Day 463: The Luminaries

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Cover for The LuminariesBest Book of the Week! Year!

This last year I read several books that played wonderfully with structure. I’m thinking particularly of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a series of stories linked by their characters that somehow forms a whole, and Life After Life, in which the heroine’s life is repeated, with slight changes that lead to significant ones. I loved both of these inventive approaches to structure, and now I add to this list The Luminaries, the latest winner of the Man Booker Prize. This book is also my second recently reviewed novel set in New Zealand.

Walter Moody is newly come to the gold fields of the South Island of New Zealand in 1866. He has arrived in rough seas and is shaken by an apparition he has seen in the bowels of the ship. Seeking warmth and comfort, he checks into a seedy waterfront hotel and enters the parlor, where he accidentally interrupts the meeting of 12 other men.

After some initial hesitancy, the men begin telling him a series of tales, all interconnected, but the whole of which they cannot make out. The tales concern a missing trunk, a fortune found in a dead man’s cabin, the disappearance of a prominent citizen, the apparent attempted suicide of a whore. Each man at the meeting has his own part of the story to impart. Moody is able to make some sense of the story, but all go away from the meeting knowing that pieces are missing.

This section of the book is the longest, making up almost half its length. The cover of the novel, showing a waning moon, gives you a hint to its structure. It is divided into 12 sections, each one shorter than the one before but each one adding to the revelations of the original tales, until the final very short slivers of sections reveal all.

Each of these sections is also headed with an astrological chart that shows how the heavenly bodies are positioned within the signs of the 12 initial characters. This I did not understand at all, but Catton provides some indication at the beginning of the sections about what the astrology predicts.

The chapters of the novel are charmingly headed with old-fashioned descriptions of what happens in the chapter. Over time, the descriptions themselves begin to drive the narrative.

In The Luminaries, we’re presented with a novel that embodies a puzzle, a complex tale of villainy and foul crimes but also of love and loyalty. I was completely engrossed in  entangling the threads of this story. Despite its beginnings as a tale of cheats and chicanery, you may be surprised to find that you are reading a love story about two characters connected by their stars.

Day 462: The Return of Captain John Emmett

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Cover for The Return of Captain John EmmettThe Return of Captain John Emmett is the first of Elizabeth Speller’s Laurence Bertram mysteries set just after World War I. I previously reviewed the second in the series, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton.

Laurence Bertram has felt himself at a loss since the war ended. He is haunted by his memories of the war and also by guilt at his lack of grief over the deaths of his wife Louise and baby son, whom he never saw. Ostensibly writing a book about church architecture, he is finding it difficult to work. So, it is with a bit of relief that he responds to a letter from Mary Emmett, the sister of an old school friend John Emmett, in which she asks him to come visit her.

Laurence has fond memories of some school leave visits with the Emmetts after his parents died but feels Mary has misunderstood the depth of his friendship with John, whom he has not seen in years. Of course, he has heard of John’s death, an apparent suicide. Mary explains that John had been staying in a rest home because of mental disturbance following the war. Since he seemed to be improving, she and her mother cannot understand why he committed suicide. She asks John to find out what he can about John’s motives.

Laurence feels uncomfortable but agrees to look into it because he has always been attracted to Mary. With the help of his friend Charles Carfax, who gets his detective skills from reading Agatha Christie books, Laurence investigates the rest home and anything he can find out about John’s state of mind before his death. Included in John’s curious scraps of paper and photos is a list of the beneficiaries of his will, some of whom cannot be identified or located, and some photos from the war.

Laurence comes to believe that John’s death has something to do with his war experience, possibly with an execution over which he was forced to preside. And it seems John may not have committed suicide after all.

Speller takes her time with these mysteries. The settings are beautifully described and the period effectively evoked. A true sense of depth of character emerges. Even though I was about 100 pages ahead of Laurence, not in identifying the perpetrator but in realizing the motive, I enjoyed every bit of this novel.

In the last few months, I have read several historical mysteries where the author did little with the time or place, simply using the historical events to frame the plot. Thankfully, Speller has taken more care with this interesting period of history.

Day 461: My Life in Middlemarch

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Cover for My Life in MiddlemarchMy Life in Middlemarch is a difficult book to categorize and an unusual effort. It is part memoir, part literary criticism, part literary history and biography, part thoughtful examination. Its focus is on George Eliot’s greatest novel, Middlemarch.

New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead muses about what the novel, her favorite as it is mine, has meant to her during different periods of her life, how different parts of the novel and different characters have spoken to her and how her sympathies with characters and comprehension of the novel’s themes have changed as her life was in its varying stages. She also examines events in Eliot’s own life—how they and the people she knew may have contributed to her works.

This book is about all things Middlemarch. Mead visits the towns and homes where Eliot resided and places where she may have set the novel. She reports on the ways that literary criticism of the novel changed over time—how it was immediately popular and then fell out of favor in later years to be rehabilitated, partially by the appreciation of Virginia Woolf. The book provides interesting insights into the novel and into Eliot’s life and possible thought processes as she wrote the novel.

http://www.netgalley.comFor those who have not read Middlemarch, the book still may hold some interest, but a lot will be lost. To those who have read and loved it, you will probably, like me, be compelled to pick it up again and reread it. I’ll be doing that soon.

Second Anniversary: Ten Best Books of the Year!

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Cover for Life After LifeTomorrow is my second anniversary of keeping this blog. So, here I am with my second list of the year’s best ten books. This list is fairly arbitrary, because to get it down to ten books, I had to make some tough decisions. As with last year’s list, these books were not necessarily published in the past year. They are just the ten best from the ones I reviewed, in the order I reviewed them.

Day 460: March Violets

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Cover for March VioletsThe blurb on Philip Kerr’s collection of three noir mysteries, Berlin Noir, compares him to John Le Carré and Alan Furst. I wouldn’t say that is an apt comparison. For one thing, the other two are writing in a different genre. For another, they are better writers. Still, if you like noir, March Violets has its own qualities.

This novel is the first in a series featuring private detective Bernie Gunther. It bears many of the hallmarks of a typical noir mystery. Its main character is a smart, wise-cracking tough guy who used to be a cop. It features beatings, untrustworthy dames, thugs, and murder. What makes it stand out is its setting in 1936 Berlin.

Bernie is hired by millionaire industrialist Hermann Six to find a family heirloom necklace. It was stolen from the safe of his daughter Grete and her husband Paul Pfarr when the two were brutally murdered in their beds and their bodies burned. Herr Six explicitly instructs Bernie not to look into their deaths but to find the necklace and return it to him. Of course, Bernie begins looking into everything.

Using credentials as a representative of an insurance company investigating the fire, Bernie soon finds out that Pfarr was a member of the SS, with a mission from Himmler to seek out corruption in the labor movement. That mission made him a lot of enemies. He also had some kind of friction with Herr Six, who is rumored to have ties to organized crime. In addition, there were unexplained problems in the Pfarr’s marriage.

Typical of noir fiction, the plot becomes very involved. The setting is convincingly evoked, especially the constant threat of violence for ordinary citizens under the Nazis. Bernie specializes in missing persons, and the novel makes clear that hundreds of people go missing from Berlin daily.

Since I am more familiar with classic noir, the novel occasionally struck me as too coarse, but that didn’t bother me as much as other uses of language. First, idioms with which I am unfamiliar are used constantly. Perhaps they are period German idioms, but they often seem clumsy and inapt, which idiomatic  language seldom does. Also clumsy and inapt are Kerr’s many metaphors, for example:

The butler cruised smoothly into the room like a rubber wheel on a waxed floor and, smelling faintly of sweat and something spicy, he served the coffee, the water and his master’s brandy with the blank look of a man who changes his earplugs six times a day.

Perhaps this style of writing is meant as a send-up of traditional noir style, but it is certainly overblown and irritating. (To be entirely dated in my references, it sometimes reminds me of the passages read by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the old TV series Ten Speed and Brown Shoe, but those were explicitly tongue in cheek, and I’m not as sure about Kerr’s writing style.) Although at one point I considered putting the novel aside, I finally decided to continue, and found the book moderately entertaining.

Day 459: The Orphan Choir

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Cover for The Orphan ChoirThe Orphan Choir is a departure from Sophie Hannah’s Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer mystery/thriller series. It still is darkly atmospheric and features her trademark neurotic characters but goes off in another direction.

Louise Beeston’s neighbor on her Cambridge street regularly wakes her up playing loud rock music late at night. When she goes over to complain in the beginning of the novel, he ridicules her in front of his friends and refuses to turn the music down. Louise’s husband Stuart can sleep through anything and doesn’t want her to call the police, but she does anyway. They refer her to the Council.

The music stops as the representative from the Council, Patricia Jervis, arrives, but Patricia seems very sympathetic and takes the complaint. Louise also complains to Jervis that her neighbor mocked her for sending her son Joseph away to school at the age of seven. Louise is actually very unhappy about the decision, but Joseph was given a place at a school that requires him to board if he is in the choir, and Stuart insists that she would be ruining Joseph’s chances if they send him to a different school.

Louise continues to hear music, but the neighbor seems to have begun a more insidious program of sometimes quietly playing choir music of children singing. After Louise turns on some loud music of her own at 6 a.m., when she knows the neighbor is sleeping, the rock music stops but the choir music continues.

With the house being renovated, Louise talks Stuart into buying a second home in a gated community in the country. Peace is the rule there, and she is happy and calm for awhile until an argument with Stuart about removing Joseph from the school results in Stuart summoning Dr. Freeman, the director of the choir, whom Louise despises. Suddenly, she begins hearing the choir music again, but without her neighbor nearby, she fears she is going crazy.

http://www.netgalley.comAs I am familiar with Hannah’s other novels, I suspected someone was gaslighting Louise, possibly her husband, who seems genial but overrides and undercuts her at many points during the novel, including summoning Dr. Freeman without discussing it with her first. Another suspect is Dr. Freeman, who seems creepy and overly concerned with whether Joseph is in his choir or not. However, I won’t say whether I was right. I think I prefer Hannah’s mysteries, but if you like novels that are unusual and slightly macabre, you may enjoy this one.

Day 458: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

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Cover for QuietMy first impression of Quiet was that it seemed much like many management books I have read and at one time (when I had a director who enforced a “management book club”) considered the bane of my existence. Hallmarks of many of these books are to base broad conclusions on a few examples and to endlessly repeat the same information. Writer and lecturer Susan Cain’s focus on business and examples of individual people’s experiences made me fear this was yet another such book, so I continued only because it was recommended by someone I trust. However, I was pleasantly surprised, for Cain’s scope broadens as the book continues, and the book shows plenty of familiarity with studies and theories that support her positions.

Cain’s initial observations are about how Western, particularly American, society and business reward extroverted behavior and consider introverted behavior a fault. Since I am myself an introvert, I was happy to read her extensive support for the position that these attitudes can be harmful for business and other endeavors and are based on false assumptions that extroverts are smarter than introverts.

Just to go off on a personal tangent, one of Cain’s points—that volubility is often mistaken for intelligence—was demonstrated to me years ago when I worked with a loud, aggressive woman. One day after a coworker and I had been sledgehammered into submission for some minutes, the coworker remarked that she was annoying but smart. I rejoined, “Did you listen to her? What she said didn’t make any sense!” The coworker had not noticed, seemingly bowled over by the woman’s verbosity.

Cain’s book is full of examples of the qualities of introverts that should be more valued. She gives advice for introverts who want to appear more extroverted, both things people can do and thoughts about how they can evaluate whether that approach is best for them. She also provides suggestions for managers who are interested in creating a workplace that is effective for both extroverts and introverts. She talks about the challenges of Asian students, who tend to be more introverted, in American society. Especially valuable are her suggestions for parents and other adults in dealing with and helping introverted children.

Overall, I find the book to provide perceptive observations and practical suggestions for dealing with work and social life as an introvert, as well as providing insights about the unrecognized value of introverts in our society.

Day 457: Sense & Sensibility

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Cover for Sense & SensibilityIn general I’m not a fan of the plethora of Jane Austen rewrites, although I will occasionally read one by an author whose work I trust. Such is the case with Joanna Trollope, who writes realistic contemporary fiction about family situations. So, I thought I’d give her reworking of Sense and Sensibility a try.

The story is a familiar one. The Dashwood women are ousted from their family home when the girls’ half brother John inherits. His selfish wife Fanny quickly talks him out of the generosity he promised his father he would show to his father’s second family.

Elinor Dashwood is in love with Fanny’s brother Edward Ferrars, but Edward’s future is uncertain. He has not spoken, so Elinor keeps her feelings to herself. Her sister Marianne, however, throws herself wholeheartedly and recklessly into an affair with handsome John Willoughby, who is visiting his aunt, a neighbor of their new home.

The reworkings I’ve read generally have some twist or contemporary slant to put on the story. In Bridget Jones’ Diary, for example, it was the surprise of finding you are reading an update of Pride and Prejudice and the charming narrative style of Bridget. Unfortunately, aside from updating the story to the current time, I don’t feel that this novel has much to add to or say differently than the original.

More importantly, I’m not sure that this novel translates very well to the 21st century, or at least not this version of it. The amount of money the Dashwoods are left would sound like a lot to most people, unlike the paltry amount left to them in the original novel, and the girls can always get a job in the current time period. Marianne’s behavior, while shocking to a 19th century audience, where ladies did not reveal their feelings for young men until they received a proposal, is mostly just excessive in the current day, except for the lovers’ behavior when visiting Willoughby’s aunt’s house. And while Edward in the original novel was behaving scrupulously in a time when a gentleman did not end an engagement, in the current times Ed just comes off as weak and indecisive. Frankly, I found myself sometimes wishing that Trollope would change the end of the novel to have Elinor end up with Bill.

I enjoyed the novel to an extent, but this modern version doesn’t involve me as the original does. The scene where Ed finally proposes to Elinor left me dry-eyed. Sense and Sensibility is one of my favorite Austen novels, and I think I’ll stick to Austen.

Day 456: Independent People

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Cover for Independent PeopleBest Book of the Week!

Who knew that Iceland had a Nobel Prize winner for literature? I didn’t even notice with his novel in my hands, given to me by my Uncle Fred last summer. I just put it in my pile of books to be read. If I’d known it was so good, I would have paid more attention.

Oddly, I seem to be inadvertently in an islands phase. This is the second book I’ve reviewed recently about Iceland (see my review of Burial Rites), and I have another I will soon review about New Zealand, The Luminaries. (See my review of The Bone People.)

Bjartur Jónsson has worked for the Bailiff’s family for 18 years to earn enough money to buy a small farm and some sheep. He is determined from now on to be beholden to no one else, to be independent. Even though his holding is said to be cursed by the fiend Kolumkilli (Saint Columba) and the witch Gunnvor, Bjartur is not superstitious and refuses to cast a stone on Gunnvor’s cairn to appease her when he first crosses the ridge into his valley. He is determined to make a place for himself and his bride-to-be Rósa on his own efforts.

On his wedding night he has an unpleasant surprise. Someone has already been with Rósa, he claims. At first we’re not certain whether he is being perverse, but one night when Bjartur is out searching for a lost sheep (that Rósa ate out of desperation), Rósa dies in childbirth only a few months after the wedding. Bjartur finds the baby on the edge of death, protected by his bitch sheep dog. Bjartur is a singular character—a lover of the old sagas and a poet, obstinate to the point of stupidity, untrusting, ornery, thinking mostly of his sheep—but he immediately loves this little girl and names her Ásta Sólillja (beloved sun lily).

Although Bjartur soon marries Finna, the woman who comes to care for Ásta Sólillja, and we get to know her and her mother and the couple’s three sons, it is the characters of Bjartur and Ásta Sólillja that dominate the story. Bjartur is so heedless of anything but his own ideas that he refuses anything resembling a gift, even if it would keep his family healthy, and Ásta Sólillja is innocent and gentle as the little flower he calls her.

The time frame of this novel is vague, so we are startled two thirds of the way through to see references to World War I, for the life of these Icelandic farmers seems no different than it would have been in the Middle Ages. Laxness describes a hard, grim existence, where babies die of illness and malnutrition, where Finna lies in bed ill for weeks every winter, where the family lives in one room full of fleas.

This story is not a bleak one, however; rather it is comic, sad, and moving. The novel centers on a rift between Ásta Sólillja and Bjartur. In anger, he throws her out. Although he repents his action, he won’t admit it and stubbornly waits for her to come ask for forgiveness. Well, she will never ask.

Slowly, things begin going wrong for Bjartur. He has already lost his second wife and his oldest son because of obstinacy about a cow. His youngest son Nonni, a brilliantly drawn character whose mother told him he would “sing for the world” (and I think is meant to be Laxness himself) disappears from the novel when he gets a chance to go to America at a young age. Soon Bjartur is left with only his middle son Gvendur, a young man not given to introspection who only knows how to “keep on doing things.”

Along with the story of Bjartur’s family, we learn a bit about the history of Icelandic politics and economy, but the novel centers on this all too human and oddly endearing family. If you decide to read this poetic novel, I think you will have a wonderful and surprising experience. It looks like several of Laxness’s works are out in paperback. I’m going to be buying more.