Forty Rooms - Olga Grushin

I heard about this book on the NYT Review of books podcast.  The story of a woman's life is told as a series of experiences in different rooms in her life, from the nursery where she is a small child to the foyer of her home in old age.  The heroine is not given a first name; we know her only as Mrs. Caldwell.  Her life begins in Russia as a child with a vivid imagination.  She loves words and early in her life composes poetry to capture the world around her and the one she imagines.  But her dreams are thwarted by the expectations of the life of a female - relationships, marriage, children, and a home. Throughout the story she faces choices and her decisions leave her wondering if she should have chosen differently.

I liked the style of the book and the writing was lyrical. Each chapter is titled with the name of a room and a phrase hinting of the content.  There is a dreamy, reflective quality to the writing that is reinforced by the conversations she has throughout her life with her imagined friends and her thoughts.  Some examples:

"For this, I know at last, is why I am here: to experience deeply, my senses a heartbeat away from exploding, then take everything I am feeling - the insignificance of being human, the enormity of being human...and use the best words I have to convey it all...and make it bright, make it personal, make it forever."

"Now, as always, you have a choice.  ...you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you."

For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy?  Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination?  And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?" 

I was left unsettled in the end, wondering if I have made the best choices in my life, if I've chosen the harder path.  I think that's a sign of a good story, it makes me think.


Published:  2016  Read: April 2016  Genre: Fiction

ISBN:9 781101982334

 

The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood

I liked Margaret Atwood's early books.  They were a mixture of real life and futuristic possibilities with a sense of foreboding (Handmaid's Tale, for example).  This book feels very familiar.

A couple who are living out of their car after the economy collapses joins a planned community where you are given a home for a month and then work in the prison as a prisoner for a month.  This looks better than trying to live in a car with unsavory characters attacking in the middle of the night so they agree to join.  Problem is, once in, never out.

People being human, the wife falls for a seductive lover and the husband retaliates with his own affair and then the management of the place gets involved and the couple wants out.

The problem with this book is it is so much a rehash of her earlier tales without the punch.  The ending just limps along without really generating any hard thought.

Not a good way to finish up the year; not recommended.

Published:  2015  Read: December 2015  Genre: Speculative Fiction

• ISBN-13: 978-0385540353

We Are Not Ourselves - Matthew Thomas

One of my reading groups chose to read this book for our monthly meeting.  It's the story of a family, Eileen, an Irish first generation American, her husband Ed, a science teacher and professor, and their son, Connell, growing up and living in America from the 1940's through to today.  Eileen aspires to have a better life than her parents; her husband resists her dreams and dotes on their only son.

As a young girl, her father takes her to see how the better half lives, beginning her desire for a better life:

"There were places, she saw now, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did.  Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were."

Reading of Eileen's ambitions for her husband reminded me of the classic movie where an ambitious wife pushes her country doctor husband to perform an operation on a boy to advance their standing in the community (I can't remember the name of it).  I felt a dread building as she pushed and pushed and he resisted.  It felt like a crisis was imminent.  She believes he's having a mid-life crisis when he spends hours listening to old records.

"It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy - retreat to the high ground of a major project."

When the real problem is revealed she wonders why it's happening.

"It hadn't happened for a reason, but they would find something to glean from it anyway.  There didn't have to be a divine plan for there to be meaning in life."

The mother/son relationship is rocky, with Eileen pushing him always to do better.  Connell is a teenager and then college student as their tragedy unfolds and finds it hard to reach out to his mother and realizes:

"...it was easier with girlfriends.  He threw all his affection at them and hoped that some of it would stick, maybe even come back to him, though if it didn't he gave it anyway, he gave it more, even, because everyone had something that needed to come out."

I enjoyed the author's descriptions of every day things, he painted pictures of their lives with small authentic details:

"She had never had a cigarette.  Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things -- except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma..."

At one point, Eileen goes through Ed's wallet and the author lists all the credit cards, membership cards, bits of paper and pictures that tells us so much about the man and our modern way of life.

This is a touching, tough and loving story of family and striving for a better life while living with the one we have.

Highly recommended.


Published: 2014  Read: August 2015  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 9 781476 756660

Euphoria - Lily King

Last fall I attended the Southern Festival of the Book in Nashville TN with my friend.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to authors explain how they go about writing a book, editing it and getting it published.  I particularly was impressed with Lily King.  She makes extensive preparation when writing, drawing maps, chronologies, family trees and other diagrams of her story.  I put her story based on the life of Margaret Mead and her two husbands on my TBR list.

Margaret Mead was married to one man when she went into the jungle to do anthropological research and met the man that would become her second husband.  With that kernel of truth, King creates a fictional imagination of their relationship and a different ending.

The book teaches a lot about anthropology in the early 20th century.  Each of the main characters has a different gift that makes them suited for anthropology.  One of the men is gifted in learning new languages and the woman in connecting with the natives they are studying.  I liked this quote about communicating without knowing the language:

Quote: "You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an over dominant sense.  You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words.  Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away.  You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing."

 I liked the realistic portrayal of the challenges of doing research and the emerging science of anthropology.  The relationship between the Margaret Mead character and her future second husband slowly unfolded and the strain of her first marriage was convincingly told.  But overall I was disappointed.  It was not a story of the real Margaret Mead and her men.  It was a story of a similar situation with different personalities and outcomes.  I don't know what was fact or fiction.  I think the book jacket and promotion was misleading.  I might try another of the author's books.


Published:  2014  Read: August 2015  Genre: Fiction

Miracle at Augusta - James Patterson & Peter de Jonge

I picked this slim novel up at the library on the new releases shelf.  I got it because it was about golf at the Masters Course in August, Georgia and my DH is an avid golfer who always watches the tourney.  It wasn't until I started reading it that I noticed the author was the prolific JP, who has been writing books with the help of other authors, who trade off of his popularity. It was a fun read and gave me a little bit of understanding of golf terms and strategies.  I even got DH to read it, though he thought it was a little, "touchy, feeley".  It's the story of a young teen who is being picked on in high school.  The harassing is observed by a golfer who is on the decline and has made some poor choices and consequently is suspended for a time from playing professionally.  The golfer takes the teen under his wing and they sneak onto the Augusta course to play a round of golf.

It was fun to read and I might try some other "golf" stories.


Published: 2015  Read: August 2015  Genre: Fiction

ISBN: 9 780316 410977

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

This bestseller was chosen for the September pick in one of my book clubs.  It's the story of two young people - a blind girl from Paris, Marie-Laure, who is detained in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France near the end of WWII and Werner, a mechanically gifted German boy swept up in the war.

The introduction advises that the walled city of Saint-Malo was bombed almost to oblivion after the Normandy invasion to root out the last of the German army.  Right away, I'm dreading an entire story that's going to end in a city, and presumably it occupants, being destroyed,  But then, we're taken on a hop scotch of time between the two characters building to...the inevitable meeting and tragedy.

I thoroughly dislike the writing style that goes back and forth each chapter between two stories. It's contrived to keep you reading to get to whichever story you prefer.  The author skips around in time too, making us keep track of multiple vignettes that eventually begin to come together the last 50 or so pages.  It's like reading a mystery or a thriller.

The prose *is* lyrical ...but there's an adverb for every verb and an adjective for every noun,  My greatest complaint is that by writing beautifully the author minimizes the horror of the war. It's as if he paints a wash over the reality and defaults to stereotypes of the besieged French and the cruel Germans so he can write a pretty story.  It's just too touching to have a blind girl lose all she loves and too predictable to have a German boy become a mindless solider that does one heroic gesture.

The book jacket has praise from fellow authors, not critics, a warning in my experience.  Too say the least, I didn't like this one.

To complicate things further, there's a sub-plot of a cursed jewel that Marie-Laure's father is given and a German officer is determined to find.  The officer is a caricature of every Nazi soldier.  That's the problem with all the characters, they are too simple, too flat, too predictable.

If you want to read something about living in Europe during a German occupation and the soldier's on both sides, I'd recommend The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

Published:  2014  Read: August 2015  Genre: fiction

The Mermaid Chair - Sue Monk Kidd

I'd been on a two week vacation with hardly anything to read (ack!!) and my sister gave me this for the ride home.  I've read a couple of other of the author's books (The Secret Life of Bees in 2002, The Invention of Wings last year) and recognized her style early on in this book.  Her writing has a languid, lush language that's a little bit too descriptive for my taste.  I'd prefer more narrative and dialogue.

The Mermaid Chair is the story of a middle aged woman, a recent empty-nester who goes back to her family home on an island and has an affair with a local monk-in-training.  The opening line is great:

"In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk."

It's told in first person as a remembrance of her time on the island and the relationship and why it came about.  I like the twists and turns and as she struggled with finding out what she wanted from life now that she was not defined as only a mother and wife.

At one point she ponders the meaning of soul: "...a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experience--a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've even known."

At another point she contemplates life without her husband: "What if there were no more Hugh in my life?  No more of these small antics, the moments we'd pieced together to form a history?  But were these habits of love--or love itself?"

Another nice line "The mind is so good at revising reality to suit our needs."

And then there's the monk, thinking about the purpose of the monastery" "they'd been picked for a hidden but noble experiment--to see if people might actually be able to live in genuine relatedness, to see if perhaps God had made a mistake by creating the human species."

A good read for the end of my trip.  Thanks, sis.



Published:  2005  Read: July 2015  Genre: Fiction

Water Witches - Chris Bohjalian

Picked this up at my friend's house in Memphis on the way back from the John C Campbell Folk School.  A young girl, her mother and aunt are dowsers - they find water for wells for people.  The world of the dowser in modern times in Vermont where they live is played out against a battle between environmentalist and a ski resort.  I enjoyed the writing and the folksy portrayal of small town life.  The relationship between father and daughter is central to the story and keeps the narrative moving until the central conflict is resolved.  Good read.

Quote: [grandfather on building something for his grandchild]
"I'm enough of an optimist to build the thing...but I'm not stupid enough to ever expect to use it."

Published:  1995    Read: June 2015  Genre: Fiction

ISBN:0-684-82612-7

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

My goodness, it looks like I haven't done any reading in over a month!  I took a trip to my birthplace in March and was completely absorbed in researching my ancestors, exploring the towns where they lived and experiencing the area as it is today.  I did pick up a couple books and will try and catch up on logging my reading for the past several weeks.

This book was a gem.  Told as a series of letters between a newspaper columnist who wrote upbeat pieces during WWII in London and the inhabitants of Guernsey, an island off the coast of England, it educates and inspires.  During the war, the island was occupied by the Germans for several years and the people there were isolated from news with dwindling food and supplies.

We're treated to a friendship, a courtship, a community of survivors that are slowly revealed in the exchange.  I delighted in the way the characters unfolded and how their quirks and personalities were so pointedly portrayed in their quick retorts and poignant stories.

Some examples:

"He's got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he's not disagreeable about it.  He's too sure he's right to bother being disagreeable."

"Emily [Bronte] had to make Heathcliff up out of thin air!...Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life."

The author does a masterful job of letting people reveal themselves as they tell stories of others.  I marked many pages that were tender:

"[People] thinking to comfort me, said 'Life goes on.' What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't, it's death that goes on."

"Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world..."

The journalist ends up going to the island to gather their story, thinking it might be her next book that her publisher and friend is waiting to be drafted.  We know the trip will lead to a book and more.

A highly recommended read.


Published: 2008  Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 780385341004