Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so boring I had to DNF it. No stars.

So evidently, that moratorium on reading books with male academic protagonists isn't going so well. I have heard of the principle of "write what you know", but this is really boring and I think male academics need to get some imagination.

The book itself is an alright read; it's basically Atonement in South Africa, though. At least, from what I can recall of that book they have a lot in common. The title, obviously. The concentration on wealthy white people. (Although to be fair to McEwan, Atonement is the book of his I remember being less obsessed with wealthy white people than usual. At least, I don't remember getting frustrated by how much I didn't care about any of his eye-rolling self-absorbed walking moneybags the way I did with his other books…)

This novel centres on an elderly white South African author, Clare Wald, and her biographer Sam Leroux – also a white South African, but having been living in New York for a very long time. Their relationship goes back a long way before that, but to explain it would spoil the plot. It's a novel about history, truth, memory… but also a novel where the only black characters are domestic workers, thieves, and obnoxious police officers, which I found more than a little problematic. I mean sure, from what I've heard, white South Africans prefer to live in isolated communities and see as little of people of colour as possible (except as servants), and my complaint isn't that Flanery should have written white South Africans to be more inclusive than they really are. It's more that I don't understand how he expects me to care about anyone in this novel. I find it really hard to sympathise with these characters with more money than they know what to do with and domestic staff to do their chores. I found it especially hard to sympathise with Clare Wald feeling so guilty about (view spoiler). She did good! What the hell is she so upset about? Jeez…

There are some other aspects of the plot I didn't find very satisfying – the eventual explanation of what happened to Laura, Clare's daughter, for example. (view spoiler) You could describe this novel as a mystery novel, with Laura's fate being the matter under investigation, except that the denouement is hearsay, untrustworthy and unclear. I get that that happens a lot in real life, that real mysteries are never explained. But I don't read mystery novels to get the kind of lack of answers I can get in real life.

Despite all of this, I kind of enjoyed the novel, though. Lacking an emotional investment in any of the characters, I took it as a mystery and ended up disappointed, but until the disappointment it was hard to put down. The differing versions of the same events were intriguing. I wanted to get to the 'truth'. Alas… (Jun 2016) ( )

This book was tremendously well written! I loved the four-pronged narrative and the divergence in each story. South Africa itself felt like another character, the way it affected so many decisions and brought up such a host of emotions in the human characters. The themes of guilt, loss, and entrapment were thoroughly explored in Sam and Clare, and the relationship between the two of them felt genuine. How much do you let another person know that you know? When can you trust enough? Who will be the first to speak? I will be on the lookout for more books by Patrick Flanery.

* I received this book for free from Goodreads First Reads. ( )

Great writing by an exciting new voice. Multiple narratives tell the story about a well-known but reclusive writer Clare Wald and her official biographer Sam Leroux who has come back to Cape Town after many years in New York. There are ties that connect that these two and parts of the book reads like a literary thriller as we race to end, trying to figure out who remembers what about the other. But there are lots of big ideas - reconciliation, forgiveness, and the violence of post-Apartheid south Africa. Stunning debut. ( )

This is a story of lives lived in ways which give cause for regret. This is becoming a genre. Ian McEwan talked about [b:Atonement|6867|Atonement|Ian McEwan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320449708s/6867.jpg|2307233]. Here the quest is for Absolution. In both cases memory and remembrances are fluid. They are fuzzy or not reliable. The quests for Atonement and Absolution become larger, more significant then the events that precipitated the need.
Will this bring us to [b:The Sense of an Ending|10746542|The Sense of an Ending|Julian Barnes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311704453s/10746542.jpg|15657664]? All of these books are characterised by muddy memories and relative truths, and unreliable authors within the stories.

It’s hard to believe that this is the first novel from Patrick Flanery. It is a self-assured and complex work that braids together the related stories of several characters. Clare is a famous South African author, a bit of a curmudgeon, who is working with her biographer. (If this was ever made into a movie, Maggie Smith would be perfect for the role.) She is using her own literary skills as a tool to clarify mysterious past events involving her family’s roles in the political history of South Africa, but she is a bit obtuse with her young biographer who struggles to understand how his own life has figured into hers. Most of the novel leads to discovering why Clare feels the need for absolution.

Flanery’s writing is intelligent, incisive, and he can write a mean bit of suspenseful action. “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire.”
There was an intense scene of a home invasion, where you could almost hear the scared breathing trying not to be heard, the tense silence broken by stealthy creaks. Clare is interviewed by police afterward, and that becomes a brilliantly Kafka-esque interaction.

There are wonderful gems of prose. On family: “One can but sow the seed and provide the proper environment, and hope that the flower promised by the illustration on the packet is the one that will grow, trust that the hybrid will not revert to the characteristics of some earlier generation, or be so transformed by unpredictable and wholly external factors – a drought, a storm, environmental pollution – that the seed mutates and something unrecognizable grows.”

Or when one’s vacation plans are suddenly upset by a phone call with unexpected news: “Lying in bed that morning, the phone still in his hand, he could feel the broken expectation of that escape raining down around him, and then he realized the rain was not just in his head but outside the window, a shower of ice that began to coat the glass, contorting their view of the traffic, the canary sludge of taxis, bleeding brake lights along West End Avenue.”
And I loved this description of a minor character: “Timothy is overripe and over-processed. His nails have been manicured, his suit is more expensive than anything I’ll ever be able to afford. He’s rotten with success.”

Flanery is American but writes convincingly of what daily life is like nowadays for some in cities like Capetown and Johannesburg. Some descriptions were so detailed that I followed along in Google Maps Streetview. That was an interesting exercise — I felt as if suddenly I was seeing the scene as the author saw it in his own mind.

This book has been one of the best I’ve read in a few months. ( )