Maria Nurowska: Sprawa Niny S. (Nina S. Case)

This new Nurowska's book was a great come back to Polish literature for me. The book centralises around the murder of Jerzy Baran, middle aged solicitor whose body is found in his office in Warsaw with five bullets in his chest. The suspects are Nina S., a well known book writer and Jerzy's ex-partner and her two twin grown-up daughters. And so the interrogation begins. The officer investigating the case goes through sessions of evidence gathering with Nina's daughters which gives us a detail picture of the family history and events that lead to Nina's relationship with Jerzy. He also goes through Nina's personal diary and learns about Nina's childhood, relationship with the twin daughters' father, twins' childhood, their life experiences and relationships... Nina's relationship with Jerzy did not end well - she gave up everything for him - her money, the family old residence, her time, her career, her feelings. And he took it all and then left her with no remorse. All the facts make the officer deduct that Nina is the person who has most reasons to commit this murder. But as the investigation goes on the less he believes she did it.

Even though the book spins around the case it really is a book about women. About their first relationships with men and how they impact the next ones, the relationships between mothers and their children, the emotions and feelings that accompany them, the tough times to write and publish books in the post-communist Poland. All these reflect a lot of Nurowska's life herself, there are plenty of autobiographical plots in this book. Nurowska spent nine years in a relationship with her Jerzy Baran who left her heart-broken and unwilling to do anything else in her life. Given all this I suppose killing Mr Baran in this book is her revenge. She also knows first hand what it was like to publish books in Poland in the 1990s and in interviews she often says she had more recognition in Germany then in her motherland. Her books have been translated to German, French and Czech, not to English, which is a shame as this book as well as some of her earlier ones are really worth reading. Here is a very recent interview with her (in Polish).

One of the characters says in the book: "It's not the facts that kill us, it's the meaning we assign to them". And then after such a statement we are faced with all the tragic love relationships of Nina and her daughters, the love that almost killed Nina (and Nurowska) and all you can say to that is "easier said than done". But it's good to see hope in Nurowska's life - she's now busy building her own bed & breakfast in Zakopane, surrounded by friends she trusts. And you know there's hope for Nina too.

I really liked this book, I like Nurowska's narration style and I'm looking forward to going home for Christmas and getting some more of her books!

And I also wonder why it is so much more difficult for me to write about a Polish book in English...?

My rating: YYYYY

Niccolo Ammaniti: I'm Not Scared

What a great refreshing book after my recent gloomy Hornby experience! How different the world seems when you look at it through nine-year-old boy’s eyes. I would like to use the word “innocent” here but Ammaniti made sure his book couldn’t be described in any obvious way.

Nine year old Michele lives his childhood life in a tiny village somewhere in Italy spending his time playing football with the other kids, riding a bike, sitting on a carob tree never rushing home for dinner – things each of us would do if we were nine years old again and lived in an Italian village. Until he makes a startling discovery in an abandoned house near the village...

Kidnapping kids for ransom has been a real plague in Italy during the 1970s which spread from Sardinia to the mainland. Typically kids from wealthy families from the north were kidnapped by poor desperados from the southern parts of the country. Many of them never returned alive. The Italian government tried to deal with the issue by blocking the bank accounts of the targeted families, which ended the epidemic at the time. In the recent years the crime has been on the rise again.

Important national issue as it is, seen through boy’s eyes, shows how surreal and cruel our world is and how adults can choose to be blind to obvious things like child’s right to live their childhood at home with their parents instead of a dark hole in the ground. How much better the world would be if ghosts really were around us and little wash-bears would tell us what would happen next.

I won’t tell you how the story develops as that would spoil the experience of reading this book. Suffice to say it keeps you glued to it until you finish. Beautiful. Moving. Unnerving in the subject but calming through the simplicity of Michele’s life. Made me want to be a child again growing up in the countryside.

A movie has been made based on this book and it had quite good reviews (IMDB) - has anyone seen it?

PS. There were no tractors in Michele’s village... ;)

My rating: YYYYY

Marina Lewycka: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

I was at the airport waiting for the flight to Kiev on the way to Crimea for holidays. I like having something light to read on holidays so I walked into an airport bookshop searching for something appropriate and I saw this book. I don't know what it was - that it had Ukraine in the title or the funny old lady on the tractor on the cover that made me buy it. Maybe it was my emotional attachment to tractors - when I was a kid I spent all my holidays in the countryside at my grandma's, with my favourite time of all being the harvest with all the machinery that went out on the roads at that time, including tractors. One of the holiday highlights I remember is the time my uncle let me "drive" one of those amazing things... Well, okay, he drove it but I had my both hands on the wheel too!

Anyway, I didn't get to read the book on that holiday as my lovely other half got his hands on it first. That should be enough of a credit to this book as he rarely reaches for anything that's not a business book (must have been the tractors too...). I read it when we got home though and it was fun to read indeed.

The story is about an old widowed man who immigrated to England in 1946 running away from the Stalinist Russia. He lives on his own, has two daughters who regularly come to visit him with their families. Until he falls in love with another Ukrainian emigrant woman - a 36 year old Valentina. The feeling is mutual - Valentina loves Nikolai for his power of getting her a permanent visa, for his money and for his house. And what an interesting character she is! I really enjoyed the detailed description of her bedroom that Marina treated us to and was truly amused by all the new ideas Valentina kept coming up with like her sophisticated taste for cars for instance. The way she bullies the old man and exploits his love to her is merciless and makes you hope love isn't really this blind. However Nikolai isn't alone in his misery - his two daughters who used to argue over their principles every time they spoke get reunited on the mission to get rid of their potential stepmother. It's a funny story overall, perfect light read for holiday / plane / train.

It also touches on some of the Ukrainian history - the civil war, the Stalin years, the Second World War and the survival in a concentration camp. It shows how the past you have been trying to forget about all your life impacts everything you do, the way you think, the way you are.

Oh yes, I almost forgot - and there are the tractors too! We do get to know a lot about them through the book Nikolai is writing and reading aloud whenever he finds an audience. It's an interesting side story – of how technology, here tractors, when misused may lead to the rise of Fascism in Germany and Communism in Russia and a world war as an effect...

My rating: YYYYY

Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger

Balram Halwai comes from a poor part of India, a little village that he calls Darkness. He’s an entrepreneur who owns a taxi company in Bangalore, one of the largest outsourcing centres in India. How did he become one? Through his eagerness to see the world outside his village, persistence in getting to work somewhere else than a tea shop, listening what may be useful to hear, learning English and murder. And he is extremely proud of his achievement. So much so that he feels he needs to share his recipe for success with the visiting premier of China: “you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs”.

The book tells the story of Balram’s life, of how he got to become who he is now. And it is a fascinating story. He tells it with a great deal of humour and wit. He shows us all aspects of India through its casts. He shows us how the globalisation touched India – Balram’s taxi company offers its services in the the late night working hours of the American outsourced call centres. Given the lack of public transport these services are strongly in demand.

I couldn’t stop reading this book. It reads easily, the language is light and funny and the story is so close to my heart. Through my job (welcome globalisation!) I’ve been to India many times and spent a lot of time working with our team there. I love going out there, I love the country (though I haven’t really seen the touristy parts of it), I love the people and every time I go there I find it really fascinating. But there are still so many things that surprise me and that I don’t understand about India. I either don’t ask them as I feel it’s inappropriate to ask or I do ask and it’s as if I was asking why the sky was blue – I never get the answer I was looking for. And that’s what Adiga helps me with – shows me the “backstage” of India, the mentality and the culture and the way of thinking. It's a breath of fresh air and I think it really deserved the 2008 Booker Prize.

My rating: YYYYY

Nick Hornby: How To Be Good

Right, so now it does feel a bit like a Hornby overload! Okay, I still like his style and language and the way he describes English mentality but this wasn’t an easy read. I felt really tired reading it, mentally exhausted trying to understand what message the book was trying to convey.

How To Be Good doesn’t exactly tell you how to be good, it touches on various possibilities but puts all of them in such a bad light that you will never feel good after you’ve done them. But in the end I guess it isn’t about you feeling good.

Everyone in the book is good - Katie is doing her good by being a doctor and healing people (yeah, right) and her husband David is being good by giving away his kids’ toys to strangers. The "goodest" person in the whole book is Mr. GoodNews who does good not only by having such peculiar name. Everyone in the book is so good that it makes you feel a bit sick. Which I guess might have been Hornby’s intention. After reading this book the last thing I wanted was to be good…

It's a very sarcastic book which is what makes it a bit of a tough read when somewhere deep in heart you actually want to be good. But interesting anyhow.

So what is the better "good"? Adopting homeless kids or not leaving the husband you can no longer stand? And how do we know we've done something good if we don't know what would happen if we hadn't done it?

My rating: YYYYY