Category: books

Day 493: Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End

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Cover for Between Summer's Longing and Winter's EndBest Book of the Week!
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is difficult to place in genre because while it is about the investigation of a crime and its repercussions, it is also reminiscent of the more cerebral of John Le Carré’s political thrillers without so much being a thriller as a record of law enforcement incompetence. The novel is crammed with characters who are mostly concerned with pursuing their own agendas, whether it be the chief constable of Sweden with his ridiculous intellectual exercises or a member of the secret police who is more concerned with pursing graft and sexual exploits than doing his job.

The novel is a fictional dissection of the possible scenario behind the true-life assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. It is the first of a trilogy of which only two novels have been published in English, but it stands fairly well on its own.

Between Summer’s Longing begins with an apparent suicide. A man living in a student apartment in Stockholm plunges to his death from his window. The apartment door is locked from the inside, and there does not appear to be any other explanation for the incident, even though the man’s shoe fell shortly after the body, killing the small dog that had just saved his master’s life from the falling body. The dead man is identified as John Krassner, an American journalist.

There are a few odd things about the crime scene, including the unusual message the man apparently left as a suicide note and the lack of a manuscript he had supposedly been writing. Still, everyone appears to be ready to wrap things up when police Superintendent Lars M. Johansson discovers that his own name and address are on a slip of paper inside a hollow heel of the man’s shoe.

In a separate time stream, the novel returns to several months earlier when the Swedish secret police get a tip to keep an eye on John Krassner. Chief Operations Officer Berg is informed by his people that they are having difficulty finding out what Krassner is up to because he seldom leaves his room, which is close by that of several students. He puts police Superintendent Waltin in charge of an operation to lure Krassner out of the house at a time when it will be empty and send an independent operative in to search his apartment. That operation takes place the night Krassner is killed, but Waltin’s operative assures him he was finished and out before the death.

Persson takes us down some labyrinthine trails before finally getting to the assassination and also before we find out exactly what happened to Krassner. In the meantime we encounter espionage agents, secret societies, sexual deviants, drunks, and incompetents, almost all of whom work for the regular or secret police or the government. If there is any hero of the novel, it is Superintendent Johansson, who figures almost everything out.

The novel is gripping and well written except for a couple of murky passages, but I wasn’t sure if I found them murky because of my own lack of understanding of Swedish politics of the 80’s or if they were perhaps even purposefully murky. Persson himself was a whistle blower in the Swedish police, so it should not be a surprise to learn that the novel is cynical, sly, and full of intrigue.

Day 492: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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Cover for The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt KidThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is billed as a memoir, but it is even more a collection of information and odd facts about 1950’s America, each chapter headed by a strange newspaper clipping from the time. This book is one of nostalgia similar to the work of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose works centered on a slightly earlier time and author of the books that spawned A Christmas Story.

The memoirs bear many similarities to Shepherd’s, possibly because of the similarities in the imaginations and predilections of young boys, although Bryson’s continue on into the 1960’s and lose a lot of their innocence as the boys become obsessed with gaining glimpses of naked women and stealing beer. I’m guessing that a lot of the humor, with its emphasis on body functions and pranks, would be more amusing to men than to women.

Still, I found the book mildly funny. It turns out that I am roughly one month older than Bill Bryson, so I can vividly remember many of the things that Bryson relates as curiosities, clambering under our desks for the absurd air raid drills, for example, or going to view model air-raid shelters. Bryson grew up in Des Moines, a much bigger town than my own, so his memories are a little more urban than mine.

One place where my memory differs from his is in his repeated assertions that the Russians would never bomb Des Moines. When I was in the seventh grade, I distinctly remember being forced to watch an “educational” film during which we were informed that our town was among the top three bombing targets in the country (which is, of course, absurd, but we believed it). My subsequent informal research (occasionally asking people) has lead me to believe that every school child in America was told the same thing.

Readers Bryson’s age can take a brief look back through time in an afternoon of light reading. Younger readers might be surprised at some of the tidbits Bryson has uncovered, but they were no surprise to me.

Day 491: The Here and Now

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Cover for The Here and NowI know that Ann Brashares is a popular author of books for teens and young adults, although I have not read her before. The Here and Now is a departure for her, though, because, although set in the present, it is in the science fiction genre.

Prenna and her people are from the future. They migrated back, fleeing from horrible conditions in our future, including a starving planet and a virulent disease called the blood plague that kills virtually everyone who is exposed to it. Prenna and her mother live with the others who came with them, and although they interact with “time natives,” they must obey stringent rules about staying uninvolved with them. Prenna finds this irksome and is aware of people being sent away for innocent mistakes.

Although she flies below the radar at school, Prenna has one friend, Ethan, who behaves sometimes as if he knows something about her. He does. She does not remember, but he witnessed her arrival a few years before. Prenna likes Ethan, but she is forced to keep their friendship on a superficial level.

Prenna’s contact with a homeless man sets up an unexpected chain of events. While trying to discover the cause of the man’s death, she and Ethan begin to believe they can change the course of the future by preventing one act.

I have written before about some characteristics of much young adult/teen fiction that I find annoying. One is a certain style of first-person narration that sounds too much like an adult trying to sound like a teen. It is used in this novel, only it is made worse by the preponderance of choppy sentences, especially in the dialogue. If Brashares believes teens can’t think and talk in complex sentences, she should read the dialogue in The Fault in Our Stars (which admittedly may be too sophisticated but strikes me as authentic). This tendency is worsened by the use of the present tense, almost always a poor choice for fiction.

But let’s look at the plot and characters, since those are what teens will think about. The only characters who are more than moderately developed are Prenna and Ethan. Brashares makes the mistake of believing we will automatically care about Prenna before we really get to know her. As for the other characters, Prenna’s mother is a total enigma who won’t even eat dinner with her daughter, although that is never explained. The other adults in Prenna’s group are basically cartoon villains.

http://www.netgalley.comWhether you can enjoy the plot depends on how much you can suspend your disbelief. I will just point out two things, as vaguely as possible. The first is the unlikelihood of Patient #1 of the blood plague being the same person whose totally separate act causes potential massive efforts to stop the horrible effects of global warming to be stillborn. (And by the way, I didn’t really appreciate the lecture about global warming that suddenly pops into the dialogue.) The second is the completely unbelievable results of Prenna and Ethan’s adventure.

I frankly had a very difficult time getting through this short novel. Teens may enjoy it, but I did not.

Day 490: The Glass Palace

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Cover for The Glass PalaceBest Book of the Week!
In the late 19th century, the kingdom of Burma was one of the wealthiest in southeast Asia. Its people were all literate, and no one in the country went hungry. Hundreds of thousands of Indians and people from other nearby countries traveled there to work on the waterways or the teak plantations.

In 1885, the Burmese government imposed a fine on a British trading company for avoiding taxes by under-reporting the amount of teak it was exporting. The British government used this incident as a pretext for invading the country and taking the royal family captive. King Thebaw and Queen Supalayat and their children, along with a few servants, were deported to India, where they were kept captive for the rest of the king’s life in a crumbling, poorly maintained house. Their personal possessions, including the king’s valuable jewelry collection, were confiscated and returned to England.

It is around this shameful incident that the beginning of The Glass Palace is constructed, an ambitious novel that tells the recent history of India and Burma/Myanmar through the stories of several related families. Rajkumar is a 10-year-old Indian orphan whose mother died in their attempt to reach Burma, and he is working at a small cooking stall near the palace when it is breached. He witnesses the removal of the queen and the princesses, and is struck by the beauty of Dolly, their young servant. Dolly is the only one of the lady’s maids who chooses to follow the royal family into exile.

Rajkumar goes to work for a Malayan businessman named Saya John Martins. With Saya John’s help and advice, Rajkumar eventually makes his fortune in the teak industry and finally travels to India to look for Dolly. She accepts his proposal and returns to Burma with her friend Uma, the recent widow of the first Indian Collector, the official in charge of the Burmese royal family.

These are just the bare bones of a dual story rich in characters and detail, on the one hand that of Rajkumar’s efforts to better himself, on the other hand that of the lives of Dolly and the royal family in exile. But this novel is not a love story, and that is just the beginning of this novel, which continues until the present. The novel follows the fates of Rajkumar and Dolly’s children and grandchildren and those of Uma’s nieces and nephews in India and Burma as the families intermarry with each other and with Saya John’s children. As we follow the fortunes of some family members in Burma and Malaya, other family members get involved in the Indian movement for independence from the British empire.

During the Japanese invasion and bombings of Burma and Malaya during World War II, various family members struggle to survive, one an Indian soldier in the British army, one a rubber plantation owner, one a photographer who disappears in Malaya. Rajkumar and Dolly and their daughter-in-law and grandchild are forced with thousands of other Indians to make the thousand-mile trek back to India.

Ghosh is interested in telling a complex story of culture and  history, so he keeps us at a remove from his characters, but that does not make the novel any less moving. The novel does an amazing job of exploring the roots of problems in Myanmar and India through its exposition of events and the varying points of view of its characters. This is a captivating and ambitious novel.

Day 489: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion

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Cover for Queen AnneHistorically, the legacy of the reign of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, has been marred by allegations that Anne was a weak woman who was ruled by her favorites. The accomplishments of her reign have been attributed to men she entrusted with leadership roles, most notably John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. Similarly, the wrongs perpetrated during her reign have been imputed to the misguidance of her favorites. Historian and biographer Anne Somerset’s new book exhaustively shows that Anne, to the contrary, was a sensible and conscientious ruler, most consistent in her views and often very stubborn, although private and reserved.

Much of what was popularly known about Queen Anne came from the writings of Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was Anne’s close friend and confidante for many years before becoming her bitter enemy. Even when they were close, the duchess seems to have been a demanding harridan, whose idea of her own power and desserts grew too rapacious and who treated the queen abominably for years. Having read a biography of the duchess several years ago, I approached this book believing Anne was a weak and silly woman, but it has made me change my mind.

Somerset makes an interesting point that Anne’s lack of charisma and physical appearance may have hurt her legacy. Although the portrait of the young Anne reveals a beautiful lady, by the time of her reign she was grossly overweight and plagued by serious physical ailments. These were diagnosed at the time as various disorders, including gout, but a modern look at her symptoms indicates that she may have suffered from lupus, a serious autoimmune disease. For the most part she soldiered on uncomplaining to do her duty for her country.

This book lucidly explains the complex issues that echoed throughout Anne’s reign, including the ouster of King James II, Anne’s father, and the refusal to acknowledge his son, Anne’s half brother James Francis Edward Stuart, as a legitimate heir to the throne because of his Catholicism; the bitter feuds between the Whigs and the Tories; and the War of the Spanish Succession. The book is thorough in its research and very well written. Although I tired at times of its dissection of a seemingly endless series of disputes among those vying for power, I think the book offers a considered and balanced look at Queen Anne’s life and reign.

I received a copy of this book free through a giveaway on Goodreads.

Day 488: As I Lay Dying

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as-i-lay-dyingAs I Lay Dying is the first Faulkner novel set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, about the death of Addie Bundren and the efforts of her family to cart her body to Jefferson, Mississippi, for burial. As an early Faulkner work, it is one of the first in his experiments with stream of consciousness and is unusual in that its plot is conveyed solely through the thoughts of its many narrators.

At the beginning of the novel, Addie Bundren is dying. Her son Cash is building her coffin right outside her window while she watches. Her husband Anse and sons Darl and Jewell are discussing whether Darl and Jewell should go off to work a job that will earn $3 so close to the time of her death.

The plot is fairly simple—they go, she dies before they get back, there is a big storm that washes out the bridge, and the whole family takes her with great difficulty to Jefferson, trying to find a way to get across the river. The accomplishment of the novel is in revealing the complex relationships among the family members from the sometimes incoherent thoughts of themselves and some of the people they encounter on their journey.

This is a dark and pessimistic novel. Although its characters are uneducated, rough, and bluntly spoken, some of them, particularly Darl, have unexpected sophisticated and even poetic thoughts. On the other hand, there is Anse, shiftless and selfish, but stubborn as the dickens when he makes up his mind to do something.

Although Addie made Anse promise to bury her in Jefferson almost as punishment for the life she hated, it is not clear whether his new teeth or his promise is the reason for the trip. On the road, there are several occasions where his determination not to be “beholden” puts his family to major inconvenience or even danger, yet on another occasion he is outraged that his neighbor refuses the use of his mules for an attempt to cross the river that results in the death of Anse’s own  mules.

We don’t hear much directly from Addie. As Cash builds the coffin she is a staring presence who doesn’t utter a sound. She has only one chapter to herself, in which she reveals her true disdain for her husband and children except for her son Jewell, the fruit of an illicit affair. Why she married Anse in the first place is not entirely clear, except that she hated her life as a schoolteacher.

The trials that the family must face to get to Jefferson are almost epic, but for what? Addie makes clear that her wish was malicious. Anse has ulterior motives. Yet Jewell is driven to Herculean efforts and loses the only thing he loves, Anse’s stubbornness nearly makes Cash lose his leg, and Darl ends up perpetrating an infamous act and being committed. The young boy Vardaman is traumatized on several occasions, and in town the only daughter, Dewey Dell, is cruelly duped.

Some of the themes of this novel are those of selfhood and existence, the contrast between spoken words and thoughts, the treatment of different social classes, and the irony of extraordinary but pointless acts. The ending makes the pointlessness clear by its almost comic mundanity.

Although this novel has echoes of characters who will appear in later novels—mentions of Snopes, Quick, the Tulls, and other characters—it has none of the bleak humor of the Snopes trilogy. It is widely regarded, though, as one of Faulkner’s most powerful novels and as a vivid example of the then new stylistic techniques of Modernism.

Day 487: The Book Thief

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Cover for The Book ThiefLiesel Meminger is nine years old when she arrives at a house in a poor street near Munich. Her mother has given her and her brother up to a foster family because she cannot support them, but her little brother died on the train on the way there. She is dirty and illiterate, and when she arrives at the house of Hans and Rosa Hubermann, she has to be coaxed to come inside.

Although the Hubermanns prove to be loving parents and Hans eventually teaches Liesel to read, it is 1939 in Nazi Germany. Slowly, the difficulties of living in the Third Reich and the hardships of war will affect everyone she knows.

Liesel has already stolen her first book, when a grave digger dropped it the night her brother died. She steals her second book from a fire on the night of a book burning, for small and even large acts of defiance have become a part of her nature.

Zusak depicts a vivid life within Liesel’s little community. The boy that becomes her best friend, Rudy Steiner, has already distinguished himself before they meet by covering himself with soot and pretending to be Jesse Owens during the 1936 Olympics. Hans Hubermann is a failing painter and virtuoso accordion player who is ultimately too kind for his own good. His gruff wife Rosa shows her inner kindness by forcing people to eat her dreadful soup.

The novel is told by Death, which acts as an omniscient narrator, sometimes telling the back story, sometimes giving a glimpse of the future. At the beginning of the book, I thought I was going to find this irritating. By the middle of the book, I was wondering if it added anything that a traditional narrator wouldn’t provide. By the end, I thought it was effective. One little quirk of style that bothered me a little, though, was that Zusak occasionally creates his own words when perfectly good ones that are very similar already exist, like lovelily instead of lovely. I think this is an affectation that adds little to the novel.

The Book Thief accomplishes an unusual goal—to show that there were decent Germans during World War II. One of the kind and dangerous things that Hans Hubermann does is shelter a Jew, Max Vandenburg, in his basement for months. Liesel’s relationship with Max forms a core part of the story.

This novel is involving and affecting. It does have a few difficult scenes, but I think that it is a very readable experience for tweens, teens, and older readers. It has been wildly popular, so obviously readers are enjoying it.

Day 486: Empress of the Night

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Cover of Empress of the NightIn early November 1796, Catherine the Great of Russia suffered a stroke and lay on her deathbed for 36 hours before she finally succumbed. Eva Stachniak’s second novel about Catherine imagines her spontaneous flashbacks of her life, interrupted by moments of fleeting awareness, as she lies there helplessly.

Empress of the Night covers some of the same ground as Stachniak’s The Winter Palace, only the previous novel is told from the point of view of Varvara Nikoleyeva, Catherine’s spy turned confidante, and concentrates mostly on the time before Catherine was Russia’s ruler. Varvara is only a fleeting presence in Empress of the Night, and I wonder if readers who had not read The Winter Palace would be confused by references to her.

Stachniak’s deathbed approach for this novel by definition causes it to be disjointed in narrative style and sometimes difficult to follow chronologically. The novel portrays Catherine as a figure more sympathetic than otherwise, but other characters are left relatively undeveloped.

Catherine’s memories go all the way back to her arrival in Russia as Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, a prospective bride for the Empress Elizabeth’s spoiled and childish heir Peter. We follow her struggles to be accepted as a future wife, to conceive, and to maintain some kind of standing in Elizabeth’s court, although that subject is covered more thoroughly in the first novel. The narrative carries us through the coup against her husband after Elizabeth’s death and the most important events of Catherine’s reign, ending with her attempts to marry her granddaughter Alexandrine to the king of Sweden and to leave her office to her grandson Alexander instead of her foolish and tyrannical son Paul.

Although this novel is interesting, I was not as drawn in as I was by the first book. The parts of the novel dealing with Catherine’s stroke and its aftermath interrupt the flow of the narrative too often. I was also taken aback by the preponderance of attention given in the novel to Catherine’s favorites, especially to the annoying Zubov, versus the actual events of her rule. The emphasis seems to lie with her personal attachments, which I frankly think is unlikely for a world ruler. I also find it hard to believe that Catherine had so much patience with some of her relatives and lovers, most of whom are characterized as being annoyingly selfish.

Since I have read a fair amount about Catherine’s life, I was able to follow the references to important events with little difficulty, but I am left wondering how easy it would be for someone who is unfamiliar to form a good understanding of what is going on. Still, I think this novel draws an appealing portrait of a complex and difficult person.

http://www.netgalley.comMy original understanding of The Winter Palace was that it was the first in a trilogy about Catherine the Great. I am left wondering if I was mistaken, because this novel does not seem to leave anywhere for the writer to go in a third novel. Empress of the Night is ultimately much less satisfying than The Winter Palace in the depth it applies to its subject, which makes me wonder if Stachniak simply lost interest.