Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Just when it seems there can’t possibly be more to write about the horrors of the Holocaust, Jim Shepard in The Book of Aron reminds us why it is something we must never stop reading about – and, hopefully, learning from.
In Aron, the young narrator, Shepard has created a selfish, defiant, naïve and curious young boy. The German invasion of Poland and the subsequent establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto are described through Aron’s experience. He and his friends turn to smuggling. They couch their activities as efforts to help their families; however, the thrill of seeing not only what they can unearth, but also what they can get away with are, initially, stronger forces.
Shepard’s descriptions of the harsh living conditions, the threat of being caught by the authorities for dealing in contraband and the pain induced by being cold and hungry are painfully vivid. At first Aron treats the situation as little more than an inconvenience and the smuggling as something to keep him and his cohorts occupied.
As Aron slowly loses his family and friends, he finds himself on the streets struggling to survive. Dr. Janusz Korczak, who ran the Warsaw orphanage, rescues him. Before the war, Korczak was well-known as a children’s rights advocate. As portrayed by Shepard, he is a man old before his time motivated by a need to instill hope in children trying to endure hopeless lives.
This fictionalized account of the eventual friendship between Aron and the good doctor is harrowing and riveting.
The Book of Aron
Four Bookmarks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
253 pages
Families can be so complicated and Anne Tyler has banked on this fact in all of her novels. Her most recent, A Spool of Blue Thread, is no exception.
Abby and Red Whitshank are the kind of folks that raise their four kids, go to work every day, are regarded favorably, pay their bills, have a peripheral connection to a church and know little about either each other or their family history. At one point, in a jesting tone, the omniscient narrator notes there are two family stories: one about the family home on Bouton Road in a respectable, comfortable Baltimore neighborhood, and the other about Red’s sister’s marriage.
Of course, there are more, many more. And Tyler slowly, almost teasingly, reveals them. There’s a good reason why she spends so much time describing the Bouton Road house built by Red’s father.
Initially, the novel appears to focus on Denny, the ne’er-do-well son who floats in and out of the family’s vision. Once he’s clearly established as unreliable and secretive, the focus shifts. Multiple times. Denny has two sisters, but they are the least developed characters. Stem, the youngest son, soon becomes a focal point, as do Red’s parents. Though separated by a generation, the secrets and pasts associated with these three are what move the narrative.
Tyler is not afraid to throw in surprises, which in retrospect were actually subtly foreshadowed. Her ability to show the strengths and foibles of family life are engaging, occasionally humorous and always insightful.
A Spool of Blue Thread
Four Bookmarks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
368 pages
I was baffled by Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James. It’s sweet but confusing. It’s a love story that considers lost chances and perhaps poor decisions. It’s also surprisingly descriptive in its brevity.
Etta is 83 years old when she embarks on a trek across Canada to the ocean. The five-sentence letter she leaves as explanation to her husband sets the tone for the novel: “Otto, I’ve gone. I’ve never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry, I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back.”
This isn’t the kind of thing she’s planned, she simply leaves to see the coast. Briefly, Otto considers trying to find her. Ultimately, it’s Russell who does so, while Otto remains on the farm.
Along her trek, Etta gains unwanted attention from the media and towns people she encounters. She also acquires a companion in James, a source of bewilderment.
The relationships among the four title characters are complex. Otto and Russell have known each other since childhood. Both love Etta. Hooper develops the bond between Etta and Otto through letters the pair exchanged during the war. Their correspondence evolves from the mundane to the heartfelt.
Hooper intersperses the characters’ backstories with their present day adventures: Etta bound for the sea, Russell in search of Etta and Otto discovering daily rhythms on his own. Meanwhile, there’s James, who’s difficult to describe. Hooper has crafted a terse novel unpredictably rich with humor and longing.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James
Almost Four Bookmarks
Simon & Schuster, 2015
305 pages
Full disclosure: I’m a John Irving fan. However, at around page 39, in Avenue of Mysteries, I wondered if he’d lost his touch. Before I knew it, I was on page 100 and realized I had nothing to worry about Irving’s storytelling mastery.
Fourteen-year-old Juan Diego and his younger sister, Lupe, are dump kids in Oaxaca, Mexico. That is, they live and work among the trash heaps where garbage is sorted, saved and burned. Through books he’s salvaged, Juan Diego has taught himself to read and learn English. He also serves as translator for Lupe, whose words are unintelligible to everyone else. What she lacks in comprehensibility, she compensates for in her mindreading ability. She’s no fortune teller. Although she has a sense of what will happen, she knows peoples’ histories.
The narrative moves between Juan Diego’s youth and his adult self, a successful writer living in the U.S., who visits the Philippines. Juan Diego’s dreams reveal his past: the dump, the Catholic Church, his mother (the prostitute and cleaning woman for the church), the would-be priest from Iowa and the circus, among many other elements. It wouldn’t be John Irving without the numerous components and the way they intersect.
As he travels, Juan Diego’s state of mind is manipulated by the medication he takes and forgets to take, as he meets Miriam and Dorothy, introduced as mother and daughter. The relationships with the women and a former student are complicated and interesting, but not nearly as engaging as Juan Diego’s earlier life.
Avenue of Mysteries
Four Bookmarks
Simon & Schuster, 2015
460 pages
I wasn’t aware of the 1983 Glen Canyon Dam crisis, nor of an effort to achieve the fastest ride through the Grand Canyon until reading The Emerald Mile. Keven Fedarko presents an engrossing, at times lyrical (and occasionally overwhelming) account of the events that led to three men hurtling down the Colorado River in a wooden boat.
Fedarko introduces a cast of characters from John Wesley Powell to park rangers, from boat builders to hydrologists, from river rats to tourists – among others. Historic, meteorological, hydrologic and recreational elements – again, to name a few – are all addressed. Fedarko’s writing is based on thorough research that serves the purpose of illustrating the myriad of components that made the river run possible while addressing aspects that threatened its fulfillment.
The author is a master of the backstory. His writing is much like the river he describes: full of excitement and the unknown, then calm. And, he apparently leaves no stone unturned. Although this is a work of fiction, it has the feel of a mystery: how is Kenton Gura, the man who captained the small, hand-built dory named the Emerald Mile, going to pull off the adventure of a lifetime? This same sense of intrigue is evident in the passages concerning the efforts to thwart a dam failure while dealing with the effects of a massive snow melt: the effect of El Nino.
This work makes me not only want to revisit the Grand Canyon, but also to tour the dams at either end.
The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in history Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon
Four Bookmarks
Scribner, 2013
415 pages (includes notes and index)
Although 16-year-old Lydia Lee is dead (revealed in the first sentence), her presence is felt on every page of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You.
The coping mechanisms of each household member are revealed through their past and current experiences. The Lees live in a small, Midwestern college town. Ng’s descriptions of its physical attributes make it sound like Perfect Place, USA. As the reader learns more about the family, the more that’s gleaned about Lydia.
Marilyn, Lydia’s mom, is angry and convinced that Lydia was abducted. Marilyn had aspirations of becoming a doctor not just because she was a brilliant student, but as a way of distancing herself from her mother, a home economics teacher.
James, Lydia’a father, is of Chinese descent. He grew up in the 1950s dealing with prejudices against skin color and eye shape. When he and Marilyn fall in love it’s his realization of the American Dream. Lydia’s older brother, Nath, and younger sister, Hannah, round out the family.
This is a story of a child’s naïve prayer, a mother’s efforts to re-launch a lost ambition, a father who’s spent his life struggling to fit in and two siblings emotionally lost in the shadows of their parents obvious preference for their middle child.
The title is intriguing on its own, but has much more weight at the novel’s conclusion because its meaning is not what was expected. Ng’s narrative is framed by familial and societal expectations. Consequently, there are many victims in her portrait.
Everything I Never Told You
Four Bookmarks
Penguin Books, 2014
298 pages
Hive-Mind by Gabrielle Myers is labeled a memoir, but it’s slightly more than that. Written in diary-like form, Myers describes her summer of 2006 on a farm in Northern California. This is no kiddie account, though. While it’s the focus of her narrative, Myers alternates the chronicle with a look back to her relationship with her mother and growing up in Virginia. As if this isn’t enough, she also includes poetry.
It’s evident that sharing the earlier memories is cathartic; this is true of the latter ones, but is less obvious until the end. Myers’s descriptions of life on the farm, from early spring to late September, are vivid and stunning. I can practically feel dirt stuck in my fingernails as she, Baker (also working on the farm) and Farmer (the woman who owns the land and decides the daily chores) sow and weed and sweat and harvest. The author is also impressive in describing meals prepared from food on the farm.
Farmer is an enigma. This may be Myers’s point: Farmer never reveals enough about herself to know who she is. Myers shares her own thoughts and reactions, but that isn’t enough to make Farmer compelling. Baker is an open book and, consequently, is more interesting.
Myers isn’t writing about coming of age, but of becoming aware. This is evident as she connects the different phases in her life following a 1995 conversation with her mother: “… how I feel can become how someone else feels.”
Hive-Mind
Three and three-quarter Bookmarks
Lisa Hagen books, 2015
299 pages
Disturbing and lyrical are the best words to describe Lida Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children. Graphic and violent could also be added to the list.
Set initially in an unnamed Eastern European village, the narrative involves characters known by single-word descriptions: photographer, writer, playwright, filmmaker, poet, performance artist, widow and girl. Everything centers on the girl.
It is her image as she flees the bombing of her home that is captured by the photographer. The girl has already been victimized by soldiers long before she loses her parents and brother in the explosion. Yuknavitch’s writing is as vivid as the photo that eventually earns the photographer critical acclaim.
The girl runs into the forest and finds her way to the widow’s home where she learns about art and more about survival. Theirs is a quiet, comfortable relationship. Their pasts are always near, but their focus is on the moment.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the artists believe they must bring the girl to the United States. The hitch is they don’t know who she is or where to find her. As often happens, money solves most problems and here it comes to the rescue in a round-about way. Even with resources the task isn’t easy.
The realistic descriptions of physical and sexual violence make this a difficult book to read. Fortunately, this is overshadowed by demonstrations of humanity and the author’s powerful writing. At its core, it questions the extremes endured to appease consciences.
The Small Backs of Children
Lidia Yuknavitch
Four Bookmarks
HarperCollins 2015
222 pages
Isabel Allende is among my favorite authors. I am reminded of how I feel about my kids: I love them even though they sometimes do things I don’t always like. Allende’s most recent novel, The Japanese Lover, is like that.
The story involves too many secrets, predictable plot lines and cardboard characters. Alma Belasco, a woman of means in her 80s, moves into Lark House, an unconventional nursing home. There she meets 23-year-old care-giver, Irina Bazili. The two bond, and soon Irina is helping Alma’s grandson, Seth, work on a book about Alma and the Belasco family history.
Of course, Irina has a past about which little is revealed, but Alma has secrets, too. As Seth and Irina learn more about Alma, it’s apparent there’s a lost love. Yawn. The younger couple believes the romance is still going strong, although this is all based on speculation.
There was, in fact, a lover. He started out as the youngest son of the Belasco family’s Japanese gardener and Alma’s childhood best friend. One of the most interesting aspects of the narrative is when Ichimei and his family are uprooted from their San Francisco home and relocated, with thousands of other Japanese-Americans, to an internment camp.
Given his role as title character, Ichimei is one-dimensional. Even Alma could have been so much more – especially in Allende’s hands. Alas, this is one of those books I didn’t like much; nonetheless, I look forward to the author’s next work.
The Japanese Lover
Two-and-a-half Bookmarks
Atria Books, 2015
322 pages
The first sentence in Eka Kurniawan epic, Beauty is a Wound, is a doozy: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.” It sets the perfect-wtf-tone for the entire novel.
Set in Indonesia, the narrative combines elements of the island nation’s history with folk lore, superstition, mystery and love. It’s farfetched in scope and captivating in its depiction of a myriad of characters.
Dewi Ayu is of Dutch heritage and her beauty is renowned throughout the island. Her story includes her childhood, survival during the Japanese occupation and eventual career path as a prostitute. She has three daughters whose beauty is also the stuff of legends and a third daughter, whose appearance is so repulsive that out of consideration for others, keeps herself hidden. Also, because of Dewi Ayg’s exquisite looks, she a very popular lady of the night.
Ironically, the ugly daughter is named Beauty.
At times it’s difficult keeping track of who’s who, which political regime is in power and who’s a spirit or not. The effort is worth it. Kurniawan jostles back and fourth among characters and time frames as he tells Dewi Ayu’s story.
Many of the subplots are like fairy tales. They are easy to get caught up in before the author reveals the connections each element has to another. Don’t expect a happily-ever-after outcome, but do be prepared for an engaging, if often exaggerated, explanation of how a woman suddenly is among the living again.
Beauty is a Wound
Four Bookmarks
New Directions Paperback, 2015 (translated edition by Annie Tucker)
470 pages
The Blue Page Special 