Dark Voyage, Sharp Objects

I was quite satisfied with the following two reads: Alan Furst's Dark Voyage and Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects. Dark Voyage is a story set in the early 1940s, where Captain Eric DeHaan sails his Dutch freighter Noordendam, under the guise of a Spanish vessel Santa Rosa, across European waterways on cladestine operations against the Germans and the Russians. It is a highly credible portrayal of wartime Europe, peppered with espionage and love.

Sharp Objects, which is more disturbing, focusses on Chicago-based journalist Camille Preaker who was despatched by her agency to her hometown Wind Gap to cover the death of two young girls whose teeth had been brutally extracted by their murderer. As she investigates the story, she finds herself ensnarled by the ghosts of her past and trapped by the vices of the present: drugs, sex, alcohol and abuse. A bloodily revolting book which is hard to put down once you begin reading it.

Blue Heat

Finished two novels over the past week. Winterton Blue, by Trezza Azzopardi, is a story set in Norfolk, England that wraps itself around the lives of two separate persons - Lewis Caine, a man torn apart by the haunting guilt over the death of his epileptic brother Wayne and his vengence-laced pursuit of Carl Finn who led Wayne to his demise; and Anna Caulder, a woman struggling to both find her own place in life and repair her relationship with her mother Rita. While the book, with all its poignant twists and exquisite character development, was just about satisfactory, I wasn't blown away by it. Perhaps it was because I just didn't buy the Lewis-Anna romance, and that may have just soured everything.

The second novel was Dead Heat, by Joel Rosenberg. Peppered with Christian theology, the story roars off to a fiery start with the American CIA launching Hellfire missiles at suspected terrorists in Yemen, and the rest of the story continues action-packed all the way through to the end, with the discovery of evidence of an assassination plot against the top US leadership; nuclear warheads vaporising entire cities from one side of the Pacific to the other; rising threats of war rocking the Middle East and Northeast Asia; one too many wrecked individuals miscalculating and squeezing the trigger far too many times; and much more. I reckon over four-fifths of the named characters in the book did not survive the end of the tale. It's a very graphic read, breakneck pace, breathtaking.

The Memory Man

I just read the 2005 Holocaust Literature award-winning book, "The Memory Man", by Lisa Appignanesi. It's a story about Professor Bruno Lind, a Viennese Jew by descent who fled and lived overseas during the horrific Holocaust years and now an aged but accomplished neuroscientist of international fame. Lind takes up an offer to speak at a technical seminar in Vienna, where he gets to know journalist Irena Davies, whose mother Marta is suffering from Alzheimer's, and Krakow pharmacologist Aleksander Tarski, whose very name sends Lind's mind reeling and stirring up his long-forgotten memories. Urged on by his adopted daughter, Amelia, Lind then travels to Poland, where he is seized by haunting recollections of his past: his family forced into hiding and torn apart by the merciless enslaught of racial and religious prejudice as Nazi influence swept across Central Europe, his family's struggle to survive and fight back, and the brutality and senselessness of their eventual massacre. What started out, for me, as a dry book peppered with neuro-psycho-philosophical jargon gradually evolved into a tale of wartime courage, sacrifice and love, and of hope placed, misplaced and found again. This novel is definitely worth a read.

Los dos libros

Managed to finish reading two of the four novels which I had borrowed over the past three weeks. Splendid achievement, I must say, given the hectic schedule. =)

The first book is "Bleeding Hearts" by Ian Rankins. It's a gripping story written from the perspective of an assassin, Michael Weston, who successfully guns down his female target but ends up having the police and a private investigator Leo Hoffer hot on his heels. In an attempt to find out who was his secret employer and who had tipped off the police, Weston embarks on a cross-Atlantic journey and is brought into dangerously close contact with a mysterious religious order as well as a ruthless intelligence service, with the unfortunate consequence of having a number of his friends and contacts die in the process from the collateral damage. A fascinating tale with surprising twists in the plot. :)

The second book is "The Weatherman" by Clint McCown, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize. A refreshing read, which opens with a prologue about a huge spider dangling precariously on the ceiling right above the protagonist, Taylor Wakefield, who is lying immobile in a hospital bed. And then the book plunges into Wakefield's childhood history, a time when he witnessed and stayed silent about a cold-blooded murder committed by his cousin William "Billy" Hatcher and when he lost the National Spelling Bee finals to another kid and went on to be a child radio-celebrity. The story then continues into Wakefield's adulthood, about how, by an odd turn of events, he joined the disreputable Alabama Broadcasting Network as a weatherman and fuelled public speculation about Hatcher's shady past through suggestive weather predictions which had nothing to do with the weather, and this, coming at a time when the "born-again Christian" Hatcher was running in the state election for Attorney-General. An excitingly vivid tale and definitely a book I would recommend.

Gilgamesh

Today marks my 2nd anniversary at work. Coincidentally, I succumbed to illness, got myself a day of medical leave, and spent the rest of the day alternating between doing limited office work from home and reading Gilgamesh.

I had read another book by the same title earlier, but this one by Stephen Mitchell is quite different. Unlike Joan London's book (which is about the romance between an Australian girl and her archeologist beau who is fascinated with the story of Gilgamesh), Mitchell's book is about the epic story of Gilgamesh himself, the giant king of "great-walled Uruk" (current day Iraq) who was born 2/3 divine and 1/3 human. Accompanied by his best friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh sets off to slay the terrifying monster Humbaba which guards the Cedar Forest and later also thwarts the plot by the goddess Ishtar to punish him with the Bull of Heaven for spurning her advances. As the story develops, Enkidu slips away into the netherword, and overcome with fear and grief, Gilgamesh embarks on his long and difficult journey to the end of the world in his quest for immortality.

This is a poetic and fascinating story which was inscribed in cuneiform script on eleven clay tablets over 3,000 years ago. These tablets were only discovered in 1853 in the ruins in Nineveh, and the script was not deciphered and fully translated until much later. It is possibly the oldest surviving epic story in the world. Mitchell has done a masterful job of translating the script into modern English and making the tale come truly alive for his readers.

This is how his translation of the prologue of the story goes...

"He had seen everything, had experienced all emotions,
from exaltation to despair, had been granted a vision
into the great mystery, the secret places,
the primeval days before the Flood. He had journeyed
to the edge of the world and made his way back, exhausted
but whole. He had carved his trials on stone tablets,
had restored the holy Eanna Temple and the massive
wall of Uruk, which no city on earth can equal.
See how its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun.
Climb the stone staircase, more ancient than the mind can imagine,
approach the Eanna Temple, sacred to Ishtar,
a temple that no king has equalled in size or beauty,
walk on the wall of Uruk, follow its course
around the city, inspect its mighty foundations,
examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built,
observe the land it encloses: the palm trees, the gardens,
the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops
and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares.
Find the cornerstone and under it the copper box
that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid.
Take out the tablet of lapis lazuli. Read
how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all."

East Side Run

Had a good East Side Run this morning with jamessoh, dragonchua and ripley. The weather was nice and cool and cloudy. We started off from the carpark outside Kembangan Community Centre, then cut across the Siglap Park Connector until we reached East Coast Park itself. From there, we turned eastwards towards the Swim Start point of the OSIM triathlon, and then did our u-turn. Only pity was that it was too cloudy for me to get a tan... :P

I didn't see anyone I recognised there at the Swim Start point, but i saw Ironmandreamer and SportsVenturer on my return leg to Kembangan. It was a good run, although my stamina is still not yet quite back yet.

Total distance: 9.5 km
Time taken: 1 hr 15 min

After the run, jamessoh drove us to the food centre at Old Airport Road where we feasted on the famous wanton noodles :) Yummy!

Then I had to go back to the office for a while, the second time this weekend. q(-;)p Ah well... Hope I won't have to forfeit my leave the next weekend as I have already made all my arrangements to depart Singapore for KL for the Adidas King of the Road race.

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Update as of 2320 hrs

Had dinner at Margarita's at Dempsey Hill with kops21, charlotte, kickjazz, angelica_wonders, teelee, roentgen, taz and junie. The area brings back memories. I recall coming here over a decade ago for my secondary school attachment with a defence technology organisation. How the place has changed! It's now a posh-looking area, frequented by guests with huge and expensive-looking cars. I ordered the Enchilada Verde de Pollo which was rather filling :) We finished off the evening with a combined birthday celebration, and then headed off for home.

When I got back, I finished a book which I had borrowed from the library yesterday which was entitled "Zacarias, my brother" by Abd Samad Moussaoui, the elder brother of Zacarias Moussaoui who was convicted of conspiring in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Both men were first-generation French citizens of Moroccan descent. The author sets out to explain how his brother, hardened and disillusioned by racism on the one hand and lacking any other accessible source of Islamic teaching on the other, turned to Wahhabism and became indoctrinated with extremist ideologies.

"...I use the term 'Blacks' even though we are Arabs, because that's the way most born-and-bred French people saw us. It was hard to label us at a glance. The only thing that was clear was that we come from somewhere else. From Africa, or from the Caribbean? I've lived with this ambiguity my whole life, and so has Zacarias. Now that I'm an adult and settled, it no longer bothers me - I've gotten used to it. But as children, Zacarias and I found it extremely unpleasant to be forced so often to explain our origins. There was something humiliating and unsettling about it - it was as if we didn't have any formal identity...We were born here, on this Earth, in this country. We had grown up here. So what did our 'integration' mean? How were we to become 'integrated' in French society when we were French? Making the shift from childhood to adolescence, and then from adolescence to adulthood, is very upsetting for people who have trouble finding a place for themselves." ~ pages 28 and 62

Olive's Ocean

Olive's Ocean was an easy read. It's written for a juvenile audience, and I knowingly decided to borrow it home from the library anyway. It is a simple story about a young girl called Martha Boyle whose classmate Olive Barstow dies in a freak road accident. The two girls had never been close friends, but as Martha finds out after the tragedy from a page from Olive's diary, they actually had much in common. With the heavy thought of Olive weighing on her mind, Martha sets off with her family for a holiday at her grandmother's place by the ocean, where she is confronted by issues of life, death, love, betrayal, aspirations and dreams that can never be fulfilled. It's a short and thoughtful book, worth 6.5/10.

This makes it my 11th book for 2007, the other ten being those shown below. Not a bad accomplishment. :)

Smoking Poppy

Went out for a second movie this afternoon, this time, with the befrienders and children from my Club Rainbow group. We went to VivoCity at around noon and watched "Happily N'ever After". A light-hearted animation about happy endings and the lack of them, but not exactly my cup of tea. But some of the kids enjoyed it, so that made it a worthwhile film. Spent a good afternoon afterwards with the children at the Pet Shop and the Comic Shop, and took some lovely pictures under the sun on Level 3 of the building.

As I was processing the photos at home, I couldn't help noticing how gaunt I've become though. :( I hope my injury is not permanent. I hope I find a happy ending to my story.

Finished reading Smoking Poppy. It's a fantastic read. Its British author, Graham Joyce, does magic with his enchanting and colourful narration. It's the story about an Englishman Daniel Innes who dropped all that he was doing to set off for Chiangmai after he had received news that his daughter Charlotte had been arrested and put in prison for smuggling drugs in Thailand. Accompanied by his son Phil and a loud and blumbering side-kick of a friend Mick, Daniel flies to Chiangmai. But instead of finding closure at the prison, the three men become drawn into a long, torturous trek through the thick forests of northern Thailand towards Myanmar, where isolated villages are engaged in the illegal and dangerous cultivation of poppy. And as the trails of opium smoke rise from these tribal huts, so also descends upon Daniel and his companions the heavy oppression that comes from shamanic evil spirits and greedy men who readily kill to keep their opium business alive. I rate this book 8.5/10.

Red Gold

Red Gold, by Alan Furst, is a cinematic-style story set in wartime France in 1941-42. The protagonist, a film producer by the name of Jean Casson, finds himself sucked by circumstances into a French resistance against the occupying German forces, becoming involved in a risky arms deal to supply the French Communist Party with guns and ammunition. Hardly the sort of thing that a non-partisan film producer would do, but these are difficult times when the police can come knocking on your door, and you are never heard of again. One after another, the author writes about French comrades who fall in the line of duty - assasination, sabotage, espionage - many of them young men and women, barely into their teens, losing their lives in their fight for freedom for France. Viva la France! At the same time, there is also the suffering of the Jews who are being persecuted, some of them choosing to flee the occupied terrority. Throw in the Gestapo, double-crossing agents and mysterious lovers to raise the level of suspense. Plus a detailed and descriptive familiarity of Paris, which lends a sense of authenticity to the tale. This book is a gripping read indeed. Though the final line of the book just leaves one big question unanswered...

3/5 for this book.

Blindness

Blindness by Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, is definitely worth a read. A story about an epidemic of sudden blindness that sweeps through a city, and how some of the blind patients are whisked away for quarantine in an isolated facility -- a run-down mental hospital -- where they are left to fend on their own. Only limited food and water are provided for them each day. There is no provision of any medical supplies. Military troops stand guard outside, with orders to gun down any blind person attempting to flee the installation. Under those circumstances, the blind attempt to organise themselves into some semblance of civilised society, but turf-fighting begins to form. Those staying in the different wards start to compete for the same limited rations that are left in the main corridor outside the wards. Over the course of the next few days, some of them get injured, some starve, some catch fevers, some try in vain to escape, some die from infected wounds, some get shot by spooked soldiers, some trip over the dead, and one blind thug gets a pair of scissors pierced into his throat as he forces a blind woman to have sex with him in exchange for food. A rather bleak portrayal of the human condition, and how quickly it degenerates.

The language structure of the book further adds to the overall theme of the story - a confusing blindness. Peppered with commas, a single sentence can run up to half a page, and a single paragraph can run for pages, and when different people speak, their words flow in a single stream of text, so the reader is left to figure out who said what and when. And none of the characters have a name.

I rate it 3.5/5.

Schopenhauer's Telescope

Schopenhauer's Telescope by Gerard Donovan, my 8th novel of the year. It's almost 300 pages of text on about 6 hours' worth of conversation between two unnamed men, a village teacher and a village baker, as they both stand in the middle of a snow-covered field in their enemy-occupied hometown in the midst of civil war in winter.

The baker is busy digging. He has been hand-picked by the enemy forces to dig a mass grave. Like a traitor who has betrayed his own townsfolk and is now facilitating the entry of the enemy, the teacher smokes and watches by the side as the baker sweats it out in the hole. And as the baker shovels away at sand, stone and snow, he engages the teacher in topics of war and history, violence and bloodshed, philosophy and science, morality and immorality. They discuss Genghis Khan whose troops killed almost a fifth of the world's known population in the early 1200s and King Leopold of Belgium who killed some ten million Africans in the 1890s. And as they speak, trucks roll by and stop alongside the field, unloading their human cargo - nervous villagers rounded up by enemy troops. By sundown, the mass grave is ready. Time for execution. There is the sound of rapid gunfire, and one of the two men collapses in a bloody, riddled heap inside the freshly dug grave. The other villagers follow him in. The traitor walks off with the enemy soldiers.

My favourite line from the book: "[A person] learns that future is behind and the past in front, rather than the other way around, because he can't see the future with his eyes. But the past is visible because it has happened, so it's in front."

Morbid as it is, the book is nonetheless written in a very engaging style. And very philosophical. But at some points of the story, it appears to depart from the realm of reality, with both men behaving in ways that are not quite believable given the frigid, wartime scenario. I rate the book 3.5/5.

And what's Schopenhauer's telescope? Well, Schopenhauer is a philosopher from the 19th century. He proposed that in order to gain perspective of our problems, we should travel some 50 years into the future and then look down a telescope in the opposite way, back at ourselves as we are now, and then make decisions based on the benefit of hindsight. An interesting proposition. Towards the end of the book, both men used Schopenhauer's telescope to see how the history books will record the part each of them played in the grim events on that sombre winter's day.

Gilgamesh

Went for my second physiotherapy session yesterday. Had electrodes connected to my shoulder to give it some electrostimulation as I attempted some simple movements with my right arm. Then, I was taught a few exercises using a Thera-Band. It's an elastic fabric, polymer-based, and I'm supposed to use it in a variety of configurations to move my arm and shoulder. The bands come in many colours, each one representing a different level of resistance. Mine was red which stood for the least resistance.

Read my 7th novel, "Gilgamesh", by Joan London, an Australian author. It is a fascinating story, and reads like a movie with its clever interplay of scenes and points-of-view.

The protagonist is a woman named Edith Clark, and the story begins with how her parents, Frank and Ada, in a post-World War I clime, marry and leave the UK for Southwest Australia after signing up for a government scheme to be pioneers in the opening up of the harsh wilderness there. Edith and her sister Frances soon become fatherless when Frank dies from the hardship and illness. In the wake of his demise, the Clark family briefly receives two unexpected visitors - Leopold Stubbs, the son of Ada's former neighbour in London and an archaeologist keenly interested in the Middle East, and his driver, an Armenian named Aram Sinanien. The teenage Edith is drawn to both men and becomes pregnant with Aram's seed, but the two men leave Australia as the threat of another global war draws near. Soon after she delivers her baby Jim, Edith makes a perilous journey to Armenia in search of her lost love, while deeply struggling inside if it is Aram or Leopold that she really loved. However, once she reaches soviet Armenia, war descends and she finds herself on enemy territority, without a home, without a man, with a child and herself to keep alive, with her search unfinished...

I rate the book 4/5.

A Clockwork Orange

An excerpt below from my next novel, "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962 and brought to the screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. It took me quite a while to get my head around the language of the book...

...This Sunday morning the charlie read out from the book about chellovecks who slooshied the slovo and didn't take a blind bit being like a domy built upon sand, and then the rain came splash and the old boomaboom cracked the sky and that was the end of the domy. But I thought that only a very dim veck would build his domy upon sand, and a right lot of real sneering droogs and nasty neighbours a veck like that would have, them not telling him how dim he was doing that sort of building...Then there was a crash and plop and a whish whish whish while the plennies picked up and dropped and lickturned the pages of their grazzy malenky hymnbooks and the bully fierce warders creeched...

Why the title? Burgess says it stands for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness. The novel itself is a very thought-provoking read. Divided into three main sections, the first goes in graphic detail about the life of teenage hooligan Alex who routinely gets into gang fights, attacks unarmed passers-by, breaks into homes and rapes women, many women. The second section deals with his life in prison and how he undergoes a special two-week experimental rehabilitation programme, at the end of which he is essentially robbed of his freedom to choose between good and evil, but is instead psychologically and distressingly conditioned to refrain from wickedness. The third and final section is about the "reformed" Alex being released back into the world, and how life is like for someone who is no longer capable of moral choice. I rate this book 4/5.

The Hottest State

Chris Ang came by to visit this afternoon. He brought along some cakes and cream-puffs and stuff for me as well. It's great to catch up with him. He's a seasoned runner, experienced in the ways of the world, and never fails to challenge and inspire me with his never-say-die attitude and competitive streak. He's got his shin-splits under control, and should be en route to a good timing at the KL International Marathon in March this year. I miss the days of training with the rest of the guys - swimming during lunch, running around the Telok Blangah area and even practising our vertical marathons together. Those were the good old days :)

Read my 5th novel, "The Hottest State", by Ethan Hawke, yes, the American actor. It's his first book, and it's about a 20-year old handsome young actor William Harding falling ridiculously and obsessively in love with a singer-songwriter Sarah Wingfield who denies his every attempt at sex; and how they grow more intimate with each other; and how their short-lived relationship suddenly comes to an abrupt end, the common fate of all immature teenage things. It's a short book, plainly written, but succinctly captures the bliss and blindness, ups and downs of youthful romance. There's a film on this same book too, directed by Hawke himself. I rate the book 3/5.

The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque

Finished my 4th novel for the year, "The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque". An interesting story about how an artist in New York named Piambo lands himself into a dark and mysterious contract to paint the portrait of a lady, Mrs Charbuque, whom he is not allowed to see but with whom he is permitted only to speak. Add in the twist that Mrs Charbuque earns a living by foretelling the future as guided by the two identical snowflakes encapsulated in resin inside a locket hanging by her neck. Throw in a side plot of a series of deaths of women from an obscure disease that causes them to cry blood from their eyes. Mix all of that with a rather murderous and supposedly deceased Mr Charbuque whose jealousy and hatred for his wife drives him to hunt Piambo down. Quite a story, I must say, and easily digestible in an afternoon. :) 3/5 for me.

Sometime after 8 pm this evening, I started to feel the tingling, uncontrollable twitching sensation in the area near my right shoulder blade. It's like the sensation in my right thigh the last time, a few days after surgery. The nurses then had told me that it was a natural phenomenon: the nerves were re-establishing contact, and that's a promising sign of recovery.

But right now, I am still battling the voices in my head that tell me I will never recover fully, and that I'll never be able to do the physical stuff I wanted to do...ever again...like rock-climbing, swimming, bulking up and martial arts...

Injury, to an athlete, is such a dark and despairing word.

Death in Holy Orders

And so, Commander Adam Dagliesh nails the murderer, and the killing spree at St Anselm's finally comes to an end. The novel is a good and engaging read, with the usual mix of equally dubious suspects with equally dark skeletons in their closets.

I didn't realise that the BBC had produced a two-part drama series based on the novel. It should be quite interesting to watch.

I rate the book 3/5.

Красный Октябрь

Finished my 2nd novel of the year, Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October".

I have never watched the film before, so flipping through the pages of Clancy's book was my first encounter of the gripping story of the nuclear submarine Krasny Oktyabr that broke away from her Soviet motherland to set off for America, triggering off a suspense-laden sequence of highly-charged military, diplomatic and covert operations involving the Russians, the Americans and the British.

Clancy is a masterful writer and certainly knows how to pin his readers to their seats, thirsting for more. Seemingly insigificant and unconnected details peppered in the earlier chapters come together later on to determine the fates of the various colourful characters in the story - literally, life and death for the pilots, seamen and submariners in the Atlantic Ocean.

This novel gets a 4/5 rating from me.

Comrade Captain, we have a radiation leak...

Got up early and went for a swim at Mt Faber SAFRA. Did 18 laps, and got a bit of a headache. I reckoned my goggles were too tight. Ah well, that can't be helped... I can't navigate in the water when the pool invades the private space between my goggle lens and my eyes. :P I'm still very slow in my movement; my kicks aren't propelling me forward as much as I would have liked.

Have spent and will continue to spend the later part of the afternoon to read Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October". I am now at page 151, the part where Dr Petrov discovers the fogged radiation badges and falls into the plot hatched by Captain Marko Ramius. Brilliant and riveting story so far...and over 300 more pages to go. I'm glued. :)