Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

I never really wanted to read this book but a long train journey and a lack of any other reading material led to it being ticked off the list. I questioned the motives surrounding the publication of Harper Lee’s follow up. It was suspicious that after a 55 year hiatus, the elderly author was wheeled out of her secluded, and most likely pleasant, existence to face the second bestseller storm she would encounter in her life. However, as To Kill a Mocking Bird is such a classic, I thought I would read Go Set a Watchman just so I could answer in the affirmative when asked if I have read it.

However, I didn’t get it.

About 200 pages in I was enjoying the retreat to Maycomb, Alabama. The drawling tones of the residents, the non-abiding auto-mow-bills and the slacks the grown-up Scout loafs about in - like a fictional Katharine Hepburn - opens the story up like a feature picture in waiting. I also admired the witty rural humour and eloquent language Lee put down with ease – words like “axiomatic” and “coterie” had me hastily reaching for the dictionary.

But, spoiler alert! It was the ending that I just didn’t understand and as I thought the publication of this book was fathomlessly pointless.

So Jean-Louise (Scout) finds out her father Atticus Finch is racist and this devastates her whole conception of the world and her memories of childhood. Her fiancé is also a racist and after engaging in a blow-out row with the both of them Jean-Louise decides to promptly leave Maycomb and never return. Her uncle then shows up, proceeds to beat her up until she is seeing stars, then he gets her drunk and THEN she decides to stay.

I’d love to throw in terms like “disillusionment” or “love of family” but instead I think I will forever view To Kill A Mocking Bird and Go Set a Watchman as two things that are part of the same story -yet completely separate - like the Jackson Five and Michael Jackson’s solo career, Grease and Grease 2, Dirty Dancing and Dirty Dancing 2… the list goes on. It’s a bit of a shame really.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an author who can make you cry with only two words – “iron bit”, “chokecherry tree”, “yellow flowers” and yet those two words can also haunt you like a powerful night terror, leaving you sick at the history they point to.

Set in the mid-1800s, in the last years of slavery, Beloved is a ghost story.

124 Bluestone Road, Ohio is troubled. Not in a spooky, spine tingling way but in the way a trauma shatters a home leaving its occupants broken.

In the first hundred words I found secreted amongst tangled phrases like “baby venom” and “lively spite” a wrathful poltergeist which the rest of the book tries to exorcise. In the final chapter there is no reequilibrium, no burst of clean sunlight or short plump woman crying “This house is clean!” Instead the feeling left in the house, and beyond, is that past demons have been dug up, unleashed into the world to rattle their chains into the present day.

Beloved is one of the most important books I think I will ever read. And I was disappointed to realise that after scouring the internet book lists for a suitable Southern Gothic, I never found it on a list. Toni Morrison’s use of the supernatural to stir up her character’s repressed memories, and the soul-breaking realities they echo is proof of the potency of the horror genre and the power of books themselves.

In Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favourite authors. Ever since I read the first page of Love in the Time of Cholera I have been enchanted by his lyrical style which infuses mystical tales with human eccentricities and sex.

 

One page written by Marquez says more than many authors say in eight hundred. His writing is like the yummiest richest cheesecake on the highest shelf of the bakery which you should only devour on special occasions.

I added In Evil Hour to my collection after discovering it in the basement of a vintage emporium. It opens up to a rain-soaked country town scarred by the memories of political upheavals and on the brink of another uprising. Townspeople awake each night to lampoons nailed outside their doors confirming shameful gossip of affairs and shoddy business deals involving donkeys.

 

While rain pelts down on the officials as they try to get to the bottom of the notices, the putrid smell of a dead cow in the river of the flooded town corrupts the air. Families wheel their belongings to higher ground and a circus visits the town.

While I wouldn’t be able to delve deeper into the political connotations of this novel, I again enjoyed the romance of the writing. The telegrapher taps out poems of love to a lady telegrapher in another town, the loud speaker of the overgrown open air cinema bounces of the walls of the church while the priest flicks through his prohibited movie list and the clandestine leaflets are found “mimeographed” on both sides.

It is part of Marquez charm that he can instantly transports you to the climate of a remote hilly Colombian town suffering from a heat-wave. Falling in line with the messages of the Autumn of the Patriarch this short novel breathes a hot breath of anger. While he himself admitted this was not his finest work, the voices of town’s populace is at times is confusing, it still stands above the finest work of other lesser authors.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was known as the Father of African Literature. His debut novel Things Fall Apart was published by the Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1958 and since then has been translated into 50 languages and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

I picked up my copy of the book at the recent West Africa exhibition at the British Library, a celebration of West African history and art. A first edition of the book was on display in a section devoted to African literature and again accolades shone down on Achebe.

Things Fall Apart is held up as a classic and when reading a classic you are expected to love it and I did. What I enjoyed the most was Achebe’s deliberate style of writing. It felt like every word had been thought out and measured. While the life of Umuofia was related, and Achebe described the food preparations by the women of the tribe, the meetings of the egwugwu* and the changing seasons, every word carefully was recited as if from memory, like a folktale passed on to generations.

It is evident from the title that novel is about the collapse of something. The precise oration about the tribe’s lives remains solid like the walls of their red dirt huts until a force comes into the village and shakes apart their structure. In the final chapter the tribe’s people language is berated for using “superfluous words” – a heartrending moment which encapsulates a breakdown in translation and understanding.

Simple yet provocative, the tale reads like an extended proverb. Although seemingly straightforward and easy to comprehend, it opens up a lot of questions.

*If you want a scare, look up some pictures of these!

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

The first few pages of the critically acclaimed Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett open with the principle character revealing their favourite breakfast foods. “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice”. Although I am partial to a banana, I don’t drink coffee. I find when I drink coffee it gives me a hyperactive interior monologue in my head for the rest of the day; a sort-of Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness, where I jitter about wondering, if like Mrs Dalloway, I should buy the flowers myself (I have entered a florist once in my lifetime).

So about fifty pages into Pond I decided that it would be better if Bennett’s character stuck to tea.

Tea wouldn’t result in a manic desire to place certain vegetables in certain bowls on certain windowsills. It wouldn’t produce a bizarre identification with the neighbour’s Portaloo and it wouldn’t create a wired isolated way of life which is unfathomable and completely unnecessary.

What I could glean from the book is that it is comprised of short stories voicing the musings of an unnamed woman who lives in a cottage on her own. The critics of the Literary Review claim Claire-Louise Bennett “privileges the modes of human experiences that are so often undervalued” – a real-world translation of this is that the author discusses the small things in life that often make up our experience, like tomato puree or broken cooking appliances.

I was ready to put this book down as literary guff until I came to page 65 to the story entitled “To A God Unknown”. The reclusive woman was reading in the bath. Reading in the bath is one of my all-time favourite things and as it happens I was reading in the bath at the time. The character had her window open to a storm outside and I thought the idea was so beautiful I wished it would rain so I could do the same.

I was following her train of thought for a few pages and then I got lost again.

I felt when I was reading this book that I was living inside someone else’s daydream. The daydream of someone I didn’t like very much. Just as I got settled I was jolted by the words like “kairotic” and “abnegation” that were dropped in the reverie’s rambling prose like status symbols. It was then I was aware that Bennett was talking and not the character and she was talking for a critical audience that wasn’t me.

The Land Where the Lemons Grow by Helena Atlee

Lemons and all things citrusy have been a career long obsession of Helena Attlee. The Land Where the Lemons Grow is a sort-of memoir of the garden historian’s quest to collect knowledge about the fruit cultivated in Italy’s landscapes.

You might think 247 pages of lemons might get a bit repetitive and on occasion Atlee’s mission is greeted with bemusement.  ‘Ah, the signora who wants to talk about lemons” says a guard to her outside the Boboli Gardens, in Florence. However, the little yellow fruit has a curious and bizarre set of family members which Atlee also gets to meet. Blood oranges, sour oranges, citrons, bergamot, esrog and budda’s hands are all part of the lemon family tree and all have a distinct heritage and unique properties.

The purple flesh of blood oranges, for example, is rich in Vitamin C and can help weight-loss - despite a person’s diet! Beragmot oranges are known as “green gold” and the oil they produce is highly valued by the perfume industry. While esrog, a yellow citron, is lovingly harvested every year for the Jewish community who accept only the purest and unblemished crop.

I wish I had this book when I was last in Italy. It is an excellent piece of travel writing. Atlee discovers botanical museums, gardens and festivals which celebrate citrus and she helpfully provides a list of in the back pages. Up until now I had not heard of The Battle of Oranges, a “food fight” which takes place every year in Irvea and has its roots in the town’s medieval past.

The fascinating history behind citrus is also related in a light and tantalising way. Franciscan monks grew potted trees in their monasteries, British naval sailors had lemons added to their daily rations while the next time I add lemons to my shopping basket I will be thinking about how the Sicilian mafia formed in order to control the thriving island’s lemon trade.

Finally the culinary uses of citrus are obviously an important part of the story. Recipes for pasta, cocktails, salads, cakes and candied peel make up segments of the book’s chapters and Atlee skilfully describes intense bittersweet flavours that fizz on the tongue.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a piece of lemon drizzle cake, drinks hot water with a slice or is partial to a bit of limoncello. The book has deepened my understanding of the fruits which speckle the landscapes of Lake Garda, Sicily and Calarbria and Helena Attlee is the perfect tour guide.