THE MASTER ORPHAN'S SON by Adam Johnson

5 out of 5

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 2401 KB
• Print Length: 465 pages

Synopsis:

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Sonushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers.

My view:

Rather than trying to explain this great novel I will let the author explain in his own words what drew him to write it, this novel is a MUST READ:

Adam Johnson on The Orphan Master's Son

When I arrived at Pyongyang's Sunan Airport a few years ago, my head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose landings hadn't gone so well. Even though I'd spent three years writing and researching The Orphan Master's Son, I was unprepared for what I was about to encounter in “the most glorious nation in the world.”

I'd started writing about North Korea because of a fascination with propaganda and the way it prescribes an official narrative to an entire people. In Pyongyang, that narrative begins with the founding of a glorious nation under the fatherly guidance of Kim Il Sung, is followed by years of industry and sacrifice among its citizenry, so that when Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn't matter that the story was a complete fiction--every citizen was forced to become a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn't played their parts, who'd spoken of deprivation instead of plenitude and the purest democracy.

When I visited places like Pyongyang, Kaesong City, Panmunjom and Myohyangsan, I understood that a genuine interaction with a North Korean citizen was unlikely, since contact with foreigners was illegal. As I walked the streets, not one person would risk a glance, a smile, even a pause in their daily routine. In the Puhung Metro Station, I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.

"THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ" by Anne Enright

4 out of 5

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• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 465 KB
• Print Length: 264 pages

Synopsis:

• Anne Enright chronicles an affair between 32-year-old Gina Moynihan, and Seán Vallely, a rich, dutiful husband and a devoted if somewhat inept father to the otherworldly, epileptic Evie, not yet 13. Set against a backdrop of easy money, second homes, and gratuitous spending, the dissolution of Gina's and Sean's marriages is both an antidote to and a symptom of the economic prosperity that gripped the country until its sudden and devastating fall from grace in 2008: "In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you lose the house.... You have to sleep there to keep your claim.... You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money." There are, as with any affair, casualties, but what weighs most heavily on Gina is not what will become of her husband, Conor, but rather Evie, who sees Gina kissing her father, and innocently asks if she might be kissed too, oblivious to the fact that this moment heralds the end of her family. She eventually becomes all too aware that her father is gone and that she's stuck with her sad, neurotic mother. And so the question that remains at the end of this masterful and deeply satisfying novel is not just what will happen to Ireland, but what will happen to Evie? 

My view:

"I met him in my sister's garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sister's garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. Half five maybe. It is half past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Sean for the first time. There he is, where the end of my of my sister's garden becomes uncertain. He is about to turn around - but he doesn't know this yet. He is looking at the view and I am looking at him......."

I truly enjoyed this novel, especially Anne Enright's prose. The characters came to life vividly. As affairs are concerned, can it ever be the right thing to do? This is in my opinion what drives the story...as in any such situation 'the couple' is never alone, always close by are family members who continue to live life often unaware...if not uneasy about their spouses. 

Is there ever an excuse so blatant which can excuse an affair? This Anne Enright tries to find out while taking us along into this forbidden territory.

I am looking forward to reading her previous novel which won the Booker Prize "THE GATHERING" 

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012

ROOM by Emma Donoghue

5 out of 5

• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Publication date: 9/13/2010
• Format: eBook

Synopsis:

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

My view:

Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra.  Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.  “Was I minus numbers?” – opening paragraph.

This novel stays with me, I finished reading it last night...I know this has happened in real life and it really shook me hard. It is a novel to read, a must read. 
It is perhaps a look into this horrible situation, which in real life has happened.Due to privacy issues, court sealed documentation we do not truly know what becomes of a young woman, abducted and kept prisoner in some deranged persons idea of life...it is chilling. The author walks us through using this fictional character in ways we start to understand the psychological ramifications this takes on a human being, once released....... 

The author:

Emma Donoghue is an award-winning Irish writer who lives in Canada. At 34, she has published six books of fiction, two works of literary history, two anthologies, and two plays.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 24 October 1969, Emma is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue. She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours B.A. in English and French from University College Dublin, and in 1997 a Ph.D. (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. Since the age of 23, Donoghue has earned her living as a full-time writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her lover and their son.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

4 out of 5

• Kindle Edition
• 939 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 25, 2011)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.

Synopsis:

The year is 1984, but not for long. Aomame bolts from the cab, walks onto the elevated Tokyo expressway, descends an emergency ladder to the street below, and enters a strange new world. In parallel, a math teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo gets an interesting offer to rewrite a mysterious 17-year-old's story for the final round of a young writer's literary prize. So begins Haruki Murakami'smagnum opus, an epic of staggering proportions that folds in a deliciously intriguing cast of characters and central motifs--the moon, Janáček's Sinfonietta, George Orwell's 1984--that acquire powerful resonance as Aomame and Tengo's paths take on a conjoined life of their own, dancing with a protracted elegance that requires nearly 1,000 pages to reach its crowning denouement. 1Q84 was a runaway bestseller in its native Japan, but more importantly, it's easily the grandest work of world literature since Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and represents a monstrous literary event.

My view:

I just finished this wonderful novel and will need a little time to absorb it's effect on me to give it a reasonable review, which is not going to be easy. Anyway here is a tidbit: I read 939 pages without any boredom setting  in, and the ending was satisfactory to me even if I wanted to know more about many characters inhabiting this novel, for each where allowed to become full bodied throughout this novel, a great feat for such a long book and a compliment to Haruki Murakami as an author. Not an easy feat. The ending is satisfactory and happy yet each of us will have to come to this conclusion on our own...delicious is all I can say....is it happy????

The Author:     

 

Haruki Murakami web site

Legend has it that on a warm day in Spring 1974 while watching a baseball game Murakami-san had the inspiration to write his first novel, later called Hear the Wind sing.

It won him his first Literary award and is part of The Trilogy of the Rat together with Pinball 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase .

His career as an writer took off fast and a steady flow of Novels, Short Stories, Articles and Documentaries followed.

The fact that he spent a good part of his life outside Japan, mainly in the US and southern Europe, is maybe the key factor of his growing worldwide success.

The stories and settings are familiar to Westerners and yet there is a distinctive Japanese touch.

 

Tonight Midnight this long awaited new novel by one of my favorite authors Haruki Murakami will be downloaded onto my Kindle. I am excited to begin reading all 900+ pages, savoring them.

THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern

5 out of 5

• Pub. Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Sold By: Random House
• Format: NOOK Book (eBook) , 384pp

First paragraph:

"The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl."

My view:

If you like classic literature and contemporary literary fiction you will love this book. This literary novel is full of twists and turns, reality and magic, even so it is often difficult to know which is illusion and which is reality.

For those who like fantasy, you are in for a real treat...This will definitely be one of my favorite reads of 2011.

"Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart..."

Synopsis: 

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazement. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.

Author:

ERIN MORGENSTERN is a writer and multimedia artist who describes all her work as being “fairy tales in one way or another.” She lives in Massachusetts with her husband.

RULES OF CIVILITY by Amor Towles

5 out of 5

• Pub. Date: July 2011
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Sold By: Penguin Group
• Format: NOOK Book (eBook) , 352pp

Synopsis:

Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.

Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher's assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes,this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.

An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn't seem more familiar with his characters or territory.

I absolutely loved this novel....

Author:

Amor Towles was born and raised just outside Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. He is a Principal at an investment firm in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children.