One more circle

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown and Company, 2013)

This is one of those books that you want to tell people about, but you can't quite find a concise way to do so. If you are like me, your pitch goes a little like this:

So there's this girl, and she keeps living her life over and over again. Like, she's born, but she dies in childbirth, and then she's born again... [interjection: reincarnated?] no, the exact same life, but this time the doctor arrives in time to save her, but then she drowns, and then she's born again but hesitates in the water and so is saved but then... and then there's the flu epidemic after World War I and...

This is the point where my FH admitted, "I lost you awhile ago and haven't really been paying attention." My mom tried, but was also stuck on the reincarnation point. Or then parallel universes, except they are not parallel since Ursula seems to maintain ghostly remembrances and premonitions relating to past lives, often in ways that help her save herself or a loved one. (And since it's nearly impossible to discuss this novel without reference to Groundhog Day, RIP Harold Ramis.)

But the reincarnation thing is a really awesome point, since a character even explicitly mentions the Buddhist notion that we keep living over and over again until we get it right. And while I've always understood that as living other lives throughout one chronological experience of time, there's no reason it couldn't be living the "same" life again and again.

But if that's the case, what is "getting it right" and is that something that's even possible? Atkinson dances up to this question, but I'd say she engages with it more implicitly than explicitly. She raises far more questions that she answers.

It's funny, reading how Ursula dies again and again mitigates the pain and sorrow of those deaths, but only to a point. You still grieve when awful things happen to her (and they do) and when a life that seems to be going well comes to an end before its time. And you grieve even more for the loved ones who are lost along the way, particularly when they appear to be collateral damage in Ursula's half-conscious attempts to alter her fate. Oh, while some sections (and lives) are short, other scenes are much longer and a huge chunk of the book is comprised of Ursula's varying experiences during World War II. And it should come as no surprise that there are an awful lot of (terrible) ways to die in that war.

So the book is really something. For the beautiful writing and the way that the premise never feels gimmicky first and foremost, but also for the metaphysical questions that it raises. I'll be thinking a lot about what the implications would be if we did indeed live our lives time after time.

Post 500! (also, manipulating children)

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (Starscape, 1977, 2002)

So, Card's a little controversial. But if I knocked every author off the list for having views I find abhorrent (ahem, Tolstoy) I'd have a reading list of approximately zero. What really interested me in this book is how many of my male friends have told me this was the book that made them like reading. (Awww!) And yet, without the movie coming out, I might never have gotten around to reading it.

In brief, Ender is a genius. He's been monitored for much of his young life to see if he is The One who will help them win the ongoing war against alien creatures called Buggers. (Ugh, that name.) So he's chosen and gets sent to Battle School with a bunch of other similar kids, and there's training and strategy and armies and creepy psychological games, etc. These are interspersed with conversations between Colonel Graff, Ender's champion, and various other military figures. Oh, and along the way we digress for a whole crazy side plot involving Ender's two siblings (also geniuses) and their attempts to shape world policy by becoming (what would now be known as) Internet intellectual personalities.

And the games get harder and the psychological toll more brutal, with each step more trying than the last. It was hard to read, especially as you keep remembering that Ender is a child - his classmates too. He is six at the start of the book, and twelve (if I remember right) at the end of the main action. Genius or not, it's too much.

That said, it's delightful reading Ender's analyses and strategies. He's definitely clever and unorthodox. It's much easier to stay in the games themselves than to journey outside them, to the hard stuff. And then the end of the book, post-climax, goes off in all sorts of crazy directions. (In my opinion, the film handled this much better.)

To conclude, I'm glad I read this, and I understand why it meant so much to so many young readers, but it was a challenging book in many of the wrong ways. I need something that makes me despair a little less.

And it really felt like 27 years

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Books, 1972 sorta)

Ten years ago, in my first week of grad school as a doctoral student in history, I was assigned both Thucydides and the Histories of Herodotus. For one class. Maybe I could have done that by the following semester, but it was essentially a non-starter. I got some ways into Thucydides, realized I could either finish it or start Herodotus, and so switched over.

And just like Sparta and Athens took a break of about eight years in the middle of their war, I took a nice long break before coming back to it. (And of course, re-starting from the beginning.)

This book is a beast. In short, starting in 431 B.C. the Greeks had their own World War. The Athenian and Spartan "empires" went at each other, often using proxy armies and invading/fomenting revolution in various other cities. They "laid waste the land" pretty much all the time. And there were lots of pretty speeches laying out reasons for and against various actions.

Eventually, Athens loses their upper hand by deciding it's a bang-up idea to go invade Sicily. This turns out to be a very bad idea, and eventually (although the work is unfinished and actually ends with an Athenian victory at sea) they fall entirely. But lots of detail in between.

Thucydides wrote essentially contemporaneously, although over the course of 27 years he had time to clean things up and insert additional information. Fortunately, his goal was to write an enduring work, so he really took time in crafting it (and hopefully in getting the details correct).

There are so many cities and politicians and generals and most of the time I couldn't remember who was on which side. Which makes for poor work in really understanding the ins and outs of the war, but was fine for providing a general arc of the brutal and complicated war and the set of shifting allegiances that brought Athens down. It took forever to read -- and required lots of stops and desires for lighter fare (I actually picked up Breaking Dawn last night) -- but I'm glad I finally did it. Now onto the next challenge.

Love and history

Overseas - Beatriz Williams (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Very early on in reading this novel, I described it as Fifty Shades of Grey meets The Time Traveler's Wife. Except then I realized that I haven't read Fifty Shades, and besides I wasn't talked about the kinky sex parts. I meant the deal with the superhot bazillionaire who is head-over-heels for a girl who sees herself as totally average. So perhaps the better comparison is Twilight meets Time Traveler's Wife. Okay.

That's it. End of review.

Except I guess I should flesh it out so that I can argue for why you should consider reading it. First of all, it's set mostly in 2008, on Wall Street. So you have a fun look at that world from the standpoint of junior analyst, both before and during the crash. (Well, during the crash she's living with her bazillionaire, so her perspective there is a little different.) And then when it's not in 2008, it's back in 1916, in France during the First World War. Kate ends up back there because she needs to stop the man she loves from .... well, it's complicated.

Time travel stories can create fun conundrums (conundra?) but this one does a pretty good job of dancing around how the characters' actions could change history, even if the characters act almost blindly in that regard. On the other hand, that meant that I sort of saw the shape of the story pretty early on. But that's okay, because what makes for a beautiful love story often isn't the plot twist.

What happens when the story takes over

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon, trans. Lucia Graves (Penguin Books, 2004)

The word that keeps coming to mind is "virtuoso" - this novel is pretty stunningly crafted. It's got plenty of melodrama, plot twists, hints of something just shy of magical realism. It's the sort of thing where you sort of think to yourself: well, of course it was written in Spanish. Whatever I mean by that.

There is a boy, Daniel. He is the son of a bookseller. He gets captivated by a book. But the book has enemies - someone is trying to destroy every book written by the author. And as he grows older, what seems like a cascade of sinister events start occurring, and they all seem caught up in the uncertain fate of the novel's author, Julian Carax. And as Daniel and a cast of other characters interact, each bringing together some threads of the story, you start to wonder if Daniel is actually living out Julian's fate. And if so, that is bad bad news for them both.

If that's a poor synopsis, that is at least in part because this isn't the kind of work that lends itself to synopsis. The beauty is in the lushness of the details and the longing in the voices of the characters.

As much as anything, this portrait of postwar Barcelona made me want to revisit the films of Pedro Almodovar and Julio Medem. Perhaps another project for one of these days...

Lost in a Painting

The Museum Guard - Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

This is one of those novels that creates a deep sense of unease from the start. Maybe it's because you find out right away that something is not right with DeFoe's romantic relationship, or because of the telling of his parents' horrific death when he was a child. Not only their death, but the way that adults tried - ineptly, as all efforts must surely be - to protect him from some of the worst of the blow. Or maybe it's just 1938, and a growing awareness of the tragedies already taking place in Hitler's Germany.

At any rate, nothing feels right in DeFoe's Halifax: neither in the residential hotels where most everyone seems to live, nor in the art museum where he guards an unpretentious collection.

Much of the first half of the novel was taken up by my wondering why his girlfriend was so cruel to him. I think I used the term "jerking him around" quite a bit. I was not impressed. But as she falls further and further under the spell of one particular painting, everything gets so convoluted, that you just want the train wreck to actually occur, the crash to happen. It's like watching a disaster in slow motion.

Despite my saying slow motion, the pacing is both fast and slow. Just when I began to feel I understand Norman's rhythms, it would switch up again. Considering how consistently I've reached for cheerier books over several months, this was a departure for me. And a difficult one. I need some sunshine.

One exchange, though, between DeFoe and Miss Delbo, the museum's tour guide, stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, it seemed the truest and most familiar moment in the whole book.

Miss Delbo: Imogen is lost to you, DeFoe. I may as well state it now as later. You aren't -- forgive my bluntness -- you aren't a man who recognizes his own nature.

DeFoe: I recognize a lot of it. I just don't know what to do with what I recognize.

Hell-o Starling

Bright's Passage - Josh Ritter (Dial Press, 2011)

I am a sucker for "Snow is Gone." I could just listen to it over and over again. I'm still discovering Ritter's other songs, but it alone was enough to get me excited when I saw he was coming out with a debut novel this summer.

Bright's Passage is lyrical and fascinating, but devoid of the joy that drew me to the songs. It makes sense; what joy is to be found in a hard world, where the trauma of the First World War is followed by the trauma of losing one's wife in childbirth and fleeing the raging inferno that has taken over your home? The chapters alternate between Bright's attempts to make his way with his newborn son and his experiences on the front lines of a war that was all over except for the brutal and senseless killing. Plus, we get a peek at the opaque menace that is Bright's father-in-law, out for revenge. As a result, the book just gets harder and harder and harder to read. Which is, I must believe, Ritter's intent.

Nothing has ever convinced me that war is anything other than hell. And this novel places it on a continuum of horrors that have followed Bright from childhood. No wonder he has picked up an angel, who offers the promise of something better. Perhaps.

The questions of redemption is left until the final pages, which is all I will say about that. Can there be such a thing as redemption in a world where such arbitrary violence is allowed to occur?

Wrapping Up: Peace, after War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Four & the Epilogue

How much do I love that Tolstoy writes a two-part epilogue almost 100 pages long? (Not a lot actually. It's so him, and that I love, but if I were his editor, part two of the epilogue would be long gone.)

Volume Four is mostly about what happens to the French (and Russian) armies after Napoleon occupies Moscow and then up and leaves, retreating all the way back to France, army in tatters. Tolstoy has a LOT to say about this, and about what caused the retreat, and how the Russians "won" by losing. This all can be mostly summed up here: "Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness."

This also gives him a chance to do what he seems to love best, which is to make fun of historians. He also shares his opinions on doctors, and on "intelligent" women - who are juxtaposed with "real women, endowed with the ability to select and absorb all the best of what a man has to show." (Yes, I almost threw my book across the room here.)

But you forgive Tolstoy. Because he is big and expansive, creating a whole world that is larger than life. Sometimes when I think of him, I think of Whitman.

Other things happen too. There are a few major deaths, a couple marriages. The epilogue takes us into the future and lays the groundwork for what I understand was the original plan for W&P: understanding how the Decembrists (not these guys) became the Decembrists.

I was dissatisfied with how it all worked out when I read it at 17. This time around, I get it more. It somehow seems more appropriate and right. I don't really begrudge the characters their actions anymore, although I wish I could have seen the alternate world where you'd get my happy ending. It probably wouldn't have been especially happy, after all.

And the last of the Twittering, where it's clear I lost a lot of steam:

• Turns out that if your sister is engaged to a dude, it's not okay for you to get involved with the same dude's sister.
• On the other hand, if then that guy were to die....
• "The war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people)."
• "But pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy."

WTF Lion

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller (Penguin Books, 2004)

I bought this book when I came across it cheap. I had heard good things about Fuller's earlier Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and was taken with the excerpt from this work that had appeared in the New Yorker (natch). Then it sat around for years, waiting for me. And I don't know why the time was now, but it was. And let me tell you, this book blew me away.

Fuller grew up in what was Rhodesia, and then Zambia. But in this book she is in the US, married, with two small children. Except she's back at her parents' home in Zambia. And she meets this man, who she calls K, a veteran of the wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He has demons, and she ends up with what I can only describe as severe cognitive dissonance upon her return to Wyoming. So when she ends up back in Africa a year later, and sees him again, somehow she hatches a plan that they will travel back into Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that through this he may exorcise the past, and she will understand it, understand this war that was the backdrop for her childhood.

But there is so much more going on here. I can't even describe it. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole as I was reading. But I also felt intensely present, thanks to the minute and vivid detail. And I kept trying to work my way through the silences to understand the relationship between this man and this woman. She uses him, in this way that writers use people, but I wonder if she is using him less - or differently - than she imagines. There's just too much there.

And since I can't manage to coherently explain my reaction to these larger themes, I'll just point out of few of the other places, where Fuller's careful and cutting description shines through.

• During a drought in the region, that somehow skirted the little area near her parents': "in the whole of central and southern Africa they [the news teams] couldn't find people more conveniently desperate--by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel"
• "The engine of Dad's boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate."
• A bullfrog, given to Fuller's mother as food but freed by her when she can't bring herself to actually cook him, "leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days."
• And the frog is nothing compared to the animal that prompted the title of this post, which is the actual note I made while reading: K knows a guy who knows a guy - another war veteran, and an important character in this story - who has a "pet" lion. Mambo launches himself at Fuller, only to be stymied time and again by K, who goes all Cesar Milan on him. Mambo's efforts to get at her, which seem like something out of a cartoon (like Lucifer and the mice in Cinderella) continue intermittently for the next 50 pages. And then there is a drunken fight between two men, after which "the lion trotted out of the shadows and started rubbing against their legs, purring resoundingly." To which, I continue to maintain, WTF. The lion is the 160 lb. feline representation of how utterly incomprehensible this world is to a person coming from my background.

At multiple occasions, and more frequently as the trip and the book hurry to a close, Fuller stops to ponder the futility of her mission to understand K, and the war, their own complicity, and how it scarred them all. The trip brought them no closer to anything like healing, and I am unsure of whether it brought acceptance.

What I do know is this: the blurb on the back cover describes K as "strangely charismatic" and I can think of no better term, for him and for the book. It was troubling, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly captivating.

Volume 3: The Big Battle

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Three

This whole section is pretty much the lead up to the Battle of Borodino and the resulting (despite a result that has to be considered a draw) Russian retreat past Moscow, ceding the ancient capital to Napoleon. In the midst of long philosophical musings by Tolstoy about how war is outrageously crazy but wheels get set in motion and none of us can really do anything about it (no matter how the history books later spin it), our characters recover - or don't - from the upheaval that ended Volume Two, they seek revenge, they move around and seek places where they feel at home.

Pierre, a la Forrest Gump, ends up right in the middle of the Battle of Borodino. Because of course he does.

Some things that happen in these 300 pages...
Tolstoy waits until page 603 to call war "an event .... contrary to human reason and the whole of human nature." [By the way, based on the complexities with which he describes people and human nature, does he really believe this?]

Tolstoy explains that the Russians fleeing Moscow essentially led to Napoleon's retreat and humiliation. He counters this act of patriotism to "the killing of children to save the fatherland." ... I would love to know what Tolstoy would have to say about the Soviets in World War II (aka The Great Fatherland War).

And all this, according to my Twitter feed:
"Everyone wished more to listen than to speak." This seems unlikely. Also, for Tolstoy, unusual.

We *think* we have free will and all, but really we are just cogs in some big master plan of fate. Even Napoleon.

Also. it's really easy to pick out evidence after the fact to justify your interpretation. This is why historians are lame.

It's kind of amazing how much I like Tolstoy considering how annoyed I get by half of what he says.

Chaotic Battle of Borodino today in #WandP. Reminds me of this poem: http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/grass.html

Tolstoy takes two pages to say: Correlation does not equal causation. (This is why #WandP is 1215 pages long.)

At the end of Volume 3, Moscow is burning, Pierre is in jail(ish), but the love story might be back on. Yay?

More tweeting Tolstoy

What I had to say about Volume 2, in 140 character snippets...

I know you haven't been missing my #WandP tweets, but they are back anyway.

Love & death are capricious.

Also, "Vera's observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most ... this one made everyone feel awkward."

Russian nobles can be really depressing. And Masons have a bunch of wacky rituals.

"She was in that highest degree of happiness when a person ... does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief."

Tolstoy, did you just call the military sanctioned idleness? OH SNAP.

I am trying to picture how fat Pierre Bezukhov is supposed to be. Having trouble.

The end of Volume 2 of #WandP is like reading a train wreck. Why is everybody so vain/proud/foolish/sexually-frustrated/etc?

And now I'm in a bad mood. Thank you Tolstoy.

The saga continued (and delayed)

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume Two

I don't have a lot to say about V2 right now. I waited a week before blogging, mainly because I've been busy, but also because this section has such a downer ending.

It's been years since the skirmish, and everyone has grown up more. The emperor and Napoleon are pals, mostly. Pierre's marriage is going about as well as you'd expect, Andrei has given up on everything, Natasha is hmm, mostly indescribable, Nikolai is kind of a hotshot. And there are of course a bazillion other characters.

And then there's this reversal of sorts, that opens up the possibility of some sort of happily-ever-after. As if Tolstoy would allow such things. And then you spend about 200 pages feeling the same sense of dread that Natasha's family seems to feel. And, since I'm doing a terrible job with this post, I'm just going to quote this description of Mama Rostov(a): "Her maternal intuition told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that because of it she would not be happy."

And by the way, this time reading, I have a lot more blame to spread around. Everyone's at fault. Everyone.

Tweeting Tolstoy

During my reading of Volume One, I also shared regular thoughts on my Twitter feed. Here they are... (hashtags removed except where integral to the tweet)

"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy" --Isaac Babel

Feeling far more sympathetic to Pierre Bezukhov than I remembered.

If Prince Andrei turns out to be like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I'm going to be pissed.

I imagine it comes as no surprise that I think War < Peace.

Andrei Bolkonsky is maybe not as awesome as I remember. (I think this is going to be a major theme of my #WandP tweeting.)

chai at Panera and #WandP (Napoleon is winning.)

The aftermath of battle: "All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for."

"He was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence..."

"... the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent."

The thought of battle makes soldiers emo. Also? Apparently the emperor is like Jesus or something.

Battles make for all sorts of confusion. And overblown prose. Thus ends Volume One.

Peace > War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume One

I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?

So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)

I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.

I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.

But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.

I'm looking forward to Volume 2.

2666 - The Part about Archimboldi

5. The Part about Archimboldi

(Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)

I don't remember for sure when I finished 2666. Close to two weeks ago. Why have I waited so long to write about it? Not sure. Maybe because this was my "January project" so it seemed appropriate to finish it at the end of the month.

Anyway, if the part about the critics was my favorite, and the part about the crimes was the "best," I would have to say that this section was the one where I was most likely to get lost in the story, where I thought the least about Bolaño and his intentions. It made the last third of the book a nice juxtaposition to the first two-thirds.

I don't want to say a lot about the section. If you're reading this, and actually ever read 2666, I want you to get to discover it on your own. But it's about Hans Reiter, an unusual youth from a German village who fights in WWII and then sets off on a different path in postwar Germany. I felt that Reiter remained a cipher; I never understood him, which is unusual when you spend so many pages with a character. But I didn't mind that I didn't know him.

I wrote about agency a while back (in relation to Oscar Fate) and think that it's a theme that deserves a lot more attention with regards to the entire novel. Reiter seems sometimes very much an actor who is creating his own destiny, and at other times entirely passive, getting swept along by other currents. (This is true for many of the other recurring characters in this section. In fact, I would read a novel just about Baroness von Zumpe.) I guess this is probably the way life really works. But I felt it particularly strongly in this novel, perhaps because we don't necessarily see it a lot in fiction.

Some - not many, but some - loose ends get tied up in this section. Enough that when the last page came around, I felt satisfied. Which is about all you can ask for.

And I was curious about this quote, by an old man who rents out his typewriter:
"Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty."
True? I doubt it. But intriguing all the same.

It strikes me as cowardly to not attempt some final analysis of the entire work. But I don't think I have it in me. I will simply say this: Bolaño creates an entire world, where several stories that only barely interact can co-exist. For all the strangeness and feelings of unreality I experienced while reading the book, this feels, at its heart, extraordinarily real.

Baggage

Last Sunday, I read a book in two sittings. I had forgotten how to do that, and it was glorious. The book in question was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a fictionalized collection of essays about the Vietnam War and its impact on those who served.

The title essay speaks to the heart of the tragedy that was Vietnam - the things they carried included supplies, weapons, trinkets, superstitions, drugs, fear, cowardice, and bravado.

A few passages:

[T]he war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

And an observation as relevant today as ever:

The only certainty that summer [of 1968] was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

And strangely enough, I may have been most affected by the last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," where O'Brien discusses childhood love and loss.

But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda Alive. And Ted Lavender too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and [more]. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

I had never heard of this book until this spring, when I saw a theatrical adaptation, which was ambitious but a bit of a disaster. Which is a shame, because O'Brien's creation is powerful and fundamentally honest.

The Suitors, cont.

I remain a little freaked out by Ben Ehrenreich. The Suitors definitely didn't get any less strange as I finished it. Which is not to say that it isn't really good and intriguing and all that - because it is! - but dude, it's a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

Suffice it to say that not only is every character flawed, but they are deeply, deeply so. Drunk with lust, gluttony, avarice - all of the deadly sins, in fact. And while the motley crew that form Penny's kingdom (formerly Payne's army) love one another, they will betray that love in a moment to get closer to Penny, and will blame anyone - including Penny herself - who pierces through her defenses.

I wish Ehrenreich had written more about Bobby, Penny's son, a preternaturally solemn child growing up in a sea of anarchy. And he eventually takes to the sea. He reminded me of Gunter Grass's Oskar, in The Tin Drum, carrying more meaning than his little body could possibly hold.

Anyway, what this all makes me realize is that I should read (or re-read - have I read it before?) The Odyssey.

Lost City Radio

Sad. I am feeling sad right now. Why? Not sure, but I partly blame Daniel Alarcon.

Such a pretty day, so I went out to walk some errands, and ended up drinking chai at Synergy Cafe. Which is where I finished Lost City Radio by the aforementioned Alarcon, a Peruvian transplant to Oakland.

The novel is set in the capital city of a nameless Latin American country, still recovering from a bruising civil war. The central theme of the novel is memory and the struggle to remember against an authoritarian government that is determined to disappear the past. Towns are renamed (actually, renumbered) and the missing seem to number in the tens of thousands.

In the midst of this Norma hosts "Lost City Radio," a weekly program that allows people to share their memories of missing loved ones, and reunites a lucky few who lost one another in the war and mass in-migration to the city. Oh, and Norma also has her own missing: her husband, who disappeared in the jungle shortly after the war ended and who may have been working with the rebels. But he, he remains nameless.

Alarcon weaves together tales from Norma, her husband, the child that appears at the station one day, his cowardly teacher, and a man who ruined other lives and had his own ruined all by accident. They run forward and backwards in time, and you're often trying to place yourself. Is this the present? Right after the war? Before the war? In its midst? City or jungle? The effect is disorienting, but so in many ways are the characters' lives.

What struck me most was the way that simple actions in the novel trigger a string of events that had unforeseen and tragic consequences. And Alarcon shows us the consequences well before delving back to the causes. The cumulative effect is powerful, and troubling. Or, like I said at the beginning of this post, sad.