Category Archives: Challenges

This has been a most interesting week. I had planned to read two books and managed to do that but I also got to see what other bloggers chose for this event and their perceptions shed a new light on my own thoughts. I’m in two minds about Carter’s work. I found The Bloody Chamber quite enjoyable but Nights at the Circus was a bit too rich for my taste. I am, however, grateful for having read this author because even if it hasn’t made me a great admirer, I can certainly appreciate good writing and Carter is one of the most resourceful authors I’ve read so far.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people joined Caroline and I for this week of fairy tales and symbolism. The most popular choices seem to have been the novels Love and The Magic Toyshop.
A big thank you to everyone who has participated, and if you haven’t done it yet, please add your link to Mr Linky here.
Thanks to Caroline@Beautyisasleepingcat, my co-host for this event. You can find a list with all the reviews in her wrap up post. I hope we get to organize more events like this together and I hope many of you will join us again.

Now I’m off to read Marina, a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón which I discovered this past weekend. So far it has echoes of Great Expectations and I’m enjoying it.

Have a great week, everyone!

Today is the last day of Angela Carter Week, an event I’m co-hosting with Caroline@Beautyisasleepingcat. Because of all the different time zones of all the participants and because, if we want to be accurate, this event ends at midnight on Sunday the 15th, the last post will be up tomorrow and will include the links to the reviews of all book bloggers who joined us in reading the work of this unique author.

I managed to finish Nights at the Circus today, but in all fairness, it wasn’t easy. What began as an intriguing journey into the fantastical world of Carter’s work with the stories in The Bloody Chamber, proved to be a different thing entirely with this novel.

The story begins with an interview. Sophie Fevvers (which is just another name for feathers) is a miracle of nature. She works in a circus as an aerialiste, displaying her talents with the flying trapeze and dazzling the world with her wings. Part woman, part bird, she claims to have been hatched and not birthed, and Jack Walser, a young American journalist sets out to find out the truth behind this incredible story.

“Is she fact or is she fiction?” is the aerialiste’s favorite slogan and together with her trusted chaperone/friend/foster mother, she spins a story that literally makes Walser dizzy. From being found by Lizzie on the doorsteps of a London whorehouse to a childhood spent playing Cupid for the customers, to working in a house with other girls such as Sleeping Beauty and the Wonder, through kidnaps and a train wreck, this story is a roller-coaster filled with so much symbolism it made my head spin. Fairy tale characters abound, there’s also a pig who can spell, tigers who can dance, monkeys who take matters into their own hands, a shaman, a clown who loses his mind during a show and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Carter crams every page with philosophy, symbols, and references to various literary works or authors including Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Dante. No paragraph is left free, no sentence untouched, and the story spins in all directions, here telling the tale of a character, here we find out about another, all linked and tied together to the mysterious bird-woman or the journalist who follows her across countries in the name of curiosity and later, in the name of love.

Almost nothing is what it seems here – Fevvers herself most of all. She is a “giantess” with a “big bosom”, blonde hair and blue eyes. She farts and spits and blows her nose with her fingers, drinks copious amounts of alcohol with the finesse of a drunken sailor, yet her vocabulary is only matched by her lust for money and that is great, indeed. Showered with gifts by admirers, invited to fancy diners, she is the wonder everybody admires, desires and obsesses over, but her calculated avarice and cunning saves her from more than one sticky situation.

I’m not sure if I liked this book. I certainly admire and appreciate the writing but certain passages I could have done without. The first part of the book – in which Fevvers goes down memory lane – was more interesting, and as for characters, I didn’t like any of them in particular. Reading this book was an odd sensation, and I’m beginning to think Carter works best for me in smaller chunks. Her prose is rich and abundant, a cornucopia of words spilling from the pages; her views on marriage, the freedom of women and the nuisance of men, quite obvious – sexuality, abuse of women, madness, fantastic elements, all are present or hinted at one way or the other.
While I did enjoy the nuances and musings, a few sprinkled here and there are fine, but a deluge is not, and at the end of the day I want to enjoy a good story without digging my way from under the symbolism. I am glad I read her work, even if it hasn’t made a fan out of me – not yet anyway (though I still think her short stories are great and would recommend them), I’m not sure if I would try and read any of her other books any time soon.

My rating: 3/5 stars
Read in June, 2014

This is my first contribution to Angela Carter Week, a reading event I’m co-hosting with Caroline@Beautyisasleepingcat.

The Bloody Chamber is a short story collection based on legends and fairy tales which take place in Gothic castles, great houses or dark woods, complete with grim surroundings, acts of cruelty and plenty of blood. Vampires and werewolves, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots, the tales remodeled, the protagonists are changed, not in name but in behavior.

The first story, The Bloody Chamber, is based on the legend of Bluebeard, the famous man whose brides meet a gruesome death when they disobey his order – never to enter the forbidden room, you may have the key but not his permission. The temptation is great and the new bride only finds what the price for her betrayal is at the end, after the act is done – the consequences are never articulated but rather shown. What is different with Carter’s approach is the power she invests in women which gives them a chance at salvation. This was my favorite story – a perfect combination of exquisite language, mystery, and a great ending that’s not exactly happily ever after but close enough.

I loved this line:

“…the unguessable country of marriage.”

The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride tell the story of “Beauty and the Beast” in a new way. While the first begins like the original story, and is of a more delicate, romantic nature, the second is brutal and horrific in its originality – the young girl has to face the Beast as one would a master, after all, her father had lost her at cards and she was now his property. It’s a battle of wits as the protagonists try to get what they want but find themselves surprised by the answer to their requests.

It was the strangest thing, reading this – I liked the story very much but when I finished the last sentence I realized it was not the first time I had read it. Does this mean I was so engrossed in the story it totally blotted out the memory of my first reading it? I hope so.

I liked this new version of Puss in Boots in which a poor young man falls in love with the beautiful young wife of an old rich miser who reminded me of Scrooge so much I could almost see his bony hands counting the coins, eating meager suppers and keeping his wife under lock and key, much as he did with his money. Puss is the narrator, which makes for an amusing point of view as he describes the things he does for his master, from stealing dinner to delivering messages, and planning some risky escapades.

The Erl King and The Snow Child were two very strange stories and I’m not exactly sure what to make of them.
The Erl King has ample references to Red Riding Hood but the story is so full of symbolism it’s almost like a riddle. Are the main characters people? I have my doubts. It feels more like a love poem to nature, the words rich and laden with subtle meaning which I can’t quite grasp.

The Snow Child begins with a wish made by a count who goes horse-riding with his wife, a wish for a girl “white as snow, red as blood, black as that bird’s feather.” While I liked the beginning of this story in which the man – and not his wife – wishes for a daughter, the ending had quite the opposite effect on me.

The Lady of the House of Love – this is a story I have read before and read it again this time and liked it just as much. A vampire story, but like with the other stories in this book, it’s not what one might expect. The decrepit old house with its old, time-eaten furnishings, a young woman – a vampire – living in seclusion, spending her long years dealing Tarot cards, trying to see the future which is always the same. Until one day it isn’t, and a young man comes to this forgotten place and of course, that changes everything.

In The Werewolf, an unnamed girl is on her way to grandmother’s house but she has to confront a wolf on her way there and that’s not the most interesting part by far. The girl is tough, in spite of her tender age, she can handle a knife like any hunter and she uses it; it’s a story in which the characters switch places and there’s a big surprise at the end which reminded me of another famous fairy tale.

The Company of Wolves is the story of a young girl and the day she leaves behind her childhood. Gone are the days of a Red Riding Hood skipping merrily on the path through the forest, picking flowers. There are no flowers here but a game of seduction where the prize is life.

Wolf-Alice is about a girl who spent her early years with wolves but she is found and taken away and sent to live with people. She goes to live with nuns and later on, with an old duke who’s not exactly human. It is a strange tale in which the wolf-girl does what comes naturally to her and in doing so brings back the duke’s mortality.

This was perhaps the strangest collection of short stories I’ve read so far, not only because the characters sometimes switch places, or the unguessed endings which came so suddenly it was delightfully shocking but mostly because of the language. I found The Bloody Chamber the most accessible and the best of the whole collection. In it, the right amount of sensuous, descriptive, romantic and also brutal and tender language is used to tell a story in which the woman is not doomed as an act of curiosity (a second chance for biblical Eve if you like) but she is saved and not by a knight in shining armor either.
The heroines are mostly young girls on the brink of womanhood, that time in-between filled with confusion, apprehension and sexual curiosity. The men are either beasts or helpless, and the women hold the power – a feminist approach if ever was one.

The writing is rich and intricate, perhaps a bit too much, like the lilies cloying the atmosphere with their perfume in The Bloody Chamber – at times I felt like being in a dense jungle without a machete to make my way through. While I can appreciate the opulence of the language, there were moments when I wished for a cleaner, less intricate way of telling the story.

My rating: 3/5 stars

Read in June, 2014

*

I’m now making my way through Nights at the Circus, a novel this time – I’m nearly 80 pages in and very curious about it and glad to see the luxurious language is not as thick as in the stories, something which I find more enjoyable. Hopefully I will finish it by Sunday if not sooner.

What are your plans for this week and if you’re taking part in this event, how do you like Angela Carter’s work so far?

Angela Carter Week is finally here. What started as a casual remark on Beautyisasleepingcat, one of my favorite blogs, led to a one week event co-hosted by Caroline and I, as part of the Once Upon a Time Challenge.
Here are the guidelines:

– The event lasts for a week
– Choose one of the two badges for your blog/website
– You can read/listen (to) anything by Angela Carter
– Leave a comment with the link to your review here or on Caroline’s blog (or both) at any time starting today until the last day of the event.

Anyone can join, just leave your name in a comment. You can find my intro post with a list of Angela Carter’s work here and a list of all the participants here.
For this week I plan on reading a short story collection – The Secret Chamber, and a novel – Nights at the Circus. I’ll post the review for the first sometime next week, and hopefully I’ll get to finish the second by Sunday, the last day of the event.
Thanks to all the participants for taking part in this. I look forward to reading your reviews!
Enjoy!

“Do you believe in fairies?… If you believe, clap your hands!”
J.M. Barrie

The seventh book I’ve read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge was Dreams and Shadows by C. Robert Cargill, a story in which fairies play an important part. After reading about djinni, golems and angels it’s the fairies’ turn, which, when I think about, I see Tinkerbell – fragile, tiny and mischievous.
The fairies in this book however, come in different shapes and sizes and they are far from being fragile and cute (some are, but not all). They live in Limestone Kingdom, a realm accessible only to their kind, and to those human children they have abducted. Ewan is such a child. Taken from his human parents from infancy, he grows up among the fairies, under the protection of Dithers, a monstrous creature whose job is to take care of the boy. In his place Dithers leaves a changeling, Knocks, an equally monstrous creature that can take the appearance of baby Ewan, and whose true nature is only visible to Ewan’s mother.

The boy Ewan and the changeling Knocks meet later on in Limestone Kingdom. A third boy, Colby, enters the story with the help of a djinn whom he meets while playing not far from his house. The djinn does what all djinn do, he gives the boy a wish and Colby wants nothing more than to see magical creatures. This way, the triangle is complete – Colby and Ewan become friends, while Knocks is the enemy, their paths crossing quite often, even after Colby leaves Limestone Kingdom and comes back to the human world. But the fairies have wanted Ewan for a very special reason, and unless Colby intervenes, the boy’s fate is sealed. The story follows all three of them into adulthood while Ewan becomes a rock star, Colby is haunted by his experience among the fairies, and Knocks just wants revenge.

I loved the first part of the book. The background story of Jared and Tiffany who fell in love, married and had baby Ewan, seemed like something out of a fairy tale. After their baby is abducted and the changeling left in its place, the author gives a detailed explanation of the creature who performed the exchange, a Bendith Y Mamau called Dithers, whose ugliness is matched by his ability to play incredibly beautiful music. Such breaks from the original story come here and there in the form of explanations of one Dr. Thaddeus Ray, Ph.D., whose excerpts from several of his books give details about the creatures of the Limestone Kingdom.

The story however, did not hold its magic sway over me. I found none of the main characters (the boys) particularly interesting and was a bit bothered by the way the female side was represented, either as innocent looking but actually evil, or as self-sacrificing mothers and lovers. This is definitely “a boys’ book” and it made me feel somehow left out, as if I was peering through a glass door instead of being invested in the story.
It did not help that the blurb at the back proclaimed it as “…definitely going to attract readers of contemporary fantasy, particular those who enjoy Neil Gaiman’s adult books.” Now I do love Gaiman’s work (not all, though) and while I do see a hint of Neverwhere in it – parallel worlds, the ability of some of the characters to cross from one world to another – the similarities end here.

My favorite parts where those excerpts by Thaddeus Ray I mentioned earlier, which goes to show I liked the background information more than the story itself.
Bonus point for the cover, which is really nice, and it reminds me of Shadow Show, which was what attracted me to the book in the first place. Or it may have been the word shadow in the title. A goodreads.com search revealed this is only the first book in a series and the second one is called Queen of the Dark Things – an intriguing title but I’m not sure if I’ll add that to my TBR stack just yet.

My rating: 3/5 stars

Read in May, 2014

I first saw this book on someone’s blog but unfortunately I have a bad habit of not writing these things down and I can’t remember the name of the blog. When I saw it at the bookstore days later, I grabbed it to read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge. Forty new fairy tales, and the list on the front cover gave the names of Aimee Bender, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Joy Williams, and Francine Prose, to name just a few. Oh, the sweet anticipation such a book can bring! I looked at it lovingly, relishing in knowing I had more than five hundred pages filled with magical stories.

I should probably state right now I enjoyed most of the stories in the book but not all. A couple of them I didn’t finish. There was something about the setting, or in some cases the wording, that just didn’t resonate with me. Some authors blended fairy tales with present day reality and in some cases I found the result awkward. Others succeeded in creating that seamless fantastical story that stemmed from something old and grew into something interesting. And on some of the stories I may have missed out simply because I wasn’t familiar with the fairy tale and felt like this was an impediment in enjoying the story.
What I liked were the explanations written by the authors at the end of each story – what fairy tale their story was based on and what inspired them to write it the way they did.
The stories I did like, however, were truly beautiful, and here are the best:

Baba Yaga and the Pelican Child, by Joy Williams

This was quite interesting, because I’ve come across a few Baba Yaga tales not long ago, in the Penguin Classics “Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov”, and while I didn’t finish that book, I read enough variants of it to make the whole story familiar. This version describes the house in the woods where Baba Yaga, her pelican child, a cat and a dog live together peacefully, until one day a stranger arrives and changes everything. He brings them sorrow, but fear not, the story doesn’t slide all the way into gloom; it also has a funny side and a more philosophical one. I loved it for the lesson it teaches and for this passage:

After this, Baba Yaga continued to fly through the skies in her mortar, navigating with her pestle. But instead of a broom, she carried the lamp that illuminated the things people did not know or were reluctant or refused to understand. And she would lower the lamp over a person and they would see how extraordinary were the birds and the beasts of the world, and that they should be valued for their bright and beautiful and mysterious selves and not willfully harmed for they were more precious than castles or the golden rocks dug out from the earth.

I’m Here, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Olga is a woman over forty who feels emotionally abandoned by her family and friends. In her attempt to recover a semblance of usefulness, she goes back to the house of her landlady, where she used to live many years ago. What she finds there, and the dialogue that follows gives the impression that something very strange is going on. The interpretation of the ending is up to the reader – because reality and imagination go hand in hand, it’s a bit difficult to choose a straight answer. A bit like the movie “The Life of Pi” – what was real and what wasn’t?
I liked it for the unexpected twist and also for this:

‘Baba Anya, I came out here thinking this might be the last refuge for me.’
‘There’s no such refuge for anyone on earth’, Baba Anya said. ‘Every soul is its own last refuge.’

The Brother and the Bird, by Alissa Nutting

This is a truly creepy story of a weird family manipulated by an evil woman. There’s also a juniper tree, a murder and a disturbing dream. This is the story that gives the name to the book:

‘My mother, she killed me’, the voice sang. ‘My father, he ate me. My sister, she saved my bones….’

Hansel and Gretel, by Francine Prose

The way this story starts made me feel curious and repelled at the same time. Curiosity won, so I kept reading. Hansel and Gretel (or Polly and Nelson) are newly married and visiting one of Nelson’s friends, an Italian artist named Lucia. She’s the mother of his former girlfriend, “the love of his life”, whom Nelson hasn’t seen in years. This makes for some awkward conversation amplified by the out-of-place behavior between Nelson and Lucia. Years later, when Polly comes back to the place for a visit, she is reminded of the whole experience and gathers a new understanding of what it means to be young and foolish.

‘At that time, I often did things because they seemed like a good idea, and I often did very important things for lack of a reason not to.’

A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin, by Kevin Brockmeier

Told from the narrator’s point of view, this was one very unusual and entertaining story. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is just that, half of somebody, and the way the story unfolds, you’d think this is the most natural thing in the world. Half of Rumpelstiltskin also has a job, goes out just like everybody else and has to face comments regarding his appearance.

In the shower, Half of Rumpelstiltskin scours himself with a bar of marbled green soap, a washcloth, and – for the skin of his extremities, as stubborn and scabrous as bark – a horsehair scrub brush. He lathers. He rinses. He dries himself with a plush cotton towel, sousing the water from his pancreas and his ligaments and the spongy marrow in the cavity of his sternum. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the only man he knows whose forearm is a hard-to-reach place.

The Color Master, by Aimee Bender

This is one lovely story which combines colors and textures into a beautiful re-telling of a fairy-tale in which a king wants to marry his own daughter. To celebrate the wedding, he asks for unusual clothes for the future bride – a dress the color of the moon, another, the color of the sun. These are not so easy to make, and the whole process is described – the selection of colors, the dying of the fabric, all supervised by the Color Master whose health is faltering. But there are other ingredients that go into these special clothes.

‘Remember, the Color Master said. She sat up, in bed. I keep forgetting, she said, but the King wants to Marry his Daughter, she said. Her voice pointed to each word, hard. That is not right, she said, okay? Got it? Put anger in the dress. Righteous anger. Do you hear me?’

Blue-bearded Lover, by Joyce Carol Oates

A very short but intense story, whose mystery pulled me in from the first sentence. There’s a poetry to the language, and a darkness in its words. Will the young wife open the door? Will she die like the others before her?

A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper, by Rabih Alameddine

A young girl on the brink of womanhood, sickness and sexuality are brought together in this story – a combination that works well to create a hybrid that serves not only to remind of the old fairy tale but to give it a twist that is truly modern and unexpected.

He seemed surprised at the lack of a response. I wanted to tell him that it was not his fault, that she had not wakened, had not moved, in a hundred years. I wanted only to save him time, to protect him from frustration. I wanted to tell him she was not the one for him, not at all. But he bent his golden torso and smelled her, inhaled deeply, and I almost fainted.

My rating: 3/5 stars

Read in April-May, 2014

The Once Upon a Time Challenge continues and I’m enjoying it immensely. The fifth book I’ve read for the challenge is Angelology and even though it’s over six hundred pages it was a pleasure to get myself lost in the story.

A young nun with an interesting family heirloom – a golden lyre pendant, an angel whose wings are marred by decay, a young man with ambition in his heart, and a secret that will bring them together and change their lives.
The story begins in the winter of 1945, when a group of angelologists find a most unusual body in a cave in the mountains of Bulgaria. It is an angel, perfectly preserved, as if he had just lain down to sleep moments ago. How that is possible is not explained right away but towards the end of the book the mystery is revealed.

Back in our days, we find out the story of Evangeline, a young girl growing up in Saint Rose Convent in New York. Her parents are dead, and she only has a lyre pendant and an old journal to remind her of them. She thinks her life will probably be spent among the nuns, but fate has other plans. In the convent library she finds mysterious letters, and when a young man named Verlaine comes to the convent and starts asking questions, things get interesting. Verlaine is working for Percival Grigori, heir to a famous angel family; Percival’s health is deteriorating and his once majestic wings are now reduced to stubs. He’s searching for a cure, a “celestial instrument” that is rumored to have the power to restore his magnificent wings back to their former glory. Celestine and Verlaine join forces, as it seems they have a common quest, but the discoveries they make threaten their lives and finally reveal the secret that Evangeline’s family had kept for a long time.

This book is a beautiful lesson in angel lore. Detailed descriptions of these magnificent creatures appear throughout the book, as the story of how they came to live among the mortals is explained. Mythology and religion are also mixed in the story, going back to the days when the sons of God noticed the beauty of the daughters of men and decided to take wives from them. This act results in punishment, as the fallen angels are cast into a deep cave, there to await the day of retribution. But they are trying to escape, and their descendants, the Nephilim, have grown powerful. Their influence is linked to major events in human history – the rise and fall of dynasties, the birth of science, the promotion of materialism, all this done to manipulate in order to control the people. The angelologists are their enemies, trained to protect the human race from falling prey to these ambitious creatures. It is a good versus evil battle, and the discovery of the famous celestial instrument could tip the balance.

The amount of research gone into the construction of this story must have been substantial. References include the myth of Orpheus, Noah’s story, the Sator-Rotas Latin palindrome (“a square used in angelology to signify that a pattern is present”) and various other biblical and mythological stories. I was impressed by the seamless way they were incorporated in the story, and captivated by the details.
I always find the names fascinating in a story and often wonder at their meaning – in this novel it’s quite obvious they are chosen to fit in with the theme: Evangeline, Angela, Celestine, Gabriella, Seraphina, Raphael.
Woven in this otherwise academic tale there’s also a great love story whose consequences reach deep across generations and gives the whole thing a more human flavor. My only issue was with the ending – it seems a little forced, as if nearing the grand finale the author wanted to make sure the reader is hooked into buying the sequel. Until then I had no idea this was just the first novel but my curiosity overcame this little annoyance and I would very much like to read what happens in the second volume called Angelopolis, although I suspect it’s not going to be as good as this one.

Some of my favorite passages:

Of course, they have also done a marvelous job of separating the intellectuals from the religious. They have made sure that humanity will not have another Newton or Copernicus, thinkers who revere both Science and God. Atheism was their greatest invention. Darwin’s work, despite the man’s extreme dependence upon religion, was twisted and propagated by them. The Nephilim have succeeded in making people believe that humanity is self generated, self-sufficient, free of the divine, sui generis. It is an illusion that makes our work much more difficult and their detection nearly impossible.

*

Addressing the creatures, his voice became commanding, as if speaking to animals. ‘Devils,’ he said.
This drove one of the male creatures from his lethargy. He wrapped his white fingers around the bars of the cage and pulled himself to full height. ‘Angel and devil,’ he said. ‘One is but a shade of the other.’

*

Their bodies were exceedingly lovely, so sensuous that a shock of longing passed through her. Yet even through the haze of her desire, Evangeline found that everything about them – from the way they stood to the immense span of their wings – struck her as monstrous.

My rating: 4/5 stars

Read in April, 2014

This is the fourth book I’ve read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge that is still running until the 21st of June. The first book was The Golem and the Djinni (and I liked it very much), and even though I don’t know much about jinni or djinni as Byatt calls it, coincidentally or not, here I am, reading a book that has this magical creature yet again withing its pages.

There are five short stories in this book. The first four are just that, short, but the last one which gives the name of this book is quite lengthy.

The Glass Coffin is about a tailor who goes out into the world to find his luck. He meets a little grey man who gives him shelter for the night in exchange for helping with house chores. The tailor cooks, feeds the animals who also live in the house, and in return for his good work and kindness, gets to choose one gift out of the three the little grey man is offering.

“You have chosen not with prudence but with daring”, says the little grey man, and the tailor sets off on his way. His choice will make him face a difficult challenge, but guided by optimism and courage, the tailor will have to let go of his fear in order to fully experience the life-changing adventure. He sees a beautiful glass coffin, has to confront an evil magician, and dispel a terrible curse. It’s a nice little story, beautiful and quite straightforward.

Gode’s Story is also about a man, this time a young sailor, who’s in love with the miller’s daughter. It’s a complicated love story, full of symbolism that would be difficult to explain without giving away too much. It reminded me of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, because it takes place near the sea and it involves a lot of waiting. I’ve enjoyed this as well but not as much as the first story.

The Story of the Eldest Princess is about three sisters, princesses “in a kingdom between the sea and the mountains”. One by one, they go on a quest to bring back the blue color of the sky which had changed to other shades. The eldest princess meets a scorpion, a toad and a cockroach on her way; she helps them and they return the favor. This has echoes of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but is also a story within a story and by the end of it I felt trapped, not knowing what to believe. The abrupt ending left me confused.

Dragon’s Breath is about a family with three children, Harry, Jack, and Eva, who grow up on tales about dragons. Life in their village is boring for the three siblings and they all dream of more exciting things, of adventures and castles and riches within their walls. And one day adventure comes but not in the way they thought it would, and it changes their lives and their perspective on things.

“Such wonder, such amazement, are the opposite, the exact opposite, of boredom, and many people only know them after fear and loss. Once known, I believe, they cannot be completely forgotten; they cast flashes and floods of paradisal light in odd places and at odd times.”

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye is the last story and it takes up more than half the book. I loved the first passage – a brilliant description of modern times told in a fairy tale way, one of those paragraphs that echoes in the mind for a long time after the story has ended. Its beauty spills into the rest of the story but somewhere along the thread of this tale I became bored and wished for something more exciting to happen. In a way I was like the three siblings in the previous story, impatient, wanting adventure, excitement. And just like them, I got my wish, but I had to wait a while.

This is the story of a woman narratologist, middle aged, successful in her career, who travels a few times a year to conferences where she meets like-minded academics and they listen to each other discourse on the history of fairy tales and legends and such. This is by far the most academic story in this collection – references and analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays, Greek myths, the “Thousand and One Nights” and the origins of various fairy tales made the story quite interesting up to a point. There are plenty of details that help make the reader familiar with the heroine’s life, her feelings, her hopes. There are also a few stories woven into this tale, of Patient Griselda, of Gilgamesh, bits of history about Turkey, where the woman visits for one of her conferences, and where she buys, in a bazaar, a curiously shaped bottle which she will later discover, houses a djinn.
The bottle could be made from “nightingale’s eye”, a famous Turkish glass from the 19th century, she is told, and because she is a collector of glass paper weights, she buys it. That’s when the real adventure begins. Her first meeting with the djinn involves a funny little part about a tennis match, which was quite amusing to read, and also endless philosophical discussions.

Byatt’s prose is anything but simple and in this last story its construction is intricate, layered, there are vivid descriptions of colors and smells, of sensuality, and it pulls the reader right in from the first sentence. It is also the kind of prose that you have to work for to fully appreciate, but the reward is well worth it. The beginning was interesting, but I felt a little disappointed with the way things were progressing. The appearance of the djinn brought back the interesting element and it never slacked off until the end. This was my favorite story along with The Glass Coffin.

“Being inside a bottle has certain things – a few things – in common with being inside a woman – a certain pain that at times is indistinguishable from pleasure. We cannot die, but at the moment of becoming infinitesimal inside the neck of a flask, or jar, or a bottle – we can shiver with the apprehension of extinction – as humans speak of dying when they reach the height of bliss, in love.”

My rating: 4/5 stars
Read in March, 2014

Fate is the second book in the Time and Light series. I quite enjoyed the first, Farundell, which I’ve read and reviewed three years ago and so I was looking forward to see what this one was about. Both of these books can also be read as standalone novels.

“What am I?
Not a ghost, though that is what most people believe. I am, and it looks like I shall forever be, Lord Francis Peter George St John Damory.
I was born more than two hundred years ago and although I am not strictly speaking alive, I am obviously not dead. My appearance is as I choose, though usually I resemble my old self. I was a handsome man; I enjoyed it then and I enjoy it now. I am not beyond vanity, nor any other trick or trap of earthly existence. My body is a simulacrum, as is my study, my fire, brandy, pen, paper.
I am an artist of the aether.”

It’s 1717, London, and young Francis Damory and his brother Sebastian are out on the town for a night of enjoyment to celebrate Francis’ 17th birthday, when they are attacked. As Francis lies in the gutter, he remembers the night of his eleventh birthday when he went sleepwalking through the rooms of Farundell and had a brief conversation with his great-great-grandfather, Tobias, whose life he knew very little about except for rumors that were quickly hushed up. Tobias had died a long time ago. Or did he?

So begins a lifelong obsession, as Francis sets up to find the elusive Tobias. As thread after thread unravels in his hands, Francis becomes more and more convinced his ancestor is alive. But how is this possible? Is he immortal or just a product of too many tales embellished over the years? And if he is still alive, where is he? Mysterious books with a rose and a cross on the cover, an enigmatic Contessa, a piece of paper leading to a secluded villa on a small island, and a key that would fit a special door, are just a few of the clues that lie scattered throughout the book like the famous crumbs in the forest. Picking them one by one, Francis travels from London to Paris and Venice, to Cairo and Constantinople, he buries loved ones, has children, encounters pirates, meets a sultan, and his life becomes interconnected with a variety of interesting characters – a friend who becomes an enemy, a famous castrato whose voice is the toast of Europe, a trusted servant, a string of lovers, distant relatives. And with each adventure he is getting closer, his curiosity driving him on, his need to know the single most powerful force in his life. Like a magnet, the elusive Tobias seems to be always one step further, his presence almost tangible, and Francis never stops pursuing him. His quest does end, only to be replaced by another, even more powerful, and Francis seems to never find peace, to always run after something only to discover yet another ramification at the end of the path he’s taken.

Most of the characters are endowed with beauty and great wealth; they flaunt a sexual freedom unrestricted by the rules of society. They live their lives passionately and some die violently – Fredericks does not shy away from killing likeable characters.
Descriptions of detailed anatomical procedures may be a bit graphic for some readers but I found myself fascinated by the details – the preserving of bodies, autopsies – the author writes about them not with a rough hand of someone seeing the cut flesh but with a certain respect and reverence for the receptacle of the human soul. The cravings of the body and the yearnings of the soul are on display and behind the many adventures of Francis Damory, lies a quest for something far more greater than himself. What he wants comes at a high price and there is no undoing.

Farundell was an interesting book but it felt a bit dispersed, in the sense that there were a few characters whose stories mingled together, while Fate follows Francis Damory and his ancestor Tobias, giving the narrative a more precise focus.
Reading this book reminded me of the Arabian Nights (from adventure to adventure, never ending) and Dracula (the quest for finding the immortal one, although there are no vampires in the story), and also of Anne Rice’s The Mayfair Witches series (experimenting with the purpose of creating an immortal being), all of them books I loved. There are also references to Greek and Egyptian gods, cats and temples, pyramids, and elixirs, a séance session complete with fortune telling cards – it helps if you’re familiar with mythology but is by no means a requirement to enjoy this book.

What I liked most about it was the sense of adventure – it had a good pace and an ongoing sense of mystery and the ending which is both satisfying and also made me want to find out more. I’m very curious to see if the third installment, The Book of Luce, out next year, will pick up where this has left off or if it’s just loosely connected to it.

Some of my favorite passages:

“The wine tasted strangely of roses; the cloth covering the table was embroidered with roses. As I watched, they twined and blossomed, releasing a sweet fragrance. I heard a sound like bells ringing, though the bell tower was long fallen. Isabel reached out and took my hand. Her gloves were embroidered with roses, alive and growing. I shook my head; the ringing faded and the roses stilled.”

“I took another bite. Yes, now I could taste the peach, the apricot. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “I didn’t know it was possible to combine two fruits in a single tree.”
“Oh yes, possible. Many things are possible if one has the time.”

“Precisely how I came to be stranded in this state is something I have not yet entirely understood, but there is no doubt that, as an experienced chemist, I should have known that the application of intense heat to a substance (my body) whose nature I did not fully comprehend was likely to have unexpected consequences.”

I’ve read this book for the Once Upon a Time Challenge.

Read in April, 2014

My rating: 5/5 stars