Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 942: Siracusa

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Cover for SiracusaNews flash! The Man Booker long list was announced today, and I have actually reviewed one of the books!

* * *

Siracusa is a sometimes shocking story about a disastrous vacation in Italy. Two couples, linked by a friendship between the husband of one and the wife of the other, vacation together with one couple’s pre-teen daughter. The trip this year has been planned by Taylor except for a detour to Siracusa, Sicily, planned by Lizzie. The story alternates among the points of view of the four adults.

Lizzie’s voice seems the most reliable, but all of the adults are unreliable narrators for one reason or another. Lizzie, a writer, is deluded. She is in love with her husband Michael and does not know he is unfaithful. Michael, a formerly famous playwright who has been working on the same novel for years, is a liar who likes power games. He has been cheating on Lizzie with a waitress named Kathy.

Finn is a restaurant owner who smokes too much and is serially unfaithful. His wife Taylor is snobbish and shallow, and she is so overprotective of their 10-year-old daughter Snow that she talks for her. At some point, Taylor begins making a play for Michael, whom both she and Snow adore.

At Siracusa, a tragic chain of events begin when Kathy appears as a surprise for Michael and begins trying to maneuver him out of his marriage. It isn’t until then that Michael realizes he wants to stay with Lizzie.

link to NetgalleyThis novel is complex and interesting, with a shocking conclusion. I was rather freaked out by one of the characters from early in the novel, and my impressions turned out to be right. From starting out to be a fairly mundane story of relationships, this novel works up quite a bit of suspense.

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Day 938: What Alice Forgot

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Cover for What Alice ForgotAlice Love wakes up from an accident thinking she is 29, pregnant with her first child, and madly in love with her husband Nick. But she is actually 39, the mother of three children, and separated from Nick. It takes her a while to understand she is ten years older, much thinner, and quite a bit harder and more driven than she remembers.

Alice escapes from the hospital by simply lying to the doctors. But somehow, she must piece together her life from the allusions of other people and her own feelings of occasional discomfort. How can she get along with her three unknown children? What happened between her and Nick? Why are she and her sister Elizabeth on the outs? And who the heck is Gina?

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, mostly because of its characterizations. Alice in her 29-year-old reincarnation is guileless and likable, and Nick in her memories is also endearing. Alice’s children seem like real kids, adorable one minute and infuriating the next.

I didn’t like as much the sections written by Elizabeth to her therapist or by Frannie to her long-dead fiancé, but their stories add more depth to the novel. Since the focus was so much on Alice, there probably wasn’t another way to fit that information in.

All in all, this is another highly enjoyable novel from Moriarty. Toward the end, I was afraid she was going to take an easy path, but she did not.

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Day 932: Black Swan Green

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Cover for Black Swan GreenJason Taylor is thirteen years old in 1982, the beginning of Black Swan Green. He is somewhat of a misfit, obviously bright and interested in poetry, a stutterer, but he spends most of his time hiding his true self to be more acceptable to his schoolmates. Still, acceptance is fleeting. One year he is on the margins of popularity; the next, he’s a pariah.

His parents have some problems he doesn’t understand. His older sister Julia can’t wait to leave home for university. The economic climate is grim in the wake of Thatcherism.

Black Swan Green seems to Jason to be the most boring village imaginable. Still, he manages to have some adventures, visiting a strange old lady in the depths of the woods, taking poetry lessons from Madame Eva von Outryve de Crommelynck, literally dropping in on Gypsies, all the while trying to avoid the popular bullies in his class.

Although I sometimes wondered where this novel was going (and for a while wondered if any time travelers were going to appear), it eventually got there. More importantly, it features a distinctive voice of a bright, funny, sometimes naive boy. It has a unique notion of character that to me makes the novel stand out.

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Day 930: Early Warning

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Cover for Early WarningEarly Warning is the second in Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy. It continues the story of the Langdon family, picking up in the 1950’s and ending in 1985.

The family, which began with a couple and their children and the occasional appearance of other relatives, expands during this period to grandchildren and eventually their children. As you can imagine, by 1985 we are dealing with many characters.

This is one of my criticisms of the novel. With so many characters, we don’t spend very much time with any, which creates distance from the novel. I already felt this with the first book, and this feeling increases for the second.

But is the purpose of this novel to follow the characters or the main events during these times? It seems to be the second, as we look at the ennui of suburban housewives in the 50’s, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and its associated protests, the counterculture and Jonestown, to name a few. Smiley manages to have at least one family member involved in each of these events or movements, which is quite an accomplishment for one family from Iowa.

Of the Langdon children whose families are the focus of this novel, Frank concentrates most of his attention on business and sexual escapades, while his wife Andie struggles with a feeling of pointlessness and self-absorption. Neither of them pays much attention to their children, except that Frank puposefully fosters competition between his two twin boys, Richie and Michael. All of his children suffer from this upbringing, and the boys are at times truly scary.

Joe is the only Langdon to stay on the farm, and although he was one of my favorite characters in the first book, we don’t see much of him in this one. He and Lois have had some lucky breaks, and the farm is in better financial shape than their neighbors’, but decisions of the Reagan administration make small farms a tough business.

Lillian and Arthur raise a rowdy and happy family in Washington, D.C. But Arthur’s job with the CIA brings him under terrific pressure, and a tragic loss creates ramifications for years. This family has more than its fair share of sorrows.

Claire eventually marries a doctor and settles down in Iowa. But she has selected her husband almost in competition with a friend and eventually regrets her choice.

The novel is saved somewhat at the very end by a touching event linked to the presence of a character who isn’t explained until the end, one who appears in the middle of the book and at intervals throughout. At first I found the introduction of this character confusing, but I figured he had to be a family member, so then it wasn’t too hard to guess who he is.

I will read the final book, but I fear that the distance I feel from the story will only increase.

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Day 928: The View from Castle Rock

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Cover for The View from Castle RockThe View from Castle Rock is an earlier Munro collection of short stories than Family Furnishings, which I previously reviewed. Since Family Furnishings is an anthology of Munro’s stories over the course of her career, I had already read several of the stories in The View from Castle Rock.

All of these stories have to do with the history of Munro’s family. In “No Advantages,” she has traveled to the area of Scotland where the Laidlaws came from. This story incorporates excerpts from other writings and quotes the epitaphs of some of her ancestors. It explains their hard life and the kinds of people her 18th century ancestors were.

In “The View from Castle Rock” Munro relates a family legend about how their drunken great-great-great grandfather James Laidlaw took his son Andrew up onto Castle Rock in Edinburgh to view America, probably as a joke, since they were looking at Fife. Although he talks of emigration throughout his life, he is unhappy when some of his sons finally take him and their families to America. This story is about their voyage and the fates of some of the family on board.

Other stories are more recent. “Hired Girl” is about a summer when Munro worked as a hired girl at a beach house on an island. For that summer, she had to learn that her employers did not consider her an equal. This was a tough lesson, as her mother especially had always had some pretensions of superiority even though they were poor.

In “Home” she revisits home after living away for some years. Her father has remarried after her mother’s death, and her old house has changed almost completely.

Cover for The View from Castle RockThe stories in this collection are powerful, relating the hard life of her family farming and raising fur, their close-mouthed quality, pride, and stubbornness. She is courageous in her ability to look at everything with honesty, even her own foibles.

One comment I have to make is on the cover of my Vintage International edition, shown here. It has absolutely nothing to do with the contents of the book and gives an entirely misleading idea of the stories. The only story that even faintly is about a beach is “Hired Girl,” and the girl is not exactly lying around in the sand. Sometimes I wonder what publishers are thinking. The cover that I used at top is much better.

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Day 922: The Vegetarian

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Cover for The VegetarianThe Vegetarian is an unusual, transgressive work, full of disturbing images and violent scenes. When I first began reading it, I wondered how seriously we were supposed to take it as a work of realism. My answer was, not at all.

The novella is divided into three parts, each written from the point of view of a different character. The first is Mr. Cheong, the self-centered, repellent husband of Yeong-hye. He has already alienated us by describing his wife in insulting terms, even when remembering when he chose to marry her.

He tells us the story of what happens when Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat. Her only explanation is “I had a dream.” But we get short glimpses into Yeong-hye’s thoughts, and they describe a disturbing vision that keeps recurring. This section climaxes in a shocking scene during a family party.

The next section is from the point of view of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist. He has his own visions and compulsions.

The final section is from the point of view of In-hye, Yeong-hye’s older sister. In-hye tries to understand her sister’s condition in terms of the hardships of her childhood, when she was abused by their father.

As Yeong-hye decides to embrace her inner plant, bending to her obsessions, the novella becomes more divorced from reality. The three main characters all are gripped by their own visions.

link to NetgalleyThe description of this novel on Goodreads calls it “an allegorical novel about modern day South Korea.” I would agree that it is allegorical (not my favorite genre), but that it’s actually about life in modern South Korea, not so much. It is set there, but it don’t think we’re supposed to see its events as representative of life in South Korea. The review in the New York Times points to the danger of “a focus on the ethnographic and sociological” and attributing much to differences in culture. If you believe this, you’ll think Koreans have very odd attitudes toward vegetarianism. I pondered this when reading, but decided that the behavior of the characters in some scenes was too extreme to be taken at face value.

Did I like The Vegetarian? Not so much, but it made me think.

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Day 921: Vinegar Girl

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Cover for Vinegar GirlWhen I realized that Vinegar Girl is a reworking of The Taming of the Shrew, my main reaction was to wonder how that could be pulled off in modern times. But, I have thought I should read more Anne Tyler, so I decided to read it. It is very short and perhaps predictable, a quick, light read.

Kate Battista feels she doesn’t have much purpose in life. She and her sister Bunny have been raised by a preoccupied scientist father who has loads of ridiculous systems for running the house (even worse than my husband’s). The girls’ mother died young, but before that she was almost always caught up in depression. Kate was expelled from college for being rude to one of her professors (which actually sounds like an unlikely reason for being expelled). Since then, she has been working as a preschool teacher, taking care of the house and garden, and being a guardian to her sister.

Kate is abrasive sometimes, and she keeps getting into trouble at the preschool for things she says to the parents. She thinks her beautiful young sister is silly for putting on a different personality for men. She has lost most of her friends through lack of shared interests, and the only thing she does that she likes is gardening.

She is taken aback when her father calls her asking her to bring him his lunch, which he has forgotten. Since he frequently forgets his lunch and never notices, that is surprising, but she doesn’t figure out that he is attempting to introduce her to his lab assistant, Pyotr Cherbakov. Ultimately, it comes out that Pyotr’s visa is about to expire, and her father wants her to marry Pyotr so that he can stay in the country.

Kate is insulted and infuriated at the same time. She is so angry that she ends up agreeing, just to get out of the house.

link to NetgalleyYou can see where this is going. The novel is a cute romance with some good dialogue. I found a little unlikely the climactic scene Kate makes at the wedding dinner, especially considering what had just gone on before. The thrust of her message is that it’s harder being a man than a woman, something my mother used to tell me that I have never bought. I think Tyler is showing her age here, but it’s the only disappointing thing in a book that is fairly entertaining.

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Day 916: The Unraveling of Mercy Louis

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Cover for The Unraveling of Mercy LouisAt the beginning of this novel, it is 1999 and the last day of Mercy Louis’s sophomore year in high school. The novel is set in the downtrodden refinery city of Port Sabine, Texas. Mercy lives with Maw Maw, her grandmother, a woman who combines a background of Cajun superstition with strict fundamentalism. Maw Maw has visions and believes that the End of Days will arrive at the end of the year.

Mercy is focused on the thing she finds most important—basketball. She follows her coach’s rigid routines and diet, and she doesn’t drink or get involved with boys. Her best friend and teammate Annie isn’t so careful, though, about parties or boys.

Troubles for the town begin when an employee of a convenience store finds the body of a fetus in the dumpster. National attention falls on the town, fundamentalists demonstrate against the evils of baby killing, and attention soon turns on the town’s teenage girls. As one of them remarks, it’s as if suddenly it’s a sin to be a girl.

Mercy feels pressure from other sources, too. She has had a fit or a vision at church. She has received a letter from her mother, who left her when she was a baby. She also has a boyfriend for the first time, Travis, a boy from an artistic, liberal background. And she’s started having trouble controlling one of her arms.

The other major character is Illa Stark, a misfit girl who has only one friend, Lennox, who works with her on the school paper. She has a crush on Lennox, but he is dating the formidable Annie. Illa also has a fascination with Mercy, the star of the girls’ basketball team.

Illa’s mother is wheelchair bound after a huge refinery accident several years ago. Now she hardly ever goes out. Illa doesn’t get out much either except as manager of the basketball team and in pursuit of her interest in photography.

Although this novel is a coming of age story, it is more about the pressures of religious fundamentalism on girls. Mercy tries to cope with the natural desires of teenage years to date and have fun, both of which she has been brought up to believe are evil.

I did care about these characters, but I felt that in some ways, although the novel doesn’t tie up all the threads, it comes to some easy solutions of the characters’ problems. I also found the writing—which is overloaded with similes and metaphors—to be irritating at times. So, I had a mixed reaction to this novel.

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Day 914: History of the Rain

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Cover for History of the RainBest Book of the Week!
The distinctive voice of its narrator is what stands out to me about History of the Rain. But again, I feel as if I may not be able to convey just how wonderful I found this lovely novel.

Ruthie Swain is a young girl bedridden from an illness. In her attic bedroom under a watery skylight she is trying to read her father’s thousands of books. She is also writing a novel to try to understand him. During this effort, she writes about Ireland, her village, and the history of her family, especially about the Impossible Standard. Her story incorporates the mythological heritage of Ireland as well as references to countless literary authors and characters and the eccentric residents of her village.

Ruthie’s mother’s family, she says, evolved from salmon, and her mother first meets her father salmon fishing, and is hooked. But that gets way ahead of the story, which in unchronological order recites the history of her father’s family, the story of the Impossible Standard and his evolution into a poet.

To give a flavor of the novel, here is how Ruthie imagines the first time Ruthie’s father Virgil is invited to dinner at her mother’s house:

“So, how do you like it here?”
“Very much.”
“Good.”
That exhausts the dialog. She realizes she hasn’t folded the napkins and takes hers and begins to press it in halves. Virgil does the same. Both of them are useless at it. Maybe evenness is a thing intolerable to love. Maybe there’s some law, I don’t know. She lines up the halves of hers, runs her forefinger down the crease. When she picks it up the thing is crooked. So is his. She undoes the fold and goes at it again, but the napkin wants to fall into that same line again and does so to spite her, and does so to spite him, or to occupy both with conundrums or to say in the whimsical language of love that the way ahead will not be a straight line.

She doesn’t give up, and he doesn’t give up. And in that is the whole story, for those who read Napkin.

This novel is funny, heartbreaking, and lovely. It is about the loves of reading and poetry and Ireland and life. I loved this book.

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Day 912: Literary Wives! The Disobedient Wife

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in modern fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs. Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

Ariel of One Little Library
Emily of The Bookshelf of Emily J.
Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors
Naomi of Consumed By Ink

My Review

Cover for The Disobedient WifeA distinctive characteristic of The Disobedient Wife is its sense of place in an unusual setting, Tajikistan. The novel contrasts the lives of two women, Nargis, a nanny and maid who is struggling to support her family, and Harriet, her employer.

The novel begins during a bitterly cold winter, and Milisic-Stanley effectively conveys how difficult life is for the majority of Tajiks. Harriet, in contrast, lives a life of luxury as the wife of a foreign diplomat. At first, she is not a very sympathetic character, as opposed to Nargil. The novel makes it clear that Harriet is a trophy wife who angled to take her husband Henri from his previous wife.

Nargil, on the other hand, is separated from her second husband. She loved her first husband, who died, but was rushed into her second marriage by her parents. Her second husband has proved abusive to her and her son, so Nargil has left him, at the expense of leaving her youngest son Faisullo with her husband’s family. She has no legal right to her son if her husband doesn’t grant it.

By contrast to Nargil’s, Harriet’s life is one of idleness and boredom. Her husband is almost constantly working, frequently away traveling, and she has little purpose to her life.

The writing style of this novel was so florid at first that it bothered me. However, I quickly got involved in the women’s stories and in the details of life in Tajikistan, particularly in Nargil’s life.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

Literary Wives logoAlthough the marriages are very different, I felt they were both stereotypical, and a bit of a weakness in the novel. For one thing, we see very little of any positive interactions between the wives and husbands. As Nargil is separated from Poulod, we don’t see day-to-day interactions but understand he was an abuser. The novel concentrates more on the difficulties Nargil faces with his continuing presence in her life and her lack of rights.

Henri expects Harriet to be a proper hostess to his guests. Otherwise, he doesn’t spend much time with her. He patronizes her and leaves her with the children most of the time. It’s difficult to imagine why they ever got married.

I guess the message we’re supposed to get about this topic is that both women have the courage to leave their marriages, no matter how different.

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