Category: ragdoll reads

#36 – The Secret History

Donna Tartt’s epic The Secret History feels at times over-wrought, over-written and perhaps many, many pages too long. That said, holy crap did this novel grab me by the toes and pull me in from beginning to end. To summarize: it’s the story of a young, unhappy man from Plano, California who finds himself embroiled in a murderous plot at an exclusive college (called Hampden) in Vermont. But the book is also so much more than that — it’s the dramatic coming of age for a young man who searches for something exciting and finds himself deeply embroiled in events that will change his life forever.

The narrator, Richard Papen, has had an ugly childhood: his parents are typically unhappy, he’s poor, an only child, and longs for a world far different from the one he grew up within. Enter Hampden College. And even better, enter his acceptance into a small fraternity of students, six including Richard, that study Greek under an epic teacher named Julian Morrow.

The group’s leader, Henry, a wickedly smart (he speaks six languages or something crazy like that), embarrassingly rich fellow who controls the group. Besides Richard and Henry, there’s Charles and Camilla (twins), Francis, and Bunny (real name Edmund). All five were reared at prep or private school, and all five both accept and reject Richard at the same time. The secret history of the novel’s title revolves around the events that fall out of a weekend where the core five, Richard excluded, attempt to create a true bacchanal in the woods around Francis’s property. It’s impossible for any of them to move forward beyond the events that happened over those few days and the book meditates on those moments in your life that impact where you’ll end up, the idea of a ruinous youth, and the consequences to thoughtless actions.

Tartt unravels the novel like a mystery with masterful suspense. Richard slowly goes through the motions of telling the story, which has become ‘the only one he’ll ever be able to tell,’ to the reader and in part finally letting the history consume him once again if only to finally let it all go. Elements of Highsmith and other solid British writers (Tartt’s an American) sneak into her prose and characterization (Henry is a solid Ripley-esque fellow, right down to his glasses), and I found the most frustrating part of the narrative never knowing exactly when the novel is set. But in the end, it’s a terrific book that sucks you right in and would be perfect for summer reading up at the cottage when it’s cold (like today) and raining (like today) and all you’re looking to do is curl up by the fire with a good, hair-raising story.

READING CHALLENGES: Believe it or not, The Secret History is on the 1001 Books list, and so it was on my particular challenge list for this year. I think I might be slightly behind the whole 1001 Books challenge for now, having given up Huck for the present time.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Saints of Big Harbour, a nonfiction book that I started while waiting for the osteopath this afternoon called High Crimes, and whatever I’m going to take to Paris (probably the two IMPAC books I actually have and anything else that’ll fit in my suitcase and, of course, a Jane Austen because I always love to read her on a plane).

#35 – See the Child

David Bergen’s lyrical, gut-wrenching and tragic novel surprised me. I picked it up on a whim, trying to satisfy my Manitoba requirement for The Canadian Book Challenge, from a pile of books that were about to be sent back to the warehouse. Am I ever glad that I did.

The story of a middle-aged man who lives in small-town Manitoba, See the Child begins with a tragedy, as do so many good, Canadian literary novels. A knock on the door wakes protagonist Paul. He comes downstairs and expects to see his missing son at the door; instead, Harry, the local police officer, stands in front of him to say that Stephen’s dead. The rest of the novel deals with Paul dealing with the loss of his son. Stephen’s girlfriend, Nicole, was pregnant at the time of his death and when she and his young grandson come to live with him at his apiary, the young boy, named Sky, becomes his lifeline.

A couple of years ago, I read Bergen’s The Time in Between, and it took me months to finish. The book just didn’t capture my attention, so I was reticent to try more Bergen. However, this novel had me from the first few pages, I read the book up until the last moment of having to babysit, walked with it home down Lansdowne, and went to bed early so I could finish it after I got home from my cousin’s. The narrative stays close to Paul. And it’s not that we feel his suffering, we see it, in his actions, in his conversations, in how he almost abandons his life from before when his son was alive. It’s a novel about small town life, and has strong resonances of Margaret Laurence, which is probably why I liked it so much.

READING CHALLENGES & WHAT’S UP NEXT: As I mentioned, this is Manitoba for The Canadian Book Challenge. That’s 10 out of the 13 to make my cross-country reading adventure. I’m still a bit stumped by Nunavut, but I’ve got Nova Scotia (Saints of Big Harbour) at the ready to dive into after I finish Donna Tartt’s exceptional (so far) The Secret History.

#34 – Bright Shiny Morning

I’m going to start off my review by confessing a number of things:

1. I work for the company that published Bright Shiny Morning.
2. I came down hard on the side of Frey over the whole Oprah debacle.
3. I did not read My Friend Leonard, but loved A Million Little Pieces.
4. I believe Frey to be an extremely talented writer.

Now with all of that out of the way, I think it’s important also to note that it’s impossible to read Bright Shiny Morning outside of the context of what happened to its author. The characters are all deeply scarred by life, by their own actions and by the harsh nature of the world in general. That’s as far as I’ll go in terms of imprinting an author’s psyche onto his work.

When I started the novel on Friday evening on the subway ride home, I wanted to ignore the world and simply read it until I was finished. Lucky for me, my RRHB had to work on Saturday so I did not leave my room until I had read all 501 pages. And the thank yous. And my first thoughts upon finishing the book was not unlike what Thom Geier over at Entertainment Weekly opined. Once done, I said to myself, “Huh, where’s the story?”

I got out of bed, pulled the covers up, tidied the pillows, sat back down and decided I was all wrong in my thinking. It’s not so much where’s the story but what’s the story. And the city is the story. The book is Los Angeles. From its beginnings (told in chronological order in parallel to the various stories that have physical characters in them) to its current state: polluted, prolific, rich, brilliant, troubled, lost, found and a whole host of other descriptors pregnant with meaning. Throughout the novel, there are 4 key storylines that thread the book together, that break through the setting (which includes many, many other characters, which go beyond their usual narrative importance and simply become setting themselves) and hold the book together: a young couple that leave abusive homes to find their fortune in LA; an American-born Mexican girl struggling to find her way; a closeted superstar with a functional marriage and dysfunctional obsessions; and a homeless man who lives near Venice Beach in a bathroom.

Frey’s unique writing style, his lack of punctuation, his driving, aching prose, reaches out off the page and right into your emotional core. When life collapses all around the characters, as it does, Frey’s ability to convey the events that cause their downfalls is matter of fact. Not without emotion, but with a driving honesty that enables one to come to grips with the sheer force of unhappiness in all its glory. That’s not to say there aren’t happy parts to the book, but there’s a lot of realistic unhappiness too, as if he’s taking the Hollywood dream and showing it from every angle the cameras won’t capture. It’s as if he’s taken the idea of honesty and pulled it apart, driven it to new heights, and then broken it all apart again just to make sure we get it.

And we do, get it.

By the end of the book, I felt despite the cliches (and there are some, they are unavoidable), despite the slightly frustrating epic-like lists, and despite my own craving for more about the 4 main stories, I closed the cover extremely satisfied. Satisfied in the sense that there are many writers trying to push the boundaries of fiction and the form of the novel, but none who can do it so publicly as Frey. His name will push the novel onto the bestseller list, but his work will show everyone what he’s got in him: a tenacious ability to tell a good tale and a need to drive the form of the novel itself in a new direction.

I got up off the bed again, stripped off my pajamas, had a shower, and decided that yes, it’s a freaking good book. My thoughts now far more in line with what the NY Times had to say. And I’d highly recommend it to anyone who asks, and I still think Oprah was a fool over it all.

#33 – The Ravine

A few years back, I read Paul Quarrington’s Galveston. It was a swift read, from what I can remember, with some rather blush-worthy sex scenes and a grand old sense of humour. And other than seeing Whale Music about sixteen times, I haven’t read much else by Quarrington, despite him being a mainstay of Canadian literature and having won Canada Reads this year.

[Note: I am blogging while under the influence of exhaustion so pardon my rambling review].

[And isn’t that an AWESOME cover?].

Quarrington’s latest novel, The Ravine, is his most semi-autobiographical (In his own words the only difference between he and the main character is the guy’s name is Phil. Heh.) book to date. The down-on-his-luck protagonist, freshly separated and eagerly co-parenting, attempts to change his life by writing a novel. Up until now, Phil McQuigge, seduced by the blue glow of the television from a young, impressionable age, has grown into a writer/producer managing to stay on the air in “teevee”-land by running a show called Padre. All his life he’s wanted to reach his full potential. All his life he’s stopped himself short by the bottle, by male stupidity (he loves his wife; he cheats on his wife) and one tragic event from childhood. In a way, I kind of felt like this was Quarrington’s Cat’s Eye, only funnier. And kind of goofier. And really self-referential and kind of trippy.

The narrative follows the narrator writing the book that the reader is reading.

Yeah.

At 4 AM it was kind of confusing but it’s sure as hell good company. Quarrington’s narrative barrels along in its own kind of drunken stupor, tangential, argumentative, full of love and great dialogue. The characters are real. Broken. Amazingly complex, but also brittle and ultimately redemptive.

I know I’m not making much sense tonight. But in a way, it’s kind of appropriate. How very Phil of me. Now, I am going to go eat dinner. Tonight I might start David Bergen’s See the Child or I might try to finish Huckleberry Finn. Let me just say that when I told my RRHB that I was finding Finn a little boring, he sat up in bed and said, “That’s because you have no sense of adventure or imagination.” Aw. He really does love me.

#32 – The Woman Who Waited

While I have to say that while much Andrei Makine’s IMPAC-shortlisted novel, The Woman Who Waited, exists somewhere between lyricism and imagination, much of the book suffers from slightly muddled storytelling. There’s also a quirk in his writing that slightly befuddled me: how sentences and dialogue simply trail off with an ellipsis… and then start up with a completely different thought. Maybe it’s an attempt for the author to force the story off the page? Maybe it’s a way for Makine to foreshadow the ambiguous nature of his main character, a Leningrad scholar to goes to a remote northern village and ends up falling in love with an equally ambiguous woman.

Who knows.

Annnnywaaay. There’s are fairy tale elements to the book that I quite enjoyed. Lots of deep, mysterious woods. Plenty of aging old crone-like women. Many figures appearing out of the mist. Goodly amounts of atmospheric hoarfrosty weather. The story goes like this: boy comes of age in an urban environment in Leningrad that’s slightly unsatisfying. Listless encounters with the opposite sex lead to drunken fumbling behind the curtain (literally and metaphorically) and our hero sets off to the north on an anthropological mission. He’s going to record and study the rituals of the women of Mirnoe, a tiny village obliterated by the Second World War, now populated almost entirely by diminishing families and widows. Among the elderly women lives a 46-year-old woman named Vera who has waited since she was 16 for her soldier to come home to her. He never arrived.

Our narrator becomes fascinated, even obsessed, with Vera, and a strange relationship burgeons between the two. He’s intrigued by her story and this drives him to follow her into the woods, to the railway station, into her house. But he’s young, foolish, and selfish, and as the novel progresses it becomes obvious that he’s incapable of telling her story, as much as he wants to. Ultimately, I think the book, more a novella than a full novel, is worth being read. The setting (which fulfills my Russia component for Around the World in 52 Books) is mysterious, enigmatic and ultimately the most interesting aspect of the novel. It’s a lovely little fable, and while so far it hasn’t blown me away like Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game, it was certainly worth the read.

READING CHALLENGES: As well as being Russia (see above), the novel the 3rd title from the IMPAC shortlist I’ve read so far.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I indulged in a little something special for myself starting this morning: Paul Quarrington’s The Ravine. I’m already over 50 pages in. Then I need to start kicking ass in terms of The Canadian Book Challenge, as I’ve got two months left to read 4 different provinces. Gack!

#31 – Airstream Land Yacht


I am counting Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht as Newfoundland for The Canadian Book Challenge. I’m quite sure that’s where he’s originally from (if I remember correctly) and it’s one of the titles John had listed in his own challenge suggestions. The poems, though, are so much more universal and can’t really be defined by geography in the same way a novel can. They take inspiration from philosophy, from art, from literature, from other poets, from everyday life, from the stars, from the sea, from a whole host of interesting things that I will not be able to mention here, many I probably didn’t even get.

Separated into four distinct parts (Air, Stream, Land and Yacht), the book’s poems are deeply intriguing. It’s been years since I’ve thought critically about poetry but even so that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the book. Perhaps in all the time since my Masters degree I’ve come to appreciate poetry a little for the pure beauty of how the words play together on the page. I’m also a little in love with the author’s impressive use of contractions, of apostrophe “d’s” and other whimsical ways of pushing the language to new heights.

If I had to pick just one favourite poem, it would be “Marram Grass” from the first section. A underlying sweetness pulls the piece along and it has stuck with me in the 10 days it’s taken to read the collection. I tried to stop my habits of speeding through sentences and forcing my eyes to take the corners fast so I could enjoy each one in the way it should be read. Thoughtfully. Carefully. Over sustained periods of time left to look up and imagine what the poet’s saying or how marvelous he is with vocabulary and language.

Highly recommended.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The cover from Anansi.ca.

READING CHALLENGES: This makes #9 for my Canadian Book Challenge. In terms of provinces, I’ve got: Manitoba, Nunavut, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick left.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m already halfway through The Woman Who Waited. I should be done by tomorrow, it’s a swift read.

#30 – DeNiro’s Game

Oh my, oh my, oh my, what a good book Rawi Hage has written. DeNiro’s Game is my favourite of the two IMPAC books I’ve read so far, and it’ll now become the benchmark to which I compare the rest of the shortlisted titles. It’s unconventional structure, it’s achingly lovely prose, and it’s heartbreaking moments all catapult together to form a book that rockets along like gunfire from beginning to end.

The story of Bassam and his friend George, two boys who grow up in war torn Beirut to become men who survive as the bombs drop and people fall out of their lives and into graves at an alarming speed. The two boys, now young men, find their way with guns tucked into their pants, who make a living in ways that are so foreign to me that I often had to close my eyes and take a deep breath, and do far too many drugs (who could blame them?). Set into three distinct parts, ‘Roma,’ (where things in Bassam’s imagination will still work out the way he hopes), ‘Beirut,’ (where life in a war zone becomes glaringly difficult), and ‘Paris,’ (where Bassam adapts to a different kind of life), the book remains riveting throughout.

For a first-time novelist, Hage’s prose-poetic style of writing is effective, repeating phrases, images and inspired metaphors litter the pages, and his characters are strongly drawn. I didn’t earmark as many pages as I thought I would, but I did find the following passage very moving:

Still I stood in the booth, looking with an empty gaze through the glass. I felt as if I could live inside of the book, feeling its borders, claiming it for myself. I pretended that I was talking on the phone, but all I wanted was to be in the booth. I wanted to stand there and watch every passerby, I wanted to justify my existence, and legitimize my foreign feet, and watch the people who passed and never bothered to look or wave.

If I have one teeny, tiny criticism, it might just be the overdone use of L’Etranger throughout the last third of the book. The parallels between the characters, sure, they’re there, but I felt like it was the only stereotypical, oh-yeah-I-guessed-it aspect to the book.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: You guessed it, just the jacket with a link back to Anansi (as pulled from their site), as I’m away from my camera this afternoon.

READING CHALLENGES: The second of my IMPAC books, Lebanon from Around the World in 52 Books, and if I were still needing to read Canada, the passing mention of Montreal (where the author resides now, I think) would have totally counted.

#29 – Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, could possibly be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Achingly beautiful prose echoes through each of the stories, and they all have such a resounding and impressive narrative voice that it’s impossible to put the book down once you’ve begun. The stories are as rich and inherently detailed as the best novels aspire to be, which just goes to show that Lahiri’s skills as a storyteller are paramount. She’s one of the best writers working in English today. I know that’s a bold statement, but I’d put forth that she rivals Alice Munro when it comes to ensuring that the form of the short story isn’t relegated to beginner’s classes and college literary journals. The work is powerful, passionate, cutting and emotionally driven. And while each of her stories work with similar themes, first and second generation East Indian families in America, they’re also each distinct both in terms of their internal rhythms and the morals that drive the narratives forward.

In the first half of the book, Lahiri doesn’t really play with form. The stories are straightforward in the sense that they don’t play with time or traditional methods of storytelling, but they are rich in character development, and they do ache with the everyday heartbreak of life. In the second half of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri has written three linked stories. The first two use the second person, which I was resistant to at first, but once I read the last few pages of the book, I understood her choice. You will too. It’s these three linked tales, stories of Hema and Kaushik, characters linked by a common childhood, that will crush your reading soul in the same way any good book should. I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say anything more about them, just to reiterate that to appreciate them is to appreciate writing at its finest.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT:If I have one criticism, it’s that I’m really not fond of the book’s jacket. Hence no photo, although I guess I could have taken a picture to make it seem less, well, boring.

READING CHALLENGES: I don’t think I’ve read an American author yet for my Around the World in 52 Books. This would be a great one to read for the States. It’s a rich canvas, writing from the perspective of immigrants to the great and fascinatingly flawed country. And while I had Dennis Johnson’s book in mind. I’m going to count this instead. Even if the setting is somewhat secondary to the character development, in a sense, it’s defining of it too, place defines these characters as much as it marginalizes them; it changes their lives from the moment the plane touches down and new homes are built. But it’s also a fascinating study of the idea of what it means to be a part of a second generation in the U.S. How different their lives are from their parents, how charged with being both American and Indian can be, how important it is for history to change perspective.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I was reading Huckleberry Finn on the ride home (I finished Unaccustomed Earth on a hard cement bench outside of The Bay after having a quick bagel with Sam before heading back up to the craziness that is work these days). But I’m not sure if I’ll continue. Maybe, like I said the other day, I’ll finish The Sealed Letter tonight.

#28 – The Attack

Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack explodes even before it starts. The first few pages describe a woman’s first-hand experience with a bomb in Tel Aviv. Her husband, the story’s narrator, Amin, is a surgeon at the local hospital, and it’s only after a long shift sorting through the casualties after the bomb that he finds out about his wife’s death. For Amin, though, this is just the beginning of the tragedy. It soon comes to light that it was Amin’s wife, Sihem, who wore the bomb that caused the blast. The revelation that his wife became a suicide bomber, a fanatic, someone so unlike the woman he thought he married, turns his life upside down.

Unconvinced that he’s heard even an inch of the full story, Amin turns his back on the entire life he’s built in Tel Aviv, pushed away by angry neighbours, by the pressures of a racially charged situation, he retraces his wife’s last steps. And as many know, when loved ones keep secrets, it’s never easy to learn the truth.

The Attack is a powerful novel, it cuts to the heart of the trouble in the Middle East and portrays a man unable to find himself, he turns his back on his own tribe only to find that it’s just as impossible to fit into the society he’s chosen. Despite the urgent nature of the narrative, the dialogue feels clunky to the point of didacticism. You get the feeling that Khadra’s writing a very important book, but on the whole I felt the novel missed a slight emotional edge. That said, I was utterly engrossed in the story from the very first, most excellent, sentence: “I don’t remember hearing an explosion.”

Amin’s journey is heartbreaking, difficult and, in some ways, unbearably pointless. It’s easy to criticize the awkward storytelling, but absolutely impossible to take the author’s motivation, if I can be so bold as to address it, to task. It’s a raw, honest book that wants to open up a discussion about the very real issues driving the conflict. In that sense, it’s terribly successful. And my criticism about the dialogue aside, there are some wonderful bits of prose in the book, and here’s just one of the many passages I marked:

The bottom’s no good for anybody. In this kind of implosion, if you don’t react very quickly, you lose control of absolutely everything. You become a spectator of your own collapse, and you don’t realize that the abyss is about to close over you forever.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Simply the book sitting on my desk, no biggie. I am excited about the fact that in a few weeks I’ll be back to taking pictures of the books in context at the cottage. Goodness, I miss the cottage.

READING CHALLENGES: I had The Swallows of Kabul on my Around the World in 52 Books last year and only managed to get halfway through the first third of the novel. This year, I had it back again, but am replacing it with The Attack. Because Yasmina Khadra (the nom de plume for Mohammed Moulessehoul) was born in Algeria, I’ll cross off that country, despite the fact that the novel takes place in the Middle East. It’s also the first of eight books in the IMPAC Challenge. I didn’t realize that The Swallows of Kabul was also nominated for the IMPAC, so it’s nice to see this book on the shortlist as well.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Until the packages from Amazon arrive with the rest of the books in the challenge, I’ll probably dive into a classic or finish Emma Donoghue’s latest, The Sealed Letter.