In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife starts off like a thriller as the author is rushed from home to the hospital for what is eventually diagnosed as a ruptured aneurysm in a pancreatic artery and internal hemorrhage. The bulk of the book is about his time in the hospital, including a "near death experience" vision of his late father, and alternates with other perilous experiences in his life as a war journalist. The latter part of the book hopscotches between physics, death and spirituality and my interest waned.

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Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg is an apt title for the strained relationship of the mother and daughter in this prize-winning novel from Norway. The mother is a divorced woman of around fifty who enjoys the noncommittal aspects of online dating and sex, appreciates her drink, is uninterested in her job managing a jewelry store, and only occasionally sees her daughter and grandchildren. Most of the narrative is from her perspective. The daughter invites her to a "girls weekend" in London and reveals her purpose once they are in the plane. She is stalking her husband's mistress and wants moral support from her mother. They proceed to meet up with her daughter's old friends, become separated and drink too much. Extraordinary detail is provided of each bleak scene in this almost plotless novel which moves along at a sure pace with precise descriptions and skillful characterization. Each time I picked up the book, I remember thinking there is nothing happening here, yet I kept reading. I recommend it for its excellent prose and portrayals as well as Wendy H. Gabrielsen's superb translation. One reviewer described it as reminiscent of early Ian McEwan which fits.

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Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thoroughly depressing story of a woman's breakdown in a bad marriage with unsympathetic children in 1958. I loved it. Penelope Mortimer is a skilled writer with superb attention to detail and a real empathy for her main character. The adulterous husband is almost textbook awful. The dialogue is spot on, funny at times, accurate always. I was reminded of Ex-Wife, another sad tale of women's lot in the 1950's which I relished.

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Jacob's Room is Full of Books

Jacob's Room is Full of Books: A Year of Reading by Susan Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The inscription to Lynne Hatwell at the front of the book tickled my soul. For years, I followed Hatwell's blog, Dovegrey Reader which is no longer extant, but I had the pleasure of talking books with her in her Devon home in 2018. She gave up book criticism to our great loss.

Susan Hill has written the kind of book that I reach for first, not unlike my book conversation with Lynne, a discussion of what she's reading over the course of a year. This is the second such treasure from Hill, the first was Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home where she forsook all purchases and borrowing of books for a year to read what was on her shelves. These books put such fantasies to rest for me. She's listed dozens of titles I've yet to read and had to order at once. Best of all, her opinions are forthright and firm: May Sarton's best book wasThe House by the Sea: A Journal ; Alexander McCall Smith has written an illuminating little book on poetry, What W.H. Auden Can Do for You; Martin Amis' early books such as London Fields and Money are his best; good fiction on gambling at the tables: Casino Royale (the only one of the films she likes), Daniel Deronda, Can You Forgive Her? and Dostoevsky's The Gambler. She also writes about the weather and birds in Yorkshire where she lives and the South of France where she summers. She talks about being a controversial judge for the Booker Prize in 2011, writers with whose books she is unable to get along (Patricia Highsmith or most of Iris Murdoch with the exception of The Bell and her essays), geese, the Reformation, notebooks, Edith Wharton, and all titles and authors are indexed. A treat.



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Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"The trick is to lift up the right foot, just a few centimetres off the floor, move it forward through the air, just enough to get past the left foot, and when it gets as far as it can go, lower it. That's all it is, Elena thinks. But she thinks this, and even though her brain orders the movement, her right foot doesn't move. It does not lift up. It does not move forward through the air. It does not lower back down. It's so simple. But it doesn't do it. So Elena sits and waits."

Elena is waiting for the medicine to take effect. Claudia Piñeiro, described on the back of the book as a crime writer, has written a haunting, detailed story of a mother trying to understand her daughter's death by hanging. The police have closed the case as suicide but Elena knows it can't be true. The book is divided into three sections label by each of the day's pills (L-Dopa) the narrator ingests to move her Parkinson's-riddled body as she investigates the death. The writing is dense, the chapters short but this story is a first-person pondering on aging, illness and caregiving. I found it completely absorbing, not without humor, and relatable to friends who have had this horrible disease. I have ordered others of Claudia Piñeiro's novels and hope they share the fine translation of Frances Riddle .



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All the dogs of My Life by Elizabeth Von Arnim

All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There were fourteen dogs and they make up the bulk of these stories lightly colored in with her biographical details. Some of her dogs evoke great affection, at least one not so much after he was neutered and lived only to eat and sleep and sadly end his days too soon. Her descriptions are mostly upbeat and witty as she traipses across Europe displaced by war and changing fortunes. One wants a straight forward biography of Elizabeth von Arnim. She's cagey about sticking to the dogs and teasing us with her own life changes. And, my goodness, according to GR, "After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H.G. Wells, then later married Earl Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield." But I enjoyed the book.

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1974: a personal history by Francine Prose

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a memoir of the seventies centered around the author's brief relationship with Anthony Russo, the co-conspirator with Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers' revelations gleaned during their employment with the RAND Corporation. The topics are dear to me as one who participated in this era, has written about it, and is married to a Vietnam Veteran anti-war activist, and the story is prescient today as we plan our own 2025 actions. I appreciated Prose's honest appraisals of her youthful self ("I tell myself that not everyone is born with a conscience, that our moral sense can develop at any age. We can change. We can change our minds. Sometimes, when people have asked what my novels are "about," I've said, for want of a better answer, or any answer at all, that some of them are "about " how a person develops a moral conscience, or not. Maybe the subject interests me because I feel that my own conscience developed a little late"), as well as her vivid descriptions of San Francisco landmarks and events, the cultural earmarks and topics of the era. She is a talented writer and skillfully structures her memoir.

Two more quotations:

"During a CBS News interview...Ellsberg said that it would hurt the American people to learn "that the men who they gave so much respect and trust, as well as power, regarded them as contemptuously as they regarded our Vietnamese allies...We are the government. The lesson is that the people of this country can't afford to let the president run the country by himself."

"There's a grim fun in listening to Johnson's recorded telephone conversations and Nixon's Oval Office taps. The crudeness and vulgarity, the vindictive nastiness, the childish lack of impulse control shown by the leaders of our country--it's comical and terrifying to realize that these guys were in charge."

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