Literary scholars, Olivier Pilipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt were commissioned to write a biography of Irene Nemirovsky, author of the highly acclaimed novel, “Suite Françoise”. When they began their research they discovered the missing pages of Irene Nemirovsky’s unfinished novel, “Fire in the Blood”, possibly written in 1940 or 1941 shortly before she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died.
“Fire in the Blood” is a beautifully written, compact novella. It is the story of, Silvio, the narrator, short for Sylvestre which means “creature of the woods”. Silvio had grown up in a small French village, but wanted only to leave and travel the world. He returned to the village where he was born---the prodigal son, having had many adventures but having spent his inheritance. He now lived “holed up in a farmer’s hovel, in the middle of the woods” remembering his youth.
The secrets of Silvio’s family and the villagers are slowly revealed. The story is set in the beautiful French countryside amid the villagers who live in their own homes, own their land, hoard their money, distrust their neighbors and covet their land.
When Silvio’s niece, Colette, marries, Silvio begins to relive the past. Did he live his life the right way? His cousin, Helene and her husband Francois seem to have the perfect marriage. But when Colette’s husband is murdered Silvio begins to remember “the fire in the blood” that seems to plague the young. In his youth Silvio loved Helene but questions whether it was the fire or the heart that led him . The author shows how the “fire in the blood” plagued her all characters, Silvio, Helene, Colette, her lover, Marc, and Bridget. The author reveals her characters as they agonize over the repercussions of “the fire”. Silvio questions whether the fire is only sexual love or could it be love in the heart, “It devours everything and then, in a few years, a few months, a few hours even, it burns itself out. Then you see how much damage has been done.”
The reader questions whether Silvio is regretting his life. He thinks Helen’s marriage to Francois is “too perfect” but it is Silvio who is alone. He regretted that Helene left him and that he was old, “I want my youth back”. Silvio did not seem to regret where the “fire” led him when he was young. But, he does know that “the fire in the blood” and the secrets it held, led himself and the others to scandal, death, deceit and sadness.
We are very fortunate that Irene Nemirovsky's biographers found and published this book. It was a joy to read this short, passionate story set in a time and a place, before a war changed everything.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Lively Language
I've never read a book quite like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to describe it. So I'll start with the title character Oscar. He lives in New Jersey, and he's the antithesis of the stereotypical Dominican. Instead of being a smooth-talking sharp-dressing ladies man, he's an overweight nerd who loves action comics, role play games and Lord of the Rings. He longs for a girlfriend but he is socially inept, and speaks in a combination of SAT vocabulary words, elvish and Spanglish. A lot of time I read this book sitting at my computer, so I could use Google Translate. I now know the names for virtually all female body parts in Spanish.
But after author Junot Diaz opens his book with Oscar's story he expands it, moving forward and backward in time, to include Oscar's runaway sister Lola and his mother, the fierce and beautiful Belicia. The novel is not just about Oscar but about fukú, a curse that hangs over his family and follows them from Santo Domingo to Patterson, New Jersey and back again. This expansion allows Diaz to weave in a lot of history of the Dominican Republic under dictator Rafael Trujillo and his successor Joaquin Balaguer. Actually 'weave' is probably not the right word, since much of this historical information is given in the factual but irreverent footnotes sprinkled through the book. The brutality of the Trujillo regime strikes the lives of Belicia's parents and her sisters, and Beli herself is forced to escape for New York when she is only sixteen.
Diaz has an amazing gift for language. He writes touchingly about Oscar's longing to find a girlfriend, or even just to be kissed, but at the same time so much of what he writes is so funny. It's slangy, energetic, street smart, full of references to everything from J.R. Tolkien to Mario Vargas Llosa, riffing about women, love, and fukú. It can sometimes be hard work understanding his polyglot prose, but I found it well worth the effort.
But after author Junot Diaz opens his book with Oscar's story he expands it, moving forward and backward in time, to include Oscar's runaway sister Lola and his mother, the fierce and beautiful Belicia. The novel is not just about Oscar but about fukú, a curse that hangs over his family and follows them from Santo Domingo to Patterson, New Jersey and back again. This expansion allows Diaz to weave in a lot of history of the Dominican Republic under dictator Rafael Trujillo and his successor Joaquin Balaguer. Actually 'weave' is probably not the right word, since much of this historical information is given in the factual but irreverent footnotes sprinkled through the book. The brutality of the Trujillo regime strikes the lives of Belicia's parents and her sisters, and Beli herself is forced to escape for New York when she is only sixteen.
Diaz has an amazing gift for language. He writes touchingly about Oscar's longing to find a girlfriend, or even just to be kissed, but at the same time so much of what he writes is so funny. It's slangy, energetic, street smart, full of references to everything from J.R. Tolkien to Mario Vargas Llosa, riffing about women, love, and fukú. It can sometimes be hard work understanding his polyglot prose, but I found it well worth the effort.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
What is a Potato Peel Pie?
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows deserves every moment that it will spend on the NY Times bestseller list - and then some. It is creative, entertaining and informative. It will warm the hearts of every book lover and book club member. You will laugh, you will cry, you will shudder, you will sigh. Need I say more? I don't know what it would be.
The back story of how this novel came to be written and published is also interesting - and more so for those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area as these are two local authors. The novel was 30 years in the making by Marin resident Mary Ann Shaffer. After the book was picked up at auction by The Dial Press in 2006, Ms. Shaffer became too ill to complete the revisions. So Ms. Shaffer asked her niece, Berkeley resident Annie Barrows (herself a published author) to take on the task. Barrows completed the revisions in December 2007 and was able to show the completed manuscript to her aunt before Shaffer died in February 2008 at age 73. You can read more of the background in the profile published in the SF Chronicle on August 27, 2008.
The entire book is a series of letters written in 1946 to and from Juliet Ashton, a successful London writer looking for her next book project. Her correspondents include her best friend from high school, her publisher, a wealthy suitor and an increasing roster of survivors of the German occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France. It is these latter correspondents who are the members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The letters are full of history and humor and enough literary references for many more months (or years) of reading. Once again we see and feel the transformative power of books and reading.
So go do something that you have been dreading or putting off (cleaning, taxes, organizing...) and then reward yourself with this book. You won't be disappointed!
Author reading: Saturday Sept. 6, 7:30 pm, San Anselmo Library www.sananselmolibrary.org
Book website: www.guernseyliterary.com
The back story of how this novel came to be written and published is also interesting - and more so for those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area as these are two local authors. The novel was 30 years in the making by Marin resident Mary Ann Shaffer. After the book was picked up at auction by The Dial Press in 2006, Ms. Shaffer became too ill to complete the revisions. So Ms. Shaffer asked her niece, Berkeley resident Annie Barrows (herself a published author) to take on the task. Barrows completed the revisions in December 2007 and was able to show the completed manuscript to her aunt before Shaffer died in February 2008 at age 73. You can read more of the background in the profile published in the SF Chronicle on August 27, 2008.
The entire book is a series of letters written in 1946 to and from Juliet Ashton, a successful London writer looking for her next book project. Her correspondents include her best friend from high school, her publisher, a wealthy suitor and an increasing roster of survivors of the German occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between England and France. It is these latter correspondents who are the members of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The letters are full of history and humor and enough literary references for many more months (or years) of reading. Once again we see and feel the transformative power of books and reading.
So go do something that you have been dreading or putting off (cleaning, taxes, organizing...) and then reward yourself with this book. You won't be disappointed!
Author reading: Saturday Sept. 6, 7:30 pm, San Anselmo Library www.sananselmolibrary.org
Book website: www.guernseyliterary.com
Monday, September 1, 2008
Survival and Friendship
Kate Furnivall, an English writer, discovered as an adult that her very English mother was not English at all. Her mother had fled Russia, as a child, with her parents and emigrated first, to China and then to England. Having learned of her new heritage Ms. Furnivall vowed to learn everything she could about her newly discovered ancestors and their ravished country. She then wrote two novels about Russian women who survived the Bolshevik revolution. Her first novel “The Russian Concubine” was published in 2007.
Kate Furnivall’s second novel “The Red Scarf” is an historical fictionalized novel that begins in the Davinsky labor camp in Siberia, Russia in 1933. Two young Russian women are struggling to survive the cruel treatment, harsh labor and sub zero temperatures in this compound known as “The Zone”. The author’s stark descriptions of the hardship of the camp, the extreme cold, the lack of food, and the inhumane cruelty of the guards, give the reader a vivid sense of the horror that took place at this time in history.
Sofia Morozova, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest, is sentenced to ten years in the compound. There she meets, Anna Fedorina, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat who was killed in Petrograd during the revolution. In the camp Anna saves Sofia’s life when her hand is seriously injured and an subsequent infection threatens her life. As the young women struggle daily to survive, they begin to tell each other stories of their lives before the camp. Anna’s stories of her wonderful childhood in Petrograd and her love for her childhood friend, Vasily, enchant Sofia. When Anna develops a violent cough that will not go away, Sofia vows to escape from the camp and bring help to Anna.
Sofia’s brave escape and difficult journey through the forests of Siberia bring her to the village of Tivil, where she believes she will find Vasily, who will rescue Anna. The story meanders as Sofia is taken in by a family of gypsies and she finds love in the village. But, the heroine cannot forget the reason she in Tivil. She must find Vasily and convince him to return to the labor camp and rescue Anna. In the village there are many characters, and events that interact to tell this story of life under Stalin, in Pre World War II Russia. It is very interesting to read and learn about this dark period in history for the people of Russia.
The last part of the story is steeped with drama and the ending seems too contrived. But, Kate Furnivall has written a captivating historical novel with strong, likable characters that is interesting and intriguing to read.
Kate Furnivall’s second novel “The Red Scarf” is an historical fictionalized novel that begins in the Davinsky labor camp in Siberia, Russia in 1933. Two young Russian women are struggling to survive the cruel treatment, harsh labor and sub zero temperatures in this compound known as “The Zone”. The author’s stark descriptions of the hardship of the camp, the extreme cold, the lack of food, and the inhumane cruelty of the guards, give the reader a vivid sense of the horror that took place at this time in history.
Sofia Morozova, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest, is sentenced to ten years in the compound. There she meets, Anna Fedorina, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat who was killed in Petrograd during the revolution. In the camp Anna saves Sofia’s life when her hand is seriously injured and an subsequent infection threatens her life. As the young women struggle daily to survive, they begin to tell each other stories of their lives before the camp. Anna’s stories of her wonderful childhood in Petrograd and her love for her childhood friend, Vasily, enchant Sofia. When Anna develops a violent cough that will not go away, Sofia vows to escape from the camp and bring help to Anna.
Sofia’s brave escape and difficult journey through the forests of Siberia bring her to the village of Tivil, where she believes she will find Vasily, who will rescue Anna. The story meanders as Sofia is taken in by a family of gypsies and she finds love in the village. But, the heroine cannot forget the reason she in Tivil. She must find Vasily and convince him to return to the labor camp and rescue Anna. In the village there are many characters, and events that interact to tell this story of life under Stalin, in Pre World War II Russia. It is very interesting to read and learn about this dark period in history for the people of Russia.
The last part of the story is steeped with drama and the ending seems too contrived. But, Kate Furnivall has written a captivating historical novel with strong, likable characters that is interesting and intriguing to read.
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