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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 Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

May2

I do believe SFP at pages turned nailed this one. (You’ll only want to read her thoughts after you’ve read the book.) It’s a short book, a novelette really, but the ending isn’t . . . exactly. Hence the title.

The book is only 176 pages long, but it tells the story of Tony Webster’s life from his perspective, which it turns out is somewhat skewed. Maybe. Tony doesn’t “get it.” The book raises the possibility that we’re all like Tony, that our memories are unreliable and we really don’t understand each other or the events of our lives very well.

The Sense Of An Ending won the 2011 Man Booker prize for literature. I think it well worth the the time invested to read it and think about it.

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”

“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thougt we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient— it’s not useful— to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

The Expats by Chris Pavone

May1

About a month after I read the ARC of this chick lit/spy novel, I heard an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with author Chris Pavone. (According to the interviewer, it’s pronounced “pavoney”).

It seems that Mr. Pavone moved to Luxembourg where he became a “house-husband” and started writing a book that bored him just as much as housekeeping did. So, he decided to make the homemaker protagonist into a retired CIA spy, and the rest, as they say—well, if not history, at least it got more interesting.

So, the protagonist of this spy thriller was a CIA agent, but she’s hung up her spurs (and guns and spy stuff) and moved to Luxembourg to become a homemaker while her banker/computer security expert husband makes a mint helping secretive banks with their security systems. Kate sees little of her husband who works long hours, and she becomes bored with her life with little children. She begins to wonder if her past has come back to haunt her in the person of a couple in the “expat” community who seem to know more about her than they should.

The book has lots of twist and turns, as a thriller should. But something about it just didn’t draw me in the same way a Helen MacInnes novel always does (my gold standard for spy novels). Maybe it was the bored mommy angle that I didn’t like. The book was just good, not great.

Other blogger reviews:
Sam at Book Chase: “Seldom have I changed my mind about a book so many times before finishing it, than I did with Chris Pavone’s debut novel, The Expats.”

Read Around the World: “Well, you may take the girl out of the CIA but there’s no way you can take the CIA out of the girl. Pavone has created a spunky, devious, brave new heroine in Kate Moore and I don’t believe for a second that we’ve seen the last of her.”

Amnesia Is In

Apr26

What Alice Forgot by Lianne Moriarty

Alice Love is twenty-nine years old and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband Nick are deeply in love and very excited about their soon-to-be-born child. Alice’s older sister Elizabeth is her best friend, and life is good. The year is 1998.

But when Alice falls at gym and hits her head, something strange happens. She wakes up, not pregnant and not in 1998. It’s 2008, and Alice has lost the memory of the past ten years of her life. I liked the way this book, essentially chick-lit, ended. The ending was unexpected, and I was pleased with the choices the author made about her characters and their choices.

Of course, this novel made me think about memories, good and bad. Who are we without our memories?

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

In this amnesiac novel, Christine has lost more than twenty years of her life. She, too, was involved in an accident that caused her to lose her memory, but for Christine her ability to form and retain memories is impaired. She can remember what’s happened to her today, but when she goes to sleep and wakes up the next morning, her memories are all gone. Each day is a clean slate in which Christine starts out believing that she is still a twenty-something or even a child rather than a forty-five year old wife and mother. Christine’s husband, Ben, must remind her every morning who she is, where she is, and who he is.

“I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not a accumulation of our memories?”

This second book is more of a thriller: Christine’s memory loss puts her in a situation that is not what it seems to be, and by the end of the book Christine is in serious danger of losing her life if she cannot find a way to access the memories that will enable her to distinguish between truth and lies.

I thought both of these were worthwhile, if you’re at all interested in the premise. I also found a couple of books at Amazon that would make good nonfiction companion reads to these two novels. I haven’t read these, but I would like to do so soon.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. “Foer . . . draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.”

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel. “Driven by vibrant curiosity, Kandel’s personal quest to understand memory is threaded throughout this absorbing history. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel’s outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.”

And here are some fictional “amnesia books” that I have read and can recommend:
The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan. YA fiction. Semicolon review here. Sequels are The Long Way Home, The Truth of the Matter, and The Final Hour.

Random Harvest by James Hilton. Semicolon review here.

A Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan. Semicolon review here.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. Not exactly an amnesia story, but it reminds me of Hilton’s style somehow. Semicolon review here.

The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa. Semicolon review here. Engineer Husband is reading this one right now, and it’s one of my favorites. Math and memory loss.

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. More modern and young adult-ish. Semicolon review here.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson. Also YA and more of a twenty-first century feel. Semicolon review here.

Anne Perry’s William Monk detective series features Mr. Monk as a late nineteenth century private detective suffering from amnesia. His assistant/love interest/foil is a nurse named Hester.

Any more amnesiac selections that you can remember?

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Apr24

I don’t know if it was just me or my mood or what, but Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel that the NYT Book Review called “thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny” just felt like a P.G. Wodehouse wannabe, except more pretentious and not nearly as accessible or humorous. Scoop is a parody of the world of sensational journalism, and as such it’s neither dated nor inaccurate. If anything, Big Journalism has become more unreliable and farcical in the twenty-first century than it seems to have been in 1937-38 when this book was first published. But I did keep thinking, as I read the story of the accidental foreign correspondent for the Daily Beast, William Boot, that I’d rather be reading about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

In a case of mistaken identity, Boot is sent to the country of Ishmalia to cover an incipient rebellion. Although set in a fictional country in North or East Africa (near Soudan?, Waugh’s spelling), the novel doesn’t really have much to say about Africa either. The Africans in the novel are simply foils for the oh-so-comical exploits of the European press corps and the politicians who seek to exploit the Africans. The N-word makes frequent appearances, and although the mere appearance of such a term doesn’t offend me as much as it does some people, the attitude of condescension and superiority that all the Europeans in the novel have toward “the natives” does make for reader discomfort and weariness after a while.

“The novel is partly based on Waugh’s own experience working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini’s expected invasion of Abyssinia – what was later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. When he got his own scoop on the invasion he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy, but they discarded it.” Wikipedia

Now that’s funny.

One main idea in the novel is that the news reporters create the news. Even if nothing of importance is happening, where there are reporters, news must happen. So the reporters make it happen or make it up. Nowadays with CNN and the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, news must be created even faster and in greater quantity. Maybe that insight is worth wading through some of the obscure slang and bewildering politics of Scoop, but I’m not sure.

classicsclubI did like the way Waugh ends some of his chapters, with purposefully purple-ish prose that satirizes the journalists and yet communicates a sort of melancholy feel to the story:

“And the granite sky wept.”

“So the rain fell and the afternoon and the evening were succeeded by another night and another morning.”

“William once more turned to the Pension Dressler; the dark clouds opened above him; the gutters and wet leaves sparkled in sunlight and a vast, iridescent fan of colour, arc beyond arc of splendor, spread across the heavens. The journalists had gone, and a great peace reigned in the city.”

Scoop is the first book I’ve read from my Classics Club list. I’m hoping it only gets better from here.

World Book Night (Day)

Apr23

WBN Poster.indd

So, this is it: World Book Night (Day).

World Book Night is a celebration of reading and books which will see tens of thousands of people share books with others in their communities across America to spread the joy and love of reading on April 23. Successfully launched in the U.K. in 2011, World Book Night will also be celebrated in the U.S. in 2012, with news of more countries to come in future years. Additionally, April 23 is UNESCO’s World Book Day, chosen due to the anniversary of Cervantes’ death, as well as Shakespeare’s birth and death.

'peace like a river' photo (c) 2010, CHRIS DRUMM - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/I will be giving away twenty copies of the book Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend it. Here’s my review of Peace Like a River.

I have some questions for you, my readers, on this lovely day of celebration of reading and writing and creativity and story:

If you could give away one book to all the people in your life who “don’t read much”, what book would you give away?

If you were going to give away your one title to strangers, where would you go to give it away?

How will you celebrate World Book Day/Shakespeare’s (Possible) Birthday?

What is your favorite Shakespeare comedy? Tragedy? Other play?

If you were going to teach a class to high school students on Shakespeare, an entire year-long celebration of Shakespeare’s plays, what is one activity you would use to engage the students and communicate a love for the works of The Bard? What plays would you include in your curriculum for the year?

Happy World Book Day to you all!

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.

What Is the What by Dave Eggers

Apr17

The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Fictionalized biography—or autobiography or memoir brings up the question of whether any memoir or autobiography is strictly nonfiction. Our memories, as other books I’ve read lately have pointed out, are notoriously unreliable. Any attempt at memoir is liable to be “filled in” with a little fiction. Author Dave Eggers and the subject of this book, Valentino Achak Deng, chose to call What Is the What a work of fiction, since Mr. Deng could not vouch for the exact accuracy of all of his memories of specific conversations and incidents, some of which happened when he was quite young. However, Mr. Deng says that the major events in the story are true and historically accurate.

That said, I learned quite a lot about the civil war in Sudan and the “Lost Boys” from reading this book. Valentino is a real person, and he asked Mr. Eggers to help him tell his story.

What Is the What is the soulful account of my life: from the time I was separated from my family in Marial Bai to the thirteen years I spent in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, to my encounter with vibrant Western cultures beginning in Atlanta, to the generosity and the challenges that I encountered elsewhere.

As you read this book, you will learn about me and my beloved people of Sudan. I was just a young boy when the twenty-two-year civil war began that pitted Sudan’s government against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army. As a helpless human, I survived by trekking across many punishing landscapes while being bombed by Sudanese air forces, while dodging land mines, while being preyed upon by wild beasts and human killers. I fed on unknown fruits, vegetables, leaves and sometimes went with nothing for days. At many points, the difficulty was unbearable. I thought the whole world had turned blind eyes on the fate that was befalling me and the people of southern Sudan. Many of my friends, and thousands of my fellow countrymen, did not make it. May God give them eternal peace.

“Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. … I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. … I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.”

The story of Valentino Achak Deng’s adventures and misadventures in Sudan, Kenya, and the U.S.A. is “soulful” and insistent and absorbing. Mr. Deng speaks in the book quite honestly about the temptation to embellish and exaggerate the already harrowing experiences he and the other “Lost Boys” went through for the sake of a Western audience, about the jealousies and immature behaviors that some of the Lost Boys exhibit, and the difficulties that they have in making a new life for themselves in the United States. The book is as much about survival and what it takes to endure such trauma as it is about Valentino Achak Deng’s specific experience. As such, it is valuable reading for anyone who is suffering, or who expects to suffer, injustice, categories that include all of us.

The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation.

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Apr15

This fictional autobiography of Alice Liddell, the original Alice in Wonderland, is disturbing in its portrayal of Alice as Lolita and Lewis Carroll as a sort of passive pedophile. The book doesn’t indicate that Carroll molested Alice and there’s nothing sexually explicit in the story, but it does imply that Carroll ruined her youth and reputation with his excessive interest in photographing her and that his interest in her was unnatural and detrimental to Alice’s growth into maturity.

I find such speculation excessive in itself, and although the novel was interesting, I found the parts about Alice’s relationships with men, not just Carroll but also Ruskin and one of Queen Victoria’s sons, to be difficult to believe. So Victorian—in the worst sense of that term. I don’t know. If you’re particularly interested in Carroll and Alice Liddell, you might either love or hate the book, depending on your image of Mr. Carroll.

Here are some other facts and snippets to take into consideration as you read, if you read:

Wikipedia article on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov:
“Vladimir Nabokov was fond of Lewis Carroll and had translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. He even called Carroll the ‘first Humbert Humbert’.”

From The Eighth Lamp Ruskin studies today:
“Alice’s father Henry Liddell was Ruskin’s tutor at one time in Christ Church, Oxford. He encouraged Ruskin’s talent and promoted his architectural drawings. It was this early connection that led to Ruskin giving drawing lessons to the Liddell children, at a time when he was becoming increasingly famous due to the success of his critical writings.”

From alice-in-wonderland.net:

Q: Was Carroll a pedophile?

A: No, probably not. He certainly liked little girls at a level that was more than normal. However, there is no evidence at all that he was sexually attracted to them. He did photograph them in the nude, but only with permission from their mothers, and only if the children were completely at ease with it. He made sure that after his death those pictures were destroyed or returned to the children to prevent them from getting embarrassed.

In his time making nude photographs of children wasn’t uncommon; all Victorian artists did studies of child-nudes, it was a trendy subject for the time. When his child-friends grew up, they told only positive stories about their warm friendship. It is suggested that Carroll loved little girls so much because he had many sisters which he loved to entertain when he was a young boy.

This article in Slate magazine about children’s author Margaret Wise Brown mentions Lewis Carroll as another example of a writer who perhaps never grew up, who retained his childhood in a way that most of us don’t. The movie Finding Neverland portrays Peter Pan author James Barrie as a perpetual child who enjoyed the company of children, not in a sexual way, but as playmates who appreciated his fantasy world. I think this understanding of both Barrie and Carroll is the closest to truth.

Texas Tuesday: The Buckskin Line by Elmer Kelton

Feb21

Elmer Kelton is from my hometown, San Angelo, Texas. I’m not much of a reader of westerns, but I thought I should at least sample the work of Mr. Kelton, seeing as he’s a hometown boy and was the farm-and-ranch editor for the San Angelo Standard-Times. Also, for five years he was editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine, and for another twenty-two years he was editor of Livestock Weekly. He wrote more than thirty western novels, set mostly in Texas, and he was awarded several Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. In 1977, Kelton received an Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement, and in 1998, he received the first Lone Star Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Now that’s a resume to be found only in West Texas.

The Buckskin Line introduces us to Rusty Shannon, a red-headed orphan who is nearly captured by the Comanches in the first chapter. The Comanches do kill Rusty’s parents as the story opens in August, 1840 during the Comanche raid into south central Texas during which the small town of Linnville in Victoria COunty was sacked and burned. “The surprised people of Linnville fled to the water and were saved by remaining aboard small boats and a schooner . .. at anchor in the bay.”

In the story three year old Rusty is carried off by the Comanche raiders, but rescued by a ragtag group of pursuers, including Mike Shannon, an Irish-Texan wanderer who farms the land he finds until it wears out and then moves on. Mike has a wife, but the two have been unable to have childen. So they adopt the orphan boy and keep his first name, Davy, the only thing the young boy can tell them about himself. Davy grows up to be called “Rusty” in reference to his red hair.

Most of the book is about the adventures of the young adult Rusty Shannon, as he joins the Texas Rangers on the Red River border with Indian Territory just before and after the outbreak of the Civil War. Rusty is a brave and honest young man, but somewhat rash in judgement and too ready for revenge when someone hurts the people he loves. The Buckskin Line shows how Rusty Shannon matures and learns to temper his judgement with faith and patience.

I liked it enough to want to read the other two books in Kelton’s Texas Rangers Trilogy, Badger Boy and The Way of the Coyote.