Feb 11th 2010

guests Brian Lowen & Ro Bennett & welcome to Lynn & Lyndsay who say they are listening over in Holland. I will be reading a review sent to me by Lyndsay later in show. It is a romance book review which is quite apt bearing in mind it is valentines this weekend. BUT 14th Feb is also the start of the Chinese new year this year being the year of the Tiger . What animal are you guys?

Reviews this week are interesting:
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Cooking With Fernet Branca (how on earth do you pronounce that?) by James Hamilton-Paterson
At Risk by Stella Rimington (ex head of MI5)
The Old Man and Mr Smith by Peter Ustinov
And the one sent to me by Lyndsay Townsend: A Different Kind of Honesty by Jane Richardson.
You certainly find some unusual books to review Ro and Brian.

I loved the comment a reviewer made on Amazon about Fernet Branca: a taste, texture and appearance something like Duckhams 20-50 motor oil. Which I have to say I had never heard of before and in fact thought the book was just a cookery book!

A good tip for 'Water For Elephants': listen to it on audiobook. The two readers, David LeDoux and John Randolph Jones, do a wonderful job of bringing both Jacobs (young and old) to life.

James Hamilton - Cooking with Fernet Branca

Review by Ro Bennett on show 8th Feb 2010.
Gerald Samper, a ghost writer for celebrities is renovating a house in a remote part of Tuscany. The estate agent assured him that the neighbouring house was occupied by a very quiet person for only two weeks of the year.
Gerald is also a foodie who loves concocting and cooking unusual recipes.

I started off by feeling sorry for him – he was interrupted whilst painting a ceiling by his neighbour bringing an ice breaking bottle of Fernet Branca which they drink.

Fernet Branca is a digestif, a type of bitters like Campari or Angustura Bitters.
First developed in Milan 1845, the recipe has been kept a secret by the family but includes various roots and herbs like myrrh, camomile, aloe, saffron and cardomom. It is 40% proof and costs about £22 a bottle which is why I have never sampled it!

So, Gerald and Marta knock back this bottle and she invites him to dinner.
He doesn’t want to go but reluctantly accepts. To put her off asking him again he makes Fernet Branca and Garlic ice cream to take as the dessert.
The way Gerald describes Marta makes her sound dreadful. He’s a snob and scathing, referring to her as a stocky, frizzy haired frump and he obviously regards her as some sort of ignorant peasant.

However the next section is written from Marta’s point of view. Then the book fluctuates between various situations seen from their different viewpoints and this is extremely funny.

For instance Gerald’s ice cream, which he hopes this will deter Marta from asking him to dinner again, is made from 4 tablespoons of double cream and 150 grams of sugar (5 ounces) of sugar ,15 cloves of garlic, and quarter pint of Fernet Branca!

However Marta describes the ice cream as a bit bland with a sort of wild herbal flavour and told her sister that Gerald got so drunk he polished most of it off.

It turns out that far from being a peasant, Marta’s from a land owning family in Voynovia, part of the former Soviet Union.
The Estate Agent sold her her house after telling her the same spiel. The problem for her is that Gerald sings opera very loudly and very badly as he works and this disrupts her concentration. She is a composer of film music
and been asked to write the score for a film by a famous Italian film producer, so Gerald’s singing and behaviour prove very distracting. None the less, she tries to be neighbourly by taking the bottle of Fernet Branca and inviting him to dinner.


The book is dotted with recipes I initially thought were genuine if a bit distasteful because the ingredients and method are all carefully written out:
How to make the Fernet Branca and Garlic ice cream, Otter with lobster sauce, Rabbit in Cep Custard Lychees on Toast and so on. Then I read the ingredients for Alien Pie and twigged - I hope - the recipes are a wind up.

As the book developed I liked Gerald less, whilst I found myself sympathizing with Marta, as more of her personality and details of her family and situation are revealed.
I enjoyed the book very much and found it very funny - a real page turner with lots of unexpected twists and turns amongst the humour.

Mainly good reviews:
5 stars on account of laughing at points until I cried. The two narrators give wildly diverging versions of encounters which are always oiled by a bottle of Fernet Branca. Both protagonsts are supremely disparaging in a long suffering way of (amongst their counterpart’s many other perceived failings) the other’s inability to hold their drink.

Then there’s this one:
When my book club decided to tackle a ‘funny book’ as a respite from Gide, Sagan, Murakami and Morrison, I put this forward as a suggestion. Swayed by the glowing reviews on the back cover and the fact that it had been Booker Longlisted, we decided to give it a go. It turned out to be a ghastly pastiche of Tom Sharpe crossed with Peter Mayle blah blah blah.
Poorly written it left a taste as foul as that of Fernet Branca, which in case you’ve never tried it, is vile and usually administered to relieve stomach upsets. We all needed a large glass to recover from this noisome book. Don’t even think about reading it. If I could give it minus stars as a rating I would.

Well I obviously have very poor taste because I really loved it!
Review by Ro Bennett

Solomon Northup - 12 Years a Slave

This book was reviewed live on radio scilly bookshow 10th April 2014, by Ro Bennett.  This is her review:

Product Description

Northup’s only written work is his autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana (1853) Northup’s slave narrative, the tale of a free African American man who is kidnapped, sold into slavery, and lives as a slave for twelve years, was not only a best seller for its genre and time, it was revolutionary. Twelve Years a Slave is praised for its meticulous examination of slavery and plantation society, especially against the contrast to his previous life as a musician and citizen of New York. Northup’s story has also been cited as representative of slavery’s horrors and has been used to support the depictions in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Northup’s narrative is valuable for the accurate description of his experiences and defines many of the slave experiences that are known. 

I was ambivalent about reading this and am still not sure that I could watch the film, but I found it a gripping, well written account. Initially I had to get used to the rather formal language because it was written and published in 1853, however, that did not detract from the quality or content of the book and the style was more contemporary than many written in that era. 

Solomon Northup was born in Minerva, New York in July 1808, to a liberated slave and his wife. Northup is a free man and brilliant musician. In 1841 he has an encounter outside Washington DC with two men "Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton”. They drug and kidnap him and sell him into slavery. He is sold to the notorious Washington-based slave trader James H. Burch, who brutally whips him for protesting that he is a free man. From there he ends up deep in Louisiana where he spends the next 12 years of his life until rescued by a prominent citizen of his home state who knew him.

From the narrative, Solomon Northup comes across as an intelligent, cultured, caring man of integrity. In contrast, many of the slave owners were despicable, brutish, ignorant thugs. Not all - Northup describes some slave owners who were loved and respected. Of his first master, William Ford,  Northrup says, ‘In my opinion, there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford. 

The influences and associations that had always surrounded him blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of slavery. He never doubted the moral right of one man holding another in subjection’. 

Unfortunately after being in that household where he was treated well, due to his owner William Ford’s financial difficulties, Northup was sold on to a couple of vicious, vindictive masters whose cruelty is beyond belief.  First to John Tibeats  who Northup describes as a ‘small, crabbed, quick-tempered spiteful man’ and then to Edwin Epps who he refers to as "repulsive and coarse” and describes as being devoid of any redeeming qualities "and never enjoying the advantages of an education". Northup spent most of his captivity as a slave on the cotton plantation of this drunken, vicious oaf Edwin Epps who used the whip and abuse his slaves savagely and freely. 

Northup comments, ‘The effects of these exhibitions of brutality on the household of the slave holder, is apparent. Epps' oldest son is an intelligent lad of 10 or 12 years of age. It is pitiable, sometimes, to see him chastising, for instance, the venerable Uncle Abram. He will call the old man to account, and if in his childish judgement it is necessary, sentence him to a certain number of lashes, which he proceeds to inflict with much gravity and deliberation. Mounted on his pony, he often rides into the field with his whip, playing the overseer, greatly to his father’s delight.

This was a very interesting, thought provoking  insight into on the one hand, man’s inhumanity to man and on the other, man’s resilience and ability to survive and even find moments of pleasure despite horrendous living conditions and desperate circumstances. 

The story of Northup’s eventual rescue and release was full of suspense and it was such a relief when he was eventually reunited with his wife, children and family - although his mother had died whilst he was in captivity. 

The sad thing for Northup and the reader was the knowledge that the rest of the slaves had no such happy ending to look forward to. 

Subsequently, Northup became an advocate for abolitionism and in the 1860s began helping fugitive slaves via the Underground Railroad. It is believed that he died sometime between 1863 and 1875 but both the date and circumstances of his death are unknown. 

Northup's book only re-emerged in the 1960s after being rediscovered by two Louisiana historians. It’s an excellent read and a very valuable historical account. There is further information available on line.