“What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onwards with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future” so wrote Iris Murdoch in 1954.

Fascinating novella, never tought of Goethe as a “page turner”. But what a disappointing finish.

I was in a foreign country and this was the only book available at the time, so I read it from cover to cover… it took me weeks. There is a lesson for me here: never travel again without options. This seems to be a cult book, well… different strokes for different folks. I’m staying well clear of both writers from now on.

I had to give this one up. I’d rather carry on looking up in blissfull ignorance than to go through this load of waffle.

I usually enjoy stories about immigration and growing up in a different culture but this was not that great. Each chapter starts with some witty remark or interesting phrase, sadly in most cases I found the chapter title more interesting than the chapter itself. It’s about this child from a West Indies background growing up in Manchester in the 60s.

This was excellent, a real page turner. The second movement was a bit too slow, but still.

At first the story was interesting but after page 150 or so it got very repetitive. Man keeps travelling in time and visiting his wife (and himself) at different ages. They take turns to tell the reader ALL about they empty lifes in great detail: what they eat, wear, how they have sex (what goes where), the name of the streets they drive through, the restaurants they like to visit, how well-read and cultured they both are etc. Narrative of both characters reads equally the same, despite both coming from very different backgrounds. If their names were missing from the start of the chapter the reader coulnd’t tell who was narrating the story. Characters were dull selfish and pretentions; midway through this book I couldn’t care less about their fate.

Diverssante y interetido :)

Rubbish. I could not finish this drivel.

This book won the commonwealth prize for best first book. Inspired by the building of Haweswater reservoir, this novel deals with the effects of this project on the small communinity that has to move to make way to Haweswater.

The dialogs are written in a way such way to transmit the local accent: “Git yasil’ inside fust. ‘Twasn’t easy, all tell y’that fer nowt” etc. I find this a bit annoying. I was reading the reviews at amazon.co.uk (everyone seems to love this book!) and one reviewer was enchanted by Sarah Hall’s use of figurative language. The constante use of metaphors and similes was a bit too much for me.

I wasn’t enjoying this book very much but persevered to the end – big mistake, the ending is really awful. This book is a downer.