Tag: multigenerational

Day 166: We, The Drowned

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Cover for We, The DrownedBest Book of the Week!

We, The Drowned is an unusual novel by Danish writer Carsten Jensen that has become an international best seller. It relates the history of the author’s home town, the port of Marstal, Denmark, from 1848 to 1945. Although it picks principal characters to follow during these times, large portions of the novel are written in the first person plural, as though the entire town is the Greek chorus in a play. The novel follows the fate of the town as it rises to become a major shipping port to its near demise just before and during World War II.

The narrative style of the novel feels like a series of seafaring tales. Ships sink, sailors are never seen again, but the townsmen of Marstal continue to be lured out to sea. We follow them as the Danes go to war with Germany in the mid-19th century and the men of Marstal wonder why they are fighting men they traded with the week before. In this conflict, Laurids Madsen is shot upward from an exploding ship and lands again on his feet, unharmed, creating a legend about his boots.

Years later, his son Albert travels the South Pacific looking for his father, who went to sea when Albert was four and never returned. He finds him with a second family in Samoa.

As an old man retired from a prosperous career as a sea captain, Albert befriends a young boy, Knut Erik Friis, whose widowed young mother does everything she can to keep her son from going to sea. When she gains some economic power in the community, she undercuts the town’s shipping industry in an attempt to keep all the young men home.

These stories and many more, ending with Knut Erik’s experiences during World War II, tell the rich tales of the lives in this seafaring town. Although I was initially a little put off by the narrative style, I found myself barely able to put down this book.

Day 164: The Bone Garden

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Cover for The Bone GardenThe Bone Garden is one of Tess Gerritsen’s Risoli and Isles series, but Isles only appears briefly, so it is more of a stand-alone mystery.

The novel takes place in two time periods. In the present day Julia Hamill has just purchased a 130-year-old house when she discovers an old skull in the overgrown garden. Medical examiner Maura Isles determines that the victim, a woman, was murdered long ago. Julia becomes fascinated with a box of newspaper clippings and letters that hold the key to the mystery.

In 1830’s Boston, Norris Marshall has joined the “resurrectionists,” grave robbers, in an effort to pay for his medical education. After a nurse and a doctor are murdered on the university hospital grounds, Norris finds he is a suspect. He seeks help from another student, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I have only read a few Risoli and Isles books. I thought this one was passable, but I didn’t like it as well as others I have read. The attempt at 1830’s dialogue is awkward and painful to read, and in this case I didn’t see any reason to use a real historical person in the novel when a fictional one would have done just as well.

Day 96: The Forgotten Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 91: Mortal Love

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Cover for Mortal LoveMortal Love is Elizabeth Hand’s extremely unusual and strange novel about artistic inspiration and its relationship to obsession. It is narrated in two parallel stories, one taking place in the present and the other in the Victorian age.

In the story from the past, an American painter named Radborne Comstock meets Evienne Upstone, a model who has inspired the work of members of the Pre-Raphaelites and who has supposedly driven one painter insane. He finds this woman irresistable but she may be insane herself. Evienne has a close associate, a maid, who has blue fingers. Comstock experiences weird hallucinations when he is near Evienne, but is not sure whether they are hallucinations or he is going insane.

In the present time Daniel Rowlands, an American writer visiting in London, meets Larkin Meade, who seems to be the same woman as Evienne Upstone. She becomes his lover and leaves him physically and emotionally deranged.

In the meantime, a young man, Comstock’s grandson, who has been raised by a man with blue fingers and has fought insanity all his life, has become obsessed with his grandfather’s paintings of Evienne and decides to visit London.

This book is a wild, fantastic tale linking Celtic folklore, the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, and ancient mythologies. It is at times bewildering but also makes compelling reading.