Orange January: Month in Review

I think I set myself up for disappointment. I so thoroughly enjoyed the books I read last year for Orange July that I psyched myself up for Orange January, but atlas it was not meant to be, and I think I am partly to blame. Last year, I went through a list of all of the books that had ever been nominated for an Orange Prize, read the synopses and then selected four books that I thought sounded interesting. This time around, I read all of the books that made the 2011 Orange Prize Short List - no picking and choosing.

Last year, two of the four books I read for Orange July made it onto my 5ers list, this time around only one of the six books I read is getting that special distinction.

Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud was a huge disappointment. There was no climax and Grace's narrative, though very informative, was missing heart and emotion. The Tiger's Wife (winner of the 2011 Orange Prize), Great House, Annabel, and The Memory of Love were all great works of fiction but they seemed to be missing that special ingredient that takes a book from very good to amazing.

Room by Emma Donaghue made it onto my 5ers list, and thus is the novel I think should have won the 2011 Orange Prize. Room was really easy to get into and very relevant with all of its similarities to the various high-profile cases that have made international news in the last couple of year. Donaghue's decision to tell the story in the voice of a very smart five-year-old boy is genius. It made all the difference in what would otherwise have been a very depressing story.

Do you know Orange?
The Orange Prize for Fiction  was set-up in 1996 to celebrates full-length works of fiction written in English by female authors around the world.

The Memory of Love

From the book cover

In contemporary Sierra Leone, a devastating civil was has left an eerie populace with terrible secrets to keep. In the capital hospital, Kai, a gifted young surgeon, is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole, a man who was young during the country's turbulent post-colonial years and has stories to tell that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect in the buzzing city, Kai and Elias are drawn unwittingly closer to Adrian, a British psychologist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories.

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This review contains spoilers.

Aminata Forna's The Memory of Love made the 2011 Orange Prize Short List, and is an 'Essence Book Club' recommended read.

I so want to add this novel to my 5ers list - but I can't.

Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome book; the subject matter is compelling, the writing is intelligent and the main characters are dynamic, but the plot really dragged at times. It took me a good 200 pages to really get into the stories (there are 445 pages to this novel).

The first chapter opens with Elias Cole, pre-hospitalization, reminiscing about the first time he met his future wife, Saffia. Eventually, he tells the rest of his story to Adrian as the novel flashes back and forth between the present and the past.

The book gets its name from Kai's feelings for ex-girlfriend, Nenemah/Mamakey.

The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love. p. 185

One of the reasons I'm disappointed that I can't add this book to my 5ers list is the many strong lines and passages. Here are a few of my favourite lines/passages from the novel:

This first line is spoken by a native Sierra Leone psychiatrist (Dr. Attila) during a conversation with Adrian regarding Adrian proposed treatment plan for some of the resident of the mental hospital he manages:

'This is their reality. And who is going to come and give the people who live here therapy to cope with this?' asks Attila and waves a hand at the view. 'You call it a disorder, my friend. We call it life.' p. 319

Adrian after Mamakey dies during childbirth:

He knows what he is doing. He's already bartering with God, making offerings. It is for just such times that humankind invented gods, while hope still exists. When hope disappears, men don't call for God, they call for their mothers. p. 419

Adrian two years after Mamakey's death:

Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living. p. 439

Shortly after this last excerpt, we find out that Kai is raising Adrian and Mamakey's daughter - the one she died giving birth to! If Adrian loves her so much, wouldn't he want to raise their child? This development was unreal for three reasons:

1) Why would Kai want to raise his ex-girlfriend's child with another man. I get that she's the love of his life, but it still doesn't add up.

2) Given the great love that Adrian is suppose to feel for Mamakey why would he consent to another man raising their child?

3) Adrian expresses so much remorse at not having convinced Mamakey to leave Sierra Leone, why would he then leave their child there?

On to the characters...

I know I said earlier that the character are dynamic, let me clarify. Aminata Forna has done a fabulous job of creating characters that jump off the pages, part of what makes them so real is the fact that they are not all likable. Kai is the only main character that I can stomach. Elias Cole and Adrian appear to be the same character in different circumstances. They are both jealous, selfish and fickle.

Elias covets his friend's wife, only to embark on a long term affair once he is married to her. Worse yet, he's an opportunistic coward, who always shifts responsibility for his actions onto the establishment or someone else.

Adrian is remarkably slow for a psychologist, he fails to make a lot of obvious connections. It's hard to believe he is trained to decipher people's feelings and read between their emotional lines. Also, his selfish disregard for the wife and daughter he left in England is shameful. Adrian's sole redeeming quality is his ability to listen to victims and villains and remain non-judgemental.

This lack of judgement is one of the reason's I so yearn to put The Memory of Love on my 5ers list. Aminata Forna refrains from preaching, lecturing or judging as she shares the stories of the men who committed atrocities, and the women and men who suffered through the atrocities. She allows us see the human side of these 'villians.'

I will definitely be reading The Memory of Love again. If you have not read it, I highly suggested you read it. It's one of the most meaningful books I have read to date.

4.5/5

The Tiger's Wife

From the book cover
In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death. Searching for clues she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with "the deathless man." But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her - the legend of the tiger's wife.
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Téa Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction.

The Tiger's Wife is a book best savoured. Rich themes, mythical ideas and subtle yet purposeful writing make this the type of novel destined to be studied in some university English one day soon.

The Tiger's Wife is such a patient and luxurious read, it's hard to believe it's written by a 25-year-old. In the exclusive interview at the back of the book, author Jennifer Egan comments on Obreht's strength and willingness to leave things unsaid (a skill she herself was unable to master in her 20s). Obreht explains that as a reader she prefers to figure things out for herself and so she struggled to give her readers an active reading experience where everything is not explained 100 per cent.

This is my biggest issue with The Tiger's Wife.

I missed the information that was unsaid. One of the missing pieces that kept nagging at me was what happened to Natalia's father. At one point we almost find out when the guy from the draft comes to investigate their household and asks her grandfather about his son-in-law.

War is ever-present in this novel. The only war that is given a name is World War II, which takes place when the narrator's grandfather is a young man. Other wars are mentioned but not by name so it's hard to say which Baltic country this story takes place in. This doesn't bother me so much because I'm not familiar with the geography of that region or the history. But, I imagine this will bother a lot of people in the Baltics once it's translated.

Overall, The Tiger's Wife is definitely a strong novel worth reading. I don't feel like I got everything there is to the story so I'll definitely be reading it again.

The main themes are war, storytelling, myths, family and death.

4/5

Grace Williams Says It Loud

From the book cover

This isn't an ordinary love story but then Grace isn't an ordinary girl.

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Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says it Loud made the 2011 Orange Prize short list.

Grace Williams is a 'spastic'; she was born with developmental challenges and various physical disabilities including a cleft lip, an over-sized tongue that sometimes hangs outside of her mouth causing excessive salivation, and one leg longer than the other. At the age of six, Grace contracts polio, resulting in the paralysis of her right arm.

At the age of 11, Grace is placed at the Briar Mental Institute. Grace's love story starts shortly after she arrives at the Briar and meets Daniel, a charismatic epileptic who lost his arms in a car accident.

I was disappointed by this book. It lacks a climax and Grace's narration is very detached throughout 75 per cent of the novel. There are novels where a detached narrative works, but Grace Williams isn't one of them.
Don't get me wrong, Grace is a very observant narrator. She does a great job of giving the reader a unpolished look at the routine degradation of living in a third-rate institution between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s, but something is  missing.

I think I expected more love story. It would have been nice to have more time spent exploring Grace and Daniels relationship. I was really yearning to see them away from the institution. I was hoping they'd move out on their own into some kind of independent living program or maybe Grace would get pregnant.

Either of the above scenarios would have help to move things along. As it is, this story really drags. I had to enact my 'you start it, you finish rule.'

2.5/5

Room

From the book cover

To five-year-old Jack, room is the world...

It's where he was born. It's where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack's imagination - the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma's clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it's the prison where she's been held since she was nineteen - for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-eleven-foot space. But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely...

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Emma Donoghue's Room made the 2011 Orange Prize Short List.

The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote English works of fiction by women around the world.

It didn't take much to get me into Room. Its similarities with the high-profile Jaycee Lee Duguard case can't be ignored. When I initially read the book cover, I was a bit concerned about the story being told from the prospective of a five-year-old, but I think the technique is a stroke of genius on the part of Emma Donaghue. By using Jack to tell the story, the readers get to skip over the boring details and she's also able to inject a little bit of levity to a very sad story.

Jack, the five-year-old narrator, is no ordinary five-year-old. He's in turns extremely smart and naive about the world outside of his room and socially an infant. His intelligence is the type the comes from having a mother who's spent five years completely devoted to nurturing his body and mind as much as possible in a 11-feet square soundproof garden shed, with a sunroof being their only source of natural light.

The book is divided into five chapters, the first two document Jack and his Ma's time in their backyard dungeon, the third documents their escape and the last two their time adjusting to the outside world. I found the first two chapters really engaging, the third chapter was the typical action sequence climax and the last two chapters were a bit of a let down with the stereotypical characters one would expect in such a story.

 5

Great House

From the book cover

For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away.
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This novel is divided into two parts, with four very long chapters breaking up each part. Because the chapters are so long and a new narrator is introduced in each chapter, during the first part, there is a feeling of reading a series of short stories with only the desk connecting most of them. I say most of them because the desk isn't mentioned in the chapters titled "True Kindness."

In these chapters the narrator is an old man who has just buried his wife and his now dying himself. The chapters are written as a conversation between himself and his youngest son, whom he's always been somewhat estranged from. This son was at one time an aspiring writer, that seems to be the only connection with the ongoing theme of writing. I don't quite understand why these chapters are included in the novel.

All of the main characters and narrators of the chapters are very intriguing; each chapter could easily be developed into a standalone novel.

I really enjoyed the tone of this novel, but I can't help feeling that I've missed a lot of meaning behind the stories and thus will probably have to read it a second or third time in order to fully understand all of the strands. After my first read, I'd say Great House is as much about the great desk as it is about memory.

4/5

Annabel

Kathleen Winter's Annabel made the 2011 Orange Prize Short List. The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote English works of fiction by women around the world.

In March 1968, a baby is born to Jacintha and Treadway Blake  in the small Labrador village of Croyden Harbour. To almost everyone present at the birth, the baby appears a normal, healthy boy. Thomasina Blaikie, a close friend of the family and the midwife, is the first to notice that the baby has a penis and a vagina.

Treadway decides the easiest course of action is to name the baby Wayne and take him to the Goose Bay Hospital to have the necessary surgery so that he can be raised as a boy. Thomasina and Jacintha are not sure that this is the right course of action but go along with this plan, so Thomasina secretly baptises Wayne with the name Annabel, and Jacintha nurtures his feminine side when they are alone.

Wayne does not find out about his condition until he is 12 years old.

The theme of bridges is a natural fit in this story. Wayne is a lover of bridges. To be on a bridge is to be in the middle of two places, not completely in either location. Just as Wayne is neither fully male nor female.

There are a lot of things to love about this novel - it's gentle treatment of a taboo topic, the strong characters, the fact that it's set in a small Canadian village are just a few.  But, the thing I enjoyed most, was the fact that it is about sex without being overly sexual. There are a few shocking moments that may have caused a less talented author to falter, not so with Ms. Winter.

My only complaints surrounds Wayne's reaction to his situation. It seemed unreal,  he doesn't display any shock or anger on several occasion when it's seemed only natural that he would. Even after he's viciously assaulted he doesn't seem to feel the humiliation his father imagines him as having suffered. Perhaps, all of this is just part of him being naive.

4/5

Orange January

I'm starting 2012 off with six novels that are almost gauranteed to be fabulous reads. After all, they were nominated for the 2011 Orange Prize. Although I only started paying attention to the Orange Prize last year, I've yet to be disappointed by a Orange Prize book, winner or nominee.

The Orange Prize for Fiction celebrates full-length works of fiction written in English by female authors. I'm not sure what order I'll be reading but, if any of the books catch your fantasy, read it and leave a comment.

Without further ado, I present the books I will be reading for Orange January:




Great House by Nicole Krauss



Annabel by Kathleen Winter



Room by Emma Donoghue

Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson

The Memory of Love  by Aminatta Forna

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht