Lemons, peppers, almonds and buses

Photo: Randi Hausken

There were a few "what's not to like" factors for me when I picked up Driving Over Lemons. The first was that the company I worked for had just been acquired by a Spanish parent company and I was hungry for anything on the geography and culture of my new employers, the second was having more than a passing interest in farming/horticulture and the clincher was that Chris Stewart was an-ex drummer of Genesis. He played on their first single Silent Sun and a few other pieces although they were barely more than a glint in Jonathan King's eye at the time. Genesis had a few other forgotten drummers before Phil Collins finally filled the seat but Chris was one of the five originals. He chose a different path and, whether or not it was as lucrative as some, you have to admire the rich and rewarding life he has built for himself and his family at the remote farm of El Valero in the Granada province of Las Alpujarras.in Andalucia.

In the Last Days of the Bus Club he writes engagingly about serving Wild Boar to Rick Stein, how not to start a tractor, doing an author tour with a sheep shearer, having to consult a hands-on faith healer about his inflamed private parts, the devastating affects of flash floods and most poignantly about having to let his daughter out into the wide world (the bus club of the title being the end of meeting fellow parents at the school bus).

Maybe it's just me...

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book as Nathan Filer has a good ear for making the narrator speak from inside the character's thoughts in a refreshingly simple and sing-song way. I liked the degree to which his view of people and events was off-kilter with the sensible adult's world. But this becomes a prison - as it does for the character himself and his real and imagined relationships. The intervention of official letters and dialogue with other characters doesn't really interrupt his internal dialogue and that ultimately makes this book, ironically, too one-dimensional an experience.

This is a highly rated book and I wondered if it was just me. Maybe I had something to fear from my own mental fragility in the face of this character's story. Certainly I struggled to empathise when he tells well-meaning helpers to f**k off and leave him alone. I know this happens to those trying to help all the time. So maybe it is just me that I gave up on the character at that point. But I didn't stop reading, I just stopped empathising.

A small but perfectly formed inheritance

The hare - particularly a white hare or rabbit - is a complex symbol encompassing elements of harmless madness, purity and rebirth and is closely associated with the seasonal pull of the moon. The hare shares many good characteristics from the Chinese Taoist moon-hare that creates a herbal elixir of life, through the Japanese Usagi, to Buddhist and Hindu incarnations, the Shi'ite reincarnation of Ali and the Celtic origins of the Mad March Hare, the Easter Bunny and Jimmy Stewart's 6 foot 3 and a half inch Pooka called Harvey. But it is not well liked in Hebrew culture, and by derivation Christians, who see the hare as a symbol of fertility and is therefore bad. This kind of nonsense and religious intolerance spread spider-like through different cultures is relevant to Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes which treats art objects as telling a story beyond their creator and cultural origins in the way that they can touch many different lives.

On a recent visit to the Pallant Gallery in Chichester, UK, I saw some really paintings by an unjustly neglected official war artist Evelyn Dunbar rescued from a Kent attic and a collection of paintings, drawings, engravings and poems by an artist called David Jones. Inspired by one of David Jones' poems was an exhibition of minimalist ceramics in cases or vitrines. Visually these were no more interesting that a pile of petri dishes and I walked swiftly past them. None of the group I was with even remember seeing them. A real lesson, and I obviously needed it, that every object, like every person, has an interesting story to tell if you will only take the time to look. This book is part of that story and it is a fascinatingly rich and diverse one that I heartily recommend.

The start or end point is a collection of 264 Japanese Netsuke which are wood or ivory carvings - none of them bigger than a matchbox and all carefully designed to be slightly rounded and easily portable. Although these are figurative it is easy to see the restraint and subtlety of their design in Edmund de Waal's pottery and he won't be the first or the last potter to be deeply influenced by Japanese cultural and spiritual attitudes. This is deeply ingrained from time he spent studying in Japan - but that is only a part of the labyrinthine cultural and art historical connections that run through his family and span the globe. I'm not going to retell the story here - you need to buy and read the book. I've just a couple of other observations to make. The first is how surprisingly cool, pragmatic and level-headed his description is of the psychosis and institutional theft that rich Jewish families suffered across Europe in the Twentieth Century and the second is how heart-warming, but so frustratingly anonymous, is the tale of family loyalty shown by the German lady who hid these valuable Netsuke in her mattress during the Second World War and ensured their success as objects which frame their owner's memories.

PS. Watch The Joyless Street from 1925 on YouTube. It's not Greta Garbo you need to watch it's the fear of the international banker. Some things don't change.

That's No Child

Eowyn Ivey describes waiting to find 'her story' and it becoming her first novel 'The Snow Child'. It's just as well that the making and reading of a book is in how you tell the story not the originality of the plot because 'her story' is also the traditional Russian fairy tale Snegurochka or Snow Maiden. It also leans heavily on Arthur Ransome's 'Little Daughter of the Snow' and less consciously on picture books like Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. Certainly this is a book that would appeal to younger readers but it is more about motherhood than childhood and about the difficult and painful process of letting go. There are some poignant moments in the protagonist's relationships that everyone will recognise - not least the abandonment of pride in accepting help from friends and neighbours.

What I liked best however was the description of the harsh brutality and beauty of the Alaskan landscape where you are forced to make brutal choices such as hunting to survive. As well as paying homage to northern mythology she also generously cites twelve Alaskan writers who mostly use their natural environment front and centre in their works. Shame she didn't mention Russell (Rusty) Annabel's Alaskan Adventures and who Ernest Hemingway described as 'the finest outdoor writer' he had ever read.

Same but different

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden is Jonas Jonasson's second novel and his self-confessed description is that it is the 'same but different' to The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.That's just dandy for me because his first one was the funniest and best novels I've read in ages. It was a pretty good film as well with delicious black humour.

What I like best of all is the way Jonasson rides roughshod over received political opinions about international politics and boils events down to the random actions of different personalities as if the world is just one big dysfunctional family. A country and a country's culture is always more complex and diverse than can possibly be expressed in a single story and yet Jonasson's farce is uncomfortably close to the truth with broad historical events turning on the whim of a few individuals' self-interest. This time apartheid era South Africa, China, Israel and, of course, Swedish politics and monarchy come in for a bit of a working over albeit in a gentle and affectionate way for the King. Can't wait for Hitman Anders and The Meaning of It All.

Gone and Forgotten

There are two sides to every story and one is good and one is bad. I was looking forward to this book because I read a reasonably average novel called Good Girl and the press seemed to equate it with this one just because of the title. I'd seen part of the film of Gone Girl and was looking forward to reading this. Now I find myself looking forward to finishing the film in order to compare the two but I'm not one of those people who complains that films aren't like the books or vice versa. They are always quite different but complimentary. Sometimes in a good way and sometimes not so good - just different. 

Strangely though I did find the two books more similar than the book to the film. That is because what frustrated me about Good Girl was the two dimensionality of just having two characters. In a film that seems less obviously a problem as your attention span and the story are short enough for it not to matter. In Gone Girl I really wanted the parents and friends to be more fully rounded. I wanted to find out what happened to the first girlfriend. I wanted to know more about the police investigators and the lawyer. The curiosity to read on is purely plot driven rather than character driven once you've worked out the basic premise and your empathy for the main protagonists is exhausted. Nonetheless you have to respect Flynn for avoiding a straightforward good versus bad approach to her characters and letting them speak fully through the narrative.

The scent of lemons in the air, 

a trace of blood in the soil

Helena Atlee's 'The Land Where Lemons Grow' is beautifully evocative of an ancient Italy steeped in citrus groves and soaked in late evening Mediterranean Sun. I defy anyone not to reach for a 'tart in a citroen' as I like to call the 'tarte au citron' or a sugary lemon cake (ideally drizzled with refreshing limoncello liquer and topped with a zesty blob of gelato limone) during this read. And that's before you get to the oranges soaked in sunsets and the sublime lime.

On the face of it a book about different types of lemon and how they have been grown through history, with a few recipes thrown in, isn't an obvious choice for a right riveting read; so the answer is it's also a well written travelogue, fascinating in anecdote and resonating on a straightforward human level. Take, for example, the reality of lemon growing in Sicily and Southern Italy which was so important and so lucrative that it gave rise to the Mafiosi. They were not, as American ex-pat urban myth would have it, the product of grinding poverty amongst the agricultural peasants but protection rackets set up by a few aristocratic and wealthy landowners.

My favourite though is the bonkers Orange fight in Ivrea. If you ever go please don't forget your red elf hat, otherwise it could end badly.