A Time in Xanadu raises some rather big questions. Where are we? How do we know? It contains powerful musings, written in a sparse and compact language. But beneath lie strange, eerie landscapes; “those white, strangely meaningless / days between Christmas and New Year.”

The questions raised concern travel, war, philosophy. The poem-stories take figures from avenues such as entertainment, history, mythology, and even comics, and use them as actors in the sometimes quite philosophical narratives.

The style and setting is distinctly Scandinavian, quite dark but even so with glimpses of humor. I like the collection a lot. It is, for me, a collection of poems to be read one at a time, at least twice, and perhaps even three or four times. My favorite is Centuries and Minutes – a poem for New Year’s Eve 1999. The poems, 84 in all, are highly evocative and very interesting.

Praise for A Time in Xanadu:

“Lars Gustafsson has an uncompromising vision of the utter complexity of modern life.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Gustafsson’s A Time in Xanadu, his third translated collection of poems, manages to be personal and quirky while also deeply philosophical.” —ForeWord

Links to books by Lars Gustafsson at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN, and in German: Auszug aus Xanadu.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The book is about a revolt occurring in the late summer of 1831. In a remote section of southeastern Virginia, the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery took place. The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner. He was an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nate Turner is based on an extant document, the “confession” of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race.

William Styron, of course, takes liberties with the historical Nat Turner. Nat Turner is a man whose life is undocumented, and so Styron created a life. And the book is on the whole fairly sympathetic to Turner, at the same time as it does not express such sentiments concerning Turner’s thoughts and ideas.

The book tells the story of Nat Turner and the uprising masterfully. But more than that; it is also a tale of some of the extremely agonizing and hard essences of slavery. Styron tells the story using the mind of a slave, and recreates and reconstructs masterfully in a way that makes this book a kind of literary history that conveys not only the facts but also the experiences of slavery. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution.

This is not a fun novel. Rather it is very dark, and full of ugliness and very negative characters from both sides of the divide. It is, however a very deep and penetrating novel, with excellent psychological analyses, that uncovers and lays bare motivations and shows in considerable detail some of the extremely dehumanizing aspects of the institution of slavery as it once existed.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a great story that still deserves to be read. It is a masterful novel, an important novel in American literature, and a book that will forever have a special place in the literature of the United States.

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. See also Bokkilden.no.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The stories are all very different from one another, and explore different types of sexual encounters and situations. For instance, A Model is a story of a young woman’s progress in sexual awakening as she works as a nude model. The Queen is a story of a Parisian artist in love with and inspired by a famous prostitute named Bijou. And The Runaway depicts a runaway young woman who is taken in by two men who both begin to train her in lovemaking.

The stories in this collection are Little Birds, The Woman on the Dunes, Lina, Two Sisters, Sirocco, The Maja, A Model, The Queen, Hilda & Rango, The Chanchiquito, Saffron, Mandra, and Runaway.

The writing in each of the stories is eloquent, steamy and sexy without being crass. All the stories are easy reads. This, plus the fact that the stories are written by a feminist author, makes Little Birds a very interesting experience into the world of erotica. I liked the stories and do not hesitate to recommend it for its sensual stories. It is an incredible collection.

Praise for Little Birds:

“[It is] so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude.” –Alice Walker

Links to books by Anais Nin at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and at Bokkilden, CDON og Tanum.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The very compelling tale of the Henry family, a North American family drawn into the very center of the war maelstrom, is a clever device for telling the story of World War II. The books capture the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War better than any of books I know of.

Herman Wouk is an exceptional writer. Wouk’s characters are real men and women – not larger than life as we find them in many historical novels. They live, breath and sometimes die.

Wouk manages to cover virtually every aspect of the struggle for world dominance that World War Two was. We follow Victor “Pug” Henry, a stoic Navy captain; his duty-bound son Warren, a Navy flyer in the Pacific; his formerly wayward son Byron, a submarine officer who marries the Jewish woman Natalie Jastrow in Europe. And we follow the Jewish Jastrow family and see – perhaps experience is a better word – the hardships of Jews in Europe, as well as the Holocaust – with their eyes. And using a fictional memoir of an imprisoned German officer, Wouk also lets us see the war from the German perspective.

Some of the reading is very chilling. Wouk’s stunning descriptions of Auschwitz and the “relocation plans” for Jews throughout Europe are the most realistic and engrossing descriptions of the Holocaust I have ever encountered.

The book is long and huge. Over one thousand dense pages. But I have rarely read a historical tale so moving, gripping and engrossing. At the same time it is very educational – I thought I knew a lot about the war but War and Remembrance told me how little I knew. And what a way to learn history! In a great, exceptionally well written and exciting book like this.

I am glad these books were recommended to me. The are both rare gems. Perhaps War and Remembrance even more so than The Winds of War. They are based on exceptional historical research, have finely developed characters and intriguing subplots – all wrapped in a compelling language and told with great compassion by a master story teller. A very, very satisfying read, and one which touched me deeply.

Links to books by Herman Wouk at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN. See aslo Bokkilden.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The book tells the story of Constance (Connie), a young lady who married Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917. Shortly after their honeymoon, he returned to Flanders to keep fighting in the World War I. When he returns home six months later he is paralyzed from the waist down. Connie remains at his side, but there is considerable distance between. Eventually Connie finds herself falling in love with Oliver Mellor, her husband’s game-keeper. He is crude and anti-social, and has an honesty and lack of pretension which Connie finds refreshing. He is also quite attractive.

This is not at all a dirty book. Rather it is a tender book with lyrical descriptions, but at the same time Lady Chatterley’s Lover is frank and explicit. The sex scenes are beautiful and not at all pornographic. Lawrence is more concerned with the emotional experience of sex than physical details.

The story in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is masterful at other levels as well – the book has accurate and very interesting descriptions of the class structure in England at the time, and with character descriptions that are very finely drawn.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an excellent novel that deals with themes of love, passion, respect, honor, and the need for understanding. It is a masterfully written and complex character-driven novel. Highly recommended.

Links to books by D.H. Lawrence at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

As many of the other most cherished books in world literature, Gulliver’s Travels is a book that has much to offer along several different dimensions. It addresses fundamental questions about humans and their societies, and brings a very satirical view of the state of European government, and of the petty differences between religions. As well, it asks the old philosophical question about whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted.

Gulliver’s Travels spins a compelling, wild, intriguing and challenging tale of one of the most fantastic voyages in classic literature. It describes the four fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a kindly ship’s surgeon.

In the first part of the book, Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on Lilliput, a strange land where the inhabitants are only 6 inches tall. Gulliver is a giant observing tiny people. There the rivalry between Britain and France is satirized.

Then he is marooned on the subcontinent of Brobdingnag where the inhabitants are giants. Now Gulliver is the tiny person in a land of giants, and he is exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In this part the insignificance of many of mankind’s achievements are there satirized.

And in the third part Gulliver is taken aboard the floating island of Laputa. Now Swift seizes the opportunity to satirize medicine and science altogether – Swift did actually not make up the crazy experiments he describes; they were all sponsored at one time or another by the Royal Society.

Finally, in the fourth part, Gulliver is marooned by mutineers in his own crew on the island of the Houyhnhynms. Here it is gentle horses who rule the land. Now Swift fires his parting shot at human society, and presents them in degraded form as the Yahoos.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has withstood the wear and tear of time and progress exceedingly well, in my opinion. It is a brilliant satirical adventure, and still a must-read for book lovers. An intelligent book with charm, whimsy and wit. A book that makes you laugh, as well as a book that makes you think.

Links to Jonathan Swift’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, Amazon CAN, Amazon DE, Bokkilden and Haugenbok.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Strange, yet appealing, Doghead follows three generations of a dysfunctional, odd Scandinavian family. Perhaps all lives are odd at close enough range, especially when you search for the strange stories and the unlikely event? I don’t really know the answer to that – but I do know that the three generations of this particular family has oddities for many, many normal families. Rather than a family saga, Doghead is a collection of family stories, told more or less chronologically.

Askild, the alcoholic grandfather who ran scams in and survived a Nazi concentration camp is the pater familias. Also, there is Jug Ears, the father in the family. He was forced to wear an armor-plated corset as a youngster. His mother, in consultation with a doctor, decided that was the best way to prevent him from touching his ears. As well, there is the often-present narrator Asger. As a child he derived his satisfaction from wrestling his obese, mentally somewhat challenged aunt.

These are some of the main characters. But the stories are even wilder than the characters. Admittedly, there is some daily, average, sane life there and there, but not so much. Perhaps even so little that as a reader you wish for a little more of it – to get a grip, to grasp the picture, to give perspective to the story.

The story starts out in Norway after the Second World War. The grandfather, Askild, has return from the camp in Germany and is hailed as a hero for striking a German soldier over the head with a stick, even though he did it to steal, not as an act of courageous resistance. But the public created the heroes they needed, and Askild was glorified as “the Carpenter”. But in the long, run of course, being worshipped as a hero for such a deed cannot lead to anything good. And indeed, in Doghead the skeletons soon start to clatter out of the closets, one after another.

Many have noted that there is a little of John Irving is Ramland’s writing. I think that is correct. Fur sure, he holds taboos in disregard and loves salty humor just like Irving. And the tale is, in many ways, quite as wild as some of the wilder by Irving. And the characters are odd too, like the child with ears that are so excessive that other children fill them with mud and tiny snails. Even so Doghead is not “The World According to Garp,” say, or “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” As opposed to Irving’s characters, who often live charmed lives, the Eriksson’s inhabit a world that is rather shocking and where even childhoods are brutal. There is little warmth and trust, and little reason to trust – instead there is cruelty, evil, adultery, duplicity and violence.

Doghead is a strange book. A dark book. I am not sure I liked it. But I will remember it. And I do think it is well worth reading.

Links to Marten Ramsland’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

In the tragic year 1929, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And the primary reason was this novel, which he started to write at the impossible age of 22, and published in October 1901, when he was only 26 years old. As the Nobel committee says, “principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”. And herein lies almost a logical impossibility: That an author, less than 25 years old, writes a novel which is not only stunning in its literary beauty and composition, tells an important and entertaining tale, and also contains a precise and correct description of the “zeit geist” of a class.

Mann wanted to write a book on the vast differences between the world of business on one side and art on the other, and present it as a family saga. He was, supposedly, inspired by the Grand Master of European literature, Stendhal’s (1830) Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics)).

However, Buddenbrooks ended up being something else. It became a novel that reflects and illustrates the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism in European literature, and which is, in fact, a little of each. A rich descriptive work, a saga mapping the lives of four generations of a wealthy Hanseatic family with complex and detailed character descriptions, intriguing in its use of symbols, with a subtle irony in its tone. It is – as evidenced in the subtitle of the book – The Decline of a Family – a tale of strength, decline, degradation and decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno, dies of a typhoid infection and with him, the family. Was it the negative influences of the artistic strain in the genes of the Buddenbrooks that explained the decline of the family business? Do art and business require vastly different abilities? What is the relationship of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben)?

Buddenbrooks was controversial at the time of its publication. When it was published, the book outraged the citizens of Lübeck. They viewed the book as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures, even though Thomas Mann never mentions the name of the city in the book. But the book, as we read it today, is much more than a vicious report about the decadence of bourgeois life in Leipzig – it is a many-sided, almost ambiguous work of art that also contains a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.

A true literary masterpiece that still shines in its richness and beauty.

Links to Thomas Mann’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The suggestively named Lee, as he’s called throughout, is a solitary Chinese émigré math professor at the end of an undistinguished Midwestern university career. He remains bitter after two very different failed marriages, despite his love for Esther, his globe-trotting grown daughter from the first marriage.

A Person of Interest starts with a bomb that explodes in the office of a very popular math professor. The professor, Hendley, occupied the office next to Professor Lee. Shortly after the bombing, a jealous, resentful Lee felt himself briefly thinking Oh, good. As a did-he or didn’t-he investigation concerning Lee, the novel’s person of interest, unfolds, Lee’s carefully ordered existence unravels.

Increasingly, chunks of his painful past are forced into the light. While a cagily sympathetic FBI man named Jim Morrison and Lee’s former colleague Fasano – who links the bombings to several other technologists – play well-turned supporting roles, Choi’s reflections from Lee’s gruffly brittle point of view are as intricate and penetrating as the shifting intrigue surrounding the bomb. The result is a magisterial meditation on appearance and misunderstanding as it plays out for Lee as spouse, colleague, exile and citizen.

Rumors spreading at the university among students and colleagues along with broadcasts by the media turn more and more ugly, and Lee soon finds himself suspected by everybody and rapidly becoming totally isolated and alienated. Personal flaws and minor errors that would have been inconsequential in a normal situation suddenly become ominous signs subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. Professor Lee’s life is turned upside down, and his chances of returning to a normal daily life dwindle by the hour. Along with this process goes ever increasing self-consciousness and self-loathing on the part of Lee.

Choi tells a merciless tale of Professor Lee, with a sardonic analysis of his anxiety, his shame, and his compulsive jealousy. It is a wonderful, deeply penetrating analysis that turns Lee into a living, real, frail human being you can almost touch.
Choi tells this complicated story with nuance, psychological acuity and pitch-perfect writing. In doing this, in A Person of Interest she also tells a larger story of paranoia in the age of terror and the smaller story of the cost of failed dreams and the damage we do to one another in the name of love.

Choi shows a remarkable talent and remains, more than ever, a writer of interest. A highly recommended book!

Links to Susan Choi’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Born in 1886, George Mallory was a brilliant student who became part of the Bloomsbury Group at Cambridge in the early twentieth century and served in the Royal Garrison Artillery during World War I. After the war, he married, and had three children. His passion was mountain climbing. Mallory once told a reporter that he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, “because it is there.” He tried two times and failed. Archer, in Paths of Glory, takes us all the way from George Mallory’s childhood, living in his father’s house, to the summit of Everest.

On his third try, in 1924, thirty-seven years old, he was last seen four hundred feet from the top. His body was eventually found in 1999. It is still a mystery whether he and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, ever reached the summit.

You may ask whether it is possible to write a book about this that will keep you glued to your chair, not wanting to stop turning the pages? Well, the answer is probably that it is not, unless the writer is Jeffrey Archer or some other equally talented master storyteller! The book is, in fact, evidence that it is possible.

Paths of Glory is an excellent historical novel. How much of the story is fact and how much is fiction I am not able to tell. What I do know is that the tale Archer tells is fascinating, persuasive, and extremely enjoyable to read. Great entertainment! Oh – and did Mallory make it? I recommend you read the book and find out for yourself!

Selected Reviews:

“Archer does eventually offer his opinion as to whether Mallory summited Everest, but by that point all but his most devoted fans will have fled the icy crags of this lifeless novel..” – Publishers Weekly.

“Although Archer’s prose occasionally feels flat and overly workmanlike, this quality is offset by the frequent inclusion of heartfelt and moving letters from Mallory to his beloved wife.” – Library Journal.

“The mountaineering sequences are marred by Archer’s apparent ignorance of the mechanics of climbing…nor are the characters especially compelling, since the author seems to feel no need to flesh out real-life figures. A bland yarn…” – Kirkus Reviews.

Links to Archer’s books: Archer at amazon US, Jeffrey Archer at amazon UK, and Jeffrey Archer at amazon CAN.

You can read more reviews Jeffrey Archer’s books at Leserglede.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.