It’s over. It’s been an interesting adventure and I almost didn’t finish, I really had to rush through the last book. And now the Expanding Horizons Challenge, my very first book challenge, is over. It’s been fun, but above all it’s been interesting and full of new things to learn. Here’s a final wrap-up.

Books I’ve read for EHC:
Asian: Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.
Indian: Anita Nair, Mistress.
Latin American: Jorge Amado, Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon.
Middle Eastern: A.B. Yeoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium.
Native: Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider.
African: Denis Guedj, Les cheveux de Bérénice.

Other books I’ve read because of EHC:
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies.
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide.
Amin Maalouf, The First Century After Beatrice.
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate (now reading).

Books added to my wish list/TBR pile following EHC (i.e. either after reading one of your reviews or because I had a bigger interest in those cultures):
Nadine Gordimer, My Son’s Story.
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Louis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
Amulya Malladi, Serving Crazy with Curry.
Amin Maalouf, Balthasar’s Odyssey.
Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.
Annie Choi, Happy Birthday or Whatever.
Daoud Hari, The Translator.
Ibtisam Barakat, Tasting the Sky.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.
Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
Justine Chen Headley, Nothing But the Truth (and a Few White Lies).
And all of the unread books on my original lists, which you can find here and here.

Some fun/interesting things I’ve learned during EHC:

• The rounded gate you see in Chinese gardens is called a moongate.
• During a prayer, Jews wear phylacteries, i.e. leather boxes containing biblical verses, on their arms.
• Five of the seven wonders of the ancient world were almost on the same meridian.
• The traditional dance art of kathakali is prohibited to women.
• The Maori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, means “the land of the long white clouds”.
• A samosa is a stuffed pastry, usually with potatos, onions and spices.
• The Gangetic dolphin has no dorsal fin.
• Maori have a tradition to bury a child’s umbilical cord as a sign of the strong bond between man and the earth.

And finally, a thank you:
I’d like to say thank you to Melissa for being such a wonderful host, and to all the people who participated for their great reviews.

The book: Amin Maalouf, The First Century After Beatrice.

The edition: I read it in the Italian translation by Egi Volterrani, published by Bompiani in 2001. Pages: 174.
Synopsis: in a somewhat dystopian novel, Maalouf imagines a fertility drug blocking female births. Greatly appreciated in most societies (due to the ancestral longing for a male heir and more generally to sexism), it soon brings on an unbalance between males and females, which in just a couple of decades leads to war, violence, poverty. The narrator is a privileged observer in all of that as the life-partner of one of the first journalists to realize about and report on the problem. The narrator’s love for Clarence and for their daughter Beatrice is also weaved throughout the novel.

My thoughts: while an awkward and disturbing read, it felt right. There are evident dangers in the way the modern world uses scientific knowledge, and while research is good, its fruits are not always so. I felt this novel to be a good warning, an alert to sleeping consciousness. We need to be wise in they way we use knowledge. Rating: 7/10. Recommended to readers who liked The Handsmaid’s Tale by Atwood.

The book: Denis Guedj, Les cheveux de Bérénice

The edition: I read the Italian translation by Fjodor B. Ardizzoia, Isabella C. Blum and Francesca Ioele, published by Longanesi in 2003. Pages: 387.

Reasons for reading: 6th book of six for Expanding Horizons Challenge, African section, plus a great interest in Guedj’s work. Ok, I’ve been cheating a little, as Guedj was born in Algeria but is more European than African in culture, so he’s the worst choice if the aim is to expand my horizons. My only excuse is that I was running out of time and there was no way to get any of the other African books I wanted to read from the library in time. My hope is to continue to expand my horizons some more, after the challenge finishes.

Synopsys: the book delves in mathematical and geographical history. It traces the story of Eratosthenes of Cyrene and of the way he came up with the very first measurement of the Earth’s circumference around 240 B.C. If you are interested in the method he used, check out this explanation. The story is novelized with other characters and stories: Eratosthenes’ relation to Egyptian kings and queens, political intrigues, characters who live on the border between history and myth.

My thoughts: I like the way Guedj can weave science history into a readable and enjoyable story. I read a book of his last year, and plan to read another one (The Parrot’s Theorem) soon. I completely enjoyed this book, but for two things. One: at times, the writer’s tools would emerge, as if he was not yet able to manage them completely (I guess this was written some time ago, before his latest, which I enjoyed more); for example, there was no need for the characters to visit a papyrus laboratory during their journey, but for the fact that the author wanted to tell us how papyrus scrolls were made. And two: for me it’s difficult to identify with characters living in ancient Greece or ancient Egypt, their culture was so far from our own, even though they were our fathers. Rating: 7/10.

The book: Amitav Gosh, The Hungry Tide

The edition: Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 2005. I did neither understand nor like the cover, but all in all this edition carried an Indian atmosphere around it, maybe due to the blue courtesy pages.

The story: it’s not easy to summarize this book without giving away anything, but I’ll try (please beware: spoilers possible!). At the very beginning, Piya and Kanai meet on a train towards the “tide country,” the jungle-and-river-lattice region called Sundarbans. Piya is a caetologist on her way to study river dolphins on the Ganga River. Kanai is a poliglot translator on his way to visit his aunt Nilima: she has recently found a notebook written by her long-deceased husband Nirmal and addressed to Kanai. On arrival they separate, and from there on into about two-thirds of the book, as Kanai reads Nirmal’s notebook, chapters alternate between what happens to Piya and the story written by Nirmal.
Piya starts on her search. On the very first day she falls in the water and a fisherman jumps in to save her, so she decides to travel with this man, Fokir, and his son Tutul. It turns out to be a good solution because he knows the river very well and knows where to find dolphins. Half through the book, they reach Lusibari, where Kanai is, and he too moves on with them as an interpreter, but he was not really needed, as Fokir and Piya understood each other perfectly even without a language in common.
Nirmal’s story is about his involvement with an attempt at resettling on a tide country island by a group of refugees, among them also Fokir’s mother. It includes also parts on Nirmal and Nilima’s story, on Kanai’s own, on Indian history and, more often, on Indian/tide country mithology.
In the rest of the book: a genocide, an encounter with dolphins, a crocodile attack, a rainbow made by the moon’s light, a tiger killing and another one killed, a trial by ordeal, a typhoon (actually, two), some romance, and some cups of tea.

The first sentence:

Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy — loose cotton pants and an oversized white shirt.

The last sentence:

“That’s the difference between us. For me, home is wherever I can brew a pot of good tea.”

My opinion: a beautiful story about understanding, about different cultures and how they clash, but also about ways of crossing between cultures. A rich and compelling writing. A very good book. Rating: 8/10.
I liked the reasoning on words, on different languages, and also on how communication can happen without a common language, while it may still not happen when a common language exists.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

On the other hand, I disliked the way relationships were portrayed. Every relationship was considered to be love/romance. I mean, why can’t some people (I’m talking the author, here) understand that there may be a deep understanding between two persons even without a romantic lien? (My only possible anwer to that would be: in a place such as the jungle, relationships have to be more black-or-white than elsewhere.) At the same time I was disappointed by the Nirmal/Nilima marriage: in the opening of the book they are depicted as two remarkable persons, people to look up to with respect, both for what they accomplished in the tide country, and for the ripeness of their own relationship. But then, here’s how Kanai describes them well into the book:

“As I see it, Nirmal was possessed more by words than by politics. There are people who live through poetry, and he was one of them. For Nilima, a person like that is very hard to understand”

Finally, I’d like to share a passage that really disturbed me:

“The worst part was not the hunger or the thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their annoucements, hearing them say that our lives, our existence, were worth less than dirt or dust. ‘This island has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a reserve forest, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people from all around the world.’ … Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their name?”

You can’t not be an environmental activist, but again, you can’t be one. You can’t not protect tigers, but you can’t leave humans in danger. In a way, it’s a book about helplessness, too.

A couple of weeks ago, the Telegraph published a list of the 110 books making the perfect library. Although I don’t completely agree with the list (it’s somehow too ethnocentric, among other things), I’ve decided to try and measure my reading against it. So here’s the list: I’ve put books I’ve read in bold, books I’ve read in part (either because in school or because I’ve abandoned them) in *bold, unread books I might, plausibly, be interested in in italics. (To be honest, I have to add that there are several titles I have never heard of, but I won’t go so far as to write which ones and show my ignorance thus!)
CLASSICS

*The Iliad and The Odyssey (Homer)
The Barchester Chronicles (Anthony Trollope)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
*War and Peace (Tolstoy)
David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Middlemarch (George Eliot)

POETRY

*Sonnets (Shakespeare)
*Divine Comedy (Dante)
*Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
The Prelude (William Wordsworth)
*Odes (John Keats)
*The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
*Paradise Lost (John Milton)
*Songs of Innocence and Experience (William Blake)
*Collected Poems (W. B. Yeats)
Collected Poems (Ted Hughes)

LITERARY FICTION

The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
*A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
*Ulysses (James Joyce)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Sword of Honour trilogy (Evelyn Waugh)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Muriel Spark)
Rabbit series (John Updike)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Human Stain (Philip Roth)

ROMANTIC FICTION

*Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
Le Morte D’Arthur (Thomas Malory)
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos)
I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
Alexander Trilogy (Mary Renault)
Master and Commander (Patrick O’Brian)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
*Dr Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
*Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
The Plantagenet Saga (Jean Plaidy)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
The Lord of the Rings (J.R. R. Tolkien)
*His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
Babar (Jean de Brunhoff)
The Railway Children (E. Nesbit)
Winnie-the-Pooh (A.A. Milne)
Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)
The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

SCI-FI

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
1984 (George Orwell)
The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham)
Foundation (Isaac Asimov)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke)
*Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
Neuromancer (William Gibson)

CRIME

The Talented Mr Ripley (Patricia Highsmith)
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John le Carré)
Red Dragon (Thomas Harris)
Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
Killshot (Elmore Leonard)

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Das Kapital (Karl Marx)
The Rights of Man (Tom Paine)
*The Social Contract (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville)
On War (Carl von Clausewitz)
*The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)
*On the Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
*On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
*L’Encyclopédie (Diderot, et al)

BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)
The Beauty Myth (Naomi Wolf)
How to Cook (Delia Smith)
A Year in Provence (Peter Mayle)
A Child Called ‘It’(Dave Pelzer)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss)
Schott’s Original Miscellany (Ben Schott)

HISTORY

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Winston Churchill)
A History of the Crusades (Steven Runciman)
*The Histories (Herodotus)
The History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T. E. Lawrence)
*The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (compiled at King Alfred’s behest in the AD890s)
A People’s Tragedy (Orlando Figes)
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Simon Schama)
The Origins of the Second World War (A.J.P. Taylor)

LIVES

Confessions (St Augustine)
Lives of the Caesars (Suetonius)
Lives of the Artists (Vasari)
If This is a Man (Primo Levi)
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Siegfried Sassoon)
Eminent Victorians (Lytton Strachey)
A Life of Charlotte Brontë (Elizabeth Gaskell)
Goodbye to All That (Robert Graves)
The Life of Dr Johnson (Boswell)
Diaries (Alan Clark)

Certo, niente è paragonabile alla Shoà e nessun male si può mettere a confronto con un altro male, ma ogni volta che un popolo della Terra si trovava minacciato dalla follia degli altri uomini, padre Pons si dedicava a mettere in salvo gli oggetti che testimoniavano l’anima minacciata. Con il risultato che nella sua arca di Noè ammassò una quantità di armamentari diversi: ebbe la collezione degli indiani d’America, la collezione vietnamita e la collezione dei monaci tibetani.
(Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Il bambino di Noè, nella traduzione di Alberto Bracci Testasecca)

Spero con questa frase di avervi incuriosito. Io, lo ammetto, non conoscevo Schmitt, ma questa storia tenera che è quasi una favola moderna e si legge in poche ore merita davvero.

The book: Jorge Amado, Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon

The edition: I read it in the Italian translation by Giovanni Passeri, published by Einaudi in 2005. It was a paperbook, counting 506 pages.

Reasons for reading: 3rd book of 6 for the Expanding Horizons Challenge, category: Latin-America.

Synopsis: Brazil, 1920s. Society is undergoing a change in the cocoa-land, from an almost feudal order where tradition is head and the power is in the hands of a few major families, to a more modern situation, where women can decide for themselves and resourceful people can “bring civilization” to the city (in the shape, e.g., of a newspaper, a bus service, a new haven for better commerce etc.).

My thoughts: it seems that, of lately, my expectations on books are never met.What Amado did with this book, was to write the story of a whole town, and that he did well: Gabriela is a true choral novel. The downside of it, is that there are no major characters. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned a sole name in my synopsis, not even Gabriela herself: and that’s because the stories Amado tells are the big and small happenings of a whole town, and the romance blooming between Gabriela and Nacib is just a marginal note among them. Unfortunately, this also meant that I couldn’t relate to any of the characters, nor to any of the story.
I, on the other hand, expected to read the story of Gabriela, and I expected her to be on the lines of other female Latin-American characters (e.g. those described by Allende, Serrano, Garcia Marquez): sanguine, powerful, with a strong link to the earth. And she is none: she is presented almost as an animal, not even intelligent enough to keep right from wrong or to understand what’s happening to her and why. Vote: 5/10.

Oggi è davvero una festa: sono arrivati due pacchi, entrambi di libri, e anche se nessuno dei due è un regalo, sono felice lo stesso. Guardate se non ho ragione:

Questo è il primo pacco, con due libri su cui ho lavorato:

• Flip e Linda Nicklin, Delfini - Incontri ravvicinati
• Sophie Collins, Io parlo con la coda - Capire il linguaggio segreto dei cani

E questo è il secondo. Conteneva:

• Grégoire Bouillier, L’invitato misterioso (per Sul comodino)
• Gian Luigi Beccaria, Sicuterat
• Philippe Delerm, Un cesto di frutta e altre piccole dolcezze
• Laura Esquivel, Dolce come il cioccolato
• Stefano Benni, La grammatica di Dio

E stasera si passa in biblioteca…

The book: Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider

The edition: I read it in the Italian translation by Chiara Brovelli, published by Sperling & Kupfer in 2003.

The story: I was not the first to read this book for the Expanding Horizons Challenge and most of you have surely seen the movie (I haven’t), so I’d rather not bore you with another retelling of the story. You can find good synopsys by Sarah and Kookiejar on their own blogs.

My thoughts: basically, this is a nice fable, somewhere on the lines of Bambaren’s The Dolphin or Sepulveda’s Story of a Seagull(*), plus a good share of ethnic struggle(**). Vote: 7/10.

(*) In writing this I’d like it to be clear that I loved Sepulveda’s book, and I liked Whale Rider too — quite. I expected it to be more true-to-life, so the happy-ending was a bit too much, as if it was a patch on an otherwise emotionally powerful story. Maybe that was due to its being intended for a juvenile readership (Melissa — I’d like to hear your comment on this point, as I guess you will not agree).

(**) As I was reading Whale Rider, I was actually considering (for other, non-bookish reasons) moving to NZ, so I was particularly keen on a glimpse on their society and culture. Of course, the book only dealt with Maori culture, and I expected that much. What bothered me is that the author didn’t really explain nor tell the reader about anything. There amount of Maori words was so high that at times it hindered comprehension (at the beginning especially, I found it hard to dive in the story because the Maori language made me continuously self-conscious), but when it came to understanding — why things are as they are, what are the relationships between the family members, what’s the meaning of this or that gesture, but also how does the Maori society work, what’s its structure like etc. — I felt like I didn’t learn anything.

The Booksworms Carnival, April edition, is up. Enjoy!