Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (raidergirl3)

Shortlisted 1971 (originally posted at my blog)

First of all, it's not that Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor the author, 1912 - 1975, was British and wrote twelve novels and four short story collections. This Elizabeth Taylor has written a bittersweet story about aging, and loneliness, and finding friendship.

Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Who goes to a hotel to live? Widows and widowers of a certain class and money, whose family won't take them in. Laura Palfrey and the others who live year round in the Claremont have their own appearances and habits to keep up, but they are in many ways just in a holding pattern, waiting to be moved to a nursing home, as they can't die in the hotel but are hanging on to their independence. Laura meets Ludo, a young writer, when she falls one day outside his home. She sees in him the attention her own grandson doesn't pay her, and he sees in her a character for his novel. They develop a friendship of sorts. Early on, it made me a little nervous that Ludo would be mean to Mrs Palfrey, or use her, and I didn't want anything too terrible to happen to Mrs Palfrey. It wasn't that she was too sweet, because she was human with good and bad qualities, but I liked her, her mix of cautiousness and recklessness as she navigated her new life.

I call this bittersweet because it was both. There were some amusing scenes, but the underlying sadness in the lives of the characters is always present. The life they construct in the hotel, with their rituals and the inevitable hierarchy of social standing were so clearly written. There have been new releases of many of Taylor's novels that I would like to read. I enjoyed her writing style and characterizations. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont has also been made into a movie starring Joan Plowright.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, reviewed by raidergirl3

Penelope Lively was born in Egypt on March 17, 1933 and spent her childhood there before moving to England. She uses some of her experiences for this book, a Man Booker winner from 1987, which covers the life of Claudia Hampton as she remembers her life from her hospital bed.

Claudia was a war reporter stationed in Egypt during the second world war. It's hard to recap her life because Claudia herself tells her story in a nonlinear fashion, as important parts come to her. I liked how Lively did this, and the jumping around in time, and perspective, should be more confusing than it was, but I found it enjoyable. The major theme of the book is that history is all about perspective and point of view. This gets extended to the story and some scenes are told from different characters perspective a very effective technique.

I really liked seeing the scene from different perspectives.
Seeing the scenes from different perspectives gives the reader insights into the characters.

Claudia has a daughter but leaves her with the grandmothers to raise as she hasn't a maternal bone in her body. There are two great loves in Claudia's life and they really shape her future life. I believed this love story like I didn't in Love in the Time of Cholera, even though both are unfulfilled love in some sense. I liked the relationship with her brother, the closeness some siblings must feel. And I shouldn't have liked Claudia, because she is independent, rude, and abrupt, but I loved her rude abrupt behavior at a time when women weren't rewarded for that sort of behavior or expected to be that way.

Writing a book as a character's memoir seems to be a common type of book, allowing an author to have their character look back over a lifetime of history and to comment on how they perceived events, leading to the idea of an unreliable narrator and leaving the reader to judge whether what is being told is true or if it has been misremembered. It doesn't always work for me (Gilead) but I liked seeing Claudia's life, or the parts she let us see.

The Gathering, reviewed by raidergirl3

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Man Booker winner 2007

I liked this book. I've read reviews that found this depressing and miserable, but it wasn't that bad. Perhaps it's a cultural thing. My paternal descendants are all Irish, way back, but in the Maritimes, we still claim that heritage regardless of how many hundreds of years ago those poor starving ancestors left Ireland. Part of the reason is that the Irish struck together over here, like the French and the Scottish, so that my father's generation was the first to marry non-Irish. He's from a relatively large family as well, so I am familiar with the large family saga, where you are related to people and know them, while you may not actually know them at all, but having met once, you have that connection, that shared heritage.

The other reason I liked this book was the connection I felt to the narrator. She's a woman about my age (she's 39) and her life is fine, no reason to be unhappy, but she's beginning to question her life and her family. Middle age angsty stuff. Veronica recognizes that she has no reason to be unhappy, but she is spiraling downward after the suicide of her closest brother. She tries to look into her past and her brother's to see where things went wrong with Liam and herself. Her memories are all tossed together with her siblings and they were more realistic described than the minutely detailed memories that occur in some memoirs. For example, she remembers the time she was eight and staying at her grandmother's and she ate a plastic flower. The flower came out it the diaper, but she was eight, so it must have been her little sister who did that, but she thought the story was about her. Lots of real touches like that.

So in conclusion, without going into any more detail, I didn't mind the depressing stuff because I recognize it. Irish stories are often depressing (You've read Angela's Ashes? My dad recognized his childhood, to a lesser degree) and I get it. I liked the writing as well, and can see why this was the winner for the Man Booker last year. There are still some things I found a little vague, so I am looking forward to the discussion with my book group about this book. I think there is a lot to discuss after reading this book.

Man Booker Challenge - raidergirl3

I'd like to make a post that I can link all my reviews to, especially now that this has expanded a bit to include the Man Booker challenge hosted by dewey. This year, I will read 6 books that were either winners or short listed. (I was planning to read 8 for the 888 challenge anyway, so I could see including more short listed books for this challenge.) My list includes:

2007 The Gathering - Anne Enright
2001 The True History of the Kelly Gang
1999 Disgrace - Coetzee
1998 Amsterdam - McEwan
1996 Last Orders - Graham Swift
1992 The English Patient -
1989 The Remains of the Day - Kazou Ishiguru
1984 Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
1983 The Life and Times of Michael K - Coetzee

Some others that are from the short list that intrigue me include:

2007 Mister Pip - Lloyd Jones
2006 The Night Watch - Sarah Waters
2006 In the Country of Men - Hisham Matar
2004 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2003 Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
2002 Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry
2001 Atonement - Ian McEwan

raidergirl3 intro and progress

Glad to be here, sharing the madness and good books. I like that this list is shorter than the Pulitzer, but you know, the Giller list is even shorter!
Here's my official, periodically updated list of Bookers I've read:

• 2008 The White Tiger Aravind Adiga 4 stars
• 2007 The Gathering - Anne Enright 4 stars
• 2002 The Life of Pi read in 2004 and loved it 5 stars
• 2000 The Blind Assassin reviewed here 3 stars
• 1997 The God of Small Things reviewed here 4 stars
• 1996 Last Orders - Graham Swift 3.5 stars
• 1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha read in the 1990s ?
• 1989 The Remains of the Day - Kazou Ishiguru 4.5 stars
• 1985 The Bone People reviewed here 5 stars
• 1984 Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner 4 stars
• 1983 The Life and Times of Michael K - JM Coetzee 2.5 stars

I found a big old list of Bookers I'd like to read and the next ones that top the list, also periodically updated, are:

• 2004 The Line of Beauty - Hollinghurst
• 2001 True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
• 1998 Amsterdam - McEwan