" Bewitching...This is a rigorously plotted novel masquerading as a pciaresque romp and highly recommended. Scudamore has talent to burn." Sunday Telegraph.
The Amnesia Clinic is an extraordinary, powerful novel set in Quito, Ecuador. Anti, a quiet English boy, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant local classmate Fabian. Fabian is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his cool, eccentric Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents.
Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and , before long, the relationship between them becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling.
One subject is taboo: Fabian's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearnce begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabian's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss.
With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an "Amnesia Clinic" that may or may not exist...
I really enjoyed this novel, and found it exciting and suspenseful, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the reader learns from page 1 that a lead character will die before the story is through. The relationship between Fabian and Anti is touching, and unlikely, and Uncle Suarez is rather mysterious and enigmatic. The boys, both teenagers, seem younger than any teen boys I'm acquainted with, maybe because Anti has asthma, and Fabian is closeted by his uncle following his parent's death. In this way, they would perhaps not be as naive or innocent to find themselves in the circumstances that they do. A clever aspect of the story is that the reader never can be totally sure, what is fact or fiction as far as the boys narratives go.
The Amnesia Clinic is Scudamore's debut novel and won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award as well as being shorlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, The Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Glan Dimplex Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
" A polished debut ...turns the tables on both characters and reader as imagination segues into dangerous reality" Guardian.
Monday 19 November 2007
Just In Case - Meg Rosoff
"Extraordinary and original. Yhisdisturbing blackly comic, sophisticated meditation on death, madness and sexuality is powerful and haunting" Sunday Times book of the Week.
What would you do if you thought fate was out to get you?
If you're fifteen year old David Case, you might decide to change your name and the way you look. You might reinvent yourself as an athlete, try to outrun the terrible things that could happen at any second. You might leave home and find yourself caught up in a series of strange misadventures. You might even fall in love.
But is David Case really in control of his life? And if he isn't, who is?
Meg Rosoff's suprisingly funny and utterly compelling new novel is as daring as her first, the award winning How I Live Now.
One day, David Case's baby brother, Charlie looks out of their top floor window and thinks, "Why not fly?" David reaches him just in time to stop him plunging out, and is suddenly hit by panic. He begins to see all kinds of danger in the world, "Suddenly everywhere he looked he saw complete ctastrophe, bloodshed, the demise of the planet, the ruin of the human race...The weight of it wrapped itself around his ankles and dragged him under."
Believing himself to be doomed, David sets about reinventing himself, changes his name to Justin, (get it?) changes his friends, clothing and acquires a zanily dressed photographer girlfriend and an imaginary greyhound, Dog.
As this occurs, fate looks on mischeiviously, and Charlie with concern.
I really enjoyed this novel, although it is a little strange. I wondered if David /Justin was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), going to extreme measures to prevent catastrophe. I'm not sure if this was the author's intentiom, but Justin certainly exhibits many of the signs. Clearly he is depressed and sees the world as a hostile place.
Fate is personified and given a voice, but it was never clear to me whether the author was playing a game with the reader in the same way the fate is playing games with Justin.
Justin is helped by Peter and his enigmatic and wise young sister Dorothea, who seem to accept and sympathise with Justin's angst.
Peter tells Justin, "...try rethinking your proposition. Check your logic. Are you running because you're being chased? Is something chasing you in order to do you harm? Think of a dog. What if fate is chasing you because you're running?"
Justin has to come to terms with his mortality in order to survive, and his journey of discovery is thought provoking and moving.
"Intelligent, ironic and darkly funny." Time Out
What would you do if you thought fate was out to get you?
If you're fifteen year old David Case, you might decide to change your name and the way you look. You might reinvent yourself as an athlete, try to outrun the terrible things that could happen at any second. You might leave home and find yourself caught up in a series of strange misadventures. You might even fall in love.
But is David Case really in control of his life? And if he isn't, who is?
Meg Rosoff's suprisingly funny and utterly compelling new novel is as daring as her first, the award winning How I Live Now.
One day, David Case's baby brother, Charlie looks out of their top floor window and thinks, "Why not fly?" David reaches him just in time to stop him plunging out, and is suddenly hit by panic. He begins to see all kinds of danger in the world, "Suddenly everywhere he looked he saw complete ctastrophe, bloodshed, the demise of the planet, the ruin of the human race...The weight of it wrapped itself around his ankles and dragged him under."
Believing himself to be doomed, David sets about reinventing himself, changes his name to Justin, (get it?) changes his friends, clothing and acquires a zanily dressed photographer girlfriend and an imaginary greyhound, Dog.
As this occurs, fate looks on mischeiviously, and Charlie with concern.
I really enjoyed this novel, although it is a little strange. I wondered if David /Justin was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), going to extreme measures to prevent catastrophe. I'm not sure if this was the author's intentiom, but Justin certainly exhibits many of the signs. Clearly he is depressed and sees the world as a hostile place.
Fate is personified and given a voice, but it was never clear to me whether the author was playing a game with the reader in the same way the fate is playing games with Justin.
Justin is helped by Peter and his enigmatic and wise young sister Dorothea, who seem to accept and sympathise with Justin's angst.
Peter tells Justin, "...try rethinking your proposition. Check your logic. Are you running because you're being chased? Is something chasing you in order to do you harm? Think of a dog. What if fate is chasing you because you're running?"
Justin has to come to terms with his mortality in order to survive, and his journey of discovery is thought provoking and moving.
"Intelligent, ironic and darkly funny." Time Out
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