Schatje's "Best Books Read in 2019"

Since today is the last day of the year, I’m presenting my list of the Best Books Read in 2019.  All the books were published in 2018 or 2019 and received at least 4 Stars in my reviews.

Best Canadian Fiction

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-of-testaments-by-margaret-atwood.html

The Innocents by Michael Crummey:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-of-innocents-by-michael-crummey.html

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/02/review-of-our-homesick-songs-by-emma.html

This Little Light by Lori Lansens:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/08/review-of-this-little-light-by-lori.html

Bina by Anakana Schofield:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/05/review-of-bina-by-anakana-schofield-new.html

Five Wives by Joan Thomas:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/11/review-of-five-wives-by-joan-thomas.html

Best American Fiction

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/05/review-of-miracle-creek-by-angie-kim.html

Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/11/review-of-rabbits-for-food-by-binnie.html

A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/04/review-of-woman-is-no-man-by-etaf-rum.html

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/07/review-of-island-of-sea-women-by-lisa.html

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-of-olive-again-by-elizabeth.html

Man of the Year by Caroline Louise Walker:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/07/review-of-man-of-year-by-caroline.html

Best Fiction from the United Kingdom

Milkman by Anna Burns:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/01/review-of-milkman-by-anna-burns.html

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/01/review-of-italian-teacher-by-tom-rachman.html

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/01/review-of-from-low-and-quiet-sea-by.html

Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/01/review-of-meet-me-at-museum-by-anne.html

Best International Fiction

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/02/review-of-my-sister-serial-killer-by.html

The Geography of Friendship by Sally Piper:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/02/review-of-geography-of-friendship-by.html

* * * * * * * * * * * * *  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  

*I did read some books published prior to 2018 and of those, I’d recommend the following:

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/04/review-of-go-went-gone-by-jenny.html

Cal by Bernard MacLaverty:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/03/review-of-cal-by-bernard-maclaverty.html

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell:  https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/08/review-of-vanishing-act-of-esme-lennox.html

Review of DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

3.5 Stars

Because of my Polish heritage, I thought it remiss of me to not have read anything by Olga Tokarczuk who has won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is often classified as a murder mystery but I found it more philosophical than suspenseful.

The narrator, Janina Duszejko, introduces herself in the opening sentence:  “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.”  She lives in an isolated village on the Czech-Polish border and devotes her time to studying astrology and translating William Blake.  One by one, men in the area are found murdered.  Since the victims are all hunters, Janina concludes that animals are responsible for the deaths.  Of course, this theory results in her being scorned and dismissed by virtually everyone.

Part of the appeal of the book is the quirky narrator.  She prefers to use nicknames rather than people’s actual names and she prefers animals to people.  Though she knows that she lacks any real power and that people are laughing at her, she refuses to be dismissed as a silly old woman and continues to rail against injustices.  She suffers from an unidentified chronic illness and bouts of crying; the latter seem to indicate how deeply troubled she is about the world.

Janina is very attuned to nature.  When she comes across a familiar fox, she speaks of “seeing an old friend” and she refers to deer as “Young Ladies” and calls her dogs her “Little Girls”.  When it rains she describes hearing “the rustle of grass growing, the ivy climbing up the walls, and the mushroom spore expanding underground.  After the rain, when the Sun breaks through the clouds for a while, everything takes on such depth that one’s eyes are filled with tears.”  Interestingly, each chapter begins with a quote from William Blake whose poetry emphasizes the importance of being close to the natural world.  For example, “A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate/Predicts the ruin of the State” and “A Skylark wounded in the wing,/A Cherubim does cease to sing” and “A Robin Red breast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage” are three such quotations used. 

Janina equates animal killings and the murder of humans.  She wishes she could write warnings in animal script:  “[people] won’t take pity on your poor souls, for they say you haven’t got souls.  They don’t see their brethren in you, they won’t give you their blessing.  The nastiest criminal has a soul, but not you, beautiful Deer, nor you, Boar, nor you, wild Goose, nor you Pig, nor you, Dog.”  She asks, “What sort of world is this?  Somebody’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth . . . Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil . . . This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies.  What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm?  What on earth is wrong with us?”

The novel also examines how women and the old are marginalized and disregarded.  She knows she is seen as a little old lady, a silly old bag, a crazy old crone and a madwoman.  She hears people “snorting with laughter” at her and not taking her seriously, especially because she is a woman; when she has a conversation with a man, she knows that if she shared his gender “he’d have heard me out, considered his arguments and debated the matter.  But to him I was just an old woman, gone off her rocker living in this wilderness.  Useless and unimportant.” 

Though serious in subject matter, the book also has humour.  I loved Janina’s theory of testosterone autism:  “With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.  The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation.  He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains.  His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”

One element that did annoy me is the extended passages on astrology.  They slow down the pace and diminish the suspense.  Since I don’t believe in astrology, I tended to skim those sections, but perhaps that’s an example of how we tend to tune out people, like Janina, whose ideas are unconventional. 

I understand why the author is a rather controversial figure in her home country of Poland.  She does not stint on criticizing its culture and religion.  At one point she rants, “people in our country don’t have the ability to club together to form a community . . . This is a land of neurotic egotists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticize, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.”

For a thriller, this book is slow-paced and not particularly suspenseful so it is not recommended to anyone looking for a quick, action-packed read.  What it does have is a lot of ideas which are perhaps outside the parameters of conventional thinking but ideas that nonetheless should be given some consideration. 

Review of THE RIVER by Peter Heller

3 Stars

Because I lived in northern Ontario for many years, I picked up this book since, in terms of setting, it is based on a trip the author took on the Winisk River.  He does in fact thank the people of Peawanuk for their hospitality after a long river trip.  Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I’d hoped.

Jack and Wynn are college friends who share of love of the outdoors and books.  They undertake an extended canoeing trip which will eventually bring them to Hudson Bay.  All goes well until they discover a forest fire is moving closer.  Then they overhear a couple arguing; their encounter with Pierre and Maia proves to be fateful so their peaceful trip becomes a desperate paddle to reach civilization. 

The novel begins very slowly.  For the first quarter, not much happens.  The suspense comes afterwards when they face dangers from both nature (rapids, fire, weather) and humans.  There is also a mystery:  what exactly happened between Maia and Pierre.  Unfortunately, that question is answered only vaguely.  Jack and Wynn’s friendship is also tested because the two interpret events differently.  Jack tends to be skeptical but Wynn has “faith in the essential goodness of the universe.” 

There is a great deal of description.  It is obvious that the author loves the outdoors because he gives detailed descriptions of nature, both flora and fauna.  These descriptions tend to be very lyrical:  “the river slowed and expended itself in unexpected wide coves.  From which loons called as they passed – the rising wail that cracked the afternoon with irrepressible longing and seemed to darken the sky.  The ululant laughter that followed.  Mirthless and sad.  And from across the slough or from far downstream the cry that answered.  And the eagles.  They seemed to mark the canoe’s progress from the gray spires of dead spruce, spaced downriver like watchmen on some lost frontier, sometimes just the unmistakable shape of the hooded predator, sometimes a scraggly limb and a huge stick nest.”

The problem is that there are often unnecessary details about other things such as fishing techniques:  “Jack tied on a dark elk-hair caddis” while Wynn “threw a tiny parachute Adams.”  Even brand names of camping gear are given:  they have Sierra Designs sleeping bags and tent, a Sage fly rod and a Winston one too.  Does the reader need to know that their rifle has a “Leupold 4-12X scope” and that their travel mugs are “stamped with the Dartmouth Pine and the school logo, Vox Clamantis in Deserto”?  Canoes and paddles are always described in detail:  “an old white-painted square-stern woodstrip canoe” and “His canoe was polyethylene, the heavy plasticlike material of the synthetic Old Towns” and “the Wenonah nineteen-foot Itasca expedition canoe” and “The canoe was Kevlar but it had an extra layer like a bow plate” and “The boat was sleek Kevlar, nineteen feet, and with a V’d hull in bow and stern” and “They each used an alder and basswood paddle made by the master Mitchell in New Hampshire.” 

The book blurb describes “a heart-pounding tale of desperate wilderness survival.”  This emphasizes suspense but there is much less of it because of the irrelevant descriptions which suggest the author is writing a non-fiction essay for an outdoor magazine.

Review of A NEARLY NORMAL FAMILY by M. T. Edvardsson

3 Stars

Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell is accused of killing Chris Olsen, a man 14 years her senior.  Her father Adam, a pastor, and her mother Ulrika, a criminal defense attorney, are devastated.  They wonder if Stella could be capable of murder and have to determine what they can/will do to protect her.

The novel has a 3-part structure.  Adam narrates the longest, first section; he focuses on the past, describing their family life and Stella’s childhood and personality.  Then, we are given Stella’s perspective from prison.  Finally, Ulrika narrates the last portion which focuses on the actual trial.  Of course, there is overlap as each part provides a new perspective on events.

None of the three is convincing or likeable.  For a church pastor, Adam is very naïve.  He claims to be able to detect when someone is lying yet that proves not to be true.  He is overly protective of Stella, insisting on counselling when Stella tries drugs, yet when she suffers a real trauma, he does not ensure that she has the help she needs.  He seems to have anger management issues and is constantly forcefully grabbing people by the arm.  Ulrika is a workaholic who has difficulty communicating with her daughter but serves as a confidant for Stella’s best friend Amina.  She is supposedly a very good criminal defense attorney but she forgets about cell phone records?  Stella has impulse control issues and is a thrill seeker who is easily bored. 

There is not a great deal of suspense.  Because there is considerable repetition in the three parts, suspense is diminished.  There is the mystery of who killed Chris Olsen but there are rather obvious clues:  “The only thing that would be worse [than being in prison] is if Amina had to be locked up.”

The novel wants the reader to ask a couple of questions:  How well do you know your own children? How far would you go to protect them?  The author suggests that parents often know little about their offspring and when it comes to one’s family, “People are prepared to put aside everything in the way of ethics and morals to protect their families.  The most rigid of principles can be easily pulverized when it comes to defending your own child.  Lies, guilt, and secrets.  What family isn’t built on such grounds?” 

This is what I consider a mediocre book.  The blurb suggests it will be interesting, but the book itself proves to be much less so. 

Review of LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE by Valeria Luiselli

3 Stars

Because it addresses such an important issue, the treatment of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern U.S. border, I hoped to like this book.  Unfortunately, the cerebral style does not create an emotional reaction.

In the first part, the narrator is an unnamed woman who is taking a road trip with her husband, her 5-year-old daughter (the girl), and her 10-year-old stepson (the boy).  They leave New York for south-western Arizona.  Both she and her husband are audio documentary makers; her goal is to document migrant children gone missing while trying to enter the U.S.:  “the story I need to tell is the one of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost.”  Her husband, on the other hand, is trying to find the echoes of the last free Native Americans, “Geronimo and his band [who] were the last people on the entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes.”  There are indications that their marriage is disintegrating because “their plans were too different . . . and neither wanted to give up being who they were.”

The second part of the novel is narrated by the stepson who focuses on an adventure he undertakes with his sister so “Ma would start thinking of us the way she thought of them, the lost children.  All the time and with all her heart.  And Pa would focus on finding our echoes, instead of all the other echoes he was chasing.”

There is very little plot until the second part; instead, there are many digressions and much political commentary.  With the inclusion of things like migrant mortality reports, I often felt like I was reading an essay.  Certainly, some passages read more like non-fiction:  “When undocumented children arrive at the border, they are subjected to an interrogation conducted by a Border Patrol officer.  It’s called the credible fear interview, and its purpose is to determine whether the child has good enough reasons to seek asylum in the country.”  There is often a didactic tone in sections.  For instance, there is this exposition:  “More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months.  All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law.  They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in.  They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes.  The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.”

It is not just the immigration crisis that receives comments:  “a landscape scarred by decades or maybe centuries of systematic agricultural aggression:  fields sectioned into quadrangular grids, gang-raped by heavy machinery, bloated with modified seeds and injected with pesticides, where meagre fruit trees bear robust, insipid fruit for export; fields corseted into a circumspection of grassy crop layers, in patterns resembling Dantesque hells, watered by central-pivot irrigation systems; and field turned into non-fields, bearing the weight of cement, solar panels, tanks, and enormous windmills.” 

The author’s style is very erudite, perhaps too much so.  The number of allusions is amazing; she references Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Susan Sontag, and Anne Carson, among many others.  The narrator speaks of reading “Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal.”  After a while, however, one is left with the impression that Luiselli is just trying to impress.  And then there’s the diction; phrases like “rhetorical usufruct” and “edulcorated versions of xenophobia” and “his prosody well attuned to the necrological hypocrisy” abound.  Oh, and then there’s a 20-page sentence. 

I had difficulty with the portrayal of the children.  They are both terribly precocious.  A 5-year-old can tell a multilingual joke?  The 10-year-old boy has a very mature narrative voice.  And a parent would consider Lord of the Flies a good audiobook for a family road trip with two young children? 

Migrant children should have their stories told.  I just don’t think that Luiselli has chosen the best way to tell those stories.  She tries to emphasize the universality of the human experience by having nameless characters and by drawing parallels between the treatment of the Apaches (“they were crammed into a train car and sent . . . far from everything and everyone”) and the migrant children, but her clever but artificial style does not evoke the type of emotional impact one would expect.  It’s a case of good intentions but poor execution. 

Review of NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

3.5 Stars

I came across this title when it appeared on the longlist for the Booker Prize.  It bears much resemblance to Waiting for Godot, the play by Samuel Beckett; in fact, as I read Night Boat to Tangier, I kept thinking it should be a play or at least a novel to be read aloud.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are two “fading Irish gangsters.”  One limps and the other is missing an eye.  They are in the ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain, where they hope to see Dilly, Maurice’s estranged daughter.  Maurice hasn’t seen the 23-year-old Dilly for three years, but he and his friend have heard that she might be passing through the terminal on her way to or returning from Morocco sometime on that day, October 23, 2018. 

During their vigil, they flashback to their early lives when they were partners in crime, fierce friends, and equally fierce rivals:  “From beneath the stones of the Algeciras dockside the humid air of reminiscence rises – it is one of the places of the earth designed for a good wallow.”  There is considerable focus on Maurice’s stormy relationship with Cynthia, Dilly’s mother.

Though the men are drug smugglers, this is not an action novel.  It is very much a novel of character.  Both men are flawed; we learn of their propensity for  violence, for example, in their intimidation of a traveller whom they think might know something about Dilly’s whereabouts.  They have spent virtually their entire lives in criminal activities, mostly smuggling and selling drugs.  In their personal lives, they have been disloyal and neglectful.  Both men emerge as fully developed characters who are best described by Cynthia:  “They do fill a room, though, don’t they?”

Despite all their negative qualities, the reader will feel some compassion for them.  Flashbacks show their impoverished pasts and familial mental health issues.  Despite their flaws and abominable behaviour, they both love Dilly and she’s missing:  “Can you imagine what that feels like?”  Though there is much humour in their witty banter, “Their talk is a shield against feeling.”  Even drug smuggling is not as lucrative as it once was:  “But the money no longer is in dope.  The money now is in people.  The Mediterranean is a sea of slaves.  The years have turned and left Maurice and Charlie behind.”  That the author can arouse compassion for unreformed criminals attests to his skill.

The hours that the men spend in the ferry terminal seem like time spent in purgatory.  The terminal itself is suffused in a “dank light” and is described as an “awful place” with “a haunted air, a sinister feeling.”  Here Maurice and Charlie seem to realize the impact their crimes have had on their lives:  the regret, the constant threat of danger and violence, the punishing paranoia, the broken relationships.  “The men are elegiacal, woeful, heavy in the bones.  Also they are broke and grieving.” 

The lyrical style of the novel is noteworthy:  “The boats put out to sea.  The trawlers moved their rust in the winter sun.  The harbour was a skivvy to itself always” and “The interior patio was whispery with ferns.  He lay shivering in a room set off from it.  It was cold as the moon.  It was so cold he could feel his blood move” and “The long night lowered itself along the last notches of its spine – the lizard night.”

This novel will not be for everyone.  For me, the Hibernian slang sometimes presented difficulties, especially when I could not easily find definitions.  It will appeal to those who enjoy novels which focus on characterization and philosophical discussions and include staccato dialogue and a lyrical style.

Review of PLATFORM SEVEN by Louise Doughty

3 Stars

The narrator is Lisa Evans, a 36-year-old teacher in Peterborough, England.  What is unusual about her is that she is dead; as a ghost she wanders the train station.  Eighteen months earlier, Lisa died on a railway platform.  Her death was ruled a suicide, but after witnessing a man jump in front of a train, Lisa vows, “I didn’t do what he did.  I didn’t throw myself off Platform Seven.  So what happened to me?” 

At first, Lisa has no memory of her past life, but once she regains her memory, she flashes back to her relationship with Dr. Matthew Goodison.  Though charming and charismatic in public, in private Matty is very psychologically controlling.  He limits Lisa’s contact with her friends, questions her mental health, and makes subtle threats which he easily explains away as being threats only in her mind.  So is the truth about Lisa’s death to be found in this toxic relationship?

I had difficulty with the ghostly Lisa because the author kept changing the rules which governed her existence and behaviour.  Initially, she has not memories of her life; she doesn’t even know her name.  Then she remembers everything about her life; even conversations are related verbatim.  She realizes “Most of the time, I know what people are thinking,” but then there are people whose “thoughts remain a mystery to me”?  Lisa describes herself as “nothing but consciousness,” but then she describes people passing through her as if she has some type of form.  At the beginning, she is unable to leave the railway station in Peterborough and she takes pains to describe her “boundaried world.”  Then she suddenly discovers that she can leave.  Later it seems like she even has the ability to see the future?  These inconsistencies make it difficult to accept the spectral Lisa as a narrator.

What the book does well is present a very nuanced portrayal of an abusive relationship.  Matty, bit by bit, undermines Lisa’s confidence and self-esteem, and curtails her freedom.  He threatens her physically but in such a way that his actions can be interpreted innocently.  For instance, “He took hold of my face, his fingers indenting the soft flesh of my cheek in four places on one side, the thumb on the other cheek pressing against my jawbone.”  When Lisa mentions his grabbing her face, Matty says, “’Lisa, honestly, talk about exaggeration.  I didn’t grab your face.  I showed you where I’d stitched [a girl who’d fallen onto a radiator], I was explaining, honestly, really.‘”  He then continues gaslighting her:  “’We have to get this straight because quite seriously I’m wondering if you’re totally insane.‘”  In public, of course, he behaves so that everyone is convinced of his love for her.  Lisa sums up his technique:  “A man like Matthew would never cross the line, I saw that now, he would just make me feel worse and worse until I didn’t trust a single thought I had any more.”

The theme of love is explored.  Lisa learns about love:  “I made the same mistake that women and girls throughout the ages and across continents have so often made, the one that is so easy and seductive, so flattering to ourselves.  I mistook possessiveness for love.  By the time I realised the magnitude of that mistake, I had too much invested in it to unpack it, and so I had to keep on making it in order to justify the fact that I had made it in the first place.”  She realizes that “Love takes so many forms. . . . I just wish that I had kept more sense of proportion.”

The book starts slowly so I wondered whether I should keep reading.  It is only when Lisa starts her flashback that the plot picks up momentum.  This flawed pacing and the issues with the ghostly narrator make this not my favourite Louise Doughty novel. 

Review of A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier

2.5 Stars

Living in Winchester in 1932, Violet Speedwell, 38, is a “surplus woman,” one of those women “left single as a result of [World War I] and unlikely to marry.”  She has recently moved from her family home and life with her constantly complaining mother to start an independent life.  Working as a typist for an insurance company provides her barely enough income to survive.  She joins a guild of women who embroider kneelers and cushions for Winchester Cathedral.  A friendship with Arthur Knight, a bell ringer at the cathedral, also brings joy into her life.

There is not much of a plot so the pace is very slow.  On the other hand, there is a great deal of focus on canvas embroidery and bell ringing.  I found my interest waning several times when there was an information dump on these topics. 

I had difficulty with the character of Jack Wells.  Why is he interested specifically in Violet?  She is not the only single woman in the area, yet he focuses on her.  Actually, the entire plot involving him seems unnecessary, unless it is to create some suspense in a novel sorely lacking in that regard.

The relationship between Arthur and Violet is also difficult to understand.  The first thing she notices about him is his eyes and that “He was much older than she, and – she automatically glanced – he wore a wedding ring.”  On their first meeting, why does she think that he is making a point to remember not to call her Vi especially when he pays her only “brief attention”?

Violet is not a particularly likeable character.  She lost her brother and fiancé during the war but that was 16 years earlier.  It took her that long to move away from her mother who has made her life so miserable?  She does become less of a shrinking violet and gains some confidence once she is on her own, but then she takes “Her act of rebellion” which she acknowledges is “making [her] life from the ruins of [another]”!  This is hardly admirable behaviour.  (And at the end of that act of rebellion, she listens to her inner body and imagines she feels a faint twinge so she concludes, “Now it begins . . . Now I begin”??!!)

I enjoyed Girl with a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures by the same author, but this novel just fell flat for me.  What the book successfully emphasizes is the few options women had, especially single women who were “considered a tragedy, and a threat, in a society set up for marriage.”  I guess a dull book is one way of stressing the dullness of life for women such as Violet?

BOOKS TO ADD TO YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING LIST

Do you have fiction readers on your Christmas list?  If so, read my latest article in my hometown newspaper:
https://madvalleycurrent.com/2019/12/01/novels-for-book-lover-your-christmas-list/

Review of THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

3.5 Stars

Set in a segregated 1960s reform school in Florida, this novel focuses on two black teenagers.  Elwood Curtis works hard and earns such good grades that he receives an offer to attend college classes while still in high school.  Unknowingly, he hitches a ride in a stolen car and ends up being sent to the Nickel Academy where boys are routinely subjected to brutal punishments:  night-time beatings, solitary confinement, and rape.  Some boys even disappear after being taken “out back.”  There Elwood meets Turner who becomes his best friend.  Turner, serving his second stint, tries to teach Elwood how to survive.

Elwood and Turner are foil characters.  Elwood is an idealistic young man who greatly admires Martin Luther King Jr.  He wants to maintain a sense of dignity above all else:  “There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are.”  Because he believes in and works for justice, he calls out petty thieves and defends victims of bullying:  “If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest.  That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.”

Turner, on the other hand, is very street-smart.  He knows how the world works and advises Elwood to do whatever it takes to survive:  “you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.”  He is sceptical, even about the civil rights movement:  “you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people.  In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths.  He had to work, but they were out protesting.  And it happened – they opened the counter.  Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way.  You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

Nickel Academy serves as a microcosm of the outside world:  “’In here and out there are the same.’”  The arbitrariness of arrests and punishments is emphasized:  “no one had ever seen [Nickel’s handbook of rules of conduct] despite its constant invocations by the staff.  Like justice, it existed in theory.”  Racism is sanctioned because it benefits whites; Nickel boys, for example, perform odd jobs for whites in the community, and merchants sell food that was designated for the black boys at the school.

Whitehead is at pains to emphasize how the treatment of the boys is just part of the racism that has plagued the country:  “Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom.  Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains.  A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time.  After the Civil War . . . the white sons remembered the family lore. . . . The Florida Industrial School for Boys wasn’t in operation six months before they converted the third-floor storage closets into solitary confinement. . . . The dark cells remained in use even after two locked-up boys died in the fire of ’21.  The sons held the old ways close.  The state outlawed dark cells and sweatboxes in juvenile facilities . . . But the rooms waited, blank and still airless.  They waited for wayward boys in need of an attitude adjustment.  They wait still, as long as the sons – and the sons of those sons – remember.”

The above quotation illustrates my problem with the novel:  it often reads like a non-fictional account with a journalistic tone.  (The author acknowledges that the story is heavily based on the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.)  Third-person narration is used and that distances the reader from the characters.  Certainly, the history lesson I quoted above emphasizes the feelings of the writer as opposed to the feelings of the young boys.  The horrors they experience are seen but not felt as compellingly.  It is impossible not to feel moral outrage, but a strong emotional connection is missing. 

There is no doubt that the book tells an important story.  Considering the treatment blacks still receive from the police and the criminal justice system, the book is very timely.  I just wish that the tone were less flat and that there was more showing and less telling.   

Review of 10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD by Elif Shafak

3 Stars

The novel is set in 1990 in Istanbul.  Tequila Leila, a 43-year-old sex worker, is “inside a metal rubbish bin with rusty handles and flaking paint.”  Her heart has stopped beating and her brain is slowly shutting down.  In the ten minutes during which her brain continues to function, she flashes back to her early life in eastern Turkey.  Interspersed with these vignettes which explain how Leyla Akarsu came to be a prostitute are the back stories of the five friends who comprise Leila’s surrogate family.

The first part of the novel which outlines Leila’s life from birth to death is a great read.  We see a child/ young girl who has few options.  Her father becomes increasingly religious and he restricts the movements of his wives and his daughter; he expects the women in his household to be silent and docile.  After being sexually abused by a relative, her fate seems sealed, especially when she refuses to be the obedient daughter her family expects.  

Leila’s five friends are all social outcasts whose lives show the treatment received by the marginalized.  Among these friends are an illegal immigrant, a dwarf, and a transfemale.  All are drawn to Istanbul, but none are greeted with open arms.  The book does not paint a positive picture of humans:  “No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and seen the things that people did, simply because they could.” 

The second part of the book was a major letdown.  Leila’s five friends set out to make sure that she has a proper burial and is not left in the Cemetery of the Companionless.  This section, full of slapstick, descends into farce.  Their devotion to their friend is commendable but some of the behaviour is totally ridiculous.  This section left me wishing that the author had ended the book at the end of the first part with its perfect last sentence:  “They never failed to recognize a sad woman when they saw one.”

Shafak is known as an advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and LGBT people.  In this novel she also draws attention to sexual violence against women and children, hoping to draw attention to the problem and encourage the Turkish government to take action.  Unfortunately, the government is investigating writers who write about difficult subjects.  That fact alone means her book should be read. 

Review of FIVE WIVES by Joan Thomas

4 Stars

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the impact of that devastation on human life on earth have recently been in the news.  Five Wives examines the devastating impact of missionary zeal on the people living in the Amazon.

The novel is based on Operation Auca, the mission of a group of American Christian evangelists in the mid-1950s.  Their aim was to convert the Waorani, an isolated Indigenous people living in Ecuadorian Amazonia.  Five male missionaries decided to make contact and were killed.  Among evangelical Christians, the five men were seen as martyred heroes.

The focus of the book is the wives of the missionaries, especially Marj Saint and Betty Elliot, and Rachel Saint, the sister of the team’s pilot.  We learn considerable background:  how Marj and Betty met their husbands, how Rachel came to be involved in the mission, how the women reacted to the deaths of the men.  There is also a contemporary subplot involving Abby, the granddaughter of both Marj and Betty.  Abby is not proud of her family’s legacy because of how they “’went to someone else’s country and said to people, your ways are wicked, our ways are good’” (31).

There is a long cast of characters so it is occasionally difficult to remember who is married to whom.  A chart at the beginning of the book would definitely have been helpful.  Fortunately, the major characters are sufficiently developed that identification becomes easier.

Initially the women are subservient to their husbands.  Women aren’t even allowed to sing aloud in church.  When the men and their wives have a meeting to discuss making contact with the Waorani, Marj understands, “This is not a meeting to discuss the risks and vote yes or no; this is a meeting to brief the girls.  The plan is glorious and complete, it’s an extravagant bird in full flight” (185).  The women are expected to accept the plan, even if they disagree and think the men are being hasty.  The men think only of the glory that awaits if they succeed and give little consideration to the consequences for their families should they fail.  After the men are killed, the women must decide for themselves if they should continue to be involved in the mission.

What amazed me is the single-mindedness of some of the missionaries.  They believe that God is behind all events and that even the simplest of things can be God’s message which must be interpreted.  Their faith leads to a form of blindness because events which most people would see as warnings are viewed as positive signs from God.  When God seems to be ignoring her, one of the wives concludes that “God had a new contract with her, the contract of silence” (331).  When the missionaries are killed, Betty views the killing of the men as “’a marvellous indication of God’s love and purpose.  It seems clear that God has moved a step closer to redeeming the Auca’” (278).

There is an element of blindness and hubris in the missionaries’ belief in the superiority of Christianity which is even seen in the name they give the Waorani; they call them Auca, a pejorative name meaning “savage.”  Non-Christian cultures are seen as valueless:  “They always talked of how they would change the Indians, what they would bring to the Indians, but they didn’t think of what the Indians would bring to them” (340).  More than one person on the mission wears a “breastplate of righteousness” (315).

Contact annihilates the Waorani and their culture.  Exposure to disease leads to deaths.  The tribe is restricted to a protectorate (reservation) comprising 8 percent of Waorani land.  That land, oil companies are free to exploit so one Waorani says, “’Thirteen days of oil for America ruined Waorani lands’” (350).  It is only after Waorani culture has been virtually destroyed that Abby learns about “The hunting taboos that protect certain animals.  The songs celebrating the bounty of the forest.  The way individuals from clans far away are recognized by their footprints in river clay.  The warfare rituals, the sharing rituals” (372).  There is such irony in a Bible finally being translated into the Waorani language, “the fulfillment of a dream cherished by three generations of Operation Auca families” (357), because by then only a few elders speak the language and not many of them can read.

The author shows different approaches to Christianization.  Betty, for example, asks, “Was it possible to reach people’s souls, and turn them over to Christ, and leave the people otherwise as they were?” and has “a lot of ideas about accommodating the gospel to native ways” (350).  Rachel, on the other hand, is totally unbending; she is determined to break their itinerant lifestyle.  She wants the Waorani to raise beef cattle so they will give up eating wild meat:  “’And anyway, if they live in one place, the game is going to peter out pretty shortly’” (325)! 

What is amazing is that the author manages to arouse sympathy and antipathy for both women.  Betty is an intelligent woman who questions the way Christian missions operate yet still has “faith that terrible and even bizarre tragedies are planned and carried out by God’” (15).  Rachel is a bully who forces the Waorani to live as she sees fit; even her nephew recognizes that the Waorani needed protection from her (350).  Yet this same woman raised five boys while she was just a girl herself and had her heart broken twice (130 – 131).  The flawed and layered characters are a wonderful element in the book.

 

The son of one of the missionaries realizes “that his family’s story always sounds better in the US.  You tell it there and people are moved to tears” (352).  My hope is that people are indeed moved to tears but not just because five men died; the impact of missionary zeal on the Waorani left me feeling devastated and reflecting on the treatment our Indigenous people received.

This book is so timely, perhaps influencing people to think more about First Nations reconciliation.  I understand why the novel won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

Review of END OF WATCH by Stephen King

2 Stars

Sometimes I wish I were less of a Type A personality.  Because I had listened to the first two books in the Bill Hodges trilogy, I just had to listen to the last instalment, even though I was not particularly impressed with Stephen King’s foray into detective fiction.  I wish I had walked away.

The book begins with Bill and Holly being told about a suspicious murder-suicide case linked to Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes killer.  The woman who was murdered was one of Hartsfield’s victims in Mr. Mercedes; she was supposedly killed by her own mother who then committed suicide.  Brady had a fascination with suicide and in the past encouraged others to end their lives, so Holly thinks of him as a suicide architect and wonders whether Brady might have a connection to this case. 

The problem is that Brady suffered a traumatic brain injury and is unable to leave the hospital where he has been for years.  Since this is a Stephen King novel, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brady has acquired supernatural abilities; telekinesis and mind control.  He is so adept that he can hijack the bodies of others to do his bidding and even destroy someone’s consciousness and replace it with his own.  Brady is also able to convert a child’s game on a cheap game console into a brainwashing program that hypnotizes people into committing suicide.

Can Bill and Holly and Jerome figure out what is happening and put a stop to Brady’s dastardly plan?  Yikes!  It’s as if King gave up on writing a detective thriller and returned to the supernatural/horror genre he is best known for. 

Besides requiring readers to accept paranormal abilities, King also expects readers to ignore so many other flaws.  As in the previous books, Bill, though he is a retired police detective, continues to hide critical evidence for law enforcement.  Then he and Holly set off to a remote location in a snowstorm for what can only be called a suicidal confrontation.  The climactic scene is over the top in terms of gore and in terms of how much physical injury people are able to survive.  It’s like watching a Rambo movie.

A friend had suggested I give Stephen King’s detective fiction a try since I was not impressed by his other fiction.  Well, I read all three of King’s crime novels and am now going to walk away.  I would not recommend them and certainly hope that King, considering the end of this trilogy, won’t attempt a Pete Huntley trilogy. 

Review of RABBITS FOR FOOD by Binnie Kirshenbaum (New Release)

4 Stars

Forty-three year old Bunny has suffered from depression virtually her entire life.  During a New Year’s Eve dinner with friends, she has a serious psychotic episode and is hospitalized.  The novel focuses on her time on a psychiatric ward where she encounters others suffering with mental illness.  Bunny (and, to some extent, her husband Albie) must make decisions concerning her treatment.

The book has a third-person narrator, but there are also first-person sections where Bunny writes short pieces based on writing prompts like “a shoebox” and “a business meeting” and “a pair” and “a hat”.  Bunny often uses these creative writing prompts to describe events from her past so they help to develop her character.  It is in one of these 300-word pieces that we learn about what happened to Bunny’s best friend, an event that has had a major impact on Bunny. 

This is not an action-packed narrative; it is a sensitive portrayal of chronic depression.  Bunny has tried different therapists and various drugs and drug combinations to little effect.  She feels misunderstood because few people know what it’s like to be her and “what it’s like not to be taken seriously, having no idea how it is to feel ashamed of who you are.”

Some suggestions as to contributing causes of depression are mentioned, though it is repeated that “Despair can’t be monitored like blood pressure or measured in centimeters like a tumor”:  “It’s often genetic, this disposition of melancholy” and “It is all too apparent:  wounds never heal, but rather, in a torpid state deep inside the medial temporal lobe of the brain, grief waits for fresh release” and “a lack of attention that might well have been a contributing factor.  A contributing factor.  One.  One of many.  Because it’s never just one thing.”

Bunny describes herself as “a headache of a person who is not easy to like.” Living with a depressive would not be easy, but I found myself growing to like her.  I loved her insightful and sarcastic comments.  When an extended family member has a child and everyone carries on “as if the parents had actually done something extraordinary,” Bunny only says, “’The earthworm is impressive because it impregnates itself.’”  When people are excited that a child has begun to walk, Bunny comments “’I’d be excited if he were flying.  But walking? No.’”  When friends are “engaged in passionate discourse about balsamic vinegar,” she comments, “’Excuse me . . . but do any of you really give a shit?  I mean, you’re going on about balsamic vinegar like it matters.  Does it? . . . Does it really matter?’”  This is a perfect response to such a vapid conversation.  Even if one does not like Bunny, it is important to remember what she mentions at the end of the book:  “People who are not easy to like, they have feelings just like nice people do.”

I found myself feeling a great deal of sympathy for Bunny.  Her family does nothing to help her; her sisters want an explanation for her depression:  “Whatever the reason, they want to be assured that it was her own damn fault.”  She has experienced loss in her life.  She is in pain:  “Bunny’s pain has no place.  She hurts everywhere.  She hurts nowhere.  Everywhere and nowhere, hers is a ghostly pain, like that of a phantom limb.  Where there is nothing, there can be no relief.”  She engages in self-harm because “Only when she hits herself or pulls her hair or bends her finger back or bites the inside of her mouth can she experience the pleasure of pain found and pain released.  It is the only way to be rid of the pain that is Bunny.  She is the point of pain.”

The author has bravely written about the complex topic of mental illness.  Her protagonist may make people uncomfortable, but her pain is heart-wrenching.  This is a novel well worth reading for its insight into depression. 

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.