The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

May7

This 123-page novella about a middle-aged widow who opens a bookshop in a seaside village in England felt familiar as I read it, but I must not have been paying proper attention when I read it the first time in May of 2008. I didn’t really remember it, and I was surprised and saddened by the ending of this tragic little story of the life and death of a dream.

In 1959 Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in Hardborough. In 1960, “she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.” The characters in this quiet story are vivid and engaging:

Florence Green, “a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance.”
Mr. Keble, the bank manager who gives Florence sage advice: “If over any given period of time the cash inflow cannot meet the cash outflow, it is safe to predict that money difficulties are not far away.”
Mr. Brundish, “a descendant of one of the most ancient Suffolk families,” who “lived as closely in his house as a badger in its sett.”
Raven, the marshman, naturalist, amateur veterinarian, and prognosticator.
Milo North, who works for the BBC, is tall, and goes through life “with singularly little effort.”
Kattie, Milo’s girlfriend, the dark girl with red stockings who comes to stay at Milo’s house only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Eleven year old Christine Gipping, the third Gipping daughter, very thin and remarkably fair, who becomes Mrs. Green’s invaluable assistant, ideal in that she has a talent for organization and never reads the books.

There are other characters, some not quite so endearing, who populate the village of Hardborough, and as Mrs. Green’s little bookshop stirs the waters, so to speak, of village life, it becomes clear that someone or something doesn’t want her to succeed. Perhaps a small bookstore is more disturbing to the status quo than would be imagined.

Raven: “They’re saying that you’re about to open a bookshop. That shows you’re ready to chance some unlikely things.”
Florence: “Why do you think a bookshop is unlikely? Don’t people want to buy books in Hardborough?”
Raven:”They’ve lost the wish for anything of a rarity. . . Now you’ll tell me, I dare say, that books oughtn’t to be a rarity.”

What do you think? How unlikely is a successful bookshop? (More unlikely nowadays than in 1960, I would think.)

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

May4

Dystopian fiction. Matt Alacron was not born; he was harvested. He’s a clone with DNA from El Patron, druglord of a country between Mexico and the U.S. called Opium, where other clones called “eejits” work the poppy fields in mindless obedience and slavery. But Matt is different; El Patron wanted Matt to retain his intelligence and his ability to choose, for some reason.

The House of the Scorpion won the National Book for Young People’s Literature in 2002 and was a Newbery Honor Book in 2003. I was fascinated by Matt’s fight for survival and by his oddly familiar world in which drug lords rule and people are enslaved by power-hungry dictators who long for riches and immortality. Would that all of those people who gain a little power would, rather than seeking after more and more, pray the prayer of Solomon:

God: “Ask! What shall I give you?”
Solomon: “Therefore give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?”
God: “See, I have given you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you. I have also given you what you have not asked: both riches and honor, so that there shall not be anyone like you among the kings all your days.”
I Kings 3

There is a God, and I am not He. To fear Him is the beginning of wisdom, and the characters in The House of the Scorpion needed desperately to hear and understand that lesson.

Other novels about human clones and cloning:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson.
Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin.
Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames.

World War One for Children and Young Adults

Apr30

I read three novels in the past couple of weeks for children and young adults that were set before, during, and after World War I. I’ll have to say that each of the books was odd in its own way: odd prose style in the first, an unexpected twist that I almost didn’t see coming in the second, and anomalous angels in the third.

Eyes Like Willy’s by Juanita Havill. A French brother and sister, Guy and Sarah Masson, and their Austrian friend Willy are separated by the war. The writing style in this one is the strange part. At least, it read oddly to me. The sentences are short and choppy, Hemingway-esque, with a lack of transitions and analogies that I found disconcerting. At the same time, the sparse prose made me pay attention to each detail, so I can’t say it was ineffective—just odd. Here’s an example, chosen at random:

“Their first guests of the summer were Willy and his father. Willy had grown much taller. He was almost as tall as Guy, and thinner. He had a thin black mustache and looked older than seventeen. Seeing Wily’s mustache, Guy decided that he would grow one this summer.”

If I were writing the story, I would probably have combined some of those sentences into one more complicated sentence. But I’m not at all sure that my inclination to complication would be the better choice for this story. The book is short, 135 pages, but it tells a nuanced story of friendship over the course of several years and the effects of war on the relationships of three young people as they grow into adulthood during World War I.

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Mr. Morpurgo also wrote War Horse, the book that formed the source material for the movie of the same name from last year. Both Private Peaceful and War Horse are set during World War I, and I plan to pick up the latter book from the library this afternoon. I haven’t seen the movie or read the book yet.

Private Peaceful focuses on the plight of British soldiers who were summarily tried, condemned and executed on the battlefield for cowardice or desertion during World War 1. Mr. Morpurgo gives some information in his afterword that I did not know about this practice:

“That a shameful injustice had been done to these unfortunate men seemed to me beyond doubt. Their judges called them ‘worthless.’ Their trials, or court martials, were brief, under twenty minutes in some cases. Twenty minutes for a man’s life. Often they had no one to speak for them and no witnesses were called in their defense. . . . The youngest soldier to be executed was just seventeen.

Successive British governments have since refused to acknowledge the injustice suffered by these men, and have refused to grant posthumous pardons—which would of course be a great consolation to surviving relatives. The New Zealand government have pardoned their executed soldiers; it can be done. The Australians and the Americans, to their credit, never allowed their soldiers to be executed in the first place.”

I thought the novel itself, the story of Charlie and Tommo Peaceful, brothers who went to war together, was well-written and absorbing. Mr. Morpurgo kept me guessing until the end, and one of the minor characters, Big Joe, was so well-drawn that I wanted him to have his own book. (Big Joe is the Peaceful brothers’ older sibling who is mentally challenged.)

I recommend Private Peaceful if you liked War Horse or if you just want to read a well-told tale of the difficulties of being a soldier on the front lines during World War I.

A Time of Angels by Karen Hesse. In 1918 Boston, Hannah Gold must face her own wartime suffering as the influenza epidemic sweeps through her family and town. While the war forms a backdrop for this novel, it’s really the story of a Jewish family and the influenza epidemic of 1918. Fourteen year old Hannah is rather improbably sent out into the streets of Boston by her erstwhile guardian to keep her from catching the flu from her family members, and she ends up, again improbably, in Vermont. Hannah also sees angels.

It’s a good introduction to the time period and the prejudices of that era and the hardships of the Spanish flu epidemic. And the reviews at Amazon are for the most part highly positive. I just didn’t ever believe in Hannah or her cold impersonal guardian Vashti or her plight. And I thought the author cheated on the ending by making us believe one (tragic) thing and then pulling off a “no, not really” surprise. And the angels seemed out of place and sort of extraneous.

So, my favorite World War I children’s and YA novels so far are: Winnie’s War by Jennie Moss, The Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Laurence, and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. What about you?

On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells

Apr19

Another boy’s book in which time travel makes my head hurt. “Time is a river in which we can travel both forward into the future and back into the past.” The urchins watched Back to the Future 2 last night, and it made my head hurt, too. With The Blue Comet I just gave up on trying to understand the river of time and enjoyed the story.

Eleven year old Oscar Ogilvie lives with his dad in a little house in Cairo, Illinois. Mom is dead, but Dad and Oscar are happy with Oscar doing the cooking, Dad working as a salesman for the John Deere Tractor COmpany, and the two of them enjoying the Lionel train layout that they have in the basement. Then, the stock market crashes, and the depression hits, and Oscar’s dad loses is job and has to go to California to look for work, leaving Oscar behind to live with his crabby Aunt Carmen. All of this and a little more happens in chapters 1-4, before the time travel/magic part of the book begins. It’s a little slow, and some kids may give up before they get to the good part.

But they shouldn’t. The Blue Comet is deceptively dull at first, but the pace picks up in chapter 5 with a bank robbery, a jump into that River of Time, and some cameo appearances by famous stars and celebrities of the 1940’s such as “Dutch” Reagan, A. Hitchcock, and even a very young Jack Kennedy. It was fun to try to pick out the celebs, and it was enjoyable just to follow the story of our boy-hero, Oscar, as he worked his way from one side of the country to the other and from one era to the next and then back to the past where he came from.

The illustrations in this book by Bagram Ibatoulline deserve, indeed require, a mention. I wish I could show you an example. The pictures are full-color painting in a sort of Norman Rockwell-style. They’re just beautiful and quite evocative of the time period. I guess the cover illustration will have to do to give you an idea, but the pictures inside the book are even better.

So time travel. Electric trains. Depression-era. A boy and his dad. Oh, and Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and a disappearing math teacher. Bank robbers foiled. Surely, one or more of those will capture your interest in this well-told tale of historical adventure.

1987: Events and Inventions

Apr18

May 28, 1987. Nineteen year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust evades Soviet air defenses and lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow.

June 12, 1987. During a visit to Berlin, Germany, U.S. President Ronald Reagan challenges Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

June 28, 1987. Iraqi warplanes drop mustard gas bombs on the Iranian town of Sardasht in two separate bombing rounds, on four residential areas. This is the first time a civilian town is targeted by chemical weapons.

July 11, 1987. World population is estimated to have reached five billion people, according to the United Nations.

October 19, 1987. Black Monday. U.S. Stock Market crashes with a 508 point drop or 22.6%. Stockmarkets around the world follow with falls: by the end of October Australia had fallen 41.8%, Canada 22.5%, Hong Kong 45.8%, and the United Kingdom 26.4%.

December 16, 1987. A marathon two-year trial comes to an end in Sicily as 338 Mafiosi are sentenced to prison terms for crimes including extortion and murder.

Chinese History in Fiction and Nonfiction

Apr17

I read two books back to back that shed some light on the vicissitudes of Chinese life and history: Fortunate Sons by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller and Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin.

Fortunate Sons is the nonfiction title, subtitled The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization. It’s about an educational experiment that took place starting in 1872 in which groups of boys from China were sent to New England to be educated in the ways of Western thinking and inventions and technology. The goal was to train leaders for China who would bring the Chinese out of their technological deficit and their impotence in the face of Western weaponry and warfare.

In spite of the fact that the boys were called home early, before most of them were able to complete their university education, many of the young men who returned to China after receiving an American education were able to serve their native country effectively and with great loyalty. Sometimes their gifts were under-appreciated and under-utilized given the chaotic state of Chinese politics in the early twentieth century. However, some of the CHinese Educational Mission graduates were given great responsibility in bringing China into the modern age in the areas of railroads, diplomacy, and warfare in particular.

Unfortunately, I had trouble remembering which boy was which as I read the book. What with American nicknames like “Jimmy” and “By-Jinks Johnnie” as well as Chinese names, such as Yung Wing and Yung Liang and Chen Duyong and Liang Dunyan, that all started to sound alike to my untrained American ears, I was confused most of the time about who was whom. A list of the boys with their Chinese names, American nicknames, and one distinguishing fact about each would have been quite helpful. Nevertheless, I do recommend the book for those who are interested in modern Chinese history.

As usual, I learned more from the fiction book that I read set in 1937-1940 China called Nanjing Requiem than I did from the nonfiction book. This novel is another one of those memoir-ish fictional treatments, based on the life and experiences of a real person, specifically the life of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College in Nanjing, China. If you’ve read anything about China and World War II, you’ve heard of the Rape of Nanjing. This story brings the Japanese occupation and pillage of Nanjing to life, but in an understated, almost documentary sort of writing style. The violence and the horror are there, and the author’s style, using a fictional Chinese narrator to tell the story of Ms. Vautrin’s courage and her eventual mental collapse, makes the barbarity of the events in the novel even more vivid because Ha Jin leaves much to the imagination. Then, there are the moral dilemmas of war and dealing with the enemy on behalf of the helpless and sometimes thankless Chinese refugees who become Ms. Vautrin’s responsibility. No one, including Minnie Vautrin, especially Ms. Vautrin, escapes the horrible repercussions of decisions made under the pressure of sometimes choosing between evil and more evil.

For those who are interested in the true story of Minnie Vautrin and the Rape of Nanjing, this video is a dramatization of material from the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, presented as a mock trial for war crimes committed during the Nanjing occupation. This video is a fictional presentation, not a real trial. The real Minnie Vautrin died in 1941.

I noticed as I read Nanjing Requiem how the characters in the novel spoke and thought about revenge on the Japanese for the atrocities they committed and how they wondered why God did not act to bring justice and vengeance down upon the Japanese army and upon the Japanese people for allowing such wickedness to proceed unchecked. I couldn’t help thinking about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years after the Rape of Nanking. Although I don’t believe that God sanctioned the bombing of those Japanese cites in retribution for the Rape of Nanjing and other Japanese war crimes, I do believe that evil begets evil. And sometimes the innocent pay for the sins of their fathers and others.

Newbery Boy Appeal

Apr16

Around Newbery Award time I heard a lot of buzz about the middle grade/young adult novel Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt had already received two Newbery honors for his books Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars. So people who really liked Schmidt’s most recent book thought it was time for him to win a Newbery.

Come January and the Newbery announcements, Okay for Now won . . . nothing, zip, not even a mention. Nor was Okay for Now among the finalists for the Cybils, even though it was nominated in the YA fiction category. If I had read the book before the award season started and ended, I would have been pulling for Mr. Schmidt with all my might. Okay for Now is an award-worthy book, and a book worth reading.

So, how to describe this novel? It’s got: drawing lessons, juvenile delinquency, child abuse, Jane Eyre, junior high school angst, libraries, literacy training, John James Audubon, returning Vietnam soldiers, baseball stats, Apollo rockets, ice cream and Coca Cola, horseshoes, Percy Bysshe Shelley-hatred, a cranky playwright, redemption, hope and change. Oh, and my favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, makes a non-speaking cameo appearance. What more could you ask?

The narrator and protagonist, Doug Swieteck, has a voice that is both memorable and endearing. He’s something of a bully as the novel begins, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like him or the book. But then, sign of a really good author, Gary Schmidt managed to enlist my sympathies by slowly revealing the secrets and influences that have come together to make Doug the boy he is: a survivor. I was drawn into the story and into sympathy with the main character almost imperceptibly. And that’s only part of what makes Okay for Now a great book.

Here’s an article about Gary Schmidt.
Review of Okay for Now by Elizabeth Bird at Fuse #8 Production. (Ms. Bird does longer, more thorough reviews than I do, and I like and agree with what she said about this novel.)

The book that actually won the Newbery, Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos, was, I suspect, trying to be the same kind of book as Okay for Now: historical fiction about a boy growing up in a rather quirky small town, lots of boy-appeal. However, whereas Okay for Now has many humorous moments and characters, it’s essentially a serious book about a boy surviving a traumatic childhood. Dead End is essentially a comedic novel about a boy living in a town full of crazy people. The boy who narrates and lives the story is named Jack Gantos, so I assume the novel is somewhat autobiographical.

The problem with Dead End, for me, was that I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even smile much. I mostly got that quizzical look on my face that you get when you wonder what in the world these people are thinking or doing???? Poison the rats in your basement with doctored chocolates? Really? Gather mushrooms in the wild to make meals for the elderly? Really? Sneak into an old lady’s house dressed as the Grim Reaper to see if she’s still alive and hope you don’t scare her to death? Really? Mow down your mom’s cornfield when you know she’s going to be really mad, just because your dad will be mad if you don’t? Really? And those are only a few of the minor plot points I had trouble suspending disbelief for.

Dead End in Norvelt gets an E for effort, but we each have our own sense of humor. Mine just wasn’t susceptible to Mr. Gantos’s brand of comedy.

Then, there were the plot holes. (These questions may include spoilers.) Five or six (I lost count) murders and no one even figured out till the very end that the deaths were not natural? Jack’s dad learns to fly an airplane in two or three easy lessons? Why did Jack’s mom ground him in the first place when he was only doing what his dad told him to do? Because she’s crazy? If anything in this book didn’t make sense, it was chalked up to the idea that “they’re all nuts.”

Checking in again at Fuse#8, Ms. Bird says Dead End in Norvelt is “weird” and “may also be one of the finest he’s (Gantos) produced in years.” She obviously liked it better than I did. I’m also not as observant as Ms. Bird because I ddn’t notice until she pointed it out that the two books have very similar cover pictures.

Dead End in Norvelt gets a few points for a more evocative and memorable title, but Gary Schmidt was cheated out of a Newbery-award as far as I’m concerned.

1986: Events and Inventions

Apr16

January 28, 1986. The space shuttle Challenger explodes after its launch from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven astronauts on board.

January 26, 1986. Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army Rebel group takes over Uganda after leading a successful 5-year guerrilla war in which up to half a million people are believed to have been killed. Museveni is still president of Uganda in 2012, serving his fourth term as president after his reelection in 2011.

February 7, 1986. President Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc”, son of “Papa Doc”) flees Haiti, ending 28 years of dictatorial rule by the Duvalier family. Army leader General Henri Namphy heads a new National Governing Council.

February 9, 1986. Halley’s Comet reaches its perihelion, the closest point to the Sun, during its second visit to the solar system in the 20th Century.

'Halley's Comet' photo (c) 2012, NASA Blueshift - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

February 18, 1986. The Soviet Union launches the Mir space station.

February 25, 1986. Known as the People Power Revolution, over two million Filippinos bring about the downfall of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos through a sustained campaign of civil resistance against regime violence and electoral fraud. Marcos and his wife Imelda flee the Philippines as Corazon Aquino, the widow of slain opposition leader Benigno Aquino, is named interim president of the island country.

April 26-30,1986. An explosion rips through the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in Ukraine, Soviet Union. One nuclear at CHernobyl is still blazing, and three other reactors have been shut down. About 15,000 people have been evacuated from the vicinity of the power plant. A book for young people about the Chernobyl disaster that I can recommend is Andrea White’s Radiant Girl, the fictional story of one girl whose life is changed forever by the nuclear disaster. From my interview with Ms. White:

I got the idea for Radiant Girl, my most recent book about the Chernobyl disaster, from a photograph I saw on the Internet. The photo showed a girl on a motorcycle in the Dead Zoneâ€“where towns and families once flourishedâ€“and when I saw that picture of the girl I knew I wanted to write about Chernobyl. The inscription was, â€œAs I pass through the checkpoint into the Dead Zone, I feel like I have entered an unreal world. It is divinely eerie like the Salvador Dali painting of the dripping clocks.â€

June 12, 1986. South Africa declares a nationwide state of emergency, and 1000 black activists are arrested.

September 5-6, 1986. Pan Am Flight 73, with 358 people on board, is hijacked at Karachi International Airport by four Abu Nidal terrorists. In Istanbul, two Abu Nidal terrorists kill 22 and wound 6 inside the Neve Shalom synagogue during Shabbat services. Abu Nidal, leader of this Palestinian terrorist group, told a journalist in 1985: “I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing … nightmares.”

1985: Events and Inventions

Apr15

A Year of Terrorism and Tragedy: Earthquake, volcano, cyclone, mudslides, storm surge–altogether they kill over 30,000 people during the year 1985. The terrorists, mostly Palestinian, kill far fewer people, but create havoc nevertheless, hijacking airplanes and a ship in their ongoing mission to turn the world’s attention toward the Palestinian cause.

March 11, 1985. Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the new leader of the USSR after the death of Konstantin Chernenko.

May 25, 1985. Bangladesh is hit by a tropical cyclone and storm surge, which kills approximately 10,000 people.

June 30, 1985. Thirty-nine U.S. hostages are released in Beirut, Lebanon after their TWA flight was hijacked seventeen days earlier by Islamic Jihad terrorists. The hijackers murdered one passenger, a U.S. navy diver, and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails as a condition for the release of the hostages. The U.S. and Israel insist that no deal has been struck with the terrorists, but Israel plans to release 700 prisoners in the next few days.

September 19, 1985. An 8.1 Richter scale earthquake strikes Mexico City. Around 10,000 people are killed, 30,000 injured, and 95,000 left homeless.

October 1, 1985. The Israeli air force bombs Palestinian Liberation Organization headquarters near Tunis in Tunisia.

October 7, 1985. The cruise ship Achille Lauro is hijacked in the Mediterranean Sea by four Palestinian terrorists. One passenger, American Leon Klinghoffer, is killed.

November 13, 1985. Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupts, killing an estimated 23,000 people in Columbia.

November 20, 1985. Microsoft Corporation releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.

November 23, 1985. EgyptAir Flight 648 is hijacked by the Abu Nidal group and flown to Malta, where Egyptian commandos storm the plane; 60 are killed by gunfire and explosions.

November 21, 1985. U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time in a summit in Geneva, Switzerland. The two leaders discuss nuclear arms control and reductions and human rights.

1984: Events and Inventions

Apr12

February 13, 1984. Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

February 26, 1984. United States Marines and other peacekeeping forces leave Beirut, Lebanon to be policed by local militias.

June 6, 1984. In response to militant Sikh extremists demanding their own state, Indian troops storm the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, killing an estimated 2,000 people.

August 21, 1984. Half a million people in Manila, the Philippines demonstrate against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

September, 1984. After two years of negotiations, agreement is reached for Great Britain to return Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997.

October 23, 1984. The world learns from moving BBC News TV reports that a famine is plaguing Ethiopia, where thousands of people have already died of starvation and as many as 10,000,000 more lives are at risk.

October 31, 1984. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is ambushed and assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards. Anti-Sikh riots break out. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son, becomes prime minister of India

December 8, 1984. At least 2000 people die in the Indian city of Bhopal after the US-owned Union Carbide chemical plant there has a chemical leak, releasing a huge cloud of toxic methyl isocyanate gas. Thousands more are blinded or injured.

December 10, 1984. Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against apartheid. He says, “I have just got to believe God is around. If He is not, we in South Africa have had it.”

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

Archives