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0307718964
| 9780307718969
| 0307718964
| 3.93
| 35,358
| Sep 10, 2013
| Sep 10, 2013
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 12, 2016
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Apr 20, 2016
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Jan 15, 2016
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Hardcover
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0316176486
| 9780316176484
| 0316176486
| 3.78
| 229,138
| Mar 14, 2013
| Apr 02, 2013
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it was amazing
| “Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someo “Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in---I don’t know, say, a Quaker household—surely things would be different.”Kate Atkinson, author of eight previous novels, including four Jackson Brodie crime books, has come up with a nifty notion for a story. Kill off your heroine, early and often, while offering a look at the history of England from 1910 to the 1960s. I would love to tell you more but an SUV appears to have run a red light at the corner, had a too close encounter with a very large truck and seems to be heading into this café...Gotta go. Damn! Now, where were we, a review? Yes, I seem to recall something about that. More of a feeling really. So, England, 20th century, perils of Pauline, well in this case Ursula, little bear, of Fox Corner, the manse of a well-to-do sort, not Downton rich, but, you know, comfortable. She has a prat of an older brother and a decent elder sis, with a couple of brothers arriving later. [image] Kate Atkinson - from The Telegraph Life is full of decision points. Walk this way, survive, walk that way and splat. It begins early with Ursula, who is offed before her first breath the first time around. She gets a better deal on the next go, managing to remain with us into childhood, and so on. The structure seems to employ the backstitch a fair bit, starting Ursula up a few chronological paces before the deadly decision point. She seems to be born again more than an entire congregation of fundamentalist Christians, or, maybe more likely a band of Buddhists, as she seems to pick up a bit of wisdom, a bit of strength with each reincarnation. I counted 15 passings-on, but sure, I could have missed one or two. The lady must have G. Reaper on her autodial. What if I had done this instead of that? How might that have changed the outcomes? One can imagine the fun, and challenge an author experiences. Taking her main character, and plenty of secondary characters as well, in one direction then another, then another. It must mimic, to a degree, the authorial process. What if I do this to Ursula? What might happen? What if I point her in a different direction? And as for stuff happening, while it is usually pretty calm here, writing while on a bench in Prospect Park, I must admit I have never seen tentacles that size emerging from anywhere let alone the very modest Park Lake. The slurping sounds are getting rather loud. That sumbitch is faster than he looks…Gotta go. Damn! So, I felt like sitting with some coffee but the local café just seemed, I don’t know, not what I wanted. Then I considered maybe heading over to the park to work on a review, but it looks like it might rain, so I think I’ll stick at home for now. Of course the desktop has been a bit dodgy of late, but no big whup. I will dip into the special Kona stash, brew up a nice cuppa and set to, shoes off, no shirt. Maybe a nice bagel with butter and strawberry preserves. Yummm! Review, yes, Atkinson, Ursula, do-overs. Oh yeah, it does call to mind a bit of Groundhog Day, although Phil the Weatherman knew early on that he was coming back each time. Not Ursula, although as time goes on she does develop a bit of a sixth sense about some things. And the other major difference here is that Life After Life takes on some heftier purpose than Phil getting the girl and becoming a better person. Ursula is faced with some immediate challenges, like evading a rapist, a girl-killer, those annoying Nazi bombs during the blitz, not falling out windows, you know, stuff. But she also must contend with moral choices, and larger scale. Not only figuring out what the right thing is to do and then deciding, for her life, but thinking about how events affect other people, the nation, maybe the world. What sort of life does she want to lead? How can she help the most people? What sort of person does she want to be? Can she make an impact beyond her immediate concerns? And within that context, others face similar choices. Ursula is not the only one with multiple exit scenes. There are plenty in the chorus of secondary characters who come and go, or should that be go and come back in varying iterations. What if so-and-so did A this time and B the next? How might that change things? This is part of the fun of the book. Not all the decisions are of the life-threatening variety, but they can seriously impact one’s life, other lives as well. Excuse me a moment, Nala, sweetie, off the desk please. I will be happy to scratch you. No, do not rub up against my coffee cup. Nala, DOWN, NOW! Too late, brown milky liquid splatters from the cup on the desk, rushing over the top of the desktop tower, which is sitting on the floor between desk and couch. I get up to fetch some paper towels. Nala’s tail is vertical as she scampers from the room. Maybe I should have worn slippers. I step away from the desk chair, contact enough wet to matter, and only feel it for moment when my body hair begins to ignite and my heart goes into highly charged spasms. I hear the beginning of a scream and then….sonuva..! Seems a lovely morning for some reviewing. Rainy out? Well, not yet, but you can feel it coming. So, open a few windows. Sit at the desk. Well. Maybe not. Might be a bit too much breeze there. Maybe the couch for a change. Yeah, book, they killed Kenny. You bastards! England. Ursula. War. I’d always meant it to be very focused on the Second World War, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to start in 1910, to get her born…I think that’s when the coming back again and again kicked in. And I was, on, oh, page 250 of the manuscript and still in the 1920s. I kept saying to people, “Yeah it’s a book about the war!” and then I’d think, it’s not a book about the war. I hadn’t realized how much I would get entangled in 1910-1939 as opposed to 1939-1945. - from Chatelaine interviewThere have certainly been some wonderful novels in the last few years that play with structure. A Visit from the Goon Squad is one of the more dramatic of that sort. The rise of the novel comprised of linked stories has seen a boom in popularity. This year’s Welcome to Braggsville takes some chances with form as well. And so it is with Life After Life. While the notion of reincarnation is hardly new in fiction, how it is handled here is far beyond what we have seen before, a real risk-taking. And so effective. Ursula is a very engaging character. Each time she comes back, you want her to stick around. And even when she makes bad choices you will be rooting for her to fix those in the next round. Her sister Pamela seems as decent a sort as their brother Maurice seems insufferable, maybe a bit too insufferable. We get to see dimensions to Atkinson’s characters over the many iterations, learn something new about them, sometimes surprisingly so. I found it to be entirely engaging, and was always sad when Ursula went dark yet again. The book opens with her taking aim at the worst baddie of the 20th century and you will keep hoping she finds her way back to that place and completes the mission. Will she? One of the most riveting and memorable elements in Life After Life is the description of London during the Blitz, on the ground, you-are-there, offering considerable nightmare material, and making it clear just how hardy the survivors must have been, and how fragile the hold on life, whichever iteration a person is in. The best part of the book, for me. There are many uses of animal references here. Ursula means little bear, The family name, Todd, means Fox. A group of Nazi wives is referred to as a wolf pack. Actual foxes move in and out of the story, residents of Fox Corner, the Todd family home. A German is named Fuchs which also means fox. There are more. A warden during the Blitz is named Woolf. At one point, Atkinson offers a wink and a nod to readers as her characters discuss time travel questions. There is much consideration here of the role and rights of women in the first half of the 20th century, and the changes in mores that marked the era. The difference between love and gratitude when considering marriage is considered. The effect of World War I on the nation is noted as well, the loss of a generation of men in the war, and the loss of vast numbers from both genders from the Spanish flu. While florid passages do not characterize the novel, there are some wonderful descriptions. One of my favorites regards the night sky during the Blitz “It’s almost like a painting, isn’t it?” Miss Woolf said.Yes it is. Now that the task is done, I think I will bring in a glass of juice and have some of these lovely hard sourdough pretzels. Maybe catch something from the DVR. Always loved these pretzels, except, of course, when bits get stuck going down. Sometimes large bits, uh oh, a very large bit…trying to self-Heimlich, but no go, hitting my head on the edge of the coffee table as I stumble and fall while trying to stand up. Maybe if I can get some liquid in there it will soften it, but the noggin-knock and the inability to get any air makes decision-making a tough go. Damn! Published - 5/2/13 Review first posted – 7/17/15 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and FB pages Interviews -----Chatelaine by Alex Laws – this is a two-parter. The link to the second part is at the bottom of this one. -----NPR - with Scott Simon -----The Sydney Morning Herald by Linda Morris My review of Todd Family #2, A God in Ruins Reading group guide - from LitLovers ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 29, 2015
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Jul 13, 2015
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Apr 02, 2014
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Hardcover
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1940885035
| 9781940885032
| 1940885035
| 3.88
| 799
| Nov 13, 2013
| Nov 13, 2013
|
it was amazing
| When a man knows another manEven death starts to look attractive when When a man knows another manEven death starts to look attractive when hope is gone. And the fittingly named Gravesend of William Boyle’s first novel is a place where hope is regularly interred. Conway D’Innocenzio and RayBoy Calabrese are in a race. The finish line is their own demise, and the contest is neck and neck all the way. Death comes in many guises. Conway’s big brother, Duncan D’Innocenzio, found his when a gay-bashing teenaged thug and his pals chased him into traffic on the Belt Parkway. RayBoy, the alpha asshole, did 16 years for the deed, but the RayBoy that was is no longer. Now he is looking to pay for his crime for real. Conway wants to kill him, which would seem a nice match. Only problem is that, after sixteen years of planning his revenge, letting his life waste away while he stewed, Conway can’t seem to pull the trigger. The death-wish field here makes it seem more like a group outing than a pairs event. Ray’s nephew, Eugene, is a 15-year-old, wanna-be thug, with a limp, a misguided case of hero worship and a worse case of bad judgment. Alessandra, an actress back from the other coast to help take care of her widowed father, is one of the few main characters here who seem determined to stay alive. The old classmate she looks up, Stephanie, is the epitome of what it is to be trapped like a rat in the place where you grew up, and to internalize the incarceration. This is not the well-heeled Brooklyn of the Heights, the Slope, Fort Greene or Boerum Hill. Not the trendy arts scene of DUMBO, not the hipster haven of Williamsburg, nor the post-apocalyptic deathscape of Brownsville. Gravesend is a neighborhood on the southern end of Brooklyn, working-class, ethnic, hard-scrabble. Like most neighborhoods in New York it watches as one immigrant group moves up, hopefully, and another moves in. It used be primarily Italian, still is, but things are changing. Not always for the better. Unfortunately, for some, they are not changing enough, and the only way up is to blast your way there or to leave entirely. The place has its share of gangsters and gang-bangers, dive bars and secluded, while public, spots for the exercise of what is usually private behavior. And the environment helps make these characters who they are. [image] The author was raised in a small town in Brooklyn, and now writes and teaches in Mississippi – “I see Brooklyn in new ways from here.” Boyle has plenty of experience with working class Brooklyn life, having had a full measure, hailing from the County of Kings, Gravesend in particular. He communicates quite well the ironically small-town feeling that pertains in so many New York neighborhoods, where kids have only a slight image of what may lie across the bridges and tunnels in Manhattan, or pretty much anywhere in the wider world. I can affirm from personal experience that Boyle speaks truth. Neighborhood as small town or not, is it possible to go home again? And would you really want to? Can one really get satisfaction from revenge? Or is it that, in the same way that depression is anger directed inward, revenge is self-loathing directed outward? The writing here is taut. I would not say that Boyle’s text is a place where adjectives go to die, but they’re not bleeding over the edges of the pages either. The narrative movement is certain and consistent, moving towards resolution of the inevitable sort. Which is not to say there are no surprises. There are. The story is not a mystery, per se, but more a look at how place affects people. Rayboy was admired as a kid for his thuggish exploits, was found attractive by girls. Not exactly a disincentive. Homophobia was hardly unknown in the environment of his youth. His nephew Eugene, short on adult male models on which to base his vision of what being a man looks like, fixates on the one male he knows who was effective and respected. While the bulk of the story is dark, there are some rays of light. Good can be found, although more in thought than deed. Hope digs its way back up to the surface, allowing for some second chances. Alessandra’s affection for a particular painting at the Met can be seen both as an artistic inspiration and an omen. Her participation in various forms of Manhattan life lifts her spirits. After all, she did manage to make it out to the west coast. But hope had better move quickly before another body lands on it. Stephanie latches on to Alessandra as a way out, but she may be too limited to make a go of that. Most of the characters may not be the sorts you would want your children to marry, but they are very well realized. Boyle offers us abundant surface, but also scrapes plenty of layers away so we can see what is going on beneath. My gripe with this book was definitely of the minor sort. The title, Gravesend, is particularly apt, suiting well the content, given the body count, whether from violence or less dramatic means. But Boyle wanders a bit in his native borough. If you are expecting a singular, focused portrait of this neighborhood, fuhgeddaboudit. The author gives us a look, for sure, but we also spend time in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Manhattan’s East Village, a small slice of Queens and even go for a couple of jaunts upstate along the Hudson, these reflecting the author’s personal NY geography, or a lot of it anyway. It was fun to walk through so many places that are personally familiar, Nellie Bly, the promenade near the Verrazano Bridge, Xaverian High School under another name, subway stations, and so on. I also related to the Stephanie character, as one of the things that makes me truly shudder is the thought of being stuck back in the Bronx neighborhood in which I was raised. No love-hate issues going on there. Such dark fears constitute more of a Twilight Zone episode. Arthur Miller lived for many years in Gravesend, as did Carlo Gambino. In Boyle’s Gravesend we get to hear the patois of the latter, and look at the people and places of his tale through eyes that see the world a lot more like the former. Gravesend, Boyle’s first novel, is a pretty good beginning to what promises to be a very illustrious long-form career. Dig in. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted at Coot's Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and Twitter pages Interview with the author from LA Review of Books – mucho goodness to be had here Another wonderful interview with Boyle, by Irene McGarrity Plumb Beach is the scene of a crime - here is some info on the place A real life case that, the author confirmed, provided inspiration for the story. This is the Joan of Arc image that Alessandra focuses on in the Metropolitan. It is a mind-blowing painting to see in person. This link adds some background to the work. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 10, 2014
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Feb 14, 2014
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Jan 26, 2014
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Paperback
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0062255657
| 9780062255655
| 0062255657
| 4.02
| 627,392
| Jun 18, 2013
| Jun 18, 2013
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it was amazing
| Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but aren’t.I turned 7 early in third grade. It was a memorable school year because I had for a teacher a nun with a reputation. Sister Evangelista was about 5 foot nuthin’, and symmetrical. If the what’s black and white, black and white, black and white – a nun rolling down a hill joke were applied to her you would have needed a lot more black-and-whites, as her spherical shape would have kept her rolling a long time. It earned her the nickname Cannonball. She was notorious, not only for her distinctive dimensions, but for having a particularly foul temper. Her starched garb also pinched her face into a state of permanent floridity and pursed her lips into a particularly fish-like shape. It was not a happy year for me at school. There would be more than one instance of raised voices, and more than one rap across the hands with yardsticks. I was even banned from the classroom for a spell, to wander the halls for hours, unaccompanied. But I somehow knew that eventually I would be a third grader no longer and would escape the sharpened claws and flapping habit of this creature. She was unpleasant, for sure, but she did not present an existential threat. [image] Neil on a drainpipe as a lad – from his FB page When the unnamed narrator of Neil Gaiman’s book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, turns 7, he has troubles of his own. It begins with zero attendance at his birthday party. The family comes on some hard times and must take in boarders. The boy is given a kitten, Fluffy, to ease the loss of his room, but the pet falls victim to a cab, arriving with a South African opal miner, the latest paying resident. Not long after, the miner takes the family car. It is found soon after, at the end of a nearby lane, with a body in the back seat, and a hose running from the tail pipe to the driver’s window. At the scene, the boy meets an eleven-year-old girl, Lettie Hempstock, who takes charge of him, and brings him to her family’s farm, which borders the lane. And so begins a beautiful friendship. (Members of the extended Hempstock family, btw, turn up in several other Gaiman books) Lettie lives with her mother and grandmother. When strange events begin to erupt in the area--the boy’s sister is assaulted by flung coins, the boy wakes up choking on a coin, and other strangeness afflicts neighbors--Lettie seems to know what is causing them. She is sent to take care of it and brings the boy, her little friend, along. They travel across the Hempstock property and into what seems another world, (mentions of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland, among others, let us know that lines will be crossed) a place that has some threatening inhabitants. Lettie confronts the troublemaker, but the boy reacts to an event instead of thinking and disobeys her lone order, to keep hold of her hand. That is when the real trouble begins. [image] Image taken from abc.net.au The boy is far too young for this to be a coming of age tale, but a central element of horror, whether of the Freddie Krueger, Nurse Ratched (or Sister Evangelista) variety, or the flapping beast central to Gaiman’s tale, is one’s helplessness before a greater, and ill-intentioned power. Although he doesn’t characterize his intentions as horror-mongering, Gaiman has laid out what he was up to in writing the book. It was meant to be just about looking out at the world through the kind of eyes that I had when I was 7, from the kind of landscape that I lived in when I was 7. And then it just didn't quite stop. I kept writing it, and it wasn't until I got to the end that I realized I'd actually written a novel. ... I thought — it's really not a kids' story — and one of the biggest reasons it's not a kids' story is, I feel that good kids' stories are all about hope. In the case of Ocean at the End of the Lane, it's a book about helplessness. It's a book about family, it's a book about being 7 in a world of people who are bigger than you, and more dangerous, and stepping into territory that you don't entirely understand.Gaiman was aware that his work might appeal to young readers for whom is it not intended. He said that he deliberately made the first few chapters of the book dull as a way to dissuade younger readers, who would be put off by that and disinclined to continue on to the juicy bits. The world the young boy faces may not be understandable. There is just too much to take in and Gaiman captures that element of childhood quite well. Changes for the boy at home include the antithesis of Mary Poppins, in the form of one Ursula Monkton, who seems to have arrived on an ill wind, with the added bonus of her having designs on the boy’s father. Adults overall seem pretty careless. But there is some balance in this universe. Lettie’s family seems beyond time itself, a bright light in the darkness, welcoming, comforting, nurturing. And then there’s the ocean. Looks like a pond to you or me, but it has qualities quite unlike other bodies of water. As in his earlier American Gods, there are things that have been brought to this newer world from the place its residents once occupied. You may not be able to go home again, but what if you could take it with you? (Also a theme in American Gods) [image] Gaiman says he usually writes for himself. One thing that was different about this book was that he was writing for someone else. His wife, musician Amanda Palmer, was off in Australia making an album. Where you or I might send along daily, or weekly notes of what was going on, Gaiman sent something else I will tell my wife, by making stuff up, kind of what it was like to be me when I was seven, from the inside of my head, not in the real world, then put it in the actual landscape that I grew up in.There really had been a boarder who killed himself in the family ride. Like his young hero, Gaiman climbed drainpipes. There really was a farm down the lane that had been recorded in the DomesDay Book. And as with such enterprises he did not have a large framework constructed. It was "like driving at night through the fog" – he knew "three or five pages ahead what would happen", but no further. There is some material here that rankled a bit. The substitute parent trope had been used to good effect in Coraline and manifests in many of the Disney animated classics, evil stepmothers in Cinderella, Snow White and the like. Ditto here. Maybe going to that well one time too many? And is dad really that dim? But there is also a nice diversity of conceptual toys at work. The flapping baddie was fun. The magical ocean and ageless Hemplocks are also very engaging. The nothingness created by the creatures referred to, among other things, as hunger birds, reminded me of Stephen King’s Langoliers, also the Nothing of the Never-Ending Story and the Dark Thing of a Wrinkle in Time. Might the three Hemplocks serve as a sort of feminine Holy Trinity? There is a wormhole that involves an actual…you know…worm, which made me smile for a long time. And any time there is a dip into water, one must ponder things baptismal, rebirth, either literal or spiritual. Letting go is what so much of growing up is about. It is the very thing that must be done in order to be able to grow, to live one’s own life. But sometimes letting go has the opposite effect, and can place you in peril, particularly when you are only 7 and not ready for the consequences. There is a lot in this short book on holding on, and letting go, and the price of both. There is a lot on doing what is right, on personal sacrifice, on permanence and the ephemeral, on remembering and forgetting. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a short novel. But do not let go of the notion that this is a book for adults. The ocean in question may look to be a pond, but do not be deceived. Jump in. The water’s fine, and deep. First posted 8/19/13 Published 6/18/13 This review is cross-posted at Coot's Reviews. Come say Hi! ==============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, FB and Tumblr pages A wonderful article on Gaiman in the January 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker An excellent audio interview by Jian Ghomeshi of Canadian Broadcasting I also reviewed Gaiman's -----Stardust, briefly, a few years back -----The Graveyard Book more fully in October 2012. -----Trigger Warning in March 2015 -----The View from the Cheap Seats in June 2016 12/3/13 - The results are in and The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted the Goodreads Choice Award winner for fantasy 12/16/13 - The Ocean... was named one of the best fiction books of 2013 by Kirkus 2/25/14 - The Ocean at the End of the Lane is nominated for a Nebula Award ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2013
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Aug 07, 2013
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Aug 13, 2013
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Hardcover
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0307959880
| 9780307959881
| 0307959880
| 4.01
| 21,618
| Feb 26, 2013
| Feb 26, 2013
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it was amazing
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Kent Haruf takes his time. His first novel, The Ties That Bind, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Foundation Award and a Hemingway Foundation/P
Kent Haruf takes his time. His first novel, The Ties That Bind, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Foundation Award and a Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. His second novel, Where You Once Belonged was published in 1990. Plainsong, which became a best-seller and was a National Book Award finalist, was published in 1999. It's sequel, Eventide, was published in 2004. Nine years later we have Haruf's fifth novel, Benediction. All his novels are set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, (a stand-in for Yuma where Haruf once lived) nearer to Kansas and Nebraska than to that suspect center of the scary urban, Denver. Benediction is not a sequel, but a stand-alone, although there are a few nods to characters from prior tales. All Haruf's novels are top-notch, written at a very high plane of craft, observation and insight, and Benediction fits in very nicely with his existing, outstanding body of work. [image] Kent Haruf - Illustration by Jason Seller - image from the magazine 5280 Dad Lewis gets the bad news straight away, cancer, terminal. Get your affairs in order. Over the remaining few months of his life Dad (we never learn his proper first name) does just that. We visit with him as he tries to come to terms with his life, recalling how he came to be on his own as a teen, how he met the love of his life, how he treated those around him, his son, daughter, employees, neighbors. This being a Kent Haruf novel, it takes a village to tell a tale. Eight-year-old Alice has arrived next door, at her grandmother's, her father long gone and her mother recently deceased. How the people of Holt cope with her presence will feel very familiar for return readers of Haruf's work, but still both startling in some of the details and incredibly moving in its execution. Reverend Lyle, late of Denver, makes the crucial mistake of actually preaching the gospel, not what most of the parishioners want to hear. His wife and son wish he would keep such things to himself. Haruf was the son of a minister, and his depiction of the politics of town religious institutions has the ring of seen rather than revealed truth. There is an older mother-daughter pair who figure into the story, most particularly in a wonderful scene that is simultaneously baptismal and pagan, and a few more characters who matter beside. There are no saints here, no demons. (well, ok, a few very minor characters are purely awful) Forgiveness is a major element for many of the relationships here. It is tougher to create an image with fine lines than to paint with broad strokes. Haruf takes his time and makes his characters breathe. All the lonely people. Where do they all come from? Holt apparently. There is enough quiet desperation in Holt that I was reminded at times of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Love does not seem to last often enough, but there are some exceptions that keep hope alive. We are invited to look at relationships between parents and children, between present, past, potential and real lovers, and between people and the places in which they live. Communities definitely affect one's options, for good and ill. One might wonder how the author goes about constructing his novels. Fortunately he has told us When I think of a story, I always begin with the characters. I daydream and brood and imagine that character for nearly a year and, of course, they all have to have problems, so I think about their problems. Then I begin to imagine and daydream about the people that would be in their lives, and their problems. It’s my biggest effort to figure out how to bring them together in a way that would move the story forward — not necessarily predictably but certainly inevitably.The atmospherics of Holt figure significantly in how we are handled as readers. After Dad gets the news and returns home, the sun is down. An assault is accompanied by rain. A parent hitting a child is lit by The wind cried and whistled in the leafless trees. During a significant sermon, The sanctuary was hot. The windows were open but it was a hot day and hot inside. It gets hotter and you get the idea. The use of weather throughout is ever-present, but tempered, never intrusive, there to add a highlight, reinforce a mood, never to direct traffic. Characters relate a fair bit around food as well, feeding each other or not. The flatness of the terrain adds exposure. ...on the plains, everything is visible, nothing is isolated. That appeals to me a great deal, these people being so visible, as if they’re seen in a spotlight. There is a scene that grabbed me, in which a character is walking the town at night and is stopped by the police: Is there something wrong with you? What are you doing out here?That passage seems to epitomize the writing and sensibility of Kent Haruf. His literary doppelganger, wandering through a town of people, seeing decency and finding meaning and joy in "this ordinary life." It’s not hard to say something nice about Benediction. Haruf writes of real human concerns, real human problems, engagingly and effectively. You will come to care about someone in Haruf's Holt, maybe more than one someone. Take your time with this one. Read it slowly. As we have come to expect, whenever Kent Haruf produces a new book, it is always a blessing. ============================EXTRA STUFF I found many interviews with the author, and have included links to a few here, in case you get the urge. The author quotes I used are from the first one listed. Benediction was chosen as the #1 Indie Next List Pick for March 2013. Here is the interview from Bookselling This Week, a publication of the American Bookseller's Association, by Elizabeth Knapp Other Haruf books I have reviewed: -----2000 - Plainsong (Plainsong #1) -----2005 - Eventide (Plainsong #2) -----2015 - Our Souls at Night From Telluride Inside and Out - interview by Mark Stephens This Barnes and Noble profile was written by Christina Nunez This interview is from November 2012, in Publishers Weekly on-line, by Claire Kirch The book was published by Picador in the UK. On their site, there is a nice photo essay about what Haruf's landscape looks like, Benediction in Pictures Also, it is worth your time to check out Michael Edwards' lovely review P.S. - I suspect that Kent Haruf has a secret first name, Clark. A stage adaptation of Benediction is planned to open in January, 2015 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 19, 2013
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May 22, 2013
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May 19, 2013
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Hardcover
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006212109X
| 9780062121097
| 006212109X
| 3.32
| 1,645
| Jan 01, 2013
| Sep 10, 2013
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it was amazing
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This review has also been cross-posted on my blog. Images tend to disappear on GR. They are all present there. The book was released on Tuesday, Septe
This review has also been cross-posted on my blog. Images tend to disappear on GR. They are all present there. The book was released on Tuesday, September 10, 2013. The trade paperback was released on October 14, 2014. Drama is a description of what is bad inside of us and the end point of that is hell, a description of a hellish landscape.This is what David Vann had to say in an interview with GR pal Lou Pendergast. (A link to the full interview is in the LINKS section at the bottom of this review) It will come as no shock then that in his latest novel he presents us with a hellscape, and we see that some of the bad is not content to remain cooped up. In fact David Vann's Goat Mountain is like Deliverance (without the sex) mated with The Golden Bough, as directed by Terence Malick. [image] David Vann Northern California. Rural. 1978. On several acres owned by their family for many years. A grandfather, father and eleven-year-old boy, accompanied by the father's friend, Tom (his is the only name we learn), have come for an annual deer hunt. This is to be the boy's first chance to kill a buck. They spot a poacher on a hill. Sight him through their scopes. Encouraged to look through the scope of dad's rifle, the boy takes a careful sighting, then squeezes the trigger, instantly killing the unsuspecting man. What are the rules? Should the boy be turned in to the authorities? Should he himself be killed as an unfeeling abomination? Should the deed be covered up? Do they just walk away? Contending with this issue is the motive force in the story. But it is not the only thing going on here. An idea is the worst thing that could happen to a writer, and as I’ve written these other books I’ve tried actually to not to know where I’m going. I think my ideas are very small and close the story off, instead I try to just focus on the landscape and the character with the problem and just find out what happens.And yet some ideas manage to find their way in to this work. It is a good thing he eschewed this advice in favor of a bit of wisdom he received from a very accomplished writer. I had a class with Grace Paley, and she said that every good story is at least two stories. And to me that’s the one unbreakable rule in writing – the only one. That if you just have an account of something, and it’s just an account – like in most people’s journals or blogs or whatever – it’s just sh*t. Like it will never work. I can’t think of a single good work ever that was just one thing – that was just an account of something. What we read for as readers is that second story – the subtext – and the interest of what story will come out from behind the other one. And so you can’t break that rule, as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen it done.So what else is in here beyond the dramatic tension of a family trying to figure out what to do with their young murderer? All of my books are about religion and our need for religion...I started as a religious studies major actually. One thing that links all of my works...is how philosophy can lead to brutalityReligion it is, but not just religion, human nature. Our narrator ponders whether killing is in our DNA. We think of Cain as the one who killed his brother, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.And later: What we wanted was to run like this, to chase our prey. That was the point. What made us run was the joy and promise of killing.The story is told mostly as an internal monologue by the boy, as both child and man. While we encounter him as an eleven year old boy, his story is related to us by the adult he will become. Positing a guess that the narrator is speaking from 2012, that makes the narrator 45 or so, just about the author's age. And yes, Vann is familiar with hunting. I didn’t feel what I was supposed to feel. I killed my first deer when I was eleven and I started missing them after that. Religion here considers the pre-historical The first thing to distinguish man…there’s not much we can do that is older and more human than sitting at a fire. ..It’s only in fire or water that we can find a corollary to felt mystery, a face to who we might be. But fire is the core immediate. In fire we never feel alone. Fire is our first god.In the atavistic is there relief from civilization? Vann offers a contemplation of human nature, through the eyes of a monster who feels more connection with ancient hunter-gatherers than he does with any living human. I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.Is the unfeeling boy really a monster, merely immature, or the core of what it is to be human? [image] This image of Vann and his father was taken from The Guardian The bible references here lean toward the Old Testament, and they are abundant. For those who, like me, enjoy trawling for literary references it might be wise to heed Chief Brody's advice to Quint, "you're gonna need a bigger boat." Cain comes in for frequent mention. I noted his name nine times, but there may be more. There is a host of further biblical references, including one in which the boy endures his own Calvary-like hike. Edenic references abound. When we read I slithered my way up that steep canyon, my belly in the dirt, and I refused to be left behind, we might be reminded of Genesis 3:14: Cursed are you above all livestockThere is a look at Jesus as being guilty of muddying the lines between life and death, the Ten Commandments as being directed against inherent human instinct, and the Eucharist as a way of remaining connected with our bestial nature. Consideration is given to the existence of the devil, and whether we need for there to be some dark agent in charge, anything in charge, because the existential chaos of being is beyond our ability to cope. What are the rules? Who made them and why? And what happens, what should happen, when we break them? There are also parts that reminded me of Dante's Inferno, as the boy consumes some particularly sulphurous water early on and the group has to pass through a daunting metal gate to enter the place in which the story takes place, among other clues. This is a book that reaches a grasping claw into your stomach and shakes your guts around before yanking them out. Definitely not a book for those who are uncomfortable with the dark, the violent or the sad. But even with all the brimstone challenging your nostrils, you cannot help but detect the aroma of power and substance in Vann's harsh new novel. Once you calm down from the brutality of the story you will long consider the subjects it raises. ==============================INTERVIEW David Vann very graciously took some time during a whirlwind book tour to answer some questions about Goat Mountain W - There is a lot in Goat Mountain about the primitive, atavistic drives in human nature. When the boy thinks "Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end" was he expressing some primitive element within the human character, his personal pathology or something else? I think it’s both. The book shows a descent that one particular mind takes (as in my novel Dirt, also, and my nonfiction book about a school shooting, Last Day On Earth) but I’m also trying to find shadows of something human and not just peculiar to an individual.W - How much of what the boy considers, particularly as it relates to a compulsion to kill, reflects your view of human nature (Do you think we are killers by nature?) or was the boy making excuses for his aberrant urges? I honestly can’t answer any of the big questions about human nature or even individuals. I wrote about my father’s suicide for ten years and yet his final moment still remains mysterious to me. With the school shooter, also, I could put together a narrative that made his final act possible but not inevitable. At the last moment, he and my father could have chosen differently. So I don’t think we’re determined. I think we can kill or not kill, and that many factors push us toward or away. In my fiction, everything is limited to a character’s view always, but I also have basically had or can imagine having all the thoughts and feelings of all my characters, in that they feel possible and believable to me.W - In an interview you said your books are about "how philosophy can lead to brutality." But the boy in Goat Mountain appears to have the brutality in him inherently. Can it be that brutality leads to philosophy? That quote was specifically about Dirt, about the dangers of the New Age movement. But it’s an interesting question, whether brutality is so abhorrent it always has to be covered in philosophy in order for the perpetrators to be able to go on telling the story of themselves. You’re right that the narrator thinks he had an inherent brutality as a boy, or perhaps it was the culture he grew up in (he says children will find whatever they’re born into natural). He’s disturbed by the fact that he didn’t feel bad after first killing, but then this changes with the buck and after that he no longer wants to kill, and he becomes fully human when he kills without wanting to. That’s what I find really disturbing about human killing, when it’s divorced from instinct and becomes abstract and we kill for philosophy or religion or politics or calculated risk.W - There are several references to a time before god. For example "grandfather did not come from god. I’m sure of that. He came from something older" and "The darkness a great muscle tightening, filled with blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work" and "The act of killing might even be the act that creates god." The contemporary view of the Hebrew and Christian god is that there was no existence prior. If the boy believes in god how could he believe that there was a time before god? There has to have been a time before god, because we made him, and it was quite a while before we came up with the idea of making gods. And antimatter is interesting as a concept, because it makes possible the existence of something before anything, the existence of what pulls existence into being. That’s what the grandfather in the book becomes, the thing that makes matter possible. That’s the closest I can imagine to god. Putting a face on god is as stupid as imagining aliens with a head and two arms and two legs. Our images of god are all simplistic like that, too dumb to be able to believe now. I began as a religious studies major and moved on to fiction, which investigates mystery more honestly.W - Did you have Dante's Inferno in mind while writing Goat Mountain? If so, were the obstructions the four face getting into their land an echo of the challenges Dante and Virgil face entering the Inferno? D - I have always wanted to write an inferno, since it’s the natural goal or end of tragedy, as you’ve quoted from me before, and I like Dante’s depiction and also the Venerable Bede’s and Blake’s and McCarthy’s, and there are always obstructions to entering and time it takes to recognize. The inferno is an externalization of a felt landscape within, the shape of our human badness, and the characters have to be put under pressure for a while before they can start to see a mirroring in the landscape. So the book becomes increasingly hellish, as Dirt did. It’s really only in the final section of the novel, when they reach the burn (an area that had had a fire recently), that the architecture of their hell is more fully realized. So they don’t enter gates really but are steadily building.W - If Goat Mountain completes a holy trinity for you, will you be continuing with religion as a major focus in your next book? What is your next project? My next novel, which is finished, is titled Bright Air Black and is the story of Medea, set 3,250 years ago, trying to stay close to the archaeological record. It attempts to be a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of her as a destroyer of kings who wants a world not ruled by men. I’ve been wanting to write something about her for 25 years, and I’m fascinated by the time period because it’s the time the Greeks imagine as the beginning and therefore can be considered the beginning of western culture and literature, but it’s actually the end of an older world, the fall of the bronze age and Hittite empire and decline of the Egyptians. Medea worships Hecate and also Nute, an Egyptian goddess, so there’s a continuity with focus on gods and landscape. But Goat Mountain is the end of my books that have family stories and places in the background.W - Are there any plans afoot for films to be made of any of your books? I’ve co-written the screenplay for Caribou Island with two-time academy award-winning director Bill Guttentag, and we’re trying now to raise funding for the film. And the French producers Haut Et Court (producers of Coco Avant Chanel and The Class) and French-Canadian director Daniel Grau will be making a film from Sukkwan Island, the novella in Legend of a Suicide.W - You said in an interview with the Australian Writers Centre: ...what I teach my students is how to read, how to be better readers, and the importance of studying language and literature. And, I use a linguistics approach for talking about style, very specifically talking about what individual sentences do, writing a grammar for a text. Have you ever considered putting your teaching ideas into a book? I have thought about that, because I can’t find a textbook that does what I’d want it to do, but I’m focused for now on writing novels.W - What books have you read in the last year that you would recommend? I’ve been reading a lot of books, about a book per week, and my favorite this year was John L’Heureux’s new novel The Medici Boy. A great portrait of an artist, an historical thriller, and a depiction of the persecution of gay men in 15th century Florence, it’s a rich masterpiece that I recommend to everyone.W - What do you do for fun? Right now I’m on a six-week residency in Amsterdam with the Dutch Lit Foundation, and my wife and I are going to music and museums and restaurants and walking all around the city. Amsterdam is wonderful. We live half the year in New Zealand, where I do watersports almost every day (waterskiing, wakeboarding, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking) or mountain-biking or hiking. And we sail on the Turkish coast each summer. I also play congas and a bit of guitar and I like tequilas and rums. Thanks, David, for your time and fascinating insights. ============================EXTRA STUFF Vann's earlier novel, Caribou Island was my favorite book of 2011. And his 2008 Legend of a Suicide is compelling reading as well. Lou Pendergrast's interview with DV (Source for "All my books are about religion" quote) The author's website - among other things there is a large list of interviews And his GR page The Family History Is Grim, but He's Plotted a New Course - NY Times article on Vann from 2011 (Source for "an idea is the worst thing... quote) University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing Blog interview with DV from October 10, 2011 (Source for Vann's mention of Grace Paley) The White Review with Melissa Cox (online only) (Source of the "I didn't feel what I was supposed to feel" quote) Vann reading from Goat Mountain and a bit from his following novel, Aquarium ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 24, 2013
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May 2013
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Apr 19, 2013
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Hardcover
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0062112244
| 9780062112248
| 0062112244
| 3.98
| 5,099
| Jun 11, 2013
| Jun 11, 2013
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really liked it
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It happens from time to time that, as with people, the first impression one has of a book changes when one expends some energy, and looks more closely
It happens from time to time that, as with people, the first impression one has of a book changes when one expends some energy, and looks more closely. I remember a girl who glowed like the sun to my heart when light shone through her hair. But I will spare you those details. I was struck with a similar sort of smitten on my first reading of Simon Van Booy’s The Illusion of Separateness, my reaction a Some Enchanted Evening experience. Wow, what a great book! Moving, poetic, artfully constructed. Curves in all the right places. Oh, sorry, yeah, the book. While I may move from point A to some other point over the course of this pondering, I should let you know up front that I end up still liking the book, so there will be no trash-talking, Dear John letters, or years of pain and regret here. Oh, damn, yeah, the book. Remember the Oscar winning film Crash? Yeah, I think Brokeback should have won too, but the structure was one of separate tales intersecting. Ditto here, with the added element of time, like three-dimensional (or would that be four-dimensional?) chess. There are two primary players. [image] Simon Van Booy - image from PBS The book opens in 2010 with Martin, an elderly caretaker at the Starlight Retirement Home in Los Angeles. We learn in short order how he came to be with his adoptive parents in Paris, or at least some of the story. Then how he came to be in the USA. We see Martin learn something significant about his heritage. In 2010 he is awaiting the arrival of a very disfigured man. That would be Hugo. His is the main story here. When we meet Hugo in 1981 he is a middle-aged maintenance man at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He is asked by a Nigerian immigrant neighbor to watch her seven-year-old son, Danny, and this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (We do follow Danny a bit later) Hugo does not really have friends. A sizeable chunk of his head was blown away during World War II in Paris, and people tend to keep their distance. He grows tomatoes to give away, and seems a decent sort. But he has very troubled dreams, or are they memories? There are others. John is a US bomber pilot in WW II who crashes in France. Amelia is his blind grand-daughter whom we meet later. The core connection here is between Martin and Hugo. There are other goings on, but their impact, IMHO, is either barely related or serves to manipulate events to a foregone conclusion. Still, the first time I read this book I was all choked up at the end. Hanky-worthy it was. And I will not try to take that away. This is a very, very moving story. You will feel, for sure. I will get to my concerns in a bit. But first some internals. The story connects from character to character like a back-stitch. When one chapter ends, the last bit connects to the following chapter and a different character. And so on. There are plenty of parallels working here. Some characters feel hated, Hugo in different times for different reasons, Danny as a black child in Manchester. Memory and imagination get a lot of attention. Kindness is on display in diverse locales, as some who have feed those who do not. Artistry pops up multiple times too. John draws, as does Danny. Amelia works at an art museum. A briefly noted schoolboy in France also draws. Both Hugo and Martin work as maintenance men. Memory and imagination figure in this story as well, as does a contemplation of the eternal. Van Booy has a gift for language and it is no shock to learn that he publishes poetry as well. So there is plenty here to hang your feeling of content on. It is not only a story, but one that carries some greater weight. It also has its very own tone and cadence. One might associate clipped sentence structure with a writer like, say, Cormac McCarthy. Which carries certain dark implications. But that clippedness is used to very different purpose here. Sometimes a priest would come and sit with me, talk to me, touch my hand. It felt nice. I wondered if His hand touches all, or if ours touch His. I remembered then, books in an attic. A small hand. Forbidden but they crawled through boxes anyway. Boxes of books and other boxes. Then I thought of the boy who brings cakes to the park for us. I wanted to boast to the priest. I felt proud to know someone like that, he knows Him, but I know Someone too. A child with the power to save us.On the other hand, some of the sentiments expressed here sounded a bit Hallmarkian Lives are staged from withinSo what’s the gripe? The title of the book is The Illusion of Separateness and we are meant to see that we are all connected somehow. Six degrees or something. Which is fine. I am sure there are many ways in which the paths of our lives cross each others. Sometimes in meaningful ways, most times not. The gyrations Van Booy went through to link Martin and Hugo seemed to me, on my second reading, forced. Not their first encounter, but latter ones. As with some Spielberg films, you get the sense that the writer/director is leading you by the nose and maybe pulling too hard sometimes on the reins. It felt less like something was being revealed than that something was being constructed. And sometimes it did seem a bit on the goopy side. I know, I know, makes it sound bad. And I do not really mean for the overall take to be a huge negative. We are manipulated by writers all the time. It is part of their job. But sometimes the beams are not well enough hidden behind dry wall or plaster. So, bottom line is that if you can suspend your disbelief for a short time (I really do mean a short time. This is a short book, and a very fast read.) you will be well-rewarded by an amazing and incredibly moving story, told in beautiful language. Not so with the girl. We did get together, but it ended badly, very badly. This book, however, will cause you no harm at all. Who knows? Maybe you will feel a connection and it really will be The One for you and not an illusion at all. Review first posted - 2013 Published - June 11, 2013 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 17, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
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Apr 17, 2013
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Hardcover
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0062120395
| 9780062120397
| 0062120395
| 4.02
| 35,855
| May 28, 2013
| May 28, 2013
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it was amazing
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HOW THE On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom. For the eight thousand years betweenHOW THE On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom. For the eight thousand years between Folsom and the Spanish, no one knew what happened; there had been people here the whole time, but no one knew what they were called. Though right before the Spanish came there were the Mogollan and when the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudo…but whether they had wiped out the Mogollon or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apache. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanche. Who were in turn wiped out by the Americans.The Son is a magnificent family saga, covering two hundred years of Texan, but more significantly American history. Do not be fooled into thinking this is just a book about the Longhorn state. In the same way that Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk (also set in Texas) took a specific day to stand for an entire period, The Son takes a much larger swath but remains a stand-in for the nation as a whole. A ranching and oil dynasty rises in parallel with the USA rising as a global power. Items covered include the settlement of Texas by Americans, Indian Wars (sometimes from the perspective of the Indians), The Civil War, WW I, WW II, the Depression. Economic shifts, rise of oil in international importance, significance of corruption in government, impact of increasing difficulty of drilling in the USA and rise of the Middle East as the world’s major source of oil, including some economic intrigue involving the use of insider information. The misuse of the land is raised, as is the complicated relationships between residents of Mexico, Texas, and some who traveled both sides of the border. Meyer splits the task of looking at different times in American history among three members of the McCullough dynasty. Eli McCullough is the patriarch of this clan, born not on the Fourth of July, but on the Second of March, 1836, otherwise known as Texas Independence Day. He is, literally, the first Texan. (Well, as with the US Declaration of Independence, it was not completely Ok’d until the next day, but who’s counting?) and is as large a character as the state itself. We meet him when he is 100 years old, in 1936, looking back on his life and times, (a la Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man) and some bloody times they were. Early settlers into what was still Mexico overwhelming the locals with numbers and guns. Bloodshed aplenty as a new population displaces current residents, whether Mexican citizens or one of the many Indian tribes in the area. Eli is captured by a Comanche raiding party that kills and abuses most of his family. Later he becomes a Texas Ranger, as a substitute for criminal prosecution, making the Rangers remind one of the French Foreign Legion. The second perspective is that of Jeanne Anne McCullough, Eli’s great-granddaughter. We meet her at age 86, injured, on the floor of her home in 2012, and are treated to her recollections as well. She is the primary female character here, a crusty old bird who is also shown in softer light earlier in her life. But while softer, Jeanne was still tough even as a kid, eager to cowgirl up, take on tasks usually reserved for men, and was unable and unwilling to adapt to the very different expectations of northeastern refinery. Adaptation, and recognizing change, seeing the truth in front of her, or not, figures in her journey. She will use ill-gotten knowledge for personal gain some day. Finally there is Peter, born in 1870, one of Eli’s sons, and Jeanne’s grandfather. Peter is the superego to Eli’s id. He struggles with what he sees as excessive violence in which his father revels, and tries as best he can to act in a moral way. I found Peter’s character to be the most real of the three. Constantly having to manage moral as well as physical conflict. He is the romantic of the crew. You will love him. We see all three come of age in very different ways. Eli is taken captive by raiding Comanches as a thirteen-year-old (view spoiler)[but over an extended period, relying on his courage and quick wits, he learns the rules and the ways of the tribe, coming to see many things from their perspective, and becomes a respected leader. We get to see him again, struggling to adapt to white society while still a teen. (hide spoiler)] We see Jeanne wanting to be who she is but struggling against the bias of the age that preferred its women less hardy, adventurous and determined. We see Peter struggling to reconcile his family and community responsibilities as a young man with the cruelty of his father and the racist townspeople determined to drive out the other, who happen to be people he knows, respects and even loves. There is enough carnage in The Son to make fans of Cormac McCarthy lock and load. One particularly brutal event is nothing less than anti-Mexican pogrom. And there is enough political inspection to make fans of Steinbeck perk up when Eli says things like: let the records show that the better classes, the Austins and Houstons, were all content to remain citizens of Mexico so long as they could keep their land. Their descendants have waged wars of propaganda to clear their names and have them declared Founders of Texas. In truth it was only the men like my father, who had nothing, who pushed Texas into war.Meyer also notes several instances in which the victors write history that is distinctly at variance with how events actually occurred. There is a lot in here about how change sweeps in and the present is always in the path of a rampaging future, whether one is talking about wilderness being replaced by farming and ranching, working the land being replaced by digging through it, or one population displacing another. Meyer highlights a major theme of the book when the last Comanche chief is found to be carrying a copy of History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Meyer takes on some regional stereotypes as well. There is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and was treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite them to join a campfire.The Teggs-us Rangers of the mid 18th-century would seem to have had a lot more in common with The Dirty Dozen than they might have had with Seal Team Six. It is also clear that there has been little change in the fact that governments often want services but are not always eager to actually pay for them. The corruption of those in power seems constant across the time-scape here. Wandering notions. We are always on the lookout for possible connections to the classics. There are some here but they do not seem central. The Eli of the bible lives to 98 and has a son named Phineas. This one lives to 100 and also has a son named Phineas. One might see in the Comanche raids here a link to the Philistine raids of the earlier time. Also Eli was cursed by God that his male descendants would not see old age. This is not entirely the case here, but the death rate is alarmingly high for this Eli’s progeny through the generations. There is a Ulysses in this story, who, like his namesake, goes on a quest. And Eli is referred to in this way as well, in Peter’s diaries: I began to think how often he was home during my childhood (never), my mother making excuses for him. Did she forgive him that day, at the very end. I do not. She was always reading to us, trying to distract us; she gave us very little time to get bored, or to notice he was gone. Some children’s version of the Odyssey, my father being Odysseus. Him versus the Cyclops, the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, Everett, being much older, off reading by himself. Later I found his journals, detailed drawings of brown-skinned girls without dresses….My assumption, as my mother told us that my father was like Odysseus, was that I was Telemachus…now it seems more likely I will turn out a Telegonus or some other lost child whose deeds were never recorded. And of course there are other flaws in the story as well.But ultimately, I do not think there is a core classical reflection at work here, just a bit of condiment for the large meal at hand. In an interview with the LA Times, Meyer cites among influences Steinbeck, Joyce, Woolf and Scottish writer James Kelman. I am sure those with a greater familiarity with works by those authors will find many connections in The Son that my limited knowledge prevented me from seeing. The Son is Meyer’s second novel, well, second published novel anyway. He wrote a couple before American Rust was published in 2009. He wrote that while in an MFA program in Austin. He has it in mind that this book, which was initially called American Son would form the second volume of a trilogy. It is even more impressive when one considers that Meyer was born in Baltimore, in a neighborhood known more for John Waters films than Indian wars and oil booms. Family sagas can be fun reads, long, engaging and hopefully educational. They can, of course, be over-long, post too many characters to keep track of and become tedious. Sometimes, though, they exceed all expectations and levitate above the crowd in the genre due to the craft of their creation, the quality of their characters, and the depth of their historical portraits. Some, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth rise to the level of literature. The Son also rises. The trade paperback edition came out on January 28, 2014 TV mini-series - April 9. 2017 ================================EXTRA STUFF 5/21/13 - Rave review from Ron Charles of the Washington Post Author’s page Wiki 2010 LA Times interview with Meyer 5/29/13 Meyer was interviewed yesterday on the WNYC Leonard Lopate program - definitely worth a listen 6/20/13 - Janet Maslin's NYTimes review, The Glory and Brutality of a Purebred Texan Clan 12/16/13 - The Son was named one of the best fiction books of 2013 by Kirkus 4/14/14 - The Son was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 09, 2013
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Apr 15, 2013
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Apr 09, 2013
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Hardcover
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0062249894
| 9780062249890
| 0062249894
| 3.43
| 8,148
| 2013
| Jul 09, 2013
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it was amazing
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If Ivy Pochoda never writes another book, this one would be enough to keep her name on the lips of readers for decades to come. On a hot July night in
If Ivy Pochoda never writes another book, this one would be enough to keep her name on the lips of readers for decades to come. On a hot July night in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, (named, BTW, for the color of its soil and an erstwhile geographical point, not for the hook-shaped pier that juts out from it today) two fifteen-year-old girls, Val Marino and June Giotta, looking for a little fun, take a small raft out into the city’s upper bay. [image] Only one returns, found unconscious under the pylons of a local pier. [image] What happened? There is danger in being in love. When we are in love we tend to lift up the things about our beloved that appeal, while minimizing, if we see at all, the things that do not. My feeling about Visitation Street reminds me of that. There is an air of ecstasy about it, as if I have found The One. And maybe there are flaws that I simply cannot see because of the overwhelming feeling of excitement that I experienced while reading this book. For what it’s worth, I have had this feeling several times in the last few years, with The Orchardist, Caribou Island, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, and Skippy Dies, to name a few. I have not felt any regret about declaring my love for them, and do not expect any regrets this time around. But just so’s ya know. Ahm in luuuuv. My wife understands. This is a magnificent book, very reminiscent in power and achievement to Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. In fact the book is released under the imprint Dennis Lehane Books, and seeing how reminiscent it is of Mystic River that seems appropriate. Ivy Pochoda has achieved a stunning success in so many ways in Visitation Street that it is difficult to know where to begin. How about characters? Pochoda clearly has a gift for portraying people. Val is struggling to remember what happened that night, and we feel her pain as she travels from forgetting to remembrance. Eighteen-year-old Acretius James, Cree, struggles to overcome the death of his Corrections Officer father, Marcus, and to find direction in his life. He spends a lot of his time on a beached boat left by his dad. [Was this boat, seen on a pier off Beard Street, the inspiration for this?] [image] Will he remain moored in the rubble of the past or find a way to sail forth? Jonathan Sprouse, a musician and music teacher at a local parochial school, and borderline alcoholic, has a lifetime of descent interrupted by an opportunity to do something worthwhile. He hears the world differently from you and me. The wino’s voice catches Jonathan’s ear. It’s dissonant, all flats and sharps with no clear words.and later Nearly every day Jonathan tells Fadi about a piece of music that’s perfectly suited to the moment. Last week he said, “It’s an afternoon for Gershwin. Mostly sunny, a little snappy, but with a hint of rain.” And two evenings ago he asked. “Did you see the sunset? Only Philip Glass could write a sunset like that.”Fadi is a bodega owner, invested in helping his community, and he works to try to unravel the mystery of what happened to [Here is the real-world place that provided the model for Fadi’s] [image] Finally, Ren is a mysterious protector who appears, seemingly out of nowhere, to watch over Cree and Val. (For those who are familiar, think the Super-Hoodie character in the British TV series, Misfits ) Pochoda makes us care about every one of these people. She breathes life into them, giving us reasons to want them to succeed. We feel the love for these characters that their creator obviously does. But they are all, well, except for Fadi, damaged people, sinking, needing a life preserver of one sort or another. Val is a basket case after that night. Jonathan was born playing first violin and somehow finds himself at the back of the orchestra. Cree suffers from the loss of his father and Ren has a dark past that has defined much of his life. But they struggle to rise above the waves, and we cheer their efforts. Next is the landscape, which, in this case, is the most significant character in the story. When SuperBitch Sandy raised the ocean's wrath in 2012, devastating large swaths of the East Coast, it was not the first time that Red Hook had been laid waste. The area had once been the primary entryway of grain to the nation. Large proportions of the nation's sugar was imported and refined in Red Hook, and a considerable swath of the metro area's beer was processed there. But the dock jobs moved to newer ports, the neighborhood was bisected when Robert Moses carved an elevated trench through it with the construction of the Gowanus Expressway, and the crack epidemic led Red Hook to be declared one of the worst neighborhoods in the nation in 1990. But Red Hook had been making a comeback. A new frou-frou supermarket has been built in a Civil War era waterfront building (it is referred to in the book as Local Harvest, but is in reality a Fairway. I have shopped there and it is fabulous, or at least it was before Sandy destroyed it. It reopened in March 2013) The story is set in 2006. There is now an IKEA in Red Hook, occupying what was an abandoned dockyard at the time of the story. On the next pier down was an abandoned sugar refinery, which was demolished in 2007, so don’t go looking. [image] This image was found in Gothamist.com and permission was granted to use it here A cruise ship terminal, imminent for most of the book, is opened by the end. [image] The Queen Mary II, at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal - 7/6/13 The change in the neighborhood is part of the world Pochoda describes. There is, by the way, a Visitation Place, on which is located a Visitation rectory. [image] We presume that the day care center at which the girls worked is there as well. There is a real Red Hook Gospel Tabernacle to match the one in the story. People were indeed killed in this neighborhood from drug-related gang violence, most notably a school principal who had walked out of his public school looking for one of his students, and took a stray round. In the Red Hook Houses, recently devastated by Sandy, reside some 8,000 people, in less than idyllic conditions. It is still a tough place. So we have amazing characters and a spot-on depiction of a neighborhood in transition from drug center to the next cool place. Next comes plot. There is indeed a compelling mystery, and Pochoda is no less skilled at peeling back the layers in that than she is in revealing her characters, bit by bit. You will want to know what took place and Pochoda will let you know, in due time. Next is the introduction of a dose of magical realism. Cree’s mother, Gloria, has the sight. Enough of a talent to spend countless days talking (visiting?) with her dead husband, while sitting on the memorial bench that had been erected to his memory. (This was inspired by the death of that public school principal. A school was named for him. Cree’s father must make do with the bench.) Enough of a talent that locals come to her for help in communicating with their dearly departed. That particular strand of DNA did not come to Cree, but his grandmother and his aunt also have the ability, and there may be another family member in line as well. After that night, Val sees and hears things. Is she losing her mind? She is not alone. How the people visited by these incomings handle the stress of it is a significant element of the tale as well. Is it real at all or merely the self-inflicted manifestation of guilt? The notion of ghosts is prominent here in Pochoda’s Red Hook. Certainly the death of Cree’s father is a spectre that continues to impact both his son and his widow. Jonathan carries with him the burden of a death as well. Val must cope with the death of her friend, and Ren not only has death-related memories that live on for him, but has seen the torment of many others. There wasn’t a goddamned night on the inside when I wasn’t woken by somebody haunted by the person he dropped. Ghosts aren’t the dead. They’re those the dead left behind. Stay here long enough, you’ll become one of them—another ghost haunting the Hook.Cree’s mother communes daily with her late husband. And the neighborhood itself echoes with the change from is to was: As he crosses from this abandoned corner of the waterside back over to the Houses he becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook—the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, the lofts overtaking the factories, the grocery stores overlapping the warehouses. The new bars cannibalizing the old ones. The skeletons of forgotten buildings—the sugar refinery and the dry dock—surviving among the new concrete bunkers being passed off as luxury living. The living walk on top of the dead—the water front dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts.I expect that by including references to sundry locations that have now moved on to another realm, Pochoda is linking the deaths and births on the landscape with the more human ghosts that inhabit this world. All these incredible characters come to life in this book, even though they are walking through a place as haunted as any graveyard. The final piece here is the power of Pochoda’s writing. Here is a sample. The women grow grungier and sexier the later it gets. Soon they bear no resemblance to the morning commuters who will tuck themselves into bus shelters along Van Brunt on Monday, polished and brushed and reasonably presentable to the world outside Red Hook. Nighttime abrades them, tangles their hair and chips their nails. Colors their speech. At night, the hundreds of nights they’ve passed the same way begin to show, revealed in their hollowed cheeks and rapid speech. Jonathan wonders how long it takes for their costumes to become their clothes, their tattoos their birthmarks. When will they let the outside world slip away and forget to retrieve it?Really, what could possibly be added to enhance that? Ok, there have to be a few chinks in the armor here, somewhere, right? I looked pretty closely at the geography of the events, and it seemed a stretch. For example, did Jonathan really carry the unconscious Val eight blocks to Fadi’s? Well, he is a young guy, 28, 29, so yeah, I guess it is possible. There is no inpatient hospital in Red Hook, and I have not yet found out whether there was one there in 2006. But I continue to search. The four-corners location which includes Fadi’s bodega appears to be located not at the intersection of Visitation and Van Brunt, but a block away at Pioneer Street. These are small items, and I have no trouble with the author using a bit of elastic geography to support her story. Certainly “Visitation “works better than “Pioneer,” the actual name of the street where the bar and bodega intersect Van Brunt, particularly as characters here are visited, in one way or another. This not a book you will want to begin before bedtime, as you may find yourself reading straight through and costing yourself a good chunk of a night’s sleep. We are in can’t-put-it-down territory here. And you might want to have a good cardiologist nearby when you finish reading this book. It’s gonna break your heart. It’s no secret. I love this book. But I’m a modern guy and this is not an exclusive love. I am more than happy to share. Don’t let this one sink beneath the waves of your attention. Reach in and pull it out. This is simply an amazing book. You must read it. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2013
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Feb 06, 2013
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Hardcover
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0060889640
| 9780060889647
| 0060889640
| 3.85
| 1,793
| Jan 29, 2013
| Jan 29, 2013
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it was amazing
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The news is not always good. Jennifer Haigh, clearly mining a favorite seam, manages to hit the motherlode again in her new tales of Bakerton, PA. Her The news is not always good. Jennifer Haigh, clearly mining a favorite seam, manages to hit the motherlode again in her new tales of Bakerton, PA. Her 2005 novel, Baker Towers, painted a three-decade portrait of the small mining town, from 1944 into the 1970s, focusing on the lives of its residents, and most particularly, the five siblings of her fictional Novak family. In returning to Bakerton, Haigh brings back several of the characters from her earlier work, completing some unfinished stories of the family, and expanding her scope as well. There are plenty of faces, even beyond those of the Novaks, that will be familiar to readers of the earlier book. In News From Heaven Jennifer Haigh demonstrates once more the immense talent for which she has rightfully come to be known. [image] Jennifer Haigh - image from The Globe and Mail She has not been idle in the eight years since she introduced Bakerton, PA to the world. In 2008, The Condition , was released, an excellent a multi-generational family drama set in New England. In 2011, she produced the exquisite Faith, about a priest accused of sexually abusing a child. In that novel and in other work she showed a power that put her at the top level of contemporary fiction writers, and she just keeps on getting better. But, apparently, Haigh had been puttering with Bakerton tales ever since Baker Towers came out. I didn’t, for a long time, imagine publishing them as a collection. I wrote them one at a time, in between novels or drafts of novels. And after about ten years of this, I realized that they belonged together in a book.So in a way, despite moving from Pennsylvania to the Boston area, one could say that in News from Heaven, Jennifer Haigh returns to Bakerton. But in a very real sense she never left. This is a book about longing, loneliness, about secrets, about wanting to flee the stifling confines not just of small town life but of responsibility and living with one’s choices. Maybe about pleading with fate. Yet it is also about the pull that our homes can have on our hearts. The stories are filled with yearnings, some met, many not. Disappointment shuffles through these stories. Secrets are revealed, often to dark effect. These are stories about change, in the world and in her characters. …good fiction always begins with complex, well-developed characters, and to write those characters I have to know where they came from. I imagine them as children, their fears and frustrations, the rooms where they slept at night, and I find it all so interesting that I have to write about it. I have come to accept that — in my hands, anyway — every story becomes a family story.As with Baker Towers, most of the action in the book takes place in Bakerton, with a few forays beyond, and the great majority of her characters are women. There are ten stories in the collection. All of them will make you feel. Four of the first five look upward, in their titles at least, while the latter five seem to look down. There are moments of awakening, moments of glorious freedom and possibility that shine through this sooty, declining place, lives that find meaning, whether real or faux, whether passing or permanent. But it seems that for most of the inhabitants, whether they remain in Bakerton or have sought greener pastures elsewhere, the news from on high is that they have to get by with what they can and not look for a paradise on earth. That said, Haigh’s writing is heaven-sent, her ability to portray real, breathing people is celestial and her talent for portraying place is rapturous. It is not necessary to have read Baker Towers in order to appreciate the strength of the writing on display here, but it certainly helps to have done so in order to get the fullest picture of her players. ===============================THE STORIES Beast and Birds opens the collection in the past. Sixteen-year-old Annie Lubicki is engaged to work in the household of an Upper West Side Manhattan Jewish family in the 1930s. The family has a son whose destiny it is to become a scholar. We are given a servant’s eye look at life in NYC as Annie experiences it on her first time away from home. On a weekend while the adults are away, Annie is charged with caring for the young man. He is unwell and cannot accompany his parents on their trip. He and Annie have developed a relationship that is nothing but sweet. There are many words for what she’d felt as she watched him sleep, many words in many languages, but the one she knows is longingDid they or didn’t they? In Something Sweet, an ironic title, Haigh brings back teacher Viola Peale from BT. She is much taken with a student, a boy who has a natural way with girls, is a gifted salesman who also demonstrates a flair for decoration. He offers her a lemon drop. “It’s nice to have something sweet,” he says. Of course he incurs the wrath of those maybe not so smooth. During the summer visit of a young relation Viola is smitten with a hunky second cousin who is very wrong for her--In a trance of longing, Viola sat on the grass, hugging her knees to her chest--and her desire is harshly rewarded. The young student knows he will never be accepted in the town and looks for a way out. The sweetness here is of the bitter variety. In Broken Star young Regina has a magical month in the summer of 1974, when her cool Aunt Melanie comes to stay with the family for a spell, and provides a wonderful assist during a time of growth and change. Gina thrives with Melanie’s encouragement but still has concerns about life, and her future, a girl born to a farming family, who is not all that interested in the land, a girl who fears getting stuck. My uncles…were like all the men I knew then, soybean and dairy farmers who spoke rarely and then mainly about the weather. Yet unlikely as it seemed, I accepted that these men had the power to transform. My aunts had been pretty, lively girls—one stubborn, one mischievous, one coquettish, according to my mother—though somehow all three had matured into exactly the same woman: plump, cheerful, adept at pie making and counted cross-stitch, smelling of vanilla and Rose Milk hand lotion. That I would someday become that same woman terrified me. My only greater fear was that nobody would choose me, and I would become nothing.Years later, after marrying, living abroad and having written a book, Regina learns a tragic secret about her aunt, and the cost of her own separateness. A Place in the Sun continues the unfinished story of Sandy Novak from BT. Despite his charm, beauty and certain skills, Sandy has never managed to get or stay ahead. He seems always on the run and has a gambling compulsion. Still, he and his sister, Joyce, maintain some sort of a connection, even if that usually means her sending him money. Trying to straighten up he takes a job at a diner in North Hollywood She had hired him off the street. Bleary, hungover, he’d wandered in for breakfast after an all-night card game. A sign in the window said HELP WANTED. Can you cook? Vera Gold asked.It is not long before Sandy and statuesque, red-headed Vera are an item, to the chagrin of Vera’s much older husband. Of course this complicates Sandy’s relationship with a young Canadian cutie, who is looking for more from him that he is interested in giving. ”That’s where I used to work,” he said, pointing. The familiar sign filled him with an old longing, the looping S with its tall graceful curvesAnd across it all he ponders his family back east, and the odds of life taking a positive turn. To The Stars looks at the town’s reaction to Sandy’s passing, with particular focus on Joyce, and her feelings about her own choices. Sandy was once a chauffeur to the stars but never managed to become a star himself. She is thinking not of his death but of that earlier departure, his disappearance like a magic trick, as dizzying and complete. His manic and determined flight from Bakerton, from the family, from her…and yet Joyce could never leave them [her family], run off to California or to Africa, as her younger siblings have done. Freedom is, to her, unimaginable, as exotic as walking on the moon.Thrift introduces Agnes Lubicki, a nurse who has lived her life in service to others and found herself with no way to have anything for herself. Until a man enters her life, and Agnes gives up everything for him. Is this what she’d been saving for? In Favorite Son, Mitch Stanek, a studly jock, had been expected to coast to a career in professional sports. But something is amiss when he goes away to college on a full scholarship. We see him, back in Bakerton, married with kids, and out of work when Mine #11 shuts down, putting 900 out of work. Joyce Novak’s daughter, Rebecca, narrates the tale, and has special knowledge about Mitch, that tells us whether he was destined for fame, or not. It is in this story that we get the quote that births the collection’s title: The white flakes landed like news from heaven: notes from elsewhere, fallen from the stars. The Bottom of Things introduces Ray Wojick, 52, back in town for his parents’ 50th anniversary party, with his pregnant second wife. Ray is looking to get to the bottom of things, his ultimate impact on his late brother’s fate, how his father was able to raise him, when he married a woman with a three-year old, how Ray’s first marriage came to be and came to end, his alienation from his children from that marriage, and how to cope once he learns what he needs to know. Sunny Baker used to be a joyous kid, thus the name, but in What Remains we see what has become of her. When her parents were killed in a plane crash her life took a dark turn, and she never quite recovered. We see her through a series of relationships, each of which add more junk to her property and take a piece more out of what is left of her. The story is paralleled by the town wanting to attract construction of a new prison. Do the math. Finally, Desiderata closes the book with Joyce Novak mourning the death of her husband, and remembering her dead son, and how he was lost. It also tells the tale of an inspirational teacher and a husband who had married a woman who did not or could not love him enough. Review first posted - February 2013 Publication dates ----------January 29, 2013 - hardcover ----------January 7, 2014 - trade paperback The trade paperback came out on January 7, 2014 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 04, 2013
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Feb 27, 2013
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Feb 04, 2013
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Hardcover
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0062200577
| 9780062200570
| 0062200577
| 4.08
| 130,548
| Apr 30, 2013
| Apr 28, 2013
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it was amazing
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Do You Fear What I Fear? Christmas was one of the best things about being a kid. There is nothing quite like the anticipation leading up to Christmas m Do You Fear What I Fear? Christmas was one of the best things about being a kid. There is nothing quite like the anticipation leading up to Christmas morning. And even now, having achieved geezerhood, I am still a complete sucker for the big day. Every year a real tree, lights, sorting through and selecting from the decades and decades of collected ornaments, gifts, and hopefully a tree skirt free of cat vomit. I put on It’s a Wonderful Life, wife by my side, hopefully at least one of my now-grown kids at hand, and keep the tissues handy. I find it completely heartwarming. One must wonder, however, how Christmas might have been celebrated in the King household. I suppose it is possible that Dad left his darker impulses by his keyboard. Did they share hot chocolate like the rest of us, or maybe add bits of human flesh instead of marshmallows. Hot toddy made with blood from a guy named Todd? Brownies made with under-age Girl Scouts? Did their whipped cream scream? Well, probably not, but one must wonder. [image] Joe Hill - image from NY Times photo by Phillip Montgomery NOS4A2, the author’s latest tale from the dark side, takes a beloved annual celebration and gives it the special family treatment. If you like your Christmas trees decorated with sparkling abominations, your Santa more by way of an oversized, but underfed mortician, and your Santa’s special elf a rapist psycho-killer, then this is the book you will want to find frightening off the other packages under your tree next Christmas. Joseph Hillstrom King, under nom de scare Joe Hill, is a man who not only would be King, he already is one. He has been pretty busy the last few years, writing up a storm, 20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box, and Horns, establishing himself as a respected, successful writer of horror fiction, picking up at least eleven literary awards to date. Although his career has been relatively brief, he has, with NOS4A2, grown up to a level where he can glare, eye-to-eye, with the best of contemporary horror writers, even that guy across the table at Christmas dinner. NOS4A2 is a work of impressive creativity, and one that may give you many a sleepless night, so powerful are some of the images he has created. But the core of the book is Victoria McQueen, Vic, The Brat. And how fitting that a King makes his heroine a queen. Applying a familiar horror-tale trope, the young female hero, we are introduced to Vic as an eight-year-old. This kid loves her bike. (like another McQueen, of the Steve variety, in The Great Escape) But then she has good reason to. It takes her where she needs to go, whether that happens to be around the block or across a magically bespoke bridge that takes her across geography, wormhole style. It comes in handy when she desperately wants to locate, say, a lost necklace that figures in her parents latest screaming match, opening for her a personal Shorter Way Bridge to take her to the proper destination. It takes her home again, of course. But it exacts a toll. And the journey through it can be harrowing. Countering this adorable heroine is Charlie Manx. Not so adorable. This definitely not so goodtime Charlie abducts children to his special place, Christmasland, taking advantage of their unhappiness to seduce them with a King-family version of Neverland. What if it were Christmas every day? Charlie’s number one supporter is Bing Partridge. Bing’s latest accomplishment was the murder of his parents, but not before engaging in unspeakable behavior of another sort. He may be dreaming of Christmas but it is more likely to be fright than white, and there are fouler things than partridges in the trees he favors. He lives, fittingly on Bloch Lane, named, we suspect, for the author of Psycho. Once teamed up with Charlie, he makes use of his access to a particular sort of gas, sevoflurane, to subdue his victims. The stuff smells like gingerbread. Bing’s yard was full of tinfoil flowers, brightly colored and spinning in the morning sunlight. The house was a little pink cake of a place, with white trim and nodding lilies. It was a place where a kindly old woman would invite a child in for gingerbread cookies, lock him in a cage, fatten him for weeks, and finally stick him in the oven. It was the House of Sleep.You won’t find Christmasland on any map, but it exists. Charley drives a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith. Not exactly a sleigh, but useful for transporting Charley and his goodies here and there. Actually, it is more a case of him bringing the children to his dubious gifts than it is of the gifts being brought to the children. Charlie has been snatching children for a long time. So we have the goodie and we have the baddies. Vic becomes that most horrifying of nightmares, an adolescent. And in a fit of rage against her divorced parents goes looking for trouble. Before you can say “Feliz Navidead,” the Brat finds herself riding into a Charlie lair, the cutely named “Sleigh House.” A bleak house indeed, as you might guess, and Vic has to resort to some extreme measures to make good her escape. Of course, once she does she earns a permanent place on Charlie’s naughty list. One positive that comes out of this ordeal is that when Vic is fleeing Charlie she is picked up on the highway by a passing biker, the large, leather-clad Lou Carmody. Classic meet-cute and oh, someone is trying to kill me. [image] It turns out that Vic and her nemesis are not the only ones with a certain gift. When Vic crosses her Shorter Way Bridge to the place of business of Maggie Leigh (second possible Psycho reference?) she meets another person with a special talent, one particularly suited to a librarian. It’s not heaven, though. It’s Iowa. Later Vic’s dad joins up and there is some help from beyond the grave as well. Team Charlie has a lot of young recruits, too. One might be forgiven at times for thinking that he might be giving new meaning to the term “cold calls” as he has his maybe-dead minions manning (would that be childing?) the phones to harass our hero. “Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absent-minded way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape--every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”The King family seems to have figured out how to make us care for their heroes, and Hill has done a nice job of that here. Vic is sympathetic, not just for her courage and determination, but for her failings as well. And there is plenty of failing to go around here, but also generous doses of redemption. And there is no shortage of action. It all builds to a very explosive climax. There are occasional bits of fun in here as well. Hill engages in a joke having to do with Checkhov’s gun that is sure to bring a smile. And he takes a cutesy swipe at Henry Rollins, in the quote above. No idea if this is a friendly poke, or a straight up dig. There are some soft spots as well. Charlie is a pretty bad sort. Not enough attention is addressed to looking at how he came to be that way. It might have helped make him more understandable, if not sympathetic, which is always more interesting than the straight up boogie man. Bing is boogie man enough, despite his less than imposing façade, his child-like insecurity. And what is it that gives certain objects their magical properties? Never addressed. Hill takes on the somewhat softball difference in value between happiness and fun, which certainly has relevance to our consumer culture, but is far from novel. Still and all, this is top notch horror, signaling not necessarily that a King is born, but that one has arrived and is ready to ascend to the throne. Happy Horrordays! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr pages Hill put up a nice promo vid for the book on his site 4/29/13 - The New York Times review by Janet Maslin In Stephen King's 2013 release, Doctor Sleep, he offers at least two nods to NOS4A2. Thanks Pop. Some fun Christmas items from National Geographic: -----11/29/2017 - Saint Nicholas to Santa: The Surprising Origins of Mr. Claus - by Brian Handwerk -----12/13/2017 - Who Is Krampus? Explaining the Horrific Christmas Devil - by Tanya Basu -----12/21/2017 - Vintage Map Shows Santa's Journey Around the World - By Greg Miller – a kitschy 50’s Santa Map -----12/19/2017 - One Town's Fight to Save Their 40-Foot Yule Goat - by Sarah Gibbens – Yes, really, a Christmas goat 12/21/2017 - This NY Times video by Matthew Salton is a trip - Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom AMC is premiering a series based on the book in Summer 2019. Here is a link to the preview. But I am concerned about the fact that the actress portraying Victoria, who, remember, begins this book at eight years of age, is twenty six. It appears that AMC has cut out the younger Vic, opting to begin her tale from when she is a high school senior, a huge mistake, IMHO. [image] Zachary Quinto as Charlie Manx - image from AMC May 31, 2019 - NY Times - With ‘NOS4A2,’ Joe Hill Finally Sinks His Teeth Into TV - by Austin Considine ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Dec 12, 2012
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Dec 22, 2012
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Hardcover
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0062110837
| 9780062110831
| 0062110837
| 4.13
| 125,229
| Apr 13, 2013
| Apr 23, 2013
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it was amazing
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I am trying something a little different here. I found The Golem and the Jinni to be a fun, magical fairy tale of a romance with a fair bit of excitem
I am trying something a little different here. I found The Golem and the Jinni to be a fun, magical fairy tale of a romance with a fair bit of excitement to it. But it is pretty clear that this is also a serious, literary work, raising meaningful philosophical questions, while using the folklore of two different cultures to inform the immigrant experience, offering a fascinating look at a place and time, and linking the experiences of the old and new worlds. These two takes seemed to call for different reviews. And, as I maintain only one identity on GR, the result is two, two, two reviews in one. REVIEW #1 Everyone loves legends, lore, tales of long ago, filled with heroes and magical beings. They dilate our pupils, excite our imagination and provide the fodder for our dreams. Helene Wecker has written a very grown up fairy tale, bringing to life a pair of magical beings. In doing so she has transported old world legend to a place where and a time when vast numbers of more ordinary people were trying to create new dreams, new legends of their own, immigrant New York City at end of the 19th century. The Golem is a clay creature constructed by a corrupt Kabalist near the city of Danzig, at the behest of Otto Rotfeld, an unsuccessful and unattractive young man. But Rotfeld was not looking for a thuggish destroyer. He wanted his golem to be made in the form of a woman and imbued with curiosity, intelligence and a sense of propriety. On the passage to New York, Otto suffers a burst appendix and dies, but not before he speaks the words that bring his creation to life. Newborn and alone, but with an ability to perceive the wants of those around her, the Golem is set loose in New York. Wandering around, she is spotted for what she really is by a retired rabbi on the Lower East Side. He takes her in, tries to get her settled and struggles with how to deal with the fact that she is a creature usually built for the purpose of destruction. [image] Helene Wecker - image from the Boston Globe Not too far away, in Little Syria, an Arab immigrant community near the southern tip of Manhattan, Boutros Arbeely, a tinsmith, is brought an unusually old copper flask. While attempting to repair it, he is confronted by a magical being of his own, a handsome arrogant, and unclothed jinni. Unfortunately for the jinni, despite having been freed of the flask, he remains trapped in the shape of a human, bound there by an iron cuff on his wrist. In this telling jinnis, despite excelling at metalwork, have no power over iron. He will have to cope as a human. Each faces challenges. The Golem, named Chava (which means life) by the rabbi must cope with the flood of wishes that assail her consciousness from the thousands of people around her. She must learn to keep her identity secret. This includes coping with the fact that she does not sleep, and that it is not considered ok for a young woman to be seen walking the city streets at night, even if her purpose is honorable. Like many immigrants before her, she is helped by prior arrivals. She learns to bake and gets a job in a bakery. Unable to go out at night she takes in sewing. How immigrant is that? The jinni, taken in by the tinsmith, is given work in the shop, once it becomes apparent that he is a marvel with metal, able to heat and mold it with his bare hands. Boutros names him Ahmad. The jinni is also challenged to keep his true nature under cover. But a part of his nature is a lustful side. He is smitten with a young thing he encounters and one thing leads to another. Chava, while not much hot to trot herself, becomes an object of romantic interest to a very good young man. Of course, in time, the two encounter each other, and that is where the story takes off. Not only is there magic in the interaction of these two friends, strangers in a strange land, they bring depth to their relationship, adding even more depth to this novel. Chava had had content-rich discussions with her rabbi rescuer, on matters such as why people risk so much to have sex, or whether people need a concept of God to keep them from self-destructing. She and Ahmad discuss the stresses of free will vs the certainty of slavery. They talk about her interest in satisfying the wishes of those around her while Ahmad is mostly concerned with satisfying his desires of a moment. A great part of the magic in this fable is how the two begin at extreme ends and meet somewhere in the middle, growing and changing, but very much aware of their limitations. The two embody, in a way, the immigrant experience. Coming to a new country, learning new ways, changing in order to fit in, coming to value what has been found, building a life. But character growth, consideration of serious moral subjects and a moving relationship are not all that this book has going on. There is danger afoot. Keeping the action moving, we get not only a look into the jinni’s ancient past, a fascinating and moving segment, but there is pursuit on those cobble-stoned streets. A person with evil intent is tracking the scent of magic and surviving this onslaught is the motive force. As we have come to care about both our primary characters their safety matters. Not only has Wecker populated her fable with two wonderful leads, but her backup players are extremely rich. In fact this is one of the best supporting casts I have seen in a while. The Golem and the Jinni has love, parental and romantic, philosophical heft, a vibrant picture of a place and time, the equivalent of an action/adventure trial-by-danger and enough magic to shake a wand at. In short it is everything in a book that you could possibly wish for. REVIEW #2 It may not take you a thousand and one nights to read The Golem and the Jinni, but you may wish it did because you will hate to put it down. It is 1899. In a town near Danzig, Otto Rotfeld is a failing Prussian Jewish businessman. He does not have much success with the ladies either. A leering and dismissive manner will do that. Determined to change his luck he opts to join the throng heading to that new Mecca, the USA. Figuring the female sorts there will find him as appealing as did those of the Old World, he decides to take matters into his own hands. Well, rather into the hands of a morally challenged Kabalist who is ok with crafting what Otto wants, a bespoke Golem, using the traditional clay, but made in the shape of a woman, and not the sort of towering, lumbering, bad-hair destroyer that usually pops to mind, thanks to early German cinema. [image] Or a more 20th century version [image] Gotta confess, I now see Gwendoline Christie of Game of Thrones fame in the role. [image] Image from syfy.com Hey, the guy's got needs. (This raises the wonderful theoretical possibility of a high-end retail business, Build-a-Golem. Schmul, more clay, hurry up.) Unwell in his steerage accommodation, Otto is looking for a little companionship and wakes his special friend. Just in time, as it turns out, as Otto, and his burst appendix, fail to make it to the particular new world he was hoping to reach. This leaves a rather bewildered, powerful and telepathic mythical creature heading for Ellis Island. She finds an unusual way to cope when asked for her papers, which I will not spoil, then, wandering around the city, is taken in by a retired rabbi who sees her for what she really is. (Yeah, he’s a lot older, but he really sees me) The Golem truly is a stranger in a strange land, but she is not the only oddity on shore. ( I was not yet born. Don’t be mean) In Little Syria, an immigrant community near the southern tip of Manhattan, a Maronite Catholic tinsmith, Boutros Arbeely, is brought a copper flask to repair. While beginning work on the piece with a soldering iron (no rubbing of the magic container this time) he is blasted across the room, and before you can say Robin Williams three times fast, there on his shop floor is a naked man. And it’s not even Halloween in the Village. Really, he is a creature made of fire and mist, but is confined by virtue of an iron bracelet into the form of a human. In this imagining, iron is something a jinni can’t do anything with, I guess like bad fashion sense. Sorry, no puff of smoke. But this magic man is a hottie. He is, of course, cut and handsome, but in addition, he is a natural metalworker. I will leave comments having to do with his ability to mold hard things to cruder reviewers. Boutros, despite the jinni’s arrogance, gives him a place to live and a job. He ain’t never had a friend like him. I see in my tiny mind the steamy Colin O'Donoghue (who played Captain Hook on the series Once Upon a Time), but am certainly open to other, more ethnically appropriate suggestions. [image] Maybe Mena Massoud of Aladdin fame [image] Ya think these two undocumenteds might cross paths? Duh-uh. But it will take some time, as each has his and her own road to travel. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 20, 2012
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Nov 21, 2012
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Nov 20, 2012
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Hardcover
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0062202715
| 9780062202710
| 0062202715
| 4.03
| 2,739
| Feb 19, 2013
| Feb 19, 2013
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it was amazing
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The title of Ron Rash’s fifth short story collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from the chestnut poem, with the same title, by Robert Frost. NaturThe title of Ron Rash’s fifth short story collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from the chestnut poem, with the same title, by Robert Frost. Nature’s first green is goldIt is one of only Characters here cover a wide age range, from middle-teens rattling their social cages to old friends in their sunset years, appreciating what they have had and cherishing what remains, from late teens struggling to find their way to a better life to others descending into criminality. They tend toward the edges, young or old with only a smattering in between, and those in the middle do not fare any better than those at the perimeter. Rash’s time line is likewise broad, with a couple of stories set circa Civil War, one in the 1960s, and most being reasonably contemporary. Overall, these stories are about the coexistence of dark and light. In the title piece, two wastrel boys stand with one foot in the world of perdition and the other in a heavenly idyll. Or maybe it is only a dream of light, as hopes are raised several times in these stories, only to be melted down. People here feel trapped, by their past, their circumstances, their weakness. But there are also elements here of incredible love and self-sacrifice, enough to move one (ok, mushy old me) to tears. Life is not wonderful in Rash’s world. Kids want to escape, move on, find something better. But the existence into which they were born drags them under like the rough river in Something Rich and Strange. How much of who we are is accounted for by the circumstances in which we were born, the prison of class? Quite a bit. Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled the junkyards with crushed metal. Crosses garlanded with flowers and keepsakes marked roadsides where they’d died. You could see it coming in the smirking yearbook photos they left behind.Some seek to leave the imprisonment of literal slavery and one the manacles of actual prison. So, life’s a bitch and then you die. Have a nice day. But wait, there’s more. Sometimes, there are pieces of life that hang on to their gloss. Two concerned parents live for a video call from their daughter in the service, every 26 days, a shining moment. Two old friends relish their lifelong friendship and enjoy the soft joys of the now. A young girl finds peace and beauty in a very unlikely place. And there is beauty in Rash’s world, even when its vibrant presence is used as a contrast to the living death of what may be a pointless existence. The OC’s coating starts to dissolve. Its bitterness fills my mouth but I want the taste to linger a few more moments. As we cross back over the river, a small light glows on the far bank, a lantern or a campfire. Out beyond it, fish move in the current, alive in that other world.Sometimes there is even beauty in death. Days passed. Rain came often, long rains that made every fold of ridge land a tributary and merged earth and water into a deep orange-yellow rush. Banks disappeared as the river reached out and dragged them under. But that was only surface. In the undercut all remained quiet and still, the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loose threads.The greatest, for me, was the beauty of a lifetime friendship told in hushed tones as an old veterinarian nestles in the warmth of a moment of serenity. Carson was always comfortable with solitude. As a boy, he’d loved to roam the woods, loved how quiet the woods could be. If deep enough in them he wouldn’t even hear the wind. But the best was in the barn. He’d climb up in the loft and lean back against a hay bale, then watch the sunlight begin to lean through the loft window, brightening the spilled straw. When the light was at its apex, the loft shimmered as though coated with golden foil. Dust motes speckled the air like midges. The only sound would be underneath, a calf restless in a stall, a horse eating from a feed bag. Carson had always felt an aloneness in those moments, but never in a sad way.These being short stories, there must be an O Henry ghost wandering around somewhere, and if you anticipate this you will not be disappointed. There are a number of ironic, even darkly comic endings, and certainly some surprising ones. Gold, as a thematic seam, runs throughout, with actual gold in the title piece, a supposed heart of gold in another, golden hair in a third, pursuit of riches in a fourth, a gold coin in a fifth and so on. I don’t want to lay claim to all the nuggets, so will leave the rest of the lode for those with a miner’s inclination, or if you don’t care for it, a panner’s. My personal favorite was Night Hawks, clearly inspired by the painting, in which a woman, affected by the social impact of her appearance as a kid, struggles to find her place in the world. Must she be limited by an externality that is no longer there? Rash inlays a few literary references in most of the stories, ways maybe to mark a trail in his woods. From A Catcher in the Rye to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, from Chekov to Darwin and plenty more. But we know whose woods these are and the paths are clear enough. It may be that nothing gold can stay, but whatever Ron Rash writes is 24 karat and will shine for a very long time, further burnishing his sterling reputation. He seems to breathe in life, landscape and atmosphere and exhale literature. No silver medals for this collection. Only the top prize will do. ===============================THE STORIES In The Trusty, a grifter in a chain gang plans an escape with a newly met, unhappy Mrs. In Nothing Gold Can Stay, two wastrel boys, stand with one foot in the world of perdition and the other in a heavenly idyll. Rash introduces a bit of magic in Something Rich and Strange, in which a diver, sent to retrieve the body of a drowned girl, has a vision. Where the Map Ends pays a visit to the Civil War era, offering a bit of good news, followed by bad. A Servant of History is a darkly comedic look at how a knowledge of one’s history might come in handy when far from home Twenty Six Days is the time two working class parents have to wait between skype video calls from their daughter in a war zone. They must endure the insensitivity of some professorial sorts as they constantly fear for her life. A Sort of Miracle contrasts two types of foolishness as a condescending accountant takes his layabout brothers in law into a national park to try to kill a bear. Those Who are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven tells of how fragile is the path out of hopelessness, even when confronted with love. A smart, ambitious young man tries to bring his meth-addicted girlfriend out of her low state. The Magic Bus contrasts extremes, a 60s era carefree sort of freedom on the one hand and a controlling, narrow farm life on the other as a teenage girl is tempted by the promise of escape. The Dowry tells of a post Civil War town in which there is nothing a young Union vet can do to satisfy the Confederate father of his beloved that he is worthy of his daughter’s hand, the father holding a grudge from his having lost an arm in the war. A town cleric finds a surprising solution, in an act of great love. The Woman at the Pond paints a picture of despair touching the life of a high school senior, without quite penetrating Night Hawks was one of my favorites, hitting a bit close to home as it does. A young woman considers decisions in her life, informed by elements of her past that were beyond her control. There is a discussion here of the famous Hopper painting. In case you are interested, here is a site with the image and a look at where the actual location may have been. Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out is a story of long-friendship, loss, rebirth and the value of what remains. Very moving Publication Date - trade paperback - 5/11/14 =============================EXTRA STUFF February 16 , 2013 - NPRs Scott Simon's lovely interview with Ron Rash February 22, 2013 - Boston Globe review February 27, 2013 - Janet Maslin's review in the NY Times March 1, 2013 - I found this review, complete with some fun turns of phrase, in The Charlotte Observer November 19, 2013 - Nothing Gold is named one of the ten best fiction books of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews June 6, 2017 - I was alerted by GR friend Linda to the following from April 2017 - WCU's Ron Rash wins Guggenheim Fellowship - Rash deserves all the recognition there is, he is a national treasure. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2012
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Nov 07, 2012
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Oct 30, 2012
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Hardcover
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0062113763
| 9780062113764
| 0062113763
| 4.09
| 6,171
| Feb 26, 2013
| Feb 26, 2013
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it was amazing
| The past is never dead. It’s not even past.It is this notion, of the past steering the present away from a true course, tha The past is never dead. It’s not even past.It is this notion, of the past steering the present away from a true course, that drives the narrative in The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, and in at least one way, it is the past that helps steer it back onto the road. [image] Rita Leganski - image from The Quivering Pen If you liked Edgar Sawtelle, the story or film of Benjamin Button, the TV show Pushing Daisies or the more imaginary tales of Alice Hoffman, you will love this book, a tale imbued with a few large dollops of magical realism. Like Edgar, Bonaventure is born somewhat different from other children. Like Edgar, he makes no sound. But while Edgar has a particular Mowgli-like talent for relating to his pooches, Bonaventure is possessed of an otherworldly sense of hearing. The medical term for one aspect of this is synaesthesia. He is able to hear color. But his gift goes far beyond the odd skills that as many as one in twenty-three humans might have. As he grows into his gift, he can hear the stories of inanimate objects. Eventually, Bonaventure is able to hear at a molecular level. He is even able to hear sounds that happened long ago. Bonaventure never met his father, William, at least while he was alive. Before the boy’s birth, Dad was shot down on the streets of New Orleans by a madman known only as “the Wanderer.” But William hangs around, having a few tasks to complete before he can graduate from Almost Heaven, and helps his unusual son adapt to the world and complete his own mission. Bonaventure’s mother, Dancy, lives with a burden of guilt originating in the day her husband was killed. Dancy’s mother, Letice, carries a heavy load of sorrow from her adolescence. It is only through Bonaventure’s gift, with the help of his father, that these decent people can move ahead with their lives. Another force is at play here as well, in the person of Trinidad PreFontaine, maker of healing potions, and well versed in the potential of most plant life. She feels the presence of Bonaventure as if they are connected by a personal, psychic tether. She has a role to play as well in seeing Bonaventure realize his potential. It is easy for a story with a fair bit of magic in it to get caught up in the pyrotechnics (verbotechnics?) of the incredible. (See The Night Circus) But that is not a fate suffered here. We are acutely aware of the humanity of these characters, and it is their emotional life that drives the story. The Magic takes an appropriate, supportive role. We follow the Wanderer, a physically maimed and mentally ravaged war veteran, from his constricted life in Detroit, as he sets out on a mission of unknown origin, to the point of his deed, and after that we see him occasionally in an asylum. He is very fixated on Alexandre Dumas, particularly The Count of Monte Cristo. One wonders what the wrong is that he is avenging. It is possible that there may be readers who are put off by the obvious religious perspective presented in Bonaventure’s world. Like the Blues Brothers, some characters here are most definitely on a mission from God. Bonaventure Arrow had been chosen to bring peace. There was guilt to be dealt with, and poor broken hearts, and atonement gone terribly wrong. And too there were family secrets to be heard; some of them old and all of them harmful.One cannot help but wonder if Trinidad PreFontaine, given her evocative name, might have some sort of baptismal relationship with BA. But take it from this atheist. It is worth the weight of Leganski’s perspective to gain the benefit of this wondrous landscape. And she does offer an image, as well, of some who would use religion for unseemly purposes. Leganski feathers her literary nest with some lovely imagery. Sparrows flit in and out, standing in for, probably, a variety of things. Birds, as a group are a significant presence In the middle of her sleepless night, Trinidad experienced a vision. A scavenging raven circled the room, its beady eyes questing after death. The bird spread its wings to swoop and glide, its feathers sounding like rustling silk. From the bird’s shaggy throat came a prruk-prruk call and a toc-toc click and a dry, rasping kraa-kraa cry. After the raven came a pure white dove, and after the dove, a sparrow.Later, Trinidad regarded circles as symbols of God’s eternal love. Her favorite circle was that which is found in the small dark eye of a sparrow.And again Tristan had rescued a bird—a sparrow—and needed her [Letice’s] help. It was a life or death situation…The bird seemed no more than a wisp, nearly weightless. She believed she could feel its bones and imagined them to be made of straw, all hollowed-out and light. Letice decided the bird was a girl sparrow, a young and delicate one. The tiny creature lay on its left side, breathing very fast. Letice could feel its heart beating in sync with her ownAre sparrows the souls of these characters? Angels? Don’t know, maybe, or maybe something else entirely. Bonaventure associates another character with an eagle later in the book, keeping the bird imagery aloft. There are plenty more, but I will stop there. There is a lovely sequence in which a few of the characters incorporate some voodoo gris gris into their experience, in a very warm, nurturing way. No black magic here, thank you very much, but maybe a bit of the sympathetic variety Some characters seem to have maybe a bit too much of a vision, if not always an absolute road map, directing them toward their goals. Trinidad certainly has a finger on the pulse of the force. William seems to have gotten a bullet-pointed memo from the Almighty in his in-box, and Bonaventure has his father to show him the way. While this may be tactically a bit convenient, strategically it supports the emotional journey of others. Bonaventure struggles to adapt to a world that is not all that accepting of someone as different as he is, particularly in the social cacophony of school, where he tries mightily to feel normal despite his large difference. I wish that we had gotten to see more of that effort. But the boy remains a pretty nifty character on his own for someone charged with helping change others. Really, it is the women whose journey we follow most here, Dancy, Letice, and Adelaide, Dancy’s awful mother, who could easily be a member of the De Vil clan, and who adds a layer of unpleasantness to the expression going postal. Along the way, Leganski offers a fascinating look at a time and place, New Orleans and the fictitious town of Bayou Cymbaline of the 1950s, primarily. The author, although from Wisconsin, and currently residing in Chicago, has a Southern heart. She has always been enamored of many great southern writers, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Harper Lee, among others. That sensibility comes through. Despite her northern Midwest DNA, the soul of this book resides in the South. She all but strokes the landscape with her rich, languid prose. There are enough overt literary references to offer tethers to other works. Dancy is, like her creator, a huge fan of Faulkner. From a different, if no less wonderful world, C.S. Lewis gets a mention, as does Lewis Carroll. Leganski writes with conviction about a sense of god, but not in a good versus evil way, although there is a bit of that in this tale. Here the battle is, mostly, about good versus despair, belief as a tool to help one overcome barriers and find again one’s better personal paths. Her notion of god, while clearly Christian in origin, extends the concept to a sort of areligious universality. Hers is not one of those church-bound deities, but a wondrous extra layer of existence that embraces profound beauty, kindness, forgiveness and understanding. The Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sorts are anathema here. The story of Bonaventure Arrow takes place in a universe of love, a universe in which bad things certainly can and do happen, but in which there are forces at work trying to heal wounds and make things right. In addition to lifting up some of its characters, this is a book that will lift up its readers. Enjoy it as pure fantasy if that works for you. Embrace the religious aspect if you prefer. The characters feel real and their struggles are all too mortal. The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow is most assuredly worth shouting about. ==============================UPDATES March 18, 2013 - I just came across this - lovely interview with the author. It adds a lot to one's appreciation of the novel. March 21, 2013 - I just learned that Bonnie made the Indie Next list for March ==============================EXTRA STUFF I stumbled on a fascinating web site pertaining to Bonaventure's particular talent ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 31, 2012
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Oct 22, 2012
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Paperback
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074995728X
| 9780749957285
| 074995728X
| 3.89
| 11,505
| 2012
| Aug 30, 2012
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it was amazing
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In London’s very gentrified neighborhood of Islington an eight-year-old boy is murdered in a playground. The suspect is slight, eleven-year-old, Sebas
In London’s very gentrified neighborhood of Islington an eight-year-old boy is murdered in a playground. The suspect is slight, eleven-year-old, Sebastian Croll, a friend of the victim. Seb is an odd sort, removed, serene in the presence of danger and pressure, until, that is, he breaks down and tosses tantrums that any three-year-old would find to be fine examples of the art. His home life leaves much to be desired, with a dodgy, self-medicating mom and an abusive, remote father. Is young Seb a sociopathic monster, someone spotted in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even a victim? [image] Lisa Ballantyne - from the Daily Record Daniel Hunter is Sebastian’s lawyer. He sees much of himself in his young client, knows how possible it is for children to be ill-treated by the world and by government, and wants to help him. Daniel had had plenty of trouble of his own as a kid. He never knew his father. Mom was a drug addict, and social services shuttled him from foster home to foster home. Daniel had some rage issues that kept the loco in loco parentis. Daniel’s final stop on the substitute parent merry-go-round was Minnie Flynn. It is the relationship between Daniel and Minnie that is the core element here. And what a core it is. Structurally the novel alternates chapters between the mystery of Sebastian’s did-he-or-didn’t-he and a journey back through Daniel’s personal history. While both tales are fascinating, Daniel’s tale is riveting. We know early on that, as an adult, he has received news of his mother’s death, and we also are told that he had been estranged from her for a very long time. The second mystery in the book is “why?” Minnie Flynn had suffered a loss that most of us could not bear. Maybe she shared life on her small Cumbrian farm with a series of foster kids to fill that need. But she took a special shine to young Daniel, and, despite the mayhem he causes when he comes under her care, he takes a shining to her. Although there is no romance involved, this is a very, very powerful love story. You will need tissues. Daniel was a lot to handle as a kid. Living with a junkie for a mother he was subjected to more than the usual sorts of childhood challenges. Most five-year-olds are not beaten up by their mother’s low-life boyfriend, or bear witness to low behavior of many sorts. No wonder he was so angry. And then the state decides that his mother is not fit to keep her son and Daniel begins the grand tour of foster homes. It would have taken someone with the patience of a saint to cope with his rage. And while Minnie does indeed have a breaking point, it is she, ultimately, who offers Daniel a safe haven, not only from the world, but from himself. She is one of those parental sorts who actually can set boundaries. She is one who can see the potential in Daniel beneath the maelstrom. And it is she who changes the direction of his life. I was struck by how similar was the feeling I had for Minnie to the feeling engendered in reading about Talmadge in the recently released fabulous novel, The Orchardist. Both are strong, good people, struggling desperately to make sense of lives in which they have suffered crushing misfortune. As with Talmadge, you will love Minnie. Ballantyne paints her with a range of colors, not all of which are complimentary, but every one of which is understandable, and very human. Ballantyne applies the same skill she uses in portraying the loving Minnie to give us the willies about Sebastian. He may or may not be guilty, but he certainly seems the sort of kid you would be reluctant to turn your back on. Other characters pop in and out, but it is Sebastian, Minnie and Daniel who hold our attention. Ballantyne makes deft use of avian imagery to support her characterizations and themes. A few examples. First, soon after young Daniel is taken in by Minnie: “Look!” she said to him, stopping and pointing at the sky. “do you see it?”Later he has taken in the image, made it his own: He felt strange: bereft, alone, cruel—like a falcon he had seen on his way to school one day, intent on a post, dismembering a field mouse. He didn’t know where his mother was. It felt as if she had been stolen.And as he feels the claws of his own guilt: he felt darkness circling around him and alighting on his chest, hooded, wicked, shining black like a raven. Daniel put a palm to his bare chest, as if to relieve the sting of the claws. He had left her, yet her leaving still seemed the greater. As he turned and turned again he felt the death beyond the loss that he had created. Her death was heavier, dark, like a bird of prey against the night sky.A visit to Hadrian’s Wall sings as an image of permanence. There are several mentions of sliced flesh that might raise hackles. And you might keep an eye out for the butterflies that flutter across the page on occasion. Ballantyne does not beat her imagery to death, but sprinkles it throughout her tale to add flavor, like a well moderated condiment. Another element the book addresses is the British legal system, that treats children as adults, much the same as in the US, so that should feel familiar for American readers. There is also much here on the notion of home. Young Daniel, effectively, if not entirely an orphan, yearns for a real, safe home, with a real, safe mam. But what might one expect had he had the home he yearned for with his biological mother? Seb has a home, but it is a toxic environment that has either made or enhanced his peculiarities. Might Daniel have become like Seb under different circumstances? How much is innate, and how much is induced? Nature vs nurture. And what is home for Minnie? Why would she remain in a place that witnessed her greatest loss when she could easily have returned to her native Ireland? The bottom line here is that The Guilty One is an outstanding novel, a true page-turner that will keep you rapt until you finish it. There is artistry to the writing and content to consider beyond the tale itself. But the strength here is the portrayal of compelling characters, and effective writing of powerful human emotion. Quite an amazing first novel. Your eyes will leak. Reading The Guilty One is not at all a guilty pleasure, but a pure one. ==================================UPDATES 3/7/2013 - There is a lovely description by the author of how she constructed the book. It includes the following This book is very much Daniel’s story – of being a young, damaged and violent child, but someone who grew to become a largely functional, caring adult. Sebastian, the young boy on trial in the book, is there to throw Daniel’s story into relief.A very warm interview with the author, from Scotsman.com. Not a bit of haggis in sight. 5/11/13 - From The York Press - Longlist announced for the 2013 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 15, 2012
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Aug 29, 2012
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Aug 15, 2012
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Paperback
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0062201050
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| 3.64
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| Oct 03, 2012
| Feb 05, 2013
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it was amazing
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Charles Dubow has been there and done that, spending his summers at the family’s place in the Hamptons, counting among his ancestors a US Vice Preside
Charles Dubow has been there and done that, spending his summers at the family’s place in the Hamptons, counting among his ancestors a US Vice President and the founder of BF Goodrich. He knows the tones of old money, and, as a founding editor of Forbes.com, and later editor at Businessweek, he knows firsthand about the riche, both ancien and nouveau. So it is no wonder that when he turned his talents to fiction he would write of what he knows. It is also clear that he knows about much more than just the world of business. [image] Charles Dubow - image from NY Post The echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, resonate loudly in Dubow’s first novel, Indiscretion. This story of need, love and betrayal takes place, primarily, on Long Island, the Hamptons. No Eggs are identified, but it is clear there are older, wealthier settlements, and others inhabited by the nouveau gauche. Claire lights up whatever space she occupies. She is a young and ambitious, living modestly in the city, but a guest at the not-so-modest home of an overpaid acquirer of cash, things, and people. Keep your ears perked and you might hear Clive’s Cambridge accent waver with the dropping of a few aitches and other crimes of inauthenticity when the going gets tough. He hangs great paintings in his flashy home for how they work with the décor. Madeleine Winslow rises from the older Hamptons world like a Venus, statuesque, athletic, bright, and gorgeous. And she cooks too. The perfect woman, and, of course, rich. Maddy is married to award winning author, Harry Winslow. At Yale he was a hockey hunk with a brain, not particularly rich. They are the perfect couple. Harry has always had the same golden aura that surrounded Gatsby. While recently famous and successful with his book (paralleling Jay’s success), he married into wealth before generating his own, as he and Maddy fell in love at Yale. But this golden boy got to marry the object of his affection. Walter Gervais has spent a huge part of his life here. He still lives in the grand home in which he was raised, by servants, next door to Maddy. He spent a lifetime in love with his own girl next door, only to see her plunge head over heels for the deitific Harry. Walter must get by with the unsatisfying leftover of platonic friendship. If one aspires to perfection everything else seems so disappointing. It is Walter who, with his ennui, guides us through this tale. He carries the unmistakable sound of Nick Carraway with him. But Gatsby is not the only sound echoing down the sands. Claire does not take long to set her sights on Harry, a step up in her climb. And here we detect the tones of Eve Harrington. Is Claire another Gertrude Slojinski? Is Walter another Addison DeWitt? Part of the fun here is to see if Claire is Eve Harrington. I am not telling, but she does come to the Hamptons for a gold-plated weekend with Clive and it does not take long before she sees a bit more glitter in Harry. A straight up comparison to All About Eve soon fails, though. Maddy is no Margo Channing although Claire does attempt to absorb all she can from her. Walter shows some cynical traits, a la Addison, (the irony is that he thinks I’ve been a friend to him. Like an aging matinee idol, whenever he hears applause, he always thinks it is for him.) but seems, ultimately, cut from a cleaner cloth. That is one of the things about Indiscretion. It makes you think about other great works, but does not stoop to copying. It is definitely its own story, however many atmospheric elements it may use to enhance its world. Debow has breathed life into all of his main characters. You will care what happens to them. And you will find yourself ripping through this book to see where it goes and what happens to them. Sleep will be lost by many who stay up a little late, then a bit later, still not wanting to put off until morning finding out what happens. No murders, no national crises, only a few shades of gray, and a fair bit of sturdy core make Indiscretion far, far more than a summer fling of a book. It is about human longing, and our lemming-like urge toward tragedy. What is enough?...There is an innate greediness that is part of the human condition. It drove Eve to eat the apple; it impelled Bonaparte to invade Russia and caused Scott to die in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. We have different names for it. What is curiosity other than greed for experience, for recognition, for glory? For activity to distract ourselves from ourselves? We hate the idea that we have come as far as we are going to go. And we are not content with what we have or how far we have come. We want more, whether it is food, knowledge, respect, power, or love. And that lack of contentment pushes us to try new things, to brave the unknown, to alter our lives and risk losing everything we already had.Walter suffers from his unrequited romantic love for Maddy. Claire pines for a higher rung on the social ladder, although there is more to her than her hunger. And Harry, a golden boy, with a fabulous wife, plenty of resources, great looks, talent and prospects, finds that there is something more that he wants. He is boosted by young Claire being attracted to him, as his love life at home has gone a bit soft and he is suffering pangs of insecurity re his career. Maddy, possessor of great physical beauty and more than enough wealth, wedded to a celebrated writer, wants, above all, to be loved for herself. It is worth noting that the name Madeleine means magnificent, and she is certainly portrayed so here, at least to outward appearance. The name Claire means clarity, and the character certainly seems pretty clear on what she wants. Perhaps it is ironic how her clarity results in such confusion for those she affects. The name Walter is associated with war, and this is reflected in his occasional strategizing and most obviously in the décor of his city apartment I love this room. Books, mostly histories and biographies, line the Chinese red walls. Military prints. On the shelves are miniature painted model soldiers. Mamelukes, hussars. One of my hobbies. I am especially fond of Napoleon’s Grande Armee. A sword that had reputedly belonged to Murat, and for which I paid a small fortune, hangs over the mantel.In fact the description of various living spaces informs us well about the people who inhabit them. The name Harry means heroic leader, but I saw little of that here. Not a person of great economic means, he spent his college summers working and joined the military after college. Honorable, definitely, but not necessarily heroic. Ok, so we are clear, I loved this book. Now time to pick a few nits. Debow throws us some literary red herrings. He opens the book with a monologue about how we alter the past when we remember it, but I found little in the book that put that notion to work. I kept wondering when recollections would be found to have been false, but if they were there, I must be too lacking in perception to have recognized them. Maybe Walter was idolizing his childhood with Maddy into something more than it was. Probably something else. Maybe it is right out there and I just missed it. Don’t know. Walter is given some Addison DeWitt lines, and does a thing or two that would be consistent with that sort of character, but then, later, does not intervene to guide events when we are expecting him to. Walter speaks to us in the prologue The notion that the past is more idyllic is absurd…What we remember is our innocence, strong limbs, physical desire. Many people are shackled by their past and are unable to look ahead with any degree of confidence because then not only don’t believe in the future, they don’t really believe in themselves.The characters here, it seems to me, are not so much looking backward through rose-tinted lenses, as they are trying to compensate for what they did not have as children. Does anyone here have a nice childhood to look back on? Not Claire, who was forced back to France for unwanted stays with an unfriendly grandmother. After her father remarried and all but abandoned her she “learned that love did not give itself freely. That if she wanted it, it had to be taken.” Not Walter who was raised in large measure by servants. Not Madeleine who pines for the love she did not receive as a child, having had a father who left strap welts on the backs of her legs. Harry had the sanest upbringing of them all. His father was a prep school instructor and he was a faculty brat, spending his youth “living on borrowed privilege.” But Walter, of them all, is the one most shackled to his youthful fantasies, the one who seems to be the most in denial. Indiscretion is a remarkable first novel, not what one would expect from a guy whose published writing has been business reportage. Clearly there was undiscovered value in his holdings and we now can all benefit. Spend the time; make the investment. Reading Indiscretion will pay serious dividends. Pub Date – October 3, 2012 Review first posted – July 2012 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Feb 6, 2013 - Indiscretion was named to Oprah's list of 16 must reads for February 2013 It was also named as one of the top Indie Next reads for Feb 2013 And got noticed in USA Today as well ----------Interviews -----Interview Magazine -----Chatelaine The Land of Lost Content by Alfred Edward Housman Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 02, 2012
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Jul 04, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
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