Tag: book review

Nexus —By Henry Miller

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Book Review

‘There isn’t a thing in the world worth fighting for except peace of mind’. All his books are autobiographical and interconnected between them, from ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, to ‘Plexus’, ‘Sexus’ and lastly ‘Nexus’. All have the same main character, the same author, Henry Miller and his exhaustive struggle to become a known writer, despite the innumerable difficulties that seem to attack him from every angle. A childhood with a toxic mother, followed by a total incapacity to overcome poverty and finishing with a wife that possesses so many prisms and fake stories to every question that not even the same Miller can decipher.

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The Year of Magical Thinking —By Joan Didion

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Review

Rating: 5 out of 5.

‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends’. John Dunn, Joan Didion’s husband, died of a heart attack, suddenly and unexpectedly. In fact, the sick one was not John but Quintana, their daughter, who had been in a coma caused by a bad pneumonia. By that that point they didn’t know if Quintana was not going to live, or to die. In the words of her doctor ‘We’re still not sure which way this is going’.

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Women who run with the Wolves —By Clarissa Pinkola Estes

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Book Review

Clarissa Pinkola Estes. This woman is the first that comes to my mind when I think about this book. She is prismatic, multifaceted, a whole, complete, intellectual, emotional and spiritual woman. Wherever side you look of her, it has been worked, it is full with experiences and memories, and specially with wonderful teachings in which every single woman can benefit from.

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1Q84 — From Haruki Murakami

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

As every novel written by Murakami, we can find big amounts of fantasy, sex, strange scenarios and characters living in parallel worlds that come out of the ordinary. However 1Q84 takes its fictional features to another level.

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Love in the Time of Cholera —By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

It is an outstanding novel. Published in 1985, it is an open window to Garcia Marquez own story. It is based on the romantic love between his parents and all the obstacles they had to overcome to end up being together, with some variations. In the novel, Florentino Ariza, the telegraphist, witnessed how his long time love, Fermina Daza, slipped through his fingers after his love letters chased her for endless months through the whole territory of Colombia. Fermina Daza was taken away by his father, on a long trip on mule, trying to extinguish that flame of love, and he succeeded. When Fermina returned to their home town she saw him and was disappointed. She punished him with an absolute indifference for more than fifty years.

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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle¬—By Haruki Murakami

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

When I think about Murakami, the first thing that comes to my mind is his amazing way of writing. Every time I dilute myself in his dialogues and thoughts I feel like a little girl, trying to describe a place or a character, even a story. I start by saying what I do since the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed at night, I describe the places, their smells, flavours, visions and their magic, to then focus on the people that I encounter. I think to whom they look like and what they inspire in me, physically and psychologically, and like that, like a long telephone cable, Murakami connects the dots without falling on boredom or repetition.

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Orlando —By Virginia Woolf

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 4 out of 5.

It is said that ‘Orlando’ is one of the finest masterpieces of Virginia Woolf. Published in 1928 it is certainly intense and ahead of its time. It is true that the background of the story involves a very traditional environment, such as the English Court and Queen Elizabeth I, but different to other books depicting this era, the importance of the Queen is left behind to focus more on Orlando as a person.

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A Moveable Feast- By Ernest Hemingway

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Ernest Hemingway talks in ‘A Moveable Feast’ of when he lost his manuscripts. How painful must have been for a writer that had dedicated his soul and body to give shape to his ideas. We all know how hard it is to lose an important text, but being a young Hemingway, still unsure of his method, without even knowing if that method was reaching its potential and if his lyrics would someday find fame, could have been devastating, as his wife lost his suitcase in a Parisian train station in 1922.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Book Reviews

It might seem strange to read this book later in life, considering that it is an American classic and it is practically mandatory for a high-schooler in that country to read. It never got my attention, not only because I was not born nor raised in United States, but the previews or an extremely rich party boy were not very attractive.  I am also a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. In his book ‘A Moveable Fist’ he documents some encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was not impressed. He described him as invasive and difficult to be with. They took a trip together to Lyon (France) that was a disaster. Fitzgerald had alcohol related problems and Hemingway used to say that his texts lacked some strength. However, the same Hemingway loved The Great Gatsby and confirmed him that it was the manuscript that was going to make him famous. It was published in 1925.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Novel by Milan Kundera

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

‘The absolute absence of weight makes the man to become lighter in the air, to fly higher, distance from the Earth, from his earthy being, that is real only in half and his movements are as free as they are insignificant’ [my own translation]

Milan Kundera loves Nietzsche. He loves his country, Czech Republic, he loves Prague. He speaks with great sadness of the communists times that swelled the ‘before’ of his country to turn it into a group of people with fear. But it also rescues the long-lasting and stubborn braveness of his fellow countrymen who didn’t get drown by the regime despite the consequences. Tomas, the protagonist of this story, was one of them. Tomas scaped to Europe but returned because he could not stand the solitude without Tereza, who went back to Prague tired of his infidelities. Others were more strategic. They migrated for good to Europe, right in the moment they could have done it, leaving the ‘Kitsch’, the communist dream, behind. In Czech Republic the citizens only ambition mundane things. Be born, grow up, fall in love, have children and die. There is no more aspiration that living in this utopia.

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