Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 1011: Once in a Blue Moon Lodge

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Cover for Once in a Blue Moon LodgeIn the present day, Nora is writing a memoir for her three triplet daughters to tell them about their lives. She begins explaining how she got pregnant after a one-night stand just before she met the love of her live.

The novel begins in Minneapolis, where Nora’s mother Patty Jane is closing down her “salon within a salon,” that is, a hair salon where she schedules cultural activities. But soon enough, Nora gets an offer to buy a stunning lake house from an eccentric older woman.

This novel is crammed with eccentric characters, and that is one of its problems. It has so many eccentric characters, what with complicated familial relationships, Patty Jane’s former customers, and various friends, I couldn’t keep them straight because we learn very little about them. Instead of building fully realized characters, Landvik simply throws out a few details about each one or briefly shifts the focus to one and then shifts it back. I see that this novel is a sequel or closely related to Landvik’s previous novel, so perhaps she is relying on people’s knowledge of the previous novel to know who these people are. But I hadn’t read it, and some of the characters are new. Since the novel is supposed to be written by Nora, the shifting point of view is a problem. Why would we suddenly get several paragraphs from, for example, Henry’s point of view (Henry being Nora’s mother’s lover’s son)?

link to NetgalleyAnother problem is the plot, at first relatively easy to follow even though broken up by many unsignaled time shifts. But after Nora has her triplets, the story seems to lose focus and we just get anecdotes as the girls age. In fact, there are really no ups and downs or climaxes, except ones we can predict.

When you combine all this with an unrelieved feel-good quality, you’ve probably guess that it isn’t my style. I can actually get into a novel full of eccentric but nice characters and can think of many that I’ve loved. But they have to be well executed and funny. This one isn’t.

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Day 1009: The Miracle on Monhegan Island

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Cover for The Miracle on Monhegan IslandI enjoyed Elizabeth Kelly’s The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, so I was pleased to find she had written another novel. I felt a further pleasure in store because of its setting. Ever since I found online a map of the island with links and information about rental cottages, I’ve dreamed of renting a cottage on Monhegan Island.

I didn’t count on the dog, though. This novel is narrated by a Pekingese named Ned, a truly intelligent Pekingese with lots of insight to offer. I could almost buy this approach in The Art of Racing in the Rain, but not quite. Here, I didn’t buy it at all.

Ned is stolen from the back of his car by Spark Monahan, who takes him as a gift for his son Hally, whom he hasn’t seen in four years. Hally has been living on Monhegan Island with Spark’s father Pastor Ragnar and his brother Hugh.

Spark is the family black sheep, but Ragnar has recently also run into trouble. He was in charge of a concert on the island, but his security wasn’t able to handle the number of people who tried to attend it for free. Now he is being sued for proceeds that were never collected from the people who got in without paying. He is the pastor of a church he basically invented and has the ambition to be a cult leader.

Hally is just beginning to find out some of the secrets of his family, and he finds them upsetting. One day when he is off by himself, he returns claiming to have seen and spoken to the Virgin Mary. Pastor Ragnar latches on to this event and starts trying to make the most of it, while Hugh and Spark more or less passively object. At a second event, people attending claim to see odd effects in the sunlight, and soon Hally is receiving national attention.

Spark and Hugh know that Hally’s mother was mentally ill when she died, so they are worried about Hally. But no one actually does anything to stop Ragnar.

Aside from the problems of the narration, Kelly leaves nothing unsaid. The dog is always pointing things out to you in case you missed them. At the same time her focus is all over the place. There are discussions about religion and faith, mental illness, inheritance, celebrity. The characters, the most interesting part of the novel, sometimes get lost in the baggage.

Also, I missed the darker overtones of the previous novel. Although this novel provides plenty of dark overtones, it lands solidly in the feel-good zone by the end, which for me is not necessarily a good thing.

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Day 1007: Perfume River

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Cover for Perfume RiverYears ago I greatly enjoyed Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. This set of short stories about Vietnam and its aftermath was beautifully written.

It’s 24 years later, and Butler is still thinking about Vietnam. His newest novel is about how a family and a homeless man are all affected in their own ways by the war.

Robert Quinlan is a Vietnam veteran who at 70 is now a university history professor. All his life, he’s tried to please his father, and his military service was part of that effort. Despite his administrative position, he had to kill a man during the Tet offensive. He is still affected by the incident and has never spoken about it at home.

Shortly before he shipped out, Robert’s younger brother Jimmy fled to Canada as a draft dodger. Their father disowned him. Now their father has broken his hip, and their mother asks Robert to try to talk Jimmy into coming home.

The homeless man Bob is also affected by Vietnam because his father was a veteran. Growing up with his father’s PTSD has affected his mental health.

link to NetgalleyI read more than half of this novel, but I grew increasingly impatient with it. The novel is closely observed but maybe too closely. All of the characters seemed to be obsessively evaluating each other’s every little action. It moves excruciatingly slowly. I felt like this novel was bogged down in detail. So, I didn’t finish it, even though the writing was beautiful.

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Day 1001: The Story of My Teeth

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Cover for The Story of My TeethHi, all, apparently I actually published this article by mistake last week. It was supposed to come out today. So here it is again.

* * *

I enjoy the occasional experimental novel, especially one that plays with structure, but The Story of My Teeth was a bit too much for me. It begins with a fairly straightforward narrative, although a whimsical plot, but at each section does something different.

Gustavo (Highway) Sánchez Sánchez claims to be the world’s best auctioneer. He has accumulated a collection of teeth belonging to famous people and agrees to auction them off for the church. But his long-lost son Siddhartha shows up at the auction and things begin to get strange.

Perhaps I should have had more patience with this novel, because I quit reading it just before the New York Times review claimed it got really interesting. I stopped reading in “The Allegories,” and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me. I just got a feeling of terrific impatience and realized I wasn’t enjoying the novel. So, I stopped.

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Day 1000: High Dive

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Cover for High DiveWell, today I post my thousandth review, so I guess it’s sort of a red letter day. I thought I’d celebrate by reviewing a book recommended to me by John Warner, the Biblioracle. If you send him a list of the last five books you read, he’ll recommend a book to you. I thought it sounded fun and got this recommendation.

As it is about an attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher in 1984, an actual event, High Dive didn’t seem like the type of novel that would appeal to me. Yet it is full of empathy as it examines the lives of several people affected by the bombing. Jonathan Lee was inspired by the rumors that a second man, besides Patrick McGee, who was arrested for the bombing, was involved.

That man is Dan, a young member of the IRA who specializes in explosives. We first meet him on his initiation at the age of 19, when he refuses to kill some dogs just because the IRA members tell him to. He volunteers for the big job years later without knowing exactly what it is and is taken aback when he learns it will probably involve the death of civilians.

The plot is to plant a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton days before the start of a conference that Thatcher will attend. The bomb will be set to go off after she is in the building.

Moose Finch, the assistant general manager of the hotel, is proud that he managed to attract the conference away from the Metropole. His boss is retiring, and he hopes to be promoted to general manager if the conference goes well. Moose is an ex-athlete who seemed as a young man to have a brighter future. He blames his lack of opportunities on not being able to attend university, and he wants his daughter Freya to have the advantages he feels he missed.

Freya isn’t sure what she wants to do. She knows her summer job at the hotel bores her stiff. She is still trying to figure out her goals, learn who are her true friends, and work out her relationship to boys.

The tension of the novel comes from wondering what will happen when the bomb goes off, but we spend a lot of time getting to know the characters, including Dan, the bomber. The insights into the characters are subtle, their personalities interesting. I found this a compelling novel.

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Day 996: World Light

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Cover for World LightAs much as I have enjoyed other novels by Halldór Laxness, I just couldn’t get into World Light. I think it was its allegorical qualities that put me off, as that is not my genre.

Olaf Karason is a foster child who has been brought up on a remote Icelandic farm. He is so badly treated there that in his teenage years he takes to his bed as an invalid. He is sadly aware of his own history, in which his father abandoned him, and his mother sent him away in a bag. He hears she is now doing well, but she shows no interest in him.

Olaf has a spiritual turn of mind and believes he has experienced some knowledge of God. He also wants to be a poet and is hungry for knowledge. But to the people surrounding him, this all just makes him seem more peculiar. He is almost ridiculously innocent, too, and because of his innocence and his hunger for love, he keeps thrusting himself into situations where he is misunderstood.

While Olaf is on the farm, I stayed with him, but more than 100 pages into the book, he loses his home and the parish sends a man to fetch him. That man, Reimar, takes him to a farm where he is miraculously cured before taking him to his destination in a convalescent home. But Olaf is cured, so no one knows what to do with him.

This section seemed to begin an entirely different book, and here it started to lose me. Because I felt as if I didn’t understand something, I began to read the Introduction, something I usually don’t do before finishing a novel, if then. Unfortunately, that told me enough about what was coming for Olaf that I developed a sense of dread. I struggled on but finally decided to stop.

Laxness’s novel is apparently an indictment of all the forces in the world against gentler souls. Certainly, the social climate and behaviors he depicts are brutal. As with some of his other novels, I had to keep reminding myself that it was set in the 20th century, because it seems to be several centuries earlier.

I hope my review doesn’t stop anyone from reading Laxness. Generally, I find him wonderful, with a keen, dark sense of humor. If this doesn’t sound like your kind of book, try Independent People (my personal favorite of the ones I’ve read) or Iceland’s Bell.

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Day 993: Slipping

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Cover for SlippingI have read two novels by Lauren Beukes and greatly enjoyed their mashup of crime fiction and science fiction. So, I thought I’d love Slipping, a collection of short stories, essays, and other writings.

Beukes’s writing is energetic and her ideas unusual, often gruesome. Her stories are often bizarre. But, oddly enough, after a while they seemed to be very similar. Most of them are set in South Africa in what appears to be the near future, although some are set on other planets. Many are violent; many have characters leading glitzy but vapid lives. They feature a lot of slang that may be invented. There is a glossary, but I didn’t notice it until it was too late.

“Muse” is a short poem about the difficulty of writing, in which the writer receives gloves made of “muse skin” with barbed hooks in the fingertips.

link to Netgalley“Slipping” is about athletes who are artificially enhanced competing in a race. One of them is even a dead body. “Confirm/Ignore” is about catfishing. “Branded” offers advertizers a brand new idea for sponsorship. “Smileys” is a dystopian tale about a street vendor defending herself against extortion. “Princess” puts a startling interpretation on the story of the princess and the pea.

I don’t know why I felt this sameness, as the stories are obviously varied in nature, but I found myself not wanting to read more. I think some of the images were just to grotesque for me.

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Day 989: Night Train

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Cover for Night TrainNight Train is one of those novels that is hard to rate using numbers or stars. My husband was reading it and remarked that it was interesting but that the writing style irritated him.

I certainly found that to be true. It is a very short book, written from the point of view of Mike Hoolihan, a female detective in Chicago. It is written using a lot of slang and jargon, and my impression is that this British author has not gotten it right. For example, Hoolihan goes on for a bit at the beginning that she is “a police,” that that’s what police call themselves. Really? I’ve never heard an American cop use that term. Of course, I don’t know that I’m not wrong, but I do know that no American ever referred to something as being in a “glassine envelope.” The only place I’ve ever heard of glassine is in British fiction or television. In short, I don’t know why Amis set his novel in Chicago, but at least he should have gotten the language right.

That being said, the story itself is compelling. Mike is asked by her former commander, Colonel Tom, to find out whether his daughter Jennifer really committed suicide. Beautiful and intelligent, with a kind lover, she seemed to have everything to live for.

This novel doesn’t quite go in any of the expected directions and spends time musing on the nature of suicide, but that’s all I want to give away. I did find it a compelling book, even though I have a high degree of skepticism about the likelihood of its conclusions. I have another book by Amis to read for the Walter Scott Prize list, and now I am very curious about it.

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Day 984: A Tale for the Time Being

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Cover for A Tale for the Time BeingMonths after the Japanese tsunami, Ruth, of Japanese descent, finds a barnacle-covered package on the beach of the island in British Columbia where she lives. The package contains a Hello Kitty box with the diary of a young Japanese girl.

Ruth gets involved in reading this diary. The girl, Nao, tells a difficult story of having been raised in Sunnyvale, California, until her father lost his job at a technology company. The family was forced to return to Japan, where her father has been unable to find work and is suicidal. Nao, seen as an outsider by her classmates, is viciously bullied. Nao, too, is considering suicide.

The only bright spot in the girl’s life seems to be Jiko, her 104-year-old great grandmother, a Zen Buddhist nun. Jiko has taught Nao a few of the fundamentals of Zen Buddhism, which help support her. Nao has stated an intention of writing about Jiko’s life, but she actually writes about whatever occurs to her, including the story of her uncle, a World War II kamikaze pilot.

This story is punctuated with scenes from Ruth’s quiet life on a small island with her husband Oliver, a biologist. Both stories dip into philosophy, Buddhist beliefs, and even a little magical realism. Ruth and Oliver become involved in Nao’s story and wonder if she committed suicide, if she survived the tsunami, and where she is.

At first I resisted this novel a bit. I probably wouldn’t have read it if it was not on my Man Booker Prize list. I wasn’t completely convinced by Nao’s voice, and I felt that the story was a way to sneak in lessons about Buddhist teachings. Eventually, though, I got sucked in and became just as interested in Nao’s fate as Ruth was.

However, in tackling its many subjects—suicide, bullying, the trash in the ocean, the nature of time, the tsunami, World War II, just to name a few—I sometimes felt this novel was all over the place. It is entertaining but kind of mind boggling.

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Day 981: Hag-Seed

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Cover for Hag-SeedHag-Seed is Margaret Atwood’s modern retelling of The Tempest, a part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. It is inventively plotted and cleverly reimagines the events and characters of the play.

Felix wants revenge. Years ago, he was at the pinnacle of his career, director of the Makeshiweg Festival, presenting The Tempest. He was known for his avante garde approaches to theatre. But while he was occupied with the play, he let his assistant Tony deal with the other points of business. In his turn, Tony plotted with Sal O’Nally, the Heritage Minister, to remove him from his job. Making matters worse, Felix’s young daughter Miranda had died a few years before.

Felix has been leading a retired life in a rustic cottage in the country. Several years ago, he took a job with a program at a local prison. Each year, he stages a Shakespeare play staffed and acted by the prisoners. It has become very popular, and the prisoners’ literacy scores have increased.

But Felix is mostly alone with only his fantasy daughter for company.

One year, Felix hears that several ministers, including Sal and Tony, will attend the prison on the day of the broadcast of the play. Their real intent, he hears, is to shut down the program, despite its success. Felix decides this year’s play will be The Tempest, and through the play, he will get his revenge.

link to NetgalleyI thought Atwood’s approach to this retelling was much more inventive than the other reworkings I have recently read, and I found the novel entertaining. Its revenge plot didn’t really grab me, though. I didn’t like Felix very much, although he gets more likable as the novel progresses. It was clever to combine the Caliban and Prospero roles into one for this book. Certainly, readers familiar with Atwood will recognize her acerbic writing style. Not to get to the point where I thought he was a real person, but I also thought his teaching methods were really creative, and the production sounded as if it would be good.

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