Welcome to ReadHead's Advent calendar, taking us all the way up to Christmas. We will choose, if you will let me, to ignore the fact that yesterday making brownies, watching Ten Things I Hate About You and getting lost on the south circular distracted me from posting Day 1 actually on 1st December. Anyway, the lucky thing is that today you get TWO POSTS. I know. Amazing. Christmas has come early for you all.
For this post I have decided to continue with my Dutch theme and share with you a book that I fell for on work experience: the Light of Amsterdam by David Park.
It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam.
Alan, a university art teacher stands watching the grey sky blacken waiting for George Best's funeral cortege to pass. He will go to Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert but also in the aftermath of his divorce, in the hope that the city which once welcomed him as a young man and seemed to promise a better future, will reignite those sustaining memories. He doesn't yet know that his troubled teenage son Jack will accompany his pilgrimage.
Karen is a single mother struggling to make ends meet by working in a care home and cleaning city centre offices. She is determined to give her daughter the best wedding that she can. But as she boards the plane with her daughter's hen party she will soon be shocked into questioning where her life of sacrifices has brought her.
Meanwhile middle-aged couple, Marion and Richard are taking a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday. In Amsterdam, Marion's anxieties and insecurities about age, desire and motherhood come to the surface and lead her to make a decision that threatens to change the course of her marriage.
As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before. Tender and humane, and elevating the ordinary to something timeless and important, The Light of Amsterdam is a novel of compassion and rare dignity.
Possibly the longest blurb ever, my apologies, but it's all down to this book having several strands. I don't know about you but I'm a sucker for those kind of stories, where lots of people from completely different walks of life all in some way connect. That is unless you're one of those stupid annoying authors who sets it up for everyone to interlink AND THEN THEY DON'T. Sore spot for me...
One thing that struck me when this book was published, almost a year after I first took a look at it, was how perfect the cover was. Admittedly it may not show any more to you than the title, but the tone it sets is just right. This is a very soft book. That sounds weird, but what I mean is that all the emotions are very delicately done and you can really feel for the novel's characters. As a result I enjoyed all the strands in this story, from the awkward relationship between a father and his son, a touching and saddening marriage and the insecurities of a well-meaning mother.
I've got to say the ending took me by surprise. To be honest, I felt in part it was a bit silly and I'm not entirely sure it's how I wanted it to end but then I equally feel that I may not have remembered this book for much longer had it not been so unexpected.
When I was presented this book to read, I was a bit put off that he was described solely as an 'Irish writer'. For me, that is the publishing term, albeit often unfairly, for 'down right miserable'. This book isn't miserable. It's not quite Barney's tea party and there are some emotional journeys for you to jump on here but it's very gentle and 'light', to use the word as Park does.
This book gets 7/10 for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment