Reviews and Comments

"Now I am rampant with memory. I don't often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past--that's nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all. But one dissembles, usually, for the sake of such people as Marvin, who is somehow comforted by the picture of old ladies feeding like docile rabbits on the lettuce leaves of other times, other manners. How unfair I am. Well, why not? To carp like this--it's my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom."

Hagar Shipley is the 90 year old maddening, often rude, sharp tongued narrator who looks back on her life as she fights off her son's and daughter-in-law's attempts to move her to a nursing home. She simultaneously conducts internal and external versions of conversations with her family, and then reprimands herself for being unkind when she isn't actually feeling that way. But she can't help herself. She is feisty and combative, and is making a final stand to assert her independence as she witnesses her bodily and mental controls slip away. You have to admire her fierceness.

Laurence skillfully weaves a dual narrative of the past and present day Hagar, and the transitions between them are seamless. The narrator looks back on her childhood, a difficult marriage, and the loss of her husband and son on the Manitoba prairie. Old age is a tough topic, and it was especially so in 1964 when the novel was written. It may not be a book for the young, but, man, does it pack a wallop for everybody else.

At turns funny and horrifying, but always riveting, I couldn't believe I had never heard of this title. Canadian writers have struggled for a long time to be taken seriously--it wasn't really until Margaret Atwood came on the scene (and even she had to fight for recognition) that people began to take notice, and The Stone Angel deserves to be noticed.

This little book wildly exceeded my expectations. A beautifully crafted story told by first person narrator Tom Birkin, a WWI soldier and artist. Tom returns to England with PTSD and receives a commission in the northern part of the country to remove many layers of whitewash from an old mural in a small rural church. On a scaffolding high above the chancel arch he reveals little by little a magnificent Renaissance painting by an unkown painter who was clearly a master of his craft.

As he works away, Tom starts to connect with the folks in the community, and as the painting is gradually uncovered he begins to heal as well.

The book is kind of perfect. The length is exactly right, and the idea of a man who starts to regain strength and wholeness from an exquisite painting and from connection to community is an appealing metaphor. Carr's descriptions of the countryside make me want to be there, and I was sent online numerous times to look up architectural terms I had forgotten long ago. I tend to agree with those who consider this book a classic.

When my book group's selection committee chose this novel it was partly because it was based on a tragic and local story that none of us knew anything about. I was fascinated and couldn't wait to read it. I am disappointed. Not because the book isn't beautifully written and skillfully structured -- it is. Not because the author wasn't successful in doing what he set out to do -- he did. It's just not the way I wanted this story to be told.

In 1912 a mixed race group of people were evacuated by the governor from Malaga Island, off the coast of Maine. They had been living a primitive existence since the 1860s, often on the edge of starvation. Many were sent to a home for the feeble minded on the mainland, and others drifted off to unknown places.

Harding writes this story in the manner of a folk tale or a biblical parable. In third person, no dialogue quotes, and with lyrical, poetic prose. The characters and the things they do stretch belief. The feeling is cool and detached, creating a universal tale as old as humanity.

There are only a couple times in the book when real outrage at what is happening breaks through. Although I know Harding limited the anger and intense feeling on purpose, I wanted more of it. As a New Englander I'm partly angry at myself for not knowing this story, but also at the cruelty of what the government of Maine did to these people. I can't quite abstract the specific facts to reach a more catholic take on the story. All that said, This Other Eden is beautifully written and explores through fable really the need of people in power, because of their own fear and narrow-mindedness, to destroy the lives of others. From the Pharaoh driving out the Israelites to the countries deporting immigrants today, it just keeps happening over and over and over again.

"Really, Bradley, you seem to be living in some sort of literary dream. Everything is so much duller and more mixed-up than you imagine. Even the awful things are."

Bradley can't quite write that important book that he thinks he has in him. He can't quite perform as a lover in the way he imagines he should. He believes art and love and life must be excruciatingly difficult and excruciatingly emotional if they are to have value. He imagines that his thoughts are more profound than those around him, and writes books that don't get published, but nevertheless are truly "art," --unlike those of his bestselling and prolific author friend Arnold--simply because of the time and emotion he invests in his work. Publishing is not the point, right?

Most alarmingly, he imagines at the age of 58 that he is in love with Arnold's 20 year old daughter and pursues (preys on?) her. They escape to a rented cottage by the beach and there is a sexual encounter that seems to be rape: "I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed...I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt."Wait, wait, you're tearing it!...I began hauling down the black tights dragging them over her thighs...'Oh Bradley, please don't be so rough...' " etc., etc., and afterwards he has no understanding of what he's done. Characteristically he places the act into an unreal literary context and makes it all about himself: " 'What made you like that, Bradley?' 'The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.' ... What had made me like that?...The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. 'It was love,' I said to her." And he believes it. With zero concern for Julian or recognition that he had hurt her. It is a hard passage to read.

In fact, the women are generally not treated well by the male characters. The book opens with a call from Arnold to Bradley saying that he thinks he has killed his wife. Only she's not dead, but beaten within an inch of her life. Yet the two men are cavalier about what happened, and even his wife eventually decides it wasn't a big deal. Murdoch was generally supportive of the independence of women, if not an avowed feminist, and I can't get a sense of her purpose in the way she drew her female characters.

This is a challenging book. Murdoch is a very good writer with a philosophical bent and there are long passages about art and love and human consciousness that are brilliant but not easy to absorb. She carefully constructs the story and places a fictional, non-fiction memoir within her novel. There are fictional forewords by the editor and Bradley, and postscripts by several of the characters and the editor again. And despite the dark events and tone there is a subtle humor that is pervasive and makes the narrative a kind of satire, especially of writers and editors.

All of the narrators, both the primary narrator, Bradley Pearson, and his acquaintances who write postscripts after the publication of his book, are astonishingly unreliable. None seem to be self-aware. In fact, it's impossible to discover the truth about any of them. And that I suppose is the point. Murdoch asks what truth is: in art, in love, and in life. She makes it clear that it is often very hard to tell.

I saw the film "American Fiction" recently, loved it, and prefer it to this book that it is based on. The basic premise is the same for both: an academic Black man nicknamed Monk who is a writer has written a number of books critically well received, but that have earned him neither popularity or much money. So he writes a book in a matter of days in Black street dialect under the pen name of Stag R. Leigh, and of course it becomes an instant best seller. His book's title is, yes, Fuck, and is nominated for a literary award. Monk had already been chosen as a judge for the award and now is faced with reviewing the book he had written as a joke.

As he struggles with the book issue he is also processing the death of his sister, his mother's advancing Alzheimers, and his brother's disconnection from the family. He is briefly involved with someone romantically, responsible for the care of his mom, and somehow also manages to spend time fly fishing and doing fine carpentry work. And that's my complaint about the book. There is so much going on, not to mention the inclusion of the entire text of Fuck, that much of the time the book feels untethered.

The novel explores how White people don't really get Blacks, and absolutely don't know what to do with upper middle class Blacks. Some of the Blacks in the book can't deal with upper middle class Blacks either. This is biting and hilarious satire, and even if it is not as tightly constructed as some of Everett's other novels, I enjoyed it. I think the movie is better at getting to essentials but both are worth attention.

In his life he, too, like all people had harboured ideas and dreams. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands again. But he was still here. And in the mornings after the first snowmelt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks scattered there, the cool stone at his back and the first warm rays of sun on his face, he felt that many things had not gone so badly after all.

In sparse, Hemingwayesque language, Seethaler tells the story of Andreas Egger, born in a prewar alpen country, who as a young man loses his wife in an avalanche. The remote town where he lives has started to construct aerial cable car lifts to attract tourists to the area. Clipped to a cable and suspended high in the air, Egger works to maintain the cables. He lives a mostly solitary life in a room attached to the local schoolhouse, and eventually moves to an abandoned cave-like livestock shed built into the side of a mountain. He quietly observes the mountains as they are increasingly scarred with large vertical swaths cleared to make way for the cable cars and the tourists attracted to them. As an old man he even guides hikes for the sightseers.

There is not much plot, but it is a well told story of a simple life with a universality that applies to all of us. It reminds me of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, another story of a man living a reclusive life close to nature after losing his wife; and doing work that it is destroying the very environment that he treasures. That book was published in 2002 and I like to think that it informed Seethaler's novel. Both books are very male, but speak to all genders about both the beauty that can be found in the outdoors and the complicity of all of us in losing it.

For years I've looked forward to listening to each Cormoran Strike (private detective) thriller, but J.K. Rowling let me down with this one and the one before it (The Ink Black Heart). Excruciatingly long, The Running Grave is dragged down by the inclusion of unnecessary lesser cases, probably meant to mimic the busyness of a real detective agency, but that only distract from the main plot. I skipped over most of these parts. There is also a wrap up discussion among the key characters at the end that goes on, and on, and on...The plot, which involves Strike's assignment to extricate a wealthy man's son from a cultish church that is a chamber of horrors, is overly complicated with too many characters to keep track of.

Then there's Strike and his assistant Robin flirting yet again with a relationship that never quite materializes. I suppose it gives a reason to produce one more novel and keep the series going, but I'm not sure I'm up for another 34 hour audio book.

It's too bad, because the outline of the basic plot is a good one and the actor Robert Glenister is an excellent reader. A religious cult can make fascinating fiction, but this piece totally lost its appeal long before it ended.

Flights didn't hit five star status for me until two thirds of the way through, so I gave it four. By the end though, I was completely captivated. I love her writing. The attention to detail is remarkable and the characters are exquisitely drawn. There is a playful quality to her very peculiar tales and I found them fascinating.

The book is a challenging read: a series of stories, many of them split and with shifting points of view, and a narrator that is unreliable at times, but not always. Playing with format appeals to me, as long as it is not over engineered or pretentious. Tokarczuk's exploration of form feels natural.

The toughest part of this novel for me was figuring out what she's saying to the reader. The ostensible theme is travel, but these are journeys unlike any other -- through both the inside and outside of bodies, through harems and Chopin's heart, listening to travel psychology lecturers. She talks about motility vs. stasis, crossing borders, and I think what it means to be free. I'm uncertain about her fascination with cabinets of curiosities and their preserved body parts, but maybe it's related to navigating boundaries?

An unusual, brilliant perspective on why autocrats hate immigration that serves as a theme for travel in all of its manifestations, and possibly for the whole book:

"This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads--this is why they persecute the Gypsies and Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.

What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging; they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, election results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.

What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of bar codes, labeling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way, by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize readings of their own bar-coded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves."

...the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of event that has passed into folklore, Ben's laughter behind her and she turns and sees Molly tickling him on her lap and she watches her son and sees in his eyes a radiant intensity that speaks of the world before the fall, and she is on her knees crying...

This is possibly the scariest book I've ever read. A far right political party comes to power in Ireland and immediately declares a national emergency. Military types are dispatched to round up union organizers and other people the government deems pesky. A family is caught up in the chaos when the father is seized and detained, and the mother is left to struggle to keep her family together.

Despite the dystopian mood of the book, and how anxious it made me feel, I was hooked after reading the first few paragraphs. The story's power comes from amazing writing. Phrases are chained together into long sentences, like the fragment I quoted above. The characters talk back and forth at breakneck speed, there are no quotes in the dialog, and few spaces anywhere. Just looking at the block of text on the pages made me feel trapped.

Lynch is issuing a warning that is difficult to hear because it's threatening so many places: we need to watch out for creepy people with weird agendas bent on overturning our lives and our countries, and people will almost always have to fight tyranny locally, often with the rest of the world looking on.

The power of this writing is astonishing. I'm not sure I've ever been so shaken by a work of fiction. I'm impressed by a lot of exceptional literature coming from Ireland lately. Maybe they're having a new literary golden era? I know they have a strong tradition, but so many of the best books I've read lately are by Irish authors.

I like this ambitious little book. It is an engaging biography that offers a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of Willa Cather in relatively few pages. Because of restrictions in her will, Willa Cather's letters were not published until 1913 when her executor died and her estate permitted their release. Taylor makes good use of his access to the letters in his story of this remarkable woman.

I didn't know much about Cather. I've read several of her books (Death Comes for the Archbishop is my hands down favorite--her evocation of the Southwest is breathtaking), but I don't think I really got how groundbreaking she was, and how much she achieved as a woman in a time when good female writers were scarce. She was tough and determined, knew what she wanted, and her work was appreciated by critics and readers almost from the start. Most of her books and stories were deeply sourced from her own experience, and the characters were often based on friends, neighbors, and family members, current and historical. Taylor reveals these connections precisely and intelligently and makes me want to read the rest of her work.

The biographical details of Cather's life are here, but the book is mostly about her work, what in her life generated it, and how it was received. It's an excellent introduction to Willa Cather and her work.