Claire Fuller, bestselling British author of Bitter Orange, found my review of the book I also posted on Goodreads and liked it! There is nothing like being recognized for what I have written by a great writer! This has already made my day!
Category: book review
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‘Bitter Orange’, by Claire Fuller – review
Bitter Orange by Claire FullerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller is a curious case study of a woman named Frances Jellico, masquerading as a fictitious memoir laced with escapism, voyeurism, narcissism, and eroticism, all glowing in the radiant color orange smothered by the shadow of forced guilt, self-loathing, and disorientation. Frances’s narrative is, however, far from being namby-pamby, importuning the reader with her litany of her woeful life. Rather, it is her remonstration of her failed dreams, rejected desires, and unfulfilled purposes with the world she believes has always turned its back against her in the most callous way. Her only revenge for the betraying world is her death, which bestows upon her the kind of liberty she wanted to purchase in one hot summer in an idyllic English suburb twenty years ago. It’s a mad, bad, and sad drama of Frances through which Fuller plays the last swan song of a deeply troubled woman in emotional distress with her masterful storytelling skills.
Written in the first person narrative, the reader will directly glimpse into the inner world of Frances whose days are numbered without superabundance of mawkish sentiments. In fact, it echoes Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” in a way that exudes a momentum of gushing stream of consciousness of a narrator that feels a combination of anger and dismay, sorrow and loneliness, and illusion and paranoia. That feeling of abstract emotions becomes physical by the witchcraft of Fuller’s atmospheric descriptions of scenes and rich dialogues. Fuller does a beautifully nuanced job of capturing all the conflicting emotions that put you in trance, carrying you over to the psych of the other.
In comparison with Dora, the subject of Sigmund Freud’s case study of hysteria, Frances’s dilemma is more existential, more corporeal, and more noogenic in terms of the cause and the nature of her Uber-Angst. To diagnose Frances’s symptoms as a typical case of female hysteria commonly associated with a timid, introverted middle-aged virginal woman does a disservice to the woman who struggled to right the ship of her drifting life all alone. IT goes against the grain to dismiss France’s story as a mere dalliance with a hedonistic couple named Cara and Peter during her brief sojourn or a pitiful attempt to break free from her socially gawky, ill-fitted rotund virginal self at the expense of her naivety. France’s narrative attests a sense of disorientation of her life without a clear vista of purpose in her life due to the lingering influence of her dead gloomy, domineering, sordid mother who bound her entire being under the rigidity of religion and morality.
Subsequently, Frances suffers from noogenic neuroses, neither pathological not pathogenic of origin, but of existential distress. In other words, Frances is not a basket case, but a human derelict adrift on a sea of life, brutally defenestrated from the comforting mooring of loving relationship and social connections by her also neurotic mother who blamed her daughter for almost anything. No wonder Frances associates her rotund appearance with her weight of guilt that is in fact nothing but her delusional imago forced upon her. In this regard, France’s narrative outstrips Freud’s Dora case with far more in-depth interior monologue of the narrator endowed with high intellect, impressible curiosities for life, and unyielding desire of being connected with the world outside herself.
Fuller is a riveting writer of dialogue and scenes, all the artistry in the marks upon the page after page, wielding a pen across the pages in an expense of her boundless imagination that seems wholly realistic and ingeniously creative, producing aesthetically sensuous ambiance of the story, as if she were painting a Renaissance triptych featuring three naked adults making furiously and frantically passionate love with one another in an Arcadian English garden tinged with citrus scents of oranges, which likewise symbolize lust, desire, and passion, all flatly denied to Frances in Bitter Reality. And it is in this subtle respect of Frances’s smoldering indignation at such cruel denial of her yearnings only natural to any woman – young and old, pretty and not-so-pretty, smart and not-so-smart – that Fuller’s vivid imaginativeness and keen observation of psyche of characters manifest to the fullest extent and hold the reader’s undivided attention throughout the book with gusto and pleasure that will make you become titillatingly insatiable as you go deeper into this arresting story.
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Pirate, Writer, and Traitor- on Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh The first time I got to know this interesting English notable was through a small paperback compiling vignettes of historical figures in the western civilizations I found from my father’s library. No man stood more gallantly and impressively than this daring figure in the Elizabethan England; it was no less a courtier, writer, and adventurer than Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) himself. The vista of his gentlemanly manner of soaking his cloak for the queen to tread upon in the messy muddy road lingered in my mind. (He was the only man in the queen’s entourage who did not hesitate to do so.) This would generate a possible peal of jeering laughter from many contemporary men and women in the age of insouciant conventions and lax mores. But such gesture of civility, a sign of respect, orderliness, and thoughtfulness, tells a lot about one’s character in the absence of the proliferation of the civic virtue as a result of ignorance, lassitude, and degradation. And based upon this gentlemanly aspect of Raleigh, I have formulated and kept my favorable opinions on him.
With this as a background of my knowledge of and interest in Raleigh, to come upon the article written by Anna Beer, visiting fellow at University of Oxford, about Raleigh’s years in the Tower of London from the latest edition of BBC History was a kind of nostalgic pleasure, rekindling my first impression on this enigmatic man. In fact, Ms. Beer seems to have viewpoints on Raleigh similar to mine: an explorer (or more precisely, a privateer), a writer, a poet, a courtier, and a gentleman are nominal titles bestowing upon Raleigh. Besides, unlike many other political and historical figures of his time, Raleigh was a dashing, handsome man who would make a fitting character actor for romantic adventure movies or drams, if he were alive. And perhaps it was this physical attractiveness of Raleigh that contributed to his endearment to Queen Elizabeth I, who was offended upon learning that her favorite subject had married discreetly without letting her know in advance. But above all, Raleigh’s prodigious feats of intellect in a spirit of Odyssey were laurels for his distinguishing merits. At the behest of the queen, Raleigh ventured to South America in search of El dorado, directed a settlement of the lost colony of Roanoke in Virginia (even though he himself did not go), ruled the seas by confiscating valuable cargoes carried by Spanish ships (he was also a pirate), and engaged in international trades like a very successful modern businessman. He was in fact flying high under the aegis of Queen Elizabeth I.
However, after the death of the vestal guardian and benefactor, Raleigh fell out of favor with King James I, who seemed to be hell bent on removing him from the court because of his unyielding individuality, which only the queen knew how to harness to her advantage. So Raleigh was found guilty of treason and incarcerated in the Tower of London on the ground that he and his ilk conspired to dethrone the king. It was groundless, of course, but the king could not wait longer to get rid of him and did not even allow him to retain a lawyer to defend himself. But no such royal counter-intuitive animosity deterred him from expressing his ever unbridled spirit; during his imprisonment in the tower, Raleigh built up a personal library of 500 books, a personal conservatory for drawing on the knowledge of a universal history for his writings, one of which included The History of the World that criticized King James I and his abuse of autocratic power and institutionalized faith. It was a radical kind of thought in his time of England. The recalcitrant subject was surely anathema to the king. Raleigh was beheaded in public in 1618, but even during his execution, he was all man by adhering to his principles without an apology nor a customary reverence toward the king.
The legacy of this adventurous Elizabethan gentleman continues in his writings that strike the political, religious, and literary chords in our hearts as well as those of the revolutionaries subsequent to his death. For example, Oliver Cromwell was an ardent myrmidon of Raleigh’s writings and even recommended them to his son in earnest. Not only Cromewell championed Raleigh’s political stance but also he reconstructed Raleigh’s dismally pessimistic providentialism, aka Calvin Predestination, based on the futility of all human actions as a result of unavoidable death to an optimism about the potentials of human endeavor under the proper guidance of providence. In addition, Raleigh’s critiques of monarchy and his support of parliament ignited the fuse of insurgencies calling for radical political changes. Surely, Raleigh was not a perfect man with immaculate morality, but he was a man of intellect, courage, confidence, and civility laced with irrepressible individuality whom posterity can look up to, especially in this multifariously convoluted era when so many politicians are just grandstanding from the vantage points of popularity.
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Existentialism in a nutshell
Landscape under a stormy sky by Vincent Van Gogh Existence precedes
the secondhand identity;
Essence follows
the primary reality.
Where a fact finds a being,
Man defines a meaning.P.S. The tenet of Sarte’s Existentialism is “Existence precedes Essence.” People love to criticize it because it lays bare to the starkest truth of life, even though they are all aware of it. Man defines himself where he stands in his life vis-a-vis his contemporaries, measuring himself against the burgeoning careers and just moderately settled lifestyles of his peers. I find this school of philosophy applicable to Charles Horton Cooley’s sociological theory of “Looking Glassed Self,” stating that you become what others think you are. Although I do not want to wholly subscribe to either of the thoughts, I can see where these thoughts come from: Human sentience, that is. Our faculty is rather instinctive than reasoning, physical than metaphysical because it reacts to an external stimuli much more than to internal principles of judgment. And I guess the age we are living in now is the apotheosis of sentient modus vivendi in many aspects…
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Thanks from the Author for my review
Mr. Stuart Kells, the author of The library: A catalogue of wonders, liked my review of the book and retweeted it into the bargain! https://t.co/oPrHlE4ian https://twitter.com/pekoya1/status/1059087996761268225?s=17
This will mark the second time the authors of the books I have read and reviewed liked my reviews and retweeted them on their tweeter accounts with compliments. The first one is from the New York Times bestselling American novelist Chris Bojalian and now Stuart Kells, an eminent Australian historian, writer, and professional book trader.
Although my blog does not have a legion of readers like those of many others, recognitions from the great writers remind me of the simple but truthful proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” What a feeling!
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‘The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders’, by Stuart Kells – review
The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart KellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Libraries are more than boring stockpiles of books gathered, nondescript depositories of books collected frequented by socially gawky individuals we love to call “nerds” or “misfits.” They are symbolic fortresses of our human cultural progresses as collective enterprises. In fact, libraries are precious repositories of our cultural wealth and knowledge inherited from the forerunners of the Humanities with prescient intentions to preserve the intellectual and spiritual prerogatives of the mankind for the posterity. Any book lover sees this magnificence of libraries, and that is the motif of Stuart Kells’s The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, a vivacious, jocund presentation of histories and development of libraries and an uplifting rhapsody of bibliophile – love of books. What’s more, this book is not a product of armchair thesis of a library as an anthropological institution, but of an empirically telltale account of cultural, aesthetic, literary, and social phenomena dedicated to preserving the writings of Mankind based on Kells’s actual visitations to the libraries he presents to us.
To begin with, Stuart Kells wears many hats in this book: a teacher, a guide, a book-collector, a historian, and a confirmed book-lover. But most of all, the image of him as I follow his narrative is that of a cross between a teacher and a tour guide with erudition and bonhomie. Like peripatetic Aristotle communicating to the minds of his students in the ancient Greek Lyseum, Kells invites the reader to saunter with him in his own mental library of snippets from a variety of literature and history that merit their substratum of textual human cultural artifacts bestriding the shelves of the Humanities ranging from the classical to the contemporary, all in the loving and caring custodianship of the author whose love of books is so deep and passionate that it’s almost physical. It’s personal, historical, academical, and magical in a way that imparts a sense of flitting in the phantasmal reverie of the world of libraries, now and then, existing and extinct, and real and imaginary, to the reader.
We travel along with Kells playing the role of a likable and knowledgeable cicerone from the Library of Alexandria to the Italian monastery of Bobbio in the Middle Ages that was said to house 666 manuscripts, Germany’s Wuttemberg State Library possessing a 17th century portrait of Vlad Dracul, aka Dracular, and the Abbey Library of Saint Gall, aka St. Gall’s Library, in Switzerland, which is now a UNESCO world cultural heritage site holding more than 400 manuscript volumes produced before the year 1000. And before we know it, Kells also brings us to the fantastic libraries of the famous Hobbits, also known as a race of bibliophile with personal libraries at home, however small the size might be, and the medieval monastery library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, where lightheartedness of the atmosphere contributes to the joy of knowledge and the elevation of the mind and soul. Although Kells’s Australian identity tells of the superiority of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mathom House, a wondrous library of literary paraphernalia, over the Italian Eco’s monastery library, it’s altogether a magical sightseeing of the mystical libraries conjured up before our eyes by the imaginativeness of Kells, and we can decide which of these fantastic libraries appeal to us.
To conclude, the book is an axiomatic compendium of world’s famous libraries throughout the western civilizations, smartly studded with tidbit information on eccentric librarians, book-collectors/booksellers, and historical figures in between the chapters serving as a kind of delightful intermissions introducing a subject of each new chapter with provocative anecdotes and vignettes, which are pleasingly digressive rests from the tour of the libraries. It’s really a bright book, not a heavy-duty one with lots of footnotes and scholastic priggishness that the reader may expect a book of this subject matter to be. Notably, Kells’s interpretations drew on his impressively eclectic knowledge of these extensive sources as a respectful book-trade historian, but he wears his learning lightly and writes with a general reader in mind. And I believe that just as the famous English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge often kissed the books of the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Spinoza, out of Kells’s passions for books and possession of the knowledge of multidisciplinary studies comes his love child in the form of this jolly, easy-to-read book. In the end, the reader will come to love this book for simple, pure pleasure of reading and may kiss the book.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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