Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson

If you've never heard of Martha Gellhorn, then you have something in common with me before I picked up this book. It now seems strange to me that I had no idea who she was, knowing what I now know about her life, her work & her spirit.

Beautiful Exile is worth a read just for the discovery of such a punchy, ambitious & headstrong woman, who found the term 'feminist' offensive. I would have to agree with the book jacket quote deeming her 'plucky'. Martha Gellhorn was compassionate & perpetually outraged, and you certainly wouldn't have wanted to mess with her. Rollyson explores Gellhorn's mother Edna's life in a brief but interesting first chapter, which I felt set the scene for her entry into the world perfectly. Born in St Louis in 1908, Gellhorn had a childhood set by her mother's example; Edna being one of St Louis' prominent community servers. It therefore comes as no surprise that one of Gellhorn's main concerns throughout her life was endeavoring to ease the suffering of others.

In her teenage years, Martha Gellhorn married the french novelist Colette's stepson (and also, ahem, her lover), Bertrand Jouvenel. In her twenties she had an affair with H.G. Wells, before meeting, living with and eventually marrying writer Ernest Hemingway (she was his third wife, and they stayed married for 4 years). Gellhorn dropped out of college to pursue a career in journalism. She traveled to Paris & joined the pacifist movement. She reported about the humane issues all across the USA during the Depression. She stayed with the Roosevelts in the White House & struck up a lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt before she was 20. She reported practically from the front line during the Spanish Civil War, and then reported on World War II from all over Europe. By the time things started to sour in her marriage to Hemingway, he used his fame & connections to 'beat' her and maneuver himself closer to the D-Day landings at Normandy. To best him, she impersonated a nurse and managed to get right into the thick of things - even more than he was.

If all that isn't enough, she went snorkeling in her 80s, lived in a tiny cottage on a Kenyan mountaintop, adopted a boy from an Italian orphanage, traveled to more than 200 countries, either charmed the pants off or annoyed the hell out of everyone she met, and lived to be 89. Apart from the lack of compelling, page-turning narrative you find in a novel, this biography has it all. It is thorough, sympathetic, dramatic and contextual. It really was a pleasure getting to know the talented, contrary and utterly human Martha Gellhorn.

The Name of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Once I really sunk my teeth into this book, I adored it.

At first it felt like another boring fantasy novel, with magic & ye olde taverns & ignorant townsfolk who gossip about demons. And granted, all those things are there. But what is also there is a great story; a fantastic adventure with heart, humour & tragedy.

Kvothe is introduced as a quiet, lonely nondescript innkeeper, but when Chronicler (the chronicler) shows up at his doorstep and begs for his story, Kvothe is unable to resist and begins to tell it. What we have in The Name of the Wind is a beginning. A huge, sprawling beginning that lets us know that Kvothe is a legendary character whose journey is one we really want to read. Raised by a travelling entertainment troupe, he was a whizz-kid trained in serious alchemy and sciences by the time he was twelve. All he can think about is studying at The University, where they have a collection of thousands and thousands of precious books. When tragedy slices into his life, he is left broken and directionless, and this first part of the story follows him through grieving and lute-playing; living rough on the streets of Tarbean, a big urban smokestain of a city; university enrolment and frisky schoolboy mischief; discovering love; dragons, bullies, music-halls and trouble. Everything, I have to say, is made more intense by Rothfuss’ habit of build-ups and over-telling. But I didn’t mind, after the first chapter or two I was hooked and drank it all up with interest and dedication.

This is Patrick Rothfuss’ first novel; and he obviously spent a long time figuring out its logistics. The only problem with it is that when you get to the end, so many things have been ‘set up’ or alluded to that you feel like you want to dive straight in to the next book in the series. Then you discover that it is, as yet, unpublished! Rothfuss is still tweaking it. I’m betting, however, it’ll be worth the wait.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Written as a long, rambling letter from a 76 year old pastor to his 7 year old son, Gilead is touching, subtle and sweet. It is sprinkled with gentle philosophy; as John Ames writes his son this sort of memoir-letter, he depicts tender family moments, the joy of parenthood, and the confusion and concrete beliefs of childhood.

As far as plot goes, there isn’t much. John Ames is old, and dying, we learn on the first page. His wife and son are much younger than him, and he writes so his son will have something to remember him by (other than the hundreds of dusty sermons that lie untouched since their delivery in his attic). Slowly paced, bit by bit, we learn about the town of Gilead, where they live. Ames tells of its history – how it is intermingled with his own family’s history – and its people; their minutiae and their skeletons. Ames is likeable and pitiable; a man that came to life too late, who wishes things had been different but knows that if they had, he wouldn’t have what he now has. He writes sometimes with the calm of a religious man, other times with the anger of one who knows his life will end and rages against his own mortality. The voice is distinct and the character well-shaped, for which I think Robinson deserves all the praise she got for this novel.

I enjoyed the rambling religious philosophising that occurred repeatedly, some of which was really very interesting and thought-provoking. However, overall I found Gilead lacking. Lacking in plot, in depth, in all-consuming fire. I like my books to eat me up from inside out, and I them, and this one was too gentle for my tastes. Perhaps it's just my atheism rearing its cynical head, but most of what Robinson wrote didn’t resonate with me. It’s a popular book that lots of people say touched them and moved them - but as for me, I closed the final page and just kind of …shrugged. Sweet, temperate and mild; not riveting, and not mind-blowing. A disappointment.

The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld

Mystery/crime genre novels are not usually my cup of tea, I have to say. But I was intrigued by this novel because of its premise involving Freud, Jung, and Hamlet. That is not to say that those three characters were stuck on a page together, making some sort of bizarre time-travelling story, though.

Set in New York City in the early 1900s, The Interpretation of Murder follows Freud on his first (and only, I think) visit to America. With Jung and some other psychoanalysts in tow, Freud sets out to give some lectures and discover the American people. This much is true; he did go there at this time and when he got back, bad-mouthed Americans as ‘brutes’ and blamed his own proceeding ailments on his visit there, a puzzle his biographers were never able to solve.

Jed Rubenfeld, however, has written a novel with his own (slightly fantastic) theory. It starts (dramatically) with a blood-curdling scream, and the discovery of a girl’s dead body in a glitzy New York hotel room. When, the following day, another young girl is found similarly brutally wounded in her bedroom and having no memory of the attack, Freud is called upon to analyse her, to see if he can bring up the repressed memories through analysis.


Rubenfeld has included some interesting psychoanalytic theory (including an analysis of Hamlet that’ll make me look at Shakespeare differently forevermore), and the historical setting of New York is well-evoked, too. Most of all I liked the plot – it is everything a mystery should be: suspenseful, peppered with humour and full of surprising twists that’ll keep your eyes glued to the page.

Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be going to the library and making a beeline for the mystery/crime section any time soon. But then, I’m not a huge fan of over-classification and the obsessive genre-fying of everything. I just like a good piece of writing, whatever its merits may be. So perhaps I should let this be a lesson in the timeless “book by its cover” adage. Or, “book by its genre”. Keep that one in mind.