When one of the key protagonists of a book is a biracial American ethnobotonist who is surmounting the challenges of Aspergers, you know instantly thaWhen one of the key protagonists of a book is a biracial American ethnobotonist who is surmounting the challenges of Aspergers, you know instantly that you’re in the hands of an author who is unafraid of taking literary risks.
And so it is with Audrey Schulman’s inspired, imaginative, and downright haunting new book, Three Weeks in December. Told in alternating perspectives, the book chronicles a three week period in two lives that are separated by a millennium: Jeremy, a young engineer who is charged with overseeing the construction of a railroad in East Africa in 1899, and Max, the female ethnobotonist, who travels to Rwanda’s gorilla country searching for a potentially life-saving vine that can be used in the development of a pharmaceutical.
Both are self-defined misfits. Jeremy is “different” in a way that eventually becomes apparent; Max leverages the unique qualities of her Aspergers become an expert in plants. “Most people didn’t understand; they consider plants as static as a bureau or a shoe,” she thought. “When she looked at a tree, she saw not a stationary object, but a photo of a dancer in mid-motion, the gesture of its branches describing the battle for food or love.”
Gradually, the arcs of the two distinct stories come together. As in Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, both Jeremy and Max will need to surmount their inner challenges and their worst fears. For Jeremy, he must confront two killer lions who, starved and desperate, are mounting increasingly bold attacks on the camp. Max must confront equally desperate Kutus – a fictional group made up from the details of child soldiers, who are drug-addicted and ruthless in their need to survive. In each case, Jeremy and Max must glean how and why they are connected to the larger world they live in, where humans are not the only force on the planet.
Audrey Schulman, in her afterword, states that she has not only visited Africa but read over 70 books to write this novel. It shows. There is plenty to learn from this book: why coltan (the material that cell phones need in order to work) is becoming the downfall of the Congo…why mosquitoes, not lions, are the most feared…why so-called “progress” is gradually destroying the dwindling habitat of the gorillas who are unlikely to survive in the wild. “The gorillas aren’t meant to live this far up the mountains,” Max is told. “At this altitude, there are fewer of the plants they eat and the temps are colder. They’re at their limit.”
I read the last 100 pages on an adrenalin high, as the arcs were woven tighter and tighter and the themes began to take center stage. Audrey Schulman does an outstanding job in integrating high-wire suspense with self-discovery. Read this book. Savor it. ...more
Meet Eli Sisters, the narrator of this genre-bending, riveting, highly original work by Patrick DeWitt.
A John Wayne he's not. In fact, he’s anything bMeet Eli Sisters, the narrator of this genre-bending, riveting, highly original work by Patrick DeWitt.
A John Wayne he's not. In fact, he’s anything but. He and his brother Charlie comprise the infamous Sisters brothers, guns-for-hire who embark on a thrills-and-spills adventure to follow the commands of an enigmatic character called the Commodore, to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm.
The thing is, Eli Sisters has a moral complexity that his older brother lacks. He’s a tubby man who romanticizes the whores and cleaning women he runs into, in a sort of Don Quixote-ish way. He’s obsessed with his oral health after an unanticipated run-in with a would-be dentist educates him on the joys of the toothbrush. He loves his rundown one-eyed horse named Tub and goes to great lengths to make sure he doesn’t end up in the horse farm. And he’s determined that the killing of Kermit Warm will be his very last.
He muses, “It came over me all at once, then: I was not an efficient killer. I was not and had never been and would never be. Charlie had been able to make use of my temper was all; he had manipulated me, exploited my personality, just as a man prods a rooster before a cockfight.” Yet before a would-be murder, he observes, “My flesh and scalp started to ring and tingle and I became someone other than myself, or I became my second self, and this person was highly pleased to be stepping from the murk and into the living world where he might do just as he wished. I felt at once both lust and disgrace and wondered, Why do I relish this reversal to animal?”
As in any journey – and this one is a journey to redefine brotherhood and to define self – there are many adventures along the way. The Sisters Brothers encounter a hotel maven named Mayfield who treats them to a Dante’s inferno type of experience, and an entire gaggle of ne’er-do-wells and lusty women who play for our sympathy as well as our disgust.
Even though there are many comedic moments, The Brothers Sisters is not a comedy. For one thing, Patrick DeWitt never holds his characters up to ridicule; we end up really liking Eli Sisters for all his faults. In some ways, he rises to Every Man status – a man exploring an unpredictable terrain where danger lurks at every corner.
And while the novel pays homage to the Old West, the gold rush, and other legends of western America, it also stakes out its own territory. It’s gritty, inventive, distinctive, and unexpectedly moving. ...more
Where do I start with this magnificent debut book? That it was so mesmerizing that I read 200 pages at one clip, skipping dinner, not coming up for aiWhere do I start with this magnificent debut book? That it was so mesmerizing that I read 200 pages at one clip, skipping dinner, not coming up for air? That it was so brilliantly done that even now, I am mulling over some key scenes? That it combines very real characters with themes such as existentialism and myth-making and how we learn and why we learn?
Let’s start at the beginning. Will Silver is a charismatic and damaged English teacher who teaches at the International School of Paris, where his teaching methods run to the unorthodox. At a graduation party, he hooks up with a buxom and troubled student, Marie de Clery, who seduces him and tells her best friend Ariel, who is used to being idolized and is envious and jealous. Another member of the class is Galad Fisher, who idolizes Mr. Silver, and who is feeling impotent in his own life against his bullying father.
In a simple prose style, reminiscent of Camus’s L’Etranger, the key characters – Will, Marie, and Gilad – recite the events that unfold during that significant time. The book is a bain for those of us who love literature; Will Silver urges his students to confront their existential freedom and choices based on the readings they do from Camus, Sartre, Faulkner, Shakespeare and others. Needless to say, moral choices aren’t always as neatly acted upon in real life and Silver sets himself up for a big fall in the eyes of his students.
The give-and-take in the classroom is so realistic that it had me on the edge of my seat with crisp dialogue, intellectual discussions, and real-world dilemmas. I have not yet read a book that explores the experience of reading so well. Alexander Maksik writes, “Every text is understood by each of us differently. Wee cannot separate our experience from the way we read. Our experience informs our reading in the same way that it informs our lives, what we see on the street, how we interact with people and so on...” In other words, there is no single truth.
You Deserve Nothing is unafraid of tackling some of the most important questions in life: does God even exist? Without God, how do we own our choices and find meaning in our lives? Can we ever go back to safer times and what happens when we can’t connect? (As Will’s colleague says, “Cowards spend their lives alone. Either with people who can’t hurt them or with no one at all.”) What if everything we have isn’t enough?
A tribute to the most dynamic teachers, a tale about the bridge between desire and action, a cautionary reminder of what happens when idealism fails, this is a stunning book. It will haunt your days.
Michael Ondaatje is an incredible words-crafter; most literary readers can agree on that. But in the past, there has been a cool detachment to his worMichael Ondaatje is an incredible words-crafter; most literary readers can agree on that. But in the past, there has been a cool detachment to his work that has made me admire, but not love, his novels.
Not this time. I love The Cat’s Table – for its stunning word-images, for its submerged concepts, and for its ability to take a metaphorical journey and turn it into the most universal, but paradoxically, the most unique of themes.
It starts with a young boy -- with the same first name as the author – who boards the ocean liner Oronsay on his way from Ceylon to England to go to school in England. Like other authors before him – notably, J.M. Coetzee in Summertime, or perhaps John Irving in Last Night in Twisted River -- Michael Ondaatje launches off from a true event; he, indeed, did take this journey.
Aboard the ship, Michael is relegated to the Cat’s Table, the least privileged place…far from the Captain’s Table.” There he meets two other boys, the quiet and somewhat sickly Ramadhin and the exuberant and boisterous Cassius. “On the Oronsay,” he reflects, “there was the chance to escape all order. So I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world.”
The number three is usually significant – the Trinity, of course, and also the psychological id, ego, and superego. And considering that this is a metaphorical journey, I don’t believe it is a stretch to see the three boys as part of one greater whole, a whole named Mynah. Later, Ondaatje will write, “Mynah. Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land. Also it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range…” Never before or since is Michael referred to as Mynah; only on the three weeks in which he is journeying with his newfound friends.
A ship is typically a claustrophobic image, but in The Cat’s Table, it is an expansive one. They meet many solitary people at the table and indeed, throughout the ship at large. There is Miss Lasqueti, who appears to be an eccentric spinster with pigeons, and Mr. Mazappa, a musician with the ship’s orchestra. There is Hector de Silva, who is dying from rabies after a Buddhist monk lays a curse on him, Mr. Daniels with his plant, and a mysterious prisoner who is being transported to England. But most of all, there is Emily, Michael’s slightly older cousin, whom he is entranced by as only a young boy can be.
During this rite of passage, seemingly disconnected moments come together and people are revealed to be more than what they are. Mynah – or Michael – is indeed not always the most reliable narrator and, with wisps of Joseph Campell’s The Hero’s Journey, he must understand and integrate the Ramadhin and Cassius parts into his psyche, face down his memories, and become a more unified person.
This is an amazing book, a coming-of-age chronicle about boyhood and its loss, the illusions in our lives that persist, the veering of a “voyage whose clear map and sure destination would suggest nothing to fear or unravel”, which turns out to be something quite different. Bravo, Mr. Ondaatje! ...more
OMG, this book is incredibly great...an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters wlaking the edge in the post 9/11 OMG, this book is incredibly great...an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters wlaking the edge in the post 9/11 New York City. It's a book about true connections, missed connections, and downright parasitic connections. See my entire review at www.bookreview.mostlyfiction.com!...more
Closing the last page of Lamb – Bonnie Nadzam’s psychological thriller – I realized I had been holding my breath for the final half-hour. It’s that kiClosing the last page of Lamb – Bonnie Nadzam’s psychological thriller – I realized I had been holding my breath for the final half-hour. It’s that kind of book…similar to a one-act play where the narrative keeps getting racheted up and screwed tighter, and the audience can never, ever even conceive of an intermission.
David Lamb – an innocuous and gentle name if I’ve ever heard one – is a seductive, narcissistic, and damaged man on the sunny side of 50, who is experiencing a heck of an existential crisis. He turns his attention to a young barely adolescent girl named Tommie, “a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes”, who is awkward and socially inept. He advises her and questions her and “the girl answered all of his inquiries as if Tommie were some other person in whom they were both extraordinarily interested in.”
By weaving mind-pictures of a fantasy life in the Rockies, he manipulates her into taking a road trip to the Rockies with him. “And there was nothing wrong with that, was there? It was good for her. It was just a little tonic for his poisonous heart. Right?”
The book never crosses over to the physical dark side. David Lamb is not your traditional pedophile; he wants something far more dangerous from Tommie. He wants her to absolve him, to testify to his goodness, to give him back some of the innocence of his lost adolescence. He says to her, haven’t always had nice people in my life. It makes me behave a little erratically, right?”
In the Rockies, David (calling himself Gary) continues his manipulation and mental seduction of the young Tommie. Bonnie Nadzam wisely makes a plot choice of briefly interjecting David’s girlfriend, Linnie, into the scene. The reader can then contrast how the mental seduction plays out with an adult – and with a child. One of the very creepiest scenes in the entire book is one in which the three come together, Linnie and Tommie intertwined far more than either of them know. “I;m afraid everyone’s in on something really wonderful, Linnie,” David says to her. “…and I don’t know what it is and I can’t be in on it.”
Another bold choice Ms. Nadzam makes it to “get out of voice” – increasingly more as the novel progresses. Whose voice is it? The author’s? David’s? Or the grown-up Tommie’s? There is evidence that points to the last theory, especially when we briefly learn what grown-up Tommie thinks about her transformational experience.
Once the story takes hold, this book is unputdownable. Anyone who has ever had experience with a narcissist will immediately understand the self-centered, self-focused seduction techniques. “You’re my twin,” David says to Tommie. “Your heart is hewn to mine. Isn’t it. Don’t you see?” And that’s the scariest line of all.
Only those who fully venerate war can think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a glorified event. Indeed, most fictional books that are set in postOnly those who fully venerate war can think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a glorified event. Indeed, most fictional books that are set in post-Hiroshima reconstruction are filled with vivid, colorful and poignant descriptions.
So it comes as a surprise that Michael Knight’s The Typist is such a gentle book. It is devoid of precisely what one might expect in a book set in the wake of World War II: no brow-beating, no heart-wrenching, no intrusive authorial political statements.
At its heart, The Typist is a coming-of-age book. The protagonist, Pfc. Francis Vancleave (Van) has one claim to fame: he types an astounding 95 words a minute. That skill keeps him off the battlefield, where his days are filled with mind-numbing letters of dictation and paperwork. That is, until he comes to the attention of General MacArthur, nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny conscripts him to keep company with his young son, Arthur, an isolated boy, who enjoys staging figurine battles with his large assortment of toys.
Van is a man who is marginalized by life. As a married man – and we initially know little about his marriage – he does not enter into the “sport” of bedding the panpan girls who “smoked and teased and sent young boys over with indecent propositions.” Unlike his roommate, Clifford, he is a straight arrow, freshly minted from Alabama, more of an observer than a participant. He is able to lose himself in the games of his young charge (would Hannibel outfox Napolean?) and fits in beautifully in Arthur’s isolated world.
There is an authentic simplicity in Michael Knight’s sparse writing, a puissance that might elude a less gifted writer. As Van searches for his own legitimacy, Mr. Knight provides him with the luxury of reaching it at his own pace. This is slow, effortless, luxuriant prose, prose that casts a spell, prose that doesn’t waste a word and refuses to erect artificial roadblocks to the story. As far as comparisons, one work that comes instantly to mind is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. There is as much power in what is not stated as what is.
There is a subtle theme of football that runs through the book – and also in the magnificent story that precedes The Typist, called The Atom Bowl. MacArthur, in shocking disregard of sensibilities, holds a football game to rally spirit in what he dubs the Atom Bowl; “the players trotted out and suddenly the ball was in the air, the Giants kicking to the Bears in the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, in the occupied nation of Japan.” If there is any doubt of how Michael Knight expects us to read this scene, it is dispelled by the opening story. In it, a young boy interviews his “pawpaw” – the last surviving participant of the Atom Bowl. As his pawpaw relives these “gory days”, the boy asks him, “What about you? Did you ever feel guilty or anything?” The response: “For what?”
This small, quiet novel centering on a rootless man in search for something he only dimly understands packs a disproportionate wallop. By juxtaposing complex characters with an economy of language, Michael Knight has created a compelling meditation of a sliver of history. ...more
From the time I started reading, I discovered that books have magical powers: to enchant, captivate, transport, and in the best of cases, weave a spelFrom the time I started reading, I discovered that books have magical powers: to enchant, captivate, transport, and in the best of cases, weave a spell that makes me feel as if I just had a liberal dose of fairy dust.
The Night Circus doesn’t just captivate the reader’s imagination – it liberates it. From the first pages, the reader is required to make a pact with the author: to suspend all belief and enter her magical world. If one persists in holding on to vestiges of reality, it’s hard to truly immerse oneself. Like the one outsider in the book – Bailey – the reader is faced with a choice: surrender or go back to the everyday world. Fortunately, I chose to surrender.
And ah, what luscious rewards awaited me! Le Cirque des Reves (The Circus of Dreams) is unlike any circus one has ever experienced, randomly appearing in one city or continent and then – poof – disappearing. Quickly, we come to realize that the circus is not what it appears; rather, it is a playing field in which two illusionists, Celia and Marco, compete against each other and manipulate the circus to play out an unstated game. Only one can emerge the victor; there are hints that the loser will not survive. Yet, in an unforeseen complication, Celia and Marco tumble into a magical love where winning ultimately becomes losing.
Still the game must go on because these two hold the fates of everyone in their hands – and what a rich assortment of characters it is! There is Chandresh Leferve, the circus proprietor and host of exclusive midnight dinner parties, Widget and Poppet, fiery-haired twins with special powers born on the eve of the circus’s opening, Friedrick Thiessen, the talented clockmaker and chronicler, and many more. Each is bound with the others in a strange world that defies reality and sparks imagination.
Not only is Night Circus a riveting and exquisitely written “read”, it also explores the very nature of magic and imagination. One of the characters, the architect Mr. Barris, states, “I have seen a great many things that I might once have considered impossible, or unbelievable. I find I no longer have clearly defined parameters in that matter.” Much later, another character echoes, “Magic…this is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to top and note it. Not a one of them even has an inking of the things that are possible in this world, and what’s worse is that none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them.”
We have become a world, the author suggests, that is devoid of magic – the magic of possibility, the magic of transformation through love, the magic of believing that within each of us is the power to change our environment…and our futures. This is a poignant message that is right for our unsettled times. In Night Circus, the “victor is the one left standing after the other can no longer endure”. The author suggests that there may be a better way. This expanded message – and this magical world – is sublime and leads me to give this marvelous book my very highest recommendation. Six stars.
What is it about evil that is so very fascinating? Consider the icy psychopathic murderer Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, the conscience-challengedWhat is it about evil that is so very fascinating? Consider the icy psychopathic murderer Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, the conscience-challenged Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, or the Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor. Now add Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, two of the most chilling psychopaths in literary history. They’re the creation of Donald Ray Pollock in his newest book, The Devil All The Time.
This is a book that grabs you by the guts and doesn’t let go, taking you on an adrenalin ride that will keep you up way into the night. Talk about folks who “cling to their guns and religion.” This novel has them in spades! There’s Willard Russell, the tormented war veteran who builds a bloody alter, using sacrificial blood to try to save his dying wife. There’s the slimy preacher Roy and his crippled cousin Theodore, in a wheelchair after drinking strychnine to prove his love for Jesus. There are the aforementioned Carl and Sandy, who travel America’s highways seeking male “models” to photograph and kill in cold blood.
And in the midst of this? There’s Arvin Russell, Willard’s orphaned son, whose fate is about to intersect with the other characters in a most riveting way.
Donald Ray Pollock pulls his plot tighter and tighter, never letting go of the tension, in a never-ending nightmare of low-life crime, religious superstition and poverty. It’s about as raw as it gets – a train wreck that’s careening out of control, but readers can’t help but keep their eyes glued to the catastrophes that unfold.
Let me put it this way: I’m usually not a fan of this genre, but two literary friends told me, “You must read this.” I started with skepticism, but page by page, I was hooked in and for three days, everything else went by the wayside as I found myself drifting further and further into Pollock’s world. He’s the real deal – a true words craftsman who is unafraid to explore the depths to which we sink without a trace of self-consciousness. Clear the decks before you start reading this. It’s riveting and real. ...more
Over 12 years ago, John Burnham Schwartz introduced us to two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis – the inadvertent death of a young boy,Over 12 years ago, John Burnham Schwartz introduced us to two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis – the inadvertent death of a young boy, Josh Lerner, by a hit-and-run driver, a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno. The book was Reservation Road, a wrenching psychological study about how a single moment in time can shatter an orderly world into tiny little shards.
Now, in a poignantly written sequel, Mr. Schwartz revisits the two families – the Arnos and the Lerners – years later, at the cusp of yet another crisis. But this time, Dwight Arno has served his time, moved from Connecticut to Santa Barbara in an attempt to redefine his life until his estranged son, Sam, shows up. And this time, it is Sam who is in trouble and struggling to come to grips with his anger and his pain.
I’m glad to report that Northwest Corner is every bit as good as Reservation Road, if not better. It sings with love and pain and pathos and the beat of the human heart as it strives for connection. Told in multiple viewpoints from both male and female perspectives – including a first-person rendition by Dwight – this book is as powerful as it is moving.
In clear, detailed images, John Burnham Schwartz defines the emotional state of his characters in just a few taut sentences. Take Dwight’s musings, for example: “We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite: only our thin, permeable skin holds us intact. Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns.” Is that perfect or what?
Early on in the book, Dwight and Sam come together for the first time in many years, Dwight is working for an ambitious “family man” in a sports shop. Sam is on the run from college after an impulsive deed that threatens to uproot his life. He has been living with his mother, Ruth, who remains in Connecticut, at a crossroads in her own life. And the other family? The Lerners are fragmented, searching, still unable to break away from the emptiness and reach out to each other for healing. The unbearable pain has been replaced by a type of functionality in each of them. But the hole in the center of their lives remain.
The plot is woven slowly and deliberately, with just enough suspense to keep the reader turning pages but make no mistake: this is, at its core, a psychological novel and the “action” is mostly internal. The growth – the so-called “arc” – is an interior one, more than an external one. And therein lies the beauty of Northwest Corner.
Is there a shot at redemption? As Dwight Arno reflects, “Wait too long to speak up and you might just miss your shot. You may do your time, but you will never really get out.” Redemption, the author suggests, is difficult and elusive, but possible with enough effort.
And the title reinforces this fact. These families have traveled beyond the road where an accident cruelly transformed their lives (Reservation Road) to a wider territory with others (Northwest Territory). They may not have taken their places in the world quite yet, but they’re moving forward. In the end, this is a story of the emotional journeys that these families – and indeed, most of us -- must eventually take to reach a point of self-salvation and completion. It helps to read Reservation Road first, but this book stands proudly on its own.
The worst nightmare of most adult children is that their parents will die a lingering death, suffering a drawn-out and humiliating series of losses anThe worst nightmare of most adult children is that their parents will die a lingering death, suffering a drawn-out and humiliating series of losses and depleting all financial reserves. Yet somehow, we think, “It won’t happen to OUR family.”
Wrong! In Jane Gross’s important new book, she reveals that approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past the age of 85 will follow this course – and that number will only grow with improvements and prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease, and pulmonary disease.
Those of us who are baby boomers – used to being in control – must stand by and (as one of Jane’s bloggers stated), “watch our mothers un-live.” Yet we are stuck in a medical world where old age is considered a disease with a cure…when in reality, precisely the opposite is true. There ARE no heroics and there IS no cure for aging.
This one is PERSONAL for me. Like the author, I was thrust into an unanticipated role of moving my vibrant mother halfway across the country to a senior facility nearby. It upended my life, causing never-ending cycles of guilt, resentment, frustration, overriding terror and exhaustion – along with the days of feeling very blessed to have the chance to be a part of my mother’s world again. I trusted my intelligence and management skills and believed I was making all the right choices. I wish I had read this book two years ago! Among the insights that Jane Gross reveals:
*The Medicare fee-for-service system is broken. To get paid, doctors must recommend a billable procedure; recommendations on lifestyle changes, for example, translate to no payment. Small wonder that few doctors are opting for gerontology or even internal medicine. Small wonder, too, that one-third of Medicare-age patients have difficulty in finding a new physician!
*Researching the best specialist in the field isn’t always (or even usually) the answer. Sometimes, an operation can be performed and the elderly patient dies of the recovery. The question to really ask is, “Is the procedure worth it, given the waning number of years?”
*Public policy has yet to keep up with the needs of a populace, inevitably adult daughters, who put their own jobs and marriages at risk. In a study, most respondents wanted caregiver tax credits and respite services – an unlikely scenario given the state of the economy.
*There comes a time when the person you viewed as parent and protector begins receding into the past. “She never stopped caring about us, per se,” writes Jane Gross of her own mother, “only in our babble about a world she no longer lived in.”
I could go on and on about this amazing book. I read parts of it with tears streaming down my eyes because I’ve been there, done that – the late night trips to the emergency room, the confrontations with a mother who held me initially responsible for her diminishing independence, the vacation guilt, the being labeled an “hysterical daughter” when I demanded certain care levels, the scramble to find quality care and a caregiver we can trust.
I was luckier than most: my mother did save up for old age and we rather quickly found a senior facility that concentrated on living, not dying, in The Hallmark (Chicago). And I have a wonderful sister who is on the same page. But the fact that I’m interjecting myself into this review is the whole point: this is shared problem that demands shared answers. Bravo to Jane Gross for a well-researched, highly personal, crucially valuable and intelligent book. ...more
Enough About Love is a quintessentially French novel about the vagaries and capriciousness of love. Two women – Anna and Louise – both beautiful, bothEnough About Love is a quintessentially French novel about the vagaries and capriciousness of love. Two women – Anna and Louise – both beautiful, both married with children, both married to successful and trustworthy men, uproot their lives thorough unexpected yet passionate affairs with two unusual men. Anna, married to another respected physician, falls under the spell of Yves, a writer. In the meantime, Anna’s analyst, Thomas, has gotten into his own tryst with Louise, an attractive lawyer married to a much-renowned scientist named Romain.
With a structure borrowed from a game of Abkhazian dominoes – discussed briefly in one section of the book – the various characters (Anna and Louise, their husbands, and their lovers) find themselves interacting in all kinds of combinations. We see, for example, Louise with Thomas (her lover), followed by a chapter with Louise and Romain (her husband), followed by another chapter of Thomas and Romain…and so on.
There are a few chapters that stand out for their audacity and their elegance. In one of them, Yves (the author and lover of Anna) is conducting a public reading on the subject of “foreignness.” In the audience is Stan (the husband) who feels like the ultimate foreigner as he puzzles why his wife would be attracted to this man and castigates himself for letting the magic slip away. The juxtaposition of these two men is displayed in a two-column “split screen”, visually communicating the differences between them.
In another, Yves is signing copies of his book when a man who he presumes is Anna’s husband enters the bookstore. He lectures Yves on one of the author’s former books, stating, “…he also suspects she loves him because he embodies unpredictability, a sense of adventure she always longed for, but he exploits her dreams to draw her in. It’s a woman thing, like Emma Bovary meeting her Rodolphe.” He forces Yves to hold a mirror to himself.
In yet a third vignette, Yves presents Anna with a book he wrote about her – Forty Memories of Anna Stein – bursting with intimacy and immediacy. As readers, we become compliant in the affair, being titillated with the passionate details.
And so, love in all its interactions is explored – married love, adulterous love, rejected love, mundane love, love that endures, love that dies out. There are many, many pithy lines and startling revelations from an author who is obviously confident and even playful in his craft.
As someone who married late in life, with an understanding of the fragility of relationships and the false euphoria of “love” flirtations, the cavalier attitude of the characters was sometimes unsettling to me. It is a testament to the power and mastery of this work that I placed my own value system aside and read on, enchanted, with no doubt in my mind that this was an intelligently-crafted, beautifully rendered work. In the end, it is a delicious read.
Jean Thompson has been aptly labeled “an American Alice Munro”, and as a reader who has been mesmerized time and again by her captivating short-story Jean Thompson has been aptly labeled “an American Alice Munro”, and as a reader who has been mesmerized time and again by her captivating short-story collections, I wholeheartedly concur.
Now, in The Year We Left Home, Ms. Thompson leverages all her strengths and skills as a short-story writer and creates a sweeping and emotionally satisfying novel composed of interlocking, decade-spanning stories of a family in flux. As her grand theme, she takes on the universal quest for “home”, exploring all the manifestations of that search.
The novel is bookmarked by two wars – the Vietnam War and the Iraqi War. It begins in 1973 when the Erickson family of Grenada, Iowa, gathers to celebrate the continuing of tradition with the marriage of the eldest daughter, Anita. As some family members – the parents, Anita and her new husband Jeff – get ready to take their place in pre-defined roles, others are restlessly searching for a way out of Iowa – notably, her brother Ryan.
As this fiercely American novel takes this family down the road of its personal setbacks and triumphs, the country, too, is going through its own weaving road: from war to peace to war again, through economic booms to heartbreaking farm crises, from conventional values to sweeping changes. Ryan reflects, “The Great State of Alienation. It stretched from sea to shining sea. Everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out. His wife was right, they’d worked so hard and were so proud to be on the outside of everything they’d grown up with. But they were inside of nothing but themselves.”
As the family disperses, each must strive to get back to that central core, a place to feel at ease. Their cousin Chip, a war-damaged Vietnam vet whose mind has become uncentered, has, perhaps, the further distance to navigate; he must travel geographically and emotionally to reach the place that he has known as home.
But the others must also embark on their own personal journeys – confronting alcoholism, life-altering accidents, divorces, agoraphobia, professional setbacks, low-grade discount and changing standards to reach their own personal centers and to embrace their own realities. Ms. Thompson seems to imply that we all face our own forms of disconnect, but with recognition and a little effort, we will eventually arrive at “true home.”
Only one of the characters – the younger brother, Blake – chooses to stay home and follow what appears to be his predestined path. Although he is the most content of the siblings, he does not escape unscathed. There are days in which he, too, ponders where life has taken him and whether he should have been more of a risk-taker.
As a new generation follows their generation, Ryan again reflects, “They had done so much. They had meant to do so much more. Imagine them slipping off to death regretting the task unfinished, the field unplowed, the child unloved.”
Richly told, finely crafted, authentically explored, The Year We Left Home gives new insights into home, family, and indeed, the American experience. Those who enjoy books such as Elizabeth Stout’s Olive Kitteridge – quiet books that pack a big wallop – this is a must-read.
The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author - Arthur Phillips's ingenious faux-memoir - was to Google to see what was true and whThe very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author - Arthur Phillips's ingenious faux-memoir - was to Google to see what was true and what wasn't...only to find that much of Phillips's traceable past has been erased.
Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he's accomplished in this novel - er, memoir - is sheer genius.
Arthur Phillips - the character - is an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and points it out in various excerpts. Right from the start when he says, "I have never much liked Shakespeare," we feel a little off-center. The book is, after all about the ultimate Shakespeare scam: his neer-do-well father, at the end of his life, shares with Arthur a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur and entices him to use his Random House connections to get the play published.
To say his connection with his father is complicated is an understatement. Arthur Phillips, memoirist, reflects, "His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy - even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those." Now he wonders: did his father perform the ultimate con? If so, how did he pull it off? And how do the two Arthurs - Arthur the ancient king portrayed in the "lost" play and Arthur the memoirist - intertwine their fates?
It's a tricky project and Arthur Phillips - the novelist - is obviously having great fun with it. At one point, he urges readers to, "Go Google the van Meergeen Vermeers...Read James Frey's memoir now...We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn't Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it." But somehow, it does.
The play is reproduced in its entirety in the second part and indeed, it reads like Shakespeare (I read all of his major plays in grad school and have seen many of them performed). It's absolutely brazen that Arthur Phillips could have mimicked Shakespeare so successfully and with seeming authenticity.
So in the end, the theme comes down to identity. As Phillips the memoirist writes, "So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and security, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken fora pauper, believeing oneself an orphan."
And, as Phillips the novelist knows, it's also a trick for perspective. The play, the novel, the memoir, the scam can equally be said to be "about a man born in Stratford in 1565 - maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way -- or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or." Just as Shakespeare may or may not have written his plays - according to some anti-Bards - so might this new one be a fakery, written by Arthur's fictional father. There is layer steeped upon layer steeped upon layer in this book. It's audacious and it's brilliant. Arthur Phillips convincingly shows us just how easy it is to reinvent a play, a history, or ourselves with just a few sweeps of a pen....more
Before you even think of reading Erik Larson’s latest masterwork, clear your calendar, call in sick, send the kids to grandma’s, and place all your evBefore you even think of reading Erik Larson’s latest masterwork, clear your calendar, call in sick, send the kids to grandma’s, and place all your evening plans on hold. You will not want to come up for air until you’ve reached the last pages. It’s that good.
In his preface, Larson writes, “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain.”
The father was William E. Dodd, the mild-mannered and almost laughingly frugal history professor who became an unlikely choice as FDR’s pick for America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany. The daughter was his bon vivant 24-year-old daughter, Martha, a beautiful and irrepressible woman of great physical appetites, who went along for the adventure of a lifetime. Their story is nothing short of extraordinary.
To quote Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” Certainly, this is a story in which truth trumps fiction. Martha – a compatriot of literary legends Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder – quickly takes her place in German society. Larson writes, “As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages and nationalities.” One such pursuer was Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo, a scarred, confident and charismatic man with penetrating eyes.
The other – one of the great loves of her life – was Boris, a senior agent for the NKVD, the precursor of the Soviet Union’s KGB. Although he is nominally married, he falls passionately for Martha and indeed, the two consider marrying.
In the meanwhile, her ambassador father is experiencing the crushing disillusionment of recognizing that the Germany of his college years has been taken over by a group of mad men. As a lone voice in the wilderness, he tries to voice concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home, encourage Roosevelt to censor the growing evil, and fight the backstabbing of the wealthy “Pretty Good Club” of affluent ambassadors who race from one glittery party to another. And astoundingly, he tries –without success – to refocus the State Department’s priorities; their “main concern about Germany remained its huge debt to America’s creditors.”
Through the eyes of history, we – the readers – know the eventual outcome of the story, and it’s viscerally painful to see all the junctures where Hitler’s nefarious plans could have been stopped – but weren’t. Like his magnificent Devil in the White City, this book is tautly told, with lots of foreshadowing, building suspense at every corner.
Ending about the time of “The Night of the Long Knives” – Hitler’s purge and the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement – this is an unforgettable look at life inside Germany in 1933 and 1934, through the eyes of a naïve but well-meaning American father and daughter. It is a tour de force about “complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature." ...more
Those who have traveled in Southeast Asia – and Korea in particular -- will know right away that the number 4 (pinyin sì) is considered unlucky becausThose who have traveled in Southeast Asia – and Korea in particular -- will know right away that the number 4 (pinyin sì) is considered unlucky because it sounds like “death” (pinyin sǐ). Why, then, did Korean author Kyung-sook Shin carefully craft a novel from four different viewpoints?
The answer is that the members of this family are unlucky, or at the very least, careless. Through years as a family, none of them ever really knew Mom or understood the sources of her strength. And now she has disappeared in a crowded Seoul subway station, where she and her husband of 50 years were about to board a train. Her disappearance devastates those who are left behind.
The story is told from four alternating points of view: Chi-hon, the oldest daughter and a successful novelist, Hyung-chol, the oldest son who is wracked with guilt for not living up to his potential, her husband who inevitably disappointed Mom through his selfishness and adultery, and last of all, Mom. Little by little, a fuller image of Mom emerges, although we, the readers, never really get to know all the facets of Mom either.
Chi-hon reflects, “Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers…You realized you’d become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life.” As Chi-hon strives to sort out who her Mom really was, she realizes that, “…because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.” Mom had become superfluous in her busy life, a solid presence who was always a little bit of an enigma.
Hyung-chol was the favored son who was both idolized and pressured. In the end though, he could not live up to Mom’s aspirations and dreams for him. “Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.”
The two adult children – and their father – realize, too late, that Mom was an integral part of existence. Father thinks, “When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall. Anything she touched grew in bounty.” Still, he selfishly ignores her intense headaches and the heartbreaks that Mom is forced to undergo alone.
When we get to Mom’s story, we learn some of the background – her arranged marriage, for instance, and a few of the secrets she keeps. But it’s left to Chi-hon to recognize the truth in a letter from her younger sister, “Do you remember asking me a little while ago to tell you something I knew about Mom? All I knew was that Mom’s missing. It’s the same now. I especially don’t know where her strength came from. Think about it. Mom did things that one person couldn’t do by herself. I think that’s why she became emptier and emptier.”
Please Look After Mom is a novel that’s distinctly Korean –ancestral-rite tables, the Full Moon Harvest, plum juice and steamed skate – but is also very universal. Every view is explored – Chi-hon and Father’s stories are in second person, Hyung-chol’s is in third person and Mom’s is in first person. And, while the second person tense can become a little cumbersome, the writing is still direct, moving, and graceful.
It’s worth noting that Kyung-sook Shin is already a prominent novelist in Korea; the book sold nearly one and a half million copies in South Korea. Translated expertly by Chi-Young Kim, the book is certain to make readers appreciate the hardworking, uncomplaining women who go by the simple endearment “Mom.”
Stewart O’Nan may simply be genetically incapable of writing a bad book. His characters are written with precision, intelligence and detail; they’re sStewart O’Nan may simply be genetically incapable of writing a bad book. His characters are written with precision, intelligence and detail; they’re so luminously alive that a reader can accurately guess about what they’re eating for dinner or what brand toothpaste they use.
In Emily, Alone, Mr. O’Nan revisits Emily, the Maxell family matriarch from a prior book, Wish You Were Alone. Anyone who is seeking an action-based book or “a story arc” (as taught in college writing classes) will be sorely disappointed. But for those readers who are intrigued by a near-perfect portrait of a winningly flawed elderly woman who is still alive with anxieties, hopes, and frustrations, this is an unsparingly candid and beautifully rendered novel.
Emily Maxwell is part of a gentle but dying breed, a representative of a generation that is anchored to faith, friends and family. She mourns the civilities that are gradually going the way of the dinosaur – thank you notes, Mother’s Day remembrances, and the kindness of strangers. Her two adult children have turned out imperfect – a recovering alcoholic daughter and an eager-to-please son who often acquiesces to an uncaring daughter-in-law.
With her old cadre of friends dwindling and her children caught up in their own lives, Emily fills her days with two-for-one buffet breakfasts with her sister-in-law Arlene, classical music, and her daily routine with her obstreperous dog Rufus, who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent life with an aging, sometimes unruly, always goofy and loving animal.
Whether she’s caring for and about her Arlene, trying to keep up with family holiday traditions, keeping tabs on a house sale nearby, and trying to do the right thing in educating her children about executor’s duties, Emily struggles to find purpose. She recognizes that time is not on her side any longer and reflects, “The past was the past. Better to work on the present instead of wallowing, and yet the one comforting thought was also the most infuriating. Time, which had her on the rack, would just as effortlessly rescue her. This funk was temporary. Tomorrow she would be fine.”
The thing is, we all know Emily. She is our grandmother, our mother, our piano teacher, our neighbor. She is the woman who gets up each day and attends the breakfast buffet or participates in a church auction, or waits eagerly for the mail carrier or feels perplexed about preening teenagers who blast their stereo too loud. She is the one who wonders whether she should have tried a little harder with her kids, even though “she’d tried beyond the point where others might have reasonably given up.” She is the woman who senses that life is waning but still intends to hang on as long as possible and go for the gusto.
The fact that Stewart O’Nan can take an “invisible woman” – someone we nod to pleasantly and hope she won’t engage us in conversation too long – and explore her interior and exterior life is testimony to his skill. Mr. O’Nan writes about every woman…and shows that there are no ordinary lives, just extraordinary ones. ...more
There is a legend of the thorn bird; as it impales itself and dies, it rises above its own agony to outsing the lark and the nightingale and the wholeThere is a legend of the thorn bird; as it impales itself and dies, it rises above its own agony to outsing the lark and the nightingale and the whole world stills to listen. As humans face death – our own or our most beloved – the best writers have the ability to rise up and eloquently sing. I speak, of course, of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, of Francisco Goldman in Say Her Name, of David Vann in Legend of a Suicide. And now, Michelle Latiolais takes her place in that very top tier of talented writers.
Ms. Latiolais masterly interweaves stories of life after her husband Paul’s death with other tales: the complex eroticism experienced by a woman visiting a male strip club with her lover, the trials of traveling to Africa with an anthropologist husband who is researching the unusual eating habits of aboriginals, young children who entice an ancient aunt to craft shapes out of moistened bread crumbs. In a few sparse words, she is able to capture a deep and complex emotion.
Take the eponymous title story. Ms. Latiolais writes, “Sometimes wandering is not better; it’s the horror of having no place she is going, no place he needs her to be, wants her to be, no one wanting her the way he wanted her. Then she sleeps, long blacked-out hours, her head beneath pillows, the quilt, and when she wakes, her pink pearls, sinuous on the vanity, comfort her…”
Or her story Crazy, when it dawns on a wife that her husband – a drama professor – is unfaithful: “Benson knew an audience at his back when he had one, and he never touched her, never even leaned down to kiss her on the cheek—blameless—but this was how she, his wife in the window, knew. All theater people hugged and kissed all the time. They were crazy for it.”
Tales of loss and betrayal – true and fictionalized – are interspersed with sensuous tales and images, of pink porcelain saucers with earthenware lips folded in and fluted out, spawning erotic fantasies…of exotic meals of lamb stew with garlic and baby lima beans, ladled over buttered couscous…of fine fabrics…of longing.
And throughout, Ms. Latiolais reveals a love affair with words, the aural and etymological echoes , the mouth-sounds, the ravishing beauty. This is a writer who reflects on her wording (and whose characters do as well) and who also understands the limitations of words when strong emotions render them useless. The writing positively pulsates with pain and beauty, with heartbreak and reverence, with alienation and survival. In short, it is stunning writing, courageous writing; as Ms. Latiolais dances and weaves her way through her grief, it is only in the last story, Damned Spot, that we, her readers, learn the reality of Paul’s death. By then, we are invested enough so that our hearts shatter into little pieces.
Some of the pieces in this collection were written long before Paul died; others were written in response to his death. All provide compassionate insight and flinching detail and position Ms. Latiolais as a writer to be reckoned with.
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