Book Review: Hand Me Down World

From Goodreads: This is a story about a woman.
And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute.
The old man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border.
The woman whose name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye.
This is the story of a mother searching for her child.

Thoughts: This book is part of my TBR Spring Clean Challenge. I've had this book for a couple of years but have put off reading it. The main reason for my reticence is my memory of reading Mr Pip, also by Lloyd Jones. While I enjoyed it, I remember a feeling of struggling with it. Once I re-read my review, it obvious the struggle came from thinking I was missing something. I might have to have another go at it.
As for Hand Me Down World - I needn't have worried. I tore through this book in just 3 days. I so desperately wanted to know what was going to happen. A woman sets out from Tunisia to find her child - the child whose father has taken and returned to Germany with. From her trip on a people smuggler boat to her trek from Sicily, through Italy, across the Swiss alps and finally to Berlin, Germany, her tale is told by the testimonies of those who helped her along the way. Once in Berlin, we get to read the longer testimonies of two who helped her there. This way of telling the tale give the reader only a glimpse of the woman who we finally come to know as Ines. All your impressions comes from third parties and as Ines is not very forth coming with details, you are left wondering about her thought processes and motivations. You know she is vulnerable, but she is also determined and, at times, incredibly frustrating! Finally, in the last third you get Ines point of view. Not surprisingly, her interpretation of events does not always correlate with what you have already been told and you are left to wonder who is telling the truth - or more to the point, which part of each testimony is true. In the end, I'm not sure I knew Ines any better for having read her story.
The use of testimonies to tell this story works. It sounds like it wouldn't and if I'd known about it before I 'd read the book I would have been very skeptical about it. However Lloyd pulls it off with brilliance. Everyone's voice sounds genuine. The spin they put on their part of the tale sounds plausible, as if the narrators truly believe every word they are saying. Ines' character stays consistent from one to another - she never lets her guard down. I truly enjoyed this book and will be looking for more of Jones' work.

Mr Pip

 

Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones

From Goodreads:

In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

I have a confession to make - I have never read Great Expectations. I know, it's terrible, but the truth is, I'm not very good at classics. I only read Wuthering Heights  after I read I Am the Messenger.I obviously need a catalyst of some type to read classics. So, after reading Mr Pip I have put Great Expectations on hold at the library. It must be popular, I'm number 3 on the list!

So onto Mr Pip. After all the whites are evacuated from, or leave the island village, Mr Watts is the only white left. He starts to teach the children, but the only book he has is Great Expectations. Matilda not only enjoys the story, she is transport to Pip's world. He is more real to her than her mother's devil, something that causes tension between Mr Watts and Matilda's mother.
I'm finding it really hard to express what I feel about this book. I enjoyed it, I think over the next few days, things about it will occur to me and give me that "ahhh" moment. The island they are talking about is near or part of Papua New Guinea  and I need to go and read some of their recent history to place the book properly for me. It was an easy read with much to think about. I really enjoyed the lack of over embellishment about events in the book. It was like it had been pared back to its bare bones, to give the reader a feeling for the starkness and reality of life in the village at that time. I felt for Matilda, torn between her mother and Mr Watts.
At one point in the story, the book is destroyed and Mr Watts and the children set about "retrieving" the story. Each day as they come to class, Mr Watts asks the children what they have remembered about the book and he notes each retrieval down in a book, noting who has retrieved it and where in the story it belongs. I love this idea, the idea that as long as we can remember a book and why it touched us, it will never be lost.