Sima’s Undergarments for Women by Ilana Stanger-Ross

This book (as you would expect) is the story of Sima, a 60-ish woman who owns a lingerie shop in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Her shop is a gathering place for neighborhood women who are making transitions, because, if you think about it, female transitions are often accompanied by the need for new underwear: adolescence, a wedding, pregnancy, divorce, weight gain or loss. Sima is herself in transition to retirement and she is knocked off her stride by the entrance of another transitional figure, a young Israeli woman Timna, who takes a job in the shop. The relationship between Sima and Timna is really complex and painful. Sima has never come to terms with her failure to have children, and the confusingly maternal urges that Timna stirs up in Sima bring on a personal crisis for Sima. Timna, meanwhile, has no desire to be mothered by Sima, yet she clearly forms an attachment to Sima, despite her efforts not to.

Ilana Stanger-Ross is a good, careful writer and everything in the story (neighborhood, relationships, character development) is well done, but I still had a hard time enjoying it. Both Sima and Timna are difficult to like, for different reasons, and I often grew impatient with Sima, especially. The claustrophobic atmosphere of Sima’s basement shop (where everyone knows everyone else’s business and feels free to comment on it) gave me the heebie jeebies. I prefer to buy my underwear in the anonymity of a department store and now I know why.

(Book 44, 2010)

National Book Award Fail

Add Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann to my ever-growing list of award-winning books that I hated (and in most cases Did Not Finish). This dreary novel joins recent winners of other coveted awards such as Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009 Pulitzer Prize) and The Great Man by Kate Christenson (PEN/Faulkner 2008, a DNF, so unblogged) in my collection of “they weren’t talking to me when they picked these” books.

In the same vein, I took great delight in reading B. R. Myers' trashing of the latest Jonathan Franzen book Freedom in October's Atlantic Monthly. Hooray, finally someone agrees with me that Franzen is a lazy writer who tries to pass off bad prose and boring characters under a wrapper of "social relevance." The Corrections (National Book Award 2001) was one of the worst books I have ever read and is at the very top of my aforementioned list of dreadful prize-winners. Myers is the author of A Reader's Manifesto, a book I've been meaning to read for a really long time, ever since I read the excerpt from it that was published in the Atlantic back in 2001. That essay caused a huge kerfuffle among fans of literary fiction, but I loved it.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

This was a good, sprawling read, something for a rainy weekend or a cottage vacation. It’s long and has lots of characters; also fairy tales, abandoned children, long sea voyages, literary puzzles, locked gardens, evil stepmothers, and mysterious inheritances. I really liked it, except for a few small complaints which I will get to in a minute.

Nell and her sisters have a happy childhood in early 20th century Australia. Only as an adult does she discover that her parents are not really her parents: she was discovered by the harbormaster at age 4, abandoned on a ship full of immigrants from England, and adopted by the harbormaster and his wife. Nell’s quest to discover her real identity (and the reason why she arrived in Australia alone) form the central theme of the book.

The author could have told Nell’s story, and the story of her quest linearly, but instead she opted for a much more complicated approach, and brings in two other central characters: the woman who may or may not be Nell’s mother (named Eliza), and Nell’s granddaughter Cassandra, who continues Nell’s quest after Nell’s death. Thus we really have three stories going on at three different points in time: early 20th century, the 1970’s and the 2000’s. On her web site, Kate Morton says that she “was plaiting the strands of Eliza, Nell and Cassandra's stories, so that each woman's journey could play its part in the solution of the book's mystery.” While I like her image of the three strands of a braid, what Morton sometimes ends up with is a big tangle where it’s hard to remember which woman is uncovering which secret. In the end I wasn’t sure whether Cassandra figured out the whole story or not, and this was a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I certainly had the whole story, which I guess is all that matters.

(Book 43, 2010)

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

This was such a disappointing book. It sounded really good when I read about it. I was envisioning some kind of travel guide like the Lonely Planet series, with photos and little blurbs about food (roasted swan), lodging (in a monastery), and attractions (London Bridge). Doesn't that sounds like a fun idea? Kind of like the fake travel guides published by JetLag, about made-up places like Molvania (A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry), only about the past instead of about an imaginary place. But no, alas, this was just a weird mix of dry scholarly facts and figures presented in the dullest of formats, prose chapters studded with occasional headings. Mortimer does try to sprinkle in some first-hand accounts to liven things up a bit, but he relies so heavily on Chaucer that it starts to feel like a Cliff Notes version of The Canterbury Tales.

The thing that annoyed me most of all about this book, though, was its assumption that the time traveller who was using this book was male. Written mostly in the second person, the book directed all its information to a "you" who was obviously a man. For example, "you" would wear a certain kind of cloak, but a woman would wear a different kind, the book explained. If "you" were traveling by horse, you might expect certain things to happen at an inn, but a woman wouldn't really be traveling by horse, the book points out. What's with that? Yes, I do understand that women's lives were lived more in the background during medieval times, but since the whole book is a fake construct anyway, why adopt this odd voice? No one, male or female, is really going to use the book  because you can't time travel (duh!) so why not just talk to everyone the same way and handle gender-related exceptions as they crop up? Real travel guides have no trouble discussing options that are available to only one gender (such as segregated bath houses, for example), without resorting to treating half the possible readers as afterthoughts.

(Book 42, 2010)

The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

I usually avoid coming-of-age stories. I had my own coming-of-age and as a mother I’ve been intimately involved in the comings-of-age of other people too. Enough is enough, thank you very much. The only reason I read this book was because I thought it was a story of married life in New York city – the familiar domestic fiction landscape that I like to inhabit. The blurb on the back certainly makes you think that! But it’s a bait and switch. After a few chapters of the courtship and early married life of Roz (Jewish, from Brooklyn) and Edwin (upstanding Nebraskan) we quickly abandon them and focus on their daughter Miranda. I missed Roz and Edwin! Edwin, especially, gets the short shrift, after he and Roz divorce and he’s banished back to the wilds of Omaha.

But by then I was invested enough in Miranda to stay with her, from her days at summer camp all the way through her first year of college. She’s a good little proto-feminist and I enjoyed her story. It was set in the 1980’s which was after my own adolescence but before that of my children, so it offered a different view. Dare we ask if Miranda’s story has anything in common with that of her creator, Thisbe Nissen, born in 1972? Oh who cares. It’s still entertaining and well written, so it makes for a good read.

This book came from a stack that I grabbed from the free book exchange located in the pool house of my mother-in-law’s condominium complex in West Orange, New Jersey. It’s amazing what you can find there! Future blog posts will feature some of my other discoveries.

(Book 41, 2010)