The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Single again: Bridget Jones returns Posted: 08 Oct 2013 08:07 AM PDT Author Helen Fielding has already dropped the bombshell news about the death of Mark Darcy, the devastatingly handsome love interest who helped the two previous books sell 15 million copies across 40 countries. Mad About The Boy is set five years after his death as Bridget launches herself back onto the dating scene as a single mum, negotiating the new-fangled technology of texts and Twitter and finding herself a boyfriend two decades younger. Her compulsive list-making remains, but these days diets are foiled by eating her children's leftovers, she is now late for school rather than work and the desire to drink and smoke tests her hopes of being 'the perfect mother'. And her fear from the first book of dying alone and being eaten by Alsatians is now replaced by a fear of dropping dead and being eaten by her starving, parentless children. One entry reads: "Thursday 19 April 2012. 175lb, alcohol units 4 (nice), calories 2822 (but better eating real food in club than bits of old cheese and fish fingers at home), possibility of having or desire to have sex ever again 0." Reviewers have complained that characteristics that were so endearing in a 30-something Bridget are a mismatch for the 51-year-old widow, the darkness of Darcy's death undermining the humour of the original books. But fans will likely relish the return of one of modern fiction's most iconic characters, and pre-orders on Amazon have already made the book a bestseller. "Clunking disappointment" Fielding created Bridget in the mid 1990s for a newspaper column about the life of a 30-something singleton searching for love in London. The first book, Bridget Jones' Diary in 1996, was a global success, spawning a whole new vocabulary - from smug marrieds to ****wits - a new, truncated style of writing and arguably kick-starting the entire "Chick Lit" genre. The second book, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, in 1999 was also a success and both were made into films starring Renee Zellweger as Bridget, Colin Firth as Darcy and Hugh Grant as Darcy's love rival Daniel Cleaver. There are some real laughs and some poignant moments in the new book, but the first reviews were not kind. "It isn't just the style that jars: the random capital letters, the subjectless sentences, the mannerisms that now seem awfully tired. It isn't just the rather hysterical tone," one critic wrote in the Sunday Times. "It's the fact that I hardly believed a word of it. I didn't believe that a 51-year-old woman would tot up the number of minutes she'd spent on Twitter, and spend meetings about her own film script sending saucy texts." Others have suggested that the reams of print that followed in the style of Bridget Jones, including most recently a spate of books about the comic trials of domestic life, have made it harder for the original to stand out. The review in the Daily Telegraph called it a "clunking disappointment", where "the tone is all wrong" and "every line feels full of effort". After the success of the books, Fielding moved to Los Angeles where she co-wrote the movie screenplays and met television executive Kevin Curran, with whom she had two children. The couple have since separated and now, a 55-year-old single mother living back in London, the author finds herself in a similar position to Bridget. She has always denied the books are autobiographical, but she told Vogue magazine that the new Bridget Jones reflects how "hard motherhood can feel sometimes". "Nobody's life is perfect and today, more than ever, I think women are under a huge pressure to be something, achieve something, look like something," she said. Mad About The Boy goes on sale in Britain and online on Thursday, before being rolled out across the world over the next six months. - AFP/Relaxnews, October 8, 2013. |
| Malala relives horror of Taliban shooting in autobiography Posted: 07 Oct 2013 08:11 PM PDT Co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban tells of the 16-year-old's terror as two gunmen boarded her schoolbus on October 9, 2012 and shot her in the head. "My friends say he fired three shots, one after another," she writes. "By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba's lap were full of blood." The book describes Malala's life under the Taliban's brutal rule in northwest Pakistan's Swat valley in the mid-2000s, hints at her ambition to enter Pakistani politics, and even describes her father's brief flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism as a youngster. Now living in Britain's second city Birmingham, where she was flown for specialist treatment after the shooting, it also tells of her homesickness and her struggle to adjust to life in England. A competitive schoolgirl who loves to be top of the class, the book reveals she is a fan of Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber and the Twilight series of vampire romance novels. Malala had become well-known in Pakistan as a young campaigner for girls' right to attend school after the Taliban took control of Swat in 2007, speaking out against the militants' ban on female education and their bombing of local schools. She describes how she received death threats in the months before the assassination. "At night I would wait until everyone was asleep," she writes. "Then I'd check every single door and window." She adds: "I don't know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me. It seemed to me that everyone knows they will die one day. "So I should do whatever I want to do." The book describes public floggings by the Taliban, their ban on television, dancing and music, and the family's decision to flee Swat along with nearly one million others in 2009 amid heavy fighting between the militants and Pakistani troops. Later it details her surgeons' frantic battle to save her life and her panic at waking up in a hospital thousands of miles from home. The book is full of praise for Malala's father Ziauddin Yousafzai, describing how he worked to set up his own school and risked his life by speaking out against the Taliban. She angrily rejects criticism that he pushed her too hard to campaign alongside him — "like a tennis dad trying to create a champion" — or has used her as a mouthpiece "as if I don't have my own mind". The book reveals that Malala's father briefly considered becoming a jihadist when he was a teenager and going to fight in neighbouring Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979. She also acknowledges that she, like her father, has been the target of considerable criticism at home, with many regarding her as a stooge of the West. Malala goes on to describe the family's homesickness and her views on life in England, including her horror when she first saw scantily-clad girls going out at night in Birmingham, and her amazement at seeing men and women socialising openly in coffee shops. She has struggled to make friends at her English school, she reveals, and still spends hours talking to her friends in Swat using Skype. However, she adds there is also much to like about life in England — "people follow the rules, they respect policemen and everything happens on time," she writes. "I see women having jobs we couldn't imagine in Swat." She frequently namechecks the late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto as a heroine, and makes clear her ambition to one day return to her homeland and become a politician — despite continued threats from the Taliban that they will attack her again if given the chance. "I was spared for a reason — to use my life for helping people," she writes. Malala is among the favourites for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, which will be awarded on Friday. - AFP, October 8, 2013. |
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