Hello, fellow Saloners,

OK, I know, December was a perfect disaster on this blog, especially in the challenges. But let's forget the last year and look forward to this year.

I started to read Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan this Sunday. She is an Italian writer and academic of Armenian origin and the story is about the Armenian genocide in 1915. The topic of the novel is very serious basicly, but after 40 pages the style of the narration looks very feminin. It's more about the relationships within a family than about the external political factors. So, its sometimes a bit boring, but I hope it will be more interesting soon.

Also currently reading
My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Patrick Süskind:
Perfume:A Story of a Murderer
(1985)

A story of smelling, set in the 18. centruy in France. My first question was to this book: is it necessary to set this story in this century? Or is it that kind of „historical” fiction, which use the past only for spectacular scenery, which makes the story extravagant.

Well, I think, it was necessary, first of all because of the life of the Parisians in the 18. century. It was quite crowded on the modern way, but still quite medieval.

So, the story is about a murderer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Grenouille means frog), who was an unwanted child, an orphan who has a special attribution, he has no personal scent, but on the other way he has the talent to recognise odours, like a dog, or even more perfectly. Like this attribution shows us, the story has several magical realistic elements.

As an orphan he has quite little chance to grow up, even to be one or two years old, but he survives all these years, even the hard times as an apprenticed to a tanner. This is one of the magical realistic elements.

And later, when he spends seven years in a cave, where he discovers finally, he has no personal scent, is for example an other one.

He creates his first perfume in th laboratory of a great perfumier, Baldini. He creates the perfumes, Baldini gives his name to them. Grenouille creates the perfumes quite easily. The real challenge begins for him many years later, when he starts to create human body odours, which influence the behaviour of other people to him.

The horrific part of the story starts after this, when Grenouille decides to kill young virgins to make an only one an perfect odour.

The end of the story remains true to itself, still full with horrific and magical realistic elements.
Although it’s a quite bizarre and sometimes disgusting theme, the basic idea and the storytelling makes it interesting. A really amusing book.

(This review was written to the Fall Into Reading challenge. More>>>)

Gyorgy Dragoman: The White King

The life of the former „Eastern Block” form the point of view of a child. Djata is a 11 years old boy, his father is at a forced labor camp. This is the most important motive in the book, which contains of several grotesque and absurd, but still anecdotic stories from the life in Romania in the middle of the 1980’s.

Well, a 11 years old child is our narrator, which means, there is a conflict between what we know about life and what Djata tells us about it. It is similar to the Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz. First of all because this book gives quite often the feeling, everything what happens is normal. This is the “normal” way of life. And of course there are several moments which are typical for an 11 years old boy, but still there are always something bizarre and terrible in the background. Djata is always waiting home his father, and there are small signals, sometimes just some words in his storytelling, that their life becomes harder and harder. And even there is a conflict within the family, between his mother and his grandparents (the parrent’s of his father), which makes the situation more complicated.

Not only the point of view is from a child, but the way of storytelling. He uses sometimes very long sentences, as usually a child, who wants to tell the people many-many things, and he wants to tell it as fast as possible, and he looks like almost to forget to breathe.

The title of the book refers to the white king of the chess board, and this motive appears only a few times in the stories.

I’ve said at the start of this post, this is a book about the life in the former Eastern Block. Well, it is not quite accurate, because there were quite large differences between the countries in this part of Europe in that period. Although some things are very familiar to our former life here in Hungary, for example the motive of the brutal and tyrannical teachers, or even the scene, when Djata and his friend find the private screening room for the VIPs of the Party in the cinema (this is like a scene from the grotesque film of Peter Bacso, The Witness), and during reading the book there was nothing really shocking in this book, I should say, we have had still more freedom, a better and easier life here in Hungary.

And although there are some ( for me) uninteresting stories in this book, the end, the last story was really worth to wait.

There are two books I’ve read already weeks (month?) ago, and I always promise to write review, but I couldn’t manage still. Well, I don’t write reviews about every book I read, but these are on my list to the Fall into Reading Challenge list, and I have also the aim to write every books on that list something.

Well, I think, the problem is more difficult than I would not have enough time to post about these books.

The one book is The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. First of all the title of this novel is interesting for me. The True Story (History) of… that’s the typically postmodern fun, I love. I know, when a contemporary novel has that kind of title, it should be interpreted ironically, and of course the story of the book is a fiction. Either is about a real person or just a fictive someone. So that’s why I would say, I don’t care about what happened with Ned Kelly, I don’t care about very little episode of his life, the way of the narration is for me more important, more interesting.

Ok, it’s still important, that he was an outlaw. Not because it’s such an adventurous and exciting thing. But because this book is about who has the right to tell the truth. Maybe a journalist, who wants to sell more and more sample of his newspaper? Or a politician? Or… or… or maybe Ned Kelly. He has the right too to tell about his life what he want. The book plays with the idea of the found manuscripts (like the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco). We can read Ned Kelly’s „letters” to his daughter, who he has never seen. But even this perspective makes Ned Kelly’s words more authentic than the other people, even when he was an outlaw.

The other book is Frater Gregorius by Mor Jokai. Every time I start to write the review I have the problem, I can’t write about a Jokai-novel for people, who has never read a book by him. Or even other Hungarian historical fictions about the middle of the 16. century. The book was interesting for me to compare the characters with other novel’s. Frater Gregorius (George Martinuzzi) was a statesman, a monk, a cardinal, in some novels he is a hated figure, but Jokai makes from his life a fairy tale (The book is from the end of the 19. century, the historian fictions from that period in Central-Europe are mostly romances) Ambition, hatred, revenge are in this novel good attributes, everything what Martinuzzi does, is good, because it’s good for the nation. Jokai is obviously of the opinion, Frater Gregorius was a good statesman for the Hungarian people, he is much much better than usually the Hungarian statesmen were. Jokai’s style is quite ironical, he talks quite often directly to his readers, and it’s a good fun to follow the storytelling of „the great storyteller”. But it’s so hard to write about it.