Dublin Opinion

Having started the idea of people posting reviews of their favourite books of the year it seems ridiculous that it’s taken me so long to get around to writing my own. And I won’t be able to do it today either.

Instead, and in a purely provisional way, I’m providing a quick guide to some of the books I got round to in 2006.

Unfortunately, to compound the situation, many of them are quite well known, so you might have read them already or glanced through much better reviews elsewhere.

I intend to write in more detail later, but for the moment I’m just providing a short review, which resembles the sort of publisher’s guff that you’d get from a shoddily-worded press release.

So, in no particular order:

Slow Man – JM Coetzee
An aging Franco-Australian photographer is suddenly incapacitated in a cycling accident. With newly acquired truculence, he decides to remain housebound rather than donning prosthesis. However, while beginning to think that he will live the rest of his life under a cloud of depression, he falls in love with the liberal arts educated Croatian day nurse he has employed to take care of him. As he tries to implicate himself in her (married) life the famous novelist Mary Costelloe appears at his door, moves into his flat and dissects his dysfunctional amorousness with her literary scalpel - much to his chagrin.

Memoir - John McGahern
A moving account of the novelist’s early life. The prose is shorn of all literary ornamentation to leave a crystalline honesty which breaths life in to those people who surrounded McGahern as he grew up under the shadow of his sadistic bowsey of a father. Principal amongst these is his mother and her early death from breast cancer forms the centre of the book. The seemingly everyday accounts of his journeys with her to and from school are recounted more thoroughly than his entire life as an award winning novelist and short story writer.

The Soccer War –Ryszard Kapuscinski
As Poland’s only foreign correspondent for many years Kapuscinski was apparently too busy reporting on events to sit down and write the book he would wish about the places and people he encountered throughout the years of civil war and disaster in Africa and South America. Some chapters in this book are referred to as ‘Notes for a planned book’ and they whisk through his many hair-raising assignments in Ethiopia, Sudan, Rhodesia, The Belgian Congo, Liberia, El Salvador and Chile, where he was imprisioned, robbed and doused in kerosean with a lighted match waved in front of him.

In this book Kapuscinski covers a lot of what happened as the various African nations gained their independence from their European masters only to have the puppet government fall, leading to civil war and the reassertion of order through a dictatorship, with bone chilling regularity.

The Story of Democracy – John Dunne
The story of a word, democratiya and a story of a political theory, though these are not nessecarily the same story. While, the word democracy described a political system used by Pericles in Ancient Greece, it was actually held in very low esteem by Aristotle, Plato and their latter day ilk. Then in the New World they needed a system that would keep the rabid horde at bay. Madison, while everyone seemed to be out at lunch, invented something where the broader swath of people could vote for people who could be trusted to vote in the right type of representative government. This government would then take care of business for the broader swath of people, though not necessarily in their interest. Or something like that.

The real meaning of democracy came to a theoretical zenith/nadire during the French revolution, but somehow along the way the ‘order of egoism’ (aristocracy/high bourgoise/vested interests) took over the word and shaved it of it’s egalitarian meaning. Nowadays of course democracy is not about equality and fairness, but about protecting the ‘order of egoism’ against the petty needs of wants of the broader swath.

Dining with Terrorists – Phil Rees
At the BBC terrorists used be called freedom fighters or rebels with bona fida gripes. Then 9/11 came along and changed all that.

Preventing the Future – Tom Garvin
The analysis and advise given to governments by US experts working with the Marshall plan allowed many European countries ravaged by WWII to enjoy the extraordinary post war economic boom. They came to Ireland too, but their advise fell on deaf ears and they took the first Aerlinte Eireann flight out of here. Of course, a good lot of it was the Catholic Church’s fault.

In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin
Sotheby’s Art expert wanders around Southern Argentina and Chile in an area known as Patagonia talking about ex-Nazis, the real Butch and Sundance and generally having a rare ol’ time. A beautifully written, facinating and entertaining episodic travelogue.

The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
As above, except for the theory about the early humanoid being wanderers by nature, their shuffling feet beating paths over great distances and thus making a b-line out of the African plain. It seems that migratory movement was done in baby steps, each generation moving just down the road from the previous one until next you know, you’re great great (repeat great 10 more times) grandkids are living in India.

For more book reviews click here