Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

9.After Dark - Haruki Murakami
If this book was a film, it'd be a film noir and in french. They'd film it in New York or Tokyo or maybe even London but everyone would be speaking French and making existential asides. It's a tale of love and hate, inexplicable events and incomprehensible motives. It leaves the reader going, yes but why and how? But that's not really important, it's enigmatic yet engaging and strangely that's enough. I could imagine a Raymond Chandler-esque voiceover talking about 'the city' as I read this and for all that the story was set in Tokyo it could have been anywhere, any big faceless city after the trains have stopped running and the night people seeped out of the shadows. Perhaps it struck me more because the last few books I'd read before it had been Chinese and had a very strong sense of place, that in contrast the location of this story felt very maleable and interchangeable. I'm not sure but that was certainly my impression.

10.The Enchantress of Florence - Salmon Rushdie
I like Salman Rushdie's books but there's just something about them that stops me from loving them whole-heartedly. The Enchantress of Florence is labyrinthine in plot and gorgeously intricately detailed in terms of historical and cultural settings and touches. Many of the locations and anecdotes were described so clearly that I could picture them clearly in my head. It looses momentum in the middle somewhat, though it picks up again towards the end (first half definitely better than the second). Maybe just the story the protagonist tells has been built up so much, and is strung out so much by him that it can't live up to its reputation? It's a good book certainly, I just can't shake the feeling that it could have been better.

11.Same Earth - Kei Miller
This was something of a relief after all the tomes I've been reading lately, I devoured this little book on the commute to my temp job in only two days. Which is always nice when your pile of library books is starting to look threatening. I really enjoyed the style this book's written in, there was a real lightness of touch to the way it dealt with complex issues without leaving the reader bogged down by them. The use of language (the vernacular if you will) seems to give it a life and a character all of its own, as though the force of the characters' personality has shaped the very language to their will, made it do extra work. Strangely it reminded me of poems and stories I read at school in Scots: all Calvinist hypocrisy and tales of wee villages loosing their sons and daughters first to the city and then disappearing across the Atlantic in search of a better life... (Though, maybe, that's actually the point he's trying to make about us all being on the same earth) No doubt that helped me warm to the story, but it is nonetheless charming, if a little idiosyncratic and I enjoyed it.

12.The Glass Palace - Amitav Ghosh
One of my hopes for this challenge was to find new authors to love, and I knew by the time I was half-way through The Hungry Tide that I wanted to read everything Amitav Ghosh had ever written. The Glass Palace is completely different from that book but I loved it nonetheless. There's one of those review blurbs on the front of the copy I read that calls it Dr Zhivago for the Indian subcontinent, and while I haven't actually read Dr Zhivago that description probably gives you the idea of the epic scale of this book. Personally I love big historical epics especially ones where the author has a personal investment in the events. Also I tend to avoid those kind of books set outside of Europe due to all the skeevy colonial issues, but the advantage of this book is that it unpacks a lot of those issues in really interesting and helpful ways. I would have liked a bit more on early post-Independence India given how much we get earlier on about Uma's involvement in the Independence movement but I wouldn't have traded the Burma in the 90s section for that even if those 50 years in between seem a tad skimmed over.


Suggested Tags: Indian, Jamaican, Japanese, Indian-british