Tag: literary fiction

Day 598: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

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Cover for Mrs. PalfreyI’ve read two books by Elizabeth Taylor, who is beginning to be appreciated as a novelist years after she authored the books. Both the novels are melancholy, about sad people in realistic situations.

Mrs. Palfrey is an old lady who takes a permanent room at the Claremont, a hotel that has seen better days. Staying at the Claremont are several other older people who are all living on limited means.

One reason Mrs. Palfrey chose the Claremont instead of a seaside resort her daughter recommended is because her grandson Desmond lives in London and works at the British Museum. Mrs. Palfrey regrets having mentioned him to the other guests, though, as day after day passes and no one comes to visit.

The life of all the permanent residents of the Claremont is similar to hers, as they sit waiting for something to happen. Mrs. Post knits while Mr. Osborne writes letters to various newspapers hoping to see them in print. Any incident, no matter how trivial, constitutes a break in the monotony.

One day while out walking, Mrs. Palfrey falls. A young man runs out from a nearby building and helps her. He is Ludo Myers, an impoverished would-be novelist. After this encounter, the two become friends of a sort. Mrs. Palfrey doesn’t know that Ludo has decided to write about old people and is using her as a model. Still, they both behave kindly to one another, he even pretending to be her grandson so she can save some face with the other hotel residents.

Underlying the lives of all the old people are sadness and boredom, but Ludo also feels lonely. His mother goes from one affair to another and doesn’t seem to care if he comes to visit. He eventually takes up with Rosie, a young woman who also doesn’t care for him much.

This novel is observant enough of people’s behavior that it is sometimes funny, but mostly it sensitively explores the solitude that is in all of us. I saw the movie a few weeks after I read the book and was interested, but not surprised, to see how the movie was just enough more heartfelt and touching to make it avoid the central message and atmosphere of the book. I liked the movie, but it missed the point.

Day 597: Neverhome

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Cover for NeverhomeBest Book of the Week!
After some personal tragedies, Ash Thompson leaves the farm in Indiana to join the Union army and fight in the Civil War. Although the truth about Ash is not immediately apparent, I feel little hesitation in revealing that Ash is a woman, because the publicity for this novel makes that clear. Why she has chosen to leave her husband Bartholomew and go off to war is another matter.

Ash, who is tall and strong, shows herself to be a brave and obedient soldier, resourceful and a good shot. No one knows her for what she really is except a few women she sees in passing and her colonel.

This story is told by Ash herself in a very understated way. In fact, it is the voice of this novel, so distinctive, that makes it stand out. It is not until the end of the novel that we learn that Ash is not always a reliable narrator.

http://www.netgalley.comThis novel is beautifully spare and compelling, a wonderful portrait of a person who is more disturbed by violence and her personal tragedies than she appears to be.

Day 590: All the Birds, Singing

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Cover for All the Birds, SingingBest Book of the Week!
Jake Whyte is a tall, strong young woman doing a man’s job on an island in northern England. She is keeping a sheep farm, doing the best she can at a hard job all by herself. She is haunted, though, by terrifying memories and the feeling that someone is watching her and coming into her house. Her neighbor Don thinks she’s imagining things, but there is no doubt that something is killing her sheep.

Interleaved with her struggles in the present time are scenes from Jake’s past, from the most recent backward in time to when she was a teenager in Australia. So, we slowly learn why Jake finds herself alone, feeling like an outcast from society.

This novel is haunting and in many ways reminds me of the excellent, Tethered, which I just recently reviewed, in dealing with damaged people. I don’t want to say more about it for fear of giving too much away. Let me say that the novel is extremely atmospheric and that I was completely involved in discovering the secrets from Jake’s past as well as what is hanging around her farm. It is also beautifully and sparely written, evoking a distinct personality in Jake.

Day 587: Harvest

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Cover for HarvestBest Book of the Week!
Harvest seems to be concerned with exploring the dark side of human nature. Set in an unspecified time in the past, it focuses on unusual events in a small, remote village.

The villagers are celebrating the harvest. They are so busy drinking and eating that they forget to appoint their harvest queen. Groggily awakening the next morning, they spot two fires. One is green wood burning in the distance, a signal that some new family is establishing itself. The other is the master’s resented dovecote and the stables. Someone has set fire to the dovecote, and the fire has spread.

The novel’s narrator, Walter, noticed three young men return the night before with a load of hallucinogenic mushrooms and a dried puffball. He knows there is no use for the puffball except to spread a fire. Still, he decides to say nothing.

After the fire is out, Walter notices how the men he believes guilty behave over-helpfully to Master Kent and insist that the newcomers must have set it. So, the master and some of the villagers go off to see them.

Walter has injured his hand in the fire, so he stays home. But he soon hears how the villagers caved in the roof of the hovel so that it injured the young woman inside and how the master sentenced her two companions to a week in the stocks.

For some reason I felt dread from the onset of this novel, and this feeling was not wrong. Although the villagers have already started trouble by not confessing their actions, much worse is to come. For kind Master Kent has lost his property through an entailment to his wife’s cousin, a ruthless and cruel young man who is only interested in enclosing the common land and putting it to sheep. Now that he is master, it is up to him to mete out justice when the next incident happens.

Although Walt’s main fault is inaction, he soon finds himself being treated like a stranger again, for he came to the village long ago as a servant to Master Kent. Soon the village he loved is unrecognizable.

This novel is masterfully written, about how greed and ignorance can destroy a community. It is a dark and twisty tale.

Day 581: Reread! A Visit from the Goon Squad

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Cover for A Visit from the Goon SquadWhen I first read this quirky book last year, I said I wanted to reread it so that I could pay better attention to the minor characters in each story. I intended this because Egan’s clever technique to tie these stories together is to make a minor character in one story be the primary character in another.

So, this is my second review of this collection, which is really great. If you didn’t run right out and get it after my last review, I urge you to do so now. The stories are hip, aware, funny, and terrifically smart, centering around the music and public relations industries.

The stories in the first half of the book all touch on two characters—Benny Salazar, who is a music business executive when we first encounter him, and Lou, his mentor. The stories move backward and forward in time, so Benny is first at the height of his career but beginning to realize his taste is falling out of fashion. In a later story he is a teenager in a punk band called the Flaming Dildoes. He has several more appearances before making a comeback in his 60’s with a sensational concert starring his old friend Scotty from that first high school band.

Lou is at the height of his powers in one of the earlier stories, when he seduces one of the girls from the Dildoes, Jocelyn. Her friend Rhea watches their behavior in dismay. Later a dying old man, Lou is delighted to receive a visit from Rhea and Jocelyn, together again after years. But Jocelyn fights an urge to push him into the swimming pool as she considers her 30 years of wasted life as a drug addict, started on her way by Lou when she was 17.

The funniest stories skewer the public relations field. Dolly, once the premier public relations agent in New York (and the boss of Benny Salazar’s wife), has given up her career after a disastrous party she planned. Her brilliant idea to suspend translucent pans of colored oil from the ceiling near spotlights so that the oil would move as it heated was ruined when the plastic pans melted, sending hot oil down to burn all the celebrities. She sees an opportunity to revive her career in a job rehabilitating the reputation of a brutal third-world general. Even though this job almost ends in a murder, when her strategy actually works, she is contacted by a slew of dictators and assorted thugs wanting to hire her.

The has-been starlet Dolly used as the general’s “girlfriend” is the focus in her early career of a hilarious vituperative mock PR piece by the journalist who physically attacked her during an interview (Benny Salazar’s troubled brother-in-law). And finally, a short time in the future, Benny Salazar brings together his smash concert by appealing to the tastes of babies (“pointers,” as they are termed by the marketeers) and using the equivalent of likes on Facebook.

I understood a few things better on rereading the book. In an interview, Jennifer Egan said the stories were about pauses. One of them, a delightful Powerpoint presentation written by a preteen girl (the daughter of Benny Salazar’s ex-assistant Sasha, whose story is the first one in the book), talks about her little brother’s fascination with the pauses in rock music. In the book, we revisit the characters at different times in their lives, after pauses when we don’t see them. This approach leads us to consider the events of their life that we don’t see. Finally, there is the title, explained by the remark of a character. “Time is a goon.”

 

Day 578: Tethered

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Cover for TetheredBest Book of the Week!
Clara Marsh has been wounded by life. She is a mortician who spends her days preparing bodies for burial, caring for them tenderly and tucking a symbolic bouquet of flowers into the coffin of each. But she herself is isolated, afraid to look people in the eye, unable to touch. Her frame is skeletal, her scalp scarred from pulling out her own hair. The only people who seem to care for her are her boss and his wife, Linus and Alma Bartholomew.

One day Clara finds a little girl in the funeral home named Trecie, who says she has been visiting Linus. When Clara asks Linus about the girl, he asks Clara to help her. Soon after, at the scene of a death, Clara finds evidence that Trecie is the victim of child pornographers. When she tells Detective Mike Sullivan that she knows Trecie, he asks her to call him when she sees Trecie again. But Trecie gets away from them.

Mike believes there is a connection between the pornographers and the death of Precious Doe, an unidentified child found murdered after being badly beaten three years before. Soon it begins to look as if he may be right. Unfortunately, a fragile friendship between Clara and Mike is threatened when Mike begins to believe that Trecie doesn’t exist.

Although this novel is framed within a mystery, its soul is within the persona of Clara and her story. Tethered is precisely and beautifully written and absolutely haunting. I was transfixed by it.

Day 571: The Goldfinch

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Cover for The GoldfinchBest Book of the Week!
Theo Decker is hiding in an Amsterdam hotel, ill and terrified. He is afraid to set foot in the street. Through most of The Goldfinch, Theo relates the roots of his troubles, which lie 15 years in the past.

Thirteen-year-old Theo is out in New York City for a day with his mother. Normally, this would be a day he’d enjoy, but he is in trouble at his prep school, and they are on the way to school for a meeting. They are early, though, and his mother wants to stop at the museum to look at an exhibit.

Inside the museum, he spots an unusual couple—a hunch-backed old man and a fairy-like red-haired girl. He is only half attentive to his mother’s explanations of the paintings because he is looking at the girl. They stop to view a painting called The Goldfinch, one of the few remaining works by a Dutch artist named Fabritius.

Theo’s mother goes off to the gift shop while Theo trails after the girl. A few minutes later, Theo is knocked out by an explosion from a terrorist attack. When he comes to, the museum is oddly empty, but he finds the old man dying. The man gives him a ring and tells him to take it to an address, and then he suggests that Theo pick up The Goldfinch from a pile of dust and take it with him. He does, an act that becomes a defining moment of his life.

Assuming that his mother got out okay, Theo goes home, but he soon finds that she was killed. Since his ne’er-do-well father disappeared from their lives, it has been just the two of them for years. Social services ends up taking him to stay with the wealthy family of one of his school friends, the Barbours.

Suffering from grief and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, Theo tries to hide his insecurity and discomfort. As formal as the Barbour household is, he likes Mrs. Barbour and worries that the family might want him to leave. Eventually, he takes the old man’s ring to the address and meets the man’s partner Hobie and the girl, Pippa, who was badly injured in the explosion. She soon goes away to live with her aunt, but Theo continues to visit Hobie, who is a furniture restorer. And he is always in love with Pippa.

Just after Theo is invited to spend the summer in Maine with the Barbours, his whole life changes again. His father arrives and removes him abruptly from New York to Las Vegas. Theo is left to himself most of the time in a deserted suburb at the edge of the desert. His father at first appears to be well off, but soon it is clear he is living on the edges. Theo befriends another outcast, a Ukranian boy named Boris, and the two begin a slide into drugs and alcohol and the margins of society. Even after he returns to New York and tries to pull his life together, the secret of the painting serves as both a pleasure and a hidden terror.

It seems as if I am giving away a lot, but I have covered only the beginning of this long, involving novel. It explores such themes as the trauma of loss, the yearning for love, and the fragility of happiness and the present. In losing his mother, Theo seems to have lost his moral compass, so that even as he tries to help people, he creates problems for them and himself.

Tartt’s characters are complex and fully realized. Even the villains have facets to their personalities. Although Theo thinks of his father as a scoundrel—and he certainly has few redeeming qualities—Boris points out to him that when Boris was alone with nothing, Theo’s father took him in. An older Theo fears he has too much of his father in him.

The Goldfinch remains a golden, potent symbol throughout the novel. Theo loves the painting and feels that owning it somehow gives him stature. Yet at the same time he is terrified he’ll be found with it. Just as the bird in the picture is shackled, so Theo is captive to the painting.

Throughout the novel Theo disappointed me with his self-destructive tendencies even though he has good intentions. Still, Tartt tells a story that absolutely impels you to keep reading. This is a wonderful job of storytelling.

Day 565: Olive Kitteridge

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Cover for Olive KitteridgeThis collection of linked short stories lucidly illuminates the contradictions that make up the human condition. The link that binds the stories together is Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher in small-town Maine.

Olive is plain-spoken and gruff. Some people are afraid of her, but she can show sudden compassion and insight.

In “The Pharmacy,” Olive’s gentle husband Henry falls in love with his young pharmacy assistant without ever making his feelings known. In “A Little Burst,” Olive steals some of her daughter-in-law’s clothes during the wedding at the house the Kitteridges built for their son. She has overheard Suzanne saying nasty things about her. In “Tulips,” after Henry has a heart attack, Olive reflects upon their pain that their son Christopher moved away to California with his wife, and even after divorcing did not return or invite them to visit.

In other stories, Olive is less important or simply a presence. A timely conversation with her seems to keep a young man named Kevin from attempting suicide in “Incoming Tide.” In another story, the Kitteridges stroll to the restaurant through the bar where Angie plays the piano every night and thinks about the man she loved.

With neighbors and strangers, Olive says exactly the right thing in a difficult moment, and with her loved ones exactly the wrong thing. Many of the stories are sad but ultimately touching. Strout uses an unusual structure to create the sense of a lovely and affecting novel.

Day 562: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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Cover for We Are Completely Beside OurselvesBest Book of the Week!
Reading Karen Joy Fowler’s fluffy The Jane Austen Book Club made me willing to try a novel that did not sound appealing on the surface. But my experience with Fowler’s previous books in no way prepared me for the profound and moving We Are Completely Beside Ourselves.

Rosemary Cooke starts her story in the middle, when she is at college and has just been arrested for a small release of her inner “monkey girl.” Rosemary has worked hard to hide her past from her new friends at college. The daughter of a behavioral scientist, Rosemary was raised with a chimpanzee Fern as her sister until she was five years old. Then Fern was abruptly removed from the household when Rosemary was away visiting her grandparents. Rosemary’s beloved brother Lowell was angry with the entire family from then on and disappeared completely during his senior year of high school.

Since then, Rosemary’s family has been broken. Her mother had a breakdown from which she never entirely recovered, and her father is remote and alcoholic. Rosemary herself has never felt as if she fits in, after years of being teased by her classmates as the “monkey girl.” Although she seldom stopped talking as a child, now she rarely says anything.  Then Lowell comes to see her, and she has a chance to recover her own history.

Although this novel is written in a light and lively tone, it eventually brought tears to my eyes. It explores such subjects as reconciliation with oneself and others, human relationships and responsibilities toward other species, and the complexities of issues surrounding scientific experiments with animals. It is odd and unusual and incredibly intelligent.

Day 559: Snow Country

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Cover for Snow CountryPerhaps I did not spend enough time considering Snow Country, because I kept feeling as if I was missing something. I couldn’t figure out if this problem was cultural or more an issue with the misogyny of the 1950’s, when it was written.

The novel follows the affair of Shimamura, an effete and sophisticated intellectual, with Komako, a simple country girl who during the novel becomes a geisha. Part of my initial problem had to do with understanding the implications of being a geisha. After all my prior reading lead me to believe that a geisha is different and in fact higher in status than a prostitute, I had to read the introduction to understand that in these hot springs villages, at least in the time the novel is set, a geisha was essentially a prostitute.

Nevertheless, when Shimamura meets Komako, she is a geisha in training, so clearly not a prostitute. Shimamura has come down from traveling in the mountains and immediately asks the hotel clerk for a geisha. None are available, so she sends him Komako. Shimamura spends the night talking to Komako but then asks her to send him a geisha. It is clear what he wants, but he seems to think he deserves some kind of credit for “behaving well” with her, whereas I, and Komako as well, understood his request as insulting. I do not think we’re supposed to like Shimamura, and I didn’t.

We know far more about Shimamura than we do about Komako. We first encounter him on a train on the way back to Komako’s village after the affair is already started. He is struck by Yoko, a girl who is tending to a sick man. Throughout, though, he is far more interested in his fantasies around Yoko than in actually getting to know her. The essence of Shimamura’s personality comes clear when we learn that he is an expert on occidental ballet even though he has never seen a ballet performed—and prefers not to.

For her part, Komako throws herself into the affair with Shimamura even though it is clearly doomed. Although Shimamura’s behavior remains consistent and it is clear that he is incapable of love, Komako is erratic. Toward the end of the relationship she says one thing and does another, she arrives roaring drunk, and she seems to have an inexplicable love/hate relationship with Yoko, as Yoko does with her.

Of course, the future for Komako is not bright, and she becomes more dissipated as the novel progresses. Although I feel we are supposed to sympathize with her, I found her exasperating. The love affair seems sterile, and I don’t see the point of it.

But this novel is set in the cold and gray snow country. Although part of the affair takes place in other seasons, the most important scenes are in the beginning of winter, and the affair ends in the fall. A sense of isolation permeates the novel.

The writing is beautifully spare, as Kawabata is a poet. I feel it is dense in meaning, but if so, I probably missed a lot of it.