bookshelves: books-i-own, src-fall-09
***Spoiler Alert***
From Books in Canada: "With his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini has written a story on par with his widely acclaimed first novel, The Kite Runner. As a counterpoint to the male point of view in his debut tale, his equally cinematic second novel focuses on female perspectives in war-torn Afghanistan, where domestic violence runs parallel to international warfare.
The novel’s title comes from a poem composed by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a 17th-century Persian poet who gave the following description of Kabul, where most of the novel is set: “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, / Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” If these romantic lines present the idyllic side of the city, the truth shatters any illusions, for Kabul is transformed into a place of violence-by the Soviet invasion, the factional warlords, and later the Taliban. Midway through the novel, a rocket destroys the house of Laila, one of the central characters, and kills her parents: “A big burning chunk of wood whipped by. So did a thousand shards of glass, and it seemed to Laila that she could see each individual one flying all around her, flipping slowly end over end, the sunlight catching in each. Tiny, beautiful rainbows.”
This dramatic and melodramatic passage typifies the strengths and weaknesses of A Thousand Splendid Suns: on the one hand, a single piece of wood whips by, signalling the beatings Laila will endure at the hands of her brutal husband and her unhappy fate; on the other hand, the improbable count of shards highlights Hosseini’s descriptive powers and narrative pacing. In that split second of total devastation, how likely are those “tiny, beautiful rainbows”? Does trauma permit such aesthetic epiphanies? As Laila strikes the wall and crashes to the ground, she sees her father’s torso with “the tip of a red bridge poking through thick fog.” Her father had worn this shirt with a picture of San Francisco on it as a sign of hope for future departure to freedom near the sea. A Thousand Splendid Suns is filled with such crises and climaxes, and Hosseini’s narrative twists and turns create similar emotional responses in his readers.
The novel begins with Mariam, the other centre of consciousness: “Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.” Harami, we soon find out, means bastard. As such, she is an outcast, but in addition, she “belongs” to a society where families are dismembered and where women are second-class citizens at the mercy of cruel husbands, brothers, or fathers. Hosseini’s occasionally clipped prose-“It happened on a Thursday”-alternates with longer descriptive sentences to create a satisfying rhythm that propels the narrative. In preparation for her father’s arrival, Mariam takes down her mother’s heirloom Chinese tea set. “Nana cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot’s spout, the hand-painted finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.” Grace and symmetry are not meant to last: “It was this last piece that slipped from Mariam’s fingers, that fell to the wooden floorboards of the kolba and ! shattered.” The shattering of this misplaced artefact foreshadows the shattering of lives throughout the rest of the novel.
Mariam’s kolba is a hut of exile outside of Heart where she and her mother live, provided for by Jalil, her wealthy father who already has legitimate children with his three wives. Out of shame, her mother commits suicide and Jalil arranges for Mariam’s marriage to Rasheed, who takes her to his house in Kabul, where her troubles multiply. Forced to wear a burqa outdoors, inside the house she endures her husband’s loathsome lust: “A few moments later, he pushed back the blanket and left the room, leaving her with the impression of the pain down below, to look at the frozen stars in the sky and a cloud that draped the face of the moon like a wedding veil.” Hosseini’s pathetic fallacies and similes are palpable and formulaic. Mariam eventually becomes pregnant, but miscarries while visiting a hamam or bathhouse. Once she loses the baby, Rasheed reacts by forcing her to eat pebbles, a form of stoning. “Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragment! s of two broken molars.”
The narrative shifts abruptly to Laila’s life in “Part Two.” Laila falls in love with Tariq who has lost a leg to a Soviet landmine. Leaving for Pakistan, Tariq is unaware that Laila is pregnant with his baby, Aziza. Mariam saves Laila after her family is blown apart, and in “Part Three” the chapters alternate between the two women. As their lives become more closely intertwined, the narrative itself becomes tighter and more satisfying. Once Laila (falsely) learns that Tariq and his family have been killed before reaching Pakistan, she has to decide what to do about her unwanted pregnancy, so she agrees to become Rasheed’s second wife, much to Mariam’s consternation. However, once Aziza is born, Mariam and Laila become reconciled, realising that they have much in common. They both share a contempt for Rasheed who regularly beats them. Despite the overwhelming cruelty, Laila eventually gives birth to Zalmai, a son for Rasheed who dotes on him while showing contempt for Aziza.!
During one of Rasheed’s brutal attacks on his two wives, Mariam is forced to save their lives by killing him. Like some maimed deus ex machina, Tariq returns to Kabul to claim his earlier love for Laila. To clear the way for Laila’s future with Tariq, Mariam confesses to her crime and is executed. At points in the novel, Hosseini alludes to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: the parallels between Hemingway’s sharks eating the captured fish, and the destruction of Afghan society are all too clear.
At an orphanage, where Rasheed had forced Laila to abandon her, Aziza learns “about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.” Hosseini portrays the region’s earthquakes at various levels and he structures his chapters melodramatically with tremors at the ends and beginnings of many of them. In their hillside retreat in Pakistan, the surviving family finds some comfort after all the calamities. “Laila likes Murree’s cool, foggy morning and its dazzling twilights, the dark brilliance of the sky at night; the green of the pines and the soft brown of the squirrels darting up and down the sturdy tree trunks.” This refuge offers a stark contrast to the bullet-ridden buildings in war-torn Kabul, yet in the end, her city of origin reclaims Laila, who is determined to begin anew amidst the rubble. Amidst the bursting radiance of a thousand suns, she will rebuild her family.
Somewhere between Auden’s “ironic points of light” and One Thousand and One Nights, A Thousand Splendid Suns offers glimmers of hope in an otherwise eclipsed landscape, ravaged by a succession of regimes and male domination. Through the burqa darkly, Hosseini lifts the veil towards a brighter future." I rate this nove 4.5 stars. ]]>
bookshelves: library, src-fall-09
Dear Mr. Irving;
I just finished reading your new book, Last Night in Twisted River. I enjoy your writing style very much and your layers of storytelling have always been amazing to me. I do have to ask you something difficult, though.
I have had this hope, each time I hear of a new John Irving book being released, that THIS time I am going to be totally surprised by how and where you have taken us as readers. My only wish is for you to really break out of you Exeter/wrestling/boys&mothers box. You do this group of themes so well, and have shown that time and again. In fact, in your new novel you rail against authors who do the same thing by "writing what they know". You can understand my confusion.
In Last Night in Twisted River, the (very)thinly veiled references to almost every book you have ever published, peppered throughout this novel, is a bit disconcerting. Along with a few badly cloaked allusions to some of your personal, real life events I am left worried your creative well is getting depleted. We readers know you KNOW this stuff ~ your comfort zone, your heart.
Please Mr. Irving, something different next time? I know you have the talent to pull off the absolutely unexpected and render the reading world gob-smacked! I still heart you and still give the novel 4 stars!
Sincerely,
Jennifer
Okay, so before the book has to go back to the library, I pulled out a couple of quotes that stood out for me.
A)"Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn't played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged - "preferably, in a child's defective car seat" - and sunk in the Androscoggin."
Okay, this just made me laugh out loud, picturing it.
B)"Danny Angel's fiction had been ransacked for every conceivable autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect? In the media, real life was more important that fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public that those pieces of the novel-writing process that were "merely" made up."
C) "That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been "wholly imagined." And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels ca be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?"
D) "Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies - none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel's novels the villain - if there was one - was more often human nature..."
Funny how my tongue-in-cheek letter, above, can be addressed with passages from the novel. These quotations were all taken from the same time in the book, covering pages 372 through 377.
Hmmmmm. ]]>
bookshelves: bookmooch-ed, src-fall-09
From Booklist: "Perrotta sent up the foibles of high-schoolers in Election (1998) and of Ivy Leaguers in Joe College (2000). Here, in warmly humorous prose, he takes on the thirty-something parents of young children. Handsome stay-at-home dad Todd, dubbed the Prom King by the moms at the playground, secretly grooves to Raffi and loves staging horrific train wrecks with his young son; he has flunked the bar exam twice and can sense his wife's increasing exasperation, but he can't force himself to study. Although Sarah has a Ph.D. in feminist studies, she is completely flummoxed by her toddler's temper tantrums and her husband's seeming infatuation with a pornographic Web site. Sarah and Todd fall into an unlikely affair, and although they know they are acting out of desperation to escape problems on the home front, their relationship is full of electric sex and genuine emotion. Perrotta, with a light but sure hand, expertly sketches the angst of the playground set and then amps up his material with a subplot involving a child molester. A fast-reading, wholly engaging novel."
I did find this novel to be a fast read and was completely engaged. I am always amazed with Perotta's ability to weave humour and angst so compellingly. I rate this novel 4 stars. ]]>
bookshelves: 5-stars, books-i-own, canadian, favourites, src-fall-09
From Amazon: "In Deafening, Canadian writer Frances Itani tells two parallel stories: a man's story of war and a woman's story of waiting for him and of what it is to be deaf. Grania O'Neill is left with no hearing after having scarlet fever when she is five. She is taught at home until she is nine and then sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, where lifelong friendships are forged, her career as a nurse is chosen, and she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, with whom she falls in love.
The novel is filled with sounds and their absence, with an understanding of and insistence on the power of language, and with the necessity of telling and re-telling our stories. When Grania is a little girl at home, she sits with her grandmother, who teaches her: "Grania is intimately aware of Mamo's lips--soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says 'C' and shore, over and over again. This is how it sounds."
After she and Jim are married and he is sent to war, he writes: "At times the ground shudders beneath our boots. The air vibrates. Sometimes there is a whistling noise before an explosion. And then, all is silent." When Grania's brother-in-law, her childhood friend, Kenan, returns from war seriously injured, he will not utter a sound. Grania approaches him carefully, starting with a word from their childhood--"poom"--and moves through "the drills she thought she'd forgotten…Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables."
A deaf woman teaching a hearing man to make sounds again is only one of the wonders in this book. Because Itani's command of her material is complete, the story is saved from being another classic wartime romance--a sad tale of lovers separated. It is a testament to the belief that language is stronger than separation, fear, illness, trauma and even death. Itani convinces us that it is what connects us, what makes us human."
This novel is so beautiful ~ the words, the sentences, the story, the flow. I rate this novel 5 stars. ]]>
05Nov09 read for task 15.4 ~ science/science fiction
One Thursday at lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the galaxy is a very strange and startling place.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is the first book within Douglas Adam’s classic and well loved “trilogy in five parts” Hitchhiker’s compendium.
The story
When Arthur Dent wakes up hung over one Thursday morning, he hasn’t the faintest idea that within a couple of hours, the world as he knows it will be destroyed to make way for a hyper-spatial express route through our star system, and he will be plunged into the strange and worrisome world on intergalactic space travel. He also doesn’t realize that his friend, Ford Prefect, is actually not an out of work actor at all, but a stranded alien from the planet Betelgeuse who was hitchhiking around the galaxy collecting data for the indispensable guide for savvy space travellers everywhere; The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
While Arthur thought he was having a bad time of it on earth, he didn’t realize that confronting the vast regions of space and time dressed in his dressing gown, desperate for a cup of tea, and realizing that his planet no longer existed would put a whole new dimension on the idea of having a bad time of it. Arthur and Ford get swept up by a wholly remarkable space ship, the Heart of Gold, which is powered by an improbability drive and has been stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the galaxy. The ship also contains the other surviving member of the human race, Trillian, who Arthur had once failed to get off with. And of course, her two white mice.
The quartet, accompanied by Marvin the Paranoid Android, progress into the depths of space, accompanying Zaphod on a mission that he doesn’t actually know about. And when they reach Magrathea, a planet now shrouded to myth and superstition, Arthur learns that all on earth wasn’t quite as it seemed...
The style
Douglas Adams is indisputably hilarious. I don’t know how he did it, frankly, but even after having read this book for the third time, I still snickered at the funny bits. And The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is packed with funny bits. Adams has a talent for taking jokes and comedic elements just far enough - not too far, but not too staid and traditional either. His dry wit is evident in every line, and he knows exactly where to twist the plot back and pull all the apparently unrelated pieces together. All in all, it is really the only science fiction I’ve every had any time for in all my years of reading.
The plot goes all over the place, but as I mentioned above comes together cleverly at the end of the story. One of the elements of the writing and plot that helps to make the book flow are Adams’s character’s theories about time, and space, and inventions like the improbability drive. He is so convincing in his explanations, but also ridiculous enough that it’s funny instead of boring.Douglas Adams knows how to combining mathematical knowledge and wit to make something interesting. He does somewhat date himself by emphasizing digital watches so much (excitement about them is SO 1980’s!) but it’s not a big deal.
Adams’s characters are great fun also. Arthur is beautifully, quintessentially English, right down to his reserve, his longing for tea, and his ways of dealing with crises. Marvin is utterly hilarious also; and the way the other characters interact with him is so realistic it’s ridiculous. Look, the whole thing is just wacky and fun-filled and excellent reading, so if you’ve managed to live this long without reading it you should really do something to rectify the situation.
This book is for anyone with a good sense of humour and for those who think they will never like science fiction. However, if dry British wit is not appealing to you, this book may not be your best choice.
If you like this book, you would also like...
There are four others in the trilogy (I know, I know!) And Adams has also written a particularly funny couple of books about a holistic detective named Dirk Gently, well worth a read. I rate this book 5 stars. ]]>
bookshelves: books-i-own, canadian, src-fall-09
Yet another re-read. Loved this the first time.
Oh, I still LOVE this book! Elizabeth Hay is a great talent.
"Two sisters fell down the same well, and the well was Maurice Dove."
Acclaimed Canadian short story writer Hay's first novel, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize in 2000, is a compelling and highly original debut telling the story of two sisters and the jealousy that irrevocably changes their lives when a young student comes to stay on their father's Saskatchewan farm in the 1930s.
Ernest Hardy is widowed, a single father raising two young girls on the rural prairies, when twenty-something Maurice Dove arrives from Ottawa to study the region's unusual weather patterns. Eight-year-old Norma Joyce, dark, fiercely intelligent, and inflicted with early puberty, claims Maurice from the first moment she sees him, albeit unrequitedly. Her sister, the "beautiful, saintly" Lucinda, 17, falls deeply in love. After Maurice leaves and his letters stop coming, Lucinda suffers a two-month-long deep depression.
Seven years later, the sisters cannot forget Maurice. The Hardy family inherits a relative's house and moves to Ottawa, on the same block as the Dove family home. What occurs between then teenaged Norma Joyce and the war-damaged Maurice brings to light a childhood betrayal significant enough to devastate everyone involved. Moving seamlessly through 30 years in Saskatchewan, Ottawa and New York City, Hay's novel offers up just the right combination of melodrama and melancholy.
Elizabeth Haywon the Giller Prize in 2007 for her book Late Nights on Air. I have devoured all of her works and adored each of them. I rate A Student of Weather 5 stars. ]]>
bookshelves: books-i-own, currently-reading, src-fall-09
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bookshelves: 5-stars, f2f-book-group, favourites, src-fall-09
From Publishers Weekly:
Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.
This was a wonderful book that will stay with me for some time. ]]>