A tallish tale that grew taller as it went along, I read this book while in the depths of pneumonia, right after reading Nothing But Ghosts. Away did not make my breathing easier. I put it down, intending to take it up again when well, but I was so bored, and it did grip my interest. What I liked best about this book was the full use made of 3rd person narration. Bloom writes vividly about the characters, their thoughts and their motivations, and satisfyingly lets the reader know what becomes of the characters when they leave the main story, which (as I said) gets pretty tall as the book goes along. Lillian (my namesake with an extra L) is looking for her lost child, whose fate isn’t known until near the end of the book. Her journey brings her into contact with increasingly strange characters and an increasingly remote landscape as she attempts to get to Siberia overland from America, going west and north. This is a book peopled by selfish, greedy characters who thieve and lie but are never entirely dislikable. It is also full of non-consentual or at least coerced, desperate unpleasant sex that is not technically violent but emotionally violent, as well as more than one murder in technicolour. This is an interesting, well written book for those days when breathing is strong.
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
My 11 year old started this book and said that the language was simple, like a kid’s book, and that she really liked it. I haven’t read Tyler for a long while, but have always liked her, and I was curious about my daughter’s reaction. The vocabulary isn’t simple, but Tyler seldom uses figurative language. This is a highly episodic book that begins with the adoption of two Korean infants by very different families: one a granola eating middle-aged American family, the other by first generation young Iranian-Americans. It’s a subject close to my heart, but the novel is really about the two families’ initial antipathy and subsequent friendship. Adoption is in the background (and Tyler made the occasional factual error about the process). The real story is about integration, exile, belonging as it unfolds in the relationship between the newly widowed grandfather on one side, and the long time widowed grandmother on the other. My daughter enjoyed the detailed realism and independence of each scene; a stand-alone slice of life in her eyes. I enjoyed some of the parenting scenes (the one about trying to make a toddler give up her pacifier made me laugh out loud), but most of all the elder love story. I don’t think this is Tyler’s best. It is a fast read and reads like a fast write. But a book that I can enjoy as an adult and which my daughter enjoys as a kid is rare. No violence here, either, which was a nice break.
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The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas
As the books I’d put on hold at the library hadn’t arrived yet, I scoured the new books shelf and saw this one. I thought, Well, Vargas. I’ve heard of her. A number of book bloggers like her. It was just translated into English in 2009, but it is the first of the Adamsberg dectective novels, and was published in French in 1991. If I’m reading the chronology right, that’s her second novel. I had avoided Vargas even though she sounded interesting because the plots sounded rather bloody. But in fact the book isn’t, at least not to me. This novel wasn’t like any detective fiction I’ve read before. I don’t know if that’s because it’s by a French writer or just that Vargas is original, but the interest in the book isn’t about thrills (I’m kind of a no-vampire gal), nor is it primarily about twists and turns though I only half-guessed the end. It’s the conversations and thoughts of unusual characters that I found totally engaging. I don’t know if I’d want a steady diet of Vargas. But every so often, oh yes. The book was an interesting, unusual dessert with an unexpected flavour. Good. Different. Surprising.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man | 2 Comments »
Nothing but Ghosts by Beth Kephart
I don’t usually read Y.A. books, but because I read the author’s lovely blog, I was curious about her novels. I read Nothing But Ghosts when my bronchitis was moving down into pneumonia and the book was a delightful treat during an otherwise dismal time.
It is charming, lyrical, compassionate, gentle, absorbing. The story of a teenage girl’s sadness over the loss of her mother, her engagement with a mystery, and through it her emergence from loss, the novel is peopled with characters who are decent, mainly kind, doing their best with what life has handed them, interested and interesting, creative.
It was a good story to read while I was ill: it was moving and life affirming; I breathed easier with it.
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Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories by Elizabeth Strout
“To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.” This line comes from the second to last page of Olive Kitteridge and it sums it up perfectly: this is a story, or a set of stories, about people who are crazed by loneliness, which is unmitigated by their appreciation of the physical beauty of the world around them. The setting is a small town in Maine, whose loveliness is vividly portrayed. There is a lot of sadness in this book, but it is competent in the best sense of the word. The work of the writer is seamless and I never noticed it popping through as I often do in even otherwise excellent books.
The subtitle is “a novel in stories.” That isn’t precisely true, but it isn’t a book of short stories or linked stories either. It’s an innovative form, in which the stories illuminate each other as the reader goes on in the book, later stories making sense of earlier ones and vice versa. The title character is the main character in several and has significant minor appearances in several more, and occasional walk-ons. What the stories have in common is this theme of crazed loneliness, which manifests in suicidal feelings, homicidal feelings, and mood disorders. The book isn’t short on violence: a hostage-taking, implied spousal battering, sexual abuse, off-stage murder, as well as explicit verbal and physical violence. But it’s a quiet novel that mounts in intensity in subtle and quiet ways.
I think this is the best book I’ve read in months because of Strout’s extraordinary skill in portraying all of the characters with sympathy and grace through events and times and moods that are not graceful at all. About 2/3 of the way through Olive Kitteridge, I put it down for a week or so because the unrelieved sadness, the excruciating loneliness of married couples got to me. (The only happy marriage is short-lived; the young husband dies, accidentally shot by his best friend. His wife goes on to a miserable marriage, more typical of the novel.) However I continued on and was glad because it really is a remarkable book, which even manages to end on a mildly optimistic note and with the tender compassion that typifies the book. I highly recommend it though it isn’t for those times when you’re looking for a pick-me-up. The characters, setting and situations stayed with me; the writing was awesome.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge | 13 Comments »
Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
This is a wonderful yarn which I totally loved while reading and not quite as well afterward. Some books (and films) stay with me afterward, and as scenes linger in my mind, I come to greater appreciation. In this case the excitement of the story and setting made me gloss over the flaws until I reached the end. Honestly, it is a page turner and I couldn’t put it down until I finished.
The story is told from two points of view in alternating chapters: Will Bird, a middle-aged Oji-Cree bush pilot living in Northern Ontario and his niece Annie in her early 20’s. Will is in a coma, recalling the events that led up to this crisis point. In the hope of reaching through to him, Annie visits him daily in the hospital, telling him about her dangerous search for her sister who, after achieving brief glory as a model in the big apple, has disappeared.
Boyden skillfully and with affection and respect portrays Native life in the bush and in urban settings. He successfully tells not one, but two love stories, which, as I’ve said in other reviews, is challenging. And he does it convincingly, with a pair of would-be lovers in midlife and another in their early 20’s. All of this while spinning a gripping tale of drugs, sex, life at the heights of fashionable New York and in the remote northern bush. It is literary fiction and the attention to detail, dialect, and the inner life is captivating.
It was only after I finished that I realized that the tale was pretty tall, and there were a couple too many scenes of partying with ecstacy (the drug, not the feeling) among the rich and beautiful.
Boyden is a terrific writer and he taught college to Cree kids in Northern Ontario, and continued to be closely involved with the community, but he isn’t Cree himself. As he says, in his mainly European heritage there are two thin strands of Mik’maq and Metis.
Anyone, including my husband, who has ancestry in Canada that goes back a way, can make a similar claim (though unlike Boyden my husband has not spent substantial time in the bush). Also like my husband, Boyden comes from a middle-class, suburban family in Canada’s largest city. To me this novel felt authentic, but as I don’t have the background to assess that, I’d be interested in how it is viewed by First Nations communities.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Cree, Joseph Boyden, Metis, Through Black Spruce | 5 Comments »
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
This is a running away to the circus story told from the point of view of a 20-something year old in the 1930’s and his later self, 90 plus and in an old folks’ home. It’s an old genre that was popular before I was born, and has been ressurrected skillfully here. The structure is also tried and true rather than innovative, but is well handled, with ¾ of the book devoted to the more exciting and exotic world of the circus interspersed with the experience of very ripe (but mainly with-it) old age. I can’t speak to the authenticity of the 93 year old narrator, being rather younger at this point, but it struck me as true, sympathetic, and a rounded portrayal. The younger self is actually, to me, less well defined, but the story itself is so much fun, and the details of circus life in the ‘30’s so engrossing that it doesn’t matter. The language isn’t as rich as other books I’ve read lately (Inheritance of Loss and Snow Falling on Cedars), but the minimalism works fine because the dialogue is terrific, with a wonderful sense of time and place and different class dialects. The villain is rather a mustache twirler and the romance wasn’t convincing (I occasionally rolled my eyes). After reading Snow Falling on Cedars, a beautiful book, which was also weak only in respect of the romantic entanglement, I wondered if romance is just tough to write in literary fiction. That being said, this is a fast and pleasant summer read. Enjoy!
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants | 1 Comment »
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
My review
The story of a Japanese man on trial for murder in 1954, on a west coast island still reeling from the after shocks of WWII, this is a book that impressed me enough to read sentences over and over.
It is naturally a good story: murder trial, secret love, WWII (nothing sells like that war) and its aftermath. But that alone wouldn’t have gripped me the way this book did. It is a wonderfully written novel, the language sonorous, vividly drawn in the range and depth of detail on everything that makes up life on a fictional island off the coast of Washington. Having visited a similarly located and real island, Haida Gwaii (The Queen Charlotte Islands) in Canada, I found the descriptions of landscape and the way of life especially riveting.
I was also impressed with the vivid character sketches of a panorama of minor characters. Even walk-ons who barely have a word merit a name, first and last, something about appearance, ability, personality. The weaving of the courtroom drama and scenes from earlier in the lives of all the participants is done incredibly skillfully.
My only quibble with this book is at the end. I felt that it was winding tightly, with tense suspense, toward a sad end. I didn’t want that ending, but it felt inevitable and right given everything that came before it.
But in the last few chapters, with rapid fire speed, a happy ending was pulled out of a hat, and for me it wasn’t convincing and didn’t have the power of the rest of the book. It brought forward the aspects of this book that weren’t as strong as the rest, reminding me that every writer has strengths and weaknesses. (The love triangle never quite struck me as real. Four years of daily necking in a cedar bush without culmination? The abrupt turnaround in feeling?) I even wondered if the ending was changed under editorial pressure
But that aside, this book has so much beauty in its language, from landscape to character descriptions. The courtroom scenes are convincing. The structure amazing. The range of it marvelous: the way it captures a time, the fishing and strawberry farming, social structure, Japanese internment camp, one of the best war scenes I’ve ever read. It’s a book I would re-read just to study the weaving of so many elements.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Snow Falling on Cedars | 11 Comments »
I know Beth Kephart, the author of the recently released Nothing But Ghosts, from her blog. And what I know–just from this–is that she is a lovely writer, a wordsmith but more than that, a person of heart, sensitivity, perception and dedication. As a tribute to that, the blogosphere has been rallying around this book, passing along the word.
It’s a story about surviving loss. About a rising high school senior whose mother has died. What lives on? she wonders. How will she? In searching for answers, she becomes embroiled in a mystery surrounding a strange recluse at a lush garden. It’s a mystery, a romance, a daughter-father story.
There is an interview here and a review here.
I haven’t yet read this book–I’m on my way to get it, and it’s on the chart for August, when I’ll be taking some time off with kids and books I can really relish. I know that Beth’s will be one of them. And I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it. I hope you do, too.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged Beth Kephart, Nothing But Ghosts | 3 Comments »
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
My review
The writing in this novel is luscious, but it doesn’t get in the way of moving the story forward. I don’t know how Desai does it–I’m tempted to re-read the novel just to figure that out. I’ve read that there is some controversy among residents of Kalimpong, the town where the novel takes place, and an accusation of Anti-Nepalese sentiment. I didn’t find that to be the case. Desai is equally ironic and castigating toward everyone in the novel and every social class.
Each sentence is gorgeous, the use of language innovative, and so just right in the way she describes a state of mind or a rat in a New York restaurant or the lushness of India. But I didn’t get lost or impatient with the language as in some books where the beauty of words exists only for itself. Maybe it was just so good that I looked forward to the next sentence and the next. If an author does anything spectacularly it rises above the very good and can work where it wouldn’t be enough in and of itself in lessor hands.
The only weakness I found was in the description of the Ghorka rebellion. Irony and hyperbole worked less well for me here and so the book slowed down right at the point where the nature of the story would be expected to be most gripping. But it picked up again as soon as she was done with that and back to her strong suit: third world people striving to be first world, love and exploitation, life in its immensity whether rural or urban.
This is not an optimistic book and none of the characters is especially likable. That would usually have stopped me early on. But ironic distance made it tolerable for me, and there is so much humour as well as intense attention to the vivid life of things that the beauty lifted me over the pessimism. The only character who grows through his experience, is introspective about it, and changes is subject to the greatest humiliation (though thankfully not the greatest violence). I don’t want to give away the end, though it stands so vivid in my mind I want to write about it. Let it be said then that when I think about it, having finished the book a week or two ago, that there is a gentle humour about the final scene, an acknowledgment that all has been lost but the most important thing, love and for love’s sake, reunion.
Posted in Fiction | Tagged The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai | 2 Comments »
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