Day 68: The Lace Reader

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Cover for The Lace ReaderFrom the very beginning of The Lace Reader, the main character tells us she is a liar. The first time I read this book, I paid attention to that comment, but I could not detect any lies and eventually I forgot about that statement. As it turns out, Towner is not really lying, but Brunonia Barry’s novel is an outstanding example of the use of an unreliable narrator, and a haunting story.

Towner Whitney has not been home to Salem, Massachusetts, for 17 years, ever since her twin sister Lyndley committed suicide and she herself had a breakdown and was institutionalized. Now her brother calls asking her to return home because her great-aunt Eva has disappeared.

Towner’s female relatives are all unusual. She comes from a family of lace readers–people who can read the future in a piece of lace–and although she refuses to read, she is clairvoyant and can read people’s minds. These abilities, which she rejects, make her feel unstable, especially since she has gaps in her memory from electro-shock therapy. Towner’s mother May never leaves the island where she harbors abused women and teaches them how to make lace, and her aunt Emma has brain damage from a history of abuse by her husband Cal.

In Salem again, Towner waits for news of Eva. She learns that one of the police officers, Rafferty, is sure that Cal had something to do with Eva’s disappearance as he has been threatening her and other members of her family.

Salem itself is almost a character with its witch-based tourist industry, and now Cal has formed a group of religious cultists who call themselves Calvinists and who taunt the witches and threaten them with damnation. It’s a bad place for Towner to be, and she is just deciding to leave again when Eva’s body turns up.

The Lace Reader is a wonderful book, layered with secrets, an exploration in the difference between perception and reality. With an atmospheric setting, characters to care about, and a compelling plot, the book is a real page-turner. The last few paragraphs made me re-evaluate everything I had read.

Day 67: Life Itself: a Memoir

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Cover for Life ItselfWriters of memoirs and biographies have the same difficult problem to deal with. There is a fine line between giving too much detail for the work to be interesting or not telling enough. (I once read a biography of Aldous Huxley written by his niece that told everything he did every single day but gave absolutely no insight into him as a person, for example, his opinions or the conversations he had with other people.) When you are writing a memoir, you have the additional difficulty of drawing the line between what should remain private and keeping readers’ interest.

In reading Life Itself, Roger Ebert’s memoir, I admit to feeling a little frustrated at times about the level of information provided while at the same time recognizing Ebert’s intent to be open. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a tell-all, because I think the world is unfortunately losing its sense of privacy, but although his memoir forthrightly confronts some issues like alcoholism in the family and his own physical problems, it seems to skip over certain periods of his life.

Ebert chooses an unusual organizational approach to his memoir. Instead of going chronologically (although the book is roughly chronological), he writes each chapter on a different topic, as if it were a series of essays. And perhaps the book originated with some of the blog entries and articles he has been writing for years. This approach made it sometimes repetitive and sometimes seem like little more than impressions and lists of things and people. Of course, it has some delightful chapters, especially the nostalgic ones about his youth.

Perhaps because Ebert is trying to protect other people’s privacy, aside from his family he hasn’t written very much about ordinary people in his adult life but a lot about the famous ones, which gives a bit of an impression that Ebert is a name-dropper (even though I don’t think he is). For example, although the information about his adult ordinary life is limited (though he writes a lot more about his life since his illness), the book contains complete chapters about famous people he interviewed only once or twice. You can’t help having the impression, time after time, that Ebert has really gotten a kick out of hanging out with famous people.

Again, this skewing gives me another reason to suspect that many of these chapters originated as blog entries and articles he has written over the years. Because of this aspect of the book, it may be more likely to appeal to people who are fascinated by everyone in show business than those like me who think famous people are just ordinary people who happen to be famous and wish everyone would leave them alone.

(As sort of an anti-intuitive “proof” of this idea, I point out the reviews on Amazon. The people who disliked the book criticize it for spending too much time on his childhood and youth, which I thought was the interesting part, and not enough time talking about famous people. In other words, they want even more information about famous people than he provided, whereas I wanted more about him as a person. Perhaps they don’t understand the point of a memoir.)

The chapters on Gene Siskel and Ebert’s wife Chaz are touching. The book is, of course, very well written. We have a lot of sympathy for Ebert’s condition–a talker who is unable talk–and come away from the book believing he is handling it with dignity and an amazing optimism. My overall impression of Ebert from this book was that he went through a lot of his life being pleased with himself for his own intelligence (and must have been extremely annoying to some of his teachers in school and professors in college) and the luck he has had in his career, but that–as he himself admits–he has finally learned later in life about what is most important.

This review sounds like I did not enjoy the book. I enjoyed it but also found it frustrating at the same time.

Day 66: The Lacuna

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Cover for The LacunaBest Book of Week 14!

My experience with reading Barbara Kingsolver has been uneven. Her first books were interesting and heartwarming, but some of her later work is more political and sometimes degenerates to lecturing on certain causes. However, The Lacuna is an absolutely enthralling historical novel.

Harrison Shepherd is a young man, half Mexican and half American, who survives an upbringing by a feckless mother and a cold father and finally begins making his own way in 1930’s Mexico. He finds a job working in Diego Rivera’s kitchen and ends up as the cook and plaster mixer in Rivera’s household with Frida Kahlo. Later, when they give Leon Trotsky a home, Shepherd works for Trotsky as a secretary and translator, and finally he returns to the United States to write Aztec historical potboilers.

The novel covers major historical events in a turbulent period, including the Communist Worker’s Movement, Trotsky’s assassination, FDR’s terms in Washington, World War II, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Although Shepherd’s life is extraordinary by any standards, Kingsolver was able to make it feel absolutely persuasive. While I usually dislike historical novels where ordinary people keep running into famous people, I completely accepted every sentence of this book.

Told by diary entries, newspaper articles, and letters, the novel gets going a little slowly, but eventually enthralls. Kingsolver does a great job of creating colorful and believable characters from the lives of real, historic people, something that is not simple, and completely involves readers in the events of their lives.

Day 65: Arcadia Falls

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Cover for Arcadia FallsArcadia Falls by Carol Goodman is a gothic novel about a young widow, Meg Rosenthal, who has been left without much money after leading a well-to-do married life. She accepts a job at a remote high school for the fine arts where she has been able to enroll her teenaged daughter. The school was founded by two artists and authors of fairy tales, Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt. Lily died under mysterious circumstances by falling into a ravine during a snowstorm. The first night Meg and her daughter are installed in their new home in a secluded cottage on the grounds, one of the students also falls into the ravine.

As Meg’s thesis concerns the school, she begins digging into the death of Lily, especially trying to figure out why the current headmistress, Ivy St. Clare, disliked her so. She is aided by her accidental discovery of Lily’s diary in a hiding place in the cottage.

This book is interesting and engaging, but the solution to all the campus goings-on has a major fault that makes it difficult to accept. It hinges on the identities of three different women. I don’t want to say more, but this problem makes the ending completely unlikely.

Day 64: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

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Cover for River of DoubtIn 1913, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt departed on a trip up an unknown river in the Amazon with a party that included his son Kermit, Brazil’s most famous explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, and the naturalist George Cherrie. Because the trip was originally planned to be less challenging and also because it was provisioned (by the leader of a failed arctic expedition) with more of an eye to comfort than practicality, the party soon found itself in dire straits, and by the end of the trip Roosevelt was near death.

In The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, Candice Millard writes a compelling tale of this dangerous journey to a completely unexplored region, which ended by putting a 1000-mile river on the map of Brazil. In a hostile environment that the explorers found strangely lacking in food, they were at times very close to attack from the Cinta Larga Indians, who had only had a small amount of exposure to Brazilian rubber hunters–and that had been violent. The group also had to deal with boats that were unsuited to the rapids they encountered, disease, dangerous animals, and theft and murder by one of their party.

Whether Millard is explaining the scientific reasons behind the jungle’s apparent lack of food, the geology of the region, or the dramatic events of the trip, she writes with absolute clarity and interest. Although this book reminded me a great deal of The Lost City of Z, which I reviewed earlier and also enjoyed, I thought it was much more interesting and better written.

Day 63: An Atlas of Impossible Longing

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Cover for An Atlas of Impossible LongingIn An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy, a family in turn of the (20th) century Bengal lives in a small remote village where the husband has moved for business. He, Amulya Babu, neglects his wife Kananbala for work, but he supports a boy in the local orphanage named Mukunda. Amulya and Kananbala have two grown sons, Kamal and Nirmal. Nirmal marries Shanti and is happy with her. But after she dies at her father’s house in childbirth, he deserts his family. His daughter Bakul is brought up in his father’s house by Kamal and his wife and by Kananbala, who is soon widowed.

On one of Nirmal’s visits after his father’s death, he goes to the orphanage to see who his father has been supporting for years and brings back Mukunda, who is casteless because no one knows his parentage. Mukunda and Bakul are raised together and allowed to run wild as each other’s only friends and companions.

The story eventually becomes about the relationship between Mukunda and Bakul and in the last section is narrated by Mukunda.

I had an ambivalent reaction to the book. I felt that the glimpses of Indian life were interesting and so was the historical context, even though momentous events are touched upon lightly. The book spans about thirty or forty years and three generations, ending in the 1940’s or 50’s. For a novel of such scope, however, it seemed too short to adequately develop the material. In the multigeneration story and the themes of the book, I was reminded of two other recent books, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and The House of Blue Mangoes by David Davidar. But both of these books were much more satisfying.

I felt little connection to any of the characters, who seemed sketchily depicted. The love story that the book focuses on in the final part of the book is the least interesting part of the story because Roy has not made me care about either of the lovers. I was curious about what would happen but at the same time did not care very much about which way things would go.

Day 62: Interred with Their Bones

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Cover for Interred with their BonesInterred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell is excellent fun, the first of a literary mystery series. Kate Stanley is directing a production of Hamlet at the Globe when her estranged mentor, Rosalind Howard, a Harvard professor of Shakepeare, gives her a small box and hints that she has made an important discovery. Later that night after a fire at the Globe, Kate finds Roz dead in her office. The box turns out to contain a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers associated with Ophelia.

Kate teams up with her friend, the renowned actor Sir Henry Lee, determined to solve the mystery of Roz’s discovery. She begins to believe that she is searching for the manuscript of a play called Cardenno that was produced in 1613 and that may be the same as a play with a similar name registered in 1653 but never published by William Shakespeare and John Beaumont. In her pursuit of the truth, she keeps running into Ben Pearl, a security expert, and another man who says he is related to Rosalind.

The book is a cross between traditional mystery and thriller with an admittedly ridiculous plot. Kate travels from London to Harvard to Utah and then to Spain and Washington, D.C., running down clues in a sort of parody of The Da Vinci Code. Lots of bodies pile up, and we hear about most of the crackpot theories about Shakespeare that have been vaunted over the years. The story is full of literary allusions, action-packed, witty, and fun to read. I guessed part of the mystery as soon as one character appeared, but I was too interested in the plot and characters for that to be disappointing.

Day 61: The Game of Kings

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Cover for Game of KingsBest Book of Week 13!

If you love an authentic, well-researched, exciting historical novel that makes you almost feel like you are in the period, then I can’t recommend a better author than Dorothy Dunnett.  I have been trying to get people to read her for years with the caveat that her books are challenging, not for the reader of light romantic history.

Lady Dunnett is described on her Wikipedia page as a “leading light in the Scottish arts world and a renaissance woman.” Her books are loaded with detail about medieval customs, dress, politics, religion, food, and literature, and have labyrinthine plots full of action. She is most renowned for two series, the Lymond Chronicles, written in the 1960’s and 70’s and set in 16th Century Europe and Africa, and the House of Niccolò, written in the 1980’s and 90’s and set in 15th Century Europe, Asia, and Africa. Dunnett died shortly after finishing the last book in this series.

Game of Kings is the first book in my favorite series, the Lymond Chronicles. Francis Crawford of Lymond makes a rollicking and disruptive re-entrance into his home country of Scotland despite the charge of treason hanging over his head. He forms a band of outlaws and begins roaming around the countryside, sneaking across the border to play tricks on the British and harassing his own family. For quite some time, you don’t know whether he is a hero or a villain. He never explains himself, so it is left up to the reader (and the other characters) to figure out his motives for sometimes seemingly wrongful acts. His enemies think he is responsible for the explosion that killed his sister and is trying to murder his older brother Richard so he can inherit the estate. His friends are absolutely devoted to him but suffer doubts when he misbehaves, as he often does. His brother doesn’t know what to think, and his mother, Sybilla, is silent.

Francis is a mimic and a rogue, a musician and a polyglot, a poet and a swordsman, as swashbuckling a character as you will ever meet with in a novel. In among the action of cattle raids, impersonations, intrigues, duels, and archery contests, you actually learn a lot about Scottish history and politics.

Game of Kings is Dunnett’s first book, and my only criticism of it is that Lymond is a bit too fond of quoting poetry in antique languages. Most of it is incomprehensible unless you are a medieval scholar, but skipping over it does not hurt your understanding of the novel. Dunnett does this much less in the other books in the series. If you read this book and continue with the series, by the second book you won’t be able to stop.

Day 60: Mind’s Eye

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Cover for Mind's EyeMind’s Eye is the first of the Inspector Van Veteren series by Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser, although it is the third published in English. Mostly a police procedural, the book also is somewhat of a psychological thriller.

A woman is drowned in her bath tub and her husband, Janek Mitter, is on trial for her murder, but Inspector Van Veteren is not quite sure the police got it right. Mitter, whose only alibi is that he was asleep and who cannot remember what happened that night, is found guilty and incarcerated in a mental hospital.

One night when Mitter is not given his drugs, he remembers someone in his house the night of the murder and trieds to call Van Veteren. He also sends a note to that person. That night he is murdered. Now Van Veteren thinks the police need to start over by examining the woman’s past.

The book was interesting enough, and I am ready to read more about Van Veteren. I was able to guess the solution–although not the exact identity of the murderer–well before the end, but the book kept my attention.

Day 59: The Tiger’s Wife

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Cover for The Tiger's WifeIn The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht has written an involving novel about the power of myth, memory, and story-telling. In the aftermath of the Balkan war, Natalia Stefanovic travels to the “other side” to help vaccinate children. While she is there, her grandmother calls to tell her that her beloved grandfather has died after telling his family he is going to visit her. When she learns his belongings were left in the clinic of a nearby village, she goes to fetch them, particularly his copy of The Jungle Book, which he has carried since he was a boy.

In remembering her grandfather, Natalia relates two stories that she says contain everything necessary to understand his life, one that he told her and one that he didn’t, that she learned about by traveling to the village where he grew up. The story he told her is about the deathless man, a man he has met time after time who claims he cannot die. The other story is about the tiger’s wife, an abused woman who befriends a tiger that escaped from the zoo during World War II, when Natalia’s grandfather was a boy.

Although I sometimes am unable to suspend my disbelief for magical realism, that is, the technique of mixing realistic story-telling with the magical or supernatural, Obreht skirts it without falling into it. Her book is a meditation on life and death, told in an almost  a dreamy way but also in a style reminiscent of a folk tale or myth. The book is also about how people deal with the past by transforming history into myth. The realistic story is interleaved with the two tales.

Although one of the themes is the separation between the groups of people in the Balkans, it is also about their similarities. In a village where Natalia has gone to give vaccinations, she encounters the same types of stories and superstitious beliefs as reflected in her grandfather’s stories about his youth and her grandmother’s injunctions about how to treat her grandfather’s death and possessions.

The book is stunning–a meditation and tribute to the author’s own grandfather, who died before she wrote it, and memories of the country in which she was born.