Book notes No. 43: The Firework Maker's Daughter, Philip Pullman

The last of i giorni della merla - the blackbird days - thought to be the coldest of the winter. And while I can say quite categorically that they are not empirically the coldest, there's something about the stillness, the silence of these days, with the steady sunshine and the slow creak of bare branch on bare branch that makes you think you have come to the very heart of the season.

Winner of the Gold Smarties Prize Award, Philip Pullman's story about a young girl following her dream is charming. I bought it because I remembered the pleasure with which I read the His Dark Materials trilogy, but found that this is not a child-adult crossover. It's actually more suitable for shared reading from 8 years and lone reading from 10, I would say. 

The Guardian noted this as "A wonderfully written adventure story," and the Daily Mail called it "An outstanding achievement". I enjoyed it, certainly. And I understand the final message as inspirational, for adults as well as for older children. But perhaps I read it in the wrong frame of mind. Perhaps I had something else weighing on me, and missed the comedy, the "genius", the "confident magic". I also found a couple of the illustrations - by Peter Bailey - rather scary (at least for the under-6s).

Still, The Firework Maker's Daughter is gentle, beautifully written and a lovely story. This little book will be returned, not to the adult shelves but to the waiting-for-the-children-to-grow-up shelves, and I will heartily recommend it to my two little readers when the time comes.



   
    

The lion in winter

Snowing. Big, fluffy flakes. All over the place.

Cannobio's lion rock roars in the snow.

Carmine Springwatch 2011: spotted!

Warmer, and more humid than of late. No sun. Just clouds. Two degrees at 8am, and a scattering of snow in the frost-pockets.

Spotted in the last week:

Winter jasmine cascading down terrace walls.

Two early daffodils in a south-facing niche.

A pair of purple periwinkles nestling into the roots of a tree.


And...

The first camellias in triumphant bloom.

Where is he now?

On the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I find myself wondering whatever happened to this little boy after he walked free from the childrens' barracks amid the cold and the carnage. 

And I feel grateful that I am able to raise my little ones without fear of this happening to them, and grateful to all those who died to make our peaceful life possible. But I feel sad and angry that our very own governments have used this peace to inflict similar brutality on children in other parts of the world. Will it ever stop?


Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Blue view

Minus four last night, rising to minus one at 8am. But the sun is now shining down benignly, warming Carmine's old bones.

Lago Maggiore just after sunrise, January 2011

Book notes No. 42 : Started Early, Took my Dog, Kate Atkinson

Cold. Colder. In fact, very much colder than recent days. The waterfalls are all proudly displaying icicles, and everywhere the soil is hard with frost.

I don't know what drew me to this book, which appeared recently out of the blue in my Amazon recommendations. I guess it must have been the title, which accurately describes what I do most days. (Perhaps Amazon have been spying on me...)

The jacket blurb explains to those idiots who haven't heard the news (idiots like me) that Kate Atkinson is a literary writer. Behind the Scenes at the Museum, her first novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year when it was first published and is therefore officially Literature. The jacket blurb goes on to explain that Ms Atkinson has turned her hand to crime fiction, that this could actually be considered a downward step, but that in fact in some way she has stooped to conquer.

And they'd be right. She has certainly conquered me with this fascinating, fast-moving crimmie, which I read in only three sittings. I regretted the late night each morning-after, but not the pleasure of the reading.

The story is told from three different perspectives: Tracy Waterhouse the plump, plain, retired policewoman; Tilly, the ageing actress in a wobbly wig; and Jackson Brodie, the gumshoe on the trail of a lost child that has brought him back to his home town of Leeds. 

With these three protagonists as reference points, Atkinson has put together a racy read full of the hairpins, cliffhangers and switchbacks that are essential to good crime writing. And amid all the comings, goings and doings, amid all the red herrings and pints of ale, amid the murders and the mystery there is some spanking good writing. The 1970s in the north of England are evoked in all their glory, and so is the north of today, bankrupt and bleak but with moments of timeless beauty. There are plenty of wry jokes, a number of scenes that wring the heart and one or two meditations that really get to the nub of things - for me at least - when it comes to talking about children and the way they are treated in our society.

A damn fine read, and well worth the mornings after.

No. 88

Another bright and clear day, but the breeze is a biter. A day to stay warm improving the henhouse and generally cleaning up outdoors.

No. 88 Via Leoncavallo, Brissago

January sunrise over Lago Maggiore

The View from Carmine Superiore, looking towards Lombardy across Lago Maggiore.

Carmine spring watch 2011: hazel

Another bright and beautiful day, but today there's a stiff, blustery, laundry-drying wind. Time to open all the windows and doors and let the fresh air in!

The hazel catkins are out all over Carmine and beyond. Now, I know that hazel is classified as a winter-flowering plant, but the catkins remind me that spring cannot be far away, and that's good enough for me. 

They also remind me of my earliest, most magical school days when in January every classroom had its jar of catkins, and I associated them with kittens' tails and caterpillars. An association that, happily, has never really gone away.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull loves...

And so do I...thanks to Sindaco Albertella and Vice-Sindaco Cattaneo for despatching workmen to Carmine with such speed - in Carmine, small improvements make a big difference! Vi ringraziamo molto.

Picture: Cannobio embarcadero.

Lago Maggiore on a beautiful winter's day.

Weather report: a thrilling 14°C at midday today, with clear blue skies.

Mist made manifest

Today in Carmine Superiore, the weather is as we dream when we dream of Lago Maggiore. Heart-liftingly sunny. Warm in the sun, chilly in the shadows. Perfect.

Droplets of mist on winter-dry grasses.

Sentiero delle genti, Carmine Superiore.

[Click on the pic to enlarge]

Book notes No. 41: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd

Another gorgeous day here in Carmine Superiore: lava-lake sunrise, followed by blue skies and warm, healing sunshine. Winter doesn't get any better than this.

But lately, the weather has been somewhat gothic. At night the narrow, empty lanes of Carmine have been adrift with misty ghosts, and the dark corners were dank with ghastly presences. By day, the woods have been haunted by silent, foggy spectres Victorian-London-style. As I tread the ancient pathways, I couldn't help glancing over my shoulder again and again. Could it be that I am being followed? An image arises in my mind: parchment skin, lank hair streaked yellow, dead shark eyes, tortured eyebrows, black-burned lips smiling a horrid rictus from ear to ear.


You can tell, can't you, that this 2008 retelling of the Frankenstein story has in the past few days reached out with icy fingers and terrified me out of my wits! 

In Ackroyd's new version of the story, Frankenstein is introduced into the society of the young Romantic poets as a real person. His experiments in galvanism and his raising of a young man dead of consumption (significantly named Jack Keat) are set alongside a fictionalised version of events in the lives of Shelley, Byron, and Mary Godwin (Shelley's second wife, and the author of the original Frankenstein story). 

The pace is lively - this is a real thriller. We move from Oxford to London to Marlow and then onwards to Geneva and Chamonix. The landscape is vivid: the Thames and its estuary, Lake Geneva, the Oxfordshire countryside, the squalid backstreets of London's East End, the gloom and danger of Limehouse. And the intellectual landscape is equally so. We are assailed with quotations from many of the great writers of the day, either quoted direct or as ideas and phrases embroidered into the story. 

Of course, Ackroyd is well-known as a writer on London, and on this period, and for his interest in the esoteric in the award-winning Hawksmoor, for example, or the lesser-known Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. His scholarship is widely acclaimed: London, the Biography and Thames, Sacred River being only two bestsellers on the long list of his works of non-fiction and biography. So the background - both in an historical and intellectual sense - cannot fail to be rich and deft. 

And of course, Ackroyd being Ackroyd there is a certain amount of self-irony, which is always enjoyable: "I had long suspected that the English, despite their air of business and practicality, were a wholly credulous and superstitious nation. Why else do they love the tales of horror, as they call them?" English or not, if you "love the tales of horror", have an interest in the Romantic poets, 18th-century scientific endeavour, and electrifying endings (excuse pun), you'll love this story. 

But be warned. You'll be sleeping with the light on for weeks to come...



Also recommended:



Available in the US:

Now for something completely different

This is why we hatch and raise our own chicks...



For those who don't speak Italian: these scenes are taking place in a factory in Iowa, USA, owned by one of the largest producers of eggs in the world. 

The chicks are hatched more or less straight onto the conveyor belt. 

The women sort the males from the females, and the males are slung without ceremony into the grinder. 

The females are hung from their heads to have their beaks trimmed - a process that brings them pain for the rest of their lives. Lives spent in tiny crates under artificial light, or for the lucky ones, 'free-ranging' (= more profit on the eggs) in a muddy field. 

The ones that accidentally fall off the conveyor belt are left to die a slow and painful death on the floor of the factory. 

Makes me want to put someone to a slow and painful death on the floor of the factory...

Carmine spring watch 2011: Buds in January

After 36 hours lying under a blanket of thick fog, we have emerged into eye-blinking sunshine. Lunch en famille al fresco methinks.

A promise of winter's end.

Not yet, but coming soon.

For more beautiful flowers up close click here.

Elephant rock

The bright sunshine and warmth that allowed us yesterday to eat lunch outdoors have disappeared. Today is mild, damp and very misty. Lago Maggiore has disappeared from view and from my study window I see no further than the nearest stone roof, with the mist drifting in between. Open the front door, and it coils in with the cats.

Elephant rock and the laghetto on this morning's misty walk.

Across Lago Maggiore

Winter morning sunshine through the trees. 

View across Lago Maggiore from Carmine Superiore.

More icy-cles

Bright, with clear skies after a pink-stripey sunrise. Signs of a frost overnight. Feeling damp and chilly, but nothing like as chilly as the chill that made these...

Icicles dripping from a willow branch, 

Carmine Superiore, January 2011.

For more on willows, click here.

Weather report

Much, much warmer today, and set to rise further this week. Damp and misty, but the thick cloud is parting in many places, revealing snow-clad peaks and the occasional shred of blue sky.

Reported conversations No. 24 : On taxes

A big one-two-three-FOUR degrees at 8am as we plied our way through the rain-sodden streets of Cannobio towards school for the first day of the new term.

AJ (aged 6) has been watching Disney's 'Robin Hood'. In the meantime, Mama and Papa have been discussing levels of taxation in different countries. Inevitably, the dirty word arises at bedtime with old elephant-ears...




AJ (thoughtfully): Mama, what are taxes?
Mama (smiling): Taxes are money we pay to the government to help them run our society.
AJ: Are you scared of the Sheriff of Nottingham?
Mama: Well, these days, the government doesn't send a bully to take your money, they take it out of your bank account ... (mutters) when you're not looking.
AJ (screwing face up over a difficult question): But Mama, what are taxes FOR?
Mama: Taxes are used to pay for all the things everybody uses (smiles wryly as the face of Silvio Berlusconi pops into her mind) - the government builds hospitals, schools, and roads for instance.
AJ: No!
Mama: What do you mean, no?
AJ: The government doesn't build the roads. 
Mama: Well who does then?
AJ: The Romans build the roads...


When Mama looks at the perfectly serviceable remains of the Roman road winding through the woods near Carmine, she can't help wishing they still did.

Flashback

In the pre-dawn twilight I can just about make out the black shapes of trees and ghostly grey mist coiled around their branches. Yesterday was mild and rainy. Today probably ditto.

Today I'm all alone in Carmine Superiore. The friends we have been entertaining since Friday night just tapped on the window, waved goodbye and disappeared down the slippery slope towards home. 

I'm also bereft of company because today is the start of the annual ski-fest, organised by Sci Club Cannobio and once again subsidised by the heads-screwed-on-right chappies at the Comune di Cannobio. And this year there are not one but two snow-bunnies in the family.

And if last year is anything to go by, lots of high-speed fun will be had by all...(click the link - it's a fun post!)

Carmine spring watch 2011: first primula

Spotted! The first primula of 2011, seen on the sentiero in Carmine Inferiore. Spring watch 2011 has begun!

Niche

Cold, probably below freezing, and overcast. The woods are still and silent.

In every room of our centuries-old house here in Carmine Superiore there is at least one niche. Each of the three walk-in fireplaces has two niches, one either side, which I assume were built in to provide a place for cooking equipment. Some, I believe, have been formed from windows and arrow-slits, as the house evolved; the presence of a three-storey arch in the middle of the house leads me to believe that at some point this building stood at the edge of the village rather than at its centre, so some of its walls would once have been outside walls and not interior walls as they are now. 

The niche in the picture is in the main bathroom. At certain times of the year, the sun sends a magical beam through a gap between the houses, across the great bald rock in front of my door (the famous Sasso Carmine), and lights the niche up in a Stonehengian sort of a way. In such moments it's easy to believe that this house has a life of its own - a life that has more to do with the mountains, the lake, the turning of the seasons and the passing of the centuries, than it does with us.

Web of ice

A criss-cross web of ice formed by droplets from a stream
freezing onto bankside grass.

Cry for help

One degree at 10am in Cannobio today. Overcast.


Help me, someone, please oh please help me! 

I think I'm descending into madness. It's the voices.. The voices going round and round in my head... Voices from my past. Sometimes I think I recognise them... Baloo the Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Zsa-Zsa Gabor - no wait - it sounds like Zsa-Zsa, but in some Twilight Zone reality shift it's not... 

Sometimes I can almost see them in my mind, but as soon as they take shape they disintegrate into something else. Winnie becomes a talking mouse and the mouse becomes Sherlock Holmes. The black bear turns brown and sprouts a green surcoat and weird feathered cap then morphs into a big marmalade cat. And they prattle not only in English, but in German, Italian and French too.

When I'm sleeping, I dream insane dreams. Nightmares of a foreign country. I'm lost in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. I'm terrified - incarcerated in a narrow, trunk-like space. I'm surrounded by cats. Cats in the attic. Cats in the basement. Cats everywhere. And there are the dogs, always the barking, snarling, biting dogs chasing me across a nightmare landscape with a ruined windmill and a tank on the horizon. I wake from these dreams, panting, bathed in sweat, panic coursing through my veins in the belief that in the night my children have been snatched from me and are even now drifting across the lake in a Moses basket.

But the worst, the worst is the ticker-tape of incomprehensible syllables that runs over and over, over and over through my throbbing skull every second of the waking day. Every second. I struggle to make sense of the words, if words they are. My failure leaves me teetering on the brink of insanity: Ay-bra-ham dee-laycey, gee-ooseppi-cay-see, tom-ass-oma-lee, oma-lee-the-a-lee-cat!





Will the person who gave my children The Aristocats for Christmas please raise your hand? Let me tell you, it's the most addictive Disney cartoon ever made and you owe me for the Prozac!

Book notes No. 40 : Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido

As we sail, day by day, towards the new term, the weather is much, much warmer. The temperature in the bathroom has risen above freezing point. The frosting that made Carmine so pretty in the last week or so has disappeared. The bright sunshine has disappeared. In their place dull, heavy, sagging cloud. Rain, or maybe snow, on its way.

Winner of the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction, Barbara Trapido's debut novel Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) is a story of first love, heartbreak and high spirits. 

As the book opens, Katherine, our heroine, is but 18 and a fresher. She strikes up a friendship with her professor, enough to be invited to his chaotic home, where she meets his wife (in the act of giving birth to child number six), and his two sons, Jonathan, and his older brother Roger. Altogether, suburban Katherine has never quite seen anything like it, and she's never seen anything like Roger.

The story of Katherine and Roger's relationship, cruel break-up and its aftermath is hugely ... real. It's also very funny, very English and in places sad. But there's more. Katherine starts out by falling in love not only with Roger but with his entire family. Ten years later and Rome (where she flees to nurse a broken heart) has made its mark on her. She is wiser, more sophisticated, almost a different person and yet still owes a debt to this eccentric, opinionated family. Allowing herself to be drawn back into her past, Katherine finally discovers her future.... 


Recommended:

Carmine diamonds

For the comfortably well-off: Motorola phone with 855 diamonds 

$10,000

For the pretty rich: Patek Philippe Twenty-4 ladies watch

Over $100,000

For the insanely overloaded: Faisol Abdullah diamond-encrusted dress

$30 million

For those with eyes to see and lips to smile at the sight:
Carmine Superiore frosted leaf

Free of charge

Cloud line

Bright but knee-numblingly cold this morning (and I haven't even been outside yet). Many of Carmine Superiore's roofs are dusted with hard frost again. The hen who thinks its clever to escape the chicken coop every night was found in a tree this morning with a crust of frost on her back-feathers. Don't anyone tell me the temperature, I don't want to know!

Low cloud crossing in front of the hills of Lombardy:

A View from Carmine Superiore

Capodanno 2011

A cloudless blue sky, and warm sunshine on heavy frost greets us this New Year's Day. By lunchtime it's such a beautiful day we're picnicking on the churchyard with all of Lago Maggiore shimmering at our feet.

I may have mentioned before that in a past life I spent a fair amount of time on the eastern seaboard of the US of A. On one occasion my new year's hostess was a statuesque Filipina, called Suzy. That night, Suzy's house was alive with friends and relatives from all over. Four generations of family squeezed into her house to share her hospitality, sunshiney smile and great cooking. 

As midnight approached, the talk turned to new year traditions and superstitions, and soon many of the white Americans present had thrown a full purse out onto the front lawn, to be 'found' just after midnight, setting the pattern for luck in the new year. 

Back in the kitchen, Suzy, a generation closer to subsistence than her American-born guests, was filling the rice container. If there was rice in the house as the year turned, there would be enough to feed the family all year round. 

Last night, as I stepped wearily into the dressing room in search of pyjamas, my firework-spangled eyes fell on the overflowing ironing basket. 

And I thought of Suzy...

A happy and successful New Year to all visitors to Carmine Superiore, whether they arrive on the Information Superhighway or on Shanks's Pony. Buon anno a tutti!

Credit: Stitching by AJ, aged 6.