Elizabeth Gilbert: Big Magic, Riverhead Books, 9781594634710, hardback

I am a fan of Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing, loved her “Eat, Pray, Love” (but not the soapy film starring Julia Roberts!) and think she outdid herself with “The signature of all things” which read like a classic.  I always look forward to a new book she writes, she is immensely diverse in her writing.

Her latest book, “Big Magic – Creative Living beyond Fear”, out since September, is non-fiction, an inspirational book, trying to give you strength, a kick in the ass to live up to your own potential and to think outside the box when it comes to giving this sparkle of an idea inside you a chance to unfold.

I would not go as far as calling it esoteric; it is not, because Liz is far too down to earth for that. She draws on experiences from her own life or that of friends. I am particularly amused by her thought of ideas visiting you and if you do not pick up on them, they will find someone else to bring them to life.  As happened with the idea for a book , an Amazon jungle novel, she had and did not follow through only to find that Ann Patchett had hatched the idea and wrote a book on the very same subject, definately not knowing about the others plans.  

Liz  divides the book into several chapters:  courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust and divinity . The book reads as if a girlfriend is talking to you, I found it uplifting, easy to read and inspirational although some of her thoughts were a little too magical for me.  If you are stuck  whether it is on a personal or professional level,  she has some interesting thoughts to offer.

But I am definitely more of a fan when it comes to her fiction.  The cover is too kitschy for my European taste, the German publisher S. Fischer uses the same cover and the book is also called "Big Magic - Nimm dein Leben in die Hand und es wird dir gelingen." She is currently touring in Germany. 

Paul Theroux:  Deep South, with photographs by Steve McCurry, 9780241146729, Penguin Random House (Hamish Hamilton), hardback, paperback out in April 2016

Just having finished this 441 page doorstopper of a hardback, I can safely say this is literary travel writing at its best. Paul Theroux is a great storyteller and observer of the human race, his language is exquisite and a joy to read, his vocabulary so rich that I came across words I had never encountered before and had to look them up in a dictionary but then I am not a native speaker.

Holding a special fondness for Southern writers myself, especially Carson McCullers, and places like Savannah, Charleston and Cape Hatteras, I was very interested to hear that Paul Theroux had turned his attention to his home country and the Deep South in his latest book.

Never having been to Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, I was really curious about his road trip and encounters, spanning over four seasons.   But I was not prepared for the level of poverty, desperation, racial issues, poor housing, dying communities and unemployment pouring from these pages. I had thought this was a thing of the fifties and sixties maybe.   As Paul was to discover repeatedly, many towns he visited would have qualified easily for financial aid from the US government had they been a Third World country where the US spent millions of US $. Yet nothing was being done at home in the South, it was simply being ignored.  The Clinton Foundation is also turning a blind eye to obvious issues in Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s home state, focusing their attention on more PR worthy activities in the Third World. 

If it were not for the perseverance of black and white farmers and some idealist not to give up on their communities, large proportions of the southern countryside and towns would soon be looking like deserted ghost towns in the Wild West. 

I could not grasp how some people would want to continue to live there under the circumstances he describes. Most towns and villages seem still dominated by big landowners, being at the mercy of banks issuing loans for crops and agricultural machinery and the big farm up the road is still called “The Plantation”.  

He finds many of the people he talks to in the typical Southern meeting places, churches and guns shows. He receives invitations to homes of ministers, mayors, social workers and dirt poor farmers, black or white, writers or laborers and paints a very colorful portrait of his visits. Paul Theroux hears of the still bad quality of many schools and universities, some of the racial stories he reports are very depressing and seem incomprehensible in this day and age.  The Klan appears to be alive and well. 

But there are also the joys of his Southern travels:   the Blues, the friendliness, warmth and culture of being welcome almost everywhere as a stranger, the Southern cuisine and the beautiful countryside.  Some of the funnier episodes are his stories about sleeping in almost derelict, dirty motels in wayward towns, all owned by immigrants from India who miraculously are all called Patel.

The beautiful, atmospheric photographs taken by Steve McCurry who did not travel with Paul Theroux but taking his own road trip, give the people in this book a face.  

Tom Michell: The Penguin Lessons, Penguin/Michael Joseph, 97807181635, hardback, GPB 9, 99

This delightful little book was published yesterday but I had the privilege of reading the proof pre publishing, courtesy of my former colleague Grazyna from Penguin. What a heartwarming, enjoyable true story, I promise you light-hearted reading hours. A perfect christmas gift in my opinion!

Tom Michell takes us on a journey to Argentina of the 70ties where he worked as a 23 year old rookie English teacher in a boarding school for very wealthy South American boys. He makes the most of his stay by taking every opportunity he gets to travel and one of these journeys takes him to Uruguay where fate strikes. On his last day, he decides to take an evening stroll and finds a beach with stranded Magellan penguins covered in oil from an oil spill. All birds appear dead but he discovers one struggling penguin that seems to have survived the ordeal.  Without thinking twice he takes the penguin to his flat, trying to remove the oil with detergents and shampoo. When he tries to take the bird back to the beach after freeing him from his coat of oil, he refuses to leave his side. Not knowing what to do, he makes a fateful decision: to smuggle Juan Salvador as he has named him back to Argentina, without a clue what is to happen once he is at the boarding school. And there the true story begins, Juan Salvador, this penguin extraordinaire,  transforms the life of the boys at school and everyone else he meets during his life at St. George’s, teaching Tom Michel a few valuable penguin life lessons himself.

Rights have been sold to 20 countries and film rights are presently under negotiation, a new Livingston Seagull movie coming our way, I can just see it.

Jane Gardam: Old Filth, Abacus, 9780349139494,

A friend working in publishing recommended “Old Filth” by Jane Gardam to me when talking about books we had read recently.  I had never heard of Gardam before, despite her receiving the Whitbread /Costa Award for Best Novel twice, the only writer ever to achieve this.  So off I went to get a copy and to make a long story short, I loved her style of writing.  The Guardian called this novel “a masterpiece” and I can only confirm, very moving fiction at its best. It reminded me a little of “Any Human Heart” but of course “Old Filth” is set against an entirely different background. 

Old Filth – what the heck does this stand for you might wonder as did I, until it is explained: “Failed in London try Hong Kong”!   Old Filth or Sir Edward Feathers as he is also known amongst his peers was once a highly successful international lawyer with a practice in the Far East accumulating great wealth.  After retiring in a beautiful house with servants in the rural English countryside, his beloved wife Betty dies unexpectedly, leaving him utterly along with memories of his past starting to resurface. 

Eddie was once one of the so called Raj Orphans, children born in Asia to British parents, sent off at a very early age to England, raised in Foster homes never to see their parents again in some cases, turning some of them into emotional cripples for the rest of their lives.  The novel very cleverly shifts between Old Filth current widowed life,  his urge to visit  people he hasn’t seen in years  and memories of  the adventure that is called life.  There is his Malaysian childhood, the abusive foster family he and his cousins have to endure,   boarding school and university with mostly kind teachers shaping his adolesence,  the Ingoldby’s,  the family of his best buddy and soon his true emotional home,  a cold, indifferent father and the equally callous aunts he is forced to live with.  The only criticism I would have is that too little is written about his life with Betty in Asia. But I soon discovered  that  Jane Gardam has written “The Man in the wooden hat” which is Betty’s, Old Filth’ wife, life story !  I have already order my copy and cannot wait to read her side of the story which evidentially reveals more about their time in Asia.

“Old Filth”  was published already in 2004 by Chatto & Windus ,  German publishers have only just discovered and published  the novel with the title “Ein untadeliger Mann” (Hanser Berlin).  

Craig Johnson: Dry Bones, 9780525426936, Viking US (Penguin Random House imprint)

I have a great weakness for Craig Johnson’s novels featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire and his recurring cast of characters, daughter Cady, Undersheriff Vic Moretti, his dog named Dog and best friend Henry Standing Bear.  So every time Craig Johnson completes a new book, I know a few great hours of reading and an armchair trip to Wyoming’s cowboy country are in store. Yippee! 

Apparently I am not the only one who thinks so, Johnson is hugely popular in the US and Warner Bros. “Longmire” TV hit show, also available on Netflix, have no doubt helped spreading the word.

I have no idea why German editors have missed Craig Johnson so far; apparently German publishers think his books are to US focused.  I would bet the TV show and the books would find their fans.

“Dry Bones” delivers with a good plot as all his other novels do,  I especially like the dry sense of humor which reminds me of old Westerns.  The bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton shake up the peace in Absaroka County, with the High Plains Dinosaur Museum and Danny Lone Elk’s family battling over this windfall after he is found dead in a turtle pond. When the FBI descend on the town, the number of groups claiming the skeloton increases which is worth several million dollar. Walt is determined to find out who killed Danny Lone Elk and who is to profit the most from his death. Soon after Walt’s daughter Cady finally arrives home for visit with his grand- daughter Lola, a new tragedy strikes the family.  

If you have not read any of the previous Longmire stories, it is best to start with the first one, The Cold Dish. They can all be read standalone but it is more satisfying to know how all characters find their place in Longmire’s life.  (The first 4 are The Cold Dish, Death without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man's Moccasins).

William Boyd: Sweet Caress, Bloomsbury UK, 9781408867976

Before I start telling you about “Sweet Caress”, William Boyd’s most recent novel, I have to confess that “Any Human Heart” is on the shelf of my all-time favorite books.  He is one of my favorite contemporary authors, a master storyteller  and whenever a new novel by him is published, I race out to get my hands on it. (Apart from his latest James Bond novel)  Lucky me – he was published by Penguin for many years and then moved to Bloomsbury, two publishers I represented in Germany for many years and therefore was privileged to get my hands on early proofs. 

If you are looking for a female version in the footsteps of “Any Human Heart”, you will find it in “Sweet Caress”, seen thru the lens of Amory Clay, a photographer. It is a tour de force through the 20^th Century and such a wonderful book – I feel sad it is finished now , wanted it to go on for a while longer than the 448 pages it already has. 

Amory Clay is a fictional character but I found myself researching her name in Wikipedia, the idea to place  photos of events and people in the book make her novel life sound so very  real.  Very clever idea, some of the characters Amory meets, like in Any Human heart, are real and Boyd lists them in “Acknowledgements”.  From Amory’s birthday in 1908 up to her death, she memorizes her life as an elderly person in 1977 living in Scotland, with her thoughts trailing back in chronological order to times gone by.  You feel like you are sitting in her living room listening to her life story.

There are the damaged souls returning from WWI during  her childhood , her father in particular, her photographer uncle Grenville who is responsible for putting the first camera in her hands  with whom he shares a special emotional bond , her years in London as his apprentice taking photographs of socialites for fashionable magazines,  the Berlin of the late Twenties  and New York in  the Thirties, her run in with Black shirts in London  altering her life forever , and finally  becoming one of the few female WWII  photographers  until life has another major change in store for her .  Amory’s taste for adventure and her curiosity is always greater than her fear as she tries to pursue her life's  dream, her recollections of her love life and relationships are some of the best parts of the book.

English fiction at its very best   - thank you William Boyd for such a great story and a follow up to Any Human Heart!  I cannot wait to see what he is up to next. 

Mary Morris: The Jazz Palace, 9780385539739, Nan Talese, Doubleday

During a visit to Chicago this summer, I came across ‘Mary Morris: The Jazz Palace’ in a book shop, I was immediately attracted to the novel  as it is set in Chicago during the beginning of the Jazz Age starting in 1915.  I have been coming to Chicago on a fairly regular base since 1989; one of my dearest friends lives in the windy city. The city has grown on me with each visit; I love the colorful neighborhoods, bars, restaurants, the amazing architecture, and the music scene, the high rises by Mies van der Rohe, the Art Institute and the Lake in particular. 

I read Morris “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone” many years ago, loved it and was happy to find this book by an author I admired on a subject that really interested me.  As if by serendipity I had just visited an exhibition on Archibald Motley, a black painter and Jazz Age Modernist who portrayed this era exquisitely in his paintings.

So I started the novel with great curiosity but despite the wonderful quotes by such famous authors as Jodi Picoult and other readers on the back cover, I just never really warmed to the book however much I wanted to.  I cannot really put my finger on the why but I always felt the story was lacking something, perhaps because it is ultimately such a sad tale with only a touch of happiness at the end.  The story is well crafted; Morris is an accomplished author, it took her two decades to finish this novel.  The lives of the main characters and their families, Pearl Chimbrova who runs the Jazz Palace, Napoleon, the black trumpet player and Benny Lehmann, the magical Jewish piano player who has no interest in the family business, are all tragically linked together. The milieu of Chicago in the Twenties is very well portrayed with gangsters like Al Capone ruling the clubs and the police, the impoverished Jewish and Black neighborhoods, the European immigrants forking out a meager existence in factories in the even harsher Chicago winter, Jazz musicians going from gig to gig living hand to mouth being virtually owned by the gangsters, these are the most interesting, vivid and colorful descriptions in the book, Morris does a great job characterizing Chicago during that time drawing from actual facts. 

I love the cover of the book , a painting called "J Mood" by Romare Bearden owned by the Wynton Marsales and Romare Bearden Foundation.