Michael

Cat’s Eye is the heartbreaking story of Elaine Risley. The novel starts with Elaine as a nine-year-old, follows her through school and college, and ends up with her as a well-respected artist who in middle-age has her first retrospective in her home-town of Toronto.

As a child, Elaine is a little odd. In fact, her entire family is slightly out of place in the Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father is an entomologist and so she, her father, mother, and brother spend the summers out in the forests of Canada researching insects. They really don’t have a home until at some point they return to Toronto where her father begins work at the university.

Elaine finally makes some friends. Elaine, Grace, Carol, and especially Cordelia are her best friends. But they are not. This is a novel about the cruelty of a group of girls*, and the trauma that bullying can cause throughout a person’s life. It is about how the past never really leaves us, but lives on, buried in our psyches and ready to reappear.

It seems to me that the novel’s focus is on a few years of this bullying, years that the adult Elaine has suppressed, and how this suppression has impacted her art, her relationships, and really her whole life.

The novel is written with Margaret Atwood’s wonderful prose. I was hooked from the beginning and felt for Elaine, and indeed for most of the characters (although Josef I could do without). I love Margaret Atwood’s writing, and this is among her best (maybe it’s not quite at the same level as The Handmaid’s Tale, but few books are).

It’s full of quotable lines, but one of my favorites is the last line, which in a way reaches back to her childhood with her brother. Speaking of stars: “It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by.” Not hope precisely, but acceptance.

*of course, the stereotypical bully is that of a boy beating up other boys, but boys can also bully in the same way that Elaine’s friends bully her.

The War with the Newts is a satirical, dystopian, speculative fiction novel by Karel Čapek. Čapek was a Czechoslovakian writer of the interwar years and War with the Newts was written in 1936. It skewers politics (liberal, democratic, and fascist), Hollywood, newspaper reporters, and even pretentious university professors, and he seems to hold a special contempt for the politicians of the day. In addition, Hitler’s presence was looming over central Europe and the Nazis rightly considered this novel subversive (they did try to arrest Čapek after the invasion, but they hadn’t realized he had died, so they arrested his wife instead).

The novel is in 3 parts. The first part relates the discovery of a species of giant newts or salamanders who are I think around 4 feet tall. They walk on two legs and are amphibious. Part two is about the exploitation of the newts. It is full of newspaper articles and “scientific” articles and contains copious footnotes. They are essentially turned into slaves and since there are so many of them, they are considered expendable. There are the beginnings of arguments among the maritime countries of the world about the newts. The third part is about…well, you can see it in the title.

Due to the type of novel and the large cast of characters, who are heavily satirized, it was impossible for me to identify with any of them, apart from Mr. Povondra. I really liked him. The style strikes me as very 1930s, and the translation is faithful to this style. However, I really liked this novel and appreciated the mirror it held to 1930s Europe and the US. It is a mirror that could be held up to the world as it exists today, as well. I am not well-read enough to understand the details as they relate to the world at that time.

I think there are people who have read this and do not like the way it ended—the last chapter is titled “The author talks with himself.” I thought it was perfect.

The Snowman is the 7th in Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole thriller/mystery series.

Harry Hole is a brilliant, generally unpleasant, alcoholic police detective. And while it seems strange that someone this damaged can remain on the police force, I am willing to suspend my disbelief. The Snowman is the name given to a serial killer who targets women. Why he targets these women is a spoiler that I won’t reveal, although anyone who has seen the TV series will know why (I have not seen the series).

There are many secondary characters and Nesbø is skillful enough that I had no trouble keeping them apart. All the non-serial killer characters are imperfect to a greater or lesser degree; some of them understand this and try to compensate and some do not.

The plot is fast-moving. There are number of twists and turns that are handled well. I guessed the killer about half-way through the book, but this didn’t bother me since this is far more in the thriller category than the mystery category. It was fun waiting for Harry to figure everything out.

The setting is dark and dreary Norway, mainly in the cities of Oslo and Bergen and their surroundings. Perhaps it is this aspect of the actual climate of Scandinavia that makes thrillers set there so gruesome and gory, and The Snowman is certainly gruesome and gory.

I enjoyed reading this novel, perhaps as a way to avoid thinking about how gruesome and gory the real world is.

Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew is set during World War II in Berlin, Paris and the French countryside. This is a novel where magical realism sits beside the monstrous horrors of the Nazis and the very human actions of the characters. Most of the characters are Jewish, most die at the hands of the Nazis. The literal Angel of Death is hovering nearby and one of the main characters is Ava, a golem. It is a novel about love, loss, resilience, and what it means to be human.

It starts with Hanni Kohn, mother to 12-year-old Lea, and her desperate desire to save her daughter. The only way to do this is to go to a world-renowned rabbi, and ask him to create a golem, whose one purpose in life would be to protect Leah. Having failed once before the rabbi refuses. The rabbi’s daughter overhears the conversations and says she will create a golem, although this would be a sin, since women are not supposed to act in this way. But the golem, who is female created by a female to protect a female is created and she is called Ava.

There are a multitude of characters in the book that I had no trouble keeping apart. Most are Jewish, but not all. I was so very sad when one of my favorite characters was killed, but that is the historical part of this historical fiction novel. Anyone starting to read this because it is historical fiction, should be aware that it is not true historical fiction, but fiction with a lot of history thrown in and a lot of magical realism and elements of Jewish folklore.

However, the novel reads sort of like an extended fairytale, a style that is difficult for me. I thought the writing, plot, and characters were wonderful, but the fairytale like style took me out of the story on occasion. But this was not enough to really bother me, and I thought this was a wonderful, wonderful book that I am so glad I read.

There are parallels to the world we currently live in that are frightening.

This is a wonderful book. The writing is beautiful, while at the same time being “simple” and easy to read. There are Farsi words scattered throughout Martyr!, but these didn’t bother me, though I must admit, I spent a lot of time with Google translate. It is about so much: life, death, love, family, and the place of art in the world. At times it became a little pretentious, but that was ok, the subject seemed to demand it.

This is written with several POVs, and it moves back and forth in time. I thought Akbar handles this well. The are dreams and surreal episodes. These are also handled well.

Many of the chapters start with a poem. Generally, I can’t appreciate poetry, so I ended up skimming these. Some chapters began with a report on the shooting down of an Iranian flight 655, a passenger jet shot down by mistake in 1988 by the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers were killed. This was a real event. It plays a key role in the life and death of one of the characters.

The main character is Cyrus, a young recovering alcoholic and sometime poet. I shouldn’t say too much more about him since there are plot points I don’t want to reveal. Anyway, Cyrus is a wreck, and his ruminations and dialog are pretentious and over-the-top. He is concerned that his life “Mean” something. I can’t stand these people in real life, but this is a novel after all, and I found him kind of loveable.

There are many other characters in the novel. They are all well written and I really wanted to know more about them. There are Cyrus’ parents, Ali and Roya; Roya’s brother Arash; Orkideh, a New York City performance artist; and Zee, Cyrus’ perhaps lover and friend. Zee was the kindest and most loving person in the novel, and he was my favorite character.

The ending is somewhat ambiguous. This is okay, since I was able to project a very happy ending for Cyrus and Zee.

I don’t really have much more to say other than the fact that I loved Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!

The Offing is the story of Dulcie, an older woman living alone in cottage by the sea in England, and Robert, a sixteen-year-old boy who stumbles into Dulcie’s garden after walking from his home in the north. Dulcie is wise and eccentric, and apparently well-to-do. Robert has finished with school, which he hated, and has decided on a little freedom before he goes down into the coal mines as his father and grandfather have done. The time is just after World War II, when the soldiers who survived the war return, but nothing is normal yet in Great Britain. Unknown to Robert, Dulcie is grieving the death of her lover, a famous German poet. She despises what her country and Hitler has done but because she is German, her poems went out of favor.

This is a coming-of-age story for Robert, but it also meaningful for Dulcie. Although Dulcie and Robert are years apart in age and miles apart in social class, their relationship becomes a true and deep friendship.

This is a beautifully written book, with wonderful descriptions of the English countryside, the people who inhabit it and of Dulcie, Robert, and Romy who was Dulcie’s lover. It is also about class, the environment, and it is deeply pessimistic about our ability to avoid wars. Nevertheless, it feels to me like a quiet book.

My only, relatively minor complaint is about Dulcie. Is anyone really that wise, and not just wise, but smart. And why does she have all the exotic food she desires, while the rest of the presumably poor population is still using ration books?

Anyway, aside from this, it is a gem of a book.