Trespass reviewed by Renée Levine

Trespass by Rose Tremain

I am a fan of the author’s ever since I read The Road Home a couple of years ago so that the theme of this book did not surprise me. Such subject matter as dislocation, a sense of belonging, looking for sanctuary, needing a home, all these reappear in this novel set in the Cevennes this time, a dark mountainous region in south western France, taking place in our time. It was in this same part of France that Robert Louis Stevenson travelled with donkey and gun to protect himself and tourists nowadays return in vast numbers still with donkeys, but no longer with guns.
The book is structured in alternating chapters each section dealing with a brother and sister, one french and one english, both sets victims of abuse, both sets seeking redemption.
The action takes place essentially in a small village in France in which Armon Lunel, a decrepit, dirty and alcoholic man 64 years old lives in his beautiful but equally decaying and decrepit stone house (called Mas Lunel the name of the local old stone houses) left to him by his father, which he has not been able to maintain and wishes now to sell to a foreigner for the money that it might bring him given that especially the Brits, are buying property in France to escape the financial crisis in their home country.
On the same grounds, but in a tiny cottage, lives his sister Audrun who has not inherited more than the patch of ground on which she built the cottage but which she, in contrast to her older brother, has maintained and loved because she loves the land and its beauty and treasures her sense of home and belonging to this ancient earth.
The second set of siblings are Anthony, an antique dealer from London who also at 64, has discovered that his riches are vanishing and his life has lost much of its meaning. In search of a sense of belonging when his feels utterly alone, he travels to that same village in the Cevennes to visit his sister Veronica who has emigrated earlier to France to find her happiness as a landscape gardener and author with her lover, Kitty, a second rate painter.
The connecting link between these two pairs of siblings, is real estate. Anthony is looking for a beautiful house which will be the happy setting for the last part of his life; Aramon wishes, desperately, to sell his house and find rest for himself with 450,000 euro which will not require any work or effort on his part but will bring him independence for the rest of his days.
Anthony Verey’s arrival brings chaos into the domestic life of the two women because the bond between brother and sister is stronger than the love which joins Kitty and Veronica. “why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do?” Kitty asks. Every love, she claims, needs protected space and now her space has been usurped.
The other trespass occurs among the french siblings, the french ones this time. He owns the large house and she feels he has trespassed on her privacy over twenty years. Now he is looking for money to escape; she is looking for revenge. Her small cottage sits on disputed land.
The book evokes darkness: darkness of the woods, danger of curving roads for english drivers, crashing rocks and fierce currents of the streams, the magnificence of loneliness and the urgency of love.
Rose Tremain brings cultural collision to the surface, outsider against native, foreigner on foreign land, seekers of sanctuary versus a sense of belonging, victims of abuse are all around but above all perhaps is the theme of our times: outsiders who presume to think that one can be at home in a foreign country on land obtained with foreign currency simply because the foreigner has fallen on hard times in his own country but can still afford the misery available for cheap abroad where owners have fallen on hard times and buyers are by comparison, rich.
However, the author brings us to some sort of final redemption after opening up the ghastly damage done to the victims of this story.
People will argue wether this worked for them, the readers. Upon finishing the novel, I saw its perfect perfection of planned story, but the form so totally structured and never given a long leash, was too tight for me. I would have preferred a little more wiggle room for the reader, a little more space to invent or to imagine perhaps.
I’ll be curious to hear what people say besides what is totally true: this woman has written a beautifully crafted work.

Room reviewed by Renée Levine

Room, by Emma Donoghue

I am Jack. Today I am five. Me and Ma live in Room, that’s all there is.

“Jack and Ma live in a locked room that measures eleven foot by eleven. When he turns five, he starts to ask questions, and his mother reveals to him that there is a world outside. Told entirely in Jack’s voice, ROOM is no horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child.”


This is a quote from the author and makes it difficult to continue because it really tells it all. The story of the boy who spends the first five years of his life in an eleven by eleven foot sized room built by the man who sexually abused and had kidnapped the young mother and installed her in this prison seven years ago, is based on a true story of abuse in the Fritzl family and so acknowledged by Donoghue.
I loved the book; read it as a page turner, was won over by the emotionally charged existence of this child and his mother and felt my heart wrenched as the tale unfolded. There are many readers who are bored, who have read about such cases in the press or heard about them on the telly, refuse to be wrenched around by a little kid and manipulated to emote over this kind of a scenario, so common in our time. However, I felt the power of the writing, I was touched by the innocence and the intelligence of the child and was carried away by the unfolding of the tale. I was mesmerized by my comprehending, actually taking in that this little boy really only knew what his mother told him; he had no other world ever at his disposal until, and I will not reveal the second part of the plot, but he does get out and he does learn to see another world beyond the eleven feet square he had always known. How he learns to make sense of that new setting, that is equally beautifully told and actually taught me about how we perceive as opposed to what there actually is.
Enjoy it. I did.

Skippy Dies reviewed by Renée

Here is the first review we have rec'd from Renée Levine : Renée Levine begins with Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

People read book reviews for two reasons, as far as I can judge that. One is to find out what the book is about, the other is to find out if it is worth their while, if they will enjoy it or learn something from it or, happily all of that.
To get the former, you google it; to get the latter, you must get to know the reviewer.
I am an opinionated reviewer. I have likes and dislikes and can only justify them by telling you that I have strong personal opinions.
Meanwhile, I have made a commitment to Penelope, owner of the Red Wheelbarrow in Paris, to review along with her, the list on the Booker Favorites for this year. Thus the first review of
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.
The novel is set in a private boarding school in Dublin for boys and opens with the death of Skippy as he is engaged in a donut eating contest with his roommate, Rupert. From there the book travels back a few years and with beautiful displays of glorious language, the author offers you the background for this rather grim opening. He shows with much humor, linguistic fireworks, spectacular and funny descriptions the mise en scene to give you a view of adolescent boys stuck in the prison like atmosphere of hormone driven boys made frantic by sexual urges, drug phantasies and professors of dubious qualities. As they wait for their food served by a server who is “ladling scrambled eggs like some kind of giant infection from a steel vat,” they squabble and argue and harass one another without end.
“The tang of adolescence , impervious to deodorant or opened windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as two hundred mobile phones banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen supply. From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below.”
Those two quotes should give you an impression of the funny and the pathetic, the soft and the ludicrous of this novel so rich in imagination and description.
Now the personal: I found it of no interest. I am not really interested in male adolescent dreams nor realities and boarding school settings don’t do it for me, no matter how talented and amusing and also sad, the presentation is offered.
Language gets A plus; humor gets an A; plot gets a B. The rest is an opinionated C minus from me. Which means that I did not enjoy that many pages on the subject and I surely did not learn from it. But it was also not meant for me. Murray has a devoted public to whom this is written and who will surely love it because of its fabulous talent for language since that public is interested in the story.

Trespass reviewed by Penelope

I really loved Rose Tremain's last book The Road Home so I was thrilled to read her new one Trespass which has been longlisted for the Booker- she is a fine writer, who like Muriel Spark, has a beginning, middle and end in each of her novels, therefore this promised to be a fine safe read. When I began reading though, I was slightly disappointed as the point of view began with another voice of a child, although a third person narrative, and having just finished Room, I was not sure this was what I wanted - but then it switches to several other characters who all are unlinked at first sight, but then in the end you realize the beginning of the novel is the end, and it hangs clearly together. I wont give you the plot. The novel was both a happy and unhappy read for me. Happy, in that it took place in the South of France, happy, because she writes elegant page turners. An unhappy read because it turns out to be a thriller, or a mystery written by someone who is not a thriller or mystery writer but a novelist. But this book is also about boundaries and property, but the crime in this book - interwoven as one of the stories is I think too large, too frightening, not quite believable or fitting into the story. Tremain writes outside of the drawing room, but her books are wonderful because she makes you feel like you are in the drawing room. There is more in it than I realized. Worth reading, if you don't like the story, as I didnt, at least the writing is good.

Room reviewed by Penelope

Someone from MacMillan UK, came into the bookshop earlier this year with Penguin's key account manager Jean-Luc Morel- and when I asked him what was the most exciting book they were publishing this year - he said, without any doubt : Room by Emma Donoghue. He said it would change the future of novel writing.Or something of the sort, so of course it was the book I read first when I decided to read the Booker longlist .

I had to force myself to read this book. And then as they said on the back blurb - it would be read in one sitting: I went to sleep at 3am the following morning - having just finished it. It is such a horrendous read - that one has to read it - if one can, in one sitting.

The story, of the child, narrated by the child is extremely irritating and frightening and bewildering at first as the child is the narrative voice in the story and he was born into the room and has no knowledge of the outside world. Therefore the rug he was born onto is called Rug, not the rug, the table is Table. His mother decided to bring him up this way, they have a television and what exists on television is in the television. This is what makes the novel so clever, the mother and the child live in a room, where they are held prisoner by a madman who has kidnapped the mother when she was nineteen and locked her into a shed in his garden. When the child turns five - they (the mother and child) pretend our child-narrator is dead, the man takes the child out to get rid of the body - the child escapes. The police get on the case right away and the mother is freed - this is one third of way through the novel - so one immediately relaxes and carries on with the story. The rest of the novel deals with them in the outside world.

What makes the novel a different novel is not only the 'heart of darkness' element of an abusive in the most frightening sense of the word relationship, in face of the intimate relationship of a mother and child, the mother who had to survive for the child- what makes the novel different is the author's clever use of a story that actually happened to make a vehicle for a us to relate to the whole interesting thought about the mother and child relationship (introduction to the world - as in the way Winnicott wanted us to think about) but also she brings up the whole idea of the world behind closed doors, and the world in the public eye, and one of the parts I liked best was in a television interview - the young freed mother turns the focus of the interviewers questions from the sensationalist side of her situation to the reality of the many many people who are out there right at this very minute, in prison, without trial, without hope. One thinks of the woman in Iran, who anyday now faces death for alleged 'adultery' and who may be stoned to death. So this novel, is a good one - it has you, the reader, one foot in the murky, yucky story, and one foot ready to think once again about the world.

Renée Levine, Penelope Fletcher review the Booker Longlist

From the depths of United States, our world citizen reviewer- Renée Levine, and bastion of the RWB, and Penelope, the founder and often floundering bookseller will take on reading and reviewing the 2010 Booker Longlist- which doesnt mean we promise to read all of them, the shortlist will be announced on September 7th.

Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue: Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)
Helen Dunmore: The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut: In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson: The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy: The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy: C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)
Lisa Moore: February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray: Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain: Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner: The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House – Jonathan Cape)

New Blog, Upcoming Reviews.

This blog will show all the upcoming Book Reviews for the Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore, in Paris.