Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai – Ruiyan Xu

Read as part W of the “Along the Library Shelf” reading journey

Chosen because

The only X on the shelf and an intriguing title.

The Review

Li Jing is a success, running his own financial investment business in Shanghai, married to the attractive and intelligent Zhou Meiling with whom he has a young son.

Then, in a gas explosion, a shard of glass pierces his head and incapacitates the part of his brain that processes language into speech. As a result he can no longer speak his native Chinese but can utter a few words of the English he knew as a child in America, not used since.

This “Broca’s aphasia” is rare and a specialist neurologist, Dr Rosalyn Neil, is flown in from America to join the medical team treating Li Jing. She is glad to make the trip, leaving behind a recently failed marriage, but finds the culture shock (convincingly described) a struggle until some ex-pats take her in tow.

What follows, slowly but never dully, is an exploration of the importance of spoken language and the feeling of impotence that results from its loss. The effect on Li Jing’s business, built on his ability to charm his contacts and clients, could be catastrophic but it his relationship with Meiling that suffers most. His inability to communicate with her as of old, contrasts starkly with the growing ease with which he can connect, using his improving English, with Rosalyn.

Of course those who speak the same language (Rosalyn and her fellow westerners, Meiling and her father-in-law) often fail to communicate too, so this is not all about a rare medical condition but also about a general malaise.

Li Jing’s inexorable drift on the tide of language from east to west is told with empathy from all points of view by Ruiyan Xu (herself a mixture of the two cultures) to produce a thoughtful book that may lack action but is not without tension of the will he won’t he, will she won’t she, kind.

Read another?

Probably not – intense emotion is all very well but I like some light relief and a bit more to be happening in my books.

Red Mist – David Tomlinson

Louis Case’s size, strength and way with words suited his career choice of minder, but his anger management issues less so, and throwing a client out of a sixteen storey window brought it to a premature end and earned him a sabbatical at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

On release he finds therapy in painting pottery and leaning to play the guitar (in neither of which has he any talent) but when his music teacher, Clarissa Glendenning, is killed in a hit and run the old instincts take over and he plans retribution.

Moving swiftly and violently through his criminal and dodgy police contacts he tracks down the perpetrator while simultaneously putting on a memorial concert for Clarissa, performed by her hapless pupils (she seemed to specialise in teaching the talentless and the tone deaf). The climax of both the hunt and the concert involve significant spillage of blood.

Red Mist is short, concisely written, with some choice turns of phrase. The violence is mitigated by the black humour that courses through the book’s (well-opened) veins. I enjoyed it and recommend it as a good short read.

Tiny Sunbirds Far Away – Christie Watson

Part of the ‘Into and out of Africa’ reading journey.

Thirteen year-old Blessing’s privileged life in the well-heeled Ikeja suburb of Lagos comes to an abrupt halt when her mother finds her father ‘on top of another woman’. It is he that has the good job, money and position so Mama packs up Blessing and her elder brother Ezikiel, and heads back to her parent’s village deep in the (Niger) delta.

Blessing’s new life in her grandparents’ compound lacks the home comforts she is used to – electricity, running water, flush toilets, TV, and air-con, but in time she finds new emotional ties and cultural values that compensate.

But life on the delta is hard for her and her family. Little money means no electricity, sporadic schooling, basic food and the risk of running out of medication for the asthmatic and nut allergic Ezikiel (who goes hungry with virtually everything cooked in nut oil).

Mama’s search for work brings her into contact with the white oil-workers and executives, and her earnings grow suspiciously. Ezikiel takes a different view of the oil industry and leans towards the rebel groups that infest the riverbank. As for Blessing, she is taken under her grandmother’s wing and becomes her apprentice in her role as birth assistant (midwife).

It is through this role that she discovers the horrors of ‘cutting’ (female circumcision or female genital mutilation); seeing the traumatic effects on affected women come home to roost during childbirth.

Against this political, economic and cultural turbulence, home life goes on with relationships ebbing and flowing (much like a West African version of The Archers) until some climactic events shift it into a higher state of being. The outcomes stay uncertain to the end, but a plausible and satisfying resolution ensues.  

The book is well written, giving what seems a fairly balanced picture of Nigeria at the time (1990’s?); maybe a touch long, with for me too much detail on the pain, joys and drama of giving birth. But these are minor quibbles and do not detract from a good and, for me, unusual read. 

Toast – Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater has written about cooking and eating for many years but here he looks back at the food and drink he grew up with to lure the reader into a nostalgic account of the tastes he enjoyed or endured as a child of the fifties and sixties – such as tinned ham, Instant Whip and sherbet fountains.

This alone would be entertaining, particularly if like me you are of that generation. But Slater uses his remembrance of food past as a framework to support his account of growing up through at first oblique, then more direct, references to his parents, siblings and other adults he encounters, all seen through the perspicacity of youth but interpreted with the wisdom of experience.

The connection between food and feeling is well established, and the subtitle of the book – the story of a boy’s hunger – surely relates to an emotional rather than nutritional shortfall in his upbringing. Not that he is angry or bitter, more regretful in hindsight of opportunities missed to give and receive love surely felt but rarely shown.

The writing is good with entertaining turns of phrase and brutal honesty in parts. A nice feature of the writing is the way the language matures subtly as the narrator moves through adolescence, making it seem more contemporaneously written than it actually is.

It’s a fine book, the description of the foodstuffs brought back memories I could taste and his childhood memories are both painful and funny (Adrian Mole-like) and the two strands are bound together without artifice to give an unusual and rewarding read.

The Adversary – Michael Walters

Read as part W of the “Along the Library Shelf” reading journey

Chosen because

This one leapt off the shelf due to its mix of a familiar genre (crime) in an unfamiliar and intriguing setting (Mongolia).

The Review

With press reports that the Ulan Baatar police are failing to take seriously a missing persons case, Doripalam, Head of Serious Crimes Team, steps in to add some high-profile policing. A good job too (although a little late) as when he arrives to interview the mother of the missing teenage boy he finds only her brutally murdered body in her ransacked ger (a Mongolian tented dwelling).

It’s almost a welcome distraction from a recently collapsed trial at which a notorious but untouchable crime boss, Muunokhoi, walked free when some prosecution evidence was exposed as faked.

Tunjin is the culpable detective, immediately suspended, but his life is more at risk than his career as Muunokhoi is not the forgiving and forgetting type; so Tunjin’s off on the run.

Investigating the whole mess is Nergui, ex-head of Serious Crimes and now upstairs in the Justice Ministry. His exact brief is unclear but his agenda is less so – he and Muunokhoi have history, and this is personal.

The story unfolds as a three-hander with Nergui, Doripalam and Tunjin working in loose concert via politics, policing and personal enterprise against an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful opponent, who for the first time appears uncharacteristically to be panicking. Someone has something he fears could expose him – is it to do with the missing boy or something the attractive female judge, Sarangarel Radnaa, knows from a previous life?

The action is pretty relentless, switching between the three viewpoints and taking us from the high society and mean streets of UB out to the nomadic settlements of the limitless steppes. The body count rises as the forces of good and evil converge for a final climactic showdown.

There are some thoughtful interludes; Nergui and Doripalam care about their country and provide some insights into modern day Mongolia, with the previous Soviet and current decadent Western capitalist influences both grafted onto bedrock of tradition and culture suited to neither.

Read another?

Nergui and Doripalam make a good team; this is their second outing and I will certainly look out for “The Shadow Walker”.

The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane takes us walking across a variety of landscapes (even seascapes) following some ancient ways, which for him are windows on the past with the personal history of all who use them trodden into the fabric of the route.

He also makes a close connection between walking and thinking, with the rhythm of the steps providing a stimulus for the mind to explore the inner self as the body treads new or familiar pathways.

More food for thought comes from people he shares part of his walks with, who too find meaning in meandering; and though most are living he also walks with the dead, reviewing the works of earlier writers who he feels offer insights into the paths he follows, the places he passes and the truths he seeks. Prime among these is war poet Edward Thomas, and a short poignant sketch of his final months is slipped in.

All these strands are layered on top of, or below, the physical landscapes described with an appreciative and knowing eye, where character, not beauty, is most valued.

The prose is both spare and poetic, in places mystical, in others prosaic, but always sumptuously readable. It may sound a bit of an oddity but it does work, and in it I found reassuringly complex reasons why I find such enjoyment in such a seemingly simple activity as walking.

The Honey Guide – Richard Crompton

Part of the ‘Into and out of Africa’ reading journey.

Mollel is a Nairobi policeman, ex CID but now busted down to Traffic. He’s a Maasai and when a Maasai girl’s mutilated body is found in Uhuru Park his insider knowledge gets him in on the case.

The trail seems to lead to some high profile figures, and as this is December 2007 with a presidential election just days away, politics threatens to interfere with his pursuit of the murderer. And with politics in Kenya a violent sectarian business, his chief of police wants his men keeping order at the polls not stirring up more trouble.

Against the background of mounting tribal tension (mainly Kikuyu against Luo with the Maasai one of several minority players) Mollel ignores orders to desist and doggedly follows the evidence, on the way uncovering lies and corruption that seem endemic in the Kenyan capital. And of course, being a cop, he has his personal problems, struggling to come to terms with the recent death of his wife and taking on sole responsibility for a young son he can’t connect with emotionally.

The story is fast paced, action-packed and full of twists and turns, uncertain to the end. The setting feels authentic and Crompton slips in some insights into post-colonial East Africa and the Kenyan national psyche, where harmonious personal relations can all too easily be swept aside by tribal affiliations and mutual suspicion based on past misdeeds.

An enjoyable read and for crime aficionados a refreshing change from regional British sleuths or Nordic noir.