#59 – Birdman

Mo Hayder remains one of my favourite crime writers. I had the good fortune to interview her a couple of years ago when she was in Toronto promoting the Walking Man series, still Jack Caffrey mysteries, but with the introduction of Flea Marley, the police diver, who becomes the other central character in the books. She’s self-educated, incredibly smart, and it was one of the best interviews I had ever done (and she was very gracious when she signed my book).

Annnywaaay, I’ve had Birdman, the first Jack Caffrey mystery, on my shelf for about four years. Every time I look through my books to see what I should pick up next, I think, I should really read that Mo Hayder novel. I guess, with everything, and with my own superstitious nature about reading (books are ready for you at the right time in your life and never before… that’s why you can’t finish them if you start and put them down again , and why it took me at least seven tries to get through Crime and Punishment; it just wasn’t the right time), it languished. There were always other books to read first. But I had just finished The Post-Birthday World and wanted something that I could read in a day — and grabbed Birdman on a whim.

I don’t know what it is about motherhood that inspires me to want to watch and read about murder and mayhem. I’ve been only keeping up with shows like Law and Order UK, Detroit 1-8-7, and watching the boxed set of Prime Suspect. My friend Duncan suggested it’s because crime novels are easy to pick up and put down. You feel like you’ve accomplished a little something when you get to the end of a police drama: there’s a mystery, it gets solved, people are punished. It’s all my overloaded, exhausted brain can handle. Well, he’s got a point. And maybe the escapism I used to get from watching movies, I’m finding in a good, solid, mystery/thriller here and there.

So, Birdman. It’s a fairly typical crime novel, of course, because it’s Mo Hayder, it’s extremely well written and utterly readable. It charges along at a fast clip and before you know it, Jack’s done it again: ruined another relationship, pissed off a whole bunch of people, and solved a heinous crime (in this case a lot of dead prostitutes/strippers/addicts) involving a serial killer (or killers). In a way, this novel is more structured than Hayder’s later books. I’m not sure if this is part of a series with anything more linking it than Caffrey as the main character because it’s all tied up very neatly at the end — that’s not to say it’s a happy conclusion — but there’s a finality to this book that the Walking Man novels don’t have. They all seem to pick up where the other left off in a deliciously addictive way.

Jack’s new to the force in London, and it’s his first big case. When they uncover the bodies of five women, all mutilated, all murdered, there’s conflict in the force. There are clues that lead a racist, repugnant DI Diamond in the wrong direction and Jack, along with his partner Essex, have to fight against the curve to get everyone working in the right direction. His profile is correct, and when we meet the villain about eight pages in, you get the feeling that it’s all coming together a bit too quickly, you know, like when the cops disappear too soon on Law and Order, and you know there’s trouble with the case…and low and behold, once the villain becomes known to the police, the killing doesn’t stop. So who is the real Birdman? Of course, it’s a race against time for Caffrey and Essex to figure it out because there are real people involved now — not just victims, but people with personal relationships to these officers.

Part of Vintage Canada’s World of Crime series, I love how the jacket copy says, “For some killers, murder is just the beginning…” It’s a pretty terrific tagline and utterly relevant to this particular book. I love it when there’s a twist that’s hinted, ever so slightly upon toward the beginning of the novel, and explodes at just the right time in the reading. Hayder’s exceptional at creating completely creepy villains who do absolutely disgusting things. Yet, the level of (for lack of a better word) “grossness” that Hayder employs in her writing is consistently balanced with razor-sharp prose, snappy dialogue and intense research. These novels are solid, have ripping plots (how else do you read them in a night while breastfeeding a baby?) and hinge upon a fascinating character that she’s created in Caffrey. I mean, he does remind me a little of Jackson Brodie — Kate Atkinson’s protagonist — they’re both damaged in a way that makes them so good at their job. In Caffrey’s case, it’s the disappearance of his younger brother when he was eight and the passionate way he’s convinced his next-door neighbour, whom he still lives beside, is responsible for his murder.

Unlucky in love seems to be the MO for these kind of men, which, of course, makes them irresistible on the page, both to the reader and to just about every woman in their path. But romance never works out for Jack and it’s a good thing too because how else would he solve the crime and save the day? I’d highly recommend any Mo Hayder novel for the crime/thriller lover. She’s such an exceptional writer that it’ll totally satisfy your craving for good sentences as much as your craving for, as my grandmother used to say, “a good whack on the head.”

READING CHALLENGES: The Off The Shelf Challenge, of course. I already have a British writer for my Around the World in 52 Weeks, so I can’t double count Hayder.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I started Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way this morning and it absolutely reminded me of one of my all-time favourite books, A Star Called Henry, and so I’m hoping to continue it this evening. Not too much time to read today as I was alone with the baby and we took an amazing nap this afternoon. How delicious is it to lie in bed with your baby tucked into your chest, and then wake up with him snuggled right into your arm all smiley and sleepy when you both wake up. Even if the moment only lasts for about five minutes before he wakes up fully and discovers he’s got shitty pants and is starving and, therefore, starts screaming, but it was a bit of bliss on a cold blustery day.

#58 – The Post-Birthday World

The Post-Birthday World, like many of Lionel Shriver’s novels, manages to defy the reader’s expectations both in its construction and its central thesis — that a life can change drastically based upon one split-second decision. This is no rom-com, and while it might feel like Sliding Doors, there’s little beyond the premise, that to act or not to act (and in Shriver’s novel, it’s very much an action that splits the protagonist’s life into two distinct futures vs. happenstance, Gwyneth missing the tube or not missing the tube), in that one moment can change your life forever.

Irina Galina McGovern, children’s book illustrator and common-law wife of Lawrence, both American ex-patriots living in London, against her better judgment, goes for a birthday dinner with the infamous, rakish, handsome professional snooker player, Ramsay. Lawrence is away on business. They have a standing birthday dinner date — but it used to be a couple’s thing. Ramsay’s wife, Jude, was a collaborator of Irina’s, and when their marriage fell apart, it fell to Lawrence and Irina to entertain Ramsay (who’d always pick up the cheque) on his birthday.

The story splits into two over a kiss: something much more than a birthday peck on the cheek, a knee-shaking, earth-shattering, fall-in-love-on-a-street-corner kind of kiss, that will determine two very different futures for our Irina. If she kisses Ramsay, she says good-bye to her lovely life with Lawrence; if she doesn’t kiss him, she would be denying herself the chance to feel passionate love, one that involves great, great sex.

As each chapter vacillates between the two realities, each relationship breaks down and apart for different reasons. Love becomes deconstructed through the everyday reality of what it means to make a choice to be with someone. Irina’s not a woman who can live without a man yet she isn’t an anti-feminist character — she’s someone who has always prized life with someone above life on her own. Her past butts up against her future in various places throughout the novel: a self-obsessed Russian dancer of a mother; a life that she left behind in the States; the need to assimilate in some ways to her new life in London.

In a way, Irina is always in relation to something, to someone — whether it’s her art (and the forward momentum of her career) or the two men in her life. The chapters that deal with her life with Lawrence, are deemed “safe” — he works for a think tank, is intelligent, but he’s also controlling in strange and obstinate ways, turning his moral eye upon a drink in the afternoon, calling her a “moron” every now and again. And it’s a relationship without passion. For years, Lawrence hasn’t kissed her, I mean, really kissed her, and Irina misses this desperately. When she asks if they can’t get married, his utterly crushing response is, “okay.”

Her relationship, and subsequent marriage to Ramsay, is the polar opposite, even when it runs along the same time line — Shriver is careful to keep the details just the same so the book does veer off and the reader gets lost but she also makes the two storylines distinct enough that you truly get a sense of how disparate Irina’s life becomes from that fateful moment — it’s passionate, vibrant, even violent (with wicked fights; not fists), and full of absolutely fantastic sex and happy moments (when the two aren’t battling).

Two sides of the same coin, Irina remains the same person, the same character, but the subtle changes in her that you see when she’s with either man bring her sharply into focus throughout the novel. Success means different things in either of her worlds and aspects of her personality get lost in either relationship. Shriver is keen to point out that love is sometimes separate from sex and other times as tangled as your bodies get. She writes of mature, intelligent, adult relationships — and she’s the only author with her sort of aesthetic, her brutal honesty, her ability to make things palatable even when you dislike so many of the characters and their decisions, but still keep you utterly engaged as a writer. Irina is flawed, deeply, and you are the more interested to read each chapter for this reason.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Shriver is one of my favourite working novelists. I adored So Much For That, especially in light of my own health issues, and the very essence of her writing always boils down to one thing for me — if we can harken back to my second-year university course on existentialism — Shriver writes so very convincingly of the human condition that I would challenge anyone to find a contemporary writer better. It seems she tackles an issue with each of her books, plants it solidly in a plot that would seem tepid to a lesser novelist, and while the themes might be love, relationships, sex and marriage, you know instantly that you aren’t reading the Jennifer Weiner or Jodi Picoult versions of reality. There’s depth and heft to Shriver’s sharp intellect and the piercing nature of her pen ensures that no characters comes out unscathed.

In the end, it’s up to the reader to imply, in a way, which was the right choice for Irina Galina to make, but the ending is just so satisfactory, and being a woman, I know what kind of relationship I’d prefer, but I don’t want to spoil it — it’s actually worth getting through the 500-odd pages. And it’s not often someone in my particular situation would have the patience to read a) a book this long and b) be willing to give up precious bits of sleep (like the hours between the feeding at 3 AM and the 6 AM feeding; it wouldn’t have mattered, I’m on so much prednisone that sleep is hard to come by anyway, I’m no martyr, I’m just on meds) just to finish it.

READING CHALLENGES: The Off The Shelf Challenge. Yes, another one bites the dust or, rather, another book is banished to the magic box in the basement that every single guest coming into my home is forced to go through. My high school friends brought brunch over today and left with over 15 books between them. Go baby go! There will actually be space for dust to collect on my shelves by Christmas (if I have anything to say about it).

#57 – Little Bee

I am of mixed mind when it comes to Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. On the one hand, it’s an interesting novel that deals with important political issues; on the other hand, overall, I didn’t find the novel entirely plausible. Cleave has definite talent writing characters in voices that are atypical — female characters that read well, but there’s just something that rings false. I felt especially this way about Little Bee herself, that she was perhaps a bit too precocious for her age, but when you factor in what she’d been through (horrific, awful events in her home country of Nigeria; unspeakable violence and two years in a detention centre in England after stowing away in a boat), maybe it’s not so inconceivable that she would be wise beyond her years. Yet, it all didn’t sit quite right with me.

So, the plot of the novel revolves around two women, the aforementioned Little Bee, an asylum-seeking refugee from Nigeria who was subjected to an horrific experience of seeing her entire family destroyed by oil men; and Sarah, the wife of Andrew, a couple who met Little Bee on a beach on a fateful day that would change their lives forever. When Little Bee is finally released from the detention centre after spending two years essentially in jail as the British government evaluates her refugee claim, the only people she knows are Andrew and Sarah, and so she makes her way to them, which sets in motion a series of events that have tragic consequences.

And it’s not just the plot that felt forced but the relationship between the two women was awkward in many ways. I kept comparing the novel in my head to Dave Eggers’s What is the What, and to Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, both novels that have protagonists that go through unspeakable horrors, but both of these novels just pull it all together in a way that doesn’t make the reader feel as though the situations are jammed in just to make a point. Granted, it’s an important point — or an important book — and you can’t fault Cleave for his research or how hard he worked to create the voice of Little Bee. But how he chose to wrap her story within that of Sarah’s and how their lives are intertwined just doesn’t work. Further, there’s a fairytale element to the penultimate action that rang false and the end of the novel was quite flat compared to how hard he had worked to set up the situation from the start of the book. I didn’t believe the drama — and this book is ALL about dramatic situations that forever change people’s lives.

Overall, as much as I was looking forward to reading this book, I am not at all sure what I think or how I feel about it. I want to like it A LOT because I believe strongly in fiction that pushes the boundaries and tells important, political stories. But in a way, I don’t think they should be shoehorned in when they don’t fit the characters or the voice that’s actually telling the story. I wanted more for Little Bee — and I wanted more from the book. But maybe I’ll feel differently if/when I think about it some more.

Has anyone else read this book? What did you think?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. It’s a chunky, chunky book so I probably won’t finish it in a day but we’ll see how many hours my RRBB spends awake tonight.

READING CHALLENGES: The Off the Shelf Challenge — I think I’ve had this book on my TBR pile ever since it came out almost two years ago. Also, Chris Cleave is British, so that counts too for Around the World in 52 Books — he can be England.

#56 – The Senator’s Wife

My bookshelves are lighter by another title this weekend as I finished Sue Miller’s The Senator’s Wife this morning while feeding the RRBB (well, technically he had finished and fallen asleep and I was approximating life before him by staying in bed and reading, one of my favourite Sunday pastimes). It was an interesting novel to read as one of the main characters, Meri, a woman approximately my age, gives birth to her first child and for the latter half of the novel somewhat loses herself in terms of having to redefine her life now that her son, Asa, is in the picture. The senator’s wife of the novel’s title is Meri’s next door neighbour, Delia Naughton, an older, graceful woman, whose character reminded me a little of Jackie Kennedy, whether or not that was Miller’s intention.

As the novel moves back and forth through time from the perspectives of both women until the ultimate climax, you get the sense that Miller was trying to create a very domestic kind of drama. Most of the action of the novel takes place in the semi-detached houses that the two women share (that’s not to say they don’t leave nor do they have jobs: Meri works at a radio station as a producer; Delia volunteers during the summer months at an historical house in town) and it’s a book that’s very much about the lives of these two women as they relate to their husbands, their children and each other.

From the beginning Meri’s obsessed with Delia. For years, she’s lived a very separate life from her husband, Senator Tom Naughton. A ceaseless philanderer, their marriage was ruined years ago, but they have maintained an interesting, connected relationship regardless. Meri and her husband Nathan, newly married, make the transition from lovers to that deeper bond that develops over time when you’re married. And the novel explores all of these domestic issues: how children change a relationship, what it means to sacrifice your sex life as your body, your desire, your life changes; and how Meri comes to terms with all of this after the birth of her son (can you see the parallels, can you!).

It’s interesting because while this is a women’s novel, and there is literary merit to Miller’s writing, it’s also not truly the kind of book that I would enjoy. It’s something I’d recommend to my aunt’s book club — a book that they can relate to in their personal lives, something that would generate a lot of discussion over a glass of wine about the value of monogamy, the fatal flaws in Meri’s character, and how Delia’s mistakes finally drive her to becoming a much stronger, even more independent woman finally free of the bonds she didn’t even realize were holding her back.

Yet, there’s not an ounce of chicklit in this book — and I’ve finally figured out why — there’s no melodrama. There’s no obvious heightened emotional situations meant to manipulate the reader. I was comparing this book while reading to Jennifer Weiner’s Fly Away Home. Both protagonists have politicians for husbands who cheat on them, but in Weiner’s novel, the sheer over-wrought-ness (I know that’s not a word) of the situation carries the novel away for me. Miller’s book is far more grounded. The women are more mature, if that makes any sense, more complete, because they’re more fully rounded and realized characters — they’re not situations masquerading as people, which is often what happens in chicklit, authors mistake the need for a certain kind of plot and plop in a character that fits the description of where they want the novel to go.

That doesn’t happen in The Senator’s Wife. It’s more of a meditation of home, of what it means to build a family, of what family means, of what marriage means, of what you need to sacrifice for your children, for the life that you want to lead, and how love informs it all in ways that neither women can control. The journey to self-realization for both Meri and Delia takes the better part of the book and that either women becomes the catalyst for the other to get there is not lost on the reader. The situation that finally spurns them both forward seems so innocent as it begins and then it ultimately reads as a subtle, yet brutal, form of betrayal. Yet, it’s something that they both needed to go through in order to fully realize who they are — who they needed to become. That this kind of self-realization needs to happen to women in their 60s as much as women in their 40s, their 30s, is an interesting theme that runs throughout the book.

The Senator’s Wife is a solid, readable novel, but not something I’d recommend as my “best books of the year” or anything. It’s a quiet book, with quiet implications, and in a way, that makes it perfect for the 2 AM reading slot that occupies my nights these days.

What’s up next? I started Little Bee by Chris Cleave — see, this clearing off the shelves challenge is absolutely working! I’ve gone through almost three novels this week.

#55 – The Man From Beijing

Henning Mankell writes gripping, engaging novels and, for the most part, I’ve enjoyed every one of his books that I’ve read. And there were aspects to The Man from Beijing that I enjoyed but overall it really wasn’t as successful as many of his other novels. It’s a stand alone, so not a Kurt Wallander mystery, and it’s full of fascinating details about China, early development of the railroad in the US, the migrant/slave workers and colonization.

The novel opens with a lone wolf tracking the scent of blood, human. A man lies dead in a remote village in Sweden. In fact, the entire small hamlet, with few exceptions, is brutally murdered. And there is no apparent motive for the crime, no reason an entire village should be brutally slayed — the likes of which have never truly been seen in Sweden before. The police can find no motive and the only link seems to be the fact that all of these people lived in the small, remote village.

When Swedish judge Birgitta Roslin hears about the killings in Hesjovallen, she realizes that she has a connection to the victims. Her mother’s foster parents lived in the hamlet, and her mother grew up one of the houses where the massacre took place. In a way, she’s somewhat related to the people who were murdered, and Roslin discovers that they were all relatives of the Andren family…and soon suspects that something much larger is going on than a madman gone wild with a machete. Although, as you plod (and I mean plod) through the complex backstory, you discover why it’s so much easier for the police to arrest their suspected madmen than to believe what actually happened, and why.

Partway through the mystery, Mankell digresses into a narrative that follows the story of a young Chinese man in 1863. As he and his two brothers make their way to Canton, poor, starving, looking for work and food, they are confronted with the harsh reality of life. San, the protagonist, and Guo Si and Wu, are forced from their village and sent to wander. Like so many, they end up in a crowded city hoping to find a new life. They come upon tragedy after tragedy, and eventually San and Guo Si are captured, stolen and forced to become slaves building the railroad in the US. It’s an impossibly hard life and as the novel progresses you understand the true toll progress takes in human life. In the end, San finds his way back home, but not before horrible things happen, things that would make a weaker man question whether or not he was cursed. How does all of this fit in to the massacres? Well, it would spoil the novel too much to truly explain, but let’s just say that some of the things that happen while San is working on the railroad are avenged years later by one of his descendants.

Eventually, Roslin figures out there’s a link to the murders with China and sets off to uncover exactly what happened. It’s a dangerous thing to do, and she’s really not aware of the kind of trouble she’s stepping in. I enjoyed Roslin’s character — she’s tough as nails, smart, and doesn’t stand for any messing about. But I’ve always had a problem with revenge plots. I think they are the weakest in terms of thrillers — I don’t like them in movies and I’m even less fond of them in novels, which is why this book sort of fell flat for me. It’s not a page-turner, and at 2 AM when you’ve got a RRBB feeding away, you need something active, and fascinating, to peak your interest. That’s not to say that the novel isn’t well researched and that the information contained within isn’t valuable, I’m just saying it didn’t all fit together as nicely as one would have expected from a novelist as solid as Mankell.

In the end, the parts of the book that I liked the best were the ones where Birgitta was out and about trying to solve the mystery. I doubt that Mankell will develop a series around the character but I do have to admit that I really, really liked her and wanted more from her in the novel. The far fetched nature of the entire book just didn’t ring true despite Mankell’s excellent prose and I was disappointed in the bad guy. He seemed very Hollywood, a little too Gordon Gecko for my liking, but I did learn a lot about China, or at least Mankell’s version of China, and the very interesting political things that are happening these days — in that sense, the novel doesn’t disappoint.

And, because Mankell’s Swedish, here’s another book that counts for my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. One day I’ll tally everything up. I’ve got four weeks left in the year. Maybe I’ll get caught up on all of my reading challenges. Um, yeah, right.

#54 – Started Early, Took My Dog

Kate Atkinson remains one of my favourite writers. I will drop any other book I’ve got for her new novel — she’s a lot like Laura Lippman in that way. She writes engrossing, utterly readable, quasi mystery books with flawed protagonists (ahh, Jackson, I knew exactly when you showed up in the narrative and it actually made me smile) and great, rollicking plots. In her latest, Started Early, Stole My Dog, Jackson Brodie is no longer a true private eye, semi-retired but working the odd case, he’s on a road trip inspired by a case: a young woman wants to find out more about her birth family. Seems simple, right? But, of course, this being a book with Jackson Brodie as the main character, there are twists, turns, and some solid punches before he gets to the bottom of the mystery.

There are plenty of other stories woven into the narrative… a retired DCI, Tracy Waterhouse, does something so out of character, she has to go on the run. And then, she’s chased. The group of police Waterhouse worked with, the old boys’ club, has something to hide that Jackson stumbles upon. Lastly, an actress on her last legs, literally, as her mind starts to wander due to dementia, and the way her final action turns the tide on the entire story feels shocking, to say the least. Of course, Jackson, even when he tries his damnedest, can’t stay out of the middle of all of it, and how Atkinson pulls it all together remains impressive throughout the novel.

It’s the kind of novel that you can read in one sitting, the perfect for a book-a-day challenge. It just breezes along, pulls you in from the beginning and doesn’t let go of your hand until you’re absolutely on the last punctuation mark of the very last page wishing that you didn’t read so bloody fast. There’s really not much more to say except I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and won’t spoil it at all for those of you who haven’t discovered Atkinson yet.

Lastly, she was born in Scotland, which means that Kate Atkinson’s novel counts as another Around the World in 52 Books, which means, maybe I’m at seven or eight now… Yay!

#53 – The True Deceiver

Trying to read more books published by NYRB remains one of the never-ending “should-do’s” on my reading life. I admire just about everything about the publishers: the packages they create, the books they choose to publish, the authors they choose, and the quality of the writing. Yet, I never seem to get around to reading, well, ANY of them. So, I was pleased when our book club, The Vicious Circle, picked Tove Jansson’s The True Believer as a monthly pick.

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, and she was an illustrator as well as an author. She grew up spending the summers on the Gulf of Finland, in a small fishing cabin, and the setting of The True Deceiver seems absolutely informed by the time she spent in that kind of an environment. The setting is stark, snow-filled, cold, and austere. The novel opens, “It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling.” The darkness isn’t frightening, it’s not meant to create the Let the Right One In kind of environment, it’s a fact of life, a season to get through — life still goes on, groceries need to be delivered, dogs need to be walked, boats need to built. I like how Jansson creates the setting, it informs and layers the story but it doesn’t overwhelm the novel.

The story revolves around two women who live in the small village. A strange, awkward girl named Katri Kling who lives above the general store with her brother, Mats (whom everyone thinks is simple but is truly just quiet and introverted). And Anna Aemelin, a relatively wealthy (as compared to the people in the rest of the village) children’s artist who is a bit of a recluse. From the beginning of the novel Katri has a plan — she wants to gain an “in” with Anna, she has a very specific, calculated plan to ingratiate herself into her life, and nothing will stop her from getting her way. The entire village thinks the girl is strange. She has a gift with numbers and with honesty, and so many people come to her for problems: is so-and-so cheating on me, was I charged too much by the grocer, is blah-de-blah taking advantage — the villagers are ashamed to ask for Katri’s help but they continually do it. With this premise, she begins to be helpful to Anna. There’s just one difference, Anna didn’t ask for Katri’s help, and doesn’t necessarily want it. She lives in her own kind of blissful ignorance, like the dark of winter, Anna closes herself up in her house, illustrates her woodland characters, idealizes the childish way she has of creating a world in the undergrowth of the forest, and wishes she could do it differently, but change isn’t something that comes naturally to Anna.

Eventually, Katri and her brother move in with Anna, into her house. Gossip starts. But as with anyone who sets out with a plan, things go astray. And the spareness, the sparsity of Jansson’s prose nicely echoes the setting. Her words are cruel when they need to be, sparingly kind in places, but always clean, if that makes any sense — she’s an incredibly clean, crisp writer, she sort of writes like the snow itself, cold, but melts when the temperature reaches a certain point. The title refers, naturally, to Katri, but it’s also pointedly about Anna, as well — deception when it comes to yourself, deception concerning another person, they are both themes that run from beginning to end. What’s simple doesn’t always seem so, and telling the truth, and then recognizing the truth about yourself, both happen to these characters by the end. Overall, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this novel, I read it quickly, in every spare moment I had, and I do have them these days, not necessarily to write long blog posts, but to read at 2 AM when the RRBB is breastfeeding. It’s very easy to balance a book on The Breast Friend, let me tell you, as long as it’s a teeny paperback. I’m having a little more trouble with my giant hardcover copy of The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell.

Also, Jansson was born in Finland, which means I can use this book for the Around the World in 52 Days challenge I do every year. I am sure I have managed about six weeks in total, but, still, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Finnish author before. And I am sure I would read more of her books in a heartbeat considering how much I loved this one.

#52 – Tinkers

Paul Harding’s novel, Tinkers, won the Pulitzer Prize last year, and it’s a novel more than worth its success. First published by the Bellevue Literary Press in NYC, the novel will hopefully find a wider audience now that it’s being published by HarperCollins. Anyway, the publishing history isn’t really the purpose of writing a review on the blog, is it?

In a way, Tinkers will feel familiar to Canadians, it’s premise, an old man lays dying and reflects on his life, is one that we’re quite familiar with. If it were only called Stone Tinkers, it’d probably be a bestseller. The novel intertwines the stories of son and father, George and Howard Aaron Crosby, as George lays dying, system shutting down, in his living room. Surrounded by family, sometimes George knows what’s happening, sometimes his body betrays him, but Harding has a particular talent for writing his death honestly and without pretense.

Both George and his father are good, honest people, but that doesn’t mean they always make the right decision. Without necessarily wanting to spoil anything (and it’s written in the marketing blurb), they’ve been estranged for years when Howard, who is epileptic, abandons his family on the pretense that his hard, hard wife has finally reached the end of her rope with the burden of his disease, and is about to commit him to an institution.
Howard, a tinker, who walked the cold backroads of Maine with his cart selling anything and everything, simply turns in the other direction and doesn’t go home. He begins an entirely new and fulfilling life that seems at peace with his utterly good nature — but, then again, it’s not an honourable thing to leave your family behind with no way to support itself. But the way its written, you actually feel sympathy for Howard, you feel like it’s the right thing to do, and are convinced that everything will be fine.

George, a clock repairman, has led a happy, quiet life. Precision guides him, even in death, and as his body shuts down, its elements of machinery, the very same things that guided George through life, are failing. His mind wanders, he can’t recognize the family members by his bed, but he notices that his favourite clock isn’t wound. In this simple example, it’s apparent that one of the most moving aspects of Tinkers remains Harding’s ability to describe a body deteriorating into death. Tears came to my eyes more than once throughout my reading of this novel — I was reminded of my mother, of how her body failed in the few days it took her to die. Sometimes his descriptions were so apt that I felt the pain of the loss in my chest. To me, that’s the sign of an exceptional writer. Someone who can move you to remember or feel something so personal yet so unrelated to the story by the simple power of a sentence.

Harding attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and worked with Marilynne Robinson, and you can feel her influence all over this novel. It’s quiet but intense, the characters are wholly good people with complex flaws, and the novel’s simple story betrays the power of the prose. Overall, I’d highly recommend this book — it’s a quick, emotionally satisfying read — it’s perfect for a rainy day when you have some time to spend just laying about on the couch. But have a tissue or two on hand…

#50 – The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Camilla Gibb’s previous novel, Sweetness in the Belly, truly, is one of the best novels I’ve ever read in my life. Pitch perfect with an amazing story, the novel honestly moved me in ways that books are supposed to, breaking your heart and pulling tears from your eyes. So, you can imagine the kind of pressure I was putting on her latest novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. But a good friend had told me that the novel wasn’t as good as her last, and that’s what I went in thinking. You shouldn’t have preconceived notions before you read a book, truly, it changes your perspective.

When I first started reading, I couldn’t get Kung-Fu Panda out of my head. Jack Black chasing his dream of being a Kung-Fu artist while working hard in a noodle shop. It was all about the noodles. The pho, and its integral part of the lives of the men who devour the soup made by one of the novel’s main characters, Old Man Hung, takes a central role. And I couldn’t stop seeing a giant panda balancing a bowl of pho on his head. It took a while to get passed that silliness that my brain created, and it took a while for me to get into this novel. Vietnam makes for an interesting setting, its customs, the after-effects of the war, the divided nature of the politics that define the modern state, they all combine to create something exotic (and I hate to use that word but it fits) that balances the very real and human interests of the novel with something different, something more.

The unrequited love that Old Man Hung has for the neighbour, Lan, was the thread throughout the book that I most appreciated. His love for her lasted decades, and she wronged him in a way that couldn’t be forgiven, and how it all comes together in the end was fitting, strong and ultimately lovely. The novel is about generations, fathers and sons, respecting your elders, daughters searching for stories of their fathers, and about how politics turns into something so much more real when one is faced with the colossal change over the last forty years. Change comes quickly and change sometimes shows the utter strength of all of the people in this novel. Hung, his adopted family in Tu and Binh, Maggie, a Vietnamese-American trying to find her father, and Lan, their lives intertwine in ways that you don’t expect when the book opens, and it ends in ways you don’t expect. It’s a solid journey in between. It’s not Sweetness, but it’s a very good book, even if it feels uneven, and even maybe unfinished in certain ways. It’s almost as if the book needed something more to pull it all together, the human relationships work on one level but I was looking for something a little deeper. Maybe I was expecting too much.

It’s funny, the only other Canadian novel that I’ve read set in Vietnam, David Bergen’s The Time In Between, felt kind of the same way — the setting, as much as it informed the novel, as much as it defined the novel, also served to alienate the novel in ways that, as a reader, I felt often throughout the narrative. However, Gibb is such a lovely writer, has such a way with human emotion, with weaving important political meaning and messages with her more personal stories of the people living through the revolution, through the Humanity Movement itself, and consistently reminds us that art has to be worth dying for, that even the novels failings can be overlooked.

#49 – The Imperfectionists

The Globe and Mail called The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, universally beloved by just about everyone and on numerous “best of” lists for 2010, “note perfect.” And there are elements of the book that I would agree with this praise, but there are also problems, especially with the female characters. They definitely could have been more well rounded and less like caricatures, but on the whole, it’s an especially readable book.

I finished the novel the first day that I landed in the hospital. It was unfortunate that I was reading the book a little under duress, maybe that’s clouded my judgement. On the whole, I agree that it is a sharp, intriguing, intelligent look at the demise of an English-language newspaper publishing out of Italy. The idea of media, in general, throughout the book provides and interesting backdrop — newspapers are failing all around the world, trying to figure out how to stay solvent, and the idea that news is no longer about a perspective, but rather ratings and sensationalism (Glenn Beck, COME ON), The Imperfectionists is a timely book. My two favourite characters, the managing editor (and forgive me, I no longer have my copy; my RRHB gave it to the resident at the hospital because she loved to read and was going to Africa to practice medicine the next week) whose love affair fell down in flames (because all of the women in this book are truly incapable of grown-up love, don’t you find?) but who knows the business, who is the business, inside and out,

My least favourite character, the female copy-editor who almost defines the word “spinster” as it was meant fifty years ago, truly disappointed me. But I’m not sure if Rachman meant for any of the characters to be completely whole. Perhaps they echo the disintegration of their paper — struggling to find the right pause to end a sentence that isn’t quite complete. Chasing a story that will never materialize in a world that cares more about how many times Lindsey Lohan can end up in jail or rehab. The social commentary and the utter inability of the latter generations to save the paper, how the corporation that owns the media simply shuts it down, and how new media essentially contributes to its demise, well, these are stories we (I) live every day having worked in both television and magazines before landing in the relatively stable (don’t believe what you read) world of book publishing.

It’s a quick read, and an engrossing one. Rachman has a talent for characters and for pulling together what are essentially short stories wrapped within the larger tale of the end of the paper. What starts off as a labour of love ends up an empty room, papers left of the floor, staff pilfering computer equipment, when I read that, it truly reminded me of the last days of Saturday Night magazine in Toronto, when the National Post took the magazine over, and I lost my truly awful job. In that moment, I was an incomplete, unhappy character, I could have easily been one of the women in this book, but luckily, I’ve got some pluck, some spunk, and maybe that’s what they were missing. I mean, truly, letting the dead beat butthead into your life just because you’re too “old” to find anyone else. I HATE that storyline. I am so sick of female characters like that…but I am rambling. Trying to get more than one sentence down before my RRBB hollers out for something.