Tag: novella

Review 2659: Study for Obedience

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

The unnamed narrator moves to another country, one she describes as a northern country of her family’s ancestors, to live with and be housekeeper to her recently divorced brother. She has been raised, she says, to curb her natural inclinations and be obedient. Certainly, her relationship with her brother looks more and more disturbing as the book progresses. For example, a point that comes out early on, she bathes and dresses her brother, who is not an invalid. Later, we learn that he insists she watch TV with both the sound and the subtitles off.

But how trustworthy a narrator is she? Her whole existence seems colored by a twisted view of life. For example, early on, she says that when she quit her job, her coworkers were so pleased to get rid of her that they gave her a big party. Well, isn’t that a tradition for a long-serving employee?

Her attitude is entirely negative—taking everything on herself. Despite being fluent in several languages, she is unable to learn the language of her new home. Almost immediately after her arrival, her brother departs for an unexplained reason, so she finds herself cut off, unable to make herself understood, with only a three-legged dog for company. She begins to sense that she’s being blamed for a series of agricultural disasters, as if she’s a witch. Since her Jewish ancestors were forced to leave this area during the war, she reads a lot into this.

Actually, she reads a lot into everything, tortuously examining every glance, every event. The book doesn’t really have a plot; it’s more about her exhaustive examinations of everything. If it hadn’t been so short, I would have quit reading it, because as another StoryGraph reader said, I felt like I was being psychologically tortured.

There is a turn to the book, but it just becomes more perverse. I read it for my Booker Project.

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Review 2655: #NovNov25! A Pale View of the Hills

~ whatmeread ~ 23 Comments

A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, is restrained and delicate and at first seems relatively straightforward. But towards the end, ambiguity sets in, forcing the reader to think back through the events of the novel. I read it for Novellas in November.

Etsuko is a Japanese woman, a widow living in England whose eldest daughter, Keiko, has recently committed suicide. Her younger daughter, Niki, is visiting from London, and a child they see on a walk together reminds Etsuko of her life in Nagasaki just after World War II. Particularly, she is reminded of her friendship with a woman named Sachiko.

Nagasaki is recovering from the bombing. Etsuko is married to Jiro only a short time, and she is pregnant. The other women in her apartment building talk about Sachiko and say she is unfriendly. She lives with her daughter Mariko in the only house left in the area, a rundown cottage.

Etsuko meets Sachiko when she expresses worry about Sachiko’s young daughter, who seems to be left alone quite often. Sachiko talks as if her daughter is the most important thing in her life, but she doesn’t worry when she is out late, and Mariko is a very strange girl. Also, we eventually learn that Sachiko has an American lover, Frank, who keeps promising to take them to America but then abandons them and drinks up all their savings.

For her part, Etsuko behaves like a dutiful housewife and entertains Jiro’s visiting father, whom she likes very much. But in the present time we understand that she left Jiro to move to England with Niki’s father.

The plot of the novel centers on Sachiko’s choice—whether to return to live with her rich uncle and cousin, who welcome her, to live the life of a traditional widow, or to go off with Frank. The girl Mariko detests Frank, by the way, and she is also concerned about the fate of some kittens.

There is a moment late in the book that made me doubt that I fully understood what was going on, and this ambiguity is not resolved. As a narrator, Etsuko is not altogether reliable, but whether this moment is a slip of self-identification or of something more sinister, readers have to decide for themselves. Certainly, by then the story has taken on a darker tinge.

Some readers may not care for this ambiguity and others, I understand, have come up with some far-fetched theories, but along with its elegiac pure prose, it is this moment that turns the novel into one you will remember and think about.

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Review 2654: #NovNov25! Why Did I Ever

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Technically, Why Did I Ever is a little longer than the page limit for Novellas in November at 210. But I found it in a list of recommended contemporary novellas and read it for this event.

Part of me doesn’t want to present a cogent plot synopsis for this book, because it isn’t presented cogently. Instead, the novella is written in fairly unconnected snippets, some of them titled but in a way that seems to have nothing to do with the snippets.

So, maybe not a synopsis, but here are some of the things that are going on. Melanie Money (we don’t learn either name for quite some time) hates her job as a Hollywood script doctor. She lives somewhere in the Deep South but occasionally flies to California for bizarre meetings about an inane script.

She has two grown children. Mev, her daughter, is methadone-dependent and has trouble keeping a job. Paulie, her son, is in New York under protective custody before testifying against a man who held him prisoner and viciously abused him.

In her home in a small Southern town, she has two very odd friends—the Deaf Lady, an old lady who is not deaf, and Hollis, a driving instructor who seems to spend most of his time in Money’s house.

Money has a boyfriend in New Orleans named Dix who calls a lot but from whom for a while she is keeping her address secret. She doesn’t regard him as very smart, but he seems to care for her.

Aside from the states of her various relationships, in which every character seems to respond to what is said with a non sequitur, the ongoing plot is about the state of the script and whether Melanie will be fired and about Paulie’s situation.

Melanie herself obsessively covers everything in her house (literally everything, even her books) with a coat of paint or alphabetizes everything, seems to drive aimlessly around the South, and worries about her missing cat and her kids.

It’s a very disjointed account, but it’s quite funny at times, especially about the movie industry.

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Review 2653: #NovNov25! For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain

~ whatmeread ~ 18 Comments

The fourth novella I chose (via eeny meeny miney mo) for Novellas in November is about two real figures in Medieval literature, Margery Kempe and the anchoress Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich’s book Revelations of Divine Love is the first surviving book written by an English woman, and the book Kempe dictated (as she was illiterate), The Book of Margery Kempe, is the first-known autobiography in English.

The point of view alternates between Julian and Kempe. Both have experienced revelations, although at that time to do so was considered heretical. Julian experiences losses of everyone in her family and eventually decides she wants a life of contemplation. She becomes an anchoress, a woman who lives in a small room attached to a church, cemented in, the room with three windows—one to observe the church services, one to pass things back and forth with the maid, and one looking out on the street. People can talk to her but aren’t allowed to see or touch her.

Margery reacts to her revelations differently. She has had 12 children but doesn’t seem to like them or to like sex with her husband. Her point of view sounds like she has gone into permanent post-partum depression. She goes to the streets telling about Christ and sobbing loudly. She is several times examined for heresy. She disturbs church services and pilgrimages with her crying.

This book eventually leads up to an imagined meeting between the two women. It is well written and provides insight into the Medieval religious mindset and beliefs. Religion is seldom my cup of tea, though, so don’t ask me why I chose this book. I can’t remember.

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Review 2651: #NovNov25! The Buddha in the Attic

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

This is an unusual little book, which I read for Novellas in November. It is based on the experiences of Japanese women brought to California as brides in the early 20th century. It doesn’t have any detailed characters but instead treats the women as a disparate group and is written in first person plural.

The girls and women have never met their husbands. They have apparently been married by proxy and have letters from and photos of their husbands. But when their ship arrives, they don’t recognize them. Their husbands are twenty years older than their photos, and they are common laborers, not the bankers and professional men the women are expecting. The women have been brought there not to improve themselves but to provide sex and hard labor.

The novel follows the women in their many paths until World War II and the internment of almost all the West Coast Japanese residents. Somehow, despite its lack of distinct characters and plot, it builds. It makes you sympathize with the hard lives of these characters. It’s powerful.

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Review 2649: #NovNov25! Seascraper

~ whatmeread ~ 17 Comments

I’m not quite sure what to make of this novella, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize but did not make the shortlist. It’s an atmospheric, closely observed story set in the 1950s that seems as if it is from an earlier time. I read it for Novellas in November.

Thomas Flatt is carrying on the difficult work followed by his grandfather, scraping the sea bottom at low tide for shrimp. He is the only man left doing this grueling job the old-fashioned way, with a horse and wagon, and the pickings are getting slimmer. He didn’t choose this path but was made to quit school to help his grandfather before he died. He lives with his demanding mother, but he has a secret desire to perform music at a local folk club.

One evening he comes home to find a stranger with his mother, an American named Edgar Acheson. He claims to be a movie director and produces as proof a cover of a movie magazine with a photo of his younger self. He wants to make a movie using the dismal fall sea as the setting, and he wants to pay Thomas, as an expert on the beach, to help him find locations. And indeed, the beach at low tide can be treacherous. He gives Thomas a check for £100, an astonishing amount, and arranges for him to take him with his horse and wagon that night.

And that’s pretty much all I want to say about the plot except that it holds surprises. Events happen that allow Thomas to explore feelings about the father he never met and to consider a new path for himself.

This novella was moody and minutely observes the details of Thomas’s exhausting job. It is the novella’s later events that leave me not knowing what to think about it.

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