Willy Vlautin- New Book Due and Movie

I'm a great Willy Vlautin fan. His three novels,  The Motel Life, Northline and Lean on Pete are all great books and worth reading if you haven't already done so. They are all rather tragic tales but Vlautin is a great story teller and his characters really draw the reader in.

   

His first novel The Motel Life has been made into a movie with Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff, Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristofferson and is due for release in the US on November 8th. A great cast and a great story so I have high hopes for the movie.  

Vlautin's new novel The Free is to be published in February by Harper books. The book description reads:
 "The life he knew before the bomb no longer existed. That Leroy Kervin was gone.

  

  Willy Vlautin's stunning fourth novel opens with Leroy, a young, wounded, Iraq veteran, waking     to a rare moment of clarity, his senses flooded with the beauty of remembering who he is but       the pain of realising it won't last. When his attempt to end his half-life fails, he is taken to the     local hospital where he is looked after by a nurse called Pauline, and visited by Freddie, the         night-watchman from his group home for disabled men.

  As the stories of these three wounded characters circle and cross each other, we come to learn     more of their lives. The father who caused her mother to abandon them both, and who Pauline     loves and loathes in equal measure, the daughters Freddie yearns to be re-united with and, in a   mysterious and frightening adventure story, the girlfriend Leroy dreams of protecting.

  Evoking a world which is still trying to come to terms with the legacy of a forgotten war,               populated by those who struggle to pay for basic health care, Vlautin also captures how it is the   small acts of kindness which can make a difference between life and death, between                   imprisonment and liberty. Haunting and essential, The Free is an unforgettable read."

Are you a Tayto fan? New flavours launched at Tayto Park this Saturday.

It’s Flavours Day this Saturday at Tayto Park

This Saturday, 5th October at Tayto Park, ‘Flavours Day’ will celebrate the launch of two new limited edition flavours, ‘Tayto Bacon Melt’ and ‘Tayto Spare Rib’. The limited edition flavours were chosen by nationwide vote and now join the choices from Tayto. 

At ‘Flavours Day’ this Saturday,  families will enjoy a day out and can enter a competition to be in with a chance to win €3,000 , an annual pass to Tayto Park, and a supply of their favourite Tayto crisps.

A shout out was made on Facebook, for people to volunteer to become a ‘Tayto Top Secret Taste Tester’, and over 6,000 people applied to take part. A group of 500 were chosen and sent out a Tayto Tester parcel. They chose Bacon Melt and Spare Rib. The new flavours are available for a limited period only. 

For information on Flavours Day at Tayto Park visit: http://www.taytocrisps.ie/park/events/flavours-day/

Review: Carnival by Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage's new novel Carnival is the excellently written story of a taxi driver, Fly, as he negotiates relationships with his friends, neighbours and passengers. They are generally representatives of the under-belly of society and Fly is the philosophical leveler when situations get dicey. Set during carnival time in an unspecified city the characters are fairground people, transvestites, criminals, alcoholics, prostitutes, drug addicts and 'spiders', those drivers who sit in their taxis waiting for fares.  
  

Born into a travelling circus, Fly is no ordinary character. Brought up by the bearded woman, he owns a flying carpet in an apartment which is filled floor to ceiling with books, categorised by his own unique system. Fly often gets drawn into sticky situations but always seems to deal with them in his own philosophical way He is an odd but admirable character and his trustworthy qualities are spotted by his passengers who strike up often more than just a driver/customer relationship with him.  

The stories of the various characters we meet are all woven around Fly's taxi journeys and returns to either his flat or the café where all the drivers eat. This premise is surprisingly effective and Hage deals sympathetically with this lower level of society whilst retaining an edge to his writing. I first encountered Hage whilst reading the IMPAC prize shortlisted books, which he consequently won with his first novel De Niro's Game. An instant fan, this is an equally rewarding read but with more depth and development of character plus a wide variety of reader emotion. Rawi Hage can definitely be considered an author to follow with great interest.

Carnival by Rawi Hage is published by Penguin Books www.penguin.co.uk

Review: Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing by Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is claimed by Orhan Pamak to be 'the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade.' Her most recent novel Honour, reviewed on this blog last April, was my introduction to her writing and I must say that I became an instant fan (http://dublinduchess.blogspot.ie/2013/04/honour-by-elif-shafak.html). Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing was first published in 2007 in Turkish and the English translation version was published in August. It makes compelling reading and is exactly what it says it is- a consideration of how motherhood affects the writer, not just Shafak but other women writers through literary history.
               

The resume reads:
     "Postpartum depression affects millions of new mothers every year, and - like most of its victims -         Elif Shafak never expected to be one of them. But after her first child in 2006, the internationally           bestselling Turkish author remembers how, 'for the first time in my adult life ... words wouldn't             speak to me'.

     As her despair finally eased, she sought to resuscitate her writing life by chronicling her own                experiences.

     In her intimate memoir, she reveals how she struggled to overcome her depression and how                    literature provided the salvation she so desperately needed."

Shafak's recognition that we are all made up of a combination of characters is illustrated by the conversations she has with her four finger-women; Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Little Miss Practical, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Dame Dervish. As she comes to terms with her womanhood and her maternal side two new finger-women whom she has kept in check, Mama Rice Pudding and Blue Belle Bovary, surface to challenge her in relation to her own self-identity. Her finger-women struggle in the art of coexistence and it is for Shafak to learn how to manage them.

Although a potentially 'heavy' subject, Shafak's book is not heavy reading, but rather compelling and thoughtful, drawing the reader in with the interesting research on relation to other women authors experiences and her own journey into marriage and motherhood.

Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing by Elif Shafak is published by Penguin www.penguin.co.uk