Olive Kitteridge

This---quite simply--- was a wonderful book. Elizabeth Strout is pretty consistently great. All the way from Amy and Isabel to these interwoven short stories. They're set in a small town in Maine. The stories are up there with anything by Alice Munro. The character thread throughout is Olive Kittredge who is a difficult, problematic character. You usually don't always experience her full on but out of the corner of your eye in a story of someone else where she pops up in the periphery. Some of her central story is only glimpsed in passing through someone else's story. The final story is Olive's though and it is a deserved ending for her which you are surprised at yourself for wanting so much.
Chalk up one for the Pulitzer people.

Cracks

Cracks by Sheila Kohler is an argument for co-ed education if I ever saw one. It's set in an all girls boarding school in the middle of nowhere in South Africa and is the story of the disappearance of one of girls from the swimming team. Dripping with hormones and longing it really captures the exquisite sort of boredom and feelings of adolescence. Where to go with all that feeling with only girls,girls, girls as far as the eye can see? Read the book and find out.

Interestingly it is written in the first person plural "we" like that other book I liked so much: And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, about the death of an ad agency. It works very well here too.
We like that.

Glover's Mistake

This bills itself as a contemporary look at modern romance and relationships. I suppose maybe because a lot of the communication is through texting, email, blogs and cell phones we can call it modern. But since none of these mediums lend themselves to any sort of profundity the book, not surprisingly, doesn't either. It was just ho-hum. It's a story of two male roommates and a female artist and their relationships to each other. Of course the inner jacket flap talks about it also being about the nature of art criticism and the art world but that was pretty thin.

It's the sort of book that they recommend in Vogue or Elle because it's inoffensive but mostly because then they get to show the author's picture. Nick Laird looks like a young intellectual George Michael, before he started to look like he does now, which is like a dirty man under a bridge.

Skip the book, google Nick Laird's image, it's what the characters in the book would do.

Zeitoun

I really enjoyed Dave Eggers' last book What is the What and this is in the same vein. A true story told in a very unsensational way. What is the What made the horrific story of the Sudanese lost boys somehow bearable. Eggers' tone is always even and unemotional, a blank slate on which you put your own emotions, he isn't always telling you what to feel. Zeitoun is a story of a Syrian American man who stays behind in New Orleans while his family flees Hurricane Katrina.
The first part of the book is about Zeitoun, his last name, paddling quietly around the city in a canoe. The second part of the book is the nightmare that he and his family fall into. In the first part of the book he's simply a citizen of New Orleans quietly helping out, the second part reminds us that he is also a Muslim and an Arab.
Not watching TV I didn't have all the visual images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that everyone else did, this book opened my eyes to the complete mismanagement of the disaster. I imagine for people who knew more about it, it will resonate even more.

Fasting, Feasting

I read this rather quickly and found it very sad and bleak. A very sad older unmarried Indian woman, Uma, living at home with her parents in a very isolated existence. An Anita Brookner character transplanted. Her brother far away in Massachusetts studying and living with an American family in a very similar isolation.
The title Fasting, Feasting probably refers to the overabundance of food in America and is meant to contrast with the Indian situation but since the Indian family seems pretty cushioned from the outside I don't think that worked so well. Nonetheless Uma seemed very real and her situation very heartbreaking and inescapable.
The exasperation you feel with Anita Brookner's characters at their inability to act is gone since this is not the Western world and Uma does not have the choices or opportunities Brookner's characters do. At least Uma has better excuses. It's all even sadder in a claustrophobic kind of way.
Onward!