Tag: literary fiction

Day 488: As I Lay Dying

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as-i-lay-dyingAs I Lay Dying is the first Faulkner novel set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, about the death of Addie Bundren and the efforts of her family to cart her body to Jefferson, Mississippi, for burial. As an early Faulkner work, it is one of the first in his experiments with stream of consciousness and is unusual in that its plot is conveyed solely through the thoughts of its many narrators.

At the beginning of the novel, Addie Bundren is dying. Her son Cash is building her coffin right outside her window while she watches. Her husband Anse and sons Darl and Jewell are discussing whether Darl and Jewell should go off to work a job that will earn $3 so close to the time of her death.

The plot is fairly simple—they go, she dies before they get back, there is a big storm that washes out the bridge, and the whole family takes her with great difficulty to Jefferson, trying to find a way to get across the river. The accomplishment of the novel is in revealing the complex relationships among the family members from the sometimes incoherent thoughts of themselves and some of the people they encounter on their journey.

This is a dark and pessimistic novel. Although its characters are uneducated, rough, and bluntly spoken, some of them, particularly Darl, have unexpected sophisticated and even poetic thoughts. On the other hand, there is Anse, shiftless and selfish, but stubborn as the dickens when he makes up his mind to do something.

Although Addie made Anse promise to bury her in Jefferson almost as punishment for the life she hated, it is not clear whether his new teeth or his promise is the reason for the trip. On the road, there are several occasions where his determination not to be “beholden” puts his family to major inconvenience or even danger, yet on another occasion he is outraged that his neighbor refuses the use of his mules for an attempt to cross the river that results in the death of Anse’s own  mules.

We don’t hear much directly from Addie. As Cash builds the coffin she is a staring presence who doesn’t utter a sound. She has only one chapter to herself, in which she reveals her true disdain for her husband and children except for her son Jewell, the fruit of an illicit affair. Why she married Anse in the first place is not entirely clear, except that she hated her life as a schoolteacher.

The trials that the family must face to get to Jefferson are almost epic, but for what? Addie makes clear that her wish was malicious. Anse has ulterior motives. Yet Jewell is driven to Herculean efforts and loses the only thing he loves, Anse’s stubbornness nearly makes Cash lose his leg, and Darl ends up perpetrating an infamous act and being committed. The young boy Vardaman is traumatized on several occasions, and in town the only daughter, Dewey Dell, is cruelly duped.

Some of the themes of this novel are those of selfhood and existence, the contrast between spoken words and thoughts, the treatment of different social classes, and the irony of extraordinary but pointless acts. The ending makes the pointlessness clear by its almost comic mundanity.

Although this novel has echoes of characters who will appear in later novels—mentions of Snopes, Quick, the Tulls, and other characters—it has none of the bleak humor of the Snopes trilogy. It is widely regarded, though, as one of Faulkner’s most powerful novels and as a vivid example of the then new stylistic techniques of Modernism.

Day 474: The Travelling Hornplayer

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Cover for The Travelling HornplayerThe Travelling Hornplayer revisits some of the characters I loved in Brother of the More Famous Jack. But first it starts with Ellen. Ellen has always had a close relationship with her sister Lydia, and the two girls’ adolescent silliness and charm is vividly depicted early in the novel in lively dialogue. But Lydia dies at age 17 while Ellen is away at university. She runs unexpectedly out into the street from the home of the man Ellen and Lydia call The Novelist and is hit by a car. Lydia has been consulting him about (well, actually cribbing from him) her essay for her A levels on Wilhelm Müller’s Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer. It takes awhile before we find out the cause of her death.

The Novelist is Jonathan Goldman, whose family so charmed Katherine, the heroine of Brother of the More Famous Jack, now his wife. Jonathan and Katherine have only one child, Stella, whose childhood illnesses and learning disabilities have led Katherine to do everything for her. Finally almost on her own at university in Edinburgh, where she becomes Ellen’s roommate (almost on her own because her mother arrives periodically to do the cleaning), Stella makes a series of spectacularly poor decisions that result in tragedy for herself and others and a separation from her family.

This sounds like a sad tale, and in some ways it is, but it is told lovingly and movingly, with intelligent characters and witty dialogue. Trapido depicts characters of surprising depth and complexity. She is a really beautiful writer, and I love her work.

My cover of The Travelling HornplayerA word about this cover. I was unable to find a good-sized picture of my book’s cover without the Amazon Look Inside logo on it. That cover, which shows two young girls comparing their identical outfits, conveys the feel of the novel much more successfully than the one above, which looks like children’s fiction or chick lit to me. Here it is in a smaller size.

Day 471: Unaccustomed Earth

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Cover for Unaccustomed EarthBest Book of the Week!

Although all of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth feature characters who are immigrants and first-generation Americans of Indian descent, they are about a lot more than that. They are about the common problems of all people.

In the story “Unaccustomed Earth,” Ruma grieves over the loss of her mother while her father fears she is making the same life for herself that embittered his marriage to her mother. In “Hell-Heaven,” a girl observes her traditional mother’s infatuation with a young graduate student in light of her mother’s detached marriage with her father. Amit and his wife Megan try to create a romantic weekend while attending the wedding of a woman Amit once had a crush on in “A Choice of Accommodations.” The best of the stories are the last three, interlinked, about two people who meet each other several times at significant junctures of their lives.

Lahiri’s stories speak to us deeply. With details of life and human behavior so finely observed, they become stories about characters for whom we care.

I am generally a novel reader, because short stories often feel to me as if a lot is missing. But Lahiri’s gift is for saying so much in so few words. You find yourself pondering her stories and characters long after you stop reading. They reveal a profound insight into the human heart.

Day 463: The Luminaries

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Cover for The LuminariesBest Book of the Week! Year!

This last year I read several books that played wonderfully with structure. I’m thinking particularly of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a series of stories linked by their characters that somehow forms a whole, and Life After Life, in which the heroine’s life is repeated, with slight changes that lead to significant ones. I loved both of these inventive approaches to structure, and now I add to this list The Luminaries, the latest winner of the Man Booker Prize. This book is also my second recently reviewed novel set in New Zealand.

Walter Moody is newly come to the gold fields of the South Island of New Zealand in 1866. He has arrived in rough seas and is shaken by an apparition he has seen in the bowels of the ship. Seeking warmth and comfort, he checks into a seedy waterfront hotel and enters the parlor, where he accidentally interrupts the meeting of 12 other men.

After some initial hesitancy, the men begin telling him a series of tales, all interconnected, but the whole of which they cannot make out. The tales concern a missing trunk, a fortune found in a dead man’s cabin, the disappearance of a prominent citizen, the apparent attempted suicide of a whore. Each man at the meeting has his own part of the story to impart. Moody is able to make some sense of the story, but all go away from the meeting knowing that pieces are missing.

This section of the book is the longest, making up almost half its length. The cover of the novel, showing a waning moon, gives you a hint to its structure. It is divided into 12 sections, each one shorter than the one before but each one adding to the revelations of the original tales, until the final very short slivers of sections reveal all.

Each of these sections is also headed with an astrological chart that shows how the heavenly bodies are positioned within the signs of the 12 initial characters. This I did not understand at all, but Catton provides some indication at the beginning of the sections about what the astrology predicts.

The chapters of the novel are charmingly headed with old-fashioned descriptions of what happens in the chapter. Over time, the descriptions themselves begin to drive the narrative.

In The Luminaries, we’re presented with a novel that embodies a puzzle, a complex tale of villainy and foul crimes but also of love and loyalty. I was completely engrossed in  entangling the threads of this story. Despite its beginnings as a tale of cheats and chicanery, you may be surprised to find that you are reading a love story about two characters connected by their stars.

Day 456: Independent People

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Cover for Independent PeopleBest Book of the Week!

Who knew that Iceland had a Nobel Prize winner for literature? I didn’t even notice with his novel in my hands, given to me by my Uncle Fred last summer. I just put it in my pile of books to be read. If I’d known it was so good, I would have paid more attention.

Oddly, I seem to be inadvertently in an islands phase. This is the second book I’ve reviewed recently about Iceland (see my review of Burial Rites), and I have another I will soon review about New Zealand, The Luminaries. (See my review of The Bone People.)

Bjartur Jónsson has worked for the Bailiff’s family for 18 years to earn enough money to buy a small farm and some sheep. He is determined from now on to be beholden to no one else, to be independent. Even though his holding is said to be cursed by the fiend Kolumkilli (Saint Columba) and the witch Gunnvor, Bjartur is not superstitious and refuses to cast a stone on Gunnvor’s cairn to appease her when he first crosses the ridge into his valley. He is determined to make a place for himself and his bride-to-be Rósa on his own efforts.

On his wedding night he has an unpleasant surprise. Someone has already been with Rósa, he claims. At first we’re not certain whether he is being perverse, but one night when Bjartur is out searching for a lost sheep (that Rósa ate out of desperation), Rósa dies in childbirth only a few months after the wedding. Bjartur finds the baby on the edge of death, protected by his bitch sheep dog. Bjartur is a singular character—a lover of the old sagas and a poet, obstinate to the point of stupidity, untrusting, ornery, thinking mostly of his sheep—but he immediately loves this little girl and names her Ásta Sólillja (beloved sun lily).

Although Bjartur soon marries Finna, the woman who comes to care for Ásta Sólillja, and we get to know her and her mother and the couple’s three sons, it is the characters of Bjartur and Ásta Sólillja that dominate the story. Bjartur is so heedless of anything but his own ideas that he refuses anything resembling a gift, even if it would keep his family healthy, and Ásta Sólillja is innocent and gentle as the little flower he calls her.

The time frame of this novel is vague, so we are startled two thirds of the way through to see references to World War I, for the life of these Icelandic farmers seems no different than it would have been in the Middle Ages. Laxness describes a hard, grim existence, where babies die of illness and malnutrition, where Finna lies in bed ill for weeks every winter, where the family lives in one room full of fleas.

This story is not a bleak one, however; rather it is comic, sad, and moving. The novel centers on a rift between Ásta Sólillja and Bjartur. In anger, he throws her out. Although he repents his action, he won’t admit it and stubbornly waits for her to come ask for forgiveness. Well, she will never ask.

Slowly, things begin going wrong for Bjartur. He has already lost his second wife and his oldest son because of obstinacy about a cow. His youngest son Nonni, a brilliantly drawn character whose mother told him he would “sing for the world” (and I think is meant to be Laxness himself) disappears from the novel when he gets a chance to go to America at a young age. Soon Bjartur is left with only his middle son Gvendur, a young man not given to introspection who only knows how to “keep on doing things.”

Along with the story of Bjartur’s family, we learn a bit about the history of Icelandic politics and economy, but the novel centers on this all too human and oddly endearing family. If you decide to read this poetic novel, I think you will have a wonderful and surprising experience. It looks like several of Laxness’s works are out in paperback. I’m going to be buying more.

Day 455: Andrew’s Brain

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Cover for Andrew's BrainI’m not sure what I think of this short novel—perhaps that it’s a conceit.

Andrew is a cognitive scientist speaking to an unknown person, perhaps his psychiatrist, about his life. Andrew is an unreliable narrator, for at the end of the novel we find he cannot have been where he reports himself as having been (that is, if we believe the end of the novel). Further, he asserts several times that he has no emotions, when that is plainly untrue.

The novel begins with his story of abandoning his infant daughter after his second wife’s tragic death by giving her to his first wife Martha. Many of his reminiscences have to do with his actions being inadvertently destructive, but he also concentrates on his relationship with his much younger second wife, Briony.

In the midst of his stories he provides us with information about the workings of the brain and seems fascinated by the idea that scientists could one day manufacture a brain with consciousness. The novel poses questions about such subjects as whether free will exists, what composes consciousness, whether memory is reliable, but little nuggets about the workings of the brain are from relatively basic neuroscience, which does not leave me convinced that the observations are actually those of a scientist.

The turn the novel takes at the end is suddenly political and absurdist, and it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the book. Are we to believe Andrew’s story, or is he delusional (perhaps even a manufactured consciousness)? As I mentioned before, in one part of the novel he apparently phones his interlocutor to tell him he is living in a farmhouse with some people about whom he had at one time dreamed. At another point he is apparently writing a letter from a cabin high above a Norwegian fjord. When we finally learn what are supposed to be his actual circumstances, those reported two places of residence are plainly impossible.

In any case, although this novel is interesting enough, it is ultimately unsatisfying and feels almost like a joke the author is playing on us.

Full disclosure: I received this novel free as a giveaway from Goodreads.

Day 442: Housekeeping

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Cover for HousekeepingBest Book of the Week!

A few years ago I was reading about a nonfiction work called A Jury of Her Peers, which discusses the routine misogyny in the American publishing and academic communities that has resulted in the neglect of works of countless American women writers. This book accomplishes the astounding task of tracing the careers of every significant American woman writer through the twentieth century, including not just the literary writers but even many popular genre writers.

On the Amazon page for the book, the author, Elaine Showalter, includes a great list: Top Ten Books by American Women Writers You Haven’t Read (But Should). My book club read several selections from that list and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. I still have not read them all, but I just recently finished Housekeeping.

First, let me warn about the blurb on the book cover, which makes this novel sound like a cheerful story about an eccentric family. It is not like that at all. The picture on the cover will give you a better idea of the novel.

Ruth and her younger sister Lucille are young girls who have repeatedly been abandoned. As children, they were left on their grandmother’s porch in the cold, remote town of Fingerbone, Idaho, by their mother, who went off to commit suicide by driving off a cliff into the huge glacial lake next to the town. This lake is the scene of another family tragedy, the place where their grandfather, a railroad worker, died when his train plunged off the bridge on the way back from Spokane.

The little girls are raised by their grandmother, a stiff, strict woman who forgets, on the rare occasions when she hugs them, that she has pins and needles stashed in a cloth in her bosom. When she dies, her maiden sisters-in-law take her place, a couple of timid, incompetent great-aunts who feel unequal to the task of raising two growing girls.

Lily and Nona find and summon the girls’ Aunt Sylvia, who was estranged from her mother for years. As soon as Sylvie arrives, the two old ladies skedaddle back to their comfortable room in the Hartwick Hotel in Spokane. Sylvie stays, but the girls are always afraid she will leave. Everything about her seems transient. She keeps a $20 bill pinned inside her lapel and never takes off her coat. She finds old friends in the railroad yard and in box cars and sometimes sleeps outside.

Ruth and Lucille have been inseparable, but soon Ruth feels her sister drifting away, as Lucille makes friends at school and becomes more aware of some salient facts: how unusual their household is and how the townspeople have begun viewing their living environment. Instead of acceding to Lucille’s perfunctory request to let Lucille make her more presentable, tall ungainly Ruth seems to grow more feral. As Lucille turns away from Sylvie and Ruth, Ruth is forced to depend even more on Sylvie.

Water is a persistent image in this disturbing novel. The lake, the scene of their family tragedies, is always there, cold, deep, and mysterious. Many of the girls’ illicit adventures involve exploring this lake. The town floods every year. The landscape is dripping and the road to town muddy. In the early days of Sylvie’s residence with the girls, she buys them cheap sequined ballet slippers to wear to town through the mud.

Every word in this novel is carefully chosen, every sentence exquisite. We can track Ruth’s growing eccentricity and unusual mind by the increasing oddness of her metaphors as she narrates the novel. Housekeeping is a stunning portrait of loss, longing, and fear of abandonment.

Day 434: Coriolanus

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Cover for CoriolanusCoriolanus is one Shakespeare tragedy with which I was previously unfamiliar, and it is a powerful one. More than any other Shakespeare play I’ve read, it is about politics, class dissension, and the fickleness of popularity. It is also about excessive pride.

The play has references to events of the time it was written, for it begins with a riot over corn, the like of which had taken place in Warwickshire the year the play was written. Its war between the Romans and the Volscians is also a reference to the war the English and Spanish had been carrying on intermittently.

Caius Marcius is a warrior who has spent most of his life as a soldier and has no social graces. He is proud and arrogant and disdains the common man. After he soundly beats the Volscians in battle, particularly his bitter enemy Aufidius, and conquers their city of Corioles, the Roman generals rename him Coriolanus and the senate wants to award him a consulship. This office as ruler of Rome is the one that all great men aspire to. Unfortunately, to have the office, Coriolanus must beg the honor from the public and show them his wounds gained in defending the state.

He is reluctant to do so, knowing that he is unable and unwilling to ask for what he thinks he deserves, but his austere mother Volumnia and his supporters talk him into it. Two jealous tribunes, who are representatives of the people, are afraid that Coriolanus will strip them of their offices. So, the two, Brutus and Sicinius, work to enrage the people after they have already sworn to support Coriolanus.

The result is another riot, and instead of receiving the high honor, Coriolanus is declared a traitor. The tribunes even try to have him executed, but he is banished.

The seeds of Coriolanus’ downfall are sown both by the treachery of his rivals and by his own hubris. Things go downhill from there.

It is interesting that in the class divide, Shakespeare’s sympathies seem to align with the men of power even while he deplores Coriolanus’ flaws. There are several speeches about the public not being able to make a decision, about their fickleness, and so on, and the actions of the public seem to bear these ideas out. You can image what Shakespeare would think about a democracy or about our current political situation.

Day 432: The Orphan Master’s Son

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Cover for The Orphan Master's SonBest Book of the Week!

I can tell before I even start that this is going to be one of those times where I have difficulty conveying just how good this novel is. It is going to sound dreary and painful, but it is a wonderful, wonderful novel.

For a long while I avoided this book, afraid that the subject matter would be too cold or too harrowing. However, it has earned so many honors that I felt I finally had to read it. It is harrowing, but it is so very human, and touching, and inspiring.

Pak Jun Do (note the purposeful echoing of our clichéd unknown man, John Doe) is the only boy with a father who was raised in an orphanage in North Korea, the orphan master’s son, or so he believes. Of course, many of the orphans actually have parents, who dropped them off because they couldn’t or wouldn’t feed them during the time of the great famine. The orphans, including Jun Do, are shamelessly put to hard labor deep in the mines, where our hero learns a skill that will come in handy, to get around in the dark.

Later, he is assigned to a kidnapping team, sneaking into Japan to abduct unwary Japanese citizens. You can see him quietly processing his opinions about this activity. From this position, he is sent to language school and ends up on a fishing vessel spying on radio transmissions from other countries and vessels, including, significantly, those of a young American woman who is rowing around the world with a partner. Jun Do begins showing himself to be observant, resourceful, and ethical in his own way.

Jun Do has had a difficult start in life in an environment that seems almost totally arbitrary, and as he experiences one event after another, he begins to develop in unexpected directions and to look at his environment with a skeptical and aware eye. After an encounter with an American ship, Jun Do and his shipmates fabricate a ridiculous lie to save themselves and their families. This lie inadvertently results in Jun Do being declared a national hero. From there his life begins a series of remarkable transformations.

I am feeling my inadequacies here, because I am not conveying at all how wrapped up I became in Jun Do’s story. It is told in many voices, including the daily loudspeaker broadcast of propaganda (which is frequently ridiculous) and the “biography” put together by a state inquisitor. Some of the events are difficult to read about, some frankly absurd, as when the Dear Leader Kim Jung Il decides to entertain some American dignitaries with synchronized fork lift demonstrations.

The novel tells a story of hope, mixed in with the grim reality and sheer ludicrousness of what seems to be a fully realized vision of North Korean existence, where people live in terror of innocently making some terrible error. The book tells this story with power, with pathos, with sly humor, and with irony.

This book is really, really great.

Day 430: The Mansion

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Cover for The MansionBest Book of the Week!

The Mansion is the compelling final novel in Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy, a series remarkable for the way Faulkner is able to focus the activity on a character, Flem Snopes, who is less and less present in each novel. Told again by multiple narrators, each unreliable in his own way (they are all male), the story’s truth is one we don’t begin to really understand until the final omniscient chapters.

This last novel concludes the events of the previous two and in many ways reinterprets them. It begins with Mink Snopes, serving 20 years for a murder he committed in The Hamlet. This event, not so important in the first book except for demonstrating the sheer cussedness of the Snopes clan, becomes the focus of the third book. The Town related how Mink paid no attention to his own murder trial, simply waiting for his powerful cousin Flem to arrive and get him out of his mess. But Flem never arrived, respectability having bitten him by then, and Mink went to jail vowing to kill Flem when he got out.

The beginning of The Mansion returns us back a few years in the events covered by The Town to when Mink is two years from freedom, having rigorously followed the advice he was given when he went in, to do everything he is told to do and not try to escape. Mink has been concentrating all this time on one thing, getting out and having his revenge.

As he is also a Snopes, Flem knows this, so he frames another cousin, Montgomery Ward Snopes, for an offense that is worse than the one Montgomery actually committed, to get him in to the penitentiary. Then Flem pays Montgomery to convince Mink that Flem is helping him escape, further humiliating Mink by getting him to make the attempt in a dress, and then turning him in during the attempt. Mink earns himself twenty more years in the pen–or Flem earns it for him.

The middle portion of the novel focuses on Linda Snopes, Eula’s daughter, who thinks Flem is her father, and her relationship with the upright Gavin Stevens. Stevens helped her escape Jefferson in The Town, and the largest portion of The Mansion covers her life before and after her return to Jefferson from a more exotic life in New York City. Despite her willingness, Stevens refuses to marry her because of the 20 years difference in their ages. She embarks on an apparently naïve and bumbling career of good works.

Finally, the novel comes back to Mink, as he unexpectedly learns he may be eligible for parole two years early, if only he can find a relative to sign for him. His wife died years ago, his children are long dispersed, but a relative does sign for him, Linda Snopes. The novel builds to a climax after his release, following Mink as he tries to get his final revenge against Linda’s father Flem and Gavin Stevens tries to prevent it.

I think the achievement this trilogy represents is astounding, written as if it were gossip told around an old country store (and later in Gavin Stevens’ law office), centering on one man but leaving that man an enigma, almost a ghost in his own life. Events are told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted, and so this “oral” history of Faulkner’s fictional county in Mississippi is created.