The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This was better than I expected, given its ubercute title, odd narrative structure, and overhyped back story. Did you know that the Channel Islands (located between France and England) were occupied by the Germans during World War II? I did not, before reading this book. Guernsey, along with Jersey, the largest channel island, and several other smaller islands, were occupied from 1940 to 1945. The citizens (the islands are British Crown Dependencies) suffered greatly under the occupation; many were deported to slave labor camps on the European continent, and shortages of food and medicine led to near starvation by the end of the war, and death by disease for many people.

This book is clearly well researched and tells the stories of a disparate group of islanders and how they coped with the occupation. The story is fiction but undoubtedly is based on fact. In the book a group of islanders forms a literary society as a way to conquer the intense boredom and frustration brought on by lack of contact with the outside world, but which also functions as a cover for resistance activities.

Here’s what I didn’t like: the literary gimmick of telling the whole story through letters between Juliet, a London-based writer and the various members of the literary society. Juliet is silly and a lot of time is wasted while we read about her social life. The islanders vary in their story-telling ability. Some are men of simple words, but others are loquacious nut jobs. Juliet does mature as the story evolves, and the plot advances, but I kept feeling like I just wanted someone to tell me what happened rather than forcing me to fool around with all these letters. But I am notoriously intolerant of alternate forms of story telling, so maybe this approach won’t bother you as much as it did me.

(Book 6, 2010)

Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box by Madeleine Albright

Not being a terribly close follower of diplomatic maneuvers, I was unaware of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous use of pins to telegraph her thoughts and intentions to world leaders and the press. But lots of other people were aware of it, and now Albright has written a book about it, to accompany an exhibit of her pins organized by the Museum of Art and Design in New York. It’s a good book to curl up with on an afternoon. It only takes about an hour to read through the text and look at the abundance of photographs of her pins, some quite valuable, but most costume jewelry, the kind we can all find in department stores and at thrift shops and garage sales.

Some examples of Ms. Albright’s pin-based messages include wearing turtle pins to signify that negotiations were progressing too slowly, and a famous incident where she wore a snake pin to confront Saddam Hussein. These events and others are related in breezy prose; Albright knows we are probably not reading this book to find out any deep secrets of international affairs. Instead we are treated to a mostly chronological account of the origins and history of her love affair with pins, including a story about wearing her future husband’s fraternity pin in college. I was charmed by Albright’s (brief) stories from her youth and her days as a young mother. I think I had just assumed that she sprang, like Athena, fully grown and ready for battle, from the forehead of Zeus.

(Book 5, 2010)

The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther

Someone recommended this to me as a good follow-up to Bitter Sweets, which I read a few weeks ago. It’s another immigrant story; Maryam moves from Iran to London as a young woman, marries an Englishman, and has a child. Eventually she feels an overwhelming urge to return to Iran to rediscover her girlhood and to reconnect with people she has lost.

Bitter Sweets was much more light-hearted than The Saffron Kitchen, which I thought was a bit overdone. Maryam is a drama queen, and takes herself very seriously. She is all scarves and jewelry and perfume and temper tantrums—I don’t usually like this kind of woman in real life, and I didn’t take to her in a book, either. At times the action is hard to follow. It shifts back and forth between third and first person, depending on who is narrating: Maryam, or her much more grounded daughter Sara. The story also shifts between the past and the present, and between London and Iran. It felt very choppy to me, like Crowther was too lazy to impose some kind of organizational structure on her work, and just wrote passages as they occurred to her.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of aspects of this book that I liked, including Maryam’s family dynamics, her interesting relationship with Fatima, a kind of nanny/housekeeper/mother figure, and an easy-to-grasp overview of Iranian politics in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Also the descriptions of the houses and the food, which everyone knows is why I really read these kinds of book.

(Book 4, 2010)

More About Brooklyn

Recently I find myself revisiting and rethinking some of my blog posts. Here's something I want to add to what I said earlier about Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. I liked a lot of things about this book, but the most interesting was Toibin's depiction of early 1950's Brooklyn. He obviously did a lot of research, and I enjoyed reading about Eilis's life in a boarding house, and her job at a Brooklyn department store.

My complaints about this book had more to do with it not living up to the hype, rather than anything to do with the story itself. The book is not boring, and is definitely worth reading, especially if you like stories about Irish village life, and New York in the 1950's.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

I find the accolades accorded to this book mystifying. A few weeks ago Toibin won the Costa Novel of the Year Award for it; the Costa is a prestigious British literary prize given to authors from the U.K. and Ireland. He was favored to win the bigger prize, the Costa Book of the Year, but lost to poet Christopher Reid. (This happened yesterday! Aren’t I current?)

I keep hearing about how subtle this book is—“modest” (Washington Post), and “understated” (Los Angeles Times). How about bland? Ordinary? Unremarkable? Those would be my words.

In the book, Eilis, a young woman, leaves her mother and sister in Ireland and moves to Brooklyn at the behest of a priest who has promised to find her work and a place to live. She does not particularly want to go, but is too passive to resist all the well meaning efforts of friends and family who see the move as an exit from the poverty and backwardness of a 1950’s Irish village. In New York, Eilis thrives despite her trepidation, though her motivation stems more from a continued desire to please Father Flood and her family than to really succeed. She gets an education and a boyfriend and some stylish new clothes. But the sudden death of Eilis’s sister Rose calls her back to Ireland and while there, Eilis must decide once and for all where she truly belongs. Or, maybe, as per usual, someone will decide for her.

Eilis is a sap and her boyfriend Tony is a bully. Everyone else is from Central Casting. If this book were written by a woman, it would have had a pink cover and been shelved with the romance novels. It’s not even as good as the best of Maeve Binchy’s offerings—I like Maeve Binchy, but in 30 years of writing she’s never won a major literary award like the Costa.

(Book 3, 2010)

Oh Cool....

Someone has finally noticed that I never write about zombies.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

This is a big book. A Big Book. A book about Art and its role in our everyday lives. What better way to frame this discussion than to create some characters who are living inside a work of art—a glass house designed by a visionary architect.

Liesel and Viktor Landauer are newlyweds from wealthy, prominent families in Czechoslovakia in the 1920’s. Both are interested in all things modern: technology, architecture, and especially the well being of their infant country, which has recently been created out of the detritus of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And to symbolize all that is forward-looking, they commission a house like no other. The Landauers hire German architect Reiner von Abt to build them a house on a hillside outside of their city. What von Abt builds is an icon of modern architecture: sleek, spare, elemental, built entirely of steel, glass and concrete, subdivided inside by an onyx wall that changes color in the sunlight.

Of course with hindsight we know what must happen. Luckily, Viktor is also alert, and manages to move his business and his family to Switzerland in the late 1930’s and eventually to the United States. The Glass House survives also. It is confiscated by the Germans and used as a laboratory for Nazi science experiments. At the end of the war it becomes the property of the Russians, and eventually of the local Czechoslovak government who allow it to slide into gentle disrepair.

Mawer follows all these transitions closely, using the house as a metaphor for contemporary attitudes toward art. We also get to know the inhabitants well, especially the Landauers. At times the story swings into overdrive with plenty of sex, infidelity, angst, and atrocities, but these provide a welcome distraction from so much talk about light, volume, and reflection.

I really liked this book (and not just because it was sent to me for free by the author’s U.S. publicist). It took me a while to read because it’s long and serious, though never boring. In the book’s forward Mawer tells us that while the house really exists, the story is complete fiction, I wished I had followed up this information when I first began reading, rather than waiting until I was done, because it’s true. The house is called the Villa Tugendhat. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe who is considered one of the fathers of the international style. So important is this house to the history of modern design that it was recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. There are lots and lots of photographs of it on the Web, and it’s open for tours, if you want to go to Brno, in the Czech Republic, which now I do.

(Book 2, 2010)