Frog Music, Artful and All My Puny Sorrows

I was very disappointed in Frog Music as the first third was very good. Set in the oppressive heat of San Francisco in 1876, Blanche is a dancer at The Hall of Mirrors. Coupled with a murder mystery, so far so good. But then the book, already a little sordid becomes quite distasteful. It only picks up towards the end as Blanche stumbles on the truth. This time the flash forwards and flashbacks are interminable and ruin the plot. I was glad when it was over. The author's Room was so much better.

Artful probably deserves top marks for it's intelligence, originality and downright creative genius. Unfortunately, it's written for final year degree literature students instead of plain old book lovers like me. I have always enjoyed everything written by Ali Smith, so I had to give this book a go. She says at the start "This book began life as four lectures .... at St Anne's College, Oxford". Did she change things for the novel to make it almost a work of fiction? Here we have a narrator, a bereaved (woman or man?) whose partner's essays and notes form the four chapters (lectures). That's when I got lost. They are packed with extracts from books, many of which I had never heard of, and poems that I had to skip. But I loved the bits when the (woman?) is speaking to us about her ex-partner. Here Smith is as delightful and witty as ever. Early on she writes "I could offer a figment of my imagination tea if I wanted". I would probably have added "to" at the end of that sentence. The fact that the author doesn't always impresses me. The book also has woven into it bits of popular culture. So although it is incomprehensible in terms of traditional narrative and plot, it remains a startling piece of writing. She/He quotes from J G Ballard's novel "Crash" where he says "We now live inside an enormous novel". And one that can take many shapes and sizes as Ali Smith proves here.

All My Puny Sorrows is not a bad book, but it did go wandering around too much. A family drama revolving around two sisters, their mother, aunt and children. Yoli is trying to save Elf, the sister she loves very much. Unfortunately there is quite a lot of repetition. It reminded me of an Anne Tyler novel, although if she had written this story it would have been a lot better and briefer. The cities of Winnipeg and Toronto are well drawn, and the dialogue crackles with wit and intelligence. Not quite the good novel it could have easily been.