythm or structure. So, poetry written by someone who couldn't actually be bothered to write poetry. Notebooks is perhaps the actual notes of Rilke, who, jotting down ideas for his poetry and subsequently realising just how many genius thoughts he had, saw the task of turning them into poetry too gargantuan. Having already achieved some fame as a poet, he decided to take a punt and see if the publisher would take his word for it that this was a novel, rather than his riverside scribblings.

Rating: 7/10.

Bel-Ami (Guy de Maupassant)

I shall start with a disclaimer: I am not approaching this review from a particularly objective point of view. As stated in an earlier post, I am in my happy place- Bath. Well, near Bath, but for the sake of anonymity I shall not name the tiny hamlet I am currently residing in. Furthermore, I am wrapped in the world's largest, baggiest jumper, drinking a mug of coffee and eyeing in the mirror the image of myself leaning against a walking stick carved like a swan. Needless to say, I am in a serene mood and disinclined to engage in much slating of literary ability at this moment.

That is all slightly redundant considering I am reviewing Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant's novel about a charismatic young veteran soldier who rises to the highest circles of the Parisian bourgeois with the help of several powerful mistresses. The classic has undoubtedly stood the test of time and creates a memorable, if totally unlikeable protagonist in Georges Duroy. I shall get to my main quibble with the text in a moment and instead concentrate on the positives for now.

Although 'a scoundrel' in very sense of the word, the reader cannot help cheering on the meteoric rise of Duroy. He uses the women in his life without a thought for their happiness or sense of self. He tosses one aside for another with little compunction. Duroy happily claims any credit for his successes, although most of the time they come about as a result of the labours of his wife or mistress at the time. However, when a character is so deliciously self-involved it is easy to see there is no malicious intent behind his actions. Duroy acts only for himself and the toe-stepping that occurs is merely a consequence of these actions rather than a driving motive.

Because I came away from the text with a slight feeling of derision for all the women Duroy uses I suspect the text was subliminally rather misogynistic. Considering the time in which it was written I am not surprised or even annoyed about this. Nor am I much riled by the depiction of Duroy's peasant parents. They are described in a scornful tone and their surroundings are much ridiculed which can only be attributed to Maupassant's ignorance due to his aristocratic upbringing.

No, my main issue is that the book is quite obviously poorly translated. There is no way the story of Georges Duroy would have lasted as an enduring classic if the original French version were written in the basic manner in which the English version stumbles along. After doing some research on Douglas Parmée I find that he is a well-respected translator of French literature. I, however, remain underwhelmed by his abilities. I finished the novel and enjoyed it on the strength of the plot and characters but felt I was perhaps only being shown the basics of what is a much richer story in the original language.

Still, absorbing and insightful, Bel-Ami is worth a read and, if you speak French, most probably a MUST READ.

Rating: 7/10.

Blackberry Wine Take 2 (Joanne Harris)

AHHH... I simply cannot muster up the required enthusiasm to review Blackberry Wine properly. Lack of enthusiasm? I hear our devoted readers ask. Pas de problème!

But it is a problem. Last time I panned one of Harris' books I was subject to a vitriolic tirade of derision from Earhart. Harris is one of her favourite authors and the outcome of this argument was that Earhart was right and in the future I will resist dipping my toes in the pool of negative reviews unless I know what I'm talking about.

So now I am sitting here, in my tartan pyjamas, drinking a cup of tea. I bought these pyjamas when I moved over here because I thought they were very English. These, combined with my tea, have been conducive in creating the zen that surrounds me at this very moment. I cannot muster up the energy to be disparaging about Blackberry Wine, knowing it could cause more sisterly tension.

THUS, I will be succinct in my criticisms:
The characters could have all benefited from further development.
Harris has since developed more subtlety in her work but this novel and The Evil Seed demonstrate Harris' earlier tendency to take her imagery and bash the reader over the head with it.
Jay, the protagonist, drinks wine made out of potatoes. I know, I know vodka can be made out of potatoes... but, no, I'm sorry. Wine? Ew.
I do have to commend Harris on her ability to make seemingly innocuous people or events very menacing. She always leaves me feeling slightly unsettled. Do I adore her novels... not particularly. But better to leave me feeling uneasy and jumping at shadows when I walk past the graveyard on my way home than totally unmoved. Apathy is not what I look for in a novel.

Rating: 6/10.

Coming up...

Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
If I Never by Gary William Murning
This Side of Paradise by F.Scott Fitzgerald

The Alchemy of Murder (Carol McCleary)

Just two months after The Paris Enigma was released (historical mystery, Paris, World's Fair, 1889) The Alchemy of Murder has arrived on shelves, giving readers more historical mystery, more Paris, more Worlds Fair, more 1889. Francophile and dedicated book reviewer that I am, obviously I had to read this second offering and see how the two compare.

Well.

The Paris Enigma - more 'literary' in a ladies book club sense of the word - you can read it and talk about the philosophy of crime according to De Santis, and pretend you actually read philosophy.

The Alchemy of Murder - more readable in the 'this is actually an enjoyable book to read sense of the word' - you can read it and you actually get a plot to follow along with.

Nellie Bly was a real person back in the 1880's - the first female reporter in America who famously went under cover in a mental asylum to expose the horrific treatment of the inmates. In The Alchemy of Murder, it is during Nellie's stay in Blackwell's Asylum that she discovers a madman who is killing the prostitutes of New York. He escapes the asylum during a fire, but Nellie follows him to London, and then onto Paris where he wreaks havoc during the worlds fair.

You get a real flavour for Paris in the 1880s here - we have anarchists, prostitutes, Louis Pasteur, Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne...the list goes on. Civil unrest! Murder Plots! Slashings! I'm getting hyped up just typing this!

My only problem with this book is the slight weirdness of using real historical characters and playing with them for the sake of your plot. I can't imagine Louis Pasteur ever imagined he would turn up in a historical murder mystery 100 years down the track. Plus, there is this whole weird romance which develops between Nellie and Jules Verne. Jules Verne as a romantic lead is a little much for me to swallow quite frankly.

However weird romance aside, this book is one to delve into if you are after a good historical mystery, with an interesting plot, interesting anarchists, and a 1880s feminist heroine with a vendetta against a murdering psychopathic maniac.

7/10

Hashish, Wine, Opium (Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier)

Do we not all think that Theophile is quite an amusing name? And what a difference the end of a name does make:

Theodore: cute, teddy-bear like person, could be English, definitely wears a waistcoat.

Theophile: drives a white van, drinks vodka from a syringe, sweats a lot.

HIGHLY intellectual musings aside, I quite enjoyed this little homage to narcotics and alcohol written in the early 19th century. Baudelaire and Gautier both wrote extensively on their experiences with hash and opium in particular and both were members of the Club of Assassins. Detailed sketchily in the book (everything is a bit sketchy, most of it was written while they were stoned or drunk), the Club of Assassins was a little group of men who used to meet on Ile St Louis in Paris and get stoned together. They then used to go home and write or paint about the effects they had experienced.

I picked this up for the title and who wouldn't? I am well-versed in the effects of wine, but opium has never been offered up at any of the parties I've gone to (actually most of the time the most potent thing offered up is a vodka watermelon, and that's on a REALLY wild night) and I giggled to think of 19th century philosophers in knickerbockers smoking joints, thus I felt this was a necessary purchase.

The book was informative as well as amusing... I learnt that these dudes used to cook the hash with butter, pistachio nuts, almonds and honey to form a kind of jam "similar to apricot conserve". YUM. Sounds delish, I could even do without the hallucinogen to be honest. It's like... baklava jam! GENIUS.

I also learnt that the word 'assassin' is actually derived from the Arabic 'hasishin', which means to be under the influence of drugs. Assassins in Persia were fed drugs before they killed. Interesting non?

Last lesson I learnt from this book- If you work with children (sigh, as I do), do not leave this lying around your place of work. The only thing worse to leave around is Dead Babies.

Rating: 7/10.

The Paris Enigma (Pablo de Santis)

Hmm hmm hmm. This is another one of those books I've been selling like crazy to customers and telling them I loved it, best book I've read all year etc. without actually having read it. However, unlike The Good Mayor, I ended up a) a bit disappointed and b) realising I've been lying to my customers. (I feel I should add in here that I do usually read books before recommending them, its just I haven't always read the book I want to recommend... I hope this doesn't call into question my reputation as a bookseller. I really do read things..I swear!)

Anyway...

The Paris Enigma is set during the World's Fair in Paris in 1889, (the fair which the Eiffel Tower was built for) and if you know me at all, the fact that it is Paris in the 19th Century should tip you off as to why I picked it up. For the World's Fair the twelve greatest detectives in the world are coming together to talk about their greatest cases. The group is known as...The Twelve Detectives. Right. Catchy!

A few nights before the grand opening of the fair, one of the detectives is killed leaving the remaining sleuths to solve the mystery of his death.

On first glances, this book could not be more perfect for me: Paris, mystery, historical fiction, cover that looks like a vintage poster... Being a bit of an Agatha Christie girl, I went into it thinking (hoping?) it would perhaps be a Parisian take on And Then There Were None. The problem was, when the mystery had been solved (with a few more bodies turning up along the way) I was seriously underwhelmed. I am used to the fantastic Poirot, where everyone is the killer/I am the killer/no-one is the killer and it all comes out in such a clever way that no-one else in the world aside from Poirot could have figured it out (except perhaps Marlowe....). At the end of The Paris Enigma, I was left thinking, well I could have figured that out. None of the ingenuity I was expecting.

So I guess the moral of this story seems to be if you want a good mystery* go for Christie.

6/10.

*I say mystery because I do not read modern 'crime' novels which are way too slasher-y and thriller-y and violent for my poor, feeble sensibilities.

Shakespeare and Co

So I think Earhart and I need another sojourn to Paris quite shortly. Darling, we shall dress in our best rags and carry around moleskins and hit up Shakespeare and Co for a bed... what do you think?

This is a bookshop that in particular should give Earhart a hernia (what with her undiagnosed yet obvious OCD); books are piled anywhere all over the floor and stacked up to the ceiling in no apparent order. It is dusty and damp. There are random beds in the corners, sometimes with people in them.

And it is the most wonderful, wonderful place in the world. I know there are those of you who are not exactly huge readers but who follow the blog and I say to you, go to Paris, go to Shakespeare and Co and just stay for a couple of hours. It's in the 5th, on the Left Bank. You will be converted, I promise you.

This all comes about because there was an article in The Guardian this weekend written by Jeanette Winterson about the bookshop and I now have an irrepressible yearning to go back. Have a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/shakespeare-and-company-bookshop-paris

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)

I should start by saying that this book was not at all what I expected. Although really, all I knew before I picked this up was that it was written from the perspective of a concierge in a Parisian apartment building and it was a bestseller in France. 'Fabulous,' I thought, 'a nice light holiday read, romp in Paris etc etc etc'. What I didn't know was that the concierge in The Elegance of the Hedgehog is very into art, Russian literature, science and philosophy. Whole chapters are devoted to the phenomenology of the spirit, which are very interesting, but not quite the light reading I had hoped for.

From the outside, Renee appears to be a 'typical' daytime TV watching, uncultured concierge, an image which she strives to maintain for reasons which have a lot to do with not alarming the bourgeois residents of her building. It is not until a new resident moves into the building and discovers that Renee's cat is named Leo in homage to her favourite Russian author that the truth slowly comes out.

The book alternates between Renee's story, and the Journal of the Movement of the World of Paloma Josse, a twelve year old girl who plans to kill herself and burn down her parents' apartment on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. Melodramatic much? Paloma's family are bourgeois to the point of being caricatures, and she can think of nothing worse then the future which she sees before her.

The book took a little while to get into, possibly because I'd finally be getting into the Renee story line, only to be interrupted by Paloma musing on the fact that the 'cat is a modern totem'.

Thanks.

I did enjoy reading it, and would have more had the characters not both been so ridiculously resigned about the world. ('How French!' A customer said to me when I made this comment....more like 'How annoying!') If Paloma was in fact as brilliant as she claimed (many many times), why didn't she set her (brilliant) mind on changing the path set out for her? Possibly I am missing the point here. But what does it say that here I am, a few weeks after finishing the book and one of the only things that has stuck in my mind is how annoying one of the characters was? I understood what Renee had to say, I was interested in her views on literature and art, I just wasn't enthralled. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog..I am just a little undecided. And I think writing this review has made me even more so.

7/10...?

Five Quarters of the Orange (Joanne Harris)

Hmmm... I really don't know where to go with this review. In one corner we have evocative writing, memorable characters and a relatively solid plotline. In the other corner we have an elusive pike (yes, the fish), a hatred of clocks never explained or justified, migraine-inducing oranges, a heroine with the face of a toad (by her own admission) and a mother who makes the SS seem the lesser of two evils.

Not that these make the novel bad per se, but it's all a bit much. I put the book down and breathed a sigh of relief that I had finished and could move on. Except I can't move on because that pike keeps popping up in my mind and unsettling me.
Sure, I like being creeped out.
Gollum?
Genius.
Voldemort?
Fabulous.
Vampires?
Obviously.
But a freaking huge, ancient, evil, intelligent pike that can grant wishes and curse people?
NO THANK YOU.
Yadiyadiyada... we still have Harris' trademark magical realism, the interweaving of recipes with the story, that description of children as 'dark and sly' that she seems to favour (I believe blondes have been known to have the occasional immoral moment); but... no. Tolerable, but NO.

N.B. Earhart loves everything Harris has ever written and vehemently disagrees with this review.
Pick a side.

Rating: 6/10.