Category: ragdoll reads

#45 – Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon‘s Nowhere Man took me many weeks to finish, but like so many of the extra-ordinarily literary books on my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge that sit on the 1001 Books list, I’ve come to expect that I will work my way through these books like one would an art gallery in a foreign city: slowly, methodically, and with great patience.

The story of Josef Pronek as told from the point of view of many different narrators, Nowhere Man is a captivating novel that highlights the uncanny ability of the author to challenge conventional storytelling techniques while creating a character who ultimately glues the book together. Hemon, originally from Sarajevo, perhaps perfectly distills the idea of a splintered society, what war does to a person, to a people, in this novel. At times he merges the stereotypical (The Beatles as revolutionary charge and right of passage) with the nonsensical (Pronek’s time as a canvasser for Greenpeace), but always manages to show how each narrator maintains that little bit of love and affection for Josef without losing the reader.

All in all, it’s a powerful, moving book that I would recommend if only for it’s wonderful use of form. In a way, it’s a bit like learning a new language each time we switch narrators and see yet another sliver of Pronek’s life. The syntax might be different in each section, but the end goals, communication, compassion, understanding, englightenment, remain exactly the same.

It’s interesting too, how my reading life and my movie life have been tracing common themes of one another really without any conscious effort on my part. Recently, the RRHB and I watched The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays a young nurse also stunted by the war in Bosnia. The two characters intersect so nicely: Josef finally releases so much of the tension built up through the entire novel by falling in love with an American girl and, in a way, the very same thing happens to Hanna, Polley’s character (she falls in love with an injured oil rig worker). It was a good experience reading and watching the two works somewhat in tandem, to get a male and female perspective, in art form, of the conflict.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I finished the book one very foggy, very cool morning on the sun deck while my cousins slept in the cottage and I wasn’t quite ready to start writing.

#44 – Lord Loss

Sometimes, I don’t know whether or not to count YA and/or kids books in the final reading tally. They’re definitely quick reads, and sort of inflate the numbers, but sometimes I actually enjoy reading the books so much that I want to talk about them, and not just in passing.

Anyway, last week I read Darren Shan’s Lord Loss for our What Would Harry Read blog. Man, it’s one terrifying book. Normally, I don’t go for the really scary stuff, and goodness knows it takes a lot for the RRHB to get me to watch a horror film (after he dragged me to see The Exorcist, I’ve never forgiven him). But the book is so addictive that I found myself enjoying it as much for the style it’s written in, really slick and cool stream of consciousness, as for the main character himself, a tenacious young fellow with the unfortunate name of Grubbs Grady.

Grubbs battles with a hell of a demon, pun intended, called Lord Loss after he discovers his family is kind of cursed. I don’t want to give too much away because there are a lot of really good twists and turns that Shan takes throughout the narrative and it’s actually better not to know they’re coming. I wasn’t prepared for the horror-style violence in the book, but it didn’t dissuade me from reading the book in one quick sitting, late at night, in bed.

No photo in context, but I am going to post the truly terrifying cover, because, well, it’s kind of cool in that old-school horror way.

#43 – A Thousand Splendid Suns


Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, takes its name from a poem by a 17th century Persian poet Saeb-e-Tabrizi, and focuses on the life stories of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila. The lives of both women, despite their very different beginnings, are fraught with tragedy, oppression, dignity and finally redemption throughout the almost 400 pages of this book.

Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man from Herat, lives in a poor kolba, a roughshod mud hut outside of town with her mother. The product of an affair between her mother, a housekeeper, and her father, who comes to visit once a week, Mariam grows up with the stigma of being a harami. Her father is ashamed of her and her mother, to an extent, resents her presence, despite the keening kind of love she feel for her daughter. After the death of her mother, Mariam is sent by her father’s many wives to Kabul, where she’s forced to marry the brutish, and much older, Rasheed. Their union is not a happy one. For one thing, Mariam is a teenager, and her new ‘husband’ is not only much older, but much more strict. He expects Mariam to be a proper wife, wear a birka, and be obedient.

Years pass, and the marriage between Rasheed and Mariam deteriorates, but by this time, Hosseini has introduced the novel’s other main character: Laila. A beautiful, blonde-haired, light-eyed girl, Laila’s family dotes on her, and she’s raised by a dutiful father who feels that everything in life stems from having an education. Laila, of course, excels at the top of her class. And then, as the Soviet regime ends, and the country collapses once again, bombs fall around Laila’s life, pulling away her dearest friend Tariq, and destroying as much of her world as she could touch by spreading her arms out beside her.

The lives of these two women, who live as neighbours in Kabul, are set against these types of incidents, as the war-torn history of Afghanistan plays out in an extremely personal way. Rasheed takes centre-stage again, now husband to Mariam and Laila, and the two women slowly learn to navigate their lives around his brutish, slavenly behaviour.

A Thousand Splendid Suns isn’t as strong a novel as The Kite Runner and a number of parts feel forced. But like in The Kite Runner, there are serious elements in this book that build nicely from beginning to end. As the Afghanistan stop in my Around the World in 52 Countries, it’s a worthy novel just for giving me an inside look at life in a war-torn country. But without the central essence say found in the main characters of a book like Camilla Gibb’s exquisite Sweetness in the Belly, the first two-thirds of A Thousand Splendid Suns lacks in emotional depth or understanding, especially in the context of the women’s lives.

In a sense, to sweep the broad swath of history from 1964 until the years just after 9/11, Hosseini gives up some of Laila and Mariam’s own stories, and fits them into the major events that changed the country’s landscape. I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing nor is this a bad book, not by any means, and the ending is particularly wonderful and has magical, even redemptive qualities, but it all feels kind of Hollywood. It feels like the book set out to prove to the rest of the world how awful life was for those women, and while it achieves that goal, I think it would have been even more effective had it not lacked a certain something when it came to their characterization. To an extent, I feel like Hosseini himself sacrificed these women in order to get his own point across, despite his obvious respect and admiration for both Mariam and Laila. But even despite my criticism, I really did enjoy reading this novel. And boy am I happy to at least be able to cross off one more country; it’s a just such a treat to keep my challenge alive.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the last 100 or so pages of the book this morning in bed while my RRHB slept after his show in Brantford last night. You can see the tail of the cat who kindly took up my position after I left. He’s keeping the home fires burning. And he’s a good excuse not to make the bed, just yet.

#42 – Run

Ann Patchett‘s latest novel, Run, isn’t coming out until October, which places me a bit between a rock and a hard place in terms of writing about it, because I think this is one of the books I’ll be recommending full-on this fall. And I want to tell everyone to go out and read it right now, but it’s not in stores. Regardless, it’s the best American novel I’ve read in ages, if not the best book I’ve read over the last few months. Trust me: it’s that good.

Set on a snowy day in Boston, probably in the same neighbourhood that was home to Jack Madigan’s crumbling Town House, Run follows a 24-hour period in the lives of the Doyle family. Doyle Sr., a former mayor, has raised his two adoptive sons, Tip and Teddy, by himself since they were young and their mother died from throat cancer. An older brother, Sullivan, returns to the fold on the very day all of the events in the novel take place; he was exorcising his own demons in Africa.

The mixed races within the Doyle family (white father, white older brother, black, adoptive sons), has always been a fact, but never truly an issue until the day that Tip, the middle son, finds himself on the wrong side of a road all whited-out from the snow. If it were not for a mysterious woman pushing him out of the way of an oncoming SUV, getting dangerously hurt herself in the process, Tip would have died from his injuries (a broken ankle). The woman’s 11-year-old daughter Kenya stands by and witnesses the entire accident, and when it’s obvious that she has no one to call and no where to go, she comes back to stay with Doyle and the rest of his family until her mother is well enough to go home.

While Tennessee fights for her life in the hospital, requiring further surgeries and more medical attention, the Doyles come to terms with the fact that all is not quite as it seems. Essentially, sometimes a coincidence is more then just chance, and in this book, it’s plain fate. Patchett’s ultimate skill as a novelist rolls out all over this novel as she unveils, slowly, how the character’s lives are intertwined. There’s a lovely other-worldly aspect to the book too, in the form of Teddy’s favourite uncle Sullivan, an aging priest who has healing abilities within his hands. Issues of race, of class, of education, of the importance of family, of motherless sons, of politics, are explored but never with the hammer-over-the-head mentality you might see if this was a movie of the week, but with spirit and empathy, with love and adoration, and with integrity and hope.

Also, it’s a bloody good thing that Patchett knows how to hold together a narrative. She has a skill for swapping point of view all over the chapters, sometimes within pages, and yet I never felt adrift. Her voice, from character to character, is so strong that you never get lost, and instead find yourself drawn even further into the story as the book moves along. Sometimes she uses sentence structure to intimate a change, sometimes it’s voice and dialogue, but you never feel like she’s forced herself into the head of a character where she shouldn’t—because so much of Run just reads right (if that makes any sense).

My goodness when I finished this book I bawled like a baby. I stayed for an extra half-hour at work last night just to finish it so I could ride home thinking about it. There are so many quotable passages, but as I don’t have a photo in context for this particular book because I forgot my camera at home, I am going to leave you with these words instead:

The present life was only a matter of how things had stacked together in the past, and all Kenya knew for sure was that if she had the chance to hand over everything she had now in order to regain what was lost there would be no words for how fast she would open up her hands.

#41 – Effigy

Weeks have passed since I started reading Alissa York’s intense new book Effigy. Set on a Mormon (who like to be referred to as ‘Saints’) ranch in the middle of the last century, Effigy is a stunning book that explores life for the Hammer family after the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. A diverse group of people in a plural family, Brother Hammer and his four wives, his multiple children, and the hired hands (an Indian tracker named, well, Tracker, and Bendy, who takes care of the animals) live in Utah on a gorgeous plot of land where they raise horses.

Keen on hunting and going blind, Hammer relies upon the Tracker to help him with his kills. His first wife, Ursula, rules the household; his second, Ruth, has a colony of silk worms that demand her attention; Thankful remains barren, but holds all the others somewhat hostage when it comes to Hammer’s lustful appetite; and Dorrie, or Sister Eudora, his youngest wife, was married for her hands alone, for it’s her skill he covets: she’s a taxidermist. And all Hammer’s concerned about is keeping his kills alive, in a way, for all to see.

Effigy remains a complex novel throughout, with York’s skill as a writer glaringly apparent at each turn: nothing is necessarily as it appears, and the story-behind-the-story with each of these characters pulls you in chapter after chapter. Rich with historical facts and with York’s attention to detail, especially around Dorrie and her particular skills, the novel seems to take on a life of its own that’s sort of akin to watching Deadwood, but not as foul-mouthed, obviously. As a reader, you’re absorbed by the time and the place here, and I appreciated that over the last few weeks.

In some places I felt as though the story sort of got away from the author, but it was never enough to make me put the book down, just the opposite in fact. It’s a broad novel, one that takes patience and understanding, and I for one appreciate being made to work a bit harder by a writer. All in all, I’d highly recommend this book, I loved Mercy so much and I’m glad to see York ever-expanding her already great skills as a novelist with Effigy.

TRH Updates – Hell Yeah!

I’m probably the only person on my floor that actually shouted “hell yeah!” when I read this morning that Don McKay won the Griffin Poetry Prize. And if you haven’t read Strike/Slip I would highly encourage you to do so, it’s just wonderful.

Other updates include two more books read, #s 39 & 40, Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies Lending Library, which is a lovely little book about a group of Ukrainian immigrant women who spend their summers up in a group of cottages on Kalyna Beach, a fictional location set just outside Midland, Ontario. Perfect for summer reading. And another book for What Would Harry Read, Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. I am looking forward to this weekend, though, as my work reading slows down a bit so I can finally finish Alissa York’s Effigy and Love in the Time of Cholera, both of which I am enjoying immensely.

And my RRHB has gone to NYC to play a show on Friday night. I am insanely jealous. Not only will he get to hang out, but he’ll get to see some of fun NYC friends, while I’m home biking and eating by myself.

Last but not least, I watched Breach last night and is it ever a good little film. Based on the life of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold secrets to the Russians for many, many years, the film stars an outstanding Chris Cooper in the lead role, with Ryan Phillippe playing the part of Eric O’Neill, a young upstart put in place to help take him down. The entire movie is rock solid right up until the end when there’s a bit of a Departed-style rat moment that makes you roll your eyes, but on the whole a sort of overlooked gem of a film.

EDITED TO ADD: And I just found out that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Prize, which absolutely pushes that book up on my TBR pile. It’s the Nigeria entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge.

Summer Beach Books

Chatelaine has a list of their top 50 Beach Books up this month. Lord knows I love a good list and I’ve actually read 30 of the books chosen. Much better odds than the 1001 Books list, that’s for sure. Oh, and they’ve done the list as a PDF too, which means you can print it off and carry it to the book store when stocking up for the summer. Smart!

But the list got me thinking: are there books that you specifically save for summer reading? Do you tend on the fluffy side or tackle a classic or two? I generally save any new Chris Bohjalian novels for the week I spend up north by myself, and read a lot of mysteries in the summer. I also try to plow through some big classics because reading Little Women as a girl up north from an old library copy found when Havelock actually had a library (am I even remembering this correctly? Probably not) was one of the moments that actually changed my life. I guess I try to recreate that ‘feeling’ each summer with a new classic or two. In fact, I spent so much of my summer up at the cottage that all of my favourite reading experiences actually happened there—and they still continue to do so.

So what’s on your summer reading piles this year?

#38 – Remembering The Bones


I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Frances Itani’s latest novel, Remembering the Bones, this weekend. On a day (today) where I barely managed to get out of bed, it kept me good company. The story of an elderly woman named Georgina (Georgie) who drives her car off the road and into a ravine down the road from her house, Remembering the Bones is an addictive little novel.

The title refers to the main character’s obsession with her grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy, 1901, and how she studied the various body parts over the years. Lying on the cold, spring ground, Georgie remembers not only the bones of her body, but those of her life as well, as she waits either for death or to be rescued.

When she drove her car off the road, Georgie was on her way to the airport, headed off to London for a lovely holiday. Born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II, Georgie, along with 98 other lucky members of the Commonwealth, is invited to a special birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. And the novel makes the most of this connection, and spilled in between Georgie’s own memories are those of Elizabeth’s, from her life-long interest in the Queen, and as the days pass while she’s lying on the bottom of the ravine, we learn more about both of their lives.

It would be impossible not to think of Margaret Laurence when reading this novel, not to think of Carol Shields, but even if Remembering the Bones fits in with a long line of similar Canadian novels that came before it, it’s still refreshing, interesting and told in Itani’s pure, generous voice. She has the capacity to create these honest Canadian characters, ancestors we all have packed away in our own genealogical closets, without them feeling stereotypical or confined by their small Ontario towns.

I enjoyed all of the characters in this book, the ones touched by the two great wars, the ones touched by the other tragedies that seem to define a life, deaths, births, books, all of the important things that mark the way from one end of a person to the other. And, as always, I’m looking for inspiration for my own stories and am thankful for Itani for introducing me to Queen of Home: Her Reign from Infancy to Age, From Attic to Cellar by Emma Churchman Hewitt, which I am now obsessed with tracking a copy down.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the last 10 pages of the novel sitting at my desk at home when I should have been writing. You can catch how cluttered it is with the week’s worth of flyers, magazines and other catch-alls underneath the book. You can also see the text of my next Classic Start underneath.

On Chesil Beach Redux

Well, Michiko Kakutani apparently vehemently disliked On Chesil Beach, calling it “a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people” (link via Baby Got Books). I certainly don’t think the book was an abysmal failure nor do I think McEwan has created “a small, sullen, unsatisfying story” with the little book—the opposite in fact. But perhaps that’s why Kakutani reviews for the NY Times and me for my own pleasure here at TRH.

Slice And Dice The "Dick"?

Hyperlinked via Bookninja, I jumped over to this NY Times article about Orion books publishing a series of pared down classics like Moby-Dick and David Copperfield. As I make a great deal of my writing living from paring down classics for kids, I’m always torn when I read about stuff like this.

On the one hand, I wouldn’t ever consider discouraging anyone from reading any book, abridged or otherwise, and if the classic Moby-Dick is just too much novel for you, then hey, at least you’re getting the gist of the story, right? But on the other hand, why on earth would you need to do this for an adult audience? What holy purpose does it serve? Books, in and of themselves, are microcosmic looks at a time and a place, and while we might consider some of the classics over-written, they have managed to earmark their place in our collective creative soul for a reason, and why change them?

My own Classic Starts are primarily for kids. But does that even matter? I think so, and I really believe, especially after my own classroom visit, that reading of all kinds inspires children. And Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, they’re all great stories, ones that I worked extremely hard to retain the original essence of when abridging them for younger readers. Are the writers/editors of these adult abridged editions going to do the same thing? And do you really think there are classics out there that need to be trimmed for this day and age? Probably, but that’s not really for me to say, I don’t think…

To me, it sort of reeks of the Restoration, when they gave Shakespeare happy endings because that was the spirit of drama at the time. Necessary then, but I’m pleased to punch that Hamlet was restored with Ophelia entirely in her grave by the time I ended up at university.