Book 32 - Sunjeev Sahota "China Room"

Sunjeev Sahota "China Room" (Vintage)







This novel consists of 2 alternating storylines, one set in 1920's India and one in contemporaneous times. In 1929, 15 year old Mehar has been married into a family with a domineering mother-in-law, Mai, 3 sons/brothers, and 2 sister brides. None of the 3 brides know which son she is married to, as each sees her husband only on alternating nights in a darkened room. During the day, Mehar and her fellow brides perform their domestic duties and speculate on which son belongs to which bride.

In the contemporary story, Mehar's great grandson has come to India from England to spend the summer with his uncle (and to kick his heroin addiction). He lives at the abandoned farmhouse where the events in Mehar's story took place.

The stories were apparently inspired by true events in the author's family.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it is competently written.Howver, it is one that I would not read again.

Book 33 - Sue Prideaux "I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche"

Sue Prideaux "I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche" (Faber & Faber)





Great title, a great cover, and a pretty good stab at the contemporary life of Nietzsche. To me, the book's main accomplishment is its detailed account of Nietzsche's last, insane years; she minutely describes what we know of his symptoms, how and where he was kept, and, especially, the individuals who campaigned to put his works forward worldwide, topics which previous biographers have mostly taken a pass on. The author does indulge in some light revisionism; she's not convinced that Nietzsche had syphilis, and although she does introduce some (rather picky, to me) evidence of weaknesses in the diagnosis, the fact that the world's greatest authority on syphilis accepted the diagnosis would seem to countervail, and, like most revisionists, she doesn't do a great or thorough job of setting out the case for the diagnosis. Even odder is her contention that Nietzsche was an admirer of Christ; this is to be difficult to contort out of Nietzsche's corpus; most of the passages she cites I would classify under either 'backhanded compliments' or 'he was better than the horrible church he inspired'.

Annoyingly, she extends her courteous approach to Christianity to capitalizIng on the divine 'he', which, as my high school English teacher pointed out in her remarks on my term paper on Nietzsche, is discordant with his philosophy. And get ready for many, many tangents; at times I felt that I was reading a biography of almost anybody else besides Nietzsche; however, it must be said that perhaps the least relevant chapters, on his sister's anti-Semitic colony in Paraguay, are some of the more interesting in the book. However, readable and informative, I'd still say that strengths outweigh weaknesses here by some distance.