A WORLD OF STRANGERS

A World of Strangers, Nadine Gordimer, Simon & Schuster, 1958, 312 pp

As always, when I begin a story or novel by Nadine Gordimer, I have to reset something in my mind in order to navigate her sentences. They are beautiful sentences but are somehow constructed differently than what I am used to reading in fiction. Someday I will take the time to analyze why and how.

Because no sooner do I make the mental reset, than I am absorbed into her story. In A World of Strangers she has created a compelling main character, Tobias Hood, a man! The exclamation point is meant to show my astonishment at how she could write an entire novel in first person as a man. It works; she nailed the viewpoint completely.

Toby Hood, a young Englishman with already formed strong views about life, is sent to run the Johannesburg office of his uncle's publishing company. Raised by liberal parents post WW II, educated at Oxford, Toby is in complete rebellion against causes and wants nothing to do with the abstractions of racial issues or politics. He enjoys living the privileged life.

Johannesburg in the 1950s is a hotbed of racial issues and related politics, so A World of Strangers is a story about the awakening of political consciousness. However, compared to Doris Lessing's Martha, this awakening happens to Toby because of his interactions with people, not because of his exposure to ideas. That is what makes the novel come alive, what made me keep working through thoses sentences and wanting to find out how it would turn out for Toby.


(A World of Strangers is currently out of print. You can find it in libraries or get it from a used book seller.

FLY TRAP

Fly Trap, Frances Hardinge, HarperCollins Publishers, 2011, 584 pp


THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

While reading Fly Trap, I was struck by how fantasy, in all its many forms and for any given age group, just might be the most fun one can have as a reader. Who can ever forget their first reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Children of the Amulet? Portals to other worlds, strange creatures, and odd twists of time are such lovely flights of imagination in which not everything has to make sense. Always there is the delicious thrill of evil lurking, and always a hero or heroine equal to overcoming that evil.

So while Fly Trap is intended for readers age 11-13, I would recommend it to any reader who is still willing to be transported into another world. Mosca Mye is a fabulous heroine, equal to Harry Potter or Philip Pullman's Lyra Belaqua, and yet is uniquely herself. "Drips fell from the tip of a pointed nose. Beneath a drooping bonnet with a frayed brim, hair spiked and straggled like a tempest-tossed blackbird's nest. An olive green dress two sizes too big was hitched at the waist and daubed knee-high in thick yellow mud. And behind the clinging strands of damp hair, two large black eyes glistened like coal and gave the marketplace a look that spoke of coal's grit, griminess, and hidden fire." That is Mosca - orphan, scrapper, nearly always hungry and cold, careening through life righting wrongs and dreaming of warmth, food and a soft bed.

Her animal companion is an equally hungry goose, Saracen, who also acts as bodyguard. Her human companion and partner in crime is the poet and grifter Eponymous Clent, a man with a quick wit and a horror of a day's work, who is usually talking his way out of the latest disaster he created. The three arrive in Toll hoping to make their way to warmer, more prosperous lands for the winter. Naturally Toll is not what it seems, and they are instantly entangled in both their own deep troubles as well as the twisted circumstances of the town. It is the role of Eponymous to come up with plans, which Mosca carries out despite any amount of hardship and danger.

Toll is a town that serves as the sole gateway from one area to another; it is as two sided as a coin, with daytime and nighttime set simultaneously in the same streets, markets and alleys, though never can the two meet or interact. In this world, a person's place and name is determined by his or her hour of birth. Every house has a patron saint, a little god called a Beloved, and Mosca's Beloved is Palpitattle - He Who Keeps Flies Out of Jams and Butter Churns - explaining Mosca's name, which means housefly. In this town, all are subject to their names and Beloveds, except the Locksmiths who play day against night in an effort to control everything.

In a story of non-stop action and incident, Frances Hardinge magically manages to fill in the back-story from the first volume in the series, Fly By Night, and explain the religion of the Beloveds, the politics of Toll, and the dastardly goal of the evil Locksmiths. Her description of how Toll-by-Day becomes Toll-by-Night rivals the writing of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville. Possibly because I am an adult, I got weary of reading what started to seem an endless tale and thought Hardinge could have left off about 100 pages without harm. However, I remember being of a reading age where the longer the book the better, so I doubt that younger readers would have the same problem.

No matter your age, I highly recommend Fly Trap to those who like the fantasy genre. It would make a great read for a middle-school book group as well.


(Fly Trap is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR

Where the Air is Clear, Carlos Fuentes, Ivan Obolensky Inc, 1960, 378 pp

So I have entered the world of Fuentes, with his first novel, published in Mexico in 1958. It was a treacherous portal for me. In the first few pages I saw that I needed some background in Mexican history. Thanks to the internet, that was easy and helped me tie together the paltry loose ends I knew about Mexico. I should also point out that Mexican PR in Los Angeles is terrible, so I had to overcome some prejudices to get into Fuentes's head.

Ixca Cienfuegos, a character in the book, is our omniscient third person narrator (when he isn't a first person narrator) who also, according to some, represents the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli, come back to avenge himself and Mexico's indigenous peoples on the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors. Confusing? Oh yes.

Otherwise, there is not much of a plot. The book is more of a commentary on Mexican government and society in the mid 1950s, comprised of vignettes and various intertwined accounts of the lives of the characters. Where the Air is Clear has been compared to Dos Passos's USA Trilogy, which I have not read. But the method of the story telling reminded me a bit of James Michener. (I like James Michener by the way.)

Finally, Fuentes is bemoaning the usual state of affairs after a revolution, where the rebels become the new status quo, creating a new bourgeoisie made up of the nouveau riche. I did learn more about Mexico than I knew before. I think I could grow to like Carlos Fuentes, but I am not there yet.


(Where the Air is Clear is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

STONE ARABIA

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta, Scribner, 2011, 235 pp

Dana Spiotta's third novel hit me so hard and deeply that I haven't been able to write about it for weeks. I won't rehash the plot because you can find that in numerous places on the Web. Briefly, it is a story about a musician and his younger sister in Los Angeles.

What it is really about is the life of a creative individual who was never recognized by the music industry or by pop culture. I would guess that such a fate is usual for a huge percentage of creative persons. Most of us take it more or less in stride, "move on" as they say, find other ways to make a living, sometimes do our creative thing as a hobby. Nik and his sister Denise never moved on.

I was surprised and delighted by Spiotta's previous novel, Eat the Document. In fact I think it was better written than Stone Arabia. But it was about revolutionary politics and its fallout in terms of the personal lives of those involved. I have never participated in anything remotely political, I don't like politics and don't think anyone can achieve positive societal change through it.

I do love music; have been a professional musician and songwriter. I do think that art, music, and literature can effect societal change. In fact, all I have ever truly desired to do in life is play music, read books and try to write both. I have had close to zero success with any of that.

Nik chose to retreat from life, hole up in a cabin in Topanga Canyon, work as a bartender and keep creating. He had about five fans, his sister Denise being number one.

What is success? How much does one person owe another? How true is memory? Is the life we see on television, in the news, more interesting, more impacting than our own little lives? What is creativity for? Big questions in a little book that reminds me, now that I think of it, of the early novels of Carolyn See (mother of Lisa See.) Spiotta says her inspiration as a writer comes from Don DeLillo.

I found Nik, Denise, Denise's daughter Ada, so annoying at times. Only after finishing the novel did I realize that I was supposed to be annoyed. This author gets under your skin and makes you look again at your cherished beliefs in new lights. It is an uncomfortable experience.

For me, she made it all right to feel really sad and discouraged about not having come even close to the dreams I had when I was young. Nik just refused to accept that fact. Whether Spiotta meant for it to happen or not, I ended up seeing him as some kind of tarnished hero.


(Stone Arabia is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SUNDIAL

The Sundial, Shirley Jackson, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958, 245 pp

Shirley Jackson was a writer unlike any other. The Sundial was not my favorite book of hers and yet it has all the qualities that are uniquely hers: suspense, psychological insight, humor and irony.

The Hallorans live in a manor house, outside the local village. Grandfather Halloran, a self-made millionaire, built the house and surrounded the estate completely by a wall. "The first Mr Halloran...was a man who, in the astonishment of finding himself extremely wealthy, could think of nothing better to do with his money that set up his own world."

As the story opens, Richard, son of the first Mr Halloran, is head of the house, though he is an invalid suffering from dementia and confined to a wheelchair. Lionel, Richard's son, has been buried that day, having suffered a fatal tumble down the stairs. Richard's current wife, suspected within the family of having pushed the hapless Lionel down the stairs, is clearly in charge.

But Aunt Fanny, Richard's sister, has had a vision: the world is going to end with her father, the first but dead Mr Halloran, promising to protect the family so that they will be the only survivors and will build a new world.

I found all of this less than exciting as I read the first fifty pages. But soon enough, Shirley Jackson put into motion the conflicting interests, the creepy details and the irony until I was intrigued. Oddly enough, through there is a final twist of the plot in the end, it was not the denouement that made the story. It was the characters.

This is an author who has an almost mystical ability to delve into the psychological quirks of people, whether they be her own children, as in Raising Demons, or the disturbed heroine of The Bird's Nest.


(I found The Sundial at one of my local libraries. It does not appear to be easily found on-line. Possibly used bookstores. Anyone have an tips on how to find this book for purchase?)

THE FOLK KEEPER

The Folk Keeper, Franny Billingsley, Simon & Schuster, 1999, 162 pp


THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Corin is the Folk Keeper. He keeps the Folk at bay, invisible angry creatures who sour the milk, make the hens stop laying, ruin the crops. Through the Folk Door, into the caverns, via the cellar, Corin brings the food offerings and spends hours in the dark, keeping the Folk Record.

But Corin is really Corinna, an orphan who has learned to protect herself from drudgery and humiliation. Now she is being fetched by a wealthy family from Cliffsend in the Northern Isles. Some mysterious past has come to claim her.

The tale continues as Corin learns the ways of the extra fierce and wild Folk of the Isles. He becomes a friend of Finian, a boy who prefers boats to running an estate. Danger from Sir Edward, the frustrated heir, forces Corin to learn who and what she really is.

I loved the folk tale atmosphere that Billingsley creates. This is the kind of story, like Island of the Blue Dolphins, that pits a strong young girl against hardship. As Corinna comes of age, her fierceness is tempered by her discoveries about her true nature. The author investigates that odd territory many girls must pass through when we might rather have been a boy and must come to terms with the restrictions of our gender. She does it well with the lightest sensitivity.

The Folk Keeper is also a love story told in the most tasteful yet realistic way, making it completely appropriate for middle school readers. I have not found a book quite like this in a long while.


(The Folk Keeper is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TURN OF MIND

Turn of Mind, Alice LaPlante, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011, 305 pp

Though Turn of Mind revolves around a murder mystery, the real mystery being investigated is what goes on in the mind of someone suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Jennifer White was a successful orthopedic surgeon forced to retire in her fifties due to dementia. When the novel opens she is 64 years old and somewhere in the middle stages of the disease. Amanda, her neighbor three doors down and her best friend for decades, has been found dead. Four fingers were surgically removed from the right hand of the dead body but other than that, virtually no forensic evidence can be found, making Jennifer the prime person of interest in the case.

Certainly a unique premise for a murder investigation. How do police investigators get reliable information from a woman who does not recognize her own children some days? If Jennifer had committed the murder, would she even remember doing so? The novel is compulsively readable.

As the shared history of Jennifer and Amanda is revealed, it becomes clear that despite their professional accomplishments, these two women lived in a fraught state of moral ambiguity, playing out many years of crime and punishment. Jennifer was a better surgeon than she was a mother. Amanda was an unyielding and strict schoolteacher with no children of her own. Both were married to eccentric men and the couples knew more about each other than might be strictly healthy.

Anyone who has cared for or lost a loved one who was in the throes of Alzheimer's will recognize the day to day states Jennifer exhibits, the techniques used to halt the memory loss, the medications used and the effects of steady deterioration on friends, relatives and caregivers. In fact, the main appeal of Turn of Mind could be its purported inside view of Jennifer's mind, precisely because no one actually knows what an Alzheimer's patient is thinking, perceiving, or experiencing except by observing the person's actions and responses.

Improbably, the novel is written primarily in the first person voice of Jennifer, alternating between her journal entries and the thoughts in her mind as she thinks them. Alice LePlante, who herself cared for a parent afflicted with Alzheimer's, imagined her way into the mental workings of dementia.

One of the notable features of family members interacting with an Alzheimer's victim is the way they will discuss what they think might be going on with that person's mental and emotional state. What a relief then to read exactly what Jennifer is thinking, feeling, and perceiving as she disrobes in the middle of a grocery store or attempts to ascertain what her son and daughter are trying to tell her.

Some of the most poignant scenes are those where Jennifer recalls incidents from her early life: her mother's death, her daughter's birth, falling in love with her husband.

Whether any of it is true or believable, author LaPlante has the literary chops to carry if off. She makes the reader truly care about Jennifer. She gets you on her side. In the end, when the mystery is solved, you are relieved at the outcome, for Jennifer's sake.

Nearly all the pre-publication reviews from both critics and readers were deliriously positive. A few have mentioned that the murder mystery itself leaves something to be desired. But the mystery of the mind has surely been solved. No one mentions that Alzheimer's has no known cause or cure. I wonder what Jennifer would think about that.


(Turn of Mind is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA

The Suffrage of Elvira, V S Naipaul, Alfred A Knopf, 1958, 179 pp

Naipaul's second novel again takes place in Trinidad. It is a spoof on democracy and elections in a developing country.

Mr Surujpat Harbans is running for General Assembly as representative for the village of Elvira. Of course he doesn't live there but lives in the city. He is financing his own campaign and visits Elvira to line up his supporters. The villagers, in just four years of democracy, have figured out how to make money for themselves by offering various services to the candidate.

This makes for a hilarious story as Harbans is fleeced for everything from posters to a loudspeaking van and a final cavalcade of taxis on election eve. Then there are the niceties of the Hindu vote, the Muslim vote, the Negro vote and the Spanish vote, not to mention various necessary bribes. One of the funniest lines comes from a less wealthy candidate who proclaims that there ought to be a law about how much a candidate can spend on his own election campaign. This story is set in 1950!

Apparently Naipaul's humor turns to a more bitter cynicism in his later novels, which I have not read. So far, in The Mystic Masseur and in this one, he provides great entertainment and an inside look at the various peoples who make up post colonial life in Trinidad.


(The Suffrage of Elvira is out of print. It can be found in libraries and from used book sellers.)

UNTOLD STORY

Untold Story, Monica Ali, Scribner, 2011, 259 pp

What if Diana, Princess of Wales, had not died, but instead had staged her death and escaped into anonymity? This is the premise of Monica Ali's new novel. The manner in which she creates the tale demonstrates her versatility, being the author who also gave us an inside look at Bangladeshi immigrants in Brick Lane and at the life of a top London chef with In the Kitchen.

The Princess, aided by her private secretary, takes on a new identity in Kensington, a small American Midwestern town, posing as a divorcee in hiding from an abusive husband. Lydia, as she calls herself, comes across as sweet but a bit dull, beautiful but low on self-esteem. She has managed to surround herself with female friends who don't pry.

Her boyfriend, Carson, wants to know more than she can reveal, so though he helps to keep her company, he also causes her continuous mental and emotional turmoil. When John Grabowski, British photojournalist on sabbatical to write a book, washes up at the Kensington bed-and-breakfast, the tension mounts.

Despite plastic surgery and darkened hair, the paparazzo who had photographed Diana intensely during the crazy years before her "death" recognizes the former princess by her eyes. It would be the scoop of his life, but he (and the reader) find out what this woman is really made of. The final chapters read like a thriller, with the exception that thrillers often have predictable, formulaic endings. The denouement of Untold Story is satisfyingly unpredictable and perplexing.

When released in the United Kingdom on March 31 of this year, the novel was the most reviewed book throughout the following week, stirring up intense controversy amongst British critics. Did Monica Ali desert her multicultural vision and stoop to trashy commercialism just in time for the Royal Wedding? Or did she rescue Princess Diana from her tabloid identity and conjure up a reverse fairy tale that explores the cost of our celebrity culture and the price paid by non-conforming women?

I go with the latter opinion. Lydia, her female friends, the boyfriend and Grabowski are certainly familiar types found in our everyday world. In other hands, the fate of a beautiful and world famous woman leaving it all behind, including her sons, could have been no better than chick lit with a twist. But Untold Story goes deeper. Even the most avid Diana fanatic would have to ask herself if she would really want to be a princess in the 21st century.


(Untold Story is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LUCKIEST GIRL

The Luckiest Girl, Beverly Cleary, HarperCollins, 1958, 297 pp


The Sunday Family Read

This was my top favorite novel when I was a teenager. I don't even remember how many times I read it; at least once a year and every year it meant something different to me as I went through boy friends and heart breaks. I can still recall my mental picture of the pink raincoat with the velvet collar. I don't think my library copy had the dust jacket as illustrated above.

I identified so completely with Shelley being bored with her boyfriend, feeling misunderstood by her mother, making plans to reinvent herself when the new school year began.

Most of all, I envied her for the chance to spend an entire school year away from home in California! I probably first read The Luckiest Girl when I was twelve or thirteen. By the time "California Dreamin" came out in 1965, I had already been dreaming about living in California for years. It took several more decades but now I do!

Reading the book again now, I was amazed by how truly Beverly Cleary captured what it was like to be a teenager at that time. It was the end of an era. The straight (meaning no drugs), good (meaning no sex) teen girl was already a thing of the past by the time my youngest sister entered high school.

I think many teen girls are boy crazy, even today, but man, it was an obsession in the early sixties, because it was the only outlet for mischief most suburban, well brought up girls had. I never even drank alcohol until I went to college. Of course, by then it was the mid-sixties, everything changed and we all just went wild.

Would teens today like The Luckiest Girl? It might seem as old fashioned as Pride and Prejudice. But I am going to see if one of my granddaughters will read it. I will tell them, "This is what it was like to be a teenage girl when I was growing up." They will most likely roll their eyes.


(The Luckiest Girl is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ROBINSON

Robinson, Muriel Spark, J B Lippincott Company, 1958, 186 pp

What is it about the 1950s and novels about wrecks on deserted islands? In Muriel Spark's second novel, three survivors of a plane crash find themselves on a tiny island in the south Atlantic. Robinson is an eccentric hermit who owns the island, named after himself, and lives there with an adopted young boy. Once a year, a boat stops there and the crew harvests the pomegranates.

By adding the three characters from the plane crash, one of them a woman, Spark has just enough people to set up tension, an apparent murder and a look at various approaches to religion and life, as well as a bit of romance.

It is all done in such a way that little resembles any other novel I have read. Quirky, close to brilliant, this short book kept me riveted to the story and left me satisfied at the end.


(Robinson is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ANTHILL

Anthill, E O Wilson, W W Norton & Company, 2010, 378 pp

The Buddha introduced a major change in religion by teaching a way of living called The Middle Path. In order to understand a problem, he taught, a person should start without bias, investigate from various angles, analyze the findings, understand the truth, find a reasonable conclusion, and then act. It sounds rather scientific as well as philosophical.

E O Wilson, naturalist, Harvard professor, author of Pulitzer Prize winning scientific books, has written a novel that celebrates the Middle Path.

His hero, Raff Cody, is one of those Harry Potter types, or if you will, an old fashioned hero, who has an upright soul, believes in honor and goodness, but is brave and has enough intelligence to solve big dangerous problems. In other words, he is not a victim, not given to extremes, but will give all he has got to whatever is his highest passion.

Raff Cody's highest passion is an area of fairly virgin land near his home in Alabama, where he spent hours as a boy, exploring and observing the natural world. He dedicates his life to keeping that tract free of harmful development that would endanger its ecological balance and its many species of plants, insects and animals.

Wilson attracted some fairly snarky reviews last year from "literary" critics who just had to complain about his novelist failings. But both Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver (two of my top favorite novelists) were enchanted and impressed. That was enough to make me curious. I was also a child who watched ants.

Anthill is a perfectly fine novel. On the matters of love for the natural world and the creation of a truly heroic main character, it excels. If you don't care about ants, you can skim or even skip a long section called "The Ant Chronicles," but let me tell you, ants live a more exciting life than a few people I know. At least the females do.

Have you read The Iliad? I have. It was mostly boring with a few highlights, in my estimation. Margaret Atwood called Anthill an "Iliad of the ants." It is mostly highlights with a few boring parts. And perhaps most significant, E O Wilson demonstrates an approach to the whole eco question that exemplifies the Middle Path. A gentle shower of sensible thought to cool the fires of extreme opposition.


(Antill is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM

A Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing, Simon & Schuster Inc, 1958, 272 pp

This is the third volume in Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence" series. I believe these novels are considered highly autobiographical and are meant to show a young woman trying to find herself as she moves out of her middle-class South African/English upbringing.

The first novel in the series, Martha Quest, shows her breaking away from the family to go live and work in the city. At the end of that one, Martha impulsively marries the first man who asks her. In the second, A Proper Marriage, Martha has a baby, struggles with expectations for her as a wife and mother, and by the end has left her husband and daughter to throw herself into left wing politics.

A Ripple from the Storm opens with a communist party meeting and in fact most of the book is taken up with meetings, squabbles, and party activities, all of which I found not very interesting. That may be because of all the other books I have read from the 1950s about people becoming disillusioned with communism.

My interest in A Ripple from the Storm was engaged whenever the story focused on Martha and other women in the story. Each one is moving through their individual ideas about self as they balance relationships with activism while continually running into male patriarchal attitudes. The question or problem of finding love with a man is an old one for women these days but many of Doris Lessing's observations on the subject remain pertinent and she has a unique viewpoint. She digs deeply into the lack of self that women must always deal with when trying to assert themselves as thinking, active members of the human race.

This volume ends with Martha in a quandary between two convictions: "One, it was inevitable that everything should have happened in exactly the way it had happened: no one could have behaved differently. Two, that everything that had happened was unreal, grotesque, and irrelevant." She feels overwhelmed with futility and falls asleep.

Clearly Doris Lessing did not give in to futility. She won the Nobel prize in 2007 and is still writing novels. So I look forward to what happens next.


(A Ripple from the Storm is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS

The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Ballantine Books, 2011, 308 pp

I loved this first novel by a writer who is also a foster mom. (It will not be released until August 23, though it can be pre-ordered now. I read it as part of a reader panel on BookBrowse.) It is possible that I was seduced by the strong message of hope in the story, but cynic that I have become in my late middle age, I do still wish the best for people and this world we live in.

Victoria has lived all her life in the foster care system of San Francisco, CA. Abandoned at birth, she became filled with rage and distrust early on. She managed to sabotage every placement, including the one with a foster mother she had come to love. When she finally aged out of the system at 18, she was left completely alone to fend for herself.

I picked this book for its title and predicted a romantic summer read. Instead I got a disturbing portrait of what abandonment and state sponsored care can do to a child. The hook in the book is the flowers and the hope of recovery from a horrid life.

Well, I was a flower child in the 1960s and even lived in San Francisco for a time. We thought we could stop hate, bombs, oppression, any of society's ills with love. We thought we could turn bombs into flowers. My mom, against whom I rebelled for years and years, who was a somewhat abandoned child herself, was also a gardener who could make anything grow. Our yard, from my earliest memories, was always a fantasy of flowers. How ironic the way things just come around as one grows older and has more experience with life.

For me, this was a perfect read after all. I did also get the romance aspect I expected through the improbably lucky breaks that came Victoria's way and through the introduction to the long history of using flowers to communicate meaning and emotion. Victoria uses them for a broad spectrum of emotion as she continues to squander the opportunities that fate sends her, but she does find redemption and a chance to give and receive love in the end. All because of flowers and her skill with them.

I would call this book a romance of the fierce survivor.


(The Language of Flowers is available in hardcover by pre-order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PLAYBACK

Playback, Raymond Chandler, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958, 166 pp

This was Raymond Chandler's last novel, so now I have read them all. Back in 2002 when I read The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, it was a whole new genre for me. I was thrilled to be reading about Los Angeles in the 1940s, chilled by the cynicism of Marlowe, and titillated to learn about the seamier side of my adopted city where the degraded, the insane and the rich make their connections.

Now that I have also read Denise Hamilton, Sara Paretsky, not to mention James M Cain, I can see where Chandler fits. I also recognize that Paretsky's V I Warshawski is a female Philip Marlowe. It has all been most enjoyable and the hard-boiled Marlowe with his soft center, looking for justice and true love, is like a modern day Robin Hood, in it for the diversion, not the money, while retaining the right to view mankind as a hopeless case.

Playback opens with Marlowe off on a wild goose chase, knowing no more than the reader why he is following a lush redhead from Grand Central Station to the California coast, except that he could make a few hundred bucks. Soon he is falling for her, protecting her from unknown sources of danger and getting hit over the head.

This novel was not one of his best. My favorites were Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye. But in each book Marlowe changes or develops as a person in intricate ways, just like a real human being does. Aside from the setting, plots and dialogue for which he is known, I think what sets Chandler above many others is the character, Philip Marlowe, who brings that humanity to the genre and thus raised the bar for writers who have succeeded him.

The final twist in Marlowe's psyche, which does not occur until about the last three pages, was just right.


(Playback is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

DOC

Doc, Mary Doria Russell, Random House, 2011, 389 pp

This book was so great. Even though I had to put it down in the middle and read something else for a review deadline, I picked it back up and was instantly back into the story. It was like when I see one of my favorite people and though we may not have spoken for a long time, it is as though we had just been together.

That is the wonder of authors like Russell. She tells her stories with so much life in the characters, so much emotional investment and such startling, real details that I am allowed into the worlds she creates as a welcome friend.

Doc is historical fiction about the American West. Doc Holliday, compatriot of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson (all of whom became legends after the shoot out at the OK Corral), is mostly known in the context of that legend. Mary Doria Russell wrote her book to get behind the legend and find the real man.

He was quite a guy. Born with a cleft palate but lucky enough to have an uncle who was one of the first surgeons able to correct that defect, he survived childhood and the Civil War thanks to his devoted mother and a male cousin who guarded John Henry Holliday from ridicule and taught him about the world.

Holliday was an accomplished classical pianist, had an eidetic memory for poetry, read Greek and Latin. But as a teen he contracted tuberculosis, the disease that killed his dear mother. The Civil War had destroyed the way of life he had been born into. At the age of 22, he left Georgia, already trained as a dentist, and landed in Dodge City, Kansas, with the volatile Hungarian whore Kate, and began to make his living in that wild town as a gambler.

Romantic, adventurous, tragic and full of heart and humor, Doc belongs in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, Wallace Stegner, even Louis L'Amour. It is one of my favorite reads of the summer so far.


(Doc is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

OUR MAN IN HAVANA

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene, The Viking Press, 1958, 220 pp

Graham Greene is such a good writer. Even in this book, clearly one of his "entertainments," where he starts out so much in the tone of a spoof, he just does not waste words. Within a few pages while Mr Wormold is being recruited for an English spy, in Havana, (profession: unsuccessful vacuum cleaner salesman); in those few pages the reader has the physical description and make-up of three or four major characters, the setting in Havana and the unsettled feeling that Mr Wormold is heading for trouble.

Then, once he has us convinced that we are reading a silly, possibly improbable story, Greene opens up those very characters as living, breathing persons with concerns of the heart and unrealized professional goals.

And so it goes. Will Mr Wormold get caught out for his outrageous schemes? Is Dr Hasselbacher a friend or a foe? Is Wormold's daughter Milly as much of an airhead as she seems? Most of all, are the secret services of any given country truly as inept and gullible as they are portrayed?

Entertainment indeed, but so much more. When I finished, I could not think of any writer as good as Graham Greene.


(Our Man in Havana is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, Crown, 2010, 328 pp

If it were not for one of my reading groups, I doubt I would have ever gotten around to reading this wildly interesting book. Had I known how much scientific info was included, I still might have passed. I like knowledge but I have some kind of block on scientific study. Rebecca Skloot has been an award winning science writer but also has an MFA in creative nonfiction. She can make science plain, understandable, even exciting.

I had never heard of hela cells before. Now I know that they are human cells used in all kinds of medical and genetic research. These cells have grown or reproduced for over 60 years from a slice of the cervical tumor found in a young black woman, Henrietta Lacks, in 1951 at Johns Hopkins hospital.

OK, that is enough on the facts, because the book is a riveting story of a family descended from slaves and their unwitting and controversial intersection with modern medicine. Along with the telling of the story comes the adventure of getting the information. Rebecca Skloot is an unrelenting, sensitive and brave young woman.

The relationships she formed with Henrietta Lacks's offspring will surprise and enlighten you as well as break your heart.

Great reading. A pageturner of nonfiction. Best of all, a look at racial issues in modern day America as deep and meaningful as a Susan Straight novel.


(The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TODAY KEEP THE WISDOM REACHED 8000 PAGEVIEWS!

WOW & THANK YOU!!

Today the stat counter on my blog tells me that there have been 8000 page views in the history of Keep The Wisdom. I realize that this is no where near viral, but it is still a good high number. I started the blog to share what I find in my reading. I haven't used any gimmicks or marketing tricks because deep down I don't really believe in that stuff. I am happy that enough people are interested in what I have to say to visit the blog.

The largest number of visitors are from the United States but I now have readers from all over the world. That is so exciting to me! In just the past month I have had people from the United Kingdom, Germany, Romania, Canada, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine and Iran.

Thank you to all; the faithful readers, the occasional visitor, even the one time curious person, even the ones who come by mistake looking for something else. I feel strongly that sharing ideas and knowledge is the key to a more peaceful, vibrant and happy life for the inhabitants of Earth. I find much wisdom in fiction. It is a last bastion of freedom of speech because the author can always claim that his writing is just imagination. When anyone starts trying to police imagination we are in real trouble.

The only thing I wish is that more readers would leave comments. Without the comments, sharing my ideas feels one sided. So if you wouldn't mind taking the time, please say hello or give an opinion on one of my reviews. You certainly don't have to agree with me. If you have trouble with the comments function, you can go to the profile page and send me an email.

Thanks again. I will let you know when we reach 9000.

Love,
Judy

NIP THE BUDS, SHOOT THE KIDS

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Kenzaburo Oe, Grove Press (English translation), 1985, (Kodansha Internation, 1958, Japanese publication), 189 pp

Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. This is his first novel, published when he was 23. It is based on his experiences as a child growing up on a remote Japanese island during World War II. When I read the book last November, I was going through a period of reading about WWII from the Japanese point of view, for which I was glad. It opened my eyes and mind, helping me to shake off some of my high school history teachings.

The kids in this story are from a reform school and have been transported to a small village set in a mountainous region. It is winter, they are cold, not well fed, and routinely roughed up. Because there have been a couple instances of plague in the village, the villagers evacuate and disappear, leaving the boys trapped there with no hope of escape. One boy is determined to find a way out.

Surprisingly, to a certain degree, the boys rise up out of their feral state and begin to come together as a community, though at first they are dismayed and directionless without orders from adults. Sadly, in the end they are doomed. The main character, the one who tried to find an escape, is the only one who just barely benefited from his brief brush with freedom.

It is a harrowing story on a level with Lord of the Flies and J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun. The writing is excellent and I liked the book.


(Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is sometimes available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time. If it is out of stock it can be ordered for you.)

THE ASTRAL

The Astral, Kate Christensen, Doubleday, 2011, 320 pp

In my review of Christensen's previous book, Trouble, I said that I hoped The Astral would be better. And it was!

Harry Quirk, mid-list poet, Brooklyn dweller, father of two grown children, and rejected husband of Luz, introduces himself: "I was hungry and in need of a bath and a drink. At my back thronged the dark ghosts of Greenpoint, feeding silently off the underwater lake of spilled oil that lay under it all, the polyfluorocarbons from the industrial warehouses. I had named this place the End of the World years ago, when it was even more polluted, hopeless wasteland, but it still fit."

After some thirty years of apartment life in the Astral, a huge redbrick fortress complete with brownstone arches, three-sided bay windows and corner towers, Harry and Luz have imploded as a married couple. Luz is the overbearing, pious, yet adoring mother Harry lost as a child. Harry stands in for the ne'er-do-well father who deserted Luz's family when she was eleven. They have raised a daughter who is a lesbian, freegan Dumpster diver and a son who emerged from his teen years of drug taking and social ineptitude to join a fundamentalist Christian cult.

It was not the plethora of modern issues that insinuated The Astral into my mind and heart. It was the characters and the familiar heartbreaking story of two people who have built a life out of propping each other up, a veritable fortress of a marriage, only to have its fatal structural faults bring it crashing into ruin.

Harry has a best friend, Marion, a photographer. They met as young artists newly arrived in New York City and enjoy a deep understanding, similar to what Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe had, but have never engaged in sexual intimacy. Luz, having always been jealous of their easy camaraderie, decided they were lovers after reading Harry's latest cycle of sonnets. She threw his laptop out the window and Harry out of her life. She will not be reasoned with despite Harry's attempts to explain the truth.

Kate Christensen's insights into the psyche of a middle-aged banished husband are astonishing. As in her earlier novels, she brings the world of artists alive and creates a sense of place with the ease of a master chef preparing a gourmet meal. In Harry Quirk however, she has surpassed herself as a writer, giving glimpses of love, sex and friendship from a mid-fifty year old male perspective that feel as true as anything written by Philip Roth or John Updike.

Perhaps in this age of longer lifespans, the coming of age novel needs to be balanced with the coming of maturity story. Christensen's affair of the human heart includes friendship, sexuality, parenthood and even religion. Harry, an atheist since his Catholic mother's death, investigates the true believer yearnings of his son and in this author's hands, even the cult phenomenon gets a sensitive treatment.

Over the period of less than a year, we watch Harry come to a tenuous understanding of himself, his wife, and his children as he just begins to look at the future. Along the way, my own life came into clearer view. That is what good fiction does.


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

NINE COACHES WAITING

Nine Coaches Waiting, Mary Stewart, William Morrow & Company, 1958, 342 pp

This was so much better than her previous book, Thunder on the Right. I was happy about that because the previous book seemed very amateur to me.

Linda Martin, raised in an orphanage in England, gets hired as a governess to a young French boy. She goes to live at Chateau Valmy, near Lake Geneva on the French side. She finds familial intrigue, a villain and love.

So it is still a romance/mystery like the last book but the writing, the suspense, the characterization are all so much more well done. It is not quite Daphne du Maurier but the potential is there. Now I am looking forward to the next one.


(Nine Coaches Waiting is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TROUBLE

Trouble, Kate Christensen, Doubleday, 2009, 311 pp

I read this because Kate Christensen has been on my list to check out for quite some time and because I was going to review her newest book, The Astral.

I was underwhelmed at first, feeling like I was reading Anita Shreve, whom I liked when I read her early books but lost interest in after a while. The story in Trouble is about female friendship, a subject usually found in very light "women's" fiction. But the writing was smooth and pulled me along. Josie, a New York City psychotherapist, decides to leave her husband, so she goes to Mexico to hang out with her best friend from college.

The friend is an aged-out rock star, a recovering addict, a woman who once had it all in terms of fame but specializes in bad ideas. They spend their days sightseeing in Mexico City, eating and (starting during the afternoon) drinking way too much into the early morning hours. They spend time with local artists. Josie begins a hot flirtation with one of the painters, intending to catch up on all the sex she wasn't getting from her husband.

Christensen's writing (the characters, the scenes in Mexico, except please-she even does a bullfight), the way she sneaks in a sense of impending doom, are what save the novel. Then the doom arrives, after which Josie goes back to New York. The trouble is, she hasn't changed much. She had her adventure in Mexico, she got her own apartment, she has a better relationship with her teenage daughter, but she is still a self-centered psychotherapist in Manhattan.

I am hoping The Astral is better.


(Trouble is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MOUNTOLIVE

Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell, Dutton & Co, 1958, 318 pp

Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is like a kaleidoscope, always refracting his characters and story in each succeeding book. In Mountolive, the third volume, the sense of political intrigue that began in Balthazar takes on an even deeper character. Mountolive is a young British diplomat in training when he meets Leila, who takes him as a lover on the advice of her crippled husband.

As we know already from Justine, Leila is mother to Nessim, Justine's husband. Now we learn that both women take lovers for political reasons. By the mid 1950s, it becomes clear that oil, Jews and Israel are involved in the story. Suddenly it all makes sense, because the main story of Great Britain after WWII was the nation's struggle to hang on to an empire that was in fact over.

But what a brilliant twist Durrell has achieved; taking what appeared to be a love story steeped in the mysterious city of Alexandria and turning it into a post Commonwealth critique of the underlying intentions of nations, leaders, diplomats, fanatics and businessmen. He reveals all of it like a Pandora's Box.

I read this book in late winter, 2011 during the days of the uproar in Egypt. It felt like I was reading exactly the right book.


(Mountolive is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

COMPOSED: A MEMOIR

Composed: A Memoir, Roseanne Cash, Viking, 2010, 241 pp

Roseanne Cash has a voice all her own. I have been a fan of her songs beginning with her 1993 album, The Wheel. I never listened to her early commercially successful stuff which was mostly Nashville influenced country music. In her memoir I learned that it took her until 1990 to find her true writing voice as a songwriter. Sure enough, that is when her commercial appeal faded away, but also when she began garnering huge critical recognition.

I think she is a better songwriter than prose writer. I enjoyed learning about her life but the way she tells it is subdued emotionally and a little too disjointed, even for a memoir. But having been a songwriter myself that makes sense to me. In a song, you must distill a story and its emotion into very few words: a few verses and a chorus. Even a short story has thousands more words than a song, so it is the opposite creative flow. You expand a story and its emotion into lots of words. It is hard to make the switch and not many songwriters have done so successfully.

Along with other readers, I wanted to know more about her marriage and break up with Rodney Crowell. She is quite reticent about all that. I felt enlightened by her accounts of the relationship between her and her father Johnny Cash. She might have shared too much about her physical woes.

The last chapters are mostly about sickness and death, so the mood was somber. Despite her successes, her struggles, her ultimate happiness with John Leventhal, I couldn't help thinking that she has had an almost life. But then, maybe most of us have almost lives that don't measure up to the dreams we once had.

Bummer. But I still listen to all her later albums.


(Composed will be released in paperback on July 26, 2011. It is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN

Methuselah's Children, Robert A Heinlein, Gnome Press, 1958, 276 pp

Heinlein returns to writing for adults here with the expansion of a story originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941.

The Howard Families are descended from a man who got rich during the California Gold Rush and left his money to be used for research into the prolongation of life. This goal was realized by his trustees providing financial encouragement to the grandchildren of long-lived persons to marry and have children. By the 22nd century, descendants have a life expectancy of 150 years, but their existence is a secret from the rest of society.

Great plot set up, because of course when they decide to reveal their secret all hell breaks loose and the Families must escape Earth in search of other galaxies and a new planet. The remainder of the story concerns their adventures in space and the events surrounding their attempts to live on two different planets. Heinlein covers contact with alien races, mad scientists, beleaguered administrators, telepathic mutants and questions of time in deep space.

I liked the men who wore kilts (yes, really) and the many hairs breath escape scenes. I thought of Greg Bear's Darwin's Children and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Now we also have Embassytown by Mieville. All of these later books riff on some of the key elements in Methuselah's Children. Also detectable were ideas that will show up in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), which answers the question I had in my review of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Best of all was renegade hero Lazarus Long.


(Methuselah's Children is out of print. I found my copy at The Bestseller Bookstore, a used bookstore in Burbank CA with a huge sci fi section.)

KRAKEN

Kraken, China Mieville, Del Rey, 2010, 509 pp

I finished Kraken over two weeks ago and had to return it to the library before I had a chance to write about it. Now I have to dig my thoughts out from beneath the several books I have read since then.

Although I have become a raving fan of China Mieville and will read the rest of his earlier books as well as anything he writes in the future, Kraken did not move me as much as either The City & the City or Embassytown. It was too something: too long, too drawn out and disjointed. It was also an insane story about the capture of a preserved giant squid that was the god of a religion.

As usual in Mieville, there is a reluctant hero and plenty of good ideas. My favorite character was the female cop, whose name I now do not remember. I also like the little god who could only exist in statues, including gargoyles and Star Wars plastic dolls.

I think you'd have to be a dedicated Mieville reader to get through Kraken. At least that is how I got to the end. The end is quite good and I was worried about that.

Go ahead. Hit me with your comments, disagreements or whatever.


(Kraken is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir, The World Publishing Company, 1959 translation, Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1958, 360 pp

I looked forward to this first volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography with much anticipation, but had no idea how wonderful it would be. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter covers the first twenty-three years of her life beginning with her earliest childhood memories. I loved the way she explained the early tantrums that came over her whenever adults attempted to block her efforts to act in an independent, self-realized fashion. Apparently she was born with the sense that she was an individual who mattered and had the right to follow her own ideas.

Her upbringing was bourgeois Catholic, though her family was by no means wealthy. She went to Catholic schools, was trained and guarded as a young girl by a devout, socially conservative mother, yet stimulated by her father's love of the theater. Although she was kept close to home and inculcated with fears about bodily functions, passion, men and sex, Simone had always a brilliant inquiring intellect. She read and studied incessantly all throughout grade school, high school and college, entering the Sorbonne as one of the few female philosophy candidates. Every drive she had was sublimated into mental activity. She was almost twenty before she went out on her own to bars, plays, movies, at which point she went a bit wild but never experienced more than a kiss from a male.

As she relates her female friendships, her infatuation with her cousin Jacques, her quest to understand life through philosophy, I was enthralled by the combined emotional, spiritual and intellectual fervor which imbued every minute of her coming of age. The loss of her Catholic faith and her attempts to understand her own mind, passions and aspirations were as exciting to me as her tortured relationship with her best friend Zaza.

I doubt that I will ever reach the intellectual heights of this amazing woman, but I have always dreamed of doing so. As I mentioned in my review of The Second Sex, it blows my mind that Simone de Beauvoir was of my own mother's generation yet our mothers were so much alike. It is almost true that she went through my life a generation earlier in another country, in Paris of all places. I am lucky that she always kept a journal and could write so movingly about her life.


(Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE TIGER'S WIFE

The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht, Random House, 2011, 338 pp

After much pondering, I have decided I need to read this book again someday. There was so much hype about the novel, the author, her youth, her background, on and on. I may have gone into it expecting something I did not find.

What I did find was beautiful writing. Let's do the page 99 test and take the first couple sentences: "You lose sunlight, and suddenly you are driving through a low cloud bank that is unfurling across the road in front of you. It is anchored to the pines and the rocks above you, to the sprawling pastures that open up below, dotted with ramshackle houses, with doorless inns, distant nameless streams." Nice.

I also found a main character who speaks usually in first person but sometimes in second. She is a medical doctor who believes in modern science but whose surroundings in postwar Yugoslavia are steeped in superstition and wild tales. The tales include a semi-feral tiger, once a zoo animal, who takes a human wife. But this woman is oddly unemotional while telling an emotional story so bottomless that you wonder how people survive life at all.

I liked the writing and the stories. I had trouble with the form which I found unwieldy and hard to follow. If you have read many of my reviews, you know that for me to say a book is hard to follow is really saying something.

The Tiger's Wife needs to be read slowly, in a savoring mood, with the full understanding that, despite having lived in the United States since she was twelve years old and despite having studied creative writing in American universities, Tea Obreht is an Eastern European writer. In a series of reviews and interviews I read at the blog 3 Guys 1 Book, I was enlightened by the comparison of The Tiger's Wife to novels by Orhan Pamuk, Naguib Mahfouz, and Nikos Kazantzakis. So there you have it. I tried to read The Tiger's Wife as a hot first novel by a young American woman. It is not that. When I read it again, I will know what I am getting into.

I can tell you this. About two years ago I read The Cellist of Sarajevo by Canadian author Steven Galloway. It was the only novel I had read about the Bosnian War and it was not bad. In fact, it was horrifying and moving. Still, it was a story told through the lens of a North American writer. The Tiger's Wife comes from a young woman who was born in the midst of that war, whose life and family were disrupted in ways I can hardly imagine, and who is bringing us news of her homeland along with the folk tales of its people.

To me that is worth more than a million newspaper articles, or nightly newscasts, or NPR commentaries. Even if The Tiger's Wife had been a bad novel, which it certainly is not, it was a necessary read for me.


(The Tiger's Wife is available on the new fiction shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LOST TRAVELER

The Lost Traveler, Sanora Babb, Reynal & Company, 1958

Before I began my Big Fat Reading Project, I was doing my Tree Grows in Brooklyn Project: trying to read all the fiction books in the library by working through the authors alphabetically. Which is how I happened to read The Lost Traveler. That was in 1994 and here is what I wrote in my reading log about the book:

Les Tannehil is a professional gambler with a wife and two kids. This is not a good combination and it finally explodes in family violence with Les on the run from the law. The writing is good, not as dreary as Joyce Carol Oates but almost. One daughter, Robin, comes to understandings about life, love and people. The rest are lost in the shuffle.

Since the book was published in 1958, it later made its way onto my reading lists. Today I looked up the author Sanora Babb and wow! She was raised in the Dust Bowl area and her first novel got bumped just before publication because John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath suddenly achieved best seller levels. Her publisher did not think the reading public would buy two books on the same subject!

Here is a great link to the story of Babb's life, which was more varied, exciting and difficult than any novel. Also I read somewhere else that Robin, the female character in The Lost Traveler, was noted as having more strength and free will than was usual in 1958 fiction. Cool.


(The Lost Traveler is out of print but available through used book sellers and sometimes found in libraries.)