Life's Too Short

Despite it's beguiling cover this book wasn't so beguiling. I read 250 pages--- realized there were 250 more---and put it down. I then picked up an actual Victorian mystery Lady Audley's Secret. Hope springs eternal.

Encore Flavia

I am quite fond of these Flavia De Luce mysteries---although how long can she be 11? I think this is the 4th book and she is still 11. I Am Half Sick of Shadows is set at Christmas and another murder happens under her 11 year old nose. Like reading Nancy Drew but a little more sophisticated. Fun.

Lost Memory Of Skin

Oh that Russell Banks! What a fun guy! This is about a bunch of homeless Registered Sex Offenders living under a bridge in Florida. My other favorite was The Sweet Hereafter about a school bus of children that veers off the road and they're all killed. Oh wait! Don't forget Rule of the Bone, about a 14 year old punk who is also homeless and abused and wanted by the police. But he is a great writer and once you get over your gag reflex you can't stop.
The Lost Memory of Skin is quite good told through the eyes of Kid, a pathetic damaged young man who did something stupid once (or twice) and ends up unable to rent an apartment or keep a job and on parole for 10 years with an GPS ankle bracelet. You see the vicious circle of his life---he can't get a job because he has a record, he can't live in town because he can't be within a certain distance of a school zone, he can't get an apartment anyway because he has no money because he can't get a job because he has a record....Banks does highlight the inadequacy of how we deal with criminals once they are back in society.
But Banks seems to have lost some memory on what the topic was and veers off with this very annoying other character the Professor and it goes a bit downhill from there. Surprisingly enough I found myself longing to be back under the bridge in the tents with the sex offenders rather than hurtling around in a van with the Professor. Only Russell Banks could make me want to do that. Shows you how good he is.

Bring Me More Bodies

What I love about Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, is Thomas Cromwell's management style----he and King HenryVIII have a good cop-bad cop thing going on and it works. Henry is the C.E.O. and Cromwell is his Chief of Staff. Henry tires of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell does all the dirty work getting rid of her while Henry runs off to write sonnets to Jane Seymour. I loved this follow up and will now hold my breath till the next one where Cromwell gets downsized.

The Edward St. Aubyn Quintet

Suddenly everyone is talking about Edward St. Aubyn and I had to decide whether the supposed brilliant prose was worth a trip down the Incest and Heroin Addiction Lane. “The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time,”Michiko Kakutani raved in The New York Times.

I decided to take a little step and promptly joined the stampede after Michiko....five books later I emerge gasping at the end of a St Aubyn marathon. Whoa! He is good. Michiko got it right for once. He has a gift for selecting the perfect metaphor. Some examples: A character repeats a phrase just used by someone else he: "hands the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else's used handkerchief",  someone else is described as seeing their car as a refuge, it "was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist". The language is so precise and witty and British. He never get's lyrical or fuzzy.

The novels are about a character, Patrick Melrose, at different points in his life. In the first book, Never Mind  he is five, living a very privileged life in the South of France and sexually abused by his father. Fortunately St. Aubyn is not Dorothy Allison or Alice Walker and our noses are not rubbed in it---the fact is awful enough, no colorful descriptions needed and it takes a page and then it is over (at least for the reader).

The second book, Bad News, is reminiscent of Lucky Jim, Patrick Melrose staggering around New York on a colossal coke and heroin binge picking up his dead father's ashes. The third book, Some Hope, finds Patrick sober attending a rather funny house party with Princess Margaret in attendance.  The fourth book, Mother's Milk, is Patrick married with two young children trying to reconnect with his mother in Southern France. The fifth and last book At Last,at the mother's funeral, is a little disappointing to start but in the end provides a very satisfying conclusion.

Not bad.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy

I kept on waiting for the other shoe to drop in this modern retelling of  Jane Eyre but it never did. Margot Livesy, who I like, reset Jane Eyre in Scotland in the 60's and it is as over the top romantic as the original. She tells it completely straight faced  She is a good writer and the story is engaging but I kept on waiting for the punchline, the twist. The unfeeling aunt, the horrific boarding school, the isolated house on the moors are all there. Some things change: the mad wife in the attic has been downgraded to a shameful wartime secret, Mr.Rochester has become quite jovial, St. Clair is faulted because he is not sexy enough but I could never figure out what made this different from a Harlequin Romance written in the same time period. What was the purpose? What has she done other than write a fairly gentle story about a young woman trying to find herself? Maybe if she didn't invoke Jane Eyre I might have liked it more.

The Giver and Hunger Games

I always used to beg my father to read books that I liked when I was a teenager...sometimes he did after I kept on bugging him. He usually enjoyed them so when Olivia commanded me to read these I did. Both were set in a dystopian world with teenagers set in perilous situations. Both writers are great storytellers and create plausible worlds and characters. The Giver ended in a very ambiguos way that Olivia and I both interpreted in different ways. The Hunger Games ends in a less satisfying way leading into the next book in the trilogy but still is quite a good ride . I will continue to accept her recommendations.

Jim Crace

Jim Crace is a truly great writer, up there with Coetzee, Marquez and Roth for me. He is always serious and only rarely does he get out of control. But after Genesis and Devil's Larder---huge stinkers---I got a little wary. I let Pesthouse pass me by. But I shouldn't have. It is quite good in a quiet almost gentle way.

Given Crace's habit of pulling no punches----remember the slow disintegration of the corpses of Being Dead, no maggot undocumented, or the breast feeding woman's mastitis in Arcadia? Ouch.I still do. Pesthouse is about a man and a woman trying to flee with the rest of the inhabitants of a dystopic America. Somehow it manages to be both horrifying and tender. He doesn't spend a lot of time explaining how America got this way---it just is, there is no set up, no explanation. But details like how a baby's dry lips are softened with the woman's ear wax are plentiful.

"A writer of hallucinatory skill" the late John Updike said. I agree, John, except for the two stinkers.

Life Among the Savages

The only thing I know about Shirley Jackson is the short story  The Lottery but she also wrote a very wickedly funny account of her family life in rural Vermont, Life Among the Savages. It is quite funny. It was written in the days when you spent ten days in the hospital reading and smoking after having a baby, when everyone walked from room to room with their ashtray and their cigarettes, where the new baby rode in the front seat of the car. There is no sentimentality or simpering over the children----each child is treated as an equal--a wily combatant to be reckoned with. What makes this all especially poignant is that Shirley Jackson died when she was only 48 and that apparently she and her family endured a lot of anti-semitism in this little bucolic town----makes you wonder who the savages she is referring to really are.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Beautiful Thing

So Behind the Beautiful Forevers is about a community of garbage pickers that live in a slum just behind the airport in Mumbai. Katherine Boo is a very matter of fact storyteller and allows the characters---who are real people--not characters---to tell the story themselves, she observes and occasional draws us to the larger picture but is remarkably unobtrusive.

It reminded me of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance which was a book that broke my heart.  The level of corruption in India was what got to me the most here though (in A Fine Balance I thought it was fiction!)---here everyone is out to get something out of nothing. The garbage pickers sorting through the cities refuse---paying people to take their garbage, the police extorting money out of people living in squalid shacks, the schools set up for the poor so that they can send photos to the charities that are funding them before they shut them down and pocket the money. At some point Katherine Boo says that corruption is seen not as a negative but as a positive in this society since it is the only way to get ahead. It was a society I knew nothing about and I wanted to read more.

So I have plunged into Beautiful Thing about bar dancers in Mumbai, young girls who dance in clubs to Bollywood music and other unsavory activities. A step up from the garbage pickers in one sense, a step down in many others. So far---not so good. Rather than staying invisible the author has already inserted herself at various points. The language is trying very hard to be lyrical and perhaps mimic the voices of the girls but it just reads as forced. Example: "Such words, if repeated often enough, might result in the gift of a TV, perhaps even a mini fridge stocked with silver-foil mithai rich with ghee and thick with nuts, or of a new wardrobe, everything within 'matching-matching' and sequined one hundred percent, so at night in the light of the creamy street bulbs, the bar dancer walking from her flat to an auto-rickshaw would cause strolling couples and children playing cricket between cars to stare, for she would appear like she was draped in diamonds sparkling so bright they could only be living, breathing things."
 

Jane Gardam

God on the Rocks was an earlier Jane Gardam novel and quite good as usual. It was nominated for the Booker back in 1978. A young girl, Margaret, growing up in the 1930's in a very fervent Pentecostal family reminiscent of the family in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson, only much nicer. Reading an article in the Guardian on Gardam (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jan/10/jane-gardam-life-writing) I realized that my favorite book of her's, Crusoe's Daughter, is also her favorite.  It's out of print in the states of course.

She is such a clever writer: she always writes little bits from one character's perspective which she later illuminates from someone else's point of view. Her writing is always so smooth and effortless---there are layers upon layers of story which you finally get through to find something resembling truth at the end. Like Margaret's mother's clothes ---layer on layer of flowing fabric which she starts to shed slowly throughout the book until she's running around with nothing on at the beach at the end of the book.  Jane Gardam looks pretty good with nothing on.

The Dew Breaker by Edwige Danticat

I was a little confused at the structure of the book. Was it a novel or a collection of short stories? The transitions between the chapters is never abrupt but they all are going in a different direction. But I realised that close up it is like a portrait by Chuck Close ---all those tiny little photos in different shades but when you pull back it is a portrait of a person or in this case a portrait of Haiti. These stories are of Haitian people---in the United States and in Haiti. The Dew Breaker refers to the TonTon Macoute who used to come in the early morning hours---when the dew was breaking---and take their victims away.  The characters and the stories of Haiti are heartbreaking. Haiti is a heartbreaking country.

I remember disliking Danticat's first book Krik Krak which seemed overwritten and pretentious. But another book Breath, Eyes, Memory , a true story about her uncle was truly moving so I thought maybe it was just her fiction I didn't like. It turns out I do like her fiction and she is an excellent writer. I am going to look for her other work.

Henning Again-ing

More Henning Mankell. This time The Dogs of Riga with Wallender shambling through Latvia. Not as riveting as usual but still good. The translation is odd at times. I am wondering if it's a different person who translated this one, there were some rather jarring idioms used.

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

I read Alexandra Fuller's memoir of growing up in Africa Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight a few years back and highly recommended it for anyone who was feeling sorry for themselves thinking they were a bad parent. Fuller's mom was atrociously neglectful---you can only shine in comparison. She's a drunk, the father is mostly absent, the kids are barely supervised and for some strange reason the kids still adore them.

The honesty with which Fuller wrote about the horrific parenting is absent in this next book. Apparently the mother is still alive and angry about how the first book portrayed her so Fuller spends the whole time back pedaling and tries to make the mother's selfishness and narcissism into just wacky lovableness. Too late for me to change my mind but maybe her mother might forgive her?

The White Lioness

I just finished Henning Mankell's The White Lioness, a Kurt Wallendar. Back in 2010 after reading his Firewall I had decided to dedicate my life to reading all his work until I picked up Faceless Killers and the grisly murder scene description in the first chapter made me dedicate my life to other things. But I had to try again and I took up The White Lioness somewhat gingerly but thinking I could maybe tough it out. It was fantastic. It has to do with a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela and somehow it involves Kurt Wallender in Sweden. There are quite a few people killed but since we are dealing with assassins they shoot everyone cleanly through the head for the most part. Even though you kind of suspect they are not going to end up shooting Mandela (spoiler alert!) you are on the edge of your seat until the last page. Wallender is his usual depressive morose self, drinking too much, shuffling around with too little sleep, eating bad food and drunk-dialing old girlfriends.

Henning Mankel just wrote a piece for the NYT about listening and storytelling focusing particularly on African storytelling. As my friend Rico would say "that man can write." and as I say: you should read it:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/in-africa-the-art-of-listening.html?_r=3

 

Is the Chain Broken?

Sadly the Chain Reader has fallen into a bit of a rut. I am reading, but nothing blog-worthy. Nothing seems to fit (including my pre-vacation and holiday clothing!)

I did read a newer book called The Wilder Life which was a very benign book on the author's immersion into the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House books. She and her boyfriend trudge around the country in the path of the Ingalls family, visiting the sod house on the banks of Plum Creek, the "Little House in the Big Woods", the other houses along the way. She discovers that the journey and 'true stories' described in the books were really sanitized versions of the real stories. At one point the real Pa and Ma and the kids worked and lived in a hotel and ran up so much debt that Pa took the family and fled town in the middle of the night. I know! PA!!!!???? Who could believe that of him? Anyway it is a very dull and sad little book and I put it down realizing that the Little House stories have been co-opted by home-schooling Christians, written by Laura's daughter maybe and that maybe none of it was really true. 

But in the end---who cares? The Little House books don't need to be true to be good, just as we know all that stuff didn't really happen to David Sedaris. They are stories and they are good storytellers. Just like I don't want to watch the Extras on How the Movie Was Made on a DVD of a favorite movie, or read the Type A musings in a lead up to a Cooks Illustrated recipe on how to make the perfect macaroni and cheese---I don't want to know how it works,  I don't want to know why they put two cups of cheese rather than 1 3/4's---I just want to watch the movie, eat the best macaroni and cheese and read a better book. The author might have made a better book if she had focused on the story and less on the boring truth that her Wilder Life wasn't so very Wild.