15 Novels Inspiring Recent/Soon-to-be-Released Films

Both CBC (http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/09/the-tiff-2015-reading-list.html)

and Chapters/Indigo (https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/page-to-screen/coming-soon?s_campaign=Indigo:Social:Twitter:Books&s_campaign=Indigo:Social:Twitter:) have compiled lists of recent/ soon-to-be-released films and tv movies based on books.  Here’s my list of 15 interesting novels which have been adapted into (recent or soon-to-be-released) films.

London Fields – Martin Amis  (Film starring Billy Bob Thornton)

In this murder mystery, the murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction.  The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts.  Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

Room – Emma Donaghue   (Film starring Brie Larson)

The narrator is five-year-old Jack, a child born into a 12’ x 12’ room, the only home he’s ever known.

His mother, kidnapped seven years earlier at age 19, has created a world for her son that is rich in play and learning, all the while anticipating the day they might make their “great escape.”

The Danish Girl – David Ebershoff   (Film starring Eddie Redmayne)

The Danish Girl portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe, a pioneer in transgender history, and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.

The Dressmaker – Roasalie Ham  (Film starring Kate Winslet)

After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town she was banished from as a child.  She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave.  But Tilly decides to stay, and though she is still an outcast, her lush, exquisite dresses prove irresistible to the prim women of Dungatar.  Through her fashion business, her friendship with Sergeant Farrat, the town’s only policeman, and a budding romance with Teddy, the local football star whose family is almost as reviled as hers, she finds a measure of grudging acceptance. But as her dresses begin to arouse competition and envy in town, causing old resentments to surface, it becomes clear that Tilly’s mind is set on exacting revenge on those who wronged her.

Into the Forest – Jean Hegland   (Film starring Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood)

Set in the near-future, Into the Forest focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters living alone in their Northern California forest home.  Over 30 miles from the nearest town, and several miles away from their nearest neighbor, Nell and Eva struggle to survive as society begins to decay and collapse around them.

The Price of Salt – Patricia Highsmith   (Film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara)

Therese Belivet is a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job.  Her salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover.

Beasts of No Nation – Uzodinma Iweala    (Film starring Abraham Attah)

Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country.  Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.  While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact.

A Tale of Love and Darkness – Amos Oz   (Film starring Natalie Portman)

A Tale of Love and Darkness is the story of a boy who grows up in war-torn Jerusalem, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many.  The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother’s suicide.  The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and community to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children.  The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.

The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge – Michael Punke   (Film starring Leonardo DiCaprio)

Frontiersman Hugh Glass enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River.  After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.   Glass appears to be mortally wounded.  Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible.  Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger to stand watch and bury him.  After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians.  Taking Glass's rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridger, leaving Glass.  Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs   (Film starring Asa Butterfield)

A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar.  They may have been dangerous.  They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason.  And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

The Septembers of Shiraz – Dalia Sofer   (Film starring Adrien Brody and Salma Hayek)

On a September day in 1981, gem trader Isaac Amin is accosted by Revolutionary Guards at his Tehran office and imprisoned for no other crime than being Jewish in a country where Muslim fanaticism is growing daily.  Being rich and having had slender ties to the Shah's regime magnify his peril.  In anguish over what might be happening to his family, Isaac watches the brutal mutilation and executions of prisoners around him.  His wife, Farnaz, struggles to keep from slipping into despair, while his young daughter, Shirin, steals files from the home of a playmate whose father is in charge of the prison that holds her father.  Far away in Brooklyn, Isaac's nonreligious son, Parviz, struggles without his family's money and falls for the pious daughter of his Hasidic landlord.

The Light Between Oceans – M. L. Stedman   (Film starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander)

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast.  To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.  Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately, but Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world.

Brooklyn – Colm Tóibín   (Film starring Saoirse Ronan)

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey cannot find work. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go.  Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady’s intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.  Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life.

The Martian – Andy Weir   (Film starring Matt Damon)

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.  After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.  But Mark isn't ready to give up.  Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next.  Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

The Family Fang – Kevin Wilson   (Film starring Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman)

Annie and Buster Fang have spent most of their adult lives trying to distance themselves from their famous artist parents, Caleb and Camille.  But when a bad economy and a few bad personal decisions converge, the two siblings have nowhere to turn but their family home.  Reunited under one roof for the first time in more than a decade and surrounded by the souvenirs of their unusual upbringing, Buster and Annie are forced to confront not only their creatively ambitious parents, but the chaos and confusion of their childhood.

(All book descriptions are from www.amazon.ca.)

2015 National Book Awards Longlist - Fiction

Today the National Book Awards fiction longlist was announced.  Here are brief plot summaries (from www.amazon.ca) of the ten books on that list.

A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

In this dystopian tale, a man, suffering from amnesia and known simply as the “claimant,” with the help of a mysterious woman, must relearn how to function in society.  At first the lessons are basic and literal—this is how a chair is used, here is how to greet a stranger—but they grow in difficulty and complexity.  But soon, urged on by unpleasant dreams, he discovers the truth behind his state.

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg

This début novel is about a circle of people who find solace in the least likely of places as they cope with a horrific tragedy.  Everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.

This novel was also longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, though it didn’t make the shortlist.

Refund by Karen E. Bender

This is a collection of short stories that explore the ways in which money and the estimation of value affect the lives of her characters.  The stories reflect the contemporary world - swindlers, reality show creators, desperate artists, siblings, parents - who try to answer the question: What is the real definition of worth?

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

This début novel follows a black family living in Detroit during the city’s economic collapse.  The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years.  Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father.  The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs.  But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage.  The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts—and shapes—their family’s future.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

This book is an examination of a marriage and also a portrait of creative partnership.  Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives.  And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets.  At the core of this novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.  At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness.  A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.  With stunning revelations and multiple threads, Groff delivers a novel about love, art, creativity, and power.

Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

This collection of stories gives voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear.  In six stories, Johnson delves into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal.  For example, in “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And the title story depicts two defectors from North Korea who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson

Born and raised in the heart of old Dixie, D’aron Davenport finds himself in unfamiliar territory his freshman year at UC Berkeley.  Two thousand miles and a world away from his childhood, he is a small-town fish floundering in the depths of a large, hyper-liberal pond.  Caught between the prosaic values of his rural hometown and the intellectualized multicultural cosmopolitanism of Berkeley, the nineteen-year-old white kid is uncertain about his place until he becomes friends with Louis, a “kung-fu comedian" from California; Candice, an earnest do-gooder claiming Native roots from Iowa; and Charlie, an introspective inner-city black teen from Chicago.  When D’aron lets slip that his hometown hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, the four decide to do a “performative intervention” to protest the reenactment.  Armed with youthful self-importance, makeshift slave costumes, righteous zeal, and their own misguided ideas about the South, the four descend on Braggsville. Their journey through backwoods churches, backroom politics, Waffle Houses, and drunken family barbecues is uproarious to start, but will have devastating consequences.

Honeydew by Edith Pearlman

This is a collection of twenty stories.  The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, and the interior life of young Emily Knapp who wishes she were a bug. "The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets-and a surprise stowaway-while the lead story, "Tenderfoot," follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new customer anguishing over his own buried trauma.  Various other characters are encountered:  a special child with pentachromatic vision, a group of displaced Somali women adjusting to life in suburban Boston, and a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.  There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.  Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.  Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

This book also appears on the 2015 Man Booker Prize shortlist.

Note:  I reviewed this book on August 10.

Mislaid by Nell Zink

In 1960s Virginia, college freshman Peggy falls for professor and poet Lee, and what begins as an ill-advised affair results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage.  Mismatched from the start—she's a lesbian; he's gay—Peggy eventually finds herself in crisis and runs away with their daughter, leaving their son behind.  Estranged from the rest of the family, Peggy and her daughter adopt African-American identities and live in near poverty to escape detection.  Meanwhile, Lee and his son carry on, enjoying all the social privileges their gender, class, and whiteness afford them.  Eventually the long-lost siblings meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings that culminate in a darkly comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

The finalists will be announced on October 14 and the winner, on November 18.

Review of "The Hanging Girl" by Jussi Adler-Olsen

3.5 Stars

Department Q is back.  Carl, Assad and Rose are joined by an additional member, Gordon.  This time they investigate a case from 17 years earlier.  Alberte Goldschmid was found hanging from a tree on Bornholm, one of the Danish islands.  The policeman, who found her body and became obsessed with discovering who was driving the vehicle that hit her, commits suicide but not before bequeathing the case to Department Q.  The investigation has them delving into a sun-worshiping cult from whose centre, the Nature Absorption Academy, people are disappearing. 

This is the sixth Department Q novel, and I would advise readers to read them in order since each one adds to character development.  As in the previous books, we learn a bit more about Assad’s mysterious past though not all is revealed.  Apparently there are four more books to the series.

The book excels at showing the road an actual police investigation takes – with twists, turns, and dead ends.  This does not make for a fast-paced story, but ensures a more realistic plot.  What also unifies the plot is the theme of jealousy.   The reader sees several examples of how people react to a perceived threat to a relationship.   The resolution does have some surprises, but logic is not sacrificed. 

As in the other books in the series, there are humourous touches.  The banter between the members of the department continues.

If you have not already discovered this Danish mystery series, do check it out.  As Queen Elizabeth II says in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, “Can there be any greater pleasure . . . than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two . . . “?

2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced today; the two American books I have already reviewed on this blog.  Here are brief descriptions (from www.amazon.ca) of all six finalists:

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Jamaica)

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing.  The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others.  Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston.  Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated.

A Brief History of Seven Killings delves into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond.  James chronicles the lives of a host of characters – gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents, even ghosts – over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s.

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Great Britain)

U. is a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London.  His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them - all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.

Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades.  Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together -- a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age?  Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news?  Perhaps; perhaps not.

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)

In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990's, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.  Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990's Nigeria, in the small town of Akure.  When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing.  At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings.  What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact - both tragic and redemptive - will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters.

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (Great Britain)

This is a contemporary epic about a year in the life of a group of young illegal immigrants living and working together in the north of England.  Three young men from very different backgrounds come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new:  to support their families; where they can, to build their future; to show their worth; to escape the past. They have almost no idea of what awaits them.

In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar.  Avtar has a secret that binds him to the unpredictable Randeep.  Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town, whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes in case the immigration men surprise her with a visit.  She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of all.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (U.S.)

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family - their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog - is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before.  And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father.  The novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.

Note:  I reviewed this book on August 2.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (U.S.)

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.  There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.  Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.  Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

Note:  I reviewed this book on August 10.

The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on October 13.

Queen Elizabeth II's Literary Odyssey - "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett

Queen Elizabeth II is now Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.  What does this have to do with books and reading?  Well, The Guardian printed a short article entitled “The Queen of Arts: Elizabeth II in Fiction”: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/11/queen-arts-elizabeth-second-fiction?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks.

That got me thinking about Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader which imagines the queen’s literary odyssey.  One of the highlights of the novella is the observations about literature and reading.  Here’s my baker’s dozen of favourites:

“What she was finding was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

“Books are not about passing the time.  They’re about other lives.  Other worlds.  Far from wanting time to pass, . . . one just wishes one had more of it.”

“The appeal of reading . . . lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.  Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not.  All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth.”

“I think of literature . . . as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach.”

“Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.”

“Can there be any greater pleasure . . . than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?”

“. . . reading was, among other things, a muscle that [can be] developed.”

“Books are wonderful, aren’t they? . . . At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak, . . . they tenderize one.”

“Who is above literature?  You might as well say one was above humanity.”

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“You don't put your life into your books.  You find it there.”

“...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice.”

Reviews Archive - Rachel Joyce's Companion Novels: "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" and "The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy"

If you enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, you must read its companion, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.  If you haven't read either, two good novels await you.

Review of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

4 Stars

Harold Fry, a sad, lonely, 65-year-old recent retiree, is caught in a stale life and a fractured marriage in which “language had no significance.” He receives a good-bye note from a former colleague, Queenie Hennessy, who is in a hospice dying of cancer. He writes a bland reply although he feels his response is inadequate: “The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference.” When walking to mail his letter, he has a chance conversation which has him believing that he can keep Queenie alive by walking to her. Thus begins his trek.

Of course, what Harold actually embarks on is a journey of self-discovery; he asks himself “Who am I?” and even his cellphone message has a long pause as if “he was actually off looking for himself.” As he walks, he reflects on his life; he frees “the past he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid.” What he specifically feels burdened by is not revealed until near the end, but Harold feels that he is walking “to atone for mistakes he had made.”

Among his discoveries are wonderful everyday things: “it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows had exploded with growth.” Another epiphany is that he is not alone because there are many people like him just struggling to put one foot in front of the other: “It was the same all over England. . . . And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”

While her husband is on his quixotic pilgrimage, Maureen waits at home and also does some reflecting. She too examines their marriage: “She sat . . . and stared into the air, seeing not net curtains but only the past.” As she has insights, her transformation is wonderfully developed through the symbolism of net curtains. At the beginning the curtains “hung between herself and the outside world, robbing it of color and texture, and she was glad of that.” Eventually she removes and discards the curtains and “Light, color, and texture fell over the room.”

This novel takes the reader through a whole spectrum of emotions; parts are heartbreakingly sad while others are funny. It encourages us to examine our own lives to find instances of misplaced anger and resentment and to rediscover “all the things in life [we’ve] let go.” Despite its bleakness in sections, the novel is hopeful and uplifting because it suggests it’s okay “to go mad once in a while” and because “Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.”

The book is a meditation on life but it is also a quirky and charming novel. It is not surprising that it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Review of The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

4 Stars

  This is a companion novel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The narrator is the woman whose note inspires Harold to walk 627 miles to visit his former colleague as she spends her last day in a hospice. As she waits for Harold to arrive, she writes him a letter detailing her life and confessing two secrets. It may be Harold who makes the long journey across Britain, but Queenie too makes a journey: “People think you have to walk to go on a journey. But you don’t, you see. You can lie in bed and make a journey too.”

The novel succeeds in being both comic and poignant. Queenie’s fellow patients in the hospice are a quirky crew; the exchanges between them are often hilarious. One of the patients tells a volunteer, “One of the pluses of chemotherapy . . . is that all her facial and body hair has gone. It’s like a permanent Brazilian for free.” A young naïve nun (who gives haircuts to the patients) doesn’t understand the term so she is told that a Brazilian is “a sort of haircut . . . Quite short.” Later Sister Lucy offers a patient a short haircut: “’If you like, you can have a Brazilian.’”

The poignancy arises because the end is inevitable for these patients. There are repeated references to the undertaker’s van coming up the drive: “He was not there this afternoon. The undertaker’s van - Well, you know the rest.”

As Queenie reminisces, she makes observations about life: “it is harder to argue with another person . . . than it is to argue with the darker recesses of oneself” and “sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.” What she emphasizes over and over again is the importance of stopping and finding happiness in small pleasures. In the past, she realizes that she was blind: “it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see.” As she nears death, she understands that “You don’t get to a place by constantly moving, even if your journey is one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in a while you have to stop in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And then you have to sleep.” Queenie’s philosophical musings are not original, but they bear repetition.

I loved the allusions to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “we would grow old. You would wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled” and “I have measured out my life in ladies’ shoes.” Queenie even dares to eat a peach. Those who are familiar with T. S. Eliot’s poem will find additional layers of meaning in the book.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a delightful read; this companion piece is likewise charming. At one point, Queenie says, “people are rarely the straightforward thing we think they are,” and her story shows that there is more to Queenie than Harold has realized. Those who enjoyed the first book should definitely read this one.

Birthday Review - "The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje

Today is Michael Ondaatje’s 72^nd birthday.  He is best known for The English Patient, but I’m posting my review of his most recent book.

Review of The Cat’s Table

3 Stars

In 1954 an eleven-year-old named Michael takes a 21-day sea voyage from Ceylon to England. He joins two other young boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, in exploring the ship.

For meals the three boys are seated at the cat's table, the least privileged place most opposite the captain's table, but "What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power" (75). From a position of obscurity, the lives of others can be observed: the boys "witness the fragmentary tableaux" (128) around them. By snooping and eavesdropping, the boys encounter the interesting and the important: "So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement" (129),

Aboard the ship, the boys are "for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults" (27). They are befriended by a coterie of colourful, quirky characters who give them glimpses of the adult world and provide them with lessons in music, literature, biology, history, and life. The encounters with adults expose them to friendship, longing, dishonesty, secrecy, and sorrow.

The book is not just a memoir of a boyhood adventure. It is a coming-of-age story. The trip is a metaphor of Michael's rebirth; the Suez Canal which connects the west and the east can easily be seen as a birth canal between childhood and adulthood. Michael may be "startled, half formed" (84) but he tries "to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what was going on there, and why" (27). Passing strangers help him in ways he does not fully understand until adulthood.

As a pre-adolescent on the sea voyage, Michael takes on the role of a careful observer. This role serves him well in his adult life and career; he becomes a writer

According to Ondaatje, "the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography" (267). It seems he has returned to his own sea voyage from Ceylon to England and has parlayed it into a book to convey themes about the benefits of the overlooked position and hindsight.

The problem is that Ondaatje's book left me unengaged. The vignettes were disjointed and left me feeling likewise. I've enjoyed this writer's other novels, but this one left me disagreeing with the book jacket's description that it was the work of "a novelist at the height of his powers."