Wednesday, December 8, 2021

The Promise by Damon Galgut

The PromiseThe Promise by Damon Galgut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pleased that this family story of apartheid and beyond in South Africa won the Booker Prize this year. Absorbing tale with a surprising thread of humor running through it.

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My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy BartonMy Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Enjoyable story of a mother-daughter and their often strained conversations, told in spare prose by the daughter who is a writer. I wanted more about Lucy at the end, but am pleased to see there's another volume Oh William!.

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The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; DependencyThe Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I lollygagged through the initial book (Childhood), then gave up on this dense memoir. Recently, I tried again by going straight to Youth and goose-stepped to the end through the German occupation of Copenhagen, Tove Ditlevsen's four marriages, three kids, her intense devotion to writing numerous poems and novels, her appallingly realistic descriptions of addiction to Demerol, the cravings and trials of getting clean. Her craving never stops as she describes in Dependency, while she's at the mercy of her mentally ill medical researcher husband for her injections: "Hell on earth. I'm freezing, I'm shaking, I'm sweating, I'm crying and yelling his name into the empty room." I was continually aware of how much better the Danish medical system is than ours (doctors actually came to the house and answered calls at unlikely hours), she spent months in a rehab facility at state expense under a caring doctor). Her specificity is part of her writing skill. A very good book.

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Sunday, September 19, 2021

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Burnt SugarBurnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just read the Booker nominee Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi in which the narrator describes her fraught love-hate relationship with her mother who is sliding into dementia, and retraces the mother's neglect of her daughter growing up in an ashram in Pune, and the lover the two shared after the daughter grew up. The girl's American-born husband, Dilip, "was handsome and tall in a way that let everyone know he'd grown up abroad. Baseball caps, good manners and years of consuming American dairy," struggles to accommodate her foibles, her inexplicable repetitive art, her relationships with her family. The writing is lively and interesting. Much attention is devoted to smells (the bakery, the smoking rickshaw engine, fried cumin and garlic, armpits, food (dal, pakoras, samosas, koftas), memories and anger, and time in the book is askew. I read it with interest, occasional amusement, and a longing to revisit India. The character of the daughter is not sympathetic, but she is not dull and her reactions and thoughts are insightful as she struggles to do her duty by her mother.
"The habit of waiting has already been instilled...deeply ingrained. I wonder if, when I'm old and frail and can see the shape of my end in front of me, I will still be waiting for the future to roll in."

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Monday, September 13, 2021

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion

A Crooked TreeA Crooked Tree by Una Mannion


I read A Crooked Tree last night. The writing is good, and even better is her characterizations of teens. Told by a fifteen-year-old, one of five siblings growing up outside of Philadelphia in the Seventies, the tale is authentic and each of the kids is distinct. The widowed mother is not responsible as a parent, engaged in an affair, working too much, and letting her anger get the best of her so Libby is forced to make her own decisions. An evil character has them all cowed in fear, but they are reluctant to share info with parental or civic authorities. The suspense accelerates and the last quarter of the book is an unputdownable mystery after some slowness in the middle.

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Saturday, September 11, 2021

A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the ThroatA 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..."

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Friday, August 20, 2021

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

IntimaciesIntimacies 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...

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