The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

336 pages

Published September 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group 

Publisher's Summary: 

“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…”

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.

My Thoughts: 

"A beautiful novel full of life-affirming wonder and imagination and, at its adventurous heart, a wry and tender love-letter to the best of being human.” —Benedict Cumberbatch

I don't usually put much credence into quotes about books from other authors. Publishers tend to pick authors for quotes who are prone to like the book and writers are likely to want to praise a book, in no small part because they'd like the same done for them. But Benedict Cumberbatch? I doubt he's hoping for a great review of his next film from Haig. 

Still not the reason I picked up this one. I picked this one because my book club read Haig's The Midnight Library and we all really liked it. Why not read his next novel as a club as well? Now I'm honestly question that decision. While The Midnight Library absolutely had a fantasy element, it worked for me as a device between chapters. But in this one the fantasy element is front and center and it's supernatural. I'm not sure how that's going to go over with my book club. I know I struggled with it throughout the book. 

"Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived the most boring life in the universe. 

That woman rarely left her bungalow, except to see the doctor, help at the charity shop, or visit the cemetery. She didn't garden any more. The grass was overgrown, and the flowerbeds were full of weeds. She ordered her weekly shopping. She lived in the Midlands. Lincoln, Lincolnshire. The same orange-bricked market town that she had stayed in - apart from a stint t Hull University centuries ago - all her adult life. 

You know the place."

Grace is a lonely woman, living with grief over the long-ago loss of her son and more recently her husband when she receives the notice that a long-ago acquaintance has left her a home. Grace once did a kindness for Christina, something that seems insignificant to Grace but changed Christina's life. Grace arrives in Ibiza only to discover that what she's inherited is a small, run-down house set far off from the city and has been left a list of things to do in her time on the island. Almost immediately warned to avoid Alberto Rios; but Grace, wanting to know what happened to Christina, soon realizes that Alberto is the only one who can help her find out. So to check something off of her list and because Alberto tells her he will show her what happened to Christina, Grace goes scuba diving with Alberto late one night. What happens leave Grace able to read minds, to have a far reaching knowledge, and the ability to move objects.  Now she must decide what to do with those "gifts" and if she can truly know what happened to Christina and stop the people who were trying to hurt her. 

All of which sounds like a crazy adventure novel. Which it is...kind of. But it is far more about how Grace, who has been battling anhedonia for years and living with the guilt of her son's death, find pleasure in life again and learns to forgive herself. And that is very much the kind of book I enjoy. Strangely, one of the things I really enjoyed about this book was all of the references to mathematics (Grace had been a math teacher) - Haig really uses math to explain how the magical elements in this book just might not be that implausible, but also to explain life. I liked that - I may have to rethink my opinion about math...and maybe magical realism. 

April in Spain by John Banville

April In Spain by John Banville

320 pages

Published October 2021 by Hanover Square Press

Publisher's Summary: 

Don't disturb the dead…

On the idyllic coast of San Sebastian, Spain, Dublin pathologist Quirke is struggling to relax, despite the beaches, cafés and the company of his disarmingly lovely wife. When he glimpses a familiar face in the twilight at Las Acadas bar, it's hard at first to tell whether his imagination is just running away with him.

Because this young woman can't be April Latimer. She was murdered by her brother, years ago—the conclusion to an unspeakable scandal that shook one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties.

Unable to ignore his instincts, Quirke makes a call back home to Ireland and soon Detective St. John Strafford is dispatched to Spain. But he's not the only one en route. A relentless hit man is on the hunt for his latest prey, and the next victim might be Quirke himself.

My Thoughts:

I've long been meaning to ready something by John Banville (his name is always popping up on lists of great authors). So I didn't even read what this book is about before I reserved it at the library and, no surprise, I didn't read the summary before I jumped in. Even though I knew nothing about the book and should have been ready for anything, I was still surprised to read this opening: 

"Terry Tice liked killing people. It was as simple as that. Maybe "liked" wasn't the right word. Nowadays he was paid to do it, and well paid. But money was never the motive, not really."

Woah now. What kind of book have I picked up? As it turns out, quite a good one, filled with truly interesting and unusual characters, a lot of darkness, and a little humor starting with the play on words in the title. There are a number of storylines going on at the same time here, which flit in and out of each other, not coming fully together until nearly the end of the book which isn't, as it so often, distracting, but instead pulls readers through the book. As good as the story is, it's Banville's writing that really made this book work for me, as in this passage where the always cranky Quirke is complaining about vacationing: 

"The conspiracy begins the moment you arrive, as he pointed out to Evelyn, who was knitting, and wasn't listening. There's the grinning doorman who yanks open the door of your taxi and gabbles a greeting in pidgin English. There's the beaming girl in black behind the reception desk who exclaims, in her bouncy way, that it is a pleasure to welcome you back, even though you've never stayed here before. There is the porter, lean and stopped, with a melancholy eye and a mustache that might have been drawn on with an eyebrow pencil, who festoons himself with your suitcases and staggers away with them, to arrive at the door of your room a mysterious twenty minutes later - was he off in some cubbyhole in the meantime, going through your things? - and, having shown you how the light switches work anyhow to open and close the curtains, loiters expectantly on the threshold, with his fake, ingratiating smile, waiting for his tip."

Doesn't that draw a vivid picture even as it tells you so much about who Quirke is? Another vivid picture, one that might feel excessive in a such a slim novel but doesn't. 

"His keenest, secret enthusiasm was the lift. It ran, or joggled, rather, up and down through the very heart of the building. It was ancient and creaky, with a folding iron gate that shuddered shut with a satisfying clatter. Inside, it was lined with red plush, and attached to the back wall, below a framed mirror, was a little wooden seat hardly deeper than a bookshelf, covered with a raggedy piece of carpet held in place by round-headed nails worn to a shine over the years by the well-upholstered posteriors of countless well-heeled guests."

Throughout the book Banville reveals things that appear to indicate that this is not the first book that features Quirke, that there may be things that first time readers don't know. But the book is so well done that it comes off feeling more like Banville has just dropped readers into a life and you're going to have to accept that there will be some things that you don't know about the characters and their pasts. It was only after I finished the book that I found out that Banville has written a number of books featuring Quirke. So now I need to find more books by Banville and books about Quirke. 

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Published January 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. 

Together with two thousand other refugees, Roser and Victor embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, the couple embraces exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. Starting over on a new continent, they face trial after trial, but they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they might go home. Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

My Thoughts:

Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors - she is superb at writing sweeping sagas that span generations of captivating, unusual characters set in interesting times and places, most often set, at least in part, in Allende's homeland, Chile. Six decades, three generations, much of the book set in Chile - in that regard, A Long Petal of the Sea is no exception. 

This is by far the most political of the books by Allende that I've read and, while I'm not opposed to that in a book, it did overwhelm the story for me. That being said, I learned so much about the Spanish Civil War and the politics of Chile and it was fascinating to compare both of those political environments with the current state of affairs in this country. Allende condemns both sides for atrocities they commit but as the child of a man who headed a socialist government, it's not surprising that the working class is portrayed more sympathetically. A warning for some - the Catholic church does not fare well in Allende's hands in this book.

You are accustomed to me saying that books would have benefited from a pruning; here, with a story this big, I felt like more would have been better. There would have been more room to include the political stories that Allende wanted to include (some for quite personal reasons - her father was the president of Chile for three years in the 1970's) while also allowing room to flesh out the stories of the families. There were characters I definitely wanted to know more about, characters I wanted to understand better. 

Mind you, this book was named as one of the best books of 2020 by a number of publications so what do I know? Perhaps they all appreciated a decades-long saga that didn't go on for 800 pages. And Allende absolutely manages, in these 314 pages, to explore so many themes, tell us so many stories, and, hopefully, have us wanting to learn more. 

Source: checked out of my local library for August's book club selection

The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti

The Telling Room: A Tale of Loe, Betrayal, Revenge And The World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti
Published December 2013 by Gale Group
Source: this one is mine

Publisher's Summary:  In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as “the telling room.” Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets—usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine.

It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a larger-than-life Spanish cheesemaker named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras as he spun an odd and compelling tale about a piece of cheese. An unusual piece of cheese. Made from an old family recipe, Ambrosio’s cheese was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and was said to hold mystical qualities. Eating it, some claimed, conjured long-lost memories. But then, Ambrosio said, things had gone horribly wrong. . . .

By the time the two men exited the telling room that evening, Paterniti was hooked. Soon he was fully embroiled in village life, relocating his young family to Guzmán in order to chase the truth about this cheese and explore the fairy tale–like place where the villagers conversed with farm animals, lived by an ancient Castilian code of honor, and made their wine and food by hand, from the grapes growing on a nearby hill and the flocks of sheep floating over the Meseta.

What Paterniti ultimately discovers there in the highlands of Castile is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he first imagined. Instead, he’s sucked into the heart of an unfolding mystery, a blood feud that includes accusations of betrayal and theft, death threats, and a murder plot. As the village begins to spill its long-held secrets, Paterniti finds himself implicated in the very story he is writing.

My Thoughts:
I know what the "experts" say about the food groups, but I have my own edition of what the food groups are and one of them is cheese. Yep, cheese gets it's own group. There are a whole lot of cheeses out there in the world and there are very few of them that I've tried and didn't like. So four years ago when I first heard about this book, I knew that I had to find out about the world's greatest piece of cheese.

I must admit that it seemed like it would be a stretch to write an entire book about one kind of cheese. Clearly I did not read the summary before I started reading because this book is so much more than a book about cheese. It is, at least a little bit, about the slow-food movement (it was that movement, after all, which caused Ambrosio Molinos' cheese to gain world-wide fame).

"Ambrosio saw himself as the needle and thread, stitching backward in time, unifying epochs. The awards had validated the idea that you could still make old food, the old way, and enthrall."

It's also about the Castilian way of life and the land. It's about family, friendship gone wrong, greed, and obsession. Not only Ambrosio's obsession with revenge but Paterniti's obsession with Ambrosio and the village of Guzman; Paterniti, a journalist who had traveled the world, became so obsessed with Ambrosio's story, eventually, he moved his entire family to Guzman. Which all makes it a book that's hard to put down, something you almost certainly wouldn't expect from a book you thought was just about cheese.

A word about Paterniti's writing: this book is chock-a-block full of footnotes; footnotes that have footnotes that have footnotes. Some of this is because of the way Ambrosio told his tale (and the tales of others). Much of it is simply Paterniti traveling down side roads, roads that were often humorous, often filled with Spanish history. Occasionally they were distracting but for the most part I enjoyed them. Just as I did Paterniti's writing. He brings the processes, the food, the land, and the people alive.

"The only constant was the bodega. It was nearly guaranteed that at some point along the way we'd end up in the telling room with Ambrosio holding forth, in great word gusts of appreciation for the joys of Castile. He slurped wine and let out wondrous sighs, saying, "Its taste reminds me of the old people who once sat here. It's a privilege to drink this wine." It was a privilege to eat the almonds and the chorizo and jamon, too. It was a privilege to sit on one's derriere in the telling room and get pleasantly soused while hearing stories. It was a privilege to walk this land, to live in this place, to watch the grain grow."

Years ago, my husband picked up a book called Driving Mr. Albert. He thoroughly enjoyed it but it didn't appeal to me (let's be honest, I wasn't really listening when the hubby was telling me about it). Turns out Paterniti wrote that book. I wonder if we still have it. Suddenly, it sounds very much like something I'd like to read!