A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Ghost in the Throat stunned me with the beauty of its writing and its passion. The author/narrator is a young wife with four children under the age of six consumed by her exploration of an 18C Irish Gaelic poet named Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. The book is a paean to research as she scours the archives for information almost impossible to find on women of that era, on the "female text." She has to look at the men around Eibhlín Dubh to imagine what was happening with the poet as she tragically faced the murder of her husband. Much of the book is Ní Ghríofa's fantasies of the poet's life alternating with her own memoir of the last decade, another female text composed while sleepless, nursing and performing innumerable chores, "a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn."
"O my belovèd, steadfast and true!
The day I first saw you
by the market's thatched roof,
how my eye took a shine to you,
how my heart took delight in you,
I fled my companions with you,
to soar far from home with you.
And never did I regret it..."

View all my reviews

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intimacies is narrated by an interpreter working in the Court at The Hague. She tells us more of the back stories of her friends and lover than her somewhat mysterious self and the "strange intimacy" of her encounter with the accused former president of an unnamed African country in his cell or in the conference room with his lawyers. She translates from the French not his native Arabic, but he "sees" her in a way that frightens her as she ponders the power of language.
Another compelling thread of the book is her lover, Adriaan, who leaves her alone in his apartment for weeks while he goes to resolve his divorce with his wife in Lisbon. When will he return, or will he? Troubled by the adulterous affair of her friend Eline's bookseller brother who she espies in a restaurant, our unnamed heroine is uncertain of her own affair. She also questions her affinities with other people recently met in her move to Holland.
The book is well written in spare language and readable in short eventful chapters. I gobbled it up even though not entirely at ease with the ending.
Read Ron Charles review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

View all my reviews

Secrets of Happiness by Jean Silber

Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Who knew where happiness came from? Well, actually, there were theories. In the Buddhism my father sometimes followed you heard arguments on the vanity of grasping for happiness. Whatever you ran after and clung to was destined to slip out of your hands, melt like snow, dissolve into thin air. What could be more obvious? The truth of impermanence was somehow a cheering idea to my father...he believed in freedom, my father." p. 218

The book is divided into seven chapters each focused on one character in this tale of two Manhattan families and their extended lovers and friends, told in the first person each time. Occasionally, I would forget who my character was but always enjoyed reading about them. The tension is good, the writing is clear and competent, and I would race to continue each night enjoying the through line of Cambodia or Thailand or elsewhere in Asia visited by the characters.

View all my reviews

Undocumented Americans

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it.

View all my reviews

Migration

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I stayed up all night reading Migrations by Australian Charlotte McConaghy.
An absorbing futurist tale of species extinction and the last Arctic terns chased by a hungry herring fishing boat. The crew and their boat end up scattered to Antarctica sought by authorities. Guided by a troubled but determined young woman who's tagged a couple of the birds and traces them on her laptop, we learn though flashbacks of her peripatetic background and sketchy history. The tale kept me up way too late and while not my usual fare, I was completely taken with the writing and the story.

View all my reviews

The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This plot-less exploration of lifetime friendships and the fluidity of the characters from childhood to old age offers a deeply involving if difficult reading experience. Woolf's lyrical writing and colors, nature, animals, meals, made it worthwhile and it's best to let The Waves wash over the reader without trying too hard to parse meaning. Play-like, Woolf Virginia takes on identity, mortality, and friendship: in six characters who are perhaps one character based on the author. Bernard, the writer with his phrases, is our anchor, and Louis, is "stone-carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet." The bonds and points of view shift in the soliloquies. There is no dialogue.
I think one of the most enjoyable reviews is Fionnuala's https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3....
I want to read more Woolf, this is said to be the most challenging of her books.

"I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire."

"Some people go to priests, others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken--I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat."
Quarantined.

View all my reviews

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times is not my usual fare according to its categorization as new age/self-improvement but the writing was skillful and lovely enough to disregard preconceptions. And as a summer person I balked at snow and ice, the frigid settings of Iceland and the Arctic, but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the Sami and their reindeer, the adaptable hard-working Finns and the Polar Bear Clubbers. The story of her husband's burst appendix resonated with personal experience (my husband's appendix burst on a camping trip) and her exploration of her own illness, pulling her unhappy child our of school and the captivating incident of losing and regaining her voice held my attention. Wolves, bees as one organism, friendly robins and kids books carried me along with the narrator. The best quote: "They say that we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too" which she says of her familiar loose, exploratory reading during nights of insomnia, "a chapter here, a segment there." And best of all, February 1st marks the Gaelic festival of Imbolc or St. Brigid's Day when we dust away our cobwebs to welcome spring hovering just over there. My snowbells are up, the tulips leaves visible.

View all my reviews