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The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Sep14

Recommended by 3M at 1 More Chapter. Also recommended by Random Wonderer.

I told my Algebra 2 teacher in high school that I hated math. He should have handed me this novel by award-winning author Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder), not that it was even a spark in the eye back then. I still don’t care much for mathematics, but if you can put it in a story, a really good story, I’ll go along with it, and even, almost see the beauty. I always enjoyed the story problems a lot more than I did the ones that were just straight numbers.

The Professor is a brilliant math professor, retired as a result of an accident in which he sustained a head injury. Now he’s a solver of math puzzles living on the bounty of his widowed sister-in-law because The Professor can only remember the last eighty minutes of his life, and everything that happened before 1975 when the accident took place.

The Housekeeper is the fifth in a succession of housekeepers hired to care for the professor —and to be re-introduced to him each morning and several times a day since the professor has no long term memory. The Housekeeper is able to give the professor acceptance and the gift of no expectations. The Professor is able to give the Housekeeper and her son, Root, the gift of friendship and of mathematics. Numbers are the Professor’s friends; and he has the ability to make those numbers and their properties tell stories, provoke thought, and give life to those around him, especially to The Housekeeper and to Root.

The novel includes a bit of mystery: what is the Professor’s relationship with his sister-in-law? Why does she tell The Housekeeper not to consult her about anything concerning the Professor? I’ll even warn you that the mystery is never fully resolved. However, the central relationships are those between The Professor, The Housekeeper, and Root. The book is a lovely exploration of friendship without conditions attached and passion for the depth of God’s creation in the form of mathematics.

And I explored imaginary numbers, triangular numbers, square roots, primes, and factorials, and amicable numbers, painlessly and delightfully explained and illustrated in the life and stories of The Professor. Do you know about the relationship between the numbers 220 and 284? I do now, and it’s rather incredible.

Read the book.

BBAW: Best Thriller/Mystery/Suspense BLog

Sep9

Voting is now open at the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards.

Kittling: Books Kittling “is a Gaelic word that means “anything that strikes [my] fancy”, and that pretty much sums up my reading tastes. Although I do have a strong perference for crime fiction (mysteries), I also love historical fiction, history, biographies, time travel…anything that satisfies my craving for strong characters, story and setting.” Cathy has a list of favorite mystery series that I would like to emulate, only mine would be different because I haven’t read any of hers –yet. Cathy also has feature called Scene of the Blog which show us pictures of where those bloggers we know and love actually blog.

A Work in Progress I’ve had Dani’s blog in my feedreader for a long time. I like her because she’s not pretentious, but she reads a lot. And often she reads the kind of books that I want to know about. Dani’s the one who introduced me to Persephone Books and to the Modern Library Top 100 list. I have several books on my TBR list because of her reviews.

Bookgasm is a prolific blogger, heavy on the news and giveaways and new releases and reviews of new books. I liked this list of 50 Reasons No One Wants to Publish Your First Book, kind of snarky but funny. Bookgasm is edited by Ron Lott.

Jen’s Book Thoughts Jen features Six Word Memoirs from famous and not as famous authors, a good way to to take a look at some authors and what they think about their life’s work. She’s also got author interviews, and lots of reviews

The Drowning Machine is “swimming upriver in the river of books.” But right now Corey Wilde, the blogger at The Drowning Machine, is busy with The Watery Grave Short Story Invitational. Sounds dangerous to me.

SInce I have to choose, I think I’ll go with Jen’s Book Thoughts on this one. Her layout is clean and inviting, and the content is spectacular. I especially the idea of the Six Word Memoirs.

Identity Crisis

Sep1

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

Little Face by Sophie Hannah.

I read these two thrillers back to back, and although Fingersmith is set in Victorian London, and Little Face takes place in modern day England, a village called Spilling, the two novels have quite a lot in common. Both books deal with themes of identity, stolen identities to be exact, and babies switched at birth. The reader of both books is also forced to switch points of view in different parts of the books as the author changes the narrative point of view and to decide who is lying and who is telling the truth. Both books are steeped in deception and double-crossing and lies and megalomania.

Unfortunately, although both books are absorbing page-turners, both also have issues. Fingersmith had me speed reading to see what would happen as the narrator in the first section of the book, a gamin of the London underworld named Sue, tells about the fraud that she and a young criminal called Gentleman are practicing upon an unsuspecting, and unmarried, lady, Maud Lilly. Sue is supposed to help Gentleman gain Maud’s confidence so that he can marry her and thereby gain her fortune, payable upon her marriage. However, things are not nearly so simple as they seem which why it takes 511 pages to tell the story. In fact, the first plot twist in this story made me laugh out loud; it was neatly done and perfectly timed. There were more twists and turns to come.

As I said, I was speeding along to see what would happen to Maud and Sue when I was brought up short by what I can only describe as “soft porn” at the heart of the story. It bothered me. I thought about giving up the novel, but I had too much invested in the characters. I’m still not sure that the decision to finish reading the book was a good one, even though the questionable portions were not extensive. To state the problem clearly, if a graphic description of lesbian sex will bother you, don’t read the book. Again, it bothered me.

Little Face had other problems. It was a really good story about a woman who comes home from her first trip out of the house two weeks after the birth of her first child to find that someone has taken her daughter and substituted another baby for her. And no one believes the mom, Alice; not even the baby’s father believes that the baby in the crib is not the same baby Alice and he brought home from the hospital. The story is intriguing and brings up a lot of questions, both plot-wise and in the ideas that keep replaying about fear and duplicity and sanity. However, I didn’t feel that the plot itself was resolved properly. Maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t see how it was that one of the characters (being purposely vague so as not to spoil the surprises in the plot) changed into a different person with a completely opposite personality at the end of the novel. Little Face also has some bad language and sickening violence, but not so much that I couldn’t skim it and get on with the story.

Take it or leave it: I read two stories with absorbing plots, but also with major problems that sort of spoiled them for me. I did finish both of them, though. You may love either or both. Most all of the reviews I read were quite positive.

Other views:

Nymeth on Fingersmith: “Being so afraid of spoiling this book for others also means that unfortunately I can’t even say much about the themes, about what I found so brilliant, about why I loved it so much. But please know that I did love it—it’s one of my favourite reads of the year so far, and I seriously suspect I have found a new author to add to my list of favourites.

Caribousmom on Fingersmith: “I thoroughly enjoyed this novel which uncovers the sinister underbelly of the human soul. Gentleman is the perfect villain – handsome, mysterious and evil. Just when the reader thinks she knows where the story is taking her, there is a twist and it goes in another direction. No one is as they seem.”

Farm Lane Books on Little Face: “Unlike much of the crime fiction I have read recently this contained no unlikely coincidences. The plot was as realistic as it is possible to get, while retaining many clever twists.”

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Aug17

This is America–a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up New York State or in the Carolina Hills.
Main Street is the climax of civilization.

So begins Sinclair Lewis’s novelistic critique of the manners, mores, traditions of Main Street, USA. Published in 1920, Main Street is proto-feminist, liberal in its politics (to contrast with the no doubt conservative politics of 1920’s small town businessmen), and agnostic in its religious views. Our protagonista, Carol Kennicott becomes the wife of a small town doctor, and finds, to her dismay, that she cannot find a place for herself at all in Gopher Prairie. At one point she calls herself a “hexagonal peg.” (“Solution: find the hexagonal hole,” she says.) She tries to reform the town, to bring culture and refinement to her neighbors and to her husband, then to reform herself to appreciate village life, but all to no avail. For 479 pages Carol struggles, fights, regroups, hides, ventures out again, runs away, and finally resigns herself to being the perpetual aginner, in an overwhelming sea of mediocrity and traditional (hypocritical) family values.

“I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”

Through the entire book, Carol mostly stays just this side of being an obnoxious, supercilious snob, and when she crosses the line, she knows it, admits it, and laughs at herself. It’s worth reading the book for those moments of self-deprecation and realism. Carol never will admit that anything about Main Street or anyone who lives on Main Street is worthy or objectively beautiful, but she finds that city people and office life are much the same as Main Street and its denizens. The best parts of the book are Lewis’s observations, voiced through Carol, of the contradictory ways we think about ourselves and others. His psychological insight into the mind of a young married woman is keen and humorous. Carol tries to read poetry with her prosaic doctor husband, makes various people she meets into heroes, and then finds that they, too, are rather prosaic and ordinary. She’s something of an idealist and unwilling to become a cynic.

The writing and the tone are well done. It’s no wonder that Lewis won the Nobel Prize, ten years after the publication of Main Street, in 1930. However, Lewis’s inability to see any good at all on Main Street makes the book and the world it inhabits a rather unhappy and tedious place to spend reading time. Which Carol Kennicott would say is a good description of Main Street and of Gopher Prairie.

But I still maintain that there are a few kindred spirits in the wasteland, that some church-goers are both thoughtful and sincere, that there is more depth, and even poetry, to the average Main Streeter than Lewis and his mouthpiece would credit. Sinclair Lewis became an expert at showing up the limitations and hypocrisies of American life (see Babbit, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith), but he never got past that antipathy to traditional American values to see anything worth appreciating and preserving in the American experience.

Interesting side note from Wikipedia: “Main Street was initially awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, but was rejected by the Board of Trustees, who overturned the jury’s decision. The prize went, instead, to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. In 1926 Lewis refused the Pulitzer when he was awarded it for Arrowsmith.”

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome

Aug10

A sampler:

“You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris—no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never ‘weeps he knows not why.’ If Harris’s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.”

“Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough more to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.”

“In the church is a memorial to Mrs. Sarah Hill, who bequeathed $1(pound) annually, to be divided at Easter, between two boys and two girls who ‘had never been undutiful to their parents; who had never been known to swear or to tell untruths, to steal, or to break windows.’ Fancy giving up all that for five shillings a year! It is not worth it.”

“George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good — said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.
Harris said he would rather have a headache.”

Such a delightful little book about three young men and a dog named Montmorency, who scull up the Thames in a boat. I probably never would have picked it up had it not been for another delightful longer book by Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog. I recommend both in succession.

Other book bloggers say:
Word Lily: “If you like dogs. Boating. England. History. Humor. Performing. Camping. Resistentialism. Traveling. Cheese. A fondness for any one of these, I think, would be enough to commend this book to you.”

Lisa the Correspondent: “This is a gentle read, and by no means a page turner. It is not so much what they do on the river as how the author tells it, and if you are fond of classic British humour, you will enjoy the telling.”

SCB at Wear the Old Coat: “In due course, the three young men (and the dog) determine that the way to deal with their maladies is to spend two weeks boating down the River (the Thames), and the book is the hilarious account of their trip.”

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski

Aug4

I read this 2007 National Book Award finalist because Mindy Withrow said it was good. She was right.

End of review. Read it.

*****************

Just kidding. But you really should read the book before you read my thoughts about the book because there are many, many things to discuss here. But you should come to the book without preconceived notions. So go thou hence to the bookstore or the library, and then come back, and we’ll talk.

Martiya is an anthropologist and a murderer. How do we reconcile those two legacies? That’s a lot of what the book is about. How could such an intelligent, lively, promising, woman have first buried herself in a native village in northern Thailand and then killed a man in cold blood? Make no mistake, Martiya does bury herself. She goes to Thailand looking for a soul-changing experience, and she gets one. She can never go back to Berkley again, not even to Western civilization anywhere. She becomes a part of the Dyalo culture she is studying, then becomes an outcast, then when she tries to be reborn into Western Christianity, she is rejected again.

Looking at this novel from my own perspective, that of an evangelical Christian sympathetic to the missionaries, the Walker family, I read the story of a woman, unsaved and unprotected by the blood of Jesus Christ, who decides to take up residence with demons and becomes enslaved to them and to the evil that they represent. In the Walkers, especially Thomas and Naomi Walker, I see a family of Christians who make a crucial mistake in their dealings with Martiya, in not seeing her as sinner in need of salvation just as much as the Dyalos need liberation from demonic bondage. Thomas and Naomi Walker pay for that mistake with the life of their only son.

However, one could read the story as the saga of an anthropologist who is driven mad by her long exile from Western civilization and who is finally broken by the single-minded jealousy of a an offended woman (Naomi) who should be able to overlook Martiya’s sin if Christianity is really true. However, I am left with questions that make me want to re-read the novel to see what I missed:

Are all the characters in the novel possessed by their own particular view of the world such that they can’t see each other or love each other? Why does Martiya seem to be so happy in the end in the prison as she works on her ethnography of prison life? And if she is happy in that work, why does she commit suicide? Because she’s finished? Because Rice is finished with her? How do Laura and Thomas Walker reconcile their part in their son’s death with their continuing work as missionaries? Why does the author imply that it takes a supernatural experience of hearing singing angels in the sky to become a committed Christian? Does he believe that? Why does Martiya’s paramour Hupasha remain faithful to Christ even after others have fallen away? What is the significance of drugs, particularly opium in the novel? Martiya commits suicide with a ball of opium. The narrator smokes opium and says that he hears the final episode of the story from the lips of Martiya’s ghost. Is opium related to the demonic practices of the Dyalo, to the traditions that Christianity is there to destroy? Can one enter into the native’s point of view and still remain an impartial observer, a scientist? Once you’ve “gone native” are you a better anthropologist or a worse one?

I may have to add this novel to my list of all-time favorites. It’s absolutely fascinating on many levels. And as an added fillip to my reading of the novel, it bears some relation to things that are going on in my own family. Eldest Daughter’s boyfriend just left to go to Thailand with this group to live in a a poor section of Bangkok for four months as a missionary. I also think he’s trying to figure out the course of his own life, looking for a “transformation of the observer’s soul” in the perhaps overly dramatic words of the author of Fieldwork. We’ll see what he finds.

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

Jul21

I’ve seen two movies based on books written by Paul Gallico: Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris starring Angela Lansbury, Omar Sharif and Diana Rigg and the blockbuster 1972 movie The Poseidon Adventure starring Shelley Winters, Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Stella Stevens, Carol Lynley, Ernest Borgnine, and Jack Albertson. However, I’ve never read anything by Mr. Gallico until now.

Paul Gallico was a movie critic, then a very successful sports writer, but he wanted to write fiction. He wrote short stories for various magazines, got a $5000 check for one story, and promptly retired from sports-writing to write fiction. His first and most successful novel(?) was The Snow Goose. Not really a novel or even a novella, the book clocks in at 58 small, widely spaced pages, and I would call it a short story. It was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940, and The Snow Goose was one of the O. Henry prize winners in 1941.

The story itself is set on the Essex coast of England, beginning in “the late spring of 1930” and ending approximately ten years later. The main action of the story takes place in and around the evacuation of Dunkirk by the British near the beginning of World War II. It’s a romantic, and sad story about an artist, his young friend and protege, and a Canada snow goose that makes its way somehow to the Essex coast and becomes a symbol of hope for survivors of the debacle and rescue that was Dunkirk.

I would think that as a gentle introduction to World War II literature, The Snow Goose would be a winner among high school students. Other books and movies featuring the evacuation of Dunkirk:

Books:
The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord. Nonfiction.

Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler by Norman Gelb. More nonfiction.

Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind by Sean Longden. Times Online review/

On Rough Seas by Nancy L. Hull. Young adult fiction. Fourteen year old Alex lives in Dover, England in 1939, and he is eventually a hero as he participates in the rescue of the British soldiers at Dunkirk.

The Little Ships: the heroic rescue at Dunkirk in World War II by Louise Borden. Picture book. “A young English girl and her father take their sturdy fishing boat and join the scores of other civilian vessels crossing the English Channel in a daring attempt to rescue Allied and British troops trapped by Nazi soldiers at Dunkirk.”

Dunkirk Crescendo by Brock and Bodie Thoene. Rather melodramatic, fast-paced Christian fiction by a pair of prolific writers in the genre of historical fiction. This book is Book #9 of the Zion Covenant series published by Tyndale House.

Atonement by Ian McEwan features Dunkirk in the second half of the story. Semicolon review here.

Movies:
Dunkirk (1958) “Documentary-style film which tells two sides of the evacuation of more than 350,000 troops from Dunkirk beaches in 1940. A British corporal (John Mills) finds himself responsible for getting his men back to Britain from the Dunkirk beaches, after their officer is killed and they are separated from the main allied forces. Meanwhile, a civilian reporter (Bernard Lee) follows the build-up to the eventual evacuation of British and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk.”

Mrs. Miniver (1942) “Mrs. Miniver nobly tends her rose garden while her stalwart husband participates in the evacuation at Dunkirk. She personifies grace under pressure as the Miniver family huddles in their bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe attack, while she is forced to confront a downed Nazi paratrooper in her kitchen, and while she is preparing for her annual flower show despite the exigencies of bombing raids.” I saw Mrs. Miniver about a year ago, and I thought it was delightful. If you like The Snow Goose and its somewhat sentimental picture of a world at war, you’ll enjoy Mrs. Miniver, too.

The Snow Goose itself was made into a 1971 film starring Richard Harris and Jenny Agutter. I’ve not seen the movie; have any of you?

Nicely maintained website for fans of Paul Gallico and his books.

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips

May30

The Well and the Mine is Alabama author Gin Phillips’s first novel, and I’m impressed. The plot is simple: Nine year old Tess witnesses a tragedy on her own back porch, and she and her older sister, Virgie, try to figure out why a Mystery Woman threw a baby in their well. It’s very much a bildungsroman, a coming of age story, reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. (OK, I’m not saying it’s as good as To Kill a Mockingbird, but the setting and themes are similar. And it is good.)

The well part of the title is indicative of the plot; the mine points to the setting. The story of Tess and VIrgie and their family takes place in the fictional mining town of Carbon Hill, Alabama, somewhere not too far from Birmingham. Tess’s daddy is a coal miner; her mother is a homemaker who works from dawn to late at night to put food on the table and make a life for herself, her husband, and her three children. Tess and Virgie have a little brother, Jack. They’re all good folks.

Each member of the family takes turns telling the story in first person from his or her point of view, sometimes for a few paragraphs and sometimes for several pages. This rotating narration was annoying at first. I had to keep looking back to the beginning of the section to the name in italics to see who was talking, who “I” was this time. But you get used to it, and this style of story-telling has the advantage of giving the reader a fuller view of what’s going on in the family, of family dynamics, of how different people see things. Each of the five narrators became a real person for me. I felt I knew them, and I was glad that Ms. Phillips saw fit to tell us over the course of the story, which mainly focuses on one summer in 1931, what happened to each family member in later life.

I’m glad I got to read this novel about life during the Great Depression in a coal-mining town in northern Alabama. I didn’t even know they had coal mines in Alabama. I associate coal mining with Kentucky and West Virginia. At any rate, if you’re a fan of the Southern novel, the summer-of-growing-up family slice of life novel, or the gentle, rambling, character-driven story of an historical era, The Well and the Mine will fit the bill. Recommended.

Change of Heart by Jodi Piccoult

May14

This odd parody of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has two threads or themes:

Death penalty=bad, very bad.
Gnosticism=good, very good.

In the book Shay Bourne, a convicted murderer sentenced to death for his crimes, is actually Jesus or a Messiah or at the very least, a miracle-worker. And if you can accept the highly individualistic Religion of Shay Bourne, you, too, can come to your own Gnostic enlightenment. Or maybe it’s all a trick, and Shay is a charlatan. But probably not. But who cares anyway because we make our own truth. Or something.

BLECH.

By the way, Sam at Book Chase wrote a post just the other day about how Jodi Piccoult dissed Dan Brown. I’ve never read any Dan Brown, but if this book is a good example of the writing talents of Ms. Piccoult, the pot shouldn’t be calling the kettle black.

The End of the Alphabet, Wit, and John Donne

May13

On a Friday night in February (during my blog break) while my ten year old daughter, Betsy-Bee was celebrating her birthday with a bevy of giggling friends in the living room watching Princess Diaries II, I watched the movie Wit in my bedroom, mostly alone. Wit tells the story of a forty-something college English professor, a specialist in the poetry of John Donne, who is told that she has stage-4 ovarian cancer. As Professor VIvian Bearing tells us later, in an aside, there is no stage-5.

Much of the movie, based on a play by Margaret Edson, is made up of the monologue narration of Ms. Bearing, as she tells the viewer of the indignities, pain and suffering that make up her journey through chemotherapy and cancer and eventually into death. As you can imagine, there are many poignant asides and scenes that are quite difficult to watch. Actress Emma Thompson plays the part of Vivian Bearing, and she is amazing. Engineer Husband saw pieces of the movie as he came in and out of our room, and he said she deserved an Academy Award. I agree.

The movie itself, especially Ms. Thompson’s performance, which really was the movie, was morbidly fascinating and difficult to watch. The way that Ms. Bearing interacted with the poetry of John Donne in her struggle with death and dying made the movie a rich and thoughtful experience. It’s rated PG-13 for “thematic elements”, and I would agree that it’s not for the young and/or faint of heart.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
~John Donne, 1572-1631

After I watched the movie and put the birthday partiers to sleep with threats and charms and poppies, I picked up a small book from my library basket, a novella really, The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson. Coincidentally, serendipitously, it was a book about death and dying. Ambrose Zephyr, the protagonist of the novella, is told that he has a rare and incurable illness and only one month to live, “give or take a day.”As she was dying, Professor Bearing travelled through examination rooms, and hospital waiting areas, and X-rays and chemotherapy; Ambrose Zephyr decides to go on a literal journey, along with his wife, Zappora Ashkinazi, to an alphabetical list of meaningful places.

A is for Amsterdam.
B is for Berlin.
C is for Chartres, etc.

As the couple visit each place, Ambrose becomes more ill, more distant and withdrawn, and more desperate. Zappora, nicknamed Zipper, tries to travel with her husband on his dying journey, but it’s not something easily shared.

Ambrose: “So what? So there it is. Here I am. There’s nothing to deal with. If there were I would do it. But there isn’t and I am terrified and this isn’t happening to you.”
Zipper: “You selfish, silent, sh—, bastard. This is happening to me.”
Ambrose: “Really? In less than a month, you’ll still be alive.”
Zipper: “Really. I can hardly wait. Lying in on Sundays? At last. A decent cup of tea? Brilliant. No more squinting, no more imagination, no more silence? I can hardly f— wait.”

Zipper Ashkenazi and Ambrose Zephyr believe in each other, in communication and shared experience and in love. Zipper is left in the end with silence and her own words echoing off the pages of her journal, “This story is unlikely.” In fact, death is the most likely story of all. It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgement.

Dr. Vivian Bearing believes in her own strength and stoicism, and when that is stripped away from her by her illness, she is left with the poetry of John Donne. She clings, not to God himself, but to Donne’s faith in God, and finally Donne’s conceits and paradoxes are empty for her, too. Her elderly mentor reads to her, not Donne, but rather the elegantly simple picture book, The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. I wonder if one can commit one’s soul to God mediated through the words of a picture book and a seventeenth century poet?

That question brings me back full circle to Donne, and ultimately to God.

“We have a winding-sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from our mother’s conception and we come into the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave.”
~John Donne’s sermon, Death’s Duel

Dr. Bearing died trusting, perhaps, in the God of Donne and of the Runaway Bunny. Ambrose Zephyr died at home in bed with his wife nearby, their final separation leading only to an “unlikely story.” How will I die? How will you?

“Our critical day is not the very day of our death, but the whole course of our life . . . God doth not say, Live well, and thou shalt die well, that is, an easy, a quiet death; but live well here, and thou shalt live well forever.”
~ Death’s Duel by John Donne.

I may die laughing or crying or screaming, with a bang or a whimper, but into His hands I commit my spirit. And I believe it to be highly likely that “He is able to keep that which I’ve committed unto Him against that day.”