Karen
I mostly enjoyed this novel about a plague struck English village in 1666 closing itself off to protect surrounding villages from the spread of the disease. The details of daily life, the background of Puritanism, and the restoration of the monarchy made the story so interesting. The different ways that people responded to the threat of the disease really resonated now that I have experienced living through a pandemic. The main character, Anna Frith, a young widow with two small boys who works as a maid for the parish clergyman and his wife, is a calm and intelligent person who thinks through all she experiences and manages to help people this way. The story is told by her character, so everything is seen through her eyes. I did suspect her of being a little anachronistic at times in her thought about how disease spreads, but I thought her loss of traditional religious faith after what she had experienced made sense and was evidence of growth in her character.
The last 30 or so pages seemed like the ending to a different book, though. I was disappointed in what seemed like a flip flop in the character of the clergyman, Michael Mompellion, and in a fantasy-adventure ending for Anna. If you've read this book, let's chat about it.
The narrator and protagonist of this novel is a 58 year old female professor of English Literature at a small college in upstate New York whose husband, also a professor in the same department, is in trouble for having had affairs with students in the past. She is anything but the wronged “supportive, silent wife,” though, as one delightful scene with some of her students shows. Her “arrangement” with her husband, that they could each be as sexually free as they liked, allows her space to pursue her own interests, sexual and otherwise. Her attitude towards the women who have come forward to accuse her husband of abusing his power over them is impatience. She thinks they are refusing to acknowledge the power they had in the situation. Indeed she goes on to exercise her own power in some startling ways, especially in relation to Vladimir Vladinski, a new professor with a hot new novel just published.
Whether you agree with her about the power dynamics of teacher-student relationships or not, this woman is fascinating. Her unsentimental view of herself and others, the energy she directs toward teaching, writing, and other parts of her profession, and the inspiration she feels as she realizes how attracted she is to Vladimir all come out in a sparkling (and sometimes spikey) narrative that moves along quickly. I felt drawn in by her voice, intensely sympathetic... until things started to go down a very strange road.
In at least two places, the narrator disparages readers who review a book harshly because they are offended by what happens in it or they don't relate to the characters the way they expect to. She wants her students to see what those elements are accomplishing technically in the book instead of merely rejecting them because they're not pleasing. I love this point and I love that this character makes this point, because almost every person in the book does something cringeworthy or has terrible motives, and yet the relationships feel mostly true. I will be thinking about this novel for a while.
This is a complex novel that centers around the idea that in the near future, people are able to upload their consciousness to the cloud where other people can have access to it. The book starts with Bix Bouton, the tech guru who invented the technology to do this, attending a salon-like party incognito and worrying that he is all out of great ideas. Going “incognito”/posing as someone you're not vs. authenticity is a theme in this world. There is a significant group of people, “eluders,” who are resistant to the idea of granting the public access to their private lives. They maintain a “shell” online, an account that posts and interacts to give the illusion that a real person is behind it for as long as possible, while the real person escapes to somewhere inaccessible. There are also people who work to facilitate “eluding,” a kind of technological resistance movement. There is also a character who, from a young age, demands authenticity from the people around him, and as an adult creates scenes in public to elicit “authentic” reactions from bystanders.
Chapters in The Candy House are written in different styles; some are straightforward third person omniscient narration, some are epistolary (email style), some are what turns out to be first person-writing-a-guidebook style. The novel tends to move from one character to another without going back much. Although it starts with Bix Bouton's worries about his ability to come up with great ideas and maintain his mover-and-shaker status, once it moves on from him it doesn't go back until near the end. I found that a bit frustrating, because once I invested in a character I wanted more development of their story. That frustration was somewhat tempered by the fact that the characters are interconnected–they are children, spouses, friends or acquaintances of someone you've already met, so you are getting development of those stories, but it's on the periphery.
At times it felt like a loosely connected series of short stories or novellas on a theme rather than a novel, though.
Ivory Frame (yes, that's her name) is a young woman estranged from her family and enrolled in an art conservatory in Paris between the world wars. She is also an elderly biologist who has spent her adult life recording the languages of animals with the understanding that their existence is threatened by human encroachment and climate change. We get her story alternating in the present and the past. The Ivory of the present is shaken to receive a letter telling her she has a granddaughter, because she apparently has no child of her own. The book sets out to give us the context and the backstory for this letter, although Ivory's story meanders quite a bit in the process. She has a difficult love affair in her past, and a sympathetic assistant in the present, and the events and emotions seem to take place on an operatic level. I am generally one who appreciates melodrama, but I think it may be a bit overdone in this book. Still, there is a lot going on in The Dictionary of Animal Languages with ideas about the purpose of art, and the difference between art and science, or art and language. This is a rich book and I am glad I read it.
I put this book on my TBR list as a consequence of reading Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake. This book tells of the real English resistance to Norman invaders in the first five years after the Battle of Hastings. Peter Rex, the author, tells us that the transition to a new King, William, went as smoothly as it did because much of the administrative body of the kingdom accepted William as ruler. But people lower down in the hierarchy resisted, in part because many of them stood to lose property and livelihood.
Two chapters near the end are devoted to Hereward “the Wake,” the legendary resistance fighter against the Normans. Rex examines the historical records to see what support there is for the commonly accepted parts of Hereward's story and to try to determine where he lived and who his family was. This is the aspect of history of that is fascinating to me: when authors are explicit about what can be known and what can only be suspected or speculated about, given what is left to us in the historical record. Throughout the book, Rex references the Domesday Book, Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History, and other sources from the period. He gives reasons for his interpretations, which I'm not really in a position to evaluate, but it is the method of building a picture of what happened long ago from scant surviving evidence that fascinates me.
The last real chapter of the book is called “the protagonists,” and it would have been more helpful to have it at the beginning of the book. It names the main characters in the conflict, the names of the well known resisters and collaborators, as well as officials and royal household members. There is a large cast of characters to keep straight, and I had difficulty knowing my Aethelwigs from my Aethelhelms, so I appreciated the help.
There are also maps and genealogies, a bibliography and index, and a few pages of black and white photo plates.
A very dark story set at a graduate art institute in Washington DC and in the woods of Maine. It's told in two time frames; one in the summer and fall of 1988 at an artist's camp in Maine and one in the fall of 2018 as Audra Colfax, a degree candidate at the art institute prepares to defend her thesis. There are also descriptions of art pieces submitted by Audra Colfax for her thesis.
The story centers around an artistically gifted young woman with bipolar disorder, and characters who either exploit and abuse her or are complicit in her abuse. There's an implication that the complicity extends to degree granting art departments, since the people involved in the story go on to become art professors. All these issues are present in a well-written page-turner of a suspense novel. You know something terrible has happened and is going to happen, but you don't know exactly what and you can't look away until you find out.
The story of a boy, Jahan, who runs away from his abusive stepfather in India and becomes an elephant keeper in the menagerie of Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, Turkey. By being in the right place at the right time as a young man, he becomes an apprentice to Sinan, the Chief Royal Architect. The book accompanies Jahan as he grows up, develops in his profession and in his character, encountering some long-simmering difficulties along the way. The book takes a leisurely approach to dealing with its central issues; they are allowed to develop organically over the course of Jahan's whole lifetime. There are periods of action, but also long periods where these issues seem to be dormant.
Elif Shafak's writing is wonderful for an adventure novel, which this is. She conveys the atmosphere of her locations with a sure touch, without overdoing the description. Jahan is a sympathetic character, an outsider without any status in the Ottoman Empire, observing the environment and customs and attempting to fit in and avoid making fatal mistakes.
This book tells the history of the United States with regard to the indigenous inhabitants of the land. It tells the stories that were left out of the history most people educated in the US learned in school, including stories about people we were raised to think of as admirable, like Daniel Boone. After it fills in the gaps you didn't know were in your education about the forming of the United States, it shows how our stance in the world today as a dominant power, bringer of democracy, a militaristic empire, has developed directly out of the way we treated the indigenous people of this land. This is an eye opening book, suitable for academic environments and for general readers. It has an extensive bibliography and notes, as well as an index, but is written in approachable language. Everyone should read it.
Sara Ahmed illuminates the work of feminism with wordplay. For example, in talking about leaving the life she was expected to live (heterosexuality), she says, “When I was wearing it, I found it wearing” (p. 48). This is one way that someone can become a feminist: by coming to understand that the world around you wants you to live a life that you don't want.
This is in some ways an academic book, but its mode of discourse is not typical academic language. She uses the different senses of words, takes advantage of the difference in meaning when a word is a noun as opposed to a verb, constructs sentences around puns, and other playful tactics to express some of the difficulties or intricacies of becoming and being a feminist. Sometimes this style conveys meaning viscerally and sometimes more meaning comes from spending time with her sentences and letting them percolate. This was not a quick book to read, but it was rewarding.
This clever and fun novel casts John Dee as a spy for Elizabeth I. Mary Stuart is being held prisoner and watched closely on suspicion that she is plotting against the Queen, while everyone also worries about Philip of Spain sending ships to invade England and overthrow the Queen. Francis Walsingham has concocted a ruse to divert some of this trouble, but it goes wrong and he sends John Dee to fix the mess. The mess turns out to be more complex than expected, and the result is an enjoyable spy novel with an unusual hero.
Mary Stuart is portrayed as truly awful, so beware if you are a Mary Queen of Scots fan.
The misery in this book is unrelenting. The working class in 1980's Glasgow endure unemployment and resulting poverty with a judgmental outlook that punishes anyone who stands out as getting above themselves, and cruelty to anyone perceived as weak or vulnerable. In the midst of all this is the Bain family. Their mother, Agnes Bain, left her marriage to an upstanding but boring man to marry Hugh Bain (Shug), a volatile, womanizing taxi driver who beat her and eventually abandoned her. She becomes an alcoholic. Her two older children get out of the house as soon as they can, but her youngest, Shuggie, dotes on her and tries to protect her from herself. Shuggie is vulnerable because he is a delicate boy, particular about his dress and his speech, and he prefers to play with dolls and other girls' things rather than sports. The book follows Shuggie and his mother as Shuggie grows up. There are moments of kindness and beauty, but they make the misery that inevitably follows that much more heartbreaking. I kept reading, though, because I hoped for some redemption. It was hard won and subtle, but it eventually came. I think this is a really fine novel.
“Shards” imply something shattered, and indeed, you do understand reading this memoir that something was shattered in this narrator's life. The book starts out with a narrative of severe illness and fragility–a brain tumor–but you soon learn of physical abuse and mental illness as well. The narrator has traveled all over the world and read a great deal too, but there is darkness overshadowing much of his experience. I had a difficult time figuring out when was the right time to read this book, because next to his beautiful reflections would be a description of torture or animal suffering. I couldn't read it at mealtimes or bedtime. I would have put the book down for good, but the beauty of his writing and the quality of wonder in it drew me back over and over again. Proceed with caution.
I enjoyed this novel about an elderly woman whose journey into dementia allows her daughter, scarred from a difficult childhood, and grandson, recovering from a harrowing experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, to gain some understanding about their family history. This isn't a story with a neatly tied in a bow redemption ending or cozy, feel-good cliches about forgiveness and healing. All the main characters have had terrible difficulties to deal with, and the problems they now face are so recognizable as problems that ordinary people have to manage. The story manages to show the movement of a small amount of grace into the life of this struggling family, and the sense of wonder that can come with it.
That's pretty vague, but I don't want to give anything away by providing detail. Suffice it to say, I appreciated this author's attention to the details of conversation in contexts from the retirement home to the battlefield. Descriptions of the crowds at a Blackpool festival and of the details of armoured vehicles were equally well attended to. This book is worth reading.
This is a story of a young American man living abroad in Paris and coming to terms with his homosexuality in the 1950's. The narrator and protagonist, David, is drawn into an affair with a young Italian bartender working in Paris, which throws his life into turmoil. The tale is told in retrospect from a pivotal moment which we can't understand fully until we get the whole story. David as a narrator gives us a candid view of his confusion, his shame, his desire to resist a path that he knows will be condemned by others and which he fears will make him despicable. James Baldwin's writing is operatic. There is so much emotion and drama in David's situation that, although he is trying to keep his cool, he is not fooling anyone, least of all his girlfriend Hella. You will need Kleenex when you read this book.
The (fictional) story of the making of the Bayeux Tapestry in 1071 is narrated by the nun Aelthwyfe, who, we learn early on, has a beard that she hides under her wimple. We wonder what her story is, and we soon find out that each of the nuns working on the “tapestry,” (which Aelthwyfe points out is not really a tapestry, but a “broidery,” since the design is embroidered onto the cloth instead of woven into it) has a strange story to tell. These English nuns have all lived through the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the violence and upheaval that followed. Although they are following the plan laid out for the tapestry, they add embellishments in the margins that tell something of their trials, and each sister takes a turn to tell her story and explain the significance of the images she has embroidered on the hanging. As the nuns work at the embroidery, a couple of mysteries are playing out at their convent. The most troubling is the one involving their abbess, Aelfgyva, who is afflicted with a mysterious illness (mysterious to the nuns, although not to the reader) after coming back from visiting Bishop Odo, who has commissioned the tapestry.
The book is written in pseudo Old English, with some archaic spellyng and with Old English and Norman words substituted for modern English, such as “heafod” for “head” and “cou” for “neck.” There's no glossary, but after a couple of pages it starts to seem normal and reading is not hard. I started to find the instances of modern words and turns of phrase a little jarring, in fact.
The nuns' tales all have fantastic elements to them. One nun flies away from her persecutors, and thereafter is able to hover above the ground when she wants. Another nun is transformed into a creature with the body and legs of a lion and the head and torso of a woman, and then back. We also learn how Aelfwyfe came to have a beard. These fantastic elements come into the story through the traumatic events of the Norman conquest, and the nuns' revealing their stories to each other constitutes quiet solidarity with each other and resistance to the Norman rule.
“These are not novels for those like King Philip of Spain who do not appreciate games, nor are they for those like Richard Crawford who need everything spelled out and aboveboard. They are novels for game players.” This book satisfied my desire to talk to someone about Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. I've met very few people who have read them, so talking them over to get a better understanding of them (and their appeal) has been an unscratched itch since I first read Game of Kings many years ago. Scott Richardson's analysis is appreciative of the books, insightful, well researched and written. He looks at the Lymond Chronicles as a hero's story, comparing it to other heroic narratives (like The Odyssey, for example), as an espionage novel, and as a series of games. I got to think about the Lymond Chronicles in new ways while reading this, and for that I am grateful.
This is a spy novel set in Cold War Berlin around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. An American woman working in West Berlin finds out that her second husband, Stefan, who she thought was a West German piano tuner, was actually an East German agent. Drama ensues.
The story was not predictable, but it also didn't draw me in very much. Although much of it is focused on the responses and actions of Anne, the main character, I never got a strong sense of her as a person. I did enjoy the atmosphere of the two Berlins just before the fall of the Wall. I probably won't read another book by this author.
This novel follows the never-to-be-realized lives of five children who were killed in the 1944 bombing of a Woolworth's in a working class part of London. The book starts with their deaths and then proceeds to track their might-have-been lives at intervals of about 15 years. I found myself drawn into those lives, caring about what was happening to the characters, but then being caught up short remembering that these characters were already dead.
Not all of the characters are likeable or lead exemplary lives. One does his best to make a fortune by scamming people. Nevertheless, the lives are rich, full of passion and striving, and moments of love and dedication. The city of London is also a character, predating and outliving its occupants in the background, filled with the lives of millions of others, and suggesting eternity.
I'm not sure if this novel needed the deaths of its protagonists in the first chapter. On one hand, it provides a kind of paradox to meditate on for the rest of the book. On the other hand, I found it to be a stumbling block. I had to “forget” about it to care about the characters and what happened to them.
The premise for this book is that Otto and Xavier have publicly declared their love for each other, and Xavier's aunt has booked them a trip on a sleeper train (formerly used for smuggling tea) in celebration. Beyond that, all bets are off. The pair board the train with their pet mongoose, Arpad, and immediately begin to encounter strange, ambiguous events. The proprietor of the train is an heiress who may or may not be a prisoner or delusional, the heiress has a past entanglement with a man whose son may or may not exist, friends of Xavier's may or may not be interfering in their lives for nefarious purposes. The train itself is fantastical, with furniture fixed to the ceiling, bazaar full of outlandish wares and tricky vendors, portrait gallery car, shower car, and library car.
There isn't much to cling to in this book. It raises many more questions than it answers, but it's an enjoyable read if you have a high tolerance for not knowing what's going on.
This slender, poetic novel tells the story of Valentine, a boy born in the woods, looking for his lost twin who was stolen away while his mother was in labor. Valentine has named his lost brother Orson and refers to the California woods where he lives as Illyria. The woods are a romantic landscape where flora and fauna have an enchanting presence, and where Val retreats to hidden pools and waterfalls to think through his problems. His mother, Bella, fittingly believes she has fairy ancestors. The setting is the struggle between environmental activists, tree sitters trying to save the redwoods, and logging companies who want to cut down the ancient trees. The novel recalls Shakespeare and Greek myths. Highly recommend.
A young man, a senior in high school, is on his way with a friend to an interview for admission to Princeton when he is diverted to a different sort of interview: an entrance examination for Brakebills College, a school of magic. With his acceptance into the college, Quentin Coldwater leaves behind an unsatisfying life where he felt like a misfit and enters a life where he is surrounded by magically talented oddballs like himself. The first half of the book deals with Quentin's time at the college, and the second half involves a magical land called Fillory, which Quentin and his friends thought was only a fictional land from a series of childhood fantasy books.
This is a coming of age novel, but it is not uplifting or heartwarming the way many coming of age novels are. Quentin is a bit world-weary and the atmosphere is dark. Magic does not automatically bring happiness. The challenge Quentin and his friends deal with is to find a meaningful life in spite of not needing to work hard for the basics. In the course of the book they contend with actual monsters and interpersonal relationship problems, and things don't always turn out well.
I enjoyed this and will probably read more of the series.
I got my copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks to the publisher!
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is told from the point of view of slum children. 10 year old Jai is the main protagonist, and his friends Pari and Faiz, and his sister Runu all play major parts in the story. There are gangs of children who scavenge through garbage for an adult who gives them food, and there are families like Jai's who are living precariously on low wages in the slums, but have so far managed to keep themselves together. Nearby are the “hi-fi” apartment buildings where the well-off live, and where many of the slum residents work in domestic service.
In this story, children from the slum where Jai lives have started to go missing. Jai, who is a fan of TV detective shows, thinks that the police are not investigating as vigorously as they should, and decides that he and his friends can talk to the people the police aren't interviewing and ask the questions the police aren't asking. Over the course of the story, we become acquainted with the people Jai knows, the place where he lives and the conditions there. As more children go missing, the community becomes agitated, and Jai's confidence that he can find out what is happening wanes. Interspersed through the book are the stories that people from the community tell themselves to bring comfort, usually featuring the spirits of the dead who are watching out for the living in their times of need.
The author's postscript on this novel explains that in her years as a journalist in India she encountered many families whose children had gone missing, and that the issue stayed with her even when she moved away from her home country. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is 100% a novel, though, not a piece of reporting. Jai is a wonderful narrator, with enough understanding of his situation that his perspective is enlightening, but with very definite limitations. His emotional progression through the story is touching. The inclusion of the “saint” stories and the djinns accentuate how vulnerable these people are, but also add otherworldly beauty to an otherwise grim landscape.
A monumental book (1120 pages) that took me 3 months to read and knocked me off my reading schedule. Rather than one or two main characters, it has a large caste of characters, including the town and environs of Glastonbury itself. Set in the 1930's, as England is becoming more motorized, there are industrialists and communists, as well as people who are still living a relatively traditional life close to the land. There are adherents of Christianity, believers in the Arthurian legends and Welsh mythology, and atheists. And whether they believe in the legends or not, everyone in the town is aware that Glastonbury is the site of many of those legendary events, as well as the site of a Neolithic lakeside town. The legendary and real history of Glastonbury extends into the present lives of its inhabitants in strange ways. That is partly what the novel is about.
It's not an easy read, which is why it took me so long to get through it. The sentences can be long and abstractly philosophical. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was happening in a paragraph because of that. But when Powys focuses on the lives of the human characters, it's magical. His characters are a large collection of men, women, and children from different walks of life, with conflicting agendas (industrialists, communists, traditional farmers, maiden aunts, philandering husbands, unfaithful wives, kissing cousins, messianic town officials, etc). Most of them are real weirdos. Many of them are part of the Crow family, which is in conflict with itself. They are all treated with loving attention by the author, so that you are drawn deeply into their lives and concerns–sometimes against your will.
I mentioned that the town of Glastonbury and its environs is also a character in the story, but there are also other non-human characters, like trees, the sun and moon, lingering consciousness from people who had died in the past, and the First Cause. Another Goodreads reviewer compared them to the gods in Greek myths, which I think is a good way to describe them. The human beings in the story are not necessarily aware of the non-human characters, but they are influential in what happens.
In summary, this is a long, weirdly wonderful book that I feel I barely understood, but I'm glad I persevered and read the whole thing. Bon courage if you decide to take it on.