Sunday, March 31, 2013

This Boy's Life



In This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff tells the story of his upbringing in the 1950's, starting with a car trip taken by him and his mother to escape an abusive man, which lands them in Utah, and soon after Seattle.  Wolff's mother eventually meets another man, Dwight, who doesn't like or accept Tobias (who renames himself Jack) from the get go.  Wolff writes of his relationship with his mother, his friends, his father, and his brother.  He straddles the line between being a kid who gets good grades and is a Boy Scout, and one who falls in with the wrong crowd and might end up with few opportunities.  This is a well written memoir that can be read in just a few days.  The language is straightforward and simple, but pierces right to the heart of things. 

How Marjorie Celona's Debut Novel Made Me Cr(Y)


Marjorie Celona's debut novel, Y, centers around the life of Shannon, a foster child who is abandoned as a newborn by her mother on the steps of the YMCA.  We follow Shannon's life from home to home, until she comes to life with single-mother Miranda and her daughter Lydia-Rose, who try their hardest to create a new sense of family for Shannon, who never feels like she truly belongs.  Interspersed with scenes of her foster family are scenes of Shannon's birth mother Yula and father Harrison, in the days when they first meet as well as the days leading up to Shannon's birth.  The novel moves quickly, with punch and unflinching detail, but even two-thirds of the way in, while I liked the writing I had not yet really been moved by any of the characters.  Yet,  I found myself with tears in my eyes in the final parts of the novel, when Shannon comes face to face with her past.   It is very rare that a book brings me to tears, and for that quality alone, I recommend Y. 

Kent Haruf is Back, with Benediction



I remember vastly enjoying Kent Haruf's novels Plainsong and Eventide, and was thrilled to learn that Haruf recently published a new work of fiction called Benediction.  The backdrop, as is the case in several of Haruf's other novels, is a small town called Holt located in the high plains of Colorado.  This story centers around the life and approaching death of Dad Lewis who has only a short time left to live as he is dying of terminal cancer.  It is interesting how I just happened to read this book after reading A Death in the Family, which also focuses on the death of a patriarch in a small town, though nearly a century earlier.  With simple, graceful language, Haruf introduces us to a diverse cast of characters that surround the protagonist and intersect with his life in different ways, including a preacher that is new to town and his wife and son, an elderly neighbor and her daughter, and Dad's immediate family, his wife Mary, daughter Lorraine, and estranged son Frank.  This work highlights some moving small moments and gestures, as well as gives one a sense of the importance of community and neighbors in small town life.  I did not enjoy Benediction as much as Haruf's earlier works, but it is well worth reading nonetheless. 

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Agile Writing from Agee


James Agee's classic novel, A Death in the Family, was published in 1957 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958.  The story revolves around the death of the patriarch of a family living in Knoxville, Tennessee in the early 1900s.  The book closely follows each family member and their internal thought process and interactions with each other shortly before and after learning Jay's death, the one major event of the novel.  Other than this, the book focuses on smaller details and intimate moments, between brothers and sisters, mothers and their children, etc.  There are many beautiful passages, including a very moving scene between Jay and his wife Mary, which neither could have known would be the last time they would see each other.  In this scene, they are up in the middle of the night, and Jay freshens the covers so that Mary will have a warm bed to return to after seeing Jay off. 

Here are a few of my other favorite passages:

"I need never fear: nor ever shall I lack for loving-kindness."
"Rufus felt his father's hand settle, without groping or clumsiness, on the top of his bear head; it took his forehead and smoothed it, and pushed the hair backward from his forehead, and held the back of his head while Rufus pressed his head backward against the firm hand..."
"I know it's just unmitigated tommyrot to try to say a word about it." 
"He put his hand around her arm and felt how little it was.  He could feel a vein beating against the bone, just below her armpit."

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Southern Fried Stories


Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, is filled with great story titles, memorable one-liners, macabre moments, and scenarios bordering on the absurd and outrageous.  Her work is very original, and her talent is evident.  O'Connor lived to be only 39 years old, and in that time she published a total of 32 short stories.  The stories in this collection are set in the rural South, and are considered to part of the Southern Gothic style.  My favorites were, "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," which focuses on a grandfather attending his granddaughter's graduation, "Good Country People,"which tells of the brief affair between a Bible salesman and a wooden-legged well educated woman, and of course the infamous title story in which a family outing quickly becomes a murderous tale, where even grandma isn't spared.  In "Good Country People," I really liked these two lines:

"Well, young man, I don't want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning." 
"True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind."  

All in all, this is a rather zany collection of unique stories.

Man vs. Marlin

The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952 is one of Ernest Hemingway's classic works of short fiction, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953.   The story is about a fisherman named Santiago who has both a physical battle with a marlin he tries to catch off the coast of Havana, Cuba, as well as a psychological battle within himself.  Hemingway is quite economical in his words, yet he vividly captures the scene so much so that you feel you are alongside Santiago in his boat as he captures the fish, then patiently waits for it to come to the surface, and then battles against sharks who want to eat the newly captured and killed fish strapped to the side of his boat.  There are some intriguing elements to this book, one being Santiago's relationship with a boy named Manolin.  They have a very tender and loving relationship, revealed to us through just a few exchanges between the two of them.  Santiago also has emotions toward the fish he aims to kill and sell.  He states, "I love you and respect you very much.  But I will kill you dead before this day ends."  He further describes fish as as "noble" and "more able" than man, and acknowledges the fish's "greatness and his glory."  Interestingly, he even at one points admits that the killing of such a great fish is "unjust."  Hemingway writes, "Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him.  How many people will he feed, he thought.  But are they not worthy to eat him?  No, of course not.  There is no one worth of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity."  As the fisherman becomes more tired, hungry, in pain, and even delirious, he continues to ponder the concept of killing the fish.  Ultimately, his great effort is not rewarded and we are left to ponder the message of this short but powerful "man vs. nature" story.  This is a book best read in one sitting!

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Turnips and Tragedy

Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell, was published in 1932 and focuses on the lives of a white sharecropper family, the Lesters, who live in poverty in rural Georgia.  The novel takes place over the course of just a few days, starting with Jeeter Lester's son-in-law passing by the Lester house along Tobacco Road with a bag of turnips.  Fueled by desperation and hunger, Jeeter tries to take Lov's turnips, and subsequently repents for this as he believes it to be a sinful act.  Jeeter and Ada Lester had seventeen children, most of whom left home to seek a more prosperous life as a result of industrialization, and more specifically, cotton mills.  Jeeter Lester steadfastly refuses to leave his land and go work in the cotton mills, given that the land had been in his family for two generations.  As Lov states, "The ground sort of looks out for the people who keeps their feet on it.  When people stand on planks in buildings all the time, and walk around on hard streets, the ground sort of loses interest in the human."  Despite his desire and need to farm his land, Jeeter has few options as storekeepers won't extend credit to him for seed and fertilizer, and he was also the victim of predatory lending.  Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Caldwell's famous novel unflinchingly portrays the degradation, oppression, and racism prevalent in those times.  It is an unsettling work, brought to life by the day to day struggle of the Lester family. 

Three with Ford


I'll read anything that Richard Ford writes, because I was a huge fan of Canada, Wildlife, and Rock Springs.  Women with Men is a collection of three long stories (shorter than novellas), that highlight intimate moments, mixed signals, unspoken thoughts, and crossroads moments between men and women. Two of the stories are set against the backdrop of Paris but my favorite story was "Jealous," which takes place in Montana and focuses on Ford's typical nuclear family of an estranged mom and dad and their teenage son.  Larry sets off with his aunt to visit his mother, but on the way, they stop in a small town where things quickly take an unexpected turn.  I loved the few exchanges of dialogue between the father and son, as I did in Ford's other books.  This wasn't my favorite Ford work, but very readable nonetheless. 

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Riveting River Tale: Deliverance


Deliverance, published in 1970 by James Dickey, is one of those novels that you really could pick up and not put down, to be read in one sitting in a couple of hours.  Set in the north Georgia wilderness (in "the country of nine-fingered people," as Dickey writes) on the Cahulawassee River, four middle-aged men decide to spend the weekend on a canoe trip down river.  What was supposed to be an invigorating weekend shaking the men out of their office life ennui quickly turns into a harrowing few days of life and death.  Dickey's writing moves swiftly and builds tension slowly but surely.  While some of it seems a bit over the top, there is a kind of lawlessness to the tale that makes it riveting.  I enjoyed the book, but other than the protagonist, we learn little of the interior life of the other characters, which would have been very interesting had the story been told from multiple perspectives. 

Whim and Grimm

I recently read Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, a collection of 50 fairy tales, which includes some well known tales as well as many lesser known tales.  These fairy tales were first published just over 200 years ago by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm.  I have not read the originals, so I am not sure how Pullman's re-tellings compare.  I did not find his notes at the end of each fairy tale to be very interesting, though I enjoyed the fairy tales.  Filled with poor millers, golden apples, wicked stepmothers, and dense forests, the stories are very archetypal and form the basis of other themes in literature.  There are some common structural elements and themes - things happen in threes, good conquers evil, and magic often happens.  While I enjoyed the swiftness and wit of the tales, the characters are often nameless and there is little emphasis on their interior life, nor emphasis on the description of the setting.  Plus, after reading fifty tales, the themes do start to get repetitive.  Nonetheless, they are inventive, entertaining, and an important contribution to the canon of literature.