Drawing and Storytelling Both

Reif Larsen’s novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is one of the more inventive and imaginative books that you can find. For starters, the physical size of the book sets it apart. Most of the hardback books on my shelf are 6” x 9” but this book is 8” x 9.5 “. So right away you know that you are dealing with something out of the ordinary.

Our hero is Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, otherwise known as T.S., age 12. T.S. is a prodigy who has an unusual and highly developed skill as a cartographer. The author takes advantage of this setup to include on almost every page an example of a map, an illustration, a doodle, a chart, etc taking full advantage of the oversize pages. It makes for a gorgeous, interesting and informative book totally apart from the story. The story too finds its way into the margins.

And the story has an interest. T.S., who lives in Montana, wins an award for his drawings from the Smithsonian Institution. But for reasons explored in the novel he decides that he must leave without telling his family and find his own way to Washington - which he does by hopping a freight train to Chicago. I found the tale of that part of his journey one of the more interesting parts of the story.

Larsen has also given us a bonus of a second novel within this novel. While T.S. is on his journey East, he is reading (as are we) the story of his great-great-grandmother Emma’s journey West. Nice symmetry.

For some reason that I can’t very well explain I was reminded as I was reading this book of The Phantom Tollbooth by Jules Feiffer. That’s a children’s book but it is also the tale of a boy on an adventurous journey.

This book is a visual delight and brimming with facts. Get a hold (literally) of a copy and read it soon. The author will be appearing in Pt Reyes on July 20th. Other appearances and information are listed on his website. Check out the website if only for pulling the rope!

A Simple Story

Why do I love this book so much? I'm not sure. Maybe it's my Irish ancestry that made these characters resonate so powerfully for me. Every word felt true and real and when I got to the end I could easily have gone back to page one and read it all over again.

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín tells the simple story of a girl named Eilis Lacey who reluctantly comes to Brooklyn from a small town in Ireland in the early 1950's. She has no particular desire to leave home and her widowed mother, but jobs are scarce and a chance meeting between her older sister Rose and an Irish priest from Brooklyn leads to the offer of a job. Her mother and Rose encourage her to take it, despite the fact that her mother remarks casually to a friend, “Oh, it'll kill me when she goes”. And Eilis, although she feels that Rose should go instead, can find no way to tell them. This feels SO Irish to me – no one can speak directly about feelings.

The story follows Eilis to Brooklyn, where she experiences homesickness that Tóibín describes so beautifully it will break your heart. But she adapts to her job and her life in a boardinghouse full of Irish women, and eventually even finds romance. And when events call her back to Ireland she is torn between her new life and her old one.

Sounds like it could be the plot of a romance novel, right? Trust me, in Tóibín's hands it is something very different. His style is understated and straightforward – no flashy language, no dramatic revelations. There's humor and pathos, sometimes both in the same paragraph, and, like Eilis herself, it's a mixture of tenderness and toughness. I loved this book so much that I'm almost reluctant to recommend it, because I'm afraid its resonance is just personal for me, and won't strike other readers the same way. But Tóibín is a respected writer, so I hope that this book will be enjoyable to all readers, not just this one.

More Fathers and Sons

I have actually spoken to one person who did not like Out Stealing Horses (OSH) by Per Petterson but otherwise everyone I know who has read it thought it was superb (see blog of April 28, 2008). So I was eager to follow up with reading Petterson’s earlier novel In the Wake. After reading this book I looked up the author’s biography and was totally confused. I thought that I had been reading a book of fiction but in fact it so closely follows the details of the author’s own life centered around a family tragedy that you have to wonder why he chose to write it as fiction.

Like OSH, In the Wake focuses on the family, in particular on the father-son relationship, but in this instance it is a bleak estrangement rather than the love of OSH. In the Wake doesn’t have the lyrical descriptions that were such an outstanding feature of OSH but it is nevertheless firmly rooted in the geography and place of Scandinavia. Young boys almost anywhere can climb trees for adventure but there are not too many places where two brothers can hop on drifting ice flows. Actually a better knowledge of the geography and place names of the Scandinavian countries would have been helpful - but not essential.

Petterson describes a sense of loss and abandonment. In his loneliness he almost verges on madness. He hints of a previous divorce and failed attempts as a writer. But he also reaches out to his daughter and his brother in ways that are touching and almost humorous. In the Wake does not, in my opinion, come close to OSH as literature but taken as autobiography this book takes us into the mind and sensibilities of a very talented writer – something to which we as readers of fiction rarely have access.

A Woman of Substance

Elizabeth Stout has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for her latest novel “Olive Kitteridge”. This book has been referred to as a novel in stories. There are thirteen chapters (she’s not superstitious!) each with its own title. The story brings to life the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine with all the quirkiness and charm of a small New England town. The tie that binds this novel together is the main character, a middle aged seventh grade math teacher, whose name is Olive Kitteridge. Olive is a force to be reckoned with. She has become a large woman in middle age, who has little patience for the changes that that have taken over her home town or the people that inhabit it. Her husband, her son and most people find Olive to be a difficult person. Her son states it clearly, “You can make people feel terrible”. Olive appears in all the stories, sometimes as the main character, a few times as a fleeting presence.

In the first chapter we meet Henry Kitteridge, Olive’s husband who is then the town’s Pharmacist. Henry is the opposite of Olive. He is quiet, reflective and remembered by everyone as kind. But as the stories progress we see another side of Olive. She is blunt and impatient but she is also incredibly empathetic. When she meets a young women who is blatantly anorexic, she cries. When she encounters a former student who wants to kill himself, she shares her past with him to let him know he isn’t alone in his sadness and depression. In one of the most startling chapters, “Tulips”, Olive goes to visit a woman who has shut herself away in her home because of a tragedy. Olive sympathetically reaches out to the woman but what she finds is someone who has lost her mind.

The joy of reading this story comes as the author weaves these complex characters together. All of the characters embody someone you know. Each character, whether you like them or not, is a strong force in this novel. But the most wonderful character is Olive herself as you watch her develop into a woman who understands where she came from and how she must change to be the person she wants to be. This “novel in stories” is a wonderful, compelling book that brings character development to a new level.