What a completely and utterly guilty pleasure this book turned out to be. Anna Godbersen’s The Luxe takes place in New York in 1899, and many around the office have declared it’s Gossip Girl meets Edith Wharton, but even more addictive. I have to say that I set aside the last 100 pages of Late Nights on Air, this year’s Giller winner, just so I could read this book uninterrupted over the past couple days. It’s that addictive.
As many of you know, I’m not one who does well with moderation (she says after watching the entire first season of Friday Night Lights again), and after a couple of really heavy movies, I needed something light and fluffy to bring me back down to a happy place. The Luxe was just the book. Centering around society girls Elizabeth, her sister Diana and her “best” friend Penelope, The Luxe imagines a world where beautiful gowns are hand-made, husbands are arranged from other good families, and under no circumstances does one get involved with the help, regardless of how dishy they might be.
It’s a sweet book that melts teen romance into historical drama, and if you’re at all into reading YA fiction, you’ll enjoy it immensely. Once you get sucked in, I guarantee it’s impossible to stop. Kind of like Friday Night Lights. Sigh.
For the first time since starting all the various challenges, I actually kind of disappointed in one of my books of choice. In the manner of swapping out already-decided books for ones that are a) more accessible and b) perhaps shorter and c) actually grabbing my interest at the moment, I’ve changed Cloud Atlas, which I absolutely will read one of these days, for Peter Ackroyd’sThe Lambs of London. It’s also a fitting historical novel to read for the Around the World in 52 Books challenge, as it’s based on real people (Charles and Mary Lamb, authors of Tales from Shakespeare) and set in London during the late 1700s-early 1800s, which means it’ll at least give me an accurate flavour for the time and place.
But I can’t help but feel slighted by the novel. Yes, it’s an interesting piece of historical fiction; yes, it cannot be denied that Peter Ackroyd knows his stuff; and yes, I found the characters and their situations relatively interesting. In short, Charles and Mary Lamb, themselves troubled in different ways (Charles by drinking; Mary suffers from a bipolar disorder) meet an equally troubled (even if it’s not apparent at first) William Ireland. Insistent upon proving his mettle to his bookseller father, William finally gets the attention and acclaim he feels he deserves when he uncovers a number of Shakespearean documents.
Unfortunately for me, I found the story somewhat uninspiring, and a lot of the historical details felt forced and often jumped out like a grandstanding football fan forced out of the stands. On the whole, the plot was fairly predictable despite how interesting I found both the characters and the setting. In truth, I don’t quite understand why the book was included on the 1001 Books list despite, as RG (the writer who submitted the book to the anthology) insists the author “playing to his strongest suits.” And the themes of literary and personal “fraudulence” ring quite hollow in terms of novels in this genre, if I’m being completely honest.
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book on the patterned furniture in my Stratford hotel room.
After my teacher “assigned” Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” as required background reading for my own work, I decided to kill three birds with one story collection (homework, 1001 Books, Around the World in 52 Books). I’ve left behind The Brothers Karamazov for now and replaced it with the Modern Library edition of two Tolstoy stories: “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and the aforementioned “Master and Man.”
Now I’m going to get this out of the way first, I haven’t read a lot of the Russians. It took me months and months, and then years and years, and then four separate tries, to get through Crime and Punishment. I’m glad I did, but for a girl that likes to power through her reading because there’s simply so much to read, I find that to be a tad labour-intensive.
However, both stories were quite short, and the entire collection clocks in somewhere around 120 pages, and there’s a power to Tolstoy’s storytelling, especially in “The Death…”, that remains captivating. I mean, there’s a reason why he’s on the 1001 Books list, and of the two stories, I did enjoy “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” slightly more than “Master and Man.”
So, I’ve read Russia. It was cold. It suffered through its characters. It made me appreciate living in a world with modern medicine and a warm winter coat. But in terms of actual critical opinion, there’s nothing that I could possibly say that might remotely be original. So I’ll tell a story instead.
Last night when I told my teacher DG that I had read the story, he went on a good, long diatribe about how War and Peace is quite possible the most romantic book ever written. It’s the only book that made him weep. That’s right, weep. So now, I’ve essentially been assigned a 1,500 page book by the teacher simply because he thinks I would absolutely enjoy it. And if Virginia Woolf made a case for the Russians, as he said, shouldn’t I?
So in starting my thoughts about a reading challenge for next year, it might just be to tackle the “giants” of our canon, but I’m afraid that’ll throw me right off my goals and I’ll never catch up to Stephen King’s 75 books a year, which, for the first time since I’ve started TRH, I’m actually on track to do. Here’s a question: how many of you out there have read War and Peace and what did you think? Is it the most romantic book ever written? Like, ever?
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Is rightfully missing because I’ve already given my copy to a friend in my class.
1001 BOOKS SCORE: Sitting at 144. Desperately trying to get to 150 by the end of the year…
The Hemingway phase continues. I finished The Old Man and the Sea last weekend but have been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down. It’s a swift and sure novella that seems to be an almost perfect meditation on the classic theme of man versus nature. I can completely see how this tipped the Nobel Prize committee in his favour after it was written. The story, which follows an old Cuban fisherman on his last great run with a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream, seems simple at first, and somewhat matches Hemingway’s stripped down prose, but it’s actually quite complex.
Despite Hemingway’s deeply unemotional prose, the book certainly isn’t afraid to plainly state how pain and suffering refuse to play fair and how some people simply have bad luck (as Cormac McCarthy points out). You feel endlessly empathetic for Santiago as it becomes clearly apparent that despite eighty-four days out at sea, the fish are no longer swimming in his stream of luck. In a way, that’s kind of the strength of the book too. This idea that bad things are always happening to good people. To men who have lived long, honest, impoverished lives.
It’s also a good story to illustrate how human beings are simply powerless in terms of facing nature and winning. Like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, the landscape is as much a character in this piece then the old man himself. The small boat, the thin line, the hard tug of the marlin, they all combine to create an atmosphere the old man will never free himself from. I’m sure that there have been better words spilled about the book, so I won’t go on here. My 1001 Books tome states that critical opinion is varied on The Old Man and the Sea, but I come down on the side that it rightly deserves to be called a classic and on the list.
As I make my way through my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I’m find that not only are the authors unfamiliar to me, but the history of their countries and their experiences are eye opening as well. Having never been to Senegal, which is a country in Western Africa where the majority of its people are Muslim, the charged words of MariamaBâ’sSo Long A Letter truly brought me into a world I have never experienced.
Told in epistolary format, middle-aged schoolteacher Ramatoulaye writes writes to her oldest friend, Aissatou, after the death of her husband. She struggles through her feelings about the event, which are made more complex by the fact that her husband took a second wife just five years before his death. Heralded for her feminist point of view, the narrative examines the wide differences between men and women in her society. Not just regarding the idea of polygamy, but also in terms of education, jobs and money.
Ramatoulaye is a strong heroine, a mother to twelve children, she’s educated and works as a schoolteacher. The range of emotions she feels, at first when she discovers her husband has married again (no one told her), then when she comes to accept his death, and finally when she moves on with her new, independent life, are the blood of this book. At times the story feels secondary to her more philosophical musing about the curves that life throws, and she’s very keen to urge young women to make their own way in life. In a way, the book is almost a parable to younger Senegalese women who should take Ramatoulaye’s lessons and live accordingly. Which isn’t to say it’s not a successful, albeit short, book. On the whole, it reminded me a little of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and I enjoyed reading it.
It had been many years since I’d picked up a copy of a title from Heinemann’s African Writers Series, and I’m glad that my challenge has brought me back. I’m reminded of how I used to seek these books out in the years after I finished my undergrad degree, before life took over and bestseller lists flaunted their accessible yumminess. Regardless, I feel richer for having read MariamaBâ’s book.
After hearing Anne Enright read last weekend at the festival, I raced home afterwards and started The Gathering right away (well, after I’d finished with Hemingway, of course). In part because I loved her reading of the work, powerfully spoken with a voice fraught with emotion and a hint of exhaustion, but also because the novel just won the Booker. (I get caught up in awards, I’m not ashamed to say. It’s a good way to discover new writers, right?). Not surprisingly, the book reads in much the same way: it too is powerful, full of emotion, and teeters on the emotional edge that Veronica, the novel’s 39-year-old protagonist, finds herself.
Charged with telling her aging mother, worn out after raising twelve children and enduring another seven miscarriages, that her brother’s body has been found in Brighton, Veronica struggles to cope with his death. As if the absence now of him from her life entirely puts her entire existence into a sharper focus, and until she gets it all down, until she tells the story of what happened when she was eight or nine in the living room of her grandmother’s house, Veronica simply can’t move on. As if the past has finally come up and choked her future, and without blowing it all out around her, she’ll never breath the same way again.
The narrative that spills out over the next few hundreds pages fights with itself at every turn, angry, raw, overwhelmed, Veronica takes hold of what’s left of her life and shakes it, pulls all the pieces down around her and then can’t really tell how to put them back together again. In the end, I’m not clear if she has or not, but it doesn’t really matter because this book is so painfully honest about life, about family, about tragedy, that becoming ‘normal’ again isn’t much the point.
Just before she started her reading, Enright mentioned that now The Gathering had taken the prize, she felt far more tender toward it, considering so many more people were going to read it now with the shiny gold sticker on its cover. And I can see why she might need to make the distinction. Veronica isn’t a character that you feel an affinity for, she’s a character that pulls you into loving her with sharp fingernails and a bitter edge to her voice. She’s at once complex and plain, difficult and bright, and smart and ridiculous all at the same time. But she’s also got to get to the end of this, not her life, but just these feelings hauling her out to the metaphorical sea of her family’s existence.
It’s a book about memory, about the lies we tell ourselves every day, about what family means and what it doesn’t, and about how people don’t change, ‘they are merely revealed.’
Moments ago, lying in bed trying at long last to finally get rid of this stupid cold that’s been plaguing me for one whole week now, I finished Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I started this morning. Less than two hours ago, truly. The book pulls you along like a long drive made shorter by great conversation, good scenery and brilliant company. It kind of makes time disappear.
Upon the death of her dad, Richard, Clarissa, 28 years old and engaged to a lovely philosophy professor named Pankaj, discovers that he’s not really her father. When her mother abandoned the family fourteen years ago, she left no clues to Clarissa’s true identity past a never-ending dissertation on the Sami and a birth certificate. Clarissa feels betrayed and abandoned by almost everyone in her life who knew that Richard was not her biological parent, and leaves behind her entire existence one night to travel to Lapland, where she hopes to find her real father, and maybe some clues about why her mother left all those years ago.
To give any more away would spoil the novel, as its prose is so tight, there’s not a wasted word, really, that almost all of the 226 pages carry important bits of story. Vida’s writing is crisp, clean, and echoes the scenery in a way, it too is sparse, complex with history, and utilitarian. So much of the story in the novel comes as a surprise, from beginning to end, and it goes in places that you, as a reader, simply don’t expect. The title, taken from a Sami poet named Marry Ailoniedia Somby, becomes so meaningful once you come to the end of the book, and it’s impossible not to feel a great deal of pain alongside Clarissa, as she takes this incredible journey towards finding out her true identity.
And it’s not what you’d expect.
I also wish that I could bend my rules about my Around the World in 52 Books challenge to maybe count this book as Lapland, if only because Vida does an excellent job of exploring the culture of the Sami without turning her novel into a lesson in anthropology. In that way, it’s like Mister Pip, and I feel richer for having read the book. I am also ashamed at how little I know about the non-Irish and non-British origins of my family. I recognized the glögg that Clarissa drinks in Helsinki only because my aunt once told me her grandmother always made it at Christmas. We’ve now lost all those traditions. But this novel almost makes me want to take a trip to Sweden right now and discover all the things about our family that have been lost over the many years since immigration.
Regardless, the book remains steadfast with Clarissa’s view, and that’s its strength, how she understands and sees the world, and how she sees herself, as one part of her life definitively ends and another begins at a moment she would never see coming. How nothing in life turns out how you would expect on the day before your father dies. How everything changes afterwards.
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Boring, yes, but the book sitting on my desk surrounded by all the various drafts of my longish story that I’m working through at the moment.
EDITED TO ADD: I had totally forgotten about this BookTV interview with Vendela Vida about the book. Isn’t she lovely and well spoken?
Right now, I think I might just be in a Hemingway phase. I mean, I’m not daft in thinking that this is an original phase to be in, but I’m still so taken with his gorgeous house in Cuba, that my curiosity is now officially getting the better of me. I’ve seen how the man lived, now I can’t get enough of knowing what the man wrote.
Annnywaay, I finished A Farewell to Arms this morning on the way to work, and while I agree it’s a great piece of literature that I enjoyed very much, I perhaps might have to disagree with its position in the canon as the defining novel of the First World War. In my humble opinion, there are Canadian books that perhaps come closer to really bringing the experience of the war to life, like Timothy Findley’s The Wars or Joseph Boyden’s excellent Three Day Road, just to name two. But I’d have to say that the parts of the book that I found most effective were those scenes of Frederic Henry, or “Tenente” as the boys call him, in the war zones. The love story, while moving, especially in its tragic conclusions, didn’t feel as authentic as the parts of the book when bombs are exploding and men are heading up to the “show.”
As we get closer to Remembrance Day, I seem to get the urge to learn more and more about the First World War, and Americans in the war in particular. My great-grandfather, G.H. Copeland, came to Canada from Ohio to get into the show himself, and I often think of him running in the trenches with Faulkner or winding up meeting Hemingway on his Red Cross ambulance, although I know G.H. wasn’t in Italy, but mainly in France. Maybe there’s a book in there somewhere?
Up next in my Hemingway phase: The Old Man and the Sea.
Currently reading: Anne Enright’s gut-wrenching Booker-winning The Gathering.
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The novel on my desk beneath its 1001 Books entry.
I always feel like Phil Keoghan when I start a post off with, “The Iran stop in my reading trip around the world…” But hell, it’s the truth, I picked The Septembers of Shiraz because I didn’t have an Iranian author on the list and the book got a whoppingly good NY Timesreview by Claire Messud. But in retrospect, I am certainly glad that any measure of influence got me to read Sofer’s work, whether it was word of mouth because of the review, the Facebook peeps that read the title through our group, or the fact that I got a copy of the novel from work, because The Septembers of Shiraz truly broke my heart in a good way.
For a first novelist, Sofer has a voice that’s assured, strong, and tender at the same time as she tells the story of Isaac Amin, a Jewish jeweler living in Tehran just after the revolution that brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power and overthrew (is that the right way of looking at it?) the monarchy. Not a monarchist, but suspected of being a spy, Isaac is arrested just before lunch on September 20, 1981. He spends the better part of the next year in jail being interrogated, beaten, and locked up in solitary. The life of an imprisoned man turns Isaac inside himself as he relives his life, his marriage to Farnaz, and tries to convince the Revolutionary Guard that he has never spied in his life.
As Isaac suffers inside the prison, his family tries to go on living without him. Farnaz tries to track him down, attempts to fight off being taken herself, and comes to terms with why her marriage might have turned stiff, if not sour, in the months before her husbands arrest. Their son Parviz, away in New York studying architecture, broke and unable to pay his rent, must come to terms with the ideas and ideals of his faith while living in the heard of Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Young Shirin, Isaac’s nine-year-old daughter, also copes with the disappearance of her father in her own way, by becoming involved in her own anti-revolutionary cause.
Sofer has a tendency to use metaphoric language to really let the reader into the experience of Isaac in prison. While it might be a bit on the flowery side sometimes, there’s an underlying ache to her prose that remains convincing throughout. As always, Around the World in 52 Countries has opened my eyes to a different world, and made me thankful that I can experience it through the comforts of my warm, dry, half-built house.
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: No photo that I took this time around, but just an image of the book cover…
HOWEVER: I’ve got three extra copies of the book sitting here in my office and I want to share. Email me via the blog here if you want one. And then I can’t wait to read your thoughts.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half a Yellow Sun took me ages to finish. And it’s not because it’s not a good book or didn’t hold my interest, even if it was perhaps just a bit too long, but more because so much other reading came up in the mean time. Work and school reading meant that I had to keep putting the book down and picking it back up again days, weeks, months even, after I started.
On the whole, it’s a complex, well-written story about the grown twin daughters of a wealthy Nigerian couple who profited from the fall of colonialism. As civil unrest tears the country apart, and the nation of Biafra fights for its independence, the two sisters are torn in different directions, both personal and political. The story moves back and forwards in the year or two before the war, and then tells of their struggles during the three years between 1967 and 1970 when Biafra became nation consistently struggling against Nigerian forces that refuse to recognize its status.
Kainene, who falls in love with a British man named Richard, fails to support the cause until an event happens that changes her outlook forever. Then she removes herself from the coastal city of Port Harcourt, and she and Richard run a refugee camp until the end of the war. There are personal difficulties, between Kainene and her sister that run throughout the book. Kainene, plain, tall, thin, regal, is plain compared to her beautiful sister. Not that this defines their relationship, but it sets them on very different paths in the years leading up to and during the war.
Olanna and her husband Odenigbo flee from their home in a university town to places that become harder and harder for them to survive within. They are revolutionaries who believe in the cause, who support the new Biafran government, who teach the noble reasons for the uprising to the children who surround them, starving and malnourished, many of whom die from the lack of food when the relief trucks are stopped at the border. Not without her own personal problems, Olanna fights to keep her daughter, Baby, healthy, and watches as her husband falls deeper and deeper into depression.
The other main character within the novel, concerns a house boy who grows up during the course of the book, Ugwu, who works for Odenigbo and Olanna. His story truly forms the heart of the book, from the girl he loves from a distance back in his village, to the terror he feels each time a bomb stops life in its tracks.
The Nigerian entry in my Around the World in 52 Books, Half a Yellow Sun is certainly a novel about an important (to use such a trite word feels wrong, somehow) time in the country’s history. I learned so much about the struggle, was shocked and saddened by the events in the novel, and felt a quiet strength in the author’s words. The sentences aren’t fancy, symbolism doesn’t fall off the page, but the stark reality of the events themselves drive the narrative in a way that shows the wisdom and tenacious ability of the writer. Epic would be a good word to describe this novel, and I am so glad I finally finished, for it’s the kind of book that truly reminds you of the importance of reading in the first place.
What a completely and utterly guilty pleasure this book turned out to be. Anna Godbersen’s The Luxe takes place in New York in 1899, and many around the office have declared it’s Gossip Girl meets Edith Wharton, but even more addictive. I have to say that I set aside the last 100 pages of Late Nights on Air, this year’s Giller winner, just so I could read this book uninterrupted over the past couple days. It’s that addictive.
