This time around I actually managed to finish the main selection for this month. Perhaps the subtle pressure of being the May chairman had something to do with it!?
Flave
I selected The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie because it had gotten a lot of attention within the mystery reading community when the book came out in 2009 and it was on my “to be read stack”. Many authors have benefited from such attention and their series were off and running. Apparently Bradley has agreed to 3 or maybe it is 5 more books to complete the arc of this story.
Not really sure why by the end I was indifferent. Perhaps because it didn’t really matter that Flave was 11-years old. Had I gotten tired of her riding her bike around the countryside. Had I gotten tired of passages like the following:
I hated Mrs. Mullet’s seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so, I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, “will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?” (p. 49)
The villagers still held novenas to pray she wouldn’t come out of retirement. (p. 62)
Seconds later the two of us were doubled over, hands covering our mouths, hopping about the room, snorting in unison like a pair of trained seals. (p. 90)
Years of practice-come hell or high water-have given her the left hand of a Joe Louis and the right hand of a Beau Brummell (or so Daffy says). (p. 104)
“What’s up, Dogger?” I asked lightly, trying to make it sound a little bit – but not too much – like Bugs Bunny. (p. 110)
One moment his cheeks were puffed out like the face of the winds that blow across medieval maps, and the next they were as hollow as a horse trader’s. (p. 176)
Charles Darwin had once pointed out that the fiercest competition for survival came from one’s own tribe, and as the fifth of six children – and with three older sisters – he was obviously in a position to know what he was talking about. (p. 224)
While clever, funny and creating a tone, could an 11-year really be in possession of such information. Okay it is fiction, maybe it does not matter. Just let it go and enjoy the affect. But then my practical side surfaces and I think, okay how can this knowledge be explained: she listened to the radio, Flave has been reading since she came out of the womb, they have a subscription to every newspaper printed in Britain, there is one or maybe many amazing libraries in this house, etc. Hmmmmmm?!
And now for something completely different. If you were wondering about that composition of Peitro Domenico Paradisi “Toccata” that Flave waxes on about on page 105 “the greatest musical accomplishment in the entire history of the world…” Click on this link http://www.ilike.com/artist/Pietro+Domenico+Paradisi/track/Toccata+in+La .
I was pleased to know that all my movie going and TV watching has not been in vain. I got the reference on p. 283. “Too late! Too late! The maiden cried. Curfew shall not ring tonight!” Remember that scene in Desk Set when the computer, EMMARAC, is printing out all the stanza’s of the narrative poem “Curfew must not ring tonight” and Catherine Hepburn’s character, Bunny Watson, is quoting from memory? See all experiences will eventually be useful and dare I say “connected”.
So did I like anything? Yes I like the embryo relationship presented between Flave and Dogger, which I assume will continue in all the books. Dogger appears to be the only one who is really looking out for people in the house. Which reminds me, what was that long chapter with the Father unburdening himself, in the prison cell? Doesn’t he spend the rest of the book behaving like a hermit, a recluse, a non-parental unit? Also I was completely charmed by the nicknames of the other two sisters: Feely for Ophelia and Daffy for Daphne.
My Vote: BORROW IT!
Paloma
Much less to say about The Elegance of the Hedgehog because I have not finished reading this book. And now I have to admit to skipping or at best scanning the “philosophy” chapters. What can I say? I am a gal who is all about the characters in the story!!!
My Vote: BORROW IT!
Oh, this is going to be so easy. I can comment about a book I read many months ago, and since (to my knowledge) none of you have completely read it yet or even read it at all, no one will be the wiser about whether I'm making pithy, intelligent observations or am completely full of myself, spewing baseless platitudes.
ReplyDeleteI initially hated this book--it was recommended to me by a friend in Detroit who hadn't read it yet but said that her truly wonderful 90-year old mother (a free-thinking single mother who had a big impact on me as a young kid) had loved it.
It was this book that led me to the invention of the Lavatory-as-Library concept. Since I wasn't making much progress on it, I tucked it tidily behind the grab-bar near my toilet (which has evolved into a magazine rack) and only picked it up when I was visiting the loo.
Miracle! Because it contains a bunch of very short chapters, you can knock one off easily in 5 minutes or so. And all of sudden, I found myself really enjoying the book, even the philosophy discourses, although I didn't really treat them with the respect they probably deserved.
Now that I think of it, there is a long tradition of adult fiction with a smart loner-type kid as the main character--To Kill a Mockingbird, for starters, and several mysteries I've read recently (What Was Left) and a charming quirky one called The Incredible Lightness of Scones. [OK, Susan, back away from your tangent and return to the topic at hand.]
So, ultimately, I ended up really enjoying it, which was a relief, because my Detroit friend and I were reading it at the same time, and I didn't have to tell her I thought her mom's taste in books sucked!
If this helps get anyone interested, there is a big twist at the end that I fully didn't expect.
And what starts out seeming to be a kind of dark story of random unhappy people on the fringes of the social pecking order turns out to be an exploration of the kinds of unlikely connections that can develop and pull people out of their isolation.
Keep reading if you're so inclined--it really grows on you. I promise.
Such divergent views! And I have to agree with both of you. Part of the time I disliked pretentious Flavia and her bike, but then I would get hooked and keep reading. I have to say it was quite a good light distraction as we sat with Al in the hospital. The quick discrete chapters did make for easy reading.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed that the father's unburdening of his soul went absolutely no where. What good is catharsis if you return to your cave?
I can't say I was surprised with the bad guy - his lurking around was too much of a give-away.
Rating - borrow it.
First off: is there a sudden glut of adult novels featuring pre-teen heroines? This is the 3rd one I’ve read this year, each of them hugely charming: in addition to our book this month, there’s What Was Lost (Catherine O’Flynn), The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (Alexander McCall Smith), and The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery). I’m feeling even older than usual!
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with our Ms. B’s observation that a little bit of Flavia goes a long way. She’s really perfectly captured as a smart-aleck 11 year old but smart-aleck 11 year olds get tiresome fairly quickly. About a third of the way through the book, I noticed myself beginning to feel sorry for the sisters she so freely maligns. A shift from identifying with the main character to wishing she’d be nicer to people probably isn’t the effect the author intended.
It’s a first novel and very cleverly written, but maybe the author is still figuring out how to portray his characters—it’d be interesting to see if Flavia becomes more sympathetic and less of a know-it-all in later books.
Actually, in THIS one, she moves fairly quickly from quirky to bratty—she’s a ‘50s British pre-teen version of a Mean Girl. She’s poisoning her sister, and seems unconcerned about the likely ramifications (granted, the book opens with her sisters tying her up and locking her in a cupboard but they should have known she was smart enough to quickly extract herself, as indeed she did.
Still, I couldn’t help loving how snide she is about her family: I wish at the age of 11 (or even at the age of 64!) I was snarky enough to call one of my siblings “the Devil’s Hairball”!
What I really DID like was the geeky science-kid aspect of her personality—she is fascinated with chemistry and spends a fair bit of time thinking up ways to poison her sisters and other “enemies” — at the beginning of the book, she describes herself as “a long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection”. This is reasonable thinking for a child, even if the wording is kind of more like Shakespeare than the way an 11 year old would speak.
What’s interesting is how the events of the book force her to see intentional murder not as something she enjoys planning but as something profoundly life-shattering. She begins to see how her mother’s death affected her father/her sisters/herself. She learns from her father about how the (alleged) suicide of a teacher has haunted him for decades. She finds out that the family handy-man saved her father from a crazed soldier who was trying to kill him during the war and has had “spells” as a result of his war experience ever since.
In a sense, she stops seeing murder as a mere intellectual pursuit and starts to grow up by experiencing it first hand--by learning the details of the suicide that her father witnessed when he was a schoolboy and when she herself is left for dead by the man who turned out to have murdered the teacher 30 years before.
There’s a nice symmetry in the structure of the book—it opens with her having been tied up and locked in a cupboard by her sisters and ends with her being tied up and locked in an abandoned underground pit. The experience at the beginning of the book is light and amusing and she escapes easily within minutes like an 11-year old Houdini, defeating her sisters’ efforts to pay her back for her on-going acts of mischief. In contrast, what she experiences at the end of the book is painful and horrifying.
I know that the author plans a series of books featuring Flavia—let’s hope he allows her to grow and evolve rather than to remain the smart-aleck-y little brat that she often was in this book.
Final opinion: entertaining, not life-changing. Rent it unless you have an unlimited budget for books!
Flavia: I had such a hard time with this one ... love it, hate it, love it, hate it. I liked the character for the most part ... she's a brat but a lovable brat.
ReplyDeleteI thought the science part was an interesting device but just a little too overdone. The fighting with her sisters made me sad ... was hoping for a reconciliation (wish the blog had spell check) but figured that it's planned for future books.
It read like a children's book ... at least that's the excuse I gave for the loose plot.
I did not hate it but do not plan to read the rest of the proposed series.
Paloma: can't get myself to start it because of issues with Flavia. I'll try the Susan method but worried that I'll get frustrated and throw it into the toilet ... oh wait, can't do that with library books.
Having said all that, I am still happy about the book club ... one of my main goals was to get myself to read books that I wouldn't otherwise choose (see Susan's book club post).