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Yvonne Vera's tale isn't a pretty one - accomplished novelist by 30, considered one of the most promising African writers, and dead from AIDS at 40. Once you know something like that about a writer, it's difficult to separate her from the books she wrote; it looks too symbolic, too depressing.

Much like Under the Tongue, in other words. Her third novel (and the first of hers I've read) is at the same time graceful and deeply unsettling, hard-hitting and willfully opaque. This is obviously intentional; after all, this tale of three generations of Zimbabwean women living around the time of the war for independence is centered around the idea that there are some things you cannot say, some things that are too horrible, too traumatizing or too taboo to speak out loud - yet will kill you from within if you don't express them; a history of accusations of witchcraft, of grief, of violence and rape. Let your women keep silence etc. How the very things you fight for can end up crushing you - or leading to you crushing others. It tries to understand, to connect, but optimistic it ain't.

Alternating between a first-person account by the young grand-daughter Zhizha and a third-person history of her family, the novel paints a picture where the reader has to fill in a lot him/herself - especially for Zhizha's chapters, which get very poetic and symbolic; too much so, IMO. While the imagery is sometimes very striking, it also frequently gets both too impenetrable and far too repetitive. The entire novel, but especially the first-person bits, has an almost nightmarish quality - and anyone who's ever tried their hand at dream interpretation know how frustrating it can be. "Oh, another reference to rivers flowing somewhere but roots tying you down?"

I'm sure there is a good, possibly great, novel to be found in here if you're willing to do the work. A story that's both compassionate and painful, furious and forgiving. If your tastes run towards the abstractly allegorical, you might like it a lot; personally, I find myself playing connect-the-dots a little too often to appreciate the whole picture.

Short is indeed the key word here; a 120-page novel in 12 short chapters, told from the POV of a woman in a small Czech village in the first half of the 20th century as the modern world starts closing in. Maryska (based on Hrabal's own mother) is the wife of Francin, who oversees daily operations at the local brewery, and her life is one joy after another; precious gifts from her loving (but reserved and very busy) husband every time he comes back from Prague, taking long bike rides with her long hair flowing behind her, lighting the old-fashioned lamps at the brewery after the generator closes down at night, helping out with the annual pig slaughter and sampling the results... and of course, helping take care of Francin's brother who came back from the war a little weird and won't leave.

There's a great deal of warmth mixed with almost slapstickish bizarre humour in this, with kooky but alive small-town characters and told in a beautifully descriptive, down-to-earth language. Hrabal is such a great stylist that you'd almost be forgiven for thinking it's a pure piece of comic nostalgia about how everything was better and simpler back in the good old days - the novel ends before Hrabal himself is actually born.

But then there's the knowledge that this was a piece of forbidden literature back in the 70s, and the longer we get into the novel, the more a creepy undertone starts appearing as things start getting... shorter. Skirts, hair, tails, lives. As humorous as the presentation is, everything that gets cut off or out makes life poorer, duller, darker. Considering the circumstances it was written under, the subtext is subtle but insidious: the more of the little unnecessary, fun bits of life you cut off, the less humorous it gets. And then the jokes, and the stories, stop and all that remains is authority and punishment.

And, of course, a whole lot of laughter in between. It is mostly a comedy, after all. Just a darker one than it seems at first.

Why bother (re-)telling a story?

If most of the volumes of the myths series so far have struggled to do anything but rehash the same tired Greco-Roman mythology, Chinese novelist Su Tong's (Raise The Red Lantern) contribution to the Canongate Myths series at least adds a different perspective. It's apparently based on the tale of Binu, the wife of a man conscripted to build the Chinese wall, who walked all the way across China to make sure he had something warm to wear when winter came, only to end up crying over his grave.

"Different" doesn't necessarily mean "good," though.

There's no denying that there's a story very much worth telling at the heart of this. Criterion #1 to re-telling an old myth to a modern audience must, of course, be that the myth still has some sort of value as a story, and Su Tong (who's a citizen of the People's Republic and lives in Beijing) certainly mines this one well. There's a great project to be built, ordered by the king whom almost nobody has seen in person and who only shows up in the story by dying, for which the people are expected to sacrifice everything and not complain; the worst crime one can commit (short of planning to assasinate the king or disobeying the local ruler) is to cry. Especially if you're a woman.

They had stolen her package, stolen her body, and finally they had stolen her grief, her tears, and her right to die.

Damnit, it's positively Orwell with a Confucian twist as Su Tong follows Binu across China, running into people from all walks (and rides, and leaps, and crawls) of life, leading up to a finale that I'm sure would make a cracking scene in a movie.

And yet. One would think criterion #2 for a successful re-hash of an old story would be to make not only the themes but also the characters come alive, so that the reader can identify with the story and not only understand but feel its relevance. Now, in fairness, it's possible that there's just a cultural gap at work here. Maybe the numerous side plots are in fact allusions to stories I've never read, and maybe Tong puts a clever spin on them and uses them to add another layer to what, to me, looks like a lifeless story, full of clumsy "magic realism" that never feels real, and populated by flat, one-dimensional characters. Our heroine never does anything but weep - bucketfulls, literally - and declare how much she needs to get to her husband, and none of the dozens of supporting characters she meets along the way serve any purpose but to provide video game-like obstacles and clues in a way that would make Paulo Coelho proud. And it goes on like this for far too long, veering back and forth the affairs of peasants and kings without ever really making any of them matter despite going into excruciating detail time and again.

I can see why Tong bothers re-telling the story of Binu. I'm not entirely sure if I should have bothered reading it, though. As an allegory, it works; but like Binu's husband, it ends up crushed under the weight of far too much stone serving no purpose but to keep people out.

Oʜ. Dʀᴀᴍᴀ.

There's a very good reason this is one of the most popular Discworld novels. And that reason is the A plot here. The B plot, as much as I love Zombie Windle Poons, doesn't always fit in well with it, and Pratchett's hatred of malls (a logical extension of the anti-commercialization themes of Moving Pictures) looks almost quaint today.

But then, again, there's the A plot. Which, on this reread, strikes me as the peak of Pratchett so far. Yes, there's a certain amount of melodrama, but... isn't that the entire point? One big refusal to just be cynical and do your job as if it didn't matter? That blind efficiency is Death itself? Each stalk matters. Yes, the arc that Death has had over the past couple of novels, and that Bill Door puts him through here, is absolutely stunning and his conclusion here is one of the most powerful moments in the entire series. But there's also the way it's balanced with all the other characters, the way the villagers quietly accept Bill Door, the meeting of wolf and man, the way the sharpest scythe in the universe isn't as useful as an ordinary sweat-soaked one with the right intention behind it.

Fᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ sᴀᴋᴇ ᴏғ ᴘʀɪsᴏɴᴇʀs ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ғʟɪɢʜᴛ ᴏғ ʙɪʀᴅs.

This was a highly scandalous novel when it first came out 150 years ago - so much so that Flaubert even had to answer in court for writing an "obscene" novel. If you look merely at content, that seems ridiculous today and should even have seemed ridiculous then; the sex scenes are so tame that it's hard to imagine anyone taking offense even in 19th-century France. But the scandalous - the bit that still puzzles slightly today, though many others have followed suit - isn't in what happens but in how it's presented. Madame Bovary looks like a morality tale; a woman cheats on her husband, loses his money, and pays the price of sin. I suppose it can still be read like that if one absolutely wants to, but the novel itself doesn't insist upon it. Flaubert doesn't pick sides, he doesn't editorialise (much), he merely narrates, and when the end comes Emma doesn't repent. There's no punishment in hell, no reward in heaven, just people messing up.

He made a post-mortem and found nothing.

In fact, I'd say that the only thing approaching a moral in this story comes in the epilogue, where the fool (well, everyone's a fool in this...) Homais gets the only happy ending, having done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

There's another way to read this: while it would indeed be difficult to argue that Madame Bovary is a feminist work, it's interesting to ask: just what is expected of Emma, anyway? Almost every single woman in the novel is stuck in one (or both) of two roles: as a loyal wife, or as a lowly servant. Again, let's remember the old woman getting a medal at the agricultural show:

Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her.

Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude.

That's an ideal to be rewarded, apparently. And while that's the extreme end of the scale - Emma is pretty privileged, after all, especially for a farmer's daughter - it's not really a world that lends itself to dreaming of something better. Flaubert makes quite a lot of little wry asides about the roles of both gender (like when he describes Rodolphe's treatment of Emma as a "consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex") and class, and all of it points to one thing: Emma is a hopeless romantic trapped in a realistic world, and has no clue how to get out of it. Her ideals are simply too lofty, too unrealistic for someone in her position - she doesn't fit in anywhere. She keeps chasing one thing after another - love, religion, material wealth, sex - and not one of them turns out to make her happy.

[Léon] was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.

They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.

Which ties into the complaint that a lot of people have with the novel: that it's hard to make yourself care about any of the characters. Basically, there's not really one single character here to root for; Charles is an incompetent but well-meaning fool, Emma is a reckless dreamer, Homais is a clueless know-it-all, etc. They're all excellently drawn, with just enough exaggeration to occasionally make for great satire, but they're far from likable. Which shouldn't be a prerequisite, of course, but... Now, I really love Flaubert's writing style, even if he occasionally gets bogged down in detail, and there are passages here that absolutely burn on the page (the coach ride, for instance - there's a reason that's a classic) and others which make me laugh out loud; ol' Gustave had a way with dry irony, and there's a lot of humour to be found in the ridiculous but all-too-normal situations everyone finds themselves in. But at the same time, when we know how it's going to end and we don't really sympathize with the characters enough to want to know exactly how they get there, it tends to drag a bit, especially in Part II. We're still conditioned to expect some sort of dramatic pay-off in fiction, and when it all just slowly falls apart with no great twists or turns we tend to call it "boring" rather than "realistic."

At the end, Charles blames fate for everything. It's described as "the only fine phrase he ever made", and then immediately undercut by Rodolphe who correctly observes that he is partly responsible, not fate. At best, Madame Bovary is a rather brilliant character drama which leaves it up to the reader to decide who was right or wrong. Nobody's a hero, nobody really manages to change anything, people just go about their business... and when they run into each other, they tend to stumble and fall. As another great writer put it - "You are right from your side, and I am right from mine."