The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells

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Book #791

Reviewer: inspirationalreads

H. G. Wells is synonymous with Science Fiction. As a fan of sci-fi I have to shamefully admit that this is my first Wells for he is often referred to as one of the Fathers of this genre.  It is clearly evident why he is heralded as such.

Wells opens his story not with an introduction to the Invisible Man and how he came to be in this incredible state, but with a stranger seeking lodging in a small English village in Iping.  He is curt and highly secretive and when strange occurances, including an odd burglary coincide with his arrival, local tongues are sent wagging and suspicions are aroused.   It is not long before the Invisible Man is revealed and he soon escapes leaving chaos and many victims behind him.

When he finds an old school acquaintance in the neighboring village, it is to this man Kemp that he pours his story out to.  He is Griffin, who left their mutual medical school to study in the field of optics.  Here is where Wells’s strength as a science fiction writer is clear. Griffin’s incredible achievement is explained in an almost credible way; through the manipulation of light refraction.

But it isn’t only a tale of scientific achievement.  For although he is successful, Griffin is unable to enjoy any of the things he has so longed for.  He can get riches and he can achieve fame, but being invisible meant it was impossible to enjoy them.  The realisation of “…what a helpless absurdity an invisible man was” creates a manic desperation in Griffin that soon gives way to outright madness.  Because now what he wants, is to inflict his “Reign of Terror” on the country.

This was an interesting lay out for this story.  To have the Invisible Man enter as a shadowy, underhand character and to be introduced to him at the same time as the villagers of Iping appears to be an attempt at a tense vibe.  And in part he is successful.  We don’t know how this invisible man came to be but we read of how rude and demanding he is and then how his dubious activities increase until he is forced to escape.  However, and this is not a small however, this section of the book became bogged down by unnecessary description and even more unnecessary meanderings by the characters.  themselves.  Interactions with newspaper reading extras does not for interesting reading make.

When our Invisible Man escapes to Dr Kemp’s house and we learn of how he came about is where the story truly came alive for me.  Invisibility has been dealt with a lot through other books, movies, tv shows etc.  The common theme is that invisibility has a demoralising effect; if your actions aren’t visible to those who can judge you or hold you in check are you able to continue to do what is right or ethical?  This isn’t a question posed by Wells.  Griffin is soon revealed as having dubious morals before he achieved invisibility.  When his miraculous achievement doesn’t bring what he hoped for and he has to start scrambling for survival, Griffin looses what little ethics he has.  Stealing, destroying property, frightening children, all is revealed to Dr Kemp and the reader.

This book is satisfying on a number of levels.  It is entertaining, gives you a few things to mull over, tense in parts and even has moments of humour; “…the anglo-saxon genius for paliamentary government asserted itself.  There was a great deal of talk and no decisive action“. There is definitely enough to satisfy the science-fiction fans and is a great introduction to Mr. Wells.  A solid 3 out of 5.

Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

Ms Oh Waily4 Comments

Book # 831

Reviewer: Ange

Welcome aboard to our newest reviewer, Ange.  She is about to take us on a rollicking sea-faring adventure.

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest –Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil did for the rest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Treasure Island was a surprisingly good read! In fact, it’s a rip roaring yarn! Because of its age I thought it would be difficult to read, but it moved along at a good pace and while there was some old fashioned language and syntax, the meaning can be easily discerned by a confident reader.

The basic plot is that Jim and his mother run an inn and a disreputable sailor comes to stay. The sailor is scared of outsiders – particularly a man with one leg. The sailor dies in unusual circumstances and Jim becomes the owner of a map – with an X marks the spot! So of course he and his companions risk life and limb to find the treasure. Sadly, one of his companions is less than perceptive and so hires a ship full of corrupt sailors. Luckily the Doctor and the ship’s captain are full of integrity and, when added to Jim’s courage and luck, a mighty battle ensues over mastery of the ship, Treasure Island and the Treasure itself. There are shootouts, bonfires, men marooned for years, booby traps,being cast adrift on the sea, drunkenness, skeletons and even a bit of digging for treasure.

The highlight for me was that the one legged man was Long John Silver, who I’ve heard of all my life, but I had failed to connect him to Treasure Island. In particular I was interested to see how many times he could change sides, how long he could retain control over the pirates and how many different plans he could have going at once. Stevenson’s handling of Long John Silver is perhaps most masterful because I know people with similar characteristics and so I could relate to him. And he really does have a parrot that cries: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

Treasure Island is justifiably famous. The imagery is good and Stevenson was great at adding atmosphere.

If the conduct of the men had been alarming in the boat, it became truly threatening when they had come aboard. They lay about the deck growling together in talk. The slightest order was received with a black look and grudgingly and carelessly obeyed… Mutiny, it was plain, hung over us like a thundercloud.

I found the baddies much more menacing than Voldemort.

‘Come now, march,’ interrupted he; and I never heard a voice so cruel, and cold, and ugly as that blind man’s. It cowed me more than the pain, and I began to obey him at once, walking straight in at the door and towards the parlour, where our sick old buccaneer was sitting, dazed with rum. The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry. ‘Lead me straight up to him, and when I’m in view, cry out “Here’s a friend for you, Bill.” If you don’t, I’ll do this,’ and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice.

I also found that compared to modern day writing the baddies were much more human by being bad for personal gain (when the risk was worth it), rather than just being evil for no reason at all.

I’m looking forward to reading Treasure Island aloud to my son when he is older.


March Update

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9   books reviewed in March.
37  books reviewed in total.
964 books to go.

Another month gone and we are now a quarter of the way through the year.  Here in the Southern hemisphere we are heading into our colder months.  So instead of sitting out on the back porch or lounging at the beach getting our daily fix of vitamin D with a good book, we will be snuggling near a heater or fire, with our hot beverage of choice getting lost with some of our favourite authors.  Ahhhh, both blissful scenarios indeed.

We had four new reviewers contribute this month.  Sweetp reviewed both Middlesex, an intriguing tale of a hermaphrodite and the Sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds.  Hayley reviewed Oscar Wilde’s eerie The Picture of Dorian Gray, where a young man discovers that a painting of him ages and allows him to stay young.  Ange, of Tall, Short and Tiny gave us the review of Possesion, a time-crossing mystery with some romance thrown in.  And Beth from Beth’s List Love   gave us the last review of the month; Fateless, the story of a Jewish teen during World War 2.

Our co-editor Ms. Oh Waily has been very busy this month.  She gave us three reviews for three very different books;  the post-apocalyptic The Day of the Triffids, the satirical A Confederacy of Dunces with the main character she describes as “medievalist, crazy man” and our first foray into Russian literature with Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  And finally, inspirationalreads was impressed by the short tale of a french silkworm merchant’s travels to Japan in Silk.

This months list suggestions has been inspired by Beth’s List Love, who has undertaken an Around the World reading challenge; 52 books from or based in 52 different countries.  We have broken it up into the different continents and found some from the list for each.

Africa

  • The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver (Congo)
  • Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
  • Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenya)
  • Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)
  • Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
  • Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
  • Islands – Dan Sleigh (South Africa)
  • July’s People – Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

The Americas

  • Disapearance – David Dabydeen (Guyana)
  • The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa (Peru)
  • Unless – Carol Shields (Canada)
  • Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges (Argentina)
  • Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)
  • The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende (Chile)
  •  Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado (Brazil)
  • The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho (Brazil)
  • Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin (Cuba)
  • Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel (Mexico)
  • Jazz – Toni Morrison (USA)
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (USA)

Asia

  • Wild Swans – Jung Chang (China)
  • Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Japan)
  • Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami (Japan)
  • The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima (Japan)
  • Memoirs of a Geisha – William Golden (Japan)
  • The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima (Japan)
  • The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (India)
  • Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande (India)
  • A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (India)
  •  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (India)
  • Land – Park Kyong-ni (South Korea)

Australasia/Oceania

  • The Colour – Rose Tremain (New Zealand)
  • Faces in the Water – Janet Frame (New Zealand)
  • The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand)
  • Voss – Patrick White (Australia)
  • The Living and the Dead – Patrick White (Australia)
  • Under the Skin – Michel Faber (Australia)

Europe

  • Broken April – Ismail Kadare (Albania)
  • Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard (Austria)
  • The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus (Belgium)
  • As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakulic (Croatia)
  • Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg (Denmark)
  • The Summer Book – Tove Jansson (Finland)
  • Platform – Michael Houellebecq (France)
  •  Fateless – Imre Kertész (Hungary)
  • Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton (Greece)
  • If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino (Italy)
  • Hunger – Knut Hamsun (Norway)
  • The Double – José Saramago (Portugal)
  • The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg (Sweden)
  • Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Switzerland)
  • The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector (Ukraine)
  • The Monk – M.G. Lewis (England)
  • Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh (Scotland)
  • The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon (Ireland)

Again, if you feel we have left out a book of particular note, please let us know.  We would love to see more entries for Australasia/Oceania (being Kiwis ourselves) and some from smaller countries as well.

Looking forward to seeing what reviews April brings us.  Happy reading!

Fateless – Imre Kertész

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Book # 329

Reviewer: Beth, of Beth’s List Love  (FIRST PUBLISHED FEB 2012)

***Spoilers follow, but no more than you would get from the cover of the book.

I haven’t given a lot of 5 star ratings, but this one definitely earned all 5. It started with the pitch-perfect narrative voice of Gyorgy, a Hungarian Jewish teen, as he faced the deportation of his father to a labor camp during WWII.

I have an 18-year-old step-son, and it was easy to place the words of Kertesz’s protagonist directly into my step-son’s head. Given where this book was clearly headed from chapter 1, it became incredibly poignant right away for me.

As events unfold, our protagonist remains an essentially naive, unworldly, teenage boy. He is embarrassed by the emotions that events he can’t fully understand are evoking in his elders. When all the Jewish teen workers at the oil plant are taken off their bus during the commute to work one morning and held pending further instructions, he is happy to play games with his fellow workers. While he is unaware of where events are leading, and lives very much in the moment, the reader is painfully aware of what the boxcars and the word Auschwitz on the gate of a camp to which he is transported portend.

My uncle was among the American troops who liberated one of the death camps. As a child, I heard my father tell of the bar of soap-shaped clay he brought home to tell the tale of the ways people were seduced into death chambers. Hearing that story was my first experience of horror, and waves of that same horror washed over me as I continued to read this tale.

The contrast between the protagonist’s innocence and that horror are part of the power Kertesz, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, wields as he weaves this tale. Fortunately, the tale soon moves to Buchenwald and then to a more rural labor camp, but not before Gyorgy comes to understand what the horrible smell coming from the chimneys of a number of buildings in the distance signify. Despite what he slowly learns about his situation, Gyorgy continues to find ways to make the experience manageable physically and emotionally. His is a powerful lesson in mindfulness, resilience, and the ultimate complexity of human experience. When he eventually returns to Hungary and is told to put the whole experience of the horrors of his last year behind him, he tries to explain that he doesn’t want to, can’t, forget the things he has experienced.

In the end, he is unwilling to dismiss them, not out of a desire for revenge, or to preserve a record of atrocity, but because he is unwilling to relinquish the memories of the moments of happiness he was able to distill as he worked to create meaning in his ordeal.