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0743222849
| 9780743222846
| 0743222849
| 3.95
| 1,744
| Jan 01, 2002
| 2002
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really liked it
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Somehow this came up while I am reading through the series. The cave title that is part of the series can't be located in my library system...so, ther
Somehow this came up while I am reading through the series. The cave title that is part of the series can't be located in my library system...so, there. Anyway, this was an interesting and daring way to present the material about caves in the Périgord. There are three timelines: one some 17,000 years ago, one during WWII, and one present day. A cave painting is found on a chip of rock and it has the art historians in a tizzy. It is an unusual and very beautiful example of a style found in France and Spain...but different. There is the story of how the painting came to be, how the painting was discovered and then hidden for decades, and how it was uncovered again. Walker managed to pull it off, but it was a close-run thing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2024
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Jul 28, 2024
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Jul 28, 2024
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Hardcover
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0385547978
| 9780385547970
| 0385547978
| 3.85
| 36,614
| Sep 27, 2022
| Sep 27, 2022
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it was amazing
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A Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This n
A Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This novel is set in the 1920s, a time of great change after the Great War, and a time of gathering wealth…for a few. The ‘culture’ I speak of that (it seems to me) is unique to England is the strength, sophistication and dare I say, deceptiveness of British women. I can assure you that while America has had strong female leaders, the only women approaching the personalities of everyday housewives Atkinson liberally sprinkles throughout her novels are pioneer women wielding long guns. Atkinson does her time warp manner of writing again: she trained us all well in her earlier novels (e.g., Life After Life, A God in Ruins) to work through the confusion. All the time she is telling the tale, we are thinking she is misdirecting, forcing us to make connections, to solve a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. If occurred to me she must be happy she trained us so well. It must be exquisitely difficult to write a novel expressing the viewpoints of so many characters and still write it all in a straightforward timeline. It can’t really be done, when you think about it. At some point the reader is going to have to retread some ground. In Shrines, the author doesn’t bother with your confusion: the reader is practically suffering the same confusion as one of the characters. But what characters! So many, and so recognizable! The gruff nightclub owner Nellie and her passel of disappointing and dissolute children, the righteous police inspector, the criminal policeman looking for the last best chance, the savvy schoolgirl, the bright, capable and attractive spy. It is such a delicious stew that we don’t care how often she turns the tables on our understanding by introducing another piece of the jigsaw. It doesn’t make for fast reading, I would say, but it does rather emphasize the pleasures of re-reading. Sometimes books are so good one would rather just wallow there for a week or so, being thrilled again and again with the club-owner’s strong-minded and (one imagines) strong-bodied son of a certain age: not so young as to be green but not so old as to be past falling hard in love. It did occur to me that readers of Ms Atkinson’s novel must surely be mostly women. Mostly because the variety of unique women in this novel would overwhelm any man who this way wanders. Women, of course, are completely aware of the range of skills and talents of others of their sex, but those who still think of women as ‘the fairer sex’ may find themselves out of their depth. This is definitely a mystery, but isn’t all of life? It begins with a mystery and ends with a different one. There are big questions and big surprises: we needed to be reminded, perhaps, that strong drugs were available since the 1800s for those who hungered for them. And those drugs wreaked havoc on societies before ours, in much a similar manner. Abortion was available, but not as safely as we have enjoyed in the past fifty years. The novel is a triumph. It is a novel for adults—not in the sexual sense—but in the sense of reminding us of aftermath of world war, the horrors of the 1920s for those who had nothing but their passion, and the grotesqueries of those who had too much of everything except passion. And then there were the supposed ‘protectors’ who exploited and abused…these cannot be forgotten. Sometimes it roiled my stomach so, I had to put it aside…when reading of the young girl who wanted to go ‘on stage.’ So hopeful. God help us all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Nov 16, 2022
not set
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Nov 25, 2022
not set
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Nov 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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4.19
| 363,336
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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it was amazing
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As this sequel to Atwood’s worldwide bestseller and Hulu serialized drama, The Handmaid’s Tale was coming to a close I grew anxious. ‘There are’t enou
As this sequel to Atwood’s worldwide bestseller and Hulu serialized drama, The Handmaid’s Tale was coming to a close I grew anxious. ‘There are’t enough pages left to wrap this up,’ I thought, but I wasn’t giving Atwood and her editors enough credit. The story is Atwood’s conversational response to readers who wanted to know what happened to characters left in extremis at the end of A Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s wonderful sense of humor brings the sharp-eyed, lumpy woman adorned in brown burlap and known as Aunt Lydia to life. Her diary is being composed as we read: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”This turns out to be one page in Aunt Lydia’s apologia for misdeeds first forced upon her and then undertaken as a means to an end. Whose end we learn at the finish. Two more points of view are given in short, discontinuous and not always parallel histories. A young girl growing up privileged in Gilead discovers at thirteen that she is considered marriageable. The horror of that notion stirs rebellion within her. An orphaned teen in Canada learns her guardians have been car bombed. She apparently has some debts to pay. Atwood braids these three stories, giving each voice distinction and character. Our mind’s eye has each firmly in sight as they gradually find themselves within arm’s reach of one another. One of the girls tells the other that Aunt Lydia is the “scariest of all the Aunts…You get the feeling she wants you to be better than you are…She looks at you as if she really sees you.” Hmm, yes. What was most interesting to me as I blazed through this big book—it is very easy to read, a straight-line adventure story—is how Atwood could see so clearly certain social and political trends that are evidenced in our society now. Her clarity and comprehensiveness of view reveals so much about her own personality. She’d be a wonderful friend. Vermont and Maine get top billing as states on Gilead’s border where residents are known to be willing to transport ‘grey market’ goods like lemons or escaping girls. A New Englander myself, I was disappointed New Hampshire, the ‘Live Free Or Die’ state, was not similarly viewed until I considered the White Mountains would pose a significant barrier to anyone expecting to travel past them to the north. In the end, I was gratified to discover Portsmouth, NH was chosen as a key location for by-sea person-smuggling from Gilead, just as it had been historically for black slaves of old seeking freedom in the north. It is difficult to avoid Atwood’s premise that literature must be destroyed in a repressive state because new, creative notions about how to live are subversive. Atwood picked out for especial notice books that would be have an enormous impact on impressionable minds, like Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Paradise Lost, and Lives of Girls and Women. I haven’t read the last but would like to, now. I might take issue with Paradise Lost. I read that a couple years ago to compare it to Jamaica’s Kincaid’s memoir See Now Then and I can honestly say that book is too dense, particularly for young girls who are just learning to read. But Atwood probably knows better. When one’s library is limited, sometimes one’s understanding becomes sharpened. When the girls in Gilead were finally able to read, it came as a shock to them that the Aunts had lied to them about the Bible. The Aunts had told the girls that the dismemberment story of the concubine, while horrific, was an act of sacrifice, a noble and charitable act. Reading the words themselves the girls discovered there was only degradation and hatred in the killing of an innocent. “I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone.”We have to have some empathy, then, for those who will lose their faith, however weak it has become over the years, in a political party now called Republican. It is sad, this death of belief. Very very glad to hear from Margaret Atwood again. I miss her already. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 14, 2019
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Oct 19, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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Hardcover
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0525521429
| 9780525521426
| 0525521429
| 3.95
| 68,568
| Aug 02, 2018
| Sep 18, 2018
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really liked it
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I finished Edugyan's third novel today in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strangely unreal world and story Edugyan h
I finished Edugyan's third novel today in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strangely unreal world and story Edugyan had created, about a former slave, physically damaged from years in captivity but involved in the science of creating an indoor aquarium in London—something never done before. If at first—and I have seen such criticism—the story seemed a little derivative of Jules Verne with wondrous and far-flung adventures, Edugyan pulled it off. There were wondrous adventures when naturalists and people of science began to turn their attention outside their own environments to the larger world. Anything they could conceive of was about to be tried…travel to the Arctic, say, or to the bottom of the ocean, or ballooning long distances. The story is an absolute feast of imagination. Race is an important component of the story in that we have an abolitionist white scientist who chooses a young slave boy to be ballast for his balloon adventure. When the white master discovers his black ballast has exceptional drawing skills, the boy’s role changes. Though they are close, there is always a power differential in their relationship that keeps the friendship from meaning as much to the white man as it does to the black man. Edugyan sketches this kind of unconscious racism so clearly, and points to it, that one can hardly walk away from the book with one’s vision unchanged, whichever side one is on. We can put words to a feeling of alienation we may have seen or felt before but weren’t able to express. It turns out the history of the world’s first public aquarium is much as is described in this novel, though I was unable to discover whether a very young black man was the first to come up with the idea and design of the tanks for public display of sea creatures in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems perfectly likely, as does the fact that such a man would never be acknowledged, his history expunged as a matter of course. Edugyan is Canadian, which is not obvious. She sets a portion of the novel in Newfoundland, but otherwise the characters travel far and wide on nearly every continent. She adds an intriguing love interest for George Washington Black, the main character and former slave from Barbados. We presume Black is originally from Dahoumey in west Africa because that place name is buried deep in his subconscious and is resurrected when his life is in danger. Black’s love interest is a mixed-race island woman of great beauty and intelligence and a rounded sense of her own potential. Her father, also a scientist, did not encourage her to develop her physical charms. One day he allowed her to purchase a few small concessions to beauty that she craved: red lipstick, a diaphanous dress, an emerald clasp. She discovered that people noticed her more but saw her less. This lesson all women must learn and decide whether to exploit or not. The start of the novel was not particularly convincing and had the feel of a young adult novel, but it began as it meant to go on, and by midway I was involved, suspending belief, rapt, and curious. There was something about the way the role of the one-time slave was progressing that held some hope that his potential would be developed. And the history of race is not yet finished being told, since we write it every day. It's a wonderful novel. Edugyan has written two other critically-acclaimed novels and at least two collections of stories. She has taught creative writing and has won several international awards for her work. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2019
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Mar 06, 2019
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Feb 21, 2019
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Hardcover
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1594631719
| 9781594631719
| 1594631719
| 3.62
| 2,851
| Oct 31, 2013
| Oct 31, 2013
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When I first read Alarcón’s recent collection of stories, The King is Always Above the People, and realized I had discovered a hugely consequential wr
When I first read Alarcón’s recent collection of stories, The King is Always Above the People, and realized I had discovered a hugely consequential writer, I tried to find other work by Alarcón. His debut novel, Lost City Radio, is spectacular, about the Peruvian civil war. This second novel, published some six years later, was more diffuse and talky, harder for me to enter into. It has a wandering beginning, and appears to feint away from that to the larger subject of broken family and societal ties a little further in. An aimless teen on the cusp of manhood falls in with a band of actors and takes a lead role in a play satirizing a corrupt government. This setup has enormous comedic potential, but I was constantly playing catch-up. There did not seem to be any impetus. It is possible some of the blame reflects on my distracted reading, and the pressure I put on the work by reading all of Alarcón’s work at once. It is conceivable I grew weary reading of a country unfamiliar to me, searching in the work to find touchstones. However, I still must conclude this is not as accessible a work as the other two mentioned above, and recommend those for a beginner. ...more |
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0
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not set
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not set
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Jul 16, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
0060594799
| 9780060594794
| 0060594799
| 3.70
| 2,393
| Jan 30, 2007
| Jan 30, 2007
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it was amazing
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This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base
This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base our instincts. I would have plunked the whole story under the rubric ‘science-fiction’ except for the acknowledgements in which Alarcón cites debts from his long period of research. After twenty years of war, teenagers are like newborns, having no institutional memory. Towns were designated by number, not name. Both sides so distrusted and despised the other they no longer ruminated on guilt. Each was sloppy in their reasoning and callous in their behaviors; they treated one another like a separate species needing extermination. Terrifyingly, it shows us what can come of broken political systems. It happened. Not long ago. It shows us what comes when intellectuals are jailed and disappeared, when the people are kept in ignorance. They know only that their family members and townspeople are disappearing, they know not where they go. This particular novel focuses on a radio show that the entire country listened to: a golden-voiced newsreader sharing names sent to her by people trying to find individuals they knew and loved. If everyone listens, there is hope that some may eventually be reunited with their families. What is so astounding about this novel is not only that it previews for anyone interested an outcome when a country follows a path of political warfare and division. Sometimes I think we can still fix our own broken system; after reading this I am sure we must, and sooner please. This novel is a debut by an author who was thirty years old at the time (2007). It doesn’t seem possible he would be capable of such depth and such understanding. But great stresses can force unusual talent. "Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret."and "….it didn’t seem at this [early] hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings once lived…"Lately I reviewed the author’s latest collection of stories The King is Always Above the People, which led me to this novel and another of his, At Night We Walk in Circles, published in 2013. Alarcón hosts a podcast for Latin American voices, among other things. He is a critically important voice for North Americans at this time of our own political upheaval, and because he is extraordinary. We need to hear him. Get something of his right now. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 12, 2018
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Jul 15, 2018
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Jul 12, 2018
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Hardcover
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031617663X
| 9780316176637
| 031617663X
| 3.49
| 56,868
| Sep 06, 2018
| Sep 25, 2018
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it was amazing
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Not all of Kate Atkinson’s novels have been what she calls historical fiction, but the last several have been. This novel may hew closest to the truth
Not all of Kate Atkinson’s novels have been what she calls historical fiction, but the last several have been. This novel may hew closest to the truth, though like she says in the Author’s Note at the end, she wrenched open history and stuffed it with imaginative reconstruction, at least one fantasy for each fact. The author tells us afterward what her intentions were: we have questions—that’s inevitable—and instead of farming out possible answers to various reviewers, she’s just blunt with us what we’d been wondering about. There is something comparable in theatre, when the actors takes off their masks for the final bow and we all celebrate together. Atkinson returns to the Second World War, periodic releases from the National Archives of secrets from that time fueling her creative process. When she discovers [true fact] an ordinary-seeming bank clerk was a major cog in rounding up British supporters of Nazis, her story had a frame. When she discovered [true fact] hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts of conversations of dissident groups in London, her story had a heart. What Kate Atkinson does is not necessarily unique (using historical documents to create fiction), but what she does with it is unique. Her style, tone, and characters are recognizably hers. She is funny: one knows there are people out there whose droll delivery of witty responses to ordinary questions is quintessentially British but we don’t come across it enough. Atkinson can do repartee. By now Atkinson may be incapable now of writing a straightforward fiction with a chronological timeline. This novel has only three time periods to work with and really only one central character, which simplifies the action enough that I only had to reread an earlier section once. This was partly due to my surprise, maybe a little resentment, and finally pleasure at being taken out of the action at what seemed like a critical moment…again! She’d done that to me in the previous section as well. I was burrowed in like a tick, and am yanked to a later, earlier, whatever time. Atkinson manages to satisfy and confound a reader at the same time. Atkinson’s characters always have the ‘ghost of Jackson Brodie’ about them. This is a very good thing, considering how much we liked Brodie and wouldn’t mind having him resurrected. We could make the case that the main character in this novel, Juliet Armstrong, is a female Jackson Brodie—honest and therefore vulnerable, she doesn’t have so high an opinion of herself that she is insufferable. In the end she is well able to take care of herself. She’s smart, and a very good liar, but keeps herself a little distant. After all, who can one trust? At eighteen, Juliet is parentless: "her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief." Young and alone, Juliet was not, however, callow. She lied like crazy through a job interview with a flippant and overly-inquisitive young man who interviewed her for a job, which she was surprised she got. Later she learned he'd known every lie, and appreciated the ease with which she misled him. This book is about spies, spies working in the service of the British government, or so we believe. What is special is that we see what is British about them—what is ordinary, patriotic, courageous, honorable. But we also see a nation at war and we see duplicity, hunger, ambition, pettiness. Then we lay over that the work of the other nations at war, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and a few exceptional people emerge alive, not unscathed, but breathing at the end. The tension comes when we are not sure who will remain standing. Atkinson writes about the middle of the twentieth century, but she could be talking about the twenty-first: Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones, Perry said.”)One always senses the intelligence in Atkinson’s work. She not only writes a good story which means getting the humanity right, she makes us think while we read. She’s unpredictable. And frankly, I like her politics. It’s always a pleasure to enjoy another of her books. ...more |
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1
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Jun 20, 2018
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Jun 24, 2018
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Jun 20, 2018
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Hardcover
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1590518454
| 9781590518458
| 1590518454
| 4.03
| 2,200
| May 13, 2014
| May 15, 2018
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really liked it
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America’s literary scene is so robust that it tends to eclipse exciting work appearing around the world. Other Press of New York has a terrific record
America’s literary scene is so robust that it tends to eclipse exciting work appearing around the world. Other Press of New York has a terrific record of finding and translating for us the best of European fiction and this month we are treated to a historical thriller from Spain, first published in 2014 in Barcelona. The author Víctor del Árbol was a seminarian and historian before embarking on a successful literary career, so his thrillers have recognizable historical underpinnings and a rich and brutal context of war and conflict. Árbol’s name has begun to show up in lists for literary prizes at home and in Europe. With this second novel to be translated into English, we experience the emotional and historical depths of a Spain struggling with its political past. The richness of the novel stems from Árbol’s contextual complexity and recognized divergence from old societal norms, e.g., the centrality of strong but flawed female characters, acknowledged homosexuality, police misconduct, and in a predominantly Christian country, an important Jewish character who suffered Stalin-era torture at the hands of leftists, leading to lifelong psychological affliction. Russia and Spain have long been intertwined, and the twentieth century brought enthusiastic support for communist ideals in Spain. Students from all over Europe travelled to offer their services to a Russian government trying to consolidate power under Stalin, but they found “being a non-Soviet Communist is seen as suspicious even in the USSR.” When a purge of dissident elements was undertaken, the Spanish engineering student Elías, along with his cohort of fellow Europeans, was caught up in the melee and deported to the now-infamous Nazino Island. Nazino Island was home to a little-known real-life atrocity perpetrated by the Head of the Secret Police Genrikh Yagoda and the Head of Labor Camps Matvei Berman and approved by Stalin in May 1933 in which 6,000 deportees made up of petty criminals and political prisoners were forcibly relocated to a small island in western Siberia. The group was meant to construct a camp designed to bring unproductive land under cultivation during a time of nationwide famine. Few provisions accompanied the prisoners and within thirteen weeks 4,000 had died of starvation, sickness, or at the hands of others. Árbol allows his imagination to construct the camp, describing the depraved behaviors the survivors are thought to have witnessed. Elías’s hope for escape from Nazino looks extremely unlikely, lending a thriller-like air to the telling. Elías’s 20th-century story is interspersed with the 21st-century stories of his children and the children of people Elías knew from his time in Nazino. His daughter Laura is a journalist-turned-policewoman, and his son Gonzalo is a lawyer with leftist sympathies. In fact, the novel opens with a shockingly brutal incident that leaves us gasping for air, and we are propelled to explain that event by looking for clues in the past. The structure of the novel is deceptively simple, jumping from one century to the next through chapter headings, but not always immediately addressing the questions we have formulated—another source of tension in the novel. References to important historical moments in Spanish history are intriguing in their own right, generating an enthusiasm in readers to investigate more straightforward accounts that would explain the larger forces at work. If I had any criticism of the book, it would be that the novel seems indulgent in length. While the situations of Elías and his family are intrinsically interesting and filled with tension, that sense of urgency is difficult to sustain over 600+ pages. Sometimes less really is more, especially in a mystery/thriller. Were the novel shorter, the author wouldn’t need to explain so much, as the reader would be following step-by-step. The character list takes a toll, and begins to put a strain on our ability to remember an unfamiliar history along with strikingly similar-sounding names, e.g., Gonzalo-Gonzalez, Luis-Luisa, Lola-Laura. And finally, after the complicated relationships carried throughout the novel, the Epilogue seemed too easy, once again usurping the reader’s role to imagine. While I wouldn’t call this international crime fiction, it has some elements common to that genre. It is closer to historical literary fiction in the way that books about WWII bring that era back to life. This mentions WWII, particularly Stalingrad, but for the Jewish character Elías that horror show just brought back memories of worse. Perhaps not enough was made of Elías’s Jewishness, unless the author meant for that to layer lightly over other elements without being explicit about what it means. In my own country, I’d know what that means. In Spain, I’m not too sure. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel for me was Barcelona living and the mindset of current residents there. Descriptions of tourists blowing in for a week of sun rang as true as the description of a popular Spanish architect living in London coming to introduce his latest commission to the public. I am not entirely sure I got my fill of the authentic experience un-moderated by American TV scenarios (like Miami Vice, mentioned in the final pages) but I very much look forward to more. ...more |
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1
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Apr 02, 2018
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May 2018
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Apr 02, 2018
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Paperback
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110187161X
| 9781101871614
| 110187161X
| 4.30
| 3,517
| Aug 11, 2016
| May 23, 2017
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it was amazing
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[image]
An inverted gold crown on a jet background graces my cover of Kei Miller’s 2016 novel Augustown and the fiction points to the couple of da
[image]
An inverted gold crown on a jet background graces my cover of Kei Miller’s 2016 novel Augustown and the fiction points to the couple of days in the 20th C when the power structure inverted in a small town in Jamaica. A flying preacher, Alexander Bedward, is instrumental in inspiring the beginnings of the Rastafarian movement in 1920’s Jamaica. That story is wrapped around a more current parallel story of Gina, the clever girl some thought would also fly. "...the stories bounce against each other like echoes..." Power and powerlessness entwine in this novel. A town is populated with memorable figures like blind Ma Taffy, gun- and drug-runner Marlon, the dread-headed part-white child Kaia born out of wedlock, the childless spinster Sister Gilzene who could sing an operatic soprano, Rastafarian fruit peddler Clarky, the uptight upright teacher Mr. Saint-Josephs whom we suspect is insane, and a white family: a corporate father with ugly values, his wife learning to ignore him, and a boy who was selfish in the way white people are when they ‘do not see color.’ A bit of a thriller, this novel, because we scent blood early on, with the guns Marlon stashes under Ma Taffy’s house, Clarky dying, and crazy old Bedward rising up like some kind of lunatic second “The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you seeOnly after I looked for interviews with Miller did I realize he is considered a poet first, though in descriptions of his education he says he started with prose stories. He is lavishly talented, and writes with an enlightened sexual awareness. This novel has a strong set of female characters and in his 2010 collection of poems called A Light Song of Light, we also get that sense of even ground, and more: Every bed was made illegal by the brushMiller saves his challenges for colonialists and from his words we recognize Miller understands rage and sorrow. "...how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids--mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful. The law concerning mermaids only caused mermaids to pass a law concerning man: that they would never again cross our boundaries of sand; never lift their torsos up from the surf; never again wave at sailors, salt dripping from their curls; would never again enter our dry and stifling world."Historical figures feature in this poetry collection, including Alexander Bedward again, Singerman (Marley?), Nathaniel Morgan, Coolie Duppy, etc. and there is a strong scent of homesickness. Miller has lived in Great Britain for some years now and perhaps is telling the same story over and over, in a new way each time, pruning and training the branches until they remind him of home. In the poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion published in 2014, Miller’s language is English but there appear so many words we have never seen that we are unsteady, unsure, very nearly undone. UnsettledThe unsettlement one feels when reading the poem is curiously the way Miller makes us feel in his novel, though he does not use such words. We retain a kind of distance. Just as well. There is danger everywhere. The only other place that ever gave me this sense of familiarity and menace was another island with a bloody colonial history, Tasmania. This is a new cultural sphere; it takes some time to accustom to this point-of-view. The language which is at once foreign and familiar, continental and island, melodic and profane, knowing and naive. Hope is not an obvious choice when one is the underclass. Rastafarians have a mighty sense of their closeness to god and ghost. White folk don’t offer the same opportunities. This truth is such a relief after centuries of colonial cant. We can feel the tide, the sun, the heat; we smell the flowers, the sea, the mangoes. Miller’s language in Augustown is easily poetic, not caught in it but casual and natural. The story, Gina’s growing up and standing up, is where we’re focused. And yet…and yet the bleaching light on the sunbaked road and the overhanging flowers thrust their way into the story, embellishing it, making us a little homesick, too. The chapter on autoclaps squeezed the heart and was almost pure poetry. This chapter made the book Kei Miller’s. Any other author may have left that chapter out, and they would have been utterly wrong. We, humans in the world, for centuries in every country, have put men in charge of…everything…our well-being, our safety, our protection. Since barely cognizant, I have always thought that was a lot to lay on one half of the human race. Kei Miller seems to understand this. Extraordinary. ...more |
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1
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Nov 18, 2017
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Dec 03, 2017
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Nov 12, 2017
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Hardcover
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1501138790
| 9781501138799
| 1501138790
| 4.08
| 2,390
| Sep 12, 2017
| Sep 12, 2017
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it was amazing
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Thomas Mullen’s Darktown series, about the first black policemen in Atlanta’s police force, is about race but it is also about the institution of poli
Thomas Mullen’s Darktown series, about the first black policemen in Atlanta’s police force, is about race but it is also about the institution of policing. We are seeing how corruption and discrimination can take hold, and we ask ourselves what is the best way to combat the ever-widening spiral of deceit. We interrogate our own moral grounding and question whether we would be able to withstand the social and economic pressure put to bear to get us to go along on controversial arrests or worse. It is that evaluative distance and internal interrogation that Mullen creates in us that may be the most remarkable thing about his books. We are thinking critically and watching the narrative unfold from a protective distance even though his stories are gripping—after all, this is life and death in neighborhoods just like ours—and we really never know where he is going to steer us next. But these novels aren’t really mysteries, and they aren’t police procedurals in the typical sense. Do we need a new genre category for the historical and sociological recreation he manages? Mullen places us in the moment by citing newspaper headlines mentioning what is happening in the country and around the world in 1950: “Late morning the house is quiet with Cassie and the kids out at a park. Rake read the paper and enjoyed the solitude. An American minesweeper had become the first U.S. ship sunk in the Korean conflict; Joe McCarthy was insisting on a more thorough investigation into the Communist infiltration of the top echelons in the American government; and officials announced that the mysterious explosions in a Brooklyn neighborhood, initially feared to be a Red attack, had in fact been caused by a gas leak…”These headlines do more than situate us in 1950, they also remind us that prejudice and crazy theories about racial or political superiority have been around before and have passed, though not without a fight. One of the very next scenes is a meeting between a cop seeking information on an old case and an FBI agent who’d been involved at the time. The FBI man suggests they meet in a coffee shop to discuss the matter, and the moment Lucien Boggs, a black policeman, begins to walk into the coffee shop attached to a department store, we wonder…Mullen doesn’t let us down. He shows us the disdain and harsh attitude of the woman behind the counter, and the surprise and shutting down of the FBI agent who told Boggs to wait outside until he finished his coffee. Earlier, a white cop came across a flyer posted to a stop sign in a suburb of Atlanta: “Zoned as a White Community” and emblazoned with a lightning bolt, “just like the ones sewn onto the sleeves of SS troopers he’d seen in Europe.” Mullen takes time to discuss the group he calls the Columbians, a group distinct from the KKK, indeed disdainful of it. This group supported Nazi ideas including the concept of a master race, and apparently believed America fought the Nazis in World War II only because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, making ‘sides’ more clearly defined. Otherwise, America had been more concerned about the red menace from the Soviets. The rivalry between the Columbians and the KKK, who are derided by practically everyone for the bedsheets disguise, is central to this story and instructive in that it clarifies motives and actors in the messy phenomenon that is racism today. Mullen also spends some time answering the notion that blacks bring misfortune upon themselves. He opens the story with the release of Jeremiah Tanner from prison. Tanner had paid his debt, and readers are inclined to be sympathetic. Throughout the story, our impressions of Jeremiah will change several times, from believing him the most evil of all to believing him the most generous of all. This is Mullen’s skill. The black lives in this latest novel are so much more difficult and complicated than we imagine at first. Their choices all appear to be bad ones. No surprise, then, that they find themselves in the middle of illegal or compromising situations again and again, and yet when we hear their explanations, they sound rational, making choices we might make in the same place. When you have bad choices, your decisions may look poor also. The white men’s lives are less appealing altogether. There are a couple of white policemen wrestling with the morality of discrimination and the exclusion of black folk, but most make no effort to push back against the few bad apples that extract fealty or promise retribution within the force. They would revolt against the bad guys on the force, we sense, but they aren’t impacted enough. They need stronger incentives to do right. They aren’t heroes after all, just working men. Mullen also manages to pack in an excellent example and discussion of the lack of reasonable housing in Atlanta at the time for blacks who did not want to live in substandard apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. The real estate industry wouldn’t certify black realtors so called them “realtists,” a word I found laughably close to “realists.” The phenomenon of “white flight” from neighborhoods into which black residents have moved is discussed in some detail. When Mullen’s first book in this series, Darktown, came out last year, I asked him how he could write the black man's point of view. His answer shows his authorship of these characters: “As far as the black point of view in the book, roughly half of the book is from black characters' perspective and about half is from white characters' perspective. But what's important here is that each character has his or her own, unique perspective--no character should be a mere stand-in for their race, or gender, or religion, or anything. I always want my characters to feel as 3-D and authentic and real as possible, in my other books and in DARKTOWN.”But are his characters authentic? Authentic enough for the series to be acquired prior to publication by Jamie Foxx for TV production. Let’s just say the outline of the characters are there, and our imaginations (or actors) fill in the missing bits that make the piece real. So this is interactive fiction, in a sense. It needs our imagination, experience, and constant attention to understand what precisely is happening here, and to whom. This is an impressive series. ...more |
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Sep 19, 2017
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Sep 21, 2017
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Sep 12, 2017
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Hardcover
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1524732737
| 9781524732738
| 1524732737
| 3.64
| 2,840
| Sep 05, 2017
| Sep 05, 2017
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it was amazing
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Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writ
Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall. Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths? The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love. During eight of those twelve years 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone had shown willingness to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further. The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with a couple degrees of separation. All appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made. In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy in Europe, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers. Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been. A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love. I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel. ...more |
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1
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Aug 29, 2017
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Sep 02, 2017
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Aug 29, 2017
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Hardcover
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0802126456
| 9780802126450
| 0802126456
| 3.61
| 3,216
| May 02, 2017
| May 02, 2017
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it was amazing
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This deeply impactful novel, contrary to what the title might suggest, is not merely beautifully written and proportioned; it is weighted with histori
This deeply impactful novel, contrary to what the title might suggest, is not merely beautifully written and proportioned; it is weighted with historical, cultural, philosophical, and political insights from an area of the world well hidden from the sight and understanding of the majority of Americans. The novel is so dense with authentic-seeming detail that it demands the kind of close attention few novels warrant. In a L.A. Times interview, Charmaine Craig tells us this novel is based on her mother Louisa’s story. Craig could not have done a better job of memorializing her mother’s memory, and it was heartbreaking to hear her recount meeting the popular Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi a few years ago and being recognized as her mother’s child. Craig spent nearly a decade writing this novel, using some of the time researching and reading declassified CIA documents to see how her mother’s first husband was murdered in the process of peace talks with the Burmese leadership, apparently with the help of some double-dealing by the CIA. Her mother, a one-time beauty queen, became a leader of Karen rebels in the mountainous eastern region of Burma. While at first Craig did not want the book to be political, it is clearly a political document, and extremely informative for that. It puts the political wrangling in Burma, particularly now in this time of Burma’s opening to the West and the Rohingya persecution, in historical and global perspective. Books of such regional particularity are rare things in English; that Craig attempts to share with us the tumultuous experience of her parents and grandparents growing up in such a consequential time and in such a distant clime is a rare gift. What makes this spectacular novel well worthy of its place on the 2017 Man Booker Prize long list is not the accuracy of its history, but how Craig’s characters navigate and philosophize their roles in their own fictional histories. Deeply meaningful statements on the human condition are sprinkled throughout the book, observations and philosophies articulated by one or another character facing a great challenge. The predominant religion of Burma is Buddhist, though many Karens are animist or Christian. Craig spent some time explaining the following phrase: “It is better to be in a position of having to ask for charity than to be in the position of never having to ask.”This sounds very close to a lesson I’d once heard from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk from Vietnam, who said that having less than one needed offered an opportunity for developing and expressing compassion. Craig explains that having to ask for something develops one’s spiritual muscle. In another circumstance, Craig draws a lesson from a Jewish rabbi when one of her characters is appealing for advice: “One of man’s injunctions is to strive to live joyously. In the face of these terrible wars abroad, when our very peace is threatened, we must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure.”What a remarkable and completely freeing and true thing to say. At the end of the novel, several characters look upon their lives and recognize this necessity to strive…to find greatness in the midst of failure. The lessons are applied, and it is grace-giving and forgiving and loving, despite all. Individuals engaged in a civil war lasting generations are concerned with the state of their souls: "I’ve been trying to figure out all these years—in defending our rights with this revolution—is whether or not we have the right to kill…It seems clear enough that violence, murder even of the murderous, is a surrender of a kind. But do we have the right to stand by and watch people be made slaves…"I love that Craig asks these big, earthshaking questions because the answers are the things that may save us. The questions show us we are worthy to be saved. We will all come across these questions in the course of a life and to have a story big enough, consequential enough, to introduce them without pedantry is a tremendous gift. Craig mentioned in her interview that she worked as an actress for a time until the stereotyping in Hollywood became too much of an obstacle to great work. I can tell her from this side of the screen the failures of imagination by casting directors and producers are agonizingly apparent. But I wish I could encourage her to “be the change you seek” and to write for the screen if she can. I would tell her the country is hungry for diversity of color and experience and she is likely to be very successful, if that is where her heart lies. I feel so grateful for this big dense book of history and imagination. Craig is enormously talented and I wish her every success. The book is also available in audio, read by the author, produced by Blackstone Audio. The author has a disconcertingly American voice when one might expect something accented, even British. However, were Craig to publish the book she says in the interview that she wrote first--the one about her mother and herself growing up--that American accent would make all kinds of sense. Sounds like a good sequel, doesn't it? However one consumes this book, I highly recommend it. ...more |
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1
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Sep 29, 2017
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Oct 19, 2017
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Aug 26, 2017
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Hardcover
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0525427368
| 9780525427360
| 0525427368
| 3.97
| 25,228
| Oct 20, 2016
| Jan 24, 2017
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it was amazing
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Has an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longl
Has an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel is his seventh, but it is Barry’s long experience writing for the theatre—thirteen plays already—that lends excitement to this work. After the years of excellent effort, suddenly The novel is not long but is fluent and unstrained; it makes big statements about human existence, war, love, about what we want, and what we get. It is remarkable how squarely Barry lands in the middle of the American debate so clamorous around us now, about race, diversity, sexuality, what we fight for and who fights for us—questions we’ve never satisfactorily answered, and so they are back again. Barry gives us humor in a horribly violent world, surprising and delighting us with his deadpan delivery. His diverse cast of characters are reliant on one another, all viewed through the eyes of an Irishman who’d suffered such terrible deprivations as a child that man’s cruelty never surprised him. What did surprise him was that we could find a way to love, to happiness, despite our sorrows. In the early pages Thomas McNulty meets John Cole under a hedge in a rainstorm. John Cole is a few years older, but both the orphaned young boys is a wild thing, having ‘growed' in the school of hard knocks. Uncanny judges of character, they almost instantly decide they stand a better chance together in the rough-and-tumble than alone and set off on a series of adventures. The pace of the novel is swift. When I go back to find a memorable passage, I am shocked at how quickly events unfolded, and how quickly I am deeply involved. The language is one of the novel's wonders. Barry doesn’t try to hide his brogue, but uses it: a stranger in a strange land. That distance and perspective allows Thomas to make comment upon what is commonly observed "Everything bad gets shot in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."and "I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America."The novel constantly surprises: when the boys answer the ad hung awry on a saloon door in a broken-down Kansas town, “Clean Boys Wanted,” we prepare for the worst. Within pages we are jolly and laughing, then agonized and pained, then back again, our emotions rocketing despite the tamped-down telling. Our initial sense of extreme danger never really leaves us, but serves to prepare us for the Indian wars, those pitiful, personal slaughters, and the Civil War, which comes soon enough. The most remarkable bits of this novel, the sense of a shared humanity within a wide diversity, seemed so natural and obvious and wonderful we wanted to crawl under that umbrella and shelter there. These fierce fighting men fought for each other rather than for an ideal. Their early lives were so precarious they’d formed alliances across race, religion, national origin when they were treated fair. “Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity…you‘re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman.” And then there is the notion of time, if it is perceived at all by youth: “Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending…” By the end of the novel, the characters do indeed perceive time: “I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.” We have been changed, too, because we also perceive time, and sorrow and pain and those things that constitute joy. We have lived his life, and ours, too. Barry gets so much right about the America he describes: the sun coming up earlier and earlier as one travels east, the desert-but-not-desert plains land, the generosity and occasional cooperation between the Indian tribes and the army come to dispatch them, the crazy deep thoughtless racism. But what made me catch my breath with wonder was the naturalness of the union between Thomasina McNulty and John Cole and the fierceness of the love these two army men had for an orphaned, laughing, high-spirited, bright star of an Indian girl they called Winona. Barry understands absolutely that our diversity makes us stronger, better men. Leave the pinched and hateful exclusion of differentness to sectarian tribes, fighting for the old days. We know what the old days were like. We can do better. I haven’t read all the Man Booker longlist yet, but most, and this is at the top of my list. It is a treasure. I had access to the Viking Penguin hardcopy of this novel--I'm still surprised at how small it is, given the expansive nature of the story--but I also had the audio from Hoopla. I needed both: the pace of the novel is swift, and may cause us to read faster than we ought. Barry writes poetically, which by rights should slow us down. The Blackstone Audio production, though read quickly by Aidan Kelly, allows us to catch things we will have missed in print and vice versa. At several stages in this novel, crises impel us forward. As we rush to see what happens, we may miss the beauty. Don't miss the beauty. Books like these are so very rare. ...more |
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1
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Aug 24, 2017
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Aug 27, 2017
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Aug 24, 2017
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Hardcover
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0544464044
| 9780544464049
| 0544464044
| 3.85
| 8,821
| 2014
| Nov 08, 2016
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it was amazing
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This is the third outstanding work I’ve read by an Israeli in as many weeks, and I find myself falling under a spell of admiration again for a culture
This is the third outstanding work I’ve read by an Israeli in as many weeks, and I find myself falling under a spell of admiration again for a culture that fights back against the worst aspects of itself, interrogates itself relentlessly, and creates humor around the morose recognition of man’s fallibility. Into a novel describing three generations living together in Jerusalem in a small house, Amos Oz weaves history, religion, politics, and leadership into a meditation on the why and how of Jewishness and the concept of a Jewish state. Not for a moment do we believe the characters have a life beyond that of describing a conflict. The generous nature of Oz’s characters make us willing to suspend judgment and place our trust in his hands awhile, to hear what he has to say. In our modern world one is rarely willing or able to hear an opposite view, but this seems a safe place to examine ideas. In a review in the New York Times, Oz speaks of this novel as a piece of chamber music. A grouping of voices influence one another, each different than the other, three generations of Jews in Israel. The time is late 1950s or early 1960s. A student Shmuel has found his thesis, “Jewish Views of Jesus,” not as unique as he’d imagined and less interesting than something he'd bumped up against in research: “Christian Views of Judas.” Shmuel discovers that without the traitor Judas Iscariot, there would be no Christianity. Jesus and his apostles were all Jews. Without the crucifixion, there would have been no rift in beliefs. Needing to ponder this theory further, Shmuel has left his thesis unfinished and has taken a job as evening companion to learned old Gershom Wald in exchange for room and board. The old man spends his days arguing vociferously with friends and enemies, and is a strong supporter of David ben-Gurion’s Zionism. Wald’s daughter-in-law Aitalia holds an opposite and more radical view that reflects her own father, Shealtiel Abravanel’s opinion that the concept of nation states and ownership of land and resources is a faulty one. "Aitalia’s father was one of those people who believe that every conflict is merely a misunderstanding: a spot of family counseling, and handful of group therapy, a drop or two of goodwill, and at once we shall all be brothers in heart and soul and the conflict will disappear. He was one of those people convinced that all that is required to resolve a conflict is for both parties to get to know each other, and immediately they will start to like each other…"The novel is a multi-layered examination of the idea of ‘traitor,’ and whether or not it is, in fact, an enlightened state “which really ought to be seen as a badge of honor:” "Anyone willing to change," Shmuel said, "will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change…"But old man Wald reminds us that it is the name Judas which has become a synonym for betrayal, and perhaps also a synonym for Jew. "Millions of simple Christians think that every single Jew is infected with the virus of treachery…So long as each Christian baby learns with its mother’s milk that God-killers still tread the earth, or the offspring of God-killers, we [Jews] shall know no rest."In a review for Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir Arab of the Future, I’d expressed some concern that Arab schoolchildren in the Middle East were learning religious hatreds early, never considering that North American Christians were of course learning religious hatreds at the same age. Oz makes no secret of his own opinions in interviews, but in this work he makes us puzzle it all out. He gives us the old conundrums in new ways, making us want to take them up again for examination. We question everything from the ground up. This work reminds me why I love literature: Oz is able to layer complex motivations onto history and take a stab at trying to explain what man is and what we should expect of him. The translation of this work into English by Nicholas de Lange from the Hebrew is especially easy to enjoy. The Blackstone audio production is excellent, the work narrated on ten discs (11 hours) by Jonathan Davis. The hardcover published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is useful to return to some ideas. Though the novel is not difficult to read, the ideas challenge readers and may require a second or third look to tie the threads together. This is great stuff. Oz is seventy-seven years old. He should be proud of himself, and we should be grateful. ...more |
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1
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Apr 22, 2017
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Apr 25, 2017
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Apr 23, 2017
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Hardcover
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1609453492
| 9781609453497
| 1609453492
| 3.85
| 283
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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it was amazing
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Australian novelist Rohan Wilson came roaring out of the starting block with his first novel,
The Roving Party
, published in 2011 in Australia, an
Australian novelist Rohan Wilson came roaring out of the starting block with his first novel,
The Roving Party
, published in 2011 in Australia, and in 2014 by Soho Press for the U.S. market. That first novel described the hunt for aboriginals still residing in Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost island state. In the 19th Century, white European settlers began to capture and eliminate to extinction the native black aborigines in Tasmania, calling this period The Black War. The Roving Party reimagines this period using real historical figures and accounts. The book was shortlisted or won several national and regional awards. The main character in Wilson’s second novel, Thomas Toosey, was once a member of one of those roving bands, though what he learned in service was that blacks were residents there first, and that a knife is a powerful inducement. Toosey remembers his own family with longing, even though his wife sold his alcoholic self down the river for a few quid more than ten years previously. Living rough in Deloraine after leaving the convict town of Port Arthur, he learns via desperate letter from his son William that his wife has died. The journey to Launceston and the search for his son, who has been living on the street since the death of his mother, reads like a fever dream: very visual, very sweaty, very terrifying. We are aghast to find Toosey has stolen banknotes from his friend Flynn, and caused a terrible accident to befall Flynn's daughter. Toosey had been looking for enough cash to start a new life away from Tasmania with his son. Wilson’s special skill is making history come alive; he sets his personal drama within the context of an 1874 railroad protest in Launceston. He makes it epic: characters struggle with life or death, right or wrong, him or me, now or never, as though they ever had any agency and they were not just playthings for the gods. There are so many watchers and witnesses in this novel, they take on the character of a chorus in a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean meme, able to shift the action minutely. Street urchins, hobos and tramps, hotel workers, cops—many folks are watching this personal struggle play out: Thomas Toosey seeking son William, trailed by revenge-seeking Flynn, in the middle of a city gone berserk. The opening lines of this novel are visual enough to describe a film, or a manga comic. "Her head hit the floorboard, bounced, and a fog of ash billowed, thrown so by the motion of her spade."This is William’s mother falling down near-dead from a standing position while sweeping the grate. Her son, William, races in shortly after with a growler of stolen brewery beer to give her, only to discover he needs a doctor instead. Racing away to find a doctor, William is waylaid by a cop who wants to put the twelve-year-old away for the brewery theft. Right here, right at the start of this novel, we can feel the tension Wilson sets up for us between a grisly realism and an absurd, immovable, buffoonish cop whose comic deafness derails the child’s plans and kills the mother. The rest of the book follows from this cruel dichotomy: absurd life, spectacular death, and the struggle between them. It almost seems if anyone stopped to think for just a second about what they were struggling for, the fight would go out of them, a legitimate philosophical stance and an accurate way to observe the human condition. "History is the art by which we lead our lives."Once again Wilson has taken a historical moment in Tasmania, looked deeply into its components, and the whole thing bursts into life—into flame, as it were. We reimagine convict life in Port Arthur, the muddy streets of Deloraine, the bustle and insincerity of worldly Launceston…and real moral conundrum. Wilson has one of the ‘orphans’ stand in the shadows, observing the action, knowing more about motivations and outcomes than the combatants engaged in life or death struggle. That orphan can change everything. Will she? "There is as much ruin comes from love as virtue…Do not follow that fool into his hole. He wanted more for you. You need to want more for yourself."Wilson won another award for this novel, the 2015 Victoria Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. Definitely worthy of attention, his work is big: it encompasses large, important themes, and at the same time, is completely unique. ...more |
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1
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Jan 24, 2017
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Feb 07, 2017
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Jan 24, 2017
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Paperback
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1501126377
| 9781501126376
| 1501126377
| 3.98
| 941
| Jan 24, 2017
| Jan 24, 2017
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it was amazing
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Krivak takes his own blessed time when telling stories. His novels are quiet, but not especially slow; they are full of drama, generations of crises.
Krivak takes his own blessed time when telling stories. His novels are quiet, but not especially slow; they are full of drama, generations of crises. It has been five years since the publication of Krivak’s quietly spectacular first novel, The Sojourn, which followed the sharpshooter Jozef Vinich during World War I. This book, it turns out, follows Vinich’s family, based now in the hill country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where they run a mill. War and its opposite, peace, are inescapable twin themes running through Krivak’s work, lacing the generations together. We are introduced to the Irishman silversmith who landed penurious in New York, only to be conscripted into the Union army, fighting at Gettysburg, one of the last men standing. Afterward he built a snug and comfortable house that lasted well, uninhabited, for many years until it again became a happy home. Jozef’s grandson Sam goes to Vietnam, a corporal, and is missing in action. But Sam had the noticing, or attention, gene that Jozef had exploited in the earlier conflict to keep himself alive: “Just movement like the breeze, except there was no breeze that day.” No one wants to believe Sam is dead. His brother and mother hold the fort at home, missing him, waiting for him to come back one day. The family history is complicated, threads overlapping and woven into the fabric of that small area where everyone knew everyone else. But Krivak patiently and clearly relates the relevant histories with their attendant tragedies and small successes until those histories are as clear as our own. When, in the final pages, Hannah stands near the corner of her land and finds a smooth-barked beech with the generations of family carved into its side, we know just who is being described. JV + HP, BK + HV, BK + AD, SK + RY, each set of carving clearer in its presence on the tree’s skin. What is so remarkable is how long the family lasted in that place, without moving or shipping anchor, and the violence done to the dreams of each in that place one might think of as sleepy, or otherwise passed by. The attention to language, to the unhurried unfurling of a long-form mystery, is Krivak’s special skill. We often ask the question, “how did this happen?” but we rarely have the patience to hear the answer. Krivak makes it interesting enough that listening is no chore, recalling as it does the lives of each of us in its moments of kismet and inevitability, love and violence, birth and death. What I liked best, perhaps, was the genuine kindness even in the confusion among people. There is no triumphalism over the indignities of failure, but neither is there any abnegation of responsibility. These Americans accept responsibility for their forefather’s actions, strive to understand, and be better for any mistakes made. They are capable of change, of understanding, and forgiveness. It is a remarkably uplifting fiction, despite the difficulties each family undergoes. One of the more delicious descriptions in the book is the occasion of a day trip to West Virginia from northeast Pennsylvania. Despite nothing out of the ordinary happening, we greet this part of the story with the excitement children might feel when told of a trip away. Krivak’s descriptions thrill us with their clarity and accuracy: we know of whom he writes. Another description that catches a moment perfectly is this description of Sam's brother Bo fishing with the parish priest, whom Bo wanted to ask for advice: "They split up on the stream, Bo took the faster water up top and fished with a muddler minnow. Father Rovnávaha worked a black ant in a lower pool where brookies were rising to terrestrials. In all this time from house to stream, they had said no more than five words to each other."They sat streamside on rocks for a coffee break, Bo walking to the edge to pick a mayfly off a stone. They'd been using the wrong flies. Then Bo broached the topic that was troubling him. There is no sensationalism here. Krivak writes about a time long gone, fifty and more years ago. It is a small, almost private novel, about making a wooden hutch for someone as a Christmas present, and when placed in their home, “looks like it had always been here.” The fiction has something of that inevitable feel, as though it weren’t made-up at all, but memoir, and deeply felt. These are beautifully written and constructed novels, and there is room for more, if Krivak wanted to move into the controversies of a modern-day novel. I’d read anything he decides to write. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 13, 2016
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Jan 08, 2017
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Oct 09, 2016
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Hardcover
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1910192147
| 9781910192146
| 1910192147
| 3.91
| 33,794
| Nov 05, 2015
| Nov 05, 2015
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it was amazing
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It is the dispassionate telling of this story that makes the mystery of Culduie such a success. Roddy Macrae, discovered walking through his village c
It is the dispassionate telling of this story that makes the mystery of Culduie such a success. Roddy Macrae, discovered walking through his village covered in blood, acknowledges freely that he killed Lachlan Mackenzie and “the others.” The novel opens with Macrae’s confession, solicited by his advocate in court. The author then tells us that in the spring of 2014 he began investigating the background of Donald “Tramp” Macrae, his grandfather, and came upon the documents surrounding Roddy Macrae and the mystery of the deaths at Culduie. We are already interested, but what we discover is that the confession written by Roddy is fluent and complete, not the brutish scribblings of an ignorant man, but full of nuance and scenes of extraordinary power, despite the limited understanding of a childish comprehension. Roddy was only a boy during most of the time his account describes, but we get the sense of a dawning recognition that what he was witnessing deserved retribution. Burnet keeps the interest level cranked to high and the outcome of the trial unresolved to the very last pages, making jury-members of his readers. He includes village histories in the accounts of Roddy’s neighbors, Roddy’s personal history, and court documents which spell out officialdom’s opinion of his actions. By the end, even the most sympathetic or jaded among us would have put their legal reasoning and beliefs to the test. Whatever realism the novel provides, one has to admit to the skill that produced a fiction so compelling, given that the whole thing was concocted by the author. The story of the village with its seasonal requirements and communal reliance, its meager crops and neighborly dramas, its distant overlords and handed-down wisdom reminds us how limited horizons can be for those who grow just enough to survive. Graeme Macrae Burnet has a favorite crime author, Georges Simenon. Burnet created this novel out of bits and pieces of real-life histories that intrigued him. The setting is one he is familiar with from vacations in his childhood, the name of the protagonist came from his personal family history, and the main bit of the murders from Pierre Rivière, who has been remembered for the account of his wrongdoing since the 19th century. Perhaps the thing that resembles Simenon best is Burnet’s inclusion of so many details of village life, at which Simenon was a master. Apparently the literary world is aflame with the question of whether or not this novel constitutes a “crime novel,” and is therefore perhaps the first time genre fiction has been given the honor of being nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize 2016. Since I am not really part of the literary establishment, I may amuse myself with stating my opinion on this case. Yes, His Bloody Project is definitely a “crime” novel, one of the very best of its type….using an innovative structure and an unusual setting and time frame…and is among the best examples of literature produced in English this year. It is a fine addition to the Booker Prize shortlist, other nominees which include innovative and unusual works of fiction by playwrights, poets, and novelists. One of the things I liked best about this novel was the way Burnet was able to involve us so completely in the story that even changing the names of individuals did not throw us off the scent of mystery…Lachlan Mackenzie was also Lachlan Broad, and Roddy Black was the infamous Roderick Macrae. Unusual tools, like a croman and a flaughter, did not blunt our curiosity about how they may be used in cleaving the skull. The words and the justice system themselves seemed foreign. We became quite versed, in the end, in the quiet unspoken menace that plagued residents of Culduie when a person against which they had no protection became dispenser of justice. Personally, I did question why Roddy, clever boy that everyone seemed to acknowledge he was, couldn’t have come up with a better solution to Lachlan Mackenzie’s transgresses than killing him, which was sure to stop the behavior, but also his own life. Since the schoolteacher acknowledged Roddy’s clear superiority over other students, Roderick never seemed to cotton-on that he alone might find a way to best the brute Lachlan. But no matter. I accept what Burnet has offered us and enjoyed it thoroughly, and consider it fine literature. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 07, 2016
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Oct 09, 2016
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Sep 05, 2016
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Paperback
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1501133888
| 9781501133886
| 4.02
| 8,648
| Sep 13, 2016
| Sep 13, 2016
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it was amazing
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The experience of two black police officers forms the kernel of Thomas Mullen's explosive new novel set in a 1948 Atlanta that was “two parts Confeder
The experience of two black police officers forms the kernel of Thomas Mullen's explosive new novel set in a 1948 Atlanta that was “two parts Confederate racist to two parts Negro to one part something-that-doesn’t-quite-have-a-name-for-it-yet.” Black policemen are as discriminated against in their own headquarters as are black civilians, so these beat cops must have strong moral grounding and resilient natures to put up with the task at hand. Their poorly equipped office is in the basement of the YMCA, run by a man who’d had his door kicked down twelve times for imagined crimes. That man was happy to find a place in his building for the new Darktown police force. The Wiki for Darktown reports that the Negro neighborhood of Atlanta stretched from Peachtree Street and Collins Street (now Courtland Street), past Butler Ave. (now Jesse Hill Jr. Ave.) to Jackson Street. It referred to the blocks above Auburn Avenue in what is now Downtown Atlanta and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood. Darktown was characterized in the 1930s as a "hell-hole of squalor, degradation, sickness, crime and misery”.Because white police officers did not often want to respond to citizens living in Darktown, the neighborhood was unconstrained and plagued by bad behaviors. In 1948 the Atlanta Police Department trained and hired eight black men, some WWII veterans, to patrol Darktown and keep the peace. One enters a fiction about race relations written by a white man with a certain amount of trepidation. At the start of the novel we are treated to descriptions of truly despicable behaviors, epithets, taunts, and conditions to which Atlanta's first black officers were exposed, and while we suspect it is all too true, we are not comfortable. No one likes to be reminded how bad it must have been. Not long into the narrative, however, we almost imperceptibly begin to relax into the telling of a crime story that involves shadowy power well beyond the reach of a Negro beat cop a few months into the job. A young, pretty black woman is found dead in a garbage heap and the last known person to have been with her was a white ex-cop, fired for corruption some time ago along with some mates on the force. This is not a novel just about race. This is a novel about policing. One of the things that Mullen reveals to us in this book is the true nature of “the job”: the thorny ethical conundrums and moral relativism that haunts those mean streets. We suspect that police officers have to deal with these difficulties every day of their working lives, and we begin to question whether any man or woman is up to the task. After all, some difficult choices are often made quickly, on the spur of a moment when the police themselves may be facing physical danger. What is moral relativism? It is the notion that there is no universal concept of right or wrong, good or bad, and that truth and goodness must be examined from the place at which the individual stands. It’s why justice is so hard to nail down, and why judges and juries are so important. But this concept can be stretched to unsupportable lengths, and we are presented with examples of that in this book. It makes for thoughtful reading. Mullen challenges us with this novel, and if I said "we relax into the reading," I certainly didn't mean for the last half of the story, which ramps up the tension to terror. The film rights for this novel were optioned in a competitive bidding war long before its publication date. The film contract was eventually won by Sony TV with Jaime Foxx as executive producer, Rachel O’Connor producing. It does have a cinematic feel: dark, hot, buggy nights loaded with sweat, blood, and moral conundrum. Mullen could easily make this first in a series, he was so competent in involving readers with his characters and their edgy situation in the context of crime within and without the Atlanta police force. It feels all kinds of relevant today, as the white population is waking up to race in America and how "discriminatory behavior" manifests. The Epigraph at the beginning of the novel is a quote from one of the first black officers to be inducted into the Atlanta Police Department, Officer Willard Strickland: ”I must tell you, it was not easy for me to raise my right hand and say, ‘I, Willard Strickland, a Negro, do solemnly swear to perform the duties of a Negro Policeman.’”Many thanks to Thomas Mullen for bringing us this absorbing and difficult story, and to Netgalley and Atria Books for sharing the e-galley with me in advance of publication on September 13, 2016. An interview with Thomas Mullen has been published on my blog. In it the author answers questions about this new series and the nature of policing. It is a read you won't want to miss. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2016
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Jul 23, 2016
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Jul 12, 2016
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ebook
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4.06
| 410,797
| Aug 02, 2016
| Aug 02, 2016
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did not like it
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For nearly twenty years the work of Colson Whitehead has been published to wide acclaim, his fiction and nonfiction both receiving many accolades. For
For nearly twenty years the work of Colson Whitehead has been published to wide acclaim, his fiction and nonfiction both receiving many accolades. For this reason I was eager to have the chance to read his new novel that focused on the origination of the race debate in America—slavery. This new novel is due out September 13, 2016. Thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for the opportunity to read an e-galley. The story centers around Cora, a motherless slave living on the Randall estate in Georgia. When another slave, Caesar, suggests they attempt an escape, Cora initially demurs…until she draws unwanted sexual attentions from her owner. The problems with this novel are not in the motivations. Those we understand. The problems are technical: an insufficiently developed Cora, and a mere silhouette of Caesar, the two central characters. When Caesar practically disappears from the narrative one-third of the way in, we barely notice, he was so inconsequential and underdeveloped. Talk about exploitation: he was simply a device. But this is fiction, and the author can do whatever he wants, like create an actual underground railroad to eliminate the pesky problem of researching and charting a perilous journey to innumerable secret above-ground destinations that would allow us to picture and relive the terror, the deprivation, and the strength of character of all participants in the movement of hunted individuals within a dangerous environment. When the author suggests that white community members in South Carolina at this time were encouraging scientific experiments on, and recommending sterilizations for, freed black men and women, we don’t trust it and are annoyed that we are going to have to do our own research to verify the (outrageous if false) claim in the fictional narrative. Problems of language are also present here, with untenable and frankly unbelievable hectoring challenges from Cora to her white rescuers along the trail: “You feel like a slave?…Born to it, like a slave?” …and Cora’s challenge to Ridgeway, the homicidal slave catcher, after a chatty exchange: “More words to pretty things up.” When Cora idly wonders whether a new wave of immigrants will replace the Irish, “fleeing a different but no less abject country” we are startled. Where did that come from and why would Cora have any knowledge of, or any particular interest in, conditions in Ireland or anywhere else, for that matter? It just isn’t reasonable and seems out of place. Then we have the awkwardness of the language: “Cora kept her tongue,” and “Over the years life on Orchard Street passed with a tedium that eventually congealed into comfort,” or “The game of husband and wife was even less fun than she supposed. Jane, at least, turned out to be an unexpected mercy, a tidy bouquet in her arms, even if conception proved yet another humiliation.” These exceptionally ugly, charmless, and clichéd constructions add nothing to our pleasure. Finally, there is no momentum in this novel. The storyline is broken into chunks that attempt to explain the backstory of some character or another or tell the story of a stop on Cora’s trail to freedom. Each break draws us further and further from any interest in Cora’s forward progress. It seems she (and we) will never get there. I have seen the glowing reviews for this title, so take my criticisms as one among many. This would not be the title you should expect will give you a rich understanding of the real underground railroad for escaped slaves. For that we will have to look elsewhere. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 23, 2016
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Jul 24, 2016
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Jul 12, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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1455541168
| 9781455541164
| 1455541168
| 3.77
| 30,590
| Jun 30, 2016
| Jul 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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Fellowes is a unique talent able to actually inhabit a world long past. Perhaps the motivations and language of people are not much changed from one o
Fellowes is a unique talent able to actually inhabit a world long past. Perhaps the motivations and language of people are not much changed from one or two hundred years ago, but habits have certainly changed. Fellowes navigates that earlier world of societal mores and constraints so beautifully, I would have loved to see him in action then. In his new serialized novel called Belgravia, the illegitimate son of an unmarried daughter is arranged to grow up under the tutelage of a pastor. The boy grows up clever, handsome, and with all the right attitudes, having expected no advantages. When it is discovered he is not illegitimate after all, but is related to a wealthy and illustrious London family, everyone wants to align their futures with his. The Duchess of Richmond holds a ball in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo to which Anne Trenchard, her husband James, and her daughter Sophia are invited. The Trenchards are of the merchant class, suppliers of Wellington’s army, so it is Sophia who has secured the invitation through the attentions of The Duchess’s nephew, Viscount Bellasis. [image] --from "Duchess of Richmond's Ball" Wiki, Henry O'Neil (1868) Before Waterloo I can say little more about the convoluted storyline without compromising readers’ surprise, so will just say that Fellowes is particularly good in this novel with the thoughts of the two grandmothers to the ill-begotten boy, once thought a bastard. Anne Trenchard is beautifully drawn as a woman interested little in the trappings of society but caught in the web of its importance nonetheless. The other grandmother, Lady Caroline Brockenhurst, is delightfully acerbic and yet entirely sympathetic to readers, having lost her only heir right at his moment of greatest promise. She faces the unhappy prospect of leaving her title and wealth to an undeserving nephew whom she disdains. I listened to this book on audio and was thrilled with the narration by Juliet Stevenson, who gave each character their own particular accents. Fellowes and Stevenson both managed to give the servants in the households their due, and as usual with Fellowes’ oeuvre, there was an authentic richness to their experiences, motivations, and manner of speaking. The aspect of this novel that gave it some cache was the serial manner in which it was delivered to readers. Once a week subscribers found an episode added to their inbox. It was good that Fellowes tried this manner of publishing again, but I found it frustrating that I could not hear the story in one go or over several consecutive days. After all, habits have developed so that we now enjoy a TV series in a glut of binge-watching. However, I was thrilled to find a new section loaded onto my device each week, and listened to it eagerly when it arrived. Fellowes used his own delivery vehicle for this book, offering readers a Belgravia app which included many extras, like maps (with links to photos) which show the properties developed in the early 1800s by Master Builder Thomas Cubitt with the help of James Trenchard, as well as closeups of the paintings that inspired Fellowes. A link to a short explanatory youTube video shows the grand central green marble staircase which features in The Brockenhurst Mansion in Belgravia Square. The app allows readers to read or listen by episode. I found it worked well for me on an iPad and it can be enjoyed more than once if one is so inclined. There is no one quite like Fellowes at work today, and his ability to read and write characters is unique. His novels tend toward gorgeous confections where outcomes seem destined to give the good and the evil their cosmic due. Since this is often not the way things work out in the real world, we can look forward to a fairytale outcome. There is a place for novels that involve us but do not agonize us. I look forward to whatever he wants to dish out. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 2016
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Jul 06, 2016
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Jun 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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3.95
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really liked it
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Jul 28, 2024
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Jul 28, 2024
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3.85
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it was amazing
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Nov 25, 2022
not set
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Nov 26, 2022
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4.19
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it was amazing
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Oct 19, 2019
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Oct 14, 2019
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3.95
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really liked it
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Mar 06, 2019
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Feb 21, 2019
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3.62
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not set
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Jul 16, 2018
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3.70
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it was amazing
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Jul 15, 2018
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Jul 12, 2018
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3.49
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it was amazing
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Jun 24, 2018
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Jun 20, 2018
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4.03
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really liked it
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May 2018
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Apr 02, 2018
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4.30
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it was amazing
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Dec 03, 2017
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Nov 12, 2017
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||||||
4.08
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it was amazing
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Sep 21, 2017
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Sep 12, 2017
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||||||
3.64
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2017
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Aug 29, 2017
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||||||
3.61
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it was amazing
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Oct 19, 2017
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Aug 26, 2017
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||||||
3.97
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it was amazing
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Aug 27, 2017
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Aug 24, 2017
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||||||
3.85
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it was amazing
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Apr 25, 2017
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Apr 23, 2017
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||||||
3.85
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it was amazing
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Feb 07, 2017
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Jan 24, 2017
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||||||
3.98
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it was amazing
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Jan 08, 2017
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Oct 09, 2016
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||||||
3.91
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it was amazing
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Oct 09, 2016
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Sep 05, 2016
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||||||
4.02
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it was amazing
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Jul 23, 2016
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Jul 12, 2016
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||||||
4.06
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did not like it
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Jul 24, 2016
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Jul 12, 2016
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||||||
3.77
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it was amazing
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Jul 06, 2016
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Jun 01, 2016
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