***** FAVOURITE *****Shortlisted : Booker Prize 2004
Finalist : National Book Critics Circle Award 2004
First Tuesday Book Club
This book is Ice Cream Soup*.
A disturbing dystopia we are already creating.
This was shortlisted!!! for 2004 Booker ... I shall have to read the book that beat it (The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst) because it must be a mighty fine book!
This is something brilliantly different. You can’t skim read because it is so rich in thought, so rich in style. It is a book to be enjoyed for the author’s talent - for the the structure and the stories.
This book is extraordinary in that is a series of short stories that are interlinked by the major theme and by the interconnectedness of the characters. It spans time periods from the colonial Pacific in the 1850’s, composers in the 30’s in Belgium, shonky nuclear reactors in Reagan's California, the dystopian world of the conurbs and fabricants, to the disintegration of civilisation. All echoes down a corridor of time.
I have blathered on ... I shall have to edit this when it filters through my synapsis.
We go up the timeline with a short story of each, then back down the timeline finishing off their tale. Simply brilliant use of language, voice, pace.
Way tooooo hard to explain. You just had to be there! Awesome. Epic!
But not for everyone. So I don’t want to know if you don’t like it.
*Ice Cream Soup : As a child, my sister, Mary, used to make her bowl of ice cream last until we had eaten ours, just so she still had some left. What she really had was just Ice Cream Soup ... but she did get to draw it out and savour it for as long as possible, and just maybe we did envy that she still had some.
This is a book to savour ... and I wish I had some left!
