Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is the first book in The Southern Reach trilogy and tells the story of the 12th expedition to Area X. Area X is the (fictional) site of a mysterious ecological disaster, located somewhere in the southern U.S. It has been closed for over 30 years at the time this book opens, and access is restricted to occasional groups of scientists. The Southern Reach is the name of the quasi-governmental/military authority that controls Area X. Expeditions there are fraught with danger; several explorers have been lost, and those who return are physically or emotionally damaged. Do we think Expedition 12 will go any better? Well, with their story entitled Annihilation, what do you think?

There’s a lot to like here for fans of the TV show Lost, and those who like to read post-apocalyptic fiction. There’s a creepy monster, and some emotional baggage with the biologist, who has an interesting reason for going on this mission. There are double-crosses, and mysterious lights and noises, and a good old-fashioned shoot-out. While you could argue that VanderMeer is just checking off boxes on a list of sci-fi/horror tropes, he uses them in an interesting way, and I was entertained. I also applaud him for making the Expedition 12 scientists all female. It would have been so easy to make them all male, or to include one token female, but he made this interesting choice and I noticed.

Here’s my problem: why haven’t I read the two subsequent volumes of the trilogy: Authority and Acceptance? I finished this months ago, and put off writing about it until I could write about all three at once, but here I am, having not quite ever gotten round to the remaining two books. I think it’s because I feel a tiny bit manipulated, as if this whole thing smacks just a bit too much of clever marketing. Annihiliation is short, at 208 pages (though the two following books are longer). All three were released within 7 months of one another, so VanderMeer clearly had the sequels well in hand when the first was released. Why not wait and release them together as one long book? Why make me pay for three books instead of one?

Well, why did Peter Jackson carve The Hobbit up into three movies? Why did someone decide to release the Hunger Games and the Twilight trilogies as four movies? Let’s squeeze as much revenue out of these properties as we can, folks. VanderMeer sold the Annihilation movie rights for a “sizable” amount, according to the Deadline Hollywood website. Who wants to bet that the remaining two books will get nice deals, too, and Acceptance will be released as two films?  If these novels had been released as one book, could VanderMeer have only sold the rights once? (I am just asking and admit to knowing nothing about how these deals work.)

It’s the combination of all these factors (the on-trend post-apocalyptic theme, the trilogy, the movie rights) that has me feeling a little bit like a pawn in someone’s media marketing chess game. It’s nice to see an author making some money and I don’t begrudge VanderMeer his opportunity to do so. I know he’s been writing sci-fi for a while and has paid his dues. It just all seems so… calculating. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

I already feel marketed-to in so many areas of my life (what TV shows I watch, products I buy, websites I visit); I don't like it when the same feeling invades my reading. It even makes me worry that VanderMeer’s choice of female protagonists was somehow motivated by a reading survey that indicated that large numbers of female readers enjoy post-apocalyptic trilogies.

Look, I know I sound like @GuyinyourMFA, whose hilarious tweets poke fun at the idea that Literature (with a capital L) can only be written with great suffering and angst, and that marketing is anathema to Art. I don’t mean that. But clearly something in me is resisting the call to participate in VanderMeer’s cunning plan. If it is a cunning plan. Which I think it is.

(Newsflash! Just in time for the  holidays! Farrar Straus Giroux releases Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, all in one volume. Could the timing be any better?)

(Book 23, 2014)

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is a “writer of a certain age” (according to Fay Weldon, more of which later). She’s also a leading lady of British letters, author of 17 novels (most of which I’ve read), and she’s got some of those letters after her name (DBE) which mean that the Queen likes her. Her latest novel is The Pure Gold Baby, about an anthropologist called Jess who raises her mentally handicapped daughter Anna as a single mother in North London in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

The story of Jess and Anna is related by Jess’s longtime neighbor Eleanor, a dispassionate observer of human nature and changing neighborhoods. Eleanor looks back on Jess and Anna’s life from such a distance that at times it isn’t clear whether she’s talking about Jess’s life or her own. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are Eleanor/Jess’s observations about the state of the British National Health Service, as it relates to the changing attitudes towards care for the mentally challenged. These parts were a snoozer, though the rest of the story is classic Drabble, about how a woman can live a life of the mind amid the myriad restrictions placed on her by society; especially how a woman like Jess can do this alone, with a needy child. I didn’t love this book. Drabble has gone over this territory before and done it better. Yet even mediocre Drabble can still be lovely--her observations are acute and she has a gift for the wry understatement.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to say in this post, I happened upon an article by Fay Weldon, in the January 24, 2014 New York Times Sunday Book Review (Note: Fay Weldon also has letters after her name: CBE). In this article, Weldon (herself a writer of a certain age) talks about the reading public’s (and the publishing industry’s) lack of interest in the voices of women over age 50. Weldon doesn’t waste time bemoaning this but instead treats it as a given, and in the article she relates her conversation with a student in her writing class. 

…older women make up the bulk of the fiction market,” my student will protest. “How odd that they don’t want to read about themselves!” “They do,” I will answer. “But they like to identify with themselves when young and beautiful, when sexual power and adventures were for the taking and life was fun — not as they are now, with bulging hips and crepey necks.

Weldon says that literary agents will advise a writer to age an older (female) character down by 20 or 30 years. And indeed Drabble does this, by setting a lot of the action in The Pure Gold Baby when Jess was a young mother. And just as Weldon observes, I liked those parts better, and I was bored by the parts where Eleanor and Jess were older. Does that mean I am now a statistic? A reader who can be quantified by literary agents and publishers? That gives me pause but I also think it might be true.

Though I am also considering whether my boredom with this book is a symptom of my increasing impatience with literary fiction in general. I am having difficulty summoning up interest in any of the new works by authors who have been my long-time favorites (Alice McDermott, Ann Patchett). I’ve been belligerently refusing to start The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (the latest must-read, according to everyone) and instead I’ve been flirting with nonfiction and obsessing over Battlestar Galactica (2003). We’ll see what develops.

(Book 2, 2014)

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

Sisterland is a country inhabited by two people only: a set of twins, Daisy and Violet. As children, the Sisterland geography was their shared bedroom, but it was also the inside of their heads. Daisy and Violet are psychic twins with the ability to see other people’s secrets and destinies. This ability becomes Violet’s raison d’etre, and as an adult she makes her living as a medium, but it freaks Daisy out so much that she changes her name, renounces her skills, and anesthetizes herself in the role of suburban housewife. She tries to be everything that Vi is not: thin, heterosexual, almost invisible. Or as she thinks of it, “normal.”

In present day St. Louis, Daisy, now called Kate, is married to a sweet guy named Jeremy and has two small children. While they no longer live in Sisterland, Kate and Vi are still connected both psychically and emotionally. When Vi makes a public prediction that an earthquake is imminent, Kate is horrified and humiliated, and yet cannot prevent herself from getting drawn into the controversy.

Kate’s got other problems, too, including a long-simmering attraction to a stay-at-home dad from the neighborhood, a nursing baby and a needy toddler, the laundry, the grocery shopping, the bad wardrobe, and a father who develops angina while visiting a prostitute. This book exhausted me, and I’m not even mentioning the abortion subplot(s).* But life is like that – the clothes still need to be washed, even when your sister is generating widespread panic in the city where you live.

Sittenfeld tells a good story but I’m not in love with her writing style in this book. Her prose is sometimes inelegant and repetitive; why is that? But she also makes profound, elemental observations about families, fate, and destinies; here she just serves them up on paper plates rather than fine china. If you liked Prep (Sittenfeld’s first breakout book) you will probably like this, though it’s not nearly as good as American Wife, which is a more sophisticated and polished book in every way.

*Abortion subplots (or plots) are a rare thing indeed in 21st century fiction and television. I think writers avoid this most polarizing topic out of fear and I congratulate Sittenfeld for even attempting it. Two different pregnant women contemplate abortion; one chooses it and the other doesn't. I tried not to read any kind of moral judgment into the characters' choices, and I don't think Sittenfeld was ascribing any, but it's hard not to think about it.

(Book 1, 2014)

The Red Queen and The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

Notice the queens are color coded (okay, there is no yellow queen)

The White Queen was a 10-part BBC production about the War of the Roses that was recently broadcast in the US on the Starz network instead of on PBS or BBC America, the more typical destinations for their costume dramas. It featured the usual assortment of British actors and stunning locations. I really enjoyed it, and was not bothered by the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms--it's TV, not a history lesson. Some critics compared it unfavorably with Game of Thrones, which I also love, and they are right, this wasn’t as good. Who cares? It was still fun, though apparently no one watched it except me. Maybe no one gets the Starz channel; I’m not even sure why we get it.

I had not read the Philippa Gregory books on which the series was based because I usually think her books are dull and repetitive, but in this case I was intrigued by her approach to this material. She wrote four different books from the points of view of four different women who all lived mostly concurrently; these books relate the same (or interconnected) events from each of the women's (often conflicting) perspectives. The BBC took all four books and combined them into one narrative, but I was curious about how Gregory did it so I read two of the four books. The White Queen is about Elizabeth Rivers, wife of Edward IV, and The Red Queen is about Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor (Henry VII; and she never was a queen so what’s with that title?). The other two books are The Lady of the Rivers (about Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta Rivers) and The Kingmaker’s Daughter (about Anne Neville, wife of Richard III, shown above in yellow). I doubt I will have the stamina to read either of these. Of the two I read, The Red Queen was a lot more interesting. Margaret Beaufort’s shocking confidence in her own ability to converse with God, and her singled-minded obsession with getting her son onto the throne made her a much more interesting character than Elizabeth Rivers, whose primary attributes seemed to be her looks and her fertility. Gregory has entitled her series The Cousins War, and a fifth and final volume is coming out soon. Called The White Princess, it's the story of Elizabeth of York, daughter of Elizabeth Rivers and wife to Henry VII. While I probably won't read that either, I like the fact that Gregory has taken on this era and story, which is usually overlooked in favor of the Tudors. 

I read both books simultaneously as I watched the show, so I would watch an episode, then read up to that point in both the books, then watch another episode, etc. The show tracked the books pretty closely and the chapters are helpfully titled. I enjoyed myself, though my reading experience is inextricably linked to the viewing experience, so it's hard to comment only on the books. I would venture to say that, without the added fun of the good looking actors, and great costumes and locations, the books would be bland. But you should try it my way: the DVDs are available in the UK now and will be soon in the US, and the books are in the library. 

Tom Hiddleston as Hal. Sigh.

And speaking of the War of the Roses, PBS just finished broadcasting new productions of the four plays that make up Shakespeare’s take on this war, including my favorites Henry IV Part I, and Henry V, starring (among others) Jeremy Irons as Henry IV and Tom Hiddleston as Hal/Henry V. I loved watching these too, though eventually I started having dreams where I tried to construct Lancaster and York family trees in my head. Chronologically these plays come before the events of The White Queen. I wish the Shakespeare series had included Richard III, the events of which do overlap The White Queen, though apparently that play is no more historically accurate than Gregory’s books. So I guess if Shakespeare could tinker with the facts to make a better story, why should anyone criticize Philippa Gregory and the BBC?

(Books 29 and 30, 2013)

Mission to Paris by Alan Furst

Have you noticed that all of Alan Furst’s World War II espionage books have similar titles? Dark Something, Night Something, Mission to Somewhere, Spies of This or That. And some books are meant to be read in order and others stand alone. How do you keep them straight, or know where to start? I wasted a lot time dithering over whether I was supposed to start with Night Soldiers or The World at Night until someone told me it didn’t matter, so I started with this one.

Mission to Paris is Furst’s most recent book, published in 2012, and as it turns out, it’s as good a place as any to dive in to his work. And did I like it? Yes! It’s about an actor who goes to Paris to make a film in the late 1930’s and gets caught up in some nasty business with the Germans and their French sympathizers. Imagine Cary Grant as the actor—no one contemporary will do. There’s danger, but not too much, very little blood, some intrigue, but nothing that’s too difficult to keep track of. Furst’s writing is smooth and sophisticated, understated and confident. Just like Cary Grant.

I could complain a little about Furst’s proclivity for the male gaze (lots of luscious descriptions of beautiful women’s bodies, sex scenes always written from the man’s point of view). In an ideal world an author this good would recognize that not all of his readers are straight men. Especially since he has no trouble giving these delicious women lots of interesting things to do. It’s almost like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, since he’s obviously making a good-faith effort to create women characters who have brains and agency. When I complained about this to a long-time Furst fan, she said, philosophically, “oh, just roll your eyes and keep reading.” That’s a pretty good advice.

(Book 27, 2013)

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

I’m getting a little bored with books where nothing happens. It’s not like I need explosions or car chases, but really, something has to happen or else I just…drift off… And so I drifted off a lot while reading The Weird Sisters, a story about three sisters in their twenties and thirties who return to their Ohio town to care for their sick mother, and who spend a lot of time ruminating over their relationships, their upbringing, and their futures, but don’t do much of anything other than that.

Because their father is a Shakespeare scholar, this book is peppered with literary allusions, all helpfully printed in italics, in case you can’t tell. And of course there is the book’s title, and the names of the sisters, who are Rosalind, Bianca, and worst of all, Cordelia. The sisters neatly embody various literary stereotypes: the good daughter (Rosalind), the party girl (Bianca), and the artist (Cordelia). Despite these handicaps I enjoyed reading the book, and finished it, despite several detours to read other, more compelling choices.

Here are a few random observations:

• Brown at times writes in first person plural, as if the sisters are all speaking as one. Hence they talk about “our mother” and things “we did” as children. It doesn’t sound like it would work but it does. Brown uses the trick judiciously and it highlights the sisters’ closeness and sense of shared history and destiny. They speak almost as a Greek chorus at times, especially when they comment on their parents’ relationship.
• The sisters and their parents spend a lot of time reading. I like books where the characters read. Of course, reading about other people reading doesn’t make for very interesting reading in itself, so there’s that. But it did make me like the characters. Their reading felt very natural to me and reminded me of my own house, where books are everywhere and everyone just reads whatever is close to hand.   
• This is a nice sweet story where everything works out okay in the end. It’s a good book for a bad day, or if you’ve recently witnessed too many explosions or car chases. 

 (Book 26, 2013)

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss

This book was the 2012 Go Big Read selection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here is a link to the online version of a feature story I did for Isthmus about Go Big Read and about this book.

While I appreciate what is innovative and interesting about this book (the illustration process, the graphic nonfiction format, the author-designed typeface) it didn’t satisfy me as a reader. It wasn’t a true biography, nor was it a comprehensive analysis of Marie Curie’s impact on science, but instead some kind of weird hybrid in a pretty package. And that typeface: Tiny hand-rendered light blue type on a dark blue background. On some pages it could have been Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet for all I could tell. Yes, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and I realize that some allowances must be made for the sake of art, but this was a book, for crying out loud, not an exhibit at an art gallery. What good is a book that you can’t read?

(Book 14, 2013)

The Wool Series by Hugh Howey

The Wool Series is comprised of eight novellas (the first one of which is called Wool) that all take place in a post-apocalyptic USA where a small contingent of survivors are holed up in something resembling a missile silo. Hugh Howey self-published this series through Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing system starting in 2011. Book 8 was published in January 2013. All the novellas are available in various permutations (singly and in omnibus editions) as Amazon Kindle downloads, and volumes 1-5 are now available in print from Simon & Schuster. Howey made news when he struck his print deal with Simon & Schuster (which occurred after these books were already Kindle bestsellers) because he retained the e-book rights. I wanted to try the series in part because I’ve been enjoying the post-apocalyptic genre, but mostly because I was interested in seeing whether a self-published book was any good. I’m skeptical because they seem like such wild cards – some have lots of spelling and grammatical errors, not to mention derivative plots. I prefer to read books that have been professionally edited – is that such a bad thing?*

I have only read the first three volumes (Wool, Proper Gauge, and Casting Off -- as a knitter I love these allusions but these books are definitely NOT about knitting). So far the plot and setting seem a little like “the survivors of the vampire apocalypse go to District 13” but I have a feeling that greater complexity is right around the corner. At least I hope so; right now these feel a bit formulaic to me, but perhaps that’s a function of reading three in a row, rather than spacing them out as you would if you were caught up. Howey is a good (if workmanlike) writer (and there are no typos); the characters are likable (except those that are supposed to be hate-able) and there is no shortage of strong women characters. That said, why am I not rushing out to read volumes 4-8? I’m not sure. Maybe I just need a break from post-apocalyptic dread?**

I noticed on Amazon that at least four authors have self-published e-books that are set in Howey’s world. From what I can tell, two of the authors have Howey’s blessing, as evidenced by quotes from Howey in the product description. So he’s authorizing fan fiction; that’s interesting.

(Book 12, 2013)

*I know that commercial publishers release bad books all the time, and that many good books never get published.  Nevertheless I don't want to waste my limited reading time on something that absolutely no one has vetted, as is the case with some self-published e-books.

**I promise not to write about this genre any more for a while.

Exit Music by Ian Rankin

Have I gone off mysteries? I have read very few in the last few years, not so much by design as by oversight. But I thought I would try again with a classic author/detective combination: Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, in his most-recent-but-one offering Exit Music. Appropriately titled, Rebus is days away from retirement but can’t keep himself from going rogue yet again and getting suspended in the process. As usual, his colleague Siobhan Clarke tries to keep him in check while getting herself into position for her long-awaited promotion.

In the end I was just kind of “meh” about this book. There’s nothing wrong with it. Rankin is a good writer and Rebus is an interesting guy and a bit easier to take now that he’s sobered up somewhat. Clarke still has a bit of a chip on her shoulder but that’s to be expected. I just couldn’t get very invested in them and what they were up to. And so then what’s the point? I guess I am breaking up with mysteries. This must be the part where I say “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Here’s something: All the Rebus novels are set in Edinburgh. Rankin’s website has lots of good stuff about Edinburgh, about Rebus and his origins, and about Scottish literature. It also includes an interactive map where you can follow Rebus around the city and a Rebus playlist for Spotify (Rebus is a huge music fan).

(Book 10, 2013)

Lady of the English by Elizabeth Chadwick

I’m on a historical fiction mini-bender and thought I would try one of Elizabeth Chadwick’s newer offerings. I’ve read a lot of her earlier stuff but kind of went off her when she switched to writing only about real historical characters (instead of pure fiction set in medieval times). As I’ve complained before, being forced to stick to the historical record limits the choices an author can make, dramatically speaking. Like this story about Matilda, who ought to have been queen of England after the death of her father Henry I, but who was denied the throne by her scheming male cousins and their pals. The story would have been much better if Matilda beat those jerks at their own game and got the throne anyway, but alas, it didn’t happen that way so Chadwick can’t write it that way. Bummer for me, the reader.

And then there’s the temptation to short-circuit the whole reading experience via Wikipedia. After a while I just really had to know whether Matilda would triumph so I looked it up. (To be honest I sort of already knew, never having actually heard of the great Queen Matilda* of England.) Then once I had read the whole article on Wikipedia, the rest of the story became kind of anticlimactic. Another battle for the men, another death in childbirth for the women, ho hum.

To be fair, Chadwick writes well and creates fully realized characters. Matilda and her husband Geoffrey of Anjou had a tumultuous marriage--she was ten years older and they married when he was still a teenager and she already a widow. Chadwick brings these characters to life; we cheer for Matilda, we have a love-hate thing with Geoffrey, and the supporting characters are quirky and memorable. If you like Philippa Gregory (who also is constrained by the historical record) then you should try Elizabeth Chadwick, who I think is a more interesting writer, and who writes about a less familiar period of history (okay, less familiar to U.S. readers).

*Matilda’s cousin Stephen, who stole her throne, was married to a woman named Matilda (so technically she was Queen Matilda) but that is a different Matilda. Apparently it was a very common name in the 12th century.

(Book 7, 2013)

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Emma Straub for Isthmus Daily Page, Madison’s weekly news and arts website. My interview was part of Isthmus’s promotion of the Wisconsin Book Festival and you can find it here. In preparation for the interview I read Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Straub’s first novel, which was released a few months ago. Straub was fun to talk to and very engaging. The book is a sweet story of a woman’s experience in the Hollywood studio system in the 1930’s through the 1960’s. I liked Laura Lamont, especially her plucky Midwestern optimism, but the story didn’t make a strong impression on me; it was at times repetitive, as if Straub didn’t quite trust herself to make her point. Maybe it wasn’t fair to Straub that I was reading it alongside Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, which is a masterpiece by a mature writer at the top of her game.

Straub says that she based the plot loosely on the life of actress Jennifer Jones. Like Laura Lamont, Jennifer Jones grew up in the Midwest and married a studio executive (David O. Selznick). We talked a bit about other recent books that are fictionalized retellings of famous people’s lives (e. g., American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, and Untold Story by Monica Ali) but it seems like Straub used Jones’s experiences more for inspiration than as a template for a novel.

It’s fun to talk to writers about their books but I end up looking at the reading experience differently afterwards. I try always to write these blog posts 100% from the point of view of the reader, and if I have a nice impression of the writer in my head, does it make me a little less blunt in my analysis? (I’m not thinking specifically of Straub here, but just of the interview/blogging process.) I don’t know. I don’t get a lot of chances to talk to writers (!) so in some ways this line of thinking is like wondering if I would get airsick on Air Force One.

(Book 30, 2012)

The Night Circus by Erin Morgerstern

The Night Circus will be a great movie, if they make it into one. It’s very visual and intense; it’s emotional; it’s got a lot of impressive magic that should translate well to the screen. But it’s not a perfect book – Erin Morgenstern has bitten off more than she can chew and she loses control of her material at times. But you can fix that in a movie – cut some extraneous characters, show us some of the circus magic instead of using the same words over and over again to describe it, and most of all, make the timeline more linear instead of jumping around so much.

I started out listening to this as an audiobook, read by Jim Dale, who read the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter books. He is a great reader and I enjoyed listening to him, but the above-mentioned timeline problems derailed me. I ended up seriously confused and almost gave up. Luckily I decided to give it another chance in written form, and quickly figured out what was going on. It’s not difficult to follow if you are reading it. And once I had Dale’s voice in my head, it was almost like I could still hear him reading to me once I switched to the print edition.

Morgenstern is endlessly clever with her mise-en-scene. So many aspects of the Gilded-Age circus are extraordinary: the clock, the bonfire, the tattooed contortionist. You can get a little caught up in just the atmosphere and forget that there’s a story going on. But the story is original, too – the circus is more than just a circus, it’s an enchanted arena where two magicians (Celia and Marco) are compelled to battle for supremacy in a contest neither of them wants, and the outcome of which will prove ruinous for one (or both) of them. If their story unfolds a little predictably sometimes, no matter; in this show the setting is as important as the plot.

At the same time I was reading this, I happened to tour the Samuel Nickerson House, now known as the Driehaus Museum, a Gilded-Age marble palace on Chicago’s near north side. It was very easy to imagine the circus impresario Chandresh Christophe Lefevre hosting one of his midnight dinner parties in the dining room of this house while Celia and Marco kiss in the upstairs ballroom.

(Book 28, 2012)

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

In The Postmistress, Sarah Blake contrasts the life of wartime radio journalist Frankie Bard, broadcasting live from London in 1941, with the peacetime lives of several of her listeners, residents of a small town in New England. Blake’s goal is to remind us how the horrors of war can go on just out of sight, just beyond our borders, and how difficult it is for people in each environment to understand the experiences of others. Frankie sees unimaginable horrors; Iris (the Postmistress) and her fellow Americans, not yet at war, are deeply disturbed by Frankie’s broadcasts. Frankie can’t imagine why no one is acting, why Americans aren’t getting involved; some of her listeners just wish she would tone it down a bit.

How do I know this was Blake’s point? Well first, because Blake is a good writer and I’m a good reader, so through the miracle of fiction, I picked up her message. But in case that didn’t work, the book contains an odd afterward, written by Blake, where she tells us that this was her point. I am mystified as to why the publishers thought this essay was necessary. Must authors now include these sorts of crib sheets, in case the reader is out to lunch? Blake also uses the essay to explain a historical shortcut – Frankie uses a kind of recording device in 1941 that wasn’t actually available until 1944 – who cares? But I guess some people might. I was mildly interested in the information she included about Edward R. Murrow and the few women radio journalists working at the time, so I guess the essay wasn’t a total waste.

Finally! I finished a book! A lot of people responded to my last post about not being able to sustain an interest in anything; apparently this condition is going around. I am half way through The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and then it’s back to Bring Up the Bodies. I’ve got a couple of things queued up that sound good too, so maybe I’m getting back on track….jinx.

(Book 27, 2012)

Untold Story by Monica Ali

Untold Story imagines that Britain’s Princess Diana didn’t die in an automobile crash in 1997 but instead faked her own death by drowning a few months later, and now lives incognito (as Lydia) in a small town in North Carolina. Her life is dull and predictable until the arrival of a vacationing British news photographer who recognizes her despite her disguise. He stalks her and plans to expose her; the plot tension arises out of this conflict.

Joanna Briscoe, writing in The Guardian, sums up this book very well when she describes it as “an ill-advised, debatably insensitive – indeed almost unworkable – project, skillfully executed.” She also references American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, a book I really enjoyed, and which I believe is more successful than Untold Story, if only because its real-life inspiration (Laura Bush) is more of an enigma (and hence a blank canvas) than Princess Diana. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a big Princess Diana fan, back in the day. She was my age, and so beautiful, and a princess! I copied her clothes (who remembers the black sheep sweater?) and her hair style. Luckily I grew out of that phase though I did watch her televised funeral. But I skipped Tina Brown’s 2007 biography because even that seemed like too much.

So why did I read Untold Story? Only because it was written by Monica Ali, whose novel Brick Lane remains one of my favorites. I was really curious to see what a literary talent could do with this subject. And as Briscoe points out, the result is mixed. Ali’s dialogue and most of the supporting characters seem like they were lifted from a bad chick flick (the exception being Lawrence, Lydia’s fictional private secretary who engineered her escape). The book is best when it’s exploring Lydia’s internal life, her unstable past, her complex motivations for leaving, and her guilt over abandoning her children. This is very much a book about what it’s like to live every day with a huge huge secret, one that defines your entire existence but which cannot ever be shared. Ali was brave to try so risky a frame for this artistic exploration and I give her credit.

(Book 22, 20120)

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau

English majors, remember this term? picaresque. From Encyclopaedia Britannica online (link): “…usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or low-born adventurer [picaro in Spanish] as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another.”

And this describes Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, which is the fictional memoir of Itsik Malpesh. Itsik is born in Russia in the early 1900s, stows away aboard a ship bound for the U.S., works in a sweatshop in New York, and spends his nights writing Yiddish poetry, all the while dreaming of his lost love Sasha Bimko, the butcher’s daughter, to whom he dedicates his awful verses. He lives a long life, filled with adventures both believable and far-fetched and writes his memoirs in Yiddish as an old man.

Framing Itsik’s story is the commentary by his translator, a Yiddish-speaking Catholic scholar who works at a Jewish book repository. By structuring the book this way, Manseau focuses our attention on the role of language in how we interpret a story. The translator stresses that much of what Itsik writes doesn’t transfer into English very well, yet since the whole book is fiction, what is Manseau saying? That all words are suspect? This is a fictional account of a translated version of an unreliable memoir. And while it works most of the time, sometimes it doesn’t. (And what are we to make of Itsik’s abysmal poetry? Is it better in Yiddish? But since it was really never written in Yiddish, is Manseau just playing a trick on us?)

However, it isn’t like I obsessed about this language thing all through the book. In my book club the discussion focused mostly on plot points (and problems). It’s an entertaining read, and pretty funny in places. If this book were a movie, it would be by Woody Allen, with Allen himself playing Itsik and one of Allen’s straight men (Tony Roberts, but younger?) playing the unnamed translator. Sasha Bimko (who does eventually show up) could be played by any number of Allen’s free-spirited co-stars (Penelope Cruz, if she was Russian?). Indeed much of the story’s outsized action seems like it’s drawn from a hodgepodge of different Allen movies, which, if you think about it, often feature Allen in a picaresque role.

(Book 20, 2012)

A Good Indian Wife by Anne Cherian

I must be a sucker for book cover photos of women in saris. It has just occurred to me that sari photos are the Indian equivalent of the “woman in heels carrying a shopping bag” graphics that grace the cover of American and British chick lit. Okay, so now I know.

Suneel, a Stanford-educated anesthesiologist returns home to India to visit his dying grandfather. Somehow he ends up agreeing to his grandfather’s fondest wish: an arranged marriage with a nice Indian girl, Leila. Before he knows it, he’s hitched and can’t get out of it. Together Neel (as he is called in the U.S.) and Leila return to San Francisco where Neel acts like a selfish jerk and Leila wanders dazed and confused through her new life.

This book had some good points: Leila, who was a teacher in India, is smart and tries to make the best of a bad situation. Her tentative attempts to form relationships with some of Neel’s coworker’s wives are endearing, as is her search for a meaningful way to pass the time while Neel cavorts with his white mistress. As you would expect, Neel eventually learns to value Leila, but for the reader this change comes too late. I just hated him so much by the end of the book that I couldn’t be happy for Leila that he was finally reforming his tomcat ways.

I was interested in the ways in which A Good Indian Wife echoes one of the standard plots long seen in traditional regency romances: The bluestocking spinster, considered “on the shelf” by her family, submits to an arranged marriage with a rake. Eventually her intelligence, quiet beauty, and inner strength help him see the errors of his ways and he renounces his promiscuity to swear undying love for his wife. Was this a conscious choice on the author’s part? How could it not be? I wonder why she did this?

(Book 19, 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)

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)

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern

Rabbi Eliezer, a great sage, is accidentally frozen in a block of ice in Russia in 1889. He remains thusly preserved for over a hundred years until he is inadvertently thawed out and reanimated during a power surge in Memphis, Tennessee in 1999. His unwitting rescuer is Bernie Karp, an overweight socially awkward Jewish teenager who has found the frozen rabbi in his parents’ basement chest freezer. How Rabbi Eliezer came to be stored in that freezer, and what happens (to him and to Bernie) after he is defrosted is the plot of this book.

This book joins a list of my favorites of this genre (Jewish magical realism?), including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The World to Come by Dara Horn, and A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell. It combines fantasy, humor, mysticism, history, tragedy, and adventure all in one pot. But this recipe also has some negatives: as sometimes happens in books like this, Stern gets carried away and tries to cram in too much. At times the book staggers under its own weight.

We talked about The Frozen Rabbi at my book club this week. Most everyone agreed that it was too long and too messy but we disagreed about what parts or characters we would cut. Most of us admitted to skimming sections but again, not the same sections. And we were all baffled by the ending which was just plain weird. We decided that this book is greater than the sum of its parts; individual sections are overly long or disturbing, but they add up to something really good.

(Book 4, 2012)

All Other Nights by Dara Horn

Last year I read Horn’s book The World to Come and I loved it. All Other Nights is nothing like that book and indeed if I didn’t know they were written by the same author I would never have guessed. All Other Nights is straight historical fiction with a linear plot. It completely lacks the whimsy and playfulness of The World to Come—All Other Nights is an easier read but not nearly as much fun.

This book tells the story of Jacob Rappaport and his experiences during the American Civil War. Rappaport is Jewish, from New York, the son of a wealthy businessman. At the beginning of the book he joins the Union army to escape from his overbearing father. Recruited as a spy, Jacob must constantly navigate the gray areas of conflict: his first assignment is to travel to New Orleans and assassinate his own uncle, who is plotting to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, and things get even trickier from there.

In my last post about The Cookbook Collector, I said that a book can have imperfections and still be a good read. That was true for TCC and it’s true for All Other Nights as well. Horn’s depictions of Jacob’s struggles (both physical and moral) are engrossing to read but Jacob himself is flat and unremarkable. He’s someone to whom things happen, but I don’t think that was Horn’s intention. It’s like she tried to make him interesting by putting him into interesting situations but that wasn’t enough to overcome his essential torpidity. Some of the secondary characters provide much needed punch, but often they just seem strangely out of place, like the girl who speaks only in palindromes; she could have wandered in from The World to Come, now that I think of it.

(Book 38, 2011)