So here we are reading the Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

In a nutshell : an American baptist minister, his wife and their four daughters leave 1960s USA to live in the Congolese jungle in an attempt to convert the locals. This poignant history of a dysfunctional family is set against the background of 30 years of Congo's history and politics and its terrible fight for independence.

The blurb : written from the point of view of the mother and the four daughters, it starts as the day to day description of life in the Congolese jungle. The father's fanatical views become increasingly damaging to the family and their attempts to "settle in" and the hardship of the everyday gives way slowly to an incredible analysis of Congolese politics and culture. About halfway through the book time speeds up and twenty years of Congolese history and its bloody fight for independence are told through the eyes o those living it, whether they are part of the action or seing it from afar. Beautiful pace, incredible descriptions and real food for thought as it throws all our western references out of the window to describe the hardships of life out there.

IMHO this is one of the best books ever written. Good anytime any place, it is a heartbreaking story of a family but also a lesson in tolerance and politics. It covers religious fanatism, cultural racism, ethnocentrism, and is a mix of anthropology, history and fiction. Must be read !

So here we are at Mudbound

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

In a nutshell: In 1946, the McAllan family move to an isolated farm in the muddy fields of Mississippi, where the "Negroes" are violently discriminated against and life is hard for everyone. In parallel, two young men linked to the McAllans, one white, one black, return from the Second World War.

The blurb: This book is written in first person narrative from various points of view- the wife who hates the muddy farm, the husband who loves it, the charming brother-in-law who has difficulty coping with his memories of the war, the black sharecropper/midwife, the black soldier who, having liberated Europe, is still just a "nigger" when he returns, and so on. We follow love and betrayal, friendship and injustice, and see a damning account of how black men and women were treated at this time.

IMHO this is simply yet well-written book that reads easily and deals with several themes: rural life in 1940s rural Mississippi, the treatment of black farmers, racism, and the power and risks of certain friendships in such a context. The most interesting part of the book deals with the treatment of the young black war hero who returns home and the bigotry of the locals. There are in fact many subplots that culminate to a violent and somewhat predictable denouement and the book seems a little too short for one to be able to appreciate it. Though we get good portraits of the characters, and follow several paths, it all seems a little light and rushed with a change of narrator every ten pages or less. As a result it reads like a cross between the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (read review here) and Little House on the Prairie. A good book, but a little short.

So here we are celebrating the Millenium (I)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

In a nutshell: Mikael Blomkvist, disgraced journalist, goes to a small Swedish village to work for Henrik Vanger, a rich industrialist and patriarch of the bizarre Vanger family, who is obsessed with the disappearance of his niece forty years earlier. Blomkvist investigates, helped by Lisbeth Salander, a delinquent hacker who follows no rules but her own...

The blurb: This is a very intricate book, and many storylines are neatly entwined around the main plot, which is the strange case of 16 year-old Harriet Vanger, who disappeared 40 years previously from an isolated island. Around this are many distinct, yet connecting, characters and stories, such as Blomkvist's career, families, financial corruption or physical abuse, which are thought-provoking and gripping. Salander's caracter is especially fascinating and complex.

IMHO this is a intelligent, addictive and multi-layered book that sucks you in gradually like a intricate game of chess. It is actually quite "slow" for about two hundred pages, but suddenly the characters and the settings click and the thriller part of the book begins. Part sophisticated thriller, part whodunnit, part exploration of a darker side of society, highly recommended.

So here we are celebrating Darwin

Charles Darwin was born 200 hundred years ago today! To celebrate and commemorate the father of the theory of the evolution of species who published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life 150 years ago in November, here is a small selection of things that I think are relevant.

So here we are detecting in Victorian England

The suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

In a nutshell: Part social history, part biography, part depiction of Victorian England and part whodunnit, this book deals with the early days of detection though the prism of a true murder committed in Road in 1860.

The blurb: This multi-layered book starts with the true story of the murder of Saville Kent, the youngest member of a middle class Victorian family. This is the whodunnit part of the book : a murder, a large household and a house locked from the inside. We then follow the investigations and suspicions of Detective Jack Whicher, one of the first London detectives, at a time when detection was a new science that had the nation in the grip of 'detection fever'. In this respect, this book is also a social history of the time, cleverly showing the side effects this gruesome- and mystifying- murder had on literature (with the emergence of a new type of novel) and the attitude of Victorian society to the case and the methods used to solve it.

IMHO this was an interesting but not particularly gripping book, definitely not a page turner. It was not written as a whodunnit so, despite not knowing who the murderer is until late on, there is none of the satisfaction of detection in your armchair. Then again, this is a true story, and therefore not as well crafted as a good Agatha Christie. That said, it sometimes seems a little confusing as we skip from Whicher's detection to broader descriptions of society at the time, from trials to flashbacks, from mini-biographies to the influence the case had on Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, amongst others. It works out as an interesting history of early detection and investigation methods, and a pretty mediocre whodunnit.

So here we are in Sarkozy's economic crisis

About ten days ago, an estimated 2 million French workers went on strike and marched through the streets of France's cities. They were not protesting specifically about job losses like in England, nor only from the public sector which is often the case. This strike was about a more abstract sense of fear and helplessness due to the crisis and a hefty dose of anger directed at Nicolas Sarkozy. This was about the country's relationship with its president, the man who won the election on the promise that people would work more to earn more, that he would boot up people's disposable income, that he would modernise the French economy by basing it on a more flexible anglo saxon model, complete with low unemployment.

In retrospect, these election pledges seem both awkward, absurd and hilarious. Unemployment is soaring; purchasing power is collapsing; the French car industry, which indirectly employs 1 in 10 French workers, is close to collapse; and the banks have had to be bailed out. This last point has gone down especially badly with the French. As they struggle with inflaion and stagnant wages, reducing consumption in many cases to bare necessities, the government managed to magic up billions for the banks, seen by the population as inefficient, dangerous and corrupt. Despite Sarkozy's characteristic hyperactivity- he has been running around France giving huge conferences every two days on average- his now-ludicrous promises and idiotic remarks ("Hoho! Now when there's a strike in Frane nobody notices" he said at a public meeting, which was seen a pure provocation by the unions) have made him a resented and distrusted figure.

All he could do was respond. So he decided to give an interview, that would be shown on 3 channels simultaneously, in his offices at the Elysée. The two journalists, which he chose, are the newsreaders of the leading private and state channels, bit they didn't reallydo much, just let Sarkozy talk.

Sarkozy looks a bit older and more tired, and certainly wasn't as arrogant and lively as usual. He was, as always, fidgety but his voice had a grave and softer tone. On the crisis, he solemnly announced that this was the worst crisis in living memory and that there were no easy solutions. Not exactly the reassurance the population was after. He justified his plan to help the economy through investment and companies, rather than by encouraging consumption, which is what the UK have done by lowering VAT (and which the French socialists would like to do). He justified bailing out the banks because French savings were at stake, not the treacherous banks, which he is furious with. He went off into a little spiel about how he had "summoned the G20 to refound world capitalism" which sounded a little bigheaded. He then dropped a couple of shock factor proposals. First to arrange a huge meeting on the 18th of february with the Unions, the different interest groups and so on where they would discuss, among other things, cutting taxes for the poorer slices of the population (50% of French workers don't pay taxes already) and getting rid of the taxe professionnelle, which represents 30% of companies' costs (but is also what funds local collectivities).

But behind the gravity and proposals, it was impossible not to notice a kind of megalomania: as well as the "I summoned the G20", there was also "I am your President, it is my role to protect you", "I went to wherever and did this", "I decided this and it was done". Amusingly, only when he suddenly came under fire for an unpopular measure unrelated to the financial crisis did he suddenly start saying that he didn't work alone, that he had a full council of ministers working round the clock and that he was absolutely not responsible alone for anything.

What came out of this was very little concrete measures. People had been expecting some emergency solution like Obama's $1000, but what they got was justification for saving the banks and helping companies, and a lot of Sarkozy saying that he would take on the crisis single handedly and not to worry. People are worried though. In the poll published today 52% of the French were unconvinced by his statements.

So here we are in London and an Egyptian tomb

Chook and I went off to London for a birthday weekend and it wa sabsolutely great. We saw the Rothko exhibition at Tate modern, ate pub lunches and English breakfasts, saw my family and met up with some old uni friends for a couple of drinks. We went to the Britsh museum and plodded around in the snow which fell in abundance in London and the South East on Sunday and Monday.


We had an amazing time and one of my highlights was visiting the new Egyptian gallery in the BM. I've always loved their Egyptian wing and when I was a child would spend ages with my poor suffering mother looking at the Rosetta stone and animal mummies, the dried out corpse of Ginger and other slightly gruesome displays. Later I also started to appreciate the statues and artefacts, pottery, jewellry and so on, and know a bit more about Ancient Egyptian history and archeology.

This new gallery is like nothing I have ever seen before. It is a actually an average sized room that is solely dedicated to the tomb of an temple accountant who lived three and a half thousand years ago. The famous Egyptian tombs are typically royal ones : from the valley of the Kings to Tutankhamon's, or the even more ancient pyramids. The lives and deaths of the everyday Egyptians are comparatively unknown. A few years ago the Louvre had an exhibition on the people who made the pyramids, not slaves as it turns out(contrary to popular belief) but highly skilled craftsmen, experts in stone cutting, woodwork, engraving, painting and so on. It looked in to the lives of the Egyptian working classes, neither pharoahs nor farmers nor slaves.

In a similar way, this tomb is the tomb chapel of Nebamun, a "scribe and counter of grain" who died in around 1400 BC. His tomb chapel was discovered in the 1820s by a Greek grave robber who later sold the incredible paintings that are on display. Though we know the tomb was located near the city/temple devoted to Amun, where he worked, in Thebes (today Luxor),the exact location is today lost. Though it is a tomb, the paintings are a celebration of Nebamun's life, with paintings glorifying his everyday activities, from fishing to family and his job. The eleven large fragments, which have been restored and preserved over the last decade, are beautiful in colour and the level of detail in each one is captivating; the artist is unknown but has been called an "ancient Egyptian Michaelangelo".

One painting shows a young Nebamun fishing on the marshes and surrounded by spieces of birds and reeds and fat fish. Amongst the reeds his cat is somersaulting and hunting. The different species symbolise life, rebirth and vitality which is what the painting inspires.



In another, we see Nebamun at work. His name literally means "he works in the service of Amun", to whom the temple which employed him was dedicated. Here he is counting and inspecting cattle, who have been painted in such a way that you can hear the clatter of their hooves and the shouts of the servants driving them.



In another, slave giirls entertain at a banquet: a display of luxury, sensuality and wealth.


The exhibition also has a terrific 3D video that explains the tomb chapel's probable location and layout, and has some nice artefacts such as toys, jewelry, games and preserved offerings. The explanations are great and fascinating (such as the fact that the word "Amun", present everywhere in the hieroglyphs, including in Nebamun's name, was smashed centuries later) and to top it all the whole gallery, like the rest of the museum, is free.