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. 

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. 

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."

Tugging at Harp Strings

Unlike the other Potok novels I read, Davita's Harp features a female protagonist, Ilana Davita, who is raised by her Gentile father and Jewish mother, both of whom are part of the Communist Party in the 1930s in New York.  As Davita grows into her own young adulthood, she becomes interested in her parents' pasts, as well as the religions that shaped them.  Ilana Davita's life is shaped by her parents' good friend Jakob Daw and the stories he tells her, her father's fierce love and laughter, and her mother's dedication to helping people.  Davita eventually forges her own path as she chooses to go to a yeshiva, only to discover that there are limitations to what she can achieve there, and is forced to make a difficult choice about how to move forward with her education.  I enjoyed this novel, but it was not as taut and climactic as some of Potok's more famous works. 

Pain in the You Know What

Pain was not a word I often thought about until this year.  Having been lucky to have lived most of my adult life without pain, it came as an unpleasant surprise to experience pain earlier this year when I had a temporary health issue.  While at Point Reyes Books, I stumbled upon this book, written by Dr. David Biro, which explores the loneliness of being in pain (which brings us "inward to the solitude of personal experience") and how difficult it is to express pain.  As Biro tells us,  "One out of every five Americans suffers from chronic pain."  Biro defines pain as, "an all-consuming internal experience that threatens to destroy everything except itself and can only be described through metaphor."  Given that pain is "the quintessential private experience," which is nearly impossible to convey to others, the only way we have to convey what we are feeling is through metaphor. 

Using both literary and artistic references, including Friday Kahlo, Jack London, Toni Morrison, and Edvard Munch, Biro culls from a variety of sources to demonstrate his point about pain being expressed and depicted through metaphor, often through expressions of battling against war and violence against the body.

Ultimately, Biro's book was an interesting philosophical and intellectual approach into the exploration and expression of pain.

The Rich and the Rest of Us

In this slim and accessible book, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West discuss poverty in the United States in a historical context and point out that in order to eradicate poverty in this country, which they believe is very possible, we need to take advantage of best practices in innovation.  As the authors put it, "One out of two Americans is living in poverty or near the poverty line," and the authors believe that the first step in eradicating poverty is destigmatizing it and recognizing that it exists.  Smiley and West outline "12 poverty changing ideas," which include things like providing jobs with living wage salaries, health care coverage for all, ending hunger and homelessness, and having the White House hold a conference on "the eradication of poverty."  They also outline in detail some suggestions for how to achieve each of these ends.  

For me, given my work with low-income populations and in community development, these ideas did not come as a surprise to me.  Therefore, while I did not have any "aha" moments, I was more impressed by the authors' vehemence and insistence that this is a crisis that needs to be solved or it could lead to catastrophe.  Some key quotes:

"With the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the class divide getting wider, there is very little reason not to believe that America could one day implode under the weight of escalating poverty."

...the poor have been stabbed with the blade of indifference."  

"Poverty is 21st-century-style slavery."

"Our intention is to prod America's consciousness toward righteously radical thinking and 21st century revolutionary action."

Ultimately, Smiley and West end by encouraging readers to take action to make poverty an "archaic remnant," which reminds me a lot of Muhammed Yunus' vision to put poverty in museums.  Let's work together to make this happen in our lifetimes.

Steinbeck, Always Burning Bright

Steinbeck's "play-novelette," which he defines as, "A play that is easy to read or a short novel that can be played simply by lifting out the dialogue," Burning Bright is a slim and punchy read, where something interesting occurs on nearly every page.  The story follows acrobat Joe Saul and his wife Mordeen.  Upon learning that he is not able to conceive, Joe Saul falls into a dark mood (You have the blackest eyes - like new split coal - that black!" says Mordeen) about not being able to pass on his lineage. Mordeen is also pursued by Joe Saul's acrobatics partner Victor.  Mordeen decides that she will give Joe Saul a child with Victor.  When Joe Saul learns his wife is pregnant (and thinks he is the father, he exclaims in delight "There's going to be a baby playing in this house.  There's going to be a child playing in that dust.  There's going to be a growing thing discovering the sky and kicking the chickens aside ane finding eggs."  Despite the agreement Mordeen thought she had with Victor, he cannot let go of the fact that he is the father and tries to force her to run away with him.  Luckily, Joe Saul's best friend, Friend Ed, takes the situation into his own hands and kills Victor.   It is a very dramatic and edgy tale.  Perhaps because the writing has some of the characteristics of a play, the story features a great deal of dialogue, which is one of Steinbeck's strongest suits. 

Other great quotes:
Joe Saul, to Mordeen - "Walk tenderly.  Oh, take gentle care.  Rest, and let your thoughts be high and beautiful."  
Friend Ed, to Joe Saul, in trying to get him to see the beauty of raising a son, even if it is not biologically his own - "You crush loveliness on the rocks of your stinking pride."  

All in all, another masterpiece from Steinbeck. 

Big Texas, Big Novel

Relatively fresh off the heels of reading some Larry McMurtry novels, in particular Lonesome Dove, I was ready to take on another epic Texas novel, which is embodied in Philipp Meyer's new novel, The Son.  The story shifts perspectives and time periods, but essentially follows the life and dynasty of the McCullough family.  In 1849, Eli McCullough is a young boy and witnesses the murder of his sister and mother by the Comanche tribe.  He and his brother are tortured and subject to various forms of brutality, and his brother soon dies.  Left to fend for himself among the Comanches, Eli soon adapts and becomes accepted by the tribe, and is even taken under the wing as a son of the chief known as Toshaway and is given his Comanche name, Tiehteti.  Eventually, the tried is faced with starvation and disease and dies off.  Eli is left alone and must acclimatize back among whites.  Torn between these two worlds, Eli forges a new path for himself.  Fast forward to the perspective of Jeanne Anne McCullough in present day, Eli's great-granddaughter who is an aging oil baroness coming to grips with a deeper understanding of her former marriages and the lives of her children.  Not for the faint of heart, Meyer's sweeping novel has no shortage of murders, scalpings, and ruthlessness.  But it also has very lush and generous language, meticulously researched details of the eras, and distinctive characters and voices.  I didn't know where the novel was taking me at first, and it took me some time to get into the story, but ultimately I enjoyed the novel and its exploration of family and ambition.

Home on the Ranch

Judy Blunt's memoir Breaking Clean, about her thirty years spent on wheat and cattle ranches in Eastern Montana will rid the reader of any idealized notion of living an easy life out in nature and attending the iconic one-room school house as one's place of education.  Ms. Blunt talks of her childhood, her own marriage, her relationship with the land and the farm animals, and her coming into an understanding of her own self. as a self-assured woman in a very patriarchal landscape.  In lyrical yet no-nonsense prose, we are brought into Blunt's world through various stories of her life out on her ranch.  She conveys the expansiveness yet isolation of living nearly 50 miles from any significant town.  This book captures the gritty, hardscrabble life in its most stark realities.  While i wasn't necessarily captivated or wrapped up in the memoir, I learned a great deal about what it was like to be a woman living a ranch life so far from creature comforts. 

Still a Mystery, To Me

Having enjoyed William Kent Krueger's most recent novel, Ordinary Grace, I decided to try his very first book, Iron Lake, which is the first of many in a series that centers around retired sheriff Cork O'Connor.  Set in the blistering cold and wind of Minnesota, Iron Lake is a tale of love, deception, and more.  Ultimately, yes, it was a page-turner, but I discovered by the end that I didn't care much about how the mystery unraveled.  I think I am learning that I am much more a fan of novels that really center around character development and dialogue, and less around plot and intrigue.  This is probably considered a good mystery among mysteries.  For me, it was enjoyable in the moment but not memorable or one I will ponder at all. 

Potok Prevails!

I devoured Chaim Potok's sequel to My Name is Asher Lev, called The Gift of Asher Lev, as well as his first novel, The Chosen, in just one week.  They were both riveting novels - highly recommended.

The Gift of Asher Lev fast forwards about twenty years in Asher's life, and we now find him a married man with two children, and an internationally known and successful artist. Having been exiled to France after creating art as a young man that was seen as a desecration to his Ladover Hasidic community, Asher is now more at home in France than he is in the neighborhood in which he grew up in Brooklyn.  Asher receives word of a death in the family, and needs to return to Brooklyn for just a few days, which turns into several months.  Torn between the desire to create community for his children and reconcile with his parents, and to live a more free and unrestrained life in France, the book navigates loyalty to family and how this can conflict with one's own self preservation.  There are many touching scenes in the book between the characters, thus making it come to life in a way that My Name is Asher Lev did not achieve.  Overall, I suggest reading the two of them together - you won't be able to put them down!

I read The Chosen probably twenty years ago in high school, and I am happy that I took the time to read it again.  The book follows the friendship between Reuven and Danny as they come of age. Reuven lives with his widowed father, who is supportive of his wish to become a rabbi, and who himself has Zionist beliefs.  Danny's father is a rabbi and a highly religious Hasidic Jew, who has raised his son in silence and only communicates with him about the Talmud.  Despite the fact that Danny is expected through his lineage to become a rabbi, he is more interested in becoming a psychologist.  The two boys share their experiences and hardships together, and form a bond despite their different upbringings.  We see these same two characters again in Potok's The Promise.  Again, these would be a great two books to be read in tandem!

Potok's writing is intellectual yet accessible, and brings the reader into the insular world of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn in WWII and beyond.  Not to be missed!

Troubled Bridge Over Water

It all comes full circle for me with my beloved Willa Cather!  Alexander's Bridge, Cather's first novel, was published in 1912, and it was one of the last of her novels that I have read.  Ironically, I read this book in one sitting just a stone's throw away from a bridge that crosses the great Stanislaus River.  The story's protagonist is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who builds bridges.  Torn between his love for his wife Winifred in Boston and his lover Hilda in London who makes him feel alive and youthful, Alexander must navigate these relationships and becomes increasingly tormented.  Perhaps, given all the weight on his shoulders and his inability to move forward in either direction, life comes crashing down on him, literally, when his newest bridge collapses, despite the description earlier in the book as a man who had shoulders that "looked strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges...."  Perhaps some heavy handed metaphor here, but for a first novel, it still showed signs of Cather's greatness.  One of my favorite descriptions in the book is how Cather writes of how Winifred's face suggested "stormy possibilities."  One of her better shorter works, but still not comparable to the wonderful My Antonia.

Obscure Cather

Willa Cather's collection of three stories of the West, Obscure Destinies, was published in 1932.  The first story, "Neighbor Rosicky," tells the story of the patriarch of the farm, Rosicky, who cares for his land and his family in Nebraska.  It is a simple story, but a really warmhearted one.  My favorite scene is when old man Rosicky visits his son Rudolph and his daughter-in-law Polly. Worried about how Polly, a city girl, will take to farming life, he goes over to give them his car to borrow so they can go out to a night on the town.  Rosicky takes an apron off a hook and gently pushes Polly out of the way.  Cather writes, "That kind, reassuring grip on her elbows, the old man's funny bright eyes, made Polly want to drop her head on his shoulder for a second."  Cather finds such tenderness in the smallest moments.  The second story, "Old Mrs. Harris," follows the life of Grandma Harris, who is often stoic except when she beams with love for her grandchildren.  The neighbor, Mrs. Rosen often brings over coffee cake and tries to bring Mrs. Harris out of her shell.  As Cather writes, the house in which the Harris family lived was small and "Mrs. Harris and her 'things' were almost required to be invisible."  While Mrs. Harris may not take up very much space figuratively, she doesn't need more than her grandchildren to make her "perfectly happy."  Cather writes of Grandma Harris and her grandsons, "She and the twins were the same age; they had in common all the realest and truest things."  This sentiment really reminds me of Capote's short story, "A Christmas Memory" which follows the friendship of young Buddy and his older cousin Sook.  The final story, "Two Friends" is told from the perspective of a young boy who looks up to two older men in his small town, who "led more varied lives than the other men in our town."  These stories are classic Cather - not my favorites of hers, but still worth reading. 

Don't Pass By McMurtry

 

Larry McMurtry is a prolific writer who spins stories of the American West, many of which take place in Texas.  Having read his Pulitzer prize-winning epic novel Lonesome Dove earlier this year, I was curious to read his earliest (and much slimmer) novel, Horseman, Pass By, written in 1961.  An unsentimental, gritty, atmospheric work, Horseman, Pass By is set against the backdrop of a cattle ranch in post World War II Texas.  Lonnie Brannon is the teenage grandson of Homer Brannon, an honest and hardworking old time cattle man who has owned the ranch for many years.  Homer's stepson Hud also lives at the ranch, and Lonnie is both repulsed by and intrigued by Hud's selfish, ruthless and "mean" ways.  McMurtry brings the tale to life with his description of the ranch landscape, the open sky, and the way a small town can make a person yearn to see the wider world. 

The heart and art of Asher

My Name is Asher Lev, written by Chaim Potok and published in 1972, tells the story of a young boy growing up as a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn who discovers at an early age that he has a gift.  Asher explores his gift by starting to draw the world around him - the streets near his house, his mother, people he sees in his Brooklyn neighborhood, etc.  Those around him discover that he possesses greatness.  His father dismisses his work as foolishness and wishes that he spend more time on his studies and on honoring his parents.  Torn between Asher and his father is Asher's selfless mother who must carefully balance her love for her son and her husband.  Asher's father believes that his son should be able to control his impulse to create art, and to fight against this "evil."  While Asher feels that his father has "aesthetic blindness," Asher's father is worried about what may be his son's "moral blindness."  The rabbi decides to connect Asher with the great Jacob Kahn (a nonobservant Jew), who takes Asher under his wing and teaches him about many important artists and techniques.  The book culminates with a big art show that Asher has in New York, in which he presents a piece that scandalizes his community, so much so that he is asked to go study at a yeshiva in Paris.  I really loved this book - it is written with crystalline language and captures Asher's passion for art and his love for his family, his mother's devotion and anguish, and his father's struggle between pride for his son and a longing for his son to have followed in his footsteps.  With intellectual savvy and emotional acuity, Potok has created a classic masterpiece. 

A Visit into a Writer's Mind, and to Chile

Ways of Going Home is Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra's third novel, which interweaves the story of the protagonist with the writer of the story, and flashes back and forth from the time of the Pinochet dictatorship to modern day.  It is a poetic, short novel, which captures the mindset of a writer and the insular world of childhood.  An interesting and unique read which sheds light on Chilean life and culture, but not a book that is a stand-out for me.  Zambra is clearly a very talented young writer, with a clear point of view and sparse but lyrical writing style.  

Mere Mortals

Willa Cather's novel My Mortal Enemy, written in 1926, tells the story of Myra Driscoll, a woman of strong character and opinion.  Not my favorite Cather novel (it is over so quickly), but still includes some beautiful passages by Cather, in which she succeeds in very distinctly describing some of the people in the short novel, as follows:

"She looked strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for its absurdities." 

"I felt that his life had not suited him; that he possessed some kind of courage and force which slept, which in another sort of world might have asserted themselves brilliantly." 

Re-visiting Potent Potok

 

On a recent visit to the library, I was looking for a copy of Charles Portis' True Grit (see earlier review below)  Finding myself in the "Po..." section, Chaim Potok's novel The Promise caught my eye.  Having remembered enjoying The Chosen many years ago, I thought I would take on another Potok work.  The Promise is a wonderful novel in many ways - the construction of the narrative, the pace, the character development, and the deep exploration of ideas in an intellectual yet accessible manner.  I couldn't put it down, and I was very interested to learn what would happen.  The story centers around Reuven Malter, a young man living in post-WWII Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studying to be a rabbi at a yeshiva.  He has a difficult relationship with one of his teachers, Rav Kalman, who takes great issue with his way of interpreting and questioning sacred Jewish texts.  Meanwhile, Reuven becomes intertwined in the life of a troubled teenage boy, Michael, who is a patient of Reuven's good friend Danny, a newly minted psychologist.  I learned a great deal about Judaism in this novel, and it is written in a highly intriguing way.  This is novel of ideas and of great tenderness.  I will be reading more (and maybe all) of Potok's novels, based on the highly satisfying experience contained in the luminous pages of The Promise.