Vonnegut, Kurt "Cat's Cradle" - 1963

Vonnegut, Kurt "Cat's Cradle" - 1963

We read this with our international online book club in June 2025.

While science-fiction is not really my thing, I would say this is more a dystopian novel. And a very good one. Granted, part of it is sci-fi though that is the case with a lot of dystopian novels. Here, the author even explained, how it happened that the world came into this distress.

I have only read one other book by Kurt Vonnegut before (Breakfast of Champions) and that was fantastic. So was this one. Kurt Vonnegut loves to play with words. And he always finds new ones that we haven't heard before but that makes a lot of sense.

As it says in the book description, our deepest fears are witnessing Armageddon and, even worse, surviviing it. My sentiments exactly. Should there be one, I'd rather not survive it than having to build up the earth again. Must be terrible.

Well, here we get the chance, We meet all sorts of different kind of quirky people who meet on a fictional Caribbean island where they witness the "End of the World". With his dark humour, the author manages to describe the encounters everyone has with Ice-Nine, a chemical that can destroy everything. And their reasons for getting engaged in the turmoil. His irony shows especially when he describes the fictional new religion Bokonon. So many witty insights that make us think about every existing religion.

He more or less ends with this quote: "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been". One of the most true sentences there are.

If I haven't said it before, this is a great story. Definitely makes me want to read more of his books.

And here are some comments from the discussion:

• Most members thought it was really well written, and humorous in a satirical way. While at the same time having some underlying themes of criticism of religion, dictatorships, science, all in a writing style very unique to Vonnegut.
• I really liked the chapter layout, with short chapters of about only 1-2 pages, that as the chapter is read you realize the title of the chapter was really descriptive and inventive. While the end-of-world-science that happened was very quickly unfolding at the end of the story and not at all believable, it was written as a quite humorous conclusion to the story.
• I was prejudiced against it before I started reading it, so got pleasantly surprised that I really enjoyed it after all. I dislike reading about wars and horrors, but enjoy some dystopias, of which this one was a quite thoughtful fun version. I was happy we chose it as I would never have read it for myself.

From the back cover:

"With his trademark dry wit, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an inventive science fiction satire that preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon - and, worse still, surviving it. 

Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. Writer Jonah's search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to an island republic in the Caribbean where the religion of Bokononism is practised, to love and to insanity. Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction is a funny and frightening satire on the end of the world and the madness of mankind."

Osman, Richard "We Solve Murders"

Osman, Richard "We Solve Murders" - 2024

I absolutely loved Richard Osman's first books because I do love him as a person and also got to love him as an author, So, I was quite happy, when my son gave me this for Christmas.

If this was a movie, this would be an action thriller rather than a murder mystery. I love watching murder mysteries (though I don't read them much) but I really don't like action movies. Far too loud for me.

I must say, this was almost the same with this book. I heard people complain about his first books that there were too many characters and that you did confused. Well, if you got confused with the first lot, this one will certainly not do for you. It took me quite a while to even understand who was who and what they were up to. My book has 464 pages and I think I got into the story at around page 200. Far too late and I would have given up if it weren't for the author.

There is some humour in this book but not the humour I am used to from Richard Osman. Such a pity.

From the back cover:

"Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job...

Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?"

Hemingway, Ernest "To Have and Have Not"

Hemingway, Ernest "To Have and Have Not" - 1937

Some people have it, others don't. Money. That is the main subject of this story. Harry Morgan belongs to the latter category and needs to find ideas to support his family.

Hemingway's love for Cuba is probably the reason for the main setting though this might have taken place in many parts of the world.

I don't think this is the author's greatest book and am glad it wasn't the first one I read. While the story itself is interesting, it goes all a little higgledy-piggledy, especially towards the end. You can't help but wonder whether Mr. Hemingway just wanted to finish this one. Apparently, he considered it his worst one.

He was still a great author.

Comments from the discussion:

• Most people agreed the characters were not likeable, but we had a lot of thoughts on the settings and time and place in history, as well as about Hemingway's writing style and how it was formed and how it influenced writing of the future.
  
  
• His writing was not really to my taste, nor his characters, I can see how he is well regarded as an author while he just isn't a great fit for me personally. Still I am now able to say I have read something by him, and it will be a good reference point while reading similar genres in the future someday.

We read this in our international online book club in June 2023.

From the back cover:

"Hemingway's Classic Novel About Smuggling, Intrigue, and Love

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

Harshly realistic, yet with one of the most subtle and moving relationships in the Hemingway oeuvre, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest."

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in 'The Old Man and the Sea' and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Vargas Llosa, Mario "The Feast of the Goat"

Vargas Llosa, Mario "The Feast of the Goat" (Spanish: La fiesta del chivo) - 2000

We read this in our international online book club in August 2022.

This was one of the toughest books I ever read. The descriptions of the torture are quite vivid and detailed. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who has a weak heart.

Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Of course, I had heard about the dictatorship and recently read "In the Time of the Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez, so I should have been forewarned enough. But I wasn't. The way, this dictator ruined almost everybody's life and what people can do to other human beings, it's just unbelievable.

The story is told by Trujillo himself, by Urania Cabral who is the daughter of one of his followers, and by his assassinators taking turns and making the story even more suspenseful than it is already. We see the different points of view - not that it makes us understand the dictator any better, I wouldn't want to anyway. Supposedly, he loved his country and its people but how can you treat someone like that if you love them.

It is unbelievable how the author managed to put this remarkable story on paper, I guess you have to be a Nobel Prize winning writer for that.

Comment from one of our book club members.
"This book provides wonderful insights into Rafael Trujillo, once dictator of the Dominican Republic. The reader can see his strength, his discipline, his idealism and the corruption of all that into a hideous corrosive force degrading himself, his collaborators and the innocent alike. The writing and storytelling are compelling. This is the best book I have read in a long time."

She is right. Unfortunately, her description fits many dictators.

Another comment:
"Reading the book started out quite slow for me, because of the different time and point of view changes, but after about half the book I could not put it down again until I finished it. It was really horrifying and revealing about history and places I had no idea about. And I dont understand at all how people can be so evil, cruel, manipulative. I absolutely also can recommend this book!"

I totally agree. It is unbelievable what people can do to each other.

"One of the most valuable things about this superb piece of literature is that it gives us a close-up, vivid, and personal view, partly factual and partly imagined, of the perpetrators of gross injustice so we can begin to understand how people can be so evil, cruel and manipulative. It worked for me."

Book Description:

"Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million people. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become the way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping away. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' ('Bookforum'), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit."

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".

Mario Vargas Llosa received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1996.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Alvarez, Julia "In the Time of the Butterflies"

Alvarez, Julia "In the Time of the Butterflies" - 1994

This was my first novel taking place in the Dominican Republic. I wanted to read "In the Time of the Butterflies" for ages, somehow I never got to it. The story breaks your heart. As we live in a time of war at our doorstep again, this might be even more important than it was ten years ago, at least in our part of the world. There have always been wars, there have always been dictators. Julia Alvarez tells us about a family that was giving it all, fighting for a free and better life of their compatriots and who paid the highest price possible.

What is amazing in this book is that there are very little things how you can become an enemy of a dictator without even wanting to get involved in the first place. Revolutionaries, or so-called revolutionaries are not always some weird people who stand up and say, hey, I don't like that guy, let's do something about it. Often, there is not much you can do about being on the blacklist. I have read many books about wars or slavery, other dictatorships, and often have found that I probably would have ended up just the same as the protagonists. However, here I am sure I would have, although, having said that, I am not as pretty as the Mirabal sisters were, so I might have gone unnoticed.

What I liked about the style of the book, there are four sisters and they all tell their stories, mostly in a kind of diary. They all get their say and you can see how each one of them thought about the dictator, the country, how each of them was affected in a different way. A little like "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver where the four sisters tell their stories.

There is no page that doesn't captivate you. From the beginning, you are right there, in the middle of the family, living with them, fearing with them.

While this is not a non-fiction book, the novel is based on the life of these courageous women. We need more like them.

Julia Alvarez mentions that she "believes in the power of stories to change the world". I think she contributes to this and we must read more by this brilliant storyteller. We need authors like her to make us aware of what is going on in this world and that we should fight for a better one.

One quote I loved a lot:
"I am pro whoever is right at any moment in time." We all should be.

From the back cover:

"They were the four Mirabal sisters - symbols of defiant hope in a country shadowed by dictatorship and despair. They sacrificed their safe and comfortable lives in the name of freedom. They were Las Mariposas, 'The butterflies,' and in this extraordinary novel Patria, Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Dedé speak across the decades to tell their own stories - from tales of hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning to prison torture - and describe the everyday horrors of life under the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Now through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in a warm, brilliant, and heartbreaking novel that makes a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression."

If you don't have the time, yet, to read this fantastic account of some wonderful women, read their story here on Wikipedia.

I read another book on the subject, this time about the dictator Rafael Trujillo:

Vargas Llosa, Mario "The Feast of the Goat" (Spanish: La fiesta del chivo) - 2000

Follett, Ken "A Column of Fire"

Follett, Ken "A Column of Fire" - 2017

I love reading about the Tudors. And I loved the two first books of the Kingsbridge Series ("The Pillars of the Earth" and "World Without End"). So, this was definitely a win-win situation.

This is mostly the story of the Willard family. There is a Romeo and Juliet plot, villains and heroes, Catholics and Protestants, Queens Mary I, Elizabeth I and King James I of England, Mary Queen of Scots, the history of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder plot and many other political events. This book has it all.

A very impressive novel. Ken Follett's style is fantastic, his love for detail brilliant and the stories in his book exciting.

I thought the list of real-life characters at the end of the book was very helpful. I would have also enjoyed a timeline of what happened at the time. Yes, I have the internet and plenty of other books where I can look this up but I find having it in the actual book I'm reading is actually very helpful.

Now on to the prequel, "The Evening and the Morning".

From the back cover:

"As Europe erupts, can one young spy protect his queen? Ken Follett takes us deep into the treacherous world of powerful monarchs, intrigue, murder, and treason with his magnificent epic, A Column of Fire - the chronological latest in the Kingsbridge series, following The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, and the prequel, The Evening and the Morning.

In 1558, the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn apart by religious conflict. As power in England shifts precariously between Catholics and Protestants, royalty and commoners clash, testing friendship, loyalty, and love.

Ned Willard wants nothing more than to marry Margery Fitzgerald. But when the lovers find themselves on opposing sides of the religious conflict dividing the country, Ned goes to work for Princess Elizabeth. When she becomes queen, all Europe turns against England. The shrewd, determined young monarch sets up the country’s first secret service to give her early warning of assassination plots, rebellions, and invasion plans. Over a turbulent half century, the love between Ned and Margery seems doomed as extremism sparks violence from Edinburgh to Geneva. Elizabeth clings to her throne and her principles, protected by a small, dedicated group of resourceful spies and courageous secret agents.

The real enemies, then as now, are not the rival religions. The true battle pitches those who believe in tolerance and compromise against the tyrants who would impose their ideas on everyone else - no matter what the cost.

Exciting and ambitious, and set during one of the most turbulent and revolutionary times in history, A Column of Fire will delight longtime fans of the Kingsbridge series and serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Ken Follett."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Stevenson, Robert Louis "Treasure Island"

Stevenson, Robert Louis "Treasure Island" - 1881/82

I have never read this book before in my life. I haven't even seen one of the many different film adaptations but I was familiar with a lot of the characters, especially Jim Hawkins, Captain Flint and the parrot of the same name, Long John Silver, well, the main ones.

I wouldn't call this a children's book, yes, children can read it, but the story is also interesting for adults, quite some excitement going on, you need to guess what might happen next and won't succeed every time.

If someone had asked me beforehand whether I would like this, I am sure I would not have known. But I really did like it. A lot of drama and action in the story. So, if you don't want too much love in your classics, maybe this is one for you. A true classic.

From the back cover:

"Originally conceived as a story for boys, Stevenson's novel is narrated by the teenage Jim Hawkins, who outwits a gang of murderous pirates led by that unforgettable avatar of immorality, Long John Silver. Admired by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and (reluctantly) Henry James, the story has the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale. It has worked its way into the collective imagination of more than five generations of readers, young and old alike, gaining the power of myth.

Although thoroughly British in its setting and characters, Treasure Island, as John Seelye shows, has an American dimension, drawing on the author's experiences living in California, and owes no small debt to Washington Irving's ghost stories and James Fenimore Cooper's tales of adventures. This edition also includes Stevenson's own essay about the composition of Treasure Island, written just before his death."

McCarthy, Pete "The Road to McCarthy"

McCarthy, Pete "The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland" - 2002

After reading "McCarthy's Bar" a couple of years ago, I was extremely sad to learn that the author had passed away in 2004. I read that that was his only book he had every written. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found this book in a second hand bookshop because it gave me another tale of Pete McCarthy's travels.

This time, he travels from Ireland to Morocco, New York, the Caribbeans, Tasmania, all sorts of destinations that somehow have to do with the name McCarthy, places you wouldn't even imagine having a link to Ireland at all. But Pete McCarthy found it.

Another hilarious book by a funny writer who left us all too early.

From the back cover: "From the bestselling author of McCarthy's Bar, this is a hilarious and thought-provoking journey into his Irish heritage around the world. As a veteran traveller, Pete McCarthy has long been intrigued that the emigrant Irish can be found in all corners of the globe. Determined to pin down mythical tales of his own clan history, Pete is thrust into a world-wide adventure that reveals an unsettled and poignant history, while unearthing a good pint in the most unexpected locations. From the Holy Ground of Cork harbour he travels to Gibraltar and Morocco, then onwards to New York, Tasmania, Montana, and the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat before finally reaching the remote Alaskan township of McCarthy and its population of just 14 people, but a lot more bears."

NDiaye, Marie "Rosie Carpe"

NDiaye, Marie "Rosie Carpe" (French: Rosie Carpe) - 2001

I like reading a French book from time to time in order to use and improve my French. Unfortunately, I rarely enjoy them because they are always so weird. Not any different with this one.

The story starts easy enough but then there are so many sub stories thrown in without any rhyme or reason. The story is very sad but it gets really weird towards the end. And it's just not the disturbing story that annoyed me, there wasn't a single loveable or even likeable character in the whole novel. No, not really my cup of tea.

From the back cover:

"When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer? If it seems unlikely that the feckless Lazare, missing for five years as he followed his own twisted path, might help, or that carnivalesque Guadeloupe, where murder and mayhem are the natural outcomes of “business ventures,” might be the place for Rosie to find peace, then Marie NDiaye may have a few surprises in store for her reader. Amid the blurring boundaries and shifting values, the indistinct realities and confusing certainties of Rosie Carpe, a love story unfolds, and all that is ambiguous and tenuous – in short, all of Rosie’s world – is underpinned with a measure of tenderness."

Defoe, Daniel "Robinson Crusoe"

Defoe, Daniel "Robinson Crusoe" - 1719

"Robinson Crusoe" "is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre" and "one of the most widely published books in history".

Classic novels are always interesting. We can "visit" a time long past and see what someone who lived at the time thought about his contemporaries, the political, economical, or social situation.

"Robinson Crusoe", okay, said to be one of the first or maybe even the first fictional novel that could be called "realistic". Possible, I have read a few older novels but they did not ring the same tone.

"One of the most widely published books in history". Well, if they say so, I am sure they are right.

I can imagine why this book is still read three hundred years after its first publication. It is an interesting story. Even today, we cannot imagine how it would be to spend a year on an uninhabited island, let alone twenty-eight. That's longer than most people get for a life-sentence in prison.

Apparently, the author based the story loosely on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was cast on an island in the Caribbean where he had to spend four years in the early 1700s, so just a few years before Daniel Defoe wrote his famous story.

The novel gives us a lot of insights into the politics and economics of the time. But most of all, it poses a lot of moral issues. "When confronted with the cannibals, Crusoe wrestles with the problem of cultural relativism. Despite his disgust, he feels unjustified in holding the natives morally responsible for a practice so deeply ingrained in their culture." Nothing has changed. We still live in a time where we have discussions about how much of our culture and moral understanding to impose of people with another background. As such, Robinson Crusoe is a great opportunity to think about this problem in a different setting and maybe get an idea on how to solve those problems nowadays.

I have no idea on how many school curricula we can still find this novel but I think it should be there. Just for the reason I gave right now.

There is probably another reason why this book is still passed on to new readers. The language is pretty simple, the story is told in chronological order, it is a pretty easy read. Tedious at times, especially if you read a lot but it offers a captivating story as well as understandable English at the same time, that must be a bonus for many people.

This was discussed in our online book club in March 2019.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Robinson Crusoe has captured the imagination of countless readers with its vivid evocation of one man's survival on a remote island, far from the civilization he knows.

Thought to be one of the first English novels, Robinson Crusoe is the timeless story of a merchant's trading voyages and adventures at sea, his shipwreck and subsequent life marooned alone. Based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, it is fascinating in its descriptions of Crusoe's ingenuity and inventiveness, his ability to make and use tools, his discovery of man Friday and his treatment of him.

In addition to this, Robinson Crusoe is also an exploration of the ways in which a man who had made his fortune in trade is able to survive in reasonable comfort, thanks to his resourcefulness, when goods and money can no longer be of any value to him."

We discussed this book in our international online book club in March 2019.

Danticat, Edwidge "Breath, Eyes, Memory"

Danticat, Edwidge "Breath, Eyes, Memory" - 1994

The world of Sophie Caco, her world starts in Haiti with her aunt Atie while her mother lives in the United States. We follow her from the age of twelve into adulthood where she has to battle with her mother's past, her mother's ghost.

This is an immensely interesting story about the life of women in any kind of culture, about the life of women in Haiti especially, the life of anybody living within a culture that prescribes what your are supposed to do according to "other people", what people are doing to defend their "honour".

A highly gripping tale, a walk between tradition and future. A highly recommendable novel.

A quote that speaks to me: "She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"When her mother leaves Haiti to find work in the US, Sophie is raised by her aunt. Their parting, years later, when her mother sends for her, is as wrenching as the reunion in New York. Though she barely knows her mother they both carry secrets from their homeland that will haunt them forever."

Allende, Isabel "Island Beneath the Sea"

Allende, Isabel "Island Beneath the Sea" (Spanish: La isla bajo el mar) - 2010

Another beautiful Allende novel.  I love everything by her, her trilogy "The House of the Spirits", "Daughter of Fortune" and "Portrait in Sepia" is fantastic. If you liked those novels, you'll love this one, as well.

The setting reminded me of "Wide Sargasso Sea", even part of the story (at least at the beginning) but not too much to make it weird. A great description of life on a plantation, first in the Caribbean, later in Louisiana, the life of the slaves and the free, lots of history, an incredibly rich account of the lives people had to lead. Like any book on slavery, this made me so mad at times, too. I don't like the words "mulatto", "quadroon", etc. Sounds very Nazi-esque, like "half-Jew". It doesn't really matter where on the scale of being a "negro" or a "Jew" those poor people are, they are doomed anyway.

I loved Zarité aka Tété, the main character, but there were a lot of other loveable characters in the book, too. And some not so loveable ones. Isabel Allende always manages to describe them so lively.

I usually have a bit of a problem with the magic realism part of these kind of stories, although I really enjoy the magic realism novels. However, this time I really had no second thoughts, I could accept the voodooisms and Tété's belief in Erzulie, the mother Loa, and her z'étoile very well. It just worked all around, a complete story.

From the back cover:

"From the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the lavish parlors of New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century, Isabel Allende's latest novel tells the story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible.

Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue – now known as Haiti –Tété is the product of violent union between an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it's with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father's plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy.

Against the merciless backdrop of sugar cane fields, the lives of Tété and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When bloody revolution arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the island for the decadence and opportunity of New Orleans. There, Tété finally forges a new life – but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not so easily severed.

Spanning four decades, ‘Island Beneath the Sea’ is the moving story of one woman's determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been so battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances."

Find more reviews of Isabel Allende's books here.

Rhys, Jean "Wide Sargasso Sea"

Rhys, Jean "Wide Sargasso Sea" - 1966

Same as "Becoming Jane Eyre", I read this when our book club decided to read "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë this year, just as I had reread it a couple of months ago.

"Wide Sargasso Sea" is considered a "prequel" to "Jane Eyre", what happened to Mr. Rochester in his first marriage in the Caribbean, how did the marriage come about and how did it end up in such a dreadful way.

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, so she knows quite something about life in the "West Indies". I really enjoyed learning about the people there at that time. Even though you know where it all leads (if you have read "Jane Eyre"), it still is a very exciting tale of love and love lost, different cultures clashing, highly recommendable.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics.

Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel's heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys's brief, beautiful masterpiece.
Jean Rhys (1894-1979) was born in Dominica. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before moving to Paris, where she began writing and was 'discovered' by Ford Madox Ford. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogs out to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 (when Good Morning, Midnight was written) onwards she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with her account of Jane Eyre's Bertha Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966."  

Naipaul, V.S. "A House for Mr. Biswas"

Naipaul, V.S. "A House for Mr. Biswas" - 1961

"'A House for Mr. Biswas' portrays through a series of homes he had and fairly brief life of a poor Indian journalist turned civil servant in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the years before and after World War II.”

I love V.S. Naipaul. He is a wonderful writer. Not only does he tell us about a life we would never be able to look into, but he does it in such an excellent way.

A man has a dream and he works for it. Not always easy. A lot of struggles. The more he tries to achieve his goals, the further away he seems to get.

A story about disappointments in life and shattered dreams, written in an exquisite way. I loved this book.

Apparently an novel with a large autobiographical background. The main character, Mr. Biswas who is based on the author's own father, is not a very likeable character, he is conceited, thinks very highly of himself and not a lot of others. Yet, with of V.S. Naipaul's wonderful use of language, the story is as beautiful as if he was talking about a beautiful and lovely princess. And even though the protagonist is not sympathetic, we can only feel sorry for those born into a certain life who have to follow the path described to them long before they were even here on earth. It does make you wonder, though, how good the relationship between V.S. Naipaul and his father was.

When following Mr. Biswas, we get an insight into the colonialism and the struggle of the natives to get out of it. We also live with the family and can get to know their day-to-day life and how a huge amount of people try to get on with each other in a crowded space.

A very complex story with a lot of subplots and minor characters that add to the fullness of this tale. It will become a true classic.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2024.

From the back cover:

"The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, 'A House for Mr. Biswas' is an unforgettable story inspired by Naipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels.

In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, 'A House for Mr. Biswas' masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas."

I have also read "Half a Life" and "A Bend in the River" which I liked just as well.

V.S. Naipaul received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.