Miss Timmins' School for Girls by Nayana Currimbhoy

This book mixes the new with the old in a strange brew that is satisfying and delicious. Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, in Panchgani, India, is one of the last outposts of the British empire. In the mid-1970’s when this book is set, the school is hanging on by a thread, run by a handful of elderly English and Scottish missionaries who operate the place as if Queen Victoria is still on the throne and regard it their duty to educate affluent Indian girls in the ways of tea and Shakespeare. Every outmoded cliché of British boarding school life is passionately embraced at Miss Timmins’ down to random inspections of the girls’ clothing to make sure they are wearing the requisite elasticized cotton knickers instead of the dreaded bikini underpants. In this little closed ecosystem enter two young teachers, Miss Apte (Charu) and Miss Prince (Pin), who stir things up with their explorations of all things 70’s (you know, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll). The contrast between the hidebound traditions of Miss Timmins and the hashish and illicit love affairs that Charu and Pin indulge in makes for a jarring exploration of a changing society.

Both Charu (who is Indian) and Pin (English) have backstories which Currimbhoy explores in depth. And fairly soon these young women are involved in a tragedy that resonates through the school and eventually through the entire village of Panchgani and through the teachers’ and students’ extended families, with consequences that last for many years. Thus this book is also part coming-of-age novel and part thriller, with a side dish of culture clash to spice things up.

This was YET ANOTHER random library find for me. Currimbhoy worked as a journalist for years but this is her first published fiction. It’s as good as anything written by the more well known Indian writers who have emerged in recent years to explore postcolonial contradictions and Indian identity.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

This book’s title refers to a real person, though the book is fiction. In 1992 Vedran Smailovic, a member of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, played his cello in a bombed-out town square in Sarajevo for 22 days in honor of 22 people who were killed in a mortar attack during the Bosnian war. In choosing this method to call attention to the random horrors of war, Smailovic put himself in daily peril from sniper fire, though he was never hurt. He eventually escaped from Sarajevo and lives now in exile in Northern Ireland.

Galloway has taken this event and used it as the inspiration for his book, though the novel is more about the characters who react to and are inspired by the cellist rather than about the cellist himself, who remains unnamed in the novel. Instead Galloway focuses on a handful of characters who are managing to survive the siege of Sarajevo and the various strategies they have developed to cope, both physically and emotionally. It’s a moving story, though some characters’ stories are more compelling than others. I especially connected with the female sniper known only as Arrow, whom Galloway portrays as bad-ass and vulnerable at the same time.

There are BIG books about war, and little books about war, and this is a little book. Is there a BIG book about the Bosnian war? Maybe it hasn’t been written yet because I couldn’t find one. An Amazon search for “bosnia or yugoslavia war fiction” yielded only 17 hits, while a search for “Iraq war fiction” yielded 410. Last year Angelina Jolie made a movie set during the conflict (In the Land of Blood and Honey) which got mixed reviews and which I haven’t seen. Ratko Mladic is currently on trial in the Hague for the massacre of over 7,000 Bosnian men and boys in 1995. You would think novelists would be paying closer attention to all this.

(Book 16, 2012)

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

Another name for this book could be The Mists of Avalon for Jews, with Shira, the Witch of Moab, standing in for Morgaine, and Eleazar ben Ya’ir as Uther Pendragon. Not really, it’s not an exact matchup, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Miriam Zimmer Bradley’s book (about the Arthurian legend) as I read this retelling of the Masada story from the points of view of several women, some of whom have more than a passing familiarity with witchcraft and all of whom endure great sorrow and hardship, only to end up on the wrong end of a Roman battering ram.

Like The Mists of Avalon, The Dovekeepers could have been about 25% shorter. I thought it featured a bit too much symbolism (Yael’s red hair, the flame tree, the lion’s mane, I get it) and it was a bit repetitive. But it’s also a story of great beauty, lyrically written and very moving, and you can skim over the annoying parts without losing anything.

Does everyone know the story of Masada, the mountain fortress where 900 Jewish zealots held out for three years against a Roman legion determined to conquer them? When faced with certain defeat the men, women, and children committed suicide rather than submit to Roman domination. The Dovekeepers is the story of four women who work together in the dovecote during the years of the siege, and whose fathers, brothers, and lovers are among the men who defend the fortress. The story features as much in the way of bloody childbirth as it does bloody battles, and while it’s clear that Hoffman did a huge amount of research, the exact details of the military operation take a backseat to the shifting relationships among the women. Though now that I think of it, we do get the obligatory “girl disguised as a boy warrior” subplot, something that is almost de rigueur in contemporary epic fiction.

My book club members liked this book more than I did, though I came away from the meeting with some newfound appreciation for the structure and the writing. Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer of popular novels that feature elements of magical realism. The Dovekeepers is far more ambitious than anything else of hers I’ve come across and it works well despite my few quibbles.

(Book 15, 2012)

Arbitrarily Timed Check-in #3

Game of Thrones 

I am still totally hooked on this. I just love seeing how beloved characters (or for that matter, hated characters) are translated from the book to the screen. I almost don’t need to watch the action since I already know what is going to happen. In the HBO adaptation some characters completely meet my expectations and look just as I had imagined them, such as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime Lannister, and Maisie Williams as Arya Stark. Most of the others come fairly close to what I hoped for, though Sunday night we met Ygritte who is much more light-hearted (and also cleaner) than the angry earthy girl that Jon Snow falls for in my imagination. But of course I will give her a chance.

Currently Reading or Not Yet Blogged 

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman. Done, blog post coming tomorrow or the next day.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. Done, post also coming soon.

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls by Nayana Currimbhoy. A surprise find on the library shelf. Really really good.

Eagerly Anticipating 

The Passage by Justin Cronin. Two friends recommended this to me independently, in the context of an e-mail conversation about guilty pleasure reading (more on which later). Vampires, but well written, they say. We shall see.

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Hooray, my boyfriend Thomas Cromwell returns in the sequel to 2009’s Wolf Hall.

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd. This was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Boyd writes just the kinds of books I have been in the mood for lately and this one is set in London and Vienna during World War I, which is a bonus, as my Downton Abbey-inspired WWI phase persists. I have also been most generously provided with a free review copy of the book, so I had better get moving, preferably before I begin either of the books mentioned above.

Guilty Pleasure Reading 

I polled a group of avid reader friends about whether or not they have a weakness for certain plot devices or themes and will overlook bad writing (or at least relax their standards) when partaking of said theme. If you want to weigh in on this, leave a comment or send me a message. Can you just not resist a book about art theft, for example? Let me know.

The London Train by Tessa Hadley

Some books are greater than the sum of their parts; The London Train is one of these. The novel is really two novellas about two different characters (Paul and Cora) who at first appear to be unconnected to one another. But of course that’s not the case and we see eventually how their stories wrap around each other’s. Both Paul and Cora are approaching middle age, have recently lost their mothers, and have unresolved baggage with their spouses, ex-spouses, children, friends. Both are adrift, rethinking their roles, trying out new identities. And their stories eventually intersect in a way that seems surprisingly inevitable.

Yes, it sounds like all the late 20th/early 21st century British novels that I like to read, but so what? Hadley and her contemporaries (Joanna Trollope, Penelope Lively) write closely observed stories about people’s interior lives where not much happens in the way action* but where much is to be learned about the way people think and feel. Hadley approaches her characters with a cool matter-of-factness (is that a word?). She does not judge them but sets them up for your judgment, nevertheless.

I read the paperback version of The London Train, published by Harper Perennial, which contains an interesting essay by Hadley about her early days as a writer and another one about the process of writing The London Train. These were a bonus.

*see my earlier bloggish ramblings about runaway trains.

(Book 14, 2012)

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Where has Amitav Ghosh been all my life? To my chagrin, I discover that he’s been writing since the early 1990’s, garnering praise, winning literary prizes, all right under my nose but heretofore undetected by me. I hate when that happens. But lucky for me other people are paying attention. My aunt Elaine gave me Ghosh’s 2000 book The Glass Palace when I was visiting her a few weeks ago and I loved it.

The Glass Palace is the story of Rajkumar, an Indian man whose life spans a turbulent time in India and Burma, from the fall of the last Burmese king Thibaw in Mandalay, through the height of British colonialism and then World War II and Indian independence, up through the end of the 20th century. Rajkumar arrives in Burma as a young sailor on a merchant ship, and stays to make his fortune in the timber industry. He marries Dolly, a servant girl, and together they raise sons with whom the story continues. Like The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, this is another tale of an average person who witnesses historic events. However, unlike Harrison Shepherd of The Lacuna, Rajkumar is more than just an observer, and the whole tone of this book is much more urgent and forceful. With Rajkumar we visit the timber encampments where teak is harvested by elephants, we see the vast rubber plantations where the British colonials make fortunes and the Burmese workers toil like slaves, we survive the Japanese invasion of Burma and become refugees who return to India. With Dolly we live in exile with the deposed Burmese king and queen, and befriend Uma who becomes a force for change in post-colonial India. One of the most compelling subplots is the story of Uma’s nephew Arjun and his batman Kishan Singh, soldiers in a British regiment that defects during the war. This strand examines the complex relationships between Indian soldiers and their British commanders, as Arjun and his compatriots are forced to think about who and what, exactly, they are fighting for.

In a blog post from earlier this month I referred to “my current fascination with epic drama.” I just seem to be in the mood for books with lots of characters, history, and action. Explosions! Revolutions! Runaway trains! (only kidding about the trains). I can’t wait to read more by Ghosh, who has just released River of Smoke, the second book in a trilogy about 19th century Canton and the opium wars. Here is a link to his website which gives you a good idea of what his books are about.

(Book 13, 2012)

Drifting House by Krys Lee

Regular blog followers know that I like to read fiction about the immigrant experience. Books like Away, by Amy Bloom (Eastern European Jewish immigrants); Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin (Irish); Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See (Chinese); and Voice of America, by E. C. Osondu (Nigerian) offer insight into how people deal with loss and change and how they survive (and with any luck, thrive) in new situations.

Drifting House covers new territory for me. It’s a collection of short stories that describe the experience of emigrating from Korea to the U.S., or in some stories, the experience of escaping from North Korea to South Korea or to China. These are not happy tales (especially the North Korean ones, as you would imagine) and even in the stories where people move from South Korea to relatively secure situations in California, the characters experience little optimism or renewal. Lee’s writing is precise and crystal clear, but also icy cold. Her characters remain opaque and I did not connect to any of them.

This is a slim volume, easily digested in small doses. I do think it does a good job adding another piece to the puzzle that is the American immigrant experience. Not everyone is as happy to be here as we might think, even if what they left behind wasn’t so hot either.

(Book 12, 2012)