Tag: books (Page 6 of 7)

Book review Tuesday: What Was Lost, by Catherine O’Flynn

April 9, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

Last week I read Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 (which is especially impressive since it was O’Flynn’s first novel). It’s a quick read but it also packs an emotional punch, and I am still thinking about it days after finishing it.

The novel begins in 1984 in the Midlands in England. Ten year-old Kate Meaney has set up her own detective agency, Falcon Investigations. She spends her free time patrolling the local mall, Green Oaks, casing the joint for suspicious individuals and keeping meticulous notes in her detective’s notebook. She is accompanied by Mickey, her toy monkey and partner at Falcon Investigations. Kate, whose mother abandoned her as a baby and whose father recently died, uses her detection activities to escape the realities of her life, including the fact that her grandmother wants to send her away to a boarding school and she has few friends other than Adrian, a twenty-two year old man who works at his father’s sweet shop.

Then Kate disappears.

The narrative skips forward nearly twenty years, to 2003, where we meet two people who work at Green Oaks, the mall where Kate conducted most of her detection. Without giving anything away, it becomes apparent that both of these people — Kurt, a security guard, and Lisa, a manager at a music store in the mall — are in some way connected to Kate Meaney. They learn about their shared connection, almost by accident, after Kurt starts seeing images of Kate appear on the CCTV cameras late at night.

The story is partly the story of Kate and partly the bittersweet love story of Kurt and Lisa. I was intrigued by both aspects of the book, including the central mystery about what happened to Kate. What I loved most, though, was how well O’Flynn captured what it is like to be a child lost in her own world of “detection.” O’Flynn excerpts Kate’s detective journal and absolutely nails the perspective of a curious, imaginative child. Here is a bit I particularly loved:

Thursday, 19 April

Man with the suntan and checked sports jacket in Vanezi’s again. He has new steel-rimmed dark glasses. Think he is American, looks like bad men in Columbo. Suspect he is a hired assassin staking out a subject. Beginning to think this could be the waitress with no neck. He stared at her a lot. Have yet to discover motive for her murder, but will attempt to engage her in casual conversation tomorrow, and if necessary I will warn her, but need more evidence on “Mr. Tan” first.

When leaving he dropped a lighter as he passed my table; think it was an attempt to view my notes. I quickly slid the book under my menu and he disguised his frustration. He is perhaps beginning to realize I am a worthy opponent.

When I was a kid, I used to do similar things with my friends: we’d “spy” on people and often feel sure that we were witnesses to illegal hijinks just waiting to happen. It was so thrilling to feel that we were on the verge of discovering something big; O’Flynn brings the reader right back to that feeling with Kate’s journal.

The character of Kate, in particular, is so lovable and heart-rending, a feeling which is compounded by the utter unfairness of her disappearance. The book is undeniably sad, but at the end of it, I had hope for the surviving characters; it didn’t leave me feeling depressed or deflated, a response to literature which I loathe. There were elements of hope and happiness mixed in with the tragedy.

Recommended for anyone looking to dip a toe into emotionally rich Man-Booker prize literature without diving into a thick literary tome.

Edited to add: After writing this review, I looked online and read a few reader reviews of this book and realized that I failed to mention the role that the shopping center, Green Oaks, plays in this novel. Indeed, the action of all three characters’ stories is centered around the mall and the author sprinkles in some heavy-handed allusions to the dehumanizing corporate power of the Shopping Mall, but for some reason, the descriptions of the mall itself did not resonate with me as powerfully as the glimpses into the inner emotional lives of the characters did. Yes, to some extent, all three characters’ emotional arcs are tied up with the mall itself, but to me, that was probably the least interesting aspect of the book. I just wanted to insert this little addendum lest it seem that I completely missed the whole mall aspect. I didn’t; I just didn’t care about it that much.

Book review Tuesday: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

March 26, 2013 / Stephanie / 2 Comments

I never thought I was a historical fiction lover until I discovered Hilary Mantel. She is a master at resurrecting worlds from the past, breathing life into them, and making well-told stories compelling in new ways.

Wolf Hall is the first in a series of historical novels by Mantel focusing on Thomas Cromwell, who was an advisor to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and then, once Wolsey had died, an advisor to King Henry VIII during that exciting period when the King was having some — issues, shall we say — with his wives, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn — and Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleaves and, well, the list goes on. The second book in the series, which I’m currently tearing through, is Bring Up the Bodies. The third book has not yet been published, but if it follows in the footsteps of the first two, it will undoubtedly win the Man Booker Prize immediately upon its release. That’s right, both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker Prize – Wolf Hall in 2009, Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. Impressive, huh?

I had heard some talk about Mantel’s books over the past year but wasn’t compelled to read any of them until I read this fascinating (and beautifully written) piece in the New Yorker about Mantel and her work. I dare you to read that piece and not want to devour all of Mantel’s books immediately. So, I bought Wolf Hall, and, once I had finished the long line of books ahead of it in my Kindle queue, I read it in a few days. It did not disappoint.

I won’t try to sum up the plot of the book – it begins in 1500 when Thomas Cromwell is still a child, growing up in fear of his abusive father, skips ahead twenty-seven years to when Cromwell is advising Wolsey, and ends in July 1535, with the execution of Thomas More. A lot of stuff happens: political dealings, divorce, torture, infidelity, love, betrayal. At the center of the story is Cromwell, a brilliant political actor who you can’t help but root for. And as Mantel traces Cromwell’s rise to power, she tells, through very human characters, a story about the changing face of England: its religious life, its politics, its monarchs, its populace. The sense of place in this novel is so palpable, I feel that I understand England better now for having read it. One of my favorite parts was the opening of the chapter entitled An Occult History of Britain, 1521-1529:

Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who had thirty-three daughters. Each of these daughters rose up in revolt and murdered her husband. Perplexed as to how he had bred such rebels, but not wanting to kill his own flesh and blood, their princely father exiled them and set them adrift on a rudderless ship.

Their ship was provisioned for six months. By the end of this period, the winds and tides had carried them to the edge of the known earth. They landed on an island shrouded in mist. As it had no name, the eldest of the killers gave it hers: Albina.

When they hit shore, they were hungry and avid for male flesh. But there were no men to be found. The island was home only to demons.

The thirty-three princesses mated with the demons and gave birth to a race of giants, who in turn mated with their mothers and produced more of their own kind. These giants spread over the whole landmass of Britain. There were no priests, no churches and no laws. There was also no way of telling the time.

After eight centuries of rule, they were overthrown by Trojan Brutus.

The story goes on: the Trojans defeated the giants, “led by Gogmagog,” who was thrown into the sea, and later, the Tudors, descendants of Brutus, entered the picture. “Beneath every history, another history.”

The most impressive facet of Mantel’s writing, to me, is how she humanizes historical figures, giving them complex motives and desires, making us rethink who is sympathetic and who is unsympathetic. For instance, one of the prominent characters in Wolf Hall is Thomas More, the man who refused to accept Henry as head of the Church in England after he sought to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Near my hometown, there is a church named for More, who was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935, making him St. Thomas More, but I didn’t know much about him before reading this book. As Mantel portrays him, More was a petty man, and a bit of a sadist who delighted in torturing heretics. He was also rather a coward, but he embraced his death as a martyr out of stubbornness and a twisted sort of self-interest. In Wolf Hall, Thomas More is in many ways Thomas Cromwell’s foil. Although they are both lawyers, men who study texts, Cromwell is a questioner, someone whose views evolve as he ages, whereas More is rigid, determined to hew to the rules of the Church. I loved this passage describing Cromwell’s thoughts about More, who he thinks of as “some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher:”

He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod – without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off of the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”

I love that passage because it’s a perfect crystallization of the conflict between two common worldviews. The book is full of these sharp observations of life and human interaction and memory. And yet, nonetheless, the plotting is perfect and the book moves at a brisk clip.

In short, Mantel’s novels are breathtaking and wonderful. Even if you’re not a historical fiction fan, these books might change your mind.

Book review Tuesday: Detroit, An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff

March 19, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

I grew up eight miles north of Detroit – eight miles north of Eight Mile Road, the dividing line between the city and the suburbs – in a comfortable, cute, safe, suburban city called Birmingham. Our little city’s neat streets were lined with trees, kids played outside, and everyone drove an American car. Birmingham was well-off: in our downtown, we had an Anthropologie, a fancy movie theater, and a number of boutique coffee shops. It was nice. And it was a far cry from Detroit, a city that was sinking into post-industrial decay even when I was a child in the 1990s. Detroit was where most people’s parents worked – my dad worked at the famous – and once quite grand – Renaissance Center for years – but the city wasn’t somewhere we went often, except for the occasional hockey game or show or dinner in Greektown. Mostly, Detroit was a place we avoided. And by the time my parents moved out of Michigan in 2002, when I was a sophomore in college, the city had really gone to hell – or so we thought. Then the financial meltdown of 2008 happened, the auto industry tanked, and Detroit reached yet another low. And today, Detroit and its people are still struggling, and very little seems to be improving.

Charlie LeDuff is a journalist who worked for the New York Times before quitting and rediscovering his roots in Detroit, where he began working at the Detroit News in 2008. The guy’s a bit of a wild card. In his book, he doesn’t try to hide his “demons,” and in a way, his instability reflects his surroundings: a structure on the verge of crumbling once and for all. In Detroit: An American Autopsy, LeDuff gives an unsparing run-down of what’s ailing Detroit, and there’s a long list. This is not a book for Detroit optimists. This is a book for Detroit realists, who fear for the people of Detroit, people who have been abandoned by their local, state, and federal governments, their industries, and their leaders, and have been left to fend for themselves with no resources.

In the beginning of the book, LeDuff explains Detroit’s significance in the national imagination, despite its current state of decay:

And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe Detroit is America’s city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana. The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen pears, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here… Today, the boomtown is bust. It is an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and homes and forgotten people. Detroit, which once led the nation in home ownership, is now a foreclosure capital. Its downtown is a museum of ghost skyscrapers. Trees and switchgrass and wild animals have come back to reclaim their rightful places. Coyotes are here. The pigeons have left in droves. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots, I am told… At the end of the day, the Detroiter may be the most important American there is because no one knows better than he that we’re all standing at the edge of the shaft.

A house in Detroit

LeDuff examines the causes for Detroit’s downfall, noting that “Detroit’s slide was long and inexorable,” and considers a number of possible culprits: “white racism and legal mortgage covenants that barred blacks from living anywhere but the most squalid ghettos;” “postwar industrial policies that sent the factories” out of the cities; the 1967 race riots and the subsequent “white flight” to the suburbs; the policies of Mayor Coleman Young, the city’s first black mayor, “and his culture of corruption and cronyism;” the “gas shocks of the 1970s, which opened the door to foreign car competition;” Clinton-era trade agreements that “allowed American manufacturers to leave the country by the back door;” and the greed and mismanagement of the UAW (the auto-workers’ union).

He also looks closely at the consequences of this spiral downwards: a city riddled by violence and left without basic resources for public services. The firehouse he visits has no fire poles and no engine; children are told to bring toilet paper with them to school; and the police don’t have patrol cars. Compounding all of this is the outrageous corruption at the highest levels of local government. LeDuff discusses in depth Kwame Kilpatrick, the self-styled “hip-hop mayor” of Detroit who, just last week, was found guilty in federal court of “a raft of charges, including racketeering, fraud and extortion.” This was not Kwame’s first brush with the law. In 2008, the Detroit Free Press uncovered, as LeDuff explains, “a cache of text messages showing that [Kilpatrick] was a criminal and a pimp.” LeDuff lays out the situation succinctly:

Kilpatrick had denied in a court of law that he had fired the police department’s chief of internal affairs because he was getting too close to an alleged sex party at the mayor’s mansion – where rumor had it that a stripper named “Strawberry” was beaten silly with a high heel by the mayor’s wife.

Strawberry – real name Tamara Greene – later turned up murdered.

Kilpatrick had also denied in court that he had an adulterous affair with his chief of staff, an old girlfriend from high school. The text messages, however, confirmed that not only was Kilpatrick carrying on with his chief of staff, he was a crook who was looting the city and a letch who bagged more tail than a deer hunter.

Worse still, the texts revealed that Kilpatrick secretly spent $10 million of the people of Detroit’s money to make the internal affairs whistleblower go away.

Yeah. This is the person who was elected as mayor twice by the people of Detroit. For a good rundown of Kwame’s antics, check out this extensive Wikipedia entry. I found it interesting that after Kwame was convicted, finally, last week, some of the jurors commented that they had, in fact, voted for him. The New York Times states: “Another juror said she had voted for Mr. Kilpatrick twice in elections. ‘I was disappointed having done that,’ she said. ‘Sitting on this trial for the last six months, I really, really saw a lot that turned my stomach.'”

Yikes.

LeDuff doesn’t just spend time examining corrupt government officials and greedy auto execs, he also delves into the lives of the individual people trapped in the Detroit quagmire, many of them sucked into endless cycles of violence against their will. It is heart-wrenching and terrible, and the book leaves you wondering what might be done. LeDuff doesn’t know, either, it seems:

Detroit, I am sure, will continue to be. Just as Rome does. What it will be and who will be here, I cannot say. The unnecessary human beings will have to find some other place to go and something else to do. The Great Remigration south, maybe.

So, we’ll see what happens. I hope Detroit can slash and burn and cleanse itself of the corruption that has plagued it for the last several decades. I hope it can start afresh. But…we’ll see. In the meantime, I recommend LeDuff’s book for anyone who is curious about what is actually happening in Detroit today. It’s a fascinating – and deeply depressing – read.

Book review Tuesday: Philida, by Andre Brink

March 12, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

In my effort not to be a complete ignoramus about the country I’m living in, I’ve been trying to read some South African literature and journalistic non-fiction. Being me, I’m doing much better with the fiction than the non-fiction. Whereas I haven’t been able to pick up Country of My Skull – a harrowing account of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – for weeks now, I finished Andre Brink’s novel Philida easily. Philida was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, but I actually decided to read it because an American friend of mine, Jon, told me he had just torn through one of Brink’s other books, A Dry White Season, and that I had to read it. I went to my local bookstore to look for it but they didn’t have it – but they did have Philida.

Philida is the story of a slave woman living in the Cape in the 1830s. The book opens with Philida lodging a complaint with the Office of the Slave Protector against her owner, Cornelis Brink, and his son, Francois Brink. Francois, Philida explains, is the father of her four children, and he promised to set her free. Now, he has reneged on his promise and is selling Philida – and their children – upcountry so he can marry a rich white woman.

The novel traces Philida’s struggle to gain her freedom, and illuminates complex relationships between owners and slaves. Secrets about the Brink family come to light and one begins to understand, bit by bit, why the slave-owner dynamics are so very tricky in this particular family. Philida is set in the 1830s, just before slaves were emancipated in South Africa in 1834 (via the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery throughout the British empire). The knowledge, shared by owners and slaves alike, that the slaves will soon be set free, complicates matters even further.

The plot has a few twists and turns but, in general, is slow-paced. Much of Philida’s journey happens on foot, with meandering descriptions of the landscape and her thoughts. Even if long-winded, the story still manages to be gripping, and the diversions weren’t enough to make me lose interest. Plus, Brink’s writing is so unique, it was hard to get bored.

When reading Philida, it is difficult not to be impressed by the ability of Brink – a white South African man – to write from the perspective of Philida, a black (or perhaps coloured) South African female slave. Brink explained in an interview with NPR that the story was based on historical records and one of the main characters, Francois Brink, was an actual ancestor of his. Philida’s voice is absorbing; it is easy to forget that she was brought to life by a white man. Brink also tells parts of the story from the perspective of Francois and Cornelis, but it is Philida we are rooting for and whose voice dominates the narrative.

In the end, Philida gets a kind of deliverance, although this is not what one would call a “feel good” book. Still, if you’re looking to read well-crafted historical fiction about one piece of South Africa’s complicated past, Philida is a good place to start.

Book review Tuesday: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

March 5, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

I had heard a lot of buzz about Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad before I read it: it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s being turned into an HBO series, it’s incredible, etc. However, despite all of this buzz, I knew almost nothing about the structure or plot of the book and thus had no idea what to expect when I picked it up a few weeks ago. It can be refreshing to go into a novel blind; often, I read reviews or excerpts or synopses before I dive into a book, and that can interfere with the process of being swept away by a piece of writing. I’m glad I didn’t read much about Egan’s book before starting it; it allowed me to be continually surprised as I read.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is composed of a series of interlocking vignettes, spanning approximately 40 years, featuring characters that are somehow connected to each other (whether they know it or not). The structure is a bit like Love Actually (a movie that I love and that my husband loathes for reasons he can’t articulate, probably because it is, in fact, a good movie), in that the characters from one vignette intersect with the characters from the next, but the novel has a larger temporal and geographic range, spanning decades and continents.

I really enjoyed and was impressed by this book. Egan’s characters are superbly rendered and the dialogue is sharp and witty. The structure of the book, for me, was a tad hit or miss, but mostly a hit. Like any series of vignettes, of course, some worked for me better than others. I particularly loved Chapter 4, “Safari,” which my friend Yohanca informs me has won literary prizes in its own right. I think it helped that I was reading the book while on safari at Elephant Plains, so the descriptions of the bush, the vans, and the lions had a special resonance for me. The chapter is about a record executive, Lou, who is on safari somewhere in East Africa (Kenya, I think) with two of his six children, Rolph and Charlie, and his new, younger girlfriend, Mindy. Accompanying them are: a safari ranger, some assorted band members, and two older women with binoculars who see more than they say. Apart from the lovely, evocative descriptions of the landscape, the animals, and the very feeling of being on safari, this chapter contains razor-sharp observations about relationships, illustrated by the poignant interactions among the characters. In this single chapter, Egan illuminates relationships between siblings, parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, acquaintances, and strangers. Here is an excerpt I loved, describing an interaction between Lou’s grad student girlfriend, Mindy, and Albert, the British safari guide, as they sit in the safari van, watching some lions in the bush.

Mindy’s face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Albert’s, is on the jeep’s left side, facing away from the lions. Mindy watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Albert says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Mindy’s, like one of those whispering tubes. “You must know that.”

“I didn’t,” she murmurs back.

“Well, you are.”

“My hands are tied.”

“Forever?”

She smiles. “Please. An interlude.”

“Then?”

“Grad school. Berkeley.”

Albert chuckles. Mindy isn’t sure what that chuckle means – is it funny that she’s in graduate school, or that Berkeley and Mombasa, where he lives, are irreconcilable locations?

I love Egan’s use of dialogue – spare, not overburdened – to convey both the longing of the characters and the impossibility of their situation. Mindy is with Lou, she and Albert live on different continents, they have different life plans. It just won’t work. We get all of that in that little snippet of dialogue.

At the end of “Safari,” I wanted to know more about these characters, but I only got glimpses of them scattered throughout the later vignettes. This is part of what makes the structure of the novel unsatisfying at times; you want to hear more about certain characters and less about others, but each character only gets his or her own little parcel of the plot.

Egan also experiments with structure in the book by playing with narration (first person, third person, even the elusive second person in Chapter 10, “Out of Body”), and even by presenting one of the chapters in the format of a PowerPoint presentation (I wasn’t a fan). Even though I found the PowerPoint chapter to be trying a bit too hard, I do appreciate Egan’s innovativeness. Also, you have to be impressed with an author who can pull off second person narration so well that you almost forget she’s using second person narration:

You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of ‘you’ at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it – what you’ve seen in people’s faces on the street – a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you can’t quite see.

There is much to be said about this novel, and I am probably not doing its complexities justice. Rather than trying to sum up this book of many parts, I recommend just reading it and seeing what you think.

Book review Tuesday – Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

February 26, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

Like many other people in the Western world, I’m absolutely fascinated by North Korea, the aggressive “hermit kingdom,” with its showpiece capital, goose-stepping soldiers, nuclear tests, and series of eccentric, wacktastic father-son dictators. I’ve seen pictures of Pyongyang, including the excellent series taken by my friend Sam Gellman, and I follow the news about Kim Jong-un’s latest nuclear machinations, but it wasn’t until I read Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick’s excellent and deeply disturbing portrait of life in North Korea, that I really began to grasp the horrendous misfortune of being born in that country.

Satellite image of North Korea – no lights

Based in Seoul, Demick covered North Korea for the Los Angeles Times for five years and wrote the book, which was published in 2010, “based on seven years of conversations with North Koreans,” primarily defectors from the regime. The book examines the lives of six such North Koreans who had left the country, both before and after their defections. It also includes in-depth research about the founding of the North Korean regime, its evolution (or, more accurately, devolution), the catalogue of bizarre and oppressive rules that exist to regulate its society, the devastating famine in the 1990s, and the aftermath of that famine, including the continuing uptick in defections to China and South Korea.

The title of the book is taken from a slogan the North Korean regime cooked up to inspire its people: “We have nothing to envy in the world.” In English, the phrase has a double meaning: while it is meant to imply that the North Korean people should not be envious of any other nation, it also can be read to say that the North Korean people literally have nothing that anyone could envy. Indeed, the stories of deprivation in the book are startling, particularly during the years of famine (1994-1998), when people were forced to eat grass and pick pieces of corn out of cow manure to survive. Demick explains that “[t]he North Korean government offered a variety of explanations [for the famine], from the patently absurd to the barely plausible. People were told that their government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification. They were told that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea that was keeping out food.”

In fact, the North Korean government blamed (and continues to blame) the United States for all manner of ills. I don’t think I was fully aware until reading this book how central a role the “imperialist” government of the United States plays in North Korean propaganda. In 2004, I spent a summer doing my undergraduate senior thesis research in Cuba, another closed-off, communist regime with a healthy distaste for Yankee imperialism and a strong propaganda machine to spin elaborate conspiracies. Demick’s descriptions of North Korean anti-American propaganda reminded me of Cuban propaganda on overdrive. After all, at least the Cuban regime isn’t lying when it says that the American government has instituted a blockade.

Nothing to Envy is rife with examples of horrific deprivation and abuse of North Korean citizens at the hand of their government, but the heart of the book is about the decisions made by the six individuals Demick profiled to defect from the only regime they knew. In North Korea, survival, let alone escape, is a complicated emotional proposition, because survival represents a kind of selfishness, a willingness to do what it takes to live, often at the expense of others. Demick and her subjects note that the North Korean famine tended to target “the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. This was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi also identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.” Those who survive and escape the North Korean regime must grapple with the choices they made to get where they are, and mourn the people they lost in the process. Demick notes that “[g]uilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.” Once escaped, defectors must adjust to life in modern society, and the transition can be difficult. North Korea continues to haunt even those who escape from it.

This book is fascinating, moving, and painful. There were times when I winced reading it, or felt like crying, or wanted to put it down. It’s not a light read. But I strongly recommend it for anyone who is curious about the lives of the ordinary people we may overlook when we think and talk about North Korea.

Book review Tuesday: The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff

February 5, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

My friend Karen recommended that I read David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, a novel focusing on, among other things, the apostasy from the Mormon Church of Brigham Young’s 19th wife, Ann Eliza Young. I find all things Mormon fascinating, so, despite being in the middle of no fewer than three other books, I downloaded The 19th Wife and read it in a few days.

Ann Eliza Young

First, a word about the structure of this book: it’s kind of confusing. Ebershoff makes use of fictional historical clippings, fictional memoir, fictional academic documents, and a fictional narrative set in the present day, mixing them throughout the book. There’s even a fictional introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe to a fictional memoir by Ann Eliza Young. Complicating matters, Ebershoff based the principal historical narrative – the memoir of Ann Eliza Young – on her actual autobiographies (Wife No. 19 (1875) and Life in Mormon Bondage (1908)). I wish that Ebershoff had explained up front – perhaps in a preface to the novel – his reasons for structuring the book this way, because his explanation in the reader’s guide at the back of the book is helpful:

I decided to include a number of fictional documents or sources (many of them of course inspired by actual documents and sources) because I wanted to give the reader the sense of what it’s like to delve into this history and to sort through the record and different points of view. The novel’s historical sections focus on Ann Eliza’s story, but I wanted to enrich that in a way that re-creates, for the reader, the experience of digging deeper and deeper into the archives.

Mid-way into the book, the structure begins to make sense and it becomes easier to switch back and forth between the various characters’ perspectives. The two main narratives are: 1) Ann Eliza Young’s memoir, set in 1975, and 2) the present-day story of Jordan Scott, a twenty-one year old so-called “Lost Boy” who was thrown out of his polygamist community at age fourteen, and who has to return to his Utah hometown to help his mother, who has been accused of murdering his father. His mother, like Ann Eliza Young, is the 19th wife of her husband. Both narratives are compelling but I was more drawn to Jordan’s story, probably because modern-day Mormon fundamentalists are so creepily fascinating. During the historical narrative, on the other hand, I often found myself skimming or skipping over long (presumably fictional) soliloquies by Brigham Young or Joseph Smith about the purposes of the early Mormon church, and so on.

My other complaint with the book was that the dialogue in the modern-day story was often tortured. For example: Jordan is gay and has a one-dimensional, flamboyant gay friend named Roland who says things like “Kanab? Sounds Kanasty. Oh, honey, where on earth?” Sometimes the characters talk in ways that real people just do not talk. Here’s a dialogue between Roland and Jordan, in which Jordan is telling Roland he needs to go back to Utah to help his mother get out of jail:

“Look at her – her eyes, I mean. I need to see her. I’ll be gone a day or two, max.”

“Sweetie, before you get in that van of yours and drive all the way to Utah, can I remind you of two small but highly relevant facts? One – and I’m sorry to put it like this – your mom dumped you on the highway in the middle of the night when you were – what? – fourteen. Not a nice thing. And two, she just popped off your dad. Are you really sure a family reunion’s such a good idea?”

Yeesh. Luckily, the story was gripping enough that I wasn’t too distracted by the ridiculous dialogue. Ebershoff paints a really chilling portrait of life inside a fundamentalist LDS community, and he manages to draw the parallels between the early Mormon polygamists and modern-day fundamentalists in a sensitive way, partly by including perspectives from (fictional) modern day Mormon academics, who are appalled by polygamy yet nonetheless proud of their Church’s history. The book provides an interesting glimpse into Mormon history, the birth of polygamy, the lives of actual historical figures (Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, Ann Eliza Young), the consequences of apostasy from the LDS Church, and daily life for modern LDS fundamentalists. It covers a lot of ground without seeming too weighted down or dry. Recommended for historical fiction fans and/or those who are curious about Mormon fundamentalism.

Book review Tuesday: Far from the Tree, by Andrew Solomon

January 29, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

[Programming note: my in-laws are in town, so Al and I will be busy having fun with them for the next little while. Blogging may be intermittent. Try to hold on without me.]

Far from the Tree is a book that I had heard a lot about before I read it, and then once I read it, I understood at once why people had been talking so much about it. In fact, I couldn’t stop telling people about it. I kept bringing it up and sprinkling bits of information I had learned from it into conversation. It’s one of those books that sticks with you.

Far from the Tree is Andrew Solomon’s beautifully written, in-depth exploration of the lives of parents who have children that are in some way exceptional, defined broadly. He is particularly interested in the experiences of parents of children who have different “horizontal identities” from their parents or families. A horizontal identity is one that is not inherited from one’s parents; for example, a gay child of straight parents has a different horizontal identity (gay) from his parents, just as a deaf child of hearing parents would have a different horizontal identity from her parents. Solomon is interested in this particular question because he is gay and for most of his life, he carried a great deal of residual anger about the way he was raised by his parents, who were baffled by his homosexuality and tried, with the best of intentions, to make it go away. He wanted to forgive his parents by seeking to understand what it was like for them to raise a child who was so fundamentally different from themselves, and so he interviewed more than three hundred families who presented all manner of challenging parenting experiences.

The book is divided into the following categories: Son (a look at Solomon’s own upbringing and the alienation he felt at being gay), Deaf, Dwarfs, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, Disability, Prodigies, Rape (that is, children conceived in rape), Crime (children who commit crimes), Transgender, and Father (a reflection on Solomon’s decision to become a father, in light of what he learned in his research for this book). All of these chapters contain fascinating stories. Many of them are heart-wrenching. Some of them are uplifting. In fact, one of the most surprising aspects of the book was how many these parents said that the experience of raising their child had in some way enriched their lives or made them better people, even when, from the outside, the situation seemed dire or horrible or unworkable.

Solomon is empathetic and inquisitive. He shows tremendous compassion for the families he interviews, but he does not always agree with them. He delves deeply into the social, political, and ethical issues that come along with raising children with various horizontal identities. He examines the political movements behind Deaf culture, autism, and transgenderism. He considers the latest science behind various genetic conditions. He compares and contrasts the experiences of real people who have raised children despite seemingly insurmountable challenges. It doesn’t do to try to summarize the stories or the conclusions of the book. For that, I recommend playing around on the book’s excellent, engaging website, which contains interviews with some of the families and with Solomon himself. You can also check this NPR interview.

The most powerful lesson in this book for me was that the experiences of raising children who are radically different from oneself is actually just an extreme version of all parenting. My own parents, over the years, have struggled to accept the ways that I am different from them. Even though I am not disabled or a prodigy or a criminal, my parents have nonetheless found it difficult to relate to me at times, and this, it turns out, is a universal experience of parents. I found the book’s discussion of these tensions illuminating and comforting. I typed out the following snippet from the book and sent it to my parents, because it perfectly encapsulates this idea of how parents’ identities become tied to and entangled with their children, and how this can cause hurt and confusion for both:

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right to the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control. And yet we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis. The psychonanalyst D. W. Winnicott once said, ‘There is no such thing as a baby – meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find yourself describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.’ Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement detractors. From the beginning, we tempt them into imitation of us and long for what may be life’s most profound compliment: their choosing to live according to our own system of values. Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

These feelings of sadness over differences, though, are often counterbalanced by the feeling that one’s children are the children one is meant to have, writes Solomon toward the end of the book:

Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die — even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.

In short, I recommend this book for both parents and children (so, everyone) because it will make you think deeply both about your own life and the lives of others.

Book review Tuesday: The Sea, by John Banville

January 15, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

I’ve been absolutely devouring books lately, like a starving person who can only take in nutrition through the eyes. That’s a thing, right? One of the things that I love most about my new life as a writer is how much I get to read and consider it “work.” I’ve learned that when left to my own devices, I’ll read a book every day or two, or sometimes two or three books at a time, and I just can’t get enough. Substitute the word “read” for “inject” and “book” for “vial of heroin” and one might think I have a problem.

Anyway, I’ve been getting a ton of my recommendations from the Man Booker Prize. In case you’ve never heard of it, the Man Booker Prize is given out each year to the best novel written by someone from the UK, the Commonwealth, or the Republic of Ireland. Their website helpfully lists all of the winners of the Prize as well as the books that were short-listed and long-listed for every year since 1969. For a book addict, the Man Booker Prize website is a dangerous website indeed.

I’ve downloaded and read quite a few of the Man Booker Prize winners and short-listers now, from various years. One that I recently finished is The Sea, by Irish author John Banville, which won the Prize in 2005.

The story is narrated by a man (Max) whose wife has recently died of cancer. While revisiting the trauma of her illness and death, Max also looks back on a certain childhood summer at the seaside when he became acquainted with a family, the Graces, who rented a house in the same resort town where he stayed with his family. As an adult, he’s so hung up on the events of this particular summer that he moves back to that resort town, Ballyless, and takes a room in the house where the Graces used to stay, which has since been converted into a rooming house. The book flashes between Max’s fresher recollections of his wife’s death and their life together and his old memories of the summer he spent with the Graces, a family he found fascinating. However, as the novel progresses, we learn that something terrible happened that summer at the seaside, and that Max is still trying to come to terms with it.

The Sea was not an entirely satisfying read for me. Some of the themes in the book seemed overly familiar, even a bit hackneyed, to me. For example, the Graces are a family of a mother, father, fraternal twin children (one of whom, the boy, is mute and has webbed feet), and a governess. I felt that Banville didn’t have any particularly new insights about the mysteriousness of twins, and his heavy-handed hints that the twins, Chloe and Myles, may have been sexually experimenting with one another seemed unnecessary. Plus, I think Donna Tartt and George R.R. Martin have pretty much cornered the market on blonde fraternal twins having sex. Maybe that’s unfair. But there are only so many times we can drag out that trope before it gets a bit stale. Some of the other themes in the book (watching a loved one die of cancer, first love, the perils of aging) also struck me as rather well worn.

I also felt that Banville failed to adequately build suspense for the final, terrible event that occurs at Ballyless. The foreshadowing was clouded with too much exposition about the narrator’s fascination with Mrs. Grace, the twins’ mother, his contemporary observations about his adult daughter, and his myriad complaints about aging. I understand that these layers are what add to the complexity of the book, but I found myself skimming whole paragraphs just to get to the meat of the story.

However, the novel is very well written, and contains some very insightful observations about life, particularly about the differences between adolescence and adulthood. This was one of my favorites, describing how Max felt after his first kiss with Chloe:

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe one’s simple luck. There I was, suddenly, with a girl in my arms, figuratively, at least, doing the things that grown-ups did, holding her hand, and kissing her in the dark, and, when the picture had ended, standing aside, clearing my throat in grave politeness, to allow her to pass ahead of me under the heavy curtain and through the doorway out into the rain-washed sunlight of the summer evening. I was myself and at the same time someone else, someone completely other, completely new. As I walked behind her amid the trudging crowd in the direction of the Strand Café I touched a fingertip to my lips, the lips that had kissed hers, half expecting to find them changed in some infinitely subtle but momentous way.

I love that observation about collecting experiences in adolescence and stacking them up to create a vision of yourself. So perfect.

In all, I enjoyed Banville’s evocative writing, but I felt a bit let down by the psychodrama aspects of the plot. Maybe the synopses I read promised more than they could deliver in terms of the “dark,” mysterious nature of the plot. Luckily, the book is a rather quick read (only 198 pages, according to my Kindle), so it doesn’t require a huge time commitment to get through, so why not give it a try?

Book review Tuesday: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

January 8, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

I read the novel Cloud Atlas when I was back in San Francisco visiting my family. It took me almost a week to plow through, because it’s massive and complex and it can be a tad long-winded. But to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. You see, I didn’t expect to like Cloud Atlas, mostly because of this hot mess of a trailer for the movie, starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in a number of unflattering wigs and facial prostheses:

Yikes.

Based on that trailer, this movie did not look good. Grand? Yes. Sweeping, even? Sure. But good? No. It looked, as I said above, like a hot mess that took itself WAY too seriously. So the book could have been the same, for all I knew.

But, in fact, the book is seriously good. David Mitchell has created a novel that takes place in six layered vignettes, each of which takes place in a different time period with different, but sometimes overlapping characters, each written in a completely different voice and style. Sounds confusing, but it makes perfect sense once you get past the first chapter.

The book begins with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, the diary of an American lawyer who is making the journey from San Francisco to Hawaii, via several Pacific islands. He’s slowly dying and can’t figure out why. The diary cuts out halfway and we enter the next vignette, Letters from Zedelghem, a series of letters written in 1931 by a young musician named Robert Frobischer to his good friend Rupert Sixsmith. The next vignette is called Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, which is in the form of a novelette about an intrepid young reporter, Luisa Rey, who gets in over her head investigating the shady dealings at a nuclear facility in the 1970s. After that we have The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, a story about a publisher, sometime around the present day, who is involuntarily committed to a seemingly inescapable, abusive nursing home. Next is An Orison of Sonmi, which is a recording made in the future by a clone in a so-called “corporatist” society who rebelled, with disastrous consequences. Finally, in the very distant, post-apocalyptic future, there is a vignette called Sloosha’s Crossin’ An Ev’rythin’ After, which is told from the perspective of Zachary, a boy living on what is now Hawaii and who’s on the run from murderous cannibals. Then, Mitchell steps down backwards through the vignettes again and ties them all together.

Confused yet? Don’t be, just read it.

The book is thematically complex, weaving together issues such as corporate greed, cannibalism (both figurative and literal), sexuality, past-lives and karma, religion, dreams, premonitions, the connection between past and future, the value of human life, the moral value of honesty versus dishonesty, and so on. Although the topics are weighty, the book is not, for the most part, heavy-handed or preachy, and is often quite funny.

My favorite of all the vignettes were the Letters from Zedelghem, written by the spirited Robert Frobischer to his dear friend Sixsmith, reporting on his life as the amanuensis of a famous composer living in a small town in Belgium. Frobsicher gets up to a fair amount of mischief and manages to piss off nearly everyone in the composer’s family, with whom he boards. The descriptions of his misadventures are really entertaining. His description of his visit to a Belgian family full of homely daughters particularly tickled me:

“The v.d.V. daughters, a hydra of heads named Marie-Louise, Stephanie, Zenobe, Alphonsine, and I forget the last, ranged from nine years of age to said Marie-Louise… All girls possess a thoroughly unjustified self-confidence. A v. long sofa sagged beneath this family of porkers.”

And then:

“Luncheon was served on fine Dresden crocks in a dining room with large reproduction of The Last Supper over floral wallpaper. Food a disappointment. Dry trout, greens steamed to a sludge, gâteau simply vulgar; thought I was back dining in London. The girls tittered glissando at my trivial missteps in French — yet their frightful English rasps on one’s ear unbearably. Mme. v.d.V., who also summered in Switzerland, gave laborious accounts of how Marie-Louise had been eulogized in Berne as ‘the Flower of the Alps’ by Countess Slãck-Jawski or the Duchess of Sümdümpstadt. Couldn’t even force out a civil ‘Comme c’est charmant!’.”

I don’t see how any of this wit could come out in the movie unless the entire thing is narrated word for word as it appeared in the book. Based on the trailer, they didn’t seem to go in that direction. Oh, well. You know what they say about the movie always being worse than the book.

Overall, I recommend Cloud Atlas for anyone who’s looking for a meaty but light-footed piece of literary fiction with the capacity to make you ponder the long-term future of our society. Also, for writers, Mitchell’s ability to switch between voices and styles is astonishing and envy-inspiring.

And you know what? I kinda want to see the movie now.