Category: Wenvoe Page Turners

The Seamstress

 

by Maria Duenas

Aged 12, Sira Quiroga was apprenticed to a Madrid dressmaker. As she masters the seamstresses’s art, her life seems to be clearly mapped out – until she falls passionately in love and flees with her seductive lover. But in Morocco she is betrayed and left penniless. As Civil War engulfs Spain, Sira finds that she cannot return and so turns to her one true skill – and sews beautiful clothes for the expat elite and their German friends. With Europe rumbling towards war, Sira is lured back to Franco’s Nazi friendly Spain. She is drawn into the shadowy world of espionage, intrigue and betrayal.

Opinion was unanimous on five counts – the writing was naïve, the story was predictable, overlong, disjointed (could have been 2 separate stories) and totally implausible when Sira progressed without a qualm from seamstress to spy.

There were three plus points – it was clever the way the story interwove real characters with fictional ones, the historical research was detailed and enhanced the story, it was a page turner.

Mixed feelings, not one of our better reads. A few enjoyed it and would recommend it as an easy read. Most of us didn’t. The score was a 6.

Pure by Andrew Miller

This book is based on fact.

"A young man of humble background, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, is ordered to exhume the vast and ancient cemetery of Les Innocents in the poor Parisian quarter of Les Halles, and demolish the church. No one knows how many bodies are buried there – it is claimed that during one outbreak of the plague the graveyard received 50,000 in less than a month – but it has recently burst its banks, poisoning the city and spreading "moral disturbance".

Baratte finds that the stink of the dead dominate the quarter, fouling the air and tainting even the breath of those who live there. The vast smoke blackened church that presides over the graveyard obliterates the light. And yet as the young engineer begins the grisly excavations, he finds that the residents of this poor, labrynthine district have a powerful attachment to both.

The impending revolution hangs over the narrative like the blade of the guillotine to come."

Taken from a Guardian review

As you will have gathered not a book for the faint hearted.

A mixed reception of thoroughly enjoyed, quite enjoyed and not enjoyed at all. It did seem to us all that it was a weird, rather creepy subject.

We did agree that it was extremely well written with short, concise sentences. The descriptions were so good we felt that we could hear and smell the things he was describing, it was at once horrific and enthralling. The excavations were done by miners supervised by Jean and his friend who had both been miners. The descriptions of their work, the piles of bones, the transport of these bones to a quarry, the thought of all these men living in tents in the midst of all this- Ugh! The author had obviously done a lot of painstaking research.

There was a part where Jean was at Versailles and saw the elephant that the King had been given by the King of Siam. The writing about this was so well done and took you into the extremes of Paris and its environs at this time.

We discussed whether we would recommend this book to a friend – a difficult one due to the macabre subject. It did come out with a good score of 8.

Sons & Lovers

by DH Lawrence

In between newer books, Barry Library often select classics for us, which are always received with mixed feelings. Those of us who had not read them before, are glad of a 2nd chance. Those who HAVE read them before, find their impressions now, with the maturity of years, and from a different era, are quite different from their teenage years.

All of us agreed that the book was very well written, with excellent descriptions of the landscape, scenery, flowers, and the hardship of the times, but we felt the characters were not as successfully depicted. The mother of the family was a very strong character, from a cultured, affluent family, who had "married beneath her", and her husband soon felt inferior and inadequate. He took refuge in alcohol to bolster his ego, and, his aggression fuelled by drink, was cruel to his sons. They in turn despised him but worshipped their mother, and her relationship with all her sons, was so unnaturally strong as to be almost incestuous.

William was adored and seen to be his mother's favourite, and Paul, the main character was attracted to 2 ladies, Clara and Miriam. His mother disapproved of both, and did not think them "suitable". Paul also seemed to find them unsatisfactory, yet could not allow either out of his life, or search for someone else. We found endless descriptions of long conversations, and thoughts, about these ladies were tedious and frustrating, and never seemed to lead anywhere.

When the immensely strong matriarch eventually fell ill, the balance of power shifted, and the long, slow lingering death was very well portrayed. The painful end, after she was helped by Paul to take an overdose of morphine was quite horrific.

We found it difficult to mark this book out of 10, as is our custom. It was VERY well-written, and the graphic detail of the tedium of poverty, cruelty, really hard work, long hours, and repression, underlined the comfort and ease of our lives in the last half of the 20th century. But the book's content had no "feel good" factor at all, and was in fact quite depressing. So our enjoyment was much less than our acknowledgement of Lawrence's craftsmanship. (A few of us wondered why the book is no longer part of the A Level Syllabus.) So the overall score was a healthy 7.5 – but with a "spinach warning"! (Good for us but not enjoyable!).

This was totally unlike the scrumptious feast of homegrown Welsh strawberries and cream, and delicious cakes, provided by our hostess that evening – Thank You, Babs, you're a hard act to follow!

 

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