I’m really enjoying this sunny summer. Last year I really struggled with the lack of sun but this year it’s been glorious. It’s disconcerting how hot it’s been though…

Below are four reviews from some of our Book club selection (spoiler alert). Not all of them were easy reading. However, since we read those books I’ve really enjoyed Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Every Last Secret by A.R. Torre and at the moment I’m reading Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult and really loving it. These ones are perfect beach books… Enjoy!

Do not say we have nothing - Madeleine Thien

Not an easy read. Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2016. Members of our book club who had little or no knowledge of 20th century Chinese history  found it tough going.

Thien uses the idea of Li-Ling’s curiosity about her father, Kai’s, suicide to set up the joint themes of uncovering history as well as a search for identity. Both themes the Cultural Revolution, whose name echoes Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, work hard to destroy.  Many found the fragmentary nature of the novel difficult.  It is held together as it jumps around in time and place by a combination of The Book of Records (History) and music. The motif of Glen Gold’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations runs throughout.  The actual recording can be heard on Youtube. Its 1st movement is particularly haunting - precise and delicate - in complete contrast to the thuggery and chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

Accounts of the destruction of beauty, talent and creativity; the cruelty and lack of empathy we found disturbing. The crowd attack the 12 year old Zhuli for being a gifted violinist. Her violin is stamped upon, her music scattered.  She’s forced to kneel, to denounce her parents for being educated and bourgeoise, spat upon, head shaved, ink poured over her and left unconscious.  Fearing the Red Guards will break her hands so she won’t be able to play she goes to her favourite room in the Conservatoire, puts on the Bach recording and hangs herself.

In contrast, Sparrow, who’d ceased to compose after his capture by the Red Guards, is healed through music.  He finds his unfinished symphony, which Zhuli had declared his masterpiece, and completes it.  Although the Red Guards kill Sparrow his music survives.  The novel ends as:

Variations of Sparrow’s complete composition can be heard all over China.  In shopping malls, private homes, on personal computers, in night clubs, on headphones in Tiananmen Square …..

Likewise the Book of Records survives:  innumerable copies … can be found ..in bookshops in Beijing, Shanghai ..

We found the stoicism and understatement in the novel moving.  Although its people were crushed, there was consolation in the fact that in spite of all the attempts of the Revolution to smash and destroy beauty and culture; its music, art and history survive.  This perhaps explains the novel’s enigmatic title: Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The Paris Apartment - Lucy Foley

This book was a tremendous success with us.  We wanted an undemanding beach book read for the Easter Holidays, and it fitted the bill perfectly.  It was clearly written in short chapters - even though there were multiple narrators, each narrator’s name and status headed the beginning of each chapter.  The key icon on the two chapters for Ben and the omniscient narrator acts as a plot pointer.  It reads like a puzzle.

The visual depiction of the structure of the apartment plays successfully on the Crime Fiction Cliche. We all agree the plotting is excellent and think the denouement clever - anticipated by only one smarty pants member of our group.  We liked the sinister tension, anticipation, threat and power of the husband being felt everywhere, even though he doesn’t appear.

The depiction of Paris is much enjoyed, especially by those familiar with it. The use of French language supported by translation certainly enlarges our knowledge of French slang and obscenities!

References to the first wife evoke the terrible snobbism of the Ancienne Regime, as does the treatment of and presence of the Concierge, spider-like in her cupboard-like Loge.  The entitlement and sexism of the privileged and bullying classes is everywhere.

Not much open to discussion, so not really a book club book, but an excellent holiday read.

Three Women - Lisa Taddeo

This was a not a popular choice. Only 2 of us managed to finish it, so it’s perhaps surprising that apparently it’s one of poster boy and popstar Harry Styles’ favourite books!

Three white middle class women attach themselves to monstrously, abusive men who control them. In view of the superficial nature of its content, we find the combination of Taddeo’s and marketing attempts to dress up the book’s content as being the result of 8 years of meaningful research as ridiculous and laughable.

Our biggest criticism of the book though, is that it is tedious and repetitive. It  completely fails to develop - it just doesn’t go anywhere.

We find Taddeo’s approach to the 17-year-old Maggie completely irresponsible. In Maggie, she presents a text book case of paedophilic grooming of a vulnerable teenager by a middle-aged man. An English teacher who plays on the fact that he notices Maggie admires him. He uses the excuse that as he is married with children in order to dictate that only he can initiate contact. He subjects her to late night phone calls hours long in which he sets up a situation of coercive control where he holds all the cards. She is isolated, groomed with the use of a novel in which he leaves notes telling her of his love for her.  Maggie’s potential is crushed, she is unable to relate to the real world. When he removes his affection he creates in her an anxiety which leads to an eating disorder.  Taddeo’s understanding of the female adolescent psyche is non-existent.  In her Epilogue she implies Maggie is complicit, claiming she accepts it …the way any child accepts any decoration, any gift.

Her two other women are also victims, controlled by the men with whom they are involved. They are far from, as Taddeo claims, in control of their desire.  All three women are oppressed by other women: variously labelled as whore/ deserving it/ husband snatchers.

Taddeo’s prose often lapses into a kind of X-rated Mills and Boon too racy to quote here.  We note that she has recently published another book called Ghost Lovers which appears to contain even more, blow dries and blow jobs than this one, according to its Sunday Times reviewer.  We come to the depressing conclusion that too many women novelists are encouraged to write this kind of banal voyeuristic erotica which masquerades as careful research in order to give it clothes so their books can sell.

Violeta - Isabel Allende

A bildungsroman set against a background of the brutality of a fascist regime of an unnamed S. American country which we assume to be Chile.  Told in epistolary form, in letters to her grandson, Camile, Violeta’s life spans the huge changes in the 100 years from the 1920 ‘flu pandemic to the 2022 Covid 19 pandemic.

We note Violeta is presented warts and all: she marries 3 times and has 2 children.  Her 2nd husband, is the father of her 2 children.  He is an unpleasant narcissist without a shadow of conscience. He becomes the focus of our discussion: true to character, as Allende claims, wherever he goes, he must be the centre of attention!  Violeta appears grateful when he is involved in serial adulteries away from home as he is out of her way.  She ‘lives in a bubble’ according to her son.  In doing so she passively colludes with the fascist regime, ignoring the fact that her second husband makes enormous sums of money, transporting political prisoners to death camps.  We also criticise her for only being concerned with making and managing money, standing by, whilst her husband abuses their children: brutalising their son for not being a real man, and living vicariously through their daughter, Nieve.  Both children are damaged through her neglect. Nieve comes off worst, ending up in Las Vegas, a victim of drug abuse and sex trafficking.

Violeta finally admits reality, redeemed through a sensible choice of a sympathetic 3rd husband. With his help, she rescues and supports Nieve through a pregnancy which kills her, but leaves her with a grandson, Camile.  Thus giving her a chance to redeem herself as a caring parent. It is to him that her letters, which give a hint of a confession, are addressed.

As a general comment, our overall response to the book is that it meanders. Rather than being a cohesive novel, it exists as a series of episodes.  With reference to the final chapter, opinion is divided about Violeta recording her own death.  Rather an odd way of doing it which leads some to feel it stretches credibility too far. However, someone else who has 1st hand experience of the gradual slipping into death by an 100year old mother, says it is exactly how it happens.