Micro-reviews (September 2023)

September 30, 2023

Bad Traffic, Indelible City, The Bandit Queens





Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis

This novel is a really engaging and unusual twist on the crime thriller genre.  Inspector Jian, a tough cop from the “Life on Mars” school of policing, travels from China to the UK to look for his daughter, Wei Wei, who’s disappeared after getting involved with some rather unsavoury characters.  It’s also the story of Ding Ming, an illegal migrant from a dirt poor part of China who’s been trafficked to the UK hoping to earn his fortune - but finds that the reality is very far from what was promised.  As well as being a page-turner, it conveys a great sense of what it feels like to be a Chinese person coming to the UK for the first time.  Whilst the people-smuggling aspect may sound grim, there are moments of humour - I particularly liked the way that the police inspector psychs himself up to go into action with the bad guys by reciting passages from Mao’s Little Red Book under this breath, such as “The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat can only be resolved through the method of socialist revolution.”  A sequel - “No Exit” - is due to be published next year.



 
Indelible City:  Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim

I’ve read several books about Hong Kong’s recent history and the Democracy movement, but this is the best one so far, by quite some distance.  Lim combines her own personal experience with some serious journalism - for example, using previously embargoed interviews with various characters involved in negotiating the  return of the territory to China, she uncovers some really interesting material.  In particular, she reveals how the British Government largely ignored the views of a committee of Hong Kong citizens that was supposed to provide input on what the people of the territory actually wanted.  She also outlines how Hong Kong’s development has been influenced by both the West and Mainland China, but its people don’t wholly identify with either and feel that they occupy a space somewhere between the two.  Lim suggests that the Democracy movement, although triggered by concern over loss of Hong Kong’s freedoms, was also motivated on a desire to preserve that unique sense of Hong Kong identity against an overbearing Chinese state (and that rather like the British for most of the time that they were in charge, China prefers to ignore what Hong Kong’s people actually want)



The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

The rumour in Geeta’s village in India is that her husband disappeared because she murdered him using some kind of black magic (in fact, he just left - although Geeta's actually quite relieved about that and finds that many aspects of life without him are better). But although she tries to convince herself that she doesn’t care about her outsider status in the village, she’s actually quite lonely.  So when another woman from her micro-finance loan group asks for help knocking off her husband (who’s an absolute sh*t), she decides to help out.  This was a book group read and I enjoyed it (it’s very funny in parts), although not everyone at the group felt the same - and it’s fair to say that there are some problems.  For example, it’s a bit uneven in tone - is it meant to be serious and largely realistic but with funny bits?  Or is it more in the nature of a black comedy, which you’re meant to take with a pinch of salt, but along the way it’s making some serious points?  I think ultimately the author was probably aiming for the latter, but it veers around a bit at times.  All that said, I thought it had some interesting things to say about women’s position in a very patriarchal society, the caste system in India and also how women (or perhaps more accurately, human beings in general) don’t always help one another out, even when they're facing much the same problems or challenges.  In what is (in more ways than one) perhaps a slightly left-field analogy, some of the moral dilemmas also reminded me of Brecht's Good Person of Szechwan, which essentially asks whether you sometimes need to be bad to be good - or whether the "system" effectively forces people into making those choices.  Anyway, if your literary sensibilities are so refined that you’ll just get annoyed by some of the stylistic problems, then this probably isn’t for you - but otherwise, I’d say it’s worth a try (despite the problems, I felt that the author has definitely got talent).

 

Micro-Reviews (May 2023)

May 31, 2023
Assembly by Natasha Brown, Johnson At 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell




Assembly by Natasha Brown

This is a short work - barely even a novella - which contains some quite striking and at times challenging writing.  And it’s encouraging to see something like this being given a big marketing push by a major publisher.  But I’m still not quite sure what I think of it and whether it actually works.  

Our narrator is a high flyer at a City bank.  She’s also black - but the bank’s appro...

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Micro-reviews (March 2023)

March 13, 2023
The Anomaly, The Animals In That Country, In A Good Light



The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier

This was a really enjoyable high concept literary thriller.  The plot revolves around a duplicate of Air France Flight AF0006 suddenly appearing 3 months after its first version landed in the US - so now there are 2 versions of the same plane and 2 versions of each individual who was on board.  How can something so unlikely have happened? This is where the high concept comes in, because it emerges that the...

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More London street libraries

November 28, 2022



This is another in a series of occasional posts about London street libraries, following on from this one (about a street library and secret garden at London Bridge) and this one (about another street library at Cambria Road, which is close to where I live in Herne Hill).   I found all these via this excellent map produced by The Londonist.

The one pictured above is in an old red telephone box in Lewisham.  It was quite well stocked but also looked reasonably well-used, presumably because of i...
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Micro-Reviews (October 2022)

October 15, 2022


Educated, The Paper Menagerie and A Ghost in the Throat

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts (the last one was a year ago, which is hardly the level of regularity I was aiming for).  That’s partly because I’ve been busy with other things, including trying to make some more progress with a story about China that I started ages ago (I’ve got about 25K words so far and it’s not like I’ve got stuck with the plot or anything - it’s just finding the time to write that...

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Patriots by Peter Morgan: a review

August 23, 2022



Patriots by Peter Morgan (author of Netflix series The Crown) depicts the rise and fall from grace of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.  I saw it at the Almeida Theatre where it’s just finished its run, but it's now transferring to the West End.  It’s an interesting play with excellent performances from Tom Hollander as Berezovksy, Luke Thallon as Roman Abramovich and Will Keen - who is well worth seeing for his uncannily accurate and rather chilling impersonation of Putin (especially hi...

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Still the hardest word

July 9, 2022


Well, it took over 50 resignations from his own government but he's finally agreed to go.  So goodbye and good riddance, Boris Johnson. Your many, many brazen lies have finally caught up with you.  I always thought you were a lazy, arrogant **** who was only interested in his own advancement.  Now it's finally dawned on your erstwhile supporters too.

And did we get an apology or even any hint of contrition or regret for his own actions in his resignation speech?  No.  It's much the same as ban...
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Vangelis: an appreciation

June 5, 2022


This rather long post is about Greek musician Vangelis, who died last month.  I’m writing it partly because, having read a reasonable number of the obituaries, I felt that there were some things that they missed (although who knows if anyone else will read this.… ). I should also point out that I’m not a fan of everything he’s ever done - all told, I reckon that I only really like about 20-25% of his total output (in particular, I’m not keen on his more bombastic material, especiall...

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What does the Draft2Digital / Smashwords merger mean for authors?

February 13, 2022





What are we to make of the recent announcement that Draft2Digital is acquiring competing self-publishing outfit Smashwords?  Initially, I was a bit concerned because as an author, Smashwords has been the best performing platform for me over the years - and I wouldn't want to see it go the way of others which have closed down (like Feedbooks, BookieJar and Bibliotastic).

But as I understand it, Draft2Digital primarily competes with Smashwords when it comes to helping authors create ebooks and d...
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Yard Sale by Charles Hibbard

December 27, 2021




This beautifully written book - available for free on Smashwords - occupies a not particularly well-colonised fictional space somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.  

It’s like a novel in the sense that it depicts various episodes in the life of one character, Ruth, who was born - I am guessing - at some point in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  We first meet Ruth in (late) middle age, having gone on a solo road trip to escape marital difficulties - but ...

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About Me


Paul Samael Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.
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