Living to Read

Reverberations

2012-02-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

Ona summer afternoon in suburban Melbourne, a group of friends andfamily gather with their assorted children for a barbecue. The hostHector is of Greek descent, his wife Aisha is Indian, and theirguests are a mix that probably represents Australia in the 21^stcentury – white, aborigine, Muslim, Jewish, gay, straight, wealthyand working class, young and old. Three-year-old Hugo has beenbehaving obnoxiously all afternoon, but his parents keep makingexcuses for him rather than correcting him. Finally, wielding acricket bat, he vaguely threatens nine-year-old Rocco, whereuponRocco's father Harry, Hector's cousin, slaps him.

That'sthe starting point for The Slap byChristos Tsiolkas, and the reverberations from that slap ripplethrough the entire story. Tsiolkas divides his book into eightsections, each one exploring the inner life of one of the charactersfrom the party. Some of the storylines directly follow the effect ofthe slap – Hugo's parents press charges, family and friends are forcedto take sides in the dispute, friendships are threatened. Othersexplore more personal stories – marriage and infidelity, mid-lifecrisis, the bonds of friendship, adolescent coming-of-age and dealing with the loss of agingfriends. Through them Tsiolkas examines racism, homophobia and classprejudice without ever preaching or sentimentalizing.

Everytime I thought he was headed for a stereotype he swerved from it togive a realistic but sympathetic view of a character. I found somestories more compelling than others (maybe I've just read too manycoming of age tales?), but Tsiolkas does an admirable job ofkeeping all eight threads woven together. Starting with a singleshocking act he paints a nuanced picture of a network of complexrelationships.

Spies...and More Spies

2012-02-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

With the recent release of the new movie version of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I thought that I would read the book instead. (I am no longer going to say "re-read" even if I remember that I read it previously because my memory of the details of the book will be virtually non-existent). I was immediately struck by the epigram attributed to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes:

TINKER,
TAILOR,
SOLDIER,
SAILOR,

RICH MAN,
POOR MAN,
BEGGARMAN,
THIEF

The version that I learned growing up started with:

DOCTOR,
LAWYER,
INDIAN,
CHIEF

Oh, well. Another one of life's mysteries. Maybe there's a dissertation here on changes in cultural norms.

Having now finished the book and while gathering my thoughts for this blog, I happened to open the latest issue of The Hoover Digest and there it was: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...Priest?", Donal O'Sullivan's article about "two treacherous clerics and the Communist infiltration of the Vatican." Yikes!!! The KGB had 2 agents, Pine and Sun, posing as theology and law students in Rome from 1956-1963. Their "mission" was "...to identify anti-Soviet elements, collect compromising information on Lithuanian priests living in Western Europe, and close down secret communication channels between the Vatican and its bishops behind the Iron Curtain." It doesn't get any stranger than this in Le Carre's fiction. You can read the full article here.

TTSS is 99.9% plot: minimal introspection, minimal description, no sex, no violence (what there is of both takes place out of sight). Much of the plot is told through flashbacks (which makes it a great book for a Kindle so that you can look up the previous references to a particular character or code name.) For this aging brain, the intricacies of the plot were best handled in a compressed time frame. That was just the right prescription for a weekend getaway without leaving home.

Changing The Past

2012-01-27T16:58:00.000-08:00

DoI really want to read a Stephen King novel? Especially when it's 849pages long? I'm not a fan of the fantasy/horror genre, so in allhonesty I had never read a King book. But years ago (Wikipediareveals that it was in 1990) he wrote a wonderful essay in The NewYorker called “Heads Down” about his son's Little League baseballteam. I thought it was one of the best pieces of baseball writingI'd read in a long time (and I do love baseball) and I vowed to tryto read something else by him.

Twenty-twoyears intervened before I revisited that vow. And it took a booktitle that resonates strongly for anyone of a certain age to make metackle his latest novel. The premise is a monumental 'what if'. What if you could go back in time and undo the assassination of JFKon 11/22/63?

That'sthe challenge that faces high school teacher Jake Epping when a dyingdiner owner in Lisbon Falls, Maine shows him a rabbit hole/portalin his storeroom that leads to the Lisbon Falls of September 9, 1958. The rules are simple, and laid out early in the story, so this isnot a spoiler. First, no matter how much time you spend in the past,when you travel back to the diner of 2011 only two minutes will haveelapsed. Second, if you travel back in time again, everything youdid on your previous visit will be erased. In addition, Jake has toconsider the butterfly effect – what are the ripple effects of anychange he makes to history?

Fortunatelyfor me, King spends not much time on the fantasy/supernatural portionof this dilemma, and far more time on its more human aspects. Thereare some sluggish passages while King navigates Jake from 1958 to 1963,as he simultaneously tracks Lee Harvey Oswald's movements and fallsin love, but there's plenty of suspense as well. King creates apoignant love story, a valentine to the simpler 1950's of big cars,rock and roll music, and rotary phones, and a thoughtful examinationof the power of friendship and the persistence of evil.

Life on the Stage

2012-01-20T14:44:00.000-08:00

Idon't read a lot of non-fiction, but I am sometimes attracted tobiographies about people I find intriguing. That was the case withJulie Salamon's Wendy and the Lost Boys:The Uncommon Life of WendyWasserstein. I admire Wasserstein's plays, especially herPulitzer and Tony winning “The Heidi Chronicles”, but what reallypiqued my interest was an essay she wrote for The New Yorkerdescribing how, at the age of forty-eight, she underwent in vitrofertilization and gave birth (three months prematurely) to herdaughter Lucy Jane. It was written in such an honest and open waythat I felt as if I knew her. And I was shocked when just sevenyears later she died of lymphoma.

Salamantraces Wasserstein's life from her comfortable childhood in Brooklynand Manhattan, through her years at Mount Holyoke and Yale DramaSchool, to her successes and failures in the theater and in herpersonal life. She was a larger than life character, a mainstay ofthe New York theater community, a woman with a huge network ofdevoted friends. And yet it is clear from Salamon's account thatalthough many friends thought they knew her well, each knew only apiece of Wendy.

Thecharacters in her plays were often conflicted and insecure, trying toplease their families, find their soul mates, achieve their ambitions– all with a bracing sense of humor. Clearly they reflectedWasserstein's own psyche. Salamon's biography captures the manyfacets of this complex women.

Three From a Master

2012-01-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

AnitaDesai has been an acclaimed fiction writer for nearly fifty years,and I'm embarrassed to say that the only Desai book I have ever readis by her daughter Kiran (“The Inheritance of Loss”). So herlatest book of three novellas – The Artist of Disappearance– seemed a good place to start.

Thethree stories, all set in India, have no characters or settings incommon, but they deal in different ways with the same theme – thesurvival of art in a world where traditional and modern culturesclash. In each story a member of the modern community is exposed toart (and in two cases an artist) from a more rural or traditionalmilieu, and is forced to make decisions about its fate.

Desailets these stories unfold slowly, painting the fascinating landscapesof rural India as she subtly fills in her characters' complexities. I liked all three stories but I was especially moved by “Translator Translated” in which a mediocre university professor finds newrichness in her life when she translates a work by an obscure authorshe admires, but then must face the consequences when her ambitiondistorts her judgment.

Desaiasks hard questions and gives no simple answers. Her prose is lucid,understated and a pleasure to read.

Mid-Life Crisis

2011-12-23T12:07:00.000-08:00

Mid-life crisis – it's a common themein literature. Think of characters as diverse as Clarissa Dalloway,Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, Emma Bovary, maybe even Captain Ahab. Hal Lindley, in Lydia Millet's Ghost Lights,is suffering his own version of this ailment. He's a decent man witha decent job with IRS, but he feels anxious and disengaged. Hesuspects his wife is having an affair with a younger man, and he isunable to move beyond his mourning for the life his daughter hadbefore an accident left her paraplegic.

Whenhis wife's boss goes missing in Belize, Hal impulsively (anddrunkenly) volunteers to track him down. He doesn't even like theguy, but it's a chance to escape and sort out his life, and also looklike a hero to his family. “Heart of Darkness” lite? Notexactly. But Hal does encounter far more of an adventure than he anticipated, as unexpected events keep overtaking him. He is forced tore-examine his assumptions about himself, and each new event seems tocarom him in a different direction.

Hal'swry sense of humor makes for many amusing and touching moments, butbe prepared for the fact that not every mid-life crisis leads tosatisfaction and enlightenment on the other side.

Favorites Books of 2011

2011-12-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

It happens every year - I have trouble winnowing down my list. The six I finally chose all appealed to me for very different reasons.

The Art of Fielding (I Love Baseball). Chad Harbach tells a powerful story that is about far more than baseball.
The Leftovers (What If?) - What an irresistible scenario Perrotta creates - life after The Rapture.

The City and The City (Double Vision) - A detective story and a sci-fi novel rolled into one - the cleverest book I read all year.

American Subversive (Radical Chic) - What if the radical underground movement of the Sixties still existed?

A Visit from the Goon Squad (Fragments of Music) - A kaleidoscope of stories and characters that connect in unexpected ways.

Skylark (A Little Jewel) - A story of one week in the life of a simple family that touches so many universal themes.

Another 'What If?'

2011-12-02T07:55:00.001-08:00

The'what if' that Amy Waldman poses in her novel TheSubmissionis a provocative one – what if architects were invited toanonymously submit plans for a memorial to be located at the site ofthe World Trade Center, dedicated to the memory of those who died on9/11. And what if the selection jury - artists, academics, arepresentative of the New York governor, and a 9/11 widowrepresenting all the grieving families – chose a winner who turnedout to be an American-born Muslim named MohammedKhan?

Inevitablya furor ensues, fueled in part by Khan's aloofness and refusal toexplain the influences on his design, which his enemies describe asan Islamic garden meant to glorify the Muslim martyrs who attackedthe towers. Waldman creates a host of characters - the radio talkshow host interested in stirring controversy, the tabloid reporterintent on building her reputation, the undocumented Bangladeshi widowwhose husband worked as a janitor at the towers, the governor whoseposition is based solely on her desire for higher office, thene'er-do-well brother of a fallen fireman who relishes his time inthe spotlight. At the center of the controversy is Claire Burwell,the rich widow on the jury who initially champions Khan's design butwavers as he resists her pressure to mollify his critics.

Waldmanmanages to give each of her characters a distinctive voice, and evenas the volume rises on their arguments she resists turning them intocaricatures. I found it a compelling story that mirrored thereal-life emotional and political atmosphere that still exists tenyears after 9/11.

The Unreliable Narrator

2011-11-11T11:25:00.001-08:00

Whydid I think Julian Barnes was a difficult read? I don't remembermuch about “Flaubert's Parrot”, but I seem to remember that Istruggled to get through it. So I approached his latest book TheSense of an Ending with some trepidation. But it had just wonthe Booker prize and was only 176 pages long, so I decided to try himagain.

Icould have read this book in one big gulp. The first section is acoming of age story, as Tony Webster recounts his memories of hishigh school and college days – his youthful friendships and hisfirst romance - “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being keptin some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.”

Inthe second section an unexpected letter causes sixty-something Tonyto look back on his life and re-examine his memories - “we livewith such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memoryequals events plus time”. Sorry to keep quoting, but Barnes putsthings so succinctly that there's no point in paraphrasing. Tonystruggles to unravel the mystery that the letter presents, and in theprocess he must deal with his own delusions and guilt.

Thisis a book about how our memories shape us and how they deceive us,how our emotions color our interpretations of events. Barnes does amasterful job of creating a character who is forced to spin his memoriesover and over before they finally show him the truth.

Jungle Sci-Fi

2011-11-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

Ann Patchett’s latest novel, "State of Wonder" opens in a small town in Minnesota in the dead of winter. But it quickly takes the reader to the depths of the Amazon jungle. Marina Singh is a pharmacologist working for a major drug company. Marina learns that her lab partner and dear friend, Anders Eckman, has died of a sudden fever in the Amazon Jungle. Anders was sent by their employer, Vogel Pharmaceutical Company, to Brazil to bring back information about the progress another employee, Dr. Annick Swenson, was making on a miracle fertility drug.

Marina’s boss and lover, “Mr. Fox”, convinces Marina she has to go to Brazil to find Dr. Swenson and bring the miracle drug to Vogel. Ander’s wife believes Marina can find out what happened to her husband.

So begins Marina’s journey to the depths of the jungle where she confronts her past and finds answers she never imagined. She becomes part of Dr. Swenson’s world among the wonderful Lakashi Tribe. She sees and learns things that her scientific mind cannot grasp and she learns to trust the jungle and its inhabitants, strange as they are. But ultimately Ann Patchett is presenting the question of medical and moral ethics that surround the need to preserve natural resources and the habitats of the native people who live and thrive on these resources, which can be and (more often than not) are, more important than scientific discovery.

Ann Patchett has written a scientific thriller with an ending that is as unexpected as it is touching and sad.

Briefly Noted

2011-10-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimesafter I read a book I find that I just don't have much to say about. That's what happened to me with Bobbie Ann Mason's An AtomicRomance. So I'll just give you the bullet points.

WhatI Liked:

- Maincharacter Reed Futrell and his feisty mother

- The Atomic half – Futrell works at auranium enrichment plant, and Mason does a creditable job of layingout why an intelligent man might end up there.

- Mason's sense of humor, especially withher quirky, complex minor characters

What I Didn't Like:

- The pace is awfully slow

- The Romance half – Futrell's onagain/off again relationship with microbiologist Julia Jensen seemsadded on just to create some tension

I Love Baseball

2011-10-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I do love baseball. So I'm sure I would have enjoyed Chad Harbach's first novel The Art of the Fielding anytime of year, but it is especially enjoyable to be reading it during the World Series. Last night I watched Texas Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus make a play that Harbach's hero Henry Skrimshander would surely have admired.

“The Art of the Fielding” is also the name of the dog-eared book that Henry studies and reveres. Written by a Hall of Fame shortstop named Aparicio Rodriguez, the books dispenses wisdom such as “The shortstop is a source of stillness in the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond”. And that pretty well defines Henry, a freakishly talented and graceful shortstop . His arrival on the baseball team at a small Wisconsin college called Westish propels the Harpooners, so named because Melville briefly visited the school on a book tour, from mediocrity to improbable success. Henry and his best friend, catcher and team captain Mike Schwartz, form a powerful alliance of hard work, loyalty and dedication to baseball, generously sprinkled with the literary references that Mike supplies for every occasion.

Harbach clearly loves baseball and I hope that even non-fans will appreciate his ability to describe the beauty and the grit of a baseball game. But this book is not just the baseball equivalent of “Hoosiers”. He is tackling big topics – friendship, failure and redemption, first loves (both gay and straight), errors made both on and off the field. It's about coming of age, and there's a little Ahab in each of the characters as they deal with their own versions of the elusive white whale.

PS Harbach was no doubt tipping his hat to Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio with the first name of his fictional author, and I guess the last name could be an homage to the many players with the last name of Rodriguez. But I prefer to believe he was thinking of hardworking catcher Pudge (much like Mike Schwartz) rather than pretty-boy A-Rod.

Back to the Woods

2011-10-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

If you read Charles Frazier's best-selling novel “Cold Mountain”, the suspenseful odyssey of a Civil War deserter making his way home to the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, you may remember Frazier's talent for evoking the beauty and mystery of that landscape. He returns to that locale in his latest novel Nightwoods. Even the covers are similar, but this time the black silhouetted mountain scene has a red sky rather than a blue one. (Seems a little obvious, Random House).

This time the story is set in the early 1960's, but it takes a while to determine that, because the main character Luce is living virtually off the grid in an abandoned mountain lodge. Her self-imposed isolation is disrupted by the arrival of her niece and nephew, twin children of her sister Lily, who has been murdered by their stepfather Bud. The kids are clearly damaged goods – feral and unwilling to speak, fond of starting fires and killing roosters. And rotten-to-the-core Bud has found a smart lawyer and beaten the murder charge. Add to the mix Stubblefield, son of the deceased lodge owner, who has returned to examine his inheritance. (For some reason he is known only by his last name while all the other characters are called only by their first names). Seeing Luce rekindles in him a teenaged crush he had developed when he saw her at a poolside beauty contest, wearing sunglasses and eating a frozen Mars bar. And it's just that kind of detail that makes Frazier so enjoyable to read. He's a great storyteller, and always slips in just the right detail to make his characters come alive. Here's how he introduces Bud: “He had a criminal record by the time he was barely a teenager, caught shoplifting a coat pocket of yellow Sun 45s from a dime store”.

There's little Carson McCullers in this book (like her, Frazier has some characters not painted in shades of gray but clearly defined as good or evil), and some of Cormac McCarthy's malevolent intensity, but neither matches Frazier's ability to make you see, hear, smell, feel the woods of Appalachia. And the suspenseful last section of the book (other than the too tidy last chapter) kept me riveted.

Leaving Home

2011-09-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

Arenovels which begin with a wedding more common than I realized? Jonathan Dee's “The Privileges” began that way, and JeanThompson's The Year We Left Home opens in 1973 with the weddingof Anita Erickson in Grenada, Iowa. The device provides a great wayto introduce the Erickson family – the simple hardworking parents,their four children, and their Viet Nam vet cousin Chip.

Thebooks spans thirty years. Each chapter jumps forward in time andcatches us up on the lives of some of the characters. Often achapter reads like a short story – a fully developed episode in itsown right. But this is definitely not a case where an author hassimply sewn short stories together. Each episode expands andenriches our understanding of the characters and of the forces thatpull the family members together and push them part. I especiallyenjoyed the arc Thompson created for youngest son Ryan as he movesfrom an earnest political science major to a disillusioned gradstudent to a successful IT professional and disappointed husband andfather. Thompson sometimes weaves Ryan's story with that of hisdamaged and confused cousin Chip, deftly contrasting their two pathsthrough thirty years of history.

Evenwhen a storyline seems headed down a predictable path, as whenrebellious younger daughter Torrie is severely injured in anaccident, Thompson turns the narrative in a fresh, unexpecteddirection. Throughout the book some characters spin far fromIowa, others stay close, but the pull towards home is strong, andThompson paints an honest, sometimes funny, often poignant portrait of an American family.

What If?

2011-09-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ialways say that I don't like fantasy or sci-fi books, and yet I lovebooks that ask 'What if?' and then spin out a believable alternateuniverse. Tom Perrotta's 'What if?' is a doozy – what if TheRapture happens? And what if, instead of taking just God-fearingChristians, it disappears a seemingly random assortment of Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, whatever? What happens to thepeople who don't make the cut – The Leftovers?

The“Sudden Departure”, as politicians and scientists insist oncalling the event, leaves in its wake a confused and anxiouspopulace. Perrotta focuses on the inhabitants of the town ofMapleton as they find ways to deal with this new reality. FrankGarvey, recently elected mayor, is trying to maintain harmony andcivility in the town even as his own life is in upheaval. His wifeLaurie has joined the wonderfully named Guilty Remnant, who bandtogether in group homes, take vows of silence, wear only white, andsilently stare down those who don't share their guilt in order toremind them that God is watching. They also smoke like fiends,following their mantra “We Smoke to Proclaim Our Faith”. His sonTom is in the thrall of cult leader Holy Wayne, who has promised themembers of his Healing Hug movement that one of his teen-aged brideswill produce the Miracle Child. And his daughter Jill is simplytrying to cope with the loss of her mother and the trials of highschool.

Thereis a smattering of humor but a fair share of bleakness in Perrotta'svision of a post-rapture world, but he presents his characters in away that made me sympathetic to even the looniest among them. His'what if' world seemed surprisingly believable and engaging, and evenmanaged to leave me with a sense of hope for Kevin and his family, and for Mapleton.

Train Travel

2011-09-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

The less I know about a book when I start reading it, the happier I am. It's the same reason I hate watching movie trailers – they often reveal too much of the plot. So when I began Tessa Hadley's The London Train, I remembered vaguely that it had gotten decent reviews, but that's it.

I love riding trains, I love stories that take place on trains (sometimes romantic, sometimes sinister), I love London, so it was a natural. The main character Paul (we never get a last name), is a bookish writer/critic who lives in rural Wales with his second wife and two young daughters. He occasionally takes the train to London for radio interviews or BBC projects, but when his daughter from a first marriage abandons her university studies for a squalid flat in London with her Polish boyfriend, his trips become more frequent and his life more complicated.

I am following this well-written story when, about halfway through the book, I turn a page and discover that the London Train story has ended and a new one, called “Only Children” is beginning. I check the front cover. Yes, it clearly says “a novel”. But this second story is about Cora and her husband Robert and her sister-in-law Frankie. What happened to Paul? And Elise (second wife)? And Pia (older daughter)?

For several days I kept trying and failing to get into this second story. I was still annoyed that the book was two novellas disguised as a novel. But finally I soldiered on, started to get interested in this second cast of characters, enjoying Hadley's observant but unsentimental writing, when lo and behold, the two stories began to fold together in an elegant, unforced and satisfying way. Naturally the London train is involved.

So I guess the moral is that the adage about judging a book by its cover sometimes swings both ways.

How The Other Half Lives

2011-09-02T16:42:00.000-07:00

A wedding is a great way to start a novel. It allows the author to throw together a lot of characters, establish their relationship to each other, and put them under stress. Jonathan Dee's The Privileges has a terrific first chapter that drops us into the wedding of Adam and Cynthia Morey. Just out of college, poised on the lip of adulthood, undaunted by a heat wave, the couple launch themselves fearlessly into marriage as the chapter ends.

By the next chapter they are settled in Manhattan with two young children. After a disappointing start at a large Wall Street firm, Adam has joined a small private equity company where he is very successful. But the couple live a strangely isolated life. The children barely know their grandparents, and the Moreys' youth, attractiveness and success make other parents at the children's exclusive school resent them. They seem to feel that they exist on some higher moral plain, so when Adam sees a way to increase his wealth by illegal means, he acts not so much out of greed as out of a sense that it proves his superiority to those who blindly follow the rules. Cynthia discovers that there is very little in life that money can't buy, and she happily passes this wisdom along to her children.

If this were the New York of an Edith Wharton novel Cynthia and Adam would be punished for their transgressions. Instead Dee gives us an inside look at life of the very rich and amoral. If he didn't write so elegantly I might have turned away in disgust, but instead I marveled at his ability to make a family dysfunctional and sympathetic at the same time.

Chance Encounters

2011-08-21T20:11:00.001-07:00

Who knew that George Washington wrote a small book/pamphlet entitled “100 Rules of Civility”, to instruct young men in the rules of accepted social behavior? Apparently Amor Towles did and based his first novel on the “Rules of Civility”.

The Prologue to the novel is narrated by a middle aged woman who is at an art gallery with her husband viewing photographs taken of people in New York City in the 1930’s. She recognizes the subject of two contrasting photos and is taken back three decades in her memory.

The story begins on a snowy New Year’s Eve night in 1937. The narrator is Katey (Katya) Kontent. She and her roommate, Eve (Evelyn) Ross, from a boarding house for young women, are headed to a Greenwich Village jazz bar with three dollars between them to ring in the New Year. Enters, Tinker (Theodore) Grey. (Everyone has a nickname.) His eyes are royal blue, he is dressed in a tuxedo with a cashmere coat over his arm. The girls are intrigued. He buys them drinks and leaves, to instantly return, with a bottle of champagne. The three make New Year’s resolutions and plans to see each other before the week is over. But by the end of the first week of 1938 a tragic accident occurs and the lives of the three new friends are changed forever.

Our narrator/protagonist, Katey, enters the fast lane of the late 1930’s with glitzy New York and Long Island parties and a new glamorous job. Eve and Tinker are on their own glamorous, disastrous journey. Their journeys take us through the best of New York City in the late 1930’s. It is almost as if the city itself is a character.

We watch as these three characters evolve, disintegrate and reinvent themselves. And what we see is not always what really is. Why does the charming, rich, successful Tinker carry a worn, underlined copy of George Washington’s “100 Rules of Civility”? Why does Eve rebuke all offers of financial help from her well meaning father? Why does Katey try not to talk about her parents?

Amor Towles has written a wonderful period piece with relatable characters and a strong, witty and reliable narrator who relates an intriguing, dramatic story.

Double Vision

2011-08-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of police novels – hard-boiled detectives, mean streets, unsolved murders. (Richard Price's “Lush Life” is a favorite). And although I'm not a sci-fi fan, I do admire writers who can create an alternate universe. I loved Michael Chabon's invention in “The Yiddish Policemen's Union”. Now I've found a novel that does both these things, and the result is a very entertaining read.

China Miéville’s The City and The City starts out as a standard crime story. Inspector Tyador Borlú is investigating a murder – the dead body of an attractive girl found in an abandoned van in the city of Beszel, somewhere in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Beszel sits next to another city called Ul Qoma – much like Buda and Pest, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, or the more prosaic Minneapolis and St. Paul. But it doesn't work quite the same way. Early on in the book, strange terminology is sprinkled in with the standard police procedural dialogue as Miéville slowly reveals that these two cities - governed by separate bodies, guarded by separate police forces, with different languages and architecture, vigorously enforcing their isolation from each other – occupy the same geographical space.

I could now give you twenty examples of the incredibly clever ways in which Miéville makes this absurd situation seem utterly believable and often amusing. But they're all spoilers, and since I really enjoyed reading this book with no advanced knowledge of this intricate conceit, I refuse to ruin it for someone else. But I can tell you that he manages to remind me of Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka and George Orwell all at the same time.

PS This is a great book to read on a Kindle if, like me, you are unfamiliar with words like machicolation, quango, boscage, lingam, and sigil.

Walking in Manhattan

2011-08-12T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've always liked books that give me a real sense of the geography of a city. I've even been known to pull up Google maps so I can follow the footsteps of a character. There are few books that do this better than Teju Cole's Open City. The diary-style book records the wanderings and musings of Julius, an African living in Morningside Heights as he pursues a psychiatric fellowship at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. Julius was born in Lagos, Nigeria to a German mother and a Nigerian father, but has now adopted New York as his home, a home in which he still feels himself to be an outsider.

Sometimes Julius comments on the sights he is seeing or on people he meets during his walks; at other times he thinks back on his childhood in Nigeria, or reflects on books he has read or pieces of music he admires. During a trip to Brussels, where he makes a feeble attempt to find his German grandmother, he meets a Moroccan Muslim at an internet cafe, and ponders the immigrant experience that they share.

As you can tell, there isn't a lot of plot. What moves the book forward are not events and dialogue but rather Julius's thoughts, ideas and questions. But it isn't boring. Julius is an interesting, insightful character, and I felt his loneliness and isolation in the honesty and openness of Cole's prose. And yet, late in the book there are revelations that made me realize that even a person as frank and open as Julius can still be blind to his own failings. The revelation is such a shock that I still wonder whether Cole was more heavy-handed than he needed to be.

Cole's prose, though not showy, can still create some striking images. For a long time I will remember the scene where Julius, accidentally leaving Carnegie Hall by an emergency exit, finds himself on a rain-slick fire escape four stories above the street. As Julius recounts this he seems to embody all that it means to be human. I'm looking forward to taking another walk with Teju Cole.

Expatriates in Paris

2011-08-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

There is something about the life of Ernest Hemingway that never fails to intrigue an audience. He was always bigger than life. Paula McLain has written a bestseller about Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920’s. McLain’s novel, “The Paris Wife”, is the story of this time through the eyes of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife.

Hadley and Ernest meet in Chicago in October of 1920. She was a twenty eight year old “spinster” living with her sister and her husband in St. Louis. He was a twenty one year old dashing, war hero who wanted to write a great novel.

He proposed, they married. After one wonderful evening with Sherwood Anderson (the author of “Winesburg, Ohio) Ernest is convinced that everyone and everything interesting in the world of writing is in Paris. And so begins the story of Ernest and Hadley in Paris, where Hadley attempts to be the perfect wife to the talented, moody, complex Ernest.

This novel falls into the category of historical fiction as the author will admit that she mined Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir, “A Moveable Feast”, about his life in Paris. But in “The Paris Wife” the narrator is Hadley. The story tells of the intricate relationships that Ernest had with John Dos Passos, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and other people who made Paris in the 1920’s the exciting, hard drinking, self indulgent haven for American expatriates. The group made wild trips to Pamplona, Spain to see violent bullfights, where Ernest set his famous novel, “The Sun Also Rises”. Their life was a maze of drinking, traveling around Europe and finding the right setting for Ernest to write.

I found Hadley to be a strong, interesting character who tries to remain dignified when her world begins to fall apart. Perhaps she took on more than she could handle but she, most likely, had no choice once she became part of Hemingway’s world. “The Paris Wife” is a great story about a special time in the history of American literature through the eyes of a woman who tried to hold her own as she was carried away by a strong, uncontrollable force-----Ernest Hemingway.

Hills of Virginia

2011-07-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Josh Weil was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and according to his bio he now “divides his time between New York City and a cabin in southwestern Virginia, where he is at work on a novel”. It's easy to tell that he has a strong connection to the rugged hill country between Virginia and West Virginia where the three novellas of The New Valley take place. The remoteness and stark beauty of the landscape seem to color the lives of each of the main characters. These are isolated men trying to make human connections, and their stories are sometimes amusing but more often haunting and heartrending.

There's something reminiscent of Ron Carlson or Daniel Woodrell in his powerful descriptions of decent but inarticulate men and unforgiving nature, but some of Weil's characters are unconventional enough to remind me a little of Flannery O'Connor. Make no mistake, these are not upbeat tales. Not recommended for readers who like uplifting endings, but I look forward to reading the novel that emerges from that remote cabin.

A Little Jewel

2011-07-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm always looking for book ideas, so when I stumbled onto a link to Time magazine summer reading recommendations from 23 authors (Pack Your (Book) Bag) I was happy to explore it. Some recommendations were for books not yet published, some were for books I'd already read, some just didn't appeal to me.

But Deborah Eisenberg's choice of Skylark, written by Hungarian writer Dezso Kosztolanyi in 1924, was really intriguing. Here's her description: “On the surface, it seems very simple and local, the story of a homely girl in a small Hungarian town, but it is electrifying, hilarious and unbelievably painful. It encapsulates just about all of human experience, like a magic diorama you enter that becomes absolutely real and endless.”

I completely agree. This poignant short novel, covering a week in the life of a simple family, reaches from comedy to tragedy and touches universal themes so subtly and honestly that I was overwhelmed. If you're interested, don't read anything else about it, just dive in and let it carry you.

PS: You've probably all experienced earworms, those annoying commercial jingles or cheesy sitcom themes that won't leave your brain. Lucky me. My earworm for the past ten days has been the beautiful Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer jazz classic “Skylark”. Check it out on iTunes – Carmen McCrae and Tony Bennett have great classic versions, beautiful instrumentals by Wynton Marsalis and Art Blakey, and k.d. Lang's version is a knockout.

How can the deaf understand sound?

2011-07-11T12:35:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered about deafness? How does one live in a silent world? In Myron Uhlberg's "Hands of My Father", a memoir about growing up the hearing son of two deaf parents, he tries to answer his father's questions about the nature of sound. "Does sound have rhythm? Does it rise and fall like the ocean?" Myron's father Louis expresses himself using his hands, face and body, methods which are just as powerful as speech. But those who cannot understand sign are cut off from much of his communication. Heartbreakingly, this includes Louis' own parents and siblings.

Young Myron, born in 1933, is the bridge between the worlds of the hearing and the deaf, interpreting each to the other as soon as he can speak aloud and sign. He cycles back and forth between adult responsibilities and childhood desires, even being first intermediary for the needs of his infant brother.

This is a sweet, loving story of a family with special challenges and special bonds. The deaf parents have rich and complex interactions but spend their lives isolated from the world outside. Their son takes on huge responsibilities yet his life is immeasurably enhanced by his unique perspective.

Poison in Manhattan

2011-07-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York is a book with something for everyone. At its heart it is the story of New York City's first medical examiner Charles Norris, and his toxicologist Alexander Gettler. At the time of Norris’s appointment in 1918 the coroner's office was run by incompetent political cronies with no background in medicine or science. The two men worked tirelessly to turn the office into a model of forensic science. But don't be fooled by that dry description.

Each chapter has a poison as its title, and each chronicles events where poison plays a role. Are you a fan of CSI? The two men use their skills to discover murders by poison (chloroform) and to exonerate the innocent (thallium).

Are you interested in the history of New York City during prohibition? Blum takes you through the traffic clogged streets of Manhattan (carbon monoxide) and into the speakeasies (methyl alcohol). And if you've never understood the role of the US government in enforcing prohibition by endangering the lives of its citizens, you'll be interested in the story of this marriage of chemistry and politics.

Do you like stories about unlikely heroes? There could hardly be an odder couple than the patrician Norris, a blue-blooded descendant of bankers, and the Hungarian Jewish immigrant Gettler, who loved betting on the horses, and whose Irish Catholic in-laws brewed beer throughout Prohibition one floor below his flat.

Are you a science geek? Blum explains in detail the chemical makeup of the poisons and the lab tests used to detect them. (I skipped some of this).

All in all, I found it an entertaining and informative read.

Twelve Years Later

2011-07-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

In John Burnham Schwartz's 1998 novel “Reservation Road” a fatal hit-and-run accident has occurred and the story revolves around two fathers – the father of the victim and the driver of the car. Schwartz's new book Northwest Corner picks up the story twelve years later. I didn't read the first novel, and although I started to watch the movie (I'm a big Mark Ruffalo fan), the death of a child and its aftermath was just too dark for me and I bailed.

But when I started reading the sequel I was immediately drawn in. The short (sometimes less than a page) chapters jump between the points of view of five characters: Dwight Arno, the hit-and-run driver who has served prison time and moved to California, his college age son Sam, who was in the car when the crime was committed but was lied to by his father about what had happened, Dwight's ex-wife Ruth, his quasi girlfriend Penny, and Emma, a classmate of Sam's and sister of the accident victim. The most powerful chapters deal with Dwight and Sam. Both father and son are still reeling from the accident and its aftermath. Their emotions are raw, their judgments are flawed, and they are capable of doing to damage to each other. It can be painful to watch as they struggle with their demons, but I couldn't look away.

For me Dwight Arno belongs to Flawed But Decent Male school of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe. If you didn't find much sympathy for those characters you might want to skip this book. But I was drawn to Schwartz's minimalist style and his ability reveal the humanity in all his characters.

Fragments of Music

2011-06-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

"Time's a goon, right?" says a character in Jennifer Egan's remarkable book A Visit From The Goon Squad. Time is one of many elements that Egan plays with, fragments, flips, turns back on itself. I could describe this as a series of linked short stories, a common form in today's fiction, as in "The Imperfectionists" (Reporting From Rome) or "Great House" (Loss and Memory), but Egan's attempt is more ambitious.

The book's thirteen chapters, divided into Part A and Part B like sides on an LP (showing my age with that reference), follow characters from the punk rock scene of San Francisco in the 70s, through the New York suburbs of the 90s, to a post-modern Manhattan, with side trips to Africa and Naples. In each chapter the tone, the voice and the point of view change, as the stories move forward and backward in time in a discontinuous but not confusing flow. Music, both the creative and business side, is an element in many of the stories, and I can easily imagine that someone could create a CD with a track for each chapter. Characters appear as their young and older selves, overlapping with each other in unexpected ways.

Occasionally I thought that Egan tried to be a little too clever, but overall I was fascinated by the the complicated, interwoven lives of her characters.

Note to e-readers: There is a wonderful chapter created by a teenage girl as a Power Point slide show which you will need a magnifying glass to read. But it's worth it.

Everyman in Hitler's Berlin

2011-06-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

"In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin"

by Erik Larson

This is the tale of William E. Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany in 1933-37, a somewhat naive academic appointed by Roosevelt after the post had been declined by four others. Dodd, Chair of the history department at University of Chicago and author of Woodrow Wilson's biography, desired nothing more than an undemanding position which would allow him time to write his master work "Rise and Fall of the Old South".

The Dodd family, including 2 adult children (Martha, age 24, is a key figure here, partly due to the detailed diaries she kept) was determined to live in Berlin modestly, in deference to Americans suffering during the depression. This included shipping their beat-up Chevrolet to use abroad, at a time when Hitler's men flaunted their power in giant black touring cars.

Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in Jan 1933 was followed immediately by a brutal spasm of state-condoned violence, as storm troopers rampaged, beating, arresting and sometimes murdering tens of thousands of communists, socialists and Jews. Dodd and other diplomats watched these events, imagining that they couldn't continue, that Hitler could not possibly maintain power, and seizing on any sign that he was moderating. We see infatuation with the regime, fruitless efforts to work with it, and either gradual or quick realization of the significance of what was happening.

Eventually it was clear to all those posted in Germany that whatever Hitler said or didn't say about wanting peace, Germany was actively re-militarizing in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

We have the benefit of hindsight, so it's a fascinating challenge to put oneself in the place of these diplomats. They naturally socialized with high Nazi officials such as Goebbels and Goring. Daughter Martha, always a fun girl, had affairs with the head of the Gestapo and the future head of the KGB simultaneously.

This is an excellent book, a slice of time containing maybe a few too many diplomatic communiques, but compelling all the while.

Unbroken but maybe bent a bit

2011-06-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

What are the limits of human endurance? And what gives people the strength to persevere? "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption" opens with a riveting glimpse of men adrift for weeks on a bathtub-sized raft in the Pacific, stalked by sharks hurling themselves onto the raft, then strafed by a Japanese plane. I was hooked immediately. Author Laura Hillenbrand (Sea Biscuit) next takes us back to the beginning, tracing the life of Louis Zamporini, troublemaker kid, thief, Olympic miler and WW II airman missing in the Pacific. As his ordeal unfolds, one cannot imagine what will come next. Readers learn about competitive running, the war in the Pacific, human endurance, frailty and redemption. We see yet again what men in war are subjected to, how they rise to the occasion, and the price they pay. Tough, headstrong Louie Zamporini in particular was well equipped to persevere. This biography is a great read.

Jersey Girl

2011-06-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

“There is just something about New Jersey that breeds a certain type of life and by extension, a certain type of person.” This is the opening line of Kristen Buckley’s coming of age memoir, “Tramps Like Us”. Kristen Buckley is a musician, a screen writer and a novelist. She has written a very funny, rather quirky memoir about how she got from the suburbs of New Jersey to the streets of Los Angelus, via New York City.

Kristen Buckley begins the story with the tragic-comedy event of her physician father announcing to his six year old daughter, “Now that that you’re six you don’t need a dad anymore.” Kristen promptly went home to her surviving parent and climbed into bed with her mother and her Korean brother and sister who had been adopted two months earlier.

And so began the odyssey of surviving in New Jersey in “70’s Divorce Hell”. From the exploding septic tank on the sprawling front lawn to the long lost Korean sibling who is rescued by Kristen’s mother, but whose knowledge of English is limited to profane four letter words.

For readers growing up in the seventies and eighties this story will have a certain resonance. But for those of us who didn’t grow up in that era or in New Jersey, this story is just plain fun. Buckley has a wry sense of humor, not to mention what a precocious, wise child she was. It is fun to laugh and commiserate with her and this crazy family as that make their way through a difficult time with a great sense of humor and determination.

By the end of this charming, laugh out loud story you are really routing for a girl who really didn’t care what anybody else thought as she tried to make sense of her wacky life. I love the section where she lists (the) 66 famous people who are from New Jersey. With this story, and Kristen Buckley’s accomplishments, there are now 67!

Streets of San Francisco

2011-06-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

When a novel is set in a city I know well, it can sometimes be distracting. Instead of focusing on plot and character, I'm trying to figure out where a house is located, or which bus a character is riding, or whether the author screwed up the geography (as in the chase scene in “Bullitt”). Carol Edgarian's Three Stages of Amazement is set mainly in San Francisco, and she makes the city a character in her story. The wealthy VC mogul Cal Rusch and his society A-list wife Ivy live in the Gold Coast section of Broadway, and Cal's niece Lena lives with her doctor husband Charlie Pepper in a disgustingly pink bungalow seven blocks to the north (must be the Marina). When Cal's butler Paco is sent down the hill to deliver a party invitation to the Peppers, Cal watches from his picture window as the butler struggles back up the street. Am I thinking about the repercussions of this invitation? No, I'm thinking “Take the Lyon Street steps!”.

But never mind. Charlie and Lena accept the invitation to an over-the-top engagement party for the Rusch's daughter Paige, and I get to be a fly on the wall as guests sample canapés from Jardiniere and Chez Panisse and listen to Norah Jones. But there's trouble brewing. Charlie, who has abandoned surgery to create a start-up for his invention - a surgical robot - needs money, Cal wants to invest, and Lena can't stand her uncle and doesn't want hubby to accept his filthy lucre. To further thicken the plot, an old boyfriend of Lena's, an impossibly hot Italian named Alessandro, works with Cal. He dumped Lena and she married Charlie on the rebound. Can this marriage be saved?

I'm being a shade too flip with all this. Edgarian creates far more with her story and characters than just a romantic fiction. She has an eye for the details of the lives of the super-rich, but she can also create a complex portrait of a women stretched thin by the stress of financial woes, a sick child, and an absent husband. The story takes some unexpected turns, some of which made it hard for me to return my focus to the main characters, but it was an honest picture of a marriage between two flawed but all too human people.

Welcome Back, Jackson

2011-06-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a Kate Atkinson fan from way back. When I read her debut novel “Behind The Scenes At The Museum” in 1997 I thought it was one of the funniest and most original books I'd read in a long time. Her next two novels were a disappointment for me, but then in 2000 she wrote “Case Histories” and launched the career of curmudgeonly private investigator Jackson Brodie. I've followed Brodie through three crime novels and now I've happily finished the fourth – Started Early, Took My Dog.

Brodie has long been haunted by the unsolved murder of his sister when she was a teenager. Perhaps that's what makes him sympathetic to his current case, a woman in New Zealand searching for the biological parents who gave her up for adoption in Leeds in 1975. The narrative switches between 1975 and the present, with each backward look revealing a little more of the crimes and cover ups that occurred. This plot weaves together with yet another case of a a child separated from a mother, an aging soap opera actress, a guilty conscience, tea shops, murdered women and Emily Dickinson. And then there's the story of the dog.

Atkinson is a master at mixing humor and violence, and at making the intersections of diverse characters and plots seem accidental rather than contrived. Brodie, simultaneously tough and introspective, broods about ex-wives (including the one who took him to the cleaners), lost loves and difficult children as he follows trails and avoids dismemberment. I hope Kate Atkinson isn't done with Jackson Brodie, because I certainly am hoping to visit him again.

PS The BBC is airing a six part “Case Histories” series in June – let's hope it makes its way to Masterpiece Whatever.

Adventure in Tuscany

2011-06-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

If reading The Ambassadors by Henry James is like running a marathon, then reading Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham is like a walk in the park. Instead of James’ paragraph- or page-length sentences with their convoluted structure of clauses within clauses, Maugham’s writing is clean and straightforward. It’s clear who or what is the subject of the sentence. Maugham’s meaning is unambiguous.

Young Mary Panton is recovering from the death of her husband a year earlier. Friends who own a villa outside of Florence, Italy, have offered her the use of the place to recover her spirit and decide the direction her life will take. Maugham’s descriptions of the Tuscan countryside, the air, the gardens, the furnishings of the villa are so vivid. It is easy to imagine why Tuscany continues to draw travelers in and to hold them there.

Mary has a suitor who has proposed marriage. When he is called away from Florence for a few days on business, Mary promises to give him her answer upon his return. During those few days, events take several unexpected turns and other men enter the drama: brash, rich, ne’er-do-well Rowley and Karl, an impoverished refugee of war from Austria. It should come as no surprise: If one carries a gun, one should expect that it will go off.

The final line of the book sums it up nicely: “Darling, that’s what life’s for – to take risks.” You’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who is speaking and why.

The paperback copy that I read was published in 2000 by Vintage International. The cover is a beautiful rendition of a painting by Maxfield Frederick Parrish, The Villa Scassi, Genoa from 1904. By comparison the cover of the current edition is so atrocious that I couldn’t bring myself to add it to our blog. I used a copy of the painting itself instead.

So Little Time

2011-05-28T11:44:00.001-07:00

This post on The New Yorker "Book Bench" blog is just too good not to share with fellow readers.

But don't say I didn't warn you: If you go to the site, be prepared to get lost for hours in an amazing treasuretrove of things to read. In just the last few days there have been posts about:
Image by mecredis via Flickr
The best-read cities in the US (posted 05.26): San Francisco, where are you? Not in the top 20. Not surprisingly, Cambridge, MA is #1 and Berkeley, CA #3.

The impact of Terry Gross (posted 05.27): photo included.

An article about Emma Donoghue, the author of Room (posted 05.26): Be sure to finish the book before reading the blog post.

And if that is not enough there is a completely separate blog on the site called "Free Range" which is the work of Susan Orlean (author of The Orchid Thief).

I can't even keep up with my subscription to the print edition of the magazine. How can I possibly add two blogs, one of which has multiple postings per day?

An Odd Italian Tale

2011-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

Valerie Martin has been under my radar since the compelling "Property" (2003). I remembered the sense of mounting tension she created so well in that tale of an unhappy white slave owner and her slave. One critic suggests that her near-obscurity may be because it's hard to categorize her. She excels at creating this kind of tension and suspense, combined with sexual anticipation and discovery in "Italian Fever" (2000). Lucy Stark a sensible, quiet woman, works for a successful but very untalented writer. When he dies suddenly she heads to Italy to settle his affairs. Mystery at an Italian farmhouse, great and mediocre art, a missing manuscript, darkly arrogant neighbors, a night time phantom, and Massimo, a handsome but married Italian (of course) enter into the mix. Lucy's observations of other characters, their hidden layers, including her reactions to great art, surprising and complicated neighbors, and her own burgeoning sexuality are all described with psychological depth (with the exception of Massimo). That mounting suspension is effectively created. This is a fun, quick, absorbing read, whether you are headed to Rome or are just seeking a mystery-like escape. Valerie Martin's books are now stacked by my bedside. Stay tuned.

A Gypsy's Song

2011-05-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Colum McCann is an author who thoroughly researches his subject matter. In an interview at the end of his novel, “Zoli”, McCann talks about the time he spent in Europe researching, before he wrote the novel. The story,“Zoli”, is loosely based on the life of the Polish Gypsy poet, Papusza.

The story begins in 1930’s when a young Gypsy girl’s family is murdered by fascists. The girl, Zoli, and her grandfather escape and begin a journey to join a caravan of gypsies, who are their relatives. Her grandfather is different from most Gypsy men in the 1930‘s. He teaches Zoli to read and write although these skills are banned for Gypsies, especially for Gypsy women. But Zoli has a gift. She invents stories in her mind and she sings the stories to entertain her Gypsy tribe.

When outsiders recognize Zoli’s gifts, the trouble begins. Zoli’s songs are recorded and subsequently published. The voice of the novel shifts from Zoli, the protagonist, to the Irish-Slovakian journalist, Swann, who Zoli falls in love with, and to a Slovak poet, Stransky. Zoli’s voice is addressed to her daughter and her tale travels with her from Slovakia, to 1930s Czechoslovakia, to Northern Italy, to Paris, Hungary and to England. The story encompasses the history of the Romany people as they travel through Europe, misunderstood and persecuted.

When Zoli finds herself banished from her home and friends, she forges an amazing journey of hardship and triumph. Zoli's story, with Colum McCann’s background research of the Romany people and their amazing history, makes this story [“a fiction based on history”] a wonderful, informative read.

Working Danes

2011-05-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

The next time I read a Thomas Kennedy novel I want to be sitting in a café in Copenhagen. I'll pick up my book and follow the paths that his characters are traveling – over bridges, through parks, past sausage trucks, into apartments. That's how place-specific his novels feel, and it helps make the characters seem like flesh and blood people.

Last year I read the first book of his Copenhagen Quartet “In the Company of Angels” (A Difficult Subject), a love story which dealt with the serious subjects of torture and spousal abuse. Falling Sideways sets a lighter tone – it's essentially a workplace novel. All the main characters (helpfully listed at the start of the book, as if in a playbill) work at place called the Tank, or are connected to someone who does. Covering only a week, the book follows their lives inside and outside the office. Most effective for me were the plotlines concerning two different but equally troubled father/son relationships, whereas the women characters seemed to exist mostly to be hit by the fallout of the explosions in the male characters' lives. The tone is sometimes satirical and sometimes quite tender. The closest thing to a villain is the cold-hearted CEO, but most characters are flawed but sympathetic.

I have a soft spot for workplace novels; two of my favorites are “Then We Came to the End" (Office Life) by Johnathan Ferris and “The Imperfectionists” (Reporting From Rome) by Tom Rachman.

Three Books

2011-05-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

I am so excited to have just found this wonderful book resource. Perhaps you already know of it (then why didn't you share it with me?). It's on the NPR website and is called Three Books. It appears to be a weekly series. I noticed it as I was browsing on the Alltop website.

It caught my attention because the most recent posting is a review of three new books about running, one of my favorite pastimes (don't ask me to choose between running, reading and mah jongg).

Why three? Here is their answer: "We live in a three-dimensional world, colored with hues that break down into a trio of primary colors. Three is a number that allows for conversation, completion, and understanding."

Sounds good to me. Check it out. I think you will find a threesome that addresses one of your favorite pastimes.

Oranges and Lemons

2011-05-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to blog this one, so as not to overdo the Israel topic, but its similarity to "The Lemon Tree" warrants attention for someone interested in understanding Israel's 20th century history. " City of Oranges" by Adam LeBor also chooses one area, in this case the vibrant historic city of Jaffa, and follows a number of resident families through the tumultuous events there from the 1920's to the present.

Two of the families are Christian, two are Muslim, and four are Jewish. Some left in 1948, some stayed, some arrived afterward. All suffered. It was a challenge keeping everyone straight, but it hardly mattered: they express themselves very clearly.

As in "The Lemon Tree", an enormous amount of detail about political changes throughout Israel and the rest of the Middle East anchors the personal stories. I'd recommend "Oranges" over "Lemon" as a more comprehensive view of the subject.

Two Families, one home

2011-05-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Lemon Tree, written by Sandy Tolan in 2007, traces 2 real families' personal experiences on opposite sides of the Palestinian/Israeli divide. Based entirely on interviews and primary sources including archives and diaries , it imagines nothing which has not been documented.

The Khairi family of Palestinian Arabs were displaced in 1948 after the Israeli/Arab war leading to the independence of Israel from the house they had built in the village of al-Ramla many years before. The Eshkanazi family, refugees from Bulgaria, moved into the vacant house and raised their daughter there, while the Khairis dreamed of returning. The book recounts how the grown children of each family develop a relationship spanning many years after Bashir Khairi comes knocking on the door. They come to respect one another and try hard to understand the other's point of view, but ultimately cannot agree.

It is painful to watch the Khairis' longing to return, with Bashir spending years in prison for his activities. Here in the US home is often portable; we move, settle in new places, build lives there. The Lemon Tree gives us a window into a culture and circumstance where this seems impossible.

There is so much more here, detail about political developments which provide the background needed to understand the unfolding of events. It's a sad recounting of the micro effects of larger changes.

Inside Politics

2011-05-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

I am certainly a late arrival to this party, but I finally got around to reading (actually, listening to) Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Although the story it tells – the 2008 primary campaign and election – is certainly old news by now, I was riveted. Part of that is due to the way the authors unfold the story.

Heilemann and Halperin gained access to a whole host of insiders in all of the campaigns, and they spoke to them shortly after the described events took place, before their memories were eroded by hindsight. Their reporting credentials – Heilemann is national political correspondent for New York magazine and Mark Halperin editor at large for Time – allow them to engage in some astute political analysis, but there's no doubt that their breezy, gossipy, behind-the-scenes style was what made it so compelling.

I listened to this book as if it were a novel that I was hearing for the first time. Of course I knew how it would all turn out, but I shut that out and just let it unfold like the sprawling, confounding, fascinating soap opera that it was.

Updating a Classic

2011-05-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

Am I just imagining it, or is Lily Bart following me? I admit that I love Edith Wharton's “House of Mirth”, and that I think there is something iconic and uniquely American about her heroine. When I read Steve Martin's “An Object of Beauty” (Art Objects) I thought his Lacey Yeager seemed to possess that same combination of ambition, intelligence, a basic decency complicated by moral ambiguity and society's strictures. And now author Victoria Patterson re-creates Lily's story in This Vacant Paradise, where heroine Esther Wilson is transplanted to Newport Beach, California in the 1990's.

Orange County is a long way from Manhattan of the 1890's, but some things seem never to change. An attractive young woman torn between marrying for money and finding true love with a poor man – does that plot ever go out of style? And, like Lily, Esther sabotages her best chance for financial security, disappoints and eventually alienates her family and friends, all because she can't let go of her longing for some deeper connection that she herself cannot define or understand.

Patterson's cast of characters is far from sympathetic. Most are shallow, venal, judging everyone by social status and possessions – not too different from Wharton's. Esther is at least clear-eyed about the society she inhabits, and her moral compass prevents her from making the easy choices, but eventually leads to her downfall.

Patterson's writing does not match Wharton's elegance, but perhaps her more florid style is meant to reflect the excesses of Orange County life, where drinking sour apple martinis in a bar in the Fashion Island mall passes for elegance.

The Long Journey

2011-04-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

This is the first of three non-fiction or historical fiction books I'll be blogging about the history of the Holy Land. First I revisited James Michener's "The Source", published in 1965, more than 1000 pages. Using the device of explaining artifacts from different eras unearthed at an archeological dig in Israel, Michener moves through time. He starts about 3500 BCE with cave dwellers, tracing the birth of religious feelings and ritual along with the evolution of agrarian societies. Every few decades or centuries we visit the area again to see a somewhat changed way of life. The constants are many: people of different religions trying to co-exist (or not), and conquerers blasting through massacring multitudes. The area is controlled successively by Jews, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans and British.

My interest certainly picked up as it reached the more familiar Greek and Roman times. Historical figures pop up, often in unexpected contexts, adding a human dimension to the general carnage.

Reading this years ago, I recall being discouraged about human nature, with all the killing again and again. The book evoked the same sentiment this time. But it's a valuable aid to understanding the history of the area.

Art Objects

2011-04-22T18:39:00.000-07:00

I love reading books where the author makes me feel as if I'm getting a behind-the-scenes look into a world I've never seen. If I told you that the author was Steve Martin, you would probably assume this would be the world of stand-up comedy, or Hollywood movies, or maybe even banjo playing. But in addition to his other pursuits, Martin is an avid and knowledgeable art collector, and in his novel An Object of Beauty he enters the New York art world, where his main character Lacey Yeager begins her career in 1993, working in the bins in the basement of Sotheby's auction house.

Lacey is young, smart, ambitious, opportunistic, and passionate about art, and she quickly moves to the upper floors, and eventually to the Upper Eastside, where she works in a gallery selling Old Masters. She's a strong believer in the ends justifying the means, which leads her to some interesting adventures in both her professional and personal life. As Lacey encounters both old and new art, the text is illustrated with color reproductions of some of the pieces, by well known artists as well as by some more obscure ones (at least to me). The discussion of the art is woven smoothly into the plot, and made the story all the more interesting for me.

But the most fun was seeing the inside workings of the New York art world, especially in the post-modern galleries in Chelsea, during the wild ride that stretched through the 90's and up until 2009, when the book ends. Martin cleverly skewers everyone – collectors, gallery owners and the artists themselves. I often struggle to understand contemporary art so I loved this explanation: “...irony provided an escape valve in case the visuals became too pretty. It was as if a pitcher had decided it was gauche to throw fastballs but still threw fastballs in a mockery of throwing fastballs”.

Lacey is quite cold-blooded and calculating, so it's hard to grow too attached to her, but in her way she was as fascinating as Lily Bart in “Age of Innocence”, set in New York a hundred years earlier, though it is the desire for art, not marriage, that seduces Lacey.

A Cold Spell

2011-04-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

As some of you may recall from my past blogs, I am not a fan of plots that revolve around ghosts or curses or spells or other supernatural occurrences. Don't ask me to suspend disbelief unless you're really going to make it worth my while. So I was not the ideal reader for Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling.

The story unfolds at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in the town of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, where a new drama teacher arrives and announces that the next production will be “Lysistrata”, the classic Aristophanes comedy about the women of Greece withholding sex in order to force their men to end the Peloponnesian War. And then an odd thing begins to happen to all the females at the school, whether they are teachers, students, or spouses. They are each touched by a cold wind which seems to cast a spell over them. And – you guessed it – no more sex, fellas.

Wolitzer takes her time with each of her female characters, developing them as flesh and blood women with aspirations and feelings. And although they are not trying to end a war, each has a believable reason that would help to explain her sudden cooling of ardor. The sexual partners of these libido-free gals are portrayed quite sympathetically as well. Wolitzer clearly isn't on a rant to trash the male species; she's examining the subtle things that can take a relationship off the tracks. She has a smooth, uncluttered writing style and a great sense of humor.

Having spun out all these storylines, Wolitzer then has to braid them all together in the last fifty pages. Her device, although somewhat predictable, was still fun to watch unfold. I'm still not the ideal reader for books that revolve around magic spells, but I'll admit that this was an entertaining read.

Life Without a True Compass

2011-04-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

My bother sends me many books both novels and non fiction because he is a true book lover. He has a special enthusiasm for coming of age novels by first time authors. I don’t always get to read them all before they are claimed by family members or friends. But in his is latest group I found Alison Espach’s debut novel “The Adults”.

This story begins on a summer night in the Connecticut suburb of Fairfield. The protagonist, Emily Marie Vidal, is describing her father’s fiftieth birthday party and the rather bizarre group of party goers. “I disapprove of this party, this whole at-home affair that would mark the last of its kind”, muses Emily. And so begins the unraveling of a family. Fourteen year old Emily is your basic spoiled adolescent, the only child of two disconnected adults. The morning of the party Emily’s parents announce that they are going to divorce and Emily’s father is moving to Prague. That is only the beginning for Emily. She unknowingly witnesses a shocking sight in the trees behind her house that night. Then, a few weeks later, she is the only eye witness to a suicide of a neighbor, the father of her would be boyfriend.

The best part of this novel is the voice of Emily. It is witty, but not obnoxious and she is very aware of the world she lives in and the adults who shape that world.
The events that “happen” to Emily lead her to begin a strange, inappropriate affair. Did the events that preceded the affair make Emily take this path, or has she encountered just one more adult in her life who is without a compass?

The story goes on into Emily’s adulthood. Things get complicated and we can’t help rooting for Emily to find her way, mostly because the author makes Emily seem so authentic. The ending is a bit convoluted but it is a good story, told with a voice that is smart, witty and sympathetic.

Murder and Mayhem

2011-04-08T19:22:00.000-07:00

It's not often that I blog about a murder mystery. After all, I'm an admirer of serious literary fiction. But come on – a country estate in late 18^th century England, a mysterious anatomist, dead bodies, arsenic, riots and mayhem, a mysterious ring, orphaned children - I'm entitled to a little fun every now and then.

Imogen Robertson's Instruments of Darkness had plenty to keep me entertained. In the very first chapter, in bucolic West Sussex, a maid awakens her master to deliver a note sent by his neighbor: I have found a body on my land. His throat has been cut. That's the way to get things started! The scene soon shifts to a London music store where a friendly shop owner is murdered in front of his horrified children. What's the connection?

Robertson swings between these two storylines, as well as to scenes in Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War. The odd couple sifting through the clues are country neighbors – Gabriel Crowther, a scientist with a mysterious past, and Harriet Westerman, the intelligent if somewhat bored wife of a naval commander who is away at sea. Their relationship is initially prickly but they come to respect each other as they examine bodies, interrogate maids and rifle desk drawers, and it is their humor and honesty that keep things entertaining, even as the bodies pile up.

Robertson does occasionally gets a little carried away with her prose: “...he swung from his bed and began to dress, letting the shreds of his too-brief rest scatter about the floorboards of his room”. (Does the maid have to sweep up those shreds?). But if you're looking for an enjoyable historical whodunit (and why) I can recommend this one.

Going Home

2011-04-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend lent me a copy of Rhoda Janzen's memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. It's probably not a book I would have chosen for myself. The title sounded a little cutesie, and a front cover blurb by “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert did make me worry that this was yet another book about a plucky gal finding her bliss. But you know what they say about judging a book by its cover.

It's true, there is an annoying gimmick early in the book, where Janzen presents faux questionnaires to the reader. The choices are too stupid to repeat, and she almost lost me right there. Fortunately this device is soon abandoned and Janzen, a poet and college professor, tells her story in a straightforward and very funny way.

At the age of forty-three she is abandoned by her husband of fifteen years, a brilliant, demanding, bipolar artist who leaves her for a man he met on gay.com. In that same week she is involved in frightening car crash which leaves her with multiple fractures. Broken in body and spirit, she heads for home – a California Mennonite community where her parents still live.

Growing up in a strict Mennonite household, Janzen had a childhood with no TV, slumber parties, card-playing or dancing. Having escaped this rigid environment, she might easily be tempted to make fun of it. And she does amusingly recall her unfashionable clothes (as she grew her mother would sew a strip of whatever fabric she had onto the bottom of her pant legs) and her “shame-based” school lunches brought from home in a navy diaper bag. But she's not a whiner, and she's blessed with a mother whose optimism makes Pollyanna look like Eeyore, and whose enthusiasm for cooking, singing hymns and matchmaking (preferably to Mennonite farmers with tractors) is utterly engaging.

Janzen tackles the paradox that, although her sheltered upbringing may well have caused her to stay in a toxic marriage far too long, her education in the Mennonite virtues of hard work, honesty, respect for family, and responsibility allowed her survive and grow. And the sense of humor she got from her mother didn't hurt either.

How To Ask

2011-03-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start with a warning to all readers who enjoy books with admirable, virtuous main characters – this is not the book for you. The characters in Sam Lipsyte's The Ask are not easy to like.

The book describes the crisis-riddled life of Milo Burke, a wannabe artist who works in the development office of a second-rate New York university which has aspirations to attain the prestige that only big donations can bring. And Milo's failure at 'the ask' (getting a big donor to cough up the dough) has gotten him fired. In addition Milo is getting little attention from his wife and little respect from his pre-school son Bernie.

Enter Purdy Stuart, Milo's college friend who has gone on to financial success and marriage to a super model. Purdy dangles a major 'give' with the condition that Milo be brought back to handle the negotiations. But Purdy's motives are complicated. He wants Milo to track his illegitimate son Don, an embittered Gulf war vet who threatens to disrupt Purdy's life.

That's the extent of the plot, but it doesn't begin to describe the roller coaster ride that reading this book provides. Milo is cynical, frustrated, inclined to rant and often vulgar, but he has redeeming qualities His love for his son threads through the story, and instead of being oblivious to the mistakes he is making, he is clear-eyed and amusingly self aware.

Lipsyte's prose is funny on every page, and yet he somehow captures Milo's decency and his pain. “The Ask” is witty and vulgar and cynical and honest, all at the same time.

Friends For Life

2011-03-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

The cover of “The Girls from Ames: A story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship” shows a group a smiling attractive teen aged girls. Jeffrey Zaslow (who is the coauthor of “The Last Lecture”) is the author telling the story of eleven girls from the town of Ames, Iowa who were born in 1963 and have maintained a unique friendship that has spanned forty years. The girls met at different times in the small city that is home to Iowa State University. Some were friends from infancy because their parents were friends, some met in grammar school but by middle school almost all of the eleven were friends. By the time they reached Ames High School they were an established group (clique) of eleven girls.

The book begins as they are meeting for one of their many reunions over the years. Using pictures taken over the years, and memories, their stories take shape. In the beginning of the book it was difficult to keep track of who was who. But in the front of the book there are pictures taken of the girls, one was a grade school photo in the second or third grade and one which appears to be a high school yearbook portrait. I would flip back and forth from the story to the pictures to figure out exactly who was speaking. By the end of the book I had become very familiar with these women.

The book is a part sociology, with many cultural references during that time frame and part biography, as each girl tells her story. It is a microcosm of American culture, “white, middle class females from the mid West during the years 1963 to the present”.

Their stories, especially in the early years, are funny and charming; keggers in the cornfields of Iowa, husking corn in the summer, proms and sleepovers. Over the forty years of friendship the girls have lived through the deaths of their parents, the strange death of one of them, marriages, children, divorce, cancer and coping with Alzheimer’s. There is joy and great sadness in their stories. But mostly this is a story of friendship and how these women rely on one another and have nurtured this bond for over forty years. This story, as a whole and each individual story, showed how important female friendships can be and how friendships can not only shape and sustain us but keep us sane and healthy!

Loss and Memory

2011-03-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

I started reading Nicole Krauss's Great House directly after finishing Jonathan Franzen's “Freedom” (blogged here). The contrast was jarring. In some ways the two books are quite similar, since both are about relationships – husbands and wives, parents and children. And neither follows a linear time line, instead jumping forward and backward, telling the story in fragments. But in Franzen's book the characters are all connected to each other, while in “Great House” there are four distinct groups of characters and storylines which initially seem unrelated. At first I thought I was reading short stories, but gradually threads begin to connect, most notably a large desk which figures in three of the four plot lines.

Franzen lards his story with the details of everyday life. If you remember Joey's retrieval of his wedding ring you'll know what I'm talking about. But Krauss's characters, although they exist in real places (Manhattan, Jerusalem. London) at real times, seem almost like characters in fables, sometimes acting in a way that seems dreamlike.

I started taking notes about each story, because I felt that clues were being dropped that would help me solve the mystery that would tie everything up neatly at the end. But Krauss is much too good a writer to go for an obvious tidy ending, and although some threads did weave together, others did not - or did I miss something? But themes did emerge that united the stories – the power and the burden of memory, the crushing pain of loss, the difficulty in truly knowing another human being, even a loved one.

I missed the humor that lightened the dark story Krauss told in her previous book, “The History of Love” - this one is unrelentingly serious. But its haunting images are powerful and hard to forget.

Another View Of An American Dream

2011-03-11T09:06:00.000-08:00

I also read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, the same book that fellow blogger Anna blogged last week in An American Dream (in fact, I borrowed her copy), but I had a very different reaction to it. Instead of being put off by Walter and Patty Berglund, I found them compelling.

The beginning of the book, where the Berglund family in suburban St. Paul is observed by an omniscient and somewhat snarky narrator, did make me wonder if I would enjoy this voice for 500 pages. But quickly the narrative switches to Patty's third-person autobiography “Mistakes Were Made” (what a great title!), written at the suggestion of her therapist, where she reveals her back story and the inner conflicts that make her so much more complex than she appeared to the snarky observer. Patty's story exposes the powerful triangle that dominates the remainder of the book – herself, her husband Walter, and Walter's best friend rock musician Richard Katz, who looks like Moammar Gadhafi (or choose the spelling of your choice).

Or maybe it's a rectangle, with the fourth side being the Berglund's teenage son Joey who confounds his earnest liberal parents, especially his doting mother, by moving next door to live with his adoring girlfriend, whose ditsy single mother and her chainsaw-wielding, beer-drinking boyfriend are the bane of Patty's existence. And without being patronizing, Franzen makes this all very funny.

But that's just Act One. Franzen follows all these characters forward to 2004, where each of them is following a path which seems to lead to freedom, set against the backdrop of the Iraq war. The narrative shifts from one character to another, each time interrupting the story just as something momentous is about to happen. This is not a minimalist novel; it's a sprawling, juicy, tumultuous story, and as the perspective switched so did my sympathies. I can complain that the social commentary got a little preachy and self-important, but I have to admire how all the characters are complex, conflicted, seeking what they think they want and then retreating from it. And did I mention that Franzen's prose was insightful and a joy to read?

So there you have it – one book; two perspectives. Your tolerance for dysfunctional families and general snarkiness will probably effect your impressions of this book.

A Boy Named Sue

2011-03-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

There are several things to take away from a reading of The Typist by Michael Knight.

One is another reminder, if one is needed, that trying to predict the defining influences in a child's life is a risky business. When our narrator Francis Vancleave "Van" was a child growing up in Alabama in the early years of World War II, his mother, who had been a secretary before she married, would type papers for students at the nearby college to earn extra money. With the typewriter set up on the kitchen table after dinner, it was a natural that she would teach her son to type. No Tiger Mother drama here: he was a willing student. What neither of them anticipated was that when Van enlisted in the military, his typing was considered a "special talent" and he was assigned to the military secretarial pool of General Douglas MacArthur, thereby probably saving his life at the very least. And that assignment sets up the rest of the story in Japan.

Another take-away is admiration for the imagination of a writer. Part of the back story to this novel, as described by Knight in the book's Acknowledgments, is that Knight attended a writer's conference in Florida in 2007 where he met a man who was in fact a typist in MacArthur's command, serving as an enlisted man in Tokyo during the American occupation of Japan after the war. Knight is able to take the life of an ordinary enlisted typist and use it to give us an expanded view into this moment of history - and a very interesting view it is. I am inspired to want to read more about MacArthur himself...and isn't that one mark of a successful story?

And finally, MacArthur named his only child, a son, Arthur. Yes, it was also the name of the boy's grandfather but why perpetuate it? I'm sure it was character building (not unlike "A Boy Named Sue").

An American Dream

2011-03-06T21:07:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Frazen has become a very well known writer. His first novel “Corrections” was published just prior to Sept. 11th, 2001 and has become the beacon of authentic “American Humanism”. His next novel took nine years to write and was highly anticipated. That novel,“Freedom”, is a story that speaks to personal liberty and how we (the American public) can find our own paths to “freedom”. Jonathan Franzen tell us that since most of us begin life as part of a “family”, it is there that we will hone our skills for finding freedom.

Jonathan Frazen's novel “Freedom” is about a Midwestern family, the Berglunds. The story begins in the up and coming (or newly gentrified) St. Paul neighborhood, called Ramsey Hill. Patty Berglund is our story’s protagonist. She was a college basketball star and now is married to the very “worthy”, do good lawyer, Walter and they have two "great" kids. How Patty and Walter got together should have been the red flag. This marriage was in for trouble from the get go. We follow Patty and Walter through their travails and those of their children, especially their strangely precocious son, Joey. Patty and Walter (but mostly Patty) continually clash with neighbors, college roommates, friends and family members. Frazen's characters are very well developed. You may not like these characters but you get to know them very well.

What these characters are all seeking is their personal freedom and the way Jonathan Franzan takes them to freedom is through everyday realism. This can be tricky for a reader. Jonathan Frazen is a very good writer, that is to say he knows his craft. But for me, the tedium of living through 562 pages of Walter and Patty Berglund’s life unraveling so they could find freedom was too much!

However, I know that this novel was very well received and acclaimed. For many “Freedom” epitomized middle class America struggling in the aftermath of 9/11 searching for a path to “freedom”. The novel explores life and a family in all its messiness, its emotions, its conflicts and its ability to forgive. He is making a broad statement on the status of the well being of this country. Some people think he has written the great American novel for this century.

This was not an easy book for me to read. Jonathan Frazen escapes me. I think he is too wordy. He put every cliché and nuance of this decade into this story. Too much was attempted. (Where was his editor??) But I am glad I read it. It may (or may not) prove to be the one of the important novels of the century.

One of the Originals

2011-03-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

I have often heard Raymond Chandler described as one of the "founding fathers" of the modern detective story with particular reference to his book The Big Sleep. I have recently finished listening to an audio recording. What a delight! And what a difference from some of the more current examples of the genre. TBS was originally published in 1939 and introduced Philip Marlowe, private investigator. The language is spare in the extreme but effective nonetheless. You know times are different when a PI can work in Los Angeles for $25 a day plus expenses. And what a cast of idiosyncratic unsavory characters - with a few exceptions including Marlowe. Lots of murder and mayhem.

Marlowe has his own ethics and code of professional conduct that, as often as not, involves operating outside the law. I have to say I was surprised by the way he resolves the fates of the guilty. But I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in his company.

Apparently, the book has been made into a movie - twice. Once starring Humphrey Bogart and once, much later and with substantial changes, starring Robert Mitchum.. If I had to choose, I would go with Bogey. He and Marlowe seem tailor-made for each other.

Here is a review of that 1946 film.

Lots of Talk

2011-02-25T16:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I can admire a book without really liking it. That's my reaction to The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson's Booker prize winning novel. It's not that often that I read a comic novel about anti-semitism (although Philip Roth has done it), and Jacobson is terrifically talented at being funny and thought-provoking at the same time, but in the end he wore me out. There is very little action; instead the three male main characters, two Jewish and one who wishes he was, ruminate about all things Jewish, and about life and love as well. It was sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying, sometimes sad, but after a while it felt like an interesting conversation that lasted too long.

Guidelines for Book Discussions

2011-02-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Whether your book group has been meeting for decades as ours has (28 years in April) or is just getting started; whether all of your members have some connection outside of the book group or are just getting to know one another, it will serve your group well to review periodically these guidelines for a lively book discussion:

1. Respect space: Avoid "crosstalk" or talking over others.
2. Allow space: Some members are more outgoing and others more reserved. If you've had a chance to talk, allow others time to offer their thoughts as well.
3. Be open: Keep and open mind, learn from others, and acknowledge there are differences in opinion. That's what makes it interesting.
4. Offer new thoughts: Try not to repeat what others have said, but offer a new perspective.
5. Stay on the topic: Contribute to the flow of the conversation by holding your comments to the topic of the book, keeping personal references to an appropriate minimum.

Many thanks to Reading Group Choices for providing these guidelines.

These principles are useful not just for book groups but also for business meetings, family gatherings, online chat rooms, blogs, etc. If you would like to add another suggestion that, in your experience, is helpful in promoting a civilized discourse, please leave it in a Comment.

In Dreams

2011-02-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

As Rana Dasgupta's novel Solo opens, a nearly one hundred year old Bulgarian named Ulrich sits alone and blind in his rundown Sofia apartment and looks back on his life. He had witnessed a tumultuous span of history in which his native country was battered by the machinations of its more powerful neighbors. Allied with Nazi Germany during World War II, it then fell under the Communist power of the Soviet Union, only to morph into a sort of mafia capitalism after the Iron Curtain fell.

Ulrich is neither a hero nor a villain in all this, just a somewhat passive observer. His own passions, first for the violin, then for the study of chemistry, were both thwarted, and his relationships all ended sadly. This first section (Dasgupta calls it “First Movement”) is titled “Life”, and its chapter titles are all named for chemical elements, which seem to match the clinical detachment with which Ulrich tells his life story. Does this sound like a downer? Well, it is kind of unrelenting. But then as the First Movement comes to an end the narrator observes: “Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense”. I think the world is full of people who are sometimes sustained by their daydreams.

The Second Movement is called “Daydreams”, and although at first I thought it was just a series of short stories having nothing to do with the first section, it soon becomes clear that these are Ulrich's daydreams - of the children he never had, the life he never lived, the travels he never made. A young Bulgarian violin virtuoso named Boris, and a poor but ambitious young woman from Tbilisi meet in New York, where the musician becomes a sensation. The story has a wildly imaginative and dreamlike quality, a sharp contrast to the first section. Even the chapter titles suggest a sort of exaggerated, underwater,mystical existence – Manatee, Ichthyosaur, Narwhal.

I'm not sure what it's all supposed to mean, but there was an odd sort of harmony between the two sections that left me satisfied.

PS Not many author's have a website quite like this one.

A Lot Can Happen in 3 Seconds

2011-02-16T05:00:00.001-08:00

What is it about the Swedish crime writers (Steig Larsson, Henning Mankell and now with their novel Three Seconds the duo of Roslund & Hellstrom) that we in the United States find so fascinating? Is it that we think that the crimes and moral dilemmas about which they write could not happen here...or precisely because we are afraid that they do happen here? I think it is the latter.

Having read the Larsson trilogy and some of Mankell I felt I would be remiss not to add Three Seconds. Prison, drugs and police informants: there you have it. A volatile mix. This is very definitely a stay-up-late, get-up-early, take-the-phone-off-the-hook kind of book. I still have difficulty with the Swedish place and street names but it didn't seem so bad this time. Maybe I'm just getting used to it.

The drug of choice in this case is amphetamines. If you want to know how to manufacture it, how to smuggle it between countries, how to cut it and how to get it inside a prison, this is the book for you. It is all here...in detail. Not always a pleasant read but informative to those of us in our cocoons. And do you really know what your spouse/partner does at the so-called office or when she/he is supposed to be at home with the sick children?

Several times in the book the line "It takes a criminal to play a criminal" is repeated. Perhaps we will now have to extend that to say "It takes a criminal to write about a criminal." One of the co-authors Borge Hellstrom is described as an ex-criminal. Teaming up with journalist Anders Roslund seems like a good decision on his part. In this book they have raised some troubling questions: about the use of criminal informants to investigate other crimes, about the access to drugs in the prison system, about the manipulation of data by the police and higher authorities. Do the same things happen here? Should we care?

Navigating a Labyrinth

2011-02-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

Is this reality, is this a dream, is this an hallucination? That's what I kept asking myself as I read Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The protagonist/narrator Toru Okada, a mild-mannered underachiever living in a Tokyo suburb, somehow becomes involved in a series of a bizarre adventures. It begins with a missing cat, then a missing wife, then Okada is spending time at the bottom of a well or in a mysterious hotel room with a mysterious woman. There's a healer named Cinnamon with a mute son named Nutmeg, and a politician brother-in-law who may or may not be involved in the disappearance of Okada's wife.

Make sense? No, it really doesn't. But there was something compelling that kept me reading. Part of it was that my problem-solving self hoped that in the end all the pieces of this strange jigsaw puzzle would fit together. Spoiler alert – they don't. But part of it was that Murakami is a talented storyteller. Some of the best stories are told by characters who have little to do with the main plot – they arrive in Okada's life, tell their stories and leave. Some deal frankly with Japanese war crimes. Did I miss their connection to the narrative or was it just not there?

One disturbing fact that I learned after I had finished the book was that the English version of the novel was shortened by two chapters in order to meet the publisher's length requirements. It's yet another reminder that reading a translation always has its drawbacks. But reading a writer as talented as Haruki Murakami also has its rewards.

O Parakeet of the Lissome Star

2011-02-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

That is just one of names that Paul West created for his wife Diane Ackerman as a therapy for his damaged brain following a massive stroke. Ackerman, a prolific writer (The Zoo Keeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, Cultivating Delights, …) and poet, has chronicled the aftermath of the stroke in a forthcoming memoir One Hundred Names for Love.

It is a remarkable story: of a wife’s devotion to her injured husband – and a very painless way to learn a lot of brain science. West was in his mid-seventies at the time of the stroke and already battling diabetes and heart disease. Immediately after the stroke he could manage only one sound: Mem, mem, mem… Over the next five years Ackerman, assisted by an extraordinary therapist, was tireless in her efforts to help West regain his ability to write and speak coherently. Just reading about the struggles is exhausting. But Ackerman is a poet and the language with which she describes their efforts, their small successes, their setbacks is rich and delightful. Because West was an accomplished writer before the stroke, he is especially frustrated by the simplistic exercises put forth as traditional speech therapy. It is Ackerman, the wife who knows him better than anyone else could, who devises exercises like the One Hundred Names (all of which are recorded at the end of this volume).

The science is fascinating…and fun. Has it ever seemed to you that women talk faster than men? “Women can pronounce words faster than men, and utter more sentences in a given amount of time. Maybe because women use both hemispheres to comb through sounds, while men mainly use the left side. With a richer bounty of connections among neurons and a more thickly wired “corpus callosum” zooming traffic between the two hemispheres, the female brain may be better organized for language. Whatever, the reason, females are less prey to stuttering, dyslexia, autism, and other language problems, including aphasia.” Aphasia is the diagnostic term given to West’s condition.

The book will not be released officially until April. I was fortunate to receive an advance reader’s copy for review from the publisher through Reading Group Choices. I hope that somehow each and every one of the caregivers of Gabrielle Giffords, but especially her husband, will receive and read this book. The importance of having a primary caregiver deeply invested in the success of the outcome cannot be overestimated. I hope that none of us has to face such a daunting task – but the odds are that some of us will. This book will give hope and comfort.

Science and Fiction

2011-02-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

If you are a reader who likes books where the main character is admirable, or likable, or even sympathetic, please don't read Ian McEwan's Solar. McEwan's protagonist, Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard, is a philandering, self-delusional, boorish old goat, and there are at least five other unpleasant adjectives I could have added to that list. This is not the first time McEwan has created a pompous gasbag ( see Henry Perowne in “Saturday”), but he seems to have gone out of his way to make this man as loathsome as possible.

And yet...the guy knows how to write. When Michael, who has latched onto global warming as a way to keep the grant money and lecture invitations coming in, travels to the Arctic with a group of earnest planet-savers, his misadventures had me laughing out loud. McEwan also manages to weave in a fair amount of physics and environmental science without lecturing. The solar solution that Beard developed (he stole the concept from another scientist) actually seemed plausible, and when he traveled to New Mexico to power up his prototype system I was actually hoping it would work.

As in many of McEwan's novels, you can feel yourself hurtling toward a disaster, and you keep turning pages in spite of yourself. But the story is told from Beard's point of view, and he is one cold customer, so the crashing conclusion doesn't pack the wallop that other novels have.

It's not McEwan at his best, but it's still an enjoyable and often very funny read.

Through the Eyes of a Child

2011-02-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

I think it is probably true that, when reading most fiction, it is a better experience, for a first reading, to come at it knowing as little as possible about the story. That is certainly the case with Emma Donoghue's Room although that would be hard to do given the amount of press the book has received.

Our narrator is Jack, age 5. I would like to hear an opinion from a child development specialist but the voice seems true to me (the book jacket says that the author has 2 young children) and very compelling even to an adult reader. I can't say that the language is beautiful because it is after all the language of a 5-year-old but it is very poignant and at times quite humorous. Jack and his mother face extraordinary challenges, some the same, some different. And there are times later in the book when the roles reverse and the child seems to have the greater maturity.

The author has tackled a challenging subject in a way that you will not soon, if ever, forget. Although this book lost out on the Booker Prize to The Finkler Question, it was awarded the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, well-deserved. Try to enlist a friend to read this book at the same time that you are reading it because you will certainly want to discuss it when you finish.

Don't Miss This One

2011-01-30T20:06:00.000-08:00

Our book group read "Tinkers" by Paul Harding this month. I had blogged "Tinkers" almost two years ago and really enjoyed the book. Since that time Paul Harding has won the Pulitzer Prize for this, his first novel. It is a beautifully written story that is told by an old man as he lay dying.

For those of you who read our blog but haven't read "Tinkers" I highly recommend it.
If you want to know more about the book you can locate my original blog. In the top right hand corner of our blog there is a box with the word "Search" next to it. If you type in "Tinkers" it will bring up a box where you can access the blog I wrote. Enjoy!

Radical Chic

2011-01-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

If you're of a certain age you may remember the Weather Underground, a radical group founded in the late Sixties which used bombings to protest the war in Viet Nam and to disrupt government operations. You may even remember when a Greenwich Village townhouse the group was using as a safe house exploded when a nail bomb they were making detonated prematurely.

What if a group like this still existed, intent on protesting the increasing power of multinational corporations by non-lethal bombings? That's the premise of David Goodwillie's American Subversive. The story is told in chapters with the alternating points of view of the two main characters. And they are an unlikely pair. Aidan Cole is a thirty-something journalism school dropout who makes a meager living by snarkily blogging about the media and living the hipster life in the West Village. He goes to all the right parties and bars, has a sometimes girlfriend who writes a column about relationships for the New York Times, but he seems to be tiring of his own cynicism.

Paige Roderick, despite her preppy-sounding name, grew up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, but was radicalized by the death of her brother in Iraq. Her fearlessness and commitment bring her to the attention of the charismatic leader of an underground group attempting to draw America's attention by the use of strategically placed bombs.

Their lives intersect when Aidan receives an anonymous e-mail which contains a photo of the beautiful Paige and identifies her as the perpetrator of the latest bombing, at the Barney's building in Manhattan. The first chapter of the book has revealed that Aidan is in hiding in a safe house, so the bulk of the story is told in flashback as the two characters alternately describe the events that led them to each other and their fates.

This book is a sort of strange mix of literary thriller, with hints of Bret Easton Ellis, and a slightly sappy tale of a couple that 'meets cute'. Maybe it was because I was always fascinated by Sixties radicals, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Thriller in Paris

2011-01-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

A thriller set in Paris involving a clothing designer, an art dealer and an independent filmmaker – sounds like an entertaining read, doesn't it? And it was. Ted Mooney's The Same River Twice sets the plot in motion on page one as Odile, a French fashion designer looking for extra cash and perhaps a little excitement, smuggles Soviet era May Day flags out of Moscow for an enterprising art dealer. She neglects to tell her her husband Max about the caper, but after all he's busy with his mid-life crisis and his cinéma vérité about a young couple restoring a houseboat on the Seine. What's the harm?

As you can probably guess, complications ensue. The story has classic thriller elements – an enigmatic Russian businessman, a couple of truly malevolent thugs, a mysterious firebombing, not one but two beautiful, calculating young women, even an ecstasy party in the sewers of Paris.

But unlike in most thrillers, there's more going on than just a fast-moving plot. Mooney creates some three-dimensional characters who do not fall easily into 'good guy/bad guy' categories. They are far more cerebral and self-reflective than standard thriller types, and they examine such weighty questions as the meaning of love and the importance of art, even as they dodge thugs and plot escapes through the streets of Paris.

There are plenty of plot twists, and on reflection some of them may have been a little forced, but I enjoyed the ride.

Our Island Neighbor

2011-01-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

When my friend Ellen, an intrepid traveler and fearless adventurer, announced that her next trip this Spring would be to Cuba, I had to admit, if only to myself, that I knew very little about this island neighbor, its culture or its history. There were a few names: Fidel Castro, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, but nothing really substantive. As travel restrictions from the US are easing, one can envision the day when Cuba, whether or not it remains nominally communist, will be quite different from what it is today or has been.

At this point in my life I prefer to learn my history the easy way- through fiction. From Charlotte's blog, I knew that Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos has some history of pre-Castro Havana. After some searching I decided on Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner. It helped in my selection that this book was a National Book Award Finalist in 2008.

The story takes place in Cuba in the late 1950's (Castro's overthrow of Batista was successful in 1959) for the most part in the insular America colony of the sugar and nickel companies' employees. It turns out that this is also personal history for Kushner as her grandparents and mother lived in Cuba during that time. Through the use of multiple narrators Kushner is able to elicit the reader's sympathies for opposing parties to the developing conflict although I personally was often confused at first as to which narrator was speaking. These several narrators also describe the same event but from his or her own perspective. For example, when one of the company executives is kidnapped by the rebels, we are given several tellings: from the other expats, from one of the rebels and from the kidnapped victim himself - all very different as you can imagine. I really liked this technique. It is a good reminder that with respect to historical events or even events in our own lives we may wish to suspend our initial judgment. (I suspect that there are other novels out there that also tell the same story by different participants. If you know of one, please leave the title/author in a Comment.)

I almost missed the very creative website that complements this book with period photographs to illustrate certain lines of text. If you do nothing else, click on the link to check out the photograph on the website portal!

Now that I have some context I can move on to Enduring Cuba by Zoe Bran, a non-fiction account of her travels in Cuba today.

2010 Favorites

2011-01-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

As we conclude three years of blogging I look at the books I have blogged for 2010 and I realize that some of my favorites are the books that have been chosen by our amazing book group of eleven like minded but diverse readers.

I really enjoyed “Let The Great World Spin”, by Colum McCann. It is a story that revolves around the real life feat, performed by Philippe Petit, of walking a tightrope between the World Trade Center buildings. Colum McCann uses this event to pivot an incredible story about twelve characters who lived in New York on that day.

“Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese, is an ambitious, family epic that spans over forty years and two continents with characters that are difficult to forget.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a novel about the Nigeria-Biafran War, “Half of a Yellow Sun”, that is mesmerizing. Her research into this forgotten war is enlightning and her characters are so strong and memorable.

On my own I have attempted to read some non fiction. One of my favorites, although a difficult book to read, was “Lucky” by Alice Sebold. This incredible story is a memoir of the author’s rape at the age of eighteen on the last day of her freshman year, in a park tunnel, at Syracuse University in New York. How this courageous girl deals with this life altering ordeal is inspiring.

To balance out my list I want to include a book that made me laugh out loud, “This Is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper. It is the very amusing story of a complicated Jewish family gathering together, after being apart for sometime, to sit Shiva for their father.

It is great to move from very serious and/or enlightening books to ones that are just plain fun. That is the joy of reading and I happily look forward to a year of more inspiring and wonderful reads!

An Interesting Recipe

2011-01-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

The Cookbook Collector is the story of two sisters – one brainy and analytical, one free-spirited and passionate – and the choices they make in men and in life. Does that sound like something Jane Austen might have written? Actually I think she did.

But Allegra Goodman isn't just copying an old formula. Her two sisters are very much grounded in the recent past – specifically, between 1999 and 2002, a time of several historic events which are smoothly woven into the story. Older sister Emily, an MIT grad, is an executive at a Silicon Valley start-up in the time of NASDAQ euphoria. Younger sister Jessamyn is a grad student in philosophy at Cal, works at a sort of vanity rare book store in Berkeley run by a Microsoft millionaire, and devotes her passions to a Save The Redwoods group and its charismatic leader. There are lots of ways to get trite and predictable with material like this, and Goodman avoids them all.

Just as she did in her previous book “Intuition” (see my blog), Goodman takes us inside disparate worlds. The constant scrambling in tech companies to attract funding for their latest ideas felt authentic, and as someone who has spent hours debugging code, I can attest that her description of an all-night code-crunching session rang true. She makes the esoteric world of antique book restoration and collecting seem fascinating, especially the amusing sub-plot about an unusual collection of cookbooks.

But the book is essentially about relationships, between friends, lovers, parents, children, and siblings. Goodman juggles a lot of plot lines, and some are better fleshed out than others, but once again I admired her ability to amuse and entertain me with a page-turning story.

PS Goodman should have done a little more research on Bay Area geography. Heading north to Arcata from Berkeley does not involve crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, but one of her characters does just that.

My Favorites for 2010

2010-12-31T13:36:00.000-08:00

I always have trouble narrowing down my annual selection of favorite books. I limit it to books I have blogged (thus eliminating the wonderful “Winter's Bone” blogged by Dorothea and "Half of a Yellow Sun" blogged by Anna) and, as I look at the list, I try to choose those that didn't just entertain me but also left a lasting impression. (It's always a little depressing to have to re-read my blog in order to remember anything about the book). Books that allow me to peek inside a place I've never been (a culture, a profession, a country) always engage me. And I love a book that offers me a mystery to unravel even as it fascinates me with interesting characters and plot.

For a lasting impression nothing could top Agatha's Hoff riveting memoir Burning Horses (A Powerful Story), the story of her mother Eva's life in a Hungary turned upside down by World War II.

I read two books where characters worked for newspapers - The Imperfectionists (Reporting From Rome) and Not Untrue and Not Unkind (Reporting From The Congo) – and both offered very different pictures the underside of journalism.

Two books had me trying to fit together the shifting pieces of a puzzle as I read - Await Your Reply (Mistaken Identity) and Mr. Peanut (Marriage and Murder). And Cloud Atlas (Worth A Second Look) was the literary equivalent of a Russian matryoshka doll – each story opening on to another and then circling back again.

Two short story books gave me what I love about this form - fresh, unexpected glimpses of characters captured like a snapshot - Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (Short And Bittersweet) and If I loved you I would tell you this (Unexpected Slices).

And if you're just looking for laughs you can't go wrong with Headlong (Country Life).

A stack of of unread books awaits me as I cross into 2011. Happy New Year and Happy Reading. Make your own list of 2010 favorites.

Free Kindle Books

2010-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

I suspect that I am not alone in having this experience. After reading through the "quick start guide" to my new Kindle 3, I was paralyzed trying to decide which book to download first. I was fortunate to go for a run with my friend Gail on the morning after Christmas. Gail has been a long-time Kindle user and lover and offered to send me some links for free Kindle books. Little did I expect such a treasure-trove of information. I just had to share it - with Gail's permission, of course. I know that many of you have been using Kindles for a while so may not find anything new here. But there probably is at least one other "newbie" like myself who can benefit.

If the veterans among you have other tips and suggestions for the Kindle, please share in the Comments below.
Here's what Gail had to say:

"Welcome to the Kindle world. I hope you enjoy it.

1. Here are some free ebook sites, for books in the public domain. I think ManyBooks and Feedbooks get their books from Project Gutenberg, but I found the ManyBooks site easier to navigate than Project Gutenberg, and I could "shop" it from my Kindle. I have not looked at the PG site in a year, so it may have improved.
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top
http://www.manybooks.net/
http://www.feedbooks.com/

2. This is an old list of free sites, but it looks like the sidebar links have been updated so the information might still be current. There are so many, I have barely touched the surface in my surfing. There are far more books available than I have time to read, let alone surf.
http://ireaderreview.com/2008/01/19/free-books-for-the-amazon-kindle/

3. This is a site I have started using only recently. It lists the Amazon books that recently dropped in price. I have also created a list of books that I would like to read. The site tracks the prices for me, and emails me if a book in which I am interested drops in price.
http://www.ereaderiq.com/

4. This lists the free Kindle books that Amazon offers. It seems to subtract those in the public domain. The list changes frequently, and it is really a toss-up as to whether it is worth checking since there is so much dross.
http://ebooks.addall.com/amazonfree.html

Happy reading!"

P.S. Here is a link to an interesting article in the Financial Times about the ebook revolution. You may have to register (for free) to read the article.

A Writer's Right to Privacy

2010-12-28T19:25:00.000-08:00

I found J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, “Summertime” to be very interesting. The reason I use the word interesting is that the premise is so unusual. The story evolves as the rough draft of a biography of the late John Coetzee, a South African writer, written by an Englishman referred to as Mr. Vincent. The “biography” takes the form of five interviews by Mr. Vincent with people who had known Coetzee in the 1970’s when he was living in a suburb of Capetown with his elderly father. Four of the five interviewees were women who had had a “relationship” with John Coetzee. The fifth, Martin, was a colleague from Coetzee’s teaching days.

The interviews are intriguing and often very amusing. The women often describe Coetzee with the most unflattering and demoralizing rhetoric. The stories the interviewees relate of their own lives are often far more interesting than the life of the J.M. Coetzee, before he became a famous writer.

One might ask, “Why would J.M. Coetzee, the novelist, (who is very much alive in 2010) want to write about a J.M. Coetzee who is somewhat similar to himself but who is dead? and why, in such a strange and unflattering way? It seems that this author, who has received many prestigious awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature, wants to make a statement: “Why are people so interested in a man just because he is a famous writer?” But only J.M. Coetzee could present this question to his readers in such a creative and beautifully written form.

Homecoming

2010-12-12T18:52:00.000-08:00

I don't read a lot of mysteries, and I don't often blog about the ones I do read, because they seem a little lightweight. But I am a fan of Irish mystery writer Tana French. I enjoyed “In The Woods”, which Anna blogged (Psychological Suspense ) and I blogged her second book “The Likeness” (Mirror Image). In her third book, Faithful Place, French returns to grizzled, wisecracking Dublin Undercover Detective Frank Mackey.

Frank is a lonely middle-aged divorced man, whose heart was broken at age nineteen when his true love Rosie Daly, who had promised to run off to England with him, left without him. Except she didn't. Twenty-two years later Rosie's suitcase, containing the ferry tickets for the couple's escape, is found in an abandoned house.

The discovery pulls Frank back to Faithful Place, the grim cul-de-sac in a Dublin area called The Liberties, where he and Rosie grew up, and from which he hoped he had permanently escaped. Frank's family still lives there, and there is no dysfunctional like Irish dysfunctional. As he tells his ex-wife, "You don't meet my family, you open hostilities."

"Faithful Place" is a detective novel, with plot twists and turns, but it is also a dark Roddy Doyle kind of family drama, as Frank is torn by his loyalties to his family and his distrust of them. The family dynamic is so suffocating and toxic that sometimes it was hard to keep reading, but Frank Mackey's voice - sometimes witty, sometimes angry, sometimes heartbreaking - kept me turning the pages.

An Irish Favorite

2010-12-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

I think we all have authors that we use as safety nets. We know they won't disappoint us, so when we're going on a trip, or anticipating a long wait or a boring commute, we take them along as a reliable companion. For me William Trevor is one of those safety nets.

First of all, he's Irish, and I'm a sucker for Irish writers. He's prolific, so he's easy to find in my favorite used book store. He's probably best known for his short stories, but his novels are also prize-winning. Last year I read and loved his latest novel “Love and Summer” (see my blog), so I picked up a used copy of his 1998 novel Death in Summer to take along on a trip.

Trevor's characters are never captains of industry or glamorous socialites. They live in small towns or on the fringe of society in big cities. In "Death in Summer" a young widower struggles to care for his infant daughter after the accidental death of his wife. But he is not the only character dealing with disappointment and sadness. The vulnerabilities of the characters seem to draw them to each other, leading to unexpected events. Trevor prose is spare, but it's not a quick read, because he unfolds his story in fragments.

Trevor is not an author for readers who like inspiring characters and uplifting endings. But once again he gave me haunting images of ordinary people touched by loss and by love.

Marriage and Murder

2010-11-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

Can you enjoy a book that you're not sure you understand? That's how I felt when I finished Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. The story revolves around three sets of married couples, which sounds simple enough. But David Pepin, the husband in what I'll call couple number one, is a successful computer game designer who is writing a novel about ... David and Alice Pepin. What's more, both Ross's book and David's book begin in exactly the same way: “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn't kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.”

Did David kill his wife, or did she kill herself, or neither? That is what police detectives Sam Sheppard and Ward Hastroll attempt to determine. Does the name Sam Sheppard sound familiar? Yes, it's the infamous Doctor Sam Sheppard who in 1954 was convicted of killing his pregnant wife Marilyn and spent nearly ten years in prison before the conviction was overturned and he was acquitted after a new trial. Although the real Sheppard died in 1970, this fictional one lives on as a detective, and the book flashes back to portray Sam and Marilyn's troubled marriage, his infidelities, and the events leading up to her death.

The third couple, Detective Ward Hastroll and his wife Hannah, have troubles of their own. Hannah comes home from work one day and takes to her bed with no explanation, and remains there for the next five months, as her husband becomes increasingly frustrated in his attempts to understand what has happened, even fantasizing her murder.

The book jumps around among these three couples, and also slips into scenes from David's book, and it's ofter not clear (at least to me) whether I'm reading about Ross's David and Alice or David's David and Alice. For example there's an odd dwarf hit man named Mobius (as in the endless Mobius strip?) who may be a real person or more likely is just a computer game sort of avatar in David's book.

Confusing? Yes, it is but it's also funny and intriguing and oddly entertaining. It doesn't all work, and I'm not sure I got it all, but I enjoyed the trip.

Silent Resistance

2010-11-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

The novel “Everyman Dies Alone” was written in 1947 in twenty four days by the prolific but doomed German writer, Hans Fallada. Hans Fallada is the pen name for Rudolf Ditzer who died shortly after the novel was published.

“Everyman Dies Alone” is based on a true story that took place in Berlin in 1941. In 1945 Fallada/Ditzer was given the Gestapo file on a working-class Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who began a surreptitious postcard campaign against the Fuhrer when a relative died in the war.

Hans Fallada took the real life events and wrote a compelling story about a non-descript working class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who decide to wage a silent war against Hitler when their son is killed at the front. Fallada sums up their unrelenting determination when Anna concludes “No one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.” This is the strength and beauty of this book. It gives the reader a lost insight into the small but meaningful resistance that some Germans took part in against unbeatable odds.

Fallada’s story involves a huge cast of characters that is not easy to follow. Fallada houses many of them in the apartment building where the Quangels live, some of the characters are downright ridiculous and others are just strange. Through the huge cast of characters Fallada seems to be illustrating the incredible level of fear and distrust that permeated the citizens of Berlin at that time. No one could be trusted. Yet, Otto and Anna persevered, writing postcards and silently distributing them week after week.

Reading this novel is difficult as we witness the unrelenting, ferocious cruelties of the Gestapo and the paralyzing fear that took over many citizens of Berlin. However, Fallada redeems himself in the ending chapters of the book. The ending is tragic, but heroic. And most important, it shows that in even the worst of circumstances human decency, determination and courage can prevail.

It has taken sixty years for this novel to be translated into English and appear in the US. It is a story that needs to be told even if it is not an easy or pleasant read.

A Woman's Destiny

2010-11-07T15:30:00.000-08:00

Jane Smiley’s latest novel “Private Life” is story about one woman’s life. The story begins in 1883 and closes in 1942 as this country enters World War II. It begins slowly as Margaret Mayfield, the narrator, describes her life in St. Louis. It is the end of the 19th century and life is uncomplicated but sad because of the untimely and surprising deaths that seem to be part of everyday life.
Margaret and her sisters are being trained to be “married” women. A great excitement for Margaret is getting to ride a bicycle when she is in her twenties.

But Margaret the oldest of three sisters is the one still not married. Her mother takes the matter in hand and creates a match for Margaret with Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an famed astronomer who is eleven years older than Margaret. And so begins the story of Margaret’s “Private Life”.

The couple move to the Mare Island naval station near Vallejo, California. From the vantage of Mare Island Margaret will watch history unfold. Jane Smiley describes the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire with all its chaos and horror. She follows that with the raging Spanish influenza epidemic, World War I, the stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and finally World War II and the overwhelming it effects in had on the people of California and the country.

Throughout this unfolding history Margaret is trying to understand and live with her husband, a strange man who is “sucking the very air from her life.” As she lives day by day, she cooks, she drives, she types, she listens and slowly she begins to think about her life and to understand a truth she never dared to think about.

Jane Smiley’s cast of characters is a lively and memorable one. The story is one that takes over and urges the reader to find out what she is trying telling us about marriage, women and history.

Unlike Charlotte, (See Blog of "Private Life" July 2010) I enjoyed watching Margaret finally figure it out. Granted, it is a slow and painful process, but not one she was trained to do and it did take, finally, some gumption on her part. And the closing line sums up Margaret, "There are so many things that I should have dared before this."

Unexpected Slices

2010-10-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

I always have trouble writing a blog about a book of short stories. Do I describe the ones I liked best? I don't want to give away too much. Part of what I liked best about the ten stories in Robin Black's “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This” was that they seemed both familiar and unexpected at the same time.

For example, there's a story (“Harriet Elliot”) told by a fifth grade girl about a new girl in her class. But it's also about the narrator's own struggles to deal with her disintegrating family. We've all read these stories of childhood unhappiness, but this one approaches it from a different angle. And the all too familiar dynamic of a parent dealing with a teenager leaving the nest is viewed through the lens of a father's reluctant acceptance of a guide dog for his blind daughter (“The Guide”).

Black gives us views of familiar subjects – fidelity, loss, guilt, acceptance – approached in fresh and unexpected ways. Some stories work better than others (I thought the title story “If I Loved You” seemed labored), but I was moved and surprised by all ten.

Checking Back In

2010-10-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Guilty: I haven’t been blogging.

But I have been reading. I just didn’t seem to have the energy to get my thoughts together. But here are some of the books that I have read during this period and can recommend:

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. This is a memoir about the friendship between two older women that ended all too abruptly with the death of one from cancer. That is not a spoiler. These two women have more than the usual bonds: Same profession, new puppies, recovered from addiction, complicated relationships with their fathers, and a love of an athletic pursuit. Most of us are not so lucky. But women readers especially will appreciate (and envy) their discovery of each other – without any of the sexual intimacy that seems to be presumed among two single women friends.

Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton. Another memoir. For a book that I really liked, it took me over a month to read and I’m not sure why. Burton is married and has five daughters (just like Tamsen Donner). One summer Burton takes her family on a road trip to recreate the journey of the Donner party. This memoir is part journal of that trip, part history of the Donner party and part record of Burton’s struggles to balance her ambition as a writer and her sense of responsibility as a mother. The history of the Donner party is fascinating. I had always thought that the stories of cannibalism were just conjecture – not so. Tamsen Donner managed to write a few letters during the journey which have been preserved; but her journal was never found. Burton tries to reimagine the thoughts and feelings of Tamsen Donner.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. Fiction. If someone had told me that I could ever take an interest in professional race car driving, I would never have believed it. But for most readers, I think, that part of this book is just tangential. It’s more about the dog. The entire book is told from the dog’s point of view – which raises some interesting questions, such as: What does a dog see when the dog is in front of a television? There is a lot about race car driving and some good philosophy. “The car goes where the eyes go” works for both.

An Irish Houseguest

2010-10-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

In Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday all the action of the novel takes place in a single day, the twenty-first of June, the birthday of an Irish actress named Molly Fox. I had to look it up to be sure, but I was right – this same construct is used in “Mrs. Dalloway”. Remember Clarissa preparing for and hosting her party in a single day? Anyway, back to Molly. The unnamed narrator is a successful playwright who has known Molly for twenty years – her first play launched her career and Molly's as well – and she is staying in Molly's home in Dublin while the actress is in New York.

The house is full of objects that remind her of Molly, and she reminisces about their long friendship, which expanded to include the narrator's college friend Andrew, now a well-known art historian. As the day progresses scraps of information are revealed about the disparate childhoods of the three friends, and we see the various ways that each of them has created an identity in response to early circumstances. All three have brothers who have in very different ways shaped their adult lives. As one memory triggers another, the playwright narrator examines friendship – how well do we know our friends? But the examination is also about identity – how do we present ourselves to the world, and how close is that to our true selves? Can a playwright or an actress know a fictional character better than she knows her friend?

This is not a book for those who enjoy a plot-driven novel – not a lot happens, and much of the story is presented somewhat obliquely in little snatches of memory. But I was left with a lovely picture of Molly's charming Dublin home, and an interesting meditation on the meaning and the mystery of friendship.

And yes, once again I've revealed my affection for Irish writers. But this time she's from Northern Ireland so that must mean I'm expanding my horizons.

Departures

2010-10-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

After You've Gone - it's a title that comes to mean more and more as Jeffrey Lent's novel progresses. In the early chapters it describes the life of college teacher Henry Dorn, whose happy marriage of over thirty years is abruptly ended when his beloved wife Olivia is killed in a car driven by their son Robert, who is perhaps under the influence of morphine and perhaps self-destructive.

But it also describes Henry's early life in Nova Scotia, where, with the help of an understanding uncle, he flees the rigid and cold life his family has carved out for him in a fishing village in order to find a more satisfying life teaching college girls and raising a family in the Finger Lakes region of New York. After he's gone he finds it difficult to visit the cold and resentful family he has left behind.

The later chapters describe Henry's departure from Elmira, New York to Amsterdam, where he hopes to reconnect with his Dutch roots and leave behind the sorrow that haunts him after his wife's death. A shipboard romance with Lydia, a younger high-spirited and independent American woman, leads to a more serious relationship as the two settle into an idyllic summer romance in Amsterdam. When she leaves him for Paris in order to contemplate their future, he is once more left behind to struggle with what it means to be alone and how to move forward into a new life, including a mid-life attempt to learn to play the cello.

Lent moves easily between these time periods as he pushes the story backwards and forward without jarring breaks. His beautifully paints the portrait of a content and happy marriage that is anything but boring, and is masterful at describing the tender and painful bonds between parents and children. He writes beautifully about a romance between two adults who struggle valiantly to overcome the baggage of their past lives. And for me he kind of spoiled it with an unnecessarily melodramatic ending.

The Forgetful Majority

2010-10-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

I missed this essay when it first appeared in the September 19, 2010 issue of 'The New York Times Book Review'; but there were several Letters to the Editor about it in the October 3rd issue and that prompted me to look it up online. With the exception of fellow-blogger Charlotte who, I believe, remembers every book she has ever read, I urge everyone else to read "The Plot Escapes Me" by James Collins.

It speaks to me - and about me - more than anything I can remember reading. But that is the irony and the point of the essay. I remember very little of what I have read over the years or even last month. Does that make it a waste of time? Collins has some very interesting answers.

Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, has a commentary on the article on his blog. He frames the question a little differently as you might expect: what is the opportunity cost of reading?

Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that book group discussions and writing down your thoughts about what you read (for example, in a blog!) should enhance retention. I can't really say that they do...but I'm not ready to give up on either.

You can read the Letters to the Editor about the essay here.

Love Triangle

2010-09-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

The love triangle – we've all seen examples of it. Shakespeare used it in “Twelfth Night”, there's Tom, Daisy and Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby”, and the memorable Rick-Ilsa-Victor triangle in “Casablanca”. David Pinner, the central character in Nick Laird's Glover's Mistake, finds himself in this predicament. He is a thirty-three year old London college teacher who reconnects with Ruth Marks, a forty-five year old successful artist who had taught him years earlier in art school. Early on David believes that Ruth is attracted to him, but it soon becomes apparent that she is interested in his much younger, handsomer flatmate James Glover, a likable if somewhat dim bartender.

The novel is written in the third person, but it is told from David's point of view, and he initially seems to be decent if a little sad. But gradually it becomes clear that Glover's Mistake is innocently believing that David has his best interests at heart. David has the unreliable narrator's talent for self-justification as he persistently undermines the romance while pretending to be a devoted friend to both Ruth and James. It would be depressing if it weren't so funny and so cleverly written. Laird skewers the pretensions of the art world, explores the nastiness of anonymous blogs, rambles through London neighborhoods and ask questions about the meaning of love.

This is not a novel for readers who want their characters to be likable, or even admirable. Ruth is self-absorbed and insensitive, David a manipulating misanthrope, and although James is endearing he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But it's a clever and fast moving cautionary tale about the dangers of love triangles.

Worth A Second Look

2010-09-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

More than one person had warned me that David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was a difficult read. But I had been given a copy by a reader I admire so I decided to tackle it. It was a roller coaster ride - parts were a little bumpy, parts were exhilarating - and I'm glad I hung on to the end.

The book's first section is a journal begun in 1849 by Adam Ewing, an American notary, as he travels by sea from New Zealand to Hawaii. But in the middle of the story (actually in mid-sentence) the story suddenly shifts to 1931 and “Letters from Zedelghem”, letters from aspiring composer Robert Frobisher, who has convinced a reclusive musical genius to take him on as an amanuensis in his remote Belgian chateau. When Frobisher isn't bedding the composer's wife, lusting after his daughter or stealing books from his library, he is working on his own composition – Cloud Atlas Sextet. This section seems to have no connection to the one that preceded it, until Frobisher discovers the torn first half of a book on the shelf of his room, and it's “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”.

I'm sure my love of puzzles and problem solving helped keep me turning pages after that. The next four sections are once again about characters and time periods with no connection to the preceding ones, except there are little kernels – a birthmark, a manuscript, a movie title – which reference the previous section in an oblique way. The first five sections are written in different styles and each ends abruptly. The sixth - “Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After” is as hard to read as the title suggests. It's a post-apocalyptic tale told in a sort of pidgin English by Zachry, a goatherd in Hawaii who describes life after the fall of civilization. Hawaii? Didn't the book start with a journey to Hawaii?

The book then pivots and works it way backwards. Each of the five stories begun in the first half is completed in the second, until, in the last section, we are back on the ship with Adam Ewing. Along the way Mitchell plants additional clever clues and references that make the book feel much more like an integrated whole than just a series of unrelated stories.

The composer Robert Frobisher described his Cloud Atlas Sextet as "overlapping soloists: piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order." That's a perfect description of this interesting book.

Three Audio Books

2010-09-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

During summer car travels, we listened to several audio books, with mixed results. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi is the true tale of the authors shared obsession with an unsolved series of crimes. A serial killer in the 1970's ritually murdered fourteen young lovers around Florence, was never caught, and is known as the Monster of Florence. Preston moved with his family to Florence (he is a mystery writer), met Spezi and together they searched to uncover and confront the man they believe is that monster. Along with murder, mutilation, suicide and vengance, they themselves become targets of a bizarre police investigation. The tale itself if fascinating, providing an additional lesson in political corruption and the concealed and extensive corruption within the Italian legal system. The tale is long, quite interesting, well narrated (Dennis Boutsikaris) but might well have benefited from some editing, since the details sometimes bog down the progress of the story.

Richard Russo, whose writing I thoroughly enjoy, wrote That Old Cape Magic, about the long, painful, sometimes funny struggles of Jack Griffin, a man in mid-life whose marriage is crumbling despite all the trappings of success, wife, daughter, etc. He has truly hideous parents and Russo creates very real, sad but often funny, people. However, over time I tired of this clueless man who excludes his family, thinking they have no impact upon his behavior and life if they are not physically present in his world. His realizations come slowly over time and I somehow lost patience with him as damages pile up along the way. Competently narrated (Arthur Morey), I wanted more to "happen" in this rather slow, character driven work.

The Bishop and the Beggar Girl of St. Germain, by Andrew Greeley, is a "locked room" mystery (unraveling a mystery without chases, locations, etc.). Bishop Blackie, an intelligent, balanced Catholic Bishop makes entertaining and wry observations about love, life, religious pretentions and rigidity, as he tries to track down and understand the motivations of a priest who has gone missing. The author includes multiple pieces of history and detailed locations in Paris that make the traveler smile in memory, and the Bishop is a very astute man. However well narrated by George Guidall, the writing suffers from being "too" clever, overusing words like "patently"and "arguably" which over time, grew annoying. I found the resolution of the story to exceed my suspension of disbelief, leaving me somewhat disappointed in the end.

That said, the pleasures of audio books cannot be denied.

A Conflict of Interests

2010-09-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

I've always had a soft spot for cop stories – I've blogged my appreciation for Richard Price's wonderful “Lush Life”(Neighborhood Crime), I've sung the praises of “The Wire”, and I still enjoy watching old “Law and Order” episodes. So Doug Dorst's Alive In Necropolis, a novel about cops whose beat includes the seventeen cemeteries of Colma, California, had obvious appeal for me. On the other hand I've never been fond of ghost stories – I'm just too skeptical.

So how do I feel about this story of Michael Mercer, a rookie cop assigned to the night shift, patrolling the living and the dead in Colma? Well, I liked the 'living' part. Predictably, I loved the 'cop-talk'. Dorst does a great job of capturing that insult-laden banter. And in Mercer he creates a believable young man approaching thirty, uncertain of what he wants in life, bouncing between the circles of his more successful and established college friends and the grittier world of his cop buddies. He even has a sort of romantic interest in each of these worlds, but in his uncertainty he doesn't handle either relationship very well. One foggy night he saves the life of the teenage son of a powerful San Francisco movie kingpin, trussed and abandoned in the cemetery by friends he refuses to incriminate. The consequences for this confused and angry boy, and Mercer's attempts to help him, are for me the most interesting plot line.

But then there's the 'dead' part. Woven through the story of Mike Mercer is the story of Colma's ghostly residents. Among them are San Francisco heiress Lily Coit, ballplayer Lefty O'Doul, a daredevil aviator named Lincoln Beachey and bank robber Doc Barker, and for reasons I failed to grasp they are at each others throats. I know, I know...they're already dead so how can they hurt each other? See...this is why I hate ghost stories.

Eventually Mercer, suffering from sleep deprivation and anxiety, becomes involved in the ghosts' disputes, and I'll just say that I liked the story much better when he was dealing with the living. Dorst has an enjoyable style, and I admire his risky choice of subject matter, but I hope that next time he'll skip the ghosts and stick to the cops.