We Need New Names

This is the last of my 2014 Challenge books this year.  If I am calculating correctly, I read all but two of the ones on my list.  And what a way to end.

This is a blunt, brutal book.  This story starts during a particularly violent period in the history of Zimbabwe.  The first chapter begins with a group of children. Given their thoughts and that one is pregnant, you assume they're maybe 14, 15 years old.  Then you realize they're 9 and 10.  That realization made my blood run cold.

The scene where the group tried to help their pregnant friend is enough to break your heart.

The story moves to America later, as the protagonist, Darling, unofficially immigrates.  The trauma is no longer as blatant, but it's still there, just as pervasive.  Much of the second half of the book is about Darling's transition to America, socially and culturally, and the great loss that leaving Zimbabwe represents to her.

The observations made on Darling's feelings of dislocation and the intense, exhausting pressure to send money back home were eye opening.  The same goes for the incredible differences between main stream American culture and that of Darling's.

Final call:

This one will pull you right out of your safe world, and make you very glad that you have it to return to.

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters is one of those authors who make tough things look very easy.  I have read all of her works now, except for her very newest novel, and she has pulled off wonderful tricks and effects in each book.

The Night Watch is possibly my favorite of her books.  I think this is likely due to the structure, which starts in 1947 and then follows the end backward through to its start in 1941.  I am thinking the same story, told chronologically, would not have had the same effect, would not have been as poignant.  Which is a little mind-bending in and of itself.

The title is referring to the third shift ambulance work that the main characters engage in during the bombings of London in WWII.  When Waters takes us out with Kay and Micky, the mood and feel is just amazing.  The same for the times we spend with Duncan in prison during the bombing raids.  Supremely eerie.

But the real gem, the passage that just takes the cake, is the 1941 section that gives us Alec.  An action that drives so much of the novel.  Most authors wouldn't have taken us as far along the path as Waters did.  The action would have happened off-stage, probably because another author wouldn't have been able to handle it as well.  This part reminds me so much of Robert Frobisher's character in Cloud Atlas.

I also thought it was a brilliant move to make some typically male faults a part of Kay's character.  

Final call:

If you are going to jump into Waters, I'd probably choose this book first.  It's got all of the Waters hallmarks without too much grinding miserableness.  And I'm still, apparently, a sucker for a non-linear plot.

Elizabeth Costello & Brooklyn

In the interest of catching up on reviewing books, here's a two pack.  These have nothing in common, really, except I read them back to back.

First, Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.  This is not structured like a novel, more like a set of essays framed as a series of talks given by an aging author in various places around the world.  Then, she dies and is required to put her beliefs in action in the afterlife, such as they are and such as it is.

  

I did some research into the book, to help me make sense of it.  I'll be the first to admit, what Coetzee's getting at, what he's approaching, is pretty sophisticated philosophy and it's is over my head.  Didn't mean that I didn't appreciate the book, but I'm sure I didn't take as much away from it as is there.  There are also some deeply unsettling topics covered here.

Next, I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.  I'm getting introduced to some fine Irish writers this year.  Toibin has an extraordinarily straightforward and uncomplicated writing style, at least in this book.

Eilis is the main character of Brooklyn.  The plot has a very even keel.  Eilis faces trials and travails, no doubt, but usually makes the right decision (or is pushed toward the right decision, but that's another issue) and moves forward.  No one takes advantage of her, despite the tremendous opportunities.  She meets a man and falls in love and he has no major faults.

The end disappointed me, though.  Eilis is already quite the passive character.  (She frickin' emigrates to America because her sister and mother decide that someone has to go, and it should be Eilis.)  She secretly marries her boyfriend in Brooklyn, at his insistence, before returning to Ireland for her sister's funeral.  While there, she develops a serious relationship with an old acquaintance and appears to come out of her dream only when one of the local gossips hears from Eilis's Brooklyn landlord.

It would have been much better, to me, if Eilis had decided to return to America on her own, without being tattled on.

Final call:

For both books.  Elizabeth Costello probably deserves a half a star extra, and Brooklyn a half a star less, but what's one to do with only whole-star graphics :)

Cat's Eye

I chipped away at this book for a long time.  It's one that got interrupted by my studying.  And it is fairly melancholy, at a time when I was, too, so sometimes it was hard to pick it back up.

This is the third of Margaret Atwood's books I have read.  Cat's Eye has a lot more in common with The Blind Assassin than The Handmaid's Tale.  Excellent characterizations of women, very nuanced relationships.  Such an accurate depiction of girlhood, and one woman's interior life as she grows.

Atwood is just delicious to read.  This is not a happy book, but it doesn't matter.  Elaine, the protagonist, has been damaged by her life but has come to terms with her childhood through art.  She's most haunted by the lost chance at genuine friendship with her childhood best friend.

I felt kinship with Elaine's early years, where she was left to be herself, as she defined it, and lived an unorthodox life chasing insect infestations of forests with her scientist father.  Not that I did that, but the part about the lack of forced gender roles.

Final call:



Read this.  Read all her books.  Authors don't come this consistently good very often.

Number9Dream

So let's talk David Mitchell.  Despite some stiff competition, he is probably my favorite author.  He has six books out (including one just released!), and now I have read three of them.  

The other two under my belt are Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas.  These books read like two facets of one very large story.  And then I read a recent interview with Mitchell where he admitted his works not only share supporting characters - they are probably all telling the same story.

Anyway, Mitchell is known for wacky narrative structures and extreme feats of imagination, and  that absolutely describes Number9Dream, even though the end effect is very different from his usual.  If he has a usual.  

Instead of trotting through space and time in disjointed but connected narratives,  Number9Dream  stays in one person's viewpoint (well, not really, but kind of).  We follow Eiji, a young Japanese man searching Tokyo for a father he's never met and dealing with the death of his twin sister and abandonment by his mother.  Eiji takes a lot of detours and has some definitely imaginary adventures on his journey.  Coincidences and obvious plot devices abound.  He falls in love.  He comes to terms with the trauma in his life.

But one of the questions in the end is, "just how much of the plot actually a happened, versus being imagined by Eiji?"  I believe that it is all in his head.  Really.  Eiji, the name, is explained twice in the text as meaning "incant" and "world."  I think he's making it up, the entire thing.  

A lot of the criticisms people have about the book, I think, don't apply if this is true.  People are seeing a hack plot with too much crazy stuff and a not-quite-right view of Japanese culture.  I say that it's Eiji's voice that is responsible for the plot "problems" and the outsider-looking-in view of Tokyo.  I think Eiji's been in Kagoshima thinking his way out of his problems the entire book, using his manga and video games to fuel his fantasies.

Then there's the 5th part of this book, A Study of Tales.  Who else would juxtapose Eiji's quest with stories about a talking goat, a sentient hen, and a primordial man to frame up questions about authorship, agency, and the meaning of life and death.  You just can't get this stuff anywhere else.

Number9Dream left me feeling many things, but most of all, at a loss.  However, there is at least one point in any David Mitchell book (and often many, many points) where you get a particular feeling, one of being extremely far-sighted.  You start to see the entirety of life and how it works much more clearly than you normally do, and the day-to-day begins to seem very myopic but also the only chance we have to make any kind of difference.

And that is why I love his books.

Final call:

This actually isn't my very favorite work of his, but he's still head and shoulders above the crowd.

The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters ended up with three books in this year's challenge, and I have already read Fingersmith.  Because she is one of the most readable authors left, and so much of my mental energy is being diverted, and my time for pleasure reading is virtually nil,  I picked up The Little Stranger.

 

This isn't Victorian-era Sarah Waters, but it is still very much rooted in her strengths.  Emotional tension, uncomfortable moments, plots that will never work out happily ever after, ambivalence about absolutely every character.  Not a single one is completely sympathetic, and there is no obvious bad guy.

You have the actual horrors of the time period.  The great halls of England falling to pieces as the great families don't have the money for upkeep and servants.  The awkwardness of upper class families  trying to maintain their social status while selling off their land and possessions to survive.  The trauma the World Wars inflicted on England.  And then pair those real, historical problems with the horrors of a house that seems to want to kill its residents - a family who is far from perfect but doesn't deserve their fates.

In a lot of reviews I saw, people were angry because the ending is ambiguous.  But, it isn't, at least I don't think so.  Throughout the book, you try to work out the root of the "evil" happenings in Hundreds Hall, and you really aren't sure.  But by the end, there's only one source left, and he shares his name with the father of electromagnetism.  At that point, it's holy obvious poltergeist, Batman.

Other people complained that it wasn't very scary.  I think that depends on how you like your horror.  I found very little gore, but plenty of out and out creepiness. I tend to think the best horror comes out of authors like this, who weave it subtly in to everyday life.  Particularly at the beginning, where everything seems mundane, and then insanity emerges in small doses and doesn't let go.

Final Call:

  

Waters is just a great author and you should read this.  Maybe around Halloween, I wish I had waited.  It's the perfect mood for a dreary fall day.

Quote Storm: The God of Small Things and The Book of Evidence

I haven't done a quote post in a while, and The God of Small Things definitely deserves one, so I might as well take care of two books with one post.

For The God of Small Things:

She had forgotten just how damp the monsoon air in Ayemenem could be. Swollen cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned themselves on dim forty-watt bulbs.

...

Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking.  Stopped talking, altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. 

...

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel had come from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered.  It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

...

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, refilling glasses).

...

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could He have swum on land?

...

Ammu wondered at the transparency of that kiss.  It was a clear-as-glass kiss. Unclouded by passion or desire - that pair of dogs that sleep so soundly inside children, waiting for them to grow up. It was a kiss that demanded no kiss-back.
...

And from The Book of Evidence:

It was that abstracted, mildly dissatisfied air which first drew my attention to her. She was not nice, she was not good. She suited me.

...

We understood each other, yes, but that did not mean we knew each other, or wanted to. How would we have maintained that unselfconscious grace that was so important to us both, if we had not also maintained the essential secretness of our inner selves?

...

It is just that I do not believe that such moments mean anything - or any other moments, for that matter. They have significance, apparently. They may even have value of some sort. But they do not mean anything.

...

I have never really gotten used to being on this earth.  Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. how could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us?

...

The question is wrong, that's the trouble. It assumes that actions are determined by volition, deliberate thought, a careful weighing-up of facts, all that puppet-show twitching which passes for consciousness.

...

Monday morning. Ah, Monday morning. The ashen light, the noise, the sense of pointless but compulsory haste. I think it will be Monday morning when I am received in Hell.

...

The Book of Evidence

When the cover of a book describes it as "an astonishing, disturbing little novel that might have been coughed up from hell" you do start to wonder what you're getting into.

But for the most part, The Book of Evidence is a psychological study that looks at evil and how society addresses it.  And this look - accomplished by living inside the head of a nut case who ends up committing a murder - makes for an uncomfortable read.  You realize very quickly that the narrator is a pompous self-centered delusional windbag and you don't want to spend time with him but that's the only way to get to the end.

All that notwithstanding, this is a great book.  The author can run circles around the English language. He has the greatest descriptions of light and mood.  And questioning that inner dead space in all of us.  Haven't we all wanted to stop playing by the rules of society at some point?  Well, Freddie just does, and unsurprisingly, things don't go well for him.  And then he tries to figure out how to make it up and - dare we say, shows a glimmer of humanity after all?

Final call:

Some folks compare Banville to Nabokov because of the unlikeable first person narrators. Banville is far more approachable - give him a chance.

The God of Small Things

So here's a Booker prize winner.  I had a copy at one point, I know I did.  But it wandered away, and I only recently found another copy at a really awesome used bookstore in Dayton, OH.  I said I'd read this for my 2014 challenge if I could find it, and well, here's my review.

This is quite a counterpoint to A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.  Written about the same time but set 10 years earlier in a different part of India.  A wildly different form of writing - playful, experimental, toying with the sounds of words, and injecting the rhythm of Malayalam into English.

Where Mistry's story lets the characters' humanity shine through, Roy uses artistry.

The plot is a fairly hackneyed set-up - an affair between castes - but the resulting consequences dwell on big questions.  How responsible are children for the results of their actions?  Even when they've been manipulated?  How do unbending social constructs protect and destroy individuals?  What motivates people either to fall in line or rebel against their given roles?  How have modern political systems grafted themselves on to cultures that greatly predate them?  

She also provides an almost incidental but damning critique of Western-driven cultural tourism.

Many parts of the book seem trippy or dream-like, but this is because much of it is told from the viewpoint of children.  Not precisely in their words, but in their style of perception.


Final Call:


In the end, this one ended up being one of my all-time favorites, much in the same way The English Patient  has.  One of the few books I would gladly reread.

A Fine Balance

I picked another hefty Booker contender for my next read.  A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

It took a while for the cover picture to resolve itself into its separate parts.  That's the whole book in so many ways - the balance between hope and despair, between protecting one's self and sheltering others.  The balance between protection and exploitation.  I'm intentionally not going into detail here, because it's better to read it not knowing much going in.  

One of the best parts of this book is the writing.  It's a very well-written book, but it's not arty or overdone.  The story is the point, and that's the focus.

We follow four people, each with painful histories, who slowly forge a family in horrific circumstances.  You hope that their lives will get better, or at least less precarious, as the book moves forward, but that doesn't happen in any kind of way that makes you feel better for them.

One of the four has a very different fate than the others, and the reason for it is one of the big questions the book asks.  This story also shows how a breakdown in the protection of basic human rights victimizes nearly everyone.  Character A steps on the back of Character B to avoid being crushed by Character C.  And then there's the appalling but very human Beggarmaster.  One of the most complex characters I have come across in a long time.

I'll be honest, I nearly stopped reading several times. I empathized to such a degree that I could hardly bear to keep going.

The extreme fragility of living in poverty will stay with you long after you put the book down.

But.  I finished it, and it's beyond rewarding.

Final call:

You need a good dose of emotional fortitude to make it through A Fine Balance, but please do.

The English Patient

And the catch up continues ...

What I knew about this book before I read it:

• I saw at least some of the movie when I was younger.  I remember a lot of sand and a very dead woman.  Pretty sure Voldemort was in it.
• It's the centerpiece of a funny Seinfeld episode.  Elaine just doesn't get the appeal of the movie and hilarity ensues.

What I know about the book now that I have read it.

• It's apparently not very similar to the movie, although both have the same spirit and feel.
• Michael Ondaatje is a poet and it shows in his novels.
• It's really hard to praise it highly enough.

Seriously.  This isn't a long book, but it has layers upon layers, and the symbolism runs deep.  A lot of reviewers will tell you the book is about identity, and how people define themselves in relation to nationality, their environment, and each other.  

And I think that's correct, but that it's also about bombs.  There's a lot of detail about the mechanics of explosive devices, and I think that is a reflection of the "bombs" in the story.  Situations and combinations of personalities that are inevitably going to to blow up.

The four primary characters are in a place and time where any part of the physical world could explode at the whim of an IED.  They're near the end of WWII in a near-destroyed villa, following the German retreat from Italy, and they themselves are mentally and physically bombed out from their various and numerous wartime traumas.  Their stories crisscross with each other and explosive characters from their pasts.

At the center is of course, the English Patient, who has no physical identity any longer and who isn't really English, either.  Who connects all of the characters, past and present, and who has been responsible for more than one explosion of his own.

And then, of course, the atomic bombs that effectively end WWII also bring the book to its end.

This book, moreso than many others, reminds you that stories are art.

Final call:

Read this, please.  Not if you want a plot burner.  You are going to feel like Elaine if that's what you're after.  But if you want to be reminded of why you read ALL of the books, then read this one, now.

Never Let Me Go

I'm behind.  I actually read this book in the first half of April.  So bear with me as I play catch up.

I have read an Ishiguro book before - The Remains of Day - so I know he's good at using unreliable narrators.  Or, at least, narrators who who stick their head in the sand and hold on tight!

Never Let Me Go is accessible and approachable.  The narrator, Kathy, feels like an old friend telling you about her school buddies.  Which I am sure is part of the point, as you sympathize with her even as you come to realize that she and her friends are very different in a key way.

It's a quiet book.  Whoever designed the cover picked up on this, with the watercolor feeling.  A few moments of high drama, and the rest is subtle.

You could call this horror, although almost everything horrific is left unsaid.  Many people pick it up without knowing it is science fiction.  To be honest, I didn't know, either.  I knew there was a twist to it, and that you should just read it and go with it.

So, I did.

Final call:

  

I felt a little bit like I knew Ishiguro's tricks already.  Of the two, I feel like The Remains of the Day is a little more satisfying.  But this one is good, too.  Read it!

On Chesil Beach

A note:  I finished reading this book a month or two ago.  As you'll see, I didn't much care for it and didn't feel like writing about it and let this post sit as a draft till now.  Oh well, time to get it out!

................................................

What a squirm-inducing little book.  There's hardly anything to it, lengthwise, but there's so much uncomfortableness.  This is one of my Man Booker Challenge books.  It was short-listed in 2007 but did not win.  

I have to say, I'm not surprised.  First and foremost because the publishers took a short story and finagled it into a very small hard-bound book.  Second, because I have read Ian McEwan before - Atonement is one of my more favorite books.  This just isn't the same level or quality.

I mean, I see what he was trying to do, but it didn't totally work.  The whole arc is messed up, neither of the main characters grow.  Except for maybe a hint given by one sentence in the last few paragraphs.  Not enough.

Final call:

Eh.

    

Quote Storm: The Luminaries

I debated doing a storm post for this book, but I have some time, so I guess you get one, haha.  This book does not lend itself to pulling out a couple of witty sentences here and there.  But on reflection - there are so many sentences in this book; a few are bound to work for my purpose!

...

"A lucky man, I've always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment."

...

One of the main characters, assessing another:

His prosperity sat easily with him, Moody thought, recognizing in the man that relaxed sense of entitlement that comes when a lifelong optimism has been ratified by success.

...

Another of the twelve, making an observation about the men and a local prostitute:

"Every man has his currency," Gascoigne added after a moment.  "Perhaps it's gold; perhaps it's women.  Anna Wetherell, you see, was both."

...

Some subtle humor:

"My father hails from the county Tyrone.  Before I came here, I was in Dunedin; before that, I was in New York."
"New York - now there's a place!"
The reverend shook his head. "Everywhere is a place," he said.

...

Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently.

...

And this part, describing Anna's relationships with her customers - while she is representing the moon, astrologically speaking.

The men with whom she plied her trade were rarely curious about her.  If they spoke at all, they spoke about other women - the sweethearts they had lost, the wives they had abandoned, their mothers, their sisters, their daughter, their wards.  They sought these women when they looked at Anna, but only partly, for they also sought themselves: she was a reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light.  Her wretchedness was, she knew, extremely reassuring.

...

"I daresay the afterlife is a very dreary place."
"How do you conceive it so?"
"We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored.  We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about.  Time would have no consequence."

...

He possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill.  

...

When the sun and moon meet:

"I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude," Anna said.
"No, no," the boy said. "Oh, no. Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company."

...

And a segment about the same, from one of the long chapter introductions:

... a connexion by virtue of which he feels less, rather than more, complete, in the sense that her nature, being both oppositional to and in accord with his own, seems to illuminate those internal aspects of his character that his external manner does not or cannot betray, leaving him feeling both halved and doubled, or in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it...

...

Illuminating astrology: a 2014 Challenge extra

I don't own this book, so it wasn't on my original challenge list.  But I heard about it, became intrigued, and found out it was available through the library.  Once I saw it compared to Cloud Atlas, I couldn't resist.

Besides winning the Man Booker, you will hear two things about The Luminaries:  the author is young, and the book is long.  However, after reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I don't know if I'll ever think of any other book as long.  I got through it in about a week, so definitely not ridiculous.   

This is one of those books where you can read the back cover and inner flap and still not really know what you are getting into.  There's a unique astrological structure that quite literally drives the plot.  The action is beyond intricate, and it's not always immediately clear what the heck happened.  Then there's a somewhat unexpected bit of the supernatural that also complicates matters.

In any case, the more I think about the book, the more I like it.  The meaning of the title becomes clear, and near the end you realize you had no idea that the entire plot (the zodiac and the planets) swings at every point around three people (the sun, the moon, and the earth).  Finding and reading most of this discussion thread really helped clue me in to the finesse in the astrological titles and other hidden gems in the text.

So was it like Cloud Atlas?  Eh.  In terms of non-linear storytelling and a unique structure.  And, briefly, a South Seas setting.  But otherwise, no.  Cloud Atlas is actually pretty easy to "get."  Mitchell borders on too obvious with the clues to his game - thank you, comet birthmark.  Catton buries hers so deeply that you might even need to read it again (!) to put everything together.  Yeah, no.  Not this year, anyway  :)

   Final call:

(and a half, maybe)


Consider long and hard before you decide to read this.  Like Dickens?  Like subtlety?  Have a big chunk of time on your hands?  Then go for it!

Quote Storm: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Flavia is one of a kind.  These are a few of my favorite glimpses into her world.

...

(I'm with you on this one, Flavia!)

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

...

The de Luce children love squabbling with each other.  Flavia, in church with her older sister:

Now, glancing over at Feely as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil's Hairball.

...

On poisons:

Although I have to admit that I have a soft spot for cyanide - when it comes to speed, it is right up there with the best of them.  If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.

...

A simile that really caught my imagination.  This is Flavia, catching the scent of her long-dead mother's perfume:

The scent was of small blue flowers, mountain meadows, and of ice.

A peculiar feeling passed over me - or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain.

...

And Flavia, describing herself and her family:

Once, when I was about nine, I had kept a diary about what it was like to be a de Luce, or at least what it was like to be this particular de Luce.  I thought a great deal about how I felt and finally came to the conclusion that being Flavia de Luce was like being a sublimate: like the black crystal residue that is left on the cold glass of a test tube by the violet fumes of iodine. 

As I have said, there is something lacking in the de Luces: some chemical bond, or lack of it, that ties their tongues whenever they are threatened by affection.  It is as unlikely that one de Luce would ever tell another that she loved her as it is that one peak in the Himalayas would bend over and whisper sweet nothings to an adjacent crag.

...

Quote Storm: Get a Life

I am going to include a few of my favorites.  As I put this post together, I realized that there were many passages I liked, but few that made sense when just a few sentences were singled out.  But here are some that work, more or less.

...

Rarely do I get a quote from the very first page of a book:

Radiant.
Literally radiant.  But not giving off light as saints are shown with a halo.  He radiates unseen danger to others from a destructive substance that has been directed to counter what was destroying him.  Had him by the throat.  Cancer of the thyroid gland.

...

His work is scientific, in collaboration with the greatest scientist of all, nature, who has the formula for everything, whether discovered or still a mystery to research by its self-styled highest creation.

...

Surely there is no purposelessness the music you love cannot deny by the act of your listening.

...

This passage actually goes on for far longer and makes the entire book worth it, in my opinion:

The Okavango delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained-by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably.  ... Where to begin understanding what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem?  Where to decide it begins.

...

Visting a natural area with nesting endangered eagles:

Lyndsay was the one who noticed the leafy twigs, as the leaflet had described, on the mess of the nest on the right--from the viewer's not the bird's point of view.  The wings of night against sun-paled sky continued to plane and dip; and then there was a descent, the transforming mastery that was the eagle's was gone, collapsed in a bird.  

(Resumption) Get a Life

I have not forgotten about you, blog.  But as the weird blend of birthday (my husband) and sympathy (the loss of my grandfather) cards on my mantel attests - life has been a really mixed bag lately, and I've been living mostly offline.

It doesn't feel right to just pick up where I left off, but with a blog, what else is there to do?

I actually finished a book - Get a Life, by Nadine Gordimer - two days before I found out about my grandfather.  I had a whole post in my mind at the time, but didn't write it, and now it seems like I read the book a year ago instead of a week ago.

But I have to get something out on it, I'm already a book behind in reviews.

Gordimer is a Nobel-prize winning South African more known for her books focused on class and race, than on health and family drama.  This is my first book by her, but I knew going in that she can be ... difficult.   But at least its only 187 pages, right?  Nope.  This is easily one of the toughest books I've tackled.

There are brilliant passages contemplating illness, death, conservation (her description of the Okavango delta late in the book is fantastic), parent/child relationships, and husband/wife relationships.  Unfortunately, they usually are couched in wild sentence structures and possibly even experimental grammar.  There are sentences that just don't read properly in English as I know it.

Books inevitably get mixed up in real life, when you're me, at least.  They can put you in a mood.  (The Bell Jar, anyone?)  This one left me feeling pretty ambivalent about life.  And then life itself left me feeling pretty ambivalent about life.          

As you'll soon see, bookwise, I changed direction. I have been resorting to light, fun lit - no more heavy hitters that question the meaning of existence for a while.  Sometimes reading for entertainment and escapism is just the ticket.

   Final call:

It's worth the slog, but I'm not sure why a writer of her skill would intentionally obscure her work. Get ready to commit some time and to question your understanding of the English language.

Quote Storm: Fingersmith

I reread my review of Fingersmith and realized that I made the book sound just super-dreary.  Which it is.  But, there is a surprising amount of humor in Sue's frank descriptions of her thieving lifestyle, early in the book.  I'm including a few examples of that here, along with a few other quotes that caught my eye.  

And another thing about Waters - you don't realize just how complicated her sentence structure can get until you attempt to correctly type out a paragraph or two!

...

Sue, the young pickpocket, talking about reading and writing:

I believe I learned my alphabet, like that: not by putting letters down, but by taking them out (removing identifying monograms from stolen goods).  I know I learned the look of my own name, from handkerchiefs that came, marked Susan.  As for regular reading, we never troubled with it.  Mrs. Sucksby could do it, if she had to; Mr. Ibbs could read, and even write; but, for the rest of us, it was an idea - well, I should say, like speaking Hebrew or throwing somersaults: you could see the use of it, for Jews and tumblers; but while it was their lay, why make it yours?

...

Training Sue to act as a lady's maid for their scheme:

'Why don't she wear the kind of stays that fasten at the front, like a regular girl?' said Dainty, watching.  

'Because then,' said Gentleman, 'she shouldn't need a maid. And if she didn't need a maid, she shouldn't know she was a lady. Hey?' He winked.

...

On husbands:

She hummed along until her eyes grew damp, and then the hum got broken.  Her husband had been a sailor, and been lost at sea. - Lost to her, I mean.  He lived in the Bermudas.

...

On servants and their masters:

I should never have put her down as the motherly sort, myself; but servants grow sentimental over the swells they work for, like dogs grow fond of bullies.You take my word for it.

...

Sue, justifying her part in scamming Miss Lilly (Maud), which is all the more delicious as Maud is actually double-crossing Sue:

And then, say I gave it all up - how would that save Maud? Say I went home: Gentleman would go on and marry her, and lock her up anyway.  Or, say I peached him up. He would be sent from Briar, Mr. Lilly would keep her all the closer - she might as well be put in a madhouse, then. Either way, I didn't say much to her chances.

But her chances had all been dealt to her, years before. She was like a twig on a rushing river. She was like milk - too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.

...

Honor among thieves ...

Last night, I finished Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.  Unlike my other year-to-date books, I have read this author before.  So, I knew what to expect, more or less.  

If you know anything of Waters, you have probably heard her described as Dickens with lesbians.  And thieves, and shysters, and all manner of unsavory characters. In fact, fingersmith is an antiquated term for thief or pickpocket.   

If you've read her books before, you also know she can write the saddest stories.  Affinity may qualify as the very saddest book I have ever read.  Waters has a penchant for writing about very vulnerable women being made miserable, and this book is no exception.  The two main female protagonists are victimized in both the same and different ways throughout.  

The first two-thirds of the book are a work of art.  So much tension.  One girl (with help) sets out to scam the other in a particularly horrible way.  But, the tables are reversed and the scammee turns out to be the scammer.  Oh, and the two manage to fall in love while plotting each other's downfall.  

The first third describes the scam, over a period of months, from Sue's viewpoint.  The second third describes it from Maud's.  It is incredibly eerie to read the same sequence of events from differing viewpoints, and see how Sue's perception is both more and less accurate than Maud's, though Maud of course knows more about the true motivation behind the scenes.  

These sections deserve five out of five stars.  It's after Maud is taken, as a prisoner more or less, to Sue's old home that the book falls flat to me.  The villainy, and the absurd chain of events that inspire it, is taken to lengths that become unbelievable.  The desperation and ill treatment of both Maud and Sue goes on for too long and in too much detail with too little purpose (unless Waters' purpose is to expose the horrors of Victorian insane asylums, in which case you should just read Affinity and be done with it), the momentum drags.  

The secondary characters never show depth. Maud's uncle is a very evil caricature.  Richard might be fascinating, but we never find out.  The various young boys exist just to perform necessary functions in the plot (Sue has to get out of the madhouse somehow).  

I am actually surprised there's a vaguely happy ending, but there's not enough light at the end of the tunnel to make you feel better about the trip because, while Sue and Maud reunite, we only see them happy for about one page.  For pete's sake, we follow Sue wandering around Briar looking for Maud for longer than we see their reconciliation.   

This book could very fairly be qualified as a horror story - one of the most horrific kinds, one that might easily have happened.  Not all of it, in its entirety, but the pieces: how very very powerless women could be in Victorian England, how limited personal freedom could be, and how little recourse of any sort was available.  How easy it was to be declared mad.  How few options the poor had.  All of the terrible tricks and cheats that people pulled.

  Final call: 

(and maybe a half)


Read this one and shiver, but be prepared to lose the magic toward the end.