Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout

Jan14

I first saw this book recommended at the Breakpoint website. Then, I think I read this recommendation at MarysLibrary. So I finally got the book from the library and read it.

It was very good. Ms. Strout apparently knows something about small town life and about being a pastor or a pastor’s wife, even though the blurb says she lives in New York City. Abide With Me tells the story of Pastor Tyler Caskey who is serving in his first pastorate in the community of West Annett, Maine. The novel is set in the late 1950’s, about the same time I was born. Lots of period details give life to the story and make it seem real. People are worried about Khruschev and the Communist threat, building bomb shelters, how to survive a nuclear attack. Then, there are the more immediate concerns of the village, such as a new wife for Pastor Caskey whose wife Lauren died a year ago and what’s to be done about the pastor’s five year old daughter Katherine who’s misbehaving in church and in kindergarten. Tyler Caskey has his own thoughts and worries: should he support the church organist’s bid for a new organ and how can he please his congregation, his mother, and everyone else, including God? And will he ever experience The Feeling, that indefineable sense of God’s presence and blessing, again?

Abide With Me is novel about grief and about maturity. Tyler Caskey is a protagonist who reminds me of Engineer Husband; he wants everyone to be happy. Sometimes, if things are not right, he wants to pretend that they are. He’s not a man to make waves, to disturb the universe. Unfortunately, life doesn’t cooperate; suffering comes; and Tyler finds himself finally unable to cope with the trials of his congregants, the needs of his family, and his own grief and guilt over the death of his wife. Things come to a crisis on a Sunday morning, as Tyler is supposed to be preaching, and the inhabitants of West Annett receive an opportunity to give grace and mercy to the pastor who has tried to give them the Word of God in spite of his own brokenness.

Elizabeth Strout’s second novel reminds me a bit of Marilynne Robinson’s second novel Gilead. There’s the same gently descriptive writing, the same delight in the natural world and the dailyness of life, the same sort of pastoral protagonist, although Tyler Caskey is much younger than Robinson’s Reverend Ames. Both men are humble servant/leaders, reluctant to claim that they have all the answers or know the mind of God. If you liked Gilead, if you are a pastor or a pastor’s wife, if you are interested in an account of living a Christian, but imperfect, life, you should like Abide With Me. It’s the best book I’ve read this year so far.

From a sermon by Tyler Caskey (never delivered):

“Do you think that because we have learned the sun does not go down, that in fact we are going around at a dizzying speed, that the sun is not the only star in the heavens —do you think this means that we are any less important than we thought we were? Oh, we are far less important than we thought we were, and we are far, far more important than we think we are. Do you imagine that the scientist and the poet are not united? Do you assume you can answer the question of who we are and why we are here by rational thought alone? It is your job, your honor, your birthright, to bear the burden of this mystery. And it is your job to ask, in every thought, word and deed: How can love best be served?

God is not served when you speak with relish of rumors about those who are poor in spirit and cannot be defended; God is not served when you ignore the poverty of spirit within yourselves.”

Tyler says in the book that this sermon excerpt breaks one of the cardinal rules of homiletics. Do you know what rule he breaks? (I didn’t even know there was such a rule; I’m going to be listening carefully to my pastor’s sermon next Sunday to see if he ever breaks The Rule.)

Poetry Friday: Setting the Table

Jan12

We’ve been reading a poem or two each morning from the book, My Poetry Book: an anthology of modern verse for boys and girls, selected and arranged by Grace Thompson Huffard and Laura Mae Carlisle in collaboration with Helen Ferris, illustrated by Willy Pogany. This book is the one I remember my mother reading poetry from when I was a kid of a girl.

This morning, however, I read a poem, and very mature 17-year old Dancer Daughter said, “I don’t like these kiddie poems.”

To be perfectly honest, a lot of the poetry in the book is rather sweet and sentimental, and the illustrations are, too. The collection was first copyrighted in 1934, and republished in 1956. I like it, but it may not “speak” to the young adults in the crowd. I found this one a few pages over by Dorothy Aldis, and I think everyone liked it.

Setting the Table

Evenings
When the house is quiet
I delight
To spread the white
Smooth cloth and put the flowers on the table.

I place the knives and forks around
Without a sound.
I light the candles.

I love to see
Their small reflected torches shine
Against the greenness of the vine
And garden.

Is that the mignonette, I wonder,
Smells so sweet?

And then I call them in to eat.

Delight in the quotidian. I wish my table looked like that. I wish my house were quiet, ever. We’re open 24 hours here. Oh, well, I can dream.

I’ve decided, by the way, to combine Fine Art Friday with Poetry Friday and give you a poem and a picture each Friday. This photographic print is called “Sunlight Beams onto a Table Set for Dinner” by Joel Sartore, and it’s available for purchase at allposters.com.

The Poetry Friday round-up is at Big A little a.

Newbery Predictions

Jan10

Franki at A Year of Reading invites readers and bloggers to predict the winner(s) of the Newbery Award and Newbery Honor books. I’m sure that, like Franki and Mary Lee, I will have no success at reading the minds of the Newbery committee members, but I’m probably more prepared to make a guess this year than I ever have been. Thanks to the Cybil awards process, I have actually read several books that were published in 2007. So here are my predictions:

1. Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. I thought this book was the best of all of the books I read that were nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut for the Cybil award, so maybe I can send good vibes about it to the Newbery folks. I’ve only read about 17 of the Cybil nominees and dipped into 3 or 4 that I didn’t like enough to finish them. I did fall in love with Clementine. Oh my darling, oh my darling . . .

2. Alabama Moon by Watt Key. Even though I thought Alabama Moon was more appropriate for young adults (high school age and up) than for middle graders, I did like the book itself very much. Well-written story, interesting subject, good characterization —a good candidate for some award somewhere. Why not the Newbery?

3. Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata. I liked this book even though it wasn’t my favorite. I think the elite of the children’s literature world will love it. It’s multi-cultural; it’s anti-war; and it’s a good story. I suppose the only problem is that Cynthia Kadohata has already won the Newbery Award once, but it’s been awarded twice to the same author before. They could do it again.

4. Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy. If funny books like Clementine don’t win the Newbery, if we have to have a Serious Subject, then Yellow Star is my personal favorite for the award. It’s deep, disturbing, with an interesting twist at the end that ties into the title, and it’s still accessible to children. My then-eleven year old read it and liked it and learned from it.

5. Rules by Cynthia Lord. This one’s a dark horse, first children’s book published by Ms. Lord, possible winner, IF the committee members appreciate the story of a girl growing up with an autistic brother and making friends with a severely handicapped young man in a wheelchair.

If The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak wins, I will resign myself to the idea that I just don’t get contemporary children’s literature and go back to my pet project of reading all the Newbery Award and Newbery Honor books of the twentieth century. If all the world proclaims that The Book Thief is the best book ever written, I will still say, “I just don’t get what all the fuss is about!” Death narrates a book about the Holocaust, indeed! Give me Yellow Star, a real Holocaust story sans the bizarre narrator.

OK, I just figured out that Marcus Zusak is an Australian and lives in Sydney, and the Newbery Award is only awarded to American citizens. Oh, well, I needed to get that rant off my chest anyway after seeing Death Takes a Holiday, aka The Book Thief on every blogger’s year-end list of favorites from here to Kalamazoo.

Poetry Friday: Carl Sandburg

Jan5

Tomorrow, January 6th, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. So I thought today would be a good Friday to post something by and about Sandburg. I’ve already posted my favorite Sandburg poem, Arithmetic, here. I found this poem tonight:

“Joy” (1916) by Carl Sandburg

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere–
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

I like those last two lines.

Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Dec15

Two books set during World War War II: One takes place in California and Arizona; the other book is set on the other side of the country in North Carolina. Sumiko is twelve years old and lives with her aunt and uncle and cousins on a flower farm; Anna Fay is thirteen and has become “the man of the house” since her daddy’s gone to fight in the war. Both girls are typical older children, responsible, obligated to grow up fast and take care of younger brothers and sisters. Both girls use gardening as a way to work through their problems and challenges. And each must face her own war, her own imprisonment, and her own fight against ignorance and prejudice.

Sumiko, heroine of Weedflower, is a Japanese-American girl; her parents are dead, and she faces prejudice against “orientals” from the beginning of the story when she is dis-invited to a birthday party for a girl in her class. The challenges only get worse after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and all the residents of Japanese descent on the West Coast are gathered and sent to internment camps. Sumiko, her aunt, her two older cousins, and her little brother are sent to Poston in Arizona. There Sumiko must learn to survive and even overcome the heat, the dust, the hostility of neighbors, and even the threat of succumbing to “the ultimate boredom.” The latter is her grandfather’s term for the temptation to give up, to lose your dreams, to surrender hope, a temptation that Sumiko must face and defeat if she is to win her war.

Anna Fay, the main character in Blue has a battle to fight, too. A polio epidemic has invaded western North Carolina in 1944, and Anna Fay’s little brother Bobby falls victim to the dread disease. Later in the story, Anna Fay herself must battle polio, even as she worries about her daddy fighting Hitler in Europe and about whether her family will ever be together again. Anna Fay is trapped in the polio hospital just as Sumiko is trapped in the internment camp, and Anna Fay faces boredom and prejudice, too. The discrimination comes when Anna Fay becomes friends with a “colored girl” who also has polio, but the two girls can’t convince anyone that they should be allowed to share a hospital ward as well as a friendship.

I thought both of these books were excellently well-written. Blue goes for the tear-jerker, drama reaction; the writing in Weedflower is a little more restrained. Sumiko is the stereotypical Japanese, determined to keep her emotions under control and her tears hidden; Anna Fay is comforted by her friend’s word picture of a God who saves each person’s tears in a bottle on a heavenly window-sill. (Anna Fay’s bottle is blue.) Each girl compares herself to a flower: Sumiko is a weedflower, a flower of the field that is both beautiful and resilient; Anna Fay is sometimes as fragile as a mimosa blossom and other times as tough as wisteria.

These books would work well, paired, in a unit study on World War II to give students a good picture of different aspects of the time period. Other World War II books for girls:

Denenberg, Barry. Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.
Denenberg, Barry. One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938.
Greene, Betty. Summer of my German Soldier.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941.
Rinaldi, Ann. Keep Smiling Through.

Weedflower and Blue also have another thing in common; both books are nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Dec5

This afternoon Brown Bear Daughter inhaled this story of a little Jewish girl who survived life during World War II in the Lodz ghetto, and I read it myself in one sitting a few days ago. It’s not a long read, 227 pages, and the prose text is arranged in an almost poetic form such that each page only has about a hundred words. So it doesn’t take long to read, but it does pack an emotional punch.

Ms. Roy wrote the book based on the true story of her Aunt Sylvia Perlmutter, who was one of only twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto in Poland. If you read the introduction or know anything about the Holocaust, you know from the beginning that there are difficult things coming in this book. I hesitated to give it to my eleven year old daughter because I didn’t know how it would affect her emotionally. However, she read it, said it was a good book, and didn’t seem too disturbed. I was the one who mourned as I read for all those children who didn’t survive —and even for those who did.

The Jewish refrain in relation to the Holocaust is, “Never forget!” However, we’re always only one generation away from forgetting what horrors man can perpetrate upon other men. I don’t know what at what age a child is old enough to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, but I agree that we must not forget that “civilized” man is only one step away from barbarous acts of cruelty. And at some point even our children need to know that sin and evil are real.

They also need hope, and Jennifer Roy manages to tell a story that is filled with tragedy and yet leaves the reader with hope. As the story begins in the fall of 1939, little Sylvia is four and a half years old. On January 20, 1945, the day after she and her family are liberated from the ghetto, Sylvia celebrates her tenth birthday. By the time she is ten, Sylvia has seen and experienced things that most of us have, thankfully, only read about. She goes on to live a full life, marriage, a son, grandchildren. For over fifty years she doesn’t talk about her experiences during World War II. Finally, she tells her niece in a series of telephone interviews what she remembers of what happened to her and her family during the Holocaust.

It’s a story worth reading and remembering.

Again, this book is one of the many good books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt

Nov10

Better late than never, I just finished reading my fifth book for Carl’s RIP Reading Challenge, the challenge that was supposed to be done by the end of October. Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure how “gothic, scary, moody, or atmospheric” it is. I’d describe it as more Victorian meets Post-Modern, and Victorian wins —maybe.

This tension between Victorian ideals and post-modern cynicism runs through the book because it’s really set in two time periods. A pair of 1980’s academics are investigating a mystery involving a pair of Victorian poets. The world of post-modern academia is shown to be cutthroat, sexually confused, and filled with social and intellectual angst. The Victorian literary world, on the other hand, is depicted as genteel, sexually confused, and filled with religious confusion and doubt. It’s the sexual confusion that’s the common denominator. For instance, witness this conversation between two female/feminist scholars:

Maud: Just at the moment, I’m trying celibacy. I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.

Lenora: Oh, I did, for a month, back in the fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and should give myself up. So I found Mary-Lou.

The Victorians aren’t much better, but if I go into the details of their tangled affairs, I’ll give away some of the mystery. So, I’ll let it suffice to say the Victorian poets are no more straightforward and unambiguous about love, sex and marriage than the post-modern academics.

Another theme is that of how over-analysis destroys life. The Victorians analyze their faith and weaken its power to comfort or guide behavior. They also engage in the much more concrete destruction of life as they dissect insects and sea creatures and then use them as images and symbols in their poetry. The modern-day academics feel they must know every detail about the lives of the poets, but realize that in dissecting the biographical materials, they risk destroying the life of the poetry. The most intelligent of them also see that self-analysis, ala Freud, has inhibited the ability of men and women to respond to one another naturally almost to the point of extinguishing the possibility for romance. To the very end, the book explores the tensions between autonomy and commitment, between romantic idealism and hard-headed realism, between fatalistic determinism and individual choice.

Finally, though, it was the mystery that kept me reading. These Victorians and denizens of academia were foreign to me, even though I understood some of their concerns. I was, however, quite interested to find out the answers to various mysteries and questions raised in the course of the novel. In fact, I understood the characters’ obsession with finding out, with knowing the ending to the story, as well as I understood any of the complicated motivations in the novel.

One of the Victorian poets is writing a poem based on the myth of Melusina, a sort of mermaid/water spirit. The words that the other fictional poet writes about the Melusine myth are also true of this novel:

What is so peculiarly marvelous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic —and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales —the best of them— are solid— depicting the life of households and the planning of societes, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.

Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. It was made into a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Aaron Eckhart, and Jeremy Northam in 2002. I found the book to be intriguing and mysterious, even if the characters were a bit too tangled up in their post-modern anxieties and inhibitions to be truly sympathetic. If you’re looking for a “literary mystery,” it’s much better, and less gory, than The Dante Club, which was the first of my RIP books.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Oct25

A quotation on the back of the book jacket from a reviewer refers to Mr. Ishiguro’s “inimitably out-of-kilter vision.” THose are just the words I was looking for as I read this book —out-of-kilter. I find that frequently as I read more recently published fiction, in the last fifty years say, I feel a sense of culture shock. These people in I’m reading about are off-kilter, not quite insane, but not thinking logically, not quite right. Eldest Daughter says it’s a feature of post modern fiction and post-modern culture. I guess I’m just a modernist, or maybe Victorian.

Anyway, I picked up When We Were Orphans at a used book sale because I enjoyed Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go so much. I didn’t enjoy this book as much. The narrator was . . . odd. (It must be the week for odd. See this review of The Book Thief.) Christopher Banks, the aforementioned narrator, is such a distinctive personality that it is hard to decide, but I almost convinced myself that Ishiguro was trying to make Banks the embodiment of what was wrong with the British attitude toward the world, and particularly China, prior to World War II. Banks is blind, majoring on minor issues that don’t seem at all minor to him, while the world around him is a literal war zone. The British, too, were blindly crying out “Peace, Peace!” when there was no peace. Then again, Banks’ blindness has to do specifically with his parents and his orphaned state. The British government wasn’t searching for its lost parents. So the analogy only goes so far before it breaks down.

Mr. Ishiguro tells a good story and creates intriguing characters, even if his protagonist does have a bit of a bug in his brain. The other characters in the novel are believable, but negligible. Christopher Banks is the center of interest. The setting for the second half of the story is Shanghai, 1937. Wartime Shanghai is vivdly portrayed, even though the person doing the portraying is somewhat myopic. Somehow the author manages to enable us to see through his narrator. And that vision leads to an ambiguous ending in which Christopher Banks believes he has finally found out what happened to his parents, but I’m not so sure I’m buying the story. So we’re left with more post-modern ambiguity. It’s pretty good slightly off-kilter ambiguity, as evidenced by the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out two days later, if you like that sort of thing.

If you’ve never read anything by Ishiguro, I recommend Never Let Me Go. (Semicolon review here.) If you like that one, and if you like off-center, you’ll probably enjoy When We Were Orphans, too.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Oct22

This was an odd book, so odd that I probably wouldn’t have managed to get very far into it if it hadn’t been recommended so highly by so many people. I’m a straightforward, A-Z, kind of gal. Give me a story that starts out “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after.” Or not happily. Tragedy is OK, too. But I like it straight and plain-spoken, or maybe poetic, but not a strange, episodic story narrated by the Grim Reaper himself.

Except I did like The Book Thief, so I’m confused. The book starts out with this comforting announcement:

* * * HERE IS A SMALL FACT * * *
You are going to die.

It ends with Death Himself beng confused and “haunted by humans.”

So, make what you will of that, and decide whether or not you want to read an odd book about Death and the Holocaust and World War II and bombs and Germany with lots of cursing, mostly in German, and lots of the aforementioned death, mostly of everybody in the book. It sounds depressing, but it’s not really. It is gritty and the tiniest bit hopeful, but not too. I can’t decide if kids will like it or not. I don’t think my kids would care for it. But some might. Or this might be the sort of book that will win lots of awards because it’s written in a different, literary sort of way and it’s about a Serious Subject, but it’s mostly loved by librarians and teachers. I can see high school teachers assigning this book in literature classes or history classes.

If I sound ambivalent, it’s because I am. Help? Someone else tell me now that I’ve read it why it was that you liked it so much.

Visit Semicolon’s Amazon Store for more great book recommendations.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Oct16

With the ‘domestic epic’, a sweeping drama set against a carefully studied social background, she broke a new ground. Undset turned away from the sentimental style of national romanticism and wanted to re-create the realism of the Icelandic sagas and write so vividly, that “everything that seem(s) romantic from here – murder, violence, etc becomes ordinary – comes to life,” as the author explained. . . . Undset’s emphasis on women’s biological nature, and her view that motherhood is the highest duty (to which) a woman can aspire, has been criticized by feminists as reactionary. —Kirjasto

I’m not surprised that feminist critics might not appreciate Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. What a story! I actually began reading this story of a medieval Norwegian mother and wife a long time ago, but found myself unable to stay with it. This time I read it in three separate paperback books, The Bridal Wreath (Part 1), Mistress of Husaby (Part 2), and The Cross (Part 3). I think the three separate books made it more digestible and less intimidating. Anyway, this time I not only read the entire book, over a thousand pages, but I enjoyed it so much that I plan to add it to my list of the 100 Best Fiction Books Ever Written.

The Bridal Wreath tells the story of Kristin’s childhood, her growth into womanhood, her betrothal, her sin and loss of honor, and her marriage. For better or for worse, the decisions that Kristin makes in this first book determine the remainder of the events of her life and her willfulness in choosing her own husband throws a shadow over even the happiest of times in her later life. Kristin is a likeable protagonist, but very much a fallible one. Book 1 of this trilogy is about rebellion and how easy it is to fall into sin, how justifiable it seems. The story also demonstrates how one sin leads to another and “what a tangled web we weave.”

Nevertheless, Kristin becomes The Mistress of Husaby, the medieval estate of her husband, Erlend. She gives her husband sons, seven sons. They are rich in land, in friends, in family. But their character, or lack thereof, comes back to haunt the two of them and their marriage again and again. Having started off on the wrong foot, so to speak, Kristin and her husband can never manage to live in harmony for long. Erlend is careless and untrustworthy, just as he was when Kristin married him. Kristin is often shrewish and disrespectful in response to her husband’s irresponsibility. Still they build a marriage that, just barely, outlasts the storms of adultery, abandonment, imprisonment, sickness, and disgrace.

In Book 3, The Cross, Kristin is getting old for a woman of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She’s in her forties as the story progresses. Her sons are growing up, and her husband is growing old. Kristin must learn the lesson of self-denial and letting go of those whom she loves fiercely and somewhat possessively. Perhaps as my children grow up and begin to leave the nest in little ways, I identify with Kristin in this book most of all. She wants so much to shield her sons from harm and from difficulty, but most of all from themselves and the trouble they will bring upon themselves by their own sins and bad decisions. Oh, I do want the same thing.

“When you yourself had borne a child, Kristin, methought you would understand,” her mother had said once. Now, she understood that her mother’s heart had been scored deep with memories of her daughter, memories of thoughts for her child from the time it was unborn and from all the years a child remembers nothing of, memories of fear and hope and dreams that children never know have been dreamed for them, until their own time comes to fear and hope and dream in secret —

But Kristin learns that her sons have their own dreams and their own unwise decisions to make. And she can only pray for them and leave them to the mercy of God. She comes to realize, too, that her own prayers have always been answered by a faithful God, that she has always been in His hand, even when He allowed her to follow the sinful desires of her own heart.

Never, it seemed to her had she prayed to God for aught else than that He might grant her her own will. And she had got always what she wished—most. And now she sat here with a bruised spirit—not because she had sinned against God, but because she was miscontent that it had been granted her to follow the devices of her own heart to the journey’s end.

Oh, that the Lord would say “no” and put a barrier in my way when I ask Him for what I think I want but what He does not will. And I pray the same for my children. But sometimes He sees that we need to experience the fruits of our willful decisions before we can see clearly that His will is best.

Kristin Lavransdatter is a wonderful book for wives and mothers especially, for those of us who sometimes struggle with those roles and who often delight in the same. If it’s slow going at first, please persist. The language is beautiful, but somewhat archaic and stilted. I think you’ll find the book worth getting through any initial difficulties.