Sunday, September 29, 2013

Serena: Simply Too Good to Put Down


I have read some of Ron Rash's works, and now Serena is by far my favorite.  Set in 1929, the novel focuses on Serena and George Pemberton who both find themselves brimming with power, sensuality, ruthlessness, and the desire for profit.  The Pembertons were timber barons trailblazing near Asheville, North Carolina, at the time that the U.S. government was trying to establish the Smoky Mountains as a national park.  Serena sets her sights on timber in Brazil, and assumes that her husband will want the same.  However, he can't quite let go of his interest in his young son whose mother was someone who worked briefly at the lumber camp, and now lives nearby.  The book ends tragically, but was very captivating, atmospheric, and even cinematic.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned novel! 

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Prim and Proper


Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice was published 200 years ago in 1813.  The novel centers around the Bennett family and the marrying off of their daughters, in particular, Elizabeth Bennett, who warms up to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy over time.  Reading Pride and Prejudice was kind of like watching Downton Abbey, but with none of the dramas outside of the romance plot lines.  Pride and Prejudice is particularly insular, focusing on the restrained interactions between the Bennetts, their neighbors, immediate family, and potential suitors.  While I don't think a 200 year old book need be stodgy, I found that to be so in this case.  Austen was no doubt a master of her time, but this is not a book that provoked much thought for me or caught my interest. 

Favorite quotes:

"'My dear, dear aunt,' she rapturously cried, what delight!  what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.  Adieu to disappointment and spleen.  What are men to rocks and mountains?""

"This is a most unfortunate affair; and will probably be much talked of.  But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into the wounded bosoms of each other, the balm of sisterly consolation."

Satirical Steinbeck

Having traveled to France in the early 1950s, Steinbeck wrote The Short Reign of Pippin IV in 1957, which is a satirical tale of a chaotic French government at the time of the French Revolution.  France finds itself in need of a king, and the unsuspecting Pippin Heristal, based on his lineage, is recruited for the task.  While Pippin would rather be left alone to his hobby, astronomy, he must inherit the throne and try to bring peace and prosperity to his nation.  Pippin's wife Marie accepts her queendom with a sense of duty, and his precocious and rather wild daughter Clotilde becomes intrigued with an "egg king" hailing from Petaluma, CA.  As I am not an expert on French history, I'm sure that many of the satire and jokes were somewhat lost on me, and I didn't find the antics that hilarious or over the top.  All in all, this was not my favorite Steinbeck novel by a long shot, but I do admire his versatility, and he still remains one of my favorite authors of all time, with my favorite books being To a God Unknown, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath. 

Some memorable quotes:

"In the salon she told her husband, 'Closed the window over the cheese - a full kilogram of cheese suffocating all night with the window closed.  And do you know what her excuse was?  She was cold.  For her own comfort the cheese must strangle.  You can't trust servants anymore."

"I want my little house, my wife, and my telescope.  Nothing more.  If they had not forced me to be king I would not have been forced to be kingly."

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Unexpected Otherworldiness


Neil Gaiman's short novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, takes place in Sussex, England and centers around a young girl named Lettie Hempstock, her mother, and her grandmother.  Lettie befriends a boy who lives down the street from her, who lives a lonely and unhappy childhood, where his main escape is reading books.  Lettie starts to protect the young boy from several dark incidents that occur in his life.  The book has tones of fairy tales, as well as magical realism.  For me, the book was rather sparse for my tastes.  As the English might say, it wasn't my cup of tea, though it explores some interesting themes in a refreshing way.

For Porter, Two Prizes


Katherine Anne Porter grew up in Texas and is best known for her short stories, the collection of which was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1965.  Pale Horse, Pale Rider features three short novels.  My favorite of the three was "Noon Wine," which tells the story of the Thompson family who live on a dairy ranch in Texas in the 1890s.  A quiet Swedish man named Mr. Helton shows up at the farm and asks for work and Mr. Thompson agrees to provide him room and board, and a small salary, in exchange for work.  Mr. Helton quickly proves himself to be a hard worker, having learned a great deal from his work in North Dakota, though with little interest for becoming friendly with the Thompson.  His main care in the world seems to be his collection of harmonicas.  All goes well on the farm for nine years, when another man shows up at the farm, claiming that Mr. Helton escaped from a mental asylum after stabbing his brother with a pitchfork over a harmonica-related scuffle.  Mr. Thompson doesn't want any trouble and wants the stranger to leave, but before he figures out a way to get him off his porch, things quickly go awry and a tragic incident occurs over which Mr. Thompson can ultimately never forgive himself.  This dark tale is very well written and moves at a quick pace.  On a different note, one of my favorite quotes from the short novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," is "How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines."  Certainly an intriguing writer, I plan to read Porter's full collection of short stories. 

Monday, September 9, 2013

The Face of the Great Depression


We all have probably seen the iconic photo, Migrant Mother, snapped in 1936 by Dorothea Lange, who worked for the government agency known as the Farm Security Administration.  The woman in the photo was Florence Owen Thompson, a 32 year old mother of seven children, who worked as a pea picker in California.  It is this famous and haunting photo that is the inspiration for Marisa Silver's new novel Mary Coin, which weaves together the fictionalized versions of Lange and Thompson, as well as a modern-day history professor who has the feeling that his own passed is tied somehow to the woman in the photo.  In simple, lush, and beautiful prose, Silver illuminates these three lives.  Walker Dodge's family owned the Dodge farm, where Mary Coin was employed many years ago as a migrant worker.  This is an interesting and satisfying novel.  It would be an interesting companion read with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is also set in California and highlights the living conditions of those who worked the fields,  and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which depicts and describes the conditions of sharecroppers in the South also during The Great Depression. 

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Pre-"Twilight"-era Vampires


Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, was published in 1897, and features the most famous vampire of them all, Count Dracula.  Told in a unique format which combines diary entries, letters, and ship log entries, the story starts out with a solicitor named Jonathan Harker who travels to a remote and ominous castle in Transylvania to settle some business matters with Count Dracula.  He slowly realizes that he is imprisoned by a very strange character, and eventually is able to escape.  Count Dracula sets his sharpened teeth on course to try to suck the blood of Harker's new wife Mina and her friend Lucy.  Harker and some of his colleagues band together to try to rid the earth of Dracula, which of course involves piercing him in the heart, no easy task for a Count that can become a bat, or wolf, or other incarnation.  Considered a classic gothic tale, even a horror novel, the story moves along swiftly at the beginning and then tends to drag.  I enjoyed the novel, but not nearly as much as I enjoyed a different gothic novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is told from Frankenstein's perspective and explores his loneliness.  In contrast, in Dracula we only hear from him on one page out of over four hundred pages, so we don't get to know his inner workings or understand him other than from other perspectives. 

Steinbeck's Last Novel


The last novel that John Steinbeck wrote was The Winter of Our Discontent, which highlights the lives of the working class in the 1960s against the backdrop of the fictional New Baytown, largely based on Steinbeck's own experience living in Sag Harbor in his later years.  The story's protagonist is Ethan Hawley, a man educated at Harvard where he  "lodged in the old, the beautiful, the obscure, indulged myself with knowledge utterly useless in running a grocery store..."  And yet, because his father lost the family fortune by "investing wildly," Ethan finds himself doing exactly that -spending his days as the clerk of the grocery store that his family used to own, philosophizing to an audience of canned goods. Ethan has a wife and two kids, and feels discontent and resentment about his job, and explores his own conflicted relationship with his dislike for the money but his fear of not having money to support his family.   This fear drives him to consider some rather unscrupulous possibilities.  As in most Steinbeck novels, the dialogue is swift and witty.  A list of my favorite pet names that Ethan has for his wife Mary include 1) cottontail, 2) my rumpled duck, 3) pin curl, and 4) pigeon-flake.  Steinbeck went no to win the Nobel Prize in 1962.  That said, this is one of my least favorite of his books, and for me, doesn't compare to East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and To a God Unknown.  Still, there are some memorable quotes:

"We can shoots rocket into space but we can't cure anger or discontent."

"It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from crhysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever."