The Sunday Salon: Hard to write review

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.