A Literary Life

The Center of Everything (Laura Moriarty)

This quick, easy read was something that I needed after the long haul of Sacred Hunger, so quick I finished it in a few days and so easy that I’d really classify it as young adult/teen reading. It is, of course, about a teenager living in Kansas — aren’t all teens at “the center of everything,” at the center of their own universes? In the standard after-school-special fashion, Evelyn has to make the tough but typical choices about what to believe, who to emulate, how to be true to herself and what she really wants out of life.

Though I found the novel lukewarm in general, I did enjoy the comparison between the main character and some of her friends who make different (read: not so great) decisions, which accurately portrayed how little things (or things you think are small potatoes) you do in your teens can change your entire life. That the main character emerges unscathed from the morass of high school is depicted as a mixture of brains and luck, which is really what it takes get through those stormy years. At least, so it seems to me in hindsight. I often think that if I was given another set of circumstances or thrown a curve ball or two, it would have been very, very easy to stumble off a cliff, changing my life as I know it. As a teen, you’re really unaware about how precarious it all is and, again, how much pure luck factors into things.

This little teen tale will soon disappear from my brain as quickly as it was absorbed, I’m sure, but it was just what the doctor ordered: Like a sorbet between courses, easy reading sometimes cleanses the palate, making reading fun again after a particularly heavy tome. Not every book has to be meaningful or unique. Sometimes you just want to hear a story, any story, just to reawaken your joy of books.

Books, books, books. So many books.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Sacred Hunger (Barry Unsworth)

It took me an embarrassing long time to read this book for several reasons: more home improvement (I know, the excuse is getting old), addiction to the book on tape I recently downloaded and the fact that it was overdue at the library. You see, when a book is overdue and can no longer be renewed, you’re paying by the day. At least for me, this makes it more of a challenge and I’ll never throw in the towel. NEVER!

Long story short — unlike my excuse — the book sat with it’s book mark 80 pages from the end for almost two weeks, even though it was an artful and compelling novel, a book worthy of it’s Booker Prize. Tackling vast philosophic and historical issues like imperialism, capitalism, slavery and racism, you might think that the tale would be preachy or snobbish. But instead, the author fleshes out characters that feel right at home in this (to the modern mentality) foreign, brutal and immoral world. The rich son of a trader whose religion is commerce and revenge. His cousin, a fallen-from-society doctor who signs onto a slaving ship, writing himself off into whatever pain he can find. The conscripted sailors, the seasoned and brutal captain, the cringe-worthy depictions of Africans sold into slavery.

All told in a somewhat formal style. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of the writers of the time period of the book — probably an intentional touch meant to drive the reader deeper into the past. However, the prose lacked the confusing flourishes of the period enough to lull a modern reader in, and the style was often striking and original.

(The slave ship was) a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, brining death and degredation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds — the bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the way of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea. Forces less tangible but equally determinate worked on the men and they were set in relation to one another in sympathy or antipathy, as happens in all communities.

The title refers to trade, to the blindly ambitious commercial and imperial endeavors of the day, which were sanctioned by king, country and God.

Money is sacred, as everyone knows, he said. So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it.

To take something as vile and despicable as slavery and immerse a reader in a world in which the practice is defended, is seen as common sense and morally just — and then to slowly have the characters wake up to a sense of disgust … I believe it takes an author of real talent to succeed at such a large undertaking, especially without denigrating or simplifying the historical figures involved, keeping them human and complex.

Deep? Yes.  Light reading? No. But Sacred Hunger (I agree with what I’ve heard) is just as worthy of critical praise and readership as the other book that shared the Booker Prize that year, The English Patient. And I think it could make just as good of a movie, too, replete with lots of ocean panoramas and violence, exotic locales and people and ideas.

And I think it’s worth the $2.10 I owe the library for the privilege of reading this intense novel.

The Gilded Chamber (Rebecca Kohn)

I did not go to Bible school as a child, nor was relating Christian parables a regular part of my family life. Outside of Noah, Cain and Abel, and that Technicolor Dreamcoat guy — oh, and Jesus, of course — the cast of characters in the Bible are strangers to me. (Hm. And who was the women who asked for a head on a platter? I suppose if I don’t know her name without a Google search, it doesn’t really count.) But lack of knowledge doesn’t reflect lack of interest. On the contrary, I think the rich, human stories of the Christian holy book are definitely worth reading, studying, discussing. I just haven’t actually read, studied or discussed any of them as yet.

So yay for shortcuts, like this easy, breezy novel about Queen Esther, a young Jewish virgin taken forcibly into the harem of King Xerxes and who beguiles him to the point that he makes her Queen. From the throne — where she’s given little power but lots of almond-oil beauty treatments, fancy clothing and tweezings — she is able to prevent the massacre of Jews in Xerxes’ Persian empire. As a story of girl power, it’s lacking. Esther only gets what she wants because she’s a beauty and she becomes a master of feminine persuasion. (No requests for heads on platters here.) But it was an interesting look into the female world of antiquity, especially of the drugged, catty harem women.

I’m told The Red Tent needs to be next on my list of biblical fictionalizations that flesh out the lives of women in traditionally male-dominated Christianity. And even if it makes me look like an up-tight nerd to put such a book on my list of summer/vacation reads, so be it because No. 1, I’m comfortable in my nerdiness. And No. 2, those chick-lit-reading beachgoers just won’t go to heaven because of their ignorance of the (fictionalized) Bible, right? Right?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I have a lot more about Christianity to learn.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

Meet two-egg (fraternal) twins Estha and Rahel, two kids growing up in the India state of Kerala in the turbulent 1960s. Welcome to the imaginative, confusing, flowing world of two connected siblings, who see the world through each others’ (vibrantly, innocently descriptive) eyes, yet understand only shallowly the events unfolding around around them. Join them as they discover — over the course of childhood and with the distance of adulthood — “the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Green Grass Grace (Shawn McBride)

This book recommendation has incredible social-networking roots, both physical and virtual. First of all, it’s one of the faves of a co-worker of mine who shares a love of reading. (That’s the physical networking.) Secondly, the subject of the book came up when she mentioned the author of Green Grass Grace requested her friendship on My Space because the book was listed on her home page. (How cool! I wanna be an author’s friend!) With the thoroughly modern way in which the book came to my attention, there was no surprise that the book was thoroughly modern — in its use of cursing and youth-culture slang, in the way it reminisces fondly about the 1980s (a period only recently romanticized as authors of a certain age look backward) and in the way it crossed the young-adult and adult genres so easily, making it great reading for teens as well as older (aka aging, am I really aging already?) bookies like myself.

The title of the novel refers to everything that the narrator, 13-year-old Henry “Hank” Toohey, doesn’t have but wants: the green pastures of the country, grass without lawn ornaments or the clothes of errant spouses who’ve been thrown out strewn about, and Grace, the sharp-tongued, big-hearted girl-next-door he’s in love with. The plot centers on Henry’s quest to bring his brother back from the brink after his fiancee’s death and reunite his parents by declaring his love for Grace in public, reigniting the love within his family’s memory and making things happily ever after once and for all. Yes, it’s a 13-year-old’s logic, but that’s what makes the idea so real, so touching and, of course, so doomed to complications.

Complications include bike riding, television-remote hijacking, seminars on how to take a bra off, haggling with local businessmen (all of whom want you to watch their new cable TV ad; very amusing), sitting on train tracks, neighborhood games of tag, making out behind dumpsters and more. But such juvenile antics are mixed with heavy adult topics like alcohol abuse, unfaithful marriages, death and poverty.

In fact, one of the most vibrant characters is Henry’s neighborhood itself, whose residents and houses are colorful, unique and also incredibly human. Henry’s words can be both humorous and amazingly touching. Take, for instance, his description of the neighborhood church:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cavernous St. Ignatius Church in the heart of Holmesburg in sunny Philadelphia. Let’s get ready to worship. The temperature inside is 98 degrees with higher humidity, but it still ain’t as hot as Hell, so pipe down and keep the top buttons buttoned. And shut up. And buck up. Open your hearts and your wallets. Bow down before the three oil paintings behind the altar of St. Julius Erving, St. Robert Clarke, and St. Richard Ashburn. Then light a candle at the statued feet of Jesus and Mary, who slouch and suffer on the altar, their hearts torn from thorns and burning like tire fires set by parishoners one dollar at a time in the name of someone dead.

It’s a quick, fun and interesting read. I’m interested to see, however, how this freshman author can take it to the next level, if he’s done anything recently that learns from this book or builds off his first novel experience. I can’t find anything online, though, so I guess I’ll have to ask my friend to check his My Space page.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Tidbit No. 26

If by “low-key” you mean 200 guests and souvenir mugs and key chains, um, I guess so …

Jenna Bush bucks tradition with low-key nuptials
By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

Jenna Bush is getting married Saturday, a semi-historic event that America will not get to see. CNN will not be going live to the ceremony. People magazine will not be snapping cover pics. Paparazzi will not be hanging from hovering helicopters.

That’s because Jenna, the first presidential child in decades to marry for the first time during her father’s term, will not be wed at the White House. One of President Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna, 26, will marry Virginia Republican scion Henry Hager, 29, in an outdoor wedding at her parents’ country retreat in Crawford, Texas, secluded with about 200 of her closest family and friends.

Via Petulant in Shakesville.

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Let me come out and say it: This book was one of the most inspired, well crafted and brilliant books I’ve read in a while, perhaps since The Road. Easy to read and straight-forwardly told, this story of Stevens — the last of a generation of English butlers with dignity and gravitas — surprised me with its humor and depth.

Every thread, every thought is woven together so gracefully. There was a moment at the kitchen table when I read the last page where the art of the novel hit me full force, making me see how this narrator’s personality and world view effected not only way we are told the tale, but the tragedies and triumphs of the plot beneath. In a way, Stevens is the ultimate unreliable narrator: Without artifice or intentional deception, we nonetheless see that his story is not the WHOLE story. While he spends time documenting the philosophy of his profession and his absolute dedication to it (the persona is a suit one never removes except when utterly alone, he notes), the reader sees what the unperceptive, dutiful butler doesn’t: what is really happening in the world, who the people around him truly are, their emotions, their desires.

Take, for instance, Steven’s experience on the road trip the novel centers around. Having rarely traveled far from his employer’s estate and never for simple pleasure, he observes the “greatness” of the scenery in such a unique way, what becomes a very signature way of the character.

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of the beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of it own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and American, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Demonstrative scenery? I say! Another great instance is how, because of the jovial character of his new American employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens attempts to master the art of making witty retorts, something too casual and unplanned to be easy for him.

A certain incident “is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. There is no reason to suppose this is not an area in which I will become proficient given time and practice, but, such are the dangers, I have decided it best, for the time being at least, not to attempt to discharge this duty in respect to Mr. Farraday until I have practiced further.”

The personality of Stevens is so alive and real, despite the obvious typecasting as “the butler,” partially because he doesn’t see himself as a type. Where he is blind, we can see and we can ask. Has he really reached the peak of his profession? Has he really become the ultimate butler he so lovingly describes? Or has his whole life been subsumed within this duty? Is his success actually a failure? Can we not love this character wholly and completely anyway, even as we ache for him?

As I said, the poignancy of this device hit me hard on the last page, at which point I burst into satisfied tears, confounding The Boyfriend. “I thought you really liked the book,” he said. “Oh yes,” I sniffed and blew unattractively into a tissue, relishing the emotion the book released.

Ishiguro, like a star athlete, makes perfection seem so simple. A good author can take a pile of letters, a collection of words, a string of sentences, and create with these simple tools a unique and solid experience, something as real to a reader as a friend, a memory or a souvenir of an eventful vacation. Though I’m a library rat, this is one book I will consider buying, just so the sight of it on the shelf can renew that flood of emotion and amazement this talented author created in me. Just so the joy — and pain — will never leave me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover

Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)

I’ll see most anything with Ralph Fiennes in it. Or with Kate Blanchett, for that matter. Combine the two and you’ll know that of course I went to go see this film when it came out in 1997. And I walked out disappointed, frustrated at the disjointed plot and the strange way the characters were just abandoned, stranded at the end of the story.

Despite the stars, I thought maybe it was the movie’s fault. The book, after all, won the Booker Prize, something I hold in very high esteem, too. So I picked it up and — guess what — still a little disappointed.

The characters are certainly wonderfully unique and complex. Oscar, an Anglican priest who pays for divinity school by gambling at the track, is a gawky, awkward and naive young man who is afraid of water. Lucinda is a young woman who lost her parents and gained an inheritance, though she feels so guilty about the unexpected boon that she seems to want to lose the money as fast as possible in various games of chance. The two gamblers are thrown together during a England-to-Australia boat trip and fall in love — and into scandal.

Carefully and artfully told, slowly and surely, the tale is surely interesting. However, perhaps a little TOO slowly, especially near the end. While some great images from the conclusion of the book stuck with me — a glass church floating down a river, for instance — the wrap up left me cold, confused. I felt indignation for these complex characters I’d come to love so much, who I saw as simply being dumped off in the middle of nowhere plot-wise. Just like the movie, the book seemed disjointed. Now I usually like novels that don’t hit you over the head with the moral of their story, but a trail of breadcrumbs is sometimes nice, and I felt I missed (or the book lacked?) some unifying thread, something to make it hum and resonate.

But despite these somewhat minor flaws, I’d pick up anything Peter Carey wrote without a second thought when I come across him in the future. His rich prose is creative and magnetic, unusual and unique. And I still rate the novel …

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Perma Red (Debra Magpie Earling)

So much is said about the Native American people we white bastards kicked off the land and out of their lifestyles, but what do we really know? We watch movies, we learn their myths, we buy their turquoise jewelry and we apologize for the evil of our past actions. But what can we really know of someone until we walk a mile in their shoes? Or, in this case, see the story of life through their eyes? In this book surrounding the people of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Earling shows her amazing ability to transport a reader of any background to the reservation in the 1940s — to taste the dust, to feel the cold through the chinks in the house, to sense the rattlesnakes coiling unseen in the fields and under houses, to feel the sting of judgment at the color of your skin, to feel hungry, to feel the pull of old ways but simultaneously, being young in a white world, not understand them.

Often meeting in the unpeopled woods or along the desolate roads that connect isolated homes with small, saloon-centered towns, the characters in this book dance around tragedy, as if the threat of the next disaster is always in the air. As if they are just waiting to see what the world will hurl at them next, steeling themselves for the blow. The main source of this steel is Louise White Elk, a teenager and the most sought after girl in the area, not because she’s pretty (although she does have an uncommon, strange beauty to her) but due to the strength and mystery of her spirit. Along with Baptiste Yellow Knife (powerful and sharp with the old magic) and Charlie Kicking Woman (the law officer of the reservation, policing his own people), Louise stumbles upon the story of her life. Her life is not flowing or plodding but confrontational, always forcing her to make decisions or take action, never allowing a moment’s rest. It’s all she can do to stand up to it, to take one more day on her shoulders.

While it sounds incredible sad, and it is, this book is also poignant and revealing and engaging. As disorienting as a tornado that pulls you out of your own quiet existence, this whirlwind story is also tinged with the the powerful meanings and larger-than-life characters of myth. While it was certainly tragic, it’s still the sort of story to tell around candlelight or campfires, the kind that curls up around your heart inside you, somehow keeping you warm despite the weight of it.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover.

The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)

“Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The first wave carried with it men accustomed to spaces and coldness and being alone, the coyote and cattlemen, with no fat on them, with faces the years had worn the flesh off, with eyes like nailheads, and hands like the material of old gloves, ready to touch anything. Mars could do nothing to them, for they were bred to plains and praries as open as the Martian fields. They came and made things a little less empty, so that others would find the courage to follow. They put panes in hollow windows and lights behind the panes.”Sure, we’re talking about Mars here. But this kind of prose is hardly typical of science fiction, with its “I kanna give er any moore, captain” drama. Don’t get me wrong, such sci fi is great on occasion. But Bradbury easily transcends genre fiction into the realm of magical realism ala Gabriel Garcia Marquez — a realm of shape-shifting aliens who want only a home, where insanity manifests in physical form, where the ruins of alien cities tower over the desert. And yet it’s all so human and tangible and authentic. My personal favorite: a standoff at the first Martian hot dog stand.

Humorous, dark, satiric, warm, compassionate and lyrical, this book of interconnected short stories (written in 1949) has stood the test of time and I’m happy that the National Book Award judges had the good sense to see that, even way back in the day.

But… well, there was one little thing.

(Audience groans, sensing a tangental rant.)

WTF?! We’ve progressed to the point in time where we’ve developed the technology to visit and colonialize the planet Mars, but Martian wives are still cooking and serving dinner to Martian husbands every night? A Martian woman, Mrs. Ttt, answers the door to the first group of astronauts and she says, “If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven, I’ll hit you with a piece of wood … I’ll see if you can have a minute with Mr. Ttt. What was your business?” In other words, I’m busy baking and if you need anything important (read: not baked goods) you need to talk to the man of the house.

Yes, yes. I realize this book was written a long time ago, decades before the sexism in these examples would have been noticed or discussed. But, man oh MAN, if we’re going to dream up a fake future where we see cool new mental abilities and fabulous technology, couldn’t we for one moment assume that there might be one corner of the universe where the men would bake us cookies?

Oatmeal raisin. You hear that, honey?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection