PALE FIRE

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Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov, G P Putnam's Sons, 1962, 301 pp

Summary from Goodreads: An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king.  

Foreward to my review: I almost did not post these thoughts about Pale Fire. It is not really a review. It is me whining. Then I thought that most avid readers are at one time or another defeated by a novel. Whether we soldier on to the end or DNF, it can be a blow. Whether we blame the author or ourselves, it is a discouraging experience. So I post this as a tribute to readers who go outside their comfort zones and try other types of books.

My Thoughts:

I was nearly defeated as a reader by this book. I read it, off and on, for several weeks. It is the most oddly constructed novel I have ever come across: An Introduction in the Everyman's Library edition I read, written by someone else; a Foreward by the narrator Charles Kinbote; a poem in Four Cantos by the fictional poet John Shade; a lengthy commentary by Charles Kinbote who fancies himself to be John Shade's friend and the editor of his poem, deconstructing the poem almost line by line.

I skipped the Introduction, as I usually do, saving it to read after finishing the book, because Introductions often contain spoilers. On the advice of several reviewers, I attempted to read the poem and the commentary simultaneously, flipping back and forth between the two. I do not advise this method.

I could tell that Nabokov was at his satirical and literary nadir but I could not quite get a grasp of what he was trying to do. In fact, though I have read and liked some of his other novels, I grew to hate him for being unnecessarily obtuse, for making me feel he was mocking the reader, and for making me feel stupid.

Finally, I went back and read the poem all the way through, then picked up the commentary where I had left off and struggled through to the end. I figured out that Charles Kinbote was the ultimate unreliable narrator and that the satire was working on various levels. 

I have read almost all of the Goodreads reviews of Pale Fire and several others from legitimate newspaper reviews. Anyone who liked the book raves about its "ingeniously constructed parody," its wild inventiveness, wit, suspense, literary one-upmanship, political intrigue, perfect tragicomic balance.

I will grant that Nabokov did all that. I will admit that I was woefully under-prepared as a reader to even remotely appreciate it.  I doubt I ever will be prepared enough, but someday when I have read another 2000 books (the number of books I have read since 1991 when I decided to move on from reading trashy bestsellers and become "well read") I may give Pale Fire another shot.

After finally reaching the end and then reading the Introduction, still feeling like I did not get the joke, I found a review by Mary McCarthy, one of my favorite super smart female writers, and she explained everything I didn't get. "Bolt From the Blue". Despite my reading friends telling me I have read everything, I have not, but already in 1962 Mary McCarthy had.

What Vladimir Nabokov and Pale Fire did for me was restore my humility and make me more determined than ever to read all I can for the rest of my life, from ancient to modern, in all genres. Still, I reserve the right to maintain my current opinion that Mary McCarthy's review is more entertaining than Nabokov's Pale Fire. 

Afterword:

So please my blog followers and Goodreads friends, tell me: what books have defeated you as a reader? How did you feel? Did you finish those books or throw them against the wall? What have you learned by reading stuff that is over your head or outside your favorite reading categories? Let me know I am not alone!

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, Doubleday, 2016, 306 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned and, though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor - engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. 

My Review:

I liked this novel very much and I admired several things about it. It is the story of a runaway slave in pre-Civil War times and follows her journey to freedom, a journey she has not fully completed by the end of the book.

The stages of her escape and her continuous flight from the slave catcher who pursues her are harrowing. They also reveal the stages a person who has been enslaved might go through to overcome the effects of that enslavement, to find a sense of self, and to learn how to live with more freedom than ever experienced before. I was impressed by the way Cora's journey paralleled the experience of African Americans over the last 200 years or more, including the reality that the social journey is also still incomplete.

Making the Underground Railroad an actual train that runs underground works on so many levels. I am sure I am not the only school child to have originally imagined it that way.

Cora, the runaway, is a great character. She is tough and vulnerable at the same time. She learns from experience, learns to read, and uses the survival skills attained as a slave, while carrying in her heart both the pain and the pride of the knowledge that her mother ran away before her and was never found. 

However, I did not totally love this novel. In interviews, the author says that he read every slave narrative he could get his hands on before writing it. Having read a couple of those myself, including Twelve Years A Slave, I felt that many of the scenes in this book were familiar. His research showed in the writing a bit too obviously. I don't know how else he could have done it and it is important that he is bringing these stories to new readers and keeping them alive. It just bothered me.

Sometimes I lost track of the reality of Cora as a character and felt I was hearing the author's voice more than hers. I think this is Colson Whitehead's first foray into historical fiction and I have found that quibble in other first historical novels before.

Everyone in my reading group was positive about the book, and this is a group that is usually widely divided about anything we read. So that is an indicator that Whitehead has the ability to reach white, middle-aged women on a topic that is full of negatives. Believe me, that is no small feat!  

(The Underground Railroad is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

COMMONWEALTH

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Commonwealth, Ann Patchett, Harper, 2016, 322 pp

Summary from Goodreads: One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them. 

My Review:

Ann Patchett's new novel!! All I want to do is gush but I will try to say something intelligent.

The story opens at a christening party. It is a family of Catholic cops and the Deputy DA shows up uninvited for reasons that are not clear to anyone. By the end of that first chapter you don't quite know what you have just read about but you do know it was unsettling and fun at the same time.

That is how it goes for pretty much the whole novel except quite a bit of sadness gets added to the mix.

Two divorces, six siblings and half-siblings shuffled back and forth between two sets of parents, unreliable adults, kids left to their own devices. It is tragic, sometimes humorous, and you cannot look away.

Never for one minute do you doubt that this is Ann Patchett. She has performed this trick for novel after novel. Not sentimentality, not sensationalism, and just a bit off from what we like to think about humanity and family and relationships and love.

She has a unique proprietary recipe for writing novels. Even as she exposes us for the moral weaklings that we are, she still gives us hope and reasons to believe that love is the answer. 

(Commonwealth is currently available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN

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The English Assassin, Daniel Silva, G P Putnam's Sons, 2002, 383 pp

Summary from Goodreads: When art restorer and occasional Israeli agent Gabriel Allon is sent to Zurich, Switzerland, to restore the painting of a reclusive millionaire banker, he arrives to find his would-be employer murdered at the foot of his Raphael. A secret collection of priceless, illicitly gained Impressionist masterpieces is missing. Gabriel's handlers step out of the shadows to admit the truth-the collector had been silenced-and Gabriel is put back in the high-stakes spy game, battling wits with the rogue assassin he helped to train. 

My Review:

In his second book of the Gabriel Allon series, Daniel Silva takes us to Switzerland. Gabriel has been sent on a supposed art restoration assignment to the home of private banker Augustus Rolfe in Zurich, only to find the man dead. As it turns out, Rolfe had requested the Israeli espionage office to send him a representative, so Gabriel had been dispatched by his longtime handler Shamron, the ruthless spymaster who calls on Allon when he needs something particularly dangerous carried out.

Gabriel lands in a Swiss jail, breaking the foremost rule: "Don't get arrested!" Soon enough he is embroiled in a case of stolen Jewish art, with a crooked Swiss cop and another crazed assassin as his enemies. Of course, Rolfe has a daughter, a world famous concert violinist, whom Gabriel must protect.

The English Assassin gets off to a much quicker start than the first book, The Kill Artist. I suppose this is because Gabriel's backstory is already known to anyone who has read the former book. However, that backstory is lightly filled in so this one could be read alone.

One reason I like spy thrillers is for the knowledge I get about history and political issues that are not always found in history books or the news. I of course knew that the Nazis had stolen money, jewels, and art from Jews during WWII. What I learned in this novel was the extent to which Swiss bankers were implicit in these crimes. In addition, the private Swiss banking system works on another more secretive and well-protected level which still obstructs the recovery of these thefts.

This was a suspenseful read. So much so, that I had to keep reminding myself that there are 14 more books in the series, meaning that Gabriel must have lived through all the scenes in which I was certain he would not survive.

One more surprising aspect was the way several characters changed throughout the story and committed acts of atonement. Appropriate reading for the period of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur during which I read it. 

(The English Assassin is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SUMMER BIRD-CAGE

A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble, William Morrow & Company, 1962, 224 pp

 

 

One of the pleasures of the 1962 list in My Big Fat Reading Project has been reading first novels by authors I have always wanted to read or authors whose later novels I have read.

Examples: Cover Her Face by P D James, In Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Letting Go by Philip Roth, Love and Friendship by Alison Lurie.

Margaret Drabble is the sister of A S Byatt. In the usual way of the media, much has been made over the years about their sibling rivalry. Actually both women have been outspoken about this in interviews and though both are highly acclaimed British novelists still publishing novels, they still don't get along. I get it. I have such a sister.

Another theme in novels by women published in 1962 is a growing awareness of a woman's place in society and in marriage, which would eventually become the Feminist movement, although that question has come up sporadically in novels I have read from earlier years.

Examples: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Love and Friendship by Alison Lurie, An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch.

A Summer Bird-Cage falls into both categories. Sarah, the main character, is a recent Oxford graduate who is working out for herself how to fit her high level of intelligence into adult life. She can't settle on a career, she can't find a man to love, and she is watching other women for clues. Her older sister Louise has always been a torment to her.

As the novel opens, she has been called home for Louise's wedding. All the years of enmity are still there. Louise got the beauty, Sarah the brains. Puzzling to Sarah is why her sister is marrying an older successful novelist who is also a rather despicable man. Did she marry him for his money?

Over the course of a year, she sees the marriages of both her best friend and her sister fall apart as she grapples with her own identity as a woman and as an aspiring writer. The shift of power between the sisters is the most fascinating aspect of the story.

I have read countless novels about this very thing and usually find them good because the relationships between women and sisters are interesting to me and resonate with my experience. What I found exhilarating in this one was the excellent writing. Drabble (only 25 when this first novel was published) is unabashed when it comes to demonstrating her own intelligence. The tone of the writing is modern with an emphasis on dialogue that reads the way people actually talk. 

I want more of Margaret Drabble!

(The Summer Bird-Cage is out of print but can be purchased as a used book or an eboook. I found my copy at the library.)

 

 

 

EPITAPH

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Epitaph, Mary Doria Russell, Ecco, 2015, 577 pp

This is the sequel to Doc and my reading group were unanimous on it being a great read, even though it is a Western, a genre we have never read in all the 15 years I have been a member of the group! No one even complained about the length.

Mary Doria Russell set out to tell the truest story she could about the shoot-out at the O K Corral in Tombstone, AZ. Her goal was to dispel the myths that have grown up about Wyatt Earp. She accomplished both, including taking the tale all the way to Earp's death many years later, delineating how those myths came about. One member of the group felt sad to learn that this hero of hers was not the wonderful man she had always revered. A peril of reading good literature, I guess.

The novel packs a lot of history and I felt I had learned more than I ever knew before about that time period in America. Somehow, though I grew up with Wyatt Earp as one of my heroes, I had never realized that the O K Corral incident occurred in 1881, just twenty years after the Civil War began. Though the Eastern part of the country was quite civilized at that time, the West was still wild, violent, and only slightly lawful.

Life for women in those Western towns was especially brutal. Most single women who found themselves there were forced to turn to prostitution to survive. Only one of the Earp brothers was married to his woman, though they were mostly faithful. But mining of gold, copper, and other minerals brought businessmen from the East and made them rich and influential. The enmity between the North and the South was still a driving social and political force with deep divisions between the two. In fact, it was politics and money that created the conditions leading up to the massacre that lasted only thirty seconds and left everyone involved either dead or scarred for life.

It is truly a monumental read and gives much food for thought. In light of our current Presidential campaign, please read and ponder the Author's Note found at the beginning of the novel:

"The poles of American politics have been stable since the presidential election of 1800. A federalist party proclaiming, 'We are a nation of laws' has always been opposed by a 'Don't tread on me' party that resists regulation in the name of personal liberty. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they've been called the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Please note that in the 1880s, those labels were reversed."

(Epitaph is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

SWEET LAMB OF HEAVEN

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Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Lydia Millet, WW Norton & Company, 2016, 250 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Blending domestic thriller and psychological horror, this compelling page-turner follows a mother fleeing her estranged husband.

Lydia Millet’s chilling new novel is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who’s just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists—and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined.

A double-edged and satisfying story with a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic, Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters—and for all of us. 

My Review: (originally published at LitBreak)

 

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Earlier this year, as soon as I heard news of Lydia Millet’s newest novel, I diligently set about reading the last two novels of her recent trilogy (How the Dead Dream, Ghostlights, Magnificence). Even when this author writes a trilogy, it is more like three loosely connected novels, the way some novels are a collection of loosely connected stories. I finished the trilogy satisfied that she had given me three distinct examples of her worldview shown through the eyes of three related characters.

As I began to read some of the early publicity for Sweet Lamb of Heaven, I became somewhat alarmed. I got the impression that it was a type of thriller with a runaway mother and child being pursued by a creepy husband. Was she pandering? I mean, anyone who loves Millet will tell you she deserves to be better known. Had she lowered herself to write something possibly more commercially successful?

I will admit, sometimes I am a reader of little faith. I need not have worried. In fact, she has written the anti-Gone Girl. Surely you read that and can admit to doing so. Possibly you saw the movie. I did both and mostly felt annoyed, a bit insulted, though I had to admire the twist at the end.

Anna is an unhappy wife with a young daughter she decided to have even though her husband Ned “threw his hands into the air palms-forward” when she insisted on going through with her pregnancy. “Afterward his schedule got fuller, his long work hours longer, his attention more completely diverted.” Anna admits she began to give up on him from that point.

She has Lena on her own with only hospital staff attending. When she wakes up after the birth she begins to hear voices. It is a cacophony of overlapping voices and continuous whenever she is near Lena. Only when Lena is sleeping or when Anna in desperation gets a sitter and leaves the house, do the voices leave her in peace. Out of the babble she discerns a word (powa or poa) and a phrase (The living spring from the dead.)

A diligent researcher, she moves through possible causes. Delirium, post-partum depression, ear or neurology issues, hallucinations, demons. She calls it “the voice” and keeps a diary. On one of the rare evenings when Ned comes home for dinner, in one of the most eerie moments in the book, he hears the voice too!

The early chapters left me less than hooked though. There are clues that Ned is some sort of psychopath, some background on the marriage, the fact that Anna brought money to the union, and her views on religion. Anna had loved Ned in the beginning but had failed to see the warning signs, though she is clearly not stupid or crazy, just naïve. She soldiers on with the voice and her research, learning that powa or poa means a Buddhist meditation practice described as a “transference of consciousness” or “mind stream.” But once Ned heard it she stopped looking for its origin or cause.

On the day that one-year-old Lena says her first word, the voice falls silent. Anna realizes that the voice passes through those newly born and when they speak, it moves on. She and her daughter live blissfully through the girl’s toddler years with the presence or absence of Ned nothing more than a slight annoyance. Sadly, Anna had fallen once more into naiveté. Even when she knew that she had to leave him, it took her several years to do so.

By that time, Ned had decided to go into politics as an adjunct to his business ventures. He had had many lovers but suddenly became a “family values” man. Though Anna only took a portion of their assets, he began to stalk her. He needed the appearance of a happy family to support his campaign.

She is only mildly careful about keeping her whereabouts concealed and by the time he finds her, Lena is six and they are living in a remote and somewhat rundown seaside motel on the coast of Maine. Lena is a bright and happy child, very outgoing, alert and smart. In fact, she is one of the most endearing children I have met in a novel. She makes friends with everyone who stays at the motel and her most special grownup friend is Kay, a former nurse for newborns in a small hospital.

Ned snatches Lena with ease and there follow many chapters devoted to Anna’s anguish and anxiety. Nothing unusual except that by now you know the mother and the child so intimately, it is as if it has happened to you. So stealthily that I hardly noticed it though, the awareness of something strange going on with the other guests at the motel had been building. All of them have a personal affliction in common and all of them knew the motel manager before they came to stay.

Here, dear reader is where I leave you. The plot that wove back and forth from past to present but seemed to meander a bit too much suddenly becomes electric with the wizardry of Lydia Millet. Her themes of women who get a grip, of more than meets the eye, of how to live in our increasingly strange society, and of what really holds us together, coalesce. I can tell you that there is a happy ending, but the novel turned out to be a parable and I would not dream of spoiling that for you.

 Just recently, Sweet Lamb of Heaven was included on the fiction long list for the National Book Award. I sincerely hope Lydia Millet wins the prize she deserves.

(Update: The novel did not make the short list for the NBA. I feel it should have.)

WHISKEY RIVER

Whiskey River, Loren D Estleman, Bantam Books, 1990, 262 pp

Whiskey River begins in 1928 at the height of Prohibition. Jack Dance is an eighteen-year-old on the cusp of becoming one of the top (fictional) gangsters in Detroit. Connie Minor, a young reporter of Greek descent, has just begun his career as a newspaper reporter when the two meet in a blind pig on the night it gets tipped over by the bulls. (I had to look up all this early 20th century slang, so if you don't know those terms, you can too!)

The story is a case of the strange friendship between these two men. As Jack Dance's career, if you want to call it that, rises in the underworld, Connie Minor's follows in journalism due to his reporting on the activities of rum runners and the accompanying police corruption. Minor writes his pieces with all the insight of an inside story. Though he never commits a crime himself, he is often there when they happen. His fascination with Jack Dance, however, does eventually land him in some hot water.

It is a tale you can't put down. The writing is as good as anything by Raymond Chandler, creating the particular flavor of illegal liquor, speakeasies, crime, and violence over the course of about four years.

Reading this one on the heels of The Turner House was a whole experience in itself. Detroit was a mighty city in 1920, almost comparable to Chicago. The two novels are bookends on the rise and fall of a major American city.

My mom was born on New Year's Day in 1919 in a small Michigan town on Lake Huron. Detroit was the closest city. So the first 14 years of her life were the years of Prohibition. How I wish she were still around and I could ask her if she was aware of it and how it impacted her life. She was a very temperate drinker. My dad was not!

I don't remember how I discovered this author or his book. Estleman was born in 1952 in Ann Arbor, MI. Whiskey River is the first in a series of seven novels in which he set out to tell the story of America in the 20th century through the microcosm of Detroit. As he said, "Detroit is the one city whose history mirrors precisely the history of the United States of America." He also wrote many other books yet, despite winning awards, most of his work is out of print already. The Detroit series is now available in eBook form and I plan to read all of them.

THE TURNER HOUSE

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The Turner House, Angela Flournoy, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 338 pp

Summary from Goodreads: The Turners live on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house sees thirteen children get grown and gone—and some return; it sees the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. Despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs, the house still stands. But now, as their powerful mother falls ill and loses her independence, the Turners might lose their family home. Beset by time and a national crisis, the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called back to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts might haunt—and shape—their family's future. 

My Review:

Here we have another one of those stories where the grown children must decide what to do with the family home. Except this family is black and the house is in a section of Detroit, MI, decimated by the 2008 crash, by drugs, crime and homeless people, etc, etc. It is more similar to Loving Day than it is to The Past. Even so, families are families and the offspring always have issues with their parents and each other. 

Detroit was the closest city to me when I lived in Ann Arbor, MI, but when I moved to California in 1991 it was still a fairly vibrant city. Just a decade later the population began a steep downtrend as Ford Motor Company moved auto production to other cities causing a major loss of jobs. By 2013, the city declared bankruptcy.

The Turners had lived on an East Side street for over fifty years. From the boom years and through the bust, they raised 13 children in a three bedroom house on the earnings of truck driving Mr Turner. The novel moves back and forth from the present to the postwar past, telling the story of the parents' move to the city from the South in the late 1940s and exposing the fault lines in the family. 

Thirteen siblings and their spouses and children would have made an unwieldy character list but the author provides a family tree and focuses on four of the siblings as well as their aging widowed mother.  She had been the force behind the family but is now on her deathbed.

When most of the brothers and sisters gather to decide what to do with their now empty family home, the house is only worth a tenth of the refinanced mortgage still due. All of the disparate circumstances of their adult lives come into play and and an old tale about a ghost seen by Charles, the eldest son, when he was just a boy plays a large part in the story. (Loving Day had ghosts too!)

The novel is wonderfully constructed, very American in it scope of dreams chased, hopes dashed, and secrets kept, with the decaying city as a background. Racism is a situation but not the major one. What I got from it is a picture of how the changing fortunes of America have affected people who exist in the lower middle class tier of our society and that is primarily an economic story.

The dust cover blurb calls the novel "a celebration of the ways in which our families bring us home." I would call it a study in how the underside of the American Dream takes its toll on even the strongest of families while it prevents families from fully developing that fabled strength.

(The Turner House is currently available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1991 (first published in Russia in 1962) (translated from the Russian by H T Willets) 182 pp

I have meant to read this for a long time. Though it was not published in English until 1963 (in a translation not authorized by the author) it was originally published in a Soviet literary magazine in 1962. I generally put books onto My Big Fat Reading Project lists in the years when they were first published. The translation I read, published by FSG in 1991, was authorized by the author. Solzhenitsyn went on to write many more novels as well as novellas, plays, and essays. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Knowing that this story was set in a Soviet labor camp during the rule of Stalin, I was prepared for a grueling read. I keep a list of books I've read called Prison Camp Lit. None of them has made for pleasant reading. So I was surprised to find it almost lighthearted. 

 Of course, Ivan Denisovich and his fellow inmates are freezing half to death, starving half to death, and worked close to death. They are ill and have no idea when they will be released. Also, some are worse off than others due to various factors but often boiling down to a temperament that does poorly in such circumstances and probably in life as well.

Ivan is a canny fellow. He has figured out how to stay out of trouble, who to befriend, how to regulate the consumption of his precious bits of food and limited minutes of free time. So it is like when you are in a bad school or an oppressive work situation and you figure out how to play the game.

Except it is not like that because he cannot leave without the risk of being killed or actually dying of starvation or exposure in Siberia. Also, he survives with the gnawing uncertainty about what he has available to go back to once he is released.

The bottom line is that it is all seriously gruesome but every time Ivan was successful in navigating all the dangers, even to the smallest degree, I was happy for him. I kept visualizing a better existence for this man and I feel that was due to Solzhenitsyn's writing. It is predicated on the idea that as long as there is life in a person, there is hope. Also that you can take almost everything away from someone but as long as his spirit is not completely broken, you can't take that.

Instead of being depressed after reading about just one day in this man's life, I was uplifted. 

(One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosivich is available in paperback on the Classics shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

OCTOBER READING GROUP UPDATE

Another good line-up of books for October. I know many of you, my faithful blog readers, are not in favor of reading groups and I understand your reasons. I am happy to say that I still enjoy all my groups and we keep picking great reads and having the most interesting discussions. I guess I am lucky. It is all about the members and about mostly everyone finishing the book. Also it has been great to see us all grow as readers and in our ability to have good discussions. 

Here are this month's picks:

Laura's Group:

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Molly's Group:

Bookie Babes:

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One Book at a Time:

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If you are in a reading group, what are you reading and discussing in October? 

 

BOOKS READ IN SEPTEMBER

Welcome to my summary of reading in September. Mostly here in the Los Angeles region it was hot, dry, and windy. Not for us the lovely cooling, the turning leaves, the harvest time. You just keep watering your property within allowed limits, run the air conditioner, and give thanks for earlier sunsets. Then there is the on-going insanity of my country's presidential election season which ramped up along with the heat. No wonder I have only read fiction for the past three months.

I read 10 books and liked them all.

Stats: 10 books read. 10 fiction. 6 written by women. 1 crime-historical. 3 from My Big Fat Reading Project. 1 Western-historical. 2 translated.

Favorites: Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Epitaph

Least favorite: None

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Have you read any of these? If so, do you have a review other readers can link to? What good books did you read in September? 

LOVING DAY

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Loving Day, Mat Johnson, Spiegel & Grau, 2015, 287 pp

Summary from Goodreads: "In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house."

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers. 

My Review:

If ever there was a year to read novels about racial issues in America, this would be it. So I am. I read The Sellout in March; Homegoing in July, and now Loving Day.

Set in Philadelphia and in some ways similar to The Sellout, this one is more focused on the mixed race experience. Of course, if we didn't suffer so severely from racism in this country, being racially mixed would not be a problem.

Mat Johnson is a versatile writer who can move effortlessly between humor and serious heartfelt stuff. Loving Day mostly pokes fun at the issues it raises but this author is not as relentless in his satire as was Paul Beatty in The Sellout.

Warren Duffy is an Irish/African American mix who does not look black. He is also a less than successful comic/graphic novel artist and recently divorced from his Welsh wife. His Irish father has died and left him a rundown mansion, once a historic landmark, that now lies in the heart of Philadelphia's ghetto.

He returns to the City of Brotherly Love with plans to complete the renovation his father started and sell the house, because naturally he is nearly broke. One thing you learn pretty early on is that planning is not Warren's strong suit. Soon enough he learns he has a half-Jewish teenage daughter he never knew he had. The disappointing wreckage of his life so far begins trending toward disaster.

As this confused guy decides he should be a responsible father to Tal, ensuring she learns about her black heritage and gets an education, he changes the plan to burning down the house and collecting the insurance. If you read the book, you will find out how that works out for him.

The plot takes off on the first page and never sags. However it is the nuanced particulars of his mixed race characters (the Sunflowers, the One-droppers, the Oreos, the multiracial humanists, and the militants) that give this novel depth as well as intelligence.

It also has ghosts! 

(Loving Day has just come out in paperback and is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

AURA

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Aura, Carlos Fuentes, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1962, 38 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion. 

My Review: I loved this novella by an author I have also come to love. I read it on my Nook, as it is not currently in print except for the bilingual edition pictured above. At first it seemed a rip off to have to pay $9.94 for such a slim volume. About three pages in I did not care.

Written like a fable, it took me into a strange dreamlike story involving a starving writer, an old woman, the green-eyed Aura and a crumbling old house.

It is spooky. It is somewhat supernatural. It is almost a deal-with-the-devil tale. Not quite like anything else I have read by Fuentes but utterly enchanting.

THE GIRLS

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The Girls, Emma Cline, Random House, 2016, 355 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong. 

My Review:

I was on the fence about reading this one. Would it live up to the hype? But I like to read novels set in the 1960s, (as well as ones written then), even if the author was not born yet when the story took place. So I broke down.

In the summer of 1969, my new husband and I turned our honeymoon into a cross-country road trip, camping our way from Ann Arbor, MI, to the West Coast. It was part homage to Jack Kerouac, part cliche (many midwestern kids our age made the trek west in those years), and part career choice.

Our goal was San Francisco where we intended to join a group of hippies who were starting a Free School in the Mission District. We arrived in the city just after the Manson murders had occurred and found that several of the parents involved in the Free School were junkies! In response to both I freaked out and demanded that we return to Ann Arbor. To this day, I have been afraid to read Helter Skelter. 

Emma Cline has done her research and she can write, though I found her style a little bit pretentious. I felt she tried to be literary and hip at the same time which did not always work for me.

What did work was her main character, Evie. Just out of ninth grade, on the cusp of turning 15, from a broken home, Evie is equal parts bored and horny. I remember that state well. When she meets Suzanne in a park that summer, she is immediately infatuated as only a young teen can be when meeting a slightly older, worldly, and mysterious girl. Eventually she is invited to the fictional hippy cult residence, created by Cline as a stand-in for the infamous Manson conclave.

They called it The Ranch and that whole scene worked for me too because I spent years hanging out with such people. I wasn't quite as wild as Evie but I was just as innocent.

Though Evie was not present when the murders were committed, her life is irrevocably changed. The author does an excellent job contrasting Evie's later adult life with that summer. Many of us were involved with happenings in the late 1960s that virtually poisoned the rest of our lives even while the goals and hopes of the times also blessed us with a unique view of life.

My favorite novel about this period is Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. I don't think The Girls lives up to the greatness Spiotta created in her novel, but it is a worthy addition to the literature. As David Crosby said somewhere, "We were right about the peace and love, but we were wrong about the drugs."

I think I can read Helter Skelter now.

(The Girls is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LETTING GO

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Letting Go, Philip Roth, Random House, 1962, 630 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered "world of feeling" that he finds in books is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes' struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable woman who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with "depth and resonance." 

My Review:

This was the fifth of books published in 1962 I read in August. I had set out to read 10 but a couple were as long as two or three books put together including this one. I enjoyed every page and found it easy to read. Letting Go was Roth's first novel, preceded by Goodbye Columbus (a novella and story collection.)

I know there is a contingent of readers who balk at reading novels by "old white men" and I sort of get it. But the fact is these old white men are still read because they could write well.

In Letting Go we again get a picture of life in 1950s America. This novel is from the perspective of two non-practicing Jewish men in their 20s and 30s who are carrying the weight of their upbringings including the expectations of their parents, and are perhaps the first generation from Jewish immigrant families to be moving into social assimilation in what was a deeply antisemitic society.

Gabe Wallach is a comfortably well off young man, teaching English on the faculty of the University of Chicago, though he has enough money left to him by his mother that he would not really need to work. He feels guilty about his relative good fortune, guilty about not wanting to spend much time with his aging father back in New York City, guilty about being attracted to the wife of his colleague Paul Herz; guilt is his driving force. Because of that, he keeps getting himself into ill-advised situations.

Paul Herz, another tormented character, is a Jew who married a Christian woman, though neither of them are religious in the least. Both sets of their parents cut off all support and connection due to the interfaith marriage. The couple is struggling financially and emotionally so Gabe tries to help them with devastating results.

I was reminded of Stoner by John Williams, especially by Paul's wife Libby, who in her own way is as neurotic as Stoner's wife was. Letting Go however has quite a bit more humor in between the pathos.

My favorite character is Martha Reganhart, the woman Gabe considers as a prospective wife. She is by far the strongest person in the story. While Roth is often charged with misogyny, I would say that he presents believable female characters from the viewpoint of a man who is clearly trying to figure them out.

All in all, one of the best novels I have read from 1962. 

(Letting Go is available in paperback by special order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

IN EVIL HOUR

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In Evil Hour, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harper & Row, originally published in Spain by Premio Literario Esso in 1962, (translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa), 183 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Written just before One Hundred Years of Solitude, this fascinating novel of a Colombian river town possessed by evil points to the author's later flowering and greatness. 

My Review:

Book # 4 of those read from my 1962 list in August. Most of the time I read for pleasure and most of the books I read do give me pleasure. Sometimes I read because of learning goals I have set for myself. That second reason is why I read this one.

The great and wonderful Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novel was not great or wonderful to me. If I hadn't already read and loved One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as Love in the Time of Cholera, this short one might have put me off the author for good. But in the interest of watching a great author develop it was a worthwhile read.

Originally published in Spain in 1962 while the writer was living in Paris, there is some lore associated with it. His first title was Este Pueblo de Mierda (This Town of Shit). He disowned the first version, rewrote it, and garnered a literary prize for La Mala Hora in his native Colombia.

In any case, I had a hard time with it. I could tell it was political in nature, a send-up of various troubles with the government of Colombia and its repressive policies in the 1950s. (In his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, I learned that as a student Garcia Marquez was involved with radical politics.)

I found the story hard to follow even though I have read early novels by Jorge Amado that deal with similar periods in Brazil. Perhaps the difference is that Amado wrote "social realism" while Garcia Marquez preferred "magical realism." After I wrote that last sentence, I thought that possibly in this first novel, Garcia Marquez was trying to do social realism.

He does create some characters that show promise of better things to come, including a number of corrupt individuals. The plot involves attempts by the town mayor to put a stop to those who are posting broadsheets around town revealing the secrets of it inhabitants. There are both humor and intrigue.

Still, I didn't figure out the point of the story until the last few pages. It was a slog despite its short length. One Hundred Years of Solitude came just five years later and I look forward to rereading as it has been 17 years since I first encountered and loved it.

(In Evil Hour is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE CRADLE

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The Cradle, Patrick Somerville, Little Brown and Company, 2009, 200 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Marissa is expecting her first child and fixated on securing the same cradle she was once rocked in for her own baby. But her mother, Caroline, disappeared when Marissa was a teenager, and the treasured cradle mysteriously vanished shortly thereafter. Marissa's husband, Matthew, kindly agrees to try to track down the cradle, which naturally means finding Caroline as well.

In another family, Adam has just joined the Marines and is off to Iraq. His mother, Renee, is terrified of losing him, and furious at both Adam for enlisting and her husband for being so mild-mannered about it all. To further complicate matters, Renee is troubled by the resurfacing of secrets she buried long ago: the memory of her first love, killed in Vietnam, and the son she gave up at birth.

Matt's search for the cradle takes him through the Midwest, and provides an introduction to a host of oddball characters who've been part of Caroline's life in the intervening years. When he finds the cradle, he also finds an unloved little boy, who will one day reunite a family adrift. A lovely debut novel, The Cradle is an astonishingly spare tale of feeling lost in the world, and the simple, momentous acts of love that bring people home.  

My Review:

I loved this short and bittersweet novel. A young man, Matthew, and his wife, Marissa, are expecting their first child. I knew I was going to like Matthew when he thinks that he knows his wife is a little bit crazy but he loves her anyway.

Marissa is the daughter of a mother who took off. Matt is virtually an orphan because his mother gave him up at birth. Something about all this makes it understandable that Marissa asks him to find the cradle in which she slept as a baby and that Matt agrees to try.

Off he goes on a quest for said cradle with only an address for the aunt Marissa doesn't know she has. Her dad, Glen, a guy who hangs out with them and is prone to tearing up, gave that address to Matt. 

The Cradle is a first novel filled with that wonderful innocence a first novel sometimes has. Patrick Somerville shows himself already a master of character and of the odd detail that places the reader right in the location and action of the story.

Most of the characters are quirky, some in humorous ways and some who are clearly insane. Then there is the female children's author who writes poetry on the side and has a near breakdown when her son enlists to go fight in Iraq. She turns out to be Matt's birth mother.

As Matthew continues his search he meets all of Marissa's missing relatives including a half brother she also never knew of. Not one of these people is even remotely normal. Every time he decides he is done and can go home again, he finds another loose end he feels he must tie up. I truly began to worry something awful was going to prevent him from ever making it back to Marissa.

There is however a happy ending, though not without its own sorrows. That is why I call the novel bittersweet.

In my Bookie Babes reading group, we take turns compiling a list of books to be voted on for our next read. On my last turn, I decided to make a list composed of novels set in the hometowns of each member. One of those towns was Milwaukee where The Cradle is set. I discovered it while searching for novels set in Milwaukee, learning that not many are. Otherwise we may have never heard of this gem. Patrick Somerville has three other novels. I will be reading them.

(The Cradle is available in hardcover or paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

GIDEON'S FIRE

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Gideon's Fire, J J Marric (pen name of John Creasy), Harper, 1960, 208 pp

Another of the five books read from my 1962 list in August was this Scotland Yard mystery, winner of the 1962 Edgar Award. J J Marric was a pen name used by John Creasy, who was so prolific that he wrote under 18 different pseudonyms and published over 600 mysteries! Gideon's Fire is the eighth of 22 books in his Gideon Series.

George Gideon is the Commander of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. He has a wife and four children, all of whom he loves dearly and who also feature in the book, but it is his job that he devotes himself to and that defines him. Conscientious, honest, a good leader, but perhaps a bit overly hands-on with the cases.

He arrives at work an unusual 30 minutes late to learn that a terrible fire the previous night had killed an entire family, leaving many other tenants burned and in shock after their whole tenement building was consumed. Adding in the rape/murder of a 14-year-old girl and two other time sensitive investigations, the man has his hands full.

As the story progresses, the fire turns out to be one of many, probably set by a psychotic arsonist. One of the murder cases begins to look like the work of a serial killer. In fact, the plot blows up like a raging fire. By the third chapter the reader is living all the stress right along with Gideon.

Though it is a rather standard police procedural, Gideon's Fire has a couple unusual features. The criminals in each case are included as characters with their own actions and thoughts covered by the same third person narrator. Thus the reader gets the story from both sides, adding even more tension.

In the end the Yard's Criminal Investigation Department prevails but there are deaths and disasters along the way. Gideon feels bad about those, as any good law enforcement professional would. In fact, the author makes you feel bad too as he takes you into Gideon's mind.

Another different feature though is that this man is not cynical, he is not being beaten down by his job or any of his superiors or even by the prevalence of crime in the vast city of London. He knows what the odds are, he knows he is competent, and he stays on top of the game. Refreshing I thought.

(Gideon's Fire is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ALL THE UGLY AND WONDERFUL THINGS

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All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Bryn Greenwood, Thomas Dunne Books, 2016, 352 pp

Summary from Goodreads: As the daughter of a meth dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. Struggling to raise her little brother, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible "adult" around. She finds peace in the starry Midwestern night sky above the fields behind her house. One night everything changes when she witnesses one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold, wreck his motorcycle. What follows is a powerful and shocking love story between two unlikely people that asks tough questions, reminding us of all the ugly and wonderful things that life has to offer. 

My Review: (Originally published at Litbreak.)

 

Wavonna Quinn, known as Wavy, born in the backseat of a car to drug addicted and drug dealing parents, is the heroine of Bryn Greenwood’s third novel. That she fell in love at the age of eight with a man who was twenty and pursued him through years of trial and trouble is the (some would say) inappropriate subject of a novel so full of ugly and wonderful things. The truth is the inappropriate people in Wavy’s life were her parents and while doing the best she could, she found the perfect person for herself.

Besides being a druggy, her mother also suffered from a form of OCD that included a horror of germs. Wavy did not eat, except in solitude where no one could watch her, she could keep a place clean, and due to other traumatic times with mom, she did not talk. The celestial bodies were her company and she knew all the constellations by heart from a young age. Whenever her parents got violent with each other, which happened regularly, she mostly kept her little brother from harm.

The love of her life, Joe Kellen, is no prince charming. He’s been in prison, he is an enforcer for Wavy’s father, meaning he has to do what he has to do when a deal goes off the rails, he is part Native American with no living parents, and he comes riding into Wavy’s life crashing his motorcycle.

If you haven’t heard of the novel yet (that in itself would hardly be believable because it is a hot summer release), I think you are getting the picture. Except you won’t have the essence of it until you read it. Yes, Wavy’s life was trash, yes it is a lot to swallow, but it is in the telling that you see how such a thing could happen and not be ugly but wonderful.

Bryn Greenwood was born and raised in Kansas. There was drug addiction in her family. She is living proof that such a beginning does not rule out making a good life. Her first two novels, published by an indie press, were notice to me that here was a unique kind of novelist. She does not sugar coat anything but moves through her plots and creates her characters with huge amounts of humanity because she looks beneath the surface. Though she has said in interviews that Wavy’s story is not autobiographical, she’s got the credibility and she also can write books that you want to read in one sitting.

Having worked as a bookseller, being a member of several reading groups, and having read thousands of book reviews, I know that people read novels for all different kinds of reasons. Some readers just don’t like anything that would upset them or offend what they think is right or moral. Such a reader would not like this one. But I have one question and would be happy to get feedback on it.

In light of what seems to be a never-ending Presidential election year, with all its vitriol, hatred, conflict, and sensationalism, I have come to realize that the country I thought I was living in is not the country I am living in. I know that democracy is hard to practice but it seems to me that possibly we Americans have been just a tad delusional about our country. If we really are one nation (under God or not), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, wouldn’t it be a good idea to know at least a little about all our citizens? How they live, what they deal with day by day, and who these many varied people are.

For sure drug dealers, child abusers, murderers, and thieves are not admirable citizens. Wavy’s mother and her sister, Wavy’s aunt, came from the same family and circumstances but grew up to live lives that were polar opposites. We don’t actually know how that happens but it does, all the time. Wavy’s intelligence and courage bring her through every terrible thing as also happens perhaps more times than we realize. When Kellen finds Wavy to be a person he can truly protect and love, he still has to go through unthinkable anguish to reconcile what his self worth requires. Even if I hadn’t loved the novel, which I did in a huge way, I think I could have learned some new ways of looking at the problems confronting Americans every day.

Of course, I would never dream of forcing someone to read something they did not want to read. I just wish everyone would read All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.

Bryn Greenwood's earlier novels:

Last Will 

Lie Lay Lain

(All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)