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)

Index of Books Read 2009

Books read in 2009, alphabetical by title. Use your browser search feature (usually Ctrl F) to find a specific author or title. Or you can search the whole blog from the Blogger search box at the top of the page.

A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indriðason
Beguilement by Lois McMaster-Bujold
Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner
Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
Borderlands by Brian McGilloway
Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon
Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer by Jane Brocket
Consequences by Penelope Lively
Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach
Daphne by Justine Picardie
The Dressmaker by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck
The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger
Dumbfounded by Matt Rothschild
Escape by Carolyn Jessup
Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich
Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris
First Person by Ali Smith
The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies
Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton
In Love with Jerzy Kosinski by Agate Nesaule
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
The Irish Game by Matthew Hart
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
Love Falls by Esther Freud
Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Mother on Fire by Sandra Tsing Loh
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Testimony by Anita Shreve
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Peony in Love by Lisa See
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel
The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
Shanghai Diary by Ursula Bacon
Silent in the Grave by Danna Raybourn
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
What was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
Who Do You Think You Are? by Alyse Myers
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

A Candle in Her Room by Ruth M. Arthur

This is the book I wrote about in this post. I picked it up from the library this afternoon and have just finished reading it, several hours later. That’s not as surprising as it sounds; it’s a young adult book, and I’ve read it before, perhaps 10 or 15 times before, if I’m remembering correctly.

This volume, from the Reedsburg, Wisconsin public library, was the only copy in the whole South Central Wisconsin library system, a system of 52 libraries. It’s a 1966 version published by Atheneum, and it has in the back the original library checkout card with due dates back to 1967. It’s probably identical to the version I read (over and over again) from the Haddonfield, New Jersey public library. I certainly recognize the illustrations, if not the orange cover. I don’t imagine anyone has checked it out in a long time.

My friend Anne, writing in the comments, remembers this book also, and how creepy she found it. But I have to say it isn’t nearly as creepy as I remember. It’s more sad, and poignant. Nina, age 12, newly released from a displaced persons camp, sent to live with her aunt in Wales after the death of her parents at the hands of the Nazis, has horrible nightmares that she attributes to the influence of Dido, the evil doll. But reading the story from the vantage point of the 21st century it’s easy to see that Nina is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition common among holocaust survivors and the children of survivors. It’s interesting that Ruth Arthur came up with this in the mid-1960’s.

In a lot of ways this book is very standard-issue mid-century YA fare. People conveniently inherit money exactly when they need it, and they die painlessly of mysterious wasting diseases. They even contact each other through the personal ads! But in other ways it’s a unique look at three generations of women and girls and how they confront their demons and take control of their lives. I’m really glad I rediscovered it.

(Book 1, 2010)

A Book Every 7.6 Days

2009 was a good reading year, full of surprises. I did not plan to read 10 memoirs, though I did. And I also read a few other fiction titles that were fake memoirs. Those include Daphne, The 19th Wife, and American Wife.

I read hardly any books that I hated. That's mostly because if I hate a book, I don't stick with it. Though I do occasionally; see The First Person and Olive Kitteridge for two of this year's stinkers.

I did not read 52 books, but I came fairly close, at 48. That puts me at a book every 7.6 days. I'm okay with that number, though I'd like to get back up to 52.

My list of 2009 favorites is shorter than usual. I did grade lots of books with A's this year, but very few of them really struck me as so out of the ordinary.

Lots of other bloggers are busy writing out their goals for 2010 ("Read all the Booker prize winners" for example). I am not that well organized, or even very interested in new goals. So this year's goals are the same as last year's: read as many really good books as I can, and return them all to the library on time.

In the next few days I will post my annual index to all of this year's books.

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka

This is the last book I read in 2009. It’s the story of one family’s experience at an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.

The writing in this book is spare and elegant and the structure is somewhat formal—it made me think of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, where minimalism and structure are as important the blossoms themselves.

The book has only six chapters. Each one describes one event in the life of this family. The first chapter describes the housewife preparing to evacuate from her home, under orders from the U. S. government. She packs up her family’s belongings, closes up the house, and prepares for departure to an unknown place, for an uncertain amount of time. Another chapter describes the woman and her children on the train to the internment camp. Subsequent chapters describe the camp and their experiences, with the final chapter describing their return home to Berkeley, California at the close of the war, and the return of the family’s father from imprisonment in Texas.

It’s a sad story of loneliness and despair, of shattered dreams and trust. Otsuka never gives her characters names, referring to them only as “the woman,” and “the boy.” This distances us from the characters, yet at the same time Otsuka excels at providing tiny intimate clues about these characters’ personalities and needs. Her simple approach belies a complex, multilayered story. I wish I could remember who recommended this to me so I could tell them how much I loved it.

This book led to an interesting conversation at a party with people who had grandparents among the German-speaking communities of southern Indiana and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Why were the German Americans not interned during the war? The blunt answer is that they didn’t look different from other European Americans, the way the Japanese Americans did; that the internment of the Japanese people was simple racism as much as fear of spies. Though one friend does remember his grandmother telling him about strong anti-German sentiment, and the abrupt closing of German-language schools in Indiana. The internment of Japanese American citizens after the invasion of Pearl Harbor is a dark spot in U.S. history. Wikipedia has a good article about it, if you need a review.

(Book 48, 2009)

The First Person by Ali Smith

I hate experimental fiction. Yet every now and then I feel the need to try some, just to see if I still hate it—it’s kind of like tasting anchovies every few years, even though you know you really think they are too salty and too fishy. I saw The First Person in the library and I thought “why not?” I haven’t tried any Ali Smith in a long time. It was kind of like the library was the hostess, and she was offering me a bite of anchovy crostini. Because this was a collection of short stories it seemed easier than attempting a whole novel. A bite instead of a whole dish, as it were. An experimental appetizer.

I liked the first bite and the first story. That’s because in retrospect, it’s the only story that makes any sense in the whole book. It’s the only one with a plot, and with characters who have any life. Interestingly, it’s a short story about short stories, and it opens with a conversation between two men discussing which is superior, the novel or the short story. It ends with a wonderful series of observations about the short story by authors like Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Alice Munro, all masters of the form. And finally Smith brings her own, equally wonderful observation:

So when is the short story like a nymph?
When the echo of it answers back.

There, I’ve just given away the best line in the whole book. I try not to do that but in this case I couldn’t help it. The rest of the stories are just pointlessly meandering concoctions about nothing, as far as I could tell. Towards the end (I really did finish this book) I couldn’t even tell if I was asleep or awake when I was reading it. Since I’m quoting, I’m going to give you this bit from Fatema Ahmed’s review of The First Person in The Guardian:

Smith's characters lack names, jobs or even personalities, but they do have time for repetitive stretches of dialogue about making tea. After a while they - and their relationships - blur into one another. Most frustratingly, though, they are constantly remarking on their keenness for narrative while failing to provide enough of it.

It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who didn’t like the crostini.

(Book 47, 2009)

Children's Book Evil Doll

When I was around 12 years old I read a book that haunted me for years; indeed thinking of it right now still gives me shivers. It was a book about a malevolent doll that brought danger and destruction to each of several girls who owned her. This book put me off dolls for good, if I hadn’t already abandoned them, yet I know I reread it several times, and really loved it. I remember that it was complex, and beautifully written, in addition to being really scary. Sometimes (even now) this book pops into my head, and I give my head a little shake to dislodge the creepy feeling from my brain.

This morning something reminded me of the book while I was sitting at my computer, so I typed these four words into Google: “children’s book evil doll.” It took only a few hits to discover that the book is A Candle in her Room, by Ruth Arthur. It was seeing a reference to the doll’s name, Dido, that made me remember for certain.

A Candle in her Room was published in Britain in 1966 then again in the U.S. in 1972, but has been out of print for years. Several of the Google hits were links to Amazon and Goodreads and I looked at them to see if anyone had posted reviews of it. Amazon has 17 reviews and the thing that most strikes me is how many people talk about what a lasting impression the book made on them. Here are some quotes:

It's a fascinating read for a kid, full of drama and magic and scares…I'm an adult and I still remember the book.

I first read this book nearly 30 years ago and can still remember it vividly.

Never, before or since, have I read a book which affected me the way this one did. I remember it in almost uncanny detail.

I memorised the first and final lines of the book and can you believe - I still know them.

And here’s one more from Goodreads: “I never looked at dolls the same way again.”

I see that Ruth Arthur wrote several other books for young women and several of them sound familiar, especially Requiem for a Princess, but I can’t really say for certain whether I read them or not. Certainly none had the impact on me that A Candle in her Room did. Alibris and Abebooks offer used copies in the neighborhood of $45, and my library system has one copy, which I’ve requested. What a wonderful writer Ruth Arthur must have been, to create a book about which so many people formed such strong memories.

Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki

I followed up a book about Pakistan with one about India—more specifically, a multigenerational story about an Indian family in both India and in Britain. It’s one of those sprawling family sagas that are often labeled “women’s fiction” but with a South Asian flavor. I really enjoyed it. Farooki’s writing isn’t the most polished but she makes up for it in humor and realism.

Bitter Sweets follows a mother, Henna, and her daughter Shona, and their husbands, siblings, friends, lovers, and children. Henna’s story begins with a lie perpetrated by her father, who arranges Henna’s marriage to the son of a wealthy Calcutta family by passing Henna off as an educated, English-speaking 19-year-old when really she is an illiterate 15-year-old with nothing but good looks and moxie to recommend her. Lies lead to more lies and it all gets a little soap opera-ish, but in a good way. Shona, living in London many years later with her Pakistani husband and twin sons finally manages to end the cycle of lies, but the gods have other plans, and a surprise ending stirs everything up again. This book would make a good fun movie. It’s got love, betrayal, affairs, secret identities, humor, good food, and beautiful women in saris.

I see from Amazon.co.uk that Roopa Farooki has published several books in the U.K. that have not been released in the U.S. It does look like the U.S. Amazon site has a few of them, though my library only seems to have one other title besides this one. I am looking forward to reading more of Farooki's books; they take some of my favorite elements of domestic fiction (relationships, food) and move them to a more exotic setting.

(Book 46, 2009)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

I heard Daniyal Mueenuddin interviewed on NPR recently and that made me check out this book. I see now that it’s getting a lot of press, which it deserves. The book is a series of connected short stories centered around one powerful family in Punjab: their patriarch, his employees, and their families. Some characters pop up in multiple stories while others do not. I like this kind of device. The common threads unify the whole package, while the shifting protagonists provide variety. (Observant blog readers will notice I contradict myself; I complained about this very device in this post a few weeks ago. But while the characters in Olive Kitteridge were underdeveloped and interchangeable, Mueenuddin's characters are sharply drawn and memorable.)

I’ve read a lot of books about India but never one about Pakistan. I was struck by the similarities in the two cultures. For some reason I had thought of Pakistan as being very different from India. But a lot of the themes of this book (class inequities, gender and family relationships, remnants of colonialism) are present in much of the Indian literature that I’ve read. And everyone was eating the same food!

Another theme that runs through the book is the corruption of Pakistani society. Several stories deal with rigged elections, biased judges, sweetheart deals, and cronyism. Mueenuddin manages to frame these issues around convincing, sympathetic characters (who exist on either side of the line), leading us like a tour guide through the gray areas of Pakistani business and society. Along the same lines, women don’t fare particularly well. Many of his female characters use their sexuality skillfully, though often not to their own best interests in the end. But you get the feeling they don’t have a lot of choices.

(Book 45, 2009)

Why Procrastinate Now When You Can Just Do It Later?

In January 2008 we bought a new refrigerator. We replaced our 1992 white side-by-side fridge with an energy-efficient stainless steel freezer-on-the-bottom model. The old fridge (in addition to unpredictably leaking water onto the floor) functioned as a family bulletin board where we hung important papers, photos, relevant Zits cartoons, etc. from magnets. The morning that the new refrigerator was being delivered (and the old fridge taken away) I hastily removed all these things and shoved them, along with all the magnets, into a brown paper bag. I would hang them all back up once the new fridge was installed. But whoa, who knew? It turns out you can’t stick a magnet to stainless steel fridge doors. So I put the paper bag in a corner of my laundry room to “sort out later.” Guess what I did yesterday? Yes, after almost exactly two years, I finally got around to sorting the contents of that bag. Want some expired pizza coupons from the now-closed Gumby’s on University Avenue? How about the signed permission slip for the 8th grade field trip (I wonder what happened with THAT?)

I relay this embarrassing story only to illustrate my innate tendency to procrastinate. Hence you won’t be surprised to hear that I have four blog posts to write about the last four books of 2009 and another to write about the first book of 2010. Then I really ought to do some kind of end-of-year wrap-up post, but that idea too just makes me yawn.

If you’re lucky, none of this will take me two years.