Water for Elephants: A Novel (Paperback)

April 1, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: book review, Fiction, International bestseller, Prize winning novel 

Water for Elephants: A Novel

Sura Gruen’s novel is among my absolute favorites. It is a beautiful story, well researched, full of compassion, and deeply touching. It make me cry, it made me laugh, and it made me want to read more of this amazing, highly talented storyteller. Fascinating! Glued me to the chair! And, also, it has, of course, been an international bestseller acros a number of countries ofr a long time. Deservedly so!

Amazon.com Review
Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life (more…)

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The Faithful Wife, by Sigrid Undset

November 10, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: book review, Nobel Prize Winner, Norwegian writer, recommendation 

In The Faithful Wife, Sigrid Undset examines women’s relationship to professional life, to eroticism and childlessness. Nathalie is a modern woman of her time; she is liberated, The Faithful Wife, by Sigrid Undsethas a good education and a leading position. She has been married to Sigurd for sixteen years, but they have no children. Nevertheless, their marriage has been happy and safe, Nathalie thinks. But while she is faithful, she finds out that her husband is not. What is wrong? What can she do?

In her works, Sigrid Undset, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, combines knowledge of history with psychological analysis and a powerful style. With this ‘domestic epic’, a sweeping drama set against a carefully studied social background, she broke a new ground. Undset turned away from the sentimental style of national romanticism, towards neo-realism. She wrote novels about women’s conditions which at the time when they were published were considered provocative and explicit.

The Faithful Wife was Sigrid Undset’s last contemporary novel, and it also bears witness to the age in which it was written – an inter-war period marked by rising Nazism and discussions about the value of human life. Sigrid Unset once again proves herself as a perceptive interpreter of the conditions and life’s of women as well as of this particular time period. To me, it was to some extent an eye-opener, but about women’s conditions at th time and about this moment in history.

The Faithful Wife is a wonderful book by one of the most talented Norwegian authors, and a book that raises fundamental questions that still are important to women, concerning the understanding of the nature of relationships between the sexes.

To read more about Sigrid Undset, go to Leserglede’s Sigrid Undset page or to Wikipedia.

If you want to order at Amazon US you can use these links: Sigrid Undset’s The Faithful Wife or her famous Kristin Lavransdatter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Amazon UK customers, please use the following links: The Faithful Wife or Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy: “Bridal Wealth”, “Mistress of Husaby” and “The Cross”

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