Introduction post and a soppy romance novel

In the past I have had some blogs, however they've never had any real direction to them... Either that or I eventually got embarrassed by what I'd written and deemed my posts unfit for the public eye. 

The thing is I like sharing my thoughts; I'm highly opinionated and I don't like to let people forget it easily. I also like sharing things I find interesting, in the albeit vain hope that everyone in the world has the same interests as me.

As I've found through living my highly opinionated and overly expressive lifestyle, not too many people appreciate hearing my thoughts all the time... But for those that do enjoy my ramblings I bring you this blog. It's here for the sake of being here, please feel no obligations to read it. It's available on line for whoever wants to read it, and for whoever wants to ignore it too...

So to start off my newest blog I'll first tell you that this is going to entail a random amalgamation of things I enjoy(ed), namely of the arts variety. The title "die kuns met Sofa" translates as "the arts with Sofa" (Afrikaans). And also "Kunst" (from the URL) is the German word for art.

So I've started the blog by including a couple of languages I don't actually speak... Yes it may seem like I'm being pretentious and annoying by using random words from other languages but I like to think of it as borrowing some flair/adding some culture, and hey, now you know a few words from the Afrikaans language and you can compare the similarity to Germanic language. Who knows, you may even want to broaden your understanding of African history by reading about why the two languages are so similar, should you not already know.

Now, before I start;

Disclaimer1: I might post sporadically, I might post rubbish, I might just post a link and hope you follow it. Sadly I have a busy lifestyle and probably won't post enough content for this blog to be terribly exciting or enjoyable, but hopefully it will be, at least in those times when you find yourself looking for a distraction from your own busy lifestyle.

Disclaimer2: Should anything come across as offensive or patronising please forgive me. It's never my intention for things to come across that way, but I'm not the best at expressing myself sometimes so please forgive me, and indeed inform me, if anything does come across that way.

So now that all the palaver is out of the way let's get to my first piece of kuns; Eleanor & Park.

Eleanor & Park is a sweet little novel written by Rainbow Powell. To start it's a soppy romance novel, but don't let that throw you off. Usually I'm not too keen on romance, if you know me you'll know that I'm far too 'armadillo'-ish to enjoy a good romance novel and write about it publicly afterwards. But obviously this book struck a chord, I guess I do have a heart after all...

I don't want to give too much away, I hate reading a book after reading a synopsis, it's a bit like watching the trailer for a film; sometimes they just give too much away... But it can't be a review without saying anything about the book so, to put it plainly, the novel follows two somewhat eccentric teenagers, who, surprise-surprise fall in love... I laughed, I may have shed a tear, and I absolutely loved the way it was written.

The characters are witty and unusual, and the book is from their perspective, meaning you have two narrators with their own distinct narrative styles. In using this perspective Powell manages to create an excellently strong emotional tie between her characters and her audience, and we all know empathy is the key to fictional romance.

The book is also realistic. It may seem trivial but it's a very good trait to fiction, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to pull it off. Hat's off to Powell as she does an excellent job of writing in not one, but two first person narratives of different sex, describing an emotionally difficult stage of their lives, and focusing mainly on the characters' emotions. As a side note to all you budding authors out there - even the best fantasy novels must have a strong element of realism in order to capture the audience's empathy and consequently their interest.

The last thing I wanted to say about this book is that for anyone to really enjoy a book there's got to be something personal about it that you enjoy. There's always something that draws you in and something that keeps you reading, and they're not always the same thing. Eleanor & Park has a number of elements that could work for you, simply the fact that it's a romance novel could be enough to keep you interested. For me though, the thing that I loved the most about this book was the way Powell uses music - the 'soundtrack' for the book is brilliant too! If you're a big fan of music you'll understand what I mean, it's like for Powell music is knowledge, culture, comfort & nostalgia all encompassed into one, which is pretty much completely how I feel about music myself...

But anyway, I won't say any more, I would hate to give anything away, you've got to read it yourselves.

I hope you enjoyed my first post. Á bientôt!