Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

source: Netgalley (review copy)

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

Ever since writing was invented, people have been documenting the contents of their brains, giving names to ideas, noting their dreams, and distorting their memories and making up new ones. Lifetimes of scribbling, and oceans of ink. Whole forests of trees reduced to pulp for us to collect our words. What if nobody reads them? I think we write to be read, even if we tell ourselves we don't. But the vast majority of everything written fails in its most basic purpose and has never been read by another. Where are you to read my works, Tomomi Ishikawa? Are we talking to ourselves? (175)

One day Benjamin Constable, a 38-year-old Brit living in Paris, comes home to find a letter from his friend Tomomi (Butterfly) Ishikawa, an American expatriate, slipped underneath the door of his apartment. In that letter, Butterfly informs Ben that she's committed suicide and that he is "the inheritor of a thing, or many things, [she's] been making for years, since long before [she] knew of [his] existence--since [her] childhood, in fact" (21). Ben follows a series of clues that lead him to places in Paris and later New York that had special meaning to Butterfly. The more clues Ben follows, the more he learns about his friend. If the disturbing tales contained in the series of notebooks Butterfly left for him to find are any indication, Ben didn't know her well at all.

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa is a difficult book to describe. Horrifying and playful are the first two adjectives that come to mind. If I had to categorize it, I'd call is a literary psychological thriller.  It is also a bit of a love letter to both Paris and New York City.

In a way I think Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa may be more about the process of writing than it is about anything else, or rather the tension between fact and fiction that is inherent in writing, autobiographical or not. Butterfly's clues and the way they are presented to him make Ben question the truth of what he is being told. Constable forces his readers to experience that same uncertainty by making himself the protagonist in his debut novel.

The novel is compelling, but I can't say that I enjoyed reading it.  After a certain point,¹ I dreaded picking it back up again each time I set it down. Though early on in the novel, I imagined how wonderful it would be to be in Paris with Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa as a guidebook.² I also didn't quite care for the ending, though I understand why Constable decided to end it the way that he did.³

I can imagine Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa being the source of a particularly fruitful undergraduate literature seminar discussion.

I had to include a featured word, because I love how Constable defined tickety-boo within the narrative:

'Tickety-boo?'
'Yes, it's British English. It means everything is running perfectly, or according to plan, and portrays a sense of contentedness with the current situation.' (173)

footnotes:

1. The discovery of the first notebook and the revelation of its contents.
2. While I live close enough to New York City to use Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa as a guide to some of its special places, the combination of the summer weather we are experiencing now (I can't even imagine tromping around the city in this heat) and the onset of the horrifying aspect of the novel put me off the idea.
3. To leave room for the uncertainty of which he seems so fond.

disclosure: I received a review copy of Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa from Gallery Books (Simon and Schuster) via NetGalley.

fragrant reading - Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet

I know that I read Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet about a year ago because I remember seriously contemplating a bah-humbuggy Valentine's Day post on martial infidelity featuring Gazelle and Blue Angel by Francine Prose, which I read around the same time. That post didn't come to anything and I never got around to posting about either of the novels. I really wasn't keen on Blue Angel and I've more or less succeeded in putting it completely out of my mind. Gazelle lingers, though.

Gazelle was an impulse buy (from Book Depot in St. Catherines, Ontario) before I put the kibosh on unfettered book acquisition. The opening sentence of its flap text--"A mother's betrayal, an unexpurgated copy of The Arabian Nights, a dazzling perfume-maker, and the scent of rose attar all serve to awaken a girl of thirteen to the erotic life"--is no doubt sufficient both as a synopsis and as an explanation for why I picked up the novel. What I remember most about Gazelle now is the novel's language and how fragrance permeates it.

That afternoon I heard the curious vocabulary of the perfumer for the first time. Vulgar was said with a sneer, venomous shadow with reverence.  A scent might be milky or metallic, sulphurous or chalky.  One was to be worn with linen the color of sand or snow; one was prodigious, one had a velvet body, another's was deep red, or, if worn in stormy weather, red veering to black; one smelled of old silver and cedar forests, and yet another was symphonic--"unlike the stenches my rivals call perfume but which are no better than the urine of asses and camels!" The great perfumes of ancient Egypt:  hekenou, medjet, sefet, and nekhenem he called: irresistible.  Their names alone seemed to darken the garden air with a mysterious smoke. (38-39)

Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali (and Brick Lane)

Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali

I read Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, in 2006 (see below). I enjoyed it so I'm not quite sure why it took me almost three years (bookcrossing tells me that I've had Alentejo Blue on my shelf since March 2009) to read Alentejo Blue. I do wish that I enjoyed Alentejo Blue as much as Brick Lane.

Alentejo Blue is a novel centered on a rural village in south-central Portugal. Its chapters focus on individuals living in or visiting the village (it opens with an elderly man finding his friend--and sometimes lover--has hanged himself, the second chapter follows a British author who has sex with two inappropriate partners just because it's something to do) making it read, at first like a collection of short stories set in the same place rather than a novel. As the novel progresses, threads begins to tie the various chapters together. While the novel had some moments, I found it bleak. Honestly I finished reading Alentejo Blue out of stubbornness.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Here's what I thought about Brick Lane when I read it in 2006 (from my copy's bookcrossing journal):

I can understand why this book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I'm amazed, though, that this was the authors debut novel. What an achievement!

Ali explores universal themes on a very personal level. The driving force of the novel, the protagonist, Nazneen, is fully realized and sympathetic.
The novel has a certain weight and urgency, which makes it all the more readable, though it did seem to drag at times.

This is one of my favorite passages:

How had it happened? It was as if she had woken one day to find that she had become a collector, guardian of a great archive of secrets, without the faintest knowledge of how she had got started or how her collection has grown. (313)

I also loved the ending.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

As I mentioned before, I picked up The Dream of Perpetual Motion at the Strand (for some reason this bookstore requires the definite article). I was intrigued by the novel's title and cover design (art and text).

I can't say that I enjoyed reading The Dream of Perpetual Motion, but I did find it strangely compelling.¹ I think I may have enjoyed it more if I had a better grasp on The Tempest (I've never read this play - horror of horrors!), which is heavily referenced in the novel.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is around the turn of the (20th) century in a city called Xeroville. The "age of miracles" is gone, but only just.² It is now the age of technology, of mechanization, of The Future. No one has done more to usher in this machine age than Prospero Taligent, inventor, entrepreneur, originator of mechanical men, and adoptive father of Miranda.
The novel's protagonist and narrator is one Harold Winslow (read: Ferdinand), a greeting-card writer, who has been imprisoned on a zeppelin powered by perpetual motion technology. Harold is alone, but for the cryogenically frozen body of his jailer (Prospero), the disembodied voice of his only love (Miranda), and the automata maintaining the zeppelin. The text of The Dream of Perpetual Motion is that of the journal in which Harold explains how exactly he came to be in his current predicament, interjecting his narrative with brief updates on his present circumstances.

I found The Dream of Perpetual Motion profoundly disorienting. The novel's prose is evocative and often dreamlike. It is for the most part very slow-paced and the emphasis on language (rather than plot) tends to slow it down even more.

I've been thinking that I didn't like The Dream of Perpetual Motion, but that can't possibly be true, not when I look at the evidence. I've already confessed on this blog to dog-earring my own books so I can freely admit that I did so to my copy of The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Not to keep my place, but to mark pages to which I wanted to return. Ten of them. Ten really is quite a lot for me, a book of this size would usually only yield 1-3. Here are a couple of passages that I wanted to revisit:

"Write down what you think happened, or what you believe happened, of something like what might have happened. All these things are better in the end than writing down nothing at all; all are true in their own way" (113).
"an imperfect grace is never what we seek when we fantasize about our futures, when we dream of a long life with someone we claim to love or we build machines that we read about in science fiction. We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once. But whatever we accomplish in the end never measures up. We always fail. We always fall short. Because when we see the perfect thing before us we fell we have to touch it. And then it vanishes or bruises or turns to show its hidden flaws or turns to dust" (340-341).

That being said, the bits of the novel that I found really and truly interesting were few and far between. Thinking back, I keep remembering little bits and wishing that they could have been expanded on.

If I haven't made it clear already, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is no steampunk adventure novel. Yes, I think we can safely consider it steampunk, but The Dream of Perpetual Motion is literary to a fault. Palmer has created an interesting world, but its obscured rather than illuminated by his prose.

I'm going to leave The Dream of Perpetual Motion among my other books for now. I feel like I should reread it after reading The Tempest, but I'm not altogether sure that I want to.

1. I'll admit that I've been procrastinating. I haven't wanted to post about the novel because I really have no idea what to write. The draft of this post has been stalled for ages, but I'm making myself push through today whether I like it or not.
2. I was so intrigued by the references to this earlier time period. Here's one: "By the time the touring Exposition of the Future came to our town, all the signs were in the air that the age of miracles was almost at its end. It wasn't uncommon to see sights like an angle staggering down the middle of a street in broad daylight, weaving like a drunkard, clutching its hand to its stomach and vomiting up blood. My father was a metalsmith, and more than half his income in those last days came from demons, who'd come to the back door of his establishment under cover of night, sacks of silver clutched in their clawed hands, begging him to use his tools to file off their magnificent curling horns" (190-191).

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

"That's who we were: the last colonials to arrive in Trinidad, before things changed for good" (202).

I took my time reading this book and it seems that I've taken my time writing up this review. As for the writing, I'll admit it, I've been procrastinating. Every time I sit down to write about The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, the prospect seems daunting and I'm not quite sure why.

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle isn't necessarily an enjoyable book (the opening scene: four corrupt policemen bring a teenager out to the wilderness and beat him nearly to death because he reported one of them for stealing his cellular phone), but it is compelling. Roffey's atmospheric writing evokes Trinidad in all its lush, steamy, corrupt and gritty glory.

Covering a fifty year period, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle follows the history of a marriage and growing pains of a young nation. Its story begins in January 1956 when Sabine and George Harwood arrive in Trinidad as newlyweds and Eric Williams launches his People's National Movement. The narrative, however, begins in 2006, tarrying there for 190 pages before returning to 1956. Roffey doesn't explain the frequently used word steupse¹ until page 220 giving the reader a small taste of the disorientation Sabine must have felt when she arrived in Trinidad.

One of the things I liked most about the novel is that Trinidad herself is a character. She is as real to Sabine as Eric Williams is (e.g. "every morning Sabine recognized her competition. This island flexed its charms, laughed in her face as she withered," pp.121-122).

I have to admit that I knew next to nothing about Trinidad's history before I read The White Woman on the Green Bicycle so the novel was a bit of an education to me. I particularly appreciated the fact that Roffey is able to come across as objective. She doesn't simplifying things by laying the blame for Trinidad's mismanagement or the Harwood's martial problems on any one person. And, even though both Sabine and George horribly flawed and unlikable, Roffey lets us see them at moments when one can't help by sympathize with them.

What I didn't particularly like was the novel's ending. I understand why Roffey ended The White Woman on the Green Bicycle when and how she did, but there was at least one thing left unresolved that plagues me.² (I did quite like how the 2006 part of the novel ended, unexpected and powerful)

There is so much more that I could say about this novel, but I think I will simply share a passage that I bookmarked:

I loved to ride past the big mansions there, the former estate houses of the cocoa barons. Most stood empty, one was a school [...] The house on the corner looked like a Rhineland castle, another like an eccentric gunboat, all spires and cupolas and oval windows. One was like a wedding cake made of coral. Another looked like a French chateau. All mimicked bygone European architecture; all seemed ludicrous rather than stately. A castle on the savannah? A chateau surrounded by coconut trees? [...] These houses gave me a sense of comfort; like me, they were hopelessly at odds with their environment. (219)

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize (the winner was Barbara Kingsolver's sixth novel, The Lacuna).

On a side note: there is something quite compelling about the novel's cover.

1. To suck on ones teeth in disapproval or annoyance
2. Talbot, what happens with him?

ETA disclosure: I received a review copy of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle from Penguin via NetGalley.

A Novel Bookstore

I have a confession to make. I rarely love any of the books I'm assigned to review for Library Journal. I expect that's partly due to the nature of the books they send me. It seems like my niche is literary fiction in translation with an emphasis on Scandinavian and German-language authors. I don't get light, fluffy, fun reads, I get hard-core literary stuff that is sometimes hard to get through. That's not to say that the books aren't accomplished, just that reading them often feels more like work than pleasure.

Earlier this week a novel I reviewed for Library Journal and really enjoyed was published.

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

Heiress Francesca and bookseller Ivan don't expect to make a profit when they open a bookstore in Paris that sells nothing but the best fiction. The store's unexpected success produces a powerful backlash: outcry from pundits, negative ad campaigns, targeted competition, and threats that escalate to physical violence. When members of the store's secret inventory selection committee are attacked, barely escaping with their lives, it becomes imperative for the owners to find out who is behind the intimidation.

With A Novel Bookstore, French novelist Cossé gives readers a truly literary thriller. Eminently readable, A Novel Bookstore is a love letter to the novel (literature junkies will find within its pages a seemingly endless supply of book suggestions) and a profound exploration of human nature.

On a side note, I love what translator Alison Andersen [by the way, she was the translator of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (see post)] did with the novel's title. In French the title is "Au bon roman" ([place] of good novels), while the English title drops the good modifier, it plays very successfully on the double meaning of the word novel.

See full review at Library Journal.

Handke's Don Juan

I reviewed this book in November, but waited until it's on sale to share it with you.

Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke

Austrian Handke's latest to be translated into English is narrated not by Don Juan as its title would suggest, but by a lonely French innkeeper into whose garden the protagonist tumbles one day. The innkeeper becomes Don Juan's confidant and during his stay Don Juan recounts his previous week's adventures. Over the course of that "womanweek" Don Juan travels as far as Damascus and Norway encountering a new woman each day. At first Don Juan is like a mythological character. The narrator describes him as a veritable St. Francis, nourished by sorrow (he was orphaned by the loss of his only child), with the ability to magic rare and wonderful foodstuffs. The narrator's impression of Don Juan, however, changes after the week of storytelling has concluded. Whatever was awe-inspiring seems to dissipate and Don Juan becomes just a regular man with irritating quirks.

Don't come to Don Juan expecting tales of excitement and seduction or detailed accounts of the lothario's encounters or you'll be disappointed. The novel is literary and philosophical rather than sensational.

Read the official review at Library Journal...

Georg Letham

A review in Library Journal last month.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss

Originally published in 1931, this is an account of a crime and its aftermath, interspersed with flashbacks that may illuminate the cause of the crime and the root of the perpetrator's moral defectiveness. The title character is the novel's unreliable narrator. Letham, who describes himself as "a physician, a man of scientific training of certain philosophical aspirations," is ever a medical researcher and taxonomist, categorizing his fellow men impassively as either frogs or rats. After murdering his wife, Letham is sent to the yellow fever-ridden penal colony C, where he is able to continue his epidemiological work and questionable experiments. The author, Jewish physician Weiss, is often compared to friend and contemporary Franz Kafka, but Weiss's work is more realistic, clearly influenced by his own life and work in the medical field.

Read the full review at Library Journal...

The White Castle

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

I wanted to like The White Castle more than I actually did, which is why I think it took me so long to finish the book despite its relatively short length.

There's a bit of metanarrative: the story does not stand on its own. The novel begins with some text about a contemporary researcher coming across this obscure 17th century manuscript, which he is now bringing to light.

The novel is primarily concerned with two characters: Him (the unnamed narrator), an Italian Christian captured at sea by a group of Ottoman Turks, and Hoja, the Turk who becomes his master. The two look eerily alike and are similar in many ways despite their mutual hatred* of each other. Pamuk uses these facts to explore identity and sense of self.

The White Castle is a very slow read without a lot of narrative thrust. I quite liked this line from somewhere near the end of the book: "I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside." Very tongue-in-cheek, but quite apropos.

* theirs is truly a love-hate relationship

Some literary fiction in translation

A couple reviews in Library Journal this month...

Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner

Published to critical and commercial success in Europe ten years ago, this debut from prominent Canadian Germanist Eichner is now offered as the third title in the "Biblioasis International Translation" series. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, a middle-aged veterinarian working in Haifa, this work is at once the story of a family and a memorial to Viennese Jews. The narrative, the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man caught between the need to remember and the desire to forget, opens in both 1980 and 1880 and chronicles the Kahn family's move from rural Hungary to Vienna, the narrator's 1938 flight to Belgium and eventual settlement in Israel, and all the family drama in between. The result is a moving book full of humor and humanity.


The Possession by Annie Ernaux

Ernaux's latest book to be translated into English is the story of an all-consuming jealousy, a self-portrait whose spare 64 pages sketch the life cycle of a possession. A woman has left a man "as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up [her] freedom." (9) The relationship may have been forgettable, but the narrator finds the idea of the man being with another woman unbearable, and her life is soon eclipsed by an obsession with that nameless, faceless woman. Occupation, the title of the original French edition, more clearly elucidates this state with its double entendre: the narrator is both engaged and possessed. While actively cultivating the obsession, the narrator is also very much concerned with chronicling it; this work is as much about the act of writing the novella as it is about the six months it recounts.

The Autograph Man

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
- audio version read by Steven Crossley

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them — all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.

The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. It offers further proof that Zadie Smith is one of the most staggeringly talented writers of her generation.

My first experience with Zadie Smith was when I picked up a copy of White Teeth soon after it was released as a trade paperback. I couldn't get into the novel at that time so it languished on my shelves and has now disappeared into a box somewhere. I wasn't sure if I'd like The Autograph Man, but I've been reading a good deal of audio books lately so I thought I'd give it a go when I came across an unabridged version.

I found the prologue (and the death of Li-Jin) somewhat disturbing, but I kept going as I had the audio in the car. Smith is unapologetically and brutally honest and while the novel is full of witty light-hearted observations and sometimes zany plot twists one can't help but feel deeply for Alex-Li, who is clearly lost and on the brink.

Disgrace

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace is a difficult book to describe. It was a much quicker read that I expected. It's well-written, spare and taut. Set in contemporary South African, the novel is about disgrace on a number of different levels. The subjects it addresses (including prejudice, rape, the harsh reality of rural life in South Africa) are not easy, but it seems impossible to tear oneself away from the story. Above all, Coetzee is honest and the novel offers no real solutions.

The Conqueror

Another Scandinavian lit review for Library Journal this month...

The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

In The Conqueror, the second novel in the Jonas Wegeland trilogy (after The Seducer), celebrated Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad offers a dark narrative exploring both the "Norwegian national character" and the human condition.
A scholar has been contracted to write the definitive biography of Wegeland, one of Norway's most famous personages, now infamous after murdering his wife. After two years of research, the scholar is mired in contradictory details and suffering from acute writer's block. That is until a mysterious stranger arrives at his doorstep. What follows is a set of eccentric but intimate stories, ostensibly recalled by the stranger, that woven together -- "the sequence is crucial; only by following it can you hope to understand anything at all [...] just one story out of place and it all falls apart" (64) -- may yield a coherent picture of Wegeland.

Read the full review at Library Journal.

book clubbing in December

For this round of book club selections, we decided to include some riskier, more literary titles. Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude was scheduled for December, mostly because it is short and wouldn't be too daunting a read in the midst of all the holiday craziness. I was looking forward to rereading it, but had no idea how it'd go over with the other members of the book club.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim

Too Loud a Solitude is a short, but powerful book. It is the story of Hanta, a man who has spent his entire working life compacting wastepaper. Though he saves books when he can (his apartment is packed with three tons of books), he's weighed down by the loss of knowledge and the innocent lives of the mice he's accidentally compacted, but also by the hopelessness of his (and their collective) life.

Hrabal's rhythmic, repetitive prose offers vivid descriptions of the world in which our protagonist lives. A world where the heavens are not humane, where academics clean the sewers and loved ones can disappear without a trace.

But, in as much as Too Loud a Solitude is the story of a love affair with the written word, it is filled with eloquent descriptions of reading, the first of which appears on the novella's very first page: "Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel" (1-2).

The dark worldview and lack of plot were the turn-offs for some book club members. That being said, I do think that Too Loud a Solitude generated a very good discussion. We discussed how the book is typical of central/eastern European literature of this period, what we as Western readers may have lost in context, how we related to the protagonist, what appealed to and repulsed us about the narrative, and how the protagonist quietly rebelled through his work.

Disobedience

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers, Disobedience is the story of Ronit Krushka, a 32-year-old financial analyst living in New York City. A strong, independent woman, Ronit has been blazing her own path since her teens. When her father, a leader of Orthodox Jewish community in London, dies, Ronit feels a strong urge to return home. Reentering the stifling environment of her youth, Ronit is forced to confront her past.

The story is narrated in turn by Ronit (with a fantastic interior monologue that refers frequently to her psychiatrist back in NY) and a third-person omniscient narrator and each chapter begins with a quote from the Torah or other Talmudic text. Highlighting both the similarities and differences between the religious community of Hendon and the secular world in which most of us live, Disobedience is indeed about the tendency to disobedience that is inherent in each of us.

My favorite chapter in seven. I loved how the chapter begins with "Our sages warn us often against the perils of gossip: lashon hara, which means, literally, an evil tongue" (109) and an explanation of why gossip is so bad and then continues to follow all the orthodox women in the neighborhood self-consciously gossiping about Ronit and Esti. Alderman handles this masterfully:

Mrs. Berditcher drew breath. She might know something. Just a little piece of news. The bread slicer clattered, its comb-blades flickering up and down as the women drew closer. Wat? What did Mrs. Berditcher know? Mrs. Berditcher shook her head. It would not be right to speak of such things. She and Mr. Berditcher thought they might have seen something on their walk home after Shabbat the previous evening. But they could not be sure. It had been dark. They had been very far away. Their eyes may have deceived them. Although, seeing Ronit so different, her hair so short, her demeanor so assertive and still unmarried at thirty-two, well, there seemed a kind of sense to it. But what? What had been seen? The break slicer roared to life again, a limp-haired assistant by its side feeding it four large, square white loaves. Mrs. Berditcher demurred. It would certainly be lashon hara to speak the words, and lashon hara is a thing of evil, as they had learned many years before. Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Abramson heard, as through from far away, a faint and calming voice telling them to desist. Move on, it said, go on with your shopping. Buy bages and kichels and rugelach. But nearer at hand they felt a quickening pulse at their temples. Go on, they pressed, go one. Mrs. Berditcher hesitate and, in a low voice, went on. (114-115)

And it just gets better.

literary movements and whatnot

At their request I recently wrote a little article on literary movements for Readers' Advisor News.

Here's the intro:
While readers' advisors often use genre designations and appeal features to help guide readers, it is easy to overlook other reading interests that may not be as obvious. Literary movements are a perfect example. While literary movements can be both nebulous and intimidating to readers, given a well-placed recommendation, books that fit into those categories may appeal to readers who don't normally think in these terms.

Care to read the rest?

My Name is Red

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn't know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery — or crime? — lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex, and power.

My Name is Red has been sitting on Mt. TBR since Tuesday, August 29, 2006. I've really wanted to read it so my train-travel weekend (8.5 hours down, 8 hours back) seemed like a perfect opportunity. So, into my bag, I threw it and The Floating Brothel (which I never even got around to starting).

I enjoyed My Name is Red, but I have to say that it was not the right selection at all for this trip. My overtired brain just couldn't fully appreciate the novel with its detailed storyline and all Pamuk's interesting narrative devices. I slogged through it, a chapter to two at a time, never getting into a real groove with my reading even when I had a huge chunk of time to devote to it. I have to say that My Name is Red is definitely a book that I'll want to reread. I know that I'll have a completely different experience reading it next time and that I'll enjoy it more being able to immerse myself completely in the story and its complexities.

book clubbing in November

It's the end of November, I can hardly believe it. Where has this year gone?

Like I mentioned yesterday, my book club met on Wednesday. This time we discussed The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, a book inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem of the same title. Of course, I left my copy of the book at work so I don't have it with me to reference as I write this post (but, c'est la vie).

I first heard of The Stolen Child when a read my friend Janelle's review of the book. A number of us wanted to read the book, but I scheduled it far in advance in hopes that it'd be more readily available after it came out in paperback. Because of that time lag, I didn't remember much about the book. In fact, I didn't remember the most important thing about the book, which is that the faeries/hobgoblins/changelings in the story are creatures who were originally human children (in all the other changeling stories I've read -- most recently The Moorchild by Eloise Mcgraw -- the human children are stolen by beings of a completely distinct fantastical race). That twist on the changeling myth gives the novel much more weight. [I got pulled away to watch a movie on TCM]

In any case, my response to the book fell pretty much in line with the response of my other book club members. I (we) found the book compelling, but quite disturbing at times (it's hard to discuss details without including spoilers). The book was a challenging read, but definitely worth it (though I probably would not recommend it to parents of young children). There is so much detail, that the novel makes great discussion fodder for a book club. My one criticism of the book is that there are some completely unnecessary coincidences (two big ones), which made (at least for me) the story a little less believable.

recent reading

I've been really hard to please lately, so I guess that's why I'm so backlogged with my real reviews. So, here's my critical look at some of the books I've read recently.

Glass Houses by Rachel Caine
Glass Houses is book one of Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires series. I liked the first book in the Weather Warden series (Ill Wind), but so far I'm not really crazy about the Morganville Vampires. That's not to say that I won't read other books in the series, but I'm not going to actively search them out.

It's refreshing to have the vampires be evil (I actually have been reading paranormal novels lately and it seems that most all of them with vampires have either a benign or positive take on them), but the book was darker than I expected or was in the mood for.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
by Kiran Desai
I have to admit that I expected so much more from this novel. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations after hearing so much good press and maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset for it when I read it, but I thought it was just OK. I like Desai's writing, but I didn't find the story nearly as enchanting as I was expecting to.

In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
I think this is one of those books that I just wasn't in the correct mindset for when it came into my life. I read it, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The book isn't long, but it took me a while to read it because I didn't find it particularly compelling. I mean, the book is depressing (in addition to being well-written) and that's exactly not what I needed to be reading at the moment.

Oh My Goth by Gena Showalter
This was a VERY quick read. The concept was definitely interesting (talk about a scared straight program!), but the story itself was pretty predictable. It's almost as if the author was so pleased with herself for coming up with such a good concept that she didn't feel she had to try particularly hard with the rest. I don't regret reading the book, but it would have been nice if it's story had been a bit more substantial (though I'm not really part of the intended audience of the book so I can afford to be critical).

Greed

My review of Greed by Elfride Jelinek (translated from the German by Martin Chalmers) appeared in the May 1 edition of Library Journal.

Jelinek's latest novel (published in German four years before she won the Nobel prize) is one that will appeal to her fans and most likely infuriate her detractors as well as casual readers previously unfamiliar with her writing.

Set in southern Austria, Greed tells the story of a country policeman with a mania for property acquisition and an appetite for rough sex that leads to the murder of a 16-year-old girl. The storyline, however, is not the important element of this novel. Its driving force is Jelinek's inimitable style of commentary on relationships between men and women, the struggles of the writer and of aging, the state of the environment, and Jelinek's love-hate relationship with her native Austria, among other things. The stream-of-consciousness musings of the novel's unidentifiable female narrator may drive some readers to distraction, with their repetition, lack of plot progression, and often incomprehensible wordplays. Like her or not, this "extraordinary linguistic zeal" is why Jelinek is a Nobel laureate.

Read the proper review at Library Journal...