Tag: 20th century

Day 105: This Side of the Sky

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Cover for This Side of the SkyThis Side of the Sky is Elyse Singleton’s novel about the friendship between two African-American women. It begins when the two are growing up in a small town in Mississippi during the 1930’s. Myraleen is a light-skinned beauty but sarcastic and stubborn, who sometimes tries to pass for white. Lilian is dark, more educated, quiet and hard-working.

The two girls become close friends, even though Lilian’s mother looks down on Myraleen. Eventually, they move away to Philadelphia where they get menial jobs. There they find more freedom but segregation that is more hidden. With still more ambition, they join the Women’s Army Corps towards the end of World War II, eventually ending up posted in London and then Paris.

Although the plot of this novel is sometimes interesting, the characters never seem to be real people. Each of them has only a few characteristics. Nor does the period setting seem particularly convincing except for the details of small town life in a poor, rural area. London during the war is not very well depicted, and Paris is barely depicted at all, as if the author has never been to either city. A few chapters from the point of view of Kellner, a German prisoner of war who is involved with Lilian, seem particularly unconvincing.

Overall, I felt this story should have been very interesting, but it was ultimately lacking in the kind of detail that would make it believable.

Day 101: The Uninvited Guests

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Cover for The Uninvited GuestsThe Uninvited Guests is a delightfully original novel. At first it seems to be an Edwardian family social comedy that reminds me of the light, eccentric novels written by Stella Gibbons or Dodie Smith, but then it takes a turn toward the bizarre.

The Torrington-Swifts live in a large, ramshackle house that is at risk because they can’t afford it. The grown children, Emerald and Clovis, make a show of resenting Edward, their kind, patient, one-armed stepfather. Clovis is sulky and irritable, while Emerald is more likeable. Charlotte, their mother, is selfish and used to being cossetted. Smudge, the youngest girl, is used to being ignored.

It is Emerald’s 20th birthday, and the family is preparing for guests and a party, but Edward must miss the party because he has to travel to Manchester to try to borrow money to save the house. The guests are settling in and a storm is building when other people begin to arrive. A horrendous train accident has occurred a few miles away, and the railroad has sent the passengers to the house for shelter. Among them is an odd character in a red waistcoat who insists upon inserting himself into the birthday party.

Here is where the story begins its strange turn as the party gets odder and odder.

The novel is extremely well written and completely captivating, with a touch of the bizarre.

Day 96: The Forgotten Garden

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Cover for The Forgotten GardenKate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden was one of my big discoveries two years ago. I absolutely love this book.

A four-year-old girl walks off a ship in Australia in 1913 with a little white suitcase. No one meets her. She won’t say who she is or where she came from. The harbor master takes her home, calls her Nell, and adopts her, and she forgets her previous life. When she is 21 and on the verge of marriage, he tells her about it. This information is so shocking to Nell that she breaks with her fiancé and her family and isolates herself, feeling that she has been living a lie.

In 1975, Nell’s irresponsible daughter drops her own teenage daughter, Cassandra, at Nell’s house and drives away, never to return. Nell has other plans, but puts them aside to take care of her granddaughter.

In 2005, Cassandra is mourning Nell’s death. She has inherited Nell’s property but is only vaguely aware of her history. When she looks through Nell’s things, she finds a white suitcase with a book of fairy tales in it. She also finds that Nell never stopped looking for her real family. Continuing Nell’s search, Cassandra ends up in a small Cornish village where she learns she has inherited a small cottage on the Mountrachet estate.

Cassandra finds an entrance into a walled garden, and another one from there to the estate. Eventually, she also discovers the history of her grandmother’s parentage.

The book traces Nell’s history by alternating among these times. The modern story is one of investigating one’s roots, but the older tale is more gothic. Ultimately, it is the story of two cousins, the wealthy Rose Mountrachet and the slum-born Eliza Makepeace, who comes to live with her and be her companion.

A mystery about family secrets, the story is complex and enthralling. Some readers may be daunted by its length, but once you begin reading, you will not be able to stop.

Day 69: The Information Officer

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Cover for The Information OfficerI really enjoyed Mark Mills’s book Amagansett from a few years ago and liked The Savage Garden. However, I did not find his third book, The Information Officer, as satisfying.

It is World War II during the siege of Malta. The British are trying to get their Spitfires to Malta to defend it, but in the meantime the strategic island is being heavily bombed. Major Max Chadwick’s job as information officer is to deliver updates to the local newspaper that are as positive as possible and figure out what is truth and what fiction.

Max’s good friend Freddy comes to him with information that someone is murdering Maltese dance hall girls, and there is evidence that the murderer is a British submariner. Freddy, a doctor, has already raised the problem with the high command and gotten nowhere, so Max decides to investigate. In the meantime, the murderer is plotting his moves.

The novel was interesting enough, with good descriptions of Malta and a fairly involving plot. However, I did not grow to care very much about the characters. I figured out the murderer, although not his motive, fairly easily.

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 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 53: The House of Mitford

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Cover for House of MitfordMany of you may be familiar with the famous Mitford sisters from Nancy Mitford’s wonderful books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, thinly veiled novels about her own eccentric family. Last year, after reading several books by Nancy Mitford and wondering about the kind of family that could have produced such extreme offspring as Nancy the social satirist, Decca the devoted communist, Diana the fascist and wife of Oswald Mosley, and Unity the fanatical worshipper of Hitler, I struggled to find an unbiased book about the Mitfords. I thought I had found one when I located The House of Mitford, which was written up as the “authoritative Mitford biography.” It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I realized the authors, Jonathan and Catherine Guinness, were Diana Mitford’s son and granddaughter. In fact, any books I could locate about the Mitfords were written by the Mitfords, a prolific family indeed.

The book is certainly interesting and often amusing, and it provides a lot of insight into the 1930’s, an especially turbulent time in Great Britain, but it has its faults.

Although the authors deplore both the extreme leftist and rightist views of the family and point out how all believed what they wanted to believe, the book shows certain biases and likes. It is much harder on Decca’s communist sympathies than on Mosley’s Naziism, for example. We are invited to admire Mosley’s ideals and prescience, and yet the book almost ignores the fact that he tolerated his followers’ rabid anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, Decca is made out to be a liar in what she writes in her book Hons and Rebels about the family, while other family members are depicted simply as having selective memories. Yet when I read Hons and Rebels after this book, expecting it to depict the family in a cruel and critical manner, I found it to be more the story of teenage rebellion. Decca (Jessica) left the family at 17 and what she remembers is colored by her feelings when she left.

Nancy, seemingly the most harmless of all the famous sisters, is depicted as two-faced. Great efforts are made to deny that Unity was a sort of groupie for Hitler, when she clearly was one. Unity’s most famous act besides the photos of her at Hitler’s rallies in Nuremburg was to shoot herself in the head on the day that England declared war on Germany.

Nevertheless, the book successfully shows that despite all the family disagreements and bickering, underlying it all was strong family affection and unity. The book didn’t do much, however, to answer my initial questions about how an admittedly eccentric but not very political upbringing could produce such extremes of personalities and beliefs in a single generation.

Day 21: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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Cover for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the PieI don’t know that anyone has invented a more delightful heroine than Flavia de Luce, the eleven-year-old sleuth in Alan Bradley’s funny, charming series. I haven’t read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie in a few years, but for series books I am trying to start with the first one, so I’ll do the best I can.

It is 1950’s Britain, and Flavia is an eccentric in a family full of eccentrics. She spends her time cooking up dangerous chemicals in the laboratory she inherited from a great uncle or riding around on her bicycle, Gladys, looking for trouble. Her father is a reclusive widower who stays locked up in the library with his stamp collection and worries about how to support their ramshackle estate. She engages in all-out warfare with her two older sisters, which includes putting poison ivy extract in Ophelia’s lipstick. Her only ally is the Dogger the gardener, her father’s batman from WW II who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

First, Mrs. Mullet the housekeeper finds a dead bird on the porch with a valuable stamp in its beak. Then a mysterious stranger calls upon her father, and they have an argument. Later Flavia finds the stranger dying in the cucumber patch. When her father is arrested for murder, Flavia decides to investigate. She finds out her father may have been involved in the suicide of a former schoolmaster and the theft of a valuable stamp. As Flavia cycles around the village of Bishop’s Lacey looking for clues and interviewing suspects, she may be putting herself in danger.

If you’re looking for a light mystery with plenty of twists and turns that will make you laugh out loud, look no further than any book featuring Flavia de Luce.

Day Seventeen: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

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Cover for The Lost City of ZThe Lost City of Z by David Grann tells the story of a famous British explorer, Percy Fawcett, and his obsession with finding the fabled city of El Dorado in the Amazon. He was the last of the great Victorian adventurers and possibly the inspiration for Indiana Jones (and for the explorer in the movie Up).

Fawcett made a career of exploring the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon, beginning with being hired by the Bolivian government to establish its border in the Amazon. He became convinced that there had been a large city, which he called Z, in the region of the Xingu River. Hundreds of expeditions had been made to find it, beginning in the 16th century, and many of them were never seen again.

In 1925 Fawcett set off on an expedition funded by the Royal Geographical Society with a small party that included his son and son’s best friend. He sent daily dispatches back from the jungle that were published in the newspapers and waited for with anticipation by the general public. Then the dispatches stopped, and he was never seen again.

But the story wasn’t over. Others went into the jungle to try to find out what happened to him, including a famous movie star. Many of them never returned, either.

Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, became interested in the subject, which he came upon while working on another project. During his research, he met with members of the Fawcett family and was given access to a some previously unpublished personal papers. He is able to provide insight into the explorer’s character and thought processes, which makes for a fascinating story.

Grann also became consumed with the fate of the Fawcett expedition and found himself deciding to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps. Although his trip through the Amazon in a jeep was no Victorian expedition, he himself is no explorer. He was surprised to find the Amazon almost as wild today as it was 100 years ago.

And maybe he solved the mystery of what happened to Fawcett’s expedition. The story of Fawcett’s adventures makes compelling reading, and the ending is unexpected.