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Midnight All Day by Hanif Kureishi
2008-01-19 08:06:00
Midnight All Day is a collection of short stories by Hanif Kureishi, an author whose characters often approach the low life, usually without ever actually attaining it. These stories are of variable quality, ranging from excellent to rather mundane, though they are all eminently readable, well written and well constructed. Sometimes, hoever, there’s just a bit too much incestuous involvement with the media. There are just a few too many writers, actors, television and film people around. One can understand why the author might meet a number of such people, but repeated use of media settings does occasionally detract from his story telling.Despite this criticism, the characters are acutely drawn, interesting, engaging and are utterly credible. They tend to stumble or shamble through their lives from one opportunity to the next mistake, initiating and terminating relationships. Despite their tendency to write about or enact other characters, they often display very little facility f...
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The Leningrad Symphony – a personal interpretation of the Symphony No.7 O
2008-01-11 14:01:00
Like much music of quality, the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Leningrad, is either loved or hated, rather than tolerated. It is famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, for its first movement, a unique statement in the history of music, a movement lasting just under half of the symphony’s massive eighty minutes. It is also music, I believe, that is uniquely misunderstood, the popular interpretation being far too naïve an analysis of the motives of a composer as unpredictably and alternatively complex and trite as Shostakovich. So this is my personal version. First the description. I apologise if you already know the piece.The piece opens with a confident, harmonically complex theme which seems to pass from one place to another, from one orchestral section to another like question, answer and analysis. It seems to portray life lived ordinarily, but tangibly celebrating the sophistication and tolerance of negotiated social contact. There is conflict here...
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Orchestral concert by Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra, La Vila Joiosa,
2008-01-11 14:00:00
To live in a Mediterranean climate with year-round access to the sea, good food and wine, plus magnificent scenery would be enough. To have access to three symphony orchestra venues within ten kilometres of the front door is a priceless bonus. The Palau in Altea is long established, whilst the Auditori Mediterrania in La Nucia is entering its second year. But this week we have the inaugural concert series of the Teatre Auditori de La Vila Joiosa, in whose steeply-raked, red, black and white surroundings the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra played last night, 9 January 2008. Under their supremely gifted director, Josep Vicent, the orchestra, resident in Communidad Valenciana since 2005, offered five twentieth century orchestral works. As ever, the programme was beautifully and expertly played by this excellent band and, once again, Josep Vicent’s choice of content was outstanding, his conducting masterful.The evening began with Short Ride on a Fast Machine by John Adams. It is a...
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The Partnership by Barry Unsworth
2008-01-06 13:00:00
The Partnership was Barry Unsworth’s first novel and feels rather different in both style and content from most of his other books. It deals with a business arrangement, and therefore relationship of sorts between Foley and Moss. They design and manufacture plaster pixies for the tourist trade in a Cornish seaside village. There’s a division of labour between them and as the book progresses, divisions of other sorts emerge as well.There’s a hint of Under Milk Wood about the setting, though there’s no attempt at poetry. What we do have, however, is a portrayal of a small community that is impinged upon by outsiders and their ideas. Not that all of the characters were born and bred Cornish. They weren’t, and so to some extent the book covers some similar ground to Julian Barnes’s England England. But it is both more and less than this.The Partnership is about the psychology and the mechanics of the relationship between Mss and Foley. Quite different in personality as well ...

In our grasp - How new technology is about to democratise publishing
2008-01-05 17:14:00
Speech to Libros International Christmas Lunch, December 2007In our graspMy name is Philip Spires and I am a Libros International author. It’s about six months since I first held a copy of my book, Mission, in my grasp. Mission was a project I had lived with, on and off, for twenty years. I wrote the book in the 1980s and forgot about it until November 2006. I retrieved it, decided to finish it and then there was Libros International. So, in my grasp, there was the book. It was a strange feeling. It felt like it had a life of its own, as if it had nothing to do with me any more.I am proud of Mission. It’s not autobiographical, but many of the events in the book did happen. But, of course, I re-ordered them, changed them, made them fit the overall idea that I decided would underpin the book. I would not be so crass, so clichéd, as to say that it is “based on real events”, but I would claim that Mission contains a lot that derives from my personal experience. The book is my w...
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Masterpiece: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
2008-01-03 12:29:00
The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”. On Chesil Beach was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I have read both books and, for me at least, what is so amazing is the mere fact that two such utterly different concepts could have been considered for the same prize. It is reassuringly astounding that the “genre” of literary fiction can be home to every style, every emotion, every approach, every outcome, everything imaginable and much that is real.Those who write book blurbs are often prone to hyperbole. The greatest, the best, the most, the biggest, the most superlative are terms of mundane commonplace. The term “best selling” is usually an empty platitude. “Real” often signifies “very”, but without the latter’s imagined meaning. So what can we make of “a short novel of remarkable depth by a write...
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A review of The Statement by Brian Moore
2008-01-03 09:59:00
The Statement by Brian Moore is a little more than a pursuit thriller. I stress a little more because it genuinely transcends the “who’s going to do it” genre, though overall it misses an opportunity to address some important and potentially fascinating ideas.Pierre Brossard is the original, but not the only name of a politically right-wing Frenchman who worked with a wartime fascist militia in Vichy France. As part of his duties he was responsible for assisting the transport of Jews to Nazi concentration camps and at least once he organised killings, in particular a massacre of fourteen individuals. He was later tried and convicted, though years later a Presidential pardon meant that he was no longer a wanted man. Still one the run, however, he was convicted of a crime against humanity via a judgment and indeed a jurisdiction that not everyone in France either respected or recognised.Pierre Brossard’s rediscovery of his Roman Catholic faith provided him with something more ...
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A social climber, our Joe
2007-12-16 21:30:00
A review of A Room At The Top by John BraineIt’s fifty years since A Room At The Top first appeared. Against a backdrop of post-war Britain, a period when people really did believe that a new future, a different kind of society was just around the corner, Joe Lampton, born January 1921, aspired to social and economic elevation. Though competent and already promoted, as a local government officer in a grubby northern English town, with spare time interests in amateur dramatics, cigarettes and beer, even he himself rated his prospects of success as very poor.But Joe’s other passion was the ladies. Two in particular caught his eye. Alice Aisgarth was married, older than him, and had a local reputation for being a bit “forward”. Basically she wanted love and passion to light up her dull, unhappy life with excitement. Susan Brown was a different prospect entirely, being nineteen, virginal and daughter of a rich businessman. If Joe Lampton could never work his way to wealth, he mi...
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A review of Unless by Carol Shields
2007-12-10 17:10:00
Unless by Carol Shields has been my third novel in a row written from the perspective of a self-analytical, self-critical and perhaps self-obsessed female narrator, the other being by Margaret Drabble and Anne Enright. Maybe Carol Shields drew the short straw, because I felt that Reta, the writer-narrator of Unless, internalised everything, so much so, in fact, that the other characters in the book became no more than projections of themselves within her. Maybe that was part of the point.Ostensibly about a family of ordinary people, Unless portrays Reta Winters, her partner Tom and their three daughters. They live an hour from Toronto in a home that sounds as big as a village. Reta can’t decide how many rooms there are, or even what might constitute a room. Tom’s a medic and Reta is a published author of moderate success. Not, at least for me, run-of-the-mill ordinary folk.The eldest daughter, Norah, a nineteen year old determined to make her own marks, has recently left home to...
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Interpretation perfected by presentation – the Berlin Mendelssohn Trio in
2007-12-10 16:12:00
One of the great, even reassuring, things about what the CD shops ignorantly label “Classical Music” is its freedom, its liberality, its democratic principles. Yes, it has its stars. Yes, it has its forms and conventions. But in “Classical Music” these aspects never dominate. The music is always the prime focus. Anyone can learn any piece, anyone can play it, and anyone is free to interpret the composer’s intentions – as long as those intentions are respected, of course. And all of this is done unencumbered by wires, microphones or amplification, since real sound and real experience are always the goal. Performance, therefore, becomes a form of communication, a presentation of the music, itself, plus often much more. Contrast that with some other genres where commerce and celebrity are the raisons d’être, where the music is merely a secondary, often irrelevant accompaniment. Never mind the quality of the lip-sync, feel the width of the show.Critics of “Classical Mus...
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A review of The Gathering by Anne Enright
2007-12-07 11:26:00
Anne Enright’s The Gathering deserves every ounce of praise it has received, and perhaps a bit more. It’s a family history of the Hegartys, told by Veronica after the death of her brother, Liam. So, and therefore, it is a wake, a stream of consciousness response to bereavement. There are more than shades of Molly Bloom here, as Veronica recounts intimate details of her own and her relatives’ ultimately inconsequential lives. And despite its obvious – and necessary – preoccupation with death and mourning, it is eventually an optimistic work, as optimistic as it can be when we are all revealed as rather inconsequential, temporal additions to the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme which, itself, is neither grand nor, indeed, a scheme. In such a void, we need blame to compensate grief. And after that is duly apportioned, at least we can just get on with it.What The gathering is not, by the way, is the kind of book that would appeal to anyone wanting instant gratification, ...
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A review of A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman
2007-12-04 17:10:00
A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman is a strange book. At one level it’s a straightforward account of university life, with its politics, affairs and academic pursuit. But then there’s the suspicion that none of this is ever satisfying for those involved. They yearn for something bigger, whilst at the same time trying to deny its significance in their lives. Another strand is the career of Federica, one of the book’s principal characters. Almost by default, she finds herself host of a BBC2-style arts review or in-depth discussion. She is forced via the subject matter of her programmes to re-examine a whole host of assumptions. So while the scientists try to identify a mechanism by which memory is both stimulated and fixed by means of electrical stimulation, Federica, via her television shows, offers apparently ever more arcane subject matter, leaving us confused as to what we think we might believe – or even remember.And these are just some of the strands of plot and characteris...
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A note on A Bucket of Ashes, a romantic novel by Jill Lanchbery
2007-12-03 15:05:00
A Bucket of Ashes , a romantic novel set in Britain and Nigeria, by Jill Lanchbery is publised by Libros International. At the heart of A Bucket of Ashes by Jill Lanchbery is an old fashioned love story. Joanna Townsend has it all. She has her own home in a beautiful Sussex village, a successful career as a freelance fashion illustrator, a fourteen year old son who she adores and a gorgeous boyfriend, Tom who wants to marry her.Sally Akinola, mother of four teenage daughters, thinks she has it all too until she learns that her handsome Nigerian husband Isaac has a second wife who has produced the sons that his family and culture value so highly.It is when Joanna is offered a prestigious assignment in Lagos that the two women, once friends but now separated by time distance and culture, rekindle their friendship. As their two lives - past and present - parallel and intertwine, ducking and diving between modern day and fifteen years earlier, they are forced to confront their own person...
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A note on God Works For Me Now by Jacqueline Blakeway
2007-12-03 12:11:00
God Works For Me Now by Jacqueline Blakeway is published by Libros International. It’s a book that describes a marriage breakdown and the spiritual responses of the partners involved.God Works For Me Now is Jackie Blakeway’s account of the rapid rise and then slow demise of a relationship. Jackie describes how she fell in love with Jai, the name she attaches to her former husband for the purposes of her personal account. The way I read things, he was somewhat forceful, a bit too self-assured and confident for someone whose main claim to fame was running a Birmingham newsagent. But when we fall for another person, as Jackie Blakeway points out, rationality, analysis or logic rarely play a role. Our rose-tinted vision is rarely twenty-twenty.The book describes the development and nature of the subsequent problems. They are presented as a sequential story and, at every stage, Jackie describes her responses, her attempts to reconcile the eventually overwhelming evidence of her partn...
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A review of The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
2007-11-29 15:05:00
It’s almost 40 years since Margaret Drabble published The Waterfall , a novel, therefore, of the swinging, liberal, liberated sixties.. The scenario is simple. Jan and Malcolm and Lucy and James are two (heterosexual) couples. Then Jane initiates a shuffle of the cards and has an affair with James. By 2007 standards, this might provide enough material for page one of a contemporary inter-relationship novel. In Margaret Drabble’s hands it is more than enough to sustain a substantial book.The narrative is seen entirely from Jane’s point of view. Alternately written in the first and third persons, we get to know Jane’s character from within and from without. She is not always honest, either with us or herself. She admits manipulation, duplicity, selfishness and infidelity. But they were the right things to do at the time, she convinces herself, the right things, that is, until she later reassesses what she did. So she justifies her inconsistencies, her whims, her foibles, her we...
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A review of Disgrace by J M Coetzee
2007-11-27 17:21:00
Disgrace is a novel of a man’s, even a family’s decline. David Lurie is a university teacher, the kind of teacher who was at home with academic material that current course requirements no longer demand. He is also divorced, twice, and even on his best form he has to grapple with the trials and tribulations that his frayed life and career present.He needs regular sex and visits a prostitute with regularity, always the same one, and harbours suspicions that he provides her with more than just business. He also suffers from self-delusion. So when he has an affair with one of his students, he really believes that she wants him for what he is, despite his thirty years of seniority. He convinces himself that she is a willing participant. It turns sour. She reports him. There is a committee. He cooperates, perhaps, but not in the way required by mores with which he cannot identify. Conveniently, messily, he resigns. And he loses his benefits.David goes off to live with his daughter in...
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Fascination by William Boyd: a virtuoso performance
2007-11-27 14:54:00
Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd’s use of these different forms is not just a writer’s trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer.Philip Spires Author of Mission, an African novel set in Kenya http://www.philipspires.co.uk
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A review of Going Home by Doris Lessing
2007-11-25 12:03:00
It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Goin g Home , an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted person because of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news because of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, however, that fifty years ago the very structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.Fifty years on Doris Lessing’s Going Home an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is more effective, indeed more powerful because of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a large slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers were rich – indeed she records t...
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A review of The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
2007-11-24 15:57:00
One of my greatest pleasures is eating, so I must cook. I savour, therefore I cook. I like tasty food made with fresh ingredients that address all four of our tastes – salt, sour, sweet and bitter – to create a complementary whole. Of course, there is now the fifth taste, unami, the expanding universe within soy sauce, that can amplify other inputs. I have just made an English pie, with chicken, mushrooms, a little diced bacon, seasoning and fresh herbs. It was moistened with stock and an egg before being baked in my own short-crust. Fresh gravy and vegetables alongside is all it will need. It thus has sweet, salt and bitter, but lacks sourness. A squeeze of lemon on the vegetables will compensate.For the expansion, take one novel closely related to cooking and read. Do try the recipes, but proceed with care. Cook things right through before committing to taste. John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure is my recommendation. It’s a highly original, highly informative cookbook w...
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A review of Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
2007-11-23 09:59:00
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes is a book I have had queuing up to read for some time. I don’t know why I have never got round to reading it. Perhaps it’s because of the overtly “literary” tag that was attached to it when it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I am not against “literary” fiction. Far from it: indeed I aspire to write it, after a fashion. My avoidance of Flaubert’s Parrot was never conscious, but was probably a result of thinking that I knew what to expect – word play, experimentation with form, biography, dissection of the writer’s role, relationship between art and life, in fact all the mundane things that your average novelist has for breakfast. The less than average ones, by the way, always have corn flakes. It is their convention. Having just finished the book, I can declare that I found all I expected and much, much, much more.Julian Barnes has his character, a doctor called Geoffrey Braithwaite, consider various literary ideas. One, w...
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A review of The Valkyries by Paulo Coelho
2007-11-22 14:09:00
I found Paulo Coelho ’s The Valkyries a bit of an enigma. I suspect the author at least partly intended it to be so. In a nutshell, the author seeks to discover new aspects of his psyche, to develop new angles on his existing skills. After a consultation with his mentor, he and his wife set off for a jaunt in the Mojave Desert to find what it is that they seek. Our author is in engaged in a quest, a search for his personal Angel. The reader, I am sure, will be convinced from the start that she accompanied him throughout.They wander off in full sun one day, take their clothes off (for some reason) and have to be rescued by Gene, who has seen it all before. He reassures the travellers that they will find their valkyries. And they do. They turn out to be a band of leather-clad women on motorbikes, ladies who have profound mystic powers which they practise amidst their regular partying.I was a bit perplexed by the narrator who claimed to have trained as an engineer in one breath and th...
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A piano recital by Young-Joo Lee in Palau Altea, Altea, Spain
2007-11-22 10:34:00
I claim to be a music lover and I attend a lot of concerts and recitals, so I don’t try to write a review every time, except for a few notes for my journal. But sometimes the playing is so perfect, the interpretations so poignant that the experience demands a record, if only to help publicise real, perhaps exceptional talent. And so it was with Young -Joo Lee, a Korean pianist. She gave her concert to the Amigos de la Musica de la Marina Baixa on November 9 2007 in Altea’s Palau on Spain ’s Costa Blanca.In summary, her programme looked rather conventional. It featured Haydn, Rachmaninov, List, Ravel and Prokofiev. I envisaged a classical sonata played as a loosener, a couple of preludes, a showpiece, perhaps a little dead princess and then something from the tuneful end of Prokofiev to round things off. I am not suggesting that concert programmes offered to the Amigos de la Musica tend to be predictable. Quite the contrary, they tend to the ambitions, but then I am always scepti...
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Europe revisited, reinterpreted
2007-11-21 14:52:00
A review of A Ruby in Her Navel, a novel by Barry UnsworthA Ruby in Her Navel is yet another superb historical novel by Barry Unsworth. By his phenomenal standards, this book might at first appear somewhat one-paced, even one-dimensional, with its action set firmly in the place and time of its main character, Thurston Beauchamp, a young man in the service of King Roger of Sicily in the twelfth century. But if A Ruby in Her Navel might lack the immediacy and complexity of Stone Virgin, it approaches the beautifully portrayed picture of medieval life presented in Morality Play. Indeed, a group of travelling players also features in this novel, as in Morality Play, but this time it’s a troupe of belly dancers from Anatolia, on tour in southern Italy. The ruby and navel of the title both belong to Nasrin, the youngest, most beautiful and most provocative member of the group. But having written that they were touring Italy, a country name that in our eyes is merely mundane and perhaps ...
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A review of A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
2007-11-05 20:25:00
Anthony Powell ’s “A Question of Upbringing” is the first part of his mammoth twelve novel epic “A Dance to the Music of Time”. He writes with wit, humour and not a little sarcasm, describing a quintessential Englishness that perhaps was never representative of the society and has, arguably, disappeared. He wrote this first volume in 1951 and, though the book starts with a London scene from that era, the majority of the book deals with the characters’ school and university experiences and recalls a time passed.The main character is Jenkins. I will follow the author’s lead and use surnames only for males, surnames plus titles for married, older or otherwise unavailable women, and Christian names for eligible women, whether they be of a certain class or prone to wear flowery dresses while standing next to post boxes in the street. As his friend, Stringham, discovered, even some of the surname plus title women at times can prove highly eligible.The book’s form is both si...
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A Silk Road Trip, or I Gobbed in the Gobi, China,1992, by Philip Spires
2007-11-01 18:20:00
In August 1992, myself and my wife, Caroline, arranged a trip to post-Tiananmen China . It was in the days when the London China Travel office was on Cambridge Circus, opposite the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road . It took me at least twenty books, a late-night Japanese television series and several months to plan and arrange the trip from what was then our base in Balham, south London. In those days, you could arrange the visit via China Travel and then, as long as the itinerary was lodged in advance, you could travel absolutely independently. Everything was pre-paid, but on setting off, we had no tickets or confirmed reservations apart from our air tickets in and out of Beijing. As ever, I kept a journal of the trip, which ran to more than fifty pages. A few years later, I condensed the experience to two sides of A4, ignoring rules of grammar and syntax, and produced the following ramble, a perhaps poetic impression of nearly a month of travel.Ex-London while the Sun dissected ...
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The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser tales by George Bernard Sha
2007-10-25 09:46:00
The title piece in this anthology is a parable on the nature of religious belief. When first published in 1932 it caused quite a stir and I wondered whether the intervening 75 years might have rendered it something less of a shocker. I found that, apart from one violation of current political correctness and a few inevitable stylistic issues, the message had lost none of its poignancy and perhaps little of its ability to shock.The Black Girl in Search of God is not a novel or a novella. It is not really a short story either. I choose to describe it as a parable because others have, but equally it could be classed alongside Plato’s symposium as a vehicle for examining a philosophical idea. It’s not a discourse, but it could be a meditation, albeit a rather energetic one. The idea in question, of course, is the nature of religious belief.The Black Girl of the title is only cast as such, I think, to provide Shaw with a literary vehicle to convey his otherwise naïve questions about...
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Up and Down in Toledo, the expected and the surprising
2007-10-22 17:24:00
I have wanted to visit Toledo for at least forty years and for one particular reason, being the canvases of Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco as we have learned to call him. Well, now I have been and I found what I sought, plus a truly amazing and unexpected surprise.Toledo is one of those celebrity tourist destinations that defy categorization. It was a trading centre in Roman times. It was the Visigoth’s capital in what we still call the Dark Ages. It became a splendid, rich, cosmopolitan, multi-faith trading city and artistic centre under Muslim rule. The Christian era saw the construction and decoration of the institutions and monuments that now comprise the city’s current iconic identity. And, after the period of relative decline that affected all of Spain, it is now one of the world’s most visited tourist venues whilst retaining its own, highly dignified life.Its setting is superb. Almost surrounded by the Rio Tajo, the outcrop towers over the gorge. And it is topped...

A review of Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov
2007-10-22 17:22:00
Black Snow is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. This apparent platitude is full of contradiction. The book is perhaps better described as an autobiographical episode, with Bulgakov renamed as the book’s central character, Maxudov. It’s also a satire in which the characters are precise, exact and often vicious caricatures of Bulgakov’s colleagues and acquaintances in the between-the-wars Moscow Arts Theatre, including the legendary Stanislawsky. In some ways, Black Snow is a history of Bulgakov’s greatest success, the novel The White Guard, which the theatre company adapted for the stage under the title The Days of the Turbins. The play ran for close to a thousand performances, including one staged for an audience of a single person, one Josef Stalin who, perhaps luckily for Bulgakov, liked it.Black Snow is also a sideways look at the creative process, itself. Maxudov is a journalist with The Shipping Times and hates the monotony and predictability of his work. Privately he create...
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A review of The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
2007-10-13 14:28:00
I have visited Turkey, but not Istanbul. It’s one of those iconic places that keeps cropping up in travel plans, but then gets overlooked, possibly because its name fits so easily into my thoughts that I convince myself I have already been there. Having just read Orhan Pamuk ’s The Black Book , that illusion will be orders of magnitude stronger. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature and this seems to have spurned new translations of his work, new versions which hopefully can widen his readership in the English-speaking world.The Black Book is a gigantic work. And, in the way that I suspect most readers might understand the term, there is no plot. Suffice it to say that Galip wakes up one morning and his wife has disappeared. He assumes she has gone off to seek out her first husband, Celal, a well-known newspaper columnist. Galip sets off to find Celal and, he assumes, his wife, but strangely the journalist has also disappeared. As a means to help him track down the t...
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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
2007-10-01 17:12:00
Anne Tyler ’s Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its characters’ world and allows you to feel their lives being lived. It’s a giant of a book in a very small world, a world inhabited by Maggie and her husband, Ira, and, it seems, by precious little else. They are long married, happy, perhaps without really knowing it, and replete with generally unacknowledged failure.Breathing Lessons starts with Maggie picking up the family car after its repair job and spruce up. She immediately runs into a truck and doesn’t stop. She and Ira then head off on a long drive to a funeral of a long lost friend. Memories revisit high school and adolescence as the widow attempts to recreate her wedding service to bid farewell to her husband. The songs her friends originally sang turn out to be highly inappropriate, depending on your point of view, and some don’t want to try to recreate their youth and so become dignified spoilspor...
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