Hope & Faith

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (Penguin, 2005)


So the two sisters are Hope & Faith (except the family is Ukrainian, so they are Nadezhda and Vera) - this is important enough that it gets spelled out. Their elderly widower father decides to marry a voluptuous Ukrainian immigrant, to help her get her papers. And because he is in his mid-80s, and utterly infatuated with this woman who makes him feel like a man again. The sisters, unsurprisingly, are not excited about this plan.

So he marries, and then everything (predictably) goes to hell. And much of the book is a tale of how they are going to get rid of this monstrous woman, sprinkled with occasional questions of whether one should admire her tenacity and/or have sympathy for her striving. But what it reminded me of was - of all things - Catch-22. I felt that same profound discomfort and unease while reading, that same sense of being trapped in an illogical world, where life was profoundly unfair. Through the looking glass, I suppose. Or like life in the USSR, for that matter. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it played out, but I felt... well, icky.

Then, somehow, it picks up a lot of speed. Maybe because you start learning more about the trauma of the family's past. This is a family whose origins can be found in the Terror, and the terror famine, and then the War and the German camps. And somehow, being reminded of all that made me feel somehow safer. I grew to believe that Lewycka had too much sympathy for her characters to make them truly suffer again. Writing that, I can see how it doesn't make much sense, but it's how I felt all the same.

And, because in a way it both wraps up the novel and a broader project in my life to consider the importance of the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences:

I had thought there was a happy story to tell about my parents' life, a tale of triumph over tragedy, of love overcoming impossible odds, but now I see that there are only fleeting moments of happiness, to be seized and celebrated before they slip away.

How to become a bestselling novelist

The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder - Holly McQueen (Washington Square Press, 2008)


I really shouldn't complain, b/c this book made me laugh a lot. (It's always fun when the baristas look over at you wondering what's so funny.) And it has a cute twist. And the requisite Daniel/Mark Darcy triangle. However, I don't feel like we get to know our romantic male lead nearly well enough, and we probably should.

More importantly, who are you, Isabel??? Her antics and total inability to understand almost anything led me from chuckling to wanting to bang my head on the table. I kept waiting for some sort of personal growth, or something... but if it existed, I missed it. I probably felt this especially keenly having just left Ellie from The Last Letter from your Lover.

Lots of intriguing characters though, and I think McQueen has a lot of space to play around with the eccentric mother secretly pursuing a bizarre dream, the disapproving father, the friend who has everything together except for a totally unreasonable crush (I wanted more of this storyline!). This is her first novel, and I'll be curious to see how her next ones develop.

As Time Goes By

The Last Letter from your Lover - Jojo Moyes (Viking, 2011)


One of the reasons I feel blessed to be a reader is for the feeling you get when you come across a book that makes you so pleased to be reading it. It may be romantic, or exciting, or heartwarming, or tear-jerking. But whatever it is, you are glad that the book exists, and that you exist and are able to read it.


All of which is a rather over-the-top way to say that I really loved this book. I am all about the British romances, apparently.


Story, in brief: in October 1960, Jennifer Stirling wakes up in a hospital, her memory essentially gone. She tries to return to upper-class life with a husband she feels is a stranger ... and then finds a letter. She had been having an affair, and now much begin a mad search to determine the identity of her lover, the trajectory of their love, and what her husband and friends may have known. 


Interspersed are flashbacks just a few months, to when she met the man behind the letters, all from his point of view. How he found himself desperately in love with someone who should have been only a conquest. And then time moves forward.


And then time moves dramatically forward, to 2003. Ellie, a reporter whose own "all-consuming" love affair threatens to wreak havoc on her career, finds a cache of these letters. For reasons both professional and personal, she sets out to discover what became of Jennifer & B. 


The earlier story is the more compelling, and I wouldn't blame any reader who wanted to take Ellie and shake her for being just like any other British chick lit heroine. But that is unkind, and not entirely true. (And also kind of okay, b/c this reader loves [most] British chick lit.) And Moyes does two things that I adore. The first is making a romantic hero of the librarian. (Thank you!) The second is entwining the two stories such that the resolutions of each are entirely bound up in one another.


If I only read novels like this, I'd be pretty darn close to perfectly content.

LOL Online Dating

Love @ First Site - Jane Moore (Broadway Books, 2005)

This is an advance ready copy, just fyi. I assume it's close enough to the final product.

So, I really needed me some British chick lit. I miss Bridget Jones. This seemed promising. It's got the right ingredients: 30something, goofy gay male friends and sassy female friends, hilariously awful work environment, frustrating dating set up, etc. But I spent a lot of the book thinking that it was fine, but.... It was missing something. And the love story depends on a lot of scenes that are not only not in the novel, but don't seem to have time to be in the novel. When would they have happened? Hmm?

But then I got to the final few pages, and it got seriously adorable. Problems galore, but awwww. So. Cute. Anything more I say gives it all away. And I mean, you'll know what's going to happen, obviously. But still. Awww.

So it didn't really fill my chick lit need. But it was okay. Next up?

Austen was REGENCY. This is VICTORIAN.

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (Penguin Books, 1995 - orig. serialized 1854-55)

A month or two ago, I found out that my friend Jason was going to be speaking at an upcoming service at the church I attend. His topic? Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and her Unitarian background and the Unitarian themes in her work. My response? BOOKS. Yay!

But I had never actually heard of Gaskell, and wanted to read something by her. And then I forgot, but then his talk got postponed to today, so a couple weeks ago we had the following conversation (paraphrased):

Me: If I were to read just one Elizabeth Gaskell book before you do your thing, which should I read?
Jason: Actually, there's a really good BBC mini-series of North and South.
Me: (offended) What? You think I can't handle reading the book?!?
Jason: (in mild distress) No. It's just... well, the book is long and I don't know if you'll like it, etc.
Me: How about I actually read the book and decide for myself?
[Karen: I love this moment. The writer telling the librarian to watch the movie instead of reading the book.]

I actually understand Jason's reluctance. Recommending books is a slightly treacherous task. Especially when you find yourself recommending a book that is 150 years old and over 400 pages long. But I asked, so I took all the responsibility on myself. It would have been my own problem had I not liked it.

Except I didn't not like it. It was so good. (Today is italics day, btw.) Now that I've taken up all this space with prologue, I will be brief about the actual review. You can go read it yourself - or watch the mini-series, which I saw half of last night. (Book is more fully realized - shock! - but I will admit that Richard Armitage is totally hotter than my imaginary Mr. Thornton.)

So a few of the main things: the title refers to the collision of Northern (industrial) and Southern (more genteel and also pastoral) mores during the period. Margaret (South) and her family move to a mill town when her father gives up his vicarage as a result of his religious doubts. Margaret, as an outsider, finds much to dislike in the North (and vice versa) but grows more fond of the region and its principles through her relationships with a millworker and his dying daughter as well as a mill owner, who is also her father's pupil. There is a strike, and a violent riot, and a love story, and lots to think about philosophically. Or you can just think about the love story, which is quite a bit like Pride & Prejudice if we had actually gotten to know Mr. Darcy a little better. (Also had Elizabeth Bennet been a little less Lizzy-esque and more like the rest of Austen's heroes. But Jason has reminded me multiple times that this is more than a whole generation later, so I really ought to stop making the comparison.)

But I will say that if you like either Austen or Dickens, you will find something to like in North and South. Also, yay for the book, for Gaskell, for Jason, and for the BBC.

July 15

One Day - David Nicholls (Vintage Books, 2009)

One day a year.... on one day a year, starting in 1988, we check in on Dexter & Emma. That first time, they have just hooked up, right as they're graduating from college. It looks an awful lot like a one-night stand. But it's the beginning of a really powerful connection.

I'm a girl, and I've loved unrequitedly, so maybe I'm especially sensitive to how much work Emma puts into the relationship in its first years. (They actually reminded me a lot of Carley & Hunter in this book, which worried me.)

But I love the way it works. I love the development, how seeing them just once a year makes it so clear how much (and how little) they change - and how we never really end up where we think we are going.

I also starting thinking about the choice of dates. Mid-July... I can start in college, and realize that give-or-take a little, you would see a lot of me if you checked in on me then: getting on a plane for a solo trip to Italy, starting a long-term relationship that would shape me considerably, sitting on a beach wondering what on earth I was going to do now that I had a degree, feeling miserable in a job that didn't challenge me, signing the lease on my DC apartment (1999-2003). So my own life was in strange ways very close to the surface as I read, because it all felt so tangible.

You can't really talk about the plot without spoiling the whole thing. You just can't. Which is frustrating, because I really have a lot to say. I need to find someone else who has read it - hello anyone? this is a popular book based on circulation at my library, so I know you're out there - so I can vent and work through the difficult emotions. And the ways that I was prepared for a whole variety of plot twists, but unprepared perhaps precisely when I needed to be. I had troubled dreams last night because of you, David Nicholls. I just thought you should know.

Behind the Scenes

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
New York: Henry Holt, 2009

I was predisposed to like Wolf Hall for a few reasons: a) I like Tudor history; b) Man Booker Prize!; c) despite all references in the novel to Thomas Cromwell being an ugly, bulldoggish man, in my head he looks like this:


Anyway, I went on a treasure hunt just before Christmas trying to find it at the library, and got lucky (very lucky: at library #3, it was not shelved, but sitting randomly on a table. I looked around like a thief to see if someone had claimed it, then snatched it up and got it to the checkout desk as quickly as possible).

I watched The Other Boleyn Girl earlier this evening, and the experience made me really appreciate Wolf Hall even more than I already had. It (the novel) is textured and complicated, and really makes you feel the passage of time and the machinations that were involved in the dissolution of Henry's marriage. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was a pawn. Cromwell is a sympathetic character, but not entirely. He is conniving, and lucky, and flawed. But you like him well enough, so you root for him. Others have written (no links - too lazy) about how interesting it is that Mantel chose to make Sir Thomas More the great antagonist in the novel, and how this is a gutsy move. I have always found More to be a little obnoxiously holy, so this set up worked for me.

What I still don't understand is the title. Wolf Hall. A place you hear about, as Cromwell takes an interest in the pale and retiring young Jane Seymour (oh, dramatic irony!) but which only makes an appearance after the final pages of the novel. Of course, it's at Wolf Hall that everything changes. For Anne Boleyn though, not so much for Thomas Cromwell, the king's right hand man. Unless perhaps that's where the end begins for him as well...

To sum up, the story of the man who rose from nothing to become as powerful as any man in England is as thrilling as it can be, considering the story has been told again and again, and we all know how it ends. It becomes clear how the forces of popes and princes - making history - are both unstoppable and yet easily swayed by those behind the scenes. I, for one, would rather be a Cromwell.

I'm so glad I missed the 70s

The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974

I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.

This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?

Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.

I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.

What was sexy (and what wasn't) in medieval England

The Illuminator - by Brenda Rickman Vantrease
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005

I kinda hate it when I wait awhile between finishing a book and blogging about it. I forget things. I stop caring. But I can't just skip it, not that whatever readers actually exist out there actually care. But I digress, as usual.

The Illuminator is probably much more about the a widowed noblewoman than the title character, a former noble who know creates the beautiful illuminated illustrations on religious texts but who also works with the heretic texts of proto-Protestant John Wycliffe. Life is all sorts of perilous for everyone in late 14th-century England. And the novel's plot feels the need to reinforce the point by letting bad things happen to good people. (That's not too much of a spoiler, right?) Anyway, in order to safeguard her home and lands with the protection of a nearby abbot, Lady Kathryn takes in the illuminator and his daughter. She's a single lady, he's a single dude, and she also has twin boys the same age as the girl. Oh, and there's an evil sheriff, an evil bishop, a female religious recluse, a dwarf, and a servant girl who can read auras. Mayhem, predictably, ensues. Also lots of pride.

But lest I make this sound like fluff, it's really not. It seems fairly well historically grounded, and I didn't feel like it was too anachronistic. I found the sympathetic characters sympathetic, and rooted for them. Vantrease's style is quite pretty, and during a stressful period, I found the quite different stresses of this world a comforting escape.

I really cannot believe I read this.

The Hopeless Romantic's Handbook - Gemma Townley
New York: Ballantine, 2007

I am really enjoying Infinite Jest. A lot. But it is hard work. (Lots of testimonials to this fact over at the Infinite Summer site.) Instead of giving up, I am taking brain breaks. I have also been fighting off a cold.

All of which led to reading this. Believe me people, I KNOW. And I'm not even going to go into the story of how I came across it. What has been fun - and more fun than reading the book, which was fine, I guess - has been casting the actors in the film version. I've gotten as far as NOT Keira Knightley thankyouverymuch for Kate (maybe Natalie Dormer? or Jacinda Barrett?), Martin Freeman for Tom. I'm having more trouble with Joe, perhaps b/c I can totally picture him but can't think of the actor who is most "him." Leaning toward someone like Teddy Dunn. Anyway, I am back to the tome and on track to finish before my semester starts.

Regency Vacation

Austenland - Shannon Hale
New York: Bloomsbury, 2007

I hadn't been to the library in ages. (Like since February probably.) So I was really excited a couple weeks ago to trek up to my local branch and see what from my "to read" list was in stock. And I was in the mood to find a book that I could read that afternoon. Hence, Austenland. (And how awesome was it when two hours later my friend e-mails and says, "My mom says hi. She wants to know what you're reading," and I had to respond, "um, Jane Austen fan lit.")

This was cute though, and a lovely weekend afternoon read. Jane (not the name I would have chosen, but whatevs) is about my age, and totally identifiable to a reader like me. She's single, relatively successful, and might be slightly obsessed with Mr. Darcy. Her great-aunt decides that Austen is keeping Jane from finding happiness in the real world, and bequeaths a vacation to an English resort where guests live in an Austen novel. With actors, and love affairs, and all sorts of ridiculousness. Jane goes, with the plan of getting Mr. Darcy out of her system forever, and being able to move on. And really? Do I have to say any more of the plot?

Another nice touch was that each chapter begins with the tale of one of Jane's loves, which run the gamut from the boy who kissed her in pre-school to her former fiance.

While nothing inspired by P&P can ever possibly be Bridget Jones, much less the real thing, this was a charming effort.

When sex isn't sexy

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)

I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).

So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.

I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.

Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.

When someone else's life hits too close to home

Yesterday I had some free time between work and a meeting, so I happily sat down with my tea latte (and later a scone) and finished John Lanchester's Family Romance. Somehow I had it set in my mind that it was a novel, so I was surprised when I first opened it and discovered it was a memoir of the author's English & Irish expat parents. And their secrets.

Lanchester's mother is the more compelling parent, not only because she had an enormous secret and a fascinating pre-mom life. She was also a more dominant character in his life - and much of the book is about how Lanchester makes peace with her and all of who she was. His father is somehow blurrier, and I found him sorrowful, a man who never stood up and made his own destiny.

It's a fascinating book about relationships and families. The secrets we tell our loved ones, and the secrets we allow to be told. But the final 50 pages I read on Wednesday changed the whole book for me, and turned it into something far more personal. Suddenly I could identify intensely with Lanchester - as he begins to write about his struggles with anxiety, struggles that began while in grad school at Oxford. Now in addition to being an only child and having a mother with a past that she didn't share in full (although I made that connection late) we both knew what it was like to suffer through a panic attack, and to know that another one was right around the corner. To live with that strange and unreasonable dread. His descriptions of the physiological and the mental response were so real to me, I find myself floundering as I search for the right way to phrase the recognition and empathy I felt. But now it was no longer a book about him, it was also a book about me, and that altered my reaction to it in unexpected ways.

So, since I can't recapture what the book was to me before, I will share a few passages from the first half of the book that struck me:

about his father - "The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person, almost as much as loving them does, but differently. Love has many textures. W.H. Auden said - it was one of his most beautiful ideas - that when you love people you are seeing them as they really are."

hmm, this one is also about his father - "You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don't. In fact, if you do think that, you're almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal."

Strange how his mother was the more vibrant, real of the pair, and yet it was in writing about his father that Lanchester most touched me.

Entanglements

Not many authors could combine a murder mystery, a treatise on the history of science, and a ghost story. Such was the ambition of Rebecca Stott in Ghostwalk. The murders - a spate from the 1660s, plus that of the woman researching them. The history - about Isaac Newton and his flirtation with alchemy, plus what alchemy meant to the scientists of the late 17th century. And the ghosts - well, they are everywhere. The novel is also one of obsession, obsessions that kill, although the word may never be stated.

I don't mind ghosts, but I think they may have been the weakest part of the novel. Because Lydia Brooke, brought in by her former lover to finish the murdered woman's book, is too sensible to believe in such things. And Stott never convinces me why she should. She convinces me why I should, but then I am gullible.

These weaknesses - and it is Stott's first novel, so I can forgive them - fortunately don't diminish too much from what is a lovely and haunting tale. Lydia is intriguing and thoughtful, and the decision to frame the novel as a letter to her lover was a wise one.

Stott's got a lovely voice, and I hope she continues to write fiction. Consider the quiet power of passages like these:

It's called entanglement, Mr. Brydon; the word describes the snares of love as well as a mystery in quantum physics. It's not just particles of light or energy that can become entangled; it's time too. Yes, moments of time can become entangled. The seventeenth century and the present have become entangled; they have become connected across time and space.

and love...

I saw that I no longer knew anything. Anything was possible. If someone had told me that you had issued an order for me to be attacked to frighten me into leaving Cambridge so that I would no longer be your Achilles' heel [Erin's note: and how much did this line make me want to be someone Achilles' heel?], if they had said that you wanted me out of the way at any price, I might have believed them. And then if someone had said that you would protect me above all else, sacrifice everything for me, that you loved me above all else, yes, I would have believed that too.