Entries categorized as ‘Book Reviews’
The Olympics seem to have robbed me of any reading momentum I had toward my impossible goal of reading 100 books this year. That plus the fact that I’m reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise which I’m slogging my way through like mud in a World War one trench. Where’s People magazine when you really need it? Anyways, some time ago, I did start and then put down The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. An improbable title which has taken some commitment on my part to memorize not unlike the numbers I am trying to learn in Spanish.
The main reason I put down the book was because I couldn’t find it. But I would have been motivated to find it a lot sooner if the letter writing form which the novel assumes, didn’t confuse quite as much as it did.
Humour is not unlike crack cocaine. When your hooked your hooked and the main character (or letter writer) in this book Juliette has enough of a quirky, funny, irreverent personality to get me back on the letter chain trying to sort out who’s writing to who.If you can get through that than this is a delightful read.
The story takes place in the aftermath of the second World War in London and Guernsey (hey now I know were Guernsey is and I want to go!) Juliette, the main character is also known as Izzie Bickestaff, newspaper columnist at large, who serves up war’s tragedy with skewering humour and aplomb.
One day she receives a letter from a stranger who is also a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and so begins a journey through letters to the life and times of the people who survived the German occupation of Guernsey.
Out of the horrors of war and the displacement of families a new social order is created where people like Juliette an d her new friends at the Literary society re-form themselves into chosen families. Need and necessity create new relationships and allows the noblitiy of every day people to rise in the face of adversity.
Humour abounds in this book and brings the charcaters to life in a very real way. If I had a criticism it would be that the characters’ quirkiness sometimes make them seem somewhat one dimensional and the fairy tale ending seems a bit too light. But hey this was a fun read that serves up war in a light way. I quite enjoyed it.
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: Annie Barrows, Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a wonderful study of human folly and caprice set amidst the studious manners and social hierarchy of early 19th century small town English gentry. If a novel that was written almost two hundred years ago sounds and feels like a foreign place (and believe me, it does, I mean how did they keep those castles heated for god’s sake) Austen’s keen eye for the flaws that make us human are very familiar.
Enter Fanny Price, a young beautiful morally steadfast and virtuous girl who is taken in by her wealthy uncle and his family so she can by afforded greater opportunity in life. Uncle Tom’s family, of course, by virtue of possessing both wealth and beauty, are by the measure of the time, morally and socially superior to the steadfast Fanny Price.
The Bertram daughters are cossetted and spoiled by their Aunt Norris who obsequiously panders to their every whim and folly. When (not surprisingly) the young ladies grow up to be of dubious moral fibre and bring shame on the Bertram name through their romantic misadventures and shenanigans, it becomes obvious to the outsider that wealth and beauty alone cannot sustain the moral order.
You could probably write a masters thesis (no doubt somebody has ) on the innumerable transactions that take place within the cast of characters in Mansfield Park that are designed to illuminate the slippery slope of moral turpitude. The great thing about Jane Austen’s world, is that if you make the right choices, your rightful place in love and society is assured.
Fanny for example, consistently resists the offer of marriage by Henry Crawford. She witnesses first hand his careless flirtations with the Bertram sisters and sees this as irrefutable evidence of a deeply flawed character. Regardless of his money and station in life, she can never marry him, even if it means she can attain a station in life far above anything she could ever have hoped for.
Henry, on the other hand, through this single flaw, will never find the real happiness he seeks. He can love Fanny and know that she is the best he can ever have but his vanity lead him to his ultimate downfall. He may have wealth and position, but he will never have love.
Edmund, on the other hand, who is Fanny’s cousin (and son of the wealthy uncle) doesn’t seek wealth and seeks only love. Even though he is misguided in his search for love when he falls for the charming but flighty Mary Crawford (sister to the morally bankrupt Henry) he ultimately finds redemption and real love with Fanny.
This book isn’t going to be for everyone, especially not Dave or readers of his ilk, but I thought this was a fun and interesting read. It took me some time to get used to the ornate use of language but I got used to it quite quickly and found that it gave me something even more to think about which is the changing nature of language.
My next book is contemporary but then I think I’ll take a dive into Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities.
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: Jane Austen Mansfield Park, Mansfield Park Book Review
I don’t usually read historic fiction but I picked this up as a recommendation from my sister. Nancy Horan is a writer and journalist who spent most of her life in Oak Park, Illinois, where Frank Lloyd Wright had lived for many years and created a notable architectural legacy with houses created as part of his organic architectural style. As she became interested in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life she learned of his love affair with Martha (Mamah) Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of his clients, with whom he had run off to Europe, leaving behind 8 children between the two families.
Although a great deal is known of Frank Lloyd Wright, very little was known of Mamah Cheney. Horan had done quite a bit of research with secondary resources, but she was able to more fully flesh out Mamah Borthwick’s character when several of her letters were found.
What Nancy Horan delivers is a very even handed and beautifully compelling story of the love between two people, who defy social convention so that they may be together.
Under Horan’s expert hand Mamah Borthwick comes to life as very conflicted, passionate and intellectual woman who follows her heart. A highly educated feminist who speaks several languages, she is in every way an intellectual match for the eccentric, brilliant and egotistical Frank Lloyd Wright.
While women today have many opportunities that Mameh couldn’t possibly have imagined, the feminist dilemna that frames this story is still very relevant today. How do you balance your own intellectual and emotional needs with a happy and fulfilling family life? Can you follow your emotional and intellectual dreams and be happy in family life? Is it moral and right to stay in a loveless marriage for the ’sake’ of the children? Can you be a good parent if you’re not personally fulfilled? Should children come first? These are all questions that Mameh faced each and every day of her life and which hounded her both publically in the press and privately.
Yet, she remained true to herself and to a love that she felt was one of the only authentic things in life. She struggled daily with her choices and yet you don’t imagine for one moment that she could have lived her life any other way. This is a compelling but difficult story.
The bonus in this book, is of course, that the man she has fallen in love with is Frank Lloyd Wright and the book fleshes out his character and the life and times that fuelled his vision of form. He was a difficult guy to love. Egotistical, brilliant, flamboyant, a terrible businessman who rarely paid his bills on time, selfish and driven. But he had a remarkable vision of beauty and form that changed the course of American architecture. And he also loved Mameh Borthwick with his heart and soul.
” Mamah and I have had our struggles , our differences our moments of jealous fear for our ideals of each other – they are not lacking in any close human relationship – but they served only to bind us more closely together. We were more than merely happy even when momentarily miserable…Her soul has entered mine and it shall not be lost.”
When great art and great love forms itself against convention there is a price to pay and the price is often steep. In this kind of tale, it seems to me, there is no right and wrong although society certainly does/did its fair share of condemnation. I think Mamah Borthwick made some very tough choices for which she paid dearly. But she lived a life that was authentic to herself. I thought this was a really interesting book that is as relevant to women’s issues today as it was during Mamah Borthwick’s time. Nancy Horan brought to life a remarkable man and woman and their love story.
Nancy Horan has an excellent web site that is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to know more about the characters or how the book came to be written. http://www.nancyhoran.com/
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: Frank Lloyd Wright, Loving Frank, Mamah Borthwich, Martha Borthwick Cheny, Nancy Horan
Dave’s turn: A Fraction of the Whole is narrated by Jasper Dean who tells us the story of his overanalyzing, philosophical, paranoid father, Martin and his deceased master criminal uncle, Terry. As he tells us of the events that led to his father’s demise, he recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and unwanted adventures.
The story starts in an Australian prison cell but travels to the cafes of Paris, through Thai jungles to strip clubs, asylums, mazes and criminal lairs. The result is a non stop diatribe- for and against- politics, family, love, relationships, religion and humanity.
Throughout the story we are witness to Jasper’s constant struggle with his relationship with his father. Not knowing from one moment to the next if he loves, hates or is going to murder him. And although we get the sense that he wants to leave (after Jasper reads, in one of his fathers many journals, that he is thought of as nothing more than a premature reincarnation of his father) to form his own identity, there is the constant inner struggle of how, or in fact if he truly wants to. I thought this was an interesting insight that explores the sometimes tumultuous relationships we sometimes can have with our own parents.
I found Steve Toltz’s writing style, philosophical ramblings and play on words more enjoyable than the story itself, which can get a little flat at times. I found myself re-reading and underlining (then suddenly realizing I had borrowed the book) certain brilliant and hilarious observations on our existence. This book has made me really think about my own life and world around it and has made me want to read more philosophy. I feel when a book has this affect it has done it’s job. I look forward to Toltz’s next writing.
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: A Fraction of the Whole Book review, Man Booker nominee Steve Toltz, Steve Toltz
I hadn’t intended to read Infidel. It was a book on a way to another book and also I am rarely able to make my way through non-fiction. This book, however, was an exception in spite of the fact that I didn’t find the writing to be that great. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life story, on the other hand, is interesting and so foreign to any life story I know that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perhaps better known as the outspoken Dutch parliamentarian and women’s rights activist who collaborated on a film with Theo Van Gogh that highlighted the abuses of Islam against Muslim women. Van Gogh was murdered and found with a note pinned to his chest saying Ali would be next.
Infidel is a memoir of her life growing up in Somalia and Kenya where she was regularly beaten by her mother, abandoned by her father and eventually promised in marriage to a man she didn’t know. She escaped to Holland where she sought refugee status, worked as a translator in abortion and women’s clinics and ultimately went to university to study politics.
It is through her ‘awakening’ in Holland to western values of equality, government, marriage, self-determination and women’s rights and her work in the clinics that drives her to fight for the rights, particularly of immigrant women in Holland. She is shocked when she learns of the sexual excision of young girls and honour deaths in her newly adopted country. But her desire to open dialogue on these issues spawns a hostility that forces her to live under guard 24 hours a day under threat of death.
This is one of those books that rips you out of your western centric comfort zone and forces you to see that the world is an entirely different place for many people but particularly for many women the world over. She obviously has a very strong view on arranged marriage, the role of women within Islam and the ability for Islam to adapt to allow women an equal role and self-determination. I don’t know enough about this part of the world to exercise any kind of opinion but I can say that the dynamics in her life story are overwhelmingly paternalistic. The quality of your life depends on the good will of almost everyone around you.
That she managed to break the mold and re-invent herself as a feminist and atheist seems shocking to me given her background. She talks about the influence of reading romance novels at a young age. She would often compare her girlfriend’s experiences with marriage to these fantasies and was determined to seek a different kind of life for herself.
I think she is a brave woman. She has guts, stamina and a burning drive to make the world a better place for women.The book, for me, was a bit depressing though. If nothing else it underlined the enormous chasm between the West and Islam and given the world’s circumstances it makes me feel less hopeful that a bridge can be created between these worlds. Maybe this is a simple view but towards the end of the book when she essentially had to leave Holland because of her public outspokeness, I felt outraged and sad (maybe sadder than usual) about the crappy world we live in.
Next book: Loving Frank
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
I thought this was an absolutely beautiful, wonderful, funny, heartbreaking book. Wow. This book made me think, feel, laugh, and cry. Muriel Barbery is a philosopher by trade and you can certainly see this in the story of the novel’s two protaganists. The story takes place in a very chic apartment building in Paris where Madame Renee Michel is a self-described thick set, bulbous, cantakerous concierge who is scornful of the building’s wealthy, snobbish tenants. What they don’t know, and what Madame Michel doesn’t allow them to see is that she has a keen intelligence, a prodigious love of philosophy, art and Japanese culture and is extremely well versed in the arts and culture.
The novel’s other protaganist is 12 year old Paloma Josse, the precocious, brilliant daughter of socialist parents. At the beginning of the novel Paloma is determined to set her parents’ apartment on fire and kill herself by her 13th birthday. She has a keen eye for artifice, cruelty and deception and she feels trapped by her family and social status and doesn’t understand the value and meaning of life.
When an intriguing, wealthy Japanese gentleman moves into the building, who against all social convention, befriends Paloma and Madame Michel, it sets in motion a series of self-revelations that can only take place in the face of true life changing friendship.
What we see through the eyes Madame Michel are the often cruel prejudices exercised against people that are considered ‘below our station’ and that render them invisible. But what she brings to us are those incredible moments of arresting beauty that make us carry on in spite of everything.
With Paloma we see something different. As a member of the privileged class she has the unique intelligence to play cat and mouse with her ‘victims’ that reveals their shallow stupidity. Her journey to try and find the meaning of life in all of this is what is so extraordinary.
While all of this sounds quite serious the book is really quite funny. Paloma and Renee are really the same people in different bodies and in different situations but they both have an extraordinary wit and a deep love for language and culture which reveals itself on every page. I will read this book again.
Categories: Book Reviews · My Impossible New Year's Resolution or the 100 Books We're Planning on Reading.
Tagged: Elegance of the Hedgehog, Elegance of the Hedgehog Book Review, Muriel Barbery
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is a fictional account of the life of a woman who is captured and enslaved as a young girl and sent to America to work on a southern indigo plantation.
This is, of course, an old story that we know all too well. But in Lawrence Hill’s capable hands we traverse this dark period of history through the eyes of a woman who recounts her brutal life story from enslavement to freedom.
What is clear, from the moment Aminata Diallo is captured and brought to the New World is that nothing in her life will ever be easy. As a black woman, whether enslaved or free, there is no place she can go that will ever truly grant her the freedom she seeks. Even when she finally escapes to New York then Nova Scotia , Freetown and finally London, she is trapped as much by whites as she is by blacks and by freedom as much as slavery.
What I find interesting is that Lawrence gives us a character who is taught to read and right. Aminata is fully literate and has a passion for language and stories. It’s clear that the moment she speaks that her literacy makes her different even within her own community. She sounds like a ‘learned, educated woman’ which she is. In the end her ability and desire to be a ’storyteller’ to tell her own story is her humanity and her freedom.
When she is brought to London by a group of abolitionist to ‘tell the story’ of slavery, to show that blacks can be educated, they insist on writing her story so that it can be used as a weapon in their fight to abolish the slave trade. Aminata knows that the only one who can tell this story is her. As witness to her life she owns her tale and won’t allow anyone to take this from her.
This reminds me very much of Chimananda Adichie’s TEDX talk where she tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
The Book of Negroes reminds me of the importance of telling stories and the importance of listening. It’s a worthwhile read just as Chimananda’s talk is worth a good listen.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Laurence Hill, The Book of Negroes
Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle isn’t exactly the lightest kind of summer read but who says summer reading has to be light.
The truth is I did find Wall’s memoir of her childhood growing up moving from town to town with her peripatetic parents and her brother and sisters quite refreshing for the first quarter of the book. Her mother is an artist and her father is a brilliantly imaginative man who uses the power of imagination and the innocence of childhood to help his children believe that their world of increasingly grinding poverty is a magical and special place.
The Wall children, not knowing anything but the life they have, for a long time believe that while other children have Christmas trees they have stars in the sky, while other children live in homes with running water, food and beds, they one day will have a Glass Castle, a home their father promises to build.
But as their mother spirals into depression and their father into alcoholism the family’s troubles increase. When they settle into Rex Wall’s hometown in Virginia the parents leave their children to fend almost entirely for themselves.
While other children eat lunch, the Wall kids scour garbage cans to find something to fill their stomachs. Beyond their emotional and addiction issues there is a selfishness to the Wall parents that is often shocking. Mary Wall secretly eats a chocolate bar while her children starve and Rex’s drunken charm finally reveals its true character when he sends his teenage daughter Jeanette off to a gambling buddy’s apartment to potentially pay off a debt.
Ultimately the image of the Glass Castle which is sustained as a beacon of hope throughout the book, is finally broken when the place where it is to be built is turned into a mountain of the Wall family’s refuse. Dying to leave home, Jeanette’s older sister moves to New York as a teenager to find her fortunes as an artist and Jeanette follows soon after to pursue her love of journalism. Jeanette’s father begs her to stay saying he’ll finally get to work on building their dream home but her childhood illusions of her father are finally broken and she moves to join her sister knowing that the Glass Castle exists only in Rex’s imagination.
Ultimately the entire Wall family end up in New York. As dysfunctional as this family is, the one thing all the Wall’s children end up doing is pursueing their life long dreams. While their parents end up living on the streets and squatting, Jeanette, her sister and her brother fall successfully into their respective careers.
As difficult as parts of this book is to read and as angry and you might become at Rex and Mary Wall for their crazy selfishness, it does strike me as amazing that these kids managed as well as they did. They survived and then some.
Jeanette Walls does a great job of balancing the emotional territory of telling a very difficult personal story without engaging in armchair psychoanalysis or even judgement. It’s clear that her early life was very difficult but she also brings to life the magic and the power of her father’s imagination and in that way the book serves as a kind of tribute to Rex Wall.
Check out Jeanette Walls on Youtube discussing The Glass Castle.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Glass Castle book review, Jeanette Walls, Jeanette Walls Glass Castle
My current schedule of everything including my heavy thinking on training for a triathlon (thinking only at this point folks, no real action taken but thinking requires a great deal of, well thinking), as well as waking up in the middle of the night with creative fb status lines and 140 character tweets about nothing, is keeping me very pre-occupied. This, in addition to the nervewrecking business of trying to sell and buy a house, means that I have no time to do anything like write book reviews. Forgive me but I’m giving in to serious mental laziness. I heard that this is what happens once you reach a certain age. My mother will tell me it’s because I’m airy. “You’re so airy” she told me this week. I’m airy. Airy or not here I go. I won’t be doing these books justice but neither do I want to pass them over because they were great reads.
Over Christmas or sometime around then I read Elizabeth May’s Late Nights on Air. The book chronicles a year (or something like that) in the life, of a small group of people, who find themselves working at a small radio station in Yellowknife, NWT sometime in the 70’s. Eventually a group of four set out on a canoe trip following in the footsteps of John Hornby who perished on his trip through the Barren Strait almost fifty years earlier. There’s something beautiful, quiet and spare about this book.The late night radio anchors’ voices reaching, almost dream like, out to the listeners in this remote community seemed so intimate and personal in spite of the public nature of the medium. The northern landscape also seemed like a character in the story and I found that interesting. But northern life (all life perhaps) is defined by this natural backdrop and I loved how the characters interacted with the landscape sometimes with tragic consequences but almost always as a part of a journey to greater understanding of oneself. Cool book. I’d recommend it.
The latest book I’ve read is The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. This book chronicles the life of four women who have chosen to give up their careers and raise children. Now at the age of 40, with their children growing up, they question how they arrived where they are and what it means. At the heart of the narrative is the question of whether women can do it all, should they, and do they even want to do it all? The book almost felt like a sociological study of women in contemporary society. The details and the minutiae of all these women’s lives was so carefully captured that anyone reading it fifty to hundred years from now would have a snapshot of middle to upper middle income women in urban America the early 21st century. It’s also interesting that the mothers of these women made brief appearances offering a historic trajectory of feminism (or the plight of domestication on the female species). Good read.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: book review Late Night on Air, book review Meg Wolitzer, Elizabeth May, Late Nights on Air, Meg Wolitzer, The Ten Year Nap
Now this was an interesting read. She May Not Leave is by British writer Fay Weldon. In it Weldon tells the story of a young unmarried professional British couple Hattie and Martyn and their new baby Kitty. The narrator is Frances Watt, Hattie’s grandmother who she tells the story of what unfolds when Hattie decides she must go back to work before her year’s mat leave is over and against Martyn’s wishes hires an au pair to care for Kitty.
Soon Agniewska arrives and domestic order is restored to the household. Kitty adores Agniewska, the house is beautifully cared for, and dinner is served on time. The money that Hattie brings in as an editor in a publishing house gives her a sense of well being and self-confidence and eases the financial burden on Martyn. Although she loves Kitty and Martyn, domesticity is a form of imprisonment for Hattie.
Martyn, who works as a writer at a political magazine, doesn’t quite make enough money to support the family which adds significant stress to their lifestyle. Martyn also harbours political aspirations and along with Hattie holds many ‘politically correct views of the day’ including reservations regarding hiring ‘foreign labour’or an au pair.Although outwardly he embraces women’s right to work and equal opportunity he secretly wants Hattie to embrace domestic life and feels betrayed by her desire to bring a stranger into their small home. The domestic bliss that he secretly longs for, however, is quickly restored by Agniewska’s domestic prowess. She performs her domestic duties so well that soon Martyn and Hattie can’t imagine life without her.
Slowly both of their previously held moral objections are eroded as their desire to ‘have everything’overcomes them. Agniewska will stay at any cost even when it becomes apparent that she is not exactly whom she claims to be. When Hattie decided that Martyn should marry her in order to prevent her deportation he agrees and it quickly becomes apparent that perhaps this is exactly what Agnieska had planned all along.
Throughout the narrative Frances Watt threads the story of her own life through Hattie and Martyn’s tale. She and her sisters are raised by their strong-willed mother through the 50’s and 60’s. As a single parent family, their life is precarious and they ultimately spiral down the economic scale. Although Frances and Serena live very full sexually adventurous lives, it’s clear that it’s through marriage, however imperfect they are, that they find security and stability.Those who are left single, much like their mother, are the ones that are left to struggle to raise and care for their children and are often looked to, to take on unwanted familial responsibility.
This is an interesting reflection on the role of marriage in modern times. It seems to me that Weldon uses Frances as a device to comment on the role of marriage then and now. Although marriage offers no easy salve to personal happiness the rules of engagement at the very least appear to be very clear in earlier times. In both generations, however, marriage and domestic life are an arrangement that women must negotiate to ensure a certain type of stability and therefore must be be played on some level. The book at first glance seems deceptively simple but I realized as I was reading it that Weldon presents the complexities of women’s lives and relationships throughout generations quite expertly. She May Not Leave really gives food for thought and is an intriguing read.
Categories: Book Reviews
Tagged: Fay Weldon, Fay Weldon She May Not Leave, feminism, reflections on marriage
