Karen

This novel covers the Borgia family from the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI to Lucrezia Borgia's marriage to the son of the Duke of Ferrara (her third marriage). It is mostly focused on the lives of Pope Alexander VI and his children, but occasionally steps back to give a wider view of what was happening in Europe for context. It's written from a third person omniscient perspective, which mostly worked for me. I did not want to be in the heads of any of these characters, and I was interested in the wider European picture. My one difficulty with this book was that the only character who really seemed to come alive was Rodrigo/Alexander, and at times Lucrezia. Everyone else seemed fairly one dimensional.

The author has said that she didn't put anything in the book that contradicted the historical record, so if you like your historical fiction to be plausible and informed by research, this might be the Borgia novel for you. I liked it well enough to put the follow up, In the Name of the Family, on my To Read list.

Fates and Furies is the story of the 24 year marriage of Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, a failed actor turned celebrated playwright, and Mathilde Yoder, a woman with a blank past, no family or friends of her own to speak of. The first half of the novel tells the story that most of the world sees and that Lotto, a self absorbed man with an outsized need for encouragement and praise, accepts without question. It's the story that Lotto himself tells about their marriage. The second half of the novel reveals Mathilde's hidden past and how it has played a hidden part in the marriage that has been so admired by all their friends.

It's a good premise, but unfortunately I preferred the first half of the novel. I was aware that there was more to the story, but what I was reading felt true. The golden boy of college was failing to live up to his promise, the “perfect marriage” was under strain because of his depression and his wife's disappointment, and the burden of supporting the household falling solely on his wife's shoulders. When success finally comes, he is still needy, so although some of the burden is shifted, it's still Mathilde who is supporting the household. There is a lot of writing about Lotto and Mathilde's sex life, which some reviewers have thought excessive, but I read it as the (not 100% physical) attraction between them that makes it possible for the marriage to stay strong in spite of the strains.

The second part of the book just read like episodes of Dallas with hints of 50 Shades of Gray to me. Over the top unbelievable, lacking in emotional truth. I kept reading to get to the end, but I had essentially lost interest in the part of the book that was supposed to reveal deeper truths to me. Big disappointment.

This was an enjoyable historical spy novel about the Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the 19th century, told from the perspective of Georges Piquart, an army Major promoted to the head of the Army's intelligence unit. He discovers evidence that Dreyfus has been wrongly convicted of treason and spends the rest of the book battling to get that evidence accepted, at the cost of great personal hardship. At times his quest appears to be impossible, especially because the public is violently against anyone who dares to suggest that Dreyfus is innocent. However, glimmers of hope appear over and over again.

The book seems well researched. Occasionally the narrative drags a little, but the story is so interesting that that didn't deter me from finishing.

Re-read after Toni Morrison's death because this was the first book I read of hers, and I remember it as golden and influential in my life. Re-reading after 30 years, elements of the story weighed differently with me than they did the first time. I remembered the unearthing of Solomon's story as long and drawn out, based on agonizing detective work, but on re-reading I realized that Milkman practically picked the story out of thin air on the basis of nothing much. I remembered sympathizing strongly with Hagar, but this time I agreed more with First Corinthians on the subject of Milkman. I had completely forgotten about the friendship with Guitar and its breakdown. One thing I recognized and remembered as soon as I opened the book and read the first page again is that to read a Toni Morrison book is to put yourself in the hands of a master.

This book tells the story of the “Dead” family through the life of its youngest member, Macon Dead III, called Milkman. Milkman is drawn into the rift between his well to do landlord father and his moonshine brewing, herbal medicine practicing aunt. Because of this rift, he comes to investigate his family's origins and the early lives of his father and his aunt. What he finds surprises and energizes him, and draws him into a more authentic life.

This is a hard book to review because it's so complex. The main story is of a husband and wife, who each bring a child to their marriage, taking a road trip from New York City to the desert Southwest so that they can each pursue documentary projects that they are passionately interested in. Even before they set out on the road trip the future of the marriage is in question, but the couple's relationship disintegrates further as they travel.

Woven through the story are themes of erasure and loss: the Apache Indian tribes who were the last tribes to surrender to the US government and who the husband is obsessed with documenting. The wife is preoccupied with unaccompanied children who attempt to enter the United States for asylum and who are unceremoniously deported back to their home countries–after enduring unbelievable hardship to get here.

One of the best things about this book is its careful attention to detail. A gesture, a commonplace phrase, the way something looks and what it suggests–all are subject to examination and consideration in the narrative. When I started reading Lost Children Archive this drove me crazy because it made the book drag. Eventually I settled down to the style, and accepted that everything was going to be subjected to the scrutiny of a poet.

There is a book inside this book, too. Elegies For Lost Children is a book that the wife brings with her on the journey and that her children sometimes read from. It's a story of a caravan of unaccompanied children traveling through hardships to reach a place of safety. It is full of literary references, from T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Latin American authors that I was not familiar with.

The main characters, the husband, wife, and two children, do not have names for the first half of the book. When they finally do acquire names, they are the names that they give each other after the husband tells a story about how Apache children were given names. The whole book is like this: constructed to place you in a mental state of discomfort, disorientation, uncertainty, to mimic what people in the book are experiencing. But there is also a feeling of distance, because the book also has a complicated intellectual underpinning that not everyone can have access to. There is a debate about whether the father or the mother are correct in calling themselves a documentarian vs. a documentarist, and I wasn't sure how seriously to take this. Was it a joke about intellectual jargon or a reference to a genuine professional disagreement? The weaknesses of the book are along this line.

It took me more than 50 pages to decide I would stick it out and finish the book, and ultimately I'm glad I did. It was challenging to read, but once I adjusted my expectations for the pacing of the story I enjoyed it.

American Spy is written as a letter to the narrator's (Marie) twin sons as she prepares to go after the CIA officer who ordered a hit on her. Marie is a black woman who grew up in Queens in the 1970's and worked for the FBI in the ‘80's. The main action of the book takes place in the mid-‘80's, Cold War times, when Marie is recruited to “get close to” Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso, and get information from him. There are several layers of deception to this recruitment which peel away as the story progresses and plans go off the rails.

As plans go off the rails, you start to wonder if it's happening because the people in the story are actually really bad spies, or if Lauren Wilkinson doesn't know enough about the work of spying to write a believable spy novel. Also, the character Marie has a great deal of confidence in her abilities, which is not always justified in her actions. If it's part of the story that she's actually not a very good spy even though she thinks she is, that's one thing. If it's just a poorly imagined spy story, that's another.

What this novel does well is show the parallels between the life of a spy and the life of a black woman in a white world. Marie is always assessing peoples' truthfulness, intentions toward her, their motivations, and she instinctively understands the need to guard her real identity, her own truthfulness, level of intelligence, and motivations. These things come easily to her, it seems, because she has done them all her life. Her father, a Vietnam veteran, became a policeman after the war, much to their community's puzzlement, and Marie's motivation for joining the FBI is also questioned. The complexity of Marie and her father's (and sister Helene's) loyalty to a country and authority structure that does not seem loyal to them is another major theme in this book, and is more compelling than the not-totally-convincing spy novel that is the vehicle.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this novel.

A decent Holmes pastiche, with the focus on Mycroft, Sherlock's smarter older brother. Mycroft is 23, out of University, working for the Secretary of War, and engaged to a young woman who was raised in Trinidad and educated in England. When rumors of young children being killed by supernatural forces back in Trinidad reach England, Georgiana, the fiancee, embarks on a trip home, and Mycroft follows her (although she tells him not to).

What follows is an adventure story and a mystery, with murderous thugs, poisonings, corrupt government officials, communities of formerly enslaved and indentured people banding together to help each other, middle of the night break-ins, sword and gun fights, and surprise attacks by sea. Here and there we see catch glimpses of Mycroft using his formidable powers of observation to inform his decisions at life-or-death moments. The story of his fiancee helps us understand why he became the confirmed bachelor we know from the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, this Mycroft is a man of action, and it is unclear what made him become the sedentary Mycroft of Sherlock Holmes fame. I guess I will have to read the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar book to find out, and I am looking forward to doing so.

I've seen this called an experimental novel. It starts out as a story about a group of teenagers at a performing arts high school in an unnamed southern American city, their relationships, and their charismatic but shady teacher, Mr. Kingsley. Midway through, the story shifts dramatically, bringing some of the same characters into adulthood, but also bringing many of your initial assumptions into question and introducing (for me, anyway) a strong element of scepticism. Once the attitude of scepticism is invoked, it persists through the third part, even though the story told in the third part seems to corroborate what we learned in the second part. If that makes sense.

In the high school section of the novel, the students are asked to perform “trust exercises” with each other: falling backwards into a crowd of their fellow students, crawling around in the dark and identifying each other by feel (!!), etc. They also perform “mirroring” exercises, where one person says a “you” statement to another, and the second student repeats the statement as an “I” statement, using tone and inflection to change the meaning of the statement each time. These exercises result in changes of relationship between the students, but they also reappear later in the story as themes. Trustworthiness, the ability (or failure) to communicate effectively, the (lack of) ability to hear or interpret what someone is saying, and self absorption are all themes in the novel.

Each section of the novel is readable, even if you don't particularly like any of the characters. There's a lot of cringeworthy sex, but you understand that it is cringeworthy for a reason. The transitions between sections are abrupt and therefore jarring–there just isn't any continuity to smooth them out. Having finished the novel, I can contemplate the whole and feel satisfied that it IS a complete whole, although it felt disjointed while I was in the process.

This is a fantasy adventure set in Spain in 1491 as the Treaty of Granada was being negotiated and signed. Fatima, a concubine, and Hassan, a mapmaker, escape from the household of the sultan before they are able to be handed over to a delegation from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Hassan has the ability to make magical maps that alter real buildings and landscapes, and they are helped on their way by a jinn whom they had previously thought was just the palace dog.

The 12th century Persian tale “The Conference of the Birds” is a strong theme in this story, where the main characters feel leaderless, lost, and hopeless, and they go searching for a safe place and someone to guide them. Fatima had seen a partial copy of the tale in the sultan's palace, and since she could not find out how the original story ended, she and Hassan entertain each other by making up different endings, or telling new stories about the different birds that might have appeared in the tale. When they have to escape from the palace, Fatima decides that they should find the island where the King of the Birds is supposed to live.

Fatima is a plucky heroine, and Hassan is her brave sidekick and best friend with a mysterious power and a major vulnerability. Their adventures are sometimes quite scary and a little bit gruesome. There isn't much explanation of how the supernatural parts of the story work–you have to accept them and move on, in spite of any questions you might have, because the narrative doesn't linger. There is a small amount of romance (and not necessarily between the characters you might expect), but it is not a major feature of the story. I really enjoyed it, although I would have liked more explanation of what certain creatures were and where they came from/why they were significant. This is really a 3.5 star review.

A fantastic gem of a book. Rosemary Cooke is the narrator, telling the story of how she had a sister, Fern, when she was small, and then Fern disappeared and her family was turned upside down. The book deals with human and animal cognition and mental development, the ethics of animal experimentation, memory and family life, AND Rosemary Cooke is a delightful character. She feels herself to be an outsider to “normal” groups of people—girls she meets at college, for example. Her sense of herself as an outsider gives her a bit of an acerbic view of human relations, including her own relationships with other people. The result is often hilarious commentary on human behavior.

I really loved this book. I'll be looking up Karen Joy Fowler's other books to put on my reading list.

This was a fun page turner about a fictional rock band finding success in the 1970's and then abruptly breaking up. The format is like a documentary or an oral history, where the band members and others who were involved are interviewed about what happened way back then. Sometimes the band members' accounts contradict each other, and personal disagreements and grudges reveal themselves in what they say. Since you know from the beginning that the band breaks up at the height of their success, you wonder how each of these little fissures contribute to the final break

In general, I enjoyed it. It was an easy read and reminded me of a lot of rock journalism that I read when I was a teenager. I'd call it a vacation novel. There are some nice insights about addiction and sobriety and relations between men and women there, but nothing heavy or taxing.

Bowlaway is an oddball family epic that starts with Bertha Truitt's mysterious appearance in the Salford, Massachusetts graveyard at the beginning of the 20th century. She wouldn't talk about her past or where she came from, but she made a place for herself in the town by building and running a candlepin bowling alley that became an important part of town life. She also surprised everyone by marrying a black man, a doctor, Leviticus Sprague.

The focus of the story moves from one character to the next without much warning. I started this book thinking it was going to be about Bertha Truitt and Leviticus Sprague, but I was wrong. It was about them for a while, but then it moved on. Also, I tagged this as a family epic, and in a way it is, but it's also not, for reasons that will be clear to you if you read the book.

I didn't find any of the characters especially likeable (with the exception of Minna Sprague, the daughter of Bertha and Leviticus, who escapes the bowling alley and who I wish was a bigger part of the story). All of them, except possibly Bertha herself, seem stunted in some way–determined to trap themselves in unhappy marriages or jobs, or poison themselves with drink. There is a sad, dead-end feel to the story at the same time as it moves along at a steady clip. The pace is what kept me reading–if I didn't like what was happening at any one moment, I wouldn't have to wait long before things changed. There were enough intriguing, oddball details (the Salford Devil, the ghost hunter, Roy Truitt getting caught sneaking into his colleague's offices) that I always had hope the story would turn in a direction that was more interesting to me. Overall, I didn't love the book but I'm glad I read it. I liked the end more than I liked the rest of it.

I gave up on page 50. I was annoyed by the plot device of driving around New York with a reporter and photographer to all the significant scenes of Sutton's life and by the trite way Moehringer addressed the cultural changes over the 20 years Sutton had been in prison. When I got to p. 51, Sutton and some friends torture a sheep in a slaughterhouse (in a section of the book where being a tattle tale or a “Judas” was said to be worse than murder, and where the sheep was said to be a “Judas sheep”) and I stopped reading. I wasn't enjoying the book anyway, and I wasn't up for reading about animals being tortured as a demonstration that betrayal of comrades would be harshly punished.

This book is exactly what the title suggests: it offers a plan for how to face the reality of climate collapse, do what one can, and stave off despair. The advice is fairly simple: it's really about making some shifts in the way we see our situations. We remember that we are part of the earth, not separate from it, and we see the grief, anxiety, anger, despair we feel on behalf of the earth and its residents as the Earth crying out in us. We remind ourselves of the resources we have, our strengths, the people we know are supporting us. We don't worry about the end result, we do what we can each day. We see uncertainty as hopeful instead of destabilizing.

Active Hope is very much like an instruction manual or a workbook. It is laid out methodically and written in simple, clear language. Interspersed throughout the chapters are thought exercises to try either alone or in groups. In a few places are extended narratives from the authors' experiences that illustrate the mental/spiritual journey they are writing about. Although the thought exercises can be done by individuals on their own, the book is really directed toward people who are working with a group on climate activism.

The book has endnotes, a list of resources for further reading/inquiry, and an index. I recommend it for people who are dealing with climate grief/anxiety/depression and for people interested in (or who already are) taking action.

This is a sustained, book length argument that mass incarceration amounts to a new racial caste system comparable to Jim Crow, and that it has created an underclass of people, mostly black men, who are locked out of mainstream life for ever. Michelle Alexander writes about the history and workings of the War on Drugs, showing how police departments were given incentives to buy into it, how the courts made it difficult to bring accusations of racial bias on one hand and officers of the law were given extraordinary leeway to pursue charges on the other hand, leading to a system that targets poor blacks over other drug users. Given that someone with drug charges on their record can't receive public assistance, live in public housing, vote, or often convince anyone to give him/her a job, people end up forced out of society and often end up back in prison.

The book is thorough, well written, well documented (50 pages of notes). The closing chapter is especially powerful, where Alexander addresses such questions as whether affirmative action helps or harms, whether the election of Barack Obama, or the success of other prominent black citizens, means that racism is fading in the US, and what is needed to ensure that another racial caste system doesn't take the place of mass incarceration.

Transcription is a spy novel, but different from most of the spy novels I've read over the years. Juliet Armstrong, the protagonist, is drawn into working for MI5 during World War II not out of a desire to be a spy, but out of need for a job and a headmistress's recommendation to a recruiter. She goes along with what she is asked to do, and thereby ends up transcribing the conversations of British Fascists with an MI5 agent they think is an agent for Nazi Germany. In the course of doing this work, her wit, her energy and her daring are noticed, and she's asked to do other jobs as well.

The novel switches back and forth between events in 1940 when Juliet is working for MI5, and 1950 when she's working for the BBC. In 1950, her old association with MI5 intrudes on her life again and she puts her wit, energy, and daring to work to try understand what is happening. The story relies a little bit on information not revealed to the reader until the opportune time, but for the most part the reader catches on as Juliet does.

I really enjoyed Juliet herself, who is not an especially compliant female. Her responses to people were surprising at times–oppositional, sympathetic, brusque, vulnerable, but not lukewarm. She dives right into fraught situations instead of avoiding them. Despite her ambivalence about spying, I thought she was probably pretty well suited to it.

This is partly a historical novel, set in the early 1980's in Chicago among a group of gay men whose community is devastated by AIDS. The other part of the novel is set 30 years later in Paris as the younger sister of one of those men, Fiona, searches for her estranged daughter. The novel alternates between the two storylines one chapter at a time.

I was riveted by the earlier storyline. I thought Makkai captured so well the sense of these young men at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic trying to take care of each other and their community and at the same time go on with their normal lives. One of the things I found so moving was how healthy people learned what to plan for from their sick friends—what kind of insurance to get, which hospital or doctor to go to, how to assign a trusted person your power of attorney so that your wishes would be respected if your disapproving family tried to meddle with your care when you were too sick to advocate for yourself. The main character of this part of the book, Yale, is a gay man working as an art curator for an up and coming gallery. He was a friend of Fiona's brother, Nico, who has died of AIDS just as the novel begins. In the course of doing his job and showing up for his community, Yale suffers two breathtaking betrayals that upend his life.

The second part of the book is set in 2015 in Paris, where Fiona has hired a detective to find her daughter and grandchild. She stays with Richard, a now famous photographer who got his start in Chicago in the ‘80's, and was part of the community of gay men that Fiona knew so well. Richard provides the comfort of someone who has known her since her youth and the discomfort of proximity to so many sad memories. I didn't like this storyline as much because I found myself annoyed by Claire, the runaway daughter. However, I did like getting to know Fiona's story after she was done taking care of her dying friends, and seeing the reverberations throughout her life of that time.

This book was difficult to read because of the style in which it was written. Only two people in the large cast of characters are given anything resembling proper names: Milkman, a paramilitary man who is stalking the narrator (who is referred to as middle sister), and Somebody McSomebody, a borderline stalker. Everyone else is referred to by their relationship to middle sister or their place in the community. So you have characters like third brother in law, the man who doesn't love anybody (also known as real milkman, because he is in fact a milkman, unlike Milkman of the book's title), and the issues women, a group of feminists. Places are also named in this style at least part of the time, and certain activities like reading while walking, which middle sister does so that she doesn't have to be mentally present for the stress of living in her repressive society.

Although the city and the country are not named, it's clear that the story is set in 1970's Northern Ireland in the midst of the Troubles. The political situation dominates life to the extent that people's imaginations are stunted—anything the least bit out of the ordinary is either denied or looked on with suspicion. The paramilitary “renouncers” run middle sister's part of the city and hold kangaroo courts to punish anyone who deviates from the approved way of conducting their life. Middle sister's ways of coping with this include reading while walking (19th century or older literature only), running by herself or with third brother in law, and an ambivalent relationship with maybe boyfriend. When Milkman appears on the scene, obviously interested in her, her coping strategies are not adequate protection.

The style made it hard to get wrapped up in this book, but I eventually got comfortable and began to enjoy it. One of the things I admired was how beautifully the discomfort of being the object of unwanted attention was evoked. Middle sister feels she can't complain about or object to Milkman's attentions because nothing physical has happened and therefore she would be accused of complaining about nothing. But she's in a double bind, because even though nothing physical has happened, townspeople have noticed the meeting between Milkman and middle sister and blown it up into a rumor and then full fledged gossip that they are having an affair.

I also realized about halfway through the novel that the odd writing style had the effect for me of making this society seem more removed from familiar cultures than it would have if it had been explicitly set in Northern Ireland and people had proper names and were described in every day language. I read this as a dystopian novel for much of the time because of that, which I think is interesting.

Overall, I liked this book a lot, but found the style to be a significant barrier for at least half of it until I settled in.

This is a history and analysis of non violent protest movements around the world and why they are successful. It's well written, readable, with index, notes and bibliography. Some of the movements included are civil rights protests under Martin Luther King, Gandhi's Salt March, Otpor and the effort to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, and AIDS activists in the US. It's not a quick read, but it's thorough and fascinating.

I picked this book up without any knowledge of the author or the storyline, but being attracted by the blurb on the back. It turned out to be a complete delight. Set in 18th century Manhattan, New York, it concerns a young man calling himself Richard Smith who gets off a boat from England and presents a bill to the local banker for an enormous sum of money. He refuses to answer any questions about his business or what he intends to do with the money. Since the bill has to be verified with the issuing bank in England, and there's a waiting period imposed by the American bank on paying out large sums, there is plenty of time for people to speculate and spread rumors. While he is waiting, Smith finds himself drawn into relationships with people in the town, some friendly, some shady, some fraught with political intrigue. Attempts are made on his life, and he lands in jail accused of fraud with the prospect of hanging. When he portrays a heroic character in a town play, it leads to a series of events which bring the life he had set up for himself in New York falling to pieces around him.

The book reads like a light hearted historical adventure novel, where the hero finds himself in one tight corner after another but escapes with his life every time. But in one of the letters Smith composes to his father while in prison on suspicion of fraud, we start to see that this adventure is not so light hearted, and that the stakes are much higher than we initially thought. When we finally learn, along with the banker and the rest of Smith's New York acquaintances, what his business is, we see everything that happened before in a new light.

This book is a pleasure to read all the way though. It IS a historical adventure novel, with a mysterious young man who manages to get himself out of some scary situations through a combination of wit and good luck. But it also subverts the genre. The heroine and love interest is an anti-heroine extraordinaire, and the young man's business is a poke in the eye to the well-to-do colonials and the English establishment who make money from business in the colonies.

Happy go lucky Toby comes home from the bar late at night and is attacked by burglars who are rifling through his apartment. They leave him with a traumatic brain injury, which turns his life upside down. After some months of trying to recover, Toby agrees to move in with and look after his uncle Hugo, who is dying of brain cancer. Hugo lives in the Ivy House, a house that Toby and his two cousins Susanna and Leon have known and loved all their lives. When a human skull is found in the hollow of an old elm tree in the yard, old secrets start to surface as well.

This was a creepy novel. French makes the most of Toby's uncertainty, so that I didn't know how much to believe his telling of the story, even though he is the narrator. Also, throughout the story Toby reveals himself to be oblivious to other people's feelings and problems, self absorbed, and mean, and as the story goes on, Toby begins to understand a little bit of this himself. The murder is solved ambiguously, and by that time Toby has lost his assurance that he knows himself. I didn't like Toby, but I liked the book.

Nathaniel, 14, and Rachel, 16, are left in the care of their boarder by their parents for more than a year in post World War II England. That's how this novel starts out. The boarder, dubbed The Moth by the children, has a motley group of friends and acquaintances who fill the house and take on quasi parental roles in the children's lives. The first part of the novel deals with the confusion of being left by their parents and the unconventional experience of being raised and shaped by this group of likable but shady people, told from Nathaniel's point of view.

The second part of the novel deals with Nathaniel at various stages of adulthood, attempting to get to know his mother after she returns and after she has died. In the process he comes to understand more of what happened when he was a teenager and gains some insight into himself.

This is a gorgeous and mysterious book about incomplete vision, being hidden from others and from oneself.

This is a good old fashioned family epic, telling the story of a Korean family that makes its way to Japan for work and ends up staying there because of World War II, the Korean War, and all the changes these upheavals brought. Children are born, and then grandchildren, and because of Japan's citizenship laws and Japanese attitudes towards Korean people, generations of Koreans grow up as “foreigners” in the land of their birth.

While this lovely novel tells the stories of the individuals who make up this particular family, it also tells the story of the Korean people who lived and worked, were born, grew up in and were part of Japan–and still are. At times it seemed like characters were introduced only to drop away after a while, and I found that disappointing. Viewing the story from the perspective of the primary character, Sunja, who is born at the beginning of the novel and is a very old woman at the end, makes that dropping away seem more natural, since some of the characters are more central to her life than others. Also, viewing this as an historical epic where individuals play their parts and then drop out is a way of understanding this aspect of the novel.

I recommend this for the historical information represented in the novel, and a compelling, enjoyable story about a family's struggle to stay together and thrive in very tough circumstances.

This is a novel about an Albanian woman, Hana, who has been living as a sworn virgin, a man named Mark, for the last 14 years, immigrating to the United States and becoming a woman again. The story of how Hana became Mark ( and to some extent why) is interspersed with the story of Hana adjusting to life in the States and life as a woman again. I could have used a bit more explication of the social rules that made it necessary for Hana to become a man and why it was an honor for her foster father that she did so. There is very little explaining in this novel, and for the most part I appreciated that. I had to take everyone as I found them even as they were culturally very different from what I'm used to. But the sworn virgin custom is SO different from anything in my culture that I feel like it warranted a little more explanation than it got.

This book was written in Italian and translated into English.

There are three novellas in this book, along with a “postface” for each one, written by the author. Marguerite Yourcenar wrote in French, so these are translated into English.

The first novella, An Obscure Man, concerns a young man of Dutch extraction but brought up in England in the 18th century. He stows away on a ship bound for the Americas, where he stays and lives for a couple of years. When he comes back home, he finds his family dispersed, so he goes to Holland and gets a job in his uncle's printing house. He lives in poor health and dire poverty until he is taken into a wealthy man's household and given easy work to do. His minimal, self-acquired education allows him to observe, read, think and form opinions about the culture he sees around him–art, philosophy, music. The story moves from the gritty physicality of the streets, hovels, taverns and brothels to the clean, airy, impersonality of a grove of trees on a windswept island, and a life of struggle and illness to apprehension and acceptance of death.

The second novella concerns a young boy, the son of the “obscure man” in the first story, brought up in an Amsterdam brothel and mentored by a famous actor. He strikes out for a life in a company of traveling actors and contemplates all the “lives” he will live through the people he will play in the theater.

The third, “Anna, soror...,” is the story of a brother and sister growing up in 16th century Naples, in a hothouse of religious piety.

These are not quick reads–the themes of these stories are heavy and the language is so heady that it takes time and concentration to read and understand them. In the postfaces she wrote for these, she said she had originally named them after painters (like Caravaggio for Anna, Soror...), and that fits with my experience reading them.