The Lady and the Unicorn is a famous series of woven tapestries, created in the 15th century, when tapestries were all the rage among the rich and powerful.

Jean Le Viste, recently ennobled, wants to show to the nobility of France that he is as good as them, so he orders a set of tapestries for his house. He wants them to show the battle of Nancy, but his wife decides that something less violent would fit the dining room better. She wants an allegorical series instead, with unicorns.

The story is told from the points of view of half a dozen people who affect the making of the tapestries, consciously or not. There’s the artist who draws the design. There’s the family of Brussels weavers who make it. And then there’s the lady and the daughter of the Le Viste family, who inspire the artist as he draws the pictures.

Chevalier jumps between the viewpoints, as they all see the creation of thea tapestries from very different angles. The stories overlap and hook into each other – a rather obvious metaphor of weaving.

Nicolas, the artist, is the warp that keeps all the stories together. He’s a horny young man, chasing all the women he meets, seducing them with the myth of the unicorn and its potent horn. At the same time, his love for women and his ability to, nevertheless, see them as individuals is what makes the tapestry a masterpiece.

It’s a lightweight but enjoyable book, and my opinion of it keeps shifting depending on the mood I’m in.

One the one hand it’s very readable: the story flows smoothly with hardly any padding, and the characters really come to life. It’s also a very evocative book: it made me wish I could see the tapestries myself. As usual, Amazon reviewers complain about vulgarity and unlikeable characters, but I found both of these flaws to be limited. There’s plenty of vulgarity and imperfection in life, and as long as it’s interestingly presented, I don’t mind.

On the other hand there’s no denying that the book is superficial and the characters simplistic – Nicolas in particular feels very one-dimensional. A slight smell of cheap romance hovers over the book, with some rather unlikely events and far too modern thoughts in the head of, for example, a 14-year old girl raised in the sheltered confines of a Catholic, noble family.

A good and memorable read but not enough to make me go Wow.

Numerous reviewers had come away disappointed because they had previously read The Girl with the Pearl Earring by the same author. Since I found this one first, it sounds like I have something even better to look forward to.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

This book got such positive reviews and so much publicity that I had to see for myself. Having read it, I have to say it was OK but not particularly impressive.

The book is written in first person, from the point of view of Amir, a young Afghan. Amir grows up in a prosperous family in 1970s Kabul, together with Hassan, the illiterate son of the family’s servant. Both boys are motherless, and they spend their entire childhood together. Hassan remains unshakeably loving and loyal, even though Amir sometimes cannot help treating him as an underling. Amir struggles to earn his father’s love and never quite succeeds. Then war forces them into exile in the US, where Amir’s father loses some of his power and influence, even though they both still remain close to the Afghan community. An old friend, now dying, asks Amir to return to Afghanistan, and various complications ensue.

The main weakness of this whole story is that it isn’t a cohesive story. It’s the union of three disparate parts: first the childhood memories, then the years in exile, and then the trip back. And there’s not enough glue to hold them together: they all have different tone, and the links between them are weak.

The first section of the book, the childhood in Afghanistan, was interesting and beautiful, even though some events were rather predictable. But when Amir moves to the US the story changes abruptly into something rather ordinary, with a love story, a death, some unexpected news etc. This part is far less interesting: events slow down, and Amir doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say.

The third part, the return to Afghanistan, is different again. Now there are action scenes and danger. Finally, pointless complications are introduced at the very end, that would have made sense if this was an autobiography, but don’t work in a fictional context.

These three sections are sort of linked by some events and facts, but some of these links seem rather contrived, the way people in soap operas find out that their husband’s twin did not die in childhood after all but is now back with a vengeance, and so on. And just like soap operas, the book manages to combine improbability with predictability.

Some reviewers have wondered whether the book was written with Hollywood in mind. Others have questioned whether perhaps Hosseini tried writing just about his childhood, and was then told by a publisher that he needed a plot, that the book needed to make a “point”. Either of these would explain the odd mixture in this book.

The writing itself was average at best, with lots of clichés and the almost-obligatory sprinklings of farsi words in all dialogue.

It was interesting to read about pre-war Afghanistan, but I can’t say the book gave me any real insight into the culture or history of Afghanistan. Despite being set in Afghanistan, the book felt American. My guess is that the book will mainly appeal to readers who want “riveting dramas of betrayal and salvation”, with the exoticism of Afghanistan adding some extra spice. Mass-market entertainment.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

In another world, some humans stand out from others – they all have some sort of deformity (which is why they’re called Tesques, short for Grotesques) as well as an extra opening in their body. A minority of them also have a healing ability, which allows them to draw out the sickness from a human body and turn it into a physical “concretion” which is expelled through that opening.

Unfortunately Tesques have no rights to speak of, and healers are treated as no more than valuable slaves. They have no say in how their gift is used, and most are drained in less than 10 years.

The book is the life story of one such healer called Payne. Unlike most healers, Payne doesn’t seem to be affected by the Drain, and he manages to complete more complex healings than most of them. He is young, overconfident, and tries to do the impossible: to heal the Drain of another healer. The healing goes wrong, leaving the other healer in a worse state than before. Nevertheless both survive, which is enough to make Payne into a bit of a legend.

He starts out an idealist, as most young people do, wanting to help humans, caring for them. But as he is excluded from their communities – even a church in which he invests a lot of his energy – his optimism wanes, his alienation grows and slowly turns into rebellion.

This was a strange book: distant and dreamy. Payne remains distant from both his world and from the reader. There is no real engagement, and hardly any emotions. The story is a seemingly random selection of episodes from Payne’s life, with no clear overall path. Neither the external events nor Payne’s personal development have any clear direction. At the end, rather unexpectedly, the story turns into myth. This doesn’t fit the preceding 95% of the book at all, but somehow it still works quite well. Perhaps it’s just because I like myths, powerful in their unreality.

But taken as a whole, the book was an interesting and satisfying reading experience. Well-written, and distinctive enough to be worth reading.

Here’s the review at SF Site that made me want to read this book. I agree with just about everything in that review except their opinion of the ending.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

This is an efficient and matter-of-fact book. On the first page we find out that the world is about to end. In six days, in fact. This fact becomes common knowledge when it’s announced on the news.

What would you do if you heard this kind of thing on the news? Not as a rumour but as a certainty, with the scientists only disagreeing on whether we have 4 days left or 6. Nothing matters, because you have no future.

In the book, some people riot, some go off to spend their last week in the Bahamas. Some realise that they’ve wasted their lives, other continue quietly with theirs. Detective Inspector Watkins, the protagonist of the book, decides to spend the last 6 days solving a murder case that he is assigned to on the same day the news breaks. The rest of the story is a straightforward detective story, against a background of the world winding down.

The idea of end of the world is conveyed in such calm, matter-of-fact tone that it becomes serious rather than shocking. Very Englishly calm and understated. A slim little book but it really made an impression on me. So much of our lives hinges on there being a future, on survival – if not our own survival then at least that of our children, our friends, or at least of the human race. And even if the human race went extinct then we’d know that the trees and spiders and nettles around us would still be there. Even if we ourselves die, we leave some mark. But everything ending? What would that feel like?

It’s not just an idea book but also a well-written one. Tight prose, no unnecessary words (although not as terse as “The Road”), good flow and good dialogue.

For some reason the book hasn’t gotten much attention. Seems to be a small unknown publisher, maybe that’s the reason? I found a single review on Amazon (2 sentences!) and one on SF Site. In any case it deserves a wider readership.

Amazon UK, Amazon US

One day, the stars disappear. It turns out that a barrier has been set up between the Earth and the rest of the universe. Research later shows that the barrier is a time discontinuity: outside it, time passes millions of times faster. Satellites sent out through the barrier seem to return within seconds, yet have weeks’ worth of data with them. But somehow there are still 24-hour days with sunshine.

It doesn’t take people long to figure out that given the size of the time differential, the Sun will soon have changed so much that the Earth would be completely uninhabitable if the barrier disappeared. An entire generation of people grows up having never seen the stars, and knowing that they might well be the last generation ever. Some go on with their lives, but as time passes, more and more of them live out their desperation and hopelessness.

Three kids happen to be out stargazing when the barrier appears. The rest of the story revolves around the three of them as they grow up. One becomes a scientist, obsessed with understanding the Spin, as the barrier is called. Another gets sucked into the various apocalyptic sects that are born out of this event. The third one observes life from the outside, never quite getting involved himself.

The SF part of the book is impressively well thought-out: all the various implications and possible effects of a time barrier are explored, everything is consistent and makes sense. Even the final explanation (yes, there is one) actually makes sense. Lots of logical but innovative side ideas are presented almost off-hand. A lesser writer using one idea per book could have built his whole career on the ideas in this book.

At the same time this is not just an idea book (as SF books can sometimes be). The human angle is all there, too. The characters are well-rounded and believable, their relationships dynamic and interesting. Humankind’s feeling of being doomed and having no future is subtly all-pervasive.

And to top it all off, the story is well told. The pacing is good, the language is smooth, and the classical flashback structure is really skilfully used. I actually want to know how the characters can get from the flashback time to the present time, and the chapters taking place in present time gradually make more and more sense as the past catches up with the present.

The end result is an intelligent and enjoyable book. Really really good.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The book thief is Liesel, a young German girl who is sent to live with her foster parents during WW2. There are bombings and book burnings, a Jew hidden in a basement, and Jews in a concentration camp. There are also childhood games and stories and accordion music.

The story is narrated by Death. Death has a penchant for ominous flash-forwards, and for printing short fact-filled asides in bold type, and for comparing everything to colours.

As you can see, I found Death an annoying addition to the story (at least as a narrator – I admit that where he actively participated in the story, he was necessary for the story).

The rest of the story was interesting and moving, and often went off in an unexpected direction. There are believable characters, touching scenes, and lots of emotion. But I found the Death angle annoyingly contrived, and Zusak’s handling of the English language pretentious and clumsy.

A more detailed review that says what I would say if I had time.

Amazon UK, Amazon US

“The Dice Man” is the faux-autobiographic story of a psychiatrist who, bored with his ordinary routine life, decides one evening to let a die determine his next action. If the die shows a 6, he does one thing, otherwise something else.

He finds the experience exhilarating and liberating, and goes on to let the dice decide more and more of his life. At first the decisions are small, but later on he includes options such as leaving his family, killing someone, etc. As the psychiatrist he is, he also decides to spread this new idea as a therapeutic technique, as a way for everyone to learn that the self is malleable and not fixed, everyone can be anyone.

The premise is that we all have minority selves, impulses that push us in different directions, but we are taught and encouraged to extinguish and suppress most of them, to create a coherent self. This coherent self is only an illusion, and, what’s worse, an illusion that only causes struggle and boredom. Somehow Luke also links this to Zen ideas of letting go of the self.

The choices that Luke makes are driven by the dice, but they’re ultimately framed by the options he sets out before he throws the dice. And the options he comes up with tend to involve lots of sex and fair amounts of violence. Initially I got the impression that he was supposed to be your average self-absorbed sex-obsessed man, to show us how everyone has violence in them. But he seemed more like a psychopath, unaffected by the violent acts that the dice “tell” him to commit, feeling no empathy or remorse. While this leads to lots of explicit sex (which may get you ’cool points’ from the lads) it also leads to an aimless plot, and a rather simple, uncomplicated and thus uninteresting man.

And that’s my main gripe with the book. The basic idea is a great one, but the story that it develops into really doesn’t make much of it. The plot is weak and gradually unravels; the style becomes more and more uneven – which was probably an intentional choice, but that doesn’t make it any more successful. Basically the second half of the book didn’t add much, after I’d read the first half. And yet there are so many things one could do with this idea!

Nevertheless there was something strangely compelling about this book. I cannot get this idea of randomness-directed decisions out of my mind. Even though I really didn’t think it was a good book, I’d recommend you to read it anyway.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

The Name of the Wind topped the 2007 best book of the year: Readers’ Choice list at SF Site, and was, according to their description, “the hands-down, no-contest winner this year”. I had to give it a try.

This is, as usual (sigh) the first part in a trilogy. On page one we are introduced to Kote the innkeeper, and it is hinted (not particularly delicately) that there is more to this man than we can see. Then a visitor arrives and it turns out that Kote has achieved great things in the past, and the inn is just a sort of retirement or a way to hide from the world. The visitor (who is a chronicler) then convinces Kote/Kvothe to tell his life story. Kote does this over three days and three books.

Most of the book is Kvothe’s first-person view of his life. I always find that first-person tellings of stories spanning years and decades are hard to believe. I cannot help thinking that it’s impossible to remember events in such detail. Of course fantasy isn’t supposed to be entirely believable, but there is always a temporary illusion of believability.

Also, in a first-person story, secondary characters get too little attention. At the same time it gives the book great focus.

The skeleton of Kvothe’s story follows a traditional pattern: a young man is thrown out into the harsh world, where he struggles through hardships, with only his wit to keep him alive. The details, however, are original and interesting, and the inevitable romantic angle is refreshingly non-standard.

Kvothe himself is an annoying protagonist. He is the best at everything he attempts, without any obvious effort. A superhuman boy genius. He is of course good-looking and very intelligent. He is also a great singer and musician, good at fighting, poetry, business, and horse-riding. He has perfect memory, is creative, resourceful, hard-working, and charming. He is also a bit too full of himself and too aware of his own greatness. This excessive perfection is softened somewhat by the weaknesses of his youth (this first book only takes us through his teenage years). He is rash and brash, thoughtless, and too proud to ask for help.

He is also trained as an actor, which is an interesting idea, and lets him achieve all kinds of things (especially getting out of tricky situations).

Most of the time this slightly overbearing character manages to tell his story in a matter-of-fact tone that is very easy to read, brisk and lively. Some parts, however, suffer from an excess of foreboding. The framing story is especially bad at this. There is way too much hinting of dark things to come, “oh if only you knew what awful things will happen next…”.

But generally the book flows quite smoothly. Rothfuss writes good dialogue and good descriptions – I got very distinct pictures in my mind of the places Kvothe visits. Rothfuss has also come up with a very original and interesting system of magic: a consistent and almost scientific idea. It seems he hadn’t put as much thought into the society and the world itself: there are some jarring inconsistencies here and there. The world is supposed to be pre-industrial and pre-scientific and yet the people tend to act in surprisingly modern ways.

On the one hand, the book is long and somewhat meandering. There is a lot of story but not much plot; nothing is resolved by the end of the book. Too many words are spent on exposing Kvothe’s cleverness, and the book would have felt more intense if it had been pared down by a good quarter at least. But at the same time the book is easy to read and enjoyable – once I got past the slightly slow start, it sucked me right in. However “easy to read and enjoyable” is as high a mark as I can give this book. It is feel-good adventure fantasy with nothing very profound in it.

Even though I noticed the book’s shortcomings while I was reading it, and couldn’t help complaining about its somewhat cliche-y structure, I was never unsure whether I wanted to continue, and there is no doubt that I want to read the sequel. I am looking forward to finding out what made this man, seemingly destined for greatness, go into hiding and leave his greatness behind. And since the series is called The Kingkiller Chronicles I want to know, what king did he kill?

I also enjoyed these two reviews at Strange Horizons, as well as this review at Amazon.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

As is standard in the fantasy genre, The Blade Itself is the first part of a trilogy.

But the book deviates from the standard path on page 10, where we find out that one of the main characters we will be following is a crippled torturer. We also have a disillusioned barbarian warrior, an ex-slave bent on vengeance, a spoiled young nobleman, a waspish young woman, and other unappealing characters. This is quite refreshing when compared to the usual fare, but it was hard to care about these people. The ones with the harsh backgrounds at least had some backbone – the spoiled nobleman was just tedious. And after the first few chapters, once you get over the novelty value, the characters became surprisingly bland and predictable.

The world that these people inhabit is not a nice place, either. There is impending war, and corruption, slavery, vengeance and a justice system based on inquisition and torture. The whole book is quite macabre and dark – even brutal in places. There are no elves or unicorns, and not much of anything to cheer about. Fantasy noir.

Well, a story about despicable characters in a harsh world can be interesting, too, if they do interesting things. But in this book they didn’t do much at all. There were no major events, no turning points, no resolutions. The characters also don’t mesh, they don’t connect with each other in other than peripheral ways.

The book was mostly full of scene-setting and world-building: introducing the characters one by one, and getting them all to the places where they will, presumably, start doing more interesting things in the next book. I found this rather unsatisfactory. The result felt unfinished, like an overgrown prologue published as a book. Its only raison d’être is to make you buy the next book.

The writing is decent but somewhat uneven. Some parts are strikingly well imagined and told. The dialogue is generally snappy and has just the right amount of humour, and the characters’ thoughts are refreshingly realistic. And people actually go to the loo occasionally, and wizards – when interrupted in their bath – storm into the room and start throwing spells around while they’re stark naked. The weakest part of the writing is that each character tends to have a phrase that they like to repeat a lot, or a thought they keep coming back to all the time. Some of this repetition got quite annoying after a while.

On the plus side the book definitely stood out from the crowd. The characters are very distinct and realistic, and quite memorable. But that’s not enough. While this wasn’t a bad book. I definitely cannot agree with the glowing reviews. (Numerous reviewers have described The Blade Itself as the best debut of the year, or even the best fantasy book of the year. Must have been a poor year.)

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

When I was in Estonia last summer, I asked what the current “must read” book was. I was pointed towards Andres Kivirähk’s Rehepapp. Now I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, and I can understand why it has been talked about so much.

One of the notable points is that the book defies categorisation. Satirical fairy tale? Folk lore potpourri? In any case, it’s a day-by-day account of the doings in an Estonian village, a few hundred years ago, to a great extent built out of traditional Estonian fairy tale components.

Estonian fairy tales match Estonia’s lowly history. There are no knights or dragons or princesses. Instead there are plucky, cunning peasants who outwit those above them, especially the Devil, who in Estonian stories tends to be a rather stupid character. There are also quite a few animal stories, sort of like the Br’er Rabbit stories in the US, and again they’re often about smaller, weaker animals tricking bigger ones.

But in Rehepapp the attention is on the various demons and goblins of Estonian folk lore. They were perceived to be almost everywhere, and they varied in character from deadly to tameable. But like the Devil, even the deadly ones (like the plague, coming to kill the village) could be tricked if you knew how. And the man who knows how to do it is the rehepapp, the title character of the book, the wise man of the village.

Other creatures are easier to control. There are make-your-own goblins, built out of whatever leftover parts you have at home, who come alive when you buy a soul for them from the Devil (promising him your soul in return, but that’s a deal you can cheat on if, again, you know how). Once built, the goblin has to work for its owner and do anything it’s asked to do. In traditional tales they were often tasked with stealing, bringing its owner all kinds of riches.

And that’s what the people of this village spend most of their time doing. They build goblins who steal food and clothes for them. Some also go stealing directly. All of this is quite open and known; everybody knows that everybody else is also doing it and therefore it becomes accepted. They steal from each other, they steal in revenge when they believe someone has stolen from them, and they steal with particular glee from the lord of the manor. They spend more time stealing than working, so it’s a wonder that there’s anything left to steal after a while. And they steal without discernment, without understanding the value of what they steal: one man steals soap and eats himself sick; a girl steals the dress that the old lady in the manor has prepared for her funeral, and parades it around the village.

It’s a poor and miserable crowd, full of stupidity and greed and envy. And the really sad part is that everyone recognises this as a satirical picture of the Estonian people, past and present. Estonians have spent centuries as serfs, so centuries’ worth of jealousy and cynicism have accumulated in the soul of the nation. If someone has climbed higher than you, you don’t admire them – you try to pull them down. And Rehepapp is also a picture of the new Estonia of the 1990s, when wealth was worshipped, and more was always better, and everyone wanted to get rich without working.

It’s not a happy tale, but it is told with a lot of humour. A painful kind of humour, sort of like Vonnegut’s. And that’s what makes this book worth reading, above all. It is also well written, the language flows well and brings the people to life.

I guess most Estonians will have read the book already. If not, I’d recommend you to do it. I saw translations mentioned, too, but I’m not sure if I would recommend anyone to read one: it’s the kind of book where a translation can never be as good as the original, because the books assumes so much implicit knowledge. At best you get an exotic story.

Read more about it: an article in Estonian and an analysis in English.