Literary Corner Cafe

Book Review - Mysteries - The Confession by Charles Todd

2012-01-26T02:14:00.000-05:00

The Confession is the first of the “Inspector Rutledge” mysteries written by the mother-son team Charles Todd, that I’ve read. I liked the book very much, and I’ll be reading more from this series in the future. The characters were well developed, the mystery was intricate yet believable, and the writing was very good.

Inspector Ian Rutledge, a veteran of the Great War, is Scotland Yard’s premiere inspector. During the course of a routine workday, a man Rutledge has never seen before walks into his office and confesses to the killing of his cousin five years previously. Of course Rutledge presses for details, but the mysterious man, who is dying of abdominal cancer, will only divulge his name and the name of the small village in Essex from which he hails.

Less than two weeks later, the confessed murderer is found floating in the Thames, a murder victim himself. When Rutledge learns the victim isn’t who he claimed to be, it raises a host of questions: What was the man’s real name? Is the man he confessed to murdering even dead? And if so, did the man in the Thames kill him as he said?

A gold locket, inscribed with the letter “E” is Rutledge’s only clue, and it leads the inspector to a small village on the river Hawking, where it seems everyone has something to hide.

I really enjoyed spending time with Inspector Ian Rutledge and putting the puzzle pieces together as he did. I certainly didn’t guess what was going on until near the book’s end, though the culprit was high on my list of suspects. I especially liked the addition of “Hamish,” the Scotsman Rutledge was forced to kill in the war, who now inhabits the inspector’s consciousness almost like a watchful friend. The reverberations of war – its senselessness and its atrocities – are everywhere in this book, and for me, they helped to humanize the characters.

The Todds write excellent prose, and its no-frills transparency is perfect for a convoluted mystery such as this one as it allows the reader to concentrate on character and plot. I did find some errors in printing, however. At least once the river Hawking is called the “Hawkins,” and several times an estate known as “River’s Edge” is called “River’s End.” My only other complaint centers around the number of trips Rutledge made from London to Essex and from Essex to London. At times I felt like I was reliving the horror of reading The Da Vinci Code.

All-in-all, I thought The Confession to be just about everything a good mystery should be. No, it’s not deathless prose or on par with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch, but I don’t think it aspires to be. It is, however, an entertaining way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.

4/5

Recommended: Yes. I think most mystery lovers will like this book. The mystery was quite well developed and the main character likable and real.

Book Review - Booker Winners - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2012-01-12T11:09:00.000-05:00

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker prize winning novella, is his fourteenth work of fiction, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s also one of his best. The book is narrated by, and centers around, Tony Webster, a man who is now in his mid-sixties and forced by circumstance to look back on his life forty or so years ago, and to remember people and events he thought he’d left far behind.

Tony’s an uncomplicated man, or so he likes to think, who only wanted an uncomplicated life. “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” To that end, Tony’s one and only friend is his ex-wife, Margaret, a woman with “clear edges,” with whom Tony remains on excellent terms. Indeed, Margaret seems to be the only person with whom Tony has any human contact, and Tony doesn’t seem bothered by that. Even post-divorce, Tony remains a man who chooses safety over risk. “I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep its value. I’ve made my will, and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled.”

Tony’s life becomes unsettled and rather more complicated than he’d like when he receives an unexpected bequest of £500 and a diary from the mother of an old school chum, and, one could say, Tony’s first love, Veronica Ford. Tony has no idea why Veronica’s mother, Sarah, would give him such a bequest. He only met her once, and he remembers her as “a carefree, rather dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any [guff] from her daughter.” So, Tony does what many people would do, he seeks out Veronica, after forty long years, in search of answers.

Veronica, you see has “stolen” the diary left to Tony, which belonged to yet another old chum of Tony’s, Adrian Finn, an idealistic, Camus-reading, young man who committed suicide at the very young age of twenty-two, years ago, and she’s refusing, with the exception of one enigmatic page, to give the diary to Tony. Adrian, Tony remembers, always did have romantic notions about suicide, even leaving a note that said that “life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it” and if a person decides to renounce that gift, “it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.”

Part One of The Sense of an Ending takes place forty years in the past, and we get to know the young Tony, and the young Adrian, as well as the young Veronica, the woman who was first the girlfriend of Tony, then the lover of Adrian. We also get a glimpse of Veronica’s mother, a woman who just might – or might not – have stolen Adrian away from her own daughter.

Tony’s reminiscences and remembrances of his early life seem pretty straightforward, and the reader has no reason to doubt what he reports. In school, Tony looked up to Adrian, though he did not emulate him. The two boys parted ways when Adrian went off to Cambridge and Tony went off to a far less distinguished university. Tony’s affair, such as it was, with Veronica came to a bad end, and Adrian, the gentleman, wrote to Tony and asked his permission to date Veronica himself. Then, for reasons unknown to Tony, Adrian committed suicide.

Part Two of this slim, little book concerns itself with the goings-on once Tony reconnects with Veronica, and these goings-on are far more complicated than Tony’s school days had been.

In Part Two, Veronica has grown into a spiteful, impatient, prickly woman, who hisses and bristles at Tony rather than talk. While this would make a lot of men run the other way, Tony says Veronica’s bad temper leaves him with the desire “to go back to the beginning and change things...make the blood flow backwards,” even knowing full well that it can’t be done.

“You just don’t get it,” hisses Veronica, over and over, and she shows Tony a letter he must have written long ago, though he doesn’t remember doing so, that might explain his one-time girlfriend’s seemingly misplaced hostility.

Bit-by-bit and piece-by-piece, Tony Webster reassembles his youthful past in search of the truth. In doing so, he forms a “chain of individual responsibilities” that seek to explain how his “peaceable” life resulted in “the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss.” Along the way to this reassemblage, however, Tony lets the reader know that there are times when he probably can’t be trusted. He’s not deliberately lying to himself or to the reader, but he’s learned to see things the way he wants to see them, not the way they really are, and memory, after all, is inherently unreliable. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.” And perhaps this “instinct for survival” is still the driving force in Tony Webster’s personality. “Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30,” Tony muses. “And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also — if this isn’t too grand a word — our tragedy.”

Reliable or unreliable, I found Tony Webster to be an engaging narrator. I liked him, and personally, I did trust him. I guess I just appreciated his candor. Throughout the book, I was on his side, even during those times when he seemed rather misguided. I heartily disliked the shrewish Veronica, and there were several times I just wanted to slap her (though I would never really slap) and tell her to “grow up” or something similar. If Tony didn’t “get it,” then part of the reason he didn’t was Veronica’s fault.

The Sense of an Ending is a beautifully crafted book filled with Barnes’ trademark wit and graceful writing. Some reviewers have called it a book “pervaded by the sense of death.” And yes, characters die in this novella. Adrian and Sarah, most notably, and Tony is very aware that youth is now behind him. But for me, The Sense of An Ending wasn’t so much about death as it was about the unreliability of memory, and the way we have of only remembering that which we want to remember, and perhaps “remembering to forget” the rest. It’s about the way people have of distorting their own past to become, more or less, the past they want it to be rather than the past it is.

But there’s no denying the book is chock-full of weighty subjects. One might think this would cause it to be morbid or depressing, though it isn’t at all. In fact, The Sense of an Ending is surprisingly light on its feet, though I’m not sure anyone should be surprised at that given that the author is Julian Barnes. In previous books, e.g., the novels Love, Etc. and Talking It Over, and the volume of short stories titled The Lemon Table, Barnes wrote about serious subjects, e.g., sexual jealousy and infidelity, age, time, and our eventually mortality, with a characteristically light, even jaunty, touch that made those books a joy to read.

I’ve already mentioned Barnes’ graceful writing and his trademark wit. His writing is also precise and economical. Barnes is a writer who doesn’t write one word more or one word less than he needs to write, and though graceful, his writing contains no frills. Here’s Tony after witnessing the Severn Bore surge wave:

I don't think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn't like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I'd witnessed either) — nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed and time with it. And to see this phenomenon after dark made it the more mysterious, the more other-worldly.

The Sense of an Ending may be a short book, but don’t let its brevity fool you. It’s dense and complex and filled with philosophical musings and reflections. If it’s “just a good story” you’re looking for, one heavy on plot, you won’t find that here. The plot of this book is, on its surface, a simple one, though the peeling back of layer-after-layer of Tony’s life adds a depth and a richness to this novel not ordinarily found in books three or four times its length.

I know some readers who had problems with this book’s ending. I wasn’t one. The two revelations were, at least in my estimation, natural, and they happened in the most natural of ways. I didn’t sense any contrivance about the book’s conclusion.

In summing up the events of the novel, Tony Webster says:

And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.

I felt I was in good company with Tony Webster, and I’m glad I didn’t miss the part of his life he chose to reveal to me.

5/5

Recommended: For mature (not necessarily "older") readers who like character driven books as opposed to plot driven stories. Not too much happens in this book in the way of plot, though the book’s protagonist, Tony Webster, sets about examining his entire life to date.

Writing Tips - People Are Interested In People

2012-01-07T05:12:00.001-05:00

Writer Roger Rosenblatt has said there are four reasons people write novels: (1) to make suffering endurable; (2) to make evil intelligible; (3) to make justice desirable; and (4) to make love possible.

I agree with Mr. Rosenblatt, but I think we could take that a step further and say simply that people write in order to understand people and the human condition. Ultimately, people are drawn to reading in order to learn about people, themselves and others. Any book, whether it’s realistic in its outlook, or whether it’s fantasy, science fiction, a mystery or thriller, a love story, etc. is going to be greatly enriched by the inclusion of characters the reader can care about and identify with.

Elizabeth George’s “Inspector Lynley” mysteries are the most popular mysteries around and have been for years now. Yes, George knows how to spin an intricate and convoluted plot that keeps the reader guessing until the last, or very nearly the last, page. But the best thing about the books is the fact that George invites the reader to inhabit Lynley’s world, to get to know him and his friends and co-workers. There was a huge outcry or protest when George “killed off” Lynley’s pregnant wife, Lady Helen Clyde, an outcry that must have pleased George in some ways because it was confirmation that her readers love and identify with her characters. Tommy Lynley experienced great emotional pain when his wife died, and the reader experienced it with him. And, just as Tommy Lynley wanted to know why such a thing would/could happen, and happen to Helen, who was a wonderful person and the victim of a random act of violence, the reader wanted to know as well. Random acts of violence are a part of Inspector Lynley’s world, but now they were hitting close to home, and, in George’s book, they were hitting close to home for the reader as well.

The above is just one example of many, and I believe if you look carefully at any book, whether it’s a lasting classic or simply popular at the moment, you’ll find the author has been able to establish a strong connection between his/her characters and the reader. The author has made us care. Are we engrossed in Captain Ahab’s search for Moby Dick? Most readers are even if they don’t care for the extensive sections on whaling. Do we care if Atticus Finch wins his case? We do. Do we care if Emma Woodhouse “sees the light” and realizes she’s in love with Mr. Knightley? We do. Do we care if there’s justice for Jean Valjean? Fervently. Does the viewer want to see Rocky Balboa win his fight/go the distance against Apollo Creed? Yes, the viewer certainly does. Sure, that’s a movie, but the principle’s the same. In fact, it's even more pronounced in mainstream movies, and the list just goes on and on. Books that endure, with a very few exceptions, are books that make us care about the central character or characters and their quest.

One of the most important things any writer or would be writer can remember is this: People are interested in people. They don’t have to be likable, (think Hannibal Lecter), but they do have to be interesting.

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-19T16:09:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays to all the readers of this book and writing blog. I hope you all have a wonderful and blessed holiday season. I'll see you in 2012 with new books and new blog posts and book reviews.

Book Review - Mysteries - Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

2011-12-09T15:32:00.000-05:00

Bury Your Dead, Louise Penny’s follow up to The Brutal Telling, takes place in and around Québec City during Carnival. This book is a little different in structure from most of Penny’s books since it revolves around three separate and distinct story threads.

As the book opens, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is recuperating from physical and emotional wounds at the home of Emile Comeau, his former boss and longtime mentor. While he’s in Québec, Gamache, with his lovable dog, Henri, decides to do a little historical research at the local Literary and Historical Society, the library that holds all of the books and papers that detail the history of Québec’s tiny – and dwindling – English speaking community. It’s this research, as well as the Society’s elderly librarian, that lead to Gamache’s unofficial involvement in the murder of an eccentric historian who spent most of his life searching for the burial site of Samuel de Champlain, Québec’s founder.

About the same time Gamache becomes involved in the murder surrounding the Literary and Historical Society, he begins to doubt that the resolution of his last “Three Pines” case, told in the book previous to this one, The Brutal Telling, is correct. In fact, thinks Gamache, there is a man sitting in prison, convicted of a crime he didn’t really commit. Jean Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s colleague, is also on leave and recovering from injuries sustained in the same tragic incident in which Gamache, himself, was injured. The Inspector sends a reluctant Jean Guy to Three Pines to try to ferret out anything the team might have missed earlier.

The third story strand is the retelling of the tragic events that led to the injuries sustained by Inspector Gamache and Jean Guy Beauvoir. This story strand is told mainly through Gamache’s remembered conversation with another of his colleagues. It’s one of the saddest stories ever associated with Inspector Gamache, and though the reader doesn’t learn the details until late in the book, he or she, with mounting horror, can pretty much guess what they are, even while hoping against hope that his or her suspicions prove to be entirely wrong.

Though I love Three Pines, the little village where most of the “Inspector Gamache” mysteries are set, I also loved the fact that this book, for the most part, was set in Old Québec City. I almost felt like I was following Gamache around the city and seeing the sights through his eyes, and it was very enjoyable and made me want to visit Old Québec sometime very soon. (I've visited several times, but it’s been years.) I also enjoyed the history provided by Penny, much of it unknown to me prior to reading this book. Some readers felt Penny included too much of the history of Québec; I thought she included just the right amount. I didn’t know the animosity between the English and the Francophones ran so high (still), so that was an eye-opener for me, among other things.

I do agree with reviewers who found the pace of the novel leisurely and rather slow moving, though this leisurely pace didn’t bother me at all. At any rate, I don’t usually enjoy novels with a fast, breakneck pace. I like my mysteries to be slow-simmered and fully developed, and this one filled that bill nicely. I do think the braided plot served to slow the pace down quite a bit, though Penny does a wonderful job moving from one story strand to another and making Gamache’s flashbacks real to the reader. I felt very emotionally involved in the book, from the very first page.

Penny’s characters – most of them recurring – are, to my way of thinking, at least, fully developed, whether we like them or not. Personally, I like Armand Gamache, and I’m glad Penny chooses to fill us in on his life outside of work and doesn’t write him as a “static” character the way Agatha Christie wrote Hercule Poirot. I enjoy all the denizens of Three Pines and all the people associated with the Sûreté du Québec. I enjoy spending time with them and getting to know them better.

Thankfully, Penny’s “good guys” are always a bit tarnished, and her “bad guys” have good qualities as well, though it’s very difficult-to-impossible for me to “like” a person – even a character in a book – who cold-bloodedly kills another. Still, even though I don’t necessarily like Penny’s killers, I do understand their motivations, thanks to their creator.

Penny’s prose is vintage Louise Penny. Yes, she still uses the maddening phrases that I find so jarring and jolting. I have no idea why she writes in this fashion unless it’s for emphasis. I think her books would be better served by foregoing the awkward phrasing and writing elegant sentences instead, but that’s not my call to make. Even though the phrases, more often than not, make me want to hurl the book across the room and slam it into the far wall, I find the plots interesting enough (so far) to keep on reading. The awkward phrasing didn’t seem quite as awkward or egregious in this book as it was in this book’s predecessor, The Brutal Telling, but make no mistake, it was still there.

This story takes place in the midst of winter, and Penny uses the cold, snowy weather very effectively in the story. I can’t imagine it taking place in summer, though of course it could have taken place at any time of the year, and both Three Pines and Québec are charming in both winter and summer. A quote from the book might help to show how important winter is in this novel:

And, when the winter sun set on a Québec forest, monsters crawled out of the shadows. Not the B-grade movie monsters, not zombies or mummies or space aliens. But older, subtler wraiths. Invisible creatures that rode in on plunging temperatures. Death by freezing, death by exposure, death by gong even a foot off the path, and getting lost. Death, ancient and patient, waited in Québec forests for the sun to set.

Bury Your Dead is the story of people who can’t, or who have great difficulty, in letting go of the past. Indeed, the entire province of Québec shares the characters’ obsession with holding onto the past – for good or for ill – in its quest to find the burial place of Samuel de Champlain. I loved this theme, and I thought Penny did a marvelous job of exploiting it. Many of her characters are haunted by their past, many have trouble forgiving themselves for things they couldn’t help, many are deeply flawed, and all are deeply human. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, especially, is a man who is forever changed by a random act of violence he mistakenly believes he should have been able to prevent.

While I very much enjoyed reading this “Inspector Gamache” mystery, for me, it wasn’t the strongest book in the series, though there’s no denying it packed an emotional punch. If you’re new to the series, I don’t think this book, or even the book immediately preceding this one, The Brutal Telling, is the best place to begin. I would begin with “Book One” and read through in order, though all the books were designed to be “standalone” mysteries. The characters, however, grow and change and develop, and this is best experienced by reading the books from “Book One” to “Book Seven” in chronological order.

I’ve read, in the past, that Penny was only planning four “Inspector Gamache” mysteries, however, to date, she’s written seven. Personally, I don’t know if there will be any more or not. I hope so.

Books in the “Inspector Gamache” series of mysteries, in chronological order are:

Still Life
A Fatal Grace/Dead Cold
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder/The Murder Stone
The Brutal Telling
Bury Your Dead
A Trick of the Light

You can visit Louise Penny’s Website at http://www.louisepenny.com.

3.5/5

Recommended: Fans of Louise Penny can’t miss this book, and I expect most of them have already read it. New readers of the “Inspector Gamache” series should, in my opinion, start with “Book One,” Still Life, though each book is written to stand alone. I like this series very much, though it’s not nearly as complex, convoluted, or dark as the “Inspector Lynley” series from Elizabeth George, which remains my all time favorite.

Book Review - Bestsellers - State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2011-12-04T01:49:00.000-05:00

While she’s in no way a “romance writer,” novelist Ann Patchett seems to love a little romance in her novels, and she seems to like that romance to flower between the unlikeliest of characters. In Bel Canto, for example, possibly Patchett’s best known and most loved book, opera soprano, Roxanne Koss has an unlikely romantic adventure with an older Japanese gentleman, only to marry an even more unlikely younger one. In her latest book, State of Wonder, the protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, is involved with a man eighteen years older than she is, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company where she works, and it’s a relationship that’s not without its problems.

Forty-two-year-old Marina Singh is a pharmacologist and research scientist at Vogel Pharmaceutical Company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Her work for Vogel revolves around some fairly routine research into the lowering of blood serum cholesterol with drugs called statins. In this way – as well as in several other ways – Marina differs from another of Vogel’s researchers, Dr. Annick Swenson. Dr. Swenson is a brilliant rogue scientist who is now “somewhere on a tributary off the Rio Negro” deep in the jungles of Brazil researching the miraculous post-menopausal fertility of the women of the Lakashi tribe, a fertility that allows them to routinely bear children well into their seventies and eighties. Unlike Marina’s research, the research of the very difficult Dr. Swenson, who is an ethnobiologist turned gynecologist turned immunologist, is so valuable to Vogel that she enjoys an open checkbook, with no questions asked. Her research could someday provide many women, now infertile, with a seemingly “magic” answer to their problems and provide Vogel with a substantial fortune. As Marina’s longtime lab partner, Anders Eckman put it, it could become a “ ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.”

As the book opens, Marina is just receiving the news that Anders Eckman, who was sent to Brazil a few months previously to find Dr. Swenson and report on both her location and her activities, has died from a fever. Curiously, it’s Dr. Swenson who writes the letter informing Mr. Fox, Marina’s CEO lover, of Eckman’s death. “We chose to bury him here in a manner in keeping with his Christian traditions,” writes Swenson. “I must assure you it was no small task. As for the purpose of Dr Eckman’s mission, I can assure you we are making strides.” Vogel’s CEO, however, isn’t going to take Dr. Swenson’s word for it.

It’s the sixty-year-old Fox, who informs Marina of Eckman’s death and tells her that she, herself, being his “Plan B,” must now travel to the Amazon, just as Eckman did, to report on those very valuable activities of Dr. Swenson. And, it isn’t long before Marina is on a pontoon boat, sailing “down a river into the beating heart of nowhere,” armed with only a volume of Henry James, a back issue of the “New England Journal of Medicine,” and a high-tech, GPS-enabled cell phone.

Only four or five pages into the book, the reader realizes that the premise of State of Wonder seems to bear a great resemblance to Joseph Conrad’s wonderful novella, Heart of Darkness. Both books feature protagonists who journey into the heart of the jungle, and Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who fails to communicate with the very people who are funding her research, may be mad, just as Kurtz was mad in Conrad’s masterpiece. For me, this was a welcome proposition since I love Conrad’s book, and the possible similarities caused me to read on with much anticipation.

This won’t be the first time Marina has come into contact with Dr. Annick Swenson. The unapproachable doctor was one of Marina’s medical school professors, one who was so difficult she caused Marina to change direction as far as her career was concerned. As Marina heads to the Amazon to do battle with Dr. Swenson, she’s flung into a world of memories, and she must do battle, not only with external forces, but with her own inner demons as well.

The daughter of a white mother and an Indian father who abandoned the family, Marina grew up feeling like an interloper in her own home. She was the girl with “all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner.” Searching for her roots, the young Marina traveled to Calcutta to visit her father, and it was on that trip that she first took the anti-malarial drugs that cause her to suffer nightmares on the long flight to Brazil. (Why didn’t she just take doxycycline? It’s a safe anti-malarial.)

Although the beginning of the book is interesting, State of Wonder doesn’t hit its stride until Marina’s plane touches down in South America, and the “state of wonder” referred to by Patchett can be felt by the reader. Arriving in Brazil, Marina imagines that “every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction.” And the reader finds he or she can agree with Marina.

As Marina’s journey progresses, we learn more and more about this quiet, and somewhat repressed, woman. And, as I wrote in the previous paragraph, it’s interesting. But interesting as learning about Marina is, I wanted to get on with the story and felt the pace of the book dragged a bit at times, especially during Marina’s time in the Brazilian city of Manaus, where she waits for the boat to take her into the jungle.

It isn’t until Marina comes face-to-face with Annick Swenson that State of Wonder finally finds its center. While Marina puzzles out just what, exactly, is happening in the jungle (and it’s a bit more than initially thought), the reader gets to know Dr. Annick Swenson, and Dr. Annick Swenson, I think, has certainly been worth the wait. A sharp-tongued, sharp-witted eccentric, Annick Swenson is the best-realized character in the book, though I suspect that may only be because Marina Singh is a little more quiet and reserved and a lot more “normal.” I liked Marina, and I didn’t particularly like Dr. Swenson, but I have to admit, it was Swenson who lit up the pages.

As the book heads toward its climax and resolution, the fate of Marina Singh, the truth surrounding the mysterious death of Anders Eckman, and the future of the Lakashi all become entwined. Was the ending an ending worthy of Conrad? No, definitely not, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about the rushed ending Patchett crafted. On the whole, I feel it’s a little too loony to be taken seriously, and it undermines all that went before.

Some reviewers have said this book is worth reading for Patchett’s prose alone. While there’s no doubt that Patchett does write lovely prose, I’ve never read a book for its prose alone, though bad prose has caused me to abandon several. There’s no doubt that Patchett’s descriptions of the jungle are real standouts. One example can be found when Marina finds herself in the jungle during a thunderstorm, when there was “a single, nuclear flash of lightening that was followed some milliseconds later by a clap of thunder that could have cracked the world in half, and then, because these things come in threes, there was rain.” Another beautiful description tells the reader about Marina’s first sight of stars from her position in the jungle. She sees a “textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink.” My favorite, however, takes place while Marina is still in Minnesota: “It wasn’t a bright day but what light there was reflected off the snow and cast a wide silvery band across the breakfast table…Pickles leaned up against Marina now and…she reached down to rub the limp chamois of his ears.”

Still, as beautifully written as this book is, there are times when Patchett resorts to cliché: jungle insects come “down in a storm,” an encounter with an indigenous tribe brings poison-tipped arrows “raining down,” and the jungle, itself, is filled with “screeching cries of death and slithering piles of leaves.” At other times, Patchett is vague, as when Marina tries to reflect on the jungle, but keeps being brought back to her own past, instead: “She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock…She thought about medical school, the fluorescent halls of that first hospital, the stacks of textbooks.” That’s okay. It’s not bad, but for someone with Patchett’s imagination, I just didn’t think that was good enough.

The characterization of Dr. Annick Swenson was wonderful, and though I liked Marina Singh and often sympathized with her, I found her a weaker character than her one-time mentor. Marina’s intentions are better than those of Swenson, but even so, Marina seems unable to put those good intentions into practice. For example, she finds the Lakashi language too foreign to even learn the names of natives with whom she interacts. Unlike Swenson, Marina remains an outsider, despite her intentions, one who’s unable to empathize with the native people of Brazil or with their problems. To a point, I could forgive Patchett her rather confused characterization of Marina Singh. Marina Singh, after all, is a confused and inhibited woman, who, for most of the book, doesn’t really know what she wants or even what she believes in.

What I found more difficult to forgive was Patchett’s characterization of the Lakashi. Patchett renders the Brazilian natives a little less than human. Beings that don’t even possess a true language (I guess Marina can be forgiven for not learning to speak with them), and who make sounds “less like words and more like the call and answer of birds.” Dr. Swenson describes them like this: “They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river.” Patchett’s indigenous people fail as characters because their creator constantly holds them up to Western “standards” of “excellence,” and allows her other characters to summarize the Lakashi in the clichéd terms of B-movies. Strangely, Patchett does the same thing with the entire southern hemisphere. Although her jungle descriptions are, as previously stated, beautiful, she is constantly comparing the southern hemisphere to the more familiar (to her characters) northern, and it’s the northern that always seems to be “right.”

Some reviewers have said that State of Wonder is Patchett’s most mature book to date, and in terms of theme, I suppose it is, and that’s all to the good, I think. However, the book lacks the emotional drive, and the heart, of some of her previous books. A weighty theme can be very important, but in the end, it isn’t more important than good, solid, character motivation. People are, first and foremost, curious about other people.

There was much about State of Wonder that I liked, and there were several things I didn’t care for at all. All in all, I feel it’s an uneven book, and even though I did enjoy spending time with Marina Singh, I felt the book definitely lacked the magic that infused Bel Canto. State of Wonder is a book I enjoyed, but it’s not a book I found memorable.

3/5

Recommended: Patchett fans will love this book and will rave about it. Others will probably like parts of the book and not like other parts. If you’re new to Patchett, this is not the place to start. Bel Canto, though not perfect, is a better book, and would be a better bet.

Book Review - Snow by Orhan Pamuk

2011-11-17T12:50:00.000-05:00

I loved Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk’s book My Name is Red. It was gorgeous; it was exquisite; it was elaborate; it was truly original. Save for the descriptions of the snow, itself, Snow doesn’t have the elegant beauty of My Name is Red and it’s far, far more political in nature. There’s nothing wrong with a book being political in nature, of course, but it’s just not my cup of tea. It took me so, so long to finish this book because I would read a little, find I just didn’t care, put it down, and often fall asleep.

While My Name is Red was set in the sixteenth century, Snow is set in the present day. It centers around an Istanbul poet, Ka, who’s been living in exile in Frankfurt, Germany for the past twelve years. However, as the book opens, Ka is on a bus heading to Kars, a mountain village in one of the poorest sections of Turkey, at the Russian border, to attend his mother’s funeral. And of course, it’s snowing, a snowfall that won’t stop until the book’s final page. (In Turkish, “kar” means “snow.”)

One of Ka’s friends, a journalist with an Istanbul newspaper, asks Ka to look into a very strange happening in Kars…the rash of suicides among the “head scarf girls,” girls who have been expelled from college for wearing a scarf to cover their heads after it’s been forbidden to do so.

Ka agrees to do a little sleuthing in Kars, but the mystery of the “head scarf girls” isn’t his primary motive, nor is helping his friend. Ka is hoping to be reunited with Ipek, a woman he knew during his days as a student, a woman he never really stopped loving, a woman whose sister, Kadife is…who else…the leader of the “head scarf girls.” Once married, Ipek is now separated from her husband and lives in a dilapidated building known, fittingly, as “The Snow Palace Hotel.”

As the snow continues to fall, Ka does attempt to learn about the suicides of the “head scarf girls,” but he finds people are very reluctant to talk to him. He’s been living in the west for twelve years, after all, he’s far wealthier than the citizens of Kars, and because of those two things alone, he’s simply not trustworthy.

Eventually, Ka meets with an Islamic extremist named Blue and the convoluted plot of Snow begins to meander and take on a rather picaresque quality as Ka wanders from encounter to encounter during the raging snowstorm.

One of the book’s defects is the fact that Ka is such a dislikeable character. I can tolerate dislikeable protagonists, and when they are drawn well, they fascinate me, but Ka, for much of the book, acts like a spoiled child and not enough like a responsible, grown man. He’s too weak, too ineffectual. He doesn’t even know if he belongs to the East or to the West. This would be okay, if Ka were simply wrestling with his problem of identity, but he’s not. It’s almost as though he doesn’t care; he waffles, depending on who he meets.

Snow is, of course, a symbolic book, almost an allegory of East-meets-West politics and Ka, because of his twelve years in exile, has come to symbolize the West. The snowstorm that blurs and isolates everything is symbolic of the blurring of both the East and the West in Kars, and of course, of Kars’ isolation.

Pamuk is an author who usually concentrates his efforts on male characters. Snow, however, is different. In Snow, Pamuk gives us two very strong female characters: Ipek and Kadife, in addition to the “head scarf girls.” While I don’t care for feminist literature or “chick lit,” I liked this inclusion of strong female characters and think it deepened Pamuk’s work. And for all his childishness and naïveté only Ka seems to realize that the “head scarf girls” are human beings and not a political or religious symbol:

It wasn’t the elements of poverty or helplessness that Ka found so shocking. Neither was it the constant beatings to which these girls were subjected, or the insensitivity of the fathers who wouldn’t even let them go outside, or the constant surveillance of jealous husbands. The thing that shocked and frightened Ka was the way these girls had killed themselves: abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday routines.

To his enormous credit, Ka manages to see that just as each snowflake is unique, each “head scarf girl” is also unique and irreplaceable and deserves to be treated as such.

While Pamuk never brings the elaborate plot of Snow to a truly satisfying conclusion, he does bring the village of Kars vividly to life in both its beauty and its squalor, and for me, at least, this was extremely interesting.

The conclusion is quite dramatic, almost melodramatic in nature, and instead of provoking the reflection that I’m sure Pamuk intended, it is almost comical. It’s also far too long, and its length detracts from its power. I think this is a book that would have been served well with the talents of a good editor.

Snow is a very realistic novel, just about as different from the fantastic and glittering My Name is Red as one can get. It’s certainly a book worth reading, but, save for the hauntingly rendered beauty of the snow and the sadness that permeates every corner of Kars, not much else in Snow lingers.

3/5

Recommended: Beautiful, but sad, portrait of an isolated Turkish village, haunting images of snow and ice; the protagonist, however, is a weak character, and the picaresque style can be tiresome at times.

Book Review - Classics - The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

2011-11-07T23:09:00.000-05:00

There’s not much I love more than a Victorian mystery. An intricate mystery, whose resolution I can’t guess from the first third of the book. Wilkie Collins’ wonderfully labyrinthine book, The Woman In White is just such a mystery. Brilliantly paced and brilliantly plotted, The Woman in White, first published in serial form in 1859, is also packed with wonderfully complex, fascinating, and fully realized characters.

The book begins with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter with the strange and enigmatic “woman in white” on a moonlit London road. Hartright assists the mysterious woman in departing the city, and subsequently learns that she has escaped from the asylum. Hartright is intrigued, knowing there is far more to the story, and wishing to learn the details. But Hartright, himself, must depart London.

A drawing master, Hartright has been engaged to tutor two students at Limmeridge House in Cumberland, one of them the beautiful heiress, Laura Fairlie, who is engaged to marry the baronet, Sir Percival Glyde. Hartright and Laura soon fall in love, but rather than give in to her feelings, Laura asks Hartright to leave Limmeridge House, as she intends to keep the promise she made to her deceased father as well as to her fiancé, Sir Percival, despite the fact that a mysterious “woman in white” warns her against the marriage, telling her that Sir Percival is “evil.” Laura’s determination sends her, her half-sister, Marian Halcombe, and Water, as well as the reader, into a spiral of danger and intrigue that doesn’t let up until the last page has been turned.

I usually dislike books written in the first person, finding it too affected, but I really enjoyed The Woman In White. Though it’s written in the first person, Collins switches from one narrator to another with each chapter. (Narrators include Hartright, the Glyde family lawyer, Marian Halcombe, an eccentric invalid uncle, the housekeeper, an over-the-top Italian, etc.) This has the added advantage of making it near-to-impossible for any reader to figure out the mystery, as the reader only learns information as the various narrators learn it. This also makes the leaving of clues almost impossible. Each narrator adds a piece to the puzzle the prior narrator did not know or twists the information already imparted by a previous narrator.

The characters in The Woman In White are incredibly well drawn. Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie seem almost too good to be true, though, and a little bland, but most of the other characters are a mix of good and not-so-good, and for that reason, are very realistic. I found Sir Percival’s “charming” friend, the Italian Count Fosco, a man who likes white mice, poison, and vanilla bonbons, especially interesting.

Personally, I thought this book’s plot contained a lot of really good twists. I put that down, in part, to the fact that it was first published in installments, the way most of Collins’ and Dicken’s work was published. I’ve read that when it was initially published in 1859, people lined up to buy the current installment, wondering what would happen next. As Julian Symons points out, William “Gladstone canceled a theatre engagement to go on reading it.” I think I might have, too. I thought the pacing was wonderful, and for me, there were no “slow parts” even though the book is quite long at close to 700-pages.

The writing itself is brilliant. Collins was a master of suspense, and The Woman In White is wonderfully creepy. Surprisingly, it’s also very witty and, at times, humorous, as well. It is also, as the excerpt below will show, quite brave:

She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

The “lady” in question is Marian Halcombe, and really, she isn’t ugly, though she many have seemed so to a Victorian gentleman conditioned to respond to blonde hair, a creamy complexion, a sweet voice, a rosebud mouth, and a voluptuously petite frame. Marian Halcombe, though possessing none of the qualities above, was honest, truthful, strong, warm, loyal, and independent. A man could not wish for a more steadfast partner.

Readers who have trouble allowing themselves to be transported back to Victorian times, and who are heavily invested in the equality of the sexes, might find this book tough going. Independent though she is, it is Marian, herself, who often raises the question of the shortcomings of the fairer sex. And modern readers might wonder what Walter Hartright sees in the vacuous Laura, when the resourceful and intelligent Marian is also available. The book’s sexism didn’t bother me. I know things were different in Victorian times, and if truth be told, men today respond to beauty more often than brains, at least initially. The happiest couple in the book are Count Fosco and his wife, who before marrying her husband was loud and obnoxious. The Count, we are told, “fixed all that” and now the Countess Fosco obeys her husband’s every command, and she does it quite happily as well.

Bottom line, this book kept me enthralled from the first page to the last. It raises questions of identity and insanity, and it takes the reader into the dark recesses of the English country manor and the madhouse, seamlessly combining Gothic horror and psychological realism. It’s a classic that richly deserves to be called a classic. I reread this book every year or two, and each time, it’s as fresh and wonderful as it was the first time. I recommend it to all lovers of Victorian literature and all lovers of mysteries alike.

5/5

Recommended: Yes, to all lovers of Victorian literature and to all lovers of good mysteries. The only readers I think should keep away are those who are going to be upset by the book’s Victorian sexism. The sexes definitely were not equal during Victorian times, and if readers can’t accept that they weren’t, this book might be upsetting for them.

Book Review - Mysteries - This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

2011-10-30T14:42:00.000-04:00

Inspector Thomas Lynley is back. Sort of. Elizabeth George’s sixteenth novel revolving around the dapper Scotland Yard detective, This Body of Death, sees Tommy Lynley’s return to London from his compassionate leave and his hike of the Cornish coast after the senseless murder of his wife, Lady Helen and their unborn child.

After the body of an unidentified young woman is found in an overgrown cemetery in Stoke Newington in north London, Lynley, who is already home in Belgravia, is summoned back to the Met by Acting Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, who made an appearance in the earlier book, Playing for the Ashes. Up to London from Maidstone, in Kent, Ardery is one of George’s trademark complex characters. She’s neurotic, alcoholic, and a failed wife and mother, who secrets and drinks small, airline bottles of liquor, usually vodka, in order to keep her on a somewhat even keel. And stay on an even keep she must, because whether or not Isabelle Ardery becomes the permanent Superintendent depends on snobbish and arrogant Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier, whose interests, as far as the Met go, lie in realms other than those of his working detectives.

It isn’t help in solving the murder that Ardery wants from Tommy Lynley, though she gets that, of course. What she really needs and wants is for Lynley to be physically present at the Met, so her team, which was formerly Lynley’s team, and still fiercely loyal to the Cornish charmer, stops thinking of him with awe and reverence and gives Ardery half a chance to succeed. And predictably, it’s Tommy Lynley who sees through Ardery’s hard shell to the scared and vulnerable woman hiding underneath. Yes, Inspector Thomas Lynley has finally healed enough to allow himself to be susceptible to the charms of a woman who is not the late Lady Helen. Though Lady Helen had always been one of my favorite characters, I was glad to see Lynley beginning to come to life once again.

Even though George writes about a London-based detective, she always manages to set her books in interesting parts of England other than the City, and so it is with This Body of Death. The identity of the murdered woman leads to the New Forest in Hampshire where Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata (Lynley has remained in London) meet a strange mix of characters in a beautiful and strange world. There’s Gordon, a thatcher and a loner who seems to have no attachments other than to his dog, Tess; there’s Robbie, an agister and brother of one of Gordon’s former lovers; there’s Meredith, a single mother who wants to be a fabric designer, and the mysterious, blonde, and voluptuous Gina, if Gina’s her real name, and the reader has no reason to believe it is, the woman who appears to be Gordon’s current girlfriend. All of these people are connected, in one way or another, with the murdered woman, and of course, it isn’t long until there are multiple suspects, and a string of red herrings, including a psychic, an ice skating instructor, and a mentally ill violinist. Though the New Forest might seem enchanting and even idyllic, in this book, it holds dark secrets whose exposure will lead to tragedy.

Threaded through the narrative of the young woman’s murder is another, seemingly unrelated story told in the form of a psychiatric report revolving around the abduction, abuse, and murder of a two-year-old by three adolescent boys, all of whom had been abused themselves.

At first, this peripheral story, which does mesh with the main narrative near the book’s end, was boring for me. I really disliked having to stop reading the main narrative to read yet another block of dry, boring psychiatric report. So, I made the decision to read the entire psychiatric report all at once (it contains no spoilers, by the way) and get it out of the way so I could concentrate on the main narrative. It was a decision I did not regret.

The main story, itself, moves glacially, at least in the first third of the book, and is burdened by so many different and fragmentary plot threads that I was almost ready to put it down – again. (Two or three times before I’d tried to read this book and was defeated by the extreme slowness of the plot’s unfolding.) I do have to say that George is very, very good at weaving her disparate plot threads into one cohesive whole, however, and when she does, it’s almost always worth the wait.

Most of the characters in this book are well drawn, but so many of them are thrown at the reader in the book’s early chapters that we never get a chance to really know the ones we haven’t met previously. I would just be settling in, taking an interest in a character, when that plot thread I was reading would dissolve into a new one, with new characters. And, while the female characters were beautifully nuanced, the male characters suffered a bit from stereotyping. For example, Tommy Lynley is always boyishly handsome in a tall, blond, Scandinavian way, while another character is this book, Robbie is described as being so toothy he’s ugly. I suppose George wanted readers to feel sympathy for Robbie, but her description of him made me lose sympathy rather than develop it.

And even though I adore Barbara Havers, in this book, some of Havers’ reactions to AS Ardery seem more childish than eccentric, and I really felt Havers deserved better. Although some of Havers scenes, especially with Ardery, are no doubt meant to provide comic relief, most of the time I found myself truly annoyed with Havers’ interaction with Ardery, and I felt guilty about that because I like Barbara Havers so much. And really, it’s time Havers had a love interest of her own, a genuine love interest, rather than following Lynley around like some lovesick thirteen-year-old. Barbara Havers, I think, would have more self-respect than that.

The dialogue, which is typically Elizabeth George, is spare and plain, and it very much fits a police procedural/mystery. The only place I felt let down by the dialogue was during Lynley’s romantic reawakening: “[Lynley] looked at her and she held the look. The moment became a man-woman thing. That was always the risk when the sexes mixed. With Barbara Havers it had always been something so far out of the question as to be nearly laughable. With Isabelle Ardery, this was not the case.”

Why was the thought of a romantic liaison with Barbara Havers laughable? Because she isn’t classically beautiful? Because she’s so eccentric? Is Lynley really that shallow? The dialogue above, besides being kind of laughable itself, made me want to slap Tommy Lynley and tell him not to be so hung up on appearances. I hope in future books George gives Havers a love interest of her own, and that she stops writing the eccentric detective as a stray cat, who will follow Lynley anywhere.

And, has Tommy Lynley, during his walk of the Cornish coast, become something of a Lord Peter Wimsey? I hope not. I like Lord Peter Wimsey, but I also like Tommy Lynley, and I want him to remain “Tommy Lynley.” His old friends, Deborah and Simon St. James make brief appearances in this novel, but they aren’t involved in much of the plot. As I was reading, I began to long for books like the early “Inspector Lynley novels,” books that featured Lynley, Lady Helen Clyde, Simon St. James and Deborah Cotter throughout the entire novel, books like Payment in Blood in which a still single Lynley and the St. James’ who were yet to marry, travel to Scotland to meet Lady Helen, who is acting in a play. I realize the characters must “move on” and I’ve enjoyed the complications among the four. And I’m one reader who didn’t mind too much that George killed off Lady Helen even though I liked her. However, I do like to see the two remaining friends – Deborah and Simon – featured more heavily. The early books, A Great Deliverance, For the Sake of Helena, Payment in Blood, Playing for the Ashes, and Missing Joseph were all tightly plotted, highly atmospheric books that really pulled the reader into Lynley’s world. I felt this cool and detached book, on the other hand, tried to keep the reader at arm’s length.

The plot in This Body of Death contains too many holes, when compared to the tight plotting of the early novels. I couldn’t buy it that Havers would place herself in peril by not calling for backup in a potentially dangerous situation, for example. And the character of Gina Dickens makes so many illogical choices that a reader has to wonder what her primary motivation is.

The above, however, were mere quibbles, and quibbles alone never put me off any book. What really put me off this book was the fact that the case referenced by the “psychiatric report” threaded through the main narrative was a very thinly disguised version of the James Bulger case that rocked England some years back. I felt sick. Why? Why did Elizabeth George, who has such a fertile imagination, have to include the James Bulger case in her book? Surely she could have imagined a fictional child murder/child murderer that would have no, or less, impact on the family of poor James Bulger. I almost stopped reading the book at that point. I had to put it down for a few days, until I felt I could tolerate it again.

I realize Elizabeth George has an interest in abused children who do not get the proper attention and care and who later commit heinous crimes. Any reader of the “Inspector Lynley” books knows that as most of the books contain a character or two who fits that description. It isn’t that I don’t care about abused children. I do. Every child has the right to grow up feeling safe and loved. I’m just tired of exploring the issue time and time again in George’s books. I just wish she’d “vary the crime” a little so it doesn’t always involve someone who was abused as a child.

This Body of Death is quite long. My hardcover copy is more than six hundred pages of small font. If that small font were “normal” size, this book could easily stretch to eight hundred to nine hundred pages. Still, psychiatric report aside, and once the first one hundred or so pages were read, the book did read quickly as George writes very flowing prose. But don’t buy this book for an airplane ride and think you’ll be able to finish it. You won’t. Not unless you’re a speedreader. Maybe not even then.

Bottom line, this book is a lot better than the meandering Careless In Red, but Lynley isn’t quite back to form. Still, quibbles and psychiatric report aside, for the most part, I very much enjoyed reading this book, though it’s by far not George’s best. I’m looking forward with much anticipation to the new “Inspector Lynley” novel that will be released in January. It’s so good having Tommy Lynley home again. If he needs a little time to settle in, I’m willing to give it to him.

3.5/5

Recommended: Readers of the “Inspector Lynley” series won’t want to miss this book, and they can take heart knowing things have improved. Though all of the books in this series can stand alone, only readers who’ve read them in order will understand the complicated relationships and subtle nuances. For the most part, the series is a good one, and if you’re interested, I recommend starting at the beginning and reading A Great Deliverance, the book that started it all.

Book Review - A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside

2011-10-23T01:56:00.002-04:00

A Summer of Drowning is John Burnside’s eighth novel. Although it sounded interesting to me, I initially decided to skip it because the previous “Burnside novels” I’d read I was less than taken with. Then I read an article in which Burnside stated that he, himself, was less than thrilled with his own early novels and that he recognized their mistakes. Okay, I decided, maybe it was time I gave John Burnside another chance.

A Summer of Drowning is set on the small Arctic island of Kvaløya, a place of “snow and sullen light” by winter, and “bird calls and wind-sifted murmurs” by summer. It’s narrated in retrospect by Liv, the teenaged daughter of Angelika Rossdale, a celebrated landscape painter from Oslo.

Liv and Angelika live together in a “grey, sunlit house above the meadows,” and Angelika, who is “famously reclusive” and who “didn’t need other people,” rarely emerges from her studio unless it’s for dinner, or Saturday morning coffee, or to garden. Her painting, she says, is her life, and her removal from the world, she insists, is deliberate: “To turn away from the busy world is interesting, up to a point…but to refuse oneself is exemplary. To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame – that is the highest form of art.” Initially, one believes Angelika, but as the reader gets deeper into the book, he or she has to wonder if Angelika has, indeed, “removed herself from the frame,” or if she’s only paying lip service to this ideal.

Liv, however, who has no choice in being “removed from the frame,” who has no vocation, not much ambition, and on that remote northern island, none of the interests that preoccupy most girls her age. Almost by default, Liv has become a watcher, “one of God’s spies.” “I simply look out,” she says, “over the meadows, over the water, and I pay attention.”

The one person on Kvaløya Liv pays attention to is Kyrre Opdahl, Angelika and Liv’s elderly neighbor. Kyrre lives on the island with his boxes of “beautiful junk” and tells Liv Norse folktales, the “old stories,” one revolving around the huldra, a forest creature who lures both men and boys to their death. When two of her classmates – Mats and Harald Sigfridsson – drown within days of each other – Liv begins to wonder if another classmate, Maia, a “dark-eyed, mocking girl with a loose tomboy walk who had always been an outsider” could be the huldra. Maia was, after all, seen with both boys shortly before they drowned, and both boys drowned on clear, still nights. As Liv puts it, “The meadows were quiet, the sky was clear, and the water was still….There was no reason for any of them to die.”

Another person Liv watches is Englishman Martin Crosbie, “around thirty…sensitive, or delicate…a worried spirit.” Crosbie has rented Kyrre’s boathouse for the entire summer, and to Liv, he’s an odd man, telling little, seemingly insignificant lies and going about always distracted, as if drunk. Liv describes him as “elsewhere, in another world, or another time.” In addition, Crosbie seems to be watching Liv as much as Liv is watching him. Crosbie, as Liv will learn, has his secrets, secrets she was not meant to discover.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that before this extraordinary summer is over, Kyrre, Maia, and Martin Crosbie will disappear as well. Despite the fact that I said “it’s not a spoiler,” I can hear the groans now. Since Liv is telling the story in retrospect, from vantage point of ten years, the reader learns about the disappearances in the first seven pages. And knowing about them doesn’t spoil the story tension, but adds to it, instead. We begin to feel claustrophobic, trapped on the island just as Liv is trapped. And, like Liv, we begin to sense the impending horror of that summer, the summer when “the light was that still, silvery-white gloaming that makes everything spectral…ghost birds hanging on the air.”

In between observing those around her, Liv, as can be seen from the above, is a keen observer of the natural world. She tells the reader about “a new sweetness of grasses and wildflowers, and mountain water gathering in the meadows” and “pockets of darkness” on garden walls. From its opening pages A Summer of Drowning is a hypnotic book, written in beautiful, hypnotic prose. I wasn’t surprised at that. Burnside is also a talented poet, a Whitbread winner, and his prose as well has been praised for its crystalline clarity and poetic cadence. This is very evident in this lyrically written book. Listen to Liv and she imagines Maia:

Maia floating in the Sound somewhere downshore, and a stolen boat drifting on the tide, miles away, empty, barely moving, on water that, to all appearances, was as still and unbroken as the surface of an empty mirror.

Even those who don’t know much about poetry, and I am certainly no poet myself, though I do love reading poetry, will notice the long vowels and the repeated consonant sounds. The beauty of Burnside’s prose actually adds to the feeling of menace and impending doom present everywhere in this book. This is a book about the shadowland between waking and dreams, between reality and myth, and Burnside’s limpid prose is perfect for showcasing that place of mystery.

Naturally A Summer of Drowning is a very atmospheric book, but what, exactly, that atmosphere might be is difficult to pin down. At times, this is a gorgeous book, filled with all the strange light and wild beauty of the remote North. At other times, it’s sinister, as just about everyone watches everyone else, and everyone, it seems, has something to hide. And, there are dips into the supernatural, but dips only. This isn’t a book “about” the supernatural, and when it comes to that subject, Burnside writes with an extraordinarily light touch. The book is definitely not “gimmickly.” As one reads on, past the first third or so, one comes to realize that this is also a book about delusion and self-delusion, and about the untrustworthiness of believing what we see with our own eyes. Once the reader realizes that the central subject of the book isn’t the mystery of what happened to Mats and Harald and Kyrre and Maia and even Martin Crosbie, but Liv, herself, a note of hysteria, or perhaps paranoia, has crept into the narrative, and the book’s title becomes highly symbolic.

And, about that title. It’s “a” summer of drowning, not “the” summer of drowning. Was there more than one? Is this something that happens with any degree of regularity on Kvaløya? Is there something, something important that Liv is holding back? For Liv, herself tells us that there are “two kinds of seeing.” One is about finding “what we have always been told is there,” while the other is about going “out alone in the world,” like “a boy going out into the fields, or along the shore,” a boy who finds that “something creeps in at the edge of his vision.”

Liv is a well-drawn character, but some readers, I think, will find it difficult to identify with her. She’s not your average girl, or what you might think of as “your average girl.” And she’s not nearly as serious as one might think, with all the disappearing and drowning going on around her. At an art gallery showing, she says, “It was immediately obvious [it] was one of those exhibitions that seek to inform and, at the same time, provoke serious thinking about what art is all about and I couldn’t be bothered with that.”

All of the characters are a bit mysterious, but in this book, that doesn’t equate to “sketchily drawn.” These characters serve this novel best by not revealing everything about themselves, by not letting us get to know them better than they know themselves.

So, did I think the book was perfect? Almost, but not quite. I think it’s weighed down – and a book like this should feel weightless – by a subplot involving Liv’s travel writer father in England, a man she’s never seen. We realize that Liv is finally being given a chance to define herself, to “frame” her own life in a way her mother never offered her. But the subplot, though beautifully written and interesting, at least at first, lacks any emotional payoff, and Liv fails to obtain the answers she seeks.

In the end, A Summer of Drowning might be one of those books that raises more questions than it answers. It is deliberately ambiguous, and this ambiguity is disturbing and haunting. This is a book that grabs hold of a reader and won’t let go weeks, months, maybe years after the last page has been turned. I just loved it.

4.5/5

Recommended: To readers of literary fiction, who don’t require every loose end to be tied up.

Note: I know some readers who believe the cover of this book, while attractive, is far too dark. I agree, and I want to point out that the actual cover is far darker than the photo depicts. The book, itself, is dark, but prospective readers must be able to see the scene depicted on the cover to be enticed to pick the book up and page through it. I hope publishers take Julian Barnes’ words to heart about cover art, and that readers will see a surge in quality cover art in the years to come.

Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending Wins the 2011 Booker Prize

2011-10-20T01:19:00.000-04:00

Julian Barnes can finally put aside his fear that he could “go to my grave and get a Beryl,” referring, of course, to the late Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker award five times and yet never won. Bainbridge was eventually awarded a posthumous “Best of Beryl” Booker for her novel, Master Georgie.

Barnes fared better. Though the Booker eluded him three times previously, on Tuesday evening, October 18, 2011, Barnes won the Man Booker prize for his short novel, The Sense of an Ending.

This was a controversial year for the Booker as many readers accused the judges of putting “readability” and popularity above genuine quality, though no one I know or have read about is critical of Barnes’ beautiful novel. The Chair of this year’s Booker judges, Dame Stella Rimington praised Barnes’ book, saying it had “the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted, and reveals new depths with each reading.”

And, as far as “readability” goes, Dame Stella said, “It is a very readable book, if I may use that word, but readable not only once but twice and even three times. It is incredibly concentrated. Crammed into this short space is a great deal of information which you don’t get out of a first read.”

In accepting the prize, Barnes offered some advice to publishers, “Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we've come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.”

Given the plethora of poor and unattractive book covers being churned out today, I heartily agree with Barnes, and I’m glad he issued the challenge to publishers to “up their game” as far as book covers go.

And as for “readability?” Barnes called it a “false hare” and had this to say, “Most great books are readable. Any shortlist of the last ten years that I've read has contained nothing but what you would call readable books.”

Barnes, who once called the Booker “posh bingo” says he hasn’t changed his view, and that what books are shortlisted and who eventually wins the 50,000-pound prize depends largely on who the judges are and what type of books they like. He added that the Booker had a tendency to drive writers mad, until they won, of course, at which time they realized that the judges were the “wisest heads in literary Christendom.” He advised dealing with the madness by treating the prize as a lottery.

Widely praised, The Sense of an Ending, Barnes’ eleventh novel, is one of the shortest winners in Booker history, though it’s not quite “the” shortest. The late Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Offshore, which won the prize in 1979, is shorter than Barnes’ book by several hundred words.

The Sense of an Ending is the story of dull arts administrator Tony Webster. The book’s theme is the unreliability of memory, and the way we shape and edit and refine our memories to make them into whatever we need them to be.

“One of the things that the book does is talk about the human kind,” said Dame Stella. “None of us really knows who we are. We present ourselves in all sorts of ways, but maybe the ways we present ourselves are not how we really are.”

It took the judges only thirty-one minutes to decide on Barnes as this year’s winner. When debate began, they were divided 3-2, but all agreed on the Barnes book by the end of what Dame Stella calls “an interesting debate.”

Barnes, who is sixty-five, had been shortlisted three times previously. In 1984, Flaubert’s Parrot lost to Anita Brookner; in 1998, England, England lost to Ian McEwan; and in 2005, Arthur and George lost to John Banville. His win this year makes Irish author, William Trevor the most shortlisted author never to have won.

This year, Barnes was the only author to have been previously shortlisted. The other shortlisted authors were Carol Birch for Jamrach’s Menagerie, an adventure on the high seas; Patrick de Witt for The Sisters Brothers, a picaresque western; Esi Edugvan for Half Blood Blues, a heady mixture of jazz and Nazism; and two debut novels, one from Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English, the story of a boy from Ghana who turns London sleuth, and AD Miller for Snowdrops, a tale of corruption set in Moscow.

Last year’s Booker chairman, Andrew Motion, questioned the absence of Alan Hollinghurst, Edward St. Aubyn, and Ali Smith on the shortlist. Personally, I would have loved to have seen Hollinghurt’s The Stranger’s Child as well as Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side both on the shortlist.

Despite the controversy over the shortlist and the “readability” factor, this year’s shortlist provided record Booker sales.

So, what’s Barnes going to do with the 50,000-pound prize money? He says he needs a new watchstrap, then adds, “I could buy a whole new watch.” He sure could.

Book Review - Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan

2011-10-18T15:26:00.002-04:00

Some other reviewers have said Stewart O’Nan’s lovely book, Emily, Alone was “too slow” or didn’t contain “enough plot” for them. I loved Emily, Alone precisely because it was so lovely and leisurely paced and didn’t contain a lot of plot twists and turns or overly dramatic situations.

Readers first met Emily Maxwell in 2002’s Wish You Were Here. In that book, which takes place at Emily’s Chautauqua lake house shortly after Emily’s husband, Henry has died, we also met Emily’s family, many of whom make appearances in Emily, Alone, though their lives have moved on, sometimes in directions they didn’t expect during that final summer together at Lake Chautauqua.

In Emily, Alone, Emily, who “never wanted to be eighty…[and] never wanted to outlive Henry,” finds herself, though relatively healthy and financially secure, eighty and without her beloved Henry, though she does still have Rufus, her elderly dog by her side. She and Rufus rattle around Emily’s Pittsburgh home, “her life no longer an urgent or necessary business,” doing crossword puzzles, listening to classical music on WQED FM, reading the classics of English literature, like Middlemarch, cleaning in anticipation of the cleaning lady’s arrival, scanning the obituaries for familiar names, and noting “the usual troop of jays and nuthatches and titmice in her bird journal.” What Emily loves most, though, is planning for the yearly visits of her children, Margaret and Kenneth, and visiting with her four grandchildren. It’s with Margaret and Kenneth that Emily must tread most carefully, weighing her “Great Depression” values over her children’s outspokenness and self-centeredness of the ‘60s. Margaret and Kenneth, after all, wield the ultimate weapon: access to those four beloved grandchildren, and neither son nor daughter will hesitate in using that weapon, even against his or her own mother.

Emily’s life might seem, at first glance, to be both peaceful and boring. In reality, it’s neither. The Maxwell family has its tensions, and every time Margaret and Kenneth visit Emily, those tensions, though muted, eventually surface. Emily is aghast when she realizes that Margaret has inherited Emily’s own short temper. In fact, the realization that Margaret, who is now divorced and sober after some time spent in rehab, is as volatile as Emily used to be causes Emily to wish “she could go back and apologize to those closest to her…how did her mother and father ever put up with her?”

Despite problems with her children, the fact that Henry is now gone, and despite that fact that more and more of Emily’s friends are dying, Emily considers herself a lucky woman. She still has Rufus, who she treasures, she has her grandchildren, and she appreciates the fact that at eighty, she’s blessed with an unchanging routine.

Writers are cautioned to “start your story on a day that’s different,” and for the most part, O’Nan does. Every Tuesday, Emily Maxwell is in the habit of enjoying a two-for-one breakfast with her sister-in-law, Arlene, at a nearby suburb’s Eat ‘n’ Park. (The Sunday paper had kindly provided coupons.) Because Henry would never let Emily drive, she’s come to rely on Arlene to drive the two of them to the restaurant and then home again, though Arlene, with her poor eyesight and disregard for traffic laws wouldn’t be anyone else’s first choice behind the wheel. But, Emily thinks, she, herself, would be no better: “After a run-in with a fire hydrant, followed quickly by another with a Duquesne Light truck, she admitted — bitterly, since it went against her innate thriftiness — that maybe taking taxis was the better part of valor.”

The “difference” in this day begins when Arlene, her plate piled high with Eat ‘n’ Park morsels, begins to speak, then mysteriously topples over. EMTs are called, of course, and as Arlene is taken to the hospital in an emergency vehicle, Emily is forced to follow in Arlene’s car.

If Arlene provided the first surprise of Emily’s day, it’s Emily, herself, who provides the next. Following the EMTs to the hospital in Arlene’s car, Emily discovers that “she was much less fearful behind the wheel than riding beside Arlene.” To my way of thinking, that shouldn’t have come as such a big surprise.

After learning that Arlene will recover, (not really a spoiler), Emily goes home and backs Henry’s 1982 Oldsmobile out of the garage. The lady’s decided that she’s going to get behind the wheel again, and it’s no spoiler to tell you that this is a decision Emily doesn’t regret. She even trades in Henry’s 1982 Oldsmobile for something more her speed, a bright blue (Emily worries that the car may be too “flashy”) Subaru Outback. Driving, Emily finds, made her feel “surprisingly alive, part of something larger again.” And when Arlene is released from the hospital, it’s Emily who takes charge.

O’Nan specializes in portraying ordinary people, who live ordinary lives. There’s nothing special about Emily Maxwell, other than the fact that she is Emily Maxwell. You probably know a person just like her. I know I do. Like this book or not, Emily Maxwell is a truly authentic character. So many authors write about the young, but I tend to shy away from books described as “coming-of-age” stories. The young, for me, at least, with some exceptions, of course, just aren’t that interesting. They haven’t lived long enough. They haven’t accrued enough history to be interesting. Other authors portray older persons as caricatures, which is just as bad as not portraying them at all. O’Nan, however, is different. His portrayal of Emily is quiet, true, but it’s also sensitive and beautifully nuanced, and to O’Nan’s great credit, he eschews sentimentality. For example, he resists the urge to allow Emily to find true love again, something I greatly appreciated.

O’Nan tells the story of Emily Maxwell is short, crisp, named chapters that are understated and filled with detail, and that take the reader through Emily’s life for the better part of a year. I’m not a fan of “short, crisp” chapters myself, but that’s just a personal “not my cup of tea” kind of thing. They did work well in this book, and there’s certainly nothing at all wrong with them.

This book has been criticized by some as not containing enough plot, and to be sure, Emily, Alone isn’t a plot driven novel. As a character study, however, its scenes present an exquisite little miniature of the everyday joys and sorrows of someone who is close to the end of a long life, but still makes the most of every day. The prose is lean and unadorned, and is characterized by a dark wit that permeates the entire novel.

I love the wealth of Pittsburgh detail that fills this novel. For me, it really made the novel come alive, not that I’m terribly familiar with Pittsburgh, though after reading this book I sometimes feel that I am. I felt I knew the Lake Chautauqua area when reading the darker Wish You Were Here, and to be honest, I did prefer the earlier book, though Emily, Alone is a tighter, more focused work. Maybe that was my problem. I like longer books, with many characters and several subplots as opposed to slim novels that focus on one character only.

Writer Frank Norris dismissed realism as “the drama of a broken teacup” in a reaction to the “parlor dramas” of Henry James, and gravitated toward the much harsher naturalism. O’Nan is definitely writing “the drama of a broken teacup” in Emily, Alone, but Emily is such a well drawn and beautifully nuanced character that most readers, I think, won’t mind that the harsher realities of life have been dealt with outside the pages of this book. Emily is just “too real” to dismiss, and in the end, the reader, like O’Nan, comes to respect this graceful woman who makes a life of “simply carrying on.”

4/5

Recommended: To those who like character studies as opposed to plot driven novels. This book contains very little plot, but the beautiful portrait of Emily Maxwell makes her a character well worth knowing.

Book Review - The Master by Colm Toibin

2011-10-15T08:50:00.002-04:00

I've been a longtime fan of Henry James and I've read almost everything he ever published. Not quite everything, but almost. My favorites are The Golden Bowl, the novella, The Turn of the Screw, and the exquisite Portrait of a Lady. Henry James is the only man, other than Jose Saramago, who can grab my attention at the beginning of a sentence and hold it until he concludes that very same sentence several pages later.

Talented Irish author, Colm Toibin's The Master, a book about Henry James, is very different from what I thought it would be, but it fulfilled all of my expectations for an engrossing and very serious book. As one reads The Master, one must be aware that this is a novel, a novel in which the central character is Henry James, and not a biography of James. To view the book as a biography would be doing it a grave disservice.

The Master opens in London in 1895, at the dreadful premiere of James' play, Guy Domville, a play James, himself, was too nervous to attend. He went, instead, to see Oscar Wilde's comedy, An Ideal Husband, but returned to the theatre in which Guy Domville had been staged in time to hear the humiliating jeers and boos from the audience. The book ends in Rye, in southern Sussex, at James' beloved Lamb House, as the 19th century is ending and his brother, William, William's wife, Alice, and their daughter, Peggy (a lover of the works of Dickens), are departing for the sunnier and warmer South of France.

While no previous knowledge of James is required to understand The Master, I think this is a book that's best appreciated by those with some familiarity with the works of Henry James and with his personal life as well. For example, it helps greatly in your appreciation of The Master if you know that James' cousin, the vivacious Minny Temple, as well as his own hypochondriacal sister, Alice, formed the basis for many of his heroines, Minny for Daisy Miler and Isabel Archer and Alice for the little girl in The Turn of the Screw. In fact, Toibin even goes so far as to suggest that James actually preferred his loved ones dead, rather than alive, so he could resurrect their ghosts as characters in his stories.

In what is the most heartbreaking section of the book, The Master explores James' tragic relationship with the American novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, a talented, elegant and highly intelligent woman (but one given to much deep melancholia) who was, in all probability James' soulmate, but a woman to whom James could not give the physical intimacy she so craved. In heartrending set pieces, James visits Constance in Florence, then later travels to Venice after learning of her suicide there to view the place where she threw herself from a palazzo window and died, broken and bleeding, on the pavement below.

Toibin portrays James as a man who always let down those he loved, particularly women. Besides laying the blame for Constance's suicide squarely on James' shoulders (he allegedly refused to join her in Venice during a particularly dismal winter after indicating that he might), he also places the blame for Minny Temple's death from tuberculosis at James' feet, pointing out that Minny wanted to join James in Rome:

Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome....

...Minny wrote to James. What Toibin doesn't tell us is that Minny knew her fantasy of traveling to Rome, or anywhere else, for that matter, was just that...a fantasy, for in a postscript to her letter to James she wrote:

I am really not strong enough to go abroad with even the kindest of friends.

Toibin leaves us with the idea that James was a cold, selfish and self-centered man, when in fact, while certainly not a gadfly, he may very well have been a kind and sympathetic friend.

Toibin is probably at his best when exploring James' repressed sexuality. It is well known that James was horrified at the fate of the very open Oscar Wilde, and Toibin assumes, probably correctly, that James' fear of the same consequences kept him from exploring and expressing his own feelings.

Toibin does manage to write in the same style as did James, but he wisely stops short of giving us James' pages-long sentences. The Master is, however, a melancholy, wistful book, and if anything, Toibin puts too much emphasis on the solitary, tragic aspects of James' life, while ignoring the author's more sociable, witty side. Toibin weaves his story into eleven chapters, each one containing an incident that triggers a memory of the past in James. A remark made by the Archbishop of Canterbury's son, for example, triggers a memory in James that later becomes The Turn of the Screw.

The book is beautifully detailed, something that further served to bring James to life. When describing James' room in the Florentine palazzo of a friend, Toibin tells us it had a:

...pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched....

Despite a few misgivings, I found The Master to be a beautiful book, as graceful and delicately nuanced as a watercolor. For me, its only failing, if it can even be termed a failing, is Toibin's insistence on concentrating on James as an essentially tragic figure. He paints James' life as a life devoid of passion. While it's true that James lived during a time in which it would have been difficult for him to explore his sexuality, Toibin doesn't seem to consider the passion, or the redemptive power, inherent in a life dedicated to art. Still, this book is so well written, and so elegantly written, that I can't justify giving it any fewer than five stars.

5/5

Recommended: Yes, especially to lovers of the works of Henry James. Those readers, I think, will be enthralled.

Note: This book won the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Literary News - Swedish Poet Tomas Transtromer Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

2011-10-07T23:02:00.001-04:00

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, 80, is the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality, said the Swedish Academy in announcing his win in Stockholm on Thursday, October 6th, while the assembled journalists cheered. Mr. Tranströmer has written more than fifteen collections of poetry, many of which have been translated into English and sixty other languages. Critics have praised his work for its accessibility and elegance, even in translation, taking special note of his beautiful descriptions of the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons, and the atmospheric beauty of nature.

Even though many of Mr. Tranströmer’s works have been translated into English, in the United States, very few persons have even heard of him, much less read him, however that is about to change. Jeffrey Yang, editor of Tranströmer’s The Great Empire: New and Collected Poems, published by New Directions, said, “It was already in a third printing – now we’ll probably do a quick turnaround short run, and a bigger run.” Yang estimates that because of Tranströmer’s Nobel win, New Directions will need to print an additional 5,000 to 10,000 volumes of Tranströmer’s book. New Directions published the first English translation of Tranströmer’s poetry in 1966 in its annual New Directions in Poetry and Prose, No. 19.

Green Integer Press, based in Los Angeles, California, plans to do just what New Directions is doing. Green Integer has a bilingual edition of Tranströmer’s Snow Gondola, with the poems appearing side-by-side in both Swedish and English. Demand for the book should be high all through the rest of the year, and perhaps beyond.

“I kind of thought it [the Nobel winner] should be a poet,” said Douglas Messerli, Green Integer publisher. “It’s been so long since a poet has been selected.”

On Friday, October 7th, Ecco announced that it would reissue the two collections of Tranströmer poetry it previously published: For the Living and the Dead: A Memoir and Poems, published in 1995, and Selected Poems, published in 1998.

Daniel Halpern, president and publisher of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, praised Tranströmer’s win, saying, “So much poetry, not only in this country but everywhere, is small and personal and it doesn’t look outward, it looks inward. But there are some poets who write true international poetry. It’s the sensibility that runs through his [Tranströmer’s] poems that is so seductive. He is such a curious and open and intelligent writer.”

Mr. Halpern said that Selected Poems, which was originally published in 2000 by Ecco, would be re-released within days, while online retailer sites reported that print copies of Tranströmer’s books were already on backorder, and electronic versions were difficult to find.

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 to a schoolteacher mother and a journalist father. He studied literature, history, religion, and psychology at Stockholm University, and graduated in 1956. He then worked as a psychologist at a youth correctional facility. In 1990, he suffered a stroke that left him, for the most part, unable to speak, though he eventually began to write again.

Journalists reported that Mr. Tranströmer, who appeared in the vestibule of his Stockholm apartment with his wife, Monica, was visibly overwhelmed at the news of his win. Speaking on behalf of her husband, Monica Tranströmer said, “That you happened to receive it is a great joy and happy surprise, but the fact the prize went to poetry felt very good.” she said.

Swedes, most of whom have read Tranströmer’s work since his first volume of poems was published, celebrated the win. Ola Larsmo, a novelist and president of the Swedish Pen Association said, “To be quite honest it was a relief because people have been hoping for this for a long time. Some thought the train might have left the station already because he is old and not quite well. It felt great that he was confirmed in this role of national and international poet.”

John Freeman, editor of “Granta” said, “He is to Sweden what Robert Frost was to America. The national character, if you can say one exists, and the landscape of Sweden are very much reflected in his work. It’s easy because of that to overlook the abiding strangeness and mysteriousness of his poems.”

When making the announcement of Tranströmer’s win, the Nobel committee noted that it had been many years since a Swede had won the prize. The last time was in 1974 when Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shard the prize.

While Swedes celebrated Tranströmer’s win, others again criticized the Nobel for being too Eurocentric. Tranströmer’s win made him the eighth European to win in a decade. The last time an American won the prize was in 1993 when Toni Morrison won.

Peter Englund, responding to the “Eurocentric criticisms” said that the literature jury has increased its number of scouts to scour for books in non-European languages. In recent years, American novelist Philip Roth has been a favorite, but has not been selected.

Once again, the literature jury proved its unpredictability. Ladbroke’s, the British-based bookmaker, had favored France-based Syrian poet, Adonis, who writes in Arabic, for the win with odds of 4-1, though Tranströmer was the bookmaker’s second choice at 6-1. In previous years, the choice of relatively unknown writers like Germany’s Herta Müller surprised everyone, better and non-better alike. In other years, winners like Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk, have had some people questioning whether the Nobel is overly political. The first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to the French poet and philosopher, Sully Prudhomme, whose poetry showed the “rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect.”

Mr. Tranströmer’s other prizes include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, and the Bellman Prize.

The Nobel Prize carries an honorarium of nearly $1.5 million.

Below is a poem from Tranströmer’s collection Selected Poems: 1954-1986, edited by Robert Hass.

The Scattered Congregation

I
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
II
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
III
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
IV
But the church bells have gone underground.
They're hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.
V
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who's got the Address?
Don't know. But that's where we're going.

Book Review - Pulitzer Winners - Empire Falls by Richard Russo

2011-10-04T23:27:00.000-04:00

I really don’t know why I didn’t read Empire Falls when it was first published or even right after it won the Pulitzer because it was sure to have caught my attention at that time. It might have been because I’d been living in Switzerland and then France for so many years, even going to school there, and I’d been immersing myself in European literature for at least a decade. Contemporary American writers were still “foreign” to me. I’ve been living in the US for several years now, and I’m an American. American literature is my heritage, and lately I’ve had the desire to make a fuller exploration of it. Empire Falls is a book many people have been recommending to me, and it did not let me down.

As in previous books, Russo, in Empire Falls, is writing about small town, blue-collar life, but this time, rather than setting his book in upstate New York, he’s set it in Maine, in the imaginary town of Empire Falls. Empire Falls is one of those small New England towns that never managed to recover after the textile mills moved south. The wealthy Whiting family controlled Empire Falls, and three now defunct factories, for more than a century, and though the patriarch, C.B. Whiting is now deceased, his widow, Francine, ensconced in C.B.’s Spanish style “hacienda” that’s so out of place in New England, still controls what’s left.

The protagonist of Empire Falls isn’t Francine, however, it’s Miles Roby, a forty-two-year-old man who was lured away from college in his senior year by Francine Whiting and back to Empire Falls in order to care for his dying mother, Grace Roby, over Grace’s strenuous objections. Grace, who was employed by Francine Whiting, wanted Miles to escape Empire Falls and make something more productive of his life. Francine, however, prevailed upon Miles to take over management of the Empire Grill when the previous manager died, though if the truth be known, Miles’ crush on a waitress named Charlene was probably far more effective than Francine could ever be. In an effort to keep Miles in the diner, Francine promised to leave the business to him in her will. But why, the reader has to ask, would anyone want it? Like the rest of the businesses in town, the Empire Grill is facing extinction, and Miles knows if he ever were to become the diner’s owner, the only profitable thing to do would be to sell it.

When the book opens, it’s been more than twenty years since Miles left college and returned to Empire Falls, and the diner is far from his only problem. His wife, Janine (Charlene married another, but she’s still around), feels that Miles has been an unsatisfactory partner sexually, so she’s divorcing him in order to marry Walt Comeau, a/k/a the “Silver Fox,” the “preening peacock” owner of the local health club, which may be Empire Falls’ only successful business. And, though Miles is far better suited to parenthood, Janine will get custody of the couple’s only child, a delightful sixteen-year-old daughter named Tick, who has several problems of her own, including a menacing ex-boyfriend and possible anorexia.

I disliked Janine when I first encountered her, and she never did grow on me. I found her to be shallow, vain, and humorless, and I was sorry she’d been portrayed as a woman of such meager depth. It takes courage to leave a marriage of twenty years, especially when the reason is lack of sexual satisfaction. I felt I should have admired Janine, but there’s really nothing admirable about her. Rather than blame Miles for his inattention to his wife, I found myself blaming Janine for being so coarse and dislikable.

Though Janine’s “romance” with Walt has deprived Miles of his home and relegated him to a fume-filled room above the diner, Miles doesn’t seem to bear anyone any ill will. This is highlighted by the fact that Walt spends a great deal of his own free time in the Empire Grill arm-wrestling Miles and asking him to break hundred dollar bills, or playing gin rummy with Horace, another patron of the grill, while preaching about the ill effects the grill’s burgers to the very diners who are eating them.

Miles still has family members who rally round him, however. There’s his younger brother, David, who lost the use of one of his arms in an alcohol-induced accident. Now sober, David helps Miles in the Empire Grill. While Miles is more or less content to maintain the status quo of the grill, David is interested in actually making the restaurant profitable. To that end, he talks Miles into keeping the grill open on weekend nights so they can attract the students and professors in nearly Fairhaven for “International Nights,” which consist of no more than twice-cooked noodles one night and flautas another. And, David wants Miles to persuade Mrs. Whiting to apply for a liquor license, and though Miles knows David is on the right track, he also knows the grill’s profitability is something about which Francine Whiting hasn’t the slightest interest.

Although Grace Roby is dead by the time the book opens, Max Roby, Miles’ father is still alive and kicking, and he’s probably the only person in Empire Falls who does exactly as he pleases. There are no obstacles in life for Max Roby; he abides by no man’s rules. A chain smoker, who has disgusting personal hygiene, Max says what he wants and does what he wants, and if others don’t like it, that’s their problem, not his. At one point, Miles even asks David if he thinks their father has a conscience. “Sure he does,” David replies. “No slave to it, though, is he?” When we meet Max, he’s as unlikable as characters come, but to Russo’s credit, Max does grow on the reader. I know some readers who’ve identified Max as their favorite character. I wasn’t one, but you might like Max more than I did. Truth be told, I did find some of his actions amusing, but I also found him, at times, to be more caricature than true character.

It might seem so at first, but Miles Roby hasn’t entirely let go of this dreams. He spends two weeks each summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the place where he vacationed as a boy, and he’d love to own a restaurant/bookshop there. It’s not in his budget, however, and anyway, life always seems to pull him back to Empire Falls. Still, Martha’s Vineyard exerts a strange pull on Miles as well. As he dreams, he remembers one boyhood trip there and a mysterious man named Charlie Mayne, a close acquaintance of Grace’s. And, as Miles dreams and questions the past, he begins to learn the secrets Grace took with her to her grave, secrets he must know in order to make sense of his life. He begins to unravel the tangled history that’s bound him to the Whiting family and Empire Falls.

Even though I made a few criticisms about the characterization of Max and Janine, for the most part, Russo’s secondary characters, and there are many of them, are beautifully drawn. I was pulled into their story and their lives so easily, and I continued to think of them long after I turned the final page. And Russo extends much compassion and dignity to the people he’s created. No matter how far they stray or what mistakes they make, he appears to respect their humanity, though that doesn’t mean he exempts them from their well deserved, and often humorous, comeuppance.

Russo weaves plot and subplot, and past and present, together wonderfully, as he tempers the seriousness of his book with a wry levity. The only misstep comes late in the novel when a horrific, though well set up, event occurs. I thought the book was so well written, and the denizens of Empire Falls so compelling, that the “shocking incident” was overkill. It simply wasn’t needed. The characters and themes Russo had been developing previously were enough, and they were far more interesting.

Empire Falls is told from the perspective of several of the book’s characters. Russo seems to like omniscient narration, and I’m glad he does. He’s created a big, old fashioned book in Empire Falls, one that depends on great characterization and great storytelling, with none of the gimmicks the post-modern authors often employ. This is just the kind of book I love, sprawling, with many characters and many subplots, and one that takes its time in telling its story. Not that the book is slow. It isn’t, though it does have a small town unhurried feel. As Tick observes at one point, “Things happen slow…if they happened fast, you’d be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. ‘Slow’ works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there’s plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the fact, that no matter how slow things go, you’ll always be slower.”

When I was scanning reviews of this book, I noticed that different reviewers would identify different themes. I think that’s only natural in a book of this size and scope. For me, the theme revolves around the difficulty of escaping our personal “family curse.” Every family in Empire Falls seems to have one. The Whiting men all marry a woman like Francine, “the one woman in the world who would regard making them miserable as her life’s noble endeavor.” The Robys all want something better for their children, but that never seems to happen. Grace wanted a better life for Miles, and now Miles wants a better life for Tick. And then there’s Francine Whiting’s minion, the corrupt cop, Jimmy Minty, who’s every bit the bully his own father was. His own son, Zack, though aspiring to be Chief of Police, promises to be just as corrupt as his father. Russo seems to be saying that blood is definitely thicker than water, and in ways we probably haven’t even considered.

Despite my little quibbles, and they are quibbles, I think Empire Falls is as perfect as any book gets. I appreciate the fact that Richard Russo cared more about something that’s becoming a rarity in the literary world – good, old fashioned storytelling and character development – than about the gimmicks offered by those “slim little volumes” that so many minimalist authors today are producing. This is the kind of book that will stay with a reader, the kind of book that he or she will return to from time-to-time, if only to flip through and read selected scenes. You really can’t do better than this book; Empire Falls really is American literature at its finest.

5/5

Recommended: Definitely, without hesitation. This is contemporary American literature at its finest.

Book Review - Classics - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2011-10-01T09:44:00.000-04:00

I sometimes have discussions with my friends about which book epitomizes “the great American novel.” For most of my friends, the answer seems to be Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick. For me, however, “the great American novel” is, by far and away, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gorgeous book, The Great Gatsby. Although The Great Gatsby is set during the 1920s and America’s “Jazz Age,” for me, its title character, Jay Gatsby, is, and forever will be, “the” symbol of “the American dream” gone wrong.

The Great Gatsby opens during the summer of 1922 in posh West Egg, Long Island. We “see” Gatsby through the eyes of the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbor, a Midwesterner who has come to New York to study the bond trade. By using Nick Carraway as a narrator, Fitzgerald successfully distances us from Gatsby a bit and increases his air of mystery.

Nick, the son of a wealthy family, is, above all else, fair and non-judgmental. Although Nick deplores the hypocrisy and shallowness of America’s upper class, he can’t help but admire Jay Gatsby, for Gatsby has charm and charisma in abundance. In fact, Nick finds Gatsby’s personality “gorgeous”:

If personality is a unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

Nick Carraway first encounters Jay Gatsby as he’s (Nick) returning to West Egg from a dinner party given by his cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom Buchanan in the even-more-opulent East Egg. East Egg is the home of “old money,” of privilege and class, while the residents of West Egg are the nouveau riche. And this distinction is very important because The Great Gatsby is a book that encompasses class distinctions, social status, and elitism. Tom Buchanan, who attended Yale with Nick, has grown up with privilege. He’s domineering, hypocritical, and totally without scruples.

Tom’s wife, Daisy (Nick’s cousin), seems, at first glance, to be the antithesis of her husband. Delicate and diminuative, Daisy almost always dresses in white, accenting both her transparency and her seeming purity. She’s not at all coarse (just the opposite, in fact), but she does affect a deliberate air of languor and jaded sophistication.

Returning home from East Egg, Nick sees his good looking neighbor, Jay Gatsby, standing on his lawn, reaching out toward a green light, shining across the bay.

From the novel’s opening pages, we know Jay Gatsby is, in many ways, a man of mystery. He’s enormously wealthy, but the source of his wealth is never made completely clear, though it’s not difficult to surmise that it’s something illegal.

Gatsby also claims to come from “old money”, i.e., a prominent family in the Midwest. When pressed, however, Gatsby says he’s from San Francisco. Supposedly an Oxford graduate, he speaks with a very affected English accent. Although there’s much about Gatsby of which Nick disapproves, he still admires him and finds him irresistible.

While Nick finds Jay Gatsby “gorgeous,” he can’t find anything at all to like about Tom Buchanan. Tom’s hypocrisy is shown to its fullest in his affair with Myrtle Wilson, a married woman who lives in “the valley of ashes,” a barren, dying area that lies between West Egg and New York:

About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screen their obscure operations from your sight.

The decaying neighborhood is dominated by an equally decaying and grotesque billboard displaying a pair of gigantic eyes. These eyes belong to Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an optometrist who used to have an office in the area. The eyes of Dr. Eckleburg seem to see and know all, much like the all-knowing eye of God:

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, form a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

Myrtle Wilson’s husband, George, owns a garage in the valley of ashes. Despite the poverty in which she lives, Myrtle is, at least outwardly, far more alive than is Daisy. Voluptuous, sensuous, and vital, Myrtle much prefers flamboyant colors to the pure white usually worn by Daisy, and unlike Daisy, she doesn’t chose her words carefully or act with artifice and affectation. Neither woman, however, seems capable of deep emotions or selfless action. While Daisy lacks genuineness, Myrtle is vulgar. In many ways, this makes both women ideal companions for Tom Buchanan.

Jay Gatsby is in the habit of hosting lavish parties every Saturday night, parties that showcase sumptuous food, unlimited supplies of alcohol, live musicians, and Gatsby’s legendary yellow Rolls Royce. They are, in short, a symbol of the decadence of the Jazz Age.

Even during his parties, Gatsby remains a man of mystery. He doesn’t mingle with his guests and doesn’t even appear to know half of them. His parties are, however, legendary, with guests arriving from West Egg, from East Egg, and even from New York City:

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the hot sun on the sand of his beach while his two motor boats slit the foam. On weekends, his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

While there is much about Jay Gatsby that is affected and artificial, we do learn that there is also much about him that is genuine. He is, above all, a man of contradictions.

Gradually, Nick comes to learn more and more about Jay Gatsby. Most importantly, he learns that Gatsby bought his house in West Egg for the sole purpose of effecting a reunion with Daisy. Five years earlier, Daisy, who had been a Red Cross volunteer, had met and fallen passionately in love with Jay Gatsby, then an Army lieutenant. And, although she accepted Gatsby’s marriage proposal, Daisy didn’t wait for him as she’d promised; she married Tom Buchanan instead.

At this point in the novel, Nick realizes that the green light toward which Gatsby yearns is the light on Tom’s and Daisy’s dock. It’s also the point where Nick becomes even more involved in Gatsby’s life when he agrees to arrange a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy.

The reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, which takes place in Nick Carraway’s house, shows us clearly the fundamental flaws of character possessed by both Gatsby and Daisy, flaws that will, before the novel’s end, lead to several tragic events.

Gatsby is a man who cannot seem to move forward in life. He wants to live in the past; he wants to recreate the past. If he could, he would freeze his first meeting with Daisy and live in that moment forever. He’s a dreamer; he’s a visionary; he’s a romantic of almost mystical proportions. While there can be no doubt that Gatsby does, indeed, love Daisy (he’s willing to sacrifice his life for her), he doesn’t love her in a healthy, realistic manner. Instead, Gatsby idealizes Daisy. She is, for him, the epitome of all his dreams: wealthy, sophisticated, privileged. Gatsby even idealizes himself. When Nick tells him, You can’t repeat the past, Gatsby responds by saying, Of course you can!

The set piece in which Gatsby shows Daisy his English shirts is not only one of the most famous in all of literature, it’s also the one in which we see Daisy at her most “human,” her most unaffected, her most vulnerable:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

Daisy, though, like Gatsby, is possessed of a fatal flaw that precludes genuine love.

While Daisy does have genuine feelings of love for Gatsby, there is something she loves even more—status and privilege—things she can share with Tom Buchanan in East Egg, but things Jay Gatsby, no matter how wealthy he becomes, can never provide.

After the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, events in the novel quickly begin to spiral out of control and the lives of the characters become more and more entwined. The reunion seems to affect Gatsby most profoundly—he stops giving lavish parties, he fires his household staff, and, for the first time in his life, he begins to care about the gossip swirling around him. While Gatsby becomes more discreet, Daisy, however, seems intent on throwing caution to the winds, inviting the inevitable disaster.

The novel’s climactic event takes place on the first day of autumn, in Gatsby’s swimming pool. It’s not simply for dramatic effect that Fitzgerald made these choices. The first day of autumn brings a chill to West Egg, but Gatsby, in characteristic defiance of the future, chooses to float in his pool, despite the cool weather. For him, the passage of time does not exist; he lives in eternal summer:

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.

The Great Gatsby is a beautiful novel, perfectly constructed and written in gorgeously shimmering prose. It’s filled with symbolism and even with religious overtones. Gatsby, himself, can be seen as a Christ figure, a lamb on the sacrificial altar of “status.” The book also presents a vivid, though quite unflattering, portrait of the decadence and sumptuousness excess of the Jazz Age.

More than anything, The Great Gatsby, to me, represents the death of the American dream. Gatsby was a dreamer, a visionary, a romantic. He represented all that America, in her infancy, represented.

The final line of The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous in all of literature:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Like the green light on the Buchanan’s dock, like Daisy, herself, life for Jay Gatsby was a dream, but always a dream just out of reach.

5/5

Recommended: Absolutely, with no reservations. This is a beautifully constructed, gorgeously written book, set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, and telling the story of the death of the American dream.

Book Review - Mysteries - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

2011-09-23T10:37:00.001-04:00

Even though I was intrigued by the title of this book, I didn’t read it when it was published in 2009. As soon as I learned the book featured an eleven-year-old protagonist, I decided I’d better skip it, much as the title did intrigue me. I’m generally not a fan of child protagonists. They usually irritate me more than anything else. I don’t know what caused me to become interested in the book again, but I’m certainly glad I picked it up. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a real treat, and just what I was looking for at the time.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is set in the fictional village of Bishop’s Lacey, England, in 1950. The protagonist is the very precocious eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, who lives in her family’s crumbling mansion, “Buckshaw” with her eccentric, stamp collecting father, and her two older sisters, seventeen-year-old Ophelia and thirteen-year-old Daphne. Sadly, the girls’ mother, Harriet, died during a mountain climbing expedition when Flavia was just a baby. Joining the family is Mrs. Mullet, the housekeeper and cook (even though she does keep baking the family unwanted “pus-like custard pies”), and there’s Dogger, a former soldier who served with Colonel de Luce. Dogger’s position at Buckshaw is less defined than Mrs. Mullet’s. “Father’s factotum,” as Flavia refers to Dogger, is suffering from shell shock, and takes whatever job suits him at the moment. When The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie opens, Dogger is the family gardener. He’s also Flavia’s confidante and the person who teaches her the skills most eleven-year-olds would be better off not knowing.

Flavia enjoys reading mystery novels, and she often refers to them when she speaks. Her real passion, however, is chemistry, and she spends much of her time in the upstairs lab created by a mentally unstable ancestor, Tarquin de Luce. “My particular passion was poison,” Flavia says, and she means it. She often concocts poisonous ointments, etc. in order to exact revenge on Ophelia and Daphne, who spend much of their time terrorizing poor Flavia.

When a dying man is found in Buckshaw’s cucumber patch, a man who utters his final word – “Vale” – to Flavia, herself, and who was surrounded by “a whiff of a peculiar odor – an odor whose name was,” says Flavia, “on the very tip of my tongue,” Flavia knows, without a doubt, that she’s encountered the biggest adventure of her young life.

Flavia is positive that a dead jack snipe, with a rare Black Penny stamp impaled on its bill, and found a short time prior to the discovery of the dead man, somehow ties in with his murder. If it was murder. And she worries that her own father, a stamp collector who “loved stamps more dearly than he loved his offspring” might somehow be involved.

Determined to solve the murder before Inspector Hewitt does – if he does – and with very little to go on, Flavia is off on her mother’s old bicycle, renamed “Gladys” by our heroine, to interview suspects, conduct necessary research, and even nose around in the rubbish because “You never know what you’re getting into when you stick your nose in other people’s rubbish.”

It’s safe to say that Flavia’s “nosing around” gets her into more trouble that she’s ever encountered in her eleven years. Before you read very far into this charming book, you’ll know that Flavia’s going to need all of her cunning and all of her knowledge, about chemistry and about everything else, in order to clear someone she loves and bring a real murderer to justice.

I loved this fresh, original, and often funny, mystery. Though one might expect a terribly precocious eleven-year-old, who dabbles in poisonous concoctions and gets the best of most, if not all, of the adults around her to be insufferable, Flavia comes across as a breath of fresh air. For all her precociousness, all her intelligence, and all her terribly strong will, there’s a sweetness and a vulnerability about Flavia de Luce that make her downright lovable, and the reader can’t help but respond. And even though Flavia describes herself as an “eleven-year-old murderess in pigtails and jumper,” she’s not nearly as bad as she – and some reviewers – make her out to be. No, she’s no pushover, and she’s certainly nobody’s fool, and really, there’s nothing wrong with that. Flavia’s brave, witty, and imaginative. She’s a little girl with whom most readers really enjoy spending time. And make no mistake, Flavia de Luce is no younger version of Nancy Drew or Maisie Dobbs or even Miss Marple. Flavia, just like the amateur sleuths mentioned above, is truly an original, but any comparison ends there.

The supporting cast of characters is wonderfully drawn as well. Besides the members of Flavia’s family, Mrs. Mullet, and Dogger, there’s a rather mysterious photographer, and Miss Mountjoy, the retired librarian, whose “Reign of Terror” has become legend, and who’s the niece of “old Cuppa Twining,” an academic whose death many years ago is linked to Colonel de Luce and to the book’s present day murder. There’s Maximilian Brock, a retired musician, who may be earning a living writing stories for American romance magazines under feminine pen names. There’s Tully, owner of “The Thirteen Drakes,” his daughter, Mary, and host of village eccentrics, all of who seem utterly believable.

I also thought Bradley did a wonderful job of bringing a 1950s English village to life. I could really “see” the shops, the old hotel, the library, the fields, and the woods. And Buckshaw. Buckshaw is, I think, a wonderful place. Amazingly, Bradley has not spent much time at all in the English countryside. Still, he did a marvelous job of evoking England just after the war, and showing the reader that the war, though officially ended, is still very much a part of day-to-day life in Bishop’s Lacey.

The mystery itself is wonderfully set up. It’s complex enough to keep one reading and guessing, but not so complex as to detract from Flavia’s charming narration. And thankfully, it is believable.

I found the pacing in this book to be “just right.” It never bogs down, yet it’s slow enough to reflect sleepy village life. This is more of a cozy, after all, not a fast paced thriller, though Bradley does include many twists and turns in his plot, enough, I think, to keep even the most demanding reader interested and guessing. It’s fun to follow Flavia as she investigates one clue after another, and tricks or cajoles one adult after another into sharing his or her confidences and memories. And, just so we don’t forget that Flavia is only eleven-years-old, no matter how clever and intelligent she is, there’s a beautiful exploration of the father-daughter relationship as Flavia comes to understand that her father isn’t invincible, and that he does have his faults, like anyone else.

The prose in this book is delightful, just perfect for the subject matter and the characters. Flavia’s voice is incredible. I was totally prepared to reject an eleven-year-old narrator, especially one so precocious, but I found myself not only accepting of Flavia, but adoring her as well. This wonderful, courageous little girl really does deserve a series all her own.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is written with a wicked sense of humor, Flavia’s sense of humor, of course, and one that suits the book perfectly. The excerpt below will show you what I mean. The de Luces are Catholics, but of necessity, they attend an Anglican church, something that Flavia doesn’t mind at all:

Even though we de Luces had been Roman Catholics since chariot races were all the rage, that did not keep us from attending St. Tancred’s Bishop’s Lacey’s only church and a fortress of the Church of England if there ever was one.

There were several reasons for our patronage. The first was its handy location, and another the fact that Father and the Vicar had both (although at different times) been to school at Greyminster. Besides, Father had once pointed out to us, consecration was permanent, like a tattoo. St. Tancred’s, he said, had been a Roman Catholic Church before the Reformation and, in his eyes, remained one.

Consequently, every Sunday morning without exception we straggled across the fields like ducks, Father slashing intermittently at the vegetation with his Malacca walking stick, Feely, Daffy, and me in that order, and Dogger, in his Sunday best, bringing up the rear.

No one at St. Tancred’s paid us the slightest attention. Some years before, there had been a minor outbreak of grumbling from the Anglicans, but all had been settled without blood or bruises by a well-timed contribution to the Organ Restoration fund.

“Tell them we may not be praying with them,” Father told the Vicar, “but we are at least not actively praying against them.”

Once, when Feely lost her head and bolted for the Communion rail, Father refused to speak to her until the following Sunday. Ever since that day, whenever she so much as shifted her feet in church, Father would mutter, “Steady on, old girl.” He did not need to catch her eye; his profile, which was that of the standard-bearer in some particularly ascetic Roman legion, was enough to keep us in our places. At least in public.

Now, glancing over at Feely as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil’s Hairball.

The congregation at St. Tancred’s had soon become accustomed to our ducking and bobbing, and we basked in Christian charity – except for the time that Daffy told the organist, Mr. Denning, that Harriet had instilled in all of us her firm belief that the story of the Flood in Genesis was derived from the racial memory of the cat family, with particular reference to the drowning of kittens.

That had caused a bit of a stir, but Father had put things right by making a handsome donation to the Roof Repair Fund, a sum he deducted from Daffy’s allowance.

If you like that kind of whimsical, tongue-in-cheek humor, you’re sure to love this book. Flavia is possessed of so much joie de vivre she manages to lighten the reader’s heart and put a smile on his or her face despite the fact that we’re reading about the solution to a murder.

With The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley has set the bar very high for his mystery series. I have no doubts that he manages, in subsequent books, to live up to, or exceed, the promise of the first book. This is a series I’m going to follow, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy myself more and more with each book.

5/5

Recommended: If you like the “cozy” genre of mysteries, I think you’ll love this book.

Note: I don’t know how many books have been planned for this series, but the ones already published include:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Book 1)
The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag (Book 2)
A Red Herring with Mustard (Book 3)
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Book 4, to be released on November 1st)

Book Review - Solace by Belinda McKeon

2011-09-18T13:49:00.004-04:00

Solace, the debut novel from Irish poet and playwright Belinda McKeon, which has been getting a lot of attention lately, is a family drama, or more precisely, an exploration of the bonds and difficulties that exist between a father and a son. We initially encounter this particular father and son in a prologue that is really taken, not from the beginning of the book, but from its middle, a choice that’s partly good, and partly not-so-good.

The father is Tom Casey, a taciturn, hard-bitten, hard-working farmer in County Longford in southern Ireland. Tom is a man whose education and interests are quite limited. He knows all about honor, though, and loyalty and responsibility. There are those who would do well to take a leaf or two from Tom Casey’s book, even though he isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect. And while Tom loves his family fiercely, like the old fashioned man he is, he also expects them to obey. In Tom Casey’s house, Tom Casey’s word is law.

The person Tom understands least is his own son, Mark, who, as the book opens, is down from Dublin for the summer with his young daughter, Aiofe, to help his father with the baling of the hay. The two men eye each other with suspicion and mistrust. Tom sees Mark as sullen, while Mark resents Tom’s attentions to Aiofe. (That strange – to American ears – name seems to be pronounced ee-FA.) In the book’s opening pages, we get a sense of the strained relationship between Tom and Mark, and we also get the sense that something significant has happened that affects, not just these two men, but the entire Casey family. It isn’t what’s said; it’s what’s unsaid. It’s in the looks the local shopgirls give Tom and Aiofe as they make their purchases. And this isn’t the first time those looks have been given:

It was as familiar to him by now as the sight of his own eyes in the bathroom mirror, the look that he had caught on their faces: fear and thrill and greed and pure excitement; a glimpse right into the wreckage on the side of the road.

After presenting us with the prologue, McKeon moves the reader back in time to the events that set her story in motion, back to Mark’s days as a student at Trinity College in Dublin. Unlike his father, Mark never had any use for rural life, and he was relieved to leave the farm for Dublin and Trinity. But Mark doesn’t really fit in with “big city” life, either. He’s a PhD candidate, writing a thesis on the work of Maria Edgeworth, a writer who was from the same part of Ireland as Mark, and whose family's former ascendancy estate now houses the hospital where Mark's mother, Maura, used to work as a nurse. Like many grad students, Mark finds he’s late turning in the next chapter of his thesis; in fact, he’s pretty much lost interest in school and would rather drift along, drinking beer and frittering away his time.

Mark’s life changes when he meets pretty, green-eyed, trainee solicitor, Joanne Lynch, who just happens to have grown up very close to Mark’s family’s home. More outgoing that Tom, and more energetic, Joanne might seem, at first glance, to be just what Mark needs in order to turn his stalled life around. There’s a huge problem, however. Joanne’s late father was a real scoundrel, a swindler, and one of the persons he swindled was Tom Casey. And Tom Casey still bears a grudge against the Lynch family, a grudge that will come into play when Mark and Joanne embark upon an intense love affair, one that quickly produces the couple's daughter, the charming Aiofa.

This “ancient grudge” theme is a familiar one in Irish literature. It’s been done before, and I really can’t say it’s done best in Solace. It isn’t. Edna O’Brien did a far better job working with the “ancient grudge” theme in Wild Decembers, for example. And if one wants the best example of a “continuation of the parents’ feud” one need look no further than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The “ancient grudge” and the “continuation of the parents’ feud,” however, aren’t the main themes of this novel. The father-son relationship, and the divide between the rural/traditional and the city/progressive ways of life always take center stage. Joanne even has a small subplot that revolves around the parent-child relationship, around family inheritance and family responsibility, but this subplot isn’t as developed or as significant as it could have been.

To tell you that a tragic event takes place just past the midpoint of this book probably isn’t going to come as any surprise. It’s been foreshadowed in this review, and that’s only because McKeon foreshadows it so strongly in her book. Far too strongly, I think. I was surprised that the author gave so much away so soon, given how subtle she was in her writing regarding other things, e.g., a physical fight between Tom and Mark.

One professional reviewer characterized the tragedy that befalls the Casey family as one “which even Hardy might have found it difficult to deal.” I can’t agree with that. My goodness, has the reviewer not read Jude the Obscure? Thomas Hardy wasn’t afraid to tackle any tragedy, and while the bereavement in Solace is truly terrible and truly tragic, it’s not something that’s unique to the Casey family. That doesn’t mean I didn’t care. I did. At least I tried to. It does, however, mean that the book isn’t as fresh and original as it could have been. In some ways, I thought McKeon was taking the easy way out. There were so many other ways, ways that hadn’t been done to death, to throw Tom and Mark, and even Aiofe, together and test their relationships and their boundaries.

Three very different characters – Mark, Tom, and Joanne – function as point-of-view characters in this novel. While I thought Tom was particularly well drawn, I can’t say the same for Mark and Joanne. Joanne’s a likable girl, filled with energy and spirit. We know too little about Joanne, though, her deeper feelings about Mark and Aiofe and her own parents.

I have to admit, I didn’t like Mark at all. He seemed downright childish and hateful when he observes, with much disdain, that Tom doesn’t even know the meaning of “ignorant” and when noting another farmer’s talk about “global warning.” I don’t need to like every character I encounter in a novel. In fact, sometimes the ones I don’t like are the most interesting. And there’s the rub. Not only is Mark unlikable, he’s extremely dull and uninteresting as well. Nothing, not even Joanne or Aiofe seems to awaken a spark of passion in this fumbling, callow, and self-centered young man. While reading, I was always anxious to leave Joanne’s and Mark’s words behind and get back to Tom’s.

The very best thing about Solace is the character of Tom Casey. Now, Tom is definitely not dull and callow. In many ways, Tom is very ordinary and unremarkable. He’s a hard-working man who adores his young granddaughter and finds it difficult to get along with his grown son, a son who has very different ideas about life and how it should be lived. Tom, though, possesses a vitality, and yes, even a charm, that all of the other characters in Solace lack. I felt the uniqueness of Tom, the genuineness. One of the novel’s best and most genuine scenes revolves around Tom as he’s first taken aback by one of Aiofe’s tantrums, then finds the whole thing laughable, then dissolves into tears, the tears he had been, until that point, unable to shed. It’s the character of Tom Casey who brings this book to life. He’s just a magnificent creation.

As unlikable as I found Mark, I did like the way McKeon refused to judge her characters. All of them are, in their own way, greatly flawed human beings, and fallible, never wholly “right” and never wholly “wrong.” This refusal to judge reminded me of Kent Haruf’s beautiful novels Plainsong and Eventide, both of which I loved, and of course, of William Trevor, though McKeon definitely isn’t on par with either of those great authors. I’m not saying she couldn’t be in the future, just that she isn’t there yet despite the praise Solace has received.

The prose in this novel is adequate, but except for snatches here and there, not great. I did like McKeon’s understatement, and I thought it fit well into the Irish tradition of John McGahern, Brian Moore, and William Trevor, for instance. But unlike those giants of Irish literature, McKeon seems so afraid of falling into sentimentality that she almost completely avoids any expression of emotion, leaving her book rather flat and monotone, and failing, most of the time, to engage at least one reader. The stark tension and pinpoint focus of the prologue, which really is wonderfully written, is sadly lost in stale jokes and too many details for the balance for the book.

And there’s altogether too much “telling” in this novel as opposed to “showing.” A prime example is a physical altercation between Tom and Mark. This should have been a raw, visceral scene, but McKeon fails to give us any of that raw emotion:

Then he (Tom) went deep, went fast, moved as though on ice through convolutions of his own invention, through spirals that could not be anticipated and could not be stopped; he was fluent, exhilarated, alight.

It’s pretty, though chilly, writing, but it leaves one uninvolved, and one of the fiction writer’s highest goals should be to involve the reader as much as possible. Except for Tom, and then not all the time, McKeon’s understatement left me unable to connect with this novel, unable to work up much caring one way or the other about things even though I really wanted to care. Sometimes raw emotion – even sentimentality – is a good thing. One just needs to use it sparingly.

McKeon does have a wonderful gift for description. Her snapshots of rural Irish life in County Longford are both charming and intoxicating:

It had been a beautiful summer’s evening. It had been hard to want to be anywhere else, looking out at the meadows stretching golden against the sunset, and at the small lake beyond them, and at the bruised blue and grey of the hills on the horizon.

And lest the reader forget that this is Ireland in crisis, in the midst of a financial meltdown:

Inside those houses on those hills were people, and people made everything difficult; tripped over one another and tripped one another up.

While the romance between Mark and Joanne felt inauthentic, and therefore failed to move me, I was moved by McKeon’s images of life in rural Ireland. For example, a frosted tractor window that looks like it’s not “one pane of glass but a thousand tiny chips, held together for one last moment within the square of the frame,” could also be a metaphor for the fragile depiction of human relationships and human life found in this book. It was a beautiful image and one I won’t forget. I was also moved by Maura Casey as she regards the sexual adventures of the young “with a mixture of envy and exhaustion.” Now that’s real humor. Gentle humor. Grown up humor as opposed to Mark’s cruder expressions, which I didn’t enjoy at all.

McKeon balances character and plot well, but in the end, I just didn’t think there was enough plot in this book – no more than what’s on the flyleaf, really – to sustain a whole novel, and I’m a person who greatly prefers character driven novels. I think Solace might have worked better as a longer short story, about the length of Claire Keegan’s beautiful and moving Foster. I’ll definitely take a look at anything else McKeon writes, however, but though I tried, this book really didn’t quite do it for me.

3/5 (The three stars are mostly for the character of Tom Casey.)

Recommended: If you like Marilynne Robinson, you will probably like this book as well.

Note: Belinda McKeon was born in Ireland in 1979 and grew up on a farm in Co. Longford. She studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin (BA) and University College, Dublin (MLitt). She's married and lives in Brooklyn, New York and in Ireland.

Book Review - Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

2011-09-12T00:54:00.000-04:00

Jennifer White may or may not have killed her best friend, Amanda O’Toole. If she didn’t, someone in Chicago wants to make it look like Jennifer did. Jennifer, you see is a sixty-four-year-old, newly retired orthopedic surgeon, and one hand of Amanda’s body was found with four of her fingers surgically removed by someone who definitely knew what he or she was doing.

So begins the plot of Alice LaPlante’s debut novel, Turn of Mind. I thought it was an excellent way to draw the reader into the book because Jennifer White suffers from dementia. She can’t remember if she killed Amanda O’Toole or not. She can’t remember if she knows anything about Amanda’s murder. Most of the time, Jennifer can’t even remember that Amanda is dead. And even though Jennifer’s memory is crumbling, something nags at its edges, trying to force its way in, “something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets.”

When the police learn that the two friends were heard arguing the very night Amanda was killed, they move Jennifer from a “person of interest” to the primary suspect. As fate – or literature – would have it, one of the police detectives investigating Amanda’s murder had a partner who suffered from Alzheimer’s. This makes the detective – a woman – very knowledgeable when eliciting information from Jennifer, and it makes eliciting that information necessary when it’s learned that Amanda and Jennifer had, not a warm and loving friendship, but one sometimes filled with betrayal and complications, instead. And, when Jennifer’s caregiver, Magdalena, points out that Jennifer no longer has access to any sharp objects, Jennifer, almost gleefully, opens a piano bench stuffed with junk and pulls out a rapier-shape scalpel to show the detective, a scalpel that’s perfect for removing someone’s fingers. When the police detective asks Jennifer why she thinks anyone, even a murderer, would do such a thing, Jennifer replies, “I’m not a psychiatrist," then goes on as if she is: “A hand without fingers can't easily grasp, can't easily hold on to things. It could be a message for someone perceived as greedy, mercenary. Or someone who won't let go emotionally.” Okay. Maybe.

Jennifer’s husband has passed away, but she has two interesting adult children living close to her own home in Chicago. Mark describes himself as a “tall, dark, handsome twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, with a bit of a substance abuse problem, looking for love and money in what are apparently all the wrong places.” He reminds Jennifer of her late husband.

Fiona, twenty-four, is a tenure-track professor, who describes herself as a “total freak with mother issues.” From the beginning, I greatly preferred Mark, substance abuse problems and all, but Jennifer seems to prefer Fiona. “Her I trust,” says Jennifer. “My Fiona. She places paper after paper in front of me, and I sign without reading.” (Never a good idea. Even if the person offering you the papers is your own daughter.)

In order to remain in her lovely, old Chicago house, a house that is only three doors down from the house in which Amanda lived, Jennifer has hired a caregiver, Magdalena. To aid her failing memory, Jennifer labels her photographs. She posts a sign on her kitchen wall that reads, “Live in the Moment.” And, she’s begun keeping a journal, a journal in which she and others – Magdalena, Mark, Fiona – all write. (Interestingly, there are conflicting notes from Mark and Fiona in Jennifer’s journal, and each child warns his/her mother not to trust the other.) The journal’s meant to serve as an anchor in Jennifer's life of confusion and uncertainty and fear, for Jennifer calls dementia “…a death sentence. The death of the mind. I've already given notice at the hospital, announced my retirement. I have started keeping a journal so I have some continuity in my life. But I won't be able to live on my own for very much longer.” Not even with Magdalena around.

Jennifer may have had to give up her illustrious career as a surgeon – one day in the OR, she even forgot what a surgical “clamp” was called and asked for “that shiny thing that pinches and holds” – and her volunteer work at a clinic for those without health insurance is over as well, but on good days, at least, she still has her memories. Memories of her late husband, of her children, of her travels to far-off places like St. Petersburg, Russia, and of course, memories of Amanda.

It’s through Jennifer’s journal reminiscences, on her good days, that we get to know Mark, Fiona, Amanda, the friends’ husbands, and what life was like for Jennifer prior to the onset of Alzheimer’s. We also get to know Jennifer, and if you’re like me, you won’t be surprised to learn that she was a woman who was highly intelligent, often brusque and dismissive, and at times, formidable. She had the strength to do what had to be done including keeping her marriage together after learning her husband was unfaithful.

Amanda, we come to learn, was a highly intelligent woman, too, and rather formidable, just like Jennifer. At times, Amanda was a good friend to Jennifer, but at other times, she competed for Fiona’s attention, and she proved – more than once – that she had a cruel streak. At one point in the book Jennifer calls Amanda “the inflictor and healer of my pain. Both.” Jennifer, according to Amanda, if we can rely on what Jennifer tells us, has narcissistic tendencies. She is, again according to Amanda, a woman who sees herself as “better” than others. “People,” Jennifer says, “who take this to an extreme are called sociopaths, Amanda tells me. You have certain tendencies. You should watch them.”

And Jennifer’s own illness is recorded, by her, in her journal, often in great detail:

This half state. Life in the shadows. As the neurofibrillary tangles proliferate, as the neuritic plaques harden, as synapses cease to fire and my mind rots out, I remain aware. An unanesthetized patient.

As Jennifer’s condition deteriorates and she becomes more and more dependent and childlike, the atmosphere of the book becomes one of palpable fear, and the images grow more and more haunting and unsettling. At night, Jennifer can be found wandering between her own brownstone and Amanda’s, puzzling over the police tape that cordons off her late friend’s living room. The sweltering heat of a Chicago summer is also brought to life in the pages of this book. You can feel the humidity rising and hear the summer insects whirring and buzzing in the air.

The visits from the police, of course, continue, and they grow more and more insistent and brutal as Jennifer gives them less and less. Of course, with her mind crumbling as it is, Jennifer can’t stand trial for murder, but if she’s found to have murdered Amanda, she will be sent to a state institution. The stakes are higher than they might seem at first glance.

Just as Jennifer is trapped inside a mind that is, in her words, “rotting out,” the first person point-of-view traps the reader as well. Everything is filtered through Jennifer’s unreliable memory, so it’s necessarily fragmented and rather staccato in terms of flow. Some readers will like this while others will be bothered it. I’ll admit, I’m a huge fan of William Faulkner and his long, flowing sentences and paragraphs, so I didn’t really enjoy the fragmentary nature of this book, though I do understand its necessity. Everything, after all, can’t be “long and flowing,” and fragmentary and staccato work well in this novel.

Employing Jennifer as the POV character does add tension and a sense of anxiety and immediacy to this narrative. We know the police are closing in on Jennifer, and we also know complete mental oblivion is closing in as well. This “closing in” adds a very claustrophobic element to the novel that serves it wonderfully. The author does have a rather sophisticated, if somewhat affected (at least in this book) prose style, and to her enormous credit, she eschews all sentimentality and never lets Jennifer descend into self-pity.

I didn’t fall completely in love with the book, though. While the character of Jennifer is rich and wonderfully complex, I found the other characters less-than-fully-realized, Amanda in particular, and I was terribly disappointed by this lack. True, we “know” the other characters only through Jennifer’s memories and recollections, and Jennifer, of course, is suffering from dementia. She does, however, have her “good” days during which her memory is crystal clear. I felt LaPlante could have given us a fuller picture of the supporting characters on one of Jennifer’s lucid days. Fiona and Mark don’t fare any better than Amanda, and the picture of the women’s husbands is particularly flat.

The other big disappointment I experienced when reading this book had to do with the mystery of “who killed Amanda?” Turn of Mind is not a suspenseful mystery by any means, nor is it a genuine “thriller.” The mystery part of this novel is really very amateurishly done. Most readers, I think, are going to figure things out pretty quickly. I know I did, and I’m not particularly good at figuring out “whodunit.” And because the book is being marketed as a “literary thriller,” I think many of its readers are going to be attracted to it because of its “thriller” qualities. Sadly, those readers are probably going to be disappointed.

Where this book really shines is in its presentation of Jennifer White and her struggle with dementia. Most of the time, I felt totally convinced that I was reading the “real” journal of a real life Alzheimer’s patient. Jennifer was that compelling and forceful. I especially liked the way LaPlante portrayed her protagonist’s vulnerability. That vulnerability kept Jennifer from lapsing into a caricature of a “tough talking dame.” It kept her credible.

Turn of Mind is a bleak, tragic book, and it certainly won’t lift your spirits, so please don’t expect it to. After all, Alzheimer’s is a bleak, tragic affliction. Despite the tragedy, there’s much beauty in the book as well. LaPlante has managed to capture the indomitability of the human spirit amid overwhelming pain and suffering. It’s this quality that lifts the book out of the sea of “every other book about Alzheimer’s sufferers” and elevates it into something more. And thankfully, this wonderful “something more” never fades, even as Jennifer’s mind continues to unravel at an ever-accelerating speed.

Sadly, as the book nears its end, some readers might feel Jennifer’s forgetfulness is something of a mercy after all.

4/5 (Only 1.5 stars for the mystery, though.)

Recommended: Yes, but read this book for the picture it paints of Jennifer White. It’s wonderful. Anyone looking for a good mystery won’t find it here. I do look forward to LaPlante’s next novel. As long as it isn’t a mystery, that is.

Note: Alice LaPlante teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford University where she has a Wallace Stegner fellowship. She lives in Palo Alto, California.

The 2011 Man Booker Shortlist Announced

2011-09-06T12:30:00.001-04:00

The Booker shortlist was announced today in London. I have to admit, my two favorites, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side did not make it from the longlist to the shortlist. I thought both of those books were beautiful and masterful, and I was really hoping Barry would win since he didn't capture the prize for The Secret Scripture.

On the whole, I do like the shortlist, though. My favorites are Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch and Half Blood Blues by Edi Edugyan, but all the books have something special to offer.

The 2011 Booker Shortlist consists of:

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes - Barnes tackles the disappointments of ageing, the slipperiness of memory and the intensity of youthful experience, as narrator Tony remembers his brilliant schoolfriend Adrian and his difficult first girlfriend Veronica. The bequest of a diary puts all his comfortable certainties into question.

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birth - Birch’s 11th novel, also longlisted for the Orange, is a brilliantly vivid recreation of the 19th-century London docks and a doomed expedition to the South Pacific to capture a ‘dragon’ for the charismatic naturalist Jamrach. Birch combines precise historical detail with epic themes of wanderlust and survival.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt - Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired killers on the American west coast in 1851, during the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Caught in a cycle of inflationary violence, Eli begins to wonder if there's not an easier way to make a life, in a Western that explores humanity in the face of huge economic and technological change.

Half Blood Blues by Edi Edugyan - Canadian author Edugyan's second novel begins soon after the fall of Paris in 1940, when jazz trumpeter Hieronymous Falk is arrested in a cafe. He is never heard from again. Just 20, he was both a German citizen, and black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin.

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman - The epidemic of teenage knife crime is the backdrop to this debut, in which an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy turns detective after witnessing the aftermath of a murder on a London estate. Voice is all in a novel that offsets adult realities with the innocent argot of small boys.

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, a former Russian correspondent of "The Economist," tackles Putin-era corruption in this assured debut. The narrator, an English lawyer living in Moscow, finds his morals compromised when he becomes entangled in a shady property deal.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted authors, and good luck.

(Descriptions courtesy of "The Guardian" Website)

Book Review - The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

2011-09-05T01:08:00.000-04:00

I have to admit that though I work in publishing and though, up until 2010, I lived more years in Switzerland than I’d lived in the United States, I’d never heard of Marlen Haushofer until this year. True, Frau Haushofer was Austrian, and was born in Frauenstein, Austria in 1920. But Austria borders Switzerland (to the east) and both countries speak dialects derived from High German. No matter what we speak in everyday life, both Swiss and Austrians write in High German. And I attended school in Switzerland (and in France). I’ve no excuse; I really should have heard – and read – Marlen Haushofer at least ten years ago. But better late than never, right?

Marlen Haushofer studied German in Vienna and in Graz before settling in Steyr. In 1941, she married Manfred Haushofer, a dentist, who she later divorced and then remarried, bearing him two sons. Haushofer’s first novel, A Handful of Life, was published in 1955. The Wall, one of her most successful books, was published in 1963, and The Loft, her final novel, in 1969. Haushofer received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1968. She died of cancer in Vienna in 1970. I am not positive, but I believe only The Wall and The Loft have been published in English, The Wall by Quartet Books in 1991, and translated by Shaun Whiteside, The Loft, also published by Quartet, and translated by Amanda Prantera. Both may prove a little difficult to find in the United States but are well worth the hunt.

The Wall centers around a middle-aged widow who’s holidaying at her cousin’s alpine home. One evening the others leave for a night out in the nearly village. Expecting them home later that night, the widow is quite surprised when she awakens the next morning and finds herself alone. Deciding to investigate, the widow, who, through the course of the novel, remains nameless, takes her cousin’s dog, Luchs, and discovers an invisible wall that separates them from the “outside” world. On the other side of the wall is a man, frozen in mid-motion. Our narrator soon discovers that “her” world is now bounded by a measurable area that is partially forested, partially alpine meadow, and occupied by a variety of different animals.

I thought this was a wonderful beginning. It’s not entirely original, but it was certainly interesting, and it did make me want to know “what happened next.” I felt compelled to read on. I was also struck by the fact that The Wall was, for me, reminiscent of the work of Jose Saramago, i.e., a strange, new world in which the fantastic seems commonplace; an unnamed narrator in an unnamed place; a faithful dog.

The Wall is often touted as belonging to “feminist, dystopian” literature, and the heroine as being a “female Robinson Crusoe.” I generally don’t care for either feminist or dystopian literature, and I didn’t like the character of Robinson Crusoe very much, so I really didn’t expect to find much to enjoy in The Wall, but, save for one incident that almost made me regret I’d read the book, I was wrong.

The narrator of The Wall soon discovers that she is, in all probability, the last living person on earth, though she is not the last living being. There is Luchs, and a nameless cat as well, who later bears a litter of kittens; there’s Bella, a cow found in a nearby alpine meadow; and there are several deer living in the forest. Forced to learn to work with Nature, though never against it, our narrator learns how to milk Bella, how to use her hands in utilitarian ways, how to grow crops of potatoes, beans, and hay, and how to kill the deer and preserve the meat, thus keeping everyone – except the deer, of course – alive.

Readers who expect a fast moving plot won’t find it in this book. The Wall, with its minimalist plot is a supremely interior, introspective book as we learn the details of all the book’s heroine must accomplish in order to keep herself, and “her” animals, alive. We celebrate her victories, and we worry over her defeats.

As the narrator struggles with the hard, physical labor of “just remaining alive” she makes many discoveries about herself, discoveries surrounding her personality, her femininity, and her very humanity. I appreciated the author’s meticulous attention to detail in this book and thought it aided my understanding of the narrator and what she valued in life.

I might not be right, but for me, at least, The Wall was an exploration of what it means to be human and our connectedness with all of nature. The narrator must take care not to lose sight of her humanity as she struggles through two winters and one glorious summer with only a dog, a cat, and a cow for company. The things our narrator thought were so important turn out to be not important at all, such as appearance. Survival must come first and foremost. To that end, Bella plays the most important role in the narrator’s life. All of the animals are beautifully drawn, and all really come alive – as major characters – in the pages of this book. Haushofer’s characterization of Luchs is particularly powerful.

When a second unexpected catastrophe occurs, the narrator feels the need to write her story down, to explore more fully the solitary life she’s been leading. But who will read what the woman has written? Anyone? This question is never answered, just as the reason for the sudden extinguishing of all life some two years before is never given.

The Wall is, at times, a claustrophobic book, yet it’s powerful and provocative as well. The author has a fluid, lyrical writing style that serves her minimalist plot quite well. The Wall is as disturbing as Cormac McCarthy’s prize winning novel The Road, but The Wall, at least for me, was far more rewarding as well. This is, in the end, a beautiful book that I’ll remember for many years to come.

4.5/5

Recommended: Definitely. This is beautiful book, beautifully written, but the plot is minimalist and introspective.

Book Review - Classics - Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

2011-08-31T20:26:00.001-04:00

Note: This review contains information that some readers may consider plot spoilers. Because the book is ninety-two years old, and a masterpiece of the Western canon, I felt most readers would be familiar with the story even if they hadn’t read the book, but to those who aren’t, and don’t want to know any plot details, it might be best to exit stage left now, i.e., skip this review.

Though on its surface, Death in Venice seems to be a fairly straightforward story of homoeroticism, it’s actually a dense, richly layered tale of repression, obsession, and decadence. Thomas Mann rarely, if ever, wrote anything that was straightforward. Yes, Death in Venice is, most certainly, a story of homoerotic obsession, but like a series of nested Russian dolls, just when you discover one aspect of the story, you realize there is another...and another...and another. In fact, Death in Venice is so rich and multi-faceted, so highly symbolic and polarized, that the definitive word regarding its many interpretations will, no doubt, never be written.

The character around whom Death in Venice revolves is Gustave von Aschenbach, a fussy, repressed, aging German writer who is possessed of a high degree of Apollonian discipline, bourgeois respectability, and dignified solemnity.

One fine day in May, von Aschenbach, who is a highly complex and complicated man, sets out from his home in Munich, overtired and overwrought, for a stroll in that city’s famed English Gardens. As he crosses a cemetery at sunset on his way back home, he encounters an apparition that is “baring his long, white teeth to the gums,” an apparition so horrifying it sends von Aschenbach into paroxysms of terror and hallucinations of “a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky—sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous” that is filled with “beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora.”

Recovering, von Aschenbach quickly retreats from the specter’s gaze with the desire to travel…to Venice, of course. Although highly touted as a city of beauty and romance, Venice is also, to those who know it well, a dank and sinister place, its calli and rii filled to overflowing with darkness and decay. Von Aschenbach’s hallucination could well have been a description of Venice, herself.

Nevertheless, von Aschenbach journeys, not without some difficulty, to the Lido, Venice’s famed beach island, where he takes up residence in the luxurious Hotel des Bains (still operating today, and yes, Mann, himself, did spend time there in 1911, but in the company of his wife and brother).

Von Aschenbach believes that he’s been successful in trading chilly, northern decorum for the sunnier Dionysian hedonism of the south. What von Aschenbach doesn’t realize, of course, is that Venice isn’t Capri or Sanremo or Viareggio. The Adriatic is far less welcoming than the Mediterranean, and von Aschenbach has journeyed, not to a life-affirming, sun-washed landscape of health and restoration, but to a Stygian underbelly of disease and death. Though it doesn’t rain, the sun rarely really shines, and Venice proves to be oppressive, almost suffocating, and the shallow, stagnant canals stink with an ever-growing cholera epidemic of which the public is largely unaware.

Soon after his arrival in Venice, as von Aschenbach is taking tea on the terrace of his hotel, he finds his attention drawn to three girls and a boy sitting at the table next to him. It’s the boy, Tadzio, a young Polish youth of fourteen, who captures von Aschenbach’s attention, for Tadzio’s beauty is arresting. Stunning, pale, and translucent, Tadzio is almost lifeless in his resemblance to classical Greek statuary. Tadzio appeals to von Aschenbach’s highly developed aesthetic desires, but even though the older man and the young boy never exchange a word, let alone a touch, it isn’t long before von Aschenbach’s aesthetic desires give way to those of a definitely more erotic nature. As Venice falls victim to cholera, von Aschenbach falls victim to obsession, and the fate of both city and man are sealed.

There has been so much discussion through the years regarding the “real” meaning of Death in Venice. Is it a rather uncomplicated story of erotic obsession, or is it, as Mann, himself said, a story about “the artist’s dignity?” Was von Aschenbach in love with Tadzio or simply the “idea” of Tadzio? Can the story even be taken literally? Did von Aschenbach really travel to Venice and become obsessed with Tadzio or was the entire episode, subsequent to von Aschenbach’s hallucination in the cemetery, simply a product of his fevered and overwrought imagination, an imagination that had been pushed so deeply into subconsciousness as to cause grave emotional illness? There have been very erudite and convincing arguments for and against all of the above and more. I have my own opinion, which I’m not going to offer here, but I will say that Death in Venice is one of the most densely layered narratives anyone can ever hope to find. I think it’s to Mann’s credit that each reader of this novella will no doubt come away from it with a more or less different interpretation.

Mann’s writing style is truly unique. He’s detailed, yet oblique. He’s moody and atmospheric. He never tells us anything directly, preferring instead to only hint at what’s going on, making his reader work doubly hard to understand. Most importantly, Mann never used “filler.” Every word he wrote is there for a purpose, though Mann was definitely not a “spare” writer. Quite the contrary; his prose is extraordinarily voluptuous. Although his work moves along at a moderate pace, Mann’s narrative is sensually languid. The example below, in which Mann describes the sunrise, will give some idea of what I mean:

Awe of the miracle filled his soul new-risen from its sleep. Heaven, earth, and its waters yet lay enfolded in the ghostly, glassy pallor of dawn; one paling star still swam in the shadowy vast. But there came a breath, a winged word from far and inaccessible abodes, that Eros was rising from the side of her spouse; and there was that first sweet reddening of the farthest strip of sea and sky that manifests creation to man’s sense. She neared, the goddess, ravisher of youth, who stole away Cleitos and Cephalus and, defying all the envious Olympians, tasted beautiful Orion’s love. At the world’s edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze; purple effulgence fell upon the sea, that seemed to heave it forward on its welling waves; from horizon to zenith went great quivering thrusts like golden lances, the gleam became a glare; without a sound, with godlike violence, glow and glare and rolling flames streamed upwards, and with flying hoof-beats the steeds of the sun-god mounted the sky.

Some people are going to wonder why Mann didn’t simply write: The sun rose. If you’re one of those, then you’ll probably find Death in Venice too heady and dense for your taste. If you’re a person like me, who’s in love with words and all they can do, especially in the hands of an artist and a craftsman par excellence, then you’re going to love Death in Venice and want to reread it from time to time. It does contain many, many references to Greek classicism, and readers unfamiliar with that subject should keep a reference handy.

I’ve read Death in Venice in the original German, in French, and in English, in H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation, the translation that was the standard for many years. Some years back, however, a new translation become available. Michael Henry Heim, a UCLA linguist, has given Mann’s prose a lighter, more modern, less stuffy feel. The passage I quoted was taken from the Heim translation, which I read recently, but I really can’t recommend one translation over the other. While Heim’s is more modern and limpid, Lowe-Porter’s, I feel, captures more fully the essence of the original German. In the end, it’s just personal preference.

In closing, I would like to mention Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of this novella. Yes, it is the very quintessence of “sumptuous,” and to those of us familiar with Death in Venice, it is a delight for the senses. If you’re not familiar with the novella, however, you’ll gain nothing by watching the film instead, beautiful though it is (it contains no dialogue). And really, the book is only seventy-three pages long, and it’s definitely one of the masterpieces of the Western canon. No one should pass it by.

Although interpretations of Death in Venice vary, and no doubt will continue to vary, it is one of the most haunting and beautifully wrought works in all of literature. Various interpretations aside, in the end, we are all left with the image of the young, beautiful Tadzio beckoning to the morbidly ill von Aschenbach, inviting the older man to join him, inviting him at last, to partake “of the voluptuousness of doom” and “the promising immensity of it all.”

5/5

Recommended: Definitely. This book is a masterpiece of the Western canon, a hauntingly beautiful novel of obsession and decadence filled with much symbolism and many unforgettable images. It should be read by everyone at least once. And don't forget the Luchino Visconti film once you've read the book.

Book Review - Nobel Winning Authors - The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

2011-08-28T23:56:00.001-04:00

Although it was first published in 1986, I read The Piano Teacher in 2004, after author Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Prize win. I was still living in Switzerland part of the time, and I bought the book there and read it in German, since I was still concerned with keeping my German fluent. It wasn’t until very recently that I read the English translation. This really isn’t a book to read twice – it’s too dark – but a group of friends were discussing it, and they were discussing the English translation. I felt I needed to read that, too, in order to really participate in the discussion. And, in the seven years since I’d read the book, I’d forgotten some of the details.

The Piano Teacher is harrowing and intense, and it explores a side of life and sexuality that is so dark, most people will, I think, find it a little disturbing or off-putting. This is a book that repulses, while at the same time pulls you deeper and deeper into its dark and tormented heart.

The Piano Teacher centers around Professor Erika Kohut, a brilliant pianist and distinguished Schubert scholar at the Vienna Conservatory. Erika is a fortyish, repressed spinster type who still lives at home with her elderly mother. (Her father went mad and died in an asylum.) Despite Erika’s intelligence and talent, she’s never developed a life of her own, and she hides a dark and disturbing secret: Erika Kohut revels in sado-masochism and self-mutilation. Though legally sane, Erika knows she’s only one step away from madness, and she relishes that one step, wanting to experience it over and over and over again, if for no other reason that to prove to herself that she is still in control. This love of the thin line that separates the sane from the mad is, I think, the key to understanding Erika and the dark forces that drive her.

At the Conservatory, Erika rules her students with an iron hand. Instead of encouraging them, even the ones who show great promise, Erika belittles them, instead, and tells them they’ll never be real pianists. She also seems bored with her duties, and one gets the distinct impression that she considers her mediocre students beneath her and feels threatened by the ones who are truly brilliant. This is a teacher who could never win a popularity contest, and her harsh and demanding ways, of course, really don’t bring out the best in her pupils. Clearly, Erika relishes the sadistic control she exercises over her students.

We get some glimpse into why Erika feels she must be so controlling and disciplined at the Conservatory when we see her interact with her mother, a domineering woman who is something of a sadist herself, a woman who feels she must be Erika’s “inquisitor and executioner all at once.” Erika’s mother gave up much in her life to encourage her daughter’s musical talent and now she expects to be repaid. She expects Erika to hand over, not only her paycheck, but her soul as well. And while Erika and her mother trade slaps and punches, they also trade kisses of an erotic nature, and night after night, they share the same bed.

Most women of forty would simply leave and pursue a life of their own, but Erika is far too damaged and tormented for that. She finds some solace in voyeurism and in the sleazy video booths that show very badly made pornographic films. “Mother,” of course, knows nothing about Erika’s more kinky side. She lives under the illusion that her daughter is a fine, upstanding member of Viennese society and that her dignity and scholarship would never come into question.

Enter Walter Klemmer, a handsome, young engineer with a talent for, what else? The piano. And whose music? Schubert’s, of course. Over her protestations, Klemmer eventually becomes one of Erika’s pupils, and he proves to be something of a prodigy himself. He shines, and he also falls in love with Erika, despite the twenty-year gap in their ages. When the two embark on an affair, it’s an affair totally dictated by Erika. They engage in sexual relations, but only in the manner in which Erika wants to engage in them. And there is nothing “loving” about the love Erika and Walter make. It’s perverse, and it’s twisted, for Erika insists on, not the open and giving nature of true love, but the role of a victim, one who’s beaten, one who’s defiled, one who’s tormented. If Erika’s piano lessons are exercises in sadism, her lovemaking is an exercise in masochism.

What makes this book a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece, despite its extraordinarily disturbing qualities, is the relationship between Erika and Walter. Although Walter tells Erika, “You repulse me,” and “You should know what you can and can’t do to a man. The playing field must be level,” he nevertheless finds himself more and more attracted to her because she is, quite simply, awakening his own repressed sado-masochistic tendencies and desires.

Whenever two people become involved – as lovers, as friends, as student and teacher, as doctor and patient – there is some struggle for power, no matter how subtle. One person always emerges emotionally dominant, though not, perhaps stronger. This simply can’t be helped since people are not, as Walter would like, equals. Trouble comes when one is very much stronger than the other or when the “game” they’re playing is one fraught with danger. Erika and Walter prove to be more equal than Erika might have liked or was prepared for, and much to Walter’s dismay, he proves to be as apt a pupil in the bedroom as he is in the music room. He differs from Erika in one respect, however – he doesn’t know when to stop. He doesn’t have Erika’s control.

I think most readers will initially feel some sympathy for Erika, though she’s not at all likable. She didn’t, after all, grow up with the best of parents or in a family that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be called “nurturing.” As the book continues, however, it becomes more and more difficult to feel any sympathy for Walter, primarily because he refuses to share in the blame for the monster he becomes. As he tells Erika:

You have to admit it. You’re partly responsible. You can’t delve around inside people and then reject them.

No, you can’t, or at least you shouldn’t, but Walter’s ultimate revenge is too violent, too much of a betrayal for him not to shoulder some of the blame himself. Had he only admitted that he liked what Erika was awakening in him, maybe I could have understood him, but his refusal to accept any culpability at all makes him the “bad guy” of this book, no matter how charming and “normal” he seemed initially, and no matter how easy and convenient it would be to shift all the blame to Erika or her mother. And they, of course, are not blameless.

The second half of this book, which revolves around Walter and Erika’s affair, was, for me, more disturbing than the scenes of self-mutilation that came before. Many readers, I think, will be disturbed by the explicit descriptions of the tormented sexual encounters, some so much so, that they won’t want to finish the book. This isn’t, however, a book about sex. It’s a book about control and domination, about how control kills, maims, and eventually destroys beyond redemption. And shockingly, to the readers who are also music lovers, and I am one, (well, I have to qualify that, I love classical and baroque music), this is a fascinating exploration of the link between music and madness. Even though, as music lovers, we might like to deny this link, in our heart of hearts, we know it exists. The greatest musicians were obsessed, and anyone who’s studied music seriously knows the commitment to rigorous discipline that must be made. Even Schubert, the musical genius Erika and Walter both revere, died a madman, something Erika never tires of telling Walter. This isn’t to say that all musicians are madmen, only that the potential for madness exists in a higher degree than it does in most “ordinary” persons.

And, although this book may seem to present very explicit depictions of domination and control, the dynamics between Erika and her mother, Erika and her students, and Erika and Walter are really quite subtle. All of us know that our deepest passions, and I don’t mean just sexual passions, if wholly aroused, might very well spin out of control, and this both attracts and repulses some of us. Most of us, luckily, never have to grapple with the question of whether or not we could control ourselves at our most base. Erika is, admittedly, an extreme case, but still, she touches a chord within us.

The Piano Teacher is an extraordinarily bleak book, and its characters are people who have traveled far beyond the point of redemption. Yet they remain so very human, and that, I think, is what is so disturbing about this book. The fact that something and someone so bizarre and so violent could also be so overwhelmingly human comes as a bit of a surprise. At times I felt totally repulsed by the book, but I understood why, and I was able to look at it objectively and realize that it is truly a masterpiece of the interactions of people who teeter on the very brink of madness.

Like it or hate it, and I really think most readers are going to hate the book, it certainly isn’t forgettable, and I have to applaud its author for not shying away from uncomfortable subject matter. I know some readers will certainly be put off by the explicit descriptions of sado-masochistic sex between Erika and Walter, but had Jelinek failed to describe those scenes, we would have never known how far both Erika and Walter allowed their basest instincts to emerge. I’m definitely not a fan of books with explicit sexual descriptions. I think when sex is involved, it’s best to leave the details up to the imagination of the reader, but in all fairness to Jelinek, her readers would have never conjured up what she delivers. In order to fully understand the very damaged Erika and the dark forces she unleashes in Walter, one simply has to know the details, like it or not.

After reading this book in both the original German and in English, I have to say I think the English translation, by Joachim Neugroschel is excellent. The sentences seemed clipped and terse in English, but the book had that feel in the original German as well. Much of the book reads like the example below, which is taken from its beginning:

The piano teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, her father exited. Eventually, Erika learned how to move swiftly. She had to.

If you like to read Freud or Jung, especially Freud, and you want to explore the darkest, most dangerous recesses of the human psyche, then you will probably find The Piano Teacher to be a masterpiece, much as I did. (Though I admit, I do not read Freud or Jung, and I’m not terribly interested in psychology. I am, however, interested in human beings.) However, this is not a book for the faint of heart or those who like to live under the delusion that the world has been spun from pink cotton candy. If you want to stay away from darkness, from torment, from violence and despair, even in your reading material, then you probably wouldn’t like this book. And though you may admire the author’s extraordinary talent, this book elicits shock, horror, revulsion, and ultimately, fear. As Jelinek shows so clearly, the line that separates the sane from the insane is a very thin one, and as one approaches it, one hears, not the sweet music of Schubert, but a very discordant melody, instead.

4.5/5

Recommended: To readers who are interested in the psychology of madness. The book is extremely dark, and some readers might find the scenes of violence and aberration disturbing. This is a book for people who loved D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel.

Note: Elfriede Jelinek won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the only work of hers I've read, and I honestly don't think most persons would include her on a list of the "world's best" authors. The Nobel Prize, as we all know, has a definite political component, and this book was cited by the Nobel committee as expressing "the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Sadly, I don't know a lot about Austria and its literary traditions, though I spent a lot of time there when I lived in Switzerland. I do know the Swiss always said Austria was "very old fashioned." I just know Austria has wonderful pastries. :)

Book Review - Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

2011-08-24T22:06:00.006-04:00

I’m not generally a fan of Anne Rivers Siddons’ work simply because the subject matter of her novels doesn’t really entice me, but I’ve always thought she was a very gifted writer. Burnt Mountain, however, promised to be a very different book than say, Peachtree Road. I knew, though, as soon as I read Burnt Mountain’s Prologue that I was going to have certain problems with the book. I chose to read on, hoping I was wrong.

The Prologue revolves around Thayer Wentworth and her husband, Dr. Aengus O'Neill, as the two are awakened very early one morning by a group of children bound for summer camp. Now Thayer Wentworth is no stranger to summer camps. It seems as though all the meaningful events – both good and bad – of Thayer’s life revolved around a summer camp. Her father’s family owned a cottage on Burnt Mountain, and Thayer’s parents even honeymooned there. Thayer always wanted to believe that the honeymoon was the stuff that dreams are made of, but it was on Burnt Mountain that Thayer’s mother’s dreams were crushed rather than fulfilled. A beautiful Southern woman with “ambitions,” Crystal Thayer married a man from a prominent family for more than love, and he disappointed her when he told her that his ambitions didn’t extend any further than remaining headmaster of the all boys Alexander Hamilton Academy in Lytton, Georgia, a school founded by the Wentworth family. Thayer’s mother promptly turned her attentions from her husband to her eldest daughter, Lily. Lily was a girl who shared the same hopes as her mother; she was a girl Crystal could mold and live through vicariously.

Thayer, who was more of a tomboy, had a strained relationship with her mother, though she idolized her father and her Grandmother Wentworth. Although Crystal didn’t enjoy the days in the beautiful Greek Revival house along the river in Lytton, Thayer thought they were idyllic. When tragedy came into Thayer’s life, it was her Grandmother Wentworth, not her mother, who pulled Thayer through. And, it was at camp, Camp Sherwood Forest, that Thayer met her first love, Nick Abrams, a boy Crystal couldn’t stand. Difficulties arose, however, one of them truly life changing, and when Nick and his father left for a European holiday, Nick and Thayer were parted forever. Or almost. (Not really a spoiler.) Once again, it was Grandmother Wentworth who pulled Thayer from the depths of despair, that time by sending her to college in Tennessee. Thayer realized that while one door was closing for her, another one was opening and she remarked as she left her home, “And Detritus nosed the car out of our driveway and toward the Great Smoky Mountains and the rest of my life.”

It was at college that Thayer met and fell in love with a charismatic Irishman, Dr. Aengus O’Neill, a professor at the school and a student of Irish and Celtic Folklore. Aengus was a romantic, Irish soul himself, and he seemed to be everything Thayer could ever want in a mate. Crystal disapproved, of course, and even Grandmother Wentworth had her reservations, telling Thayer there was something “dark” about Aengus, but he and Thayer married anyway, and the “real” story of Burnt Mountain began. Unfortunately, it’s also the place where Burnt Mountain begins to fall apart.

Although Siddons attempted, in her Prologue, to set up a dramatic turn of events surrounding one of her characters (and I do applaud her for that), I don’t believe this turn of events is believable. The change in the character was too abrupt. Readers are, I think, left saying, “Oh, that would never happen!” And really, it doesn't seem like it ever would, and Thayer shouldn’t have been as unhappy as she was. Not at that point in the story. To make matters even worse, Siddons allows Thayer to “unexpectedly” run into Nick as he prepares to work on a project in Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics. I found that unbelievable as well. And what is the year supposed to be anyway? Various references in the book place the story in the 1950s or, at the latest, the 1960s. However, besides the Summer Olympics, Siddons has one character talk about taking a child to see a Harry Potter film, and not necessarily the first one. (The first Harry Potter film wasn’t released until 2001.) I realize a significant chunk of time could have passed by between Thayer’s childhood and her marriage, but not thirty or forty years. Even if a reader isn’t bothered by the abrupt shift in time, many of the characters in Burnt Mountain use cellular phones, which weren’t so prevalent in the 1990s. And there’s a subplot involving a neighbor of Thayer’s, Carol, and Carol’s three sons. This seemed like it was going to be an interesting subplot, however far too much was left out. The subplot felt more like an outline than a fully fleshed out story thread.

I’m a reader who can usually overlook some messy plotting if the prose is first rate. And Siddons usually writes lovely prose. So it is in Burnt Mountain, though Siddons can, at times, be a bit overwrought and melodramatic, and melodrama definitely isn’t my “thing.”

Even Thayer wasn’t up to par with the characters Siddons usually creates. She was likable, to a point, but I got tired of her passivity, the fact that she more or less – usually more – drifted through life. She lived to love her father and her grandmother, then Nick, then Aengus. She never lived to love her own life, apart from others. In fact, she seemed to have no life of her own. She wasn’t at all complex.

Regarding the twisted turn the book takes during the last fifty pages or so, perhaps Siddons simply wanted to venture into the Southern Gothic, a genre I love. If she did, I believe Burnt Mountain missed the mark. While the Southern Gothic often incorporates the supernatural, one of the key components of the genre is deeply flawed characters and decayed, claustrophobic settings, often linked to racism, poverty, or violence. While these elements can enhance Southern literature, if they aren’t organic everything seems out of kilter. This was the case with Burnt Mountain. The book's Southern Gothic elements seemed imposed on the story as opposed to the early “Tennessee” novels of Cormac McCarthy or the work of that master of the Southern Gothic, William Faulkner.

Although parts of the book were very good, and were beautifully written, the ending seemed “tacked on” despite the foreshadowing in the Prologue. The ending was weird and twisted and downright evil, and the rest of the book simply was not. And, in a book replete with ancient folklore, why is no explanation, supernatural or otherwise, given for the “curse” that haunts Burnt Mountain, itself?

Despite the problems with the book, I did, at times, love its darkness, and I loved the descriptions of the rural Georgia landscape. But these things, however, can’t carry an entire novel.

If you’re an Anne Rivers Siddons fan and want to read everything she writes, you might enjoy this book, though be warned, it’s very different from most of her work, and it’s certainly not her best effort. If you’ve never read Siddons and want to give her a try, please don’t begin with this book. Try Peachtree Road or Colony or Outer Banks, instead.

1.5/5

Recommended: Sadly, no. I rarely say this about any book because we all like something a little different and “good” writing has a strong subjective component, but this book really is a waste of time. Even most Siddons fans don’t care for it. Try Peachtree Road, Colony, or Outer Banks, instead. I'll say this, this is one instance in which I think the cover was absolutely perfect for the story the book tells. I loved it.

Book Review - Classics - A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

2011-08-22T00:39:00.008-04:00

I own the DVD of David Lean’s marvelous film adaptation of E.M. Forester’s novel, A Passage to India, and I’ve watched and loved that DVD several times. Until recently, however, I’d never read the book. I knew I was missing something special, but I wasn’t aware of just how special. If I had been, I certainly would have read this wonderful book sooner.

A Passage to India takes place in and around the fictional town of Chandrapore, India at the height of Britain’s power and control in that country. The perilous balance of East and West in Chandrapore is upset when two Englishwomen – the older Mrs. Moore and the younger Miss Quested – arrive in Chandrapore. Mrs. Moore is there to visit her son, the City Magistrate, Ronny Heaslop, and see him married and settled, and Miss Quested is there because she’s Mrs. Moore’s choice of wife for Ronny. The two women, who know little-to-nothing about social situations or politics in the Orient, want to see “the real India,” and they want to meet a “real Indian.”

Because he likes Mrs. Moore so much, the young, kindly Dr. Aziz, a Muslim, who is a respected Medical Officer at the Chandrapore Hospital, impulsively invites the two women – and several men, of course – on an excursion into the hills to visit the renowned Marabar Caves, and it’s at the caves where something goes terribly wrong, resulting in Miss Quested accusing Dr. Aziz of a crime, a crime that seems, on its face, to be believable due to an entire series of unfortunate events surrounding the outing.

With Dr. Aziz standing accused of a crime against an Englishwoman, Forster has set the stage for a full exploration of the East-West divide that existed in colonial India and the impossibility of lasting friendship between persons of the two cultures. As one might predict, the Indians support Dr. Aziz, while the English, who, for the most part, believe the Indians to be guilty of any charge brought against them by an English person, support Miss Quested. The one and only exception is Cecil Fielding, the Principal of the Government College, who truly believes in Dr. Aziz’s innocence, and who has the courage to break with his own countrymen in order to stand in support of the Indian doctor. In a very real sense, I felt that Mr. Fielding only was supporting Dr. Aziz. The others – both English and Indian alike – seemed to be supporting their prejudices without examining anything Miss Quested or Dr. Aziz said or did while they were visiting the caves. The English believe Miss Quested is right because she is English; the Indians believe Dr. Aziz is right because he is Indian. Only Fielding cares enough to take a good look at the circumstances and the people involved.

The resolution of Dr. Aziz’s trial isn’t really surprising. In fact, there are some who go so far as to say the issue of what really happened at the Marabar Caves doesn’t matter at all, only the repercussions are of consequence. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say what did or didn’t happen in the caves was unimportant, however Dr. Aziz’s arrest certainly brought all the simmering prejudices of both the English and the Indians out in the open. And the incident at the caves was an incident just waiting to happen. Adela Quested tells another character that she had felt “unwell” since the day of the tea party, a tea party that took place long before the outing to Marabar.

What kept me reading was wondering how the respective English and Indians were going to act after the trial was over. Were they going to be able to keep their friendships intact? Or would even Fielding’s and Aziz’s deepening friendship be broken by the Anglo-Indian divide no matter what Fielding and Aziz themselves want?

I can’t say any book has brought India to life for me like Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, but A Passage to India came close. And really, I don’t think I should compare the two books as they depict two very different times in the history of India and very different people. A Passage to India is, I think, the best book I’ve read about colonial India and the problems suffered by both English and Indian alike.

I have to admit, I don’t know a lot about the colonization of India, so keeping that in mind, the characters, for me, rang very true. I found them wonderfully drawn, their dialogue was believable, and I found I understood them even if I didn’t particularly like all of them. I think Forster must have had excellent insight into human character.

I think it should be pointed out that with the exception of Fielding, A Passage to India is a book without heroes and without villains, something that I think deepens its theme. The colonization of India had its good points and it had its bad, among the English and among the Indians, and Forster doesn’t shrink from exposing both. Still, Forster doesn’t pretend to understand India or the complex relationships that occurred during colonial days. India, he says, is a “muddle,” but it is through the problems of colonial India that Forster examines universal problems among human beings everywhere.

Though Forster is commenting on the colonization of India, and though the reader gains insight into how colonial India was governed by the British, A Passage to India is not a political book. The heart of the book doesn’t concern itself with the politics of Raj India, but rather how those politics impacted human relationships in that country during that time, a subject that’s timeless.

Forster’s stream-of-consciousness prose gives us access to the thoughts of all his characters. I loved this as the prose was never awkward, as stream-of-consciousness can be. It flowed beautifully, keeping the reader oriented at all times, though I wouldn’t expect less from a writer as masterful as Forster was.

This is a beautiful novel, but for me, it was also very sad. Even though Fielding stands by Dr. Aziz through his trial, Dr. Aziz still worries constantly that the Englishman will betray him. Such were relationships between the English and the Indians in Raj India. And when the two men meet years after the trial has concluded Fielding asks Aziz, “Why can't we be friends now? It's what I want. It's what you want.” Yet even though the two men desire friendship, friendship seems unattainable.

In Howard’s End, also written by Forster and also a wonderful classic, Forster’s overriding message was to “only connect.” The characters in A Passage to India, however, find “connecting” impossible, much as they may desire it.

5/5

Recommended: With no reservations. This is a beautiful, and beautifully sad, classic that everyone should read. The film adaptation by David Lean is wonderful as well.

Book Review - The Hollywood Dodo by Geoff Nicholson

2011-08-18T23:32:00.002-04:00

The dodo, a large, flightless bird that vanished from the earth about 1662, is the centerpiece around which Geoff Nicholson’s fourteenth novel, The Hollywood Dodo, revolves. The dodo, which is actually derived from the Portuguese word “duodo,” meaning “stupid,” or “simpleton,” lived on the otherwise then uninhabited island of Mauritius. When the Portuguese arrived, bringing with them an assortment of animals, the poor dodo really stood no chance.

The Hollywood Dodo consists of three overlapping and intertwining stories, told during two time periods—the 20th century and the late 17th century.

Nicholson begins the story in the 20th century with a young, wannabe screenwriter named Rick McCartney. Rick, whose business card proclaims him to be the “Auteur of the Future,” has a dream. He wants to make a rather artsy, period film revolving around an eccentric 17th century Englishman, an Englishman who also has a dream—a dream of finding a dodo to mate with his own, thus saving the species from extinction. As Rick tells one skeptical film executive after another, in a vain attempt to pitch his story:

It’s the story of a man who owns what he fears may be the last dodo on earth, and he’s trying desperately to find a mate for it before the whole species dies out.

Hollywood, as you can probably guess, isn’t interested.

When everything seems against him and all doors seemed to be closed, Rick visits Carla Mendez, a one-legged, Hispanic, past life therapist, a woman with:

...olive skin and festoons of black hair, and dark eyes and lips.

From her Venice Beach apartment, Carla regresses Rick into late 17th century England, where it seems he lived life as one William Draper, a medical student at Oxford whose training is cruelly halted when he, himself, becomes ill. Afflicted with a rare skin disorder that makes it impossible for him to be exposed to sunlight, Draper is told by his superiors:

...a would-be physician who cannot cure himself, nor be cured by the best physicians....

...is nothing but an embarrassment.

Cast out of Oxford, Draper takes up residence in a seedy, seamy part of London known as Alsatia and becomes a spy for the Royal College of Physicians, reporting back to them regarding anyone whose medical practices seem in any way irregular.

Draper also sets about fulfilling a personal quest. The owner of an aging dodo, Draper wants nothing more than to find another dodo with whom his can mate, thus saving the species from extinction. Sound familiar? As Draper puts it:

The dodo needs a friend and a champion. I have selected myself for the task, though there are times when certainly I feel I have had little choice in the matter.

After his regression, Rick feels compelled to travel to England where he just happens to meet an English writer, and just happens to steal a manuscript from his study that just happens to be about…William Draper. Titled “The Restoration of the Dodo,” Rick is sure this manuscript is the key to getting his own film produced.

While traveling back to L.A., stolen manuscript in hand, Rick has a major panic attack on the plane and fears he’s dying. Enter fiftyish Dr. Henry Cadwallader, a recent widow (I had to wonder if he’d been married to Mrs. Cadwallader, from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Cadwallader not being the most common of names), who is accompanying his daughter, Dorothy, to Hollywood where she hopes to become “a star.” The trouble is, while Dorothy is pretty, she’s also totally vapid. It’s clear to everyone but her that her brush with fame isn’t going to be either long or lasting. However, this won’t be the end of Rick’s interaction with Henry and Dorothy...not by a long shot. Nor will it mark the end of the Cadwalladers’ love affair with Hollywood.

Nicholson is known as a satirist, but he writes with a surprisingly light touch, and The Hollywood Dodo is truly enormous fun. However, it’s heavily contrived and filled to the brim with coincidence. Surprisingly, I really didn’t mind this. The disparate story strands are extremely vivid and Nicholson does a superb job of weaving them together.

Nicholson is also particularly good at manipulating the third person subjective, so we really get to enter the minds of his characters and come to know them extremely well. He’s also excellent at building connections, even though many of these connections do rest heavily on the already-mentioned coincidence, as well as on doubling. The chapter titles have been taken from film titles, e.g., “25. Back to the Future” and “26. Mask.” This is clever, but in the long run, it might just be a little too clever for some readers. I wasn’t bothered by it, though.

It’s also rather difficult to discern a clear theme in the narrative of The Hollywood Dodo. Or, perhaps, there are too many themes. With the dodo as the book’s centerpiece, one gets the idea that The Hollywood Dodo is about extinction, or the sheer fragility of existence. And so it might be, for at one point in the book, Dr. Cadwallader says:

...you don’t make a movie about death and extinction simply by having someone spouting about death and extinction.

But The Hollywood Dodo is definitely about deception as well. Just about everyone in the book is set on deceiving everyone else. William Draper falls in love with a medical fake, and Rick McCartney almost falls in love with his past life therapist, Carla. Both of these plot points highlight the theme of deception and also show how Nicholson employs doubling.

Nicholson, as always, does a great job of playing one character off another, but another of this book’s problems is the fact that there’s not much at stake for anyone. No one’s world is going to end if Rick fails to make his dodo film or if Dorothy fails to find the yellow brick road to stardom. The characters do change by the book’s end, however, some of them dramatically. Hollywood has to have an influence on people, whether for good or ill:

We all know what Hollywood does to people. It changes them, and very seldom for the better. It makes them glib, fake, embittered. And this seems to have nothing much to do with actual achievement, with how well or badly they’re doing. Hollywood success and Hollywood failure can be equally corrupting, though presumably in different ways.

And, so it is in this book.

The thing that keeps the reader turning the pages of this book is Nicholson’s magnificent prose, which is dark and delicious, along with his vivid characterizations. Although this book is, at times, as dark as it is funny, it really isn’t cynical or biting enough for me to term it genuine satire. Black comedy, then? Well, yes, but only at times. There are other times when the book is decidedly unfunny. A running gag and a mispronunciation elicited more groans than laughter from me.

Despite this book’s obvious faults, I still think it’s far above average. For the most part, the humor is quite subtle and Nicholson layers his narratives wonderfully. If you’re a reader who can get past coincidence and plot contrivance and just enjoy the ride, you’re going to find The Hollywood Dodo a lot of fun. If you can’t stand the above, however, you’re going to feel a lot like Nicholson’s characters:

You’re glad you made it, but it’s not quite as you imagined…There was less than you expected, less of everything, fewer explosions and car chases and sex scenes. The exposition was clumsy. The dialogue was flat, the performances wooden. You got restless and thought of walking out before the end.

Some people, I think, a little sadly, are going to feel just that way about The Hollywood Dodo. I didn’t, and if you read this book, I hope you won’t, either.

3.5/5

Recommended: Yes, to those who like satire or black comedy. Although heavily contrived, with not much at stake for the characters, the book is tremendous fun, and it’s worth reading for Nicholson’s dark and delicious prose.

Book Review - Mysteries - The Likeness by Tana French

2011-08-14T23:24:00.007-04:00

I don’t for a second believe that we all have a double, as some people say. The one thing I know I share in common with Vladimir Nabokov is my intense dislike for the doppelganger theme, so it was odd – at first – that I chose this book to read. However, The Likeness was written by Tana French, who has shown me, and many others, that she knows how to spin a very good story, and a lyrically written one as well. For a book written by Tana French, I could suspend my dislike of and disbelief in doppelgangers.

The Likeness is French’s second novel, following In the Woods, which, like The Likeness, was also very well received, making French a new “favorite author” for many readers. Also like In the Woods, The Likeness takes place in and around Dublin, Ireland, and centers around a murder investigation.

Those who read In the Woods will already be acquainted with Cassie Maddox, this book’s narrator. (Sadly, Rob Ryan, the narrator of In the Woods, is no where to be found.) The former Murder Squad detective has spent the last six months in Domestic Violence (DV) attempting to recover from the nine months she spent posing as “Lexie Madison” while carrying out “Operation Vestal” and investigating a drug ring, nine months that culminated when she was stabbed.

French sets the plot of The Likeness in motion when Cassie gets a telephone call from her boyfriend, Sam O’Neill, who is still working in “Murder,” telling her she should come out to a certain crime scene right away. A puzzled Cassie travels to the rural town of Glenskehy and an abandoned two-room cottage. There, she finds, not only the murder victim, but Frank Mackey, her acerbic, wisecracking boss, who is also something of a true Irish charmer, and the man with whom Cassie worked on the above-mentioned “Operation Vestal.”

Cassie is startled by the appearance of the victim, who died of four stab wounds. She looks enough like Cassie to be her twin. And even more startling, her identification says her name was “Lexie Madison.” “Lexie Madison,” however, was a creation of Frank’s and Cassie’s. No one ever believed she was real, and certainly no one ever expected Cassie’s double to show up whatever her name might be. Lexie Madison, however, was a registered graduate student in English Literature at Trinity College, and she lived with four fellow students in a dilapidated mansion known as Whitethorn House, near the village.

The four students, all PhD candidates, who shared Whitethorn House with Lexie – the cold and paternal Daniel, the handsome Rafe, the eccentric Abby, who has a love of antique dolls, and the nervous Justin – swear they were all together the night Lexie was attacked, and none of them, so they say, left the house. Only Lexie, who was in the habit of taking a nightly walk.

Because Lexie was a ringer for Cassie, Frank names the investigation, “Operation Mirror,” and remains convinced that one of the four students still living at Whitethorn House is guilty of murdering Lexie. Since the public does not yet know that Lexie died, Frank, over the objections of Sam, convinces Cassie to go undercover once again – as Lexie. Frank plans on releasing the news that Lexie has “survived” the attack and recovered from the coma she was in. Then he’ll send Cassie – as Lexie – back “home” to Whitethorn House in order to learn more about the four surviving roommates, and hopefully to determine which one, or ones, killed “Lexi.” A bandage over “Lexie’s” “stab wound” will conceal a microphone that will enable Frank to monitor everything that goes on.

We know something is going to go horribly wrong, of course. For one thing, while Cassie can learn Lexie’s habits, like taking the nightly walk, other things, like Lexie’s distaste for onions, will prove impossible for her to learn. This, of course, ratchets up the suspense, as mistakes will inevitably be made, and Cassie will have to try to explain them and remain believable to the housemates.

Inside Whitethorn House, Cassie – now “Lexie” – learns that the roommates live a strange, though rather idyllic life that takes little notice of the outside world. In fact, the roommates will remind many readers of Donna Tartt’s bestseller, The Secret History in which college students, who may be responsible for a murder, make a secret pact, each one protecting the others as well as himself. But questions remain. What secret really holds the residents of Whitethorn House together? Why do the villagers despise them so? What really happened the night Lexie was killed? And when will the guilty party make his/her move?

Danger, of course, and chinks in the integrity of “Operation Mirror,” lurk around every corner as Cassie, who at heart, is very lonely, responds to the warmth and affection offered her at Whitethorn and is drawn further and further into the life of the woman who was “Lexie Madison.”

The Likeness isn’t a typical mystery. For one thing, French takes her time setting things up. She’s far more concerned with character development than in giving us a “connect-the-dots” mystery to solve or even a “big twist” to shock us. Some of what happens in this book is predictable and conventional, but certainly not all of it. The leisurely pace of the set up allows the reader to be pulled into Cassie’s world, and French’s writing is good enough to keep most readers there until the end of the story.

The bulk of the book concerns Cassie’s experiences at Whitethorn House with Daniel, Abby, Justin, and Rafe. During this section, I think the book tends to bog down in detail just a little. I found Cassie’s core loneliness interesting, and I applaud French for exploring it, but I can read only so many descriptions of idyllic domestic life in a mystery before I want to return to the main plot and move along toward its resolution. And, speaking of the resolution, while French did deliver on the “Who is Lexie” mystery, that solution, for me, was pretty obvious by the time we reached the end of the book. To French’s credit, she gives us more emotional closure at the end of this book than she did in In the Woods, while still avoiding tying everything up in a neat and tidy package.

I enjoyed reading The Likeness even though I felt, at times, that French was asking her readers to suspend their disbelief a little too often. In reality, I don’t think Cassie could fool four people who knew “Lexi” intimately for even one entire day; I don’t think “Lexi” could have enrolled at Trinity; and I don’t think any trained undercover detective worth her salt would conceal evidence from her superiors. I can accept one implausible – the fact that “Lexi” looked just like Cassie – but I have trouble accepting a whole string of them. And what about Daniel? (To say more would be to give you a spoiler, but if you read the book, you’ll know what I mean.) I understand that French is exploring loneliness and the bonds of friendship, and that she’s using the mystery of “Lexi Madison” to do so, but still, mystery readers are going to be French’s primary readers, and mystery readers need for French to devote as much care to the actual mystery of the book as she does to the characters involved in that mystery’s resolution. The fact that French doesn’t seem to care about the mystery as much as her characters is this book’s big flaw.

The writing in The Likeness is gorgeous, though, and it’s the writing that kept me reading. However, there were times when even that let me down. The dialogue sometimes got a little too trendy for my taste, and the roommates and Cassie indulged in ambiguous conversations that hinted at long-buried secrets one too many times. And, the book is simply too long for one that resolves so conventionally. I know, The Secret History (Tartt) was longer, and I loved that book, but that book was far less conventional than this one is. All in all, I think I liked In the Woods more than The Likeness. I found it a darker, more lyrical book than The Likeness, and a lot more believable, and I am very attracted to dark, lyrical books.

Still, a lot of people loved reading The Likeness. If you can accept a book whose plot is built on several “implausibles,” and if you don’t mind a very slow moving mystery, you might enjoy reading The Likeness, too. I know I will keep reading Tana French.

3.5/5

Recommended: To readers who like their mysteries long and rather slow. This definitely isn’t a fast paced thriller, nor does it pretend to be one. The plot resolution is rather predictable, but there is much delving into character along the way.

Note: It’s not necessary to have read In the Woods prior to reading The Likeness. French orients the reader well enough to key events that happened in the previous book.

Book Review - Home by Marilynne Robinson

2011-08-08T00:02:00.004-04:00

Home, the winner of the 2009 Orange Prize, is a companion novel of sorts to Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead. Both novels can stand on their own, of course, and Home is neither prequel nor sequel to Gilead. Home takes place during the same summer in 1956 as Gilead, and contains many of the same characters. However, while Gilead revolves around John Ames, a third generation Congregationalist minister, and around Ames’ memories and reflections, Home revolves around the Boughton family and tells their story and their history, from their perspective.

The Boughtons, especially Jack (John) Boughton, Ames’ godson and namesake, and the wayward son of Ames’ best friend, the Rev. Robert Boughton, do make an appearance in Gilead, but Home is their book just as Gilead is the Ames family’s book. Robert Boughton and John Ames grew up together in Gilead, and when it came time for them to follow their calling in life, both men followed their own fathers into the ministry, Boughton, whose ancestors were from Scotland, led the Presbyterian church in Gilead, while Ames, whose grandfather was a visionary abolitionist from Maine, became head of Gilead’s Congregationalists. Home develops the Boughtons’ stories, especially Jack’s, stories that began years ago in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. The point-of-view character of Home, however, isn’t Jack, it’s his sister, the thirty-eight year old Glory Boughton, the youngest of the eight Boughton children.

Glory has returned to Gilead, and her family’s big, vine-covered house, in the wake of a failed romantic relationship, to care for her elderly and ailing father, sometimes fondly referred to as “the old man.” Robert Boughton is overjoyed to see his youngest child, though both father and daughter walk on eggshells when it comes to Glory’s broken engagement. By unspoken agreement, it simply isn’t mentioned. Glory, however, has mixed feelings about “coming home.”:

I am thirty-eight years old, she would say to herself as she tidied up after supper. I have a master's degree. I taught high school English for thirteen years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house.

As soon as Glory settles in, another of the Boughton clan decides it’s time to return home. Both the Reverend and Glory are surprised when Robert Boughton receives a letter from forty-three year old Jack, the youngest of the four Boughton brothers, and definitely the “black sheep” of the family, stating that he, too, will soon be arriving “home,” in Gilead. Jack hasn’t been “home” for twenty years, when he dishonored himself and his family by getting a teenage girl pregnant, then deserting both her and his child-to-be.

John Ames, in Gilead, remembers Jack less charitably than simply as “the black sheep.” Though Jack’s his godson, the Reverend Ames sees the younger man as a mean-spirited trickster who had no remorse for the damage he caused others, someone who, at best, eschewed any sense of personal responsibility, and who, at worst, was truly malicious.

Readers of Gilead will know that John doesn’t trust Jack around his (John’s) young son, Robby (named for Reverend Robert Boughton), though Robby likes Jack very much, and Jack seems to like Robby. Speaking of Jack, Ames says, “....these people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.” And predictably, though he’s a generous and charitable man, the Reverend Ames never does credit Jack with trying to be any better than he already is. The characters in Home judge and misjudge one another over and over again.

Jack’s father, however, is inclined to be a bit more charitable regarding Jack, as one would expect. Rather than attribute Jack’s misdeeds to maliciousness or even to a lack of personal responsibility, Boughton feels that Jack’s bad behavior can be attributed to sadness, or an overriding sense of familial estrangement. “I just never knew another child who didn’t feel at home in the house where he was born,” Boughton says. “I always felt it was sadness I was dealing with, a sort of heavyheartedness.” Boughton is overjoyed to see his youngest son and he still feels that his own “boundless love” might open the prodigal’s heart and turn his life around.

As Robinson sets up and develops her story, the past overlays the present time and time again. Boughton is a man who, at this time in his life, at least, prefers to reminisce about the past rather than anchor himself in the present, and really, who can blame him? When Jack gives his father a bunch of mushrooms, they trigger a flood of memories in the older man:

He drew a deep breath and laughed.... Morels. Dan and Teddy used to bring me these. And blackberries, and walnuts. And they'd bring in walleye and catfish. And pheasants. They were always off in the fields, down by the river. With the girls it was always flowers. So long ago.

Glory, however, doesn’t recognize the beloved brother who arrives in Gilead, “a stranger unsure of his welcome.” Gone is the handsome man Glory once idolized, and in his place is someone pale, thin, and distinctly unkempt. And it’s clear Jack has a secret, a secret he chooses not to share with his father or with Glory. (Readers of Gilead, however, will know what that secret is.) Jack has changed, and Glory now sees him as “the weight on the family's heart, the unnamed absence, like the hero in a melancholy tale.”

Jack may not be a hero, but he definitely is carrying the weight of a great sorrow on his shoulders. It’s clear Jack is speaking of himself when he asks, “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” Yet neither his father nor his godfather can answer Jack’s question with any real clarity. It’s Lila, Ames’ much younger wife who reassures Jack that “a person can change. Everything can change.” But does it? Can they?

It’s clear Home is a secretive novel, or a novel filled with secrets. And it’s clear Jack Boughton is a man in spiritual crisis. While one of Jack’s secrets revolves around the letters he writes every day to a woman named Della, and why those letters are eventually returned unopened to the Boughton home, Jack’s spiritual crisis is something both the Reverend and Glory fear, lest Jack leave Gilead once again. Robinson writes:

They had always been so careful of him, almost afraid to touch him. There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile.

By the end of the book, Glory, rightly or wrongly, come to associate her feelings about Jack with the frequent description of the Messiah, as a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face.”

One of the best things about Home is the beauty of Robinson’s writing. Though she’s from Montana, she’s been teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for twenty plus years now, and it’s clear she’s come to love the small towns and farms that dot the Iowa countryside; she’s definitely caught the rhythm of their life:

One evening Jack came in from the late twilight while Glory was settling her father for the night. They heard him in the kitchen getting himself a glass of water. The air had cooled. Insects had massed against the window screens, minute and various, craving the light from the tilted bulb of her father’s bedside lamp, and the crickets were loud, and an evening wind was stirring the trees. It always calmed her to know Jack had come inside for the night. She knew he would be propped against the counter, drinking good, cold water in the dark, the feel and smell of soil still on his hands.

But the rhythm of life in a small village in Iowa, more often than not, is rather static, and Home, despite Robinson’s beautiful, shimmering, but plain, prose, is a rather static book. Some readers will be able to tolerate this and even like it, while others will find it boring. And those readers who grew up in strongly religious, Protestant homes, will, I think, understand the people in Home best of all.

I found Home far more religious than Housekeeping, which I found spiritual, but not religious at all, and less religious than Gilead. (All of Robinson’s writing is strongly influenced by her own Protestant faith. Raised a Presbyterian, like Boughton, she became interested in the Congregationalist faith – the faith of Gilead’s John Ames – while studying 19th century American writers, and today she is a longtime member of the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City, Iowa.) But, while Gilead is the more religious book, Home does more to explore family dynamics and relationships. It is, after all, a book whose central theme revolves around the return of the prodigal, and Home also touches on questions of politics in that Jack is very concerned with a certain political question. And, although Gilead and Home can be read as “stand alone” books, I think the reading of one certainly enriches the reading of the other. Both books do raise similar theological and spiritual questions, however, despite the theological questions posed in both books, don’t expect any answers, at least no clear-cut answers. Robinson has said that while she likes exploring matters of faith in her writing, she, herself, is content to let the questions raised stand, unanswered.

If I had one problem with Home it had to do with the voice of Jack Boughton. We’re told Jack was/is the “the black sheep, the ne’er-do-well” of the family, but when Jack “speaks,” he speaks in the gentle, understanding voice of his father (or of Robinson, herself), not his father’s ne’er-do-well son. For example, when Jack is telling Glory about the woman he left behind in St. Louis, he says, “We became friends almost without calculation or connivance on my part.” This is not the Jack Boughton Robinson describes to us, the “black sheep,” the man who left a young girl pregnant and his child-to-be. Jack, more often than not, elicits sympathy from the reader, which I thought was fine, but I did want access to his more unprincipled side as well.

In the end, readers who liked Housekeeping and Gilead are going to love Home, while those who found the first two books too slow moving are going to find Home too slow moving as well. I don’t think anyone can argue with the book’s perfect structure, though, or with the beauty of its essentially plain prose.

Home, for me, was my favorite among Marilynne Robinson’s three novels. I enjoyed spending time with the Boughton family, and I found Home a more emotional, but no less beautiful, experience than the other two books.

4.5/5

Recommended: To those who love highly literary novels and can tolerate a slow moving book that is dependent more on characterization than plot.

Op-Ed - Ten Classics That Shouldn't Be

2011-07-30T01:03:00.006-04:00

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville – Melville wasn’t a tidy writer. Perceptive readers might have noticed that Melville first intended a character named “Bulkington” to be the book’s protagonist. After writing the character of Ahab, however, Melville found him to be so much more interesting. Rather than change what he’d already written, as that was too much work, Melville simply disposed of poor Bulkington by allowing him to be swept overboard and lost at sea. Melville also tended to overwrite, not a little, but a lot. Entire chapters are dedicated to such topics as the color white, a whale’s tail, and endless descriptions of the sea. While interesting at first, this overwriting soon leads to mind-numbing boredom on the part of most readers. More than once, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the book slipping out of my hands to the floor with a thud.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger – Sure, this is “the” novel of teenage Angst, but is any character in literature more whiney than Holden Caulfield? He spends the entire book just walking around, wasting his life, with no burning needs and no overriding desires. I realize that Salinger was trying to capture the feeling of hopelessness we all experience sometime between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, but that’s still no excuse for writing a story that is no story. Other Angst-ridden characters, characters who owe their very existence to Holden, try to find some purpose in their shallow, misdirected lives, no matter how small. Think of Tom Henderson, Dennis Cooverman, and DeeDee Truitt. Holden just walks around in a daze, unable to even get laid by a prostitute, for heaven’s sake. And at one point, I thought if he mentioned calling Jane Gallagher one more time, I would have fired a gun into the air while screaming, “Just pick up a pay phone and call her, you *&^%$! Do something! Anything!” And the ending really sucks. Everything is still pretty much like it was in the beginning of the book. Too much time has passed between the carousel scene and the epilogue. What the heck was going on? Why is Holden in California? He told Phoebe he wouldn’t leave. Is this the mental institution alluded to in the beginning of the book? He's still there? Who figured out he’s insane? I just wanted to give this kid a good shake and scream, “We all have to grow up!”

Lord of the Flies by William Golding – This book could have been horrifying, but it asks the reader to accept too much. For starters, I can never get over what a bunch of pre-pubescent English schoolboys are doing on a plane, above what must be Polynesia, during World War II. If a person can get past that, he or she must realize that there is no way anyone at all, not even James Bond, Chuck Norris, or MacGuyver, could start a fire with a pair of glasses, and no way a bunch of little kids could hunt down a raging wild boar with some pointed sticks. Jeez.

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser – The prose in this book is so bad it honestly reduced me to tears when I first encountered the novel in high school. And if writing poorly isn’t bad enough, Dreiser tends to be redundant. I kept flipping through to the end, checking to see how many pages I had left and wondering if I could endure them. For those who don’t know (count yourselves lucky), the book is 828-pages (too) long. Now, even in high school I wasn’t stupid enough to read the whole thing, but I did persevere to page 350 before I threw in the towel and made do with a better-written synopsis, so I’ve had experience enough. Dreiser manages to milk his bleak and hopeless narrative for all it’s worth and ends the book in a typically (for him) anti-climactic manner. Bottom line: There really is no reason on earth why any sane person should waste his time, valuable or not, on this blight on the face of literature. Avoid this book like the plague.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse – First I need to admit that I despise Hermann Hesse’s entire oeuvre, with the possible exceptions of The Glass Bead Game and Narcissus and Goldmann, and even those aren’t dear to my heart. I despise the books, in part, because proponents of the old “hippie” movement of the 1960s gravitate toward them, and I can’t stand anything to do with “hippies,” “flower children” or anything “counterculture.” It’s not that I’m satisfied with American life the way it is. I’m not. It’s that I’ve always found people who ascribe to a “counterculture” to be so idealistically phony and fake. Non-conformists are so very conformist; they just conform to a different set of “rules” than mainstream America. The problem with this book is the fact that its protagonist, Harry Haller, doesn’t want to be a member of any “counterculture” at all, despite his dissatisfaction with his life. He’s really quite bourgeois. He’s miserable peering into all those homes. Haller knows he’s the one who has it wrong, not the people tucked up safely inside. But I can well understand why Hesse’s work is so popular with the ‘60s counterculture movement. I’m sure it all goes down a lot smoother and easier with a bong.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – I hate this book, and I hate Hester Prynne even though the woman was treated unfairly. I’ve always thought this book was the reason behind the high drop out rate in American high schools. I also believe it’s the reason why kids on a rampage target the English departments of universities. You can’t just “forget” The Scarlet Letter. Once you’ve read this book, you’re a different, though not a better, person. It was this book that made me want to gouge my eyes out when I ran into bad prose. If you like the following, this might be the book for you: In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. ZZZZZzzzzz.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton – I mean seriously, they try to kill themselves by sledding into a tree, and then are surprised when it doesn’t work. It’s almost laughable.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway – Hemingway wrote fabulous stories, and The Old Man and the Sea is a fabulous book, but readers need to stop right there if they want to appreciate Hemingway. They shouldn’t, by any means, read A Farewell to Arms. Cardboard cutouts for characters, a trite and almost non-existent plot, sentimentality galore. Hemingway had a fascination with pregnant women, and he loved to kill them during childbirth. Nowhere is this more evident than in this book. Beware.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – The truth of the matter is this: Atlas Shrugged is one of the worst books ever written. It’s filled with characters more flat than the pages on which they live, who nevertheless lounge around in Art Deco mansions and spout philosophical gibberish. Atlas Shrugged, with The Fountainhead, are the only books I’ve read in which the dramatic climax consists of a 100-page monologue on some sort of philosophical/political subject. And in the midst of all this philosophy, Rand tosses in a few lurid, rape-like sex scenes worthy of Jacqueline Susann or some other romance writer whose name I’ve blessedly forgotten. She’s not even mildly entertaining in the way that Dan Brown and Dennis Lahane can be mildly entertaining. Blech! Rand is not for me.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – A lot of people love this book, but for me, it’s a contrived, pretentious piece of work. I mean every line, every word. Steinbeck never tires of pounding it into our heads that “this” is “art.” The terrible dialogue, the shallow message that is artificially “deep.” Unlike the other books, however, I don’t recommend intelligent readers stay away. I think everyone should read this book so they more fully understand how easily people not only swallow shallow tripe, but go on to proclaim its (non-existent) virtues as well.

In the News - The 2011 Man Booker Prize Longlist

2011-07-26T14:41:00.003-04:00

The thirteen books forming the 2011 Booker longlist were announced today. Have you read any? Do you have a favorite?

Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)

Sebastian Barry - On Canaan's Side (Faber)

Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

Esi Edugyan - Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile)

Yvvette Edwards - A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)

Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)

Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

Patrick McGuinness - The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)

A.D. Miller - Snowdrops (Atlantic)

Alison Pick - Far to Go (Headline Review)

Jane Rogers - The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)

D.J. Taylor - Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

I haven't read any of these books, but I certainly will. Do you have a favorite?

Book Review - The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

2011-07-20T07:02:00.003-04:00

Promotions for this book often ran along the lines, “If you liked Possession, you’ll love The Children’s Book.” This isn’t/wasn’t necessarily true. A.S. Byatt’s Booker winning Possession and her Booker shortlisted The Children’s Book are very different, and liking, even loving the former doesn’t guarantee a reader will like the latter at all. Possession was a romance, with a double storyline and characters based on Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. The second half of the book picks up speed until it’s a race against time almost on par with Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. The Children’s Book is a complex portrait of an era, brimming with characters, stories, and detail, and the pace of the novel, even at its most rapid, can be said to be “meandering.” I know people who loved both books (I am one), and I know people who loved Possession and didn’t care for The Children’s Book at all, as well as those who didn’t like either book. The only real similarity between the two books is the extremely high quality of Byatt’s writing.

The Children’s Book stretches from 1895 to 1919, encompassing England’s late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and is set primarily in the beautiful downs and marshes of County Kent, in southern England, as well as the southeastern coast at Dungeness, with excursions to Paris, Munich, the Italian Alps, and the trenches of the Somme. At the center – more or less – of this richly textured and meticulously researched novel, are three families – the Wellwoods, the Cains, and the Fludds, supported by pre-Raphaelites, Russian anarchists, socialists, antivivisectionists, Theosophists, Symbolists, members of the Fabian Society, the Arts and Crafts Movement, proponents of German Expressionism, suffragettes, as well as cameos from historical persons including Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, J.M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and a very broken-down Oscar Wilde.

Humphrey and Olive Wellwood, with Olive’s sister, Violet, who functions as a nanny/head housekeeper, live with their brood of children (the book will follow Tom and Dorothy, the eldest most closely) in a charming country house with the improbable name of “Todefright.” Olive is a “successful authoress of magical tales” for children, while Humphrey is a banker by default, rather than by inclination. The book opens in the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert) as Olive is seeking inspiration from the museum’s “Special Keeper of Precious Metals,” Major Prosper Cain. Off on an adventure of their own are Olive’s eldest son, Tom, and Cain’s son, Julian (daughter Florence isn’t in the museum, but she plays a large part in the book), who are soon to discover Philip Warren, an artistic lower-class runaway from the Potteries, who’s been surreptitiously living in the museum’s labyrinth of storerooms. It’s Philip who connects the Wellwoods to the Cains and the Fludds, when he’s rescued by Olive and apprenticed to Benedict Fludd (based on the British sculptor, Eric Gill), a genius potter given to “werewolf-changes” and “religious fits.” Fludd lives with his wife, the dreamy Serephita, his son, Geraint, and his pretty daughters, Imogen and Pomona, who are “pallid silk moths” and live “as though they have sleeping sickness, or are under a spell.” The Fludds’ ghastly home, Purchase House, stands in stark contrast to the charm and whimsy that is Todefright. But as the reader soon learns, all is not as it would seem at first glance.

In the Wellwood and Fludd families, in particular, secrets abound. We soon learn that Olive’s and Violet’s background in a dingy mining community in south Yorkshire, with its dire poverty and traumatic loss, is more akin to Philip Warren’s than it is to any member of the Wellwood family, and that Olive, despite her seven children, is not the “modern Mother Goose” she portrays herself to be, nor is she a fairy godmother come to life. Everyone is this book suffers from a hidden past, secret relationships, and repressed pain. The Children’s Book is definitely not the idyllic tale of life in the countryside that some readers might think it to be. This book is chock full of marital infidelities, dysfunctional relationships, unwanted pregnancies, illegitimate children, mental illness and more. This is, in part, a book about how much a person is willing to sacrifice for his or her art, and how much he or she is willing to sacrifice those closest to him or her as well. For me, The Children’s Book is Byatt’s darkest work by far, as the creative process, at least for most of the characters in this novel, brings out the very worst in the artist’s nature rather than the best. In this book, it’s the need to create that drives many of the characters – principally, Olive Wellwood and Benedict Fludd – and that need overrides anything else in the characters’ lives. I enjoyed the darkness in this book, but I do think many readers will be put off by it, or reject its use in such large measure.

At the center of this book are Olive Wellwood’s dark and rather sinister fairy tales – the infant prince whose shadow is stolen while he’s still in his crib; the girl who imprisons a group of miniature human beings in her dolls’ house only to be imprisoned herself by another, larger child – written more in the German tradition than in the English. Byatt has threaded extracts of Olive’s work throughout the book, thus inviting, I think, those unfair comparisons with Possession, and introducing the reader to her own opinion of the writers of children’s literature of the period. One can find, in the pages of this book, J.M. Barrie, Edith Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, and others. And there’s Olive, of course, who seems to be a composite of several historical writers of the time.

For each of “her” children, Olive has created a special book, a book that not only reveals her inner feelings about that child, but her biological relationship as well. “The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless. They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit on to the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning.” The first book, and by far, the longest, belongs to Tom, Olive’s eldest, Peter Pan-like son, the boy who, ironically, despises the figure of Peter Pan and “make believe.” It’s Tom Olive loves the most, and oddly, it’s Tom Olive hurts the most when she fails to separate her son from his fictional alter ego, and when she makes the details of “his” story available to the public at large by way of a play – “Tom Underground” – that’s celebrated for its echoes of Wagner and Kleist. It was, after all, understood that each child’s story would remain private, for “everyone understood that the magic persisted because it was hidden, because it was a shared secret.” A secret shared only by Olive and the child for whom the book had been written.

With Olive’s betrayal of Tom, the children of the novel grow to adulthood knowing full well that the darkest side of life lies just around each corner, waiting to strike. The girls learn that their husbands will betray them, the boys that wives will sometimes do the same. And both girls and boys learn that one’s birth mother or father is often not the same thing as one’s “true” parent, and that even “true” parents are capable of the most hurtful of betrayals.

Many readers find the sheer number of characters inhabiting this book to be daunting. And, at times, they can be. For example, Byatt introduces more than thirty characters in the first one hundred pages. For me, however, all the characters, as well as their stories, came to life beautifully, and quite memorably. I didn’t have any trouble keeping them straight. I’m not sure if I really liked anyone in this book, but I do know everyone in the book interested me greatly, perhaps all the more because I didn’t really care for them. Many of the characters in the book are trying to figure out just who they are and what their place in life should be. Though Tom takes center stage as the book’s “lost soul,” he’s certainly not the only one, by far. The changes and advancements taking place during the Edwardian age seemed to make it all the more difficult for a child to grow up secure in his own self, knowing who he or she really is. Like them or not, we care about these people, and we genuinely want the best for them.

Byatt’s prose in The Children’s Book, like her prose in every book she writes, is beautiful. The narrative flows in and out of the minds of the various characters so smoothly and effortlessly that the technique is barely visible unless one actually looks for it. And this book is rich in sensory detail, something that really brings the story to life. Byatt is masterful when describing Olive’s early pregnancy nausea as she bites into her morning toast and honey “nourishing herself and the blind life she had not exactly invited to settle in her,” or the sudden desire of young Elsie Warren, who “had reached an age where every surface of her skin was taut with the need to be touched and used.” On one hand, the book might be said to be “writerly,” but on the other, it’s far too human and engaging and genuinely moving to be thought of as “writerly.”

And of course, the book can’t help but veer into politics now and then. For much of the novel, World War I is looming just over the horizon. I think Byatt is at her best when describing the gathering forces of both England and Germany and the crises of identity the war engenders in several of the book’s characters. The coda at the book’s end, centering on the fate of the “bright boys” who fought for England during the Great War is a masterpiece of restraint. It’s beautiful and harrowing at the same time. I don’t know how any reader could fail to be moved. I think many readers are going to feel that The Children’s Book ends on a note of bittersweet hope. Those who managed to survive the war are, in the book’s final pages, reconnecting with loved ones and strengthening old bonds. But one should never forget that this is a very dark book, and the reader should remember that in twenty-one short years, the children of these “bright boys,” most, at the novel's end, still in their nursery, with many not yet born, will be dispatched to the trenches of World War Two.

Some people felt this book needed a shorter, more streamlined story. I’m not one. I think a shorter, more streamlined story would have been a different story, and not the story Byatt wanted to tell, and that would have been such a shame. I loved The Children’s Book exactly as it is. For me, it was an exquisite reading experience, one that stands along side Hilary Mantel’s glorious Wolf Hall and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace. The Children’s Book is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and appreciated without wanting to change a single thing. This book affected me deeply; I’ll never forget it.

5/5

Recommended: Only to those readers who prefer literary fiction and writing of the first order. The book is brimming with detail, and at times, it moves at a leisurely pace. If you’re a reader who needs a plot that moves along at breakneck speed, wonderful as it is, this wouldn’t be the book for you.

Book Review - Psychological Horror - The Ghost Writer by John Harwood

2011-07-17T23:34:00.006-04:00

Although certain elements, i.e., veiled specters, haunted mansions, a porcelain doll that comes to life, and the finding of hidden photographs, for example, of John Harwood’s stylish debut novel (he’s since also written The Séance) could be termed cliché, the story this wonderful book tells is such an old fashioned “ripping good yarn” I didn’t care if he did make use the occasional cliché. And, truth be told, Harwood tells his story in such a fresh and innovative way that nothing about it feels cliché at all.

The Ghost Writer is the story of Gerard Freeman, a lonely, awkward, sexually repressed boy growing up in the 1960s in Mawson, Australia, a little town plagued by millipedes and red dust. An only child with a distant father and few, if any, friends, Gerard finds solace in the stories his mother, Phyllis, tells him of her childhood at Staplefield, an English country estate in the grand manner, an idyllic realm of hawthorns, mayflies, and chaffinches. One day, however, the ten-year-old Gerard, who is given to very serious snooping, discovers a photograph of a beautiful, unknown woman and the manuscript of a ghost story written by someone identified only as “V.H.,” presumably, Gerard’s maternal great-grandmother, Viola Hatherley, who lived and died at Staplefield. Although the discovery only whets Gerard’s appetite for more of Staplefield and Viola, his reclusive and neurotic mother chooses, for reasons unknown to Gerard, to stop talking about both rather than filling Gerard in on all she knows, and this, of course, pretty much guarantees that Gerard, himself, will some day journey to England in search of his mother’s ancestral home.

Gerard’s dreary life seems to brighten a little when he, by chance, obtains a penfriend...in England, of course. Alice Jessell is something of a mystery herself. Injured in the accident that killed both of her parents and confined to a wheelchair, Alice is resolute in her determination to neither meet Gerard nor send him a photo until she’s “cured” and walking again, something that, by her own admission, will require a miracle. How she looks is left to Gerard’s rich imagination, and he conjures images of a voluptuous and seductive pre-Raphaelite beauty with milky skin and cascades of coppery hair.

As Gerard grows into adulthood, his friendship with Alice is a growing constant in his life as is his obsession with Viola and Staplefield. When his mother dies, Gerard, who no longer has anything to live for in Australia, sets off for England in search of Staplefield and Alice, with whom he now fancies himself deeply in love.

Threaded throughout the first person narrative of The Ghost Writer are Gerard’s letters to Alice (and vice versa) and, just as importantly, Viola’s ghost stories, which seem to turn up at the most improbable times and quite by chance. The ghost stories make up approximately one-half of the narrative of The Ghost Writer, and each is written in a distinctive style and voice that is quite different from Gerard’s. The stories are both elegant and genuinely “creepy,” and it’s important to read them carefully for they’re integral to a full understanding of the very convoluted plot of this marvelous book. I felt the pace of the book slowed a little during the telling of the ghost stories, but that might be “just me,” and even if it did slow, I thought the slower pace was “just right.” Overall, I think this is a very well paced book, with extremely good writing and flow throughout.

As Gerard’s investigation of his ancestral roots in England leads him deeper and deeper into a labyrinthine and intricately-constructed web of fact, fiction, and fantasy, the lines that define that fact, fiction, and fantasy begin to blur, just as some of the paintings so integral to this story’s plot blur. This is definitely a story of shapeshifters par excellance. All the signs point toward a macabre and horrendous Hatherley family secret, but at this point, can Gerard really trust even his own reason? And who is the real ghost writer? Is it Viola? Alice? Or is it perhaps Gerard, himself? Like all ghost stories of the highest quality, The Ghost Writer raises more questions than it ultimately answers.

Because of the stories and letters that make up much of the narrative of The Ghost Writer, comparisons with A.S. Byatt’s Possession were, I suppose, inevitable. Although the structure of the two books is certainly similar, the mood and atmosphere of each is totally different. Possession is a story of intertwining loves; The Ghost Writer is, well, a ghost story. It owes far more to Henry James (with even a nod to Dickens’ Miss Havisham) than it does to Byatt. In fact, people very familiar with James’ masterpiece of horror, The Turn of the Screw, may feel The Ghost Writer to be slightly derivative. I wasn’t one; as I mentioned above, I felt Harwood’s material was both fresh and original. Though he's evocative of James, I didn’t find him at all derivative.

Like The Turn of the Screw, however, The Ghost Writer is a very interior—even claustrophobic—book, but, though we are privy to Gerard’s thoughts, Harwood keeps him at arm’s length. I never really felt I got to know Gerard and so had little empathy with him. This didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the book in any way, however. In fact, I liked the fact that Harwood resisted the possible urge to psychoanalyze his character and simply gave us a first rate story instead.

There's been much criticism leveled on the ending of this book. No, Harwood doesn’t tie everything up into a neat and pretty package, and this book is definitely intricately plotted, but rest assured, Harwood has played more than fair with his readers. Anyone who’s paid close attention to the narrative will understand the ending and realize the meaning of the clues that have liberally laced the story as well as the “stories-within-the-story.” Enigmatically, while many questions will be raised, all the pieces will simultaneously fall into place.

I loved this stylish, elegant, and erudite ghost story and believe it deserves a far wider readership. It’s psychological horror in the grand tradition of James’ The Turn of the Screw, and horror certainly doesn’t get any better than that. This book, along with Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, are the only books I believe can stand alongside The Turn of the Screw and hold their own. And hold their own, they certainly do.

5/5

Recommended: To all who love a “ripping good yarn” told in a stylish and elegant manner. This “genuinely creepy” book is bound to keep readers turning pages far into the night. This would make a first rate book for any book discussion group.

Writing Tips - The Ten Biggest Mistakes New Writers Make - The Second Five

2011-07-15T00:16:00.004-04:00

6. Many new writers, and some experienced ones as well, fail in knowing when to use “that” and when to use “which.” Often, in editing a manuscript, I’ll change either “that” or “which” to the right word, only to have the author change it back to the wrong word again. It’s really not difficult to know when to use “that” and when to use “which,” and there’s no excuse for using the wrong one. Just no excuse. When you use the wrong word, it’s very jarring to the reader.

Use “that” before a restrictive clause, and use “which” before everything else. For some, this begs the question: What is a restrictive clause? A restrictive clause is part of a sentence you can’t omit because it specifically restricts the other part of the sentence.

The cookies that are on the table were baked by me.

Did I bake all the cookies? Thank goodness, no, I did not, but I did bake the cookies on the table. Without the restrictive clause, however, the sentence would mean that I did bake all the cookies.

A nonrestrictive clause, on the other hand, is something that can be omitted from the sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence as a whole. A nonrestrictive clause adds information, but not necessary information, and it’s usually set off by commas:

The Sound and the Fury, which is generally thought of as Faulkner’s masterpiece, is Jane’s favorite.

We could say: The Sound and the Fury is Jane’s favorite. However, we’ve added a nonrestrictive clause to show that Jane’s favorite novel is also generally thought of as Faulkner’s masterpiece. Did you have to have that information? No, you didn’t. It “adds to.”

It’s really as simple as that.

7. Many beginning authors do not understand point-of-view and do not realize when point-of-view is broken. And point-of-view can be difficult as it’s one of the most complex things about fiction writing. Point-of-view will determine everything about your novel: its theme, tone, characterization, etc. Write the same story with a different point-of-view and you’ll find that while you’ve utilized the same basics, you have a totally different book. The purist stays in the same POV for an entire scene, while some big name authors change POV at whim – often to the detriment of their books. I was reading a “Grand Prize” winning story from one of the many writing contests out there today, and I noticed that the author had broken point-of-view in the first paragraph. I doubt that even the contest judges realized what had happened or they wouldn’t have given that particular entry “Grand Prize.” Point-of-view can be very subtle.
Although first person POV is en vogue right now, I think it’s best for beginners to use third person limited point-of-view. First person can work well in some books, but it’s fraught with danger for the inexperienced writer. When choosing a POV character, use the POV of the most important character, usually your hero or heroine.

8. New writers often give characters similar sounding names, causing confusion for the reader. It’s almost always wrong to give characters similar sounding names. Let’s say you have two characters with names beginning with “S” – Susan and Samantha, and Samantha is introduced first. Readers will invariably bond with Samantha and give Susan short shrift, even if Susan is the more important of the two. This holds true even if one character is a woman and one is a man, say Samantha and Samuel. How difficult can it be for the author to change one of the names? I’m working on a book now with a fairly large cast of characters and none of the characters have names so similar as to cause confusion. I can tell you, I didn’t have an unduly difficult time choosing character names. You should also avoid names that sound alike even if they do begin with different letters, e.g., Aiden and Jayden or Addison and Madison. It just confuses the reader and muddies the story. If you have names that are alike, choose one of the names to use, and rename the other characters.

9. Beginning writers often neglect a character’s interior monologue. Yes, it’s possible to write an entire book, and write one very well, without giving the reader any of your characters’ interior thoughts. Eudora Welty did it at least once and did it well. However, it’s not a good stance for a beginner to adopt. Interior monologue can reveal facets of the story not available through dialogue, it can deepen characterization, it can impart vital information to the reader. Just make sure it’s unobtrusive and doesn’t seek to explain emotions or details already shown through dialogue or action.

10. The work of beginning writers often lacks a unifying theme. When a book lacks a unifying theme, many readers will end the book with the question: Now what was that all about? A theme, if you do a good job of exploring it, will add depth and complexity and richness to your novel. Just remember to be subtle. Don’t state the obvious. A theme does not “stick out like a sore thumb,” and yes, I do realize that’s a cliché, but is woven subtly throughout your story. It's sometimes difficult to choose a theme before beginning writing. Often the theme will emerge during the crafting of the story.

Note: Since the posting of the first five “mistakes” many readers and writers have asked me about voice. Voice is not style. Voice is not POV. Voice is unique to each author, and is best developed by writing, writing, writing. If you do enough writing, you’ll eventually develop your distinctive voice. Some writers have a voice that is easily identifiable, such as Edna O’Brien, while other writers have a voice that is transparent. Sometimes, a transparent voice works best. One way to know if you have a truly distinctive voice is by entering various writing contests and then studying the judges’ feedback if available. Usually a distinctive voice will receive very high marks from some judges and very low ones from others. People will either like a distinctive voice or they will not.

Writing Tips - The Ten Biggest Mistakes New Writers Make - The First Five

2011-07-13T07:45:00.005-04:00

Most of my work involves ghostwriting books for established authors, however I also do a lot of independent (not through a publishing house) editing for up-and-coming writers. Many of those up-and-comers ask me to list the ten biggest mistakes new writers make. This isn’t hard to do, as I see the same mistakes being made over and over again. And, learning how to correct those mistakes, and learning to greatly improve one’s writing really wouldn’t take a lot of work on the writer’s part. If you’re going to be a writer, strive to be the best. You might not always meet your aspirations, but your work will reflect your desire. Now, those top ten mistakes. The first five are below and I’ll post the next five on Friday. Avoid these, please!

1. By far, the biggest mistake I see new writers making is “telling rather than showing.” I recently read two debut novels, and both of them were “told” in narrative rather than dramatized in scenes. It got to be a real chore just reading the books, and by the time I finished, I was tuckered out. If I hadn’t had to read the novels, I wouldn’t have done so. “Telling,” rather than dramatizing in scenes, can make your reader feel like you’re lecturing him, or worse yet, yelling at him. All telling isn’t bad, though. You do need “telling” when you transition from one scene to another, and in a few other areas in your book, e.g., to slow down the pace, and to show repetitive action, e.g., if you protagonist is enjoying a day at the Indy 500, you don’t want to “show” your reader every lap! That would just be “too much.”

2. New writers use far too many adjectives and adverbs. You knew that one was coming, didn’t you? I don’t think you should dispense with adjectives and adverbs altogether, just most of the time. Most of the time you need to find the precise noun or verb that expresses just what you want to express. If it’s a sunny day, you might not want to say “the blue sky” because the sky is almost always blue on sunny days. You might, however, say “the cloudless sky” because sunny days don’t always feature cloudless skies as well. If we know your protagonist is happy, then you don’t need to tell us “he cried happily.” We already know it. If an adjective or adverb can be dispensed with without harming the integrity of what you want to express, then it’s probably best to get rid of it. Too many adjectives and adverbs will only make your prose seem ponderous, and in the end, you could veer off into “purple prose,” something I’m assuming you want to avoid.

3. New writers are usually vague writers. And no one gets excited about vague writing, especially not agents and editors. Vague writing weakens your book because it forces the reader to guess what you mean rather than “seeing” your words come to life on the printed page. Vague writing is something most writers have to learn to overcome. I know I wrote vague paragraphs when I was learning to write. I don’t any longer. Vagueness is a mistake that is easily corrected. If you’re talking about trees, what kind of trees? Flowers? What kind of flowers? What does that bone china tea service look like that your heroine is so inordinately fond of? What exactly does your protagonist see when he/she looks in the mirror? What do others see? Be specific. Tell us exactly what your characters see, hear, feel (touch), taste and smell. For example, don’t tell us that the scent of flowers was in the air. Tell us the garden was filled with the scent of summer flowers – sweet pea, mignonette, and stock.

4. New writers almost always try to use another dialogue tag in place of “said,” and usually, this backfires. As a dialogue tag, “said” is a perfectly good word. In fact, ninety percent of the time “said” is the only tag you should use. You don’t want dialogue tags calling attention to themselves, and words like “sobbed,” “proclaimed,” “announced,” etc. do call attention to themselves. The dialogue itself should convey how it’s spoken. I don’t go so far as to rule out every dialogue tag except “said,” though. “Shouted,” “asked,” and “whispered” are sometimes useful. Using anything else marks your work as that of an amateur.

I once edited a manuscript so overburdened with fancy dialogue tags, I couldn’t help but write down a few statistics for future reference. On the first five pages alone, this beginning writer had used twenty-two dialogue tags and not one of them was “said.” This writer must have worked very hard to find them all, and she seemed quite pleased that she had. Words like “declared,” “affirmed,” “assented,” “vowed,” “professed,” “alleged,” etc. were cluttering up the story and weighing it down. I edited out most of the tags and replaced others with “said,” and the author did realize how much better and clearer that was.

5. Beginning writers will often write an opening hook that has little or nothing to do with the story they’re going to tell. A lot of new writers I’ve edited write killer opening hooks, just bristling with danger, mystery, and the readers’ “need to know more.” Problems arise when this “bristling” opening hook really has little or nothing to do with the story these writers go on to tell. When that happens, their readers, including any agents and editors, are going to feel much like anyone would feel if he or she were the victim of the old “bait-and-switch.” Here’s an example:

We crept down the stairs, making as little noise as possible. The old house seemed even larger in the dark, and we weren’t sure where we’d go once we got to the ground floor. We heard a loud sigh and couldn’t tell if it came from the oak trees on the front lawn or the ghost we knew inhabited the front parlor. Then the wind picked up, and the large double doors leading to the front porch blew open.

Scary enough, right? Most people want to know how a human being is going to fare when he’s up against a ghost. Then, we read on:

I felt my children wiggle in my arms as I turned another page. “What’s wrong, kids? Don’t you like ghost stories?”

An opening like that is going to cause your readers to slam the cover of your book and toss it aside. That is, if your book ever makes it far enough to have a cover, and it probably won't if you write opening hooks like the above. Don’t attempt to play tricks on your reader. Don’t try to fool them with hyperbole, dreams, jokes, false alarms, or anything else. Sure, work toward those great opening lines and paragraphs, but make sure they relate to the story that follows. If they don’t, you’re disrespecting the very person whose trust you need to earn – your reader’s.

Book Review - Mysteries - The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

2011-07-11T07:41:00.008-04:00

I love Louise Penny’s “Inspector Gamache” mysteries, and The Brutal Telling is one of the best in the series.

As readers of Penny’s series know, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache heads the homicide department of the Sûreté du Quebec. And, as readers of Penny also know, most of the time, Chief Inspector Gamache is investigating a murder in the seemingly idyllic (I’d love to live there) village of Three Pines, twenty miles south of Montreal.

The corpse that gets things rolling in The Brutal Telling belongs to a hermit who shows up dead on the beautiful pine floor of the bistro owned by longtime partners, Olivier and Gabri, who also run the B&B next door. When Gamache and his colleagues, Jean Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste show up, they discover that no one seems to know the dead man’s name or even where he came from. He certainly wasn’t living in Three Pines. And, it isn’t long until a young local man, Agent Paul Morin asks the group if he can tag along and learn what Gamache and company already know:

...to catch a killer they didn’t move forward. They moved back. Into the past. That was where the crime began, where the killer began. Some event, perhaps long forgotten by everyone else, had lodged inside the murderer. And he’d begun to fester.

What kills can’t be seen, the Chief had warned Beauvoir. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s not a gun or a knife or a fist. It’s not anything you can see coming. It’s an emotion. Rancid, spoiled. And waiting for a chance to strike.

It isn’t too long before Gamache discovers the hermit’s hut – a log structure hidden deep in the woods and containing more than one surprise. But what was the hermit’s name? How was he killed? And what was the motive? No one in Three Pines seems to know, or if they know, they aren’t talking.

Some of the above questions are eventually answered, while others remain mysteries, at least for most of the book. But this is the part of crime solving that Gamache loves the most:

...the possibility of turning left when he should have gone right. Of dismissing a lead, of giving up on a promising trail. Or not seeing one in his rush to a conclusion.

We know, almost from the beginning of the book, that some of the inhabitants of Three Pines are lying. Olivier, the man who owns the bistro in which the hermit’s body is found, is one. Olivier tells Gamache that he doesn’t know the dead man, but we know he does. Did he kill the man? Maybe. We’re unsure about every character Penny introduces. With each new introduction we have to ask ourselves the same question – could this person have killed the hermit – and invariably, the answer will be yes. Penny has woven red herrings all through her plot.

How involved is Myrna, owner of Three Pines’ bookstore, and the woman who found the hermit’s body on the floor of the bistro? And why does the very eccentric Ruth, the woman who takes her pet duck, Rosa, everywhere keep leaving scraps of poetry for Inspector Beauvoir? Does Ruth know who killed the hermit? Is she leaving Beauvoir clues? Does the killer come from within the ranks of the isolated villagers, or could he or she be one of the strangers in town? What about the people renovating the sinister old “Hadley house?” The Czech immigrants? The strange man in the forest? One of those persons knew the hermit. We know that from the book’s opening pages. But, did that person kill the hermit as well? Penny keeps the reader on his or her toes as we guess and guess again.

The plot is a heady and complex blend of mystery, history, greed, art, and lies, yet even with all its complexity, its never overly complicated. It’s quite cleverly constructed, and though some reviewers compare Penny to Agatha Christie, with all due respect to Ms. Christie, and I do love her books, Penny’s books reach further than Christie’s. Penny’s books explore so much more than just the solving of a murder. The Brutal Telling, especially, explores the broader themes that give rise to a violent and desperate act like murder.

The characterization is rich and complex. For me, the people inhabiting Three Pines really came alive. They all have backstory and histories with one another, and it shows. Not one of them could be eliminated, not one of them functions as “just a plot device.” And I loved their quirkiness. Ruth doesn’t have a pet dog or cat, or even a bird. She has a pet duck. A pet duck that wears discarded baby clothes.

Even Three Pines functions as a character, as Clara well knows:

This solid little village that never changed but helped its inhabitants to change. She'd arrived straight from art college full of avant-garde ideas, wearing shades of gray and seeing the world in black and white. So sure of herself. But here, in the middle of nowhere, she'd discovered color. And nuance. She'd learned from the villagers, who'd been generous enough to lend her their souls to paint. Not as perfect human beings, but as flawed, struggling men and women. Filled with fear and uncertainty, and in at least one case martinis.

I’ve seen a few complaints regarding the subplot involving the artist, Clara and her husband, Peter. A few people thought Clara and Peter were introduced only to bring an art expert into the mix. Not so. And if it’s an art expert Penny needed, she had one built in in the character of Therese Brunel. Clara and Peter’s subplot, and Clara’s desire for the validation of having her works shown in a major gallery, have been a running subplot in all the “Gamache mysteries.” However, one doesn’t have to know this in order to read and enjoy The Brutal Telling. This book can stand on its own. It doesn’t require the reader to be familiar with the previous books in the series. And, if a reader reads The Brutal Telling first, that reader can go back to the previous four “Inspector Gamache” mysteries confident that the fifth gives no spoilers regarding the previous four.

As the plot of The Brutal Telling advances, Inspector Gamache becomes entwined in the international art and antiques trade, and he travels from Three Pines to Montreal to the Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago off the north coast of British Columbia. What he finds there, while necessary to this book’s resolution, will only cause Gamache, and the other inhabitants of Three Pines, much sorrow.

I know readers who put the “Inspector Gamache” mysteries into the classification of “cozies.” I would have to agree that that classification comes closest of all, though Gamache is certainly nothing like Christie’s Miss Marple, to me, the "Queen of the Cozies." (I adore Miss Marple, by the way.) Three Pines is quaint and charming no matter how many murders are committed there. There’s something dreamlike and mystical about the village, especially during the fall, and The Brutal Telling is set during the colorful southern Canadian autumn when everything is undergoing a transformation, not into something totally different, but into something more fully itself.

Though there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, I didn’t really like the book’s ending, and for me, it was a gloomy ending. I came away from the book feeling that some day Louise Penny is going to have more to say about this murder and the person who allegedly committed it.

The one criticism I have of this book has to do with Penny’s writing style. Instead of writing longer sentences, Penny tends to break a sentence up into phrases. Not every time, of course, but often enough so that it became very, very noticeable. At first, I didn’t mind, but it happened so often it began to drive me nuts. It was jarring. The writing was calling attention to itself, and it would have been so much better had it not done so. Here’s one example:

But nothing was more surprising than what awaited Chief Inspector Gamache. In the farthest corner of the room.

And:

While everyone else was gazing ahead, he was slumped down and staring back. To where they’d been.

And those aren’t even the worst offenders. Some of the many other instances caused the writing to be extremely choppy. Maybe those of us who are bothered by this are in the minority. I don’t know, but given the glowing reviews of this book, and all Penny’s other books, I’d say we are. You might feel this is a quibble, or you might be bothered even more than I was. I just wanted to make readers aware of this quirk in Penny’s writing style. Otherwise, Penny’s writing style is fine, just perfect for a murder mystery. While reading, I would be totally engrossed in the mystery until one of these awkward (to me) phrases would pull me out of the book.

In the end, though, The Brutal Telling is the kind of mystery that envelopes the reader, that leaves him wanting more, that makes him happy to open the pages of the book and get reacquainted with characters he considers “old friends.”

Even though I closed this book with sadness, I can’t wait until I have an opportunity to read Penny’s next book in the series. Louise Penny is one of the finest mystery authors writing today.

4.5/5

Recommended: If you love a good literary mystery, then this is the book for you.

Note: If you think you recognize Ruth Zardo’s poetry, you probably do. The poetry Penny has used, with permission of the authors, belongs to Margaret Atwood, Ralph Hodgson, and Mike Freeman.

The “Inspector Gamache” mysteries are, in order of publication:

Still Life
A Fatal Grace
The Cruelest Month
A Rule Against Murder
The Brutal Telling
Bury Your Dead
A Trick of the Light (To be released in the US on August 30, 2011)

Book Review - Classics - The Golden Bowl by Henry James

2011-07-07T10:20:00.006-04:00

Although The Portrait of a Lady will no doubt always be Henry James' most read and most loved novel, I think The Golden Bowl is his masterpiece. Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl, along with The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, constitute James' final, and most complex, phase as a novelist.

The Golden Bowl, set in England and in Italy from 1903 to 1906, is the story of four people, two men and two women, and two marriages. Two marriages whose core holds the same secret, the same unacknowledged truth. The plot is a simple one and revolves around that most human of all "failings" - adultery - or at least the suspicion of adultery, and in this case, suspicion may prove to be more deadly than the actual deed, itself.

Adam Verver, a wealthy American industrialist, sans scruples, has acquired almost all the material possessions his heart desires. When he travels to Europe, accompanied by his young daughter, Maggie, however, he has one important "purchase" yet to make - a husband for Maggie. He thinks he's found the perfect candidate in Prince Amerigo. And in some ways, he has. Although now impoverished, Prince Amerigo is descended from an aristocratic Florentine family, a family who lives in the once elegant Palazzo Ugolini. Prince Amerigo can provide Adam Verver's descendants with something Adam, himself, cannot provide at any price...a title. Maggie, herself, finds the Prince charming and delightful and is not at all averse to her father's plans for her marriage. But the course of love and marriage is, more often than not, a rocky road, and predictably, complications lie in wait for Maggie in the form of her best friend, Charlotte Stant, an impoverished woman who's long been involved in a torrid sexual liaison with Prince Amerigo...without Maggie's knowledge, of course. (Not really a spoiler.)

Fanny Assingham, a American expatriate now living in London, is well aware of the relationship between Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, and she believes she's come up with the perfect solution. Much to Prince Amerigo's dismay, Fanny suggests that Adam and Charlotte marry. Then all four people will be happy, or so Fanny thinks. But this is Henry James, and as in real life, happiness doesn't come quite that easily. Although Adam believes Charlotte is marrying him for financial security alone, Charlotte has reasons for marrying Adam that are different from what anyone, save perhaps the Prince, suspects.

One of the biggest problems in the marriages of Adam and Maggie isn't, as might be expected, the fact that their respective mates have long been lovers. The real problems surface only when Adam and Maggie, who are both very happy with the situation, begin spending far too much time together, leaving Prince Amerigo and Charlotte to devise ways to amuse themselves, and amuse themselves, they do. But, are they to blame? Or must part of the blame lie with Adam and Maggie, themselves, who are so involved with each other and so wrapped up in each others lives that they fail to notice the problems inherent in their own marriages or their mates' attraction to each other?

The Golden Bowl is a book filled with ambiguity. Nothing is black or white, bad or good, something that makes it all the more challenging for its reader, but all the more rewarding as well. The Golden Bowl is a character study par excellence, and at least in my opinion, it is filled with more innuendo and delicately shaded nuance than are any of James' other books. In this novel, James left much for the reader, himself, to answer. And, lest any reader think the "sin" in this book is adultery, it isn't. It's excessive attachment, excessive clinging, excessive selfishness. Prince Amerigo and Charlotte are perfectly matched in their passion and sensuality; we know, without a doubt, that these two people were destined to love each other. Adam and Maggie are perfectly matched in their passive-aggressive tendencies and in their desire to take what they want despite the feelings of others; this "perfection," however, could ultimately become their tragedy.

The book's title isn't superfluous. The Golden Bowl really does contain a golden bowl, and it's this that leads Maggie to the startling realization that both her husband and her best friend have been lying to her. Does she assert herself? Does she become a victim? Does she resign herself to her fate, much as Isabel Archer did in The Portrait of a Lady? That, of course, would be unfair to disclose, but it is Maggie's actions that bring The Golden Bowl to a surprising close.

The Golden Bowl is Henry James at his finest. His narrative powers, in my opinion, have never been greater than they are in this magnificent novel, though I do know people who find this book rather boring. I really think those people wouldn't like James no matter what book of his they chose to read, and if one is new to the work of Henry James, this isn't the place to begin. Daisy Miller would be a far better choice. I found The Golden Bowl to be a richly dense tapestry, as James layers scene upon scene, set piece upon set piece, weaving all into a seamless whole.

The Golden Bowl does contain James' beautiful, flowing, convoluted prose that meanders and continuously folds back on itself again and again, however, I don't think the prose is quite as convoluted as it is in The Portrait of a Lady. The Golden Bowl is divided into two sections, with the first being titled "The Prince" and the second, "The Princess." As the novel opens, Prince Amerigo is in London, considering his options, and lost in thought regarding Maggie Verver:

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognised in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner.

Perhaps, more than any other book written by James, The Golden Bowl is a very interior, introspective book. Yes, even more so than The Portrait of a Lady. While that book concerned the internal torment of one very naive person, Isabel Archer, The Golden Bowl contains the internal torment of two, Prince Amerigo and Maggie Verver, and by extension, Adam Verver and Charlotte Stant, and save for Maggie, none of these characters is, in the slightest bit, naive.

Surprisingly, for me at least, the most sympathetic character isn't Maggie, it's Charlotte. Maggie and Adam are "collectors" - they treat people in much the same way they treat objets d'art. It is indicative of the genius of James, however, that our sympathies never settle, but constantly shift, first to Charlotte, then to Maggie, then to Adam, then to the Prince. It is also indicative of the genius of James that despite the tragic failings of each of the four main characters in The Golden Bowl, there is something to be pitied in each of them as well.

If I have one small criticism of this magnificent novel, it's the fact that it lacks story tension, and it might be a little overly long. We know Prince Amerigo and Charlotte are being drawn to each other like moths to a flame. It's not really a question of "if" but rather "when" and what the consequences will be.

In the end, The Golden Bowl revolves, not around adultery, but around the torment we endure because of the lies we tell ourselves, the words we leave unspoken. This book constantly asks the questions: What constitutes truth? What constitutes a lie? What is right and what is wrong? James never makes the answers clear and this book is filled with much nebulous ambiguity. In the final analysis, one must ask oneself if tragedy lies in the doing or in the unacknowledged desire of what we want, and, perhaps, need, to happen.

5/5

Recommended: To those who love highly literary, interior novels and character studies. It could be too convoluted and interior and slow-paced to suit some readers. Those who love beautiful prose will probably like this book, though. It's flowing and graceful, if a tad slow-moving.

Book Review - Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

2011-07-01T00:56:00.004-04:00

The Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead was the first of Marilynne Robinson’s books I read, but I loved it so much I wanted to explore her other novels, and I think there are only two – Housekeeping and Home. Housekeeping begins by confronting the reader with a mystery of sorts:

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

Right away, I wondered why Ruth and Lucille Stone had so many caretakers. Were they such disobedient girls that no one wanted them? How did they lose their mother, their grandmother (well, she did die, no mystery there), and their great aunts? All of them? What caused the comical and sometimes bumbling Lily and Nona to flee?

I soon saw that where Gilead revolved around the relationship between a father and a son, Housekeeping, which is set in the fictional town of Fingerbone in the 1950s, was going to revolve around women and their more difficult and complicated relationships. That brought up more questions: Do men always leave or die prematurely in Ruth and Lucille’s world? In the end, are woman always left alone?

Set in the desolate mountains of Idaho, Fingerbone seems like the end of the world, and it most definitely is the end of the line for several of the town’s train travelers. Near the beginning of the book, Robinson dispenses with the only man around by writing of the catastrophic derailing of a train and its slide into Fingerbone Lake. That derailing took the life of Edmund Foster, the grandfather of Ruthie, our protagonist, and her younger sister, Lucille. In fact, it was Edmund who relocated the family to Idaho. It was Edmund who set into motion the family’s strange relationship with the wild, windswept, wintry landscape of the northern mountains. Edmund’s slide into his watery grave, for his body was never recovered, highlights one of this book’s major themes: loss and how different people deal with loss and the grief it ensues.

Strangely – or maybe not so strangely – Edmund’s wife, Sylvia (not to be confused with her youngest daughter, Sylvie) decides to deal with the loss of her husband by simply not speaking of him. Our narrator, Ruthie, and her younger sister, Lucille, suffer a similar loss when their mother, Helen, drops them off on the porch of their grandmother Sylvia’s Fingerbone home, with only a box of graham crackers to comfort them, then drives her borrowed car off a cliff and into the lake. Ruthie and Lucille are left with nothing but questions about who their mother really was, while Sylvia deals with the grief of losing her middle daughter in the same way she dealt with the loss of her husband. She simply doesn’t speak of Helen or the way she died.

While Grandma Sylvia tries her best to give Ruthie and Lucille a sense of normalcy, Grandma Sylvia also knows she can’t live forever. When she dies five years into caring for her motherless granddaughters, it’s her sisters-in-law, the quaint-but-bumbling Lily and Nona Foster, who arrive in Fingerbone to care for the girls.

Lily and Nona add a bit of humor to this otherwise delicately bleak book. They’re people one would expect to meet in an English drawing room farce rather than in dreary Fingerbone, Idaho. The sisters really don’t resemble the Foster family at all, save for the fact that neither one comes right out and says what she really means. Here are Lily and Nona discussing their first glimpse of Sylvie, Ruth’s and Lucille’s youngest aunt, and the person they hope will take over as caretaker of the girls:

So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, “What a lovely dress,” it was as if to say, “She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!” And when Nona said, “You look very well,” it was as if to say, “Perhaps she’ll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!”

And, go they do, the very same day Sylvie arrives. It’s not Ruth and Lucille they cannot tolerate; it’s Fingerbone. From this point on, Sylvie Foster Fisher will be the primary caretaker of Ruth and Lucille Stone, and the book is really the story of Ruthie’s relationship with her aunt, Sylvie, an eccentric, free spirited woman, and how that relationship, for better or worse, shapes the person Ruthie becomes.

There isn’t much plot in Housekeeping. Almost all of the book’s events take place in or around the rather odd house Edmund Foster built at the edge of town. I’m a fan of character driven novels over plot driven ones. I certainly don’t need a book to be “heavily plotted.” I love Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and John Banville’s The Sea, neither of which can be said to be heavily plotted. But, while there are few “big events” in Housekeeping, the set pieces, most of which are only one or two pages in length, are lovely.

One of the book’s key scenes occurs when Lucille, who is growing tired of Sylvie’s bohemian ways, turns on the light during dinner. Sylvie prefers to eat dinner in the dark because she dislikes the starkness of the dark windows against a lighted room, however the light only serves to illuminate Sylvie’s complete ineptitude as a housekeeper. Dried leaves have gathered in the corners of the rooms, newspapers are stacked precariously, one on top of another, burned curtains are hanging at the windows, and mountains of tin cans with the labels removed – Sylvie’s newest “housekeeping fetish” – are ringed around the room. Even Sylvie doesn’t know why she’s saving so many of them.

Water plays an important role in this book. We never really get a good look at the town of Fingerbone, which was “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather,” but we do get several looks at the lake that overshadows it, the same lake that took the lives of both Edmund Foster, and many years later, his adult daughter, Helen. The lake, which is “a place of distinctly domestic disorder,” surrounded by “uncountable mountains” seems to draw, if not Lucille, at least Ruthie and Sylvie, to it. And even those residents of Fingerbone who were not drawn to the lake could not escape its waters, for every spring, the lake flooded the town, washing away the past, but not before tarnishing the present, and perhaps the future as well, with the mud and silt such a washing away would bring. Strangely, it’s the lake that will allow two of the book’s characters to escape to what we hope will be a happier life, a life that’s at least free of the mores and fears and judgments of the narrow minded townspeople.

It’s difficult to write about Housekeeping without giving away its scant plot, but suffice to say that Ruthie and Lucille decide on very different paths in life, and for the first time, the lives of the sisters diverge. This is especially difficult for Ruthie because Lucille had always spoken for both herself and for her older sister. Now, Ruth has to find someone else with whom to identify. And, the town does not take kindly to gentle Aunt Sylvie and the cavalier way Sylvie treats things like church and school and well, housekeeping, itself. The townsfolk despise Sylvie’s transience and believe something should be done to save Ruthie from suffering the same fate. Yet they seem to overlook, despite the yearly flooding, the fact that life, by its very nature, is transient. Everything gets swept away...eventually.

Robinson is excellent at characterization. She not only sums up who her characters are on the inside, she paints a vivid portrait of how they appear on the outside as well. This is Ruthie describing Bernice, a woman who lived in their building in the Middle West, before they came to Fingerbone:

Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear. She was an old woman, but managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease. She stood any number of hours in our doorway, her long back arched and her arms folded on her spherical belly, telling scandalous stories in a voice hushed in deference to the fact that Lucille and I should not be hearing them.

The writing, most of which is bleak and not at all comical, is gorgeous and flowing. I’ve heard some people call the book one long poem. It’s not a poem, though, it’s a novel written in low-key, poetic sentences that remain lyrical while never showing off. Here’s Ruthie talking about one of the family dinners, eaten with Sylvie in the darkness of a summer night, and this is, I think, one of the most beautiful passages in the entire book:

We looked at the window as we ate, and we listened to the crickets and nighthawks, which were always unnaturally loud then, perhaps because they were within the bounds that light would fix around us, or perhaps because one sense is a shield for the others and we had lost our sight.

Robinson also has a keen eye for describing nature, especially winter:

If one pried up earth with a stick on those days, one found massed shafts of ice, slender as needles and pure as spring water.

As one reads Housekeeping, one becomes aware that it isn’t a book of ideas so much as it’s a book of symbols and impressions. Robinson has assigned Ruthie the task of narrating with Emerson’s “transparent eyeball.” Emerson, himself, described the “transparent eyeball” in his 1836 essay titled Nature:

We return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

If that sounds a bit mystical, Emerson meant for it to sound that way, and Robinson’s book, too, explores people who have access to the mystical in life, at least in nature. On one very strange trip across the lake in a stolen boat, Sylvie tells Ruth how she (Sylvie) can see and feel the presence of the ghosts of children, and we have no reason to disbelieve her.

Housekeeping is a profound book, without really sounding profound, but it isn’t a book that will make most readers feel better about life. Housekeeping lets us know that loneliness and isolation are necessary parts of life, perhaps big parts of life that must be endured and embraced by everyone. The mystery in this book – why Helen drove the borrowed car into Fingerbone Lake, why Grandma Sylvia refused to acknowledge her grief at the loss of her husband and daughter, why Ruthie and Lucille acted as they did – is best expressed by Ruthie as she muses on the suicide of Helen:

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.

In Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson has crafted a haunting novel that leaves both the book’s characters and the reader with more questions than it answers, questions that are, perhaps, unanswerable.

5/5

Recommended: Absolutely, for lovers of highly literary, character driven fiction. Be aware, though, that this is a very quiet novel.

You can find my review of Gilead here.

Book Review - Pure by Andrew Miller

2011-06-23T01:19:00.007-04:00

Pure, Andrew Miller’s sixth novel, takes place in 1785, in Paris, as Normandy engineer Jean-Baptiste Baratte is summoned to the Palace of Versailles. There, Baratte, who is a graduate of the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussées, is commissioned by the State to demolish the ancient cemetery beneath the church of “Les Innocents” in central Paris, and dispose of the thousands of bodies buried there.

The cemetery is far too close to the famous markets of Les Halles. The many bodies, whose fat refuses to decompose “properly” and saturates the ground instead, are causing the entire area to smell horribly. Even the food is being affected. “Les Innocents” – both the church and the cemetery – are now closed after human remains broke through a wall into the cellar of a neighboring tenement. Baratte will oversee the year long moving of the graves and charnel pits as well as the transportation of the remains to a quarry outside of Paris, an act that is supposed to “cleanse” or “purify” the church and the surrounding land.

Baratte, of course, can’t do all of this alone, so he calls on a friend, Lecoeur, who brings a group of sturdy and stoic Belgian miners to help get the job done. As the project gets underway, Baratte is both sickened and humiliated, but he’s accepted an advance from the State, and he’s also a forward looking man of reason, not of emotion or superstition. He tells himself he is only sweeping away the “poisonous influence of the past” and that he and his team will be “the men who will purify Paris!”

Although Baratte tries to console himself with thoughts of the good he’s doing, his task seems destined to failure from the very beginning, a failure that’s symbolized in the part of France that Baratte calls home. Baratte and Lecoeur have invented what they consider to be an ideal society and have named it Valenciana, derived not from Valencia, Spain, but from Valenciennes, France, the terrible, and terribly dirty, coal mining town in Normandy from which Baratte and Lecoeur both hail.

One would think the Parisian residents in the immediate vicinity of “Les Innocents” would welcome the purification Baratte and his miners are undertaking, however, surprisingly, some of them oppose it, among them the family – the Monnards – with whom Baratte lodges. Ziguette, the unmarried daughter of the house, is so incensed that she attacks Baratte in the middle of the night with a hammer.

Ziguette isn’t the only local with whom Baratte forms a difficult relationship during his year of digging and purification. Besides the somber Monnards and their beautiful but strange daughter, and Lecoeur, of course, there’s Jeanne, the sexton’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter, a sensitive and gentle girl who’s lived her entire life to date among the dead. By helping Baratte identify the graves, Jeanne tells him she is forced “to assist in the destruction of her little paradise.” There’s the mad priest of “Les Innocents,” Père Colbert, the stylish organist, Armand, who takes Baratte in hand and shows him how to dress in the latest fashion. And of course there’s Dr. Guillotin, the levelheaded and very humane man who becomes a part of the demolition and purification for research purposes only, and whose name will forever be linked to a terrible invention used in the coming revolution.

Héloise, however, is the person Baratte grows closest to. She’s the “hooker with a heart of gold,” who manages to retain an air of mystery and who isn’t at all stereotypical despite the way I described her.

All of the above characters and more bring Baratte’s story to life, and all of them are needed by Miller. In this story, everyone has a necessary part to play that can’t be played by anyone else.

Pure is a book filled with action. There’s murder, suicide (and you’ll never guess which character), madness, fire, and sex with a mummified corpse. And why not? Digging up the graves of children who’ve died of plague or young women preserved by embalming day after weary day is enough to drive even the strongest man witless. And the book is, of course, deeply political, though if you don’t like politics, you probably won’t even notice because Pure is, first and foremost, a wonderful, and wonderfully told, story. Still, how could Pure not be political? This is a book that centers on a repressive past that’s making way for the enlightenment of the future. Like most things consigned to the past, however, “Les Innocents” doesn’t give way easily or without a fight. Change is, more often than not, a very painful process.

The mood of Pure is, of course, bleak. And despite all the action in the book, the story often feels ponderous and claustrophobic, but ponderous and claustrophobic in a very good way. The characters may be vivid and colorful, but the atmosphere of Pure is heavy with anticipation and dread. At times, it’s downright creepy. I could see the fog off the Seine shrouding the graves of “Les Innocents” and hear the rain dripping down through the leaves on the stones. We know that a dark cloud is hanging over France, and Miller has succeeded is conveying this dark cloud in his novel. With every page the reader turns, he or she feels that something terrible, something really horrible, is waiting just around the corner.

The writing is flawless, and for me, it was vintage Andrew Miller, reminiscent of his glorious debut novel, Ingenious Pain, also set in the eighteenth century, an age Miller seems especially adept at calling forth in all it’s filth and forward thinking. In Pure, for example, as Baratte waits in the anteroom in Versailles, a small dog fouls the floor, causing Baratte to ponder “the way even a dog's piss is subject to unalterable physical laws.” While Pure is filled with the stench of the Paris streets, threaded through the book is an air of modernity. There are nods to both Voltaire and the importance of public health.

Miller’s descriptive powers have never been better. He writes of eyes as “two black nails hammered into a skull,” and coffins opened “like oysters” and my favorite, “the liquorice shimmer of a human eye.”

This is prose that shimmers and soars. It’s a book one could read for the prose alone, but Miller is far too good a writer not to unsettle us as well. In Pure, he gives us much to think about while we’re marveling at his way with words, thoughts that will linger long after we’ve read the book’s final page.

As Baratte tackles the technical difficulties of his commission, he begins to wonder how to live his own life with purity, and how best to achieve the happiness he so desires. Fittingly, it’s a dog that shows him the way, just as it’s a dog that introduces him to the filth of Paris near the book’s beginning.

I thought this book was flawless. Miller is such an extraordinary writer that I expected much from him, but not this much. Pure is one of those books you only come across three or four times in a lifetime. It’s vivid, it’s elegant, it’s earthy, it’s depressing, it’s vibrant. I can’t say enough good things about the book or Miller, himself. For me, Pure is definitely a work of art (and the cover, a retelling of Goya’s etching titled “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is both gorgeous and perfect). The only other book I’ve read as brilliant as Pure is Hilary Mantel’s glorious Wolf Hall.

Miller’s novel Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001. I expect Pure to at least be shortlisted. If there’s any fairness in life, it should capture the win.

If you’re looking for a highly literary novel that’s as perfect as a book can be, you can’t go wrong with Pure. And if you haven’t yet read Miller’s debut novel, Ingenious Pain, now’s the time to do so. Both books are brilliance distilled in its purest form, guaranteed to please even the most discriminating of readers.

5/5

Recommended: Definitely, and especially for those who enjoy highly literary novels. This is a beautiful book that’s beautifully written. I can’t praise it highly enough.

Book Review - Bestsellers - The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

2011-06-18T22:41:00.004-04:00

I’m more than a little late in reading Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book that “Le Figaro” described as “the publishing phenomenon of the decade.” Though the book might have been the “publishing phenomenon of the decade” in France, where it sold more than one million copies and won numerous awards, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the “publishing phenomenon of the decade” in the US. Nor were the comparisons to Proust on target. This is a good book, a very good book, and it’s a book that sometimes concerns itself with the elongation of time, but it’s definitely not Proust. No one writing today is Proust. I just want to make that perfectly clear.

The story, almost all of which is set inside an upscale Paris apartment building, is told in alternating chapters belonging to Renée Michel, the fifty-four-year-old bunion ridden concierge of the above mentioned apartment building, who is secretly passionate about literature and philosophy, and twelve-year-old Paloma Josse, the precocious daughter of a bourgeois family, who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. Renée reads Tolstoy and Husserl in her spare time, and Paloma is determined to burn the apartment building down prior to her death. Renée and Paloma rarely speak to each other, and unbeknownst to them, the two share many things in common, among them a love of Japan, art, beauty, and philosophy.

Renée, it should be pointed out, has reasons for remaining a closet intellectual. The inhabitants of 7 Rue de Grenelle include a celebrated restaurant critic, high government officials, and several members of the old nobility. For these haughty residents, Renée Michel only exists if and when they want or need something from her. As incomprehensible as it might seem, actual scandal would ensue should these inhabitants discover their dowdy concierge enjoyed such “high falutin’” things as Mahler and Japanese cinema. And Renée prefers it that way. She has no desire to be the object of everyone’s curiosity and ridicule. “To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent,” says Renée, “condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to adopt at an early age.” And even if the above weren’t true, Renée needs to maintain her low status in order to keep her job, a job she sorely needs.

While Renée’s chapters consist of standard literary narrative, Paloma’s take the form of “Profound Thoughts,” written in haiku and crammed into a looseleaf notebook. Paloma writes wonderfully of beauty. The beauty of movement, such as a petal falling from a rose, is something that fascinates her (though it’s still not, by any stretch of the imagination, Proust), and she intends for these collected “Profound Thoughts” to be her legacy to the world after she is gone:

The main thing isn’t about dying or how old you are when you die, it’s what you are doing the moment you die. In Taniguchi the heroes die while climbing Mount Everest. Since I haven’t the slightest chance of taking a stab at K2 or the Grandes Jorasses before June sixteenth, my own personal Everest will be an intellectual endeavor. I have set my goal to have the greatest number possible of profound thoughts, and to write them down in this notebook: even if nothing has any meaning, the mind, at least, can give it a shot, don’t you think?

While Paloma’s “Profound Thoughts” may very well be profound, especially for a girl of almost thirteen, the language is reminiscent of a young teenager. Renée’s, however, are written in more formal language:

When of a sudden Old Japan intervenes: from one of the apartments wafts a melody, clearly, joyfully distinct. Someone is playing a classical piece on the piano. Ah, sweet, impromptu moment, lifting the veil of melancholy…In a split second of eternity, everything is changed, transfigured. A few bars of music, rising from an unfamiliar piece, a touch of perfection in the flow of human dealings – I lean my head slowly to one side, reflect on the camellia on the moss of the temple, reflect on a cup of tea, while outside the wind is rustling the foliage, the forward rush of life is crystallized in a brilliant jewel of a moment that knows neither projects nor future, human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days, glows with the light at last and, surpassing time, warms my tranquil heart.

The reader knows, of course, that something is going to upset the apple cart, change the status quo. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the apple cart is upset when one of the celebrated residents of the apartment building dies, and a mysterious and cultured Japanese man, Kakura Ozu, moves in. Kakura Ozu is a quiet man, but this doesn’t stop him from befriending both Paloma and Renée, and the balance of the book will revolve around these three characters.

With Monsieur Ozu, Paloma comes to the conclusion that Renée’s outward appearance belies an inner elegance, the “elegance of the hedgehog”:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terribly elegant.

There’s not a lot of action in this book, and it’s very “talky.” Some might even call it didactic, especially those who don’t like the novel. It’s a character study of Renée, Paloma, and Monsieur Ozu as Barbery explores her favorite themes – the application of philosophy to everyday life, and the skewering of class-consciousness. And skewer they do. Paloma can’t stand her life of wealth and privilege; she despises her older sister, Colombe, as well as her politician father and her plant obsessed, Flaubert quoting mother. For her part, Renée knows people like Paloma’s parents never see much beyond their own creature comforts, and she pities them for it.

There’s no doubt that the beginning of the book is slow. Much of the early pages of the novel are dedicated to the day-to-day routine of life in 7 Rue de Grenelle, as seen through the eyes of Renée or Paloma. The short, alternating chapters can get a bit wearisome with so much philosophizing going on, and Renée and Paloma mirror each other so perfectly that the contrivance of the book begins to lose its charm. That’s why I was happy when Monsieur Ozu made his entrance. He’s the one who really kicks this book into high gear.

Kakura Ozu sees something in both Renée and Paloma that both have failed to see, in themselves or in each other. (Really, as good as both Renée and Paloma are at analyzing everything around them, neither is good at self-analysis.) Paloma, Monsieru Ozu knows, though she talks like an adult, is still a child. Even her vow to kill herself is filled with childish melodrama, though most readers will find this sort of childishness more charming than anything else. Renée finds that it’s impossible to wear a mask of intellectualism under the penetrating gaze of Monsieur Ozu. For perhaps the first time in her life, Renée’s caught off-guard, she loses her balance – just a little. Maybe she really does need more than books and music and the cinema. Maybe she needs more than beauty. Maybe she needs other people. Little-by-little, Renée’s inner longings are made clear, and as they are, we learn, for all her love of Mozart and Mahler and Tolstoy and the Japanese cinema, this lovely woman is certainly no snob. If one wants to be a storyteller, a superb storyteller, Renée tells us, one need look no further than “The Hunt for Red October”:

One wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers.

Though most of the story belongs to Renée, Paloma, too, has her moments to shine, though for me, some of those moments rang as false as a foghorn on a clear, sunny day. The worst occurred when Madame Josse takes her daughter, who she’s convinced is being “too secretive,” to an icy Parisian therapist. Paloma, not one to be maneuvered into a situation not of her making decides she’s capable of “taking on” the therapist on her own:

Listen carefully, Mr. Permafrost Psychologist, you and I are going to strike a little bargain. You're going to leave me alone and in exchange I won't wreck your little trade in human suffering by spreading nasty rumors about you among the Parisian political and business elite. And believe me – at least if you say you can tell just how intelligent I am – I am fully capable of doing this.

That was so bad, I actually found it embarrassing. It was painful to read and painful to write in this review. It didn’t work. Thankfully, the therapist is the only person Paloma attempts to best with her childish threats.

All in all, despite the intellectual monologues and treatises on obscure subjects, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a very sentimental book, so reminiscent of the film, “Amélie of Montmartre,” though lacking that film’s originality. This sentimentality, though, is made bearable by the genuine sweetness of the characters. Renée really is genuine and sincere; Paloma, underneath her high IQ, really is an innocent child; and Monsieur Ozu really is the most charming of men and possessed of the most generous of spirits.

Thankfully, Barbery eschewed sentimentality when writing her ending, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog is definitely not a “feel good” novel. In fact, by the time you reach this book’s dénouement, you’re more likely to have tears in your eyes than a smile on your face.

No, I didn’t think the book was perfect. Not by any means. It has its faults. But I liked it very much. I really enjoyed reading it. I loved spending time with its characters. I won’t soon forget Renée, Paloma, and Monsieur Ozu. Renée, especially, won a place in my heart. She’s exactly the type of person I love getting to know.

4/5

Recommended: Yes, if you can stand the book’s early interior monologues and like Renée’s formal language. And the book is sentimental, despite the intellectualism of its characters, however the loveliness of the characters offsets most of the saccharine sweetness. It’s not a perfect book, but it is one that’s rewarding to read.

Note to Muriel Barbery: Where is Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox?” With Renée’s love of the great Russian Realist, I thought this was one reference you wouldn’t miss.

Book Review - The Long Song by Andrea Levy

2011-06-15T18:41:00.003-04:00

The tale herein is all my mama's endeavor.

So says Thomas Kinsman, a Jamaican publisher, who learned his trade in Britain after his mother abandoned him, newborn, on the doorstep of a Baptist missionary. Thomas intends to publish his mother’s book – a memoir – very nicely bound, complete with sugar cane on the cover. However, he and his mother, an octogenarian Jamaican woman named July, who was once a slave on the Amity Plantation, definitely do not see eye-to-eye. Thomas tells us in his Introduction, “Although shy of the task at first, after several months she soon became quite puffed up, emboldened to the point where my advice often fell on to ears that remained deaf to it.” For her part, July says she will not waste her time or her readers’ time with descriptions of trees and grass, and that her memoir – The Long Song – will not keep company with books filled with the “puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind.”

Slavery is a subject that has inspired the writing of some truly extraordinary books, including two of my all time favorites – Toni Morrison’s magnificent Beloved and Edward P. Jones’ elegant The Known World, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The predominating mood of both those books is tragic and melancholic. So I was skeptical when I learned Andrea Levy’s fifth book, The Long Song, was set against the backdrop of Jamaican slavery. After all, Andrea Levy is known for her comedic look at life, and slavery is something so serious that taking a comedic look at it would be akin to blasphemy. However, I didn’t have to read many pages of this life-affirming novel before I knew I need not have worried. And The Long Song really isn’t a “book about slavery.” It’s a book about July.

The Long Song is set in the Jamaica of the 1831 slave rebellion known as the Baptist War and revolves around the then ebullient July. July was born the daughter of an elegant looking slave named Kitty and the plantation’s white overseer, Tam Dewar, a Scotsman, who was more interested in enjoying his strawberry preserves than in his daughter’s birth.

July, as she tells us, was a pretty child, possessing that “whiff of English white,” and it isn’t long before she caught the eye of the plantation owner’s sister, Caroline Mortimer, who renamed July “Marguerite” and takes her into the “big house” to be trained as a lady’s maid. Every day, July hoped and prayed her mother will come to visit her, and every night, Kitty peered through the windows of the big house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter. Each one never realized that the other is looking for her.

One would think Caroline Mortimer would be a very unsympathetic character, but Levy succeeds in making her just the opposite. Caroline arrived in Jamaica a young, childless widow and one who was definitely not enamored by the harsh household of Amity. When her sister-in-law, the wife of plantation owner, John Howarth, dies in childbirth, Caroline, as John’s sister, becomes the new mistress of Amity. In fact, it’s Caroline who is at the center of, perhaps, the book’s best and most memorable set piece, one that revolves around a lavish Christmas dinner.

Seeking to rouse her brother from the depression that engulfs him after the death of his wife and child, Caroline, with the help of her servants/slaves, and of course, July/Marguerite, who by this time is a young woman, seeks to make the Christmas feast one of unmatched beauty and style. Incongruously, the whole thing falls apart initially because of the price of candles. “It is not that things be expensive,” the diplomatic slave Godfrey tells Caroline, “it is just that you cannot afford them.” Godfrey then proceeds to cover the table, not with the fine linen tablecloths Caroline hoped for, but with an old bed sheet, instead. As things turn out, no one minds the bed sheet. People have more important things to think about when Christmas dinner is interrupted by the first volleys of the Baptist War, and the men leave to fight, while the woman are left cowering amid their finery.

The Long Song, however, is no historical drama, and though Levy has certainly done extensive research on the rebellion, our narrator, July, is more concerned with life at Amity than with politics. During the Christmas feast, July cares little for the rebellion raging outside and is more concerned with sneaking forbidden liquor to the butler’s boy and trading stories about their respective mistresses with the snobbish “quadroon” maid, Clara, over from a neighboring plantation.

We do learn enough about the horrors of the uprising to understand when John Howarth subsequently takes leave of his senses, and July does allow herself to describe the symbolic funeral that marks the end of Jamaican slavery on July 31, 1838. However, our unreliable narrator goes on to inform us that she wasn’t actually present at this symbolic funeral. She was still closeted in Amity with Caroline, the plantation’s new owner, and the story July really wishes to tell is a more personal one – her own.

Though July’s pleased at being emancipated, she’s also upset that she’s been “assigned” a value of only thirty-one pounds, the same value as the “useless, one-eyed” cook who “could kill you with her custard.” It’s not right, July tells us.

After the uprising, it’s July who becomes the intermediary between Robert Goodwin, Caroline’s new husband, and the freed slaves, who want to work, but want to work on their terms, not Robert’s. July’s relationship with both Robert and Caroline forms this novel’s center.

A good looking clergyman’s son who smells of wood smoke, Robert Goodwin has dreams of an agrarian utopia in which the freed slaves can work their own farms and still earn a living working Amity’s fields. It sounds perfect, and maybe it’s too perfect because it never comes to pass. The problem with Robert Goodwin is that his personality, which is quite self-serving, doesn’t allow him to incorporate his lofty ideals into reality, and most of the freed slaves of Amity end up “between a rock and a hard place” in the most literal of ways.

Although Caroline adores her new husband, her new husband only has eyes for July, and it comes as no surprise when July, never one to deny herself something she’d really like to have, refuses to deny herself Robert.

More than once, when working with Thomas, July declares her story told. She wants to concentrate on the good things and avoid remembering the bad. Thomas, however, has other ideas and lets his mother know she needs to tell more. “But reader,” says July, “if your storyteller were to tell of life with July through those times, you would hear no sweet melody but a forbidding discord. You would turn your head away. You would cry lies! You would pass over those pages and beg me lead you to better days.” Thomas, though, exhorts July to make an accurate record of her life, not just a pleasant one.

The Long Song is a cleverly constructed book, and it’s beautifully written. July’s narrative switches between the third person past and the first person present, and there’s a wonderful mix of the Jamaican patois and the more formal English spoken in the Victorian period.

July’s tendency to remember only the good times and her delightful fallibility as a narrator are, for the most part, charming and irresistible, but in some ways, it’s July, herself, who hinders the telling of this tale. Levy can and does stop the action when she wants to insert Thomas’ exhortations of seriousness to July. Most of the time this works very well, though at times, it seems rather strained, and the contrivance of the book becomes all too clear. It’s also something of a problem to see everything through July’s eyes, especially the other characters. We wonder how much the irrepressible July is telling us, and how much she’s not. We wonder if she’s giving some characters credit she shouldn’t be giving and selling others short.

As I said near the beginning of this review, there’s little here of Toni Morrison or Edward P. Jones, and that’s exactly how it should be, at least in this story. Levy’s comedy, which made me skeptical at first since the book’s backdrop is very serious subject matter, works quite well in the telling of July’s story for July is a protagonist possessed of much joie de vivre. In the end, we care greatly about these characters. We lose ourselves in their vivid story, a story that’s as vivid and bold as the Jamaican landscape. In the end, I found The Long Song to be both powerful and playful, and that’s a very rare - and welcome - combination in any book.

4.5/5

Recommended: Definitely, unless the reader finds a light, comedic tone too much of a turn-off is a book whose backdrop is slavery in Jamaica. Remember, though, this isn’t a book about slavery; it’s a book about July.

Book Review - The Appointment by Herta Mueller

2011-06-13T13:44:00.006-04:00

I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.

So begins Herta Mueller’s novel of one woman’s life in Romania under the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu, and we soon learn that this is not the first time our unnamed narrator has been summoned to the office of a man known only as Major Albu for the purpose of interrogation. This isn’t the first time, but for some reason, our narrator believes this interrogation will be worse than any of the interrogations that have gone before.

And what is our narrator’s crime? Sewing notes into the lining of ten white linen suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, along with the narrator’s name and address. To her supervisor, Nelu, these notes are the same thing as prostitution while on the job, and our narrator is “turned over” to Major Albu. Then notes proclaiming “Best Wishes from the Dictatorship” are found in the lining of suits bound for Sweden, and then more notes in suits bound for yet a third country, and our narrator is fired from her job, though she tells us she didn’t write the second and third batch. But that, of course, is irrelevant to Major Albu.

The entire novel – my paperback copy was 214 pages – takes place during the unnamed narrator’s tram ride to her appointment. The tram ride from the seventh floor apartment she shares with her second husband, the alcoholic Paul, until she misses her stop and gets off on the wrong street; a tram ride that takes about ninety minutes and for which she’s risen particularly early.

The tram ride to her appointment with Major Albu seems to trigger thoughts of just about everything in our narrator, expressed as a jumbled interior monologue, and the reader is privy to what seems to be her entire life. She remembers her father’s indiscretions with a person Mueller calls “the woman with the braid” and how our narrator wished to take that woman’s place; she remembers her good friend, Lilli, who was shot and killed while trying to escape across the border to Hungary with her lover, a sixty-six year old military officer; she remembers her own indiscretions with Nelu, the garment factory supervisor with whom she had a brief affair, then rebuffed, leading him to betray her; she remembers how she met her current husband, Paul, at a flea market where she sold the wedding ring her first husband had given her; she remembers her first husband, who betrayed her grandparents; she remembers her former father-in-law, a man she refers to as “the Perfumed Commissar,” who dispatched her grandparents to a forced labor camp while sitting astride the same white horse he rode when he confiscated the property of others.

You’ve probably guessed by now, but this is a book without a hero, a novel without a plot. That was fine with me. I love Ulysses. And as I was reading, I remembered that I loved another book with an antihero that took place entirely on a tram/train – Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. It’s also reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle and The Trial in that it tells the story of someone who is summoned repeatedly for interrogations. The above books, however, are much better books than The Appointment.

Rather than plot, this book’s narrative consists of a jumbled, fragmented, and elliptical narrative. While it reads smoothly enough, and it’s not at all difficult to keep track of the many jumps into the past and returns to the present, eventually, one begins to wonder if any of it is worth the trouble. The narrator isn’t a sympathetic character at all. It’s very difficult to empathize or sympathize with her, and not because she was living in Romania. The character of Lilli, I thought, who had quite a bit of spunk, would have made a much better protagonist than the numb-to-life narrator, but I feel Mueller used several autobiographical elements in building her unnamed narrator and really wouldn’t have written her any other way.

Another problem for me revolved around the interrogations that took place in Central Europe. Though I certainly don’t mean to diminish them and know they were frightening for those who had to endure them, they just aren’t the stuff that makes us want to sit up at night turning pages. We’re too used to more brutal interrogation tactics and more brutal consequences. The serious Western reader is familiar with the works of Solzhenitsyn and has read about Stalin’s Soviet Union at its very cruelest. With all due respect, what Mueller portrays in The Appointment can’t begin to compare.

Worse yet, there are no real scenes and set pieces in The Appointment. For me, this made it a dry book to read, one I plodded through and didn’t enjoy at all. At one point, regarding her life in Romania, the unnamed narrator says, “Instead of these thoughts we're constantly mulling over, it would be better to have the actual things inside your head, so you could reach in and touch them.” I would have to answer, “Yes, infinitely better.” This goes for novels, too. The reader can only take so much “telling” as opposed to “showing” before he or she grows weary enough to cast the book – and the author – aside. Being privy to the narrator’s thoughts is one thing; reading a 200 plus interior monologue is quite another. There’s some reward for the first, while the second is rarely, if ever, rewarded.

The Nobel Committee got it right when they described Mueller’s work as having “no epic line, no plot with beginning and end.” However, they were praising her books. I can’t.

At times, it seems as though the narrator is so worn down, she’s given up. She says:

Whenever I hear the elevator descending to fetch Albu’s henchmen, I can hear his voice quietly in my head: Tuesday at ten sharp, Saturday at ten sharp, Thursday at ten sharp. How often, after closing the door, have I said to Paul: I’m not going there anymore. Paul would hold me in his arms and say: If you don’t go, they’ll come and fetch you, and then they’ll have you for good.

I suppose that could be the point of the whole book – that life under Ceauşescu was so taxing that many people simply gave up. I can believe that. I can and do have much sympathy for those who had to live under that grueling regime. However, “giving up” doesn’t make for good literature. And I suppose Mueller chose not to name her narrator as a way of identifying her as an “Everyman” in Romania, but for me, the practice of not naming a main character is just annoying and amounts to misplaced conceit.

In some ways, though, the narrator, far from giving up, has herself become a mini Major Albu. She’s very forceful when it comes to her attempts to get Paul to stop drinking even though she admits to herself and to the reader that those attempts are more than likely to come to naught. She complains that “drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves – and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission.'’ Still, she tries.

For me, sexual gratification played far too large a role in this novel. Just about everyone in the book seems to indulge in affairs with anyone and everyone they encounter. Pointless affairs that revolve around neither love nor lust. I thought, for the most part, these characters were far too worn down to indulge in affairs, which ultimately compounded their problems while bringing no relief from the boredom and drudgery that made up their days. The sex struck a very false note to me. I felt like it was inserted arbitrarily.

The Appointment is a book in translation (it was originally written in German; I read it in English), and even allowing for that translation, some of the author’s word choices are strange, to say the least. For example, at one point, the narrator likens the effect the interrogations have on her to “the way the roof of your mouth rises up and glues itself onto your brain.” For me, at least, that was just odd, and it lacked power because it was so bizarre.

Although Paul has been fired from the engine plaint where he worked (he was making contraband TV antennas that would pick up stations in Bucharest and Budapest), our narrator still thinks about the showers he took at the plant and the way the other workers would steal his clothes. Thinking of this, and comparing it to her appointments with Albu, the narrator says, “It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot. But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough.”

For me, “…your whole body feels like it’s barefoot” is also bizarre. Does Mueller mean she feels ashamed, as though she’s without clothes in public? If so, I think she would have been better off to simply write that rather than compare the feeling to an entire body feeling as though it’s barefoot.

And then there are the run-on sentences: “A breeze was rustling in the ash trees, I listened to the leaves, perhaps Paul was listening to the water.” Or “The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take.” And why did the author dispense with question marks at the end of questions? I have to put this down to conceit, like the nameless narrator, because dispensing with question marks at the end of a question is not standard practice in German.

There were times, however, when I found the description in this novel to be lovely. One of those times occurs when the narrator is describing her widowed mother’s lack of affect:

When she dried herself she became like the towel, when she cleared the dishes she became like the table, and she became like the chair when she sat down.

I still prefer “showing” to “telling” but if one has to “tell” then telling like the above is both graceful and effective.

The prevailing mood of The Appointment is one of tremendous ennui. The narrator is far too worn down to feel any hate, bitterness, or antipathy. She’s reached a stage where resistance is no longer possible. I’ve heard some people say The Appointment is too bleak and hopeless for American readers. I disagree. While many Americans do love their happy endings, readers of highly literary novels love bleakness. They embrace it. I liked the subject matter around which the novel revolved. I just didn’t like that way the author wrote about it.

In the end, I think the book can be summed up in this short paragraph, one of the best paragraphs in the entire novel:

Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around – portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds.

In The Appointment, the energy it took to monitor one’s thoughts, words, and actions 24/7 was enough to “snuff out life in an instant,” and I think, at times, the narrator, herself, would have preferred being chilled to the bone in one of those watery graves.

1/5

Recommended: No. The book is too pointless and burdensome to read. The interior monologue is exhausting. The reader is left with no lasting image, no reward for having read. However, this is the impression the book left on me; I know people who loved it, so always keep the subjective component of literature in mind.

Note: Herta Mueller was both in 1953 in a German-speaking village in Romania. In 1987, two years before the Ceauşescu regime was overthrown, she immigrated to Germany. She writes almost exclusively about life in Romania under Ceauşescu. Herta Mueller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. She lives in Berlin and writes in German.

Book Review - Thrillers - Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

2011-05-28T12:41:00.003-04:00

The following review contains very minor plot spoilers that some readers might rather avoid.

While I do like mysteries, I’m not much of a fan of thrillers, and especially not political thrillers, however several friends suggested I give English screenwriter, Tom Rob Smith’s debut novel, Child 44 a read, and when I recently found myself with some hours to kill while on a fairly long flight to Hawaii (my husband, who was seated beside me isn’t much for “plane conversation”), I decided to give it a try.

The book did a wonderful job of pulling me in.

Child 44 is set in Stalin’s Soviet Union of the 1950s and revolves around WWII hero and MGB member, Leo Stepanovich Demidov. The book begins, though with three males whose first names all begin with the letter “A” – Andrei, Arkady, and Anatoly. Andrei appears during the book’s 1933 Prologue, which revolves around a young boy who disappears during a terrible famine. Then there is Arkady, a young boy who’s found dead on a suburban Moscow railway line. And finally there’s Anatoly, who’s been accused of spying and is on the run from the MGB and more specifically, Leo. These three boys/men set the stage wonderfully for the story that follows, and better yet, they set the tone of the book – bleak, haunting, and creepy. But back to Leo Demidov.

Leo’s troubles begin when the body of a young boy – Arkady, to be exact – is found on a Moscow railway line and subsequent examinations show the boy was no doubt murdered. This is Stalin’s Soviet Union, a worker’s paradise, and murders, of course, are not supposed to take place. Since the boy’s father, Fyodor, is a friend of Leo’s, it’s Leo who’s sent to the parents’ home to “quash any unfounded speculation, to guide them (the parents) back from the brink.”

Now, Leo is a “good” member of the Communist Party; his dedication to the MGB is unquestioned. He “understood its necessity, the necessity of guarding their revolution from enemies both foreign and domestic, from those who sought to undermine it and those determined to see it fail. To this end Leo would lay down his life. To this end he’d lay down the lives of others.” Leo, it would seem, is the perfect person to defuse the public’s growing interest in the “murder” of an unfortunate young boy in a Moscow suburb. But Leo’s dedication and loyalty are not set in stone.

When the bodies of more children are found, their mouths stuffed with tree bark like Arkady’s had been, their stomachs excised, Leo knows his suspicions are true, and that the children were most definitely murdered, and moreover, that their deaths were the work of one brutal serial killer. These were no random killings, committed by men who’ve already been charged, convicted, and sent to prison as the Party asserts. And the families, Leo thinks, should not be “forced” to accept the official verdict of a “terrible accident.” But Soviet Russia has been too good to Leo for him to start making waves now. Or has it?

It’s only when Leo realizes that a man he hunted down and cruelly tortured was innocent that he begins to question himself and his Party. And then he’s ordered to spy on Raisa, his own wife. Of course, Leo, himself gave the Party its ammunition for that one. He suspects his schoolteacher wife of doing a little more than comparing notes with one of her fellow teachers.

Initially, Leo does as he’s told, spying on Raisa and trying not to over think his situation. In Stalinist Russia, however, Raisa Demidova’s guilt was decided before she was even accused. Leo and Raisa are exiled to the distant Urals, where Leo takes up his post as a small town policeman, lucky just to be alive. And there, in the bleak Siberian countryside, Leo (too conveniently) finds two more murdered children, mutilated in the same way the bodies of the Moscow children were mutilated. Now he understands: someone is “riding the rails,” killing children all across Russia. He and Raisa, who admits she had only married him out of fear, begin to draw closer together, both determined to find the killer and stop him.

It’s obvious that Smith has used the real life story of Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, better known as the “Rostov Ripper,” as a base from which to fashion his plot, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. In fact, I found the first one-half to two-thirds of this novel gripping. I loved its bleakness and its creepiness. And it is bleak. Smith uses just the right details in the first part of his book to hook readers and keep them turning pages – hospitals, farms, and orphanages that aren’t named, but numbered, instead, the local factory replacing the local church, men who die of “hopelessness, uninterested in surviving if this is all there [is] to survive for.”

It isn’t until page 275 of Child 44 that Tom Rob Smith lets his readers know what that cryptic title means. Some readers have called the revelation shocking. I call it ho-hum. And here is where the book starts to come unhinged.

Smith, who conceived his story in screenplay format, is, strangely enough, best when he’s creating atmosphere, when he’s evoking the little details that make this book bleak, haunting, and creepy. His skills in plotting, characterization, and, for a screenwriter, surprisingly, in dialog, leave much to be desired.

It isn’t that Leo is a bad character; it’s just that he’s too much of what we were expecting. There’s no freshness or originality about either Leo or Raisa. Leo isn’t particularly handsome. He’s got a bad meth habit he picked up during the war. He loves his parents, who were forced to vacate their spacious Moscow apartment for one considerably smaller when Leo was exiled to the Urals. His marriage is in trouble. He carries with him long-buried family secrets. He’s dedicated to his job, but he also has a conscience that keeps him from becoming “one of the bad guys.”

To make matters even worse, it seems as though Smith, himself can’t decide whether he wants Leo to be a dedicated member of the Party or a cynic. Raisa – and others – mention Leo’s “blind faith in the State” more than once, but I have to wonder if they were talking about the same Leo I was reading about. Because if they are, that Leo has been pretty cynical from the very start of things. A scene or two showing us Leo’s “blind faith to the State” would have made Raisa’s, etc. comments a whole lot more convincing.

And what about that “strained” marriage of Leo’s and Raisa’s? Raisa goes so far as to tell Leo that she never loved him, that she only married him out of fear of his position in the MGB. Yet by the middle of the book, Leo and Raisa are a veritable Russian “Tommy and Tuppence,” and by the book’s end they couldn’t be more in love.
I found the Leo/Raisa subplot forced and detracting from the overall story rather than adding to it and making it richer as good subplots should do. In fact, I found the “getting back together and making our marriage stronger” subplot, as well as Raisa, herself, to be mind-numbingly boring. And in one long sequence, during which the husband and wife duo find tools and weapons in the most unlikely of places and from the most unlikely of persons, Leo and Raisa turn into James Bond and Lara Croft. This was slightly believable from Leo, but Raisa was a schoolteacher, not a trained spy.

The book’s “bad guy,” Vasili, who is not the murderer, doesn’t fare any better. He’s such a stock character that he’s downright cartoonish. I could almost see him twirling a long, thin mustache as he spoke and sneered.

And why, for heaven’s sake did Smith think it best to dispense with standard quotation marks around his dialogue and italicize it, instead, and set it off with hyphens? This odd choice (in a debut novel and in a thriller) made the dialogue a chore to read. It caused the dialogue to call attention to itself, and dialogue really shouldn’t do that. At times, it’s difficult to know who’s speaking, and the reader has to go back and figure it out. I appreciate the lack of unnecessary “he saids” and “she saids” but readers do need to be able to follow a conversation without working so hard to do so.

The plot is messy. It meanders all over the place, and the book would be better off if it ignored some of the places the plot meanders to.

Smith’s writing style is ponderous and weighty, and his grammatical errors are, on occasion, hilarious, and hilarity is not something one should find in this particular book. Smith seems fond of dangling participles, e.g., “Excited, the blade went in further and faster,” misused words, e.g., “He no longer believed that they would be designated a better residence,” and vague pronouns, e.g., “To Leo’s surprise the prisoner reached up and, with his wrists still bound, felt his brow.” There’s just no excuse for mistakes such as those. If Smith is a sloppy writer, then his editor should have made the corrections.

Without going into detail about the plot, while the first one-half to two-thirds of the book is fairly good, the final half dissolves into a jumble of clichés and coincidences that kind of made me forget all the good stuff that went before. And the worst part is that it needn’t have done so.

Hoping for redemption at the book’s end, I persevered and read on only to find that the final twist was truly contrived. No other serial killer in the history of literature has given his or her readers such a truly nutty explanation as to “why he did it.” And the worst part, the most annoying part of this whole reading experience was confirmation of the fact that I had known the identity of the killer since the end of the first chapter, and I'm not even very good at figuring things like that out. Yes, Mr. Smith, I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter (a vastly superior book), too, and I suspect many of your other readers will have read that book as well. That book was so fresh and original that I really can’t blame Smith for borrowing a little something from it. Just be aware that if you’re a “Dexter” fan, the identity of Child 44’s killer, as well and Leo’s dark secret, won’t be any mystery to you, either.

Not surprisingly, since Smith is a screenwriter, and since Child 44 is such a cinematic book, Ridley Scott is scheduled to direct the film adaptation. Thankfully, Smith won’t be writing the screenplay. With Scott at the helm, I think this definitely will be a movie that’s better than the book.

Child 44 was nominated for seventeen International Awards, and it actually won seven, which was very surprising to me. The most surprising was that it was longlisted for the Booker. My goodness, come on, this book might be an okay way to pass a day or two at the beach, but it’s certainly not Booker material. I don’t mind the fact that a thriller/political thriller was nominated; I think it’s high time the really well written thrillers were recognized by the community of highly literary writers, but Child 44 doesn’t belong in the lofty company of books like Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Child 44 isn’t serious literature that challenges the reader and makes him think. Its good guys are too good and its bad guys are too bad for that as is its pat and contrived ending. It doesn’t illuminate some dark aspect of life. It just whiles away the hours and that’s about it. It’s not nuanced in lovely shades of gray; it's stark black and white. And backing up to that pat ending one last time, I wonder if Smith realizes that he did leave one thread untied? After Stalin has died, after Vasili, too, is dead, after the murders have been solved, the orphans taken care of, the good guys rewarded and the bad guys punished, after Leo and Raisa return to Moscow, Leo’s poor parents are still languishing in that tiny, frigid apartment. It just doesn’t seem fair.

1.5/5

Recommended: No. Read Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, instead or Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and if you’ve read them, move on to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Child 44 really isn’t worth the time spent with it.