A Word About Awards

THE BAD GIRL by Mario Vargas Llosa   Award: Nobel Winner 2009   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2009   Date Read: November 30, 2022   What happens when you love someone that is a shape-shifter, a liar, a compulsive cheat? This is the focus of Llosa’s The Bad Girl. Ricardo meets the Bad Girl as a child in Miraflores, Peru and is immediately besotted. He repeatedly asks her to be his girlfriend and she rebuffs him every time. After she is publicly humiliated for being found out in a life (telling everyone she was Chilean when she was Peruvian like everyone else), she drops out of site and he doesn’t see her again.   Ricardo’s singular focus in life is to escape Peru and to live in France. He accomplishes this by becoming fluent in English and French and, over time and with great effort, in Russian. He has casual encounters with women but is never quite taken with anyone. And one day, out of the blue, when he hasn’t been in Paris that long, he meets the bad girl as Comrade Arlette who has bee

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR SIMMONDS & DR GLAS by Dannie Abse   Nomination: Booker Longlist 2002   Date Read: November 25, 2022   This bizarre novella follows the life of Dr. Richard Simmonds, who practices medicine in London. Having had his face disfigured in childhood, Dr. Simmonds has never married and has never had a girlfriend. He does, however, become obsessed by Yvonne, the wife of his patient Anton Bloomberg.   The Bloombergs are newlyweds and in addition to advice on Anton’s asthma, Anton further seeks advice on how to overcome his new wife’s rebuffs of his advances. They have been married for about a month, yet Yvonne will not consummate the marriage. Dr. Simmonds advises Anton to move into another bedroom to ease her anxiety and given time, nature will take its course.   Of course, this advice serves the doctor’s interests as he doesn’t have to imagine Yvonne making love to Anton. He can keep her pure in his own mind. Meanwhile, Yvonne gifts Dr. Simmonds the notebook of Dr. G

CARAMELO by Sandra Cisneros   Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2004, Women’s Longlist 2003   Date Read: November 22, 2022   Caramelo follows the Reyes family as they live a dual existence, with one foot in the U.S. and the other across the border in Mexico. Three of the Reyes brothers drive to Mexico City every summer, with wives and children in tow, to visit their parents who still live there. The grandchildren refer to their grandmother, Soledad, as the “Awful Grandmother.” Of course, anyone who becomes this hated didn’t start out this way.   So begins the story of the generations of the Reyes family and how they came to be. From loves won and lost. Hearts given and betrayed. Fortunes sought and never found. Living in one culture but being from another. The lives of this family are rich, textured and feel based on truth.    Cisneros is incredibly skilled here at painting the duality of the kids being brought up in America. They live in American culture but are still held to Mexican stand

BEFORE YOU SLEEP By Linn Ullmann   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2001   Date Read: November 17, 2022   I’m not entirely sure of the point of Before You Sleep. I had initially thought it was about not going to bed angry and now I’m not sure exactly why I thought that. In general, this novel is about the Blom family, all members of which are struggling in their own ways. Anni, who both daughters repeatedly explain is not quite right in the head, is divorced from their father, although we are never privy to his name.   Their daughters, Julie and Karin, both live in Oslo and are making their way in the world. Julie is married to Aleksander and they are expecting their first child, who turns out to be Sander. Almost immediately Julie and Aleksander realize they aren’t quite suited to each other but with a child on the way and then having been born, they decide to take a trip to Italy to try to find where they misplaced their love. If it did ever in fact exist, I believe loving someone is a ch

ANIMAL’S PEOPLE by Indra Sinha   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2007, Dublin Finalist 2009   Date Read: November 15, 2022   I can’t lie: I was really not looking forward to this novel. Reading about a young man who is permanently doubled over and is forced to walk on all fours through the slums of India sounded so depressing. This novel is an absolute joy, even through the hardships and misery and hopelessness. You cannot help but fall in love with Animal and his people.   The premise is simple and all-too plausible. Animal lives in Khaufpur, a town where an American company (Kampani) had a chemical factory and one day the factory blew up, killing all in its path. Those who weren’t killed were disabled in numerous and terrible ways. Although Animal was orphaned, he survived relatively unscathed and was taken in by French nuns. Several years later, while in the orphanage, Animal seemed to get sick and the illness slowly tortured and twisted his body until his spine was bent in half and he

BY LOVE POSSESSED By James Gould Cozzens   Nomination: National Book Finalist 1958   Date Read: November 10, 2022   By Love Possessed is truly about love in every sense of the word. The love between husband and wife. The love between parents and children. The agape love between male and female friends, although not many female friendships were represented here. And, finally, the love between the devoted and their God. My previous foray with Cozzens wasn’t as successful as this. Perhaps it’s because I respond better to the subject of love than war. Love is, after all, the entire reason for our being (IMHO).   The protagonist of this novel is Arthur Winner, with a name that evokes his character. Arthur is a good man, good husband, good father and even better attorney. He is generous with his time and his opinions and always tries to live a noble life, much in his father’s image. Yet even the venerable Arthur is prone to fallacy, as all humans are.   Arthur and his law firm have taken und

ASSEMBLY by Natasha Brown   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2021, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2022   Date Read: November 5, 2022   Assembly is a short but mighty novel about a black British woman and the discrepancies in her experiences versus her white counterparts. Waiting for a large anniversary party to begin, hosted by her white boyfriend’s wealthy parents, our unnamed protagonist is caught in a sort of limbo. She has done everything she was expected to do – college, career, boyfriend, owning property, keep your head down and carry on. So what gives?   She is at an inflection point, having recently been diagnosed with cancer which has metastasized. How does she want to handle it. Her usual method of pretending events are happening to someone else is no longer working as the pain is all too real, the implications all too dire. Her boyfriend, towards the end of the novella, spontaneously proposes but she knows in the next day or the next week, he will wish to take it back.   Her career

THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS by J.M. Coetzee   Award: Nobel Prize 2015   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2015   Date Read: November 2, 2022   David is a boy who is lost in every sense of the word. Having been separated from his parents as they were leaving their country, all he had with him was a letter explaining who is parents are. In the chaos of the journey, the letter was lost. With no way to identify his parents, the 5 year old David is taken in by a fellow exile, Simon. Upon entering their new home country, an unknown place where everyone lives in government housing and Spanish is the national language, David is assigned the name David and we never learn his birth name.   Simon has vowed to stay with David until he can find his mother. With no name and no visual, the task is entirely impossible. The town where they settle, Novilla, is a strange place where bread is almost the only food available for consumption and everyone seems nice and helpful but never goes out of their way to be trul