Gabby

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about God, morality, and the right way to live? If so, this is a book for you. I am not one of those people, but I do like to check the classics off my list, so here I am. The book tells the story of the titular siblings and their father, using them to examine various approaches to existence. The father, Fyodor, is a grotesque old man who badly mistreated both of his wives and completely neglected his children. He's spent his life amassing money, chasing women, and drinking. His latest obsession is a young woman called Grushenka, who he knows doesn't love him but hopes to entice into marriage with his money. His rival for her affections is his oldest son, Dmitri (also called Mitya). Dmitri is in some ways a chip off the old block in that he is a hardcore party boy, but he has zero money management skills and also is not complete trash as a human. He's desperate to get money to make a play for Grushenka before she takes up with his father but is already 3,000 rubles in the hole because he stole that amount from his fiancee, Katerina. Katerina loves Dmitri no more than he loves her. Rather, she loves the middle brother, Ivan. Ivan is highly intelligent and rational, rejecting the religious faith that drives the youngest brother, Alexei (almost always referred to as Alyosha). Alyosha is, when the story begins, a novice at a monastery and devoted to an Elder in the Orthodox church. The characters are richly drawn, with Alyosha the obvious hero but all three of them are interesting in their own ways. The plot is both sprawling and simple: tension builds, followed by a murder about halfway through, and then a trial. It's unwieldy and constantly wanders off down little theosophical side paths. I liked it much better than the first Dostoyevsky novel I tried (Crime & Punishment), but I don't know that I'd say that means I liked it in a global sense. There were things that I found compelling, primarily in terms of character development. The trial at the end is propulsive and very engaging. But ultimately there was just way more religion than I'm looking for in the sorts of stories I enjoy.

I wanted to read this both because Midnight's Children was great and its own notoriety. It's interesting, because while Rushdie's debut felt like a more technically accomplished book, I thought this one (his fourth) demonstrated real growth in storytelling prowess. I enjoyed reading it more even as its flaws (including just way too many characters) were obvious.

In Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, The Troubles are explored primarily through the lens of one disappearance: that of Jean McConville, widowed mother of ten. It opens with a startling scene: Jean at home in the evening, trying to relax a little after a full day of work, when masked figures turn up demanding entrance to the apartment. McConville's children try to resist them, but Jean is taken and goes with them. She never returns home. No one will say what's happened to her. We then go back, and forward, to examine how her abduction came to take place, and what became of all the players in the drama afterwards.

There's a lot of information in here: about the origins of the Irish Republican Army and the offshoots that came into being around the time of the fighting (like the Provisional IRA, the one you're probably thinking about when you think about the IRA), the leadership of that group, the eventual rise of Sinn Fein and end of active hostilities. But just as much, it's about people. Dolours Price and her sister Marian, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams from the IRA; and also Jean McConville and her family, how she might have drawn the attention of the IRA, the ways that the sudden and unexplained loss of their mother affected the children as they grew up.

I'll admit I struggled to get oriented in this book at first. I came in with very little background and a lot of the factual stuff, with often confusingly similarly named organizations and groups, is frontloaded. It was hard to get and stay engaged and I honestly found myself turning to Wikipedia quite a bit to get enough context for what I was reading to get my head around it. But once it finished with the set up and dug into the major figures tied up in the disappearing of Jean McConville, it found much more solid ground and got much more compelling. I was left with indelible impressions of Dolours, Brendan, and Gerry, figures who had been completely unknown to me beforehand.

The book prompted me to do a lot of thinking about the porousness of the line between terrorism and revolution, the astonishing power of pure conviction, and the potential of even violent people to turn over a new leaf and be a perfectly normal member of the community. That the members of the IRA thought of the violent methods through which they sought to achieve their aims as justified and that they were military rather than criminal in their killing of other people is obvious. Is this why people like Dolours were able to transition away from their former lives, because she didn't think of herself as a bad person? I always appreciate when a book is able to make me question my assumptions, and if you're interested in learning more about what happened during The Troubles, this book has a lot to offer. But do beware that the beginning is slow and may not provide enough information to really give the kind of context it's clearly looking to.

Campaign autobiographies are often only interesting in what they tell you about how the candidate would like to be viewed. But this was written in the mid-90s, long before a run for office was on Barack Obama's radar, and it should not come as much of a surprise that it's very good. He's always been a talented writer, and this examination of his own childhood, his post-college years organizing in Chicago, and a trip to Kenya to learn more about his father is well-crafted, despite some uneven pacing and occasional indulgences. It's very much worth the read and still has interesting things to say even nearly 30 years after it was written.