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| 1476785058
| 9781476785059
| 1476785058
| 3.76
| 2,812
| Mar 01, 2015
| Mar 24, 2015
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really liked it
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(3.5) Abigail Thomas writes a particular type of episodic memoir, in which chapters are often just a few sentences or paragraphs long. Safekeeping is
(3.5) Abigail Thomas writes a particular type of episodic memoir, in which chapters are often just a few sentences or paragraphs long. Safekeeping is the best example of her style, while A Three Dog Life is her best overall (I remember it as one of the first books to turn me on to the memoir genre). I would place this latest book somewhere between those two in terms of quality. I was disappointed to find little mention of the aftermath of her husband Rich’s traumatic brain injury (the subject of A Three Dog Life) – he incurred the TBI in 1997 and died in 2007. Perhaps given the number of years in between, Thomas felt the time for writing about Rich had passed. Instead, this book is more about simple, everyday life: her new hobby of painting on glass; her children and grandchildren; napping with her hound dogs; volunteering as a hospice caregiver as a way of learning what’s truly important in life; teaching a memoir-writing class to people with cancer, who embody a sense of urgency about documenting their lives; meeting up with old acquaintances; blind dates going wrong; and being taken aback by the ageing process (she’s now into her 70s). The overarching theme of this memoir is Thomas’s 30-year friendship with Chuck, whom she met when they were colleagues at a publishing company. They took long lunch breaks and perfected the art of wasting time; their proudest idea was for ‘inaction figures’ named Torpor, Languor, and Stupor. Many years afterwards, Thomas was astonished to find out that Chuck was cheating on his wife – with her own daughter, Catherine! When Catherine was later diagnosed with breast cancer, it was an emotional strain for Chuck, too, even though the affair was long over. Negotiating her loyalties to these two loved ones has been one of the central challenges of Thomas’s recent life. More so than I’ve noticed before, Thomas’s content and attitude are quite similar to Anne Lamott’s. For instance, both are former alcoholics who have jumped on and off the wagon over the years. The observations on writing here are especially reminiscent of Lamott’s Bird by Bird: “What do we use? That’s easy. We use everything. We have our eyes and ears open to snag the lovely and the harsh and the hilarious. There is ruthlessness to all writers.” “Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid of the mess. The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls us through? Curiosity.” My favorite individual pieces are just one paragraph each. Here’s a taste of “Chronology”: “I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it’s so boring...[it] reinforces the fact the only logical ending for chronological order is death.” In “Hospice,” she accounts for her decision to work with the dying as a volunteer: “I want to make Death a member of my family. I don’t want it to arrive as a stranger.” The chapters are so short that this can be picked up at random in whatever snatches of time a reader has available. I can see this appealing to fans of Anne Lamott or even Nora Ephron (e.g. I Feel Bad About My Neck) – although Thomas isn’t as humorous in her approach, her thoughts on ageing have a similarly wry quality. This would also serve as an interesting introduction to Thomas’s work for people who don’t like straightforward, birth-onwards autobiographies. It’s not quite as memorable overall as A Three Dog Life, but recommended nonetheless. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 24, 2015
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Jan 28, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0991305884
| 9780991305889
| 0991305884
| 3.66
| 139
| Apr 28, 2015
| Apr 28, 2015
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liked it
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Kelley’s first novel is earning comparisons to David Nicholls’s One Day, but I was reminded more of classic Meg Ryan rom-coms like When Harry Met Sall
Kelley’s first novel is earning comparisons to David Nicholls’s One Day, but I was reminded more of classic Meg Ryan rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally and especially You’ve Got Mail. Like the former, this book asks if a guy and girl who find each other attractive can ever really just be friends; like the latter, it takes two people who shouldn’t necessarily be suited to each other and sees how, even as they move on with life and have other relationships, they can never quite escape their hold on each other. The novel opens with Joanna, aged 24, traveling back from Prague after seven months of teaching English. It wasn’t the wonderful abroad experience she’d hoped for, and now she feels like a failure for abandoning her students partway through a year. Back in Portland, her sister Laura puts her up on an air mattress while she looks for work. Joanna isn’t sure what she wants from her life, but one thing is sure: she won’t go back to living with her mother, Tess. As Joanna walks around Portland, she carefully observes the houses’ architecture and landscaping, imagining future possibilities. Romance, too, seems like a possibility when Joanna meets Malcolm Martin at a birthday party for Laura’s boyfriend, Ted. Malcolm, Ted’s housemate, seems a little odd: the first thing he does, seeing Joanna absentmindedly flicking through a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting from Ted’s shelf, is to touch her stomach and ask if she’s pregnant. It turns out he’s a gardener and carpenter and makes beautiful wooden benches and huts. Joanna is intrigued. The bad news, though, is that he’s leaving tomorrow for two years with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. Joanna and Malcolm make out that night, and promise to keep in touch while he’s away. A year and a half later, Joanna is moving out of a beloved apartment and in with her new boyfriend, Nate. The last thing she packs is the precious bundle of airmail letters she’s been collecting from Malcolm. Although she’s moved on with her normal life, this old-fashioned paper correspondence is a sign that she hasn’t given up on what seems like a fairytale romance. She finally sees Malcolm again at Ted and Laura’s wedding, where Malcolm is the best man. Joanna is vehemently opposed to marriage; after her parents’ divorce, she’s convinced it’s always doomed to fail. But can she believe in true love nevertheless? Over the years, Joanna and Malcolm epitomize an on-again, off-again relationship pattern. More often than not, they’re both dating other people. Joanna teaches writing at a community college, buys herself a little fixer-upper house with potential for a nice garden, and tries out Internet dating. Malcolm does contract jobs in Alaska and California. Yet these two keep getting thrown together, often into intimate situations. When Joanna runs out of oil during a snowstorm, she shelters at Malcolm’s place. They join friends on a spring break trip to the coast and keep running into each other at parties. Then comes a bit of an unusual turn in the plot: Malcolm offers to move in with Joanna to help her renovate her crumbling house. This will be a “just friends” arrangement, mind you. Until it becomes “friends with benefits.” Joanna decides to put a stop to the shenanigans with a list of sex challenges; her logic is that if they can just get each other out of their systems, they can go back to the good old days of being friends. Is that really what she wants, though? “We’re obviously in love with each other, but you want to go around being ‘just friends’,” Malcolm erupts. What happens next is for readers to find out, after a somewhat rushed ending. There were some elements that didn’t work for me here. I couldn’t relate to Joanna’s impulsiveness and self-sabotage. Years later, she’s just as aimless as she was when she got back from Prague. The repetitive nature of the will-they/won’t-they plot means that nearly every chapter has Malcolm and Joanna breaking up or having a major argument. Some of their relationship decisions seemed ludicrous to me; who would go over to an opposite sex friend’s house, sleep in bed with them, and not expect something to happen?! Ultimately, it’s so far from my own experience that I can’t really get the whole “friends with benefits” thing. However, this was still a pleasant read; I raced through it in less than a week. Joanna’s Internet dating mishaps can be amusing, especially the time she decides to make pumpkin-flavored cocktails. The Oregon and Nevada settings are terrific – Kelley knows them personally, and it shows. Plus the chapter names are just as fun as the play on words in the novel’s title. If you have a hankering for some Nora Ephron-style romantic comedy, or if you enjoyed last year’s Cutting Teeth (Julia Fierro) and Friendship (Emily Gould), this is for you. Broken Homes & Gardens releases on April 28th. With thanks to Rebecca Kelley for sending me an electronic copy. I was provided with a free copy in exchange for my honest review. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 26, 2015
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Mar 05, 2015
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Jan 11, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1620408244
| 9781620408247
| 1620408244
| 3.41
| 233
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 13, 2015
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really liked it
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(3.5) A fairly straightforward account of Godwin’s career, with a focus on the specifics of preparing books for publication: securing a publisher, bei
(3.5) A fairly straightforward account of Godwin’s career, with a focus on the specifics of preparing books for publication: securing a publisher, being assigned an editor, and choosing titles and cover art, for starters. Then there’s also a book’s afterlife: its critical reception and sales, any awards won, and publicity efforts including book tours. A true introvert (see Susan Cain’s Quiet), Godwin admits that this part is always a challenge for her: “Once I’m in front of an audience I can perform, but when it’s over I collapse in solitude and wonder how I did it.” For some reason I had mentally classed Godwin in the school of dirty realism. Instead it sounds like Flora is a mid-twentieth century version of Henry James’s mildly scary ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. A number of Godwin’s novels have had religious themes, featuring priests or nuns as central characters. Perhaps she was a forerunner of Susan Howatch and Jan Karon? Or, with her Southern background (she was born in Alabama and went to college in North Carolina), might she be closer in tone to Daniel Woodrell, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Wolfe? Any life is full of odd surprises, and Godwin’s was no different. This is not a conventional autobiography, however, so sometimes the very events you’d like Godwin to expand on get short shrift. For instance, her mother, Kathleen Krahenbuhl, was also a writer; I would have liked to hear a bit more about her work. When her mother remarried, Godwin gained half-siblings, one of whom was murdered – an incident that inspired her novel A Southern Family. And then there’s this tantalizing passage: My life after Chapel Hill had been studded with drama: On assignment for a Miami newspaper, I had spent the night in jail with a woman who had murdered her husband and I had flown on a navy plane into the eye of a hurricane. I had been fired by the same newspaper, been married and divorced within the space of five months, sailed to Europe on a freighter, lived in Copenhagen and the Canary Islands, and, for the last two years, in London, where I worked at a glamorous menial government job. In just this partial paragraph she hints at so many stories that are outside the remit of this book. One can only hope they’ve been explored elsewhere (Godwin has also published two volumes of her journals, entitled The Making of a Writer). In 1958, when Godwin was a student, publishers still sent talent scouts out to the major universities to look for promising writers. She took along five pages of a novel in progress, only for Knopf to tell her that she wasn’t what they were looking for. (Can you imagine – publishers went searching for the next Great American novelist in the same way that music producers and baseball coaches search for the next hit singer or star player?! It was a whole different world.) Godwin recalls that she “trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity.” Luckily, she was not discouraged and went on to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a student of Kurt Vonnegut and a classmate of John Irving. Godwin generally takes a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach to her material, so you occasionally get phrases like “but I’ll come back to that in such-and-such chapter.” The structure might be an attempt to avoid tedious lists of what happened and what happened next, but there is, unfortunately, still an element of that. My eyes glazed over a bit when reading about one publisher merging with another or various editors being fired and replaced. I most enjoyed the sections where Godwin intersperses details about her writing with vignettes from her personal life – a longtime relationship with a composer and their home in Woodstock, New York. Bibliophiles will also relish hearing about the process of birthing a novel, especially the challenges of choosing titles and cover art. The only time Godwin gave in to a publisher’s demands and changed a novel’s title (from The Red Nun to Unfinished Desires), she lived to regret it – her Catholic girls’ school novel now sounded like romance pulp. I daresay any reader of this book will come away with a list of at least three or four Godwin books they’d like to try. I hope this pleasant little memoir will have the desired effect of getting an underappreciated novelist some more attention. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 17, 2015
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Jan 21, 2015
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Oct 04, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 080212352X
| 9780802123527
| 080212352X
| 3.75
| 4,829
| Mar 03, 2015
| Mar 03, 2015
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really liked it
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(3.5) So I kept wondering what the metaphorical significance of the aquarium fish in this book might be. Turns out David Vann just really likes fish.
(3.5) So I kept wondering what the metaphorical significance of the aquarium fish in this book might be. Turns out David Vann just really likes fish. Here’s the revelatory passage from his memoir, A Mile Down: I’ve loved tropical fish all my life, at one point in junior high had eight aquariums spread throughout the house. For years, even in upstate New York, in grad school, I had gazed at fish every night, watching how they fluttered, imagined myself suspended in warm water with them, so this [snorkeling in the Tobago Cays] was heaven for me, to spend a little quality time with the fish. I’ve been a huge fan of Vann’s fiction ever since Caribou Island slapped me upside the face in 2011, so a new book from him is a big deal for me. In some ways, it’s very different from the rest of Vann’s oeuvre, but in other ways you can see how the previous books have prepared for this one. Like Goat Mountain (2013), Aquarium is narrated by an adult looking back at a troubled event from childhood. As in Legend of a Suicide (2008), Caribou Island (2010) and Dirt (2012), a dysfunctional family situation looks set to boil over into unthinkable violence. Aquarium even shares a theme with the first story in Legend of a Suicide, titled “Ichthyology.” On the other hand, this is the first of Vann’s novels to be set outside Alaska or California, and it also marks his first attempt at narrating from a female point-of-view. Aquarium also has a considerably less tragic vision than any of his previous works, several of which approach Greek tragedy in their bleak violence. But more on that later. The novel is set in 1994, narrated in the first person by Caitlin, who is looking back from the present day (aged 32) at her twelve-year-old self. She lives with her single mother, Sheri, in the bad part of Seattle. Sheri works on the docks moving shipping containers – hard, cold work that has made her hard and cold, too. Her mom’s genial boyfriend, Steve, is an increasingly frequent visitor to their small apartment. Meanwhile, Caitlin’s best friend at school, Shalini, is an immigrant from New Delhi and everything about her, from her colorful clothing to her Hindu traditions, captivates Caitlin. Every day after school Caitlin waits at the aquarium for her mom to pick her up. She has a season pass, and knows everything about fish; she says she wants to be an ichthyologist when she grows up, and refuses to eat fish – although, ironically, people keep cooking and serving it throughout the novel. At the aquarium she befriends an old man who also acts fascinated with the fish, and at first seems to be a little bit creepy, touching her arm and talking about taking her to Mexico and wanting to meet her mother. For a moment it seems like this will turn into a pedophilia drama, with Sheri and the police staging an intervention, until it turns out that the old man is Caitlin’s estranged grandfather. Sheri detests her father because he left the family when her mother fell sick with cancer. For four years Sheri had to care for her ailing mother single-handedly, bathing, feeding and changing her while enduring verbal abuse. Sheri decides that Caitlin needs to understand what she went through, and thus why she hates her father so much and can’t just let him be Caitlin’s grandfather as if nothing ever happened. She concocts a plan of reenacting the very worst days of her mother’s illness. This section of the novel is very hard to read; I even had to set it aside for a day or two because I was afraid of just how far it would go. Although Sheri still wants to punish her father, she accepts his offer of having them live with him in his three-bedroom Victorian; it means she can give up work and the apartment, and go back to school. All the same, she refuses to forgive him. A trip out in the snow to cut down a Christmas tree looks set to turn into a major tragedy (as in Goat Mountain, perhaps), but Vann pulls back from making it as awful as he could. In fact, the more threatening situation is Caitlin’s surprising sexual awakening, something I felt slightly uncomfortable reading about when I remembered that this is a twelve-year-old girl. Vann has produced another memorable story of family breakdown – but here, more than in any previous book, there is a glimmer of hope that the family might piece things back together eventually. At the same time, it’s a powerful examination of the competing impulses to revenge and forgiveness. Some things, it seems, can never be forgotten and will shift the family dynamic forever. I could see this being a sort of gentle introduction to Vann’s work for someone who doesn’t want to plunge straight into the high Greco-Shakespearean tragedy of a book like Caribou Island (splendid though it is). Call it a gateway drug, if you will. Much as I enjoyed the novel, I was left scratching my head over the metaphorical significance of the fish. Perhaps an aquarium stands for life’s constrictions; like fish in tanks, characters are trapped by destructive habits and bitterness. Hardy yet fragile, fish have various survival strategies such as hiding or metamorphosing, terms that certainly apply to the humans in the novel. It is especially noteworthy that the book includes 18 color photos of aquarium fish. It may seem like a strange choice to print them in the text, but maybe Vann didn’t think he could convey the colors and strangeness of various fish without them. Ultimately, I think the fish represent primal nature – life at its most basic but also its most enduring. I noted when reading “Ichthyology,” from Legend of a Suicide, that the aquarium fish there seemed like a symbol of powerlessness. As an earlier evolutionary stage, they might be a reminder of the beautiful simplicity humanity has lost, but also a salient warning of the animal diversity we are losing every day: By the end of the century, nearly all fish will be gone. The entire legacy of humanity will be only one thing, a line of red goop in the paleo-oceanographic record, a time of no calcium carbonate shells that will stretch on for several million years. The sadness of our stupidity is overwhelming. Or maybe David Vann just really likes fish. Assessing Vann’s oeuvre, I would place this novel squarely in the middle of the pecking order. (Caribou Island is a 5-star masterpiece; Goat Mountain is a 4-star fable. Because I read it later on, I appreciated Legend of a Suicide more as a rehearsal for Caribou Island than anything else; I’d give it 3 stars. Dirt is undoubtedly the hardest of Vann’s novels to love, with some truly abhorrent characters; I’d call it 2.5 stars.) (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 2014
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Nov 05, 2014
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Oct 03, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0062127225
| 9780062127228
| 0062127225
| 3.64
| 2,075
| Jan 01, 2014
| Nov 11, 2014
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really liked it
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Between the ages of about eight and 15, I was adamant that I wanted to be either an archaeologist or a paleontologist when I grew up. I can date the l
Between the ages of about eight and 15, I was adamant that I wanted to be either an archaeologist or a paleontologist when I grew up. I can date the latter ambition to the first Jurassic Park movie, which I saw in the theater when I was in third grade; the former is a bit more challenging to trace, but may have something to do with the hours my first best friend and I spent “excavating” behind the shed in her backyard. With our hand trowels we unearthed ceramic fragments and seemingly endless oyster shells. I doubt any of it was worth anything, or proof of any kind of interesting history on this plot of land. It was most likely just a 1950s suburban trash dump. Still, I felt like Indiana Jones discovering buried treasure. When I was 15, I finally had the chance to do some real archaeology, through a University of Maryland summer field school. Five of us eager high school students won places through an essay contest to participate in the college kids’ dig behind a Colonial-era home in Annapolis. A classmate and I carpooled every day for those two weeks, our moms taking turns driving us in to the historic town center, where we split our time between field work and lab work. I wish I could say the field school was inspiring, but if anything it convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for archaeology. It was a dripping hot Maryland August, and our work was painstaking and filthy. Outsiders probably don’t realize that you work literally centimeter by centimeter, and spend proportionally more time taking notes and making sketches than you do digging. Finds are few and far between, and usually not very exciting; the highlights of the whole time were an animal tooth and a few shards of blue pottery. It was hard to gauge our contribution to the overall goal of finding traces of the home’s formal garden. I finished the two weeks feeling glad of the experience, but disillusioned with my erstwhile life goal. All the same, I’ve never quite shaken off my interest in archaeology — despite an introductory college course that bored me to tears (and lowered my grade point average). It turns out I wasn’t actually that compelled by soil layers and evidence of early farming and animal domestication. I couldn’t see the rare delight of discovery past all the mundane, laborious realities of an archaeologist’s day job; I studied English and Religion instead, and became a freelance writer and book reviewer via multiple bookstore and library jobs. Approaching journalist Marilyn Johnson’s third book, then, I hoped for an off-beat journey through the world of contemporary archaeology: a nostalgic but not overly rosy view of a difficult profession. I certainly was not disappointed. Johnson captures perfectly both the cinematic allure and the everyday drudgery of archaeologists’ work: “From a distance, this kind of work might seem to fit the Indiana Jones fantasy, full of treasure and danger. Up close, the glamour can be hard to detect. Archaeologists are explorers and adventurers — Hollywood got that part right — but not exactly in the way you’d think.” From a position of almost total ignorance, Johnson went about educating herself through a whirlwind tour of as many different aspects of archaeology as possible. She attended two field schools, one on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, where she looked for remnants of Dutch plantations, and one at Yeronisos, off Cyprus, where Joan Connelly runs an ongoing dig searching for proof of a Greek priestess cult. The variety just in these two field experiences points to the difficulty of making generalizations about the career as a whole: Archaeology itself is not easy to navigate; it is a broad and complicated profession, and the archaeologists of the Old World (who study Iraq and the ancient civilizations of the East and Middle East, including classical Rome and Greece) tend to go to different conferences and read different journals than the archaeologists who work in the New World of the Americas. Yet Johnson was determined to get the whole picture. She learned about bog bodies, Native American methods of harvesting bone grease, forensic archaeology, and jade “pig dragon” sculptures from the Goddess Temple in northeastern China. At conferences she chatted with experts on ancient alcoholic beverages (Uncorking the Past by Patrick E. McGovern), debated the historical authenticity of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series (starting with The Clan of the Cave Bear), and toured Machu Picchu with UNESCO delegates in Peru. A female archaeologist also gave her a sneak peek into the Explorers Club in Manhattan — where women were only admitted in 1981! Underwater archaeology is where it’s at nowadays, apparently, and in one of the key chapters of the book Kathy Abbass introduces Johnson to marine archaeology taking place in Newport, Rhode Island, a hotspot for Revolutionary War shipwrecks. Fishkill, New York also proved to be a surprisingly good Revolutionary-era site, with a soldiers’ graveyard that has more than once been under threat from developers. The book is not all about centuries-old history, though. It’s just as much about what we value today, and what we will commit to saving. One of the most intriguing sections of the book is about modern war zones. A group of archaeologists had the brilliant idea of issuing American soldiers with playing cards featuring Iraqi and Afghan archaeological treasures. By collecting them all, and putting them together to form a bigger photo, they might absorb the message that they are in a land of ancient traditions with riches worth preserving. “These sites have survived thousands of years; will they survive you?” went the provocative slogan. “Good archaeology fills in the blanks of history. It tells the losers’ story. It teases out the history that falls between cracks,” Connelly told Johnson. Sometimes, sadly, it seems archaeologists are the losers at risk of falling between the cracks. This year Forbes magazine named archaeology the #1 worst college major, “based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial earnings.” The husband-and-wife team with whom Johnson worked in the Caribbean struggled to find jobs when they moved to England. It took two years for Grant Gilmore to get a six-month contract, and two and a half years in total for him to get his dream job — a dispiriting 300 job applications later. Johnson sums it up with this sobering sentence: “Jo and Grant were in thrall to a profession that couldn’t sustain them.” Indeed, none of the archaeology graduates I know personally are working in their field. But if Johnson paints an overall somewhat depressing picture of archaeology today — it’s a difficult field to break into or make a living from, and governments and ordinary people are not always supportive of digs that stand in the way of development — she makes a case for how relevant and essential the work still is. As she asked herself of one enthusiastic archaeologist she met while exploring Deadwood, South Dakota, What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there. Now that’s a noble aim. I highly recommend this book, for armchair travelers and professionals alike. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 16, 2014
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Nov 06, 2014
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Sep 01, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 1439138338
| 9781439138335
| 1439138338
| 3.61
| 21,112
| Oct 2014
| Oct 07, 2014
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liked it
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A subtle portrait of a bereaved family in late 1960s Ireland. Nora, 40, has lost her husband Maurice to sudden illness. Repressing her own grief, she
A subtle portrait of a bereaved family in late 1960s Ireland. Nora, 40, has lost her husband Maurice to sudden illness. Repressing her own grief, she helps her four children move on. She will sell the summer house, get a job, and try to maintain a semblance of normality: vacations in Ireland and Spain, hobbies, and the school year’s rhythms. But how to keep going when life has lost all purpose? “When she asked herself what she was interested in, she had to conclude that she was interested in nothing at all.” Nora’s daughters, Fiona and Aine, are away at university and prep school in Dublin, respectively, and her two sons, Conor and Donal, still live at home. The two boys, especially, seem to be suffering from post-traumatic stress. Conor wets the bed; Donal has nightmares, develops a stammer, and starts to make trouble for his teachers. Although Nora tries to attend to her children’s problems, she has enough of her own. There’s the shame of having to go back to her old office job at Gibney’s, under the supervision of a woman she once behaved snobbishly towards. As is common in many British novels, there are subtle class distinctions to where people work, what they wear, even how they do their hair. Everyone stares at Nora and thinks she’s putting on a younger woman’s airs when she dyes her hair to cover the gray. I thought of Nora as a bit like a female Stoner, meandering through a world that seems to be against her. In two excruciating (but very well written) scenes, others set her up for failure – distracting her while she’s computing pages of figures, or confusing her with a new piano arrangement so she doesn’t know when to start singing. “You’ve left it too late,” her voice teacher tells her; that bitter aura of defeat hangs over the novel, as does the background rumble of the Troubles. In some ways Nora is a memorable, even a formidable, figure. In one of the most striking scenes of the novel, she visits Conor’s school principal to protest at the boy being relegated to a lower class. She threatens the man – “You will be hearing from me…And you will find that when I am crossed I am very formidable” – and very nearly follows through on her promise to picket outside the school, until the other teachers convince the principal to relent. Tóibín’s writing is unfailingly serene and precise, especially when describing Nora’s internal monologue: “So this was what being alone was like, she thought. It was not the solitude she had been going through, nor the moments when she felt his death like a shock to her system, as though she had been in a car accident, it was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.” Yet Nora’s story is so circumscribed that it should only have been a novella. At 373 pages, it feels dragged out, with minor incidents piling up just to fill space. Like Arnold Toynbee once said about history, the plot sometimes feels like just one damn thing after another. Nora visits her sister, a rich and snobby farmer’s wife; she keeps score for a village quiz; Fiona borrows money to buy new clothes in London; Nora goes on vacation to Spain with her aunt Josie; Donal goes to boarding school and has trouble fitting in; Nora embarks on house renovations and decides to paint the ceiling herself; and so on. Some of these events, separately, might make for a fine short story, but all together they just feel like a boring litany of everyday life. Sometimes this even plays out at the sentence level: She made herself a cup of tea and came and sat in the armchair beside the fire. She turned on the radio but they were reading sports results and she turned it off. On going upstairs, she found that the boys were sound asleep and she stood watching them before closing the door and leaving them to the night. Downstairs, she wondered if there might be something interesting on the television. She went over and turned it on and waited for the picture to appear. How would she fill these hours? Clearly, the repetitive sentence structure is deliberate, a way of expressing – visually and sonically – the tedium of Nora’s days. But it can be equally tedious to read. Nora Webster is such a determinedly realist novel that there is something very strange about the late scene when Nora hallucinates that she sees her dead husband in her room. Although she’s taking both painkillers and sleeping pills at the time, it still seems an unusual and rather out-of-character incident. As the novel ends, Aunt Josie and the rest of the family perform an intervention of sorts to pull Nora out of her grief. It is 1972; Maurice has now been dead three years. They convince her it’s time to get rid of his clothes, and she independently decides to burn his letters – again, strangely unsentimental of her, but it’s a powerful symbol of relinquishing her firmly held, daily grief. Tóibín has written (for instance, in this Guardian article) that his widowed mother’s grief was the inspiration for Nora Webster. It is a very personal novel for him, then, perhaps with autobiographical touches that most readers won’t recognize. The novel takes place between 1969 and 1972, but it is only possible to determine the time period through small clues, such as Donal’s obsession with television footage of the Moon landing, and an upcoming choir recital of German music to commemorate 25 years since liberation from the Nazis. Apart from these tiny shreds of evidence, the book feels like a timeless evocation of grief. With thanks to Maya Lang, and Kara Watson of Scribner, for arranging my free review copy. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 21, 2014
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Oct 03, 2014
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Aug 07, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1476786569
| 9781476786568
| 1476786569
| 3.46
| 3,248
| Jan 06, 2015
| Jan 06, 2015
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really liked it
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Twelve of the 13 stories in this collection take up the lives of historical women who are either virtually unknown or only known through association w
Twelve of the 13 stories in this collection take up the lives of historical women who are either virtually unknown or only known through association with more famous figures. As Bergman puts it in her author’s note, the stories “are born of fascination with real women whose remarkable lives were reduced to footnotes.” Some of our ‘almost famous’ heroines are Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Allegra; Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dolly; Edna St. Vincent Millay’s acting sister, Norma; and James Joyce’s unstable dancer daughter, Lucia. There are also historical figures you may have heard of but likely know little about: painter Romaine Brooks, actress Butterfly McQueen (one of the maids in Gone With the Wind), and early aviatrix Beryl Markham. There is such variety in this baker’s dozen of stories: they are split almost equally between the past and present tense, and between first- and third-person perspectives, although the latter wins out a bit more often. Two stories even use the first-person plural, a viewpoint of which I’m particularly fond. “The Internees” is a story in miniature, just one and a half pages, depicting the female residents of Bergen-Belsen in 1945. When liberation comes and they are able to wear lipstick again, it restores their identity: “We were human again. We were women.” This perspective also has an intriguing use in the first story, “The Pretty, Grown-Together Children,” about conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Although Daisy is the chief narrator, she sometimes lapses into first-person plural: “We were somewhere between singular and plural.” If the Hilton twins were beyond the pale because of their physical uniqueness, other heroines are so because of their sexuality. For instance, “The Siege at Whale Cay” is about Marlene Dietrich’s visit to lesbian couple Georgie and Joe – M. B. “Joe” Carstairs, a larger-than-life heiress who owned a Caribbean island and held sway over the locals. Dolly Wilde was also a lesbian; in two subtle connections with previous stories, she once shared a lover of Romaine Brooks’s, and corresponded with Joe Carstairs (both were ambulance drivers during World War I). The main characters of the final story, “Hell-Diving Women,” are doubly unconventional: black and lesbian, they were members of the first integrated female swing band. Whether they break racial or sexual taboos or (like Romaine) are so old the world no longer remembers them, all of these women are outsiders. Yet they are such vibrant individuals they simply cannot blend into the crowd; “You don’t have the luxury of being mediocre,” the Millay girls’ mother chides them. Most of the stories are set in the 1910s-40s, but a couple of notable ones break that mold. “The Autobiography of Allegra Byron,” narrated by the little girl’s nurse at the Italian convent where she lived the last two years of her short life, is set in the 1820s. “The Lottery, Redux” is set in an unspecified near future and has dystopian elements. It’s the odd one out in that it does not contain any historical figures. Rather, it is inspired by Shirley Jackson’s most famous short story. A second generation of exiles on the island of Timothy, banished for “environmental crimes,” must reduce their population one by one through a ritualized ceremony. My favorite story of all is “Saving Butterfly McQueen.” The narrator, Elizabeth, is about to cut into a cadaver as part of her medical training in Baltimore. Suddenly her mind jumps back to the moment when, as a teen on a door-to-door evangelism mission in Georgia, she met Butterfly McQueen on her doorstep. McQueen was an avowed atheist and told Elizabeth not to waste her time; she was going to be donating her body to science. Especially when Elizabeth’s mother became ill with cancer, she came to realize how, for McQueen, dedicating her body to research “was about taking control of the thing that was undeniably hers.” Although the framework is fictional, McQueen’s story is historical. It reminded me of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, one of my favorite recent books. Indeed, many of these stories could lead readers directly into longer works. Here are a few of my related recommendations: If you like “The Siege at Whale Cay,” try Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood and The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. If you like “Hazel Eaton and the Wall of Death,” try The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. If you like “The Autobiography of Allegra Byron,” try Juliet’s Nurse by Lois Leveen. If you like “A High-Grade Bitch Sits Down for Lunch,” try Circling the Sun by Paula McLain. If you like “The Lottery, Redux,” try Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell. This is a rich, wonderful collection. If I have one point of criticism, it is that the shorter stories (several in the range of 3–5 pages) don’t add much to the whole. The in-depth character analysis you get in the longer stories is where Bergman shines. I can see this book fulfilling a dual gateway function: inviting those who normally read non-fiction, especially biographies, to attempt some fiction; and luring historical fiction lovers to give both short stories and non-fiction a chance. Bergman’s author’s note gives her sources and initial inspirations for each of the stories, so readers can follow up on anything of particular interest. As the narrator of “Who Killed Dolly Wilde?” muses, “Maybe the world had been bad to its great and unusual women. Maybe there wasn’t a worthy place for the female hero to live out her golden years, to be celebrated as the men had.” That is, until Bergman’s terrific book gave these almost famous women the perfect showcase. With thanks to Maya Lang, and Kara Watson of Scribner, for arranging my free review copy. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 19, 2014
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Nov 07, 2014
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Aug 06, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0349004404
| 9780349004402
| B00GFHFYYY
| 3.05
| 5,580
| Jul 01, 2014
| Jul 03, 2014
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really liked it
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(3.5) This seems like a young woman’s book (you can’t avoid comparisons with Lena Dunham’s HBO hit, Girls), but anyone can relate to themes of failure
(3.5) This seems like a young woman’s book (you can’t avoid comparisons with Lena Dunham’s HBO hit, Girls), but anyone can relate to themes of failure and disillusionment. It’s not your average chick lit. Full review, originally posted at Bookkaholic: For your summer reading pleasure, here’s a perfect book to take to the beach, on the train, or to the doctor’s office. It’s just right if you’re a 30-year-old woman, like me and like Gould’s main characters, or if you’re facing first-time motherhood; it’ll be an equally apt choice if you’re broke and questioning your career path, or if you’re unsure of what life is going to bring next and what your purpose in the world might be. In other words, although this seems like a young woman’s book, skirting the edges of the chick lit camp, I’d argue that the bittersweet tone and sly sense of humor will ring true for most people. Still, the comparisons with Lena Dunham’s HBO hit, Girls, are both inescapable and accurate. However, you might think of Friendship as giving a picture of those characters five to ten years on. Best friends Bev and Amy are pushing 30 and have failed to achieve the professional and romantic success New York City seemed to promise back in their early twenties when, fresh-faced, they set off from home looking for adventure. When Bev Tunney left Minnesota, her dream was to become a writer, but now, recovering from a disastrous relationship, she has deferred her MFA program and temps for agencies instead. It was as a temp for a publishing company, in fact, that she met Amy Schein, a Jewish princess from suburban Maryland. Amy (who is pretty obviously a stand-in for Gould here) was an online gossip columnist before moving to Yidster, a pop culture website designed to appeal to young, hip Jews in the City. Anyone who has ever worked a mindless job will recognize Amy’s “sense of great urgency – not because she was eager to get to work, but because she was eager to get through her fifteen minutes of work and then get on with her life.” One day, unable to face another day of composing moronic ‘Yid Vids,’ she quits. Unfortunately, this means that she is unemployed just when her artist boyfriend is leaving for Spain and her landlord decides to raise the rent. “She still couldn’t quite believe that this was where she’d ended up.” I could relate to these two penniless, disillusioned friends’ feelings of envy and incomprehension when faced with “people who seem to know what their spot in the world is and inhabit it comfortably.” Two such people are Sally and Jason, a married couple for whom Bev and Amy housesit one weekend. They’re only about ten years older, but they seem to have it all together: a gorgeous home out in the countryside, successful artistic careers, and money to show for it. For Bev and Amy, it’s a glimpse of everything they think they will never attain. Except Sally and Jason’s relationship is not as perfect as it appears. Their lives become intertwined with Bev and Amy’s in rather strange ways. I won’t give too much away, except to say that the Sally and Jason subplot, to me, felt formulaic and unnecessary. The book can lose its way a bit when the two main characters are apart: a long flashback to Bev’s attempt to live with boyfriend Todd in Madison, Wisconsin is tedious; and Amy’s return to Maryland hampers the pace. I liked it best when the BFFs were together (either in real life or online) and trading banter. Although I was slightly annoyed by all the instances of “dude” and “um” in their speech, it does sound authentic and natural. Their language also points to the fact that, at age 30, they’re still acting like they’re in their early twenties. It’s a mark of arrested development in these ‘starter lives’ of theirs: they’re still missing out on those traditional badges of maturity people their age are meant to have earned, namely stable salaries and relationships. Really, what Gould does best, and what I wanted more of, was simply what the title suggests. The friendship between Bev and Amy is the bedrock, but can sometimes get lost in the workings of the plot. Here are two people who can be completely honest with each other; “they were allies in a world full of idiots and enemies.” When Bev learns she is pregnant from a one-night stand, Amy starts to withdraw from her, and other friendships spring up to threaten the primacy of their own. There’s Bev’s odd relationship with Sally, plus Amy’s ex-colleague Jackie (“it was refreshing to be around someone who, for whatever misguided reason, admired her and wanted her approval”) and Allie, Bev’s college acquaintance. So what constitutes a friendship? In one of my favorite passages, Bev says to Amy, “I don’t want money. Well, not from you. I want you to think about me. Call me, text me. Be curious about what’s going on with me, not just use me to unload all your bad feelings, like I’m your therapist. I need you to care about me, not resent me.” (Take that as a cue to rethink what you’ve been using some of your own friendships for!) Especially in the post-college years, when we aren’t often thrown into situations in which relationships naturally develop, it can be easy to think of friendship as a bonus, a luxury, rather than a necessity. “I already have loads of ‘friends’ on Facebook,” you might think. “Why would I need any more?” But this novel reminded me of a few things: life is hard, or at least pointless-seeming at times, and we all need a little support. Real, intimate friendships are so rare that they must be nurtured and prized. Gould is known as a tell-all blogger; she was a former co-editor of Gawker.com gossip website and published an autobiographical essay collection, And the Heart Says Whatever, in 2010. Co-owner of independent e-bookstore Emily Books, Gould is from suburban Maryland (she and I have remarkably similar hometowns and birthdays) and now lives in Brooklyn. Friendship is her first work of fiction, and in some ways it shows. But I suspect that if you can tolerate a bit of froth both on your cappuccino and in your summer reading, you’ll ♥ this book. Read-alike: It was first published 23 years before, but Ann Hood’s Something Blue has a remarkably similar storyline and friendship theme. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 25, 2014
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Jul 18, 2014
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May 28, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 055341853X
| 9780553418538
| 3.07
| 1,789
| May 27, 2014
| Mar 31, 2015
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liked it
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The World Before Us is like a cross between A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze. I was drawn to the Victorian setting and th
The World Before Us is like a cross between A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze. I was drawn to the Victorian setting and the dual story line, contrasting the mysteries of an 1870s mental asylum and manor house with the discoveries a museum employee makes in the present day. The interplay of past and present is intriguing, but there is a lot of superfluous detail and the experimental narration is off-putting. Ultimately, I was disappointed with what I hoped would become a new favorite Victorian pastiche. Main character Jane Standen works at the fictional Chester Museum in London (perhaps based on a Victorian collection like Sir John Soane’s). Alas, the museum is closing down in two weeks, so Jane and her colleagues spend their time boxing the treasures up and preparing to move on. Jane “is a good archivist, has a willingness to navigate history, to consider its blank pages. But history is tricky. Jane thinks it is a buffer, a static place that sits obediently between now and then...History is shifty; it looks out for itself, moves when you least expect it.” This is certainly true of Whitmore Hospital and Inglewood House, two Yorkshire landmarks she researched for her graduate degree. Both places still haunt her, almost literally. You see, Jane has a dark secret: about 20 years ago, she babysat for Lily, the five-year-old daughter of celebrated botanist William Eliot. Only 15 at the time, Jane was half in love with Eliot, but the tie between them was severed when Lily went missing at a Yorkshire grotto while she was under Jane’s care. The little girl was never found. Now, as the Chester enters its last week in existence, Jane runs into Eliot again: he’s giving a keynote lecture after winning the Chesterwood book prize (modeled after the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction) for his survey of Victorian plant hunters, The Lost Gardens of England. Jane isn’t sure what to expect from this meeting, but she never guesses Eliot will not even recognize her. Furious that he could forget her when Lily’s disappearance is the defining moment of her life, she slaps him and quickly leaves. Dropping her cell phone back home and picking up her dog and some clothes, she leaves London for Yorkshire. Here she registers at a B&B under a fake name so she can continue her research on the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics and poke around Inglewood House, currently undergoing restoration. All through, Hunter has been interweaving sections describing events linking the Whitmore and Inglewood in the 1870s. Indeed, the novel opens with a visit a few of the inmates – Leeson, Herschel, and a mysterious female referred to as ‘N’ – pay to George Farrington’s manor house, documented by a chiding letter he sent to the caretakers. The peek into a Victorian asylum is eye-opening; some of the patients sound distressingly normal, like “Eliza Woodward, 22,” whose symptomatic activities include: “Disobeys her father. Invents mischief...Will go out without a bonnet...Has fits of laughing, crying and kissing people.” There are other historical connections. For instance, Edmund Chester, the museum founder, makes a brief appearance, and his wife Charlotte is having an affair with Farrington’s brother, Norvill. Norvill gets caught up in a shooting accident involving one of the asylum inmates, and the one witness, ‘N,’ a servant girl, is sent away to secure a cover-up. This all happens very near to the grotto where Lily Eliot disappears a century or so later. As Jane continues her research into what happened at the Whitmore, using her false name to gain access to Inglewood and taking up with Blake, a 19-year-old builder, she circles closer to answers about what happened in the 1870s, but no nearer to an understanding of her own loss. The historical encounter that inspired the novel is based on a real event: inmates from Witley Hospital, where poet John Clare was a patient, turned up at Alfred Tennyson’s house in October 1877 (an element of The Quickening Maze). Around the poles of two girls’ disappearances some 100 years apart, the novel explores loss and the sometimes treacherous workings of memory. The problem is that the novel never really goes anywhere or makes any great revelations. We learn who N is but it doesn’t seem to matter; we get the full story about Lily’s disappearance but that doesn’t seem to explain Jane any better. There is no resolution to the William Eliot debacle, and consequently no clue to how Jane will go on with her life. Also problematic is that the novel is narrated in the first-person plural, a perspective I often enjoy but here found distracting. “Memory being what it is, we sometimes remember backwards, or sideways, or inside out,” remark the Whitmore ghosts, known by their identities in life, such as “the theologian,” “the idiot,” “the girl,” and so on. They bicker among themselves and report their observations on Jane’s behavior. In some caves in the French Dordogne, a guide said to Jane, “You were surrounded this whole time” by bison cave paintings, and the same is true for the spirits. Though there is something deliciously creepy about that statement, the overall effect of the point-of-view is to create distance from Jane. I would have liked more scenes to be set at the Chester Museum, or in the archives in Yorkshire. Byatt’s Possession masterfully links past and present, but Hunter doesn’t quite get the balance right here. There is far too much detail about the Victorian locations, most of it superfluous to the storyline, and the lack of resolution in the present-day plot is frustrating. It’s the Canadian author’s second novel, but this felt to me very much like a debut, with the first-person plural narration marking a consciously ‘literary’ tactic that backfires. Still, for a lover of all things Victorian, it is pleasant to spend a bit of time in 1870s Yorkshire. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
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1
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Jan 04, 2015
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Jan 28, 2015
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May 28, 2014
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ebook
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| 3.68
| 300
| Jan 01, 2014
| Feb 10, 2014
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really liked it
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In brief: Nine linked stories focus on the life of Miriam Batson, a writer and adjunct professor at a Minnesota college. Now in her late forties, Miri
In brief: Nine linked stories focus on the life of Miriam Batson, a writer and adjunct professor at a Minnesota college. Now in her late forties, Miriam faces the challenge of caring for her aging mother. Indeed, several of the stories are inspired by Alden’s experience as a caregiver for her late mother, who suffered from dementia. The close third-person perspective creates intimate knowledge of the main character and encourages sympathy for her professional and personal struggles. “Sorrow,” recalling Miriam’s upbringing in South Carolina, is reminiscent of The Help, while “The Student” and “Enormously Valuable,” with their college English department setting, recall John Williams’s classic, Stoner. Full review, originally posted at Bookkaholic: Miriam Batson, the protagonist of these nine short stories, first appeared in Paulette Alden’s previous collection, Feeding the Eagles (1988). Like Alden herself, Miriam is a writer and sometime college professor based in Minnesota. Although it is intriguing to ponder how autobiographical these stories might be, ultimately it makes little difference to a reader’s enjoyment. The close third-person perspective creates such intimate knowledge of the main character that one cannot help but feel sympathy for her professional and personal struggles. The opening story, “The Student,” is among the strongest. Miriam learns that Brian, one of the students in her advanced short story class, has attempted suicide – in three different ways. Horror cedes to compassion as she realizes how he must have been suffering, even while keeping up a cheerful exterior in class. As she visits Brian in the hospital during his recovery, Miriam is taken aback by her feelings for him. Hesitant to borrow spiritual language, she still senses that she and Brian have a soul connection. At the same time, she realizes that no relationship is entirely one thing or another; their teacher-student dynamic may resemble a parent-child link, but sex keeps creeping in unexpectedly. This story, which reminded me of “Rising Tide” from Elizabeth Spencer’s recent collection, Starting Over, beautifully illustrates the often surprising bonds that can form across age, gender, and class boundaries. In “Sorrow,” told in the present tense, Miriam learns of the death of one of her black nannies and returns to South Carolina to pay her respects. Filled with memories of segregation, this story shares the social conscience of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. “Enormously Valuable” returns to the first story’s academic setting, with Miriam receiving notification that someone else – a less experienced man – has gotten the teaching job she applied for. She decides to take legal advice to determine whether this is a case of sex discrimination. This story tips over into melodrama slightly, but is still an affecting look at career disappointment. The themes of bureaucracy and petty infighting in a university English department recall John Williams’s Stoner. “Swimming, Snow” was commissioned as the Minnesota Center for Book Arts’ 1993 Winter Book. Miriam slowly starts to heal after her father’s death, thanks to the therapeutic effects of activities like massage, classical music, and sex. This one is a perfect segue into the collection’s last five stories, which together reflect on Alden’s experiences as a caregiver during her mother’s final years with dementia. “Her Mother’s Pocketbook” begins with Miriam moving her 85-year-old mother from South Carolina to a Minnesota senior’s apartment. “In many ways, her once-formidable mother is helpless.” Five months later, she has to be moved again, this time to a nursing home – the subject of both “Not Ready” and “Home.” Miriam’s mother is losing her mental capacities and physical independence, yet she remains opinionated and strong-willed; “What a mix of powerlessness and willfulness, of meekness and feistiness she was.” Miriam soon has to face previously unimaginable tasks, such as administering an enema to her own mother. She “felt a kind of wrenching compassion, not exactly for her mother, but for flesh, this mortal flesh.” Alden gives a powerful sense of how repetitive and unpleasant many of the caregiver’s chores can become; Miriam “got so sick of her mother, her need, she could die or scream.” Some of these stories repeat basic information, probably a result of them starting as separate tales. However, they might have been edited to cut redundant details, or even combined into a multi-part novella. In “Lost Lake,” set a year after the move to the nursing home, Miriam and her husband take a chance on a two-night lake lodge vacation with her mother, but after one sleepless night they decide to give up and leave early. It is a bittersweet account of facing up to reality and accepting limitations, but also of deepening compassion. Miriam can now better understand how frightening dementia must be for her mother: she “couldn’t imagine what that was like—each moment new, maybe scary, nothing familiar.” The title story, the last in the collection, does indeed have a stand-alone feel, combining all the emotions of the previous four into the most shrewdly crafted of the tales, rich with symbolism. It opens with Miriam driving to a monastery for a writing retreat. Although it is April, it is snowing, and Nat King Cole’s song “Unforgettable” is on the radio. Ironically, that title is also the name given to her mother’s nursing home’s remodeling campaign. Miriam has been taking beginner’s Italian lessons; her bewilderment is an echo of her mother’s confusion about language. In addition, Easter is coming up the following week, and the symbology of death and restoration plays a significant role. Miriam can no longer deny that her mother will be dead soon, yet she feels that she will live on – perhaps even through Miriam’s work: “Writing is her religion, her resurrection. Long after her mother is gone, she will have this moment. Her mother will rise from the dead and live again in those words.” As in Susan Allen Toth’s No Saints around Here, Alden tenderly conveys the overwhelming difficulties and small joys of being the primary caregiver for a loved one with serious health problems. She is unflinchingly realistic but not humorless in the face of impending death. You do not have to share any of Miriam’s experiences to value her insight and admire her courage. I daresay every reader will find at least one aspect of these stories to be, as the title suggests, simply unforgettable. With thanks to the author for sending an electronic version of the book. I was provided with a free copy in exchange for my honest review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2014
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Jun 15, 2014
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May 14, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 1627790071
| 9781627790079
| 1627790071
| 3.45
| 667
| May 13, 2014
| May 13, 2014
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really liked it
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In brief: A collection of nine linked short stories about family, music, medicine, and the legacy of Stalinist oppression. Most are set in the northea
In brief: A collection of nine linked short stories about family, music, medicine, and the legacy of Stalinist oppression. Most are set in the northeastern Russian town of Magadan, though America often provides a useful counterbalance. Several stories focus on three female generations of one family, and it is a pleasure to spot the threads joining the narratives. Russian music, proverbs, and foodstuffs abound, and you can feel the bleak cold. Meanwhile, the theme of finding happiness by carving a logical narrative out of the chaos of life should resonate with any reader. Full review, originally posted at Bookkaholic: Kseniya Melnik grew up in Magadan, Russia but moved to Alaska at age 15. In her debut short story collection, she reflects on the past half-century of Russian history through the experiences of ordinary people coping with family and marital strife, medical trauma, and crises of meaning. “Magadan was famous for having been the center of the cruelest of Stalin’s camps...the most remote island in the notorious Gulag Archipelago,” Melnik writes. The town is thus not only of personal significance, but also a metaphorical tie to wartime tragedies. Chronologically the first story, “Strawberry Lipstick” is set in 1958 and finds Olya both jilted in love and rejected by her chosen college. She settles for Alek and follows him into military barracks, but soon realizes she’s made a mistake when he starts gambling their money away. Olya bitterly recalls her sister’s wry proverbs: “Bride has an axe, groom is barefoot” and “A bad husband’s wife is always an idiot.” When Alek’s behavior turns violent, she escapes along with their daughter, Marina, and trains as a doctor in another town – thus paving the way for more stories featuring her descendants. Indeed, eagle-eyed readers will remember a character named Marina in the second story, “Closed Fracture.” Tolik, retired to California after years working as an aviation engineer in Anchorage, gets a phone call from childhood friend Tolyan, who still lives in Magadan. This unexpected voice from his past prompts him to recall his years in Russia: the skiing accident that left him with a bad leg; meeting his wife Marina at a Black Sea sanatorium; and his and Tolyan’s diverging experiences of marriage and fatherhood. Looking back, Tolik isn’t always sure he’s made the right decisions – “But only in solitary confinement does memory become a merciless editor, cutting a bearable story out of the ever-accumulating mess of days.” Five of Melnik’s stories are modified coming-of-age narratives set in the 1990s. Music is a frequently recurring element in these near-past tales. In “The Uncatchable Avengers,” the pupils of Magadan Children’s MusicSchool #1 put on a televised Tchaikovsky festival. One of the amateur pianists, Dima, finally gets through his piece on the fourth attempt – after some excruciating flubs reminiscent of the childhood performance memory in Richard Powers’s recent music-themed novel, Orfeo. Dima shares a piano teacher with Tolik and Marina’s daughter, Sonya, who appears in two of the later stories. Sonya narrates “Summer Medicine,” set in 1993 during a stay at her grandmother Olya’s clinic. Longing to be a doctor herself, Sonya follows the staff around and makes up some peculiar ailments of her own. The hospital setting and precocious protagonist reminded me of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, another wonderful debut with an Eastern European setting. In “Our Upstairs Neighbor,” the (somewhat over-long) last story, Sonya is disappointed when legendary singer Vadim Makin fails to show up for his ninetieth birthday tribute concert. Instead, her grandfather, Deda Misha, recounts Makin’s unusual life story for her. Makin, a closeted homosexual who spent time as a prisoner, had been his upstairs neighbor in Magadan. Music serving as a tonic for heartache links this story to “Rumba,” in which a middle-aged dance instructor falls for one of his young students. The latter story’s bittersweet tone reminded me of Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me, a novel of love and disappointment in the world of professional ballet. “Kruchina,” the next-to-last story, also dwells on this uneasy balance between music and sadness. Masha is visiting her daughter Sveta, a Russian mail-order bride, in her new home in Fargo, where she and her daughter Katya have joined Brian and Brittny to create a new, blended family. Masha begs Katya to perform a song with her at their green card celebration party: a somber folk tune called “Kruchina,” an archaic word for grief – “the existential sorrow about a woman’s lot.” This story is, to me, the most successful juxtaposition of Russia and America, and the clearest exploration of the immigrant’s emotional impasse: “The longer I am away from Russia, the more surreal it all seems,” Sveta says. “You’re a different kind, Katya,” Masha observes. “You live in two worlds. Imagine, each foot standing on a globe beach ball.” The two stand-out stories for me are, in some ways, the least representative ones. “The Witch,” set in 1989, is narrated by Alina, whose mother and grandmother take her to a traditional healer for her migraines. Alina makes believe that she is entering a fairy tale, with the medicine woman taking on the role of Baba Yaga, the witch in a forest cottage. Her imagination contrasts beautifully with the darker reality of the headaches – and possible Chernobyl fallout. My favorite story of all, though, is “Love, Italian Style, or in Line for Bananas.” It is 1975 and Tanya is flying from Magadan to Moscow for a major shopping trip. In a time of shortages, she needs to stockpile food and clothing for her husband and sons. On the plane, Tanya is propositioned by a player from the Italian soccer team, who invites her to meet him at his Moscow hotel at 8 pm. All day, as Tanya gathers supplies and chats with Auntie Roza and her apartment mates, she’s pondering the offer. “Remember that the State disapproves of intermingling with foreigners,” one nosy neighbor warns. Should she take the chance on a fantasy romance? Tanya sets off for the hotel but stops short when she sees a street seller with crates of bananas. Her sons have never tasted the fruit before, and she loves the thought of treating them to an exotic delicacy. Will she have time to wait in line for the bananas and still meet her would-be Latin lover? Like one of E.M. Forster’s Italian-set novels (Where Angels Fear to Tread or A Room with a View), this story pivots on the disparity between Italy, with its hot-blooded passion, and the stoic reality of Soviet existence. In the end she doesn’t get either thing she wished for, but realizes she’s content with what she already has – a message that echoes the wisdom of a classic O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi.” Melnik brings Soviet Russia to life with a wealth of vivid detail: “hoar-frosted leaves falling with a jingle” in winter; crowded communal apartment buildings; shared experiences of privation and pain. Yet there is also something tender in her depictions of the place and its people; she lovingly weaves in proverbs, songs, and Russian vocabulary. Food is another prime trigger of memories: “The snow smelled like freshly cut cucumbers,” Deda Misha is “full of stories, like a barrel full of pickled cabbage,” and Auntie Roza serves Tanya “the perfect nostalgic borsch.” I highly recommend these short stories; read them this May (perhaps as a pairing with Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart’s delightful memoir of growing up in Russia in the 1970s), and then keep an eye out for what this very talented young author comes up with next. (With thanks to Caroline Nitz of Henry Holt for sending a copy of the novel; I was provided with a free ARC in exchange for my honest review.) ...more |
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May 08, 2014
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May 11, 2014
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May 08, 2014
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| 1935639625
| 9781935639626
| 1935639625
| 3.49
| 1,838
| Aug 06, 2013
| Aug 06, 2013
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John Irving is among the many big names who have praised Pamela Erens’s latest, an emotionally complex and darkly gripping love story set among teenag
John Irving is among the many big names who have praised Pamela Erens’s latest, an emotionally complex and darkly gripping love story set among teenagers at an exclusive New England boarding school. As the novel opens in 1979, sixteen-year-old Aviva Rossner has just made her way from Chicago to New Hampshire to begin her junior year at Auburn Academy. Her parents are getting a divorce, and her sense of confusion and dislocation prompts her to start changing her image. No longer just some mousy Jewish girl, she picks up a reputation as ‘easy,’ especially when she starts hanging around with Seung Jung. Seung is the son of very demanding Korean parents, and although he is popular at school and a successful swimmer, he constantly struggles to meet their expectations. It soon becomes clear that Aviva and Seung’s is an ill-fated, Romeo and Juliet kind of love. All their classmates assume they’re having sex all the time, but that isn’t true. Though these two are desperate to lose their virginity to each other, it never quite seems to happen for them. Perhaps what is most unique about the novel is that it is not written from Aviva or Seung’s perspective, or told by a third-person omniscient narrator. In fact, it is narrated in the first person by Bruce Bennett-Jones, an amateur dramatics enthusiast who has been obsessed with Aviva since he kissed her on the day she arrived at Auburn. The first line of the novel suggests that it might be, like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, a case of the intriguing first-person plural: “We sit on the benches and watch the buses unload.” Maybe this will be, like Eugenides’s novel, a collective, retrospective look at doomed teenagers, I thought. But as the first chapter continues, readers learn that this is really Bruce’s story, and he is in careful control. It is impossible to forget that this is a voyeur’s tale, pieced together from what little Bruce has observed and heard. “Let me re-create her journey,” he says coyly before recounting Aviva’s long trip out to Auburn. Later he sets up her first encounter with Seung by proposing “They meet in music theory. Let’s say that. [...] I’m convinced that she made the first move.” Reminders of how this narrative has been deliberately constructed, and based on limited evidence, are frequent. Although Bruce is an entirely unreliable narrator, his account is all we have, and Erens’s writing is so good that it’s usually possible to overlook the framework and just get lost in the story, accepting it all at face value. What is more difficult to accept, however, is that Bruce would be privy to the details of Aviva and Seung’s love life – described here in surprisingly explicit, erotic language. I found myself feeling uncomfortable every time I remembered these characters are only 16 or 17 years old. They may struggle with sex itself, but the tender intimacy between them is somewhat shocking. Again, though, remember that this is all Bruce’s fantasy, overlaid on his acquaintances to suit his own purposes: that creepy edge of manipulation and almost pornographic imagining can be unnerving. As the students plan their future after Auburn and deal with family breakups and romantic disillusionment, Bruce has one last chance to see if he can do more than just record events. Might he be able to change the course of the future for Aviva and Seung? The Virgins doesn’t shy away from some unpleasant realities. It may be about teenagers, but I sense that it’s not really geared towards YA readers. The characters may seem immature at times, but they are dealing with tough issues like sexual dysfunction, drug abuse, domestic violence, and mental illness. (In this very melancholy book, I was most affected by the scene when Bruce’s friend Detweiler has a nervous breakdown and simply cannot face stepping outside the door of his dorm room.) I felt sad, even guilty, for these characters – they’re far too young to be faced with such experiences. Along with The Virgin Suicides (to which, with the similar title, time period, and setup, it must be at least a semi-conscious homage), The Virgins reminded me strongly of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals. All of these campus novels bear more than a slight air of menace. There is also a taste of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, a lighter, more gossipy boarding school novel that still touches on deep emotional issues. I’m not sure I completely enjoyed The Virgins – it was a bit too creepy and graphic for me to be able to say I actually liked it – but I admired Erens’s narrative strategy and her hard-hitting story of angsty teenage romance. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
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Jan 14, 2014
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| 0307962903
| 9780307962904
| 0307962903
| 3.62
| 19,199
| Jan 06, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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A convincing psychological study of the world of competitive ballet. A dancer mourns the death of her career and the end of a passionate love affair –
A convincing psychological study of the world of competitive ballet. A dancer mourns the death of her career and the end of a passionate love affair – but her dreams may live on through her talented son. Seating Arrangements was one of my favorite debut novels of 2012, so I jumped at the chance to read Maggie Shipstead’s new novel a few months before the official publication date of April 8th. It was rather a surprise to find that this one takes place in the high-stress world of professional ballet. I liked Black Swan about as much as the next person, but have no particular interest in dancing or competitive sports. Luckily, you don’t have to have any knowledge of or enthusiasm for ballet to enjoy Shipstead’s impressive psychological study of talent, betrayal, and parenthood over three decades. The novel opens in New York City in 1977, with Joan Joyce resigning herself to the end of her ballet career. Her mercurial lover, Arslan Rusakov, whom she helped defect from the Soviet Union to America during the height of the Cold War, is about to marry someone else, and a pregnant dancer can only blend into the background for so long. Luckily she has her affable college boyfriend, Jacob Bintz, to fall back on. Things get strange, though, when Joan and Jacob’s son Harry also develops an obsession with ballet – especially the work of Arslan Rusakov himself. Meanwhile, the lives of the Bintz family have become entwined with those of their southern California neighbors, Gary and Sandy Wheelock and their daughter Chloe. Gary and Sandy desperately want Chloe to be a high achiever, and with Jacob a gifted and talented program coordinator and Joan a sought-after ballet instructor, they think their daughter is in the right place to have her skills noticed. Both Harry and Chloe grow up bearing the weight of their parents’ expectations, struggling to enhance their innate talent through luck and hard work. A mutual love for ballet initially brings them together, but also threatens to drive them apart in the end. Shipstead’s every character is well-drawn, with a backstory and a plausible psychology. (I had a special fondness for Mr. K, a bisexual Russian ballet director dying of AIDS.) Shipstead moves deftly back and forth within her 30-year time span, between Joan’s early years as a dancer and tumultuous relationship with Arslan, and Harry’s budding career a quarter century later. She also shifts effortlessly between her characters’ perspectives (using the close third person) and between New York City, Paris, Russia, and southern California, all along questioning the ways in which history repeats itself. Especially in the cutthroat world of ballet, time is a limited commodity and talented dancers are cruelly cast aside even in the prime of life. They are only nearing age 30 when Joan’s best friend Elaine muses, “one day you realize you’re not getting better, only older.” Making the most of a second choice, or a second chance, is a theme that resonates with The Art of Fielding – another novel about professional sports and the disappointment of failure. And, like with baseball in Harbach’s novel, ballet is just the backdrop for a sophisticated study of modern life. As Harry notes in the last few pages, “dance is about age and also the contrast between the limitations of the body and the way love makes you…free.” I was somewhat disappointed to find humor (one of the key strengths of Seating Arrangements) mostly lacking here, and I wish I could have taken a more personal interest in the ballet material, but I would still make a case for Shipstead being one of the brightest rising talents in America. And since she’s just 30 years old now, she will only get better. Étonnez-moi, Diaghilev said to his Ballets Russes dancers: Astonish me. That search for the sublime amid the ordinariness of life – the desire to find art within the heartbreak – is one of Shipstead’s most enduring messages. I’m sure she’ll keep astonishing me with her wise and intricate novels for many years to come. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
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| 0816692866
| 9780816692866
| 0816692866
| 4.08
| 143
| Apr 01, 2014
| Apr 14, 2014
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really liked it
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A beloved memoirist chronicles the last 18 months of her husband’s life, as she and an army of caregivers coped with his decline from Parkinson’s dise
A beloved memoirist chronicles the last 18 months of her husband’s life, as she and an army of caregivers coped with his decline from Parkinson’s disease. I’m sure I must be one of Susan Allen Toth’s biggest fans. In the months before I first journeyed to England for my junior year abroad, I devoured her trilogy of travel books: My Love Affair with England, England as You Like It, and England for All Seasons. Later I learned that she was also the author of two memoirs about her growing-up years, Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood (about her childhood and adolescence in Iowa – and thus a great companion piece to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, who is also an inveterate Anglophile) and Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East, about her years at Smith College. Though we’re of different generations, I could relate to so much of Toth’s experience of life at a women’s college – especially the crushing disappointment of narrowly missing out on the summa cum laude degree class. I hadn’t heard anything from Toth in years, so I was surprised and delighted to come across a new book from her. There’s a sad story behind this one, though: Toth’s husband and long-time travel companion, architect James Stageberg, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the mid-1990s and had been in physical and mental decline ever since. This memoir is based on Toth’s journal entries from James’s last 18 months of life, before he died at the age of 85 in 2010. Toth initially wanted to replicate the diary entries exactly, with no editing or commentary, but changed her mind when she was finally strong enough to face reading them again. There was too much repetition, and she felt ashamed of her tone: constantly moaning about her lack of time and her distaste for some of the more unpleasant chores she had to undertake on a daily basis (brushing and flossing James’s teeth was her least favorite). In one sense, time was slipping away – it wouldn’t be long before she lost James forever – but in another, it felt like there was nothing but time, endless hours spent performing repetitive caregiving tasks. (She also avoided the guilty thought that, once James was gone, she would have all the time in the world to do whatever she wanted.) As the title suggests, Toth never considered herself a saint; because she “lived with constant interruptions,” she often responded with frustration when James tried walking downstairs without calling her, or when he complained of being bored with a DVD, or when he got her up from meals or her ritualized morning cups of tea a second or third time in a row. She didn’t exactly relish shopping for male incontinence pads, and hated having to call neighbors over in desperation when it took three people to hoist James up after a fall. Still, James and Toth were fortunate: they had the money to hire several nurses who would come and cover various shifts, including overnight, so Toth could sleep and run errands. James’s six children were often able and willing to help. Towards the end they had the opportunity to enroll James in a hospice scheme that included near-instant delivery of prescriptions. And, best of all, they were able to keep him at home throughout the whole ordeal, so he wouldn’t have to face death alone in a nursing home or hospital. Those were a few of the small mercies that kept Toth sane; some others were: friends who had been through the same experience and encouraged her to keep going, a new pair of jeans, a few colorful silk shirts purchased from eBay, and an obsession with the life and works of Johnny Cash. Sometimes she simply had to look after herself, with some tiny luxury making the difference between wallowing in self-pity and making it through the day feeling confident. She was even able to escape to her beloved London for nine days, after recruiting an army of caregivers and making a schedule marked by military precision. At other times, she survived by finding the humor in daily situations, like the time she broke off a phone conversation with a friend when she realized with alarm that James was napping on the porch with his head in the pansies, or when she took a toy stuffed sheep to her heart, only to discover it was actually a rabbit – henceforth known as “sheepit.” After all, she thought, if you didn’t laugh you’d cry. Toth gets the tone of this memoir just right: although she is honest, she is never melodramatic; although she often feels sorry for herself, she also recognizes how lucky she has been, not just to have done a good job of looking after James, but to have had him in her life at all. Theirs was a second marriage and James was 15 years her senior, so at some level she always knew that she could be a widow for many years – yet that was no damper on the years they did have together. Even when James was at his weakest, when the disease had reduced him to a mere shadow of his old self, the love they’d shared for decades still remained. Although I found this to be a beautiful and touching story, I did occasionally wonder what it could have been like if Toth had written the whole thing after the fact, rather than piecing it together from contemporaneous journal entries. It’s hard to say which approach would have been more successful. The journal entry format does have the advantage of making readers feel they are right there in the moment with Toth and James, but the lengthy introduction and a concluding chapter written a year after his death also introduces the perspective of hindsight. Toth went back and found the vows she had made to James on their wedding day. They concluded with, “I promise to abide with you in sickness and in health...In short, I will do the best I can” – and that is just what she did. No saints around here, just ordinary people doing their best to live up to the love they promised. Many thanks to the University of Minnesota Press for providing me with an advance reading copy via NetGalley. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
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Dec 13, 2013
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Dec 18, 2013
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Dec 13, 2013
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Paperback
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| 9781101630914
| 3.90
| 87
| Nov 12, 2013
| Nov 12, 2013
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Happy Thanksgiving! (Even though it’s just an ordinary Thursday here in the U.K.) This is a short (59-page), enlightening account of the Pilgrims’ set
Happy Thanksgiving! (Even though it’s just an ordinary Thursday here in the U.K.) This is a short (59-page), enlightening account of the Pilgrims’ settlement at Plymouth Rock and the uncertain days leading up to the first Thanksgiving. It’s always good to be reminded of the layers of complexity behind a simple story. Squanto, especially, was a more mysterious character than legend makes out. Philbrick writes gripping historical narratives, in clear and conversational prose. However, this is an excerpt from a longer work, so you might feel short on details and explanation (especially about some more minor characters). (See my full review at Bookkaholic.) For more Thanksgiving reading suggestions, see my blog post on the topic. [A couple of novels I would recommend on the theme of native-colonial friendship are Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks (about the first Native American to attend Harvard) and The Potter’s Hand by A.N. Wilson.] ...more |
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Nov 19, 2013
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Nov 19, 2013
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Nov 19, 2013
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ebook
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| 1908434295
| 9781908434296
| 1908434295
| 3.65
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| Feb 20, 2014
| Feb 20, 2014
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really liked it
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In a new Tess of the d’Urbervilles for our time, eighteen-year-old London stripper (and single mother) Hayleigh Weeks narrates one momentous week in h
In a new Tess of the d’Urbervilles for our time, eighteen-year-old London stripper (and single mother) Hayleigh Weeks narrates one momentous week in her life. An authentic teenage voice, intriguing use of second-person narration and a vivid (if sleazy) setting make it impossible not to feel sympathy for Hayleigh. Nina de la Mer is a Scottish novelist now based in Brighton, England. Her previous novel, 4 a.m. , about a pair of young British army chefs posted to Germany, was published in 2011. She earned praise for capturing the slang-filled voices of young men, especially the Scottish dialect of her character Cal, with such accuracy. The Glasgow Herald even called her a “female Irvine Welsh.” Her second book, Layla, is another triumph of voice, this time the simultaneously jaded and naïve Cockney talk of her main character, eighteen-year-old stripper Hayleigh Weeks. Hayleigh narrates one momentous week in her life in the second person (“you”), a fairly rare point-of-view that, along with her adoption of “Layla” as her stripper persona, is a signal of her dissociation from her experiences. The first line – “You blink. Once. Twice. Double blink.” – immediately reveals two essential aspects of the novel: Hayleigh’s desperation to distance herself from the mess her life has become, and her frequent instances of disorientation when, hungover or high, it takes her a few moments to wake up to reality. When Hayleigh comes to consciousness in these first sentences, she realizes she’s pole dancing at Elegance, the low-class lap dancing club where she works in London’s seedy Soho district. Like Hayleigh herself, we as readers are thrown right in at the deep end with this narrative: there is no preamble; the story begins in medias res, right in the middle of the action at the club. Only gradually do we learn of Hayleigh’s background: she has a little boy named Connor, living back with her mother in Brighton, and she is anxious to get back to him – as soon as she can save £10,000 to fund a new life. Hayleigh’s father is a double amputee after a warehouse accident; they communicate via text messages, often only through knock-knock jokes. Hayleigh has had three stepfathers already, although her mother is only 40. The insecurity of home life has followed her to London, where she lives with two prissy roommates who think she is a receptionist and croupier (that would explain working nights), and constantly nag her about paying the bills. They clearly look down on Hayleigh, objecting to her slutty clothing and crude speech. If not quite Cockney in origin, Hayleigh’s language still has working-class associations: her narrative is peppered with terms like “ain’t” and “you was,” and whenever a word is on the tip of her tongue she interjects “whatchamacallit?” Her colorful manner of speaking may reflect her class, but it also shows her sense of humor, as in “knowing which side your bread’s buttered, you channel meek and mild.” Even though Hayleigh chides herself with “you’re not much good at describing stuff,” the truth is that her speech is very evocative, even unmistakable – revealing her age, background, and outlook. It’s a sleazy world that Hayleigh has gotten herself caught up in. Most of her clients seem pretty harmless, especially middle-aged Colin, who only comes in to chat, but even Colin turns bad one day and attacks her. The bouncers throw him out, but he follows her home in a needy stalker sort of way, an episode that really shakes her up. Already on probation at the club, Hayleigh feels that Layla has to be the best if she is to compete with Sapphire and the other new surgically-enhanced girls at Elegance. She has saved £4,500 so far, but there is much more to be earned, if only she is willing to do what it takes. In London’s sordid underworld, pornography and outright prostitution aren’t as far away as she might think. Hayleigh often indulges in fantasy to escape the shame of her work. “You feel good. You’re a movie star swishing down the red carpet,” she thinks during the opening pole session, and when she settles down to give a customer a lap dance, she divulges that to get through it “Your eyes glaze over. And...your thoughts drift off to...Covent Garden, The Royal Opera House.” She hides the particularly painful incidents of her life, like leaving her son behind, under language that consciously echoes fairy tales: “Once upon a time there was a girl…she had a baby who she adored more than life itself, who was taken away from her.” By contrast, the sexual fantasies that a place like Elegance inspires contradict the uncomfortable reality of life. Behind the airbrushed sexual performance, no one could guess that Hayleigh is having an off week because she’s menstruating and has had a bad wax job – two facts that leave her reluctant to put her genitalia on show. “Like, don’t you ever feel...used?” she asks a friend and fellow stripper. It is impossible not to sympathize with Hayleigh’s feelings of shame and disappointment about what her life is become. Who could blame her for occasionally wallowing in self-pity? “Nobody’s expecting the violins to come out…but it’s got to you, it really has. You’re not made of stone, believe it or not...You want your baby back and it’s blinking well killing you!” De la Mer parcels out the gritty facts of Hayleigh’s circumstance in punchy daily chapters, interspersed with a record of her text messages and e-mails. The novel packs a lot into just eight days’ worth of events, including Hayleigh’s confusion over her sexuality. Nearly every day finds her waking up in some sort of daze: arriving back at her flat hungover after a night of clubbing, vaguely remembering drugs she took and anonymous strangers she slept with. Her emotions go in cycles of elation and despair, such that “you’re torn between right and wrong: the bitch on your shoulder” fighting for place with an angel on the other. That sense of having a divided self is clearest in the last few chapters of the novel, when Hayleigh begins switching between the first, second, and third person, getting confused about her true identity. “You are not a bad person. ‘I’m not a bad person,’ you say out loud,” and then to a stranger’s polite enquiry she replies, “Yes I’m fine, Layla’s – no, Hayleigh’s fine.” The genuine teenage voice de la Mer creates for Hayleigh is reminiscent of Jenni Fagan’s Panopticon and Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, while the raw facts of a stripper’s life recall Diablo Cody’s memoir, Candy Girl. It also seems likely that de la Mer chose second-person narration as a tribute to Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a 1984 cult classic about a young man’s drug-fueled wanderings in Manhattan. The hooker with a heart of gold may be something of a cliché in movies, but de la Mer has elevated Hayleigh’s story to something much more literary. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Layla is a new Tess of the d’Urbervilles for our time. Like Hardy’s heroine, Hayleigh is “a pure woman” caught up in desperate circumstances. Even if she hasn’t always made the right choices, she doesn’t deserve the horrible life that manipulative men have forced upon her. Her disastrous life course seems almost fated, in the tradition of classic literature stretching from Shakespeare through Hardy: “My God, what were you thinking? It was a diversion from the right track...it hasn’t escaped your notice what a disaster you’re becoming.” Whether or not Hayleigh will make it back to her symbolically-named Brighton neighborhood, “Peacehaven,” to be with Connor remains uncertain, but de la Mer closes with some lovely, optimistic imagery: “the train pulls out of the station, pitch-black in the tunnel at first, then a piercing blue light, a blue light filled with the brilliant hope of a summer’s evening.” A new voice, the first-person plural, comes in at the very last, as Hayleigh imagines a new life for her and her son; “Together, we’ll dance, we’ll fly.” ...more |
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Feb 06, 2014
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Feb 09, 2014
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Nov 01, 2013
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Paperback
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| 0241146224
| 9780241146224
| 0241146224
| 3.80
| 5,078
| Jan 30, 2014
| Jan 30, 2014
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liked it
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In short: Calcutta, 1837. Two very different East India Company officers are given a dangerous quest: to track down Xavier Mountstuart, the elusive, d
In short: Calcutta, 1837. Two very different East India Company officers are given a dangerous quest: to track down Xavier Mountstuart, the elusive, disgraced author. A fairly rip-roaring Victorian adventure story. Carter’s first novel opens in September 1837. The voice is that of William Avery, a young East India Company recruit from Devon, England. In between longing for his countryside home and deploring the heat and the seeming barbarity of Indian customs (“any honest Christian would want to pull [this temple] down and hang its priests...The place seemed to me heavy with evil, degradation and corruption,” he thinks), Avery finds plenty of time for reading. He loves Mr. Dickens’s brand new The Pickwick Papers, but his favorite author is Xavier Mountstuart, who writes both poetry and Indian adventure stories. “Mountstuart seemed to me the very acme of Byronic manhood,” Avery enthuses, and, indeed, this fictional author sounds something like a cross between Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling. With his pal Frank Macpherson, Avery forms a great pair of hapless Dickensian bachelors; the two remind me of Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, or Davy and Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield. But this particular friendship soon ends, and Avery finds himself taking on a strange new mission. He is asked to summon Jeremiah Blake, an older, jaded officer who seems to have gone rogue. Blake knows multiple Indian languages and even had an Indian wife – has he so gone native as to have lost all loyalty to the Company? Avery is to bring Blake back into service; together they are tasked with tracking down the missing Mountstuart, who has become persona non grata with the Company after his latest novel, a saucy roman à clef, revealed details of all the major scandals of Calcutta’s expatriate society. Readers’ memorable introduction to Blake is fantastically blunt: “F— off, lobster,” he grumbles at Avery – using a derogatory term that referred to the English soldiers’ bright red uniforms. In the course of their fraught journey, Avery and Blake learn more about the “Thugs,” a particular ethnic group of highwaymen, who were thought to accost foreign travelers and become friendly with them, then strangle them with red scarves and rob them before devoting their corpses to the goddess Kali. Mountstuart had been traveling north to research the Thugs when he disappeared. Fear of “Thuggee” was widespread in both India and England – and presumably explains the etymology of our modern word “thug,” meaning an unintelligent and menacing person. Back in England, intrigued readers devoured Confessions of a Thug, which Carter dubs “a now unreadable Gothic novel by Philip Meadows-Taylor,” as well as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. (Thugs might also have been an intended element in Dickens’s unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which features some Indian characters.) Blake and Avery begin to suspect there might be some sort of conspiracy afoot: it seems the English are deliberately encouraging, or even embroidering, the myth of the Thugs to maintain some order in the colony. When Blake and Avery finally meet up with Mountstuart, he is – inevitably, for an idol – not everything Avery expected. “You should know that your hero’s books are compendiums of fabrication and falsity,” Blake warns him. And Mountstuart himself is scatterbrained, haughty, and as bad an opium addict as Thomas de Quincey ever was. All the same, he is an engaging character and provides some comic relief in the book’s mid-section. I mustn’t reveal too much of the plot that follows – especially because Carter has already announced that a sequel, The Infidel Stain, is already in the pipeline, due in January 2015 (there was a taster of its first chapters at the end of my e-galley). However, I think it’s important to point out that there is too much dialogue, and far too many descriptive passages, for my liking. This means that the novel is slow to start and truly lags at some points thereafter. Only gradually does it become a fairly rip-roaring Victorian adventure story, in the vein of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. I did especially enjoy the fight scenes – though not one between Avery and a white tiger. Unfortunately, Carter’s writing doesn’t quite live up to the great historical material she had at her disposal. The Strangler Vine reminds me most of Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens, with which it shares some plot elements. I would rate Carter’s novel on a par with the latter or with Lynn Shepherd’s Victorian mystery, The Solitary House. Ultimately, I wondered if her book might not have worked better as a third-person omniscient tale. This could have made it even more of a genuine Victorian pastiche, and might have made the historical background information a more seamless part of the plot, rather than shoehorned in through what Avery is able to learn or observe. As it is, the glossary and author’s note at the end of the book are almost more interesting than the novel that went before. The Infidel Stain opens in London with a gruesome murder at a printing press, and then has Blake and Avery reuniting for another mission. I’m not sure I’ll keep up with their continuing story; I can only ever be bothered to read sequels when the characters are utterly irresistible, and I just didn’t find Carter’s Avery compelling enough as a narrator. (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 25, 2014
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Mar 02, 2014
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Oct 31, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 0547352204
| 9780547352206
| 0547352204
| 3.68
| 2,945
| Nov 05, 2013
| Nov 05, 2013
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it was amazing
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Here’s a book I wish I had written. “Waste not, want not” goes the aphorism, and Miles’s second novel explores both themes to their fullest extent: th
Here’s a book I wish I had written. “Waste not, want not” goes the aphorism, and Miles’s second novel explores both themes to their fullest extent: the concept of waste – from profligate living to garbage and excrement – and ordinary people’s conflicting desires. In three interlocking story lines, Miles looks for what is really of human value at a time when everything seems disposable and possessions both material and digital can exert a dispiriting tyranny. The novel opens on Thanksgiving 2007, with New York City buried under an early snowstorm. The nation’s annual excuse for gluttony makes a perfect metaphorical setting for Miles’s exposé of food waste and consumerist excess. Like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, it’s a timely, humane response to the modern condition, especially the unavoidable fact of environmental threat. This formed part of an article on my Best Fiction Reads of 2013 for Bookkaholic. An excerpt of my full review is available to non-subscribers at BookBrowse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2013
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Nov 29, 2013
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Oct 24, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 1408704188
| 9781408704189
| 1408704188
| 3.45
| 698
| Mar 01, 2013
| Apr 18, 2013
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liked it
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“The great auk is extinct. However, there’s a part of me that refuses to believe it. I suppose that’s the part of me that is known as hope.” It is 1845 “The great auk is extinct. However, there’s a part of me that refuses to believe it. I suppose that’s the part of me that is known as hope.” It is 1845 and English naturalist Eliot Saxby has set out on Captain Sykes’s Arctic-bound vessel to search for the last remaining traces of the great auk, a bird presumed extinct. His patrons are a group of London collectors with money riding on whether this penguin-like bird is actually gone without trace. Saxby’s task is to bring back evidence that will prove the birds’ fate once and for all. On board the Amethyst are many salty characters, including Sykes himself, a jovial but possibly sadistic leader; Talbot, the taciturn and frostbitten second mate; Edward Bletchley, a gentleman coming along for hunting adventures; and Clara Gould, his ‘cousin.’ (The relationship between Bletchley and Clara is rather unsettling, with the hint of incest bringing to mind A.S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects.) Curiously, Saxby is convinced that he has known Clara before, nearly a decade ago – except then she was known as Celeste Cottesloe, daughter of a Norfolk country squire whose bird egg collection he was busily repairing and cataloguing. Celeste seemed to be a prisoner in her room; she would whisper out to Eliot from the keyhole, begging him to help her escape – which he did, but to disastrous effect. Is Clara actually Celeste? Saxby seems certain, but when he recounts the tale for Clara she receives it as just that: an interesting story, but one that has no bearing on her personal life. The idea that Saxby might be delusional, or at least emotionally disturbed, makes him a deliciously unreliable narrator. En route to the distant rocks where the great auk was last seen, the crew stops at many points for what seems like arbitrary and gratuitous hunting. They harpoon a mother and baby whale for fun, behead a walrus just to keep its tusks, and club dozens of seals. Sykes remains a fairly impartial narrator through it all; Page, though, clearly finds the Victorian sailors’ brutal legacy troubling. Through Bletchley, who spends the rest of the voyage traumatized after a wounded baby seal looks directly into his eyes, Page delivers a sobering message: “We have filled the hull of this ship with dead things. It is the weight of their souls that has caused us all to suffer.” Some may find this animal rights message too obvious, but after such distressing material it is hard to disagree that our relationship with nature has for centuries been unhealthy and exploitative. The harrowing nature of this Victorian-era narrative also reminded me of Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie, another seafaring novel that descends into gory tragedy. The story of Saxby’s fictional great auks is engrossing (if slightly unlikely), so I won’t spoil it here. Page’s descriptions of his Arctic setting and fauna are very evocative. At one point during a landing, Saxby leaves the others behind and walks out onto an ice sheet, where he soon gets lost. Even though I happened to be reading this book while riding through Tuscan wine country, I still felt the sense of vastness and isolation keenly; I even fancied I could feel the searing cold. As Talbot asserts, “They say hell is flames, but I disagree. It is this — it is frozen.” (This review originally appeared at Bookkaholic.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 31, 2014
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Apr 07, 2014
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Oct 09, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 0988383772
| 9780988383777
| 0988383772
| 4.19
| 267
| Apr 30, 2013
| Apr 28, 2013
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it was ok
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(See full review at Bookkaholic.) “As Her Heart is Navigated” and “Be Not Afraid of the Universe” stand out, but in general these stories strive for p
(See full review at Bookkaholic.) “As Her Heart is Navigated” and “Be Not Afraid of the Universe” stand out, but in general these stories strive for profundity but actually add up to very little. The twists feel forced, the imagery is strange, and a clichéd romantic subplot is shoehorned into nearly every narrative. All too often the stories fall short of Parsons’s lofty aims. With (a lot) more practice, he could join the ranks of some of the great American writers of dirty realism.
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Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 04, 2013
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Nov 05, 2013
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Sep 20, 2013
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Jan 28, 2015
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Jan 24, 2015
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| 3.66
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liked it
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Mar 05, 2015
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Jan 11, 2015
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| 3.41
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really liked it
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Jan 21, 2015
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Oct 04, 2014
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| 3.75
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really liked it
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Nov 05, 2014
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Oct 03, 2014
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Nov 06, 2014
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Sep 01, 2014
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Oct 03, 2014
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Aug 07, 2014
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| 3.46
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really liked it
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Nov 07, 2014
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Aug 06, 2014
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| 3.05
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really liked it
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Jul 18, 2014
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May 28, 2014
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| 3.07
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liked it
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Jan 28, 2015
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May 28, 2014
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| 3.68
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really liked it
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Jun 15, 2014
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May 14, 2014
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| 3.45
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really liked it
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May 11, 2014
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May 08, 2014
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| 3.49
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liked it
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Jan 23, 2014
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Jan 14, 2014
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| 3.62
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liked it
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Jan 19, 2014
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Jan 02, 2014
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2013
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Dec 13, 2013
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Nov 19, 2013
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Nov 19, 2013
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| 3.65
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really liked it
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Feb 09, 2014
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Nov 01, 2013
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| 3.80
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liked it
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Mar 02, 2014
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Oct 31, 2013
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| 3.68
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it was amazing
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Nov 29, 2013
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Oct 24, 2013
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| 3.45
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liked it
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Apr 07, 2014
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Oct 09, 2013
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| 4.19
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it was ok
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Nov 05, 2013
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Sep 20, 2013
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