Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis

One of the reviews of this book on Amazon sums up exactly what I thought, after having just finished it:

"Interesting, but did I actually LIKE it???,

Brett Easton Ellis doing what he does best: social commentary with a plot which twists and turns, and rants and raves, and gets bloody and gory and disgusting in parts... it definitely made me dizzy but did I like it? Still not sure. This one is more intellectually challenging than his previous novels and I couldn't put it down while I was reading it, but I doubt I'd ever want to read it again."

I've been a Bret Easton Ellis fan since I read American Psycho, which I thought was a brilliant book. Lunar Park, on the other hand, I found confusing. It started as a straight autobiographic narrative, which I found too self-referential and self-congratulatory. It gradually morphed into something that still seemed autobiographical but clearly wasn't. Where the book started veering off into supernatural territory I started to have doubts, but towards the end I think it started to all make sense, in a weird way. Like American Psycho, you are left at the end wondering how much of it actually happened and how much was the product of a tortured mind. Since Bret Easton Ellis is not that tortured, I think he has done a great job of writing from the perspective of drug-induced madness. The autobiographic start of the book leaves you with no clear dividing line between what you know to be true and what you wonder about.

Almost up to the last few pages I was convinced that I would give this book a poor review, but now I'm not so sure. One thing is certain, though; the reviewer (on the cover of my copy) who found the book 'funny' had clearly not read it. It is a tale of Generation X all grown up, and living in suburbia with money, children, and responsibilities, but none of the coping skills that are needed. The story is filtered through a haze of drugs and drink, which clouds the distinction between fact and fiction in a clever and seamless way.

Comfort food?

Today is the Belgian national day, 21 July - the day the first King of the Belgians took his oath of office in 1831. Despite working for an international institution, I also get the day off, which is always welcome. I had intended to go in to the centre of town and watch the festivities, which include a military parade. However, the weather was so bad that I couldn't face it - it was cold, wet and windy. More like October than July. So I stayed at home, and enjoyed one of my indoor passions - baking bread.

I baked a couple of loaves of sourdough rye bread - OK, I lied a bit, I started the process yesterday, before it became obvious that today would be so bad weatherwise. But since sourdough is such a slow process, I would have had time to go into town during the 'rising' periods. To make sourdough rye is fairly simple - first catch yourself a wild yeast, which you keep, by partially using and replenishing every week or two. To catch the wild yeast, leave a batter of flour and water in the open air for a day or so, until the wild yeasts in the atmosphere colonise it - it will start to bubble a bit. Keep this captive yeast/batter mix in the fridge until you need to use it - this is then your 'sourdough starter'.

When you want to bake the bread, take the starter out the day before, and replenish it with some flour and lukewarm water. Do this in the morning, and in the evening of the day before you intend to bake. On baking day, in the morning, take some of the (now expanded) sourdough and put it back in the fridge for next time. With the sourdough you intend to use (about a cup-full), mix the flour (rye and wheat in roughly even proportion), and a teaspoon of salt, and warm water to make a fairly wet dough. Mix it well - I use a handheld mixer with dough-hooks. Leave it to rise for a few hours - it will be a slow rise, as sourdough starter is far less potent that fresh or dried yeast (this would have been the time to go into the July 21 celebrations). When the dough has risen somewhat (a doubling is too much to hope for), re-knead it a bit, and form into loaves of whatever shape you want. Place these on wooden boards dusted with fine cornflour (to avoid sticking). After another few hours, depending on how fast they rise, turn on your oven to 250 C. I bake directly on a tile placed low in the oven, to similate a 'real' brick bread oven. When the oven it up to temperature, quickly slide one of the loaves onto the tile, and bake for about 20 or 25 minutes, until the crust is brown. Remove the loaf, and repeat with the next one, if there is one. And here is the result:

An unusual mancala game board

Yesterday I bought a Mancala game board in a small 'ethnic knickknacks' shop in Brussels. Most such boards on sale in Brussels come from Africa, and are designed for playing the common West African variety of the game called Awalé. The board I bought, however, is from Indonesia, where the game is played on a slightly different size of board.

In Indonesia the game is called Congkak or Dakon, and is usually played in boards with two rows of seven holes (2x7), plus 'store holes' at each end. The board I found, though, is rarer – it has two rows of only five holes, plus the store-holes. I have never before seen such a board on sale – in fact it is rare to see any boards other than the mass-produced 'two rows of six holes' Awalé boards; so much so that many westerners think that this is the only real form of Mancala. They could not be further from the truth – there are over 400 varieties of the game, spread from South America and the Caribbean across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as far as the Philippines and the Marianas Islands.

The rules of play for Congkak on a 2x5 board may be the same as in the larger versions (boards of 2 x 9, plus store holes, are also known), but the game may be shorter and quicker.

The game was sold along with a set of 40 pieces, which were Nickernuts, or seeds of the Caesalpinia bonduc shrub. These are the traditional playing piece in West Africa and the Caribbean, but not in Indonesia, so it seems that the shop added them to the board.

In Indonesia, and much of Asia, the game is played with small Cowrie shells:

In fact the holes in the board would be too small for Nickernuts, which are much bigger than Cowrie shells. In Congkak there are usually as many shells per hole at the start of the game as there are holes on each side of the board, i.e. 5 shells per hole, or 50 in total for the game. The fact that the shop gave me only 40 seeds showed that they didn't really understand what they were selling.

Upon request, the shop also gave me a simple photocopied sheet of 'rules' for the game I was buying, and this proved beyond doubt that they didn't have much understanding of the game, because the rules were for Awalé, and a board of 2x6 was specified. No harm was done though, because I already have rules for most of the known Mancala variants, including Congkak. The board joins my collection of Mancala boards, mostly home-made, which already includes all of the main sizes of boards – 2x6, 2x7, 2x12, 3x6, 4x7 and 4x8.

Redemption Falls, by Joseph O'Connor

I have just finished Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor (brother of Sinéad O'Connor, a frequently controversial, and frequently brilliant, Irish singer). The book is a historical novel following, in time, the events covered in his earlier novel Star of the Sea. Some see Redemption Falls as a sequel to Star of the Sea, but I don't agree - the characters are different, and there is no real connection between the two except that they both deal with Irish immigrants to mid-nineteenth century America.

If a measure of a book's worth is how much you want to get home from work in order to get back to it, then this book is worthy.

The novel centres around an Irish revolutionary, latterly Acting Governor of the Mountain Territory in 1860s America, called Con O'Keeffe. The novel comprises legal documents, ballads, poems, interviews, narratives and a host of other paraphernalia associated with O'Keeffe. Some reviews see this as too complicated, but for me it worked.

An excellent book - get it and read it.

Luzhanqi

This is a curious little game that goes under a variety of names: Tezhi Luzhanqi, LuZhanJunQi, Luzhanqi, or Chinese land army chess. It is claimed to be popular in China, and various sources describe having bought the game there. But it is entirely absent from the classic western source books on games (HJR Murray, RC Bell, DB Pritchard).

The game is one in which two armies of rectangular block pieces, each inscribed with the name of the rank of soldier or piece of equipment it represents, face each other on a board inscribed with lines of movement, some of which are railways. The picture below shows the two armies facing each other:

This one shows the red army from the perspective of its player:

And this one shows the black army from the perspective of its player:

I bought my set on the internet, from http://www.ancientchess.com/ in the US. It cost very little, and it came with a cardboard board and rules in English. The same rules can be downloaded directly from Ancient Chess. The pieces are small plastic blocks, with their ranks painted on one side only (the enemy remains ignorant of which piece is which, as the picture above shows).

The history of the game is obscure, and probably not very old. The soldiers and the equipment refer to a 20th century form of warfare, rather than the medieval form found in Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). Nonetheless, the game has been around for most of the 20th century, judging by the 1950s version from Taiwan shown here.

The object of the game is to capture your opponent's Flag. Fights are resolved based on the rank of different pieces. High ranking pieces such as the General or Lieutenant General defeat pieces of lesser rank such as Engineers or Captains. There are two special pieces; a mine which destroys anyone who attacks it (with the exception of a Engineer), and the grenade which can kill any unit but in the process destroys itself.

Number 9

No 9, Rue Aviateur Thieffry, in Etterbeek:

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

I've just finished reading If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, by Irvine Welsh. It’s a collection of short-ish stories, the last one being actually quite long (a 'novella', some reviewers call it).




The first few stories I thought were quite poor, to be honest. My opinion is shared by some of the reviews on amazon.co.uk: "The short stories are all rather flat and dry and without soul", "this just didn't hit the mark for me …", "this is his worst work yet- a waste of time …", and so on. Ouch!


The glowing reviews on the cover of the book: "Vigorous, stunningly funny, whimsical, warm, surreal, grotesque and brilliant" (The Guardian), seem a bit wide of the mark. A real example of why you should not judge a book by its cover!

A few of the stories are based in the US, but Welsh just isn't convincing as an American. He only becomes convincing when he returns to his roots in the last story, Kingdom of Fife. It is Welsh at his gruesome best – a fest of drink, drugs, sex and violence, narrated largely in the Scots dialect of the main character. Not for the faint-hearted.

By pure coincidence, an hour after finishing the book, I came upon an article in the property pages of the Irish Times – Irvine Welsh is selling his house in Dublin, in order to buy another one nearer to the airport.

"A house with a history always has cachet but for "Generation Xers" the ultimate trip is to lay claim to a house that was once a hero's home. Number 41 Grove Park, a quiet residential street just over Rathmines bridge, is the place novelist Irvine Welsh calls home and should spawn many dinner party conversations for house hunters.

The creator of Trainspotting lives in Dublin 6 but travels weekly to the US and UK, and the round trips are taking their toll. The writer wants a base closer to Dublin Airport than his present address."

"The writer's office is on the second floor with views of the Dublin mountains. It's a great space for creative thinking. "When I need to take a break from pounding at that intensity, I kick back my chair, which is on wheels and look out the window," he says".


The article notes that If You Liked School, You'll Love Work was written in this room.

Welsh has picked a bad time to move house, as the Irish housing market is crashing at present. However, since he intends to stay in Dublin, he'll be able to buy a new place cheaper too.