Zadie Smith –White Teeth

White teeth is a thick book with a lot of colour. The main themes are the Stranger, History and Migration. Cultures clash in the British melting pot, where immigration, emigration, colonisation and heritage are by no means new. The creation of such a rich, diverse and profound cast is an impressive achievement. The writing is good, smart, young and british.
Reading the book made me feel like a stranger, having no experience with such problems of cultural confusion and alienation. It’s too far away for me to “get” it, and it becomes more a saga, a fairy tale than realism.
It is funny though, and I suppose that I am now better equipped for understanding these issues than before.
Memorable quotes:

“ ‘Where I come from’, said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’
‘Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean,’ said Samad tersely, ’that it is a good idea’.”
“Desire didn’t even bother casing the joint, checking whether the neighbours were in – desire just kicked down the door and made himself at home.”
“ ‘Being married to a Jamaican has done wonders for my arthritis.’ ”
“ ‘That girl swallowed an encyclopaedia and a gutter at the same time’ ”
“Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone lent him the words and made him swear not to break them.”

Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar

Here comes the gender perspective. If this book had been written by a man at the same time, there would have been nothing extraordinary about it; just a good novel. But the fact that it is written by a woman, from a female perspective, and at this time (1960s) makes it really interesting.
To my great pleasure, the writing and the phrases are immaculate. Many funny and granite statements to ponder and go “yeah, that was a good one”. There are no confusions, the prose is clear and liquid.
The story is of a girl who goes to New York to try to make it. Make it as a writer, but mainly just make it. Make her life. Make life into something that can be desired and held on to. But early on there is a slipping feeling to the main character, the adolescent drowning in a world that never sits still enough to be asked a question. Soon enough, there is too much to reach for and nothing to hold on to.
Memorable Quotes:

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. ---
I said, ‘Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs?’
The Rosenbergs were to be executed late that night.
’Yes!’ Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in that cat’s cradle of her heart. It was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomb-like morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.
‘It’s awful such people should be alive.’”
“With immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.”
“My favourite tree was the Weeping Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the spirit in Japan.
They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong.”

Katarina Wennstam – The girl and the guilt

The most horrible, horrifying book I’ve ever read. Katarina is a crime reporter who has written a formidable book on the enraging way that rape trials and investigations are conducted and the way rape victims are treated. The examples are many and gut-wrenching. Everyone should read this book, because the illusion of living in a civilised country with a justice system that works gets properly disbanded. I hate the men who rape. But I hate also the system that puts the victim on trial, that makes excuses for the perpetrator and all this for the worst crime imaginable. Or even, the most un-imaginable crime, because all through the book I find myself detached, separated from this reality by my own inability to imagine these crimes as a part of my world.
A more subtle tone in the book, a recurring chorus, hums a dark and sinister tune of how there still, in spite of, or aided by, the sexual liberation, exists a distorted and dangerous image of women and the female sexuality that can nurture the growing abuser and sway the judgement of our courts.

John Updike - Seek My Face (one)

John Updike – Seek my face
I started reading Updike because one of my friends says he’s his favourite writer. We’re not friends anymore, but that’s neither here nor there.
I feel I suffered through the book a bit. Not to my taste it is written as a whole, without breaks or chapters, without even any real brakes in the story. Just the old woman, talking to the younger woman, about the men and the Art. Boring, and tedious in itself. The very idea of writing this book seemed slightly ridiculous to me through most of it. Like a hunger strike on a tight rope.
But, in having finished it, I must admit that there was some subtle enjoyment in it. For it IS very well written, very secure in it self, and if it doesn’t sweep you along with it to any new and magical places, it gives you a comfy feeling like an old couch.