Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying,
Let's not forget this.
--David Eggers
Atria Books, 2014. 337 pages.
Fiction Favorites
As years go by and pages turn, I find myself willfully disdaining and wantonly disparaging works of well-received, wildly popular, widely recommended contemporary fiction. Just because I can. Becoming, I fear, a bit of a literary curmudgeon, a book-wielding crank, a narrative killjoy… a well-read wet blanket! Every so often, however, I break from willfulness and wantonness, flat-out enjoying that which I meant to eschew. Which brings us to this book—a well-received, wildly popular, and widely recommended piece of contemporary fiction penned by one of Sweden’s most successful authors. This man called Ove is a curmudgeon, a crank, a killjoy, a wet blanket—a våt filt, so to Swedishly speak. Neighbors refer to him as the bitter neighbor from hell. But when a congenial young family moves in next door, Ove’s solitary world turns upside down, inside out, and round about. And as it turns round about, behind Ove’s curmudgeonly façade is a story; beyond the rigid principles and strict routines is a tale to tell—and a heart-rending one at that. This is a thoughtful consideration of our collected connectedness and of the impact one life has on other lives, a Scandinavian variation of It’s a Wonderful Life. Or Det är ett underbart liv, so to Swedishly speak.
TICK-TOCK: All people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if'....
As years go by and pages turn, I find myself willfully disdaining and wantonly disparaging works of well-received, wildly popular, widely recommended contemporary fiction. Just because I can. Becoming, I fear, a bit of a literary curmudgeon, a book-wielding crank, a narrative killjoy… a well-read wet blanket! Every so often, however, I break from willfulness and wantonness, flat-out enjoying that which I meant to eschew. Which brings us to this book—a well-received, wildly popular, and widely recommended piece of contemporary fiction penned by one of Sweden’s most successful authors. This man called Ove is a curmudgeon, a crank, a killjoy, a wet blanket—a våt filt, so to Swedishly speak. Neighbors refer to him as the bitter neighbor from hell. But when a congenial young family moves in next door, Ove’s solitary world turns upside down, inside out, and round about. And as it turns round about, behind Ove’s curmudgeonly façade is a story; beyond the rigid principles and strict routines is a tale to tell—and a heart-rending one at that. This is a thoughtful consideration of our collected connectedness and of the impact one life has on other lives, a Scandinavian variation of It’s a Wonderful Life. Or Det är ett underbart liv, so to Swedishly speak.
TICK-TOCK: All people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if'....
New York Review Books, 2012 (1962). 241 pages.
Oldies But Goodies
I’ve had positive experiences with New York Review Books: under-read authors, forgotten titles, books removed from
the literary limelight by time and space… a formulation for satisfying, oh-so-clever reading. In this late-autumn selection, reliably unreliable narrator Cassandra Edwards, a graduate student at Berkeley,
travels to her family’s ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills for her twin
sister’s wedding to a fine young doctor from Connecticut. We learn that
Cassandra has complicated feelings about her brandy-swigging father—a retired
professor of philosophy—and that she struggles with the persistent psychic
disruption of a dead mother. Her most complicated feelings and most persistent
psychic disruptions, however, are reserved for Judith, her un-identically identical
twin and life-long alter-ego. Consequently, Cassandra appears bound-and-determined to
sabotage the impending nuptials. Along the way, we learn that Cassandra is
gay—a significant, if somewhat circumspect, point of character development,
muffled by oblique allusion, vague innuendo, and mid-century mores. Cassandra is at once self-aware and downright absurd, conniving
and candid, hopeful and heartbroken, exasperating and sympathetic. This tragicomic novella doesn’t look or act its age. I found it to be incisive and insightful… a quirky coming-of-age story coming to terms with identity, love, and a one-and-only life.
TICK-TOCK: It was time for us to
decide on one thing or another, either be what we should be or become something
else....
Harper Perennial, 2010. 337 pages.
History and Travel
Daniel James Brown has a way of spinning meticulous research into fine storytelling. In The Boys in the Boat, we rode along in that eight-man shell as it skimmed across Depression-era waters into Olympic history. Here, we live and breathe a subtitle: the harrowing saga of a Donner Party bride. This is a family's story, a frontier adventure, a tragic history wrought from naive optimism, uninformed decisions, and simple bad luck. It's also a practically unfathomable survival story. The narrative follows twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves who, in the spring of 1846, journeys west with her new husband, her parents, and her eight siblings. Seven months later, after meeting up with a pioneer party led by George Donner, Sarah and her family reach the high Sierra Nevada, just as the season's first heavy snowfall closes the pass ahead and cuts off the dream of California. In early December, starving to death by degrees, Sarah and a select group of relatively young, relatively healthy souls set out on improvised snowshoes over snow-bound mountains in a desperate search for help. Curled up in a favorite reading chair, sheltered in a warm, bright house, I feel it nonetheless. Line by line, excruciating footstep by excruciating footstep, the grip of abject hunger and biting, howling-wind horror fills the room.
TICK-TOCK: For the first time, the anxiety that had been eating at the company for weeks gave way to something close to stark terror....
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig.
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1999 (1978). 314 pages.
Nonfiction and Biography
We stumbled upon Ivan Doig during our late-summer visit to the Valley Bookstore in Jackson, Wyoming. Trusting the bookseller's impeccable inventory, we bought into this memoir about growing up in the American West. Memoir writing is, of course, a highly personal endeavor: a literary exercise to decipher the past and to make sense of what follows. Doig's memoir has much to say about the formative power of family: a father, a mother, a grandmother-- people who loved him, cared for him, nurtured him, before sending him into the wider world. This is also a memoir of the land, the rugged wilderness of western Montana, and how that landscape shaped him. This House of Sky is not a hefty tome and one may contrive to polish it off in a session or two. But more likely, and more satisfactorily, one may choose to take it slow, to linger between the lines, to savor the prose and the poetry, the clear-eyed honesty and the haunting nostalgia of Doig's story.
TICK-TOCK: My mood there was to see everything as the edges of tomorrows, as if time were waiting in coiled shimmers behind the outline of whatever my watch picked out....
Heart Earth by Ivan Doig.
Harcourt, 2006 (1993). 160 pages.
Nonfiction and Biography
Written and published after This House of Sky, Heart Earth is essentially a prequel to Doig's acclaimed memoir. I read this one first; my husband read the other one first; we both enjoyed both and are enriched immeasurably by tripping Doig's biographical timeline. Set during and after World War II, Heart Earth traces the Doig family's journey from Montana to Arizona, their time in a desert boomtown, and their return-- a homecoming of sorts-- to the high country wilderness of Montana. This slim volume is also a tribute to a mother lost-too-soon: Bernetta Doig succumbed to asthma at age 31, on her son's sixth birthday. Drawing from a cache of letters, a scattering of black-and-white photographs, and his own memories coaxed into focus, Doig creates a prose poem, a portrait of an indomitable spirit consigned to a frail, failing frame. In her short time with him, Bernetta Doig instilled a love of language in her son: the son's recompense rests on the pages of this book. Doig passed away in 2015. We are grateful he shared the story while he was here.
TICK-TOCK: Like light, time is both particle and wave....
Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman.
Berkley Books, 2002 (1947). 313 pages.
Oldies But Goodies
This is something that I should have discovered a long time ago but didn't: a book group summer reading recommendation, a charming almost-classic based on real-life characters, penned by a real-life husband and wife team. Interesting. When sixteen-year-old Katherine O'Fallon travels from her Boston home to her uncle's ranch in Calgary, Alberta, she gains a measure of respiratory health in the bracing Canadian air-- and loses her heart to Sgt. Mike Flannigan, a member of the Northwest Mounted Police. What ensues is a tender, touching love story: courageous, kind, good-natured Mountie Mike and his beloved Kathy, aka Mrs. Mike, live and love, finding happiness and encountering heartache in the harshly beautiful North Country wilderness. Bonus points for use of the charmingly outdated pet name You Little Minx....
TICK-TOCK: During the day you've got the sun, and at night the stars. From them you'll learn to tell time....
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Viking, 2013. 501 pages.
Historical Fiction
This has been waiting patiently on a to-be-read shelf for nigh unto four years. In spring, as my garden burst into bloom, I thought, It may be time, at long last, to pick up that well-researched botanical-historical fiction and give it a whirl. Alma Whittaker, born at the dawn of the nineteenth century, inherits her father's botanically-inclined mind and his considerable fortune. Ahead of her time, out of step with traditional feminine behaviors of her time, teetering on the brink of spinsterhood, clear-headed scientist Alma falls precipitously, hopelessly in love with Ambrose Pike, an itinerant orchid artist, utopian dreamer, and ardent spiritualist. If this all sounds complicated and weird, yes it is, and yes it is. And yet. And yet. The Whittaker saga whisks us from London to Peru, from Philadelphia to Tahiti, from the Age of Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution-- and we are genuinely engrossed, entertained, and educated.
TICK-TOCK: She thought again about the four
distinct and concurrent varieties of time, as she had once named them: Divine
Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time… One thing was certain: Human Time
was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever
existed. She tried her best to ignore it. Nevertheless, the days passed by....
The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman.
Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2016. 365 pages.
Historical Fiction
A tropical island! A dream of Paris! Forgotten history! Forbidden love!
Impressionist painting! Coming of age on St. Thomas in the early nineteenth
century, Rachel often thinks about a different life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s
mother, a bastion of social convention in an enclave of refugee Jews, cannot
and will not condone her daughter’s nonconformist tendencies and far-flung
dreams. Plots are laid and plans are made, all about Rachel, none by Rachel. After
an arranged marriage to a much-older widower with three children, an unexpected
death, an estate to be settled, and the arrival of a handsome, much-younger
nephew from France, Rachel takes charge of her life trajectory, embarking on a scandalous
love affair and an equally scandalous marriage to Frederick the much-younger-nephew-estate-settler.
Hoffman’s prose is light and lush, with luminosity reminiscent of Impressionist
painting and sensory luxuriance rivaling the island’s exotic milieu. There is much
to admire in this snippet of history mingled with magical realism, this richly
imagined portrait of the woman who gave birth to Camille Pissarro, the Father
of Impressionism.
TICK-TOCK: Time was like a river,
and I was a fish in that river, moving so quickly that the world outside my
household was a blur….
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott.
Farrar, 2017. 256 pages.
Historical Fiction
Alice McDermott has long been a book group favorite, dating to a decade-and-a-half-ago reading of Charming Billy. Her most recent offering
invites us to ponder the scope and bounds of love: the nature of forgiveness
and forgetfulness, the tension between sacrifice and self-fulfillment… our
obligation to others, to ourselves, to our God. In the early 1900s, on a cheerless
winter afternoon in Brooklyn, an Irish immigrant named Jim—out of work, down on
luck, determined to assert that the hours of his life belong to himself
alone—opens up his tenement’s gas taps, nearly incinerating the neighborhood
and, as intended, ending his life. Suicide, obviously, removes Jim from
the narrative, but the act has plot-propelling consequences for those he leaves
behind: specifically, his wife Annie and an unborn daughter. Initially comforted
and counselled by aging Sister St. Saviour of the Little Nursing Sisters of the
Sick Poor, Annie eventually secures work and a way forward at the convent, raising
daughter Sally, assisting demanding-yet-doting Sister Illuminata in the
basement laundry, and befriending feisty Sister Jeanne. McDermott is a master
at delineating the Irish-American experience; her characters are sharply drawn
and sympathetic; her prose is fluid and chock-full of sensory data. I leave the
book with the distinct impression that there were a lot of aromas wafting
through turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, many of them unpleasant—and with new
appreciation for the snap-starched steadfastness of freshly laundered sheets.
TICK-TOCK: Isn’t it funny how we
all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives….
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 290 pages.
Fiction Favorites
Confession: I picked this up when, for
cyber-profiling-demographic-trolling reasons beyond my comprehension, the Facebook
newsfeed insisted I would like it. The story builds several character-space-time suspension bridges
between three lives, three continents, and three centuries. Not the finest-ever
feats of literary engineering—but sturdy enough to keep the pages turning—and
skilled enough to slow the page-turning down as we savor the suspense. Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos paints her way to an appointment as the
first female master painter at the Guild of St. Luke. She produces an unusual,
haunting winter landscape, At the Edge of the Wood. Manhattan, 1957: Marty de
Groot, inheritor of the de Vos landscape, wallows in wealth and an unhappy
marriage—even as Ellie Shipley, a cash-strapped art history student from
Australia, accepts a commission to paint a forgery of the work. Sydney, 2000:
Ellie, now a well-respected art historian, is curating an exhibit of female
Dutch painters of the Golden Age—and both the original and forged versions of
the painting threaten to arrive on scene, exposing fraudulent brushwork and
deceits of the past. Thanks, Facebook!
TICK-TOCK: She’s
suspended in time. Vermeer wants us to believe that the light is still pouring
down….
Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range by Jack Turner.
St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 248 pages.
History and Travel
Heeding the advice of my wise and well-read husband, I packed this
memoir-cum-climbing reminiscence-cum-philosophical essay-cum-natural history in
a rolling duffel to read during our August visit to Wyoming. Turner, a long-time climber and guide with the prestigious Exum Mountain
Guides, is Thoreau-like in his immersive contemplation of landscape: in this
case, the temper and the times, the flora and the fauna, the weather and the wildness,
the various and sundry inhabitants and seasonal stewards of the Tetons, a
forty-mile swath of fault-block wonderment in western Wyoming—and Turner’s
self-claimed home range. We’ve been traveling to and trekking through the Tetons over the course
of two decades now, endlessly in awe and always with reverence for this most
beautiful, most beckoning mountain landscape. This year, it was a pleasure to
travel and trek a few miles with Jack Turner.
TICK-TOCK: This book does not
describe a single year in my life… it portrays a representational year. It is
more like a painting than a photograph… My imagination has arranged them, not
the race of time….
Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold by Anne Tyler.
Hogarth Shakespeare, 2016. 237 pages.
Fiction Favorites
The Hogarth Shakespeare project offers Shakespearean tragedies and
comedies retold by acclaimed and best-selling contemporary authors. The concern
is, of course, that the proposition sounds a bit gimmicky and that re-telling
will fall far short of the Bard’s most beloved works. In this December read, Kate Battista is in a long-running rut, running house and home for an eccentric
scientist father and a pretty-precocious younger sister. Kate's quirky
personality and forthright workplace manner frequently land her in tepid water with
parents of her adoring, adorable pre-school charges. When her father’s brink-of-breakthrough scientific research is threatened by the imminent deportation of brilliant young lab assistant Pyotr, an outrageous, silly, delightful plan is
hatched, and success all depends on Kate. Will she be able to resist? ‘Tis
hatch’d and shall be so…. Okay, so perhaps a bit gimmicky—but a good sort of gimmicky. And
perhaps not up to Shakespeare snuff, but Tyler writes crackerjack
domestic-fiction-comedy-of-manners stuff. One reviewer opines that Tyler’s
re-telling channels Jane Austen as much as William Shakespeare. Fine by me, and
a fine, fine read.
TICK-TOCK: He just went on
smiling at her. He seemed to have all the time in the world….
To quote Dr. Seuss, How did it get so late so soon?
Wishing Us All a Happy, Healthy, Peaceful New Year—
With Plenty of Time to Read!
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