HENRY AND THE CLUBHOUSE

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Henry and the Clubhouse, Beverly Cleary, Dell/Yearling, 1962, 192 pp

 

 

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

 

 

As part of My Big Fat Reading Project, I am reading my way through Beverly Cleary's books. The Henry series are for young readers aged 8-12.

 

Good old Henry, the youngest paper boy in town, decides to build a clubhouse in his backyard, along with his friends Robert and Murph. But Murph doesn't like girls so he insists it be a "Boys Only" clubhouse.

Henry as usual is juggling multiple problems: One of his good friends is Beezus, who is a girl. He has to keep his paper route going while also working on building the clubhouse. The paper route includes collecting from customers and he is trying to get up the guts to sign up new customers.

Then there is Ramona, the troublesome younger sister of Beezus. She begins following Henry around on his route. Then one day she locks him in the clubhouse and won't let him out until her tells her the secret password. He has to get out so he can do his route that day.

Henry's number one worry is that he wants his father to be proud of him. He bungles his way through and comes out a winner all around.

What I liked best about this one is the way it shows how much kids worry. Harry Potter is a top worrier in children's fiction but here Henry takes second place as the world's most worried boy.

(Henry and the Clubhouse is on the shelves in paperback at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

DECEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

The joys and overeating of being in so many reading groups:

 Five extra Christmas/Hanukka parties.

Voting on our favorite book of the year.

Secret White Elephant book exchanges where you get books no one wants to read.

Eating, drinking, and celebrating the reading life.

Here are the books my groups are reading in December. (One of these days I will get this post done at the beginning of the month. Ha Ha.)

New Book Club:

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Tiny Book Club:

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Tina's Group:

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Bookie Babes:

Party Only!!

One Book At A Time:

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And not one sappy holiday book in the bunch. Well, Art of Racing in the Rain has the potential for sappiness but is not a holiday story. I will let you know.

What are your reading groups doing this month?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!! 

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

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The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, Simon and Schuster, 1962, 568 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

 

My Review: I have read eight books by Doris Lessing, mostly in order of publication. Each one has had an impact on me. The Grass Is Singing, her first novel, is still my favorite but all the others remain important to my reading life and to me as a woman.

 

One of the things I admire is her utter disregard for the critics. She has never pandered to them or to the Western white male dominated literary establishment, possibly not even to her readers. It is an entire travesty that she had to wait until she was 88 years old to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But as she said at the time, "Oh Christ. It's been going on now for 30 years, I can't get more excited." This was after she had won almost every other prize!

 

That down-to-earth lack of vanity has got to be what makes her books so meaningful to me. She was a woman, born in the same year as my mother, possessed of a brilliant mind and a high level of courage. All of that comes through in her writing.

 

The Golden Notebook is a tough read. I don't recommend it lightly. The structure is odd but does serve to illustrate how a woman who wishes to be independent of men, who is creative, who is raising a child by herself, and who at the same time loves men, sex, being in love and being loved, has to compartment her very psyche in order to handle it all. I found that truthful.

 

Anna's four notebooks are where she records these fragments of herself. Only four, I thought? I must be a basket case because I have many more notebooks than that. Her golden notebook is a symbol of the successful integration of her disparate selves.

 

The copy I read, procured from the library, is big and heavy. I've had a crick in my neck ever since I finished it. It also has a new introduction, written by the author in 1971, nine years after the novel's original publication. In this introduction she refutes the reviewers, friendly and hostile, in their belittling claim that the book is about the sex war. Nor did she intend for it to be a "trumpet for Women's Liberation."

 

Her main intent was to present the broad range of women's thoughts and emotions and experiences. Also she worked with the theme of a breakdown being a way of self-healing and rearranging false dichotomies. She admits that "here (the writing) is rougher, more close to experience...more valuable perhaps because it is rawer material."

 

Anna's breakdown is made so visceral, so disturbing, and yet it was so understandable, at least for me. I would say that Doris Lessing was about 40 years ahead of her time in writing to expose the female psyche.

 

Due to my upbringing, or possibly my horoscope, who knows, I have been a woman dedicated to "keeping it together" in front of others. I have had the idea that unlovely emotions and breakdowns were something to be ashamed of and should be hidden. Reading this novel was healing for me because, though I will probably still keep it together in front of most people, I no longer feel ashamed of my emotions or breakdowns. 

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

 

BOOKS READ IN NOVEMBER

November went by in a blink. I also lost a week making our Thanksgiving journey. I read a few long books and there you go. The stats are low.

Stats: 7 books read. 4 by women. 1 translated. 1 children's book. 1 speculative.

Favorites: Kafka on the Shore, The Golden Notebook, and The Gap of Time. I did not have a least favorite so that is one good stat!

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How did your November reading go?

KAFKA ON THE SHORE

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Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, Alfred A Knopf, 2005, 467 pp, (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, published in Japan 2002)

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

 

 

My Review:  I am no longer a Murakami virgin. He has had his way with me, it was painless, and I am more than satisfied while being left wanting more. 

 

I had mistakenly thought it would be a challenging read. Instead it was smooth and moved along like a bullet train. Though the novel is set in 21st century Japan, somehow having read The Makioka Sisters just a couple weeks earlier, I felt oriented in the country. Also the story opens with an incident that happened during WWII so at first it almost felt like I was reading a sequel.

 

I loved the David Mitchell-style way that the story jumped back and forth in time and slowly revealed the connections between the characters.

 

I loved the ghost story atmosphere, the references to music and literature both Japanese and American, but most of all I loved the characters, even the insane artist dad.

 

Kafka himself is one of the greatest characters I have come across in all my years of reading. Just to prove that he is an evolved human male, Murakami also created several awesome and believable female characters. He takes the motherless boy trope to new heights.

 

And yes, it is a metaphysical, magical realism, philosophical novel at the same time.

 

Since all I can do is gush, I will end here. 

 

 

(Kafka on the Shore is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

I will be off the blog for the rest of this week. We are taking a road trip to visit with family. I plan to eat and drink and eat and drink and so on. The next generation is doing all the work. There will be lots of talking and laughing and playing of music. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers and followers. Keep The Wisdom is ten years old this year! It is hard to fathom that I have been at this for a decade. If you get bored, you can read my blog on your device while you digest. This is post #1294 and most of them are about books.

If you go back far enough you will even find some early rough drafts of chapters for my memoir, another parallel project begun a decade ago. It has turned into a version of the Myth of Sisyphus as I read the books described in My Big Fat Reading Project because I keep finding more books to put on the lists as well as more memories and thoughts to incorporate into the memoir. Who knows if I will ever finish it, but the journey so far has been amazing.

 

My prayers go out to all the refugees, the orphans, the homeless, the poor, and the hungry. No single one of us can feed the world or stop the wars. But I do have faith in the power of literature to shine the lights of knowledge and wisdom even into the darkest of places.

KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST

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Kitchens of the Great Midwest, J Ryan Stradal, Viking, 2015, 310 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: When Lars Thorvald’s wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine—and a dashing sommelier—he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He’s determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter—starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredient represents one part of Eva’s journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast that’s a testament to her spirit and resilience.

 

  

My Review: This book arrived in my mailbox in advanced reader proof form. One of the perks of being a book reviewer is that publishers sometimes send me books without my requesting them. All of my family on my mother's side either live in Michigan or were born there. I lived there for over 20 years. We all cook or are otherwise involved in the food business. We consider ourselves Midwesterners.

 

So I was intrigued by the title though somewhat put off by the cover. The book summary did not excite me: a woman "finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota." Not my kind of book, I thought.

 

Many months later I listened to the OtherPeople podcast interview with the author and something clicked. Then one of my reading groups picked it and so I read it. It turned out to be my kind of book: Fractured families, an absolutely unique heroine named Eva, laugh-out-loud snarky commentary about all things foodie and, while he could have gone that way, no heartwarming ending.

 

Eva lost both her parents early. Her mother got a taste, literally, of wine in the life of a sommelier, and realized she was not cut out for motherhood. She vanished without a trace. Eva's father was a consummate chef and wanted to feed his newborn pureed pork shoulder. Alas, she was still on the bottle when he met his end.

 

The baby was raised by her aunt and uncle in near poverty but she was super smart and clearly had the food gene. In fact, after an almost fatal fling with hot peppers in middle school and despite her clueless though loving stepparents, she goes on to become an amazing chef herself.

 

J Ryan Stradal began his career writing for TV. You can see that in the quick flashes of scenes going by, the hyper awareness of modern culture, and a pitch perfect command of snark. But he is from Minnesota himself and probably at heart a half-grown Midwestern boy. His characters come leaping off the page as he finds the goodness inside almost every one of them. He is a master of voice and nuance.

 

The story flies by so it wasn't until about halfway that I realized I was only seeing Eva through the eyes of the characters who intersect with her life, making for an unusual but quite effective structure that is cinematic in style. The novel would make a great movie.

 

Though Eva suffers, she always prevails. And isn't that the dream of any human being? To grapple with all the hurts and misfortunes but to emerge as the superhero of one's own life. 

 

In summary, a delightful real-life fantasy. 

THE WINTER'S TALE

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The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare, early 1600s, read in The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. Play is 38 pp.

 

 

Summary from Goodreads:

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the "lost" daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione.

My Review:

My reading friends know me as a Shakespeare hater. When I've had a drink or two I can come across that way. In reality I am a Shakespeare wimp. Reading his plays are just too much work. But I was planning to read and professionally review The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson's retelling of The Winter's Tale. Her novel is the first in a series of retellings of Shakespeare plays planned by the Hogarth Press.

So I hunkered down on Halloween weekend with my friend's Riverside Shakespeare and one of those plot summaries you can find on the internet and I made my way through, footnotes and all. I have read that this is considered one of his "lesser" plays. I liked it, but what do I know?

The theme is jealousy, specifically male jealousy. King Leontes observes his best friend King Polixenes being overly nice to Leontes's pregnant wife and spirals down into insane and violent jealousy. Everyone is harmed: the friend, the wife, the young son and heir, and the newborn baby.

The rest of the play trails through a complicated maze of secrets, mistaken identities, comedy, and madness. It's a mess and ends with some things made right though the damage cannot be undone. Jealousy + Power = Bad.

I was made to read Othello and maybe a couple others in high school and college. All I remember is "the quality of mercy is not strained" and "to be or not to be." As an adult I have read A Midsummer Night's Dream and liked it. The Tempest was also not bad.

I know the Bard has influenced literature as much as, if not more than, the Bible and folk tales. Having read The Winter's Tale surely did enrich my enjoyment of The Gap of Time which I finished last night.

Have I made a breakthrough as a reader? Have I grown up enough? Do you read Shakespeare?

(The Winter's Tale is available in many paperback editions with summaries and footnotes by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE CHRYSALIDS

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The Chrysalids, John Wyndham, Michael Joseph Publishers, 1955, 200 pp

 

 

I like this cover better: 

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.

 

 

My review:

One more by John Wyndham. Then I am moving on. 

 

This one is radically different in a few ways. Though set in the future after what appears to have been a nuclear disaster, called "The Tribulation," the tone is more elegiac than in his earlier books and Wyndham is addressing a different set of issues.

 

The hero, David Strorm, is coming of age in a strictly religious community. His father is one of those fundamentalist types that creep me out more than any other variety of human. They live by the Bible and any plant, animal, or human showing a genetic abnormality is ruthlessly obliterated or shunned.

 

David's abnormality is invisible. He is a telepath and by that skill? gift? fatal flaw? communicates nonverbally with several others. The build up is slow but inexorable until David and his fellow telepaths make a break for freedom. At that point the story takes on an extreme adventure tone as the characters travel through woods and wastelands pursued by a posse that includes David's father.

 

It was quite the relevant read in these days of mega attention on "differences," those who want them accepted and those who consider them abnormalities.

 

Of course, the rogue characters are the most interesting. David's much younger sister Petra is an extremely strong telepath who has little control over her ability at age eight and inadvertently causes major troubles. She reminded me of Ramona in the Beverly Cleary books. In the end, she plays a large role in saving the others, a bit like super tech savvy kids these days who some say are leading mankind to a singularity.

 

Petra makes contact with an advanced female being who is from Zealand, where people have obviously recovered from "Tribulation" and rebuilt a civilization. This character put me in mind of some of Anne McCaffrey's best galactic heroines.

 

It is a thought provoking and complex story. Wyndham made a big leap with it and I look forward to reading the rest of his books...someday.  

 

 

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

THE KRAKEN WAKES

The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham, Ballantine Books, 1953, 288pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: It started with fireballs raining down from the sky and crashing into the oceans deeps. Then ships began sinking mysteriously and later sea tanks emerged from the deeps to claim people . . . For journalists Mike and Phyllis Watson, what at first appears to be a curiosity becomes a global calamity. Helpless, they watch as humanity struggles to survive now that water one of the compounds upon which life depends is turned against them. Finally, sea levels begin their inexorable rise . . . The Kraken Wakes is a brilliant novel of how humankind responds to the threat of its own extinction and, ultimately, asks what we are prepared to do in order to survive.

 

 

My review:

I had never heard of John Wyndham until I read Jo Walton's Among Others (a book I loved in deep inexplicable ways.) The teen protagonist in that book joins a sci fi reading group at her local library and Wyndham's The Chrysalids was one of the books discussed.

 

I have since learned that Wyndham single-handedly redefined science fiction by not writing about "the adventures of galactic gangsters" but instead about stuff that could happen on earth if we kept going the way we were going. He called this "logical fantasy" but today it is called speculative fiction. He influenced Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale and The Maddaddam Trilogy.

  

His first book, The Day of the Triffids featured an attempted takeover by monstrous carnivorous plants, his speculation on genetic engineering. The Kraken Wakes involves an invasion of aliens, visible only as dots of bright red lights coming in from space and going directly to the deeps of the oceans. They begin sinking ships, capturing people from shoreline towns, and melting the polar icecaps. 

 

Mike and his wife Phyllis, favored journalists for the English Broadcasting Company, follow the story for years. Professor Alastair Bocker, a visionary scientist, after much ridicule, finally develops a way to obliterate the alien monsters without destroying the planet.

 

The writing is intelligently humorous and moves at a typically British sedate pace but you can't hold a gripping tale down. It is a leisurely page turner, if you can imagine.

 

Relevance for today: How earth might deal with rising sea levels. The way governments and business influence the press to keep the real magnitude of disasters from the public.

 

Connections with other books I've read: 

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson where I first learned about the Deeps.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch in which a kid finds a possible almost extinct Giant Squid on the shores of the Olympic peninsula. He was a Rachel Carson fanboy who read The Sea Around Us over and over.

The Deep Range by Arthur C Clarke, about whale farming and the sea monsters who threaten it.

Kracken by China Mieville; the weirdest story ever about a Kraken. 

 

 

(The Kraken Wakes is a bit hard to find in print. I got my copy from the library: a John Wyndham omnibus.) 

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS

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The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki, Alfred A Knopf Inc, 1957, 530 pp (translated from the Japanese by Edward G Seidensticker)

Summary from Goodreads: In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity.

Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances. Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonist, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature.

My review:

I came across this book in the fourth edition of The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature by Clifton Fadiman. I bought that book several years ago as an aid to my autodidactic quest to become well read, a quest that eventually morphed into My Big Fat Reading Project. Reading The Makioka Sisters now dovetailed nicely into my current quest to read modern translated literature.

There are four sisters whose parents passed away when only two of them had married, leaving those sisters to take care of getting husbands for the younger two. When the story opens it is the mid 1930s and for upper class families marriages had to be arranged using a go-between. All sorts of ritual surrounded this procedure including the "rule" that daughters had to be married by order of age.

The third sister is shy to the point of barely being able to speak in front of a man. She is a hard sell to prospective husbands and her family is picky. Throughout the book, which spans several years, the search for this one's husband drives the plot.

Japan is already involved in their war with China and WWII begins in Europe. The family is not as well off as they used to be and the youngest sister is a wild non-conformist who could care less for tradition. She always has a man she is ready to marry and her tarnished reputation adds to the difficulties in finding a husband for her older sister.

So the drama of the marriage plot along with encroaching Western ideas gives the novel its tension. It is also a study in the inner lives of the women and their relationships as sisters. During incidents of meetings with prospective husbands, disagreements between the two older sisters, a terrible flood, illnesses, and the youngest girl's exploits, the author paints a vivid picture of Japanese society in transition. 

I found it easy to read and got involved with all the women even though it is such a long book. In the end I decided it is the Japanese version of Pride and Prejudice.

 

BOOKS READ IN OCTOBER

October was another adventurous and excellent reading month for me.

Stats: 11 books read. 6 by women. 3 speculative fiction. 2 translated. AND 1 play by Shakespeare no less. 

Favorites: I loved them all in different ways though reading Shakespeare is always a challenge for me.

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Reviews to come on the last four books.

What good books did you read in October?

THE HUNDRED YEAR HOUSE

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The Hundred Year House, Rebecca Makkai, Viking Penguin, 2014, 335 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.

The Hundred-Year House unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.

 

My review:

The more I read, the more I see that there are infinite ways to tell a story. Why shouldn't it be so? I like the variety and that only gets broader as I read more translated books and more novels written by women.

 

I first heard of Rebecca Makkai when she published her first novel, The Borrower, in 2011, a book about libraries, librarians, and a geeky kid who reads compulsively. All the negative stupid reader reviews I read only made me want to read it, but alas it has languished on my huge TBR list. Now I will! Because:

 

The Hundred Year House was so good! The eponymous house has been in the hands of one family for a century. During the Depression it was rented out to an artist's colony. That was all I needed to know. Favorite sub-genre of mine: Artist Colony/Utopian Community fiction.

 

The story is told (brilliantly in my opinion) by moving backward. It starts in 1999, on the eve of Y2K, with an unstable couple. Zee, a Marxist scholar and professor, and her husband Doug, out of work in the academic world and way overdue on publishing the book that could save his career. Reading Part One, you realize that both of these people are hapless in their own unique ways but Zee is also a bit whacked. Of course, it turns out she has good reason to be.

 

Part One is half of the book, written in a contemporary style appropriate to hapless 21st century characters and maybe it did go on a bit too long and did have me scratching my head. It was entertaining in a John Irving kind of way but not that impressive. However, though I am a slacker in many areas of life, I am not one as a reader. I read on.

 

Man, was I rewarded. It makes you realize the truth behind cutting weird people some slack because you don't always know what they have been through before you met them. 

 

In Parts Two and Three we learn what Zee has been through, why her mother is so very odd, how a portrait of an ancestor in the house makes bad things happen and is suspected to contain a ghost, but most of all what it means to a group of artists to create a community and how far they will go to preserve it.

 

In my usual, mostly unsuccessful practice to get my reading group members to read outside their own boxes, I pitched this, got it read by one of these groups, and was shamed by how much vitriol they exuded-toward the book, not me. (It is a thing in reading groups. You never blame the person who suggested the book, maybe because she is sitting right there and it is easier to pick on the poor absent author.)

 

Most of the people in this group are lawyers. I think The Hundred Year House is meant for artists and those who love artists. Or at least for people who don't need everything in life and in books to be wrapped up in neat packages with no rough edges, no "inexplanities," all mysteries solved and culprits punished.

 

 

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

NOVEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

Now begins two months of eating! Oh boy. But best of all, in So Cal, now begins the months of cooler temps and possible rain. The best reading days of all!

And I will start that season out with a bang because all the November reading groups are bunched into the first three weeks due to Thanksgiving. Here we go!

The Tiny Book Group:

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I have already read this and discussed it last month at Laura's Group. But The Tiny Book Club is a Nina Revoyr fan group plus we are meeting at The Trails Cafe in Griffith Park for our discussion!

 

Laura's Group:

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Really looking forward to this one because most of my Thanksgivings as an adult took place in the Midwest with my family of super cooks!

 

Molly's Group:

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I am a Murakami virgin. And it's a LONG book. I wonder how I will do. And yes, I joined another reading group.

 

 

Once Upon A Time Adult Reading Group:

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Not sure I want to read this. Sounds a bit too heartwarming. But it is translated from the Swedish, so maybe.

 

 

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Really!

 

 

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I have also already read this one but that is a good thing. I have a lot to get through this month and it is a great discussion book.

 

What are your reading groups discussing this month? Do you go to actual live meetings or discuss on-line? Any recommendations for good reading group titles?

 

 

APOCALYPSE BABY

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Apocalypse Baby, Virginie Despentes, The Feminist Press, 2015, 336 pp (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds, orig pub 2010 in France by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle)

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Valentine, the troubled daughter of a well-off but dysfunctional Parisian family, vanishes on her way to school. Inexperienced private detective Lucie Toledo is hired to find the missing teenager, and enlists the help of a formidable agent with a past, known to her friends as the Hyena. Their quest, from Paris to Barcelona and back, uncovers a rich cast of characters whose paths have crossed Valentine's, leading to an alarming climax. Part political thriller, part road-movie, part romance, the latest novel by subversive writer and film-maker Virginie Despentes won the Prix Renaudot 2010 for the pitiless gaze it directs at society in the age of the internet.

 

My review:

For several years I've been following a couple blogs that deal solely in translated literature: Three Percent and The Complete Review. This year I set myself a challenge to read more novels translated from other languages by writers that live in other countries than the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia. How have I done so far?

 

Counting up I found that out of 92 books read this year, eight were originally written and published in another language. That is almost 9%, so not too bad.

 

Of those eight books, three had already become hot sellers in America: From Italy Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop, written in German but set in France. Three are classics written and translated long ago: Independent People by Haldor Laxness from Iceland, Dead Souls from Russia by Nikolai Gogol, and The Marioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki from Japan. I also read Yannik Grannet's The Goddess of Small Victories, written in French but set in Vienna and America because it is about the wife of Kurt Godel.

 

Reading those books has been a good experience though what I really want is more books being written and set in the 21st century so I can get a grasp of what life is like now in countries I have not traveled to. Apocalypse Baby fit the bill.

 

It was written in French and set in Paris and Barcelona in about 2008 or 2009. Though I have been to Paris two times in my life, I only had the tourist experience. The two female private investigators searching for a missing teenage girl are beyond streetwise and operate far outside the tourist milieu.

 

Valentine, the missing teen, is from a somewhat privileged family but her mother Vanessa is of North African Arab descent, being the one sister who clawed her way out of the ghetto to marry a French novelist. After Vanessa deserted the novelist and her daughter, Valentine grew up to be a full participant in the naughtiest of youth culture pastimes. 

 

One of the investigators is Lucie, over 30, a bit of a non-motivated loser who tends to do the least work possible. The other is a force of nature called The Hyena, a feminist lesbian with a secret agent for hire past which has pretty much caught up with her. 

 

As they troll through Parisian youth culture and the Arab slums of Barcelona, the book presents a view of these cities not seen in tourist brochures or even on the news. Valentine is one of the more depraved teens I've found in a novel: groupie, slut, fearless narcissist. But as the reader is dragged through this miasma of lust and violence, an even more deadly political scene rears its head and leads to an almost unbelievable climax.

 

I found Apocalypse Baby an exciting read full of complex characters, wise commentary on current topics, humor, and nail biting suspense. For me, it painted a gritty picture of 21st century life in two European cities. I realized that any modern country has its own unique mix of situations made up of economic, ethnic, and other cultural factors.

 

Possibly the book should come with a warning sticker although the cover illustration may act as its own warning. I recommended it to one of my reading groups and it was just too much for two of the ladies. Virginie Despentes is an award-winning author and filmmaker in France. She has written nine novels, only three of which have been translated into English.

 

One more thing: I found this book through Three Percent's 2015 World Cup of World Literature. I am working my way through the list. 

SOME LUCK & EARLY WARNING

This is going to be a dual review covering the first two volumes of Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years Trilogy. I read the first volume in August and the second one about two weeks ago. Just to be clear, Jane Smiley is one of my favorite authors and though I have not read every one of her novels, I have never been disappointed with any I have read.

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Some Luck, Jane Smiley, Alfred A Knopf, 2014, 395 pp

The first of the trilogy centers around an American farming family from Iowa beginning in 1920. The trilogy will span a century. This one ends in 1952. Each chapter covers a year and includes incidents in the family and in the country from that year.

The writing is super smooth and I grew to be totally invested in every single character. Obviously covering an entire year in fairly short chapters necessitated quite a distilling of history and that is part of the brilliance of the books. Early in this volume she portrays the early life of the first children in the Langdon family from their young viewpoints, reminding me of the way she imagined the horses' inner lives in Horse Heaven.

 

The story begins just after WWI in the year after my mother was born, the year my father was born. It moves on through the prosperous 20s, the crash of 1929, the Depression, the drought that caused the Dust Bowl, WWII, the rise of communism, the beginnings of the Red Scare, the mechanization of farming and the change to growing mostly corn, and the Korean War.

 

Due to My Big Fat Reading Project, I am familiar with these historical periods much better than I was when I finished my formal education. Smiley does an excellent job of showing how each period affected farmers in the Midwest. It could have been history light but is instead a tour de force concerning the development of farming, the diaspora of offspring from a farming family, and the life of women in that 33 year progression.

One of my favorite characters was Rosanna, the mother, who personifies how quickly the hard life of a farm wife in those years aged women. The whole book has a wonderful tone of family connection amidst hardship and rapidly changing times.

 

In an earlier decade or if Jane Smiley was a man, this novel would have been a Pulitzer Prize contender. It was long-listed for the National Book Award. 

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Early Warning, Jane Smiley, Alfred A Knopf, 2015, 476 pp

 

 

 

Now we come to volume two. This one follows the offspring of the Langdon family while the lives of many of the original parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents end. From 1953 to 1986, it covers the years I was growing up and beginning my adult life. All but one of the children of Walter and Rosanna scatter all about the United States, finding their roles in life, marrying, having their own families, and navigating their own joys and tragedies.

Again she weaves in the social and political turbulence, illustrated in the effects these changes have on the families, year by year. The book is never dull, often exciting, and frequently sad, as she gathers and intertwines all the threads. Her evidence shows how unique the United States of America is and how family ties are also bonds which will inevitably be broken to a degree as people grow up. It also shows how one's family, if one was lucky enough to have a fairly intact one in those days, could ground and anchor a person's life.

Smiley touches on several truths: that childhood and the teen years are the most fun, how adulthood is mostly the grueling hard work of accepting or trying to avoid responsibility, and how old age basically sucks. Or maybe that is how I read it because that is how I see it at this point in my life.

By the end of Early Warning I got the sense of what a saga the trilogy is. If you have ever perused Jane Smiley's book about writing, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, you will know, just by the reading list she covers, that she may have read more sagas than any working novelist today. A true saga does not moralize and this one does not. These are not sentimental, heartwarming books, but rather stories full of tragedy, humor, and a bit of philosophy.

And now I am fortunate because #3, Golden Age, had been released. I can finish the saga before the year ends!

(Both Some Luck and Early Warning are available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FIRST BAD MAN

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Summary:

From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny--so Miranda July--readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee--the selfish, cruel blond bombshell--who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.

My Review:

The book summary is correct. The story is tender and gripping, it is slyly hilarious but also ridiculous at times. The sexual fantasies are over-the-top raging though probably better than 50 Shades of Grey, which I have not read; will not read. The maternal love is fierce and was my favorite aspect of the story.

I actually enjoyed reading all of it though I can't think of anyone I know to whom I could recommend it. Possibly if Anne Tyler were putting out her first novel in 2015, she could have gone this way.

Margaret Atwood recently said in an interview that these are not the times to write realistic fiction (paraphrase) and explained in another interview that she meant stories about middle class life, family stories about love and relationships. Miranda July appears to have a similar viewpoint.

Most of the people in my extended family are fairly regular. So are the members of my reading groups. The people in this novel are quite whacked and far from regular. They have the usual human wants and dreams with an inability to get them.

But there are ever widening fissures in the lives of these regular people I know and the standard human pattern (if there ever were such a thing) is undergoing cataclysmic change, so I think reading these books like Miranda July's, being written by GenXers, GenYers, and Millennials, are perhaps the best way to get a glimpse of what is going on. Speculative fiction is the new realistic novel!

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

FATES AND FURIES

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Note: Due to requests from a few followers, I am resuming reviews of the books I read. Thanks for caring and especially for letting me know you do!

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff, Riverhead Books, 2015, 390 pp

Description from Indiebound:

From the award-winning, "New York Times "bestselling author of "The Monsters of Templeton" and "Arcadia," an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception.
"Fates and Furies" is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation.
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.

 

My review:

There is truly not more I can ask of an author than the power of her story to engross me completely. Despite a few times when I could not comprehend why Lauren Groff did what she did in structuring this novel, I knew I was in the grip of the truths and weirdness that make up any long term relationship.

 

In the first section, "Fates," which by the end I realized was from Lotto's point of view, the story of how he came to be the person he was kept me riveted except for the endless round of parties during the early years of their marriage. But even though reading about those parties became tedious, I later saw how she used them to build many of the main characters giving the reader a developing picture of who they really were and who they were pretending to be.

Then in the second part, "Furies," when we learn who Mathilde really is, the formative events of her past come to light. You may wonder how a woman can keep so many secrets from a man she truly loves, but looking back on my own marriage it seems to me that any woman is compelled to secrecy, to certain lies and misdirections, to all of the pulling of strings behind the scenes. It is the way we find agency in what is still a man's world.

There were times in Mathilde's section when I had to suspend my disbelief in order to assimilate incidents. During the many times shifts I sometimes felt lost and adrift. But Groff never forgets her reader. In fact, she gave me courage to own up to my own rage and sorrow and mistakes.

This is a book about marriage but ultimately it covers many things: creativity, secrets, effects of early loss and abuse on later life, but best of all the absolute rage of a woman. Even in a happy marriage, the role of wife is no bed of roses.

Mathilde is a mighty character worthy of Shakespeare. The novel reminded me of others I have been deeply moved by: Joyce Carol Oates novels, Hild by Nicola Griffith, The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and all of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante.

(Fates and Furies is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

MY LIFE IN BOOKS

A fellow blogger (Jessica Bookworm) tagged me with this meme. I went to my bookshelves to answer the questions. It was geeky and fun!


1) Find a book for each of your initials.
J: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
K: King of the Gypsies by Peter Mass

2) Count your age along your bookshelf.  Which book is it?
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

3) Pick a book set in your city/county/country.
Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr

4) Pick a book that represents a destination you would love to travel to.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Barcelona)

5) Pick a book that’s your favorite color.  
Hild by Nicola Griffith (blue)

6) Which book do you have the fondest memories of?
Little, Big by John Crowley

7) Which book did you have the most difficulty reading?
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (still trying to read it)

8) Which book in your TBR pile will give you the biggest sense of accomplishment when you finish it.
City of Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

All of you, my readers and followers, are hereby tagged. I would love to see your answers in the comments!