Girl Detective

I committed to reading Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife because my friend Amy was reading it for an online discussion at In Our Study, and because I was CERTAIN I’d be done reading the Morning News Tournament of Books books. That was before I faced down Wolf Hall, however. Thus I found myself reading Anne Frank:tBtLtA alongside Wolf Hall as March rolled into April.

AF: tBtLtA pulled me in quickly and drew me through, hardly what I expected of a book of literary analysis. I have fond memories of reading Anne’s diary when I was a girl. But the last time I remember reading the book was in 5th grade for a book report; I’d have been 10 or 11. I had read it at least once before. Its details were vague until I started reading Prose. Her careful reading of the book and thorough research into its history immediately brought back many particulars.

The myth of Anne, begun with the publication of her diary and fueled by a later play and film, is that she was a girl like any other, writing in her diary while hiding in an attic from Nazis in WWII Holland. The group was caught by the Nazis, sent to camps, and all but Anne’s father died. Most teaching plans for the book focus on Anne as a typical teenager in a unique situation. They don’t usually deal with her intelligence, her skills as a writer. They don’t often study the reason she was in the attic, and how racism and genocide are alive in today’s world.

Prose has immense respect for Anne, not only as a person who was killed in the Holocaust, but as a writer and skilled editor of her own work. Anne’s diary, we know, survived. But what most don’t know, and Prose tells carefully and compellingly, is that Anne’s diary isn’t one simple thing. Near the end of their time in the attic, she heard a broadcast by an exiled politician urging Dutch families to document their experience in war, so others would learn of it afterward. Anne started then to edit her diary in longhand on loose sheets of paper. Both the diary and the loose sheets survived, and her father edited them using mostly the revised version, with some original entries added back in, and some passages about Anne’s tempestuous relationship with her mother removed. (Extensive handwriting analysis has proved that Anne was the author of the documents, her father only an editor.) So there are really three versions of Anne’s “diary”: the original diary, the revised diary, and the edited compilation know to most people.

Prose divides her book into four sections. The Life deals with the historical details of Anne’s life. The Book is about her father’s struggle to find a publisher for the book. The Afterlife is largely about the play and movie based on the book, and the critical problems they raise: that Anne is presented as a silly, flighty girl characterized by hope, and that her Jewishness, and thus the reason for their internment in the attic and later deaths, is largely effaced. A segment on teaching the book in schools ends the book.

I recommend this book highly to anyone who ever read Anne’s book, and even for those who haven’t. I plan to watch the PBS production of Anne Frank this weekend, and hope it presents a more nuanced, complex and Jewish heroine than have previous adaptations of the diary. Prepared by Prose’s excellent book, I also very much look forward to reading a version of the diary again, which will be done by the group at In Our Study.

I was initially put off from reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall by its lengthy character list (98 people plus 2 family trees) and guarded reviews from Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly. Friend Kate F recommended it, then it was chosen as a contender in The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books after it had already won the Man Booker prize; I decided to go for it, even buying it as the queue for it at the library was so long. It went on to win the National Book Critics Circle award, as well as the rooster prize in the ToB.

And so, I wish I could say I loved it more. At 500+ pages, it’s big, but not prohibitively so. Set during the reign of Henry VIII, its main character is Thomas Cromwell, son of a drunk, abusive blacksmith father. He rises to power and becomes a confidant and councillor to Henry during the latter’s “Great Matter”–his desire to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Along the way, Cromwell also stealthily aids England’s break with Rome and the protestant reformation.

As Mantel writes him, Cromwell is a fascinating, complex character. Yet I found him too perfect. He “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows every language, can psychologize everyone, can remember everything (including the entire New Testament), and makes money as if he were breathing. The book ends when he’s still in his ascendancy, without a hint of his fall, five years hence.

I found the book too much, too. There were so many characters, so many ups and downs, that as I neared the end I stopped trying to remember or go back for which lord this was, or what event that referred to.

I struggled with the writing, as well. Mantel chose 3rd person present tense. I often became disoriented with her third person, till I realized that when in doubt, “he” usually meant Cromwell.

So: Stephen Gardiner. Going out, as he’s coming in. It’s wet, and for a night in April, unseasonably warm, but Gardiner wears furs, which look like oily and dense black feathers; he stands now, ruffling them, gathering his clothes about his tall straight person like black angel’s wings.

“Late,” Master Stephen says unpleasantly.

He is bland. “Me, or your good self?”

“You.” He waits.

“Drunks on the river. The boatmen say it’s the eve of one of their patron saints.”

“Did you offer a prayer to her?”

“I’ll pray to anyone, Stephen, till I’m on dry land.”

Third person, though, allows her access to other characters besides Cromwell, and present tense makes for an immersive feeling of the time. This did convey the slow, agonizing process of Henry’s divorce and remarriage to Anne, yet didn’t endear the book to me.

The book has been almost universally lauded, along with its awards. Mantel writes evocatively and concisely. Cromwell and the characters are fascinating and engaging. Additionally, her choices, such as the ambiguous third person and the abrupt ending, can be seen as brave authorial choices, as noted in Stephen Greenblatt’s review from The NYRB:

The point is not to create an insoluble puzzle but to make you, the reader, do a little work in order to orient yourself. And orienting yourself in this novel always means returning to Cromwell

and Olivia Laing’s in The Guardian:

By ending without a dramatic resolution, she allows the “what happened next” of the historical record to underscore her central, sobering message: that human kindness and idealism are no match for the fickleness of fortune.

In the end, I I found Wolf Hall chilly, distant, and over populated, but still admired it and learned from it.

I was warned off A Gate at the Stairs by more than one reader friend. Eh, they said, it’s not her best. Read her stories instead. So I was a little disappointed to see it on the short list for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, but decided to read it anyway. I agree it’s not a great book, but am not sorry I read it.

In the fall of 2001, Tassie Keltjin is a midwestern college student who grew up on her father’s boutique farm in Wisconsin. Searching for a job, she stumbles into a nanny position for an older couple who are adopting. An older, more experienced Tassie narrates, so there’s often a mismatch between the voice telling the story and the naive, inexperienced girl whose story it’s telling. The couple, Sarah and Edward, are socially awkward and uncomfortable, and there is little comfort to be found in the pages of this novel. But it’s even unsettling in its unsettlingness, as the book itself seems cold, distant and disjointed. A paragraph toward the end of the book captured the feeling I had when I read it:

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting, unimportant but spell-bindingly mad speeches (249)

This book has many threads. There’s Tassie’s coming-of-age story, the mystery of why Sarah and Edward’s marriage seems so strange, a subplot about terrorism and another about the military, a critique of well-intentioned liberals, and, throughout, questions about race and racism. They never quite came together for me, and perhaps that wasn’t Moore’s intention, as she hints at in the above paragraph. And while she can write beautiful, attention-getting sentences and passages, I found myself wanting a deeper, more coherent narrative. I can see why her style might be better suited to short stories.

I saw Nicholson Baker read from The Anthologist at last fall’s Rain Taxi Festival of Books. He was funny and clever, but I wasn’t moved to read the book till it was a contender at this year’s Tournament of Books. I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

Paul Chowder, the narrator, is a poet trying to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems he’s put together. Paul’s writers block is the stuff that 12-step programs are made for. His girlfriend has moved out, he keeps injuring himself and he’s obsessed with cleaning his office instead of writing.

In between his dryly hilarious musings on his sad sack life, Paul holds forth on poetry, explaining in a clear, entertaining manner why rhyme is often reviled, and why pentameter is just plain wrong. He quotes many poets, including Mary Oliver, who I read and enjoyed last year. Chowder made me like poetry, which I generally don’t, and made me want to read more, which is unusual for me. There’s not much by way of plot here, but there’s plenty of Paul, who’s a great character. And the ending is not only charming, but a clever way of reframing the book. This was a smart, quick, funny read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

This month’s selection for one of my book groups, The Yamas and Niyamas,: Exploring Yoga’s Ethical Practice by Deborah Adele, is a good book for those who have taken yoga class and want to learn more about the philosophy. Yoga classes, in which asanas, or poses, are practiced, is the third of eight paths of yoga. The Yamas and Niyamas are the first two. Yamas is Sanskrit for “restraints,” which include nonviolence, truthfulness, nonstealing, nonexcess, and nonpossessiveness. Niyamas mean “observances” and include, purity, contentment, self-discipline, self-study and surrender.

Adele, an experienced yoga teacher and life coach, gives each of the Yamas and Niyamas their own chapter, which includes both real-life stories and yogic quotes and adages. The chapters are accessible and engaging. At the end of each chapter, Adele suggests a focus of practice, and encourages journaling for four weeks on four different aspects of each. In this way, she far exceeds the purview of most self-help books, which are easy to forget once the cover is closed. Here, patient, persistent practice is advised, just as in a yoga class.

Those who practice other religions will find the content consistent with other philosophies. I found the the Yamas and Niyamas, their meanings and practices, corresponded closely to those of the Ten Commandments, e.g., nonviolence = do not murder, truthfulness = do not bear false witness, nonstealing = do not steal, and more. The Commandments also, like the Yamas and Niyamas, are split in half, but in the opposite order of the Yamas and Niyamas. The first five commandments focus on religious practice (though there’s some dispute over #5, honor they father and mother), while the final five focus on life conduct, and are phrased similarly to the Yamas “non” with the negative “do not.”

I followed the journaling advice, and found it helpful and not difficult. This is a good book for clearing the mind and focusing, and for those wanting to take their yoga practice to the next level.

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is one of those word-of-mouth bestsellers, that women friends recommend to their friends, then all the book groups are reading it, when it’s still in hardcover, no less. Doing so well, in fact, that the publisher is delaying the paperback. Other books that have had similar trajectories are Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Pie Society (which I quite enjoyed).

Don’t consult the cover if you want to know what it’s about; for that, see the UK version, deemed too controversial for American audiences. Set in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 60’s, chapters alternate first-person point of view between two domestic servants of white families, Aibileen and Minnie, and Skeeter, a white-woman friend of their employers. Reading this book made me profoundly uncomfortable. Not only does Stockett, a white woman raised by a domestic in the South, write from the first person, but she chooses to write in dialect for the black characters, but not for the white ones.

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.

Stockett faces the same dilemma as her fictional counterpart, Skeeter, who interviews the maids in her town to detail the many injustices and cruelties of institutional racism in a southern US city. Stockett’s intention is good; she’s trying to conscientiously give voice to those who didn’t have it, and at the same time educate readers on the countless horrifying particulars of life during the time of Jim Crow laws. Her book is good. It’s a readable tale of a group of women who love and support one another, and who fight for justice in a violent and vicious environment.

In the end, though, there were few, if any, surprises for me. The plots unfolded predictably. Several of the mysteries, like Minnie’s “Terrible Awful,” the fate of Skeeter’s caregiver Constantine, and the secret of Minnie’s new boss, Miss Celia, were easy to guess, and were strung out so long they lost their power to shock, as they were meant to. Most of the characters were caricatures of ones I’ve seen too many times. Aibileen is the loving mammy. Minnie is the sassy maid. Her husband is the drunk wife beater. Miss Celia is the white-trash hottie who married up and whom all the other women envy. Skeeter is the conscience of the town. Her childhood friend, Hilly, is the villain.

Stockett does a decent job of making her white characters, like Hilly and Aibileen’s boss, Elizabeth, complex. Hilly is racist, yet she loves her children. Elizabeth neglects her daughter, yet lives in fear of Hilly and is in turn neglected by her husband. But the black characters for the most part are two-dimensional–all good, all hard working, all persecuted by their white employers.

I wish Stockett would have constructed her book and conveyed the truths within in a way that didn’t trespass so blatantly on the lesser social status of her subjects by trying to speak in their voices. In the book, Skeeter edits the maids’ stories, she doesn’t write them. Perhaps if the entire book had been in third person, or if the maids’ sections had been, that might have troubled me less. Especially since Stockett chose to put one central chapter in the third person, without dialect, and it worked well.

This is a complicated book to talk about. It’s a good story, capably written, with many sympathetic characters. But it’s also manipulative, simplistic, and perhaps enacts vestiges of the racism the author purports to expose. I know many people loved it, but I definitely didn’t. I doubt I’d even recommend it.

See this discussion at Amazon for more from people who have problems with this book.

Last year’s National Book Award for fiction winner, and one of the first “players” in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, Collum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin pivots around Phillip Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in August 1974.

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed , until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

The novel is constructed of chapters from different characters’ points of view, all related somehow to Petit’s walk and ultimately all related to one another. There’s a struggling priest advocating for the prostitutes in his neighborhood, his brother who recently emigrated from Ireland, mothers of boys killed in Vietnam, computer hackers, failed artists, and more. It builds tension as the stories begin and connect to the event, and becomes taut in the middle as they all come together. The last few chapters lost momentum for me, as they played out stories I thought would happen anyway. But the overall novel, fictionalized from an historic event, crowded with memorable, relate-able characters described in prose so skilled I hardly noticed how good it was, is a good read, and a very good book.

For more on Petit’s walk, see the Oscar-nominated Man on Wire, or read the Caldecott-winning children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle is one of those sleeper contenders in The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books. Good reviews, but very few copies in my library system, and a huge queue. Lured with a coupon, I bought a copy. And don’t regret it one jot.

Don’t look for dignity in public bathrooms. The most you’ll find is privacy and sticky floors. But when my boss gave me the glossy envelope, the bathroom was the first place I ran. What can I say? Lurking in toilets was my job.

Ricky Ray is a bus-station janitor in upstate New York when he receives an envelope that moves his life in a new direction. He’s been a junkie, a thief, even part of a cult, but none of these have prepared him for the strangeness he’s about to encounter when he’s invited to a place called The Washburn Library.

The details of this book are so lovely and strange I don’t want to spoil them. This is a surprising book that includes elements of horror, spirituality, mystery, even a kind of coming-of-age. The central characters are all black, and the story’s blend of mystical realism reminded me, in a good way, of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. It is by turns funny, tragic, horrifying, and wondrous. Throughout, though, it made me want to turn its pages. When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it, or wanting to get back to reading it. This book, like Lowboy, is one I probably wouldn’t have discovered or sought out on my own, if not for the ToB. But I’m very glad to have made its acquaintance.

I’m trying to cram in as many of The Morning News Tournament of Books contenders as I can before it begins on 3/8, but David Benioff’s City of Thieves jumped the queue by coming into the library about a month ahead of when I needed it for next month’s Books and Bars discussion. While I’m now woefully behind on my ToB OCD (brackets!), I don’t begrudge City of Thieves. It was fabulous.

There are two beginnings. One is by the author, named David who is a screenwriter of superhero mutant movies in Hollywood. He’s asked to write something autobiographical, and instead wants to know what happened to his grandfather during WWII.

David begins:

My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen.

And continues in Chapter One with Lev, the grandfather’s story:

You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier–all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages–eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.

Lev is 17 during the siege of Leningrad. His mother and sister have left the city. His father, a poet, was taken by secret police and never returned. With his friends, he watches the night skies for German planes; one evening he sees a paratrooper. What follows leads to his arrest and imminent execution. In a bizarre circumstance, he and another young man, Kolya, are spared and put on a singular mission: find a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of a secret police colonel’s daughter. As Lev and Kolya’s adventure spins out, it becomes many things: a Nazi story, horror tale, buddy journey, tragedy, even romance. Once it gets to a bitter twist of a denouement, City of Thieves has taken on the trappings of a folk story. This is a grand tale, well written and peopled with characters I hope will linger with me. There are many books I like, and admire. This one, I flat-out loved.

Volume 13 of the comic-book series Fables, The Great Fables Crossover, is a welcome respite from the near-unrelenting darkness and violence of the last few volumes. This compilation includes issues from Fables, Jack of Fables, and The Literals miniseries.

How thoroughly you enjoy this book may depend on how well you like the character of Jack. You know, Jack: Frost, Horner, the Giant Killer, Be-Nimble, and the Bean Stalk, etc. I stopped reading the Jack of Fables series when I found him more insufferable than funny. And while he has some good bits in this volume, especially his meta-textual intos and outros, anytime he was on page I couldn’t wait for him to get off.

More entertaining, I thought, was learning more about The Literals, characters like Gary the Pathetic Fallacy, Mr. Revise who can edit stories permanently (ever heard of the four little pigs? He’s why not.), and the Page sisters, who are kick-ass librarians with magic powers.

The villain this time is not the bad guy from The Dark Ages. Apparently he’s taking a back seat during this romp. No less evil, though, is Kevin Thorn, who is able to write worlds in and out of existence. He’s struggling for the words to unmake the world, which has gone on so long without his intervention that he’s appalled by how things have turned out: The Big Bad Wolf is in human form, married to Snow White, and a father? Gepetto became so much more than a puppet maker? As he struggles against his twin Writer’s Block, the Fables and Literals race to eliminate Kevin before he does the same to them.

Pink elephants! Theocratic badgers! Girls with glasses and really big guns! Babe the blue ox, insane and funny! Plus a little girl who’s not as sweet as she looks. This is a fun, clever diversion, too heavy on Jack, but a nice break until we get back to the good and grim stuff, which I’m sure will happen soon.

I’d read about and been interested in Logicomix, a comic-book fictional history of Bertrand Russell and his struggles to clarify the foundations of logic and mathematics. My husband G. Grod is a math geek, and a fan of Russell and Kurt Godel, who is instrumental in the history, as well as Alan Turing, who plays an important role in framing the end of the narrative. I’ve become a fan by association of these great thinkers, so the subject interested me. Then when it was added to The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books I decided to buy it for G. Grod for Christmas, as a not unselfish gift that still wasn’t exactly a bowling ball with “Homer” on it.

Doxiadis seems to be the instigator for the book, but it is certainly a team effort, both in production and in narrative, since all the creators are also included in and commenting on the work, a clever method of self-reference, a logic term that Russell’s Paradox is an example of. Christos Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science and author of a book on Turing. He was consulted and involved both to confirm the broad strokes of Russell’s story and legacy, and to engage the creative team in an effort to better the book. Art and color were done by husband/wife team of Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. Interchanges among the creators frame most chapters, and offer commentary on the ambiguities in the story. Russell mostly narrates his own story through a frame of a lecture, starting with his childhood as an orphan in the severely regulated house of his grandmother and his introduction to mathematics by a charismatic tutor.e

The authors do an admirable job of portraying both the characters involved in the evolution of logic and mathematics, and in the explication of some complex examples of both, which could easily have bogged down the narrative, which instead proceeds at a lively clip. Russell is a typical hero in the classic mode: orphaned, struggling in childhood with overbearing adults, moving on to his quest (for the foundations in logic), struggling with monsters (a streak of mental illness in his family, also found frequently in his colleagues), and, as in the real world, coming to an end that is both happy and sad, depending on how one views it, but certainly complex. It’s because of Russell and his colleague’s heroic narrative that Doxiadis thought to make the story in comic-book form, which works well. The art is clear and easy to read. while also embodying at times more than one level of meaning.

In the end, though, I didn’t find this to rise as high as some exemplars of the comic-book format, like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Persepolis/Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus/Maus II by Art Spiegelman. The story is good, the art is good, both together are better than either alone, yet somehow it never became far more than the sum of its parts, as the above titles did for me. Logicomix is entertaining, provocative, educational and very good, even as I felt it didn’t quite achieve the true greatness of its subjects.

At first glance, John Wray’s Lowboy looked like a run-of-the-mill YA novel–young mentally ill boy gets lost in NYC. It sounded rather like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Then I looked at the reviews, and looked again, because they were impressive–stars from both PW and Kirkus. As it was on The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books short list, and had a short wait at the library, I decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did; I’d have been sorry to miss this book.

Will Heller is a 16yo schizophrenic who has stopped taking his meds, and run away from his caretakers to ride the NYC subway.

He got on board the train and laughed. Signs and tells were all around him. The floor was shivering and ticking beneath his feet and the brick-tiled arches above the train beat the murmurings of the crowd into copper and aluminum foil. Every seat in the car had a person in it. Notes of music rang out as the doors closed behind him: C# first, then A. Sharp against both ears, like the tip of a pencil. He turned and pressed his face against the glass.

A detective, Ali Lateef, is tasked with finding Will, who is considered an SCM, or Special Category Missing. He meets with Will’s mother and tries to unravel why Will has run away, and more important, whether he’s a danger to himself or others. Chapters of Lateef and the mother in an intricate dance of information alternate with those of Will, nicknamed “Lowboy”, who is convinced that the overheating world is going to end in flames, and that only he and his actions can stop it.

This book is many things: psychological mystery, coming-of-age tale, and meditation on global warming are just a few. Initially, the comparison of Will to a famous NYC roaming schoolkid named Holden was most obvious to me. As the tale unraveled, though, I was put more in mind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov. This is a smart, scary, many-layered tale. I enjoyed and admire it a great deal.

I am FINALLY getting to The Morning News‘ 2010 Tournament of Books short list, after a spate of book group and book-group-book related reading. My hope is to read twelve of the sixteen*. There’s little possibility of me accomplishing all 12 by March 1, when the tourney begins. But darn it, I’m going to try.

First up was Wells Towers’ brief and devastating story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. No false advertising there; these are bleak, brutal stories. The central characters, young and old, male and female, are struggling to make meaning in their lives, even as any hope flickers and dies. Take the opening paragraph:

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He’d come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him–under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

The writing is spare and sharp, the characters easy to know, the humor dark and fleeting. If you’re looking for a brief, beautifully written collection of ugly stories, this is for you. If you’re feeling fragile? Best stay away.

*I hope to read:

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Lowboy, by John Wray

And am probably not going to try for these, as their descriptions and reviews don’t excite me:

Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter
Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie

This week’s selection for Books and Bars, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, is a sci-fi classic. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards when it came out. The short story it grew out of was published in 1977, the same year Star Wars came to theaters. Card expanded the story to a novel, published in 1985. Ender, a nickname for Andrew, is not unlike Luke Skywalker, or any number of other mythical heroes whose story follows what Joseph Campbell called a monomyth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Ender’s Earth was attacked and almost destroyed twice within the last century by an alien race, called “buggers.” Since then, peace has existed among the countries. Children are monitored for excellence, and a very few are selected for the International Fleet’s battle school. Ender Wiggin is 6 years old. He’s a third child, a rarity, and something not allowed for most people on Earth. His parents were not only allowed, but encouraged to have a third child, after his older brother, Peter, proved a brilliant sociopath and his sister, Valentine, too pacifistic. In conversations between the military adults that preface each chapter, readers learn that Ender is a hoped-for synthesis of his siblings: brilliant and strong and empathic.

As Ender progresses through battle school, he is faced again and again with challenges, some of which are situational, and many of which are manufactured as the adults try to manipulate him into the military leader they hope him to be. Peter and Valentine, meanwhile, take on a challenge of their own when the fragile peace on Earth is threatened. They patiently and thoroughly build reputations for themselves online as political commentators known by the pseudonyms Locke (Peter) and Demosthenes (Valentine). Both siblings continue to affect Ender throughout his education. Peter is the violent killer Ender fears he has become, and Valentine is twice manipulated into urging Ender on in his training.

The book is a chilling meditation on the power adults have over children in the control of environment and information. It also ponders the relation between the military and the state, and what each person owes, or doesn’t, as a citizen. Ultimately, it wonders what it takes to be a killer, and whether killing is an inevitable result, whether out of fear, self-preservation or power. Card’s thorough and complex characterizations of Ender and his siblings, as well as the momentum created by a strong plot, make this an engrossing and provocative read for fans of science fiction and heroic myths, like the Harry Potter saga.

I am assured by fans of the series that the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, not only equals but surpasses and completes the saga begun in Ender’s Game. It, too, won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, the year after Ender’s Game did. There are several more books in the Ender tale, and some about other characters.

I recently read Nicole Krauss’ excellent The History of Love. It has a few surprises at the end that made me want to go back to the beginning and start all over again. So I did. I was again impressed by Krauss’ juggling of several narrators, all of which had distinct and believable voices. Additionally, there are echoes of experience among the characters that are fleeting, but serve to underline the themes of connectedness among people, and repetition in history.

Speaking of repetition, this time through I noted how the character of Leo Gursky, the old man, said the same thing many different ways:

“I made up everything” (8)

“sometimes I see things that aren’t there.” (26)

“my head is full of dreams.” (34)

“I told her–not the truth. A story not unlike the truth.” (86)

“The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.” (167)

“I chose to believe what was easier.” (168)

“who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn’t also lose my mind?” (169)26)

“The truth is…” (226)

“I knew I was imagining it. And yet. I wanted to believe. So I tried. And I found I could. (228)

“I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.” (230)

“What if the things I believed were possible were impossible, and the things I believed impossible were possible?” (248)

As I wrote before, I highly recommend The History of Love.

My husband G. Grod recommended Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to me several years ago. M, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, read it within the past year or so (ha! in 2005, actually. I have a long memory, I guess.) and recommended it, then a review at Semicolon intrigued me, so it crept up my to-read list. After my recent reading and appreciating of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, I moved it to the top of the list. (Bonus for us book geeks–it’s a shelf sitter, so I’m reading a book from home, rather than a new purchase or one from the library.)

The book opens in the 26th or 27th century. A novice monk, Brother Francis, is doing a Lenten hermitage in the desert, when he encounters a wanderer, and then comes across an archeologic find from before the Flame Deluge that took place in the 20th century. Francis’ order is of Leibowitz, a 20th century scientist and martyr whom they’re trying to have canonized. The book is divided into three sections, which I won’t detail as it might spoil an event I found truly shocking and moving. But the central question is whether history must repeat itself:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne, and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America–burned into the oblivion of the centures. And again and again and again. (245)

This is a satire of Catholicism, while making the monks and abbots of Leibowitz sympathetic, conflicted and complicated. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, as well as a theological and philosophical one. I’m off to review the legend of the “wandering Jew,” which might have enriched my reading experience if I’d had it in my mind from the beginning. This book made me feel, made me think, and continues to make me think. While we’re fortunate to have avoided a nuclear war in the 20th century, this novel retains a timeless quality as the threat remains, still, and other questions, like the ethics of euthanasia and the dangers and benefits of progress, remain relevant today.

I’d been meaning to read Nicole Krauss’ History of Love for a while; some trusted friends like Duff had recommended it; that’s her lovely photo above. So when it was a choice for the Twin Cities’ book group Books and Bars, I decided to give it a go. I started a copy I got from the library, but wasn’t able to finish by the time it was due; no renewals were allowed, as it had a wait list. So I bought a copy, and am glad I did. The History of Love is not long, but it’s deep and complex, and I can’t wait to read it again.

The book begins in the voice of Leo Gursky, an elderly Holocaust survivor afraid of dying unnoticed in New York City. He devises behavioral schemes to make himself noticed–spills things in stores, talks in movies, falls down on the street. Krauss swiftly and skillfully makes an annoying person a sympathetic one. Leo is funny, and he’s a writer. He also has a complicated history of love. He loved a woman once, but she went to America and married another.

Leo’s sections alternate mostly with those of Alma, a young Jewish girl whose mother is a translator of books, and whose father died early in her childhood. Alma writes notes to herself disguised as a survival notebook, and she has a fragile relationship with her brother Bird, who thinks he is a lamed vovnik, one of 36 chosen ones on Earth.

Bird gets a section, and the fictional book by the character Zvi Litvinoff, History of Love, gets a few, too. Yet the changes in voice and setting were never confusing, though I can’t say that about the book as a whole. The obfuscation is deliberate, though, as boundaries and stories are blurred and mixed. Events build momentum to a powerful conclusion, one that made me want to turn back and begin all over again. That this thought made me happy to do so, and that I think I’ll do so after I finish my current book, is a mark of how highly I admire and enjoyed The History of Love. Krauss’ husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, is the more famous novelist, but I wonder if Krauss might be the more skilled. This book made me think and feel, as well as go off in search of more information. Highly recommended.

Marganita Laski’s Little Boy Lost was actually a gift for my husband G. Grod nearly six years ago. I was at the Persephone Books shop on Lamb’s Conduit Lane, chatting with Nicola, and told her I’d left my 9mo son at home with my husband to attend a friend’s wedding. She urged Laski’s book on me as a gift for him. Once I described it to him, though, G. had no interest in reading what sounded like his worst nightmare–a father’s search for his lost son during wartime.

(G is rather more the worrying parent than I am. Which is odd, since it’s contrary to our regular-life personalities.)

So LBL languished on the shelf these past several years. Recently Jessa Crispin at Bookslut read it, loved it, and reviewed it at NPR. The book inched into a forward part of my brain. Then when I read The Road last month for Books & Bars in Minneapolis, with its fraught portrayal of a father/son bond in a dangerous time, LBL jumped the queue.

It was not at all what I expected, which was something like a hard-working soldier returns from the war to find his young son missing, then goes off to find him, at all costs. Instead, Little Boy Lost is far more interesting and complex. Hilary Wainwright had an English desk job in the war. He learns his wife, who’s remained in France, has been killed by German troops, and believes his son dead, too. When he learns his son is lost and perhaps not dead, he can hardly bring himself to hope, as he’s so steeled himself against loss and disappointment. When an acquaintance tells him he has a lead, Hilary does not rush off, but instead waits until the war is over, and even then drags his feet, conflicted with guilt and duty.

It was nearly a year since Pierre had first written, and now Hilary had been demobilised for a week and his excuse no longer held good; and Pierre had lately written that he must come soon, if ever.

For he would never wish Pierre to know his deep unwillingness to undertake this search.

He said to himself, It’s been so long now since the boy was lost. I’ve had over two years to make myself invulnerable to emotion. I can do without comfort now. I am content to live in my memories. All that is important now is that no one should disturb my memories. (28-9)

Hilary meets an orphan boy named Jean who is the right age. But Jean remembers none of his past, and bears no resemblance to Hilary or his dead wife. Hilary struggles whether to take the boy even though he’s not sure Jean is his son. He longs for a simple, childless life with his present girlfriend in England after the war.

I’m used to the Mel Gibson/Liam Neeson revenge pic where someone’s child is kidnapped or killed, and the father tears off with vengeance. My husband assures me this is a modern plot constructed for corporately powerless cube jockeys like himself. Instead, LBL is a book of its time, post WWII. Like noir books and films of the same era, its hero is ambivalent, and complicated. There’s even sort of a femme fatale near the end who leads the hero astray. The tension about what will happen is drawn out skillfully to the very end, at which point the author pulls off one of the sharpest endings I’ve experienced. This book is a gem and a keeper, as well as a fascinating contrast to The Road.

I’ve written before about Mark Bittman’s book Food Matters, and have been cooking from it and using its ideas since I got it last year. I finally sat down and read it cover to cover. Bittman writes on many of the same aspects of food that Michael Pollan has in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: the problems with industrial farming, the epidemics of obesity and diabetes in the US, and the prevalance of fast and processed food products. From the introduction:

If I told you that a simple lifestyle choice could help you lose weight, reduce your risk of many long-term or chronic diseases, save you real money, and help stop global warming, I imagine you’d be intrigued. If I also told you that this change would be easier and more pleasant that any diet you’ve ever tried, would take less time and effort than your exercise routine, and would require no sacrifice, I would think you’d want to read more.

After a weight gain and health caution from his physician, Bittman developed what he calls simply “sane eating,” or the Food Matters approach. He chose a mostly vegan diet for breakfast, lunch and snacks, and a looser approach for dinner so he didn’t feel deprived. He stresses many times that this has worked for him, but to take your own life, habits and preferences into account. The approach he advocates is simple, and eminently adaptable. This is not a strict regime, or a punishment. Instead it’s an adjustment of your approach to cooking and eating that focuses almost entirely on what you can and should eat (lots of fruit and veggies, whole grains), what you should eat in moderation (dairy products and meat) and what you should avoid (overly processed artificial foods and industrially produced meat.)

While Pollan wrote “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” from In Defense of Food, Bittman not only takes you through why it’s important, but also puts it into practice with 77 easy-to-read and good-to-eat recipes. As Laura Miller at Salon noted when it came out, Food Matters is applied Pollan. Bittman is an experienced cook and recipe writer; he’s the author of the New York Times’ Minimalist column. The recipes are easy to follow, and he offers myriad variations and ideas. Throughout he has an upbeat, encouraging tone that urges new and experienced cooks to experiment and have fun. Here are two salad recipes that can be eaten for lunch or dinner, and have many variations.

Makes 4 servings. Time: About 24 minutes with cooked chickpeas.

This is more salad than sandwich. I make this open-faced, with the crunchy pita and spread nestled under a pile of greens. But you can easily deconstruct the dish and serve the pita (toasted or not) alonside for scooping up the hummus. Or if you have pocket pitas, smear the insides with the hummus and fill with the stuffed greens for a more portable lunch.

4 whole wheat pitas
2 cups drained cooked or canned chickpeas,some cooking liquid reserved (use water if canned)
1/2 cup tahini (with some of its oil) or more to taste.
2 cloves garlic, peeled or to taste
1/3 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon ground cumin or smoked paprika more or less, plus a sprinkling for garnish
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Juice of one lemon, plus more as needed
6 cups lettuce or assorted salad greens, torn into pieces
Cucumber slices, tomato wedges, thinly sliced red onion, and/or black olives, for garnish
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint or parsley leaves, for garnish

1. To toast the pitas if you like, heat the oven to 450F. Put them on a baking sheet and cook until just barely crunchy on both sides, about 15 minutes total.

2. Meanwhile make the hummus: Combine the chickpeas, tahini, garlic and 1/4 cup of the oil in a food processor with the spice and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Use the reserved bean liquid (or water) as necessary to get machine going. Puree, then add about half of the lemon juice, along with more tahini or salt if desired.

3. When the pita has cooled smear a layer of hummus on each and put on plates. (You’ll probably have some left over; the hummus will keep, refrigerated, for about a week. Eat it with raw begetables or on bread.) Put the lettuce in a bowl, sprinkle with some salt, pepper, and a pinch of the spice you used and drizzle with the remaining olive oil and lemon juice. Toss well then pile on top of the pitas. Garnish and serve.

I further garnished the hummus salad with grated carrot and peeled, sliced orange with good results. Here, Bittman advises to use a little bit of bacon for flavoring, but the bulk of the meal is a filling, satisfying salad:

Makes 4 servings. Time: about 45 minutes.

2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper
2 thick slices of bacon
1 red bell pepper, cored and chopped
1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon peeled, minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Juice from one orange
1 pound fresh spinach leaves

1. Heat the oven to 400°F. Put the sweet potatoes on a baking sheet, drizzle with 2 tablespoons of the oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss to coat. Roast, turning occasionally, until crisp and brown outside and just tender inside, about 30 minutes. Remove and keep them on the pan until ready to use.

2. While the potatoes cook, put the bacon in a nonreactive skillet and turn the heat to medium. Cook, turning once or twice, until crisp. Drain on paper towels and pour off the fat, leaving any darkened bits behind in the pan. Put back on medium heat, and add the remaining oil to the pan. When it’s hot, add the bell pepper, onion, and ginger to the pan. Cook, stirring once or twice, until no longer raw, then stir in the cumin and the reserved bacon. Stir in the orange juice and turn off the heat. (The recipe can be made up to an hour or so ahead to this point. Gently warm the dressing again before proceeding.)

3. Put the spinach in a bowl large enough to comfortably toss the salad quickly. Add the sweet potatoes and the warm dressing and toss to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning, and serve.

DC Comics decided to do for Batman what they did several years ago with Superman. They had a two-part story written by a comics great (Alan Moore) that ended the series running at the time, then started the titles again from 0. (Making comic-shop employees everywhere groan.) For Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, they tapped Neil Gaiman and artist Andy Kubert. Set at the funeral of the Batman, friends and foes take turns telling stories, as the reader tries to figure out what’s going on.

“Where am I?”

“You’re here. In Gotham.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“No, you aren’t dreaming.”

“This is Gotham. I mean, I know it’s Gotham. But…it’s strange. I know Gotham like I know myself.”

Typical of Gaiman, the story focuses on the power and relative truth of stories. Included in the Deluxe hardcover edition are 3 other Gaiman Batman-related stories. Kubert channels past masters as the appearance of Batman and the style of the stories changes. It’s a nice edition of a good tribute to a great character but better perhaps for fans of Batman than for fans just of Gaiman because of the comics backstories that inform it.