In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

Until recently I believed that literary genres were fairly static. We had literary fiction, popular fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, mysteries. Now I feel like I discover new genres all the time. Maybe these new genres are really sub-genres of these larger groups, but who cares? It’s fun. A few weeks ago I wrote about tartan noir. Today I’m writing about slipstream, fiction with a fantastical edge to it, not really fantasy, but not realistic fiction either. I love it.

The stories in this book are uneven in how closely they walk the boundary between fantasy and reality. They are also uneven in quality. The title story In the Forest of Forgetting is just brilliant. It’s a vivid mixture of traditional fairy tale (an innocent maiden wanders alone into a forest and encounters a witch) and reality (the forest is illness; the witch is a surgeon; the walk through the forest is a journey towards death from breast cancer). I also loved Sleeping with Bears, which is available on this website. You can read a few other stories on Goss’s own website, here. Some of them appear in the volume I just read, and others stand alone.

I want to read more books like this one but have trouble finding them. Suggestions?

(Book 11, 2011)

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

What a refreshing change this book is from the contemporary fiction I’ve been reading recently. Instead of a book about self-absorbed whiny people where hardly anything happens (Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris; Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger), this book is a sprawling saga of World War II in Hungary, with a cast of thousands, a huge variety of locations, war, deprivation, joy, anxiety, relief, love, hate, birth, death, and not a shred of self-pity. I loved it!

I didn’t know much about Hungary in the war and a lot of the information was new to me, and I suspect it will be new to most readers. It’s the story of Andras Levi, a Hungarian architecture student, and it begins in the late 1930’s as he moves to Paris to take up a scholarship place at architecture school. It follows Andras, his brothers, his parents, his eventual wife, her family, and their children throughout the war, from Paris, back to Budapest, through stints in the Hungarian Labor Service, throughout the siege of Budapest, to the aftermath of the war.

This book is in the tradition of the great war novels that are also great family sagas: I’m thinking now of Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, and also of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. Like Wouk and Mitchell, Orringer skillfully integrates fact and fiction, including both real and fictional characters. Meticulously researched, it’s as much about epic battles as it is about how people hang on to their humanity during the most trying situations imaginable. Also like those three books I mention, The Invisible Bridge is not high literary art; it’s got its share of purple prose and overwrought descriptions. Yet I think it too will endure as a classic.

My sincere apologies to loyal blog readers for such infrequent posts: The Invisible Bridge is long (over 700 pages), and I read it during an especially busy time at work and at home. In this post I complained that the Kindle version provided no maps, but I was mistaken. I discovered the map after I was done reading; had I better understood the workings of the Kindle I would have found it earlier. It even shows the location of Carpathian Ruthenia (which, it turns out, is in Ukraine).

(Book 10, 2011)

Please Turn Off All Electronic Devices

The Amazon Kindle is an electronic device. Thus, the familiar airline directive to "turn off and stow" left me with NOTHING TO READ during takeoff and landing, and worst of all, nothing to read during the entire flight from Madison to Milwaukee, which is of too short duration to allow for the use of any devices at all (let alone handouts of free soda and peanuts).

Well that was on the way to Philadelphia last week. This week, for the return trip, I had the foresight to buy a magazine (Vanity Fair) and got to read all about Stuxnet. The book I am (intermittently) reading on the Kindle is The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, which started off slowly but is picking up steam. I remain ambivalent about reading on the Kindle. While it was convenient not to lug around a 600-page hardback, I still miss holding the book, turning the pages, and looking at the cover. And long time blog readers may remember that I really like it when a book has maps. I don't know whether the print version of The Invisible Bridge has maps, but the Kindle version sure doesn't, so I was left wondering where, exactly, was Carpathian Ruthenia.