A Book A Week

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

2008-07-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve occasionally read pieces by Susan Orlean in the New Yorker, so when I saw this paperback at the library book sale, I picked it up, thinking it would be something good to dip into now and then. That has proved to be true, except for a few problems.

No, really only one problem, but that problem infects several of the profiles in this book. Most of the pieces in this book were written in the mid-1990’s and a few of them date back to 1987. While the quality of Orlean’s writing certainly remains consistently good, it’s the subject matter that no longer works 20 years later. For example a piece originally published in Rolling Stone in 1988 on the pop star Tiffany was a dud for me. Who was Tiffany? I can’t for the life of me conjure up even a passing memory of her, so I really wasn’t interested in reading about her. The same was true for pieces on Hollywood movie moguls and New York music promoters from the same era.

On the other hand, a few of the pieces are timeless, such as the profile of Kwabena Oppong, the king and supreme rule of the Ashanti tribespeople in the United States, and one about surfer girls in Maui. I think I need to stick to Orlean’s current work in the New Yorker, though I see from her Web site that she’s got a collection of more recent pieces called My Kind of Place.

The title of this book is like a parlor game, or a homework assignment for a creative writing class. Can you make up any similarly unexpected phrases? Here are two I came up with: “The farmer adjusts her stockings” and “The nurse trims his mustache.” It’s harder than you might think.

(Book 27, 2008)

Not Alternate Enough

2008-07-15T14:00:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I read and wrote about Resistance by Owen Sheers. That book, which is alternate history, led me to The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, which is also alternate history, and is set at about the same time as Resistance. But unlike Resistance, which takes place in far-away (for me) Wales, The Plot Against America takes place in Newark, New Jersey, in the very neighborhood in which my mother-in-law grew up. As I read the first few chapters of this book, I could imagine her parents, Grandpa Max and Grandma Rose, in their clapboard two-flat with the piano on the porch, and it was too close to home. The Nazis were coming! I just couldn't read it.

However, at Petrona I discovered an interesting post about a site that is a guide to alternate history books. Who knew there were so many? I just need to pick one that is a little more alternate, if you know what I mean.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

2008-07-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

Geraldine Brooks has gotten lots of press lately for her newest book, People of The Book. But I’ve had Year of Wonders on my list since it came out, so I thought I’d start with this one. It’s a beautifully written account of one village’s encounter with bubonic plague in Restoration England (1666), told in the voice of Anna Frith, a woman who survives the disease. It’s based on the true story of the village of Eyam, in Derbyshire, England, which voluntarily quarantined itself to prevent the spread of the disease into the surrounding villages.

Brooks avoids the temptation to instill Anna with 21st century understanding; thus Anna is as baffled by the plague’s origin and means of contagion as are her neighbors. She bravely nurses her family and friends, assisted by the protestant minister and his wife. The townspeople are a mix of gentry, miners, small farmers, and craftspeople, and the book provides an interesting study in how people lived, and how their lives fell apart in the face of catastrophe.

Why do I like books about the plague? Is that kind of weird? I especially enjoyed this one because it’s contemporaneous with the first book I ever read in which the plague figured strongly: Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor. I still remember Winsor’s vivid descriptions of the Great Plague of London, more than 30 years after reading it. Another good book about the plague is Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which is really time travel science fiction. And one more along these same lines (if you can stand him) is Michael Crichton’s Timeline (and I have to admit that I have a weakness for his thrillers). There’s just something elemental about the plague, even though these days a simple course of antibiotics does the trick, and people don't so much live among flea-infested rats, thank heavens.

(Book 26, 2008)

Run by Ann Patchett

2008-07-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, finally, a great book. You know how it is, when you find the thing you’ve been looking for all along, that feeling of relief and delight? That’s how it felt to read this book.

Everyone is running in this book, running for office, running toward their destiny, running away from their shame, running around the track. A family of men (widower Bernard, former mayor of Boston; eldest son Sullivan, the ne’er-do-well; younger adopted sons Tip and Teddy) are accidentally reunited with the missing female half of their family, Tennessee (birth mother to Tip and Teddy) and her daughter Kenya. Tip and Teddy (who are almost grown) need a mother. Bernard and Sullivan need people they can nurture. Tennessee and Kenya are in dire straits. This book asks the question, what defines a family? What makes someone a mother, or a father, or a daughter?

Everything in this book feels real. The writing is beautiful, the plotting is intricate and interesting, the pace is perfect. I read it in two days and loved it. Did I love it as much as I loved Bel Canto? I’m not sure, but that’s not the point. This is a great book.

As usual, the New York Times says it better than I could. (Note how this reviewer takes a backhanded swipe at Ann Packer, a writer who is NOT Ann Patchett, and who is vastly overrated, as far as I'm concerned.)

(Book 25, 2008)

The Guynd by Belinda Rathbone

2008-07-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

Belinda Rathbone is an American writer who married a Scottish laird and moved with him to his 400 year old estate in Scotland, known as the Guynd. This book is the story of their epic (and ultimately unsuccessful) battle to restore the house to some semblance of its former glory.

Rathbone’s husband had been avoiding the Guynd for years, spending his time mostly in London. His ambivalence about his legacy is clear from the outset, though with Belinda at his side he seems finally interested in trying to get the place going again. What a job! Apparently no one in the 400 year history of the Guynd ever threw anything away, and I really liked reading about Rathbone’s discoveries: a desk filled with engraved stationery from the 1930’s, linen rooms stacked with embroidered sheets and towels, outbuildings filled with old broken down farm equipment, ancient books that turned to dust when opened. But it turns out that Rathbone’s husband is cut from the same cloth as his ancesters, and Rathbone was unsuccessful at getting him to part with much of this rubbish. He is also extremely frugal and seems to have a bad case of ADD; everything was done as cheaply as possible, and projects began, then lingered for years unfinished.

The book is as much the story of their marriage as it is the story of the house. Because of course, she really married the house – her husband even proposed to her by offering her the house instead of his hand. And like the restoration, the marriage seems to have failed. But it’s still a well written and engaging story.

The New York Times has a good profile of Rathbone. It was this article that put the book on my radar in the first place.

(Book 24, 2008)

A Quick Trip to India

2008-07-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

My local library recently featured a display of Indian literature, that is, novels by Indians and about India. I often enjoy these, so I scooped up three that were new to me. It proved to be a mixed bag, and I didn’t finish any of them.

Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar was the best of the bunch. It’s set in an apartment building in Bombay, and provides literary snapshots of many of the residents of this apartment as they gather to celebrate the wedding of one of the younger generation. More in the vein of connected short stories rather than a novel, I found the shifting focus interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying. I read about half the chapters and felt like I was done. I did enjoy learning about the Parsis, a community of which most of the book’s characters are members. This group is a minority religion in India, and I knew very little about them.

Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal held my interest for a while. Unlike the other two, this one is set in Britain among the Indian immigrant community, and tells the story of three women who have been friends since childhood. The narration shifts among the three characters, and at times it felt like the author couldn’t decide if she was writing chick lit or serious fiction. It was good at first, but then I got bored.

I only read a few chapters of A Breath of Fresh Air by Amulya Malladi. I didn’t like this one at all. I thought it sounded good, because the blurb said it was about the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal in the 1980’s. But it wasn’t really about that at all (except very peripherally) and instead was some kind of lost love story where there were lots of BIG SECRETS and MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS. Maybe it was a Young Adult novel; sometimes those are a bit too obvious for my taste.

So, kind of a disappointing trip. But I will try again.

Taking Advantage

2008-06-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

My son is in an acting company that performs several plays over the summer. The first set of performances is this week. Because the actors are between the ages of 8 and 18, they need some supervision during performances; hence the position of “backstage parent.” As far as I can tell, the job of backstage parent is to be a wet blanket. The mere presence of an adult seems to discourage spontaneous sword fights among the younger actors and behind-the-curtain make-out sessions among the older ones. Why am I telling you this? Well, I love being backstage parent, because I can read for hours! Almost no one ever volunteers for this job, so I get to do it all the time. The performances last for hours sometimes, and all I have to do it sit there with my book, looking up occasionally and frowning if it gets too noisy. Last night I read nearly all of The Guynd by Belinda Rathbone and I'm sure I'll finish it tonight. My only interruption was when an actor made his leg bleed by scratching his mosquito bites too hard and I had to find him some paper towels so he didn’t bleed on his costume. Otherwise it’s a reader’s paradise.

The Gathering by Anne Enright

2008-06-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

I was very disappointed in this. It was disjointed, confusing, depressing, meandering, and unpleasant. It’s filled with suffering and populated by nasty characters. I read about half of it, then skimmed to the end, hoping against hope I would find some redeeming feature, but I did not.

Why did this book win the 2007 Man Booker Prize? I will admit it contains flashes of interesting prose, but for me that hardly counteracts all the weirdness of both subject and style.

(Book 23, 2008)

Wizards, Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

2008-06-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

I picked this up from the new release shelf at the library. It’s a collection of fantasy short stories by several authors including Elizabeth Hand, Gene Wolf, Eoin Colfer, Patricia McKillip, Jane Yolen, Nancy Kress, and others. I thought it would be a good way to try out some of these people.

I didn’t read every story, though I tried to! But in all honesty, I abandoned several of them very quickly. I didn’t want to read any that were set in schools of wizardry; J. K. Rowling now owns that territory, as far as I am concerned, and also, I prefer to read about adults. I also skipped the ones set in contemporary times. But I did read and enjoy The Witch’s Headstone by Neil Gaiman, Holly and Iron by Garth Nix, The Stranger’s Hands by Tad Williams, Zinder by Tanith Lee, and Stonefather by Orson Scott Card. My favorite was Holly and Iron by Garth Nix, a writer who is new to me (though my son has long been a fan). I also liked Stonefather by Orson Scott Card. The notes for this story tell me that Card will soon come out with a series set in this same fantasy world, so that is something to look forward to.

(Book 22, 2008)

Marie-Therese, Child of Terror by Susan Nagel

2008-06-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

I was always a fan of the English kings and queens. Like a lot of American girls in the 1970’s I read all those books by Jean Plaidy and I know people still read the ones by Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir. I always wondered why the French monarchy never received as much attention as the British (at least in the realm of light history and historical fiction written in English). Is it because it all ended so badly for them?

It seems like this has been changing recently, as far as one queen goes. I first noticed it a few years back with the release of Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser, a book I gave as a gift to my mother-in-law, but which I never got around to reading myself. A quick check of Amazon reveals several new books as well: The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette: A Novel, by Carolly Erickson; Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, by Caroline Weber; and The Private Realm of Marie Antoinette, by Marie-France Boyer and Francois Halard. All of these have been released since 2006. And of course I did see the delightful movie Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola.

Now we have Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie-Antoinette’s Daughter by Susan Nagel. I think this must be more scholarly than some of the titles I list above, more in the vein of the Fraser book. It’s certainly not a secret diary or a fashion study. I enjoyed it a lot, though it went kind of slowly. It’s dense with history, but not so dense as to overwhelm. It would be a good entry to the period for someone who didn’t know much about the French Revolution and wasn’t sure which book to start with.

Marie-Therese endured violence, imprisonment, the murder of her parents and brother, and was for many years a refugee with no secure home. Yet she maintained her grace and intelligence throughout her life. She is an inspiring figure, and this book does her justice.

(Book 21, 2008)

Something Different to Try

2008-06-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Susan is recommending that we read Dombey & Son, by Charles Dickens, in its original serial form, and that we do so together. Not just Susan and me, but all of us! We should all stick to the same schedule, and we should use her blog to talk about each installment when we have finished. Susan recommends getting a copy of the Oxford edition, edited by Alan Horsman, which indicates the original serial portion at the top of each lefthand page. We read two sections a week and Susan posts some thoughts about each section on Mondays and Fridays. We are invited to comment.

But oops! This whole escapade began on June 2 without me. Luckily I still have time to catch up. It turns out Wikisource has the whole text of Dombey & Son (because it's in the public domain) and the Wikipedia article about Dombey & Son has the original serialization information (click on "Original publication" in the Contents box). From that list you can determine which chapters to read for each section.

(Note that this blogger Susan is NOT Susan B. from the comments, but a different Susan whom I know in the flesh. Welcome to Blogger, Susan!)

Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston

2008-06-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

What was this, exactly? Light fiction? Yes. Historical fiction? Yes. Reality-based fiction? Yes. Caroline Preston has written a novel about a character called Ginevra Perry, and her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. She is based on a real character called Ginevra King with whom the real Fitzgerald had some kind of relationship during his days at Princeton and upon whom he reputedly based several of his female characters. The fictional Ginevra is a self-absorbed, spoiled rich girl. I didn’t like her very much, just as I never particularly liked Fitzgerald’s fictional women either. Now I guess I know why.

I am never sure what to do with these “reimagined history” books. I find myself constantly trying to figure out what is real and what the author made up. I think it’s a tricky kind of book to write, and I’m not sure Preston was entirely successful. The book is sloppily edited (a reference to the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz movie appears in a sequence that takes place before that movie was released). The first person narrative voice is too contemporary to sound authentic for the time, and yet not backward-looking enough to sound convincingly like the reminiscences of an old woman.

Preston is also the author of Jackie by Josie, which I read several years ago. That is another reimagined history tale, about Jacqueline Kennedy, and Josie, the graduate student who is hired to do research for a tell-all biography about the former first lady. I liked that book better than Gatsby’s Girl. I think it's out of print, but your library probably has a copy, and Amazon had several used copies for sale. Take that one to the beach instead of this one.

(Book 20, 2008)

Kindle

2008-06-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

What do we think about the Kindle? It’s that device from Amazon that is like some sort of electronic book reader. It can store up to 200 books at a time. I have to admit that I have paid very little attention to it until recently. I remember thinking when I first saw them advertised on Amazon “who would buy one of those?” But that just shows why I don’t work in marketing, since apparently the answer to that question is, lots of people. My mother-in-law recently told me that many of the senior citizens in her neighborhood in Florida use them. And my husband, who recently traveled to Germany said that he saw four of them on his airplane. Now I’ve got Caroline and Susan discussing them in my comments. Susan says she’s not yet ready for one, but Caroline thinks they are very 21st century.

Now I am no technophobe, and am handy with a computer. But I find myself agreeing with Susan that there’s something about the feel of a book in my hands. The $400 price tag puts me off (plus an additional $10 for every book) and also the battery recharging. I have enough trouble keeping my cell phone charged. What if you really wanted to read, but your Kindle was dead? And finally, what about the bathtub? If you drop a paperback in the tub, all you’ve got is a mess. If you drop the Kindle in, maybe you are electrocuted! Does anyone know the answer to that one?

Poking Along

2008-06-05T18:19:00.000-07:00

Some people in my family call me Poky because sometimes I am slow. This is definitely the case when it comes to reading this week. I am still reading Marie-Therese, Child of Terror, about Marie Antoinette's daughter, and it's still good, but I guess I am just not reading it that much. Yesterday I passed a desultory 30 minutes in the library looking around for something slightly more compelling, and picked up Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston, and I started that last night too. It's okay, but maybe a little bit lighter than I wanted. Today's reading consisted of two articles in the latest Atlantic Monthly, one by Sandra Tsing Loh about the mommy wars, and another about the rising crime rates in small cities. Both were good, and worth the price of the magazine. I also read an article in the New York Times about how insanely busy the months of May and June are for working parents as they juggle all the end-of-school-year activities and it reminded me that that also might be a reason for my lack of reading time. Many hours have been spent in the last weeks at band concerts, dance recitals, and the like.

It's times like this that make me question my obsessive dedication to the library. I can think of many many books that I want to read right now (including newish books by Ann Patchett and Hilary Mantel) but I can't get my hands on any of them. I have to patiently wait my turn in the really long library line. I could go out and buy them, and sometimes I think that as a book lover I ought to go out and buy them, but somehow it just feels like cheating.

Resistance by Owen Sheers

2008-05-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

This book confounded me. It’s very poetic, which isn’t usually my thing, yet at the same time it’s a really compelling, tension-filled story. I had conflicting urges: to read quickly so I could see what happened next, or read slowly, to savor the beautiful language and descriptions.

Resistance is alternate history. Briefly, imagine what would have happened if D-Day were a total failure and in response the Nazis invaded Britain and set up an occupation, just as they occupied the low countries, for example. Resistance cells pop up all over Britain and the men of an isolated valley in Wales leave their farms and their families to work for the insurgency. Around the same time that the men disappear, a small group of German soldiers become stranded in the valley by the sudden onset of a harsh winter. Holing up in an abandoned house, the soldiers are grateful for the respite. The farm women, at first wary of the soldiers, soon realize that they won’t survive the winter without their help.

Sheers paints the German soldiers with a sympathetic brush. Their leader, Albrecht, is a medieval scholar who studied at Oxford before the war. The others are mostly shell-shocked boys who have already seen too much pain to be able to inflict any more. The women are a more varied lot. Eventually special bonds develop between certain pairs: Sarah and Albrecht dance carefully around their mutual attraction. An older woman and a young soldier connect through their shared interest in a horse.

But what happens when spring arrives? I was very nervous about how it would all come out. Would the soldiers be court marshaled for desertion? Would the women be labeled as collaborators? Where did the men of the valley disappear to? To my disappointment, Sheers mostly sidesteps the answers and creates an ending so ambiguous that readers disagree about what happened. (The New York Times reviewer interprets it one way; the Guardian reviewer concludes the opposite.) This is not a good thing, to leave your readers confused and unsatisfied. Maybe some people don’t mind, but I did.

Some reviewers point out that Philip Roth's book The Plot Against America dovetails nicely with Resistance. Roth's book is also alternate history, but set in an America where Franklin Roosevelt has lost the 1940 presidential election to Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. I haven't read this yet, and hadn't planned to, but now I might.

(Book 19, 2008)

The Chris Farley Show by Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby

2008-05-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

I do not usually read celebrity biographies. The last one I read was a memoir by Lauren Bacall which I enjoyed sometime in the 1980’s. But Tom Farley is a neighbor, and his son is my son’s friend, so this book came to our house and I started reading it because it was sitting on my kitchen counter. I am happy to say that I was immediately engrossed. The book is a collection of memories of the late comedian Chris Farley, arranged chronologically. Tom Farley (Chris’s older brother) and his co-author Tanner Colby interviewed dozens of people who were close to Chris (family members and friends, both famous and not famous) and strung the bits together to form a coherent portrait of his life. Interspersed between the quotes are brief factual sections that provide some background, but most of the story is told through the voices of those who were interviewed. The structure works very well to keep the story personal and immediate, but still move the action forward.

This book is very sad. Farley’s downward spiral through alcoholism and drug abuse was frighteningly intense. The authors do not sugarcoat or excuse Farley’s behavior and several members of the Farley family and Chris Farley’s immediate circle are open about their own feelings of guilt and failed responsibility. Together all the memories form a collage that I think must accurately reflect Chris Farley’s tortured brilliance. If all celebrity biographies were this good I would read more of them.

(Book 18, 2008)

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

2008-05-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult to read a Persephone book and not view it through a 21st century lens. As I read The Priory I kept thinking things like “The reason Penelope has to make this choice is because she has no education, so no other options are available to her” and “if Christine had her own money she wouldn’t have to leave her baby with her sister.” Of course these reasons are still the reasons if you know what I mean – I am not ascribing motivations inaccurately. But I wonder if I were reading this book in the late 1930’s (when it was originally published) whether I would be as sensitive to them, or would feel as bothered by them.

This is a story of a family of mostly women: two sisters, their aunt and their stepmother; also various women servants. The few male characters are ineffectual and mostly just cause problems for the women. Major Marwood, the father, is a retired army man. His estate is mortgaged, he owes thousands of pounds to his creditors, his house is crumbling around him, yet he stages exorbitant cricket tournaments each summer that put him further and further into debt. The women in his family see his foolish ways but are powerless to stop him. His daughters, Penelope and Christine, are forced to marry men to whom they are ill-suited, and in the case of Christine, whom she barely knows, to escape from the poverty and to have some opportunity for a life. His second wife Anthea sequesters herself in the nursery with her young twins and refuses to acknowledge the state of their finances. She willfully ignores all evidence of it, and forges ahead with an expensive nursemaid and redecorating projects that compound the family’s financial woes. The tragedy of the story is that all three women (and several other women characters also) are intelligent, resourceful, creative people who are given no education and no opportunities to be of any use to society. Anthea’s anger is most clearly drawn through her passive aggressive money battles with the major, but the daughters too (especially Penelope) seethe with suppressed rage.

As with every other Persephone book I’ve read, this book is filled with tiny telling moments that add up to a perfectly rendered world. I do have one small complaint: it’s very long, around 500 pages. I got about 9/10ths of the way through and ran out of gas. (Astute observers of my Shelfari sidebar will know that it’s been stuck there for weeks.) I finally finished it last night.

(Book 17, 2008)

Icebergs by Rebecca Johns

2008-05-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is beautifully written and very moving but I couldn't finish it. I got too upset by the two WWII airmen who were stranded in Labrador in a snowstorm after their plane crashed. I just didn't want to read about their deaths (or rather the death of one of them, given what I managed to glean from the blurb). Alternating with the story of the two lost airmen is the story of Dottie, one of their wives, who is home on her family's farm in southern Ontario. I really liked her story, but again, I couldn't figure out how to read just those parts. I can usually read about unpleasant things but this time it was too raw. It was almost like I thought maybe I could keep the airman alive if I didn't read the part where he dies. I may try this book again when I am in a different mood.

This book reminds me of another wonderful book about a Canadian family in the years after World War II. That book is A Good House by Bonnie Burnard. I never have met anyone who has read this, but I thought it was extremely good. I don't know why it didn't get any press.

Both Icebergs and A Good House are examples of how a skilled author can turn domestic fiction into art. Both feature measured prose, a lack of sentimentality, and very realistic characters.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

2008-05-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

This is not my usual thing, but I liked it. I was alerted to it after reading Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, which I see now is pretty similar in premise, if not in style or execution. Gods Behaving Badly is much lighter and funnier. This book is dark, but very engrossing.

Here’s the idea: when an immigrant comes to America, he brings his gods (or other mystical creatures) with him. Thus the Irish brought the Leprechauns and the African slaves brought Anansi. These gods are still here, wandering around, getting by as best they can, even though almost no one believes in them any more. Recently, Americans have begun to believe in new gods, and they are here also; they include Media, who looks like a television newscaster, and also a god called Technical Boy – I’m not exactly sure what his area is, but he’s always going on about wireless Internet. Eventually, as you would imagine, these gods must battle for supremacy.

The leader of the old gods is Mr. Wednesday, who is of course Odin, the god of war in the Norse pantheon. But as in any good myth, Wednesday’s role is multi-layered and his motivations not always pure. He takes a protégé called Shadow, who turns out to be much more than he seems – this uncovering of people’s real (mythological) identities is the most fun part of the book. Gaiman does a great job of integrating mythology from every corner of the world, and while some characters I could identify right away, others were complete mysteries. Who is the old woman with dead mice in her refrigerator? I would love to find some kind of god-by-god guide to all the characters in this book.

Wikipedia has an article that identifies many of them, but it’s not complete, Some gods appear under their real names (Wisakedjak, of the Algonquins, and the Slavic god Czernobog, for example) but many use aliases, and the article doesn’t connect the gods to their associated characters, except in a few places. A few Web sites have popped up that do some decoding, but I haven’t found one that is really comprehensive.

My only complaint about this book is that the non-stop action and on-going puzzle of who’s who can obscure some problems with the plot. Some things didn’t quite hang together for me, and some characters’ motivations were sketchy, at best. And who, exactly, were Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone? But it was hard to get too worried about these details when the story was so compelling.

(Book 16, 2008)

My Life in France by Julia Child

2008-05-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

This is a quick read. Three things struck me about it. One is this: Where will memoirs like this come from in the age of e-mail? Child and her co-author, Alex Prud’Homme drew heavily from letters she and her husband Paul Child wrote while they lived in France in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. These letters were saved by the recipients and were returned to Julia to help her remember her years in France in detail. Thus this book is filled with vivid descriptions of meals, friends, and vacations, details that no one would remember 50 years on without letters or perhaps diaries to jog the memory. Nowadays an American living in France is writing e-mail messages home to family and friends; what happens to these messages? I don’t imagine anyone is archiving them, but maybe I’m wrong.

The second thing that I noticed right away was how many hours poor Julia spent typing and retyping her manuscript! Mastering the Art of French Cooking would have been published years earlier if Julia had had a computer (but then again, she wouldn’t have had those hand-written letter to draw from, so it all evens out).

And the final thing that struck me was how far away from Julia’s ideal of cooking and dining we have traveled in this country. Going to the outdoor market, buying chicken from the old woman who raised the birds, perfectly cooking the chicken in butter with fresh herbs, making a simple salade verte to go with it, choosing the correct wine; I can’t even pretend that this is my life.

(Book 15, 2008)

The Italian Lover by Robert Hellenga

2008-04-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

The Italian Lover is the story of two middle-aged Americans who meet and fall in love. Woody is a Classics professor who teaches American students in Italy, and Margot is a restorer of ancient manuscripts with a studio in Florence. They are an interesting couple, and interesting things happen to them: a movie producer is making a film version of a memoir Margot wrote years before and Woody and Margot work on a screenplay together. We also get to know the movie producer, the director, and the cast of the movie. Margot and Woody are intelligent and well educated, and there is much talk of literature, art, film, and history. It’s a good formula for a lovely literary novel set in Italy.

But wait, there’s more going on here. Years ago I read another book by Hellenga called The Fall of a Sparrow and it remains one of my favorite books of all time. I always meant to get around to his first novel The Sixteen Pleasures, and another recent one, Philosophy Made Simple, but didn’t quite. What I failed to realize is that The Italian Lover is a sequel to all three of these earlier books. Woody is also the protagonist of The Fall of a Sparrow, and Margot’s story is in both The Sixteen Pleasures and Philosophy Made Simple (the protagonist of this one is her father). To complicate matters further, The Sixteen Pleasures is the memoir (really a novel!) that they are filming in The Italian Lover.

I would like to tell you that you could read and enjoy The Italian Lover without having read any of the previous books, and maybe that’s true. But knowing Woody as I do (he makes a memorable impression in TFOAS) added a great deal of depth to this reading experience. I wish I had had the same background for Margot. So if you really want to do this right, read the books in the order in which they were written (The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Philosophy Made Simple and finally The Italian Lover), OR, read the one book about Woody (TFOAS) first, then read the two books about Margot (T16P and PMS), then read The Italian Lover.

Hellenga is an enormously intelligent writer, and he creates complex memorable characters (and great women characters!) While my description above may make this book sound a bit light, it isn’t; it’s subtle and emotional. But this book also isn’t nearly as powerful as The Fall of a Sparrow. The Fall of a Sparrow is the story of the death of Woody’s daughter Carolyn in the Bologna train station bombing in 1980, and the subsequent disintegration of his marriage. It’s a complex analysis of fatherhood, faith, anger, forgiveness, politics, terrorism, death, and art, and it’s truly a brilliant book that will haunt me forever. While I’m happy to see that Woody has finally found some peace and happiness with Margot, The Italian Lover did not move me the way The Fall of a Sparrow did. So if you don’t want to embark upon a total Robert Hellenga trip, just read that one instead of this one. Though I plan to go backwards soon and read Margot and her father’s stories as well.

(Book 14, 2008)

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

2008-04-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since a book gave me nightmares, but this one did. And when I woke up, I was angry. Why did the author have to make this book so gruesome?

I think Yrsa (to be correct in Icelandic) is a talented writer, and she's created a likeable protagonist, Thora, and a great setting at the University of Iceland with quirky professors and likeable janitors and an interesting subplot about some missing historial documents, and then she's plunked this totally revolting murder into the middle of it. I kept trying to read around the murder but that didn't work, as you would imagine. Finally I gave up. I'm really disappointed to not be able to finish this book, because I like Thora, and I like Iceland and all the other stuff, but what happens to this murdered guy (who seems like he deserves it) just makes me lose my lunch (or certainly my sleep) and I couldn't hack it any more.

Startitis

2008-04-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

This is a term familiar to knitters. It’s when you start knitting something, but before you finish it, you start knitting something else. When you knit, a lot of the fun comes at the beginning as you see how the yarn knits up, and what the pattern looks like. Once you get going, it can sometimes just be a long slog until you're done. It’s not uncommon for knitters to have seven or eight projects going at once, all because of a bad case of startitis.

And so it goes with me and books these past few weeks. That Persephone book I started three weeks ago? Not done yet, because it started to be a slog about two weeks ago, and so I started reading The Italian Lover, by Robert Hellenga. Am I done that yet? No, because this week I started an Icelandic mystery by a new writer, Yrsa Sigurdardottir. Well, am I done that? Not yet. I haven’t started anything else, but I do have several tempting items stacked next to the bed….

Finishitis is a much rarer condition in knitters. Occasionally someone will blast through all their unfinished projects and announce that they’ve had a case of it, but personally I’ve never been afflicted. I still have half a mitten from 1994. But maybe the book version will hit me soon and I’ll finally have something to blog about (other than weird made-up diseases, that is).

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

2008-04-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

This was a lot of fun. It turns out the gods of Olympus are still alive, and living in a crumbling house in London. No one believes in them any more and they have fallen into obscurity, though they still have to make a living. Zeus, bedridden and senile, is banished to the attic. Dionysus runs a disco but spends all his income bribing the police to ignore the debauchery that the Maenads get up to on the stage every night. Apollo still controls the sun, and his twin sister Artemis the moon, but the rest of their powers are greatly diminished, so Artemis works as a dog walker to pick up extra cash, and Apollo tries to get by as a television psychic. All is disrupted when Apollo falls in love with a mortal woman whom Artemis has hired to clean the house.

As tempting as it is to give away all the jokes, I’ll stop here. If you like this kind of thing, well, you’ll like this! (Though a passing familiarity with Greek mythology is essential.)

Oddly enough, I recently came across a review on the Unruly Reader blog of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It sounds a bit similar, though darker and more complex, and the god incognito is Odin. I’ve never read Neil Gaiman, though I gather he’s really popular. I’ve requested this from the library; we’ll see what happens.

(Book 13, 2008)

London 1945: Life in the Debris of War by Maureen Waller

2008-04-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

If it were my habit to assign catchy titles to my blog posts, this one would be called “Only for the Truly Obsessed.” Another one I thought of was “Too Much Detail, Even for Me.” Want to know what color the ration books were? Buff for adults, green for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children under 5. Blue for children between 5 and 16. Want to know how much allowance a householder was granted if he had evacuees staying with him? 16s 6d for older children, 8s 6d for younger ones. How about which articles of civilian clothing were allotted to returning soldiers (a hat, a three-piece suit, a shirt, a tie, two pairs of socks, one pair of shoes, a raincoat and a pair of cufflinks). See what I mean?

Because I just love this kind of thing, I did read most of the book. I skipped the chapter about propaganda, and skimmed the bombing statistics (how many bombs in which neighborhoods, how many wounded, how many dead). Instead I concentrated more on the domestic details. Did you know that British women used shoe polish for mascara? It doesn’t say whether any of them went blind from it.

Waller’s prose is matter of fact and can be flat in places, especially where she’s just citing statistics. But she’s nothing if not thorough. I enjoyed most of this book, and the parts I didn’t enjoy I just skipped. Easy. It’s not like I didn’t know how it ended.

(Book 12, 2008)