Tuesday, January 13, 2015

SomeoneSomeone by Alice McDermott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story, the poetic writing, took my breath away as her Brooklyn Irish family came alive in McDermott's beautiful, compassionate telling of Marie and her neighbors packed together in a neighborhood of brownstones and twilight stickball and Mass.  In the final pages the mystery unfolds of her tragic, golden brother whom she "had associated with the sacred darkness...or the hushed groves of the seminary, or the spice of the incense in the cavernous church, even with his lifelong, silent communion with the words he found in his books. Incomprehensible, yes, but in the same way that much that was holy was incomprehensible to me, little pagan."  I did not want the book to end.


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Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue YearsDiana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years by Alexander Vreeland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a personality! And not a single exclamation point as she guided Vogue with inspiration and verve, sending instructions and thanks to Beaton, Avedon, her editors, her friends. Stunning photos although the memos become repetitive over 300 pages.


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WaveWave by Sonali Deraniyagala
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is a devastating portrait of grief but also it is a picture of love and living on after tragedy. Her family (husband, two sons, her parents) were lost to the tidal wave which hit Sri Lanka in 2004. Each is portrayed vividly and engenders a start and a smile as these recollections become more bearable.  There are poetic descriptions of nature such as her trip to Sweden where she is “on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that mellow light” and .on her return to Yala where the wave hit, she sees “the sea eagles that had thrilled”  her son, “bold in this desolation, they sailed low, sudden shadows striking the bare ground,” or a boat trip to see the blue whales: “a foamy mass heralds the head that rises to the surface, its shape an ancient arch.”  She parses out fond recollections of growing up in Sri Lanka, her family, their culture including the food they ate (curries, shrimp pastes, fruit, fish), her father’s library in their house, her mother’s sari collection, their  vacations, friends and servants. She writes evocatively and I was compelled to keep reading despite the sadness and pain.  The end of the book, seven years after her loss, grants a whiff of hope as she is able finally to recall joyful moments with her missing loved ones in her new home in New York City which has given her “the distance for which I can reach for my family…travel[ing] back and forth to London and Columbo, rediscovering us.” The book was on several “best of 2013” lists and now goes on mine.


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ArtfulArtful by Ali Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Smith is a genius and her essays/talks on time, on form, on edge, on offer and on reflection but also a love story sent me immediately to buy the book as I handed in my library copy. Starting right off, she quotes Dickens from an old orange Penguin edition of Oliver Twist, then the myth of Achilles, Alice in Wonderland,The Golden Bowl, Jane Austen from an obscure title Jack & Alice. Ozi e vizi a Pammydiddle which I can only find on here in Italian, Walter Benjamin,Joseph Conrad,José Saramago.  I can't stop. I'm scurrying all over the house looking for copies of every book mentioned, placing library orders,expanding my swollen To Read list like the crazy bibliophile and avid poetry reader I answer to.  Who is Gordon Mackay Brown?  GR doesn't know but I must find out. And I haven't even touched on her exquisite prose and wonderful mind, linking literature, art, movies, music. It is all here.


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Summer Will ShowSummer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a beautifully crafted tale of a 19th C wealthy, landed and slightly smug Englishwoman who spurns her adulterer husband, loses her children from smallpox and flees to France. There she finds herself stretching her feminist inklings to forge a new life with her husband's ex-mistress and embraces the revolution of 1848 happening around her. As Minna, her new companion, says "Though you may think you have chosen me..or chosen happiness,it is the revolution you have chosen." My commonplace book at the ready, there were abundant quotations to jot down, some outright humorous, but mainly the clear thinking and revolutionary story of a woman's transformation which propel the reader along. Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Woolf and Mansfield and equal to them in her writing. We read this book for a book club and the conversation flowed hither and yon.


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The Children ActThe Children Act by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very much a McEwan story with stalker?, bits of arcane knowledge of the law, marital agonies and all but I was absorbed throughout, particularly with his main character, the woman judge, and the way he got inside her head.


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10:0410:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just put down Ben Lerner's 10:04 which is the semi-autobiographical story of a young author who is on sabbatical from college teaching and may or may not have Marfan's Syndrome (which Lincoln had). He is trying to impregnate his best friend, Alex,not his "girlfriend," but a platonic friend whom he met in college. She is 36, unemployed and wants to have a child and he is elected as good father material. The plot rambles through Brooklyn on their walks and Manhattan to the fertility clinic. He acts as big brother to an 8-year-old Latino boy named Roberto. He sells a book contract for a strong six figures ( “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”) and flies to a residency in Marfa, Texas where he hibernates, walks, writes a poem rather than his novel. The themes of walking and of art and poetry run through the book, along with his fear of a dissecting aorta, another symptom of Marfan's. He watches the movie "Back to the Future" during two threatening hurricanes (Irene & Sandy) which is where the title originates. The language challenges: he does not cry but has a "lacrimal event." He suffers proprioception, a sort of unconscious awareness of the body's internal stimulii to external events. And I experienced the usual challenges of reading in bed, unwilling to get up and look up the words because I am smitten with the story, the writing, the references to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Robert Creeley, the obscure National Book Award winner William Bronk, the teaching/writing couple whose "house [was] so full of books that it seemed built of books," movies like The Stranger with Orson Welles, the exhibit of the Institute for Totaled Art (rescued from an insurance company warehouse). It is a book which is worthy of its challenges and I will be first in line for his next one. I loved it. Slate reviews it expertly here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...
Or bookforum here http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_...


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The Year We Left HomeThe Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another beautifully written book about an Iowa clan over the last decades of the 20thC.  Thompson's ear for dialogue is flawless and I found myself reading aloud passages to my nearest at every opportunity.


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My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore

My Old SweetheartMy Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I read this many years ago, it's evocative descriptions of Hawaii and growing up there stay with me and it remains one of my all-time favorites.  As www.dovegreyreader.com so perfectly described it in her 1/27/2011 review:
I always think as I read a book like My Old Sweetheart that I want to read many more books like this. Spell-binding and measured books with a store of quietly held revelations kept in reserve, that make me gasp a little, novels that countenance no interruption and make you look up to think and then feel quite surprised to find that the world is still there happening around you. This felt like a book of blessed quietness, it has a quality of stillness and fragrance about it, created  in part by the heady languor of the heat with its power to oppress and stifle, but also to radiate and infiltrate. There is a certain  light that shimmers here, and a moment when Anna and Lily swim to an underwater cave that actually transported me there....yes, holding my breath to dive and feeling that slight sense of panic about getting out again, even if I was sitting here in my thermals.


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Review of Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the GhostGiving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mantel's is the kind of writing which leaves you thinking why bother with your own scribbles. She is so good.  The ghost of her stepfather flickers on the first page, then a hundred pages in we are alerted to the apparition seen in the garden at the age of six or seven; this is the ghost which haunts the rest of her memoir: "I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, in not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are." She remembers the people she knew including her family and her "best friend" who was mean to her,  the Catholicism of her early years, her confused little person thoughts, games played by name and the size, color and story of many classic books. She recalls every place she has lived and the pains of marital breakups and moving. She writes about her grueling medical history with just enough detachment and wit that you can keep reading and marvel at her metaphors:  "I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being..." And after a diagnosis finally arrives. "I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago." Her descriptions can be reread over and over: On their first marital lodgings: "We couldn't get the stately family wardrobe upstairs, so it stayed down, its fine mirror reflecting the flickering of the silverfish as they busied cheerfully about their lives." It is the work of a master writer.


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Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines FaithFleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith by Carlene Cross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith was a class assignment which I resisted, it not being a topic of much interest but within thirty pages or so, I found the book to be a page-turner. The author is a good and descriptive writer with a sense of humor.  I appreciated her thorough nature as she enhanced her biblical study with historical research. Her missionary junket behind the Iron Curtain was tense and suspenseful and the ways in which her marriage to a Northwest Baptist preacher evolved was a shocker, confirming my suspicions about fundamentalist conservatism and misogyny.  Her exploratory journey into and away from the confines of this secretive, scary extremism is an enlightening and entertaining trip to another world.


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