Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Flight

Flight: A NovelFlight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a good domestic novel of three grown children and their spouses and children gathering for Christmas now that the matriarch, Helen, has died. They try to maintain old customs and some are more entrenched in family memories than others, a couple are artists, each has concerns of their own. Most rue the mother's passing. There are mishaps and challenges with the five children present, and the last quarter of the book steps up the pace considerably when a child is missing in a snowstorm. At that point, it went from a three-star to a four-star for me. I thought the writing admirable with a nice balance of scene and dialogue plus introspection. In the beginning with six adults and a neighbor, I struggled to keep track of who was married to who, made their living doing what and who had which kids. I put notes in the front of the book to guide me. Kate, whose mother has died, remembers her: "But she's the only person in the world who ever saw me the way she saw me, who loved me like that, who remembered me as all the things I'd ever been and also thought of me as all the things she still thought I might become...It feel harder--fucking terrifying--that there is no longer any person in the world who loves me like she did." A poignant sketch of mothering and mother loss.

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Saturday, January 13, 2024

Tremor

TremorTremor by Teju Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Teju Cole's book is a learning experience. He writes beautifully, talks about historical tragedies, and the book has a challenging shifting narrator scheme and the same with many locations, starting in Maine, then Cambridge, MA to Mali and Nigeria and back. He discusses J.M.W. Turner's painting "Savers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying" which we've seen with its foreground of roiling seas and brilliant red sky and the ship Zong, plus the Africans, some in chains, which the slaver is throwing overboard, cargo he is transporting to America. Lloyds of London has since offered reparations. There were at least 130 who drowned in 1781. According to the BBC this ship and the crime paved the way for eventual abolition of the slave trade so something was learned by someone.

He also fields an interesting discussion of the unreliability of Western custody of artworks citing the WWII destruction of work by Van Gogh, Courbet, Murillo, Rubens, Titian, Goya, Botticelli, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio. by allied bombs. And there are references throughout to so many paintings (i.e. Chris Ofili's "Mary Magdalene" with a "violet so deep it could drown the eyes, in whose "Raising of Lazarus" there is a violet so base it could raise the dead."

In the beginning of the book, Cole includes a scene where his partner and he are shopping for antiques at a rural warehouse in Maine and find a couple of things they wish to buy including a ci wara, a ritual object representing an antelope and used by the Bambara people of Mali. Later, he goes to Mali for a conference and buys others of these sculptures. He also spends evenings listening to the music of the area at a club and the music is available on a playlist: https://open.spotify.com/queue

I'll skip a recap of the serial killer mentioned by a student in his creative writing class.
He also watches The Searchers and a 1994 film by an Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, Through the Olive Trees.
Art and music predominate but fewer books from this creative writing professor at Harvard. except for a handful of titles, Virginia Woolf's "The Death of a Moth." Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America about captivity narratives; Invisible Cities and Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. But I remind myself it is not about a WRITING professor, it's about a photographer! I had a hard time not reading it autobiographically.

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Thursday, January 4, 2024

The Door

The DoorThe Door by Magda Szabó
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Door by Magda Szabó is about a hard-working cleaner who is hired to look after the writer-narrator's apartment and performs impeccably until she is struck ill, found by neighbors immobile in squalor and sent to hospital with no help from the narrator who has writing obligations elsewhere. "Emerence was pure and incorruptible, the better self that each and every one of us aspired to be. With her permanently veiled forehead and her face that was tranquil as a lake, she asked nothing from anyone and depended on no-one. She shouldered everyone's burden without ever speaking of her own, and when she did finally need my help, I...left her, in the squalor of advanced illness, for others to witness the single moment of degradation in her life." The author began her writing life as a poet and has written numerous novels, non-fiction and short stories and won various awards. A compelling read.

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Winter in the Blood

Winter in the BloodWinter in the Blood by James Welch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A teacher recommended this book and I dutifully picked it up and inhabited another world, a Montana reservation where members of the Gros Ventre and Blackfeet tribes live outside of towns such as Harlem, Dodson, Havre, where they grow grain and run cattle. James Welch writes with humor and truth. His dialogue skills are rich and authentic: "Why don't you settle down?" I said to my hands. "Pay up," said the bartender. When he left, I said, "If you settled down you'd be a lot better off; you'd be happier, believe me, Agnes." "You bore me," she said. "You should learn a trade, shorthand," I said. "There's a crying demand for secretaries." She looked at me as if she didn't recognize me. "Shorthand?" she squealed.
His images of nature and characters put you right out on that flat grazing land of the West. "Evening now and the sky had changed to pink reflected off the high western clouds. A pheasant gabbled from a field to the south. A lone cock, he would be stepping from the wild rose along an irrigation ditch to the sweet alfalfa field, perhaps to graze with other cocks and hens, perhaps alone. It is difficult to tell what cocks will do when they grow old. They are like men, full to twists." Welch started as a poet and is quoted in Louise Erdrich's introduction: "we are storytellers from a long way back. And we will be heard for generations to come." The book was published fifty years ago and I am as excited about reading it as if it were just out, a new discovery. And his storyteller credentials are evident in the braided tale describing a cattle drive perfectly paced with a bar spree. The narrator describes his mother, "she had always had a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made the others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast...I saw...how much she had come to resemble the old lady." Highly recommended.

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Friday, December 29, 2023

Reading Year at a Glance 2023

2023 on Goodreads2023 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fruitful reading year of 72 titles, 17,475 pages, and ratings averaged 3.8. Most of my collection was from the U.S. but 26 titles were translations and 9 were poetry collections. Apparently, twenty of my authors were men. Authors new to me numbered 25 and included Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, and Tan Twan Eng. Old favorites continued to be favored, i.e. Ian McEwan's Lessons, Diane JohnsonThe true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives and Muriel Spark The Abbess of Crewe. My non-fiction selections were 18, anchored by Nabokov's memoir (Speak, Memory).
Books published in 2023 came to 25. The oldest was Nabokov's. The stories that excited me the most were The English Understand Wool and The Wren, the Wren(Irish)and Foster(Irish), although I was quite taken with Australian author Helen Armstrong (The Children's Bach). I thought The true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives was a delight and an ingenious history and Mary Ruefle'sThe Book pleased me with its discussions of friendships, of plums. Authors new to me were Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, Tan Twan Eng and Marie NDiaye.
***
Just read Val's valiant effort to reduce her number of TBRs to 195. My 1164 TBR's are really books I want to read so the longer the list, the more curious and interested in variety I appear, no? Such a didact! My shame would be the number of books on my shelves which I have yet to read, and still I buy more. These two categories conflate in my records. I read Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home and aspired to do as she did, stop buying books and curtail library usage, until the landings were cleared. In fact, one of my categories toward this end is "Howard's End is On the Landing" (HEIOTL). I also chuckle familiarly over Nick Hornby's The Believer columns where he reviews books bought and books read and sometimes there is no overlap. I understand. I now must catalog the HEIOTLs with new vigor and make next year's 70-book goal to read my own books.

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Saturday, December 16, 2023

The Lunatic

The Lunatic: PoemsThe Lunatic: Poems by Charles Simic
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of these short poems delight me with the poet's everyday metaphors and his sardonic wit: "Looking for a Soul Mate," a sort of dating app description "Recovering puff pastry and almond cookie addict,,,Now seeks a comfortable brownstone free of cats/..And where he'll be free to mingle with bankers and lawyers/And sit in their wives' laps like a much-pampered pet." Or "Meet Eddie" "Whose life is as merry as a beer can/Hurling down a mountain stream...Are you ready to meet your Maker?"
Others didn't work as well for me: "Dark Night," his soulful verse about God and Satan, each playing Solitaire or "Passing Through," but I like his dogs, his cats, his fish, his fleas and birds and poems of winter. My favorite was this one (perhaps emblematic-of-the book?) with lines "About life being both cruel and beautiful" and "the sight of a dog free from his chain."

"So Early in the Morning"
It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store -
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again - a friend at death's door
And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not - despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor's trash can.

If you want to read the best review of this book, see s.penkevich on Goodreads

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Lessons

LessonsLessons by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ian McEwan's Lessons is an old-fashioned, compassionate, multi-generational tale of a literary figure, this time a mother who leaves her baby son and her husband to become a novelist, and the father who stays home and raises the child. I couldn't put it down.

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