Author Archives: susannegjonnes

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

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AllthelightwecannotseeReview by Thomas Peak and Susanne Gjønnes

Set during the darkness of World War II, All the Light We Cannot See is a powerful and emotional novel. It follows a young boy and a girl caught up on each side of the whirlwind of Nazism and war. Werner, a poor orphan drafted into a special school for Nazi cadres and then the Wehrmacht and Marie-Laurie, a blind girl living in Paris with her father, whose life is turned upside down by the German invasion. The fates of Werner and Marie-Laurie slowly weave together over the course of their young lives, finally merging in the picturesque town of Sant-Malo during heavy bombardment.

Werner and his sister Jutta live in a cramped, impoverished and dirty home for orphans in a dead-end coal mining town in the Ruhr. Until his extraordinary scientific abilities and talent for mending radios attract attention, it seems that his life will follow the same predictable course of all poor boys in this town and that he will be broken – and like his father, possibly killed – in the coal mines. Werner seemingly escapes his fate by being sent to a special school for Nazi elites, where he is exposed to predictable cruelty, but also meets his best friend.

Marie-Laurie is the daughter of a locksmith at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Falling completely blind at an early age, she nevertheless develops a curiosity for the world akin to Werner’s, encouraged by her loving father and nurtured by a childhood spent exploring the museum. Following the Nazi invasion, Marie-Laurie and her father flee Paris and the museum. Before they leave, the locksmith is trusted with the greatest treasure in the museum, a perfect but cursed diamond, the ‘Sea of Flames’. The diamond must be protected from the roving Nazi hunters at all costs, and the museum disperses a number of fakes among its scattered staff.

A mysterious radio broadcast that captivated young Werner and Jutta, the bravery and the stubbornness of the ordinary children and women who risked everything in the resistance, and the relentless pursuit of Nazi treasure hunters whose shopping list for the Reich extends to all of the cultural wealth of Europe, these all meet in the story’s climax, under the heavy bombardment of allied war planes and artillery shells in Saint-Malo in 1944. All the light we cannot see is dramatic and engaging, the reader is swallowed into the book, and it is difficult to set aside.

Insightful children move this novel – Marie-Laurie is beautiful, the simplicity of her goodness stands out, and the reader really wishes to discover what will happen to her; Werner, an undersized, but brilliant and caring child who must face his own crimes; Jutta, Werner’s sister who sees through Nazism from the beginning; and Frederick, Werner’s pure and unbending friend at the Nazi school – they would all be at home in one of Roald Dahl’s stories. Together they create a tension that carries the reader along the short, energetic, chapters.

Much of the beauty stems from the flickering of candles of humanity that could not be blown out by the winds of war. But, whilst not clichéd exactly, the mise en scène becomes somewhat transparent at points. The ritual evils lurking in the special school, a place which makes the dim reality of the mine shafts shine brightly by comparison, the flatness of some of the characterisations, a slightly mono-tone and unchallenging depiction of the failed Nazi dream. But these notwithstanding, it is an emotionally engaging tale. The war is described in a way that makes the reader feel the hunger, the brutality and the desperation of war, reminding us of the terrible suffering in large parts of the world today.

Catching Thunder: The True Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase, by Eskil Engdal & Kjetil Sæter

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Crime / Thriller, Fiction

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9781925322224This true-life crime novel, ‘Catching Thunder: The Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase’, is the dramatic account of Sea Shepherd’s 110-day long international pursuit of the pirate fishing vessel Thunder.

Sea Shepherd is a group of activists committed to fighting illegal fishing led by the Swedish-American captain, Peter Hammarstedt. Their ship Bob Barker is trawling around for the ‘Bandit 6’, a list of six vessels fishing illegally in the Southern Ocean. At the start of their adventure, they come across Thunder, a vessel with an INTERPOL purple notice, and wanted by several governments around the world. This is the start of the ever-longest chase at sea, lasting 110 days, and crossing three oceans. Behind the scenes, INTERPOL and various countries’ fisheries management watch the chase, collaborating with Sea Shepherd in unconventional ways behind closed doors.

The book takes us from the once state of the art fishing vessel’s birth in 1969 in Ulsteinvik, Norway, across the oceans, and to Galicia, Spain, where unscrupulous mafias have specialised in the illegal fishing and whitewashing of Patagonian tooth fish, a lucrative species of cod icefish also named the “white gold of the ocean”. A criminal business extending across several jurisdictions, and including a web of tax havens, insurance companies, and ship registries, facilitates this lucrative poaching.

The product of a three year investigation taking them to four continents, the Norwegian investigative journalists Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter, have produced a book which is both a page-turner and a highly impressive documentary account of their work.

Chilling in places, with many situations hovering on the edge of extreme danger, one admires Sea Shepherd but also yells at them for the reckless peril they subject themselves to. Hammarstedt knows that the world and their donors are watching, and giving up is no option. This is both bravery and stupidity, but in the end a deep passion for protecting the oceans wins through, one that is hard to disagree with.

The book depicts how the international system fighting illegal fishing still has a long way to go if it effectively wants to get rid of the mafias out there, who are exploiting valuable ocean resources. In a really exciting fashion, the book highlights the problem of illegal fishing that has profound impact on communities across the world, but is largely unknown to the majority of people.

The takeaway is that combating environmental crime requires greater international cooperation than is the case today, and meanwhile, environmental NGOs are filling the enforcement vacuum left by inadequate government action. They take great risks to do so, risks that should not be required.

Catching Thunder will be out in English in March this year.

Italian Shoes: Henning Mankell

29 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

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italian-shoesWe find an aging man, living by himself on a Swedish island, where he has been in solitude since his retirement 12 years back. Once, he made a mistake he regrets so badly he has left everything to stay by himself with only a cat and a dog for company.

His world is suddenly disrupted when Harriet, his first and only love, who is suffering from a deadly illness, comes to see him to claim a promise he made before he left her; that he would take her to a pool in the forest he visited as a child.

For the first time in many years, Frederick is forced not only to think about the past, but also to confront it in flesh and blood, and by that, also to change his situation, and shape a different future.

Frederick is not able to understand why he left Harriet, nor is she. Indeed, there are a number of things about himself and the choices he has made in life that he is not able to comprehend, and he must realise that he has not always been a good person. He cannot make up for everything that has been lost, but he can try to fulfill his promise.

Throughout the book, the reader gets to know more and more why Frederick has decided to abandon everything to live on an island. A journey which takes the reader through a number of encounters; Italian shoemakers living in the forest, girls who have fled war but are unable to escape conflicts which continue inside themselves, athletes who lost everything, and professional postcard writers.

Sometimes Mankell’s stories are so farfetched they become difficult to relate to, but every story also has a purpose. As in his other books, Mankell wants his readers to be reminded of those who are worse off, including those who live far away, to be made uncomfortable by the large inequalities that exist in the world today.

Italian Shoes is a book about getting old, loneliness, and how our life choices affect us. It makes us consider what is really important. Despite the many opportunities to change his life journey, for our hero, doing so seems very hard. This is the situation for many people, and should remind us to reflect about our situation – time passes fast and at certain point things can no longer be done, or undone, depending on the situation. 

Despite the difficult themes, the book is beautiful, almost poetic. Mankell’s language, and the way he depicts Frederick and his emotional journey, makes this a book that should be prioritised. 

Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves by Sheldon Garon

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Current Affairs / Politics / Society, Non-Fiction

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The key question Sheldon Garon, Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton, tries to answer is why are some countries thriftier than others, and in particular, why is the US saving so little? Through a comparative historical analysis, Garon tracks thriftiness back in time in Western Europe, Asia and the US. The central argument is that, in contrast to theories emphasising the role of culture and economic growth, savings are driven predominantly by government interventions and institutions.

Countries’ savings levels reveal wide variation and raise a number of puzzles. Common explanations imply that people save either for a ‘rainy day’ or with an eye towards retirement. So, it should be expected that countries with less of a social safety net and younger populations would be the keenest savers. But Garon finds that European countries with generous welfare states have high savings, and the US, with its limited welfare spending, has much lower savings, and the younger populations of the US and the UK are spending when in fact the ‘life cycle’ theory suggests they ought rationally to be saving for old age.

Also, a number of East Asian countries that have high saving rates today used to be low and even negative savers. Indeed, China, which has extraordinary high household savings, was de-saving in the 1980s. So can such disparities through time be explained by culture?

Garon argues no. He demonstrates that thrifty cultures are the result of government institutions and policies, including post office saving banks and national saving campaigns. Japan used aggressive savings campaigns in order to save for catch-up development in the post-War period. Indeed, although savings grew together with GDP, he demonstrates that high savings were in many ways a precondition to growth, and that those institutions, rather than growth per se, was the main driver of savings.

Although he disproves overly simplistic and a-historical cultural theories of savings, he does not disregard culture. Garon’s comparative historical approach instead provides an interesting view of the porous and changeable nature of cultures. He considers it a malleable force that can be changed, and that changes stemming from conscious government interventions can explain differences in savings behaviour. So we find that institutional frameworks and deliberate borrowing and imitation of others are key determinants in understanding why and how savings rates vary across borders.

Garon’s interesting use of international history serves to problematize simplistic categories of ‘culture’ or even ‘historical experience’ which are sometimes employed as explanatory tools. The process shown in this book, whereby certain modes of social action, thriftiness and responsible consumption, come to be seen as intrinsic to a ‘national character’ are found to be more susceptible to policy interventions than one might have assumed.

Nevertheless, despite its rich historical analysis, a few things were missing in this book. First of all, why are savings so important, and why should a government target it as a public policy, instead of, lets say, more direct welfare policies? It is evident that indebtedness is not good for society, as the financial crisis clearly demonstrated, and also that high saving households are more resilient. Nevertheless, a few pages devoted to arguing why this policy should be favoured would aid his argument.

Second, even though the US is the focus of the book, depictions of the role of savings in East Asia throughout the 20th century begs the interesting question of what saving campaigns might do for developing countries today. In particular, hearing Garon’s view about the relation between savings and development would be valuable. His analysis covers Japan, and also a number of other Asian savers, who initiated saving campaigns at very early stages of development, demonstrating that such campaigns played a central role in these countries’ development. Indeed, financial inclusion was key not only to increasing investments, but also as a tool of social policy and state building; through savings, citizens acquired a financial and emotional stake in the state.

The book’s last chapter, in many ways the most interesting, asks what the US can learn from other higher saving countries. However, from the many success stories depicted throughout the book, it would be interesting to hear what the contemporary world can learn from the history of household savings.

Garon combines culture, historical economics, institutionalism and political economy. Anyone interested in the history of capitalism and comparative political economy is very likely to enjoy it.

Mengele Zoo by Gert Nygårdshaug

24 Sunday Apr 2016

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2115195Widely regarded to be the best Norwegian book ever written, and recipient of numerous literary awards, it is strange that Mengele Zoo has yet to be published in English. It is the first in a trilogy that continues with Himmelblomsttreets muligheter (The Sky Flower Tree’s Opportunities, 1995) and Afrodites basseng (Aphrodite’s Pool, 2004), both of which are also yet to be translated, despite very good critiques at home. (For those of you interested, a French version is available, ‘Le Zoo de Mengele’, and has received excellent reviews).

The main character is Mino, the son of a butterfly hunter who lives somewhere in Amazonas jungle. His life is turned upside down when an American company takes over his village in the search for oil. Suddenly, the whole village live in a sort of apartheid system, with no say in how the resources they have guarded and lived with for centuries, are used. The brutal rule of company owner D. T. Star (Detestar in Spanish – detest in English), result in sudden killings and constant terror. The situation goes from bad to worse, and soon Mino finds himself alone in the world, having lost everything.

Whilst Mino’s experience isn’t based on a true story, it could well have been. Many people have seen their villages disappear and their societies fall apart as collateral in a company’s hunt for new resources. This book reminds us about this, and also scathingly highlights some of the negative sides of economic growth.

Mino is intelligent, passionate and a fast learner. After a number of ups and down, a magician turned into a Father, and more adventures spanning several South American countries, Mino finds likeminded people. He and his friend, the orphan Orlando, go to University where they group up with others all sharing a common anger against people who destroy the jungle and the globe along with it.

They start a terrorist group targeting all these persons; travelling to Japan, the US and Europe, and hunting down the very top leaders of companies and organisations involved in destroying the rain forest. Their reasoning is simple: the rainforest is the oxygen of the planet; if it is destroyed, so will be the world.

But here comes also my own personal criticism of the book. Mino’s hatred towards the people who destroyed his village and killed his family converts all the persons involved with the companies and organisations destroying the rainforest into evil persons, including bodyguards, family members and company employees. Especially one part, when a whole company building is bombed, one can’t help to ask whether such indiscriminate terror was necessary.

Nevertheless, by writing a book from the perspective of a young boy who has experienced the worst that can happen to anyone, the book forces the reader to think about who the real terrorists of the world are, how our own thinking of what is acceptable is actually unacceptable, and that inaction is also action. Your head is turned upside down; Mino’s brilliant way of thinking, reasoning and justifying forcing you to reflect about everyday actions and how we draw the bounds of the tolerable.

In contrast to impersonal depictions of the persons the Mariposa group are targeting, the dialogues between the persons Mino loves and cares about are beautiful. Especially Mino and Orlando’s dialogues are worth both second and third reads. Nygårdshaug’s imagination and use of words is exceptional. Seldom have I read anyone able to fantasise so large, so wide, and so fearlessly. This book transforms reality, pushing against boundaries in a way that makes you realise and question how limited your own way of thinking really might be.

If this book review could only consist of one word, it would be colours. The book is never boring; it is one of those that you can’t stop reading until the explosive and very unexpected end. Although one is left sad, one also has an amazing feeling inside; the feeling one gets after having read something very, very good.

Dear Life: Alice Munro

07 Monday Sep 2015

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Dear life

Review by Thomas Peak and Susanne Gjonnes

Why do we read?  To think, to experience and most of all to feel. Perhaps. Munroe’s final collection of short stories Dear Life achieves all of this in abundance.  With characteristic subtleness, a refined and homely style, the stories in this collection penetrate into the reader with a sad yet fulfilled sense of engagement with ordinary life.  This book ultimately confronts one with the routine cruelty, joy, disappointment and harmony of everyday experience.

Dear Life is a collection of short stories from the Canadian Nobel Laureate for 2013, some previously published, and concludes with a number of autobiographical reflections.  With most of the stories set in interwar Canada, the characters are usually girls and women; either children, young, in their adolescence, as well as women who have already established themselves.

These are stories and settings that most of us can relate to; simple, un-crowded and familiar. The topics covered are day-to-day themes. Love inevitably runs through all of the stories, be that the intense and brief or the established and long-term kind. Jealousy is another topic that runs deeply through, and especially the jealousy felt between siblings.  The calm pervasiveness of these themes, often creeping up with an intensity belied by seemingly mundane contexts and settings, can serve as a useful reminder to the reader that life, our life, is happening right now.  In Munroe’s stories we can feel the urgency that the characters themselves sometimes miss.  We can see hopes, dreams, and expectations pass by unchecked, and we are prompted to stop and ask ‘is this happening to me?’

And what is so extraordinary about Munro’s writing is how she manages to draw you quickly into the characters, their stories and their emotions. A few pages can impart a richness for characters and circumstances for which most other authors need a whole book, if they even manage then. Each story is so satisfying that you can leave it there.

For us, Munro’s book was a break away from contemporary literature where everything is more, where authors need to fill their books with money, violence and sex to keep an audience.  She represents the type of author where the words and the personalities are in the centre. And having read other of Munro’s short stories, we would say that the best way to read her books is gradually, digesting one story at a time, and leaving a few days between each. If not, they can feel a bit too similar, and the profound richness of each can quickly become lost.

The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala): Mario Vargas Llosa

20 Monday Jul 2015

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downloadDo you believe in endless, unconditional love? The answer to this question is likely to shape one’s opinion of The Bad Girl.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian Nobel Prize winner in literature. His most famous books include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and the War of the End of the World. He is an exciting multi-talent, moving between journalism, writing, politics and lecturing. These multiple roles are also reflected in his writing, which give intelligent and real accounts of society and current affairs.

The Bad Girl extends over decades, covering the lifetime of Ricardo Somocurcio. Starting in the 1950s, when fifteen year old Ricardo meets the love of his life, Lily, in Miraflores in Lima, Peru. However, Lily quickly disappears when it becomes evident that she has been lying about her nationality and background. In his twenties, Ricardo moves to Paris, where he works as an interpreter and translator. Again, he meets Lily, who this time goes under the name ‘Comrade Arlette’, a trainee revolutionary. Ricardo falls in love with her again, but once more she disappears following a short romance. She later remerges as the wife of a French diplomat, then as the wife of a rich horse trader in Newmarket, London, and later on as the wife of a Japanese businessman. She is constantly on the hunt for material improvement, and men are the tool she uses to get this. Ricardo, with his modest income from working as an interpreter and translator, is unable to win her over, but through his job, he manages to arrange to attend conferences where Lily currently lives. This way, their romance stretches over a number of different contexts and time periods.

It is a book for the hopelessly romantic, for those who believe that the concept of ‘the one’ is actually real, for those who dream of experiencing true and endless love. I remember when I first read this book, in my early 20s, single, and on my way to Uganda. Full of dreams and new impressions, this book managed to make a real impact in me, as I smiled, cried and loved with Ricardo. As soon as the book finished, I went straight to the first page and read the whole story over again.

For the rest, it might be too much. This is probably also why the book got a number of poor reviews when first published.

A review in the Guardian said it was full of cliches and unconvincing. There might be some truth to that; Lily is not a very charming character, with the exception of her beauty. She is overtly materialistic, sacrificing her body and her life to advance her social standing. It is difficult to understand what she wants in life, and probably she doesn’t even know that herself. Still, she is a character that makes the reader ask themselves important existential questions about the times we live in, and what constitutes happiness in our capitalistic societies.

Ricardo might also be a tough character to understand; a simple man, living an ordinary life, with the exception of his crazy love for Lily, which makes him sacrifice everything for her. Compared to Lily, he is happy where he is, having fulfilled his childhood dream of living in Paris and working with languages. The only thing missing is the love of his life. Again, some questions come to mind. What is a happy life, is it better to be happy with what you have and the small things in life, or should you pursue more, like Lily? In the end, he is the one who is rewarded, whilst her life goes downhill, but this can probably be interpreted in many different ways.

In the end, your reading experience is likely to depend on whether you believe such love exists, and with that, if you also find these characters and their emotions credible. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading not only for the love story, but also for Vargas Llosa’s depiction of life and society, in Peru and Europe, from the 1950s to the present.