Synopsis from Amazon
Panina Manina, a trapeze artist, falls and breaks her neck. As the ringmaster bends over her, he notices an amulet of amber around her neck, the same trinket he had given his own lost child, who was swept away in a torrent some sixteen years earlier. This tale is narrated by Petter, a precocious child and fantasist, and perhaps Jostein Gaarder’s most intriguing character since Sophie. As an adult, Petter makes his living selling stories and ideas to professionals suffering from writer’s block. But as Petter sits spinning his tales, he finds himself in a trap of his own making.
I recieved this book through the post as part of a bookring and wasn’t too sure if I’d like it as I have started Sophie’s World on several occassions and never managed to finish it. However within a page of reading this I was hooked. Petter, is a child with an amazing imagination and intelligence, he is continuously imagining new stories, how wonderful it would be if there were more children like this around.
The book features the story of Petter’s life as well as a number of the stories that he invents, some of them the same story told with a different slant on it as he gets older.
One of my favourite reads of the year so far, I will have to dig out my other books by Gaarder and give them a go.
A novel with an identity crisis! The synopsis sold this as the next best thing since Marquez – has the person writng the synopsis read Marquez would be my question.
This novel is the story about the love between and young woman and a man, they cannot marry as she is the youngest daughter and therefore tied by tradition to looking after her mother till the day she dies. Her lover, Pedro is told he cannot marry her and is offered her older sister instead, he agees to marry this older sister as it means he will get to see the woman he is in love with everyday.
I’m okay with it up to there, their love stories continues with all the ordinary comlications you can imagine. Then the author decides to spice things up, she adds in a little Magic Realism (which I guess is where the link to Marquez comes in), it’s not great but passable. This novel is presented in monthly instalments rather then chapters, which is extremely deceptive and just random as it leads you to believe this may be the events of one year when in fact the story spans 20 odd years. Each monthly instalment comes with a recipe for a Mexican dish, now here is where I had problems. I can see why she would include descriptions of the prepartion that is gone into with the food, as it is a huge part of the characters life, but recipes! I instinctively skipped the first paragraph of each ‘monthly instalment’ as it simply was a list of food and the beginning of a recipe.
Not a book I’d recommend.
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