The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

(In which I was once again baffled by an artist.)

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Usually, when people use a one-word description of artists, they would come up with something like weird, strange or eccentric. Interestingly, when one justifies his eccentricity and weirdness he would retaliate by saying he’s an artist, like what Ogie Alcasid did in his Manila Girl movie.

Nicolas des Innocents, however, has his own brand of ‘artistic’ qualities.

In Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn, Nicolas is introduced as a cocky, conceited, handsome and lascivious miniaturist who was commissioned to do a tapestry design for Jean Le Viste. In the course of the story he is able to impregnate two women (whose children he never took responsibility of) through his winning story about the purifying power of the unicorn’s horn. You can, of course, go ahead and use your imagination.

But as an artist, he is gifted. Though people do not want to tell him that. Why, he does that himself! Before one can give out a sigh of admiration for his work, he would blurt out his ideas about how perfect he thinks his work is; and then the admirers would think better than letting their tongue boost his already colossal ego. So what they will tell him are the faults, which of course he won’t take, what with the perfection of his work and skill. Until he met the tapestry weavers.

If there’s one thing quite gripping about the novel, it’s actually not how talented Nicolas is as an artist, or how significant women in the novel are portrayed symbolically in the five tapestries narrating the seduction of the unicorn. It’s the marvelous transformation of one art to another emphasized by how readers can peep through every character’s mind to see how paint connects to thread. What remains after closing the book is definitely not whether Nicolas succeeds in seducing Jean Le Viste’s beautiful daughter Claude or if the unicorn tapestries made Nicolas and/or the de la Chapelle weavers famous, but the beautiful end product of the timeless virtue of hard work in achieving one’s seul desir. One desire.

Currently reading

The Lost Diary of Don Juan by Douglas Carlton Abrams

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The Lady and the Unicorn

Don Juan

The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble

(In which I’m starting to really like British writing.)

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If there’s one thing similar among Alan Benett, Michel Faber and Elizabeth Noble apart from being British, it’s the uplifting humor in their writing. it comes when you least expect it, thus catching you off guard. But then the good storytelling grasps you again until you bump into another humorous remark. Before you know it, you’ve finished the novel, smiling and ruminating and shaking your head in disbelief.

The latest addition to my ever-growing pile is that of Elizabeth Noble’s – The Reading Group. I picked it up believing it would be a great help in my ambitious idea of starting a book club in the university I am currently teaching in, only to be baffled by how much I underestimated the novel’s capability. What seems to be a mere reading group turned out to be a complicated mix of women living complicated lives made colorful by the books they read. The team is made up of Harriet, a woman who believes that there must be more in life that her consistently loving husband; her best friend Nicole, who thinks there’s nothing more valuable than her consistently philandering husband; Polly, a woman torn between her love for her new boyfriend and her twenty-year-old pregnant daughter; Susan, a ridiculously happily married woman tormented by her mother’s disease; and Clare, a quiet yet clever woman who lives the unfortunately ironic life as an infertile midwife. The women, different as they are in age, belief and size, turn out to be the greatest allies each of them needs. Hesitation fills them at first. But just like The Avengers, they realize they are together in a reading group to serve a common purpose – to find solace in their tumultuous lives in the arms of people who understand.

Told in a lively, omniscient voice, The Reading Group takes readers into the labyrinth of women’s heart and mind. And in the end of the maze, if one doesn’t find a pot of gold, then at least there’s the enlightening trio of feminine strength, friendship and literature.



Currently reading

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chavalier




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The Reading Group
The Lady and the Unicorn

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

(In which I reevaluate my reading standards.)

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If there’s one word I could use to describe reading, it’s antidotal – something you take to go back to normal, to forget how terrible the situation is and to relieve you of anything poisonous like boredom. So I don’t usually read something that might threaten to disturb the comfortable surface of my reading life. The genres/subgenres that usually make it to my shelf or pile are art and historical fiction. Classics, modern, futuristic, action, mystery, sci-fi, thriller, chic lit and fantasy are generally off limits. YA I’m ok with, but only when it’s in art or historical fiction. So you’ll probably imagine how limited my reading experience is, and therefore how boring, I think so too.I was able to like mystery because of Arturo Perez-Reverte. Then I moved on to Javier Sierra’s religious fiction. So yes I read religious writings now. And reading is still antidotal. I consider my last read as one big, awesome leap for my development as a reader because it is a mix of the things I used to leer away from – futuristic, si-fi and YA. And I enjoyed it. My reading hiatus even added to the experience. I was so hungry I finished the series in less than a week. And by the way, I wasn’t a fan of series.

What made me pick up The Hunger Games wasn’t because of its record-breaking movie or the cheap price for the whole series (which was almost my reason because there was a 20% off!) but the fact that it’s high time I go out of my shell. I just have to read it.

And so I did. And what welcomed me is Panem, a dystopian setting where Katniss Everdeen takes over the role of being the breadwinner of her family and where an annual Hunger Games, a gladiatorial combat, is held. Only the fighters, a tandem of male and female citizens of each district of Panem, who were called tributes, were no prisoners of war or slaves vying for freedom, but twelve to eighteen-year-old kids fighting to the death for fortune and fame and for the sheer entertainment of the people in the Capitol, Panem’s main city. Katniss finds herself, along with neighbor Peeta Mellarck in The Games when she volunteers to take her twelve-year-old sister’s place. From here a remarkable story of victory and love unfolds. Then a rebellion, war, death and more deaths. At some point reading The Hunger Games isn’t much of a novelty. I’ve been reading stories set in the Second World War and other civil wars in which death is an underlying theme. It’s the intensity of the characters’ personality, the timelessness of its theme, the transformation of the people in the story that moved me. It reminds me that leaders and heroes come in all forms, ages and sizes. And that living and dying for a cause are equally heroic.At times I found myself staring at the page, sometimes laughing and ruminating at the lines. That’s how good it is. And because of that, I cannot agree more with Stephenie Meyer when she said:“. . . The book keeps me up for several nights in a row, because even after I was finished, I just lay in the bed wide awake thinking about it. . . The Hunger Games is amazing!”Currently reading

The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble






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The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Mockingjay
The Reading Group